Unless we're speaking about things that literally are extinction events for us, the larger organism doesn't really care about extremely short term fluctuations; in the scale of a few hundred million years the current climate change (or the temporary existence of homo sapiens) doesn't make a meaningful impact.

Sure, the hunk of rock we call a planet will go on, and life will go on, but claiming we are the only casualty here is profoundly wrong.

The Venus atmosphere is 50x thicker than Earth's, Venus is also ~1.4x closer to the sun. Where will all this extra atmospheric mass and incoming radiation come from?

Reaching that tipping point is quite difficult though, and would require additional warming besides fossil fuels. Methane-based runaway warming maybe? Or even basic thermodynamic heat sink effects (which we'll reach in about 200 years at the current rate of growth in energy supply).

It looks like currently the TSI at Earth varies between 1315 and 1405 w/m^2 (a range of 90 w/m^2), which apparently has less effect on the temperature than the tilt of the earth. http://lasp.colorado.edu/lisird/sorce/sorce_tsi/index.html

Is James Hanson not "serious"? I agree that the consensus view seems to be that this is still an unlikely scenario.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130729-runaw...

As far as numbers go, I'm not a climate scientist, but I have done these kind of calculations before. If I figure out the tipover temperature, I'll post it.

"When surface temperature is below the critical point temperature (647K), the surface pressure is set as the saturation vapour pressure for that surface temperature, and the tropospheric temperature– pressure structure is taken directly from the saturation vapour pressure curve. Where the surface temperature exceeds the critical point temperature, we prescribe surface pressure as 2.6×107 Pa, corresponding to Earth’s surface water reservoir." http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n8/full/ngeo1892.html

So first, they do increase the thickness of the atmosphere, and the increased surface temperature would come from a possible future sun (not adding CO2) I guess. Second, I wouldn't put much stock in such simplified models.

I think human civilization has bigger problems in the mean time.

By lifestyle I mean supermarkets and restaurants and iPhones and planes ... all the stuff that we're so proud of as a society.

Scale relative to what, or when? I mean, yeah, we are certainly 'off the scale' for supermarkets, iPhones and planes compared to, say, the ancient Romans. But in fairness, they've got us well and truly beat on the ignorance, slavery and infant mortality scales. How do we rank in 'spiritual' terms relative to the Romans?

But taking your assertion as a given, what specifically do you suggest we do about this problem? My concern is that, in the near future, we may find ourselves climbing down a few rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, leaving 'self-actualisation' / spirituality way out of reach.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautama_Buddha#Biography

Nit: it's thread a camel through the eye of the needle, not fishing line

http://www.biblicalhebrew.com/nt/camelneedle.htm

We seem to have established that, for 'many', there's no relationship between material wealth and spirituality (although the people replying to you appear to disagree, but I'm going with your notion). And I think the original post was suggesting that climate change is a consequence of a lack of spirituality.

If we take all the above as true, wouldn't this all logically suggest:

(a) We're doomed regardless of how many solar panels / wind farms we build, because the root cause (lack of spirituality) remains unaddressed; and

(b) To avoid being doomed, we should devote the bulk of our finite efforts and resources towards general public achievement of spiritual enlightenment? And only after this has been achieved, only then might we be able to stave of climate change?

Or is something else being suggested?

Just my opinion, but I'm not so certain that there's either (a) no relationship between 'spirituality' and material circumstances, or (b) that there's an inverse relationship, as is suggested below (i.e. poor people are more spiritual). I can't see how either of these propositions are self-evidently true. The latter is a nice thought, I guess ("oh, he said the meek! oh isn't that nice!"). It's a similar idea to that of the 'noble savage' I suppose.

Going with your notion (i.e. no relationship): I think catastrophic climate change would significantly diminish material resources, in practically every respect. Even 'empty space' will be in shorter supply, due to mass migrations towards relatively unaffected geographies. IMHO, these sorts of 'material privations' (and I don't mean your voluntary weekend fast, here) would bring out the worst, most desperate behaviour in most people, particularly if experienced en masse. I don't think these would be people freed from petty material concerns, and therefore able to pursue 'spirituality'. I suspect they'll instead be people doing whatever it is they need to do to increase the chances of their family's survival.

IMHO, the social dislocation caused by catastrophic climate change is one of the few things I could see leading to a violent breakdown of social order, or to the next global scale war. I tend to think these sorts of adversities would lead one away from spiritual enlightenment (unless dying counts as spiritual enlightenment).

Would you contend that people were generally more 'spiritual' during the Great Depression? Were they more spiritually enlightened during the world war that followed? Or does one thing have nothing to do with the other?

To me it is clear we should do something about it but that is unpalatable to many or even most people because they think their lives will be worse without cheap abundant energy. I think they are wrong.

On cheap abundant energy, I come at it from the other side of things. You're probably right that those is 'first world' countries (like myself) could be more conservative and less wasteful in our energy usage. And we've already got more than enough 'stuff', and having a little less is unlikely to hurt us. My concern is more about developing countries, particularly large ones like India and China that are rapidly industrialising. It's not that people's lives in developing countries will be worse if they halt this process, it's more that they will be condemned to living significantly poorer, and shorter, lives because of a problem they're mostly not responsible for (and that other countries have gotten rich from).

The latter two in particular have rapidly growing energy consumption, and, to be fair, they are making some attempt to generate energy from viable non-co2 sources (for instance, both are strongly pursuing nuclear fission programmes). That said, the overwhelming majority of their current increases in generating capacity comes from constructing new coal-fired plants.

Asking people in these countries to lower their energy use seems extremely unfair: it's like asking the poor to eat a tax-hike to repair the budget. I suspect they'd find it quite intellectually insulting if we were to suggest that instead of continuing to make material improvements to the quality of their lives, they should instead pursue 'spirituality'.

Bad accounting is killing our planet. Neglecting important parts of the balance sheet creates perverse incentives.

But as much as I think the human species will win a Darwin award, there's really zero risk of "killing our planet". I mean, one could sterilize the entire surface of the Earth, and the Archaea would hardly notice. They extend kilometers below the surface.

I can't argue spirituality, enlightenment. "If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him."

While I personally believe we'd all be better off reconnecting with awe, wonder, our place in the universe... When's the last time you watched the Milky Way? Heard the birds singing without the roar of airliners? ...Those beliefs aren't actionable.

There are organizations that seek to preserve the possibility to view the night sky with minimal light pollution (http://darksky.org). I went to a campsite in New Mexico that is designated as a dark sky sanctuary recently -- it was amazing.

Science shows us there is no meaning, purpose, or grand truth. All life is a 4 billion-year old chemical reaction... born by chance in the universe's beautiful dance of physics, fueled by energy and bound by entropy. From dust to dust, the billions that came before us are as forgotten as those that live and those yet to be born.

But, yet, there is meaning.

We don't exist at the abstraction layer of quarks or microseconds, nor do we exist at the scale of galaxies or millennia. Questioning human existence at those levels is a philosophical divide-by-zero. We exist at the human layer, in the context of society, on the scale of under a century. Science gives us a solid foundational existential philosophy for higher order philosophy, which we can probabilistically derive from the evidence available and test as rigorously as any other aspect of our understanding.

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

So anyway, the planet will be fine. Human civilization may collapse, given the risk of crop failure and war. But even humanity will survive.

Edit: Many other species won't be so lucky. Maybe there are moral implications there. And certainly there will be practical implications. That will be part of crop failures.

Whenever I get told a corrolary of 'the planet is more important than humanity' I automagically hear:

'look, I'm not really into this scientific thing where you guys seek truth with experimentations, logic and deep thinking. I guess I could, but frankly I don't see the point, I'm just going thru life, because, well, because. But, you see, I'm pretty sure this time we're having the last drop of our civilization because a {insert big fear here} is coming upon us and we can do nothing about it!'.

This has been going since the beginning of humanity I guess. Differents type of minds, as aliens to each others as are cats to dogs. Greek philosophers to roman plebe. Galilee and Copernic to their so-called peers. Technologist to ecologist.

That's the real danger we are still facing since the beginning: we're at the same time forced to collaborate to do something really meaningfull for our children (free and sustainable energy/food, freedom from work, long and diseases-free lifes, space-faring, etc), and utterly unable to communicate and seek consensus in a very efficient way.

I don't think anyone really believes the giant ball of iron we live on is alive or can be killed.

"Killing the planet" is shorthand for "making the planet inhospitable and causing harm to a majority of its living inhabitants" or something like that.

So why do so many people feel compelled to derail conversations about global warming by pointing out at length that the earth itself is not literally going to be killed?

It's not informative and not helpful.

We wouldn't be here, but for the last major extinction event.

Anyway, I'm not arguing for inaction. But I do think that it's too late. Exponentials and positive feedback are full of surprises.

Everyone knows that there will continue to be life on earth. Everyone knows that noone will care 1e9 years hence.

Are you suggesting we shouldn't care either?

Are you just trying to be "more correct" than other people by pointing out literal falsehoods in things that they've said even though noone is actually taking it literally? (That qualifies as a strawman argument)

Either way, your statement is not leaving anyone more informed than they were before, and carries an attitude of resignation/despair which is not helpful.

You're very right about positive feedback and it is almost certainly too late to avoid a ton of damage. But whether our children will be able to live healthy happy lives 80 years from now in the places they've grown up (or anywhere) is still an open question and could very well depend on how well we get our act together over the next decade. There is some urgency here, and we should strive as much as possible for our discourse on the topic to be productive.

I am not suggesting that we shouldn't care.

Maybe you're right that there's still a chance of averting catastrophic impact if "we get our act together over the next decade". That's what I've been arguing for decades. But in recent years, the signs of increasing rate of change and positive feedbacks have become much clearer.

What are the chances that the US will cut CO2 emissions by 50% in a decade or two? I'd say that it's about zero. Suburbanization is a huge conundrum. Plus all that old infrastructure. Not to mention the fact that a substantial minority thinks that it's all bullshit, that God is on our side, and that it's all part of immanent Armageddon.

I agree. But so does everyone else. So why point it out unless to argue in favor of despair?

Placing a sufficient price on CO2 emissions would probably do it. Odds of getting our legislatures to do this may be slim, but why not try?

> Exaggeration doesn't help the argument that anthropogenic climate change is a serious problem.

I'm not exaggerating. The EPA's forecasted temperature increase over the next 83 years is a confidence interval with upper bounds at 12F for the USA and 8.6F for the global average. (https://www.epa.gov/climate-change-science/future-climate-ch...) A change of that magnitude will have tremendous consequences:

- Changing rainfall patterns and foundering marine ecosystems might threaten public food and water supplies.

- The resulting economic fallout might create large migrations of people who will have to compete for space in regions of the world already overfull.

- Large regions of the country would become unpleasant to reside in on account of the temperature alone.

- Violence and poverty could become widespread.

These seem to me to be genuine threats that it is realistic to believe that people alive today might face in their old age.

I just think that focusing on human impacts has the best chance. Indeed, your examples are all about human impacts.

When I read "kill the planet", it seems about much more than that. Maybe that's just my ecohippie spiritualism ;)

Why?

It doesn't look like we are staring extinction right in the face.

