11 ms·

‘Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome’: top climate scientists

39 points by 1qazxsw23edc 6y ago

wcerfgba 6y ago
Fellow techies interested in helping solve the climate crisis may be interested in https://climateaction.tech/ https://climateaction.tech/ :)
- lcam84 6y ago
  I am a tech guy, but I am not very optimistic about finding a technological solution for this. The problem is energy, how much energy do we need to change to move to a greener infrastructure? There is also the paradox of jevrons [1]. I need to slow down the economy and, at the same time, ensure that everyone lives a decent life. This would be real progress. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - n4r9 6y ago
    Is it not possible that we find a way to scrub carbon straight out of the atmosphere and trap it underground? I don't know, and would be happy to pointed towards research on this, but it doesn't strike me as a simple energy-in-energy-out situation. There seems to be the potential for a brilliant technological solution.
    - gshdg 6y ago
      They’re called trees.
      - FooHentai 6y ago
        Not really - By converting pasture back to woodland you could potentially restore some of the released carbon from agriculture-driven destruction of old forest land. But it won't make up for the vast reserves of carbon that have been dredged up from deep underground and released to the atmosphere. If it's necessary to re-balance that withdrawal we're going to need to put something back down there, or come up with something novel.
        gshdg 6y ago
        AFAIK, every other method requires massive electricity input; and we’re still not getting enough energy from renewables for that not to mean spewing more additional carbon than we sequester for each unit sequestered. (Of course, trees also require massive energy input. The difference is that we don’t have to supply that energy.)
        n4r9 6y ago
        Which leads back to my question: is it not possible that we may find a technological alternative to trees which scales better and does not require us to supply so much energy.
        gshdg 6y ago
        I suspect the chemistry of it requires as much energy put into sequestering as is captured by releasing it. But... I could be wrong.
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    There is a whole lot that we can do. A plant caused the last ice age[1]. If we could genetically engineer that plant to grow on the ocean, it would sequester an incredible amount of CO2. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
    - klipt 6y ago
      Most of the discussion of combatting climate change focuses on reducing atmospheric CO2, but there's an entire second category of approaches: Solar Radiation Management, some of which could be much faster and cheaper than reducing CO2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation_management While reducing CO2 emissions via investment in renewables is still an important long term goal, if we're already heading towards a potentially catastrophic situation, it seems we should be investigating other forms of climate engineering more seriously?
      - lcam84 6y ago
        I find some challenges in geo engineering: - Problem shifting. Gaia is a very complex system, and geoengineering solutions can have unexpected effects - We don't just have the problem of climate change to solve. Loss of biodiversity, acidification of the oceans, soil loss have to be taken into account. - We have the jevons paradox. By finding a technical solution to the problem we can think that it is justifiable to continue polluting. If we could slow down human activity, nature would begin to regenerate. I think it is possible to slow down our development without any major problems for humanity, after all we have never lived in a period of such prosperity. It would be a matter of maintaining our level of wealth (or even lowering it a little) instead of aspiring to more. Solutions created by us are usually fragile compared to natural systems that are anti-fragile.
engineer_22 6y ago
Voice of action is a Marxist propoganda website
- ManuelKiessling 6y ago
  I think it is good style to combine especially strong opinions with especially strong supporting facts, proofs, evidence, or arguments.
  - korantu 6y ago
    Editor opinion on Marx [0] and the 'About' section of the web site [1] where class struggle is prominently featured give some credibility to this opinion. [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/ashermoses/status/1180642662052855814 https://mobile.twitter.com/ashermoses/status/118064266205285... [1] https://voiceofaction.org/about/ https://voiceofaction.org/about/
  - tripletao 6y ago
    "Propaganda" is mostly used more just as an insult than as an objective category, but the founder of this website would indeed seem to literally be a Marxist. In his Twitter feed, he advocates policies similar to those advocated by Marx, using language similar to Marx's. He also refers to Marx directly by name in approving terms: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aashermoses%20marx&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aashermoses%20marx&src=ty... This of course doesn't make anything claimed in the article any more or less true, but the purportedly scientific conclusions here do align nicely with his politics. As to the article, Malthusian predictions have a long history of being incredibly wrong. It seems likely to me that global warming will continue to a point that many current agricultural practices must be abandoned for new ones, and that this transition will result in many deaths; but that's not the "collapse of civilization". Maybe scientists frustrated by the public's slow response to this serious problem have decided to try falsely portraying it as an apocalyptic problem, to see if that gets a faster response; but I doubt that it will, and it's a lie either way.
  - jariel 6y ago
    There are no facts in the article to support any of their many sociological positions. For example, that inequality of asset ownership leads to social decay. That there is even actually social decay or real instability in America. One thing missed by in the treatise and a lot of comments, is that 'consumption' is somehow tantamount to 'resource utilisation'. Obviously, there is a correlation. But a considerable amount of what we 'consume' does not entail necessarily excessive resource consumption. Plastics, electronics doesn't eat up a lot of 'resources', though some parts perhaps more than others i.e. 'alkaline batteries'. Huge swaths of our consumption aren't even related to resources: entertainment, video games, software, social networks etc.. If they are really smart, they would take some time to decouple the 'resource intensive' aspects of consumption, with those that are not, and help industry to optimise along those lines.
LatteLazy 6y ago
And there is literally nothing any of us can do about it.
- lcam84 6y ago
  We can try degrowth. We need to find a way to live well and decrease the GDP. The article talks about the limits of growth for, those who don't know what it is you can watch this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9wjJjmkmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9wjJjmkmc
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    No, we can't try that I'm afraid. People won't accept that. People have chosen to doom the planet. The problem here isn't technology or economics. It's people and politics. People don't want to survive, they want cheeseburgers and air-conditioning.
