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Why Our Brains Can't Process the Gravest Threats To Humanity
merbs writes: Our brains are unfathomably complex, powerful organs that grant us motor skills, logic, and abstract thought. Brains have bequeathed unto we humans just about every cognitive advantage, it seems, except for one little omission: the ability to adequately process the need for the whole species' long-term survival. They're miracle workers for the short-term survival of individuals, but the scientific evidence suggests that the human brain flails when it comes to navigating wide-lens, slowly-unfurling crises like climate change.
Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) thinks that these slow moving threats are ones that society will handle, because they do have visibility.
Initial:
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1...
Update:
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1...
I tend to agree with this: there's only so much buck-passing that can happen. I'll also point out that several messes today have literally everyone agreeing that they should be cleaned up, but they are just maneuvering such that the "other" guy (whether that distinction is factual or not) pays the price, be it in dollars, land, or the lives of fighting men.
Hate to tell you, but you're stereotyping. There are plenty of skeptics who simply think the scientists involved have no good idea how to model the climate and that their attempts are crude at best, dismal at worst. The climate does seem to be getting warmer, but it doesn't take much to prove that. Everything else is half-baked, IMHO. Do we need to take drastic measures that will destroy the Western world's economy? Probably not.
Most people in support of drastic intervention fail to grasp that we have no real alternative to fossil fuels in the pipe. Furthermore, renewables research isn't moving fast enough for their sensibilities, and they tend to overestimate the possibility of an imminent solution. A very common aversion to nuclear power alongside global warming extremism just puts in the last nail. We should go nuclear. That would fix carbon emissions. Most warming interventionists don't want that either.
Still, I'm glad the renewables research is happening. Fossil fuels are decidedly finite. So is nuclear. We need a means to survive, I'm just doubtful that we need to flail about with solutions that may cause more harm than good.
Sincerely,
Not anti-science, not a creationist, never owned a gun, am very good with math, and independent as far as political leanings go. Don't stuff me into your box. Thanks.
Climate change "deniers" is a misnomer. Everyone with a lick of sense knows we're in a rising temperature period. We're coming out of an ice age. We all know the climate changes, and may change for the warmer. Remember this next time you use a politically calculated term that doesn't describe most of the people involved.
Apparently the human mind is also lacking in the grammar department. " bequeathed unto we humans" contains a prepositional phrase, the object of which should be in the ... wait for it.... objective case. Thus the correct version is "bequeathed unto us humans". Get the simple stuff right and the more complex will follow.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Yes, but those transitions usually take place within thousands or tens of thousands of years.
Not so. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports...
The central Greenland ice core record (GRIP and GISP2) has a near annual resolution across the entire glacial to Holocene transition, and reveals episodes of very rapid change. The return to the cold conditions of the Younger Dryas from the incipient inter-glacial warming 13,000 years ago took place within a few decades or less (Alley et al., 1993). The warming phase, that took place about 11,500 years ago, at the end of the Younger Dryas was also very abrupt and central Greenland temperatures increased by 7C or more in a few decades (Johnsen et al., 1992; Grootes et al., 1993; Severinghaus et al., 1998). Most of the changes in wind-blown materials and some other climate indicators were accomplished in a few years (Alley et al., 1993; Taylor et al., 1993; Hammer et al., 1997). Broad regions of the Earth experienced almost synchronous changes over periods of 0 to 30 years (Severinghaus et al., 1998), and changes were very abrupt in at least some regions (Bard et al., 1987), e.g. requiring as little as 10 years off Venezuela (Hughen et al., 1996). Fluctuations in ice conductivity indicate that atmospheric circulation was reorganised extremely rapidly (Taylor et al., 1993). A similar, correlated sequence of abrupt deglacial events also occurred in the tropical and temperate North Atlantic (Bard et al., 1987; Hughen et al., 1996) and in Western Europe (von Grafenstein et al., 1999).
The inception of deglacial warming about 14.5 ky BP was also very rapid, leading to the Bölling-Alleröd warm period in less than twenty years (Severinghaus and Brook, 1999). Almost synchronously, major vegetation changes occurred in Europe and North America with a rise in African lake levels (Gasse and van Campo, 1994). There was also a pronounced warming of the North Atlantic and North Pacific (Koç and Janssen, 1994; Sarnthein et al., 1994; Kotilainen and Shackleton, 1995; Thunnell and Mortyn, 1995; Wansaard, 1996; Watts et al., 1996; Webb et al., 1998).
There are plenty of skeptics who simply think the scientists involved have no good idea how to model the climate and that their attempts are crude at best, dismal at worst.
Hate to tell you, but there really aren't. Pretty much all the "skeptics" have a huge blind spot and no amount of research can sway them.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Article's author covers politics for treehugger.com. Yeah, no agenda there.
[Insert pithy quote here]
we are profoundly foolish to think that our impact has been significant - it has not.
Worldwide fossil fuel usage, which is has grown approximately 44% in the last decade, is more than 41 million tons per day. Human dry biomass is only about 100 billion tons. In other words, if all humans were dried out to be burned as fuel, we would supply our own energy needs for about 2.5 days (if we paradoxically had energy needs after being dried out to use as fuel). Total annual production of plant and animal biomass is estimated at about 275 million tons per day. At the rate fossil fuel use is increasing we could be at that point of burning more fossil fuel than that in just over 50 years. That seems like naive curve fitting, except that it seems to work perfectly well historically and we have no reason to believe that increasing population and industrialization won't lead us to that point. Any events that would prevent that from happening other than a wholesale switch to alternative sources would pretty much have to be horrible tragedies.
The amount of oxygen required for burning fossil fuels varies from as little as twice the mass in oxygen required for methane to as much as 14 times the mass. Let's just settle on 4 times the mass. So, we can say that the fossil fuel burned in a day at present uses about 164 Million tons of oxygen per day. There are about 1 quadrillion tons of oxygen in the atmosphere. So at just the present rate, that's 0.0000164% of the oxygen in the atmosphere a day, or .00596% a year, or .0596 a decade or .1197% over twenty years, or .2993% over fifty years. Except that, if usage does continue to grow at current rates, in fifty years, the usage rate will be high enough that it would be 2% of the atmosphere over the next fifty years after that if usage levels remain steady.
Of course, the oxygen in the atmosphere isn't static. It's constantly being replenished. About 1.37 billion tons of it is made every day on Earth. So, using 164 million tons of it a day for combusting fossil fuels, we're only using 11.9% of daily production. Not a problem! And if we actually reach that 50 year projection, we'll only be using 80% of the oxygen produced in a day (at least at current levels, the vastly increased C02 would increase oxygen production from plants a little, but wouldn't affect the total that much). Surely Not a problem. It's not over 100% after all. Even then, we wouldn't actually start dying en masse of asphyxiation for a good 1000 years or more, so who really cares, right?!
Ok. After that little exercise, I feel a lot better and I have to concede to you that someone would have to be a truly profound fool... in fact, a total moron, to think that we couldn't, uh, I mean could, have any impact on the atmosphere.
A snowstorm in Boston is a single, transient event (weather). Snowpack in the mountains is something that accumulates over the entire winter season (climate). Anything else you need explained?