Hi Chris. Thanks for a bit of personal history. Always welcome. My wife is also an immigrant. She finds your comments on US immigration a bit puzzling, as do I. Can I presume that your wife is a US citizen since your children are?
Aye, my wife is a US citizen. Surprised this piece is puzzling! I thought it to be fairly straightforward... However, the riffing around the 'paradox of democracy' may be confusing to folks leaning towards the blue team, especially if they still remember when the blue team was the party that embraced different perspectives (i.e. in the late 20th century). This might make it harder to recognise the enforcement of unitary ideologies that has dominated the blue team since the Obama administration, especially via social media censorship. Without this perspective I imagine this piece could be quite the head-scratcher!
Like any species, we humans seek to control needed resources for life, but for humans that list of items has expanded as has the population to where the available resources are under considerable stress to achieve a tolerable standard of living. Meanwhile current climate change has reduced the habitable zones available for humans. This leads to Rope Ladder societies opposed to further immigration.
Everyone in North America is or was descended from immigrants, the first humans now thought to have arrived 30,000 years ago.
All immigrant populations have had to fight for their place in the sun and often pull up the rope ladder of development.
A good historical example is Syracuse, located on the island of Sicily which was founded by Greek colonists from Corinth in 734 BC. By 5 BC they were at war with with the Greeks.
Hopefully renewable energy generation couple with storage and distributed by advances in transmission and power electronics and eventually buttressed by nuclear fusion will create a new basis for more acceptance of immigration.
Thanks for your commentary here, Bob! Much appreciated.
Personally, I'm not yet convinced that the current changes in climate have significantly altered the habitable zones, although this is a popularly invoked claim. Thus far, I have only seen this in 'projections' i.e. in computer models, which are at-best hypotheses in need of empirical verification. I have also yet to see such models make a single correct prediction, which makes me sceptical of their actual predictive power.
It's clear that there is a tipping point where too much carbon dioxide will be disastrous... but the rocks show significant shifts in atmospheric CO2 over geological time, far greater than we're talking about right now, which muddies the waters considerable. What's more, nobody has yet shown me a convincing way of calculating the relevant thresholds, even as an order of magnitude calculation (it may not even be plausible to do so).
I fear we are rushing into 'solutions' without adequate investigation into the problems. Or to put this more flippantly, the sky is always falling but it hasn't hit yet.😁 The aphoristic warning 'more haste, less speed' might well apply here in terms of practical solution planning. As with so many topics, less certainty coupled with good quality open conversations would definitely help us think more clearly in this regard.
If you know of any places on our planet where the habitable zones have actually contracted (or expanded) in the present day, please do share some links! As far as I can tell, the largest single factor regarding increases in global migration right now is armed conflict and the associated destruction of settlements, much of it driven by arms manufacturers in the US and Europe. I would like to see this side of the immigration question given as much attention as the climate.
More on these topics (prediction, energy) in the January reflections at Stranger Worlds, actually - so your personal predictive power is sound. 🙂
Wishing you and yours a wonderful Gregorian New Year!
I was not referring specifically to the human contribution to climate change which of course is setting in..
The band of arid/desert that now stretches' from Dakar to Bejing two thousand years ago used to be well watered fertile land and in Africa is spreading south.
Hi Chris. Thanks for a bit of personal history. Always welcome. My wife is also an immigrant. She finds your comments on US immigration a bit puzzling, as do I. Can I presume that your wife is a US citizen since your children are?
Aye, my wife is a US citizen. Surprised this piece is puzzling! I thought it to be fairly straightforward... However, the riffing around the 'paradox of democracy' may be confusing to folks leaning towards the blue team, especially if they still remember when the blue team was the party that embraced different perspectives (i.e. in the late 20th century). This might make it harder to recognise the enforcement of unitary ideologies that has dominated the blue team since the Obama administration, especially via social media censorship. Without this perspective I imagine this piece could be quite the head-scratcher!
Many thanks for commenting, Frank!
Chris.
Wishing our inhabitants of These Stranger Worlds Health in the New Year.
Estimated global population from 10,000BCE to 2100
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1006502/global-population-ten-thousand-bc-to-2050/
Like any species, we humans seek to control needed resources for life, but for humans that list of items has expanded as has the population to where the available resources are under considerable stress to achieve a tolerable standard of living. Meanwhile current climate change has reduced the habitable zones available for humans. This leads to Rope Ladder societies opposed to further immigration.
Everyone in North America is or was descended from immigrants, the first humans now thought to have arrived 30,000 years ago.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-22-earliest-americans-arrived-new-world-30000-years-ago
All immigrant populations have had to fight for their place in the sun and often pull up the rope ladder of development.
A good historical example is Syracuse, located on the island of Sicily which was founded by Greek colonists from Corinth in 734 BC. By 5 BC they were at war with with the Greeks.
Hopefully renewable energy generation couple with storage and distributed by advances in transmission and power electronics and eventually buttressed by nuclear fusion will create a new basis for more acceptance of immigration.
Thanks for your commentary here, Bob! Much appreciated.
Personally, I'm not yet convinced that the current changes in climate have significantly altered the habitable zones, although this is a popularly invoked claim. Thus far, I have only seen this in 'projections' i.e. in computer models, which are at-best hypotheses in need of empirical verification. I have also yet to see such models make a single correct prediction, which makes me sceptical of their actual predictive power.
It's clear that there is a tipping point where too much carbon dioxide will be disastrous... but the rocks show significant shifts in atmospheric CO2 over geological time, far greater than we're talking about right now, which muddies the waters considerable. What's more, nobody has yet shown me a convincing way of calculating the relevant thresholds, even as an order of magnitude calculation (it may not even be plausible to do so).
I fear we are rushing into 'solutions' without adequate investigation into the problems. Or to put this more flippantly, the sky is always falling but it hasn't hit yet.😁 The aphoristic warning 'more haste, less speed' might well apply here in terms of practical solution planning. As with so many topics, less certainty coupled with good quality open conversations would definitely help us think more clearly in this regard.
If you know of any places on our planet where the habitable zones have actually contracted (or expanded) in the present day, please do share some links! As far as I can tell, the largest single factor regarding increases in global migration right now is armed conflict and the associated destruction of settlements, much of it driven by arms manufacturers in the US and Europe. I would like to see this side of the immigration question given as much attention as the climate.
More on these topics (prediction, energy) in the January reflections at Stranger Worlds, actually - so your personal predictive power is sound. 🙂
Wishing you and yours a wonderful Gregorian New Year!
Chris.
Chris,
I was not referring specifically to the human contribution to climate change which of course is setting in..
The band of arid/desert that now stretches' from Dakar to Bejing two thousand years ago used to be well watered fertile land and in Africa is spreading south.
https://tinyurl.com/DesertBandMap
I think some of this is due to continental drift, variations in Earth's orbit and inclination, and denuding of vegetation.
Changes in the Atlantic current that warms northern Europe is still a major area of study
Thanks for this additional point and clarification - greatly appreciated!