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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I remember a links post by Scott from like 8 years ago where he asked, given the fact that humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall, (not to mention introduced lots of invasive species detrimental to various local environments), why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture? I guess I have a pet theory I've been working up in my mind for a while

Epistemic status: I know close to nothing about agriculture, except some basic historical facts I've heard about previous food industries changing.

Essentially, I think that capitalism and human industry may be what has saved us and prevented catastrophic changes. As someone who works in engineering, I know you always have to deal with changes to your plans, and nothing ever goes right. When you do deliver systems that work, nothing ever stays non-broken, and you always have to come up with new fixes. However, you have goals, and as such you keep finding tradeoffs and workarounds so you're still able to deliver and fulfill the customer need consistently. If you don't, then you lose the customer's business and someone else ends up fulfilling their need instead. Perhaps almost all human-impacting ecological sectors have essentially already been turned into self perpetuating industries.

Is there some fungus which is going to kill all the Gros Michel bananas in the world? Banana farmer moguls absolutely do not want that happening, and they're not stupid. They will end up employing experts that help them set up systems to delay that eventually as long as possible, so they can still meet their quarterly earnings projections, whether by developing new farming methods or new antifungal treatments for the plants.
Does it finally get to the point that the Gros Michel banana can no longer hang on? Either the Gros Michel banana moguls have already started setting up systems to farm new varieties of bananas in preparation for this eventually, or else some until-now specialty supplier of bananas that used to be not as popular (like the Cavendish banana) ends up rising to power by fulfilling the now-unmet demand for bananas, capturing the market and supplanting the old industry leaders as the new head of the industry.
For the record, Gros Michel bananas did taste different, and maybe even better, than Cavendish bananas. But I guess Cavendish bananas are a sufficiently good workaround because they've been the norm for 70 years now.

Is it still bad that humans cause so many changes to the ecology? Yes, but maybe not THAT bad. I postulate two situations.

  1. There might be aspects of ecology that would have been ripe for eventual human exploitation that have not yet been industry-ized. What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have been turned into a low-carbon-emission fuel source using 2025 technology? Well, then we are out of luck in exploiting that fuel source as a new industry. However, this still doesn't impact current industries, only potential future ones. We may never realize what we could have achieved and what we lost the opportunity to do had that banana not gone extinct, and as such this isn't viewed as a catastrophe.

  2. There might be negative effects to the environment that are so detrimental that there is no mitigation possible, and it will make non-viable even other related industries that might have come in and filled the gap. This is the catastrophe scenario that is typically pushed by environmentalists to make laymen worried. But really, I'm not certain I know of any examples of this catastrope scenario coming to pass (not that that means it cannot happen in the future). I guess I've heard that in pre WWII France, they had the technology to farm truffles, and the decimation of France in the war resulted in them somehow losing that capability. As such, truffles need to be hunted and gathered these days by specially trained pigs, and the price of truffles went sky high. I'm not too clear on how this happened, and I'm not sure if it has to do with ecology or just loss of human knowledge.

I speculate that this model of "ingrained industries as a shield" may also apply to other non-agricultural scenarios as well.

why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture?

Fossil fuels. Fossil-fuel based fertilisers allow us to largely ignore the damage we've done to the environment, and fossil-fuel powered farming vehicles and techniques give us even more energy to make up for it. Petroleum-based agriculture is hideously inefficient compared to traditional farming techniques (because this caused confusion on here in the past, I am using efficiency to refer specifically to calories in vs calories out), but petroleum is such a dense source of energy that for the short-term period where we have access to them we can inflate the global population to thoroughly unsustainable levels. We've just been throwing oil and energy at the problem, which is why we haven't actually noticed.

I don't think it's unsustainable, we could use solar for all our current energy consumption if we had to.

because this caused confusion on here in the past, I am using efficiency to refer specifically to calories in vs calories out

Now, if only we could get you to stick to that definition of efficiency when talking about nuclear power.

I'm totally fine with adopting that as a metric - you just have to include all the calories that go into refining the fuel, building the plant, etc.

Why do we care about calories in?

And for something like solar power, how is this computed? Sure, I get that you're going to somehow compute all the calories that go into manufacturing the thing, but then, how do we get calories in from the sun? Is it just the local radiance captured? Is it net of some heat output? Is it actually total solar radiance on Earth's surface (since we're inefficiently only capturing a portion of those calories)? Do we actually compute the calories that go into the fuel of the sun's fusion reactor? Is there some different calculation used for a fusion reactor 'up there' compared to one we might make 'down here'? If so, why?

And for something like solar power, how is this computed?

Because the metric you actually, seriously use is energy returned on energy invested. We don't have to invest any extra energy into the sun to make it shine, nor do we have to make the wind blow ourselves. All we actually care about is the return on the energy we invested to capture that energy. The reason we care about sourcing uranium/nuclear fuel is because it takes human labour to convert uranium from ore to fuel pellets.

because it takes human labour

Ok, so am I correct in understanding that your measurement of efficiency is rooted in human caloric expenditure for 'calories in'? If so, then it's a bit strange to think that modern agriculture is less efficient than in the past, since in the past, we had >90% of the population performing hard labor to produce a sustenance level of food product, whereas now, we have about 1% of the population producing an incredible surplus. There is obviously some additional human effort in building the machines and gathering the fuel, but I think it's incredibly unlikely that if we were to tally that all up, the agriculture-specific human caloric input would be anywhere close to 90% of the workforce.

