I watched David Attenborough's recent film 'Ocean' on a big screen. The footage of bottom trawling was really shocking. I don't understand how that has been allowed to continue in UK coastal waters, let alone to be subsidised in marine protected areas. Madness. It's like napalming a forest to get a few deer. Thankfully things may be changing:
Greenpeace used to drop boulders into the ocean to prevent bottom trawling circa 2021-2022. Unsure if they still do. Fairly straightforward to solve for if you’re willing to drop chunks of rock (granite, non reactive) or concrete in the ocean at the right spots.
Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though. Hard to take the selfish out of the human, so you have to engineer systems accordingly.
I think it would be a great PR idea for a billionaire to buy a few old ships and use them to drop rocks over the most popular/vulnerable fishing grounds. What happened to rich people who were all not evil?
How do you think billionaires became billionaires? How can you extract a billion dollars of wealth in your life time, or even several generations? Certainly not by creating value. Almost certainly by destroying something else, privatising the profits and socialising the losses. E.g. mining, commercial fishing. Etc.
We will never see billionairs act as a force for good because the current system only allows for evil to create such a level of private capital. I would go as far as to argue such wealth disparity is not natural and is only possible through severe perversion of the natural order.
It is natural. Unfairness is the basis of civilization.
In order to mobilize a group of humans for the common good they must be artificially incentivized to do it as the tragedy of the commons usually prevents people from doing these things collectively. Look up the tragedy of the commons.
But in order for a group of humans to be incentivized like that there must exist an authority with enough wealth to incentivize humans to work collectively like that. That means one authority needs to get unfairly rich. And additionally there must be incentive itself for such an authority to conduct that action in itself. So basically there must be some unfair distribution of wealth for any of this to happen AND there must exist strategies that can be exploited for someone to gain that wealth.
I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories about why certain places developed into advanced civilizations or not literally relied on whether or not the currency of the habitat could be used to accumulate wealth. For example fruits in Hawaii didn’t last long enough for someone to become a billionaire but grain in Europe does.
This is very "theory X" - the theory that people only work or do anything if someone in authority forces them to.
The other theory, "Theory Y" says that people work because that's what people do, and the function of authority is more about guidance and removal of blockages.
I'm a Theory Y believer, and believe that people work together to improve their lives without needing an authority or any compulsion. I believe that the incentive for people to work together for the common good, is the common good. That alone is enough incentive. I believe that authority tends to enrich itself and work against the common good. Less authority is better.
You're saying this because you actually don't understand a huge part of what I'm talking about: The tragedy of the commons. You didn't look it up, so your answer here is completely mistaken. MY entire ARGUMENT is based on that, and that is EXACTLY what theory Y is. It is the negative consequence of theory Y. You need to understand my argument before responding. Perhaps it's my fault for expecting most people to know what the tragedy of the commons is:
The tragedy of the commons is a paradox in which individually rational behavior leads to a collectively irrational and destructive outcome. It is not a story about bad people doing bad things. It is a story about good people doing exactly what makes sense—and still destroying something vital in the process.
Imagine a shared resource: a pasture open to all local herders. Each herder faces a choice:
1. Add another animal and gain the full benefit of that animal’s growth.
2. The cost? Slightly more wear on the pasture, but that cost is shared by everyone.
Rational choice says: add another animal. You gain, others share the cost.
But now every herder thinks this way. They all add more animals.
Soon, the pasture is overgrazed. The grass dies. The system collapses.
Everyone loses—including the ones who were just “doing what made sense.”
Let’s be crystal clear:
1. Individually: Adding another animal is logical. The gain is personal.
2. Collectively: If everyone does it, the shared resource is destroyed.
3. Result: Rational behavior by all leads to a guaranteed catastrophe.
This is not about greed or malice. It’s about structure.
It’s a situation where doing the right thing for yourself creates the wrong outcome for everyone.
The tragedy of the commons is not a flaw in people. It is a flaw in unregulated systems.
It is inescapable unless external mechanisms change the incentives.
And that is what makes it truly tragic: it unfolds from reason itself.
That external MECHANISM is what I mean by AUTHORITY. You need some law to control it. The tragedy of the commons is the reason to almost all the environmental problems we face on earth today.
You and I are exactly talking about theory Y.
Now. That being said. What happens when you let theory Y run rampant? That's pre-civilization anarchy. Hunter-Gatherer groups.
This isn't even a personal opinion I'm talking about here. This is academic opinion. People who study these things say what I'm saying and all I'm doing is regurgitating it. But, of course arm chair expert marcus_holmes knows best and can trump all of academia with theory Y.
