Humanity's Eviction Notice
This planet is going to start rejecting humans soon. The rich don't care. They are already prepared to survive it. The rest of us are too stupid to stop buying their waste. If you are poor you are almost completely fucked. Migrations are already happening and will become larger as time progresses. Land will become scarce and jobs will become very few. The poor will take a financial hit of many trillions of dollars. It's going to be absolute chaos and we aren't going to stop it. Our children and grandchildren are going to be fighting nature and each other tooth and nail for survival. Take measures now to prepare for what is next.
Sell your beachfront property if you have one. It's not going to hold value because well...
It's gonna be under water.
Move to high ground near abundant water supply, away from highly flammable environments. Anywhere with common natural disasters will see an increase of those natural disasters. All of the weather will essentially become magnified, so you are looking for a place that doesn't have any or many natural disasters. Everywhere is going to get hotter. Climates that are cold will become mild, climates that are hot will become deserts.
Consider building an inexpensive underground bunker with state of the art air filtration. Essentially all you really need is a pantry, abundant with food, water, and clean air. This may not come in handy immediately, but it could come in handy soon for multiple reasons, or it could come in handy for your children in the future, but remember the importance of location.
Fresh water is going to become the new oil. It will be the most valuable and sought resource on the planet because it is going to become increasingly more difficult to access. You need some. As a matter of fact you need as much as you can possibly find and you should probably store it in your bunker.
I don't know what is going to hit harder, the planet itself or our difficulties in coexisting with one another as it happens. In the midst of it all I have a feeling that government will eventually fail, shift, or become non existent altogether. Buy a gun. If you are smart, buy several. Don't trust anyone, as we will all be in constant fight or flight mode, and don't ask me for help. I'm sorry, but just because I have preparation doesn't mean I have rations or weapons or time to save you. My family is my responsibility under survival conditions and your family is yours. It isn't anything against any of you, it's just the intelligent way to approach the situation. Although I try my hardest to be a decent human, I don't trust people to be decent to each other, or expect that they have my best interests in mind, especially when shit hits the fan.
Good luck.
Sell your beachfront property if you have one. It's not going to hold value because well...
It's gonna be under water.
Move to high ground near abundant water supply, away from highly flammable environments. Anywhere with common natural disasters will see an increase of those natural disasters. All of the weather will essentially become magnified, so you are looking for a place that doesn't have any or many natural disasters. Everywhere is going to get hotter. Climates that are cold will become mild, climates that are hot will become deserts.
Consider building an inexpensive underground bunker with state of the art air filtration. Essentially all you really need is a pantry, abundant with food, water, and clean air. This may not come in handy immediately, but it could come in handy soon for multiple reasons, or it could come in handy for your children in the future, but remember the importance of location.
Fresh water is going to become the new oil. It will be the most valuable and sought resource on the planet because it is going to become increasingly more difficult to access. You need some. As a matter of fact you need as much as you can possibly find and you should probably store it in your bunker.
I don't know what is going to hit harder, the planet itself or our difficulties in coexisting with one another as it happens. In the midst of it all I have a feeling that government will eventually fail, shift, or become non existent altogether. Buy a gun. If you are smart, buy several. Don't trust anyone, as we will all be in constant fight or flight mode, and don't ask me for help. I'm sorry, but just because I have preparation doesn't mean I have rations or weapons or time to save you. My family is my responsibility under survival conditions and your family is yours. It isn't anything against any of you, it's just the intelligent way to approach the situation. Although I try my hardest to be a decent human, I don't trust people to be decent to each other, or expect that they have my best interests in mind, especially when shit hits the fan.
Good luck.
Comments (159)
Really poor advice. This is what brought us to this pitch. The bunker mentality.
The problem is that we have learned to control the environment, but have no idea how to control ourselves.
Not that I'd know. But I'm sure answering that question would teach you a thing or two about yourself.
Do you trust humans to give you an accurate model of the future? Extreme poverty is in decline, life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Is it really time to cower in some bunker?
I believe you can't really escape being, since being like something is all there is between spans of non-existence. Though we can escape suffering by whatever means is deemed worth it.
I just don't want anyone to cut my eye lids off and slowly cook me alive over a fire. Be merciful.
No, I don't expect it to change by some manipulation. That is rather the point. You keep on with the same old and expect a different result. And even you can see that it doesn't work. So stop. Take a look around.
You preach end days and I’m the one that’s flailing aimlessly in the dark?
Unfortunately his bunker mentality isn't going to help him for long, you only need to watch Mad Max to see that.
There are two things that interest me here, when will real estate values at sea level begin to drop? And how the super rich think they are going to insulate themselves from the mayhem?
Firstly, I give the real estate values maybe another 5 years before the penny drops and secondly it would be interesting to know if there are any super rich building bunkers in mountains anywhere yet?
Perhaps a mountain range somewhere like Hawaii, or New Zealand. I'd give South Georgia a go, but I'm not rich enough, but I have recently moved uphill, I'm now at 56m above sea level.
Historically good times become bad times and bad times become good times. Civilizations fall because humans do not live sustainably, and eventually, their populations require more than their environments can sustain. Increasing our success by consuming from around the world, means we pull the whole world down, not just our own civilization. Even if the changing weather patterns did not lead to our doom, our refusal to live with the limits of our environments and the limits of the planet, will take us down. Just as every civilization before us fell, including the fall of Rome and South American civilizations. However, if a plague wipes out 1/3 or more of the population, those who survive, get to enjoy the good life.
And looking to the survivors, Mad Max looks about right, with more gazolene than I would expect. We would be back to a feudal system quite quickly I expect, but with some serious turmoil and blood shed during the intervening years. The question is, just how far we will fall before it bottoms out.
I am an antique dealer, I have reservations about the market recovering following the recent fall of the market.
It's conceivable, but there would need to be some big evolutionary changes. Wouldn't it be better to be developing successor-robots now? They'd last better, and there might be some profit in them.
I will go with what Punshhh says about the importance of transmitting our knowledge to the young. I believe democracy is best for humanity and it is not defended unless it is defended in the classroom. We have not defended democracy in the classroom since 1958 when we replaced liberal education with education for the Military-Industrial Complex that makes people dependent on technology and authority instead of preparing us for liberty and the responsibility of democracy. Now we have humans who are happy to give up their liberty to live under the control of robots because they believe robots can be superior to humans. That is frightening! A machine can never be human. There are no fairies that can turn Pinocchio into a real boy.
What a bunch of pathetic, self indulgent losers. I don’t believe any of you really believe what you write. You insult everyone that’s come before you to forge a life out of nothing.
A great plot for a video game or a movie but I think it's been done to death. Judging by the popularity of this genre I suspect it reflects the mainstream opinion or is the geeky lot, those who actually watch and play doomsday-themed movies and games respectively, susceptible to such bleak outlooks. Considering geeks are usually of above-average intelligence should we put stock in such future scenarios or is it that the geek-intelligence relationship is just a misconception and the future-is-disaster mindset is nothing more than an idiosyncrasy?
Quoting TheMadFool
I think they got just enough of an education to lead them to think they’re intelligent.
Quoting Punshhh
So the rest of the world is fine.
So, there's no truth in such beliefs - beliefs that there's a calamity waiting for humanity just round the corner? Geeks have it wrong then.
