LoadedMore

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In a piece I wrote in 2014 I opined, "If you want to corrupt a people, corrupt the language." I added, "Once it becomes impossible to say the truth with the language we have, it will ultimately be impossible for us to adapt and survive."
In that piece I was complaining about what I dubbed "oil Newspeak," an Orwellian lexicon created by the oil industry to deceive policymakers, investors and the public.
Of course, back then I concerned myself only with words. But with the increasing power of artificial intelligence (AI) enhanced software which is now available to average computer users, practically anyone can alter and/or create images and audio recordings that seem real, but which are entirely concocted. It means that comedian Richard Pryor's famous line—"Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?"—may very well morph from a joke into a serious question.
Humans understand the world by narrating it. Our narratives are always approximations of reality; we cannot know objectively our reality because we are inside of it and limited in the scope and modes of our perceptions—modes that are shaped by evolution to help us survive, but not necessarily plumb the depths of the universe.
Still, those narratives must be reasonable approximations of the dangers and opportunities we face or they will lead us in the wrong direction. Words can be powerful and images even more so. The power of the iconic is so great that it can easily bypass our logic and slip directly into our minds.
Draftsmen, painters and sculptors have long created images for us to dwell on, many of them filled with mythic animals, immortal beings and historical and non-historical personages. There was a time when most Christians equated depictions of God as an old man on a throne with God himself. And, even here language is important; some religions do not even assign gender to the ultimate ground of being that the word God represents.
Far below the celestial sphere where the Christian God is said to dwell, art also depicted such creatures as dragons and gryphons which represented forces in the universe and in the human psyche, but which were nevertheless taken as real by many.
So, how does this type of depiction differ from taking actor Nicholas Cages' image and placing him in movies he was never in—or worse yet, taking the faces of serious, well-known film actresses and combining them with the bodies of porn actresses in action?
The former examples, of course, are attempts to represent a deeper truth even if they are misleading to the literal mind. The latter are direct attempts at trickery against and ridicule of specific persons. And herein lies the problem. Such power to alter images and audio now threatens not only any prominent person who has been photographed, filmed or recorded, but anyone who has posted video or photos of themselves, their friends or their family on the internet.
Eventually, public understanding will catch up with the technology. Video and photos which seem out of character or, in the case of a prominent person, which are designed to ridicule or defame will simply be dismissed as an AI takedown job, even if the video or photos in question are depictions of real events.
The problem is that as AI becomes more sophisticated, it will become harder and harder to detect fakes, according the MIT Techonology Review article which is also linked above. And, this will inevitably lead to a presumption that all photographic, video and audio evidence of anything from murder to a wedding party is suspect.
How do we anchor ourselves in a world in which neither the narratives we are told nor the images we are shown can be trusted? We can try to do the forensic work ourselves. But since we live in an increasingly complex world in which much of the technical knowledge required to decipher our society is beyond our abilities and our available time to master, the necessary forensic investigation will be all but impossible.
Thus, we will end up, as we often do, relying on others we trust—friends; experts we don't necessarily know personally but respect; religious, business and political leaders—to tell us what is authentic.
Given that even these sources can be duped by (or part of) the vast public relations apparatuses employed by companies, governments, political parties or any wealthy organization, we may end up increasingly at sea in a world of doubtful information. In fact, we already are.
It seems that only a threat that supersedes narrow political, economic and sectarian interests, one that imperils our very survival could break through such a cacophony of misinformation and lead us to seek a common understanding.
Alas, we have such a threat that we call climate change. Climate change is the most well-studied, well-documented phenomenon in history, and yet we are paralyzed as a species. We are sold various narratives that include the following:

1. Climate change is not happening.
2. Climate change is happening but "natural" and nothing to worry about.
3. Climate change is happening, but it will be good for us.
4. Climate change will be solved by technology.
5. Climate change will disrupt and bring chaos to our global civilization, possibly leading to a dark age.
6. Climate change is something that will happen in the future so we don't need to worry about it now.
7. Climate change is happening now, and it is already too late to do anything about it, so why bother.

If climate change is unable to harness the human ability to cooperate in the face of an existential crisis, it is fair to ask if there is anything, anything at all, that could get the human species to unite around a well-supported narrative and move forward together toward a shared destiny.
This is the central question of our age. The problems we face cannot be solved by any one individual, community or nation. There are nascent efforts at the community and provincial and state levels that are promising with regard to climate change. But these remain too small for now to alter our collision course with the warming atmosphere and oceans.
History teaches us that societies make dramatic change only when they are forced to. That will be far too late to avoid the worst ravages of climate change which scientists tell us would continue to get worse for the next generation and beyond even if we stopped adding any carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere today—which, of course, we are not going to stop doing anytime soon.

We all love a good story. And, we humans are all storytellers by nature. It is how we cope with the world. But our storytelling skills seem to be no match for the exceedingly complex world we live in. We can narrate the small part we inhabit with some success. But we cannot seem to find a common narrative that joins all humans and all of planetary life together in a way that would allow us to address the biggest threat humanity has ever faced.

