Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?

> the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people.

That rings very true unfortunately :/

> often accompanied by demands that poor nations be denied the cheap sources of energy they need to develop

I have literally only ever heard that argument in articles that say this is a stupid argument. Who'd ever say that? These people have bigger problems than climate change and don't have the resources or infrastructure or do something about it. The poorest also pollute the least per capita. It's us who can do something.

But then the article builds on that logic by saying:

> “If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070 you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,”

Which doesn't logically follow. No, we can't expect the poorest of this planet to buy or build hi-tech solar panels and batteries when they could simply dump coal in a steam turbine and be done with it, but it's also not the case that we're optimizing for CO2 in 50+ years. Those are two different statements. In fifty years we'll be long over our CO2 budget and potential runaway effects have long been triggered.

Anyway, the premise of the article is not necessarily wrong. The last sentence captures its point reasonably:

> Happily, there is a plenty of middle ground between climate apocalypse and climate denial.

And it also captures why I'm afraid the article is (unintentionally) a bit misleading. The author clearly understands climate change, and he's also clearly frustrated with extremists calling it an apocalypse (or, in your words, doomsday predictions). Indeed, I'd describe something as apocalyptic or doomsday if it threatened the lives of most of us, and that's not the case here.

So he's arguing against exaggerating to a point that very few people (a vocal but tiny minority perhaps) agrees with. That's a correct argument, but it's very easy to extrapolate that to what was said above: "[no] urgent need for radical changes in the global economy". It might not threaten most humans' lives, but that doesn't mean it's not big enough of a deal to implement radical changes. Intuitively, the "plenty of middle ground" between apocalypse and denial centers around "it's there but not that big a deal". I don't think that's what the author meant to argue. Especially if one only looks at the headline and is already inclined (as many Americans seem to be) to think that the whole climate thing is not as important as activists make it out to be. Those readers are now going to be more strongly convicted, while the article isn't actually that blunt. The headline is meant to catch readers' eyes but thereby sends the wrong message.

The question that remains is how bad it's going to be. The author didn't really convince me there. There are error margins on any prediction, and most meaningful predictions build on other predictions with their own error margins. We don't yet know how to be self-sufficient. If we're fine with letting natural food chains collapse, do we have all the dependencies needed for growing the food we need to stay healthy? Not everything will go extinct at once, but we don't know which parts will be able to adapt, so we need to make sure we captured the whole (circular) dependency chain.

We'll probably find solutions to missing pieces, hence my not expecting it's going to be the end of humanity, but how fast will we figure it out? How fast can we scale up synthesizing that? There's just so many unknowns. Reducing a single variable, CO2 in the air, seems trivial when compared to the engineering feats we'll need to artificially make the earth hospitable to 10 billion people.

One thing in the article that keeps coming back is the koala. I don't know why he keeps bringing it up, it really doesn't matter if koalas specifically are still around. The question of food chains would be much more relevant.

Another thing is the wildfires, cited in a few places to not currently be solely caused by climate change. Again, not something I think many people really claim in the first place. The message, as I see it in climate activists' promotional materials, is more that we'll see more of this in the future. The article confirms that climate change is already playing a role, albeit small and definitely not a singular cause, and the climate has as of yet barely changed.

Another place where the article is a bit odd is this:

> “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide,” notes IPCC, “but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause”

The "notes IPCC" part is a link to a PDF which does not contain that citation, even in part (the world "displacing" doesn't occur at all and "robust evidence" is used in one spot but not something that seems relevant to this quote). I looked it up because it sounded weird in the first place. Why would a panel on climate change look at displacement caused by sea level rise when it has been changing on the order of centimeters per decade? Of course you would find "limited" evidence for that directly causing displacement.

The cited rise itself is also using 2007 numbers which were adjusted by the IPCC in 2014 (and the article is from 2019 so it could easily have used those numbers), but whether it's 0.6m or 0.9m, I guess the consequences aren't all that different.

As a Dutchman I also feel obliged to say something about the representation of our situation. It says we learned to live 7 meters below sea level 400 years ago... even with today's tech we couldn't simply manage a wall of 7 meters of sea. This -6.76m point is 30km inland. Every meter of rise would be a really big deal (glancing at a heightmap (AHN3), one of the higher sea-to-land-after-dike height differences seems to be -1m). But we're just a tiny country and it wouldn't make sense for everyone to do a lot of effort just for us, so enough about us. This thing about the Netherlands just isn't accurate in multiple ways.

That said, I thought the predicted sea rise would be on the order of meters, not less than a meter. That's one takeaway from this article in which the effects of climate change will be less bad than I thought. Wikipedia has another chart that shows a few meters of potential change, but of course I can't tell who among all the smart people is most likely to be right, so I'll stick with that it's very likely going to be less than 1m.

So let me just try to end on that. I spent 3 hours looking into this now, from reading the article to putting my concerns into words while learning more about various aspects. Another takeaway in the same vein is that when digging into Wikipedia's citations, it's often not put as starkly as Wikipedia's text actually says. Nevertheless, I hope I also showed that the article doesn't argue that we don't have a very big and urgent problem (even if it's not an "everyone will certainly die" kind of big).

Early tyrannical states and back-breaking agriculture outcompeted relatively free and comfortable hunter gatherers.

I don't mean we value human life less in the way that a woke 14 year old means that, which is the way you seem to have interpreted it. I mean it in the sense of market value. Technology and market efficiency are leading to your average person being less valuable to other people, and fewer people being substantially more valuable. Maybe one farmer can now feed 100,000 people. The 999 people it used to take to feed those 100,000 people are actually less valuable to society than they were prior to the technological and market advances that allowed that one person to feed 100,000 people. Sure they can get different jobs, and new jobs are created, but there is no guarantee that this happens according to any functional ratio; it's certainly not 1:1.

This is essentially why wages are stagnating. Most people are actually worth less to society than they used to be. And again, I don't mean that in the woke sense, I mean it in the market sense. I mean that wages are accurately reflecting their true market value, and that value is less and less as time goes on. I think that the minimum barrier to entry in order to produce market value is constantly rising, and is basically happening on the basis of something like IQ. Maybe the next century will be characterized by more jobs like software and hardware engineers, while even those jobs will change and eventually be done by fewer and fewer people, but the point is that not everyone will actually be able to do those jobs. If nurses and doctors and PAs are phased out in favor of diagnostic algorithms and service utilities, for example, that doesn't mean that those millions of roles will have millions of new roles created in order to service the technology. And more importantly, the new roles to service the technology might actually require capabilities that most of those people are not actually capable of.

I'm not making a statement about society being some way and it should be some other way. I'm saying that our societies are fundamentally predicated on the notion that stability can be achieved simply due to the idea that people provide relative value to one another. This idea is what has allowed liberal democracies to function with minimal authoritarian influence. That most people are capable of providing sufficient utility to one another such that, left to their own devices, they are able to secure resources for themselves by providing utility to others. This is less true now than it was, and will continue to be less true as time goes on. All I'm saying is that we're approaching a hinge point where we have to grapple with this reality.