Once upon a time there was a person trying to boil some rice in a pot. The infrastructure of society had changed too much, and cooking could no longer be easily done in a large firepit or any other method besides boiling things on a pot in a stove, so the person was boiling rice in a pot on a stove for the first time of anyone ever. The water began to become quite hot and some of it turned into steam. This caused the pressure in the pot to build up and start rattling the pot, and eventually it started boiling over, including some of the starch from the rice. This got all over the stove and it started burning and caught on fire.
“Oh no, whatever shall I do?” the person said.
“It looks like we can’t cook food anymore,” their neighbor said, “because whatever we cook on a stove appears to burn! Sure, we’ve been cooking food for all of history and even prehistory, and the implications of no longer cooking food have not yet been measured, but that appears to be what we’re going to have to do, because trying to cook food indoors in a pot on a stove is leading to us burning everything. We can no longer eat meat since our digestive tracts are not the same as true carnivores since we discovered fire to kill meat germs ages ago, and the sushi supply can never catch up. We might be able to have the occasional fire pit outdoors but this is going to be difficult to regularly hold, so it looks like we’re going to have to eat most of our food as raw plants. It is true our digestive tracts didn’t evolve for this, and we will likely not be able to maintain our current level of physical activity or the needs of our brain, but we can adapt, just like pandas and koalas. I think pandas and koalas actually have a better way of living, since they don’t have a care in the world, and they’re not even aware of their own problems since they’re basically always asleep. I look forward to the brave new world of our changed lifestyles! We must adapt or die! I think I’ll start eating some raw rice today, and if we can no longer cognitively plan the economy or work in rice fields, we can always just eat leaves off trees!”
“I think you’ve lost your mind,” the first person answered, “What good is life if you don’t have the mental ability nor the energy to even be aware of your surroundings? If we’re sleeping all the time I don’t think we’d even have much in the way of dreams. Surely there must be a way to continue cooking our food.” Then he saw the lid rattle on the pot, and steam exited it, which caused less water and rice starch to boil out. “Eureka!” he said, and started lifting the lid from the pot a little whenever he was making rice in a pot indoors. “We will not have to adapt to a diet of primarily raw plants after all!”
The fact is, all utopic ideals of a so-called post-carbon future aside, I think there’s a heavy burden of proof on the people who want to stop global temperature increases right now and this isn’t shelling for BP or whatever. An overwhelming amount of data we have shows that, all other things being equal, it would be optimal for the Earth’s temperature to rise by about 4 degrees above pre-industrial levels give or take a little. In fact, all the colonialism people complain about is because prior to industrial times, Europe was in the Little Ice Age which literally ended because of anthropogenic climate change, and the Little Ice Age was so bad because crops would die off and people would also sometimes just freeze to death. You know all those science fiction stories about an advanced alien race having to leave its planet because it’s killing them, including that terrible Three-Body Problem thing that’s being produced on Netflix right now? That was basically the Europeans for real, not that that remotely justifies how they often treated the natives they encountered, two wrongs don’t make a right.
How the Little Ice Age Changed History | The New Yorker
Interestingly, there are two notable times that the Earth was about 4 degrees warmer than it is now. The first that comes to mind was during the Late Cretaceous when modern birds, mammals, and flowering plants really took off in recognizable forms even though there were still dinosaurs. The second was literally right before the beginning of the last Ice Age (which we are still in, we’re just in an interglacial period which means the ice is only at the poles rather than everywhere. It is overwhelmingly likely to be the case that it would be better off for there to be no ice at the poles.) The hypothesized cause of the last Ice Age was plate tectonic activity between North and South America, which formed the Isthmus of Panama and cut off the Pacific-Atlantic Current.
