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There's a seemingly reasonable fallacy embedded in the argument that so far technology has been able to dig us out of the holes that it itself digs: That past p

by jal278 12y ago

There's a seemingly reasonable fallacy embedded in the argument that so far technology has been able to dig us out of the holes that it itself digs: That past performance is indicative of the future. Of course, the past often does predict the future -- yet, we can't bank on it, because there are sometimes qualitative shifts, and exceptions. The problem with hoping that technology will solve climate change before it happens, is that we're gambling something we can't afford to lose. So, it may well be the case that we do solve the problem -- but what if we don't? There are limits to technology, after all. To me, the danger in placing excessive faith in technology is that it can bypass our critical thinking. For example, right now our own technology (nuclear weapons, or biological weapons as that technology develops) is the greatest threat to humanity's existence. So while technology is a great thing, it may well be our species undoing rather than its savior -- at least until (if) we survive long enough to colonize other planets or enhance our own morality such that we can handle the responsibility our technology demands.

polemic 12y ago
Good analysis. I like to think that it's a bit like investing in a vehicle that may or may not be a ponzi scheme. It's worked so far, but that doesn't mean you bet the house on it.
mikeash 12y ago
This is indeed a problem. If there is an event which causes the extinction of humanity, then by definition we will not find a parallel event in the past to use for prediction. Yet to conclude that humanity will never go extinct is ridiculous. It's only going to happen once. There's also another problem from the opposite direction. Resources have run out plenty of times. Entire civilizations have collapsed because they could no longer sustain themselves, because they used up something important and couldn't find more or come up with a substitute. Yes, peak oil now could end up being like peak stone in the stone age, where there's plenty of it and we move on to better things well before we run out. But peak oil now could also be like peak forest on Easter Island, which resulted in the collapse of civilization there. I don't see anything in this article beyond naked hope for why peak oil must follow the former path rather than the latter. Yes, the history of resource exhaustion is extremely optimistic if you ignore all the times when it led to disaster, but that doesn't tell me anything.
- glenra 12y ago
  The Easter Island story told by Jared Diamond in Collapse is arguably a myth. Do you have any other examples? An alternate view of Easter Island includes these sorts of points: - Forests on Easter Island were largely killed by rats (an invasive species) and to (productively!) clear land for agriculture, not to make statues. - Civilization there grew and persisted and thrived even well after the trees were gone due to human cleverness at finding and making new resources. (The Islanders ate fish and rats and eggs and chickens at that time) - When their civilization eventually collapsed it was because they were pushed. It was due to war and diseases brought by outside invaders who sold a lot of the locals into slavery. Mark Lynas sums up the situation here: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-ecocide/ http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-... Jared Diamond, sticking to his guns, responds to Mark: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-jared-diamond-responds/ http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-... Lipo and Hunt in turn respond to Jared's response filling in lots more detail: http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-myths-of.html http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-m... Leading quote: "Diamond would have readers believe that the majority of archeologists who have studied Easter Island support his thesis. It is simply not true. The new evidence that we and other serious scholars have provided over the past decade not only contradicts the old story that Diamond has so heavily invested in, but has led to a new consensus among the majority of scholars around our work." UPDATE: Okay, now THIS is my favorite thing I found revisiting this old argument. Diamond thinks the statues were moved on logs but Lipo thinks they were "walked" into place upright...and here is a video showing how one does that - walks a multi-ton statue upright using only people and ropes: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/easter-island/walking-statue-video http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/easter-island/walk...
  - mikeash 12y ago
