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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, there is no law of the universe that says that change will only occur at a survivable rate. Thousands of species are already going extinct every year, and we're still burning just as many fossil fuels as what got us into this mess. We don't have thousands of years to wait for animals to adapt, we have mere decades.

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Correct, there's no law of the universe that says change will occur a survivable rate. Species have been going extinct long before humans. We should help those species who environments we damage and we should mitigate or nullify the damage in the first place, but we should not play God.

That struck me as mostly reasonable until the 'playing god' bit which upended everything. For one, that term almost never means the same thing to any two people. For another, from the context up to this point you seem to have unrealistic assumptions that this is all part of a broader cosmic give and take that balances itself, or stands over us as an indecipherable mystery.

I think that temptation to stand in awe before a cosmic mystery is a common one and, in many cases a laudable one. In this case, that temptation is getting in the way of some very-knowable facts which are spelling out doom. "Not playing god" in this context seems to amount to standing by as an extinction event unfolds, and I don't think the desire to get lost in existential ditherings is an acceptable reason to stand by and let that happen.

We are playing God now by artificially and dramatically altering Earth’s set point.

How much are we altering it over coming out of the last ice age and the natural effects of volcanos and vents?

That is still unknown and constantly shifting in predictions.

Yes we should minimize our effects on the environment as much as possible, and we are doing a lot better in that goal, but we still need to live.

I wouldn't say living our lives is playing God.

Living life as a highly technologically advanced species that uses systems to dominate the plant for resource extraction to the detriment of countless other species with the awareness to know better is playing god, albeit rather poorly. .

> How much are we altering it over coming out of the last ice age and the natural CO2 effects of volcanos? That is still unknown and constantly shifting in predictions.

No, it's not an unknown. Please stop with this cowardly delusion. Human activity is changing the Earth's climate at unbelievable rates compared to the historical norm. XKCD for scale: https://xkcd.com/1732/

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