this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
430 points (86.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43965 readers
1885 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It isn’t catastrophizing when it is about a literal catastrophe which climate change is.
It absolutely does represent an existential threat to the current and future lives of billions of humans.
There is also a CATASTROPHIC loss of biodiversity and habitat occurring on earth, there is literally no other word for it and the consequences are so gargantuan it is difficult to wrap your head around. We are living in a mass extinction, which may yet include ourselves.
I agree with your point on biodiversity and yes, climate change poses an existential threat to individual people, but not to civilization as a whole.
facepalm no, I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what is occurring here. I am not going to sit here and argue semantics but suffice to say there is absolutely zero evidence that we won’t wipe ourselves out through habitat loss, collapse of the biosphere and climate change (that themselves cause a litany of other quick and slow moving disasters).
To think civilization will inevitably make it through this is to understand the human organism as just a single species of ape, not a dizzying constellation of bacteria, viruses, plants, fungus and animals that sustains what we think of as “human”. We destroy that and there is no “us”. We can’t just take the human species and transplant it to mars and expect it to survive without the diversity of all those other species. You might as well pluck out a single ant from a colony expecting it to be able to survive alone.