Here's a new gem to consider when northern Greenland was 60F warmer and a temperate forest just 2 million years ago. They mention plant and animal life flourishing.
"Together, the DNA paints the picture of a complex, fully integrated ecosystem—one that existed and developed during an era when the polar region was somewhere between 11 to 17 degrees Celsius (about 20 to 30 Fahrenheit) warmer than today, and an era that provides one of the closest possible analogs to our future with climate change."
Very stimulating article! I finally read it once and will need to read it again. Now that I'm getting a bit used to your arguments, they don't sound as "nutty" as they did initially!
If that's OK with you I'd like to create a few comment threads to discuss different parts of your article.
Most of the discussions around climate change policy are very binary -- net zero or not. That's the same with most policy discussions. More taxes or less taxes? More immigration or less immigration? Binary choices are easy to make -- I can simply look at what most people in my party think and make the same choice. I can even just flip a coin! It's a bit like multiple choice tests in school. You don't even have to understand anything in the class and yet you can get 1/4 or 1/5 of the answers right.
What you are proposing is much more difficult (but ultimately potentially more satisfying). First I need to have a finer grained understanding of what the IPCC actually says. "OMG we're all going to die of climate change" doesn't cut it. What exactly am I afraid of? What is the probability that will happen? How confident am I? Basically I pretty much have to read the AR6 WGI report (which is 3,000-page long). Already the summary for policymakers introduces biases and errors.
Then I need to understand what are my own assumptions, beliefs and biases. For instance when you write that people have always migrated, my first reaction was "But there will be war! Countries will defend their borders! And now that we have nuclear weapons such wars will be horrible!" That's a gut feeling. That's my "think fast" system speaking. I now have to look at those beliefs coldly. I also need to find more of my beliefs.
Finally, you're inviting us to *imagine* different futures. That's the hardest part. It's so easy to think about a finite "policy universe" (net zero or not). It's much more demanding to start saying "OK, if CO2 reaches 1,500 ppm, what then?" Well, oceans will rise by Y meters and so on. "OK, what will people do? What will this look like?" You show this kind of imagination when you present an alternate New York City.
I'm looking forward to continuing the discussion. I appreciate your humility. You wrote "I don’t know what the right answer is." Few (no one?) amongst people who write and talk the most on climate change say "I don't know." They seem so sure (e.g. The Unhabitable Earth), but they never explain, let alone question, their assumptions and beliefs. Thank you for doing that and motivating me to do the same!
Love it and yes, it is 'nutty'. Even nuttier, to avoid the "denier" accusation I'll sometimes say "I'm not a denier, I'm an advocate. I accept all the evidence of warming you give me, but I think it should happen and here's why"
I do that because they've pushed the binary to "it's warming or not" and I'm trying to ask why that matter, how it matters, and what we can do.
And yes, please do start some sub threads here that'd be great.
Another great post. I would love to tease this out and say here's where most people agree and disagree, but here's why some of the outcomes need to be same even if you don't agree about the causes of climate change and here's some other things we should consider too.
Glad we don't agree in everything. Otherwise it'd be boring. If you don't mind, what was something that you found compelling and what was something you disagreed with?
I can't agree @ormond. It isn't making any what ifs except if we rethink how we conceptualize the problem. I found it refreshing in its honesty of challenging the prevailing paradigm.
Well.. Cold deaths, which are the majority are in decline. and heat deaths are rising. But still. 166K people didn't die from heat....how do you figure that?
This post is heresy. ACCURSED IS THE MUTANT IN THE SIGHT OF GOD AND MAN! ...Which is we all hide out on my blog, where I've discussed the same topic in three different posts, the first of which is literally called Heresies: Global Warming because it's heresy and we're all mutants. We don't have the Innsmouth look, though.
Interesting take, Michael. Adaptation is what we’ll do anyway, but it would be really cool if we could run an experiment to prove or disprove the IPCC models. I’m skeptical of things like CO2 removal from the air, geoengineering, or other technical “solutions”. The paleo records of climate are interesting as well, and makes you wonder about our situation today. But in general, your take of the dynamism of climate is spot on I think. We all want the weather to be Goldilocks perfect, but even that is boring, and certainly not likely for long in all places.