I chanced upon a wikipedia entry titled Survivalism and it's exactly what the OP is about. The OP discusses the extreme version of survivalism but in the broader sense that it actually has is of considerable relevance to us e.g. it's about self-sufficiency and disaster preparedness and other stuff, all of which have real-world applications and are actually practised in disaster-prone regions of the world.
What is questionable though is the leap to global disaster scenarios. I mean events that could set off a global catastrophe need to be exponentially greater than the local disasters we experience - supervolcanoes, giant asteroids, extreme global climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, worldwide politcal meltdown, etc. - and the likelihood of such events seem minuscule. Nevertheless the probabilities are non-zero i.e. even if very very unlikely, a supervolcano can erupt which would vindicate the extreme version of survivalism.
I guess it boils down to understanding probabilities of events and then making decisions accordingly. Reminds me of Pascal's wager - should I not prepare for a world-ending catastrophe because it's so unlikely or should I prepare for it because it's so lethal?
Quoting Punshhh
Kindly read above.
Quoting TheMadFool
Truth in beliefs? I’m sure you know better than that.
:up: Belief has to be true for it to count as knowledge. Right?
Yes, I agree about survivalism. Your suggestion that such behaviour is only necessitated by great global catastrophes, is I fear over optimistic. Such events would probably bring about the extinction of humanity, or a reduction to a few hundred, or thousand of the most tenacious survivors.
It will require only small changes in climate, in the direction of warming, to result in a fall of civilisation and a return to a primitive human existence.
Well. flesh-and-blood humans aren't, I think, likely to survive the capitalist climate Gotterdammerung, so if we want something to survive, robots seem the best bet, if we create them such that they evolve.
So when do you make the move to protect your family? When it's too late or when the predictions don't look good?
You are trolling? Do I really have to write a thesis for you on how to google a word before you make a claim that is incorrect on a forum that revolves around definitions?
The branch of knowledge is surviving climate change.
The study is how to.
And it is in the category of current affairs because it happens to be in progress.
You posted something like a rant and some paranoid version of a post apocalyptic survival guide. It’s really hard to see the philosophical value if this unless you maybe shifted the discussion to a hypothetical scenario and ask how society would rebuild - that would interesting.
If others are happy to engage, fair enough. I don’t see any merit here though.
For a lot of people, flooding isn't going to be the problem: it's drought, as you mentioned, and yes, fresh water will be in very short supply. People who have been driven out of their homelands by successive crop failures, drought, or repeated floods (whatever the hell it is) are going to move, and if the nations in their path don't want them there, there will be BIG trouble.
However, granted all that, I don't believe "survivalism" will work. What the "survivalist" hunkered down in his huge underground bunker with huge tanks of water, canned food up the ying yang, and so on, are really "delayers of the inevitable" rather than survivalists.
That a little cadre of Navy Seals (or something like that) can hole up in a mountain fastness and not only protect themselves and their children's children's children, but actually sustain a fragment of civilization is fantasy. Such fantasy makes for great SF plots, but a poor plan for the real world. Why?
First, because the life in the bunker will be pretty much static, and minds living in static conditions start to dull after a while. People will go nuts. Second, the supplies will eventually run out. Up in the mountains a good deal of what you bought down in the valley from the local Walmart won't be replaceable in your little habitat. Third, You won't be able to revert to a hunter-gatherer style of living either, because the first thing you will run into is a lot of other people hunting and gathering too. Fourth, all the people who are living in the degraded world will have made critical adaptations to a potentially very hostile environment. Maybe they got over the embarrassment of cannibalism and and know how to select dinner from the herd. You won't; you might be more likely to end up in the kettle.
The best way to survive is to survive in as large a functioning community as possible -- generally that means at least a small city with enough people bearing the diversity of skills it takes to keep everyone alive and well.
All of the large functioning communities are NOT going to disappear. Adaptable cities will have found ways to supply themselves with food--sustainable methods of food production and preservation. Adaptable cities will still have schools, libraries, musical performances, doctors, mechanics, plumbers, etc. -- all the people and institutions that produce civilization.
In one hundred years, 2120, sea level rise will have fairly noticeable consequences, especially for cities that were reclaimed from the ocean. A good example would be Boston. Some of Boston, MA will stay high and dry, but the core of the city will revert to wetland. It's not called "Back Bay" for nothing. It used to be open water and then was filled in in the 19th century.
In 300 years, it may be the case that the lower Mississippi River Valley will be one very big bay opening off of the Gulf of Mexico. The northern Great Plains in the future will be much warmer, more like the southern plains are now. That is NOT going to take hundreds of years. And just a word to people who imagine the corn, wheat, and bean belt migrating into Canada, it isn't going to happen. A good share of Canada is not agricultural land. It takes a long time for warming tundra to turn into fertile properly structured soil--not hundreds of years, but thousands.
I don't know how much Anthropology has caught up with this idea, so this is only speculation. It looks to me that during a previous catastrophic global flooding most of humanity was wiped out in a stroke. Leaving small pockets surviving at altitude, certainly in the Himalayas, possibly the Ethiopian highlands etc. This may have happened more than once and is talked about in ancient mythology. These isolated groups obviously survived and grew into modern humanity.
I see this extinction event as another such catastrophe, although the initial conditions are unique on this occasion. There are mass populations which there weren't before, deadly weapons and more critically I would think, a mass extinction of species due to a sudden shift in climatic conditions. So who knows, it looks like uncharted territory.
Quoting TheMadFool
Is that true? I’m genuinely not sure. It doesn’t seem to add up to me. Does it mean that belief can be counted as knowledge? How so?
Edit: in relation to this:
“So, there's no truth in such beliefs - beliefs that there's a calamity waiting for humanity just round the corner? Geeks have it wrong then.”
Quoting Punshhh
It’s these sort of posts that undermine you’re position; most of humanity wiped out in a stroke, speculation, possibly, ancient mythology. How can we take that seriously?
My goodness, that is a strong criticism. I am not exactly sure which statements you find so bad. But I think there are books that would change your mind. Such as this book ... by Izolda Trakhtenberg
Quoting amazon
Nature works to keep things in balance and humans have greatly disrupted that balance. How could anyone not think this is a very important subject, or see as anything but concern for future generations and our planet? I happen to be a pagan who thinks caring for our planet is very important, and excuse me but humans have become a problem. Something is really wrong when people have such a negative interpretation of our concern. Why all the hostile negativity directed towards those of us who sincerely care about future generations and the planet?
Excuse me but I must disagree with you. Not only do I find little value in life without humans, but robots also demand finite resources. A problem with electric cars is the finite resources required for their batteries. But what if we are God's consciousness? Can that be transferred to a robot? I don't think so.
And our planet sure does not need robots to preserve life. But many ancient cultures thought it was man's purpose to help nature. Too bad we don't live with that belief today.
God is asleep in rocks and minerals, waking in plants and animals, to know self in man. The teaching of Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
The future of India looks very bad! https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/coastal-concerns-rising-sea-levels-will-inundate-coastal-areas-sooner-than-projected-/articleshow/71985765.cms
The satellite radar used by NASA paints a worse picture of our future than expected.
