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I mean we have had to deal with climate change in all of human history and we have only become increasingly better. We also live places today which wasn't poss

I mean we have had to deal with climate change in all of human history and we have only become increasingly better. We also live places today which wasn't possible 100 year ago. Migration have always been a fact of life and we have always managed to deal with it. We are better at that today than any other time in history. So the question I am trying to get answered is what have been scientifically demonstrated to be the case with climate change that we cant deal with if we don't "do anything" today? Climate is always changing yes, the temperature have been rising yes, that will have consequences on us yes, but which changes have been demonstrated that would be worth the cost of upending the current use of ex fossil fuels to help modern civilization deliver goods and services to it's growing population and to reduce the amount of funding for new scientific discoveries or R&D in Molten or fusion? It sounds like a Pascals wager to me but without the upside and instant damnation of the existing people inhabiting the planet.

eesmith 7y ago
I want to pin you down on what "deal with" means. It appears that your "deal with" accepts mass migration, mass starvation, and civil unrest, as those are some of the historic ways humans have addressed things before. If so, I don't see a difference between your view and "just let things happen - some people will survive, and I don't care who." (Actually, your "worth the cost" suggests that you care less about the world's poorest people, whose deaths have the least economic impact.) If your view is anything at all like that, then of course we can "deal with" the effects climate change. But it's not a humane approach.
- ThomPete 7y ago
  The human approach is the one that gets most people out of poverty and into the middle class so they can deal with the consequences of the climate which we always will have to deal with and always have had to deal with. The most predictable way of doing that is allowing them to use cheap reliable energy. Mass starvation happens when you don't have cheap reliable energy, pesticides and other modern technologies to deal with the always ongoing consequences of climate change. Civil unrest is what happens when people don't have access to food, right now the only societies that can ensure that are rich societies using capitalism, technology, and energy (mostly fossil fuels) to deal with that. Mass migration happens all the time but again it's more likely to happen when you don't have the means to defend you against the always occuring challenges of the climate. It's anti-human to hinder poor people getting access to the very resource that allow them to fight the consequences of climate change like we are able to in modern societies. Nature doesn't give us a safe and friendly environment we make unsafe, it gives us a hostile and dangerous enviroment we make safe through the use of energy. My approach is pro human flourishing. So "deal with" means allowing humans to deal the challenges of nature.
- flash_zombie 7y ago
  > It appears that your "deal with" accepts mass migration, mass starvation, and civil unrest, as those are some of the historic ways humans have addressed things before. If you want to see civil unrest, just raise the taxes on gasoline, like Monsieur Macron. As for mass migration, if there really is such a big fallout due to climate change (or anything else) rendering places uninhabitable, let the people migrate. Humans have always migrated. Why stop now? As for mass starvation, I don't buy it. Most crops today are fed to cattle, there's a lot of leeway in terms of repurposing it for human consumption.
  - eesmith 7y ago
