[jal278]

There's a seemingly reasonable fallacy embedded in the argument that so far technology has been able to dig us out of the holes that it itself digs: That past performance is indicative of the future. Of course, the past often does predict the future -- yet, we can't bank on it, because there are sometimes qualitative shifts, and exceptions.

The problem with hoping that technology will solve climate change before it happens, is that we're gambling something we can't afford to lose. So, it may well be the case that we do solve the problem -- but what if we don't? There are limits to technology, after all.

To me, the danger in placing excessive faith in technology is that it can bypass our critical thinking. For example, right now our own technology (nuclear weapons, or biological weapons as that technology develops) is the greatest threat to humanity's existence. So while technology is a great thing, it may well be our species undoing rather than its savior -- at least until (if) we survive long enough to colonize other planets or enhance our own morality such that we can handle the responsibility our technology demands.

[jerf]

If there is a subtle fallacy embedded in the idea that innovation will always save us, there's a blatant fallacy in the idea that we're inevitably doomed because we're absolutely guaranteed to continue on our current course with no changes until we consume all the resources that we are consuming in the current static snapshot of the world. Looking back over the past couple of hundred years of us overcoming challenge after challenge, and drawing the conclusion that it is absolutely certain that can't happen more, is simply an absurd position to take on a rational basis.

If you do not wish to completely flip to the "everything's going to be peachy keen!" side, hey, fine. I'm not even sure anyone's really advocating that. But trying to salvage the panicky pure-ecologist view is in my mind frankly irrational. The one guarantee in life is change, and projecting out the present conditions into the indefinite future as a static precondition is always wrong. Mind you, it may be wrong because the nuclear exchange of 2021 wipes out 98% of humanity and not because the Happy Fun Solar Company solved all world energy problems in 2025, but still, change is inevitable. And what's going forth into the future is not mindless automata who passively experience challenges and fall over dead at a feather's push... what's going forward into the future are several billion human beings, which for all their faults, are still the cleverest things in the Universe we know about.

By the way, trying to mitigate the fact we've overcome challenges by pointing out that there are still challenges in the world is just another way to try to dodge dealing with the fact that we have overcome challenges. I absolutely, positively guarantee you that if we survive another 20 years, that there will be even more challenges. I forsee no day coming where the human race can just sit back and declare total victory over challenges.

[genofon]

>Looking back over the past couple of hundred years of us overcoming challenge after challenge, and drawing the conclusion that it is absolutely certain that can't happen more, is simply an absurd position to take on a rational basis.

Looking a bit further there were society completely destroyed by themself (for example Easter Island http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/News-Events/Latest-News/News-...)

It's good to have both forces, a conservative and a progressive, to maintain equilibrium, it's never a good idea to put all the eggs in one basket

Edit: update link about Easter Island

[orthecreedence]

> there's a blatant fallacy in the idea that we're inevitably doomed because we're absolutely guaranteed to continue on our current course with no changes until we consume all the resources that we are consuming in the current static snapshot of the world

Perhaps, but it's already getting to the point of "too little, too late" as far as convincing people climate change exists, not to mention our current infrastructure is heavily invested in ignoring climate change. So continuing on our current course is bad, yes, but deviating at this point will only delay the inevitable. There are a number of cascading changes set in motion already.

And while I don't think humanity will be extincted by climate change, we'll certainly get our "hair mussed." As in, large amounts of drought/flood displacing millions of people into already crowded areas that don't have the infrastructure to support the influx...meaning plagues, food/water shortages, etc.

And to say, "technology will find a way to fix it!" is the bigger fallacy. We should be ready for a nice big shitstorm 50-100 years from now that no amount of scientists or computers can fix. After all, as much as we like to think of ourselves as little gods, we're really just apes with shiny toys. We've made it this far, but when you think about it, we've been through one ice age, a handful of plagues, and zero mass-extinctions. Not a big list. We're a blip on the geological radar, and we can disappear as fast as we came. We need to remember this.

[ars]

> we're really just apes with shiny toys

No, we are incredibly intelligent people who have invented amazing things.

50-100 years from now climate change will be viewed the way nuclear winter is viewed now.

In the language of the article you are an ecologist because you believe people will accept changes without doing anything about them.