I was watching an episode of the science-fiction noir thriller "The Expanse" recently. Set hundreds of years in the future, the United Nations has now become the world government and its main rival is Mars, a former Earth colony. The UN is still in New York City and a new fancier UN building is now tucked safely behind a vast seawall that protects the city from rising water resulting from climate change.
It's a world that looks like an extension of our own, but one that has survived the twin existential threats of climate change and resource depletion. But will it be so easy to update our infrastructure to overcome these threats?
The naive notion that we can, for example, "just use more air conditioning" as the globe warms betrays a perplexing misunderstanding of what we face. Even if one ignores the insanity of burning more climate-warming fossil fuels to make electricity for more air-conditioning, there is the embedded assumption that our current infrastructure with only minor modifications will withstand the pressures placed upon it in a future transformed by climate change and other depredations.
That assumption doesn't square with the facts. Take, for instance, the Miami, Florida water system. One would think that Miami's first task in adapting to climate change would be to defend its shores against sea-level rise. But it turns out that the most troublesome effect of sea-level rise is sea water infiltration into the aquifer which supplies the city's water.
Once that happens the city would have to adopt desalination for its water supply, a process that currently costs two and one-half times more than current water purification processes. And, of course, desalinating water for a city as large as Miami, a city of more than 400,000 who consume 330 million gallons per day, would require a huge, expensive new infrastructure.
But the problems don't end there. Superfund sites dot Miami and are already contaminating some of the water supply. The rising waters and more frequent floods will only make matters worse, requiring expensive decontamination equipment even before desalination becomes a necessity.
In addition, limestone mining allowed in many places leaves holes which quickly fill with water and allow much freer movement of chemicals through the aquifer.
At this point I feel like one of those late-night infomercials blaring, "But, wait there's more!" That's because the list keeps getting longer.
Developers have in many cases skipped expensive hook-ups with the area's sewer system and opted for septic tanks. But as the water table rises due to sea-water infiltration and as flooding becomes more frequent, these tanks will increasingly be in contact with the city's shallow aquifer. The writer of the linked piece above asks: Who will pay to hook up these households, and does it really make sense to hook up those households that in a decade or two may be underwater for significant periods during the year?
Which brings us to the next problem. The real estate boom in Miami will come to an end one day. A major slump in property prices could hit tax revenues making it more difficult for Miami to pay for climate change preparations. But the nightmare scenario is that the threat of climate change and sea-level rise could turn Miami from a destination city into a depopulating backwater with plummeting real estate values and contracting economic activity, and with all this happening "before the sea consumes a single house." Who would pay for all the needed adaptation for those staying behind?
The interlocking nature of infrastructure, environmental change, economic activity and political institutions make the problem of adapting to climate change much more complex and expensive than most people and governments realize.
The problem elsewhere will not be one of too much water of the wrong kind, but of too little water to go around. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation which oversees federal water projects recently projected that Lake Mead which provides water to Arizona, Nevada and California has a one in five chance of dropping below 1,000 feet by 2026. That would trigger giant cuts to cities relying on the water; and that would be on top of cuts already made before reaching that level.
A further 100-foot drop would turn Lake Mead into what is called a deadpool behind Hoover Dam which formed the lake. That means no water would flow from the dam.
California and Nevada have already signed on to a plan to manage cuts and reduce water consumption. Arizona has so far refused, continuing to rely on existing water agreements to keep the water wolf at bay. Whereas Miami's problems fall squarely on its municipal government to solve, the problems of water allocation in the southwestern United States are a multi-jurisdictional issue. The complexity of climate adaptation goes up exponentially when several official bodies must act in concert.
As for our hypothetical lover of air-conditioning whom I mentioned at the outset, even that amenity in most places depends on water. This is because thermal power plants including coal- and nuclear-fired facilities use lots of water to create steam to spin electricity generating turbines. That water must be cooled before it is returned to the rivers or lakes from which it is often drawn. That is the purpose of the large cooling towers from which plumes of steam constantly flow. Returning the water to its source without cooling it kills much of the marine life.
But, it's hard to cool off hot water in a cooling tower when the outdoor temperature is also very hot. This is what was behind the shutdown this summer of nuclear reactors in France.
Sometimes the problem is just lack of water to run a power plant. This was the case in India in 2017 when a weak monsoon forced the shutdown of 18 plants for varying lengths of time from a few days to months. The electricity generation lost would have been enough to supply the island nation of Sri Lanka all of its electricity for a year.
This discussion, of course, only scratches the surface of all the water infrastructure that will be affected by climate change. I didn't even mention the effects on the agricultural irrigation infrastructure (and the knock-on effect on food supplies). And, of course, I've said little about other types of infrastructure which are vulnerable as well and won't be easily or cheaply fixed, if they are fixed at all.
Even more alarming is that, at least in the United States, we are starting with an infrastructure that has been very badly neglected—so badly that the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country a D+ on its latest infrastructure report card. The organization estimated that the country needs to spend $4.5 trillion by 2025 just to bring its infrastructure up to good condition.

If the United States ever gets busy upgrading its infrastructure, perhaps it will include building a seawall to protect New York City as imagined by the creators of "The Expanse." But I'd rather see the money spent first on securing our water systems for the simple reason that nothing, absolutely nothing in our society can function properly without a reliable, clean water supply.

