Soil-borne anthrax is very common; there's in fact "anthrax season" when (usually small) outbreaks happen among wild and farmed animals, from North America to southern Africa, Russia to China and India. (Search for anthrax on https://www.promedmail.org/, there are 37 reports in 2017 so far.) That a thawed carcass was infected is an interesting anecdote as far as the mode of the transmission, but it isn't surprising. That is, it's not a disease that we've eradicated that is coming back to haunt us.
Thanks for this. This isn't the first article I've seen that tried to make tenuous connections between climate change (née global warming) and all manner of horrible, immediate effects. The environmentalist crowd gets frustrated that most people consider their cause to be a far off problem that everyone currently living won't have to bear the burden of, and they use articles like this to try to create fear of immediate consequences in order to advance their agenda. I like to read facts, not speculation created by masters of fearmongering.
The article used anthrax as an example for a mechanism that could become more prevalent as more permafrost thaws. This mechanism is neither speculation nor a tenuous connection. It's fact. It is also a fact that global warming makes permafrost thaw.
On the whole, this is not an alarmist article at all. It merely explains some potential risks based on the findings of serious scientists.
Do you have anything to add to the discussion other than pure speculation, fearmongering and conspiracy theories regarding the motivations of the authors and scientists?
It may be true that this article is overblown, but let's not pretend that the science for climate change and global warming is not rock solid, even if we can't predict the exact extent of the damage.
Russian roulette is a game for fools and those with no hope, not an intelligent species with only one habitable planet.
> let's not pretend that the science for climate change and global warming is not rock solid
I didn't say it wasn't. I just said that this article is making giant leaps of logic and science to scare people. Even if I agreed with the policy suggestions of the most extreme environmentalists, I would disagree with this tactic. Science is on their side on a great number of issues, but transparent fearmongering like this will only serve to annoy people and ultimately hurt their cause.
Here's a thought. Instead of criticizing the article for scaremongering, how about rebutting the points? If you don't believe the permafrost is melting, say why. If you don't believe the planet is warming up, say why. If you don't believe that humans are contributing to the warming, say why. If you don't believe that ancient microbes thawing out is a matter to be concerned about, say why. By offering this sort of discourse, those of us who don't study microbes and infectious disease, for example, can become better informed.
The comments on this article are fascinating and why I love reading the HackerNews. Point vs point debates about interesting scientific theory but in a way that average person like me can understand. I used to read about this kind of conversation happening in the late 19th Century in the bars of Royal Science institutions in Europe - it feels a little bit like that. :)
Strange, I'm the exact opposite. Reading all this conjecture makes me cringe. I don't know yet if I should consider that a personal failing, or just accept it.
I'm somewhere in between. When an article gets posted about something you have deep up to date knowledge of, you realize how inaccurate the comments here are in the details. To the point of damaging in some cases.
In this case I suppose I should take a more direct active role in attempting to mitigate FUD or verifiable inaccuracies - but those comments take a lot of effort and sourcing. Probably something everyone here should attempt to do more often though :)
But overall the conjecture and discourse in topics I'm relatively read up on but not a deep subject expert I find quite enjoyable, even if I know some of the details are likely to be wildly inaccurate. It's usually more than enough information to get pointed in the right direction so I can start doing my own highly specific research. I've found out about all sorts of awesome technologies/tools/projects I never would have if I hadn't read the comments on interesting subjects.
Overall I find that to simply be humans. Bar conversation was likely riddled with even less adherence to facts from otherwise scientific and principled people. It just happens, and is part of being human - you do it too and don't even know it. Most likely at least.
I'm with you. Educated comments are rare. The only good articles are HN are business advice. Rest, including technology is fanboyism, conjectures and one-upmanship.
My wife always bugs me about the cold. I tell her operating rooms are cold. Heat = entropy, disease vector increase. Any thawing of permafrost will start to revive dormant diseases, viruses and flora. We might as well complete the trifecta and start looking for ancient DNA and revive long gone species for the win. She always tells me cold and drafts = sick, but if you look where the percent of currently diseased - its never in the north - always in tropical places where diseases, worms, parasites have a field day. There will be a day where she'll be begging for the cold :)
Makes sense to me. A lot of bodily fluids sit right on the line between "gel" and "liquid" at room temperature. And gels promote biofilm formation. A few degrees too cool and all your externally-exposed fluids are now gels all the time.
