I agree that global warming is real. Global warming is a problem. However...
> If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will.
That's an amazingly stupid comment. This is why global warming deniers exist, because people make these types of stupid comments. A hurricane strengthening and stalling on land is not linked to global warming. It's always happened and always will. What was hurricane Andrew then in 1992? What about Katrina 2005? How about in 2004 where 4 hurricanes hit Florida in a 6 week time span? I lived through that one.
Hurricane Lorenzo, right now, is a better example due to where it's at in the Atlantic and its strength. Still not a great example, but better than Dorian. Dorian was technically a normal hurricane. Nothing that special or different. Devastating yes. But devastation is not an indicator of climate change. A higher number of hurricanes and higher than average number in Cat 4 and Cat 5. That's an indicator. And to be honest, this year has been pretty chill when it comes to hurricanes. Only one FL scare. Most years there are 3-5 scares by the end of September. We're only on L when it comes to named storms. Bad years in the past are around S by now. Hurricanes are named in order of the alphabet if you didn't know. In 2004, we went through the whole alphabet, plus some.
I agree global warming is happening. But this year's hurricane season does not show it.
That's not at all why global warming deniers exist. The reason they exist is because the fossil fuel industry managed to make believing in climate change a political issue rather than a scientific one, which is why the denial is embraced by one party but not the other.
The actual "arguments" don't matter, this one especially since it's impossible to tell if Dorian would've even existed or not had the climate not changed.
> Is there any way to escape the prisoner’s dilemma facing the provision of a public good?
Wrong question. We're not creating public goods, we're preventing the creation of a public bad, aka externalities. How to prevent creation of externalities is well-known: Pigouvian taxes, which are similar to but not quite the same as sin taxes.
The prisoner's dilemma also exists here, but there is a solution which also won the Nobel Memorial Prize: William Nordhaus' climate clubs.
I find it very weird that the author chose to use the prisoner's dilemma and public goods as a framing for the article when the tragedy of the commons and common goods seem to be much more apt. Every ton of CO2 a country emits is consumption of a finite resource (the amount of warming we can endure before catastrophic effect) and you can't inhibit another country from releasing it. Therefore the problem is about a non-excludable but exhaustible resource.
I'd love to hear from someone more economically minded about why I'm wrong.
Using taxes to change public behavior only work for things that are completely optional, ala alcohol or cigarettes. A tax like this on essentials like fuel just leads to people wearing traffic vests burning down your capital.
When I was a child, my parents were in a dooms-day cult.
When people threaten your future with vague notions of impending, and irrevocable doom, there is only one answer:
Live for today.
Why don't climate dooms-dayers not see that their very tactics of spreading irrational fear (instead of rational solutions) is antithetical to their desired outcomes?
(there's a post about planting trees I haven't read yet, seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with instead of trying to ram down ideas very few people agree with)
Isn't that the cause of the issue though ? "Who cares about 100+ years in the future, my v8 mustang and my weekly plane trips are pretty convenient, and planting a tree won't change much anyway, and china is doing anyway, plus if I'm the only one doing it it won't help that much, and &c."
> seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with instead of trying to ram down ideas very few people agree with)
The problem is that the things most countries agreed on are not nearly enough and even if they were almost none of the goals are met.
>seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with
So people will do something that has very little effect on the problem, feel good for their contributions. Then, people will learn than this "something" had no meaningful impact, feel betrayed ("but we agreed on this"), and give up. "Oh, come on, I already did "something". They'll wait for someone else to pickup the burden.
>Why don't climate dooms-dayers not see that their very tactics of spreading irrational fear (instead of rational solutions) is antithetical to their desired outcomes?
It's not irrational fear.
Why do cynical eye-rollers like you always try and crab bucket people's attempts at changing things for the better?
Do you not worry about the world you will be leaving behind for your children? or nephews/nieces? or just the rest of humanity that will come after you?
Irrational fear? Climate change is an irrational fear in America? Just drives home how late we are to do anything about it.
If Americans, the richest most polluting people on earth can't be persuaded to release less CO2, good luck convincing a citizen of India or Indonesia to do the same.
And apparently a sizeable part of the population thinks that planting trees or buying a few Teslas will solve it.
The Paris Agreement, as part of the way as that's going to get us, is by-and-large being globally implemented. Rising awareness about climate change has contributed to pushing for all sort of policies from more fuel-efficient cars, to state subsidies in dozens of countries for things like renewable energy, electric cars etc.
