Food for thought for those of us whose communities have so far escaped the sharp end of climate breakdown. Create community resilience now, or face the consequences soon.
The trolls seem to have landed on Planet Critical, which is an unfortunate by-product of it's success I suppose. I'm going to try to exercise restraint and ignore them.
To those who are desperate to win the scientific argument - great! Knock yourself out. You could be right. All that misses the point that this is about people. It's about people who suffer and people who care about that suffering and also it's about people who create and maintain systems that profit from that suffering. This is a very human condition and human-created
On identity, think of the fact that many people, particularly in rural areas, do the same work their ancestors did, and feel obliged to, because they feel that among other things, it is necessary in order to keep the souls of their ancestors alive. Strongly held spiritual beliefs like this go a long way to understanding why, as discussed, many people resist changing from one type of work to another despite what seems to others as a clear need to do so.
And as for Rachel's comment on existential risk, as it happens, AI is now seen as a far higher existential risk (mainly in the shorter-term) than global warming, as evidenced by Toby Ord and others. This is partly due to the mainstream's near refusal to accept or even discuss existential risk, or literal human extinction from climate change, in favor of sticking with the "hopeful messages" tactic, combined with the scientific reticence clouding IPCC publications which famously underestimate risks across the board. No doubt, AI people are as misinformed as the rest as to warming's danger and so they underappreciate it.
All industrial warfare and social unrest is the direct result of our massive human overpopulation. We are 3,000 times more populous than were our ancestral migratory Hunter-Gatherer clans/bands just a few thousand years ago, and they, unlike us, were living in an ecologically balanced self-sustaining renewable lifeway in an intact natural environment, now, nowhere to be found in the "New World". We have become the authors of our own obituaries: "they literally ate the planet and burned-up".
could be ….but i would argue that most people feel more isolated than prior generations by social practices and technology rather than they feel hemmed in.
Wait until we start seeing mass migration due to climate change. Authoritarians have taken control around the world and use racism to blame their problems on immigrants. When the white supremacists are confronted with mass migration, their heads might explode.
...problem. There are verifiable changes in the planet's systems whatever the causes that causing harm and instability and making it less and less possible for some people to maintain a viable life where they live. We should be concerned for them and extend a helping hand not because carbon is or isn't the answer but because there is a need. That's all it is.
This looks like a problem designed to play to the climate emergency narrative.
The issues are two fold..
People are typically violent or anti social mainly because of poverty or low prosperity.. and trying to correlate this with climate is nonviable.
The other point is that the low morale and social discomfort is being generated by the false propaganda about the fear of a climate emergency that for almost all people does not physically exist rather than any issue to do with climate itself...
I don't think it's a good faith move to attempt to disenfranchise decades of scientific endeavour by putting the word "narrative" in a sentence, as if that cancels everything out.
You rightly point out that the precarious nature of some people's lives can lead to violence. The point being made here is that the very real and immediate effects of climate change in the form of droughts and excessive heat exacerbate that situation. Climate change in this case and many others is a threat multiplier.
The idea that just a 1-degree increase is generating all this mayhem is laughable.
Also, on just about every metric there are no adverse weather trends attributed to climate change outside of normal weather variation. As said the emotion you mention is being fueled by propaganda rather than real issues.
"Given the tremendous size and heat capacity of the global oceans, it takes a massive amount of added heat energy to raise Earth’s average yearly surface temperature even a small amount. The roughly 2-degree Fahrenheit (1 degrees Celsius) increase in global average surface temperature that has occurred since the pre-industrial era (1850-1900 in NOAA's record) might seem small, but it means a significant increase in accumulated heat.
That extra heat is driving regional and seasonal temperature extremes, reducing snow cover and sea ice, intensifying heavy rainfall, and changing habitat ranges for plants and animals"
Climate change emergency denier is more accurate.. but...At least I am not part of the climate emergency industrial complex that is distorting and subjugating science.
Yes it appears he has not kept up with scientific information here. But Mr Heat and Fury is unreliable on evidence. There is US "Security" green washing campaigns now underway that people need to be v sceptical about. When you hear ' threat multipliers" what are you being forced to do? Reach for your gun(s)!! Who has most biggest/ most etc? US ride to the rescue! I think not!
