Earth lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF

[pjclarke]

Its a very easy, but subjective question. What's your answer, Oh Optimist? How many degrees Celsius rise in the global average surface temperature would qualify as 'catastophic' in your book?

The term 'CAGW' was coined as a pretty transparent way of raising the bar/framing the debate, some scientists do use 'catastophic' it as a way of describing the consequences of the extreme end of the possible scenarios, but it has no place in the literature and does not appear, for example, in the IPCC reports.

As William Connolley said, in the linked article, 'if you can’t imagine anything between “catastrophic” and “nothing to worry about” then you’re not thinking.

HTH.

[NotAllThere]

... We need to reach a point where human numbers begin to plummet so that the rest of the ecosystem can redress the imbalance.

You could take yourself out of the equation - that'd help.

The trouble with WWF and like-"minded" people is that they think so parochially and short-term. Sooner or later the Earth is going to get hit by a big asteroid, or be irradiated by a nearby supernova, or some such event. Even if that doesn't happen, in 4 billion years, the sun will turn into a red giant.

The only way all the fluffy bunnies are going to survive is if an intelligent species is around to head off the disaster, or in some other way mitigate it. One way is to leave the Earth and spread around the universe a bit. Unfortunately, initially that's going to require exploitation of the Earth's resources. So, we sacrifice 50% of the wildlife in order to prevent the extinction of 100%. Those mad anti-environment ravagers of the earth are actually doing us all a favour.