However, you do know, since much has been said of it, that a theory to count as scientific there must be a way to disprove it. I don't hear climatologists making strong enough claims that can be tested against observation in a way that permits of refutation. — TheMadFool

How often do you hear any scientist announce at a press conference that his theory is falsifiable? Isn't falsifiability an entry level condition for a good scientific theory, rather than something that rates a major announcement?

All the evidence for global warming is based on temperature trends over the past few or so decades and even if there is an upward trend we can always ask if it could be cherry-picking — TheMadFool

As it happens, the evidence for global warming is not based just on a few decades of temperature trends. Geologists, 'ice'ologists, oceanographers, and various other specialties have been studying the past few million years for evidence of the relationship between CO2 in the atmosphere and climate. Take ice cores: What they find in very old ice are tiny bubbles of the then existing atmosphere. When the climate at the time is compared to the levels of CO2 in the ice, the correlation is strongly in favor of more CO2 = warmer climate. The same relationship is found in ocean floor mud, tree rings, cores of soils which go back thousands of years in time. Conversely, when CO2 levels are lower than average, the climate is cold. It isn't a correlation between CO2 and temperature: It's a causative relationship. CO2 absorbs and radiates solar energy more than other normal gases in the atmosphere. The more CO2, the hotter the climate.

In itself, global warming is neither a good nor a bad thing. At one time both ice caps had melted, and millions of years later, here we all are. The difference between past gyrations in climate (and there have been a few) is that they were slow. Plants and animals were able to adjust because they had many years in which to adapt to new conditions: Thousands of years, not 50 to 100 years.

That the climate should warm fast enough to melt the Arctic ice cap during a human lifetime, is unprecedented. That the average temperature should rise 2 or 3 degrees F in a human lifetime is unprecedented. That the 70% of the earth that is ocean has warmed up and become more acidic as a result of human activity in a one or two human lifetimes is astounding.

We participate in The Philosophy Forum because we like to collaborate at least to some extent. This site is, by its nature, collaborative. Solitary people who want to spout whatever philosophy or stupid nonsense they believe in, solo, can do so in the comfort of their own homes. Just open your mouth and start blathering away. Or they can open a blog on Tumblr and just scribble into the abyss.

As it happens, collaboration is one of the more successful ways of doing business in the world, whether it is feeding the poor and hungry, working for Exxon, or serving in the Mafia, Camorra, Cosa Nostra, or whatever criminal enterprise one is employed by.

Some individuals don't collaborate. Social isolates who live under bridges on rural freeways don't collaborate, for instance. Isolated monks and nuns who live solitary lives in prayer don't collaborate. Rattlesnakes don't collaborate. Mad dogs don't collaborate.

Are Do-gooders any different than mafia hitmen, as far as collaboration is concerned? Probably not.

Regarding fusion, for interested parties, there is a big international project, funded by the USA, China and the EU, among others, called ITER. It is a project which will, hopefully, prove the viability of industrial fusion, being scheduled for operation in 2025. — Solipsist

And it would really be wonderful if it works even moderately well. I would be ecstatic if ITER works really well. Pollution free energy would be a huge help. Just remember, though, even if ITER works as intended, it won't be a "production reactor". The routine production reactors will follow, and will take 40 to 50 years (possibly a low ball guess) to be installed around the world. Meantime, CO2 will continue to be dumped into the atmosphere.

Also, Tokamak reactors (and associated equipment) are heavy duty industrial equipment which will require a lot of energy and matériel to build.

Well, TMF, relativity has been worked on for a century, and it doesn't have to be proved against the behavior of the oceans, atmosphere, plants, animals, land masses, ice flows, industrially produced gases, and so on. Astronomical observations providing a major proof of relativity, but we didn't have to arrange that event. The problem with climate science is two-fold: First, it is difficult to collect densely distributed data points from the planet surface and secondly, it is difficult to process the masses of data that go into climate models. It takes a lot of big brute force computers, which have not been available since the first signs of climate change were discovered.

Climate science is solid science, like most areas of science. Climate science is not the equivalent of chiropractic medicine and astrology. It is NOT controversial because it hasn't been done well; it is controversial because the consequences of events revealed by the science are so catastrophic. Standard Oil scientists were the first to reveal the connection between fossil fuels, CO2, and climate change. Once the implications of their findings became clear to the company, the PR department took over and buried their results. That would make a good movie -- something like the one about Karen Silkwood. Bearers of bad tidings often end up without honor, if they survive.

there are two routes to carbon sequestration: The first is pumping it deep into the ground and filling the tap pipe with concrete. The second is combining CO2 with calcium, for instance, to make calcium carbonate. Both of these methods work, as far as we can tell, but both take energy to achieve and neither is designed to work with diluted atmospheric CO2. These are "carbon capture in the chimney and then sequestration"programs.

