I recently posted a link to Bill Mollison’s “Introduction to Permaculture”, which is available to borrow digitally on the archive.org [1]
One critical aspect of permaculture is water management. It’s usually one of the first things you consider when designing a home, a farm, a town, a city — even a whole region.
The crazy thing is, despite all the drought, most of our land is engineered to “ditch” water — get it off the land as quickly as possible.
This is because too much water can cause it’s own set of problems, and the flip side of drier summers can be flood-like rain in the wet months.
What permaculturists like to do is find ways to capture rain in a non-destructive way, through “swales” (winding excavations that slow the water as it moves through the land, distributing it from the valleys to the ridges, sometimes small ponds), and deep rooted perennial prairie grasses and trees that break up the hard pan souls and allow water to penetrate deeply. The overall aim is to recharge the underlying aquifer.
There’s lots of secondary benefits to this kind of whole-system approach, but at minimum we should be re-engineering our landscape to make better use of what we’re given every year.
I'd love to see more innovation in farming practices. I'm a huge fan of aquaponics. Uses around 10% of the water of current farming techniques. I've got my own setup in my backyard. Right now I'm working on getting it started, but I'm planning on experimenting with growing wheat, and if I ever get a large enough system, I want to try growing trees, like almonds, which are traditionally pretty water intensive. These aren't generally worth growing at a small scale, but I figure if it can be done then maybe it could scale up. I really want to try making a combine harvester for wheat that runs on rails along the aquaponics grow beds to help in the automation.
> The crazy thing is, despite all the drought, most of our land is engineered to “ditch” water — get it off the land as quickly as possible.
Which land are you talking about? In western Kansas, fields are terraced and capture rainwater to soak into the ground water table. Since they've done the terracing, gully-washers have been non-existent and most of the time streams are dry.
Drought like this, driven by global warming, was predicted in the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, published in 2007.
He read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree, with extensive references. Massive drought in the western U.S. was in his chapter for one degree of warming, right where we're at now.
Given what's in his later chapters, I'm not too happy about seeing him accurate so far.
It's been several years since I read it, but up through two degrees, things were a terrible mess but life goes on. By three degrees, the South American rainforest burns to the ground, and some major agricultural regions dry up because they depends on dry-season melt from glaciers that don't exist anymore. Hundreds of millions of refugees.
After that it got bad. I forget the details but by four degrees it looked to me like modern civilization would have a hard time staying viable, and by six it was hard to imagine our species surviving.
> by six it was hard to imagine our species surviving
I suspect before we got near extinction point there would be plans for the last few tens of thousands to survive underground/underwater/in domes/at high altitude/latitude etc. We have people talking seriously about a colony on another planet, after all.
All of those ideas are much more problematic than people acknowledge. I can only compare them to the badly conceived startup ideas that have gone under the minute easy money disappeared.
In terms of underground or dome living, that has been attempted at small scale and timeframe and with external support and failed. People talk about a lot of things, but ultimately only 12 humans have ever step foot on anything other than the Earth, for total of less than a week. Mars is 500 times further away than the moon. The underground stuff is most plausible and has lots of issues.
It is extremely frustrating to read stuff like this because it's easier and more likely to succeed to prevent global warming in the first place than it is to deal with the worst consequences.
It's entirely up to you. If you'd like a different name, let us know. If you're attached to this one, carry on.
The only thing we don't allow is trollish usernames, since they end up trolling every thread they post to. That includes special cases like using someone else's real name (we had a pseudo-Britney Spears the other day).
I can't reply to your first reply, but you completely misread me, "it's easier and more likely to succeed to prevent global warming in the first place than it is to deal with the worst consequences"
It is critical to human survival in the current and next generation to almost completely eliminate fossil fuel consumption, as well as mine and sequester vast amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. It will be easier and more likely to succeed to do that than create bio domes or extraterrestrial colonization.
To be fair how different is it from using a random name like 'growlist'? Since when does the handle someone uses to post correlate to the substance of said post?
Sounds like that would require significant planning and building. Who decides who “the last few tens of thousands” will be? What will everyone else think about that?
People talk seriously about a lot of things, doesn’t mean they are viable or realistic.
I'd bet those plans do exist somewhere. We had plans for pandemic defense too, but we didn't bother actually stockpiling masks and ventilators. At least for that we can afford to catch up.