A friend of mine includes a saying with each of his emails that goes like this: "It shouldn’t be easier to imagine the end of civilization than the end of air conditioning." But in most depictions of the end of civilization at the cinema these days, the air conditioning (or heat, if it is winter) is going full blast until the very moment of civilization's demise.
What he is alluding to, of course, is that we can't imagine ourselves giving up much of anything even in the face of the biggest man-made threat to human survival ever, namely, climate change. To make sure that we don't have to, the oil industry is championing a plan that will use federal money to build a seawall along the Texas coast in order to protect—you guessed it—oil refineries, a large number of which are located near the water's edge.
It will protect a lot of other stuff as well. But the irony is not lost on the reporter of the linked piece who in droll understatement writes: "But the idea of taxpayers around the country paying to protect refineries worth billions, and in a state where top politicians still dispute climate change's validity, doesn't sit well with some."
Elsewhere, efficient use of water, especially in agriculture, is deemed wise policy as water demand rises and water supply becomes more uncertain in the face of climate change. The U.S. Department of Agriculture states the following on its website:

Agriculture is a major user of ground and surface water in the United States, accounting for approximately 80 percent of the Nation's consumptive water use and over 90 percent in many Western States. Efficient irrigation systems and water management practices can help maintain farm profitability in an era of increasingly limited and more costly water supplies.

This seems like sage, indisputable advice. But recently researchers writing in the journal Science reported that highly efficient irrigation can actually undermine natural water systems and result in net losses of water availability.
How can this be? The researchers explain that efficient irrigation such as drip irrigation tends to increase water usage among farmers who see opportunities to grow high-value, but more water-intensive crops and to expand the land area which they irrigate. Thus, cheaper water bills can cause more consumption if there is profit to be made from consuming more water.
The second issue is that drip irrigation, for example, returns only 5 percent of the water it uses back to the water basin from which it comes versus a 30 percent return for regular surface irrigation. That water can be reused.
The authors highlight several examples. Here's one: "[In] Snake River, Idaho, where farmers have increased their IE [irrigation efficiency],...this has reduced groundwater recharge and led to a decline in the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer by about 30% since the mid-1970s, despite increased precipitation."
The phenomenon the researchers describe is often called The Jevons Paradox. Wikipedia rightly describes it as occurring "when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand."
We pursue efficiency because we believe it will accomplish two things we like at once: reduce our economic costs and reduce our total resource consumption. But we usually achieve the first while exacerbating the second.
For example, even as the global economy becomes more energy efficient each year on the whole, it consumes more energy including more fossil fuel energy as overall demand rises. The result is, of course, rising carbon emissions from energy use. The only way to prevent this increase would be to reduce fossil fuel energy consumption. In a world where 80 percent of all energy is produced by fossil fuels, that will only happen if there is a worldwide cap on fossil fuel consumption that is lower than present usage. And, substantial declines won't occur unless the cap is lowered over time.
Such a scheme has been proposed, and it's called Tradable Energy Quotas. TEQs are similar to cap and trade systems used successfully to reduce sulfur emissions responsible for acid rain and carbon emissions in some jurisdictions. It is difficult, however, to imagine that such a system would be adopted worldwide anytime soon.
I have said before that the central intellectual challenge of our age is that we live in complex systems but we don't understand complexity. Seemingly commonsense approaches to resource management such as drip irrigation and energy efficiency backfire inside the complex feedback loops we have created within our global system. Even when we endeavor to do the right thing, we may end up making things worse.
All this suggests that we humans are not good at tracing the possible consequences of our actions, especially when they involve complex systems. And this suggests a principle which I take from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author and famed student of risk, probability and complexity, to wit: It is dangerous to perturb complex systems upon which our survival depends because we cannot foresee the results.
Climate is one of those complex systems. The excuse for doing nothing about climate change is that we don't really know where it is headed. Using Taleb's principle, the reason for doing something dramatic to curb our interference in the complex climate system is exactly the same.

Alas, building seawalls to protect Texas Gulf Coast refineries does not seem like our first task. But apparently, several climate change deniers in the Texas political establishment aren't deniers after all. They just don't want the industry which got them elected (and could get them defeated just as easily) to pay anything to protect itself from the very dangers to which the use of the industry's products exposes the entire globe.

