The Future Is Grim
medium.com
medium.com
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).
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?)
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.
ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous networking yet no spirit no coordination.. strange isn't it ?
You can’t hammer people problems with tech and expect a fix. They’re people problems!
- 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.
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.
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).
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.
There are ZERO indicators showing that we will meet any climate saving goals.
If you're going to dispute the qualifications of the IPCC, it would help to show something peer reviewed by people in the field.
The EU are nearest to meeting IPCC recommendations, and have taken some worthwhile steps forward, but so far not nearly enough, though they committed to net zero by 2050 shortly after the failed COP25. Most of the rest of the world is doing nothing, or worse. Don't forget emissions are still rising, coal and gas plants still being built, and new oil fields explored.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/15/cop25-un-cli...
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.
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.
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.
are they really? we simply expropriate more and more land from wilderness for animal farming.
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 [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/science/bird-populations-... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/america-... [3] https://www.audubon.org/climate/survivalbydegrees [4] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/798652v1 [5] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/798694v1
This author does this a lot. I just couldn't keep up with all the inaccuracies and mischaracterizations, so I stopped reading near the bottom. This article is an example of modern top-notch fear mongering.
As much as I loved The Newsroom, that Toby clip is one example of a failure in their writing. Where 1 death by climate change somehow translates into everyone on earth dying. Spoiler: Everyone does at some point. SMH
If it happens, we can at least be certain that 6 billion more will not die in the subsequent period.
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.
https://miro.medium.com/max/696/1*NHFNUj3lns_y-3srODj-zg.jpe...
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.
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.
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.
The worst case scenarios here look pretty bad and our lack of ability to respond so far seems to indicate we just won't be able to respond.
Humanity is taking a big gamble here. Win, and we maybe have slightly higher standard of living (whatever that really means), lose and we can't live on this planet any more. That's a pretty dumb gamble to be taking as a whole, it's just some people think they'll end up ahead of the others.
Provided that doesn't actually trigger an ice age, the earth will shortly become more habitable.
And as AIDS, it won't kill you, but it may put you in a position where otherwise minor problems may become lethal (wars, plagues, self-destructive social trends, etc)
Correct me if I'm wrong but I guess that most people who say these sorts of things don't believe that this natural corrective mechanism will affect them personally.
We (as a species) did survive world wars indeed, but I wouldn't envy anyone who had to live through it.
Humanity, and even civilization, will certainly recover fully within two centuries, three at the outside.
This does not inspire confidence in the immediate future.
Why NZ?
2. Because you can. https://www.businessinsider.de/international/countries-where...
* Stable currency
* Stable political system
* Speaks English
* Few geopolitical entanglements
* Natural resources
I assume you mean altitude?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...
2. Peter Thiel bought there and sold NZ to all of his rich friends which started a snowball effect
3. “New Zealand is an enemy of no one,” Lynch said in an interview from his office in Murchison, Texas, southeast of Dallas. “It’s not a nuclear target. It’s not a target for war. It’s a place where people seek refuge.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doo...
We are a "managed population", following Edward Bernays's program from one century ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...
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."
Reading these lines makes my blood boil:
"Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'"
This is a report by a military complex that has waged endless wars in the last 20 years. And they're steadily working towards a new major war right now. We don't talk about that on HN, but please spare me their reports about how climate change will cause as many deaths as their willfully engineered on false pretexts wars.
Surely you are joking. Japan is not self-sufficient with respect to food; they have to import around 63% currently and it is of great concern to them, see https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/08/20/editorials/j... .
What are we planning on doing, digging up a trillion tonnes of the formerly fertile soil from previous areas and transporting it? I very much doubt that Antarctica and northern Russia have soils that are as amenable to agriculture after a few millennia frozen solid. Even if the area were enough, which it isn't, yields would likely plummet.
Civilisations collapsed in the distant past, migrated and fell, yet there was a glut of available land everywhere. So hardly surprising here we still are -- we were nowhere near limit. Somewhere else fertile and usable could be found. Borders weren't controlled.
To give a rough example, the UK currently has a population around 68,000,000. The black death in the 1350s led to the population falling from around 3m to 1-1.5m. London's population fell 60% from 120,000. I don't know the population during the Roman civilisation period, but well under a million. 200k perhaps? That's a hell of a lot more area per person, and a huge amount of scope to relocate come catastrophe.
p.s. The West has more forest than a century ago because most of Europe's forest was clear cut centuries ago. What's been planted particularly in the 19th and first half of the 20th century is monoculture forestry, completely unrelated to the former temperate rain forests and other mature native forests that once thrived, long ago. It's certainly nothing to crow about.
https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/Roman-Britai...
https://books.google.se/books?id=t7KeBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT260&redir...
Direction of changes, short term, are more reliable where there is information, but with long periods without information, so only rare baselines.
Basically, we can’t see something growing exponentially for the disaster they it will unleash until the last minute (literally)
For instance, if something doubles every hour, we don’t realize there is any problem until the very last moment: one hour before, half the resources were free, and the hour before, 3/4. But two hours later, it’s 0% and we never saw it coming.
The point is well illustrated in the talk, I highly recommend it.
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.
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?