Actually I did, and again: It is really silly to make argumets that make Putin and Russia to sound as not the ones that are making the change harder. Particularly in the nuclear front too.
He said not only that there’s no realistic plan now, but also that there’s no immediate likelihood of one emerging; and, in addition, that we should hope that we don’t succeed in meeting goals for limiting global warming.
Which, yes, reads to me as saying that anything we’re doing or are at all likely to do is useless, and we should not be trying to find anything that works, because attempting to limit global warming is overall a bad idea. The OP doesn’t say, we should hope that technique X doesn’t work, or that we’d better hope technique X isn’t put into effect because it won’t work. It says, we’d better hope that we don’t succeed in limiting global warming.
If that’s not what Cecil means, then it needs to be re-worded.
Side note to the thread -
When reading the OG columns, it seemed to be that often a great deal of work and idea-bouncing came from assistants, experts in the field who would supply insight, and back-and-forth with other individuals of like (and opposing!) minds.
The new efforts seem to be entirely based on Cecil working by himself, admittedly with information taken from books, articles, and elsewhere. And again, feedback is being given here of course. I do wonder if Cecil is or has considered developing a group of individuals online or IRL to get the pre-release feedback of areas where the rough draft should acknowledge assumptions, do a quick fact check, and the like.
Maybe that’s us?
That’s what I’m trying to determine. I did say “feedback is being given here of course.”
Certainly, that would polish up his thoughts and wit, as well as avoid quite a few mistakes considering the high-class nitpickers here. But I wanted to know more if these new columns should be considered finished, pre-release, or rough draft. Because so far they seem more the latter two than the first. I also grant 100% that a large part of them as stated before they began was Cecil making sure they could deliver said quality content on a frequent basis, and so an awkward stage of getting back up to speed could be expected.
So just trying to figure out how we set our assumptions and expectations accordingly.
This follow-up is almost more disappointing that the original.
The best Cecil columns of yore were the ones that explored a weird or little-known set of facts. From the front page, now: How woodpeckers survive head trauma, why is tag a universal game, the etymology of British place names. I can learn cool stuff by reading those.
The worst ones were always the opinion columns, where Cecil decided to wade into contemporary politics with a fairly smug pro-establishment perspective. Frankly, if I wanted that, I could read George Will.
I hope he’ll return to his strength, and dig up strange nuggets of cool information. I worry that he’ll decide that being relevant means being a pundit.
What makes you think I’m trying to glamorize the system? I merely point out that, by some measures, humanity’s lot has substantially improved, and that this has arguably brought us closer to a sustainable future. You seem to be saying that, in the process, the world has run up an unpayable debt we can’t do anything about. The facts suggest this pessimism is unwarranted and there’s a path forward. I’m not optimistic enough to say we’re on it now.
You apparently think a specific birth cohort is responsible for everything that has gone wrong in the past 50 years. (Seriously, allergies?) I can’t take this view seriously and will say no more about it.
I take it you’re looking for a critique of late-stage capitalism. This probably isn’t the place for it, but there are points of interest that might be profitably explored. If I can take on whether there’s a God (admittedly this took two columns), why not neoliberalism?
Let’s not exaggerate how early the scientific consensus developed. Here’s a quote from the New York Times opinion piece cited in the column:
As the science historian Spencer Weart put it: “How abrupt was the discovery of abrupt climate change? Many climate experts would put their finger on one moment: the day they read the 1993 report of the analysis of Greenland ice cores. Before that, almost nobody confidently believed that the climate could change massively within a decade or two; after the report, almost nobody felt sure that it could not.”
In 2002, the National Academies acknowledged the reality of rapid climate change in a report, “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises,” which described the new consensus as a “paradigm shift.” This was a reversal of its 1975 report.
On this telling, a scientific consensus had emerged by 1993. Up until then the situation had been described in conservative terms. The first IPCC report in 1990 was cautious, indicated a wide range of uncertainty, offered tentative policy suggestions, and said more research was needed. The sense of urgency among scientists built thereafter, culminating in the 2002 report.
I grant you the U.S. was slower on the uptake than the rest of the developed world. We didn’t ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol due to opposition in the Senate. Was this the doing of the boomers? Industry resistance and money were surely bigger factors. Boomer Al Gore might have had more of an impact had he been elected in 2000. However, a different boomer won.