Has it occurred to you that the narrative you're repeating here is awfully convenient for the elite? Don't question their wealth - don't you know civilization itself depends on it!
> I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories
It's a theory, yes. And there's another theory which says that's all BS invented by the ruling classes over time - the church and kings back in the day, the billionaires these days - to justify their otherwise quite unjustifiable positions, cloak them in mumbo-jumbo about natural law or what not, with the goal of discouraging questioning of the status quo.
History is full of people with extreme wealth and power. I would say our current political structures are keeping them somewhat under control.
Edit: So in that sense, I'm also on the side that billionaires are created naturally. When you already have a lot of wealth, the odds are in your favor to create even more wealth. So if you would just keep the system running without much interference, wealth will naturally accumulate to those who already have a lot. Therefore, we need political structures to keep that under control.
Billionaires are the definition of unfairness. And therefore they are natural.
Only From the perspective of civilization, of course, which is only a small fraction of human existence.
From the perspective humanity overall, not only are billionaires unnatural, but civilization in itself is unnatural. Hence all the declining birth rates we see today.
Show me one billionaires in nature beside mankind. Billionaires now and then are artificially created by the systems mankind creates.
They are an anomaly
>For rainbow trout, an estimated 10 (1.9–21.7) minutes of moderate to extreme pain (Hurtful, Disabling and Excruciating pain combined) are endured by each trout due to air asphyxia (Fig. 1).
Also taking the action of starting to organise some collective action is a good thing. But don't continue eating fish until everyone else agrees not to, because that becomes self-defeating.
"Technically, probably the hardest thing was trying to film bottom trawling because it's never been filmed before and we didn't know if it was possible. You have to film the wonder but you also have to film the destruction. Capturing that was absolutely essential and it took a lot of research to find some scientists planning bottom trawling experiments who decided that adding cameras would help their research and also help to share it with the world."
I watched this film last night, and it was stunning and horrifying all at once. It really brings home the impact of industrial-scale trawling on the marine environment. It's literally like bulldozing a garden to harvest the fruit.
That part of the film is horrifying. Like genuinely, sick-to-the-stomach horrifying. I can't believe that anyone would willingly cause that much destruction.
> A marine protected area (MPA) is a protected area of the world's seas, oceans, estuaries or in the US, the Great Lakes. These marine areas can come in many forms ranging from wildlife refuges to research facilities. MPAs restrict human activity for a conservation purpose, typically to protect natural or cultural resources. Such marine resources are protected by local, state, territorial, native, regional, national, or international authorities and differ substantially among and between nations. This variation includes different limitations on development, fishing practices, fishing seasons and catch limits, moorings and bans on removing or disrupting marine life. MPAs can provide economic benefits by supporting the fishing industry through the revival of fish stocks, as well as job creation and other market benefits via ecotourism. The value of MPA to mobile species is unknown.
I interpreted his "optimism that we will fix this" as the continuation of his lifelong practice of science communication in service of ecosystem preservation. I believe he grasps that people are far more motivated by having a positive vision to run towards than by a negative one to flee.
In that, I think he's being incredibly strategic with his voice in what he knows are his final years. He could leave us saying "everything is fucked, you absolute idiots", but what is there for us to do then besides lie down in the mud?
Instead he's signing off with "We have come so far, I wish I could witness the spectacular recovery you're all about to usher into being!"
My theory: The forces of Line Must Go Up are going to keep winning. Mitigating the impact of climate change will be part of Line Goes Up. Whether it will be cheaper or more expensive than avoiding it in the first place will remain to be seen (but won't really matter in the end), but we will be facing whatever impacts we will be facing, and we will face them, and we will deal with them.
If you have any doubt, look at how the Netherlands dealt with storm surge.
For the Netherlands, the entity that pays the cost is the same that benefits from preparedness. For climate change, the plastic doohickey plant in misc country who would have to pay the cost of losing their asset, is entirely divorced from the entities who will benefit from CO2 reduction: everyone in the world. It's a prisoner's dilemma played at every level from the individual to the corporation to the region, and country. I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups. Especially when basically every existing business in the world will fight it tooth and nail. We got lucky with solar that its naturally cheaper than coal power, but there's no law that has to be the case with anything else.
I'm not talking about CO2 reduction, I'm talking about living with the result that the emissions have caused. And for that, the entity that pays the cost and benefits will again be the same.
> I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups
The opposite needs to happen. Less consumption needed, overall. Less spending. It kind of already is, via lower and lower total fertility rates. Might not be declining quickly enough to cause sufficient decline in consumption.
Entire companies have been wrecked by "line must go up" thinking. I see no reason why it should preserve the planet when it can't even preserve its own livelihood.
