My partner’s family from Philippines grew up in a home without appliances like refrigerators, like many, many people in developing countries.

So while now they have every modern convenience, old habits die hard and stomachs seem to adapt to even the most adverse conditions of foodstuffs.

Not mine. I love their cooking but can only eat food that I’ve seen opened or cooked in front of me. They will legitimately leave meat dishes out on the table for two days or more and then simply “reheat” and consider it good to serve. The cabinets are full of things like mayo, cheese dips, opened gravies and open bottles of fruit juice.

I have had some of the very worst food poisoning in my life from inadvertently eating something there like chicken salad that I thought was fresh, but made with hard-boiled eggs that had been sitting on a counter in summer heat for several days that a “friend” brought over so they “wouldn’t waste.”

Of course I’m the only one that gets sick, so I’m the “special one” that everyone now thinks has some terminal illness and treats me like a hospice patient.

I am happy to have raised the bar a little for online science discussion, it’s very tempting and easy to rip someone’s throat out if you don’t understand what they’re trying to communicate, and sadly I think that weird dopamine hit of attacking a stranger has become a worldwide addiction reaching pandemic proportions. But we’re really shooting all ourselves in the foot by making a world where we can’t talk to strangers. People stay strangers that way and strangers are less inclined to help each other, and in the coming decades… we will really, really need each other.

That all said, I am passionate about science with decades of study, and lately, specifically, geology and climate… I highly recommend some youtube channels like https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryoftheEarth or https://www.youtube.com/@myroncook for some starting points that are accessible and fascinating looks at the long, intense, unimaginable history of our planet, or another way of looking at it, the story of how rocks became something that can question where they came from.

My only real claim is that we don’t know shit.

This is partially true. But I want to stress partially.

We do have very robust models of climate, of exchange cycles, of how chemicals and atmospheres and heat and cold and life all interplay, if we didn’t have these models we wouldn’t be aware of the impending danger and we would be saying “wow this hot spell sure is lasting” so let’s give science some credit here.

And that’s MY only position and reason for pushback. There STILL can be things done to avert the worst-case models, it’s going to be bad but it could also be a lot worse if no action is taken, and more likely than not, our species is going to slide through this one like Indiana Jones grabbing his hat behind the lowering stone block, but it’s not going to be without a lot of suffering and sorrow and loss of life.

But if this science denial/doubting continues, we might not gain enough traction and momentum in our education and outreach efforts to ensure actions are taken to reduce the amount of harm coming. The harm coming is going to be worse than anything we have imagined in Humanity’s long history, but we CAN get through it, we may even fix it if enough people can start working together. Maybe a few more degrees and people’s discomfort will finally drive our species to avert course at the last second like we tend to do a lot.

But science denial has been an agent of chaos that has put us here to begin with. I don’t like using science to predict the near future and then abandoning it when we need to make educated speculation on what can and cannot happen. If you truly believe that this trend is going to lead to iron boiling on Earth’s surface, that’s fine and you can believe that and it’s not a hill worth a fight much less a death, I’m just telling you that’s not what’s going to happen. Life will survive us.

The “exponential” heating curve you’re seeing on the graphs is a measurement of rates of change, NOT a measurement of maximum possible heat indexes or a prediction of long-term climate models, because Earth’s climate is complicated, it tends to change itself over long periods of time.

The most extreme instance we can see in the fossil/geological record was the Permian Extinction, where Earth lost 96% of all life, this was due to the Earth basically disemboweling itself across what’s now Russia and Siberia. This was a lake of fire that covered a sizable portion of Earth and gases and ash that plunged the Earth into a runaway greenhouse with deadly acid oceans and then eventually back to frozen snowball as the greenhouse gases began to stabilize (most greenhouse gases don’t have geologically long lifespans unless some process is replenishing them like Venus’s volcanic activity, even Carbon will eventually react or bond with things and over vast stretches of time be pulled back into the Earth from a variety of biological and abiotic processes.)

It’s also speculated that life was already thriving while Earth was undergoing the Late Heavy Bombardment, a period of around a billion years where Earth was just getting pummeled by everything from space debris to small planetoids, this was the period of time that saw the formation of the landscape of the Moon, and Earth didn’t look too different, with seas of molten lava and craters everywhere.

While sure it’s possible for a runaway greenhouse to create sterilizing conditions, there is just no scenario where we can see that as an outcome from human activity based on what we know.

And speculation does have its limits, we’re just all trying to be smart here and show we understand those limits. Just because there are gaps in our knowledge, we don’t need to summon Russel’s Teapot.

Well, you are correct that Earth’s nuclear weapons are literally a poofing fart compared to the energy we could potentially get from the sun, and we do have precedent for the sun creating extremely hostile conditions due to greenhouse gasses in one of our nearest neighbors, Venus.

