I think it’s wild and deeply inspiring to imagine how the surface of the earth had radically different forms over billions of years. Huge landscapes of unrotted dead plants. Then massive landscapes of fungus and decomposing bacteria breaking that down into dirt. And on and on.
I think it is wise to understand that earth has been through many eras and is not as homeostatic as our narrowly imagined “natural” state we seek today. And I am not trying to build an anti climate change argument, just that static “naturalism” is a human construct.
Rather than motivating environmental conservation out of some species-level nostalgia for "the biodiversity of our youth", there's another, forward-looking motivation for it: the species that evolved at the same time we did — our "evolutionary cohort" — are the species of our own Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. While they may not share our ecological niche, they all share a dependency on the same air mix we do, the same temperature ranges, the same water osmolarity and pH, etc.
This implies two things:
- Insofar as we want to keep the Earth a good place for us to live, we can measure our success by the number of our evolutionary cohort of species that stick around;
- Insofar as we plan to live in space, terraform other worlds, etc., it's only animals of our evolutionary cohort that will be able to comfortably survive in the places we optimize for our own well-being. If we increase global CO2 levels here on Earth to such a point that species on Earth that like our current air mix begin dying off, and we see an evolution of replacement species that prefer higher CO2 levels (and we ourselves retreat to dome cities or something to avoid that fate); but then we later terraform Mars to have the environment of Earth ca 5000BCE; then the species that inhabit Earth by that point, won't be able to be transplanted to Mars. Only the species we had conserved — keeping them in the dome-cities with us — would be able to be transplanted.
(Another way to say that second one, is that if we screw up the Earth's environment, but later fix it, we'll lose biodiversity twice — we'll have killed off our evolutionary cohort with the screw-up, and we'll kill off the newer-evolved species with our "fix.")
The time scale for new species adapted to a completely new climate is many millions of years, not a few thousands. What we destroy today won’t be replaced while humans as a species as we know it today even exists.
It will always be many orders of magnitude easier to terraform Earth, even after we screwed it up, than trying to terraform Mars.
We have been agressively terraforming the earth into a form less accomodating of current complex life for some time now, and we show no signs of slowing. That's the whole problem
We increased CO2 concentration by about 200 parts-per-million (a factor of about 2x), and increased the average temperature by about 1-2°C. Rain patterns are slightly different. Ocean PH levels dropped by about 0.04 .
Sure, given how delicate the biosphere is, these small changes have a significant effect. However, if we look at Earth on the same scale as any other object in the solar system, the environment on Earth today is almost identical to the environment on Earth 1,000 years ago. The atmosphere is about 1023 millibars; 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon, and 0.04% everything else. Liquid water covers most of the surface, with an active water cycle causing water rain to occur periodically over much of the planet.
The temperature change is so small, that we would not notice it if it were on any other planet in the solar system, and it is far below the noise floor of day-to-day variance
Yes aggressively. Raising the average (I don't understand why you'd bring up noise when discussing average) temperature of the entire Earth by 1-2 degrees C in a period of 100 years, from 1 single organism is remarkable. Any why specify CO2 as if that's the only thing we're polluting with? What about methane? Remember when we disrupted the ozone layer? What about pollution with plastics, and industrial chemicals in land and water?
And don't forget that the Earth is more than willing to enter a negative feedback loop -- she will take that 1-2 degree increase in temperature and say "I heard you like warm weather, so I'm gonna release all this trapped methane and CO2 from my frozen parts and let you have it too."
This is such a dangerous perspective. Why would we want to make the temperature on Mars like the one on Earth!?! We already have 7 Billion people here to take care of and we're already witnessing mass heat, flooding, and famine deaths from climate change. People focusing on colonizing Mars when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world.
> People focusing on colonizing Mars when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world.
I don't agree with the logic that we cannot focus on two things at the same time. It's like saying, "People focusing on making movies when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world." or "People focusing on curing fibromyalgia when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world."
The bottleneck to reversing climate change is not money or manpower, it is politics. We cannot force other people (especially in other countries) to do the right thing for the environment. We can, however, do our best to improve things on our side and pressure others to do so as well. And while we are putting our best effort towards that, we shouldn't stop making art, researching medicine, or even, trying to colonize mars.
Also, the research and development needed to colonize Mars may very well yield scientific discoveries that allow us to reverse climate change. And even if it doesn't, and Earth is ruined despite our best efforts here, we won't have all our eggs in one basket.
My point is, I just do not believe that researching colonization of Mars will do anything to thwart our efforts to improve the Earth. Quite the contrary, it may help those efforts.
> I don't agree with the logic that we cannot focus on two things at the same time
This times a million. I see it all the time on social media when it comes to news stories too, and it's as ridiculous there as it is here. People have different interests and skillsets, and they don't all need to focus on the same thing at the same time. The folks looking to explore Mars colonisation/space exploration and those working to slow down or prevent climate change are usually entirely different groups, who have studied what they're interested in for years. You can't just chuck them all at a single 'project' and refuse to allow anything else, in the same way we can't pause the rest of human civilisation because your pet issue isn't being sorted quickly enough, or have the entirety of a media organisation reassigned to a single story.
I agree with you for the most part, but I don't get on their case so much because the kinds of advancement (e.g. re: recycling) that you'd need to settle on Mars are also the kinds of advancement you'd need to fix things here on Earth.
We live in an environment that's we're so conveniently adapted for us that it's easy to take for granted. You can spend your whole life doing damage to this precious thing we all got for free and die before the consequences of your actions catch up with you. It's all too easy to just miss ecological thinking altogether.
On a spacecraft though, or a Martian colony, the f-around-find-out cycle is gonna be deadly short. You're gonna need everyone in board with doing what they need to to stay alive.
Again, something we desperately need on Earth.
So let them fail to colonize Mars. Let them fail 100 times. Because what we learn from those failures just might save us at home.
I believe that your reasoning misses one crucial detail: we do not exactly know how to climate control a whole planet, we have almost no experience with that.
Attempts to terraform Mars allow humans to try some things and to see what happens. It will allow to make our models of climate more precise.
For now our understanding of a climate based on observational studies. Not a controlled experiment. So when we start to do something having some climatic goals in mind, we'll start to learn a lot. And it would be better for Earth if we started with Mars.
