I want to ignore these articles as it is so painful to watch the beautiful clockwork of the natural world unravel. I hate facing the suffering, diminishment, and extinction of so much in the name of profiteering and ever-increasing growth.
But this is the world now, there will only be more stories like this, and so I'm not turning away from it any further. The world becomes less beautiful, less rich, less full every year.
I do volunteer, donate, and advocate and I won't use my extreme pessimism as an excuse not to engage. But in private, I mourn what is coming with little hope for substantial reduction in harm. If anything, those with power seem upset that we're not doing more to fasttrack catastrophe - if it's going to happen, may as well be the one to profit from it as much as possible before you're dead, the thinking seems to go.
It's hard when your job and even hobbies are intertwined with this destruction. I enjoy working with computers and industrial machinery - two giant sources of pollution and social disruption. I sometimes feel this existential crisis where I am part of the problem yet I have no way to escape and become filled with guilt. Yet without this technology our lives would be more difficult.
I sometimes think about a post-industrial fantasy world where technology still exists, though minimally, and carefully applied to solve real problems humanity faces instead of selling FOMO or a millions of "shiny things" that wind up in land fills do you can sell the new FOMO/shinything so some numbers on a spread sheet goes up.
You have articulated my feelings, behavior, and outlook almost exactly. I feel so hopeless every time I read an article like this. I've joined climate activist groups and meetups, and I've donated to orgs and political candidates. But I just feel like there's so much more damage to be done before we get to substantial improvements, it's so disheartening
Blaming "profiteering and ever-increasing growth" is way too easy.
Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.
We've always consumed and extracted until we run out, but only very recently started actually tracking it and taking any preventative measures at all. Will take yet more time to gain momentum in that direction. The consequences will be too obvious and unavoidable for the next few generations to stagnate like we have.
But on the plus side a few companies increased shareholder value. Can you imagine if we had fewer products, or didn't push the human population its theoretical maximum?
Who is we? Which we opted to push the planet to carrying capacity? Is it? What is the capacity? Are the decreasing birthrates across the world really the Earth's theoretical maximum? What does it mean to have fewer products, which things precisely should we not have? Who should be in charge of setting this?
No, we're very resilient bastards, we're going to let the huge majority of species go extinct before we go ourselves. We're already in a mass extinction event and we're just getting started.
Sometimes those stories try too much to impress. I recorded a documentary series "How to kill a puppy and get rich" about street dogs in Romania and the business around them, and I had to stop it after 10 seconds, not exaggerating. Folks, I want to know the mafia and story, but I can't stand to see and hear that torture...
Is that sharks are an ancient species and they’ve survived way warmer oceans even relatively recently.
For example the Medieval Warm Period Sargasso Sea surface temperatures were 1°C warmer than 400 years ago, and Pacific Ocean water temperatures were 0.65°C warmer than the decades before.
Body size and metabolic rate are intertwined, a factor that is especially important to understand with regard to animals that live in aquatic environments, where heat loss is related to water temperature. Payne et al. developed a method to estimate routine metabolic rate based on measures from tagged fish, and combined the estimates with published respirometry rates to create a dataset spanning the entire body size range of extant fishes. Using these data, the authors found a scaling imbalance between heat production and loss that affects especially large, mesothermic fishes in warm waters. This imbalance both explains the distribution of these fish in cooler waters and suggests a special sensitivity to warming waters. —Sacha Vignieri
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Abstract:
Body size and temperature set metabolic rates and the pace of life, yet our understanding of the energetics of large fishes is uncertain, especially of warm-bodied mesotherms, which can heavily influence marine food webs. We developed an approach to estimate metabolic heat production in fishes, revealing how routine energy expenditure scales with size and temperature from 1-milligram larvae up to 3-tonne megaplanktivorous sharks. We found that mesotherms use approximately four times more energy than ectotherms use and identified a scaling mismatch in which rates of heat production increase faster than heat loss as body size increases, with larger fish becoming increasingly warm bodied. This scaling imbalance creates an overheating predicament for large mesotherms, helping to explain their cooler biogeographies. Contemporary mesotherms face high fuel demands and overheating risks, which is a concern given their disproportionate demise during prior climate shifts.