"The Expanse" is a popular science fiction television series (based on a book series of the same name) that at first seems to follow a predictable storyline: essentially the Cold War revisited, only in this case with warlike Mars (previously settled by people from Earth) pitted against Earth as the two planets vie over the resources of the asteroid belt (which is a stand-in for today's so-called less developed countries).
But quickly we are drawn into a mystery that implicates a non-state actor with interests so important that that unknown actor has its own warships which are superior to those of Earth and Mars. While I made some fun of "The Expanse" previously for its assumptions about energy, after watching the entire series I've come to appreciate the nuanced manner in which it deals with the systemic risk that unfolds as the story progresses.
Here I must issue a spoiler alert for those who have not seen the series and wish to see it unhindered by foreknowledge of the plot.
Those who've seen the series know that the systemic risk results from the discovery of what comes to be known as the "proto-molecule," an alien life form first encountered on one of Saturn's moons. The proto-molecule has the miraculous power to transform anything living that it touches, remaking and reorganizing it from the ground up. (Later it learns to transform inanimate matter as well.)
The life form is initially controlled by a large conglomerate which immediately sees the proto-molecule's potential as a weapon, one that could be sold to the highest bidder in the solar system. (The parallels to current-day genetic engineering and bioweapons seem obvious.)
But key word here is "controlled" for the proto-molecule quickly gets beyond the control of any human and appears to have a destiny of its own. What had previously seemed like a tool that would follow the commands of humans turned out to have agency itself, a profoundly and unexpectedly dangerous agency.
Throughout the series various characters voice concern about who should and should not get access to this life form, about who would use it "responsibly." In the end every side gains access to it, but not without untoward and unforeseen consequences.
The best any of the characters can do at that point is simply accept with resignation that the life form/technology is now "out there." While attempts were made to destroy it earlier in the story, now there isn't even a hint of a suggestion that it needs to be outlawed and eradicated. No side wants to give up the power the proto-molecule seems to confer even if having it risks total annihilation.
In this respect, the writers of the series have their fingers on the current discourse on technology and human survival. Humans do not want to give up or even reduce their dependence on fossil fuels despite the likely catastrophic consequences. We do not want to curb genetic engineering even though the systemic dangers grow greater with every tweak of every genome. And, the constant and widespread use of chemical pesticides not only threatens the current generation, but generations to come through "epigenetic human alteration."
One character in "The Expanse" seems to be resigned to the possibility that the proto-molecule will never be eliminated when she says:

No one knows what the proto-molecule wants or what it's doing, but they are using it anyway. It's already scattered too far to ever be sure it'll all be gone. It's part of the equation now, and it will be from now on. We can't change that. We can't wish it away.

This fatalistic attitude may seem appropriate for the series, but does it have to be our attitude about technologies posing systemic risk today?
As individuals we can and do make decisions to give up self-destructive behavior every day. People give up smoking, give up drinking, give up addictive drugs and give up excessive eating. It may be difficult to do, but they do it because they can see the harm to themselves and want to stop that harm.
It's not the same with systemic hazards such as climate change, genetic engineering and chemical pesticides. It's true that these hazards, too, are well understood and their harm is heavily documented. But, the big difference between the individual and society when it comes to such harms is that they aren't evenly distributed.
Some people are affected much more profoundly than others, usually those with low incomes and low mobility. The vested interests who benefit economically from propagating these systemic risks can usually protect themselves from the dangers; for example, they aren't likely to get sprayed with pesticides by a crop duster while dining in their Park Avenue apartments on a pastured-raised organic roast accompanied by locally grown organic vegetables and salads.
All the while these vested interests have armies of lawyers appearing before regulatory bodies insisting that every regulatory decision must go through a risk/benefit analysis. But there can be no benefit which outweighs the risk of systemic ruin in the form of intergenerational genetic damage, widespread chronic disease associated with exposure to chemical toxins, the threat to ecosystems and agricultural production from untested genetically engineered species, and the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate change.
In "The Expanse" both the bad guys and the good guys keep thinking they can somehow control the proto-molecule long after it has demonstrated its horrific lethality—just as we think we can limit the damage to ourselves and our civilization despite the systemic dangers we've unleashed on the ecosphere.

Even though "The Expanse" is described as a noir thriller, it comes to a relatively felicitous conclusion at the end of the third season. But, it seems doubtful that the noir thriller we've produced for ourselves here on present-day Earth will end so well without a drastic change in our current trajectory.

The so-called CRISPR technique for editing the genes of plants and animals is being hailed as a more acceptable face of genetic engineering. After all, it doesn't rely on the insertion of genes from one species into another—which is what previous techniques allowed and what alarmed critics.
No, this technique can cut out precisely an offending gene and let the cell sew things up like new afterwards. No chance of strange interspecies complications. No random mutations created by gene guns that can never shoot straight by design. Just a little editing of an existing gene to subtract what we do not want from a plant or animal (including ourselves).
Hence, the breathless coverage.
But as with practically every biologically driven endeavor these days, we are forgetting first principles as explained by pioneering ecologist Garrett Hardin who tells us that "[t]he science of ecology is founded on this generalization: We can never do merely one thing."
Not surprisingly, it turns out that CRISPR may not be as accurate as advertised. A recent study revealed that "in around a fifth of cells, CRISPR causes deletions or rearrangements more than 100 DNA letters long. These surprising changes are sometimes thousands of letters long." Oops!
The linked article continues: "So why have the thousands of teams using CRISPR failed to discover this before? Because they have been looking for small mutations in a narrow region around the target site. If that whole region is deleted, this approach makes it appear as if there have been no mutations at all." As the author of the study noted, "You find what you look for."
The linked article also points out that researchers are working to increase CRISPR's accuracy and on versions that simply turn off genes or make them less active rather than performing the more tricky deletion process.
But even if CRISPR becomes more accurate over time (and we certainly cannot expect 100 percent accuracy in the end), we are faced with another problem which flows directly from Hardin's dictum: An emerging understanding of how genes work suggests that all genes may be implicated in complex traits. Called the omnigenic model, it posits that no one set of genes is responsible for the complex traits we see in animals and plants. Some genes may be more important than others. But all act in concert to create a complex trait.
So what is a complex trait? Here's a formal definition: "A trait that does not follow Mendelian Inheritance patterns, is likely derived from multiple genes, and exhibits a large variety of phenotypes." It turns out much of what we want to manipulate in genomes relates to complex traits. Parkinson's disease and diabetes are related to complex traits. There will be no editing those out of the human genome.
In plants we grow for food those traits include yield per plant, days to flower, days to maturity, seed size, seed oil content and others.
Plant breeders have been breeding for complex traits for centuries. The newest genetic engineering pioneers believe they've found a more efficient and precise way of getting the traits we humans desire without inserting genes from other species. But if what they mean by precise is that they will get exactly the result they seek and nothing else, then they are only fooling themselves. Their narrow vision of will inevitably result in unexpected and possibly dangerous consequences.
Even the enthusiastic VOX article cited previously notes some newly discovered dangers of using CRISPR to repair genetic defects in humans: "Scientists have recently learned that the approach to gene editing can inadvertently wipe out and rearrange large swaths of DNA in ways that may imperil human health. That follows recent studies showing that CRISPR-edited cells can inadvertently trigger cancer." Which is why it is important to keep in mind that "[w]e can never do merely one thing."

