Elysian meaning : a blissful state [ relating to or characteristic of heaven or paradise.] O.K. then !
A fanciful if pleasant delusion ! How about that for a comment on your entire article ! A dream.
"Unless you have something tangible and practical to suggest, please stop wasting people's time and building false hope with shallow platitudes." Felix MacNeill !!!!
I was about to agree with Felix until I read the rest of his garbage ! [ apologies , I don't have the time or the inclination to pull it all apart and show the utter stupidity of ALL the vague and worthless assumptions Felix ! ].
The nearest I came to agreeing with anybody was " because for 85% of the Earth’s geological history, there was no continental ice in polar regions or anywhere on the planet; we are currently, and have been for about 34 million years, part of the remaining 15%, the ice age eras. Geologically, now is the exception. !!!"
IA Overview : "The most recent ice age, known as the Quaternary glaciation, began approximately 2.6 million years ago and is still ongoing, although we are currently in a warm interglacial period. Prior to this, there have been at least four other major ice ages in Earth's history, with the earliest one dating back about 2.4 billion years."
Yes. "We" are IN AN "ICE-AGE" !...."We" are enjoying a WARM PERIOD , that is , an INTERGLACIAL PERIOD in the latest ICE AGE. From all the "facts" gleaned so far about the Earth's Climate History , it is THE COLDEST INTERGLACIAL of all of the few there have been so far in THIS ICE-AGE. So , any warming that "we" can produce MAY be beneficial by EXTENDING THIS INTERGLACIAL because when it ends , the planet will RE-FREEZE and "our" civilisation will also end ! Not with a bang , not even with a whimper ! Just a hostile environment and freezing !
Depending on the extent of the ice-sheets HUMANS and other life-forms may continue to survive into a very uncertain future , but maybe not ! Nothing may survive at all ! Since about 99.99% of all the life forms that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct , what makes you assume that "we" won't !!??
Felix.....was it Polar Bears 'driving their CO2 producing SUV's , that caused the recent thawing that started 20,000 years ago'........or NATURAL CAUSES perhaps ? Which seems more probable to you ?
My 'analysis and observations' of the available data are that LIFE HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER for the vast majority of human beings , that the Earth is greener , wetter [ humid] and that crops are more productive and reliable THAN EVER due to the very-slight warming and the minor increase in CO2
which occurred JUST IN TIME to prevent the death of MOST plant-species that provide animals and us with fodder and food. So , HUMANS and the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION actually SAVED all the life-forms on the planet [ except the anaerobes perhaps ! ].
Leave well-enough alone ! DON'T TINKER ! You don't know enough about anything at all to attempt Climate-Control or Terra-Engineering ! Look at the joke called CLIMATE COMPUTER MODELS !. Sorry to bore you with this , enough time expended ! Regards Etienne ! Adieu.
This most reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy. He attempts to write plausible political conflict around the terraforming of Mars, and mostly succeeds in conveying the political coordination issues, but it's hard to write credible conservatives when the environment you're talking about doesn't sustain any form of life. (He also wrote The Ministry of the Future more directly about climate change, but it's more of an extended thought experiment than a novel, and even as a KSR fan I can't recommend it.)
I think "we should learn to control the climate more generally" is most compelling because "stopping" climate change isn't simply a matter of applying the brakes. It will require many different approaches, and being able to reverse certain kinds of damage will mean having a lot more deftness than simply ceasing the mistakes we've made this far. We have been living in a world where humans affect the climate unintentionally, so the only place to go from here is a world where we control it intentionally.
Excellent points. It seems an oversimplification failure to think that we can just stop what we did wrong to fix the big problem in one stroke, instead of finding countless small, messy, complicated solutions to a host of smaller problems that add up to the big problem. "Intention" is a good keyword here.
Nobody wants to keep the climate like the eighteenth century because they're conservative, superstitious or NIMBYish. What people actually want is to keep climate broadly within the parameters required to sustain our existing systems and infrastructure. And it doesn't require severe energy poverty to do so - just more careful use of better forms of energy.
Given Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere, rejecting attempts at colonisation has nothing to do with a sentimental wish to keep things as they are - it's about not frying your idiot self!
