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...re climate change...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/07/06/...

Why a sudden surge of broken heat records is scaring scientists

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment...

Reeling Arctic glaciers are leaving bubbling methane in their wake, scientists warn

The articles are behind a paywall. But I think I'm familiar with what they are talking about. A lot of methane is locked up in methane hydrate. As the world heats up, that melts releasing the bonded methane. Methane is a VERY potent greenhouse gas.

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

I'm also starting to see articles about how the human body starts to shut down at 104F. At ~120F (50C), sweating does not cool you. I can vouch for the last one. We -in Phoenix- see 115F days routinely every summer. All sweating does is dehydrate you. You need to intake cold water for any cooling. Or just go inside where there's air conditioning.

Poorer nations will not have that option. Heck, people die here because they can't afford air conditioning, or in some places it is uncommon to be installed because it never used to be necessary. Then people die.

All the while the anti-environmentalists were calling environmentalists "tree huggers", saying "put people first". Well, that's what the environmentalists -many of them- were doing. We are dependent on the environment to survive. If we mess it up too much, it will kill us. The Earth doesn't need saving. It will be fine for a few billion more years. Whether any of our descendants survive to see it is the question.

We are dependent on the environment to survive. If we mess it up too much, it will kill us. The Earth doesn't need saving. It will be fine for a few billion more years. Whether any of our descendants survive to see it is the question.

I understand what you are saying. On the other hand, dare I saw, it is a defeatist approach. You could extend it to saying that we can drop nuclear bombs around and as the world is independent to our actions, the world at large will adapt - some species will survive and change over time, and although human civilisation will end, the Earth is bigger than us and it will keep going.
The problem is that our actions are ^not^ independent to us. We are year by year destroying life on the planet. As someone posted earlier, we have almost completely replaced all mammal mass with both ourselves and our livestock. Yet the rate of species extinction alone is astronomical.
The first step (necessary but not sufficient) is an awareness of what we are doing, which we are sort of in denial about on the whole. I think there is nothing wrong with stating everything to make it clear, as we can only then talk about remedies and have the power, strength or initiative to slowly steer out Titanic away from self destruction. I think that isn't a bad way of putting it because it is really hard to change cultural momentum but it doesn't mean we are a slave to this momentum.

We are in agreement. That was my whole point: by saving the Earth, we save ourselves. If we go on as we are, our civilization will collapse, and in a few thousand years the Earth will recover and be just fine. Saving whales, hugging trees, "going green"...that's for our benefit as well as the Earth's. The Earth doesn't depend on us, but we depend on it. We should jealously protect it, but we're not. Which could spell our doom.

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Berkshire Hathaway FAQ

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