I’m a climate scientist and I think society will collapse by 2050. I’m preparing
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A good example: crop failures happening not in some areas once or twice, but simultaneous in several important areas. Potentially taking out a good chunk of an important crop like maize, soy, wheat or similar. A recent study on this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38906-7
Things can turn ugly pretty quick if people go hungry.
Other possibilities: out of control wildfires across the globe, mass deaths due to a high-humidity heatwave combined with power (read: airco) failure in a big city, another pandemic (or combo of multiple diseases going pandemic), methane releases kicking climate change in overdrive, the list goes on.
Maybe it won't be so bad. Or maybe we've seen nothing yet. But you can't really rule out anything.
Victory gardens grew 40% of vegetables consumed in the US (back when we got a lot more calories from vegetables, and yes, corn is a vegetable).
It's not going to be one or two crop failures out of nowhere and suddenly we're in WW3.
We are so far away from starving or running out of water that it's hilarious.
Sure, our current way of life is probably not going to continue forever, but there is so much room for easy optimizations, it's outrageous.
> ...and beef is so inefficient there's easily room for another 5% or more just from that, probably another 5% if you convert ethenol crops back to food for human consumption.
> Victory gardens grew 40% of vegetables consumed in the US (back when we got a lot more calories from vegetables, and yes, corn is a vegetable).
I'm skeptical those things address the vulnerability:
1. Can animal feed/ethanol supply chains be shifted quickly enough towards human consumption? Is that food even consumable by humans (e.g. hay is not)?
2. Isn't it unreasonable to assume those food sources are independent of each other? For instance, if there's a major crop failure of maize, wouldn't it affect all maize agriculture (for humans, animals, and fuel)? So the "5%" used for beef production may be much less in the context of crop failure. Similarly, if the climate is bad for conventional agriculture, it's going to be tough on people with gardens, too.
3. A "victory garden" isn't something you can start one day and feed yourself the next. You need seeds (which may be in short supply in this scenario), land (which many people don't have access to), at least half growing season of time, and some skill (which I think is far less common given the shift from rural to urban living).
IMHO, probably the only way to deal with the sudden shock of major crop failures is stockpiling to create slack in the food system. IIRC, many years back I read there was some analysis done that showed the US lacked that slack (something ridiculously short, like 30 days, but that may have been more in the context of nuclear war than crop failures).
In the case of beef, yes. ~64% of cow feed is corn and soybean meal.
Is cow feed a mixture of 64% corn/soy and 36% human-inedible stuff? If it is, is it stored that way?
In any case, I'd expect crop failures that affect human food supply chain would also hit the animal food supply chain just as bad.
Let me guess, you live a sheltered life in a 1st world country (like most on HN). Others are not so lucky.
"The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that we entered 2022 with 828 million hungry people. This number represents an increase of approximately 150 million hungry people since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic." [1]
The bell curve gets flatter and wider, so extremes become much more likely, so the risk of simultaneous extremes in two or more regions at the same time, and for consecutive harvests, goes up even more.
From O(1 in a million) in the 1980s, to O(1 in 10) by the 2050s. (Numbers for illustration, not exact, but the change in order of magnitude is about right, I think.)
But then I realised how much fat there is in the global food production system, particularly with biofuels and animal feeds (wheat, soy, maize). It's not likely to be a problem until every other harvest is failing.
I don't mean to be trite, but I don't know that being a climate scientist particularly qualifies one more than another on sociological issues. I look to the climate scientist to say "here are the probably climate outcomes...", and to the sociologist to say "...and if that turns out to be true, we can expect society to turn on each other like rats/band together in a community-minded effort to live in harmony."
* Why was Rome, Rome? Well, Rome had a population of 1M. Which was incredibly unique at the time. This made the city able to conquer land very far off. How was this city size possible? Because water travel is very cheap, and the fields of the Nile are water-accessible from Rome. That's how you feed Rome. That's right, the same geographical peculiarity explains both the pyramids and Rome's greatness. It was Rome, but it could have been any other city on the Mediterranean shore. So much so that when Emperor Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople, Rome's population fell well under 50k in a few decades. That must have been quite the depression.
* How did modern societal freedom came to be? Well, before, 70% of the population was dedicated to agriculture. Then the industrial revolution liberated the masses, which had time for other more complex activities, etc.
* Why did the industrial revolution occur in England? They had mines that were filling up with water, and had to resort to pumping it out with steam engines... powered right from the mines' coal. This enabled a tight local loop of optimizing theses engines; which could serve other purposes later on, triggering the global 150 year trend of harnessing fossil energies.
We live in a complex system of intertwined material contexts which all stem from mother nature. Why not start modelling it as such?
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TL;DR: I don't know if there's such a thing as psycho-history, but there definitely is one named geographical determinism (which is under-studied, and under-taught IMHO)
- Race and Culture
- Migration and Cultures
- Conquest and Cultures
If ever there were developed the equivalent of psychohistory, it'd likely be a theory of economics. Asimov either chose to ignore or wasn't informed enough about chaos theory at the time he wrote Foundation. He wanted to write a future history that read like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and psychohistory was a device that got him there.
It's funny, this used to be common sense but now we're so far gone we can't talk about it anymore without being labeled heretics.