I love your baseline location argument! Locating your baseline in the Little Ice Age makes warming likely. But wherever and whenever you’re measuring, climate will change, and if we want steady weather, we need to move to a dead planet.
Goldilocks perfect is probably 4 degrees higher than pre-industrial levels, or 18 degrees C. This is the temperature that some people have calculated to be optimized, as well as the temperature of the great Late Cretaceous flourishing of life where modern mammals, birds, and all flowering plants came into being and the temperature before the last Ice Age. But we can't have that, current geopolitical boundaries and the status quo are way more important. https://michaelamckuen.substack.com/p/is-the-earth-a-boiling-pot
I found the piece very superficial and mostly irrelevant. Of course, the issue is adaptation. Of course, life and even human life will adapt and end up fine. 90% of the human population could die and humanity would go on. A simple adaptation would be to simply nuke the affected populations and carry on usual.
The question is who adapts and in what way? Choosing to slow climate change puts the burden for adapting on those causing the problem, which is less likely to cause violent resentment on the part of those doing the adapting. Choosing not slow climate change puts the burden for adapting on those most affected and who may not have caused the problem. This is more likely to cause violent resentment.
Given the size of the American response to an event as trivial as 911, who knows what the response to far large acts of terror might take us.
It's good to hear you've taken the step beyond the immediate issue and are thinking of adaptation. That makes you one of the very few and so I appreciate you think it's superficial. I agree. I wish I didn't even have to write it.
But when you see the response it gets elsewhere, you'll see why I wrote it. Because the majority on both sides are staring at their toes and ignoring the forest for the trees leading to stupid arguments on Twitter and in governments focused on pedantic noise.
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by Michael Woudenberg
Thanks for the measured response. :)
Actually, both responses to the problem (stopping climate change and not stopping it) are both adaptations. We think of them differently because we are not accustomed to thinking about cultural evolution. As the cultural animals we are, we have created a cultural environment in which we live (and evolve). This cultural environment does lie inside of a natural environment, but I think the fact that H sapiens have managed to colonize just about every natural environment (we can even live in outer space!) *without* speciation is pretty good evidence that we evolve our culture to adapt to external environment changes. So, there is no doubt we will adapt, but that adaption will involve stopping climate because we like the climate the way it is and we can do it *because* we are the cultural primate.
I kinda have a polymath approach in my own substack, which discusses various aspects of our current crisis using a variety of social science tools, My own background is retired industrial scientist, Ph.D. chemical engineering. (My wife does music and knitting--I do this).
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by Michael Woudenberg
Everyone currently alive and everyone they ever knew lived in a world with an average temperature between about 1.2 degrees lower than today and today. We have experience with that sort of world and are already set up to live in it. Hence this provides a reference, we know what we had recently worked for us.
We are current manipulating the climate in order to make the temperature higher. Our current plans are to raise the temperature of the Earth to levels far beyond anything our species has experienced since the development of civilization 5000 years, and eventually, to levels our species has never encountered. We have very good reasons to believe that we cannot continue to do this without incredible cascading (negative) consequences. Prudence would suggest that we might want to carefully consider our plans to continue to proceed in this fashion. And this is what we are doing.
Yet the studies that keep coming out seem to question our influence. We had an iceage 10K years ago and a lot of cycling in and out.
Further, even a 1000 year snapshot of humanity captures the medieval warm period and the little ice age while ignoring that plant life is optimized for 1200PPM CO2 and that the earth has been much much warmer in the past.
Cascading consequences are important but it's also borders on hubristic that the reaction is to stop it. I'd recommend looking at the Younger Dryas (which I mention in the essay here) where we had incredibly volatile activity, massive temp spikes and drops, oceans rising 400+ feet and yet earth didn't have a runaway cascade of consequences.
Here's a study showing only 12% of the CO2 increase can be attributed to human activity
May 12, 2023·edited May 12, 2023Liked by Michael Woudenberg
The first study doesn't really say anything, Since the amount of CO2 emissions in any year is small relative to the cycling of CO2, changes in the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere will depend on how much of C14-free CO2 was added and the exchange dynamics. Since the exchange dynamics are not known, one cannot back out how much C14-free CO2 was added. SO the paper is kinda meaningless.
