Last edited Mon Sep 23, 2024, 11:44 PM - Edit history (2)

:-/
The planet has been stuck with the bill for our excesses and scientific illiteracy as a species.

I often wonder why we talk/think or even care so much about so many things so little worth talking/thinking/caring about as we continually ignore the ecological issues that will affect every other issue.

I find myself thinking that political struggles are little more than “bread & circuses.”

I certainly don’t want a repeat of the Trump years, and yet, I fear it is too late for the best intentioned president to stop the wheels from turning.

https://openatmosphericsciencejournal.com/VOLUME/2/PAGE/217/

And I do think degrowth - both in terms of smaller population sizes (sorry J D Vance!) and slower and smaller economies -is the long term solution.

Our societies are so poorly and chaotically managed and run as is that runaway, deregulated growth is a liability in the long run. And as you rightly pointed out, so many of our political struggles are about bread and circuses i.e. performative stuff, but nothing very real..

I feel a holistic (not hippie holistic, but scientifically holistic) understanding of the planet would help scientists identify those planetary stresses which work most to undermine and threaten planetary stability.

I also suspect that eschewing a strictly Anthropocentric standpoint from time to time would probably be better for the vast majority of humans, but it is hard for our scientifically incurious* society to get that. Not even most shopaholics would like to live in a polluted, noisy parking lot denuded of all green cover if the connection was clear to them. But because :a) their ecological footprint represents damage to the ecosystem that is out of sight; b) no one bothers to point out the connection and c) people get defensive when that is pointed out, here we are…

It is one part dominion theology and many parts an incurious and crass way of thinking. Who cares how many species go extinct? Who cares if my meat comes from factory farms? Who cares if my shopping sprees or multiple cars are a strain on the planet and so on..

(*: I said incurious because I don’t think some of the wealthy people in tech for instance are scientifically illiterate - they are just entirely incurious about the planet except as a backdrop for shopping malls/parking lots/pubs and so on. They have no understanding of ecological sciences and not much curiosity either as far as I can tell. My own curiousity about the natural world is always blunted by the misery of getting fond of more and more new species and life forms only to know in more detail how threatened or exploited they are by humans.)

1. I largely agree with your analysis, but believe it should be written in the past tense. At this point, I’m afraid there is no long-term solution. It’s too late for “degrowth.” We’ve set processes in motion which will not be stopped in that way. In retrospect, a smaller, more harmonious existence might have worked. As for the incurious masters of technology, I was astonished by the Musk/Trump show. My assumption had been that Musk had “run the numbers on the climate,” concluded it was hopeless, and foolishly decided he’d move to Mars to escape the apocalypse. I never imagined he was so completely ignorant of the most fundamental science of “the greenhouse effect!” Now I think he simply wants to become “King of Mars” so he can live by his own laws and impose them on his serfs.


2. I think one of the most serious problems we suffer from, is a lack of comprehension of the very large, but finite. e.g. pump all of your shit into the rivers, the seas, the air, and it just goes away. I remember thinking as a boy that if sitting in a running car, in a closed garage would kill you, wouldn’t constantly running millions of them eventually be a problem? There’s no apparent harm in cutting down a tree, but what if we denude continents? Need more water? Drill deeper wells! Pump the oil out of the ground, dig up the metals, and the coal, “there’s plenty more where that came from!”

Are you serious sir? I mean, do you really think the world is going to end this afternoon?
Yes, in just over one minute and thirty-five seconds.
Well, isn't there anything we can do?
No. Nothing.
Suppose we were to lie down, or put a paper bag over our heads or something?
If you like, yes.
Well, would it help?
No. …

I largely agree with you. But one still hopes. I don’t know your age, but I am relatively young for a DUer (mid forties). And my family by and large tends to live well into their 80s and 90s (and usually in good health). So…gulp..I still have a long enough stretch on the old rock that I have a facile hope that at some point the rest of our species gets the message.
I dread to think about what the future will look like 40 years from now if we continue like this..

Hansen, J., M. Sato, P. Hearty, R. Ruedy, M. Kelley, V. Masson-Delmotte, G. Russell, G. Tselioudis, J. Cao, E. Rignot, I. Velicogna, B. Tormey, B. Donovan, E. Kandiano, K. von Schuckmann, P. Kharecha, A.N. Legrande, M. Bauer, and K.-W. Lo, 2016: Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms:/ evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 C global warming could be dangerous Atmos. Chem. Phys., 16, 3761-3812. doi:10.5194/acp-16-3761-2016.

Hansen, J.E., M. Sato, L. Simons, L.S. Nazarenko, I. Sangha, P. Kharecha, et al. 2023: Global warming in the pipeline, Oxford Open Climate Change, 3, Issue 1, kgad008.

Last edited Wed Sep 25, 2024, 06:02 AM - Edit history (1)

Recently the Biden admin is cautiously opening the door to it and it is fine if it is done with real scientific knowledge and appreciation of the potential issues (ie not as a Musk would go about it):
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/01/white-house-cautiously-opens-door-to-study-blocking-suns-rays-to-slow-global-warming-ee-00104513

I just hope that if/when they try such measures it is people like Hansen or the Fauci/Francis Collins type of scientist rather than the Richard Lindzen type of contrarian or worse someone outright in the pocket of industrial interests.
I generally think scientists like doctors are a decent lot. But it would have to be scientists without serious conflicts of interest commercially who do factor in the ecological sciences rather than demoting those in favor of the views economists.

Economists are not scientists in that sense. And the failure of economics as a field to even factor in the planet in any serious way does not get talked about anywhere near enough.

For all the whinging about liberal scientists, it is hardly addressed enough that economics is a very right shifted field not to mention not a hard science but an inexact human science (by which I mean far more susceptible to human vagaries than anything more objective).

A type of worldview (common I suspect in the tech world/cs) essentially sneers at ecological sciences or evolutionary biology (social Darwinism and eugenics are not evol bio in my book) in any sane sense, but gives exaggerated importance to economics and that is not good.

I have “mixed feelings” about “elective surgery” but, if I decided to have it done, I would want a competent surgeon, and I would not want to be her first patient.

Here’s the tack I’ve taken since about 2000, regarding “geo-engineering,” we’d better start experimenting now (then), because “mixed feelings” or not, we’re going to be forced to take actions like this in the near future. It would be best if we knew what we were doing once we did.

In 2008, Hansen et al advised:

IEA (2024), Global electricity generation from coal and COP28 pathway, 2030, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-electricity-generation-from-coal-and-cop28-pathway-2030 , Licence: CC BY 4.0

Thanks for all the info .

This Sc Am article captures how I feel about it. It is not the scientists I am worried about so much as the “entrepreneurs” (ie often people with the same myopic, greedy, crass mindset that got us here in the first place):
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/geoengineering-wins-reluctant-interest-from-scientists-as-earths-climate/

If natural systems were modified with proper scientific oversight (ie not with an expert in the pocket of scientifically incurious and myopic creeps looking to make money off of “green energy”) it could be viable I suppose.

However, the role of the disinterested scientist should not get diluted down to a joke. These are complex topics that very few people have any real expertise in and so the need for trusted disinterested experts is vital.

What alarmed me about that article was the indication that industry would go ahead with some of it without much public debate.

As for reasonable standards re public engagement on such complex matters..that is another nightmare these days.

Looking at how Covid went, public skepticism about science can often be driven by nonsense . Therefore, I am not saying that we need experts who can convince Marjorie Green that space lasers and vaccines are not killing babies..

The truth is I don’t understand these issues any better than Marjorie Green does (well okay probably better than Marjorie Green but that is a low bar), but our concerns are over very different matters. Mine is more of a generic concern about deregulation from the private sector not distrust of democratic governance or mainstream scientific consensus.

I posted this elsewhere -a really cool oped by Dr Francis Collins of the NIH that is tangentially relevant to all of this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/opinion/covid-vaccines-truth-life-death.html

Thanks for all the reading material again .

Try the Working Group III report of IPCC AR6. You’re particularly interested in Chapter 12.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_Chapter12.pdf

Especially 12.3.3 CDR Governance and Policies

Light read indeed
Section 12.4 is of particular interest to me because our food system is so messed up. We are not following even rudimentary tenets of animal welfare (thanks to horrors like factory farming) as well as ignoring both environmental concerns and concerns related to human health.

A truism that sadly failed to resonate with too many "progressives" or others in 2016.

** obviously the bigger part of the 2016 problem was the uninformed and/or deplorable who have a weird idea of "progress" or "good" in the first place - but if the number of "progressives" I knew who sat on their hands (or worse) on Election Day; or trash-talked Hillary right up to Election Day then said they "held their nose and voted for her" - if that is at all indicative, they very well may have cost the election, and 4years of horrific backtracking on many fronts including climate change.

It is probably too late to avert a certain (terrible) amount of damage. But we can at least slow it down, and reduce the suffering that will result.

I was (guardedly) optimistic in 2008, when Hansen et al summarized things like this:
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2008/2008_Hansen_ha00410c.pdf

.

Hooray for us! We know no boundaries!

I have always respected your tireless devotion to the environmental cause hatrack .
You have been sounding the alarm here for over 20 years now. I appreciate that commitment to this most important, but bizarrely overlooked issues.
When the environment goes to hell, wars increase (resource scarcity), societal health degrades, civil rights take a hit and yet that simple connection is never made.

I think it is the effort it takes to be a serious environmentalist that seems to turn people off. It is so easy to post feel good hashtags and then carry on with shopping and celebrity gossip etc.