I think no. We are in a boring, prosperous, stable time with an overactive media. The virus is bad, but it will pass and medical science will save many millions. The plague of Justinian, this is not. Hope I'm not wrong about that, at any rate.
Climate change and the collapse of global ecosystems can absolutely manage that and according to every serious scientist we are pretty much on the worst case scenario path according to any peer reviewed model.
The rise in nationalism and authoritarianism around the world is another phenomenon that could unleash forces of global conflict which might lead to cataclysms like a nuclear war or another world war at least.
Of course pivotal moments in history can only be declared as such in hindsight. But the forces leading up to them usually gather steam decades before. It looks as we have no shortage of those in our time.
On a personal level I mainly agree with you (we're on track for much worse than the RCP2.5 that everyone is barely even attempting to make goals for), but the complexity of the system seems to bring people to vastly disagree about this somehow.
I think what really has become a turning point of our civilization in the last few decades is that specialization and the complexity of the world are absolutely entirely outside of the reach of any single person. The expansion of diversity and knowledge in the last few hundred years is much like the expansion of the universe, in that we can't seem to be able to beat it at all in terms of speed no matter what we do.
Any sci-fi device that could perhaps offset that eventually (e.g. a future neuralink-thing being able to "upload" knowledge into you) is not the kind of thing I would bet my savings on in terms of time constants when compared to much more immediate events like climate change wrecking our modern civilization.
By my way of thinking about such things I think this is the best comment in the thread so far, in that:
- it recognizes that there are even more risks (disagreement over climate change --> political changes --> war) from climate change than the obvious first order ones
- it recognizes that the world is a system, and that it contains complexity
- it recognizes that complexity can cause vast disagreement
- it does not speculate about (and consider to be a fact) the causation of an observation ("to vastly disagree about this somehow") but rather, correctly notes that the causation is unknown
> I think what really has become a turning point of our civilization in the last few decades is that specialization and the complexity of the world are absolutely entirely outside of the reach of any single person.
I agree, and I estimate that most other people here would as well, but only when thinking about this concept abstractly. But if one is to closely(!) observe how people talk about our (infinitely complex) world, you may notice this phenomenon where it seems as if people are literally not aware of the complexity of the world. Now, if one is to respond to such a comment pointing such a shortcoming out, typically (in "smart" communities) the person can then(!) skilfully recognize whatever aspect of overlooked complexity you noted...but at the time they made the initial comment, was this complexity ~"included in the cognitive context of their mind" when pondering the problem, or was their mind working with a vastly simplified model of the world (because that is efficient, and the mind seems to often err on the side of efficiency rather than correctness)? If one is to ask that question, the person will typically assure you with supreme confidence that of course they were aware of it, but that they were "speaking loosely/generally" or something along these lines - which of course may be true, but is it actually true? I would say the fact of the matter is unknown, because we do not seem to have that level of insight into the workings of the mind. (And if you then respond with this theoretical question, extremely interesting things often transpire, but that's a whole other ball of wax that I'll skip for now.)
I believe if you treat this very general and speculative philosophical idea as a kind of lens through which to view the activities of human beings from an abstract, curious alien entity perspective (no prior or presumed knowledge of "how it is" with Earth and Humanity, but infinite curiosity about the highly paradoxical nature of our species), you may start to notice a set of repetitive patterns everywhere you look, in all sorts of different levels of dimensional abstraction and aggregation. And if you notice that and then speculate about what unseen/undetected Force in the Universe could be causing all this, maybe some interesting new theories might start to emerge about why things are the way they are.
Obviously not true.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
> Obviously not true.
I think GP was referring to predictions of climate sensibility to changes in CO2 concentration appearing to track the predicted worst-case [1]. He was not referring to the predictions of CO2 concentration per se.
And the predictions about CO2 rise you refer to are not very comforting anyway. If the 2 degree line is crossed, as predicted by these data, then a cascade of tipping points [2] will likely put the earth into a permanently "hot" climate state.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/13/climate-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_...
And we ("hackers") give them both the open society they can hate against and the tools to potentiate their propaganda for free.
Except that most models are piss-poor at predicting anything and that they only cherry pick the ones that happen to make it with new data.
On top of that, climate change is a slow moving disaster, and we are typically good at mitigating long term changes (at least way better than urgent crises). Scientists calling for the end of the world at every opportunity will look ridiculous 100 years from now.
I wish I could share your optimism. Climate change may be a slow moving disaster, however it is more a "high latency" moving disaster. In the sense that once the symptoms start hurting us, it will not be possible to administer any control inputs that will effect the course of climate change within an acceptable period of time.
And while we may be good at mitigating long term changes, I think "existential crisis" kind of long term changes may not have any modes of mitigation that would be acceptable to the current generation of humans (like accepting that 90% of world population just won't have a chance of long-term surivival).
The science is absolutely certain on this one: the only way to prevent disastrous climate changes, including massive rises in sea levels, extreme temperatures and drought in many highly populated areas of the world etc. is to stop emitting CO2 TODAY, literally. Or, well, to be more accurate, a few years ago, more likely.
Either way, urgent overhaul of our whole global economy is the only option, but it remains of course an absurdity in the current political climate.
Given that there's no chance at all of this happening, what's Plan B?
It will require the deployment of direct air capture tech at a total-war level of industrial mobilization.
An adequately priced carbon tax could make it profitable?
That statement is laughably incorrect, in fact the complete opposite of what is pointed to by the evidence. Humans are much better at dealing with urgent crises than long term threats due to our evolutionary history. We even have three branches of emergency services and the military that are trained to deal with urgent crises.
Don't make the mistake of thinking this is something you can safely ignore. If you do, your children will pay the price.
Calling this a prosperous time is also flawed, for who? The middle class is nearly gone, freedoms are being eroded, racial tensions are still high, the world order is destabilizing as many governments lean into more dictator-like structures. I genuinely want to understand what you see to give you hope because right now I'm failing to find much to grab onto.
- It is a prosperous time for far more than ever before. Within the last thirty years, a new world power has risen and raised 400 million people out of poverty in an unprecedented act of economic engineering with no military conquest to enable it. Never before has this been done. Its neighbour during this time has simultaneously raised 180 million people out of poverty. During this time neither nation has fought its neighbour. Before this massive reduction of human unhappiness, the loss of the median American's third car pales.
- Absolute measures of human standards of living have continuously increased. They are not going down. The major world economies have all improved continuously. You will need to define the middle class and why that measurement is meaningful to you. If Bezos gets Mars and I get a piece of American land the size of San Francisco, our relative inequality will have increased, but I will take that trade every day.
- Racial tensions were way higher in the past. Black people were segregated! In South Africa, they had apartheid. And a little farther back and Japanese-Americans were in concentration camps. In California, the fourteen thousand Army National Guard troops suppressed race riots.
- The world order is being destabilized as America withdraws the shield that preserved Pax Americana. This is true. But that was a subsidy to (or perhaps an investment in) the world, a tide that raised all ships, and America's more than anyone else's. America prospered with world trade. By these actions, America weakens herself. But that's geopolitics. The sands shift with the wind. We shall see what happens. Other generations faced greater threats.
Inequality has increased, and I think this is bad, but I don't get the point of an over-the-top statement like this. Median household income in the US is over $60,000 (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N). How is that gone?
The pandemic, when combined with widespread misinformation and mistrust, increasing inequality and climate change makes for a potent combination and people are right to be worried.
Look at the Spanish flu, it gets a cursory mention in this history of the early 20th century. WW1 and the Great Depression dominate that narrative.