Climate Change(d)?

[steve_bank]

All other creature including plants live in a dynamic balance with the environment developed over time. Science and technology has taken us out of any checks and balances. Result, unrestrained population growth.

Sooner or later a new balance will occur. The question is whether we will do it in a controlled fashion or it will be imposed on us by the environment.

For examples we can look at South American and other civilizations. They grow becoming wealthy and powerful, over use resources, and decline.

What we are doing is not without historical precedence, the difference being the global scope.

The basic problem here is one of survivorship bias. We look at history and we see that we have always overcome the disasters that have threatened and we conclude that that's what's going to happen in the future.

Nope, we don't always overcome them--it's just the groups that fail to overcome them cease to exist and are erased from the historical memory. (Although their failure is sometimes discovered by archeologists.)

That is out American myth of invincibility which persist despite our failures over recent decades.

I listened to anthropologist on a Tavis Smiley show talk about her work studying why civilizations fail.

The general patterns are the same. A civilization grows and becomes successful based on a set of paradigms or world views. As time passes and complexity grows the old paradigms are insufficient to solve problems. Leadership charges but they come from the same basic social pool, and nothing changes. Pretty much our political system. Our basic economics on both left and right is from the 19th century. Expand and explot.

I watched a show on a South America civilization. I forget the name, it is know for a very rapid decline and disappearance. From the evidence one possibility was poisoning the water supply. The process for creating large scale building materials involved heat chemical reactions that polluted water. Contamination was evident.

It was Greeks or Romans that harvested a marine creature to extinction for a dye.

Or the over harvesting of English trees for firewood. 'By hook or by crook' may have been coined about poor people illegally taking wood. One of the things the American colonies supplied was timber for ships.

Trade and exposition goes back to tye first human conizations.

What we see today globally is the logical conclusion of thousands of years of economics.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

We are all stuck between economies and action on climate. We saw what happened with a relatively ordered economic shutdown during the pandemic.

"Pollution" Is a Dishonest Word Taken From a Primitive Superstition

What happened was that the Lethal Lockdown lowered auto emissions to the level in which the virus could survive. Otherwise, it would have been quickly wiped out because of the atmosphere being toxic only to microbes. Fauci lied, people died.

 

[bilby]

All other creature including plants live in a dynamic balance with the environment developed over time. Science and technology has taken us out of any checks and balances. Result, unrestrained population growth.

Sooner or later a new balance will occur. The question is whether we will do it in a controlled fashion or it will be imposed on us by the environment.

For examples we can look at South American and other civilizations. They grow becoming wealthy and powerful, over use resources, and decline.

What we are doing is not without historical precedence, the difference being the global scope.

The basic problem here is one of survivorship bias. We look at history and we see that we have always overcome the disasters that have threatened and we conclude that that's what's going to happen in the future.

Nope, we don't always overcome them--it's just the groups that fail to overcome them cease to exist and are erased from the historical memory. (Although their failure is sometimes discovered by archeologists.)

That is out American myth of invincibility which persist despite our failures over recent decades.

I listened to anthropologist on a Tavis Smiley show talk about her work studying why civilizations fail.

The general patterns are the same. A civilization grows and becomes successful based on a set of paradigms or world views. As time passes and complexity grows the old paradigms are insufficient to solve problems. Leadership charges but they come from the same basic social pool, and nothing changes. Pretty much our political system. Our basic economics on both left and right is from the 19th century. Expand and explot.

I watched a show on a South America civilization. I forget the name, it is know for a very rapid decline and disappearance. From the evidence one possibility was poisoning the water supply. The process for creating large scale building materials involved heat chemical reactions that polluted water. Contamination was evident.

It was Greeks or Romans that harvested a marine creature to extinction for a dye.

Or the over harvesting of English trees for firewood. 'By hook or by crook' may have been coined about poor people illegally taking wood. One of the things the American colonies supplied was timber for ships.

Trade and exposition goes back to tye first human conizations.

What we see today globally is the logical conclusion of thousands of years of economics.

English trees were harvested primarily for timber, and that primarily for shipbuilding.

