People quite often object to the idea of climate change, by saying that climate has always been changing. They triumphantly point out that there have been billions of years of climate change. Temperatures have been much higher than they are now and things still lived. Life will not end. Then they ask, why is it that alarmists neglect this fact?
The problem is that we ‘alarmists’ do not ignore this fact. Indeed if you believe we do, then you are probably not getting your information about alarmism from scientists. I know of no one interested in climate change who is not aware that there have been large numbers of different climates in Earth’s history and that many different kinds of creatures who have flourished or died out in these different climate regimes. No one expects life to die out completely in the current process of climate change, either.
What some people do say is that the Holocene period, which is the one in which humanity has been living, has been remarkably stable. During that stability, humans developed civilisations, which tend to fix us in place.
We currently seem to be facing a rapid period of climate change, ecological destruction and biodiversity loss; one measured in hundreds of years, not tens of thousands of years. This will almost certainly put massive stress on civilisations, the weather conditions will change, sea levels will change, water availability will change, food availability will change. As the change is rapid the chance is high that storms will increase. People will try to move from areas which no longer seem habitable to areas which do seem habitable. All of these factors will add further stress to civilisations.
So the big problem is not climate change in itself. One problem is whether it is likely that any of the current major civilisations will be able to cope with these stresses without significant social breakdown and population death. The other problem is whether any of them will do anything to significant lower the pressures, or the rate of change.
Countries are not all in a resilient place to begin with. Some civilisations may already be breaking down irrespective of climate change.
For example, many people in the US expect income and wealth inequality to grow and standards of living to continue to decline. By some accounts many of those people already suffer from unstable low incomes, food shortages, unaffordable medicine and rampant disease, and we have only just started moving into the additional problems of climate and eco-crisis. Given the US’s inability to keep its infrastructure repaired, protect its population from Covid-19 (now over half a million dead, and unknown numbers with ‘long covid’), look after people equally or rebuild after violent storms as in Puerto Rico [1], [2], or New Orleans (still), or prevent the energy consequences of a cold snap in Texas, then it seems improbable business and government will be able to cope with severe and added difficulties. They may, but it seems sensible to reduce the magnitude of the problem in advance, if that is at all possible.
Unfortunately, dealing with this change seems to threaten the power and wealth of some powerful groups of people, and they are doing their best to persuade people that it is not a problem. And they are doing this quite well. But for them its not a problem, they figure the ordinary folks will be the ones that suffer, and they can ride it out. They have wealth, they can buy violent protection, they can buy technology that will keep them safe. They may be even be correct, but do you want to sacrifice yourself, your friends and family to preserve these people’s power?
We can stick with helping the crisis to happen if we want, or we can ‘do the research’ overcome the misinformation being distributed, and try to think of solutions. If you really do think that people who are worried about climate change never consider that climate change has occurred in the past, then you might also want to think about why the people giving you your information about climate change alarmists are lying, and why.
Tags: climate change, Disinformation
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
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