Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

by geox • 3 years ago

191 169 3 years ago

science.org

naikrovek• 3 years ago

yeah, yeah, we know.

there's money to be made, though, so we ain't stopping.

readthenotes12• 3 years ago

It's more like there are babies to be made. After all, if we stopped procreating so prolifically, things would right themselves fairly quickly

casparvitch• 3 years ago

One and the same, economic growth has lead us here & economic growth has been highly tied to population growth.

SinParadise• 3 years ago

Its OK magic of technology will swoop in and save us. Any time now.

bvrlt• 3 years ago

And Apple will be carbon neutral in 2030.

Acssux• 3 years ago

How is something critical if it has been transgressed and we are still alive? Or on the very first moment every single one is past we all suddenly die?

Cerium• 3 years ago

Breathing is critical to keep me alive, but I can hold my breath for a minute, and if forced by external means to stop breathing, will still be ok for a few minutes.

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

It reminds me a bit of radiation poisoning - you can receive a lethal dose in moments. After that, you can carry on for a time; hours, maybe days feeling normal, but your death has already been ordained and your biochemical systems will collapse from the insult.

musha68k2• 3 years ago

Hokuto Shinken self-application; all the neuralgic points, and with determination and lots of force.

netsharc• 3 years ago

Ha, good point, let's not focus on the main issue and instead argue semantics shall we... /s

To ELI5 like you seem to prefer, the iceberg breaching the hull of the Titanic seems like a critical transgression, but the ship stayed afloat another hour or so...

diogenes4• 3 years ago

If the main issue is not semantic, how would you characterize it?

scrozier• 3 years ago

They are not arguing semantics, they are getting to the very premise/context of the paper.

ricardobeat2• 3 years ago

This is looking at changes over a scale of centuries, and the potentially irreversible effects of what we are doing right now.

Had Earth system remained forced by 1988 conditions (350 ppm and 85%/50%/85% of tropical/temperate/boreal forest cover remaining), the simulations show that temperature over the global land surface would not have increased by more than an additional 0.6°C in the subsequent 800 years
If climate and land system change can be halted at 450 ppm and forest cover retained at 60%/30%/60% of boreal/temperate/tropical natural cover, then the simulation indicates a mean temperature rise over land of 1.4°C by 2100 (in addition to 0.7°C between preindustrial time and 1988) and 1.9°C after 800 years as vegetation evolves in a warmer climate

The latter is an optimistic projection assuming we will do more to stop climate change, the paper goes further into the odds of a >3C increase.

To put that in context, a 1.5°C increase in average temperature is considered a doomsday scenario where wildfires and storms ravage the earth, killing over half of the global population.

paint2• 3 years ago

Echoing the kind of climate change scenario 5 year old kids have seems kind of cruel the week thousands of people in Libya died of events that are exasperated by the climate crisis. People are already dying of climate related causes, like crop failures and natural distasters.

swader9996• 3 years ago

Man-made dams broke.

chx• 3 years ago

I'd recommend watching Margin Call, a movie set during the 2008 financial collapse.

lkbm• 3 years ago

The article says:

Boundary positions do not demarcate or predict singular threshold shifts in Earth system state. They are placed at a level where the available evidence suggests that further perturbation of the individual process could potentially lead to systemic planetary change by altering and fundamentally reshaping the dynamics and spatiotemporal patterns of geosphere-biosphere interactions and their feedbacks

Probably would need to read more to get a clear understanding of exactly what they mean and how they're defined, but it sounds like we're to an unstable place. Perhaps somewhat analogous to skating on thin ice: you may not have haven't broken through yet, but you're in a spot where a break could happen at any moment and from any movement.

haltist4• 3 years ago

California's climate patterns are already changing but the state has managed to deal with the problems and will probably continue to do so. Texas on the other hand is starting to see problems with their electricity grid during summers and it's going to keep getting worse as temperatures continue to rise.

IKantRead• 3 years ago

Give it some time. Good news is that "faster than expected" seems to be a very common saying among people studying these areas, so you might not have to wait as long as the geological time might suggest!

