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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?
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!
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
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.
It has always been a political solution since then. We just have to decide to act.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.