bigmacbear (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bigmacbear) wrote2010-02-07 01:13 pm
bigmacbear) wrote2010-02-07 01:13 pm
Climate Change: It's real, it's bad, but there is hope
I've had a rather nasty little thought in the back of my head for a few months now, that has been difficult to articulate.
But I managed to sum up this rather disquieting thought: It appears the prescription for mitigating climate change is a host of individual actions and regulations that collectively will do serious damage to our democracy, our standards of living, or even our liberty itself. So skeptics argue that the science is outdated, fraudulent, or at any rate insufficient, precisely because to argue otherwise will force us to give up a significant chunk of our quality of life, and therefore we should do nothing. And I was all set to argue that maybe the skeptics are right.
But something I read on the Daily Kos yesterday went into the thought processes behind the skeptics' arguments. Essentially, to dismiss the findings of climate science as a conspiracy theory, either cooked up by politicians bent on control or by scientists hungry for grant money, requires enough participants in the conspiracy that Occam's Razor dictates the theory be dismissed.
Then I found a link in that article that led me to a new understanding of the necessity for action on climate change, the reasoning behind the conspiracy theories, and a little bit more about why the prescription for mitigating climate change may not be so bad after all, especially considering the alternative. The argument is similar to Pascal's Wager regarding belief in God, but with a better idea of the probabilities involved.
The arguments presented fill over seven hours of video, so I skimmed the transcripts to get a better handle on the material.
First I found (under "Scare Tactics") a reference to a serious explanation with an amusing title: [Link added]
Part of what makes this all terrifying is not just the possibility of abrupt climate change, but how it’s a complete mismatch for our threat-survival system. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote an excellent column in 2006 titled “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming,” where his basic point was, we evolved (if you believe in that) to react to what is immediately threatening—call it the Saber Tooth Tiger reflex—and that’s worked great for us so far as a species. But now we find that we are threatened by something that instead is abstract and in the future. And we’re just not wired to watch out for stuff like that.
And I found a few quotes which spoke to my fears about tyrannical regulations, lost liberty, and Armageddon. [All emphasis mine.]
For instance, the segment "Get What You Want":
Common objections to action on AGW like “We need to protect the economy” and “The government just wants more control of our lives,” seem to me to really all come down to one thing: the need for self-determination. No one wants to be limited by others or told what to do. Specifically, it seemed a majority of the comments could be lumped into two subcategories: economic self-determination (sort of the “I need to put food on the table” idea), and social/political self-determination (sort of the “Don’t tread on me” idea).
Later in the same segment:
Now, as for protecting our social and political self-determination—our liberties—the case seems much simpler to me, and can be summed up in a single sentence: democracy cannot survive in a Mad Max world.
There’s a reason martial law exists. It’s so that when the asteroid hits the fan, the government can do whatever necessary—even suspending the rights of the individual—in order to secure the greater good for the greater number. Do you think anyone in New Orleans in the days after Katrina gave a rat’s ass about civil liberties? No—they were busy looting bottled water and disposable diapers. And had the National Guard gotten there faster, they would have opened up the fire hoses on the looters to ensure order. There’s nothing like large scale natural disasters or threats to national security to bring out the draconian in any government.
From "No Holds Barred:"
I think people are tired of feeling like they’re constantly being told that they are the problem, that they are bad for just going about their lives. And so they lash back, with whatever small bit of terminology or concept they may have picked up. So I want to be clear: we’re not bad for causing global climate change. It’s not a moral judgment. We’re just doing stuff that ends up being bad for us. What’s the saying? “Don’t poo in your own bed?” That’s really all we’re talking about.
And in a later segment [Operation Saturation]:
If you’re like me, all the bad news may make you feel very closed in, very trapped. Almost everybody feels that yesterday they had more space, more community, more safety, more opportunity. It seems we’re up against the limits of growth on a finite planet. Wouldn’t it be cool to go back to that feeling of “The future is wide open, limitless?”
I think we can do that, if we allow ourselves to be free to choose new definitions, like that Hal Harvey quote I shared in the video “The Solution,” where just realizing that people want light, heat, and mobility, rather than barrels of oil or kilowatt-hours of electricity completely opens up the picture of what’s possible. So if we’re up against the limits of growth, maybe we can sidestep that by focusing on quality of life rather than more growth.
And further on in that same segment:
And I want to warn you: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. You don’t have to bike to work and eat vegetarian and recycle religiously and compost, and sit in a cold dark house before you can speak to a co-worker about climate change. Make the changes that you are comfortable with, and then, instead of spending a bunch of energy making changes you aren’t yet comfortable with, spend that energy spreading the word. Because the net impact will be greater if you do so. Decide for yourself, I suppose, but I think the biggest “bang for your buck” is using your limited energy to spread the word, so that we get a change in the culture, so that policy makers are forced to take significant action, so that massive action can happen without too great of a burden on individuals, so that we can get the heck out of column B, which is where we sit now, enacting our daring action plan of simply hoping that most scientists are wrong or corrupt.
