Anthropogenic Climate Change

If I had to take a guess... Florida. Generally low lying and even the parts that wouldn't be flooded would have very bad effects as salt water infiltrated the water table.

Woohoo. Page topper

Edited by KnightofLsama on Sep 27th 2020 at 10:37:49 PM

Florida, Hawaii, Alaska, and the East Coast megalopolis that's home to 1 in 6 Americans.

...was it a mistake to have all those tourist attractions in Florida?

Also, did Alaska warmed up or something?

Reminder that Alaska had a heat wave so hot, Anchorage hit 90 F during this past summer.

But the big one, the one that will screw us all, is Nebraska. And Kansas. The American "breadbasket", where we grow the food that feeds ourselves and half the world. If we ever lose corn, or wheat, well...

In B 4 someone suggests that the farms will simply "move north". Modern agriculture doesn't work like that.

Off-topic, but what you said about agriculture just reminded me of this.

Take this for what you will.

Edited by asiacatdogblue on Oct 3rd 2020 at 8:27:50 AM

*clicks*

Ayyy this gonna be good

Okay hear me out

What if correlation isn't causation

And the drop had more to do with the fact that the whole Eastern Mediterranean just turned hot and dry, eliminating the rich coastal/wetland zones that had provided so much food for hunter-gatherer cultures before

Thus necessitating the adoption of agriculture along the Fertile Crescent in the first place

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Oct 3rd 2020 at 8:43:25 AM

Last summer, Alaska had the same air quality that California's got now, due to a single giant wildfire that lasted all summer.

To make sure it didn't happen again, the local weather gods stole all the rest of the West Coast's rain this year for ourselves. Sorry about that.

Always knew Alaska was a place of eldritch horror. Must be Canada’s influence.

Edited by M84 on Oct 4th 2020 at 12:53:25 AM

Diamond's book was fantastic, but I don't understand the premise of his article. I have literally never met anyone who thought that humans gave up a hunting-gathering lifestyle because farming is easier and healthier. They did it because it allowed them to have and raise more babies.

Diamond's book was fundamentally wrong in its assessment of the European conquest of the Americas as an inevitable conquest won by superior firepower and "virgin soil" diseases, rather than centuries of gradual progress and complex relations with Native peoples - many of whom still held power centuries after contact and only got overwhelmed by diseases once compounded by wartime privations, environmental destruction and other stress factors.

His background is in biology and specifically insular biogeography, or how island environments shaped the species living in them. Guns, Germs and Steel was his attempt to bring his methodology into the study of history. And as a refutation of traditional "Great Man" history, where all of history is driven by a small handful of great kings and captains, it's quite decent. It invites its mainstream audience to think about how material factors shape the development of human societies, beyond the simple will of a few great men.

But he makes his case by pulling European accounts of the colonisation of the Americas and taking them at face value, as if they're unbiased, raw data from a scientific observation, when they were anything but. And it kind of ended up repeating the same old racialist narratives that he set out to debunk: the Europeans won and the Natives lost because their inherent upbringings and physiques determined it so. So as a study of the Trans-Atlantic contact as a real, historical event, it's deeply misleading.

So, you don't agree with his thesis that the fundamental reason that it was the Europeans who colonized NA, and not the North Americans who colonized E, is because there were insufficient native plants and animals to domesticate, resulting in lower total population, fewer urban areas, reduced immunity to cross-species disease, fewer cross-species diseases for European colonists to become infected by, and less advanced technology? After all, those complex relations between Europeans and Native Americans took place in North America, not Europe, and that was the phenomenon he was trying to explain.

I am aware of evidence regarding a substantial population die off in NA beginning just after the Spanish contact. There is also some evidence concerning large scale flora and fauna changes at about the same time. Do you disbelieve these?

That still misses the fact that:

a) There were crops in the American Continent that were good enough to sustain the population, amongst them maize and potatoes, and it's not like the continent had a lack of flora and fauna.

b) There were already urban centres in a Bronze Age stage of development in Mexico and Peru AKA the Aztec and Inca Empires, these are also the ones that possibly tanked the wave of disease better since they had more food productivity.

c) The main reason for why technology was still at Antiquity level broadly speaking is basically because there was no Mediterranean Sea, Silk Road or any other major route of trade that could properly spread advancements from one place to another. This also justifies the lesser amount of urban centres since trade is vital to their existence.

Diamond addresses each of those points, but I will have to go back and re-read the relevant chapters, so I'll have to post about that a little bit later.

I remember those bits from Diamond's book. Mostly point A, because he shows it in a very handy chart. Specifically he does a correlation between kcal needed to gather vs kcal given by a specific type of crop. It's not that maize or potatoes weren't good, it's that they weren't as good as what grew between Tigris and Euphrates.

Similar for the fauna: the domesticated animals in asia and europe ranged from horses, sheep, cows, yak, pigs, ducks, chickens, camels and goats vs Llamas, Alpacas and Turkey (special mention: The Bison that was notoriously difficult to hunt for food).

The titular Germs weren't combated by food production, so whether or not the urban centers in The Aztec or Mayan centers had food or not was irrelevant: It was the fact the natives in America never had a chance to develop the antibodies and resistances against the animal born diseases the Europenas had centuries to grow accustomed to. This because, again, the europeans and asians had plenty of time to get accustomed to all those domesticated animals from which the deadliest diseases came.

And for point C, Diamond makes a distinct point to point at geographic accidents to explain this. Going OUTSIDE of Diamond, well, this is exemplified by the wheel. You would think the great aztec empire or the innoative mayans would have discovered chariots or wheelbarrows at the very least? Why did they suck so bad to not discover the freakin wheel?

Well have you fucking been in Central America? It's a hot tropical mess, muddy and difficult to traverse.

The fucking FRENCH in 1881 couldnt terraform the Panama Canal hundreds of years after the Aztecs and you expect of the Mayans, Aztecs or Incas to have succesfully terraformed all of that terrain and paved them for roads like it was Via Agrippa only to have the goods have to be transported by slaves since the only beasts of Burden were Llamas which were only native to freakin South America?

Oh and the only reason why the United States even managed to "open" the Panama Canal is not because the Panama Canal is a monumental feat of enginering all along the length of panama:They used 27215500 kilograms of dynamite to blow the fuck out of everything. THAT is how hostile and unmanageable the terrain was - even in the 1800s tech. People prefered to BLOW IT TO FUCKING SMITHEREENS JUST TO BE ABLE TO WORK IN IT.

The terrain is far more hostile, muddier and dangerous to construct roads. Hence why the majority of trade was acheived via coastal trading. I used to date an Archaeologist and she mentioned me that the main reason why archaeological underwater exploration was so difficult to perform was due to the lack of funding, the difficulty and political reasons but htat hen it was done it yielded a fuckton of information regarding how ancient mesoamerican groups interacted you otherwise wouldn't find.

So there WAS trade: but due to geography it was limited.

The first person to raise their hands and claim New York, pretty much all of the Netherlands, or the swmap that swallowed three castles in Monty Python's Holy Grail were proof you could construct in hostile terrain and thus it can't be narrowed down to the geography as to why the Aztecs/Mayans didn't build roads gets a slap to the back of the head.

Now, all of this doesnt mean to say oh there is plenty of historical agency removed from the natives after the european historians take over and that the relaitonships between native peoples and the "conquistadores" were far more complex (Heck, Hawaii had a QUEEN we could take pictures of) and the spaniards would NOT have won the war against the natives ad they not meddled in the political internal affairs of the different tribes, and allied WITH some AGAINST others.

But I think the points brought by Diamond are incredibly significant - too significant to cast out lightly, and that they are far, far, far from even getting CLOSE to implying any bit of "superiority" from one peoples to another. He made that bit very, very explicit in his book.

Heck, disproving that assertion was the whole point of the book. That was a very good and comprehensive summary by Aszur, but I promised to reply, so I'll just add a few cents worth:

The relevant chapter is "Apples or Indians" (chapter 8 in my edition), where he points out that the adoption of domestication as a way of life has to compete successfully with hunting and gathering from the very first stages—otherwise no one would go through the incremental process of fully domesticating anything. Therefore, because of that, the presence of a few potentially domesticable plants and animals won't be good enough—there has to be an entire suite of such species in order to make the change to a sedentary lifestyle at all viable. Thus, the suite of species available in a given region must be such that it can successfully compete with the availability of plants and animals for gathering and hunting. If the local range of species for domestication is less desirable from the get-go than the local species for hunting and gathering, there is no incentive to develop domestication at all.