If your view of people pushing for something being done about climate change is that of a dooms-day cult you're going to have to admit that it's a rather politically successful cult.
One tactic that seems like it will be very effective is to call or write your congressperson to let them know that you support H.R. 763. The bill has support from economists and scientists alike. It's designed not just to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but to do it in a way that minimizes impact on the economy, and also provides an incentive for other countries to pass similar legislation (by imposing tariffs on imports from countries that don't).
The world of today is highly individualistic, and climate change is exactly how nature will punish humans for not being able to be more cooperative. It's as simple as that.
To me inequality and global warning are siblings. They are about the same thing, and share a common cause. If you cannot solve inequality you cannot solve global warming.
Unless Elon Musk or somebody else is able to finance a big breakthrough in several technologies that makes ALL greenhouse gasses machines obsolete, there is literally no way humans will avoid having their population reduced.
This article is short and it's a good summary on why individualism not only makes society unfair, but also threatens humanity.
I'd say we are making big breakthroughs in technology that will make greenhouse gas machines obsolete, and that's where we'll get eventually. But getting there will take decades, because we have to obsolete out (and/or buy out) existing fossil-dependent infrastructure - heating in cold climates, and international shipping are two big ones that come to mind. But do what we can.
That said, I'm not convinced this is going to lead to a global population reduction. In modernized economies, food isn't the boundary on population growth (all modern economies are at near-zero growth or even negative growth, and developing nations are modernizing to low birth rates at an astounding pace). Barring any huge changes, we're looking at the global population growing maybe 50% over the next century, and being completely level or shrinking after that, and most of that growth happening in the next few decades.
So for the population to shrink significantly, it would require billions to die, of famine or resource wars. So what's going to shrink the food supply that much? Enough to induce famine at a global scale? Keep in mind that global warming moves more slowly than harvest cycles. Farmers and nations can make decisions on what crops to plant and adjust their farming practices based on new information and reasonable predictions. Next year's weather won't be much different than this year's was, even if it will be significantly different than the weather in 20 years.
We are also on the cusp of two massive technological changes that will impact our farming abilities - IoT, and GMO. IoT allows plant-by-plant management of crops, reducing tilling and chemical use. GMO allows adaptation of crops to growing conditions more quickly than hybridizing does.
It just seems to me that the concerns about feeding everyone, in the wake of a previous century that absorbed a quadrupling of the population while making more food than ever and a future of at least two key technological breakthroughs, is more doomsday than solid reasoning.
> If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will.
If you think the "other side" is a climate change denier, you don't have a grasp of the issues involved and I'm really suspect that your op-ed is preaching to your crowd rather than actually trying to engage the problem.
The issue has never been denying the scientific fact that CO2 reflects infrared light, causing a greenhouse effect. It's a question over the scale of the problem, the timelines in which it plays out, and the panic and alarmism exhibited by one side of political debate.
Moving off fossil fuels is going to cost a lot of money, and it is going to be substitutive spending, not the growth-building kind. The Green New Deal, if enacted as specified, would send us into a prolonged, generation-long recession. Is is worth it? Is it necessary? That depends on how alarmist you are in your global warming predictions. And that is where we disagree. I've lived through two major economic recessions, and seen the effect that has on young people and opportunities. I wouldn't want to wish that on an entire generation. Millennials think boomers gave them a bad break, but wait until their kids see what opportunities their climate change policies leave them with...
We need to move off fossil fuels. But we can do it in a way that is gradual and growth-positive, while exploiting the warming climate in a way that boosts agricultural yields and adds living space for the growing population of the world. That requires a healthy debate about trade-offs and choices, and recognition that this is a complex, multi-faceted issue that people come to with multiple opinions and that's okay.
The per-capita CO^2 emissions of well-to-do western countries like Norway and Germany are a little over half as much as that of the US, France is around a quarter of US emissions (mainly due to Nuclear).
You're the one who's being alarmist if you're trying to argue that the US is staring down some decades-long recession to move more in that direction, which is pretty much all that's being suggested by some fringe politicians in the US.
Is German and Norwegian youth looking at having to deal with decades of recession, rising unemployment, rising income equality etc? No, they're not.
