So far, 27 years of COP meetings have been a complete failure; you can't argue with physics. Anyone saying otherwise has fossil fuels or books to sell. #EmergencyMode
@ClimateHuman I agree totally, however I think that exponential curve is flattening. And since it is cumulative it’ll take a long time to go back down again.
CW - longish ramble
@peterbrown @ClimateHuman hard to tell and in 100 years either it is flattening and we have a chance or not. My own measure, the state of the mountains, suggests the archeologists are right - no human culture/civilisation has survived climate change and this one with all the aces up its sleeve may be no different
CW - longish ramble
@DaveFernig @peterbrown @ClimateHuman
Hey @FlintDibble have you got anything you'd like to add to this? (Or is there anything I just said above that you'd like to take issue with, for that matter? 😅)
@s3nnacherib @DaveFernig @peterbrown @ClimateHuman
Hi Adam, complicated topic! I think I agree with most of what you said.
Defining collapse is tough. One of the things I find ironic, is most of the "collapses" we see archaeologically are a collapse in elite material culture, yet elites think they might escape modern climate change
I need to time in my life, because Id love to write more on that!
@s3nnacherib @DaveFernig @peterbrown @ClimateHuman
i personally think archaeology and history is very relevant to our own moment, but at the same time (as usual) our own moment is unique. So, it won't provide direct answers, but perhaps a larger context with which to understand our world and the potential impact of the decisions we make
i certainly think it goes to show that we won't "science" ourselves out of this. It's a cultural shift we need, if we will get out of this intact
@FlintDibble In case it wasn't obvious, I absolutely agree we have relevance to how interpreting the present crisis, Flint!
For me the issue is that we have to be really vigilant in not misinterpreting the past for the sake of creating a more dramatic narrative. The evidence for impacts is bad enough as it is; there's no need to embellish it further by failing to acknowledge its complexity.
By the same token, one of the things that drives me up the wall about the sort of "everyone died" narrative about historical climate impacts is that it completely obscures the often-remarkable degree of resilience many past societies showed in the face of climatic disruption. Archaeology and history can inform about adaptation as much as risk, but it's rare to see the former get as much attention in popular discourse as the latter. Both sides of that story really need to be told if we're going to give people a real sense of not only the challenges we face, but that past peoples could and did successfully adapt to climatic challenges in the past.
@FlintDibble @s3nnacherib @DaveFernig @peterbrown @ClimateHuman
We need a paradigm shift.
@ArdentArchivist @FlintDibble @DaveFernig @peterbrown @ClimateHuman Do you mean a paradigm shift about how we think about historical climate change impacts, specifically? (Or relatedly, how the past informs our thinking about the modern climate crisis?)
@ClimateHuman @peterbrown @s3nnacherib @FlintDibble @DaveFernig
How the past informs our thinking is of vital importance, you’re right, but my thinking was much more basic: too many people are too ignorant of the problems (and solutions), and of those who aren’t, too many are burying their heads in the sand. Humanity wants to continue the status quo, but Mother Nature has other ideas. We must accept that & act.
@peterbrown @s3nnacherib @ClimateHuman @FlintDibble @DaveFernig
So yes, it’s a culture thing. And the cultural perception has to change from “We don’t want to deal with this, it’s too expensive and it’s too late anyway,” to “Holy shit, why did we waste half a century? We need to get cracking on this NOW, and no expense is too great vs annihilation.”
Or something like that.
@FlintDibble @DaveFernig @peterbrown @ClimateHuman Hah, yeah... it's funny how that works, isn't it? Almost like they don't realize how dependent they are on the rest of the rest of the world... 😏
And yeah, collapse is SUPER complicated. But it's *definitely* not the sort of straightforward, monocausal nonsense Jared Diamond depicts in his book (which is sadly way more influential than it should be because it's... not great).
@s3nnacherib @FlintDibble @peterbrown @ClimateHuman
I will write more when I have time, but this is absolutely right - collapse is not a simple one way process.
CW - longish ramble
@DaveFernig @peterbrown @ClimateHuman Um, archaeologist who studied climate change impacts here -- and that is absolutely NOT what we say.
Yes, individual polities have been decimated by climatic events, and many historical crises have an environmental component. (I myself have made that exact case regarding the role of megadrought in the rapid decline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.)
But as nearly any archaeologist who is versed in the subject will tell you, "collapse" is kind of a meaningless and badly-defined term. There are literally dozens of articles and books out there which explicitly lay out WHY "collapse" is a bad term, because it creates the false impression of a total destruction that almost never happens. (Karl Butzer's PNAS piece is a great introduction to that literature: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1114845109)
Case in point, for example: obviously the *polity* of the Roman Empire is dead and gone. But is Roman culture really "dead" when the Latin language, Roman philosophical and legal ideas, Roman iconographies of power, Roman religion (at least from the later Empire), Roman architectural style, and so on, are very much still with us? Even the word "empire" is itself a Roman term still in use today (just like the titles "kaiser" and "tsar" were in fact direct continuations of "Caesar"). So is Roman culture and/or Roman "civilization" (whatever that means) actually "dead," or not? Well, that kinda depends on who you ask, and how you define "dead".
Anyway, my point is this: polities come and go, sure. But "cultures" rarely die unless they are actively killed by other human cultures (as in the case of Spain's brutal colonial conquest of the so-called "New World", for example). And even in those cases, at least some cultural habits or preferences tend to stubbornly cling to life in the new sociopolitical order.