Is Mark Lynas, the author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, downgrading global warming in his hiearchy of environmental concerns? In a recent post, he writes that
biodiversity may well qualify as a more important planetary boundary even than climate change itself.
By way of reminder, the "planetary boundary" concept was laid out in this 2009 Nature essay, and nicely translated into laymen terms by Carl Zimmer, who wrote in Yale Environment 360:
They [scientists] propose that humans must keep the planet in what they call a "safe operating space," inside of which we can thrive. If we push past the boundaries of that space "” by wiping out biodiversity, for example, or diverting too much of the world's freshwater "” we risk catastrophe.
It's a controversial concept, but also little discussed, because global warming hogs all the headlines. Jon Foley lamented this one-track mindset here:
In ...