I am alarmed by someone flagging this thread for not being philosophical. I am not sure how moderators here handle such conflicts of interest, between those who want to remain blind to reality and keep everything pleasant, and those who want to raise awareness of problems with the hope we will use knowledge to resolve problems. Science comes out of philosophy, let us hope those who love philosophy do not turn their backs on science. Doesn't philosophy mean a love of knowledge? Should we shut down threads that are knowledge of things we don't want to think about?
Directly to your explanation of why cities are better than survivalist isolation, we need education for democracy for those cities to function well. It will be as we create it and without an understanding of democracy, we could have short sited ideas of survival and look more like the feudal period of our history than an evolved democracy.
There is no contradiction in what I said. Also as far as I know I'm simply repeating the official line.
Nuclear facilities are vulnerable, true enough. While a plant can be shut down (the nuclear reaction halted), there is fuel stored in water pools (sometimes above ground) which definitely will not remain harmless forever. As we saw in Chernobyl and Fukushima, things can spectacularly go to hell really fast. The plants will not explode like nuclear bombs, however.
Quoting Punshhh
There was never enough water on the planet to produce a flood that could wipe out humanity all at once. Even the big meteorite that wiped out the big dinosaurs didn't kill everything off -- mammals, birds, and insects survived and mammals became the dominant animal.
The catastrophic event which global warming may well bring about will be composed of features which in combination will prove fatal: too many people to feed, agriculture not able to produce enough food, not enough water, too much heat, severe environmental degradation, disorganization. Nothing more is required than that to drop the population from 7 or 8 billion back to where it was around 70 years ago -- 2 billion. It also won't be instantaneous; expect it to take a few decades. The survivors will get to watch while it happens.
Just watch out for Caesar and the NCR. Of course, I'm sure your bunker will keep the meddling governments of our new world out, but all I'm saying is that it didn't work for the Brotherhood of Steel.
What makes you so sure that there wont be wildfires in the west, drought, agriculture failure and mass migration? Have you seen NASA's predictions of soil temperatures into 2100? They do not look good at all.
"Society" will survive in some form, even with a catastrophic die-off of human populations. There will be some places where life will go on for some people. How bad the environment becomes in 1000 years can't be guessed; there are just too many factors to consider. Most likely it will not be very good.
"Civilization" (apart from whatever society happens to be like at any given moment) will likely suffer pretty severely. A lot of our cultural heritage will be lost--not just from fire, flood, hot humid mold-and-rot-encouraging climate, marauding hordes, and so forth. "Civilization" requires intact inter-generational stability for learning and style to be passed on intact. Our civilization will die like previous civilizations have died, and will be revived by other people in later times (assuming we do not go extinct).
I'm not optimistic about the long term future. But there is always hope.
For the last three years life expectancy in the USA has declined, so something ain’t right.
Something ain't right, for sure. The UK has also experienced a decline in life expectancy, but we are talking about a small change for both the US and UK..
"Life expectancy" is an average. The decline has been brought about by higher rates of death among people who use opiates (ODs) and chronic users of highly addictive drugs like meth. Suicide rates among working class men have also lowered life expectancy. Deaths from heart attacks are down, and deaths from cancer are either steady or declining.
In the last 50 years the rate of smoking among adults has dropped from around 45% to about 15%. The rate of lung cancer deaths has fallen for people who quit smoking say 20 years ago. Some people are living longer and some people are dying younger.
In a healthier society (one less sickened by the depredations of capitalist predators like the Sackler family's opiate racket) we would live longer and/or happier lives.
Would we? And is it really that easy to pin the guilt on capitalist predators like the Sackler family? I think a healthy society could handle its predators.
Quoting Athena
It is strong criticism. My only concern is that it might be counter productive.
The fact that you suggest particular books to read that would “change” my mind means you’ve already put me in a particular camp, where I approve of mindless destruction in the name of capitalism.
It’s true that nature does work to keep things in balance, but it’s a dynamic planet so you can’t be sure of what exactly that balance is. My negative interpretation of your concern is that we can’t go back to your pagan way of life. The “hostile negativity’ is an effort to stop what I regard as a movement that will not help us or the planet, a movement incapable of dealing in reality and in the adaptability and extraordinary development of the species we are.
Of course we are capable of damaging the environment, just by our sheer numbers alone, and there has been a lot of work done to mitigate this damage. There’s little doubt that people are generally healthier than they’ve ever been. True, some people are still struggling, but not in the same way they have in the past.
What I find myself resisting is the doomsday mentality, not as extreme in your post, but still there by association.
“Even if the changing weather patterns did not lead to our doom, our refusal to live with the limits of our environments and the limits of the planet, will take us down. Just as every civilization before us fell, including the fall of Rome and South American civilizations.”
It’s a lack of faith in who we are that I object to and belief that it’s all over I find the need to resist. I don’t see it as helpful to pass this on to the next generation. Of course help them to understand the importance of our relationship to the environment, but don’t crush their hope or educate them through fear.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yes, I know it’s the party line. I’ve done the reading. As I said I just find it hard to accept a sentence or idea containing the words ‘truth’, ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’.
So you think the other animals, the plants and the Earth don't matter in their own right? The monstrous irony is that it is precisely that almost universal held (in the developed nations at least) attitude that destroys any possibility of sustainable human thriving.
This is possibly another reason why my posts are so critical.
Quoting Punshhh
Is it a healthy symptom? In what way might you regard it as healthy and therefore constructive, not for you alone, to maintaining a functioning society?
It really is that easy if you are prepared to foreswear fealty to capitalism and face how ruthlessly exploitative capitalists tend to be. The Sacklers are guilty; the Koch brothers are guilty; lots of people are guilty of fucking over the world in really very exploitative ways. They can be named. We could change the laws which protects these bastards. They could be put out of business. That would be a healthy society at work. Instead we stand around with our thumbs up our collective asses muttering drivel about free enterprise, and all that crap.
I don't think it is necessary to point out that capitalists are not standing idly by, waiting for the peasants to take up pitchforks and torches and burn the castle down. They industriously propagandize and legislate on their own behalf, and we fools believe them.
Maybe we need a new word here. I was wondering at what point on a descending line we would find a capitalist business that is not really one of exploitation and destruction, because obviously all business is not like that. There are businesses out the in the world that thrive on good employer/employee relationships, that are responsible and contribute to society and our wellbeing. Maybe we need a new word for the thing we are talking about here. Maybe it’s not capitalism at all.
Maybe we should be done with it and call them Oligarchs.
I think you’re getting cranky @Bitter Crank
Does the owner of an apple orchard need to be condemned because he produces and trades his goods? I think it’s wrong and destructive to use definitions so loosely and bitterly.
There is a quantitative difference and almost of necessity a qualitative difference between the small apple grower who sells produce at small farmers markets on the one hand, and United Fruit Company which fucked over Central America (they started back in 1899) with the help of American gun boat diplomacy. There is a difference between Whole Foods (now part of Amazon) and the couple that raise specialty mushrooms in their basement and sell fresh at farmers markets. Sure, it seems like the couple was selling the mushrooms for a pretty penny ($32 a pound) but they were excellent, and they aren't receiving any government subsidies and aren't covered by crop insurance.
