Climate update
Worrying discussion of "runaway climate change." This kind of stuff leads me to think that the planet is actually genuinely screwed and we may have seen the peak of human civilization. We could be headed for the world described in the central portion of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas - obviously having bypassed that futuristic bit (it's a fine read and recommended BTW).
No more below.
No more below.
posted by Peter at 10:35
1 Comments:
Nope. There are two cumulatively runaway effects at play here but they only account for one of them.
This is a "bona-fide" anthropic coincidence, and ALL anthropic coincidences are balanced between diametrically opposing <-|-> runaway tendencies toward certain death.
What is not being considered here is the the long-term trend toward glaciation that is predicted by empirically derived Milankovitch models, which predict that we are now overdue for a 100,000 year long period of total glaciation of the planet. These cycles are preceeded by a 10,000 year long interglacial, for which we exist beyond the tail end of.
Both, the runaway greenhouse effect, and glaciation are cumulatively runaway, so global warming prevents the accumulation of snow, which reflects light and causing less of it to melt off each year until the balance tips and we fall all the way to the opposite extreme end of the relevant spectrum.
So the fact that we're basically clueless about all of this indicates that the survival mechanism is innate... like squirrils that bury nuts for the winter without any real understanding for why they do it.
Now, don't get me wrong here, certainly intelligence enables environmental awarness and this causes us to act, but don't assume that this isn't simply to prevent us from getting "bitch-slapped" rather than exterminated, because ecobalances are proven to be **self-regulating**.
You can't fool mother nature, and we aren't going anywhere that she does not want us to go.
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