Though we have no time, but it doesn't seem a sufficient reason not to try get at least some experience from terraforming Mars. It may reduce risks.
I don’t understand what you’re saying is dangerous exactly, because the thread you’re replying to is full of people pointing out the ludicrousness of “terraforming Mars” compared to doing anything-at-all on Earth: pointing out the massive gulf between “massive” human impact and what is necessary for Mars (far, far greater).
I interpret this as you misinterpreting the opinions here, confusing them with the opinion of unrelated colonization-fanatics, via an unknown mechanism; I will not attempt any defense of either perspective right now.
Amount of floodings and deaths because of natural disasters and famine have never been so low compared to what history tells us.
In no way I want to argue against climate change. But it's important to not become a hysterical Greta type of person and to approach our climate issues with proper factual science. Not emotions.
They might be talking about farmland. For example, pastures, agriculture and forestry in New Zealand has approximately zero in common with the native flora & fauna that was here before humans modified the environment. The native plants that remain are virtually all in areas that are simply too uneconomic to farm in any way (usually mountainous). ~55% of New Zealand is being used for sheep and cattle, and another 8% for exotic forestry.
We also eat an extraordinary amount of the fish and seafood in the world from the ocean. “The global per capita consumption footprint in 2011 is estimated at 27 kg. Our estimate is higher than the 18.6 kg reported in FAO statistics for the same year, as it also takes into account the indirect use of capture fisheries production by the fishmeal sector.” “the conversion of wild-capture fish that would not be used for human consumption into fishmeal and subsequent use as aquafeed, results in an overall increase in human consumption of fish”. “31% of the world's wild fish stocks are estimated to be overfished, 58% fully exploited”.
"Globally agricultural land area is approximately five billion hectares, or 38 percent of the global land surface. About one-third of this is used as cropland, while the remaining two-thirds consist of meadows and pastures) for grazing livestock."
That 1-2 degree C change is enough to cause mature trees all over my US state to start dying of heat stress every year. So yes, it seems warranted. I've never seen anything like it in my 37 years on this earth.
We reversed the Chicago River 120 years ago, protected the Netherlands from flooding for centuries, blasted out the bed of the East River to make New York one of the most successful ports in history, laid at least one canal through every major ithsmus, and built dozens of reservoirs and irrigation systems into every hydrological ecosystem that touches a major population center. That's just water projects.
> The time scale for new species adapted to a completely new climate is many millions of years, not a few thousands.
On what are you basing this statement? I would argue that entirely depends on the complexity of the species and the time per generation. Bacteria certainly can adapt to extremely different conditions within years, if not even quicker. And these "simple life forms" are arguably much more important for the ecosystem than more complex ones like mammals.
if you only want bacteria, maybe. but even insects or spider still need more and more time to evolve closely new species. we even don't need to talk how many time for evolving a new mammal species. plants will extinct, too.
> The time scale for new species adapted to a completely new climate is many millions of years, not a few thousands. What we destroy today won’t be replaced while humans as a species as we know it today even exists.
When it comes to changing climate (and some degree of pollution) instead of newly evolved adaptations you get migrations or selection for particular alleles. Adjust up and back down and you can end up with diversity constraints on both ends.
Some manages to migrate or adapt. Many won’t. Either because there’s nowhere to migrate to, or because there’s no path there available. In the end, we will lose a lot of biodiversity.
This is one of the best rational arguments of environmentalism that I've heard. I wish more environmentalists used this kind of rigor in their arguments, instead of relying on emotional talk and guilt tripping.
The very reason we care about the ecosystem in the first place is because we depend on it. That's the most important point - environmentalism is first and foremost about our own survival. Nobody gives a shit about plants and animals for their sake.
Wrong end of the viewscope. You're considering what's survived. Those are largely exceptions.
What's gone extinct: Virtually all of South America's marsupial megafauna (much of this prior to the arrival of humans, triggered by the rising of the central American ithsmus), mammoths, mastodons, native horses (the species was reintroduced by Europeans), giant ground sloth (Megalonyx), short-faced bears, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, tapirs, peccaries, giant tortoises, the American lion, Miracinonyx (the American cheetah), siaga antelope, several species of llamas, Camelops (a giant camel), and more, all in North America alone. Very nearly the American bison ("buffalo") and California condor, amongst others.
In Europe there were also several species of mammoth and mastodons, native straight-tusked elephants, lions, cave bear, Irish elk, woolly rhinocerous, aurochs, and more.
Australia saw two phases of human-driven extinctions, one triggered by the aboriginies roughly 50kya, the second by Europeans, beginning about 250 years ago.
First, that's an informal statement made in an online discussion forum, rather than a tightly-worded scientific assessment.
However it might be charitably interpreted along the lines of "of the prehuman megafauna extant on the multiple continents, the greatest degree of survival to the present day is found in Africa, where those species co-evolved with humans rather than experiencing humans as a suddenly-appearing invasive species".
Which is what the sources I'm familiar with generally suggest. Though not a primary source, Wikipedia reasonably summarises the situation:
Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world with the highest amount of Pleistocene megafauna surviving to the present day. These surviving species include the African bush elephant, African forest elephant, black rhinoceros, white rhinoceros and the hippopotamus. All of these species maintained populations in sub-Saharan Africa even after many of them were extirpated from Eurasia during the early Holocene.[58] This means that all of the largest herbivore genera present in Pleistocene Africa are still present today.
Citing:
Stuart, Anthony John (May 2015). "Late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions on the continents: a short review: LATE QUATERNARY MEGAFAUNAL EXTINCTIONS". Geological Journal. 50 (3): 338–363. doi:10.1002/gj.2633. S2CID 128868400
Stuart, Anthony J. (1991). "Mammalian Extinctions in the Late Pleistocene of Northern Eurasia and North America". Biological Reviews. 66 (4): 453–562. doi:10.1111/j.1469-185X.1991.tb01149.x. ISSN 1469-185X. PMID 1801948. S2CID 41295526
Which would strongly support the original statement by maxerickson above.
I really like this comment & it has a lot going for it.
At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium. The tree of life has become incredibly wide & complex.
The naturalist tendency doesn't have to be as static as portrayed here. Nature itself is such a dynamic & changing system death & population booms chasing each other around wildly. What, I think, is so scary about right now is how in jeapordy so much life seems. Insects & birds are disappearing at mass scale. Large life is hunted to breaking points. Many animals lack for habitat and access to essential food & water.
