Previous related discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37500752">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37500752</a>
Defining a discrete "boundary" seems misleading, since most of these things have linearly worse effects as you do more of them, there's no bright red sharp line. Eg. climate change is obviously bad, but you can't really point to a specific temperature as a "boundary" - 2C of warming is worse than 1.5C, 3C is worse than 2C, 4C is worse than 3C, and so on.<p>I didn't recognize the term "novel entities" - it seems to refer to new industrial chemicals, plastics, etc. developed by humans that don't exist in nature. The graphic is drawing on a paper which says people are developing and releasing these chemicals without enough safety testing. That's bad, sure. But how could you say when this has crossed a "boundary" - at a million tons of release? Ten million tons? Of which chemicals? Any chemicals? The paper is very fuzzy, and basically just waves its hands and says:<p>"We define and apply three criteria for assessment of the suitability of control variables for the boundary: feasibility, relevance, and comprehensiveness. We propose several complementary control variables to capture the complexity of this boundary, while acknowledging major data limitations. We conclude that humanity is currently operating outside the planetary boundary based on the weight-of-evidence for several of these control variables."<p>Again, sure, obviously pollution is bad, but this doesn't meaningfully define what a "boundary" would be, or what the consequences of crossing it are.<p><a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04158#" rel="nofollow">https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04158#</a>
I'm all for bringing attention to anthropogenic changes we bring to our planet, and we should definitely be concerned with reversibility or runaway effects, but defining things in this fashion seems arbitrary and feels like junk science that can become easy fodder to the climate deniers.
It frustrates me that the actual paper is well researched and very interesting, yet the title and even the concept of these 9 boundaries will make many immediately disregard it.<p>There seems to be this notion that scary titles and overly-simplistic frameworks like this make it more digestible and give it more attention, but I think that’s a big PR mistake.
Sounds about as accurate as the doomsday clock. Also we're outside of the safe operating region of "land-system change?" Every one of the 9 somewhat arbitrary metrics they chose are bound in complicated, non-linear arrangements with numerous other metrics, most of which they don't track. Pulling one lever will move 50 other cogs over the course of decades, at various rates, with various other linkages. It's silly to condense down environmental landscape changes to one thing like "land-system change" and assign it a single axis of goodness vs. badness.
I skimmed the background article "Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries." [0] The boundaries don't seem especially helpful.<p>* They don't seem to account for adaption, in particular by humans. Before December 1903 no powered airplane had ever achieved liftoff in the history of humankind. Within about 70 years jet travel became close to ubiquitous as a means of transportation in the developed world.<p>* There does not seem to be much acknowledgment of uncertainty in the science behind the boundaries. I'm unqualified to make judgements about things like ocean acidification but seeing estimates presented as bald facts does not give the reader much confidence.<p>* They don't have much value as a rhetorical device to persuade people to care about the environment. The basic argument seems to be that we're moving out of the conditions that prevailed across the Holocene, so that must be bad. Most people find flooded basements or crop failures more persuasive.<p>We're torching the environment IMO but there are better ways to get people focused on that and to fix it. Restoring marshlands or changing the albedo of cities seem like a better path.<p>Edit: typo<p>[0] <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458</a>
Cautionary remarks on the planetary boundary visualization: <a href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2023/egusphere-2023-2760/egusphere-2023-2760.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2023/egusphere-20...</a>
My issue is that “sustainable” is not something we can “go back” to - we have never been sustainable since the Industrial Revolution.<p>Sustainable is a not-yet-invented future. People complain about climate deniers blythly waiting for a technology to fix it all for us, but getting shelter, heating, food and urban lifestyle to 8 billion people is going to come at an enormous energy cost - China spent 30 years building cities for 1 billion and basically Doubled the CO2 output of the planet.<p>We need to invent houses that have ridiculously less carbon, city transport based on bicycles and vegetarian diets for billions.<p>We don’t know what sustainable looks like<p>And that terrifies me more than thinking this is “just a diet”
Why should I believe that<p>1. these boundaries are reasonable groupings.<p>2. That the thresholds identified are valid.<p>It's hard to tell what some of them even mean from the page.
Is this chart confusing as shit for anyone else? No axis ranges, label names change, categories randomly split into new sub-categories, my eyes must dart around to find anything, and what the hell are (not measured?) "novel entities"? Are the values, which are represented by areas, correspondingly non-linear?<p>Maybe I'm just being an idiot, but this chart choice seems <i>horrendous</i>.
I dug through the article and the paper it references, and I can't find any definition of what "Biosphere integrity: Genetic" is supposed to be. The paper references two things under "Biosphere" but neither of them sound like something "Genetic" would refer to.<p>EDIT: Managed to find it, it's on <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458</a> .
<a href="https://darktower.fandom.com/wiki/Beams" rel="nofollow">https://darktower.fandom.com/wiki/Beams</a><p>This article reminded me of the “beams” that held the universe together in Stephen Kings Dark Tower series of books.<p>That being said, we have a pretty complete fossil record for at least the last planetary extinction in which Earth still remained suitable for life. Obviously I have a somewhat personal opinion about being a part of the next one.<p>So I guess this graph more so defines ideal markers of homeostasis as I have faith that this particular planet will continue to support life after us.
This is pretty scary. The worst part is nobody in charge really cares.<p>As an individual you can reduce, reuse, recycle, and do your part perfectly and it makes zero difference.
>"We"<p>>"Humanity"<p>There's something profoundly saccharine and inaccurate about this conceit.<p>The conception of being universally connected in any substantial way to the the "human species" seems extremely artificial and doesn't describe real power relations in a useful way.<p>I think it's more useful to explain what's happening and why it's happening, e.g. "The world has become x% unsustainable due to the actions of y, caused by simple incentives and lack of disincentives".<p>Then again, that also feels fake because A) "the world" has zero inherent meaning, it only has any meaning because humans deem it so and B) "sustainable" is from the perspective of thinking that human life must keep growing on the scale of billions. Even global catastrophe would likely retain a core population from the perspective of some kind of human maximalist.<p>Generating hypotheses upon the basis of dubious moral priors really causes some serious accuracy issues. Much easier to stick to "don't murder/torture people or animals", i.e. something literally everyone agrees with.
And what should not be forgotten.<p>Even with all boundaries largely crossed it's still easier to keep earth self-substainable colonized then doing so for mars.
Is there any more info on the technicalities of the various measures? The one about phosphorus and nitrogen in particular - are we running out, or is it too much of them ending up in water and causing algal blooms?
The "the sky is falling" worldview is insidious and self-reinforcing. You can't convince a doomsayer that things might actually wind up okay.<p>There are certainly challenges ahead. My grandchildren will live in a starker world than I did, but only in some ways. We are struggling with the shrinking world, with growing demand for global economic equality but shrinking equality, and a whole slew of mostly human invented issues. The economy as we know it will cease to exist in the next few decades, and we will see pockets of 1984 here, pockets of Atlas Shrugged there, and all the while good people will be trying to do good things.<p>I have 100% faith in the ability of the minority to save the majority from themselves.
The real environmental question is how to get out of this situation. Growth or deceleration. It's pretty clear through growth I can get more towards a lower environmental footprint. I can put solar on my roof, drive an electric car, and run heat pumps. If I wanted to I could pretty easily use no grid electricity through growth and technology.<p>There is a deceleration environmental school of thought that says this is all impossible and we should decelerate growth, have no kids, and eat bugs. It makes my blood boil because of how short-sighted this approach is. It's mostly a Western, white, privileged school of thought. The problem is there are huge populations on Earth that don't believe in this deceleration approach and will just steamroll this inherently shrinking mindset in a couple of human generations. The only way out of environmental harm is strong human growth that passes the ethics of environmental stewardship down to growing generations.
Ok so is climatology the new scientology?<p>Much of this dribble is unfalsifiable and unscientific. There are some real climate issues to solve over the long term and this kind of planetary boundary BS is completely counterproductive.
BY WHOM<p>--<p>If we can quantify such, then we can qualify where that data comes from - we should be able to identify the industries, contributors and manufactures of these inputs.<p>So take a single input and which industry AND companies are at its core.
The problem with the disaster reporting on the climate is that it
is starting to feel like the child who cried wolf.<p>I have no idea for how many years I have heard
"Unless we act right now, NOW, we are all FUCKED".<p>Ok. so that was 20 years ago, its still:
"Unless we act right now, NOW, we are all FUCKED".<p>Either the models were wrong and have been adjusted every year.
or more likely the people shouting about reports who didnt entirely
do their homework.<p>I have no doubt that things are getting worse.
but reading speeches from 20 years ago, right now we would all be
dead, beneath the sea, no food, etc etc.<p>Instead, here we are, a few billion more folks, consumption, and production
still increasing.<p>The Paris goal is well and truly blown to bits by now in any sane analysis.
Which we know means we are fucked.<p>Yet:<p>Norway holds the most passionate speeches at various conferences and such yet.
Oslo keeps buling all the big cultural buildings and most expensive housing
right at the water's edge, that will shortly be partially under water.
and pumps and produces as much oil and gas as possible.<p>Yet:
Netherlands has not started evacuating the parts fofthe country already under the waterline.<p>Yet:
Biden giving speeches on the climate.
Interpreted and translated by Greta:
"Blah blah blah blah jobs, blah blah build back better blah blah".<p>And you see Joe opening up for drilling on federal lands,
US #1 producer of oil, 2/3 from fracking.<p>Now either Joe doesnt not believe in his own speeches,
and does not believe in science.
Or he is one sadistic person.<p>You cant be green and still do your best to increase the production of gas and oil.<p>There is strong doublethink at work here.
One thing is said in passionate speeches.
The direct opposite is executed.<p>Personally, I concluded some time ago that we are fucked.
and now like George Carlin said you can sit back and watch the show.
Communism is missing in their graph and is at all time high.<p>I am tired of the attept to use climate change and other metric to push us toward a totalitarian world government. People are waking up to it.<p>There is no global warming catastrophe.<p>Solar is on an expodential path, so is EV and other initiatives.<p>I am way more concerned about the risk of nuclear war (US proxy war created by the democrats), the creation of other virus in labs and the contamination of everything with BPA and forever chemical.<p>Tech is mostly good, so is freedom and free entreprise.
they have to keep changing it to quantify their alarmist view<p>is this one really helping anyone?<p>you can be aware of and accept an alarmist view without this oft revised chart
Boundaries? In what sense? This is an unhelpful exercise in vague fearmongering.<p>What actually helps is building and validating models and testing interventions against them along with planning for expected outcomes.<p>This seems engineered to frighten people to share and then post “why won’t anybody do anything” while that person changes nothing about their lifestyle.<p>I’m not opposed to science, I am opposed to whatever kind of thing this is. A scientist looks to uncover truth, an engineer looks to design for change, … this just seems like Bible-thumping on a soap box “beware sinners”. All the people who left Christianity still needed hell and replaced it with environmental doom.
Time to expand beyond the planet then?<p>If we don't manage it before we start down a degrowth/de-industrialisation path, we might well have missed the one chance our species had to go multiplanetary.