The invisible science of our future
Of all the aspects of America’s conservative culture that make me anxious, the most troubling is the fierce reaction that many traditionalists have to the science of our collective future.
We know from a vast body of research that the earth has entered into what a growing number of scientists call the anthropocene, the age of man.
This is an epoch where we collectively influence the nature of life on our globe, replacing natural phenomena (glaciers, volcanoes, solar cycles) as the most powerful force.
In large measure because of the conservative movement, a serious civil discussion of what this means has ground to a halt. Democrats and Republicans who once talked productively about climate change have fallen silent.
Population growth is a taboo subject, even for many environmental groups.
The irony, of course, is that we know more and more about what our planetary civilization is doing to the planet we rely upon for, well, everything.
We know that fishing pressure and pollution are literally altering the bios of our oceans, making them more acidic, eliminating whole species with an efficiency that would be impressive if it weren’t so bleak.
We know that human commerce is rapidly spreading invasive species around the globe, so that the Great Lakes begin to look more like the Black Sea and whole forests in America fall prey to insects from Asia.
We also know that by the end of this century, there will be another 2.4 billion of us sharing this rock.
To put that in perspective, that population growth will require the construction of four additional New York City’s per year, every year, until the year 2100.
That’s four NYC’s this year. And four NYC’s the next year. And four more the year after. And repeat.
Economists also expect the standard of living to rise for billions of humans. That’s a good thing, except that it also means more consumption of resources and food, and likely far more emissions of carbon and other forms of pollution.
Balanced against these facts are two human traits that make it very difficult for us to confront what the science of the anthropocene will mean for our civilization.
First is the fact that for many of us our basic cosmology — the mental construct that we use to imagine our world — is still based on a world where humans weren’t such a big deal, at least in scientific terms.
In 1804, when the grand experiment of the United States was just hitting its stride, the population of the earth was one-seventh its current size.
It stood to reason that mankind could “use” and “master” the natural world around him without considering the wider consequences. We like to think of that kind of behavior as “freedom” and a part of our “manifest destiny.”
When a pointy-headed bureaucrat, or an egghead scientist, suggests to us that it might be a bad idea, say, to dump a factory’s toxins into a river that now has tens of millions of other people living along its banks, that sounds to us like “big government” and “regulation.”
The second thing that makes it difficult to grapple with the new science of life on earth is what some researchers call “shifting baseline syndrome.”
This is our tendency as a highly adaptive species to see the world around us as “normal.” Generations growing up now in China and India have no visceral sense of what their countries were like before human activity overwhelmed the natural world.
Here in the US, we like to tell ourselves that we’ve tackled some of these problems. In recent decades, we’ve restored much of our environment. We’ve protected forests and rivers to a remarkable degree.
But the truth is that we accomplished many of those gains simply by shifting the burdens we place on the planet to other places. And we now know that what happens in China doesn’t stay in China.
There are also signs that our impact on the planet is entering a new, more unpredictable phase.
The Gulf oil spill was a vast science experiment in what happens when the anthropic system hiccups. We still don’t know what the long-term impacts will be on the Gulf’s vast ecosystem.
The idea that we might generate energy for the next century by pumping caustic chemicals into the groundwater table is another big lab project.
And it’s inevitable that as our population grows the search for energy, and food, and other resources will force us to take bigger and bigger risks.
It’s also worth pointing out that the 2.4 billion population increase now projected could be wrong. The best estimates suggest that population growth will begin to plateau, and reach some kind of long-term stability.
But if birth rates are just a tiny bit higher, and life expectancy grows just a little bit more, the number of humans relying on our world could easily double.
I suspect that for a while longer, we’ll avoid talking about the ramifications of all this.
The cosmology of a world where humans — beautiful, precious humans — must also be reckoned as a burden and a problem, is just too frightening. It forces us to think hard about basic moral questions.
And the ramifications of what it might mean to be required to think globally are just too complex. We’ll have to re-examine what a healthy family looks like and what a healthy nation-state looks like.
