By Gaius Pubius, a professional writer living on the West Coast. Follow him on Twitter @Gaius_Publius. Cross posted from AmericaBlog
As you may know, we’ve restarted our climate crisis writing here at La Maison, beginning with this piece, a global warming picture “from 10,000 feet”:
The climate crisis in three easy charts
There we took the long view and noticed that the big temperature spike in the early days of the Cambrian, some 540 million years ago when life on earth was exploding in number and diversity of species, is a match for the temperature spike we could very well see in 2100 under the “do nothing” carbon scenario. The Cambrian temperature spikes reached 7°C (12.5°F) above pre-industrial (pre-1800) norms, which is also where we could be headed if we don’t stop.
We also saw that the entire period of time from the Cambrian (again, about 540 million years ago) until now is divided into just three geologic eras, or major divisions …
The Paleozoic Era — the era of life before the Age of Dinosaurs, 540–250 million years ago
The Mesozoic Era — the Age of Dinosaurs, 250–65 million years ago
The Cenozoic Era — the Age of Mammals, which we’re now in
… and that each of the first two eras ended in a major mass extinction event. Will a mass extinction end the Cenozoic Era, the Age of Mammals? If we hit a warm enough temperature, yes. This piece explains why and looks at the broad consequences for man under a couple of warming scenarios.
What Does “Major Mass Extinction” Mean?
In order to discuss global warming and mass extinction, we need to look at mass extinctions in general to get a sense of the scale of these events and their effect.
Consider again the chart of extinctions since the Cambrian, 540 million years ago. (This chart was presented in slightly different form here.) The labels across the top — “Cm” and so on — are geologic “periods”. For your convenience I’ve added the larger divisions, the three geologic eras as well, and indicated where the current geologic period, the Quarternary, fits in.
“Extinction intensity” on the Y axis measures only marine extinctions. That’s for apples-to-apples comparison across the chart. Land plants evolved roughly 475 million years ago, and amphibians roughly 375 million years ago. “Extinction intensity” doesn’t measure all species extinct, just countable ones based on the fossil record, but it’s still an excellent measure for showing the relative scale of these disasters.
As you can see, only a handful of mass extinctions grew to real size. The biggest one by far is between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras — at the Permian-Triassic boundary (“P” and “Tr” above). That extinction is called the Great Dying, since over 90% of all marine species and 70% of land vertebrate species died out. It not only ended the Permian, it ended the whole Paleozoic Era.
There’s another major extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (“K” and “Pg” above) in which half of all species went extinct. That extinction ended the Mesozoic era, the Age of Dinosaurs.
Look at the chart again and locate the most recent extinction, the one that ended the dinosaurs. That spike killed off 50% of all species. There aren’t many spikes of that intensity on the chart. If James Hansen is right (see below), we’re about to create another one, a 25–50% species-extinction event. Will it end the so-called Age of Mammals? That depends on the effect of temperature on extinctions, and also the temperature the earth finally heats to before warming levels off.
Let’s start with temperature and extinctions.
What Temperature Increase Will Trigger the Next Mass Extinction?
This is a key question — what warming increase will trigger an extinction of the scale of those on the chart?
We know that global warming will cause some crises, since the little warming we’ve experienced so far (0.8°C or so) is already a problem. But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading scientific organization studying this phenomenon, this is only the beginning. What’s the temperature we should stop at if we don’t want to cause another world-class extinction?
We also want to know the effect of these increased temperatures on man. As we showed in this post, the transition of homo sapiens from 200,000 years of hunter-gatherer life to what we call “civilization,” which occurred 12,000 years ago, coincides exactly with the stabilization of global temperature to its current narrow range.
To see that dramatically, look at the chart below. I presented an unmodified version here; the version below has been enhanced with names of relevant geologic eras and periods, and also information about the appearance of human species, including our own. (To see this chart full size, click the image. To see the full-size unmodified original, click here; it’s large and interesting.)
First at the left, notice the large orange temperature spikes. The biggest one, at the extreme left, reaches 7°C (or 12.5°F) above the Y axis zero mark, the post-civilization, pre-industrial “norm.”
Then look almost all the way to the right, at the 12,000-years-ago mark. That’s the start of the Holocene, “today” in geologic time. In the Holocene, Earth comes out of its last ice age and global temperatures stabilize, going from about 1°C below the pre-industrial norm to almost flat, holding roughly in the range ±0.5°C. (To zoom in on just the Holocene temperatures, from 12,000 years ago until now, click here. The black line in both charts, this one and the Holocene chart, shows the average of eight regional temperature records.)
The flattening of global temperature in the last 12,000 years is remarkable. It also coincides exactly with civilized man, man emerging from hunter-gatherer status. It would be nice to keep the earth in that range, right?
Which brings us to James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and a lead American researcher in this field. He’s been working on the problems of global warming and climate crisis since the 1980s (our discussion of Hansen’s earlier work is here.)
Hansen recently published a paper called Perceptions of Climate Change: The New Climate Dice (pdf), then authored several op-ed columns based on its conclusions. He has the temperature number we’re looking for, the global warming increase that leads to a sizable mass extinction event. In his conclusion, he says (my emphasis and paragraphing):
Although species migrate to stay within climate zones in which they can survive, continued climate shift at the rate of the past three decades is expected to take an enormous toll on planetary life.
If global warming approaches 3°C by the end of the century, it is estimated that 21-52% of the species on Earth will be committed to extinction (3). Fortunately, scenarios are also possible in which such large warming is avoided by placing a rising price on carbon emissions that moves the world to a clean energy future fast enough to limit further global warming to several tenths of a degree Celsius (29). Such a scenario is needed if we are to preserve life as we know it.
See the paper itself for the references. Footnote (3) refers to Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, volume 1 of the IPCC Assessment Report 4, the most recent. You can read sections or download the PDF here.
Hansen’s follow-up op-ed in the New York Times was just as stark (again, my emphasis and some paragraphing):
Game Over for the Climate
… Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.
That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.
What Hansen is saying is what our chart above also says — that global warming of 3°C (or 5.5°F) hasn’t been seen since the early Cenozoic, millions of years before the dawn of man. He also says 3°C — whenever it arrives — is the mass extinction point, potentially the start of a new geologic era.
Why Staying Below 3°C Global Warming Matters
We need to keep James Hansen’s number in mind for two reasons. The first is that even if we stop global warming at “just” 3°C, it’s a disaster. Imagine living in a world in which the earth is so warm that 20–50% of species are going extinct. Imagine the chaos, the death from disease, starvation and war, the global population migrations. Now imagine that this all happens in the next 90 years. The compression is stunning.
And we’re halfway there if you count the warming that’s in the pipeline and inevitable — the warming that’s unavoidable as ice sheets continue to melt, summer arctic ice shrinks to nothing, summer oceans absorb the sun’s rays instead of reflecting it, and permafrost releases its frozen-for-millenia methane.
There’s no stopping a certain degree of roughness we’ve already made for ourselves — global warming is at 0.8°C now and headed inevitably for 1.5°C. There’s a great deal of consensus around that number as the minimum that’s inevitable. This is why world “leaders” want to stop at 2°C; they know stopping at any lower number is a lost cause. In fact, if there’s disagreement at all among the unbought professionals in this field, it’s that some scientists now think our chance of keeping global temperatures below 2°C is already unlikely. Who will be proven right? I don’t know, but every time I look at the headlines, things are happening faster than anyone expected.
So the first bottom line for today is this. If you accept that …
1. Scientists are cautious and conservative in their estimates by nature
2. Events have been moving faster than predicted
3. This is one disaster no one should be tempted to flirt with
… we’d be foolish not to heed Hansen’s warning. A 3°C warmer world by 2100 would be hell to manage.
Eventually we might be able to set up enclaves near the arctic circle and preserve something that looks like civilization — some farming, some energy production, some manufacturing — but what are the human population numbers at that point, and what does the coming century look like during that transition? It won’t be a world anyone wants to live in.
Yes, a 3°C warmer world would be a challenge to say the least. But there’s a second bottom line for today that’s even more stark, and presents an even stronger reason to put on the carbon brakes now.
