Heresies: Global Warming

What kind of crazy person wants a cold, dry planet anyway?

Off and on for a couple of days I was thinking about writing a post joking about how global warming sounds really nice anyway because who likes the cold, I want more summer. As it turns out, a lot of people have asked this question unironically. Then I started also asking this question unironically. I think the media really wants you to equate global warming with pollution but why would global warming automatically mean more pollution? The fact is a planet that’s warmer and wetter, all other things being equal (which is highly speculative) just sounds really nice, and people who want the planet to be cold and dry sound like a bunch of crazy religious extremists who just want you to suffer because their life is suffering due to their stupidity and insanity, and they should take their place among the fossils.

Most unironic defenders of the idea of global warming are certainly right-wing thinktanks and independent parties aligned with them, however, this should not be a partisan issue. Many people don’t seem to be taking it as a partisan issue, either. Even people in the Guardian, a left-wing British newspaper, are debating the pros and cons of global warming.

Could climate change be a good thing? | Environment | The Guardian

Global warming is good for you | Duncan Steel | The Guardian

That there are substantial drawbacks to global warming is unarguable. Certain low-lying areas such as Bangladesh and various Pacific islands may well be flooded. It will be the responsibility of the developed nations, which produce most of the carbon dioxide emissions, to find ways to assist those people most affected. But it is not only the developing world that will be inundated. For example, most of Florida, rather than just the Everglades, may become a swamp. In 100 years' time Miami may be submerged, but a century ago there was almost nothing there. Such change - slow change, on the scale of the human lifetime - causing the shifting of peoples has been a continuing feature of history.

In Britain the coastlines have never been constant: as Beachy Head erodes, it produces shingle that banks up to the east. The place where William the Conqueror landed in 1066 is now inland. Status quo is the exception, not the norm. For the human utility of the planet as a whole, some regions may need to be abandoned, while new zones of habitability will become available as planet Earth warms slightly. It is a natural function of humankind to move on, and search for new opportunities and horizons.

The second article mentions Bangladesh and other low-lying areas being flooded, but even then, I’ve read other articles (such as the Spectator one below) stating that the GDP of poor countries would increase by 9 times the current amount and Bangladesh would be able to afford dams like the Netherlands has today and not be flooded from rising sea levels anyway.

Meanwhile, here are some right-wing sources who, in line with big business interests, much more expectedly argue that it’s a good thing:

Happiness Is a Warm Planet | Hoover Institution Happiness Is a Warm Planet

Why climate change is good for the world | The Spectator

The Bright Side of Global Warming — Countere Magazine

The fact is people are likely just scared of change so all the insane religious extremist-seeming people who run the governments and organizations might be like “Fore verilee we wishe fore þe climate too remaine as it is, fore þis worlde is but a vale of teers, and colde weathere purifies þe soule. Let us eet of þe cheese and drinke of þe wine befoor þe mice raide þe stores and enjoyee þe stronge stenche þereove.” They don’t want the Arctic and Antarctic to turn into Australia and New Zealand while, at worst, some low-lying tropical and subtropical places will need to build a lot of dams… but also have an order of magnitude more money than they have now and more labor force as well to do it with.

Some people will turn around and say “It’s not global warming, it’s climate change! You’re not getting 7 months of summer and turning New York into the new Florida so no one has to leave for nicer weather once they get rich enough to! The ice will get worse and even though the glaciers are melting it will get dry!” I tend to doubt it, but that’s speculative. I just want to open up the possibility of a non-partisan discussion. As much as I’m promoting heresy here I’m not trying to assume climate change is automatically good, I’m just having a hard time seeing why I should assume it’s automatically bad either.