But we need to examine what we’re talking about here specifically. I am not a geophysicist so I don’t have the numbers, but in order for your “concern” to have teeth you would need to show that there’s anything we can do here and no or even in the next thousand years that could change the nature of Earth’s atmosphere enough to replicate the kinds of conditions that created Venus’s current conditions.

And not only that, you need to compare what we could possibly do, even intentionally, that would come remotely close to some of the other greenhouse heating events that we’ve experienced in the past, and we’ve had some real doozies. We’ve had Earth heat up to scorching conditions from the planet turning inside-out several times, we’ve had Earth become a giant ice-ball. We’ve had impacts in the distant past that make the Chicxulub impactor look like a bottle-rocket misfire. And still, Earth regained equilibrium enough to support life. Over the last 4.5 billion years or so it doesn’t appear we’ve experienced anything that turned Earth’s surface and subsurface hostile to all forms of life, so it’s pretty safe to say that unless we start deliberately steering planetoids into our crust, which isn’t out of the question knowing our warlike ways, we’re probably not going to unintentionally create Venus-like conditions on Earth.

And of course we have to address the fact that we’re not even sure if Venus is sterile, there are increasing signs of bacterial life in the atmosphere so it’s quite possible that once life gets a foothold it may be incredibly hard to dislodge.

This isn’t an argument against the serious threat that we pose to the ecosystem, or to say that we’re not in extreme danger of ruining the current biosphere of the planet, we are in fact in the middle of a human-made mass-extinction. It’s not good. Our worst-case scenario sees a planet completely devoid of ice, no clouds, an atmosphere that consists of a hot haze that heat can’t escape from for thousands of years and an ecosystem collapse killing off most land animals. But it won’t be the end of life. Just another setback.

This is important to make clear because truth is important, speculation is not helpful when it points out unlikely extremes, it gives ammunition to deniers when you proclaim factually improbable extremes. Things are absolutely going to get bad, but there’s no reason at all to hype it to an extreme or you shoot yourself and your cause in the face.

Explain.

We cannot claim that our damage to this planet will reverse before that limit is reached. It might, but we have no basis to say it will.

I just got to this part and that’s a resounding no, even if we dedicated all our resources to it, we couldn’t literally sterilize Earth. I can’t even think of a cosmological event in the next million years that would have this effect.

Earth will be just fine. We will likely be gone by then, but there will be life and it will do just fine. You are seriously lacking knowledge and sense of scale of Earth and the ecosystem and life on a broad scale. Go back to start and try again.

Eh, a million years is a blink in geological history, we have no record in the long, long, long stretch of time before us of earth no longer being able to sustain life, as evident by our being here typing comments on the internet, so it would be WILDLY surprising if this all came to an end right now. (The next million years is “right now” in geological time.)

In about 70 million years we might be ready to talk issues with the carbon cycle, but for the next geological “hour” we’ll likely be facing the same issues as always. Short of a nearby supernova or other event that will cook Earth below the crust, or a collision with a small planetoid, I can’t think of anything that will sterilize Earth anytime soon.

It seems so obviously counterproductive that the only thing I can think is that they’re enjoying it, like it’s a kink to get into other people’s sex lives and tell them what they should and should not do.

No, seriously. If you spend time in the conservative, christian communities like where I grew up, you hear these people just spend night and fucking day thinking about “sin” and the ways that nasty, dirty, eeeeevil sinners like to sin and all the details about what manner of sin they partake in… and so on.

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Next thing you’re going to tell us is that we SHOULDN’T become absolutely obsessed with the personal habits and sex lives of other people whom I will never meet nor be involved with in any way! Preposterous!

The best story I ever heard about this was a single dad who had to take his teenage daughter to the doctor because she got an infection from inserting a toothbrush handle or something else that wasn’t sanitary, and instead of giving her ANY kind of scolding or negative judgement, he was very loving and helped her laugh it off, and then he just left on her pillow a $100 gift card to Adam & Eve or some other large, commercial, adult site that lets you buy gift cards.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to even suggest an age here, but I think as a parent you will know when it’s time to have the talk/leave the card.

I wish we could make a population with even the basic reading comprehension to understand these facts and then people might start taking advantage of our most powerful tool, democratic voting, to make real changes to how wealth is distributed.

But to this day when you suggest such a thing, people will default to images in their mind of everyone being forced to wear grey jumpsuits and stand in line for hours for a potato. We have the technological and productive means now to socialize many elements of our lives that would give everyone access to more resources and benefits and lower poverty and needless suffering, which helps everyone, even those already privileged.

But the capitalist narrative will push back on these ideas to its last, dying gasp, even as the world starts to burn and people lose everything, we will still see people arguing for “job creators” and how the wealthy are responsible for all our comforts, and that the socialist alternative will mean people will never own anything… as capitalism takes people’s ownership of everything.

Pretty sure they are germanic in origin, but I would have to double check.

Originally, in the middle ages miners experienced toxic gasses and other weird effects while mining iron, such as ore exploding when smelting. They attributed some of the problems to mischievous creatures they would call Kobolds hiding in the mines.

It was eventually discovered that these problems were caused by another whole element creating impurities in the ore, when separated and identified, it came to be known as Cobalt.

Our obsession with owning land and borders will be the death of us all.

Like, without hyperbole, if we all die, it will be because of our attachment to the concept of “owning land” and having to draw imaginary lines across ground and rock and water to signify who owns what.

But when you step back and really think about it, it makes zero sense if you actually care about an equitable world where people aren’t hurting each other. It makes zero sense from a cosmic perspective, as this is a rock flying around a star, it has been here longer than us and will outlast us to a degree that our presence here, no matter what we do, will be a brief blip in cosmic time. We have no legacy, no real connection to the dirt below us other than how it gave us life. And yet claim ownership over it?

It makes no sense from a material perspective either, all borders do is reduce the flow of goods and services, creates artificial limits on who can go where creating “pressure zones” that eventually explode over and become migration disasters, and of course the people who pretend to rule these patches of dirt and rock and water and will send millions of people to death to preserve this roleplay. And we all cheer and defend this concept with all our heart.

Make it make sense.

Do you think people become more conservative with age or is it society becoming more progressive and leaving them behind?

I am getting up there in years and seeing this play out over and over.

I think every generation wants to be more progressive than the last, but we tend to carry baggage of fear and insecurity through the generations. Or more specifically, older people tend to gain the political and monetary capital needed to affect policy and shape our societal outlook and attitude. They will always be more conservative than the younger generation who will want more freedoms and personal rights, inherently, and as the ruling class will clash with newer sensibilities, over and over.

What we’re asking here, is the conservatism reflected in our elders and leadership now broadly more harmful or helpful? Are we out of the touch or is it the kids who are wrong?

I think it’s a mix but mostly it’s not our real problem. Our real problem is that no matter what our age, we have greatly misunderstood how our own existence works. Most people have been taught that they have brains designed to exercise logic and reason and that brains are the best thing ever if you use them and make them smart.

No, our brains are not logical tools. We are not a rational species. There was no “age of enlightenment.” It’s all a hoax. Our brains are tools designed to write a story to explain how you feel. And that’s it. It doesn’t even have to make sense. When we all learn how our brains actually work we will collectively make better decisions, have more compassion for each other, and likely sink into even deeper despair as we all start to realize we have no free will.

We should all be learning that we’re all children. Some of us, over time, gain a lot more baggage and issues, but that shit just layers right on top of the “child” parts so we’re all just basically children with complex problems.

The brain doesn’t “prune” itself. The brain you had when you were 12, you have that same damn brain. It doesn’t change. Stuff just gets added to it.

Almost anyone with an irrational political stance betrays their youth.

Political ideology has always captivated the passions of youth, but isn’t successfully implemented or even internalized except by people with age and experience and emotional regulation.

Bears can be trained to drive cars and communicate through various means, it’s thought they may be as smart as great apes like gorillas. This is why they were a choice circus animal for a long time.

Yes, this should be terrifying information.

But we’re fine with the gun and murder?

Understand the way in which people commonly use iconic media figures in artistic, subversive ways to parody and highlight social issues. It’s a human thing, humans do it.

You gotta try to fit in y’know.

The hot tl;dr of this that is going to get you a lot of angry boys sending you incoherent diatribes is that we haven’t decided as a species that we will stop sexualizing youth.

Yes there are biological imperatives for the sexually aggressive sex to seek out mates that are young, healthy and capable of producing offspring before they become too old to reproduce. That’s all a thing that’s real, but it’s as far distant in our past as most other ancient instincts that we’ve put to rest. We just keep this one alive because we want it to continue broadly. The whole notion of older men predating and sexualizing youthful appearances or “innocence” as standards of femininity is absolutely something that if we all decided together was no longer acceptable, it would end tomorrow. (Or realistically in one generation.) This is not a more natural part of us than anything else we choose to follow or not, because we are well above using any natural response system as an excuse to allow dangerous social norms to continue.

The reason I say this is because there are a lot of men who will secretly or overtly hold the position that since we have biological urges, then it must be natural and acceptable. Meanwhile, ya’ll fuckers completely ignore the thousand other biological drives and standards that we’ve abolished because they’re unproductive, hurt people or just have gone out of style.

For example: body odor. Do you really think we were using soap and perfume when we were packed together in huts and caves for the last thousand millennia? You are genetically identical to the people who used to bury their faces in each other’s armpits to identify each other in the dark, but the thought makes you gag now because you were socialized to feel repulsion at this. (Fetishes aside.) We can socialize ourselves to believe and internalize almost anything, we are far, far beyond the forces of natural selection and are now choosing our evolutionary path. Wouldn’t it be nice if we chose good paths that respected others and protected children.