This guy's blog is subtitled "Eliot Jacobson's Collapse of Everything Blog".
Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true?
Is this his schtick? Does he just say the world is ending all the time, or is what he's saying true?
I noticed this a lot in 2020. COVID was (and is) awful, but there was so much shit that Doomers claimed would happen that year that just didn't. They seem to have a bias towards always considering the worst case scenario the most likely.
They serve an important function in society to keep us aware of just how fragile things can be and that we need to be vigilant about understanding the second order affects of our actions as a society.
[0]: Ones that generally rely on nonpartisan facts / science / evidence for making their claims, without resorting to debunked information to further their claims and/or not relying on conspiracy theories, for instance.
[1]: I'd put alot of technologists in this group, for an example. People who constantly hype real breakthroughs and advancements as proof that we will always be trending upward as a species
No, it won't. Because we will act.
"Everything will turn out fine, we don't need to worry about anything!!"
No, it won't. We need to act.
Honestly, both extreme reactions paralyze humans and nations into inactivity. We fixed the hole in the Ozone. We fixed Acid Rain. We stopped the whales from going extinct. We did this through concerted human and governmental actions together with pressure and regulations on corporations.
We can do it again. Not without some consequences. Significant human populations will become climate refugees. Significant species will go extinct. But we can offset the worst effects, but not if doomerism or "climate change is inevitable, humans have survived worse" optimism cause us to stop trying.
But hectoring and chiding and unhealthy amounts of stress aren’t going to muster sufficient resources and capabilities to put a handle on this problem.
You know what will? Good old fashioned human ingenuity and optimism. This isn’t to lessen the inevitable losses. Humans will die. Species will be lost forever. Island nations will sink beneath the waves (and not just the UK this time).
Things are gonna get worse before they get better, but like the apocryphal Americans, you can always trust humanity to do the right thing after they’ve exhausted every other option.
We’ve got this. Shaming someone for throwing out a USB mini cable ain’t gonna get us there.
Reminds me of this quote: "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"
And... will act? The time to act already has come and passed, probably during the Bush years. We did not act. This is no longer about making it to the runway, this is about deciding which patch of rocks will kill the fewest passengers.
In the Biden years climate scientists are telling people that change is here, and it IS here.
And more people are at least talking about the change, and asking what are we going to do about it.
And the worst thing to tell someone who is motivated and curious (and an entire Generation Z is) is to say "It's too late. You had your chance and you blew it. There's nothing to do now"
Your first sentence betrays a horrific misunderstanding: "I don't care if it's possible or not". It should not change my certainty in my ability to try. Even if it's not possible, it's still worth trying. What else are we supposed to do?
y2k too... that could have been awful
We consistently fall in the worst case scenario of most climate models so much so that "faster than expected" is now a meme.
It is indeed too late to avoid famine and water wars but it is not too late to keep large parts of the world still livable. I would very much like my children and my children's children to have a fighting chance.
see also: the book of revelations
There will always be people fixated on The End, some because they think we all deserve it, others because they can't seperate their own existential crisis from potential global crises
There is a long and embarassing trail of false apocalypses predicted from extrapolations + assumptions of helplessness, often made by otherwise intelligent and scientifically inclined people. We were all going to starve, but then Haber figured out how to chemically fix Nitrogen. Nuclear war was going to end the world, but then MAD actually worked. The ozone hole was going to cook the plant life, but then we cleaned up our refrigerants. We were going to run out of oil by 2010, but then we found more.
Betting against humanity isn't a historically wise move. You don't have a choice in the matter, and it's easy to fixate on this and imagine yourself trapped, but you are "trapped" with one hell of a fighting chance so the truth is you just don't know.
We're talking about bringing half a dozen to multiple dozens of networks out of balance that we only halfway understand.
> extrapolate that "humanity will always find solutions"
Good thing I didn't do that! Doomers, however, do extrapolate failure. They walk far out on a branch and forget they are carrying the burden of proof. That's my entire point.
And if you happen to read a bit about how biological systems, the weather systems, our economical systems, food supply et al. work together while keeping in mind that IPCC reports are _conservative_ about their predictions (meaning they rather underestimate than overestimate), you should really deeply be worried about the near-future outcome of the ongoings.
Just because we successfully hacked our nutrition system a 100ys ago does not mean that we'll be able to cope with how consumerism and agricultural intensification afterwards affects us with dozens of new problems. At some point it just gets too expensive and/or too complex for humans to solve.
I'm not sure who the "they" you're referring to is, but the fast majority of authors/researchers I've read on these topics are quite well aware.