The fact is no one wanted to live in cold Europe so they left and started colonizing everything. This makes perfect sense, because Europe used to be much warmer. As in, back in ancient times, there were lions in Europe and that’s why there’s the myth of Hercules slaying the Nemean lion, which also seems like strong evidence Europe is not going to get colder as a result of global warming as well. Europeans moved to Europe because it was warmer, believe it or not light skin tones don’t mean that you love white snow, then basically got stuck in Europe as the climate cooled and then starting in the Renaissance they had the technology to leave so they did. The Little Ice Age of the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s in Europe (which was not a global event) was likely partially started by Columbus wiping out lots of natives in Central America to begin with, which in turn made cold Europeans even more miserable and started all the colonialism that’s so controversial today, which is itself an unprecedented event from a natural-historical perspective, not even the Polynesians just bypassed a bunch of areas of land to move somewhere non-adjacent because they liked the weather since they couldn’t, and I don’t think humans would’ve evolved the same way at all if we could because e.g. language-learning is quite inefficient which makes modern human languages horribly badly suited for a world with modern global travel, therefore I think all of human cognition would’ve developed differently in that case.

If no one wants to live somewhere cold then global warming might be great. Of course this needs to be measured against other effects like perhaps increased CO2 is a problem for reasons unrelated to warming the planet and melting the ice, or maybe the weather will become unpredictable and cause problems faster than they can be solved if the climate changes too quickly, but I still have a hard time seeing “We need to keep the planet cold and dry just like miserable destitute Europe, which no one other than people too lazy to vamoose has been able to tolerate ever since the temperatures have been dropping and we got the technology to leave for terrible ghetto places with bad, non-cold weather that have things to do besides visit museums and pretend gastronomic French restaurants are not disgusting, like the Americas, South Africa, and New Zealand!”

How the Little Ice Age Changed History | The New Yorker

European Union, I know why your economies suck – ALICIA & JOHN (aliciaandjohn.com)

If we want to end the Ice Age (which we are technically still in) and make the planet much more habitable, but more CO2 levels are bad, maybe we just pay everyone to leave Panama and just take out the entire Isthmus of Panama with dynamite? That’s highly speculative, please don’t run around like “Michaela McKuen wants to blow up Panama into rubble in the sea!” rather than just saying I speculated about it (which I’m sure is too much for some people.) However, supposedly the current Ice Age was caused because of plate tectonics between North and South America which cut off the Atlantic from the Pacific and changed global currents.

The fact is, more than the vast majority of technological innovations, I tend to daydream about how nice it’d be to just live on a warmer, wetter planet, though for most of the time I’ve associated this with a sort of science fiction type of goal of space exploration, and a desire to go move to a hypothetical rainforest planet, which seems so far-off at this point my best bet for that even would be in decades after the tardigrade gene implant is widely available and that’s too long to wait. It was only once I put two and two together that I considered Earth could possibly become a rainforest planet. That would mean we have more technology, more culture as a result of higher populations, and more of most things you could possibly want, since more resources means more people who would overwhelmingly be capable of achieving more in terms of science, technology, the arts, and most other areas of productivity. It would be a much better and brighter world than I think most people could really imagine, it would make today’s world (or at least relatively recent history, now might be a sort of transitional stage that’s not all bad) look like how people think of the Dark Ages or worse in my opinion.

In the meantime, I’m actively downvoting all the pictures of terrible cold Europe Microsoft keeps using as the opening screen on my Microsoft computer, I wish I could automatically swap them all to New Zealand, Japan, South America, and other places that are nicer to look at instead of just being boring desolate cold grass and rocks over and over. However, the remnants of the old world still want us to think this is what sophisticated people like rather than the fact aristocrats used to build pineapple buildings, and pretend we don’t want spices on our food either while we’re at it, like yes now the old type of people who are on their way out shall use all their money to pretend to be poor even though there’s a good reason you don’t want to act poor with your money and you might as well light it on fire as engage in performative ironic-poverty just because the rich people now are a different kind of person that’s threatening to push you out and you can’t keep up without changing beyond your brain-damaged comfort zone.

I just want to open this up as a topic of discussion so all you people, mutants and norms, aren’t afraid to talk about it and so people don’t associate the topic with so many partisan views either. I’m not advocating for global warming or climate change, whatever you’d like to call it. I do think a warmer and wetter planet sounds nice and anyone who thinks otherwise is nuts, all other things being equal, but there’s a legitimate debate about whether or not all other things are equal which I want people to be able to productively engage in so we can come to the correct conclusions together.

If people are going to think I’m advocating global warming automatically, whatever.

Follow-up post on the topic of considering actually possibly demolishing the Isthmus of Panama: