I want to ignore these articles as it is so painful to watch the beautiful clockwork of the natural world unravel. I hate facing the suffering, diminishment, and extinction of so much in the name of profiteering and ever-increasing growth.
But this is the world now, there will only be more stories like this, and so I'm not turning away from it any further. The world becomes less beautiful, less rich, less full every year.
I do volunteer, donate, and advocate and I won't use my extreme pessimism as an excuse not to engage. But in private, I mourn what is coming with little hope for substantial reduction in harm. If anything, those with power seem upset that we're not doing more to fasttrack catastrophe - if it's going to happen, may as well be the one to profit from it as much as possible before you're dead, the thinking seems to go.
It's hard when your job and even hobbies are intertwined with this destruction. I enjoy working with computers and industrial machinery - two giant sources of pollution and social disruption. I sometimes feel this existential crisis where I am part of the problem yet I have no way to escape and become filled with guilt. Yet without this technology our lives would be more difficult.
I sometimes think about a post-industrial fantasy world where technology still exists, though minimally, and carefully applied to solve real problems humanity faces instead of selling FOMO or millions of "shiny things" that wind up in land fills so you can sell the new FOMO/shinything so some numbers on a spread sheet goes up.
This may upset some people, but I think you have to come up with mental demarcation for responsibility, or you’ll go nuts.
I simply cannot decide to avoid all the technology of my field because whoever designed the electrical infrastructure didn’t do it responsibly. Or because the handling of ewaste hasn’t been dealt with. Or because everyone sourced materials in unethical ways.
My responsibility for most of that kinda ends at my voting behavior or trying to make reasonable personal decisions that are well within my small sphere of influence. A problem domain that I can handle.
Anyone who watched The Good Place knows what I mean. It’s not absolution for my own behavior, it’s just not holding myself accountable for everything that everyone else does… badly.
Otherwise there’s just no sword to fall on that’s big enough to feel at peace with the world. (Think of the snails!)
First off, I'm vegetarian and generally climate-conscious. I think we humans should do what we can in order to protect our planet. I think we can do a lot to keep the planet a good place for all living beings.
But to also say something unpopular, humans are part of the natural world. So these human driven changes to nature are just 'nature changing nature'. I understand that we are potentially causing mass extinctions, but this needs to be seen as natural unless you take for granted that humans are inherently 'special' which leads to speciesism. So, this might just be the way planets with intelligent species evolve, they outcompete the others and exploit natural resources to their benefit. It might just be a biological/evolutionary law.
Also, to be fair, _most_ of life on earth will survive this. Bacteria outnumber all other class of organisms IIRC, and they are shown to survive in truly challenging conditions.
Blaming "profiteering and ever-increasing growth" is way too easy.
Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.
Why do you think that is? Hint: taxing people buying food, which is getting worse and worse, while the top 0.01% gets more and more rich and keeps making it worse, is maybe not the solution people should embrace that you think it is...
You have articulated my feelings, behavior, and outlook almost exactly. I feel so hopeless every time I read an article like this. I've joined climate activist groups and meetups, and I've donated to orgs and political candidates. But I just feel like there's so much more damage to be done before we get to substantial improvements, it's so disheartening
There was a Norwegian TV series called Catastrophe or something to educate the whole family about how insecure and bad the future is. What to do if a Russian van keeps driving through your neighorhood. What to do in a natural catastrophe.
How nice. Us adults who have ruined the planet[1][2] and now we are lecturing the youngins about how to deal with this suckage.
With a bizarrely cherry narration. Did you know things are about to suck for you? Just your usual shameless state TV programming.
But we, with our particular national programming, are just supposed to act like we were just spoiled brats that now have to live without dessert post-dinner. The “dessert generation” indeed.
[1] Um akshually, we haven’t ruined the planet—the planet is just minerals! It doesn’t care. We are just ruining the foundation for our own comfortable exi— yeah no kidding.
Serious questions, how is this destruction and not just "change?" It seems throughout time the world has experienced acute shifts, dying offs and other events. In those transition periods many animals that you know and love today finally got a shot at main character roles. Heck the reduction of o2 in the air that killed/shrunk a lot of dinosaurs is basically the opening slave for you to be able to write this Hacker News comment.
