Massive die-offs have happened many times before in the history of the planet, it’s a natural cycle of life.

And it’s not all gloom and doom, there are lots of flora and fauna that are strong enough to thrive along with man. Such as pigeons, rats, deer, catfish, cockroaches, poison ivy, and crabgrass. Over time, the tough ones of these species will evolve to be even stronger. Perhaps these bio-activists should put their energies into helping the species that have a decent chance of survival with man.

1 The left column is the “Market Price of Timer (sic).” If this graph conveys important information, why is one of its most important labels misspelled?

2 The right column is composed of sections which may be the costs of deforestation.

2.1 How are the cost values arrived at? Is there a subjective component?

2.2 What are the causal links, e.g. how does deforestation cause decreased precipitation?

2.3 Are the cost estimates independent, e.g. is the cost given to desertification independent of reduced precipitation?

2.3.1 If not, how are they kept distinct, how is double counting kept out of the calculations?

2.4 Are the relations between the price of a unit of timber and the environmental costs linear, or do they change with time?

2.5 Is this the right graph at all, does it show anything that’s true, or is it just a scary drawing with one bar measuring bad things on an arbitrary scale which happens to be longer than the other bar measuring good things, on an equally arbitrary scale?

This is not to say that the question that the graph tries to answer isn’t an important question, which we need an answer to: I just don’t see that the graph produces a meaningful answer as it stands. It needs an awful lot of supporting context, and if the graph can’t stand on its own without the context, then it doesn’t serve as the shorthand its authors want for it.

Massive die-offs have happened many times before in the history of the planet, it’s a natural cycle of life.

Massive die-offs happen from time to time, but make the world a worse place for millions of years to come. Floods are natural, too, but it’s still stupid to let them destroy your house.

Evolution says that strong species survive, but that doesn’t mean what you think. Taking sensible precautions and helping other species may well become part of our strength.

Mankind is by far the strongest species ever to evolve…

Oh, and this is not close to true. Evolutionary strength is not about defeating other creatures, it’s about surviving and spreading. And while humans are pretty good at those, there are lots of things that are much better.

I even saw a job posting that they wanted a video editor (which is one of my jobs), which when I inquired they apparently want someone to take videos from other people off the internet, crop out any of their watermarks and put in icanhaz’s own crappy watermarks.

Ben Huh is the new Ebaums. I.E. he’s a huge douche.

From the report, what I do know is that it was prepared by a Mark Trevitt at Trucost. A brief description on that consulting company’s methodology can be found here. Whether the data on the graph is robust or not is unclear, but in the TEEB report, the phrase, “These are rough estimates” is used.

Still, I think the graph makes you think of things you might not normally think about. More importantly, maybe it makes business folks think of things they don’t normally think about.