No, we shouldn't return to the climate of the 18th century

e used to call it global warming, or the greenhouse effect. In the early 2000s, we collectively agreed to call it something new. We did this because it turned out we weren’t dealing with a straightforward heating of the atmosphere, but with a complex phenomenon, involving some areas getting wetter, drier, often hotter but sometimes colder, or hit with a variety of unusual weather events. On average the globe was and is warming up, due to the greenhouse effect of atmospheric CO₂ capturing the heat of the sun, but the local effects are diverse and hard to predict accurately. So we called it climate change. This is what we’re fighting against: one of the big battles of this century.

There are many good reasons to be fighting climate change. If we let it happen, it will be damaging, harmful, costly. Crops will fail. Populated areas will become less inhabitable. Heat waves will kill more elderly people and spark more destructive wildfires. Species will go extinct. Coastal cities will be threatened by the sea and have to build expensive infrastructure like floodwalls. Most likely, we’ll adapt — few people seriously entertain the most extreme scenarios, where humanity’s survival is in jeopardy — but we will pay a high price for it.

So, better to prevent climate change altogether if we can. Or minimize it, at least. The less the Earth’s climate shifts, the better. We want the opposite of change: stasis. Keep things exactly as they were. Reject modernity, embrace tradition preindustrial average temperatures.

When it comes to the climate, most of us are radical reactionaries, fully ready to disrupt our entire economic system if it gives us an inkling of a chance to return to the lost golden age of the mid-18th century, when the atmospheric CO₂ was below 280 ppm, and keep it that way forever.

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