This kind of rhetoric is alarmist and counterproductive. It effectively gives one a free pass to do nothing. After all, if you already believe the earth is doomed, what's the point in trying?
Bluntly, your little prognostication, here, is based on nothing. Is 2023 a wicked outlier in the global climate? Absolutely. Is global warming continuing to progress as humanity fails to move quickly enough to change our ways? Absolutely.
But this is one year. A single data point. It's absurd to come to such an extreme conclusion based on a single year of (admittedly very scary) data.
If anything, I'm hoping this year will serve as a wake-up call for more people who might've previously been on the fence about the nature and severity of climate change, and will thus accelerate moves by people and their governments to do more about it.
Let's not understate this. The OP article is regarding a record low in 2022, but this year (2023) we've now also seen a sustained 5-sigma deviation in sea ice extent.
> This one year, or the year previous, is not evidence that the ecosystem of the planet is going to collapse in 10 years.
Global warming writ large has been going on for a lot longer than a couple of years, and ocean temperature tipping points have been an anticipated consequence. An anomaly of this size warrants alarm. If not proof of imminent ecosystem collapse, it seems foolish to 'wait and see'. Though I take your point that defeatism is worse, but I doubt OP is defeatist.
> rhetoric that we're all gonna die by 2030
That's an even more sensationalist spin than what the OP wrote
That phrase is used when someone is delivering someone else's message.
That comment, both it's content and it's implications, are yours. If you're gonna run away from it now, you shouldn't have written it in the first place.
I stand by what I said, but I am just the messenger.
Everywhere its easy to see evidence of the tipping point accelerating.
There's extremely good reason to panic at this stage.
>> But this is one year. A single data point. It's absurd to come to such an extreme conclusion based on a single year of (admittedly very scary) data.
Nope - this year is part of a statistical heat trend. It's not up and down, some years cooler, some warmer. It's getting hotter every year.
Plants and animals and the ocean ecosystem will be devastated by this.
The human food supply depends on seasons, and seasons are being massively disrupted. If plants don't product food then that's a big problem.
I would wonder what do you gain from denying this is where the problem has got to? Why do you need it to not be at catastrophe level right now?
> Everywhere its easy to see evidence of the tipping point accelerating.
Cool, let's start here, then: what tipping points are you referring to, specifically, and what is the evidence that they're accelerating?
To be clear: ocean temperatures are unusually high this year relative to historic trends, but with just this one year as a major outlier, there's no basis to conclude a tipping point has been reached, especially given El Nino muddies the data.
As for atmospheric temperature, 2023 is likely to be a warmest year on record, but January to July 2016 was hotter, so there no reason to believe 2023 will be wildly outside the current trendline (which, to be clear, is up and to the right):
Oh, it won't be 10 years, stop hoping for entertainment!
It will be a long, slow, boring grind taking place over generations. It already has been. I'm 43 and 66% of the world population is younger than me. I remember there were lots more insects (and amphibians and birds!) when I was a child. That's not considered a crisis for some reason, there's never been a protest about bugs as far as I can tell, and never some apocalyptic "Ahh, all the bugs just died!" moment. It's been "Ho hum, let me spray some more pesticide on my lawn to kill those pesky grubs again" the whole way.
The next generation will have never known what it was like to have XYZ plant or animal or insect or fish around, and they won't miss it.
A staggering loss that suggests the very fabric of North America’s ecosystem is unraveling.
Cornell Lab director John Fitzpatrick and study coauthor Peter Marra
I don't dispute those at all; I think we're headed for disaster. But Earth's ecosystems and biospheres are huge and complex. We've probably kicked off a cascade that inevitably leads to a major collapse already, but it be a long process, like watching a log decay. There will be spasms as this or that or the other species has a big spike and looks like it is "rebounding"--like swarms of locusts, e.g.--but really it's the system unraveling. The biosphere's natural way of adaptation is to dip into a reservoir of biodiversity via (sometimes local) extinction. It'll keep trying to settle into new configurations of stability, but they won't work, and they'll be temporary plateaus on our slide down this long slope.
It could take many decades or even centuries for most of the damage to be done. We're trying our hardest to speed it up, but yeah, there's a big reservoir to burn through and most of the time it will look like things are standing still.
Saying that everything is going to unravel in 10 years and collapse is going to turn out to not be true, even if the underlying dynamic is inexorably pointing in a bad direction and headed that way.
We need to do something more productive and synergistic than that...
But you are right with every shift in biodiversity there are consequences for food chains, etc. No such thing as a "distant event" - it's not just about (magnificent!) penguins, it's about the intricate, interdependent web of life we rely on (lots of unsung heroes in biodiversity).
Compartmentalization and thinking that all of this is remote to our human experience / survival is a complete illusion.
If we are the stewards of this planet, we're called to ack and act with urgency.
I often hear this apocalyptic outlook and I wonder how probable it is.. people speak of it as if it is a certainty but I am not entirely convinced. Can someone point me in either direction?
For a less apocalyptic point of view I’d recommend UW professor and meteorologist Cliff Mass.
Fair warning that he’s a bit of a lightning rod for controversy due in large part to his relatively centrist views on exactly these and similarly hot button issues.
Would you define collapse? If you can meet in San Francisco and are a credible individual, I will give you $10k right away and you can give me $40k 10 years and one day from now (15% compounding).
At least if you agree that the dollar won't be useful once we have total global ecosystem collapse.
I haven't heard this particular phrase. There's definitely been a lot of talk about water levels being X metres higher by 2100, or worldwide average temperatures being X by 2050. What's actually happened is that all prior projections have been found to be underestimated and we're probably already 5 years ahead of where we should be.
Ruminants would do well on most wild growth. In Australia they are pretty much let loose in semi-arid vegetation and then rounded up and sent to feedlots at end of life. They may not do well in a drought or flood, but that's already the case as they are often die on stations in extreme weather events. Plenty of wild pigs and sheep around to suggest they'd do okay without humans, but maybe not to the same flourishing.
For some types of livestock, where they were lucky enough to be living in fairly idyllic circumstances, it might go rather well.
OTOH - the U.S. alone has something like half a billion chickens. Mostly live locked up in huge metal sheds on factory farms. Similar ~1/4 billion turkeys. The humans go "poof" ...and those metal sheds probably don't have any "peck here for 30 seconds to open emergency exit" doors. Zero of the trucks which deliver the chicken and turkey feed, the high-intensity farming operations which are growing that feed, and the processing facilities blending it will just keep running due to some sort of Narrative Momentum trope.
I'm not familiar with factory farming of pigs (about 22 million in the U.S.), but I suspect similar issues.
The entire global ecosystem faces collapse IMO within 10 years or so.
The heating seems to have reached a tipping point.
The best thing for every non-human plant and animal on the planet would be for all humans to vanish overnight.