Well, neither of us knows. Certainly ever-greater numbers are crowded into coastline cities, and sea levels are rising. That ought to be interesting. And feeding everybody depends on petrochemical fertilizers, and oil isn't going to last for ever. Placing blind faith in Some Future Technology seems like quite a gamble to me. This techno-leveraging is posited on Civilization as Usual. But really, it wouldn't take a whole lot to bring down the whole house of cards. For example an abrupt stop of the Gulf Stream (for which there is a precedent in a warming period and of which the consequences would be catastrophic for anyone living in eastern North America or Western Europe): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulation My money goes on a superbug arising from globalized factory farming. Something akin to Airborne Ebola, say. We've had warning events (SARS, whatever) out of acutely overcrowded places like eastern China, where humans live in close proximity to pigs, which closely resemble us genetically (horizontal humans, as they say) and leave the doors wide open for The Bug Jump. (Factory-farming pigs leaves the poor things breathing the fumes from their own highly acidic shit, which chronically inflames their lungs, which makes for a fantastic breeding ground for some Super Virus.) Worldwide: For The Moment. Certainly within the US this is true. There's plenty of wealth, just in too few hands.
The pogrom against scientists has begun: President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team appears to be compiling a roster of names of Energy Department staff members, including career civil servants, who worked on plans to cut carbon emissions, according to a questionnaire obtained by ABC News. The questionnaire asks for information on several Department of Energy programs and asks twice for lists of the names of staff members who worked on specific projects. One line item asks for names of any staff or contractors who attended international meetings on climate change run through the United Nations, such as the summit that produced the landmark Paris Agreement last year, signed by 116 countries to cut carbon pollution. A second question in the memo asks for names of personnel who attended domestic interagency meetings focused on the “social cost of carbon.” Those working groups generated metrics and recommendations for the Obama administration to craft new regulations. Other questions listed, include: “Which programs within DOE are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama's Climate Action Plan?” and “Who 'owns' the work on international Clean Energy Ministerial and 'Mission Innovation' [a multinational effort to develop clean technology]?" In the past, Trump has called climate change a "hoax," created by special interests that negatively affects businesses. Trump has yet to tap his energy secretary, but possible contenders include Harold Hamm, the chief executive of oil and gas company Continental Resources, as well as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). The targeted survey of staff in a specific policy area -- one on which Trump has been sharply critical of the current administration -- is unusual, according to Jeff Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit that specifically represents and advocates for public government employees who work in energy and the environment. “Rather than [saying], ‘give a broad overview and how it all fits together,’ they’re saying, ‘give us all the people that are working on this hot-button issue,” Ruch said.
Well, that's what they always say. Until the shit hits the fan. People who predicted a warming climate were first "plumb wrong". Then when the facts became indisputable they graduated to "alarmist". And now that sea levels are rising and glaciers and ice caps melting, they're "right, but they've picked the incorrect cause". And so forth. But they were called Chicken Littles for a long time. Bad things often happen very quickly indeed. Take the Gulf Stream thing. If it happens, it won't be gradual ---- it'll be a Tipping-Point Phenomenon, like a light switch. The lights don't go to "sort of off", it's boom they're off. I should think the same with a Superbug. One day everything will be fine, the next day it will be Upon Us. There certainly won't be time to "adjust". I make no claim to predict the future with precision. It just seems to me that we have all sorts of runaway processes here (overpopulation being the worst -- a geometric progression). As regards the climate, we're simply in mass denial. Speaking of geometric progressions, check this out:
No, it's not going to be a light switch. It'll be a gradual decline with increased suffering while equilibrium is maintained. The rich will continue to get richer and so there won't be motivation to change the course of things.
Possible. Nobody can say with certainty. But there are any number of light-switches jest a-waitin' ta click us off. And the more we push this envelope we call our "natural environment", the more of a high-wire act our existence becomes. If motivation ever arises, it will -- I'm convinced -- be too late. Hell, it probably is already.
The most relevant switch might be bacterial evolution rendering all antibiotics ineffective. Still we managed to survive eons without them. Again equilibrium will be maintained through deaths of overcrowded areas. It won't be a switch so much as a dimmer. But this thread is about Trump's finger on the dimmer switch.
