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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.""
One of Pete Postlethwaite's last movies covered the issue in a similar way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
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.
People must like feeling afraid.
When humans lack sufficient drama they make more. Alleviated of hunger, war, plague, etc. we create and indulge new "problems" to fill the void.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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.
I'm old enough to remember them saying that the worlds rainforests would be gone by 2010. That the water would be so polluted by 2000 that we wouldn't have anything to drink. That north america would be a desert by 2012, and southern canada would be semi-tropical by 2015. Fear mongering is the way money grubbers make money.
Oh, and those predictions? They came out while I was in grade school...in the 1980's, still got the pamphlets and handouts somewhere for them.
Om, nomnomnom...
You're looking for a solution "the political, economic, and technological realities of today"?
Let me quote Albert Einstein for you:
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.
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.
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.
That wasn't rooted in climate change, rather it was the result of poor agricultural processes. Even your wiki link says so.
>> 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
As a guy who's read scifi for 30 years, this sounds as boring as fuck. Hundreds of writers have written civ collapses into the backdrop of their story and many of these have been manmade ecological disasters. But then the good writers write a story, populating the post-event world with people whose lives and relationships riff off the tragedy of the fall and the sense of current loss.
As worded, this sounds more like the background notes for a role-playing game set in the future, after an ecological collapse....zzzzzZZZZZ.
The mass (near) extinction of humans need not be noticeable. All that is required is that the environment become inhospitable enough to humans to cause the birth:death ratio to drop below 1. Given that currently everyone still dies, this simply means that people stop producing at least 1 child per parent (e.g. 2 kids per hetero-normative couple) that survives and produces more children.
This could mean people start dying of disease and famine due to global warming. Or it could just mean that people decide not to have as many children because it decreases their quality of life. When the earth had lots of easily accessible natural resources, making lots of children was a good strategy. Maybe when you can barely find enough food for yourself, you might choose to have only 1 kid instead of 2.
The "near extinction" (i.e. drastic lowering of human population), need not involve any significant amount of suffering (not more than we have today anyway), and it may not even need to be noticeable without statistical analysis. If this decline happens over thousands or tens of thousands of years, it will not be noticeable over the course of a human lifetime. Failing to notice a 0.1% drop in population over your lifetime will be like failing to notice a 0.1 degree increase in average temperature over your lifetime.
In fact, if you believe overpopulation is a big problem, this kind of gradual decrease in human population may even be considered a good thing until our survival as a species begins to be threatened by it.
I suspect something far more normal will happen. We will simply hit an equilibrium point, where the world is just hospitable enough to cause humans to have about a 1:1 birth:death ratio, with some fluctuations. Technology may even raise this equilibrium point well above the 7 billion people we have now.
See awareness worked...
There are about 7.25b people. There were about 1b people in 1800 and I don't think anyone would consider the population to be going extinct then. Right now in the lowest reproducing countries the rate is 1.3 children per female. That induces halving in population per 2 generations. Or about 6 generations so even if we were to have the lowest rate in the planet we would be in 200 years about where we were 200 years ago. At that point resources would be abundant.
What gets me is the mild warming we are obviously going to be experiencing (since large CO2 increase have not shown not to correlate to rapid temperature increases as previously thought) is going to bring an overall boon to the planet, just as it did in ages past - a wider range of arable land.
Sure some land will change for the worse, but overall as a species we will be better off - and the rate the climate is changing allows for plenty of time for people, plants and animals to adapt.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
"As for global warming itself, it could be fully or partially man caused. I don't know, but again, I don't think it's a problem either way, so I don't really give a crap. "
See that bit where you write "I think...". Stop thinking , if you don't have a qualification in climate science, and go and look up what the experts say because on a fundamental levels your opinions are no guide at all to anything useful if you don't have the training to have a reliable opinion on the matter.
And if thats hard to understand, google "Dunning Krueger" for more explaination.
