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Can Problems From Climate Change Be Addressed With Science? (scientificamerican.com)
Slashdot reader bricko shares an article from Scientific American about two "ecomodernists" who argue that the problems of climate change can be addressed through science and technology.
In his Breakthrough essay, Steven Pinker spells out a key assumption of ecomodernism. Industrialization "has been good for humanity. It has fed billions, doubled lifespans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children. It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs in pollution and habitat loss have to be weighed against these gifts...."
We can solve problems related to climate change, Pinker argues, "if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far, including societal prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance, and investments in science and technology... Since 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the United States has slashed its emissions of five air pollutants by almost two-thirds. Over the same period, the population grew by more than 40 percent, and those people drove twice as many miles and became two and a half times richer. Energy use has leveled off, and even carbon dioxide emissions have turned a corner."
The essay also cites ecomodernist Will Boisvert, who believes climate change will be cataclysmic but not apocalyptic, bringing large upheaval but a small impact on human well-being. "Global warming won't wipe us out or even stall our progress, it will just marginally slow ordinary economic development that will still outpace the negative effects of warming and make life steadily better in the future, under every climate scenario.... Our logistic and technical capacities are burgeoning, and they give us ample means of addressing these problems."
We can solve problems related to climate change, Pinker argues, "if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far, including societal prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance, and investments in science and technology... Since 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the United States has slashed its emissions of five air pollutants by almost two-thirds. Over the same period, the population grew by more than 40 percent, and those people drove twice as many miles and became two and a half times richer. Energy use has leveled off, and even carbon dioxide emissions have turned a corner."
The essay also cites ecomodernist Will Boisvert, who believes climate change will be cataclysmic but not apocalyptic, bringing large upheaval but a small impact on human well-being. "Global warming won't wipe us out or even stall our progress, it will just marginally slow ordinary economic development that will still outpace the negative effects of warming and make life steadily better in the future, under every climate scenario.... Our logistic and technical capacities are burgeoning, and they give us ample means of addressing these problems."
Is it super natural? No? Then yes science can eventually get there.
Money is the root of all evil?
"Ecology... Nature is only model we have that has survived climate change with shear, total, utter, neglect..." @RestorationAgD http://bit.ly/1ohVqpE
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
If climate change can be avoided, it won't be without technological advances. It certainty isn't going to come from some politician living it up and telling the rest of us to accept a lower quality of life. This means we can't keep cutting science & education, and we can't oppose new technology when it gets here, as is the case with nuclear power and genetically engineered crops.
This is an overly simplistic analysis. We wouldn't have the severe ecological problems we have today if it were not for advanced technology. While earlier civilizations had, sometimes locally catastrophic, impacts on the environment they were never anywhere close to drastically altering the overall carbon budget or nitrogen budget of the biosphere as we are today. Nor did they pose anything like the challenges represented by biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.
While its not crazy to suggest that technical progress can solve many of the issues we have today, FUNDAMENTALLY the problems aren't technical or scientific and so these kinds of solutions can have but a limited impact. Its MORE reasonable to imagine that the march of technology will present ever greater challenges and that the pace of these challenges will increase, whilst our ability to advance socially and morally has not really changed at all (I think there is such progress, but it is fundamentally unaffected by technology).
Thus it would be far more rational to argue that we are increasingly losing control of our impact on the world and that these conditions are likely to spiral out of control, or else be replaced with even MORE intractable problems we may not even be fully capable of imagining today. People 200 years ago couldn't even really imagine air pollution or global warming for example.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Do people really believe that everyone else is going to adopt some great downsizing to yurts and kale? It's not going to happen folks. Grow up. If climate change get addressed it will be through the creation of cheaper, cleaner alternatives. Nothing else is feasible. It never was.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
These articles are expected. âOk, itâ(TM)s happening, but science will fix it... now move along nothing to see hereâ(TM). This message brought to you by the Exxon communications department.
Go away troll. Or alternately, put up or shut up. I also Invoke Godwins Law. Your form of tyranny deserves the comparison.
Money is the root of all evil?
Maybe.
He has no clue about the complexities of the environment. We already have unleashed diseases by accident when we modified the environment, AIDS and ebola are examples.
Only cataclysmic? Gee that makes me feel better. Obviously he is assuming he and/ children and/or grandchildren will survive. I always get a kick out of zombie flick fans. They always ID with the survivors, no one ever goes "See puss filled zombie #3? That's me! I really want to be a puss filled zombie."