^Yup, between overuse of antibiotics and the anti-vaxxers, a lot of old nasties will rear up again. I suspect China will get hit first, no major county is guilt-free over antibiotic use, but China simply does it on the Chinese industrial scale, and a lot of the resistance to last-resort antibiotics are springing up there. Technology will give us the upper hand again, but it's a question of whether it'll do so before a major outbreak. There are plenty of new avenues being opened up, including some new methods that identifying all kinds of new compounds and bacteria in soil that we were simply unaware of.
Oh lord. An overpopulation nut. Right now the world is supporting about a billion more people quite well than overpopulation clowns in the 1970s thought was the maximum possible.
@Nono, now is a good time to whip out the facepalm negrep. Please aim carefully, I don't want to be splashed.
Five days ago, Pence, Flynn and others met with Alan West Yesterday (or this morning?) West posted this on Facebook This is the sort of thinking that is "normal" to the people in the incoming administration - NOT JUST TRUMP - take seriously.
'Fraid so, Dayton. Overpopulation is that humungous elephant in the Homo Sapiens Living Room. See it or not -- your choice.
We need to realize the amount of production a person can do has vastly changed in a very short time. We are using an antiquated idea of work. The reason we have unemployment problems is we do not need as many people working anymore. We have come to a point where we really need to consider socialized workers and a guarantee of the basics. For instance we can make it so everyone has food, water, shelter, electricity, phone communication, and access to the internet. There should also be public schools with education standards. We need well trained police, firemen, and rescue workers. We also should maintain the infrastructure of roads and railways. These things should be held to a good standard.
I agree with all of this. And every bit of it is perfectly feasible ---- if the political will is there. Something like a guaranteed minimum income wouldn't go amiss. And may be coming. At the same time, I wouldn't bet a whole lot of money on the entire Globalized House of Cards not falling down around our ears very suddenly indeed. Something straight out of left field, for instance a major climate "event". If it's suddenly no longer possible to endlessly ship widgets around and around the globe, and all our shoes (or whatever widegets) have all been outsourced to Bangladesh, then we're out of luck. I grew up in a Steel Town. On my way to school I passed a factory making manhole covers, another wood furniture, another underwear, and whatnot. My grandmother worked in a spinning mill. All gone now. All being done by wage-slave labour in some overcrowded, dirt-poor country. I think we've ventured kinda far out on a fragile limb here.
Nono has some good points, articulated better than my sling blade ass could. We are carrying such a huge human population because we are propped up artificially by technology. We are a world on "steroids" as it were because the human race has to get stronger (at food production for example) to support a growing population. Of course this food increase enables even more population growth so now we have to take even stronger steroids or risk our even taller house-of-cards from falling. Now instead of millions starving (and the political & social unrest it spawns) it's billions! But steroids have side effects like the super bug example - packing more and more animals or crops or whatever into tighter and tighter areas (which is very efficient) risks a bug spreading that much more efficiently. Packing more and more people into tighter and tighter areas also increases the bug efficiency . And while medical science is getting better & better, bugs evolve faster & faster. What happens when (eventually) we lost that race? As for "climate change" it's coming because the earth has always had it since our species was around, but before "civilization" when the human population could just pack up and leave because we were hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers. Everything we owned was on our backs. So whether it's global warming or global cooling the earth is going to do what it's been doing but our species is less able to handle it now because our incredibly large population is being artificially propped up. We are adding more and more links in the chain of keeping civilization growing. Yes humans are natural problem solvers but if one of those links in that long, long chain breaks we are . Our steroid supply will eventually get cut off one way or another. Civilization might collapse and the vultures & buzzards might have a field day, but humans will still be around, just knocked back down to a naturally sustainable level. Since every nearly every single species goes through population cycles of "boom and bust" why would we be exempt? Taken further all species eventually die out as they evolve into different species. Taken even further earth itself experiences a major "extinction event" now and then since the planet itself is part of a harsh, deadly dynamic universe - that's a dice roll for whatever species are around when that shit hits.
How would a major "climate event" stop shipping? The ocean levels could rise several feet or the Pacific be full of hurricanes and container ships could and would still ply the oceans with their cargoes.
A major climate for example could be the atlantic thermal conveyor shutting down - forget ice free ports in much of western europe! That's not even talking about the effect on farming there. We are in an inter-glacial period right now - the ice age is coming back, whether we are there to greet it or not. but I'm guessing by then we will be already knocked the fuck back into the stone-age but our weakened physical states/immune systems/gene pool will leave us ill-prepared to handle it like we (a a species) as well as the previous times.