If we were to follow the precautionary principle, we would want to make sure that none of our new creations could have systemic effects that might be ruinous. But governments won't require that because 1) it would get in the way of fast profits for the politically powerful companies practicing this technique and 2) it would require modern society to drop a naive belief that innovation is always benign. Instead, we will plunge headlong into another uncontrolled experiment carried out on humans and the biosphere because we still haven't absorbed Garrett Hardin's first law of ecology.

Anyone who has followed the climate change issue in the last 30 years knows that official forecasts provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are quickly upended by developments and have often been obsolete before they were issued.
The latest report from the IPCC is the first, however, to abandon the measured tone of its previous ones and foretell what it considers a climate catastrophe for human civilization unless the world makes an abrupt U-turn and begins dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions almost immediately.
And yet, even this forecast is probably too conservative in its pronouncements. That's according to Michael Mann, a climate researcher whose famous "hockey stick" graph has been central to understanding the rise in global temperatures and has been replicated again and again using other measures of historical worldwide temperatures.
What is little understood by the public is that humans have been underestimating the pace and impact of climate change since Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first suggested in 1896 that the globe was warming due to emissions of carbon dioxide.
Which brings me to a broader point: The public tends to hear most often about the median values or middle-of-the road scenarios in any forecast, sometimes called the reference case. (Very little emphasis is put on the range of possibilities. For example, the IPCC in 2000 forecast that global average temperature could be 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Centigrade higher than the 1990 level by 2100.)
Today, we find ourselves fretting that going beyond a 1.5-degree increase from pre-industrial times will spell catastrophe involving global agriculture, severe weather, sea-level rise, and disease epidemics. Previously, 2 degrees was thought to be the threshold for severe irretrievable consequences resulting from climate change.
We've been surprised by the speed with which climate change is proceeding (because we tend to think of climate change as progressing in a gradual straight line). And, we've been surprised by the effects so far. Ice sheets are melting faster, the rate of carbon buildup in the atmosphere is accelerating, and the observed rise in sea level continues to accelerate. But, the public has not even begun to grasp what 4 or 5 degrees of warming would mean.
There is a double conundrum: What is the extent of warming likely to be over time and how severe will the effects be of each level of warming? These are difficult questions to answer since truly accurate answers lie in the future. But the whole point of a forecast is not to forecast an exact trajectory but to create scenarios for evaluating risk. That is why most bona fide forecasts contain ranges (sometimes referred to as "error bars") for numbers and for various scenarios of effects. The IPCC has been faithful in providing these.
But we as a society have not done what good risk analysis suggests, namely, take the worst case scenario and ask whether human civilization as it is currently constituted could survive that scenario intact. The answer is probably not and has been for a while.
We thought we had plenty of time to deal with climate change 30 years ago. Its effects and dangers were still many decades away. As those 30 years have passed, the old extreme scenarios have become the consensus scenarios and the new extreme scenarios have gone beyond catastrophic. Our previous benign or not-too-serious climate change scenarios soothed our emotions, but they failed to prepare us for serious challenges to the stability of our modern civilization.We failed to understand that the most severe end of the range of possibilities is what we should have been preparing for—precisely because such an outcome is likely to be too severe for our civilization as currently organized to survive.
Speeding up deployment of renewable energy while ramping down carbon emissions, reducing meat consumption, and reversing deforestation were considered costly and possibly growth-destroying for the economy. But the ravages of climate change will almost certainly outweigh all of those costs many fold. In fact, if we take as our assumption that the destabilization of society followed by rapid depopulation is simply unacceptable, then we will realize that cost/benefit analysis is simply unacceptable, even insane, when it comes to climate change.
As famed student of risk Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote in his book Fooled by Randomness, "It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear." Industrial civilization continues to mount new records of production and wealth. And yet, if its current path results in societal collapse, that path can hardly be counted as a benefit.
I would be remiss if I did not mention here that in another important area, energy supplies, the public and policymakers have been inflicted with the same emphasis on the median forecast. Forecasts for the supply of our major energy source, oil, continue to be sanguine. But these long-term forecasts often lack ranges for us to contemplate.
We assume wrongly that the forecasters must "know" what is going to occur in the oilfields in the future. But a chart prepared by a U.S. Energy Information Administration staff member demonstrates how little we know about future oil supplies. The chart is somewhat dated now, but it makes an important point that is still valid  today. Most of the new supply we expect worldwide is based on faith and nothing else. We're saying to ourselves, "We've always grown supplies in the past, so we will in the future."
Let us return to Taleb and repeat his warning: "It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear." If oil supplies begin to decline in earnest unexpectedly and we are not prepared, then global society will experience serious hardship and possible destabilization. We are faced with the same problem as in climate change. We aren't ready for this event because we have been told that everything will go exactly right for the median forecast of oil supplies through 2040 or 2050 to come true.
A friend of mine, Dick Vodra, calls this “Yhprum’s Law.” He wrote me recently that this law "assumes that everything will happen on time, within budget, and work as well as planned the first time. Yhprum is Murphy spelled backwards." (Readers will recall that Murphy's Law says more or less the opposite: "If anything can go wrong, it will." Don't ask me how to pronounce "Yhprum.")
Yhprum’s Law is the benign assumption our global society has been living out in its daily life with regard to climate change, namely, that we will somehow solve it easily and with time to spare. It is also the assumption behind our sluggish effort to transition away from fossil fuels, particularly oil.
Usually, it is technology that is said to be the solution to these twin problems. But if we humans were as clever as the techno-utopians tell us, it is puzzling that we are not well on our way to solving both climate change and oil depletion. Perhaps these are not technical problems. Perhaps technology is the cause and not strictly speaking the solution to these problems. Perhaps these problems are political and social in their essence. All that is for another essay.