The problem is the vast majority of this "adapt and overcome" has been based on two major things:
- Historically: a geologically remarkable period of climate stability
- More recent: abundant fossil fuels
Malthus was wrong because he failed to predict the Haber process. But currently the Haber process relies heavily on fossil fuels. We didn't produce astoundingly more food per acre then ever before in history because we are incredibly smart, but because we had ready access to hydrocarbons. The same logic follows for nearly all great inventions of recent eras
> Betting against humanity isn't a historically wise move.
I see this comment all the time but it's a very odd one. As far as species go humans are very, very young and survived very little, just about 300,000 years. Additionally, like I said, we've only existed as a species during one of the most stable climates in the history of the planet.
One final point on the "people always think the world is ending!" rhetoric. We've only really started seeing strong apocalyptic thinking in the last several hundred years. Let's say, for argument, that humans were wiped out in the next 100 years. Alien scientists visiting would see people thinking about the end times in the last 1/300,000 of the species' existence to be fairly prescient, even if they were off by several of their own species lifetimes.
On top of that the writing on this topic is not without merit historically. Revelations was written during the Siege of Jerusalem, when things were collapsing for the world of the author. Most medieval apocalyptic literature was written or based on the black death which wiped out between 30-50 percent of Europe. Hardly irrational beliefs that the world is ending based solely on existential anxiety.
There's also an obvious logical fallacy in all this thinking. Most of the time when people look up webMD they think they have cancer, and they don't most of the time. But it doesn't logically follow that they can't have cancer no matter how strong the evidence.
Humans have been contemplating the end of the world and the promise of a subsequent paradise or judgement for thousands of years, evidenced by ancient religious and cultural texts. The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament, Zoroastrian eschatology, etc.
Homo sapiens survived the transition from the last ice age to today's climate.
As a related digression I think what people just keep forgetting about here isn’t like, we’ll survive. It’s we have all this nice stuff like avocados, grapes, heart surgery, and MacBook Pros, elephants, winter sports, houses, etc. and it sure would be nice to not lose that stuff for no good reason only to say “we’ll see we didn’t go extinct it wasn’t that bad”.
The apparently abrupt changes the unnecessary lives lost, and what could be damaged or lost forever are what’s of concern. Less so just survivability.
My point was just that claims that the entire species is going to go extinct are unlikely and, worse, counter-productive. The last thing we need is fatalism and people giving up hope.
Agreed completely on fatalism and nihilism being mind viruses.
I can put a pot of water on my stove, but my hand in, warm the pot by 1°C, and I'll be fine. I can't do the same with an increase by 100°C.
For the current climate change, we've been calling +2°C catastrophic.
It is catastrophic: millions will die, species will go extinct, trillions will be spent updating infrastructure and rebuilding. But I believe that it's survivable.
Over what time period? 10°C in 10 million years is fine. In 10 years it would kill almost all life. The amount of change is inconsequential as long as the rate of change is small enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period#/media/Fil...
There was a roughly 5°C change in about the last 2,000 years.
I wish I could share your optimism.
> the truth is you just don't know
You disproved:
> it doesn't logically follow that they can't have cancer
Good job, you really pwned that straw man.
Also, I want to preserve this one for posterity, because I'm pretty sure it's hilariously wrong but I have better things to do than dig through the literature right now:
> We've only really started seeing strong apocalyptic thinking in the last several hundred years.
I wish more people would take a reasonable middle approach like that. Are we still, as a society, allowed to do things like that?
The reality is rarely "as bad as we imagined" OR "nothing is wrong at all".
I don't think my landlords would approve of a bunker. And where would I put it? The whole property is 25x75 feet.
"Prepare" is sometimes "realize that I'm completely screwed and I have to die of something someday".
Everything is temporary, after all, including me and you.
Hmph. I want to scoff at how easy he has had it on this subject. And I guess I am.
I didn't get any "alarmist" signals from this post of his until near the end. If all the data is as it suggests there really does seem to be something going on this year in particular in addition to a trend. But then he said "Infrastructure will break beyond repair." which jumped out as alarmist to me. Like we can't fix or build more infrastructure? I wish people wouldn't do that, as it makes me react with "dude calm down" when they otherwise seem to have a point.
When he says "infrastructure" he means the nature that we draw on (to build our infrastructure) i.e. the weather, the trophic chains etc.
I would doubt that everything from one type of infra can be translated to the other. E.g. when it comes to nature some things are simply almost irreversible, whereas there is no such thing for man-made infra.
I am definitely not an expert on infrastructure or civil engineering in general, but I’ve heard lots of stories about heat being bad for our infra, e.g. warped rail lines in the UK. “Beyond repair” seems within the bound of reason
EDIT: also, obligatory dont-look-up-ication:
"I didn't sense any 'alarmist' undertones from this post of his until almost the end. If all the data is as it suggests, there genuinely seems to be an extraordinary astronomical event headed our way this year on top of other celestial trends. But then he said, 'Civilization will crumble beyond repair,' which struck me as alarmist. Like we can't rebuild or adapt our society? I wish people wouldn't resort to such extreme statements, as it prompts me to respond with 'dude, calm down,' even when they otherwise seem to have a valid concern."
- No, we won’t hit scorched earth Venus-like runaway warming.
- If we don’t reduce emissions drastically, greenhouse gas warming plus various feedbacks will cause extreme weather, render some parts of the world unlivable due to wet bulb temperature, and overwhelm unprepared infrastructure, costing huge amounts of money and creating millions of migrants.
So, not the end times, but definitely dark times.
If you sprinkle a bit of pessimism about current politics it’s not a stretch to assume we probably won’t handle those impacts gracefully, or achieve the drastic emissions cuts required to avoid them.
This think tank says 1.2B:
https://www.zurich.com/en/media/magazine/2022/there-could-be...
Reasoning:
- 19 countries with the highest number of ecological threats are among the world’s 40 least peaceful countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Chad, India and Pakistan.
- Over one billion people live in 31 countries where the country’s resilience is unlikely to sufficiently withstand the impact of ecological events by 2050, contributing to mass population displacement.
- Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa are the regions facing the largest number of ecological threats.
- 3.5 billion people could suffer from food insecurity by 2050; which is an increase of 1.5 billion people from today.
- The lack of resilience in countries covered in the ETR will lead to worsening food insecurity and competition over resources, increasing civil unrest and mass displacement, exposing developed countries to increased influxes of refugees.
This is what I've been trying to tell people for years. Climate change is everyone's concern, if only because entire nations becoming uninhabitable, wars over natural resources (not just oil - now we'll be seeing fighting over arable land and water sources), etc. will cause massive influxes of refugees. Even if many nations did not have a significant split in opinions on migrants, most are still ill-equipped to handle the many millions of climate refugees that will come.
Remember the Syrian migrant crisis? Where people were shouting about "the great replacement" (read: "white genocide") over people fleeing ISIS? That's going to seem like chump change compared to what's coming (and I'd bet good money that new extremist groups will start popping up as conditions deteriorate, governments collapse, etc. - a good chunk of the blame for climate change can be laid at the feet of developed nations, after all, so I would be shocked if no extremist groups decided to take matters into their own hands).
I could write at length about this, but I'll leave it at this: the US is not going to come out of this unscathed. Obviously, sea level rise will lead to coastal flooding, yada yada, but unless American agriculture is forced to be more conservative with its water usage, the aquifers we rely so desperately on for our farmlands will run dry due to over-pumping within this century (and with megadroughts getting worse, our aquifers are recharging far slower than before...this will only get worse as climate change worsens).
This message doesn't serve the interests of billionaires, and Gates is no exception.
As I see it, it's possible to frame all technologies as being fundamentally based on one of the following mechanisms, interactions, or focus points:
- Materials: stuff, its properties, abundance, and sourcing and disposal issues. Wood, stone, ceramics, metals, fluids, chemicals, nuclear materials.
- Fuels: energy potential stored in material arrangements. Biomass, fossil fuels, nuclear fuels. This excludes energy flows such as solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal. Subject to limits in stores and creation rates. Result in waste products and phenomena.
- Power transmission and transformation: from simple machines to complex mechanisms and grid distribution. Levers, screws, pulleys, electromagnetism, beamed energy. This would include energy flows described above.
- Process knowledge: "technology" writ large. As J.S. Mill put it, the study of means, how to achieve some goal through some process or technique.
- Causal knowledge: "science" writ large. As J.S. Mill put it, the study of causes, or why the world is and acts as it does, based on empirical study.
- Networks: nodes and links. These may be physical or logical. Transportation, distribution, social, economic, commercial, political, and conceptual collections of loci and the connections and interactions between them. Famously give rise to network effects, also subject to hygiene factors (below).
- Systems: management of process with feedback and models. From basic polity to vast technological, economic, and ecological systems. "The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control" -- Charles H. Cotter.
- Information: input, processing, storage, and output. From basic anatomical senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) to language, maths, logic, abstract representation, manipulation, detection, transmission, reception, and retention. Capable of immense scaling itself, but often with profound limits on direct application.
- Hygiene: management of unintended and/or unanticipated consequences. All technologies achieve both desired and undesired effects, those may be manifest or latent, and may occur immediately or lagged. We tend to best cope with immediate and manifest effects, it is the lagged and latent ones that tend to cause the greatest trouble.
