Looking at climate change from an evolutionary perspective make you complacent?

[Tieno]

The more I get into evolution from a big picture, the more you realise that species have come and gone. Evolution has always been triggered by change in the environment, or rather, change in the environment has triggered evolution and change in diversity and species. The more I realise this, the less I seem to care about climate change. It's like "yeah, whatever, this has happened before. We'll just have to adapt and it depends on where the threshold is but we'll get to it eventually".
I'm not advocating exploitation of nature and think that it's ideally better to go back to a more primitive state of living in peace with nature if we can't figure this out.
What I'm trying to say is that in a way I'm not really scared of this climate change, on some level I find it rather exciting.

[Eric P]

it is exciting and it's a shame that it may kill billions of people before we get to the "good" parts.

[Tieno]

it is exciting and it's a shame that it may kill billions of people before we get to the "good" parts.

A shame? We're with way too many people on this earth.

[Eric P]

i do have a kind of empathy for billions of people i have never, nor will i ever meet.

so it's a shame that so many may die.

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

In a few billion years when the Sun will turn to a red giant and destroy Earth, there won't be any climate to change.

[recursivelyenumerable]

that can be applied to absolutely anything, though.  ww2: just a natural, if extraordinary, expression of human behavior patterns that evolved naturally.

[Eric P]

that can be applied to absolutely anything, though.  ww2: just a natural, if extraordinary, expression of human behavior patterns that evolved naturally.

it was exciting and it's a shame that it did kill millions of people before we got to the "good" parts.

[Crushed]

that can be applied to absolutely anything, though.  ww2: just a natural, if extraordinary, expression of human behavior patterns that evolved naturally.

it was exciting and it's a shame that it did kill millions of people before we got to the "good" parts.

what good parts

[brawndolicious]

The problem isn't the number of people.  It's the amount of conveniences that they have.

And your topic doesn't make sense.  This isn't a cycle that every species or even every human civilization goes through.  Most civilizations don't ruin the environment due to greed.

[Eric P]

that can be applied to absolutely anything, though.  ww2: just a natural, if extraordinary, expression of human behavior patterns that evolved naturally.

it was exciting and it's a shame that it did kill millions of people before we got to the "good" parts.

what good parts

The Americanization of Emily

[Eric P]

 This isn't a cycle that every species or even every human civilization goes through.  Most civilizations don't ruin the environment due to greed.

i thought that many parts of africa were barren due to overgrazing of herds thousands of years ago.

though that may be discredited now

looks like it maybe discredited

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/109062679/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Abstract
What is overgrazing? Does it cause soil erosion? The recent debate from the ecological literature is reviewed as background to the debate on overgrazing and soil erosion. This debate stresses the need to view dryland grazing systems as dynamic ecosystems driven more by rainfall events than by livestock numbers. The case for soil erosion is then examined. Two case studies from communal rangelands in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, have cast doubts on the conventional wisdom that overgrazing leads to soil erosion. The first, a study of historical land-use change and erosion in a communal area, showed that the most intense erosion, taking the form of steeply dissected badlands, was associated with cultivated land that had been abandoned and reverted to grazing from the 1960s onwards. Such severe erosion was generally absent from land that had been under grazing since the 1930s. The second study demonstrated that erosion rates from communal grazing lands (overgrazed) were only slightly higher than those from land under optimal grazing, that is grazing at a level considered not to exceed the carrying capacity of the land. These results support the ecologist's contention that communal grazing systems do not necessarily degrade the range condition relative to management systems based on a notional carrying capacity. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[brawndolicious]

i thought that many parts of africa were barren due to overgrazing of herds thousands of years ago.
though that may be discredited now

really?  I'm pretty sure that that's what happened to Mesopotamia with their farming practices but I thought that Africa was still mostly jungles south of the sahara.

[Eric P]

i thought that many parts of africa were barren due to overgrazing of herds thousands of years ago.
though that may be discredited now

really?  I'm pretty sure that that's what happened to Mesopotamia with their farming practices but I thought that Africa was still mostly jungles south of the sahara.

i wasn't specific in my example.  i meant northern africa.

[brawndolicious]

i wasn't specific in my example.  i meant northern africa.

I have absolutely no idea.  I'd guess it took thousands of years with all the sand there is now.  Apparently that sand is very important for soil around the world and gets picked up by winds or whatever so that could have been created by nature somehow.

[Eric P]

i'd agree

that's some huge desert area.

dunno though.  i'm hardly an expert.

[Boogie]

Just because evolution may have been triggered by past changes in the climate does not necessarily imply that future drastic changes to the climate will benefit human evolution.

Human civilization has developed over the past several thousand years because the earth's climate was very conducive to that development.  This situation is not to be taken for granted as a guarantee in perpetuity.

It is entirely possible that drastic climate change could completely fuck up the potential for any advanced human civilization to thrive in the future.