[TeMPOraL]

This only shows that, while CO₂ concentrations are the dominant control variable in the question of our long-term survival, the overall health of the environment is influenced by many, many more things, especially short-term. Now it is especially clear that protecting the environment and mitigating the climate crisis are two different, and only partially aligned efforts. Frequently, they're in opposition - which is why it's extra important not to confuse them.

The example I tend to use is plastic pollution. Interventions like switching from single-use plastic bags and bottles to reusable woven bags and glass bottles may very well help with the amount of plastics (and microplastics) present in the environment, but they're also a climate disaster, because plastic bags and bottles are ridiculously efficient to make at scale. And so here, I also worry that despite the environment taking a break from us during COVID-19, this will turn out to be a huge step back climate-wise - as soon we'll have to start rebuilding, and there will be less money and will around to fund R&D and deployment of less carbon-intensive solutions.

[rorykoehler]

> protecting the environment and mitigating the climate crisis are two different, and only partially aligned efforts

I wish more people understood this. Too many times conversation are hijacked by the CO2 discussion when really in the short term we should be focusing 99% of our efforts on bio-diversity preservation.

[TeMPOraL]

I sort of meant the reverse. You make a good point about importance of biodiversity downthread, but wrt. things like plastic pollution vs. CO₂, I'd argue we should just ignore the former. The reasoning is:

- We know the ecosystem is thoroughly polluted by microplastics, but there is no evidence that it's in any way harmful. It may be, but we haven't seen it so far.

- We know that without mitigation, climate change is an existential threat to civilization, that will materialize within the lifetime of many of us here.

Given that, we really can deal with microplastics later. Let's first stop the house from being on fire, and then focus on tyding it up.

[rorykoehler]

I was under the impression that micorplastics are acidifying the ocean and in turn kicking off a process that removes oxygen and creates dead zones?

[TeMPOraL]

I've never heard about that. As far as I know, acidification is caused by the oceans picking up CO₂ from the atmosphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

[rorykoehler]

A quick search seems to back you up. If that is the case how did sealife survive during times of high co2 concentrations historically?

[im3w1l]

It's not that high CO2 is intrinsically bad. It's just that the change is happening quicker than a lot of species can adapt.

[tomp]

Really interesting reasoning. I'm almost tempted to say "extremely unscientific".

1. "no evidence of microplastics being harmful" sounds very much like WHO's "no evidence of human transmission". Personally, I'd say that in both scenarios, the outcome we should be most worried about is tail risks - what if we suddenly realize the situation is much worse than we imagined, but it's already too late...

2. Is "climate change" so bad? I mean, would it be really so bad if the Earth warmed up a bit, and all of Siberia, Greenland and the Antartic became livable (and arable) land? More food, more space for new humans, ... all good! Except, obviously, 2 things - biodiversity (which you want to ignore) and tail risks - what if the Earth warms up too much, and we "trigger" some unexpected process (e.g. thawing of permafrost releases vast quantities of extremely potent greenhouse gases).

I think most people are simply really confused about their reasoning process. Microplastics? Ignore tail risks. Global warming? Tail risks! GMOs? Ignore tail risks. 5G? Tail risks! Vaccines? Ignore tail risks. Endocrine disruptors? Tail risks! (Of course, the exact configuration of positions is highly correlated with one's political orientation.)

[pietrovismara]

2. Of course it's incredibly bad. It will displace entire populations and alter permanently entire ecosystems. The effects will be cascading all over the world and we have no idea what the consequences will be in the long term.

It is definitely a very concerning prospective.

[rorykoehler]

You've articulated perfectly something I've been struggling with on conversations here on hackernews in your last paragraph. People can be incredibly short termist when it suits their agenda but some things are dangerously irreversible if we get them wrong. I liken it to a child dismantling a toy to see how it works and then not being able to put it together again but on a civilisation impacting level.

[TeMPOraL]

I'd argue the two basic heuristics I apply in this and similar cases are pretty scientific:

1) Strong effects are obvious in the data; conversely, if you have to dig deep and play with statistical significance to prove there's a connection, the effect is very weak - it's a scientific curiosity, sure, but "to zeroth order of approximation" you may as well say it doesn't exit.