    The question of what the trees were used for and how the statues were moved, while interesting in general, isn't relevant here. When deciding whether Easter Island represents a collapse due to resource exhaustion, the relevant questions are whether the trees were cut down at all (seems to be no dispute there), whether this represents general ecological destruction (in dispute, it seems), whether the population declined precipitously (no dispute here either), and finally whether that decline was caused by the ecological destruction. Researching the question a bit (and not using Diamond as a reference, at least not directly or intentionally) I can't see any support for the idea that the island was doing fine until outsiders bought war, disease, and slavery. As far as I can see, the war, disease, and slavery period followed European contact, but the initial population decline from a peak of around 15,000 down to 2-3,000 happened before European contact. In the absence of external pressures, that seems to leave only resource depletion as the possible cause. Even if it was external, though, why is "land which isn't being overrun by invaders" different from any other resource? As for other examples, Cahokia and the Anasazi are two possible examples in North America. The Norse settlement in Greenland is a more likely but smaller example. The collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization is another possible example. Malden and Pitcairn are two more potential Pacific island examples, both supporting human settlement for centuries, but eventually containing no people by the time of European discovery. Finally, there's good evidence for a sharp genetic bottleneck in the human population deep in pre-history, in which the world population was reduced to 10,000 or less. The cause isn't too clear, but whether it was a volcano, gradual climate change, or something else, it seems that some sort of resource limitation has to be at work. None of these are completely clear-cut, but we can't really expect them to be. A collapsed civilization isn't necessarily going to leave a lot of records. Even if some of these were due to something else, it doesn't seem likely that they all were.
jerf 12y ago
If there is a subtle fallacy embedded in the idea that innovation will always save us, there's a blatant fallacy in the idea that we're inevitably doomed because we're absolutely guaranteed to continue on our current course with no changes until we consume all the resources that we are consuming in the current static snapshot of the world. Looking back over the past couple of hundred years of us overcoming challenge after challenge, and drawing the conclusion that it is absolutely certain that can't happen more, is simply an absurd position to take on a rational basis. If you do not wish to completely flip to the "everything's going to be peachy keen!" side, hey, fine. I'm not even sure anyone's really advocating that. But trying to salvage the panicky pure-ecologist view is in my mind frankly irrational. The one guarantee in life is change, and projecting out the present conditions into the indefinite future as a static precondition is always wrong. Mind you, it may be wrong because the nuclear exchange of 2021 wipes out 98% of humanity and not because the Happy Fun Solar Company solved all world energy problems in 2025, but still, change is inevitable. And what's going forth into the future is not mindless automata who passively experience challenges and fall over dead at a feather's push... what's going forward into the future are several billion human beings, which for all their faults, are still the cleverest things in the Universe we know about. By the way, trying to mitigate the fact we've overcome challenges by pointing out that there are still challenges in the world is just another way to try to dodge dealing with the fact that we have overcome challenges. I absolutely, positively guarantee you that if we survive another 20 years, that there will be even more challenges. I forsee no day coming where the human race can just sit back and declare total victory over challenges.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Who is saying that we're inevitably doomed because we're guaranteed to continue on our current course? The doomsayers are almost universally saying, we need to change course to avoid catastrophe. That's the complete opposite of being guaranteed to stay on course.
- genofon 12y ago
  >Looking back over the past couple of hundred years of us overcoming challenge after challenge, and drawing the conclusion that it is absolutely certain that can't happen more, is simply an absurd position to take on a rational basis. Looking a bit further there were society completely destroyed by themself (for example Easter Island http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/News-Events/Latest-News/News-Archive/2008-News-archive/Easter-Island-The-mystery-of-population-collapse http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/News-Events/Latest-News/News-...) It's good to have both forces, a conservative and a progressive, to maintain equilibrium, it's never a good idea to put all the eggs in one basket Edit: update link about Easter Island
mempko 12y ago
It also ignores massive collapses of civilizations throughout history because of ecological collapse. In the past they were localized, but we are becoming more connected with each other.
waps 12y ago
