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Fascinating that his Gaia hypothesis came after his research with Royal Dutch Shell. It’s amazing how early we knew fossil fuels were destabilizing our biospher

by timst4 4y ago

Fascinating that his Gaia hypothesis came after his research with Royal Dutch Shell. It’s amazing how early we knew fossil fuels were destabilizing our biosphere. This man knew we were heading towards an uninhabitable world and screamed at the top of his lungs, but corporate growth was more important. Persephone, indeed. He may have walked back his prediction of earth being largely uninhabitable by 2050, but I have a feeling he was only slightly off. The sad truth is that 50C is coming faster than you realize, and this man was crystal clear on the subject in the 1990s.

culi 4y ago
What's wild to me is how consistently science has chosen to be politically palatable rather than come off as "alarmist". Like in the original 1.5C report. We didn't have good data on permafrost melting and how much methane that would release. Permafrost melting has been hypothesized as possibly one of the biggest contributors to a runaway effect. But they just straight up decided to ignore the entire effect That's just one of the many decisions made that makes the 1.5C report wildly more optimistic than reality. It's no wonder scientists like Lovelock who were very familiar with this research were some of the most likely to point out that science is a political institution with its own biases and incentives
- svnt 4y ago
  If the choice was to be invited to participate in the conversation or not, wouldn’t you tone down your public statements in order to have a hope of influencing policy? I’m not saying it’s the right strategy now, but premature hyperbole just slows down adoption, if it does anything at all.
  - groby_b 4y ago
    The answer is "no". If the system refuses to face truth, you will need to circumvent the system. The opposite of that gives us institutions that are continually disseminating lies, in the process undermining trust in institutions. Truth doesn't get "invited to conversations". It is always part of it, and the choice is just spoken or unspoken.
    - anthony_d 4y ago
      > If the system refuses to face truth, you will need to circumvent the system. That is a terrifying sentence. It can be used to justify anything while denying accountability. There's always the possibility (probability) that you are wrong about what is "the truth."
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - culi 4y ago
        I completely agree with you but I don't really think it's relevant to this situation. The situation is not a decision between 2 different possible truths. It's a decision to sweep something under the rug. Something that we know will have an effect, we just don't know the magnitude of it. When faced with ambiguity we should take a best guess (even if it's a "conservative" guess) not ignore everything because its more politically convenient The "best guess" was clearly not taken here
      - carapace 4y ago
        Right, that's why empiricism and the scientific method are so important. This is in the context of scientists being "invited to participate in the conversation or not", eh?
      - groby_b 4y ago
        "face truth" is not exactly "anything". The desired outcome is - which is pretty damn obvious from the context here - that the system will need to face up to truth. And I'm certainly not sure how any of this denies accountability. Maybe you're just projecting a little bit much into a single sentence?
      - vkou 4y ago
        > That is a terrifying sentence It is. But so is the situation under discussion. When you have the choice between getting silenced for the truth, or keeping quiet about a disaster, the people putting you in this dilemma aren't doing so by using tools of reason or debate - but with tools of power and terror.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > If the choice was to be invited to participate in the conversation or not, wouldn’t you tone down your public statements in order to have a hope of influencing policy? An interesting bind is called "The Critics' Dilemma", best understood through a (Chinese) story. One day some farmers see an invading army coming over the hill. They rush into the city to tell the emperor. "Emperor, a huge army is approaching, we're surely doomed!" Not wanting to have the whole city panic the emperor has the men executed to silence them. Invaders enter the city and slaughter all the imperial soldiers. Many years later two farmers are watching the horizon when they see an army gathering. "Quickly, let's warn the citizens" says one. "No. Remember the story of what happened to our grandfathers." says the other. So they return to the city and tell the emperor, "We saw a few bandits gathered by the woods". The emperors soldiers go to confront them and are all killed, The city is raided again. The dilemma is "Tell them too much and they will deny you out of fear. Tell them too little and they will be unprepared." This applies, along with the Cassandra effect, right to the heart of all intelligent critique. People are happy to die from ignorance so long as you don't upset them with cognitive dissonance. Later, when they are in imminent peril, they'll blame you for not speaking up sooner.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      The story doesn't really make sense, wouldn't the more distant outposts easily confirm if a huge army is amassing nearby?
