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.