Moreover private owners optimize for wealth under capitalism, not preservation. Look at why oil companies want to do to the sea and arctic. Or the replacement of Amazonian forest with pasture for beef grazing.
African countries suffer under the poverty created by colonial extraction of both resources and people, followed by being charged for the privilege of having their resources taken, and saddled with unpayable loans. Those loans also placing them in a position where they are forced to allow western countries to continue to extract, and are prevented from protecting their national interests.
If Africa was allowed to own its wealth and develop without negative interference (assassinations, extraction, the world bank, foreign militaries) it would be the richest region on the planet.
Anyway, I read on HN that AI was about to solve climate change any time now. I'm sure prompting LLMs the right way will harness the world knowledge to generatively hallucinate a way for trees to grow better.
"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment"
However it will cause ecosystem collapse which we rely on for food due to too rapid change which nature can't handle, and it will change which areas are viable for human habitation and agriculture. Meaning many many people will have to move.
And of course mass forced migration combined with shrinking resources is a recipe for global war. See how popular migrants are now in many countries, and consider half the world having to migrate to survive. Poor people living in areas that become uninhabitable (and who never caused the problem in the first place) will move to a better place where it's likely the current inhabitants will protest.
And a global war is very likely to lead to extinction with the WMD tech humanity has now.
All we need to do is stop trying to be richer than everyone else and to work together :(
Citation absolutely required. This is not in the IPCC reports, which are already quite extreme in their projections.
The IPCC sixth assessment report has an entire section on ecosystem impacts, and while a number of changes are projected with varying degrees of confidence, the word “collapse” is nowhere to be found, except for the following sentence:
> It is not known at which level of global warming an abrupt permafrost collapse…compared to gradual thaw (Turetsky et al., 2020) would have to be considered an important additional risk.
My in-laws are a lost cause. I can make immediate ground in most discussions, but give it a day and they're back to their same FUD arguments that I'd just taken down the day before.
The pitiable thing about their position is, I think, that they want the lifestyle they lived for their kids and grandkids, and think that this "green scam" will impoverish and threaten the viability of their extending family.
Unfortunately the future could be much worse than that, but for basically the opposite reason.
It's surreal watching human denial working in real-time.
But I also see multiple places they mention the changes as being at least partly due to logging or wood harvesting. Which seems like biomass being removed and yet not going into the atmosphere.
In fact, the natural feedback cycle of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is for greenery to increase, not decrease.
...waits 50 years...
dr_dshiv•1mo ago
https://www.icos-cp.eu/news-and-events/news/finlands-forests...
lmc•1mo ago
https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000268965/vom-retter-zu...
jabl•1mo ago
timr•1mo ago
Planting more trees than you cut down is an effective way of offsetting CO2 emissions.
dr_dshiv•1mo ago
timr•1mo ago
mc32•1mo ago
PaulHoule•1mo ago