Until then, sorry dude, but its a reasonable reply he gave. This really has nothing to do with left or right wing politics, since science doesn't work that way.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
"We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage. At the very worst bad weather has caused localized destruction that is, in every single case, completely recovered within a decade. "
You're hilariously wrong on this point. I'll grant you that it may depend on your scope and scale, but I trust you're aware that the Middle East used to be referred to as the "Fertile Crescent." What happened? Climate changed. It's theorized that the Mongols were able to cross the Asian steppes in the first place because significant rainfall patterns over several years greened the countryside enough to support a large foraging army as it traveled. And history is full -- literally *full* of examples of kingdoms toppled, countries overthrown, and civil unrest and destruction as a result of climate changes.
1770 Benghal: Famine kills 10 million people. Cause? Drought. One third of the population dead. Recovered in ten years? Not bloody likely.
1630-1631: Famine kills two million in China. Repeated drought-related disasters feed unrest and lead to the collapse of the entire Ming Dynasty in 1644.
1844-1849: Great Irish Potato Famine. Kills over one milion Irish, leads to the emigration of 1.5-2 million more. Irish demographics permanently shifted as a result, Irish populations seeded in other countries including a significant population in America.
1972-1973: Famine in Ethiopia kills 60,000 people, leads to the downfall of King Haile Selassie. Clearly this is a non-issue today, because Ethiopia is now a lush land of plenty and abundance.
1816-1817: Year Without A Summer: Has a huge number of impacts on innovation and culture, as well as killing several hundreds thousand more people worldwide. Wikipedia has the full list of interesting details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...
So, no, you're just wrong about this. Multi-year weather patterns and long-term climate shifts have killed tens of millions of people throughout history. Famine and drought have toppled nations, destroyed city-states, and crushed empires. In some cases, the economic impacts of these events continue to reverberate in modern history.
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.
Extinction due to climate change? What science is that based on? During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum there was a great diversification of terrestrial life. For the majority. of the time mammals have roamed the earth it has been so warm that there have been no polar ice caps, yet life kept chugging along and adapting.
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.
I mean shit, look at Al Gore, if there was a list of everybody on the planet sorted by personal carbon consumption, he'd probably be in the top 1%.
Gore is carbon neutral isn't he?
I don't care how energy efficient his 20 bedroom house or his private jet are;
Gore doesn't have a private jet.
both inevitably consume a LOT more energy than your typical person's luxuries.
How does a jet consume energy without existing?
In a small contained lab environment we can sit there and measure how much of a greenhouse effect different gases have, but historical data doesn't even so much as show a correlation between greenhouse gases and climate change.
That's not true for any of the past 420 million years
IIt doesn't appear to harm ocean life
Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit.
plant life, or land animals either
Bullshit
as during one of Earth's "greenest" periods in history we had 20 times the present atmospheric CO2, really fucking massively sized insects, dinosaurs, and more.
Kind of irrelevant. We have existent species now. Those are the ones that have to be able to live. Really fucking massively sized insects, and dinosaurs are already dead.
Other data suggests that rises in atmospheric CO2 follow rises in climate, not the other way around
Nope:
CO2, increasing since about 1750.
Temp, from about 1900.
As for global warming itself, it could be fully or partially man caused. I don't know, but again, I don't think it's a problem either way, so I don't really give a crap.
Well, we've got a lot of science now, so we don't need to base our decisions on what you think.
It's entirely possible that the higher CO2 we're seeing is yet another rise following a climate change that we had no part in.
No it's not. It's from the combustion of fossil fuels.
And by the way, the arguments for stopping climate change so that we can save the economy are also incredibly stupid and self defeating.
Bullshit
We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage.
Bullshit. Economic impact of global warming is costing the world more than $1.2 trillion a year, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP
Meanwhile we have seen on well more than one occasion where stupid economic decisions cause global long term collapse. Hurting the economy for what is probably much ado about nothing is therefore pointless
The 10 state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative saw their combined economies increase by 1.6 billion in the first three years. Oh, the pain! The pain! Ouch! Stop the hurt!
/. vote this bullshit +5, interesting? I would have thought anti-science grandstanding was antithetical to "news for nerds". This place really has dropped in discernment over the past few years hasn't it.
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Why did
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.
Nope, hotter now.
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.
Zero - like the relevance of your post.
The point being refuted was "We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage."
Context, noob.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
to be fair, the potato famine was due to the potato blight, a fungal disease that makes them inedible.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.