Because they think it might make people give a shit enough to do something to change that outcome?
Fear is a strong motivator, but it is not a good one in this case. To really be effective, there must be the threat of direct, immediate, and severe consequences.
Instead it causes people to treat their messages as hyperbolic and undermines their entire movement.
tl;dr is there's very poor ROI to do nothing to improve our polluting habits and banking on the world sorting itself out.
Furthermore, most actions we can take to improve climate outcomes can also improve societal and technological outcomes. The only downside to taking more actions to have clean energy and less pollution are based on made up economic rules that normal people are supposed to follow, but that the super rich/powerful skirt at their leisure. A cleaner future benefits the VAST majority, irrespective of climate change. And the bonus is that if climate change does progress, we're better suited to manage it.
Or we can keep burning liquified dinosaur bones and partying like cigarettes don't cause cancer. I get the appeal of the 60s for how care free people could be - they lived without consequence. And we're stuck dealing with their failed policies.
Why put a number on it? Every number so far has been wrong. Can we agree on the negative impacts of humans on an environment conducive to humanity without putting obviously wrong timings on predictions? I bet your intention is to provoke urgency but to most people it just causes an eye roll because it's not true, whereas the underlying ideas are true.
because whales can communicate into the thousands of kilometers range and nowadays, because of marine traffic, they are luck to get into the hundred meters
micro-plastics into the ocean don't have a good prognosis on numbers reduction
Very much agree. It's a pretty common mistake to bundle real information with obviously wrong details and lose credibility. Especially in the eyes of people looking for a reason to discredit the argument.
The disingenuous people who discredit climate change will do so no matter how serious people act. There is no point in changing behavior on their account.
I think their point is that discounting the time estimates is more a constant shifting of the window of what we expect more than them being de-facto incorrect. They’re more off by degree (e.g. an XX% reduction vs complete extinction) than being worthless. As the example points out a large reduction can be very similar to an annihilation it’s just that we are only used to what we know so we constantly shift what is normal.
You have sailed past the point. There were so, so many cod it was hard not to catch a bunch. That isn’t a metric, it’s an indicator that most likely meant vast unseen numbers. The tip of the iceberg is a metaphor for a reason, though it may become an anachronism within our lifetimes.
Evolution of small things like algae and the krill which feed on it and feed the whale is quite fast. Single celled organisms reproduce on the scale of 20 minutes and hold immense amounts of genetic diversity in their populations to facilitate the success of a better adapted line almost immediately. Additionally, they are adept at horizontal gene transfer from other well-adapted organisms.
This would be great news if the whale literally only required krill to survive, but complex megafauna have complex needs, so the ability of krill and other small creatures to evolve is largely irrelevant in a discussion regarding the ability of megafauna to survive. This is especially true if you read TFA and see that the whales already adapt to eat different things as necessary.
Algae are the bottom of the ocean food chain. Everything interacts with it. But algae's happy to grow in a bowl of water left in the sun.
Lots of things eat krill and small fish. They're near the bottom of the foodchain too. In addition to algae, krill are opportunistic omnivores who often consume detritus. But their primary diet is algae. Small fish tend to be pretty similar.
It's not that other things don't interact with algae or krill or small fish, it's that those groups are the foundation bedrock of the ocean ecology. And single celled organisms like algae are tough as nails in aggregate. Couldn't kill them all if we tried. Pool owners will be familiar with the struggle.
It could easily become this fast or even faster, if we would just stop worrying so much about "playing god" and focus instead on getting good at this job. We don't have much time for this either, as AI is on the trajectory to take over that mantle in the next decade or three, whether we like it or not.
But seriously, we may not have much choice. Natural evolution stopped being able to adapt to environmental changes after it created us; genetic engineering is essentially the only way to make biology adaptable enough again.
The next question is which traits to do you choose and the next question is which traits are better, because choices will imply ordering, and then you open a big can of worms that last time killed millions of people. So maybe there's other ways to avoid doom that didn't create doom last time we went down the path.
Unpopular opinion for obvious reasons, but probably the only realistic one apart from just witnessing one extinction after another. Pollution and climate change aint going anywhere until we elevate whole world to the level of say western Europe.
But since we humans are pretty arrogant with our wisdom and lack long term patience, I can see many ways where well-intended meddling can end up in catastrophe overall.
Imagine you killed off all of humanity save for a couple people in Muncie, IN. How long until the next Shakespeare or Einstein emerges? Better yet, a properly heterogeneous culture?
I hope we create whalegemma (similar to dolphingemma) so we can explain to them how to co-exist better with humans (e.g. avoid this area during their whale hunting season, travel to this area if you get sick or tangled in rope).
…while not changing anything about our behavior, you mean. Because we were never ignorant of how to do better; we just couldn’t accept even any inconvenience, any obstacle to our “growth”.
>There is a federal law that prohibits people from communicating with dolphins.
>It’s called the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Signed in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, the federal law was created to protect marine mammals from being hunted, harassed, captured or killed.
>In a sense, talking to or communicating with dolphins could qualify as harassment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
>There are two levels of harassment, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Harassment at one level is considered “any act of pursuit, torment, or annoyance that has the potential to injure a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild.”
>On another level, harassment is defined by the NOAA as “acts having the potential to disturb (but not injure) a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild by disrupting behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.”
> Bursting from their enormous lungs at over 300mph (483km/h), a humpback whale's blow can rise up to 7m (23ft) into the air.
Pick a lane BBC.