That makes me suspect that perhaps destroying the physical land of Panama after evacuating everyone from it would be the most reasonable way to deal with climate change, which should stabilize at the optimal 4 degrees about pre-industrial levels after that. Due to the fact Panama is a recently-formed product of volcanic activity which is suspected to have literally caused the last Ice Age (not glacial period, the entire Ice Age itself, which seems to completely stop at that 4 degree temperature and makes Antarctica basically New New Zealand,) the entire area underneath Panama is basically a giant mantle tunnel so not very much excavating would have to be done to put explosives there if any had to be done at all. Regarding the explosives, we have all these nukes sitting around, most of them are H-bombs which don’t even have radioactive fallout since they’re fusion bombs, yet countries mostly want to get rid of them and just can’t because of how they’re built and the fact they might accidentally explode or leak. I’m sure we could dump a lot of them in there and that would drastically cut costs even assuming it isn’t enough to blow it all up by itself which we need some calculations to see.
However, it seems that the temperature levels of Earth were not actually higher solely because of the Pacific-Atlantic Current. They were higher because there was more CO2 in the air, which means CO2 wasn’t all bad and wouldn’t all be today. The implication of this is also pretty dire: CO2 levels higher than what we have today immediately predated the last Ice Age and didn’t save the Earth from it. I think that what happened was, essentially, the Isthmus of Panama caused the climate patterns to become extremely erratic and this killed off large amounts of fauna on the Earth, which meant the ratio of plants absorbing CO2 to animals and early humans emitting it was much higher, which caused a feedback loop once the poles started to freeze which killed off more organisms as well as physically trapping environmental gases in the ice and ground under the ice.
Do you remember or know about all those 1970s documentaries about how we’re on the brink of another Ice Age, such as the one with Leonard Nimoy of playing Spock fame himself? We probably really are on the brink of another Ice Age because the dieoffs of species would happen so quickly that it would make up for any “global warming” within a relatively short amount of time due to the turbulent climate effects. It’s not “global warming,” climate change is in fact a recreation of the conditions prior to the last Ice Age. It doesn’t matter if we pump out lots of carbon, we aren’t actually offsetting glaciation, we’re bringing it back on the same way Europeans brought on their Little Ice Age, because all that carbon will just be absorbed once people and animals start dying off but the vegetation level is, initially, the same as it currently is prior to things getting colder again. You’re not getting seven months of summer, you’re getting endless winter.
In other words, I think the Earth is essentially a boiling pot. Some people will use this metaphor to say “we don’t want to be in a boiling pot because we’ll cook.” However, the whole point of having a boiling pot is you want the pot to boil at first, you just don’t want it to boil over. You don’t want it to be at room temperature or you wouldn’t be trying to cook with it. You might want to lower the temperature a little once you get it to boiling, but you don’t want to turn the stove off and set it back to room temperature, that’s as absurd as the people in my story who were discussing eating raw rice because it’s what pandas and koalas do.
I think trying to roll back industry entirely is equivalent, since we would be going back to the time period of the Little Ice Age plus we’d be rolling back technology, travel, and everything else indirectly. The lives of Europeans a century ago are barely preferrable to the lives of pandas and koalas to most people except for a few people, somehow coming from the far-left and far-right alike (though I have my own observations on why that is,) who think that if you just made yourself get used to it somehow, living in the Dark Ages would be some kind of paradise world where everything’s simple and not, as it actually was, a time where people were largely pretty paranoid because they were suffering but didn’t understand why and inventing myths to both explain and justify it. If you’re trying to cook with the pot, you want it hotter, you just want to open the lid a little so it’s not boiling over.
This isn’t even that much of a metaphor, since I think the compression of heat and turbulence is literally behind the cause of the last glacial period, this isn’t some sophisticated metaphor about the hotseat and the agitation of the times, it’s a literal and direct comparison relating one thermodynamic event to a larger-scale one. The fact that it might also just be optimal for both us and everything else on the planet for the global temperatures to be a little warmer than now, though not indefinitely warmer like the 18 degrees Celsius of much of the Jurassic where there weren’t so many mammals because they would often just die in the heat, only helps drive the point home.