    "let the people migrate" You'll notice that many Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe were not allowed to migrate there, nor the asylum seekers currently trying to reach the US through Mexico. This is not new. Jews trying to flee Europe before WWII were also prevented from migrating. Chinese people were prohibited from migrating to the US. Many people resist economic migrants, to the point of wanting them killed. "Build a wall", etc. So the question isn't "why stop now?" Why have we stopped over a century ago, and what must be done to allow migration? But that's still not enough. I pointed out the Dust Bowl for a reason. The Okies who needed to migrate were discriminated against, even though there were no legal reasons to prevent their migration. Quoting http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/The-Great-Okie-Migration.pdf http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/... : > The mass of migrants that arrived in California did not receive a warm welcome from the state of California, which was already overwhelmed by the amount on people on the state’s relief roll. They were met at the state border by patrolmen who told them to turn back – that there was not enough work for them in California. Additionally, the established population of California was hostile towards the migrants due to differences in regional culture. They viewed the Okies as culturally and socially inferior, backward and uneducated – a view echoed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The term “Okie” originally had the derogatory connotation of "They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred."—The Grapes of Wrath “poor, white trash.” As the character of Tom Joad stated in The Grapes of Wrath, “Okie means you’re scum.” So when ThomPete writes "Migration have always been a fact of life and we have always managed to deal with it", that seems to include the Okie experience as one of the ways we deal with it. Is that experience what the Miamians of the 2060s might have to look forward to?
walleeee 7y ago
- https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672: humankind (including "trusted" bodies such as the IPCC) have underestimated the dangers associated with anthropogenic climate change - https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252: we have also underestimated the speed at which the climate will depart from the relatively stable Holocene equilibrium we've lived under for the past ~10,000 years - https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-operations/usda-crop-progress-corn-planting-drags-along https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-operations/usda-crop-progr...): we are already seeing consequences to crop yields in the U.S. - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2019EF001189 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/201...): heat waves are becoming more frequent and more damaging - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab13bf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab13bf), etc: so are other extreme weather events - https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/29/2002084200/-1/-1/1/CLIMATE-CHANGE-REPORT-2019.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/29/2002084200/-1/-1/1/CLI...: the DOD recognizes climate change as an extraordinary threat to the U.S. - https://games-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/23db9731-209c-44c2-ab0f-1db57d157f51/note/7acf47a1-8ec4-4e76-a93e-2d4dba26cb28.pdf#page=1 https://games-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/docu...: so does the intelligence community - https://iflas.blogspot.com/2019/07/compendium-of-research-reports-on.html?m=1 https://iflas.blogspot.com/2019/07/compendium-of-research-re...: a good aggregation (the commentary is speculative; read the papers) Our global industrial society relies, more precariously than most realize or admit, on conditions which will soon diminish or disappear. For example: - Stable, predictable weather patterns (industrial agriculture depends on this) - Just-in-time global shipping/logistics, by which food and other necessities get to supermarket shelves (threatened by extreme weather, political crises, fuel availability, etc) - Relatively cheap, easy availability of fossil fuels (extraction costs will continue to rise over time, and competition will likely grow more intense) - Plentiful fish/marine life stocks (we are destroying coral reefs extremely quickly, which are a key part of the ocean lifecycle; ocean acidification due to carbon capture also threatens sea life, as does oceanic warming) on which many rely for food - Low atmospheric CO2 content for breathability (cognitive ability decreases as CO2 levels rise) - Thriving coastal cities, as centers of both population and economic activity (many are under threat of regular flooding if not complete loss this century) It will likely take indefinite human intervention to keep the climate system habitable for anywhere near our present numbers, if we're even capable of the sort of coordination required.