The problem with this argument is that it is both an argument for and against climate change, and so both for and against taking action on climate change. Humans have a history of (locally) causing massive pollution and other various disasters, like removing topsoil and destroying agriculture. Mining. Extermination of non-tiny animals in a large area. The list goes on. Every time this turned out not to be a problem. Will it now ? If so it will be the first time. But of course, climate change is not based on physical evidence, nor first principles. It is based on statistical trend analysis. Climate change only has basic explanations of mechanisms of change in the athmosphere, they cannot physically model a warming planet from first principles, only by extrapolating past observations into the future can predictions be made. Of course the truth is that both facts are chaotic. In other words, every event in human history is a first, and every change in the athmosphere is a first. For either domain, any particular event is without precedent, and will never happen the same way again. This does not exclude, of course, that one observes patterns. Temperature has been rising, and there are many historically analogous periods, but none that are quite the same. So will the same thing happen ? Unfortunately we know the mathematical theory underpinning this. The answer is sure to disappoint all involved : we don't know, and we don't know the chances either. And no algorithm can ever be used to arrive at a correct answer (note the problem is NOT that we don't know, it's that we can't ever know [1]). It is impossible. It is extremely obvious in human history. When we move past oil (and we will, in the next decade or two), there will be a key ingredient that wasn't there before that completely determines the outcome. It will be a first, that's for sure. Either we find a new energy source that economically blows oil out of the water, or it will be the first long-term sustained drop in global economic activity due to running out of energy. It may also be something different entirely (e.g. WWIII). Maybe thorium reactors start taking the world by storm. Nobody can tell you, with any amount of certainty, what this grand event will be, but it is a surety that it will come. What isn't entirely obvious is that the same is true for climate. Whatever happens, it will be a first, and there will be some event, some factor, that completely determines the outcome, but we can't see it just yet. Firstly, there is of course the potential for large external factors that are obviously so large as to be much more powerful than anything happening on the earth surface itself. Think volcanic activity or a comet, but likely there are 100 such events that could happen we don't even know about. Both events can both raise and drop the temperature by ridiculous amounts, far outstripping what we could ever do with co2. Other things could happen. Suddenly the sea floor starts leaking methane on a large scale, like what happens in any earthquake, but it is sustained. There's certainly enough methane down there to make human solar forcing look like a cow fart. Maybe we're wrong about cloud cover (still a possibility) and the situation simply self-corrects past a certain threshold, something that no statistical model of the past would ever have been able to uncover. Maybe we do get a single world government and actually stand a chance of fixing the situation. Maybe Saudi Arabia and Iran start doing what they've been threatening eachother with for 100 years now and Iran nukes the oil fields there. Maybe it doesn't correct at all, solar forcing happens, and animal life becomes very difficult for a few centuries/millenia. But what is an absolute certainty, as you say, is that the situation will not continue as it's been progressing so far. That is pretty much the only impossibility. Note that the obvious defense of climate theory here, that it results from deterministic actions, and so is not random/chaotic at all, is both correct and completely beside the point. Random systems are not chaotic nor vice versa. Deterministic systems that exhibit 3 properties are chaotic. None of them involves randomness. Neither chaotic nor random systems are predictable [1]. As to whether chaos theory really applies to climate theory the following can be said to summarize things : for 150+ years, the study of chaos theory and the study of climate were one and the same field of study. This has changed, but not for good reasons. There is a longstanding argument that long-term effect dampen the medium term unpredictability, but there is no proof for this, in fact there is plenty of contradicting evidence. And the last defence of climate theory is that climate theory only studies averages. They admit that short-term change might be chaotic, but long-term averages aren't. They certainly don't look it, after all. This flies in the face of the central insight of statistics : the central limit theorem (it basically states that any variable you study must be convergent, that statistics doesn't work on divergent series. And it doesn't, that can be easily tested). This argument is incompatible with statistics on a theoretical level. Therefore it does not matter if this argument is true or not. If this argument is true, then there is no correct way to calculate even an average. If it is false, then you simply can't correctly average certain variables (including a lot of climate variables). The "false" seems to me the sane option, but it doesn't even matter which you pick. Lots of scientific fields of study have these "existential" problems. That doesn't mean they have no value, just that they are fundamentally limited in a few ways. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