      - Mtinie 4y ago
        Not if the distant outposts have already succumbed to the advancing army…and all of those who came in from the field to warn the Emperor have previously been silenced.
      - DoughnutHole 4y ago
        It's a short parable, of course it doesn't stand up to pedantic nitpicking. The Boy Who Cried Wolf isn't a tightly tuned narrative either - why wouldn't they just put a more reliable shepherd boy out with the sheep after the first couple of lies? But that's hardly the point of a parable/fable.
  - miguelazo 4y ago
    "Premature hyperbole"? Interesting choice of framing.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > premature hyperbole just slows down adoption Wasn't it intentional euphemism in this case, however?
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Assuming that permafrost is going not only be a major contributor to greenhouse gases, but also trigger a runaway reaction is the alarmism. They're not being politically palatable, they're making predictions based on the data that we have and being honest.
  - culi 4y ago
    #1 The likely scenario we don't yet have evidence to make a strong claim about: it's a huge effect #2 The conservative position: it's going to have an effect #3 The radical position that goes completely against any existing science: it won't have any effect Why choose #3?
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      There's an asteroid headed for earth. It's going to kill us all. We need to drop everything, including our effort on climate change, to redirect it. I can't actually find the asteroid, but should we still follow through with my demands?
      - culi 4y ago
        Do you understand how the example you just gave is exactly the opposite of the actual scenario I tried to paint. My ENTIRE point is that it's a continuum. It's not a binary thing. The point is that there's gonna be an impact and it's gonna be somewhere between 2.35 and 6.25 of impact on some arbitrary scale I just made up. Why would we act as if it's 0 when we could at LEAST act as if it's 2.35?? Your scenario is exactly the opposite of this and a really unhelpful metaphor
        Manuel_D 4y ago
        Where does the lower bound of 2.35 come from? When you state this lower bound you are saying that we know with certainty that at least this much impact will happen. We lack that data so there's no lower bound, or rather the lower bound is zero. You could falsely claim a lower bound, but that erodes the credibility of the environmental movement.
burkaman 4y ago
> It’s amazing how early we knew fossil fuels were destabilizing our biosphere. For those who don't know, the US government had a pretty complete understanding of the issue in the 60s. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3227654-PSAC-1965-Restoring-the-Quality-of-Our-Environment https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3227654-PSAC-1965-Re... https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/jul10/56.pdf https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibr...
- ta988 4y ago
  We knew about tobacco, we knew about opiates, we knew about climate, we knew about lead, the list is long.
  - tunesmith 4y ago
    I've wonder if that's as damning as it sounds, though. Knowing something is a problem, and even knowing how to theoretically solve it, still doesn't mean you have the power to change it. Fighting systems is hard, even for a government that might happen to be a supermajority sometimes.
    - y4mi 4y ago
      Also "knowing" and actually knowing are different things. There had been research done as far back as that which came to the conclusion that it causes climate change. But that doesn't mean that the governing body at that time was aware of the research and if so, really believed it or just thought that the researchers are massively exaggerating. I know that the research was done on the behalf of the government, but that doesn't mean that everyone governing/deciding on these issues had access to/were aware of the results.
      - toyg 4y ago
        > really believed it or just thought that the researchers are massively exaggerating. Particularly in a period of time, the '60s/'70s, where a lot of things were happening and lots of stuff was shouted in the street as "inevitable" (the proletariat rising, the age of Aquarius, the arrival of aliens, or even good ol' biblical apocalypse...).
iNerdier 4y ago
Persephone? I think you might mean Cassandra, if you’re talking about the woman who was cursed by Apollo to speak the truth but have nobody listen.
