Roman Dial in the news

Just to summarize:

Global warming is causing permafrost to melt.  Bacteria create acid which leaches metals out of rocks and into the stream.  That turns the river orange and kills the fish.  The Salmon River had lots of salmon in it but now it doesn’t.

Maybe after the permafrost melts the river will be able to clean itself up, which could take decades.

The same thing happens at abandoned mines where miners expose rocks that are exposed to oxygen which leaches sulfur creating sulfuric acid which pollutes everything.

Not to worry… after the human species goes extinct, the plant will heal itself… and some other species will be the apex…

I flew from the Noatak River back to Kotzebue last summer and saw some of this from the air. It’s brutal to see in person and I fear it will only get worse……

I’ve never been to Alaska, but I’ve seen the Red Moshannon where the mine runoff causes the problem.  It’s really a vivid marker of pollution.

This is what I’m talking about, don’t exaggerate climate change:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/31/magazine/hannah-richie-interview.html

“That’s the point of the name Extinction Rebellion. a British-founded environmental-activist group. Its name clearly suggests that humans face an existential risk, but the group’s materials connect the word “extinction” to “the Anthropocene Extinction,” also known as the sixth mass extinction: the current wave of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate vast numbers of living species this century.

There’s an activist group in Germany called Last Generation. I’m not saying that everyone is telling their kids that they’re going to die from climate change, but there are strong activist groups where that is a core message. You can communicate that a problem is urgent without saying that we’re all going to die from it. How is a 12- or 14-year-old supposed to understand that? The reality is bad enough; we don’t need to overblow it.

This rhetoric does work for some demographics and does inspire them into action. But there’s a large demographic where it has the opposite effect. They do not like this overblown message. They don’t trust these messages. It does a detriment to people trusting the scientist when these messages get the headlines.

There are people on the far end of the spectrum, close to deniers — they love these headlines. They can weaponize this and say, “Look how ridiculous these people are.” Then there’s a big middle where I think people are lukewarm on the issue, but these overblown messages probably push them more toward the skeptical end than the action end.”

IMO, talking about increasing extinctions due to climate change is a totally legitimate topic of conversation. It’s not an exaggeration, and not the same as telling children that they will die from climate change. Some people do care about species other than Homo sapiens, so I think it’s good to talk about it.

I do think that climate change will cause a lot of human suffering, but not extinction.

Yeah, definitely.