If We Go to 3°C Warmer, We May Go All the Way to 7°C
For a reason I’ll discuss next time, if global warming is man-made — and few unbought scientists think otherwise — then 3°C warming may well be just the halfway point to the full disaster. By that I mean, because of the way the socio-political process works, the “never stop burning carbon” scenario could easily take us right past 3°C to a 7°C (12.5°F) warmer world — in the worst case, by 2100.
That’s double the compression of Hansen’s 3°C scenario — 3°C warmer by the mid-2050s and 7°C warmer by the end of the century. The discussion of that outcome is also in the IPCC literature, the same literature Hansen used to make his mass-extinction prediction. This is their absolute worst-case scenario. It’s not a prediction, but it’s one of the possibilities. Yikes.
For a look at times when the earth was as hot as 7°C above pre-industrial norms, you have to look at the Mesozoic Era and earlier (again, see the chart above). In a 7°C warmer world, I’m not sure we’re even a species. I’m not sure what it would take to exist in the arctic, much less live in a “civilized” way.
I’ll expand that consideration next time. But the short-form is this: If mankind’s carbon is the big driver in the warming process, then the process doesn’t stop until man does. Man will stop spewing carbon (a) by intention, (b) by most of us going pre-industrial, or (c) by drastically reducing our numbers, perhaps to zero. When one of those three things is true, all of the warming after-effects in the pipeline will play out, and global temperature will level off. Not before.
Will that level-off point be after 2°C? 3°C? 7°C? Stopping at 2°C will take intention. The others imply an out-of-control process. We’ll look that aspect shortly. This is however your second bottom line for today. It’s entirely possible that when 3°C warming is present, 7°C is in the pipeline. If a 3°C warmer world doesn’t mark a new geologic era, a 7°C warmer world certainly will. Man as a species might survive a transition to the first. We won’t survive a transition to the second.
Why Consider These Scenarios?
I’m writing this series for just one reason — we can put ourselves on a different path whenever we want to. But we have to want to. I’m trying to help us want to. So if you’re feeling some panic right now, good. When enough of us feel that panic, we’re halfway home. We just have to “hug the monster” and act.
In addition, world-wide resistance is coming, and that’s a good thing. We still have some time — I’ll lay out some what-happens-when scenarios in a bit — and the will to act can only get stronger. This isn’t hopeless. It’s just very important.
GP
To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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the nc community expresses a great deal of skepticism re: economic models which are untestable, and which never seem to predict crashes.
climate models deserve the same examination. they should be published, along with the raw data. satellite measurements of temps have been stable for almost 2 decades now. the climate models don’t allow for such a possibility.
you can’t model something when you don’t have all the raw data. for instance, how much water is there in the atlantic ocean? how much water entered it today via rivers, rain, icemelt? how much evaporated off? we’ve barely got 2 decades worth of temp data at depth, only a few hundred years of surface temps to work with.
the raw facts are not known. you can’t model an ocean unless you’ve got the raw data. you can’t model global climate unless you grok oceans.
hansen’s certitude comes from the same place krugman’s does.
How predicatable. A post on global warming and the anti-climate change agnotolotists are out in full force.
And they only have one argument: it isn’t proven!
What about scientific consensus don’t you understand? Even with Wikipedia under serious right wing influence in its editing (this has been documented), they can’t water this down:
“No scientific body of national or international standing maintains a formal opinion dissenting from any of these three main points….”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
The economics comparison just proves you have no argument. Economics is not a science. It desperately pretends to be one, which is what makes it really offensive. And accordingly, there are multiple schools and theories that contradict each other. Trying to pretend economics has any relevance to real science is pathetic.
spot on repro.
As the natives of Easter Island used to say, before settling down to a feast of long pig, “Who needs trees?”
Let’s see what the second chart actually says. Over the past 500 million years, the average temperature has been about three degrees above the graph’s zero line with a cooling and stabilizing trend. The last 50 million years have seen unusual cooling down to two degrees below the graph’s zero line at the end. The last 500,000 years show a stabilization around the minus two degree level with short peaks 10,000 years wide to about plus half a degree. The most recent 10,000 years show a peak that is just reaching the plus half degree level of the previous four peaks. According to the graph, the present temperature is likely to rise a bit more and then drop abruptly to the graph’s minus two degree level over the next several hundred years. This is independent of any human activity.
Measurements show that a new factor influencing the temperature is an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The close correlation between industrialization and the causal mechanism of the burning of fossil fuels to produce carbon dioxide indicate that human activity is the cause of this rise in CO2. The correlation between the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature increases is less close and the causal mechanism of the greenhouse effect is not proven. Because the causes of the rapid rise and fall of three degrees in the four previous peaks is unknown, the effect of increasing carbon dioxide on the temperature has to be one effect among several.
Even if the temperature effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide is valid, there are obvious limitations. If peak oil has passed, the emissions of carbon dioxide from burning oil will decrease. Scarcity and the high cost of fossil fuels will decrease their use and the corresponding emissions further. If the article’s extrapolations of temperature increases are based on present trends, they exaggerate the effect. Of course future generations may find the drop in temperature predicted by the graph to be more challenging than any predicted global warming.
There are other effects of carbon in the atmosphere besides warming, like ocean acidification.
You don’t account for forest depletion. The earth may not have the capacity to stabilize itself as much as it did in the past.
Human activity is also having an effect on other species.
I’m sure there a many such points that could be made. These are non-linear. Get hit by a car at 20mi/hr and you break a bone or two. Get hit by a car at 40mi/hr and you’re dead. That kind of non-linear.
You said (JackRabbit):
“I’m sure there a many such points that could be made. These are non-linear. Get hit by a car at 20mi/hr and you break a bone or two. Get hit by a car at 40mi/hr and you’re dead. That kind of non-linear.”
That’s because it is non-linear. The impact from getting hit at 20 mph vs. 40 mph is 4 times more energy, not twice (i.e. energy = 1/2 mass times the square of velocity).
CO2 impact, however, from a straight physics viewpoint, is actually sublinear: twice the CO2 does not yield twice the warming. The extra temperature increase beyond 1 or 2 degrees is all due to feedback – the types and amounts of which are far from validated.
Whether peak oil has arrived or not, there are still 2800 Gt of carbon in known recoverable reserves (at today’s prices) of oil, natural gas and coal. The optimistic climate scientists say burning another 500 risks disaster. The pessimists say 300. Burning all 2800 Gt destroys the planet beyond all shadow of a doubt. Yet that’s precisely what the market capitalization of the companies that hold those reserves implies. Peak oil is irrelevant. There’s more than enough carbon left to f**k the Earth six times over. And at present Mr. Market is saying, “Burn it all”.
Scientific consensus?
Richard Feynman defines its worth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b240PGCMwV0
Everything depends on the empirical data, the observable data. Not models.
My first point was that the data in the temperature graph does not support the conclusions of the article. My second point was to note that the effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide on the earth’s temperature is highly speculative, given that it is not known why the earth suddenly heated up 10,000 years ago and is likely to suddenly cool down again soon. My third point questioned the basis for the author’s claim that we may be facing a 3-degree temperature rise by 2050 and a 7-degree rise by 2100. Obviously any actual temperature rise due to atmospheric CO2 depends on the accumulation of CO2. That’s why peak oil is relevant – if fewer fossil fuels are burned and less CO2 is produced, the temperature rise will be less rapid.
I use the three points to illustrate that articles such as this are not scientifically valid despite the science trappings. Instead, they make it harder to get agreement on measures that might be appropriate to mitigate any climate change in an optimal way.
My first point was that the data in the temperature graph does not support the conclusions of the article.
Unsupported opinion.
My second point was to note that the effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide on the earth’s temperature is highly speculative, given that it is not known why the earth suddenly heated up 10,000 years ago and is likely to suddenly cool down again soon.
Milankovich Cycles.
My third point questioned the basis for the author’s claim that we may be facing a 3-degree temperature rise by 2050 and a 7-degree rise by 2100. Obviously any actual temperature rise due to atmospheric CO2 depends on the accumulation of CO2. That’s why peak oil is relevant – if fewer fossil fuels are burned and less CO2 is produced, the temperature rise will be less rapid.
The figure is based on proven reserves which are confirmed to be extractable at a profit. Peak oil will play no role in preventing that.
Spot on!
