Discussion for article #238330
“Not with a bang, but a whimper.” Sad that the human race may have survived discovery of the atom bomb, only to die slowly and painfully from global warming.
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The human race is not going to die out from global warming. Which is not to say it won’t be extremely bad if the worse scenarios come to pass, given that most major cities are on the coast, but it’s nothing like nuclear war. Hell, 55 million years ago the Earth was much warmer, there were no polar ice caps, and mammal diversity was higher than it’s ever been.
Yet we appear to be within the sixth great extinction. Global warming is one of the contributing factors that make humankind’s future precarious.
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Moynihan was a technocrat on par with some of the great minds of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust. Unfortunately he came along at a time during the great unraveling when Pat Buchanan was whispering in Nixon’s ear and John Ehrlichman was probably driving a muscle car.
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“Hugh Heffner knows a lot about this.” I thought his interests were rather different…
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It’s a different Hugh Heffner.
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Perhaps the environment would have benefited from a bit of benign neglect, then?
mammal diversity was higher than it’s ever been.
True. Of course, every one of those mammals had a completely different biochemistry and was specifically evolved to a different eco-environment, but who’s quibbling?
Well… “completely different biochemistry” is perhaps overstating it. It’s not as if raising the temperature will chemically poison us, at least not immediately or in the dramatic way we often think. But we are evolved for this specific environment uniquely and the physical and biochemical properties are linked. If your mother had gone back 50 million years in a time machine and born and raised you in that environment, you’d notice the difference, and not just because it would have been warmer. It would have had an adverse effect on your physical health. I have no doubt that you and your mother would been the ones facing extinction, due to ill health and early death.
Never forget that we are bottom dwellers in a shallow ocean of a specific chemical soup. Every time we open our mouths and inhale, like guppies sucking in a mouthful of sea water, our bodies are uniquely evolved for this soup. Even the surface of our skin is immersed in this soup 24 hours of every day; as an organ it is evolved to interact with it in its own way. And every time we exhale, like guppies crapping in the ocean, we are contributing to – and subtly changing – this soup, the chemical environment we and other organisms have evolved to inhabit. In other words, a bio-system doesn’t consist of a given fixed and static environment in which biological entities are placed inside it. The bio-system is one uniquely co-evolved system, and changing some part of it has consequences for all the other parts.
The point is, the environment from 50 million years ago was different – radically, albeit subtly – from today’s, and not just because of the physical property of temperature.
In other words: the problem is not just that we’re changing the PHYSICAL property of temperature to what it was 50 mya. Rather, the problem is the temperature is reverting to what it was 50 mya because we are changing the CHEMICAL properties of the environment to what it was 50 mya. Those two are not the same, and the latter has more serious ramifications than just the former.
(Note: Sorry, I meant this to be a reply to my previous comment above, not independent)