Climate change could mean the extinction of our species

[hippifried]

I didn't feel like digging through the character map for the enye. This is America, & it ain't on the keyboard.

[trish]

Thank you hippiefried and muh_muh.

[Odelay]

It has (peruse any reputable refereed journal on climatology) and you won't (witness the current state of denial). Why isn't the world coming together? Two factors.

1) Denial. Look at the position to which russtafa persistently returns: He, like many others, fears that solutions will stress the world economy in ways that will negatively impact his life and the welfare of his countrymen. When you don't understand science and you have to take your "truth" on the word of authority, that economic burden weighs heavily against accepting the authority of climate science. That's psychologically understandable, but it's also poor epistemology.

Once swayed by ignorance and the threat of economic burden, or by ignorance and ideology (or all three) a different psychology sets in: the need to defend one's position at all cost; even if that cost is your own intellectual integrity. Look for example at Faldur's claim above that there is no consensus among climate scientists. Even if you're ignorant of science, you shouldn't be ignorant of the easily checked fact that consensus exists. Faldur even knows, on a certain level, that is does when he sarcastically attacks climatologists generally in post #441. Why attack all climatologists when you claim (albeit falsely) that 50% of them support you? Or look at Faldur's post #333 where grasping for any straw to stay afloat he links to an article which he thinks attributes general long term ocean rise to the effects of El Nino and El Nina whereas the article makes no such claim, but even shows the El Nino and El Nina oscillations superposed upon the general rise due to global warming (see my post #334). These sorts of attempts to misrepresent and distort (whether they be due to inexcusable ignorance or deliberate) are examples of what the denier is led to in order to remain a denier. They are also examples of denier propaganda.

2. There is no obvious solution. It is unfeasible to simply stop burning fossil fuels. China is building coal burning plants hand over fist. Its the cheapest way for them to produce energy. It is estimated that there are enough coal deposits left on Earth to last a millennium (perhaps we should conserve them for the next ice age...but we won't). I don't see any way short of a miracle that we won't burn through them. For one thing, our first world lifestyles are at stake. Anyone here want to give up their computer, connectivity, winter heat, summer air-conditioning, car etc. etc. to save our great grandchildren that grief? For another thing, there's too much money to be made providing that energy. The coal is just laying there. All you gotta do is dig it up, sell it and ship it. One might try to slow down consumption by various sorts of regulations or incentives. Originally Democrats pushed for regulations. Republicans insisted on cap and trade. Now Democrats are pushing cap and trade, and Republicans say the free market will handle it. But to be effective, any regulation or incentive has to be international, and I'm pessimistic that we'll ever have effective national or international control of our energy consumption. The deniers (who, generally, deep down know they're wrong) are all waiting on the next scientific miracle that will produce safe energy for free while at the same time they want to reduce the funding of scientific institutions and take anti-science potshots at biologists, paleontologists, geologists and climatologists.

Disclaimer: Nowhere in this post (or prior posts in this thread) do I support any political position. I merely present the hard science and speculate on what might be going on in the heads of deniers.

Nice post, Trish. I enjoy your writing, and the thought you put into it. Wish my reading list was as substantive as yours.

EDIT: Oh hell, I might as well address the topic with my own opinion. Mine is not all that different from Trish's above. When global warming science first started getting a widespread airing, I was very alarmed. I changed some things up at the time, including the way I live my life and my laid back ways with others. I was pretty laissez faire, but global warming sort of kicked me in the butt and pushed me to become a whole lot more politically active. Since then, I've gradually mellowed out. I think it was at the time of the busted Kyoto conference/talks that it dawned on me that significant preventative action was not going to happen. It was right about the same time, and thoroughly related, that I saw the US political system as irreversibly broken. Warming will continue and we will see incredible effects even over the next 50 years - and I won't live much beyond that. The irony is that science and engineering will likely save the world. Praying to Jesus, definitely won't. Once disastrous effects are happening everywhere, science will take a prescriptive approach to solving the problems. And 150 years from now people will wonder why a far less costly preventative approach couldn't have been developed and executed in the late 20th century.

[Ben]

Nice post, Trish. I enjoy your writing, and the thought you put into it. Wish my reading list was as substantive as yours.

