re: #394 Blind Frog Belly White

This is something I tried to explain to Conservative friends years ago about climate change:

If you look at the climate record as best we can discern it, the last 10,000 or so years are anomalously stable. Outside of that, it was prone to huge fluctuations. Those 10,000 years contain the entirety of human civilization, which has only been possible because we knew where we could plant crops and expect them to grow to maturity before the first frost, and with only the water provided by the right amount of rain. It allowed us to build towns, which grew into cities, close enough to rivers and coastlines that we could use them for transportation but still only rarely flood.

That stability allowed us the luxury of enough food, without the constant labor of everyone merely to survive. That allowed the development of culture, including the arts and sciences, which in turn allowed us to advance still further.

But it seems like we’d been balancing on a knife edge, and we eventually developed the ability to knock the climate off that knife edge, back into instability.

the problem is thinking things like:
everyone is just like “us”
everywhere is just like “here”
everything’s always been the way it is now
everything’s always going to be the way it is now

when in fact,
- everything changes.
- we are not even temporarily in control

and it’s an illusion to think we ever had it all under control in the first place

this is true at the macro and micro (personal) levels