> exploiting the warming climate in a way that boosts agricultural yields
The world getting 1.5C hotter on average doesn't mean everywhere just gets 1.5C hotter all the time. If the increase means more droughts and more excessive rainfall, it's limited what you can do to exploit it for agricultural yields.
The idea that a huge infusion of Keynesian spending into the economy is going to trigger a generation-long recession has to be the least informed take.
The choice is a stark one: either invest in technologies and infrastructure to decrease CO2 production, or give future generations the gift of a dead planet.
> If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will.
However big they seemed compared to the past, they're nothing compared to the future, though everything we do affects it. We can still avoid some of the worst.
My biggest gripe with that type of argumentation is that it plays into the idea that weather and climate are pretty much the same thing, when they really aren't.
That's kind of a bad way to open it, because in the absence of other information a hot summer followed by a hurricane absolutely would not convince anybody of global warming.
I think I'd like to know more about hurricane trends and strengths. Trends in hurricane strength and frequency as the only useful metrics as damage done has more to do with where and what we build.
But I guess if I were a NYT's reader I wouldn't even think about asking these questions, I'd just yell ERMEGERD Dorian and start trash talking anyone who doesn't immediately panic.
One phrase that seems to be missing from the article is is larger category of problem -- a collective action problem. The public good framing has to do with a citizen/state relationship. The collective action framing reflects a state/state relationship. A number of the more technical terms throughout the article imply this, but I was surprised that the term itself was left out because including it immediately tells us that certain solution simply will not work.
Further note (edit). I think it is unlikely that a single state will ever be able to mitigate alone unless all other states stop or drastically reduce CO2 release. Maybe one state could threaten to set off a bunch of nukes in the upper atmosphere to destroy electronics and power grids around the world as a threat to encourage compliance, but that seems extremely far fetched.
The problem of seeing this as a cost-benefit equation is when you may risk facing infinite cost.
Climate change, as a single, isolated factor, won't cause by itself human extinction or at least the end of the human civilization in a foreseeable future, but reality is complex, current civilization and most of mankind depends on a lot of connected systems. Positive feedback loops happen, in climate, economics and in cultures, and from time to time the effects catch by surprise experts. We might be betting it all, and losing the bet, forever.
Stronger storms, heat waves, drought, floods, erratic weather. Check. Where I live, we are on track to have the driest September on record. We have also broken or tied 7 record hot days (and looks like we might go for 8 today)[0]. How much more common does this have to be before people start acting?
Edit:
[0] Had someone argue with me that this just means we had record hot months before. I'm like, no, that's not how that works. Those record days were from different years. The new ones were from the same year.
Remember when people were saying that global warming wasn't happening because we were in the middle of a particularly cold winter? Treating this year's bad weather as proof of global warming is making the same error in the other direction. The climate can only be understood as a long-term average of the quite large annual variations in weather.
I'm a treehugger. During the 90s, I volunteered at Wetlands Conservation Network (WetNet), a short lived Audubon offshoot trying to save the Pacific salmon.
During my time there, I somehow got the impression that all environmental (ecological) challenges could be fixed with better accounting and fair markets.
More than just addressing externalities.
With our salmon, the (economic) winners were timber companies and developers. Who reaped outsized rewards for developing habitat. (Timber companies were turning second growth forests into urban sprawl thru their subsidiaries.)
Other beneficiaries were power (hydroelectric) and some farmers (irrigation).
The biggest losers were the commercial & tribal fishers, anglers, and the hard to quantify "culture".
But for some reason, beyond my experience and understanding, commonsense structural reforms were completely out of bounds.
For instance, (I'm told) that water rights in the West are "use it or lose it", so potato farmers in Idaho continue to grow an oversupply. Whereas if they somehow rent (or transfer) those water rights in an open marketplace, that water could be put to better uses.
--
Note that I've been out of the treehugger game since 2000, so I don't know what, if any progress, has been made since.
Also, I continue to be surprised that Wright's Nonzero thesis apparently hasn't gotten any traction. Neither with the libertarian Freedom Markets™ cultists. Or the weirdly regressive leftists who reject markets and incentives, and continue to conflate corporatism & cronyism with capitalism.
"Humanity" has not treated problems collectively until a few hundred years ago. Some might argue it still doesn't, really.
Also, and more importantly - it's easy to categorize problems retroactively based on how they were eventually resolved; not so easy to apply this categorization with foresight.
