[ablation]

The author of that Climate Casino post has some... strong views. So you might want to bear this in mind when reading his analysis:

"The human cancer is destructive to every living thing, as humans continue to eat the planet into oblivion. As someone who values “everything else,” I would be one of the first to rally behind the NTHE philosophy if it had any scientific basis at all. I want the human cancer gone from this planet."

https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/unfortunately-the-end-o...

[elcritch]

It's additionally not clear that TFA is a copy of the Climate Casino (CC) post.

It's on the same topic, possibly spurred by the CC. Yes it uses the same graph (which I presume CC also didn't make), but otherwise the content and writing is very different. It's less detailed, possibly LLM written, but also more approachable.

I guess re-posting about a salient topic is now just "AI copyright theft".

[brikil]

To be fair, the planet is gonna be fine in the long term. It's the human race that's in danger... so maybe a win-win from his perspective??

[throw4847285]

Hey, that's Ian Malcolm's line in Jurassic Park!

“Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.”

But I don't think it's all that interesting of an argument. When people say save/destroy the Earth, they mean humanity. Call that arrogance, but it's true.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

The planet as a rock in space is not something they care about (and you know it).

Life (especially sentient animals), on the other hand…

[MarkusQ]

Right. Specifically, "I want the human cancer gone from this planet."

That's a kind of caring, but probably not the sort you were trying to imply.

[QuantumGood]

The most powerful humans, and human systems, often score very low on stewardship and empathy. While "cancer" triggers as opinionated, using a less-charged analogy I think should probably make a similar point.

[cuu508]

What analogy might work better, i.e., be less charged but as precise?

[cratermoon]

Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.

[dylan604]

One of my favorite worded bits of machine logic about humans. All of the sci-fi tropes have it. The "I, Robot" movie has similar "my logic is undeniable" comment about the same conclusion of the humans being the problem. I just really liked Agent Smith's specific comments

[pocksuppet]

He is wrong, by the way. Most animals multiply until they exceed carrying capacity, then die off in massive numbers, then repeat. They may find a long-term equilibrium. The current boom in human population, and a subsequent die-off that has not yet happened, were predicted back in the 1970s.

[cratermoon]

This happened in rapid succession in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. First rodents and small scavengers multiplied rapidly, but then the easy food ran out and their predators showed up, and the cycle repeated. The zone is now roughly at equilibrium, we think, but it's isolated and surrounded by human activity so it's hard to be sure.

The Kaibab Plateau deer disaster from 1906 to 1939 also demonstrated boom and bust cycles.

[holowoodman]

It is also probably BS to assume a periodical die-off for humans in the near future. At the moment, humans are not showing any signs of a die-off, they are just not multiplying anymore. Humans do have something that animals do not, a culture. And this culture seems to have induced a downward variation in population.

[cratermoon]

We call human die-offs "war", "genocide", "drug epidemics", "pandemics".

There was a spike in 2021, of course, but the world death rate has been edging up slightly every year since then.

[masfuerte]

We will reach some kind of equilibrium. It is literally impossible for things to continue as they are.

[QuantumGood]

TLDR; hard to resolve that question with dialog.

Complexity resists reduction, yet fundamentals that affect change over time exist.

That said, growth seeks to shed restrictions upon it, but unrestricted growth has many suboptimal effects on the area it grows in.

If you propose a system growth effect thesis (established example: the iron law of oligarchy), it's not possible to show its influence both accurately, and in such a way that agrees with most observers. It may not even be useful; it might exist as a concept better in a group relation with other concepts, and focusing on the group might be most useful.

And responses to actions to display a system's properties tend to be about those actions, not about the system.

Some of the most popular responses re: growth are "the area doesn't have a beneficial significance equal to the beneficial significance of the growth", but one is measured essentially to support propaganda, and other is barely measured and poorly understood.

Once you narrow the framing, people criticize the framing as the reality, not its usefulness as a paradidm for the reality of the issue. The map is not the territory; we cannot "describe" reality. We can create interfaces to that reality, we can measure, discuss, theorize about cause and effect, attempt to emulate or simulate to better understand, but responses tend to focus on the interface instead of the reality, and then devolve to epistimelogical "statements about statements" type activity.

[bryanrasmussen]

So, because he's a nutter the graph shouldn't be front page news is the argument then? That'll teach him.

He will learn the regret the day he dared say "hey, this graph means we're all gonna die if we don't do something! Look at it!" because we outsmarted him by refusing to look.

[luddit3]

The argument is that when a data point comes from a source with such an obvious bias, the data point is called into question.

[kelseyfrog]

The beautiful thing about evidence is that it's able to be evaluated on its own merit.

Adding heuristics trades accuracy for speed. It's fine to be overloaded and rely on heuristics, but let's call them what they are, shortcuts.

[ablation]

You seem to be projecting onto me far more than my words literally state. I neither stated nor insinuated anything of the sort.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Because he's a nutter, you should not take his word for it that a 3.5 sigma event (1 in ~2000 for a normal distribution) in the temperature of a particular ocean region means we're all gonna die if we don't do something.

[virgilp]

Well before I knew he was a nutter, it strikes be that the graph starts in 1991. Feels like we should should have more data than that, and that the same graph would be more powerful if it started in 1800 and showed the same thing (or at least, earlier in the 20th century, surely we must have data from the 1950s at least? probably earlier?)

Not saying that the data is not concerning, or that climate warming isn't real, BTW. I'm just saying this particular graph feels fishy.