For now, try to remember than the median is not the message. It is just one among many messages. The most important message comes from the range of possibilities we face, especially those that threaten to bring down our entire system.

The United States government has now officially embraced climate change as a catastrophe in the making. Only it contends that the catastrophe is now inevitable no matter what humans do...and so, we should do nothing at all since whatever we do won't matter much.
That, at least, was the justification offered for freezing fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles after 2020. For the National Transportation Safety Board which issued a report containing the justification, the phrase "Every little bit helps" has morph into "Every little bit won't matter."
The problem, of course, is that if this becomes the attitude of everyone trying to mitigate climate change, almost nothing will get done.
But the report does highlight one very important problem for those who desperately want to address climate change: Climate change is no longer a "crisis."  As French thinker Bruno Latour reminds us in his book Facing Gaia, climate change is not really a "crisis," at least not anymore. A crisis comes and goes. Climate change isn't going anywhere except toward a place which is much worse. It isn't going to pass. It is going to endure.
That is the hard part about it. Addressing climate change does not mean taking temporary emergency measures which can be relaxed after the crisis has passed. Addressing climate change means making profound and permanent changes in the way we live. That is, of course, why doing much of anything is opposed vehemently by interests dependent on fossil fuels for their livelihoods such as the auto industry and, of course, the oil industry. There's no going back to the way things were after the crisis passes because it's not going to pass.
Latour styles climate change as the third world war of the 20th century, one that most of those who lived through it didn't even notice. We didn't even notice that the climate was waging a successful campaign destined to make much of the Earth uninhabitable for humans and untenable for modern civilization. That was the moment of crisis if there ever was one in this fight. That we could have won that war if we as a global society had noticed it was happening is now lost on most. With multiple tipping points probably already passed, we are now left with "a profound mutation in our relation to the world," he writes.
Our response is manifold. Some choose despair. Some choose denial. Some suggest that we double down with additional modern attempts to dominate nature through something called geoengineering. According to those advocating this approach, the problem is not that we have assaulted the planet and its climate; it's that we have not dominated their workings enough!
We are told we face crises in education, in leadership, in morals, and in politics. We have health crises and food crises and toxic chemical crises. The soil, the water, the forests and the fisheries are all in crisis. It never occurs to the bulk of the population nor to its leadership that these crises are all related to systemic changes in the landscape, the sea and the atmosphere linked to our profligate use of energy and resources.
Because half measures do not seem enough in the face of this great ecological storm of change, the U.S. government now says that no measures at all need to be taken. This is not the voice of despair. Nor is it the voice of denial in the brute sense of the word. This is the voice of a child who simply does not want to change even though he or she now understands that change must come.
Yet children most often adapt and that's how they grow up and mature. But great masses of people can remain dangerously immature. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung wrote that the reason that collective guilt is so lightly worn—he was referring the Germans in World War II—is that when, say, 70 million share the guilt, they only seem to feel one seventy-millionth of it.
This is part of the collective drama we live in. Some feel the results of our ultimately ruinous way of life first. And, some feel it more brutally because they haven't the means to shield themselves. While the rest may feel some sense of blame, this does not weigh heavily enough to slow down their daily lives, not yet, at least.

But slowing down is really the first step. The availability of cheap and growing energy supplies in the industrial age has beckoned us to go faster and faster and never slower. And yet, slowing down is a first step in noticing. And, noticing is a next step toward understanding. After that comes imagining how we might live in ways that mitigate the onrushing catastrophe of climate change and resource depletion. That's what the mature mind does in the face of unalterable change.