Both of these are technically feasible (as far as I know) but again, they haven't been scaled up, so we don't know whether they will work on a very large and permanent basis. Planting a trillion trees (and more) would be another way to capture CO2, and produce a lot of O in the process. A sprouted tree may take 20 years to get big enough to make a difference, but that's a workable time scale. A trillion trees, though, means less land for agriculture. In 50 to 80 years we would have a lot of mature trees to cut down to make room or more, NOT burn them, and replant.

retention is shot this year thanks to anxiety — Pfhorrest

I appreciate that. I've had some bad years of anxiety and depression and between the disease and the medication I couldn't absorb much, let alone remember it. Fortunately, that proved transitory. Once I retired I had a return of mental clarity. It wasn't instant but it was pretty fast. Now I feel like I'm function (mentally) like a young man, instead of the old guy I am.

Best wishes for your mental health in the coming New Year, which I also hope will be happy. But let's not hold our breath. There's that election, for instance.

I do what I can personally, I don't fly, I heat my house mostly with wood I have grown myself and am researching an appropriate ground source heat pump to install... — Punshhh

All good. Please continue.

Unfortunately (and it really is a misfortune) the problem can not be solved by virtuous individual efforts. That doesn't mean your efforts are wasted, however. You are following the course we all could follow, and if we all did, the world would be much better off. Anyone who shows that reduced consumption is not only possible but perfectly satisfactory is doing good work.

The petrochemical/metal/auto/consumer industrial establishment is the problem, and all that is under the ownership and control of a fairly small group of very wealthy, very powerful people--maybe 10 to 15 million stockholders who make up the planet's economic elite. They are calling the shots, and they do not intend to abandon their extremely remunerative oil, coal, and manufacturing assets. They will extract the last dollar's worth of value, and the devil can take the hindmost.

One day we'll have fusion power. The US gave up on researching it because it was politically unpopular. I'm guessing the Chinese will do it eventually. — frank

As I recollect, it wasn't so politically unpopular as technically unsuccessful. It isn't dangerous, but it is extraordinarily difficult to achieve sustained fusion inside a 'force field'. If all the powerful physical forces are not perfectly arranged, then nothing much happens.

Fusion is a great disappointment; I really wish we had been successful by now.

But energy isn't the only issue. Suppose we figure out how to make fusion power work. It will still take a good long time to build out the necessary units. Time is an issue here, an asset we are running out of. By the time fusion provides all this power too cheap to meter (dream on) we will be late in this century when the fecal matter has hit the fan.

Energy and time are not the only issues. There is also the issue of raw material processing. Making steel from ore without the chemical and physical properties of coke and limestone is an unknown technology. There will still be no substitute for the hydrocarbon molecules that are at the center of so much of our technology. 9 or 10 billion people, or 13 billion--whatever it turns out to be by the end of the century--will still exceed the sustainable fecundity of the oceans and soils. (We are already doing that, actually.).

We are pinning hope on what James Howard Kunstler called (in the title of the book) "Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation".

Where does this all leave us? I expect that there will be a large die off of the human population along with many other species, and down the road a few centuries, that our species will survive in a diminished world.

We still have an emergency brake available (the abrupt abandonment of the fossil-fuel-based economy, world wide). The brake will not be engaged because the immediate consequence would be horrendous economic, social, agricultural, cultural, industrial, and demographic decomposition. While probably saving the climate and many species, it would paradoxically produce much of the disaster we'd like to avoid.

A sensible plan. How long do you think that will last? (I'm counting on the same thing -- heating and AC for at least the next 10 years. Beyond that... given my age, probably the grave.)

Gad, these are corny; one could fatten pigs on them. Thanks for posting them.

I'm not sure what percentage of mankind are assholes, but it certainly could be as high as 90%. Clearly you and me are superior beings.

The problem here is that the role of evolution and genes in determining complex behaviors is by no means clearly or well understood. My view is that homosexuality is genetically determined, but perhaps indirectly. Rather than genes acting directly on males, it may involve genes acting in the female to produce a sequence and timing of hormones during early pregnancy that results in males being homosexual. Your description sounds like another indirect mechanism, But again, we really don't know.

We have 46 chromosomes (23 pairs) but we have a huge number of genes, some of which operate indirectly. A given gene may have a significant effect on development by turning another gene off or on. A lot of genes have direct effects, and many genes have effects by turning others on and off.

our behaviors don't track back to many specific genes, so far anyway. I'm gay. There are most likely a whole set of genes that operate directly and indirectly that result in my finding a particular guy irresistible, and making the necessary moves to have sex with him, and perhaps live him for decades - just like there would be for heterosexual attraction.

Qmeri, human behavior has ALWAYS bounced back and forth between laudable and lamentable. The Internet is, indeed, a tremendously useful amalgam of technologies. Inventing it was laudable. Donald Trump's narcissistic self-infatuation is lamentable, and he'd be that way with or without the Internet. Ditto for whatever ails Elon Musk.

There is a lot of excellent information made available through the Internet, but there is also a lot of slop. Libraries didn't have the problem of accumulating slop because laudable librarians didn't let it happen. There is a lamentable lack of librarians looking after the Internet.

