The climate has no pronouns
The Guardian says the climate disaster is here. Not on the way, but here.
“We have built a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” as Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, puts it.
The world has already heated up by around 1.2C, on average, since the preindustrial era, pushing humanity beyond almost all historical boundaries. Cranking up the temperature of the entire globe this much within little more than a century is, in fact, extraordinary, with the oceans alone absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second.
Until now, human civilization has operated within a narrow, stable band of temperature. Through the burning of fossil fuels, we have now unmoored ourselves from our past, as if we have transplanted ourselves onto another planet. The last time it was hotter than now was at least 125,000 years ago, while the atmosphere has more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in it than any time in the past two million years, perhaps more.
So the thing is, we didn’t evolve to live in this climate. We evolved to live in a different climate, which is now gone. Permanently gone.
“We are conducting an unprecedented experiment with our planet,” said Hayhoe. “The temperature has only moved a few tenths of a degree for us until now, just small wiggles in the road. But now we are hitting a curve we’ve never seen before.”
And it’s swimming in oil, and we have no brakes, and there’s a cliff just past the curve.
I have been listening to and following Hayhoe for a few years, and she is very good at communicating the issues of climate change. She has a series of videos called “Global Weirding.” They’re not only entertaining, but provide clear discusons of how the application of science has demonstrated the effects of excess carbon on the atmospere and oceans, and how this will affect us. Since she is an evangelical Christian herself, she focuses her communications on their viewpoint and dispels many of the misconceptions that are spread through the churches.
We’re in it deep, and it will take centuries for life on earth to recover. Whether humans make it through is questionable. Evolutons moves relatively slowly, but if Lewontin and Gould were right then the life that comes out of this mess will be very much changed from today.
Post-holocene explosion here we come!
Yes, the climate disaster is here, and it is going to get worse, especially for people who aren’t lucky enough to make it to rich Western countries. Some smart dude has a couple of posts about how it isn’t going to be end-of-civilisation bad which have caused me to re-think my own position slightly from “humans will probably go extinct in the next thousand years” to “billions of people will remain a permanent underclass while a small percentage of the species explores and colonises space”.
Doomsday cults are attractive, especially when there is something behind the doom. There is something romantic about knowing a hidden truth and being a special witness to the end of the world. But it seems…funny, to me, how so many people in the West can look at the most prosperous and healthy and free and equal society in the history of the world and only see doom and gloom and evil and suffering. Yes, doom and gloom and evil and suffering all exist, but they have existed everywhere, for all time. And every generation has had lots of people who were absolutely certain that theirs would be the last generation, or at least would be the apex, with nothing but chaos and dissolution and destruction to follow. It has been that way at least as long as we have written records, and likely far longer. Yet we are still here, and we have made a civil society out of the chaos of nature, regardless.
On the other hand, Canada and Siberia are already melting, in a vicious and likely irrecoverable cycle which will not stop until the Arctic is free of permafrost and ice, no matter what we do. And our agricultural practices have precipitated a mass extinction event mostly-orthogonally to the carbon catastrophe, and the more intensely we farm, the more fragile the ecosystem becomes. These systems are non-linear, possibly even non-modellable at all, given the scales and novelty involved. It is not inconceivable that the smart people who read the IPCC reports closely and conclude that even the worst-case scenarios aren’t civilisation-ending are wrong, and the planet could become uninhabitable for us in our own lifetimes.
On the gripping hand, I look around at what society is becoming, at how intensely adolescents and young adults and their try-hard older “allies” fight so self-righteously and aggressively in order to instantiate religious dogmas over race and gender and the language we use for them, at how feminist groups and green groups and gay groups alike have all been captured by this clique of postmodern elites who think change means getting people to mouth pieties or risk utter ruin, and I wonder, just a bit and not too often, if it isn’t all in need of a little Mad Maxing. In my better moments I hope we can come through the current moral panics with a combination of technology and empathy and restructured lifestyles, but I fear that relies too much on the better angels of our nature, which despite the absolute moral progress we’ve made are altogether fragile and were by no means inevitable.
I dunno, I’m just thinking out lout at this point. But if I had to bet, I’d lay my money on us suffering more acutely for awhile, perhaps a few generations, and then building out again. That seems to be what we do. The meantime is always…unpleasant, but then again, nobody promised us life would be pleasant to begin with.
No percentage of the species is going to “colonise space.”
Too true… We’re not even anywhere near building a space bolas and our chemical fueled rockets won’t do it.
More likely scenario? We will dwindle in numbers, because we are so far above carrying capacity already, and global warming will reduce carrying capacity. We will continue, perhaps, but we will not continue in the same numbers, and we will not continue in the same lifestyle. And yes, I do suspect some people will remain rich while most remain poor, but we are grounded. Colonizing space is a dream more for science fiction than for science. It is believed in by physicists and engineers, who know we can build things in space, but not by biologists, who understand we won’t likely build functional communities there.
Is it really believed in by engineers? I would think they’d be the last people to believe in it, because of the engineering impossibilities involved. How in hell would these future humans get all the necessary infrastructure to another planet? How would they even get enough water to another planet?
Yes, most (essentially all) engineers believe that if we do not blow ourselves up or bioengineer or greenhouse-gas ourselves to death, it is inevitable that humans will establish outposts in the solar system, and potentially across the galaxy, if it happens that we’re early enough in the Universe’s timeline that we don’t run into more powerful and more technologically-advanced extraterrestrial civilisations.