Alfred Korzybski, the father of general semantics, first uttered what must now seem like a well-worn phrase: "The map is not the territory." And yet, I don't think this view has yet been well-incorporated into human culture.
In a time when social media outlets are trying to sort what is "fake" from what is "genuine" or "true," very little thought is being put into what we even mean by "fake," "genuine" or "true." Facebook, for example, has resorted to third-party fact-checkers, a mix of news organizations and fact-checking nonprofits. It is also hiring thousands of new employees to check what it calls "non-news" information posted on Facebook pages.
A lot of checking revolves around whether someone said or did what is claimed. That's not too hard. The next level involves the effect of a policy or position. That's more difficult since some of the policies in question aren't in effect and even for those that are, it is always hard to trace cause and effect from a policy to a specific result.
Then, there are what I'll call "model" questions. Some claims fit into one model, but not into another. So, it's very important to know what model one is using. In physics what's true in our everyday experience isn't true in the world of quantum mechanics, the domain of the very small. For example, it takes time for information, say, in the form of electrical signals through a cellphone network, to travel from where I am in Washington, DC to a client in Eastern Europe. We notice ourselves overlapping in our conversation sometimes because of the delay.
In an actual experiment of quantum effects, electrons that were a mile apart influenced each other with no time delay, suggesting that information at this level somehow travels instantaneously from one place to another. It's a weird result, but consistent with the theory.
No competent physicist would suggest that relativity (a theory about gravity and the very large) can explain everything we know about in the universe or that quantum mechanics can. Both theories seem necessary for now to explain different phenomena.
So now, let me return to Facebook where howls of protest were registered when the company took down more than 80 alternative health pages. I've never been to the pages listed and so don't know what content was on them. But in reading the titles some seem focused on organic food or meditation. The first topic now has a food label sanctioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other agencies around the world and the second deals with an age-old spiritual and health practice.
Yet others may have been touting cures from proper diet or herbs; I cannot know for sure. Facebook provided no information about why the pages were taken down other than that they violated Facebook's terms of service.
The one thing that seemed to unify them, however, was that they are not touting pharmaceuticals or surgery as answers to one's health problems. Both options may be perfectly appropriate depending on circumstances. But they aren't the only paths to health.
And here, based solely on the titles of the pages in question, I began to ask what model of human health was being applied in these cases to evaluate the veracity of the claims made. I would guess it is the narrow biomedical model which imagines the body as a bioelectrochemical machine. That model has shown its effectiveness in many cases. But it is mostly based on treating disease states as defined by the model through pharmaceuticals and surgery, not maintaining optimum health.
Psychiatry is considered a branch of medicine even though it deals with the psychological lives of patients. Psychiatry has also moved medicine toward recognizing that the mental state and attitude of patients is a critical part of their recovery. No sensible physician would argue otherwise.
Going ever further outside the narrow biomedical model, community medicine, for example, looks at environmental, occupational, socio-economic, educational and public health factors in the whole community in determining the causes and best treatments for disease. It also emphasizes prevention. So, it turns out that modern medicine works from a variety of models depending on the needs of patients and the problems to be addressed.
Full disclosure: I use alternative health treatments and do consulting work in the alternative health field. But recently, I took a course of antibiotics because it seemed like the best and wisest course of action given the circumstances. I apply different models based on circumstances without having to reject any that seem useful.
And, usefulness is ultimately how we should judge models which are, after all, just maps and not the actual territory. The purpose of models is to simplify experience to help us understand and order it. No model can account for everything because then it would no longer be a model; it would actually be everything.
In medicine, in other areas of science, in social sciences and even in philosophy, we treat models too often as truths rather than shorthand attempts to describe the world around us for purposes we choose.
This is not to denigrate well-supported models based on widespread observations and experimental evidence such as climate models. We build models in order to judge risks and benefits. One of the best supported set of scientific models ever built is for climate change, involving tens of thousands of scientists across the globe who through meticulous data collection and experimentation have arrived at a very strong consensus. We should note that various models are part of that consensus because they come to similar conclusions and those models are constantly being adjusted based on new information—information that so far suggests we've consistently underestimated the speed with which climate change is happening.
Even these scientists can't predict the future, but they can tell us quite convincingly what risks we face if we don't act on climate change. And, their general predictions keep coming true by the day.
But, where a model doesn't serve us well, we should look to other models. Modern medicine is superb at intervening in infectious disease (usually with antibiotics), using trauma surgery to put people back together, correcting physical defects or damage with cosmetic or orthopedic surgery, and preventing life-threatening disease with vaccines.
But modern medicine does a miserable job with chronic diseases such as diabetes which seems related to diet, lack of exercise, social factors which encourage poor eating habits and a sedentary lifestyle, and occupational and public health factors that include environmental exposure to toxins which affect the endocrine system. Modern medicine seeks to manage diabetes. Alternative approaches based on different models of health and illness seek to eliminate it.
The nice thing about models is that often you can try them out and see how they work. If they don't work, you can do some research and try another model. We are still a species that learns much of what we know by trial and error.
As the stakes rise, our care should rise in what model we experiment with. If for example, I'm a person trying various regimens to treat my frequent heartburn, I can try lots of approaches likely without hurting myself or others. If I am suffering from a potentially fatal cancer, I must weigh the risks of various models carefully to decide how to proceed, and I may not have lots of time for experimentation. But first I have to be aware that there is more than one model of health and illness to choose from!
When the fate of global society is at stake as it is with climate change, we need a mechanism for agreeing on a model that evaluates risk properly in order to take concerted action. We cannot say that our climate model is inexact and so can be ignored. All models are inexact. Their purpose is to give us a basis for taking action. In those cases involving huge societal risks we need a plan for closure and common action. In cases that involve the health of the individual, we need to be more open to experimentation that will allow for additional understanding and testing of various models.