Never underestimate the complete destructive nihilism some are willing to engage just to earn some status and/or dollars. The feedback mechanism from climate change is far too slow. This kind of "ah it'll be grand like" attitude is completely naïve.
Relying on market forces to mitigate/address the impact of climate change will require us to collectively impose actual market pressure (i.e. regulation, constraints) to do so. Not seeing much sign of that among the major contributors of emissions right at the moment.
That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now. For most, climate change exists as an abstract idea and not an immediate, physical problem. It doesn't help that claims like those made by Al Gore about the polar ice caps being gone by 2016 turned out to be untrue.
I wouldn't expect society to transform itself if told that an asteroid may impact Earth in eighty years, for similar reasons.
Heck, faced with a rapidly spreading virus that can kill in 2 weeks (for the general public at a very low percentage, for our elderly neighbors a lot higher), a large majority of humans turned to angry denials and conspiracy theories to justify to themselves that "it's not that dangerous!".
When somebody says something isn't that dangerous it always comes with an unstated post-text of 'for an average person of average health.' Each year the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people. As the population ages, and thus has more individuals in senescence where your body is basically just breaking down, that will increase into the millions. But yet it's still not unreasonable to say that the flu isn't that dangerous.
And you might think I'm being disingenuous with these facts and perhaps e.g. all those deaths from the flu are just in Africa or wherever. Whereas in reality it's the exact opposite! Places like the US have a substantially higher than average mortality rate from the flu. Globally deaths are around 700k and in the US it's around 50k. We have 4% of the world's population, but 7% of the world's flu deaths. The reason is because it's not about healthcare, vaccines, or whatever else. It's about the amount of people in senescence.
At a certain age, and the subsequent state of health it entails, lots of things that indeed 'aren't that dangerous' turn into life-ending threats. For some contrast that most aren't aware of, the average age of mortality of the Spanish Flu was 28 - which made it a completely terrifying freak outlier in terms of viruses, which generally affect the very young and very old most severely. Nobody would be saying that the Spanish Flu is not that dangerous in modern times.
Well, maybe search for the keyword "long COVID" and see how it has caused a lot of suffering even among young and otherwise healthy individuals.
Also, people seem to forget that exponentials go up very fast, so an "average person of average health" would be very selfish to not make the necessary precautions to limit the spread of the virus as much as feasible.
Market pressure is required to avoid climate change by keeping companies from externalizing climate impacts.
Market pressure is not required for a city to decide that having the city flooded is bad, and start a tender for building a sea wall. This makes the line go up for the sea wall companies.
- “Yes, the patient might die, but we’re confident that given enough resources, we’ll bring him back to life.”
Well, to be fair, it’s basically what’s happening with LLMs atm. So, maybe feathering up Mammon and aiming for the sun will be the tech industry’s most lasting legacy.
I agree. I reflect on this from time to time when I consider that my mom, having died a few years back, would not be enjoying much of anything going on in the world right now. (Further, that she was born at the close of WWII in the U.S., she may have been lucky enough to have lived in the best part of recent history here.)
“No one cares about the bomb that didn’t go off.” - Tenet
Preventing “bombs” from going off is not rewarded. And indeed the Line Must Go Up Crowd is reliant upon someone else fixing the problem while they get theirs. But when the majority think that way we’re f**ed.
It’s a good comparison especially in the context of mutually assured destruction, whether administered directly or indirectly, the same grim pragmatic political truth of wedge issues remains:
If we keep at it like we have been maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel for Earth, ecologically. In say 100k or 1M years, after we're long gone and things have started to repair themselves.
The sad part of our human existence is that none of us ever live to see how our story ends. We "spawn" at a random point in time and "vanish" at another. Ageing is being worked on vigorously and while we did change our lifespan from 40 years to 80 years of existence thanks to modern science, in order for us to truly comprehend changes on a universal scale, average human lifespan would need to be 50000 years long. That way you'll see species evolve, continents move, quasars explode, maybe even Betelguese explode?
Yes we die, the body goes. But if there is a further element to the experience - and near death experiences, out of body experience suggest there is - we perhaps do see how the story ends. In fact, this experience might not be the real 'story', just an opportunity of some sort to learn, grow. The point is that although many assume material reality to be all there is, it might not actually be the case.
I can understand there is an inherit sadness in not knowing the outcome of one's life's work, but as you say none of use ever see how it ends. In terms of our natural environment humankind has only ever observed in person, let alone recorded, what amounts to the blink of an eye.
Someone might. I think we stand a reasonable chance of self-selecting for extinction in the next few centuries. It's not the end of the story, but it's the end of our story. Someone will be the one who shuts off the lights on the way out.
Our generations of the last 10,000 years are seeing how the story decays.
When the food supply was abundant, families would jog every day doing BBQ every night hunting down mammoths
We have become red in tooth and claw. At the summit of civilisation, we are alienated with our screens, licking frozen TV dinners in our shared flat while we work hard to support our landlords
As long as we have surviving records people have been saying the past was golden and the present is decay with a long list of the present ills which are the downfall of the glorious past. It's a boring take and has been incorrect for thousands of years and will continue to be. Arguments about how some list of things haven't been on a monotonic increase during the last generation do not refute this.
One of the things I like most about David Attenborough is it never seems like he's reading a script. It feels like he's talking about something he knows about (which he does).
When it comes to the acting or performing worlds, is there a phrase describing this?
None of us see the end of the story but I do fear that the story could change when we inevitably lose a passionate advocate in Sir David whose credibility on this issue has been unchallengeable.
I take some comfort from the younger generations who are now growing up with a much greater awareness of the natural environment and the damage we humans can do to it and a much lower tolerance for political sophistry and capitalist all-about-the-money "ethics". With the selfishness of politics in much of the world today I think things will probably get worse before they get better. I still hope that we won't cross any points of no return as those younger people gain influence and those of older generations who are not always as enlightened and concerned as Sir David also leave us.
I think those younger generations will have better chances if there is a highly visible advocate for protecting the natural world for ordinary people to coalesce around. I don't know who the next David Attenborough could be. Perhaps one of his final gifts to humanity can be helping to find and establish the profile(s) of natural successor(s) who can carry on his work.
Here's the good news: we've done basically nothing about climate change even with him, so losing such an esteemed spokesman won't actually make it worse.
Admittedly that's only "good" in the sense that things are maximally bad and cannot get worse. But we might as well fake a smile because that's all we're going to get. I'd say we won't act until it's too late, but it is already too late.
There is no single "point of no return". We have obviously passed the point where bad consequences can be avoided, but every extra ton of CO2 and methane makes things a bit worse.
I worry that the sentiment of "we have passed the point of no return" induces an impotent apathy in people, when the truth is that every step in the right direction makes our future a little bit less dire.
Folks are worried about phase change, the flip from one set of patterns to a different set of patters. That is much different than a linear "every ton makes things a bit worse".
There is going to be big fundamental change, but people need to stop thinking about it like "the sky is falling" and instead ask "how are we going to adapt?"
People are going to have to move to where water is available, to where heat is less of a problem, and large scale infrastructure is going to change. A lot of struggle is going to go along with that change but starting to plan now and predict where is going to be habitable and how to prepare for that is what people should be doing instead of the shame and doom.
The narrative climax to the human story around climate change has yet to happen. Assuming we continue on the current trajectory, expect riots and wars over food and clean water, possibly more.
https://archive.md/CFCFn
I watched David Attenborough's recent film 'Ocean' on a big screen. The footage of bottom trawling was really shocking. I don't understand how that has been allowed to continue in UK coastal waters, let alone to be subsidised in marine protected areas. Madness. It's like napalming a forest to get a few deer. Thankfully things may be changing:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-proposes-to-ex...
Don't know how much of that was due to the film.
Greenpeace used to drop boulders into the ocean to prevent bottom trawling circa 2021-2022. Unsure if they still do. Fairly straightforward to solve for if you’re willing to drop chunks of rock (granite, non reactive) or concrete in the ocean at the right spots.
Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though. Hard to take the selfish out of the human, so you have to engineer systems accordingly.
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/live-greenpeace-boulders-...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-marin...
I think it would be a great PR idea for a billionaire to buy a few old ships and use them to drop rocks over the most popular/vulnerable fishing grounds. What happened to rich people who were all not evil?
New money outcompeted old money in the economic ecosystem and new money doesn't have the same historical fear of the proletarian guillotine.
Ray Dalio is involved with Ocean research and education: https://www.daliophilanthropies.org/ocean/
How do you think billionaires became billionaires? How can you extract a billion dollars of wealth in your life time, or even several generations? Certainly not by creating value. Almost certainly by destroying something else, privatising the profits and socialising the losses. E.g. mining, commercial fishing. Etc.
We will never see billionairs act as a force for good because the current system only allows for evil to create such a level of private capital. I would go as far as to argue such wealth disparity is not natural and is only possible through severe perversion of the natural order.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, because you're absolutely right.
It is natural. Unfairness is the basis of civilization.
In order to mobilize a group of humans for the common good they must be artificially incentivized to do it as the tragedy of the commons usually prevents people from doing these things collectively. Look up the tragedy of the commons.