None of this is to say don't mourn or long for any of this, but the show doesnt end, the charecters just change.
We've always consumed and extracted until we run out, but only very recently started actually tracking it and taking any preventative measures at all. Will take yet more time to gain momentum in that direction. The consequences will be too obvious and unavoidable for the next few generations to stagnate like we have.
No, we're very resilient bastards, we're going to let the huge majority of species go extinct before we go ourselves. We're already in a mass extinction event and we're just getting started.
Sometimes those stories try too much to impress. I recorded a documentary series "How to kill a puppy and get rich" about street dogs in Romania and the business around them, and I had to stop it after 10 seconds, not exaggerating. Folks, I want to know the mafia and story, but I can't stand to see and hear that torture...
But on the plus side a few companies increased shareholder value. Can you imagine if we had fewer products, or didn't push the human population its theoretical maximum?
Who is we? Which we opted to push the planet to carrying capacity? Is it? What is the capacity? Are the decreasing birthrates across the world really the Earth's theoretical maximum? What does it mean to have fewer products, which things precisely should we not have? Who should be in charge of setting this?
Is that sharks are an ancient species and they’ve survived way warmer oceans even relatively recently.
For example the Medieval Warm Period Sargasso Sea surface temperatures were 1°C warmer than 400 years ago, and Pacific Ocean water temperatures were 0.65°C warmer than the decades before.
Sharks are an ancient division of life, roughly 440 million years old, which has survived far warmer oceans.
There are ~500 living species of shark and likely tens of thousands extinct in their lineage.
We are perpetrating a mass extinction event that incorporates not just temperatures, but ocean acidification and trophic cascade for fisheries. In mass extinctions, enough things about the ecosystem change that specialists often go extinct. Great White Sharks are a specialist species in their extreme size; Most size specialists are in a precarious local maxima that disappears too quickly to adapt if conditions change drastically.
I presume it was due to the temperature gradient being extremely low, so they could gradually adapt to the change over hundreds of years. We're pulling the handbrake in geological terms.
Body size and metabolic rate are intertwined, a factor that is especially important to understand with regard to animals that live in aquatic environments, where heat loss is related to water temperature. Payne et al. developed a method to estimate routine metabolic rate based on measures from tagged fish, and combined the estimates with published respirometry rates to create a dataset spanning the entire body size range of extant fishes. Using these data, the authors found a scaling imbalance between heat production and loss that affects especially large, mesothermic fishes in warm waters. This imbalance both explains the distribution of these fish in cooler waters and suggests a special sensitivity to warming waters. —Sacha Vignieri
---
Abstract:
Body size and temperature set metabolic rates and the pace of life, yet our understanding of the energetics of large fishes is uncertain, especially of warm-bodied mesotherms, which can heavily influence marine food webs. We developed an approach to estimate metabolic heat production in fishes, revealing how routine energy expenditure scales with size and temperature from 1-milligram larvae up to 3-tonne megaplanktivorous sharks. We found that mesotherms use approximately four times more energy than ectotherms use and identified a scaling mismatch in which rates of heat production increase faster than heat loss as body size increases, with larger fish becoming increasingly warm bodied. This scaling imbalance creates an overheating predicament for large mesotherms, helping to explain their cooler biogeographies. Contemporary mesotherms face high fuel demands and overheating risks, which is a concern given their disproportionate demise during prior climate shifts.
They will move to different locations like they always have been for the past 400 million years. Sharks are older than trees, they can adapt to climate change better than anything alive right now.
No, because most of the estimates are wonky as hell. For one, calories from silage don't exactly translate directly to calories humans can make use of. Second, most estimates are worst case only and ignore the fact most animals are pastured for some/all of the year on marginal land. Some animals can survive entirely on foraging and waste from agriculture (pigs are a great example).
On the other side, not all climates can produce all the plants required for a balanced vegan diet. Here in Canada, nothing grows for 6 months and what does grow is relatively limited.
The lowest energy system would likely include a reduction in animal products but not a complete elimination, while keeping transportation to a minimum.
Also, just like with energy generation, there's the game theory aspect. If you reduce emissions, will everyone cooperate? What if you suffer only to have someone else increase their emissions anyway? We see this here... We limit our fisheries to try preserve ocean fish, only for Chinese vessels to sit on the edge of our borders hoovering up all the aquatic life...
Carbon emissions from food production may go down about that much. However, those emissions are only about 30% of the total CO2 emissions humans are responsible for, if I recall correctly. So, total CO2 reduction would be about 18%.
and likely other un predictable knock on effects would reduce the benefit, like going vegan would mean more food is available overall, and population might rise in response.
That factoid always hides the real issue. The biggest reason that that factoid is true is that the 100 biggest companies includes a large amount of the fossil fuel industry, and that that industry produces most emissions in the world. A company like Saudi Aramco produce 4% of global emissions.
We need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
For full clarity, it's also not the 100 biggest corporations that produce most emissions, but the 100 biggest companies. A massive amount of the global emissions are done by state-owned companies.
That’s basically a different way of measuring the same thing. These corporations don’t just exist in a bubble, many of them are going to be behind the food production either directly or indirectly (e.g. energy companies providing fuel for machinery).
Food is responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions[1]. I agree that it’s not realistic to assume this will be solved individually, more pressure needs to be put on these large corporations from governments, but the quickest way you or I can make our own (individually small, collectively large) impact is by cutting out meat from our diet (specifically beef[2]). We are end-consumers of those 100 largest corporations one way or another.
(Not a vegetarian/vegan btw. I’m not trying to shame, I’m certainly not perfect! I just wanted to share the info that it’s not someone else’s problem. We’re all in this together)
The smaller ones are most likely less efficient (which blocked their growth). So it'd be a game of whack-a-mole where every hit makes everything worse...
We grow a lot of human-edible food for the sole purpose to feed it to livestock, who then spend most of those calories on existing and put a small portion into body mass that we eventually eat.
Sure, that stuff isn't of the same quality as food grown for human consumption, but putting livestock on a diet and diverting some of their food to human consumption would more than cover any shortfall from the missing meat
> Several large tuna species and sharks, known as “mesothermic” species for the way their bodies run hot, require more fuel to maintain their temperature and are thus confronting a “double jeopardy” of warming oceans and declining food, mainly from overfishing. As water temperatures climb, these species will be forced to relocate to cooler waters.
They are moving to cooler waters but the cooler waters won't have the food supplies they need. So it's either stay where the food is and overheat or go to cooler water and starve.
It’s a white noise so hard to notice, but our behavior is fundamentally driven by the design of our nervous system. Thus the more immediate the consequence, the better we link our behavior and can adjust. Since this is true at an individual level, the dynamic emerges from societies and populations as well, even large ones.
For example, something is red, you touch it, get burned. You won’t touch it again.
Environmental harm unfortunately is precisely the opposite. Consequences arise on a very long arc, in some cases beyond even our lifetimes. We register problems like this only intellectually, and even that becomes clouded with politics.
So the problem is kind of inevitable unfortunately.
I want to ignore these articles as it is so painful to watch the beautiful clockwork of the natural world unravel. I hate facing the suffering, diminishment, and extinction of so much in the name of profiteering and ever-increasing growth.
But this is the world now, there will only be more stories like this, and so I'm not turning away from it any further. The world becomes less beautiful, less rich, less full every year.
I do volunteer, donate, and advocate and I won't use my extreme pessimism as an excuse not to engage. But in private, I mourn what is coming with little hope for substantial reduction in harm. If anything, those with power seem upset that we're not doing more to fasttrack catastrophe - if it's going to happen, may as well be the one to profit from it as much as possible before you're dead, the thinking seems to go.
It's hard when your job and even hobbies are intertwined with this destruction. I enjoy working with computers and industrial machinery - two giant sources of pollution and social disruption. I sometimes feel this existential crisis where I am part of the problem yet I have no way to escape and become filled with guilt. Yet without this technology our lives would be more difficult.
