Cherry Picking of Future Realities

(Source: 11trees)

A week or so ago (Sunday, January 19th), a day before President Trump’s inauguration, I woke up, ate my breakfast, opened my daily paper, and was immediately exposed to major changes in ongoing global events:

  • the inauguration
  • the start of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, with the release of three young hostages who were captured on October 7, 2023
  • the shutting down of TikTok, followed by its almost immediate return
  • the prediction of a large snow storm (around 5”) where I live (NYC), which resulted in a much lower level (1 – 2”)
  • the approach of International Holocaust Remembrance Day (yesterday, Monday, January 27th)

Save for the fluctuations in the snow and TikTok, which I do not use, I have a direct or indirect stake in all of these events, and I care very much about the reality that they represent. Every aspect of the realities that I mentioned is complex and is being addressed by many. But one can take a bird’s eye view and address the connections in terms of “good for us” or “bad for us.” Two articles in the opinion section of the NYT are good examples of this approach.

Cherry picking was addressed before on this blog (see September 17, 2019, and January 19, 2022); however, these blogs were much narrower in scope. This time, a week after the inauguration, the concept is much more consequential. Cherry picking can often be beneficial, especially when it is followed by actions that amplify the “good” parts and try to decrease the “bad” parts. One example of “good” would be negative energy pricing models. They are good for energy consumers but not so good for energy producers, so they cannot last. They amplify the need to improve the grid in a way that will facilitate the transportation of excess energy to places where the high energy demand makes it too expensive. An example of the “bad” part would be President Trump’s call to “drill baby, drill” on the same day that he was traveling to California to see the impacts of the deadly fires in LA and a day after he traveled to North Carolina to inspect the recent flood there. Both trips took place with the full knowledge that climate change strongly amplified the impacts of the two events. There is also no scientific debate that the fossil fuels he wants to drill for are responsible for human-caused climate change.

Below are my takes on the NYT opinion pieces representative of the “good” and “bad” that I was exposed to that Sunday:

The “bad” for us – Ezra Klein:

Now Is the Time of Monsters

Donald Trump is returning, artificial intelligence is maturing, the planet is warming, and the global fertility rate is collapsing.

To look at any of these stories in isolation is to miss what they collectively represent: the unsteady, unpredictable emergence of a different world. Much that we took for granted over the last 50 years — from the climate to birthrates to political institutions — is breaking down; movements and technologies that seek to upend the next 50 years are breaking through.

If somebody is referring to reality in terms of “monsters,” there shouldn’t be any doubt about his opinion about the reality that he is describing.

I wrote about elements of three of his “monsters” last summer (August 20, 2024) in my post “The Olympics in Terms of Global Trends”:

The 5 trends include computer access, electricity access, fertility, carbon emissions, and estimated number of nuclear warheads. All five trends are anthropogenic (generated by us humans). All five have a major impact on our lives and all of them started in my lifetime. Each trend has a set of complex impacts, with both destructive and positive potential. The impact they have on our lives is projected to increase.

As we can see, there are some differences between Klein’s “monsters” and my trends. Klein also misses the biggest monster on my list: the threat of nuclear war. This threat has recently been voiced by Russia more often than ever. Maps of US vulnerabilities to such attacks have also been shown regularly. Another trend on my list that is missing from Klein’s list is that of accelerated global electrification, without which the AI “monster” mentioned by Klein could not have come about. In my list of the trends that are mentioned by Klein, AI is just an important consequence of global digitization, whose benefits and harms are much more nuanced and balanced than just AI.

The “good” for us opinion in the NYT came with an apology that the author, Nicholas Kristof, cannot currently see much good in his surrounding reality. This is quoted below:

Even This Year Is the Best Time Ever to Be Alive

Around the beginning of each year, I customarily write a column about how we’ve just had the “best year ever” in the long history of humanity.

This annual eruption of exuberance outrages some readers who see it as disrespectful of all the tragedies around us. Others welcome it as a reminder that even in our messed-up world, many trends are still going right.

So this year I heard from readers asking: Where’s your “best year ever” column?

To be honest, I didn’t have the heart to write it. I was dispirited by the suffering of children in Gaza, by the atrocities and famine in Sudan, by the wildfires in Los Angeles and what they portend and by a December trip to Madagascar, where I saw toddlers starving because of a drought probably exacerbated by climate change. And then a felon I consider unstable and a threat to democracy is about to move into the White House.

Yet, just as some readers wanted reassurance, so did I. Precisely because I felt blue, I wanted to read a column putting grim news in perspective. It has become apparent that the only way I am going to read such a column is if I write it first — so here goes.

However, Kristof does manage to find some positives from last year. He lists a few things, of which I am quoting 4:

        • And 2024 appears to have been the year in which the smallest percentage of children died since the dawn of humanity.
        • Likewise, consider extreme poverty, defined as having less than $2.15 per day, adjusted for inflation. Historically, most human beings lived in extreme poverty, but the share has been plummeting— and in 2024 reached a new low of about 8.5 percent of the world’s people.
        • Now we’re approaching 90 percent literacy worldwide, and the number of literate people is rising by more than 12 million each year. Every three seconds, another person becomes literate.
        • Scientists have newly developed the first antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia in decades, and a vaccine against a form of breast cancer may enter Phase 2 trials this year. And with semaglutide medications, Americans are now becoming thinner, on average, each year rather than fatter, with far-reaching health consequences.

The title of Kristof’s piece needs to be directly compared with the aspiration of our newly re-elected president, who attracted many of us with the promise to “Make America Great Again”  (MAGA). There is no exact reference for the time we would be returning to “again.”

Trump has used President William McKinley’s administration (1897-1901) as a marker  in some examples and even suggested that the tallest mountain in the US (Alaska), whose name reverted to its local Denali in 1975, should again bear McKinley’s name.

As it happens, Netflix is now showing “American Primeval”:

Western television miniseries created and written by Mark L. Smith and directed by Peter Berg. Starring Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin, the series is set in 1857 during the Utah War.

The show has become very popular. However, I don’t think that many Americans would be delighted to go back to the way of life of the mid-19th century shown in the series.

About climatechangefork

Micha Tomkiewicz, Ph.D., is a professor of physics in the Department of Physics, Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. He is also a professor of physics and chemistry in the School for Graduate Studies of the City University of New York. In addition, he is the founding-director of the Environmental Studies Program at Brooklyn College as well as director of the Electrochemistry Institute at that same institution.
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