I'll almost be relieved when we're officially inevitably fucked... at least these "nearly there!" articles won't keep popping up.
1: https://tenor.com/view/truck-crash-test-pole-doesnt-reach-gi...
The front of the train has already hit the pole. Cars nearest the front are already crumpling, killing thousands and leading millions to migrate farther back into the train.
Meanwhile, those of us fortunate enough to be in cars farther down the line are starting to get cynical about doomsaying because when we look around us, all of our cars seem mostly fine. Sure, maybe we hear a little rattling (food prices, heat waves, more hurricanes every year), but that's just random chance, right?
And, sure, maybe it seems like more and more people keep showing up from cars closer to the front with the luggage and settling into our cars, which are—if we're totally honest—starting to get a little crowded.
But the train is fine, right? We look out the window and the scenery is still trundling by just fine so there's no reason to stop the engine, right?
Bearing in mind that extreme weather events have been killing people in large numbers since there have been people to kill in the world, please name at least one specific event or group of weather events that have unambiguously killed thousands of people as a result of man-made climate change. I'm honestly curious about what they might be, because I've seen many (in my mind partially dishonest) narratives in which a hurricane occurs, as hurricanes have occurred since the length of human civilization, and it's called a man-made climate change even despite a lack of concrete distinction.
Name at least one person who was unambiguously killed by smoking.
Nobody says 'game over' because that's not helpful. It can always get worse, and hope and action is the only way it ever gets better.
I think a lot about this article from Harpers in 2015: https://harpers.org/archive/2015/04/rotten-ice/
In it there are scientists that more or less say we were in mitigation phase then, not prevention.
The problem is you can't admit that we're officially inevitably fucked in public. If you did that, funding for climate science and climate mitigation would dry up, because there's nothing we can realistically do about it. Trust in governments would evaporate - the purpose of a government is to keep us all safe, but if we're all fucked anyway, it'll quickly become every man for themselves. Currency would lose its value, because it assumes that there will be a future better than the present where you might want to buy things. So everybody has an incentive to parrot the "Things are looking bad, we have a serious problem, but if we all band together and lower our emissions we can solve it!" line.
I'm also curious how many personal changes you've made (flying less, vegetarian) when it seems like we need massive government intervention to move the needle.
Thanks for replying!
If we had taken Al Gore's warnings in the 80s and began an aggressive push to move off of fossil fuels then, we could perhaps have avoided the whole climate change problem. We didn't, and we can't now. Instead, the rational approach is to accept that the climate will change, there will be consequences of this, and then do our best to avoid the worst effects of the consequences. That includes:
We should be building seawalls and flood barriers around major low-lying areas. Every major city should have an evacuation plan for how to get everyone out in a natural disaster. If the road capacity for this doesn't exist, we should build it. We need systems in place to deal with mass migration. We need housing tech, ways to quickly build housing in new locations because the population is soon going to be forced to move to new locations. We should be researching ways to add back the seed diversity that we've extinguished over the past 60 years, because major agricultural staples are soon going to be out of their climate windows. We need local renewable energy - the biggest benefit of renewables isn't going to be reducing carbon emissions (it's too late for that), it's divorcing ourselves from global energy supply chains that are going to get increasingly unreliable.
My wife works in climate investing, which was a sleepy backwater when she started 12 years ago but now is the hot field to be. There's billions of dollars in capital chasing hare-brained carbon capture schemes that have basically 0% chance of working. That capital should instead go into mitigation efforts, programs that accept that we're fucked but try to avoid the worst effects of that. But if anything, government policy is going the opposite way - we're making it harder to migrate, refusing to build housing or transportation infrastructure, telling people they're on their own when a hurricane hits, and centralizing seed ownership under Monsanto.
Imagine one of the consequences of all the ice melting is the salty ocean is diluted allowing for planet scale algal and fungal blooms, extincting phytoplankton overnight. What if the only hope our species has for survival is not to accept climate will change and la la la continue dumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, but instead to immediately stop doing that and for the next 30 years at any one time maybe three quarters of the global population goes without electricity.
In practice, phytoplankton is not going to go extinct overnight. People underestimate the resilience of evolution. Maybe 95% of phytoplankton might go extinct overnight, but the survivors (by definition) will be adapted to the new, less salty ocean currents. So then we get planet-scale algal and fungal blooms, and we should be asking ourselves "What then?" Maybe we'll want to harvest algae and make food out of it, or maybe we want to get the hell away from coastlines. The jet stream's probably going to shut down, so all those folks in Northern Europe may want to consider evacuating to Africa.
The point is to adapt to the world as it is rather than the world as we wish it to be or as we remember it. People who do that will survive and pass on their genes, and people who don't will die and drop out of history.
