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Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

51 points by Pausanias 7y ago

Pausanias 7y ago
Excerpt: "There are three main factors that could be encouraging professional environmentalists in their denial that our societies will collapse in the near- term. The first is the way the natural scientific community operates. Eminent climate scientist James Hansen has always been ahead of the conservative consensus in his analyses and predictions. Using the case study of sea level rise, he threw light on processes that lead to “scientific reticence” to conclude and communicate scenarios that would be disturbing to employers, funders, governments and the public (Hansen, 2007). A more detailed study of this process across issues and institutions found that climate-change scientists routinely underestimate impacts “by erring on the side of least drama” - (Brysse et al, 2013). Combined with the norms of scientific analysis and reporting to be cautious and avoid bombast, and the time it takes to fund, research, produce and publish peer-reviewed scientific studies, this means that the information available to environmental professionals about the state of the climate is not as frightening as it could be. In this paper I have had to mix information from peer-reviewed articles with recent data from individual scientists and their research institutions to provide the evidence which suggests we are now in a non-linear situation of climactic changes and effects."
Causality1 7y ago
Alarmism. Societal change is inevitable, societal collapse is not. Society has survived a hell of a lot. Chinese society survived the Mongols. European society survived losing a third of its population to the black plague. Is climate change going to wipe out a third of the world population anytime soon? I doubt it.
- rectang 7y ago
  I empathize with the powerful craving to see reprehensible climate change denialists punished, but giving in to it results in a just-world fallacy. The universe is indifferent to scum. Only humans judge.
- IAmGraydon 7y ago
  Feel free to continue to psychologically comfort yourself in a thick blanket of hubris. Whatever you need to do. It won't change anything back here in reality.
- mc32 7y ago
  A big difference now is the ease of mobility. A catastrophe in equatorial Africa a thousand years ago didn’t result in mass migration to Southern Africa. A catastrophe today will result in massive mobilization from one locale to another. The only example I can think of of mass migration was the steppes peoples but even that wasn’t that quick to happen.
  - ThomPete 7y ago
    Mass migration over time though. Not civilization ending. You should be more concerned about a meteor or giant vulcanic eruption than catastrophic climate change.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    There's not a lot of great data from that time period, but another potential example is the bronze age collapse which was in part caused by a mass migration of "the sea peoples" into the great empires of the time. The societal collapse so great that we forgot and had to reinvent writing after it had existed for millennia.
aportnoy 7y ago
Wow, he has a bachelor's AND a PhD?
kyrieeschaton 7y ago
If you believe climate change is going to lead to complete societal collapse, your primary policy remedies are 1) geoengineering, or 2) nuking some combination of India and China (a subset of option 1, but practical with existing tech). However, almost every global warming proponent advocates deindustrializing the west and moving production to vastly less efficient areas overseas. Why does this discrepancy persist?
- everdev 7y ago
  > 2) nuking some combination of India and China No one is advocating for #2 or anything like it because it's a completely incompetent and reprehensible idea.
  - ghda 7y ago
    Better than letting human society collapse though. If that’s what you really believe will happen.
    - spaceheretostay 7y ago
      That cannot be the logical follow-through. A collapsing society can do its best to recover - a nuked and destroyed, murdered wasteland cannot. Climate-precipitated societal collapse is surely preferable to all over a large-scale nuclear war that is suggested to have been unilaterally invoked, tantamount to murder of billions and multiple genocides. That kind of 'solution' has no place in reasonable discourse about climate change mitigation or adaptation.
      - derp_dee_derp 7y ago
        Logically, Indian and Chinese societies are distinct entities from each other and from American society. It makes logical sense for american society to nuke Chinese and Indian society to prevent american societal collapse. Or maybe this whole societial collapse thing is just fear mongering and it's not as big a deal as they say it is??????
ThomPete 7y ago
Sorry but this is getting silly. You dont get to claim scientific basis without being able to demonstrate your conclusions. This is speculation not actually scientifically demonstrated.
- foolzcrow 7y ago
  They are a death cult. Its all they think about.
yodon 7y ago
If society collapses even for just one generation, that's the end game. There isn't enough readily available energy available on the surface to restart society. We depend on large amounts of energy and energy requiring infrastructure to get the remaining oil and gas to the surface for consumption. China might have enough accessible coal (I simply don't know) but if there is a societal collapse for a generation or so and if they do have accessible coal today it's likely to be sufficiently valuable in the interregnum that it too will be stripmined away before society is able to try to recover. (Solar, wind, and energy all take far too much education to get running at large scale, and educated individuals are likely to be in equally short supply of society collapses for a generation). We have to keep society running. We won't have the energetics to get it started again if it stops.
- purplezooey 7y ago
  We have to keep society running. We won't have the energetics to get it started again if it stops. That's what I tell myself lying in bed every morning.
mirimir 7y ago
> Some of the people who believe that we face inevitable extinction believe that no one will read this article because we will see a collapse of civilisation in the next twelve months when the harvests fail across the northern hemisphere. OK, I gather that means fall 2019. If that were going to happen, I'd have expected some drop-off in 2018 harvests. And I don't see news about that. But let's see what happens this year. > They see social collapse leading to immediate meltdowns of nuclear power stations and thus human extinction being a near-term phenomenon. Certainly not more than five years from now. That's still possible, I guess. But it too seems like a worst possible case. But whatever, I'll be happy if the next decade or two is ~OK.
globlist 7y ago
Get your daily dose of climate hysteria!
foolzcrow 7y ago
Al Gore said the same thing back in the 1990s. This is about controlling people and nothing else.

51 points by Pausanias 7y ago

Excerpt: "There are three main factors that could be encouraging professional environmentalists in their denial that our societies will collapse in the near- term. The first is the way the natural scientific community operates. Eminent climate scientist James Hansen has always been ahead of the conservative consensus in his analyses and predictions. Using the case study of sea level rise, he threw light on processes that lead to “scientific reticence” to conclude and communicate scenarios that would be disturbing to employers, funders, governments and the public (Hansen, 2007). A more detailed study of this process across issues and institutions found that climate-change scientists routinely underestimate impacts “by erring on the side of least drama” - (Brysse et al, 2013). Combined with the norms of scientific analysis and reporting to be cautious and avoid bombast, and the time it takes to fund, research, produce and publish peer-reviewed scientific studies, this means that the information available to environmental professionals about the state of the climate is not as frightening as it could be. In this paper I have had to mix information from peer-reviewed articles with recent data from individual scientists and their research institutions to provide the evidence which suggests we are now in a non-linear situation of climactic changes and effects."

Causality1 7y ago

Alarmism. Societal change is inevitable, societal collapse is not. Society has survived a hell of a lot. Chinese society survived the Mongols. European society survived losing a third of its population to the black plague. Is climate change going to wipe out a third of the world population anytime soon? I doubt it.

rectang 7y ago
I empathize with the powerful craving to see reprehensible climate change denialists punished, but giving in to it results in a just-world fallacy. The universe is indifferent to scum. Only humans judge.
IAmGraydon 7y ago
Feel free to continue to psychologically comfort yourself in a thick blanket of hubris. Whatever you need to do. It won't change anything back here in reality.
mc32 7y ago
A big difference now is the ease of mobility. A catastrophe in equatorial Africa a thousand years ago didn’t result in mass migration to Southern Africa. A catastrophe today will result in massive mobilization from one locale to another. The only example I can think of of mass migration was the steppes peoples but even that wasn’t that quick to happen.
- ThomPete 7y ago
  Mass migration over time though. Not civilization ending. You should be more concerned about a meteor or giant vulcanic eruption than catastrophic climate change.
- monocasa 7y ago
  There's not a lot of great data from that time period, but another potential example is the bronze age collapse which was in part caused by a mass migration of "the sea peoples" into the great empires of the time. The societal collapse so great that we forgot and had to reinvent writing after it had existed for millennia.

aportnoy 7y ago

Wow, he has a bachelor's AND a PhD?

kyrieeschaton 7y ago

If you believe climate change is going to lead to complete societal collapse, your primary policy remedies are 1) geoengineering, or 2) nuking some combination of India and China (a subset of option 1, but practical with existing tech). However, almost every global warming proponent advocates deindustrializing the west and moving production to vastly less efficient areas overseas. Why does this discrepancy persist?

everdev 7y ago
> 2) nuking some combination of India and China No one is advocating for #2 or anything like it because it's a completely incompetent and reprehensible idea.
- ghda 7y ago
  Better than letting human society collapse though. If that’s what you really believe will happen.
  - spaceheretostay 7y ago
    That cannot be the logical follow-through. A collapsing society can do its best to recover - a nuked and destroyed, murdered wasteland cannot. Climate-precipitated societal collapse is surely preferable to all over a large-scale nuclear war that is suggested to have been unilaterally invoked, tantamount to murder of billions and multiple genocides. That kind of 'solution' has no place in reasonable discourse about climate change mitigation or adaptation.
    - derp_dee_derp 7y ago
      Logically, Indian and Chinese societies are distinct entities from each other and from American society. It makes logical sense for american society to nuke Chinese and Indian society to prevent american societal collapse. Or maybe this whole societial collapse thing is just fear mongering and it's not as big a deal as they say it is??????

ThomPete 7y ago

Sorry but this is getting silly. You dont get to claim scientific basis without being able to demonstrate your conclusions. This is speculation not actually scientifically demonstrated.

foolzcrow 7y ago
They are a death cult. Its all they think about.

yodon 7y ago

If society collapses even for just one generation, that's the end game. There isn't enough readily available energy available on the surface to restart society. We depend on large amounts of energy and energy requiring infrastructure to get the remaining oil and gas to the surface for consumption. China might have enough accessible coal (I simply don't know) but if there is a societal collapse for a generation or so and if they do have accessible coal today it's likely to be sufficiently valuable in the interregnum that it too will be stripmined away before society is able to try to recover. (Solar, wind, and energy all take far too much education to get running at large scale, and educated individuals are likely to be in equally short supply of society collapses for a generation). We have to keep society running. We won't have the energetics to get it started again if it stops.

purplezooey 7y ago
We have to keep society running. We won't have the energetics to get it started again if it stops. That's what I tell myself lying in bed every morning.

mirimir 7y ago

> Some of the people who believe that we face inevitable extinction believe that no one will read this article because we will see a collapse of civilisation in the next twelve months when the harvests fail across the northern hemisphere. OK, I gather that means fall 2019. If that were going to happen, I'd have expected some drop-off in 2018 harvests. And I don't see news about that. But let's see what happens this year. > They see social collapse leading to immediate meltdowns of nuclear power stations and thus human extinction being a near-term phenomenon. Certainly not more than five years from now. That's still possible, I guess. But it too seems like a worst possible case. But whatever, I'll be happy if the next decade or two is ~OK.

globlist 7y ago

Get your daily dose of climate hysteria!

foolzcrow 7y ago

Al Gore said the same thing back in the 1990s. This is about controlling people and nothing else.