Bottom line: You don't have to be a neo-Luddite to have a positive impact on climate change... just do as much as you can to help ensure everyone pitches in. I hope this post helps in some small way.
But I managed to sum up this rather disquieting thought: It appears the prescription for mitigating climate change is a host of individual actions and regulations that collectively will do serious damage to our democracy, our standards of living, or even our liberty itself. So skeptics argue that the science is outdated, fraudulent, or at any rate insufficient, precisely because to argue otherwise will force us to give up a significant chunk of our quality of life, and therefore we should do nothing. And I was all set to argue that maybe the skeptics are right.
But something I read on the Daily Kos yesterday went into the thought processes behind the skeptics' arguments. Essentially, to dismiss the findings of climate science as a conspiracy theory, either cooked up by politicians bent on control or by scientists hungry for grant money, requires enough participants in the conspiracy that Occam's Razor dictates the theory be dismissed.
Then I found a link in that article that led me to a new understanding of the necessity for action on climate change, the reasoning behind the conspiracy theories, and a little bit more about why the prescription for mitigating climate change may not be so bad after all, especially considering the alternative. The argument is similar to Pascal's Wager regarding belief in God, but with a better idea of the probabilities involved.
The arguments presented fill over seven hours of video, so I skimmed the transcripts to get a better handle on the material.
First I found (under "Scare Tactics") a reference to a serious explanation with an amusing title: [Link added]
Part of what makes this all terrifying is not just the possibility of abrupt climate change, but how it’s a complete mismatch for our threat-survival system. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote an excellent column in 2006 titled “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming,” where his basic point was, we evolved (if you believe in that) to react to what is immediately threatening—call it the Saber Tooth Tiger reflex—and that’s worked great for us so far as a species. But now we find that we are threatened by something that instead is abstract and in the future. And we’re just not wired to watch out for stuff like that.
And I found a few quotes which spoke to my fears about tyrannical regulations, lost liberty, and Armageddon. [All emphasis mine.]
For instance, the segment "Get What You Want":
Common objections to action on AGW like “We need to protect the economy” and “The government just wants more control of our lives,” seem to me to really all come down to one thing: the need for self-determination. No one wants to be limited by others or told what to do. Specifically, it seemed a majority of the comments could be lumped into two subcategories: economic self-determination (sort of the “I need to put food on the table” idea), and social/political self-determination (sort of the “Don’t tread on me” idea).
Later in the same segment:
Now, as for protecting our social and political self-determination—our liberties—the case seems much simpler to me, and can be summed up in a single sentence: democracy cannot survive in a Mad Max world.
There’s a reason martial law exists. It’s so that when the asteroid hits the fan, the government can do whatever necessary—even suspending the rights of the individual—in order to secure the greater good for the greater number. Do you think anyone in New Orleans in the days after Katrina gave a rat’s ass about civil liberties? No—they were busy looting bottled water and disposable diapers. And had the National Guard gotten there faster, they would have opened up the fire hoses on the looters to ensure order. There’s nothing like large scale natural disasters or threats to national security to bring out the draconian in any government.
From "No Holds Barred:"
I think people are tired of feeling like they’re constantly being told that they are the problem, that they are bad for just going about their lives. And so they lash back, with whatever small bit of terminology or concept they may have picked up. So I want to be clear: we’re not bad for causing global climate change. It’s not a moral judgment. We’re just doing stuff that ends up being bad for us. What’s the saying? “Don’t poo in your own bed?” That’s really all we’re talking about.
And in a later segment [Operation Saturation]:
If you’re like me, all the bad news may make you feel very closed in, very trapped. Almost everybody feels that yesterday they had more space, more community, more safety, more opportunity. It seems we’re up against the limits of growth on a finite planet. Wouldn’t it be cool to go back to that feeling of “The future is wide open, limitless?”
I think we can do that, if we allow ourselves to be free to choose new definitions, like that Hal Harvey quote I shared in the video “The Solution,” where just realizing that people want light, heat, and mobility, rather than barrels of oil or kilowatt-hours of electricity completely opens up the picture of what’s possible. So if we’re up against the limits of growth, maybe we can sidestep that by focusing on quality of life rather than more growth.
And further on in that same segment:
And I want to warn you: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. You don’t have to bike to work and eat vegetarian and recycle religiously and compost, and sit in a cold dark house before you can speak to a co-worker about climate change. Make the changes that you are comfortable with, and then, instead of spending a bunch of energy making changes you aren’t yet comfortable with, spend that energy spreading the word. Because the net impact will be greater if you do so. Decide for yourself, I suppose, but I think the biggest “bang for your buck” is using your limited energy to spread the word, so that we get a change in the culture, so that policy makers are forced to take significant action, so that massive action can happen without too great of a burden on individuals, so that we can get the heck out of column B, which is where we sit now, enacting our daring action plan of simply hoping that most scientists are wrong or corrupt.
Bottom line: You don't have to be a neo-Luddite to have a positive impact on climate change... just do as much as you can to help ensure everyone pitches in. I hope this post helps in some small way.