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  I'm sure you're right that the commenter meant Cassandra but one might also argue that Persephone's curse, that newly increased periodic temperature swings will sometimes turn the earth barren and useless to us, is relevant to the conversation.
radford-neal 4y ago
- skyyler 4y ago
  My friend, the person you are replying to was saying that daily highs of 50C aren't far off. Not that average temps will increase by 50C. That would be silly.
  - radford-neal 4y ago
    Hmm... Maybe. Except that temperatures far above 50C have been recorded before, including over a century ago. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o...
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      In a place called 'Furnace Creek Ranch'. Makes you wonder about the name. Really, it was quite clear that the original comment wasn't talking about a delta of 50 C and it is quite clear that 50 C outside of say Death Valley isn't normal.
      - radford-neal 4y ago
        Highest recorded temperature in Arkansas was 49C. Maybe it will get up to 50C sometime. That wouldn't be especially alarming.
        skyyler 4y ago
        You are willfully missing the point. Did you not hear about the heatwave in Europe last week? 50C is coming to places that have never had temps that high.
        eCa 4y ago
        So the Arkansas record was set in 1936. The way I see it, it doesn’t really matter if Arkansas ever beats that record, but rather what happens if it hits 48C five days per year. (I say that as my hometown recently beat it’s highest ever record by approx 1C.)
TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
What so you mean 50C is coming? 50 degrees C of warming?
- DFHippie 4y ago
  I think they mean the temperature spiking to 50C, instead of ~40C, in the summer.
  - alvah 4y ago
    ~10C of warming in the short to medium term is beyond even the wildest IPCC models is it not?
    - wk_end 4y ago
      Averaged out globally that might be the case, but any one location might experience temperature spikes like that. Consider the Pacific Northwest “heat dome” that we got last summer, featuring temperatures 10-20C above normal. They indeed maxed out out at 50C in the village of Lytton, BC, which burned to the ground as a result.
      - eru 4y ago
        I suggest moving.
        amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        Global warming. Moving to a different globe?
        eru 4y ago
        No, why? Just because something has 'global' in the name, doesn't mean everywhere will have the same temperature.
    - cagenut 4y ago
eru 4y ago
> This man knew we were heading towards an uninhabitable world [...] Huh? Since when are we heading towards an uninhabitable world? Yes, climate change is real. But it's not going to make the world uninhabitable. The best estimates are that climate change would cut between 5-20% of global GDP. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change#Aggregate_impacts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... or https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/climate/climate-change-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/climate/climate-change-ec... (Keep in mind that the latter is an article from the NYT reporting on an analysis by an insurer. The NYT isn't exactly a climate change denier.) That's a gigantic number in absolute terms. But it's also less than the difference between US and UK GDP per capita. And the UK is far from uninhabitable. (My assumption here is that an uninhabitable place would have essentially zero GDP. Therefore to retain 80%+ of GDP, the planet must still be heavily inhabited.)
- nickd2001 4y ago
  "Uninhabitable" could take many forms. Imagine that by 2050, summer temps in Europe and N America sometimes hit 50C, and in the likes of Middle East, N Africa, Pakistan/India etc they hit 60C. This doesn't seem far-fetched given that Seattle had 42C last year, UK 40C this year, Pakistan has had 50C, and the trend appears to be accelerating. So in the 60C places there'd be complete wipe-outs of population if people tried to stay living there, in the 50C places there'd still be mass deaths. But also, there'd be extremely severe crops failures leading to mass starvation even in places not as hot. Unless humankind develops very fast, some carbon capture tech that immediately rids us off this excess CO2, and/or some major advances are made in agriculture to respond to the change in temperature, it seems to me that much of the earth could become effectively uninhabitable.
  - eru 4y ago
    You know that airconditioning is already a thing in hot places, do you? There's also other lower-tech means for dealing with temporary extreme temperatures. > But also, there'd be extremely severe crops failures leading to mass starvation even in places not as hot. [...] We'd expect all of these to show up as a drop in GDP, wouldn't we? Eg you can clearly see the wars in Syria or Ukraine show up in their GDP figures. Please correct the Wikipedia article I linked to, if you have better impact-of-climate-change on GDP forecasts than what's currently on there.

