Little Ice Age
Article
Little Ice Age is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 30, 2021 and March 16, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “‘Little Ice Age’ notwithstanding”; ""change on a global scale hasn’t happened before to this degree (” Little Ice Age ” notwithstanding) in modern history""; “Was the Little Ice Age unjust?“. It most often appears alongside California, 1984, AI.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: April 30, 2021
- Last seen: March 16, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- California (2 shared issues)
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- 1984 (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- AI research (1 shared issues)
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- Air (1 shared issues)
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- Air (1 shared issues)
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- Alice Waters (1 shared issues)
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- Amartya Sen (1 shared issues)
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- American (1 shared issues)
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- American wheat (1 shared issues)
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- America’s Next Top Model (1 shared issues)
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- ancient Greek rhetorical device (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Finally, in "Air," we get to the most (in my view, the only) ambivalent section of the book. First, unlike in the other "Elements" chapters, in "Air" the carrying capacity substance in question – excess atmospheric greenhouse gases – is a problem that the Wizards themselves created, partially to solve the problems in the other three chapters. Second, humanity has gone through a lot of local carrying capacity scares around food, water, and energy, and we’ve always managed to scrap our way through it, but climate change on a global scale hasn’t happened before to this degree ("Little Ice Age" notwithstanding) in modern history, so it’s easier to imagine it as that final straw that shows carrying capacity to be ominously real after all. Third, no one wants Snowpiercer world, where we employ some untested tool of Wizardry to solve a novel problem and end up on a literal doom train. At the time when Mann was writing The Wizard and the Prophet, it was still unclear whether the projected global warming figures would fall into the merely very bad range over the next century, or the X-risk-inducing range that would plunge us into a Vogt-style apocalypse. Three years and countless Integrated Assessment Models later, and it seems like it’s still unclear, except that "‘[w]e’ve ruled out ‘We’ll be fine,’ and we don’t think ‘doom’ is very likely.’" I and other Wizard-leaning people are hopeful that the combination of new energy efficient technologies and carbon capture and sequestration schemes will minimize the damage, but I recognize that it was probably the Prophets yelling at us for 50+ years that accelerated interest in these solutions, and they may not work quickly enough to avoid substantial lost lives and suffering.
What is “climate justice”? Was the Little Ice Age unjust? What if it killed millions? Is it unjust for Mali to have a less pleasant climate than California? What if I said that there’s a really high correlation between temperature and GDP, and Mali’s awful climate is a big part of why it’s so poor? Climate justice couldn’t care less about any of this. Why not? Hard to say. Maybe because there’s no violation and no villain.