That only really holds true if disruptions in the carbon cycle are the fundamental root cause.
Carbon seems extremely important no doubt, but I've never personally bought the idea that the health of the entire planet can be boiled down to a single, analytical metric. I've also yet to be convinced that, even if it truly is all about carbon, we understand the problem so completely that we know how to intervene precisely without breaking anything else or causing unexpected side effects.
We've seen a noticeable increase in ocean temperatures in the last year or two and I've seen compelling data pointing to it being caused by ultra-low sulfur emissions regulations in marine shipping. People thought they were doing the right thing, they just didn't account for the cooling effects of sulfur in the atmosphere. We could easily do the same with global interventions in the carbon cycle.
I'd much rather see us leaning into a reduction in interventions wholesale. Its much harder to break things when you just stop causing so much damage.
> I've never personally bought the idea that the health of the entire planet
It’s not the health of the entire planet that’s at stake. It’s the habitability of the inhabited parts of the planet for humans. The earth will be just fine.
Sure, I'd still stand by my statement making that substitution. I don't think the ecosystem humans specifically depend on can be boiled down to a single metric.
We've leaned extremely analytical in modern times but doing so puts us at serious risk of missing the forest for the trees. We have a habit of trying to quantify everything and missing the fact that doing so loses context and greatly increases the risk of over confidence in our ability to understand and intervene with a complex system.
Carbon seems extremely important no doubt, but I've never personally bought the idea that the health of the entire planet can be boiled down to a single, analytical metric. I've also yet to be convinced that, even if it truly is all about carbon, we understand the problem so completely that we know how to intervene precisely without breaking anything else or causing unexpected side effects.
We've seen a noticeable increase in ocean temperatures in the last year or two and I've seen compelling data pointing to it being caused by ultra-low sulfur emissions regulations in marine shipping. People thought they were doing the right thing, they just didn't account for the cooling effects of sulfur in the atmosphere. We could easily do the same with global interventions in the carbon cycle.
I'd much rather see us leaning into a reduction in interventions wholesale. Its much harder to break things when you just stop causing so much damage.