Honestly, as someone who has been very concerned about climate for a while now, I'm surprised how much visible disruption of the climate system we've directly been able to observe. Earlier in my life I thought that, though dire, this was certainly a problem that would impact future generations but not so much ours. It turns out I might have been quite wrong on that front.

jacquesm9• 3 years ago

You have a funny definition of 'good news'.

tuatoru2• 3 years ago

The Club of Rome's "Limits To Growth" study in the 1970s, in its central scenario, had the 2040s as the time when we'd start to really feel the consequences of "pollution" (broadly conceived, including things like fossil water drawdown and soil exhaustion as well as the results of using fossil fuels).

A little faster than expected maybe. Not all that much though.

JumpCrisscross2• 3 years ago

How is something critical if it has been transgressed

I don't think the paper claims we've passed criticality. Instead, it talks of boundaries and risk, the latter reflecting that we don't know where the critical points are.

on the very first moment every single one is past we all suddenly die?

Biosphere collapse could happen suddenly and without warning. That would throw the global south into political turmoil while prompting a global and destabilizing refugee crisis.

elihu• 3 years ago

The Titanic didn't sink the moment it hit the iceberg, it took a little over two and a half hours. During a significant portion of that time it wasn't all that obvious that anything was seriously wrong. The ship was listing slightly to one side and the engines were off.

The passengers weren't all affected equally either. A lot of first-class passengers made it onto lifeboats, whereas third class passengers mostly didn't.

(The analogy breaks down a little in that we don't have lifeboats and the collapse of our ecosystems probably won't be as absolute and catestrophic as a ship sinking. The Earth's ability to sustain large numbers of humans may decline significantly though, and a lot of things we take for granted now may be gone.)

autoexec5• 3 years ago

We don't have life boats (yet) but I do wonder if some part of the massive increase in wealth disparity we've seen is due to uncertainty about the future, or if the reluctance to take meaningful action to slow/reverse the impacts we've had on the earth is because it's already clear that our time is running out and there's nothing that can be done to stop it.

Iridescent_• 3 years ago

If you have a pond with 1000 fishes, and each year the population of fish doubles, you can remove 501 fishes/year for quite a while. You are clearly in an unsustainable situation, yet it will take time for the population to completely collapse. These limits are in the sense that we cannot stay above forever, not in the we cannot go above ever sense.

isotropy• 3 years ago

Well, only for 8 years.

1000 998 994 986 970 938 874 746 490 ooops

pixl972• 3 years ago

If the engines on your plane fall off mid flight, everyone doesn't die instantly. They die instantly after 30 thousand feet of screaming terror.

This comment screams lack of education about complicated systems. For example take overpopulation in things like grazing mammals. The funny thing about being overpopulated is that it is not instantly deadly. Once the mammals eat enough of their food source that their food source cannot reproduce reliably the game is over. But they tend to have reserves of fat and muscle that last for some period of time. The weakest die first. Then the population reduces. But the population doesn't go back to what was previously considered at the over population limit. No, populations massively collapse because there is nothing to eat at all. 9 out of 10 members of the population can die. And if it's something like an island, extinction is on the menu.

jacquesm9• 3 years ago

Even if not on an island extinction is on the menu depending on how large the population was to begin with and the velocity of the crash. This is because the males in the population can't reproduce by themselves and the weakest are often the young. So when food runs out, even if it is temporarily, you may see one last generation of very fit males and possibly some cannibalism and after that it is game over. Calhoun did some pretty gruesome (and borderline unethical) experiments that are the closest thing we have to lab controlled overpopulation experiments. The results presented are pretty sobering.

myshpa3• 3 years ago

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/st-matthew-island/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity#Planetary_Bo...

readthenotes12• 3 years ago

What a fantastic graphic and title! I do not believe I need to read the article to understand the point of it. Rarely have I seen such good visualization.

musha68k2• 3 years ago

It’s very telling yes:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458#F1

Liquix• 3 years ago

Clearly, it is in humanity's best interest to...

Herein lies the problem. What happens to the environment is not governed by "humanity's best interest", it's governed by whomever has the most power and the biggest stick. These entities act in their own best interest.