Finally - some problems have both societal and technological aspects, and so do their solutions.
1. The plague, while probably exacerbated, was not caused by urbanization.
2. With the exception of up until modern times, farming, like many other major changes in human habitation, never threatened our existence on this planet.
3. Fire is dangerous, but the benefits vastly outweighed the dangers, and also did not permanently, in the chronological perspective of human beings, threaten our ecosystem.
We don't need to imagine, we know how humanity reacted to plague prior to effective treatments. Very badly. With lynch mobs and singling out certain groups for persecution. Even having acne would do it...
[+] [-] corodra|6 years ago|reply
> If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will.
That's an amazingly stupid comment. This is why global warming deniers exist, because people make these types of stupid comments. A hurricane strengthening and stalling on land is not linked to global warming. It's always happened and always will. What was hurricane Andrew then in 1992? What about Katrina 2005? How about in 2004 where 4 hurricanes hit Florida in a 6 week time span? I lived through that one.
Hurricane Lorenzo, right now, is a better example due to where it's at in the Atlantic and its strength. Still not a great example, but better than Dorian. Dorian was technically a normal hurricane. Nothing that special or different. Devastating yes. But devastation is not an indicator of climate change. A higher number of hurricanes and higher than average number in Cat 4 and Cat 5. That's an indicator. And to be honest, this year has been pretty chill when it comes to hurricanes. Only one FL scare. Most years there are 3-5 scares by the end of September. We're only on L when it comes to named storms. Bad years in the past are around S by now. Hurricanes are named in order of the alphabet if you didn't know. In 2004, we went through the whole alphabet, plus some.
I agree global warming is happening. But this year's hurricane season does not show it.
[+] [-] dyslexit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|6 years ago|reply
Wrong question. We're not creating public goods, we're preventing the creation of a public bad, aka externalities. How to prevent creation of externalities is well-known: Pigouvian taxes, which are similar to but not quite the same as sin taxes.
The prisoner's dilemma also exists here, but there is a solution which also won the Nobel Memorial Prize: William Nordhaus' climate clubs.
https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/
[+] [-] enragedcacti|6 years ago|reply
I'd love to hear from someone more economically minded about why I'm wrong.
[+] [-] tomatotomato37|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reallydontask|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobertRoberts|6 years ago|reply
When people threaten your future with vague notions of impending, and irrevocable doom, there is only one answer:
Live for today.
Why don't climate dooms-dayers not see that their very tactics of spreading irrational fear (instead of rational solutions) is antithetical to their desired outcomes?
(there's a post about planting trees I haven't read yet, seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with instead of trying to ram down ideas very few people agree with)
[+] [-] lm28469|6 years ago|reply
Isn't that the cause of the issue though ? "Who cares about 100+ years in the future, my v8 mustang and my weekly plane trips are pretty convenient, and planting a tree won't change much anyway, and china is doing anyway, plus if I'm the only one doing it it won't help that much, and &c."
> seems reasonable to do _something_ that everyone agrees with instead of trying to ram down ideas very few people agree with)
The problem is that the things most countries agreed on are not nearly enough and even if they were almost none of the goals are met.
[+] [-] rcMgD2BwE72F|6 years ago|reply
So people will do something that has very little effect on the problem, feel good for their contributions. Then, people will learn than this "something" had no meaningful impact, feel betrayed ("but we agreed on this"), and give up. "Oh, come on, I already did "something". They'll wait for someone else to pickup the burden.
That would be big waste of time and energy.
[+] [-] lordfoom|6 years ago|reply
It's not irrational fear.
Why do cynical eye-rollers like you always try and crab bucket people's attempts at changing things for the better?
[+] [-] reallydontask|6 years ago|reply
Surely, I can't be alone in this.
[+] [-] emptyfile|6 years ago|reply
If Americans, the richest most polluting people on earth can't be persuaded to release less CO2, good luck convincing a citizen of India or Indonesia to do the same.
And apparently a sizeable part of the population thinks that planting trees or buying a few Teslas will solve it.
[+] [-] avar|6 years ago|reply
If your view of people pushing for something being done about climate change is that of a dooms-day cult you're going to have to admit that it's a rather politically successful cult.
[+] [-] asokoloski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jokoon|6 years ago|reply
To me inequality and global warning are siblings. They are about the same thing, and share a common cause. If you cannot solve inequality you cannot solve global warming.
