On matters of scale
Jan. 11th, 2009 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumHad our 12th night party last night. A good time was had by all, but I was hard pressed to hold my tongue when one of the guests was explaining to Maia why "global warming" is both a "myth" (because we can't be sure that people burning billions of tons of sequestered hydrocarbons is any different from previously occurring rises in CO2 levels), and no big deal, even if so.
What we have to worry about, per him, is glaciation.
It's not that I've not heard such nonsense before. It's that he uses (without real intent) his skillset as a rocket scientist (he does fuels, and stuff relating to electronics hardning against solar radiation and flares). He made reference to graphs, and curves, of previous CO2/Methane increases. He trotted out the reveresal of glaciation 12,000 years ago, and how that affected the spread of mankind, etc. He said the coral had to deal with changes in sea level in the past (after all, at the height of the last glaciation the sea level was hundreds of feet below what it is now).
All of that makes it hard (apart from not wanting to start a row, near midnight, at the end of a pretty good party), to refute him in conversation. I don't have the reference materials ready to hand (nor, to be honest does he, but he made reference to them, and absent knowing just what they were how could one really address them?)
He also made some hard claims to substantiate. He blamed the expansion of the ice with the demise of Clovis Culture, and the death of the megagfauna on it (not pondering the idea that perhaps the predations of man, on apex species with slow reproduction rates might have been contributory, and the loss of such megafauna might have been both self-induced, and contributory to the lack of need for the tools to kill them).
He said aridity, qua aridity, did the Anasazi in, when the climate cooled (that they'd deforested their surroundings, which probably had a big effect on the water cycle in their area... not important).
What all of his arguments (which he summed up with the, facile, "People don't seem to realise there are worse fates than having to turn the air conditioning on more often"), boiled down to were, "people aren't able to make this sort of change, and the planet will survive."
He is right about the last part. But the first part is patently false. There are enough examples of people managing to so disturb the ecology which sustains them that they are, at best, displaced; and forced to change (the Dustbowl of the 1930 in the US is a recent example).
What he (and others like him) fail to consider is scale. On the timeline geologists ponder, he's right. There have been such swings in temperature (though oddly, and he didn't mention it, one of the things which the glaciations [perhaps his coming from the frozen portion of middle america also affects how he views cold, but I digress] were usually preceded by was a period of warming. I suspect the deep-cycle of the ocean currents gets disturbed and that cools Europe, which is the sort of thing he's glad isn't happening). The planet has survived.
Life was not eliminated. It may have been really hard for a lot of species (and fatal for some) but the earth wasn't sterilised (not gonna happen, "life" is tough, and some bacterium, if nothing else, will hang on; somehow, and the whole thing will start again. That's pretty much a given until the sun heats up enough to heat the planet to the point the water cycle is broken. I won't even bet against something adapting to survive in a venusian steam bath; only to die out when the sun heats enough to boil off the atmosphere, again I digress).
But if the seas pop up enough to drown the coral we have today, it's going to take some time for them to reestablish themselves (and this is where the plankton phase, and millions of offspring to get a couple of descendants pays off). Because animals don't live on the geologic scale. Mice get 1-6 years (and that six is coddled life in captivity). People get "threescore and ten", if they make out of puberty.
We have billions of people, most of whom are dependant on a whole bunch of steps to get from field to table. Break that cycle, and most of them are going to die.
Do I think climate change is going to wipe people out? No. There are too many of us. We are too adaptable, and we are in place to find the niche which is capable of sustaining us until the equilibrium of the weather system is reestablished. We've survived at least one bottleneck, where we may have been down to as few as 100 people.
It's not a given. Too many people fighting for too few resources (or making a mistake, a la the Easter Islanders who wiped out the trees they later needed to leave when the people outstripped the available food supply) could put the final nail in the coffin.
But to say, "the planet is really big, and people are really small, and warming isn't going to wipe out the planet is daft."
Because you know what... "The Earth" doesn't need us. It's not "the planet" we need to save. It's us I am fond of being alive. I am fond of the human race (some of the members... enh!). It may be we are it. The only bit of life to move from sentience to sapience.
Doesn't matter. We've done great things. We can (I hope) stave off the sort of catastrophe which massive changes in the weather cycle would cause. Beethoven is dead if the people who know how to read the music go away. He just as dead if the recording are all that's left (assuming they can be played), and no one knows how to make the instruments to play the music.
All of the good things people have done are additive. We are standing on the shoulders of the people before us, and it's shoulders all the way down. Climate change can destroy that stack of shoulders. Is is worth a bit of dislocation to prevent that?
Yes.
Is it worth assuming people can cause that kind of strife? Yes.
If I'm wrong, and there is nothing people can do to upset the weather cycle... well it will be annoying getting used to the new ways of doing things.
If he's wrong, and people are able to "break" the weather cycle... we're all fucked.
I know which of those two outcomes is the more rational one to plan against.
What we have to worry about, per him, is glaciation.
It's not that I've not heard such nonsense before. It's that he uses (without real intent) his skillset as a rocket scientist (he does fuels, and stuff relating to electronics hardning against solar radiation and flares). He made reference to graphs, and curves, of previous CO2/Methane increases. He trotted out the reveresal of glaciation 12,000 years ago, and how that affected the spread of mankind, etc. He said the coral had to deal with changes in sea level in the past (after all, at the height of the last glaciation the sea level was hundreds of feet below what it is now).
All of that makes it hard (apart from not wanting to start a row, near midnight, at the end of a pretty good party), to refute him in conversation. I don't have the reference materials ready to hand (nor, to be honest does he, but he made reference to them, and absent knowing just what they were how could one really address them?)
He also made some hard claims to substantiate. He blamed the expansion of the ice with the demise of Clovis Culture, and the death of the megagfauna on it (not pondering the idea that perhaps the predations of man, on apex species with slow reproduction rates might have been contributory, and the loss of such megafauna might have been both self-induced, and contributory to the lack of need for the tools to kill them).
He said aridity, qua aridity, did the Anasazi in, when the climate cooled (that they'd deforested their surroundings, which probably had a big effect on the water cycle in their area... not important).
What all of his arguments (which he summed up with the, facile, "People don't seem to realise there are worse fates than having to turn the air conditioning on more often"), boiled down to were, "people aren't able to make this sort of change, and the planet will survive."
He is right about the last part. But the first part is patently false. There are enough examples of people managing to so disturb the ecology which sustains them that they are, at best, displaced; and forced to change (the Dustbowl of the 1930 in the US is a recent example).
What he (and others like him) fail to consider is scale. On the timeline geologists ponder, he's right. There have been such swings in temperature (though oddly, and he didn't mention it, one of the things which the glaciations [perhaps his coming from the frozen portion of middle america also affects how he views cold, but I digress] were usually preceded by was a period of warming. I suspect the deep-cycle of the ocean currents gets disturbed and that cools Europe, which is the sort of thing he's glad isn't happening). The planet has survived.
Life was not eliminated. It may have been really hard for a lot of species (and fatal for some) but the earth wasn't sterilised (not gonna happen, "life" is tough, and some bacterium, if nothing else, will hang on; somehow, and the whole thing will start again. That's pretty much a given until the sun heats up enough to heat the planet to the point the water cycle is broken. I won't even bet against something adapting to survive in a venusian steam bath; only to die out when the sun heats enough to boil off the atmosphere, again I digress).
But if the seas pop up enough to drown the coral we have today, it's going to take some time for them to reestablish themselves (and this is where the plankton phase, and millions of offspring to get a couple of descendants pays off). Because animals don't live on the geologic scale. Mice get 1-6 years (and that six is coddled life in captivity). People get "threescore and ten", if they make out of puberty.
We have billions of people, most of whom are dependant on a whole bunch of steps to get from field to table. Break that cycle, and most of them are going to die.
Do I think climate change is going to wipe people out? No. There are too many of us. We are too adaptable, and we are in place to find the niche which is capable of sustaining us until the equilibrium of the weather system is reestablished. We've survived at least one bottleneck, where we may have been down to as few as 100 people.
It's not a given. Too many people fighting for too few resources (or making a mistake, a la the Easter Islanders who wiped out the trees they later needed to leave when the people outstripped the available food supply) could put the final nail in the coffin.
But to say, "the planet is really big, and people are really small, and warming isn't going to wipe out the planet is daft."
Because you know what... "The Earth" doesn't need us. It's not "the planet" we need to save. It's us I am fond of being alive. I am fond of the human race (some of the members... enh!). It may be we are it. The only bit of life to move from sentience to sapience.
Doesn't matter. We've done great things. We can (I hope) stave off the sort of catastrophe which massive changes in the weather cycle would cause. Beethoven is dead if the people who know how to read the music go away. He just as dead if the recording are all that's left (assuming they can be played), and no one knows how to make the instruments to play the music.
All of the good things people have done are additive. We are standing on the shoulders of the people before us, and it's shoulders all the way down. Climate change can destroy that stack of shoulders. Is is worth a bit of dislocation to prevent that?
Yes.
Is it worth assuming people can cause that kind of strife? Yes.
If I'm wrong, and there is nothing people can do to upset the weather cycle... well it will be annoying getting used to the new ways of doing things.
If he's wrong, and people are able to "break" the weather cycle... we're all fucked.
I know which of those two outcomes is the more rational one to plan against.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 10:23 pm (UTC)It's a whole lot of complex system being upset. There is a mean to which it will return (all other things being equal) but that mean doesn't have to include civilisation, as we have it now, even if it includes people.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 10:26 pm (UTC)That's a recipe for disaster, as it will boil down to mere contradiction.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 10:42 pm (UTC)At least it makes a change from the Magical Incantation Theory, the one which presumes we can avoid global warming if we can just find some scientist somewhere who says it's probably not going to happen.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 10:47 pm (UTC)His posistion is that stasis is best, but warming is ok, because cooling is horrid, and warming isn't that big a deal, apart from the insignificant problems it would cause; which technology will solve (see comment about AC).
Is daft.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 11:14 pm (UTC)[That's my default userpic; after posting I realized that creatures like it went through at least one mass extinction, which is a rather larger matter than we're talking about here. You won't find any alive today.]
no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 11:48 pm (UTC)a) Pontificating about controversial issues at social functions is a mark of a socially inept person, regardless of their technical expertise.
b) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
c) There is a time and a place for scientific debate.
d) How nice for him.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 12:04 am (UTC)How much phyto-plankton we have has a direct effect on how much carbon sequestration is going on, which is what will need to happen to have the cycle level out again.
Then again, we could have a bit of axial straightening, which would cool the planet (which he thinks is BAD) and the Sahara might once again bloom.
Because *I* am not too much of a gentleman to say it...
Date: 2009-01-12 12:05 am (UTC)Also, I think I Like You (http://pecunium.livejournal.com/345083.html?thread=2799099#t2799099) must now be upgraded to "I am developing a mild, non-stalkery sort of crush on you".
Re: Because *I* am not too much of a gentleman to say it...
Date: 2009-01-12 12:07 am (UTC)Marna, Bill
Have fun.
Re: Because *I* am not too much of a gentleman to say it...
Date: 2009-01-12 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 12:42 am (UTC)For all I know it might have been a side effect of magnetic pole movements (it's not always, N/S) and something relating to the moon/sun as a result.
The system is big, and something are a lot faster than we give them credit for.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 12:55 am (UTC)That guy you describe seems to be akin to the Free Market Libertarians who seem not to consider the enormous consequences of what look, on their charts & graphs, like minor Market adjustments. *sigh*
Mind you, I wouldn't be surprised if we've already passed the point of no return on Global Climate Change -- and if we haven't, I would be astonished if we actually do anything effective to ameliorate it. Ever optimistic, I think it's probable that (as you suggest) enough small pockets of humans will survive that the cycle can be started over again in a few hundred years.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 01:43 am (UTC)It's like the dinosaurs. They were in decline when the meteor hit. That was the last plank in the coffin (even if it took some time for the nails to be driven in).
If we get a collapse, this problem won't recurr that quickly. The means to re-release the sequester carbons won't be present.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 02:32 am (UTC)"You're right, I hadn't considered...the cockroaches will surely survive."
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 03:21 am (UTC)A lot of people think we're due for a polar reversal; the timespan is estimated at anywhere from 5k to 50M years. (In other words, NASA reported the smallest possible and the largest possible, and in their news release probably referred the reporters to their whitepapers on the subject, which went unread because hey, the news release has all the info we'll ever need!)
One thing I know for a fact is happening is that Earth's axis is crossing the galactic center plane. If certain people are to be believed, that particular event signals big changes, with nothing we can do except cope if they happen suddenly; but most changes are gradual or in abeyance until we cross a tipping point -- and then, cascade.
I think if we don't quickly find a way to sequester at least as much carbon as China is putting out these days, we've already crossed the tipping point in he carbon cycle. You're right that Earth, and life, will go on, and that we might not.
But me, I just have to think bigger... given that iron is the largest atom that a star normally can form and distribute (in the form of burning off all its other fuels until it goes nova), and that denser elements are a result of supernova, we're living in the remnant of a supernova. In fact, it has been (at the very least) speculated that the main blow-off gas cloud surrounds our little pocket of safety. Given that, I'd want to be looking for the remnant: a small but extremely dense object which does not put out much (or any!) light except as heat. And given that it took several billion years to form our planetary system, there may not be sufficient heat to observe; best to look for gravitic anomalies instead, like whether our star wobbles (which means correcting for Earth's wobbles, then re-correcting for anomalies observed by non-Earth-orbiting satellites, of which we have few or none looking at the stars outside the Solar System). And of course any such cycle might be measured in the thousands or millions of years, but... if we can manage to survive an Earthly mega-disaster with sufficient resources, this kind of search may be worth trying just in case there really is a Death Star radiating high-energy neutrons at us (or otherwise providing a serious disruption) on its way past ol' Sol.
Re: Because *I* am not too much of a gentleman to say it...
Date: 2009-01-12 04:21 am (UTC)Re: Because *I* am not too much of a gentleman to say it...
Date: 2009-01-12 04:21 am (UTC)Re: Because *I* am not too much of a gentleman to say it...
Date: 2009-01-12 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 04:45 am (UTC)Japan 30-40 kya
Solomon Islands 30 kya
Hawaii 2.5-1.5 kya
Madagascar 2 kya
NZ 500 years ago
Everywhere we've turned up, there's been mass extinctions. When you've got as good a match as that between theory and evidence, you don't need any further reasons. Otherwise, I'd be keen to hear how warming or whatever had an effect 50 kya in Australia, 30 kya in the Solomons, 14-12 kya in the Americas, and only 500 years ago in NZ.
It was us. Can we all get over it?
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 04:53 am (UTC)"Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies" (http://carbonsequestration.us/Papers-presentations/htm/Pacala-Socolow-ScienceMag-Aug2004.pdf), S. Pacala and R. Socolow
Here's a summary (http://www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk/impee/topics/stabilisationwedges/files/Stabilisation%20Wedge%20v1%20PDF%20WITH%20NOTES.pdf), but basically, we have fifteen technologies right now that can make enough of a difference. These include simply insulating housing better, or swapping coal for nukes, or for wind, or for gas. None of these things will solve the problem on its own, but to avoid the worst of climate change, we only need to use seven.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 05:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 09:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 07:40 pm (UTC)"A wise man once said, "Climate is what we expect; weather is what we get." He also said, "If it can't be expressed in figures, it's not science it's opinion."
Using the weather of your local 200 square miles or so to refute hypotheses about the climate of 197 million square miles is probably Not a Good Idea."