Thus half the reason for saunas (besides the Heat Shock Protein effects): they turn all the gels caught in your pores, your sinuses, your tonsils, your lungs, etc. to liquid, where your body can then much more easily flush them out.
Though, freezing cold air isn't that bad, either: a lot of those liquids will become fully solid. Frozen snot grows no bacteria.
I guess it's just the "danger zone" principle of food safety, applied to human tissue?
I believe they figured out that there is some truth to the idea that cold=sick at least for influenza. It doesn't live long while airborne but in a cold environment it can survive a bit longer, meaning in a warm room if someone sneezes you are less likely to be exposed than in a cold one.
I read that being in a cold environment weakens the immune response in your nostrils when breathing in that cold air enough to cool off the inside of your nose, where then the pathogen fails to be destroyed as it would have normally had it not been cold.
I recently saw an article on HN (don't have a link, sorry) that said that cold did not, in fact, do anything to make us sick or help us catch stuff[1], EXCEPT that it made it more likely to spread something due to running nose or other contact with body fluids.
[1] it may have been specifically about cold and flu, I don't remember exactly. It was within the past month or two in case you feel like searching...
Air circulation is compromised in the winter because we close all the windows and doors, and generally we congregate closer together.
For a long time that was considered to be the only reason colds happen more in cold weather. This thing with influenza viability would change that (of course, what one study finds another refutes, so who really knows).
Here in Florida no circulation season is April - November. And yet flu season is still winter, the only part of the year where people even consider opening windows.
Influenza is caused by a virus, and viruses tend to be extremely resilient. They're not alive so temperature changes don't affect internal chemical reactions as it would for bacteria and humans.
Bacteria have temperatures at which they grow most effectively, which is why we try to keep food cold. Note that the food in your fridge still goes bad, and it would be pretty damn uncomfortable living at fridge temperature for humans. Bacteria are way more resilient than we are, though it varies by species.
> Influenza is caused by a virus, and viruses tend to be extremely resilient.
Viruses can be extremely resilient or extremely fragile, depending on a number of factors including whether or not they're enveloped, whether or not they're currently protected in an aerosolized droplet, etc.
The main causal link I have seen between common cold and temperature is that some common cold virus develop in the nasal cavity but need a temperature closer to 30 degrees than our typical body temperature to prosper.
There are quite a few sci-fi novels and one show I saw that feature nightmare scenarios based off of thawing ice. I seriously doubt we will see something catastrophic though. It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells.
The Red Queen hypothesis suggests that the struggle between organisms and their parasites involves a constant reshuffling of offensive and defensive strategies, so it may be entirely possible that, if one of the bacterial/viral species released were originally adapted to infecting mammals or even our ancestral primates, they could target a pathway that humans (or more likely, some subset of humans) have stopped defending because modern parasites don't currently target that pathway.
It'd be sort of like airport security letting through someone with a blowgun because they're trained to look for modern guns.
Ideally we'd quickly gain immunity to the parasite or there would sell be some subset of humans with a resistance that they could spread to the rest of the population, but that's not always a given.
There's also the thought that evolutionary adaptations are so tightly coupled with environmental landscape that it'd primarily work the other way around. For whatever defense mechanism we lack for that particular parasite, they lack anything to combat their own million-year-more-efficient predators (like our immune system). It is less about evolution moving forward and being more 'advanced', and more about evolution ensuring an efficient equilibrium with a crazy-dynamic environment. Jumping into a new environment after being conditioned for a very different one likely leads to death much much more often than an accidental advantage. You might not be able to even breathe were you transported a few hundred million years either forward or backward.
Depending on how far back you go, today's planetary environment is a very different place - in terms of chemical food, predatory tactics, biochemical efficiency, atmosphere, etc. Having to compete against organisms that are efficiently adapted in our current environment will almost certainly be immediately lethal for these revived organisms.
Not really. A single organism (outside of the human race) cannot call the full force of an entire 'environment' against another species. And species (outside of humans) must abide by natural laws of energy transfer - for every advance there is an energetic tradeoff. The more different the organism is the easier it would be to target with drugs that only target precisely those differences. The less different, the easier our own bodies would work on it. The more lethal it was, the less it would spread. The less lethal, the more time there would be to figure it out. Without bringing to bear the force of an environmental change (shifting the equilibrium or set-point), there is very little that could be biologically catastrophic for the human race.