So, he then goes on to compare and contrast three regions: the Fertile Crescent, New Guinea, and North America. He systematically demonstrates a range of advantages that the available range of species had in the FC over the other two regions. The evidence for North America is especially compelling, as he goes over each individual crop species available anywhere in the New World (a mere seven in all) and shows why they fall short of the productive potential of crops available in the FC, even before they had been domesticated (that is, the wild varieties in the FC already lended themselves to a sedentary lifestyle even before they were fully domesticated).

So point a) is fully addressed.

There were, of course, urban centers in NA prior to the arrival of the Europeans (famously the capitals of the Aztecs and Incas). The problem is that these urban centers failed to domesticate more than one or two species of animals, and thus, were never exposed to the range of pathogens that the Europeans had been over thousands of years, and also did not have a local range of pathogens that could infect the Europeans in return. Of course, being densely populated means that they were even more vulnerable to epidemics than they would have been had their populations been more spread out. Additionally, they had far fewer of these urban centers, and the ones they had did not develop as extensive a trade network among themselves as was true in the old world, so the pathogens they had weren't even shared with each other.

This also negatively affected the rate of diffusion of inventions and technology, given the presumption that the more centers of culture that are in contact with each other, the greater the pool of innovative ideas will be. This is not a source of cultural superiority on the part of Old World peoples, but a mere effect of random chance—that the different centers of cultural development from Asia to Europe are more or less at the same latitude with each other, which means they were all connected by relatively easily traversed temperate zones, as opposed to the extreme deserts, jungles, and mountain ranges that separated South American, Mesoamerican, and Mississippian urban centers.

So that covers b) and c).

I find myself not so much disagreeing with Raziel, as refining his points. As Aszur pointed out, none of this contradicts the fact that what happened after contact occurred, the historical actions the Europeans took, and the way they screwed the indigeous peoples in every way they could every chance they got. But the only reason they got those chances was because of an accident of geography.

Edited by DeMarquis on Oct 6th 2020 at 6:16:10 AM

So I think this is where I'm going to clarify the scope of my argument. That geographic factors affected different societies differently is pretty obvious - I mean, duh. I'm not disputing Diamond on that count. What I'm disputing, specifically, is that these factors affected post-contact interaction in the way he asserts.

Chapter III, "Collision at Cajamarca", kind of exemplifies this, showing Pizarro's party (based on his brothers' account) massacring an Incan army hundreds of times their size with their guns and steel, capturing the empire in one fell swoop. Which is just plain untrue. They massacred Atahualpa's unarmed attendants while his army (which wasn't strictly loyal to him) was camped some distance away. Large swathes of the empire were still in a rebellious mood following the recent civil war with Huascar, and Incan rule barely extended over the frontier territories they'd recently conquered. Every other engagement the conquistadors fought was mainly fought by native allies, who were glossed over by their accounts. It was ultimately political factors on the ground that prevented Pizarro's venture from turning into a disaster like his predecessors' did, not technological or population advantages.

Which brings us into the big picture. The book basically buys into the "terminal narrative": that the 1492 contact was an event horizon for the Americas, and from there on European conquest was pretty much predestined by their material advantages. There's nothing inevitable about the conquest. It was slow, fragile, contested at every turn and is arguably still incomplete to this day. In most places, Native actions and happenstance mattered much more than European advantages.

There's some research out there that took the drop in atmospheric CO₂ during the Little Ice Age and tried to use it to estimate the population drop in the Americas. The paper acknowledges that its use of documentary estimates is flawed, for reasons I'll get to below. More than that, though, the whole thing gives off a whiff of confirmation bias: there must have been a massive die-out across the Americas in this period, so let's use the CO₂ drop to give the numbers a go and link it to the Little Ice Age's anthropogenicity while we're at it. And while there were clear population collapses in Hispaniola^* Active genocide by Columbus on a small Native population. and Central Mexico,^* Massive war between the Nahua states that Cortes hitched onto, population displacement, droughts and then successive epidemics - which might not have necessarily come from the Old World - within the span of a few decades. I don't think it's wise to extrapolate these to the whole continent.

Why would that matter? If population sizes determined the ability to conquer, then China or India would've gobbled everything up long ago. Population count didn't necessarily translate into the technology or motivation to sail across the Atlantic, and they were a non-factor on the ground, where Natives far outnumbered European colonists for the first century or so.

And a disproportionate number of the early conquistadors came from Extremadura and Andalusia, which, y'know, had been an impoverished warzone for centuries. Not exactly the beneficiaries of good nutrition and bountiful growth.

