The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy
Call me callous, but I don't really care if this paper depresses you. But you have been warned, and if you want more warning see this review.
And if you are of the 'give it to me straight, doc' persuasion, look on this work, o ye mighty and despair.
And I don't really want to get into the argument about publication, either. I think it is scholarly enough to be taken seriously and discussed on its own terms.
[quote=Abstract]The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near- term social collapse due to climate change.
The approach of the paper is to analyse recent studies on climate change and its implications for our ecosystems, economies and societies, as provided by academic journals and publications direct from research institutes.
That synthesis leads to a conclusion there will be a near-term collapse in society with serious ramifications for the lives of readers. The paper reviews some of the reasons why collapse-denial may exist, in particular, in the professions of sustainability research and practice, therefore leading to these arguments having been absent from these fields until now.[/quote]
[quote=Conclusion]Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations. This situation makes redundant the reformist approach to sustainable development and related fields of corporate sustainability that
has underpinned the approach of many professionals (Bendell et al, 2017). Instead, a new approach which explores how to reduce harm and not make matters worse is important to develop. In support of that challenging, and ultimately personal process, understanding a deep adaptation agenda may be useful.[/quote]
There is so much I could quote here, so much of social and psychological interest, and of interest to a student of the foundations of science. But let my give a few bullet points of the 'what', and let you read for yourself or imagine for yourself the 'so what'.
1. Climate change is unstoppable.
2. Social collapse will be worldwide, and in the next 10 years or so.
3. This will involve Flooding caused by sea-level rises displacing huge populations, decline in crop yields leading to starvation even in developed countries, collapse of infra-structure, power, clean water particularly.
4. There's fuck all to be done to stop it.
5. So what might we do or think or discuss in the meantime?
Well the anti-natalists will rejoice.
And if you are of the 'give it to me straight, doc' persuasion, look on this work, o ye mighty and despair.
The gap in the literature that this paper may begin to address is the lack of discussion within management studies and practice of the end of the idea that we can either solve or cope with climate change.
And I don't really want to get into the argument about publication, either. I think it is scholarly enough to be taken seriously and discussed on its own terms.
[quote=Abstract]The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near- term social collapse due to climate change.
The approach of the paper is to analyse recent studies on climate change and its implications for our ecosystems, economies and societies, as provided by academic journals and publications direct from research institutes.
That synthesis leads to a conclusion there will be a near-term collapse in society with serious ramifications for the lives of readers. The paper reviews some of the reasons why collapse-denial may exist, in particular, in the professions of sustainability research and practice, therefore leading to these arguments having been absent from these fields until now.[/quote]
[quote=Conclusion]Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations. This situation makes redundant the reformist approach to sustainable development and related fields of corporate sustainability that
has underpinned the approach of many professionals (Bendell et al, 2017). Instead, a new approach which explores how to reduce harm and not make matters worse is important to develop. In support of that challenging, and ultimately personal process, understanding a deep adaptation agenda may be useful.[/quote]
There is so much I could quote here, so much of social and psychological interest, and of interest to a student of the foundations of science. But let my give a few bullet points of the 'what', and let you read for yourself or imagine for yourself the 'so what'.
1. Climate change is unstoppable.
2. Social collapse will be worldwide, and in the next 10 years or so.
3. This will involve Flooding caused by sea-level rises displacing huge populations, decline in crop yields leading to starvation even in developed countries, collapse of infra-structure, power, clean water particularly.
4. There's fuck all to be done to stop it.
5. So what might we do or think or discuss in the meantime?
Different people speak of a scenario being possible, probable or inevitable. In my conversations with both professionals in sustainability or climate, and others not directly involved, I have found that people choose a scenario and a probability depending not on what the data and its analysis might suggest, but what they are choosing to live with as a story about this topic. That parallels findings in psychology that none of us are purely logic machines but relate information into stories about how things relate and why (Marshall, 2014). None of us are immune to that process. Currently, I have chosen to interpret the information as indicating inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction.(my bold)
Well the anti-natalists will rejoice.
Comments (210)
An interesting contradition seems inherent in the abstract, which isn't a good omen...
I've always wanted to play the madman who proclaims that the end is coming, this will give me something to use.
Seriously though, I think global warming can still be stopped just since people like Elon Musk say it can but it's clearly not going to be stopped because none of the big governments care enough. Oh well, I just hope it's going to be my grandchildren or great-grandchildren who suffer and not me.
First when the IPCC released their report they said it plainly - some scientists say we have as little as 12 years. Well a little statistical knowledge of the Central Limit Theorem and The Normal Distribution shows this means the vast majority do not. But what did the climate change alarmists hear - we have only 12 years. It makes you wonder - it really does.
Secondly there is a tacit assumption - namely if catastrophe does occur we cant do anything about it. There are many engineers working on the problem that disagree - but that is generally not talked about.
Climate change is real, but a doomsday scenario it is not.
As a positive huge strides are being made in Fusion power and it is now thought it could be here about 2030. That will be a massive game changer.
Another thing to notice about the IPCC is the use of so called grey literature which is non peer reviewed literature. Anybody that knows anything about science knows that is a no no that cant be covered up by the public face of the IPCC that when pressed to justify what they say simply resort to - we are not scientists - we only report what they say. As far as I am concerned, while climate change is not a hoax, the way its reported to the public creates a lot of irrational alarmism.
So stop worrying, learn some basic statistical theory (you will be surprised at the misconceptions just doing that resolves) and spend a bit of time keeping up with the progress being made in fighting the global warming that is actually occurring.
Thanks
Bill
That is correct.
There's no way to make an accurate prediction like that. It's one thing to predict the climate 10 years from now. Seems like we have fairly good models. Society is a whole different animal.
Quoting unenlightened
How can anyone know that without time traveling into the future? There have been proposals for engineering the environment to correct for global warming and removing the C02 form the atmosphere.
Quoting unenlightened
It's not the first doomsday prediction in the history of the human race, nor the first environmental apocalyptic prediction in the past several decades. To date, the doomsday predictions have not come true. I'm a bit skeptical of worst case scenarios. Not that they can't happen, but when they're talked about in inevitable terms. I don't think we can know enough about a system as complex as the environment in conjunction with human civilization to make such claims of certainty.
There is a way, You type the words on a lap top and then click "post comment". Science is all about predicting the future. Weather forecasting is not totally accurate, and yet it is done with some success, without the aid of time machines. Perhaps 1 hour has not been long enough for you to read and absorb the paper, and so you resort to criticising my down and dirty headline teasers. But come up with something bit more sensible and less cliche ridden. This is a serious, well researched, thoughtful paper. Ignore it if you like, but your scorn reflects more on you than on anything said here, so maybe ignore it in silence?
The part about global social collapse and extinction is idiotic.
But if there is a significant chance for massive disruptions, avoiding or alleviating such disruptions ought to be a major concern.
Quoting Marchesk
We still ought to consider reasoned predictions. Just that the knowledge is not certain does not mean it isn't a relevant prediction.
Massive disruption, yes, sooner or later. But that would be true even if there was no anthropogenic global warming.
That's neatly sidestepping the issue. We are talking about a specific prediction about near-term societal collapse due to anthropogenic climate change. As @unenlightened said, you are free to ignore it, but not to call it "silly" without argument.
I think the global social collapse and extinction bit was unenlightened, not the guy from the two-bit college.
I have the same qualifications you do for prophecy.
No, I think it's the paper making these predictions. Though when it says "extinction event", it doesn't mean extinction of humans.
:groan:
I want you to point out exactly where I talked about human extinction or withdraw the claim, because I think you are making shit up about me.
Quoting Marchesk
Did you not see that Marchesk quoted you? But I'm glad to hear you're backing down on that.
Now on to global social collapse. The paper does not explain how China, which has unparalleled experience with famine, is going to manage to go into collapse in the next 10 years. Care to enlighten us?
Do you not see that in my post that is a quote of the article? So it is not my words. Will you now withdraw your false claim about me?
OK. You're not the idiot. The author of that paper is.
And now let's go back to your qualifications for calling Dr Jem Bendell, a Professor of Sustainability Leadership and Founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria (UK), an idiot.
But to the stray five or six people who read this thread: please refer to the works of reputable scientists before seriously considering the ravings mentioned in the OP.
That's all I wanted to say. :)
Remember folks, refer to reputable scientists before seriously considering the lunacy mentioned in the OP.
Remember folks, this idiot has no qualification in the field, and likes to make up random accusations that he cannot begin to justify.
I'm just suggesting that people refer to reputable scientists. There are a lot of them out there. :)
It'd be more helpful for us casual readers to quote the paper where you think it's wrong and then quote another scientist to back up your claim.
What one can find in a reputable scientist is an understanding of what computer simulations tell us and exactly what our limits are in making predictions. A good starting point would be a freshman level textbook on global warming.
You are not going to have the last word on this one Frank. You do not have the reputation yourself that would allow you to say that the author is not a reputable scientist. I have provided evidence that he is, and he has provided copious references to support his claims. You have provided nothing but smoke.
And I will not let your baseless accusations go unchallenged, as long as I am able to post. Perhaps when you have finished, some of us will be able to start discussing the article.
On a cursory reading, I see no specific claim that humans will go extinct due to climate change in the next ten years. You'll need to quote that one. Social "collapse" is a muddier issue.
This:
seems reasonable to me.
This:
A lot less likely if near-term unequivocally means within ten years, but then I presume there's evidence for this that will be produced. (And it's a strong claim, so the evidence should be correspondingly strong).
Quoting frank
You're presuming the matter under debate. You consider him unreputable because you disagree with his conclusions, right? But his conclusions are the subject of the discussion. So, what you are saying effectively is, none of this is worthy of discussion.
To me as well.
I initially thought it was just unenlightened who concluded that human extinction and global social collapse were likely due to global warming, but he insisted that the author of the article believes that.
My point from the outset was that whoever it is that believes that: you're out of step with climate scientists.
Quoting Baden
He's not a climate scientist. It's worthy of discussion mainly because there is a tendency among some to approach the topic apocalyptically. That does no good for anyone. In some ways, it has the same effect as climate change deniers.
Imagine that I am a brilliant but disturbed philosopher who walks around all day with a hair trigger loaded gun in my mouth. So long as my day to day situation is relatively stable I might be able to pull this off for some time. If my day to day situation becomes chaotic, the chances of the gun going off goes way up to near certainty.
This is the situation we're in. Climate change will disrupt the delicate balance of a highly interconnected global economy, and in the resulting social/political chaos the nuclear gloves will come off.