But as scientists will tell you, it really doesn’t matter in the end what we believe, or what we want to talk about. The earth is a closed system, finite and ultimately fragile.
As more and more of us look to share the world, we will sort out how to be good stewards, respectful of the facts of life. Or we will watch in dismay as it breaks under our weight.
Tags: analysis, environment, politics, science
terrific link from myown. everyone should take a look.
it’s an article of faith (incorrectly so, imho) on the right that the media has a liberal bias, but i think this really underscores how on climate change, the media is biased way to the right.
JDM writes: “No-one has ever observed any biological process adding information!”
You really don’t get it. Evolution has nothing at all to do with adding information. Zip, nada. It has everything to do with slight changes in genes that result from copying errors: mutations. The vast majority of mutations are harmful, and the individual that results produces no or fewer offspring. A minority of mutations are inconsequential, conferring neither advantage nor disadvantage in reproduction success. A tiny percentage of mutations confer a reproductive advantage– those changes result in more individuals bearing those genes, and in time, come to dominate the gene pool.
None of this has anything to do with “adding information”; mice and men have essentially the same amount of DNA. You might want to read the Introduction to evolution on Wikipedia.
ht writes “…i think this really underscores how on climate change, the media is biased way to the right.”
I think this overstates the case, or misses the cause. There are media outlets that are heavily biased to the right and to the left, certainly. It happens that Fox News is the number one cable news channel, which gives it an outsized influence. But the real problem is with the mainstream media’s efforts to provide balanced coverage by treating both sides of the story as if they were equally valid, without doing enough fact checking to be able to adequately identify disinformation. I think most viewers would be surprised to learn that 97 percent of climate scientists accept that the climate is growing warmer as a result of human activity. (Wikipedia: Global warming controversy)
Walker –
I agree that JDM’s statement that “No-one has ever observed any biological process adding information” is uneducated and wrong.
Ever hear of gene duplication? Even JDM has to admit (well maybe not, I assume JDM is also an HIV denier) that when one becomes infected with a retrovirus new information is added to the genome. In fact our body is riddled with stretches of DNA derived from ancient retroviral infections.
As for most mutations being harmful, not quite. Most mutations are neutral.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB101.html
I submit to you that if God created all things then the laws of science must be among those things.
Absolutely.
But the interpretation of some science is debatable. Man is fallible. True?
My initial response to this article was that I believe God has figured replenishment into the equation; perhaps a safety net, if you will. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in reducing CO2 emissions, etc. It means that I recognize man’s limitations and the deference to a higher power.
If we are going to acknowledge God as a higher power than mankind, I submit that we are not capable of grasping his entire entity – that some things are not explainable.
Knuckle,
On that post about CO2 and sinning, as a Christian I would certainly say that pollution, and sometimes our lifestyles which focus on materialism and consumption are often sin, pollution is certainly sin. Different topic, but indeed part of what God has given us is a free will that we have intentionally used to destroy His other free gifts to us, which is a unique planet that gives us physical life and is also beautiful.
We have created nothing, we discover things and we use things.
Kathy –
Man is fallible. True?
Not in all cases. In several posts back, JDM proclaimed he can interpret the exact meaning of the Bible because he is imbued with the holy spirit.
Kathy writes: “I believe God has figured replenishment into the equation; perhaps a safety net…”
Kathy, how do you know that global warming isn’t a test: if we fail to take good care of God’s creation, we’ll get swept away in a kind of thermal deluge.
Reading this long discussion through, two quotes come to mind:
Stephen Colbert: “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Anthropogenic climate change hits all of us reading this blog right where we live. I don’t think that it takes more than a minute or two of thought to realize that reducing emissions of greenhouse gases requires big changes to the very comfortable lives we live. Denying climate change means no lifestyle change is needed, it’s an easy path. Accepting climate change means accepting frustration, anxiety, and guilt in at least a small measure – because we are all part of the problem, and there is no fully developed solution that we can adopt. The solution is going to come in bits and pieces, and the bits and pieces will come from scientists and engineers.