Ok, so am I correct in understanding that your measurement of efficiency is rooted in human caloric expenditure for 'calories in'?

I think he means "total" caloric expenditures, not just "human". That is, we're cheating by having oil do all the work for us. The sun doesn't count because it will be hitting the Earth no matter what, so we're not "expending" anything. The work that would go into building solar panels would count, though.

I was hoping to get a nice distinction somewhere along those lines that I could probe to see if I could make it consistent, but what I got was "because it takes human labour". If @FirmWeird would like to clarify and say that it's not about human expenditure and about something else instead (maybe some sort of "no matter what" test that I'd want to probe for details), then I'd be very pleased to investigate.

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For EROI, you don't count the solar input for a solar plant, only the energy used in building and maintaining the plant. For the same reason for fossil fuel plants you don't count the energy in the fuel, but you do count the energy extracting and refining the fuel.

Using EROI at all for agriculture is just kinda weird.

given the fact that humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall, (not to mention introduced lots of invasive species detrimental to various local environments), why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture?

I think ecosystems are massively overhyped. Most species aren't needed, there are a few which are really important and the rest are basically window dressing. They've managed to survive and that's about it. Closing 10,000 random businesses would not be nearly as disruptive as shutting down Microsoft or TSMC or Saudi Aramco. It's the same with animals, most of them are just there.

That’s the kind of reasoning which encourages Great Leaps Forward. Never mind the subcontractors, never mind the supply chains, we in the planning office know better.

It’s also really…aesthetically unappealing? Interesting for a cyberpunk novel, but a miserable place to live. I have to believe there is value outside of what’s measured by stock prices.

Unfortunately for Mao, the sparrows that he had killed were really important. I think there's a perception effect where the species that come to your attention are usually important in one way or another. Prominence correlates with importance. So you assume that everything is important - but the species that are lost are mostly unimportant and never came to your attention because they were unimportant.

In the same way, I think we romanticize nature and don't realize the impact of what we've done. I've walked through the English countryside, it's quite pleasant. Completely unnatural. It was all forested, then the forests were cut down, marshes were drained, fences and grassland installed and maintained...

I think one key fact is that the central example of a human-extincted species is some bug living only on one type of tree in the rain forest, and the central type of domesticated species is perhaps the goat, whose precursor today lives in a region from the south of Turkey to Pakistan. Or take the genus Oryza from which rice was derived is found in Africa, Asia, South America, Australia.

Classical targets for domestication are generalists who thrive under a wide variety of conditions. Of course, for luxury food we might domesticate less resilient plants such as cocoa (which was doing ok in South America but can not really claim being native on multiple continents) or spices or drugs.

The other thing is that we don't have a long memory. I am sure that there are some wild species which the Romans found so tasty that they ate them to extinction, but 2000 years on, hardly anyone ever complains about not being able to eat them. As you say, capitalism goes on, and if I can't buy the tastiest bananas any more, I sure want the next tastiest.

In general, I would say that there is a big difference accidentally between extincting a domestic species through monoculture+infection and the typical 'depraved-heart' extinction of a wild species through loss of habitat. I am sure that the former can happen to specific cultivars, but are unlikely to affect the important staples where we have some diversity. I place the odds of a virus which wipes out all domestic rice plants at even lower odds than a virus which wipes out all the humans.

I am sure that there are some wild species which the Romans found so tasty that they ate them to extinction, but 2000 years on, hardly anyone ever complains about not being able to eat them.

Ironically, the canonical example of a species the Romans ate to extinction is silphium, which people regularly complain about being extinct- because the Romans thought it was an effective birth control. Even if Roman medical knowledge was 100% accurate for once, how to prepare it as a contraceptive would almost certainly have been suppressed by Christianity(early Christian writers hated birth control, and it’s generally agreed that whatever efficacy silphium had it was as some sort of preparation).

But there you have it.

I think one key fact is that the central example of a human-extincted species is some bug living only on one type of tree in the rain forest

We’ve got a bunch of more impactful recent extinctions than that.

A few that come to mind:

The passenger pigeon, whose flocks were so large they used to black out the sun for days on end as the billions of birds passed.

Stellars sea cow, the largest sirenian ever known to exist and the only which existed outside of warm tropical waters.

The dodo, one of the dozens of quite unique Australian animal species which went extinct in the past couple centuries, and which has become synonymous with extinction.

The thylacine, another Australian example. The largest marsupial carnivore on the planet. Not only its species but the entire family it represented is now extinct.

The carolina parakeet. The only parrot species native to the USA.

Of course there are a lot more which are not fully extinct but have been reduced so drastically it’s sort of similar.