eesmith 7y ago

I want to pin you down on what "deal with" means. It appears that your "deal with" accepts mass migration, mass starvation, and civil unrest, as those are some of the historic ways humans have addressed things before. If so, I don't see a difference between your view and "just let things happen - some people will survive, and I don't care who." (Actually, your "worth the cost" suggests that you care less about the world's poorest people, whose deaths have the least economic impact.) If your view is anything at all like that, then of course we can "deal with" the effects climate change. But it's not a humane approach.

ThomPete 7y ago
The human approach is the one that gets most people out of poverty and into the middle class so they can deal with the consequences of the climate which we always will have to deal with and always have had to deal with. The most predictable way of doing that is allowing them to use cheap reliable energy. Mass starvation happens when you don't have cheap reliable energy, pesticides and other modern technologies to deal with the always ongoing consequences of climate change. Civil unrest is what happens when people don't have access to food, right now the only societies that can ensure that are rich societies using capitalism, technology, and energy (mostly fossil fuels) to deal with that. Mass migration happens all the time but again it's more likely to happen when you don't have the means to defend you against the always occuring challenges of the climate. It's anti-human to hinder poor people getting access to the very resource that allow them to fight the consequences of climate change like we are able to in modern societies. Nature doesn't give us a safe and friendly environment we make unsafe, it gives us a hostile and dangerous enviroment we make safe through the use of energy. My approach is pro human flourishing. So "deal with" means allowing humans to deal the challenges of nature.
flash_zombie 7y ago
> It appears that your "deal with" accepts mass migration, mass starvation, and civil unrest, as those are some of the historic ways humans have addressed things before. If you want to see civil unrest, just raise the taxes on gasoline, like Monsieur Macron. As for mass migration, if there really is such a big fallout due to climate change (or anything else) rendering places uninhabitable, let the people migrate. Humans have always migrated. Why stop now? As for mass starvation, I don't buy it. Most crops today are fed to cattle, there's a lot of leeway in terms of repurposing it for human consumption.
- eesmith 7y ago
  "let the people migrate" You'll notice that many Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe were not allowed to migrate there, nor the asylum seekers currently trying to reach the US through Mexico. This is not new. Jews trying to flee Europe before WWII were also prevented from migrating. Chinese people were prohibited from migrating to the US. Many people resist economic migrants, to the point of wanting them killed. "Build a wall", etc. So the question isn't "why stop now?" Why have we stopped over a century ago, and what must be done to allow migration? But that's still not enough. I pointed out the Dust Bowl for a reason. The Okies who needed to migrate were discriminated against, even though there were no legal reasons to prevent their migration. Quoting http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/The-Great-Okie-Migration.pdf http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/... : > The mass of migrants that arrived in California did not receive a warm welcome from the state of California, which was already overwhelmed by the amount on people on the state’s relief roll. They were met at the state border by patrolmen who told them to turn back – that there was not enough work for them in California. Additionally, the established population of California was hostile towards the migrants due to differences in regional culture. They viewed the Okies as culturally and socially inferior, backward and uneducated – a view echoed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The term “Okie” originally had the derogatory connotation of "They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred."—The Grapes of Wrath “poor, white trash.” As the character of Tom Joad stated in The Grapes of Wrath, “Okie means you’re scum.” So when ThomPete writes "Migration have always been a fact of life and we have always managed to deal with it", that seems to include the Okie experience as one of the ways we deal with it. Is that experience what the Miamians of the 2060s might have to look forward to?

walleeee 7y ago

- https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24672: humankind (including "trusted" bodies such as the IPCC) have underestimated the dangers associated with anthropogenic climate change - https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252: we have also underestimated the speed at which the climate will depart from the relatively stable Holocene equilibrium we've lived under for the past ~10,000 years - https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-operations/usda-crop-progress-corn-planting-drags-along https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-operations/usda-crop-progr...): we are already seeing consequences to crop yields in the U.S. - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2019EF001189 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/201...): heat waves are becoming more frequent and more damaging - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab13bf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab13bf), etc: so are other extreme weather events - https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/29/2002084200/-1/-1/1/CLIMATE-CHANGE-REPORT-2019.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/29/2002084200/-1/-1/1/CLI...: the DOD recognizes climate change as an extraordinary threat to the U.S. - https://games-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/23db9731-209c-44c2-ab0f-1db57d157f51/note/7acf47a1-8ec4-4e76-a93e-2d4dba26cb28.pdf#page=1 https://games-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/docu...: so does the intelligence community - https://iflas.blogspot.com/2019/07/compendium-of-research-reports-on.html?m=1 https://iflas.blogspot.com/2019/07/compendium-of-research-re...: a good aggregation (the commentary is speculative; read the papers) Our global industrial society relies, more precariously than most realize or admit, on conditions which will soon diminish or disappear. For example: - Stable, predictable weather patterns (industrial agriculture depends on this) - Just-in-time global shipping/logistics, by which food and other necessities get to supermarket shelves (threatened by extreme weather, political crises, fuel availability, etc) - Relatively cheap, easy availability of fossil fuels (extraction costs will continue to rise over time, and competition will likely grow more intense) - Plentiful fish/marine life stocks (we are destroying coral reefs extremely quickly, which are a key part of the ocean lifecycle; ocean acidification due to carbon capture also threatens sea life, as does oceanic warming) on which many rely for food - Low atmospheric CO2 content for breathability (cognitive ability decreases as CO2 levels rise) - Thriving coastal cities, as centers of both population and economic activity (many are under threat of regular flooding if not complete loss this century) It will likely take indefinite human intervention to keep the climate system habitable for anywhere near our present numbers, if we're even capable of the sort of coordination required.