    - lcam84 6y ago
      Maybe you are right, but we need to try something and for me this is what make sense. For instance did you notice the effect of covid in the environment? We need to challenge assumptions. The assumption of growth is one of them. We need to have intrinsical objectives. The goal should not be to save the planet but to act in the best possible way to make it happen.
      - LatteLazy 6y ago
        How do you and me try degrowing the world economy? We can't. >The goal should not be to save the planet but to act in the best possible way to make it happen. Sorry, but this sort of thinking is exactly what has gotten us nowhere for the last 50+ years.
        lcam84 6y ago
        We could channel the consuption taxes to a UBI. This would make local economies more competitive compared the global economy. For example, taxes on fossil fuels would make products made from far away more expensive than local products. With time UBI would not be needed as local economies tooked the global economy role. There are many attitudes towards climate change. We can be too optimistic and tell ourselves that we do not need to worry because we will have a solution in the future. We can be very pessimistic and think that it is no longer worth it, we all gonna die. I want to have a middle position, I know it is a very big challenge and there are great possibilities, that it will not be possible to reverse what lies ahead, but we will try nevertheless. The objective is not what will happen to the planet, the objective is to define what is our role in all of this.
rayiner 6y ago
Is this "top climate scientists" or the "scientific consensus?"
oxAAAFFB 6y ago
Just deploy a solar shade, it’s easy.
korantu 6y ago
> “senior U.N. environmental official” claims that if global warming isn’t reversed by 2030, then rising sea levels could wipe “entire nations . . . off the face of the Earth.” > Crop failures coupled with coastal flooding, he said, could provoke “an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ ” whose movements could wreak political chaos the world over. Unabated, the ice caps will melt away, the rainforests will burn, and the world will warm to unbearable temperatures. > Governments “have a ten-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effects before it goes beyond human control,” said the U.N. official. [0] the above was published by U.N. official in 1989, with point of no return being year 2000, not 2030. People knew it for more than 20 years already. It is important to keep in mind that alarmism can actually be harmful, where instead of doing anything people just have their burger whole try can, as there is no point doing anything anymore. [1] [0] https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25/why-everything-they-say-about-climate-change-is-wrong/#3f848ba412d6 https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25...
- magicnubs 6y ago
  > instead of doing anything people just have their burger whole try can I assume this is just a typo, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the original was
  - makerofspoons 6y ago
    I read it as "instead of doing anything people will just have their burger while they can"
clay_the_ripper 6y ago
I’m sorry - I don’t buy this article at all. I am not a climate denier, just a reasonable person with a brain. Obviously global warming/global climate change is real. Obviously, green house gas emissions by humans are the main culprit. But I do not for one second believe that civilization will collapse, at least not in say the next couple of hundred years. Ecosystems are already toast -GBR will mostly die in the next 50 years. Rainforests and biodiversity, deforestation etc are history. Already dead. But will human beings and our civilization “collapse”? No way. These “climate refugees” everyone talks about “overwhelming” us actually stinks of xenophobia. And in what way is a climate refugee different from a regular refugee? The developing world is already a catastrophe, yet I wouldn’t say refugees are overwhelming us. Bacially my view is this: yeah it’s bad but saying that 6 billion people will die which is what this article suggests is alarmist nonsense.
- jariel 6y ago
  The term 'refugee' does not even appear in the article. ... and while people do talk about 'climate refugees', nobody is talking about them 'overwhelming us'. And FYI it definitely does not take too many people to overwhelm a social system with benevolent impetus, as we saw starkly in Sweden, 2016. As for the materiality of the article and what should set off alarm bells: "“For example, it appears that the USA is entering a long period of decline in many aspect of its society, with a potential for a more rapid collapse in the coming decade,” said Steffen. "Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told Voice of Action that the coming collapse would not be a single black or white event. “With respect to civilisations, what is more likely is that we have entered a stage of what JM Greer calls ‘catabolic collapse’ – where we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep things going for a bit longer,” said Alexander. “Capitalism is quite good at dodging bullets and escaping temporary challenges to its legitimacy and viability. But its condition, I feel is terminal.” "“As economies deteriorate and as inequalities deepen, more people get disenfranchised, incentivising resistance and sadly sometimes making people look for scapegoats to blame for new or intensifying hardships (e.g. the so-called alt-right),”" “I think global capitalism is realising that the parasitical nature that has emerged (where the top 1% own the vast majority of the world’s wealth), can only be sustained for so long,” said Buckley" We have: A) America in social decline (political statement) B) the other boogey man 'capitalism' as the root cause obviously! C) The 'alt right' (are we talking about the environment here?) D) Researchers work cancelled for ostensibly political reasons, which is not good, but it's also not objective either. So the problem with the article, is that a lot of the authorship is deeply ideological. This is hard issue to escape when trying to put an economic value of such things as 'pollution and traffic' vs other elements. Far too many references to their representation of 'inequality', and major gaps in their assumptions as to how that leads to social decay, for this to be a serious treatise on climate. And of course, no mention of Nuclear Energy, which is odd, given 'existential threat' you'd think we'd try to use something that is already fairly well proven.
mrosett 6y ago
Neo-malthusian arguments have been recycled by the same group of intellectuals for the last 50 years or so. You'd be hard pressed to point to a single prediction they've made that turned out to be correct. If there's a single fatal flaw, it's that they discount how much people will change their behavior in response to a change in circumstances. Unchecked global warming may spell doom for civilization as it currently exists... but adaptations will be made. Food will be grown in places that are currently too cold for it. Sea walls will be built. Air conditioners will be purchased. If "top climate scientists" want to argue that preventing climate change is better than adapting to it, then that's something I'd engage with. But this? Absolute drivel.