> Several large tuna species and sharks, known as “mesothermic” species for the way their bodies run hot, require more fuel to maintain their temperature and are thus confronting a “double jeopardy” of warming oceans and declining food, mainly from overfishing. As water temperatures climb, these species will be forced to relocate to cooler waters.
They are moving to cooler waters but the cooler waters won't have the food supplies they need. So it's either stay where the food is and overheat or go to cooler water and starve.
It’s a white noise so hard to notice, but our behavior is fundamentally driven by the design of our nervous system. Thus the more immediate the consequence, the better we link our behavior and can adjust. Since this is true at an individual level, the dynamic emerges from societies and populations as well, even large ones.
For example, something is red, you touch it, get burned. You won’t touch it again.
Environmental harm unfortunately is precisely the opposite. Consequences arise on a very long arc, in some cases beyond even our lifetimes. We register problems like this only intellectually, and even that becomes clouded with politics.
So the problem is kind of inevitable unfortunately.
Carbon emissions from food production may go down about that much. However, those emissions are only about 30% of the total CO2 emissions humans are responsible for, if I recall correctly. So, total CO2 reduction would be about 18%.
and likely other un predictable knock on effects would reduce the benefit, like going vegan would mean more food is available overall, and population might rise in response.
That factoid always hides the real issue. The biggest reason that that factoid is true is that the 100 biggest companies includes a large amount of the fossil fuel industry, and that that industry produces most emissions in the world. A company like Saudi Aramco produce 4% of global emissions.
We need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
For full clarity, it's also not the 100 biggest corporations that produce most emissions, but the 100 biggest companies. A massive amount of the global emissions are done by state-owned companies.
The smaller ones are most likely less efficient (which blocked their growth). So it'd be a game of whack-a-mole where every hit makes everything worse...
That’s basically a different way of measuring the same thing. These corporations don’t just exist in a bubble, many of them are going to be behind the food production either directly or indirectly (e.g. energy companies providing fuel for machinery).
Food is responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions[1]. I agree that it’s not realistic to assume this will be solved individually, more pressure needs to be put on these large corporations from governments, but the quickest way you or I can make our own (individually small, collectively large) impact is by cutting out meat from our diet (specifically beef[2]). We are end-consumers of those 100 largest corporations one way or another.
(Not a vegetarian/vegan btw. I’m not trying to shame, I’m certainly not perfect! I just wanted to share the info that it’s not someone else’s problem. We’re all in this together)
We grow a lot of human-edible food for the sole purpose to feed it to livestock, who then spend most of those calories on existing and put a small portion into body mass that we eventually eat.
Sure, that stuff isn't of the same quality as food grown for human consumption, but putting livestock on a diet and diverting some of their food to human consumption would more than cover any shortfall from the missing meat
I want to ignore these articles as it is so painful to watch the beautiful clockwork of the natural world unravel. I hate facing the suffering, diminishment, and extinction of so much in the name of profiteering and ever-increasing growth.
But this is the world now, there will only be more stories like this, and so I'm not turning away from it any further. The world becomes less beautiful, less rich, less full every year.
I do volunteer, donate, and advocate and I won't use my extreme pessimism as an excuse not to engage. But in private, I mourn what is coming with little hope for substantial reduction in harm. If anything, those with power seem upset that we're not doing more to fasttrack catastrophe - if it's going to happen, may as well be the one to profit from it as much as possible before you're dead, the thinking seems to go.
It's hard when your job and even hobbies are intertwined with this destruction. I enjoy working with computers and industrial machinery - two giant sources of pollution and social disruption. I sometimes feel this existential crisis where I am part of the problem yet I have no way to escape and become filled with guilt. Yet without this technology our lives would be more difficult.
I sometimes think about a post-industrial fantasy world where technology still exists, though minimally, and carefully applied to solve real problems humanity faces instead of selling FOMO or a millions of "shiny things" that wind up in land fills do you can sell the new FOMO/shinything so some numbers on a spread sheet goes up.
You have articulated my feelings, behavior, and outlook almost exactly. I feel so hopeless every time I read an article like this. I've joined climate activist groups and meetups, and I've donated to orgs and political candidates. But I just feel like there's so much more damage to be done before we get to substantial improvements, it's so disheartening
Blaming "profiteering and ever-increasing growth" is way too easy.
Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.
We've always consumed and extracted until we run out, but only very recently started actually tracking it and taking any preventative measures at all. Will take yet more time to gain momentum in that direction. The consequences will be too obvious and unavoidable for the next few generations to stagnate like we have.
But on the plus side a few companies increased shareholder value. Can you imagine if we had fewer products, or didn't push the human population its theoretical maximum?
Who is we? Which we opted to push the planet to carrying capacity? Is it? What is the capacity? Are the decreasing birthrates across the world really the Earth's theoretical maximum? What does it mean to have fewer products, which things precisely should we not have? Who should be in charge of setting this?
>natural world unravel
Natural world would be mostly fine one way or other, human beings might not survive though...
No, we're very resilient bastards, we're going to let the huge majority of species go extinct before we go ourselves. We're already in a mass extinction event and we're just getting started.
Sometimes those stories try too much to impress. I recorded a documentary series "How to kill a puppy and get rich" about street dogs in Romania and the business around them, and I had to stop it after 10 seconds, not exaggerating. Folks, I want to know the mafia and story, but I can't stand to see and hear that torture...
My main skepticism (Shark lover here btw!)
Is that sharks are an ancient species and they’ve survived way warmer oceans even relatively recently.
For example the Medieval Warm Period Sargasso Sea surface temperatures were 1°C warmer than 400 years ago, and Pacific Ocean water temperatures were 0.65°C warmer than the decades before.
Were there any periods in which the rate of change in warming was the same or greater?
I think there’s debate on the current numbers but I’ve heard sea surface temperatures are currently about 0.5°C above the 1981-2010 average.
for hn comment-only readers:
paper link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt2981
---
Editor Summary:
Body size and metabolic rate are intertwined, a factor that is especially important to understand with regard to animals that live in aquatic environments, where heat loss is related to water temperature. Payne et al. developed a method to estimate routine metabolic rate based on measures from tagged fish, and combined the estimates with published respirometry rates to create a dataset spanning the entire body size range of extant fishes. Using these data, the authors found a scaling imbalance between heat production and loss that affects especially large, mesothermic fishes in warm waters. This imbalance both explains the distribution of these fish in cooler waters and suggests a special sensitivity to warming waters. —Sacha Vignieri
---
Abstract:
Body size and temperature set metabolic rates and the pace of life, yet our understanding of the energetics of large fishes is uncertain, especially of warm-bodied mesotherms, which can heavily influence marine food webs. We developed an approach to estimate metabolic heat production in fishes, revealing how routine energy expenditure scales with size and temperature from 1-milligram larvae up to 3-tonne megaplanktivorous sharks. We found that mesotherms use approximately four times more energy than ectotherms use and identified a scaling mismatch in which rates of heat production increase faster than heat loss as body size increases, with larger fish becoming increasingly warm bodied. This scaling imbalance creates an overheating predicament for large mesotherms, helping to explain their cooler biogeographies. Contemporary mesotherms face high fuel demands and overheating risks, which is a concern given their disproportionate demise during prior climate shifts.
Time to make sunsets. https://makesunsets.com.
I don’t see a way out except for stratospheric aerosol injection.
I wonder what would happen if we started measuring the carbon emissions for multinational supply chains..