Unless Elon Musk or somebody else is able to finance a big breakthrough in several technologies that makes ALL greenhouse gasses machines obsolete, there is literally no way humans will avoid having their population reduced.
This article is short and it's a good summary on why individualism not only makes society unfair, but also threatens humanity.
[+] [-] beat|6 years ago|reply
That said, I'm not convinced this is going to lead to a global population reduction. In modernized economies, food isn't the boundary on population growth (all modern economies are at near-zero growth or even negative growth, and developing nations are modernizing to low birth rates at an astounding pace). Barring any huge changes, we're looking at the global population growing maybe 50% over the next century, and being completely level or shrinking after that, and most of that growth happening in the next few decades.
So for the population to shrink significantly, it would require billions to die, of famine or resource wars. So what's going to shrink the food supply that much? Enough to induce famine at a global scale? Keep in mind that global warming moves more slowly than harvest cycles. Farmers and nations can make decisions on what crops to plant and adjust their farming practices based on new information and reasonable predictions. Next year's weather won't be much different than this year's was, even if it will be significantly different than the weather in 20 years.
We are also on the cusp of two massive technological changes that will impact our farming abilities - IoT, and GMO. IoT allows plant-by-plant management of crops, reducing tilling and chemical use. GMO allows adaptation of crops to growing conditions more quickly than hybridizing does.
It just seems to me that the concerns about feeding everyone, in the wake of a previous century that absorbed a quadrupling of the population while making more food than ever and a future of at least two key technological breakthroughs, is more doomsday than solid reasoning.
[+] [-] bristleworm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] british_india|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garmaine|6 years ago|reply
If you think the "other side" is a climate change denier, you don't have a grasp of the issues involved and I'm really suspect that your op-ed is preaching to your crowd rather than actually trying to engage the problem.
The issue has never been denying the scientific fact that CO2 reflects infrared light, causing a greenhouse effect. It's a question over the scale of the problem, the timelines in which it plays out, and the panic and alarmism exhibited by one side of political debate.
Moving off fossil fuels is going to cost a lot of money, and it is going to be substitutive spending, not the growth-building kind. The Green New Deal, if enacted as specified, would send us into a prolonged, generation-long recession. Is is worth it? Is it necessary? That depends on how alarmist you are in your global warming predictions. And that is where we disagree. I've lived through two major economic recessions, and seen the effect that has on young people and opportunities. I wouldn't want to wish that on an entire generation. Millennials think boomers gave them a bad break, but wait until their kids see what opportunities their climate change policies leave them with...
We need to move off fossil fuels. But we can do it in a way that is gradual and growth-positive, while exploiting the warming climate in a way that boosts agricultural yields and adds living space for the growing population of the world. That requires a healthy debate about trade-offs and choices, and recognition that this is a complex, multi-faceted issue that people come to with multiple opinions and that's okay.
[+] [-] avar|6 years ago|reply
You're the one who's being alarmist if you're trying to argue that the US is staring down some decades-long recession to move more in that direction, which is pretty much all that's being suggested by some fringe politicians in the US.
Is German and Norwegian youth looking at having to deal with decades of recession, rising unemployment, rising income equality etc? No, they're not.
[+] [-] magicalhippo|6 years ago|reply
The world getting 1.5C hotter on average doesn't mean everywhere just gets 1.5C hotter all the time. If the increase means more droughts and more excessive rainfall, it's limited what you can do to exploit it for agricultural yields.
[+] [-] notfromhere|6 years ago|reply
The choice is a stark one: either invest in technologies and infrastructure to decrease CO2 production, or give future generations the gift of a dead planet.
[+] [-] Miner49er|6 years ago|reply
Source? The last New Deal helped get us out of the Great Depression. Seems crazy to suggest that a new similar one would cause one.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] spodek|6 years ago|reply
> If the summer heat, followed by Hurricane Dorian, hasn’t convinced you that climate change is real, probably nothing will.
However big they seemed compared to the past, they're nothing compared to the future, though everything we do affects it. We can still avoid some of the worst.
[+] [-] hnarn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reedx|6 years ago|reply
Resulting in endless gridlock, getting nothing done aside from increasing outrage and spectacle.
[+] [-] whatshisface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merpnderp|6 years ago|reply
But I guess if I were a NYT's reader I wouldn't even think about asking these questions, I'd just yell ERMEGERD Dorian and start trash talking anyone who doesn't immediately panic.
