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The Future Is Grim
- matznerd 7y agoI am personally more of an optimist, but I originally saw this post on r/collapse and then on r/bestof and now its made it to my FB feed via this Medium post. I care more about people understanding what a dire situation we are in so that we can take action ASAP. there are also a number of good links in here, whether or not you agree that we are locked into this future. It will definitely take a concerted effort from society to make sure the future is not grim.
- agumonkey 7y agoWe need to invent middle layer political onset. Everybody is wondering what to do, nothing happen yet it should have been so yesterday. ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous networking yet no spirit no coordination.. strange isn't it ?
- toomuchtodo 7y agoNot strange at all. Why would ubiquitous tooling confer resolve and fortitude? You can’t hammer people problems with tech and expect a fix. They’re people problems!
- agumonkey 7y agoIt's partly relevant still because all tech is sold as a 'tool to aid humans'. Otherwise I agree. And the original question still remains. Anybody who solves the intermediate organization problem (doesn't matter how) will wins a special spot in human history (what remains of it)
- dpflan 7y agoCould you elaborate upon what you mean by middle layer politics and intermediate organization problem?
- agumonkey 7y agoI lack proper terminology. I mean: - individual initiative is not enough - nation wide (or larger) is not happening (there are big efforts but there are also contradicting accounts of actual progress and even opposing forces like countries investing in coal even more) the usual levers (parties) are not effective, how to combine individual efforts into groups (the middle layer) so that people can 1) have access to useful information 2) find solutions to problems (buying local food, consuming less, producing some stuff locally if it makes sense). I have this view where small groups spread in enough numbers would divert all the yet passive people into followers so that quickly economics will be redirected into a sustainable low pollution model.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoRun for local government, enact low carbon policies (electric buses, prohibition of new natural gas service and petrol fueling stations, establish municipal electric service that buys 100% renewables in bulk for citizens, etc). If you need funding, go to the muni bond market and skip the federal gov green bank if they can’t get their act together.
- remir 7y agoNothing happens because politicians needs to sell dreams in order to get elected. The public doesn't want the truth, that's the problem. There's people out there in very poor shape, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and eating junk every day and it would take a massive health problem to get them to change their habits, even tho they feel like crap all the time. This is essentially the same thing with our society. What needs to be done is drastic, yet how do you convince people that this is desirable? You can't. Most people need suffering in order to change.
- agumonkey 7y agoFair point. I'm calling for a different group of people to sit and think. People with a bit of abstract math, systemic and various fields (food, geology, ecology, logistics) to assemble, and reflect on how to migrate people lifestyle gradually. Spreading small degrowth groups around, creating nature cattering associations, educators to turn people from consumers to actors of their neighborhoods with pleasure and care. I'm highly convinced it doesn't require much to tip off a whole population in our case. Because the system is already sick to me. People just need a smooth path out and the benefits are not far (better diet, more physical exercises, less loneliness, less stress, less toxic competition, more control over their life).
- perfunctory 7y agoWhat exactly makes you optimistic? Genuinely curious. I don't see any concerted effort from society so far.
- merpnderp 7y agoThe thing that makes me most optimistic is the IPCC is highly confident that if we switch from fossil fuels, within 10-20 years the man made part of global warming will end. In just 20 years my state has moved from 70% coal - 30% natgas power to 25% coal, 50% natgas, 25% wind. In maybe a decade the only CO2 my state will be producing of any significance will be from automobiles, which look to be on the verge of being replaced by electric in at most 2 decades. Granted my state in the US has likely moved the fastest on this. It is hard to believe that given just our current level of progress, that the world won't have drastically cut CO2 by 2050.
- perfunctory 7y agoThere are some local success stories here and there for sure. But global co2 emissions are still rising. Not declining, not even flattening, rising! According to the latest UN emissions gap report we need to reduce global emissions by 7.6% every year starting now to meet Paris agreement. Last year global emissions increased, again. Reduction trend is nowhere in sight yet. I have no idea where hope and optimism come from.
- pojzon 7y agoIn a contrast my country went from 15% wind 30% nuclear 10% water 45% coal to 70% coal 10% nuclear/wind/water. There are ZERO indicators showing that we will meet any climate saving goals.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoIf. COP25, the 25th year, was a farce of self-interest from fossil producers. Australia found a way to fiddle their historic figures to claim they need take no action! No one's listening to the IPCC, except those not running countries (except maybe some of the smaller, poorer ones).
