[kktkti9]

We’ve had empirical measure of industry related climate change since the 1860s hidden away by industry, who continued to be confirm through private research over and over.

If our math models can predict the Higgs decades before it’s experimentally discovered, why is a math model from the 70s confirming society will implode in the 2040s any less reliable? Same correct order of operations. Reconfirmed recently by better trained experts.

Unfortunately your “always been this” way is problematic nowadays since humans weren’t always capable of annihilating themselves. A whole lot of their imagined scenarios rightly were bullshit. Previous generations left behind rock and stone buildings, some sludge at worst.

We’re leaving behind an industrial mess and a melted planet.

Now is a very different point in time.

Earth will go on with or without us. If the answer is shrug it off, well that won’t work as a majority get anxious. Nihilism risks social stability and solution seeking. If a bunch of people aren’t going to care, why support society? Let’s all just go tribal now.

[lolc]

> Previous generations left behind rock and stone buildings, some sludge at worst.

I don't see why we should ignore the deforestation or hunting to extinction that previous generations imposed on the planet.

[jacquesm]

Compared to what we've done in the last 50 years they were rank amateurs.

[lazide]

They were pretty thorough at wiping out entire classes of large land animals in North America (and probably everywhere else but Africa and parts of India), at least if the theories hold.

[lolc]

The iron age required a lot of wood.

[jacquesm]

The iron age was a long time ago, America had not been 'discovered' yet.

Just two pictures to give you an idea of what has been lost:

https://i.pinimg.com/550x/73/62/26/736226b8437e6ce9eb1bab42e...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7a4mTiIIAEsESF?format=jpg

Multiply by a few million or so...

[lazide]

England used to be covered in dense forests of oak and other trees. It got almost completely deforested to build ships, among other things, and many of the areas never grew back. And that is what we know from detailed records. Many of the other changes there are no records. We don’t know full details of how extensive the megafauna was in the America’s before humans showed up, and how extensive and intentional was the hunting to extinction of them was. But it definitely happened and at huge scale for a long time.

We have evidence of wide scale changes made by humans long before written records existed. We also now have better records, so it’s easier to point to this one here done by this person, instead of only picking up what is visible in the fossil record (which is by it’s nature spotty and incomplete). But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.