This is Part V of the Specificity Sequence

Companion post: Examples of Examples

Most people agree that climate change is a big problem we should be solving, but couldn't tell you what specifically "solving climate change" means. By the end of this post, I promise you'll know what specifically "solving climate change" means... and also what it doesn't mean.

The Climate Crisis

The first step is knowing the key specific facts of the climate crisis. I admit I couldn't recite them accurately before writing this post. Here's a quick summary from Tomorrow and NASA (both great friendly explanations worth checking out):

Earth's average temperature has shot up by 1°C in the last 50 years.
The causal link from greenhouse gas emissions to Earth's rising temperature has been well established.
On a 1M-year timescale, Earth's temperature has been fluctuating plus or minus a few degrees tops, so this 1°C change is a big fluctuation.
We're predicting it to be as high as a 6°C warming by 2100, so it's actually a huge fluctuation.
The current rate of temperature rise is a whopping 20 times faster than the rate at which Earth's temperature historically fluctuates, so it's actually an oh, SHIT fluctuation.

Thiel's Definite vs. Indefinite Attitude

In Peter Thiel's smart and highly original book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, the chapter called "You Are Not A Lottery Ticket" centers around the concept of definite vs. indefinite attitudes:

Under the heading "Can You Control Your Future?" Thiel writes:

You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you'll give up on trying to master it.

Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what's the most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we're encouraged to start hoarding "extracurricular activities". In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come wha

...

bastnerd

bastnerd