SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Environmental scientists are warning of a sixth mass extinction, pointing to a decline in vertebrate population sizes, even among species of least concern:
Many scientists say it's abundantly clear that Earth is entering its sixth mass-extinction event, meaning three-quarters of all species could disappear in the coming centuries. That's terrifying, especially since humans are contributing to this shift.
But that's not even the full picture of the "biological annihilation" people are inflicting on the natural world, according to a study published Monday [open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1704949114] [DX] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Gerardo Ceballos, an ecology professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and his co-authors, including well-known Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, cite striking new evidence that populations of species we thought were common are suffering in unseen ways. "What is at stake is really the state of humanity," Ceballos told CNN.
The authors: Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo.
Also at The Guardian and DW.
Related: For the Second Time, We Are Witnessing a New Geological Epoch: The Anthropocene
Crystals Win in the Anthropocene: 208 Manmade Minerals Identified
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday July 11 2017, @11:47PM (21 children)
We got lucky with technological improvements and some political sanity. That luck may run out.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday July 12 2017, @01:49AM (13 children)
Well, sure. But whose fault will it be when we get "unlucky"?
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:31AM (8 children)
And of course khallow doesn't see the ultimate irony in using that quote himself.
Heinlein had a lot of good stuff, but the man also had major issues. Also, I hope you realize that you and your ilk are the "right minded" people as far the the US of A is concerned. Thanks for holding us back you dick.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 12 2017, @03:11AM (6 children)
Ah, yes. The tu quoque [wikipedia.org] fallacy. That's really strong reasoning there.
Notice that this AC fails to have even a single reason why this is alleged hypocrisy or "ultimate irony". It's just another empty accusation from an empty person.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Wednesday July 12 2017, @10:49AM (3 children)
A non-argument statement cannot be fallacious by definition. You are missing the vital part 3 in the cited article "Therefore X is false".
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday July 12 2017, @01:17PM (2 children)
And a red herring as well. Since no such "non-argument" was presented, we can move on...
...to another red herring. Just because a part isn't explicit doesn't mean it's missing.
Let's analyze the post in question:
First, there's an explicit claim at the end that I'm "holding us back". It's based on the unfounded assertions that a) I'm a member of the "right-minded" class who opposes some productive, creative minority (what makes it a tu quoque fallacy argument is the insistence that I'm suffering from the same problems I decry and hence, by insinuation my argument can be ignored), b) Heinlein "had major issues" so we can again safely ignore his quote (ad hominem fallacy), c) there is some objective viewpoint called the "US of A" which can determine my status as a right-minded hold-backer and once again, ignore the Heinlein quote.
All I can say is that as a near-libertarian, I'm far more liberal on economic, social, and individual liberties than most people on SN (and definitely more liberal than the crowd who thinks I have magic mental failwaves to hold people back with my mere opinion). In particular, I don't "hold" people back. Instead, I see the major problem as one of consequences. Many advocates for various sorts of actions don't consider the consequences of their actions. They merely assume things will become better as a result of the action. For example, if one glances at the article of the story, it is strongly implied that climate change is more serious than habitat destruction.
Notice how "climate change" which is actually anthropogenic global warming is listed first. But wouldn't you think that turning more than a third of the Earth's surface into farmland or pasture would be a bigger deal than the mild global warming forecast for the next century? That level of habitat destruction is climate change in itself, no less, and yet it's in its own mental compartment. Climate researchers are notorious for going through great efforts to remove the effects of habitat destruction from their data (such as filtering out urban heat island effects from temperature data).
Similarly, notice how generic "humanity" is blamed for everything, but the most significant problems are occurring in Africa (note that all the animals mentioned above as being affected by "poachers" are African), Asia, and other high population, impoverished areas. These are areas that would be the worst affected by global warming mitigation efforts - which let us note, have been spectacularly useless to date aside from making poor people poorer.
This is the typical tunnel-vision syndrome. These authors and the journalist are so blinded by ideology that they can't properly list the worst causes of species decline and extinction nor implicate the people and regions most responsible for such.
Anyway, anyone basing solutions off this ideology will have the problem that it will fail. They won't understand the problems well enough to make things better and even in parts where they do, they won't apply solutions that work (such as creating developed world societies). At that point, some scapegoat needs to be blamed for the failure. Apparently, I've been nominated. But my take is people, who correctly predict both the problems you face and the failures you achieve, but who have taken no action to inhibit your course of action, aren't really holding you back.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Wednesday July 12 2017, @09:45PM (1 child)
Raising a tangential issue is not a red herring when it's done in a way that does not detract from the original conversation. Either you are implying that I'm trying to defend AC's point by not arguing it (which is inaccurate and unjustified), you believe I'm somehow preventing you from continuing that conversation with them (how exactly?) or you are carelessly misusing terms of which you have incomplete understanding.
Your reply was structured as follows:
A reasonable reader would assume that the sentence you cite before alleging fallacious reasoning is the statement you believe is fallacious. Here you are talking entirely about the second paragraph of his comment, which is not the one you originally cited.
AC's comment separates that part in a separate paragraph from the rest of his comment. This implies a break in the line of reasoning and beginning the presentation of a new idea. Therefore, the only link between the first and second paragraph one can presume are those explicitly specified, of which there are none. As such, the most sensible interpretation of his comment is that it contains two separate points, the first being a moral judgement of you and the second being inconsistent drivel.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 13 2017, @01:42AM
I think it detracts from the original conversation.
A reasonable reader would assume that the sentence you cite before alleging fallacious reasoning is the statement you believe is fallacious. Here you are talking entirely about the second paragraph of his comment, which is not the one you originally cited.
The second paragraph elaborates to some degree on the statement of the first. I discussed the second paragraph since that gave insight into the poster's statement of the first paragraph.
Sometimes that is true, but not in this case and certainly not as a general rule. I wouldn't even consider it a rule for completely different posts under different stories. You have to look at the context of the writing to decide if it is unrelated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @01:54PM (1 child)
"Notice that this AC fails to have even a single reason why this is alleged hypocrisy or "ultimate irony". It's just another empty accusation from an empty person."
That post is voted insightful, so it isn't possible for that to be true.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 13 2017, @01:59AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @08:43AM
> Heinlein had a lot of good stuff, but the man also had major issues.
Heinlein was a man, therefore the quote is wrong.
okay
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:39AM (3 children)
That is like asking who's fault it is that gravity exists. Sometimes there isn't any better solution or it can't be had right now due to limitations.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 12 2017, @03:33AM (2 children)
Or someone playing whack-a-mole with the productive members of their society.
It's worth noting here that the "luck" had been in play for decades before 1970. For example, the infrastructure for breeding/discovering and distributing more efficient strains of crops had been around globally since after the end of the Second World War, and in place in the developed world for at least a century before that. So the agricultural gains or "luck" that have permitted humanity to grow to its current extent has been around since well before the 1970s when Paul Ehrlich made his extremely erroneous predictions.
He also ignored economics. There's a variety of natural ways for humanity to deal with scarcity of a natural resource, by using it more efficiently or by using something else instead.
My view is that to say that Paul Ehrlich was wrong merely because humanity was "lucky" is to insult the billions of people who have toiled hard to make the Earth a better place and tame the problems that never became serious.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 12 2017, @06:47PM (1 child)
R&D results is not a deterministic activity. It requires hard work, persistence and indeed some luck. Previous gains will not guarantee future ones. Getting people to use resources efficiently without learning by hard mistakes is not an easy task. Free market economics is not necessarily overall efficient.
I don't doubt people work hard to make the world a better place but realities puts up limits even for hard work. Sometimes people find a a way around them by doing something else. Sometimes not.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 13 2017, @01:48AM
And you had "good luck" in not getting struck and killed by an asteroid while writing that post. At some point, the likelihood of the "luck" becomes so high, it makes little sense to speak of luck.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday July 12 2017, @01:52AM (5 children)
Oddly, that was Ehrlich's excuse each time he was challenged and forced to face his utter failure.
Yet each time when asked to point out the particular piece of luck he could not find a single convincing answer.
Mass extinction events do not come along slowly as in "entering its sixth mass-extinction event".
They are sudden events and have external causes, such as impacts or volcanoes (blamed for at least 5 of those 6).
Human plagues, wars, etc, which were within our power to prevent, had we just a tiny bit of knowledge, don't even enter into the equation of a mass extinction event.
Seriously, the zombie apocalypse is more believable than drifting into an extinction event.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @04:12AM (3 children)
Global warming gets a lot of blame while everyone ignores the real problem.
Yes, we are in the midst of a mass extinction. The external cause is that 3/4 of the Earth's non-frozen, non-water surface has been cleared and replaced with a little thing called agriculture. Not many wild creatures live there anymore. But hey, people gotta eat.
Global warming is real, and yes, it's caused by humanity, but the more I learn about what's really going on in the world, the more I start to think GW is just a scapegoat; a smoke-and-mirrors distraction, redirecting our attention away from a more nefarious reality. There are much bigger problems on the horizon. Just watch. Really.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:14PM (2 children)
3/4? Dude... what have you been smoking?
It's about 11% of total land surface and about 36% of the total surface that could be made suitable for some sort of crop production.
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:04PM (1 child)
source [ourworldindata.org]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 12 2017, @03:27PM
Yes, exactly. 37.6% overall land area times 28% of that arable ~= 10.5%.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday July 12 2017, @06:55PM
What do you base that statement on? Maybe a few naturally occurring cataclysmic events have caused a couple of rapid mass-extinctions, but there is nothing that says a mass-extinction event can't happen (relatively) slowly.
In the past few hundred years, humans are personally responsible for the extinction of a whole whackton of different species, and the only reason we haven't wiped out a whole whackton more is because of active conservation efforts.
Just because you feel personally threatened/attacked by the idea that your mere existence is contributing, however indirectly, to a planet-wide catastrophe, doesn't mean it's not true.
(Score: 1) by ewk on Wednesday July 12 2017, @12:19PM
Think of it as evolution in action...
With the possibility that us human may not be the fittest to survive anymore. :-)
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews