We invest much effort in combating global warming. But what should we do, many years in the future, if we finally got control? Return the world to a pre-industrial climate?
But if biodiversity is a critical measure of planet health, wouldn’t we want to create a more ideal climate? What would that Earth look like?
If that is too abstract, then consider terraforming Mars. What would be the optimal result, there?
The question is meaningless on the timescales in which human societies operate. Extinction and speciation are not symmetrical processes - extinction can take place on scales of decades to centuries, while speciation (with very few exceptions, such as polyploidy) occurs more on the order of tens of thousands to millions of years.
Global warming concerns are on the timescale of centuries, during which we can’t expect to increase biodiversity.
Hypothetical large-scale genetic engineering or societal planning on the scale of millennia might change that, but aren’t really GQ material since they would be wild speculation.
A question that calls for so much speculation, I’m not sure it can really be answered factually, but for transplanting species from Earth, a climate like Earth’s on a terraformed Mars would be useful.
If we really could control the climate, we wouldn’t use it to increase biodiversity. We’d use it for economic benefit by turning as much land as possible into productive farm and grazing land.
Even if we didn’t have that level of control, we’d at least try to maintain the status quo. Climate change is expensive because people live where they can make a living, which, for most of the world, mean where they can grow food. If the climate changes, some sparsely populated land will become arable, some new shipping lanes will open up, but that will not make up for the misery caused when some densely populated areas begin to dry up.
If we really did decide to control climate for the benefit of the ecosystem I don’t think there’s any best thing we could do. Long before Man arose, the climate changed and ecosystems adjusted to it. Whatever we did, there would be species that would win, species that would lose, and many that would just move around. I would just keep two goals: Don’t let the oceans freeze over and don’t let the oceans boil away.
Since this is not really a question that can be answered factually, I think it’s better suited to GD than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
We’re a long ways away technologically from a “global adjustable thermostat.” The geopolitical ramifications if the technology ever exists are a mountain in and of themselves. Finally, the sad truth it is we’ll probably (if ever) attain this “global thermostat” before we have a “complete” understanding of the full intricacies of global climate. Meaning messing with the thermostat would result in things we couldn’t predict accurately and thus, would cause huge problems we hadn’t foreseen.
Now, assuming a global thermostat and a complete understanding of the effects of adjusting it, I think the best adjustment would be to “leave it alone, unless some catastrophe would require us to change it.”
Hmm. Well, I was hoping that there were at the least some general theories in the academic community on this.
It’s a great failure in the environmental movement that it is constantly saying what it does not want, but not what does it want. It’s largely negative: Bad chemicals are out of control, habitats are being lost, species are dying. But the question of what to terraform toward is critical, right now. The environmental movement, I believe, should change course immediately, directed toward concrete, distant targets.
Is the object to have more farm land, as EdwardLost may have been suggesting? Or should we let nature have an “invisible hand” as soon as it’s stabilized? (A position from Martin Hyde I’ve heard, for example, used to reject attempts to “bring back” recently extinct species.) wevets’ answer perhaps assumes that there’s nothing we can do.
I had parts of tentative answers occur recently. They were kicked into high gear by reading an article in ScienceNews making the suggestion that lack of biodiversity is responsible for allowing disease to spread more rapidly and widely. (Hence the alarming recent problems with bats, frogs, cultivated grapes, trees, etc.)
My haul-it-up-the-flagpole answer is that we should return the Earth to the biodiversity it had before mankind had a significant effect, and during an optimal period. I supposed that period would be one with warm, placid weather. Even if we never reach that goal, at least we would know how to evaluate the cost of other economic actions that went contrary to the goal.
The problem comes in that that state is out of whack with the background impetus of planetary climate cycles. The maximum biodiversity you refer to happened to occur during an interglacial, but in reality, overall we’re moving, or should be moving, to the end of the current interglacial period in the next 5000a or so. Much better, I think, to return to a pre-human state and then let overall climate cycles take their course. So return to where we reckon we should be with CO[sub]2[/sub] etc, and reduce ourselves to as close to a zero emission society as possible.
Or, as a wise Gnole once said: “arguing with the weather only makes you wetter”
Which pre-industrial climate? The of 1800, in the middle of the little Ice Age, when temperatures were several degrees cooler than today and the blizzards experienced in the Norther Hemisphere this winter would be considered mild??
The climate of 10, 000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, before humans began to have a serious impact on climate?
The warm, wet climate of 40, 000 years ago, before human had any detectable effect on climate whatesoever?
I don;t think you understand that the climate has always changed. There wasn’t just one “pre-industrial climate”, there were many, most of them much more different from today’s climate than today’s climate is from the climate of 1900.
The question is meaningless. Biodiversity is the result of both spatial and temporal environmental diversity. The ideal climate in terms of biodiversity is one which varies widely in both time and space.
Once again, the question makes no sense.