Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink

arditty@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 295 points –
washingtonpost.com
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Reading climate change articles always reminds me of this monologue from the antagonist in Westworld:

I think humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a God, he would’ve given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, “Why are we here?” You want to know what I think your purpose is? It’s obvious. You’re here along with the rest of us to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We’re maggots eating a corpse

From the late great George Carlin: "The planet is fine. The people are fucked."

Except we’re taking out a load of other species with us

Life on earth has been through far worse than humans and recovered (in a few million years).

Different species will fill the available ecological niches.

Life will survive.

Nobody is claiming or worried that all life will go extinct. What sucks is that we are fucking over all the animals that we know and love. If elephants go extinct, there will never be elephants again. Same with whales and koalas and sloths and bees. They will all be gone forever like dinosaurs and dodo birds and thylacines and trilobites.

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The jellyfish, mosquitoes, mold, sea urchins, flies, algae, fungi and cockroaches will probably thrive. That's a good foundation for evolution to start a new ecosystem, isn't it?
This is the kind of hope I am clinging to this year.

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Or in the words of Agent Smith:

"You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure."

Smith program was so edgy in the early 2000s 😂

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