It seems to me economics isn’t even good on the terms of social science, psychology for instance is on better scientific ground even though still weak. And economics is being compared to real physical and biological sciences?
Clearly, you don’t understand the scientific process. In addition, the term “all the raw data” is vague and amorphic. The comment sounds as a poor excuse for rejecting solid scientific results.
Note also the bogus name misdirection like as if its someone from Japan or something.
The data are freely available. The models are available. There’s never been a refutation of those things because no denier has been able to come up with an alternative model.
How much does API pay you to deceive people? $1.00 per comment? $1.50? That’s worth your soul and the future health of our world?
There is simply no comparison between economics and climate-science. The latter has very specific and verifiable theories and data. Economics is really speculative and, in my opinion, an art rather than a science.
My standard rebuke to climate-skeptics is to critique their refusal to use common risk-analysis techniques. With complex systems like life on Earth you cannot calculate anything with certainty. Ideas in complexity and chaos theories show that turbulence (which is essentially what happens when out of equilibrium energy increases in the atmosphere) show often paradoxical data–but the vast majority of the data will indicate the direction things are taking in general. But skeptics don’t have a clue about things like that because they start with the notion that modern science cannot be right if it violates certain ideologies whether they are religious or political/philosophical.
There is no way that current climate science can predict with certainty but it can predict there in NOT a 0% chance that human activity is causing changes in the amount of energy that stays in the Earth’s system. Skeptics refuse to calculate the probability that they are right and everybody is wrong. They actually deliberately refute the whole career of Western Civilization by believing that climate-science is pseudo-science and, inherently, reject the laws of physics.
Of course we should be skeptical of science–I certainly am and I’ve read Kuhn and others but in something as important as climate-change we cannot roll the dice we have to err on the side of orthodox science. Besides, and I won’t make the argument here, dealing with climate-change will have positive social, political and social consequences which I will be glad to enumerate if asked even if scientists are flat out wrong.
Are humans smarter than frogs? Obviously many, like kimyo are not. All the brief history of industrial civilization points to the near certainly that we will sit in the pot of water until it boils rather than jumping out and proactively abandoning fossil fuel-based socio/economic organization.
Kevin Trenberth:
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2013/05/wither-global-warming-has-it-slowed-down/
While the article points out the predictive limitation of relying too heavily on measurements at the earth’s surface absent adequate deep ocean data, it did concur with the view that anthropogenic global temperature rise is indeed occurring.
Animated for your amusement and pleasure
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2374
Wow, you’re totally right. The world is too intractable to make a reliable mathematical model about the climate and how human endeavors effect it. For example the thermohaline conductor, that transports warm water from the gulf of Mexico to the European coast has the waterflow of about 100 amazon rivers and is effected by small fluctuations in the salinity of the ocean. Our computers are not powerful enough to model the flow of all that water and how the massive amounts of freshwater runoff from human civilization will effect it. By direct observation we can tell that in the last ten years it has altered it’s course pointing the warm water away from England toward the arctic sending Britain into a small ice age and accelerating the melting of the arctic. So maybe the fact that we’re too stupid to comprehend the scope of nature should make us more cautious rather than more zealous in our desire to manipulate the earth.
For example the thermohaline conductor
Correct. It has not been modeled and it takes 800-1000 years to complete one circulation (MIT).
It’s irrelevant to heat accumulation. Cycles like the PDO and thermohaline move heat around, they don’t prevent it from accumulating. Manipulating the atmosphere by radically increasing its CO2 content means the planet experiences a growing energy imbalance. The satellites can and do measure that more energy is coming in than is going out. It isn’t arguable.
Not so – it affects the distribution of heat with secondary effects, for example, on albedo. This would lead to faster or slower rates of heat accumulation depending on whether the albedo is, on average, increased (more heat reflected back into space) or decreased (more heat absorbed and retained). So it needs to be modeled.
Slightly aside, what I find more important than the absolute change in temperature is the rate at which the temperature changes. We, and many species, may be able to cope with a 3 C change over several hundred years but not the same magnitude of change over 50 years. Note that in the middle of the Paleozoic (~ 400 m years ago) a temperature spike occurs that reaches the same temperature as that of the P-T boundary, but it is less abrupt and caused apparently fewer extinctions. The big thing, IMO, is that we may cause these changes to be too big and too *fast*.
Re: “the raw facts are not known. you can’t model an ocean unless you’ve got the raw data.”
You are talking nonsense. There’s hundreds of peer reviewed published articles covering the areas of concern that you opine to be unknown. The only thing unknown at this moment is your capacity to alleviate yourself of your bad case of cranialrectalitis.
Is all the hollering about Humans dying off or all of life? As it stands the Earth and other life would be done a great service if we Humans died off. As we have seen in time past the Earth always comes back. Gaia self regulates. The Dinosaurs we know about and I’d hate to think all the other species that this has happened to over the long haul.
However I digress. At the rate we’re going food shortages will actually make a serious impact on reducing population levels (and climate effects) before we get anything done via politics anyway.
In the end we may not matter.
It’s not unlike the Libtards that argue, monopoly is ok, oligopoly is ok, the market will decide who wins at the end, so, Global Warming is ok because the really smart Galt MF**ks will survive to build a brave new Galt Gulch.
Yea human extinction sound preferable to that.
You sound very angry.
Food shortages would take centuries to make a significant impact on industrial greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve got less than thirty years to radically reduce emissions or the planet is screwed.
Regrettably its not that simple. There will likely be a long lag time before the full impacts of climate change and temperature rise become full on. This is because it take a while for the oceans to heat up.
Unfortunately this will give time for the fossil fuel burners to keep business as usual for far too long if they triumph in their obscurantism and pursuit of the quick buck and continue their propaganda that everything is fine.
Regarding ‘Gaia’ there may be a degree of resilience and regulation in the way the earth’s climate functions but it has limits and the big danger is between mobilizing methane hydrates and all fossil fuels we may push things too far.
A factor to consider (see Hansen’s stuff about this) is that if you push the temperature too high you get other serious positive feedback heating taking place. Venus is the extreme illustration. Its not too much closer to the sun than us but it is way hotter because of what is known as runaway Greenhouse.
To understand positive feedback have a look at the Arctic Ice melt. The more dark ocean is exposed the more heat retention with occur.
Of course nothing is certain but as anyone who works in an office knows air conditioning systems are touchy and you don’t go out to deliberately break them.
Indeed! What strikes me most about climate skeptics is their utter ignorance of systems theory and cybernetics–something that was far better understood by intellectuals of the late forties than now (why?). Systems are not linear they all operate within certain ranges. When the system can no longer operate within that range phase change occurs. In some systems it’s very predictable with complex systems it is not at all predictable. Anything from a one degree to a five degree change could trigger positive feedback loops–but climate skeptics don’t understand those things. They also don’t understand anything at all to do with risk-analysis which is standard procedure for the bigger projects I’ve been involved in–how they ignore that is utterly preposterous.
I believe climate-change deniers are yet another group that is turning its back on the career of Western Civilization for reasons that I can elucidate if asked.
“believe climate-change deniers are yet another group that is turning its back on the career of Western Civilization for reasons that I can elucidate if asked.”
As always Banger, I am a big fan of your commentary. Since youre almost asking me to ask you, I would like to say, ‘Pray tell, in your opinion, what causes these modern day reactionaries to be such?’
I was afraid someone would call my bluff. Actually I have something to say on this and I can’t keep it as short as I wanted to–but here it is:
Human society has always centered on what we now call religion—and by that I don’t mean a set of ideological beliefs that you can accept or reject—what I mean is a total view of the world that provides each member of society with a place within the larger scheme of things. Rituals, stories, taboos and codes of conduct were all intertwined and each person was socialized to fit into that basic scheme. This was true whether the religion was shamanic of monotheistic.
After the invention of printing and the spread of literacy the contradictions and impossible nature of Christianity as a unifying force (before then localized sects were possible) became more generally known religious differences were highlighted between different parts of Europe. Literacy on a level never before known deeply upset the balance and the end result was the discrediting of religion and the rise of modernism, reason and science and what was, essentially, the disenchantment of the world.