[andy_ppp]

I can understand the desire to be concerned about the climate systems that keep earth habitable for humans starting to break down might come with some extreme views. It seems almost thinking we can continue as normal given the predictions of climate scientists are now coming true, is the extreme views. I worry that these climate scientists might have under egged their estimates due to a “sensible mindset” rather than following the data and we could be in for a horrifying next 30-50 years.

[dr_dshiv]

The data seem to suggest an urgent need for solar radiation management because reducing fossil fuel consumption to a negative value isn't really a viable plan, as it turns out. Instead, we will have to use technology to solve the problem, surprise surprise.

Calcium carbonate has the benefit of de acidifying the ocean.

[pstuart]

> reducing fossil fuel consumption to a negative value isn't really a viable plan, as it turns out

That seems to be the case politically. Technically it could be done with the only variable being the time to do so.

[hamilyon2]

Nobody tried planet-scale geo engineering before, as far as I understand the opinions on it's effectiveness vary.

[holowoodman]

We did try planet-scale geo engineering. It has worked so far, predictions were met. Heating through CO_2 and other heavy molecules works as predicted. Cooling through Sulfur compounds works even better than predicted, as evidenced by the sudden rise in temperatures after cessation of sulfur-rich fuels.

And in the end, all solutions we can attempt are technical and in some aspect untested. We just assume that the consequences of some of those solutions are small enough, but none have really been tested at scale.

[adrianN]

Optimistic of you to assume it’ll only be fifty years. Do you expect humans to adapt that quickly? The climate will be messed up for centuries at least

[dylan604]

Where do you get the "centuries at least" bit? The hole in the ozone layer "repaired itself" much faster after humans made changes. There's no more acid rain in Los Angeles after humans made changes. These all happened within my lifetime. We also saw during covid lock downs how quickly things changed from the sudden slow down in human activity.

[doug-moen]

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

[quickthrowman]

Changing refrigerants and propellants away from fluorine chemistry and installing desulfurization equipment on coal plants are both many orders of magnitude easier than reducing the amount of hydrocarbons we burn globally to the point where the temperature increasing is stopped or reversed.

One of them requires the entire global population cooperate to burn fewer hydrocarbons. The examples you mentioned were handled in the US by regulating power plant operators and chemical manufacturers.

[dylan604]

The point is that if humans would change, the Earth would change quickly. The way the first comment was worded made it sound like the Earth would need that time and not that humans will drag it out that long. That's a given. The Earth will snap back fairly quickly if the pesky humans would just get their shit together.

[otherme123]

There are some positive feedbacks that once triggered could not be reverted for millenia. For example a potential stop of the AMOC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...

[adrianN]

You can look up the carbon cycle on Wikipedia, it is fairly well understood where atmospheric carbon can go. Most processes that sequester carbon long term take geological time spans. So unless you think we engineer sequestration at a rate comparable to what we emit today, atmospheric carbon is here to stay for a really long time. Personally I think we won’t be able to scale sequestration technology sufficiently in the next decades to make a dent in the carbon levels.

[holowoodman]

Carbon sequestration through plant-life seems to increase more than expected with rising atmospheric CO_2 levels. We are currently seeing increased global plant mass.

[garbageman]

Both of those problems you cited are far smaller and easier to fix than the ~1,500 gigatons of C02 humans have emitted in the past century. CFC's have a half life of only 50 years, C02 just persists now forever since we're dumping it faster than can be consumed. Acid rain was a mostly localized problem, not one spanning the entire Earth and affecting ocean temps, ocean currents, etc etc. The cited problems are insanely easy to solve compared to global climate change.

It's likely / probably unsolvable at this point as we're hitting tipping points for which there is no effective return such as permafrost melting and releasing more co2, causing more heating, melting more co2, etc and partial shutdowns of critical ocean currents. But yeah I know...MUH FREEDOM.

[Loquebantur]

People in the climate movement are rarely professional PR folks. Weaponizing their personal faults against the objective subject matter they talk about is disingenuous anyway?

You cannot deduce factual correctness from how "holy" the messenger is.

[strken]

Wanting every living human being to die and our species to go extinct ("NTHE" stands for "near-term human extinction") is a little beyond not being professional PR folks.

[simiones]

Per the article, the NTHE "movement" are doom sayers, not doom pushers. That is, the NTHE people are people who predict that humanity and most complex life on Earth will be killed off by global warming by 2030 (used to be 2026), through a somewhat convoluted but unavoidable series of consequences of the polar ice cap melting completely (in their theory). There is no indication that the NTHE people want this outcome to happen, it's just the outcome they think is already unavoidable.

Now, the author's position is both more and less nihilistic. The author also seems to think that human extinction is unavoidable, but he thinks the timeline is much more dragged out. He also seems to think that this is actually the preferable outcome at this point, given that global warming is our own fault, and that the only thing we should do is try to make it so that the planet is as well as it can be after we are finally gone.

[inigyou]

It reads to me as a prediction, not a desire: if we don't prevent NTHE then NTHE will happen.

[strken]

In the context of "I want the human cancer gone from this planet" and the rest of that blog post, I am confident that it's a desire.

Probably a desire for a peaceful fading out of the human species rather than a violent one, but it's still far beyond PR naivety.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

Human cancer certainly means careless humans.

[birksherty]

It's humans who are doing this to themself and every other species on earth. So it's true.

[ablation]

I wasn't aware I had weaponised their personal faults, or indeed claimed that what they said was indicative of being a personal fault. I read his post, and then read some more of his writing, and simply felt it would be worth posting what I read in this thread. For me at least, it was a useful experience that changed some of what I was reading into the commentary surrounding the data. YMMV.

[vpribish]

Glad you did. It’s just reasonable behavior to me