To the Chinese government, more factories = more money = more power = good. To the US government, more military equipment = more power = good. At the executive level of either organization one would be laughed out of the room for suggesting environmental issues should take priority over national security.

But it's not just two countries, it's every single country making these types of decisions for 100+ years... And if $country doesn't build that weapons facility or export that labor, $otherCountry will, therefore $country will be at a disadvantage. Repeat ad infitium.

Those in power are far more concerned with maintaining and leveraging that power than they are with "humanity's best interest".

JumpCrisscross2• 3 years ago

t's governed by whomever has the most power and the biggest stick. These entities act in their own best interest

Everyone acts in their own interests. The gilets jaunes were a grassroots protest against a gas tax increase. You see similar gas-station sticker-shock pressure exerted by voters in the United States.

There are coordination problems to climate change. But it's less a prisoner's dilemma than a time-horizon problem: the fruits of a green transition won't yield for decades. (Economies of scale help with this. Geopolitical decoupling gets in the way of that--this is the only domain where I see the prisoner's dilemma that you allude to.)

dopidop4• 3 years ago

Digression :

The Gillet jaune started this way. Very true. But also self organise to be something vastly different pretty quickly. Maybe 20 days into that months long movement ( it’s not officially over; like Korea war … )

littleweep• 3 years ago

I guess until govts realize enviromental security is national security...

lastofthemojito• 3 years ago

At the executive level of either organization one would be laughed out of the room for suggesting environmental issues should take priority over national security

Supposedly some folks are starting to frame climate issues as threats to national security. It may just be lip service so far, but we're now seeing "Meet the Climate Crisis" listed as one of the top 5 priorities for the US Department of Defense: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/331664...

ipnon2• 3 years ago

“Hell hath no wrath like a national security apparatus threatened,” I think that’s how it goes. Once USG, or Wall Street even, is threatened nothing is really off the table.

bombcar2• 3 years ago

I’m always extremely suspicious of “we care about climate charge” arguments that always argue for exactly what the group has always wanted to do.

gmuslera• 3 years ago

Another flavor of the Tragedy of the Commons. Everyone optimized by their local, short term priorities.

PaulDavisThe1st6• 3 years ago

And another opportunity for me to point out that there is no such thing as the Tragedy of the Commons. Garrett Hardin, who popularized the term, has walked it back, and others, as long ago as the 1990s, have pointed out with a wealth of evidence that the popular conception of "the Commons" never actually existed. More or less all "pooled" resources in human cultures have historically been carefully managed by a variety of cultural, social, political and economic systems. The so-called "Tragedy of the Commons" happens not because typical individuals over-use the resource, but because specific individuals violate norms, actively work to dismantle management processes and willfully work to utilize the resource for their own benefit to the detriment of others.

account-5• 3 years ago

Repeat ad infitium.

Unlikely since these entities all end when the environment is fucked. I don't know the Latin for: approx next 100 years.

mc32• 3 years ago

Hmmm, I think if we had similar (but roving, pastoral, etc) neolithic with population we do today (ok, doubtfully possible, but whatever carrying capacity), we'd never the less have resource fouling, resource depletion and we'd be sending soot into the atmosphere.

apsec112• 3 years ago

The vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions isn't military, it's for ordinary consumer uses like heating, cooling, driving, and farming meat. No matter what the form of government, lots of people will object very strongly if the solution to climate change is not having central heating, cars, hot water, or beef for dinner.

ribosometronome• 3 years ago

Does renewable power and hydrogen/electric vehicles not solve essentially all of what you listed, save beef?

neltnerb• 3 years ago

I think I would like to have safe housing, healthcare, nutritious food, and clean water more than "driving and farming meat" but I guess we all have our priorities.

I think that can definitely be sustainable indefinitely, but not so long as companies and cultures are unable to make any kind of real concessions to reality. We should not be using plastic. For basically anything. We should never have started. We should barely be using cars. We should never have started. We should not be eating nearly as much meat as people do in rich countries. We'd use a fraction of the agricultural area and be healthier to boot. Yet somehow meat being cheap is a god-given right?

