Few more points about CO2

[Jean]

I know that many may be tired of this subject. Put I think my points are uneard enough (one of them) for them being worth creating a topic.

Let's take some distance over the situation.
To grow, plants reduce CO2 using energy from the sun, build their structure with the carbon and release the oxygene. In the atmospher.
When plant developed so much that it become very hard to compete for sunlight, life forms feeding on plants appeard. They oxyde the carbon cointained in the plants and get some energy from it.
But until now, carbon oxyding life forms couldn't keep up with the rythm of plant growth, and huge amount of carbon, incredibly easy to oxide was stored into the soil, out of reach of most animals and mushroom.
This resulted in a dramatic reduction in the amount of CO2 alvailable for plants to reduce, making them much less flourishing.
But fortunately, on life form (us) found a way to access those massive amounts of carbon, an grow exponentially fueled by this energy, and in a few century, restored the balance.
When it's duty was over(well, when condition were back to those before theire existence), the life form disapeared.

What I mean, is that I don't see the point of stoping doing what we(humanity) are doing.
If we stop, some other animal will end up releasing this CO2 in a few million years.
So why stop, to extend the reing of mankind?
If we wan't to maximise life as a whole, it is probably bether to release this CO2, because it will put plants at an advantage, and they can absord sunlight while we (animals and mushrooms) can only kill plants to survive.

Well, I mean, as long that one is personnaly hedged against the effect of global warming, what's the point of trying to convince the other? Ain't that to much empathy for other humans?

Well, you get my point.
What do you think.

[jacob]

What I mean, is that I don't see the point of stoping doing what we(humanity) are doing.
If we stop, some other animal will end up releasing this CO2 in a few million years.
So why stop, to extend the reing of mankind?

Yes, that would be the general point. Specifically to preserve human civilization.

And to avoid deliberately repeating this ... just out of general empathy with practically all currently existing lifeforms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2 ... tion_event

It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with up to 96% of all marine species[5][6] and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct.[7] It is the only known mass extinction of insects.[8][9] Some 57% of all families and 83% of all genera became extinct. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on Earth took significantly longer than after any other extinction event,[5] possibly up to 10 million years.

A large (approximately 0.9%), abrupt global decrease in the ratio of the stable isotope 13C to that of 12C, coincides with this extinction,[18][22][23][24][25] and is sometimes used to identify the Permian–Triassic boundary in rocks that are unsuitable for radiometric dating.[26] Further evidence for environmental change around the P–Tr boundary suggests an 8 °C (14 °F) rise in temperature,[18] and an increase in CO2 levels by 2000 ppm (by contrast, the concentration immediately before the industrial revolution was 280 ppm.

... which left these cute little guys, the ancestor of all mammals and obviously humans, as the dominant species.

[Jean]

Well, my point is valid for other species as well.
Whatever the changes in the environment, some species will survive and evolve into different species filling all the available ecological niche.
Mankind and all those species are going to disapear at some point.
So why go against nature and delay our extinction and those of some apparented species?
Because we have a very active role in it and are able to realise what will happen?
That's a very egocentrical reason.
I'm realy asking.
I don't know if we have a purpose on earth, but surviving as long as possible isn't a satisfying one.
On the other side, putting back all this carbon in the atmosphere might be one.

[jacob]

Because we have a very active role in it and are able to realise what will happen?
That's a very egocentrical reason.

Yes and yes.

Suppose we have a bunch of people (or sheep) on a train heading towards a broken bridge. Our foot is on the accelerator. We have an active role and we know what's going to happen. We also know that regardless of what we do, these people will die of old age several decades from now.

Scale up to planetary scale.

Is your argument that "it doesn't really matter what we do because they're going to die anyway and that it's egocentric to keep their heirs from inheriting their stuff for several decades instead of shortly?" Seems like a callous form of nihilism to me?

Somehow planetary murder-suicide doesn't strike me as a satisfying purpose either. Consider that the reason to live might actually be to NOT put that CO2 back up in the atmosphere. Maybe that's why we got these big brains of ours? Or at least that might be a good use of them anyway...

[Jean]

Is your argument that "it doesn't really matter what we do because they're going to die anyway and that it's egocentric to keep their heirs from inheriting their stuff for several decades instead of shortly?" Seems like a callous form of nihilism to me?

Somehow planetary murder-suicide doesn't strike me as a satisfying purpose either. Consider that the reason to live might actually be to NOT put that CO2 back up in the atmosphere. Maybe that's why we got these big brains of ours? Or at least that might be a good use of them anyway...

Well at least this is now a debate and not a cycle of statement and denial of facts.

I think we can assume that life will keep existing, and get back to a huge diversity in a few million decades.
To go back to your train example, the crash itself won't happen in our lifetime, we'll see some major destabilisation, but we may have a nice ride.
So why should the people that will be in the train when it crashs be more important than the vultures who will feed on the corpses after it?
Maybe corpses brought by regular train crashes are an important part of the ecosystem.

Maybe a brain able to understand our doom was needed to release this carbon.