Water is a non-starter for constraining this process; it’s one of the most abundant molecules in the Universe. It’s a bit scarce in the inner solar system, because of the Sun being so close and boiling most of it away, but there’s plenty of it on the Moon and on Mars, and just enormous amounts in the asteroid belt and Jupiter’s moons and “trojan” asteroids (hidden under dirt in all those cases) or Saturn and beyond, where the Sun’s furnace is too weak to melt it. There is many times more water in space than there is on Earth.
And there are many times more of virtually everything else in space, too. It’s locked up in inconvenient forms in horrible conditions, but we do not need to carve out a significant chunk of Earth’s resources in order to build the infrastructure to colonise anywhere; simply getting to space from Earth’s gravity is most of the problem of building things in space. And the technology that we have now, or will have very soon, will enable us to exploit space’s resources without technically colonising it, which could unlock many orders of magnitude more rare elements than are readily-available on Earth’s surface within our lifetimes.
I dunno about you, but to me, strip-mining asteroids is much better than strip-mining our planet. And we are not far off from that becoming economically viable. Once that becomes viable, there will be a strong incentive to establish a permanent colony on the Moon. Even if that colony never winds up sustaining itself agriculturally, having an inhabited population outside of Earth’s gravity well would be worth the cost.
So a possible future is one with space colonies that do not grow any food, but provide essentially all of Earth’s raw materials in exchange for the Earth becoming a giant garden, with robots doing most of the actual dangerous work and exploration. And, as I linked to, there are lots of very smart people who think that climate change will not entirely close off that possibility even in the worst case. And there are other possible futures that do not entail humanity’s imminent extinction, with at least a few people working on ushering those futures in.
Is it possible that all these people are deluded? Sure. Even if they’re morally right about the possibilities, we could still be fucked (see again the methane in Canada and Siberia). But I am not sure simply reiterating how fucked we are and insisting that there is no way out or through and the world is going to end is actually helping anyone. Like…sure, let’s say we’re just irremediably fucked. What should we do in the meantime, then? What is the point of us worrying about women’s rights or the new woke blasphemy codes, or of trying to build a better world at all, if we are certain it will end in the not-too-distant future?
I remain optimistic. I could be wrong, but if I am, I’d rather have tried, and have had hope in the trying, than to have succumbed to the temptation of doomsday.
I’m more worried that a depleted humanity won’t have a sufficiently advanced civilization to deal with the next global catastrophe (space rock/supervolcano/etc) and *that* will be what kills us.
Because those actions, while they may not help humanity in the abstract, do help individual humans. And even if we think that the species isn’t going to survive much longer, it’s still incumbent on us to ease the suffering of individual members of the species.
I’m just thinking out loud here, too.
I think humans as a species are tough and resilient; it’s civilization that is fragile. For the forseeable future, as long as Earth remains to any degree habitable, humans are going to be inhabiting it, albeit in far smaller numbers, as iknklast noted. Supporting billions of people requires civilization, and if that collapses, then you can’t feed billions of people, so there won’t be billions of people, “underclass” or no. The surviviors of such a collapse will be those who are able to exist within the limits of natural, living systems rather than artificial, industrial ones. The West’s dependence on a small number of industrialized monocultures requiring massive inputs of industrialized chemicals and machinery for planting, growth, and harvesting is a weak point, not a strength. The few human communities which have managed to remain unentangled with and dependent upon modern civilization may have a better chance of survival if they can adapt their lifeways to the changing world around them.
As temperatures rise, climate zones and biomes will tend to shift northward. If they can. Not all of the things that make up a given biome can just get up and trek north. Like soil. There will be massive disruption. Some species and combinations thereof will be squeezed out as they run out of “north” to go, or leave conditions upon which they’d depended behind them. This will be as true for human agriculture as it is for natural ecosystems. The Canadian Shield is not noted for its crop-ready acreage.
Life on Earth is actually pretty resilient, too, if not particular species and ecosystems. We are disrupting the current configuration of plants, animals and climate, but we are not destroying the foundations for life itself. A new balance will emerge, but not necessarily on a timescale convenient for human lifespans, or conducive to human civilization, but life will go on, with or without us. As for putting our hopes on space for continued human survival, even a post-nuclear-holocaust, post-climate-change world will be far more hospitable to life than anywhere in the solar system we can get to or build. Any space colony will always be a few critical technical failures away from extinction.
The problem is how much of Western prosperity, freedom and equality is dependent upon the infliction of doom, gloom and evil upon others? As iknklast noted, humans are operating beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Earth cannot support seven billion people living at a North American or European standard of living; it’s just not possible. Stripmining asteroids only works for some materials. It doesn’t address the destruction of biodiversity brought about by expanding agricultural production. Either we reduce our numbers, or it will be done for us. We are swiftly destroying the natural systems upon which our own civilization depends, before we’ve had a chance to figure out how they all work and interact. We are in fact, entirely dependent on “the chaos of nature.” As we diminish the natural world, we destroy the very foundations upon which civil society is built. That society is only possible because of nature, not in spite of it.
Previous collapses of cultures and civilizations have been relatively local. This time it’s global. There will be no safe havens. Western wealth and power will insulate us from disaster for only so long. Grotesque levels of inequality can be maintained for only so long. We are animals. We have to eat. We can’t eat money. We are dependent upon the air, water and soil just like everyone else. Like it or not, we’re all in this together.
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