I sometimes think about a post-industrial fantasy world where technology still exists, though minimally, and carefully applied to solve real problems humanity faces instead of selling FOMO or millions of "shiny things" that wind up in land fills so you can sell the new FOMO/shinything so some numbers on a spread sheet goes up.
This may upset some people, but I think you have to come up with mental demarcation for responsibility, or you’ll go nuts.
I simply cannot decide to avoid all the technology of my field because whoever designed the electrical infrastructure didn’t do it responsibly. Or because the handling of ewaste hasn’t been dealt with. Or because everyone sourced materials in unethical ways.
My responsibility for most of that kinda ends at my voting behavior or trying to make reasonable personal decisions that are well within my small sphere of influence. A problem domain that I can handle.
Anyone who watched The Good Place knows what I mean. It’s not absolution for my own behavior, it’s just not holding myself accountable for everything that everyone else does… badly.
Otherwise there’s just no sword to fall on that’s big enough to feel at peace with the world. (Think of the snails!)
First off, I'm vegetarian and generally climate-conscious. I think we humans should do what we can in order to protect our planet. I think we can do a lot to keep the planet a good place for all living beings.
But to also say something unpopular, humans are part of the natural world. So these human driven changes to nature are just 'nature changing nature'. I understand that we are potentially causing mass extinctions, but this needs to be seen as natural unless you take for granted that humans are inherently 'special' which leads to speciesism. So, this might just be the way planets with intelligent species evolve, they outcompete the others and exploit natural resources to their benefit. It might just be a biological/evolutionary law.
Also, to be fair, _most_ of life on earth will survive this. Bacteria outnumber all other class of organisms IIRC, and they are shown to survive in truly challenging conditions.
Yeah, but some of my favorite life forms are vertebrates. Would hate to see that branch go.
Blaming "profiteering and ever-increasing growth" is way too easy.
Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.
Why do you think that is? Hint: taxing people buying food, which is getting worse and worse, while the top 0.01% gets more and more rich and keeps making it worse, is maybe not the solution people should embrace that you think it is...
You have articulated my feelings, behavior, and outlook almost exactly. I feel so hopeless every time I read an article like this. I've joined climate activist groups and meetups, and I've donated to orgs and political candidates. But I just feel like there's so much more damage to be done before we get to substantial improvements, it's so disheartening
There was a Norwegian TV series called Catastrophe or something to educate the whole family about how insecure and bad the future is. What to do if a Russian van keeps driving through your neighorhood. What to do in a natural catastrophe.
How nice. Us adults who have ruined the planet[1][2] and now we are lecturing the youngins about how to deal with this suckage.
With a bizarrely cherry narration. Did you know things are about to suck for you? Just your usual shameless state TV programming.
But we, with our particular national programming, are just supposed to act like we were just spoiled brats that now have to live without dessert post-dinner. The “dessert generation” indeed.
[1] Um akshually, we haven’t ruined the planet—the planet is just minerals! It doesn’t care. We are just ruining the foundation for our own comfortable exi— yeah no kidding.
[2] Like with Norwegian oil/gas extraction
Serious questions, how is this destruction and not just "change?" It seems throughout time the world has experienced acute shifts, dying offs and other events. In those transition periods many animals that you know and love today finally got a shot at main character roles. Heck the reduction of o2 in the air that killed/shrunk a lot of dinosaurs is basically the opening slave for you to be able to write this Hacker News comment.
None of this is to say don't mourn or long for any of this, but the show doesnt end, the charecters just change.
We've always consumed and extracted until we run out, but only very recently started actually tracking it and taking any preventative measures at all. Will take yet more time to gain momentum in that direction. The consequences will be too obvious and unavoidable for the next few generations to stagnate like we have.
>natural world unravel
Natural world would be mostly fine one way or other, human beings might not survive though...
No, we're very resilient bastards, we're going to let the huge majority of species go extinct before we go ourselves. We're already in a mass extinction event and we're just getting started.
Sometimes those stories try too much to impress. I recorded a documentary series "How to kill a puppy and get rich" about street dogs in Romania and the business around them, and I had to stop it after 10 seconds, not exaggerating. Folks, I want to know the mafia and story, but I can't stand to see and hear that torture...