That is not to say that a virulent plague would not be a bad thing for a lot of individuals, if not the human species - but it'd be pretty challenging to even design worse than already exist out there - HIV, ebola, marburg or smallpox.
Something equivalent in virality and lethality to smallpox could be catastrophic if you consider the geopolitical consequences as well as the initial biological impact.
A nonlinear system, like an epidemic, can have phase changes. Most epidemics don't make it very far, but we should still be nervous about that one which crosses the manifold into pandemic.
One should keep in mind, for example, that less than 1% of the Liberian population ever caught Ebola, but the consequences for the country have been serious and long-running.
> Ideally we'd quickly gain immunity to the parasite
In evolution, a population gaining immunity means that all individuals without the immunity die out before spreading their genes. Yeah, still not the ideal scenario...
> It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells.
This falls under the class of things that if they could happen, they already would have. The global temperature is not a uniform scalar modifier on what the temperature "would" have been without the changes. There are already hot spots and cold spots every year, continuously. There are already places in the ice that thawed out last year, and ten years ago, and during the Medieval warm period, and whenever it was warm before that. And we have not witnessed mass dieoffs due to disease from those events either.
It's like the concerns about high-energy collisions doing something terrible like forming micro-blackholes and eating the Earth. If that was a danger, it would be something Nature would already be doing and we'd be able to see it.
The ability to "infect" something is not a natural property that all bacteria have. It is something that has to evolve. A bacteria popping out of cold storage from half a million years ago precisely adapted to infect a modern animal would be every bit as weird as seeing a bacteria pop out of that same cold storage that was precisely evolved to live on Mars, or live on vast quantities of plastic, or otherwise adapted to conditions it couldn't possible have witnessed during its previous life.
It isn't absolutely, mathematically impossible. But it's not much worth worrying about. It's a science fiction storyline, not something that happens.
Now, if there were humans in such cold storage, I would be somewhat more careful. But so far in those cases where that has occurred we still haven't been wiped out. I haven't even heard of anyone pinning so much as a cold virus on pulling a cadaver out of a glacier. Links welcome if anybody does have such a story.
But it's a numbers game, right? A global thaw would be more likely to release a pocket of bacteria. It's like saying that just because a single bullet from a handgun didn't hit you, you ought to be safe when someone fires a machine gun at you.
And the Black Plague did happen to come by less than a century after the end of the warm period...
Per my point about evolution almost certainly prepping these bacteria to live somewhere other than the rather hostile insides of an animal, at the very least I'd modify that metaphor to someone shooting their bullets a few miles away from you, and pointed the other way.
I don't think we need to hypothesize that the Black Plague was some sort of bacterial refugee from the past; I've never heard anyone express any confusion about where it could possibly have come from, so it seems like a solution to a non-problem.
An asteroid can impact with the earth... Oh wait, that's happened already. Luckily, we haven't had such a collision large enough to kill us all, yet.
A plague could kill many people... Oh wait, that's happened already. Luckily, we haven't had a plague with enough virality and lethality to kill us all, yet.
IANAD, but I imagine modern bacteria that have evolved multi-antibiotic resistances are much more dangerous than ancient bacteria that are probably still vulnerable to most of our antibiotics.
I'll just add this to my list of things that I probably should give some thought, but won't because the top of the list includes refugee crisis, income inequality, and all the less Crightonesque consequences of climate change.
That's if it materializes. What's already material is 410 ppm carbon in the atmosphere and rapidly thawing polar sea ice that regulates ocean temperatures. If you are scared about some ice germs then you might as well be reading USA Today for sensationalism. The truly scary stuff is not fun to read about like this.
I'm not saying this isn't a threat. But it doesn't seem as scary as the title or comments are making it out to be. The article admits that most bacteria can't survive this long frozen. Only certain types that have adapted to serving in the cold long term by forming spores. It only mentions one bacteria that harms humans that can do that, botulinum. Which isn't contagious and is only a problem with improperly canned food. And anthrax which is deadly but fortunately not very contagious.
Viruses are more of a concern, but the article doesn't make a great case there either. They mention that scientists found a smallpox victim but were unable to recover a complete smallpox virus. Just fragments of it's DNA. The scariest thing recovered was Spanish Flu. Which fortunately many people have already been vaccinated against: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-flu-vaccine-idUSTRE65E65S2...