- Udik 7y ago> A study by the Pentagon confirms [there will wars caused by migrants] The reading of newspapers confirms that the Pentagon is causing wars today. Some of the climate change scare is a huge distraction from much more important and actual issues, on which we have much more agency and yet we've decided to ignore. Just to give an example, we seem to be extremely worried about populations living on a bare subsitence level- that is, without secure food sources, decent housing or sanitation- being threatened by climate change. And somehow we've decided that we need to invest trillions not to take them out of poverty, but to keep them in the same poverty but with a better climate. Priorities.
- smitty1e 7y agoReports from the other side of the argument contend that the modern age continues to drive down the number of people in dire straits. So one idea is to step back from the messengers and wonder who drives the messages: how much of this reporting is intended to manipulate policy?
- mudil 7y agoSerious questions. What is wrong with a hypothetical scenario that our children will have to move to Antarctica and northern Russia to grow corn and grapes? I mean after all, people moved all the time. Civilizations collapsed in the past from lack of water where it used to be plentiful, and other natural disasters wiped out entire civilizations. And we are still here, living well, eating organic food, drinking clean water and watching Netflix. And we are living longer and better, and in the West we have more forests than a century ago. How do we even know that these naysayers are correct while those that blamed witches and proclaimed impending apocalypses were wrong?
- mudil 7y agoNow the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us (2004) (theguardian.com) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...
- mudil 7y ago"Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world."
- sbierwagen 7y agoSomeone should let this guy know that Medium lets you put inline images in a post.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jurassic 7y ago> Of all the birds left in the world, 70% are poultry chickens and other farmed birds While the overall thesis of this article may be correct, the writer undermines themself with the inclusion of misleading statistics like this one. It makes it sound as if we have killed all the wild birds or shunted them into the food industrial complex when really these things are fairly independent of one another. We're simply growing more chickens than ever because people like to eat meat.
- GrayTextIsTruth 7y agoBut the bird population has decreased. Deforestation and house cats are doing a lot of damage.
- noahtallen 7y agoFair enough, for sure, but the statistic doesn’t really get at that point directly. It’d be better to say “50% fewer non-agricultural birds were alive in 2019 than in 2018” (or whatever the stat is) if that’s the point they wish to make.
- jurassic 7y agoI don’t doubt the bird population has declined. But the stat cited above doesn’t convey any information about the decline. If you have 30 wild birds in your property and you setup a barn with 70 industrial meat birds inside, you did not necessarily obliterate the wild population.
- perfunctory 7y ago> when really these things are fairly independent of one another are they really? we simply expropriate more and more land from wilderness for animal farming.
- matznerd 7y agoI'm not sure he completely undermines himself. Yes, we are definitely growing more birds for food and he could have made that relationship more clear, but at the same time, there is simultaneously a bird "extinction" event going on that also results in an increase in the percentage of birds that are for poultry use. I'm not sure if you've seen this, but based on an extensive report examining 140 million records of birds, the Oct 2019 paper in Science, "Decline of the North American Avifauna"[0] determined that there are now 3 billion fewer birds in the US since the 1970s: >"Using multiple and independent monitoring networks, we report population losses across much of the North American avifauna over 48 years, including once-common species and from most biomes. Integration of range-wide population trajectories and size estimates indicates a net loss approaching 3 billion birds, or 29% of 1970 abundance. A continent-wide weather radar network also reveals a similarly steep decline in biomass passage of migrating birds over a recent 10-year period. This loss of bird abundance signals an urgent need to address threats to avert future avifaunal collapse and associated loss of ecosystem integrity, function, and services. This paper also spurred some articles that discuss the issue such as "Birds are Vanishing From North America" in the NYT [1] and "The Quiet Disappearance of Birds in North America [2] Then a week after that paper came out, the Audubon Society released a report "Survival by Degrees" [3][4][5] saying 2/3rd of birds are at risk of extinction from climate change alone if global warming hits 5.4 deg F by 2100. So while the author could have been more clear, the fact is, the evidence is clear that bird populations are rapidly declining due to climate change and the latest reports warn that we must take steps to "avert future avifaunal collapse." [0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6461/120 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6461/120 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/science/bird-populations-america-canada.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/science/bird-populations-... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/america-has-lost-quarter-its-birds-fifty-years/598318/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/america-... [3] https://www.audubon.org/climate/survivalbydegrees https://www.audubon.org/climate/survivalbydegrees [4] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/798652v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/798652v1 [5] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/798694v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/798694v1
- hellofunk 7y ago> billionaires caused the climate change and how they are building bunkers and buying NZ passports to fly there when [shit happens] Why NZ?
- endymi0n 7y ago1. Because it's reasonably "far away" from the main centres of possible climate refugee migration 2. Because you can. https://www.businessinsider.de/international/countries-where-you-can-buy-citizenship-residency-or-passport-2018-9/?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.de/international/countries-where...
- dehrmann 7y ago* First-world, developed country * Stable currency * Stable political system * Speaks English * Few geopolitical entanglements * Natural resources
- ncmncm 7y agoIt is an inconvenient destination for mass migration and military invasion, not downwind of likely thermonuclear war targets, is large enough to support amenities, and is at sufficiently high latitude.
- hellofunk 7y ago> at sufficiently high latitude I assume you mean altitude?
- ncmncm 7y agoLatitude. Tropics become uninhabitable (anyway, unfarmable) by humans fairly early on. When the super-rich do finally decamp to New Zealand, CO2 output will probably be declining precipitously. A resulting new ice age would make refuge at high latitude ironic.
- colinhb 7y ago> Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a prominent investor, recalls telling a friend that he was thinking of visiting New Zealand. “Oh, are you going to get apocalypse insurance?” the friend asked. “I’m, like, Huh?” Hoffman told me. New Zealand, he discovered, is a favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm. Hoffman said, “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.’ ” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...
- brenden2 7y agoHumans have an incredible history of adaptation and survival, and I do agree climate change is a big problem. The metrics are all going the wrong way, but I see the fallout (famine, disease, death, etc) as a natural corrective mechanism. Earth has a long history of hot and cold periods, the only difference being this time it's largely caused by humans. We survived the plague, world wars, and much more, so I think we (as a species) will still be around on this rock for a long time to come.
- Tronno 7y agoOf course humans will survive, but what about our civilization? That seems less likely. I also fear the "natural correction" will be violent, painful, and potentially apocalyptic in scale. Watching everything we built crumble, watching our children suffer, etc, would be horrific. We have to do something.
- brenden2 7y agoEntire civilizations have been destroyed before, notably the Roman Empire. Humans came back stronger and more well off.
- ncmncm 7y agoHumans, outside cities, were not then dependent on long-distance food transport. Furthermore, the Roman Empire was not destroyed. It declined over centuries. Catastrophic collapse is an entirely different phenomenon. It matters which humans. If you mean that after six billion starve, the remnants will have access to substantial remaining infrastructure, OK. Probably the wars won't destroy most of it.
- brenden2 7y agoFWIW the word "collapse" appears 7 times in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire
- ilaksh 7y agoI have read a lot saying that in many countries population is imploding, indicating that the overpopulation fears may be dated.
- renjimen 7y agoWe're currently at +90 million people per year. The UN predicts that to drop by around 1 million people per year [1], which would mean the total population is still increasing for another 90 years. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
- ncmncm 7y agoPopulation decline is highly localized. It is happening least in the areas that will become uninhabitable without adequate action.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ncmncm 7y agoTaking bets on the most likely path to worldwide civilization collapse, sans adequate action. My bet is mass migration north in response to loss of tropical and subtropical agricultural production drives isolationism, putting fascists in power, who initiate wars leading to (limited?) use of nuclear weapons. Resulting chaos disrupts farming, food transport, trade, industrial supply, and climate disruption response, resulting in more chaos, more fascism, more war, and on down. Timeline 2030 unless CO2 is actually declining by then. Reason: already started, action already inadequate.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- beetwenty 7y agoWhen I see articles with so many various facts assembled together, I have to remind myself that the author cannot possibly be an expert in all of them, and so the story is just that - a story. Which doesn't change the fact that something needs to be done, or that many of the predictions will come to pass, just, the full story is never going to work out quite how anyone expects. And that's enough to have some hope.
- pan69 7y agoLooking at the chart of the climate summit targets, we don't really seem to have a history of doing the right thing. I would love to share your optimism of "some hope" but to me it seems that as a species we're simply incapable. https://miro.medium.com/max/696/1*NHFNUj3lns_y-3srODj-zg.jpeg https://miro.medium.com/max/696/1*NHFNUj3lns_y-3srODj-zg.jpe...
- Damorian 7y agoI can only read so much far-left death cult nonsense before rolling my eyes and closing the tab. How many cherry picked stats can you fit in one article? Look at the number of people removed from extreme poverty. Look at the price cliff solar and electric vehicles are falling off. Every "problem" is a hypothetical projection that I have no doubt will be addressed once they turn into economic problems. I'm not losing sleep about fresh water when I'm paying a fraction of a cent for a gallon. If I could talk to a person from the future 1000 years from now, my first question isn't "how many degrees did the Earth warm from climate change" it's "how many star systems have humans colonized."
- ncmncm 7y agoIn a thousand years, it will be looked back on as we do the Black and Justinian plagues. It will inspire awe: "They knew, and did nothing?" Humanity, and even civilization, will certainly recover fully within two centuries, three at the outside. This does not inspire confidence in the immediate future.
- Damorian 7y agoI expect climate change will look more like Y2K than the black plague. If anything the increase in precipitation, higher temperatures, longer growing season and CO2 concentration will help humanity more than it hurts with mass afforrestation and better crop yields.
- ncmncm 7y agoYou just keep telling yourself that. Doing nothing is the easiest thing, and no one will blame you, personally, after.
- Damorian 7y agoDon't make assumptions. I have both an electric car and a 7kw solar system on my home. Not because I'm saving the world or smelling my own farts, but because it makes economic sense. That is the reason, the only reason, climate change will be solved.
- Gatsky 7y agoThe ecological history of the earth shows there have been dramatic changes in climate before. It is speculated/strongly believed that some of these changes had a strong contribution from organic life eg plants and trees affecting weathering rates and therefore atmospheric composition. These climate changes were usually associated with the annihilation of most (sometimes all) complex life, certainly anything you would ever call an animal. I just make this point to say that climate change can definitely wipe us out, just as it has other large animals before. One issue that isn't discussed much - an ageing population. Obviously this is a generalisation, but the more elderly are disincentivized to do anything about climate change. They also lack the resources to really change behaviour, and are resistant to the kind of sweeping economic and societal changes being proposed. At the same time, they have a lot of influence on political decision making or are the decision makers themselves. I don't see a solution to this problem, aside from waiting until the influence of that generation dies off (about another 10 years).
- perfunctory 7y ago> I don't see a solution to this problem, aside from waiting until the influence of that generation dies off (about another 10 years). Another solution is active resistance. Either we solve it via a civilized conflict now, or we all get brutal conflicts around the globe later (in 10 years?)
- RestlessMind 7y ago> I don't see a solution to this problem Generalizing the problem - if a group of people (X) is disincentivized to tackle a problem which terribly affects another, possibly bigger, group of people (Y), and if X also wields a lot of power to prevent any meaningful solutions to the said problem, then History shows us that it is only a matter of time before Y will acquire enough power to overthrow X. See - French revolution, Russian revolution. But I also disagree with your take that "elderly are disincentivized to do anything about climate change". I believe that the elderly in the fire prone areas of California or hurricane prone areas of Florida would be very much interested in tackling the climate change. A big problem is the lack of meaningful solutions. Once you have seen enough in the world, you can see through the gimmicks like banning gas pipelines to all the new houses (Mountain View) or flight shaming or moralizing against meat by all the vegans.
- duelingjello 7y agoWhat do you do if someone pulls a knife on you and tries to murder you? You fight back until the threat ends. For our survival, most of the billionaires need to be liquidated, in both senses. They’re killing us with their greed and corruption. They need to be stopped and positive control restored, or we all die.
- GoodJokes 7y agoThis person is not a climate scientist and many of his sections have been roundly debunked and or heavily nuanced by actual climate scientists who are not deniers. The amount of r/collapse stuff on this sight is incredible relative to the supposed technical expertise of the "tech" industry. Really makes one think Good rule of thumb - if it originated on r/collapse you are dealing with something that is heavily influenced by narcissistic pessimism. This person starts the article convincing us of his credentials none of which are climate scientist. I would use these two sources to check on shit like this: https://climatefeedback.org/ https://climatefeedback.org/ https://climatetippingpoints.info/ https://climatetippingpoints.info/
- GoodJokes 7y agoWhy is r/collapse troll copy pasta being posted here? The only reason this stuff is hard to ignore for me is it legit makes people suicidal and that is not cool.