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Random pessimisms
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Ted
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Apr 21, 2013 09:18AM
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It's too late. There is evidence of methane being released into the atmosphere from Siberian permafrost. This the positive feed back run away climate change scenario beginning. When the Earths heating/cooling system becomes activated this is too large a process for human kind to dampen down.
Rob wrote: "It's too late. There is evidence of methane being released into the atmosphere from Siberian permafrost. This the positive feed back run away climate change scenario beginning. When the Earths heat..."Yeah, I'm pretty much with you on that.
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Well this is what the pessimism thread is really for! We can still hope (perhaps naively?) that these reports are overstated, or else that the worst releases won't come to pass.
Although methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, it also doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long. But it's not a good story, and this is one of the things that the climate models generally don't even attempt, because of the large number of unknowns. At least that's my understanding.
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Even reducing the carbon dioxide radically will help offset the methane--but remember farming/agricultural practices and our Western "overeat" culture also adds to methane production. ..and people are so set in carrying on with fossile-fuel that they have started offering up some rather extreme countermeasures.
I quote from (Gardiner,S M Climate Ethics :Essential Readings 2010 :285)
A number of interventions are already being proposed for combating climate change, ... For example, some suggest deflecting a small percentage of incoming radiation from the sun by placing huge mirrors at the Legrange point between it and the earth, some advocate fertilizing the oceans with plant life to soak up more carbon dioxide, some suggest a massive program of reforestation, and some propose capturing vast quantities of emissions from power plants and burying them in sedimentary rock deep underground.”
Some of these sound pretty far-fetched, and not even close to practical implementation even now in 2013. Take one of the more practical possibilities: reforestation is a joke with DEforestation still going on. ..and I'm wondering if more plant life in the ocean wouldn't also mean more methane production ultimately?
To Traveller's comment, I have a few objections. I don't think it's 'humanity' who is not not taking this whole climate change thing seriously enough. It's hard to point fingers at ourselves, but as far as I can tell, it's Americans who aren't taking things seriously enough. Add to consumerist Americans some resistance from the Chinese, and hopes for turning things around looks worse. But in a way, telling developing nations how they can and cannot use energy doesn't seem fair, especially when the US is notoriously flouting efforts to bring about change. I also don't think the world 'overeats'. This, too, seems like a developed country phenomenon, led, shamefully by the US (though the Britons are fast catching up, in one example).I also disagree that reforestation is a joke. I'm seeing reforestation mean improvements to the heat island effect at home and I am glad that cities are doing something about reforestation and conservation. While I understand your frustration with deforestation, I don't think we should give up all hope. Yes, the Japanese sure conserve their forests, mainly because they can conduct deforestation with impunity elsewhere, so it's easy to feel cynical and disillusioned, but I still think it's worse to just condemn all efforts. The system needs to change so that people don't keep thinking that they can buy a CD and a sapling will be planted in India and all is well with the world, but this does not mean that reforestation is completely useless.
I also think that depending on the plant life encouraged in our oceans, this can in fact mean improvements, again, depending on the life forms. Bacteria from a Primeval Ooze, so to speak, produced the oxygen rich environment we have evolved in. If tiny life forms can help, we have to believe that encouraging productive organisms in different ecosystems will help offset the damage we cause somehow ...
I just realized that in the optimistic thread from yesterday or the day before I was very pessimistic, but sound more hopeful in this one. I don't want to mix things up too much!
I should also add that I feel your frustration, Traveller. Maybe I just woke up feeling a little more hopeful today but I hope you don't think I'm picking on you.
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Melissa, it looks like you're suited as a bridge commenter between the optimisms and the pessimisms.
Though I think it likely that many of us feel both of those mind-sets.
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Ah, I never meant to imply that reforestation isn't useful, and I must admit that I have not checked to see if reforestation efforts are matching deforestation activities, but do keep in mind that it is much quicker to cut down a tree than it is to grow one! One of the frustrating things in this regard, is that I know about areas in the world where trees are being cut down not only to "make space" for people, but to increase the local water levels so that dams can be fuller for human consumption and for agriculture!!! :O
I feel frustrated about so many things, don't get me started on frustrations. It is true that the US and Russia, or the ex-USSR are among the two biggest environmental cuprits, since, indeed, Europe is a lot better with their use of hydro, solar and wind electicity for domestic use.