Now FTFA:
"Simply moving water where it’s needed will continue as the mainstay of water management. Here California is the leader. The California Aqueduct, running 400 miles up and down mountain ranges to take water from the wetter north to the drier south, is just part of a colossal irrigation system that has made the state’s arid landscape an agricultural powerhouse. "
I hope he realizes that climate change will destroy both this source and the Colorado River as a source of water as snow pack shrinks over the years. CA won't be the only place. The man is clueless.
He also cites huge infrastructure which costs billions to maintain. Not economically efficient.
FTFA:
"Meanwhile, countervailing developments that increase yields will outrun the effects of climate change and dramatically raise farm output. "
not without water.
FTFA:
"less mechanized farms could set up battery-powered tents with AC and cold water to cool over-heated laborers."
1) you need water which is disappearing. 2) most farms are too large to cover entire crops. You are talking about building green houses. As any green house operator how much effort it takes to keep blights and infestations out of green houses.
FTFA:
"But as apocalyptic as it seems, sea-rise poses little risk to human well-being. " Ask New Orleans how that's working out for them.
FTFA:
"Anti-fracking movements would make gas-fired electricity, indispensable for balancing wind and solar, scarcer and more expensive than it needs to be. The green jihad against nuclear power, a safe and generally cheap source of reliable low-carbon energy, is especially counterproductive. "
I think I know where he gets his money.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Since the first step is knowing you have a problem, science has at least made the first step. It has also identified at least some of the causes of the problem.
Nullius in verba
Follow the link and post comments. Go right to the source.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
That won't work. How about:
1) Select sperm from genetically healthy males.
2) Slaughter all males
3) Ration out the sperm
4) Male children will be allowed to reach puberty after which they get slaughtered. Some of them might ave their sperm saved
5) Compost the males bodies.
Fewer humans, more food! A win-win! /s
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Science is observation. It cannot change the climate.
The problem is actually applying Science and Engineering to the situation. So far, the human race has managed to do basically nothing since the problem is known, which it has been for a few decades. Instead, most effort was channeled into denial and quite a few people still do that as their problem solving strategy. With that track record, I am not hopeful. When the effects become impossible to ignore, the problem may be too large so that the human race is completely incapable of dealing with it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The answer is yes and math will get you there.
Math is the foundation of the other sciences so they to come into play.
I built a house for about $7,000 in materials that does not require artificial heating nor cooling. We live in a cold climate so the heating end of the season is the more challenging one here in the central mountains of northern Vermont.
The same technology can be applied to keep houses cool in hot climates. It is based on thermodynamics, large thermal mass built into the structure of the house, good but not fantastic insulation, no fancy 'smart-home' electronic gadgets. I just works. It floats down into the 40's or 50's F in the winter so put on a sweater or alternatively light a very small fire. 0.75 cord of wood keeps the house toasty warm all through long winter when it my be below -25ÂF for extended periods and some periods to -45ÂF with high winds.
Yet all of this technology is solid state, easy for the average Jane or Joe to build without even a complete high school education. Doing the design does take a lot more skill with math but here are people like myself who do it for fun and freely share their results.
I built my house, called my tiny cottage where I've been living for over a decade with a family of two adults and three kids. It worked. We loved it. As a nice bonus the town assesses the value of the house very low so our real estate taxes are low.
Low cost of construction.
Low maintenance costs.
Low operating costs (electric, other fuels).
Long life (figure 400 to 1,000 year life span for building)
Beautiful interior and exterior designs.
We use masonry, stone, concrete generally from local sources These are materials that are beautiful, durable and last hundreds to thousands of years.
After the cottage came our on-farm USDA/State inspected butcher shop or meat processing facility as they call them in the lingo.
People told me we crazy to try build our own on-farm butcher shop. But it's doable. It's been done. And now we've one it once more with a super lower energy efficient design and operation. Our butcher shop is about 40' x 35' x roughly two stores or 25' high.
Currently we have on-farm progressing which is paying our bill and generating additional need to fund the research and construction of the next step. It is very much a boot strap projected. We keep building bigger boots.
It's repeatable. Every family could be building a low cost, low resource, low maintenance, long lived home. This would save trillions of dollars and the associated energy and reduction in pollution.