Just a note, you are part of mankind, so... whatever ails mankind probably ails you too. Me as well.

it is an "east is east and west is west" kind of difference. Bob Hope and Jane Russell sang it in a movie, Paleface, back in 1947. Never saw it, but the song was popular for a long time. Everybody sang it, even Gene Autry -- to his horse, Champion the wonder horse, I suppose. Kinky.

East is east and west is west
And the wrong one I have chose
Let's go where they keep on wearin'
Those frills and flowers and buttons and bows

People often come to diverse opinions even with the same evidence before them. And, in the case of global warming, it doesn't matter what you and I believe. The world isn't doing a whole lot about reducing CO2 and methane emissions, and that includes every nation on earth.

I have written elsewhere that actually making the kind of changes that I and other extremists think are necessary, and doing so at the speed that might be advisable to save the climate, would initially be a cultural, health, and economic disaster which would be responsible for many deaths. How? By producing massive turmoil and disruption in almost all human activities!

Halting the mining of fossil fuels (coal and oil), ceasing the production of individual cars, drastically curtailing air travel, reducing consumption of electricity (server farms, for instance, produce about as much CO2 to cool equipment as air travel does), sharply reducing consumer consumption and at the same time switching to all-renewable energy sources or doing without, and so on and so forth, would produce disturbances in the production and distribution of food and essential supplies that would lead to many deaths. (Many = hundreds of millions around the world).

How would people in northern latitudes stay warm in winter (and elsewhere, cool in summer)? How would food be produced, processed, and distributed? How would necessary pharmaceuticals be produced? What kind of work could most people do, under these circumstances?

Eventually the world would adjust -- it would probably take around 50 to 60 years, minimum. Historical item: Major changes in technology have generally taken around 40 to 50 years to be fully adopted. By the time all this was accomplished, the momentum of global warming might have started to slow down and the population would have been significantly reduced.

No national or international body or its leaders want to be responsible for this sort of act of commission -- though their acts of omission will have at least the same or worse results.

I can safely pontificate all I want because the levers of power are nowhere even remotely close to my reach.

I doubt very much that you are either ignorant or uninformed. Where did the global warming narrative really begin to unravel for you?

A friend who reads deeply about climate change and economics has commented that there are some objections that can be raised against both the manner in which global warming is reported and to the conclusions which may be drawn. There are conflicting reports on the same issue -- whether, for instance, China's performance in reducing emissions (or the USA performance, or anyone else's) is not meeting, meeting, or exceeding some targets.

Sometimes the avalanche of information is overwhelming and one has to withdraw from contemplation of the details just to save one's sanity. And sometimes the avalanche is repetitious -- the same findings are presented again and again as news.

I wonder, for instance, how accurate the accounts of CO2 emissions are. When I read a report that says that so many gazillion tons of CO2 or methane are being added to the atmosphere, I wonder just how did they calculate that figure? CO2 may be the better measurement -- take published fossil fuel production figures, calculate how much CO2 is produced per ton of coal or oil, and multiply. Fine. But methane is much trickier.

Gas bubbles are coming off the bottom of lakes in northern Canada and Siberia and collecting under the ice. Poke a hole in the ice, light a match, and you get a flash burn of flaming methane. Did anybody check this out 50 or 100 years ago? Is there a change? Or methane in the Arctic Ocean: was it there 100 years ago? When the Nautilus navigated under the polar ice (some 60+ years ago, give or take a couple) did they discover any thing unusual, like big bubbles? (they weren't looking, I would imagine.). l

The changes I believe in the most are changes I can see around me: noticeably warmer winters; plants leaving out and blossoming something like 2 or 3 weeks than usual -- for the last 10-15 years. Fewer flying insects; fewer birds, etc.

I'm a believer, but there are "issues" in the information. It's sort of like the problem of AIDS and HIV back in the 1980s: Public Health people wanted people to get concerned, and they were successful: The people who were least at risk were by far the most anxious--the worried well. Gay men, the most at risk group, drew their own conclusions from their experience, and many were fatalistic. It is difficult to shape successful messages for different groups of people. Some people never did get good information.

I have no reason to think NASA is lying about anything. Do I believe climate change is real? Not in the way it’s being reported. — Brett

Here is an article from INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS that provide a survey of what has been published in the last 10 years about climate change.

Believe it or not, but at least this is the sort of thing which causes my alarm about the future.

Was 3M corrupt in their initial intentions? — Brett

Probably not. The intention of developing fire retardants was not corrupt. It may have been ill-advised, it may have been saintly; I don't know, I wasn't in on the planning. What was much less morally ambiguous was dumping a lot of the chemicals used in a permeable soil dump, where the stuff percolated down (quite a long way) to the water table. They dumped PFAS and PFAS waste in various states, not just in Minnesota.

The sales effort involved in getting PFAS into everything from pajamas to carpet to adult rain gear (!) and much more was probably independent of any caution their chemistry department had about the stuff. It has become ubiquitous, and it won't be disappearing anytime soon. What 3M did was decide that it was a good idea to coat the planet with a super stable chemical that is known to cause health and environmental problems independently of its beneficial aspects. That for the sake of profit. Lots of large corporations have done exactly the same thing with other chemicals and products.