Some amount of climate change and social disruption is already built in. We can adapt to that. It's the nukes we should be focused on because 1) that's a game ending threat we can't adapt to, and 2) that's something decisive we could do immediately.
What's happening is that human beings are functioning like a cancer on the biosphere, and so the biosphere is responding by attempting to reject the disease.
True! And human extinction could happen tomorrow. It just takes one asteroid or the right bacteria.
A claim like that is sufficient to not take the paper seriously. Maybe the guy should have stopped studying climate change for a few months so that he could learn something about epistemology instead.
Until the 20th century the vast majority of humanity lived on the land, and thus knew how to garden, hunt, forage etc. These days all most people know about obtaining food is how to swipe a credit card at the grocery store. Most people don't keep that much food on hand either because after all, who has room to store 3 months of food in the typical urban apartment?
So, if the highly complex human food supply chain is interrupted social chaos will begin almost immediately. It won't start when people run out of food, but when a critical mass of people conclude they will not be able to replenish their food supply via legal means. The vast majority of security personnel whose job it is to maintain order will be in this same situation, and protecting their loved ones will take priority over protecting you and me.
There can be some measure of good news in all this. We're all going to die from something someday anyway, but we're masters at pretending this is not the case. Events such as are being discussed will puncture this fantasy and bring on a higher level of existential awareness. This will be terrifying for many or most, but it does offer philosophers an opportunity.
What is our relationship with death?
We are assuming that climate change driven crisis is bad because we assume that death is worse than life. Is that true? Do we have any rational basis upon which to come to such a conclusion? Isn't really just philosophical laziness which causes us to leap to such conclusions?
Nice one Frank! Like I'm the one making unsubstantiated claims and disrupting your thread. You are the enemy of an interesting discussion, and like I said I'm not giving you the last word. You are the enemy of reasoned debate because you make unsubstantiated accusations in an attempt to pre-empt debate, and now you claim I'm the one with a problem. Quoting Terrapin Station
Reason that, or just be quiet, because a claim like yours is sufficient reason not to take you seriously, without an argument, maybe some references to support it, which the author has already.
Here's how that reads to me: "I (, unenlightened,) also do not know enough about epistemology to realize why a claim like that is a problem."
Knowledge of epistemology?
And that reads to me like you cannot provide any justification and so resort to ad hom.
Please talk about climate change with reference to the paper and the evidence within or elsewhere for its claims along with counterevidence, for those who disagree, from other scientific sources. Everything beyond that will be subject to deletion unless there's a very good reason for its inclusion.
(And this rule generalized goes for all discussions in the science/tech category, which this is now in).
Quoting Baden
I can't find it either. Unenlightened found it somewhere in the article. Maybe he could quote a larger portion that includes that claim.
I thought un's point was the un didn't make the claim not that the author necessarily did.
Quoting Baden
Unenlightened said he was quoting the article here:
Quoting unenlightened
I thought that was from unenlightened until he insisted that it was in the article.
I still don't see that specific claim being made or un claiming the author made it, but he can speak for himself, of course.
Quoting unenlightened
If unenlightened is actually the source of that sentence instead of the article, then I withdraw my statement that the author of the article is an idiot.
Unless you can quote otherwise, it seems to me, neither un nor the article writer made the specific claim that humans will go extinct within ten years. So, why are we discussing it?
Unenlightened said he was quoting the article here:
We're discussing it because unenlightened has been adamant that the article is from a reputable scientist who claims that global social collapse is inevitable and human extinction is possible due to climate change in the next ten years.
I think we can all agree that no reputable climate scientist claims this.
You could easily clear this up by quoting the section of the article where the author states that global social collapse is inevitable and that human extinction is possible due to climate change.
The above is a quote from the article that will be under discussion in just a few more pages, hopefully, and is a replica of the last quote in my opening post, without my added bolding. So the last sentence expresses the author's interpretation of the evidence he has presented, and obviously, in context, allows that other interpretations are possible. And being a generous minded fellow he doesn't even insist that other interpretations are idiotic lunacy, or disreputable. My understanding is that the author considers human extinction a possible consequence of climate change. I think one would need that time machine to confidently say it was impossible.
The very good reason for the inclusion of nuclear weapons in a discussion about climate change is that these weapons will be the reason that climate change will be catastrophic.
Climate change can be catastrophic on it's own. As example, let's say that human populations are reduced by half. We can adapt to that. We can adjust to the new social and environmental reality. A big problem, but a fixable problem.
If climate change triggers the use of nuclear weapons, a very reasonable prospect if climate change does indeed cause widespread social chaos, the equation changes entirely. It's still probably not human extinction, but the set back would be of an entirely different scale. Not only would much of the infrastructure of civilization be destroyed, but the environment would be dramatically affected immediately, not over a period of years, decades, centuries.
What's happening in this conversation is the same thing I am so often bellowing about. Thought operates by a process of conceptual division. And so you are trying to divide climate change from nuclear weapons. Conceptually, that is obviously possible. But...
Climate change and nuclear weapons are not divided from each other in the real world.
Thus, to the degree members and mods insist on such a division, you are engaged in fantasy.
Again, a respectful request. If the mods find it necessary to delete this post, ok, I respect your ownership of the forum. But please delete my account along with the post. Only takes a second, right?
If you can not tolerate reading this post, you are not qualified to read any of the rest of my posts either.
If the scientific community truly believed that human extinction is possible due to climate change in the next ten years, this would be of tremendous import.
At present, it is not the attitude of the scientific community.
As for global social collapse, as I asked earlier, how is it that China is supposed to collapse? Instead of asking me to prove a negative, help me understand the positive that's being presented.
China is held together by the tight grip of a dictatorship. It's already a touch and go operation which could unravel at any time. Add a big pile of stress on to the system, and China most likely unravels in to a collection of local warlord ruled sections.
China is a very robust dictatorship. It's survived tremendous stress during the 20th Century and is now poised to become the dominant political entity in the world.
Yawn...
Yes, much has been written on this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_cult
Here's a fairly comprehensive list of predicted apocalyptic events, many made by science:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events
For a walk down memory lane, here are some scientific doomsday predictions made at the time of the first Earh Day in 1970:
http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-2/
The more interesting phenomenon is how the adherents react when the prophecy fails and how they attempt to maintain their beliefs in light of them being proven wrong. Yours is particularly troubling for adherents because the date is only 10 years (or so) away. Can we declare the paper wrong in 15 years?
Yes, I get it, all these past examples of failed predictions don't prove that this newest version is also wrong. I also realize that if we make such predictions long enough we might eventually be right. But, my very strong hunch here is that we'll be having this same conversation in 10 years (or so), assuming we don't die from something else.
Quoting Baden
This would be a fair suggestion if scientists had a proven past of avoiding bias and had the ability to divorce themselves from this odd pessimistic psychological phenomenon that leads them to find evidence of eventual final death and destruction. That it is to say, this is not just ad hom mud slinging, nor is it an anti-scientific stance, but it's clear evidence that scientists go horribly wrong when they attempt such future extrapolations. Pretending that scientists are just objective apolitical folks sorting through facts and crunching out numbers is just that - pretending.
Let us also be clear that the paper itself admits to a high degree of speculation and conjecture:
"It is a truism that we do not know what the future will be. But we can see
trends. We do not know if the power of human ingenuity will help
sufficiently to change the environmental trajectory we are on.
Unfortunately, the recent years of innovation, investment and patenting
indicate how human ingenuity has increasingly been channelled into
consumerism and financial engineering. We might pray for time. But the
evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and
uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction,
migration, disease and war.
We do not know for certain how disruptive the impacts of climate change
will be or where will be most affected, especially as economic and social
systems will respond in complex ways." pp 13-14.
This comment is fraught with political ideology, concluding as if fact that patent law, capitalistic consumerism, and financial engineering (whatever that is) are interfering with human ingenuity. That certainly sounds like a thesis unto itself, and one hardly universally accepted as true. He then speaks of how me might pray, which I understand is for effect (as if that's all we can now do), but are these the words fitting for a serious scientific discussion or is this more a call to arms?
The author then goes on to say:
"These descriptions may seem overly dramatic. Some readers might
consider them an unacademic form of writing. Which would be an
interesting comment on why we even write at all. I chose the words above
as an attempt to cut through the sense that this topic is purely theoretical.
As we are considering here a situation where the publishers of this journal
would no longer exist, the electricity to read its outputs won’t exist, and a
profession to educate won’t exist, I think it time we break some of the
conventions of this format." p. 14
He doesn't even pretend to be scientific, citing to nothing really, and admitting it's just time to stop being so damn scientific. He then goes on after this to discuss the various psychological forms of denial and other unhelpful ways he thinks people are dealing with this real problem. That is simply not science, but just a lament that people don't accept his claims and are finding ways to thwart our saving of the planet..
I don't even believe this prediction:
"If all the data and analysis turn out to be misleading, and this
society continues nicely for the coming decades, then this article will not
have helped my career." p. 24
Should society continue nicely in the coming decades (and now we moved to decades and not just the next 10 years), his career will be fine. From the citations above, it seems clear that damnation cults will always have a role to play in our world.
Frank, there is a prediction made in one place, of social disruption, and even collapse in ten years or so.
And you have attached that timeframe to another section entirely that makes other claims. In introducing the article, I have given highlights, and left out lengthy discussions of evidence and reasoning. And you have mashed together bits of sentences in the most unfair way in order not to have to consider anything that might upset your views.
If those are the only claims we're considering, then :up:
He might be horribly wrong. I haven't taken a position on everything he says. I'm just trying to keep this on track by asking people to criticize on the basis of what the author actually claims in the paper (as there are things being criticized that no-one has claimed) and what other scientists claim because we're in the science category. There's no other way to resolve the debate other than scientific evidence. And if it's so obvious he's wrong, then it should be an easy refutation. Anyway, got stuff to do. Be back on this later.
He is the founder of some think tank. There is no such thing as bad publicity.
He might be wrong. He might be horribly wrong. You might want to check some of those references, he might be a snake oil salesman, or a self-publicist. But the sea level is rising, the ice is melting, global temperatures are rising, atmospheric CO2 levels are rising, Global average temperatures are rising, he's not wrong about that stuff, is he?
And perhaps just consider... he might be right.
80mm is about 3 inches, which is not very much at all, until it's 3 inches of water in your living room, and then it's way too much. Too much because no sewage, no electric and probably no fresh water. If he's right that the changes are nonlinear, then the next 3 inches might not be 25 years away, but 10 years, and the next 3 inches only a couple of years after that. I will be a refugee by then, as I live on the coast.
I've stumbled into this with in economic and financial debate, the phenomenon of the existence of the so-called permabears. Now a permabear forecasts the imminent collapse of the stock market and the financial system. He or she sounds like a breath of fresh air to the very annoying permabull-people trying to sell you stocks and who see everything through rose-coloured glasses. At least at first. For one year or two. Now some of the arguments are indeed correct and can be very convincing. About every 10-25 years that is. We do have a financial crisis every now and then.
You would assume that a financial commentator that is correct once in ten to twentyfive years wouldn't have a following, but that isn't true. And the most suprising thing is that IF they would change their views. they come to the conclusion that now things are so bad that it's time to buy stock, they will LOOSE their audience, which at the worst times is the greatest. In fact they are prisoners of their own following audience.
Hence it's not only that the most dire forecast will break the newsbarrier, come to be quote far more than something more realistic, which people find simply boring. It's that dire & gloomy predictions create an audience who will just love the doom & gloom and be extremely hostile to any positive upbeat news.
Perhaps the most incredible thing is that when indeed some of the dire predictions come true, then we simply will ignore them as life does go on...
No.
That freshman textbook on global warming explains that. It explains that there's a delay between emission and actual warming. It explains how this is actually a long-range problem. It explains the challenges to being specific about what will happen. It also explains the biggest challenge to actually doing anything about it.
I don't think you understood what I said. I wasn't being condescending. I was telling you something basic.
If you promote the habit of looking at the short term, you're basically heading people down the wrong path. Point them toward understanding the basics of the climate.
I want a reference to this text book you keep talking about as if you've read it for a start. I know you can't predict the future, so I already know that "the next decade might be cooler" means exactly nothing at all. That the climate varies I had already surmised.
Also, Banno would say that since I'm being more civil than you are, I automatically win.
And where is that reference? Or are you unwisely extrapolating from text books you've seen on other topics?
Read the primary source material (datasets, scientific peer-reviewed journal publications) and stop letting people interpret the data for you (i.e.: most news source out there).
Here are global temperatures:
https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/
https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/2019/tlt_201901_bar.png
Shows 3 year global trend of dropping temperatures. The average is now in line with peaks in the 80s, 90, early 00s. I repeat, global temperatures have been going down for the last 3 years.
Fact that is hard for many people to swallow: every study that tries to devine the future uses climate models ... (simulations by computer, using simple formulas, funded by government) for example NASA, or its Japanese or French equivalent.
Look at the primary source, the IPCC assessment report:
https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_05.pdf
1. it predicts that we should have experienced an 15-18 degree C increase in global temperatures by now.
look at the global temperatures now, last winter, we were only 0.1 degree above the global mean.
that is not just a wrong prediction, you are not even in the same ballpark.
2. It predicts that rainforest would have lost 20% of its precipitation and would shrink due to climate change
completely false, precipitation is increasing. Again they are off not by a little, but by an order of magnitude.
http://www.waterandclimatechange.eu/rainfall/amazon-river-basin-rainfall-in-average-year
the amazon forests thrive in warmer temperatures and actually grow shockingly fast.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature16512#ref2
Again, these climate reports based on a conglomerate of climate scientists (who BTW 90% work for government, and im sure that government has no bias, and neither does pumping money for grants)
So the point is, all climate models in the 90 and 00s were completely wrong. Global temperatures are factually going down for the last 3 years, none of the models predicted this. Most people here read articles about the "Earth warming in 2050 and there's nothing we can do about it"... I advise you to look how they come up to those numbers...
how do you think they can make a prediction in 2050? that's right, climate models. which are proven again and again to be completely wrong. The mods edited the IPCC wiki page for their assessment reports and claim they predicted today's tempertures (laughably, and factually untrue, look at the PDF of their report).
Scientists don't simply extrapolate. They computer simulate.
I'm not sure why you're fixated on my textbook. I don't have it anymore, so I'm not going to quote from it. I'm guessing most global warming textbooks are about the same. If there's something specific you want a reference for, let me know.
Because you keep hitting me with it, and because you haven't mentioned when repeatedly asked, any other source for your opinions.
Quoting frankMy turn to patronise. Yes dear, that's right, clever scientists collect a lot of data about the past and from that they produce a model or algorithm that dynamically matches the data sets (to an approximation). And then they use the same model and the current data set to extrapolate to the future. And always the data sets are partial, the models are partial and the predictions are tentative. And this means that a scientist can be reputable, and not stupid, and still get their predictions wrong. So there's no need to slag them off when you disagree with them, or compare them with astrologers and conspiracy theorists.
Well, this discussion about climate change and the future has been about as successful as most of them.
Science is all about repeatability, and societal collapse isn't a repeatable phenomenon. It has happened for various societies in the past. But that's history, not science. And there's a difference for a reason.
But yes, anyone can type words on a laptop and click post.
The odd thing about this analogy is that you seem to have it the wrong way round. The permawarmers acknowledge that every few years, the temperature will go down for a bit but overall, the long term trend is steadily or unsteadily upwards. And the permafrosties are always saying it's going down or is about to go down, and the reason for it going up is not the reason that has been theorised for 100 years, burning fossil fuels raising CO2 in the atmosphere, but random woo and the hot air of climate scientists.
Fair enough. Tell me what you want me to back up.
Quoting unenlightened
My point was that the fact that it's been warmer during the last few decades doesn't mean it won't cool down in the next.
If it does cool down, we don't want people saying "Hey! I thought you said..."
But then again, maybe we do want them to say that. If it's true that we can't do anything about it, we might as well become completely deluded. So, carry on.
We're all going to die. So eat, drink, and be merry. Or sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Whichever.
First question for any paper: what is it trying to do?
(1) The paper is trying to highlight that current climate science/sustainability management treats severe global socioeconomic impacts as an edge case (A), that management strategies thus advocated are short term bodges given the plausibility of severe global socioeconomic impacts of climate change within our lifetime (B), and because of (A) and (B) it is now time to consider alternative strategies which adjust or adapt to the plausible reality of such changes (C).
Second question for any paper: how does it try to achieve this?
(2) It surveys contemporary climate science to assess the plausibility referenced in (1), finding that such large changes are consistent with its reviewed literature, evincing (A). Moreover, it does a literature search for climatology or sustainability management looking for people analysing adjustment or adaptation strategies given severe global socioeconomic impacts from climate change within our lifetime. It doesn't find much literature explicitly on it, and doesn't find much literature which treats these scenarios as plausible, evincing (B). Given (A) and (B), investigating (C) seems sensible. So he proceeds to investigate (C).
Investigating (C), he takes the approach of trying to isolate why there are holes in the scientific literature corresponding to (A) and (B) - which has psychological and institutional components, he summarises:
he then begins to analyse what he sees as relevant information for adjustment or adaptation:
So first thing, the article is not predicting an extinction event, the argument does not require strong commitment to the reality of an imminent extinction event - though that is consistent with the broad aims of the paper - it predicts socio-economic upheaval on a large scale. As it puts it in the introduction:
If the author thought his research strongly supported an extinction event, I doubt he would put this emphasis on adjustment to massive socioeconomic upheaval. The paper is even called 'Deep Adaptation' for Christ's sake, and the title of the section he reviews the climatological literature in is 'Apocalypse Uncertain'. He does however make an effort to portray an extinction event as emotionally relevant:
I suspect that good responses to the article would deal with its 'theory of adaptation' and possible socio-economic organisational strategies that might work irrespective of the doomy-gloomy plausibilities.
Oh, and just for @frank, firstly:
if the World Bank, that well known cabal of green anarchist zero-growth environmental activists, is informing us of the need to prepare for Bad Times, we (by that I mean our betters) should probably take it seriously. If that doesn't suffice there are two slightly methodological sections called 'Our Non-Linear World' and 'Looking Ahead' which cover why the paper takes a more qualitative/integrative approach over the use of quantitative models.
I'm sure if you actually went through a proper error-propagation over all the combined climate data and tried to estimate the societal effects, your resultant models would have crazy high future error - and they should, because the future of nonlinear complex systems is really hard to pin down in numbers -, but if you change your frame of questioning a bit; why should the need for such error propagation and an integrated quantitative model of everything the paper touches on stop us from trying to plan to adjust or adapt to the horrible possible circumstances consistent with those models? They shouldn't... that's the real point of the paper. That is the position from which its interesting questions are tackled. It looks at various psychological factors in depth, and some institutional ones. It's only from that position does its title and intended contribution to discourse actually makes sense.
So please, if you want to put this research in bin with the Mayan Apocalypse and Millenium Bug, do so, but politely leave it out of the thread (personal opinion, not moderator opinion).
I did confirm that social disruption is on the horizon, you $$#%^&&. :)
Hey good! Now you're ready to start considering the arguments in the paper!
We were.
Climate change experts generally mark out some future time -- 2050 or 2100 -- as a time by which some environmental change will have occurred that will be destabilizing. There is no comfort to be taken in disaster striking in 2029, 2050, or 2100 because expected future disasters are foreshadowed in the present, just not very efficiently.
Southern Florida, for instance, is expected to first turn into a bog, then a swamp, and finally just be covered up with sea water altogether -- maybe by 2100. How is this registering among Floridians? Denial, for one. People who now live in Florida, or who want to move there for the sunshine, warm weather, and the lively society, all have a similar interest in not facing facts. Especially if you have a house you want to sell, it's a good idea to discourage gloomy thoughts about salt water intrusion. Real estate agents aren't anxious to tell buyers about salt water pooling in their back yard, even though they are miles from the ocean.
So it is that buying and selling houses continues in Florida.
No body in the midwestern US is abandoning farmland, even though climate change is altering agricultural equations. A 10 year investment seems to be safe; a 20 year investment is probably OK; a 30 year investment is risky, and planning for 2100 is out of the question. Farmers know that several minor changes in frost dates, heavy rain fall, storms (hail, wind), or disease vectors can wipe out a year's EDIT: [s]profit[/s] production.
What will cause agricultural collapse is likely to be a few bad years followed by a few more bad years that prevents financial recovery. A few bad years is all that is required to shift from large crop surpluses to large crop shortages. Global crop shortages affect poorer, less developed countries much more severely than it does richer developed countries. But destabilized poor countries can be highly inconvenient for the better off--remember the turmoil that Syrian war refugees caused as they surged towards Europe. Consider it a dress rehearsal.
Yep. The Atlantic has been encroaching on the whole east coast for about 200 years. In recent years they resort to making sand banks to protect real estate, which means digging up a bunch of sand from one part of the coast and moving it to another. The result is the ocean encroaches faster where they dug it up. And that leads us to the real issue: vulnerable people. As always, they are the ones who will really suffer. When NYC starts to go under, the rich will move. The poor will lose everything and wander toward Minnesota.
Well, people should understand the difference with weather and climate.
My point is that when people choose what they want to hear, you get an audience that will want to hear one thing and actually isn't open to change it's views and then the presenter can fall into pleasing tje crowd. That would mean a permafrostie/warmer changing his or her view would irritate the old crowd that followed him or her, while the previously "other side" would just sneer at him or her "finally coming to senses".
An example from real life (from financial world). I followed this one financial commentator who was quite permabear in 2007 onwards promoting gold and raw materials investments etc. Yet in 2011 he got totally fed up with gold narrative, stopped talking about a raw materials supercycle and really got angry of one guest forecasting oncoming hyperinflation. This angered a lot of his followers and for a while lead to heated debate until he simply stopped answering to listeners questions and commentary. Likely his audience simply changed. (With gold he was proven correct. Now btw he is starting to be bearish again)
But back to actual issue: The problem is that when scientists present the dire "alarmist" predictions and they don't come to be true, this is just brushed aside as the alarmism is seen as to have been beneficial to "wake up" people to the problem and/or to get the medias attention to the issue.
That's why we plan to blow up the bridges over the Mississippi, tear up the freeways in Wisconsin, and start installing minefields and electrified barbed wire fences along the border between Iowa and Missouri. We're breeding wolves, aggressive wild turkeys, belligerent buffalo, and other natural riff-raff repellents. Wisconsin plans on using stampeding dairy cattle as a deterrent. Several hundred holsteins can be quite intimidating. Iowa will turn itself into one giant corn maze.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5222/the-climate-change-paper-so-depressing-its-sending-people-to-therapy/p1
Quoting Marchesk
That is a highly controversial statement. Which epistemological principle requires repeatability specifically?
Quoting King in the Desert
Are you sure you know what a trend is?
Quoting King in the Desert
How old is that report?
Quoting King in the Desert
From the executive summary of that report:
"near the Earth's surface, the global average warming lies between +1.5°C and +4.5°C, with a "best guess" of 2.5°C"
Where did you get your number from?
Quoting King in the Desert
Again, from the executive summary:
"Precipitation: (...) the global average increases (...) by 3 to 15%..."
You probably tripped over this sentence:
" Total deforestation of the Amazon basin could reducee rainfall locally by 20%".
But that is talking about a specific hypothetical.
Until shown otherwise, I'm happy to accept that the author is an intelligent, well educated expert in his field. And yet, he felt comfortable presenting an academic paper proposing an imminent catastrophic threat presented by climate change, which includes only the most passing reference to nuclear weapons.
What makes this interesting is that the author is clearly not stupid or uninformed, but is better described as an intellectual elite. So understanding such a glaring omission is not as simple as just dismissing the author as a wacko. It seems we have to look elsewhere for an explanation.
The problem would seem to be much larger and more worrisome. That is, the author is writing in a culture suffering from a mass delusion, and is simply doing what all of us do, what is declared "normal", "reasonable", "sensible". He's ignoring the threat from nukes. He's fitting in within the group consensus, and probably wisely so because if he weren't willing to pay the price of conformity to the group think he would likely be casually dismissed as being just another alarmist riding a hobby horse, which is not a very good way to advance one's academic career.
Academics do their work within a fairly tightly controlled group consensus. They have to color pretty closely within the lines. And so if all of us are blindly ignoring the threat of nuclear weapons, they have to as well, or risk brand damage to their career.
But the truth is likely more that the author has internalized the mass delusion himself, and thus sincerely sees no conflict in leaving nuclear weapons out of a catastrophic climate change warning discussion. After all, that's what everyone else is doing, so the author is guilty of nothing more than being normal.
However, none of this changes the fact that it's not possible to have an intelligent discussion about a pending climate change catastrophe without including the subject of nuclear weapons as an integral part of such an investigation. Thus, if one is looking for intelligent discussion of such matters it would likely be best to invest one's time in writings from another more insightful author, should one be able to find one.
Methodological naturalism.
The main issue in this thread isn't with climate change predictions, it's with societal collapse predictions, which are not scientific, even if the reasons for predicting a collapse are scientific.
Consider the analogy with predictions about future automation displacing a large percentage of jobs. The studies about current technology might be sound, but prediction about how the technology will be applied and how workers and employers will adapt are not well understood.
We've been hearing this doom and gloom for decades. Centuries if you include Malthus. In the 1970's people feared global cooling. The doom and gloom never comes true, but it's a winner when it comes to political fundraising.
What does methodological naturalism have to do with repeatability?
And I don't see how you go from "social processes are not well understood" to "therefore predictions about social processes are unscientific".
Obviously it wouldn't wipe out the species because we've been through it before. We just don't remember it.
The advantage is that you get to float the concept of catastrophe in a truly scientific way. Everybody wins.
Indeed. Notable ones in the past 50 years or so:
Population bomb: no way we can feed several billion people.
Silent Spring: chemicals like DDT would wipe out birds and other animal population.
Rainforest deforestation: Amazon will be cut down in a couple decades.
Ozone depletion: everyone will be getting skin cancer from the sun.
Acid Rain: northern forests will die off.
Peak oil and various minerals: we'll run out and civilization will crash.
Animal population declines: means major extinction is on its way.
Carrying capacity: The Earth can only support 4 billion people.
Now all of those have been or still remain problems. But the worst case scenarios have not come to pass. Animal populations have a tendency to recover (often when protectives measures are taken). New oil fields and mineral deposits are discovered with better means of mining them. DDT was banned, air pollution in developed countries has declined, the rate of deforestation went down, the green revolution happened, and improvements in technology change the carrying capacity equation.
Also, our understanding of the environment improves as do the computer models over time. So predictions are adjusted. The key point is that society adapts and changes over time.
So I'm thinking about what I might do as say a gardener, in terms of perhaps building in micro climates to allow a greater diversity of plants, in contrast to a sort of conservation attitude, kind of encouraging adaptive change in the ecosystem. Grapes in Scotland already, between the raspberries. Baobabs in case it turns dry between the sitka. Eco systems will tend to move North, so help out the slow-moving bits, like trees.
A scientific prediction has to be based on experiments and observations that can be reproduced. Otherwise, human bias and experimental flaws can be mistaken for real results. We should always be cautious with any single paper or experiment. There always needs to be confirmation.
Quoting Echarmion
I didn't say "social processes" in the generic sense. I said societal collapse, which is quite specific, and would mean the global society we have today.
Get lost with that crap.
Societal problems could happen. It's not a bad idea to prepare for that possibility.
The problem is that there's no way in hell to justify an idiotic claim like "2. Social collapse will be worldwide, and in the next 10 years or so."
A few nuclear weapons knocking out critical oil infrastructure in the Middle East; 1 nuclear weapon destroying the Houston, Texas refining and chemical industry; just 1 bomb going off in Manhattan, or in Washington, D.C., or London, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing, Mumbai, Bangalore, or Karachi (and so on) would be a great disaster with far reaching political and military consequences. And it could be a bomb for each of the above.
It is possible for a nuclear weapon to be detonated outside of national command and control safeguards. It doesn't have to be official national policy; it could be a rogue, or terrorist-sponsored event. And, of course, it could certainly be national policy to get rid of adversaries by nuking them.
When North America was glaciated, all of the small earthworms that were native were scrapped off. The former worm-occupants had not recovered their range after 15,000 years. Europeans introduced a number of exotic species to North America -- like honey bees and big, fat earth worms. The big fat worms, which we refer to as 'night crawlers' and like to use as fish bait, have been spreading northward from their introduction sites. They have now infiltrated into the hardwood forests where they are causing a problem. They are eating all of the leaves that fall on the ground.
You will probably say "that's what worms are supposed to do". True enough, but they do such a good job that the ground under the trees is left bare, or at least much more thinly covered by leaves. When it rains, there is nothing to slow the movement of rainwater down hillsides which the formerly uneaten leaves were good at doing. This washes away a lot of the worm castings (their dung) which is excellent fertilizer for trees, and it leads to erosion and soil loss.
The trees aren't dying because of the worms, but the soil situation is slowly changing. All because of bigger earth worms. This is a (rare) case where bigger is not better.
There are several episodes of arboreal diseases which show us that forests can be ravaged by disease. 4,000,000,000 (billion) edible nut-bearing chestnut trees died between 1900 and 1950. The species has not recovered. Dutch elm disease has wiped out most of the elm trees in North America and Europe. All native species of ash are susceptible to the diseases the emerald ash borer carries, including the trees planted in many cities to replace elms.
There are various diseases and insect pests affecting forests all over the world. This is nothing new, but trees are made more susceptible to diseases by warming climates.
True, but none of them can bring civilization crashing down in 30 minutes. When one has a loaded gun in one's mouth that is the only issue. Once the gun is removed, ok, then other issues merit our attention.
This is not an impressive resume for discussion on climate change.
Quoting unenlightened
From the CV there given, I would say this guy is a career communications person. When he states as his academic career "twenty years of experience in sustainable business and finance", then has gotten into the very trendy Davos circles on the WEF and gives TedX talks, yep, no wonder can he write something that will shock and awe ordinary people. Likely because he has been giving talks to people all his life and obviously and knows what sells.
It's like the classic way how in Washington policy circles you sell US Foreign Policy to Americans that are otherwise quite ignorant of the outside World: "Scare the shit out of them!!!"
But wait. You're just saying that because you disagree with him, right?
What I want you to consider is that as the glaciers melt, less light is reflected back to space. The glaciers are melting, so that's why we should accept the real possibility that a cascade of events is about to unfurl ending in worldwide social breakdown.
If you cant accept that, will you please prove that it's wrong?
This is true. A full-out exchange of bombs among the existing nuclear powers would result in massive fire storms which would greatly extend the initial blast damage, and would throw up so much soot and dust into the upper atmosphere that climate would start cooling rapidly. The world would not freeze, but agriculture might dwindle to virtually nothing for a few years -- long enough for the survivors to starve. Then there is radiation on top of everything else, and a lost of vast stores of resources.
Humpty Dumpty was bagging his trash
when overhead there burst a bright flash.
There was no time for the egg to expire
Sir Oval turned ash in the nuclear fire.
I already know that some of you skeptics are going to say that it's because we don't know what to prepare for. AMOC slowdown? AMOC shutdown? Who gets wetter? Who gets dryer? Who gets colder? Who is under salt water?
What's happening is that you're getting too wrapped up in statistics. Simply look at the weather since 2002 and you'll see the urgency.
I read over the document, looking at the summary and conclusion in particular. I didn't see anything that was very compelling. I have thought we were screwed for some time. It isn't just the amount of CO2 lurking in the tundra and and the frozen methane ambush at the bottom of the ocean. It isn't just the physics and chemistry.
Our human behavior is just not very tractable (long run, short run) in the face of very difficult problems with uncertain solutions. WE cast the bleak light on our future. Nations can mobilize for war with remarkable speed and success, but generally wars are pretty concrete: We will kill them or they will kill us and these are the weapons we need to make. The country with the most resources and the most factories has a huge advantage.
Just try to train a group of slightly interested people what goes into the compost bin, the recycle bin, and the trash bin, never mind changing their entire lifestyle. (I understand this because I'm not able to change my lifestyle either.)
Nature will be indifferent to our problems and will not tell us anything. She has seen it all before.
One of the adaptations that we might well make is dropping dead in large numbers when we can no longer feed ourselves or provide enough drinking water. That is how nature solves over-population problems when the excess population becomes insupportable.
We will all become vegetarians because that will be the best bet for the next meal, never mind the ethics of eating meat. Some people will probably try what cannibals call "long pig".
Life will become simpler for many people. Many of us will not set foot in dreary offices again. We may never have to deal with another bureaucrat for the foreseeable future. If we don't get picked off by the local gang of liars, thieves, knaves, and scoundrels, we might do OK for a few more days. Or, we will be part of the Liars, Thieves, Knaves, & Scoundrels Benevolent Association until we are liquidated by a larger, better armed gang, like the Karing Kannibals Konsortium.
I don't know. On the upside, there is the fairly pleasant A World Made by Hand. On the downside there is The Road. Which book it will be, don't know.
What I do believe is that extensive adaptive solution-engineering will probably not be possible. Some people say we could power the world with either fission or fusion. Both of those solutions run up against the critical problem of many many tons of rare elements that would be needed for either method of energy production. Fission and fusion reactors won't last forever, and will have to be replaced. Each new reactor will suck up another large order of elements that just aren't plentiful.
For those who think agriculture will just move north into the tundra, think again. The thawing tundra is made up o peaty frozen vegetation and is centuries from being soil that wheat can grow on.
Even if society takes 50 to 100 years to fall apart completely, we are already on a down hill slope. There just won't be a happy ending, I am afraid (and I am afraid).
This seems to depend on what time frame is being examined. If the chosen time frame is the lifetime of a baby born today, yes, some amount of climate change is already baked in. That is, unless the change can be reversed by some engineering technique, a prospect perhaps more dangerous than the influence we've already had on the climate.
This seems exaggerated, though if we include all factors which could lead to social collapse, perhaps not. Climate change as a sole cause of social collapse in ten years? Doesn't seem likely. Climate change as a contributing factor to social collapse over a longer period, ok, seems reasonable.
Ok, but over what time period? If this happens slowly we can adapt. If it happens quickly, a crisis.
Let's define "it". I presume this to mean damage to civilization driven by climate change. Here's the big hole in this paper and this discussion. To the degree the author is correct in his predictions, the main source of damage to civilization will be nuclear weapons and war in general, not climate change. And there is plenty we can do about this source of damage right now today. Ok, maybe not the war, but the nukes can be destroyed any time we are ready to reclaim sanity.
Focus on the primary source of damage and discuss how to remove that threat.
My best guess is that a long view is required.
It would take something the scale of an asteroid strike to wipe us out completely, so it seems humans will continue in some form whatever crisis may disrupt the current status quo.
The Romans attempted to build a global civilization and for awhile they were making good progress. And then the whole thing fell apart. I suspect the same kind of thing is happening in our time, just at a faster pace.
If you think about it, it's actually not too logical to assume that we could successfully construct a highly complex interdependent global technological civilization on the first try. We may get there eventually, but it seems more reasonable to assume such a project will take numerous attempts, with many failures along the way.
My generation, the boomers, has the luck of the Irish. We got here after the Great Depression and WWII and arrived at the peak of success for this iteration of global civilization. We lived high on the hog, and had blessed lives. We didn't do a lot to solve the problems, did quite a bit to make things worse, and now we're checking out and leaving the mess to our kids and grandkids. I doubt we will be remembered fondly on balance.
There's a lesson in the boomer story for younger people. When we boomers were twenty somethings we were VERY idealistic and had the noblest of notions. Those young today should not just assume that the idealism they now possess is a permanent fixture of their lives. A great deal of work and sacrifice will be required to hang on to the idealism of youth, and the odds are not with you.
That said, crisis and pain are miracle drugs, so instead of looking to the fat cat softy boomers as a model you might look to the WWII generation. They rose to the challenges presented to them and prevailed, so maybe you can too.
Yet if you get people notice an issue with alarmist attitude of the World is ending in a decade, that doesn't mean that issue isn't true itself. But naturally just saying "perhaps the issue of world ending in a decade" is a bit of a exaggeration OBVIOUSLY means that you think that there doesn't exist any problem with the issue.
Quoting Bitter Crank
But notice how angry Jake comes if you point out that exploding all the nuclear weapons in the World creates way far less energy (and soot and dust to the upper atmosphere) than did the latest mass extinction event, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. Yeah, obviously just saying that I'm denying that nuclear weapons pose a danger.
There's some kind of calculation to be made, about what's worth doing to preserve or protect, this or that, but that calculation can only be contemplated when there is a surplus. Some places, they just let your house fall into the sea, and call it 'managed retreat'.
We all know the world is going to hell because welfare scroungers, fat cat bankers, corrupt politicians , and boogie men. But imagine, if the reason Trump got elected is because he told people what they wanted to hear - that problems have solutions. That a wall will stop migration, that a dam will stop flooding, that work will prevent poverty, that a pill will make you happy. Imagine that things are not in human control at all. Imagine all these hotshot engineers are just playing sandcastles on the beach.
There's a lot of angry people about, and they all want to be angry at someone. Right now, its doom and gloom snake-oil salesmen. Time for their world domination to end, What say you? How dare they suggest that the human world is falling apart, that the more we try to control the environment, the more unstable it becomes? How dare they suggest that we are not in charge and not in control?
If I were going to bother "proving wrong" every ridiculous or dubious thing that anyone said, that's all I'd be doing 24/7. I'll let a sort of natural selection take care of the insufficiently skeptical as they wind up conned one way or another.
If you have nothing to offer but an unsupported opinion, you have nothing to offer, period. You are not giving anyone a reason to take what you say seriously. Doesn't mean you're wrong, just that your contribution is superfluous.
A side story to make the point. A very very long time ago I worked on a project to improve propeller efficiency in large ships to save fuel. One easy idea was to encase the propeller in a cowl, the physics was easy and predicted a 2 or 3 percent fuel saving. The test tank confirmed the physics. So we installed a few on ships, and did some prolonged sea trials. We could not find any statistical significant fuel savings. There are just too many other variables with a much higher significance in the real world for the minor predicted fuel savings to be measured.
That didn't stop us, we sold them anyway because the engineering was good, and accurate, and buyers would believe, that even though they couldn't measure it, they were still saving 2 or 3 percent of their fuel costs. It was engineered snake oil. And there are thousands of them on ships today.
There is always a gap between real life, and scientifically modeled life. And it rare that we can accurately account for all the consequences of the actions we take in complicated systems. All that said the science of climate change is good, and we should do what we can reasonably do to mitigate and move away from fossil fuels, whether we can or can not accurately measure the impacts, or know all the consequences.
And one aside.
In almost all climate change discussions, an important part is often missing. The availability of cheap energy over the last give or take 100 years may well be most significant thing that has improved the human quality of life planet wide to level unimaginable less than 3 generations ago. Seems there is no free lunch.
If you look at global temperatures for the last million years, you'll notice what climatologists point out: that during the time human civilization appeared, there was an unusual period of climate stability.
So it may be that what we are is so fragile that it can't adapt to even moderate change. There are a lot of flora and fauna like that. Others survive all kinds of change, like frogs. I think the fact that we're adapted to just about everywhere on the planet indicates that physically, we're in the second category. No climatologist sees any reason that the species itself will be threatened by climate change. Whether civilization can also survive is another question. We've never been here before. We have no experience to draw on in making a guess.
It's possible that the climate stability I talked about was only crucial to the first emergence of civilization. Maybe during our happy beginnings, we developed enough power over nature that to some extent, we are masters of our destinies. I lean toward this theory. And I think when archaeologists dig through our graves 1000s of years from now, their picture of the past will include China, but they'll have to piece together who the rest of the world was.
And to the moderators: this is actually on topic, and if you don't understand that, it's because, as you've been doing throughout the whole thread, you're skimming the conversation and jumping to incorrect conclusions. So quit fucking picking on me.
Not to mention that it has nothing whatsoever to do with climate scientists' area of expertise.
But we can't even predict simple sociological phenomena very well, even when we're talking about sociologists making predictions, even when we're making very minor predictions about a very short period of time in the future. The phenomena are too chaotic. There are way too many variables.
Have some airy brain farts.
I don't have any practical skills, so the 'adaptation agenda' in the paper made me want to think about failure points in production and distribution, and what would exacerbate the effects of those failures. An energy crisis maybe could be postponed for a while by switching to nuclear fuel, though the radioactive materials would run out eventually - I find it difficult to imagine a globalised world that doesn't require lots of energy production for its technology. I find such a world desirable to maintain, as the failure to treat the world as our commons seems to me a big factor in why we're unable to address climate change effectively. In an ideal scenario, we have a civilisation that spans the stars, and I believe we need a sufficiently robust (or anti-fragile if you like Taleb) political/economic system to take us there; technology makes nature less cruel to us, it would be a shame if the only viable means for humans to obtain eternity involved having a non-technological, low energy consumptive, highly localised political economy.
Food shortage? There'd probably be need of rationing at some point, which might be an opportunity to undermine the central(ising) role money plays in organising global production if rationing was widespread; though me focussing on this is more about personal ideology than assessments of facts. It is broadly in line with the paper you linked's (very brief and buzzwordy) account of how our political economy makes us unable to address aggregate problems.
Overpopulation and crowding could create localised resource shortages even if production could still provide enough for all to live with basic needs me over a broader geographic area; crowding due to fleeing collapse or shortage is likely to make all the other problems more likely to occur and worse when they do.
Everything's a matter of degree and it's really difficult to get a handle on the aggregate effects of climate change even if we have very precise measurements/models of what changes are driving the effects - Jensen's inequality is a bitch.
Correct. The author of the article explains that he rejects the temperance of a scientific attitude.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Correct. And yet H.G. Wells predicted WW2 with some accuracy. Interestingly, the further away from his own time his predictions get, the more wrong they are.
No no, I think you're putting more effort into your posts in this thread now, and they seem broadly on topic and well considered to me. Though, I am a kind god.
You're a jackass.
I think this is Deeply Shallow. As if nature is not our mother and sustainer. As if we are not the product of nature. It's odd, because this is the trope one more often finds coming from the other side - humans are natural, therefore motor cars are natural. Well indeed, and extinctions are natural. But then nature is not cruel or kind and nothing is better or worse than any other.
Technology allows us to hack nature; literally, technology is a giant machete. We attack our mother with a machete and then accuse her of cruelty. We need to change our mindset at this archetypal level in order to begin to understand what is happening or we will literally go to our self-manufactured extinction still complaining about 'cruel nature'. Technology is the problem. Perhaps technology can be the solution too, but it will take a deep identity change in the hand that wields it.
I don't think it's a sin to believe that technology gives us the opportunity to live better lives. I'm very grateful that when I get ill I can go to a doctor, that we can clean stuff to reduce disease spread, but what I'm most grateful for is the kind of thinking and tinkering that leads to such cumulative betterment. Lives are longer now than ever, so I'll remain optimistic that there is a place for scalpels, microscopes, soap and antibiotics in Eden, and that there's no place in it for cholera and tuberculosis.
Quoting unenlightened
Instrumental rationality gets a bad rep; insofar as it sees nature as just collectable resources, I'm with you in criticising that ideology's deleterious effects. Insofar as people treat large systemic problems like climate change as problems to be worked at within our current political-economic framework with little effort or fundamental organisational change required to solve them, I'm with you in criticising it again.
Humans are historical creatures, we work with tools, we have language; all skill takes to develop incrementally is the tradition allowed by our historicity and the novelty created through our projects. Of course, continued history is required for such development, and that requires we're not all dead. So we have choices to make. Political structures and systems of resource management which facilitate adaptation are technologies in the broad sense. They are simultaneously tools we (and by we I currently mean our betters) choose to use and environments we (the meek) inhabit; I wish we would tinker with our institutions and maybe even our sociality itself with as much passion as the urgency of our situation might require.
Perhaps it's too late, and all we can hope for is that the rot of our civilisation fuels the monied accumulation of resources which destroys the next one. Looting crumbling buildings for precious metals on the new frontier.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Two points: First, our fragility. Take the "wet bulb" relationship between heat and humidity. Humans can not do work and survive outside (literally, die) when high humidity and temperatures above 99ºF combine. We die from heat stroke because we can't dump enough heat through sweating and evaporation. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun; the rest of us stay in the shade.
There are several large food producing areas, like (southern North America, SE Asia, South Asia, etc.) where low elevation, high humidity, and normally high temperatures are going to severely cut into the time people can work outside on food production. That's a problem.
Second, flora and fauna. A lot of plants are pretty tolerant, but there are limits. Food plants (corn, soy, rice, fruit, grains, seed crops, etc.) have been bred to be more tolerant, but there are limitations on how far breeding and yield can go. As for fauna, you've probably heard about the declining insect populations. In some places it's a decline, in others it's a crash. This is a pretty bad harbinger of things to come. Insects are a key part of the biological web; bees aren't the only pollinators, a lot of insects prey on other insects, many birds depend on insects for food, and so on.
The insect population reflects the complexity of environmental problems. Heat, herbicides (eliminating "weeds" that many insects require for food), pesticides (many kinds), mono cropping (whole regions of nothing but corn or soybeans), etc. So it isn't just one thing (like rising global temperatures) that could upset the applecart. It's negative synergism.
True. And climate scientists point out that since for some portion of the next 10,000 years the mean temperature will rise above what it's been since Homo Sapiens came into existence, there may be something we don't see now that could represent an insurmountable challenge to our survival.
And that's true AGW or not. We are headed for extinction. It's just a question of when. And this is my question for you: what does it mean to accept that? Do you find freedom in it? Or are you unable to face it? Or do you go back and forth? Does it relate in some way to contemplation of your personal death?
I've been sunk for about a year in the Bronze Age and the Bronze Age Collapse and that impacts my perspective. I don't think we (the global civilization of the 21st Century) are going to survive. I'm not sure if it's human nature or Nature itself that manifests itself in arcs: birth, youth, old age, and death, but you can see it in civilizations.
It's only been in the last century that we've even realized the sophistication of Bronze Age societies. I imagine it will be like that. We'll be completely forgotten for a time. And then one fine century someone will start digging in the right place to find us, and they'll be soooo amazed. :)
Tinkering sounds so innocent, not like rape at all. My medical hero of the 20th century is President Carter .
No big tech, just good governance and hygiene.
But if you will not admit to sin, try this for a heresy: Human longevity and human happiness are not the beginning and end of virtue. Man is not the measure of all things. but even if he were, science has not arranged the environment all that well for him. Clean water, good sewage, will do most of the work against cholera; clean air, good animal husbandry will do most of the work against tuberculosis. Clean air... now how did the air get dirty?
It's ironic really the scientific and rational education I have been subjected to in this thread in defence of the culture of mass destruction and extinction. As though it is all made up, or if not made up, then unimportant, or if important, easily fixable, or if not fixable, a price worth paying, or if not worth paying...
Science has won, modernism has won, and we snake oil salesmen are laughable - but it is a gallows laugh. I'm just putting it out there, your philosophies are hangovers from a primitive age from the age of childhood tantrums with mother. Time to grow up and start acting responsibly. Mother is old and sick, not very happy with her children, not going to clean up after you any more.
They might be digging with their dextrous six (or horrors, eight) legs. Smart spiders discovering cans of RAID™ designed to kill their forebears. Arachnid rage would incite a pogrom against the intellectually sophisticated, and dexterous rat species, the mammalian princes of the future.
Quoting frank
That is a profound question; it's probably worth a thread of its own, but in that thread we would be back here in a flash, so... there is that.
I'm sort of, kind of, in a way reconciled with my own death. On most days I don't welcome it, but death is our common and inevitable fate. Death could have come decades earlier, so... I'm grateful to be alive today.
I feel... "sad" isn't the word; I feel a great grief that our species might (could... probably will? definitely will?) become extinct. Of course, eventually we would be extinct no matter what--but the extinction related to the dying sun is too far off to worry about. An extinction in the next 500, 1000, or 5000 years--or next week--is grievous unto despair. It is grievous to hear of the last of another ancient species dying, and we do not hear of the thousands of "the last of their kind" that die every year.
There is no protector in the universe charged with preventing extinctions. There have been 5 mass extinction events on this planet that we can't be blamed for. It is likely that mass extinction events occur every day somewhere in the universe. So, that's just...
What I am doing is trying to find a stress-relieving context in which to fold our own species-death. So far I have not been successful.
Good animal husbandry will help prevent the transmission of TB from cows to humans, but unless we apply animal husbandry to the humans who have TB and transmit it to others, checking cows is only part of the solution. I have a very strong preference for fresh, unpolluted air, but clean air doesn't do much to prevent TB transmission. The healthy person sitting next to someone with active TB in fresh, clean air will still get infected -- as soon as they would in dirty air.
Now that we have multi-drug resistant TB, animal husbandry of sick humans is even more important.
What gave you the impression that I was defending it? I appreciate that you are attempting to give me a revelation through rhetoric; I see technology, learning and social organisation strategies being jointly necessary for humanity's welfare - being essential to its development and maintenance. My reading of your posts is that you also posit humanity's welfare as a necessary metric for the same things, but emphasise the suspicions that purely technological interventions will never set the world aright for us again.
You seem to read my veneration of technology and the progress that its successful application can bring as a paradoxical ideal to hold. In one breath it values humanity's survival in the world we all inhabit and share the consequences of, in another it commands the environment of this world to become uninhabitable for us. I imagine that you see my beliefs above as an ideological corpuscle that cannot be separated from the current existential risks the meddling I value so highly has created.
This is a fair point, and I should have emphasised that seeing humanity's welfare as a yardstick for valuation of our collective action must not also treat nature as something exogenous; either as an unmovable reserve of our resources or as a largely antagonistic set of constraints to be overcome. I agree that holding either of these two views, or selling an ideology that requires either, is decidedly suboptimal for humanity's continued development.
However, the emphasis you are placing on seeing nature as neither reserve nor enemy is fully consistent with a perspective that sees both as detrimental to human welfare, while still using human welfare as a system of valuation for our collective actions and attitudes towards nature. In essence, you are selling a promise to improve our chances of survival and development by stopping the rape of nature. I agree with this, it is a useful rhetorical strategy to make nature our beloved codependent whore instead.
But of course, I'm exaggerating the difference I see in our positions, I'm fairly sure that we actually agree on most things but disagree over what ideological framework to use to renegotiate our relationship with nature. You're not being a mystic, you're being a different flavour of sustainability management technician.
Edit: I appreciate your link to the Guinea Worm project, it is always nice to be reminded that human progress does not require firing lasers at everything.
I'm only quoting you because you're the only one talking about the topic. I don't mean to accuse you, and I'm not really even addressing you more than the rest of the world, and mostly myself.
Quoting fdrake
To a large extent, I'm trying on a perspective. As if, we are at the end of something, that might be civilisation, or humanity, or a particular scientistic ideology, as if we (I) realise too late or almost too late that all this (unspecified but sort of understood) is already dead. So that most of our conversations should they survive will look to 'them' like the religious arguments of the scholastics, complex, futile dated, irrelevant. I'm not committed to anything more than an obituary of failed philosophies in all this.
I'd like to make a connection - perhaps it's extravagant.
1. Controlling the environment tends to destabilise it.
2. Controlling the psyche tends to destabilise it.
1. is obvious in this context as to meaning, truth is another matter. As to 2., it is half formed, but think as a maybe-paradigm of the Catholic attempt to control sexuality, and the scandal of child abuse - latest instalment in Australia this week. There must be a mathematics of control systems, but it probably involves strange attractors and does my head in.
I'm quite happy to be accused.
Quoting unenlightened
This makes more sense to me now, thank you for the clarification. It's an interesting topic to think through.
Quoting unenlightened
Something really amazing about how weather prediction models work is that we actually understand the forces that drive the climate pretty well at this point, we're in a position to make very accurate short term predictions. How error is sometimes evaluated in these models, apparently, is that the models are re-run lots of times and the variety of the results informs, say, the probability of raining tomorrow, of attaining a certain temperature and so on. But, the perturbations to the initial parameters in their models that they use to study their modelling error are actually very close the machine precision for their giant supercomputers. As in, a change in an observation of temperature by 10^-16, 10^-32 or 10^-64 degrees; which is about the same proportion (or much smaller for the last two) of a meter to an atomic nucleus; can quite rapidly result in huge differences in expected behaviour under the model.
I think this suggests that actually modelling the climate with incredible precision is actually wrongheaded when trying to think in the long term; we shouldn't be thinking about % impacts on wheat yields in the long term. For long term planning, we should be trying to curtail exposure - how much is at risk and what are its effects. Rather than counting human lives saved by a policy or precisely how much starvation will occur, I believe it makes more sense to try and create systems of political economy that are less sensitive to perturbation; ones with broader comfort zones and more levers to pull to keep things within that zone. I doubt it is possible to design a social system in the aggregate which actually likes the disorder associated with its necessities, or at least I find it inconceivable. Humans are fragile, and we shouldn't ideally have political-economic structures that allow highly correlated failure over all their components. Such organisation makes the extremes that will eventually come lethal, rather than 'just' a huge setback.
There’s something about your first post that I didn’t like, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Now I realise that it’s the whole issue of fear. The stakes may be very high and you and others may feel that fear, as a last resort, is called for. But I don’t want to have our problems addressed through the lens of fear. There are probably a long list of reasons for this position, but my main concern is how can anyone think and act rationally under the shadow of fear.
It’s probably true that there are some out there who can function under fear, and I suppose those are the ones who might make the decisions. But then again I don’t like the idea of those decisions being removed from me and being made on my behalf. Because if I’m living under fear I can’t even be sure about their position, about the quality of their decisions. How can we think theses things through then vote under these conditions.
This reminds me a little of the fear ramped up during the Cold War, until children were taught to hide under school desks and families bought their own nuclear bunkers. The insanity was high then and this doesn’t look so different.
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was, indeed, pretty crazy -- and did it ever go away? Not much. Whether the Soviets were going to attack us or not, and regardless of how many bombs they did or did not have, we all had been led to believe they were wicked enough to trigger MAD. (We were just as likely to trigger MAD, and we had more bombs.) At the time it made sense for the citizen to take note of where the public fall out shelters were, whether they were ready, or whether their own basement would suffice.
If I had left out the word ‘insanity’ how would you have responded to my post?
What’s disturbing is that we have children believing that the world is going to end in ten years.
I say this because, over and above the psychological and emotional difficulties people would likely face in seriously attempting to entertaining the idea, there is the greater difficulty that the exact form and duration of such a hypothetical collapse, as well as the aberrant human behavior that would seem likely to be manifested in a such a situation are incalculable.
Add to that the fact that if everyone believed that societal collapse is imminent, it would probably become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and so in light of all that I can't see much value in the article. Academics are not always the best judges of human emotion and psychology.
The fear of getting nuked at that time was real enough (I remember it). Some people called the situation insane, the anti nuclear warfare people (SANE not an acronym, for a change) in particular (Bertrand Russell was one). The rank and file weren't insane for being worried; it was the military industrial political elite that were insane.
I'm not sure how many people think the world is going to end in 10 years -- not too many, I would guess. It wouldn't be insane of someone to think that -- it might be merely premature or slightly neurotic to think that today. What is INSANE is the world's corporate/government elites being unwilling to make the necessary decisions to seriously cut CO2 emissions rather than just slowing the growth rate.
I would have thought the two go hand in hand. It would seem you can't seriously cut CO2 emissions without seriously slowing the growth rate, and you probably can't seriously slow the growth rate without seriously cutting CO2 emissions.
What if the corporate/ government elites have plans in place (regardless of how misguided or ineffective those plans might be) to save themselves and their families and friends from any coming catastrophe?
It's like the twin scientistic fantasies of extending human life indefinitely and traveling to the stars; even if they ever came to fruition, it would most probably only ever be for a tiny elite.
I guess it depends where you live, but the time that I am reminded of is more the thirties. Nobody wants to know that a war is coming there is an angry divisive atmosphere comprised of mixed fear and despair, the rise of Fascism and much wild indulgence.
But whether anyone likes the tone is no concern to me. Fear might be appropriate, but is singularly ineffective. Fear leads to bigger walls to keep out the dreaded migrants and the greedy stockpiling of the preppers. Fear leads to the anointing of Elon Musk as saviour of humanity - fear personified. Fear is already dominating, and doesn't need my little thread.
If you take this seriously, fear is ended, and grief can begin. It is way too late for acting rationally, even if such a thing were philosophically conceivable. Indeed it is the fantasy of rationality that has lead us to the extreme of debating here in all seriousness, with scientific rigour and appropriate format references, the possibility of our having already contrived our own destruction. And what was it you thought was insane, again?
So the plans that you have been making on the assumption that everything will go on as before, need some adjustment. It's not worth making plans. What is still important?
And here, especially for Brett, is the thread theme song.
Why for me?
What percentage of the population would you use as evidence that fear is already dominating?
Oh here's a factoid. 1.5 million people were internally displaced in the US in 2017.
http://www.internal-displacement.org/countries/united-states
I'll use them as evidence of something
However, ‘fear is already dominating ’ was not answered.
Of course this is not a logical decision, it’s not even based on data and analysis, it’s a scenario individuals chose to live by. It’s a psychological decision that reveals everything about the individual. Of course some people might be lying when they say they chose to respond positively, who can know? Who can know if someone going with ‘inevitable collapse’ isn’t also lying, or doesn’t even know why they would chose such a thing, or doesn’t even know what they’re saying, being an irrational condition.
Evidence of fear.
1. Wall building, border closing, troop mobilising, defence spending.
2. Intolerance of dissent, polarisation, hate speech.
3. 'Strengthening', meaning callousness, authoritarianism, nationalism.
In the UK, the mantra of "strong and stable" has become a horrible joke. But I'm not in the business of researched analysis, merely of hand-waving gestures you can take or leave, according to whatever criteria you wish to call rational.
We all know with certainty we're going to die, so what is it that we do now as we march toward our death? Why should the remote possibility of starvation caused by flooding be more concerning than the real possibility of cancer or being struck by a car?
But should I accept your premises that (1) the end is nigh and (2) it's too late or just impossible to repair, then what I ought to do is stockpile food, fuel, and an arsenal. I should prepare as the preppers do. Since you reject those who treat your concerns as folly, what else would be reasonable? It seems the only solution left the way you've presented it.
They called Noah a fool until the rain started falling, so let's take note and start building now.
Yes. It's surprisingly (to me) popular, and I assume that is a prudential, rational 'ought' you're deploying. I, of course disagree, that this is at all a sensible response, for reasons that are discussed in the article, and will be familiar to Noah, who in my opinion was well advised to take his eco-system with him into the ark, instead of extra crates of destructive power.
I’ve reread your first post and I take note of your “hand-waving gestures”. Which is, I guess, “just putting this out there”. Is that right? You threw a hand grenade into the room.
Is this your question? I mean is this the point you’re trying to make?
If we’re mentioning Noah, are we talking about after the flood?
The earliest reference to the notion that burning coal might eventually lead to global warming was 1912, I think. A century later, the might has become definite, the eventually has become currently, and consequences are becoming inescapable. I didn't throw the hand grenade into the room, I merely mentioned it was there. Don't shoot the messenger. I don't really want to ague the toss about whether we will start calling it a catastrophe in 2030, or 2050, or whether the global psyche can be fairly characterised as fearful or angry or anything else at this time.
Quoting Brett
Yes. That is the question I am asking myself and the paper is asking itself Given a future social collapse and environmental collapse, and assuming that unlike Hanover you don't think that littering the countryside with arms dumps and food caches is the solution, what will help, what is worth doing?
I'm a wee bit surprised that no one has taken the monastic view, that in the dark ages, one must hunker down in an abstemious cooperative community dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. The wonderful tech that everyone is so attached to. I'm a wee bit surprised that so few people are even able to consider the idea without accusing me of terrorism, or some other madness.
I wasn’t intending to shoot the messenger. I just wanted to clarify your intention.
This is interesting.
The way this thread has gone, you would think that no one has ever considered something bad happening except religious nuts.
EDIT: someone already has! Cool! http://www.worldservice.org
This is encouraging! :up:
I see your point, but who has considered these things? Can we read about what they achieved or concluded? Where? The paper linked in the OP is the first of its kind that I've seen. You say others have considered these matters, but who and where are they?
Yes, I don't (especially) want to sound like a raving commie (:joke:) or anything, but the underlying theme here is that capitalism has destroyed the world. By encouraging consumption for its own sake, it has caused our demands for wealth to exceed the ability of our environment to provide it. Continuous-growth economics? An eco-joke in poor taste, and an impossibility, given a finite environment.
Actually it did. We're now in the situation that the US and Russia don't have SO many nuclear weapons that they can literally destroy every city as they did before. We have come down from 60 000 nuclear warheads to 10 000 nukes. And this is actually makes things more dangerous. Even more dangerous when you take in the new Russian doctrine of "nuclear de-escalation" meaning de-escalating a conflict situation by using nuclear weapons. In 1993 the Russian doctrine allowed the first use of nuclear weapons only when the “existence of the Russian Federation”, it changed in 2000 to Russia reserving "the right to use nuclear weapons to respond to all weapons of mass destruction attacks” on Russia and its allies. And now it has come to "in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to the national security of the Russian Federation.”
Hence Putin thinks using nukes will calm the US down. Now that ought to sound pretty crazy and dangerous!
Quoting unenlightened
Well, I'm not looking for reasons why the future cannot be known, just reminding that the human species is quite adaptable and if draughts, hurricanes and political turmoil happen, they aren't anything new to us. But if I understood the game correctly, here's my plans:
a) Likely have to build a new sauna that is now on the waterfront of the sea. (I assume a lot of countries will look at how the Dutch have used dams in their country.)
b) Go visit sub-Saharan Africa or places that are still safe... before they perhaps they collapse to be similar places of anarchy as Somalia or Libya nowdays. Or to see Antarctica in it's present state.
c) Enjoy now the nice Finnish winter with lots of snow. It might turn into the dismal English winter later (except if the Gulf Stream stops, then welcome Alaskan climate).
d) If mankind cannot find solutions to the problem, like it seems to have found for Peak Oil (at least to avoid a rapid total collapse), then let's hope enough volcanoes erupt to protect us from global warming. (Yellowstone erupting might be too much though...)
Solution. Quoting bert1
Thesis.
The crisis has been brought about by not enough intelligence, not enough government, not enough humans deciding what they want.
Is it possible that more cleverness, more decision making, and more planning is not the answer? Is it possible that when heading for the cliff, either a change of direction or stopping entirely is more what's needed? Go to the world government website, and there is a quote from Einstein. Einstein has the answers, Einstein for president. This touching faith in the puissance of great men, is - shall we just say, 'a religious impulse'?
Anyway, here's the updated theme tune courtesy of @fdrake, moving us on a little from the angry hippy phase, when a change of mind still seemed possible.
I have a bad cold and feel terrible, so Yellowstone can go ahead and blow up. I'm ready to get it over with. Will it be too much? Dunno. The last time it covered a good share of the great plains with a thick layer of volcanic ejecta. Would stuffing a large H bomb down Old Faithful's throat trigger it?
GO YELLOWSTONE!
It's a kind of soul-feeding misanthropy. The roots of it go down past where I can see, so I know it's beyond my control. It's a force of nature. Nature itself stirs within us to make us fear ourselves. One of the passing clouds in this landscape is the notion that if we fear the worst, maybe we can defend ourselves from it before it's too late. Another darker cloud is that the greatest, bloodiest drama gives a human face to the Great Threat. This is a thread that runs through Christianity and back to some shaman vomiting blood in spasms of lamentation, as the tribe watches spellbound.
But yes, for the most part, the American Bison might have gone the way of the mammoth and the African elephant today: squished around tiny dwindling waterholes, unable to adapt. Science frees the mind of superstition.
Why is World government seen as the answer? Is an extremely centralized authority global problems the answer? Has it been? Is it politically viable? Is a centralized authority the best way to tackle a difficult complex problems? And is a theoretical physicist the best political leader?
Why isn't cooperation between independent countries seen as a clever answer? Many times best solutions have come from surprising innovations from surprising places, not something that a centralized authority has thought to be the thing needed.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Ah, and think about what great time the media would have with it. People would be glued to the televisions, laptops and smartphones...
Anyway, I had "a traumatic experience" in my youth with volcanoes. I was living as a child in Seattle and my father took me to a trip to Florida. For a boy in 2nd grade Disney World and John F. Kennedy space Center were simply awesome. I even saw a huge fire started from race riots in Miami as we were on the runway leaving the place. Our flight from Dallas was cancelled and so we had to stay for the night in Dallas. I saw this huge thunderstorm with lightning everywhere from revolving restaurant top off a skyscraper. I was all eager to tell my schoolmates what awesome things I had experienced.
None of them listened to me at all. All they talked about how they had waken up early on Sunday on the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens. Nothing can compare to waking up to AN EXPLODING VOLCANO. We lived in the place called View Ridge, which had direct sight to the mountain, hence all the talk was how huge an awesome the sights and sounds were. When I came there, the first explosion clouds had already drifted to the east (Seattle had no ash fall). Yes, erupting volcanoes are simply awesome.
If Yellowstone blows up, I'll congratulate you on how lucky we are to live in historical times...
No I don't think so. World government is not something we have tried before. A system is a saviour for a time. A world-size problem needs a world-size system. Not doing this is exactly to keep running towards the cliff edge.
One could argue that the problem is not external but internal - individual self-control is ultimately the only proper answer to any problem. But this would take imminent metanoia en masse of company ceos, voting populations, oligarchs and dictators, which on statistical grounds alone seems unlikely.
My invocation of an AI is just a practical suggestion which may not be a good one. If the massive changes to global society is to be effected with miminum loss of life and minimising suffering, the calculations involved in figuring out what to grow where and how to distribute food and energy and whatnot would be horribly complex.
What do you think constitutes not continuing to run towards the cliff edge?
Well the idea I'm playing with is to suppose that science and reason has created a problem and cannot solve it, because there is no reason to stop. Humans are stuck in a multi-billion way prisoner's dilemma where every individual's best interests lead them to continue towards the cliff, in a vast game of chicken. Perhaps there would be still time, if we stopped, but we are not going to stop, because those who stop are already being trampled by those who won't. So the preppers in their reasonable insanity are stockpiling, grabbing what they can, building their fences and bunkers, and that is obviously the sensible thing to do, given the imminent cliff. Bunkers will not be open to the general public.
People hate getting upstaged by volcanoes. The nerve! I feel for you. It must have been a crushing experience.
I thought that large numbers of buffalo were wantonly shot -- and not slaughtered, maybe just skinned for their hides -- as a way of depriving the plains Indians of food. Is that true? Don't know for sure at this moment.
The biggest danger for humanity and the species being brought to endangerment and extinction by us seems to lie in the idea that the natural world is merely a bunch of resources for us to use as we see fit, and the associated assumption that when the resources being currently consumed have run out or become too difficult or costly to source, human ingenuity will always find new ways to exploit yet-to-be discovered resources that will enable us to get out of any pickle we may find ourselves in.
It doesn't seem to be generally acknowledged that without Christianity and fossil fuels there probably would not have been an industrial revolution and the ensuing explosive growth of science and technology with all the benefits and problems they have brought. For a fascinating study of this and other related issues, see The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent. :smile:
Could have been partly that, but I think that the buffalo's land was wanted for cattle, competition for the grass. The best way to take their land is to kill them. Kill two birds with one stone?
Make long term plans because Dr Jem Bendell doesn't speak for anyone else but himself. Bottom line, how many educated individuals are predicting societal collapse within 10 years?
Even worse, how accurate has previous doomsday predictions been? (I'm looking at you Al Gore!).
This thread will not age well.
The obvious question, to me, leading on from this, is what do we need? What is it we should take with us through to the other side and what should we leave behind? Who do we want to be?
That’s my understanding, too. Though in the end it makes no difference why they did it.
The nice people who set up the Svalbad seed bank chose to assume an ecological disaster. They don't look silly because one hasn't happened, any more than having a fire alarm looks silly unless you have a fire. They do look a bit silly because their precaution looks inadequate. Frankly, the argument that it is silly to consider disaster unless it has happened is so fatuous as to look insane. It is the complete opposite of the rational precautionary approach that science and industry takes in every other field.
Thank you for your kind words, Bitter Crank. :smile:
And no one has made that argument. Everyone agrees the world could end tomorrow. No one disputes your right to believe it will happen whenever. If people reject your invitation to join you in this belief, there's nothing at all wrong with that and you aren't owed any justification for that rejection.
Indeed not. and your right to not discuss the topic of the thread is fully acknowledged on my part. Indeed I wish quite a few people who do not wish to had availed themselves of the option, and also not found it necessary to inform me at length and in detail of their rights and wishes.
It seems to me that climate change is the thing that will do it. The cost of fighting it will be high, something that will be passed on to the consumer/citizen. Decisions about what we want as opposed to what we need will have to be made. Where will our wages go: in paying for energy or paying for a pair of torn jeans?
The cost of ignoring it will have virtually the same impact.
So my earlier question of who we want to be will be answered by what is available, what can be sustain, what’s lost and what’s gained. This is evolution in action, right?
There's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that planting trees can no longer save us
[i]Rob Ludacer, Jessica Orwig
Business Insider
Oct 2018[/i]
Alarmist panic isn't helping anything/one.
Being informed is a good first step, though.
Haven't noticed much of that, fortunately, aside from the wall building, migrant hating, xenophobia. But I suspect it will manifest right along with the food shortages. You can't panic while starving though - it will be those that still have food that will panic.
Yeah, they'll panic, as they sit there stuffing their faces, while the hordes prepare to attack. Wall building is itself already an act of panic.
From here.
@jorndoe Being informed isn't helping anything until it informs some action. I'm not the definitive expert, but the standard list of easy stuff that us ordinary folks can do is along the lines of, insulate your home, put up solar panels if suitable or other passive heating, stop flying, eat less meat, and eat more local produce, especially fresh produce that is likely to be flown, use public transport, live near your work, recycle, reuse, and reject manufactured and false needs (eg fashion), grow something, set up some insect houses. Let's get to it!
:up:
Quoting unenlightened
:up:
Already on it.
A World Without Clouds
Natalie Wolchover
Quanta Magazine
Feb 2019
Really? I think that the only significant way in which the doomsday (climate-change) predictions have failed is in when they will occur. They start off saying 'by the end of the century', or something like that, but it happens before the end of the decade. Doomsday really is here, but our momentum prevents us from seeing it, even though it is already too late.
I think you basically answered your own question. The idea that the Bison were brought to extinction by Europeans must be "soul-feeding misanthropy", but apparently, the contrary view that climate change might be responsible is a "great realization".
Opinion on scientifically difficult topics varies, and does so for good reason. Confirming what we already know is boring and doesn't get published, overturning what we thought we knew is exciting and, with luck, will make the main press, certainly secure the next research grant.
It was a shock to learn just how much damage humans have done to the planet, now it's old news and the only thing that is going to get published is anything that indicates it might not have been us afterall.
So, maybe you're right about the soul-feeding misanthropy of presuming we're to blame for everything, but don't be so naive as to think that evidence we're not is any less psychologically motivated.
The Little Ice Age doesn't prove that humans didn't wipe out the massive herds of bison that once spanned much of North America. It only provides an alternative explanation. When the bison disappeared, no one was there to collect data, so all we can do is speculate. My realization was that I'm prone to jumping to certainty without any good foundation.
So I realized what you apparently have also realized: beware of hidden bias.
Yes, fair enough, "not" was only a rhetorical device to make my sentence shorter.
Quoting frank
I was using (misusing, it would seem) that quote as a summary of your wider argument about the tendency toward morose self-flagellation.
Your writing seems to very much express the sentiment that such doom-and-gloom mongers are bewitched by this state of mind, whereas 'reality' is not so anthropocentric in its allocation of disaster-makers. I'm arguing that it's not so much self-flagellation as just publication bias. Yesterday it was shocking (and so publishable) to hear that humans caused the Bison extinction, today its shocking (and so publishable) to learn we didn't, or not so much.
It's tempting to think the truth lies somewhere in between, but that's just another psychological bias, the idea that permanent fence-sitting automatically makes one wiser than those on either side.
Could be. But are you telling me what my experience has been instead of asking me? To ask requires dwelling in a state of unknowing. I think ideal science spends a certain amount of time there.
No, I'm conjecturing an explanation for it. If you say you experience day and night, I'm not being presumptive in suggesting it's because the world is going round.