Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change

[ChescoWx]

31 minutes ago, GaWx said:

Chesco,

 Have you analyzed # of lows by decade at or above a certain high level, such as # aoa 75?

Hey GaWx that would be a interesting I would suspect that in our current warming cycle while our Tmaxes are lower the Tmins should be higher as our climate variation seems to be narrowing during this latest warming cycle. I will run some analysis! Thanks!!

[ChescoWx]

2 hours ago, GaWx said:

Chesco,

 Have you analyzed # of lows by decade at or above a certain high level, such as # aoa 75?

Hey GaWx See the below with # of average lows by station over 75 degrees since 1900....a bit surprising to me but as with most of our metrics - very cyclical with a clear trend to less warm nights over the last 2 decades.

[chubbs]

Philadelphia shows a clear increase in 95F days vs 100+ years ago. The trend in 100F days is less clear, but certainly no decrease.. The linear trends since the 1880s are: +2.9 days per decade reaching 95 and +0.2 days per decade reaching 100F. 

Plenty of caveats in this data. The station equipment was different: non aspirated, different shelters, and mercury vs digital thermometers. The station locations are also different. Chescowx's results are skewed by the changing station population. The older stations are warmer with the biggest changes in occurring after 1980. It wasn't uncommon for the old Chesco stations to run hotter than Philadelphia. That is rare in the current station population.  Of course the Philadelphia station locations also changed. The move from center city to the airport in 1940 being the most important. However there were also multiple station changes before 1940. Finally unlike Chesco, the Philadelphia data has one site per year.

[Typhoon Tip]

What is hoped and/or thought likely to be gained by needling through a single county records in PA - particular in this question, ...it's significance to global warming/climate change ??

This has been going on for months at this point to no end.  What is the point of it?

[rcostell]

2 hours ago, Typhoon Tip said:

What is hoped and/or thought likely to be gained by needling through a single county records in PA - particular in this question, ...it's significance to global warm/climate change ??

This has been going on for months at this point to no end.  What is the point of it?

Thank You! Someone had to say it. Ignore the anatgonist and enrich the thread so its worthy of its name...The micro focus makes zero sense. 

[rcostell]

Just now, rcostell said:

Thank You! Someone had to say it. Ignore the anatgonist and enrich the thread so its worthy of its name...The micro focus makes zero sense. 

...antagonist  (sp) 

[chubbs]

On 6/9/2024 at 2:48 PM, ChescoWx said:

I was asked to also look at hot days >95 degrees over the same time frame. Plus I added in the average number per station as the number of stations have changed by decade with a dramatic increase in stations in the 2010's . Again the hottest decades were as we all know back in the 1930's thru 1950's.

Finally got a chance to look at some of the Chesco coop high temperature data. Chescowx's averaging hides a lot of sins. There is a big disparity among the two main long-term stations that I checked: West Chester, and Phoenixville, Most noticeable, the Phoenixville data in the 1930s and 1940s has many more 95F days than West Chester and the other Chesco stations. Phoenixville is also much warmer than Philadelphia in this period, with over 3x the 95 degree days as Philadelphia in the 1930s and 40s. With only a handful of Chesco stations, Phoenixville skews the county average, giving Chester County many more 95F days than Philadelphia in the 1930s and 40s. A silly result.

Of course this isn't the only problem. The shifting station population also skews the results. Many of the modern stations, at higher elevation like Chesco's house, rarely reach 95.

This data is a good advertisement for bias adjustment. Problematic data, like Phoenixville's in the 30s and 40s, is easy to spot and correct by inte-rcomparing stations. That is the benefit of a dense US station network. A benefit completely lost on climate deniers. Thank goodness we have NOAA to provide unbiased estimates of our past climate.

 

[chubbs]

Long video (10 min), but a good depiction of on-the-ground conditions in Broward County Florida during ytday's flash flooding. Note that several flooded homeowners had damaging flooding last year.

https://twitter.com/AstuteGaba/status/1801253815121015183

[bluewave]

Florida is experiencing increasing flooding from higher sea levels and record rainfall as a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. 

 

[HailMan06]

1 hour ago, bluewave said:

Florida is experiencing increasing flooding from higher sea levels and record rainfall as a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. 

 

If I’m right 10.8mm/yr converts to ~1.1cm/yr, which is insanely fast.

[ChescoWx]

On 6/13/2024 at 5:50 AM, chubbs said:

Finally got a chance to look at some of the Chesco coop high temperature data. Chescowx's averaging hides a lot of sins. There is a big disparity among the two main long-term stations that I checked: West Chester, and Phoenixville, Most noticeable, the Phoenixville data in the 1930s and 1940s has many more 95F days than West Chester and the other Chesco stations. Phoenixville is also much warmer than Philadelphia in this period, with over 3x the 95 degree days as Philadelphia in the 1930s and 40s. With only a handful of Chesco stations, Phoenixville skews the county average, giving Chester County many more 95F days than Philadelphia in the 1930s and 40s. A silly result.

Of course this isn't the only problem. The shifting station population also skews the results. Many of the modern stations, at higher elevation like Chesco's house, rarely reach 95.

This data is a good advertisement for bias adjustment. Problematic data, like Phoenixville's in the 30s and 40s, is easy to spot and correct by inte-rcomparing stations. That is the benefit of a dense US station network. A benefit completely lost on climate deniers. Thank goodness we have NOAA to provide unbiased estimates of our past climate.

 

 

 

Charlie "a silly result" is typical of what alarmists say when the actual data does not support their views. Also just to make sure you are clear on this "the shifting station populations" of the modern stations is actually and factually skewed much more to the warmer lower elevations.Just keeping it real!!

[GaWx]

3 hours ago, bluewave said:

Florida is experiencing increasing flooding from higher sea levels and record rainfall as a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. 

 

More on the accelerated SLR along the SE US:

“The rate of sea level rise (SLR) along the Southeast Coast of the U.S. increased significantly after 2010. While anthropogenic radiative forcing causes an acceleration of global mean SLR, regional changes in the rate of SLR are strongly influenced by internal variability. Here we use observations and climate models to show that the rapid increase in the rate of SLR along the U.S. Southeast Coast after 2010 is due in part to multidecadal buoyancy-driven Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) variations, along with heat transport convergence from wind-driven ocean circulation changes. We show that an initialized decadal prediction system can provide skillful regional SLR predictions induced by AMOC variations 5 years in advance, while wind-driven sea level variations are predictable 2 years in advance. Our results suggest that the rate of coastal SLR and its associated flooding risk along the U.S. southeastern seaboard are potentially predictable on multiyear timescales.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00670-w

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00670-w/figures/1

 

[bluewave]

51 minutes ago, GaWx said:

More on the accelerated SLR along the SE US:

“The rate of sea level rise (SLR) along the Southeast Coast of the U.S. increased significantly after 2010. While anthropogenic radiative forcing causes an acceleration of global mean SLR, regional changes in the rate of SLR are strongly influenced by internal variability. Here we use observations and climate models to show that the rapid increase in the rate of SLR along the U.S. Southeast Coast after 2010 is due in part to multidecadal buoyancy-driven Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) variations, along with heat transport convergence from wind-driven ocean circulation changes. We show that an initialized decadal prediction system can provide skillful regional SLR predictions induced by AMOC variations 5 years in advance, while wind-driven sea level variations are predictable 2 years in advance. Our results suggest that the rate of coastal SLR and its associated flooding risk along the U.S. southeastern seaboard are potentially predictable on multiyear timescales.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00670-w

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-024-00670-w/figures/1

 

https://wcd.copernicus.org/articles/5/753/2024/

An alternative possibility is that the changes seen in the reanalyses are a combination of natural variability and a forced response that is not represented in CMIP6 models. This might explain why the models are systematically biased towards underestimating the variability in the explained variance of the NAO, as seen in Fig. 3. If part of these changes in the relative strength of the NAO are indeed due to a forced response that is lacking in climate models, then there is a risk of a systematic underestimation of the changing risks of climate extremes over Europe in a warming world. A second alternative is that the change is the results of a long-term, multi-decadal variability (perhaps with a variability of 60–80 years such as that found in studies on Bjerknes compensation). If the models reproduced such oscillations and were initialized in different phases of the multi-decadal signal, this could possibly produce the observed differences in the long-term changes in variance explained by the NAO. However, it would be very difficult to reliably confirm a 60–80-year oscillation in a 150-year simulation since you would barely have two full cycles. Both of these alternatives are speculation and would need significant further investigation to confirm.

While the large-scale patterns derived using an EOF analysis are a good indicator of the changes in weather systems over the North Atlantic, recent works have found that jet regimes are better at capturing spatial structure compared to patterns like the NAO and have the advantage of a greater physical connection to the underlying weather systems (Madonna et al., 2021). Future work is planned to investigate how these jet regimes have varied over time in the reanalyses and how well the CMIP6 models capture these variations.

[donsutherland1]

On 6/13/2024 at 5:50 AM, chubbs said:

Finally got a chance to look at some of the Chesco coop high temperature data. Chescowx's averaging hides a lot of sins. There is a big disparity among the two main long-term stations that I checked: West Chester, and Phoenixville, Most noticeable, the Phoenixville data in the 1930s and 1940s has many more 95F days than West Chester and the other Chesco stations. Phoenixville is also much warmer than Philadelphia in this period, with over 3x the 95 degree days as Philadelphia in the 1930s and 40s. With only a handful of Chesco stations, Phoenixville skews the county average, giving Chester County many more 95F days than Philadelphia in the 1930s and 40s. A silly result.

Of course this isn't the only problem. The shifting station population also skews the results. Many of the modern stations, at higher elevation like Chesco's house, rarely reach 95.

This data is a good advertisement for bias adjustment. Problematic data, like Phoenixville's in the 30s and 40s, is easy to spot and correct by inte-rcomparing stations. That is the benefit of a dense US station network. A benefit completely lost on climate deniers. Thank goodness we have NOAA to provide unbiased estimates of our past climate.

 

I agree. There is very likely an issue with the earlier Phoenixville numbers for 95F days.

To look further into the matter, I ran regression equations based on the 1950-1980 period testing West Chester and Phoenixville and West Chester and Coatesville.

The West Chester - Phoenixville equation broke down badly when applied to the 1930-1949 period, ballooning from 2.8 days to 12.4 days. The West Chester - Coatesville equation held reasonably consistent. This disparity suggested that the issue concerned Phoenixville, not West Chester.

To determine whether the 1950-1980 period was an issue, I also tested that equation for 1981-2015 for West Chester - Phoenixville. The equation held up reasonably well. The Coatesville data record ended in 1982, so I could not test the West Chester - Coatesville relationship.

In sum, the combination of the consistency of the West Chester - Phoenixville equation for the 1950-1980 and 1981-2015 periods and the consistency of the West Chester - Coatesville equations for the 1930-1949 and 1950-80 periods strongly argues that Phoenixville's 1930-1949 measurements were at issue and are not reliable.

The Phoenixville station history can be found here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCND/stations/GHCND:USC00366927/detail and https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCND/stations/GHCND:USC00366927/detail

In terms of predicted vs. actual 95F days, the 1930-1949 period for Phoenixville was wildly out of line, even vastly exceeding the 95% confidence limit. Considering that the average number of 95F days exceeded the predicted figure for maximum such days during the entire period, it is very likely that the 1930-1949 data for Phoenixville is not reliable. Moreover, based on the predicted values, it is more likely than not that Phoenixville is experiencing an increase in 95F days in line with the other sites.

 

 

[Typhoon Tip]

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-antarctic-cold-shatter-global-late.html

[chubbs]

4 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

I agree. There is very likely an issue with the earlier Phoenixville numbers for 95F days.

To look further into the matter, I ran regression equations based on the 1950-1980 period testing West Chester and Phoenixville and West Chester and Coatesville.

The West Chester - Phoenixville equation broke down badly when applied to the 1930-1949 period, ballooning from 2.8 days to 12.4 days. The West Chester - Coatesville equation held reasonably consistent. This disparity suggested that the issue concerned Phoenixville, not West Chester.

To determine whether the 1950-1980 period was an issue, I also tested that equation for 1981-2015 for West Chester - Phoenixville. The equation held up reasonably well. The Coatesville data record ended in 1982, so I could not test the West Chester - Coatesville relationship.

In sum, the combination of the consistency of the West Chester - Phoenixville equation for the 1950-1980 and 1981-2015 periods and the consistency of the West Chester - Coatesville equations for the 1930-1949 and 1950-80 periods strongly argues that Phoenixville's 1930-1949 measurements were at issue and are not reliable.

The Phoenixville station history can be found here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCND/stations/GHCND:USC00366927/detail and https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCND/stations/GHCND:USC00366927/detail

In terms of predicted vs. actual 95F days, the 1930-1949 period for Phoenixville was wildly out of line, even vastly exceeding the 95% confidence limit. Considering that the average number of 95F days exceeded the predicted figure for maximum such days during the entire period, it is very likely that the 1930-1949 data for Phoenixville is not reliable. Moreover, based on the predicted values, it is more likely than not that Phoenixville is experiencing an increase in 95F days in line with the other sites.

 

 

Yes, Phoenixville clearly was too warm in the middle of the 20'th century. Other stations don't have the spike in 95 degree days that Phoenixville does. You get the wrong answer about our local climate if you don't bias adjust the Phoenixville data. Same with many of the other Chesco  coops. Fortunately, we have a dense regional network to catch the mistakes.   As I said above thank goodness for NOAA.

 

[donsutherland1]

45 minutes ago, chubbs said:

Yes, Phoenixville clearly was too warm in the middle of the 20'th century. Other stations don't have the spike in 95 degree days that Phoenixville does. You get the wrong answer about our local climate if you don't bias adjust the Phoenixville data. Same with many of the other Chesco  coops. Fortunately, we have a dense regional network to catch the mistakes.   As I said above thank goodness for NOAA.

 

Yes. I suspect that the 1915-48 period did not provide reliable data for Phoenixville. The site record doesn’t provide sufficient information to know whether the equipment was flawed or its siting was flawed. Fortunately, as you noted, NOAA addresses such issues. 

[ChescoWx]

On 6/14/2024 at 4:48 PM, chubbs said:

Yes, Phoenixville clearly was too warm in the middle of the 20'th century. Other stations don't have the spike in 95 degree days that Phoenixville does. You get the wrong answer about our local climate if you don't bias adjust the Phoenixville data. Same with many of the other Chesco  coops. Fortunately, we have a dense regional network to catch the mistakes.   As I said above thank goodness for NOAA.

 

 

"mistakes" as Charlie calls it.....of course it must be a mistake!! LOL

[TimB]

3 hours ago, ChescoWx said:

"mistakes" as Charlie calls it.....of course it must be a mistake!! LOL

You’ll never be convinced. Fortunately everyone on this board and most people in real life consider you an idiot.