This week I just got informed that our on-farm Vermont state inspected meat processing facility has passed the USDA head of regional operations Walk Through. Normally they find problems that you must then fix and get rescheduled with them to come back to review the fixes. To our surprise and delight we obtained a score of 100% right! We aced the test. Now we'll be upgrading from doing Vermont State inspection to USDA inspection in about two weeks to a month. Pretty wild!!!
We got there with perseverance and math.
The question isn't can science address the mechanisms of climate, of course it can.
The question is will people who have their incomes and careers bound up in advocating for particular results actually do science
Just for the record here, Steven Pinker is a psychologist. He's making pronouncements on science.
That's rich.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sounds like fun, but remember, it's the females who get pregnant, not the males. Why leave things up to chance?
It has always been a political solution since then. We just have to decide to act.
This kills the human race.
It seems to me we are producing an enormous volume of environmental damage in plenty of other ways as well. Consider the sheer scope of industrial activity on our planet, just the list is huge.
If you then you consider the impact of each industrial activity, like the amount of plastics that end up in the seas, or the environmental impact of CRTs becoming obsolete, or even planned obsolescence as an example and the whole discussion about Climate Change and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is just a part of the larger argument about the sheer amount of waste that this consumer economy creates. Carbon is one externality, not all externalities.
It's difficult to escape the very nature of media is used to create this false reality of ourselves and sell it back to us. The consequence of believing this false reality is it triggers behaviors in us that cause us to consume. How much carbon does our consumer economy drive into the atmosphere just powering unnecessary consumption, let alone the waste stream it created.
I think advertisements try to mold me into an "individual" with desires to buy buy buy. I just look to the waste and crap in my own life that I can't avoid making just interacting with our civilization and I wonder if it is right to suggest that maybe this is the consequence of the human mind being manipulated by advertising in the western world for 50 years or more?
Seems to me we're trapped in this never ending quest for the production of more items by having out unconscious desires manipulated and that's what's destroying the planet.
Maybe the science isn't just about the planet, maybe it's also about us?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Come on! Don't be posting the secret plan on a public forum! At least when it was a Penthouse story, they made it so that men could imagine themselves as one of the select lucky few.
It actually reminds me of the form used to explain why nobody's plan to fix spam email would work. I don't know where to find a copy to satirize, but it feels like a very similar situation. There are a hundred reasons why population control won't ever be a viable solution, just as technical solutions to email spam were never going to work. Nonetheless, as economies develop, people start having smaller families and as email systems have developed, the incidence of spam that I see have dropped.
People propose solutions that aren't going to work to solve the problems they observe. Yet, somehow, solutions still get closer and closer to being completely effective. In New York, with a very high population density, the average family size is less than three. It isn't the result of some secret plan or law, but it is still happening.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Seems like the Law of unintended consequences is going to kick in sooner or later if we start expensive engineering projects to counteract climate change. At some point we're going to get a massive volcanic eruption that will cause a nuclear-winter like cooling event anyway. The supervolcano off the coast of Japan has been growing rapidly lately.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How can we even talk about doing it on mars? Might as well get earth back firmly in the perfect zone to lock down the tech for playing with other planets. Good ol foundational tech.
And you have stated the other hand. Now, in the gripping hand, its inevitable that we will do something bad to ourselves, so where exactly is the out? One one hand technological progress is vital, and on the other it dooms us utterly.
Again, the solution MUST BE social and 'spiritual' in nature. Mankind, as constituted, cannot simply continue to 'progress'. We either grow up, or we die. There ARE no other choices.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
and save our planet...but at what cost?
[($)]
Science : "more CO2 in atmosphere mean higher glasshouse effect, more energy into atmosphere, higher average temperature. Science solution : lower dumping CO2 (switch to other production of energy and transportation mean)". THAT solution was refused by at least one of the biggest producer per capita of CO2.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Use science to bop Republicans and plutocrats on the noggin.
Table-ized A.I.
Can you make actually combating the climate change profitable?
The best i think would be a huge monopolistic megacorporation that lives off having a franchise of repair shops that can repair pretty much everything, thus lowering the demand for new devices and products.
"We can overcome any new problem with dinosaurology, because it has always helped us overcome problems in the past. Oh wait ... whats is that flaming thing I see on the sky ..."
work magic, I hear.
It's the acting arm of science.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
If sea levels rise everywhere, then it's hardly local any more, is it? Even if it happens gradually, the people from the lowlands are going to migrate to higher ground. The slight problem with that is that there are already people there and they might not like it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You ask a fundamental question, that is How much time do we have as a species to prevent fossil=fuel combustion from making planet Earth unihabitablefor humans?
