“What if Columbus had been told, ‘Chris, baby, don’t go now. Wait until we’ve solved our number one priorities — war and famine; poverty and crime; pollution and disease; illieracy and racial hatred—and Queen Isabella’s own personal brand of ‘interal security’‘” – W.I.E. Gates
Humans are capable of doing multiple things at once. Some people working on space travel doesn't preclude others from working to slow (can we even reverse at this point) climate change.
Not sure this kind of rhetoric ever worked. As far back as I have followed the news - so perhaps for 35 years - it was about to be too late. We were at the brink of a catastrophe. Humankind had to do something now. Tomorrow, it would be too late.
Look, global warming exists, it's (at least partially) man-made, and that's really bad.
But it's one issue out of many man-made or man-fixable issues. Fighting poverty is another. Curing diseases like malaria is also important. Curbing starvation. Spreading democracy and the rule of law. Then there are women's rights. Education. Racism. Avoiding WWIII. I am sure I forgot many large issues. How do we prioritize? Do we have to prioritize or can we deal with all of them at once?
While climate change denialists minimize and try to pretend that more analysis is needed before lifting our smallest finger to change the obvious problem (humans burning hundreds of millions of years of sequestered carbon in the span of 150 years)
It’s actually rather urgent that we collectively acted like the singular species we are, and acted yesterday already.
Don’t wait til 2030 to phase out whatever, let’s go full bore and do it now dedicating our full combined engineering might to tackle the problem.
IS HUMANITY CAPABLE OF COLLECTIVE ACTION IF OUR LIVES DEPEND UPON IT?
You know those films with alien invasions where humanity comes together to fight it, can you imagine traitorous factions saying the alien invasion is just a myth? Undermining all that is needed for collective action
"Everything will go wrong whether we do anything or not!!"
No, it won't. Because we will act.
"Everything will turn out fine, we don't need to worry about anything!!"
No, it won't. We need to act.
Honestly, both extreme reactions paralyze humans and nations into inactivity. We fixed the hole in the Ozone. We fixed Acid Rain. We stopped the whales from going extinct. We did this through concerted human and governmental actions together with pressure and regulations on corporations.
We can do it again. Not without some consequences. Significant human populations will become climate refugees. Significant species will go extinct. But we can offset the worst effects, but not if doomerism or "climate change is inevitable, humans have survived worse" optimism cause us to stop trying.
I understand what you're saying about the hyperbole, but we're also at the point where there are multiple, overlapping problems of a very serious nature to a species with 7.8 billion beings sharing a planet. The hyperbole isn't useful, but the larger idea that the time to act IS NOW shouldn't be diminished.
Doc Smith would find that assertion embarrassing, I think.
The good news is that across the world, this sort of hand-flapping is being ignored. In reality, we have already begun doing the right thing. We're already averting the worst-case scenario. But that isn't a repair job. We're slowly the rate of getting-worse. We have to do more to arrest that, to get to a net-zero state and then a net-negative state, because we can't predict that whoever we stick with the check will then be in as advantageous a place as we are to pull that brake.
This has immediate and short-term benefits even if one is too selfish to care about our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Within living memory, rivers in the United States were too foul in which to swim and now, for the most part, they're not. Cities in the West were choked with smog and now, for the most part, they're not. And bringing it back to the topic at hand: cruise ships foul the ports they land in; you can smell it on shore and the trash they leave in their wake is obvious, and as a side benefit they also have extremely disproportionate climate impact. "What if...we didn't do that?" is not a difficult question and not one to rend one's shirt over.
Doing the right thing is better for us, now, as well as for our descendants.
Saying "it's not too late to do something" is more likely to effect change than saying "it's too late, climate change already happened, we're all fucked, good bye." I think you agree with GP here.
To be honest, for a problem that's only been around for 50 years and that requires major technological and economic disruption combined with global geopolitical cooperation to solve, I'd say we, as a species are doing pretty good at coming together to combat climate change.
Is it easy to imagine going faster, easily. Are we doing absolutely everything we can, assuredly not. Is there still going to be dramatic ecological fallout, definitely. But still... humanity's historical track record for these kinds of changes is on the order of centuries or millennia, not decades.
In my experience, people only rally around a problem when faced with an immediate problem. It's probably irrelevant how you frame the issue because nothing will be done until it's juuuust about too late. The good news is humans are highly adaptable, the bad news is other species will suffer.
Ignoring the errors in the article, what can we do? Due to the selfishness and shortsightedness of our race, I think the only way we are not totally screwed is if we (quickly) invent some tech that cleans up the atmosphere and oceans - not an easy task!
The worse the situation becomes, the less will be done.
We could have taken action even 10, 20, or 40 years ago, but so far, we have done nothing significant to prevent it from happening.
The longer we wait, the more expensive and complicated the solutions will become. Politicians are often reluctant to make unpopular moves that might anger their base, so they tend to focus on short-term goals rather than long-term sustainability (though Bernie might have been an exception, imho). We are searching for solutions that maintain the status quo.
One of the most significant issues is the exponential growth driven by our financial system's need for constant growth. Yet, we have not even begun to start discussing that.
For all the reasons you give, bad things are going to happen. We don't have time to stop that, but if we start now, we can mitigate the severity of those bad things that do happen and prevent others. The cleanup scenario isn't an option in any respect if the earth is really screwed.
The emissions trend is slowing. We have the technology we need in order to change course, we're just not deploying it fast enough.
The worst projections, at least, are off the table: we're not headed for 6 degrees of warming, we're on track for 3, and I strongly suspect we'll end up closer to 2 degrees of warming.
That is going to be terrible. People will die, wars will be fought, and we'll see the largest migrations in human history with all the attendant political upheaval and barbarity, but we'll still be here. Humans as a species are going to make it.
For me, I found it helpful to go and work in climate. So long as I wasn't actively working to solve the problem, I was driven mad by the knowledge that we were heading for disaster.
We don't do anything now because it is easier to put it off till later. In the future, the humans should be wealthier on average, and have access to better technology.
But even then, it will always be easier to put it off till later. What generation is going to take a significant, and eventually massive, charge in order to help their grandchildren? It seems not unlikely that no generation does, the problem gets worse and worse, wealth stagnates and then starts to decline, and eventually the problem is unsolvable. This could happen even without any climate tipping points.
“What if Columbus had been told, ‘Chris, baby, don’t go now. Wait until we’ve solved our number one priorities — war and famine; poverty and crime; pollution and disease; illieracy and racial hatred—and Queen Isabella’s own personal brand of ‘interal security’‘” – W.I.E. Gates
Humans are capable of doing multiple things at once. Some people working on space travel doesn't preclude others from working to slow (can we even reverse at this point) climate change.
reply