[bluewave]

 

 

[donsutherland1]

11 hours ago, bluewave said:

 

 

That’s an informative paper. The mechanism involved produces an outcome Jessica Tierney and others found when researching equilibrium climate sensitivity during the Eocene Thermal Maximum. ECS was higher and they attributed the higher ECS to changes in clouds. This most recent study raises an interesting question as to whether the modest acceleration in warming and increase in the Earth Energy Imbalance might have more to do with clouds than a reduction in aerosols.

[LibertyBell]

8 hours ago, donsutherland1 said:

That’s an informative paper. The mechanism involved produces an outcome Jessica Tierney and others found when researching equilibrium climate sensitivity during the Eocene Thermal Maximum. ECS was higher and they attributed the higher ECS to changes in clouds. This most recent study raises an interesting question as to whether the modest acceleration in warming and increase in the Earth Energy Imbalance might have more to do with clouds than a reduction in aerosols.

Don what do you think of this?

I love that they reference Asimov's Foundation series as that is something I've based everything that's going on on this planet since I was in middle school.

 

https://nautil.us/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt-626051/?_sp=853d659a-c159-42ae-97bd-c1224fbd8ebb.1718559458320

known Dan Brooks for 40 years now. Somehow we’re still talking to each other.

We’ve followed radically different trajectories since first meeting back in the ’80s. Over the decades, Dan built a truly impressive rap sheet as an evolutionary biologist, with over 400 papers and book chapters, seven books, and too many awards, fellowships, and distinctions to count on your fingers and toes. I, in contrast, left an academic career in marine biology in a huff (industry funding came with, shall we say, certain a priori preferences concerning the sort of results we’d be reporting) and became a science-fiction writer. It’s a position from which, ironically, I’ve had more influence on actual scientists than I ever did as an academic—admittedly a low bar to clear.

And yet our paths continue to intersect. Dan offered me a post-doc in his lab around the turn of the century (DNA barcoding—I really, really sucked at it). A few years later I helped him relocate to Nebraska, leading to an encounter with the armed capuchins of the United States Border Patrol and eventual banishment from that crumbling empire. The protagonist of my novel Echopraxia is a parasitologist suspiciously named Daniel Brüks. And I once ended up one creepy handshake away from Viktor Orbán, when Dan finagled a speaking gig for me at Hungary’s iASK Symposium.

The dance continues. Sometimes we hug like brothers. Sometimes we feel like punching each other’s lights out (also, I suppose, like brothers). But one thing we never do is bore each other—and whenever Dan’s in town, we manage to meet up at a pub somewhere to reconnect.

What follows is an edited record of one such meeting, more formal than most, which took place shortly after the publication of A Darwinian Survival Guide, authored by Dan and evolutionary biologist Salvatore Agosta.

In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050. 

In response to all of this, the last COP (Conference of the Parties, the annual international climate change meeting held by the United Nations) was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas. In that corner: Dan Brooks and Sal Agosta, with a Darwinian survival guide. So, take it away, Dan. Guide us to survival. What’s the strategy?

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit, Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

    Why is it that human beings are susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea and are not?

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. And so, if there is the kind of nature collapse that the Melbourne Sustainable Studies Institute is talking about, how are those people going to survive?

A completely dispassionate view would just say, “Well, you know, most of them won’t. Most of them are going to die.” But what if it turns out that we think that embedded within all of that technologically dependent society there are some good things? What if we think that there are elements of that existence that are worth trying to save, from high technology to high art to modern medicine?

In my particular case, without modern medical knowledge, I would have died when I was just 21 years old of a burst appendix. If I had managed to survive that, I would have died in my late 50s from an enlarged prostate. These are things most would prefer not to happen. What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?

So to be clear, you’re not talking about forestalling the collapse—

No.

—you’re talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.

Yeah, that’s right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”?

In other words—and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy—if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?
In Body Image
SURVIVOR: “We’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence,” says evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks. If nature collapses, as scientists predict, “how are those people going to survive?” Photo by Diego Cervo / Shutterstock.

Are you basically talking about the sociological equivalent of the Norwegian Seed Bank, for example?

That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

Well, that said, that’s kind of a repeated underlying foundation of the book, which is that evolutionary strategies are our best bet for dealing with stressors. And by definition, that implies that the system changes. Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Right, right. Yeah.

And you take on quite explicitly the neo-protectionists, who basically want to preserve the system as it exists, or as it existed at one point in the idealized past, forever without end, as opposed to allowing the system to exercise its capacity to change in response to stress. You cite anoxic ocean blobs; you cite, quite brilliantly I thought, the devastating effect beavers have on their local habitat.

Yeah.

And you take on the sacred spirit animal of the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear. And the bottom line here is that shit happens, things change, trust life to find a way, ‘cause evolution hasn’t steered us wrong yet.

Yeah.

Now, this is an argument that some might say can be invaded by cheaters. I read this and I thought of the Simpsons episode where Montgomery Burns is railing to Lisa, and he says, “Nature started the struggle for survival, and now she wants to call it off because she’s losing? I say, hard cheese!” And less fictitiously, Rush Limbaugh has invoked essentially the same argument when he was advocating against the protection of the spotted owl. You know, life will find a way. This is evolution; this is natural selection. So, I can see cherry-picking oil executives being really happy with this book. How do you guard against that?

Anybody can cherry-pick anything, and they will. Our attitude is just basically saying, look, here’s the fundamental response to any of this stuff. It’s, how’s it working out so far? OK? There’s a common adage by tennis coaches that says during a match, you never change your winning game, and you always change your losing game. That’s what we’re saying.

One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

    This is neo-protectionist language—that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain—this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation. Because everything that human beings have done for 3 million years has seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s only been in the last 100 or 150 years that human beings have begun to develop ways of thinking that allow us to try to project future consequences and to think about unanticipated consequences, long-term consequences of what we do now. So this is very new for humanity, and as a consequence, it’s ridiculous to place blame on our ancestors for the situation we’re in now.

Everything that people did at any point in time seemed like a good idea at the time; it seemed to solve a problem. If it worked for a while, that was fine, and when it no longer worked, they tried to do something else. But now we seem to be at a point where our ability to survive in the short term is compromised, and what we’re saying is that our way to survive better in the short term, ironically, is now based on a better understanding of how to survive in the long run. We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.

What you’ve just stated is essentially that short-term goals and long-term goals are not necessarily the same thing, that one trades off against the other. When you put it that way, it seems perfectly obvious—although I have to say, what you’re advocating for presumes a level of foresight and self-control that our species has, shall we say, not traditionally manifested.

But yeah, a widely adhered-to view of evolution is a reactive one—the pool is drying up, and evolution looks at that and says, oh my goodness, the pool is drying up! We should probably get those fish to evolve lungs. Whereas what evolution actually does is say, oh look, the pool is drying up! Good thing that fish over in the corner that everybody picked on has a perforated swim bladder; it might be able to, like, breathe air long enough to make it over to the next pool. Too bad about all those other poor bastards who are going to die. And to hone that down to a specific example that you guys cite in the book, you’re saying “high fitness equals low fitness”—that you need variation to cope with future change.

Right.

So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s like—who was it that responded to The Origin of Species by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. I’ve forgotten who said that.

A lot of biology professors, who then wrote articles about how they actually had thought of it for themselves, but nobody paid any attention to that!

And that might be one of the more essential values of this book—that it reminds us of things we should already know, but never thought about rigorously enough to actually realize.

