Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: climate change Page 3 of 4

The Genocidal Species

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On December 21, 2017

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

As a species, humans are genocidal.

This is a fact. We are genociding multiple species right now, we have genocided many in the past. We are driving so many species to extinction that the fossil record will show this as a great die-off.

And, if we decide one part of our own species isn’t “of the tribe,” well, we happily genocide them too. (A genocide is ongoing in Yemen, and, despite all our caterwauling about “never again,” we are doing nothing about it. Indeed, the US is aiding and abetting it.)

Humans commit genocide, a lot.

Now there are two ways to look at this tendency: with a view to free will and a view without. If humans don’t have free will, well, we have no moral culpability. It’s like blaming a fox for killing all the hens in a hen-house even though he won’t eat most them: He can’t help himself. In this model, humans are just animals and are no different from any other in terms of moral culpability. We’re biological machines governed by cause and effect.

That doesn’t make those we kill any less dead but it does mean feeling remorse is silly. We’re serial killing mass murderers, but it’s not our fault. We might as well be bacteria in a petri dish, eating everything they can, polluting the dish, and wiping themselves out amidst their own waste.

Ourselves.

The other model suggests that human beings do have some control over ourselves. Some ability to use reason and reasoned emotion to control ourselves. We can model the past, present, and future and we can act to manage that future. We identify with and feel the pain of not just fellow humans but that of animals and even plants, and we can act on those feelings to reduce the amount of pain we cause.

Because whether we have free will or not, this we know: Suffering is real.

Even from a completely self-interested point of view, we know what we’re doing is bad: The species we’re killing are important for the health of eco-systems upon which we rely. If the ocean plankton go away, we are so screwed. If various other ecosystems collapse, well, we rely on them to keep the world habitable by higher lifeforms.

And the genetic wealth we are destroying, which we could use with our unfolding biological technologies, is incalculably large: Miracle cures and genetic modifications we will never know.

All this leaves aside the non-trivial possibility we could wipe ourselves out and the reasonable chance that we will destroy our civilization and plunge ourselves into a dark age.

If the other species could vote, surely most would vote to have us be the next genocide victim, in order to spare so many other species.

Looking at all of this leads to a fairly simple conclusion: We can’t handle the technology we have. We do not have the ability to manage ourselves. As a species, we cannot control our breeding, or manage limited resources and sinks, nor plan for any future more than a few years out. When we broke the Malthusian trap, we set ourselves up for disaster. When we learned how to exhume large amounts of carbon and burn it, we set most of the world’s species up for catastrophe.

We are dangerous to everyone, including ourselves, not primarily out of malice (though there is plenty of that) but out of selfishness, greed, stupidity, and short-sightedness.

And it’s not clear we can learn. Oh, individuals and groups can learn. The lessons of the Great Depression were learned well by those who were adults then, but they couldn’t pass those lessons on to their kids and grandkids, who went on to pursue essentially the exact same policies which caused the Great Depression (as well as fascism).

So if we make it through the great climate change and ecological collapse and learn our lesson, how long will it be before the grandkids or great-grandkids say, “Oh, we would never do that again. Let’s loosen some regulations, they’re stupid and get in the way of making a profit!”

As a species, we now have three great tasks:

  • Get through the ecological issues barreling down on us
  • Learn how to live in space and get off the planet so all our eggs aren’t in one basket (jump to more petri dishes!)
  • Most importantly, learn how to create stable, sane societies that aren’t a menace to themselves and every living creature around them.

The first two are clearly possible (though we may not manage them).

The third?

I don’t know. Can humans truly learn? Or are we just bacteria in a petri dish, too stupid to control ourselves?

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Bugpocalypse: Environmental Collapse Continues

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On October 22, 2017

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There are two major, interrelated environmental problems today. The first is climate change, the second is environmental collapse. The ecosystem is a very complicated web, from single celled organisms on up to apex predators and humans. When you unbalance it, when you take out chunks, the consequences cascade through the ecosystem, and it is possible for ecosystems to collapse, losing the ability to support higher forms of life, while the makeup of the lower parts changes significantly.