This new scientific/rational view created a deeper division between intellectuals and average people between rural and urban people. The logic of reason was that there may be some underlying “good” way to live that we don’t know about yet but we will know about in some distant future instead of the traditional view that wisdom lay with the ancients (nearly all major cultures have shared this view) and now we had to get busy to find the truth that we were unlikely to find in our lifetimes. This created dramatic internal problems for people who had developed for thousands of years under one kind of religion or another. How would they find meaning?
The result was a hunger for material benefits and a Faustian bargain with materialism and the machine. Religion became a kind of lifestyle choice. Even for modern American Christians their religion is secondary to their quest for material possessions and quest for entertainment. Secular culture based on non-spiritual principles is the religion of our time and it is like decaffeinated coffee—no punch so what’s the point? People have always lived with a notion that there are deeper forces that are largely mysterious and deeper almost unfathomable orders we cannot see.
Ok, so along comes 20th century science and philosophy that puts into question all the old certainties built up in the 18th and 19th centuries that we live in an orderly and mechanical universe and that we are each separate independent agents whose chief goal in life ought to be some kind of “self-fulfillment” and that, in fact, pursuing our own self-interest despite what every religion or fairy story (remnants of pre-Christian religions) have taught us. Independence and “freedom” were the most important qualities of modern life. So this new science with relativity, indeterminacy and all that symbolized along with the failure of philosophy to supplant religion all caused deep anxiety. In more recent times science has taught us that human beings are deeply interconnected with others—we are hardwired for cooperation and sociability and social science backs this up by telling us that happiness or unhappiness is often connected to our connections with others and that more equal societies are happier and live longer. And, that we are also deeply connected to our environment—and this notion is why there is such a vehement anti-environmental ethic in the United States the home of the ideology of selfishness and what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism.
So climate-change deniers want to return to 1900 and before relativity, quantum mechanics and, above all, systems theory, complexity, chaos theory and all the rest of it that puts into question the easy to understand linear universe where endless growth is possible and that there are no limits and we can live in a purely materialistic society living to satisfy our urges and nothing else. The objection to environmentalism is aesthetic and ideological. The idea that we are inter-connected to larger wholes is deeply offensive to these people—the religion of simple rationalism (as opposed to post-Wittgenstinian philosophy) where we can find simple answers, simple laws we can measure with a ruler is increasingly absurd and easily refuted at the same time that machine intelligence threatens to outstrip the power of our own linear machine-like intelligence. Environmentalism is a direct threat to a whole way of life—we must change our culture and the culture will change and anti-environmentalists and those that oppose a world where the linear more mundane aspects of life can be managed by machine intelligence to free us to develop our higher brains are just lost.
I wonder if every mass extinction event has been a result of sapience.
In our experience, a mere few thousand years of rampant human sapience has brought about a geologically very abrupt disappearence of many species from the future fossil record.
If the sapient life form itself perished in the mass extinction event it generated through its own sapient efforts, the artifacts of such sapience would form a negligeable part of the fossil record over the course of millions of years subsequent. e.g. The layer formed by a few thousand years of human sapience would be scarcely discernible in 60 million years’ time.
From the standpoint of a prospective future paleontologist, it would seem as if something from outer space came along and wiped out most of the species.
That unsuspecting future paleontologist, being filled with the naive charm of his own beloved sapience, would seek evidence of any sort of external impact upon that past ecological system, sooner than suspect that one mischievous species, in a mere geological moment, hit the sapience jackpot–and promptly killed the world.
Let’s hope for future generations that the unsuspecting Palentologist is not a Libtard sub species influenced by other Libtards like the Kochs and the Pauls and also that he lives in a generation unlike ours where Baby Boomer re**t*ds who slept through most of their college courses and then handed the reins over to the GOPers and the Libtards. I remember reading a comment by someone in an earlier thread that it is wrong to blame the Baby Boomers for everything – it’s not unlike Joseph Goebbels castigating us by saying, ‘not all of us Iron Cross warriors are insane’. Every generation bears the Cross that its leaders (who THAT generation elects and fetes and toasts) fashion and the Baby Boomers have fashioned a World where the Rich prey on the Poor ad infinitum. So, suck it up. Everytime you see the Clintons, remember it came from the soft easy lovely green pastures that your forbears made possible with their struggles and which you promptly forgot by sitting on your ass and copulating in the mud on Yasgur’s Farm. The Boomers went one step further, while screwing all of humanity, they also made sure to stifle and silence the few in their generation who were prophetic seers, the Naders, the Chomskys, the Rachel Carsons. Yeah, throw a shoe at the Clintons and the Carters the next time you see them. Frum hit the nail on the head with devastating accuracy when he said that the Boomers were engaged in this huge going our of sale of all of Society and all that was built with the sweat of Mother Jones and Roosevelt.
You may suck it up and blame the Boomers if you like. That, along with a dollar, will buy you a cup of coffee and nothing more.
There are now good reasons for why extinction can happen naturally. Surely you have heard of the meteor that hit earth 65 million years ago and the Deccan Traps.
That said you point is useful. I suggest you peruse the story of the Fermi Paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Deccan Traps
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071029134743.htm-
main story plus various links all in on one page
John McLoughlin “The Toolmaker Koan”.
I’m not a climate scientist. I suspect we should all shut up on the matter other than to insist on hearing from them directly without corporate and media idiots getting in the way. The idea that neo-liberalism is killing us is 5-sigma, whatever the truth on CO2.
We’ve already heard from them. If you have had courses in non-science major college science you know enough to learn about climate science and should inform yourself on it because if Hansen and his community is correct this is the issue of our time and ignorance is not an option.
There is no doubt that the earth is warming, that sea levels will rise and that a major causative is human production of CO2, but effectcts thtis will have on civilization is a ?
…
This post, like the last by this knucklehaed is religious cant based on wishful fullfilment that sinners (CO2 emiters) will be punished
…
1) The author disingenously glides over fact that all the mass extinction events but the first were precceded by major earth cooling trends.
2) Equally disengenouously, the author fails to note that there is NO SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS on the causes of mass extinctions except the K-T event at the beginning of the Cenozoic era and that the accepted causitive event(s) was one or more extraterestial body impacts (the famous Iridium boundry sediment layers).
… but effectcts thtis will have on civilization is a ?
I dont know about that: So far the burning of oil has had the effect of bloating the population in the middle east way past any sustainable level and simultaneously greatly enhancing the ressources and influence of the saudi wahabbi sect who is bent on forcing the world to live like people did in the desert in year 700, with success.
We spend trillions on GWOT and other security circuses just to keep that Oil flowing North!
Those are consequences.
Limiting CO2 emissions effectively* will generate instant returns in “not sending money to people who want to kill us”, temper the worst aspects of globalisation – that one can just move production to places that truly do not give a toss – and hopefully kill wastly destructive and inefficent energy sources like tar sand.
“Saving the Climate” is an added Bonus.
Personally, I think that Climate Change was invented as a “focus point” deliberately with the purpose of derailing the 1970’ish “security” arguments for self sufficiency and saving energy by people with other interests. It worked too – people are now arguing the toss over models and methods rather than objectives and purpose.
Once reality becomes too obvious to hide behind your slithering obfuscation, your type will be the loudest to cry, “I told you so…”
David, there is now scientific consensus that the Permian extinction, the biggest ever, was caused by global warming. Your information is out of date.
Next question.
(Yes, there is question as to what caused the global warming which caused the Permian extinction. However, there is no question as to what is causing global warming right now… so….)
Regarding Alberta’s oil sands, if you are attempting to prick the conscience of the Canadian then I wish you luck. Lot of luck because you’re going to need it.
Canadians know only one narrative, that of the innocent victim. Whether it be acid rain, a global recession or global warming it’s always the Americans fault. If a unique problem can’t be blamed on the yankees then we find some other foreigners to blame – like those horrible Soviet hockey players. Canadians themselves are never to blame. From the government down we are forever the innocent victims when something goes wrong.
Given that narrative, Canadians do not have to change anything. Not our neanderthal governments – Reform, Liberal, Progressive Conservative, take your pick! – nor our way of life. The simple fact is that Canadians will not inconvenience themselves one iota to make any change which might avert global warming. Sadly the same can be said for most human beings.
I feel sorry for the polar bears and other species who will be the true innocent victims in all this. Humans are the authors of their own destruction and shall get what they deserve.
