They write:
Considering the entire history of the Earth, it has been both much warmer and much colder than today. So the fact that the Earth is warmer today than anytime over the last 120,000 years is not really important — other than for shock value.
I disagree. Behaviourally modern homo sapiens, seem to have appeared between 40 and 150 thousand years ago. About 100-200 thousand years ago homo sapiens came out of Africa. The agricultural revolution is only 10-15 thousand years ago.
Like, the Earth will be fine no matter what humans do. Life as a whole will be fine. The question is about our species specifically.
That’s more or less the point they’re making in the paragraph after the one you quote.
I find that paragraph pretty stupid too though. Of course Earth was hotter during its early years of existence when it was basically a volcanic hell hole, or colder during the ice ages. But neither of those are conditions are really livable or something we strife to go back to.
Whether or not we strive to go back to climate not seen for the past 50 million or even 500 million years, we might end up getting there regardless. Even if we decided today to put all our industry together, we’ll still hit double the amount of warming we’re experiencing today. If that is extreme enough for a catastrophic feedback loop like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, permafrost outgassing, catastrophic ecosystems collapse in a subcontinent, or all the plankton dying at once because the oceans got too acidic, then even our best efforts can not save us from that reality.
And once we are in that reality, those of us that survive deserve a chance. Even if Antarctica melts and 90% of all human structures ever built are flooded, even if the forests die and global dust swarms blanket the planet until even the tropics are buried in snow, even if no living thing can exist outside a purified climate-controlled space. We, here and now, owe the people living through that our best effort. And that means looking at those futures unflinchingly, determining which are more or less likely and trying to prepare for all those eventualities as best we can.
The time to throw up our hands and say “all of these options are terrible, we should just stop climate change as hard as we can” was twenty years ago. Barring a technological miracle like the Silicon Valley AI God actually saving us from perdition, a billion human deaths would be us getting off easy. We need to prepare for the inevitable catastrophe, because even if a billion humans die, the next billion matter just as much, and the billion after that, and after that, and after that and after that and after that, and after that.
(That said, obviously research shouldn’t be used as a smokescreen for delaying carbon emission reduction. It’s crystal clear what our politics and our economy need to do if we want to raise the average life expectancy of children born today above 50).
You are right.
… so far.
