- No-one indeed, John. Exactly. And what Britt is saying too: complex subject where we're probably not Archived Message
- Really useful perspective, from a fully-competent geologist, on climate variation, and where we are - Old (Most) Contemptible December 4, 2019, 9:18 pm
- Re: Really useful perspective, from a fully-competent geologist, on climate variation, and where we are - John Monro December 5, 2019, 7:52 am
Posted by Old (Most) Contemptible (+)
on December 5, 2019, 8:58 am, in reply to "Re: Really useful perspective, from a fully-competent geologist, on climate variation, and where we are"
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competent to meddle; not yet, and maybe not ever. I just put this video up because it's one of the more credible statements (there are, as you know, lots of less credible ones) about just what's happening with this complex process. The raw, brute truth is that we just can't say with any - justified - certainty what's happening and where it will lead. Doesn't stop lots of folk from frothing frantically about it though, both pro-AGW and denialist-anti. My main point is that - in sober truth - we just can't (sic!) know ahead of time how such a hugely complex, inherently probablistic system is going to jump, nor in what direction exactly. In a probalistic reality, such cast-iron certainties are impossible - in principle. And thus, rabid dogmatism and Chicken Little panics-de-jour are hardly appropriate. Pragmatism becomes the necessary default stance. We can, though, make a short-odds bet that if we go on with our currently utterly feckless path, bad things along the lines cautiously adumbrated by 'The Limints To Growth' and 'TLTG - The Thirty-Year Update' are as certain as any human prediction can be to happen. I sense that you and I, John, both have to live with the painful realisation that our species seems barely equal to the task of wise, Vulcanly-rational comprehensively-self-disciplined management of the Synergising Global Crises. And so, they're happening to both us and the planet as fate. If that's an accurate judgement, then a certain fatalism seems to be the only way to stay sane and human through these dark times, already here or just little way ahead. I dare say you'd agree with me, though, that Gaia-respecting, healing efforts like forest-permaculture re-forestation, and an equally careful, wilderness-mimicking approach to the world's grasslands and drylands would at least be highly likely to do no harm, and probably would do a whole lot of stablising and re-balancing good...? Whatever we choose to do, though, it should certainly be cautious, tentative, and strictly pragmatic: try it and see, and act on from there accordingly. And - since we are indeed dealing with processes which insist on operating on multi-millennial time-frames - we need to face that irksome-to-human-psychology reality too. And then there's the added layer of awkwardness that there are a whole lot of planetary and inter-planetary processes which we will never be able to manage; repeated glaciations according to the Milankovitch Cycle, and asteroid strikes being two typical examples. 'Man' is simply not in charge of these processes, and probably never will be. You'll have gathered, I daresay, that I don't buy into our current popular myth of 'Progessforever! Onward and ever upward into our god-like destiny as super-creatures managing the universe like god-almighty, him/her/itself!!' Comedy central!  The SGCs - which we have triggered - look to me like the most difficult challenges that our barely-competent species has every encountered. Perhaps we'll grow and evolve to meet them victoriously. Or perhaps our species will follow the pattern of all others that we know about so far: Flourish for a few million years, and then go extinct naturally; discarded into reality's re-cycle bin because our time is up. See what I mean about the uses of fatalism...? 
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