You jump from the apple farmers to Amazon as if there’s nothing in between. — Brett

Come on, Brett, buddy. One can't cover all the possibilities with out a post that would be longer than the entire oeuvre of The Philosophy Forum.

I'm cranky, sure. But there is nothing wrong with "capital", "capitalism", and "capitalist". The Wall Street Journal uses these terms proudly. Capitalism is an economic system of corporations producing profit for stockholders. (Individual entrepreneurs, of course, do that for themselves.) It is a very robust, powerful system. It's a great system for those who are its primary beneficiaries: stockholders, managers, and well-paid employees who receive benefits. It's a very bad system for those who suffer the consequences of corporate actions which produced profits but damaged the world. It is a bad system for employees who are crudely exploited.

There is a quantitative difference and almost of necessity a qualitative difference between the small apple grower who sells produce at small farmers markets on the one hand, and United Fruit Company which fucked over Central America (they started back in 1899) with the help of American gun boat diplomacy. There is a difference between Whole Foods (now part of Amazon) and the couple that raise specialty mushrooms in their basement and sell fresh at farmers markets. Sure, it seems like the couple was selling the mushrooms for a pretty penny ($32 a pound) but they were excellent, and they aren't receiving any government subsidies and aren't covered by crop insurance.

The apple farmer and mushroom producer are what are called "petite bourgeoisie". The US has millions of petite bourgeoisie, operating family farms, small grocery stores, repair shops, small diners, little businesses selling stuff or a service, and the like. Much different than Jeff Bezos at Amazon. In many ways these petite bourgeoisie are the salt of the earth. They work very hard for very modest returns.

The Sackler family are multi-billionaires and are not even remotely in the same league as the guy with the small apple orchard guy. So yes, distinctions can be made between the tiny, petite (pronounced 'petty') bourgeoisie and multinational, multi-billion dollar mogul.

But the capitalist mandate is dangerous: maximize profit, externalize costs, pay workers the lowest possible wages, sell the product at the highest possible price. Never ask whether what you are selling is "good". If it makes money, that is all that matters.

"Good" and "bad" corporations all do the same things, pretty much. Take 3M, maker of Post-It notes and Scotch Tape. They make a lot of other stuff, too. They make a lot of fire-retardants, everything from a chemical found in children's pajamas to the foam spread on the runway when a plan may have crash on landing. These fine products contain perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS), chemicals that never break down but do bio-accumulate. Studies have documented multiple effects, including cancers in highly exposed groups — especially testicular and kidney cancers — as well as impacts to the immune system and metabolism. Evidence also indicates that elevated PFAS in wildlife can lead to developmental and reproductive problems, the groups noted.

Millions of tons of the product have been very profitably sold, and now these chemicals are everywhere, from the suburban St. Paul, MN water systems contaminated by 3M dumps, to ice in the antarctic; from people in China to squirrels in Central Park. Everywhere. Fire retardants would seem like a good thing at first glance, but then we find they are 'forever chemicals' that can make us animals sick when concentrated by bioaccumulation (like bald eagles, apex predators, getting dosed with the stuff).

No, we don't need another word. Capitalism is a good accurate term. So, every capitalist is not guilty of Sackler-grade crimes. The universe is full of such annoying incongruities. Just round up the usual suspects, and later you can let the nice wolves go. Oligarchs? They don't have to be capitalists (oligarchs existed before capitalism) but some capitalists are oligarchs.

Would we? And is it really that easy to pin the guilt on capitalist predators like the Sackler family? I think a healthy society could handle its predators. — praxis

It really is that easy if you are prepared to foreswear fealty to capitalism and face how ruthlessly exploitative capitalists tend to be. The Sacklers are guilty; the Koch brothers are guilty; lots of people are guilty of fucking over the world in really very exploitative ways. They can be named. We could change the laws which protects these bastards. They could be put out of business. That would be a healthy society at work. Instead we stand around with our thumbs up our collective asses muttering drivel about free enterprise, and all that crap.

I don't think it is necessary to point out that capitalists are not standing idly by, waiting for the peasants to take up pitchforks and torches and burn the castle down. They industriously propagandize and legislate on their own behalf, and we fools believe them.

For the last three years life expectancy in the USA has declined, so something ain’t right. — praxis

Something ain't right, for sure. The UK has also experienced a decline in life expectancy, but we are talking about a small change for both the US and UK..

"Life expectancy" is an average. The decline has been brought about by higher rates of death among people who use opiates (ODs) and chronic users of highly addictive drugs like meth. Suicide rates among working class men have also lowered life expectancy. Deaths from heart attacks are down, and deaths from cancer are either steady or declining.

In the last 50 years the rate of smoking among adults has dropped from around 45% to about 15%. The rate of lung cancer deaths has fallen for people who quit smoking say 20 years ago. Some people are living longer and some people are dying younger.

In a healthier society (one less sickened by the depredations of capitalist predators like the Sackler family's opiate racket) we would live longer and/or happier lives.

I'm pretty sure there WILL BE "wildfires in the west, drought, agriculture failure and mass migration". I'm pretty sure that the boreal forests in Canada will burn too -- not next week, but at some point in the not too-distant future. I expect that there will be more fires in various places along the lines of the current fires in Australia (December 2019).

"Society" will survive in some form, even with a catastrophic die-off of human populations. There will be some places where life will go on for some people. How bad the environment becomes in 1000 years can't be guessed; there are just too many factors to consider. Most likely it will not be very good.

"Civilization" (apart from whatever society happens to be like at any given moment) will likely suffer pretty severely. A lot of our cultural heritage will be lost--not just from fire, flood, hot humid mold-and-rot-encouraging climate, marauding hordes, and so forth. "Civilization" requires intact inter-generational stability for learning and style to be passed on intact. Our civilization will die like previous civilizations have died, and will be revived by other people in later times (assuming we do not go extinct).

I'm not optimistic about the long term future. But there is always hope.

Thanks for the link to Economic Times/India Times, and your thoughtful posts.

Although nuclear facilities like power stations would likely go off. — Punshhh

Nuclear facilities are vulnerable, true enough. While a plant can be shut down (the nuclear reaction halted), there is fuel stored in water pools (sometimes above ground) which definitely will not remain harmless forever. As we saw in Chernobyl and Fukushima, things can spectacularly go to hell really fast. The plants will not explode like nuclear bombs, however.

I don't know how much Anthropology has caught up with this idea, so this is only speculation. It looks to me that during a previous catastrophic global flooding most of humanity was wiped out in a stroke. — Punshhh

There was never enough water on the planet to produce a flood that could wipe out humanity all at once. Even the big meteorite that wiped out the big dinosaurs didn't kill everything off -- mammals, birds, and insects survived and mammals became the dominant animal.

The catastrophic event which global warming may well bring about will be composed of features which in combination will prove fatal: too many people to feed, agriculture not able to produce enough food, not enough water, too much heat, severe environmental degradation, disorganization. Nothing more is required than that to drop the population from 7 or 8 billion back to where it was around 70 years ago -- 2 billion. It also won't be instantaneous; expect it to take a few decades. The survivors will get to watch while it happens.

You are right that a big cataclysm is a-coming, but the two critical factors are timing and location (always, location, location, location). The ocean has risen some, and will rise a lot more; as bad as the long-term effects will be, remember, the rise--relative to our life times--is slow. But again, it depends where you live. People who live on low-rise islands are already screwed. People who live in areas only a little above sea level (Jakarta, Baltimore, Amsterdam, Venice) won't have to wait too long for really serious problems-- probably in the latter part of this century. The New York Metropolitan area has already paid many billions of dollars to repair itself after Hurricane Sandy. They should be spending as many billions more to get ready for the next one. Areas along the gulf coast need to be depopulated for a ways inland to get people and property out of harms way.

For a lot of people, flooding isn't going to be the problem: it's drought, as you mentioned, and yes, fresh water will be in very short supply. People who have been driven out of their homelands by successive crop failures, drought, or repeated floods (whatever the hell it is) are going to move, and if the nations in their path don't want them there, there will be BIG trouble.

However, granted all that, I don't believe "survivalism" will work. What the "survivalist" hunkered down in his huge underground bunker with huge tanks of water, canned food up the ying yang, and so on, are really "delayers of the inevitable" rather than survivalists.

That a little cadre of Navy Seals (or something like that) can hole up in a mountain fastness and not only protect themselves and their children's children's children, but actually sustain a fragment of civilization is fantasy. Such fantasy makes for great SF plots, but a poor plan for the real world. Why?

First, because the life in the bunker will be pretty much static, and minds living in static conditions start to dull after a while. People will go nuts. Second, the supplies will eventually run out. Up in the mountains a good deal of what you bought down in the valley from the local Walmart won't be replaceable in your little habitat. Third, You won't be able to revert to a hunter-gatherer style of living either, because the first thing you will run into is a lot of other people hunting and gathering too. Fourth, all the people who are living in the degraded world will have made critical adaptations to a potentially very hostile environment. Maybe they got over the embarrassment of cannibalism and and know how to select dinner from the herd. You won't; you might be more likely to end up in the kettle.

The best way to survive is to survive in as large a functioning community as possible -- generally that means at least a small city with enough people bearing the diversity of skills it takes to keep everyone alive and well.

All of the large functioning communities are NOT going to disappear. Adaptable cities will have found ways to supply themselves with food--sustainable methods of food production and preservation. Adaptable cities will still have schools, libraries, musical performances, doctors, mechanics, plumbers, etc. -- all the people and institutions that produce civilization.

In one hundred years, 2120, sea level rise will have fairly noticeable consequences, especially for cities that were reclaimed from the ocean. A good example would be Boston. Some of Boston, MA will stay high and dry, but the core of the city will revert to wetland. It's not called "Back Bay" for nothing. It used to be open water and then was filled in in the 19th century.

