What difference does that make? Why does the mode of the catastrophe matter? The examples I cited actually killed half the population at the time. Nothing since has even come close.
Is that a bad thing? All other animals have population collapses from time to time and it redresses the balance. I don't see it as particularly catastrophic.
Of course, now this reduces to how we define catastrophe, and we obviously have a difference. But I see a halving of the human population hardly a catastrophe at all, whereas the permanent extinction of species a much worse thing.
Right, the thing you're currently freaked out about is ecological damage. Got it.
And it's worse than it's ever been. Before, it's not like we were pumping sulphur into the air until it rained acid, or lead from gasoline into the air where everybody breathed it, or CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer, or pumping so much pollution into rivers that they literally caught fire. No, this is the worst, right now.
/s
Look, there are serious environmental things going on. Plastic particulates. Forever chemicals. Estrogenoids. CO2. There's a lot that's real, serious, and is having real, damaging effects. I don't want to minimize that.
At the same time, you seem to be hyper-fixated on one thing. You seem to be an example of what the article is talking about.
This is already starting to get grayed out as of 13 minutes from being posted (which hopefully reverses later), but Jesus man, it really makes me wonder where people's sense of perspective comes from. We had an ozone hole growing past the entire continent of Antarctica. We were at best a decade from driving all whales extinct. When I was a kid in Los Angeles, around 5-10% of an average year we were banned from playing outside and had recess canceled because the air quality made it dangerous to breathe. Eastern Canada was effectively unfishable and industries and food stuffs were collapsing because of acid rain from the American rust belt.
I don't doubt there is still a lot of ecological damage being done and at least some of it is cumulative, getting worse with time even if what we're doing year-on-year gets better, but a lot of it is not. We wantonly destroyed common supplies of air and water 40+ years ago in ways you almost never see any more and somehow this gets totally ignored.