Diseases were a huge killer, and I don't think anyone's going to dispute that the livestock concentration in the Old World led to a larger cocktail of pathogens. If there's anything we've learned from our current plague year, though, it's that immunology is a complex art bordering on black magic. Europeans might have gained increased innate immunity over the millennia; doesn't change that adaptive immunity is a large part of the puzzle and you can't really acquire that without getting exposed to the pathogen in the first place. And while the "germs" were lethal, they're not "permanently kill off 95% of a whole continent's population" lethal. A study of more recent contact with Amazon Natives shows that populations can rebound from deadly epidemics following peaceful contact. It took a complex mixture of stress factors to achieve the mortality rates we see in the estimates.

For that matter, how do we know that our current estimates of population changes are accurate? To draw from Chinese history, which I'm more familiar with: there's a tendency in pop history to sensationalise the casualty counts of major wars like the Three Kingdoms and the An Lushan rebellion, which supposedly wiped half the country's population off census records. But here's the thing: conflict plays havoc with bureaucracy in ways beyond the killing itself. Population displacement and damaged administrative networks mean that it's incredibly difficult to get an accurate count in conflict zones, even now in the 21st century.

I wouldn't trust the encomenderos of the 16th century to be any more accurate with their numbers. Especially since they would've had motives to exaggerate the population drop, like minimising the amount of tributes they had to pay to the Crown.

Plus, some of the things we took as evidences of depopulation simply weren't. It used to be Common Knowledge that the great mound cities of the Mississippi were depopulated by disease; now we know that many cultures in that region customarily dispersed their populations as a strategy to deal with resource shortages. We've still a long way to go in getting accurate estimate of the Native populations and how much of a drop there really was.

Define "less advanced". Technology arises according to need, not a linear Civilization-style tech tree. As Aszur said, wheels aren't much use without anything to use them on. How many people can you kill with a 16th century matchlock musket before they're on top of you? Diamond says that it was European guns and steel that persuaded Native allies to join them, but that's ignoring everything that's been written on the topic in the past few decades: the Europeans didn't start reliably winning battles until after they'd recruited Native allies. This is the kind of mistake that you'd get from treating eyewitness accounts as objective data.

For that matter, the Native peoples weren't passive. They adapted their tactics to minimise the impact of European weapons and took them up as they saw fit. The Mapuche famously developed a European-style army with captured Spanish gear, managing to outfight and outlast the Spanish Empire in the Americas and only submitting to Chile in the 19th century. Diamond mentions the Spanish putting down the Vilcabamba Incas with superior firepower, but they, too, had adopted European weapons and armour; once again, it was Native allies that won the battle. The Comanche built an empire on horseback and not only resisted but outright dominated their would-be colonial overlords, bullying the Mexican government for decades and extracting tribute from Spanish, French and American settlers until the decline of the bison population brought their growth to a screeching halt. In the end, European technology in the form of railroads finally eliminated their strategic advantages - but that, too, wouldn't have been possible without Native allies to lend a toehold on the frontier.

n.e.way, this is all outside the scope of this thread and we should probably take the non-climate-related stuff elsewhere. But I've already made my point back at the top of this post. Diamond's book is a useful pop-history primer on how geographic conditions shaped the development of societies besides human agency. It's just spectacularly bad at asserting how those factors shaped the conquest of the Americas, because his understanding of how it actually happened was flawed.

I know that Diamond was trying to refute the idea that the European conquests were enabled by some superiority of character. But the picture he paints is a world of largely-passive Native victims, doomed to failure from the start.

The idea that Native peoples are unable to adapt on their own terms and doomed to a tragic decline (if not extinction) was the exact rationale used to herd them (and Indigenous Australians) into residential schools in the previous century. It paints over their actual existence as a people who have adapted to the post-contact world and are still finding new ways to assert themselves to this day.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Oct 6th 2020 at 6:48:04 AM

I think you seriously mischaracterize Diamond's thesis, in that he never claimed that anything was "inevitable", he was merely trying to explain what actually happened. However, you are right that this is off topic for this thread, so we should take this to the Aboriginal Americans thread, where I would be happy to continue to discuss this, if you like. You might be interested to know that we discussed Diamond's book there, here.

But let's get back to Climate Change.