Thanks for the piece. The effort is appreciated but in vain.
The EU could have banned oil from tar sands – of course the EU did not do that.
I’m sorry.
I’ve read your comment and other comments in which ‘boomers’ and/or canadians are held responsible for all the current threats we now face.
I’m sorry.
As a 66 year old canadian I might be considered full of self-justifying sh!t were I to point out that roughly 21% of canadians are foreign born, that Canada has been exploited by others before those 21% and the ‘boomers’ got here, that many canadians have acted to protest and prevent the exploitation of the tar sands, the clearcutting of forests and the poisoning of waters, the devastation of the cod off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
Etc.
Hell, even I was an alien when I first got here. And for all my efforts I’m only getting by now because of damned ‘socialist’, union-sponsored greed.
Does my apology suffice or is it just a good example of your claim that canadians pass the buck?
So, I’m sorry.
You write: “Sadly the same can be said for most human beings.”
Is that an out?
From the time that my ancestors were displaced from their fields by their ‘betters’ (for the profit of a few bleating sheep), through the flight from the Colonies in ’76, the loss of a few crappy dustblown acres, to the work in a sulphrous smelter to get a few bucks to feed offspring, my family has fucked up the planet.
I’m sorry.
I don’t believe it is in vain. Things are not absolute. Phase change happens in science and in human affairs. Paradigms change very rapidly. Yes, there are large numbers of people who don’t give a sh!t. Yes, there are large numbers of obnoxious science-deniers and professional irrationalists and people who wish Western Civilization has stopped in 1900. But human culture and human beings are well-equipped to change on a dime.
I believe that human beings are feeling a need for a return to simplicity and normal human culture. By that I mean an emphasis on connecting with others–science shows we are hard-wired for connection on the level of our neurons. Developmental psychology has shown this unambiguously. Moving towards sustainable energy what I call elegant engineering (aided by intelligent machines) will lead us to a world where the emphasis will not be on being separate islands masturbating to online porn but beings who live to party. As the old song goes “you got to fight for your right to party! This crap kind of society we’ve created that centers on power and consumption of mass-quantities is just f!c!ing boring.
Once again, I have to take issue with the terminology that implies that the collective “WE” will decide how to deal with global warming rather than the royal “WE”.
Isn’t it clear by now that our so-called political “leaders” are in the pocket of wealthy industry interests that do no want to stop burning oil?
Furthermore, most people that our political leaders interact with are unconcerned. They think their money and status will allow them to ride out any difficulty.
That is why government is preparing to managing thru global warming instead of tackle it head-on. And don’t give me the BS that we need to have a global process because poor countries will continue to burn. If the West decided to act, they could easily compel compliance by threatening to shut out poor, non-conforming countries from global trade and the world financial system.
Stop F*kimg appealing to US, who can really do NOTHING, and start blaming THEM (“TPTB”)
TPTB have already begun blaming the victim: YOU. (Just like every other systemic disaster.) Stop being a f*king victim and start getting angry, for god’s sake!
==
It seems to me that the writer pulls some punches here.
My understanding is that ocean acidification begins to kill ocean life at 5%. How many people rely on ocean life for food?
Also, its my understanding that the climate studies are conservative and DO NOT ACCOUNT FOR KNOCK-ON EFFECTS. Such as methane released by warming in the artic. There many other such effects.
In November 2012 the World Bank concluded that we are on track for a 4 degree Celsius world by 2100. So why is the author using 2 degrees as a baseline and 3 degrees as a OMG level?
/rant
Hi jackrabbit,
You wrote: “My understanding is that ocean acidification begins to kill ocean life at 5%. How many people rely on ocean life for food?”
It’s better to think of ocean acidification in terms of degrees of pH. Wikipedia’s Ocean Acidification article is quite informative. Here’s a quote: “Between 1751 and 1994 surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14,[4] representing an increase of almost 30% in H+ ion concentration in the world’s oceans.[5][6]”
The point being that the ocean is still quite alkaline, but becoming less so as we pump 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, and the ocean absorbs about half of that.
One serious problem for us on the U.S. West Coast is that we’re having increasing failures with our oyster fisheries due to spat (newly born oyster) not being able to set shells due to adverse pH condidtions.
***
On your second point, about 1 Billion humans rely on the oceans as their primary source of protein. They are in trouble.
I meant +5 degrees C, not 5%.
In general we can all safely assume that there is a reasonable chance that scientists like Hansen could be right. To deny that is to deny the whole career of Western Civilization. The question is to calcualte probabilities and put them into a matrix and calculate risks and benefits of doing one thing or another. And there we come to the weakness of the climate-change deniers. They do not understand risk-analysis or are afraid of thinking that way. They do not understand systems theory either or they would understand that a few degrees rise in average temperature can cause positive feedback loops. Systems operate with tipping points and phase change–why is that hard to understand?
I’ve gone back and forth with guys who don’t believe in human influenced climate change who actually know something about science yet they don’t understand systems theory or risk analysis? It’s stunning–what kind of science education is going on in our universities?
On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
hop your clever-less neolib cottontail back over to zh
a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. steinbeck
Yeah, but do you want your kids and grandkids to live? Most people do. I don’t really give a damn if we all die when the sun burns out in a few billion years; global warming is going to knock us out within mere generations.
Global temperatures have been flat for fifteen years according to NASA, and yet CO2 continues to increase each year. Many scientists in peer reviewed literature have concluded that climate sensitivity – how much temperature will increase with a doubling of CO2 – is much lower than previously estimated by Hansen and others. Global warming alarmism is unfounded, and calling skeptics “deniers” won’t change the facts.
Without going too much into the whole temperature thing let’s be clear what we are talking about here. We have, in the Earth’s physical system, a highly complex system which is, by definition, unpredictable–no model can come very close to predicting anything.
Turbulence is an important dynamic, which like systems theory and risk analysis, most climate-science denialists don’t understand. With complex systems you have non-linearity and seeming paradoxes. This is why making solid predictions is impossible with the climate–almost anything “might” happen. The question is to gauge the probabilities and evaluate them in some kind of risk-analysis matrix. If we do nothing what are the probabilities of this or that happening? If we do any number of other things what do the risks look like? And there is a possibility in that matrix that leads to catastrophe and positive feedback loops. That is why I object to most of those who choose to ignore the fact we are increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere–they don’t believe, it seems, that there is anything to worry about. Even if they are mainly right (we know that neither side can be completely right) does that still mean we shouldn’t use seat belts, so to speak? Are the disadvantages of actually beginning to roll back the production of greenhouse gases so dire and catastrophic? Couldn’t there be advantages to moving towards renewable energy sources and elegant and AI-influenced engineering?
The fact remains that physics tells us that the gases we are describing to increase the net energy in the Earth’s system if you believe in physics. That energy can be translated into things other than temperature increases–the point is that the Earth is full of systems that have equilibrium states that depend on a certain stability in the environment when that stability is seriously challenged we are going into unpredictable (by definition) results–why is this so hard to grasp?
If skeptics were so open to science why not convene a serious board of inquiry to establish some paramaters and agreed upon principles to serious inquiry? Why not start by creating probabilities for various outcomes and risks associated with them? My view is that the objection to the findings of most climate-scientists is not based on reason but on aesthetics, ideology and, in many cases, fundamentalist religion.
It seems the climate skeptics only want to confuse the public and delay action to address this crisis. Their arguments are impervious to evidence or reason.
Rather than arguing with them, we should (as one NYT commenter suggested) inscribe their names on a large public monument so that generations living in the climate hell they brought us will know who to thank.
This Disaster Brought to You Courtesy of: Charles and David Koch, Lee Raymond and the Exxon Corporation, Sen. James Inhoffe …
Nothing like you denialists just making stuff up when the facts aren’t on your side.
Global temperatures are unquestionably at record levels over modern timeframes:
“There are slight differences in global records between groups at NCDC, NASA, and the University of East Anglia. Each group calculates global temperature year by year, using slightly different techniques. However, analyses from all three groups point to the decade between 2000 and 2009 as the hottest since modern records began more than a century ago. Temperatures in the 2010s have been running slightly warmer still.”
https://www2.ucar.edu/climate/faq/how-much-has-global-temperature-risen-last-100-years
I find the “denialist” label way too generous. More accurate is “obfuscate and when that fails, lie”.
