23 KiB
[Q] [D] Impact of Global Warming on Future Society
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Author: u/Transfuturist Carthago delenda est.*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3dl4xz/q_d_impact_of_global_warming_on_future_society/
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Score: 5
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Created: 2015-07-17T03:51:23
Post:
I'm working on worldbuilding for a near-future (+200 years) setting, for something that could be my next NaNoWriMo attempt. After a reminder of the danger global warming is posing us, I realized that I couldn't actually find much discussion of the impacts in relation to science fiction. World-building in general, even sci-fi, seems to be focused on creating utterly alien cultures, and I can't find anything about writing fiction set in Earth's future, with all that we know may come with it.
So, what exactly could happen, politically, socially, economically, in reaction to the instability that global warming is beginning to cause? How quickly will we actually start to mitigate our greenhouse output, and how will we adapt over the next two centuries? What will the cities in danger of being flooded and eventually consumed by the ocean respond? What will the death toll be? I know that the greatest threat to life is focused in developing nations, so how will their society and political relations be affected? I've only ever seen relations of population as a cause of further emissions, not relations of GW impacts to the population growth rate. The EPA has some nice releases on impact threats, but they only show examples of what has been done to further adaptation, and it reads a bit like US propaganda. Not to mention it only discusses impacts and adaptation in the context of the US.
In the story I'm looking at, I want first-world nations (G7 or NATO, or something like it) to be focusing on space colonization, and to have a massive technological capability. They've built an orbital ring with hanging elevators, which is where most of the story would take place. Nanotechnology is a massive field; general nanoassemblers, "room-temperature" (via insulation and thermoelectric coolers) quantum computers, ultracapacitors, extremely efficient solar, a partial Dyson bubble, fusion propulsion, genetic engineering, and all sorts of augmentations and upload-oriented intelligences (via quantum simulation, non-connectionist AI is nonfunctional so far) are functioning.
On the other hand, I want developing nations (BRICS?) to to be pissed off at the spacefaring first-world nations, and to try to fight back. Part of the story would involve an attempted (successful?) takeover of sections of the orbital ring, which the invaders don't want to destroy because it's such valuable infrastructure. I've been inspired here by the developing nation conflict in Planetes, and I'd certainly like to touch on some similar themes. What I'm most concerned with is what these developing nations would look like after being affected by GW for ~200 years. What happened to their populations? How did they react? How did they survive? What nations changed, melded, or simply disappeared due to adversity and migration? How would nanotechnology beginning to leak out of the first world affect them, as well?
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+8] Time flies like an arrow (39 minutes later)
Suggested reading is The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, which has a lot of neat stuff in it. Quite a bit of it is about global warming; it's set in 23rd century Thailand, in a city that's below sea level.
Second, Charles Stross has a few articles on building the near future that you might want to read, "Shaping the Future" and "World Building 404: The Unknown Unknowns".
Okay, so with your homework out of the way, the really big problem -- the huge, massive, can't avoid it problem -- is that you can't just consider global warming. You need to consider global warming and all the other stuff. The biggest mistake that science fiction makes when it tries to predict the future is that it just narrows in on one single thing. This is great if you're going for allegory or political commentary, but it doesn't paint the future like it will actually look. So you need to think about global warming, genetic engineering, increased automation, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics, etc. all at once, which is really, really ridiculously tough (and this is why I like writing fantasy more than scifi).
So the very first question you have to answer is why global warming wasn't stopped. You need a vaguely plausible timeline for how the United States go to general nano-assemblers while it should have been devoting resources to keeping major population centers from drowning. You need to justify why space colonization was deemed better or more efficient than just stopping the global problems -- or how the first world developed local solutions to global problems. You need to deal with the knock-on effects of global warming, like ocean acidification and extreme weather conditions.
Right now, it's pretty clear that first world countries are in a better position with regards to climate change than third world countries. This isn't just because they have more money; they have better infrastructure and institutions which will be able to deal with it. There's an index that I looked at a while back that tried to quantify which nations would be most affected by climate change given their disposition and resources, and it wasn't terribly surprising to see that the first world was in pretty good shape. Hell, 17% of the Netherlands is below sea level already; it's possible that the developed world is just going to get a lot of dikes and polders.
