A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste Away – Search (bing.com)
“A mind that is anxious about the future and unhappy before misfortune
even arrives is a disaster,” wrote the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
It will never be at rest, and while overwhelmed with worry, it will “lose the present
things that it could enjoy.”
A pivotal political figure in first-century Rome, Seneca indeed had much to worry about, along with wealth and prominence to enjoy. He earned the distinction of offending three emperors: Caligula nearly ordered his death. Claudius banished him. And Nero, who once was his pupil, ultimately commanded him to commit suicide.
For those unable to take Seneca’s advice to abandon anxiety, there’s plenty to fret
about in our time — from immediate concerns like the Ukraine war, labor strikes in various industries and a possible US government shutdown to the existential threats
of climate change to natural disasters and nuclear weapons.
Yes, we have more modern voices advising us — how can we forget Bobby McFerrin’s musing in his 1988 hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” – Bing video that “In every life we have some trouble, but when you worry, you make it double”? Yet there’s something reassuring about a voice that resonates across a span of 2,000 years, of someone who contended with strife in a world utterly remote from and in some ways strikingly familiar to our own.
It turns out that quite a few people are thinking about the world of ancient Rome.
As historian David M. Perry pointed out, “a viral trend has swept through TikTok
in which women asked their husbands and boyfriends how often they thought about
the Roman Empire.
A surprising number claimed to think about the ancient empire as often as ‘every day’
or least every week or two. It became a meme (are you even in a relationship if she hasn’t asked you about the Roman Empire?), spread to other social media sites, then received serious news coverage in multiple outlets.
Now it seems like it’s everywhere.”
In the Financial Times, Jo Ellison also explained that, judging by some TikTok posts,
“men are in awe of all the Romans achieved. They marvel at their absolute dominion, their mastery of every strand of civilisation — and then how that power suddenly slipped away.
Some see metaphorical comparisons: are we poised at the end of another epoch?
Others think about the Stoics.
Who knew Marcus Aurelius would be such an influencer?
The millions of men who subscribe to apps daily offering his wisdom, that’s who.”
Podcasts, books, movies have all fed the appetite, David Perry noted. “There’s just a lot
(in a fairly narrow band) of Greek and Roman history to easily consume. What’s more, a small selection of surviving primary sources for the late Roman Republic and early empire are fun to read, lurid in sex and violence and available in cheap paperback translations.
Yet while “people love history,” Perry lamented:
“the studying and teaching of history at the university level is slowly vanishing”
as students are told that college is all about preparing for a career. A case in point is West Virginia University, which is sharply cutting programs and faculty in languages and other fields.
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As Paula M. Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, wrote,
“The cuts being made to the liberal arts at WVU will dramatically narrow educational opportunities not just for West Virginia students who want to major in humanities fields but also for STEM and business students.
All students’ job prospects and lives are enriched by language study, writing instruction and the research and analytical skills taught in beginning and advanced literature and culture courses.”
“The climate is always changing!” So goes a popular refrain from climate deniers who continue to claim that there’s nothing special about this particular moment. There is
no climate crisis, they say, because the Earth has survived dramatic warming before.
Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy recently exemplified misconceptions about our planet’s climate past. When he asserted that “carbon dioxide as a percentage of the atmosphere is still at a relatively low level throughout human history,” he didn’t just make a false statement (carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest they’ve been in at least 4 million years). He also showed fundamentally wrong thinking around the climate crisis.
What threatens us today isn’t the particular concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the precise temperature of the planet, alarming as those two metrics are. Instead, it’s the unprecedented rate at which we are increasing carbon pollution through fossil fuel burning, and the resulting rate at which we are heating the planet.
Consider the warming event that paleoclimatologists point to as the best natural comparison for the rapid greenhouse-driven trend we’re seeing now.
This Will Be My Most Disliked Video On YouTube | Climate Change – YouTube
What caused the Extinction of Dinosaurs – Bing video
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum happened 56 million years ago, roughly 10 million years after the demise of the dinosaurs, which itself was caused by climate change (a massive asteroid impact event led to a global dust storm and, in turn, rapid cooling). The PETM warming resulted from an unusually large and rapid injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions in Iceland.
Global temperatures increased by approximately 10 degrees Fahrenheit in as little as 10,000 years, rising from an already steamy baseline of 80 degrees Fahrenheit possibly up to a sauna-like 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The impact event and Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum were, ironically, fortuitous for humans: They paved the way for our ancestors.
There are several theories for the cause of the extinction of dinosaurs 12345.
These include Volcanism and mountain-building cycles altered the habitat and changed the climate 1. One or more asteroids hit Earth, resulting in immense dust clouds that blocked sunlight for several years 13. Disease, Heat waves & resulting sterility and freezing cold spells 2.
The extinction of the dinosaurs (except the ancestors of birds) created a new niche for early mammals, and the stifling conditions of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum selected for small, arboreal mammals, including the oldest primate identified clearly by fossil materials, a primitive lemur-like creature named Dryomomys. Without either of these two events, our species likely wouldn’t have arrived at this moment — in contrast
to the current warming, which plenty of evidence shows is a threat to our existence.
Extinctions followed another warming period in our more recent past,
when the last ice age ended about 18,000 years ago.
Driven by Earth’s changing orbit relative to the sun and boosted by a heightened greenhouse effect as warming oceans gave up their carbon dioxide in the same way an open bottle of warm soda loses carbonation, the planet warmed by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the subsequent 8,000 years.
That rate of warming — which, again, was about 10 times slower than the warming
today — was rapid enough to wipe out entire species. Gone were the magnificent woolly mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths and saber-toothed cats that had roamed the plains of North America. A combination of climate change and overhunting by paleo-Americans did them in. A few of them got stuck in tar pits and are preserved — some at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.
Boomer explains why America is experiencing labor issues and hits the nail on the head.
In the fall of 2017, I participated in a climate change forum at the tar pits museum, which is at the center of those ancient pools of asphalt — the viscous, evaporated remains of crude oil that seeped to the surface from deep below.
I couldn’t help but see further irony there:
Crude oil from beneath Earth’s surface threatens us today because we’re ensnared
by it politically rather than physically. Paleo-humans survived the end of the ice age
because of the resilience afforded by our big brains, which gave us the behavioral
plasticity to adapt to the changing climate.
But that same intelligence has gotten us into trouble today.
We’ve used it to create a global energy system dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. The great Carl Sagan once commented on the absurdity of our plight: “Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.”
Our societal infrastructure — upon which more than 8 billion people now depend — was built around a global climate that was stable for thousands of years. The viability of that infrastructure depends on the climate remaining close to what it was, or at least changing slowly enough that the rates of environmental change don’t exceed our adaptive capacity as a species and a civilization. What finished off the dinosaurs and the mastodons was a climate that shifted too rapidly away from what they were adapted to, in the first case cooling and the other case warming. That’s our challenge today.
Can our big brains save us this time?
They can if we make proper use of them and learn the lessons offered by Earth’s past. Paleoclimate data characterizing past episodes of natural climate change, such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and peak of the last ice age, allow us to test the models that we use to project future warming.
Our models pass these tests, reproducing the paleodata from historical periods when driven by the estimated changes in greenhouse gases and sunlight during those periods.
The paleodata, in turn, helps us refine the models.
The end result is that we can trust these models to peer into our climate future.
They tell us that we can avoid a catastrophic trajectory for our global climate if we reduce carbon emissions substantially over the next decade. So this fragile moment in which we find ourselves is in fact a critical juncture.
As Sagan said: “We are at a crossroads in human history.
The choice between peril and promise is ultimately still ours.
Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising.”
Michael E. Mann is presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.” | This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