As for the second, the effect of CO2 on plant growth is not really relevant when the issue is rising temperature and its effect on habitability.
It's nuggets like this I find tucked away in other research that cause my eyebrows to rise:
"In the Northern Hemisphere, [Dansgaard–Oeschger events] take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet increased by around 8 °C over 40 years, in three steps of five years, where a 5 °C change over 30–40 years is more common"
This puts our current global warming of 1°C over the past 100 years into a different context...
I came across this one the other day. The ancient city of Ephesus was relocated a few times due to the shoreline and harbor shifting and then eventually abandoned though it was a regional center used through the Roman period. I share it to show how much shifts and changes over time.
Whether I die due to excessive heat, cold or pollution induced cancer is of little importance. A more pressing concern is that I have not perfected the means to choose my destination after death. https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/8/6/
Here's a new gem to consider when northern Greenland was 60F warmer and a temperate forest just 2 million years ago. They mention plant and animal life flourishing.
Here's a new gem to consider when northern Greenland was 60F warmer and a temperate forest just 2 million years ago. They mention plant and animal life flourishing.
https://gizmodo.com/oldest-dna-2-million-years-greenland-ecosystem-1849860675
Here's another take on the same finding:
"Together, the DNA paints the picture of a complex, fully integrated ecosystem—one that existed and developed during an era when the polar region was somewhere between 11 to 17 degrees Celsius (about 20 to 30 Fahrenheit) warmer than today, and an era that provides one of the closest possible analogs to our future with climate change."
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/2-million-year-old-dna-greenland-disovery-ancient
Very stimulating article! I finally read it once and will need to read it again. Now that I'm getting a bit used to your arguments, they don't sound as "nutty" as they did initially!
If that's OK with you I'd like to create a few comment threads to discuss different parts of your article.
Most of the discussions around climate change policy are very binary -- net zero or not. That's the same with most policy discussions. More taxes or less taxes? More immigration or less immigration? Binary choices are easy to make -- I can simply look at what most people in my party think and make the same choice. I can even just flip a coin! It's a bit like multiple choice tests in school. You don't even have to understand anything in the class and yet you can get 1/4 or 1/5 of the answers right.
What you are proposing is much more difficult (but ultimately potentially more satisfying). First I need to have a finer grained understanding of what the IPCC actually says. "OMG we're all going to die of climate change" doesn't cut it. What exactly am I afraid of? What is the probability that will happen? How confident am I? Basically I pretty much have to read the AR6 WGI report (which is 3,000-page long). Already the summary for policymakers introduces biases and errors.
Then I need to understand what are my own assumptions, beliefs and biases. For instance when you write that people have always migrated, my first reaction was "But there will be war! Countries will defend their borders! And now that we have nuclear weapons such wars will be horrible!" That's a gut feeling. That's my "think fast" system speaking. I now have to look at those beliefs coldly. I also need to find more of my beliefs.
Finally, you're inviting us to *imagine* different futures. That's the hardest part. It's so easy to think about a finite "policy universe" (net zero or not). It's much more demanding to start saying "OK, if CO2 reaches 1,500 ppm, what then?" Well, oceans will rise by Y meters and so on. "OK, what will people do? What will this look like?" You show this kind of imagination when you present an alternate New York City.
I'm looking forward to continuing the discussion. I appreciate your humility. You wrote "I don’t know what the right answer is." Few (no one?) amongst people who write and talk the most on climate change say "I don't know." They seem so sure (e.g. The Unhabitable Earth), but they never explain, let alone question, their assumptions and beliefs. Thank you for doing that and motivating me to do the same!
Love it and yes, it is 'nutty'. Even nuttier, to avoid the "denier" accusation I'll sometimes say "I'm not a denier, I'm an advocate. I accept all the evidence of warming you give me, but I think it should happen and here's why"
I do that because they've pushed the binary to "it's warming or not" and I'm trying to ask why that matter, how it matters, and what we can do.
And yes, please do start some sub threads here that'd be great.
Another great post. I would love to tease this out and say here's where most people agree and disagree, but here's why some of the outcomes need to be same even if you don't agree about the causes of climate change and here's some other things we should consider too.