In 300 years, it may be the case that the lower Mississippi River Valley will be one very big bay opening off of the Gulf of Mexico. The northern Great Plains in the future will be much warmer, more like the southern plains are now. That is NOT going to take hundreds of years. And just a word to people who imagine the corn, wheat, and bean belt migrating into Canada, it isn't going to happen. A good share of Canada is not agricultural land. It takes a long time for warming tundra to turn into fertile properly structured soil--not hundreds of years, but thousands.

A warmer climate has a relationship to insect populations, but what is much more significant for insect population crashes is the burden of pesticides, like the neonicotinoids which are indiscriminate, and nerve-gas derived poisons (organophosphates) aimed at particular agricultural pests, but which then drift, spread, and poison non-targets. Then there are the insane lawn care people that put down poisons to get rid of ants--ordinary black ants that make the little round sand circles on cracks in the sidewalk. Another enemy of insect populations is mono-culture--endless fields of corn, soybeans and wheat, and nothing much else.

Please don't post any more pictures of giant yellow jacket colonies. I can stand a few small round hives on the ceiling of the garage, which I generally let live, but giant house-invading, car-engulfing super-colonies look too much like the Supreme Growth of science fiction nightmares.

Also I don't think we can predict where the line is which we could cross resulting in runaway climate change. — Punshhh

Not precisely, no; but we can make guesses. For instance, there are a lot of lakes and Arctic Ocean floors from which methane is bubbling up, the product of bacterial decomposition of organic material.

Methane in the atmosphere traps much more heat than CO2, and as the arctic warms (faster than mid latitudes), more and more previously frozen vegetable matter will rot and more and more methane will be out-gassed. The more methane, the faster the arctic warms, the more methane. This is the sort of feedback loop that will produce a tipping point where the atmosphere has warmed enough, that some other large change will cascade into being--probably much to our disadvantage. One of the cascade possibilities is a rapid increase in Greenland ice melting, flushing too much fresh water into the ocean to maintain the conveyor belt of warm gulf salt water on top glowing north, and cold arctic salt water flowing south. If and when this happens, the prevailing westerlies that pick up gulf heat crossing the north Atlantic will turn cold and Europe will become much colder (despite global warming). @John Gill

At the same time, the NYT has published photos of methane gas plumes coming out of natural gas and fracking operations that are much, much bigger than anyone was previously aware of.

The first satellite designed to continuously monitor the planet for methane leaks made a startling discovery last year: A little known gas-well accident at an Ohio fracking site was in fact one of the largest methane leaks ever recorded in the United States.

Societies that maintain the ability to create vaccines will survive. The others will die out. — frank

You are assuming the vaccine-wielding nations won't have starved before they sickened from novel viruses. The extinction of insects has already begun, and many of the evaporating species of insects are pollinators--not just honey bees, but they are the most familiar.*** About 35% of our food supply depends on pollinators -- fruits, nuts. seeds, and vegetables. Things like apples and orange, carrots, peanuts, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, etc. [no more French fries]. Rice, wheat, and corn are self-pollinators and would continue in production without bees. Then again, corn, rice, and wheat production will probably be significantly reduced by heat, drought, and unseasonable rain, a shortage of fertilizers, and eventually (owing to the demise of abundant petroleum) a lack of fuel for ag. equipment.

***(I suspect that nasturtiums--a salad plant developed in France--are pollinated by earwigs. The beautiful and edible blossom has a sharp mustard-like scent and are often obscured by the foliage. Earwigs are the only animal I have ever seen crawling around in the blossoms.)

In conclusion we are, in all probability, totally screwed.

I know it was callous. It also happens to be true. That said, I'd rather be in a society that reaches out with compassion to people who are in pain than one that sees them as superfluous (even though we probably all are.) — frank

Make up your mind, Frank: either you want to live in a compassionate society, and one where people are NOT seen as standardized production units that are interchangeable and removable without consequence, OR you can accept a society where employees are superfluous (we are not quite there yet), disposable, and a COST rather than an ASSET -- which is current practice.

I once heard that when workers unionize, they just get two asshole bosses instead of one since unionizers tend to be belligerent buttheads. — frank

Did this pearl of wisdom fall out of your head when you last blew your nose? Look, corporations are often quite flawed, because corporate bosses are flawed, and unions are flawed because the membership (and leaders) are flawed. "Nothing straight was ever built with the crooked timber of mankind" Kant said. Truer words are rarely spoken.

The AFSCME union to which I belonged at one time was not highly effective largely because its membership was kind of passive and timid. The leadership wasn't great, but then the membership wasn't either. Plus, the relatively recently organized AFSCME unit to which I belonged was at a public university where the administration had not thought it worthwhile during the previous century to consider the needs or interests of the people who performed all of the diverse services we provided.