The whole tone is utterly patronising and simplistic: a parade of platitudes arguing for some utterly undefined notion of "improvement" and, while briefly and superficially acknowledging past failures and irreducible difficulties, glibly suggesting that somehow we'll get it all correct this time.
Fantasising like a schoolboy reading science fiction (which generally has a fair bit of imagined technology but bugger all actual science) is exceptionally unhelpful in trying to deal with a huge set of complex problems.
Unless you have something tangible and practical to suggest, please stop wasting people's time and building false hope with shallow platitudes.
Your comment makes sense if you genuinely think people don't reason like this, but I wrote the article because I have observed that some do. I think you're doing the opposite of a strawman: imagining more sophisticated interlocutors than the ones I'm arguing against. Which can definitely be a valuable strategy, but in this case I'm sorry to say that it just sounds like you missed the point of the article.
Happy to end things here, but I can’t help being curious what you think the logic error is! Yes, there are some people who believe something which I think is wrong, so I’m writing to argue against that belief. I didn’t mention your other points because I think they’re correct (“your comment makes sense”), they’re just relevant to a slightly different discussion than the one I chose to have in the piece.
Look, there are "some people" who believe all sorts of crap - quite a few still believe that NASA faked the moon landings! I just don't see that as a sound basis for forming an argument - particularly as you didn't make clear that you were addressing rather extreme and less common views, thereby implying that the argument in favour of keeping climate as close as possible to pre-industrial levels was fundamentally and critically infected by a silly, sentimental conservatism. I've been around the environmental movement for thirty years and I can't say I've ever actually encountered the view you purport to have seen - it's more the province of anti-vaxers and their ilk.
Obviously we won't really be able to get back precisely to an eighteenth century climate, even if that WAS our naive goal - the thing is we need to stay as close as we possibly can to that situation, as our entire civilisation and all its cities and infrastructure were built to work in that world.
If you consider what's happening with natural disasters, agriculture and so forth, there are no positives emerging from the changes of the last couple of centuries - and there certainly aren't any in the foreseeable pipeline. Trying to spin it positively is, I think, essentially delusional. So any trivialising or dismissing of wishes to stabilise our climate as far as we are able is simply irresponsible. Yes, we'll have to do our best to adapt to the world we've already set in train, but let's not kid ourselves there are any positives.
Sorry to be so grumpy, but I just can't see the benefit of your approach in comparison with honest realism.
Well, I suppose this is a point of genuine disagreement between us, but I don't think these are particularly uncommon views. In fact I think that the conservative outlook applied to the environment is pervasive in contemporary Western society, even if it is rarely recognized as such. NIMBYism is a good example *symptom* (not cause) of this thinking: lots of people just don't want their local environment to change, and I speculate that it comes from the same natural tendency we humans have to desire a world that remains similar to what we're used to. To be totally clear, the "going back to the 18th century" bit is a stylistic exaggeration that ended up being the title just because it's a good title, but more specifically I do think "keeping the climate exactly as it is right now" is an actual goal (or at least vague aspiration) that many people have.
Of course, there are plenty of more sophisticated thinkers who understand and reject the conservative outlook, including perhaps yourself as well as the people you've met in the environmental movement. And yet even you say in the comment above that we should "stabilise" the climate. Why not say "control"? If we have control we can not only stabilize, but also improve. And it's not like stabilization without full control seems particularly easier to achieve, given our relative lack of success at reducing emissions; or morally good, given that many (not necessarily you) advocate for deprivations as the core method to achieve it. Control would be difficult to achieve, but plausibly not *more* difficult.
Also, I want to emphasize that we agree that the current uncontrolled climate change is bad. I do not aim to trivialize it or spin it positively. Our contention is simply about what the alternative should be: stabilization or improvement. I think our culture at large is incorrectly dismissing improvement, and changing that is the point of the article, even though that means defending a relatively unpopular view.
I'm loving this new essay series! Great ideas and innovative thinking all the way! This series should be read to pupils in schools everywhere to inspire the next generations of politicians, engineers and dreamers
Elysian meaning : a blissful state [ relating to or characteristic of heaven or paradise.] O.K. then !
A fanciful if pleasant delusion ! How about that for a comment on your entire article ! A dream.
