This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I saw this tweet by Palmer Luckey the other day:
"The real secret of of global warming is that the climate can be whatever humanity wants it to be. Two dozen nations could each single-handedly send us all into an ice age."
He's right. It wouldn't be that hard to prevent climate change via geoengineering. In fact we did some geoengineering by mistake last year. New regulations limited the amount of sulfur that oceangoing ships could emit. This caused an increase in the global temperature.
So, if climate change is such a threat, why don't we do something about it?
Because, let's be honest, our current climate change mitigation strategies are doomed to fail and will only make us poor.
Even if the United States and Europe cut 100% of carbon emissions tomorrow, the climate is going to get hotter. China already emits about 3 times as much carbon as the United States. In the developing world, new coal plants are being built every day. 2024 will set a record for coal production, and 2025 will be greater still. And there is hundreds of years of coal left to be consumed.
Getting people to downsize their SUV to a Prius isn't going to fix the problem. Renewables are not the answer either, being both unreliable and requiring constant upgrades. We are using huge amounts of resources to build solar and wind capacity, but the lifetime of these projects is just a couple of decades. So we need more metals and more concrete, which will result in more emissions, not to mention the associated ecological destruction from strip mines.
Did you know that 8% of global carbon emissions come from the production of concrete, the same amount produced by all private passenger automobiles? Fantasies about electric cars solving global warming are just that.
To fully fix global warming, we need to reduce global carbon emissions by at least 90%, more likely 99%. Carbon in the atmosphere has been increasing since before 1800 AD.
So why are we spending trillions trying to nibble at the edges when we could spend billions and achieve much better results. We can cool the climate to an acceptable level while we wait for the carbon removal technology that is the only way to fully solve the problem.
There’s a whole cadre of risk averse people who have been putting a damper on all discussion of geoengineering for decades now.
But I think that we will roughly follow the path that’s laid out in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future: we hold off on geoengineering right up until some large scale tragedies happen which are clearly as a result of climate change and then use that as a watershed moment to start spraying stuff in the atmosphere to try and defend ourselves.
The risk reward logic for whoever might start doing it doesn’t work out until there is some terrible event to point to. We prefer the status quo and need a big attention grabbing event to justify any type of big actions that deviate from it.
Of course, once we do start doing it, it’s unlikely we’ll scale up carbon capture technology to truly make that much of a difference IMO, so it’ll just be a game of doing this forever or else deal with the termination shock.
A rational approach would be different than this but our psychology makes a waiting-around-and-then-rushed-panicky-reaction strategy more likely.
I'm not sure what that would be exactly. These disasters would seem to be decades or centuries in the future. Over time, deaths due to natural disasters have become much reduced. Our capacity to deal with weather has increased faster than the climate warming. And in many areas, colder temperatures are still a bigger threat to human survival than warm ones.
To put things in perspective, 500,000 people died from the Bhola Cyclone in 1970. It's nearly inconceivable that we'd experience a weather-related disaster of that magnitude today.
In the book it’s a heat event greater than survivable wet bulb temperatures in India. Once the grid goes down, 20 million people die over the span of a few days.
India reacts by unilaterally deciding to begin solar geoengineering and declares any attempts to stop it as an act of war.
I don’t know how likely an outcome like this is. (The death number is definitely pretty crazy).
But who knows. We are just at the beginning of climate change after all.
One paper that does raise my eyebrows quite a bit is this, estimating that by around 2070 1-3 billion people will be subject to hot climate conditions currently only experienced by 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface (currently represented by just a few parts of the Sahara).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1910114117
At best that really messes with the economy in those places and the pressure to emigrate skyrockets.
I think humans usually surprise me by our ability to deal with extreme heat. But also, tolerance to any environmental stressor is a threshold function, things can look okay while stresses mount until suddenly at certain threshold we see more dramatic impacts. (Example, rising floodwaters are not a big deal right until the moment the water rises to the level of your front door, then costs/damages suddenly rise dramatically).
Seems like a reasonable premise.
Definitely true. The Earth's surface temperature increased by like 5° Celsius over 1000 years at the end of the last ice age. So it is capable for fairly large swings. And, of course, if it wasn't for human emissions, we would eventually fall into another ice age which would cover much of the Northern Hemisphere in glaciers hundreds of meters thick.
The Earth's temperature fell drastically over the last 5 million years, with deepening glaciations. A snowball Earth might have been our future as plants continued to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#/media/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg
So it is imperative for humans to take action to control the climate, setting it to the ideal temperature.
We should start today with small, limited actions to prevent increases in global temperatures. As time goes on and the effects are well-studied and understood we can increase our actions to set the global thermostat. The ideal temperature is probably close to our current temperature, or maybe that of 20 or 30 years ago. I doubt we'd want to go much colder that that.
What is this, though? I agree that we should strive for the capability to set the global thermostat to whatever we want, but there are genuinely diverging interests here. Maybe Burkina Faso wants a year round balmy weather for its tourist industry; maybe Muscovites want to wear shorts in January.
It's still better to have that control than not, and probably there's some clever market design where countries can bid to set the thermostat.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link