Totally agree. Digging trench lines never resolves conflict. I think a reframe can help us a ton!
Brilliant Essay. Well documented and illuminating. Not sure I agree with everything but it leaves me with much to research and question.
Glad we don't agree in everything. Otherwise it'd be boring. If you don't mind, what was something that you found compelling and what was something you disagreed with?
An extremely superficial and undocumented series of wha-ifs?
Below you.
I can't agree @ormond. It isn't making any what ifs except if we rethink how we conceptualize the problem. I found it refreshing in its honesty of challenging the prevailing paradigm.
How do you mean what ifs? Most statements have hyperlinks.
Some of those hyperlinks refute your assertions. The Lancelot article notes that cold deaths are in decline while heat deaths are increasing.
Few of those hyperlinks are to peer-reviewed science.
Well.. Cold deaths, which are the majority are in decline. and heat deaths are rising. But still. 166K people didn't die from heat....how do you figure that?
This post is heresy. ACCURSED IS THE MUTANT IN THE SIGHT OF GOD AND MAN! ...Which is we all hide out on my blog, where I've discussed the same topic in three different posts, the first of which is literally called Heresies: Global Warming because it's heresy and we're all mutants. We don't have the Innsmouth look, though.
https://michaelamckuen.substack.com/p/is-the-earth-a-boiling-pot
I'll certainly take a look!
Interesting take, Michael. Adaptation is what we’ll do anyway, but it would be really cool if we could run an experiment to prove or disprove the IPCC models. I’m skeptical of things like CO2 removal from the air, geoengineering, or other technical “solutions”. The paleo records of climate are interesting as well, and makes you wonder about our situation today. But in general, your take of the dynamism of climate is spot on I think. We all want the weather to be Goldilocks perfect, but even that is boring, and certainly not likely for long in all places.
I love your baseline location argument! Locating your baseline in the Little Ice Age makes warming likely. But wherever and whenever you’re measuring, climate will change, and if we want steady weather, we need to move to a dead planet.
Goldilocks perfect is probably 4 degrees higher than pre-industrial levels, or 18 degrees C. This is the temperature that some people have calculated to be optimized, as well as the temperature of the great Late Cretaceous flourishing of life where modern mammals, birds, and all flowering plants came into being and the temperature before the last Ice Age. But we can't have that, current geopolitical boundaries and the status quo are way more important. https://michaelamckuen.substack.com/p/is-the-earth-a-boiling-pot
I found the piece very superficial and mostly irrelevant. Of course, the issue is adaptation. Of course, life and even human life will adapt and end up fine. 90% of the human population could die and humanity would go on. A simple adaptation would be to simply nuke the affected populations and carry on usual.
The question is who adapts and in what way? Choosing to slow climate change puts the burden for adapting on those causing the problem, which is less likely to cause violent resentment on the part of those doing the adapting. Choosing not slow climate change puts the burden for adapting on those most affected and who may not have caused the problem. This is more likely to cause violent resentment.
Given the size of the American response to an event as trivial as 911, who knows what the response to far large acts of terror might take us.
It's good to hear you've taken the step beyond the immediate issue and are thinking of adaptation. That makes you one of the very few and so I appreciate you think it's superficial. I agree. I wish I didn't even have to write it.
But when you see the response it gets elsewhere, you'll see why I wrote it. Because the majority on both sides are staring at their toes and ignoring the forest for the trees leading to stupid arguments on Twitter and in governments focused on pedantic noise.
Thanks for the measured response. :)
Actually, both responses to the problem (stopping climate change and not stopping it) are both adaptations. We think of them differently because we are not accustomed to thinking about cultural evolution. As the cultural animals we are, we have created a cultural environment in which we live (and evolve). This cultural environment does lie inside of a natural environment, but I think the fact that H sapiens have managed to colonize just about every natural environment (we can even live in outer space!) *without* speciation is pretty good evidence that we evolve our culture to adapt to external environment changes. So, there is no doubt we will adapt, but that adaption will involve stopping climate because we like the climate the way it is and we can do it *because* we are the cultural primate.