(For example, there are predictions of jellyfish taking over the oceans, or in bio-habitats, slimes becoming dominant.)

Climate change will be catastrophic, and it feeds into ecosystem problems by changing climates faster than animals and plants can adjust, but it’s probably survivable for humanity. (Just because humans will survive does not mean you and your kids will survive.)

Probably doesn’t mean certainly; there are outside scenarios where some system goes into exponential overdrive and renders the Earth unsuitable for humans.

Ecological collapse has its own nightmare scenarios. Traditionally, the apex predators (and, yeah, that’s effectively us), don’t survive great die-offs, and we have induced a great die-off. We’re losing, basically, all the fish: We have been spreading areas of oxygen drought in the ocean. Anecdotal reports of insect die-offs now have some scientific confirmation:

The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years.

This new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany, but has implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture, the researchers said.

This amounts to a six percent decrease per year, and it’s happening in nature preserves, which are the places one might expect to be effected least.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Anecdotally, as someone who’s almost 50, I remember a lot more insects in cities when I was a child. I see hardly any now.

As humans, we have taken over so much of the land’s surface and replaced it with farms and a very few animals (domesticated animals like cattle, chicken, sheep, llamas, and so on). We’ve removed most of the great forests and jungles, and replaced them with plants and animals that are very close to being monocultures (especially as the animal and plant breeds have been reduced to a few strains, with heirloom strains being phased out.)

58 percent of all vertebrate wildlife was lost just between 1970 and 2012.

On top of this, we have massive use of pesticides, mass release of chemicals into the environment in general, and the vast pools of plastics, all of which have become ubiquitous throughout the environment–including microscopic particles in our drinking water.

We’re pushing environmental collapse, in other words.

It’s not as obvious as wolves growing too numerous and taking too many dear, then dying off themselves, but it’s very close to the same thing.

It isn’t, well, necessary. We could do agriculture in ways that didn’t create monocultures, didn’t use mass pesticides, and made farmlands not be wastelands for everything but our few chosen animals and plants, but we don’t. Our cities could be full of green things and life that isn’t harmful (or not very) to humans, but they aren’t.

In most cases, this might be more expensive and more work, but it would also be better for us. We do better where there are more micro-organisms, not less. We do better where there are more plants, and especially trees, not less. A flourishing biome is in our interest, despite some challenges.

But we haven’t. Driven by efficiency and the profit motive, we have chosen instead to strip ecosystems bare, and not create new ones or work to keep those remaining healthy.

This is a great danger to us, and to most other living beings on the planet. We are foolish to think we will escape severe consequences: We will not.

This intersection of ecosystem collapse and climate change contains the highest chance humans have to cause their own apocalypse. The only other threat as large is the use of nuclear weapons.

It may be that humans are simply incapable of handling the technology we can create.

We shall see. It is clear, at the least, that we will need a harsh lesson, with deaths of a billion or more, as a corrective.

Let us hope that’s all that happens, and that those who survive, learn from it and change. Permanently.

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Hurricane Irma and Thinking About Future Climate Change

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On September 8, 2017

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I haven’t written about the hurricanes this season because much of what I’d say, and will say, has become mainstream.

Yes, this is related to climate change, because hurricanes take their energy from the heat of ocean water and ocean water is hotter.

In the late 90s, my friend Stirling Newberry posited that the first major effect of climate change would be more extreme weather events, and more powerful ones. The journals at the time wouldn’t publish, but now everyone knows who cares to know.

So listen, now, and carefully. One of the next great concerns (and it has already begun) is going to be changes in routine rainfall patterns. Those changes are going to disrupt or destroy agriculture in large regions, as well as the typical vegetation of those regions. Forest fires will be one of the results, the great fires of this season will not be the last.

This will go beyond agriculture to what areas are viable to live in with large populations. Heinlein warned in the 50s that California was profoundly unnatural: it required vast water supplies and if they were disrupted, that could cause massive numbers of deaths. I fear large parts of India are also going to be destroyed by this, combined with rising heat. (In fact, leaving Island nations aside, India is one of the nations which will be hit hardest by climate change.)

