When I was a kid, the media had convinced me there wouldn't be any wildlife left on the planet and pollution was going to render large sections uninhabitable by humans.
That was really my first experience with reasoning by extrapolation and it really affected my thinking. Later, when none of the things that were forecast came to pass, I began to examine the whole process of reason by extrapolation and its application to dynamic systems.
That isn't to say that there haven't been pollution events, or that things that shouldn't have gone extinct haven't, instead the dynamics of the system shifted and pushed things in different ways.
I also read about the many extinction events in the planets history and how things came back from each one, different than before.
It is always possible that humans will be the cause of the next major extinction event, and if we are, that event will likely take us with it. And that would demonstrate that ultimately the system stays in balance. And that ultimately the planet doesn't really care about us at all.
That said then, do we as a species kill off our own fishermen? It has been estimated by some [1] that less than 2 billion people can live on the planet in "harmony" (what ever that means) so do we go kill off the other 4 - 5 billion losers? And then take up residence in caves?
Or do we focus on harnessing the energy and technologies we need to support as many people as we would like and to move them to other planet too? Ultimately someone has to tell the general population that whether it is humans, an asteroid, a volcano, or something else this place is a death trap and we better get working on a plan to go elsewhere.
Those documentaries are largely correct. Over 80% of the biomass of the oceans has been lost in the past century, and a substantively similar amount of non-human, non-domesticated vertebrate terrestrial biomass.
In the past 100 years, 80% of the biomass of fish in the world’s oceans has been lost, Christensen says in a AAAS video that coincided with a symposium at the Annual Meeting. “Just in the last 40 years, we have lost 60% of the biomass,” he explained. “So we’ve seen some very serious declines, and there’s no doubt about what the cause is: We’re talking about overfishing—overfishing at the global scale.”
I think this gets released after every cold spell on the east coast. I'm pretty sure I can correlate the actic vortex to various friendly reminders these climate people need to get paid.
We arguably are in the middle of a major extinction event. It's just happening so slowly (as measured on human timescales) we don't notice it happening.
We have entered the Anthropocene era, marked by humanity's impact on the planet. Fully 38% of the arable land is now farmland of one stripe or another. We've more than doubled the nitrogen production rate. Oceanic biomass has plummeted precipitously. Development is wiping out native species; biodiversity is falling (however a countervailing argument says that the spread of invasive species may counterbalance the loss of native species).
Whales were once so ludicrously abundant in the ocean that they were a severe hazard to navigation. Now they're a rare sight.
Parts of North America were so crowded with animals that no longer exist. They've been entirely exterminated. The Passenger Pigeon is one of many examples.
Although there's nothing we could do that would destroy the planet any worse than nature has in the past, each cataclysm requires tens of millions of years to recover from.
I'm not sure about you, but I don't want to live in a barren hellscape where the temperatures are so high the ocean has evaporated.
Maybe we should do what we can to avoid that fate, right?
The "2 billion" figure assumes no alterations to the environment. We could handle more if we improve our sustainable practices.
"... I also read about the many extinction events in the planets history and how things came back from each one, different than before. It is always possible that humans will be the cause of the next major extinction even..."
This is a description of the Holocene period. An informal term also used is the Anthropocene period. [1]
And that would demonstrate that ultimately the system stays
in balance. And that ultimately the planet doesn't really
care about us at all.
So the planet will ultimately be OK, but what about the billions of individual plants and animals we're causing the (very often unnecessary) death and suffering of in the meantime?
(That said, I upvoted you because I think it's still a good post.)
That was really my first experience with reasoning by extrapolation and it really affected my thinking. Later, when none of the things that were forecast came to pass, I began to examine the whole process of reason by extrapolation and its application to dynamic systems.
That isn't to say that there haven't been pollution events, or that things that shouldn't have gone extinct haven't, instead the dynamics of the system shifted and pushed things in different ways.
I also read about the many extinction events in the planets history and how things came back from each one, different than before.
It is always possible that humans will be the cause of the next major extinction event, and if we are, that event will likely take us with it. And that would demonstrate that ultimately the system stays in balance. And that ultimately the planet doesn't really care about us at all.
That said then, do we as a species kill off our own fishermen? It has been estimated by some [1] that less than 2 billion people can live on the planet in "harmony" (what ever that means) so do we go kill off the other 4 - 5 billion losers? And then take up residence in caves?
Or do we focus on harnessing the energy and technologies we need to support as many people as we would like and to move them to other planet too? Ultimately someone has to tell the general population that whether it is humans, an asteroid, a volcano, or something else this place is a death trap and we better get working on a plan to go elsewhere.
[1] http://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_ca...