Yes, poverty can be a pressure leading to violence, but trying to remove climate change as yet another source of pressure is not defensible. And don't forget, the greatest violent acts the world has ever seen are the result of the wealthy seeking to expand their wealth and power.
Book is unreliable. Most disappointing. First chapter initially convincing but last chapter US biases show up. Too much contextless detail. Question is ‘Whose Security?& Wilson centre ? Usa security only.
I don’t need to read anything from an “unscientific” writer. I computationally modeled thermodynamic phenomena (science speak for how air and liquids behave under the influence of gravity, an external energy source, et cetera) when I earned my degree in Traditional Physics from the USAF Academy. None of you has proven that human effort is going to boil the planet. All of you point to somebody else’s computational model (about which you know nothing) and you declare “see, the planet is dying”. But none of those computational models are proof of ANYTHING. Computational models are developed with hundreds of human assumptions precisely because we can’t solve for an equation that actually represents the earth’s climatic elements. We develop models in the same way gamblers develop a system to beat opponents in poker - it’s an effort to predict the future. When have these doom and gloom climactic models predicted the future? They have not! The climate models you are pointing to were all developed by people who were ideologically influenced or pressured, resulting in the hundreds of assumptions they make about their models, and the initial conditions data, being contaminated by their desire to get a certain outcome. These models are all rigged to give the modeler what they expect, not a prediction of the future.
Make a $100,000 bet, with the public, about a very specific negative climate measure 10 years in the future, then wait to see if you keep or lose that $100,000. Then, and only then, will you have something worth reading.
Nature doesn't care about our discourse or backgrounds. The solar imbalance is heating up the planet. That's where all that ice went. You know that. Follow the CO2 data from NOAA (even though DOGE might block it as their visit to NOAA this week has resulted in this site being offline at times): https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ But your military background may help you during a global mass starvation attempt as what is left of society becomes militarized, William/David. What's that old adage? "Soldiers eat first."
I have firearms. I’ll be just fine in whatever scenario you imagine in your head. I’ll be the strong, silent John Wayne figure.
As for the real world … the sun’s energy input and variability in the earth’s orbital mechanics are likely the overwhelmingly predominant forces that drove past climate change. They will continue to be the overwhelming drivers. And humans … the only animal on earth to be an ecosystem agnostic platform (self awareness is awesome) will do in the future what they did in the past - adapt.
End note: increased carbon dioxide levels appear to be “greening” deserts, not growing deserts. Look it up and see if you can understand the hypothesized mechanism.
You must be talking about a 100% precise outcome on your bet. Scientists predicted that there would be stronger storms and then it happened. The science has been in agreement since the 70s that climate change is man made. Everything they predicted has happened, just not to enough specificity for you. After Exxon did their own study in the 70s, they came up with the exact same results that climate scientists were getting. They made the choice to spend billions on a climate denial campaign, opposite of what their own study showed, so they could continue to take in profits. You can not deny that the warming of the planet starts to spike at the moment of the Industrial Revolution. The arrow on the graph is shooting straight up. You're free to believe whatever the hell you want. 99% of climate scientists with perr reviewed studies are all coming to the same conclusion. Check out the climate data during the pandemic when there were no cars on the road .
I guess you didn’t actually read it then. O well, worth a try. And I assume you mean The Science™️
I was actually hoping for an intelligent well argued counter to what he claims. How can you ever hope to persuade those like me who genuinely want to understand what is going on if that is all you have to offer?
I have read it. I’m not really sure what to say to you. It’s a very well-written assemblage of more than a dozen fairly common climate denial talking points and tropes, some conspiracy theory, some misrepresentations of environmentalism, some nice rhetoric, some references to respectable scientists (mostly not climate scientists), some straw-man misrepresentations of what science is, and quite a few non-sequiturs and pieces of equivocation.