Shifting gears to another key point in the book: democracy, which you describe as the one form of government that allows the possibility of change without violence. But you also admit, and this is a quote: “Our governance systems—long ago co-opted as instruments for amplified personal power— have become nearly useless, at all levels,  from the United Nations to the local city council. Institutions established during 450 generations of unresolvable conflict cannot facilitate change because they are designed to be agents of social control, maintaining what philosopher John Rawls called ‘the goal of the well-ordered society.’ They were not founded with global climate change, the economics of well-being, or conflict resolution in mind.”

So what you are essentially saying here is that anyone trying to adopt the Darwinian principles that you and Sal are advocating is going to be going up against established societal structures, which makes you, by definition, an enemy of the state.

Yes.

And we already live in a world where staging sit-down protests in favor of Native land rights or taking pictures of a factory farm is enough to get you legally defined as a terrorist.

That’s right. Yeah.

So, how are we not looking at a violent revolution here?

That’s a really good point. I mean, that’s a really critical point. And it’s a point that was addressed in a conference a year ago that I attended, spoke in, in Stockholm, called “The Illusion of Control,” and a virtual conference two years before that called “Buying Time,” where a group of us recognized that the worst thing you could do to try to create social change for survival was to attack social institutions. That the way to cope with social institutions that were non-functional, or perhaps even antithetical to long-term survival, was to ignore them and go around them.

So let me give you an example: I was speaking with member representatives of a rural revitalization NGO in Nebraska a year ago, and they said, “OK, this rural revitalization stuff and climate migration, this sounds like a really good idea. How are we going to get the federal government to support these efforts?” And I said, “They’re not going to.” I said, “You have to understand that in the American situation, the two greatest obstacles to rural revitalization and climate migration are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a party of big cities; they don’t want to lose population. The Republican Party is the population of the rural areas; they don’t want people from the cities moving into their areas. Both parties are going to be against this. This is why Joe Biden’s, you know, ‘the climate president,’ but he’s not doing nearly enough. Not even close. Because these people are all locked into the status quo.”

And so I told these people, I said, “You don’t ask for permission, and you don’t go to the federal government. You go to the local towns in these rural areas and you say, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ You then advertise for the kinds of people you want to come in. You want to have electricity self-sufficiency in your town. You need somebody who knows how to build and maintain a solar farm. Advertise for people like that in the big cities. Get them to come and live in your town. Don’t ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. They’re not going to pay any attention to you.” And these people said, “Yes, but then if we’re successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit!” And I said, “So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and they’ll forget you.”

Maybe. But in cases where it’s been tried, the power utilities step in and squash such efforts as though they were bugs. Set up solar panels and the utility will charge you for “infrastructure maintenance” because by opting out of the grid, you’re not paying “your fair share.” Drive an electric vehicle and you might be subject to an additional “road tax” because, by not paying for gasoline, you’re not paying for road work. The system actively works to make these initiatives fail. And this power goes beyond just stifling progress. They have control of armed forces; they have a monopoly on state violence. We are not allowed to beat up the cops; the cops are allowed to beat us up.

I suppose I have more faith in human nature than is warranted by the evidence. Sal and I do not think such local initiatives will be easy or that they will mostly succeed—at least not until things are so bad that they are the only workable option. What we are saying is that these local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble (move away from trouble, generalize in fitness space, and find something that works), and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now. At the same time, during climate perturbations, lots of organisms do not make it, so we need as many individual efforts as possible to increase the chances that someone will survive.

There is evidence that some people are doing this, sometimes with the blessing of local and state authorities and without arousing the interest of national authorities. What people need to do is have a commitment to survival, decide what their assets are and their local carrying capacity, and then go about doing the right thing as quietly as possible. As for your point about state violence: What happens if the cops in a small town are the people you go to church with?

That’s an interesting question.

That’s the point. I mean, what we’re trying to find out, one of the experiments that rural revitalization and, and climate migration is going to resolve for us, is, what is the largest human population that can safeguard itself against being taken over by sociopaths? Let me explain what I mean. Generally speaking, the larger the population, the smaller the number of people who actually control the social control institutions. So you have five different language groups in the city, but somehow it turns out that the people in charge of the religion, or the banks, or the governance only represent one of those language groups. They end up controlling everything. This is a breeding ground for sociopaths to take control.

And sure enough, by about 9,000 years ago, when this is all in place, we begin to see religious and governance and economic institutions all support the notion of going to war to take from your neighbors what you want for yourself. And we’ve been at war with ourselves ever since then, and this was not an evolutionary imperative; this was a societal behavioral decision. It’s understandable, in retrospect, as a result of too many people, too high a population density. So you live in circumstances where people cannot identify the sociopaths before they’ve taken control. And that’s the subtext in the idea that one of the ways that we should deal with the fact that more than 50 percent of human beings now live in large cities in climate-insecure places, is for those people to redistribute themselves away from climate-insecure areas, into population centers of lower density, and cooperating networks of low-density populations, rather than big, condensed cities.

    Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Let’s follow this move back to the rural environment a bit, because it’s fundamental. I mean, you brought it up, and it is fundamental to the modular post-apocalyptic society you’re talking about.

Sure. Not post-apocalyptic: post-collapse.

Post-collapse. Fair enough. So, another quote from the book: “Neo-protectionists compliment the ever-larger city’s perspective by suggesting that the biosphere would be best served if humans were maximally separated from the wild lands.”

Right.

“This makes no sense to most humans, and that is why no post-apocalyptic or dystopian novel or film depicts large cities as places of refuge and safety during a crisis.” Just putting up my hand, I can vouch for that, having written my share of apocalyptic sci-fi.

Nobody’s running to the cities.

“Any attempt to separate humans from the rest of the biosphere would be detrimental to efforts to preserve either.” And I believe at some other point you reference neo-protectionist arguments that we should put aside half of the natural life—

Yeah. That’s E.O. Wilson’s half—

And putting aside, for the moment, my sympathies for that sentiment—in defense of the neo-protectionists, all of human history says that whenever we interact with nature, we pretty much fuck it up.

No. It doesn’t say that. First of all, when you talk of most of human history, you’re talking about the last thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years. What has been the actual historical record of humans for the last 3 million years?

I take your point. And it’s a legitimate point when you talk about a global human population, that you mention, in the millions. But we’re at a population of 8 billion now. So accepting, wholesale, without argument, your argument that cities are basically wasteful, unsustaining, pestholes of disease and so on—

That benefit a few people a lot, and treat the great majority as a disposable workforce.

Yeah. But we still are dealing with a planet in which 94 percent of mammalian biomass on this planet is us and our livestock, so how does that kind of biomass integrate intimately with what remains of our natural environment without just crushing it—or are you anticipating, like, a massive cull of a—

But, see, you’re repeating a bunch of truisms that are not borne out by the actual evidence. We don’t crush—Homo sapiens doesn’t crush the biosphere. Homo sapiens interacts with the biosphere in ways that alter it. See, evolutionary alteration of the environment does not mean collapse. It means change. This is the neo-protectionist language—that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit. I mean, what human beings are doing to the biosphere right now is nothing compared to what blue-green algae did to the biosphere 4 billion years ago.

Absolutely.

And what happened? Us, OK? The Chicxulub asteroid: If it hadn’t killed the dinosaurs, there would be no us.

I actually, personally, find comfort in the idea that there have been, what, five major extinction events? And that in every single case, there has been a beautiful, diverse—

Because there was sufficient evolutionary potential to survive.

Exactly.

Not because a whole bunch of new magical mutations showed up.

Right. But, it took anywhere from 10 to 30 million years for that to happen—

So?