Whites migrate long distances including deep waters when they age
How come the sharks don’t migrate toward colder water?
> Several large tuna species and sharks, known as “mesothermic” species for the way their bodies run hot, require more fuel to maintain their temperature and are thus confronting a “double jeopardy” of warming oceans and declining food, mainly from overfishing. As water temperatures climb, these species will be forced to relocate to cooler waters.
They are moving to cooler waters but the cooler waters won't have the food supplies they need. So it's either stay where the food is and overheat or go to cooler water and starve.
Whites do dive deep as they age, and feed on giant squid and elephant seals that dive deep as well.
It’s a white noise so hard to notice, but our behavior is fundamentally driven by the design of our nervous system. Thus the more immediate the consequence, the better we link our behavior and can adjust. Since this is true at an individual level, the dynamic emerges from societies and populations as well, even large ones.
For example, something is red, you touch it, get burned. You won’t touch it again.
Environmental harm unfortunately is precisely the opposite. Consequences arise on a very long arc, in some cases beyond even our lifetimes. We register problems like this only intellectually, and even that becomes clouded with politics.
So the problem is kind of inevitable unfortunately.
- stupid question
- if everyone on the entire planet went 100% vegan from tomorrow, will carbon emissions really go down by 60%?
Carbon emissions from food production may go down about that much. However, those emissions are only about 30% of the total CO2 emissions humans are responsible for, if I recall correctly. So, total CO2 reduction would be about 18%.
and likely other un predictable knock on effects would reduce the benefit, like going vegan would mean more food is available overall, and population might rise in response.
Maybe. Due to not just the caloric availability, but due to eating habits that may influence behavior.
Most of the emissions are done by the 100 biggest corporations. That's where I'd start fixing things.
That factoid always hides the real issue. The biggest reason that that factoid is true is that the 100 biggest companies includes a large amount of the fossil fuel industry, and that that industry produces most emissions in the world. A company like Saudi Aramco produce 4% of global emissions.
We need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
For full clarity, it's also not the 100 biggest corporations that produce most emissions, but the 100 biggest companies. A massive amount of the global emissions are done by state-owned companies.
The smaller ones are most likely less efficient (which blocked their growth). So it'd be a game of whack-a-mole where every hit makes everything worse...
That’s basically a different way of measuring the same thing. These corporations don’t just exist in a bubble, many of them are going to be behind the food production either directly or indirectly (e.g. energy companies providing fuel for machinery).
Food is responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions[1]. I agree that it’s not realistic to assume this will be solved individually, more pressure needs to be put on these large corporations from governments, but the quickest way you or I can make our own (individually small, collectively large) impact is by cutting out meat from our diet (specifically beef[2]). We are end-consumers of those 100 largest corporations one way or another.
(Not a vegetarian/vegan btw. I’m not trying to shame, I’m certainly not perfect! I just wanted to share the info that it’s not someone else’s problem. We’re all in this together)
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions [2] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints?Commodi...
Don't corporations just serve their patrons?
"just" is a weasel word there. Decisions are made and policies are enacted based on a number of factors.
And their investors.
maybe, but only because a lot of people would starve... that's a demand change our food supply isn't currently structured to handle
long term with a proper transition, probably not 60% but likely some lower double-digit percentage (maybe closer to 20?)
We grow a lot of human-edible food for the sole purpose to feed it to livestock, who then spend most of those calories on existing and put a small portion into body mass that we eventually eat.
Sure, that stuff isn't of the same quality as food grown for human consumption, but putting livestock on a diet and diverting some of their food to human consumption would more than cover any shortfall from the missing meat
Yes, only the rich should be allowed to eat the basic food group of natural meat.
reminder - there's tech out there capable of reading your mind remotely
It's strange they haven't considered diving an extra couple of inches to compensate (if it is even required)
Warmer water also means less oxygen, thus fish have to swim closer to the surface to get enough oxygen.