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Imagining the Future History of Climate Change
HughPickens.com writes "The NYT reports that Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, is attracting wide notice these days for a work of science fiction called "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future," that takes the point of view of a historian in 2393 explaining how "the Great Collapse of 2093" occurred. "Without spoiling the story," Oreskes said in an interview, "I can tell you that a lot of what happens — floods, droughts, mass migrations, the end of humanity in Africa and Australia — is the result of inaction to very clear warnings" about climate change caused by humans." Dramatizing the science in ways traditional nonfiction cannot, the book reasserts the importance of scientists and the work they do and reveals the self-serving interests of the so called "carbon combustion complex" that have turned the practice of science into political fodder.
Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."
Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists.""
Oreskes argues that scientists failed us, and in a very particular way: They failed us by being too conservative. Scientists today know full well that the "95 percent confidence limit" is merely a convention, not a law of the universe. Nonetheless, this convention, the historian suggests, leads scientists to be far too cautious, far too easily disrupted by the doubt-mongering of denialists, and far too unwilling to shout from the rooftops what they all knew was happening. "Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did."
Why target scientists in particular in this book? Simply because a distant future historian would target scientists too, says Oreskes. "If you think about historians who write about the collapse of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Mayans or the Incans, it's always about trying to understand all of the factors that contributed," Oreskes says. "So we felt that we had to say something about scientists.""
People must like feeling afraid. If the rate of warming has slowed to the point that the scientific community is calling it a hiatus, how can you justify the alarmism?
There's no reason to assume that humanity will go extinct - billions may die if things get really bad, but so long as at least some algae and insects survive the transition at least a small population of humans should be able to as well. Wouldn't even be the first time it's happened - genetic evidence suggests that the global human population fell to only a few thousand individuals during the last major ice age.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Seriously, I'm sick of scientist being blamed for crap. Especially when they've been warning about global warming from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...> the 1970s and there's been consensus since the eighties.
You want someone to blame? Blame the fossil fuel special interests groups that taken up, and refined the tactics of big tobacco. Blame the billionaires that fund conspiracy theorists, and wack-a-doodle that muddies the debate. Blame the hair brain bloggers that have made a living out character assassination, and hysterical invective against the scientist that are trying to communicate their findings to the public.
These are the arseholes you should blame. Not the scientists.
The failure to act on the warnings lies clearly on the people who fail to react to the warnings. This is a failure of the human social system to adapt to a limited resource. This is a classic tragedy of the commons example.
There are many factors at play
1. lack of education to undestand the science, pollution, basic tragedy of the commons problem
2. desire of profit or lifestyle, pretty much the strict commons problem, not willing to make a sacrifice
3. blind to the problem due to religious beliefs
4. plain old innertia to what is not preceived as an imminet threat
The science is clear even if we don't 100% understand all he dynamics, (we can't get 7 day weather right why should we expect 2 year, 5 year or 100 year predictions to be perfect).
The generation and acceptance of un-science is wrong.
We went from:
Horses to landing on the Moon with decades to spare.
About 1.8 Billion people to nearly 6 billion. If not for war and corrupt governments, all 6 billion would be well fed.
From about 20 WPM on the Telegraph to 100 terabits per second (experimental)...unless you are using Microsoft Windows, then it's more like 20 bytes per second.
Average life expectancy of 46 years to now approaching 80.
I think we will be able to handle whatever fantasies this guy can dream up...but we still won't have a flying car.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Oreskes has misunderstood the climate change denial industrial complex if she thinks the only obstacle to the denialists accepting reality is an issue of style. They would simply find a different pretext.
Yes and no. If you go back to the 1930s, a lot has changed, but a lot has stayed the same. People in the 1930's already had cars, Relativity, Evolution, and were considering things like nuclear reactions and going to the Moon. They had phones and they were already ready for wristwatch phones.
Move forward to today, and we have the computers and the Internet, which make things somewhat different, but in the end, this isn't that different a world. There has been some revolutionary stuff going on, especially in comparison to previous centuries, but we still aren't teleporting around, using psychic powers, or speak a completely different language or anything. And despite some work with landing on the Moon, that effort is still basically a one-off program that hasn't gone anywhere, let alone to the stars.
Indeed, where futurists are most wrong is where they move too far from incremental progress. That is obvious, of course, but it is also why gloom and doom types are just as often wrong as the guys who think we should already be flying around at Warp 6.
We will have a lot of trouble predicting the next revolutionary change, but unless there are many of those changes, the world won't be incredibly different than it is now in many ways.
So, in regard to scientists being too conservative, I'm not sure that this is a warranted criticism. Change may be accelerating, perhaps, but it is still pretty slow.
What the bloody fuck? Scientists failed us?