I'll try to do some links to arguments, but in any case, you are correct in that vested interests in the US has been kicking against moving over to cleaner sources of energy. I also didn't mean to say that one shouldn't try 'enriching' the ocean, but this is happening anyway because of the higher temperatures spreading north and west --this is part of the "feedback systems" I was talking about. You get positive and negative feedback from the ecosystem.
Do keep in mind, though, that decomposing organic material also sets free greenhouse gases, and bacteria and algae is the kind of material that dies and decomposes the quickest..
I share your frustration, for sure, Traveller!! I can understand you not wanting to get started on all the things we can point to that are frustrating! And I agree a lot more with your latest post, especially just how much of a difference there is between chopping down a tree and growing one. Not to mention the fact that older trees are better storehouses for carbon, which undoes the idea that we can plant a tree when we cut one down, and we're still in good shape or in relatively the same place.
I've never embedded links in posts so I don't know how to do that, but will try to learn from you and Ted. I love how his reviews hide spoilers and things like that. I can copy/paste links. That's it. I can't include them as highlighted parts to my arguments/posts. I am not very good at this.
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I'm wondering what members think of these remarks? Have they made you somewhat optimistic? Or are you somewhat cynical and believe that nothing much will come of this?
I'm going to post the same comment on both the "optimisms" and the "pessimisms" discussions.
Reply on one or both threads if you like to make remarks about this.
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That is horrible, Elham. I had no idea that some Iranian cities were so polluted, though I know that there are many very serious problems in China.
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While admitting the absolute necessity of roads for a developing country, how can we proceed in a more ecologically-oriented discussion on future planning?
Is it viable to argue for rails over roads (say rails for long distance transport and roads for last-mile-connectivity)?
Or do we have to just accept that the roads have keep growing and vast stretches of barren-land criss-crossing the country is just something to be accepted?
Any suggestions on how to direct such a debate towards something practicable would be appreciated guys.
I think I will also try to cross-post this in some relevant review thread.
I just asked a question over at Quora.com, "How long would climate change last?".My goals were two:
First, generally, knowledge is good. Not knowing how horrifying the consequences of an action (or lack of action) might be makes it easier to ignore it. So I wanted to the worst-case scenario.
Second, I firmly believe that education can come in strange forms, so I added the "futurist" and "science fiction" communities to the scope of the question (although I'm not sure whether that will do what I hope). If more science fiction authors write books about how we've probably ruined things for the next 100,000 years, and more movies get made from those books, maybe we'll get more action.
I quickly got a very good response, which also mentioned a book that I hadn't spotted, and I don't see on the bookshelf here.
That would be David Archer's The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate .
I just thought I'd mention it in case anyone was interested.
Here's the review on "The Long Thaw" from Publishers Weekly:With so much dust and noise thrown up by those economic forces opposed to reducing carbon emissions, average readers may be hard-pressed to understand what all the fuss is about. Univ. of Chicago geophysicist Archer has perfectly pitched answers to the most basic questions about global warming while providing a sound basis for understanding the complex issues frequently misrepresented by global warming skeptics. Revisiting his technical treatment of the same subject (2006's Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast), Archer presents detailed science in layman's language. With a breezy, conversational style, he breaks complex concepts into everyday analogies, comparing for example the oxidation and reduction of carbon dioxide in seawater with an upset stomach. Divided into three parts-the Present, the Past and the Future-Archer provides a complete picture of climate change now, in the past, and what we can expect in years and centuries to come. His models, though conservative, imply that humans won't survive the environmental consequences of severe warming over the next thousand years. While Archer is neither grim nor pessimistic, he is forthright about what's at stake, and what must do to avert catastrophe.
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I've read
The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate
now, and very much enjoyed it. If you want to get a good technical overview of how our civilization is changing the long-term (e.g., geological time) climate, along with some well-explained grounding in how scientists analyze and model such things, it's a pretty short and sweet book.My complete review is here. Comments and questions are welcome!
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway...
I had always thought that the term implied a situation where the warming effect would not be stoppable by human effort, but would eventually cease with the earth still a habitable place for a subset of current life forms, perhaps even including us.
In fact the term implies a scenario in which all water boils off the earth and the planet ends up a sterile hothouse, as Venus is.
See this section of the Wiki article for assessment of the "Current Risk" of this happening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway...
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The middle panel of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights", called Humanity Before the Flood".
This famous work by Bosch plays an interesting role in the film, serving as a bookend for DiCaprio's own story of his years of engagement with the issue.
I was aware of the film because my son texted my yesterday that he planned on watching it with my grandkids, 8 and 11. Hope they did watch, and got something out of it.