The more intensive ideas like underground bases would have to be built well before modern civilization collapsed. They'd cost a lot, and we'll have less and less resources available as the damage worsens, so doing it in time might require more foresight than we've shown so far.
Just going to high altitude would be less protective but relatively cheap. But any small refuge would have to deal with a lot of well-armed people fighting over it, plus epidemics brought on by overcrowding and mass migration. It might be safer to be on Mars.
But sure, in theory a small population could eke out an existence in an enclosed base.
No. We didn't even have a plan for a pandemic, much less our extinction. There may have been some think tanks that have put some thought into it but I seriously doubt any plan was ever put into place.
EPICA core samples show fluctuations of 16 degrees over 100ky, but there is no evidence of ancient rainforests burning. I'm not denying anthropogenic climate change but it's difficult to take such predictions seriously.
And yes, I use throwaway accounts because the HN hivemind slaughters anyone that goes against the mainstream opinion. If you don't want to respond to me because of this, then don't. If moderators want to remove this comment, then by all means please do. But I don't know who it helps.
You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I don't think it's true that "the HN hivemind slaughters anyone that goes against the mainstream opinion", and I'm not seeing that in most of the comments you've posted.
I believe it's the range from hottest to coolest, over 100KY. Which of course is exactly like a 2-3C change over a couple of hundred years, so no big deal... right? /s
Probably a more relevant point - war, famine, plague and chaos are still things that happen in 2020. It would be helpful if the population at large accepted that bad things happen in prosperous places and prepare for them.
The climate-driven thing is topical, but you don't need climate change to have a 1 in 1,000 year drought. JIT production would have doomed any society up until around 1800AD and it really hasn't been tested all that well in the last 70 years in wealthy and peaceful nations.
A lot of the western US has been in drought nearly my entire life. They have been using the underground rivers nearly to depletion (Kansas) or importing water via massive pipelines from other states (California). It's been completely mismanaged even down to choice of crop (I.E. Almonds aren't drought friendly and should not be grown in places that have them).
I imagine if things get even slightly worse it could help lead to a collapse.
Hmmm, I would think the massive sucking dry of the aquifers by farms and cities using massive pumping schemes would be more to blame.
Once you pull the aquifer down far enough, the surface starts to dry up, plants stop holding the soil together, the microclimate changes, which reduces the water capture, etc, etc.
From the other end of the equation, if the aquifer is primarily surface fed and does not receive input from rainfall, the aquifer will drop regardless of the withdraw rate.
Drought is definitely not a variety of climate. Drought is a shortage of water supply, which can be caused by climate, or, for instance, a change in the flow of a river.
Episodic or seasonal droughts; nthe El Niño Southern Oscillation / La Niña Pacific Ocean cycle,[1] the Indian Ocean Dipole,[2], changes in weather due to vulcanism,[3] or more cataclysmically, asteroid impacts,[4], seasonal wet-dry cycles such as monsoons,[5] predictable megacycles such as the precession of Earth's apses (Milankovitch cycles),[6] and even large-scale changes in vegitation -- growth or decline of forests and wetlands can affect both micro- and regional weather as well as global weather patterns.[7]
Other possible factors are changes in ocean behaviours (especially currents) which themselves may be driven by other climate-related changes, or by changes to seabed (landslides, vulcanism), or joining or parting of landmasses (tectonics, sea level change). Changes in terrestrial hydrological patterns: mountain formation (usually geologically slow, sometimes not), changes to river courses, formation and draining of inland seas and lakes, ice-dam formation and flooding (eastern Washington's badlands are a stunning example).
7. https://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/climate-change/climate-ch... touches on this. One theory is that the decline in Native American populations following European contact, and epidemic disease, lead to a growth in forests in North America, with a resulting decrease in global atmospheric CO2.
Reading some of the comments on this thread, would like to ask if anyone knows the right term to research something that has long bothered me. There are of course people who disagree on science, data and facts. What I'm curious about is people who claim or are science and data-driven but believe that only certain scientific fields are engaged in organized collusion or mass delusion. For instance, a biologist I met who thought archeologists are covering up young Earth, an astronomer who thinks the NIST/ASCE 9/11 Study was complete fabulation (although they admitted they'd never read it), and engineers I know who insist climatologists are all just in it for the money.