Because we have also drained and polluted our aquifers, water is going to be a huge problem. I expect the combination of rainfall changes and aquifer destruction to devastate agriculture in many regions, including the US, China, and India.

Right now we produce more food than we need, globally, we just waste a ton of it and distribute it execrably, but that is going to change.

The just-in-time global delivery system is VERY fragile. You should have food and water to survive at least a couple weeks, and ideally a few months. Beans and rice is one option if you can also arrange something to cook with. This is cheap, and done properly you can live on it for a long time. And water, in case the water in your taps goes off or becomes undrinkable.  There are other options, and the survivalist types have done the work, it’s just a question of doing the research and figuring out what is within your means. A couple weeks food and something to cook with isn’t that expensive.(In some places a pot and wood will do the job, but not all places.)

Water, in particular, requires some room to store. But properly stored food and water in a shed, basement or even jammed into the corner of a room could save your life. (You may also or instead wish to have water purification gear available, such as iodine.)

Just something to bear in mind.

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The World Is Going to Hell Because

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On August 26, 2017

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Globe on FireYou get the behaviour you reward.

Politicians in the US, with the Iraq war and the vote to have it, committed the exact same war crime most Nazis were hung for: aggressive war.

They, including the most responsible politician, George W. Bush, were not punished for it. Indeed, Bush was re-elected and so were most of the others.

In 2008, there was a vast financial crisis, caused by bankers and Wall Street brokers and so on–financial executives. It included a widespread amount of fraud, aided and abetted by ratings agencies, financial regulators, and central banks.

No one was held responsible and sent to jail. Instead, they were bailed out and allowed to keep their illicit profits, and the same games that caused the crisis were reinstituted alongside aggressive money printing targeted at the class of people who caused the crisis.

In other words, the people who caused the financial crisis, as a class, were rewarded for that their behavior.

We have an ongoing problem, due to turn into a worldwide catastrophe causing over a billion human deaths and so many non-human deaths it will show up clearly in the geological record. It is called climate change.

Oil companies knew that climate change was real, based on their own research, back in the 80s. Not only did they not make that research public, they spent large amounts of money to fund propaganda saying that what they knew was true wasn’t.

Put more simply, for their own personal and financial gain, major corporate executives did their best to make sure that information known to be true, which might have helped stop a billion or more deaths, was not acted upon.

They have not been punished for that, but they have, indeed, retired wealthy and happy.

If people who knowingly do very very bad things (like causing the death and suffering of millions of people in wars, economic downturns, and forseeable environmental catastrophes) are not only not punished but rewarded, then more of the same behaviour will occur.

During his term in office, Obama increased drone murders significantly and destroyed Libya, in a war of aggression (the same war crime that for which Nazis were hung, and Obama also should be in a war crimes dock along with every other Western leader involved in Libya). He was then re-elected.

None of this stuff should be hard to understand. If leaders who do monstrous things are rewarded, as opposed to punished, for doing those things, more leaders will do even more monstrous things. They have been shown that is what is rewarded.

Welcome to a world tottering towards hell, because that is what too many people want–as measured by what they reward.

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Nature Does Not Grade on a Curve

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On May 13, 2017

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Globe on FireOne of the problems with how we are educated and how we work is that almost all of it is “grading on a curve.” What matters is what our teacher thinks of us; what our boss thinks of us. Except when it comes to sickness, nothing else matters even nearly as much.

It’s all “on a curve,” it’s all social bullshit. If you can convince your boss or teacher to pass you, you pass, and there’s no objective level required in most cases: The difficulty is set by a person.

Nature does not grade on a curve.

If a bear is chasing you, and you can’t run fast enough, you’re probably dead.

If your capitalist democratic system can’t handle climate change, a problem predicted decades ago (and in plenty of time to fix it), billions of people will die.