I object to lots of things that reality forces me to deal with.

maerF0x02• 3 years ago

majority of greenhouse gas emissions

To be extra precise, human initiated greenhouse gas emissions. My understanding is about half of the emissions are natural and there's little we can do about their emission (but can do about their sequestration). Of course that doesn't/shouldn't stop us from addressing the half we can :)

midoridensha6• 3 years ago

No matter what the form of government, lots of *Americans* will object very strongly if the solution to climate change is not having central heating, cars, hot water, or beef for dinner.

FTFY. Countless people outside the US get along just fine without cars, central heating, and the entire 1B+ nation of India is fine without beef for dinner.

yoyohello13• 3 years ago

I recently came across a game theory term called "Moloch" in which individual incentives lead to negative outcomes for all parties involved. Nobody individually wants the negative outcome, but it's extremely difficult to break out of the cycle.

svachalek• 3 years ago

I've also just learned this recently. See "Meditations on Moloch" for the original essay. It explains so much but it's also very depressing -- it's hard to imagine how any ordinary person has a prayer of changing the system when so many elements of it are primed to both produce terrible outcomes and to resist change.

It's possible that you could design a new system of government deliberately designed to counter some of these natural tendencies, to change the rules of the game to reward beneficial outcomes better than selfish ones. But I don't know you'd ever get such a thing in place when the people who can make that kind of change are the ones with the most to lose.

hinkley• 3 years ago

And even that's not true.

It's governed by the eyeballs of whoever has the most power and the biggest stick. We don't, for instance, know what the actual rates of theft is in a civilization because we cannot accurately discern lost belongings from stolen belongings. Anyone who tells you they think they know the number is absolutely full of shit. A truly crafty thief makes you think you lost something, used it up, or threw it away. In which case there is no report, because as far as you know nothing happened. The better the criminals, the bigger the disparity between the reality of theft and the perception of theft.

I can't beat you with a stick if you're dumping toxins somewhere I can't see. And it's no good beating your successors once you're dead, or you once you're very old, because there is no lesson to learn there except that you can get away with bad things for 30 years, so time your crimes accordingly.

formvoltron3• 3 years ago

pretty sure we have enough solar and batteries to power the world. Sure ok we could use nuclear in some places too. aerosols... that's from burning fossil fuels, no? fake meat will go a long way to reclaiming farmland.

micro / nano plastics everywhere sucks. going to have to think hard about how to fix that one.

can we take cell samples of all the species just in case we need to conjure them up again? (or is at least one required to "boot")

dopidop4• 3 years ago

It’s satire right ?

formvoltron3• 3 years ago

no. what part would be satire?

dr_dshiv2• 3 years ago

I don’t know why this triggers such skepticism in me. Particularly the section on novel entities. But it feels funny, somehow, and I can’t put my finger on it.

ipnon2• 3 years ago

I think the thought, like death, is simply so horrible it defies full consideration. This is why climate activists can seem fanatical, because it has a religious quality. Either you believe “it” will happen in our lifetime, very soon, or it will not happen at all, and it’s this horrifying, apocalyptic nature of the problem that causes this schism. If some of these climate scientists are right in their claims it is the most important thing for these activists to do. I’m sure we can all draw parallels here.

SV_BubbleTime3• 3 years ago

There’s a lot of religion going on right now. Whatever that is in humans that encourages that, going back to tribal behavior, or survival or whatever, it hasn’t gone away just because formalized religions are weak right now.

commandlinefan• 3 years ago

why this triggers such skepticism

I know it does for me - because the people who claim to believe in it the most don't actually live their lives as if they actually believed it. Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to do whatever I could reasonably do to create cooler summers and less smog, but I've never heard any actual concrete proposal beyond "vote democrat".

pixl972• 3 years ago

In general because the tragedy of the commons is solved by one group pointing a gun at everyone else. Nobody wants that, but at the end of the day that's what we're going to get if we like it or not.