Not short-sighted politicians, not lobbyists for climate-raping corporations, not greedy corporate types.
No, of course the Scientists failed us. They didn't warn us strongly enough!!!
Okay, breathe.
Getting over the initial outrage, note that to have an actual effect on modern day policies, Oreskes could have written that the politicians were to blame. If modern-day people are shown that they will be remembered in infamy, it might just cause them to change. It happens with presidents all the time - doing something to be remembered by, leaving a positive mark for future historians, &c.
Bawk. Bawk. Bawk.
The sky is burning.
Bawk. Bawk. Bawk.
Oh noes. Oh noes
Anything more need to be said?
Yes, there is one more thing that needs to be said: If the scientists who have studied this are even remotely correct, your great grandchildren will look upon your memory in a manner somewhat akin to the way that people speak of southern slave owners, and the way Germans remember the NAZIs
(I remember the days when Slashdot still had intelligent, intellectual, technically minded, conversations. And even when people disagreed, they brought facts to the table, not childishness.)
Or JUST POSSIBLY it could be like all the 60s/70s end of the world nuclear Apocalypse fiction..
Or in fact the 70s 80s 'big freeze' Apocalypse fiction.
Or, well, zombie plague fiction, etc, etc.
Its 'insightful' that in their own description of the book they appear to complain about the limits of non-fiction for discussion of 'scientific ideas'
Damn those limitations of, you know, actually having true facts and not just making shit up.
Really, this is one step below gutter science, its embarrassing to the whole debate.
Tomorrow will be like today because today was like yesterday? Is that what you're argument amounts to?
One thing, we live in a finite world. We already reached peak coal in the USA in 1998 (in terms of energy potential, not tonnes mined, as different grades give off different amount of heat, and the best grades were mined first).
Another example, what today was was large sized tuna, in the 1950s and 60s would be considered mid-sized most likely, like in the Japanese fish auctions for sushi and other food products. Why? Because Tuna is being "mined" more and more and never really allowed to grow old enough before being caught.
This type of resource usage is mirrored all over, a type of M Hubbert bell curve in most instances. But here you are, telling us everything will be alright because it was alright in the past.
Gee, thanks! But your technology progression analogy has nothing to do with resource usage and future living conditions.
We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage.
Of course we have: the "Dust Bowl" of the 1930s.
Don't misunderstand me: I basically agree with what you say above. But one of the reasons the alarmist climate nonsense has been believed by so many people, is precisely because they are unfamiliar with climate history.
The 1937-1937 were FAR hotter than today, across almost the whole United States. (I'm not claiming it was global.) While that might not be "global climate change" it puts any of today's "extreme weather events" to shame.
And yes, the damage to land and property, and other economic effects, were downright devastating.
While the Dust Bowl might not have lingered long enough to be called "climate" by modern climatologists, that made utterly no difference to the displaced and the poor.
See awareness worked...
Great arguments there. That's the typical left-side argument these days: "I'm right because SHUT UP!"
Yes, we get it: people who doubt global warming are not of your tribe - they think badthought and no tolerance can be shown to other tribes.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That wasn't rooted in climate change, rather it was the result of poor agricultural processes. Even your wiki link says so.
It was caused by severe drought, which was aggravated by not using good dryland farming techniques. Which is not terribly strange, since many "good" dryland farming techniques we use today were unknown at the time.
I'm aware that it wasn't "rooted in climate change". My point though, was that even though it might not have been exactly what you were talking about, or whether it was natural or man-made (it was a bit of both), it was a long-term "weather event" with huge economic consequences.
If you want to talk about real, long-term climate change, just look at areas of the Middle East and Persia that we have written records of being lush and fertile, which are now arid desert. Whole civilizations moved away from their once-friendly lands.
But I grant you: we don't have any modern equivalents of that, at least of which I am aware.
I guess I see your point, replying to a comment that we've never had economic disaster due to climate change. But aren't most of your examples irrelevant, given that they occurred prior to the industrial revolution, and therefore had nothing to do with man-made climate change? If anything, those examples point out that climate disasters are a regular occurrence, regardless of human activity. I'm not sure that's the point you were trying to make.
See that bit where you write "I think...". Stop thinking
Yup, that's exactly the "I'm right because SHUT UP!" argument I was talking about. Thinking can only lead to badthought. Not thinking is safe, and avoids unwanted questions that might lable you out-tribe, and thus to be despised.
And if you think science has nothing to do with politics, you really haven't been paying attention. Scientists are no more or less idealists than anyone else, no more or less corruptible, and in the absence of data that people admit falsifies their hypotheses, can spin their wheels for a generation agreeing with one another and accomplishing nothing (see: string theory).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
And how many of these historical events can be traced back to CO2 concentrations? Zero.