But in order for a group of humans to be incentivized like that there must exist an authority with enough wealth to incentivize humans to work collectively like that. That means one authority needs to get unfairly rich. And additionally there must be incentive itself for such an authority to conduct that action in itself. So basically there must be some unfair distribution of wealth for any of this to happen AND there must exist strategies that can be exploited for someone to gain that wealth.
I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories about why certain places developed into advanced civilizations or not literally relied on whether or not the currency of the habitat could be used to accumulate wealth. For example fruits in Hawaii didn’t last long enough for someone to become a billionaire but grain in Europe does.
This is very "theory X" - the theory that people only work or do anything if someone in authority forces them to.
The other theory, "Theory Y" says that people work because that's what people do, and the function of authority is more about guidance and removal of blockages.
I'm a Theory Y believer, and believe that people work together to improve their lives without needing an authority or any compulsion. I believe that the incentive for people to work together for the common good, is the common good. That alone is enough incentive. I believe that authority tends to enrich itself and work against the common good. Less authority is better.
You're saying this because you actually don't understand a huge part of what I'm talking about: The tragedy of the commons. You didn't look it up, so your answer here is completely mistaken. MY entire ARGUMENT is based on that, and that is EXACTLY what theory Y is. It is the negative consequence of theory Y. You need to understand my argument before responding. Perhaps it's my fault for expecting most people to know what the tragedy of the commons is:
The tragedy of the commons is a paradox in which individually rational behavior leads to a collectively irrational and destructive outcome. It is not a story about bad people doing bad things. It is a story about good people doing exactly what makes sense—and still destroying something vital in the process.
Imagine a shared resource: a pasture open to all local herders. Each herder faces a choice:
Rational choice says: add another animal. You gain, others share the cost.But now every herder thinks this way. They all add more animals. Soon, the pasture is overgrazed. The grass dies. The system collapses. Everyone loses—including the ones who were just “doing what made sense.”
Let’s be crystal clear:
This is not about greed or malice. It’s about structure. It’s a situation where doing the right thing for yourself creates the wrong outcome for everyone.The tragedy of the commons is not a flaw in people. It is a flaw in unregulated systems.
It is inescapable unless external mechanisms change the incentives. And that is what makes it truly tragic: it unfolds from reason itself.
That external MECHANISM is what I mean by AUTHORITY. You need some law to control it. The tragedy of the commons is the reason to almost all the environmental problems we face on earth today.
You and I are exactly talking about theory Y.
Now. That being said. What happens when you let theory Y run rampant? That's pre-civilization anarchy. Hunter-Gatherer groups.
This isn't even a personal opinion I'm talking about here. This is academic opinion. People who study these things say what I'm saying and all I'm doing is regurgitating it. But, of course arm chair expert marcus_holmes knows best and can trump all of academia with theory Y.
Has it occurred to you that the narrative you're repeating here is awfully convenient for the elite? Don't question their wealth - don't you know civilization itself depends on it!
> I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories
It's a theory, yes. And there's another theory which says that's all BS invented by the ruling classes over time - the church and kings back in the day, the billionaires these days - to justify their otherwise quite unjustifiable positions, cloak them in mumbo-jumbo about natural law or what not, with the goal of discouraging questioning of the status quo.
Unfairness maybe be natural but billionaires are artificial.
History is full of people with extreme wealth and power. I would say our current political structures are keeping them somewhat under control.
Edit: So in that sense, I'm also on the side that billionaires are created naturally. When you already have a lot of wealth, the odds are in your favor to create even more wealth. So if you would just keep the system running without much interference, wealth will naturally accumulate to those who already have a lot. Therefore, we need political structures to keep that under control.
Billionaires are the definition of unfairness. And therefore they are natural.
Only From the perspective of civilization, of course, which is only a small fraction of human existence.
From the perspective humanity overall, not only are billionaires unnatural, but civilization in itself is unnatural. Hence all the declining birth rates we see today.
Sounds like something you just made up. Kind of moot to argue what is natural and what isn’t.
Unfairness or billionaires might be natural or not - that doesn’t mean we have to accept their existence.
You know what else is natural? To die at 30 from dysentery or a broken leg.
Natural is a nonsense category
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/unfairness
No mention of billionaires.
Show me one billionaires in nature beside mankind. Billionaires now and then are artificially created by the systems mankind creates. They are an anomaly
Stop eating fish. The fishing industry is destroying the oceans.
Besides, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-04272-1#Sec3
>For rainbow trout, an estimated 10 (1.9–21.7) minutes of moderate to extreme pain (Hurtful, Disabling and Excruciating pain combined) are endured by each trout due to air asphyxia (Fig. 1).