The American buffalo. The right whale. Much of the range of the wolf, of bears, the general abundance and size of life in the ocean which has decreased over time, etc. etc.

The carolina parakeet. The only parrot species native to the USA.

There are native parrots on the Rio grande.

The dodo, one of the dozens of quite unique Australian animal species which went extinct in the past couple centuries, and which has become synonymous with extinction.

The thylacine, another Australian example. The largest marsupial carnivore on the planet. Not only its species but the entire family it represented is now extinct.

These are due to species from "big land" getting on smaller lands and have very little to do with "ecosystem damage etc." it happens all the time when separated lands get connected

But how are these impactful? What's the negative implication for humans from them being extinct?

Natural beauty is eroded, and the world is less interesting. No, these species did not make number go up, but that doesn't mean they meant nothing. What are the negative implication of humans living in a pod and not knowing what a tree is?

I guess I propose that they might mean close to nothing, when there's still 10 to 30 million other species that remain that easily fill the gap left.

I specifically chose species which don’t have others that easily fill the gap.

There aren’t birds that blot out the sky or native parrots or cold water manatee creatures in the US anymore, personally I think that’s something of value that disappeared.

We don’t miss them because of shifting baseline syndrome.

But for example, let’s say I’ve seen the manatees in Florida.. I have, they’re really beautiful. These huge gentle warm water mammals that just float up into the river systems and natural springs. You can be on a paddle board above a group of them and pet them, they just hang out underneath.

It would be sad if we lost these. Wouldn’t you agree?

Quite possible, btw

I find it hard to understand people’s attitudes towards nature sometimes. It’s typically, “sure we could lose that and we’d survive fine!”.

A lot of things could be lost and we’d survive ok. Just pick a dystopia from fiction. 1984, Brave New World, humans survive! We’re doing fine!

Should the response be then “who cares?”, or, are there other things in the world that matter than just human survival?

There a very big gap between an existence without manatees that a few people ever see on a recreational voyage, and living in a pod devoid of sunlight and subsisting on nutrient paste, or whatever other dystopia you might want to bring up.

And so because of that, we’re likely to keep reducing the web of life on the planet.

Yeah, it doesn’t affect you much if the manatee disappears. There may be some complicated knock on effect like more frequent algal blooms that make the beach a shitty place to be and affect the fishing industry. But we’re good at ignoring this type of thing.

Heck even if our cousins the chimpanzees (between 100k - 300k still exist in the wild), or the orangutan (~50,000 are left) disappeared, doesn’t really matter to you.

Ultimately it’s a spiritual principle. Either non human life on earth has value, or only human concerns do.

I have a foundational semi religious belief that the biota of the planet has innate value, so for example, if someone destroyed the rainforests of the planet tomorrow, even if through some magic this was made to have no impact on human wellbeing, I’d be forced to consider it unspeakably tragic.

Apparently not all humans share this belief.

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I am sure that there are some wild species which the Romans found so tasty that they ate them to extinction,

I think you're referring to silphium.

What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have been turned into a low-carbon-emission fuel source using 2025 technology

Don't worry about anything like that. How much energy you can get out of crops is capped by photosynthesis. It's not that much because photosynthesis is extremely inefficient. If there was a plant that had a higher photosynthesis efficiency, we'd know.

they had the technology to farm truffles, and the decimation of France in the war resulted in them somehow losing that capability.

You heard wrong. Truffles are still farmed, and apparently there's been a recent breakthrough. Some micro-testing which lets people buying tree seedlings are successfully inoculated with the symbiotic fungi that grows truffles.

humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall,

There are many, many species of bugs. Notoriously many. Apart from pollinators I've not read anyone related to farming worrying about anything going extinct, as a niche wouldn't stay unfilled for long.

Don't worry about anything like that. How much energy you can get out of crops is capped by photosynthesis. It's not that much because photosynthesis is extremely inefficient. If there was a plant that had a higher photosynthesis efficiency, we'd know.

That was just a doesn't-matter-farfetched-hypothetical to quickly illustrate how past shifts in ecology might (or might not) have unrealized impacts on human progress, it's not meant to be a serious postulation. I could have said "What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have cured malaria"

You heard wrong. Truffles are still farmed, and apparently there's been a recent breakthrough. Some micro-testing which lets people buying tree seedlings are successfully inoculated with the symbiotic fungi that grows truffles.

That's interesting. Do you have any links you can share? Perhaps only certain species of truffles were impacted?

Nah. I read it somewhere, the technique basically just improves efficiency for farmers because it can test every tree seedling for the presence of the symbiotic mushroom that produces truffles.

Cultivation can be done in apparently as simple way as taking acorns from truffle-producing trees and planting them in an area with the right soil and climate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle#Cultivation

But in the modern day farmers buy seedlings inoculated with the mushroom spores, plant that and that almost guarantees each tree is going to produce truffles when it's grown sufficiently. The decline in truffles is apparently due to re-forestation and.

What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have cured malaria

Like the Cinchona tree?