I kinda have a polymath approach in my own substack, which discusses various aspects of our current crisis using a variety of social science tools, My own background is retired industrial scientist, Ph.D. chemical engineering. (My wife does music and knitting--I do this).
https://mikealexander.substack.com/
There are two incredibly hubristic assumptions when people suggest we stop climate change that I tried to address in this essay.
1. That we know at what levels it is optimal to stop at.
2. That we actually can without incredible cascading consequences.
Everyone currently alive and everyone they ever knew lived in a world with an average temperature between about 1.2 degrees lower than today and today. We have experience with that sort of world and are already set up to live in it. Hence this provides a reference, we know what we had recently worked for us.
We are current manipulating the climate in order to make the temperature higher. Our current plans are to raise the temperature of the Earth to levels far beyond anything our species has experienced since the development of civilization 5000 years, and eventually, to levels our species has never encountered. We have very good reasons to believe that we cannot continue to do this without incredible cascading (negative) consequences. Prudence would suggest that we might want to carefully consider our plans to continue to proceed in this fashion. And this is what we are doing.
Yet the studies that keep coming out seem to question our influence. We had an iceage 10K years ago and a lot of cycling in and out.
Further, even a 1000 year snapshot of humanity captures the medieval warm period and the little ice age while ignoring that plant life is optimized for 1200PPM CO2 and that the earth has been much much warmer in the past.
Cascading consequences are important but it's also borders on hubristic that the reaction is to stop it. I'd recommend looking at the Younger Dryas (which I mention in the essay here) where we had incredibly volatile activity, massive temp spikes and drops, oceans rising 400+ feet and yet earth didn't have a runaway cascade of consequences.
Here's a study showing only 12% of the CO2 increase can be attributed to human activity
https://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Fulltext/2022/02000/World_Atmospheric_CO2,_Its_14C_Specific_Activity,.2.aspx
Here's one showing the crop increases since 1940 are largely driven by CO2 increases
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29320
The first study doesn't really say anything, Since the amount of CO2 emissions in any year is small relative to the cycling of CO2, changes in the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere will depend on how much of C14-free CO2 was added and the exchange dynamics. Since the exchange dynamics are not known, one cannot back out how much C14-free CO2 was added. SO the paper is kinda meaningless.
As for the second, the effect of CO2 on plant growth is not really relevant when the issue is rising temperature and its effect on habitability.
This article popped up in my news feed. It is just the kind of planning you were talking about.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/08/how-to-move-a-country-fiji-radical-plan-escape-rising-seas-climate-crisis?utm_source=pocket-newtab
That's a really good find! And yes it is exactly what we need to rethink.
It's nuggets like this I find tucked away in other research that cause my eyebrows to rise:
"In the Northern Hemisphere, [Dansgaard–Oeschger events] take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet increased by around 8 °C over 40 years, in three steps of five years, where a 5 °C change over 30–40 years is more common"
This puts our current global warming of 1°C over the past 100 years into a different context...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event
Here's a new one. Studies show using CO2 boosts plant grown 4x in rooftop gardens.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/co2-boost-plant-growth-on-roof
I came across this one the other day. The ancient city of Ephesus was relocated a few times due to the shoreline and harbor shifting and then eventually abandoned though it was a regional center used through the Roman period. I share it to show how much shifts and changes over time.
https://www.facebook.com/AncientOriginsandArcheology.1ST/posts/pfbid031wYsCSz3YX886EsdCvnsWFnvAM9HDBZrGENvHQP7DpUvULwfudFo7f6X4FCa4T9Tl
Whether I die due to excessive heat, cold or pollution induced cancer is of little importance. A more pressing concern is that I have not perfected the means to choose my destination after death. https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/8/6/
I see you blocked me on LinkedIn. Not up to the task I gather. Your post is still vacuous unsubstantiated pseudointellectual nonsense.
Here's a fun one Jack
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/co2-boost-plant-growth-on-roof
Here's a new gem to consider when northern Greenland was 60F warmer and a temperate forest just 2 million years ago. They mention plant and animal life flourishing.
https://gizmodo.com/oldest-dna-2-million-years-greenland-ecosystem-1849860675
Nah. That was the other guy. You and I are still friends