Forecasting Doomsday

Boccaccio writes "James Lovelock, the planetary scientist famous for his Gaia Theory, writes in today's Independent of his belief that it is already too late to divert an environmental catastrophe which will see much of human civilisation destroyed. Fearing it too late to be green, he instead suggests communities plan for survival in a Mad Max type world with limited resources ruled by violent warlords. "We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can." He suggests we should be writing a practical guidebook printed on long lasting paper containing "the basic accumulated scientific knowledge of humanity.""

Comments

Obligatory Richard Pryor

[thatguywhoiam]

In regards to climate change, and those who deny it:

"Who are you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?"

Just getting off a week of +5-10C weather, in January, in Toronto. (40-50F for the Americans.) That is really, really atypical.

So is the 28 days of rain the west coast just received.

So is the 13 feet of snow in Japan.

Its unsettling.

Re:Doomsday can come only from governments

[Red Flayer]

"There is so much land available in the entire globe that I don't see how warlords can use the strength of weapons to take over"

Useable land? Enough useable farmland to support 6 Bn people? Along with the fuel needed to get the same kind of return from the land that we experience now, including distribution of the food?

I suggest you read Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed .

Good insight on the topic.

My point is that faced with a growing population, uncertain sustainability of our current food production methods (e.g., how can we do it without fossil fuels to rely on for production and distribution), and reduced supply of both arable land and waters suitable for food production, how can we expect to keep everyone fed? And if we can't feed everyone, how will disputes be resolved? My guess is through warfare. State action in some cases, "Mad Max"-style in others. If the drop in food production is extreme enough, modern states will collapse, and the "Mad Max" vision may come to pass.

Re:I disagree..

[tgd]

When 2/3 of the current food-producing land in the world no longer can produce food, I think the billions who starve to death may beg to differ about "feel[ing] the pinch", but that might just be me. After all I was miserable in my last meeting because it went a half hour into lunch and I was starving.

Global Warming and the Ice Age

[Zobeid]

Just ask any geologist. . . The Earth is in an Ice Age. Actually we're in an "interglacial period", which is what we call it when an ice age pauses and the ice sheets retreat for 10 or 20 thousand years, then they advance again. In the 1970s several climatologists looked at the available data -- solar cycles and records, precession of Earth's orbit, etc. -- and concluded that the interglacial period was about to end, and the ice was going to come back Real Soon Now. They started warning their governments about the need to prepare for a colder climate, shorter growing seasons, dropping ocean levels, etc.

That was before all the talk about global warming began, of course.

And yet, their data didn't lie. What some climatologists are beginning to figure out is that global warming -- from greenhouse gases emitted as a by-product of human industry -- came along just in time to hold back the ice sheets. It began with clearing forests for farmland (which released carbon), and raising livestock which produce methane. It accelerated with the industrial revolution, and all the coal that was burned. Up to that point the greenhouse gases were roughly staving off the natural cooling trend.

Then, in the 20th Century, we saw an explosion in the burning of oil and gas for power. That's when the global warming effect began to outstrip and overwhelm the natural cooling trends. Today we have a climate that is definitely growing warmer, alarmingly so. And yet. . .

If we were to cut off greenhouse gas emissions today -- either on purpose, or as a result of our industrial civilization's collapse -- it seems likely that it wouldn't take long for the current situation to reverse. It certainly ought not take 100,000 years for the global climate to recover from our CO2 emissions. Like it or not, we are still in that ice age, and we'd soon feel it.

Re:Doomsday can come only from governments

[Fordiman]

It's similar to the way things could be nicer worldwide. If, for example, everyone donated $0.25, you could cover the world's landmass with 802.11g WiFi and have enough left over to make it solar/wind powered, impregnable, maintenance free, and, aside from the $0.25, completely free to everyone.

Similarly, if you donate $0.25, you could cover the world's landmass (6km granularity) with solar-powered atmospheric H2O/CO2 reclamation facilities. The would quickly offset the global warming problem; with less CO2, and more importantly, less water vapor in the atmosphere, you have less heat trapped and less H2O being produced to trap it. For that cost (at $0.25 per person, at 6km granularity - 3km radius per unit in a hexagonal array, the possible cost of a unit is about $400), you could rig seasonal fuzzy logic (unit is at lat 45, temp is about 66 deg, it's january. Turn on and start drying the atmo; we're too warm and wet right now.), to maintain the balance after the problem is repaired. Not to mention the possibility that a district could relocate its excess water to more needy places for cash.

'Cept, you'll nevr get it done. Too many people would argue against either ("Free WiFi to all would hurt industry!" or "We have no idea what reducing moisture and CO2 levels could do to the environment!"). That's where it all falls apart, really. Doing such things would require both a full understanding of each project (to quell the naysayers) and an organization willing to actually act in the public interest (unlike government, which acts more on a pluralism of cash-backed interests).

That's where it all falls apart really. To truly understand such projects, you need to actually do them, and there aren't any organizations that act purely in the public interest. Thus, you'd have to find a way to make the projects tangably profitable for all people.

Oh, well.

Re:Pop Scientist Melodrama

[AoT]

Everytime I hear comments about "alarmists" I think back to the beginning of Asimov's Empire and the way Hari "the raven" Seldon was treated.

Most people wish to live in a world where everything is going to end up ok, where science will save us, where the doomsday predictions are not true. Not that this necessarily mean he is right; but we do need to take this with some amount of seriousness.

It could mean the end of modern civilization and the death of billions, not something to be dismissed lightly.

Locklock is missing a few points.