Wikipedia has a qrd:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle#:~:text=Volatile%20constituents-,Cultivation,-edit

Tl;Dr: WWI devastated the know how that provided huge cultivated truffle harvests. There have been recent successes in cultivation, but we are not back at the pre-WWI peak.

As the debate kids would say: “cap solves.” Leave the problem for someone else, so long as we can be reasonably confident their incentives are aligned correctly. Our best way of doing that is by letting them make money on the free market.

It’s interesting that @jeroboam mentioned Taleb, because I was thinking of his other works. Companies have their plans for the present. With a sufficient time horizon, they’ll also hedge against the “known unknowns” of the future. But how do they deal with “unknown unknowns?” Black swan events which defy the models and do incalculable damage before anyone pivots. The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.

So how much of that risk is correctly measured by agriculture companies? Modern farming is capital-intensive and low-margin. I would expect this to pull their time horizon closer. Every dollar spent on contingency plans is one not spent on something more urgent.

There’s a fun little story which I also encountered via Scott. Vincent Kosuga managed to ruin onion futures for the entire country. It turns out what’s good for stock prices isn’t necessarily beneficial for everyone—or anyone—else.

As the debate kids would say: “cap solves.”

Debate kids no longer say this, they say stupid race bullshit with no relation to the topic at hand and then call you racist for pointing it out.

Kritik is much funnier when I don't have to encounter it firsthand, yeah.

I’m old enough to remember when I was in debate, Kritiks were debates about the effects of capitalism and could at least be argued relative to whatever the topic was.

I stopped volunteering with the special debate league for inner city kids when I was having to judge stupid race nonsense they didn’t believe and couldn’t explain.

But how do they deal with “unknown unknowns?”

How do pre-modern subsistence farmers deal with the "unknown unknowns"? How much of that risk was correctly measured? My sense is that they mostly just died.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a bit of a tool, but I think his concept of "skin in the game" is a valuable one. The older I get, the more I discount people's opinions when they don't have skin in the game.

For example, here's a group whose opinions I don't respect: climate change experts. We could mitigate 90% of the negative effects of climate change in the next decade – but few experts are recommending action. Why? Because climate change experts don't suffer from climate change. If anything, their power and prestige grows when the climate gets warmer. Why else would they hype up any negative report and downplay any positive news. If somehow the climate stopped warming tomorrow, they'd be out of a job and looking rather foolish.

The beauty of capitalism is that it usually (though not always) aligns incentives in a positive way because the people making decisions have skin in the game.

I think that tackling climate change is hard because it is a massively collective action problem.

The payoff matrix of anyone likely to drown when the ocean level rises basically does not depend on how much CO2 she emits, only how much CO2 the rest of the world emits. Thus, even she does not have skin in the game in the sense that she will personally benefit from any choices she makes regarding limiting her CO2 emissions. She will drown or not depending on the actions the rest of the world take, but her own consumption choices only influence how much she has to pay for her car.

I think that for some topics, it is very hard to find a person who has something riding on the outcome which is proportional to what society has riding on the outcome. Climate change is one such topic. Geostrategic matters are another, perhaps. You have a bunch of military leaders who recommend this or that action, buy an aircraft carrier, invade Russia in the winter, get out of Afghanistan, whatever. Their pensions do not depend on how well their country does with their advice. In fact, their personal interests may lie diametrically opposed to that of their country sometimes: large scale conflict is generally bad for the general population and has bad outcomes for at least half of the countries who engage in it, but for general it can be their chance to shine. Of course, the incentive of a grunt who does not want to die in some ditch is also sometimes misaligned to the incentives of a country.

We could mitigate 90% of the negative effects of climate change in the next decade

"Could" can mean a lot of different things.

For example, we could likely put a 100 people on Mars within a decade (if we made that the global focus of our economy to the detriment of every other goal).

Or NATO could invade and occupy Switzerland (i.e. it is technically possible but nobody has any incentive to do it).

Or we could build a Tesla with six instead of four wheels (if we pay Musk a few billions, he will likely design a prototype for us).

Or I could pass you the salt over the table (i.e. just ask and I will do it, no trouble for me).

Where on this spectrum do you think 'mitigate 90% of the negative effects of climate change' falls?

On the order of $100 billion we could do it. So somewhere between the Tesla and Switzerland options.

Is this sulphate aerosol geoengineering, or are you thinking about something else?

I'd also like to know the answer to that question.

IIRC the likely-better short-term alternative to sulfate aerosol is calcite aerosol (so the main side effect is to reduce rather than increase ozone depletion), and the likely-better long-term alternative is enhanced rock weathering (to actually get excess CO2 out of the atmosphere rather than just papering over a few of the problems it causes), but IIRC they're even further back in the theoretical/experimental stages.

So we are talking about mitigation of effects, not getting rid of GHG, I guess?

I have not done the math, but I can see that kind of money building a lot of dams to counter rising see levels. I don't really see how it is enough to combat the expected heat waves, though. It will not buy half of Africa air conditioning for their homes.

