Hothouse Earth

[ysabetwordsmith]

This article talks about tipping points and the trend toward Hothouse Earth.  So far, so good.

What I don't think most people realize is that we're not talking about tipping this kind of domino effect, but rather this kind.  We've already knocked over the first several smaller dominoes.  In order to survive, now we need to get ahead of  the fall and knock out several medium ones to create a firebreak.  Otherwise, we're already pretty much fucked.  Most people just don't see it yet.  By the time they do, it will be too late.  It already is too late to avoid massive unpleasant changes, many of which are currently here (e.g. California on fire, the debirding of the Mojave).  What we're hoping to avoid now is the threat of human extinction.  I've been squalling about this since about the time I could talk and it's done fuckall good.  At this point I'm pretty much down to defending my right to stand in the foyer-ever-after and say, "I fucking told you so."

Comments

[arlie]

*sigh* I don't believe our species is capable of enough foresight to meet the targets it has set. Changes this slow aren't real to us until we've lived through them - the 'normal' of my childhood doesn't exist, or isn't seen as valuable, or both, by today's youth - their only goal will be the normal of their childhood. Sure, the more scientific ones will understand, objectively, that things used to be better. But not in their guts. Hence you get the Easter Island effect, otherwise known as boiling the frog slowly. (Most people's goals will be limited to something not too horrible, for them, during their own lifetime.)

Then add our compulsion to create hierarchies, and allow those at the top to demonstrate their power by destroying things. And our apparant inability to care about externalities, unless a squad of affected individuals come after us with pitchforks. And our once evolutionarily-adaptive habit of dealing with hard times by trying to wipe out other groups of humans, so as to be among the suvivors sharing the new smaller pool. We're fucked. The only real question is how fucked - i.e. whether we exterminate ourselves and/or sterilize the planet while fighting for the remaining scraps.

I don't know whether or not we're in a chain-of-dominos situation objectively. But it doesn't matter, because we're almost certainly not capable of changing our ways. An eventual new equilibrium might include some of us - still careless about ecology - or not. But I can't see it including humans that don't behave this way, short of some non-human species taking control. And no, that does not mean human-created artificial intelligence.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> *sigh* I don't believe our species is capable of enough foresight to meet the targets it has set. <<

Capable in theory, yes. Capable in practice, often not.

>> Changes this slow aren't real to us until we've lived through them - the 'normal' of my childhood doesn't exist, or isn't seen as valuable, or both, by today's youth - their only goal will be the normal of their childhood.<<

Sadly so. Shifting baseline is a serious problem.

Look at history. Often problems don't get solved, although sometimes they do.

We've actually seen this before, many times. It started with the one dumbass who'd cut the sacred grove off the top of his hill and then all his crops died. Then it got bigger, and whole civilizations would do something stupid and habitat foreclosure would wipe them out. But now the habitat being foreclosed on humanity is the Earth. :(

>> An eventual new equilibrium might include some of us - still careless about ecology - or not. But I can't see it including humans that don't behave this way, short of some non-human species taking control. <<

Well now, that assumes the humans in control are the only kind of humans. They're not. They never have been. They're just really good at spreading.

Have you ever looked at the math behind The Prisoner's Dilemma? It turns out that a lot of nasty rules compete very well indeed ... in a mixed field. Against each other, they don't. Very generous rules do great with each other, but don't compete well. In the middle is the classic "Tit for Tat" rule. It plays well with itself and competes moderately well with others. Humanity started out with the latter two approaches to civilization, and then came up with the first which started taking over everything else. Here we are a few thousand years later with violent, oppressive regimes ruling or influencing a majority of the planet.

They've just run into an enemy they can't simply beat to death. This is not the kind of problem they solve well. Quite likely, they've just hit the end of their evolutionary leash, which has happened to a number of civilizations in the past. This time, the crash will be bigger, and there's no coming back from it along the same line of technology because they used up all the accessible goods. A subsequent civilization would have to derive some other base of technology, such as biotech.

Anyhow, there are still pockets of saner cultures scattered around here and there. Some of them are reasonably well equipped to survive the coming disaster, unless the warlords decide to throw nukes in a final tantrum.

There might or might not still be humans on Earth a century or two from now. But if so, they won't be like these humans, who are in the process of wiping themselves out. Either humanity evolves a solution to the problem, or evolution will solve the problem the hard way.