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It's been relatively fixed on the timescales that human civilization has grown - in particular our modern civilization as it exists over the past few hundred ye

It's been relatively fixed on the timescales that human civilization has grown - in particular our modern civilization as it exists over the past few hundred years. As we have developed, we have spent the majority of our human productivity on efforts to optimize ourselves, our cultures, and our infrastructure for the relatively static status quo climate. This includes the placement of cities, the choice of crop cultivars in various regions, the effort put into irrigation systems and infrastructure, the planning of building codes and expected lifetimes of infrastructure based on regional climate, the kinds of diseases and pests we guard against in various regions, and on and on. Billions of people depend on those optimizations. A slippage of a percent in the effectiveness of those optimizations will be counted in the lives of millions. What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war.

soperj 5y ago
In the timescale that human civilization has grown we've had the Bering land bridge. I don't think we've had a relatively static status quo climate. Past few hundred years has had the greatest change in temperature in the last 10 thousand years according to tree studies. I don't think you can have it both ways here.
- spankalee 5y ago
  "modern civilization"
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
  > last 10 thousand years AKA roughly 3% of the times humans have been on earth. Or .0002% the age of the earth. But on the other hand, that probably doesn't matter much. The difference between human made and natural climate change is just the moral implications. If there was another (natural) ice-age on the horizon, it'd be in humanities best interest to try and prevent it.
  - moistly 5y ago
    AKA roughly 100% of the times humans have lived in settled communities. I would prefer to not live a roaming hunter-gatherer life. Edit: disclaimer—“first settlement” doesn’t seem to be a settled fact. How permanent must it be? How many families? Is purposeful agriculture a requirement?
- kannanvijayan 5y ago
  The infrastructure, agricultural optimization, crop cultivation and breeding, city growth, and other technology that supports the several billion people that are alive today was built over the last century. The capacity growth is also exponential, so the relevant infrastructure is on an even shorter timescale than that. Global ecosystems are also far more stressed from the load of humanity than they were 100 years ago. The regenerative capacity of biological systems responding to that system is not simply "barely at capacity", it is in a negative state. On top of that, we will be accelerating the rate of average temperature changes, in a time when access to weapons of mass destruction (ones that are orders of magnitude higher than what existed 100 years ago) are higher than ever. The nature of exponential growth and what it does to fixed capacity regenerative systems is certainly difficult to internalize. Cracks form over time as stress is absorbed. Collapses happen fast. The transition between the two is hard to time.
- graeme 5y ago
  The Bering land bridge disappeared 11,000 years ago. The earliest human major settlements were formed about 6000 years ago, in Mesopotamia. Your whole timescale is wrong. We’re not talking about humans. We’re talking about settled civilizations. Things didn’t fluctuate very much since 9000 BCE, when the Bering land bridge went away. All of recorded history is since then. As for recent history it’s only really since 2000 we’ve burst out of that range. There was fluctuation before but within the post 9000 BCE norms. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
acituan 5y ago
> It's been relatively fixed on the timescales that human civilization has grown - in particular our modern civilization as it exists over the past few hundred years. That's the crux of the argument; zoom in enough and it looks fixed. Zoom out enough, there wasn't even plants. Framing is everything. And it is the best rhetorical device because it can be (ab)used to serve even contradictory viewpoints. > What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war. I don't deny the consequences of mistreating the environment, but more often than not we are making proportionality errors (both by underestimating or over-cathastrophizing it). I am not trying to be mean to you but want to invite self-reflection; apocalypticism has also been a perennial tool in our "optimization" toolkit, ironically with catastrophic failure modes. Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
- kannanvijayan 5y ago
  I'd venture the opposite, that people have an inherent need to believe that humanity is special in an objective sense, that drastic change and collapse cannot happen in the timescales we operate in. An adult variant of "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away". After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion? > Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue. I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest.
  - acituan 5y ago
    > I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest. Climate predictions are complicated but the negative valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions doesn't represent that. That is what I am calling out as proportionality error. It is a version of "this plane crashing would be horrible, even though the probability multiplier is likely to be very small, I can so vividly envision the horrible outcome that I will behave as if it is more probable and have a panic attack". There is a lot of affective/emotional (so-called) reasoning. Not only that, we don't know to what extend (not if) we are projecting our unconscious, personal, perennial problems such as fear-of-death onto a global wish of world not existing after we die for example. Human beings are deeply religious creatures, and in absence of a structured spiritual approach to these problems, we are prone to deify and mythify what is around us. (To be crisply clear, I am not calling anthropogenic climate change a myth by any stretch of imagination, but it is a certainty that our responses are not in 100% correspondence to the reality of it, including as you rightly point out "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away".) > After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion? It wasn't the sentiment, it was the act of humbuggery around the inflated immediacy and absurd dramatization of outcomes, from the likes of Al Gore to Hollywood, that either turned people into apathetic nihilism or burned out defeatism. I am not saying these are single handedly responsible for this response; post-WWII onwards especially during the Cold War people have been culturally trained for these types of thinking and today we are seeing their protracted influence.

