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.
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.
Not everybody is a scientist who understands that it's just a metaphor.
> Majority of Britons believe climate-change could end human race. ... 54 percent of adults agreed that climate-change threatens our extinction as a species
It isn't necessarily just a metaphor. The idea that the human population being reduced to a tiny fraction of what it once was is totally survivable isn't undisputed fact. Us surviving times where there has been a narrow amount of human life have all happened when we were hunter-gatherers or at the very beginning of things approaching civilization. The vast majority of humans today are dependent on each other and technology. The climate is also different - the sun is warmer than the last time the green house gasses on this planet rose to their highest concentrations, and we know that runaway global warming can turn a planet completely uninhabitable for human life - just look at Venus.
Yes, there are plenty of scenarios where a small amount of humanity lives on and repopulates the world over time. It certainly can happen. But there's also plenty where we don't. The author doesn't bring up any accurate science to back up his claims, or make any real arguments beyond 'We've survived population bottlenecks in the past', so I'd say that 54% of Briton's are right - climate change is a threat that could cause extinction. It isn't guaranteed to, even unchecked... but the question isn't whether or not it's a guarantee of extinction for humanity, or a threat possible of causing it. And it certainly is.
I'm saying that if some event brings the human population to .1% immediately and then that .1% dies out in the future because it cannot sustain itself, that event might as well have directly ended the human race, even if some remnant lingers on temporarily.
It's 0.000004286% of the human population that would be considered a minimum viable population size, and of course that's considered stable. We know human population was less than that at least twice in history. For the vast majority of human history human population was about 0.000171429% of what it is now.
Both are vastly less than the .1% you claim to be fatal. What is your basis for claiming this number would end the human species ?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
there is the metaphysical evidence that self is an illusion, a cognitive construct, the purpose of which is practical.
in the field of physics, we believe that at the atomic and subatomic levels, there aren't "solids" for instance. there are just lots of loosely connected independent charged particles.
just a lot of vibrations and wiggles...
this substantiates the reported experiences of many spiritual groups who report feelings of oneness and unity which lie beneath the usual feeling of self.
that the names we apply to "things" are just pointers.
just labels.
the real thing cannot be named.
so, if we want to make claims about ultimate reality, we must wrestle with the incontrovertible evidence that the self isn't even our own individual ultimate truth.
for instance, my body might just be an antennae for consciousness. consciousness may lie outside of me, and I am a mere vessel.
since it seems you possess neither the knowledge nor experience to support your assertion, why don't you learn up on the topic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egoism
Isn't that self interest too? Because he thinks it is the right thing to do to save that man. He said he can't leave him out, he have to help him. So helping the guy out is important to him. Maybe if he didn't save the guy he will be suffer from guilt.
> A bigger problem for psychological egoism is that some behavior does not seem to be explained by self-regarding desires. Say a soldier throws himself on a grenade to prevent others from being killed. It does not seem that the soldier is pursuing his perceived self-interest. It is plausible that, if asked, the soldier would have said that he threw himself on the grenade because he wanted to save the lives of others or because it was his duty. He would deny as ridiculous the claim that he acted in his self-interest.
> The psychological egoist might reply that the soldier is lying or self-deceived. Perhaps he threw himself on the grenade because he believed that he could not bear to live with himself afterwards if he did not do so. He has a better life, in terms of welfare, by avoiding years of guilt. The main problem here is that while this is a possible account of some cases, there is no reason to think it covers all cases. Another problem is that guilt may presuppose that the soldier has a non-self-regarding desire for doing what he takes to be right.
> The psychological egoist might reply that some such account must be right. After all, the soldier did what he most wanted to do, and so must have been pursuing his perceived self-interest. In one sense, this is true. If self-interest is identified with the satisfaction of all of one’s preferences, then all intentional action is self-interested (at least if intentional actions are always explained by citing preferences, as most believe). Psychological egoism turns out to be trivially true. This would not content defenders of psychological egoism, however. They intend an empirical theory that, like other such theories, it is at least possible to refute by observation.
> There is another way to show that the trivial version of psychological egoism is unsatisfactory. We ordinarily think there is a significant difference in selfishness between the soldier’s action and that of another soldier who, say, pushes someone onto the grenade to avoid being blown up himself. We think the former is acting unselfishly while the latter is acting selfishly. According to the trivial version of psychological egoism, both soldiers are equally selfish, since both are doing what they most desire.
> The psychological egoist might handle apparent cases of self-sacrifice, not by adopting the trivial version, but rather by claiming that facts about the self-interest of the agent explain all behavior. Perhaps as infants we have only self-regarding desires; we come to desire other things, such as doing our duty, by learning that these other things satisfy our self-regarding desires; in time, we pursue the other things for their own sakes.
> Even if this picture of development is true, however, it does not defend psychological egoism, since it admits that we sometimes ultimately aim at things other than our welfare. An account of the origins of our non-self-regarding desires does not show that they are really self-regarding. The soldier’s desire is to save others, not increase his own welfare, even if he would not have desired to save others unless saving others was, in the past, connected to increasing his welfare.
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.