Many of the odd or false claims about the climate science you can find responded to in places like Skeptical Science (https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php) or you can simply follow and/or familiarise yourself with the mainstream climate science.(TM) Of course, if you consider the mainstream, majoritarian and peer-reviewed climate science to be suspect (perhaps because it might seem to be political and affected by power), whereas the heterodox and fringe climate views and interpretations are more amenable, can I ask you to be charitable enough to follow the vested interests, money, motives and power at work in the heterodox direction too (which strangely tends to support Business As Usual, nothing to see here, fossil fuels etc.). It may also be worthwhile asking yourself why you might prefer the particular account you reference here (assuming that you do), rather than the mainstream view (which is the work of thousands of climate scientists, research bodies and institutions – none of whom are getting rich from this).
As to your request for discussion, many of us don’t engage in debate and argument on some of these things for a number of reasons. First, it’s not a debate (a debate is about winning and deploys rhetoric, affect and other techniques to persuade), it’s about truth and that is another matter. Sadly this all too often descends into a question of whose ‘science’ or ‘facts’ are true, and the whole thing becomes obfuscated by power/politics and then conflated with a debate. However, the science is a community endeavour of testing, peer review and approximation towards truth. Scientific matters will become settled for a time, but can be overcome, modified or rejected later if there is compelling evidence otherwise. There are ways to challenge this simplistic account, but it's a very good heuristic to trust the community and mechanisms of the majority, rather than valorising marginal views and theories simply because they are skeptical or contrarian (sometimes they may be proven right, mostly they aren’t). Again, it’s worth asking yourself who do you trust, or distrust, and why.
Secondly, most of us fall back on Brandolini’s Law. This can be paraphrased as the bullshit asymmetry principle and, although not a scientific law, it does seem to be well-established in practice. It basically states that the effort required to debunk falsehoods is an order of magnitude, or I would say nearer to two orders of magnitude, greater than the effort that went into uttering or producing the falsehoods. It’s also pretty well-established that lies, falsehoods and fake news propagate far more quickly than the truth. So, many of us just don’t have the time, energy or will to fight the flood of falsehoods.
With regard to the paper you cite, I can see a lot of effort has gone into it (many hours - unless it’s an AI or ChatGPT product, which would be amusing and certainly not too hard to prompt it to do). But it would take me many dozens of hours to respond to all of the points properly – and I would be doing so knowing that they have been addressed by others who are better equipped and more knowledgeable elsewhere.
Two last points:
Poor Hannah Arendt would be spinning in her grave if she saw how her writings on totalitarianism were being used in this piece. Read the first few pages of her The Human Condition for her thoughts about earthly existence, especially prescient about those who might seek to flee the Earth and also the future dangers of AI. This seems like a horrible misrepresentation and misuse of Arendt.
And the thing that really lets this piece down for me is the ‘carbon is our friend’, ‘carbon epiphany’ and ‘war on carbon’ tone. It’s a really odd or silly talking point and disanalogy. No one is warring on carbon or claiming that anything on the periodic table is evil or our enemy. Just as lead isn’t evil, but a lead bullet through one’s head is to be avoided (and who knows, gun control might be a good idea), and also one degree of global warming may not seem to be a lot, except one degree of warming in a human body can be fatal. The disruptive capacity of carbon – as with most things – is only relevant from a systemic perspective (e.g. climate sensitivity in the case of CO2).
Sadly, probably half an hour to read the piece a couple of days ago (and I've read more than a few similar things), and certainly more than an hour to put a fairly short reply together. Brandolini's Law at work; when I ought to be doing my day job.
The piece is very engaging and well structured, and sprinkles lots of truths at the beginning to pull you in: water vapour *is* the most voluminous greenhouse gas; carbon *is* the molecule of life; plants *do* need CO2 to grow; the earth's climate *has* changed over time,. But these facts are cherry-picked, pulling apart the tapestry of scientific research which explains how these facts interact with the earth systems, and how her stability is equally fracturing under mankind's activity.
By flip-flopping between small facts and large-scale models, the piece blurs the bigger picture which is that homosapien found its feet in the holocene, the past 10,000 years which enjoyed a mild and stable climate. Only five times in the earth's history has she experienced a release of this much CO2 into her atmosphere, all of which led to mass extinction events. Yes, in the long run she will be fine, but the life she supports, including our human societies, have developed to live on an earth which is now changing rapidly. "More plants" because of "more CO2" may sound good, but this isn't about value judgements, it's about ecosystems which have been stable for thousands of years suddenly losing their structure, causing cascading effects throughout all of earth's systems.
I think people intuitively mistrust power after millennia of abuses, but are pointing the fingers the wrong way: the scientific community is not powerful, the powerful have more to gain from denying climate science than scientists would cooking it up.
Also, we can feel the planet changing in our bodies: crops dying, seasons changing, storms worsening, childhood homes disappearing under rising sea levels. Our constants are disappearing because the earth's stability is coming apart.
As Paul said, lots of commonly debunked claims, such as "the Third World needs fossil fuels to develop" (they don't; the Global North needs to share their wealth). This is where the piece comes apart and starts to inflect analysis with judgement, claiming to find conclusions. What really stood out to me was the amazing misreading of certain passages, so blatant it feels propagandist in its own nature -- re-read the passage from the Club of Rome to see they were merely noting how global politics has functioned and how this global problem could be an opportunity to collaborate rather than compete. Same regarding Arendt, who literally says power-hungry regimes reject science.
Then the piece loses all integrity with outright lies such as the claim global forest cover is higher now than 150 years ago.
As for the ending: many suggestions are admirable, such as cleaning up our waterways and moving away from plastics. But concluding all this points to a war on carbon which is "a war on life"? That's alarmism masquerading as logic.
Food for thought for those of us whose communities have so far escaped the sharp end of climate breakdown. Create community resilience now, or face the consequences soon.
The trolls seem to have landed on Planet Critical, which is an unfortunate by-product of it's success I suppose. I'm going to try to exercise restraint and ignore them.
To those who are desperate to win the scientific argument - great! Knock yourself out. You could be right. All that misses the point that this is about people. It's about people who suffer and people who care about that suffering and also it's about people who create and maintain systems that profit from that suffering. This is a very human condition and human-created
Wonderful! Two things:
On identity, think of the fact that many people, particularly in rural areas, do the same work their ancestors did, and feel obliged to, because they feel that among other things, it is necessary in order to keep the souls of their ancestors alive. Strongly held spiritual beliefs like this go a long way to understanding why, as discussed, many people resist changing from one type of work to another despite what seems to others as a clear need to do so.
And as for Rachel's comment on existential risk, as it happens, AI is now seen as a far higher existential risk (mainly in the shorter-term) than global warming, as evidenced by Toby Ord and others. This is partly due to the mainstream's near refusal to accept or even discuss existential risk, or literal human extinction from climate change, in favor of sticking with the "hopeful messages" tactic, combined with the scientific reticence clouding IPCC publications which famously underestimate risks across the board. No doubt, AI people are as misinformed as the rest as to warming's danger and so they underappreciate it.
All industrial warfare and social unrest is the direct result of our massive human overpopulation. We are 3,000 times more populous than were our ancestral migratory Hunter-Gatherer clans/bands just a few thousand years ago, and they, unlike us, were living in an ecologically balanced self-sustaining renewable lifeway in an intact natural environment, now, nowhere to be found in the "New World". We have become the authors of our own obituaries: "they literally ate the planet and burned-up".
could be ….but i would argue that most people feel more isolated than prior generations by social practices and technology rather than they feel hemmed in.
Wait until we start seeing mass migration due to climate change. Authoritarians have taken control around the world and use racism to blame their problems on immigrants. When the white supremacists are confronted with mass migration, their heads might explode.
...problem. There are verifiable changes in the planet's systems whatever the causes that causing harm and instability and making it less and less possible for some people to maintain a viable life where they live. We should be concerned for them and extend a helping hand not because carbon is or isn't the answer but because there is a need. That's all it is.
This looks like a problem designed to play to the climate emergency narrative.
The issues are two fold..
People are typically violent or anti social mainly because of poverty or low prosperity.. and trying to correlate this with climate is nonviable.
The other point is that the low morale and social discomfort is being generated by the false propaganda about the fear of a climate emergency that for almost all people does not physically exist rather than any issue to do with climate itself...
I don't think it's a good faith move to attempt to disenfranchise decades of scientific endeavour by putting the word "narrative" in a sentence, as if that cancels everything out.
You rightly point out that the precarious nature of some people's lives can lead to violence. The point being made here is that the very real and immediate effects of climate change in the form of droughts and excessive heat exacerbate that situation. Climate change in this case and many others is a threat multiplier.
The idea that just a 1-degree increase is generating all this mayhem is laughable.
Also, on just about every metric there are no adverse weather trends attributed to climate change outside of normal weather variation. As said the emotion you mention is being fueled by propaganda rather than real issues.
Not laughable at all Nigel. From NOAA:
"Given the tremendous size and heat capacity of the global oceans, it takes a massive amount of added heat energy to raise Earth’s average yearly surface temperature even a small amount. The roughly 2-degree Fahrenheit (1 degrees Celsius) increase in global average surface temperature that has occurred since the pre-industrial era (1850-1900 in NOAA's record) might seem small, but it means a significant increase in accumulated heat.
That extra heat is driving regional and seasonal temperature extremes, reducing snow cover and sea ice, intensifying heavy rainfall, and changing habitat ranges for plants and animals"
Its been warming up for more than 300 years and long before you drove your car down the road.
Show me one one 30 year window weather trend that is getting worse.
Obviously you have not read the climate research but instead have given your ear to climate deniers.
Climate change emergency denier is more accurate.. but...At least I am not part of the climate emergency industrial complex that is distorting and subjugating science.
Yes it appears he has not kept up with scientific information here. But Mr Heat and Fury is unreliable on evidence. There is US "Security" green washing campaigns now underway that people need to be v sceptical about. When you hear ' threat multipliers" what are you being forced to do? Reach for your gun(s)!! Who has most biggest/ most etc? US ride to the rescue! I think not!
explain please
Yes, poverty can be a pressure leading to violence, but trying to remove climate change as yet another source of pressure is not defensible. And don't forget, the greatest violent acts the world has ever seen are the result of the wealthy seeking to expand their wealth and power.
Book is unreliable. Most disappointing. First chapter initially convincing but last chapter US biases show up. Too much contextless detail. Question is ‘Whose Security?& Wilson centre ? Usa security only.
Another fool banging away on his typewriter hoping for Shakespeare to spit out from the roller.
Rather disrespectful, WilliamTransDavid, but you might prefer to read this and read their novel: https://twonavyguys.substack.com/p/breaking-news-world-leaders-read?r=1dhjde&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
I don’t need to read anything from an “unscientific” writer. I computationally modeled thermodynamic phenomena (science speak for how air and liquids behave under the influence of gravity, an external energy source, et cetera) when I earned my degree in Traditional Physics from the USAF Academy. None of you has proven that human effort is going to boil the planet. All of you point to somebody else’s computational model (about which you know nothing) and you declare “see, the planet is dying”. But none of those computational models are proof of ANYTHING. Computational models are developed with hundreds of human assumptions precisely because we can’t solve for an equation that actually represents the earth’s climatic elements. We develop models in the same way gamblers develop a system to beat opponents in poker - it’s an effort to predict the future. When have these doom and gloom climactic models predicted the future? They have not! The climate models you are pointing to were all developed by people who were ideologically influenced or pressured, resulting in the hundreds of assumptions they make about their models, and the initial conditions data, being contaminated by their desire to get a certain outcome. These models are all rigged to give the modeler what they expect, not a prediction of the future.
Make a $100,000 bet, with the public, about a very specific negative climate measure 10 years in the future, then wait to see if you keep or lose that $100,000. Then, and only then, will you have something worth reading.
Nature doesn't care about our discourse or backgrounds. The solar imbalance is heating up the planet. That's where all that ice went. You know that. Follow the CO2 data from NOAA (even though DOGE might block it as their visit to NOAA this week has resulted in this site being offline at times): https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ But your military background may help you during a global mass starvation attempt as what is left of society becomes militarized, William/David. What's that old adage? "Soldiers eat first."