[amper]

Disclaimer: I credit SimEarth with indtroducing me to Locklock's theories. :)

Lovelock is a very smart person, and he may in fact be correct about the fate that awaits us, but the reasons for it may not be the particular concerns he's raised. For example, the most prevalent theory that I have seen regarding climate change is that "global warming" may actually have the more immediate effect of "global cooling" in the form of interruption of the thermohaline cycle in the Atlantic Ocean. It would be really helpful if we could figure out if we need to move north (as Lovelock seems to suggest), or south in the face of a cooling trend. These theories are well born out by the archaeological record.

Second of all, it really disturbs me that so-called "greenhouse gases" still receive the majority of the blame for climate change in the first place. I am firmly of the belief that heat emissions may be just as much of a concern. It's not only CO2 and other pollutants coming out my my tailpipe...there's a whole lot of heat released in the process, and it has to go *somewhere*, and even nuclear energy leads somewhere down the chain to thermal inefficiencies.

If you take into account the theories surrounding the Peak Oil phenomenon, we begin to see a more complete picture of what the coming decades may hold. Many people seem to think that technology will somehow save us from ourselves. How then, can we continue to make such great technological innovations in the face of a scarcity of energy? The flip side of this is that as the effects of Peak Oil become more prominent, it is highly likely, if not assured, that we will see a massive reduction in both heat emissions and greenhouse gas emissions. It is only the availability of cheap and plentiful energy, primarily in forms which are relatively easy to transport, that has enabled the massive cancer-like growth of the human population and the resulting positive feedback loop of resource depletion in an environment of fixed bounds (barring interplanetary/interstellar colonization, an idea which is vanishingly unlikely, Earth is all we have).

There is also some evidence that a global increase in CO2 concentration is causing a global increase in vegetation, though much, if not all of this, is mitigated by our increasing resource depletion. It seems to me that the real question that Lovelock may not be able to yet answer is, "How quickly can the planet regulate itself, and exactly *where* are the "control points" beyond which the regulation fails?" I would submit that we cannot know this, even though we can look to the archaeological record for evidence of past self-regulation, the exact effect of human "intervention" in the climate remains unknown, even if we can be assured that it must inevitably have *some* negative effect.

As regards the "Max Max"-like society--remember that a man can only possess that which he can successfully defend. Community is a basic human need, though in the future we may find our communities much smaller than we once envisioned. It would not surprise me in the least to see the human population decrease over the next century by a factor of 1,000 (5-6 million people worldwide). Such a population could probably be easily sustained, even in the face of extreme climatic change. However, it is likely that we may revert to feudal, or even pre-feudal, societies in an attempt to preserve what remains of civilization. Of course, this is quite the pessimistic scenario--perhaps, with what we now know after a couple of hundred years, give or take, of technological innovation, that we can maximize the efficiency of pre-Industrial Revolution ways of life so that we can ensure the survival of many more. The real question here is, "How much have we forgotten?" The discontinuity of human history created by the Technology Revolution may mean that while we better understand things at the micro level, we have forgotten how to operate simpler forms of existence at the macro level. How many blacksmiths are there these days? Farmers? Sa

Re:Pop Scientist Melodrama

[Theatetus]

1) it's never too late to avert an environmental disaster; it just costs more the longer you wait.

It was too late for the Easter Islanders the moment they cut down their last tree. It was too late for the Norse in Greenland once they ate their last cow. Those were, admittedly, isolated ecosystems but there still will always be a point of no return beyond which a species is not viable in an ecosystem -- even a worldwide one.

Re:Doomsday can come only from governments

[dada21]

Actually, I've come up with a really good solution for government. I call it a unanimocracy.

There are three rules in Dada's Unanimocracy:

1. No law can exist with a unanimous vote of the populace -- direct democracy in ultimate form.
2. All laws sunset after 6 years.
3. No future laws can change any of the 3 basic rules.

The unanimocracy will likely produce 7 different levels of government: Federal, Regional, State, County, Village, Community, Household.

If 300,000,000 voters can't pass a law unanimously at the Federal level (let's say minimum wage), then they can try at the Regional level (3-4 states maybe). If those 40,000,000 can't pass a minimum wage law, they can try it at the State level. If those 10,000,000 can't pass the law unanimously, they can try it at the County level, and so on and so on.

Some laws may only exist at the Household level. Some might be only at the County level -- and counties will compete for similar-believing citizens.

Most laws will never pass at the Federal level. You might have "No murder" laws at the Federal level, but you sure won't have "No using drugs" or "No prostituting" laws at even the State level. If a law DOES pass, in 6 years it fails and must be repassed by the new voting bloc.

This is hereby known as Dada's Unanimocracy.

Re:true enough but...

[thatguywhoiam]

Incendiary foaming at the mouth "warnings of planetary illness" do our overall chances of mitigating the reality of human-caused global warming no good either. Extremists undercut the message for anyone more moderate, and more likely to actually effect change.

I understand. And agree, to a certain extent. However I cannot help but fall back on the idea that extreme stories and happenings (assuming for the moment they are true) reported on people from the likes of the Royal Society deserve a modicum of credit. In other words, say the author is an eccentric genius, taken to fits of bombastic verbiage. Hey may also be right, and while you can call him bombastic, he does not deserve to be summarily dismissed based purely on writing style. Does that make sense? In other words, he might be a foaming-at-the-mouth incendiary character who may well have a point; it is up to me to see past the language and investigate/weigh the claim.

I'm also sympathetic to the view of the earth acting like a living organism, in fact you can make the same argument for the whole universe. But because it looks like that doesn't actually mean it is a living thing, although I'm not sure how you'd define it at that macro a level...

The question is whether it actually gives a shit whether or not it's hospitable to life. As a member of the Church of the Utterly Indifferent God, somehow I doubt it. It certainly will be a problem for us though.

You reminded me of an Onion article: "God Wonders Whatever Happened To That Planet With All The Monkeys"