{"id":405,"date":"2008-07-01T21:01:26","date_gmt":"2008-07-02T02:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=405"},"modified":"2015-01-07T14:07:09","modified_gmt":"2015-01-07T18:07:09","slug":"back-off-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/?p=405","title":{"rendered":"Back Off, Man"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/a>
\nwrt that mike davis piece<\/a> i&i linkthink’d<\/a> yesterday, my fren ben, who knows a thing or two about climate science, offers a (slightly) more upbeat, measured take —<\/p>\n

interesting. i admit that i’m surprised to hear that the London
\nSociety is ready to put the golden spike on the anthropocene. seems
\nto me that geological ages are defined by prevailing conditions, not
\noncoming trends, and the present-day impacts of climate change don’t
\nseem big enough to merit the distinction . . . it’ll take a century or
\nmore of steadily worsening conditions to get a definitive signal in
\nthe global stratigraphic record. that’s not to say that the
\nanthropocene isn’t a useful concept; it’s just odd that the London
\nSociety wants to tie it to the geological record.<\/p>\n

i mean, how do you drive a golden spike into unconsolidated sediment, anyway?<\/p>\n

engaging article, tho. it’s important to hear the criticism that the
\nIPCC is too conservative in its estimates. a handful of scientists
\nhave started arguing the same point, but only a handful — most of us
\nwaste our time responding to skeptics of the IPCC rather than pointing
\nout how badly the consensus report understates the potential for
\nextreme change.<\/p>\n

that being said, i think we need to be a little more optimistic than
\nthe article allows. sure, there are problems with all of the current
\nefforts to mitigate climate change, but we haven’t been working on
\nthis for very long. you can’t dismiss all biofuels just because of
\nthe recent rise in food prices (which has little to do with biofuels,
\nanyway), you can’t give up on carbon capture because the first pilot
\nplant failed, and you can’t use the present-day costs of (boutique)
\ngreen construction to estimate the expense of future (mass market)
\ngreen construction.<\/p>\n

so i guess that the article is useful as a wake-up call, but i’d
\nrather use the wake-up as a motivation to pursue all avenues of
\nmitigation, including the diplomatic and market-based efforts that the
\nauthor prefers to mock. it seems that he’s more interested in seeing
\nhumanity get the ass-kicking that it deserves than in trying to
\nminimize suffering . . . his prediction might be right, but i’d like
\nto think that we can do better.<\/p>\n

especially if the engineers can bail us out again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

wrt that mike davis piece i&i linkthink’d yesterday, my fren ben, who knows a thing or two about climate science, offers a (slightly) more upbeat, measured take — interesting. i admit that i’m surprised to hear that the London Society is ready to put the golden spike on the anthropocene. seems to me that geological […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[227,226],"class_list":["post-405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-global","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8495,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions\/8495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wayneandwax.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}