sillydriver
Member
We don't live in isolation on this planet. Our stable civilized existence depends upon a reliable, broad and deep food and natural resources chain which depends upon a wide array of insect, plant, and non-human animal life.
At least in the earlier stages of the new CO2-driven climate change, the biggest effect may come from the speed of the change rather than the absolute temperatures. We are pumping carbon from long-term slowly built up storage underground into the atmosphere and will be causing rates of climate change 10x faster than anything living on the planet now has experienced or evolved to handle. Clusters of highly interdependent life forms are going to have widely different abilities to adapt to the changes and thus food chains are likely to be seriously disrupted.
We can't just deal with it by running the A/C more often or packing up and moving closer to Canada.
Here is where my views sharply diverge from the received view of environmentalists. There is our food chain and there are other food chains in the global ecosystem. Our stable civilized existence depends on the food chain we depend on, which is already highly artificial and engineered. I think we depend on natural foodchains mainly to the extent we need pollinators for our crops, and that risk must be managed. Other than that we can move our wheat closer to Canada.
Then there are the other food chains - the web of life - of the global ecosystem. Environmentalists have an esthetic value to the effect that the global ecosystem is sacred and must not be interfered with. I believe this esthetic value is misguided. Over the long span of times the ecosystem has absorbed much greater shocks than we can provide, whether from asteroids, flood basaults or ice ages. It adapts every time, and a new web is formed for later environmentalists to value. If there had been sentient dinosaurs they would be appalled at the destruction of warm-adapted ecosystems that would follow their own existence. And now that we are bringing back the warm, there will be new ecosystems for future environmentalists to treasure and try to protect.
Individual animals live and die, and the more advanced ones are sentient enough to experience their lives. But a species over and above the individual organisms that compose it has no sentience and thus in my view no value over and above those individuals. Thus I could mourn the last polar bear but not polar bears as a species. Other interesting species will replace them. And the particular polar bear who is the last will live its life and then die whether or not we warm the earth. To make a fetish of webs and food chains and ecosystems is to adopt a particular esthetic or even religious view, but not one to which I subscribe.