And if you think science has nothing to do with politics, you really haven't been paying attention. Scientists are no more or less idealists than anyone else, no more or less corruptible, and in the absence of data that people admit falsifies their hypotheses, can spin their wheels for a generation agreeing with one another and accomplishing nothing (see: string theory).
Yeah, mate. The scientists did all that undergrad and postdoc study so that they could all become idealists instead of doing research.
Thank God we have you to show us where they all went wrong. Politics!
You do realize as the only person smarter than all the scientists, you have an obligation to fix up the politics errors in the climate science papers, and submit the truth for publication.
Academia has processes to deal with this, as other experts will issue studies showing faults in the previous ones.
One thing to note though, without qualifications in the field you are almost guaranteed to be unable to determine if a particular scientist is trustworthy.
Fortunately in climate science however there IS a mechanism, which is the IPCC reports which use extremely wide scale peer review to synthesize findings from vast quantities of research.
Here are things that are not reliable:
* Blogs, notably by untrained conservative commentations or known crackpots.
* Conservative thinktanks
* Politicians.
* Aristocrats.
* Pretend Aristocrats (like "lord" monckton)
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Yes, but you seem to be suggesting a conspiracy dating back to the start of climate science in the 1800s which if true involves millions of scientists constantly lying, a complete rewrite of some very fundamental physics, an entire world of weather stations and satelites being deliberately made wrong, AND a mechanism to make the world seem like its following physics despite it not following physics. All for reasons nobody can work out, and all being done so well no one ever discovering it, well until a plucky band of conspiracy theorists, anti-science activists and oil industry lobbyists blew the top off the whole thing.
Its a bit on the David Icke side of crazy, if you ask me.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
And how "inhospitable" would that be? Both Eskimos and Berber are doing fine.
And climate change doesn't destroy climate globally anyway, it just changes it around. We'll likely end up with more arable land overall long term under the most severe climate change scenarios, even if the transition is more disruptive.
Actually, we already have effectively reached that point, and not through material privation, but rather development. Developed nations tend to stop having population growth.
Primates were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than any predicted by the IPCC.
Your idea of speciation is wrong; speciation happens when ecological niches open up; "reduced gene pools" and "habitat loss" don't prevent it, they encourage it.
That the water would be so polluted by 2000 that we wouldn't have anything to drink.
I guess you missed the huge amount of regulation that has come in regarding pollution in waterways in the last 50 or so years then? Or do you think that this prediction would still have been wrong if factories had been allowed to keep dumping waste into rivers? In fact, maybe you should just try visiting some of the parts of India and China where they've managed to build an industrial base without such regulation and see how the water tastes. The entire point of making such predictions is so that we can avoid them happening.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But there comes a point where most scientists will say 'enough now, let's move on'; why should we keep rehashing the same arguments over and over?
The reason there's so much contention is because the science in question is being used as a justification for a call to action that may very likely have a significant real-world economic impact. That's very different than many other sorts of scientific theories which have little real-world consequence, or are mostly of interest only to scientists. People keep saying "the science is settled!", but when has that ever been a mantra in the scientific world before? The reason people desperately wish for the science to be "settled" is so that we can now move on to the "action" which will prevent the supposed climate disaster that may be looming in the future, as envisioned by this author.
There's a huge amount of scientific data and research out there, and nearly all the conclusions reached about climate change require a very significant amount of predictive modeling and interpretation. It's unlike many other scientific phenomenon which can be repeated and proven in a lab. Here's the kicker though... modelling the planet's climate to any accurate degree in the long term seems a bit unrealistic, given the relative complexity of an entire planet's ecosystem*.
We can look at general patterns and try to extrapolate future directions, and hypothesize about what might be causing them, but there's no way to test those hypothesis, because obviously we don't have an alternate universe Earth to make changes to and observe the resulting effect. As such, I don't believe that theories of climate change can ever really be "settled", because there's no way to prove or disprove them. We have exactly one Earth on which we can conduct global experiments, but anyone familiar with the scientific method knows you need to repeat experiments in order to validate them.
In other words, we can't measure our actions against a known baseline in order to compare the effect of those actions. That means we can never really know how much of any climate change is due to our actions and how much may be naturally occurring. We can only make guesses and create hypothesis based on what data we have. The longer we study and make predictions with our models any hypothesis, the better chance we have of making them more accurate, but "long" is a loaded term when you're dealing with geological time compared to a human lifetime.
Honestly, I'd call myself somewhat "agnostic" regarding AGW, in that I don't consider myself enough of an expert to be able to say either way. A lot of scientists are saying there's something there, and I think we should probably pay attention, but with this caveat - scientists are people too, and no one, not even scientists, are immune from their own biases and agendas. Given the economic ramifications of taking action at a global level to reduce carbon levels will have serious consequences, this critical skepticism shouldn't be dismissed lightly.