[+] [-] justsubmit|6 years ago|reply
That is not a scientific claim.
[+] [-] tgbugs|6 years ago|reply
Further note (edit). I think it is unlikely that a single state will ever be able to mitigate alone unless all other states stop or drastically reduce CO2 release. Maybe one state could threaten to set off a bunch of nukes in the upper atmosphere to destroy electronics and power grids around the world as a threat to encourage compliance, but that seems extremely far fetched.
[+] [-] gmuslera|6 years ago|reply
Climate change, as a single, isolated factor, won't cause by itself human extinction or at least the end of the human civilization in a foreseeable future, but reality is complex, current civilization and most of mankind depends on a lot of connected systems. Positive feedback loops happen, in climate, economics and in cultures, and from time to time the effects catch by surprise experts. We might be betting it all, and losing the bet, forever.
[+] [-] amanaplanacanal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chooseaname|6 years ago|reply
Edit: [0] Had someone argue with me that this just means we had record hot months before. I'm like, no, that's not how that works. Those record days were from different years. The new ones were from the same year.
[+] [-] whatshisface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justsubmit|6 years ago|reply
On average, how many record-high days have been recorded each year, for as long as your records have been kept?
How many record-low days?
A number out of context is not useful for drawing a scientific conclusion.
[+] [-] specialist|6 years ago|reply
Robert Wright's book Nonzero, which advocates for these kinds of reforms, deeply influenced my worldview, way back when.
https://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-Logic-Destiny-Robert-Wright/d...
--
I'm a treehugger. During the 90s, I volunteered at Wetlands Conservation Network (WetNet), a short lived Audubon offshoot trying to save the Pacific salmon.
During my time there, I somehow got the impression that all environmental (ecological) challenges could be fixed with better accounting and fair markets.
More than just addressing externalities.
With our salmon, the (economic) winners were timber companies and developers. Who reaped outsized rewards for developing habitat. (Timber companies were turning second growth forests into urban sprawl thru their subsidiaries.)
Other beneficiaries were power (hydroelectric) and some farmers (irrigation).
The biggest losers were the commercial & tribal fishers, anglers, and the hard to quantify "culture".
But for some reason, beyond my experience and understanding, commonsense structural reforms were completely out of bounds.
For instance, (I'm told) that water rights in the West are "use it or lose it", so potato farmers in Idaho continue to grow an oversupply. Whereas if they somehow rent (or transfer) those water rights in an open marketplace, that water could be put to better uses.
--
Note that I've been out of the treehugger game since 2000, so I don't know what, if any progress, has been made since.
Also, I continue to be surprised that Wright's Nonzero thesis apparently hasn't gotten any traction. Neither with the libertarian Freedom Markets™ cultists. Or the weirdly regressive leftists who reject markets and incentives, and continue to conflate corporatism & cronyism with capitalism.
Oh well.
[+] [-] programminggeek|6 years ago|reply
What if the planet got warmer without our input? What then?
[+] [-] dragonwriter|6 years ago|reply
Climate change is a problem whether or not it's anthropogenic (which there is massive evidence that it is).
> Yet, if we DID control the planet, we could simply fix it.
Us having the capacity to initiate a warming trend doesn't imply that we could simply stop it.
> What if the planet got warmer without our input? What then?
Then we'd have just as much interest in bringing it under control. The impacts don't change of the source is different.
[+] [-] adj83|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lowken10|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] liaukovv|6 years ago|reply
>What do you mean plague vaccine? We need to stop dreaming about magic solutions and just stop living in cities
>Farming? No this will never work, just stop reproducing. And collect more berries.
>Fire? Why do we need fire? It's dangerous and hot food is a luxury.
[+] [-] einpoklum|6 years ago|reply
Also, and more importantly - it's easy to categorize problems retroactively based on how they were eventually resolved; not so easy to apply this categorization with foresight.
Finally - some problems have both societal and technological aspects, and so do their solutions.
[+] [-] hnarn|6 years ago|reply
2. With the exception of up until modern times, farming, like many other major changes in human habitation, never threatened our existence on this planet.
3. Fire is dangerous, but the benefits vastly outweighed the dangers, and also did not permanently, in the chronological perspective of human beings, threaten our ecosystem.
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptah|6 years ago|reply