Diseases from early humans are an interesting point of worry. What tends to make a deadly disease deadly is that it is able to infect us, but is poorly adapted to us. A disease that is adapted to a close relative of ours is likely to both infect us and not be well-adapted to modern humans.
When you consider, for example, the Zika virus and it's effect on the human brain, perhaps - on the other hand - we have a virus to thank for making homo sapiens more intelligent than our then "competition"?
Bacteria, could be a positive well.
Of course it's a roll of the dice either way. C'est la evolution.
All I know of are colon-dwelling bacteria fermenting and otherwise breaking down "indigestable residue" ("fibre", cellulose, seeds etc --- which certainly helps voiding such roughage and may furnish some butyrate and possibly a few B-vitamins to the colon mucosa in the process) and other refuse. Do you host bacteria in your small intestine, the prime site of digestion and absorption? Or do you count the colon as a site of "digestion"? Maybe I have the wrong understanding of the word..
> Do you host bacteria in your small intestine, the prime site of digestion and absorption?
Yes, actually.
The idea that the small intestine doesn't host bacteria, and those that it does are transient passers-by from the oral mucosa, was due to some technically limited work from the 1950s. It was actually laughably easy to find that wasn't the case - there's a transition zone of gram positives to gram negatives throughout the latter ileum, which sharply switches to high numbers of gram negatives, anaerobes, coliforms, on the distal side of the iliocecal valve.
The intestinal bacteria also play a key role in furnishing vitamin K.
And yes, the colon is a site of digestion. Digestion is the process of food breakdown, nutrient extraction, and waste elimination. The colon is involved in some extraction (primarily vitamin production, and water reabsorption) and elimination; admittedly, not so much with breakdown.
For the most part the phrase "the gut" seems to be in fashion. I'm not so sure we know much about what's going on where, when and by what "third parties."
From what I understand, we have bacteria on the skin as well. And that full body washing with soap might not be a great idea. Sure, get the obvious dirty bits ;) but the rest probably just need a water wash.
And among many other non-digestive contributions, they do contribute to furnishing short-chain fatty acids and K+B vitamins from incoming substances. Glad I looked that up then =)
Fwiw, the watershed moment for me was an article in the NY Times Magazine approx 3 yrs ago about gut bacteria. Blew. My. Mind.
As a side note, one of the key takeaways I extrapolated from that article was bacteria have a direct effect on life expectancy.
For example, they say, when you have a partner you're likely to live longer. But is that love, or because you get to swap bacteria? The same for having pets. They too help to strengthen the system within your body. And so on.
Sometimes I wonder if we're more bacteria than we are human. That is, who is the host and who is the "parasite."
An interesting question with the partner or pet example for me is whether it's truly "win-win" --- do both "live longer" or one does and the other now lives less longer, unwittingly =)
To be clear, the article didn't connect those dots. I did.
It did say current indications are gut diversity is a good thing. That such things impact life expectancy. It also said partners / family effect gut diversity, as do pets.
I'm sure emotions also play a role (as - e.g., - depression is bad for the immune system). But, best I can extrapolate, the gut also plays a role. But the details science has been done. Yet.
I always assumed that most of the health benefits came from things like increased social interaction, and the simple fact that if you have a heart attack or stroke or a fall, someone's there to dial 911.
I imagine that for the social aspect of it, it's only a win/lose if one person gets more stress than joy out of the relationship.
I think that's the standard interpretation (i.e., human interaction is the lifesaver). However, when you start to drill down on the whole (gut) bacteria thing, I think things change. Sure, emotions also have impact on the immune system, but so do bacteria. Love IS a powerful emotion. As bacteria are as well ;) The irony (?) is gut bacteria have also been linked to mental conditions / emotions.
I love you...because your gut told my gut to say that? :)
I think it's worth adding that, for me, gut bacteria are a MAJOR argument against GMOs. The gut is a VERY complex system, a system at this point that we have little true understanding about. We're just now scratching the surface. There's no telling how changes in food "makeup" can effect the gut.
I don't want to get off topic but it was worth mentioning.
Yup. So while the first reaction is fear (because we're wired that way?) the other side of the coin is these "new" entities also have the potential make positive change on the species.
I'm not a microbiologist but when accounting for evolution, you'd think that a microbe which was locked away in ice for millions of years would be maladapted to modern animals - Particularly in terms of transmission between hosts.
I would be more afraid of pathogens that were frozen more recently.
Doesn't this work both ways though, where modern animals would not be well equipped to defend against a microbe that has been locked away for millennia?