I'm generally a proponent of anything that will reduce our dependence of fossil fuels and reduce our carbon footprint. There are a LOT of good reasons, not just environmental, for doing so. But I think it's probably a bad idea to panic and waste money on technologies that are not yet ready to supplant current, proven systems. Let's keep moving forward at a reasonable pace. Look at it from a very pragmatic standpoint: if we push our economies too hard in a rush for green technologies, there will be a lot more push-back against further development, and may end up hurting more than helping. In a robust economy, however, I think people will be more willing to listen when they're not worried about whether they'll be able to make their next house payment, or even have a job. It's a bit hard to focus on climate issues in that sort of scenario.
* Did you seriously just compare predictive modeling of an entire planet's weather patterns decades or even centuries into the future to "1 + 1 = 2"?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
It's disingenuous not to see that the scientific community, as much as it is to blame as anyone, brought this distinctly on themselves.
Since the 1960s and particularly in the 1980s, scientists cheerfully have joined the debate, not as asserters of facts and data, but as political voices themselves. "We hate Ronald Ray-gun" so the Union of Concerned Scientists (among others) were histrionic in their puerile terror of nuclear weapons, despite those very weapons ensuring the longest period of great-power peace that modern civilization has seen. Scientists were at the forefront of the Silent Spring movement to ban DDT, when in fact the very experiments Rachel Carson discussed had been recognized by their originators as deeply flawed. Scientists too have repeatedly been part of the Green movement, lying down in front of trains in the 1970s and 80s to kill the entire nuclear power industry in the US - leaving us with no choice but to consume fossil fuels. Hell, I could pull up 10 web pages right now with 'scientists' explaining in detail why GMO food is deadly dangerous to consume.
This debate has often been compared as "the anti-science Right" vs "the truth". The fact is: to the bulk of the populace, Credibility matters. If you cry wolf enough times about how the sky is falling, and it never does, ultimately people stop listening...even if this time you're right.
-Styopa
You argue convincingly and there is a lot of good sense in what you day, but I think you are trying to pass off some dubious arguments as well.
modelling the planet's climate to any accurate degree in the long term seems a bit unrealistic, given the relative complexity of an entire planet's ecosystem
Is it more compicated than, say, modelling the evolution of a star from the primordial disc of dust? We do that with a high degree of confidence, knowing full well that this kind of models are somewhat uncertain; they give us valuable insight into how stars actually work, at least with some useful degree of resolution. It is the same with climate modelling: we know they are not correct in the sense that everything that comes out of the models is accurate, but they are near enough to be useful. All the calculations come with guidelines on how far we can trust them, just like the weather forecast, BTW. And while we are on the weather; we can actually make more reliable predictions about the climate than about the weather, because weather forecasts try to produce an detailed map of things like temperature, cloud cover, wind and precipitation within very short time frames of a few hours, whereas the detail in climate forecasts is more like averages over decades and across whole regions.
I don't have a problem with people raising honest objections based on serious, logical consideration of facts; what I have a problem with is the unthinking rejection and sometimes obstructive obfuscation based on short term interests. Producers of fossil fuels have an interest in blocking anything that may lead to them losing profit, and any climate research that concludes that we should stop burning fossil fuel will put their profits at risk. To me this reasoning is very plausible; much more plausible than any conspiracy theory about a secretive cabal of 'climate scientists' trying to further their own agenda.
* Did you seriously just compare predictive modeling of an entire planet's weather patterns decades or even centuries into the future to "1 + 1 = 2"?
You know the answer perfectly well, I think; this is the sort of question one asks to make the opponent look silly. No I didn't compare climate modelling to elementary maths; I compare the socalled 'skeptics', with their deliberate 'misunderstanding' of what climatologists are telling us, to a child's behaviour, when a child does not want to listen to a 'boring' explanation and spitefully tries to avoid the issue.
"People keep saying "the science is settled!", but when has that ever been a mantra in the scientific world before?"
Erm, all the time, actually. The whole point of science is to be able to know something about the world, and act on that knowledge. We know enough about semiconductors to build computers, for example. There's plenty we don't know about semiconductors, but we know enough to act.
The notion that all scientific knowledge is merely conjecture, based on the facts as we know them but continuously open to being disproven, and therefore not a basis for action, is rhetoric gone wrong. The openness of a piece of scientific knowlege to being disproven is not an on/off binary state. If you were to discover some facts that appeared to show that semiconductors don't in fact work the way we thought they did, and have this completely different mechanism of action, we would question whether the facts were real, and if they did ineluctably lead to that conclusion, etc etc. We'd question even harder if you told us that the facts appear to show that computers can't work at all.