2) When ascertaining the possible impact of something in the future, your estimate will be more accurate if you have a clue about mechanisms of action involved.

Microplastics seem to fail both heuristics at the moment - there isn't any obvious impact that we've measured, and there isn't any obvious mechanism of action that could imply serious danger. There most likely are issues caused by them - however, we've been living with them for decades now, so if this was an emergency-level threat, we'd probably see something by now.

Compare that with worrying whether coffee/red meat/artificial sweetener/vaccine/5G will give you cancer - maybe it will, maybe it won't, but if the chance of it was remotely worth worrying about, it would be blindingly obvious in the data by now. Contrast that with "no evidence of human transmission" - not enough data to check heuristic 1, fails heuristic 2 due to similarity to other coronaviruses with known mechanisms of human-to-human transmission.

Climate change passes both #1 and #2. There is known, first-principles mechanism of action that you can dig into like into a fractal, if you want to explore consequences for various aspects of the ecology and society. There is a known mechanism of action that makes it into an actual threat - food shortages, mass migrations, political unrest, leading to wars, starvation, suffering and death. We know how fragile our civilization is (present COVID-19 situation makes a lot of weak points clearly visible). There's lot of historical data supporting the above and the threat evaluation - for instance, we're seeing how increasing average temperatures are impacting agriculture and habitability of some regions on Earth.

One more clarification: the reason climate change is dangerous is not because it threatens plants and animals. It's because it threatens human civilization. We care about nature not because it is, but primarily because we need it to live. Moreover, since almost no one would enjoy suddenly being thrown back to preindustrial age on a thoroughly broken planet, we can safely say that the concern is about survival of existing civilization, not survival of human species (not to mention, you can't fix the damage without technology, and you won't have technology when civilization collapses). Human civilization is very fragile.

Also: just saying "tail risks" isn't meaningful. You have to actually estimate the sum of the tail to determine whether it's even worth paying attention to. Which circles us back to heuristics #1 and #2, which - in my opinion - say that microplastics are a secondary issue to climate change.

[tomp]

Good answer, thanks!

[NJRBailey]

What are the benefits of focusing on biodiversity preservation? I can think of some things like food security but would global warming not also impact on those?

[poooogles]

>What are the benefits of focusing on biodiversity preservation?

They're not always aligned. There's many more issues that come out of low biodiveristy than just those affected by climate change. One important one that's unrelated would be high biodiversity environments have more rich soils that are better for farming. Similarly more biodiverse environments are more resistant to disease; Ash dieback disease that affects the Ash in Europe appears not be fatal to the tree in mixed diverse forest [1].

Diverse ecosystems are also more resistant to climate change [2], so there's that too.

1. https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/... 2. https://news.mongabay.com/2015/11/greater-biodiversity-makes...

[rorykoehler]

>but would global warming not also impact on those

Other way around. By focusing on biodiversity preservation we increase the robustness of the ecosystem and stop the dominoes from falling. Removing biodiversity cascades through the whole ecosystem and accelerates climate change. Also once bio-diversity is gone it's impossible to get back but we can always invent technology to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. Remember most of the species we're losing we don't even know they exist.

[pietrovismara]

Everything is connected in nature, for example if we lose bees the effects will be devastating. Most seemingly "useless" animals actually have a very important role in their ecosystem. Without healthy ecosystems we are doomed.

[AnthonyMouse]

> as soon we'll have to start rebuilding, and there will be less money and will around to fund R&D and deployment of less carbon-intensive solutions.

That isn't necessarily true. There is going to be a push for jobs programs to fight unemployment. Why can't some of the jobs be those types of things?

[TeMPOraL]

I feel that most of cleantech work is still essentially a luxury, which will be hard to justify in a recession market. I also didn't mention the other aspect - how many of existing environmental protections and standards will have to be suspended because everyone will argue they can't afford to survive and recover if they have to stay clean?