"Unless you have something tangible and practical to suggest, please stop wasting people's time and building false hope with shallow platitudes." Felix MacNeill !!!!
I was about to agree with Felix until I read the rest of his garbage ! [ apologies , I don't have the time or the inclination to pull it all apart and show the utter stupidity of ALL the vague and worthless assumptions Felix ! ].
The nearest I came to agreeing with anybody was " because for 85% of the Earth’s geological history, there was no continental ice in polar regions or anywhere on the planet; we are currently, and have been for about 34 million years, part of the remaining 15%, the ice age eras. Geologically, now is the exception. !!!"
IA Overview : "The most recent ice age, known as the Quaternary glaciation, began approximately 2.6 million years ago and is still ongoing, although we are currently in a warm interglacial period. Prior to this, there have been at least four other major ice ages in Earth's history, with the earliest one dating back about 2.4 billion years."
Yes. "We" are IN AN "ICE-AGE" !...."We" are enjoying a WARM PERIOD , that is , an INTERGLACIAL PERIOD in the latest ICE AGE. From all the "facts" gleaned so far about the Earth's Climate History , it is THE COLDEST INTERGLACIAL of all of the few there have been so far in THIS ICE-AGE. So , any warming that "we" can produce MAY be beneficial by EXTENDING THIS INTERGLACIAL because when it ends , the planet will RE-FREEZE and "our" civilisation will also end ! Not with a bang , not even with a whimper ! Just a hostile environment and freezing !
Depending on the extent of the ice-sheets HUMANS and other life-forms may continue to survive into a very uncertain future , but maybe not ! Nothing may survive at all ! Since about 99.99% of all the life forms that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct , what makes you assume that "we" won't !!??
Felix.....was it Polar Bears 'driving their CO2 producing SUV's , that caused the recent thawing that started 20,000 years ago'........or NATURAL CAUSES perhaps ? Which seems more probable to you ?
My 'analysis and observations' of the available data are that LIFE HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER for the vast majority of human beings , that the Earth is greener , wetter [ humid] and that crops are more productive and reliable THAN EVER due to the very-slight warming and the minor increase in CO2
which occurred JUST IN TIME to prevent the death of MOST plant-species that provide animals and us with fodder and food. So , HUMANS and the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION actually SAVED all the life-forms on the planet [ except the anaerobes perhaps ! ].
Leave well-enough alone ! DON'T TINKER ! You don't know enough about anything at all to attempt Climate-Control or Terra-Engineering ! Look at the joke called CLIMATE COMPUTER MODELS !. Sorry to bore you with this , enough time expended ! Regards Etienne ! Adieu.
This most reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy. He attempts to write plausible political conflict around the terraforming of Mars, and mostly succeeds in conveying the political coordination issues, but it's hard to write credible conservatives when the environment you're talking about doesn't sustain any form of life. (He also wrote The Ministry of the Future more directly about climate change, but it's more of an extended thought experiment than a novel, and even as a KSR fan I can't recommend it.)
I think "we should learn to control the climate more generally" is most compelling because "stopping" climate change isn't simply a matter of applying the brakes. It will require many different approaches, and being able to reverse certain kinds of damage will mean having a lot more deftness than simply ceasing the mistakes we've made this far. We have been living in a world where humans affect the climate unintentionally, so the only place to go from here is a world where we control it intentionally.
Excellent points. It seems an oversimplification failure to think that we can just stop what we did wrong to fix the big problem in one stroke, instead of finding countless small, messy, complicated solutions to a host of smaller problems that add up to the big problem. "Intention" is a good keyword here.
More strawmen than a scarecrow factory.
Nobody wants to keep the climate like the eighteenth century because they're conservative, superstitious or NIMBYish. What people actually want is to keep climate broadly within the parameters required to sustain our existing systems and infrastructure. And it doesn't require severe energy poverty to do so - just more careful use of better forms of energy.
Given Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere, rejecting attempts at colonisation has nothing to do with a sentimental wish to keep things as they are - it's about not frying your idiot self!
The whole tone is utterly patronising and simplistic: a parade of platitudes arguing for some utterly undefined notion of "improvement" and, while briefly and superficially acknowledging past failures and irreducible difficulties, glibly suggesting that somehow we'll get it all correct this time.
