I'm really puzzled by the belief that the world's plant life was ever fixed at all.
As we have developed, we have spent the majority of our human productivity on efforts to optimize ourselves, our cultures, and our infrastructure for the relatively static status quo climate.
This includes the placement of cities, the choice of crop cultivars in various regions, the effort put into irrigation systems and infrastructure, the planning of building codes and expected lifetimes of infrastructure based on regional climate, the kinds of diseases and pests we guard against in various regions, and on and on. Billions of people depend on those optimizations. A slippage of a percent in the effectiveness of those optimizations will be counted in the lives of millions.
What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war.
Past few hundred years has had the greatest change in temperature in the last 10 thousand years according to tree studies.
I don't think you can have it both ways here.
AKA roughly 3% of the times humans have been on earth. Or .0002% the age of the earth. But on the other hand, that probably doesn't matter much. The difference between human made and natural climate change is just the moral implications. If there was another (natural) ice-age on the horizon, it'd be in humanities best interest to try and prevent it.
I would prefer to not live a roaming hunter-gatherer life.
Edit: disclaimer—“first settlement” doesn’t seem to be a settled fact. How permanent must it be? How many families? Is purposeful agriculture a requirement?
Global ecosystems are also far more stressed from the load of humanity than they were 100 years ago. The regenerative capacity of biological systems responding to that system is not simply "barely at capacity", it is in a negative state. On top of that, we will be accelerating the rate of average temperature changes, in a time when access to weapons of mass destruction (ones that are orders of magnitude higher than what existed 100 years ago) are higher than ever.
The nature of exponential growth and what it does to fixed capacity regenerative systems is certainly difficult to internalize. Cracks form over time as stress is absorbed. Collapses happen fast. The transition between the two is hard to time.
Your whole timescale is wrong. We’re not talking about humans. We’re talking about settled civilizations.
Things didn’t fluctuate very much since 9000 BCE, when the Bering land bridge went away. All of recorded history is since then.
As for recent history it’s only really since 2000 we’ve burst out of that range. There was fluctuation before but within the post 9000 BCE norms.
That's the crux of the argument; zoom in enough and it looks fixed. Zoom out enough, there wasn't even plants. Framing is everything. And it is the best rhetorical device because it can be (ab)used to serve even contradictory viewpoints.
> What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war.
I don't deny the consequences of mistreating the environment, but more often than not we are making proportionality errors (both by underestimating or over-cathastrophizing it).
I am not trying to be mean to you but want to invite self-reflection; apocalypticism has also been a perennial tool in our "optimization" toolkit, ironically with catastrophic failure modes. Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
> Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest.
Climate predictions are complicated but the negative valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions doesn't represent that. That is what I am calling out as proportionality error. It is a version of "this plane crashing would be horrible, even though the probability multiplier is likely to be very small, I can so vividly envision the horrible outcome that I will behave as if it is more probable and have a panic attack". There is a lot of affective/emotional (so-called) reasoning. Not only that, we don't know to what extend (not if) we are projecting our unconscious, personal, perennial problems such as fear-of-death onto a global wish of world not existing after we die for example. Human beings are deeply religious creatures, and in absence of a structured spiritual approach to these problems, we are prone to deify and mythify what is around us. (To be crisply clear, I am not calling anthropogenic climate change a myth by any stretch of imagination, but it is a certainty that our responses are not in 100% correspondence to the reality of it, including as you rightly point out "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away".)
> After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
It wasn't the sentiment, it was the act of humbuggery around the inflated immediacy and absurd dramatization of outcomes, from the likes of Al Gore to Hollywood, that either turned people into apathetic nihilism or burned out defeatism. I am not saying these are single handedly responsible for this response; post-WWII onwards especially during the Cold War people have been culturally trained for these types of thinking and today we are seeing their protracted influence.
You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm. Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes. Maybe you should give it a shot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Normally I wouldn't want to honor your manner of discourse by responding to it, but I want to make the case that one can still discuss the contents of an argument despite emotionality;
> You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm.
I personally am pretty optimistic and excited regarding the prospects of tackling this problem, because embedded in it a plethora of large scale multi-agent coordination problems we ought to solve, and we do have the capacity for it. Incidentally, I think individual level solutions don't necessarily have the strategic depth to address what is essentially a problem of scale. But if you think you're doing the right thing, more power to you, at least at your scale you couldn't harm things even if you wanted to.
> Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes.
Does her influence look like a success to you? It doesn't to me. Maybe there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in talking down to people, or appeals to romantic emotionality, instead of bringing the best and the most rational in them. Maybe rampant consumerism and lack of higher-order thinking to maneuver climate change are sibling problems, both intimately related to the problem of stupefaction of the masses.
Maybe calling people names is part of the shame-politics that attempt to turn adults into temporary children. Hijacking our deepest fears of ostracism in the name of some ostensible "greater good", but inadvertently reducing people's agency and higher order thinking, both of which are deeply needed to steer out of the problem.
You seem to be making the mistake of assuming all predictions are similar in scope and nature.
To use an analogy: predicting the specific effects of how a blast of heavy radiation will affect a human body is _complicated_. But a prediction of "this is going to hurt you badly" can be made with high confidence.
There's a universality here regarding complex systems, and it applies to human bodies, buildings, economies, geologies, and natural ecosystems alike. Complex, self-reinforcing systems do not fail linearly. Pressure cause cracks and minor symptoms as the system absorbs the initial stresses, and at some point systemic collapse occurs rapidly.