I have firearms. I’ll be just fine in whatever scenario you imagine in your head. I’ll be the strong, silent John Wayne figure.
As for the real world … the sun’s energy input and variability in the earth’s orbital mechanics are likely the overwhelmingly predominant forces that drove past climate change. They will continue to be the overwhelming drivers. And humans … the only animal on earth to be an ecosystem agnostic platform (self awareness is awesome) will do in the future what they did in the past - adapt.
End note: increased carbon dioxide levels appear to be “greening” deserts, not growing deserts. Look it up and see if you can understand the hypothesized mechanism.
You must be talking about a 100% precise outcome on your bet. Scientists predicted that there would be stronger storms and then it happened. The science has been in agreement since the 70s that climate change is man made. Everything they predicted has happened, just not to enough specificity for you. After Exxon did their own study in the 70s, they came up with the exact same results that climate scientists were getting. They made the choice to spend billions on a climate denial campaign, opposite of what their own study showed, so they could continue to take in profits. You can not deny that the warming of the planet starts to spike at the moment of the Industrial Revolution. The arrow on the graph is shooting straight up. You're free to believe whatever the hell you want. 99% of climate scientists with perr reviewed studies are all coming to the same conclusion. Check out the climate data during the pandemic when there were no cars on the road .
Your response - “obey my authority and the authority of others.”
My response - “you and your authorities have not demonstrated predictive power, so I will not obey your authority.”
Next.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thelethaltext/p/the-carbon-epiphany?r=3ezew&utm_medium=ios
I would love to read your response to this
Written by someone who hasn't read the science, or is otherwise motivated. Waste of time.
I guess you didn’t actually read it then. O well, worth a try. And I assume you mean The Science™️
I was actually hoping for an intelligent well argued counter to what he claims. How can you ever hope to persuade those like me who genuinely want to understand what is going on if that is all you have to offer?
I have read it. I’m not really sure what to say to you. It’s a very well-written assemblage of more than a dozen fairly common climate denial talking points and tropes, some conspiracy theory, some misrepresentations of environmentalism, some nice rhetoric, some references to respectable scientists (mostly not climate scientists), some straw-man misrepresentations of what science is, and quite a few non-sequiturs and pieces of equivocation.
Many of the odd or false claims about the climate science you can find responded to in places like Skeptical Science (https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php) or you can simply follow and/or familiarise yourself with the mainstream climate science.(TM) Of course, if you consider the mainstream, majoritarian and peer-reviewed climate science to be suspect (perhaps because it might seem to be political and affected by power), whereas the heterodox and fringe climate views and interpretations are more amenable, can I ask you to be charitable enough to follow the vested interests, money, motives and power at work in the heterodox direction too (which strangely tends to support Business As Usual, nothing to see here, fossil fuels etc.). It may also be worthwhile asking yourself why you might prefer the particular account you reference here (assuming that you do), rather than the mainstream view (which is the work of thousands of climate scientists, research bodies and institutions – none of whom are getting rich from this).
As to your request for discussion, many of us don’t engage in debate and argument on some of these things for a number of reasons. First, it’s not a debate (a debate is about winning and deploys rhetoric, affect and other techniques to persuade), it’s about truth and that is another matter. Sadly this all too often descends into a question of whose ‘science’ or ‘facts’ are true, and the whole thing becomes obfuscated by power/politics and then conflated with a debate. However, the science is a community endeavour of testing, peer review and approximation towards truth. Scientific matters will become settled for a time, but can be overcome, modified or rejected later if there is compelling evidence otherwise. There are ways to challenge this simplistic account, but it's a very good heuristic to trust the community and mechanisms of the majority, rather than valorising marginal views and theories simply because they are skeptical or contrarian (sometimes they may be proven right, mostly they aren’t). Again, it’s worth asking yourself who do you trust, or distrust, and why.
Secondly, most of us fall back on Brandolini’s Law. This can be paraphrased as the bullshit asymmetry principle and, although not a scientific law, it does seem to be well-established in practice. It basically states that the effort required to debunk falsehoods is an order of magnitude, or I would say nearer to two orders of magnitude, greater than the effort that went into uttering or producing the falsehoods. It’s also pretty well-established that lies, falsehoods and fake news propagate far more quickly than the truth. So, many of us just don’t have the time, energy or will to fight the flood of falsehoods.