There is a point at which the health of individuals becomes a public health issue if enough people are suffering from the same problem and that problem needs to be addressed on a systemic basis. The role of environmental toxins comes to mind (though because of the powerful interests invested in continuing the release of these toxins it seems doubtful we will ever get serious about them). To the extent that we can, however, we should look to the effectiveness of our models to see how they are performing rather than choose one model for ideological reasons or for reasons related to influence and power.

Most people know the tale of the blind men and the elephant. Each describes a part of the elephant. The elephant is said to be like a pillar by the blind man touching the elephant's leg. The one touching the elephant's tail says the elephant is like a rope and so on.
Now, let's substitute so-called futurists for blind men in this tale and you get something even less reliable. Futurists are the soothsayers of our age. Of course, futurists have eyes to see at least. But they, like the blind men, almost never see the whole picture.
And, in this case they are giving us a description of something that is not even there for them to examine. The future doesn't exist. It's a mere concept. Unlike the blind men, futurists aren't really describing part of a whole.
Typically, they imagine the future as a more magical version of the past where all kinds of new powers are made available to the individual: the ability to transmit emotions and memories through a worldwide "brain-net," 3D-printed human organs based on our own DNA that replace damaged or diseased ones, re-creations of loved ones who have passed away with which we can interact as we did when they were alive.
Naturally, some futurists put the first humans on Mars in the 2030s. NASA apparently has a contest for 3D-printed designs of habitats suitable for humans on Mars. The idea that colonizing Mars will enhance the chances that humans will survive well into the future is already part of the culture. (Wait a minute! You mean really bad stuff could happen on Earth in our benign technology-laden future. But I digress.)
Unfortunately, there is the nagging problem that cosmic radiation is likely to turn anyone living on Mars into a cancer-riddled dementia patient. No problem! We'll just engineer a whole new race of humans designed to resist the cosmic radiation they will be subject to on Mars and during any space travel.
For all their imaginative and storytelling powers, futurists—the ones who imagine an unlimited, happy future with vast technological change but not those who see dystopia and destruction ahead and who are instead labeled "alarmists"—these happy futurists cannot imagine dramatic change in our social and political systems.
Capitalism as we know it remains intact, apparently even on Mars. Democratically elected governments are still around; but their choices are increasingly limited to what to do with all our future abundance and the savings that will come from licking most acute and chronic diseases for good.
And, there is another really, really big thing they don't seem to be able to imagine: a civilization crippled and possibly destroyed by climate change.  Well, of course, technology will solve the climate problem, they say. My retort continues to be, "If humans are so clever and our technology so powerful, why haven't we solved the problem of climate change, a problem we already knew 30 years ago was a civilization-threatening emergency?"
The answer, of course, is that climate change cannot be solved by merely applying technology. It is a multi-dimensional, complex problem that is above all political. Those who hold power do not want to pay either in the form of foregone revenue or higher taxes what would be required to solve the problem.
And, the consumer society that is now spreading throughout the world is so profitable and appealing to just about everyone, that there is simply not the necessary constituency to support those few in the power elite who are ready to make such expenditures and sacrifices.
So, as this existential problem literally burns our forests, scorches our crops (thereby threatening a global food crisis) and brings drought to those thirsting for water and floods to those who already have too much—even as we continue down this path of destruction, the artificial intelligence labs and 3D printing equipment makers are predicted by futurists to be racing forward to a future that doesn't include the possibly fatal ravages of climate change.
The stability of governments is at stake. The viability of whole nations hangs in the balance in the future that climate change has already imagined for us.
There's a reason that most so-called futurists either don't take this into account or dismiss it as a minor problem that will somehow be fixed. The reason is that they either work for or consult with the world's corporations. And, the corporate imagination of the world we live in and will live in is entirely dominated by visions of continuing corporate control of our lives (but in a benign way, of course). No revolutions, no social upheaval, no mass migrations, no food or water crises and above all, no redistribution of wealth or power. Nothing to get in the way of continued economic expansion and resource use directed by the world's corporations.
As I've written before, "The Future" is a sales pitch designed to keep us locked into existing institutions and power relationships. It has nothing to do with solving our real problems or liberating us from the increasing power of corporations and the governments they have captured. It is, in fact, an elitist vision of a future entirely run by wealthy technologists who find politics and environmental disruption inconvenient.
Trying to put things into perspective for me, my landlady suggested that in the future only a fool would rob a bank in person. Why not get a robot to do it for you and have a drone play the role of the lookout? The answer from the technologists, of course, is that we won't need actual physical banks or paper money in the future.

That may or may not be true. But I have a feeling that the criminals will figure out other purposes for their crime robots and drones (and artificial intelligence squads for that matter), purposes not currently discussed in the speeches and white papers of the world's corporate-funded futurists. These futurists, I predict, will be too busy forecasting the ways in which our attention and income will be monopolized by new technologies in the wondrous world to come.