[hosh]

The global ecosystem is a living, complex, adaptive system, and will recover with or without human intervention. Whether humans survives as part of that adaptation remains to be seen.

Rather than looking at this as if we are separate from the ecosystem we live in, and try to sequester carbon, I think the better approach is to develop deeper relationships with local ecosystem.

The problem isn’t carbon. The problem is that the carbon is not moving through the ecosystem. Probably one of the more practical things is to separate the local hydrological cycle from the local carbon cycle — that is, plant more stuff; feed onsite composting to the plants; make greater use of greywater, even blackwater; design dwellings and sites with sun and shade and more passive heating and cooling in mind.

[bwestergard]

"The global ecosystem is a living, complex, adaptive system, and will recover with or without human intervention."

On the trajectory we're currently on, a significant fraction of all species on earth could go extinct. There will be life, yes, but significantly less diverse life.

[hosh]

Take polar bears for example. At the rate things are going, they will go extinct. On the other hand, the polar bears that are cross breeding with their cousins, the grizzly bear, are producing offspring better adapted to melting ice caps.

If we want to have better genetic diversity, it’s not going to come from reducing carbon emissions. It will be things like planting wildlife refuges in your front yard, at least poly-cropping not mono-cropping, letting landraces develop for local conditions instead of insisting on standardized produces. It’s participating within the ecology and not trying to take the entire yield and maximizing usefulness to humans. Reducing carbon emissions will not, by itself, get us there.

[rcxdude]

The carbon being put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels wasn't part of the ecosystem for millions of years. Simply moving it around the cycle isn't really going to solve the excess (though whether the air is the best place to try to remove it from the cycle is an important question).

[hosh]

Pollution, desertification, ocean acidification, habitat destruction are as great, if not greater concerns, and yet here we are, picking a single metric as if changing that alone will solve everything.

[rcxdude]

Well, a lot of those are being driven in large part by climate change. I don't think I was saying that reducing CO2 back to pre-industrial would solve all environmental problems, just that reducing it is an important part to improving a lot of them.

[hosh]

Pollution is not driven by climate change. It is driven by our industrial processes that includes fossil fuels. It also includes the processes that goes into high-tech materials. We don’t have forever chemicals and microplastics because of climate change.

Desertification has to do with ecosystems degenerating. While there are regions that are desertifying because of changes in percipitation patterns, our industrial scale agriculture and feedlots are depleting the soil in a way that is leading to desertification, even without changes in climate patterns. We kill soil with fertilizers and pesticide. We got rid of beavers, and the way they reroute rivers and watershed to spread out water, making the land less resilient. We pipe water to grow things in areas we probably shouldn’t. The Great Dust Bowl was not a result of climate change.

Ocean acidification is a result of the ocean absorbing more atmospheric CO2 as a consequence of burning fossil fuels. It has affects on the health of marine ecosystems. It is not a consequence of climate change.

[staunton]

The problem is that it will be a lot harder to grow food after 3°C of warming and also to get people drinking water. At some point your "deepening relationship" has to feed billions of people. That's assuming the heating is stopped at that point. Otherwise it gets worse until people are starving, which might eventually reduce CO2 emissions.

[hosh]

Atmospheric temperature is one thing. A focus on that leaves blindspots to things like land temperatures.

Soil is alive, dirt is dead. Healthy soils helps with water retention, and changes the local microclimates. So does designing canopy layers — agroforestry and perennial food forests.

Industrial scale monocropping is not adaptive, and kills off soil. It is fragile, and contributes little to regulating temperatures in the local microclimates.

There are solutions beyond simply looking at carbon emissions or industrial scale carbon sequestering.

[staunton]

Soil damage only happens where it happens while warming can significantly reduce arable land on the planet. This matters a lot for feeding people.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't care about maintaining soil qualiy but your comment "heating irrelevant, just deepen your relationship with the environment" is vague and people basically hear "do nothing about the CO2/warming because it's fine, we just need more hippies loving the soil". That's probably not what you meant but it's how it sounds.

[hosh]

There was a time I used to think I was doing my part by recycling. I did not know then, this stuff gets ship overseas to be dumped, or that it often gets burned. Or that the ethics of recycling was a result of clever marketing by the corps involved to shift this burden onto individuals. I grew up with it and recycling made be feel as if I was doing my part to help save the planet without really ever considering a change in the way of life.

This is exactly what I am seeing with the messaging around “climate change” and “carbon emissions” and “carbon credits”. It allows people to continue with the way of life they are used to and feel good about doing their part.

When I say “get connected with the local ecosystem”, I am not espousing a hippie view.

Part of our modern way of life insulates us from really understanding at an instinctual and bodily level, what it means to be a part of an ecosystem or a community. I mean it literally: many people do not actually know what it is like to eat an apple off a tree, let alone a relationship with that particular tree, and all the birds, bees, worms, fungi, and microbes involved with that apple.

I don’t know how to say this any more literally and directly. Advocating for “doing something about CO2/warming” is so far away from getting your hands dirty, and knowing at a deep level, that this is our home, and we’re not the only ones living here, and that the land can very well provide healthy food, and our actions directly impacts the land around us.

Oh and as for warming — the Soviets were able to adapt warm-weather fruit bearing trees, and we can do the same. There are plenty of heat-hardy edible plants, if we are willing to go beyond the small handful of monocropped “food” we have standardized on. We can try using industrial scale solutions, but we are just kicking the can down the road. It is our way of seeing the world around us that lead us here.