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Have you considered the possibility that those scary predictions were only wrong about the timeline rather than the eventual outcome? Humans are very bad at rea

Have you considered the possibility that those scary predictions were only wrong about the timeline rather than the eventual outcome? Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time.

sqeaky 10y ago
That might be reasonable to consider if we didn't keep getting better at making the resources we need and making them accessible. For something like 14 of the past 15 decades food production per capita has gone up worldwide despite a preposterous increase in population. Some things are losing out, like the rainforests and it sucks. But them being cut down is not an existential threat to humanity. If can encourage even more globalization and event better trade maybe we can feed those still starving before they cut down all the rainforests for subsistence farming. Sadly we have to trust that we can come up with some difficult but possible technical solutions to big problems. How are we going to capture CO2. If we can do that we can mitigate wars caused by droughts caused by climate change.
hga 10y ago
Yes, I both can and do do math, "Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time" is not a true let alone useful statement. Although I'll grant it's demonstrably true of the doomsayers who made and continue to make such confident predictions while not accounting for many things, most especially human ingenuity (look at Paul Ehrlich for example). They tend to have little or no grasp of the market mechanism ... well, they tend to be central controller types, without realizing the information theoretic limitations of that approach. For example, when faced with externalities, they invariably go high without even considering low (one example I remember reading was some European country requiring plant water intakes being downstream of outflows, and that's about as simple as you can get). Anyway, one of my points there is that the demonstrated inability of those guys to predict the future should not be extrapolated to the rest of us ^_^. Plus we haven't tapped the tiniest fraction of the the Solar System's resources, and much of the Earth's remain their for the picking, at some cost in money, and as of late in the West, to the fashion sense of our elites (although I grant you coal is nasty stuff). Yeah, some day we'll run out of resources in the Solar System, but that's so so far in the future, we probably have to worry more about the Singularity, or too many nuclear wars ... see The Moat In God's Eye for a look at that, which has one co-author who thought well and deeply of the '70s Limits to Growth garbage. (And even took advantage of it to be able to write more realistic SF, if you freeze most scientific developments....)
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  How does anthropogenic climate change fit into your understanding of events and how our future on this planet is developing?
  - hephaistos 10y ago
    This apocalyptic view of climate change isn't based on reality. What is the big danger to the human kind? Warming? Cooling? It won't make the earth inhabitable. Humans live in a wide range of temperature. Permanent flooding? It won't happen overnight but over centuries. Humans move. Drought? We're making huge progress on solar desalination (thanks to Israelis efforts). Humans are ingenuous. And this is without taking into account Alaska and Siberia, two gigantic regions that would become more and more hospitable. Fear-mongering is a useful persuasion weapon, until it backfires.
    - SwellJoe 10y ago
      Ethically speaking, what should developed nations do to assist people living in, for example, sub-Saharan Africa, who have no resources with which to relocate, and are already suffering the consequences of climate change? I consider it a catastrophic situation, even though I'm personally not among the sick, dying, or refugees. I don't think it's fear-mongering to acknowledge the massive harm industrial nations are causing to real human beings, and to demand solutions of policy-makers, even if those solutions are costly.

sqeaky 10y ago

That might be reasonable to consider if we didn't keep getting better at making the resources we need and making them accessible. For something like 14 of the past 15 decades food production per capita has gone up worldwide despite a preposterous increase in population. Some things are losing out, like the rainforests and it sucks. But them being cut down is not an existential threat to humanity. If can encourage even more globalization and event better trade maybe we can feed those still starving before they cut down all the rainforests for subsistence farming. Sadly we have to trust that we can come up with some difficult but possible technical solutions to big problems. How are we going to capture CO2. If we can do that we can mitigate wars caused by droughts caused by climate change.

hga 10y ago

Yes, I both can and do do math, "Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time" is not a true let alone useful statement. Although I'll grant it's demonstrably true of the doomsayers who made and continue to make such confident predictions while not accounting for many things, most especially human ingenuity (look at Paul Ehrlich for example). They tend to have little or no grasp of the market mechanism ... well, they tend to be central controller types, without realizing the information theoretic limitations of that approach. For example, when faced with externalities, they invariably go high without even considering low (one example I remember reading was some European country requiring plant water intakes being downstream of outflows, and that's about as simple as you can get). Anyway, one of my points there is that the demonstrated inability of those guys to predict the future should not be extrapolated to the rest of us ^_^. Plus we haven't tapped the tiniest fraction of the the Solar System's resources, and much of the Earth's remain their for the picking, at some cost in money, and as of late in the West, to the fashion sense of our elites (although I grant you coal is nasty stuff). Yeah, some day we'll run out of resources in the Solar System, but that's so so far in the future, we probably have to worry more about the Singularity, or too many nuclear wars ... see The Moat In God's Eye for a look at that, which has one co-author who thought well and deeply of the '70s Limits to Growth garbage. (And even took advantage of it to be able to write more realistic SF, if you freeze most scientific developments....)

SwellJoe 10y ago
How does anthropogenic climate change fit into your understanding of events and how our future on this planet is developing?
- hephaistos 10y ago
  This apocalyptic view of climate change isn't based on reality. What is the big danger to the human kind? Warming? Cooling? It won't make the earth inhabitable. Humans live in a wide range of temperature. Permanent flooding? It won't happen overnight but over centuries. Humans move. Drought? We're making huge progress on solar desalination (thanks to Israelis efforts). Humans are ingenuous. And this is without taking into account Alaska and Siberia, two gigantic regions that would become more and more hospitable. Fear-mongering is a useful persuasion weapon, until it backfires.
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    Ethically speaking, what should developed nations do to assist people living in, for example, sub-Saharan Africa, who have no resources with which to relocate, and are already suffering the consequences of climate change? I consider it a catastrophic situation, even though I'm personally not among the sick, dying, or refugees. I don't think it's fear-mongering to acknowledge the massive harm industrial nations are causing to real human beings, and to demand solutions of policy-makers, even if those solutions are costly.