Unfortunately, there are several considerations that make things more dire than many might expect:.
1) in many parts of the world we are rapidly approaching wet-bulb temperatures that are lethal to humans. During the most recent El Nino, temperatues in the region of he Persian Gulf rose to above 140 F for hours at a time. The next El Nino, coupled with additonal warming due to carbon dioxide pollution, will greatly expand this region of temperature lethality and temperatures in excess of 145- 150 Fshould be expected within the next 10 years. Since we are in the early phase of a warming that is exponential in nature given its cause (greenhouse gas accumulation), temperatures will rise far more dramatically than they have up till now in human history
2) the geology and chronology of earlier extreme warming periods indicate that massive sea level rises will occur over the next few centuries, perhpas as much as 5-6 m over the course of 200-400 years time. Given that about 80% of world populations live in or near coastlines, the disruption to human activities will be far larger than most imagine.
3) at the current rate of ocean acidification, most organims that deposit calcium in their exoskeletons will go extinct in the next 200-400 years. This is a big deal, since many of these species such as pteropods, whose popoulations are dramatically declining worldwide are the foudations of marine food chains. Humans rely on between 30-50% of all their protein from the oceans (including meals for growing cattle, pigs, and poultry, growing crops, etc.)., with most fisheries in rapid decline worldwide.
4) with the unexpectedly rapid warming of the Arctic a huge reservoir of carbon currently locked in permafrost is about to be rapidly released. Even though only a fraction of this store may enter the asmosphere or the oceans, the reserve does have the potential to double the current rate of warming within a few hundreds of years time, independent of what humans do in the future to curb their own greenhouse gas production..
Now if you carefully look over all the slashdot comments, made by the presumably techically literate among us, and their likely impact on or relevance to any of he 4 considerations just mentkoned, you can see humanity has a major challenge ahead, if it has any chance of survival beyond the relatively near future.
Not to put a fine point on it... Truth Hating Freaks breed. And unfortunately, the evolutionary definition of fitness is about reproduction, not quality of life.
What these guys are talking about essentially sounds like the mainstream proposed solutions to climate change. Congrats on reinventing what the scientific community has been saying since forever! Their ideas seem to be a response to the right-wing false dichotomy of technology/scientific progress vs. climate change mitigation (AKA "we'll all have to live in mud huts to stop climate change!") rather than any real problem.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
didn't you catch /s ?
The universal sarcasm marker?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It's my plan. I would make sure I wasn't slaughtered. Then as the last man on earth I might finally get a date :)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The reason for much "denialism" on climate is not because all the skeptics are oil investors. After all, investors trade, switching at any given time to whatever technologies are doing well. It's because climate activists insist that their favored brand of apocalyptic nonsense is the only response to the problem.
Just like all the other environmental problems we have ever faced: plague, urban smoke, deforestation, overpopulation, resource depletion, unsustainable farm practices - the science that is detecting climate change is the science that will show us how to fix it, and without any need to destroy civilization.
This was Pol Pot's solution. Look how successful it was!
Pollution is a consequence of human activity. It's that simple. The more people you have the more pollution you get. It does not take a rocket scientist to get that digested as a fact. There is a common fantasy that science can sort of leap frog along thus saving humanity in the nick of time. That is a really bad bet. Obviously we have had decent science around for at least 100 years and the world still has hunger, disease, homelessness and numerous wars that have to do with poverty. Science is wonderful but it is not our salvation. That is compounded by a population that fights to resist change. As far as global warming not threatening all of us consider just a tiny bit of the consequences. First expect home insurance to vanish. For example the Miami area represents at least 10 million people. The buildings and homes in Miami would either be standing in water or destroyed by water. That would mean billions in losses to the insurance market. Then we have the issue of insurance companies owning banks. If the insurance industry crashes our banks will crash as a consequence. Then consider that home sales will be impossible as no mortgage company in their right mind would write policies. Next consider where your drinking water will come from. Sure we could desalinize salt water but that is expensive and then one must safely dispose of the salt. You can't simply dump salt in a small area as it will kill off ocean species if the salt content is too high. So maybe you live at altitude and think you will be OK. One example is that south Florida is about the only heavy producer of fruit and vegetables throughout the winter and those farms are very, very close to sea level. And just where do you think the water will come from to use to grow crops. Has anyone considered what the Mississippi River might do if the ocean rises? At what point would that river simply stop flowing into the ocean? We are at huge risk yet the public sort of yawns and resists all change.