I’m pretty much the same. The opinions of professional activists, actors, writers, singers just get an instant dismissal from me. Nobody in that group has any real stake in the outcome. They aren’t going to feel the effects of failure or the benefits of success. An activist wants less policing but he doesn’t even live in that community. If crime goes up, it’s not his stuff getting stolen. And if businesses flee, it’s not them losing their job.

Even so called experts are hyper-expert in one tiny corner of a very large interconnected web. Yes, shutting down all the coal plants in the world would mitigate climate change. Of course, it’s not going to work because our entire economy requires electricity to function.

The beauty of capitalism is that it usually (though not always) aligns incentives in a positive way because the people making decisions have skin in the game.

Doesn’t the whole concept of externalized costs undermine this claim?

I’m don’t think it’s a specific failing of capitalism but the insulation of decision-makers in business from consequences seems alive and well to me.

Doesn’t the whole concept of externalized costs undermine this claim?

Capitalism isn't utopian, and most capitalists are willing to let the state address its inadequacies. You acknowledge that this isn't solely a failure of capitalism, but isn't the externalization of costs even greater in bureaucracy or democracy as a whole?

I don't follow the question really as I don’t see bureaucracy or democracy as the same type of thing as capitalism.

All I’m saying is whatever its virtues I don’t see how capitalism somehow leads to more decision makers having skin in the game. Would you be willing to flesh out an argument?

Allow classic Milton to get you into the basics with only a sound bite.

Doesn’t the whole concept of externalized costs undermine this claim?

No of course not. The existence of exceptions doesn't negate the general rule. I thought about bringing up externalities but it felt long winded. So I just said (though not always) and hoped that would cover it.

Capitalism is the worst system except for all the other ones, yadda yadda.

What is your evidence of the general rule?

To make sure I understand, you’re saying “in general, capitalism leads to decisions made by people with skin in the game,” right? Would you be willing to flesh out an argument a little more? I just don’t see why that’s true.

At the risk of being basic, here's a simple example. Let's say I own a restaurant making chicken sandwiches. I have skin in the game. If I serve bad sandwiches at high prices, I will lose money and then go out of business.

On the other hand, consider the DMV. No one gets promoted or fired based on performance of the DMV. People are required to use their services, and they can't go out of business. No one has any skin in the game.

Chicken sandwich restaurants are generally good. DMV's are generally bad.

As a stupid counterpoint, we had a chicken chain try to move in recently. Super Chix. Good sandwiches at high prices. I think they lost out hard to the existing (and ever-expanding) force of Chik-fil-a.

This isn’t an argument against the general principle, but it is a reminder that there’s more than one way to lose money. Whether or not we eradicate a species has less to do with our stated preferences and more to do with its particular habits.

Super chix tried to advertise themselves as the woke version of chic-fil-a at higher prices. Needless to say, paying a premium to get gay chicken was not a recipe for success in the Dallas suburbs even if they did have slightly better fries.

Wouldn’t the same be true of a worker’s coop? This seems more like an example of markets providing the right incentives than capitalism. Many group the two together; not trying to nitpick, it’s fine if you want to group them together, just want to make sure I’m clear.

It would be even more true of a workers' coop when considering the market for the provision of goods. The place workers' coops fails is, ironically, when considering the market for the provision of workers' compensation. Putting your investments in a single business instead of diversifying is in general a bad idea; making that business be the same business you rely on for a salary makes it an even worse idea. Maybe not for the customers, because from their perspective the workers' incentives are now just about as well-aligned as they possibly could be, but when considering the workers or even just considering both together it's hard to beat keeping most wealth in index funds rather than a "pray to God this one company doesn't go under" fund.

For sure. I get paid mostly in shares of stock and it blows my mind that my colleagues will keep theirs instead of selling and diversifying.

Disagree that climate change experts are usually the ones to downplay positive news.

Often climate activists get mad at certain climate scientists for talking up the progress that’s been made or reasons for hope.

Some examples: Michael Mann (doom and gloomers really hate this guy), Zeke Hausfather (here’s an example of the measured tone he tends to take).

Petteri Taalas, the chair of World Meterological Organization in 2016-2023 and highly influential globally through IPCC and UN, was dunked on constantly by Finnish climate activists for statements like this.

“This translation service isn't available in your region”

That’s classic Petteri Taalas.

Sigh.

"WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas soothes people's climate pain: "Only small changes to our everyday life" Fighting the climate crisis looks promising and hopeful from the eyes of an aeronautical scientist.

Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization Petteri Taalas

The actions required to combat climate change are significantly easier than what has been done to combat the corona pandemic. And they don't have to be done immediately, but over time.

This is the message of the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization, WMO, Petteri Taalas, in his book , Climate change in the eyes of a meteorologist, published today .

  • That's how it is. The change that is needed can be made with fairly small changes in terms of our everyday life, says Taalas.

WMO is an international organization in the field of meteorology under the UN. Taalas works in the organization's highest office. The core of the world's climate science, the intergovernmental panel on climate change IPCC, is also under his supervision .

So Taalas' words have weight. That's why he is listened to.