The third world is probably screwed. Dysfunctional governments aren't going to be able to build the infrastructures necessary to keep their cities safe; money that's earmarked for levees will go missing, projects will come in over budget and behind schedule with skimming off the top, and the cut corners are going to come back to bite someone in the ass (though there's a decent chance of any of that happening the first world too). Climate change is going to mean migration, which puts stress on infrastructure, which probably leads to death and disease. This means calls for aid from the first world, which might not be answered due to them having their own problems.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (an hour later)
why global warming wasn't stopped
I was under the impression that the only preventative action would be reducing emissions, and that even if we stopped emissions now, the world would still be headed for disaster.
general nano-assemblers while it should have been devoting resources to keeping major population centers from drowning.
Well, I didn't actually say that first-world nations wouldn't be enacting adaptive measures, quite the opposite. That doesn't preclude nanotechnology research though, especially considering that nanotechnology itself offers a lot in the way of removing the problem with aeroforming as well as preventing the problem from happening again with better energy technologies. I also want to give the impression that the real breakthroughs happened in the last half-century or so, and is just starting to become ubiquitous in the first-world.
why space colonization was deemed better or more efficient than just stopping the global problems
It's not really meant to come across as "escaping the planet," like in Firefly, but more about reducing the burden of population on the Earth's ecology. Maybe they're planning to ship off the population of developing nations. Is Venus a good aeroforming target? Hell, they could be planning to use the same technologies to fix Earth on Venus.
The third world is probably screwed.
I'm just wondering how much. If they are so screwed, then maybe the story should be set where impacts are fixed enough that the third world can get their shit together again? Would government collapse be imminent?
u/None [+3] (23 hours later)
I was under the impression that the only preventative action would be reducing emissions, and that even if we stopped emissions now, the world would still be headed for disaster.
Yes, but you're writing sci-fi, so introducing an unknown unknown - bioengineered super-effective carbon-sequestering cyanobacteria, for example - is perfectly acceptable.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)
Maybe. I don't want to really focus on GW impacts directly, but it could provide an extra source of resentment from third-world to first-world nations... Maybe the climate should be already solved around the story's setting, and the space colonization is in reaction to the third-world population beginning to skyrocket again.
After about 80 years, effective atmospheric carbon sequestration could be invented, and 50 years later, the climate is put back on track (aeroforming controls on sequestration plants would allow a planetary thermostat, essentially). In that time, however, the third world has already been devastated with droughts, floods, famines, storms, and the resulting instability. First-world nations did not properly plan for provision of adaptive resources in their foreign aid plans, and since they aren't able to produce a good surplus of food or water in the tough times, the third world is left to their own devices.
After 130 years, around the 2140s, things are rebuilding. Cheap spaceflight is a priority item in first-world nations, as the prolonged impacts of global warming inspired mistrust in the stability of environment and life on Earth. The social focus of technology is now fully focused on control of the natural state, including habitats and the human body. An ongoing project for the development of an orbital ring ramps up, and with nanotech developments in solar, NASA starts launching statites out of the ecliptic plane for a nonintrusive Dyson bubble. Insights on general nanoassembly are starting to come together, and genetic engineering for the human body becomes a big focus of research, particularly by the military.
I want the US/NATO/G7(?) military to be a very big force, with somewhat fascistic control, at the very least in the decades before the story starts. The main characters are a military project, training to act as military police officers for the proposed colonies. This is a way for both the originating countries and the military itself to exert control over the colonies, so we don't have anything like the Martian Revolution in B5. Neurology is also a very advanced field now, particularly with the addition of neural interfacing and simulation, which is how the military is able to fuck the soldiers' heads into giving complete loyalty. There is a second generation of officers, androids with the uploaded minds of the original generation's top performers, and that's where things get interesting.
Sound good?
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
I really like this interpretation. Sounds good to me.
First-world nations did not properly plan for provision of adaptive resources in their foreign aid plans, and since they aren't able to produce a good surplus of food or water in the tough times, the third world is left to their own devices.
That's what the third world would say. The first world apologists would say that they had provisioned for the third world just fine, and the reason it wasn't adequate came down to profit-seeking behaviors, government corruption, etc.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
Or a thin-film mirror in solar orbit between the Sun and Earth, blocking a few percentage points of incoming solar energy, and using the heat that is not reflected to power an industrial complex.