[jal278]

We surely have invented amazing things -- and we are intelligent -- and yet our brains aren't that far removed from our ape ancestors.

These brains of ours really are not well-suited for considering really-long-term abstract uncertain problems that require altruism to solve (e.g. the environment as the tragedy of the commons, or solid agreements between nations to dismantle nuclear arms).

The thing is, it is hard to be objective about our limitations as a species: being that we are a member of our species we are each a bit biased. Overcoming that bias, to see humanity in its current state as basically a selfish tribalistic society, is challenging.

Note that I mean selfish in the larger sense -- that generally we devalue human lives with increasing distance from our own birthplace, country, class, time, etc.

[ars]

See, when you say "shiny toy" you imply someone gave you the toy - you use it, but can't make it and don't know how it works. But we invented all we have, so we can rightfully be proud of it.

(I am aware you didn't invent that saying (I don't know who did), but you used it without thinking about how stupid of a saying it actually is.)

> and yet our brains aren't that far removed from our ape ancestors.

OK, that's just so ridiculous as to verge on absurd. Our brains are so far removed from an ape that you wouldn't know we were related if all you could observe were actions (rather than form and shape).

> are not well-suited for considering really-long-term abstract uncertain problems that require altruism to solve (e.g. the environment as the tragedy of the commons

Any yet somehow we have solved that over and over. And humans are the most altruistic of all the species - witness how we rush to help when there is a disaster, or how much charity we give - or that we invented of concept of charity in the first place!

> or solid agreements between nations to dismantle nuclear arms).

We haven't done that because we don't want to do that, not because we can't. And we don't want to for very good, thought out reasons, not because of some brain lack. You might disagree on the reasons themself, but you can't claim there were no reasons.

> Overcoming that bias, to see humanity in its current state as basically a selfish tribalistic society, is challenging.

And presumably you have done so? And you have one of these flawed brains? You seem to have a contradiction here. Not that I agree with your analysis anyway. You are trying to use tribalistic as a negative but it doesn't have that meaning. And we are not selfish, we are competitive. Selfish would imply hurting others for no gain of your own and while some individuals do that, as a whole we don't.

> that generally we devalue human lives with increasing distance from our own birthplace, country, class, time, etc.

We don't devalue them because they are far, but rather we don't believe we have the ability to do anything about their lives, so we ignore them. The closer someone is to you the more likely you are to help - is that your point? But people don't help more because they are more similar - people help more because they have more ability to do so.

[jal278]

The way I would interpret the phrase 'apes with shiny toys' (although it was not me who used that phrase in this thread) -- is that we are slightly-evolved apes who have become infatuated with our technology. Thoreau said: "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end."

It's just that technology is far from a panacea, and it creates as many problems as it solves. Worse, the problems it creates can be of greater magnitude than its solutions. For example, arguably technology on its whole became a net loss once we invented nuclear weapons -- until that point, we never were a push-button away from extinction.

The tragedy of the commons is far from solved; one example is that the environment is a commons that industrialized nations abuse (and whether it will have a devastating effect on our future is yet to be decided). It is great that we have made moral progress as a species, and that we do have charity; yet how far has our morality progressed when we have food enough to feed the world yet starvation continues?

No, I'm not claiming that I've entirely overcome the bias of my brain, only that I'm aware that human brains were evolved to suit cave-man conditions, not the modern world that we've invented around us; cultural and technological evolution have outpaced natural evolution in our lineage.

Finally, I entirely disagree with your assertion that we devalue lives in other countries because we don't have the ability to affect their lives; of course we can affect the lives of people in other countries -- through charity as you yourself point out, and in the way that our politics affect other countries.

For example, to most Americans, American civilian lives are worth much more than civilians in say Iraq or Afghanistan; not because Americans cannot affect Iraqi or Afghani lives -- we have and continue to do so (e.g. the civilian casualities in Afghanistan dwarf the losses of Americans in 9/11)[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_War_...

[jal278]

I agree that humanity has a strong track record of overcoming challenges, and of course, that's a great thing! And I'm not saying that climate change will be something we'll be unable to overcome. However, it's unwise to bet the planet on an uncertainty: Let's just be a little cautious when we are talking about something with potentially devastating consequences.