The problem isn’t warming, or CO2, which seems necessary for warming, the problem is just the turbulence, which actually seems it would very clearly cause cooling and another glacial period (“Ice Age”) based on what happened in the past when the geological arrangement of land on Earth was essentially identical and temperatures and CO2 levels were higher than now, but lower than they would be projected to be at the end of the century. It might be good to mitigate CO2 output for a while so we don’t kill ourselves off and start another Ice Age which no animals other than the polar bears want, though I guess if “save the polar bears!” is your rallying cry you can have it by killing humanity and nearly everything else (and even if the Earth keeps warming maybe polar bears could just adapt like basically every other kind of bear has, the world wouldn’t be the same but it’s not going to be the same one way or another, this option looks better even if the polar bears did die, who cares so much about them that they want to destroy literally everything else including humanity, most animals, and most plants.) However, that is not a long-term solution as should be clear from the fact it would mean permanently eliminating or plateauing industry, and the Earth would probably just generally stabilize if the climate warmed without so much turbulence because the new algae and plants that grow due to the greenhouse climate would absorb a lot of the CO2 beyond a certain point. We would probably just have to physically overpopulate Earth or some kind of unforeseen disaster like an asteroid or a manmade grey goop or radiation type of disaster would have to occur for there to be significant worldwide climate problems again, and with the GDP of even poor countries predicted to rise by about 9x if we had a similar climate to before the last Ice Age or the late Cretaceous (warm and wet but mild, not turbulent like current trends) getting to outer space seems like it would be an order of magnitude easier as well. We already have back the real space program with rockets instead of death trap space shuttles starting back up again anyway so we have something to work with.
The picture I posted at the beginning was something I clicked on because I liked how the graphic showed that the boiling-over pot is opening up to let out the pressure, but ironically it’s from an article trying to say that Earth is a boiling pot because of climate change… metaphorically. They were saying that the economy, politics, etc. are being agitated, which is true, yet somehow even with that metaphor, they didn’t consider that just maybe, the actual literal problem is just the turbulence from heat rather than the heat itself, which is exactly the case when you have a real boiling pot, and that if we reduced that we could fix the problems with climate change instead of trying to make the Earth colder and drier like a bunch of crazy people who want to move to somewhere freezing and also not have modern technology, because that’s what the proposed solution very literally amounts to even if it sounds like an exaggeration. Slowing down a little while we find a way to let off the pressure might be a good idea, and we don’t want the temperature to increase by 10 C or more even if we do do that because then India really does become Death Valley unlike with 4 C, but 4 C seems to be better than keeping things cold when the whole problem we have today is literally that Earth seems to be too cold and this is hitting people in some areas more than others, namely the colder areas, which leave to colonize everyone, and the drier areas, which seem to be particularly vulnerable to being colonized. We probably will need to scale down carbon production, but nothing says eliminating it entirely would be the optimal solution, that seems more like people who are about to take their place among the fossils being scared of change than anything, when change is constant and always has been, we just want to keep it as change for the better.
The Boiling Pot - Post Carbon Institute
New Dating of Panama Formation Throws Cold Water on Ice Age Origin Ideas | Scientific American
A few years ago geologist Carlos Jaramillo stood in a man-made canyon in Panama staring at rocks he knew to be 20 million years old, and shook his head in confusion. According to conventional geologic theory, the Panamanian Isthmus didn't emerge from the sea until just a few million years ago. So what was a 20 million-year-old fossilized tree doing there?
…I don’t know, maybe it came there from the Galápagos due to the underground tunnels that are moving rock around, and in that case we should probably just use those tunnels to blow it up? But it might be more complicated than that, since it’s unlikely an entire tree would be carried 900 miles over lava flow.
But Jaramillo and his colleagues have proposed a new model: most of Panama existed as it does today 12 million years ago, with shallow, narrow channels connecting the two oceans periodically after that. The results are detailed in a recent issue of the Geological Society of America Bulletin (pdf), with more details in press in the Journal of Geophysical Research (pdf).
