The Inconvenient Truth of Modern Civilization’s Inevitable Collapse
I have been studying environmental and sociopolitical news for nearly the past two decades, particularly as it pertains to the life cycle of modern civilization:
"...These disturbing headlines indicate to me that the Sixth Mass Extinction is gathering pace and the real stock market underlying our very existence and survival is crashing before our eyes!!! Humans are recreating the past extinction known as The Great Dying, perhaps at a much faster pace and definitely at many more human-forced levels that leave no ecosystem on Earth intact. By orders of magnitude, the human endeavor has grown much too large for the Earth to support; climate change, plastic pollution, and biodiversity loss are just a few of the symptoms of this global ecological overshoot..."
We are following the growth, decline, and death cycle that any organism or civilization goes through when it finds a rich energy resource to exploit and eventually overshoots its environment's carrying capacity, this time on a global scale. Essentially all organisms will expand their population to the maximum that available resources allow. Environmental constraints are beginning to bite, outstripping our technology's capacity to overcome them. According to the study 'Limits to Growth', human population should level off and begin to decline around 2030 with complete collapse of modern civilization happening some time around mid century. In Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, William Ophuls wrote:
“Civilization is trapped in a thermodynamic vicious circle from which escape is well nigh impossible. The greater a civilization becomes, the more the citizens produce and consume—but the more they produce and consume, the larger the increase in entropy. The longer economic development continues, the more depletion, decay, degradation, and disorder accumulate in the system as a whole, even if it brings a host of short-term benefits. Depending on a variety of factors—the quantity and quality of available resources, the degree of technological and managerial skill, and so forth—the process can continue for some time but not indefinitely. At some point, just as in the ecological realm, a civilization exhausts its thermodynamic “credit” and begins to implode.”
Nothing lasts forever. For modern man to have extended his reign would have required a herculean exercise in self-control and sacrifice for long-term gain and good —not a natural proclivity of humans. Notice that I said "would have," because it is far too late to reverse what has been set into motion. The Earth cannot even begin to reach a new climate state until humans stop emitting the roughly 40 to 50 gigatonnes of CO2 per annum and stop altering and destroying global ecosystems. Climate change might as well not be real to humans because we have literally done nothing to stop it even though we knew it was real for decades and even suspected it to be real for far longer when Svante Arrhenius published this paper in 1897. The Fossil Fuel Age would not be stopped by any scientific consensus on climate change. There were profits to be had. The wonders of plastic were coming to fruition. And consumer capitalism was spreading throughout the globe. Humans even reset in their minds what they perceive as normalcy in their environment, accepting the ever-shifting baseline of anthropogenic climate change.
When renowned paleoclimatologist Lee Kump was asked whether comparisons to today's global warming and that of past mass extinctions are really appropriate, he ominously said, “Well, the rate at which we’re injecting CO2 into the atmosphere today, according to our best estimates, is ten times faster than it was during the End-Permian. And rates matter. So today we’re creating a very difficult environment for life to adapt, and we’re imposing that change maybe ten times faster than the worst events in Earth’s history.” Four of the last five mass extinction events were preceded by a disruption of the carbon cycle. All the conditions that existed in previous extinctions now exist plus novel new ones created by man, and they’re worse than ever. The stable Holocene climate which has allowed mankind to flourish is coming to a close and with it we may be going as well.
"...These disturbing headlines indicate to me that the Sixth Mass Extinction is gathering pace and the real stock market underlying our very existence and survival is crashing before our eyes!!! Humans are recreating the past extinction known as The Great Dying, perhaps at a much faster pace and definitely at many more human-forced levels that leave no ecosystem on Earth intact. By orders of magnitude, the human endeavor has grown much too large for the Earth to support; climate change, plastic pollution, and biodiversity loss are just a few of the symptoms of this global ecological overshoot..."
We are following the growth, decline, and death cycle that any organism or civilization goes through when it finds a rich energy resource to exploit and eventually overshoots its environment's carrying capacity, this time on a global scale. Essentially all organisms will expand their population to the maximum that available resources allow. Environmental constraints are beginning to bite, outstripping our technology's capacity to overcome them. According to the study 'Limits to Growth', human population should level off and begin to decline around 2030 with complete collapse of modern civilization happening some time around mid century. In Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, William Ophuls wrote:
“Civilization is trapped in a thermodynamic vicious circle from which escape is well nigh impossible. The greater a civilization becomes, the more the citizens produce and consume—but the more they produce and consume, the larger the increase in entropy. The longer economic development continues, the more depletion, decay, degradation, and disorder accumulate in the system as a whole, even if it brings a host of short-term benefits. Depending on a variety of factors—the quantity and quality of available resources, the degree of technological and managerial skill, and so forth—the process can continue for some time but not indefinitely. At some point, just as in the ecological realm, a civilization exhausts its thermodynamic “credit” and begins to implode.”
Nothing lasts forever. For modern man to have extended his reign would have required a herculean exercise in self-control and sacrifice for long-term gain and good —not a natural proclivity of humans. Notice that I said "would have," because it is far too late to reverse what has been set into motion. The Earth cannot even begin to reach a new climate state until humans stop emitting the roughly 40 to 50 gigatonnes of CO2 per annum and stop altering and destroying global ecosystems. Climate change might as well not be real to humans because we have literally done nothing to stop it even though we knew it was real for decades and even suspected it to be real for far longer when Svante Arrhenius published this paper in 1897. The Fossil Fuel Age would not be stopped by any scientific consensus on climate change. There were profits to be had. The wonders of plastic were coming to fruition. And consumer capitalism was spreading throughout the globe. Humans even reset in their minds what they perceive as normalcy in their environment, accepting the ever-shifting baseline of anthropogenic climate change.
When renowned paleoclimatologist Lee Kump was asked whether comparisons to today's global warming and that of past mass extinctions are really appropriate, he ominously said, “Well, the rate at which we’re injecting CO2 into the atmosphere today, according to our best estimates, is ten times faster than it was during the End-Permian. And rates matter. So today we’re creating a very difficult environment for life to adapt, and we’re imposing that change maybe ten times faster than the worst events in Earth’s history.” Four of the last five mass extinction events were preceded by a disruption of the carbon cycle. All the conditions that existed in previous extinctions now exist plus novel new ones created by man, and they’re worse than ever. The stable Holocene climate which has allowed mankind to flourish is coming to a close and with it we may be going as well.
Comments (53)
So I see you are working hard to change minds. And I see you are not optimistic. Is there something else you'd like to do while we await our annihilation?
So 2050, 31 years from now is the end of times? I'll mark it on my calendar along with all the other end of times predictions that have come and gone.
I don't know the exact date the rotten tree leaning over my house will fall. But that doesn't mean I should ignore it. I don't understand this weird smugness about other people not guessing correctly.
https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-media-humanitarian-crises/
Is the book worth buying? If one is well informed about this stuff already, no. Wallace-Wells pulls the familiar (and occasionally unfamiliar) information together and makes a range of generally depressing projections. As a gift to a friend or relative who thinks there is nothing to worry about, the book might be helpful, but it is just as likely to cause a mental shutdown of cognitive dissonance.
The book preaches to the choir of doom. That's not a bad thing, just that for the already well-informed, the cost of the book might better be spent on alcohol.
One response is to dismiss the threat -- Hanover. A second response is to propose all sorts of solutions which amount to magical thinking (many of us). A third response is to contemplate our demise (some of us). The difference in the three responses has nothing to do with intelligence or technical acumen. It's personality. Hanover in Hell would see opportunities. Unenlightened in Eden would see problems. These aren't flaws. Hanover can't help being Hanover, no more than Bitter Crank can help being Bitter Crank, or Unenlightened being Unenlightened.
And religiosity, which is probably a personality trait as well.
That's what I thought when I first saw An Inconvenient Truth. My hunch was that liberal democracies would not rise to the challenge, because it is such a difficult problem, and the science is too hard to understand. And I was correct.
Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, for about 3 years there was a consensus in Australian politics that it had to be tackled, and there was bi-partisan support for at least some kind of action (even if pretty weak). Then in 2009, the conservative faction of the Liberal Party (then in opposition) overthrew their then-leader entirely on the basis of his agreement with the then Labor PM's climate policy. They then introduced a disgraceful scare campaign, that a carbon tax was a 'great big new tax on everything', and rubbished the basic idea of climate change. This same politician then became PM, and completely dismantled a successfully-introduced carbon tax, which was doing exactly what it was intended to do, namely, bring emissions down, and introduced some half-arsed scheme to 'plant lots of trees'. Since then, emissions have started rising again.
The same politician who did all that (Tony Abbott) gave a speech in London recently where he compared climate change science to 'sacrificing goats to the mountain gods'. And the same politician who had been rolled by him as Opposition Leader, namely, Malcolm Turnbull, was deposed as Prime Minister last September, also over energy policy and climate change. So it's been a complete and utter shambles, a total failure to come to terms with the problem.
Just as I thought it would be.
Another problem that prevents action is that ordinary individuals can not individually do anything that will make a difference. We are encouraged to recycle. I do, faithfully, but as far as the difference it makes: pfffft. If we all did the same sensible and strategic things, say all 3 billion people in the industrialized world, that would make a big difference. When was the last time such a thing happened?
Probably 100,000 wealthy, powerful movers, shakers, and not clearly benevolent overlords could bring about drastic changes in short order if they so chose. They are not so choosing at this point.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is, indeed, really scary.
Politicians and the wealthy are not going to solve the problem because it is not in their short term interests to do so.
The same goes for the populace. The problem is that hardly anyone is prepared to sacrifice their precious lifestyles (including me, of course!) even to a small extent. We want to continue to drive our cars and fly overseas, and purchase foods and other goods from other countries, buy from supermarkets because it's cheaper and more convenient, enjoy the benefits of modern health care, cheap goods that are cheap on account of outsourced slave labour, and so on and on.
The "100,00 wealthy, powerful movers, shakers, and clearly not benevolent overlords" only exist because we keep buying their shit and/or voting for them.
Also, people become cynical when they discover that figures like AL Gore not only don't want to give up an ordinary more or less prosperous lifestyle, but live far more extravagantly than the average. Gore lives on a large estate and flies a private jet, which makes him look like a hypocrite.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/2/al-gores-nashville-estate-expends-21-times-more-en/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/06/29/is-al-gore-a-fossil-fuel-industry-mole/#253201f0d150
The truth is that most governments have an official policy which is in accord with accepting the climate science, but democratically elected governments would lose their corporate support and be voted out if they took any actions which were adequate responses to the actual situation.
The real problem is that the populace cannot achieve any coordinated action because, for example, they are not educated, or they don't care, or they are cynical when they see the hypocrisy of figures like Gore, or they have given up in despair of having any effective political voice.
Many, if not most, of the strategies that are ostensibly designed to ameliorate global warming and pollution in general are really exercises in public relations, and amount to no more than paying lip service to the need to do (or more accurately, to be seen to do) something "green". For example as @xraymike79 indicates below "recycling is a sham".
True and this has been proven in research papers and real life:
An Inconvenient Truth: Does Responsible Consumption Benefit Corporations More Than Society?
We're dealing with the superstructure of capitalist industrial civilization which cannot be reformed.
Plus recycling is a sham:
'Moment of reckoning': US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports
Plastic pollution: One town smothered by 17,000 tonnes of rubbish
Our waste problem has become a gargantuan, globe-trotting catastrophe!! :(
Climate protection and environment preservation change would still have been painful, but it would have been doable without brutal suffering the world over. It's the difference between abrasions on the elbows, knees, and face and perforations of the skull, chest, and abdomen.
So now we don't have 50 years for a graceful transition.
My city and county collect trash, recyclable paper, glass, metal, and plastic, yard waste and compostable kitchen waste (which includes paper towels and tissues). Composting turns kitchen and yard waste into a product that gets used for landscaping (particularly highway landscaping and parks). Trash is burned for the most part, as is recyclable material for which there is little demand. At one time the recycling operation could sell most of what they collected. Much less so now.
The big municipal incinerator generates steam for the downtown Minneapolis area -- heating and hot water. At least some of the garbage goes for a good cause. The city says it is a safe operation, but I would not buy a house near it. It doesn't stink, at least. Does the incinerator produce toxic waste products? Of course. You can't burn garbage and plastics without producing at least some toxic products coming out of the stack.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-deadly-choices-at-memorial-826
Might even be worth a separate thread to discuss the morality of collapse...
1. Make alternatives more affordable.
2. Prompts people to come up with alternatives
For example as price rises solar and wind power more affordable then co2
Secondly we have no clue why the earth is warming up.
Because you're not talking about a rotten limb hanging over your fence that is obviously going to fall fairly soon and that is going to predictably damage a few slats from your fence.
You're speculating about the end of the world, which has been something that has been going on since the beginning of the world. Call me smug, but you seem to also be calling me blissfully ignorant. What value is there is my fretting with you about something you declare inevitable, regardless of what we do about it?
My prediction is that you will spend your life worrying about something that will have minimal impact in your life. You're going to be fine, but if you're not, it won't be because the climate failed you. It will be because of war, poor government policy, heart disease, or a drunk driver. Think of all the time you might spend worrying about the floods that are coming only to be hit by a freight train and not being able to see the end of the world you were predicting.
That's a flippant and facile way to dismiss a prediction. Of course you must be familiar with the story of the boy who cried "wolf". No doubt superficial thinkers will dismiss any dire prediction with the same blithe disregard as the people in that story dismissed the boy's cry for help.
I'll go ahead and mark it down for you since...well...add another 31 years to your current age and lifestyle and do you realistically come up with the idea that you will still be living? :pray:
Anyway, we innovated our way into this set of problems and we as Americans will be challenged, accept the challenge and innovate our way out of this one too.
We have to remain nimble and able to morph in order to thrive not just survive.
I predict the world will be around in 40 years, and I chastise you twice the amount you chastised me for flippantly rejecting a prediction.
A Problem might be that there is very little new to say about the problem, and a philosophy forum isn't necessarily the best place to look for expertise on how to deal with the ecological crisis.
There is little reason to hope that world leaders, be they democratically elected or not, will take any steps with serious side effects until significant and visible damage has occurred. The same is, broadly speaking, true for individual lifestyle changes. The only viable way to improve those chances is individual activism. So, we should all campaign, actively and seriously, for major policy changes. But will we? And where do we go for the right policies to campaign for?
Well ever since the 70's I have been exploring and advocating 'alternatives' in eduction, food production and distribution, and housing. There is no expertise, and there is no solution. It is easy enough to theorise what 'we' could do, but, 'we' are not going to do it, for reasons I already mentioned. There is something new (to me, anyway) to say, that has to come out of the shock of despair. But because I don't want to confuse this thread, or by any means discourage folks from campaigning, and changing their lifestyles as best they can, I have taken that response to a new thread.
It might possibly have been, except that you seemed determined to run off anybody who might have actually understood the threat posed by climate change. You get that climate change is going to be socially disruptive, but you haven't thought through what that entails. The real threat is not climate change, but our reaction to climate change. The real threat, as usual, is us.
Climate change (generated by us) is a real threat, and so we are a real threat insofar as we created it and are unwilling or unable to do anything to halt it or even ameliorate its effects by slowing down population and economic growth and exploitation of resources.
Colonizing Mars and the moon - in part - will be interesting events to kick-off into the next century. I cannot imagine what kind of problems we’ll have to deal with and how our self-engineering will alter us as a species even more than it already has. It’s truly an amazing and exciting revolution we’re living in and I for one embrace and welcome the changes and dificulties that will come our way.
The one thing I am reasonably sure about is the decline of the idea of “nation”. I think globally we’re starting to see the protest of this decline voiced in some political spheres. As the ease fo instant communication becomes more easy, and languages more widespread, the sense of national identities will slowly wane ... no idea what will fill this possible void though.
Imho, the real threat is how we will react to climate driven changes to the status quo, and less so the change itself.
The actual changes to the climate are unfolding quickly in historic terms, but still we're talking in terms of years, decades, centuries. Our reaction to climate driven social change could crash civilization literally within a few hours.
Modern urban civilization is very fragile. As just one example, the average urban dweller (most of humanity now) knows little about obtaining food other beyond swiping a credit card at the grocery store. Any source of stress which threatens the highly complex human food supply chain can lead to mass chaos within days.
Climate change could indeed be the deciding source of stress, but there are other more immediate potential sources, such as a 2008 style collapse of the financial system which isn't successfully managed.
I agree and disagree. Immediately, for sure, as the cliche has it nowhere is more than about three meals away from chaos and insurrection. It is not hard to imagine a Syrian type disintegration in Europe, the US, etc. And then add nuclear weapons and unknown biological and chemical weapons to that, and the immediate may be all that there will be.
But supposing there are human survivors, and that life itself survives, that is when engagement with climate change really begins.
:lol:
If you get a diagnosis of cancer, would you change your lifestyle? This is what it's like anent the humanism's disregard for anything not human: h. sapiens appear to be a species incapable of changing its collective lifestyle when facing a cancer diagnosis; unfortunately, this means we belong to a species that does nothing but exploit and consume each other and planetary resources until everything is without elan vitale as a proper measure of order, or if it can it will move to another planet with its wrecking ball.
An individual has the ability to change and reorder his life in a way impossible to the collective horde. It is high time each of us think about doing so. There are major obstacles. Market society, for example, and the idea of sacrificing your life to a romanticism of numbers (income/profit) and mechanicalized time...surely these aren't sane maxims. Once you start working to live and not living to work (i.e., the only self-preservation if we're being intellectually honest)...you separate from this insane perpetual mechanical living, your work is related only to the projects you have to get done, and not totally controlled by a device human's invented. You stop treating people as means to an end or objects to consume, whether for your entertainment, or for the mercenary valorization of transactionalism. The prognosis doesn't look good.
One thing I'll bet the farm on: humans are more distracted and overstimulated than ever before...you can be sure not too many people are really ready to give up their willy-nilly hyperstimulations and take an honest look at the state of the world. This is maybe the most troubling aspect of what's before us. And this is right where I'd begin teasing apart what could/should be done to reverse the madness. As an anti-humanist (that is, thinking science and technology devoid of reason and idealism are going to save us), and someone without a smartphone (mark of the beast...ha), I would suggest asking if people shouldn't disconnect from each other a little and reconnect with autochthonous, telluric values as the obvious place to start convalescing. People are blinded by themselves and their systems and institutions, this is clear. The looking glass is a narcissistic one, individual to collective, and this is a big part of why the individual and collective can't stop changing in needless ways, and start changing in needed ways.
Yes, lack of proper regulation is a real danger. The way I see it, the Industrial Revolution made possible the spectacular burgeoning of science and technology, with all its health and lifestyle benefits, and the Industrial Revolution itself was made possible by the discovery of fossil fuels. It's arguable that it would be impossible to sustain our current lifestyles by substituting renewable energy sources for fossils fuels, let alone bring the rest of the world's poor into middle class life. And yet, to do just that is the "official" global aim.
I think perhaps the greatest potential rapidly precipitating threat (aside from possible ecological catastrophes such as the collapse of the Greenland and/or West Antarctic ice sheets) could be a collapse of what appears to be a gigantic Ponzi scheme: the US shale oil industry, a collapse due to the impossibility of sustaining oil prices at a level sufficient to yield an actual profit to that industry.
Well, it isn't a Ponzi Scheme, it's a simple case of the market mechanism.
Too low oil prices for enough producers -> drop in supply -> demand larger than supply -> higher oil prices
And if the oil prices climb too high, then the Global economy halts like someone would have put a handbrake on and then the prices fall again. Also with high oil prices other energy sources become competitive.
It's a Ponzi scheme if it is running on investors' capital, and not on reinvestment of profits, and there is no plausible likelihood of there ever being a return of the investors capital investment, let alone a profit.
According to some commentators Wall Street is now shying away from shale oil.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Wall-Street-Has-Lost-Faith-In-US-Shale.html
Like um…. Silicon Valley and the IT-sector have done now for decades?
Besides, 11 million barrels per day and being the 3rd largest producer in the World doesn't sound like a Ponzi scheme.
So, Silicon Valley and the IT-sector have made no profit for decades, and provided no return for investors?
11 million barrels per day...etc.might not sound like a Ponzi scheme. What would you call a venture that continues only on the strength of investors' money and government subsidy that yields no return for investors?