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by randycupertino·9y ago·view on hn ↗
How can anyone be denying global warming at this point in the game? It was 90* today in San Francisco. We're killing the earth and meanwhile everyone is distracted arguing about why we have to have blind jingoism and mandatory standing for the national anthem during football games.

The whole thing makes me so completely depressed. I am glad I don't have kids or else I would be too stressed out to function worrying about their lack of futures due to massive climate change.

2 comments
Having just had my first child, I can tell you how odd it is to feel joy in home life, while be horrified by the decay of the outside world.

I have a lot of millenarianists in my family who think of the chaos today as being signs of the "end times". I can't really buy into that, given that we're not in a crisis of WWII-level carnage. The fact that a human being today is far less likely than ever before to die a violent death is absolutely remarkable.

On the other hand, humananity is quickly evolving more ways of plausibly extinguishing or crippling itself, either by action of a small number of humans or prisoner's dilemma-like failure of large numbers of human to cooperate. Nuclear weapons were first, but it will soon be joined by other technologies.

What's depressing to me is that we're clearly not evolving the means to manage our power, wasting that energy on extremely petty concerns, instead. In fact, we seem to be moving backwards.

The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and will be around long after humans are extinct. "Killing the earth" is really not what we're doing.
I wouldn't be so sure. It's not implausible that we could effectively wipe out complex life by setting off feedback loops that progress faster than ecosystems evolve.

Can we kill all life on the planet? Certainly not. But we could make the long-term carrying capacity for humans so low that we'd enter terminal decline. So maybe "killing the earth" isn't precisely true, but what's the difference if there's no one around to understand the distinction?

Some people care about precise wording. Instead of saying we are killing Earth, saying we are making Earth inhospitable to us is a more accurate statement. And it is true statement while the former is false.