What We Are Actually Doing to the Living World

The physics doesn't care what we believe about it

Start with the part that isn't actually in dispute among the people who study it, however much it's disputed everywhere else. The planet's average surface temperature has risen a little over 1.1°C above the pre-industrial baseline, and it did that in roughly a century and a half — a geological eyeblink for a change that size.

The mechanism is not exotic: carbon dioxide and a handful of other gases let sunlight in and slow heat from leaving, we have added about 50% more CO₂ to the atmosphere than existed before we started burning fossil fuels at scale, and the atmosphere has responded exactly the way basic radiative physics said it would. None of this required a model to predict after the fact. Svante Arrhenius calculated the rough shape of the effect in 1896, using pencil and paper, decades before anyone had a reason to be politically invested in the answer.

What's changed since Arrhenius isn't the physics, it's the stakes. We're now watching the predicted consequences arrive on schedule: ocean heat content climbing year over year without pause, glacial and polar ice mass declining on every continent that has any, sea level rising at a rate that has itself been accelerating rather than holding steady, and a measurable increase in the frequency of the kind of heat extremes that used to be once-a-century events.

None of any single one of these, in isolation, proves anything — weather is noisy, and any one hot summer or one heavy flood season can always be waved off as an outlier. What can't be waved off is the pattern holding across every independent line of measurement, on every continent, for fifty consecutive years. At some point "it could still be noise" stops being a scientifically serious position and starts being a preference dressed up as a doubt.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not claiming here, because this is exactly the kind of topic where imprecision gets mistaken for either alarmism or denial depending on which direction you round. I am not claiming every specific model projection will land exactly on target, or that scientists have never revised an estimate, or that uncertainty about the tail-risk scenarios has vanished — it hasn't, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.

What I am claiming is narrower and much harder to escape: the core mechanism is confirmed physics, the core trend is confirmed measurement, and the range of remaining uncertainty is about how bad and how fast, not about whether.

The extinction most people aren't looking at

Global warming gets the headlines. The other half of what we're doing to the planet gets a fraction of the attention despite arguably being the more irreversible half, because a degree of warming can in principle be reversed on some multi-century timescale — a species that goes extinct is gone on a timescale of forever.

Biologists increasingly describe the current rate of species loss as comparable in scale, though different in mechanism, to the five great mass extinctions in the fossil record — the last of which ended the dinosaurs. Current extinction rates are estimated at somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times the background rate that prevailed before humans became the dominant force reshaping the biosphere. We are, on the timescales that matter to evolution, doing in centuries what previously took an asteroid.

It's worth separating this into two categories, because they call for different kinds of honesty and different kinds of policy response.

The conscious extinction. Some of what we're doing to other species is a direct, intended, first-order consequence of choices made with full knowledge of the tradeoff. Clearing a forest for cropland is not an accident — someone decided the timber and the farmland were worth more than the habitat, and in a narrow accounting sense, for that specific actor, they usually were.

Industrial-scale fishing that outpaces a stock's ability to reproduce is not a mystery either; the people running the boats generally know the stock is declining, they are simply betting they can extract value faster than someone else does, or before regulation catches up, or before the fishery collapses on someone else's watch instead of their own. Overharvesting, habitat conversion for agriculture, and direct exploitation of wildlife account for the majority of documented extinctions and near-extinctions to date.

These are not mysteries of unintended consequence. They are ordinary economic decisions made by people who understood roughly what they were trading away, made rational by the fact that the cost of the tradeoff fell on everyone except the person making the decision.

The unconscious extinction. The other half is stranger and, in its way, more unsettling, because nobody chose it and almost nobody can see it happening in real time. Insect populations have declined by an estimated 45% globally over four decades — a number so large that if it were a single charismatic species, it would be the most-covered story in the world, but because it's insects, spread across thousands of species most people can't name, it registers as background noise.

Ocean acidification, driven by the ocean absorbing roughly a quarter of the CO₂ we emit, is quietly undermining the ability of shellfish, corals, and the plankton at the base of the entire marine food web to build the calcium structures they depend on — an effect no individual actor caused on purpose and no individual actor can unilaterally undo. Climate-driven range shifts are pushing species toward the poles and up mountainsides faster than many can disperse, stranding slow-moving or habitat-specialist species with nowhere left to go once they run out of altitude or latitude.

Nobody sat in a room and decided to acidify the ocean or shift the isotherms. It happened as the accumulated, undirected byproduct of billions of individually reasonable-seeming decisions, none of which priced in what they were doing to a coral reef or a beetle population on the other side of the planet.

The Social Liberty view: this is a pricing failure, not a morality play

Here is where I think both the standard environmentalist framing and the standard skeptical framing go wrong, in mirror-image ways. The environmentalist framing often wants this to be a story about greed or moral failure — as if the fisherman overharvesting a collapsing stock, or the family clearing land to feed itself, is simply a worse person than the rest of us, rather than a rational actor responding to a cost structure that externalizes almost the entire true cost of the choice onto people who aren't in the room.

The skeptical framing, meanwhile, often wants this to be a story about uncertainty or overreach — as if the appropriate response to a diffuse, slow-moving, genuinely difficult-to-perceive harm is to simply wait for more certainty before acting, conveniently deferring any cost onto a future in which the person deferring it won't be the one paying.

Both of these framings share the same error: they're arguing about character and belief when the actual mechanism is neither. What connects the conscious and unconscious halves of this crisis is that in both cases, the person making the decision does not bear the full cost of the decision. The fisherman doesn't pay for the collapsed fishery — the next generation of fishermen does. The commuter doesn't pay for a ton of CO₂ — everyone alive in 2100 does, divided into shares too small for any one of them to trace back to any one tailpipe.

This is not a mystery requiring a moral awakening. It is the textbook description of an externality, and it has a textbook-adjacent family of remedies: don't ask people to be better, change what the price tag says.

This is, not coincidentally, the same argument this site has made about land. A parcel of land's value doesn't come from what its owner did to it — it comes from the surrounding community, the ecosystem services it either provides or fails to provide, the fact that other people and other species have a stake in what happens on it. An owner who degrades ecologically valuable land is, in miniature, doing exactly what the overharvesting fisherman is doing at larger scale: capturing a private benefit while quietly billing the cost to everyone else, including everyone who hasn't been born yet.

The honest response to both the conscious and the unconscious versions of ecological destruction is not a finger-wagging campaign asking people to want less for themselves. It's making sure the price of an action actually reflects what that action costs everyone else — visibly, predictably, and in a way that doesn't require anyone to have first become a better person. What that looks like in practice, and whether it can actually be built without becoming its own kind of mess, is worth its own essay — and there's a live, specific proposal worth taking seriously on exactly that question, which is where I want to go next.

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Sources: NASA: Global Climate Change — Vital Signs of the Planet; IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis; NOAA: Climate Change: Global Temperature; WWF: Living Planet Report; Sánchez-Bayo & Wyckhuys, "Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers," Biological Conservation 2019; Ceballos, Ehrlich & Dirzo, "Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction," PNAS 2017; NOAA Ocean Acidification Program.