Biosphere routines, feedbacks

I always feel slightly at odds with the term "climate change." Deep political stasis needed shattering with a slogan, and the phrase filled in. We had to unify and focus, pack up our smorgasbord of ecological concerns and send a single must-have item home. The old terrestrial alarms of the 19th and 20th centuries ended up putting decent people off. Numbing them. Too often our best information was seen as alarmism. It wasn't seen as fire alarms or canaries in coal mines, as notices we should at least hear and preferably investigate to see if we can help. As in all eras, some concerns were exaggerated, or turned out to be failed best guesses from partial facts, but so many weren't.

The stasis isn't unlike finding yourself saying "everything causes cancer!" to dismiss a new snippet on how you might get or avoid cancer. The rational action, of course, is to listen to the piece of information. It could save your life. (And it could save someone else's if you share.) If you believe that thinking about cancer will spoil your fun while you smoke barbecued lamb or spray paint a car door in an unventilated basement, I'll tell you what'll spoil your fun: dying unexpectedly. Talk about exaggerated concerns! It is untrue that everything causes cancer. It is true, however, that the dose makes the poison. So if you were rational, you wouldn't say "everything causes cancer!" You would listen and then try to glean what evidence there is and what dose of this factor could be threatening. Even too much water will poison you, but if a companion points out that the wild berries you're eating are poisonous, good luck with the reasoning that "everything is poisonous!"

"Everything's bad for the environment!" Are we on the same page about the difficulty we Earth aliens are having when we think about this? It's a lot easier to ruffle your flightless wings and stick your head in some mud. It's more difficult to think, "Wait a minute. Many things are bad for the environment. It isn't just one. But, hm, not everything is bad for the environment. And not everything is equally bad. Hm. So what are the worst things? And what are the best things? Where can we start today?"

It isn't actually that hard. It's just harder. And many people out there are setting the easy example of head-under-quicksand-it's-really-great-try-it. Humans love to imitate each other.

Climate change has helped focus our concerns. Most of us know it isn't just global warming from CO₂ that's looming on our radar. At the same time, I worry that "climate change" is both too vague and too specific. If someone doesn't feel as if a changing climate sounds all that bad—after all, we've lived through ice ages and hot spells, and plants will enjoy some extra CO₂—then "climate change" is just vague enough and just specific enough that this person may feel excused from considering any of the problems at all.

This leads to the question of whether we face one problem or many unconnected problems. And while there are many problems, I believe they are connected. These are dangers to the biosphere introduced by inefficiencies and inadequacies in the world's political and economic practices. In my opinion, we have plenty of information about how to upgrade those practices. The trouble is that it's happening so much more slowly than the speed of knowledge and understanding.