'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else dare mention
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I saw some of the awful bugs that were fixed first hand. I have no reason to doubt that my experience wasn't replicated in important "legacy systems" right across the industry. Things only passed so smoothly because of that effort.
I completely accept the evidence and the consensus that human action is causing global carbon levels and therefore temperature to rise. The part I don't get is what exactly happens to the planet, our species and other animals given say, a 2C rise by 2200. Say that's a 2 metre sea level rise. Ecosystems and societies are pretty robust to that level of change over 200 years. There would be very bad effects on some low-lying coastal cities, and the areas of the earth that are productive for different kinds of agriculture and habitats would change.
This is bad and we should work to avoid it, but I think that we lose credibility when we speak of the end of civilisation, or even major threats to our normal way of life globally.
You can read my attempt at a primer, which details some of the consequences here : https://climate.btmx.fr
We have been figthing to survive nature from the start. Ex. sea rise is not a problem that can't be solved just look at Holland.
What is your point in saying this? Everything always has uncertainties, but scientists and economists are in agreement there is enough known that we need large changes in energy use (which affects all sectors of the economy). That is found in the latest version of the report you linked to, or even the version you linked.
The idea that Bangladesh can "solve" sea level rise because Holland can is laughable. Just look at these maps: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/08/bjorn-...
Of course Holland and Bangladesh isn't the same situation so to call your own strawman laughable says a lot about where you are coming from in this.
But against my better judgement I am still engaging in the hopes that you are in fact interested in hearing what my point is.
Yes everything has uncertainties which would be good to remember in this debate as thats the difference between whether we are doomed or whether the climate will change as I has always done and we need to adjust to it. Instead of trying to claim that we know for a fact what the outcome is, how big our involvement in climate change is, how much we can do something about.
Even the IPCC does not deal in such certainties and have toned down their doomsdaying over the years. That's important to keep in mind before we all jump on the "we are doomed" bandwagon.
There are things we can do especially these days as we are much better at handling nature than we were 100 years ago which means that no matter how much of climate change is manmade we have a better chance of dealing with the consequences today than if those changes had happened 100 years ago.
For example the Younger Dryas¹, about 15ky ago. The best estimate is global temp dropped 2-6° over 50 years and 1000 years later, did the opposite. Before that our data is so poor it's hard to distinguish between 1000 years and 1 year.
[1] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/The%20Younge...
"Future climate will depend on committed warming caused by past anthropogenic emissions, as well as future anthropogenic emissions and natural climate variability. The global mean surface temperature change for the period 2016–2035 relative to 1986–2005 is similar for the four RCPs and will likely be in the range 0.3°C to 0.7°C (medium confidence). This assumes that there will be no major volcanic eruptions or changes in some natural sources (e.g., CH4 and N2O), or unexpected changes in total solar irradiance. By mid-21st century, the magnitude of the projected climate change is substantially affected by the choice of emissions scenario. {2.2.1, Table 2.1} Relative to 1850–1900, global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century (2081–2100) is projected to likely exceed 1.5°C for RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and RCP8.5 (high confidence). Warming is likely to exceed 2°C for RCP6.0 and RCP8.5 (high confidence), more likely than not to exceed 2°C for RCP4.5 (medium confidence), but unlikely to exceed 2°C for RCP2.6 (medium confidence). {2.2.1} The increase of global mean surface temperature by the end of the 21st century (2081–2100) relative to 1986–2005 is likely to be 0.3°C to 1.7°C under RCP2.6, 1.1°C to 2.6°C under RCP4.5, 1.4°C to 3.1°C under RCP6.0 and 2.6°C to 4.8°C under RCP8.59 . The Arctic region will continue to warm more rapidly than the global mean (Figure SPM.6a, Figure SPM.7a). {2.2.1, Figure 2.1, Figure 2.2, Table 2.1} It is virtually certain that there will be more frequent hot and fewer cold temperature extremes over most land areas on daily and seasonal timescales, as global mean surface temperature increases. It is very likely that heat waves will occur with a higher frequency and longer duration. Occasional cold winter extremes will continue to occur. {2.2.1}"
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/SYR_AR5_FI...
One problem with a single headline number is that this is an average temperature rise. What we're actually seeing is a mixture of things: more energy accumulating in the hydrosphere and atmosphere means more energetic weather events (e.g. powerful hurricanes/typhoons). Some areas warming lead to other areas cooling (e.g. melting Arctic ice cap and meltwater outflow from the Greenland ice cap may lead to temporary shutdown of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation and a Gulf Stream stall, freezing the British Isles and Western Europe with a -5 to -10 celsius temperature drop in the short term -- meaning, decades to centuries). So there'll be a rise in the incidence of weather/climate related disasters.
Another problem is that we can't simply shift agriculture to new, thawed territories. The Canadian Shield and Siberian Tundra are pretty poor soil, unsuited to intensive wheat/corn growing: it might be possible to condition them, but it'd take decades to centuries of hard work, during which other agricultural territory (the US mid-west and south, much of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa) will be subject to lethal heat emergencies. Lethal not so much for humans -- we know how to build solar-powered air conditioning -- but for crops and livestock which will die in the fields.
Suggestions that we're one supermarket supply chain collapse away from the end of civilization are obviously bogus. But if we start having large-scale crop failures 3-5 times a decade, food prices will soar globally, leading eventually to civil unrest and war. (For example, the Arab Spring was to some extend a side-effect of the 2007-08 global financial crisis, as capital sought refuge in commodity futures and the price of bread throughout the Middle East doubled-to-tripled in twelve months: what will 2-4 consecutive wheat harvest failures accomplish?) Infrastructure damage (including agricultural infrastructure) due to strife and mass migration will in turn increase our dependence on surviving infrastructure, reducing our overall resilience. And there may eventually come a tipping point at which we end up in a positive-feedback loop of mutually reinforcing failures.
Not so much the sea level, as the effect in change in average temperature; many plants have their reproduction cycles triggered by particular temperatures. The boundaries between different types of ecosystem are determined by temperature range. It will also make a difference to which crops are viable in which areas.
It makes rather a lot more difference if you think of it not as "each day is 2C warmer than the corresponding day of the previous year" but instead "most days are the same temperature but some are warmer by enough to wipe out the local staple crop".
It won't take much of a change in the climate before we see significant conflict over access to water. India and Pakistan have a treaty they both signed in 1960 regarding access to water from 6 rivers they share (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Waters_Treaty). These are two nations that have nuclear weapons... if that treaty fails and results in a war, that'd almost certainly end up being World War III, and could very well result in the end of civilisation.
This isn't speculation on my part. We're already at the point where nations have civil wars over access to natural resources like water and agricultural land. It was a key factor in civil war in Sudan. Wars around the middle east between Israel and it's neighbours are rooted in religion but are often also about access to water from the Jordan basin.
Climate change isn't simply things getting hotter and sea levels rising. People literally go to war over resources. It really matters.
Climate change isn't the threat, the problem is that population growth is exponential. We don't have a reliable mechanism to shrink population apart from run out of resources and have a war. Claiming that climate change is making resources scarce isn't grappling with the fact that in 100 years at 2% population growth, resources are going to be scarce anyway.
In particular, population growth slows down where it matters, i.e. for those people that have the biggest carbon footprint.
And, in the short term, exponential may be a reasonable fit. Doesn't make it a long-term guarantee.
There's no real evidence yet in the stats for the next transition to a drop in the absolute growth numbers per year.
UN historical & projected data:
https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/1_Demographic%20Profiles/...
It's really difficult to overestimate the level of damage something like this would do to society. Picture half the population of humanity starving to death in famines or being killed in combat over water resources.
And yes, you're right, photosynthesis would probably cease. We're going to see similar problems in the opposite direction, probably drought on a scale heretofore never experienced in human history in temperate areas. Imagine the climate of Los Angeles moving north to Vancouver BC, and similar cascading effects across the board.
The issue is that, while climate change at UN COP21-23 estimates isn't necessarily an existential threat to Western society, it 1.) has exceptionally real effects on individuals who are affected (and those who are going to be affected in the near future) and 2.) requires an enormous amount of investment and development to manage the transition from a pre 2C rise to a post 2C rise.
When you're looking at having to protect at least 20K+ square km of land and ~150-200M people, some amount of directness is acceptable.
Saying "200mm of people will migrate or die" (assuming its true) would be direct, but the "we are all doomed" is very misleading because the effects are not universal and not evenly distributed. The described scenarios will not cause doom to me, and most likely to you as well.
Furthermore, even for the politicians that have completely publicly accepted the notion of climate change, statements like "requires an enormous amount of investment and development to manage the transition" and "having to protect at least 20K+ square km of land and ~150-200M people" are simply literally false - they can (and possibly will) choose not to protect that land and those people, because they're "others". They have the ability to choose not investing in managing that transition globally, but only handling the direct local consequences, and protect their population from the global effects simply by investing into armaments/defence industry - as Dr. Hillman is saying in the original article, "How are these regions going to respond? We see it now. Migrants will be prevented from arriving. We will let them drown." Looking at some of our global leaders, such a scenario seems at least possible.
I can’t in good conscience call them fun, “terrifying” would be a bit more accurate
For a rich country like the United States, the climate change itself is survivable.
So Arizona becomes unsurvivable desert and Lousiana is lost to the sea; New York builds seawalls and subway pumps and Miami partly becomes Venice and partly Atlantis. The Great Sandhill Desert re-emerges from the plains.
Food prices increase; diets shift to accomodate -- less beef; more chicken; more vegetarianism. Diseases associated to warmer places spread: malaria and zika. Millions of people are forced to move. But civilisation itself isn't really threatened.
The civilisation-threatening problems happen in poorer countries. Population size, though growth has been slowing for decades, will not have peaked before climate change reduces carrying capacities. Waves of refugees from the resulting famines and wars will try to make their way inland and northward.
What will happen when India and Pakistan, nuclear powers both, are overwhelmed by mass displacement and food shortages? How many refugees will we accept, and how many will we turn our backs on? What will our role be in the wars?
Secondly, what evidence do you have that fuel will be more expensive? The shale revolution has made gas cheap and it will stay so for a long time. You can make methanol with gas for example. The proven reserves go up of fossil fuels as well.
There is also no limit on electrical energy, we could build nuclear plants until the cows come home if that is required. France has shown that it possible and that it is not unreasonably expensive.
Even if farmland would somehow be an issue, we could easily do factory farming. The only reason we don't is that its more expensive then using land.
Where?
As I understand it, pretty much all the good farmland is already in use for farming.
The only available farmland I'm aware of that is not being used for that is being squatted upon by McMansions in the suburbs. The land they're sitting on was formerly farmland, but it was found to be more economically valuable as land for upscale homes.
Think what it would mean for those economics to be flipped around, for farmland to become more valuable than McMansion lots. It means farming has become a very high-dollar economic activity, which means food has become really expensive, which means many fewer people would be buying McMansions.
So what then is your plan? That we put almost all the human population into arcologies like the Stephenson cyberpunk novels, so that we can free up the land to be farmland again?
In general, people has been proportional spending less money on food for each decade that has gone past. Production per acer has also gone up, while the number of people working as farmers has significant dropped.
I am pretty sure that the reason why there is not more potato farmers in the world is because the price of potatoes are not high enough to utilize all the land where potatoes can be grown.
But even if we somehow run out of land we would still not need to build arcologies. The primary reason we don't have many seaweed farms in the world is because few cultures has seaweed as an primary diet. Economics could likely change that.
There is also tons of lower quality land that could be farmed if you really needed to as well.
Around 45% of corn production is used to make transport fuel rather then food. Most of Brazilian transport fuel is also made from food.
Simply put, there is HUGE amounts of potential for increase in food production.
All of this is without using advanced things like factory food production.
Also, food is not becoming more expensive other then being more expensive because of oil and transport cost.
https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/is...
> So what then is your point? That we put almost all the human population into arcologies like the Stephenson cyberpunk novels?
No. My point is that spreading irrational fear and false facts about food availability is wrong and you should stop scaring the uninformed people.
I don't propose anything. Human can just live where they like. Buy food and energy where they want to buy it. Most move to urban centers voluntary. Only 0.5% of land is actually paved and that's where the waste majority of people live.
My point is that we have lots of energy and we have lots of food. There is no real concern that either is gone run out. There is not even a need for government to do any gigantic policies (unless they want to fix carbon emissions, then a carbon tax would easily resolve the problem).
The future will be one of more unused land that is untouched by humans and that will happen without a conservation policy.
That's consistent with my claim that all the good farmland is already taken. The shrinkage in use of farmland could be that marginal farmland is falling away due to soil exhaustion and economic effects.
> humans are becoming more urban.
That sounds like the path towards arcologies.
You can see it now: former single-family dwellings in the large cities are being rented out to groups of yuppies, each of whom, despite being high earners, would struggle to pay the rent alone. The low earners are being forced out, but to where? Where does this road lead, if not to arcologies?
> It has nothing to do with McMansions, humans are becoming more urban.
Only if you define "urban" as identical to "metropolitan area."
Take any large US city, then include its complete metropolitan area, which I'll define here as the area of continuous land surrounded by either farmland or wasteland. I'll stretch the definition of farmland to include single-family-owned parcels of land which are large enough to support small alfalfa crops, horse pasturage, etc.
How many "cities" are in that metropolitan area? Why are they called "cities," even though there is no farmland between them? I'm fundamentally a rural sort, all my life, but I've been in such areas many times, and the only way I can tell that I've traveled from one city to another is that there's a sign situated between a laundromat and a strip mall, with the city boundary going down the alley between them. Once upon a time, they were in fact separate cities.
Take Los Angeles, California as an example. In what meaningful way is Anaheim not "L.A."? I get that its streets don't look much like those of Beverly Hills or Monrovia or Pasadena, but the whole area is one urbanized mess. You used to pass through farmland to get from each of these cities to the next. As an occasional visitor to the area, "L.A" to me extends from Ventura to the north down to San Clemente in the south, and inland almost to the Salton Sea. All that former farmland is paved over now.
> There is also tons of lower quality land that could be farmed if you really needed to as well.
Less productively, by definition.
> Around 45% of corn production is used to make transport fuel rather then food.
Sure, but that's just part of the same problem: as population and wealth rises, the wish to have personal rapid transit also rises, which leads to either:
1. Greater consumption pressure on our oil reserves.
2. A switch to biofuels of some sort, which in turn puts pressure on the rest of the bioeconomy.
3. A switch to electric vehicles, which requires massive solar cell arrays and massive distributed mines for rare earths, which stresses the environment still further.
...or some combination of the three, of course.
It's all an interdependent system. You can't move one part without affecting many other parts.
> food is not becoming more expensive other then being more expensive because of oil and transport cost.
The increasing transport costs are in part because of my original premise: cities used to have nearby farms to draw from. Now that we've pushed the boundaries of so many of our conurbanizations out to the wastelands, we've got to truck in food from much farther away than before.
In the US, some of the areas of most rapid population growth are out in the desert, places like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Why do you suppose that is?
> Most move to urban centers voluntary.
Yeah, voluntary in the same way that having children work in the coal mines was "voluntary" to our forebears. They had a choice: starve or go farming. Back then, we still had much of the West available for expansion. That's largely gone now.
At the grandparent level, my family were farmers. The land they did all of that on is now sold off for houses. My forebears made the desert bloom. The thing is, though, they did it around rivers which now run dry because the remaining farms are sucking up all of the water that isn't going into the houses or being dumped back on the desert to keep all those middle-America lawns green.
You speak of increasing productivity for our existing farmland, but all increasing curves flatten out eventually. There are no exponential curves in ecologies, only S-curves that haven't started to flatten out yet. (Or, collapsing curves!)
Well if you want to disagree with all expert assessments, then feel free.
> That sounds like the path towards arcologies.
If humans voluntary adopt this, then I don't see the problem.
If people want to get a cheap large house in Texas, they can just go ahead and do that.
> Take Los Angeles, California
California is hardly the typical case. Just because you experience this locally doesn't change global statistics.
> Sure, but that's just part of the same problem: as population and wealth rises, the wish to have personal rapid transit also rises, which leads to either:
Yes. But using ethanol never made a lot of sense in the US. It purely because of politics. We are not fundamentally energy restricted, you could easily substitute ethanol for methanol for example. Gas is actually demand constraint in the US right now.
Again, we do not have a lack of energy or land supply. My example about ethanol was more to prove that we have more then enough farm land.
I don't understand what your issue with this accepting this is.
> At the grandparent level, my family were farmers. The land they did all of that on is now sold off for houses.
Again, you continue to assert completely 100% false statistics. The waste majority of land is not covered by houses. In fact there are people who are trying to recreate the North American Step because there is so much empty land.
> You speak of increasing productivity for our existing farmland, but all increasing curves flatten out eventually. There are no exponential curves in ecologies, only S-curves that haven't started to flatten out yet. (Or, collapsing curves!)
Productivity will continue to go up. We have new technology such as GMO that can make a major difference. The reality is that most of the worlds farm land is not farmed with anywhere close that efficiency. Would could have massive amount of food production growth if we had more adoption of current technology.
I really don't understand any of your arguments. We have lots of access land. We have so much land we can use part of it for ethanol and another huge part for meat. If there were any real constraint on food production, those things would change. Its the same in other countries, Britain used to be intensively farmed and now they are talking about establishing a prehistoric forest across the whole for northern Britain because they DON'T NEED LAND TO FARM. Its the same in many countries. That is a simple fact, however much you want to invent stories about your grand parents farm. WE ARE NOT CONSTRAINT IN THE AVAILABILITY OF FARM LAND!
Even if land was the issue, we could still do very efficient factory farming where land is not a constraint at all.
Would you be able to explain why that is, or link to something that can? It's not immediately obvious to me why that would be.
Of course, human activity could speed up the transition for these areas, but soil building is a quirky technology that's hard to scale up.
Some land is lost in X, and gained in Y. That land in Y will be close to where farming currently happens and with a delay of a couple of years the farmers can extend northwards a little bit.
I can't see how such a slow process could lead to a 'shortfall'.
In most of the world farming is limited by water and fertiliser availability. Water availability is an increasing problem from California to Yemen.
The higher temperatures will also be melting mountain snowpack earlier, so the highly variable rivers that feed much of our irrigation will be getting dry by late June rather than the first week of August with serious impact to crops.
So we are losing huge forests (which help to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by simply existing) at an unprecedented rate and we are producing more emissions by developing this land for agricultural use.
Large animal populations (> ~10kg) have responded poorly to larger ones, of the scale we're facing in < 100 years.
Good earlier discussion, and links:
This is from a scenario where the world warms by 4 degrees. Other parts of the world, e.g. Western Australia and Canada, would benefit. See http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-li...
Katrina was "just" a local event.
And see how civilization respond to this.
Now, think what will happend if we get this kind of events more often, EVERYWHERE. AT THE SAME-ish TIME.
I kind of grew up with that phrase. It was all over in my childhood climate nature science books etc. But the real world today looks far from it. I mean we have many problems, sure. But doomed?
So maybe that's why I can't really take people serious who start with that phrase.
"He believes that accepting that our civilisation is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognises he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives."
And I rather believe that really doomed people don't care anymore about long-term cancer risk when they allready are full of it. Optimistic people who want to live long and prosper care about that. I mean, we are all going to die anyway, yes. But usually our children live on. But if I would believe the world is doomed, how can I possible raise children with good hearts? But if I and everyone else, stop raising children - then we are indeed doomed.
1.4-5.8 and is based on estimates of global population between 7-15 billion people.
Thats the official data and it's not as certain as many would like to make it.
It is a difference between saying "we are doomed".
Or
"if we continue this, we are doomed".
Under heavy pressure and possible temporary decline, yes, but doom means extinction to me and this I don't believe. Especially not with all the technology we are going to build in the next 100 years. I bet we could live allmost sustainable on mars by then. And no matter how devastated the earth will be a some point, it will allways be easier to live here. Even if the whole food supply comes from sealed greenhouses. Those we can (and do) build. As long as the sun shines, I see no problem. (And even if the sun don't shine for some years, we could survive. Related: I will start playing Frostpunk tonight..same topic, even though in the scenario they survive by coal, while I would bet on nuclear)
On the whole, our technological advances over the past 100 years have increased the rate of unsustainable energy use, despite widespread awareness of climate change for over half of that. What makes you think the technological advances of the next 100 years are going to be led responsibility? The truth is that there are very few people currently making a positive difference, and if we reach a point where climate change starts becoming inconvenient it'll already be too late.
To safe everybody? We never did. People allways died of starvation.
And people are doing nothing? Well here in germany they can't hear the word sustainable and renewable anymore. But they are still switching slowly. Changes take time.
But even China and Saudi Arabia are pushing all for it
Too late to avoid unnecessary deaths.
> "To safe everybody? We never did. People allways died of starvation."
People die of starvation as a result of war, lack of rainfall and plant diseases. Do we need to add another cause to that list?
> "And people are doing nothing?"
People aren't doing nothing, but the changes aren't quick enough. For example, how much of our energy currently comes from non-renewable sources? If you look at the graphs here, you'll see that use of oil, coal and natural gas are all growing at faster rates than renewables or nuclear:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
What do you think it will take to turn the tide on this trend?
Too late to avoid unnecessary deaths."
Erm, unnecessary deaths are not nice, sure. But they don't mean Doom for humanity
And this also won't:
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
"What do you think it will ake to turn the tide on this trend?"
More technology? Exactly what is happening right now. The fire still needs to burn, so we can't just shut of it, before the alternatives aren't ready. And thats the point. There is simply no magic, awesome technology to replace all the fossil driven ones from one day till the next. It is very complex and it will take time. And it probably will go on, even if the sea level rises 4 m and droughts are common. But coal and oil will get burnt till that day, I have no illusions abou that.
Other species will not. Through climate change we have brought ill effects to the whole ecosystem of Earth. And irreversible phase already started. That's why doom is used often. You can always say we are not doomed because humans are selfish and don't want to take the blame. Or take as little blame as possible or just plain ignore.
Regarding giving up hope and being careless, I can say one thing. Saying doomed does not make people give up. But saying it's not as bad as it looks definitely makes people be careless. Because they now things it's ok and we will survive anyhow, so why should I put effort and suffer. That's what I have seen with climate change deniers.
No, because they don't believe it (anymore). Thats why. But I like to use words by their intended meaning - so I don't see it positive yelling Doom! to get the information to people, that we have a problem.
It is the same Mendeleev who was able to figure out explosives and alloy compositions out of the railroad traffic to the factories which produced these explosives and alloys.
So I think you can be sure that Mendeleev was able to use data he had pretty efficiently.
The drastic changes you mention will be not so drastic after all and, I think, will be surprising to all of us if we see them today.
You can be right about a catastrophy, and so wrong on the timeline while everybody keeps dancing it seems your worries were just ghosts.
I'm still amazed at some people around me, eating pizza, drawning in alcohol, and living this old.
I wouldn't recommand this lifestyle though, while they would certainly defend it the way a lot of people in this thread defend our current society ways.
As for Pinker; the techno-optimists don't seem to get that the Limits to Growth forecasts predicted substantial exponential growth. The huge success and progress we've seen and celebrated by them doesn't invalidate LtoG. The lesson is not that they didn't or can't happen. It's that they can't continue for ever and will inevitably result in over-reach, peak and crash. And that's the part that Pinker et al won't accept. They're attempting to portray and an unlimited rosy future without really looking at all the implications.
Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1976, also awarded the National Medal of Science (1988), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1988), and the John Bates Clark Medal (1951)), in "The Energy Crisis: A Humane Solution", 1977:
You will all recall ["Limits to Growth"] was a report in which engineers were saying we have finite resources -- a finite amount of coal, a finite amount of space, and so on and so on; things grow at exponential rates, and so long as things grow at exponential rates they are ultimately going to become infinite; and since resources, are finite, we're going to bump into it and therefore we are faced with a terrible future in which sooner or later we are going to run out, of steel or coal or whatever you want to name. We're going to run out, and we really have to adjust our sights; we can no longer take the view that we can have growth forever; we must recognize that there are, in their title, limits to growth and reconcile ourselves....
Now this approach, whether adopted by the Club of Rome or by Mr. Schumacher or by the CED, is completely wrong. The plain fact is that from an economic point of view the volume of resources available to us is larger today than it has ever been in history. We are less dependent today on natural resources than we have ever been.
http://0055d26.netsolhost.com/friedman/pdfs/other_commentary...
(I've made a small hobby of collecting all the action figures: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=cornucopians&r...)
Thats a different discussion than the one I read the parent talking about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16930843
https://web.archive.org/web/20180426113749/https://news.ycom...
Yes it does. There is no limit to growth. Its an absurd notion. As long as we can produce more energy, there is absolute no limit to growth.
We have gigantic amounts of energy resources left. The Uranium and Thorium in the world alone could power all human energy need for 1000s of years with current technology. We have HUGE amounts of coal left, not to mention gas and oil. The sun is putting out huge amount of energy that we can use. That is all without considering things like space resources or fusion.
We already have the technology needed for unlimited amount of growth.
The same is true for everything else, we have enough land and food. Humans actually use less land over time. We easily have the ability to produce huge amounts of food and we can absolutely supply a massively growing population. We produce so much food that Brazil and US run whole fleets of cars with ethanol. There is large potential for GMO to increase yields. If you want to take it to the next level you can do true factory farming, the only reason we don't is because land is still so cheap.
After 200 years of people predicting limits to growth and population we should finally figure out that this whole narrative is simply wrong. Economists like Julian Simon spent their whole live showing this is true.
That's quite breathtaking. "Reducing human population" is a phrase that can only have so many meanings: controlling reproduction, removing access to healthcare, or killing people. There are no other options I'm aware of.
You can go to just about any physics site and see lists of things physicists still don't understand. Some of them are so far out in the woods that they're even debating the role of empiricism and the scientific method. (If the math looks good, and we could never perform an experiment, isn't that good enough?)
Yet here we have an expert in the social sciences suggesting we do something about having too many humans.
Hillman has had a fine career. I wish him the best in his continued efforts. Articles like this exist to praise people of note, also to poke at folks like me who might find some of their statement a bit over-the-top. Better to generate controversy and readership.
But we really need a more serious discussion on climate. Not pandering to the end-of-world folks, not pandering to the "nothing to see here, folks". Something substantive. There's a lot of religious and magical thinking in climate science, many times by people who would consider themselves uber rationalists. (They're the worst). The vast majority of the public has had about enough of the extremists and self-promoters. There may be an opportunity to start a reasoned discussion.
We should replicate the work of Bangladesh: http://www.futurehealthsystems.org/news/2013/11/25/understan...
"Bangladesh has achieved high (62%) contraceptive prevalence and a rapid fall in fertility from 6.3 births per woman in 1971 to 2.3 in 2010—a rate unparalleled in other countries with similar levels of development."
Voluntary control of reproduction is a nice thing, but it won't achieve population reduction, it will only stop/limit growth.
It looks like at least part of Bangla Desh's small reduction in absolute growth in population in recent years is due to emigration. Numbers leaving are about 1/3 the size of the total growth. So actual growth has been consistently over +2m/yr since 1975. Like a lot of other places round the world that looks like 4 to 5 decades of linear growth.
Education of women, better access to contraceptives, etc.[1] reduce the birth rate of a country which I suspect is what he's referring to.
1: complex issue, http://blogs.worldbank.org/health/female-education-and-child... as a starting point
Well, you forgot sending humans away from earth.
Education, better healthcare, better access to birth control? Making people have less children doesn't have to be at gunpoint or forced in any way.
If you're talking about reducing population as a means of affecting climate change, then this means a larger/quicker decrease in population than what can be possible with reasonable means; if we'd somehow decide that we'd have to get to, say, 4 billion or below by 2100, then that requires either drastic reductions in reproduction or mass slaughter.
Then we have corporations, like oil companies, who for many decades suppressed information and actively tried to distort public discussion about climate change. We have politicians who are either in the pocket of corporations or who support an ideology that opposes them even acknowledging the existence of climate change (or denying the role of humans), as that would hurt stock markets and shareholder profits in the short term. And we have consumers (people aren't really citizens anymore, but consumers first and foremost thanks to capitalism) who are bombarded daily with things they should buy to improve their lives, and who thus refuse to give up things like flying or meat or cheap clothes from the other side of the world.
Combine it all and you get the frog that's being slowly boiled (except the frog is smart enough to get out in time).
Take a look at my original comment which says that it's time to start talking. Currently it's at -2.
Sound public policy-making is preconditioned on people of diverse opinions talking through issues. Nobody gets what they want, but everybody gets something. We reach some sort of local maxima.
If the mob rule that currently plagues the internet has their way, this is going to permanently disappear. That's fucked. I remain convinced that people of differing opinions can accomplish great things -- but not in an environment like this. Far too many people are eager to identify the good guys and bad guys (and reward and punish them appropriately) and far too few people are eager to actually listen to one another.
If humans don't regulate their own numbers (humanely or otherwise), the Horsemen shall ride, as they always have.
You're both providing a false dichotomy / excluding options, and appealing to consequences.
If we want to solve environmental problems we have to separate science and engineering from leadership. Scientists' and engineers' training and skills make them effective at collecting data, analyzing it, and making predictions.
They rarely have training to influence people, especially billions of people. JFK's speech advanced us more to the moon than the work of any single scientist or engineer.
Hillman recognizes that we all have to change our behavior. His track record implies he is unskilled at leading others to change their behavior so he conclude's we are doomed.
I don't think looking to scientists or engineers for leadership will help. Data, predictions, implementation plans, yes. Leadership, no.
I believe leadership in the style of Mandela, King, Gandhi, and Havel, suitably adjusted for today's needs, is essential to reduce environmental problems.
It seems to me that Hillman's position on climate change follows from his background of opposition to car usage, not the other way around.
I think that a primativist approach to solving climate change is bound to fail. The reality is that motor vehicles offer a convenience that drivers (and voters) are unwilling to sacrifice. If we genuinely want to solve climate change, we should focus on changing our technology rather than our way of life. I believe that if we're to make a genuine difference, it will be from shedding our energy's dependence on fossil fuels, not from shedding our dependence on energy.
Read up on current state of the data and modeling done on oceanic thermocline, it will cheer you up.
But for the second part, can you link any of the research you're talking about or explain why it should make me feel better?
People, writ large, don't want to hear this. Happy stories are far more compelling. Complex stories with unhappy endings, not so much. And all systems stories are complex. (They don't all have to have bad endings, though many do.)
Politics, particularly large-scale democratic systems, hew away from intellect and sophistication. Aristphanes wrote of this in ancient Greece, The Frogs. One of the most accessible and concise developments I've seen is H.L. Mencken's 1926 essay, "Brayard vs. Lionheart", on the Coolidge-Cox U.S. presidential race. Highly recommended.
https://amomai.blogspot.com/2008/10/hl-mencken-bayard-vs-lio...
Our institutions, cultural, governmental, commercial, and otherwise, can address the situation at best poorly, and often directly contribute to the problem. I don't have a handy argument as to why, though I'm thinking much on that. The "P Literature" -- Parkinson's Law, the Peter Principle, Putt's Law, and Stephen Potter's Gamesmanship seem to form part of a core. I'd add the Jevons paradox, Gresham's Law, and John Gall's Systemantics as well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successfu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
Broken models and frames -- theory and ideology -- contribute hugely. I've been focusing particularly on economics and its general failures to properly address both costs and value. (The realisation that "cost", "price", and "value" are three distinct, and frequently only tenuously-related concepts, is a breakthrough in understanding.)
And failures of understanding, communication, and processing of information -- our epistemic system -- are another wrench thrown in the works. Not trivially addressed, and perhaps best considered a fundamental system constraint rather than a bug.
We've been taking out loans from the atmosphere for a couple centuries without too much trouble, but nature is eventually consistent.
E.J. Mishan is an example I've only just discovered. He was a University of Chicago trained economist who questioned the growth mantra beginning in the 1950s.
Leonard Silk, also an economist, ran a fascinating column in The New York Times from the 1960s - 1980s, and addressed Mishan several articles. This one, from 1972, I'd submited to HN without traction a few days back:
"Economic Analysis: Dangers of Growth (1972)"
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/20/archives/growth-vs-enviro...
I've been wondering about that for a few months. I am fully aware that the current organisation of the world will come to an end in like, ten to fifteen years; is it wise for me to continue working with computers, which I love, hoping they will still be of some use after the collapse of civilisation?
Timing societal collapse is even more fraught than timing the market.
I don't think this is clearly true. I was pretty convinced by Pinker's latest two books, and even though a lot of historians were critical of them, I wasn't convinced by the criticisms. I think that people have undervalued the tremendous increases in average quality and length of life across the whole planet in the last 200 years, and that people generally like doom-mongering stories. If we go on the basis that the media tries to make a profit by producing the stories that people like to read, opening up any news source would seem to provide evidence that people like to read bad news.
He also fails to account for the mechanisms, and limits, of progress.
But most of us prefer to subscribe to large-scale myths or ideologies offerring hope, salvation, redemption, etc. That is the backbone of every major world religion, and most political ideology. It's certainly what the economic orthodoxies mantra of perpetual growth pretends.
Sad songs say so much, but Pop is overwhelmingly Happy.
Story arcs tend far more to Comic than Tragic. "Hollywood ending" is a trope for reasons.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hollywood-ending
And in politics, realism is the kiss of death. Carter's "Malaise" speech:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=32596
We remember (or have been indoctrinated with) Churchill's "we shall fight them on the beaches", but not the full paragraph, and far bleaker thoughts, which follow it:
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/apr/20/greatspe...
These are overwhelmingly negative. They're typically systemic (e.g., they aren't easily solved, and they are complex, which means hard to report and make accessible). They often fit poorly into established narratives, and/or are outside the Overton Window. Many challenge Establishment and/or Power. Or concern low-appeal / low-sympathy victims.
http://projectcensored.org/category/the-top-25-censored-stor...
Negative stores are what we hear most not positive ones.
http://www.journalism.org/2000/10/31/negative-vs-positive/
https://qz.com/307214/heres-what-happened-when-a-news-site-o...
There are a few studies of news content and coverage. The Tyndall Report looks at prime-time news coverage, overview available online. The PEJ News Coverage Index looks at TV, radio, talk radio, and print for selected national sources, though it's not. The Vanderbilt Archive similarly has national news data (and content) dating to the 1960s (summaries/headlines online). Local TV, radio, and print are a whole 'nother barrel of fish, though notably a major staple of Los Angeles (and many other regions') live TV coverage is ... vehicle chases.
Much of the coverage is both, yes, negative, and non-substantial. Commercial, entertainment, sport, celebrity, "weird", and otherwise trivial matter.
But not, as a rule, matters of serious existential import.
http://www.journalism.org/news_index_methodology/
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-high-spee...
Any evidence to back this up? I would say the fact that news runs on ratings and overwhelmingly offers negative stories suggests it's false.
Of course even zero emissions may not be enough, and it's good to see that getting acknowledgement - if we have a consensus that we're past the point where we could stop global warming by reducing emissions, then we can start looking at active measures to counteract it (i.e. geoengineering). It won't be easy, or cheap, or safe, but there are no safe options any more.
Solar / wind are dropping Moores law fashion, governments could crank up action if doom looked likely, the earth has had far higher co2 in the past. 100 million years ago it was about 5x what it is now but life wasn't wiped out.
Source: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
I agree that industrial civilization is very likely doomed. Or at least, except for the wealthy. There's just too much momentum from CO2 already in the atmosphere. Even if no more were released, starting today. And then there are all the potential, arguably likely, positive feedbacks. Such as melting of permafrost in northern Canada and Siberia.
But I disagree about the mass extinction aspect. Earth is in the midst of an anthropogenic mass extinction. But collapse of industrial civilization will mitigate that, I suspect. Climate change will drive some species extinct, but overall diversity will do better without so many people.
As you say, CO2 levels were higher in the past. But damn, when they were, the Earth was a tropical hothouse. But what's bad about rapid CO2 increase is that evolutionary change can't keep up. Species, even entire ecosystems, will get sucker punched. And even so, having less people will help.
I doubt that humans will go extinct, either. We're tough bastards. Maybe there's a population bottleneck coming, but that's often a good thing, in the long term.
It's been at least 2 decades since I've met or heard from one who didn't.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=scientists+letter+warning&atb=v64-...
"Thousands of scientists issue bleak 'second notice' to humanity"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2...
"16,000 scientists sign dire warning to humanity - CNN"
https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/14/health/scientists-warn-humani...
"20,000 Scientists Sign "Warning To Humanity" Letter About ..."
https://trofire.com/2018/03/18/20000-scientists-sign-warning...
I don't agree at all with the half-assed expensive solutions proposed so far.
> A small band of artists and writers [...] have embraced the idea that “civilisation” will soon end in environmental catastrophe but only a few scientists [...] have suggested as much.
So both the number of artists and writers, AND the number of scientists supporting this are apparently small. And, again, unreferenced.
I won't defend the commenter here directly, but their comment is certainly no worse nor less valid than the article.
> governments could
You're ignoring the tragedy of the commons, and democracy. Would the population pay 10x more for flights because of a tax? Would a government give its own industry a competitive disadvantage for the environment?
If it has to be written, he had a letter to Science on BECCS iirc.
First of all, while climate change can be disruptive, it will absolutely not wipe out humans or anything even close to that. The changes are gradual enough that continues adoption will resolve the waste majority of problems without much issues.
Fossil fuels cause climate change, but the also cause that people went from 30 to 70 years of avg live. Far more people live in China because they have energy from coal. Denying people cheap energy because of climate change will be MORE harmful to them then climate change.
The poorest people on the world who die the earliest are those that don't have access to energy.
Starving our-self of energy is not in efforts to consume less, is a futile effort and will never solve anything.
We should be concerned and adopt solutions and think about the future, but this sort of pessimism is totally unwarranted.
> Hillman doubts that human ingenuity can find a fix and says there is no evidence that greenhouse gases can be safely buried.
The cycle for carbon is understood and we could put carbon into lime stone and put them into the ocean again. Its just an energy problem.
Secondly, you make a lot of assumptions on which you base you reasoning. What if the changes are not that progressive ? What is there is a tipping point ?
Then you also assume thzt we couldn't have done overwise, that our lifestyle and how we achieved it was not only inevitable but the only way it is worth it.
Your part about self starving is espacially revealling of a narrow view deeply rooted, not only in materialism, but also in rejection of the idea anything else would be good for the human specie.
Now i do appreciate the confort of our modern life, but ignoring the price of it, denying the usefulness or even the possibilities of alternatives and promoting the statu quo is very limiting.
Maybe there is maybe there is not. His point is that there is no hope, and that is false.
> Then you also assume thzt we couldn't have done overwise
Please tell me all the cases in human history where large amounts of people voluntary restricted their energy use?
Carbon growth comes from the developing world, and we can do nothing to restrict that.
> Your part about self starving is espacially revealling of a narrow view deeply rooted, not only in materialism, but also in rejection of the idea anything else would be good for the human specie.
If you want to voluntarily starve yourself of energy, go ahead have fun. However suggesting it as a solution for a global problem is a non-starter. Even a western person starving himself of energy will still use many X more then most Indians. An most Indians would like to use as much energy as westerners.
> Now i do appreciate the confort of our modern life, but ignoring the price of it, denying the usefulness or even the possibilities of alternatives and promoting the statu quo is very limiting.
I have never denieded the usefulness of alternatives. All I have said about the status quo is that it is actually saving millions of peoples lives and giving them a higher standard of living. That is often ignored and it should not be, because it misses literally the biggest improvement in human welfare in world history.
The man spent his life in metrics indicating that trend, which made him pessimistic. It's fair. If you see somebody drinking, smoking, and eating burger all life, your wouldn't have much hope either, but to somebody who have just heard about it, not watching it, it seems a "severe" judgment.
> Please tell me all the cases in human history where large amounts of people voluntary restricted their energy use?
> Carbon growth comes from the developing world, and we can do nothing to restrict that.
You could have used the same argument about slavery not so long ago.
"Humanity always've done it. All our achievements used slaves. Our lifestyle is based on slaves. Please tell me all the cases in human history where large amounts of people voluntary restricted their use of slaves ?"
Then we did it this one time.
> If you want to voluntarily starve yourself of energy, go ahead have fun. However suggesting it as a solution for a global problem is a non-starter. Even a western person starving himself of energy will still use many X more then most Indians. An most Indians would like to use as much energy as westerners.
"If you want to voluntarily starve yourself" are such strong worlds. There is a lot of margin between eating meat every day + running all oil engines + changing phones each years + everybody having children... and living in a cave.
Beside, if you have 10 men in a cabin in Artic, and everybody must either poop on the floor or get terrible cold and poop outside, people may poop on the floor for a while. But it's not sustainable. Sooner or later somebody will have to say that they should all go outside. Or find an alternative. And your argument is pretty much "you go first".
> All I have said about the status quo is that it is actually saving millions of peoples lives and giving them a higher standard of living. That is often ignored and it should not be, because it misses literally the biggest improvement in human welfare in world history.
Yes. And now that we've done it this way, we know the price of it. We have the feedback and the scientific knowledge to understand the system we live in, the consequences of exponential growth in a finite system and what our needs are as a specie.
Some very intelligent yet with nothing to gain from it are saying that we are doing very badly. They said it clearly, loudly, respectfully, repeatedly, with strong arguments.
There is nothing more they can do.
It's now our job to act on that.
Well then he was looking at the wrong metrics. Because during that time we observed the largest expansion of human prosperity.
It seems that he deliberately wants to pick these metrics to fit his Anti-Humanist agenda.
> You could have used the same argument about slavery not so long ago.
There are many ways this is a different case. But I don't want to get into a side argument.
> Yes. And now that we've done it this way, we know the price of it. We have the feedback and the scientific knowledge to understand the system we live in, the consequences of exponential growth in a finite system and what our needs are as a specie.
Yes, and what we have learned is that people who don't have energy are very unhappy and die young. So when we think about the future of the species we should not simply think of some abstract species that we need to save globally, rather we should realize the real world constraints such as the benefits of the current system provides for all humans.
So if your solution means depriving lots of people of energy, then first of all that's just cruel. Second it is politically infeasible. Third, reducing human population is a terrible way of making the future better.
I think there are lots solutions out there but HIS point is that he does not believe in these solution because he believes the ONLY way we can solve the problem is by restricting consumption. That is the same 'finite resources' zero sum thinking that has plagued the world for such a long time.
People can, unfortunately, easily ignore problems that aren't right at their door, and most of the people who are affected the most aren't in North America or Europe.
Second, the Wikipedia article you link to doesn't provide clear information. The number my source cited was from 2016, which is still quite recent. If we're down from 36 million in 2006, that's good news, but it still means that millions still die every year due to starvation and malnutrition.
But for the sake of argument. Let's imagine that number was true. The stupefying thing is even that number is surprisingly positive. There are currently 7.6 billion people in the world. Numbers like this are really hard to wrap your head around, but to put that another way that means that, even if we pretend that number is real, that means that 99.9% of this world have enough food to get by. Think about all of the countries doing completely idiotic things and all the warfare going on which tends to cause starvation. In spite of all that 99.9% of people have enough to get by? That is really quite remarkable!
And as mentioned the big problem here is not a lack of money or a lack of arable land or anything like that. It tends to be because of bad decisions. Zimbabwe, the former 'breadbasket of Africa' is the poster child here. They chose to forcibly confiscate the land of experienced farmers (without compensation) because of their skin color, and then redistribute it to people with minimal farming experience. Around the same time they also decided to try to become socialist ruining the extrinsic (financial) motivation to maximize production. You'll never guess what happened next!
So what do you want to do there? You're not going to solve that country's issues by donating to a charity or even pursuing greater foreign aid. They need to either solve their own issues (which they do seem to be making progress towards - having recently staged an armed coup) or you're left to start another war for some good old fashioned 'regime change' in which case we often end up screwing things up even worse in the longrun, if not in the shortrun, as war and hunger tend to go together.