The longer we wait, the more people are going to get shot by that gun.

bottled_poe• 3 years ago

Curious!

vlz4• 3 years ago

Ok, I will bite. Concrete proposals for anybody regardless of political view:

* Eat half the meat you do or less

* Don‘t fly unless absolutely necessary

* Get on a plan for renewable electrical energy if possible

I know, far from everything in this topic is about consumer choices but a lot really is. If you don‘t want the nanny state to fix your problems you can start at your own doorstep.

deprecative• 3 years ago

One of the reasons for this is because you're not actually responsible for all that much as a middle class and below person. Yeah, get better fuel efficient cars. Yeah, eat less meat. Yeah, get the most out of what you can when you buy things. But that's not going to do much while corporations are still chugging along. It won't do much while coal and gas are the primary energy production. Sure, use less electricity and get onto renewables as much as you can but the offenders will buy these nonsensical carbon credits and such that cause issue.

The real answer is definitely vote Democratic, one cannot vote democrat as that's not a party in the US. But more than that it gets involved in the political process such that change to our policies are done with climate change in kind. You won't get that from Republicans.

yongjik• 3 years ago

I've never heard any actual concrete proposal beyond "vote democrat".

Trump called the global warming a "Chinese hoax." If you're looking for leverages to influence the global climate as a US citizen, "vote democrat" is not a bad strategy. (Have to add: it's not because democrats are awesome, but because the alternative is horrible.)

acqq• 3 years ago

Instead of speaking of own feeling based on a "section" the rational approach is to read the actual scientific paper dealing only with that topic:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04158

"Outside the Safe Operating Space of the Planetary Boundary for Novel Entities"

Environ. Sci. Technol. 2022, 56, 3, 1510–1521

toss15• 3 years ago

Note that the areas of the three largest deviations are, in order: Biosphere Integrity, Novel Entities (synthetic chemical & processes), and Biogeochemical Flows.

The entire ecosystem on which we depend for sustenance is an extremely complex web of interlocking dependencies, from plankton to pollinators, to soil microbiota, to temperature & hydration, and so on, endlessly.

This is the food web. If it collapses, we as a species are beyond fooked. Because it is so complex (and even something relatively simple such as CO2-driven greenhouse effect climate change is too complex for the lower half of the population to understand), it is barely even discussed.

But make no mistake, the food web is under massive assault from all kinds of human activities (and even the artificial agriculture web is coming up against the hard limit of a phosphorus crisis). This is likely to be a sooner and more catastrophic failure than the climate crisis. The Fine Article nicely clarifies some of the threat.

myshpa3• 3 years ago

This is the food web

One major contributor to the overshoot is our current agricultural practices, with animal agriculture being a primary offender.

It's responsible for a significant amount of greenhouse gases, it's a leading driver of biodiversity loss and deforestation, and it contributes to soil degradation and water pollution.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/10/World-Map-by-Land...

BIODIVERSITY LOSS

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4

Humans are driving one million species to extinction - UN backed report finds that agriculture is one of the biggest threats to Earth’s ecosystems

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...

Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26231772/

Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption

DEFORESTATION

https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation

Drivers of Deforestation - combined, beef and oilseeds for animal feed account for nearly 60% of deforestation

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/whats-driving-deforestation

Just four commodities — beef, soy, palm oil, and wood products—drive the majority of tropical deforestation.

Beef - 2.71 million hectares / year

Soy - 480,000 ha / year (77% for animal feed)

Palm Oil - 270,000 ha / year

Wood - 380,000 ha / year (but probably more)

GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS

CO2 - 16.5+% animal agriculture (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352100490_Emissions...)

Methane - animal agriculture leading driver, https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#methane-ch4-e...

N20 - animal agriculture leads again, https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector#nitrous-oxide...

SOLUTIONS

We can significantly reduce our footprint by adopting plant-based diets, reforesting the pastures (more than 50% of which were originally forests), and allowing biodiversity to recover.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4

The carbon opportunity cost of animal-sourced food production on land - shifts in global food production to plant-based diets by 2050 could lead to sequestration of 332–547 GtCO2, equivalent to 99–163% of the CO2 emissions budget consistent with a 66% chance of limiting warming to 1.5 °C

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/917471

Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable

analognoise• 3 years ago

Humanity would rather go to war to thin our numbers than give up eating meat.