I agree that predicting based on a static extension of the present may be limiting -- but prediction in general is a pretty tough game, and we should not put too much faith in any extrapolations into the distant future; meaning that there is much uncertainty in the future, and we should acknowledge that we can't know what will happen; and thus we should try to minimize risk if possible when dealing with singular resources (like our planet as a whole).

My main point is that technological optimism should not be an excuse for failing to ask inconvenient questions (that may demand opposing the current inertia of technology-driven capitalism): Are we negatively impacting the environment in a way that may undermine our grandchildren's quality of life? What happens as technology automates away a large percentage of cognitive jobs and displaces those workers? Is the current trend of increasingly powerful technology and relative moral stagnation likely to lead to our species' extinction?

[mikeash]

Who is saying that we're inevitably doomed because we're guaranteed to continue on our current course?

The doomsayers are almost universally saying, we need to change course to avoid catastrophe. That's the complete opposite of being guaranteed to stay on course.

[mempko]

It also ignores massive collapses of civilizations throughout history because of ecological collapse. In the past they were localized, but we are becoming more connected with each other.

[mikeash]

This is indeed a problem. If there is an event which causes the extinction of humanity, then by definition we will not find a parallel event in the past to use for prediction. Yet to conclude that humanity will never go extinct is ridiculous. It's only going to happen once.

There's also another problem from the opposite direction. Resources have run out plenty of times. Entire civilizations have collapsed because they could no longer sustain themselves, because they used up something important and couldn't find more or come up with a substitute.

Yes, peak oil now could end up being like peak stone in the stone age, where there's plenty of it and we move on to better things well before we run out.

But peak oil now could also be like peak forest on Easter Island, which resulted in the collapse of civilization there.

I don't see anything in this article beyond naked hope for why peak oil must follow the former path rather than the latter. Yes, the history of resource exhaustion is extremely optimistic if you ignore all the times when it led to disaster, but that doesn't tell me anything.

[glenra]

The Easter Island story told by Jared Diamond in Collapse is arguably a myth. Do you have any other examples?

An alternate view of Easter Island includes these sorts of points:

- Forests on Easter Island were largely killed by rats (an invasive species) and to (productively!) clear land for agriculture, not to make statues.

- Civilization there grew and persisted and thrived even well after the trees were gone due to human cleverness at finding and making new resources. (The Islanders ate fish and rats and eggs and chickens at that time)

- When their civilization eventually collapsed it was because they were pushed. It was due to war and diseases brought by outside invaders who sold a lot of the locals into slavery.

Mark Lynas sums up the situation here: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myth-of-easter-islands-...

Jared Diamond, sticking to his guns, responds to Mark: http://www.marklynas.org/2011/09/the-myths-of-easter-island-...

Lipo and Hunt in turn respond to Jared's response filling in lots more detail: http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-m...

Leading quote: "Diamond would have readers believe that the majority of archeologists who have studied Easter Island support his thesis. It is simply not true. The new evidence that we and other serious scholars have provided over the past decade not only contradicts the old story that Diamond has so heavily invested in, but has led to a new consensus among the majority of scholars around our work."

UPDATE: Okay, now THIS is my favorite thing I found revisiting this old argument. Diamond thinks the statues were moved on logs but Lipo thinks they were "walked" into place upright...and here is a video showing how one does that - walks a multi-ton statue upright using only people and ropes:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/easter-island/walk...

[mikeash]

The question of what the trees were used for and how the statues were moved, while interesting in general, isn't relevant here. When deciding whether Easter Island represents a collapse due to resource exhaustion, the relevant questions are whether the trees were cut down at all (seems to be no dispute there), whether this represents general ecological destruction (in dispute, it seems), whether the population declined precipitously (no dispute here either), and finally whether that decline was caused by the ecological destruction.

Researching the question a bit (and not using Diamond as a reference, at least not directly or intentionally) I can't see any support for the idea that the island was doing fine until outsiders bought war, disease, and slavery. As far as I can see, the war, disease, and slavery period followed European contact, but the initial population decline from a peak of around 15,000 down to 2-3,000 happened before European contact.

In the absence of external pressures, that seems to leave only resource depletion as the possible cause.

Even if it was external, though, why is "land which isn't being overrun by invaders" different from any other resource?

