The more I read...
about this issue, (e.g. this, from yesterday's Times), the more I begin to wonder if maybe I should jump directly to getting involved in some sort of Noah's Ark type of project, although so far this sort of project only seems to exist in the form of thought experiments.
But, seriously. I'd feel slightly (very slightly) less bad about the possibility of a collapse of civilisation if I knew that serious efforts were being made to preserve certain things. Well, there's Norway's seed ark, which is a start, I suppose, and hopefully national libraries and other crucial repositories of our history and knowledge are making efforts to preserve a lot of stuff even in the event of various sorts of serious disruption. Yet, having worked at the German National Library, I'm actually not sure I'd be willing to bet on much of that surviving for very long if things really were to go thoroughly pear-shaped. And I'm afraid that, generally speaking, we are relying far too much on forms of storage (and retrieval!) that take the existence of a high technology infrastructure for granted.
E.g., I'm not entirely sure if the German National Library even has a non-digital catalog anymore... so what's a hypothetical survivor of a hypothetical collapse to do, in, say, the year 2150, when looking for specific sorts of information among all those millions of books? (That's assuming, of course, that the books even survive that long...)
Of course, ideally we should do both: we should do everything we can to mitigate (3 degrees may mean collapse just as 7 degrees do, but there'll still be a vast difference between the kinds of lives possible after societal collapse in a 3 degree world versus a 7 degree world - not to mention a difference in the respective death tolls), and we should establish refuges as well as 'arks' for knowledge and other resources that could eventually be used to 'restart' civilisation if the worst really happens. Plan B, if you will.
But, seriously. I'd feel slightly (very slightly) less bad about the possibility of a collapse of civilisation if I knew that serious efforts were being made to preserve certain things. Well, there's Norway's seed ark, which is a start, I suppose, and hopefully national libraries and other crucial repositories of our history and knowledge are making efforts to preserve a lot of stuff even in the event of various sorts of serious disruption. Yet, having worked at the German National Library, I'm actually not sure I'd be willing to bet on much of that surviving for very long if things really were to go thoroughly pear-shaped. And I'm afraid that, generally speaking, we are relying far too much on forms of storage (and retrieval!) that take the existence of a high technology infrastructure for granted.
E.g., I'm not entirely sure if the German National Library even has a non-digital catalog anymore... so what's a hypothetical survivor of a hypothetical collapse to do, in, say, the year 2150, when looking for specific sorts of information among all those millions of books? (That's assuming, of course, that the books even survive that long...)
Of course, ideally we should do both: we should do everything we can to mitigate (3 degrees may mean collapse just as 7 degrees do, but there'll still be a vast difference between the kinds of lives possible after societal collapse in a 3 degree world versus a 7 degree world - not to mention a difference in the respective death tolls), and we should establish refuges as well as 'arks' for knowledge and other resources that could eventually be used to 'restart' civilisation if the worst really happens. Plan B, if you will.