Read the 'Drowned World' by J.G. Ballard, humans start having ancient dreams.
'Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard, Millennium 1999, p. 41.
Revel with me in the thought that we —humans— think we are center of the world.
That Earth is made for us and we have the power to shape it in whichever way we wish. That we own the planet.
But, in reality, we don't. We are here only temporarily. There are powerful organisms hiding out there who are perennial.
And they act like guards. If we push it too far, we set off the right conditions for them to spring to life, and restore balance on Earth by anhililating the threat — i.e. us.
Except that, on it's current trajectory, humanity will very shortly conquer all known challenges that earth offers. Even death itself is solvable given effort and time. We do share this spaceship with many other lifeforms, but we really are the ones taking the helm.
It wouldn't surprise me if humanity chose to restore earth to something like the state it was in before the industrial age.
> on it's current trajectory, humanity will very shortly conquer all known challenges that earth offers. Even death
This sounds like more of a statement of faith than fact.
I'm hoping this is going to be the case, but some issues may be completely intractable. Strong AI and fusion have been on the five-year horizon for decades.
It's conjecture either way. From everything I see, I think it's entirely possible that humanity could technically succeed like he says: conquer all known challenges on Earth, eliminate biological death even, and proceed to the stars.
However, it's also entirely possible we'll fail miserably and go extinct, not because any of these things are prevented by physics (they're not, except maybe exceeding lightspeed but you can always build a generation ship or use cryo-sleep etc. to work around that), but because our basic human nature prevents us: we'll fight with each other and annihilate ourselves, or we'll destroy our environment due to our recklessness and collective stupidity and shortsightedness, and that'll prevent us from making those achievements in time to survive.
Personally, I'd bet on the latter. I think it's highly likely we won't be around in 200 years, or if we are, we'll be back to the stone age and our population reduced to very small numbers. We're simply not showing that we have what it takes as a species to deal with global challenges successfully.
> on it's current trajectory, humanity will very shortly conquer all known challenges that earth offers
We don't seem to be on a clear single trajectory. There is also a lot of short sighted self destructive stuff going on. You are right that we have definitely taken the helm but who knows which turn we will take next and the sea is a harsh mistress.
The descendants of our evolutionary lineage will hopefully leave the solar system, but I doubt they'll be the same species, or even primarily biological.
It's our job to nurture the trajectory that will make this happen.
This sounds like a very manageable threat. We already have systems in place to identify and control the spread of diseases. It's already equipped to deal with new or rare diseases. This will be an added burden but probably no more difficult than dealing with something like ebola. Likely easier due to the geography and population density involved.
> From the bubonic plague to smallpox, we have evolved to resist them
We have antibiotics for plague, and vaccination / eradication for small pox. That doesn't feel like we evolved any resistance. A couple of thousand cases of plague are reported to WHO each year.
> That doesn't feel like we evolved any resistance.
If you take into account the infection of native Americans compared to Europeans since the 15th to 19th century [0] you'd infer that some ethnic stratum really evolved a lot of resistance wrt. to smallpox.
Conversely, because of smallpox eradication I would guess that some part of the population probably regressed on that.
The spread of disease from European contact was not always accidental. Europeans arriving in the Americas had long been exposed to the diseases, attaining a measure of immunity, and thus were not as severely affected by them. Therefore, disease could be an effective biological weapon.
In a way, we did evolve to acquire the brainpower —and invent the tooling and the methods— with which we managed to discover the vaccines and cures to effectively eradicate the diseases.
We have evolved to resist if we assume our intelligence is an extension to our body, and intelligently managing diseases is an extension to our immune system.
The idea is neither novel, nor does it add to the discussion. It simply purposefully distorts the original commenter's intended meaning for "resistance".
I guess I prefer that they stay there... but can't help but to say that it seems fascinating that there are these dormant antique lifeforms just waiting to be discovered. Hope they don't kill us.
This has been happening for at least a couple of hundred years. Mammoth bodies have been exposed in Siberia since at least the 18th century and probably much further back than that.
Over the past 5-10 years I've gone from being mostly optimistic about our collective future to quite pessimistic. It's looking increasingly likely that we're unable to solve problems like climate change that require mass cooperation and that too many people are too selfish and short-sighted to allow for collective action. And in the (hopefully unlikely) event that industrial society collapses (from a pandemic, mass political instability, etc) any surviving humans won't be able to restart it because we've already used all of the "easy" fossil fuels. This is pretty much our only shot at making civilization work.