As for other examples, Cahokia and the Anasazi are two possible examples in North America. The Norse settlement in Greenland is a more likely but smaller example. The collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization is another possible example. Malden and Pitcairn are two more potential Pacific island examples, both supporting human settlement for centuries, but eventually containing no people by the time of European discovery. Finally, there's good evidence for a sharp genetic bottleneck in the human population deep in pre-history, in which the world population was reduced to 10,000 or less. The cause isn't too clear, but whether it was a volcano, gradual climate change, or something else, it seems that some sort of resource limitation has to be at work.

None of these are completely clear-cut, but we can't really expect them to be. A collapsed civilization isn't necessarily going to leave a lot of records. Even if some of these were due to something else, it doesn't seem likely that they all were.

[glenra]

> whether the population declined precipitously (no dispute here either)

No, that is definitely one of the items under dispute. Lipo claims the population never reached that high a peak and did not substantially decline until after outsiders came.

> I can't see any support for the idea that the island was doing fine until outsiders bought war, disease, and slavery. As far as I can see, the war, disease, and slavery period followed European contact, but the initial population decline from a peak of around 15,000 down to 2-3,000 happened before European contact.

Lipo says that the claim that the population followed that sort of trajectory was essentially an early rough guess not based on actual data. A popular one, so you might find it in multiple sources, but a guess nonetheless. In response, quoting from that last link I gave before:

> Finally, Diamond ignores field research reporting dated domestic habitation sites (see Hunt and Lipo 2009 for discussion). When the habitations are plotted in fifty-year intervals, the number of those occupied clearly shows that the first and only sustained decline, as a relative measure of the population, began only in the first interval following European contact. Before contact the data show a population that is growing and stabilizing, as reflected in their habitations across the landscape. There is no evidence of population decline, let alone “collapse” until after European contact. Indeed, there is direct, abundant evidence that population numbers grew, stabilized, and then fell only after European contact beginning in 1722.

(source: http://www.evobeach.com/2011/10/diamond-attempts-to-defend-m... )

> Even if it was external, though, why is "land which isn't being overrun by invaders" different from any other resource?

That story would lead to a very different conclusion, especially if you want to turn the story into an analogy for how we should treat the earth as a whole. Should we worry more about building a Space Defense network to protect us from aliens and not so much about preserving forests? :-)

[mikeash]

You misunderstand my "un-invaded land as a resource" point.

I'm just pointing out that un-invaded land is a resource, and that these people weren't able to cope with the loss of that resource.

So, is there something about un-invaded land that makes it different from other resources, such that humans can cope with losing others but not that one? If so, what makes it different? If not, then it shows that resource exhaustion can kill civilizations.

If un-invaded land is unique somehow, then obviously we're not under threat in that respect. But if it's not, then it demonstrates that this class of problem exists, and shows that we need to take steps to ensure we don't run out of the resources we do have looming problems with.

[glenra]

That's an odd take on it. No, I'd mainly say there's something about being invaded that can kill a civilization. A great many somethings. Though certainly some of them are environmental. It'd be harder to live there the same way after an invader used the land to graze sheep. Or after an invader brought in smallpox or rats or any number of other unwanted interlopers.

What's special about "un-invaded land" is that it has a bunch of people surviving on it living in a certain way and if they've been living there long enough, their way of life probably works pretty well for them. If some important resource they need is getting scarcer it's NOT going to disappear instantaneously all at once as per the poetic image of a "guy cutting down the last tree" catching everyone by surprise. As any given resource gets scarcer it gradually gets harder and harder to rely on access to it, which means people first have a small, then a moderate, then a large, and eventually a MASSIVE incentive to find substitutes. Other ways of living. Other things to eat. Other forms of shelter. Humans are a creative bunch; if there are other POSSIBLE ways to survive, we're pretty likely to find them given the existence of hundreds or thousands of people in an area whose lives depend on it and who have some ability to share info, try out ideas, and copy what works.

Invasion is a massive sudden shock to the system; some massive shocks aren't survivable.

[polemic]

Good analysis. I like to think that it's a bit like investing in a vehicle that may or may not be a ponzi scheme. It's worked so far, but that doesn't mean you bet the house on it.

[waps]

The problem with this argument is that it is both an argument for and against climate change, and so both for and against taking action on climate change.

Humans have a history of (locally) causing massive pollution and other various disasters, like removing topsoil and destroying agriculture. Mining. Extermination of non-tiny animals in a large area. The list goes on. Every time this turned out not to be a problem. Will it now ? If so it will be the first time.

But of course, climate change is not based on physical evidence, nor first principles. It is based on statistical trend analysis. Climate change only has basic explanations of mechanisms of change in the athmosphere, they cannot physically model a warming planet from first principles, only by extrapolating past observations into the future can predictions be made.

Of course the truth is that both facts are chaotic. In other words, every event in human history is a first, and every change in the athmosphere is a first. For either domain, any particular event is without precedent, and will never happen the same way again. This does not exclude, of course, that one observes patterns. Temperature has been rising, and there are many historically analogous periods, but none that are quite the same. So will the same thing happen ?

Unfortunately we know the mathematical theory underpinning this. The answer is sure to disappoint all involved : we don't know, and we don't know the chances either. And no algorithm can ever be used to arrive at a correct answer (note the problem is NOT that we don't know, it's that we can't ever know [1]). It is impossible. It is extremely obvious in human history. When we move past oil (and we will, in the next decade or two), there will be a key ingredient that wasn't there before that completely determines the outcome. It will be a first, that's for sure. Either we find a new energy source that economically blows oil out of the water, or it will be the first long-term sustained drop in global economic activity due to running out of energy. It may also be something different entirely (e.g. WWIII). Maybe thorium reactors start taking the world by storm. Nobody can tell you, with any amount of certainty, what this grand event will be, but it is a surety that it will come.

What isn't entirely obvious is that the same is true for climate. Whatever happens, it will be a first, and there will be some event, some factor, that completely determines the outcome, but we can't see it just yet. Firstly, there is of course the potential for large external factors that are obviously so large as to be much more powerful than anything happening on the earth surface itself. Think volcanic activity or a comet, but likely there are 100 such events that could happen we don't even know about. Both events can both raise and drop the temperature by ridiculous amounts, far outstripping what we could ever do with co2. Other things could happen. Suddenly the sea floor starts leaking methane on a large scale, like what happens in any earthquake, but it is sustained. There's certainly enough methane down there to make human solar forcing look like a cow fart. Maybe we're wrong about cloud cover (still a possibility) and the situation simply self-corrects past a certain threshold, something that no statistical model of the past would ever have been able to uncover. Maybe we do get a single world government and actually stand a chance of fixing the situation. Maybe Saudi Arabia and Iran start doing what they've been threatening eachother with for 100 years now and Iran nukes the oil fields there. Maybe it doesn't correct at all, solar forcing happens, and animal life becomes very difficult for a few centuries/millenia.

But what is an absolute certainty, as you say, is that the situation will not continue as it's been progressing so far. That is pretty much the only impossibility.

Note that the obvious defense of climate theory here, that it results from deterministic actions, and so is not random/chaotic at all, is both correct and completely beside the point. Random systems are not chaotic nor vice versa. Deterministic systems that exhibit 3 properties are chaotic. None of them involves randomness. Neither chaotic nor random systems are predictable [1].

As to whether chaos theory really applies to climate theory the following can be said to summarize things : for 150+ years, the study of chaos theory and the study of climate were one and the same field of study. This has changed, but not for good reasons. There is a longstanding argument that long-term effect dampen the medium term unpredictability, but there is no proof for this, in fact there is plenty of contradicting evidence.

And the last defence of climate theory is that climate theory only studies averages. They admit that short-term change might be chaotic, but long-term averages aren't. They certainly don't look it, after all. This flies in the face of the central insight of statistics : the central limit theorem (it basically states that any variable you study must be convergent, that statistics doesn't work on divergent series. And it doesn't, that can be easily tested). This argument is incompatible with statistics on a theoretical level. Therefore it does not matter if this argument is true or not. If this argument is true, then there is no correct way to calculate even an average. If it is false, then you simply can't correctly average certain variables (including a lot of climate variables). The "false" seems to me the sane option, but it doesn't even matter which you pick.

Lots of scientific fields of study have these "existential" problems. That doesn't mean they have no value, just that they are fundamentally limited in a few ways.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory