ELTON JOHN posted:

Unless posted:

pbs terra has a whole new episode today on parts of the biosphere collapsing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo90uHHN6R8

silicone thrills posted:

lol i reposted some of the IPCC stuff in another place and some guy decided to go off about how you know, ozone hole stuff and acid rain were nbd and luckily multiple people were like dude we actually did poo poo about both of those things which is why they (mostly)* went away.


Im always amazed how people can build these narratives to themselves.

silicone thrills posted:

I always love the "we probably wont go extinct" and im like probably not. we managed to survive a probable population bottleneck of like 10k when when of the super volcanos popped. But humans struggled for tens of thousands of years after. PROBABLY WASNT A GREAT TIME TO BE ALIVE

Rip Testes posted:

We are going through breach 1.5C and when the world doesn't immediately fall apart everyone will seize upon the scientific community for false doom mongering.

Microplastics posted:

(me being the last person alive, yelling at a pile of skulls and lab coats) YEAH BUT NOT EVERYBODY DIED, DID THEY

silicone thrills posted:

Another book recommendation here for Disposable City: Miami's Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe

gave me a little crack ping when it covers that miami has already seen nearly a foot of sea rise since they started keeping records.

quote:

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

TehSaurus posted:

My group of college friends from 20 years ago has a fairly active email thread still somehow. I often wonder of I should be asking then what they think of the future. The hope is that they could also become radicalized by the existential risk to their children, but I also feel it is kind of cruel to confront them with it when there’s nothing any of them can do about it. Although someone just had a kid a month or so ago, and maybe that’s some suffering that could have been prevented?

Of course, no one would believe it is as bad as I say it is, so it really would be alienating a bunch of human connections for no actual gain and

Perry Mason Jar posted:

It's possible to have uncomfortable conversations without alienating anyone. I hate that the thread always acts like this is some Herculean feat. To wit, I sat my cousin down, ran through everything, and ended with, "and that's why you shouldn't have children." He mostly agreed but held onto a glimmer of hope.

Our relationship stayed the same and last month I congratulated him on the birth of his daughter. Poor thing.

Koirhor posted:

the two genders are now

Worse and Faster

brakeless posted:

if warming is going to supercharge bog farts beyond expectations, BOE is going to turn things super spicy what with all the arctic wetlands

quote:

Most plastic eaten by city vultures comes straight from food outlets

Since the 1950s, humanity has produced an estimated 8.3 billion tons of plastic, adding a further 380 million tons to this amount each year. Only 9% of this gets recycled. The inevitable result is that plastic is everywhere, from the depths of the oceans to the summit of Everest—and notoriously, inside the tissues of humans and other organisms.

The long-term effects of ingested plastic on people aren't yet known. But in rodents, ingested microplastics can impair the function of the liver, intestines, and exocrine and reproductive organs.

Especially at risk of ingesting plastic are scavenging birds. For example, New World vultures regularly forage at landfills, and have been observed to leisurely pick at synthetic materials such as boat seats, rubber seals, and roofs.

Now, researchers from the U.S. have shown that the amount of plastic ingested by black and turkey vultures (Coragyps atratus and Cathartes aura) can be predicted from their location on suburban and exurban maps. This isn't just a distinction between country versus city birds; the amount ingested depends on the local density of human commerce within urbanized landscapes. These findings are published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

"Here we show that black vultures and turkey vultures in areas with more urban development and a greater density of commercial food providers ingest more plastic," said Hannah Partridge, a doctoral student at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the study's first author.

"It's possible that they eat some of this plastic on purpose rather than exclusively by accident, as is typically believed."

TehSaurus posted:

ah yes they tried and true method for controlling population growth: just don’t build stuff

MightyBigMinus posted:

i'm not reading any of that

i find carhaters edgelord nihilism annoying

but only like 2% as annoying as the "everything is ecofacism" tone police and their meltdowns

please go back to d&d

quote:

To paint or not to paint?

That is the question that many homeowners are facing as their dreams for perfect turf are battered – whether it’s from inflation pushing pricier lawn care options out of reach, or droughts leading to water shortages.

Increasingly, many are turning in the spreader for the paint can, opting, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, for shades of green with names like “Fairway” and “Perennial Rye.”

Where does this yen for turning the outside of the house into a trim green carpet come from?

What I found was that lawns extend far back in American history. Former presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had lawns, but these were not perfect greenswards. It turns out that the ideal of perfect turf – a weed-free, supergreen monoculture – is a recent phenomenon.

The not-so-perfect lawns of Levittown
Its beginnings can largely be traced to the post–World War II era when suburban developments such as the iconic Levittown, New York, had its start.

Levittown was the brainchild of the Levitt family, which viewed landscaping – a word that only entered the English language in the 1930s – as a form of “neighborhood stabilization,” or a way of bolstering property values. The Levitts, who built 17,000 homes between 1947 and 1951, thus insisted that homeowners mow the yard once a week between April and November and included the stricture in covenants accompanying their deeds.

But the Levitts took the obsession with the lawn only so far. “I don’t believe in being a slave to the lawn,” wrote Abraham Levitt. Clover was, to him, “just as nice” as grass.

Engineering perfection
All of which is to say that the quest for the perfect lawn did not come naturally. It had to be engineered, and one of the greatest influencers in this regard was the Scotts Co. of Marysville, Ohio, which took agricultural chemicals and created concoctions that homeowners could spread over their yards.

Formulators like Scotts had one great advantage: Turfgrass is not native to North America, and growing it on the continent is, for the most part, an uphill ecological battle. Homeowners thus needed a lot of help in the quest for perfection.

But first Scotts had to help lodge the idea of perfect turf in the American imagination. Scotts was able to tap into postwar trends in brightly colored consumer products. From yellow slacks to blue Jell-O, colored products became status symbols and a sign that the consumer had rejected the drab black-and-white world of urban life for the modern suburb and its kaleidoscopic colors – which included, of course, the vibrant green lawn.

Architectural trends also helped the perfect turf aesthetic take root. A blurring of indoor and outdoor space occurred in the postwar era as patios and eventually sliding glass doors invited homeowners to treat the yard as an extension of their family room. What better way to achieve a comfy outdoor living space than to carpet the yard in a nice greensward.

In 1948, the perfect lawn took a giant step forward when the Scotts Co. began selling its “Weed and Feed” lawn care product, which allowed homeowners to eliminate weeds and fertilize simultaneously.

The development was probably one of the worst things ever to happen, ecologically speaking, to the American yard. Now homeowners were spreading the toxic herbicide 2,4-D – which has since been linked to cancer, reproductive harm and neurological impairment – on their lawns as a matter of course, whether they were having an issue with weeds or not.

Selective herbicides like 2,4-D killed broadleaf “weeds” like clover and left the grass intact. Clover and bluegrass, a desirable turf species, evolved together, with the former capturing nitrogen from the air and adding it to the soil as fertilizer. Killing it off sent homeowners back to the store for more artificial fertilizer to make up for the deficit.

That was bad news for homeowners, but a good business model for those companies selling lawn care products who, on the one hand, handicapped homeowners by killing off the clover and, on the other hand, sold them more chemical inputs to recreate what could have occurred naturally.

The “perfect” lawn had come of age.

The meaning of grass painting
By the early 1960s, homeowners were already looking for ways of achieving perfect turf on the cheap.

A 1964 article in Newsweek pointed out that green grass paint was being sold in 35 states. The magazine opined that because a homeowner “needs a Bachelor of Chemistry to comprehend the bewildering variety of weed and bug destroyers now fogging the market,” paint was becoming an attractive alternative.

So the interest in grass painting is not entirely new.

What is new, however, is that the recent interest in painting the lawn is taking place in a context in which a more pluralistic vision of the yard has taken root.

People fed up with corporate-dominated lawn care are turning back the clock and cultivating their yards with clover, a plant that is resistant to drought and provides nutrients to the lawn, to boot. And so the clover lawn has been making a comeback, with videos on TikTok tagged #cloverlawn boasting 78 million views.

Together, the return of grass painting with the resurgent interest in clover lawns suggests that the ideal of the resource-intensive perfect lawn is an ecological conceit that the country may no longer be able to afford.

Wakko posted:

i agree with cuttle and am p. upset people would suggest reducing the human population when we’re already rocketing past Pliocene co2 concentrations. we are doing a speedrun here and need everyone we can make to pitch in.

Wakko posted:

yes that’s why i encourage everyone to have kids. your kid could be the next thomas midgley jr. we cant afford to take the risk of them not being born.

bedpan posted:

I've checked with the scientists, and they wanted me to let you know that things are actually basically okay. Heck, they're even getting better! None of this then!

I've checked with the scientists, and they wanted me to let you know that things are actually basically okay. Heck, they're even getting better! None of this then!

I've checked with the scientists, and they wanted me to let you know that things are actually basically okay. Heck, they're even getting better! None of this then!

I've checked with the scientists, and they wanted me to let you know that things are actually basically okay. Heck, they're even getting better! None of this then!

Perry Mason Jar posted:

The "easiest" lever to pull for the "management" of human population is reducing income inequality. The less the income inequality, the lower the reproductive rate. Usually to about replacement rate.

That's why these conversations are so gross and pointless. We know the solution to this apparent problem but the global ruling class aren't going to massively redistribute their wealth, they're gonna start killing people.

Cuttlefush posted:

it's worse

A Bakers Cousin posted:

white rock whoever you are arguing with has made you really upset but they dont seem to post in this thread?

silicone thrills posted:

A fun thing to think about :

an extreme simplification: Trees literally caused one of the major mass extinction events because they just grew and there was nothing to break them down at all when they died so it just hosed everything up completely.

But then we got fungi and stuff later to deal with it and that rocks. coincidentally thats why no more oil will ever be created.

really loving good book that gives a fun primer of all the ways earth has hosed itself up and then always taken like hundreds of millions of years to reset after every time:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32075449-the-ends-of-the-world

White Rock posted:

Eh I don't think that we aren't locked in to 10c degree warming yet. We're locked into hundreds of million dead, and a bleak future of social turmoil and collapse, during which a lot of poo poo can happen which might flip the script in a million different ways. If that counts as optimism then lol.

Cuttlefush posted:

it's not a fair question. it's not even a question. again, overpopulation is not an issue that is to be solved. if you think that overpopulation is a major issue and that it should be addressed directly in any way, you are wrong. that is a reactionary argument and it doesn't make sense to start talking about how the depopulation event will happen or whatever the gently caress. this is basic stuff. i really dont know what the hell is wrong with some of you. i just hope you'll get blasted repeatedly for it

F Stop Fitzgerald posted:

having kids ftw

Wakko posted:

also barging in to lay down the law in a thread you don't read while breathlessly posting in the feedback thread about it may not be brigading but is is a party foul lol

MightyBigMinus posted:

yea its also pretty neatly explainable in one word: projection

no one said these things, but *i'm* immediately thinking of them, so they must be to