One of the reasons I read other people's blogs

[james_davis_nicoll]

I encountered these interesting discussions of environmentalism in SF.


In fact, I see I came in at the wrong end of the Puchalsky discussion:

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Given what people on metafilter think of me, I'd to clarify that I fall into the "anthropogenic climate change is real, nothing will be done about it, some degree of change is therefore inevitable, only realizable strategies involve adapting to the new conditions" camp. Granted, easier to do this hundreds of meters above sea level in an area that very well may not be desertified.

The quotation from Adam Roberts' "Anti-Coperniucus" reminded me a lot of Inherit the Earth

Comments

[bibliogrrl.livejournal.com]

I don't know what other people on MeFi think of you, but I think your the tops.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Thank you! But apparently I come across as an anthropogenic climate change denier.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

For people who don't regularly read you, some of the stuff you say and link to makes you come across as one of the non-denialist Libertarian contrarians whose response to global warming is "any kind of adaptation to climate change and reduction in profligate energy consumption will reduce the developed world to a poverty-stricken hellscape: we can only sit on our hands until Private Sector Genius creates a magic non-polluting free energy source!"

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

To be fair, James *has* said pretty much exactly that, repeatedly, usually while linking to something that demonstrates exactly how dumb it is.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

The discussion of the engineering mindset in SF and how it relates to SF treatments of overpopulation reminded me a great deal of "Engineers of Jihad". At minimum, that article's data certain fits with the behavior of far too many SF fans.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to say what book it was because it isn't out yet but I was a little surprised when a book I read in the last year had a massive genocide of a specific sort of human in it and the moral turned out to not be "genocide is bad" but "make sure you've killed them all 'cause those guys really keep grudges." It's part of a series so it's possible this will evolve into a quite different position [1] but the protagonist gets mental contact with one of the survivors and the survivor is basically a total monster that needs killing.

(I will ID the publisher in a negative sense: it was not from Baen)

1: The one I am expecting is "Saying 'nobody could have survived that' is no replacement for actually locating the body."

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Ick. It's sad that I'd be very surprised if the author wasn't from the US.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

There's a reason why "but not as bad as Lothar von Trotha" is a sentiment I've used in reviews.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

But I don't think it's particularly American, although I grant a total rejection of anything even faintly resembling compassion is a core part of being a true American; an eagerness to slaughter entire groups to which one does not belong is an established human behavior.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

We all know that "Nobody could have survived that!" means
"He'll be back. Soon." Don't these people read comics or watch action movies?

"A dynamic character with the ability to survive certain death and a questionable death scene leaving no corpse? Face it, we'll never see HER again." - Riff in this Sluggy Freelance strip

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Puchalsky sounds much saner in a monologue than he ever does in comment threads. social interaction must rub the poor bastard raw.

Environmentalism and anti-environmentalism are convenient markers for writers who believe in poor characterization. I don't think there's anything deeper going on here other than "hard" SF being a predominantly fringe right genre for culturally contingent reasons.

Hard science fiction has been a vector for toxic fringe right ideas for decades, but who reads the stuff any more? You'd be better off publishing them in a comic book.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

"anthropogenic climate change is real, nothing will be done about it, some degree of change is therefore inevitable, only realizable strategies involve adapting to the new conditions"

I guess I feel similarly, except that if literally nothing is done, so that carbon emission continues to increase without limit until all the coal in the earth is gone, adaptation will not be possible.

I think we're already past the point where the scientist-activists' threshold-for-major-adverse-consequences (a couple of degrees Celsius warming) is unavoidable, but it's a frustratingly popular misconception that this is some kind of binary tipping point beyond which further effort is useless. Actually it just makes further effort more essential.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Where was that carbon before the coal beds were laid down?

[(Anonymous)]

Walking around in animals or chillin' in plants, I imagine: and before that, coming out of volanoes? I doubt it was all in the atmosphere at one time.

Bruce

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, I don't think unaltered humans could have breathed the air back then (too much oxygen).

[(Anonymous)]

The estimates for ancient oxygen were pretty shaky, last time I looked. I'm falling behind in that area, though. As to the carbon, some of it was indeed in the atmosphere, but at that time the sun was cooler, so it's rather a good thing it was there as even so the Carboniferous ice age was the most extensive in the past 600 million years, with CO2 at near-current levels.

My guess is that only new technology will solve this problem, and I am certain that the free market will not produce said technology by iteslf (though once it is produced the FM will make a ton off of it, and later claim to have invented it). A Manhattan-project sized effort, proportional to our economy today, might work wonders.

William Hyde

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's right, there's the whole faint-young-sun paradox, or what used to be a paradox.

[(Anonymous)]

Which particular coal beds are you talking about? They date from at least three periods in North America - Carboniferous, Jurassic and Cretaceous.

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

Remember that most of the previous CO2 peaks occurred back when the sun was a touch dimmer than it is now.

A large modern CO2 peak would be more along the lines of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum: +10-15 C above current temperatures for a million years[0]. Note that this would render the tropics and much of the subtropics uninhabitable for humans without air conditioning[1].


[0] We don't get anywhere near that simply by burning fossil carbon, however the oceans are pretty close to saturated with CO2 and the solubility goes down with increasing temperatures.

[1] When you get heat stroke just from sitting in the shade and drinking ice cold lemonade, it becomes kind of hard to live there.