> Earth has changed drastically with all the humans on it.
do you have earth scale measures for this? what is your threshold for drastic?
on most measures I can think of, earth is pretty much the same as it was 100k years ago. maybe you are suggesting humans have a drastic impact on other species on earth?
> They have a pretty good track record of ~9000kY of being virtually unchanged from their current forms and inhabit all parts of the world, including some fairly remote islands.
And we’re nowhere near that is my point. Not sure what you think yours is?
> Technically that can be said for any species that breeds beyond carrying capacity of its local environment. Humans are no different.
Absolutely not. A species exceeding their environment’s carrying capacity will have die-offs then the survivors carry on. It does not make its own environment unlivable for itself, which is what humanity is doing.
Humanity is also heading towards exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity but that is a separate issue.
You meant 300k, right? The problem is, the human species is growing at an exponential rate, so if this continues and it's going to be hard not to, the damage tho the ecosystem can go very fast as there are processes that can also be triggered in an exponential manner.
For example, melting of the ice cap would cause not only ocean rise but a lot more heat staying in the planet as ice reflects a lot of it back into space.
Also, a temperature rise of 5 degrees would kill most phytoplankton, which is the main source of oxygen.
All of this sounds very catastrophic, but it might be somewhere in between a few centuries and a few millennia away, which is nothing on a geological time scale.
The current equilibrium that allows for human life on this planet is much more fragile than we think.
> Define "Fine" when 90% of the animals on earth are extinct?
If humans go extinct, human timescales cease to be relevant. Since we're talking about the Earth, reverting to geologic timescales makes sense. Earth 10 or 100 million years after humans may not be that different with or without humans.
(I agree, however, that the platitude is unhelpful. We're human. We care about the Earth on a human timescale.)
> isn’t it folly as none of us will survive and it is akin to species suicide?
Do you have a link to a credible source that predict human extinction? Someone serious like the IPCC.
Most model predict huge problems and catastrophes. If the hot and low level part of the word become more difficult to inhabit, there may be huge migrations and perhaps wars.
Imagine something like: Everyone moves from the south of India to Siberia, and that makes India and Russia unhappy. But in most models the change is slow, so perhaps something like this can be done peacefully. (I guess not 100% peacefully, but I hope with a small amount of problems.)
What are the predictions for the increase of the sea level and temperature in 2119?
> But the environmental burden of even the current population is quite severe, is it not?
Most people fall between the extremes of a moral bar they are trying to measure human behavior by or you accept that everything that happens in the universe is defacto natural.
With or without humans (ie when Yellowstone pops), the environment will change drastically over many human lifetimes. Creatures (maybe humans one day) will change, disappear, and wipe out other species. I worry about that day, more than the possibility the california delta smelt have a right to exist.
That will catch up to us. It already has, in many parts of the world, and it's not looking like it'll get better soon.
And let's not forget, it's not just people who have paid the price.
> The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate, the historically typical rate of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the planet); also, the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth.
All of which is to say nothing about the inequality in how that shareholder wealth is distributed, which is incredibly short-sighted for literally billions of reasons. 8 Americans own more wealth than 4 billion humans. It's perverse beyond comprehension.
Can you point to any time during the existence of our species with a similar kind of change?
> and it's collapse of whole ecosystem.
That's mostly based on scientific studies, existing examples of rapid changes in ecosystems, and previous mass extinction events. Do you have any evidence counter to this idea?
The Earth may be effectively eternal (from a human standpoint), but human species is not. More likely, humans will be around, but modern human society would likely suffer an extinction event at some point with our trajectory.
I like your idea of higher-temp corals. Are you aware of efforts to repopulate corals based on varieties that are temperature resistant?
> My goal, btw, is to point out that humans are part of the ecology.
We should not forget that, but the interesting question would be if introducing more humans into the environment _now_ would increase or decrease the biodiversity. There might be ways of living for humans that would increase the biodiversity around them (as you pointed out aborigines may have done in the past), but would anyone wish (or be capable of) living like that today?
If there is no realistic prospect that the introduction of more (of todays) humans into the environment will increase the biodiversity, then it might be better to focus on other factors that could help.
Why is it so commonplace now to conflate climate change with basically armageddon? I thought that most models predict some hard times (mass migrations and everything bad that comes with it), but species extinction (or even, civilization collapse) is still a fringe belief among the scientists.
> The difference is that an asteroid is an existential threat to humanity while climate change is just short of that.
This is a valid point.
To clarify, though, I don't think climate change is likely to make humans extinct, but I believe it has a non-trivial chance of destroying our civilization.
If/when the climate gets really bad, human irrationality will go into overdrive, and we'll be a massive danger to ourselves.
> We have a few hundred million years to figure out how to colonize other planets or live in space before Earth becomes radically different and potentially unlivable.
Hmm... at the rate we are going, big parts of the Earth (a big slice around the Equator) may well become unlivable for human beings in a couple of decades.
I get the idea that it won't mean that the Earth will be unlivable for all organisms, but from what we know, a sufficiently advanced civilization only needs a couple hundred years to destroy itself.
> You realize we're not in a massive extinction event now right?
We are, in fact, in a mass extinction event right now, with extinction rates estimated at 1-2 orders of magnitude greater than any previous such event.
do you have earth scale measures for this? what is your threshold for drastic?
on most measures I can think of, earth is pretty much the same as it was 100k years ago. maybe you are suggesting humans have a drastic impact on other species on earth?
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