Concrete spalls, metal rusts, and when the time comes the building collapses rapidly as the reinforcing mechanisms fail one by one. Cancers form, mild symptoms are felt, and eventually the body succumbs in weeks or days as the final metastasized stages shut down vital functions. The ground is silent as pressure build, tremors are felt, and in a matter of seconds heaves to spew its burning contents.
The stressors on our world's ecosystems are numerous and myriad and well documented. The seas and fish populations are strained by plastic pollution and overfishing to feed a population that is an order of magnitude larger than existed just 100 years ago. Insect populations are observably collapsing in many parts of the world. Water tables have been severely depleted in many agricultural lands, including in many parts of the USA, but also places like southern india. These are the observable cracks. The article of this subject contains more.
Modern agriculture, at the rate of productivity that it operates at now, relies on the existence and viability of sophisticated supply chains that mine, produce, and deliver fertilizer, pesticides, and other "high-level economy" products that themselves depend on deeper supply chains.
Climate change and the rapid increase in global temperatures introduces a steady grind of increasing pressure - a new stressor to this complex system that is already heavily stressed to unsustainability, and is already showing it cracks.
We know for a fact that the stress will increase steadily and inexorably.
It is indeed possible to make high confidence statements that this is going to hurt us badly. It is wishful thinking to hope otherwise.
What _can_ be hoped for is mitigations. We may be able to mitigate some of the damage, if we try hard and fast enough.
I am with you. This is called the criticality of a complex adaptive system.
It is the grain of sand that will collapse a sand heap into chaos.
The problem is we don't know where the criticality point is, nor we qualify the knowability of that point, nor we know if the critical point is the most important thing to focus on, e.g. incremental degradation could just as well saturate our harm tolerance without really reaching a phase-shift point. The reason I am bringing these up is not to use skepticism to induce apathy, but to underline the fact that all of these axes require drastically different policy responses.
There is a risk in trying to invest the entire political, psychological and moral capital into an all-or-nothing apocalypse-countermeasure-policy-A if the system at hand actually needed a set of incremental countermeasures with policies B, C .. Z. This is the main objective in focusing on proportionality, to ensure our response is the appropriate one.
Incrementalism doesn't make headlines the way apocalypticism does and over-salience of criticality might be distracting us in a way that brings us closer to it. Demonstrated time and again, it doesn't rally people to action, it doesn't seem to enchance our agency, and maybe even hurts it.
We know that given the inertia we have currently, we are almost guaranteed to hit it. We cannot stop on a dime, and even if we did, the existing inertial effects will continue.
> Incrementalism doesn't make headlines
It also doesn't really work, as evidenced by the complete failure of the incrementalist "reduce, recycle, reuse" campaign, which effected nothing and might well have acted as a safety blanket to prevent serious policy.
But the failure here lies more in a politically dominant demographic that was not ready to understand any reality that might involve policy that impacted material costs or the conveniences, combined with the fact that any relevant solution necessarily would involve those sacrifices.
Alarmism works just fine as a political tool, and it has worked to spur action on many issues - legitimate or not. In this particular case, the alarmism is certainly warranted. And generational shifts allow for a more receptive audience for that message.
You might be right. And that is the whole point; how do we make sure we are not making proportionality errors in either direction? What is the objective measure? What is the criteria to use to find out if and in which direction we are making such an error?
> It is perfectly possible to predict mass negative outcomes in a cool headed and honest way. Like predicting massive overspends on a major construction project.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but also can't ignore that the non-linearity and complexity of climate science is an unknown quantity more than that of a construction project. The reliability of predictions will have different upper bounds, and our conveyed sense of confidence should reflect that, not the romantically moving horribleness of the worst case scenario we can think of.
LOL, yah, I’d hate for the ocean to not have plastic, or CO2 levels to get back down, or to not breathe mercury from the local coal plant, or… gosh, any of those errors in the wrong direction, you know.
Whataboutism and analysis paralysis are not helpful modes of behaviour. Immediate action to begin remedying the obvious problems would be helpful. We can do that on an individual basis, and must also press those with more power to do the same.
A good practical tool we have is to just run a cost benefit analysis. But reduce your requirement for unproven benefit as the cost drops. So you require masks in a pandemic even when you don't know if they will work. Because the cost is low the loss is minimal if there is no benefit. This kind of decision is made all the time intuitively in things like renewable energy.
Ultimately the political system has to answer these questions. And it deals with such questions all the time. I wonder how predictable international power politics or economics is in terms of "non-linearity and complexity".
If a 1,000 year old tree suddenly can't survive in the now new climate in the same location, that's a little bit more than curious.
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[0] - Excluding shenanigans like horizontal gene transfer, that are mostly relevant to bacteria and archaea.
That being said, although climate and the makeup of life on earth changes on its own, and can greatly change over time, the big difference here is how fast this is happening. I feel quite confident that humans will never kill all life on earth, because life is very adaptable and resilient. However, rapid climate change could result in the loss of a huge amount of the biodiversity that exists now. Many species will die, and be replaced with more resilient ones.
I think what we're also likely to see, is that some of the most adaptable animal species are small animals (eg: rodents) and insects, things that are typically considered invasive species. Larger animals don't reproduce as fast, and there aren't as many, so they have a smaller gene pool that doesn't recombine as rapidly as with animals that can produce large amounts of babies every year. That makes them way more vulnerable to being killed off by climate change. So, yeah, I hope you like cats, rats, possums, mosquitos and cockroaches.
The article starts off with "Previous periods of rapid warming millions of years ago drastically altered plants and forests on Earth"