Episode Description
In the late 1970’s, English chemist Dr. James Lovelock and American biologist Dr. Lynn Margulis published a research paper hypothesizing that living organisms – without intention or agency – could have a regulatory effect on their environment that helped ensure their continued habitability. While the Gaia hypothesis they originated has remained controversial for the last four decades, it has provided a provocative explanation for why the Earth remained more or less clement over its ~4 billion year history, even though the sun that warms it has grown about 30% brighter over that time span. Of course, there have been notable catastrophic exceptions to Earth’s habitable stability – in the form of cataclysmic Snowball Earth events that froze the entire planet at least twice in its first 3.5 billion years of existence.
In our latest episode, Probable Futures founder Spencer Glendon explores another application of the Gaia Hypothesis, as it applies to human civilizations. In a December 2023 newsletter, Mr. Glendon examines how for much of the last 12,000 years, humans have been agents in shaping the stable global climate from which we are a beneficiary, through the expansion of agriculture and its related deforestation. By releasing CO2 at rates that balanced the cooling effects of various planetary orbital shifts, humans helped avoid the planet plunging into another Ice Age. But, much like the Snowball Earth events of the Precambrian Era, the advent and acceleration of fossil fuel combustion then shifted people’s relationship with climate from stabilizing to potentially catastrophic. The difference between the ancient and modern examples is that now – with awareness of the problem – humans can impact their environment with intention and agency. Join us as we examine how past climate stability has shaped much of humanity’s world view, and how that might impact our approach in responding to climate change now.
Transcript
James Lawler: [00:00:00] Welcome to Climate Now, I am joined this week by Spencer Glendon. We have had the pleasure of welcoming Spencer several times, and he's graciously agreed to come back today to talk about his latest letter, which he published on December 21st. So we're speaking about it a few weeks after its publication date.
And the title of the letter, which we'll link to in our show notes, is “Solstice greetings: seeing the divine in a graph”. And Spencer, I want to say something about your writing style and the experience of reading what you write because I find it to be very unique and pleasurable and I want to try to convey what that is like for folks.
It's like, it's a delicious meal that you have to savor, right? And you enjoy how the flavors combine and relate to each other across kind of the whole of the piece.
It's a really kind of a unique experience, especially for people who are thinking [00:01:00] about climate change and sort of asking questions like “how are we going to get through this?” And sort of “how do we need to prepare ourselves for what's coming?”. And I think that your letters are really helpful in that regard.
Spencer Glendon: This is a letter that I thought about for a long time, thought about these ideas for a long time, not with the intention of sharing them, but over time they fit together better and better.
You know, we're all prone to bits of imagination that feel fun or, or even, in the moment, clarifying. And then after a while, they, they lose their vividness or they lose their sparkle. I stew over things for a long time. If there's something good there, then I'm going to stew over it. I'm trying to make sense of the world and this world is hard to make sense of, but sometimes there are frameworks or analogies or metaphors that actually really do clarify things.
And this is one that I came up with [00:02:00] on my own, on a lark, sort of, just as a- trying to figure out how to think about climate change and our relationship to it. And then it kept working in different contexts. It kept working over time. As I went from somebody who didn't think about this at all to somebody who thinks about it all the time and yet still finds it a process, yet still finds it- a way of searching.
James Lawler: Right. So let's just talk about the backdrop. So you set this up by first reminding readers of the period of climate stability in which humans developed human society and everything that we take for granted related to human society around us today.
And that this was sort of this very, very limited, you know, period of the last 10,000 years or so when we were able to do this. Tell us about the climate before that. So what was our world's climate history before those 10,000 years?
Spencer Glendon: So if we go back to the formation of this planet, the climate was wild and incredibly hot a lot of the [00:03:00] time and not prone to having life on it. And then I'll skip ahead billions of years to, let's pick it up- pick up the story 100 million years ago.
And so 100 million years ago, the, the world roughly looks similar from a distance. Probably from space it looks quite similar. The continents are a little bit different in their location, but, you know, it's like green and blue and clouds and, and so there's lots of plants, which, you know, were a pretty late addition.
I love the fact that sharks have been around longer than trees as a species on this planet, because there was more life underwater than above it for a long time. But a hundred million years ago, it was warm; it was too warm for human beings.
It was, and we have a nice record of this in every- in most children's education and imagination when they think about dinosaurs. Well, those are not mammals. What does that mean by they're not mammals? They don't generate heat. They like taking heat from the [00:04:00] outside. And so that's the evidence that it was hot. But then the planet cools and, starting about two and a half million years ago, it enters this pretty stable phase which has a wide range of temperatures- about five degrees centigrade each way. Actually a little more, six or seven degrees centigrade each way, and it ranges from mild, like the temperature we have sort of now, to extremely cold.
So 30 percent of the planet covered in ice and extremely cold. And so from 2.5 million years to 200,000 years ago, it goes back and forth with these oscillations and with no humans. But it's cold, so mammals start doing well. Because if you can generate your own heat, the atmosphere will gladly relieve you of it.
And so mammals do well, and lizards do poorly, essentially. And humans evolve from a combination of other species, and we are just small potatoes. We are- very few of us around. We're struggling to survive, [00:05:00] and the climate is continually moving. And what we know from archaeology is that those continually moving humans from 200,000 years, when the first Homo sapiens, like James and Spencer and everybody listening were born around 200,000 years ago.
They didn't form settlements. They kept moving. And we didn't really know why they kept moving until Paleo- time dug up all these ice cores and discovered, well, those early humans, the climate was unstable. So the species they lived with kept moving around. And so it was hard to be a human because the world was not on our terms.
It was cold. It was highly variable. It was rough. And so, not surprisingly, there weren't that many of us. And then, in about 10,000 BCE, in a mild part of this cycle, the regular part of this cycle reached a mild point where it stabilized for a little while.
And our ancestors said, “you know, we could stay here. The nice [00:06:00] places seem to keep being nice, so let's, let's build a toilet. Let's, let's make a hearth. Let's plant raspberries, or at least cultivate the raspberries that are here”. And so humans settled. And by that time, humans were in lots of different places on the planet. You're building structures, domesticating agriculture.
This is the beginning of what we call civilization. You start having specialization and capital because now you're saving. And that goes on for, well, millennia, a couple dozen of them. And humans over that whole time, keep enjoying that stable climate. The climate stays just like that.
There are two things about the stabilization of the climate that are pretty amazing. One is, it really is like, ridiculously stable. And then the second part about it is it literally is the exact perfect temperature for human beings. And so, everywhere on Earth stayed below what's known as a Wet Bulb temperature of basically 30 degrees [00:07:00] centigrade or, uh, whatever, 82 degrees Fahrenheit.
And so, it was stable, there was a lot of temperate land, and nowhere was too hot for the human body. And so that stuck with me. Like, okay, it's not just stable, it's like perfect for us. And then what I thought about that is, alright, I can tell a story where that sort of deterministic, that sort of probabilistic luck, just stochastically that happened.
But the other part of this, which is something I've written about before, is that what started to happen two or three thousand years ago, is humans started to make up mythologies. Now, we can say they were divine, that, you know, sort of chosen people came to Earth, or they were illuminated, but between Moses and Jesus and Muhammad and others who came along and the books that are written about them, those mythologies all have this idea that the Earth was created as stable.
Like Cain and Abel are born to Adam and Eve, and [00:08:00] immediately Cain is made a farmer. And Abel is made a shepherd. There's no wandering around. There's no climate instability.
James Lawler: Right. So these are like the monotheistic mythologies that you're referring to.
Spencer Glendon: Yep.
James Lawler: Cause there were previous mythologies.
Spencer Glendon: Exactly.
And so you, if you look at the previous mythologies, a lot of them had way less confidence that the earth was on our terms, way less confidence that it was given to us. Way less confidence that, or even the opposite, that we were destined to be special and above the other animals or the other species, right?
Even the ancient Greeks didn't really seem to think that the earth was made for us, right? We were just incidental in what the ancient Greek gods were interested in themselves. And so this idea though, that there were these religions that said, “nature is given to humans on these very favorable terms”. I found it interesting to think those religions didn't [00:09:00] appear until the climate had been stable for 7,000 years.
So it took a long time for people to say, “you know what, this just seems like it's given to us. This just seemed like this is the deal and it's a good deal”. And so if you look at the- at those documents, or if you look at those mythologies, or even look at the art that comes from them, nature plays a very trivial role.
