I’m slightly reminded of this xkcd. If everyone chills because hey, technology is advancing so quickly these days, then nothing is going to happen. Just like how in the 40s and 50s, if polio had been downplayed as “oh, we’re bound to solve it soon enough,” Jonas Salk would never have developed the vaccine. Panic leads to getting stuff done.
Plus, as is mentioned above, the people who will really be damaged by climate change aren’t going to be the receivers of the latest technological advances, and given that we don’t even know if those advances will come, prevention is key. Not that it’s happening nearly as much as it should . . .
But you did not address why I said that. Polio was attacked and defeated because there were no naysayers with political agendas to insist that there is no such thing as polio. In other words, people did not chill. Unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by that.
True, if everyone really stops innovating, waiting for everyone else to do it, progress will grind to a halt. But I don’t expect that to actually happen. And it won’t be long before computers are the ones advancing the frontiers of science and technology all on their own, without need of input from us anyway.
I suspect ultimately these kinds of questions will become irrelevant. We will be like chimpanzees next to the computers. Let’s hope they treat us better than we’ve been treating our primate cousins. (I do think they will–once again, I tend toward optimism.)
And if you think that alarmist, millennialist article is “all true” then you are not so moderate as you seemed to present yourself upthread, when you distinguished your views from those of “extremists”.
I gather from this that you don’t know much about computers. This ain’t going to happen for a very long time. If ever.
What you seem to be saying is that a magic high tech solution you can think of now will save us. That’s not how it works. 30 years or so ago lots of people thought solar power satellites would beam energy to earth, solving the energy problem. See any? The reason we don’t have an energy crisis is that we are a lot more energy efficient and we are better at extraction.
Make carbon production expensive and you’ll see lots of people working on reducing carbon emissions, and the problem will be assuaged a lot faster than waiting for nanotech.
It would be nice if you’d actually present a thoughtful argument. Something a little meatier than what you’ve given us. I’m at work. I’m not getting paid to critque an article line by line. But the gist of it is true. I don’t see anything in there that’s extremist. But then again, unlike you, I am not optimistic. Every day I hear arguments about why we mustn’t care so much about the environment. These arguments come from people who are way more powerful than you or anyone else in this thread. So forgive me for being a tad cynical.
There’s also nothing wrong with the alarmist. They called Rachel Carson an alarmist too, and they were right. She was. But decades after she raised her alarm, we’re still wringing our hands over the question of toxic substances in our environment. We have done a lot of half-measures and passed some laws. But we’re still conveniently ignoring the science showing we’re being exposed to endocrine disruptors and carcinogens and other environmental nasties. If someone dares to suggest that we do something meaningful about it, they are swiftly dismissed by people who like their flexible plastics and flame retardants. Even intelligent people behave this way.
People think they’ll listen to calm voices of moderation before they will the alarmist. But they are wrong. People listen to whomever tells them exactly what they want to hear.
I don’t see people ignoring it–I certainly don’t, and I see people increasingly getting concerned about BPA and the like. Certainly though I’d like to see more focus on actual envuronmental toxins, rather than on a nontoxic substance like carbon dioxide.
And that includes alarmists and pessimists themselves, who sift through what they read and hear to find, and fixate on, the “touch of grey” rather than the silver lining.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The Sahara is growing, and farms that were once productive are now not productive. Global climate change is a catastrophe for rain-fed farmers.
But aren’t there areas in Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia becoming more agriculturally productive?
As for the Sahara, my understanding is that it has been growing for thousands of years: many places where there has been little more than sand dunes for hundreds of years used to have rivers and swamps and trees and crocodiles.
If the majority of people weren’t biased against environmental regulation, I wouldn’t have a job. My agency wouldn’t exist.
I don’t know what this means.
And I’m still waiting for a real argument. Having an opinion is fine, but you seem so uninformed about everything you’ve been talking about that it is really hard to take it seriously.
Do you know how and why the modern world eradicated polio? We freaked the fuck out about it. When we finally had something more effective than trying to avoid exposure we spent tons of time and money and effort to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible. It’s not the vaccines themselves that eradicated polio in the developed world, it’s the huge, expensive, logistical nightmare we embarked on to get those vaccines into as many people as possible. And do you know why we embarked on that huge, expensive logistical nightmare? We did it because we freaked out about a real and present danger.
You are mixing up the 41,000 year cycles associated with the Earth’s tilt with the quick, devastating process that is currently rendering fields that were fertile just a few years ago barren and causing once predictable rain cycles to become erratic. The irony is that climate change seems to be improving agriculture in developed countries while it has a strong negative impact on poorer countries where people rely on rains for their fields and animals.
I’m not sure it’s ironic. In any case, if agriculture is improving in the places where it is done much more efficiently, sounds like a net gain for the world (and as noted upthread, hunger is on the decline worldwide). The disappearance, in the 21st century, of localized subsistence agriculture that is so backbreaking, unproductive, and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of droughts, is not something I am going to shed tears for.
This efficient, modern, high yield agriculture you so venerate is highly dependent upon fossil fuels (to plant, harvest, dry, transport, process, and to produce artificial fertilizer via the Haber–Bosch process) and largely non-replenishable water resources. It is no more sustainable than the other petroleum-intensive industrial and transportation processes.
Regarding the original inveighing to “just chill about climate change”, even if the assumption that some technology will be developed which is capable of sequestering carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere with any useful degree of efficiency, it still behooves us to reduce dependency and use of existing petroleum and hydrocarbon reserves. Although the ocean CO[SUB]2[/SUB] content remains at equilibrium with the lower atmosphere and can therefore act as a natural reservoir to absorb and concentrate CO[SUB]2[/SUB] for sequestration, atmospheric carbon in the upper atmosphere (where it will contribute most to the so-called “greenhouse effect”) will remain in place for decades or even centuries before migrating down to surface level where it can be absorbed. Unless your science fiction view of the future includes giant platforms somehow flying in the upper atmosphere filtering carbon dioxide directly out of the tenuously thin air, we still have to be concerned about what we’re pumping into the atmosphere today, and the energy necessary to implement any future infrastructure to remediate atmospheric CO[SUB]2[/SUB]. This is akin to terraforming, and while it is easy to make infographic cartoons for a Popular Science article on how atmospheric processors will save the planet (no doubt serviced by technicians in flying cars and wearing shiny silver suits), the reality is that this is akin in complexity to terraforming another planet, which is something we don’t even know how to do on a world we don’t care about, much less muck about with the only one we have.
While warming trends may offer northern latitudes longer growing seasons, they will ultimately also disrupt the relatively stable weather patterns which are governed by the jet stream, and are already causing “bleaching” (i.e. death") of coral reef systems which are critical in providing both nutrients and protection for marine ecosystems. This will result (as it already has) in reductions in fishing yields which are a vital protein source for a large part of the Earth’s population and are the lowest impact of protein yield per unit carbon impact. The impact on aquatic systems of global climate change should not be dismissed as a “minor impact”; we will already likely see major extinctions in many classes of ocean fauna which will dramatically affect human populations and other land-dwelling animals which are dependent upon resources coming from the ocean.
We may also want to reserve carbon sources for future use. Petroleum and other densified hydrocarbons provide a rich source of complex carbon material which may be highly desirable for future industrial applications. Today we use the thick, carbon-rich leftover from petroleum refining to make a wide variety of plastics, but in the future direct manufacture of carbon-based structures and nanomechanical systems using carbon as the main structural backbone (e.g. carbon nanotubes and more complex carbon structures) will require a rich source of pure carbon which is rare in nature.
Finally, and the most immediately pressing reason why we should develop and employ alternatives to fossil fuel energy sources, is that fossil fuel reserves are concentrated in a few areas of the planet which are also home to significant political and social unrest. The security impacts of this and the resulting costs are obvious and insidious, creating a major impetus for otherwise unnecessary and egregiously destructive military adventurism, particularly in the last three decades. The correlates between petroleum reserves and major military conflict are undeniable and the results upon the affected populations are tragic and unwarranted. We (the United States, Western Europe, and industrialized Southeast Asia) should have been developing non-petroleum based transportation fuels and power sources which minimize CO[SUB]2[/SUB] emission and rely upon indigenous sources of energy, e.g. solar, wind, biomass, thorium fission, et cetera.
Up until the mid-'Eighties it was assumed that controlled thermonuclear fusion was right around the corner (only “twenty years away”) and that we’d be free of dependence on foreign energy sources sometime around the turn of the century. We’re now a healthy decade and change past that with still no sign that controlled nuclear fusion will be commercially viable any time this century even if we can make it work in an experimental context. This is where relying on “the future will save us” mentalities gets you; you roll the dice on some future technology which will be the salvation of your current, self-admitted selfishness, and be it fusion or the technomagical “nanotechnology” pixie dust, it doesn’t live up to expectations.
We need to stop holding up the pretense that we can fix problems later. The problems we’re creating right now, on the only planet which is capable of sustaining human life, will persist for centuries. We’ve managed to boost the carrying capacity of Earth for the last couple of centuries, but only by the use of resources which are not being replenished on any human timescale, which is sort of like borrowing money from Jimmy Conway; sooner or later, Jimmy is going to want his money with three points above the vig to boot. Betting on the horses while facing a debt like that is a fool’s game.
In my humble opinion, your OP and posts in this thread betray the immaturity and lack of understanding of how reality works of a high school freshman, not somebody who has been here eleven years. Turn off the Star Trek and get a skill that requires you to work hard to accomplish something, rather than having it fall into your lap, and tell me how magical nanorobots will make everything better. The only way anything gets done is if people work at it.
And what fucking difference can it make to people in the expanding Sahara whose farms no longer produce if Alberta gets a bumper crop of wheat? Is everybody affected negatively by climate change supposed to move to Canada? We’re talking about a lot of people.
I’m not 100% sure what you mean by this. If you’re saying that 2 billion of the 7 billion people alive today will still be alive in 70 years, your numbers are quite a bit high (closer would be maybe 500 million folks. most of whom are under 10 today), barring a better increase in life expectancy than we’ve had over the last 70 and spread over more of the world.
If you’re claiming that there will be only a population of 2 billion alive on the Earth in 70 years, that’s hopelessly, astoundingly, stunningly pessimistic. We could have a nuclear winter and more people would survive than that–it’s inconceivable that the population would reduce that much even in the climate change worst case.