It doesn’t matter whether there are “reasons” why we couldn’t handle it, not to the dead.

It also doesn’t matter if there are “reasons” why we can’t come up with a better way of running the world than capitalism with a side of democracy or autocracy, depending on the country.

People are always nattering on about how capitalism is the bestest system ever. (Although what has really produced the changes they like is mostly industrialization, not capitalism, though that’s a different article.)

It’s nice that we can’t come up with something better than capitalism (er, ok, not nice), but capitalism has failed. That it hasn’t blown up yet is irrelevant to this. If my brakes and steering fail at 90 miles an hour as I’m heading towards a mountain cliff, well, no catastrophe actually happens until I not only go off the cliff, but hit the ground, but the future is set.

That’s where we are; the future is essentially set. We aren’t going to stop climate change, it’s doubtful we even can (it would, even theoretically, take massive geo-engineering at this point), so capitalism, and the political systems attached to it, like democracy and Chinese one-party autocratic rule, have failed.

It is that simple. And nature does not give a fuck if capitalism is the “bestest bestest system that we ever came up with” or if, qua Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

They have failed.

And what people are not getting through their heads is that they will be seen to have failed by those who have to suffer the consequences of our monstrous abnegation of responsibility.

They will be loathed; even as we who live in this era and especially those who were adults in the 80s and 90s, will not just be loathed, but treated as lepers, similiar to how we consider Nazis. (Yeah, I went there, deal.)

One of the problems with de-naturing (with living in almost entirely human made systems, and with pushing those bits we don’t control off into ghettos as we would illness), is that it means most people almost never experience a benchmark that isn’t set by other human beings. They feel, in their guts, that if only other people are convinced, any problem can be fixed or finangled.

No.

The bear doesn’t care that you can’t run fast enough because TV is funner than going for a jog, and nature doesn’t care that shareholders needed value and that oil barons didn’t want to be a little poorer (or whatever).

And neither will those who suffer from climate changes due to our ethical monstrosity and sheer incapability.

Capitalism is a shit system in a number of ways. It can be made to work, by people who stay right on top of it, as between the 30s and 70 or so, but it is prone to going off the rails. If all that meant was that the poor suffer what they must and the powerful do as they will, well, so be it, but it isn’t.

We must come up with better ways to run our societies. We are creating existential threats by failing to do so, and our infatuation with capitalism risks taking democracy down with it.

Worse worlds are always possible. So are better ones, and no system is ever “the best.”

And nature doesn’t grade on a curve.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Will Capitalism Be Replaced By Something Better?

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On April 2, 2016

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The short answer is: “Who knows?”

The longer answer is “probably not,” simply because we have such a mess coming down the road in terms of climate change, resource exhaustion, imperial collapse, and so on.

But the answer isn’t “No.”

The answer is that it is possible. Not likely, but not so unlikely as to be a write off not worthy of consideration.

Far better systems can be thought up, I believe. I believe it’s even possible those systems would work with human nature well enough to be viable (a.k.a., are not utopian, in the impossible sense).

I also think they are our best alternative.

Wait? What?

Yeah. I think the odds are less than even that we pull it off, but I also think it is our best chance.  Sometimes the best bet you’ve got just isn’t a very good bet. We either fix the way our economic system works (how we turn resources into goods and services) and our political system works (how we make group choices) or we could go extinct. Better case scenarios involve billions of deaths and amazing amounts of suffering.

Of course, dividing the problem in two is wrong. Capitalism isn’t “just” an economic system.  The great mistake of the social sciences was changing from “political economics” to “economics.” Capitalism is a political choice, but it’s also how we make most of our group choices.

The right is right. Ideas matter, and the ideas on the ground during a crisis are important.  We’ve got a lot of crises ahead of us. That is bad, but it is also our hope. Setting up to win those crisis points is what matters. The neoliberals won the last one (the financial crisis), but no one wins them all.

It would be good if we had some radical options on the floor which would also make most of humanity better off, provide for freedom, and so on.

So figure out what you want to replace capitalism (or how it can be radically fixed); and do look seriously at the political system. Democracy is not going to be immune from the fallout (nor is the sort of one-party state China runs.)

We can create a better world, but that doesn’t mean we will. It’s up to us, to humanity, in the largest sense.

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The End of the Age of Oil

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On March 31, 2016

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Has the last oil boom ended?

Electric cars will be cheaper to own than conventional cars by 2022, according to a new report.

The plummeting cost of batteries is key in leading to the tipping point, which would kickstart a mass market for electric vehicles, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) analysts predict.

This is very good news for the world, and though the technology is certainly not carbon neutral, it is better than oil, the energy used to charge the battery can be kept relatively clean. Once upon a time, that energy was coal and other conventional energy sources, but coal is now more expensive than solar, and the price of solar is continuing to drop.

While this is good for the world, it’s going to be very, very bad for many countries. The oilarchies’ days are numbered. I will state right now that I doubt that Saudi Arabia’s monarchy will survive this.  Countries that are heavily reliant on oil, especially expensive oil, are going to be in trouble. The same is true of natural gas.

All resource booms end. Eventually resources are replaced. Once there was a huge rubber boom in Brazil: Then we learned how to make synthetic rubber.

We might get one more oil boom, but that’s it.

So: Alberta oil sands oil? Done. The Alberta-dominated Conservatives damaged terribly the Canadian manufacturing sector during the last oil boom by refusing to acknowledge that the high Canadian dollar affected manufacturing sales, but the good days won’t be coming back to Alberta.  It’s possible that Alberta has a key resource which will boom in the future of which I’m not aware (entirely possible), but if it doesn’t, Alberta’s high-flying days are done.

Go down your list of major oil exporters and look at the prices they need per barrel to make a profit. A lot of them are going to have to reduce production of the most expensive wells. This process will continue for years. Saudi oil production costs per barrel are under $10, but the price they require to keep their society running is much higher.

Cheap energy is an economically good thing. But the effects of dislocation will be immense.

Unfortunately, while this is great news for the environment, it is all too late to stop runaway climate change. Methane locked into land and ocean will be released now. It is too late, we have passed the point at which the process of global warming became self-reinforcing. It is now a vicious cycle and cannot be stopped by simply reducing carbon emissions.

Whoops!

We knew this would be the case, and we decided not to do anything about it. Let no one tell you otherwise.

A large amount of the world is going to become essentially uninhabitable due to heat. Climate change will change rainfall patterns and many areas will experience a decrease in agricultural productivity. Combined with aquifer depletion, conventional agriculture will take a huge hit.

This is a fixable problem. We can grow ten times as much food as standard agriculture in small, intensely cultivated plots, even indoors. We will have cheap energy. The remaining oil can be used for fertilizer until we have better solutions.

The next problem is water. Large parts of the world will not have enough fresh water. Water reclamation, desalinization, and other technologies around water are key here.

Geopolitically, there will be water wars. Watch nations where major rivers cross borders, and the up-river nations will want to take “more.” Canada, which has most of the world’s lakes, is in great danger from America, who will want that water in amounts and at prices for which we should not settle. Meanwhile, the US may drain the Great Lakes faster than they are replenished.

The mass migrations of this period will make the current “immigration crisis” look tame. It will be worse even than it is for the countries taking the biggest groups now (none of which are European).

Sea stocks are collapsed already, and will collapse past commercial fishing viability. Essentially, all the fish you eat will be “farmed.” Ocean acidification has killed the Great Barrier Reef, but the greater risk is that the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon may effectively end.

Combined with our continued deforestation, the lack of carbon fixing capacity, along with these various vicious cycles, could lead to a runaway climate change worse than virtually all the models I’ve seen are predicting.

If we had sense, we would be transitioning from conventional to intensive agriculture NOW (well, ok, 15 years ago minimum). We have spare workers–we do not have a spare Amazon. If we had sense, we would pay Brazilians and other mass deforestors more to stop what they’re doing than they get from continuing. We must mass-reforest, and re-wild land, and do so NOW.