Still, workers have nothing else other than solidarity to protect themselves from the predations of corporate wolves or state bureaucrats. The efforts to build solidarity may be halting and clumsy, but eventually concerted efforts pay off. The old Bell Telephone System treated its employees quite well because the Communication Workers of America had put the telephone company over the barrel enough times for Bell to fear the wrath of CWA. GM started paying attention to union demands after the workers seized control of their big assembly plant.

Were all the Civilized Nations (sic) to apply the French law to their various corporate and/or state employers and then resort to the guillotine, a new large corporation would be needed to design, build, deliver, and maintain all the beheading equipment--sharpening blades, cleaning up the copious blood spatter, making sure that Occupational Safety and Health rules were followed, etc.

There is a reason why we get paid for coming into work every day: we sure as hell wouldn't do it for free.

There is something about the world-wide dominant paradigm of management - worker relations that so easily begins the slide down the slippery slope towards dehumanization, alienation, anomie, etc, and I bet France is a relatively good place to work, by and large. And maybe the workers at this spoiled Orange French Telecom should have practiced more la solidarité and la résistance, oui?

Moral responsibility works both ways -- offense and defense. A better cure than small fines and short jail sentences (which are under appeal and might be dismissed) is strong united worker power.

Can a discussion about bullshit be anything other than bullshit? Is analytical distance possible? Or can one only lament?

although the more passionate ones believe in theirs — god must be atheist

Eloquent bullshit*** can degrade discourse, but believing one's own bullshit is THE cardinal sin.

*** "If you can't dazzle them with facts, then baffle them with bullshit."

How are such societies dysfunctional? — TheMadFool

They are dysfunctional because they have been fucked over too many times. People left to their own devices generally settle down to live ordinary lives more or less peacefully together. Until, that is, they are invaded, colonized, obliterated, subjugated, and so forth, Or until they start invading, colonizing, obliterating, subjugating, and so on. Nothing new here -- it's been going on for a long time--millennia.

But the thing is, it's very hard to fix the damage. Take Haiti: there is a country that has been multi-fucked-over. At times they have been in pretty good shape, but then some larger nation would screw them up again. Take your average banana republic: fucked over by the church, the military, international agribusiness (Chiquita banana et al), the US State Department, etc. Take Iraq: run by a dictator, subjected to a pretty bad war (USA, USA, USA ...), then some more war, ISIS, internecine terrorism, and so on.

Normally, the best fucked up societies can hope for is maybe a century or so of being left alone and they gradually put themselves back together.

It's like a plant: You can transplant a healthy specimen and it will do fine if you take care of it. But if you run over it, keep pulling it up every week, let it dry out or rot in a swamp, it will be dead before long.

Anyone who follows global warming closely has to be aware of the problems involved in talking about both "conditions that are changing now" but are part of "conditions that will change over 1, 2, or 3 centuries time". RIGHT: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Dhaka, Shanghai, New York, or Boston are not going to be evacuated next year or next decade, even if some small low-rise Pacific Islands are pretty close to being frequently flooded. Things are changing rapidly, but the great mass of ice, water, and land means that these changes aren't going to be over in a few years. Greenland and Antartica will take quite a while to melt.

But it's necessary to keep people's minds on both the present and the distant future, because (well, you know all this, I am sure) what we have done in the last 150 years, what we are doing now and will probably continue to do (adding CO2 and methane to the atmosphere) can't be undone quickly. Also, there are those worrying tipping points, where some changes happen quickly, and unpredictably.

I don't know what is in Greta's future, of course. Christ, I don't know what is in my own immediate future. My guess is that she will remain an activist of some sort but that her newsworthiness will fade, which is probably a good thing for her, if not everybody else.

Were I writing your paper, I would look among anthropologists, psychologists, or sociologists. Some philosophers might have written on the subject, but scholars in other fields definitely have.

I am thinking of Keep The River on Your Right by Tobias Schneebaum. It was published in 1969, and is a good lively read. The book deals with Schneebaum's encounter with the isolated Arakmbut tribe in Peru. The book deals much more with cannibalism than nakedness, but the description of his first encounter, in which he was stripped naked and investigated in detail is worth a read. Schneebaum wasn't mortified, apparently, and certainly the Arakmbut were not embarrassed either.***

Not every group of people is troubled by nakedness and shame. Any number of groups have been encountered who did not feel shame about being naked, though their "discoverers" (like missionaries, anthropologists, or conquistadores) may have felt intense shame about their own own nakedness. Shame and nakedness need not be seen as natural and necessary.

People feel shame about certain actions (theft, nakedness, sexual acts, religious acts, etc.) because they think these actions are wrong. Or they believe their bodies are very inadequate -- too thin, too fat, too pale, too dark, too this, too that -- and they are embarrassed if other people see them naked.

I overcame a good deal of shame about my body by a method similar to "flooding" which is used to overcome phobias: I found a park where other gay men sunbathed in the nude and I did likewise. Undressing in public and laying on a towel in the open took a lot of nerve on my part, but it was curative. After a few visits to the nude park I began to feel less and less shame about my appearance. (I discovered that I had misapprehended how others saw me.). In a couple of weeks I was cured.

There is also "modesty" -- a condition where people avoid being seen naked because they think it is wrong, They may not feel shame about it, but they do avoid nakedness in the sight of others.

All that sunbathing was about 40 years ago. Its benefits (aside from a couple of basil cell skin cancers) has endured.

***Summary: Keep the River on your Right is a short memoir written by painter/anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum and published in 1969. It is an account of his journey into the jungles of Peru where he is accepted by "primitive" Indians and ultimately a tribe of cannibals named the Arakmbut, which he refers to by the pseudonym Arakama. Schneebaum was presumed dead by colleagues, friends, and family after he disappeared for years into the jungle, the last westerner to see him was a missionary who had given him instructions he would find the cannibals if he "kept the river to his right." However, Schneebaum struck up a friendship with the Arakmbut based partially around his considerable art skills and his interest in theirs. The book is most renowned for its anthropological observation of flesh-eating rituals and the honest, light-hearted style in which it was written.

There are non-profits that teach people "how to fish"; some of them work in the US (or other developed countries), and some of them work in the third world. Most of them are doing good, honest work.

The problem that these programs face, even the most excellent ones, is that many, many millions of people live in societies that are at least somewhat dysfunctional, and no amount of programming can overcome people's disadvantages on a piecemeal basis. What some countries need, frankly, is a thoroughgoing revolution to remake themselves, but... that's a very risky strategy. Look at Haiti: there's a country fucked over by crooks for decades. The US has played a role in keeping things fucked up there. The problems in Haiti are way beyond mere fishing lessons.

I'm not sure that dithering over "quantum supremacy" even qualifies as political correctness. It's not even wrong. It's nonsensical.

What seems to be going on with this (and other) words is that people look at a word, check to see if they can free-associate something negative to the word, and if hey can, they feel everyone must stop using it. The behavior reminds me of the Monty Python skit in which the daughter becomes hysterical whenever she hears a "tinny sounding word" - preferring "woody sounding words"--like "intercourse".

This nonsensical political correctness is starting to infest science fiction. I recently read two sci-fi novels in which there were "aliens from other star systems". The leadership on board the space ships were very concerned that racist or prejudicial terms not be applied to the aliens. One of the alien species, a bird-like creature, interbred with a human. (Don't ask me how that would work!). The human mother was very protective of her monstrous child, very concerned that people would reject her because she was "different". Different indeed. While the mother was dithering over the equal rights opportunities for her half-bird child, the bird species was busy wiping out 9/10 of the human inhabitants on earth--too stupid and not cooperative enough. For some odd reason the humans didn't accuse the killer birds of genocide.

Back when psychoanalysis defined homosexuality as a serious deviation, the establishment considered thought it was constructed--domineering mothers, distant fathers, etc. In the early days of gay liberation (1972, to pick a year) the idea that homosexuality was essentialist was dominant and liberating. "Nature composed my sexuality in this manner, and it is good" was an empowering idea. 40 years later constructionism is back, only its more DIY this time around. Now we have this absurd list of 50 genders, which is itself an indication that gender theorists have run amok.

Essentialism and Constructionism are recruited for whatever purpose is at hand. Gender politics is a form of polymorphous perversity all by itself.

Unfortunately the list of card-carrying Liberal/Progressives was stolen just the other day by Rudy Giuliani and a gang of pro-Russian Ukrainian thugs as part of the Trump reelection campaign. Stay tuned for further announcements on the matter.

There have been a number of discussions of essentialist vs. constructionist thinking on gender in Quillette. This article is an example, and there are 3 additional articles linked at the bottom of the page.

The politics surrounding whether x, y, or z is determined by essentialism or constructionism is a swamp one does well to stay out of.

Sex is determined at the moment of fertilization: xx or xy. The body may begin with a female template of sorts, but it is destined to be either xx or xy. Sex isn't decided at birth by a committee -- it's identified at birth. in almost all cases, it's clear whether the neonate is male or female.

The human genome is 3 billion base pairs. What we are isn't wide open to choice. Those billions of base pairs define us as human with varying degrees of intelligence, physical characteristics, mental and physical features and traits. A lot of what we are, and how we exist in the world, is determined by genetics, like it or not.

This is an essentialist view. It isn't the sole property of conservatives. There are progressives who are also essentialists and conservatives who are constructionists.

True enough, our human behavior and personality is at least somewhat pliable. How it all is expressed is determined by both genes and environment. It doesn't make sense to take an extreme essentialist or a constructionist position. Clearly, both methods of shaping behavior are in play,

Don't get sex and gender mixed up. Males and females all have gender roles, and there is quite a bit of consistency in the roles, but sex is not adjustable; gender behavior is.

The old expression, "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" applies to animals, including us. Your average cow isn't going to win prizes at the state fair. A dog that is not very bright is going to stay that way. Highly risk averse people have generally been risk averse from their first baby steps, and explorers have, likewise, been that way from the get go. Very smart people tend to stay smart throughout life. Stupid children usually grow up to be stupid adults.