So many doomsday takes here. For me, this is the important tidbit: > Although both the business-as-usual and comprehensive technology scenarios point to the co

So many doomsday takes here. For me, this is the important tidbit: > Although both the business-as-usual and comprehensive technology scenarios point to the coming end of economic growth in around 10 years, only the BAU2 scenario “shows a clear collapse pattern, whereas CT suggests the possibility of future declines being relatively soft landings, at least for humanity in general.” > Both scenarios currently “seem to align quite closely not just with observed data,” Herrington concludes in her study, indicating that the future is open. What this is saying is that while one model predicts a more catastrophic scenario, the other predicts a slow drag (and even the catastrophic one doesn't necessarily mean the end of the world so to speak). But I don't think we need to go as far trying to predict things: you can just look at how resource-constrained economies are doing today: various places around the world are already forced to do water rationing, for example. If there's anything the whole global warming doom and gloom got wrong is the idea that it would affect the whole world more or less the same way everywhere. But now, studies and news articles both show that these events are going to deviate from averages (e.g. pockets of extreme forest fires in specific locations due to local weather conditions, predictions of ocean tides raising by nearly a foot in specific locations depending on specific astronomic conditions). It doesn't seem like a stretch to postulate that the effects of a collapse are already here for some places in the world, in one form or another, such as what we already see with water shortages or flood seasons due to pollution or forest fire seasons. Rather than some scenario where the entire world breaks out in civil war, it seems more logical to think that society will continue to live in a business-as-usual sort of way for a long time, except with ever increasing rates of location-specific annoyances/inconveniences/inequalities (e.g. no water tuesday or $70/lb salmon or terrible air quality for two months per year or what have you).