soperj 5y ago

In the timescale that human civilization has grown we've had the Bering land bridge. I don't think we've had a relatively static status quo climate. Past few hundred years has had the greatest change in temperature in the last 10 thousand years according to tree studies. I don't think you can have it both ways here.

spankalee 5y ago
"modern civilization"
throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
> last 10 thousand years AKA roughly 3% of the times humans have been on earth. Or .0002% the age of the earth. But on the other hand, that probably doesn't matter much. The difference between human made and natural climate change is just the moral implications. If there was another (natural) ice-age on the horizon, it'd be in humanities best interest to try and prevent it.
- moistly 5y ago
  AKA roughly 100% of the times humans have lived in settled communities. I would prefer to not live a roaming hunter-gatherer life. Edit: disclaimer—“first settlement” doesn’t seem to be a settled fact. How permanent must it be? How many families? Is purposeful agriculture a requirement?
kannanvijayan 5y ago
The infrastructure, agricultural optimization, crop cultivation and breeding, city growth, and other technology that supports the several billion people that are alive today was built over the last century. The capacity growth is also exponential, so the relevant infrastructure is on an even shorter timescale than that. Global ecosystems are also far more stressed from the load of humanity than they were 100 years ago. The regenerative capacity of biological systems responding to that system is not simply "barely at capacity", it is in a negative state. On top of that, we will be accelerating the rate of average temperature changes, in a time when access to weapons of mass destruction (ones that are orders of magnitude higher than what existed 100 years ago) are higher than ever. The nature of exponential growth and what it does to fixed capacity regenerative systems is certainly difficult to internalize. Cracks form over time as stress is absorbed. Collapses happen fast. The transition between the two is hard to time.
graeme 5y ago
The Bering land bridge disappeared 11,000 years ago. The earliest human major settlements were formed about 6000 years ago, in Mesopotamia. Your whole timescale is wrong. We’re not talking about humans. We’re talking about settled civilizations. Things didn’t fluctuate very much since 9000 BCE, when the Bering land bridge went away. All of recorded history is since then. As for recent history it’s only really since 2000 we’ve burst out of that range. There was fluctuation before but within the post 9000 BCE norms. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/

acituan 5y ago

> It's been relatively fixed on the timescales that human civilization has grown - in particular our modern civilization as it exists over the past few hundred years. That's the crux of the argument; zoom in enough and it looks fixed. Zoom out enough, there wasn't even plants. Framing is everything. And it is the best rhetorical device because it can be (ab)used to serve even contradictory viewpoints. > What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war. I don't deny the consequences of mistreating the environment, but more often than not we are making proportionality errors (both by underestimating or over-cathastrophizing it). I am not trying to be mean to you but want to invite self-reflection; apocalypticism has also been a perennial tool in our "optimization" toolkit, ironically with catastrophic failure modes. Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.

kannanvijayan 5y ago
I'd venture the opposite, that people have an inherent need to believe that humanity is special in an objective sense, that drastic change and collapse cannot happen in the timescales we operate in. An adult variant of "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away". After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion? > Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue. I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest.
- acituan 5y ago
  > I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest. Climate predictions are complicated but the negative valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions doesn't represent that. That is what I am calling out as proportionality error. It is a version of "this plane crashing would be horrible, even though the probability multiplier is likely to be very small, I can so vividly envision the horrible outcome that I will behave as if it is more probable and have a panic attack". There is a lot of affective/emotional (so-called) reasoning. Not only that, we don't know to what extend (not if) we are projecting our unconscious, personal, perennial problems such as fear-of-death onto a global wish of world not existing after we die for example. Human beings are deeply religious creatures, and in absence of a structured spiritual approach to these problems, we are prone to deify and mythify what is around us. (To be crisply clear, I am not calling anthropogenic climate change a myth by any stretch of imagination, but it is a certainty that our responses are not in 100% correspondence to the reality of it, including as you rightly point out "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away".) > After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion? It wasn't the sentiment, it was the act of humbuggery around the inflated immediacy and absurd dramatization of outcomes, from the likes of Al Gore to Hollywood, that either turned people into apathetic nihilism or burned out defeatism. I am not saying these are single handedly responsible for this response; post-WWII onwards especially during the Cold War people have been culturally trained for these types of thinking and today we are seeing their protracted influence.