Any talk of reasonable influence on climate is over a few centuries.

So why do do you its 'late'?

But yes, probably not extinction.

More likely is collapse of industrial civilization. That will cut CO2 emissions, and climate will recover is a few centuries. Many other species will go extinct in the process, however. It'll be a major extinction event.

From wikipedia, Holocene extinction. By what other metric could you possibly define "killing the planet" than killing the life on it?

I hate this argument because it feels like moving goalposts. For one thing, I don't think its hyperbolic to say that an uninhabitable planet is dead. It's dead as far as it matters to us. Moreover its so hard to read something like that and not feel like the message is "Don't worry, it'll be okay". If life is reduced back to single cells, is that okay? Will the planet still not be dead? If there is still water and organic molecules, so that life may evolve in the coming millions of years, is the planet still alive?

Due directly to human actions, species are dying faster than they ever have. Global warming has the potential to erase more species than ever before. Given the speed it's happening at, it may be a very real possibility that plants will not be able to adapt to changing conditions. Given that, it may be a very real possibility that the overwhelming death will cause runaway greenhouses faster than new plant and ocean life can reverse it, which would end all life on earth.

Life on earth would probably survive a nuclear holocaust. If you wanted to have the beast chance of permanently killing all life on this planet, this isn't far off from how you would do it. Push as much co2 as possible into the air as quickly as possible to change global conditions enough to kill all plants at the same time. If you just try to nuke everything, you'll leave a niche that other organisms will expand into. It's like antibiotics- you can't take just one huge pill, you need to keep taking them to make sure absolutely nothing survives.

Saying we aren't killing the earth is like watching someone that is getting stabbed repeatedly and saying he still has blood left.

This makes no sense. How exactly an abundance of CO2 will "kill all plants" given that they are thriving on it? Let's say temperature rises further, like +10C rise. Desertification may kill some plants, sure. In the meantime, huge swaths of Siberia and Canada will stop being permafrost and transform back into thriving bogs, marshes and forests.

Moreover, there were times on Earth with widely higher temperatures. We are talking thousands of ppm of CO2 in the air and tropical flora on Antarctica. This didn't "end all life on Earth" at all.

A 3C rise will kill a lot of plants. A 5C rise will kill most of the plants, and if they can survive the change in biodiversity, the release of methane and CO2 from everything rotting, starving predators, and extreme weather and fire, life on earth might survive and eventually recover after a few hundred thousand or million years.

A 7-10C change over 300 years would, most likely, kill every single thing on the planet that was not transplanted by humans. There are only two ways to survive that without human intervention.

1: Be wide-ranging enough to spread very quickly to areas that become habitable as they open up. A few times a century the entire ecosphere will have to pack up and move to live in the changing climate as floods and deserts move things around. These plants would find it impossible to thrive over the long term and have very little chance of surviving.

2: Literally just tank the entire thing start to finish. For most plants, they will not be able to significantly change their range over this time. In ideal conditions yes, under the massively destabilized climate -disappearing coasts, halting ocean circulation, temperature swings from freezing to sweltering- no way.

The plants in northern Canada would have to be able to survive in tropical heat as well as they currently do in ice and snow. Plants in the tropics would have to survive 100 meters underwater. As the permafrost melts, plants will spread northerly- but the climate will catch up. Ironically it would be better if we killed 99% of plants right now so they could beat the climate. As it stands in a hundred years tropical vines will not be winding their way between New England evergreens- they will be dust in a desert. The pines outside my window will be choking in 40C weather. Boabab trees wouldn't survive in the soil here and Redwoods won't survive in Greenland.

NB: I don't mean to say I think the total collapse of life on earth is likely at this point in time. I think at present even humans are pretty likely to survive what's coming even if we stay our current course for 30 years. However I would give it better than 50% odds that a 7C+ warming would kill multicellular life. Most of the assumptions that you have to make to lead to warming that high necessarily kills everything, eg ice melting, circulation stopping, humans not giving a fuck, etc.

It's like setting up a bomb, and it has multiple stages. You load co2 into the air until the bomb goes off, causing enough temperature change to cause large desertification. That releases even more stored carbon. That triggers the polar melt feedback, which triggers the permafrost melts, which triggers even more deforestation, which triggers wildfires and weather, which trigger even more polar melting, which wrecks ocean circulation, which fires the clathrate gun, and suddenly there are a handful of species in an earth that is set to random and they will inevitably die out.

But plant life? Are you thinking phytoplankton?

If you instead pumped a toxin into the air, you would kill a great deal of things right away but as the concentration of poison rose they would develop a resistance. Thats the slow, traumatic burn, which is global but survivable with enough biodiversity.

If you nuked everything, that would kill almost everything on earth but after a couple decades it'll be relatively survivable again. Life only has to stick around a little bit- spores and seeds is safe places, that by some freak coincidence managed to survive the radiation. Also survivable.

With CO2, nothing happens until suddenly it does. There is a massive change in temperature that kills off biodiversity at a rate higher than ever before- we haven't even hit significant changes and we're experiencing this already. Then, once the biosphere is vulnerable, it gets hit with millenia of instability and extreme problems. There might be pockets that are shielded from this- if they sustained large, diverse populations through the massive initial changes.

It's like the KT extinction on steroids. KT was ~10,000 years- a CO2 bomb would happen even faster and last even longer.

But killing off plants? Can you cite something for that?

It seems to me that preventing collapse of human civilization is the thing to focus on. It's what most people will care about, right? And it's far more likely than total global ecosystem collapse. I mean, we may see the first signs within a few years. The "end of all life on this planet" is something that humanity will never get near, because it'll be long gone before it happens.

The short term problem is probably ocean acidification, although 3+ degrees will directly kill a ton of food production and plant species. Ocean acidification is usually thought of in terms of corals and shellfish but it can also lead to a collapse of the ocean food chain when nearly all zooplankton die. Oceanic plants can survive acidic conditions and will thrive without predators or competition, but that leaves out the fact that the ocean will now be full of dead, rotting things. There are an incredible number of ways that scenario can become a nightmare. Poison by toxins, infection caused by too-rapid growth, explosion of predators as they feed on detritus, etc. A healthy population is required to survive a huge climate change, and there are a million ways for that to go wrong.

The major catastrophe would be 5+ degree warming, which has the potential to collapse current ocean circulation patterns including the nino cycle. That would cause major devastation to biodiversity, deoxygenation of the ocean, and kill most life by land area and ocean volume. Then the isolated patches of life would have to deal with extreme weather, air quality, acidity changes, water and temperature changes. The survivors would have to stabilize the biosphere and live for millions of years with an unprecedented lack of biodiversity, until they could evolve. Species die spontaneously all the time. Tasmanian devils developed contagious cancer.

The Sahara used to be a jungle. The wind changed a little bit, and converted everything to sand. As the climate changes, areas will be destroyed- even if they stay green, biodiversity will be massively reduced and those places will no longer be sustainable long term. Even if rain starts falling in the Sahara, it will be decades or centuries before it grows.

In a normal extinction event growth is moderated over tens or thousands of years, in a smooth transition to other species. We have a century until we reach the same changes.

Say you have a field with grass, moss and cows. Geological warming kills the grass over a hundred years, and the moss slowly grows in it's place, and all is good. If anthropogenic warming kills all the grass overnight, The cows eat all the moss except for a little hidden under a rock, which is killed when a cow dies on top of it and blocks the sun.

>It seems to me that preventing collapse of human civilization is the thing to focus on. It's what most people will care about, right? And it's far more likely than total global ecosystem collapse. I mean, we may see the first signs within a few years. The "end of all life on this planet" is something that humanity will never get near, because it'll be long gone before it happens.

Wow, that may actually change my feelings on reading this sentiment. It's still a little horrifying that we have to wait until humans are affected, but I do understand how someone could look around and say "Yep, still looks alive to me!". If focusing on the threat to humanity engenders the threat as a whole, I'm all for it.

Of course, the breakneck speed of extinction is still horrifying. Each day means hundreds of species that I will never see, and I'm already pissed about missing giant sloths. We only killed those 10,000 years ago.

With luck, we'll only get part way into 2, and it won't be too bad. But those positive feedbacks are frightening.

Many asteroids and barren planets are also going to be fine, but I don't think anyone cares about that. People care about the future of human civilization, which is very much at risk.

Personally, I care more about the future of consciousness than about the future of humanity, per se.

edit: /mute/moot/g

Science: "Climate change will destroy human civilization."

Big oil: "They lie. No problem. Anyway, God gave it all to us."

The iPhones and the planes and the supermarkets are not the problem - they are fruits of civilization and represent our progress as an intelligent species, at least in one regard.

Also, I don't think "ego-centric values" will be going anywhere, they seem to be rooted in our biology, from which dominant societal values are ultimately derived.

Of course, biology and basic societal expectations are not the only drivers of human behavior. Intellectual ideas, abstract thought, understanding of nature (in the broad sense), coupled with our faculties of emotion together act as essential motivators, and are often incorporated by society as general expectations and norm.

Obviously, taking a simplistic, power-driven, ego-centric behavioral paradigm to an extreme without incorporating the bigger picture into our perspective is a major mistake. We become short-sighted, basic and ignorant, leading to both practical problems as well as a philosophically undesirable state of humanity.

The concept you distinguished as one of the potential solutions - spirituality - and particularly your example of a physicalist/pantheistic spiritual outlook on the Universe that is not constructed dogma but rather a mental interpretation of scientific fact - is precisely the sort of thing that needs to be more common place. I have a hunch that a philosophy of that exact nature will be embraced in the not-so-distant future.

We are intelligent agents, isn't it common sense that we take as much knowledge as we can into consideration before we act, rather than being exclusively animated by immediate, manifest but somewhat animalistic motivators?

Douglas Adams talks about a theory by Mark Carwadine in Last Chance To See[1] in which he tries to explain why the Kakapo has a terribly slow and inefficient mating habit. The idea is that basically, without mechanisms (like predators) to keep them in check, any population that reproduces too fast will trigger a chaos theory-like strongly oscillating population count (coinciding with the resources available per capita at any previous sample point) and thus, most likely, flatline at zero at some point.

Maybe that's our problem: We were able to remove many constraining factors limiting us as a species, but can't let go of the habits that made us succeed so far. Of course, that doesn't only apply to reproduction, but also to resource consumption as a whole. On top of that, our ability to exploit fossil resources only amplifies this effect, because we were able to continue without more immediate consequences so far.

In that sense, one might argue that even without climate change, we would have to change our ways in order for our lifes to remain sustainable.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Chance_to_See

I call this the "abstinence based" approach to solving environmental problems. Guilt and shame and preach people into denying their "sinful nature." It works about as well as telling teenagers not to have sex.

We have made a near idol out of technology because the benefits of modern technology and all its associated energy consumption are massive. Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth, these benefits are the most massive for the poor. The major driving force of consumption and pollution growth is not the relatively small number of super-rich buying more jets, but the rise of billions of people from hand-to-mouth poverty into something beginning to resemble at least a first world lower-middle class lifestyle.

Sitting in a rich Western country and telling them they're sinners for wanting these things is not going to work. It's going to get you ignored. It's getting you ignored.

The way to save the planet is to stop the feel-good moralism and start treating this problem as what it is: a technical problem that can be solved by scientists and engineers. Replace fossil fuels with solar, wind, and nuclear power and give out free condoms to teenagers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_...

If you pay attention to the large scale developed economies on that list, you'll notice a large difference between the CO2 emissions of, say, France or Switzerland vs. the United States or China. All of these nations are full of mobile phones and computers and high speed transit systems, but all are not equal in terms of their environmental impact. Clearly some are doing what they are doing in ways that cause less environmental harm than others.

It is possible to maintain and even continue to develop our "sinful" lifestyle while reducing its footprint.

Not only is this possible, but it's the only option. There are still billions of people living in poverty, and those people are going to ignore your rhetoric. It's their desire not for opulence but for basic health and dignity that is going to push the planet past 600-800ppm CO2 in this century... unless we find ways to satisfy that desire without trashing out atmosphere.

We will solve these problems by innovating, or we will sit around and pray and moralize all the way to hell.

The liberal approach to CO2 emission is solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, and EVs. The liberal approach to STDs and teenage pregnancy is for the man to put a rubber thing on his wang.

The American right ignores this problem entirely, so they haven't even made it that far. On sexual externalities they are consistently conservative or reactionary.

Man this pseudo spiritual hippie bullshit annoys me to no end. This philosophical shift toward absurdism is infuriating and every time I read something like this my blood boils. I have nothing against you personally but lets be honest here; the ONLY reason you can say this crap is simply because people competed, lost, got ahead and in process elevated your living standard so much that you can now sit behind a computer screen today and be pretentious and ungrateful about what society have achieved so far.

You being an observer of what is does not lead to anything meaningful. And if you find meaning in that, then great. More power to you! But to claim that iPhones, planes and supermarkets are not things to be proud of is a sign of nothing other than ignorance. You clearly can't see the level of pain and suffering that had to be endured for us as a species to get to this point. That's why you can make such claims. You simply lack perspective.

If overcoming your own biological limitations (flying) is not enough of a miracle for you, then... I dunno wtf is.

Edit:

Just take a look at the replies below to see what I mean. People lack perspective. Most haven't read enough history to understand that we are making one of the BEST trade-offs humanity has ever seen. The question never was IF environmental degradation is okay, which they think it is. Instead, the question has always been HOW MUCH is okay and what do we get back in return?

In these people's minds, virtue signaling far outweighs the alleviation of human suffering. They do not understand that the trade-offs we are making is what allows them the freedom to speak their mind and gives them the ability to effectively communicate using the medium they are currently utilizing. Rather than focusing on solving a problem, they instead praise mushroom eating as the way forward.

The problem with the green movement as a whole is that they do not understand economics or trade-offs. If they could communicate and argue from a reasonable and realistic position, there is no doubt in my mind that the green movement would have been embraced by all.

Even though you're grossly exaggerating what I've said in the comment, I'm still going to answer with a rhetorical question:

What good is all that shit if the price for that is the suffering and death of our children and eventual end of our species ?

This is what the article is really about. ...

My perspective comes from the summers spent with my grandparents - in the village where life was as it has been for thousands of years. They produced no garbage, they breathed clean air and drank clean water. Did they suffer ? Yes of course, from time to time, that's how it's always been.

Frankly, with all our advanced technology, knowledge, medicine, I think we are a lot more unhappier as a whole - you said it yourself, "my blood boils" - and for what ?

Anyway, I think you're angry at the wrong person, because I think we can have both magic and sustainability - if we just change our philosophy. We can look at the last 100 years or so as a 'growth spurt' for humanity - we had to break eggs to make an omelet; now it's time to get back into shape.

Use the best of magic and our ability to create new one and integrate it into a sustainable system, which treats nature as an organism and not as 'resources' and we might be able to survive it.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a time in history when life was better than it is today. And if you did find one, it would be so long ago than population levels were a fragment of what they are now.

We can't go back. Get that idea out of your head. The question is how can we steer the ship.

That's nice and dandy but what good is it if we can only sustain that maybe another 50 years if we're lucky?

Of course, the industrial revolution was a force of economic pressure, not a decision the world came together and decided on in unity.

So to prevent the industrial revolution would have required a suppression of freedom and property rights unlike has ever existed in history. On a world scale.

You mean how we can fix the leaks.

Thinking that organising a worldwide migration to another planet is going to be a practical option is as absurd as thinking that moving back to a pre-industrial society is.

"May you live in interesting times."

Seriously, get a grip and stop being self-absorbed. Read history before you long for something you've never actually truly experienced!

Leaving aside your silly anger about "hippie bullshit" (really?) and regardless of our history of "competing, losing, getting ahead", what would you propose? Are we just going to brace for pain, and then compete over diminishing ressources?

Consider: all of environment protection legislation that we take for granted now was once "hippie bullshit".

No, all the environmental damage we now defend and wish we could take for granted was once, and remains, valid science. Bio-time, bio-space, and the folding and unfolding of DNA across the ages are in fact hippie bullshit.

[1]http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...

In part; I think environmental policies and technologies are very strongly influenced by economics and capitalism. I mean they managed to monetize CO2 emissions via emission rights. It's making money out of vapor. There's probably a few people getting very rich off of the emission rights market.

The other one is alternative energy sources. Solar panels are a good example; they're expensive, have a limited lifespan (10-15 years), and yet provide a huge amount of goodwill and feel-good. There's a lot of people getting very rich off of a product that, in the end, is not actually sustainable and does little to nothing to alleviate the emissions problem - not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime.

I'd argue the only environmental protection stuff that is still primarily motivated by hippie bullshit is things like the ban on whaling and the conservation of nature areas. Neither of which has much of an impact on the environment, unless it's on a huge scale (like idk, spanning all of the Amazon plus all of the deforested areas of the past fifty years).

That is no longer true [1].

[1] http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-04021...

No, it's making money out of the process of assigning a limited resource to the most economically efficient use.

...not when the production of a solar panel costs more energy than it'll generate during its lifetime.

This is just rubbish. The embodied energy payback period of solar PV was already under 4 years a decade ago.

Your argument makes it sound like most people actually have an option to participate in progress or not (they don't realistically) or that the people making the decisions on tradeoffs are doing so in a rational way that benefits everyone. (They aren't.)

If you view progress as some kind of struggle of the species, like a force of nature, then yes it is indeed grand. If you view progress in the light of power struggle between factions in the species, then most progress actually benefits very few people.

I mean, despite the fact that people have known that plumbing is awesome for several thousand years most people still defecate in a hole in the ground.

I get it. That "captain-planet-mother-gaia" bullshit gets on my nerves too. But so does "economics is a science like physics". While the former is obnoxious, the latter is dangerous.

It would be if the gains were on the level that would justify the adoption of whatever was/is proposed. Give me any tech, green or not, with 10x improvement on what currently exist and I can bet you anything that no amount of capital or vested interest will be able to oppose it - there are exceptions ofc but I would argue that those are far from the norm (if they weren't no progress would ever take place which we know is not true).

>If you view progress as some kind of struggle of the species, like a force of nature, then yes it is indeed grand.

I believe indeed in this former view you describe here. We could argue which of the two views you present is more true than the other, but I think there is plenty that speaks for both. I choose to believe in this version as long as there is evidence to support it.

> But so does "economics is a science like physics". While the former is obnoxious, the latter is dangerous.

I could not agree more. In fact, I think you are the kind of guy who I could sit with and talk to for hours and we'd get somewhere. I don't believe economics is like physics. In fact, I believe economics, like politics, are more like religion. Case and point being the clusterfuck that is the rule of Keynesian economics for the past 80 years or so.

When I say economics I refer to the rational human ability to understand trade-offs. Not all agents are equally capable of it and not all care as much. But, with that said, it does not take a genius to understand what I wrote above (which you originally replied to).

I firmly believe that most of these hippie green suckers wouldn't want to live in the world they themselves describe as ideal. I think they vastly underestimate the prices of things and how much of their living standard is dependent on energy as a whole. It is short-sightedness that pisses me off. You see people complain about living cost being too high in one thread and later on see the same person talk about how we should be greener regardless of cost. This cognitive dissonance buggs me to no end...

Being able to see the trade-offs beyond what is in front of you is what, in my book, classifies as economics. Perhaps I should have been clearer in my definition. But I hope that this clarifies to you where I stand on the matter!

Despite the fact that I'm about as liberal as a person can get, my problem with the fossil fuel argument is that places like New York state ban fracking but buy natural gas from Texas and Louisiana. So it's OK for us to screw up our environment, but it's not OK in their back yard. Louisiana is so captured by the energy companies that its one of, if not the most, polluted states in the country. New Yorkers get to make money off of energy, use the energy, and complain about how its produced? Fuck that in the ear.

The thing that bothers me the most, though, is the way that we (meaning the democratically elected government) can't use the levers of power to force the massive economic engines that are the energy companies to finance the shift to other technologies. Like a sovereign wealth fund, or something like that. The way it works now, the people fund research and give tax breaks to companies in lots of sectors that are then allowed to privatize the profits that get generated from that investment. Why can't we get part of the profits? Instead of fighting over taxes, it should be viewed as actual ownership and return on investment.

I know that the idea would make a lot of libertarians throw up in their mouth, but I don't think that you can really ever keep government out of markets. It makes the markets. If it operated from an ownership perspective then it can use that ownership to make the public's concerns a real fiduciary issue. It's already picking and choosing winners and losers. It always has. The question, at least as it seems to me, is on whose behalf is the government going to intervene? It's going to intervene. Should that be only to benefit the wealthiest, or is there a way that we can force the markets to honor democratic will without completely screwing it up. I don't know, but I can say this. I don't believe in business anymore as a means to solve any problem. Over the course of my life I have only seen business prove time and time again that short sighted, short term, growth is more important than any other factor.

Even with the way that government has colluded with business to help create the situation we are in, at least government has even notionally democratic institutions while business are inherently un-democratic. I'm not a shareholder of Exon by birth, although I am an American.

I don't know. I'm not optimistic. I do agree with you though about the faux hippie thing. That kind of woo woo BS ends the conversation just as fast as saying "Jesus will fix it".

This guy gets it; he's laffin.

"We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

We will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed!... Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance at the stars!"

(Which is where we should head, by the way, before our lease here expires.)

Either you believe that we are not heading to a near extinction-level event, that we will prevent it before it happens, or that such an event is a fair price to pay for enjoying a century of computers and iphones.

The first option seems blind, the second baseless optimism, and the 3rd... I don't really know what to say. Is there a 4th?

I have seen predictions expecting mass forced migrations, decrease in sustainable population, etc; but unless you're literally expecting the vast majority of the worldwide population to die, it's not an extinction-level event, it's not near extinction-level event, it's an entirely different ballpark.

It might be a horrible catastrophe, it might change civilization as we know it, that's for sure, but there's really no valid reason to mention the term of extinction in this context. There are some risks/potential events that have a (low) chance of threatening extinction, but the expected climate change is not one of them.

It is debatable how close we have been, during various past crisis, to an actual large-scale nuclear conflict. I don't think we can deny our raw capability to cause a near-extinction-level with our existing technology (nuclear, biological or otherwise). Our political and military ecosystems, flawed as they may be, have kept that capability in check.

But would such a "horrible catastrophe" stress that ecosystem way past the point where it will remain confidently under control? Absolutely yes, I believe that beyond any reasonable doubt.

With our global structure out of control, is there is a significant probability for that destructive capability to be put into action? Absolutely yes, I believe that probability to be significant, beyond any reasonable doubt. I don't see how it can't be otherwise.

* climate change may lead to a "horrible catastrophe" of unknown substance with probability A

* this "horrible catastrophe" may lead to a nuclear war with probability B

* the nuclear war may lead to humanity's extinction with probability C

* you are claiming that A * B * C is very close to 1

If that's right, I call bullshit. There is a ton of potential triggers for nuclear war besides climate change, we didn't have one yet and I can't see why climate change should be the biggest concern in this regard. Moreover, nuclear war is hardly an existential threat to humanity and may even cool the planet a bit.

It would be horrible, it would be comparable to the largest mass killings of 20th century, but it wouldn't be anything that different from what we have survived in the past and it wouldn't be a "near extinction event". "Just" a horrible catastrophe.

yea, just toss an opinion aside as blind because you don't like it. That will get people listening to your point of view!

But you anger makes no sense: your world view is winning. Opinions like the one you replied to are definitely in the minority.

People value their iPhones and disney cruises way more than the natural environment.

This is a emotional statement rather than a practical one. I think you'd probably get people to give those up if it would have a measurable, provable impact that wasn't 200 or 300 years in a possible future. The real bulk of emissions are caused by the everyday use of things that make modern life and the current population levels possible. Giving up an iPhone is one thing giving up electricity, transport, sanitation, modern farming, refrigeration, climate control, and sending countless billions into abject poverty while causing a few billion more to starve is a politically untenable position.

I believe few people actually truly hold these beliefs as suicides among environmentalists don't seem to be abnormally common and yet it is probably the most carbon friendly course of action possible. The idea seems to be that someone else should do without and that someone else is typically the working poor and middle class families at home and the majority of the world that lives in poverty abroad.

Yes, they do. It's just that destroying the planet and letting the future generations suffer for a more comfortable and convenient life right now is not a trade that they are willing to make.

source?

Groundwater depletion: https://water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html

Antibiotic resistance: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23231044-000-antibiot...

Shall I go on?

Humanity faced a lot of problems in the past. Let me remind you just a few:

* multiple plagues decimating European population

* wheat rust (and unpredictable famines ensuing)

* guano depletion

However, we engineered our way out of them. I can't see why the problems you've listed are any different.

Plagues could still happen again. We know more about how they occur and how to contain them, but we don't have any magic bullet against all future plagues that will occur.

Rust is still a problem. I'm not sure why you think it isn't. We have more resistant lines and fungicides but the rust is adapting rapidly.

The difference is, apart from maybe the guano depletion, none of the problems you list of the past were due to human actively making things worse. All of the problems I listed are due to action right now that will cause major problems in the future.

https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels/dp/1591847443

Which gadget do you feel is worth that?

People are very bad at estimating the probability of catastrophic events. We base our estimates on things that have happened in the past, but that doesn't help predict things that have never happened before. Hundreds of millions of years of pent up carbon have never been released into the atmosphere over the course of a couple centuries before. It is hubris to the point of suicidal to think anyone can predict the effect it will have on a complex, nonlinear system like the global climate.

Sure, maybe it will be fine. But the burden of proof should be on the people claiming that it's going to be fine, not on those recommending caution before screwing with something we don't understand.

The gamble we're making is that we're smart enough to survive in the most dire conditions.

That's a stupid gamble, but we might win. Plus we're on a roll so far.

Earth is just a bootstrap.

All of that said, I'm not arguing against pursuing actions to protect the environment. Just pointing out that "preventing the extermination of the human race" really isn't a terribly good justification for doing so when you look at the big picture.

If you accept that premise, the question then becomes: "what are the good arguments for pursuing actions to protect the environment / reverse climate change?" That is, what arguments will persuade people to care about protecting the environment for future generations that don't exist yet, in a time beyond their own limited lifespan?

The iPhones and Supermarkets are of the dream reality.

A world without consequences, where the Foxconn Factory Workers (or the mines of Congo) do not exist.

And yes, I would definetly say it's a problem if workers in a factory can not afford the goods the factory produces.

Even if the factory is producing high end sports cars or precision engineered industrial machinery?

For that matter I doubt even the CEO of Boeing could afford most of the 'goods' made in his factories.

The CEO of Boeing can probably still afford to take a flight on a plane made by his company, and that probably is true of an average worker of a Boeing factory as well.

So let me rephrase: if people working in a factory can only afford the very basic necessities and the actual goods the factory produces get shipped to the other side of the globe (and waste gets left behind), something is not right.

I mean I kind of get the point you are trying to make, but Foxconn and iPhones aren't really a good example of that.

I'll bite. What's the dream reality?

So, while some aspects of what we know from neuroscience and modern medicine map pretty closely to some eastern practices, those practices are embedded in superstitious religions that are no different from their counterparts in other regions.

The real goal is to procreate. There is no soul or divinity or whatever. While we can say that yes to a degree the world as experienced by my brain is like the concept of Maya and the synthesis of my inputs into consciousness are my subjective reality, that's really it. You can't get from there to "the real goal is to see the perfection of things".

The practices of meditation, visualization, etc do have benefits but they don't have to be rooted in the mysticism that spawned them. In fact, that's one of the things I like about zen. it rejects those notions because of the way that people assign baggage to them and start to worship the baggage instead of doing "the thing".

I think it's noble and commendable to act ethically, and promote ethical behaviour. However, I don't think "people acting ethically" is the thing we want to be relying on when we're trying to avoid self-extinction. By a large margin, people are usually selfish and will act in a self-interested manner, so it's probably safer to harness this particular aspect of humanity. I'm not saying it's pretty, but it sure beats self-extinction.

You see this with how smoking is viewed. People don't really care about the health effects to bystanders, they care about what others will think about them. That is human nature.

The trouble with this kind of tax/fee is that it trivialises the issue. You are allowed to do something wrong as long as you pay a small fee. This sends a mix message, and even leeds to a sense of entitlement.

Cost of energy is a significant cost in most mass-production processes (particularly in manufacturing). So, prior to the imposition of a carbon tax, when faced with the choice of purchasing one of two identical widgets, a 'co2 indifferent' consumer would choose the cheaper one. All other things equal, if widget manufacturer A can externalise some of their production costs (by polluting for free) and widget manufacturer B can't (or won't), widget B will likely have a higher price, even though their total social cost of production is lower. So there is more incentive to be a polluter.

The situation is reversed if a tax is levied on co2 pollution, with the rate set to internalise the cost of all external harm. Now the 'co2 indifferent' consumer will purchase co2 free widget B, because it now has the relatively lower price (prices are now more reflective of total social costs of production because the global cost of polluting has now been internalised).

I guess the other approach, that sidesteps this whole argument, would be to implement a 'cap and trade' scheme (my personal preference). The government auctions or allocates, say, 100,000 one-tonne permits: each permit allows a business to legally emit 1 tonne of co2. If a business needs to emit more co2, and what they produce is more valuable relative to what some other permit holder produces, then they can buy additional permits from this other 'less productive' business (and all businesses like it).

Under this latter scheme there's a hard cap on emissions. So people can feel as entitled to pollute as they like; they'll still be breaking the law if they do so without owning sufficient 'pollution permits'.

Might the latter sort of approach (cap and trade) address your concerns?

The forces that created us no longer drive us. Shackled by our biology we apply obsolete instincts to a novel problem. Unchecked, they will lead to our ruin.

Time is running out.

― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2376452-l-existentiali...

Not gonna happen, of course, because it's a huge and expensive undertaking---and there's no(t enough) political will nor even any consensus. But the problem is not our lifestyle per se, nor is competition.

These things were all prohibitively expensive for most people in Western countries, but their declining cost has made them more affordable and more used.

Electric batteries don't power anything, they're best compared to empty buckets.

In analysing the effects of increased usage of electric transport, what's important is where new electricity generating capacity will come from. In the US that's primarily natural gas and solar. Coal generation has actually been decreasing.

Of course, that's not to say that if everyone suddenly started driving electric cars that all the new supply would be green energy.

However, even coal power stations taking into account powerline losses are more efficient than a typical car's engine, and in Western countries usually cleaner as far as particulate and nitrous oxide pollutants are concerned.

Coal's share of electricity production is declining or being phased out almost everywhere.

Coal still produces 40% of every KWh consumed with Nuclear making up a fair portion of the remainder.

Renewables are at 20% and (fortunately) rising sharply but for the moment fossil energy sources are by far the bulk of the energy consumed by electric vehicles.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.COAL.ZS

Even in countries that still have coal-fired power today, an electric vehicle is certainly no worse than a fossil-fuel one.

And, as grid share of renewables and other cleaner energy sources increases, each EV becomes greener and greener over time. But each fossil vehicle remains just as polluting - or perhaps even gets worse as it ages.

I've yet to see an end-to-end over the lifespan of the vehicle report that was factual enough that it was possible to make that call.

Keep in mind that EVs have been subsidized a lot, that the batteries themselves are made with technology that also pollutes and emits CO2 and that a new EV is almost certainly a net negative compared to continuing to driver an older ICE because the ICE car already exists and the EV has to be built new.

That makes the whole equation so complex that I really do not feel comfortable saying that an electric vehicle is certainly better or equal to a fossil-fuel one, it would very much depend.

I'm writing this as a long time renewable energy nut that would very much like to see our dependence on oil reduced to manageable proportions and not for something like transport where we have other alternatives. Even so, if this is all to succeed then the best way forward is to be realistic rather than to hype EVs and the reality is that right now people claim their EVs are 'green' when in fact they are to a large extent turning decentralized pollution into centralized pollution.

Thermal efficiency for a coal plant is ~35% give or take (depending on how new the plant is) so that would be your starting point.

Charge/discharge losses for a large (20KWh) pack that I used were around 25%, a modern EV might do a bit better but probably not that much better (because the internal resistance of those cells they use is quite high).

Putting all that together:

    .33 * .75 * .95 * .97 = ~22%, and ~24% for a high 
    efficiency coal plant.

So it's actually pretty close, better than I expected.

Right now new fission power is not economic because of enormous capital costs---but most of that is quite negotiable. Nuclear could be much cheaper, if we only held it to the same standards as eg gas. (I am not even proposing holding it to the same standards in terms of life lost per Joule as coal---coal is aweful on that metric.)

Efficient, sustainable energy and transport will bring huge economic benefits to countries that are net fossil-fuel consumers.

Considering the article, I don't think it is useful to for example try to minimize a human footprint. If that is the goal we might as well drop dead to achieve it. The question is more around what kind of footprint it is. Does it allow us and the nature ecosystem to still evolve in a way it works towards our goals or not. The universe will not give a damn about the rearranging of atoms we do, but as we depend on how those are arranged to live, we have no choice to care or not.