Taalas makes the fight against climate change sound easy and nice. And like you don't have to give up or suffer from anything.

That's what he wants it to sound like.

  • We have hope in this matter. At the moment, the situation looks quite promising, says Taalas in an interview with Yle.

However, in Taalas' opinion, the image of combating climate change is in danger of slipping off the wrong track. According to him, the necessary actions, at least from the individual's point of view, will not revolutionize anyone's life in one way or the other.

  • My mission is to tell the facts, and also to think about which are important and which are less important in combating climate change. Sometimes it's a bit lost, which are the most important things. As a mathematical scientist, I want to tell you what the magnitude classes of things are, he says.

So Taalas wants to restore dimensions to the climate debate. In his book, he repeatedly reminds us that understanding the proportions of things is important when choosing ways to solve a problem.

  • It is important to be aware of the magnitudes of things. Sometimes big and small things get mixed up, for example in the media. For example, we may create unreasonable burdens for mothers of small children when they feel that they have to make certain choices to solve climate change, says Taalas.

We sacrifice 75 percent of the Earth's arable land for growing livestock feed. It's a fool's errand and globally the biggest drawback of land use.

According to him, the means to combat climate change should be chosen carefully and thoughtfully.

  • Not everyone has to start living a life like Pentti Linkola's , but this can be solved with fairly small changes in our everyday life. We need both large-scale political decision-making guidance and our own activities, such as movement choices, housing choices and diet choices, says Taalas.

According to Taalas, people should focus on big things if they want to play their part in climate action. Big things mean moving, living and spending.

Recently, the airspace has been dominated by diet changes, reducing the economic exploitation of forests and stopping air travel as the best ways to solve the climate problem. Someone is already talking about climate fanatics as standard-bearers of the true doctrine and guides in the lives of fellow human beings , he writes in his book.

Climate fanatics are taking climate talk on the wrong track Petteri Taalas has seen how climate change has turned from a phenomenon that worries a small group of researchers into mainstream news that shakes the whole world.

He has also seen how climate skeptics, who once strongly attacked science, have withdrawn from the debate. Now Taalas thinks it has gone to the other extreme.

This time, in Taalas' opinion, the desire to combat climate science has partly arisen as a result of "sharp and incriminating climate communication".

The desire to limit people's movement, diet, living or leisure time habits or the number of children under the guise of combating climate change has certainly put many people on the back foot , Taalas writes in his book.

On the other hand, Taalas does put the number of children on the agenda in an interview when talking about climate change. He would like population growth to be discussed in connection with climate change.

  • I'd be happy to put curbing population growth alongside combating climate change. Very little has been said about it. If our population was at the same level as 100 years ago, there would be no climate change, says Taalas.

In Taalas opinion, diet is also an issue that needs to be considered.

  • The most important challenge is that we sacrifice 75 percent of the Earth's arable land to grow livestock feed. It's a fool's errand and globally the biggest drawback of land use. It should be abandoned. By eating less meat, we could use arable land to produce, for example, biodiversity or biofuels, he says.

Taalas also blames the sharpness of communication as the reason why the support of some parties has increased and others have decreased. In Finland, according to him, the Greens and the left-wing coalition have been at one extreme, and the basic Finns at the other.

So, according to Taalas, has a certain kind of politics done a disservice to climate protection?

The topic involves political sensitivities, because a significant part of the world's economic growth, jobs, transport and industry has been achieved by coal, oil and natural gas. Humanity's dependence on these was and is considerable , he writes.

  • It is important how climate measures are sold to citizens. Taxes are not popular, tax reductions are, even if heavy emissions are taxed more, he formulates.

For example, Taalas raises the yellow vest movement in France. The people took over the streets in protest of France's intentions to slightly increase diesel taxation .

  • We have to think about what is acceptable to the people. You have to choose the means so that the general public also accepts them.

According to Taalas, the majority of the world's population is of the opinion that climate change should be combated.

  • But there must also be a certain calmness and reasonableness in the measures. I believe that reasonable measures will be accepted by the public.

Things have to be considered from many points of view; in terms of climate, biodiversity, economy and employment.

  • This is the question for the political decision-maker. But we have the technical and financial means to solve this problem, and it doesn't have to change our everyday life very much.

According to Taalas, people are worried about how they will be able to move around at a reasonable price in the future, eat the reasonably priced food of their choice and vacation as they wish.

Presenting the fight against climate change as a penitential exercise requiring asceticism and self-flagellation falls into the lair of populists , Taalas writes in his book.

According to Taalas, sharp and blaming talk about climate change leads to polarization.

  • Something similar has been seen in religious circles. When extremist Christians say things in public, the general public feels anxious and finds it negative. There is a somewhat similar risk in combating climate change. If it requires a Pentti Linkola-type life, the general public will easily reject it, says Taalas.

Just like the church, the fight against climate change also needs objective and moderate messengers, so that its image remains positive , writes Taalas.

According to Taalas, extremeness when talking about climate change can lead to the popularity of populists.

  • As has been seen in the USA, populists are not the best outcome in terms of combating climate change.