Firewood had a tiny impact, when compared to that of the Royal Navy. You can burn trees of any size, but only large mature trees (particularly oaks) are good for shipbuilding. Spar timber (masts) needs to be mechanically different, and was mostly Baltic pine. One of the justifications for colonising Australia was that Banks had reported stands of pine, which were hoped to be a source for replacement spars for naval operations in the Pacific; However it turns out that the Norfolk Pine is not suitable for masts and spars, as it splits readily under tension.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

It's a lot of both.


After spending time on a yacht celebrating Gate's birthday, Bezos flies in to Glasgow on a private jet and from the Cop26 pulpit gives a sermon about how the riff raff need to mend their ways to save the planet. That's called "taking the piss".

What do you mean about the riff raff?

He seems to be doing Amazon publicity, but also investing some money to fight deforestation and stuff like that.
At any rate, Bezos is neither a cult leader nor a cult follower. And I do not see that he has any nefarious plan to control people - more likely he's just doing what he reckons he needs to do in order to avoid bad publicity and get some good one, and perhaps he also wants to make things better, even if he doesn't go the best way about it.

While I see many people making a lot of unwarranted claims about climate change, their opponents also seem to jump to conclusions.

 

[Swammerdami]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

 

[Politesse]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

Yes, I'm very eager to read this one (it releases on the 9th of this month I believe). Amateur anthropology writers with Victorian-era ideals are the bane of my classrooms. Unfortunately, it is apt to be ignored by those who most need to read it, due to Graeber's well known political views. But science is science, and it is vastly superior to pure speculation in my view.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

Sounds excellent. Definitely on my list.

“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.

Not sure I agree with a lot of this. Are we really stuck? If we're really stuck then so is every other species on the planet in its own right. They all toil similarly.

 

[TSwizzle]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

I'm sure the book has some very interesting stuff in it but it very much looks like an attempt by an anarchist to rewrite history.

The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition).

 

[skepticalbip]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

I'm sure the book has some very interesting stuff in it but it very much looks like an attempt by an anarchist to rewrite history.

The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition).

That description of the book does make it seem like the author misses that the world's nations, not just Europe, was primarily ruled by monarchs. Writers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, etc. were not inspired by the emperors of China, Japan, the Aztecs, the sultans in India, etc.

 

[Politesse]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

I'm sure the book has some very interesting stuff in it but it very much looks like an attempt by an anarchist to rewrite history.

The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition).

That description of the book does make it seem like the author misses that the world's nations, not just Europe, was primarily ruled by monarchs. Writers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, etc. were not inspired by the emperors of China, Japan, the Aztecs, the sultans in India, etc.

At the beginning of the Colonial period? No, the majority of the world was not governed by capital states at that time. I doubt very much that Graeber and Wengrow are confused about the definition of empire, or that China and Mexico qualified, but empires of that time ruled limited areas of arable land, not the majority of the inhabited planet.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

Misfits' Mythology

Glorifying indigenee savages is virtue-signaling to those who don't fit in with the progress and destiny of the White race. Our decadent hereditary classes should go back to the crumbling castles of Europe where they belong, instead of trying to discredit our historical achievements and elevate Third World lowlife.

 

[skepticalbip]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

I'm sure the book has some very interesting stuff in it but it very much looks like an attempt by an anarchist to rewrite history.

The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition).

That description of the book does make it seem like the author misses that the world's nations, not just Europe, was primarily ruled by monarchs. Writers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, etc. were not inspired by the emperors of China, Japan, the Aztecs, the sultans in India, etc.

At the beginning of the Colonial period? No, the majority of the world was not governed by capital states at that time. I doubt very much that Graeber and Wengrow are confused about the definition of empire, or that China and Mexico qualified, but empires of that time ruled limited areas of arable land, not the majority of the inhabited planet.

The idea of "the noble savage" was a Victorian era obsession, not something driving the enlightenment.

 

[Politesse]

The idea of "the noble savage" was a Victorian era obsession, not something driving the enlightenment.

I would be highly surprised if the book in question came to any such conclusion, though the trope of the noble savage did drive some Enlightenment thinkers, especially the man who coined that phrase, John Dryden, and Jean-Jacques Rosseau, who wrote frequently on the theme a century later. I note that neither "noble" nor "savage" had quite their modern meanings at the time. But I am beyond certain that neither Graeber or Wengrow think that everyone outside of Europe was living in an idealized "state of nature" before 1492; quite to the contrary, much of Wengrow's career concentrated on de-mystifying heavily mythologized developments such as statehood and writing in Egyptian prehistory.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

Misfits' Mythology

Glorifying indigenee savages is virtue-signaling to those who don't fit in with the progress and destiny of the White race. Our decadent hereditary classes should go back to the crumbling castles of Europe where they belong, instead of trying to discredit our historical achievements and elevate Third World lowlife.

You mean the places we exported our pollution to... and then blame them for the pollution?

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

Misfits' Mythology

Glorifying indigenee savages is virtue-signaling to those who don't fit in with the progress and destiny of the White race. Our decadent hereditary classes should go back to the crumbling castles of Europe where they belong, instead of trying to discredit our historical achievements and elevate Third World lowlife.

You mean the places we exported our pollution to... and then blame them for the pollution?

Where There's Smoke, There's Fire

"Pollution" is a dishonest term pre-judging neutral by-products. It was taken from a primitive superstition, proving how mindlessly backward the agenda-driven pseudoscientists are. They are also murderers, like their hero, the Unabomber. Viruses can only survive in what these jealous-weakling enemies of human progress call "Clean Air."

 

[steve_bank]

The thread has drifted toward the natures of ancient civilizations. In this regard let me re-post a book suggestion I made two weeks ago: a book said to "upend bedrock assumptions"! The book may be quite relevant to some of the points made in this thread.

The Dawn of Everything

The Atlantic has a review (subtitled "A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change") of a book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I've not read the book but plan to order it....

The book is not yet available at the on-line store I order from, but just the review article is fascinating. Or save time and just click to my prior post where I include a long excerpt.

Sounds excellent. Definitely on my list.

“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.

Not sure I agree with a lot of this. Are we really stuck? If we're really stuck then so is every other species on the planet in its own right. They all toil similarly.

Are we not 'stuck' as being human no different than a monkey of parakeet?

Hitler wrote war was a natural human state, was he wrong? China is on an empire building path. Brits vs EU. Historically doesn't all things boil down to conflict over resources and survival?

Post WWII our foreign policy was get resources and markets for business, by any means possible. Assassination's and toppling governments,. Puppet regimes aka Bannana Republics.

 

[steve_bank]

We are all stuck between economies and action on climate. We saw what happened with a relatively ordered economic shutdown during the pandemic.

"Pollution" Is a Dishonest Word Taken From a Primitive Superstition

What happened was that the Lethal Lockdown lowered auto emissions to the level in which the virus could survive. Otherwise, it would have been quickly wiped out because of the atmosphere being toxic only to microbes. Fauci lied, people died.

Ad Hominin, to attack the individual without substantive critique of the issue. FOX And Friends.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Eventually it becomes a contest for survival and wealth. How we all wage that contest is the issue. Violence has been the standard and I don't think we'll be changing anytime soon.

 

[steve_bank]

Sports is an outlet for aggression.

 

[bilby]

Eventually it becomes a contest for survival and wealth. How we all wage that contest is the issue. Violence has been the standard and I don't think we'll be changing anytime soon.

Violence, at least in the sense of warfare, has massively declined over the last hundred and twenty years.

The Great War was the last war between major powers to be entered into lightly, as though it were no big deal to kill a few thousand (or a few million) young men to assuage some vague feeling of insult or slighted honour felt by powerful people.

It took a lot to get WWII underway in Europe; The appeasement of Hitler went on far too long, largely because the French and English were desperate to avoid war, almost at any cost. Hitler's attitude to warfare was out of date in Europe by the early 1920s. So yes, on the question of war being a natural state, Hitler was wrong (as he so often was). And, of course, even had he been right, civilisation is, by definition, the rejection of those elements of our natural state that are harmful or stupid. 'Natural' means neither 'desirable' nor 'necessary'.

Wars are now smaller, shorter, and less deadly than at any time in the industrial age. In Europe, my great grandmother's generation expected that their sons would want to go to war. My grandmother's expected that their sons would go if the king asked. My mother's expected that they would only go if forced. My generation don't expect the question to arise.

America remains belligerent and warlike, by comparison to Europe. But even she doesn't go to war these days unless she expects an easy victory (albeit those expectations are often hugely unrealistic).

This American exception has its roots in the fact that the USA uses her military as a substitute for the welfare state, as they have an irrational phobia about redistribution of wealth, and have to do it in a clandestine way (because modern civilisation cannot survive without it).