Not sure how long it will be there
Thanks for these posts. I’ve watched some of the XR film (I’ll catch the rest of the film tomorrow hopefully) and it’s started very well I thought. Roger Hallam makes apt points doesn’t he.
It’s interesting that Beyond Politics targeted these organizations. And now they are on hunger strike. Good luck to them…
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Yes, the film is good. It’s not that surprising to me that RH and XR have parted ways - I watched a video a while back in which he was bemoaning the shift to the center that was happening in XR.
There’s a big tension playing out within the multi-faceted environmentalist movement right now. On the one hand there are folk who believe in the high likelihood or even inevitability of some kind of unstoppable momentum in the climate breakdown (and hence some kind of societal collapse) and on the other those who believe this is defeatist, and that everything remains to fight for.
I’ve been reading a lot of Jem Bendell’s thoughts on Deep Adaptation, which caused a huge controversy when he wrote it. Much like the Planet of the Humans film by Jeff Gibbs (which I also thought was very good). RH seems to be quite firmly in the deep adaptation camp.
XR seems to straddle both sides, but a lot of environmentalists and climate scientists argue strongly against it…
A future discussion topic here at 5F I think!
Regardless of all that, RH is an incredibly brave man. On hunger strike for the second time. I’ve not seen a mention of that on the MSM yet… Probably because he tried to consider the Holocaust as one of many holocausts. A cardinal sin.
Cheers
Watching this film made me re-classify Roger in my personal estimate: he seems to be a classic visionary - almost always trouble-makers, of course - rather than the silly-arse which had been my initial, superficial snap-judgement when I first came across him. (Still think that about Rupert Read, btw; but he’s demonstrated it in spades, already.) Roger is one to watch. Their dedication leads to unexpected outcomes, often.
Oddly, though, watching hims expound in detail pushed me back into a hunch which has been growing recently, that the climate thing is a lot more complex, and therefore a lot more unpredictable, than we’ve taken to believing.
Is human GG release affecting the global climate? Pretty obviously it has to be. Are natural cyclic changes happening at the same time? Can’t see why not. The Milankovich Cycle is still operating, after all, as the Earth’s distance from the Sun varies slowly over time. Does all of this justify apocalyptic panic, with dogmatically-certain predictions that “we have just twelve years left to reverse the climate disaster”? I doubt that.
I don’t think we are able to offer any detailed predictions of such a complex situation with any - justified - certainty. About the best you can say is that some big changes are in the pipeline, but we can only discern them in hazy outline. And that goes especially for the timing. According to the Milankovich Cycles, we should be heading into a cooling and re-glaciation period right now. But the perturbations of humankind seem to have complicated that. And then there’s the extraordinary resourcefulness of Mam Gaia in responding creatively to these upheavals. (She already has her first early versions of plastic-refuse-eating mutant micro-organisms on the job, apparently; just as I expected.)
All in all, a thoroughly unpredictable situation, requiring more than anything an agile readiness on our part to adapt to the inherently unforeseeable-in-detail adventures of the near future. But - I suspect - not a reason to panic and run about shrieking that the sky is falling…
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Yes, me too. I didn’t really know an awful lot about him personally before this.
This is a core issue, Rhis. Undoubtedly you are correct that it’s complicated and has a high degree of unpredictability. The problem is that this cuts both ways, incidentally. RH and Jem Bendell argue (with others) that the models used by the IPCC actually fail in the other direction - too conservative and therefore that the situation will likely be much more deadly than predicted.
In my mind, then, I fall back on some more classical logic and risk analysis to try and determine how I think about things. As far as I can see, there are two related but separate issues:
- How accurate are the models in predicting the future?
- What is the risk-matrix that we are dealing with?
Let’s leave (1) for the moment and focus on (2). To form what I call a risk-matrix, we can list our assumptions and examine the consequence of them being true or false. This allows us to know something about where our uncertainties lie. For example:
In the example above, we can see that even by assigning some degree of uncertainty to the models (they could be wrong), if we wait to act the likelihood of us getting completely screwed is twice as high as the likelihood that we will be ok. Given the severity of what “we’re fucked” could mean, that’s a bloody scary road.
