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If you want a healthy viewpoint that fully internalizes the incentives and actions of the people of the world, I have one to offer. Most people just want to be
by CompelTechnic 8y ago
If you want a healthy viewpoint that fully internalizes the incentives and actions of the people of the world, I have one to offer.
Most people just want to be comfortable. This is fine. We do not care much about the death of other animals, as evidenced by continuously choosing not to become vegetarians. Even if a large number of species collapse because of warming, human agriculture will go on easily and the resilient species will continue to inhabit landscapes all over the world. If anyone starves to death, it will only be to the extent that they already do, which is almost exclusively because of coordination problems, not for a worldwide lack of food. Humans are resilient and easily solve problems when they are urgent. If we lose a degree of technological or economical development while fighting this problem, consider that these are not factors that truly make people happy. Quality time with good friends and family is what counts. We are sufficiently advanced that detrimental lifestyle changes incurred while solving problems related to climate change will be small in comparison to the great health and lifestyle improvements we have made so far.
The poorest people around the world have seen their incomes rise rapidly in recent years (i.e. the "Elephant Curve"). Climate change will have relatively little impact in comparison to humanity continuously bootstrapping itself into higher levels of wealth through markets, government, and collaboration.
Compare the level of action you have personally taken to fight global warming to the level of action you feel (and advocate) people should be taking. Talk is cheap. Actions reveal preferences. In a broad perspective, given today's frontier of possible technology and lifestyles, people would rather live a first-world middle class lifestyle, accepting the additional risk of climate change caused by this lifestyle. Fighting this preference is not without cost, and humanity has chosen that a different fight can occur later, solving individual symptomatic problems when these problems have urgency.
- plesner 8y agoWill agriculture go on easily though? If you look at just two effects, increased variability of the weather and loss of arable land because of rising sea levels, how do those alone not lead to lower output and greater insecurity?
- Brometheus 8y agoAgriculture in Europe for vegetables is already concentrated in Spain's greenhouses...
- l_camacho84 8y agoWe cannot forget that this agriculture is based on fertilizers that are a finite resource.
- CompelTechnic 8y agoConsidering how much food we overproduce already (about half of the food grown in the world is wasted), any slow-moving disaster has plenty of time for people to adapt, just from stockpiled production capacity. This is even considering that a large amount of this capacity is devoted to feeding livestock, producing ethanol, and producing low-yield, expensive, high labor input luxury crops. The likelihood of a climate event destroying more than 50% of the world's yield in one growing season is so scant as to be unimaginable. If you ever find yourself living in a world where almost all arable land is devoted specifically to the most calorie-dense staple crops, with almost no meat being produced, and maximum technology utilization to increase yield (greenhouses, drip irrigation, etc) you can worry. We are eons away from that point.