Regarding agriculture, I do think it should be a priority (not the highest) to have structures on a scope as to be weatherproof. Like a Large mega dome that can ensure that most natural disasters would not affect the crops (I say most, because...earthquakes)While also allowing in the sunlight needed to thrive.

However I also think that it should be done in a manner where it would not contribute to the climate chnage it suppose to protect form. Which means we need a Green energy grid and building standards before even undertaking it.

Until then and during then, plans should be made to make artificial substitutes for the vital crops to prepare for the worse or try to create a strain of them that can thrive on mountainous territory (if only because I expect people migrating to mountaintops an outcome to consider)

There's also space exploration to consider, but the timescale seem too wide for it to be of use (for now), and it might prove a double edged sword if humanity fails to learn from their mistakes

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Oct 6th 2020 at 7:06:53 AM

Earth's atmosphere might be in a bi-stable regime, where comparatively minor change in climatic parameters can cause the trade winds at the equator to reverse. This state of climate is known as "superrotation" which naturally occurs on Venus.

And, IMO, it is perhaps one of the most dangerous possible climate change scenarios for the following reasons:

• There is very little research on superrotation, and virtually all of it does pertain either to non-Earth planets or to a heavily idealized (no continents) Earth.
• Superrotation is almost always disussed only in the context of its effects on the Pacific Ocean and El Nino^note Superrotation, i.e westerly winds along the equator, will transport the West Pacific warm pool across the Pacific and together with the still existing, but now confined to the outer tropics, recirculates it across the Pacific like El Nino but nothing on whether it might extend across the Amazon, Atlantic or Congo and what its effects will be if so.
• Tropical Eddy feedbacks are seldom discussed in this context, but presently tropical cyclones and westerly wind bursts^note Westerly wind bursts are temporary westerly winds along the equator, see Wikipedia for more can enhance each other. Such a feedback process could occur during superrotation and trigger its onset...
• ...but numerous models of superrotation also envisage strong VWS^note Vertical wind shear; in this case strong westerly winds at high elevation and weaker westerly winds or easterly winds at low elevation which would hinder cyclogenesis. Convective momentum transport (10.1073/pnas.1407175111) might act to dissipate this shear and would aid cyclogenesis independently from momentum transport.
• Such a feedback between cyclogenesis and superrotation could easily spin up a lot of tropical cyclones off season and close to the equator where they are not expected. See Pali 2016 as a prototypical example.

The sea ice extent in the Laptev sea has not begun expanding yet, the first October since records began that this has happened.

Vox had an article from earlier this month that I meant to post here but I was distracted by other events, thankfully I've finally gotten around to posting it.

How the world’s biggest emitter could be carbon neutral by 2050

Xi Xinping has recently declared that China intends to be emission-free by 2060. I'm cautiously hopeful but it's certainly understandable if one is skeptical. After all, major emitters haven't exactly done anything substantive to fight Climate Change. But in this case, positive expectations may be realistic.

A group of China's top climate scientists has recently come out with a plan that could make that promise a reality. They advocated for China to peak its emissions in the next decade and then rapidly decrease them to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Unlike the United States, they have the ear of their country's leadership and thus this is not a pie in the sky project that has no chance of being implemented.

There's more but I think this is a decent summation of the article's contents, I'd recommend anyone who's interested to read it further.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 28th 2020 at 11:02:14 AM

From the article:

"But totally phasing out all fossil fuel consumption would be very difficult, particularly in the industrial sector where coal is used to produce steel, cement, and other materials at high heat. So, to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, China would cut these emissions from a projected peak of 10.5 billion tons to 1.7 billion tons by mid-century. To offset those remaining emissions, China would lean heavily on carbon sinks and negative emissions — methods of trapping and absorbing emissions.

The researchers suggest these emissions could be dealt with in a number of ways. Carbon would be captured at power plants and buried underground. Some power stations could reduce emissions by burning plants (which have themselves sequestered carbon growth) and burying the carbon dioxide released from the plant. The remaining half of emissions would be offset by planting trees (in itself a fraught approach to removing carbon from the atmosphere)."

So, some details are fuzzy, and it may not entirely work. But a damn sight better than the US has done, so far.

Indeed, there is some uncertainty which isn't ideal. But as you say it's significantly better than what we're currently doing.

We've known for a while that China was serious about electrification of its transport industry. This isn't just about an enlightened approach to global climate; it's pure self-interest: the country suffers vast economic losses from pollution.