With regard to the paper you cite, I can see a lot of effort has gone into it (many hours - unless it’s an AI or ChatGPT product, which would be amusing and certainly not too hard to prompt it to do). But it would take me many dozens of hours to respond to all of the points properly – and I would be doing so knowing that they have been addressed by others who are better equipped and more knowledgeable elsewhere.
Two last points:
Poor Hannah Arendt would be spinning in her grave if she saw how her writings on totalitarianism were being used in this piece. Read the first few pages of her The Human Condition for her thoughts about earthly existence, especially prescient about those who might seek to flee the Earth and also the future dangers of AI. This seems like a horrible misrepresentation and misuse of Arendt.
And the thing that really lets this piece down for me is the ‘carbon is our friend’, ‘carbon epiphany’ and ‘war on carbon’ tone. It’s a really odd or silly talking point and disanalogy. No one is warring on carbon or claiming that anything on the periodic table is evil or our enemy. Just as lead isn’t evil, but a lead bullet through one’s head is to be avoided (and who knows, gun control might be a good idea), and also one degree of global warming may not seem to be a lot, except one degree of warming in a human body can be fatal. The disruptive capacity of carbon – as with most things – is only relevant from a systemic perspective (e.g. climate sensitivity in the case of CO2).
Brilliant reply! Far more eloquent than I could have managed. I did read the link and thought about responding, but couldn't find the energy.
Sadly, probably half an hour to read the piece a couple of days ago (and I've read more than a few similar things), and certainly more than an hour to put a fairly short reply together. Brandolini's Law at work; when I ought to be doing my day job.
Thank you for the considered reply. I will attempt an equally positive response.
Paul's response was brilliant.
The piece is very engaging and well structured, and sprinkles lots of truths at the beginning to pull you in: water vapour *is* the most voluminous greenhouse gas; carbon *is* the molecule of life; plants *do* need CO2 to grow; the earth's climate *has* changed over time,. But these facts are cherry-picked, pulling apart the tapestry of scientific research which explains how these facts interact with the earth systems, and how her stability is equally fracturing under mankind's activity.
By flip-flopping between small facts and large-scale models, the piece blurs the bigger picture which is that homosapien found its feet in the holocene, the past 10,000 years which enjoyed a mild and stable climate. Only five times in the earth's history has she experienced a release of this much CO2 into her atmosphere, all of which led to mass extinction events. Yes, in the long run she will be fine, but the life she supports, including our human societies, have developed to live on an earth which is now changing rapidly. "More plants" because of "more CO2" may sound good, but this isn't about value judgements, it's about ecosystems which have been stable for thousands of years suddenly losing their structure, causing cascading effects throughout all of earth's systems.
I think people intuitively mistrust power after millennia of abuses, but are pointing the fingers the wrong way: the scientific community is not powerful, the powerful have more to gain from denying climate science than scientists would cooking it up.
Also, we can feel the planet changing in our bodies: crops dying, seasons changing, storms worsening, childhood homes disappearing under rising sea levels. Our constants are disappearing because the earth's stability is coming apart.
As Paul said, lots of commonly debunked claims, such as "the Third World needs fossil fuels to develop" (they don't; the Global North needs to share their wealth). This is where the piece comes apart and starts to inflect analysis with judgement, claiming to find conclusions. What really stood out to me was the amazing misreading of certain passages, so blatant it feels propagandist in its own nature -- re-read the passage from the Club of Rome to see they were merely noting how global politics has functioned and how this global problem could be an opportunity to collaborate rather than compete. Same regarding Arendt, who literally says power-hungry regimes reject science.
Then the piece loses all integrity with outright lies such as the claim global forest cover is higher now than 150 years ago.
As for the ending: many suggestions are admirable, such as cleaning up our waterways and moving away from plastics. But concluding all this points to a war on carbon which is "a war on life"? That's alarmism masquerading as logic.