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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I definitely think this is backwards. its the humans that are less likely to overhunt the animals that they evolved alongside. If the animals are part of your culture/religion/ecosystem you’re not going to wantonly destroy them. But as humans spread, the animals may not have meant as much to them culturally, or they didn’t know how to not overexploit them. Like the first people in north america were likely a key factor in the loss of megafauna, but then became stewards of many existing megafauna/ecosystems as their culture adapted and they became more grounded in place



  • We have very little say in how our government works. Over the course of US history the material decisions have been whisked away to less democratic structures (eg the supreme court, the federal reserve). Even early on the democracy was built for property owners (owners of people and land). People are feeling disenfranchised and the vote for trump is a (petulant) vote to flip the gameboard. Of course voting for trump is one of the worst things you can do if you want you and your community’s lives to improve, but the fundamental motivation is disenfranchisement and anger






  • abies_exarchia@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzInvasive
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    2 months ago

    He was gonna say he fed the fries to a house sparrow and the guy waiting around the corner was going to harass him for feeding an invasive species. I guess the joke is that the author sees humans as the most invasive species (which, as an aside, is a bad take when you think about indigenous peoples of our species)


  • I looked really hard in the original paper for where it says the rate of change is greater than it has been at any other time in the Phanerozoic and for the life of me could not find it. This article from 2013 states that climate is changing faster now than in the last 65mya (since KT extinction). So I was eager to see this updated number in the paper. The cleantechnica article cites that from an interview with Judd.

    My sense is that the paper does not specifically address rate because the time spans at which the rate of change is measure is dramatically different between contemporary climate change and climate change over the last 500mya. And this is what Judd observed, but did not try to get this number through the peer-review process because it might be difficult and the paper is about so much more than just rate.

    I think it’s a little irresponsible of the cleantechnica journalist here to use this as the title and main point. If you read the abstract and conclusion of the paper the rate is not mentioned at all. This article makes very important contributions, namely showing a strong consistent link between climate change and CO2 concentration, showing that global mean surface temperature (GMST) varied over a range from 11° to 36°C over the last 500mya, and calculating that for every doubling of CO2 concentration the GMST increases by 8°C (which is a lot higher than we thought).