SotA-R-3: Heat and Cyclones
(This is part 3 of the “Stages of the Anthropocene, Revisited” Series (SotA-R).) Drought is (obviously) not the only kind of disaster caused by climate change, although it is probably the most severe in terms of its (long term) effects. Other types of “natural” disaster that have to be taken into account given the purpose of this series include heatwaves, storms, and other forms of extreme weather. The focus in the present article will be on heat and tropical cyclones (including hurricanes and typhoons). heat While there are several papers projecting aspects of heat as an effect of climate change,...
SotA-R-2: Drought and Its Effects in the 2030s and 40s
(This is part 2 of the “Stages of the Anthropocene, Revisited” Series (SotA-R).) Of all climate-change-related disasters, drought may very well be the worst. While other kinds of disasters might look more disastrous because of the clearly visible damage they cause, droughts destroys livelihoods. Drought is associated with water shortages (obviously), crop failures, famine, migration/refugees, and violent conflict (including civil war and war). Furthermore, droughts tend to affect larger areas, and the effects are, therefore, widespread. Persistent drought can make once fertile and pleasant lands inhospitable or even uninhabitable. For these reasons, significant changes in global precipitation patterns can have...
Stages of the Anthropocene, Revisited
(This is part 1 of the “Stages of the Anthropocene, Revisited” Series (SotA-R).) In Stages of the Anthropocene (2018), I argued that if one aims to make mid- or long-term predictions of the effects of climate change on human civilization, it is useful (if not necessary) to distinguish three phases or stages within the time period known as the “anthropocene”. There is some disagreement about when the anthropocene started – the industrial revolution (mid 18th century) and the advent of the atomic age (mid 20th century) have been suggested, and an argument has even been made for the emergence of...
(Not) Too Late for What?
Some people seem to believe that it is too late to fight climate change. Others seem to believe that this kind of fatalism is as dangerous as climate change denialism (because both effectively advocate not doing anything). It’s hardly a secret that I’m rather pessimistic about climate change and its effects – just have a look at what I’ve written about the topic before – but that doesn’t mean that I think that it is “too late” to fight climate change. Rather, I think that the notion of it being “too late” (or not) in this context is nonsensical. The...
Technological Immortality
Seven years ago I published a paper arguing against afterlife beliefs and various other kinds of “death denial” titled “The Incoherence of Denying My Death”. The denial of death in this sense is not a denial of physical or biological death so much as it is a denial of annihilation. In that paper I distinguished two ways of denying death, which are distinguished essentially by which word in the short proposition “I die” they deny. Strategy 1 denies the dying part – that is, it argues that I somehow (can) survive my physical/biological/bodily death. Strategy 2 denies the “I” in...
Dissonant Reality
There is a persistent belief among both scientists and non-scientists that good theories must be somehow beautiful or elegant or something similar, because reality itself is ultimately – in some relevant sense – harmonious; or in other words, that science must be beautiful/simple/elegant/etcera because the laws of nature are beautiful/simple/elegant/etcera. This belief is particularly influential in physics and mainstream economics (which likes to mimic physics or an image thereof as much as possible). Sabine Hossenfelder has written an interesting book about how this belief “leads physics astray” rather than that it provides useful guidance. For an illustration of how deep...
Predictions
A year ago, I predicted that the Covid19 pandemic would kill 35 million or even more people. Although mortality statistics suggest that the current official death count (about two and a half million at the time of writing) significantly underestimates the real number of deaths, it is also becoming increasingly unlikely that we’ll reach numbers anywhere near that pessimistic prediction any time soon. The reason why my prediction was so far off is the same reason why many other predictions fail: they insufficiently take into account that human behavior changes in response to changes in circumstances. Typically, models used to...
Carbon-neutrality by 2050 (version of December 2020)
(Some corrections were made in this article on March 2, 2022. The most recent version of this article can be found here.) This year several governments announced that their countries will be carbon neutral by 2050. This is a cheap promise, as the target is so far in the future that it doesn’t commit them to do anything significant now, but even if the commitment would be real, one may wonder how probable it is that the target will actually be reached, and whether it will be enough. These are two different questions, of course, and I will try to...
A Right to Hate?
In August, French blogger Pauline Harmange published a booklet titled Moi les hommes, je les déteste (Me, men, I loathe them), which caused quite a stir in France (and a little bit outside France as well). The book – supposedly – is a protest against misogyny (hatred of women), by taking up the opposite point of view of misandry (hatred of men). “Supposedly”, because I’m not sure exactly about the book’s arguments as it is no longer available and I have thus been unable to read it. In any case, it is not this book itself that is the topic...
On the Idea of an Unconditional (Moral) Rule
In his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant argued that the moral law (assuming there is one) must be unconditional and universal. As part of that argument he made a famous distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives. Imperatives are “ought” (or “should”) statements, such as “you ought to tell the truth”. The difference between the two kinds of imperatives is that hypothetical imperatives depend on a specific kind of condition, namely a desire, while categorical imperatives are universal, unconditional, and absolute. Thus, “if you want human civilization to survive the 21st century, you ought to eat the rich” is...
An Upper Limit of 3.9°C for Climate Change?
One of the oldest quantitative claims in climate science is that the likely global average temperature increase due to a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ is between 1.5 and 4.5°C. This range dates back to 1979 and has remained unchanged until yesterday with the publication of a refined estimate by a large group of researchers in the Review of Geophysics. Based on three different and independent lines of research (modeling, historical records, and paleoclimate records), they conclude that the range is between 2.6°C and 3.9°C. This had lead some media to proclaim that both optimists and “doomsayers” have been proven wrong,...
Uchiyama, Marx, and Gramsci on Ideological Superstitions
In 2019 typhoon Hagibis destroyed part of the railroad that leads to Hakone, a small town near a volcanic lake in Japan that has a long history as a resort town. One of the stops on the line that can no longer be reached by train is Ōhiradai. About fifty meter south of the station there is a small and inconspicuous temple named Rinsenji. In 1909, during the railroad’s construction, the police searched that temple. They found dynamite used for building the railroad that was temporarily stored there. They also found an illegal printing press under the main altar. A...