by jal278 12y ago

polemic 12y ago

Good analysis. I like to think that it's a bit like investing in a vehicle that may or may not be a ponzi scheme. It's worked so far, but that doesn't mean you bet the house on it.

mikeash 12y ago

This is indeed a problem. If there is an event which causes the extinction of humanity, then by definition we will not find a parallel event in the past to use for prediction. Yet to conclude that humanity will never go extinct is ridiculous. It's only going to happen once. There's also another problem from the opposite direction. Resources have run out plenty of times. Entire civilizations have collapsed because they could no longer sustain themselves, because they used up something important and couldn't find more or come up with a substitute. Yes, peak oil now could end up being like peak stone in the stone age, where there's plenty of it and we move on to better things well before we run out. But peak oil now could also be like peak forest on Easter Island, which resulted in the collapse of civilization there. I don't see anything in this article beyond naked hope for why peak oil must follow the former path rather than the latter. Yes, the history of resource exhaustion is extremely optimistic if you ignore all the times when it led to disaster, but that doesn't tell me anything.

glenra 12y ago
The Easter Island story told by Jared Diamond in Collapse is arguably a myth. Do you have any other examples? An alternate view of Easter Island includes these sorts of points: - Forests on Easter Island were largely killed by rats (an invasive species) and to (productively!) clear land for agriculture, not to make statues. - Civilization there grew and persisted and thrived even well after the trees were gone due to human cleverness at finding and making new resources. (The Islanders ate fish and rats and eggs and chickens at that time) - When their civilization eventually collapsed it was because they were pushed. It was due to war and diseases brought by outside invaders who sold a lot of the locals into slavery. Mark Lynas sums up the situation here: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-ecocide/ http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-... Jared Diamond, sticking to his guns, responds to Mark: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-jared-diamond-responds/ http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-... Lipo and Hunt in turn respond to Jared's response filling in lots more detail: http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-myths-of.html http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-m... Leading quote: "Diamond would have readers believe that the majority of archeologists who have studied Easter Island support his thesis. It is simply not true. The new evidence that we and other serious scholars have provided over the past decade not only contradicts the old story that Diamond has so heavily invested in, but has led to a new consensus among the majority of scholars around our work." UPDATE: Okay, now THIS is my favorite thing I found revisiting this old argument. Diamond thinks the statues were moved on logs but Lipo thinks they were "walked" into place upright...and here is a video showing how one does that - walks a multi-ton statue upright using only people and ropes: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/easter-island/walking-statue-video http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/easter-island/walk...
- mikeash 12y ago
  The question of what the trees were used for and how the statues were moved, while interesting in general, isn't relevant here. When deciding whether Easter Island represents a collapse due to resource exhaustion, the relevant questions are whether the trees were cut down at all (seems to be no dispute there), whether this represents general ecological destruction (in dispute, it seems), whether the population declined precipitously (no dispute here either), and finally whether that decline was caused by the ecological destruction. Researching the question a bit (and not using Diamond as a reference, at least not directly or intentionally) I can't see any support for the idea that the island was doing fine until outsiders bought war, disease, and slavery. As far as I can see, the war, disease, and slavery period followed European contact, but the initial population decline from a peak of around 15,000 down to 2-3,000 happened before European contact. In the absence of external pressures, that seems to leave only resource depletion as the possible cause. Even if it was external, though, why is "land which isn't being overrun by invaders" different from any other resource? As for other examples, Cahokia and the Anasazi are two possible examples in North America. The Norse settlement in Greenland is a more likely but smaller example. The collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization is another possible example. Malden and Pitcairn are two more potential Pacific island examples, both supporting human settlement for centuries, but eventually containing no people by the time of European discovery. Finally, there's good evidence for a sharp genetic bottleneck in the human population deep in pre-history, in which the world population was reduced to 10,000 or less. The cause isn't too clear, but whether it was a volcano, gradual climate change, or something else, it seems that some sort of resource limitation has to be at work. None of these are completely clear-cut, but we can't really expect them to be. A collapsed civilization isn't necessarily going to leave a lot of records. Even if some of these were due to something else, it doesn't seem likely that they all were.

jerf 12y ago

If there is a subtle fallacy embedded in the idea that innovation will always save us, there's a blatant fallacy in the idea that we're inevitably doomed because we're absolutely guaranteed to continue on our current course with no changes until we consume all the resources that we are consuming in the current static snapshot of the world. Looking back over the past couple of hundred years of us overcoming challenge after challenge, and drawing the conclusion that it is absolutely certain that can't happen more, is simply an absurd position to take on a rational basis. If you do not wish to completely flip to the "everything's going to be peachy keen!" side, hey, fine. I'm not even sure anyone's really advocating that. But trying to salvage the panicky pure-ecologist view is in my mind frankly irrational. The one guarantee in life is change, and projecting out the present conditions into the indefinite future as a static precondition is always wrong. Mind you, it may be wrong because the nuclear exchange of 2021 wipes out 98% of humanity and not because the Happy Fun Solar Company solved all world energy problems in 2025, but still, change is inevitable. And what's going forth into the future is not mindless automata who passively experience challenges and fall over dead at a feather's push... what's going forward into the future are several billion human beings, which for all their faults, are still the cleverest things in the Universe we know about. By the way, trying to mitigate the fact we've overcome challenges by pointing out that there are still challenges in the world is just another way to try to dodge dealing with the fact that we have overcome challenges. I absolutely, positively guarantee you that if we survive another 20 years, that there will be even more challenges. I forsee no day coming where the human race can just sit back and declare total victory over challenges.

mikeash 12y ago
Who is saying that we're inevitably doomed because we're guaranteed to continue on our current course? The doomsayers are almost universally saying, we need to change course to avoid catastrophe. That's the complete opposite of being guaranteed to stay on course.
genofon 12y ago
>Looking back over the past couple of hundred years of us overcoming challenge after challenge, and drawing the conclusion that it is absolutely certain that can't happen more, is simply an absurd position to take on a rational basis. Looking a bit further there were society completely destroyed by themself (for example Easter Island http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/News-Events/Latest-News/News-Archive/2008-News-archive/Easter-Island-The-mystery-of-population-collapse http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/News-Events/Latest-News/News-...) It's good to have both forces, a conservative and a progressive, to maintain equilibrium, it's never a good idea to put all the eggs in one basket Edit: update link about Easter Island

mempko 12y ago

It also ignores massive collapses of civilizations throughout history because of ecological collapse. In the past they were localized, but we are becoming more connected with each other.