We see strictly worse coming & that has built a fervor for the worlds we are actively losing/destroying.
Adam Curtis’ “All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace” theorized that that emerging chaotic state mixed with our recent technological emergence has lead us to believe we can “contain the chaos” of this highly sophisticated system. He quite amazingly illustrates over 3 hours that we falsely believe that earth is an unchanging systematic snow globe rather than a chaotic system. And the more we try to control it, the more we sort of build up larger and more chaotic outcomes.
There is no natural state as defined by hyper static equilibrium. Only brief moments where we purport to control it — building up a chaotic momentum beneath it.
"There is no natural state as defined by hyper static equilibrium. Only brief moments where we purport to control it — building up a chaotic momentum beneath it."
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
If you're being serious, it's more that within time you begin to realize both your fragility and lack of power over yourself and nature. And on top of that you realize the narrow perspectives you held as a child that came for your culture, like owning things or believing you have control over them, are far less real than we think. Here she points out, look, you can say you own something, but that's a cultural concept. Long after you are dead and gone that land will be there, you will not. Long after you said you can control nature, it will consume you in the grave. You are a part of it, and for a time you can exert some power over it, but in the long term, we are just waiting to be overrun by it. What may appear inferior, could, over a long time horizon, prove superior. Trees for example have survived 100's of millions of years, and humans are a mere 10's of thousands. We are young, ambitious and naive and we are cutting them down -- the thing that provides the very air we breath.
Its a broader perspective that come with age I'm guessing.
"You" in a geological and time sense are almost nothing.
Fill the room your in with dead-body clones of yourself, it will probably take well over a hundred.
Collect all the humans on the surface of the Earth, they'd all fit inside Rohde Island (thanks XKCD). Humanity is a tiny fraction of the mass and surface area of the world.
You've been alive for less than 100 years and only seen, heard, touched or felt the smallest fraction of the surface of the Earth. Met a tiny fraction of the people.
Time wise you're limited to 80? years of cognizant thought. Maybe 90? Humans have been around for thousands of years, and earth has been around for billions.
Yet, we as humans claim parts of nature as our own. My land, my country, my trees, my pet rock. All those things aren't yours and never were.
The poem just imagines what would happen if nature suddenly decided to reclaim what was always hers.
Shout out to Ballard's The Drowned World, a post-ecopocalypse story where the main character undergoes a (perceived) reconnection with larger biophysics, "neuronic time.
I feel like having Atwood, Ballard & Curtis in a thread deserves some kind of commendation.
Maybe I am misinterpreting the tone, but this is an incongruous belief. Nothing about a chaotic system precludes a *trend* in that system. I think it is quite objectively clear that while extremely chaotic, the trend of recent human impact on the earth is an equally extreme destruction of natural habitats.
Yeah chaotic systems are merely characterized by their extreme sensitivity to initial conditions for a particular long term outcome. All systems trend when modeled mathematically. It’s just difficult to know where a chaotic system will be at any point in time because of how hard it is to establish initial conditions.
One way you can play with a real chaotic system is to build one of the circuits in jc sprott’s papers and vary the control variable. You’ll see at some values of your control an “orderly” progression of the response variables, and at others a difficult to predict progression.
If you believe that then I think you haven't spent much time out in nature. Some wild species populations boom and crash in chaotic ways even in areas that haven't been impacted much by humans. Nature is far from stable on any time scale longer than a year.
ISTM like you haven't fully grasped the fractal nature of, well, nature.
At one scale, it's chaos. 1 or 2 scales up or down (in time or in space) it's stable. It's like that all the way up and all the way down.
Oh, and not only are the scale levels not just spacial or temporal but both, but the number of levels is itself non integer.
But the point is that even chaotic systems often display order if you find the right place or perspective to stand and look.
You can't say "it's not stable". Not ever. Rocks aren't stable over aeons. Galaxies aren't. Protons aren't if you wait long enough.
But it is often possible to measure the rates of change and of complexity and say, look, given greater levels of complexity, then lower rates of change will probably hold...
Even given a famine or a plague that's currently devastating one region.
AWOBMOLG was more about mythologization of tech as oracular & all powerful, leading us to think that we can handle anything. Techno-utopianism.
A lot of the series is about the belief that we could, with technologies predictive powers & neoliberal market ethos... And how it doesn't pan out. We have "New Economies" greatly bloom in the world. And about how instead we got the 1997 Asian financial crisis. We thought we were taming market complexity (via in part neoliberalism weirdly) but turns out not so much. We have the rise of cybernetic thinking & Limits of Growth (& it's limitations in assuming we cannot change human behavior).
"Sure everything is trending towards shit, but we're humans, we can definitely go create some genius machine that will fix this, right"
Curtis rarely comes out and makes broad conclusions, but the watcher is definitely left with impression of absurd hubris & folly & chaos-triumphant, in AWOBMOLG and in much else of Curtis's excellent excellent catalog of contemporary history documentaries.
> Curtis rarely comes out and makes broad conclusions
Indeed; his films (and their titles!) are oblique and suggestive. They are about politics, but it's very hard to discern his own political posture clearly. I wonder what kind of a man he would be to meet.
He's still a bit reserved somewhat in interviews but they are fun to watch.
Just my take, but I think the core concept is really that there is no one actually genuinely leading, no one left with a compelling believable vision in any position of power, and that total power vacuum keeps letting mad scenes play out across history.
The need for hope, to show a willingness to go in authentically good direction at scale, is a fuel that powers the public spirit, and we keep suffering long eras where it's simply unavailable.
Trends are chaotic too and hit inflection points that are hard to predict. He goes deep on the pred/prey model from Isle Royal where trends go for a bit then inflect. Tons of wolves then tons of elk then low populations of both then high of both. There are trends but no hyper static state or relationship even.
Humans have destroyed natural habitats, but at the same time some species have come to thrive in the unnatural habitats we have created. Think of pigeons, rats, cockroaches, coyotes, racoons, etc. Life expands to fill every niche where enough energy is available for survival.
He gives the example in (maybe my favorite content of the last decade) Can’t Get You Out Of My Head about how climate scientists looking to alter weather patterns to fight the Cold War discovered, accidentally, how even the tiniest of changes cause Earth’s climate system to spiral wildly out of control.