EDIT: Oh hell, I might as well address the topic with my own opinion. Mine is not all that different from Trish's above. When global warming science first started getting a widespread airing, I was very alarmed. I changed some things up at the time, including the way I live my life and my laid back ways with others. I was pretty laissez faire, but global warming sort of kicked me in the butt and pushed me to become a whole lot more politically active. Since then, I've gradually mellowed out. I think it was at the time of the busted Kyoto conference/talks that it dawned on me that significant preventative action was not going to happen. It was right about the same time, and thoroughly related, that I saw the US political system as irreversibly broken. Warming will continue and we will see incredible effects even over the next 50 years - and I won't live much beyond that. The irony is that science and engineering will likely save the world. Praying to Jesus, definitely won't. Once disastrous effects are happening everywhere, science will take a prescriptive approach to solving the problems. And 150 years from now people will wonder why a far less costly preventative approach couldn't have been developed and executed in the late 20th century.

[trish]

Thank you Odelay. We find ourselves pretty much aligned.

Hi Ben.
Derrick Jensen defines a city as a population large enough to require the importation of resources. That’s fine, but it does leave out a number populations that are regarded as cities. A typical farmer in ancient Athens actually lived in the polis of Athens itself. Athens, and most other Greek poleis of the time, was surrounded by lands that the citizens of Athens farmed or used to graze sheep and cattle. The farmers typically retired to their homes within the polis at day’s end. Was Athens self-sustaining? Probably so. Why the qualifier ‘probably?’ Well, Athens was outward oriented. It chose to open itself to the world, through trade and the exchange of ideas. There were considerably many imported goods and considerably many exported goods. All that trade makes it difficult to say whether Athen’s survival required the goods it imported. But that complex flux of trade also demonstrates the irrelevance of the question. The real question is: Was the entire trade network (to which Athens was only one member) self-sustaining? Athens can be called a civilization, but it was not Civilization. The Civilization to which the Greek world belonged was the network of cities and farms to which it was connected. Did the cities of the ancient world sustain each other? Did that network survive into modern times and evolve into a modern network built upon the old? Or did the old network collapse and die?

There is a parallel with modern cities. Is Chicago, for example, self-sustaining? Well Chicago imports and exports all sorts of goods. Does the survival of Chicago depend on the imports? Probably so, if you consider milk brought to the city from fify miles downstate an import. If you don’t, then just making sense of the question is problematic. But the survival or collapse of Chicago is not the rise and fall of Civilization. The real question is: Is the network to which Chicago is connected self-sustaining? These days, that network is pretty much the world. Are we in the world succeeding at the task of sustaining each other and if so will we continue to succeed or will the whole thing soon collapse?

It is clear that in a finite world, growth cannot be the single strategy for solving economic problems. But it is also clear that growth often works when the population hasn’t yet come near carrying capacity. Perhaps the biggest difference between Greens and non-Greens is how the two groups esitimate our proximity to that capacity. The other difference might be measured by how optimistic one is about the possibility of political solutions to problems of sustainability. By that measure I am not a Green.

[hippifried]

I'm not buying those definitions at all. Derrick Jensen's full of shit, just like so many others who need to revise the language to make their earlier ideas seem not so totally lame. Civilization is when you become unsustainable? C'mon... What're we supposed to do? Kill ourselves off by the billions so we can revert back to our glory days as savages? Then what? Who does this clown think started building cities?

I haven't read his books, & now I won't. I regret wasting the time to listen to the posted videos.

[Odelay]

Don't have quite the visceral reaction of hippi, but I don't really buy his definitions either. I understand the need to make certain definitions or assumptions when writing material like this, but great care needs to be taken that exceptions aren't screaming out as soon as you lay a stake in the ground. It can also be argued that life in the country isn't sustainable either. Without the wealth that cities create to pay for armies, police, justice systems, etc., farms would be and are overrun. Wealthy farmers only exist where chaos is held at bay. There's a symbiotic nature between a farming region and cities, that combine to make civilization.

[Ben]

Thank you Odelay. We find ourselves pretty much aligned.

Hi Ben.
Derrick Jensen defines a city as a population large enough to require the importation of resources. That’s fine, but it does leave out a number populations that are regarded as cities. A typical farmer in ancient Athens actually lived in the polis of Athens itself. Athens, and most other Greek poleis of the time, was surrounded by lands that the citizens of Athens farmed or used to graze sheep and cattle. The farmers typically retired to their homes within the polis at day’s end. Was Athens self-sustaining? Probably so. Why the qualifier ‘probably?’ Well, Athens was outward oriented. It chose to open itself to the world, through trade and the exchange of ideas. There were considerably many imported goods and considerably many exported goods. All that trade makes it difficult to say whether Athen’s survival required the goods it imported. But that complex flux of trade also demonstrates the irrelevance of the question. The real question is: Was the entire trade network (to which Athens was only one member) self-sustaining? Athens can be called a civilization, but it was not Civilization. The Civilization to which the Greek world belonged was the network of cities and farms to which it was connected. Did the cities of the ancient world sustain each other? Did that network survive into modern times and evolve into a modern network built upon the old? Or did the old network collapse and die?