Nature's role is to be maybe sacrificed, maybe stewarded in some way, but it is not a source of narrative power. It is not- certainly not other living things, they don't do very much. And the idea that we are among them, or on their equal, or really should do more than just tend to them as food and agriculture is pretty absent.
And so I thought it's very interesting that you'd have these views, these came to be in my mind: stable climate religions. They are religions that, that said, well, given that it's all like [00:10:00] this, these are all placed, all these species are placed here by the divinity for us, same thing too.
James Lawler: Yeah. If you look at the garden of Eden or, or any of these sort of ways in which the natural world intersects with Judeo-Christian mythology, nature and its abundance are kind of one example of God's gifts to us, right?
And that is sort of one of the great reasons why, you know, we should, we should understand us to be special. Like this has been given to us. Ergo, we must be, right?
Spencer Glendon: That's right. And I've watched the difficulty other people have of bringing into their awareness this notion that they are actually responsible for the world as opposed to the world being given to them or made for them. The idea that actually we are responsible for it is a difficult one for people to internalize if what they were told through their own mythology was it was actually given to us.[00:11:00]
So it's ours to do what we want with, it's ours- there may be some stewardship responsibilities- but it is on our terms. And so I started wondering about, well, how could I present to people the notion that we'd really been very, very fortunate. And that that fortune, that good fortune of that climate stability, that ideal climate, was one that we should probably work hard to maintain.
And what this led to, which is what you see in the last part of the letter, is this question of, well, are there ingredients in these religions, in these mythologies that could steer us towards stewardship could steer us towards finding ways to expand our scope of caring, expand our sense of responsibility.
And to do that, I find the need and I also find it sort of useful to show [00:12:00] philosophies that I think are bad ones, are dangerous ones, ones that really have very little hope of steering us in a good direction. And that's why I start talking about the techno-optimism and crypto and its belief in infinity.
James Lawler: Yeah, so let's talk about that for a second. So, one of my favorite parts of the letter is when you quote Sam Altman. I just love this quote. So OpenAI CEO, he was interviewed by the New York Times and he said- just about the, the dangers of artificial intelligence- and his quote was, "yeah”, uh, “I actually don't think we're all going to go extinct. I think it's going to be great. I think we're heading toward the best world ever".
So why are they part of this narrative, Spencer? Why do you go to the techno-optimists? How does that relate to climate and what we're, what we're facing?
Spencer Glendon: Because the premise of that [00:13:00] group of thinkers- and they're broadly, I would say, the most modern set of beliefs- is that the answer to every problem is more power for humans, that if humans just had even better tools, we would solve all the problems, whatever the problems are.
And there, what I like about that quote, and I discuss it in the letter, is that it's so non-specific. Like, what is the best world? Best in what way? Best for whom? It's the best world ever, really? Ever, ever? And where that comes from, his explicit premise, is that it's going to get better because we're going to have even more control, even more power, even more tools to shape the world in the ways we want.
And what I find interesting about that is that I'd be very surprised if Sam Altman really took seriously the idea that climate stability created [00:14:00] the even possibility of OpenAI. And so that's the thing that I find most interesting about that. I also cited Sam Bankman-Fried for similar reasons, which is that there's a kind of hubris to their explicit moral philosophy of, like, more people with more power is more good.
And that's pretty counter to the, the religions that even themselves might have taken the physical world for granted but said there are ways to live with humility and respect and and deference and perspective that are often about not having too much power, not abusing power, not taking other people for granted.
And so I, I think of the, the Sams- Bankman-Fried and Altman- as being [00:15:00] representatives of the more power, more people, more everything is an unambiguous good when what we could really use is fewer emissions, more stability, and to get that it's quite clear we actually need other species to thrive. We need other parts of life to do well.
James Lawler: Yeah, maybe we could go to James Hansen for a second and to what he attributes this period of climate stability in which human civilization developed and we developed our technologies and we developed our philosophies and we were able to, you know, grow as a civilization and attain the kind of power that we have today over so much of the world.
Spencer Glendon: Well, the way to think about this is that when the world was on humans' terms in particular, once it settled, humans began reshaping the earth pretty quickly. And so if you look at what happened, as far as we can tell from historical [00:16:00] records, from archeological, from anthropological, but also from, you know, sort of um, sediment and other things in Asia, in North America, in Europe, quite quickly, humans started burning down forests and favoring grasslands where they could hunt and they could see better. And they were more. more dominant.