To me it would be really suprising if previous millennium would not would not have been more diverse. Of course we have only seen <5% of this millenium so maybe its early to say? But the trend is not looking great.
I think your flippant response here robs us of a conversation as to why we do this — what larger purpose does it serve in the macro scale mentioned earlier. Is earth a set of short term
optimized life leading to different eras or are humans the first sentient life that must take responsibility for it. If so how and with what goals. For our own preservation? To freeze all life as it is today?
No other species has had this great of an impact on that many species. If we were wise and thoughtful, collectively we could both advance ourselves and allow the diversity to continue. So it's a shame we aren't.
Arguably cyanobacteria beat us to the punch a bit less than 2.5 billion years ago in the Great Oxidation Event, when they killed off much/most of the other life by producing a lot of oxygen:
To learn and try to understand that is the goal of human life. How can we possible understand our planet if we destroy all of its resources, kill off its diversity of life before we have an inkling of the complexity of how it works?
We can continue to exist and learn without killing off the planet.
>At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium.
Lol, no.
Today is not in any way more/less special than any of the preceding 350million years. We obviously know more, because today's animals don't need to be dug out from the ground as fossils.
Also, Darwin wrote a lot about the extreme variations that we see in the 'balanced' ecosystem. He tallied up the birds near him and found that ~4/5ths of all the birds would die every winter. He remarked that a 10% death rate illness in humans would be considered a huge event, but that every year, nearly all the birds near him just up and die. This was in a passage on how the 'balance' that we see is really just a lot of species furiously competing with each other and trying to eek out minuscule improvements in the deadly chaos.
I've been a falconer for a couple of decades and in general try to keep up with the research around birds of prey. The general consensus is only about 10% of birds of prey survive the first year. It doesn't surprise me that the survival rate for most other birds is equally as bad. I've been out in the field a number of times in the winter and found wild birds of prey that were so weak they couldn't fly and you could just walk up to them and pick them up. In every one of these cases the birds were skin and bones, starving to death. Nature can be brutal.
It's something George Carlin has touched on as well. Paraphrasing a bit: We're not really trying to save the planet. The planet has been here for billions of years, it'll be here for billions of years after we're all dead and gone. The planet will be fine. The people? The people are fucked. That's what we're trying to save. We're trying to keep the planet hospitable to us.
And the animals. There is more than planet and humans. If it was just us - to some extent - I’d say “we get what we deserve.” But animals vastly outnumber humans, feel pain just like us, and do not deserve any of it. At least that’s what I find myself experiencing when I think about the future of our planet.
Edit: I looked it up. Estimate is 20,000,121,091,000,000,000 or 20 billion billion animals. “Vastly” was clearly an understatement.
Well billions may be stretching it, by some estimates in 1 billion years Earth will be be hotter by cca 25 degress. All kinds of runaway greenhouse effects will happen way before that, ocean will become probably unhospitable warm chemical gunk and some of it may evaporate out of Earth's atmosphere and then taken by solar winds out of gravity well.
Some primitive form of life will probably thrive for another billion years till Earth is slowly sterilized by Sun, but not complex life like us.
Changes are static or not depending on the scale of time you consider.
In a time span of billions (even millions) of years, our planet indeed went through different eras.
For a duration of one human life, the state of nature is expected to remain quite static. The problem with climate change is that we started to witness the planet entering in a new era in such a small time frame - roughly 200 years.
This isn't the greatest illustration: it only goes back 20,000 years. That's only a minuscule portion of the Earth's history, and even for humans it's just a fraction of our history (humans are roughly 2M years old).
Of course, going back to the climate the Earth had in the Cambrian era, for instance, probably would not be comfortable to humans at all, but still, humans have survived for a much longer time than is illustrated here. Human civilization, OTOH, occupies about half the time period shown here.
The thing that's most important about climate change is: how will it affect human settlements where they're located now? You can't just pick up whole cities with billions of people and move them, and many (most?) of the cities are close to water.
Way to wait a week to sneak this in. Anti-science thrives when it avoids scrutiny.
If you think going back more than 20k years would in any way change the entire point of the cartoon[1], then by all means do the research, draw the graph and show where it's wrong.
I waited a week because posting it sooner gets me "You're posting too fast. Slow down". So some of my replies are quick, others get queued up for days. Fix the site, don't complain to me.
Anyway, it's not anti-science. It's well-known that the earth was hotter during the time of the dinosaurs. Sure, rate of change is important, but as I said in the end, the biggest problem for humans is rising sea levels, because of where humans live. Worse storms are also a big problem, though here again where humans live is a big problem since they tend to live on coasts and storms usually hit there.
Posting too fast clears in an hour or two, not days. Learn how the site works, don't complain to me.
It's classic climate denial to continue to harp that the earth was hotter in the past so somethingsomethingsomething look over there and ignore the fact that the rate of change this century, not looking back a million years, is the point of the comic.
This isn't true. For most of history we just don't have the resolution to see changes over a few hundred years.
But we do have recent examples of much quicker temperature changes. During the Younger Dryas the global average temp dropped about 5°C over a few decades and about 1000 years later, rose again just as quickly.
Don't really care. Basically the same old tricks with new faces. Even worse when you try to use the word "consensus" when it was everything except that.
End result for europeans is paying more taxes while other places keep doing far worse. I'll be damned to yet see any of those groups advocating for more nuclear power around here to save the environment.
Sure this isn't binary and plenty has improved in regards to ecology when you want to nitpick on reddit-style, what truly bothers me is the sheer percentage of green washing instead of focus on real improvement.
What a weird comment. The ozone hole WAS a huge problem… and then the world banned CFCs and we fixed it. But it took years of lawsuits, journalism, and scientists speaking up.
Similarly, global warming is a huge problem today and threatens our future. We will fix it just like we did the ozone hole, but again it will take decades of lawsuits, science, public outcry.
The problem this time is twofold: the rise of conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party, who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, and the stranglehold that globalist neoliberal corporations have on the economy.
The second being what you meant in your last paragraph. It’s hard to actually address waste, overconsumption, and pollution when our economy and government is controlled by a handful of corps, who are getting better and better at greenwashing.
>The problem this time is twofold: the rise of conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party, who refuse to even acknowledge the problem, and the stranglehold that globalist neoliberal corporations have on the economy.