Sometimes people get confused by small issues–energy and heat doesn’t necessarily translate only into higher air temperatures. This is a complex system and increase energy inputs can express itself in storms, earthquakes deep sea temperatures–the energy can be used to increase melt, for example without significantly raising air temperature and so on.
No, increases in surface temperatures have slowed, not stopped. 2010 was the warmest year on record. Heat accumulation in the deep ocean, however, (past 700 meters) has continued uninterrupted.
Sooner or later that heat will come to the surface.
Another thing which is overlooked is the fact that heat absorption itself can appear non-linear. The fact that ice in the Arctic and elsewhere is melting only now, to the uneducated mind, obscures the fact that it takes a huge amount of heat to enact that phase change: heat that is not measureable by thermometers but is used to do the work of physically melting the ice. Heat that would have been making the planet even hotter in the last few decades, if it hadn’t been melting the ice.
Thus, once the ice is melted, with that “work” done, global heating will accelerate at a truly scary pace. This is only one of the issues that is going to “surprise” deniers as well as the public at large.
Global Warming exists because some humans believe, because of their religion, that our world is for human use/abuse and the Rapture will resolve everything.
Some of the rest of us think about long term survival risk factors and urge prudence with technologies like fossil fuels , agra and nuclear. Since we are not in power and those that are side with faith breathers, our future is severely compromised.
Much of mankind has not made it through the Enlightenment period and our abuse of the world since that attempt is coming back to bite us on the ass.
Very misdirecting article. It takes the last 5-10 thousand years and says look, look here at the temperature rising. Basing that on millions of years comparisons. There could have been several, thousands of temperature spikes 10 degrees higher in the past, but they wouldn’t show up on the chart there as an average. Very misleading.
Then you need to read it again. It does not say “look, temperatures are rising in the last 5-10 thousand years”, it says that temperatures over the last ten thousand years have been very stable. Every reconstruction shows the same result: the holocene has been climatically mild compared to previous eras.
Another very weak article.
James Hansen is a very, very poor source of spokesmodel. Besides being so fanatical about CAGW that he doesn’t even pretend to be a scientist anymore, his 1980’s era models have been so wrong as to be actively funny.
His more recent models aren’t doing much better.
I’d also note that 12,000 years ago – there was a major Ice Age. Hard to farm in that situation, and equally interesting that the current interglacial – i.e. warm period between glaciations – is being called bad because it is warming.
Global warming is expressed much of the time with world averages, such as plus 1.5 C, the specter of over 2C, etc.
This sets aside, ignores, that some regions experience far higher warming, and are more affected, and that sudden unexpected spikes do much damage or some threshold is met and humans cannot cope (e.g. 2003 in France when many died, forest fires and drought in the US, Russia, etc.)
Other regions either do not experience much warming, or even stability or relative cooling as experienced on the ground (more water vapor leads to more rain and snow.) Some even welcome higher temperatures. Growing wheat in Siberia is the stereotype.
Some regions adapt easily, specially in temperate climes, where one can switch from ‘northern’ to ‘mediterranean’ agriculture, say, in Europe.
Others face desertification, extinctions of some forms of life, uninhabitable territories, sinking into the sea, etc. These differences create political (world politics) strife which remain little mentioned or acknowledged.
I think climate scientists should man up on these issues. I mean about variability, not Putin, Gore or such.
Plastics?
I am a biochemist and while I know that global warming is a fact there are some interesting details. One is the “pan evaporation rate” data measured by farmers and ranchers. In this warming world this rate is dropping, it takes longer for the water to evaporate. This is due to particulates in the air which scatter sunlight. Black or dark colored particulates (From old coal powered industries) immediately add heat to our atmosphere. The developed world needs to retrofit the coal burning plants in poorer countries with particulate removing technologies (Scrubbers?). This would immediately slow down global warming.
CO2 must diffuse up to create the greenhouse effect so CO2 released today will take time to add to global warming. In addition now that the permafrost is melting and releasing methane which is many times more potent than CO2 with respect to global warming. However the methane needs to diffuse up to create the effect.
In fact as far as CO2 is concerned, now that the permafrost is melting a feedback loop has been created so trying to dramatically reduce CO2 may not be very productive.
If one large volcano like Katla erupts then this could cool the earth.
One main thing that could be started is attempting to lower the human population by choice instead of by disaster. This subject seems to be very taboo.
One thing not mentioned is that the human race as a whole does better in warm times than in ice ages. If the underwater conveyor belt is stopped by too much fresh water pouring into a spot near Greenland, then the earth will start another ice age.
It is not a simple situation.
Not mentioned is the possibility that most of the leaders of the largest and most powerful countries are psychopaths. This may the challenge: We need to stop being ruled by psychopaths who have no conscious and would rather manipulate than succeed.
Volcanic aerosols reside in the atmosphere only in the short term. So assuming you plan to blow up a supervolcano in a way which only emits massive quantities of aerosols, what do we do 18 months later? Blow up another one?
The problem with burning fossil fuels is its made of hydrocarbons which means that hydrogen and carbon atoms chained together ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon ) and therefore when burned the carbon atoms can only combine with oxygen to make co2 and the hydrogen atoms can combine only with oxygen to make water vapor which means when we burn fossil fuels not only are we making water vapor but depleting our oxygen supply on earth.
And no exploding volcano will save us from that. If that will ever happen
All in all the country or society that learns how to imitate nature rather than destroy it will win the future such as that nature usually recycles itself as we should do with our production, such as creating jobs with a reverse automobile assembly (disassembly) line like they have in that one country in Europe (I forget which one) or when trees are replanted after they are cut down to restart the cycle. As far as energy in general renewable energy would allow us to export fossil fuels like were doing with coal to China thereby giving us extra tax income.
I keep reading all of these articles about ecological doom and how we we need to change our economic system less we all die in a mass extinction but how come I never read about what exactly we should be doing that is politically and socially acceptable?
It seems to me that if the argument is that we westerns should be welcoming austerity because it reduces aggregate demand and thus industrial output which therefore reduces emissions austerity is good because more poverty is good for planet.
I have to conclude this kind of “green” reasoning is just as reactionary as any conservative is on the fiscal issues.
What exactly is the plan to elevate the living conditions of humanity including poorer Americans like myself while reducing our capacity for industrial output and power consumption?
I would be more inclined to buy this climate activism stuff and get on board if I wasn’t constantly guilt tripped about how evil I am for liking my washing machine, dryer, refrigerator, etc…
There is a bourgeois class bias regarding this stuff that reeks of having an elitist Malthusian underbelly.
What exactly is believing in global warming going to do for the average western working family other than making them think they are evil for having to drive a car to work?
What exactly is the plan that is going to make the criminal elites pay and leaves the rest of the us out of it cause we didn’t exactly have a choice?
Whoa–what the hell do you mean what to do? There are plenty of things to do. For starters change the cost structure to reflect real costs of what we do from building to transportation rather than allow externalities to be paid by generations to come (if they come) and the poor.
For starters start taking the path towards cooperation and elegant engineering rather than adopt the stupidest technologies that are kept going by monopolists who rig the system for their own benefit. We are all connected and working towards a greener world will bring us together and stop living in fear and stupidity as the elite want us to live–maybe party more and buy less crap. Other countries are doing it but we have to give mother nature the finger to feel like men (and it usually men that oppose environmentalism).
If the U.S. started pushing towards greener technology we would still be in the driver’s seat because we have the great research universities of the world and have the mentality and creative potential to make things happen here. We still have a chance before the Scandinavia, Germany and East Asia pass us by.
Quote: “For starters change the cost structure to reflect real costs of what we do from building to transportation rather than allow externalities to be paid by generations to come (if they come) and the poor.”
Okay. Please how exactly intend to change the cost structure? How did you calculate the “real costs” and “externalities”? Please show in detail why your accounting model will work and prevent further damage with enough certainty to convince most people politically that willing to support it as it will motivate to to take the little time we have apart from the rat race.
If you can’t provide such detail then you have your answer as why no progress is being done on this issue.
Quote: “For starters start taking the path towards cooperation and elegant engineering rather than adopt the stupidest technologies that are kept going by monopolists who rig the system for their own benefit.”