Or maybe the Sun enters a cooler cycle, or the oceanic carbon cycles adjust slightly to compensate.
I don't dismiss global warming, but I'm not entirely convinced that it's something we're responsible for. I'm sure humans aren't helping, but the world's been a lot warmer before.
Even if humans are causing global warming, if the sun enters a cooling phase and we get another global ice age, that'll kibosh any global warming we generate.
u/narfanator [+1] (2 hours later)
For just the global warming v space...
The first kind of nano-assemblers was for graphene cord, and maybe only worked well in microgravity - so, perfect for space elevators (grab asteroid, spin the cord as you travel back home), but little else. Cheap, got the job done, so by the time shit started to really hit the fan and the Sleeping Giant of the US population woke up, the options were: a) bunch of hard stuff* dealing with shitty problems** or b) motherfuckin' space.
[1] Damming the Golden Gate. Massive levies. Water production. Etc. Not that space isn't hard... it's just also sexy.
[2] To deal with these problem, you have to face the human misery involved... misery you know you're part of the cause of.
Also, although someone better at math can look at this - What happens if we start mining iceteroids for freshwater on Earth? Can the produce enough water for sea level rise?
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (2 hours later)
Yes. Easily. The total of all water on Earth can be contained within a sphere of water 600km in diameter, if I remember right, which is smaller than Ceres (900km diameter), and my understanding is that Ceres is mostly water.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+1] Mouse Army (11 hours later)
I have found the number of 360 km³ of water will raise the oceans 1 mm. Thats 360 gigatons of water. If we have a look at a select few of our main industrial materials:
- steel: 1,600,000,000 tonnes
- concrete: 4,000,000,000 tonnes
- wood: 2,800,000,000 tonnes
- oil: 10,194,000,000 tonnes
That comes out to a mass of 18 gigatonnes. So all the industrial capacity on earth right now is probably smaller than 50 gigatonnes.
Remember, for asteroid ice mining to raise ocean levels by 1mm² you need 360gigatonnes! By the time you have that industrial capacity, global warming is not a problem anymore. Just built dams hundreds of meters high and pumps that pump seawater etc. In terms of moved and refined materials thats still cheaper.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (14 hours later)
To me, the question seemed to be a question of possibility, not plausibility. I answered it's possibility, you answered it's plausibility with pseudo-current technology.
If we start talking about a real asteroid-belt-based industry using automation and devoting significant infrastructure to additional infrastructure growth, plausibility and possibility begin to approach one another over time.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+2] Mouse Army (14 hours later)
Well analyzed.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (11 hours later)
I was under the impression that the only preventative action would be reducing emissions, and that even if we stopped emissions now, the world would still be headed for disaster.
Preventing emissions is one side of the coin. The other side is carbon sequestration. Emissions reduction is currently the best option for slowing or preventing climate change, but that's not necessarily going to be the case forever. If climate change were stopped, I would suspect that it would be through reactive methods rather than preventative methods, just because of how humans tend to set their priorities. If humanity can't do large-scale geoengineering to fix the planet ... well, I guess my narrative preference is that humanity did try to fix the planet through geoengineering, and that this just went wrong in some way. But if you've got wicked-good genetic engineering and general nano-assemblers, I have to start wondering why those weren't tried as solutions to the problem (possibly they just developed far too late?).
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (16 hours later)
Advanced GE and general nano would be developed around the 2180s.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+1] Mouse Army (11 hours later)
Well, we do have the technology to reduce CO2 content of the atmosphere. (burying trees, storing it in liquid form, making diamonds out of it, engineering cyanobacteria to deposit graphite, turning them into hydracarbos again) etc the possibilites are endless. Only trouble is its much to expensive right now, its a lot cheaper (by about 2-3 orders of magnitude IIRC) to reduce emissions.
BUT: if the price of energy goes down to nearly zero (right now we have prices of 0.05€ per kwh), some of the methods get a lot cheaper. If we have mature industrial semi-autonomous industrial robots, they get cheaper again etc.
Sure, you would not immediately get the pre-industrial climate back, esp if some of the tipping points have already gone over, but you sure can mitigate GW.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (2 days later)
Warning comment may have political spiders for some, but contains an honest request for information
I was under the impression that the only preventative action would be reducing emissions, and that even if we stopped emissions now, the world would still be headed for disaster. general nano-assemblers while it should have been devoting resources to keeping major population centers from drowning.
Does anyone have a good primary source with some math that would work on this topic? I'm trying to convince myself the global warming/climate change concern isn't a popular myth on the same magnitude as people using 2% of there brains. I have a hard time though, due to the level of ad-hominem attacks that are usally used against "climate change deniers" and models neglecting greater order of magnitude inputs to examine lesser order of magnitude inputs
If anyone with a good grounding in physics and statistics has a primary source or well referenced secondary source please link it.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (2 days later)
This would be more visible in the next off-topic thread, or perhaps LessWrong. I'm not sure how many replies you'll get three comments down a swiftly aging thread.
However, you shouldn't let the ad hominems of one side influence your beliefs. From what I hear, "climate change deniers" are well-versed in their use as well.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+0] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (2 days later)
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll make a note to re-post then. shrug Politics is spiders, but I'm looking to see if it's just a bandwagon fallacy that fails statistics, such as . . .well gun control, Thanks again.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (2 days later)
just a bandwagon fallacy that fails statistics, such as . . .well gun control
[citation needed]
What form of reducing gun violence are you even talking about?
u/Predictablicious [+1] Only Mark Annuncio Saves (14 hours later)
Kim Stanley Robinson's "Science in the Capital" trilogy focuses on global worming.
u/Izeinwinter [+1] (a day later)
... Make it about labor relations. The most likely reason to have massive space infrastructure is ecological footprint. Heavy industry kicked upstairs because noone really gives a crap if you deal with massively toxic by-products of your processes by loading them into a mass driver and launching them at a designated lunar crater, and if your nanotech develops bugs in the code and start doing bad things.. Well, you just evac the facility and point mirrors at it until it hits thermal equilibrium with the surface of the sun.
Of course, one more reason to do industry in space might be to avoid earth side laws relating to the safety, dignity and compensation of labor.
There you go: Now you have a reason for the developing world to have lots of bodies already up there and angry as all heck, because they frequently being casually murdered in the name of profits. (Corporations only care about safety when forced to. Extraterritorially based industry?..)
Which could also lead to really ironic demands on behalf of the forces doing the takeover. Such as filing for full statehood with every first world nation arranged in anything resembling a federal structure at the same time.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)
one more reason to do industry in space might be to avoid earth side laws relating to the safety, dignity and compensation of labor
Well, I actually want space presence to be strictly controlled by governments, but if this sounds plausible enough for the US to do, that's definitely going in. Perhaps the military is actually now a network of PMCs... (Although the evil PMC trope is just about used up)
arranged in anything resembling a federal structure at the same time.
What do you mean by this?
u/Izeinwinter [+1] (a day later)
Tradition is to make the plot a thinly veiled reenactment of the american war of independence - but any plausible space presence is going to be much to economically tied into earth for that to make sense. So instead, I figure that it might make a lot of sense for the strikers/rebels/whatever holding the proverbial clogs over the very expensive machinery to demand that their habitats get recognized as a member state of an existing federal structure with the attendant rights and obligations- and since they are hopelessly multinational, they can propose this to everyone worth joining. Heck, as a negotiating tactic, this has merits, because.. well, while taking over what would amount to a "special economic zone" gone very awry would entail a lot of hassle, it would also entail economic upsides.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)
Colony independence is not a part of the setting. They don't even have colonies yet.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
Moving humans around in space is really expensive compared to moving robots around. Without even considering wages. All those gasses, chemicals, recycling, food production, etc.
This means it's going to take a great deal of infrastructure to build space industry facilities / communities large enough to justify a human labor force doing physically dangerous work in space. By the time that infrastructure is built, there will likely be government entities controlling things.
The dystopian-prison-colony-in-the-asteroid-belt idea isn't impossible, but I don't think it's very likely either.
u/Izeinwinter [+1] (a day later)
Well, I was not aiming for maximum likelihood in all respects - that would most likely be "Lots of telepresence". I was trying to set up conflict. That said, this setting does need a cheap way to supply the off-earth presence. Either we are talking an actual space elevator, or someone invented a very cheap way to send up consumables. Railgun->Capture by rotating tether dipping into upper atmosphere or something similar. People cant go up and down that way, but that night be a desirable problem from a story standpoint.