The only viable method is lab grown meat that tastes exactly the same, same texture, and is cheaper. That's it. People have real stuff in their lives - they're not worried about planetary survival in 100 years, they're worried about next months rent, etc.

toss15• 3 years ago

>Our agriculture and food production are major contributors to the damage

Yes - deadly serious.

I had to travel to the US midwest recently, after not having been there for a long time. As I drove out of the city the first impression of the farmlands was pleasant. But after an hour of highway-speed driving past nothing but bare fields (out of growing season) with scant rows of trees, we became a bit horrified — there was absolutely zero habitat for anything but the artificial plantings, when they were in season. And they would be coated with pesticides to ensure that there were no insects, or anything that ate them, or that ate the things that ate the insects, etc.. And indeed, returning to the airport in daytime, there was remarkably little wildlife.

It was a seriously disturbing experience, which I did not expect.

>Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable

Yikes. The damage being done by 7 billion right now, adding 20-30% more is kind of unthinkable, even setting aside the agricultural damage. And you're absolutely right that we need to adopt a plant-based diet.

The conversion away from meat does seem much more doable, since only 12% of Americans eat 50% of the beef. Moreover, that's men between 50-66 years old, so if younger generations don't acquire that habit, we'll get a 50% reduction just by that sub-population aging out.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2023-08-mere-americans-nation-beef-sig...

jacquesm9• 3 years ago

In NL the agro lobby has just successfully launched the largest political party here, on the back of a very well financed and organized series of protests. These people will stop at absolutely nothing to be allowed to fuck us all over for a few more years just so they can rake in some more dough. It is very disturbing to see how gullible the voters are.

thriftwy• 3 years ago

This late summer was pretty great around here. We were able to go swimming on 10th of September, whereas the folk wisdom here tells is's a no-no after 2nd of August.

maerF0x02• 3 years ago

Meanwhile Austin has has the 3rd hottest[1] year on record (so far, we still have ~3.5 months to go). https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/austin/yearly-day...

[1]: i used days of 100f and over as a proxy for deciding how hot a year is

swader9996• 3 years ago

That airport station wasn't around for the entire record though. 20's was similar to present. I really don't think you can make any claims either way with just that data.

BirAdam2• 3 years ago

The one thing I don’t see people take into account is a globally declining birth rate, very rapid declining birth rate. Fewer humans will mean less consumption, and therefore lower demand and less production. This could reverse many effects within the lifetimes of millennials and GenZ.

tuatoru2• 3 years ago

Yes, fertility is below replacement in 183 out of 191 countries. True. But it depends.

IPAT: impact = population times affluence times technology.

Take away the 700 million people with the highest incomes (10%), then about 90% of the impact is gone. I doubt that population decline will be that swift or deep, though.

Technology won't save us either. If it isn't deployed commercially at billion-dollar scale now, it won't scale up enough in four decades to make much of a difference.

BirAdam2• 3 years ago

But… in four decades the largest and wealthiest generation ever will be long dead.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

Population momentum means the total human population will top out at 9-10 billion people before rapidly declining after 2100.

lucidguppy• 3 years ago

We are done falling off the cliff and are toes are starting to impact the ground.

The best case scenario is for the powers that be to understand that there isn't enough private island to stop what's coming. They're in the same boat with us no matter what. Nature always has the last say.

We need to stop draw down of fossil resources, reduce our impact on the land, and seek the best possible outcome of a really bad situation.

badrabbit• 3 years ago

I feel like climate issues are best solved by anthropologists and diplomats.

That aside, considering how much things improved during covid lockdowns, I've wondered if one of these climate failures killing a fee billion people will fix the whole problem on its own and have earth recover from the human parasite for a few more decades.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

If anything, the covid lockdowns just proved that human activity has that much of an affect on the climate. Some people already accepted that prior to lockdowns, some people became aware of it, others continue to deny it. Those that deny that human activity has an effect will never be convinced otherwise.

Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

Related Stories