Oh I dunno. Like an abrupt stop of the Gulf Stream, pitching Western Europe and the upper Eastern Seaboard of North America into an ice age. It has happened before, y'know --- in precisely the sort of warming trend we're currently experiencing. That would stop global trade Right Quick. Think about it. The entire edifice would collapse.
I covered & posted that a few minutes ago, but yeah - even barring a full-blown ice age much of europe would be devastated - farming alone would grind to a screeching halt and what farming still existed would have to be revamped for different crops. Transportation (especially in the winter) would be nearly impossible - how many snowplows does London have ready-to-rock at any given time?
Sorry, fella, didn't see your post. Yes, you've got it. The Gulf Stream currently makes quite a few places a lot warmer than they would otherwise be. What would effectively happen is that all those places would revert to what their latitude usual offers as a climate. Stockholm, for example, is about the same latitude as Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon. The climate in the two places is incomparable. Stockholm is absolutely temperate. Etc. So there would be a wave of climate refugees from the north, probably mass starvation too. It doesn't bear thinking about.
yep - humans are the only species (because of our big old brains!) that can harness/grow technology to increase & expand our population far beyond what we can accomplish without it. But we are still nature's bitch and we need occasional reminders to put us in our place.
Isn't it extremely naive then to expect the global climate to remain about the same it has the last few hundred years just because that has allowed humans to prosper and expand dramatically?
Naive? Probably. It has been about the same for the past 10,000 years+, which has allowed agriculture to get started and allowed homo sapiens to largely abandon the small hunter-gatherer group as the basis for society. If the climate changes, there must be a cause. (These things don't just happen by themselves.) If it has suddenly started to warm in recent decades, there must be a reason for that too. And what a weird coincidence that it just happens to follow along increasing carbon emissions by increasingly over-numerous humans. To do an Ostrich Number on these coinciding events involves Quite a Bit of Unscientific Determination.
I'm not a climate change skeptic, and believe that human behavior can and has had an impact. But you should realize that earlier in the thread, you mentioned climate change happening before (as in all on its own), and now are arguing the opposite in order to place blame on human behavior.
Yeah, the climate does change naturally over time, however that isn't an argument against us doing anything. We accept that forest fires sometimes naturally happen, but also tend to accept that it's not a good idea for people to throw around matches in the middle of summer.
There seems to be two parts to this question: 1)"Isn't it extremely naive then to expect the global climate to remain about the same [as] the last few hundred years?"Yes, it is naive to expect global climate to remain the same, especially as the conclusion of virtually all climate experts is that the climate is changing. The Earth is warming. 2)"...just because that has allowed humans to prosper and expand dramatically?"You seem to be assigning justification to expect climate to remain the same. Given that the climate is changing, it would follow that any justification for an expectation it won't change, would also be naive. I'd add a third naivety; that man's burning of fossil-fuels does not affect climate and we can do nothing about it. The question is really: should we do anything to curtail greenhouse gas emissions that are known to increase the rate of global warming and why? I think we should because: Changes in climate within a few generations are too fast to allow populations to adjust without stress. This stress will lead to global conflicts. I don't think we will because Trump (on climate change) said yesterday: This seems very naive.
LOL. This is the sort of thing that makes me, well, laugh out loud. You -- Dayton -- have no freaking idea what the cause is. Neither do I, of course. But by contrast with you, I admit it. Whereas you're too busy batting away the evidence to notice how arrogant (and ignorant) a statement like that sounds. Nobody knows for sure. That's how science is: competing hypotheses. Then one fine day practically everyone coalesces around one theory because it appears unbeatable. That's how geocentrism, for example, bit the dust. And how, say, "continental drift" (as it used to be known, when people didn't understand it) eventually won out. You, though, seem already to have decided, despite the absence of clinching evidence. You must have some sort of emotional or ideological stake here. Not scientific, anyway. Meantime, I reason that if I let go of a brick and it keeps heading for the ground (as opposed to the sky), there's probably a connection, some invisible force involved. If I hypothesized gravity, no doubt you'd be there to remind me that one mustn't mistake coincidence for causation. What are the chances that a warming climate is not, at the very least, being helped along by carbon emissions? In my view, you're sailing very close to the Wind of Wacko if you can't at least admit that.