While I understand why the general populace may hold such views, I'm curious as to if there have been studies concerning how a population of those who believe in scientific method can so strongly believe their peers in selective (usually other) fields are so differently motivated.
This one can be quite complicated, but I wonder how much of it is actually related to the quote that goes something like “science progresses one death at a time”. Which is talking about a bigger problem in science, which is that tenured scientists have either too much invested in their careers or too much vested in their models to allow the spread of upstart scientists’ ideas. There’s often a generational aspect (though don’t confuse this with age, since someone new to a field at 70 would be a younger generation) where newer scientists pick up on some thing that older scientists ignored and they start spreading it’s importance, then 20 years later, once the last of the old guard leave the field, it’s no longer downplayed and science can ‘advance’ (there is some risk that said thing wasn’t actually important, but for hard sciences data tends to trump all else).
So then the question to your question becomes more, are these contrarians representative of some new wave? As a trained economist, I’ve been trained to be skeptical of entrenched establishments, usually people will fail to believe that which threatens their paychecks. So the other question is, are there big incentives to encourage the established field to continue believing what it believes?
I will say there are a lot of crackpots out there, and novices tend to be wrong a lot, so the way science is currently done isn’t such a bad thing. But it would be wise to at least listen occasionally to cross discipline contrarians. They will often bring up arguments that are strong from their primary field, without being weighed down with baggage from the other field. You get an occasional Eli Whitney, or if you’re really lucky a John Nash.
One last thought. Hard sciences are hard for a reason, reality keeps them in check. And experiments allow for falsifiable hypotheses. There are a lot of sciences that rely primarily on observation, with little to no experimentation. This makes falsifiability tricky. This also means you’re going to see more general dissent associated with these fields (and if you don’t see it within the field that might be a red flag).
Sounds like you basically got there yourself in your last paragraph, but I think a term that might lead you down some fruitful reading is "motivated reasoning." It's often about maintaining some other desirable property (e.g. being accepted by their community; keeping a particular friend group; holding a belief system), and rationality takes a backseat to maintaining that property.
If you're curious to learn more about this, I really strongly recommend reading the latest IPCC Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers[1]. It's a pretty easy read, will take an hour or two, and you'll come out the other side with a really good understanding of the fundamentals.
[1] Here's the latest, from AR5 in 2014. It's a little out of date, but it holds up fine as an introduction (mostly what's new since then is "we've done nothing, so things are now even worse"). AR6 is due out in 2022. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/AR5_SYR_FINA... (3.5 MB)
Rainfall will be different. There will be more or less rain, at different times of the year, with a changed susceptibility to droughts and/ or floods. So yes, there may be more rain overall but - just as some places may get cooler - local climatic changes will be in multiple directions on multiple axes.
It won't be a smooth change to the new conditions either; there will be centuries of instability and infrastructure and agriculture will have to adapt to obsolescence every few decades.
I'm not a climatologist but I do know some of the reasons why:
The thermal gradient between the equator and the poles (a major driver) will weaken - the poles will heat up more quickly.
Ice at the poles drives some ocean currents.
Temperatures at different heights in the atmosphere will be affected differently.
Increased evaporation from oceans but higher ambient temperatures will change cloud formation unevenly.
Nights will cool down more slowly due to the 'blanket' effect of CO2.
The overall effects are interconnected of course, which is why there is so much work on modelling and so much work still to do.
Edit: I forgot to mention the effects on vegetation and landscape that will also feedback unevenly into the climate. e.g. rainforests depend on and generate a lot of rain; a rainforest may hit a tipping point where it is no longer viable and rainfall will then collapse over a large area.
To add to the other poster - the type of rainfall will change as well. There is an appreciable difference between the spring showers we used to get that rained 2 or 3 inches over a 12-14 hour period, and the gully washers we have gotten in the last five to ten years locally that drop 1/2 to 1 inch in an hour or less.
Hotter air can hold more water. In cooler climates, the air over a region will become saturated with moisture, causing precipitation. In warmer climates, the air is able to hold a lot more water before becoming saturated, therefore the rain falls somewhere else.
I imagine you'll get more rainfall over oceans; air currents over land will hold onto moisture until they blow over oceans, cooling them. I also imagine you'll get more rainfall on the sides of mountains which are already regions where warm, damp air rapidly cools causing precipitation.