by timst4 4y ago

culi 4y ago

What's wild to me is how consistently science has chosen to be politically palatable rather than come off as "alarmist". Like in the original 1.5C report. We didn't have good data on permafrost melting and how much methane that would release. Permafrost melting has been hypothesized as possibly one of the biggest contributors to a runaway effect. But they just straight up decided to ignore the entire effect That's just one of the many decisions made that makes the 1.5C report wildly more optimistic than reality. It's no wonder scientists like Lovelock who were very familiar with this research were some of the most likely to point out that science is a political institution with its own biases and incentives

svnt 4y ago
If the choice was to be invited to participate in the conversation or not, wouldn’t you tone down your public statements in order to have a hope of influencing policy? I’m not saying it’s the right strategy now, but premature hyperbole just slows down adoption, if it does anything at all.
- groby_b 4y ago
  The answer is "no". If the system refuses to face truth, you will need to circumvent the system. The opposite of that gives us institutions that are continually disseminating lies, in the process undermining trust in institutions. Truth doesn't get "invited to conversations". It is always part of it, and the choice is just spoken or unspoken.
  - anthony_d 4y ago
    > If the system refuses to face truth, you will need to circumvent the system. That is a terrifying sentence. It can be used to justify anything while denying accountability. There's always the possibility (probability) that you are wrong about what is "the truth."
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - culi 4y ago
      I completely agree with you but I don't really think it's relevant to this situation. The situation is not a decision between 2 different possible truths. It's a decision to sweep something under the rug. Something that we know will have an effect, we just don't know the magnitude of it. When faced with ambiguity we should take a best guess (even if it's a "conservative" guess) not ignore everything because its more politically convenient The "best guess" was clearly not taken here
    - carapace 4y ago
      Right, that's why empiricism and the scientific method are so important. This is in the context of scientists being "invited to participate in the conversation or not", eh?
    - groby_b 4y ago
      "face truth" is not exactly "anything". The desired outcome is - which is pretty damn obvious from the context here - that the system will need to face up to truth. And I'm certainly not sure how any of this denies accountability. Maybe you're just projecting a little bit much into a single sentence?
    - vkou 4y ago
      > That is a terrifying sentence It is. But so is the situation under discussion. When you have the choice between getting silenced for the truth, or keeping quiet about a disaster, the people putting you in this dilemma aren't doing so by using tools of reason or debate - but with tools of power and terror.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > If the choice was to be invited to participate in the conversation or not, wouldn’t you tone down your public statements in order to have a hope of influencing policy? An interesting bind is called "The Critics' Dilemma", best understood through a (Chinese) story. One day some farmers see an invading army coming over the hill. They rush into the city to tell the emperor. "Emperor, a huge army is approaching, we're surely doomed!" Not wanting to have the whole city panic the emperor has the men executed to silence them. Invaders enter the city and slaughter all the imperial soldiers. Many years later two farmers are watching the horizon when they see an army gathering. "Quickly, let's warn the citizens" says one. "No. Remember the story of what happened to our grandfathers." says the other. So they return to the city and tell the emperor, "We saw a few bandits gathered by the woods". The emperors soldiers go to confront them and are all killed, The city is raided again. The dilemma is "Tell them too much and they will deny you out of fear. Tell them too little and they will be unprepared." This applies, along with the Cassandra effect, right to the heart of all intelligent critique. People are happy to die from ignorance so long as you don't upset them with cognitive dissonance. Later, when they are in imminent peril, they'll blame you for not speaking up sooner.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    The story doesn't really make sense, wouldn't the more distant outposts easily confirm if a huge army is amassing nearby?
    - Mtinie 4y ago
      Not if the distant outposts have already succumbed to the advancing army…and all of those who came in from the field to warn the Emperor have previously been silenced.
    - DoughnutHole 4y ago
      It's a short parable, of course it doesn't stand up to pedantic nitpicking. The Boy Who Cried Wolf isn't a tightly tuned narrative either - why wouldn't they just put a more reliable shepherd boy out with the sheep after the first couple of lies? But that's hardly the point of a parable/fable.
- miguelazo 4y ago
  "Premature hyperbole"? Interesting choice of framing.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > premature hyperbole just slows down adoption Wasn't it intentional euphemism in this case, however?
Manuel_D 4y ago
Assuming that permafrost is going not only be a major contributor to greenhouse gases, but also trigger a runaway reaction is the alarmism. They're not being politically palatable, they're making predictions based on the data that we have and being honest.
- culi 4y ago
  #1 The likely scenario we don't yet have evidence to make a strong claim about: it's a huge effect #2 The conservative position: it's going to have an effect #3 The radical position that goes completely against any existing science: it won't have any effect Why choose #3?
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    There's an asteroid headed for earth. It's going to kill us all. We need to drop everything, including our effort on climate change, to redirect it. I can't actually find the asteroid, but should we still follow through with my demands?
    - culi 4y ago
      Do you understand how the example you just gave is exactly the opposite of the actual scenario I tried to paint. My ENTIRE point is that it's a continuum. It's not a binary thing. The point is that there's gonna be an impact and it's gonna be somewhere between 2.35 and 6.25 of impact on some arbitrary scale I just made up. Why would we act as if it's 0 when we could at LEAST act as if it's 2.35?? Your scenario is exactly the opposite of this and a really unhelpful metaphor
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        Where does the lower bound of 2.35 come from? When you state this lower bound you are saying that we know with certainty that at least this much impact will happen. We lack that data so there's no lower bound, or rather the lower bound is zero. You could falsely claim a lower bound, but that erodes the credibility of the environmental movement.

burkaman 4y ago

> It’s amazing how early we knew fossil fuels were destabilizing our biosphere. For those who don't know, the US government had a pretty complete understanding of the issue in the 60s. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3227654-PSAC-1965-Restoring-the-Quality-of-Our-Environment https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3227654-PSAC-1965-Re... https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/jul10/56.pdf https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibr...

ta988 4y ago
We knew about tobacco, we knew about opiates, we knew about climate, we knew about lead, the list is long.
- tunesmith 4y ago
  I've wonder if that's as damning as it sounds, though. Knowing something is a problem, and even knowing how to theoretically solve it, still doesn't mean you have the power to change it. Fighting systems is hard, even for a government that might happen to be a supermajority sometimes.
  - y4mi 4y ago
    Also "knowing" and actually knowing are different things. There had been research done as far back as that which came to the conclusion that it causes climate change. But that doesn't mean that the governing body at that time was aware of the research and if so, really believed it or just thought that the researchers are massively exaggerating. I know that the research was done on the behalf of the government, but that doesn't mean that everyone governing/deciding on these issues had access to/were aware of the results.
    - toyg 4y ago
      > really believed it or just thought that the researchers are massively exaggerating. Particularly in a period of time, the '60s/'70s, where a lot of things were happening and lots of stuff was shouted in the street as "inevitable" (the proletariat rising, the age of Aquarius, the arrival of aliens, or even good ol' biblical apocalypse...).

iNerdier 4y ago

Persephone? I think you might mean Cassandra, if you’re talking about the woman who was cursed by Apollo to speak the truth but have nobody listen.