waps 12y ago

The problem with this argument is that it is both an argument for and against climate change, and so both for and against taking action on climate change. Humans have a history of (locally) causing massive pollution and other various disasters, like removing topsoil and destroying agriculture. Mining. Extermination of non-tiny animals in a large area. The list goes on. Every time this turned out not to be a problem. Will it now ? If so it will be the first time. But of course, climate change is not based on physical evidence, nor first principles. It is based on statistical trend analysis. Climate change only has basic explanations of mechanisms of change in the athmosphere, they cannot physically model a warming planet from first principles, only by extrapolating past observations into the future can predictions be made. Of course the truth is that both facts are chaotic. In other words, every event in human history is a first, and every change in the athmosphere is a first. For either domain, any particular event is without precedent, and will never happen the same way again. This does not exclude, of course, that one observes patterns. Temperature has been rising, and there are many historically analogous periods, but none that are quite the same. So will the same thing happen ? Unfortunately we know the mathematical theory underpinning this. The answer is sure to disappoint all involved : we don't know, and we don't know the chances either. And no algorithm can ever be used to arrive at a correct answer (note the problem is NOT that we don't know, it's that we can't ever know [1]). It is impossible. It is extremely obvious in human history. When we move past oil (and we will, in the next decade or two), there will be a key ingredient that wasn't there before that completely determines the outcome. It will be a first, that's for sure. Either we find a new energy source that economically blows oil out of the water, or it will be the first long-term sustained drop in global economic activity due to running out of energy. It may also be something different entirely (e.g. WWIII). Maybe thorium reactors start taking the world by storm. Nobody can tell you, with any amount of certainty, what this grand event will be, but it is a surety that it will come. What isn't entirely obvious is that the same is true for climate. Whatever happens, it will be a first, and there will be some event, some factor, that completely determines the outcome, but we can't see it just yet. Firstly, there is of course the potential for large external factors that are obviously so large as to be much more powerful than anything happening on the earth surface itself. Think volcanic activity or a comet, but likely there are 100 such events that could happen we don't even know about. Both events can both raise and drop the temperature by ridiculous amounts, far outstripping what we could ever do with co2. Other things could happen. Suddenly the sea floor starts leaking methane on a large scale, like what happens in any earthquake, but it is sustained. There's certainly enough methane down there to make human solar forcing look like a cow fart. Maybe we're wrong about cloud cover (still a possibility) and the situation simply self-corrects past a certain threshold, something that no statistical model of the past would ever have been able to uncover. Maybe we do get a single world government and actually stand a chance of fixing the situation. Maybe Saudi Arabia and Iran start doing what they've been threatening eachother with for 100 years now and Iran nukes the oil fields there. Maybe it doesn't correct at all, solar forcing happens, and animal life becomes very difficult for a few centuries/millenia. But what is an absolute certainty, as you say, is that the situation will not continue as it's been progressing so far. That is pretty much the only impossibility. Note that the obvious defense of climate theory here, that it results from deterministic actions, and so is not random/chaotic at all, is both correct and completely beside the point. Random systems are not chaotic nor vice versa. Deterministic systems that exhibit 3 properties are chaotic. None of them involves randomness. Neither chaotic nor random systems are predictable [1]. As to whether chaos theory really applies to climate theory the following can be said to summarize things : for 150+ years, the study of chaos theory and the study of climate were one and the same field of study. This has changed, but not for good reasons. There is a longstanding argument that long-term effect dampen the medium term unpredictability, but there is no proof for this, in fact there is plenty of contradicting evidence. And the last defence of climate theory is that climate theory only studies averages. They admit that short-term change might be chaotic, but long-term averages aren't. They certainly don't look it, after all. This flies in the face of the central insight of statistics : the central limit theorem (it basically states that any variable you study must be convergent, that statistics doesn't work on divergent series. And it doesn't, that can be easily tested). This argument is incompatible with statistics on a theoretical level. Therefore it does not matter if this argument is true or not. If this argument is true, then there is no correct way to calculate even an average. If it is false, then you simply can't correctly average certain variables (including a lot of climate variables). The "false" seems to me the sane option, but it doesn't even matter which you pick. Lots of scientific fields of study have these "existential" problems. That doesn't mean they have no value, just that they are fundamentally limited in a few ways. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory