[myshpa]

We're about to outpace that.

"very quick" = 60 ± 48 thousand years, we're aiming for 100 years or so

> It kicked off the largest mass extinction event

Yet. Let's wait few decades.

> It is also the largest known mass extinction of insects.

We're already 75-80% down.

https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-insect-population-fl...

https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-202...

https://wwflpr.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_2022_full_r...

There has been about 69 per cent decline in the wildlife population of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish across the globe in the last 50 years. The highest decline, 94 per cent was in Latin America and Caribbean region. According to WWF report, Africa recorded 66 percent fall in wildlife population, the Asia Pacific 55 percent and population of freshwater species reduced by 83 percent globally.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12816

The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?

"Estimate that, since around AD 1500, possibly as many as 7.5–13% (150,000–260,000) of all ~2 million known species have already gone extinct, orders of magnitude greater than the 882 (0.04%) on the Red List."

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi...

The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...

Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss

[zosima]

We had a ~10C increase in temperature from 20000 YA - 13000 YA or so and then a yoyo jump back down ca. 6C and up again in a 1000 years, during the younger dryas.

While the 19th-21th century increase of 1-1.2C or so is a bit faster, it's not a magnitude faster.

Humans have definitely changed nature everywhere, and is probably responsible for many species dying. But blaming that on the climate change doesn't really make sense. Deforestation is much more likely to be the cause.

[myshpa]

I'm not blaming it on the climate change. I'm blaming overshoot.

Mainly our agriculture (deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution), misuse of fossil fuels and the structures of our societal and financial systems.

[zosima]

But deforestation and the following biodiversity loss is a completely different problem than reducing CO2. And in general, very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation (and contrary to popular opinion, even large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either).

[myshpa]

> very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation

Reform of agriculture might be it. Agriculture is also the leading driver of deforestation (50% of pastures were forested in the past).

> large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either

But it could, it's probably the best tool in our arsenal. And it would not only affect CO2, but many of our other problems too (droughts, biodiversity, warming ...).

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4

Agricultural land use, particularly for animal feed, poses the biggest obstacle to ecosystem restoration and carbon sequestration, hindering climate efforts. The potential for carbon sequestration is vast, with enough capacity to meet the entire 1.5°C carbon budget.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/04/improvin...

Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests. Better farming techniques across the world could lead to storage of 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, data shows

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap...

The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately, says study

https://news.mongabay.com/2023/06/to-meet-u-n-climate-biodiv...

To meet U.N. climate, biodiversity goals, 79% of plant cover must be saved, study

https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation

Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops (upto 80% for animal feed), and raise livestock

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).

[bryanlarsen]

> If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).

No we wouldn't. Everybody gets cause and effect backwards on this one. They see that we're using essentially all of our arable land for food production and draw the conclusion that's how much is needed to produce the amount of food we currently produce.

But it's actually the other way around. We use all the land available because that's the cheapest way to produce the amount of food we need. If we had more land, we'd use it and food would be cheaper. If we had less land we'd produce the same amount of food, but it would be more expensive.

For an extreme example, we could probably feed 8 trillion people on the same amount of land by covering all of our arable land with greenhouses.

[myshpa]

Moving towards a plant-based diet would mean needing less land as we wouldn't be raising as many animals for meat. The greenhouse idea is cool, but it'd be very resource intensive.

So, while we can definitely get creative with land use, we also need to consider the costs and environmental impacts.