Please don't take this as truth, I'm just theorizing, I'm not qualified.
> Global warming is umbrella term for 'Extreme Weather Conditions'
Yes and no. It explicitly means that the average temperature, globally, is increasing. Drastically so.
Extreme weathers is just one of the side effects. Others include: ecological collapse, insane scale population migration, catastrophic sea level rise, etc, etc.
None of this is actually true. Rain patterns are driven by ocean currents. And oceans are driven my Multi-decadal oscillations. Shifts in rain patterns due to these oscillations have always occurred.
It says number of "recorded" natural disasters. Do you really think there was only 6 natural disasters in 1920 in the whole world or is this data set a function of a time when the world was not: 1) interconnected by weather satellites and radios 2) globalized with regards to trade and 3) had open data and sharing between governments and standards for reporting on them
That means climate change is a natural function going back billions of years. See:
Sad but true. I live in the mountains of central Arizona. This year has been good (8 inches so far, our yearly average is 18 inches for the entire year). Last year was also good.
But, long term, the whole southwest is in a long term worrisome position.
It'd be interesting to hear plans for viable ways forward, instead of one side saying there is no problem, and the other side saying there is a problem and the only solution is X (which is a tragedy of the commons type solution). It'd also be interesting to hear the potential upsides (along with the catastrophic downsides) with what is going on. And, if there are absolutely no upsides and everything is going to end horribly no matter what we do, then how can we make the best of our remaining time?
> other side saying there is a problem and the only solution is X (which is a tragedy of the commons type solution).
You may want to broaden your sources, I can't imagine how you got the impression of "only solution is X."
There are all sorts of mitigation plans, all sorts of energy transition plans. Nobody know what will work in the end, what new unforeseen technologies will be developed, and how the costs will change as industry scales technologies, so there's a huge variety.
If your X == "stop emitting greenhouse gasses," well, there's tons of ways to do that. Many of which will massively increase economic productivity.
There are occasional large reports that spell out various routes to stop emitting GHG. There are resources like Project Drawdown that investigate these potential of a hundred different climate interventions. There are focused news media like GreenTech Media that focus on technology interventions. There are an abundance of governmental reports on ways to meet our climate goals, on all sorts of particulars, for example I was reading a great one last night about electricity of buildings in California or using renewable natural gas [1].
There's soooo many books, forums, advocacy groups, policy wonks, podcasts, news outlets, etc. focused on exploring what you say you want to hear. So many that it's hard to even suggest a starting point. Imagine if somebody said "I'd be interested in hearing more about computers and the internet," how would you start pointing them to the general resources for something so broad?
That's great to hear. Unfortunately, such perspectives don't seem to make their way to the news sources I generally consume (i.e. TV ads, news.google.com, etc.). The level of exposure I get tends to come across more as doom and gloom: all the icecaps are melting, climate catastrophes everywhere, etc. and so we must force these unwieldy CO2 based policies on the population (and maybe drastically reduce the population and economy). So, I think part of the strategy should be a better PR on the issue. But, maybe the non doom and gloom perspective doesn't sell as well?
This information is available if you go look for it. Start at the latest IPCC reports and branch out from there. It's a very large topic, your summary of the "sides" is wildly uninformed.
I always wondered, if there is a way to geoengineer clouds to refill those aquifiers.
Find out the main windband going there, go over the ocean, create a artifical thermic (via solar) and produce lots of moisture (ultrasonic foggers driven by solar?), creating rainclouds in a synethetic way.
Ultrasonic foggers would also increase the amount of salt in the air, so you’d have to run them far out in the sea.
Instead, flood Death Valley with ocean water:
1. Massive evaporative potential.
2. Moisture trapped by tall mountains replenishing the aquifer and making lush surroundings.
3. Massive hydro potential
4. Displaced species not seriously harmed since the moisture gradient would be large (are P. 2)
5. You could harvest the salt prolonging the suitability of the project (anyway measured in centuries if not millennia)
Basically you’d have the lushness of the surroundings of Salt Lake City (compared to the desert anyway). Except there would be a lot more moisture (lower salinity wrt it Salt Lake, moisture better trapped)
You could do the same thing in Egypt at the Qatara depression, except with potentially global benefits. Here the half of the Sahara could be turned into productive farm land.
