After this covid fiasco, im done with models. You guys have fun supporting the climate austerity that is to come, I'm going to just believe that the earth has it's own regulation magic that we have not uncovered yet.
I share your pain in society's mishandling of covid, and understand your skepticism towards poorly applied models. Society is much more complex than most models can address.
The issue with the faith in the earth's own regulation magic is that it also assumes that the regulation magic is friendly to us, and/or that the goal of the regulation is to maintain a steady state which is good for humanity, or that it is even to maintain a steady state (maybe it's idea of 'regulation' is maintaining a chaotic cycle).
I used to joke that climate change was really the dinosaurs trying to come back; we are pumping FOSSIL fuels into the air with an end result of recreating a climate more similar to the warmer days when the dinosaurs roamed.
by issue, I mean "problems even if we assume that the earth's regulatory/homeostatic mechanisms are properly functioning."
That assumption is also problematic, if one allows for the possibility that our technological powers and population size mean we are pushing on the system faster than its regulatory mechanisms can compensate. Our bodies have highly tuned regulatory mechanisms to control body temp, which work amazingly well as long as ambient temps stay within a certain range. Outside that range, not so well.
> I'm going to just believe that the earth has it's own regulation magic that we have not uncovered yet.
Well, it, er, does, but it isn't very good (see ice ages), and operates on timescales that would be inconvenient to us. If humanity died out tomorrow, then CO2 levels would likely get back to normal eventually, but it's not really a _great_ solution, is it? We can hopefully do better.
This type of 'extinction leade' typifies why i switched teams. no one thinks that earth will become Venutian. flooding, soil loss, bio loss, whatever the worst part will be; extinction is not even on the table. fuck these models and the horses they ride in on.
The issue with the faith in the earth's own regulation magic is that it also assumes that the regulation magic is friendly to us, and/or that the goal of the regulation is to maintain a steady state which is good for humanity, or that it is even to maintain a steady state (maybe it's idea of 'regulation' is maintaining a chaotic cycle).
I used to joke that climate change was really the dinosaurs trying to come back; we are pumping FOSSIL fuels into the air with an end result of recreating a climate more similar to the warmer days when the dinosaurs roamed.
by issue, I mean "problems even if we assume that the earth's regulatory/homeostatic mechanisms are properly functioning."
That assumption is also problematic, if one allows for the possibility that our technological powers and population size mean we are pushing on the system faster than its regulatory mechanisms can compensate. Our bodies have highly tuned regulatory mechanisms to control body temp, which work amazingly well as long as ambient temps stay within a certain range. Outside that range, not so well.