But on the plus side a few companies increased shareholder value. Can you imagine if we had fewer products, or didn't push the human population its theoretical maximum?
Who is we? Which we opted to push the planet to carrying capacity? Is it? What is the capacity? Are the decreasing birthrates across the world really the Earth's theoretical maximum? What does it mean to have fewer products, which things precisely should we not have? Who should be in charge of setting this?
I wonder how much Claude Code were cost if we were to take the cost of environmental destruction from its energy consumption into account.
My main skepticism (Shark lover here btw!)
Is that sharks are an ancient species and they’ve survived way warmer oceans even relatively recently.
For example the Medieval Warm Period Sargasso Sea surface temperatures were 1°C warmer than 400 years ago, and Pacific Ocean water temperatures were 0.65°C warmer than the decades before.
Sharks are an ancient division of life, roughly 440 million years old, which has survived far warmer oceans.
There are ~500 living species of shark and likely tens of thousands extinct in their lineage.
We are perpetrating a mass extinction event that incorporates not just temperatures, but ocean acidification and trophic cascade for fisheries. In mass extinctions, enough things about the ecosystem change that specialists often go extinct. Great White Sharks are a specialist species in their extreme size; Most size specialists are in a precarious local maxima that disappears too quickly to adapt if conditions change drastically.
Were there any periods in which the rate of change in warming was the same or greater?
I think there’s debate on the current numbers but I’ve heard sea surface temperatures are currently about 0.5°C above the 1981-2010 average.
I presume it was due to the temperature gradient being extremely low, so they could gradually adapt to the change over hundreds of years. We're pulling the handbrake in geological terms.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
for hn comment-only readers:
paper link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt2981
---
Editor Summary:
Body size and metabolic rate are intertwined, a factor that is especially important to understand with regard to animals that live in aquatic environments, where heat loss is related to water temperature. Payne et al. developed a method to estimate routine metabolic rate based on measures from tagged fish, and combined the estimates with published respirometry rates to create a dataset spanning the entire body size range of extant fishes. Using these data, the authors found a scaling imbalance between heat production and loss that affects especially large, mesothermic fishes in warm waters. This imbalance both explains the distribution of these fish in cooler waters and suggests a special sensitivity to warming waters. —Sacha Vignieri
---
Abstract:
Body size and temperature set metabolic rates and the pace of life, yet our understanding of the energetics of large fishes is uncertain, especially of warm-bodied mesotherms, which can heavily influence marine food webs. We developed an approach to estimate metabolic heat production in fishes, revealing how routine energy expenditure scales with size and temperature from 1-milligram larvae up to 3-tonne megaplanktivorous sharks. We found that mesotherms use approximately four times more energy than ectotherms use and identified a scaling mismatch in which rates of heat production increase faster than heat loss as body size increases, with larger fish becoming increasingly warm bodied. This scaling imbalance creates an overheating predicament for large mesotherms, helping to explain their cooler biogeographies. Contemporary mesotherms face high fuel demands and overheating risks, which is a concern given their disproportionate demise during prior climate shifts.
No they aren't.
They will move to different locations like they always have been for the past 400 million years. Sharks are older than trees, they can adapt to climate change better than anything alive right now.
Time to make sunsets. https://makesunsets.com.
I don’t see a way out except for stratospheric aerosol injection.
- stupid question
- if everyone on the entire planet went 100% vegan from tomorrow, will carbon emissions really go down by 60%?
No, because most of the estimates are wonky as hell. For one, calories from silage don't exactly translate directly to calories humans can make use of. Second, most estimates are worst case only and ignore the fact most animals are pastured for some/all of the year on marginal land. Some animals can survive entirely on foraging and waste from agriculture (pigs are a great example).
On the other side, not all climates can produce all the plants required for a balanced vegan diet. Here in Canada, nothing grows for 6 months and what does grow is relatively limited.
The lowest energy system would likely include a reduction in animal products but not a complete elimination, while keeping transportation to a minimum.
