
We Can't Destroy Planet Earth - indigodaddy
http://www.hughhowey.com/we-cant-destroy-planet-earth/
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spodek
Annoying pedantry.

Everyone knows "destroy the planet" means something like "decrease Earth's
ability to sustain life, especially human society" as is clear from every
context it's used. Of course there are edge cases, which amount to rounding
errors.

Yes, people would communicate more effectively by speaking more precisely, but
this post doesn't merit meaningful discussion.

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nydel
well-said & hear hear!

..excuse my not knowing where better to ask:

when i see a submission as what i would classify as "clickbait"-ish at
hackernews, what is the right thing to do? is that what flagging is for?

a cursory search hasn't returned me a FAQ or anything & i'm relatively new to
commenting. thank y'all in advance if there's such a document available to
link to.

~~~
dmos62
There's a link to the FAQ on the bottom of the page:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

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rurounijones
I am not worried about wiping out humanity. I am worried about wiping out
enough humans thst our modern civilization crumbles and never recovers,
relegating us to a single planet species forever.

We have fought against entropy to get this far using the relatively easily
available resources. If we fail now those won't be available for future
generations.

I want future generations to lead better lives than we do, not regress. I want
them to live the optimistic sci-fi future, not the post-apocalyptic ones

~~~
zzo38computer
Earth should not be destroy, and, I am not worried about wiping out humanity
either; currently, it is instead too much humanity, but if later it is too not
enough compared to another species then we can worry about it.

I decide to don't have any children. Therefore, we can try to reduce the
future human population, in this way.

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perfunctory
You don't have to worry about wiping out _all_ of humanity to worry about
climate change. Impending human suffering is reason enough to worry. "Climate
is an existential threat" is obviously a hyperbole. If somebody doesn't
understand it, too bad.

> What I don’t like is when we exaggerate and undermine our good intentions.

I don't see how that undermines anything.

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Lowkeyloki
Although I'm sure Howey is technically correct, I don't think what amounts to
semantic quibbling is actually adding anything to the discussion.

Okay, so humanity won't be eliminated. But there will be a dramatic increase
in death and suffering and overall quality of life will be drastically
diminished except for those already in the top 1% of wealth. How does that
distinction change the overall discussion or the importance of fighting
climate change?

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jordanbeiber
Is the author claiming that the complete destruction of planet earth and all
human kind is what the environmental debate is about?

For me it’s about my grand children not ending up in Mad Max or Blade Runner.

That would truly suck... for them.

In both these scenarios the earth is around, humans are living and pretty much
everything else is dead or dying.

You can always argue that whatever takes place within the boundaries of this
universe is a natural progression. My bother is that we as a species know a
lot of things, probably more than anything that ever lived on earth, still we
keep doing obviously stupid things at scale.

This makes my computer say “no”, and it’s hard to rationalize as natural
progression, considering this accumulation of knowledge.

My program tells me to do what I believe is best for my offspring and this
seems rather natural to me.

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jaredklewis
A lot of complaints here about "semantic quibbling" and the like, but I found
Howey's principled relationship with language refreshing.

Today, we get bombarded with an endless stream of clickbait that routinely
stretches words to the very limit of their meanings and beyond. In politics
especially, double speak is now the standard. "Fake news" probably isn't fake.
A "Clean Air Act" bill probably isn't about clean air. The "middle class"
probably isn't really in the middle. "Job creators" probably aren't creating
jobs. And on and on.

Why shouldn't we all strive to use words in a precise, straightforward way?
Why embellish our argument when the plain truth is already horrifying enough?

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Creationer
Climate change will benefit some countries according to Stanford:

[https://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/map.php](https://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/map.php)

Russia: +419% to GDP. Hmmm....

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baxtr
As a tautology that might be true. We can’t destroy the planet, we “just”
change its appearance and its composition. Will it be a great place to live
on? Not so sure about many parts of it.

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everyone
It _is_ apparently possible that runaway global warming (the very kind we are
currently initiating (perhaps irreversibly initiated already)) could render
Earth like Venus. The sun is hotter now than the last time the clathrates got
released at the Permian–Triassic extinction event. This is not espoused much
by mainstream climatologists but real non-crank climatologists have work
supporting the fact that it is possible. Steven Hawking even publicly brought
this up.

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furgooswft13
> Steven Hawking even publicly brought this up.

And was rebuked for it.