Individual actions won’t change the system, you need collective organised action
Be the change you want to see in the world.
You can only control your actions.
Also taking the action of starting to organise some collective action is a good thing. But don't continue eating fish until everyone else agrees not to, because that becomes self-defeating.
The relevant excerpt. [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/IzG9AwlypaY?feature=shared
Watch it in a cinema, to get the full effect.
There are some before and after scenes of the sea bed, which are pretty shocking as well.
I'm not sure how that got that footage. Surely fisherman would not want that to be seen?
Found this:
"Technically, probably the hardest thing was trying to film bottom trawling because it's never been filmed before and we didn't know if it was possible. You have to film the wonder but you also have to film the destruction. Capturing that was absolutely essential and it took a lot of research to find some scientists planning bottom trawling experiments who decided that adding cameras would help their research and also help to share it with the world."
At:
https://www.arksen.com/blogs/news/ocean-with-david-attenboro...
I watched this film last night, and it was stunning and horrifying all at once. It really brings home the impact of industrial-scale trawling on the marine environment. It's literally like bulldozing a garden to harvest the fruit.
That part of the film is horrifying. Like genuinely, sick-to-the-stomach horrifying. I can't believe that anyone would willingly cause that much destruction.
> subsidised in marine protected areas
What do you mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_protected_area
> A marine protected area (MPA) is a protected area of the world's seas, oceans, estuaries or in the US, the Great Lakes. These marine areas can come in many forms ranging from wildlife refuges to research facilities. MPAs restrict human activity for a conservation purpose, typically to protect natural or cultural resources. Such marine resources are protected by local, state, territorial, native, regional, national, or international authorities and differ substantially among and between nations. This variation includes different limitations on development, fishing practices, fishing seasons and catch limits, moorings and bans on removing or disrupting marine life. MPAs can provide economic benefits by supporting the fishing industry through the revival of fish stocks, as well as job creation and other market benefits via ecotourism. The value of MPA to mobile species is unknown.
I think that not seeing how the story ends will be a blessing in disguise.
(I do not share his optimism that we fix this, the forces of Line Must Go Up are going to win... at least until we all rapidly lose)
I interpreted his "optimism that we will fix this" as the continuation of his lifelong practice of science communication in service of ecosystem preservation. I believe he grasps that people are far more motivated by having a positive vision to run towards than by a negative one to flee.
In that, I think he's being incredibly strategic with his voice in what he knows are his final years. He could leave us saying "everything is fucked, you absolute idiots", but what is there for us to do then besides lie down in the mud?
Instead he's signing off with "We have come so far, I wish I could witness the spectacular recovery you're all about to usher into being!"
Gentle parenting the apocalypse. What a legend.
My theory: The forces of Line Must Go Up are going to keep winning. Mitigating the impact of climate change will be part of Line Goes Up. Whether it will be cheaper or more expensive than avoiding it in the first place will remain to be seen (but won't really matter in the end), but we will be facing whatever impacts we will be facing, and we will face them, and we will deal with them.
If you have any doubt, look at how the Netherlands dealt with storm surge.
For the Netherlands, the entity that pays the cost is the same that benefits from preparedness. For climate change, the plastic doohickey plant in misc country who would have to pay the cost of losing their asset, is entirely divorced from the entities who will benefit from CO2 reduction: everyone in the world. It's a prisoner's dilemma played at every level from the individual to the corporation to the region, and country. I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups. Especially when basically every existing business in the world will fight it tooth and nail. We got lucky with solar that its naturally cheaper than coal power, but there's no law that has to be the case with anything else.
I'm not talking about CO2 reduction, I'm talking about living with the result that the emissions have caused. And for that, the entity that pays the cost and benefits will again be the same.
> I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups
The opposite needs to happen. Less consumption needed, overall. Less spending. It kind of already is, via lower and lower total fertility rates. Might not be declining quickly enough to cause sufficient decline in consumption.
Entire companies have been wrecked by "line must go up" thinking. I see no reason why it should preserve the planet when it can't even preserve its own livelihood. Never underestimate the complete destructive nihilism some are willing to engage just to earn some status and/or dollars. The feedback mechanism from climate change is far too slow. This kind of "ah it'll be grand like" attitude is completely naïve.
This is not what's going to happen planetwide.
What's going to happen instead is that the rich will mitigate the effects only for themselves.
They will spend a small percentage of their wealth to protect themselves and their property from all the ill effects of climate change.
Relying on market forces to mitigate/address the impact of climate change will require us to collectively impose actual market pressure (i.e. regulation, constraints) to do so. Not seeing much sign of that among the major contributors of emissions right at the moment.
