Climate change and the (near total) inflexibility of global culture

Yesterday the New York Times published a (very dark) op-ed by Bill Gail that speaks very clearly to many of themes discussed on this blog. He makes the point that the "accumulated wisdom" of humanity (which I would call ... wait for it ... "culture") will soon become outdated, as weather patterns, ocean currents, the timing of seasonal events, changes in precipitation, extreme weather, and many other changes will begin to swamp our ability to absorb them in a tidy fashion.

The idea that we simply won't be able to manage what's coming will become a more common theme as time goes by. In many parts of the world, we will being to transition from a "cultural selection" regime (where cultural solutions can be developed faster than cultural problems arise) to a "natural selection" regime (where cultural solutions can't be developed fast enough). The latter is a bloody, horrible affair that we should be working very hard to avoid. Unfortunately, we are already beginning to see the signs of it. The Syrian/Iraqi refugee crisis has already strained the goodwill of neighboring countries in Europe and the Middle East to almost beyond the breaking point. Similar conflicts can be expected to arise elsewhere as political tensions, driven almost entirely by economic disenfranchisement of large sectors of the population, make living where you were born untenable.

The problem is that there is nowhere else to go. Every part of the world (whether economically well off or not) is occupied by people who already feel the economic noose tightening around their necks. If enforced birth-rate limitation policies (e.g., no more than 2 children per couple) are off the table, then there are only two ways out (in the short- and long term):

• Sustainably grow the global economy to accommodate the growing demand for resources (which is unlikely since we've already pulled the "globalization" trigger ... and globalization is unlikely to yield any further high-growth dividends)
• Uniformly loosen the economic noose for everyone by reducing income inequality (very hard, since the natural tendency of the wealthy in times of scarcity is to hoard wealth).

The problem is that neither of these solutions is any way reflected to how we live now. As Bill Gail would say, they are totally at odds with humanity's "accumulated wisdom." The first asks us to radically change how we all live, and the second asks the wealthy to think about how their actions (and the rigged financial system that supports them) can be sustained when global demand for the goods and services that keep them afloat plummets to dangerously low levels.

But an even more diabolical roadblock is that humanity's experiences and problems are not uniformly distributed. We will not all experience climate change in the same way, and we can expect that while many might be highly motivated to pursue aggressive policies to soften the blow of climate change, there will continue to see aggressive action as seriously hassling their vibe. Without a uniform perception of what is at stake, our "accumulated wisdom" will truly mean exactly squat.