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Пишет stereo_sanctity (![[info]](http://lj.rossia.org/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} stereo_sanctity) |
вчера вот такое читал:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-future-is-a-landscape/
But won’t temperatures just keep on rising and bring on the apocalypse? The evidence from paleoclimatology offers a good way to check the rhetoric. 250 million years ago in the Triassic Period, the atmosphere had six times as much carbon dioxide in it as it has today—a level that will never again be reached, because so much carbon has been locked up in inert geological forms like chalk and limestone since then. The earth was much warmer, ice caps and glaciers were unknown, and the climate accordingly shifted into overdrive: paleoclimatologists have coined the moniker “megamonsoon” for the cataclysmic weather systems that swept over the planet in those days. Nonetheless the ancestors of today’s cedars and sequoias thrived, leaving the traces of vast forests for paleontologists to admire. So did your ancestors, dear reader—for the therapsids, the ancestors of mammals like you and me, the Triassic was a great time.
But what if some kind of long shot catastrophe takes place? Here again, it’s happened. A little later, in the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, gargantuan volcanic eruptions in the Toarcian and Cenomanian-Turonian epochs triggered what paleoclimatologists call super-greenhouse events, in which the temperature of the planet spiked to very high levels. The dinosaurs shrugged and went on munching ginkgo leaves. If the dinosaurs had built an industrial civilization, massed huge populations in unsustainable dinocities, and sunk trillions of dinodollars into infrastructure that would become worthless when the temperature rose, they would have had a very hard row to hoe, no question. They didn’t, and so they were still thriving when the earth got whacked by an asteroid millions of years later.
A couple of thousand years from now, in other words, archeologists from one or more of the future nations of eastern North America will travel on muleback through the slowly greening deserts to unearth the fabled ruins of Las Vegas and marvel at the insane bad taste of their ancestors. Then they’ll go back home, publish illustrated books on their adventures, and go on to deal with the problems and possibilities of life in their own time, which will not be anything like the present, nor for that matter anything like our fantasies of the future. (Look at comparable notions of the future published in, say, 1880, if you want some sense of just how far off the mark ours will be.) Then history will go on and other things will happen.
Apply the same logic to every other crisis of our time and see just how different the future looks. Think about the current population bubble as yet another boom that is already showing signs of tipping over into bust—one recent study argues, on plausible grounds, that we may already have hit peak population worldwide. Just as in every great civilization of the past, centuries of steady population decline will help define the shape of the future before us. Think about fossil fuels not as things that about to run out suddenly, nor as things that are about to be replaced by some new and even more abundant energy source, but as things that are already trickling away gradually as rising prices and shrinking production feed each other, leaving us to get by on the much more modest energy resources of sun and wind and muscle.
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-futur
But won’t temperatures just keep on rising and bring on the apocalypse? The evidence from paleoclimatology offers a good way to check the rhetoric. 250 million years ago in the Triassic Period, the atmosphere had six times as much carbon dioxide in it as it has today—a level that will never again be reached, because so much carbon has been locked up in inert geological forms like chalk and limestone since then. The earth was much warmer, ice caps and glaciers were unknown, and the climate accordingly shifted into overdrive: paleoclimatologists have coined the moniker “megamonsoon” for the cataclysmic weather systems that swept over the planet in those days. Nonetheless the ancestors of today’s cedars and sequoias thrived, leaving the traces of vast forests for paleontologists to admire. So did your ancestors, dear reader—for the therapsids, the ancestors of mammals like you and me, the Triassic was a great time.
But what if some kind of long shot catastrophe takes place? Here again, it’s happened. A little later, in the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, gargantuan volcanic eruptions in the Toarcian and Cenomanian-Turonian epochs triggered what paleoclimatologists call super-greenhouse events, in which the temperature of the planet spiked to very high levels. The dinosaurs shrugged and went on munching ginkgo leaves. If the dinosaurs had built an industrial civilization, massed huge populations in unsustainable dinocities, and sunk trillions of dinodollars into infrastructure that would become worthless when the temperature rose, they would have had a very hard row to hoe, no question. They didn’t, and so they were still thriving when the earth got whacked by an asteroid millions of years later.
A couple of thousand years from now, in other words, archeologists from one or more of the future nations of eastern North America will travel on muleback through the slowly greening deserts to unearth the fabled ruins of Las Vegas and marvel at the insane bad taste of their ancestors. Then they’ll go back home, publish illustrated books on their adventures, and go on to deal with the problems and possibilities of life in their own time, which will not be anything like the present, nor for that matter anything like our fantasies of the future. (Look at comparable notions of the future published in, say, 1880, if you want some sense of just how far off the mark ours will be.) Then history will go on and other things will happen.
Apply the same logic to every other crisis of our time and see just how different the future looks. Think about the current population bubble as yet another boom that is already showing signs of tipping over into bust—one recent study argues, on plausible grounds, that we may already have hit peak population worldwide. Just as in every great civilization of the past, centuries of steady population decline will help define the shape of the future before us. Think about fossil fuels not as things that about to run out suddenly, nor as things that are about to be replaced by some new and even more abundant energy source, but as things that are already trickling away gradually as rising prices and shrinking production feed each other, leaving us to get by on the much more modest energy resources of sun and wind and muscle.
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