"The domestic climate debate has tones different from many other countries" In his book, Taalas accuses Finland's climate debate several times of being too fanatical and of moving at the level of imagination.

According to Taalas, it is important to value the importance of diet, the number of children, forests and air traffic with the numbers that describe them, and take into account the entire spectrum of reducing emissions.

Well, what are those numbers? You can look at it from many angles.

If you look at it from an atmospheric scientist's point of view, i.e. from the perspective of the amount of greenhouse gases ending up in the air worldwide, the numbers look like this.

Global greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest cause is energy 73.2%.

  • The biggest producer of emissions is energy production, second is transport, third in countries like Finland are real estate and housing. Then come land use issues and dietary issues, which are clearly smaller issues. They are also worth doing, but we cannot solve this problem with them. There are ways to improve energy, transport and housing systems. As individuals, we can support this activity, says Taalas.

Taala is annoyed by the fact that, for example, the coverage of the IPCC's land and sea reports has given rise to the image that, in his opinion, the most central issue of climate change is agriculture and forestry or the seas.

According to him, the general public may have had a deficient picture of the fight against climate change as a whole, because the role of fossil fuel emissions has not been discussed in these contexts.

  • We solve this by changing our energy production from fossil energy to hydropower, to renewable energy, and to some extent also to nuclear power. Our transport system needs to be changed to electric and to use biofuels and hydrogen. There are also new opportunities for synthetic fuels, which can even absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Living in Finland is central to how we heat or cool our apartments, he says.

If you look at emissions from the perspective of a single person, they look like this.

The carbon footprint of the average Finn is 10,300 kg C02/person/year

  • I believe that electric cars will become cheaper. Geothermal heat is an attractive solution. A vegetarian diet is also healthy. Light traffic is also good for health, he lists.

According to Taalas' view, small climate measures are pointless tinkering. In his opinion, it doesn't matter from the point of view of the climate whether he chooses a paper or plastic bag in the store.

If climate change is not curbed, the earth will not be able to support the current number of people According to the most recent measurements, the global average temperature has broken the limit of 1.2 degrees of warming. According to the British Meteorological Institute, the magical 1.5 degrees may be reached at least momentarily already by 2024.

A return to the climate gap of pre-industrial times is no longer in sight.

Finland's Arctic region will warm by at least three to five degrees, even if the Paris Agreement is kept within the limits. In winter, the readings are even higher.

Sea level rise is happening slowly and will inevitably continue into the 21st century, even if we stay within the limits of the Paris Agreement.

  • So far, we have not gone in the right direction. We have broken records for these concentrations year after year. The same goes for temperatures. So far it has gone in a bad direction.

The IPCC showed in 2018 that one and a half degrees would be the most ideal goal for the entire planet. Even two degrees would be happy in terms of the well-being of humanity. In conditions above three degrees, feeding the world's population would become very difficult.

Both policy makers and various companies and financial actors have heard this message and want to be part of solving this problem.

If emission restrictions are completely failed and all fossil resources are burned, the average temperature may rise by 3-5 degrees by the end of the century. Life on Earth continues even under those conditions, but the biosphere, i.e. the environment, experiences dramatic changes and is unable to support the current number of people.

Taalas wants to remind you that climate change is not leading to the destruction of humanity or the destruction of our planet.

  • This is not the case. The scenarios that have been calculated do not support such an idea. We have certain risks that need to be monitored. There are certain shades of gray to choose from for the future, if the 2050-2060 carbon neutral goal becomes the prevailing goal throughout the world.

Taalas even sees the situation as promising at the moment. By promise, Taalas means that so many countries in the world have made promises about climate action. China, the EU, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, with President Biden, the USA will also join the same front.

  • It means that two thirds of the world's emissions are behind these commitments. We also have a growing number of technical ways to solve this problem, and new innovations are emerging all the time. I am quite optimistic that we will reach the 1.5-2 degrees range of the Paris [climate agreement].

This is despite the fact that the Earth has already warmed 1.2 degrees on average and 1.5 degrees is knocking on the door.

  • We have quite a good chance of reaching two degrees. Of course, 1.5 degrees would be better for the well-being of humanity, or in fact the best situation would be that we could museumize the situation to its current state. That is no longer possible. The change will continue until 2060. That's a fact.

According to Taalas, the message that climate scientists have been preaching for 40 years has now been heard.

  • In that respect, the situation is promising. Both policy makers and various companies and financial actors have heard this message and want to be part of solving this problem. That there is hope, but we haven't seen that positive change in the atmosphere yet, he says."

Invasive species have caused catastrophes but it doesn’t seem that the median invasive species does. Most are benign or positive, unless you’re an eco-preservationist. I’m not.

Invasive species have caused catastrophes though.

What sort of catastrophes? I'm interested to know, I know little about this.

Kudzu. What used to be a useful plant when planted, farmed, and cultivated became a natural version of The Blob when released into the wild. Because it grew uncontrollably, it's literally smothered millions of acres of other plant life by blocking out the sun. It's almost impossible to kill chemically without also destroying the natural habitat. While grazing by farm animals can help control the problem, it does not kill the plant itself. Even burning the plant doesn't solve the problem because the vines can grow back from the roots themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_in_the_United_States

Edit: reading your other response you were looking for catastrophic impacts on humans, which isn’t the main point of what I wrote, but I’ll keep it up because I think it’s an interesting subject.

The chytrid fungus pandemic has taken a staggering toll on amphibian life around the planet. Probably the most impactful invasive species in the world from the standpoint of affected species and proportion of global biodiversity.

White nose syndrome is another fungal epidemic that has decimated bat populations across North America.

Fun finding, there’s a study connecting the collapse of bat populations to increased infant mortality. Bats consume copious amounts of insects. When they disappear, farmers have been found to increase their use of pesticides in affected counties. These pesticides have medical implications for humans.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg0344

Another example with a more direct human impact, the disappearance and near extinction of the American Chestnut. Once was among the most prized and useful tree in North America for both its wood and its nuts. It was among the most common tree across eastern forests. In the early 1900s, chestnut blight arrived from Asia and essentially erased the species from the North American landscape within a decade.

Other invasives like cheatgrass generate much higher fire risks in the west, and aquatic invasives such as zebra mussels are extremely expensive for management organizations to deal with. The latter can reorganize entire food webs when introduced and end up having impacts on local economies such as fisheries.

Edit: reading your other response you were looking for catastrophic impacts on humans, which isn’t the main point of what I wrote, but I’ll keep it up because I think it’s an interesting subject.

Makes sense. But, yeah, I guess the core of my hypothesis is that human ingenuity and the human drive for survival is what keeps industries afloat in the face of ecological adversity, due to humans' vested interests. So it needs to be an example where humans have a large vested interest.
And that's not to say that there aren't problems which develop which make the agriculture harder or more expensive. It's just that I suspect people keep coming up with ways to overcome these problems, which results in much less impact to everyday people. Perhaps I'll edit that onto my post when I get a moment.

The most obvious case seems to be potato blight which somehow got from the New World to Europe in the 1840s and killed millions of people due to famine.

That couldn't happen today of course because our agricultural systems are not dependent on a single crop and we can easily transport food from all over the globe.

Phylloxera is another example. There is still no way of controlling it even with 21st century technology - if it wasn't for the good fortune that vitis vinifera grows well when grafted onto the rootstock of American vine species with natural resistance (but which produce undrinkable wine) we would have lost >95% of our ability to grow wine.

As a (technical) Irishman and an oenophile, I am genuinely conflicted about whether potato blight or phylloxera is the worst thing to come out of America. But both make high-fructose corn syrup and The Phantom Menace look like nothingburgers.

Cool. I wasn't sure of the cause of the potato famine. But if it is a case of human-caused invasive species of disease, then I would definitely call it one example of a catastrophe.

Complicating this is that it isn't just the potato blight which got from the New World to Europe via human action, it was the potato itself.

Here's a fun example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia

In 2023, rangers discovered a female cane toad in Conway National Park in north Queensland which, recorded unofficially at 25 cm and 2.7 kg and dubbed 'Toadzilla', may be the largest ever seen.

Uh, that's a big toad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia

Well, I'd certainly never heard of this before, but I am still wondering, after quickly skimming the article, what the catastrophe is.
This also might depend on your definition of what a catastrophe is, but I guess I'm referring to large loss of human life, or drastically decreased living conditions for tens of thousands of humans, as the end-result of an event like this in order for me to consider it a catastrophe.

It has been fairly devastating. I grew up camping around Australia's top end, across the Litchfield tabletop plateau and Kakadu escarpment and floodplains. True frontier country. Before the cane toads made their way up from Queensland, we often saw quolls poking around the firelight edge. When the cane toads first arrived, they were scarily thick on the ground, you couldn't go for a piss in the night without seeing four of them (and this is in remote, wild areas -- not constrained to places with human activity). You see fewer cane toads now, since the monitors, kites and wedgies learned to flip them over and eat them safely, but I never saw a quoll again.

I am perpetually surprised by how many of your animals sound fictional.

He’s using colourful nicknames, I believe- wedgies are probably wedge tailed eagles, for example.

Australia’s got a whole continuum of them.

Cane toads, as you observed, mostly poisoned dogs and local wildlife. They’re also notorious as speed bumps for cars. I get the impression that more speculative harms (ecological collapse, cattle diseases) are scientists fishing for a justification.

Rabbits: erosion, which matters a little more for countries relying on grazing animals. Serious enough that the government built a fence across the continent to slow them down. There were obvious upsides in terms of meat and pelts, though.

There’s also a Dingo Fence! I mention it mostly as evidence that predator populations are worth keeping out. Also, it’s the only time I’ve seen native populations blamed for introducing a species.

All in all, we’re not terrible at mitigating the direct economic consequences. But is that really a worthy goal? Letting an annoying, messy species tile the continent just because it doesn’t do enough damage to get a corporation involved? There’s something sad about a decline so slow, so soft, that it can’t be called a catastrophe.

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