[https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/earth-is-not-at-
risk...](https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/earth-is-not-at-risk-of-
becoming-a-hothouse-like-venus-as-stephen-hawking-claimed-bbc/)

Even in the absolute worse case scenarios we'd expect to see a temperature
increase of around 10C, which is nowhere close to Venus levels. Also he threw
in "raining sulphuric acid" just to make it sound even more apocalyptic I
guess.

Earth becoming Venus is not even a "less likely" to happen scenario, it's a
completely implausible scenario even if 100% of humanity dedicated itself to
releasing all carbon into the atmosphere as quick as possible tomorrow just
for kicks.

Prominent scientists like Hawking publicly making such groundless and
hyperbolic statements IS hurting case for action against climate change, and
that's exactly what this article is talking about.

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sixothree
There is not much here to support his argument.

~~~
keldaris
He isn't so much making an argument as stating a simple and fairly trivial
observation. It's rather sad that hysterical alarmism has grown to such
proportions as to even necessitate such observations.

My only objection to his thesis is that, if I was being pedantic, I could note
that with a highly organized research and engineering effort, we could
technically construct sufficient supplies of cobalt salted nuclear weapons to
theoretically wipe out all organized human life on this planet if they were
all launched at once. That's a purely academic counterpoint, of course, as no
such supplies are likely to ever be constructed, let alone used.

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cthalupa
>The universe will collapse into a single black hole.

Basically no one believes the Big Crunch theory is likely to be accurate these
days, which is what I imagine he is referring to here - but it's also
inaccurately stated even for that theory, because the laws of physics are so
different when the universe becomes that compact that the properties that
allow black holes to exist are incredibly different. Not all singularities are
black holes, and indeed, the universe would not condense into a single black
hole if the Big Crunch were true. If he's not talking about the Big Crunch, I
have no idea what he could mean, since there's no conceivable theory in which
all of the matter ends up collected in one big black hole otherwise.

I know astrophysics and climate science are very different fields, but someone
writing about how Thing X but not Thing Y is actually an existential crisis,
some basic understanding about the ultimate fate of the universe would be
nice.

>It turns out that planetary life is a downhill chemical process if you have
sunlight and liquid water.

All evidence we have is that life, or at least intelligent life, is quite
rare. We don't understand abiogenesis, either. Between these two things,
acting like it's a given that we'll have life in short order if we have
sunlight and liquid water is absolutely silly.

>I have a short story in an upcoming anthology inspired by this point. The
third entry in the fantastic WASTELANDS series by John Joseph Adams will have
a story by me about a place where our worst case scenario has already
happened. > (If you want to read my solution for how to wipe out all of
humanity, check out WOOL and the Silo Saga. Spoiler: it ain’t pretty)

Oh. It's just a long form advertisement for his writing.

As others have pointed out, no one is really arguing about whether or not
humanity might survive in some shape or form in these scenarios, but it
wouldn't be anything like modern civilization. Our entire modern way of life
ceasing to exist is plenty existential, and there's no guarantee that if we
were reduced to a population of 2000 or so again that we would survive. See
again the fact that as far as we can tell, intelligent life is incredibly rare
- if intelligent life can keep hitting the 'restart' button when they fuck
things up, we'd probably see evidence of life existing elsewhere in the
galaxy.

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rtkwe
Sure, if we're taking 'existential threat' literally it's probably not in the
sense that it won't end all human life on Earth. If we take it a little looser
though it is a big threat to modern civilization and that will be pretty
difficult to restart just because we've mined so many of the easily available
energy sources and resources.

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lalaithion
To destroy the Earth:

[https://qntm.org/destro](https://qntm.org/destro)

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julienreszka
ugly rant

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phreeza
In the time before the hydrogen bomb there was discussion that such a device
may ignite the atmosphere. If we managed to somehow do that, it may do the
trick.

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xaduha
Biggest changes will be geopolitical driven by humanitarian catastrophes. It's
very much in the interest of the Western World not to allow it to happen.

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Causality1
We can't destroy humanity. We can, however, destroy any hope that human or
human-descended life makes it off this planet.

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perfmode
> I like reducing poverty and war, because their reduction lifts the global
> economy and makes travel safer and more enjoyable

a tad bit self interested, no?

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pmalynin
And why is that an issue?

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lumberjack
Because a lack of empathy for other human beings is problematic, because it
means that as soon as your self interest does not perfectly align with their
well being you will think nothing of harming them.

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matz1
Its only problematic for people who emphatize with other people well being.

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usrusr
Even those are not magically excluded from being harmed.

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matz1
Yes, which is expected. Its the reality.