I strongly recommend Curt Stager’s book “Deep Future”. Stager fully accepts that climate change is real, but he puts together a very good argument that it is not going to result in the end of life on earth, or to the extinction of homo sapiens. It has eased some of my eco-guilt, and it has fed the twinges of optimism I feel from time to time that we will solve this problem.
An interesting link about a recent study that found distrust in science growing among conservatives, but not in other groups: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/03/loss-of-trust-in-institutions-of.html
I accept climate change. The guilt is going to be telling people in poor countries you have to remain poor because we have a climate problem that we created. Tell those hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants that know they can actually have a car someday like we ALL do, that they can’t because they have to sacrifice to save the planet. It is not going to happen. This is no longer our issue or in our control. China is now the largest producer of green house gases it in the end will be up to them and the rest of the world. We can help, but we are not in charge.
Mervel, I don’t really worry about Chinese cars all that much– at least they’re going to be tiny and fuel efficient. I want to see the extinction of the Great American Gas-Guzzling “Sport” Utility Vehicle. What an abomination! It’s one thing to use fossil fuels. It’s quite another to waste it with abandon.
Mervel, the poor people in foreign countries aren’t so much of a problem if the objective is to improve their lives dramatically. But if we think they want to all become consumers on the scale that Americans are we are in big, big trouble.
Improving the lives of the poor in Africa, Asia, and Latin America can be achieved while at the same time keeping them from being huge users of scarce resources. In some places there may be environmental improvements by providing solar ovens so people rely less on firewood, village scale solar power so people can use electric appliances but not run power lines everywhere, and village scale water supplies so people can have clean water without spending hours a day carrying it around. And people who deal with this sort of thing all the time will have many ideas big and small to make the lives of the poor better while at the same time limiting their increased use of resources.
I think that would be really awesome if they would develop in a way that is more sustainable and more efficient than we have developed. If some of this distributed technology can come on line in the next 10 years I think that can happen.
However those choices will be up to them. I agree its nuts to drive around giant cars/trucks for no good reason except that you like the way they look. But we can’t control our own citizens and their choices in this matter, it is very doubtful we will have an impact on Chinese or Indian consumers and their decisions.
From all indications they are starting to act like American consumers. We are seeing for example a large increase in meat consumption in India as they grow wealthier. The styles the consumer choices seem to be heavily impacted by Western consumer culture.
Personally I think our style of living is bad for our souls.
“But we can’t control our own citizens and their choices in this matter…”
Well we could certainly influence their choices. For decades we let the car companies tell us that raising the CAFE standards would just ruin everything. And we could certainly stop subsidizing the oil companies entirely. I know more expensive gas is hugely unpopular, but gas prices kept artificially low is what made it possible to sell SUVs in the first place.
Yes we could do that. People would still buy SUV’s. But yeah gas is too cheap no doubt about that.
But those things would not really make any significant difference in the massive change that needs to happen for the global issues that Brian is talking about in this post. That is my point, we are not in control of this anymore, we can cut all we want and it won’t help unless we have large scale global decreases. How is this supposed to happen when people in China and India can for the first time buy a car? They should be told to not do that? It is classic American Limoseane Liberal to tell lower middle class people to cut back while I fly around saving the world.
None of this is going to happen, thus we need to make bold moves to cool the planet that do not depend on whining about people driving big cars.
Mervel “Personally I think our style of living is bad for our souls.”
Amen, brother!
Mervel, you may be right, though the big-engineering-feat scares the willies out of me– get it wrong and it could be a mighty big whoops.
If we would get behind solar development to the point where electric cars became a feasible alternative to fossil fuel, it might make the Chinese and Indian entry into the car market negligible, but we should have done it decades ago– it may be close to too late.
Ah well… glad I don’t have kids!
By the way, can anyone explain to me why conservatives think that liberals have anything to gain by making a big deal out of climate change? Is it just because market forces won’t work to fix it?
Walker,
My guess is that it comes from two sources.
1) Just good old energy lobby interest groups fighting any change that would dampen their profits. They have a lot of conservatives in their pocket on capital hill. That is why you see the craziest deniers from Oklahoma etc.
2) Fear of government control. This view is a little more interesting. The reasoning is that this problem is so big the only way to fix it is for the government to take control of every aspect of our lives and force us to live in a very particular way, and by doing that we will end up giving away our civil liberties.
Knuckle,
Yes I agree about the geoengineering. It is exciting on one hand and on the other is it just arrogant? I mean it seems like whenever we do try those sorts of experiments with the environment they backfire. I think about all of unintended consequences of introducing one non-native species to battle another one etc.
The scary part about some of those techniques according to the article I was reading is that they don’t need world wide approval and buy in, one country could do it they are not that hard to try, the consequences could be horrible though if they are wrong.
Mervel writes: “The reasoning is that this problem is so big the only way to fix it is for the government to take control of every aspect of our lives and force us to live in a very particular way, and by doing that we will end up giving away our civil liberties.”
…and therefore it can’t be true? Amazing!
And yet they’re perfectly happy to give away our civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism.
Besides, it really doesn’t require “the government to take control of every aspect of our lives and force us to live in a very particular way.” It simply requires us to stop subsidizing the oil companies and, if necessary, raise fuel taxes until folks stop wasting oil prodigiously– a nice market-based approach.
It doesn’t add up. That leaves us with #1, protecting excessive oil company profits.
If we stopped subsidizing oil companies and raised fuel taxes, would ti solve the world climate change problems?
No, but it would have helped significantly if we had done so twenty years ago.
It would still help now. Because it’s not a complete solution, you figure we shouldn’t bother?
Doing those things is not cost free. If you increase fuel taxes you will increase unemployment and hurt those who can least afford gas now. Those things are real costs, so no if this is not going to really help we should not do it.
No they’re not cost free. But I thought you believed in the power of the marketplace. Raise the price of gas, and the auto industry will build higher fuel efficiency cars, and people will move closer to where they work.
After all, oil subsidies are distortions to the marketplace. If we had never subsidized oil production, we would never have had the gas guzzlers of the sixties and seventies. Look at the European cars of that era. And we would probably have not had as much suburban sprawl either. So your thinking is that because we started it, we have to continue it forever?
European cars are huge polluters, maybe we could go to that model?
Yes we could do these things, but we should keep in mind that we are forcing people to lose their jobs and incomes and pay more for gas so we can feel better about doing the right thing, even though we all admit that it won’t make any difference.
We all know that if the US does these things and the rest of the world does not, mainly China, India and Europe than it is pointless. So why would a Liberal want to do those things?
Well the conservative argument is that it would increase the power and control of government and that would help liberals because government is an interest group of liberals.
I don’t really buy that, but you need to get the good argument.
It is about the power and control of government. If you can propose a solution that does not involve forcing people to do something by the power and blunt force of government; that would be good.
“European cars are huge polluters…”
Say what!?
“The United States continues to lag far behind the rest of the world in fuel economy standards for passenger vehicles, according to a new report released this week by the International Council on Clean Transportation. ” (ICCT)
And Europe has had high fuel taxes for at least fifty years; presently gas costs $8.63 per gallon in France, $7.91/gal in Germany, $9.35/gal in Italy,
$5.98/gal in India and $4.01/gal in China, vs. $3.90 per gallon in the U.S.
“If you can propose a solution that does not involve forcing people to do something by the power and blunt force of government; that would be good.”
Mervel, raising fuel costs is exactly that kind of solution– it’s market-based. Besides, conservatives should love it, because it’s a flat, consumption-based tax.
And how am I to respond to your “even though we all admit that it won’t make any difference”? I absolutely don’t admit any such thing. Saying that is not a complete solution is not the same as saying that it would be useless– it would make a considerable difference even now. It would have made a huge difference if we had done it decades ago.