—and I would argue that most people—I mean, I’m kind of on your side in this, but I’m also increasingly sympathetic to the human extinction movement. I think most people are hoping for recovery in less geological terms, timescale-wise.

This is a really critical point, because this, then, loops back to the whole Asimov’s Foundation thing. Do we wait 30,000 years for the empire to rebuild, or can we do it in 1,000 years? That’s what we’re talking about. We have great confidence that the biosphere is going to restore itself, within—you know, no matter what we do, unless we make the whole planet a cinder, the biosphere’s going to “restore itself” within, you know, 10 million years. Whatever. That’s fine. And we—you know, some form of humanity—may be part of that, or may not.

But the reality is that what we want to do, as human beings, is we want to tip the odds in our favor a little bit. We want to increase the odds that we’re going to be one of those lucky species that survives. And we know enough to be able to do that. We now know enough about evolution to be able to alter our behavior in a way that’s going to increase the odds that we’ll survive. So the question is, are we going to do that?

So this whole business of whether or not, you know, what’s going to happen in 3 million years—you’re right: That’s not important. But what happens tomorrow is not important either. What’s important is what happens in the first generation after 2050. That’s what’s important. That first generation after 2050 is going to determine whether or not technological humanity reemerges from an eclipse, or whether Homo sapiens becomes just another marginal primate species. 

https://nautil.us/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt-626051/?_sp=853d659a-c159-42ae-97bd-c1224fbd8ebb.1718559458320
 

[LibertyBell]

I love that it references Isaac Asimov's Foundation series which I read when I was 12.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and these have been my thoughts ever since

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the collapse is coming, we can't stop it, what matters is how long the collapse lasts and how we rebuild afterwards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

they are basically saying that every major study shows that civilization and society will collapse by 2050.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and nothing we can do right now will change that and the only thing that matters is what the generation that comes after 2050 will do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

humans will have to start from scratch in a much more sustainable way

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

let's see if we can change human nature.

[donsutherland1]

6 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

Don what do you think of this?

I love that they reference Asimov's Foundation series as that is something I've based everything that's going on on this planet since I was in middle school.

 

https://nautil.us/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt-626051/?_sp=853d659a-c159-42ae-97bd-c1224fbd8ebb.1718559458320

known Dan Brooks for 40 years now. Somehow we’re still talking to each other.

We’ve followed radically different trajectories since first meeting back in the ’80s. Over the decades, Dan built a truly impressive rap sheet as an evolutionary biologist, with over 400 papers and book chapters, seven books, and too many awards, fellowships, and distinctions to count on your fingers and toes. I, in contrast, left an academic career in marine biology in a huff (industry funding came with, shall we say, certain a priori preferences concerning the sort of results we’d be reporting) and became a science-fiction writer. It’s a position from which, ironically, I’ve had more influence on actual scientists than I ever did as an academic—admittedly a low bar to clear.

And yet our paths continue to intersect. Dan offered me a post-doc in his lab around the turn of the century (DNA barcoding—I really, really sucked at it). A few years later I helped him relocate to Nebraska, leading to an encounter with the armed capuchins of the United States Border Patrol and eventual banishment from that crumbling empire. The protagonist of my novel Echopraxia is a parasitologist suspiciously named Daniel Brüks. And I once ended up one creepy handshake away from Viktor Orbán, when Dan finagled a speaking gig for me at Hungary’s iASK Symposium.

The dance continues. Sometimes we hug like brothers. Sometimes we feel like punching each other’s lights out (also, I suppose, like brothers). But one thing we never do is bore each other—and whenever Dan’s in town, we manage to meet up at a pub somewhere to reconnect.

What follows is an edited record of one such meeting, more formal than most, which took place shortly after the publication of A Darwinian Survival Guide, authored by Dan and evolutionary biologist Salvatore Agosta.

In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050. 

In response to all of this, the last COP (Conference of the Parties, the annual international climate change meeting held by the United Nations) was held in a petrostate and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company; the next COP is pretty much the same thing. We’re headed for the cliff, and not only have we not hit the brakes yet, we still have our foot on the gas. In that corner: Dan Brooks and Sal Agosta, with a Darwinian survival guide. So, take it away, Dan. Guide us to survival. What’s the strategy?

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit, Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

    Why is it that human beings are susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea and are not?

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. And so, if there is the kind of nature collapse that the Melbourne Sustainable Studies Institute is talking about, how are those people going to survive?

A completely dispassionate view would just say, “Well, you know, most of them won’t. Most of them are going to die.” But what if it turns out that we think that embedded within all of that technologically dependent society there are some good things? What if we think that there are elements of that existence that are worth trying to save, from high technology to high art to modern medicine?

In my particular case, without modern medical knowledge, I would have died when I was just 21 years old of a burst appendix. If I had managed to survive that, I would have died in my late 50s from an enlarged prostate. These are things most would prefer not to happen. What can we begin doing now that will increase the chances that those elements of technologically-dependent humanity will survive a general collapse, if that happens as a result of our unwillingness to begin to do anything effective with respect to climate change and human existence?

So to be clear, you’re not talking about forestalling the collapse—

No.

—you’re talking about passing through that bottleneck and coming out the other side with some semblance of what we value intact.

Yeah, that’s right. It is conceivable that if all of humanity suddenly decided to change its behavior, right now, we would emerge after 2050 with most everything intact, and we would be “OK.” We don’t think that’s realistic. It is a possibility, but we don’t think that’s a realistic possibility. We think that, in fact, most of humanity is committed to business as usual, and that’s what we’re really talking about: What can we begin doing now to try to shorten the period of time after the collapse, before we “recover”?

In other words—and this is in analogy with Asimov’s Foundation trilogy—if we do nothing, there’s going to be a collapse and it’ll take 30,000 years for the galaxy to recover. But if we start doing things now, then it maybe only takes 1,000 years to recover. So using that analogy, what can some human beings start to do now that would shorten the period of time necessary to recover? Could we, in fact, recover within a generation? Could we be without a global internet for 20 years, but within 20 years, could we have a global internet back again?
In Body Image
SURVIVOR: “We’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence,” says evolutionary biologist Dan Brooks. If nature collapses, as scientists predict, “how are those people going to survive?” Photo by Diego Cervo / Shutterstock.

Are you basically talking about the sociological equivalent of the Norwegian Seed Bank, for example?

That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

Well, that said, that’s kind of a repeated underlying foundation of the book, which is that evolutionary strategies are our best bet for dealing with stressors. And by definition, that implies that the system changes. Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Right, right. Yeah.

And you take on quite explicitly the neo-protectionists, who basically want to preserve the system as it exists, or as it existed at one point in the idealized past, forever without end, as opposed to allowing the system to exercise its capacity to change in response to stress. You cite anoxic ocean blobs; you cite, quite brilliantly I thought, the devastating effect beavers have on their local habitat.

Yeah.

And you take on the sacred spirit animal of the World Wildlife Fund, the polar bear. And the bottom line here is that shit happens, things change, trust life to find a way, ‘cause evolution hasn’t steered us wrong yet.

Yeah.

Now, this is an argument that some might say can be invaded by cheaters. I read this and I thought of the Simpsons episode where Montgomery Burns is railing to Lisa, and he says, “Nature started the struggle for survival, and now she wants to call it off because she’s losing? I say, hard cheese!” And less fictitiously, Rush Limbaugh has invoked essentially the same argument when he was advocating against the protection of the spotted owl. You know, life will find a way. This is evolution; this is natural selection. So, I can see cherry-picking oil executives being really happy with this book. How do you guard against that?

Anybody can cherry-pick anything, and they will. Our attitude is just basically saying, look, here’s the fundamental response to any of this stuff. It’s, how’s it working out so far? OK? There’s a common adage by tennis coaches that says during a match, you never change your winning game, and you always change your losing game. That’s what we’re saying.

One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

    This is neo-protectionist language—that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain—this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation. Because everything that human beings have done for 3 million years has seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s only been in the last 100 or 150 years that human beings have begun to develop ways of thinking that allow us to try to project future consequences and to think about unanticipated consequences, long-term consequences of what we do now. So this is very new for humanity, and as a consequence, it’s ridiculous to place blame on our ancestors for the situation we’re in now.

Everything that people did at any point in time seemed like a good idea at the time; it seemed to solve a problem. If it worked for a while, that was fine, and when it no longer worked, they tried to do something else. But now we seem to be at a point where our ability to survive in the short term is compromised, and what we’re saying is that our way to survive better in the short term, ironically, is now based on a better understanding of how to survive in the long run. We’re hoping that people will begin seriously thinking that our short-term well-being is best served by thinking about our long-term survival.

What you’ve just stated is essentially that short-term goals and long-term goals are not necessarily the same thing, that one trades off against the other. When you put it that way, it seems perfectly obvious—although I have to say, what you’re advocating for presumes a level of foresight and self-control that our species has, shall we say, not traditionally manifested.

But yeah, a widely adhered-to view of evolution is a reactive one—the pool is drying up, and evolution looks at that and says, oh my goodness, the pool is drying up! We should probably get those fish to evolve lungs. Whereas what evolution actually does is say, oh look, the pool is drying up! Good thing that fish over in the corner that everybody picked on has a perforated swim bladder; it might be able to, like, breathe air long enough to make it over to the next pool. Too bad about all those other poor bastards who are going to die. And to hone that down to a specific example that you guys cite in the book, you’re saying “high fitness equals low fitness”—that you need variation to cope with future change.

Right.

So optimal adaptation to a specific environment implies a lack of variation. When you’re optimally adapted to one specific environment, you are screwed the moment the environment changes. And the idea that high fitness equals low fitness is what I call a counterintuitive obvious point: It is something that seems oxymoronic and even stupid when you first hear it, but when you think about it for more than two seconds, it’s like—who was it that responded to The Origin of Species by saying, Of course! How silly of me not to have thought of it myself. I’ve forgotten who said that.

A lot of biology professors, who then wrote articles about how they actually had thought of it for themselves, but nobody paid any attention to that!

And that might be one of the more essential values of this book—that it reminds us of things we should already know, but never thought about rigorously enough to actually realize.

Shifting gears to another key point in the book: democracy, which you describe as the one form of government that allows the possibility of change without violence. But you also admit, and this is a quote: “Our governance systems—long ago co-opted as instruments for amplified personal power— have become nearly useless, at all levels,  from the United Nations to the local city council. Institutions established during 450 generations of unresolvable conflict cannot facilitate change because they are designed to be agents of social control, maintaining what philosopher John Rawls called ‘the goal of the well-ordered society.’ They were not founded with global climate change, the economics of well-being, or conflict resolution in mind.”

So what you are essentially saying here is that anyone trying to adopt the Darwinian principles that you and Sal are advocating is going to be going up against established societal structures, which makes you, by definition, an enemy of the state.

Yes.

And we already live in a world where staging sit-down protests in favor of Native land rights or taking pictures of a factory farm is enough to get you legally defined as a terrorist.

That’s right. Yeah.

So, how are we not looking at a violent revolution here?

That’s a really good point. I mean, that’s a really critical point. And it’s a point that was addressed in a conference a year ago that I attended, spoke in, in Stockholm, called “The Illusion of Control,” and a virtual conference two years before that called “Buying Time,” where a group of us recognized that the worst thing you could do to try to create social change for survival was to attack social institutions. That the way to cope with social institutions that were non-functional, or perhaps even antithetical to long-term survival, was to ignore them and go around them.

So let me give you an example: I was speaking with member representatives of a rural revitalization NGO in Nebraska a year ago, and they said, “OK, this rural revitalization stuff and climate migration, this sounds like a really good idea. How are we going to get the federal government to support these efforts?” And I said, “They’re not going to.” I said, “You have to understand that in the American situation, the two greatest obstacles to rural revitalization and climate migration are the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is a party of big cities; they don’t want to lose population. The Republican Party is the population of the rural areas; they don’t want people from the cities moving into their areas. Both parties are going to be against this. This is why Joe Biden’s, you know, ‘the climate president,’ but he’s not doing nearly enough. Not even close. Because these people are all locked into the status quo.”

And so I told these people, I said, “You don’t ask for permission, and you don’t go to the federal government. You go to the local towns in these rural areas and you say, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ You then advertise for the kinds of people you want to come in. You want to have electricity self-sufficiency in your town. You need somebody who knows how to build and maintain a solar farm. Advertise for people like that in the big cities. Get them to come and live in your town. Don’t ask the government; do the right thing. Never ask for permission; just do the right thing. They’re not going to pay any attention to you.” And these people said, “Yes, but then if we’re successful, the politicians will come in and claim credit!” And I said, “So what? Who cares! Let them come in, do a photo op, and then they go back to Washington D.C. and they’ll forget you.”

Maybe. But in cases where it’s been tried, the power utilities step in and squash such efforts as though they were bugs. Set up solar panels and the utility will charge you for “infrastructure maintenance” because by opting out of the grid, you’re not paying “your fair share.” Drive an electric vehicle and you might be subject to an additional “road tax” because, by not paying for gasoline, you’re not paying for road work. The system actively works to make these initiatives fail. And this power goes beyond just stifling progress. They have control of armed forces; they have a monopoly on state violence. We are not allowed to beat up the cops; the cops are allowed to beat us up.

I suppose I have more faith in human nature than is warranted by the evidence. Sal and I do not think such local initiatives will be easy or that they will mostly succeed—at least not until things are so bad that they are the only workable option. What we are saying is that these local initiatives are the Darwinian response to trouble (move away from trouble, generalize in fitness space, and find something that works), and if we recognize trouble early enough, we can opt to begin surviving now. At the same time, during climate perturbations, lots of organisms do not make it, so we need as many individual efforts as possible to increase the chances that someone will survive.

There is evidence that some people are doing this, sometimes with the blessing of local and state authorities and without arousing the interest of national authorities. What people need to do is have a commitment to survival, decide what their assets are and their local carrying capacity, and then go about doing the right thing as quietly as possible. As for your point about state violence: What happens if the cops in a small town are the people you go to church with?

That’s an interesting question.

That’s the point. I mean, what we’re trying to find out, one of the experiments that rural revitalization and, and climate migration is going to resolve for us, is, what is the largest human population that can safeguard itself against being taken over by sociopaths? Let me explain what I mean. Generally speaking, the larger the population, the smaller the number of people who actually control the social control institutions. So you have five different language groups in the city, but somehow it turns out that the people in charge of the religion, or the banks, or the governance only represent one of those language groups. They end up controlling everything. This is a breeding ground for sociopaths to take control.

And sure enough, by about 9,000 years ago, when this is all in place, we begin to see religious and governance and economic institutions all support the notion of going to war to take from your neighbors what you want for yourself. And we’ve been at war with ourselves ever since then, and this was not an evolutionary imperative; this was a societal behavioral decision. It’s understandable, in retrospect, as a result of too many people, too high a population density. So you live in circumstances where people cannot identify the sociopaths before they’ve taken control. And that’s the subtext in the idea that one of the ways that we should deal with the fact that more than 50 percent of human beings now live in large cities in climate-insecure places, is for those people to redistribute themselves away from climate-insecure areas, into population centers of lower density, and cooperating networks of low-density populations, rather than big, condensed cities.

    Life will find a way, but it won’t necessarily include the right whales and the monarch butterflies.

Let’s follow this move back to the rural environment a bit, because it’s fundamental. I mean, you brought it up, and it is fundamental to the modular post-apocalyptic society you’re talking about.

Sure. Not post-apocalyptic: post-collapse.

Post-collapse. Fair enough. So, another quote from the book: “Neo-protectionists compliment the ever-larger city’s perspective by suggesting that the biosphere would be best served if humans were maximally separated from the wild lands.”

Right.

“This makes no sense to most humans, and that is why no post-apocalyptic or dystopian novel or film depicts large cities as places of refuge and safety during a crisis.” Just putting up my hand, I can vouch for that, having written my share of apocalyptic sci-fi.

Nobody’s running to the cities.

“Any attempt to separate humans from the rest of the biosphere would be detrimental to efforts to preserve either.” And I believe at some other point you reference neo-protectionist arguments that we should put aside half of the natural life—

Yeah. That’s E.O. Wilson’s half—

And putting aside, for the moment, my sympathies for that sentiment—in defense of the neo-protectionists, all of human history says that whenever we interact with nature, we pretty much fuck it up.

No. It doesn’t say that. First of all, when you talk of most of human history, you’re talking about the last thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years. What has been the actual historical record of humans for the last 3 million years?

I take your point. And it’s a legitimate point when you talk about a global human population, that you mention, in the millions. But we’re at a population of 8 billion now. So accepting, wholesale, without argument, your argument that cities are basically wasteful, unsustaining, pestholes of disease and so on—

That benefit a few people a lot, and treat the great majority as a disposable workforce.

Yeah. But we still are dealing with a planet in which 94 percent of mammalian biomass on this planet is us and our livestock, so how does that kind of biomass integrate intimately with what remains of our natural environment without just crushing it—or are you anticipating, like, a massive cull of a—

But, see, you’re repeating a bunch of truisms that are not borne out by the actual evidence. We don’t crush—Homo sapiens doesn’t crush the biosphere. Homo sapiens interacts with the biosphere in ways that alter it. See, evolutionary alteration of the environment does not mean collapse. It means change. This is the neo-protectionist language—that any change is going to collapse the biosphere. That’s bullshit. I mean, what human beings are doing to the biosphere right now is nothing compared to what blue-green algae did to the biosphere 4 billion years ago.

Absolutely.

And what happened? Us, OK? The Chicxulub asteroid: If it hadn’t killed the dinosaurs, there would be no us.

I actually, personally, find comfort in the idea that there have been, what, five major extinction events? And that in every single case, there has been a beautiful, diverse—

Because there was sufficient evolutionary potential to survive.

Exactly.

Not because a whole bunch of new magical mutations showed up.

Right. But, it took anywhere from 10 to 30 million years for that to happen—

So?

—and I would argue that most people—I mean, I’m kind of on your side in this, but I’m also increasingly sympathetic to the human extinction movement. I think most people are hoping for recovery in less geological terms, timescale-wise.

This is a really critical point, because this, then, loops back to the whole Asimov’s Foundation thing. Do we wait 30,000 years for the empire to rebuild, or can we do it in 1,000 years? That’s what we’re talking about. We have great confidence that the biosphere is going to restore itself, within—you know, no matter what we do, unless we make the whole planet a cinder, the biosphere’s going to “restore itself” within, you know, 10 million years. Whatever. That’s fine. And we—you know, some form of humanity—may be part of that, or may not.

But the reality is that what we want to do, as human beings, is we want to tip the odds in our favor a little bit. We want to increase the odds that we’re going to be one of those lucky species that survives. And we know enough to be able to do that. We now know enough about evolution to be able to alter our behavior in a way that’s going to increase the odds that we’ll survive. So the question is, are we going to do that?

So this whole business of whether or not, you know, what’s going to happen in 3 million years—you’re right: That’s not important. But what happens tomorrow is not important either. What’s important is what happens in the first generation after 2050. That’s what’s important. That first generation after 2050 is going to determine whether or not technological humanity reemerges from an eclipse, or whether Homo sapiens becomes just another marginal primate species. 

https://nautil.us/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt-626051/?_sp=853d659a-c159-42ae-97bd-c1224fbd8ebb.1718559458320
 

It's a fascinating piece. I don't think society is doomed to such an end. At least not yet.

Societal simplification or collapse of civilization on a local/regional/global scale is a plausible scenario. Numerous drivers create the risk: climate change where global temperatures rise faster than species/societies can adapt; resource consumption that exceeds global resource production (chronic overshoot) driven by the assumption of perpetual growth unconstrained by sustainability in a finite world; economic systems that are highly efficient within narrow constraints but ill-suited for addressing larger structural issues, etc. There are also important political and geopolitical issues that enhance the impact of the above drivers.

Alternative paths also exist. But taking those paths will not be effortless. They will entail challenges that seemingly make the unsustainable status quo approach seem more attractive, as the highest costs of that unsustainable approach still lie in the future. As wonderful as technology is, it may also represent a barrier to departing a familiar, comfortable, but unsustainable status quo.

Big things can be done quickly. The Manhattan Plan and Apollo Projects are two examples. The world's coming together to address the threat CFCs posed to the Ozone layer is another. Fossil fuels can be rapidly eliminated. It's a political choice, not a technological one. Defeatist claims that it is impossible have zero merit. Thanks to years and decades of relative inaction, the transition will be bumpier than it would otherwise have been. Additional delay will only make the transition even tougher.

That path has largely not been taken, because when it comes to phasing out fossil fuels, the necessary courage, creativity, and leadership have been largely absent. Words set forth at annual COP conferences that are not backed by binding targets and credible enforcement mechanisms ring hollow. COP28 was a failure.

The $7 trillion in direct and indirect global  subsidies provided to the fossil fuel industry each year feeds the societal addiction and underwrites the industry's ability to distort public policy. Messaging on fossil fuels and climate change is weak and ineffective. Rather than describing heat and heat-related deaths in abstract terms, messaging that would tie the industry to deaths and other harm from the added warming caused by their hazardous products would be better. It would shift the question as to whether the industry should maintain license to take a growing number of lives, just as ultimately became the proposition related to the tobacco industry.

The rapid advance of technology has seduced policymakers into an almost blind belief that a technological miracle will rescue them from the consequences of their own inaction. Thus, they cling to that faith and do little.  

For me, the question is whether there will be a shock of sufficient size that will galvanize humanity to break free from the status quo before an irreversible inflection point is reached at some unknown point in the future. I'm not sure what magnitude is required, but tragically it would likely need to be vastly larger than what the world has already experienced. Otherwise, as has happened in the face of growing heat, drought, and fire disasters, humanity will simply normalize such events and carry on.

Should one accept a hopeless fate? No.

Humanity still has plenty of agency. So long as humanity can shape the future, catastrophe can be averted. So long as that capacity exists, catastrophe remains a choice, even as some try to assert that choice does not exist. It is a choice, because human society knows what needs to be done and already has the tools to change course.

Today, humanity can still avert societal simplification. The effort will be difficult--far more difficult than it would have been decades ago. It should make that effort, if not for the contemporary generation, certainly for future generations who will inherit what is left to them.

 

[LibertyBell]

On 6/21/2024 at 1:32 PM, donsutherland1 said:

It's a fascinating piece. I don't think society is doomed to such an end. At least not yet.

Societal simplification or collapse of civilization on a local/regional/global scale is a plausible scenario. Numerous drivers create the risk: climate change where global temperatures rise faster than species/societies can adapt; resource consumption that exceeds global resource production (chronic overshoot) driven by the assumption of perpetual growth unconstrained by sustainability in a finite world; economic systems that are highly efficient within narrow constraints but ill-suited for addressing larger structural issues, etc. There are also important political and geopolitical issues that enhance the impact of the above drivers.

Alternative paths also exist. But taking those paths will not be effortless. They will entail challenges that seemingly make the unsustainable status quo approach seem more attractive, as the highest costs of that unsustainable approach still lie in the future. As wonderful as technology is, it may also represent a barrier to departing a familiar, comfortable, but unsustainable status quo.

Big things can be done quickly. The Manhattan Plan and Apollo Projects are two examples. The world's coming together to address the threat CFCs posed to the Ozone layer is another. Fossil fuels can be rapidly eliminated. It's a political choice, not a technological one. Defeatist claims that it is impossible have zero merit. Thanks to years and decades of relative inaction, the transition will be bumpier than it would otherwise have been. Additional delay will only make the transition even tougher.

That path has largely not been taken, because when it comes to phasing out fossil fuels, the necessary courage, creativity, and leadership have been largely absent. Words set forth at annual COP conferences that are not backed by binding targets and credible enforcement mechanisms ring hollow. COP28 was a failure.

The $7 trillion in direct and indirect global  subsidies provided to the fossil fuel industry each year feeds the societal addiction and underwrites the industry's ability to distort public policy. Messaging on fossil fuels and climate change is weak and ineffective. Rather than describing heat and heat-related deaths in abstract terms, messaging that would tie the industry to deaths and other harm from the added warming caused by their hazardous products would be better. It would shift the question as to whether the industry should maintain license to take a growing number of lives, just as ultimately became the proposition related to the tobacco industry.

The rapid advance of technology has seduced policymakers into an almost blind belief that a technological miracle will rescue them from the consequences of their own inaction. Thus, they cling to that faith and do little.  

For me, the question is whether there will be a shock of sufficient size that will galvanize humanity to break free from the status quo before an irreversible inflection point is reached at some unknown point in the future. I'm not sure what magnitude is required, but tragically it would likely need to be vastly larger than what the world has already experienced. Otherwise, as has happened in the face of growing heat, drought, and fire disasters, humanity will simply normalize such events and carry on.

Should one accept a hopeless fate? No.

Humanity still has plenty of agency. So long as humanity can shape the future, catastrophe can be averted. So long as that capacity exists, catastrophe remains a choice, even as some try to assert that choice does not exist. It is a choice, because human society knows what needs to be done and already has the tools to change course.

Today, humanity can still avert societal simplification. The effort will be difficult--far more difficult than it would have been decades ago. It should make that effort, if not for the contemporary generation, certainly for future generations who will inherit what is left to them.

 

Thanks Don, they also rightly pointed out how fossil fuel companies still dictate policy at these COP summits and how fossil fuel execs address these conferences. The truth is these corporations are the reason we have not seen action yet and allowing them to attend and have a say in what happens is as bad as letting tobacco companies decide policy on how to get people to cut down on smoking.  We have this massive problem of letting corporations regulate themselves and conduct their own 'safety' studies-- that simply cannot be allowed anymore.  Conflict of interest is the new pandemic.

[rclab]

3 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

Thanks Don, they also rightly pointed out how fossil fuel companies still dictate policy at these COP summits and how fossil fuel execs address these conferences. The truth is these corporations are the reason we have not seen action yet and allowing them to attend and have a say in what happens is as bad as letting tobacco companies decide policy on how to get people to cut down on smoking.  We have this massive problem of letting corporations regulate themselves and conduct their own 'safety' studies-- that simply cannot be allowed anymore.  Conflict of interest is the new pandemic.

This 1907 illustration ‘Almightier’  from Puck bears relevance today. However the house changes …… the God remains the same. Stay well, as always …..

[ChescoWx]

Plenty of lunacy and misrepresentations being presented by main stream media outlets. This weekend on MSNBC they are reporting on this run of the mill not unprecedented June heatwave in the eastern US as : “Extreme heat,” “baking,” “absolutely scorching,” “extreme,” “ferocious,” “relentless heat wave smashing records,” “intense,” “scorching hot,”; Ridiculously they go on to say that “Scientists say there is a clear Link between intense heat & human-caused climate change, meaning this extreme weather is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon"  Weather like this week in the east is of course not climate but no one ever seems to correct climate alarmism. I love how the reporter says "it just feels like it is getting hotter every year" welp except for 90 years ago in the 1930's....  https://x.com/i/status/1805269169442623714

With this recent warm period....aside from Caribou, Maine (data begins in 1939), did any station location set a monthly or all-time record high temperature  with data back to early 1900s or late 1800s?

[donsutherland1]

18 minutes ago, ChescoWx said:

Plenty of lunacy and misrepresentations being presented by main stream media outlets. This weekend on MSNBC they are reporting on this run of the mill not unprecedented June heatwave in the eastern US as : “Extreme heat,” “baking,” “absolutely scorching,” “extreme,” “ferocious,” “relentless heat wave smashing records,” “intense,” “scorching hot,”; Ridiculously they go on to say that “Scientists say there is a clear Link between intense heat & human-caused climate change, meaning this extreme weather is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon"  Weather like this week in the east is of course not climate but no one ever seems to correct climate alarmism. I love how the reporter says "it just feels like it is getting hotter every year" welp except for 90 years ago in the 1930's....  https://x.com/i/status/1805269169442623714

 

 

Although the heat was not unprecedented, it was a notable June outbreak. Hundreds of daily high maximum and minimum temperature records were tied or broken. At least 19 monthly high temperature records and 24 monthly high minimum temperature records were tied or broken. Caribou tied its all-time highest temperature. Burlington and Caribou tied their all-time highest minimum temperatures. Fort Kent, where records go back to 1893, demolished its all-time minimum temperature record by 4°. Numerous additional cities came within 1°-2° of their monthly records.

Finally, although there are a few regions where there has been no statistical long-range trend (from 1895) for summers, most regions in the U.S. have been experiencing warming summers, as has the contiguous U.S.

Northeast:

Contiguous United States:

[ChescoWx]

9 minutes ago, donsutherland1 said:

Although the heat was not unprecedented, it was a notable June outbreak. Hundreds of daily high maximum and minimum temperature records were tied or broken. At least 19 monthly high temperature records and 24 monthly high minimum temperature records were tied or broken. Caribou tied its all-time highest temperature. Burlington and Caribou tied their all-time highest minimum temperatures. Fort Kent, where records go back to 1893, demolished its all-time minimum temperature record by 4°. Numerous additional cities came within 1°-2° of their monthly records.

Finally, although there are a few regions where there has been no statistical long-range trend (from 1895) for summers, most regions in the U.S. have been experiencing warming summers, as has the contiguous U.S.

Northeast:

Contiguous United States:

So Don you think that kind of reporting on the weather this week is appropriate??

[ChescoWx]

Funny Don the difference in those summer charts in my section of the Northeast USA.... if we eliminate the after the fact computer adjustments to chill those nagging hot summers in the US back in the 1930s and 1940s in blue....now if we allow for altered data in red- there is the warmth you speak of.