Best,
Mary

P.S. I really appreciate knowing that the ideas in that essay resonated for someone else. Thanks!

Thank you, friend.
Live long, and prosper.
-Zid

It’s pretty easy to see that the real cause is the industrial revolution, but that brings up a bunch of interestingly useless questions: Could we have had the industrial revolution without fossil fuels? Could we have had the enlightenment without leading to an industrial revolution? Could we have had the enlightenment without the rennaissance, or the rennaissance without the dark ages? Could we have had a rennaissance without the dark ages if we hadn’t had Catholicism?

The answer to all of these questions is, of course, no. History can only happen the way it has already happened. If you insist on contemplating them regardless, then the question becomes one of theology.

A complicated whole led us to pump carbon from the ground into the atmosphere. A complicated whole will eventually lead us to stop it. Isolated analyses are next to useless. Any government which attempts to solve the problem by well-intentioned rational fiat will have to be willing to take grossly violent actions, or it will simply not be effective.

Analogy time: your car doesn’t run, because there isn’t enough pressure in one of the pistons. No, it’s because your car’s computer isn’t flexible enough to be able to adjust to one non-pressured piston (which is certainly physically possible). But maybe instead of re-inventing the control software to run in the degraded mode, we could more productively observe that the car is broken because an exhaust valve got mangled. Well, that might help us fix it in the immediate, but in the long-term I don’t think it got at the real cause of the problem. Actually the cause of the problem is that you red-line the engine before shifting up, and this over-revving has mangled the valve. So stop red-lining the engine! But even that is not even remotely complete — you also haven’t changed the oil in 50,000 miles.

Here’s a well-understood physical system with an extraordinarily well-defined goal, and yet still there is a ton of philosophical ambiguity about “cause”, to such an extent that it can be practically difficult to figure out a reasonable resolution: stop driving so fast, change your oil sometimes, and listen to your car when it makes funny noises. Or maybe you should just switch to leasing, so when your car breaks you can just trade it in for another one.

Our knowledge of climate change is at that point where we are saying, “I’ve got it! The pressure is low because the valve is stuck open,” but anything we can do that approaches a meaningful understanding of a humane solution to the problem introduces so many unknowns that the way we manage our unknowns (“faith”) completely drowns out any scientificly-acquired knowledge. We haven’t even got but the vaguest notion of what a “properly-functioning” post-industrial society would look like.

Here is a myth they debunk by proving it, “Environments rich in stimuli improve the brains of preschool children.” They say that removing stimuli causes mental deficits. They say that adding more stimuli to a stimuli-rich environment does not improve things. WHICH JUST PROVES THE POINT. Children benefit from an environment rich in stimulus. That is not a myth! The myth is that playing Bach or hiring tutors or buying toys produces a richer set of stimuli.

And then the next, “Individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style, whether auditory, visual or kinesthetic.” They go on to explain that our understanding of the word “preference” is naive. Way to go, but you have to really stretch to find a definition for “preferred learning style” that doesn’t turn this “myth” into a tautology.

They’re just trying to say “you, reader, are stupid,” and only sharing useful information as an afterthought. My least favorite trend in science reporting.