The technologies which seem to best fit your "credit card" model are those involving fossil fuels especially, materials resources formed very slowly or at singular points in time in Earth's history, and of hygiene impacts whose immediate and long-term consequences diverge strongly. Steve Keen (amongst others) shows that economic productivity scales near-linearly with energy consumption, yet we are using fossil fuels at rates millions of times greater than they accumulated. Virtually any mining activity represents extraction at rates greater than accumulation (the reverse is "farming", though even that can be problematic). Current industry has a strong reliance on a large number of elements and minerals, many of which are scarce or sparse. An example of the latter being "rare earths", which are not actually rare so much as they do not form ore bodies, and must be separated with high energy and waste-material costs from exceedingly low concentrations in the Earth's crust. Similarly, various emissions are often presumed or advertised as being low-consequence ... until they are not. Heavy metals, inert compounds (most notably hydrofluourocarbons), synthetic materials (e.g., plastics with bioactive and endocrinologic effects), and carbon dioxide resulting from combustion are all now major environmental concerns, initially dismissed, overlooked, or actively obscured by those with a short-term benefit from their use.
It seems that there are possibilities within process and causal knowledge, power transmission and transformation, networks, systems, and hygiene mechanisms for technologies which are far less prone to risk or debt-shifting. Though critics such as Tainter would suggest that complexity is its own inherent risk, with substantial justificiation.
> Steve Keen (amongst others) shows that economic productivity scales near-linearly with energy consumption, yet we are using fossil fuels at rates millions of times greater than they accumulated.
The only way I can see (without spending more than just a few minutes thinking about this comment) this being true is with 100% efficiency and I wonder if that's the underlying assumption here. I'd hazard a guess that we're using fossil fuels at low single digit percentage efficiency if that and perhaps even putting more in than we're getting out. To your point though, since we're using fossil fuels way faster than they accumulated there's just no way to escape "running out" [1]. Just a matter of when.
[1] I don't think we'll ever run out of course, it'll just be more and more expensive. When I think about running out I think about not having society able to adapt to the cost because of how we've built and designed our infrastructure. The US is particularly screwed here since we rely on them so much.
Energy plays no role in the standard Cobb-Douglas Production Function (CDPF), and a trivial role in a three-factor CDPF where it is treated as a third input, independent of labour and capital. Starting from an epistemological perspective, we treat energy as an input to both labour and capital, without which production is impossible. We then derive an energy-based CPDF (EBCDPF) in which energy plays a critical role. We argue for the redefinition and measurement of real GDP in terms of exergy. We conclude that the “Solow Residual” measures the contribution of exergy to growth, and that the exponents in the EBCDPF should be based on cross-country comparative data as suggested by Mankiw (1995) rather than the “cost-share theorem”.
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...>
For an excellent discussion of efficiency of energy use over time, see Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization (2017), which shows the actual attained efficiencies of various fuels usage.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_and_Civilization:_A_His...>
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536165/energy-and-civilizati...>
Note that due to conversion efficiency limits, most generally those of Carnot engines, achieved efficiency in converting thermal to mechanical energy trends around 30%. That can go higher in some applications (e.g., dual-cycle steam turbines combined with usage of residual thermal heat in cogeneration plants). But for the most part large-scale modeling relies on the 30% figure. See for example the Lawrence Livermore Labs energy-flow Sankey charts, in which ~30% efficiency simply assumed for the model, rather than explicitly measured, based on modeling:
End-use efficiency is estimated at 65% for the residential sector, 65% for the commercial sector, 21% for the transportation sector, and 49% for the industrial sector, which was updated in 2017 to reflect DOE's analysis of manufacturing.
<https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/styles/or...>
<https://gs.llnl.gov/energy-homeland-security/energy-security...>
TL;DR: results are based on overall inputs and outputs, don't get caught up in considering minutiae of conversion efficiencies.
Degrowth is the only sustainable solution, geo-engineering will create more problems than it solves.
"We (the ultra-rich) won't experience a scorched Earth ending"
- Real.
- Influenced by human activity, both positively and negatively.
- Difficult to study, because we only have decades of hard data for what is a phenomenon spanning eons.
- A narrative pushed by Western economies to discourage economic development of the Global South and maintain hegemony. If the former were actually serious about mitigating it, it would harshly regulate planned obsolescence which causes astronomical amounts of waste and pollution. Instead, they browbeat poor countries for building durable infrastructure.
- Classic fear-mongering as a means of maintaining control ("follow me or everyone will die").
- An expression of aging "hippy" eschatology; we have one of the most individualistic generations in human history reaching old age and projecting its death onto the world as a coping mechanism.
- A polarizing topic that lures engagement.
I think blogs like this are a manifestation of the latter two or three.
Which one do you think is winning?
(Also, when you say the Global South, do you mean the Global South that tends to be exempt from, or subjected to less stringent carbon limitations than the developed world? Or do you mean the Global South that everyone starts complaining about as soon as I mention that maybe we should reduce our emissions...)
Exactly, it's modern lipstick for an old pig.
> the Global South that everyone starts complaining about as soon as I mention that maybe we should reduce our emissions...
Yeah, that one.
These two things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.