But this is great news. Also the fact that whales "transport huge amounts of nutrients across the globe" (linking to [1]) is fascinating. The role of whales in sucking up critters in one place and pooping them out elsewhere being a fundamental dynamic that drives global ocean ecosystems... just chefs kiss
How we measure things in the UK has been dragged into political debates (Boris floated the idea of forcing supermarkets to list weights in pounds and ounces "again"). So critical thinking or sane decisions are out the window on this front.
Although there is some logic to keeping miles per hour for road speed limits as there is a big cost associated with updating all the signs and associated "documentation".
An organisation like the BBC have to make sure to use imperial measures (as well the one most people actually interact with), otherwise Reform voters have a meltdown.
It's not just the BBC, it's the UK as a whole. Miles per hour or deeply entrenched for speeds but for measurements we use meters. The same for weight, we weigh people in stone but we weigh everything else with grams.
I remember reading about whales returning to an area they hadn't been in for decades and people were worried about them eating all the local fish, but in fact their faeces enriched the local ecosystem from the ground up, leading to more fish. It's a bit like the counter-arguments to the lump of labour fallacy.
Is it also their policy to botch the significant digits? 300 mph is obviously a crude estimate. Converting to 483 km/h implies an unreasonable degree of precision.
Apparently they also measurably affect the vertical water mixing. Fish need dissolved oxygen to breathe, so they don't normally venture past the thermocline. And their fins are also vertical, so they don't cause a lot of vertical water movement.
But whales routinely dive deep, and their tail fin is _horizontal_ and it creates powerful updrafts.
Another organism that affects mixing is apparently jellyfish.
https://www.agweb.com/opinion/doomsday-addiction-celebrating...
What I'm wondering is why is there such a push for this stuff? Why does someone want everyone to think life as we know it is ending?
Fear is a strong motivator, but it is not a good one in this case. To really be effective, there must be the threat of direct, immediate, and severe consequences.
Instead it causes people to treat their messages as hyperbolic and undermines their entire movement.
Simple thought exercise (it's a 2x2):
What are the consequences of climate change being consequential vs inconsequential?
What are the consequences of us doing too little or too much to mitigate climate change?
Which quadrants are most consequential for the future of our planet?
Furthermore, most actions we can take to improve climate outcomes can also improve societal and technological outcomes. The only downside to taking more actions to have clean energy and less pollution are based on made up economic rules that normal people are supposed to follow, but that the super rich/powerful skirt at their leisure. A cleaner future benefits the VAST majority, irrespective of climate change. And the bonus is that if climate change does progress, we're better suited to manage it.
Or we can keep burning liquified dinosaur bones and partying like cigarettes don't cause cancer. I get the appeal of the 60s for how care free people could be - they lived without consequence. And we're stuck dealing with their failed policies.
micro-plastics into the ocean don't have a good prognosis on numbers reduction
global warming has a huge effect on oceanic life
and so on. maybe the number is much worse
We have no real frame of reference for what we've already lost.
The food chain really is sun -> algae -> krill (and sometimes small fish) -> humpback whale
But they don’t eat large fish, squid regularly, or anything like seals - so they’re not “generalists” in the broad, anything-goes sense.
They’re still constrained by their baleen filter-feeding system, which limits them to tiny prey
Lots of things eat krill and small fish. They're near the bottom of the foodchain too. In addition to algae, krill are opportunistic omnivores who often consume detritus. But their primary diet is algae. Small fish tend to be pretty similar.
It's not that other things don't interact with algae or krill or small fish, it's that those groups are the foundation bedrock of the ocean ecology. And single celled organisms like algae are tough as nails in aggregate. Couldn't kill them all if we tried. Pool owners will be familiar with the struggle.
Like what? Emotional support dolphin?
But seriously, we may not have much choice. Natural evolution stopped being able to adapt to environmental changes after it created us; genetic engineering is essentially the only way to make biology adaptable enough again.
But since we humans are pretty arrogant with our wisdom and lack long term patience, I can see many ways where well-intended meddling can end up in catastrophe overall.
https://www.projectceti.org/
The same goes for most of our ecological problems, really.
>There is a federal law that prohibits people from communicating with dolphins.
>It’s called the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Signed in 1972 by President Richard Nixon, the federal law was created to protect marine mammals from being hunted, harassed, captured or killed.
>In a sense, talking to or communicating with dolphins could qualify as harassment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
>There are two levels of harassment, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Harassment at one level is considered “any act of pursuit, torment, or annoyance that has the potential to injure a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild.”
>On another level, harassment is defined by the NOAA as “acts having the potential to disturb (but not injure) a marine mammal or marine mammal stock in the wild by disrupting behavioral patterns, including, but not limited to, migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.”
> Bursting from their enormous lungs at over 300mph (483km/h), a humpback whale's blow can rise up to 7m (23ft) into the air.
Pick a lane BBC.
But this is great news. Also the fact that whales "transport huge amounts of nutrients across the globe" (linking to [1]) is fascinating. The role of whales in sucking up critters in one place and pooping them out elsewhere being a fundamental dynamic that drives global ocean ecosystems... just chefs kiss
[1] https://www.nature.com/research-intelligence/nri-topic-summa...)
Although there is some logic to keeping miles per hour for road speed limits as there is a big cost associated with updating all the signs and associated "documentation".
An organisation like the BBC have to make sure to use imperial measures (as well the one most people actually interact with), otherwise Reform voters have a meltdown.
Said from a proudly metric country, New Zealand, where everyone knows their weight in kilograms and height in feet and inches.
But whales routinely dive deep, and their tail fin is _horizontal_ and it creates powerful updrafts.
Another organism that affects mixing is apparently jellyfish.
Sorry. I couldn’t resist.
For the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_progressive_rock_super...