We've Just Had the Best Decade in Human History
spectator.co.uk
spectator.co.uk
Why climate change is good for the world - "Don't panic! The scientific consensus is that warmer temperatures do more good than harm" https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/10/carry-on-warming/
His tenure at Northern Rock does not inspire confidence:
The man who crocked Northern Rock - and how the scandal will cost £55 BILLION https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1026384/The-man-cro...
Lessons of the fall - "How a financial darling fell from grace, and why regulators didn't catch it" https://www.economist.com/briefing/2007/10/18/lessons-of-the...
Northern Rock chairman quits after crisis https://www.euronews.com/2007/10/19/northern-rock-chairman-q...
Matt Ridley would turn planet into Northern Rock https://theecologist.org/2018/nov/05/matt-ridley-would-turn-...
Do you have any specific disagreement with anything he wrote? Because it seemed to be an interesting article with many things in it I didn't know, written in an engaging style.
From glancing through the comments below it seems people are angry because this guy isn't angry, and doesn't believe the world is doomed.
Why climate change is good for the world - "Don't panic! The scientific consensus is that warmer temperatures do more good than harm"
You don't explicitly pass judgement on this, apparently believing climate sensitivity and impact of small temperature changes is so obvious as to be beyond doubt. But there's a lot of doubt about how sensitive the climate really is. Climatology is very far from being a precise and well understood science, and that's before you get into some of the questionable scientific practices found inside.
The article is, again, well written and makes good arguments. It starts by citing a scientific meta-study into the economic impacts and goes from there. It also acknowledges the possible counter-arguments.
For those who are interested in the question of climate sensitivity Nic Lewis (a published climate scientist and skeptic), has some good talks on the matter, like this one:
https://www.nicholaslewis.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Lew...
Let't take a look. Here's a report when it was published[1]. Even one of the people Mr Lewis cites disputes his claims.
The "good news" the IPCC apparently tried to hide is that the world's climate system is less sensitive to a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than some scientists think it is.
The bad news for the GWPF – a secretly funded organisation founded by UK climate science sceptic Lord Nigel Lawson - is that before the ink has even dried on their new report, the organisation has been accused of cherry-picking facts to make their argument stick.
And in more bad news, one of the researchers cited by the GWPF report has told me that even if Lawson's think tank is right, then we're heading for 3C of global heating by the end of the century (which is actually very bad news).
Good prose does not make a good scientific or factual argument. It is as you say, just "good talks", or hot air. Lawson was so bad at denial that his appearances on the BBC were more a black comedy five minutes than actual contrarianism.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/mar/0...
http://www.mattridley.co.uk/books/
I read his book Genome years ago and thought it was a moderately interesting primer on the revolution in genetic research starting to unfold in the wake of the Human Genome Project.
I'm sorry to discover Viscount Ridley turned out to be such a hack:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/MemberContributions?mem...
> Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.
...and what you're leaving out here is that this is far too little, far too late. This is like noting a decrease in the number of iceburg collisions in the last hours before the Titanic sank.
This is NOT a cause for optimism. We're destroying the environment at a slower rate, but that doesn't mean we're not destroying the environment.
What we are doing is reducing the rate at which our damage grows.
Reduction in acceleration is not reduction in velocity or reversal.
We are using natural resources at a rate which is constantly increasing, and the rate of increase is increasing as well.
If you're going to say that all green types are nuts because everything is hunky dory, you have to at least put in some claim that the Earth isn't even really warming, or isn't warming as much as we thought, or that rapid warming is good. Any of them would be false, but you've at least got to try.
Always focusing on the negative and problems has many thinking there has not been positive movement, has left people with more anxiety and depressions, and causes hordes of other problems.
Celebrating and talking about positives is important. It doesn't mean all things are hunky dory. But, it's healthy to do.
In particular, what parts were ranty? I didn't see anything that would rise to the level of a rant. It's remarkably good natured given the invectives routinely dished out by those who would disagree.
It seems to depend very much on where you are:
Countries with an aggregate population today of roughly six billion will suffer for it, though.
I often wonder about that. It could also be that our collective attention can only handle one big emergency at the time, and we make that our sole focus.
I would not be surprised if in some years another emergency will dominate the news. Maybe its about ecocide then, large-scale collapse of ecosystems due to a combination of overfishing, poaching, natural habitat destruction and pollution. And man-made climate change only an additional factor in that.
Where exactly are you getting this from? It's certainly not from the science.
