Forests and carbon capture

[Labster]

Children only learn what "hot" means after they touch the pretty red flower and it burns them, so perhaps whatever civilisation emerges afterward will have learned to take fucking care of their habitat... and if not, we'll have proven we collectively aren't worthy of survival.

On learning from disasters: someone mentioned Mt. St. Helens earlier in the thread, and people not leaving.

But lets move a bit backwards, to Vesuvius' eruption in 79.  It erupted for three days straight, covering the town in a rain of pumice rock.  It turns out that this is not so harmful to human because the rocks are mostly air, and can be defeated with technologies like a basic pillow.  But, it piles up.  If you have a flat-top roof, then if enough of it piles up, it can collapse a building like snow does.  About one-third of the Pompeii dead were killed by this.  The remainder were killed 3 days later, when hydrostatic balance in the volcanic cloud collapsed when the eruption subsided -- and everyone was suffocated by ash if indoors, or flash-cooked outdoors if running.  A lot of people had plenty of chance to evacuate, but chose to ride it out and protect their homes.  These people all died.

So what did we learn from this, as a people?  Well, some people still try to live near an volcanic eruption, and almost all of the roofs in modern Naples are flat.

King Edward I passed a law banning the burning of coal in London, way back in 1272, because of the harm to people.  Eventually, people started burning more and more coal for the factories and power plants in England.  In 1952, the pollution got so bad that the Great Smog killed over ten thousand people around London.  And here we have people arguing that there's no reason to stop burning coal, because climate science is made up.  But even if it is, coal pollution kills humans.

I don't know that any people "after the disaster" will do any better than we do.  Humans have serious reasoning defects.  We have trouble understanding time scales longer than a year, and why we'd need to plan around that. Any event we did not personally witness, we tend to not know about, or think it was irrelevant to our lives.  It can't be coincidence that we've had an era of massive deregulation and financial industry excess, followed by a long economic downturn, followed by a rise in populism.  The people who actually remember what happened last time are too few, so we're repeating the mistakes of three generations ago.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.