This is also to avoid collapse of the biosphere, an event which is within the realm of possibility. If such a collapse occurs, humanity will go with it.

Our continuing reliance on very non-competitive markets to create what we need in time may wind up dooming our race. Markets are great and useful in this situation, but market support (such as was used for decades to create the computer industry) can jumpstart industries, cutting years to decades off the time it takes for prices and costs to drop sufficiently for mass adoption.

However, in general, the way we do Capitalism is going to have to change. Capitalism may need to be replaced with something better, but even if it continues the vast waste must end. The doctrine of planned obsolesence, for example, must go.

A world where we aren’t constantly producing crap we either never needed in the first place or wouldn’t need if we allowed engineers to design products to last will be a much nicer place to live, anyway. Yes, there’s a lot of work to be done to mitigate the coming disasters, but there is so much work going on which shouldn’t be done at all that we would most likely wind up working less and living better.

Those who survive, anyway.

The Age of Oil is coming to end. Did it last 20 years too long? Is the Age of Humanity also to end?

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What the Paris Climate Accord Tells Us About Our Future

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On December 14, 2015

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Eiffel TowerThere are two ways to look at the Paris accords. The first way is that it is a step in the right direction: Countries have made promises to improve carbon emissions, report back every five years, and each five years promise to increase emissions reduction.

The emission reductions promised are substantial and will decrease warming substantially–if met.

The second way to look at it is that the emissions targets are not binding and are insufficient to avoid catastrophe in any case. Forests and oceans are still imperiled, the Pacific Islands are toast, and our coastal cities are goners. Because of self-reinforcing cycles which will see the release of vast amounts of methane stored in peat bogs, permafrost, and underwater, we were already probably past the point of no return some time ago. Far more drastic action was required; it was not taken.

Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye, in other words.

I tend towards the second view, which regular readers will find no surprise. However, it is interesting that Paris did include more substantial promises than have been included previously. Decision makers are far behind the curve, as usual, but they are beginning to take the problem seriously.

My default scenario indicates that by 2100, most coastal cities will have been flooded. A very few may survive with full dike systems. The default scenario used by the UN underestimates both sea-level and temperature increases, as it doesn’t properly account for vicious cycles releasing stored gases like methane, and those gases accelerate the process exponentially.

In addition, climate instability will increase. Rainfall patterns will change, there will be far more extreme weather events like hurricanes, and they will be more powerful. Parts of the world which are today inhabitable will become uninhabitable due to heat or lack of water. The amount of arable land will decrease significantly and we will have to convert to high-intensity agriculture techniques quite different from the ones we use today. Potable water will be a huge problem, and we will not have enough. Mass desalinzation and recycling will be the order of the day. We are going to lose most edible sea-life, and such seafood as we have will be mostly farmed, and quite a bit less healthy than wild seafood.

There are a vast number of knock-on social and economic affects of such a scenario, and we can expect to see mass migrations, a minimum of a billion incremental deaths (and I expect far more), which would not have occurred without climate change. There will be war and revolution, and so on.

Capitalism, as it exists now, is unlikely to survive these changes. It will be seen, and rightly so, to have been responsible for famines, genocides, and wars that will dwarf those of the 20th century. Collateral damage to other ideologies will occur, though it’s hard to say exactly how that will play out. Will “democracy” be discredited, or will it be reborn in a more robust form, for example?

I don’t, actually, think the Paris accords were the last chance. I think the last chance passed at Kyoto, years ago. The Paris accords are just another reminder of “too little, too late.” That said, whatever we do is worth doing, as it will reduce deaths and suffering. It is just not enough to stop the bulk of the damage.

If you are young, you will see much of this future. Be prepared. If you are older, your job is to prepare the world by changing existing ideas so that when real political and economic change happens (and it will, be sure of that), it changes in the best ways possible.

Because catastrophe will not be avoided, it is best to detach, mentally, and look upon the present and future as interesting times. Do what you can, know that there are billions of people, so your responsibility is only minor, and relax. History will wend its way.

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