And so over this time, from 10,000 BCE up till the- through the Middle Ages, the forest cover of the world went down. And as the forest cover of the world went down, it meant that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was going up because forests have much more carbon in them than the grasslands that they were replaced by, or than the farms that they were replaced by.
And so actually humans were gradually adding to the atmosphere, a layer upon layer upon layer of greenhouse effect. The northern hemisphere of the earth got a lot of [00:17:00] land on it. And the Southern Hemisphere has very little land on it, which means that actually the Southern Hemisphere is much darker, color wise than the Northern Hemisphere, which means that it absorbs more light and energy than the Northern Hemisphere does.
And so when the Northern Hemisphere is even slightly favored towards the sun, the Earth actually absorbs less energy than when the Southern Hemisphere is favored towards the Sun. And that's what caused these periods of glaciation expanding and then going the other way- was the Earth's tilt and orbit and wobble shifted so that it was a little more south prone or a little more north prone.
And those took place over roughly 100,000 years at a time. So I was born in 1969. I actually remember when the Time Magazine headline came out that the Earth was heading towards global cooling. And the reason was that scientists had [00:18:00] figured out this oscillation, and figured out that actually the Northern Hemisphere was now favored towards the Sun, if you will.
And so they discovered in the seventies, oh my goodness, we're at a period where another ice age is extremely likely due to these long-term forces. And then Hansen comes along just five or six years later and says, actually, that's not what's going to happen. That's what would happen if we weren't putting carbon in the atmosphere.
James Lawler: Right.
Spencer Glendon: So we actually haven't talked about the premise of the letter explicitly, which is that I postulate, what if there was a deity that started the, the universe with a bang and then just watched what happened. Eventually, these interesting, this interesting life form, still the deity is just watching, passive.
And then these humans get kind of interesting. They do some cool things and the deity says, “well, let's make conditions perfect for these humans and see what they do”. And it turns out, under perfect conditions, we do all kinds of things. And I think, [00:19:00] well, what would the deity do? As humans started to really run roughshod over the world, like, we really start to be the dominant species.
Well, maybe the, the deity would give them a test. And the test would be, “I will make climate science powerful enough. I will help, I will leave the clues”. Like, it's just so, it's obvious who did it. It's just the CO2. All you need to do is not a complex story. There is no cabal. There is no big conspiracy theory.
It's just one variable. You just need to control yourself in one way- it’s just stop burning so much stuff. And if you do that, you can keep having this ideal climate for as long as you want. And so the deity sets- lets humans go and go, but then leaves these clues that humans eventually find themselves.
That's what I like particularly about it. And then can we, having discovered that, we could mess this up or we could [00:20:00] maintain it. Can we restrain ourselves? Can we coordinate? Can we work together? Can we be sort of the best of ourselves to maintain it?
And I view Hansen this way as a good sort of partner in this storytelling because he's the one who most visibly raised the alarm and said, “things are still fine, but in order to keep them nice, we're going to have to take action”. And he did that more than 40 years ago. And now 40 years later, he's still around and pushing us and saying, “well, actually, you know, we didn't do anything much for those 40 some years. And now the terms are even harder. The situation is tougher. We actually need to ask more of each other. Now we need to take dramatic action”.
There is more asked of us today than would have been asked 40 years ago to keep this under control. And so the challenge goes up every year to be a sort of a better and better person or a better and better [00:21:00] civilization, a better and better, a more thoughtful, a more caring, a more planning, a caring more about children and the future, future of the species.
There needs to be more explicit attention.
James Lawler: Mhm.
Spencer Glendon: Whereas before, who knows? Maybe a small hidden carbon tax would have been enough way back when.
James Lawler: So what are the questions that our current moral frameworks and maybe those that have come before fail to adequately answer or account for that we should be asking?
Spencer Glendon: So the one I think about, what I think is practically the hardest but conceptually the easiest is: how do we value both members of our own families and faiths and nearby communities and people who are far away?
So how do I care about my wife, my parents, my sister, my neighbors, and people in Bangladesh? Because if I look at the old religions, they don't really have a place for them, for people you'll never meet. You'll never see people so far [00:22:00] away. How do we value them and value communities?
So I see in the, for example, in effective altruist communities, a lot of valuing of abstract numbers of people elsewhere. But how do we have both community, which we need to do all kinds of things, and values for people far away? The second is: how do we treat our relationships to place when we know there will be hundreds of millions of immigrants?
When people will be moving in large quantities is where I live, my home. Should I welcome everyone who comes? How do we have a framework for valuing immigrants, refugees in a way that we haven't been asked to before?
James Lawler: This is such a hard one, right, Spencer? I mean, once climate stabilized, we were able to have homes, like permanent homes. And so, that, that's, it's one of the most foundational pieces of our mythologies, of our cultures, is the home.
Everything starts with the home. So this [00:23:00] idea that we have to think about, or we may need to think about home in a, just a very different way, is incredibly, you know, it's, it's highly unsettling, right? As all these questions are.
Spencer Glendon: And my point is to bring them up and not say that I have answers, but that these questions will be posed of us, are already being posed of us by changing climate.
Changing climate is forcing us to either address these questions or ignore them, but they are being posed. So the third would be: how do we include other living things in our values? Our- many of our values are very human-centric, and if we only value living things for their instrumental nature, how they benefit us, two things are likely to be true.
One is we'll never see them probably very accurately, but two is we'll probably be wrong because we don't know exactly how these links between species work. And I [00:24:00] like Catherine Hayhoe's expression of this, which I read recently, which was that climate change threatens civilization, extinction of other species threatens human survivability.
Like, we need other species in order to be alive, regardless of how much AI we have. So how do we include other living things explicitly in our values? The fourth question is: how do we make our communities resilient and prepared for hard times while also planning for good times?
There is a tenor, and you navigate this beautifully in your work, and, and I know work hard to do so, and I'm trying to do the same, which says the climate crisis is bigger than most people think, and it's not hopeless. In fact, beyond not being hopeless, there are things to look forward to. We should make things to look forward to.
But that balance is not easy, it's not obvious. It is easy to either be an optimist or a pessimist as opposed to being hopeful and worried. And [00:25:00] so that's a balance. Then the fourth is: should we believe that a small number of people, including me, have the right to eat whatever we desire, buy anything we want, and go wherever we choose because we can afford it?
And this gets to two things. One is we know that the distortion of the climate and everything else is predominantly being done either directly by or in service of a small percentage of people on the earth who have an outsized consumption of natural resources, of everything.
I'm aware that, that audience is reading my letters and asking this question. Do you have a right to go on a long plane flight? Do you have a right to do whatever you want because you can afford it? “Is it really a right or is it a kind of accidental privilege that maybe does carry quite a lot of moral weight?” is a question that a lot of people are reluctant to answer.
But I think the [00:26:00] answers- and I bring it up partly because the answers in the monotheistic scriptures are very clear: the chance of going to heaven for the rich man in the Bible is very, very low. And it's very explicit, and so part of the reason to bring that in is that rich people have an outsized influence. And the other is that the most prominent religious views in the world say that that's immoral.
And so trying to leverage a set of beliefs that would actually restrain emissions and other forms of abuse to the land already has precedent. And then the last is more direct. How do we emphasize the values of restraint, humility, and charity? How do we valorize that as opposed to penalize it or make it seem austere or unmanly or whatever the potential negative associations are?
And what I say after this is [00:27:00] the above questions often humble me with their enormity, but when I go through them slowly, deliberately, I can envision a very good future, a future in which humans have lived up to the challenge we all face and have discovered truly better ways of living, being, and thinking.
We can't make the climate go back to that perfect climate, but we could live a lot better in the changed world. We just need an orientation to want to do that and values and a story that get us there.
And the idea that the solutions, even just in mitigation, let alone in resilience, adaptation, migration, charity, all those things, but even the most fundamental of just, like, clean electrons requires us to be better people in relationship to one another and have a shared story.
It gave me the confidence to write a letter about this out into the ether in the hopes that you and others would find something of value in it. [00:28:00]
James Lawler: Well, I really enjoyed it. I'm sure that others have been enjoying it as well, but Spencer thank you so much for spending the time with us today. It's been great as always
Spencer Glendon: On my side as always as well. It's a treat to travel this road with you James.
James Lawler: Thanks
That's all for this episode of Climate Now. Thank you for joining us. For a full transcript and resources on today's episode, please go to our website, climatenow.com and if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email us at contact@climatenow.com. We love to hear from our listeners.
We hope you'll join us for our next conversation. Thank you.
Living outside our comfort zone