DiCaprio tries to highlight both the enormity of what we are facing, and offer rays of hope - which he himself doesn't seem to feel particularly optimistic about.
I'm going to post this same comment in the "Random Optimisms" thread.
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Th..."
Thanks! Watching tonight
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Heh. If the Dems need a candidate who would appeal to millennials, they might consider DiCaprio. It even seems possible that he could be interested, even though it would mean throwing away his acting career. I find him very impressive.
Hope you get to see the movie!
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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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I'll see if I can figure out how to make a topic for the book you mention, if I do I'll try to contact you somehow (I don't know how, now that you're a GR author). Or you could just check back when I post another comment in this thread (you should see a notification for that if you have them set as I do.)
Thanks for the read and the link, I'll look at the review soon.
Not related directly to any book, but this article is pretty dire:
The Uninhabitable Earth: Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think
, in New York Magazine. Favorite line: «But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.»
Richard wrote: "Not related directly to any book, but this article is pretty dire: The Uninhabitable Earth: Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you..."
And it's doubly difficult when national policy denies the fact of alarm. I hear some alarm at the state and individual level but most people seem to feel pretty helpless in the face of government and business indifference and the indifference of a good number of the population due to the dumbing down of science news, etc.
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The Uninhabitable Earth: Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — soo..."
The polls on climate change are continually trending more in the direction that they need to. At some point this should overcome the political problem, assuming we can have democratic elections that are not hacked.
The problem with the profits of giant corporations is different. I'm not sanguine about overcoming that one. I might point out the conversation that I initiated about the book Organic Marxism. The critique of 21st century capitalism as destroying the planet is pretty devastating, though not without lots of things that can be argued about.
My husband and I are concerned about climate change, but, as I have said before, because of our advanced age and lack of living descendants, it is not our very first priority. We support the cause but will let younger people and people with descendants fight it out with idiot, indifferent politicians, so that our planet will have a chance to remain habitable for future generations.I just thought I'd let you know that where we live (high desert in the north-east of Utah), climate change is, definitely, happening, and it is already affecting us.
We had "beautiful" warm spring weather in March; spring flowers emerged, at least, 3 weeks earlier than usual; and the leaves on trees also came out 3 weeks earlier than what's normal for our area. Not only that. We have now been experiencing high winds and also heavy storms for most of May, June, and, so far, July. Normal time for spring storms is mid March to end of Aril, when the temperatures are still low.
While the "beautiful" spring was enjoyable (even though concerning), the high winds and storms are not. They interfere with gardening and outdoor activities. And what's worse, they increase the wildfire danger. High desert with dry weather and lots of juniper and sagebrush is anyway prone to wildfires. Add to this the funnel effect in our canyon. Ever since we live here (since 1996), we have had numerous wildfires endanger our property.
Not long after we had moved here, there had already been an incident with a number of fire engines on our parking lot and firefighters about to spray the roof of our house. (This happened while we were out of town.) Another time, a huge wildfire that killed 3 humans, hundreds of cattle, and countless wild animals endangered our property, and mandatory evacuation was imminent. (It caused us to voluntarily evacuate all of our animals [then 35 cats] for 3 1/2 weeks.) About half a dozen other times, we had cages lined up in the living room and bug-out vehicles ready for evacuation of our animals. And just this last May, we had yet another wildfire (approx. 850 acres) only 2 or 3 miles from our property, and this with a raving storm that lasted for 2 weeks (just as the wildfire did). And again, we had to have cages and vehicles ready for bug out with our animals (presently 19 cats, 2 dogs, and 9 chickens).
As we finally have a fairly reliable house-/petsitter, we had planned a 6-week RV trip to Canada for this summer/fall. Yet with the increased fire danger, we probably won't dare to leave town for any distance that would not allow us to return home within a few hours.
The combination of dry climate and high temperature is very dangerous and, particularly, in an area with lots of sagebrush and juniper. (The latter, when burning, produces explosive gases, which, then, explode and produce firestorms.) Now add to this high winds or even storms.
Richard wrote: "Not related directly to any book, but this article is pretty dire: The Uninhabitable Earth: Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think."
Just in case my original link didn't prompt you to read the (fairly long) article, here are my favorite highlights:
«Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century.»The article also points to the very recent book The Ends of the World: Supervolcanoes, Lethal Oceans, and the Search for Past Apocalypses, which looks quite intriguing.
«Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: hundreds of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal […] The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change […] most recent [report] projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century […] But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees.»
«The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock [...] The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead.»
«At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six […] summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today.»
