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by wkat4242 1084 days ago
Yes, in the end continuing with fossil fuel will result in much more wildlife destruction though. I think it's always important to consider the alternative which in this case is really bad.
2 comments

Oil spills, fracking and nuclear drama seem far more ruinous than shading an otherwise-inhospitable biome on track to get even hotter. Or putting up fans, or building dams.

Your point goes overlooked too often! We're destroying all ecosystems under the status quo.

We are distrupting ecosystems but you cant destroy ecosystems. The most urbanized or polluted place on earth is still an ecosystem. It takes time for an abundance of species to emerge that can take advantage of this ecosystem, but it will emerge. Consider the rock dove, evolved to roost in the very specific environment of a rock cliff. Today, however, ecosystems have changed, cities are more or less giant artificial rock cliffs, and pigeon populations are massive in cities as a result.
Or consider the fact that most of North America was under a thick sheet of ice only 10,000 years ago.
But now we're changing climates over the course of hundreds of years, not tens of thousands. We're not giving nature time to adapt (nor ourselves, for that matter)

Climate change is "normal" on our planet, yes. But it's not normal at the speed at which we are causing it now.

Theres been plenty of extinction events that were far faster and vastly more destructive than even climate change from us humans. These events serve as opportunities to expose ecological niches to new species. Its all part of life on earth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambo...

According to some people’s mental model of how the world works, an event like this should leave the entire earth a barren wasteland.

Instead the caldera itself is now a National Park known for its forests rich biodiversity, some 200 years later.

For now, sure. But consider the earth as a system and not a place where humans live for their one lifetime. Burning more fuel means converting long buried organic material into material that exists on the surface. The fact there are issues with this is that the processes to deal with this great excess haven’t yet organically evolved on their own, but given time taking advantage of the excess carbon in the atmosphere and a more energetic earth from greenhouse effect should see things like rapid evolution of microbial photosynthetic life, even extending to favor rapid evolution of macroscopic photosynthetic life as well.