The apple farmer and mushroom producer are what are called "petite bourgeoisie". The US has millions of petite bourgeoisie, operating family farms, small grocery stores, repair shops, small diners, little businesses selling stuff or a service, and the like. Much different than Jeff Bezos at Amazon. In many ways these petite bourgeoisie are the salt of the earth. They work very hard for very modest returns.
The Sackler family are multi-billionaires and are not even remotely in the same league as the guy with the small apple orchard guy. So yes, distinctions can be made between the tiny, petite (pronounced 'petty') bourgeoisie and multinational, multi-billion dollar mogul.
But the capitalist mandate is dangerous: maximize profit, externalize costs, pay workers the lowest possible wages, sell the product at the highest possible price. Never ask whether what you are selling is "good". If it makes money, that is all that matters.
"Good" and "bad" corporations all do the same things, pretty much. Take 3M, maker of Post-It notes and Scotch Tape. They make a lot of other stuff, too. They make a lot of fire-retardants, everything from a chemical found in children's pajamas to the foam spread on the runway when a plan may have crash on landing. These fine products contain perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS), chemicals that never break down but do bio-accumulate. Studies have documented multiple effects, including cancers in highly exposed groups — especially testicular and kidney cancers — as well as impacts to the immune system and metabolism. Evidence also indicates that elevated PFAS in wildlife can lead to developmental and reproductive problems, the groups noted.
Millions of tons of the product have been very profitably sold, and now these chemicals are everywhere, from the suburban St. Paul, MN water systems contaminated by 3M dumps, to ice in the antarctic; from people in China to squirrels in Central Park. Everywhere. Fire retardants would seem like a good thing at first glance, but then we find they are 'forever chemicals' that can make us animals sick when concentrated by bioaccumulation (like bald eagles, apex predators, getting dosed with the stuff).
I think you’re being arbitrary. Run your eye up that line I was talking about, through the petite bourgeoisie until you find the corrupt. You jump from the apple farmers to Amazon as if there’s nothing in between.
Was 3M corrupt in their initial intentions? I don’t know if they were or not. People were happy to have an innovation like fire retardants in children’s pyjamas. Just like today people are happy with vaccinations. If in the future it turns out vaccines weren’t a good idea are we going to suddenly accuse those pharmaceutical companies of corruption, of getting rich at the expense of peoples’ health?
Perhaps a noncommittal word like "information" is more suited then.
Quoting TheMadFool
Used how?
"Information" doesn't have as much theoretical baggage as "knowledge"
“Belief has to be true for it to count as information.”
I don’t think I’d want to be responsible for a sentence like that.
Come on, Brett, buddy. One can't cover all the possibilities with out a post that would be longer than the entire oeuvre of The Philosophy Forum.
Probably not. The intention of developing fire retardants was not corrupt. It may have been ill-advised, it may have been saintly; I don't know, I wasn't in on the planning. What was much less morally ambiguous was dumping a lot of the chemicals used in a permeable soil dump, where the stuff percolated down (quite a long way) to the water table. They dumped PFAS and PFAS waste in various states, not just in Minnesota.
The sales effort involved in getting PFAS into everything from pajamas to carpet to adult rain gear (!) and much more was probably independent of any caution their chemistry department had about the stuff. It has become ubiquitous, and it won't be disappearing anytime soon. What 3M did was decide that it was a good idea to coat the planet with a super stable chemical that is known to cause health and environmental problems independently of its beneficial aspects. That for the sake of profit. Lots of large corporations have done exactly the same thing with other chemicals and products.
Also you seem to be one of those posters who cherrypick things to dispute, or criticise and yet I notice you have kept your powder dry.
How do you mean?
For what?
The problem is not resources but capitalism, which is burning up the world. It's my own notion that it is probably an inevitable evolutionary development, the reason no-one has ever contacted us - they're all ashes. I suppose some sort of 'natural' life may evolve to live in the heat, but so what? We'd have more in common with robots we ourselves had developed, I think. We have all the possible historical beliefs to prevent destruction available to us, but unfortunately we live in a system dedicated to immediate profit whatever the cost. I wish we didn't.
Quoting Punshhh
Very few of us are qualified to comment on any of the issues that crop up on these OPs. Most of us regard our opinion as some sort of factual proof used to demolish the opinion of someone else.
You asked me what my synopsis was on ‘Humanity’s eviction notice’. I don’t even know what you mean. Do you mean for me to present a synopsis in opposition to @Lif3r? I can’t forecast the future any more than anyone else can. For me his type of post, and yours, suggest some dark psychological space where you can indulge, without harm, in some end game scenario of death and destruction. To me it’s a nihilistic game that does no good for others trying to get by or the next generation coping with life that’s difficult enough under ordinary circumstances.
I’ve already made myself clear on this point. What you’re creating, or supporting, is a sort of quasi doomsday religion. No one’s allowed to voice another opinion, if they do they’re a heretic. It reminds me of the position of Christians when they we’re challenged by Darwinism, no good Christian could voice the possibility of it being true without being excommunicated. It’s all belief in the coming apocalypse.
What will happen? Like all these things it will pass by. There will be less and less interest from the public. The MSM will move on and headline other issues. When government grants in alternatives dry up then business will move on. There will be no Nazis in Washington. There will be no flooded cities. Worse still, you will have damaged faith in science, you will have contributed to the demise of socialist and social Democrat parties who will be lost in the wilderness without a constituency, pointless and unable to offer opposition to governments on the right and the power of corporations.
The problem for people will be in the effort required to right itself from the blow you have delivered in your little end game fantasy, the damage you will have done to developing countries, the costs and damage done to energy sources, the instability you will have created in economies, the division in communities, the lack of faith in how good we can be.
But people will recover, they always do, but first they have to clean up the mess that was left by you.
Quoting Lif3r
The same way we always have.
Quoting Lif3r
It is a lie of sorts. Not with any organisation behind it, but a strange phenomena, in my opinion, inherent in humans. Maybe the Salem witch hunts would be a very small version of this. Globalisation, mass media, the internet, etc. have created the same thing on a global scale. Global madness really.
However if you genuinely feel the way you do I can understand your response. But can you be sure you’re not a victim?
We can still exist as robots and just be better versions of ourselves and whichever line of evolution is meant to be will be. It's still a better alternative to roasting alive or starving out or one of the other hundred ways we could all go due to our biological needs.
I have no reason to think NASA is lying about anything. Do I believe climate change is real? Not in the way it’s being reported.
Quoting Lif3r
I’m not asking you to believe me.
I am excited about reading your explanation of that statement.
Well, I assume we write into the basic programme the ability to change in response to changing conditions. It is, after all, how our own evolution worked, and well within current possibilities, surely?
Heavens no, I wasn't thinking that. I just know when we (all of us) have different opinions it is usually because we have read different things. :lol: I am one of those obnoxious people who is so sure of what I believe to be true, that I am sure if others were working with the same information they would agree with me. :grin:
Quoting Brett
:lol: Your assumptions fill me with the joy of laughter. I will point out the Christians thought the Greeks were pagans and it is the Greeks who gave us philosophy and put us the path to science. They began with nature-based gods and goddesses. I think that was important to the development of their thought. The Greeks were not as materialistic as the Romans and unfortunately, although the Greeks gave the more barbaric Romans the bases of civilization, it was the materialistic (a belief in matter) Romans and then the Christians who became dominant. I see nothing incompatible with Greek paganism and science. And yes, I feel strongly about a consciousness that is in harmony with nature rather than a strongly materialistic consciousness.
Quoting Brett
No people are not healthier than they were. 30 years ago that was true, but recently the health of younger people has gone to hell. Our government with its new focus on profits is not protecting us as it did when it first created controls of our food supply. The problem with diabetes has rapidly increased and we have spread it to third countries with products such as sodas. I am so ashamed of us. Restaurant meals are commonly not that healthy and commonly the servings are way too much. At Least Shari's, a northwest restaurant chain, gives people information of the calories in a meal.
Quoting Brett
As I said, you haven't read what I have read. If you did you would not be arguing.
Quoting Brett
When you are interested in knowing facts let us know. Only when people such as yourself are working with the facts, can we resolve serious problems. Going on "faith" in the pharaoh, or any other ruler who is supposed to have the power of keeping things in balance and pleasing the gods, or faith in technology and our new leaders is no better than past faiths.
We the people must take the responsibility of being well informed, and if you were, you would not speak of having faith, instead of facts. When a young child runs into the street screaming about the dangers of running into the street will do absolutely no good unless the child is old enough to know the meaning of all those angry words. Today our adults need to stop trusting and working on faith, and accept responsibility for learning and then acting on informed decisions. Unfortunately, education for technology has not prepared the young for growing up and taking responsibility. Education has become just bull shit about our superiority and how technology can resolve every problem, and prepared the young to be dependent on authority, on the "experts", instead of preparing them to be their own authority. I am stating this as a national, politically driven problem and culture change that is not good for us or the world.
I think that is a wrong assumption. Only if we value a study of history do we keep ourselves as informed as we need to be. Unfortunately, with education for technology came disrespect of the elders because today we so much smarter than older people. Like every generation, our young think they are smarter only unlike previous generations we have turned the young against their elders in favor of faith in technology.
Unfortunately, I have a college education and burn with resentment towards some of my professors. Had I been young I would not have known better than to sit in awe of them. As an older student, I was often horrified by what they said. Not only do some of them insist information for papers be from the abstracts, but it must also be less than 10 years old. With this mentality, our university government document library emptied its shelves of the books recording government documents. Today no one can find information without knowing exactly what to look for and depending on a librarian to retrieve that information that is electronically stored. No more sitting with the old books and discovering what is in them. This is like blinding the whole population! I am horrified by what has been done. Information today is as controlled as when the Church had power. It is just a different set of people controlling it.
May all those who remember when things different raise their hand.
Maybe. In the modern world of science-tech unquestioned faith, culture is possibly tending toward delusional sociocentrism...people are seemingly oblivious to the human rights violations being committed against personal privacy.. Transhumanists and people who think there is something special about the modern era with its slightly desultory science/tech-determinism, believe so as a kind of promissory physical savior for humankind ( perhaps neuralink will save those who have the implant, lol) have fairly naively attributed fictive images about working together.
It's true hunter-gatherers have worked together from the start. And this is where standardization began also...whoever failed in their part bringing down the game was probably sacrificed. Which points to a problem not directly related to the thread...having more to do with what can go wrong when people subscribe to survival of a group: neuroses, anger, hatred, violence. Only the individual survives or dies.
Ultimately, what will be valuable is nonphysical, untradable non things....skills. And yes, it starts with primitive survival skills all the way up to modern engineering skills. It's impossible to predict what you will have access to materially to feed you flesh and stay warm.
This being the case, you have to assume you'll have access what sun and earth provides (however, the sun may be behind a permanent and dense cloud) and nothing else. A solar still works well in precipitating water from your own urine if you have no other way of getting it. To the extent one knows no bushcraft whatever and is completely dependent on the market, he is akin to a neonate. He may not be a child in the human, pseudo-environment...but in the only environment, he is. Note: this isn't to offend anyone here, I also am lacking in ability to take care of myself in the one environment, and as such am like a babe. For me though, it doesn't feel right not knowing how to care for myself. Learning all from making cordage, pots, fire, and water, to putting together circuits may be on the bucket list. Not the bucket list that involves more infantile consumption...a list that has the drift of satisfying that primal need of self-governance and autonomy, a satisfaction which leads away from the loop of neurotic dependence on a fabricated system; though we are always dependent on the environment for survival...our species has come to see it fit to spread the one environment with its own idealistic overlay, a fabricated, fictive, pseudo- environment. This is why the more man succeeds, the more he pollutes. Instead of saying the GDP has gone up, why not say pollution has gone up? Pollution = success; pollution of clear understanding leads to pollution of the organism-environment. Stimuli from a fictive environment have repercussions in the only one.
A lone wolf would have many advantages in surviving. Advantages that would be as though he didn't exist to others. He could live with no trace, taking what he needed when he needed it and then merging with shadow. And if they were a renaissance person, they could secretly build up more of what was need to survive alone. Really, upon reflection, it seems obvious this would be the one case (doomsday) where everyone is out for themselves, and only individuals can survive....no one survives for the individual. Interpersonal conflict would most likely increase to a pitch that few really got along. In this case, the more benevolent human being would keep to himself avoid the ineluctable internecine skirmishes. Your friends and enemies would be interchangeable over short periods of time. All this is hard to imagine in today's media and tech driven pseudo-environment. Or maybe it wouldn't. All the foulness, in terms of sadism, you see in comments in online social platforms would become manifest in the one and only environment.
Quoting Athena
You must get over the idea that America is the world.
Quoting Athena
That’s a problem, isn’t it? Things are so bad they have to eat in restaurants.
Quoting Punshhh
It’s not so weird. It seems weird that so many people, men and women, fell in behind Hitler but they did.
“All these folk”. On this forum or worldwide? I don’t think I’ve seen those statistics.
Quoting Punshhh
This story might help you appreciate the complexity of issues like the Greenland ice cap, I know it may not satisfy your concerns but it’s worth mentioning just to keep things in perspective.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190719135545.htm
Quoting Athena
I don’t know if you failed to read this carefully or purposely misconstrued it.
It’s not faith in “the pharaoh” I mentioned but faith in ourselves, in who we are. What else could there be, who else should we have faith in? I don’t see how my faith in people is evidence of taking no interest in facts. Then you go on to blame me for something you made up.
The US project Iceworm has become exposed from the ice cap now. It turns out that the whole ice cap moves, flows like a glacier, which is why they abandoned the station in 1963. It adjusts to the pressures, or lack of them around the periphery. So provided the ice continues to melt around the edge it will surely collapse. Also the Arctic Ocean is warming at over twice the rate of elsewhere due to less reflectivity from less ice. A positive chain reaction, it looks like we will soon find the north west passage after all.
I predict in 5 years the ice cap will be discovered to have breached far quicker than predictions allowed for.
Here is an article from INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS that provide a survey of what has been published in the last 10 years about climate change.
Believe it or not, but at least this is the sort of thing which causes my alarm about the future.
I appreciate your post, but there’s no point in trying to remind me that I’m ignorant and uninformed. I’ve being thinking about this since 2006; “An Inconvenient Truth”, when I believed it. Now I don’t.
A friend who reads deeply about climate change and economics has commented that there are some objections that can be raised against both the manner in which global warming is reported and to the conclusions which may be drawn. There are conflicting reports on the same issue -- whether, for instance, China's performance in reducing emissions (or the USA performance, or anyone else's) is not meeting, meeting, or exceeding some targets.
Sometimes the avalanche of information is overwhelming and one has to withdraw from contemplation of the details just to save one's sanity. And sometimes the avalanche is repetitious -- the same findings are presented again and again as news.
I wonder, for instance, how accurate the accounts of CO2 emissions are. When I read a report that says that so many gazillion tons of CO2 or methane are being added to the atmosphere, I wonder just how did they calculate that figure? CO2 may be the better measurement -- take published fossil fuel production figures, calculate how much CO2 is produced per ton of coal or oil, and multiply. Fine. But methane is much trickier.
Gas bubbles are coming off the bottom of lakes in northern Canada and Siberia and collecting under the ice. Poke a hole in the ice, light a match, and you get a flash burn of flaming methane. Did anybody check this out 50 or 100 years ago? Is there a change? Or methane in the Arctic Ocean: was it there 100 years ago? When the Nautilus navigated under the polar ice (some 60+ years ago, give or take a couple) did they discover any thing unusual, like big bubbles? (they weren't looking, I would imagine.). l
The changes I believe in the most are changes I can see around me: noticeably warmer winters; plants leaving out and blossoming something like 2 or 3 weeks than usual -- for the last 10-15 years. Fewer flying insects; fewer birds, etc.
I'm a believer, but there are "issues" in the information. It's sort of like the problem of AIDS and HIV back in the 1980s: Public Health people wanted people to get concerned, and they were successful: The people who were least at risk were by far the most anxious--the worried well. Gay men, the most at risk group, drew their own conclusions from their experience, and many were fatalistic. It is difficult to shape successful messages for different groups of people. Some people never did get good information.
I can’t remember when my doubts began or what started them. I do remember beginning to see a lot of reports appearing with very loose language, claims that began with words like “Its possible”, or figures “suggest”.
I also began reading about scientists who were excommunicated because they disputed uncertainties surrounding climate sensitivity to increased greenhouse gas concentrations, or had accused the IPCC process of gross politicization and scientists of succumbing to “group-think” and “herd instinct”, or who claimed that climate models and popular surface temperature data sets overstated the changes in the real atmosphere and that actual changes were not alarming.
Then I saw large amounts of money entering the picture, generalisations made about percentages, averages, of heating over long periods and historical figures on temperatures being altered. So many of the predictions made never happened and the horror stories that began to appear became standard forecasts, even though they were based on a worst-case scenario and unlikely to happen.
Not to mention all the things you mentioned in your post.
Eventually I was called a denier. What could I do, I was.
If the language was more precise, you'd now be complaining that forecasts did not come true. Something you are, in fact, already doing.
Quoting Brett
And have you looked up the actual cases, looked at the professional records of those scientists? Everyone who claimed to have been "excommunicated" I ever looked up was either not actually a climate scientist or an obvious hack.
Quoting Brett
Large amounts of money? Compared to the money the oil lobby spend? I doubt it. What did you "see" exactly? Bank records?
God, you’re so predictable, every one of you.
So are you. Never a single answer.
I believe there is a good reason to have faith in humans, but that is conditional and we have met those conditions. That means our faith in humans is no better than past faiths, because the faith does not go with the necessary conditions for that faith. Do you want to argue unconditionally we should have faith in humans? How about why should we have faith in humans?
In a 1920's newspaper an article warned... "Given our know oil supply and rate of consumption, we are head for economic disaster and possibly war." All industrial economies collapsed and the world went to war. Following that, we dramatically increased our consumption of oil, and today people argue we have all the oil we need. I think the people who make that argument are poorly informed. Now convince me of why I should have faith in them.
Well, the last few generations of Elders, having left us up Shit Creek without a paddle, seem to me to deserve about as much respect as some Chinese geese we once had to keep the lawn down - we lost track of them in the grass! I think that we need to distinguish very clearly between the material of history and the other subjects and those who have control of education. When I was a kid in the Rhondda, after what had been done to our people, about the only person we respected was Paul Robeson, and when I was in Cambridge about the only person I respected was Leavis, the great critic, who didn't much respect anyone else. It was a place full of rich snobs from public (your private?) schools, many on closed scholarships, and I was in perhaps the worst of all the colleges in that respect, so my reactions were just boredom and contempt. Isn't the stuff you are talking about available on the internet? An amazing amount of material does seem to be. I'm not unsympathetic with your views, but I feel that each generation is now adapted to the technology it is supposed it will be living with, and it cuts down on generational contacts, because capitalism will see to it that technology goes on developing fast. Wouldn't designing humanoid robots and bowing out with dignity be a preferable approach?
So many of the predictions are happening, the language of scientist is has gotten stronger and the warning now says the changes are happening faster than expected. Where on the earth do you think wildlife is safe from the devastation of human activity?
Walter Youngquist is a geologist who explains what we have done to the planet and the threats to natural habits and humans in his book GeoDestinies. How well do you understand the minerals essential to agriculture and where did you get your information?
How about the rain forest. If you want us to believe you are well informed, tell us why the forest are important and what is happening to them. What happened to trees in the US and why did it happen? How about what happened to the trees on Easter Island and the impact that had on the island. Tell us you know and instead of attacking us for believing we have some very serious problems. Give us reason to agree with you.
If I understand you correctly, your argument is that robots are better than humans? This is such a wonderful subject it deserves its own thread. Why would a robot care about anything?
It would be great if we could all watch the Britsh tv show "Humans" together and then share our impressions and concerns. This link provides ways to access the show
https://www.google.com/search?q=online+British+tv+show+%22Humans%22&rlz=1C1CHKZ_enUS481US483&oq=online+British+tv+show+%22Humans%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j33.34768j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I think possibly the best book ever written for common people and understanding how our world works, is Youngquist book "Geodestinies". I knew him and I am quite sure he is dead now. He was a geologist and worked around the world. Then he became a geology professor. He wrote two books that I know of "Mineral Resources and the Destiny of Nations" and "Geodestinies". "Geodestinies" got special awards and finally, our local paper accepted the importance of his book after I got on them about that. I am saying really important information is not getting to the people, so we can not have faith in the masses. However, if you want to be well informed you can access the book here and give a copy to your local library and possibly highs schools. This is something real and meaningful we can do.
Quoting Athena
I’m not expecting you to agree with me. My initial response was to the alarmist comments that you and others posted. I’m not unaware of the damage to our environment. Just because I’m opposed to your posts doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of what’s going on around me. You and others keep asking for proof of something from me, but you know I could never satisfy you.
Quoting Athena
Take this question for instance. You ask me how well I understand the minerals essential for agriculture. It seems like a reasonable question. But in the same sentence, before I’ve even answered, you then ask where I got the information from, as if there’s something unreliable about my source. So you deny me an answer in the same sentence you ask for one. So it’s obvious I could never satisfy you.
Quoting Echarmion
I don’t really like doing this sort of thing, it just leads to an endless back and forward of who’s who and who’s not, but you insist I never give an answer, so here goes.
Lennart O. Bengtsson
Head of Research and later Director at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading in the UK (1976 — 1990), and as Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg (1991 — 2000). Bengtsson is currently Senior Research Fellow with the Environmental Systems Science Centre at the University of Reading, as well as Director Emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.
Bengtsson’s scientific work has been wide-ranging, including everything from climate modelling and numerical weather prediction to climate data and data assimilation studies. Most recently, he has been involved in studies and modeling of the water cycle and extreme events.
John R. Christy
He holds a Ph.D. (1987) in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Christy is best known for work he did with Roy W. Spencer beginning in 1979 on establishing reliable global temperature data sets derived from microwave radiation probes collected by satellites. Theirs was the first successful attempt to use such satellite data collection for the purpose of establishing long-term temperature records.
Christy has long been heavily involved in the climate change/global warming discussion, having been a Contributor or Lead Author to five Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports relating to satellite temperature records.
Richard S. Lindzen
He holds a Ph.D. (1964) in applied mathematics from Harvard University. He is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT.
Already in his Ph.D. dissertation, Lindzen made his first significant contribution to science, laying the groundwork for our understanding of the physics of the ozone layer of the atmosphere.[22] After that, he solved a problem that had been discussed for over 100 years by some of the best minds in physics, including Lord Kelvin, namely, the physics of atmospheric tides (daily variations in global air pressure).[23] Next, he discovered the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO), a cyclical reversal in the prevailing winds in the stratosphere above the tropical zone.[24] Then, Lindzen and a colleague proposed an explanation for the “superrotation” of the highest layer of Venus’s atmosphere (some 50 times faster than the planet itself), a model that is still being debated.
East is east and west is west
And the wrong one I have chose
Let's go where they keep on wearin'
Those frills and flowers and buttons and bows
People often come to diverse opinions even with the same evidence before them. And, in the case of global warming, it doesn't matter what you and I believe. The world isn't doing a whole lot about reducing CO2 and methane emissions, and that includes every nation on earth.
I have written elsewhere that actually making the kind of changes that I and other extremists think are necessary, and doing so at the speed that might be advisable to save the climate, would initially be a cultural, health, and economic disaster which would be responsible for many deaths. How? By producing massive turmoil and disruption in almost all human activities!
Halting the mining of fossil fuels (coal and oil), ceasing the production of individual cars, drastically curtailing air travel, reducing consumption of electricity (server farms, for instance, produce about as much CO2 to cool equipment as air travel does), sharply reducing consumer consumption and at the same time switching to all-renewable energy sources or doing without, and so on and so forth, would produce disturbances in the production and distribution of food and essential supplies that would lead to many deaths. (Many = hundreds of millions around the world).
How would people in northern latitudes stay warm in winter (and elsewhere, cool in summer)? How would food be produced, processed, and distributed? How would necessary pharmaceuticals be produced? What kind of work could most people do, under these circumstances?
Eventually the world would adjust -- it would probably take around 50 to 60 years, minimum. Historical item: Major changes in technology have generally taken around 40 to 50 years to be fully adopted. By the time all this was accomplished, the momentum of global warming might have started to slow down and the population would have been significantly reduced.
No national or international body or its leaders want to be responsible for this sort of act of commission -- though their acts of omission will have at least the same or worse results.
I can safely pontificate all I want because the levers of power are nowhere even remotely close to my reach.
Quoting Bitter Crank
That’s the first truth of climate change.
The second truth is that we cannot agree on how much CO2 is being released. If we can’t agree on that then we can’t agree on consequences..
The third truth is that disagreement is healthy. If it were not for that we would still believe the sun revolves around the earth.
The fourth truth is that humans are the most adaptable species on the planet, and if not of all species then of mammals. Humans live and thrive all across the planet, this is where we were born.
Quoting Bitter Crank
This is more than likely. We are extraordinarily adaptable but that sort of pressure might be too much. It’s social engineering on a massive scale. I don’t believe social engineering works on even a small scale (that’s not a truth, that’s just me).
Final truth;
Quoting Bitter Crank
Welcome to human nature, this is what we are like, we can barely organise a piss up in a brewery. The bottom line is we need to shift from fossil fuels to renewables pronto and then start trying to work out how to shuttle folk around the place with these renewables, because they won't want to stop doing that.
Oh and in the meantime try not to go to war with each other (this includes trade wars), or profiteer, or exploit each other to much, as that will impede our progress.
Just for fun, here is Bob Hope and Jane Russell
but this is a better version of Buttons and Bows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ggNUKQL2Y
How about the Lawrence Welk Show
Democracy is about citizens ruling themselves rather than being dependent on authority about them. That is why education is so important.
Do we have agreement that we can not maintain our way of life?
Do we agree that global warming will become increasingly costly in the way of extreme weather, flooding and fires, ice and excessive heat causing deaths of plants, animals, and humans, and the rising seas destroying land and agriculture?
What can we do?
We can spread information and check with the schools. Write letters to editors and post online to spread information. Perhaps read books or take college classes so we are better informed ourselves. Buy butcher paper and buy meat where it can be wrapped in butcher paper instead of put in plastic trays. When possible go to the store with containers can that can be refilled and buy bulk instead of prepackaged food. Always carry your own bags, and do not use straws when stopping for liquid refreshment.
Dospossible baby diapers and sanitary pads are huge environmental enemies. It is not just that can contaminate groundwater and take forever to degrade, but they consume resources and increase the cost of gas because they are an oil product as well as require trees. https://www.smallfootprintfamily.com/dangers-of-disposable-diapers
We can use cloth diapers and pads. That is not convenient or pleasant but future generations deserve our care.
What else can we do? I am not saying these actions will save the world, but they buy us time.
Your post is interesting in the assumptions you make of others.
First I imagine @Bitter Crank post isn’t addressing the problem in terms of straws and butcher paper. I imagine he’s talking about the power and consequence of China, or India, as well as the internal conflicts of America and the great cultural changes going on all around the world. Climate change seems to be about more than the weather, it’s become some sort of psychic shift in who we think we are and what we should be. Hence the heated differences on this forum. So I imagine he’s talking about some sort of existential experience in the contemporary world, as I am.
Secondly, you really should consider who you might be addressing, what age they might be. For me and my age group we used cloth diapers, we received our food in paper wrapping or bags, we refused plastic bags many years ago, we actively engaged with social issues, we demonstrated and spent time in jail, obviously most people on this forum are well read and educated. Do you think we don’t embrace those ideals anymore, that we don’t actively engage with the world in the way we always have.
In one of your posts you mentioned respect for elders but you fail to live up to it yourself.
Interesting point, this is something I have considered. All the people I know who are sceptical of climate change, or the appropriate response to the warnings from climate scientists, are over 70 years of age. It is about 75% of them. All the people I know under the age of 70 are fully onboard with the agenda as suggested by Bitter Crank, for example. Notable are every person I know under 20 years of age.
Indeed right across Europe, a young person who is sceptical on these issues is a great rarity. I expect, but don't know, that there are a portion of the younger age group in the US, who are sceptical for some reason. Is it the case do you think, that there is more scepticism on this in the US than elsewhere?
Quoting Punshhh
I don’t know. I have to question myself often about how much I really know about the US.
Quoting Punshhh
I feel that it’s just a symbolic gesture. Greta and Attenborough; both tv factoids. What exactly is meant to come out of it?
He has a degree in natural sciences. Other than that he’s a talking head.
Edit: of course it’s a publicity stunt, I get that. But how can anyone take it seriously. What could Greta possibly have to contribute intellectually.
Yes it's a publicity stunt for the issues they are concerned with. There is no need for any intellectual content, the intellectual argument has already been won. It is simply one of many facets of a seismic shift going on in the global psyche.
On the same programme I heard Mark Carney, the outgoing governor of the Bank of England, soon to become the UN special envoy on climate change, warning investors that now is not the time to invest in fossil fuel rich enterprises, as such assets will become worthless in the near future. And that enterprises involved in Green technologies are the best places to invest.
Quoting Punshhh
So why the interview, then, if the war is won? If the intellectual war is won everything else should follow. After all the science is in.
Robots will be what we decide to make them, I suppose, and might survive the capitalist world-burning. After the latest British and American elections I'd need a lot more than some programme to sell me on the current species. The majority are now endlessly manipulable, I'd say, and the system will manipulate them to the end.
This reminds me of your faith in the adaptability of humanity. I don't have such faith, faith in highly populous civilisations to make systemic change rapidly. In the UK, the government is the primary agent in social and industrial change. Our current government repeatedly makes hollow claims and promises about action on carbon reductions. Once they are in power complacency reigns, even while they claim that the goals are being achieved, there is inaction.
The only way to get systemic change in our system, and I expect it is the same in most countries is by force, force of public opinion, public demand, public action. This is now finally beginning to happen.
Greta said in the interview that such complacency had resulted in the recent talks in Madrid failing to make progress and that we must focus on making a success of COP26 in the UK next year.
Do you know that a UK representative at the Madrid talks reported that there were 150 US representatives going around trying to impede the talks and they may have succeeded. I wonder who told them, or their superiors to do that?
What do you think we should be doing now? Personally, I am in favor of doing what I can do. My sister is taking college classes so she has a better understanding of the problems and what we can do. She suggested the things we could do and I just passed them on. I think sharing information is important, don't you?
I really don't know what you mean by an existential experience. As of the end of this day, I am homeless. Thankfully I know this is only temporary, and I have resources so I can put most of what is important to me in a storage shed and my medical insurance provides a pass to gyms so I can feel rich soaking in hot tubs and I can shower. At the moment my survival seems a little more important than having an existential experience.
However, it is possible everything is going as planned. That is, the mass of humanity on earth and all the things that are happening are part of a higher plan. You know the New Age thinking. This is the dawning of the angel Aquarius, a time of peace and high technology and the end of tyranny. The mass of humanity could be the result of souls being reincarnated just before a major transition. We can thank the tarot cards, and the Pyramid of Gisa, and the bible, and Aztecs, all speak of the end of times. Is that thinking having an existential experience?
Robots might survive. Capitalism will burn all the humans. Why should there be a point?
Climate change is real
It is of less concern than given credit
We should be educating the next generation on how to resolve it
But the leading educator for the public is not an environmental scientist so she doesn't provide any useful education
But the majority of scientists are wrong because of a few who find their data inconclusive.
So you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Not 60 40
Not 50 50
Not even 80 20
96 to 4
We have too much extra stuff. We make things that aren't useful instead of saving the resources for things that are. Our energy is not self sustainable in the least and is a one way road with toxic waste as a result.
Addressing the concerns of climate change regardless of it's catastrophic or non catastrophic effect on society also addresses these concerns
I also think about appliances and tools and clothes in excess.
We dont really need TVs, we have phones that are more useful. Technology should go so far as to educate and entertain on a level that is not energy demanding. We dont need microwaves or toasters or coffee pots. We can use small stoves and ovens. We dont need dishwashers, excessive sets of dinnerware, or excessive cookware. Wash minimal dishes with minimal water. We dont need piles of blankets, clothes, and we shouldn't buy more or encourage the market to make more textiles by buying them until it is absolutely necessary and then yes second hand if possible.
We should probably stop eating meat as well. Very inefficient for the ecosystem.
And we should stop buying things that dont retain value over time past simple entertainment or things that utilize resources with a limited purpose like toys or jewelry.
And we could stop going on the internet, using the power grid to drive our computers or charge our phone batteries. Maybe get by without a mobile as we once did.
Quoting Lif3r
That would pretty hard to prove, which is why there’s no reference I guess.
Well you can’t have it both ways. The library of human knowledge? How did we ever get by pre internet, how did we develop the world we live in without the internet?
Oh my goodness is that idea wrong. You will not find the valuable information that is in old books such as the series of books recording the early congressional debates of the US, nor the encyclopedia written by Theodore Roosevelt on line. You will not find an explanation of what education had to do with mobilizing the US for WWI and WWII on line. At least not if you don't know that is something you want to look for.
The O of U library had a department of books containing government documents and anyone could access them and just browse the books looking to see what is in them, such as the letter Eisenhower wrote praising the German contribution to the democracy, and without that little piece of information it is not possible to understand how Germany changed the US. I am saying there is important information in books that people will never know about because the books are no longer available. There is a digital record of them but you have to know exactly what information you want to get to it. No one is free to just browse the books and discover what is in them. We can not access information we know nothing about without the books to browse.
With books and this did not becoming really meaningful until the west learned about paper and printing from the east and the books were made available to all those who who could afford them and eventually libraries made them available to even those who could afford them. Books spread knowledge in a away the internet can not. To find anything on the internet you have to know what you are look for and even then it may not come up on search.
For example what did Theodore Roosevelt say of women when the US mobilized for the first world war and how did schools support the war effort? This is human information that may not interest a robot. :grin:
I need to see my comment in context. I don’t even recall when I made it.
It depends on the children's education. In Oregon our schools are educating children about climate change and the children have become politically active.
Climate change and weather are not the same thing! Global warm is not about hot days, which would be about weather. Global warming is about climate, meaning that our planet is hotter then it was. The climate in which weather happens has changed. I don't think the average person gets that.
Quoting Lif3r
I see, now. I wasn’t really ignorant of how we got by without the internet. It was in response to the idea that the internet is the library of human knowledge and therefore essential.
I think we need to understand how books are different from the internet. Come to think of it, what information would a robot find important? What motivation would a robot have for understanding humans? Technological information can be devoid of the humanities. Books are written for people interested in humanity. The quality of the books and therefore the culture, matters. The internet just isn't the same.
Humanity has never fought as lone individuals.
From the dawn of times, it has always been group against group. Individual fights ("random violence") are even considered unlawful in our fundamentally social species. If you want to fight with legitimacy, your fight will need to be "organized violence", i.e. "war".
In conflict, you will not face other, lone individuals. You will face entire groups. Therefore, you will be forced to join your own group. What will, however, be the principle of cohesion in your fighting group? Traditionally, humanity has always used extended-family ties for that purpose, i.e. clans or tribes.
A common religion may actually also be a sufficiently functional system of cohesion.
If you are not already member of such (virtual) clan/tribe, then by the time the shit hits the fan, it will be too late to develop the mutual trust required. In that case, you do not stand a snowball's chance in hell to survive violent conflict. Hence, I can only conclude that you are toast already.