«Precipitation is notoriously hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced[.…] The droughts in the American plains and Southwest would not just be worse than in the 1930s […] but worse than any droughts in a thousand years.»
«[R]ain forests like the Amazon, which in 2010 suffered its second “hundred-year drought” in the space of five years, could dry out enough to become vulnerable to […] devastating, rolling forest fires.»
«There is a 12 percent chance that climate change will reduce global [economic] output by more than 50 percent by 2100, […] and a 51 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 20 percent or more by then[.…] By comparison, the Great Recession lowered global GDP by about 6 percent, in a onetime shock; [researchers] estimate a one-in-eight chance of an ongoing and irreversible effect by the end of the century that is eight times worse.»
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The Uninhabitable Earth: Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — soo..."
Richard, those are pretty scary quotes, and prompted me to take a closer look at the article.
The only real problem I have with it is that an article like that doesn't seem to me all that helpful. Perhaps the opposite, since many people who know that warming is occurring, and know why it's happening, are going to throw up there hands and say, well, we're cooked. May as well give up.
Any sort of swirling of this attitude into the mix that's already out there won't help at all.
The lead person of our Transition group here in Howard County just this evening sent out an email with a link to a brief response by climate scientist Michael Mann. In it he frames the article (partly) as I've just done. In addition, he points out one or two aspects of the article which he thinks are based on a misunderstanding. https://www.commondreams.org/views/20...
Ted wrote: "..."Glad to hear it. I'm concerned that, as the article asserts, scientists are often extraordinarily cautious. That's understandable, since they'd be roasted with soundbites if they sound alarmist.
On the other hand, this did seem quite extreme. As Traveller wrote four years ago, "We're all going to die!", but it'd be nice if we had a decent chance at seeing civilization survive. I hope this is overblown, but I'm still suspicious the narrative hasn't been doom-ful enough, and remains too easy to dismiss.
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Glad to hear it. I'm concerned that, as the article asserts, scientists are often extraordinarily cautious. That's understandable, since they'd be roasted with soundbites if they ..."
I'm not sure that people can be scared into believing. Maybe some can be worried into believing - I think that's why public opinion seems to be tilting towards that, simply because of more and more extreme weather events. But what do I know! 8 /
Why should it make people despair to the point of inaction? Or perhaps it's just been put marginally wrongly? It's like learning to accept one has a long term medical condition; or, a policy analogy, in Britain, rationing etc in the Second World War. Most people find ways of managing, even if things are a bit more difficult and different. It seems more of a reason to act, whether one leans to prevention or resigned preparation.The problem is really governments which don't publicly accept it might be that bad, and therefore there isn't a sensible response.
In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh's view (one I do find pessimistic) is that the deep machinery of govt and the military a) accepts it might easily be very bad b) doesn't expect to do a great amount to avert it and c) intends to use the disruption as a route to increasing authoritarianism. This goes contra to the social collapse forecasts - but actually if you are in a small country it reads unfortunately more plausibly. Makes a certain amount of sense for Britain especially (small + island) whereas the collapse / division scenarios sound more possible for a large area with people more spread out and significant cultural differences like the US.
Even the Black Death did not bring about regime change - e.g. peasants walking in to palaces and taking over the throne - although it did change economic conditions markedly. But then, there was a great abundance of fertile land to grow food, no soil depletion, and weather conditions generally conducive to it most years.
The main problem with the NYMag article is simply use of 'will' rather than 'may' and neglect of that argument that in many other fields - from academic studies to every day activities like crossing the road - a great deal more weight and attention is given to risks with very bad consequences, and to trying to avoid them. Otherwise it's a lot like Six Degrees ... I can't help reading "may" where it says "will". (Would it have lost anything in publicity by making that change?) And spotting a few obvious errors; I'm sure quite a lot of Romans lived in better conditions than their ancestors of 500 years earlier.
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Think that this and your previous comment are well-put, as usual. The main diff. with climate change vs. "other" problems would of course be that the "bad" results are in the future, and frankly, even under the very pessimistic assumptions, far enough in the future that many people, I think, unconsciously dismiss them as "not top priority for me right now" - if even that.
But another branch, as to action, is the view that "all right, we're screwed, and there's certainly nothing that I can do about it, so ...". And add that into the previous "not top priority" and you have a recipe for a lot of people not even caring about whether the people they vote for are deniers or not.
The Transition Movement
Books mentioned in this topic
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (other topics)The Ends of the World (other topics)
The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate (other topics)
The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate (other topics)