StrictDabbler 4y ago
I'm sure you're right that the commenter meant Cassandra but one might also argue that Persephone's curse, that newly increased periodic temperature swings will sometimes turn the earth barren and useless to us, is relevant to the conversation.

radford-neal 4y ago

skyyler 4y ago
My friend, the person you are replying to was saying that daily highs of 50C aren't far off. Not that average temps will increase by 50C. That would be silly.
- radford-neal 4y ago
  Hmm... Maybe. Except that temperatures far above 50C have been recorded before, including over a century ago. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o...
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    In a place called 'Furnace Creek Ranch'. Makes you wonder about the name. Really, it was quite clear that the original comment wasn't talking about a delta of 50 C and it is quite clear that 50 C outside of say Death Valley isn't normal.
    - radford-neal 4y ago
      Highest recorded temperature in Arkansas was 49C. Maybe it will get up to 50C sometime. That wouldn't be especially alarming.
      - skyyler 4y ago
        You are willfully missing the point. Did you not hear about the heatwave in Europe last week? 50C is coming to places that have never had temps that high.
      - eCa 4y ago
        So the Arkansas record was set in 1936. The way I see it, it doesn’t really matter if Arkansas ever beats that record, but rather what happens if it hits 48C five days per year. (I say that as my hometown recently beat it’s highest ever record by approx 1C.)

TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago

What so you mean 50C is coming? 50 degrees C of warming?

DFHippie 4y ago
I think they mean the temperature spiking to 50C, instead of ~40C, in the summer.
- alvah 4y ago
  ~10C of warming in the short to medium term is beyond even the wildest IPCC models is it not?
  - wk_end 4y ago
    Averaged out globally that might be the case, but any one location might experience temperature spikes like that. Consider the Pacific Northwest “heat dome” that we got last summer, featuring temperatures 10-20C above normal. They indeed maxed out out at 50C in the village of Lytton, BC, which burned to the ground as a result.
    - eru 4y ago
      I suggest moving.
      - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        Global warming. Moving to a different globe?
        eru 4y ago
        No, why? Just because something has 'global' in the name, doesn't mean everywhere will have the same temperature.
  - cagenut 4y ago

eru 4y ago

> This man knew we were heading towards an uninhabitable world [...] Huh? Since when are we heading towards an uninhabitable world? Yes, climate change is real. But it's not going to make the world uninhabitable. The best estimates are that climate change would cut between 5-20% of global GDP. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change#Aggregate_impacts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_ch... or https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/climate/climate-change-economy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/climate/climate-change-ec... (Keep in mind that the latter is an article from the NYT reporting on an analysis by an insurer. The NYT isn't exactly a climate change denier.) That's a gigantic number in absolute terms. But it's also less than the difference between US and UK GDP per capita. And the UK is far from uninhabitable. (My assumption here is that an uninhabitable place would have essentially zero GDP. Therefore to retain 80%+ of GDP, the planet must still be heavily inhabited.)

nickd2001 4y ago
"Uninhabitable" could take many forms. Imagine that by 2050, summer temps in Europe and N America sometimes hit 50C, and in the likes of Middle East, N Africa, Pakistan/India etc they hit 60C. This doesn't seem far-fetched given that Seattle had 42C last year, UK 40C this year, Pakistan has had 50C, and the trend appears to be accelerating. So in the 60C places there'd be complete wipe-outs of population if people tried to stay living there, in the 50C places there'd still be mass deaths. But also, there'd be extremely severe crops failures leading to mass starvation even in places not as hot. Unless humankind develops very fast, some carbon capture tech that immediately rids us off this excess CO2, and/or some major advances are made in agriculture to respond to the change in temperature, it seems to me that much of the earth could become effectively uninhabitable.
- eru 4y ago
  You know that airconditioning is already a thing in hot places, do you? There's also other lower-tech means for dealing with temporary extreme temperatures. > But also, there'd be extremely severe crops failures leading to mass starvation even in places not as hot. [...] We'd expect all of these to show up as a drop in GDP, wouldn't we? Eg you can clearly see the wars in Syria or Ukraine show up in their GDP figures. Please correct the Wikipedia article I linked to, if you have better impact-of-climate-change on GDP forecasts than what's currently on there.