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Ravaged jungle: just 25% of the world’s surviving tropical rainforests are in good condition
(theconversation.com)
Birds are disappearing, jungles are disappearing, wetlands are disappearing. The biosphere is decaying.
Most people reading this will not feel the effect much yet, but many people out there are already living the consequences. But they don't have much to sell us and they don't have camera phones everywhere, so they're invisible to us. Just as invisible as the wildlife.
I really do think the natural feedback loops - in particular methane emissions - will soon dictate the climate conversation. We won't be scrambling to reach zero emissions any more, we will be scrambling to develop environmental GHG capture and other terraforming (lol) technologies as a last resort. We'll chase the solution long after the experts realize it was a pipe dream like in that one space movie.
China has done incredible work toward a green transition in recent years. But they can only do so much about saving the Amazon, saving the Everglades, saving the Antarctic, saving the Congo Basin, and so on. And the same goes for anyone else who would put in the effort. Almost all of us need to take this seriously and focus our societies on it or else it doesn't matter if a few do, too much of the planet will be destroyed for the remaining parts to escape their own devastation. And then there's the issue of developing a nation's economic and industrial base enough to support a transition without destroying the environment in the process.
So anyway I'm not very optimistic! The more we look at the methane situation the worse it gets. And while I think it is important if biosphere destruction affects anyone (which it already does), it appears that soon it will affect everyone. And yet I'm expecting it to drive us further apart rather than closer together.
Nothing short of refocusing the productivity and economic organization of our entire planet - along with a readjustment of cultural norms - is likely to control the situation imo. (That or maybe immediate industrial collapse.) And I would still be worried even then!
You can't rewind damage to the biosphere. It's usually a non-reversible process with loads of downstream effects. And although it is easy to forget, the rest of nature is much bigger than all of us.