Today, however, there are zero channels, zilch, nada, and that’s why we need the Panama Canal, which is currently having problems with its operation ironically due to climate change. So maybe we don’t even have to blow up all of Panama, maybe we just open up a few channels and the Earth gets enough circulation to support more CO2 without having so much turbulent weather that kills things off, Panama still gets to exist in a similar form to today, but the Panama Canal is still obsolete because there will be some natural channels which should be more low-maintenance anyway. And North and South America are still connected since the channels are not hard to cross, but the Atlantic and Pacific are not hard to cross either because of the channels. This might be the best way to go. This might make the cost of demolishing small parts of Panama even more reasonable, since it would take many fewer explosives and fewer people would have to be paid to evacuate and told to sell their property or start renting in another country.
"This is the most interesting for me, because if you tell somebody living in Nepal that the isthmus rises three million years ago versus 10 million—who cares?" Jaramillo says. "But think about this: having ice in the Arctic is the reason we're in the climate we are right now, and we still don't have a clear mechanism for it. That's very interesting, no? How can we even think about modeling the climate of the next 100 years if we cannot model how to produce such a big feature of our climate today?"
If a few small channels in Panama are not enough to change the entire climate of Earth then I would suspect there are other areas where there are small channels that have been closing off and this caused the period of glaciation. We would enter another period of glaciation intermittently, in fact most likely within our lifetimes at this rate, because those channels are still closed off, but we’re not just like “let’s smash all of Panama!” anymore, even though even that would probably still manage to be a better solution than what’s proposed by most of the public climate scientists and politicians. I do think we need to give the currents places to go so they aren’t whipping around making the weather patterns kill off most of the organisms, but it isn’t all concentrated at one place, so we’re not going to see any big chunks of missing land relative to modern maps and globes in the future. Incidentally I noticed yesterday the one globe I bought for myself years ago has all the major world trade routes outlined on it and that seems to correlate with natural formations just like country borders usually correlate with rivers and mountains.
The Source of Europe's Mild Climate | American Scientist
If anyone needed further proof that people debating current climate science are not all shills for the fossil fuel industries and other sources of pollution, today I learned that the Gulf Stream is not actually responsible for the temperatures of Europe being higher than Labrador. The Gulf Stream still makes Europe a little warmer, but most of the work is simply done by how water absorbs heat vs. drier climates, and without the Gulf Stream Europe would be Seattle, not Labrador. Since mainstream climate scientists that you see on the news are running around saying that Europe would be Labrador without the Gulf Stream, yes, there are many concrete reasons to be skeptical of the mainstream narrative that have nothing to do with shilling for industries or any kind of partisan issue. In fact reading that inspired me to think, maybe politicians are the problem, or at least, politicians posing as scientists are the problem, because they don’t give us any solution to our problems that isn’t “hand us all the power and be miserable,” while real scientists fix things. Of course, they’re just in a Labrador state of mind, like that The Chrysalids book I discussed a little in my evolution post and mentioned intermittently before then, when they should be in a New Zealand state of mind.
It’s funny how all people of European ancestry just agree together on what the archetypal ideal and non-ideal climate for Europe is, like oh, we have this new artificial mythology of England called Lord of the Rings because Tolkien thought England needed a real mythology and Arthur and Vikings weren’t specifically English. Now half a century later we’re going to make a movie of it. Are we going to set it in the green hills of England? No, that’s what real modern England looks like but it’s not what mythological ancient England looks like, mythological ancient England looks like New Zealand! This incidentally seems like a super accurate assessment as well (other than the geographic proximity meaning that Europe’s ecology would be more like Africa’s than Polynesia’s,) since there’s a lot of evidence Europe was warmer for a while and that’s why there were lions among other things. Unicorns were rhinoceroses originally and the King James Bible ended up translating rhinoceros as unicorn because the Greek word for both was the same (monoceros.) Where did Europeans get the idea of unicorns from? Probably most proximally from Rome but before then there might be some traditions of “shamanism” that remembered when they were actually there in prehistory, and those currents might’ve come together and people still managed to completely misremember what a rhino looks like. Dragons are big lizards, and warmer places have bigger birds-of-prey like the giant Lord of the Rings eagles and the birds on all the medieval heraldry as well.