Also, just like with energy generation, there's the game theory aspect. If you reduce emissions, will everyone cooperate? What if you suffer only to have someone else increase their emissions anyway? We see this here... We limit our fisheries to try preserve ocean fish, only for Chinese vessels to sit on the edge of our borders hoovering up all the aquatic life...
Carbon emissions from food production may go down about that much. However, those emissions are only about 30% of the total CO2 emissions humans are responsible for, if I recall correctly. So, total CO2 reduction would be about 18%.
and likely other un predictable knock on effects would reduce the benefit, like going vegan would mean more food is available overall, and population might rise in response.
Maybe. Due to not just the caloric availability, but due to eating habits that may influence behavior.
Most of the emissions are done by the 100 biggest corporations. That's where I'd start fixing things.
That factoid always hides the real issue. The biggest reason that that factoid is true is that the 100 biggest companies includes a large amount of the fossil fuel industry, and that that industry produces most emissions in the world. A company like Saudi Aramco produce 4% of global emissions.
We need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
For full clarity, it's also not the 100 biggest corporations that produce most emissions, but the 100 biggest companies. A massive amount of the global emissions are done by state-owned companies.
That’s basically a different way of measuring the same thing. These corporations don’t just exist in a bubble, many of them are going to be behind the food production either directly or indirectly (e.g. energy companies providing fuel for machinery).
Food is responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions[1]. I agree that it’s not realistic to assume this will be solved individually, more pressure needs to be put on these large corporations from governments, but the quickest way you or I can make our own (individually small, collectively large) impact is by cutting out meat from our diet (specifically beef[2]). We are end-consumers of those 100 largest corporations one way or another.
(Not a vegetarian/vegan btw. I’m not trying to shame, I’m certainly not perfect! I just wanted to share the info that it’s not someone else’s problem. We’re all in this together)
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions [2] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints?Commodi...
Don't corporations just serve their patrons?
"just" is a weasel word there. Decisions are made and policies are enacted based on a number of factors.
And their investors.
The smaller ones are most likely less efficient (which blocked their growth). So it'd be a game of whack-a-mole where every hit makes everything worse...
maybe, but only because a lot of people would starve... that's a demand change our food supply isn't currently structured to handle
long term with a proper transition, probably not 60% but likely some lower double-digit percentage (maybe closer to 20?)
We grow a lot of human-edible food for the sole purpose to feed it to livestock, who then spend most of those calories on existing and put a small portion into body mass that we eventually eat.
Sure, that stuff isn't of the same quality as food grown for human consumption, but putting livestock on a diet and diverting some of their food to human consumption would more than cover any shortfall from the missing meat
Yes, only the rich should be allowed to eat the basic food group of natural meat.
I wonder what would happen if we started measuring the carbon emissions for multinational supply chains..
How come the sharks don’t migrate toward colder water?
> Several large tuna species and sharks, known as “mesothermic” species for the way their bodies run hot, require more fuel to maintain their temperature and are thus confronting a “double jeopardy” of warming oceans and declining food, mainly from overfishing. As water temperatures climb, these species will be forced to relocate to cooler waters.
They are moving to cooler waters but the cooler waters won't have the food supplies they need. So it's either stay where the food is and overheat or go to cooler water and starve.
Whites do dive deep as they age, and feed on giant squid and elephant seals that dive deep as well.
Whites migrate long distances including deep waters when they age
It’s a white noise so hard to notice, but our behavior is fundamentally driven by the design of our nervous system. Thus the more immediate the consequence, the better we link our behavior and can adjust. Since this is true at an individual level, the dynamic emerges from societies and populations as well, even large ones.
For example, something is red, you touch it, get burned. You won’t touch it again.
Environmental harm unfortunately is precisely the opposite. Consequences arise on a very long arc, in some cases beyond even our lifetimes. We register problems like this only intellectually, and even that becomes clouded with politics.
So the problem is kind of inevitable unfortunately.
reminder - there's tech out there capable of reading your mind remotely
It's strange they haven't considered diving an extra couple of inches to compensate (if it is even required)
Warmer water also means less oxygen, thus fish have to swim closer to the surface to get enough oxygen.