Call me a “Star Trek progressive”. I am very optimistic that in 70 years we will look back on all this gloom and doom about the climate the way we do now on the polio scares of the 1940s. Our technology will be so advanced by that point that we will be able to use nanotechnology to clean (and rearrange if we like) any and all parts of the atmosphere we need or desire to.
If anything, I think the toughest part of it will end up being the next 20-30 years, depending. Especially around fifteen or twenty years from now, when the effects will be worse than they are now, but the amelioration tech is less likely to be up to speed yet. But that’s a lot different than the millennialism of, for instance, this just-released dystopian sci-fi novella, written by a Harvard professor.
The thing is, it’s not us who suffer from global climate change. It is poor people with rain fed crops who will now have more unpredictable and likely to fail crops.
Given that such Star Trek technology as “build latrines” and “provide basic health care” are still unavailable in these areas, I’m not convinced that technology that doesn’t even exist much is going to help them.
In a practical sense, the word “nanotechnology” is too often used as a substitute for “magic”. How is nanotechnology going to selectively remove individual molecules from the atmosphere in large enough amounts to make any difference at all? It’s pure fantasy at this point.
I agree that humans have a fascinating future. The problem is most will not survive to see it. Of the 7 billion on the planet at the moment possibly 2 billion will be the population in 70 years.
I’d feel better if the scientists and engineers working on your brilliant nano-tech solution to ameliorate climate change didn’t “just chill” about the climate change scare. In fact, I want them to be really really concerned about it for the next 70 years until they’ve found the solution, likely a variety of solutions, including the dramatic reduction in global output of climate changing polutants and the dramatic reduction in our dependence on oil, gas and coal for energy.
In the meantime, you just go right ahead and chill out with your Star Trek dvd’s and avoid the dystopian sci-fi if it’s harshing your buzz.
It is definitely harshing my buzz, you got that right.
In the 1970s it was widely believed among similar millennialist style gloom-and-doom liberals that a population explosion was leading to imminent mass famine. Instead, global hunger has been on the decline for decades now.
How do you think an iPhone with Siri, or Google Glass, would have looked to your average American in 1944? Like magic, perhaps? (And if anything, I expect technology to develop faster in the next seventy years than it did in the past seventy.)
A lot of stuff is getting better on the developing world, but natural disasters are increasing. In part, this is due to increasing population and urbanization. But climate change is causing part of this right now as we speak
Things will improve, but there is a long ways to go and climate change isn’t helping.
To be accurate, that is Malthusian Theory and dates from 1798. So far it hasn’t proven out as you correctly say. However we have not previously come up against any limits - the planet had infinite resources for the smaller population.
I never said the idea originated in the 1970s; however, it did gain great currency then–that being the era that Paul Ehrlich appeared on Johnny Carson roughly 20 times to peddle his book The Population Bomb, arguing that the massive famines would occur before the end of the 20th century and making foolish bets with more sober-minded experts.
The best thing we could do is reduce the birth rate across the world, that would help, all these countries-the UK include -with this outdated and unsustainable view to increase population is stupid and dangerous, all I hear is "we need more houses ",no, we need less people! Same the world over except it is not first world problems in some places is life and death
From Dr Seuss’ If I Ran The Circus. “Sneelock, brave Sneelock will do it - He’ll Manage just fine; Don’t ask how he’ll manage. - That’s his job. Not mine…”
Yeah, people in the 40’s were dumb-asses for worrying about polio. They should have known from reading their sci-fi novels that in about 70 years we would have the human genome mapped and be able to cure any disease instantly. Just like we are able to instantly cure all diseases today.
You wasted your time Jonas Salk. You could have spent your time working on making cigarets more flavorful and let the future take care of the hard stuff. Think how much better off we would have been if he did.
Like the polio “scare”, we will develop a defensive technology against climate change only if we accept the fact that it is real. Polio was very real, I grew up in the 40s, and I knew people who got polio, and for decades after that, I knew people in wheelchairs who had polio, and there are probably still a few disabled survivors today.
Polio was very real, so was the doom and gloom to people whose kids suffered from it. And there would still be polio, if people had just chilled about it. Imagine what the world would be like today, if an entire political movement existed in the 50s and 50s to deny that there was such a thing as polio, and people should just chill about it.
Sure. And we’ll use our flying cars or jetpacks to get us to our 3-hours-a-week jobs at the fusion power plant. Those of us who don’t just teleport there, that is.
Even if technology does eventually save the day, that doesn’t mean we need to relax. The technological deux machina may arrive 50 years from now or 500 years from now. Lots of shit could go down in the interim. Shit is going down now.
And the solution–if that’s what it is–isn’t going to benefit “everybody” equally. No solution ever does. There are still people who have to worry about polio, even though that problem has been eradicated as far as the rest of us are concerned. The rich may be able to afford climate-controlling drones or construct giant windwalls to protect against tornados and hurricanes. The rich will be able to afford the latest vaccines against West Nile, dengue fever, and yellow fever, and they’ll be able to buy some Arctic real estate when the temperate zone becomes unbearable. But everyone won’t be as lucky.
Imagine we took the same attitude about the ozone hole in the 80s, and said “No need to stop producing CFCs, because we’ll eventually find a way to clean it up.” It’s now 30 years later, and we still don’t have any way to remove CFCs from the atmosphere.
But instead, we got together and agreed to stop producing chemicals that were depleting the ozone layer (Montreal Protocol). As a result, the ozone hole is now shrinking.
Scr4, agree that this is a good example of science and engineering saving the day. But a lot of what I hear these days is more equivalent to if people in the '80s had said “well, we will just stop having to use air-conditioning”. And there is no way you are taking away my fucking AC.
Sure, never meant to suggest otherwise. My mom remembers being kept home in the summer, not being allowed to go to public swimming pools, etc., although polio never actually touched her family. My father OTOH lost his only sibling, my uncle, at age six to polio (not to an iron lung or wheelchair, but to full-on death from the initial infection). And they were upper-crust Northeastern WASPs. The “scare” was about real fear. But today it is only a danger in the Pakistani hinterlands where the Taliban hold sway. The modern world has eradicated it.
But we haven’t eradicated infectious disease, not by a long shot. Global infectious disease is much more analogous to the climate change problem than an individual polio epidemic.
I’m curious about what exactly you’re hearing. I don’t hear anyone calling to ban fossil fuels–not anyone who actually has any sway over public opinion, at least. What I do hear is people saying that now is the time to start switching over to solar and wind, at least to slow the pace of the inevitable. I don’t hear anyone saying that we need to close down coastal cities and move everyone inland. But what I do hear is people saying we need to start preparing coastal cities for more frequent and intense storm surges and stop building down to the shoreline. I don’t hear anyone saying that we need to do away with consumer goods and live like our stone age ancestors. But what I do hear people saying that we shouldn’t sacrifice rain forests for hamburgers. Yes, there are some extremists out there who are advocating extreme measures. But they are outnumbered by the people who don’t want to do anything at all. The do-nothings would have everyone believe even pragmatic measures are nonsense.
I think the OP feels this way because they haven’t experienced the effects of global climate change directly, and also likely feel that they have the money and opportunity to adjust if they need to. Very selfish mindset, iyam.