That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now. For most, climate change exists as an abstract idea and not an immediate, physical problem. It doesn't help that claims like those made by Al Gore about the polar ice caps being gone by 2016 turned out to be untrue.
I wouldn't expect society to transform itself if told that an asteroid may impact Earth in eighty years, for similar reasons.
Heck, faced with a rapidly spreading virus that can kill in 2 weeks (for the general public at a very low percentage, for our elderly neighbors a lot higher), a large majority of humans turned to angry denials and conspiracy theories to justify to themselves that "it's not that dangerous!".
We are so fucking dead.
Which virus turned "a large majority of humans to angry denials"?
COVID
When somebody says something isn't that dangerous it always comes with an unstated post-text of 'for an average person of average health.' Each year the flu kills hundreds of thousands of people. As the population ages, and thus has more individuals in senescence where your body is basically just breaking down, that will increase into the millions. But yet it's still not unreasonable to say that the flu isn't that dangerous.
And you might think I'm being disingenuous with these facts and perhaps e.g. all those deaths from the flu are just in Africa or wherever. Whereas in reality it's the exact opposite! Places like the US have a substantially higher than average mortality rate from the flu. Globally deaths are around 700k and in the US it's around 50k. We have 4% of the world's population, but 7% of the world's flu deaths. The reason is because it's not about healthcare, vaccines, or whatever else. It's about the amount of people in senescence.
At a certain age, and the subsequent state of health it entails, lots of things that indeed 'aren't that dangerous' turn into life-ending threats. For some contrast that most aren't aware of, the average age of mortality of the Spanish Flu was 28 - which made it a completely terrifying freak outlier in terms of viruses, which generally affect the very young and very old most severely. Nobody would be saying that the Spanish Flu is not that dangerous in modern times.
Well, maybe search for the keyword "long COVID" and see how it has caused a lot of suffering even among young and otherwise healthy individuals.
Also, people seem to forget that exponentials go up very fast, so an "average person of average health" would be very selfish to not make the necessary precautions to limit the spread of the virus as much as feasible.
Market pressure is required to avoid climate change by keeping companies from externalizing climate impacts.
Market pressure is not required for a city to decide that having the city flooded is bad, and start a tender for building a sea wall. This makes the line go up for the sea wall companies.
- “Yes, the patient might die, but we’re confident that given enough resources, we’ll bring him back to life.”
Well, to be fair, it’s basically what’s happening with LLMs atm. So, maybe feathering up Mammon and aiming for the sun will be the tech industry’s most lasting legacy.
I agree. I reflect on this from time to time when I consider that my mom, having died a few years back, would not be enjoying much of anything going on in the world right now. (Further, that she was born at the close of WWII in the U.S., she may have been lucky enough to have lived in the best part of recent history here.)
“No one cares about the bomb that didn’t go off.” - Tenet
Preventing “bombs” from going off is not rewarded. And indeed the Line Must Go Up Crowd is reliant upon someone else fixing the problem while they get theirs. But when the majority think that way we’re f**ed.
The bombs not dropped here today remain available to be dropped elsewhere tomorrow, so perhaps we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back just yet.
It’s a good comparison especially in the context of mutually assured destruction, whether administered directly or indirectly, the same grim pragmatic political truth of wedge issues remains:
why solve today what can be put off til tomorrow?
The human population is set to crash quite hard in the next 100 years. It's backed into the cake.
Not all human population is going to crash. Africa population in 1950 was 228.7 million, in 2025 is 1549 million. Fertility rate in 2025 is 4.05.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/afr/afr...
If we keep at it like we have been maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel for Earth, ecologically. In say 100k or 1M years, after we're long gone and things have started to repair themselves.
This is where I find hope: ten million years from now we'll all be gone, and the earth will be a beautiful, thriving place once again.
The short term doesn't look so good, but at least I will only have to watch a few more decades of it.
This is a very macabre position! Your life and other people's lives are a joyous blessing.
The sad part of our human existence is that none of us ever live to see how our story ends. We "spawn" at a random point in time and "vanish" at another. Ageing is being worked on vigorously and while we did change our lifespan from 40 years to 80 years of existence thanks to modern science, in order for us to truly comprehend changes on a universal scale, average human lifespan would need to be 50000 years long. That way you'll see species evolve, continents move, quasars explode, maybe even Betelguese explode?
Yes we die, the body goes. But if there is a further element to the experience - and near death experiences, out of body experience suggest there is - we perhaps do see how the story ends. In fact, this experience might not be the real 'story', just an opportunity of some sort to learn, grow. The point is that although many assume material reality to be all there is, it might not actually be the case.
Amazing how many pop-ups I have to click away. It's almost like being back in the 90s.
Firefox with Blocking turned on and I see no ads..
On mobile Firefox with blocking I still see - cookie consent - some self add for subscription - an altert that I have to login
Can't read it
Started reading and immediately hearing it narrated in his voice.
Nobody sees how the story ends
I can understand there is an inherit sadness in not knowing the outcome of one's life's work, but as you say none of use ever see how it ends. In terms of our natural environment humankind has only ever observed in person, let alone recorded, what amounts to the blink of an eye.
The Sundays beg to differ.
Wow was not expecting to see a Sundays reference in this thread, let alone HN. One of my all-time favorite bands!
Phoebe Bridgers also. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ9-xN6dCW4
Are you alluding to some religious thing?
Fear of oblivion and/or the unknown is fucking scary.
Certainly this: https://youtu.be/FHsip5xOenQ
So is the Fridays ;)
Avril Lavigne as well.
Depends which story. Every death is the end of somebody's world.
Someone might. I think we stand a reasonable chance of self-selecting for extinction in the next few centuries. It's not the end of the story, but it's the end of our story. Someone will be the one who shuts off the lights on the way out.
Our generations of the last 10,000 years are seeing how the story decays.
When the food supply was abundant, families would jog every day doing BBQ every night hunting down mammoths
We have become red in tooth and claw. At the summit of civilisation, we are alienated with our screens, licking frozen TV dinners in our shared flat while we work hard to support our landlords
As long as we have surviving records people have been saying the past was golden and the present is decay with a long list of the present ills which are the downfall of the glorious past. It's a boring take and has been incorrect for thousands of years and will continue to be. Arguments about how some list of things haven't been on a monotonic increase during the last generation do not refute this.
We’re not here to see how our story ends, we’re here to experience and live in the world that was someone else’s ending, that they never got to see.
that's...actually really beautiful
thank you
David Attenborough narrated some of my favorite paleontology documentaries.
One of the things I like most about David Attenborough is it never seems like he's reading a script. It feels like he's talking about something he knows about (which he does).
When it comes to the acting or performing worlds, is there a phrase describing this?
“Conversational delivery”
You seen Prehistoric Planet[0]?
The CGI is so good, you can practically smell the beasties.
[0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Planet
None of us see the end of the story but I do fear that the story could change when we inevitably lose a passionate advocate in Sir David whose credibility on this issue has been unchallengeable.
I take some comfort from the younger generations who are now growing up with a much greater awareness of the natural environment and the damage we humans can do to it and a much lower tolerance for political sophistry and capitalist all-about-the-money "ethics". With the selfishness of politics in much of the world today I think things will probably get worse before they get better. I still hope that we won't cross any points of no return as those younger people gain influence and those of older generations who are not always as enlightened and concerned as Sir David also leave us.
I think those younger generations will have better chances if there is a highly visible advocate for protecting the natural world for ordinary people to coalesce around. I don't know who the next David Attenborough could be. Perhaps one of his final gifts to humanity can be helping to find and establish the profile(s) of natural successor(s) who can carry on his work.
Someone like Bertie Gregory could be next? https://www.bertiegregory.com/
Attenborough will be incredibly difficult to follow though. The depth of his career has made him such an iconic and reassuring force for so many.
Here's the good news: we've done basically nothing about climate change even with him, so losing such an esteemed spokesman won't actually make it worse.
Admittedly that's only "good" in the sense that things are maximally bad and cannot get worse. But we might as well fake a smile because that's all we're going to get. I'd say we won't act until it's too late, but it is already too late.
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I’m confused. We are beyond the point of no return when it comes to global warming. Hasnt he already seen how the story ends?
There is no single "point of no return". We have obviously passed the point where bad consequences can be avoided, but every extra ton of CO2 and methane makes things a bit worse.
I worry that the sentiment of "we have passed the point of no return" induces an impotent apathy in people, when the truth is that every step in the right direction makes our future a little bit less dire.
Folks are worried about phase change, the flip from one set of patterns to a different set of patters. That is much different than a linear "every ton makes things a bit worse".
There is going to be big fundamental change, but people need to stop thinking about it like "the sky is falling" and instead ask "how are we going to adapt?"
People are going to have to move to where water is available, to where heat is less of a problem, and large scale infrastructure is going to change. A lot of struggle is going to go along with that change but starting to plan now and predict where is going to be habitable and how to prepare for that is what people should be doing instead of the shame and doom.
The narrative climax to the human story around climate change has yet to happen. Assuming we continue on the current trajectory, expect riots and wars over food and clean water, possibly more.
What do you think he means when he says “how the story ends”?