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Comment by kilroy123 | Hacker News Reader

I have a theory, and I have no evidence to back this theory up.

The increases in anxiety in the general public over the last decade or so is in large part to people knowing we're on an unsustainable path. We're all collectively marching towards the edge of the cliff to jump off together. More people than ever have anxiety because we subconsciously (or consciously) know this.

We're unsustainable with how we pollute and how we treat the environment. How we overfish the oceans. Income inequality rising. Political and cultural polarization widening.

It's all so unsustainable.

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My dad grew up in the Great Depression. He fought in both WW2 in his teens and in Vietnam in his 40s. The world was on the verge of ending during WW2 and for many years after during the Cold War because of nuclear weapons.

There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Korilian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable planet. The only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they do not know about it!

-- Men in Black https://www.quotes.net/mquote/61255

People pay too much attention to the negative parts of the news and not enough attention to the positive parts.

When Iraq left Kuwait and lit oil wells on fire on its way out, it was predicted that it would burn for years and be a global climate catastrophe. When crack teams converged on the country, invented new methods on the spot and wrapped things up in a mere six months, it was not given the same level of media celebration that the hand wringing about the end of the world got. It was a footnote in more dramatic stories.

People get anxious when they feel they have no control. There are things individuals can do, but most people feel it doesn't really make a difference and that's partly because they aren't likely to get pats on the head from anyone for quietly doing the right thing.

Some things that help:

Walk more, especially as a form of transportation.

Use more daylighting and passive solar. This can be as simple as opening the window instead of cranking the AC.

Eat less meat.

I've lived under sentence of death for a long time. I"m still here. I've largely stopped listening to the whining of people who didn't actually care when it was just me facing a horrible, gruesome death but now they are all scared about their future, wah.

If you don't want this future, then do something about it. Among other things, I gave up my car more than a decade ago. People can make such choices. Most people just don't actually want to be personally inconvenienced by the coming apocalypse. They seem to want everyone else to behave better so as to preserve their right to do whatever the fuck they want.

I would argue that the increase in anxiety is due to the growing wealth gap. Compounding that is the fact that those in control are actively working on maintaining that gap and will allow nothing to stand in the way, including the environment. The gap is growing worse and will continue to do so and that relentless pursuit of wealth at the top and the hopelessness of those in the middle is making the environment worse. If I am barely surviving and I feed my kids with wages from a polluting industry, with no other option I will vote for those that allow my wages to continue, and damn the torpedoes, even though deep down I know I am making the world worse (further compounding my anxiety and despair). See the coal industry.

So many of us exist in quiet desperation.

People struggling to survive are focused on their next meal or rent payment and while not destroying the world tomorrow sounds good, they are more concerned with what they have to deal with today.

The environment is a side effect of civilizations profit at all costs mentality. Unfortunately this outlook will continue to do as it has always done, reward the few at the top and punish everyone else.

Except, those “rewarded” will suffer the same fate as the rest. This isn’t a Hollywood story, there is no off-planet settlement and won’t be before it’s too late for humanity. I think people underestimate just how fast the shits gonna hit the fan. My guess is my kids will not want to have kids given the environment of their lifetime.

"I can't help it, it's my nature" said the scorpion to the frog.

I have $2MM in my 401k I can't touch until I'm 59-1/2. I'm in my 40's and I'm worried of being broke when I'm 60. Insane? Probably. It's like no matter how much you have there's always fear. I keep thinking, "Yeah, it's all in funds and could just go poof if the DOW corrects back down to 7,000 because it took 20 years to get to where it is now..." Does the anxiety never end?

>>I can't touch

Yes you can. If you're actually going to go broke when you're 60, I'd HIGHLY recommend touching at least a bit of that cash at the cost of federal income tax.

Edit: Am not financial advisor

OH, right, yes. I can pay the 30% penalty. I was pointing out how irrational my brain is and the anxiety I feel when 70% of the population is nowhere near where I'm at.

"So many of us live in quiet desperation".

This is so true it hurts.

It's actually a famous quote, i.e.:

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The context is also relevant here.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

Maybe, though I suspect the income inequality/political instability side is causing more anxiety than the environmental one. The latter is certainly more of a focus now than it was before, but the money side probably plays more on people's minds. A lot of old life advice isn't working any more, people are finding their kids may have a worse quality of life than they did and governments are doing nothing to fix it.

And of course, then there's the constant media hysteria driven by an obsession with social media stats and clicks too. Things are bad in many ways, but if you went by how the press spins it, you'd think the apocalypse was about to hit next week.

That'd surely increase a lot of people's anxiety, even more so if their sources are particularly slanted in a certain political direction.

Same thing. Money = flexibility and control. People may feel the environmental anxiety, but feel powerless to do anything about it because they have to spend all their time working (if they can) to make ends meet. Social media stats/clicks are a similar race to the bottom to make money. Overall there's a sense that every part of our lives, environment, social sphere, and future is being over-leveraged, over-risked, and is hanging from a high wire above oblivion.

The way I like to spin it is: the paperclip maximizer that AI futurists worry about is already here, in the form of capitalism, and we're all part of it. It doesn't care about life; just numbers in bank accounts.

I have a related theory, that rather than our rise in anxiety being because of an analytic understanding of doom, we are more anxious because the environment is becoming unfamiliar, and we as animals still are not comfortable with such a fundamental shift in the world around us.

Since we’re trading theories, I’ll jump in!

My theory is that we are destroying the environment because of our anxiety. It leads us to want to control things and accumulate safety in tangible, physical and dollar form. And the more we do that, the more we destroy the environment. And of course, that also leads to further anxiety as you’ve all pointed out.

So, therapy for everyone - heal people’s desperate fears and the world will heal itself.

I'm optimistic about the research being done in psychedelic therapy for this reason. Take a capsule, lose your ego, understand your place in nature, and put your mind back together - all in an afternoon session.

Sadly, 1 capsule won't be enough.

We all need 2 ayahuasca shots...and some will need up to 4. and there is only one other key requirement, it will all need to be done together simultaneously, otherwise you will end up with a sort of 'race condition'.

I agree! I think that the solution to the current environmental catastrophe is going to be an unexpected leap forward in our understanding of the mind and emotional life.

I also have a theory. Anxiety is increasing because anxiety sells. The right leaning sites raise anxiety about immigrants. Left leaning sites raise anxiety that Trump is on his way to becoming a dictator. Environmental sites raise anxiety about species going extinct. Business sites raise anxiety about increase regulation and taxes.

Meanwhile, humans are the best off we have ever been. This is one of the most peaceful times in history. We have more opportunity and less inequality than before. For the first time in history, half our population is not subject to endless pregnancies and high maternal mortality. Women are valued not primarily for the child-bearing or child-rearing but for their ability to contribute to the full spectrum of society.

In addition, we are more capable of dealing with the vagaries of nature. Take for example Ebola. We came up with treatments and then a vaccine.

We also know how to control our environments. Air conditioning allows humans to live comfortably in some of the hottest climates on earth. We also know how to efficiently produce food, and more importantly to transport food from one area of the world to another.

For energy, we are not dependent on cutting down trees for firewood. We can know harvest sunlight, wind, and atoms to create unthinkable amounts of energy.

We are just on the cusp of having the capability to colonize another celestial body!

Yet, it is not the good news that sells in our attention economy. It is bad news and fear and outrage.

What you are saying is true.

However never before have we humans been on the cusp of ecological collapse.

Check out the global temperature record. [1] In particular this [2] is the temperature from ice core readings for the past 800k years. Modern humans evolved sometime around 300k years ago. Can you imagine going through such sharp changes with negligible technology? They were surviving through these changes with little more than furs and basic woodworking. Consider the first evidence of something as trivial as metalworking. It's required for basically any other meaningful task and can be achieved very easily. All you need is mud, ore, and fire. Nonetheless, it was incredibly difficult to discover. The first evidence of metalworking doesn't appear until around 11,000 years ago! And this is just the macro scale. Local game extinctions, droughts, disease, and so on were a constant and often fatal occurrence.

So you might say that we're now just living through the first highly publicized possible collapse. Yet once again this also would not be true. While we now find these things laughable, at one time people took doomsday predictions very seriously. And throughout the centuries there are invariably influential religious figures (including, for instance, popes) that have offered doomsday predictions. So seriously were these taken that some figures have even been punished for making such predictions and then them not coming to pass. There were also things like the 'Great Conjunction of 1524'. This was an event that based on astrological reading that predicted the world would end with a new great flood. This led tens of thousands of Londoners to abandon their homes and head for higher ground.

Ultimately, humans thinking they're all going to imminently die because of something outside their control is not a new phenomena. However, mass media is.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#/med...

Sigh.

I think you are trying to point out that we were wily enough to survive past swings with a fraction of the technological arsenal we have today. Is that fair?

We know some humans survived history. How many? Where did they live? Did the survivors stay in a single place called "home" for thousands of years, change be damned? Did the survivors follow good weather and food? Did they live near the ocean, where all temperature variations are smoothed out? Did they migrate for adventure, or follow the whims of season and climate?

When they moved to a new place, were there already humans there? Was there enough space, shelter, and food for both groups? Did they welcome each other, or fight?

It's not that I think you're wrong. We're creative, resourceful, persistent, stubborn, and adaptable. But I think the picture you're making leaves something important out. For most of that graph, we were smart, rare, small-group primates that used wit, teamwork, and basic tools to overcome our natural environments.

It's probably no coincidence that metalworking turns up so near the emergence of our early social and organizational super-organisms. You don't need bronze tools to hunt shellfish, fruit, or rabbits. Our super-organisms needed them to raze forests, clear land, excavate rock, and make war.

Surviving climate change is not be about overcoming our environment a final time. I agree, that is a fight we could win. Surviving climate change is about overcoming our nature as individuals, the nature of the social and organizational super-organisms we form, and the historical accumulated impact of both with interest.

Apologies here for the length here. As Twain might say, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

I was simply responding to the statement that "never before have we humans been on the cusp of ecological collapse." That is not an accurate statement. Ecological collapse was very much an everyday reality, and battle, for humanity through much of its existence. And in more modern times, people lived through decades waking up each day knowing that nuclear war could very realistically end the world, as they knew it, at any moment. And indeed it very nearly did, multiple times!

Outside of that I fully agree with almost everything you've said. The 'almost' part comes primarily because I think you're not considering the imbalance of power that would result from the current mitigation strategy of reducing CO2 emissions. Developing nations and those who dependent on carbon output for revenue, such as China and the Mideast would be asked to entirely change their developmental trajectory. Developed nations, by contrast, need to do little more than possibly accelerate the trajectory they're already on. To deal with this inequity the Paris agreement, for example, proposed the developed nations subsidize the developing nations. This sounds reasonable on paper, but in practice what you're talking about is places such as China rolling back its development and then becoming dependent on US handouts to regrow and simply sustain itself. That's a relationship that could and would be abused, once established, to further our ends. This is a nuance that places such China are not going to ignore.

This certainly falls under the blanket of overcoming our nature as individuals, whether individual means a single person or a large group acting as an entity. But it also reframes the problem in a way that I think is somewhat more realistic than a rallying among equals to do their part for an equal outcome. This is why I increasingly think that technological solutions, such as carbon scrubbing, need to be playing a bigger role in the discussion. For instance imagine the US (and other developed nations) greatly subsidized the research, rollout, manufacturing, and deployment of carbon scrubbing industry in developing nations. This is something that I think could see real effect since there's a more equitable relationship. The developing nation is not only able to continue on their current trajectory, but to develop even faster through the further expansion of their energy/industrial facilities. And the developed nation is able to use little more than their great economic might to effect positive change. And there's less room for abuse of the relationship. If the developed nation pulls funding, they suffer due to the lack of scrubbing. And if the developing nations tries to use scrubbing as leverage (or misappropriate funds) they suffer for identical reasons. Interests are aligned with no imbalanced leverage.

For instance our current CO2 emissions due to fossil fuels is about 37 billion tons a year. One new technological solution [1] proposes an atmospheric removal of CO2 that could cost as little as $94 per ton. That's $3.5 trillion, 4% of the global GDP, to reach 0 carbon emissions. And that not only doesn't cripple developing nations but could greatly accelerate and strengthen them. I don't entirely understand why stuff like this isn't a more significant part of the conversation.

[1] - http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/ne...

Thanks for responding, and for correcting my takeaway. I agree it's not an accurate statement.

We might be chasing our tails at this point. Power imbalances (current and historic legacy) is a big component of what I mean when I say this fight is against our super-organisms and their accumulative impact. I'm optimistic about what technology can do, but skeptical of anything that sounds like an excuse for anyone with economic or ideological incentives to write off emission-reduction strategies.

All approaches to climate change have to be implemented through a complex adaptive system in which billions of human individuals and superorganisms that have their own concepts of what is/isn't in their best interest, constantly recalibrating behavior against each other.

Will impoverished people be willing to stay that way just because the fossil-fuel bonfire is passé? Will there be clean alternatives for them to improve their lives? Will they be able to afford them? If not, will other actors with sufficient capital finance them? Will they suspiciously reject gifts from colonial powers?

If we're unable to avert the collapse of some ecosystems, will the people living in/around them placidly endure misery and await death? Will they chase better weather and food?

Will people in areas relatively enriched by shifting climates help pump the brakes, or step on the gas? If some of these are the same developed powers largely responsible for emissions to date, will they have enough internal support to actively reject this boon and take responsibility for the actions of earlier generations?

When primary fossil fuel demand peaks, will countries and landowners sitting on large fossil fuel deposits and companies producing them ease off to hold prices steady, or lean in to force prices down, undermine the short-term profitability of renewables, and extract as much wealth as possible before the party is over?

What if individuals and superorganisms that invested in profitable atmospheric CO2 capture iterate into technology that supports profitable extraction far below ~278ppm?

How many superorganisms will make the bet that they can make short-term profit by externalizing costs and some conscientious third party who'll feel compelled to pay $94-232 per ton to capture extra emissions?

Will superorganisms acquire companies that invent potential carbon capture technologies like this in order to extort rents from the patents, or repurpose the technology for some other application with little urgency to support the original intent?

Will rumors proliferate on the internet that large carbon capture facilities are a secret plot to poison or pacify the population?

With respect to your first point, life expectancy during those times was age 20-30. Their standards of living were more akin to the standards for animals in zoos than modern humans.

Climate change isn't a religious doomsday prophecy. Since modern humans evolved 300k years ago, we've industrialized and created technologies that are accelerating the pace of the destruction of Earth. The claims in the article are based on verifiable science.

I don't know that this is true. Do previous ice ages not count? Or how about the plague? It seems that we've been near extinction at least a few times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck

I'd also add that until the 1990s the threat of total nuclear annihilation of the human race (and probably other stuff) was very real. That was anxiety inducing.

I agree, and this time we have a lot more knowledge and tools for coping with ecological disasters.

It would still be very much preferable to not have to do it.

> humans are the best off we have ever been

This is too broad to be true. It's easily disproven with a single counterexample.

I could guess what you actually meant, but the tiny details in sentences like these change so much meaning I better let you clarify if this was an important point you're making.

Especially since you seem to be aiming to dismiss concerns about people who are not safe, I think it's important you be more specific.

Ok here are some of the areas where we are better off than ever looking at humanity as a whole:

* Infant mortality * Life expectancy * Maternal mortality * Global poverty * Opportunities for women * Global literacy * Ability to control pain * Knowledge

Here is a more concrete example. Imagine you are going to be born as a baby girl in a random family on earth. In what other time would you have a better chance of having a decent life?

Thank you for clarifying, this is much easier to have a discussion about.

I have two open questions, I won't try to make a counterclaim (that 2019 is worse), but I can point out where your position feels hollow to me and needs to be shored up.

1) If I accept what you're saying that for the average person life is better in 2019 than in 1950, that doesn't generalize to all humans. My assessment is that life has been pretty good for the average human regardless of the time period, and good governance is more about how bad we let it get for the marginalized few than how good it is in the average case.

2) You listed things that are better for the average human... Are you claiming that there is not an equal (or larger) set of things that's worse? For example: depression, loneliness, anxiety. If your children are all living but you rarely speak to them and are cripplingly lonely, is that a better outcome than having 7 children, four of whom died, and you live in an intact healthy family unit?

(Also, as a side note knowledge is not monotonically increasing with "progress". The Catholic Church tried and partly succeeded at destroying all native language books in Central America, and replaced them with books that seemingly include much less knowledge. Social knowledge loss is one of my biggest concerns with modernity: More knowledge accessible to any individual, less knowledge stored in the overall system. Less culturally usable knowledge for most individuals. Another example: we're probably only just getting back to the same level of total beer making knowledge that was embodied in the system before the mass market beer system.)

>My assessment is that life has been pretty good for the average human regardless of the time period.

Here is where we fundamentally disagree. My assessment looking at history is that life for the average human, especially, the average female human, was horrible. I would guess our current 10th percentile is better off than the 50% percentile in the past.

The average human was a farmer. They had to do hours of back-breaking labor. They were many times just a bad harvest away from starving. They were routinely preyed on by the more powerful. A significant portion had personally lost a child/spouse/parent due to childbirth. They were illiterate. Child marriages and involuntary marriages were the general rule. The distinction between you and elite was directly coded into law.

A lot of what you are talking about here is still the case in much of the world. In other parts of the world where it is no longer true, it will absolutely make a comeback unless we can halt and reverse the damage being done by the levels of inequality we have.

> If your children are all living but you rarely speak to them and are cripplingly lonely, is that a better outcome than having 7 children, four of whom died, and you live in an intact healthy family unit?

Yes, unless you have an extremely convincing argument that being lonely is worse than being dead.

Ok, I'll try: being lonely hurts and being dead doesn't.

What's your argument that it's better?

Whilst the data you are referring to is correct, so is the data on climate change and the various degrees of impact that humanity will have on the hospitality of our planet for our own human race.

In other words: some things are getting better, but others are getting so much worse that it might be for nothing.

Anxiety sells and social media enables every person to play a part in signal boosting it.

Read "Factfulness" (one of Bill Gate's Top 5 books)... or Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (or just watch the 15 min TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting... )

In most places, in most ways, the world is getting massively better than it even was 20 or 30 years ago...

Sure, if you conveniently exclude the environment.

I completely agree.

Read the late Dr. Hans Rosling's Factfullness. By many measures, the world is getting much much better. Try testing yourself to see what you know, are you smarter than a chimp?: http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

Better and better? A comment on Hans Rosling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoIcsj9ysvs

Great rebuttal! Thanks for that!

"World" - does this include measurements for the natural world as well (which our world is built on top)?

Or just things that have improved human life without looking at the environmental destruction that occurred over the past few decades.

I'd say so. Climate change is real, but not permenent.

If we decide to do massive geo-engineering, it's not going to take 100,000 years to accomplish whatever goal we set. With nothing but pure hubirs to back me up, I'd say it will take 500 years, but more like 100.

We're very smart over a long enough time scale and we will likely live in harmony with the Earth, at least asymptotically so. It'll never be perfect, but it will get close.

My understanding is the current climate science (IPCC 2018 report) is that we have around 10-20 years maybe to turn things around, i.e. radically decarbonise to avoid global warming rise above 1.5C and now this report by IPBES about mass extinction event.

How are we going to achieve what is necessary to turn things around when governments and people are asleep at the wheel and just continue business as usual.

Are people willing to change their destructive habits, i.e. willing to drastically reduce their meat & dairy intake?

Are organisations willing to become more sustainable rapidly and not just do drip feed changes over the next 30+ years.

Maybe it's the feeling that we feel a plateau coming?

If anything, I think we all feel that there is a cliff coming.

Though not like a Kurzweilian Singularity, we all see a climate change cliff out there in (most of) our lifetimes. We all know that the future is not going to resemble the present, and that's anxiety producing.

I'd argue that from Dr. Rosling's data, it will be a much better world. But even his stats and monte-carlo show us that it'll be different. Pax Americana is ending, clearly, but what comes next with all those missles we have chained up in those silos, that's reasonably terrifying.

The world has never been more 'up for grabs'. It's exciting to me, but it can reasonably be very anxious to others whose livlihoods depend on stability.

Humans are good at being anxious due to the precariousness of life. Especially for things we don’t fully understand.

For example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halley's_Comet#1910

Why is the environment any different?

> we don’t fully understand.

That's a language trap. It's true that we do not understand the environment fully, in the sense that we don't know how every single living creature on it will die.

But we understand it well enough: we can see the big trends.

We don't know exactly how times we will hit the cliff as we fall, but we can see clearly that we're falling.

Because the rate of change is too slow to perceive it as something that is critical. When looked at on a geological time-scale this is all happening in an eye blink. When looked at on a human timescale it is spread out over many years and so there is time enough to get accustomed to the new baseline as the change is happening.

The only thing different between an explosion and wind is the rate of change.

I agree that humans are, in a sense, evolved to stress out, but this is a horrible example.

Like so Michu astronomy, Flammarion's theory was merely conjecture with no experimental evidence. Further, many other scientists correctly contested his hypothesis at the time.

Compare that with overfishing, where we have strong evidence that tuna populations have drastically declined in the past 50 years [1]. These declines are very likely due to overfishing, particularly of immature fish that have not had a chance to reproduce. Without a change of trajectory, many tuna species will almost certainly go extinct.

Yes, we should be skeptical and not give into hysteria. But that doesn't instead mean we should just stick our heads in the sand.

Don't you think oceans without fish are going to cause a lot of problems?

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3251139/

I think you have reversed the cause and effect. People before us lived far closer to the brink of destruction, and endured actual hardships, which I think made them less anxious.

Our current anxious, no-risk state makes us much more prone to fatalism, and nihilism, making the environment the perfect end of days thing to feed that anxiety.

This is the case for me. I just can't be apathetic to what seems like impending suffering at a scale never seen. N=1, though.

There was an absolutely phenomenal piece written recently: "How the news took over reality" [1] It goes into some degree of depth about why it is exactly that ever more people are increasingly feeling every pulse of every issue. And why it's not necessarily a great thing.

Consider something. Today, by most metrics, is by far the most stable and safe time that we've ever lived in during humanity's existence. This seems contradictory to how many feel. But consider that it wasn't that long ago that literal imminent nuclear annihilation was just a regular part of life. As a child we had fire drills. Go back just a couple of decades prior and school children were having nuclear explosion drills.

And there was absolutely no end in sight. The Cold War started around 1946 and ended around 1990. Imagine 44 years of fear of nuclear annihilation. You had a generation of people that grew up knowing nothing except this reality and for it to last long enough for them to reproduce and yet another generation to live through this, onto adulthood, as well. It's difficult to even imagine this.

And it's not like that was some extreme example. Right before the Cold War we had a couple of very not cold wars. In World War 2, some 3% of the entire world's population was directly killed in 6 years. It's impossible to understand that scale of loss directly. So let's measure it in terms of 9/11 attacks, where 2,966 were killed. Given today's population a 3% global loss would be the equivalent of 77,882 consecutive 9/11 attacks. That's 213 years of a 9/11 attack happening every single day. If you have a child at age 25 that means you're great great great great great great grand children would get to live their life with a 9/11 attack happening every single day. And now take all that misery and despair, and compress it into 6 years. And of course we weren't fighting over the petrodollar. We were facing an opponent who had every open intent of enslaving and/or engaging in genocide against the losers. And for some time it looked like he may very well win.

Now let's consider climate change. In the worst case scenario we're looking at extreme weather conditions and having to deal with coastal regions (where most people tend to live) becoming less habitable and uninhabitable in some instances. And this is assuming we completely fail at transitioning away from carbon producing systems and also completely fail to develop mitigating technological measures - many of which already exist (such as amine based scrubbing), but are too expensive to deploy. Climate change is of course very relevant, but when you frame it in comparison to issues people of previous generations have had to face... Suffice to say I'd happily take climate change over imminent nuclear annihilation and genocide. Not exactly a high bar I'm setting, but that low bar is exactly the sort of circumstance that defines what we've had to live through for centuries.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/may/03/how-the-news-to...

This assumes the effects of climate change will be smooth and linear, rather than lurching and dramatic. It also fails to connect the dots between the nuclear annihilation you fear and the politically destabilizing effects of Climate Change.

Extreme weather conditions will be paradise, not the worst case scenario. When we reach 3 degree mark we are going straight up to 4 and then 5. Between 5 and 6 degrees the world is over in the most spectacular apocalyptic way you can imagine. How far away is this? I’m guessing your kids won’t want to have kids to spare them the suffering of 4 degree rise. At that point we will be fighting wars, billions will need to migrate north, nukes are on the table. The sad thing is, once we get there we have inevitable human extinction. Fresh water and food shortage will be a massive problem. A few or more billion people will die. How you get to extreme weather as the worst case scenario is beyond me. Look at how complex ecological systems are and how they affect one another. Acidification will bring about ocean life extinction and phytoplankton suffocation. Ice will melt, all of it, sea levels will rise, ocean currents totally screwed up, superstorms, flash flooding of biblical proportions will displace everyone in the coastal region. Migrations will trigger wars, food will become a luxury, methane will trap more heat, ozone will poof, enjoy your cancer.

This is a cheerful read.

So what's the solution? Can we get the global economy to change course and can we get most people in the West to change their destructive habits?

How are you preparing for such future? Move north and become a prepper?

The solution is likely a multi-faceted approach on all levels of society - policy, private enterprises, consumer, personal habits, education, social initiatives etc...

We need to be doing everything, not one or two things.

I think asking the West to change is an impossible task, but putting in place policy to guide decisions and to bring about mass education regarding environment is probably a step in the right direction.

Yes, it requires a radical change and I think we know what to do and we have solution in place already and we know how to research and develop more solutions.

Question is can we do it? Will leaders of the western world be able to trigger this radical systemic change that is required... keeping in mind that the orange leader doesn't even acknowledge that there is a climate crisis.

So with that in mind... what are your plans for the next 10 years or so? Move out of cities?

Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists [1] disagrees with both your statements: nuclear annihilation is out of public mind, but it is not much less probable, and climate change is, among other things, a risk factor there. Global catastrophic risks are often interconnected.

[1] - https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

The issues faced by previous generations were temporary. Wars end, new treaties are signed, etc.

Climate Change is irreversible if we don't act ahead of time.

How would they know they would be temporary? The Cold War lasted more than 40 years without stopping and no clear way out. People grew up knowing nothing but the Cold War. They had children who knew nothing but the Cold War. Each and every day people woke up realizing there was a very real chance this could be their last one on Earth. And in several instances we came extremely close to that becoming true. For instance a single man, Stanislav Petrov [1], is likely single-handedly responsible for stopping nuclear war at one point. We certainly wouldn't be here concerning ourselves over climate change had there had been a lesser man in his role!

And wars of time past were not like today's proxy wars or petrodollar warring. See Generalplan Ost [2]. Hitler planned to colonize central and eastern Europe by engaging in the mass genocide of native Slavic peoples, people who numbered in the hundreds of millions. And it's extremely unlikely he'd stop there. This is the sort of war where if you lose, the suffering has only just begun. And this was the reality of life for people in one way or another, for centuries.

'Irreversible' is somewhat misleading as used in climate discussion. It's used in the same sense as saying that the above consequences would be irreversible. And in that sense it's completely true. But many people interpret it, as you seem to be implying, to mean impossible to ever reverse. What it really means is that the expected return to a climatic equilibrium, through entirely natural processes, would take a length of time outside the scale of a human lifetime - hundreds to thousands of years. It does not mean permanently irreversible nor does it mean we go full Venus. And perhaps most importantly, technological changes such as carbon scrubbing [3] - which already exists but is not yet economically viable as a solution, altogether negate the notion of 'irreversible'.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber

> 'Irreversible' is somewhat misleading as used in climate discussion. It's used in the same sense as saying that the above consequences would be irreversible. And in that sense it's completely true. But many people interpret it, as you seem to be implying, to mean impossible to ever reverse. What it really means is that the expected return to a climatic equilibrium, through entirely natural processes, would take a length of time outside the scale of a human lifetime - hundreds to thousands of years. It does not mean permanently irreversible nor does it mean we go full Venus.

I'm not sure what your point is here. Yes, nothing is ever truly permanent—eventually the sun will die and all life on earth will likely go with it. When I say something is "permanent", I think I should have to qualify it with "until the heat death of the universe."

If a million species go extinct, they aren't coming back. The glaciers, once melted, will take millennia to reform.

This is entirely different from a normal geopolitical conflict, which can be ended whenever all sides agree to such. Wars can of course inflict permanent damage (and loss of life), but the time scale is generally of a different order of magnitude.

The point is not to be drawn into sensationalism. For instance you responded to my comment by comparing time frames of hundreds to thousands of years to the heat death of the universe, which is something on the scale of 10^100 years. For some context to that number, 10^100 is greater than the number of atoms in the entire observable universe. And to give that number some context, there are 100000000000000000000000 atoms in a single grain of sand. That's not really a reasonable notion.

The reason climate change being reversible on human timescales matter is because it becomes a self correcting problem even in the worst case scenarios. If we create conditions such that the regular flow of society and production is disrupted, we just instantaneously solved our emissions problem. And of course there are technological solutions which already exist to reverse climate change. Only holdback there is they're not yet economic to deploy at scale. Consequences get worse, and governments will consider that perhaps that 2 trillion spent trying to stabilize the petrodollar would be better spent trying to stabilize carbon output.

Of course I completely agree with you of course that some changes such as the loss of various species would be irreversible. But as this article emphasizes this is not just an issue of climate change: pesticides, plastics, poaching, overfishing, even things like people using bug zappers to get rid of mosquitoes are playing major roles. By some estimates we're already losing thousands of species per year [1]. Many of these things could be resolved by with relatively simple per-nation action (as opposed to global action) that'd have near immediate outcome (as opposed to a non-negative outcome on the scale of decades). That nations are unwilling to even engage in this, by contrast trivial, behavior should emphasize why it's quite relevant that climate change is reversible.

[1] - https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/el...

The above is why I said that 9/11 was really nothing in the grand scheme of things, but a lot of people got mad at me. Were we not the nation that faced down the Germans and the Japanese at the same time? And then a few years later, a couple planes hit a couple buildings and everyone lost their minds and let the government take away most of their rights. Makes no sense. And yes, they dug deep--look at all the spying they do on us now, all the rules for bank accounts, drivers licenses, the TSA, the PATRIOT Act and the absolute dragnet put on the Internet.

9/11 was the biggest bunch of nothing (yes, it sucks if you were victim or the family of a victim). We let the big gov statist MIC get such wonderful mileage out of it! Then that bastard Chertoff with the shoe bomber got his naked body scanners sold, too. Never forget!

The people who run the US since the 1950s are such pieces of shit. We the people deserve better and we need to do better at stopping this scourge.

What's the theory? So far you just stated a premise...

> The increases in anxiety in the general public over the last decade or so is in large part to people knowing we're on an unsustainable path.

That's the theory, or at least that's how I read it.

when someone on the internet says "theory", they usually mean it in the "everyday speak"-way, not in the "scientific definition of a theory"-way.

But somehow I guess that you already know that?

regardless of what "definition" of theory I used, the post is still without conclusion. It started off somewhere and then never made a point.

The "Club of Rome" report[1] was published in the early 1970s. We've known for a long time. Still, most people probably still don't know, because they are too busy shopping for the latest shoes or cars.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

Gaël Giraud (Chief economist of the French Agency for Development) said something along these lines: In economy, usually when someone builds a model that predicts the future for 18 months they later get the Nobel. The World III model from the Meadows Report almost exactly described the world for more than 45 years.

If we may think that it's still modelling our world exactly enough, complete civilisational collapse will probably come in the next couple of decades.

>"If we may think that it's still modelling our world exactly enough [..]"

Some people think that it has been pretty accurate:

"[..] The dotted line shows the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario out to 2100. Up to 2010, the data is strikingly similar to the book’s forecasts."

From: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...

Do you have links to any decent analysis of that model?

Because the only things I've been able to digest are the criticisms (the majority of what I've found is that the model does not accurately reflect the world we live in). I'm not trying to confirmation bias myself here, but I would like to see what the proponents have to say.

Here is a pretty good one IMO (loooong read):

https://jancovici.com/en/readings/societies/the-limits-to-gr...

Another article that explains well what the model does, that economists do as if matter and laws of physics didn't exist (unless they're of the rare breed of Georgescu-Roegen's disciples):

https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/societal-choices/...

Another article from another source:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/09/discovering-limits-to-gro...

This (esp the first figure) reminds me of economics research on long waves:

http://joshuagoldstein.com/jgcycle.htm

Thanks, looks like an interesting read.

How much of that is just survivalship bias though? As in, if you were to asked to bet on a 50-year-in-the-future model in 1970s, would you have picked this model?

Might be transformation rather than collapse, not a done deal

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