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Probably a bit worse than "bad world war". A lot of the people currently alive are alive because of relatively fragile technological developments (eg. the Gree

Probably a bit worse than "bad world war". A lot of the people currently alive are alive because of relatively fragile technological developments (eg. the Green Revolution, global shipping, globalized finance) from the last 50-60 years. World population was 3B in 1960, now it's 8B. Take away fossil fuels and globalization and I'd expect many of these people to die. (Well, everybody's going to die, but die without leaving surviving descendants.) I'd expect world population to revert back to its pre-industrialization levels (~1.2B as of 1850), which implies a die-off of about 85% of people. It wouldn't necessarily be a sharp die-off, but just people having fewer surviving children as resources become more scarce, fertility declines, fewer offspring survive, and fewer of the surviving offspring choose to reproduce. It would also be very unevenly distributed, with some regions becoming basically uninhabited while others have only minor effects or even benefit. By contrast, WW2 killed off about 15% of the population in the worst-affected regions (Poland, Lithuania, the USSR) and only 0.32% in the U.S.

benreesman 4y ago
I hope I didn’t imply that it’s a minor thing, and if I did I regret it. Climate change (to the extent that our computer models of chaotic phenomena are directionally accurate which I think they are) is going to be devastating. I don’t think that it’s going to kill of 85% of people, because to your point it will happen over time: a failed harvest here, a flooded city there over decades or centuries. We will have the opportunity if we take it to adapt incrementally and help the most recently impacted incrementally. Now we might just leave the impacted for the wolves, and that’s a depressingly likely outcome, but we could choose something better. A lot of dystopian thought and fiction was premised on unbounded Malthusian catastrophe, and it isn’t playing out that way to my surprise and I think most people’s surprise. But we haven’t even scratched the surface of options that are available with current technology, one example would be widespread deployment of quite safe fission energy. It’s going to be bad, but how bad depends a lot on what we do.
- palata 4y ago
  While I tend to agree with your points, I think that you underestimate the problem by limiting it to Climate Change. Climate Change hasn't started yet, and we are living a mass extinction. Remove all CO2 from the atmosphere today, and we are still in a mass extinction. Then comes the energy problem: we don't have any viable alternative to fossil fuels. Solar/Wind infrastructures are growing fast thanks to fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are not unlimited (peak conventional oil was 2008, peak oil may be now, peak LNG may be 2038). So we are slowly running out of time in terms of energy resources (given how much time it takes to build a nuclear plant). "Technology will help" ignores that technology brought us here, but also that technology takes time, and energy. Without the CO2 problem, nothing says that our society would not collapse because we can't replace fossil fuels.

benreesman 4y ago

I hope I didn’t imply that it’s a minor thing, and if I did I regret it. Climate change (to the extent that our computer models of chaotic phenomena are directionally accurate which I think they are) is going to be devastating. I don’t think that it’s going to kill of 85% of people, because to your point it will happen over time: a failed harvest here, a flooded city there over decades or centuries. We will have the opportunity if we take it to adapt incrementally and help the most recently impacted incrementally. Now we might just leave the impacted for the wolves, and that’s a depressingly likely outcome, but we could choose something better. A lot of dystopian thought and fiction was premised on unbounded Malthusian catastrophe, and it isn’t playing out that way to my surprise and I think most people’s surprise. But we haven’t even scratched the surface of options that are available with current technology, one example would be widespread deployment of quite safe fission energy. It’s going to be bad, but how bad depends a lot on what we do.

palata 4y ago
While I tend to agree with your points, I think that you underestimate the problem by limiting it to Climate Change. Climate Change hasn't started yet, and we are living a mass extinction. Remove all CO2 from the atmosphere today, and we are still in a mass extinction. Then comes the energy problem: we don't have any viable alternative to fossil fuels. Solar/Wind infrastructures are growing fast thanks to fossil fuels. And fossil fuels are not unlimited (peak conventional oil was 2008, peak oil may be now, peak LNG may be 2038). So we are slowly running out of time in terms of energy resources (given how much time it takes to build a nuclear plant). "Technology will help" ignores that technology brought us here, but also that technology takes time, and energy. Without the CO2 problem, nothing says that our society would not collapse because we can't replace fossil fuels.