Let's assume that the world is incapable of solving this problem.
What can an individual do to not suffer?
Invest in oxygen masks and a mountain cabin?
What can an individual do to not suffer?
Invest in oxygen masks and a mountain cabin?
Let's say we reduce that 2.43 ppm increment to 1 ppm at some point. Or even to 2.41 ppm. Does that mean we failed? In a way, yes. But was the effort meaningless? No, the 1.43 ppm we didn't put out in the atmosphere really had an impact, and in a similar way, the 0.02 ppm we reduced also had a real impact on actual people. Both would translate to less sealevel rise, less floods, droughts, storms, heatwaves, biodiversity loss, etc. Which means a reduction of death, migration, hunger, suffering, extinction, chaos, economic loss, etc.
I know your question is about adaptation and not mitigation, but we need to get out of the either/or mindset. Every single action we take to reduce our emissions matters. I mean that in a very matter of fact way, not as a call to action. It is just technically incorrect to think it does not matter (though by no means I am implying you specifically think so).
There’s nothing you can do strictly by yourself in my estimation that will help over the long term.
The only way out is through as a team
Why? 1+1=2 2+2=4 3+3=6 And 0.5+0.25=0.75
When two people don't give it 100% you can't get the results you are looking for. Just ask anyone who has been divorced...
You should be asking what an individual can do to not starve to death or die of over heating.
Most answers are: move to a rich, powerful country not in the danger zone
There might not be any. Migration pressure from uninhabitable areas will keep mounting, and some of the countries in the "danger zone" have nukes.
If there was a viable geoengineering technology available, we'd be using it right now. Assuming that something will pop up is wishful thinking.
Before nuclear war, lots of constructive things like geoengineering could happen.
Do you think if e.g. India or Pakistan start experiencing lethal wet-bulb temperatures and people there decide to mass-migrate to survivable lands, only to be stopped at the border and denied entry, will those people and these countries just throw their hands up in the air, seeing there's nothing they could do, and accept imminent death? Or maybe they'll try to threaten or force to be let in, using any means available, up to and including nuclear weapons?
(This applies to all nuclear-armed countries - I mentioned these two, because AFAIK they'll be the first nuclear powers likely to experience lethal wet-bulb temperatures - but that's not the only way climate change could make a country mass-evacuate, and such other factors could hit other nuclear powers first.)
Nuking your desired safe haven is obviously a stupid idea. But threatening them with nukes so they accept you in, that's a reasonable negotiation tactic when you're otherwise up against the wall. If they refuse, making a stronger threat is an obvious next move. There is, however, no obvious stopping point before tensions are so strong that a small mistake - or someone at high enough level getting irrational - will cause the nukes to be launched.
All cooperative moves are much better than extended suicide - for both sides.
It's effective, because the other side is forced to bet their own lives on you eventually accepting defeat and agreeing to die, so that they may live. It's not an easy bet to make and stick to.
All cooperative moves are indeed better than suicide, but when we're at the point everyone wants to get to NZ, we're way past the time of cooperative solutions.
Also, assuming that there are only zero or negative sum moves left is a really big assumption.
With global changes this big, we can't expect the usual MAD Mexican Standoff a couple big powers to keep everyone safe. It may be that all nuclear powers (or all that remained after a brief nuclear war) will decide together to politely ask NZ to open up or else.
I say the people threatening with nukes here would turn to more subtle methods of invasion, that's their objectives. They won't destroy it because they can't have it. That'd be a waste of nukes.
Now is there someone threatening another country with nukes at the moment but not using them because he knows that'd be useless anyway and would it prove my point ?
Then I recommend you spend more time around people. Grown men have been convicted of throwing acid in an ex-girlfriend's face because "if I can't have you, no-one can."
> Now is there someone threatening another country with nukes at the moment but not using them because he knows that'd be useless anyway and would it prove my point ?
It doesn't prove your point because no country today is facing imminent extinction. Rationality changes when desperation comes into play.
> Then I recommend you spend more time around people. Grown men have been convicted of throwing acid in an ex-girlfriend's face because "if I can't have you, no-one can."
You come up with a stupid analogy based on children behavior and now you invoke people throwing acid ?
This is nickelodeon level debate here.
> It doesn't prove your point because no country today is facing imminent extinction. Rationality changes when desperation comes into play.
You are making the extraordinary (and quite childish considering you started with an analogy based on children behavior) claim that a country would nuke another one to go and settle there, it's up to you to prove it. So far, in the real world, no one has used nukes like that.
I'd follow the argument but if a guy would throw acid and was in position to throw a nuke over a country they were denied access to it's most likely plausible they have the means and resources to get into this country in a more discrete and safe way (safe as in: he's in a country that wasn't nuked).
It’s called an analogy. Given we’re talking about nuclear war, it’s not an insane analogy.
> claim that a country would nuke another one to go and settle there, it's up to you to prove it.
I never said they’d try to settle the wasteland. I think you’re struggling to understand the analogy.
> It’s called an analogy. Given we’re talking about nuclear war, it’s not an insane analogy.
It looks more like a slippery slope bias to me. You can "prove" any dangers with that analogy but it's running against what history and reality have shown us so far.
> > claim that a country would nuke another one to go and settle there, it's up to you to prove it.
> I never said they’d try to settle the wasteland. I think you’re struggling to understand the analogy.
True, true, somehow the "threaten to" stayed in the keyboard. I still stand by the fact that this analogy doesn't scale to the real world.
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I’m simply making a point that humans don’t always behave reasonably in a way that would achieve their stated goals. I tried to use an analogy to make this easier but you seem confused. I could have replaced “acid” with “murder.” Would that have helped?