I’ve heard a few times that the King Arthur myth most likely refers to some kind of Roman general or similar figure the Celts encountered. Magic is technology you don’t understand, like in the 300 where they called the bombs magic or also in Lord of the Rings where things like the palantír orbs are very clear stand-ins for the radio that Tolkien heard during WWII that was used by Hitler for propaganda despite the origins being benign (also makes the security company named Palantir sound really horrible, but then, most people don’t understand the things they read.) If you like fantasy and you’re writing or looking for fantasy, don’t make it medieval, since it overwhelmingly seems like “medieval” fantasy is just people misremembering the ancient civilizations like Rome and even those medieval myths were decidedly set in pre-medieval times, because the medieval people were remembering them, not living them out presently.
Even Tolkien had Atlantis (Númenor) as literally being the ancient civilization where everything in his mythos originated, something that most of what passes for fantasy today lacks (speaking of mythos, if you like Tolkien and Lovecraft you might want to look into this old Victorian author called Lord Dunsany who I heard was really the direct inspiration for both despite Tolkien and Lovecraft generally having really different connotations.) The fantasy world was basically real in a way, it was just different because it was inhabited by educated people who knew things and not by poorer and uneducated people who were misremembering and exaggerating everything like a game of telephone played over centuries, so if you like it and would want to live there maybe consider the idea that a warmer climate would really not be all that bad and trying to fix the climate issues we have today doesn’t necessarily mean the climate should be cooled to pre-industrial levels, which is literally the cause of much of our grief worldwide such as colonialism to this day.
Now after my great realization of today I can easily turn around and tell all the medieval fantasy people that they’re being Eurocentric picking a backwards time in Europe for making up their own fantasy world instead of anything non-backwards. The reason all the other time periods you could pick basically look better is just because of a bias where the only thing Europeans remember for other civilizations is relatively more glorious and advanced times, even though those are real and not “fetishized” as the postcolonialists tend to call any insinuation to the contrary. If you were from another civilization you would have to play some boring and backwards non-chapter from barely-recorded parts of Chinese history or Aztec or whatever other dark age with few records and fewer accomplishments. That also saves me from having to be a history buff, which I feel like is basically my weakness like magic is Captain Marvel’s, when I just want to read, watch, or play something with mythology sometimes and have other people do it with me, I don’t care about history, I’ve never felt all that interested in studying history and I eventually called my blog’s community the mutants because I identify with being part of a new world and the converse of that is not really caring about the old one.
I have cared so little about actual medieval history, or much any other period of history for that matter up to the point where there are some basic things I know about the past but I don’t even go out and read biographies of people other than when I had to for class, I feel like I can learn everything I need to know about the past from how it’s influencing the present and the ways of verifying documents, artifacts, etc. seem unreliable compared to understanding the principle of things and kind of going full German idealist and perceiving the truths with my mind, which is more or less what I’ve been training my readers into here, which makes calling you all mutants doubly appropriate. This is such an alien mindset to most people but I think it’s a direct outcome of how I think in general to be honest and a result of the strengths in my thinking, and since I realized that people who play D&D and write bad fantasy novels aren’t uniquely obsessed with history so much as I’m uniquely indifferent to it, this has opened up a lot of realizations for me. In fact I have all sorts of other posts I could make about that, but this one itself is probably very much an outcome of that way of thinking: I don’t care if things were better when Earth was cooler, things are changing in other ways so there’s no guarantee cooling Earth down would make them better again, and in fact, I don’t think the past was all that great anyway. I mean, we’re basically just fantasizing about space travel because we’re bored with the whole planet, not because we have any real pragmatic need to quite yet. The point is to make things better, not leave them the same, isn’t that what progress is and why we do things at all? If you want stasis you’ll get it when you’re dead, but I don’t think being dead sounds very appealing. Even most descriptions of Heaven sound terrible and boring, it’s just people sitting on a lawn of a mansion eating figs forever. I don’t think that’s accurate at all to what religions are trying to teach, but that’s what people get from it because most people are braindead and afraid of change so they dream of a world where nothing ever changes, even though that’s the same as dying and not getting any kind of life after that at all.