The Wordsmith's Forge

Here's a look at how humanity is destroying the biosphere.  Of course, the Earth has survived worse; it's had ice ages and comet collisions and volcanic outbursts.  Embarrassingly, humanity is in that category of mass extinction drivers. :/

But it's not true that "nobody remembers" the past.  I'm never going to turn into the knife-wind of winter and not scent for mammoth.  I can't read an article about giant sloths without saying, "They were so delicious.  We ate them all."  (If you've had beef tongue, sloth was a lot like that, only all over: rich and sweet and melt-in-your-mouth tender. Because they didn't move unless they had to.)  I remember the prairie like a sea of grass, the waves winking silver-and-green, then suddenly blinding with flowers.  It could be all pink one week and all yellow the next, or sometimes a dozen colors mixed together.  I remember.  People look at a few hundred blackbirds and say "That's a lot of birds."  Not if they aren't blotting out the sun, it's not.

It makes me want to chat up the Druze.  I wonder what they remember.  They stick to a different part of the world, and it's beat to hell.  Do they remember the Cedars of Lebanon?  I bet they do.  It probably makes them homesick like me remembering when Sumer was green and green as far as the eye could see before the fields salted up.

It doesn't matter if we remember.  Nobody believes us.  Nobody listens to us.  We've seen it all before, and it's happening again.

If humanity wipes itself out, I wonder if the rats will remember us. They'll probably think we were gods, and this shithole will be their Eden.  Once, there was food everywhere, and the gods dropped it from the sky so you could just run out and grab it instead of having to work for it.

 ... can happen incredibly fast.

Since the Earth depends a lot on the Amazon rainforest, people outside it need to pay into it, such that maintaining it becomes more profitable than destroying it.  Otherwise people will wear it out in the soon future, and then we're all even more screwed than we are now.

... can turn food plants toxic.

However, I wonder if it might make currently toxic foods less so. I'd look at borderline things that are just a little too toxic to eat safely or that need a lot of preparation, like the ones mentioned in this article, but different species.

Animals influence fire in complex ways.

Just to pick one example not at random, elephants make 'roads' that can function as firebreaks.  Turtle Island has no native elephant species left.  I expect the mammoths and mastodons served a similar purpose.  Possibly some other giant fauna helped in this regard, like the giant ground sloths.

 ... and the bees are winning.  \o/  It's not the size of dog in the fight that matters ...

 ... is highly unpredictable.

What we know:
* The Earth is warming rapidly
* because of human actions
* which is a Very Bad Thing
* because it worsens things like wildfires, floods, and violent weather
* and we can't stop it
* because it's already here
* although we still have time to buffer it a bit.

What we don't know exactly what will cause tipping points, or where those critical thresholds are, or how fast catastrophic changes can occur.

I keep telling people not to be fooled just because the Earth is big and often slow.  It can move at blinding speed when provoked.  Predictive models are only as good as the data going into them.  They can help us identify trends based on what we know, but they can't tell us what we don't  know.

Expect the unexpected.

... may emerge as permafrost thaws.

My go-to example is the SF story "The Greatest Dying" by Frank M. Robinson.

 ... buffer extreme heat when and where needed the most.

 Something to protect.

 I just want to squish this guy for saying All the Things.