One of the references cited in the paper below directs readers to a thought-provoking book that advocates for adopting long-term strategies to address the pressing issue of rising sea levels. https://www.amazon.com/Long-Thaw-Changing-Climate-Princeton/dp/0691169063
“This paper aims to formalize long-term trajectories of human civilization as a scientific and ethical field of study….This paper is based on a discussion led by Baum on September 9, 2017 at the Workshop on Existential Risk to Humanity, which was hosted by Haggstrom and Sandberg at Chalmers University of Technology.”http://gcrinstitute.org/papers/trajectories.pdf
Against that background, the conventional habit of discussing climate consequences primarily up to 2100 or even 2200 appears remarkably short-sighted and ethically difficult to defend in practice. Such horizons encompass only a handful of generations, while many of the choices being made today may shape coastlines, ecosystems and human societies for centuries or millennia. A civilization capable of altering planetary systems should surely be capable of extending its moral imagination beyond the lifetimes of those presently alive. The question is not simply what kind of world we will leave to our grandchildren, but what kind of world our decisions may impose upon people living tens or even hundreds of generations from now.
PS - The map below, depicting approximately 4,000 years of world history or around 160 generations offers a useful sense of perspective. What appears to us as an immense sweep of recorded history represents little more than 1% of the time Homo sapiens has existed, and only about 0.0001% of the more than four-billion-year history of life on Earth. Seen against such timescales, even several centuries of climate policy amount to little more than a moment.
