[ExI] Phil Jones acknowledging that climate science isn'tsettled

[Christopher Luebcke]

The problem has never been that people cannot adapt. It's that ecosystems can adapt in ways that are extremely unfriendly to people. No matter how well-deserved your estimation of your own genes is, your kids are not going to grow gills or derive nutrition from sand. Catastrophic global warming won't kill by heat stroke. It'll kill by war, disease and famine.


________________________________
From: Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Mon, March 1, 2010 8:22:16 PM
Subject: Re: [ExI] Phil Jones acknowledging that climate science isn'tsettled

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 10:45 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> I often see stuff like this, but it is always puzzling.  Can someone explain
> why the average temperature increasing by a degree or two or half a degree
> in a human lifetime would bring civilization to its knees?  Are we really
> that delicate and non-adaptable?

My theory supposes linear growth of 1 degree per year wouldn't be so
bad if not for the anecdote about boiling a frog to death.  So if we
don't get wildly concerned today, we may find ourselves evolving
perfectly comfortably into lizards to accommodate our new ecology.
There may be a few people who are OK with this but they're more than
two deviations from the top of the curve (which everybody knows is the
safety-in-numbers best place to be)

Conversely at >1 degree per year as input to my weather model, we
notice hypertetration of temperature increase.  This threatens to
overcome the mere exponential growth in technological ability to adapt
to temperature change.  If we don't act immediately to rectify Earth's
runaway temperature increase, we might find ourselves within a few
short months having an average temperature in excess of the surface of
the sun.

The observation of <1 degree per year of temperature increase to this
weather model would indicate an unknown dampening of hypertetration.
Unknown variables could later be discovered to have disastrous
consequences, perhaps leading to a complete re-examination of the data
and possibly the invalidation of the theory.  People generally view a
complete restart after years of emotional investment to be
unimaginable and therefor inherently wrong.

To answer that last question quite seriously:  No, we are not that
delicate - we only think that we are.
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