As temperatures soar, California wildfires roar I just wonder why? Why are Americans so willfully blind to climate change. I know that oil company propaganda is effective but it can't be this effective. There are people, mainly men, who religiously object to doing anything about the environment whether it is climate change or just ordinary pollution because, they say, only God can control the environment. This is really what they say. Some anti-environmentalists are just haters--like some men are rapists, these (usually) men simply hate nature and believe it ought to be beaten into submission, trampled on, torn up just for the heck of it. These people really exist. But most of the opposition to doing anything about climate change and other environmental problems comes from deeply unconscious fears of losing control--it is a highly irrational response to a clear scientific problem.
Those of us who have studied some science understand that our climate is a "complex system" which means, by definition, that outcomes cannot be predicted with any degree of accuracy because there are simply too many variables and there is no way, short of creating a model that is as complex as the Earth weather system and even now we lack not just the computing power, but the data to make it work. However, we can create various parameters and we can carry on rational risk assessments which generally proceed as follows: 1) you evaluate as best you can some range of probability as to the likelihood of the global temperature change and its possible effects with the best modelling you can find; 2) you evaluate what sorts of consequences might be in store for various temperature ranges; and 3) you evaluate the possible risks is you do nothing, a little, a lot, or genuinely try to do solve the problem. A risk analysis would say, for me, that there is a decent probability that we could face within a couple of decades a catastrophic positive feedback loop with methane rising out of the ocean and artic tundra as ice and tundra melt, since the artic is warming much faster. Now even if that probability is, say, 5%, is that a risk you would want to take? Now I thing that possibility is about 40%--by that I mean the probability no only that we would have a series of catastrophically high surface temperatures but that most life on earth as we know it would cease including all but a few very, very, very rich people who can afford to build little underground cities or whatever. The cost of actually trying to solve the problem would be, in my view, would be moderate in the short term and relatively minimal in the medium and long-term.
What is noticeable here is that no one (this calculus is being done in the security services who are planning for mass chaos and also by the rich in secret) in the media which is strictly controlled by the oligarch class which consists of hundreds of people and their retinues, is even addressing this risk assessment model even though each of the corporations that run the industry routinely make very sophisticated risk assessments of their business practices; few in academia are doing anything like this; and few if any in the general population even think that such a thing as risk-assessment even exists as a matrix for solving this sort of problem. Why? Because most Americans are, when confronted with a problem, either want to blow something up, or simply not think about it. Why? Because Americans are now used to living almost exclusively in fantasies.
Let me be clear, my even saying this in the tone I am saying it with is objectionable even to people who might agree with me. They say, that I am being too pessimistic and that, at any rate, they don't have time to think about this its too horrible. This is true of people I am close to, my own family, my friends. No one contradicts the truth of what I'm saying, it's easy enough to prove just do simple research and you can, in a few hours, draw up your own crude risk-assessment matrix and come to a similar conclusion. Certainly there is a chance that if we do nothing that nothing seriously bad will happen in our lifetime--but this chance gets lower every year. I am certain that unless we address this issue very soon, in a century only the rich will survive and even them might not be able to live in that future. There are people today who are going to try and upload their personalities into cyberspace and exist in a virtual reality.
The sad part is that a transition to non-carbon energy is technologically possible--I'm not going to go into it all here but I will say this, that with fairly primitive technology the US astronauts went to the moon less than a decade after JFK announced the project. We've forgotten that I guess.
Those of us who have studied some science understand that our climate is a "complex system" which means, by definition, that outcomes cannot be predicted with any degree of accuracy because there are simply too many variables and there is no way, short of creating a model that is as complex as the Earth weather system and even now we lack not just the computing power, but the data to make it work. However, we can create various parameters and we can carry on rational risk assessments which generally proceed as follows: 1) you evaluate as best you can some range of probability as to the likelihood of the global temperature change and its possible effects with the best modelling you can find; 2) you evaluate what sorts of consequences might be in store for various temperature ranges; and 3) you evaluate the possible risks is you do nothing, a little, a lot, or genuinely try to do solve the problem. A risk analysis would say, for me, that there is a decent probability that we could face within a couple of decades a catastrophic positive feedback loop with methane rising out of the ocean and artic tundra as ice and tundra melt, since the artic is warming much faster. Now even if that probability is, say, 5%, is that a risk you would want to take? Now I thing that possibility is about 40%--by that I mean the probability no only that we would have a series of catastrophically high surface temperatures but that most life on earth as we know it would cease including all but a few very, very, very rich people who can afford to build little underground cities or whatever. The cost of actually trying to solve the problem would be, in my view, would be moderate in the short term and relatively minimal in the medium and long-term.
What is noticeable here is that no one (this calculus is being done in the security services who are planning for mass chaos and also by the rich in secret) in the media which is strictly controlled by the oligarch class which consists of hundreds of people and their retinues, is even addressing this risk assessment model even though each of the corporations that run the industry routinely make very sophisticated risk assessments of their business practices; few in academia are doing anything like this; and few if any in the general population even think that such a thing as risk-assessment even exists as a matrix for solving this sort of problem. Why? Because most Americans are, when confronted with a problem, either want to blow something up, or simply not think about it. Why? Because Americans are now used to living almost exclusively in fantasies.
Let me be clear, my even saying this in the tone I am saying it with is objectionable even to people who might agree with me. They say, that I am being too pessimistic and that, at any rate, they don't have time to think about this its too horrible. This is true of people I am close to, my own family, my friends. No one contradicts the truth of what I'm saying, it's easy enough to prove just do simple research and you can, in a few hours, draw up your own crude risk-assessment matrix and come to a similar conclusion. Certainly there is a chance that if we do nothing that nothing seriously bad will happen in our lifetime--but this chance gets lower every year. I am certain that unless we address this issue very soon, in a century only the rich will survive and even them might not be able to live in that future. There are people today who are going to try and upload their personalities into cyberspace and exist in a virtual reality.
The sad part is that a transition to non-carbon energy is technologically possible--I'm not going to go into it all here but I will say this, that with fairly primitive technology the US astronauts went to the moon less than a decade after JFK announced the project. We've forgotten that I guess.
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