Well this time it's a lot worse because not using CFCs had a comparatively small impact on the world economy, with a big payoff.
There is currently no realistic path to keep somewhat decent living standards for the number of people we have, while ramping down the world economy sufficiently to battle global warming.
Even if everybody turned vegan and stopped flying it wouldn't be enough.
Wood was once used to power engines, then coal, then oil and in current days electricity. The sooner you move to the next stage of evolution, the more efficient you can become and better afford to preserve natural resources.
What most people forget is that pollution comes from the basic need of survival and improving life quality. So you need efficiency and balance what matters for most humans.
Instead of forcing everyone to become vegan and to stop flying, how about supporting the industries that create artificial meat cheaper than the real thing and airplanes that run on electricity? (both of these things already exist nowadays)
>Instead of forcing everyone to become vegan and to stop flying, how about supporting the industries that create artificial meat cheaper than the real thing and airplanes that run on electricity?
I was saying everybody turning vegan and stopping flying entirely wouldn't be enough.
Flying on electricity and lab grown meat still use a lot of energy compared to not having those.
You're actually making my point really well. Extreme measures aren't enough, so why not do less than that? Nobody wants to give up their quality of life. Especially not sufficiently to stop climate change.
It's bizarre to me that climate skeptics think the ozone issue is a point in their favor. Ozone depletion was a real issue, but the international community came together and banned the use of CFCs. Since then ozone levels stabilized and then started to recover. They should reach pre-1980s levels this century based on current trends. It is a clear example of collective action successfully addressing a climate problem.
It was as much of a real issue as corona recently.
Both got solved with the same approach. If you went ahead getting untested vaccines into your body then for sure you also tolerate more taxes in name of "climate change".
Albeit we live on the same planet it does seem we live in two different worlds and look at the same things in opposite manner. I don't care what "science" has to say or whatever happy reality you live where "collective action" happens.
And then after millions of years and all of the biological matter turning into oil we will eventually use it all up within ~300-400 years. The era that humans will utilize this kind of gasoline combustion is such a tiny blip of the whole human history, but today it seems like civilization can't possibly exist without it.
I don't see how airplanes are even going to exist for mass transit and cargo 200 years from now or how we will ever escape Earths gravity again without building some kind of space elevator before we run out.
Rockets (especially SpaceX ones) can fly without fossil fuels. Hydrocarbons can easily be synthesized with thermal depolymerization or wasteful processes like how we make ethanol from corn.
That's to say nothing of how all the oil fields we've tapped are the easy to get ones, and the deep sea holds a ton of oil.
Electric and hydrogen fueled airplanes are progressing. There are also futuristic ideas about powering the planes with ground or space based lasers powered by solar. Zeppelins still scale really well, and ships can use sails again. I believe a lot of this stuff would have already been resolved if we had stopped propping up the fossil fuel industry by funding wars to maintain supply and allowing the industry to externalize its costs.
We need a president to declare transitioning of fossil fuels to be a national emergency and also a matter of national defense, and set the military industrial complex to work actually building a sustainable supply chain for energy and materials.
The US is a little under 15% of the world economy, and a little over 15% of the worlds energy use. It’s going to take a lot more than just the actions of one President to solve climate change.
This is the opposite of how politics work. The median voter is near retirement age; their #1 issue is they hate change and their #2 issue is they hate gas prices going up. Anything which looks like either one of these will fail.
So instead of hyping up things you're going to do, you need to hype them down. Ideally, you'd just go around saying you're doing absolutely nothing. (Also, don't raise gas prices.)
On the blip of the radar that is Human Civilization, it is abssolutely appropriate to be “naturalistic” since the organisms on this current Earth are very sensitive to sudden changes one way or the other.
But philosophically speaking or as hypothetical interestellar gods who live for millions of years then yes, worrying about what’s “natural” as we currently conceive it is narrow-minded.
I read that book and watched the later documentary about what happens when the earth takes over, about how nature just over-runs human endeavors ... it was pretty depressing (though the writing was sophomoric)
but I am always amazed at how much 'nature' has been interrupted by humans laying concrete (streets and buildings etc)
Manhatten Island was once a sanctuary and now is a concrete cemetary.
Concern about climate change is about its effects on us. Most of our great cities are coastal. We thrive in a temperate climate. We are dependent on fisheries and a whole food chain of other Holocene organisms. Having all that change would be incredibly disruptive to us. We’d survive (as a species) all but the most extreme scenarios but our quality of life could take a huge dive and many people could die.
Obviously life will just keep evolving. There have been times in the geological record when there has been little to no polar ice and times of “snowball Earth.” Life existed during all these times but both these extremes would be more hostile to humans than the current epoch.
Totally agree. And beyond that human life assumes it’s own sentience through an incredibly narrow view. Isn’t it fair/logical to assume that if giant mushrooms did over the earth that given the passing of considerable time they’ve likely evolved to a far more considerable state of intelligence/harmony than humans have. Their survivability/adaptability being an illustration.
Likewise, one ends up sounding like an anti climate nut, but the existential fear for the planet seems arrogant at best and massively over emphasises our place in the universe. See, I sound like an anti climate nut.
> Isn’t it fair/logical to assume that if giant mushrooms did over the earth that given the passing of considerable time they’ve likely evolved to a far more considerable state of intelligence/harmony than humans have.
No? Intelligence isn't needed for a stable evolutionary state to exist in an organism. You would have define what you mean by intelligence and then show evidence of that before it would be reasonable to make that assumption.
Indeed. This sort of misanthropic talk is shockingly incoherent and absurd. For starters, demeaning human life automatically undermines the value of any life, even more drastically than how acceptance of infanticide undermines all human rights. The notion of sacrificing ourselves for "the planet" is pure nonsense.
Most of this talk is unthinking affectation and empty emotionalism, I suspect, something you might expect a mopey teenager to say, but it does betray some degree of viciousness. Envy and pride come to mind.
> just that static “naturalism” is a human construct.
I think you are somewhat strawmanning environmentalism and climate-change concerns here (not with malicious intention or anything) because I don't think that many argue that things are or should be static - though they mostly appear to be static from our short viewpoint.
Instead the concern is that the changes are too fast. It's more akin to consciously bringing a meteor down on the planet than it is to "the world is changing and always have and humans are a tiny blip in the existence of the world".
A similarly wild thing to think about is that Pangaea was just the most recent supercontinent. The landmass on earth has split and merged several times.
It’s saddening that a comment like this needs to disclaim that it’s not anti climate change. I get it, I’ve posted things in the past that were attacked as anti climate change and I was perplexed. My gut tells me there are just people that like to stir up trouble and will post “enraging” things on anything really. It’s unfortunately discouraging and makes me not want to engage in social media.
It's somewhat odd that one has to explicitly say they're not "anti-climate change" when presenting any kind of perspective that could be perceived as such. As if they're afraid of the somebody punishing them for daring to think such "problematic" and "destructive" thoughts...
I understand why you said it. It just seems that the general atmosphere of the internet is that of self-censorship and fear. It just doesn't sit well with me.
The intolerance of different views is driving the hostile and divisive atmosphere in the social media.
Let's say there's a person who's really anti-climate change. How is that person supposed to change their mind, if they get attacked every time they voice their opinions, instead of being approached in a civil manner? People can't be bullied people into agreement, only silenced and driven further away into their own echo chamber, at which point you lose any chance you had of ever changing their minds.
I'm not saying it's right or useful, but I think a lot of people (especially young people) are just really sick of climate change denial-ism. I know I am. I'm nearly half a century old and the handwriting has been on the wall my whole life.
I don't want to quash discussion (interesting and informative discussion is the main reason I use HN) but, yeah, it's not a bad thing to differentiate yourself from the climate deniers, if you want people to hear you these days.
Being really sick of a certain group of people just because they hold different beliefs than you is exactly what causes the division.
Why are you sick of them? That's a fairly strong emotion. Do you hold resentment because they are the ones who are going to bring the apocalypse to the world? Is it annoyance from hearing too many incorrect opinions? Or something else entirely?
Honest question - why are you, personally, sick of them? I'd really like to know.
1. Their existence is the political justification for inaction.
2. They form an unholy alliance with other anti-empiricist groups (e.g. anti-vaxxers, young earth creationists) to undermine reality-based policies, including in education.
3. Their denialist opinions are typically held in bad faith. That is, they are held because if they were true they would confirm some pre-existing belief (e.g. that scientists are tools of a global elite cabal), not because an independent evaluation of the facts has led them there. This reinforces their hostility towards whatever group they think is lying.
4. Denialists typically engage in a perverse form of virtue signaling. The greater and more well evidence a claim is, the greater the "cred" they get for denying it. This creates a fertile field for sham experts to sell lies to members.
First, I want to make it clear that I don't think of "climate deniers" as a group per se like a race, creed, or nation. There's a lot of detail and nuance in the world and I want to explore that, not abrogate it.
I just want to elucidate on that a little before I get to answering your question.
You have folks like the people in the oil companies who knew about the science of the greenhouse effect and still spent lots of money casting doubt on it in public to protect their profits.
You also have people who have honest doubts and questions. I'm even one of them. I've heard that global warming and climate change might have more to do with changes in the Sun's energy output than human chemical emissions, and I'd like to talk more about that, but ooo yeah not in public, eh? You would have to be all like "but I'm not a climate denial-ist" like OP.
So, just to repeat, I'm not being tribal here. (For instance the Chinese Communist Party creeps me out, but I still give them credit for e.g. fixing the Loess Plateau, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537409 ) I'm not against a group, I'm sick of certain behaviors.
To answer your question "why [am I], personally, sick of [certain behaviors]?" It's simple.
When I was a kid in high school I found my parents' copy of the Next Whole Earth Catalog which was a kind of hippie how-to guide from the 70's. I have no idea what happened to the people who made and bought and read this thing. My parents didn't talk about it or anything like that. But it became, for awhile, something like my bible. I left my textbooks in my locker and carried it around instead (it's like four feet wide and weighs six or seven hundred pounds!)
In it I learned about people like Christopher Alexander, Bucky Fuller, and Bill Mollison, and I began to see, or think that I saw, a better world. A world where humans and nature were in harmony, and "no one had to get nailed to anything."
That was about thirty-five years ago.
So, from my POV, everybody has been running around enacting "Idiocracy" instead and, yeah, I'm sick of it.
Thank you for the honest response. It reflects your perspective in a vivid and relatable way.
I understand you in some manner - I grew up watching Captain Planet and similar eco-oriented shows that have instilled in me some feeling of "importance" of the whole subject. And seeing other people trample upon what are some of our most sacret beliefs, developed for decades, can make us sick of them.
The only criticism of those beliefs I would have is that they come from sentiment, not (only) reason - so, in theory, if instead of eco-literature, you read, say, the Bible, you would most likely have equally strong beliefs towards Christianity, and they would be supported by more-or-less same number of arguments derived from years of studying.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), it's really hard to separate ourselves from our sentiment. I guess that the world is doomed to stay a divisive place, because humans are, in their essence, emotional creatures with reason added.
> The only criticism of those beliefs I would have is that they come from sentiment, not (only) reason - so, in theory, if instead of eco-literature, you read, say, the Bible, you would most likely have equally strong beliefs towards Christianity, and they would be supported by more-or-less same number of arguments derived from years of studying.
I like to point out (usually in a different context) that ecology is a science, and it's applications are technology.
I wrote a comment a few months ago about my beliefs and "the similarities and differences to religious apocalyptics as I see them" that you might find interesting? In sum (if I may be so gauche as to quote myself) "Ideally environmental apocalypticism is self-extinguishing." That's the primary (psychological) diiference (IMO) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32065654
> I guess that the world is doomed to stay a divisive place, because humans are, in their essence, emotional creatures with reason added.
I dunno. The most powerful emotion is love, eh? And I think the newfangled talking computers will make really good cheap therapists.
it could also be a non-belief that turned out to be true, so that kind of shoots down that theory
yep, "belief" is definitely the wrong word to use here, "truth" or "reality" would work since climate change is true & real, and having "different beliefs" is definitely not the same thing as having your own truths and reality, which is why climate change deniers generally get mocked by people
Legitimately, do you believe that people posting on internet forums is an effective means of getting someone to change their minds?
My take is that by the time the poster goes through the effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into their personal belief system; they're not seeking answers.
Don't most studies show that fact based arguments only cause people with faulty beliefs to dig in further?
> Legitimately, do you believe that people posting on internet forums is an effective means of getting someone to change their minds?
