Comment by nostrademons
8 years ago
It's very likely that local band-aids are the most effective way to deal with this.
Your train example is a pretty good one, but you've mixed up the metaphor. Here, "stepping out of the way" = mass migrations out of coastal cities. "A mechanized winch that temporarily lifts us over the train" = flood control projects like in Tokyo, Houston, Venice, or the Netherlands. "Calling the train company and asking them to stop running trains" = stopping global warming by addressing carbon emissions.
If you had a train barreling down on you, which one would you choose? I'd bet it wouldn't be calling the train company and asking them to stop running trains, because a.) they are unlikely to anyway and b.) even if they were willing, by the time you got through to someone with the power to stop the trains you'll probably be dead anyway.
I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed, and people will pick up the pieces of their lives elsewhere. If they're proactive, they might evacuate before the city is actually destroyed, and we'll see mass migrations of people (as have been happening for the last several hundred years anyway) away from areas that will face greater climate risks and toward areas that benefit from global warming.
That's what humans do: we adapt to our environment. Only in particularly hubristic times (like now) have we expected to adapt our environment to us.
Adaptation without mitigation will not be effective as the impacts worsen. Uncapped emissions and business as usual scenarios will cause outcomes that we will not be able to build ourselves out of.
We must reduce emissions and push for sustainable infrastructure and solutions, now.
We must adapt and we must also mitigate. Only through the combination of both efforts and through our determination and willingness to lead sustainable lifestyles will we be able to beat climate change. We must push for renewable energy, and technological solutions to efficiently use resources.
The policy coming out of the White House is against these efforts and we need to find a way to prevent them from hurting us and our posterity by postponing the efforts to transition to clean energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/climate/clean-power-plan....
Nah, the problem is self-limiting. If global warming reduces the carrying capacity of the environment, people will die. Dead people don't use resources; their bodies are returned to the environment by decomposers, where they will provide fertilizer for trees and other plants, which will grow even more abundantly because of the enhanced CO2 levels. Eventually the earth reaches a new equilibrium at a somewhat higher temperature.
Most people don't want to die, and so we have a self-interested argument for not destroying our environment. But we're at the top of the food chain - well before there's a lasting impact on the earth's ability to sustain life, we'll all be dead. It's the height of hubris to believe we have the ability to effect lasting change on the earth's environment that won't disappear once we do.
It's not true that a stable equilibrium is always reached. It's also possible that irreversible changes are set into motion which shift the equilibrium so far away from livability that humans cannot survive.
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It seems that we could be headed for a mass extinction, whether or not humans manage to survive thousands of years longer.
We aren’t going to entirely destroy life on the planet, which will eventually recover great diversity (speciation to fill new ecological niches in some new stable equilibrium) within a few million years after we’re gone, but it will look significantly different than what we are familiar with.
That’s not much consolation to people who feel attached to what human societies and cultures we have all spent a lot of effort developing.
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I hear the eco-nihilist party is polling excellently, pretty soon everyone will see the folly of trying to improve anything ever.
Too bad the people who die in the name of "carrying capacity"always tend to be brown and poor.
LOL. Sigh. Why does global warming attract this particular brand of sophistry all the time?
"President, what's your solution to the North Korean nukes?"
"Nothing to worry: the problem is self-limiting. If they start a nuclear war, billions will die, and then the survivors will be too poor to build any more nuclear weapons, so naturally there will be no more nuclear wars."
"But what about Puerto Rico? When are the aids coming?"
"The problem is self-limiting. If we do nothing, most of them will die or simply move to somewhere else, and then next time another hurricane hits there will be less people to die!"
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The people most likely to die are the lowest emitters.
Remarkably blasé and somewhat nihilistic.
There are market forces behind renewables already. Wind and solar is getting cheaper and cheaper. Coal and oil are getting more expensive.
Why can’t Tokyo attempt both adaptation and mitigation? Which happens to be exactly what they’re doing.
> I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed,
And the people too poor to evacuate will stick it out in the city hoping for the best, and die in the aftermath of the next catastrophe.
A mass evacuation out of Houston for a hurricane is impossible. I have seen it time and time again - every time they try to evacuate us, a bunch of people just die in the streets, and then there's the risk of a NOLA situation where all the people who are poor to evacuate at every whisper of hurricane die of disease from disgusting floodwaters, or exposure. Or drown.
The population of the Greater Houston area is 5.6 million. Just look at the map https://goo.gl/maps/rU1ZWvfjy9w You can get out via 45, 59/69, i-10, 290, 69NE, or hell even 249. It's quite possibly the most spider-webbed city in the country. You can go to Austin, Dallas, San Antonio.
And every hurricane those freeways are deadlocked, and people are caught by the storm from behind, and old people's oxygen tanks explode on their busses because of texas heat, and that's without a full-blown evacuation ordered. We even run out of gasoline, the Oil City.
I'm not sure what the solution is but yea, evacuation out of Houston is not an option. I just wish there was some way to tackle the "big truck" mentality out here so we can start reducing our contribution to climate change. Our one attempt to build a inner-city metro is a comical failure that people just crash their giant trucks[1] into on a regular basis because they built the damn thing on ground level on main street.
[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq6W45lG1Jg)
I believe they were talking a bout a slow, permanent evacuation of an area likely to get hit by more and bigger floods coupled with rising oceans.
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When the alternative is
> even if they were willing, by the time you got through to someone with the power to stop the trains you'll probably be dead anyway.
But in reality, "we're" not just doing one thing. There are many things going on to solve the problem from multiple levels. While Tokyo is building up flood protections, Australia(n banks) is actively divesting from fossil full projects.
As an aside with similar sentiment, this quote really drove home the point of flexible humans are to their situations.
"Centralisation breeds anomalies: beach resorts often buy their seafood in Mexico City’s wholesale market, hundreds of miles from the coast."
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21665027-its-combinat...
>That's what humans do: we adapt to our environment. Only in particularly hubristic times (like now) have we expected to adapt our environment to us.
Changing emissions profiles IS adapting. We've already done it with smog and lead, etc.
> I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed, and people will pick up the pieces of their lives elsewhere
Even this is optimistic. It seems more likely to me that cities like Houston will keep getting flooded and "bailed" out (ha ha) by federal relief funds and state bond issuances.
"Only in particularly hubristic times (like now) have we expected to adapt our environment to us."
You can't generalize at this level of granularity. Humans have done a lot of "adapting the environment to us" - draining swamps, building canals, reversing rivers, building dams, making water, power, and sewage distribution systems.