Even if we choose to act now as if the models are correct, there is still the possibility that we will face a catastrophic future. In fact there is the same possibility that we will face collapse as there is that we will have spent our money, time and effort for nothing. 50/50 that we waste our money or face collapse even by acting as though the models were real. Given that the human cost of collapse is so much higher than the economic cost of massive change, our path of action should be completely clear.
So. Whether the models are right or wrong - even with the uncertainty in our knowledge - the only rational course of action seems to me to be one of massive, sustained effort. As Mr Spock would say - “It’s only logical”.
Back to our point (1) - how accurate have our models of the future been so far? Well, there are plenty of models around, going back to 30-40 years now. In systematic reviews (which I will add as an edit when I can find it again) the models that show how temperature evolves with increasing CO2 have been pretty accurate over the last 30 - 40 years. The IPCC models, if anything, always err on the side of caution, and hence fall in the “too optimistic” category above. And even other models, like the Limits to Growth model now show that overshoot and collapse is inevitable.
There are zero models that I am aware of, which even suggest that it might be better than we think. Zero, meaning that to the best of our combined knowledge, no one has a model to show that catastrophic change is not coming. Of course I could be wrong about this - I’d love to see some models of this, if they’re out there.
So, the models have been evaluated over the last 30-40 years and have found to be pretty accurate for temp/CO2 and to have under-estimated the severity of the consequence on seal level, storm frequency, coral bleaching and other bad things. This suggests that, to my mind at least, it is very unlikely that the models are all going to be completely wrong about the likely effect of climate change.
Could there be other mechanisms that come into play that can act as a negative feedback, meaning that things could calm down naturally? Yes, there could, and I really, sincerely hope that this does happen! Can we bank on that? Hmm…
Does that uncertainty mean we should change our approach to attempting a massive effort at systemic change? Absolutely not.
Hope this rambling message is kind of clear!
Cheers
PP
Yes, we’re pretty definitely looking at huge upheavals. That’s my gambler’s odds-guessing conclusion too. Odds on, I’d say. But a planet scraped clean of life? Doubtful. There have been dramatically different global climates states before in the Earth’s history, some of them tipping over with horrifying suddenness, with at least five major global extinction events to boot. Mam G has re-fecundated everything every time - so far.
I always hark back to the astonishing speed with which Surtsey, off Southern Iceland, began to accumulate life, after rising from the Atlantic as wholly-sterilised cooled-magma gravel. Simply amazing how swiftly it happened - and continues right now. And how did the original whole-Earth cooled-magma field acquire its infant Mam G in the first place…?
And more recently, there are the goats of the Great Orme, exploring down into the silent town of LLandudno, during the early days of the lockdown seclusion. (Typical of the cool inquisitiveness of goats. I’ve kept 'em, and they’re not at all like sheep.) It took them about 36 hours of canny observation from their rock to decide to go down and have a look! 
I know all this ultra-long view is cold comfort for our here and now. But it is a philosophical comfort for the angst, at least. Meanwhile, buckle-up for another sudden, sharp shift in our living conditions. That’s pretty well baked in now, I suspect. And will we do anything even to alleviate what can be alleviated? Well yes, a smidgeon at a time, as circumstances compel immediately. But an organised, global campaign to stop the climate shift (could we even do that, even if we got organised? Doubtful)? I don’t believe it. We’re not psychologically up to it, I fear. Piecemeal response to immediate problems is our way. That’s what we’ll do, I think. And that will produce lucky survivors, rather as the birds survived the end of the dinosaurs. As did crocodilians, of all unlikely things… 
One of my favourite cartoons that sums up this choice brilliantly is the Joel Pett cartoon. A link to the cartoon with a bit of discussion by the cartoonist about it going viral is here https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article44162106.html but it slightly cuts off the top (although you still get the gist). All the other links I could find (that don’t cut off the top) are to articles discussing it. If you just search in images for “what if it’s all a hoax cartoon” you’ll find it but the link I have given is pretty good (and I prefer to link to the actual creator rather than the reproductions!) 
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What a great cartoon! I think I must have seen that somewhere before. I think the message can’t be argued against!
Cheers