Facing Facts Allows Us To Reshape The World

This post was inspired by a comment to a comment I left on a video about Climate Change. Sometimes people can be very generous and positively inspiring.

Humans have been changing the landscape and affecting the environment since they started playing with fire and pointy sticks.

Sooner or later, one must face facts.

Everything is interdependent. Your independence is expressed through what you know. Those of us who have stopped learning, know nothing.

Visit the links and understand what it all means. Click on every hyperlink. Take your time.

1 — All civilizations have collapsed into the sand because of the desiccation of the local environment.

The new study suggests merely that climate change caused the late Ottoman abandonment of the Khabur River valley, not the collapse of the entire Ottoman Empire. But it also makes the case that archaeologists and historians ignore climate change at their peril. "There is an environment in which history occurs," said Weiss. "There are reasons for regional abandonments that are definable, observable and testable," even when ancient peoples have left no written record of climate changes.

2 — Bio-Complexity has been exponentially decreasing since pointy sticks and fire.

Abstract

Dynamical shifts between the extremes of stability and collapse are hallmarks of ecological systems. These shifts are limited by and change with biodiversity, complexity, and the topology and hierarchy of interactions. Most ecological research has focused on identifying conditions for a system to shift from stability to any degree of instability—species abundances do not return to exact same values after perturbation. Real ecosystems likely have a continuum of shifting between stability and collapse that depends on the specifics of how the interactions are structured, as well as the type and degree of disturbance due to environmental change. Here we map boundaries for the extremes of strict stability and collapse. In between these boundaries, we find an intermediate regime that consists of single-species extinctions, which we call the extinction continuum. We also develop a metric that locates the position of the system within the extinction continuum—thus quantifying proximity to stability or collapse—in terms of ecologically measurable quantities such as growth rates and interaction strengths. Furthermore, we provide analytical and numerical techniques for estimating our new metric. We show that our metric does an excellent job of capturing the system's behaviour in comparison with other existing methods—such as May’s stability criteria or critical slowdown. Our metric should thus enable deeper insights about how to classify real systems in terms of their overall dynamics and their limits of stability and collapse.

3 — The IPCC is vastly understating what is happening.

4 — As much as 80% of all non-human or agricultural life is already gone, and the rate of extinction is increasing.

Plant and animal extinctions are occurring at a rate of at least 1,000 times faster than the time before humans, a new study says.

In the study, published Thursday by the journal Science, lead author and biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University and colleagues, calculated a “death rate” of species going extinct each year out of 1 million. On pre-human earth, the death rate was 0.1, but that number spiked to between 100 to 1,000.

The main reason is attributed to habitat loss, as animals are left without places to live as areas around the planet are being taken over and changed by human presence. With the added pressures of invasive species and climate change, the study writes, species are vanishing faster.

Groundbreaking assessment of all life on Earth reveals humanity’s surprisingly tiny part in it as well as our disproportionate impact

5 — The Earth has lost one-third of its forest cover since the last ice age.

6 — Anthropogenic global warming or "climate change" is a fact.

The fact is, if you want to, you can do something about this. Start with educating yourself about the topic. Ask yourself, is life on earth important enough for you to take action. Do your children’s future ability to live meaningful lives matter? Choose your leaders wisely. Engage with your local community to solve problems and create new economies.

A rigorous theory of money, credit, and bankruptcy in the context of a mixed economy, uniting Walrasian general equilibrium with macroeconomic dynamics and Schumpeterian innovation.

What is wealth? Wealth is life and conscientiousness. What is economics?

“Every short statement about economics is misleading (with the possible exception of my present one.)”

If you really don’t care about what happens to life on Earth, continue on aping the behaviors you’ve learned and throw away your agency and sovereignty. If you are fortunate, enjoy and be thankful for what you have — come what may.