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How many of you knew about the band Ladytron?
Because I didn’t even know they existed just about a month ago, and now I’m saying, “I just discovered this cool group that uses synthesizers live in concert and sounds like rock candy melting on a computer,” and everyone says, “oh, yeah, Ladytron.”
Anyway, to return to Global Warming (and leaving activism for the moment).
Speaking personally and only personally, I am reluctant to use a rhetoric of apocalypse. There are too many variables which could necessarily interact either constructively or destructively, to exacerbate or mitiagate the effect. Given the prevalence of approximate humans for 1-4 million years (depending on what we define as an approximate human) of which 5,000 – 6,000 years can be fairly called “history” I doubt that we are at an end of plagues/epidemics/disasters with the potential to level the human population. In fact, Ebola was a distinct possibility, and only its immediate recognition and intense quarantine prevented it from becoming a pandemic. That said, I don’t think such rhetoric is useful without incontrovertible evidence.
What gets lost in a histrionic debate is that global warming need not result in apocalypse to be hugely damaging. DC has said that “nightmare scenarios all concern mechanisms of positive feedback” but that suggests a false binary. There are dozens if not hundreds of mechanisms to measure, and several operating cooperatively will result in large-scale ick. The fact is that the ultimate nightmare scenario — global uninhabitability — is probably unlikely. But there are plenty of nasty scenarios along the way that nevertheless fall short of the worst case. I’ll also match this against Kennedy’s assertion of standard of living. The fact that our industrial standard of living is so high represents quite a bit of potential backsliding. We could have the global life expectancy drop to forty or fifty. Life would still be quite a bit better than the dynastic line you cite, but would it compare favorably with life now? This also begs the question of what we would owe to developing countries which are not, on the whole, responsible for emissions, but which will bear the brunt of negative effects and are least capable of adapting.
The best and most rigorous angle I can come at this myself has to do with the oceans. I’ve edited a number of books at work this past year that address the interaction of the climate and the oceans: Oceans by Trevor Day, Droughts by Michael Allaby, and a couple others. I have a better undestanding of these interactions than others.
Now it is a fact that if global temperatures, human caused or not* get much warmer, then the Greenland icecap will melt. This is already happening, in fact. Substantial melting will almost certainly retard the gulf stream, which is the main reason that Europe doesn’t have the climate of Siberia or northern Canada.
Now would that mean the end of humanity?
No, it would only mean the displacement of tens to hundreds of millions of people, energy, agricultural, and industrial crisis and so on.
Likewise, carbon emissions alter the acidity of the ocean, making it less sustainable for phytoplankton. Which are basically to the sea what leaves and grass is to the land. Diminished phytoplankton means diminished fish catches, which if the drought issues in Africa continue to worsen (and it isn’t getting better), will deprive a very poor part of the world of one of its more reliable sources of food.
Now would that mean the end of humanity?
Probably not. It would only mean that a few hundred million people living in poverty in a semi-arid steppe have their already tenuous food supply desiccated.
I could give an easy three or four other possibilities, from the disruption of nutrient upwellings to the climactic erosion of coral reefs (which are second only to rain forests as ground for developing new medical technology). Any and all are plausible, but none require the others in order to occur. Phytoplankton can be diminished without icecap melting, and so on. Suffice it to say even one such catastrophe would be sufficient to make the next hundred years a “nightmare.”
At any rate, our current path seems like a gamble with really ugly odds.
As for prevention vs. technology, we need both frankly. It’s not an appropriate comparison to talk about technological innovations in the past, because until this century there was always a frontier ready for expansion; to accept human stress. But I think even cursory objectivity shows that our population is disproportionately high to the availability of resources on the surface of the earth. If we were ready to colonize Mars or the core of the earth, maybe we could make the argument that technology would be sufficient.
But we’re not.
We’re decades, if not centuries, away.
We’ll just have to be careful and make this planet hold out awhile longer.
That’s my take.
*And to cynics, everyone has a bias, including Penn & Teller (who are, after all, serving members of the Cato institute, funded by Exxon and co.) If we believe that aggregates cancel out bias or that big business usually has the better hand (either assumption will suffice) then the scientific community is firmly convinced that it *is* mainly human caused. Which is, incidentally, why alan1 is correct. The issue is necessarily politicized, and it could not be otherwise.
END OF POST.