So the question is merely technological? A some people argue that very idea of technical fixes is what is creating the problem.
Who decides what is the elegant engineering that is needed? On what basis do they decide and why should we trust these Engineers know what they are doing? Should these engineer-kings be given the authority to overrule the anti-technocrats who believe that the technological dependence is the root of the problem?
The problem is the idea of the “good environment” is linked to a political idea of the the “good life” and if you let technocrats decide that issue who is to say the new technocratic authoritarian order are going to be better than the current authoritarian order?
How does one scientifically decide what is the “good life”? Saying the science on climate change is settled doesn’t say much the science of human culture “climate” most certainly isn’t.
Ok, externalities can be quantified how that is done is a political process. If someone pollutes they pay a fine. If investment companies bring down the economy through fraud their officers get jail time and their company is liquidated. Carbon fuels should be taxed gradually at first and then increasingly and so on and so on.
As for technology: using increasingly intelligent machines to manage things like building temperatures, de-centralized energy production, what I call elegant engineering, i.e., using design and thoughtfulness to design better systems–I’ve seen many promising technologies sit in a bin because they earn 5% short-term return instead of 5.1% return.
We have the technical capacity to live much lighter on the planet. I don’t have time to go through it all but the systems we use whether it’s transportation, heating and cooling buildings, health-care, the military, the FIRE sector, government, even IT all use highly wasteful profoundly “stupid” systems engineering because vested interests profit from it. Why these interests are so short-sighted is too long to get into now.
“but how come I never read about what exactly we should be doing that is politically and socially acceptable?”
One reason is people are somewhat baffled about what to do about such a big problem. I favor carbon taxes myself, offset by other tax breaks and even tax credits (subsidies to low incomes) when necessary. How’s that? But the other issue is just corruption, how to make a corrupt government do good things, even if it could in theory, it doesn’t tend to because it’s hopelessly corrupted.
“It seems to me that if the argument is that we westerns should be welcoming austerity because it reduces aggregate demand and thus industrial output which therefore reduces emissions austerity is good because more poverty is good for planet.”
The western lifestyle, especially the American lifestyle is not good for the planet. It doesn’t necessarily mean a good lifestyle couldn’t be achieved with less fossil fuel use. Before austerity Europe achieved at least as good a lifestyle as the U.S. on much less fossil fuel use (no it’s not all nukes). (I’m not going to talk about Europe post-austerity because I think those problems really have nothing whatsoever to do with environmentalism at all).
“What exactly is the plan to elevate the living conditions of humanity including poorer Americans like myself while reducing our capacity for industrial output and power consumption?”
We might have to have a system where all wealth wasn’t concentrated in .01% of the population for it to work well. The .01% take almost all of the wealth as is, and string people along with promises of economic growth, no matter the cost.
“There is a bourgeois class bias regarding this stuff that reeks of having an elitist Malthusian underbelly.”
Not really, mostly apologizing for the destruction of the environment is apologizing for the capitalists. It’s done for their system and ultimately for their profit (of course neo-liberalism is not the only economic system capable of environmental destruction, but it is the main cause these days). They OWN the fossil fuel companies along with everything else. Accepting their destruction of everything, why because their !@#$ system must be valued above human lives and life on earth as such, is the real class apologetics.
“What exactly is believing in global warming going to do for the average western working family other than making them think they are evil for having to drive a car to work?”
That’s a really odd way to choose beliefs. What it could do from a strictly selfish perspective: you should maybe be aware of future water and probably eventually food shortages. I think ideally it might inspire activism, though the odds might be long, because ultimately everything good in your life depends on a stable climate. All the little concerns of the middle class family are all dependent on a stable climate.
I think most anyone serious about the issues knows that driving a car to work is not an individual issue but rather a societal issue of a society that was built in such a way as to be car-dependent. Framing it as an individual issue is a right-wing although very mainstream in this culture framing. And that is not necessarily where all environmentalists are coming from (though yea, you have some lifestyle types.).
Quote: “One reason is people are somewhat baffled about what to do about such a big problem. I favor carbon taxes myself, offset by other tax breaks and even tax credits (subsidies to low incomes) when necessary.”
So the solution is taxes aka austerity taking money out the system but offset with subsides and credit aka adding the very same money back into the system.
So the planet can be saved due to the right combination of paper shuffling?
It seems to that before whose papers need shuffling we should to what end? You can’t to avoid climate change because that is like saying we have a plan to build a bridge to “not that future.” It doesn’t tell anyone anything.
Quote: “The western lifestyle, especially the American lifestyle is not good for the planet. It doesn’t necessarily mean a good lifestyle couldn’t be achieved with less fossil fuel use. Before austerity Europe achieved at least as good a lifestyle as the U.S. on much less fossil fuel use (no it’s not all nukes).”
So the plan is a future that support that’s not the “American Lifestyle™ cause that’s bad. mkay,…
But, go into what make any Lifestyle™ What inputs does the American or European life consist of? Well, mostly inputs from cheap third world labor.
So what does it take in terms of physical power inputs to give the expected 10+ billion people on the planet to reach even somewhere close to the “Western Lifestyle™” based on current modes of power and materials consumption?
The answer is none. Nothing Scales at this level. No matter what you always end up with a Malthusian disaster with the only solution being forced population reduction.
Quote: “The .01% take almost all of the wealth as is, and string people along with promises of economic growth, no matter the cost.”
No, the .01% take claim to almost of the wealth in financial form but they most certainly do consume most of the wealth in physical terms. The individual elite footprint is much much less than that of the masses no matter how much higher their per capita consumption is because they are so small in number.
Any objective environmental analysis would have to conclude that the most of the sins against the environment are from the evil poor who want better lives than the planet can sustain. The rich are actually doing the planet a service every-time time they release some mass poison that kill millions prematurely.
There is no argument based on scarcity and limits which doesn’t work out well for the promoters of austerity and plutocracy. Likewise there is no argument that can be made than a human race with less access to the “ability to physically work” ( i.e. less power consumption) will have “greater physical ability to do work towards improving the climate and their lives” i.e. have greater power toward physical improvements.
Quote: “It’s like people have never heard of environmentalism that grows out of a systematic understanding of the world and think it’s all about someone bragging about recycling today or something.”
Really? If the Green gospel is so rooted in such a systematic understanding of the world then why is the Green message is hopelessly confused.
So far I’ve heard: Industrial/Capitalist Growth is the problem and therefore we need sustainable growth, degrowth, and a steady state economy. What are I suppose make of all these mixed messages? I read green sites all the time and you are all like that old joke about an economist; ask him a question and get 3 different answers.
Quote: “That’s a really odd way to choose beliefs. What it could do from a strictly selfish perspective: you should maybe be aware of future water and probably eventually food shortages.
Well welcome to how average people actually decide on things. They don’t live in some abstract concept of a “stable climate” or “ecological balance.” They want to know how they going to get to work and still have enough money to feed the kids if gasoline is now 20 bucks a gallon because some technocrats and academics says it’s saying the saving the planet.
You have to give people real solutions. You call it rightwing. It’s not. It’s just typical human short sightedness when confronted with a lack of options. It’s entirely rational to ignore some guy ranting about the weather 20 years from now being unstable?
Unstable? You want unstable? Trying living on 25k a year with 2 kids and banksters threatening to kick you out on the street? You think the average American will trust some pinhead ecology freak with the future stability of the entire planet when the best of Harvard business school can’t keep food prices stable for a single month?
The typical response is gonna be “F’ you commie and if the eco-apocalypse is going to happen cause I drive a SUV then better off with my friends Smith and Wesson than with you evil Liburals are goin’ after my second amendment rights.”
Meanwhile, the Bankster and Oil Company Execs are laughing
at you Oil Soaked-Eco-NGO believing suckers thinking you are fighting for anything other than bourgeois romanticism about “simpler times.”
When one’s thinking is dominated by dystopia can one really expect anything else to be built?
“So the solution is taxes aka austerity taking money out the system but offset with subsides and credit aka adding the very same money back into the system.