I am unclear why anyone ever trusted government or believed government would be the avenue for resolution of this problem
You either understand history, or you trust government, you can not both understand history and trust government..
The second people put their trust in government was the second humanity was fucked. In the best of time Government is like fire, is a troublesome servant and a terrible master.
>the purpose of a government is to keep us all safe
When has that ever been the case... The purpose for government is to provide a framework for non-violent dispute resolution, and to safe guard natural rights and property), and maybe form a national defense force. Not to provide individual safety and security.
>>Currency would lose its value, because it assumes that there will be a future better than the present where you might want to buy things.
No fiat currency actually needs the future to look worse than today to encourage spending today and discourage saving for tomorrow. This is why fiat currency required inflation, and why deflation is feared above all else with fiat currency. You have to have spending today, you have to have people spending in multiples of what they really have in currency (i.e debt spending) and you have to have that in perpetuity.
In short, Fiat Currency is a legal pozi scheme that is destined to fail at some point anyway....
Providing for national defense, non-violent dispute resolution, and protecting natural rights and property sounds an awful lot like "keeping us all safe". I'm not sure what else you think that could mean.
When that social contract is broken, people tend to ignore the other half of it, which is "if you follow the rules of society..." Empirically, it doesn't seem to matter whether the root cause is starvation or war or violence, the result is still civil disorder and anarchy - which usually just intensifies the survival challenges.
The social contract does not exist.
>> That could be in the sense of monopolizing physical force so that roving gangs can't kill you, or it could also be in the sense of ensuring that a random natural disaster doesn't kill you or you don't starve to death.
Here you are expanding government well beyond my definitional parameters. Government can not prevent and does not prevent either one of those. We also have plenty of examples in modern times of government failing pretty publically at those things
>>When that social contract is broken, people tend to ignore the other half of it, which is "if you follow the rules of society..."
Incorrect. Society stops following the rules when the rules become either too draconian or as we are seeing more recently selectively enforced to the point where the people that follow the rules are the ones being punished by government in general, and people that do not are rewarded by government either directly or indirectly which is what we are seeing to some degree today.
People desire to live in a civil society because that is what is in their best interest to do normally. Civil Society is normally the best for not only survival but to thrive and enjoy life.
Civil society is not created by government, nor can it be created from government violence. The break down of civil society normally comes when the government starts to protect those that are not civil
There is something we can do about it: we can keep improving, evolving, getting better. The solution will only be found in the future, with tools maybe outside of our grasp today.
Nothing is inevitable, until it happened. Till then, you and every other pessimist cand still be proven wrong. My money is on the creativity and ingenuity of the race that started in the trees, went to the moon and is currently birthing an even greater intelligence.
Well.. the second law of the thermodynamics guarantees that.
> The problem is you can't admit that we're officially inevitably fucked in public.
I see several people attempting to start a career off of just that, some of them are quite successful, even. It helps if you add a lot of theocratic and pseudo-religious ideology into your message. People need _something_ to latch on to after all.
> because there's nothing we can realistically do about it.
We are a dynamic species. My proposition is we are currently living through a sort of "modern dark ages." Government imposition and corporate monopolization are at all time highs, to the extent that most new wealth is captured and not used to create new technologies and to progress the species. This is an artificial situation and it is not sustainable.
If you let this cloud your judgement of what is possible you may arrive at this position and feel it is logical. I suggest to you that it is actually a form of insanity or odd religious fervor to actually believe this.
Perhaps, in afterthought, more generously it's a desire to not lose any current level of comfort that you enjoy while "realistically" being able to solve the problem. A solution to this problem will obviously require drastic and hopefully generally positive change, something we've been known to do sporadically many times before.
This article talks about 7m of sea level rise over the next couple hundreds of years. That's pretty bad, but its easy to imagine something even worse.
We won't know when we pass points of no return until well after we're past them (and even then, living in denial may be an understandable option). To know if the brakes will work, you have to actually step on the brake first.
But we have lost a lot of biodiversity as a result of global warming, yes. Things like palsa bogs which won't come back for a long time even if climate returns to preindustrial tomorrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
Someone ought to make a parody clock at this point.
Case in point, if you've watched the news over the past week you'd expect Paris to be a warzone with protests everywhere and the city burning to the ground. A freind visited last week, going to all the usual tourist places, and said they didn't see a single protest or building burning. There was uncollected trash though - in neat piles next to the bins.
https://dailysceptic.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/image-35...
Also, the trend on graph only looks alarming because it's been truncated and covers a relatively short period of time. Go back to old IPCC reports and the graphs show levels were much lower than today and then grew rapidly at the start of the 70s.
The droughts, the floods, the fires?