[jacob]

Well, it's a somewhat sophomoric debate and I fail to see the relevance of considering the next million years when the human species doesn't even make a habit of thinking ahead by fifty or even five years.

Basically, your argument is that those presently alive can do what we want knowing full well that people in the future will suffer or even go extinct due to our actions, because, hey, in a million years, some other life form will emerge and all will be good?!

In other words, genocide (actually mass extinction goes substantially beyond that) is a fair trade against immediate personal benefit because ultimately they'd be dead anyway?

I think I'd like to see a somewhat stronger and possibly less callous argument for trading away the lives of maybe 5000 or 50000 additional years of humanity in return for two hundred years of full-on fossil fuel partying.

In case it makes a difference, we can't necessarily assume that life will keep existing after an extinction event. Yes, some life has survived all extinction events so far on Earth. However, Mars and Venus are both in the Goldilocks zone, so life could have potentially existed there but it seems like it no longer does, so either life never appeared there ... or it didn't survive its last extinction event.

Then again, why should vultures be more important than the minerals of a lifeless planet ...

It life more important than atoms?

If not, then the sun will start turning into a red giant in about 5 billion years from now and proceed to swallow up the Earth. Earth will then become part of the sun until the sun expels part of it/us as a planetary nebula into the interstellar medium. There will be atoms currently part of you and I in that gas cloud.

Can you give me a good argument for why we shouldn't try to speed up this process in order to recycle our nuclei back into the interstellar media as an important part of galactic chemical evolution?

[m741]

Incidentally, you can use Jean's argument to support just about anything. Stranger has a really nice car you like? Might as well steal it: cars don't last forever and it would have broken down eventually, so you're not doing any harm.

Arguing that you can do anything just because it may happen eventually makes no sense.

I have to assume this particular argument is trolling.

[Jean]

What I mean is that I can personnaly hedge against the effect of global warming.
I even have a quite mamal-sustaining environment friendly behavior.
But i think that imposing the same on enough other humans would a lot of violence.
I don't see a way to stop this without massive use of force.
Some countries are very corrupted. Fighting corruption might mean killing a lot of people. Not fighting corruption might end up in a total ruin of the country mid-term.
If you are naturaly inclined to be uncoruptible (or not confortable wasting ressource and destroying your environment, I don't steal someone's car because i'm not comfortable doing it, even if I think i'd madea better use of it blabla dostoievski). Ain't that not enough to live your life desolidarized from careless humanity, instead of fighting them in order to save them?
Well maybe I got closer from the question i really wan't to address with this post.

[IlliniDave]

Well, it is true (I believe) that most all the CO2 humans emit burning things is CO2 that was once in the atmosphere so it's not like we're creating tons of new C02, we're just redistributing it. But at the same time, we and the plants/animals we've evolved with have evolved successfully under certain conditions to include the composition of the atmosphere and the corresponding climate and weather dynamics. By significantly modifying that we are shuffling the deck in a way that has consequences we cannot necessarily foresee and that may prove difficult (at best) to adapt to. Humans are part of nature and by definition whatever we do is "natural" in a macro sense, but that doesn't mean we can readily survive it. A big part of our success as a species has been due to the ability to modify our environment, and it would probably be wise to use that ability to, in this case, preserve some of the favorable aspects of our current environment.

From a natural/global perspective the earth and life will go on irrespective of whether we over exploit our niche to our own demise through the excessive extraction and release of CO2. I suppose a person's view of that depends on whether he/she believes the purpose of the earth in the grand scheme of things is simply to provide a home for humans (what many of our religions hold). But the way of the world has always been that species come, conditions change, and species go.

[Dragline]

As m741 pointed out, this is the kind of philosophical question that can apply to virtually anything. It's actually simply a variation of the "Ring of Gyges" question originally posed by Plato: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges In effect, we all wear such rings from the perspective of someone who will live in the future.

However, the question as posed here is also based on the unsupported assumptions that humans are "careless" and therefore "not deserving" of empathy, implying that empathy for others is unnatural in some way, when in fact it is part-and-parcel of what it means to be human.

Most humans (about 95%+) have empathic responses to various stimuli, and they probably wouldn't have been able to organize and dominate the earth if they didn't. Usually, the form of a narrative about another individual (or an anthropomorphized animal or thing) is the most effective. Here's some of that science with a video: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article ... ange_brain

But humans don't agree about what they should care about, what the priorities should be, and how they should go about caring -- in effect, natural empathy gets directed in many different ways -- , which leads to conflicts over this issue and most other societal questions that humans tend to argue about.

[Dragline]

Postscript -- this video about air pollution was just released in China over the weekend and over 150M people have already watched it (not on YouTube -- in China): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM

Note the use of the personal narrative that begins in the first minute and parallels the video narrative in the experiment above. And the audience reaction.

[fiby41]

I recommend watching Dragline's posted video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM

[steveo73]

I don't agree with the premise regarding we shouldn't care about what we are doing to the environment. I think we should all care about what we are doing to the environment.

In stating that CO2 and GW is not an issue that we should even be thinking about.

[jacob]

That video has now been censored in China.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/0 ... ing-viral/