39 points by 1qazxsw23edc 6y ago

Fellow techies interested in helping solve the climate crisis may be interested in https://climateaction.tech/ https://climateaction.tech/ :)

lcam84 6y ago
I am a tech guy, but I am not very optimistic about finding a technological solution for this. The problem is energy, how much energy do we need to change to move to a greener infrastructure? There is also the paradox of jevrons [1]. I need to slow down the economy and, at the same time, ensure that everyone lives a decent life. This would be real progress. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- n4r9 6y ago
  Is it not possible that we find a way to scrub carbon straight out of the atmosphere and trap it underground? I don't know, and would be happy to pointed towards research on this, but it doesn't strike me as a simple energy-in-energy-out situation. There seems to be the potential for a brilliant technological solution.
  - gshdg 6y ago
    They’re called trees.
    - FooHentai 6y ago
      Not really - By converting pasture back to woodland you could potentially restore some of the released carbon from agriculture-driven destruction of old forest land. But it won't make up for the vast reserves of carbon that have been dredged up from deep underground and released to the atmosphere. If it's necessary to re-balance that withdrawal we're going to need to put something back down there, or come up with something novel.
      - gshdg 6y ago
        AFAIK, every other method requires massive electricity input; and we’re still not getting enough energy from renewables for that not to mean spewing more additional carbon than we sequester for each unit sequestered. (Of course, trees also require massive energy input. The difference is that we don’t have to supply that energy.)
        n4r9 6y ago
        Which leads back to my question: is it not possible that we may find a technological alternative to trees which scales better and does not require us to supply so much energy.
        gshdg 6y ago
        I suspect the chemistry of it requires as much energy put into sequestering as is captured by releasing it. But... I could be wrong.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
  There is a whole lot that we can do. A plant caused the last ice age[1]. If we could genetically engineer that plant to grow on the ocean, it would sequester an incredible amount of CO2. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
  - klipt 6y ago
    Most of the discussion of combatting climate change focuses on reducing atmospheric CO2, but there's an entire second category of approaches: Solar Radiation Management, some of which could be much faster and cheaper than reducing CO2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation_management While reducing CO2 emissions via investment in renewables is still an important long term goal, if we're already heading towards a potentially catastrophic situation, it seems we should be investigating other forms of climate engineering more seriously?
    - lcam84 6y ago
      I find some challenges in geo engineering: - Problem shifting. Gaia is a very complex system, and geoengineering solutions can have unexpected effects - We don't just have the problem of climate change to solve. Loss of biodiversity, acidification of the oceans, soil loss have to be taken into account. - We have the jevons paradox. By finding a technical solution to the problem we can think that it is justifiable to continue polluting. If we could slow down human activity, nature would begin to regenerate. I think it is possible to slow down our development without any major problems for humanity, after all we have never lived in a period of such prosperity. It would be a matter of maintaining our level of wealth (or even lowering it a little) instead of aspiring to more. Solutions created by us are usually fragile compared to natural systems that are anti-fragile.

engineer_22 6y ago

Voice of action is a Marxist propoganda website

ManuelKiessling 6y ago
I think it is good style to combine especially strong opinions with especially strong supporting facts, proofs, evidence, or arguments.
- korantu 6y ago
  Editor opinion on Marx [0] and the 'About' section of the web site [1] where class struggle is prominently featured give some credibility to this opinion. [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/ashermoses/status/1180642662052855814 https://mobile.twitter.com/ashermoses/status/118064266205285... [1] https://voiceofaction.org/about/ https://voiceofaction.org/about/
- tripletao 6y ago
  "Propaganda" is mostly used more just as an insult than as an objective category, but the founder of this website would indeed seem to literally be a Marxist. In his Twitter feed, he advocates policies similar to those advocated by Marx, using language similar to Marx's. He also refers to Marx directly by name in approving terms: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aashermoses%20marx&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aashermoses%20marx&src=ty... This of course doesn't make anything claimed in the article any more or less true, but the purportedly scientific conclusions here do align nicely with his politics. As to the article, Malthusian predictions have a long history of being incredibly wrong. It seems likely to me that global warming will continue to a point that many current agricultural practices must be abandoned for new ones, and that this transition will result in many deaths; but that's not the "collapse of civilization". Maybe scientists frustrated by the public's slow response to this serious problem have decided to try falsely portraying it as an apocalyptic problem, to see if that gets a faster response; but I doubt that it will, and it's a lie either way.
- jariel 6y ago
  There are no facts in the article to support any of their many sociological positions. For example, that inequality of asset ownership leads to social decay. That there is even actually social decay or real instability in America. One thing missed by in the treatise and a lot of comments, is that 'consumption' is somehow tantamount to 'resource utilisation'. Obviously, there is a correlation. But a considerable amount of what we 'consume' does not entail necessarily excessive resource consumption. Plastics, electronics doesn't eat up a lot of 'resources', though some parts perhaps more than others i.e. 'alkaline batteries'. Huge swaths of our consumption aren't even related to resources: entertainment, video games, software, social networks etc.. If they are really smart, they would take some time to decouple the 'resource intensive' aspects of consumption, with those that are not, and help industry to optimise along those lines.

LatteLazy 6y ago

And there is literally nothing any of us can do about it.

lcam84 6y ago
We can try degrowth. We need to find a way to live well and decrease the GDP. The article talks about the limits of growth for, those who don't know what it is you can watch this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9wjJjmkmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9wjJjmkmc
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  No, we can't try that I'm afraid. People won't accept that. People have chosen to doom the planet. The problem here isn't technology or economics. It's people and politics. People don't want to survive, they want cheeseburgers and air-conditioning.
  - lcam84 6y ago
    Maybe you are right, but we need to try something and for me this is what make sense. For instance did you notice the effect of covid in the environment? We need to challenge assumptions. The assumption of growth is one of them. We need to have intrinsical objectives. The goal should not be to save the planet but to act in the best possible way to make it happen.
    - LatteLazy 6y ago
      How do you and me try degrowing the world economy? We can't. >The goal should not be to save the planet but to act in the best possible way to make it happen. Sorry, but this sort of thinking is exactly what has gotten us nowhere for the last 50+ years.
      - lcam84 6y ago
        We could channel the consuption taxes to a UBI. This would make local economies more competitive compared the global economy. For example, taxes on fossil fuels would make products made from far away more expensive than local products. With time UBI would not be needed as local economies tooked the global economy role. There are many attitudes towards climate change. We can be too optimistic and tell ourselves that we do not need to worry because we will have a solution in the future. We can be very pessimistic and think that it is no longer worth it, we all gonna die. I want to have a middle position, I know it is a very big challenge and there are great possibilities, that it will not be possible to reverse what lies ahead, but we will try nevertheless. The objective is not what will happen to the planet, the objective is to define what is our role in all of this.

rayiner 6y ago

Is this "top climate scientists" or the "scientific consensus?"

oxAAAFFB 6y ago

Just deploy a solar shade, it’s easy.

korantu 6y ago

> “senior U.N. environmental official” claims that if global warming isn’t reversed by 2030, then rising sea levels could wipe “entire nations . . . off the face of the Earth.” > Crop failures coupled with coastal flooding, he said, could provoke “an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ ” whose movements could wreak political chaos the world over. Unabated, the ice caps will melt away, the rainforests will burn, and the world will warm to unbearable temperatures. > Governments “have a ten-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effects before it goes beyond human control,” said the U.N. official. [0] the above was published by U.N. official in 1989, with point of no return being year 2000, not 2030. People knew it for more than 20 years already. It is important to keep in mind that alarmism can actually be harmful, where instead of doing anything people just have their burger whole try can, as there is no point doing anything anymore. [1] [0] https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25/why-everything-they-say-about-climate-change-is-wrong/#3f848ba412d6 https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25...

magicnubs 6y ago
> instead of doing anything people just have their burger whole try can I assume this is just a typo, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the original was
- makerofspoons 6y ago
  I read it as "instead of doing anything people will just have their burger while they can"

clay_the_ripper 6y ago

I’m sorry - I don’t buy this article at all. I am not a climate denier, just a reasonable person with a brain. Obviously global warming/global climate change is real. Obviously, green house gas emissions by humans are the main culprit. But I do not for one second believe that civilization will collapse, at least not in say the next couple of hundred years. Ecosystems are already toast -GBR will mostly die in the next 50 years. Rainforests and biodiversity, deforestation etc are history. Already dead. But will human beings and our civilization “collapse”? No way. These “climate refugees” everyone talks about “overwhelming” us actually stinks of xenophobia. And in what way is a climate refugee different from a regular refugee? The developing world is already a catastrophe, yet I wouldn’t say refugees are overwhelming us. Bacially my view is this: yeah it’s bad but saying that 6 billion people will die which is what this article suggests is alarmist nonsense.

jariel 6y ago
The term 'refugee' does not even appear in the article. ... and while people do talk about 'climate refugees', nobody is talking about them 'overwhelming us'. And FYI it definitely does not take too many people to overwhelm a social system with benevolent impetus, as we saw starkly in Sweden, 2016. As for the materiality of the article and what should set off alarm bells: "“For example, it appears that the USA is entering a long period of decline in many aspect of its society, with a potential for a more rapid collapse in the coming decade,” said Steffen. "Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told Voice of Action that the coming collapse would not be a single black or white event. “With respect to civilisations, what is more likely is that we have entered a stage of what JM Greer calls ‘catabolic collapse’ – where we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep things going for a bit longer,” said Alexander. “Capitalism is quite good at dodging bullets and escaping temporary challenges to its legitimacy and viability. But its condition, I feel is terminal.” "“As economies deteriorate and as inequalities deepen, more people get disenfranchised, incentivising resistance and sadly sometimes making people look for scapegoats to blame for new or intensifying hardships (e.g. the so-called alt-right),”" “I think global capitalism is realising that the parasitical nature that has emerged (where the top 1% own the vast majority of the world’s wealth), can only be sustained for so long,” said Buckley" We have: A) America in social decline (political statement) B) the other boogey man 'capitalism' as the root cause obviously! C) The 'alt right' (are we talking about the environment here?) D) Researchers work cancelled for ostensibly political reasons, which is not good, but it's also not objective either. So the problem with the article, is that a lot of the authorship is deeply ideological. This is hard issue to escape when trying to put an economic value of such things as 'pollution and traffic' vs other elements. Far too many references to their representation of 'inequality', and major gaps in their assumptions as to how that leads to social decay, for this to be a serious treatise on climate. And of course, no mention of Nuclear Energy, which is odd, given 'existential threat' you'd think we'd try to use something that is already fairly well proven.

mrosett 6y ago

Neo-malthusian arguments have been recycled by the same group of intellectuals for the last 50 years or so. You'd be hard pressed to point to a single prediction they've made that turned out to be correct. If there's a single fatal flaw, it's that they discount how much people will change their behavior in response to a change in circumstances. Unchecked global warming may spell doom for civilization as it currently exists... but adaptations will be made. Food will be grown in places that are currently too cold for it. Sea walls will be built. Air conditioners will be purchased. If "top climate scientists" want to argue that preventing climate change is better than adapting to it, then that's something I'd engage with. But this? Absolute drivel.