The limiting factor to growth is not sperm availability. A single man easily generates enough sperm to impregnate countless women if distributed evenly.
Talk about this not being news for nerds...
The Katrina example is great: Around 1600 in Louisiana died in Katrina, out of a population of four and a half million. If we use death rate as a metric, then compare to other sources of death and see what the bigger problem is: 35,000 people die unexpectedly in car crashes in the US, and six million die of malnutrician in the world every year. Even if there were a Katrina every year, it wouldn't be even close to our biggest problem. Pick another metric, about 250,000 people moved as a result of Katrina. Far more people have had to move as a resulting of manufacturing clearing out of the rust belt in the US.
Calling him a shill is just abuse, not an argument. There have been several thoughtful environmentalists who are pro nuclear ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) for reasons that aren't the least pecuniary. I'm not saying I agree with the article, just that your arguments are poorly constructed and illustrative of exactly the sort of blindness to math that the authors decry. I wish the article pointed to some numbers so that one could grasp whether their points make sense or not. Without seeing real data, it's just who has the biggest anecdote.
I approve of this plan.
I do not mean 'hand wavy new age mumbo-jumbo'. I mean moral maturity and what are truly defined by the words 'virtue' and 'wisdom' in their most fundamental forms. Not the laughable pap sold to the masses by cheap preachermen, but a real deep and abiding thoughtfulness.
You may call this impossible, and who will really refute that judgment, but to do so is to declare the issue of humanity's future closed, and not in a good way.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The problem is that these "Ecomodernist" are lying about what their "solutions" can achieve. They are basically a false-flag operation. I am pointing that out. You , on the other hand, are regurgitating propaganda.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Very simple. I am a physicist, and not qualified. I find it funny that elementary physics, well suited for a 1-3rd semester student seems to be not well understood.
OTOH, for sure we can "adress the problem by technology and science". We should, and we will. It may be enough for you, and me, our kids and their friends. But i am pretty sure that it will not be enough for the whole world.
There are two kinds of technology:
a) Trying to do planet-wide terraforming. Good luck with that. Recollecting the CO2 may be a little more hard than you imagine
b) mitigating the impact. Sure, seeing how humanity got along in respect to helping the poorer parts of the planet when it comes to ridiculously cheap to solve problems like infections/child mortality, we all believe that aid and technolody to lessen the impact will be made available to 6 Billion people and not just to 2 Billion (China, US, Europe)
You assume that he would find that unfortunate. Clearly, AC wants us to remain at the hunter gatherer stage. Perhaps he would accept gardener stage.
Will the remaining males have to do prodigious duty with women of a highly stimulating nature?
LOL: saw the subj phrase in here:
https://thebreakthrough.org/in...?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
We'd have to teach too many ignorant people about science before we'd be allowed to apply it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Climate change isn't necessarily gradual. For example, with all the fresh water coming into the north Atlantic from melting Greenland glaciers, the Gulf Stream is slowing and may shut down, no longer warming northern Europe.
It's unlikely that science or technology can provide "ample means of addressing these problems"
And this, is how, the world, will end.
with a technical solution.
The cause of the problem is people, not CO2 or whatever.And we are all pointing who should do something about it, as long if it isn't 'me'. It starts with the small things. We have electric tootbrushes, because we are lazy. We have bottled water, because we like to believe the marketing instead of ghhetting drinkable water everywhere. And when it is there, we still rather pay for a plastic bottle.
We use clean water to clean out toilets, because it is easy. If we are, as humans, not able to do these small things/ If we lack the willpower to do anything about what WE do, we will be unable to do anything about the bigger things, like using clean energy or preserving the planet.
Darn, I can not even keep my desk clean.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It doesn't require heating or cooling, no fire needed, to stay above freezing (in the 40'sF) in our very cold climate. With a very small fire it is easily boosted to the 70'sF. So no artificial heating or cooling are required. A small fire is an option. We only use 0.75 cord of wood for those fires which is a tiny amount in our climate. It's almost all deadwood, lying around free for the picking up off the ground.
I'm not selling the idea. You can use it free of charge. It's very simple. Insulated thermal mass. Control the energy flow on the annual cycle.
Enjoy.