I don't know if I would say I'm 'hoping' for this, but I'm certainly interested to see what kind of incredible projects will come out of the increased necessity brought on by climate change.
It seems like for a long time there's been resistance to really try to do 'big' things in NA. We hardly even build subways since the 60's -- too complicated, too expensive, too disruptive, too big! Maybe we'll increase our ambitions as a society when we're less comfortable.
Sigh. Let's destroy a vast ecosystem and fundamentally change the atmosphere of a hugely important agricultural region. Let's not solve one problem by creating 10.
What are these problems? I’ve asked (many) geologists and the best answer they come up with is salt seepage into the aquifer if it’s not done right, and a temporary increase of seismic activity due to relaxation from the added weight.
Look, the Three Gorges damn is much larger than this and much much more destructive. Entire cities disappeared.
But it also generates 22 GW of power.That’s an insane amount of coal that wasn’t burned.
So choose: burn coal. Burn U235. Flood valleys. Sashimi the birds. Carpet the desert with glass. Or massively decrease your standard of living.
For the record, I’m actually in favor of the last option.
Why do you think geologists are the right specialists for this question? I would imagine geological concerns would indeed be mild, but meteorological effects could be monstrous as the weather created by this new sea would massively impact local climates, which could have far-reaching downstream impact.
I agree with you, but at the same time, that is worth looking into because we are already changing the ecosystem fundamentally. We shouldn't just haphazardly try to geoengineer our planet, but geoengineering out planet is pretty much a necessity unless over half of us die and the rest turn into mostly pre-industrial methods of livings.
But you could have picked anyone of hundreds of other artificial lakes already in California. Ones that are deeper, with clean water instead of runoff.
You could also compare it to the Dead Sea, another body of water with no outlet.
The Salton Sea is already an ecological issue in terms of the run off and salinity you mentioned. Additionally there are economic concerns.
One of the plans is to use local geothermal power for desalination. Importing saltwater to freshwater lakes would disrupt ecosystems. Depth wouldn't necessarily be an advantage if we are are looking for evaporation.
I'd guess that it's more efficient to desalinate water and distribute it via pipelines than to go the extra step of getting it up to cloud height and then letting it fall down again.
It's all feasible, if you have cheap enough energy.
The installations themselves are not that expensive. The energy required is very expensive. And unless it's 100% 0-Carbon it will only exacerbate the situation.
Cloud seeding exists already. It works by distributing particles (I forget what of) in the air that water can coalesce around into clouds and then raindrops.
There are ethical and geo/political consequences though, since doing it is effectively stealing rain from another area.
The era of fossil fuels will go down in history, if any history is preserved, as the point where human ignorance was no longer held back by lack of capacity. We are so doped up on carbon-based fuel that we are completely oblivious to the total dependency our way of life has on it. A simple thought experiment by the way of "what does it take to produce a pencil"[1] will give anyone insight in this. Sometimes I feel like we just don't have the collective mental capacity to handle mega-issues like these. And in the end, just like an addict, unless we kick the habit we are collectively, as a species, going to walk hand in hand into oblivion.
I would be careful about blaming "human ignorance" because, case in point, a great many of us are aware of the climate crisis and feel the need to do something about it. In the US, for example, most of the component policies of the Green New Deal poll quite well across party lines.
The problem is that the climate crisis demands large-scale collective planning and decision making, and our systems for doing so have been completely co-opted by powerful economic entities. The actions available to the average citizen amount to putting aside everything in one's life to become an activist (which most people don't have the luxury to do), occasionally voting from a menu of pre-selected corporate-backed candidates, or making ultimately insignificant lifestyle changes (and even that has been subverted by economic powers through "eco-friendly" consumer products).
It's always helpful to look at a problem through the lens of power relationships before blaming "people" for being stupid or ignorant. Certainly some people are, but that doesn't mean it would solve the problem if they weren't.
It is ignorance though, both willing and unwilling. It's ignorance at the bottom, ignorance at the top, and ignorance at every level in between. Even our "solutions" are ignorant.
Every improvement in energy efficiency we have ever made has resulted in more energy use, but we still cling to the idea that if we can make everything just a bit more efficient then that will do it and our problem will be solved. It's a lie and it's a scam.
A green new deal isn't the solution and it's our ignorance that makes us believe that it is. All it does is greenwash all of the toxic things we are already doing. We can't solve industrialisation with more industrialisation.
We can look outside of our windows now and see the solution. It's doing less, it's working less, it's not polluting the world, it's consuming less and producing less. Radically so.
I don't disagree with you at all in terms of the solution. I didn't mean to imply that all conceptions of the term "Green New Deal" represent a solution, but simply that there is broad support for doing something. The policy advocates I take seriously absolutely recognize that a solution cannot constitute more industrialization and emissions, but they also recognize that if we radically do less under our current paradigm, the people who are barely scraping by now will be crushed.
In terms of energy efficiency, it is obviously crucial, but under our current system every improvement simply represents surplus capital which then goes towards growth and expansion. Changing that, again, requires collective long-term planning and decision making which is being subverted.
I think it is giving far too much (or too little?) credit to the powerful to say there is "ignorance at the top". There is not ignorance at the top. They have demonstrably understood this looming crisis for a very long time, and what we are seeing is the expansion and fortification of existing power relationships in the face of it.
If ignorance and lies are being spread at other levels of power, again, I think it's worth asking "by what means?" and "for whose benefit?"
> but they also recognize that if we radically do less under our current paradigm, the people who are barely scraping by now will be crushed.
It sounds like we should change that current paradigm too then.
We're on the conveyor belt to planetary destruction asking how do we slow it down instead of how do we get off. It won't be easy to get off, but it would be much better if we managed it ourselves rather than waiting to be flung off.
> I think it is giving far too much (or too little?) credit to the powerful to say there is "ignorance at the top". There is not ignorance at the top. They have demonstrably understood this looming crisis for a very long time, and what we are seeing is the expansion and fortification of existing power relationships in the face of it.
> If ignorance and lies are being spread at other levels of power, again, I think it's worth asking "by what means?" and "for whose benefit?"
I agree with basically everything you've said but I'd caution that "broad support for doing something" without much care as to what is a recipe for a lot of bad things to come to pass under the guise of fighting climate change.
Of course, I'm only challenging the notion that there is complete ignorance about the need for action. What that action looks like is up to us. I would say we are actually already on the path for "a lot of bad things to come to pass under the guise of fighting climate change." It is the explanation for a lot of the trends we are seeing like nationalism, the strengthening of borders, and the weakening of labor representation.
If that's truly your fear, you should support real (and acceptable) moves for fighting climate change as a way to head that off at the pass before it comes to be.
Today, if you make a list of all the fascistic bad things that governments have done "under the guise of fighting climate change" I'm pretty sure the set is empty, it's a zero item list. No government anywhere is a green fascist dictatorship, and it seems far-fetched to imagine one. But again, if you think that's a real risk, I urge you to support climate action now so that public support for drastic action doesn't build up.
You appear to be reading a ton of sentiment that isn't there into my comment. All I'm saying is that opportunities for big action give cover to those looking to do bad things that would not otherwise be acceptable and give cover for people who would not otherwise condone those bad things to ignore it. We need to be vigilant so that we don't say we're fighting climate change but instead wind up off in the weeds screwing over people.
And for the record, I am strongly in support of any progressive (as opposed to regressive) measure that has a net positive impact on climate change.
> We can look outside of our windows now and see the solution. It's doing less, it's working less, it's not polluting the world, it's consuming less and producing less. Radically so.
And this requires revolution because our whole economy is built around constantly working (and thus producing and consuming, if not rent-seeking, but we can't all be rent-seekers), even if all our basic needs were already met.
Every improvement in energy efficiency we have ever made has resulted in more energy use
Actually, quite a few countries never went back to their pre-2008 total energy usage, the primary example being the UK which invested heavily in efficiency.
Just for a second, try and imagine what world you would be living in without fossil fuels in the last 200 years. Would you have the computer or phone to write on? Would you have the internet to connect? Your house? Your food?
That's not to say it's not a good idea to change this, and to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. But to say this period was a period of human ignorance and "doped up"-ness is an extremely naive reading of human history.
Describing the era of fossil fuels as "doped up" is not a way of saying that the progress that was made was not good: it's a way of pointing out that it was unsustainable, and irresponsible. There's no reason to believe that computers or phones could not have existed in a different reality where fossil fuels were used in a more restricted manner, owing to their inherent dangers when over-used. Not only could the use have been restricted, we could also have compensated for the usage earlier, and made less irresponsible choices in how we perform our agriculture and industrial endeavors. The insight into climate change is not new, it's not something we're understanding just now. We just didn't care until now.
There's a reason people get hooked on drugs, it's a very pleasurable experience, while you're still using it.
I understand your sense of grievance, and often share it at an emotional level.
But what makes you think it would ever have been different? Any creature which evolved the behavioural flexibility to outrun curbs on its pullulation would eventually overtax its environment. It just so happens that human spread has been so extensive that our environment is the whole globe. It is only natural, in the strictest sense, that we will damage it, probably to the point of making it inhospitable to us (at least in current numbers & consumption levels). To think that we (merely a bright hominid, evolved for small-group social interactions) might transcend our biology to manage an entire planet is, well, wishful thinking at best.
It was a pleasant fantasy, with religious origins. That's all.
I don't think it's that special. When there are large benefits to humans and no apparent downsides, humans will pollute as much as Earth capacity allows. Just like any other organism before.
Humans aren't single cell organisms. We are self-aware organisms, arguably more intelligent than any other organism we ourselves have ever encountered. There are very apparent downsides to the benefits we are reaping, but for some reason we are incapable of acting as one in the interest of all, and instead seem to prioritize acting for ourselves, seemingly incapable of making the connection that the detriment of all will, in the end, also be the detriment of ourselves.
The economy functions in order to provide services to as many people as possible. In fact, with the marriage of state and business of today, the output is optimized to extract as much as possible and distribute to people beyond what can be realistically consumed. Our metric is growth of economic activity alone, and thus to detriment to long-term sustainability, prudent management of resources and effective outcomes of economic output.
I'm a small c conservative, and as part of this I care about the environment, and from my perspective there are a number of ways that the environmental movement don't do themselves any favours. Firstly there are those amongst them that come across far too preachy, in a way that can be a turn-off. Nobody constantly wants to hear bad news and moralising and be told they are personally responsible for all these problems, when most are just trying to get by in a system they didn't create, and have little real influence over. Secondly some of them oppose even the suggestion of technical solutions, preferring instead to emphasise that a kind of hair-shirt existence of drastically poorer lifestyles is all we have the right to expect, as if we've committed some kind of moral crime and only penance will suffice. Thirdly and related to both of the first two points, some (most?) of them are tightly bound to leftist political movements - sometimes tending to the extreme - which both immediately alienates people like me, and makes me suspicious that they are merely using the green movement as a vehicle for ulterior concerns, and indeed some of them are actually completely open about this:
'I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back.'
I could go on to point out the myriad inconsistencies in the positions of these groups e.g. pro-environment/pro-migration, pro-environment/anti population control, but I'll leave it there. If I think about it for too long it makes me angry because I think these groups are doing more harm than good, and I question whether they really care about the environment at all.
Not sure how you can care about protecting the environment while explicitly ignoring investigation into what’s harming the environment? Unless you believe human activity is not driving climate change, then of course environmentalism is linked to anti-globalization sentiment.
> Not sure how you can care about protecting the environment while explicitly ignoring investigation into what’s harming the environment?
Can you point to where I advocated for this? I was just pointing out that the groups that have chosen to attempt to monopolise environmental issues for themselves might deserve scrutiny. Remove these groups with ulterior motives - who in any case have proven themselves not particularly effective - and we might get closer to a more grown up debate. Isn't it funny how they choose to hammer rich, liberal democracies that are doing the most for climate change, whilst conveniently avoiding protest in countries where they might get beaten up/thrown in jail?
> Unless you believe human activity is not driving climate change, then of course environmentalism is linked to anti-globalization sentiment.
Well there's another contradiction for you then: anti-globalization/pro migration.
> Isn't it funny how they choose to hammer rich, liberal democracies that are doing the most for climate change, whilst conveniently avoiding protest in countries where they might get beaten up/thrown in jail?
Rich countries emit the most carbon per capita and are responsible for the lion's share of past emissions. So the first part of that sentence is rank BS.
Activists are obviously gonna activize in their own countries, most of which happen to be rich, liberal democracies. In case you care, even poor democracies have their domestic climate and environmental movements. Non-democracies usually don't have open political movements of any sort.
There are no points to be scored here. I'm just explaining, since you asked, that what you call "ulterior motives" are what environmentalists believe to be root problems.
Unfortunately, once you identify that human activity is harming the environmental, everything thereafter becomes politicized. Even science becomes subservient to the negotiation. We humans will continue to squabble whilst the world burns.
> If I think about it for too long it makes me angry because I think these groups are doing more harm than good
I'm don't think you're being fair here since both movements you mention achieved some measurable success last year and caused a surge in local and political conversation with the UK Government ultimately declaring climate emergency and setting a net zero emissions goal. I think the rest of your comment is more or less attempting to paint anyone involved with environmental activism as a preachy, contradictory hippy trope which isn't very realistic nowdays given how mainstream these issues are becoming.
It wasn't those people that pulled the US out of the Paris agreement. All they have done is complain whilst it's been the conservatives that have their hand on the tiller.
I would argue that at least in terms of the environment that wasn't a particulary 'conservative' act, wouldn't you?
It's possible for both sides to be wrong. But when people like John McDonnell - ex-Labour Shadow Chancellor in case you are not familiar with British politics, and the flavour of politician that's prone to quoting Mao in parliament - start talking about the climate emergency you know it's been hijacked.
Oh no, the conservative thing to do would be to conserve your environment and resources. That thinking isn't very Conservative though.
As an aside I never believed Labour would really tackle climate change, they are too in-hoc to the unions whose members often work in industries with high emissions.
If the cure is worse than the illness, why take the cure? Who are you going to save the planet for? I don't particularly mind humanity ending a few years after I've died of old age.
This strikes me as Luddite thinking, at best; 'I like things the way they are, so why change' type of thing. At worst, this comes across as short-sighted, selfish, and hateful.
Please explain yourself, so I can understand what you're saying.
Luddites were people that went out destroying the machines that replaced them in the workforce. Obviously their efforts were futile. Please explain how this applies to my thinking.
I'm not opposed to technology, I welcome technology. Isn't it very much like the Luddites to advocate for "scaling back" with our "pollution"? The motives are different, but the objective seems identical.
You can call me all the adjectives you want, but I do not care if earth explodes after I die. I just don't. I care for my benefits during my own life. I've said this before and I say it again, I do not have any moral problems with sacrificing other peoples benefits for my own benefits and neither should you. Doing this is insanity. Would you starve yourself to death so you can feed other people? Why should I care for other people? It's a silly notion. Maybe I'd care a little bit if I had children, but I don't.
This is all wonderful but could someone explain why scientists, who claim they can predict when (and if) a drought would start, at the same time can't predict when (and if) it would end? Case in point: nobody predicted that CA drought would end, yet it did.
I don't like seeing the kind of belligerent ignorance you're peddling going unchallenged.
The claim, in the first paragraph of the article, is:
"a megadrought as bad or worse than anything even from known prehistory is very likely in progress"
Note it is "very likely". This is not the same as being certain. Note the drought has already started (quoting Science Mag: "the period from 2000 to 2018 was the driest 19-year span since the late 1500s and the second driest since 800 CE").
As for the CA drought ending, the state is currently 35% in drought (https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/california). The rain that ended the drought seems like it was fairly inconsequential against the long term trend.
Yeah, I think I'm done believing models where the authors reputation is not on the line if the model turns out to be dead wrong. You can call it "ignorance", I call it "common sense".
Perhaps they simply can't make accurate predictions. The rest of their behavior can be easily explained in terms of self interest. While this may be overly cynical, I think it is worth keeping Occam's razor handy.
One critical aspect of permaculture is water management. It’s usually one of the first things you consider when designing a home, a farm, a town, a city — even a whole region.
The crazy thing is, despite all the drought, most of our land is engineered to “ditch” water — get it off the land as quickly as possible.
This is because too much water can cause it’s own set of problems, and the flip side of drier summers can be flood-like rain in the wet months.
What permaculturists like to do is find ways to capture rain in a non-destructive way, through “swales” (winding excavations that slow the water as it moves through the land, distributing it from the valleys to the ridges, sometimes small ponds), and deep rooted perennial prairie grasses and trees that break up the hard pan souls and allow water to penetrate deeply. The overall aim is to recharge the underlying aquifer.
There’s lots of secondary benefits to this kind of whole-system approach, but at minimum we should be re-engineering our landscape to make better use of what we’re given every year.
1: https://archive.org/details/introductiontope00moll/mode/2up