[LINK] Surviving Climate Change

[Jim Birch]

On 21 January 2015 at 20:47, David Boxall <linkdb at boxall.name> wrote:

I hate to break it to you, but the human race will end.
>

 I have no doubt about that.

Just to clarify, I fully support active CO2 reduction policy of a more
serious kind than anything on offer yet.  And I'm personally 100% willing
to take an the economic hit.  The impacts of continuing along the current
path are clearly disastrous.  I just can't see it wiping out the human
race.  Some people will left in concrete boxes wondering why we let it
happen.  That is my don't-go-there situation.

Watching the global warming debate has really affirmed my belief in human
stupidity.  Quite apart from aesthetic issues, collective climate change
mitigation is a no-brainer on purely economic grounds unless you expect to
be dead within 20 years and don't care much about anyone else.  The
unfortunate evidence is that's how an awful lot of us appears to think:
basically, to follow our biological programming to exploit the available
environment.  On the positive side, the libertarian movement seems to be on
the wane, the Chinese are on board, solar power is becoming cheaper than
fossil fuels, energy storage is following, and geoengineering looks to
offer a last-resort option for abatement.  (Interestingly, the warming
pause/slowdown of the last decade or so now looks to be mainly attributable
to increased volcanic activity.  And just to get in first I'm not
advocating geoengineering, it will produce another set of problems.
Realistically though, it might be part of the kludge.)

Jore: I'm sort of in agreement but I see it a little differently.  Biology
is all about exploitation.  We might have a Garden-of-Eden nature aesthetic
(which actually indicates our disconnect from nature) but look under any
rock or in any ecosystem and you see warfare, uneasy truces and
exploitation.  Species that didn't maximally exploit their environment are
no longer with us.  This is built into the DNA of us and everything else.
We didn't develop big brains or cooperation or anything else to be nice or
something we developed them to be even more successfully exploitative.
This has (arguably) worked well for a few billion years but we are suddenly
up against ourselves.  It isn't culture that made us exploitative, it is
culture that can stop us, or at least to mitigate our most shortsighted
programmed exploitative tendencies.

Jim