Some percentage of them? Yes. Unfortunately, there's no way to know when that happens, so it's very easy to assume it doesn't.
> My take is that by the time the poster goes through the effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into their personal belief system; they're not seeking answers.
If what you're saying is true, what's the logic behind censoring people? Nobody is able to convince anyone of anything anyway.
>If what you're saying is true, what's the logic behind censoring people?
Because at some point, arguing the same topic over and over and over is exhausting. The impact of greenhouse gases and climate change, for example, has been established as 'a thing' for my entire adult life. And yet people still want to argue about it even existing.
During the Trump era, conspiracy theories became a prominent part of mainstream conversation, while scientific knowledge was often dismissed as just one perspective among many. In my opinion, a societal culture that treats truth as malleable poses a greater threat than individuals on the internet who are hesitant to publicly express anti-scientific beliefs.
Sounds like a big number but thats just the nature of this reality, hundreds of thousands of people die every day. The virus that we were tricked into thinking was a significant event by global media is in the same category as the flu, which has been killing 0.01 forever with no fanfare.
Covid was statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of human health. The reality is we are mostly a herd species, the group experiments show that people will conform to false information against their better judgement to not go against the group.
Its not about intelligence, there are plenty of idiots who knew covid was a scam from day one and plenty of smart people who probably still think it was real to this day despite all the evidence showing it was massively overblown.
I think that it was overblown by design, as part of a bigger agenda, rather than incompetence. And the whole death thing doesnt get me anyway, I think death is relief in most cases and should be celebrated.
We are part of something far greater than these bodies, it seems like we come here as a game to pretend we dont know anything about reality. When you die you will see we know everything, but I wonder if you will remember I told you so.
> Its not about intelligence, there are plenty of idiots who knew covid was a scam from day one and plenty of smart people who probably still think it was real to this day despite all the evidence showing it was massively overblown.
Specifically this included the CPP officials who downplayed the virus, and allowed it to wreck havoc on the globe rather than taking immediate action to stomp it out
Right? We should consider the added worth of each life saved by slowing down the virus's spread, which allowed time to develop vaccines. Although the worldwide response was far from perfect, I'm truly thankful for the technology and measures that protected numerous people. While I value freedom and individual rights, it's challenging to compare those principles to the importance of preserving a life.
What I find fascinating about the current debates about cancel culture is that it ignores, on both sides, the fact that it isn't new. The only thing that has changed is the balance of power.
From a US perspective - In the past, social shunning and ostracizing was used as a way to norm the culture for the predominately white, christian culture. Cancel culture was literally being run out of your town, and/or excluded from social and religious events. This had a huge chilling effect.
Now, the power belongs to a previously marginalized group (lgbtq/minority individuals) to 'cancel' people.
It's not new; the only difference is that the people who used to have to power are pissed that their views aren't the popular views anymore. It's a symptom of a massive societal change that has occurred and the subset of people who refuse to let go of their outdated ways.
> It's not new; the only difference is that the people who used to have to power are pissed that their views aren't the popular views anymore. It's a symptom of a massive societal change that has occurred and the subset of people who refuse to let go of their outdated ways.
I think this is an extremely skewed perspective on the whole issue.
It's not us vs. them - cancel culture was, and still is, driven by ignorance and sensationalism. People like the rush of a good story, regardless of whether it's true or not - that's what makes cancel culture so unjust.
Whether it's a gay person being called a Satan's spawn, or Richard Stallman being called a pedophile, or any other case - all cases have one thing in common: exaggeration for the sake of sensationalism, and punishment being completely out of proportion with the crime (note that by "crime" here I strictly mean "the act that is condemned by the group doing the cancellation", regardless of its actual criminality).
If you're a member of the previously-oppressed-now-powerful group, you may rejoice at the thought of retribution on those that caused you (your group) so much injustice in the past, but I hope you realize how hypocritical that makes the whole "tolerance" story that your group has been pushing for the last few decades. But I guess that power corrupts, no matter who's wielding it.
I'm not quite young, and I do understand that the world is different. I have lived most of these changes as an adult, and believe that the world is worse today than it has been, if for no other reason than a complete inability to escape connection to society for any reason thanks to technology.
But.
Yes, these things could happen before social media. Like most things, social media has absolutely amped up the effects, but this existed before.
Hell, go all the way back to the Red Scare and the various black books that existed in the, what 1940's and 1950's? Say the wrong thing in the wrong place and you were immediately labeled a commie and shunned.
That's what I'm saying. It has always existed. I just think it's a "bigger problem" for people now and there is more push back on cancel culture today than in the past because it's the previous mainstream that is being cancelled instead of an already at-risk community.
"Cancel culture" was e.g. gays getting beaten up by random strangers just for existing, and now it's e.g. getting fired for telling a homophobic joke in public.
The phase shifts in huge dynamic systems are fascinating. The Earth can look more or less the same for millions of years (with minor variations), then an extreme event happens and the world is completely transformed, never to return to a previous state again. We humans sure like to play with fire.
Eh, I think lots of living things "presume" today's state of things --and involuntarily evolve and try to adapt when things change from what is now to what will be then. But otherwise, I agree.
Thank you! People don't realize how much of a blip we are in Earth's long history, and trying to hold on to what we are used to i.e. conservatism, is actually the most unnatural thing to do.
That happened with trees because cellulose was new, but I don't think there would be an issue with plants which cells have been around for a long time.
But maybe I'm missing something in which case I'm happy to learn.
And Prototaxites happpened in just the most recent 10% of the Earth's history. (-Blinking incomprehension-) A lot of time for unfathomable stuff to arise, then disappear!
Another super interesting fact that never occurred to me is that trees are not a taxonomic grouping of their own. Rather a broad set of characteristics that have separately evolved into a convergent set of traits. So, it's unnecessary to say Aspens are not like other trees because they aren't actually related to other trees. The MCRA of all trees would not remotely be a tree.
Fish are ancient and sharks in particular. Obviously the record will never be entirely complete but it's possible that sharks have been on Earth longer than plants have been on land.
>Weighing 13 million pounds, Pando is the world’s largest organism by mass (Oregon’s “humungous fungus” spans a greater distance). Quaking aspens can reproduce by disseminating seeds, but more frequently, they send up sprouts from their roots and form a mass of trees aptly known as a “clone.”
When I was growing up in Lake Tahoe in the 1980s, I would leave the house in the morning to return at dusk, and I often went on a hike up Ward Creek from my house to the backside of Alpine Meadows.
Quaking Aspens were my Spirit Tree and I loved being around them.
I didnt know at the time that the groves of Aspen were acually all the same tree.
But they had a profound effect on me as I hiked and built stuff from them.
I used to chop them down and build tee-pees with pine bows as walls... I was like 13 or so. If you got caught in any of my booby-traps, I am sorry...
IMHO that stretches the definition a bit. They're clones that happen to have an interconnected root system. Does that really make them the "same" organism? Not in any useful sense of "same".
It feels this part is what they are asking citation for: "Aspens are weird enough that they may be thought of more like a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies rather than trees per se". At least the second sentence of their comment seems to suggest that.
I read the page you kindly linked but I'm not seeing anything about Aspens being considered a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies..
Not literally, but in style. They are clearly trees.
But they exist in a large underground network of roots, and spawn trunks upwards over that large area, not unlike how many funguses do. Convergent evolution of an approach to life.
I'm definitely a layman here, but I lived in Utah about 10 years ago and did some reading on Aspens, which is when I came across that comparison. I was hoping to find a direct citation to post here but haven't managed to do so yet.
A fire (or clear cut) can take down the entire overstory of trees, but that living root system will survive & send up more "suckers" that become new trees. It's this "the real life is underground" vibe that makes them particularly fungi-like to me. I wonder if any other trees are like Aspens in this regard...
I don't think you're going to find a citation to the original post. I don't think they were saying aspen are a type of fungi just that they act like one in some ways.
He's the original commenter. He is saying that he was reading about aspens from experts and they made the comparison that the big clonal set of aspens have a lot of properties we'd normally associate with fungi. He wants to find that original source to share but can't.
I wonder though how plausible this "trunk only" appearance is. What would the biological function of that trunk in the life cycle of prototaxites supposed to be? Modern fungi have heads, I think to spread spores.
Temperature control maybe? The ground is a pretty good insulator all things considered, so if the organism is producing more heat than it can shed into the soil, protrusions into the air like this may help.
The title is misleading, the article is more honest in admitting that it is thought that these things named prototaxites are a fungus, but we are not sure.
Ok, we've replaced giant mushrooms with prototaxites in the title above. Thanks!
Related: I dreaded looking into this thread because titles like that (I mean the original one) almost always provoke shallow-sensational-reflexive responses. There are a few such subthreads here but for the most part the hivemind didn't derange itself this time. Well done hivemind!
The HN headline edit obscures the point of the article, which amounts to an argument that prototaxites were basically fungus.
It's like taking an article that says "dinosaurs are related to birds" and changing it to read "the ancestors of birds are related to birds." It reduces a new, interesting claim to a tautology which is not, in any way, what the article concerns itself with.
Also, while I'm going off, this is a great example of how the clickbait-reduction policy at HN ends up selecting for titles which obfuscate or mislead.
Here, the descriptive, sensible word 'mushroom' is replaced with 'prototaxite', a word that is meaningless to (let's be honest) most casual visitors to this site.
Accessibility and meaningfulness are casualties in the war on interestingness.
A fascinating read, including the Nat Geo article OG link; but couldn't help chuckling at one of the quotes in it .... ..Sucking up carbon from microbial crusts would [make large fruiting bodies] possible. fnar, fnar. But seriously though, Mind. Blown.
I think over time we will eventually set the beginning of “agriculture” to be in the age of fungi. The more we learn about trees the more they resemble an evolutionary step up from lichen.
Lichen is a symbiosis between fungi and single celled chlorophyll owners. Forests are multicellular lichen. Like the cyanobacteria, trees can often function without their host, but they do better things with them.
Do you have any more information on what led you to this idea? I'm not an expert by any means, but when I look at trees I see 100% plant, with some fungus in the soil and roots and what not, somewhat akin to animals' gut bacteria.
The fungi are underground. Out of sight, out of mind.
Suzanne Simard was one of the first to draw attention to it. She has a book now, as does Paul Stamets, but there’s also The Secret Life of Trees and a few others. Healthy forests are a network, the fungi arbitrage sugars and water, and sometimes minerals between the trees. But in addition some of these fungi can still degrade stone to make minerals accessible to the plants. There was a study where they found nano holes in forest sand particles that are consistent with the dimensions of mycelia. No direct observation yet that in know of, but the pathways exist so it’s “worth further study” as they say.
Biological weathering of rock, as in lichen, was critical to how plants got a foothold on land.
I think we’ll find that it was also critical to the development of mega flora, and that fungi and trees are a case of coevolution, where the fungi take a less overt role in the partnership.
What if Fungi were the key to our technological advancement? If we could make fungal computers we could become a bio-technical race like Species 8472 in Star Trek Voyager Season 3 Episode 26.
I watched a documentary that proposed eating mushrooms, and the ensuing hallucinations that happened, as the cause of our Neanderthal ancestors developing free thought and the underpinning of creativity that lead to tool development.
> “A 6-metre fungus would be odd enough in the modern world, but at least we are used to trees quite a bit bigger,” says [geophysicist Kevin] Boyce. “Plants at that time were a few feet tall, invertebrate animals were small, and there were no terrestrial vertebrates. This fossil would have been all the more striking in such a diminutive landscape.”
Throw in a turtle invasion and a time traveling plumber, and you've got yourself a movie.
> Before 2005, fossil findings indicated that grasses evolved around 55 million years ago. Finds of grass-like phytoliths in Cretaceous dinosaur coprolites from the latest Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) aged Lameta Formation of India have pushed this date back to 66 million years ago.
Flowers are relative newcomers. This is because it required a relatively tight relationship between insects and plants. Coordination between species is trickier to evolve.
I think it's rather the opposite. The insane weirdness of plants (polyploidy, symbiosis with insects, fern genomes, multiple evolutions of tree-forms), parasites, molluscs having all kinds of eyes, indicate more than one divine entity. More over, those entities clearly squabble, make jokes, and generally plague each other at biology's expense.
I think it is wise to understand that earth has been through many eras and is not as homeostatic as our narrowly imagined “natural” state we seek today. And I am not trying to build an anti climate change argument, just that static “naturalism” is a human construct.