Fantasising like a schoolboy reading science fiction (which generally has a fair bit of imagined technology but bugger all actual science) is exceptionally unhelpful in trying to deal with a huge set of complex problems.
Unless you have something tangible and practical to suggest, please stop wasting people's time and building false hope with shallow platitudes.
Your comment makes sense if you genuinely think people don't reason like this, but I wrote the article because I have observed that some do. I think you're doing the opposite of a strawman: imagining more sophisticated interlocutors than the ones I'm arguing against. Which can definitely be a valuable strategy, but in this case I'm sorry to say that it just sounds like you missed the point of the article.
"I've observed that some do" is your basis for framing an argument?
I'm sorry to say that it just sounds like you missed the point of basic logic.
And thanks for ignoring the other substantive points I made.
Goodbye.
Happy to end things here, but I can’t help being curious what you think the logic error is! Yes, there are some people who believe something which I think is wrong, so I’m writing to argue against that belief. I didn’t mention your other points because I think they’re correct (“your comment makes sense”), they’re just relevant to a slightly different discussion than the one I chose to have in the piece.
Look, there are "some people" who believe all sorts of crap - quite a few still believe that NASA faked the moon landings! I just don't see that as a sound basis for forming an argument - particularly as you didn't make clear that you were addressing rather extreme and less common views, thereby implying that the argument in favour of keeping climate as close as possible to pre-industrial levels was fundamentally and critically infected by a silly, sentimental conservatism. I've been around the environmental movement for thirty years and I can't say I've ever actually encountered the view you purport to have seen - it's more the province of anti-vaxers and their ilk.
Obviously we won't really be able to get back precisely to an eighteenth century climate, even if that WAS our naive goal - the thing is we need to stay as close as we possibly can to that situation, as our entire civilisation and all its cities and infrastructure were built to work in that world.
If you consider what's happening with natural disasters, agriculture and so forth, there are no positives emerging from the changes of the last couple of centuries - and there certainly aren't any in the foreseeable pipeline. Trying to spin it positively is, I think, essentially delusional. So any trivialising or dismissing of wishes to stabilise our climate as far as we are able is simply irresponsible. Yes, we'll have to do our best to adapt to the world we've already set in train, but let's not kid ourselves there are any positives.
Sorry to be so grumpy, but I just can't see the benefit of your approach in comparison with honest realism.
Well, I suppose this is a point of genuine disagreement between us, but I don't think these are particularly uncommon views. In fact I think that the conservative outlook applied to the environment is pervasive in contemporary Western society, even if it is rarely recognized as such. NIMBYism is a good example *symptom* (not cause) of this thinking: lots of people just don't want their local environment to change, and I speculate that it comes from the same natural tendency we humans have to desire a world that remains similar to what we're used to. To be totally clear, the "going back to the 18th century" bit is a stylistic exaggeration that ended up being the title just because it's a good title, but more specifically I do think "keeping the climate exactly as it is right now" is an actual goal (or at least vague aspiration) that many people have.
Of course, there are plenty of more sophisticated thinkers who understand and reject the conservative outlook, including perhaps yourself as well as the people you've met in the environmental movement. And yet even you say in the comment above that we should "stabilise" the climate. Why not say "control"? If we have control we can not only stabilize, but also improve. And it's not like stabilization without full control seems particularly easier to achieve, given our relative lack of success at reducing emissions; or morally good, given that many (not necessarily you) advocate for deprivations as the core method to achieve it. Control would be difficult to achieve, but plausibly not *more* difficult.
Also, I want to emphasize that we agree that the current uncontrolled climate change is bad. I do not aim to trivialize it or spin it positively. Our contention is simply about what the alternative should be: stabilization or improvement. I think our culture at large is incorrectly dismissing improvement, and changing that is the point of the article, even though that means defending a relatively unpopular view.
I'm loving this new essay series! Great ideas and innovative thinking all the way! This series should be read to pupils in schools everywhere to inspire the next generations of politicians, engineers and dreamers
Love that idea 🥰
The Elysian is always illuminating! Great article by Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Thanks for posing the "what if" questions.