It may help you to ponder that in the 1980s, a lot of people were extremely confident human civilization was doomed, doomed, doomed by certainly no later than 2000, and even setting the date that late was terribly optimistic.
There are people who profit from selling this doom. Buy less of it.
I'm not a binary thinker, so just because I'm saying "don't feel quite so doomed" does not mean I'm advocating for the polar opposite blindly sunny disposition either. I said "buy less of it" rather than "stop buying it" quite deliberately. But doom has been "real soon now!" for, like, 60+ years, and it's an important perspective to keep that in mind when you hear today's confident doom-mongers promising immanent doom Real Soon Now (TM). (More than 60 years, really, you can find people complaining about how society is going downhill in antiquity. But the modern brand is about 50-60 years old.)
The difference now is that we feel potentially doomed by inaction as opposed to reckless action, even though one could think of our environmental damage as the result of many compounded actions without awareness of their result.
Making comparisons to antiquity is useless because we didn't have any mechanism for ruining the planet. Now we have all of the tools necessary to make that happen in a few hours through action (nuclear weapons) or a few decades through inaction (climate change).
And your comparison to the 1980s is even more nonsensical considering we came very close to doom a number of times in the 50-60 years you cite:
"And your comparison to the 1980s is even more nonsensical considering we came very close to doom a number of times in the 50-60 years you cite:"
I would consider this support for my point, not contradiction.
Before replying, please do me the courtesy of at least trying to imagine how I might consider that the case.
I also reiterate my point about this not being a binary situation, because I can't help but think you did indeed, despite my explicit discussion, interpret it as a claim you shouldn't be worried about anything.
> It may help you to ponder that in the 1980s, a lot of people were extremely confident human civilization was doomed, doomed, doomed by certainly no later than 2000, and even setting the date that late was terribly optimistic.
I imagine a lot of people thought things were going to be fine too as the Roman Empire collapsed. Or at the start of the Dark Ages. Or when the Black Plague began. Or when the 1929 market crash that kicked off the Great Depression. Or on the eve of both of the World Wars.
The point being: yes, most of the time, humanity muddles its way through its crises successfully. Until one day, it doesn't...
Of those, I would only classify the plague and the wars as some sort of crisis for humanity.
For example, the fall of Rome did not involve a decrease of average living standards. Rather it is the opposite that is the case as it happened at roughly the same time as the abolition of slavery in Europe.
You should not conflate crises that affect only the ruling classes with crises for humanity.
What are you talking about? The fall of Rome involved the loss of a huge amount of technology and learning, as people abandoned the idea of specialization of labor and cities so they could go work as serfs in the fields for feudal lords. For the citizens of Rome (not just the ruling classes), it was absolutely a large decrease in living standards, and in overall civilization. There's a reason the period following is called "the Dark Ages": there was very little education any more, and no one wrote anything down like they used to, so that period is largely a mystery (relative to how much we know about the Roman times). It took 1000 years for western civilization to get anywhere near the level of civilization that Rome had developed.
Now you're right that it wasn't exactly a "crisis for humanity" because it only affected one part of the world--western Europe (the eastern Roman Empire continued), and also didn't involve a massive die-off, just a regression of civilization in that one area.
We muddled our way through those crises, too, just with a lot of pain at the time. In the distant future those will looks like minor setbacks in the glorious development of humankind.
It's a shame you're getting downvoted, I thought your comment was quite insightful, if a little pessimistic.
There has certainly been lots of doom and gloom in the past, with some (not all) of it quite justified - look how close we came to nuclear annihilation multiple times during the cold war. It was only cool headed individuals that kept all of humanity from a tragic end. Those fears were well justified, and we're getting to a similar situation right now, so close that William J. Perry thinks we're at the highest likelihood of nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis.
Those war-based risks are of a very different (political) nature however, one that doesn't persist after the war pressures subside. With climate change, we're in a much different situation, and one that I'm actually not sure we're up to solving. If we look at progress so far, I don't think it looks good.
It's a shame it's being converted into a political and tribal game. We're talking about the survival of an advanced species here (hell, it might be the only one). There is literally nothing more important than that.
Is there any evidence that any of those disasters are likely enough to sacrifice our other goals for? We've recently had mass political instability, yet WWII was actually followed by a boost of industry rather than a collapse and the cold war was followed by people carrying on perfectly fine but with space travel and satellite communications.
Just because people don't cooperate to do the thing that you personally want them to do doesn't make them selfish. They are still cooperating doing something else which may turn out to be even more valuable - improving technology and helping each other with real, and possibly even more serious problems like disease and happiness. You can't judge that that they're working towards the wrong goal, it's just different to your personal goal.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted here, I must say I broadly agree with you. Certainly on the "mass cooperation and altruism" part.
What I'd like to know, is: "Is democracy suited to solving issues like climate change" ? It seems to me, that, solutions to climate change mostly mean a reduction in consumption & energy use (at least in the interim), and, what politicians will be voted in on those policies?
> "Is democracy suited to solving issues like climate change"
Noam Chomsky gave a talk[1] about a month ago about that question, but his version substitutes intelligence for democracy. Species that are successful at maintaining their niche over evolutionary time spans are not selecting for intelligence. Survivability of a species, population size, and speciation rate generally decrease as intelligence rises.
I might believe we have a chance as a species if we were doing anything even remotely realistic to address our actual long-term threats, but we aren't. Instead, the actual actions being taken seem to be almost unanimous trying to accelerate us into disaster.
I don't usually like citing old dead people, but Thomas Jefferson said "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." I think the biggest problem with our lack of action with regards to climate change is our lack of education.
> any surviving humans won't be able to restart it because we've already used all of the "easy" fossil fuels.
How much fuel do we need to restart a society, assuming we still have knowledge left over? Could a seed of a technological society start at hydroelectric dams, or in places where solar infrastructure still exists?
There's an interesting Youtube channel "Primitive Technology"[0]. Note how pretty much every technology involves fire. This is prehistoric tech-level, and it already won't scale to modern population sizes without fossil fuels. Trees aren't enough[1]. Modern technology is even more energy intensive.
Modern population sizes are unlikely to be sustained past a hypothetic apocalypse and a rebirth of technology is unlikely to include a large part of the survivors. The question is how many hands you need at least to bootstrap from society's scrap metal back to a sustainable technology stack.
According to Guns, Germs, and Steel, a population of 4,000 humans living in Tasmania were cutoff from contact with the mainland after the Bass Straight flooded 10,000 years ago.
In this extreme isolation, they regressed beyond even stone-age technology, including losing knowledge of how to catch fish or start fires.
why would you jump all of the way back to prehistoric tech? a lot of modern (and fairly green) tech would be pretty easy to salvage. manufacturing some of this stuff is pretty involved, but i don't think we will have to start all the way over.
Edit: Looks like I'm wrong. Apparently the ice block is in the John Carpenter film, but things aren't spelled out in great detail. I need to watch both of these again...
Climate fluctuations will happen regardless of whether we do anything to cause warming/cooling. We need to focus on protecting ourselves from it by using more energy... because both heating and cooling our living rooms and cars requires energy... and make artificial heating/cooling accessible to more and more people... regardless of whether or not our activities warms up or cools down the earth.
Why we are focusing on what happens to the overall earth's climate makes zero sense to me... I'm sure it is entirely political and it is a fight between few rich corporations and political powers where everyone has been dragged into. Climate will change very drastically like it has done in the past, with or without human activities. We should be working on how to save ourselves from changes in the future... not desperately trying not to breathe too hard which might cause some tsunami in another part of the world (butterfly effect)... specially because nobody can correctly predict if it will.
People do lots of hand wringing about climate change but really we could and surely will just do what you say and protect ourselves from whatever comes. Air conditioners where it becomes too hot, sea walls where storm surges become too frequent, irrigation where rainfall is reduced, moving people around where arable land moves, etc. We already do all these things on a massive scale. They're nothing unrealistic.
How much warming, in degrees F, C, or K, since when, measured how, by whom, published where, compared with what other measurements?
Why ask these questions? For one, AFAIK "climate warms" essentially has not been happening to any significant extent for about 20 years and, really, since the coldest of the Little Ice Age -- apparently there was some cooling from 1940 to 1970 so some warming since then. On the Little Ice Age, there was ice skating on the Thames River in London.