If you're going to argue this pedantically, perhaps don't start by claiming you know the opinions of every scientist, because if we're being pedantic, that's obviously not true.
Less pedantically, I think we agree that probably humans will survive global warming. But I think that we can agree that there's a temperature that's not survivable, even if we don't know what temperature that is. There's no long-term upper bound on how hot earth can get, and we're modeling uncharted territory: earth has never been as hot as it's going to get, while life has been on earth. So we really don't know how bad it will get. There is some chance that global warming will literally wipe out humanity, and given the stakes, I think that's a significant risk we need to be addressing.
Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum [0]
The associated period of massive carbon release into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted from 20,000 to 50,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C. Paired δ13C, δ11B, and δ18O data suggest that ~12000 Gt of carbon (at least 44000 Gt CO 2e) were released over 50,000 years, averaging 0.24 Gt per year.
Since at least 1997, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum has been investigated in geoscience as an analog to understand the effects of global warming and of massive carbon inputs to the ocean and atmosphere, including ocean acidification. Humans today emit about 10 Gt of carbon per year, and will have released a comparable amount in about 1,000 years at that rate.
Take a look also at "Abrupt climate change" article [1]:
Timescales of events described as 'abrupt' may vary dramatically. Changes recorded in the climate of Greenland at the end of the Younger Dryas, as measured by ice-cores, imply a sudden warming of +10 °C (+18 °F) within a timescale of a few years. Other abrupt changes are the +4 °C (+7.2 °F) on Greenland 11,270 years ago or the abrupt +6 °C (11 °F) warming 22,000 years ago on Antarctica.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrupt_climate_change
I mean that's even less scientific than what climate deniers say.
Is this what the world has come to? You have two camps: climate deniers, and climate alarmists, neither party caring in the slightest about science?
By that reasoning, literally everything is an existential threat to humanity.
It was alluded to in this section (ctrl-f "emissions"):
>> A wind farm requires far more concrete and steel than an equivalent system based on gas. Environmental opposition to nuclear power has hindered the generating system that needs the least land, least fuel and least steel or concrete per megawatt. Burning wood instead of coal in power stations means the exploitation of more land, the eviction of more woodpeckers — and even higher emissions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellet_fuel?wprov=sfla1
Interesting. I wonder how much power is available from that.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
I'm not convinced it's all waste product.
> Europe imported more than 4 million tons of wood pellets from US forests last year and wrote it all off as renewable energy.
https://www.businessinsider.com/europe-imports-wood-biomass-...
Coal is very energy dense. Imports and other automated machinery like wood-cutting machines, planes for seed planting all burn oil. If you import coal and import wood, you could end up burning a lot more fuel with the wood option.
Now, that's kind of a tricky form of accounting because it would make wood burning worse from the perspective of the importing country only. But the carbon was still pulled out of the atmosphere in the exporting country.
The real reason wood burning/planting doesn't make much sense for reducing emissions is just one of scale. You end up needing to plant billions of trees to balance even just airline travel, let alone everything else. There isn't enough space short of terraforming deserts and other very energy intensive activities that probably wouldn't balance.
What I think the author misses is the interplay between pessimists identifying problems and innovators creating solutions. A voice identifying a severe problem is important, but do is the own saying “we got this, let’s fix it.”
I would also agree that economic growth and energy usage aren't inherently bad; these are only problematic at our current level of technology. And we're going to need a lot more of both in order to tackle future existential problems among other things.
However one aspect of well-being which isn't always included in these treatments is that of 'mental health' or the state of our 'souls' as it used to be thought of. Both concepts are vague but they do point to something real and profoundly important. So here's an unrhetorical question: are we getting better or worse in this respect, on average? Or is it simply impossible to measure at our present inadequate level of understanding?
But stating "best decade in human" history is really tongue in cheek. You could has well hand pick other indicators and state "end of the world signs were clear starting from 2010":
- The biggest economical power in the world, China, is now turning into 1984
- 60 % of the insect species considered extinct, and because of us
- Micro plastics everywhere
- USA general opioid addiction
- For the first time literacy, IQ and lifespan decrease in some occidental countries
- Obesity and diabetes epidemics
- Highest difference between rich and poor in centuries, while the former never paid such low taxes.
- Mass surveillance and black torture sites are now considered standard practice
- Extremism rising
- Mega corporations now have more economical power than some small countries
- Ads, ads everywhere. Comments are ads. Articles are ads. The entire internet has been sold to PR companies.
- Huge revealed scandals (panama papers, PRISM, Epstein, snowden, equifax...) ended up with no consequences for the criminals, screaming to the world that the powerful can actually do whatever they want
- Health care and justice systems in rich countries are saturated
- Jails are businesses, filled mostly with males from a few minorities.
- The population is violently divided on major political issues: Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK, Gilets Jaunes in France, Hong Kong in China...
- Privacy is at a all time low with the rise of IoT and smart speakers/cameras to complement the already omnipresent internet trackers and ubiquitous phones
- Star Wars 9
Not disagreeing with your main point, but positivism doesn't mean what you think it does (you wanted "positivity" instead.)
noun: positivism
1. a philosophical system that holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and that therefore rejects metaphysics and theism. a humanistic religious system founded on positivism. another term for logical positivism.
2. the theory that laws are to be understood as social rules, valid because they are enacted by authority or derive logically from existing decisions, and that ideal or moral considerations (e.g., that a rule is unjust) should not limit the scope or operation of the law.
I guess also the problem here is that many statements about things getting worse are very subjective, whereas the article tries to focus on objective metrics like absolute poverty, metals usage, etc. And it takes a global view.
Your list is pretty large but, for instance, you say "ads everywhere". The internet has been funded by ads for decades. Did it objectively get moreso in the past decade? And if so, isn't the worseness of this purely subjective given that many services we enjoy may not exist without ads or, possibly, would be charged for and thus available only to the rich, in rich countries? This is highly debatable. Whereas "child mortality is at record lows" is metric-based and objectively good.
Also many of these are very USA specific, but the worst places to live are really outside the USA. If your child died of TB "too many ads" and "the rise of smart speakers" is going to seem really trivial in comparison. No quantity of ads will counterbalance even a small rise in child mortality as a problem.
Still, it's good for our collective mental health to acknowledge that many really important elements of the human experience are really improving in meaningful ways.
If nothing else, openly acknowledging the successes of the past decades gives humanity confidence to address the considerable challenges of the present.
Strictly focusing on either the negative or the positive is out of balance. Balance is healthy.
Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today there are still 40 years of warming from current emissions in the atmosphere plus unstoppable feedbacks that have already been triggered (Arctic ice, methane in the permafrost, etc). Nobody really knows how much warming these feedbacks will add or for how long.
And even in the best case scenario we won't get to zero emissions in at least a couple of decades.
Don't forget that the high yields are caused by the crops being highly optimized for current conditions..
[1] https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Global...
Edit: Also that graph doesn't show emissions per capita which is the metric that really matters.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Also see this about cumulative emissions:
https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/uploads/cumulati...
The US is still the country that has emitted more CO2.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/author/matt-ridley/
>The most dangerous thing about the Amazon fires is the apocalyptic rhetoric
>Ignore the global warming hysteria: hurricanes are not getting worse
>The eradication of South Georgia’s rats proves we can do anything
>Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy
>The world is getting greener. Why does no one want to know?
And my personal favorite:
>How hunting and shooting help wildlife – and not just in Africa
Bloody brilliant, let me tell you.
The hunting of endangered species is a gross practice that is a natural extension of the colonialist history of the West. When rich whites go to shoot animals who are not capable of defending themselves, no one should kid itself that yeah, there are alternatives to that horrid practice - and meanwhile, illegal hunting continues to eat up entire species, so the whole talk about hunting conserving the population is simply not true when taken in its actual context.
And we completely ignored the times when the ruling class goes to countries, shoots animals unlawfully, and gets away with it. Examples:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/11/donald-trump... https://dailynewshungary.com/deputy-pm-semjens-swedish-hunt-...
And we could continue with more historic examples, like this piece of art right here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian%E2%80%93Roosevelt_...
Makes my skin crawl.
But it's still a weird definition of "help". And I would argue that, if you look at it holistically, in many cases it is little more than a temporary holding action.
> predictions I made ... that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less...’... our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.
That's the kind of evidence he gives?
* "Some" nations, not all nor most, nor the largest ones.
* "Beginning" to use less stuff, not "using" less stuff.
* "less stuff: [one kind], [another kind], [a third kind]" - not using less generally, but using less of certain kinds of things, albeit important ones.
and so on. This is Junk commentary. I wouldn't be surprised if even his sources are also painting an overly rosy picture.
Interesting. But before I hip-hip-hurray, I'd like to know how many 13g drink cans were made in 2019, and how many 85g cans were made in 1959.
At a quick glance I'd say, umm, more...
Though the numbers are only for the US, total number of empty beverage cans produced and shipped in the US and US-controlled territories in 1960 was 9.700 (billions or tonnes, I'm not sure, the unit is not in the table) and in 2010 it was 96.457. So there's been a ten-fold increase of production for an eight-fold decrease in aluminum used. Note the numbers are for total cans, which I think includes steel, but there's only aggregate data up to 1979.
Data from this table from the page you linked:
http://www.cancentral.com/sites/cancentral.com/files/public-...
Fortunately, it seems that for other types of cans production went down. For example, total number of food cans was 34.600 in 1970 and 28.432 in 2010.
This table:
http://www.cancentral.com/sites/cancentral.com/files/public-...
Again thanks, I should have looked it up myself :)
Look: measurement a,b,c,d all show things are improving. So this is the truth.
It's one point of view. There are plenty of other ways to look at the world seriously. It doesn't have to be reduced to 5 or 6 numbers.
The "roaring 20s" preceded the great depression. And then a world war.
Cheap solar energy
Electric cars
CRISPR gene editing
Real world machine learning applications
Commercial space vehicles
Ebola vaccine
Heightened public awareness of: plastics, climate change, inequality, sexual harrassment
We fixed the Ozone hole
Extreme poverty down by half
Higgs boson and gravitational waves discovered
What about mass surveilance, rising suicides and homelessness, or never-ending wars, among other things?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates-by-se...
My wife has a coworker who has to go to therapy to deal with her generalized anxiety about the world’s issue, which went into overdrive after the Trump election. She is constantly on top of the latest NYT disaster article. Her hair has started to fall out and she’s only in her mid-30s. It’s really, really sad.
But the best decade politically? Not even close. Nobody saw the resurgence of right-wing populism coming, of anti-immigrant vitriol, of rejecting the international institutions safeguarding peace, or breakdown of constitutional norms.
And with climate change on its way, I wouldn't count our chickens before they're hatched.
I am not disputing that our world is on a knife edge. I am saying that it has always been like this, or worse.
Intellectuals and progressives are very guilty of similar behavior, it's just that their out-groups are not delineated by skin color, so no one notices it.
But I'd argue that what's particularly scary is the fact that things have gotten worse politically. It's not that the 10's were improving less fast -- it's that long-trusted political institutions are falling apart, and nobody knows how much further they have to go, or if they'll be able to be put back together.
Or... we're witnessing a rebalancing of power where an executive branch will no longer have carte blanche and there will once again be a balance of power between the three branches of government (in the US at least, can't speak to how other countries do their politics).
One can hope at least.
This isn't the first time that's happened, you know. And the institutions that replace them will also fall apart and be replaced. And those as well.
You should stop worrying about governing body A or B and start hoping that the next group who seizes power respects inalienable rights as much as the ones who created your current situation.
You're implying that it's more important who rules ("the next group") rather than which institutions constrain them. I would suggest that this is deeply misguided. Institutions are what we have to protect us. Worrying about them is incredibly important, because they're what determines who the next group will be.
That's very much a matter of perspective, almost by definition. "Right-wing populism" is just grassroots politics that some people don't like. We're also seeing a resurgence of left-wing grassroots movements; and again, plenty of people might dislike these political stances, but one can also see where they're coming from.
If poverty is an error, then a 60% error rate on 1 billion requests and a 10% error rate on 6 billion requests is the exact same thing for those people.
There is less poor people now than there was 10 years ago.
It's basically the World Bank covering its ass for its own spectacular failure.
I can't conceive of the mental contortions you must have forced yourself into to conclude that a world of 600 million people, all in abject poverty, is just as good the world we live in now.
No. They are not the same thing. Error rate does not automatically drop when requests grow. The number of errors remains the same, but the number of "good" increases, how is that "the exact same thing"?
Also, 1 billion world population was in 1800s, at that time poverty rate was 80%.
Optimistic comments are being voted down by the moderators (who have a high enough ranking to do so). Yet, this article has been pushed to the top by regular members.
The messages within the down-voted comments aren't breaking any of the community rules. So the down-voting is happening because of a political disagreement. The moderators are intolerant of an opposing view and rather than engage in open debate; they instead wink the things they disagree with, out of the conversation entirely.
It's always been ok for downvoting to express disagreement on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314.