There is a parallel with modern cities. Is Chicago, for example, self-sustaining? Well Chicago imports and exports all sorts of goods. Does the survival of Chicago depend on the imports? Probably so, if you consider milk brought to the city from fify miles downstate an import. If you don’t, then just making sense of the question is problematic. But the survival or collapse of Chicago is not the rise and fall of Civilization. The real question is: Is the network to which Chicago is connected self-sustaining? These days, that network is pretty much the world. Are we in the world succeeding at the task of sustaining each other and if so will we continue to succeed or will the whole thing soon collapse?

It is clear that in a finite world, growth cannot be the single strategy for solving economic problems. But it is also clear that growth often works when the population hasn’t yet come near carrying capacity. Perhaps the biggest difference between Greens and non-Greens is how the two groups esitimate our proximity to that capacity. The other difference might be measured by how optimistic one is about the possibility of political solutions to problems of sustainability. By that measure I am not a Green.

Hey Trish,
The likes of Derrick Jensen say we're killing the planet. 200 species a day are being wiped out. I mean, what happens, according to Jensen, if we keep going as is? What will the planet look like in 100 years or 200 years or 500?
But he thinks we have to end industrial civilization. (First off, most people, would and do strongly disagree.) He believes electricity isn't sustainable. (Derrick Jensen is of the left left left -- ha ha! I mean, there's left-liberal and left. But Derrick Jensen is left left left.) He also believes we can't and shouldn't have bicycles. What?!?!?!?!?!
But he does make a point that we managed fine without electricity prior to circa 1880. Of course, well, it'd be a radical step for humanity. And most people wouldn't go along with it. Well, I wouldn't.
But he makes some interesting points. Well, we know that cancer is a byproduct or consequence of civilization.
Ya know, if we go back, say, 15,000 years ago cancer didn't exist. It's a consequence of civilization.
And, say, 20,000 years ago human beings were taller, their bones were denser and we lived longer.
Why do we assume agriculture, technology and all this stuff is a sign of progress? Close to 8 million people die every year from cancer. Again, a consequence of our despoliation of the planet.
I might add: what's the endgame of industrial civilization?
I don't agree with Derrick Jensen. But he does raise some serious questions about industrial civilization.
Spencer Wells, too, talks about the destructiveness of civilization in his book: Pandora's Seed.

[trish]

I'm not buying that cancer is a byproduct of civilization. You really think Cro-Magnon didn't get melanomas? Certain gene combinations are known to predispose women to breast cancers which may develop spontaneously or develop with exposure to carcinogens (which can be found in nature as well as in the products of the industrial world). Do we have any reason to think those genetic combinations are the result of civilization and weren't in the population say 30,000 years ago? Without the benefit of the scientific method, Cro-Magnon never knew about vitamins. He died of rickets and scurvy. Nor did they have knowledge of pathogens and contagion. Consequently their children died of childhood diseases and whole tribes were wiped out by plagues. I don't believe the average life expectancy 20 000 years ago was longer than it is today. Childhood mortality is enough to skew it our favor. Modern geriatrics skews it even more in our favor.

It's true that Homo sapiens have lived on the planet for a couple hundred thousand years. Were our ancestors self-sustaining, or were they living subsistence life-styles?

Here's an interesting multiple choice question.

When was the imminent extinction of Homo sapiens more probable?
a) 125 000 years ago.
b) Right now.

I'm going with answer (a).

For my money Jared Diamond has a more reasoned and sane handle on the factors that allow civilizations to survive, flourish or collapse (Guns, Germs and Steel and also Collapse are two of his books on the subject).

[muh_muh]

But he makes some interesting points. Well, we know that cancer is a byproduct or consequence of civilization.
Ya know, if we go back, say, 15,000 years ago cancer didn't exist. It's a consequence of civilization.

that is such an unbelieveable bunch of bullshit
first of all animals get cancer too secondly how the hell do you know cancer didnt exist back then?
lastly in the majority of the cases cancer is a condition that appears late in life which obviously means that 15k years ago where the life expectancy was several decades shorter than today cancer would naturally have been a lot less prevalent