Reference for temperature over the past 2000 years? Okay:
Committee on Surface Temperature
Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years,
National Research Council, Surface
Temperature Reconstructions for the Last
2,000 Years, ISBN 0-309-66264-8, 196
pages, National Academies Press, 2006,
available at
In the Medieval Warm Period, did all the ice and permafrost melt and make everyone sick? Well, if it all melted, then what's in the ice and permafrost now is not so old and maybe safe. But I didn't hear that diseases released by the melting ice and permafrost made lots of people sick during the Medieval Warm Period.
My guess: The BBC is pushing made-up, cooked-up, stirred-up, gang-up, pile-on, continually reinforced fake, nonsense scare stories to get continuing eyeballs, ad revenue, and British government subsidies.
Not reading it.
For some simple evidence: The Little Ice Age really was significantly cooler, but there is no evidence that it was preceded closely by lower concentration of CO2 -- the lower temperatures had some cause other than lower CO2.
The Medieval Warm Period really was warmer, but there is no evidence that it was preceded closely by higher concentration of CO2 -- there must have been some cause other than higher CO2.
It appears from ice core samples and more that the temperature of the earth has varied significantly over at least the last 800,000 years. Maybe CO2 has had something to do with warming since the Little Ice Age, and otherwise it looks like the causes of warming/cooling had little or nothing to do with CO2.
It appears that people who talk about warming are blaming CO2, in particular from human activities, and from what I've seen in the temperature records for the past 800,000 years, the only time when CO2 might have caused significant warming was since the Little Ice Age -- even if we accept this, there's the problem of the cause of the cooling from 1940 -- 1970. Otherwise the temperature changes had other causes -- so, my guess is that the temperature change since the Little Ice Age also has some cause(s) other than CO2.
Is CO2 a greenhouse gas, that is, absorbs Planck radiation from the surface of the earth? Yup, absorbs in three bands in the infrared; since we can't see CO2, it does not absorb visible light. So, is there a warming effect from that CO2 absorption? Well, maybe, but water is also a greenhouse gas so that maybe the radiation would be absorbed by water instead of CO2. But even if CO2 is the only way that infrared radiation can get absorbed, it's still not clear how much warming, net, all things considered, it would cause. E.g., lighting a match will also warm the earth.
Is there more CO2 in the atmosphere now? Apparently the concentration someplaces is 400 ppm (parts per million) -- IIRC that would be in Hawaii, right, near a volcano, and volcanoes are supposed to be one of the major sources of CO2. Also there's CO2 in the ocean, and warm water absorbes less CO2 than cold water, so maybe recently some of the ocean around Hawaii is warmer and the source of the Hawaii CO2.
I've seen no good presentations of CO2 levels over time with explanations of the causes.
I've seen no good data on CO2 sources, sinks, or flows.
E.g., first cut, how much CO2 is in the atmosphere now? Then, how much CO2 enters the atmosphere from human activity each year now? If the ocean warms a little, say, from an el Nino, how much CO2 is released into the atmosphere? At what rate do green plants take CO2 from the atmosphere? My guess is that CO2 from human activities is comparatively tiny, that the basic data would show this, and this is why we don't get the basic data.
I see lots of articles on CO2 and warming, but I don't see articles with even this basic, first cut data.
So, to me, the articles don't really have a case since if they did they would make their case. In the articles I see efforts to grab people emotionally but darned little data to convince people rationally.
BBC: "as climate warms" is where you lost me.
Or with this logic, we could write even more shocking articles:
As the next galactic gamma ray burst hits the earth, all the atmosphere will be blown off the earth, and everyone will die. Moreover, since the gamma rays will come at the speed of light, we will never be able to see them coming. Now, get scared. Get afraid. Be very afraid. Watch the BBC for hourly updates 24 x 7 for the rest of your life to keep up on just what will happen as the next gamma ray burst hits the earth. Same for marauding neutron stars, highly magnetic neutron stars, and black holes. Read BBC tomorrow for the results as the next black hole hits the earth.
For more, the expansion of the universe is slowing down, and we may be in a big crunch and all compressed to a point -- see the BBC next week for the details when this happens. Back home, see what will happen when Yellowstone blows again -- last time it put ash 10 feet deep (it's rock and enough to crush nearly any roof) 1000 miles down wind or some such. Remember, those bacteria are down there, fighting every second among themselves, evolving, just to come out and kill everything else, including YOU!!!
Your comment is absolutely huge and most likely not worth reading. All of the scattered sentences I skim read are just rambling fear mongering, doubt and general misinformation.
The climate is warming. The permafrost is melting, more and more each year. You have to be living in an echo chamber to not understand this.