> I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Sorry, I reread the definition from the bias list and it's not the good one. Read the whole line, it's too small an illustration to fit a bigger picture:
> It looks more like a slippery slope bias to me. You can "prove" any dangers with that analogy but it's running against what history and reality have shown us so far.
> I’m simply making a point that humans don’t always behave reasonably in a way that would achieve their stated goals.
This, I agree with. But:
> I tried to use an analogy to make this easier but you seem confused. I could have replaced “acid” with “murder.” Would that have helped?
No. I understand your analogy but it happens that I disagree with how it is an argument in favor of your opinion (which I also disagree with but that's for another paragraph).
If anything, I think it undermines your position because it reduces the many more complex steps leading to nuking another country to a petty and cruel behavior from one individual. The analogy doesn't explain the reality behind a potential revengeful nuclear strike (geopolitical moves leading to that decision, climate disasters, consequences stemming from the reaction of other nations, etc.). All it is saying is "there are humans who would do crazy things so it follows that we are always at risks from one human doing the most crazy thing like nuking another country" but nuking another country, for the sake of the argument, requires more than one human (no matter how petty he is) and so far it hasn't been done yet (unlike people throwing acid at exes, which breaks the analogy). This is skewing proportions ("this analogy doesn't scale").
I'd rather we discuss the likelihood of such an event happening based on real world data and information, not using illustrations.
To follow on the analogy: unlike the guy with the acid bottle, the guy with the nuke has certainly the means to hop on a plane and buy his way into NZ rather than nuking it.
Of course we can always make the argument "but what if someone crazy comes and do the crazy thing" but how likely is it ? Adding "but what if he's under a lot of pressure ?!", that's still a what if scenario that would be better validated through real world examples/data than an analogy boiling down to "there are crazy people" or the single argument "people don't always act rationally so anything is possible. Well, duh.
On analogies, I like this blog post: http://itdept4life.blogspot.com/2012/04/why-analogies-suck.h...
That assumes money matters any more. It’s not unreasonable that we go past that point, leading to the irrational scenarios.
It’s hard to apply regular probabilities to this, since we’re discussing a situation where the best option for all humans is to get to New Zealand! We have no frame of reference for this scenario.
You have misunderstood the entire argument. Perhaps instead of calling other people stupid you should review your own reading comprehension.
If your civilization is on the verge of extinction then you are not concerned about wasting nukes. You are way overestimating human rationality under extreme pressure.
> You are way overestimating human rationality under extreme pressure.
Ironically, pretty sure the people with the power to launch nukes won't feel the same pressure as people suffering from climate change consequences. So.. keep the restless and angry gods content and they won't wage war and spread destruction.
A hypothetical country threatening NZ with nukes in this example would be presenting an argument: either let us in, or else we will nuke you - in hopes that NZ prefers being overcrowded but surviving, over being glassed. NZ will not take the deal - at first. The other country can insist more and more, until the situation is so tense that any random event could trigger launching the missiles.
And then, if NZ acquiesces and lets people from one country evacuate to their land, another nuclear country would ask for the same deal. Or they may even point half the nukes at the first country early on, to make sure that either they get the deal or no one else.
Thing with brinkmanship is that at no point anyone wants to actually use the nukes - but at every point it's locally optimal to up the threat, and there is no obvious stopping condition until someone trips over a cable, hits a launch console, and the nukes starts flying.
China? Norway? UAE? I feel like they will all fare very differently
Incapable not, but unwilling most certainly - just look at the state of politics across all Western countries and that doesn't even include China and India who're hell-bent on growth.
> What can an individual do to not suffer?
Move to somewhere high up north, these places are going to be those where climate change will at least not cause them to get uninhabitable.
Unwilling and incapable are sort of two sides of the same coin. Our political and economical systems are set up as a greedy (in the CS sense) optimization process.
This makes solving long term global scale problems all but impossible in any case that would entail any sort of short-term inconvenience, and anyone seeking to solve such problems by such means are (by definition) politically and economically irrelevant.
I think in general there's a somewhat unfounded notion that someone is actually in control that's getting harder to defend in the light of what's been several decades of fairly public failures to address obvious problems in society. You to look very hard to find examples of public policy successfully addressing any sort of problem, and even in that case it's questionable whether the problem was actually solved or whether it's just a case of regression to the mean.
I think it's obvious by now when all that began: with the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia in the early 90s. With the corrective against capitalism lost, everything defaulted to greed in the following decades.
Before that, humanity showed many times over that it could cooperate on critical crises and to ban dangerous stuff: sulphur in fuel was banned after "acid rain", lead and asbestos were banned, CFCs were banned after the ozone hole, nuclear weapon tests were all but abolished, biological and chemical weapon developments as well. Even the right to wage wars of aggression was under pretty solid control.
I watched a documentary about bread bakers in Afghanistan and there was a whole ecosystem of wheat growers, millers and bakers who were all centered around a river and had been doing the same work for many generations. They are screwed.
Does "suffer" take into account "transitive suffering" from children? (from future generations, our offspring)
i.e. if I'm physically fine but my child is suffering, I suffer too.
Now, for what one can do, there are always two ways: one is, as suggested, to find a better spot for oneself and let the others go to hell for all I care. But what about the children?
other is to become millitant, and force action. Worse outcome for oneself, but potentially a better outcome for the children.
Be independent in all your supplies as much as possible (food, water, basic necessities). Cyclical gardens, Biosphere-2 like systems, etc. Then scale up and do the same with a small community. The bigger the community, more chances to repel an attack of cannibals.
Beyond that you are supposing based upon bad data and conjecture which results in a scenario where worry will kill you.
But let's say the worst happens and you can't live in a city anymore. Can you grow your own food? Can you grow all of it? How many resources does that take near where you live? How about in the mountains near where you live? Now go learn how to do it.