So the planet can be saved due to the right combination of paper shuffling? ”
Actually the only reason the planet is being destroyed is paper shuffling. A fake accounting system that doesn’t account for non-renewable resource use and the filling of planetary sinks (the ocean can only absorb so much carbon). So the paper shuffling is the existing economy. It’s not real. The planet we depend on for survival is.
“It seems to that before whose papers need shuffling we should to what end? You can’t to avoid climate change because that is like saying we have a plan to build a bridge to “not that future.” It doesn’t tell anyone anything. ”
At this point noone argues climate change can be avoided. It’s just a question of how many degrees warming will be baked in and thus the degree of the catastrophe.
Quote: “The western lifestyle, especially the American lifestyle is not good for the planet. It doesn’t necessarily mean a good lifestyle couldn’t be achieved with less fossil fuel use. Before austerity Europe achieved at least as good a lifestyle as the U.S. on much less fossil fuel use (no it’s not all nukes).”
“So the plan is a future that support that’s not the “American Lifestyle™ cause that’s bad. mkay,…”
Yes snark all you want but by any humanistic value system I think a lifestyle that destroys the planet we live on is bad. So yes the American lifestyle is bad. But again I don’t view this as primarily a problem with individuals.
Quote: “The .01% take almost all of the wealth as is, and string people along with promises of economic growth, no matter the cost.”
“No, the .01% take claim to almost of the wealth in financial form but they most certainly do consume most of the wealth in physical terms. The individual elite footprint is much much less than that of the masses no matter how much higher their per capita consumption is because they are so small in number.”
Your focusing on individual behavior again, which I thought we agreed is a misguided focus. I don’t care how the one percent behave in terms of their consumption etc.. The point is the decisions made are for their benefit. Why does BP skimp on making sure it’s oil rigs are safe? Profits. Why can’t governments address climate change? Because they are bribed by these companies.
“Any objective environmental analysis would have to conclude that the most of the sins against the environment are from the evil poor who want better lives than the planet can sustain.”
No I think pretty much no environmental analysis would conclude that. Yes some middle class person may consume more resources than a .01%. But in terms of resource consumption on a country wide basis, the global North consumes far more than the global South, while the global South will disproportionately suffer the effects of climate change.
“There is no argument based on scarcity and limits which doesn’t work out well for the promoters of austerity and plutocracy.”
Yes so? If the plutocrats argued 2+2=4, I wouldn’t disagree.
“Likewise there is no argument that can be made than a human race with less access to the “ability to physically work” ( i.e. less power consumption) will have “greater physical ability to do work towards improving the climate and their lives” i.e. have greater power toward physical improvements.”
Those improvements are not going to be possible period with enough climate instability.
Quote: “It’s like people have never heard of environmentalism that grows out of a systematic understanding of the world and think it’s all about someone bragging about recycling today or something.”
“Really? If the Green gospel is so rooted in such a systematic understanding of the world then why is the Green message is hopelessly confused”.
Environmentalist probably made a mistake in attempting at one point to make their message about individual behavior. It’s not some unique Green gospel mistake, the false gospel they fell for is the American individualist gospel. Basiclaly though there is a lot of overlap in the environmental movement and social justice movements etc.. I’m talking activists, not what treehugger is pushing you do to be green this month.
Quote: “That’s a really odd way to choose beliefs. What it could do from a strictly selfish perspective: you should maybe be aware of future water and probably eventually food shortages.
“Well welcome to how average people actually decide on things. They don’t live in some abstract concept of a “stable climate” or “ecological balance.” They want to know how they going to get to work and still have enough money to feed the kids if gasoline is now 20 bucks a gallon because some technocrats and academics says it’s saying the saving the planet.”
Well I said any carbon taxes would be offset with direct credits if necessary. So it balances out economically. So that answers the economic question. But anyway a stable climate is not an abstract question. Ask all the farmers who are having severe water shortages if a stable climate is an abstract concept.
“Unstable? You want unstable? Trying living on 25k a year with 2 kids and banksters threatening to kick you out on the street?”
Yes and these people are already starting to be affected by climate change. The storms, the fires, the droughts, etc.. They all effect real people, even those only earning 25k a year, in fact they effect them more of course because they dont’ have a financial cushion.
“You think the average American will trust some pinhead ecology freak with the future stability of the entire planet when the best of Harvard business school can’t keep food prices stable for a single month?”
Nice non-sequitor.
“Meanwhile, the Bankster and Oil Company Execs are laughing
at you Oil Soaked-Eco-NGO believing suckers thinking you are fighting for anything other than bourgeois romanticism about “simpler times.””
Of course that’s factually untrue. The oil companies fear eco-activists, or they wouldn’t treat the Keystone XL protestors like they do. They may laught at those who make the environmental issue purely about individual behavior. But I’d bet the Kochs laugh more at you, defending fossil fuel till the end, maybe they’ll even pay you, to sow phony division, between environmental and social justice, that doesn’t exist.
By Keystone XL protestors I mean those on the front lines fighting the actual building of the pipeline.
quote: ” I favor carbon taxes myself, offset by other tax breaks and even tax credits (subsidies to low incomes) when necessary. ”
Well this is exactly what the Kyoto Protocol proposed, and many signed up. (Without the subsidies to low income ppl, which remained a national matter, but while offering leeway or less strict conditions to ‘poorer’, ‘emerging’ etc. countries, as well as to those, like Australia, who had clout to bring to the acrimonious negotiation table.) It was built on the idea that nefarious activities (being purposefully vague) would cost the baddies money and that somehow the money would go to ‘good’ efforts. Trading carbon credits would…a hem..thru free market mechanisms reduce CO2 emissions!
It is exactly like having a high VAT on alcohol and shunting that money in part to the treatment of alcoholics, which many countries do, in a confused obscure way (state or universal health care), or like directly taxing casinos (real casinos, not finance), to pay for gambler-addiction treatment, which is the case, for ex. in Switzerland. (Casinos are taxed 50% and the money goes to old age pensions and ….you got it.) That usually sounds good, but the incidence of alcoholism or gambling that throws families into social aid is not affected, and continues to rise. The reasons are multiple but not hard to imagine in these low level, individual type cases.
Big Corps that pollute or create huge GHG emissions allow a small part of the budget to growing trees in the desert (say) and these die or whatever. All it does is create an extra ‘tax‘ type economic circuit, more bureaucracy, more power plays, and most importantly, more domination by large Corps and less to any ‘smaller‘ efforts. Fiddling about with the tax/money system will not work. Money has become a symbol, a measure, for everything that moves or doesn’t…
It’s like people have never heard of environmentalism that grows out of a systematic understanding of the world and think it’s all about someone bragging about recycling today or something. Horay my special snowflake self earns a gold star for recycling today. Look there’s nothing wrong with recycling, or driving a Prius, or strictly individual (not even local community) actions. But no that’s not a deep understanding of what’s wrong with the world environmentally (and otherwise).
Nothing is going to change until we rid ourselves of the kleptocracies that loot us, undo the wealth inequality that impoverishes us, and win the class war which is being waged against us.
We would need to do this even if there were no climate disruption, but we have not one existential problem to overcome in climate change, we have several. Overpopulation: World population will hit 9 billion around 2040. Resource depletion: Peak oil, peak energy, water usage, rare earths, agricultural production, etc. And environmental damage: species loss, climate change, deforestation, pollution, overfishing, and ocean acidification.
These challenges dwarf what we face with kleptocracy, wealth inequality, and class war, but we cannot effectively address these existential threats until we deal with the more immediate ones. That we are already seeing the effects of the existential crises simply underlines the fact that we have a rapidly closing window of perhaps as little as 5 years and certainly no more than 15 years to rid ourselves totally of kleptocracy, wealth inequality, and the class war. We are on the Titanic. We take over the ship now, change course, and have a future, or we hit the iceberg at which point it won’t matter what we choose.
Ditto~
Skippy… its like Gallipoli all over again, but, this time… a planet is at stake. All whilst they quibble over the poor quality of the Tea*(*Freedom!!!) served in the officers tent… FFS~
Why don’t we leave it for another ten years. By then we will have 30 years of accurate temperature measurements and, if they as stable as now, then the scare was just a scare. If, however, the temperature does increase a lot then let us get cracking about it.
We know enough already. Your plan would kill many and force hardship on many more.
The longer we wait, the more difficult is the change. The soon we start, the better we can adapt.