Let me be clearer then. There’s unquestionably a path forward; it jumps out at you from the data. In OECD countries as well as in China, industrial development and the emergence of a middle class have been accompanied by a flattening of both the birth rate and CO2 emissions. That’s surely not coincidence.
But the world’s climate change action plan, to the extent there is one, doesn’t reflect this basic understanding. Instead it amounts to industrialized countries telling the developing world to stop developing. For a host of reasons, some more obvious than others, that’s not going to work.
True, I don’t have the support infrastructure I had in the past. How I miss the experiments in kitchen science with Una and her spreadsheets! But I still bounce ideas off people, and would like to take greater advantage of this forum for that purpose. Whether that’s going to work we’ll just have to see. That’s one of the reasons for the current low-profile effort.
God forbid I should ever be a pundit. But I’ve always been a know-it-all. You think this has somehow changed?
No, it isn’t wrong, it’s substantially correct. First of all 1985 isn’t “the 1970s”, and whatever Sagan had to say didn’t necessarily reflect any scientific consensus at the time. A much more authoritative statement was made to Congress in 1988 by the noted climate scientist James Hansen, and though Hansen was right, he was way ahead of the curve with respect to mainstream opinion.
I’m not sure it’s quite right to say that the first IPCC report in 1990 “said the crisis was still a long way off”; rather, the prevailing sense one gets from that early report was one of considerable uncertainty; indeed, they predicted that a definitive signature of anthropogenic greenhouse gas effects as distinct from natural variations was probably still a decade away. It’s also true that some of the climate research of the 70s was contradictory. Very few were actually predicting cooling, but unfortunately those few disproportionately attracted media attention and led to scientifically unsound hype in some popular media. A study of a cross-section of climate papers published between 1965 and 1979 found that 62% of them were predicting global warming, 10% thought the planet might be cooling, and 28% had no position; those that did take a position on either side were based on highly tentative data with high levels of uncertainty. Uncertainty is perhaps the single most salient characteristic of the climate science of the 1970s when viewed from a modern perspective.
I’m not saying you glamorize the system, I’m saying that the kind of argument you’re making is often used to do so; so by repeating it, you’re giving ammunition to those who do. (Also, I’m not convinced burning through almost twice of what’s available to us on a yearly basis is ‘bringing us closer to a sustainable future’.)
It’s not that we can’t do anything about it—merely that right now, we don’t. Or not nearly enough, at any rate. And the measures needed to course-correct get more drastic the more time passes; consequently, the obstacles to implementing them increase. We must hope that at some point, the will for change will surpass the needed threshold, and that when it does, there still is enough time to act.
From the 1979 report ‘Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment’ by the National Research Council:
For more than a century, we have been aware that changes in the composition of the atmosphere could affect its ability to trap the sun’s energy for our benefit. We now have incontrovertible evidence that the atmosphere is indeed changing and that we ourselves contribute to that change. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are steadily increasing, and these changes are linked with man’s use of fossil fuels and exploitation of the land. Since carbon dioxide plays a significant role in the heat budget of the atmosphere, it is reasonable to suppose that continued increases would affect
climate.These concerns have prompted a number of investigations of the implications of increasing carbon dioxide. Their consensus has been that increasing carbon dioxide will lead to a warmer earth with
a different distribution of climatic regimes.[…]
The conclusions of this brief but intense investigation may be comforting to scientists but disturbing to policymakers. If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible. The conclusions of prior studies have been generally reaffirmed.
From the 1978 internal Exxon report ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ by James F. Black:
What is considered the best presently available climate model for treating the Greenhouse Effect predicts that a doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would produce a mean temperature increase of about 2°C to 3°C over most of the earth.
Neat little trick there… debunk the current “gloom” (i.e. concern about the very real consequences of climate change) be associating it with a different “gloom” whose reasons haven’t come to pass (overpopulation). Because if one alarmist was mistaken about one theory 50 years ago, this debunks all alarmism from here on out. Ehrlich’s alarm about humanity running out of food was wrong, therefore cleaaaaarly nobody needs to worry about climate change. Silly alarmists! Always alarming!
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that living standards went down, so this is a bit of a strawman, isn’t it? If living standards went up due to unsustainable trends of consumption and pollution (as it seems, since we’re standing on a climate precipice), then there’s really nothing to brag about. Unless of course you dismiss the concern over externalities as alarmism.
And this really is something we have a problem getting the elder generation to see. You won’t be around when the worst of the consequences hit, so you’re content to recline back and marvel about how great things are right now for the rest of your life. An enviable position, but you need to understand that this is only one narrow way to see things.
I would love a cogent analysis of late stage capitalism, but that wasn’t really the point. The boomers are a target of ire of later generations because they benefitted from an unprecedented period that was driven by unsustainable processes. Even if a lot of things are better in absolute terms, many things have peaked and are now going backwards.
Humans probably starting complaining about the younger generation as soon as they lived in communities that allowed them to see a significant number of them. Boomers may be getting more push back than most older cohorts because:
a) They cannot count on the things previous generations took for granted (buying a house, sending their kids to college, retiring) and
b) The older generation (or maybe just NYT opinion writers claiming to speak for those generation) have been blaming them for the effects of these trends
To put in how the younger kids speak today, many of the the advancements and improvements that occurred during and right after the baby boom have been caused by f***ing around, and those coming of age now are going to be stuck with most of the finding out. And they are a bit salty about simultaneously being blamed for it.
My lifelong goal has been to piss off everybody. It’s your turn this week. I’ll get back to the capitalists soon enough.
As for when the world first knew about climate change, the disagreement here is twofold: first, when did the scientific consensus on climate change emerge? Second, when did boomers, and the public in general, become aware of said consensus?
On the first point, the confusion arises from a crucial detail: scientific consensus on what? The consensus in the 1979 report you cite was whether global warming was occurring at all. The consensus at issue in the material I quoted was whether global warming would be abrupt.
Here’s what the 1979 report had to say (last paragraph of summary):
To summarize, we have tried but have been unable to find any overlooked or underestimated physical effects that could reduce the currently estimated global warmings due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 to negligible proportions or reverse them altogether. However, we believe it is quite possible that the capacity of the intermediate waters of the oceans to absorb heat could delay the estimated warming by several decades. It appears that the warming will eventually occur, and the associated regional climatic changes so important to the assessment of socioeconomic consequences may well be significant, but unfortunately the latter cannot yet be adequately projected.
So yes, the authors agreed global warming would happen eventually. They didn’t know how soon or with what effect. The scientific consensus that climate change would happen abruptly didn’t arise until 1993 - in one historian’s telling, anyway - and was formally declared in 2002.
On the second point - and it’s on this that the question of boomer culpability turns - few would dispute that the public heard little about climate change in the 1970s, and what they did hear was contradictory. You can find lots of mainstream news accounts throughout the decade quoting scientists who thought the world was cooling. So if the public was confused, the blame goes to the mistaken scientists and the journalists who believed them.
In the 1980s … well, the Straight Dope is as good a gauge as any. The Teeming Millions sent me thousands of questions on every subject imaginable, and I’ve always loved writing about threats to the planet. The subject of global warming, then called the greenhouse effect, didn’t come up until 1989, when I did a column on methane belched up by cows. My first column about CO2 emissions was in 1994, when I straightened out a confused individual who thought the problem with Amazon deforestation was oxygen depletion - and even then I mentioned the contribution of fossil fuels only in passing. Was what I wrote accurate? Yes. Had I fully grasped the problem? No, and I was in a better position to judge than most boomers. Could we all have been a little quicker off the dime on this? Yeah. Nostra culpa. The more important issue is, now what?
That’s not actually what I said. What I said was that the quality of life today cannot be said to be “unquestionably” better. It’s worse in many ways, I cited a number of those ways. I did not assign blame directly.
However, if you want to infer that, let’s explore. The rise in auto-immune disorders are not well understood yet, but most will agree that environmental factors are the most likely culprit. Who is responsible for creating those environments that the Millennials have grown up in? Certainly, the Boomers weren’t knowingly making choices that harmed later generations in that specific respect, but their materialism and consumption probably had something to do with it.
I will argue that. In fact, I did.
In this and the previous discussion there was a lot of handwringing about the liberal use of generalizations implicit in a debate about generations. This statement about living standards is also an overgeneralization.
@Half_Man_Half_Wit and I both immediately raised the issue with the US middle-class. While we have computers, the internet, better medicine and a (somewhat) less bigoted society today compared to 40 years ago, that’s only part of the story. And for many that’s merely window dressing on the real economic issues.
The middle class is shrinking. Weath inequality is growing fast. Kids graduating college today have much steeper hill to climb when it comes to starting a family and accumulating wealth when compared to a Boomer simply graduating high school (or not, for that matter).
It’s the economy, stupid.
Still trying to clarify – so you’re saying that when you wrote:
you didn’t mean we should hope that we don’t meet goals to limit global warning?
And, while I haven’t time to research all countries, China’s CO2 emissions don’t appear to have been going down. It’s not a steady curve, but they appear to have gone up considerably. If they’re not going up quite as fast as they were a few years ago – that’s not enough to solve the problem.
Plus which – while the birth rate does indeed tend to go down as people become economically better off, that’s a long-term effect taking multiple generations to really take hold, which is why world population is still increasing and will for some time. It seems highly unlikely that we have time enough left to wait for that effect – even if it will drop CO2 emissions; which it may not, if emissions per person increase faster than the population drops.
Birthrates drop when people start expecting nearly all of their children to survive plus in addition women have genuine access to birth control, including societal support for using it. We need to work on this – but part of making people able to expect that their kids will live to grow up is keeping them from having to become climate refugees.
I do not disagree with anything you said at all, but I think there is a semantic divergence in what we all mean by “standards of living” and who we apply it to.
If we consider a worldwide scope, and we constrain it to basics like nutrition, shelter, availability of medical care, education, and things like that, then the standard of living has risen, both on top and at the bottom. Even for the US middle class.
But as you said, that’s not the whole situation. The standard of living has increased, but for the poor and middle class it’s become more precarious, while the upper and super-upper classes hoard enough wealth to last a thousand lifetimes. If not for that inequality, then everyone could have a standard of living that is both abundant and secure.
The former point is no small thing, and we should give credit where it’s due. But the latter is also important, and should give pause to anyone who thinks we ought to congratulate ourselves just because the average person consumes more calories for less money than they could in (say) 1900. There’s more to the picture of “standard of living” than access to the basics.
The middle class has shrunk, but that’s mostly due to professional households moving UP into the upper class. The lower income class increased about 4%, the upper increased by 7%, and the middle class shrunk from 61% to 50%.
However… Income in all classes has constantly risen. In 2020 dollars the lower class saw their average income rise ftom $20,604 in 1970 to $30,963 today. That’s a 45% increase in pay in constant dollars.
The biggest change at the low end is that it is harder to make a middle class income without a college degree. That’s not the fault of boomers, it’s the rise of credentialism and the decline in quality of schools. Plenty of blame to go around for that.
Every generation thinks it has it harder than the previous ones. You think buying a house now is hard? You should have tried it when mortgage rates were 15%. Cars of equivalent quality are cheaper than they have ever been. Everything from appliances to TVs and computers are cheaper and better than they have ever been. Food is cheaper and available in more variety than ever. Big box stores like Wal-Mart have increased the standards of living for the poor by using market power and efficiency gains to drive down prices.
Also, it’s easier to move to and work from lower cost cities and towns than it ever was, and real estate there is still very inexpensive. The boomers moved around a lot to improve their circumstances.
The boomers also lived through two major workforce transformations: first the move off the farms when agriculture mechanized (a process still ongoing when the boomers came of age), and then out of factories as production efficiency improved and we also offshored a lot of manufacturing. In 1970, 26% of the population was employed in factories. Today, it’s under 10%. But there are currently lots of well-paying factory jobs available if you want to live like a boomer.
I think it’s more than just semantic. Cecil here, to my reading, is using the broad idea that people in third world countries are better fed, better connected and have access to modern medicines in order to obfuscate and dismiss all the other criticisms of the Boomers. It’s kind of like congratulating George Bush for his legitimately successful work on fighting HIV in order to hand wave away the war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cecil said:
Living standards unquestionably improved in much of the world over the past couple generations due primarily to industrialization and the growth of the middle class.
Unqualified, that’s just not true. If you want to add the qualifications its defensible. Cecil was dismissive of the criticism. Nevermind the fact that the middle-class is NOT growing, that statement is objectively false.
The original question “Did baby boomers wreck the planet?” I think has some pretty clearly implied context, it’s not a question of the “standard of living” of the poorest of us. It’s about the environment primarily, secondarily it’s about the systemic changes to our society that are regressive.
Can you back any of that up? Cost of living is not lower as a proportion of income in any report I’ve seen.
High interest rates taken alone mean nothing without considering the home costs as a proportion of income.
When morgage rates were 15% the average house cost 4x median income, not 7.5x. I’d be delighted to pay 15% if the house only cost 4x median income.