Steelman - my proposition about human optimum wellbeing in balance with the rest of nature

Steelman - my proposition about human optimum wellbeing in balance with the rest of nature - for Sean Rush to steelman

12/4/2023

Sean Rush declined to enter into a steelman debate with me. This would have been my draft proposal for him to steelman in such a debate.

My draft Steelman Proposition about: Human optimal wellbeing, in balance with the rest of nature, over the global warming era (ie from 1850 to 2100 and beyond) ------------------------------

Human wellbeing and thriving, and it’s balance with the rest of nature, to 2100 and beyond, is under threat. These threats come from human activities, and include weather disruptions, sea level rises and other climate changes driven by human activities, overlayed with natural variations.

Evidence for existence of major climate shifts since 1850 is building and there is a small but significant risk of even more dramatic and potentially irreversible shifts occurring by 2100, especially if climate tipping points are reached (or have already been crossed).

Additionally, rates of change of some climate indicators such as global average temperatures (and others) are already unprecedented in timescales longer than the timespans over which large scale human civilisations have developed and thrived and in which large-scale outdoor rain-fed agriculture has been a key enabler of civilisational success and scale.

A particular focus is needed on feeding people and getting them affordable energy as a short term (2023 - 2033) and medium term (2033 to 2050) priority whilst also decarbonising the global economy by mid-century (say 2050) using GDP-positive projects and infrastructure changes based on advice from relevant and focused experts.

The risk of climate tipping to a new, hostile equilibrium state should be kept to a “manageable” level. This will be possible using technical, social and behavioural tools at humanity’s disposal, and tools that can be reasonably predicted to be invented by 2100. Overshoot beyond Paris 1.5, perhaps even Paris 2.0, is likely, and a narrow path back to climate stability, and eventually long-term optimisation, is possible, but only if risks associated with climate tipping points are carefully managed.

my steelman proposition ends --------------------------------------------

2 Comments

Sean Rush

28/8/2023 12:33:19 am

Thanks - I didn't 'decline' this debate but it is a matter of priorities and what is the benefit. I am also not familiar with a 'steelman' approach but here's a few thoughts:

Your argument seems to focus on human well-being and how this is threatened by climate change. I recently conducted a review of AR6 and UN literature to find little evidence offered for this proposition.
Rather, the evidence shows that in 180 years of climate change, the changes have been small and manageable to date. There is no reason why our children and grandchildren can not expect to look forward to a much better planet than prior generations. For example:

- no Cold war, the reality of an ever-threatening nuclear war is no longer part of the daily discourse. Millions that lived behind the Iron Curtain are comparatively free. Unlike me, my children do not worry about nuclear missiles pointed at major Western cities.

- The biggest food surpluses ever. A world where famine “has diminished significantly and abruptly as compared to earlier eras.”8

- The UN’s latest Report on Global Food Markets9 discloses resilience in the agri-food sector, despite the
challenges resulting from Covid – 19. “Climate change” is a non-problem. It is mentioned once on page 108 as a factor that the Philippines will build resilience to, rather than as a global problem.

- Amongst all the good news of surplus food, obesity, caused by an imbalance of energy digested and expended, is now the bigger issue, being linked to 4.7 million annual premature deaths.10

- “The incidence of polio worldwide has been reduced by 99%, since 1988 from an estimated 350 000 cases then, to 6 reported cases in 2021”.11 “The world stands on the threshold of eradicating a human disease globally for only the second time in history, after smallpox in 1980.”12

- “Between 2000 and 2020, the maternal mortality ratio (MMR, number of maternal deaths per 100 000 live
births) dropped by about 34% worldwide.”13

- Childbirth survival is exponentially better for Mums and children.

- “gender inequality is declining in virtually all major domains.”14

- “The absolute number of war deaths has been declining since 1946. In some years in the early post-war era,
around half a million people died through direct violence in wars. In recent years, the annual death toll tends to
be less than 100,000.”15

- Mortality from extreme weather events has declined by more than 90% since 1920, despite a four-fold increase in population:
o Deaths and death rates from droughts, which were responsible for approximately 60% of cumulative deaths due to extreme weather events from 1900-2010, are more than 99.9% lower than in the 1920s.
o Deaths and death rates for floods, responsible for over 30% of cumulative extreme weather deaths, have declined by over 98% since the 1930s.
o Deaths and death rates for storms (i.e. hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, typhoons), responsible for
around 7% of extreme weather deaths from 1900-2008, declined by more than 55% since the 1970s.
o To put the public health impact of extreme weather events into context, cumulatively they now contribute only 0.07% to global mortality.16

- Democracy has grown across the world over the past four decades.17

These trends are on account of a more affluent, caring and inclusive world, that has been driven in part by the access to affordable, reliable energy. Cut of access to that energy, without viable substitutes, and we will indeed see a reversal.

8 See https://ourworldindata.org/famines
9 See https://www.fao.org/3/ca9509en/ca9509en.pdf
10 Source: https://ourworldindata.org/obesity
11 Source: https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/the-big-catch-up-the-race-to-get-childhood-vaccinations-back-on-track/
12 Source: the World Health Organisation https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/poliomyelitis
13 Source: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/maternal-mortality
14 Source: Dorius SF, Firebaugh G. Trends in Global Gender Inequality (Forthcoming, Social Forces). Soc Forces. 2010 Jul 1;88(5):1941-1968. doi:
10.1353/sof.2010.0040. PMID: 21643494; PMCID: PMC3107548.
15 Source: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
16 Source: Deschenes and Moretti “EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS, MORTALITY, AND MIGRATION “ The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 91, No. 4 (November 2009), pp. 659-681 (23 pages) Published By: The MIT Press
17 Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/14/more-than-half-of-countries-are-democratic/ft_19-05-02_democracyupdate_map/
18 The particular matter was the precision of the historic global average thermometer record.

David Calver

3/9/2023 03:29:37 pm

Sean, Thanks for providing those comments. They provide food for thought. It's not clear whether or not you are steelmanning my proposition. From reading your comments, it appears not, since you seem to be putting up counterarguments rather than providing material or suggestions for how to strengthen my proposition. More about the steelman process here, if you’re interested in undertaking a steelman debate with me (please let me know if you do):
https://themindcollection.com/steelmanning-how-to-discover-the-truth-by-helping-your-opponent/

Re your actual comments.

1) You are right that there are threats to human thriving other than AGW since the industrial revolution. It is of course debatable how high a priority AGW is versus other matters such as risk of wars or obesity. You suggest you have not found evidence, in UN sources, of significant threat from AGW. I offer just one UN counterexample here. From IPCC AR6 WG2 (2022):
“Climate change has caused substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater and coastal and open ocean marine ecosystems (high confidence). The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous
assessments (high confidence). Widespread deterioration of ecosystem structure and function, resilience and natural adaptive capacity, as well as shifts in seasonal timing have occurred due to climate change (high confidence), with adverse socioeconomic consequences (high confidence).”

2) You list a number of aspects of recent human history that have been improving since the industrial revolution, including survival rates from extreme weather events. You suggest “These trends are on account of a more affluent, caring and inclusive world, that has been driven in part by the access to affordable, reliable energy. Cut of access to that energy, without viable substitutes, and we will indeed see a reversal.” I think you might be using a strawman argument there, conflating increased access to renewable energy and restricting access to fossil fuel energy? I don’t think there are many people suggesting cutting access to energy per-se. Quite the contrary – with renewable energies expanding fast, and the economic calculations in favour of them versus fossil energies in almost every part of the world, it is the global transition to decarbonised energy that will help secure further human development gains going forward. It is subsidisation and defence of fossil fuel energies that will delay such a transition and will increase the damages caused by their contribution to AGW. Furthermore, many of the improvements you list are because of human actions to counter the threats. That will continue, irrespective of the mix of renewable energies and fossil energies, and the state of the global decarbonisation transition. A simple example is improved flood warning and evacuation procedures – a human adaptation mechanism. I think the matter of climate tipping points is very relevant here. Adaptation can do much, but as and when climate tipping points are triggered, adaption will become far more expensive and impractical very quickly, and losses and damage will probably rise exponentially. The UN IPCC is not good at reflecting the risks from climate tipping points in its main published works.

3) You say “Democracy has grown across the world over the past four decades”, but you make no explicit connection between that and the matters discussed here. It looks a little disjointed and might be irrelevant? I’m not that ‘into’ politics, so will leave it at that.

4) Your references start at “8”, and your reference “18” seems unconnected to the matters being discussed here. Are your comments an excerpt from a larger piece of text?

5) Overall, your counterargument against my proposition seems to be that humanity has been improving its wellbeing since the industrial revolution, implying that AGW is not a serious threat, and that “There is no reason why our children and grandchildren can not expect to look forward to a much better planet than prior generations”. One thing you might want to consider is the work of researchers who have tracked how developed nations, over a certain threshold of GDP per capita, tend to have declining wellbeing (see debates about the environmental Kuznets curve). Part of this is the growing damage from pollution (including AGW). See also my LinkedIn post about future AGW damage curves:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/david-calver-8974ab_what-agw-damage-curve-do-you-prefer-attached-activity-7099823995314675713-fG9D?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

6) I think the most helpful aspect of your comments is that they steer us towards looking for the evidence for the growing future damages from AGW, how they compare qualitatively and quantitatively with other threats to human flouris

Planetary CFO

Steelman - my proposition about human optimum wellbeing in balance with the rest of nature - for Sean Rush to steelman

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