Except, we (the rich world) won't run out of food. About a third of the global maize (corn) crop is used for biofuels and a similarly large fraction of wheat and maize (edit: and soy) is used for animal feed. We may have to go light on meat consumption and ban biofuels (which would be no bad thing anyway).
Places with ineffective government, dense populations, and water scarcity will likely suffer.
Global warming is only one of a number of things we are doing to destroy the global harvest, though. Soil erosion and poisoning (salination and chemical poisoning), groundwater exhaustion, river diversion and damming, annihilation of supporting microbes and insects, ... take away climate change and the picture doesn't change much.
What I don't know is the likelyhood of global harvest failures. Bad conditions in one place should compensate in others, perhaps, avoiding a full-on disaster? But if we are unfortunate, it may quickly become every nation for themselves, but a level of panic we haven't seen before.
The EU was supposed to be a union, but when COVID started getting really bad in Italy, what did Austria do? They shut the border to Italy. I do fear it will be every nation for themselves, just like individuals are selfish and worry first about their survival, it'll be nations/tribes doing the same (and the worse things get, even tribes will start in-fighting). I say tribes, I feel like violence against anyone who looks different will worsen with scarcity.
I feel like leaders of the rich countries are just closing their eyes to the global disaster (because trying to make a more ecological world is a vote loser, just look at Macron's attempt at taxing fuel more), they're probably hoping there'll be some magical solution, and that before that, if the people are going to die, it'll be the poor of the world without bothering them them too much...
There are plenty of jokes about the fragility of our tech stack, but I don't think many people appreciate how fragile knowledge networks are. Some core ideas, like conservation of energy and elementary quantum mechanics will be pretty robust, but the subtle voodoo that makes modern society actually tick? There won't be people who can replace existing devices, much less design and build improved ones.
You can make your bug-out bag, but remember that you won't be an MRI in your future. Your batteries will decay and your memory chips will fail. In a few short decades you'll be back in the early-mid 1800's, if you're lucky to be in a place with a cooperating climate.
I believe we may need to create an unshackled AGI that could potentially inherit the Earth from us. However, I question whether we will have sufficient time to accomplish this.
My thoughts are based on two points: (1) Much of the richness of my life comes from the comforts of modern society. In a world where all that is ripped away it's hard to imagine having a ton of will to go on. Family would maybe be enough, but I live hundreds of miles away, so it's unlikely I would ever be able to contact them. (2) Anything I can do to prepare tautologically increases my value to raiders/anyone able to use violence on me, and often increases my visibility. If I save and grow seeds, I will have a valuable cache of calories. If I stockpile weapons, I will have a valuable cache of weapons.
(New Zealanders don't do "respect for authority"; they do "respect for demonstrated ability".)
His answer was "I'm going to embrace my destiny and run towards the Zombies. There's no way I want to live in a world that's 80% Zombies and 20% Survivalists."
Replace with 80% struggling-to-survive-poor and 20% sociopaths-with-weapons... and yeah. Pessimism is not the wrong answer IMO.
EDIT: A pre-emptive statement: if you're a survivalist in the collapse of modern society, you have to be (or become) a sociopath. Caring too much about your peers will get you betrayed and killed once the easy supplies are gone.
By his reasoning, if all we do is figure out how to grow enough crops by 2050, this disaster will be mostly averted.
This seems trivially easy if the alternative is total societal collapse and the death of all mankind.
Once it’s in rich people’s best interest to fix the problem, it’ll get fixed. Rich people don’t want to get eaten in the apocalypse, and total societal collapse would hit the richest the worst (most to lose when money is meaningless). By rich, I am not just talking about Billionaires. Americans earning a median wage are rich by global standards.
Not convincing at all.
> Grimly, McGuire likens the human population to bacteria in a petri dish. When these bacteria multiply, uncontrollably, their number becomes so big that they can no longer sustain themselves in the dish. At this point, they die
> There’s one projection that by 2050, crop yields may be down by up to 30 per cent, at a time when the world will need 50 per cent more food [to account for population growth],”
Oh wow, I take what I said back. He's even more wrong than the usual doomer.
For one, we're not running out of food. The old idea of a planetary "carrying capacity" for humans has long been busted: technology progresses and makes food production more efficient. We might run out of good agricultural land, but that just means we need to clear out more or shift to hydroponics. As the price of food increases, that's a signal to the market to devote more resources to growing food, making more intensive methods of farming possible.
> Now in the countryside, McGuire’s house has walls that are two-thirds of a metre thick, to keep the heat out
Doesn't more insulation keep the heat in? Traditional construction in the tropics where I come from are not giant insulated blocks for good reason, that's how you die from overheating yourself without air conditioning.
> Then there is the water supply. He says it is important to be self-sufficient. “I am doing a lot of rainwater harvesting. The summers in Britain will be seeing consistent temperatures of 40 degrees plus, so water is going to be a huge issue,”
We won't run out of water the same reason we won't run out of food. Once the cheap water is gone, you turn to more expensive methods -- drilling, then desalination. Of course it's more expensive -- that's the whole point -- marginal increases in cost allows for more expensive methods of production. The same way increasing oil prices allows for deep sea drilling, increasing water prices will allow for desalination and other such technologies.
I really don't know why people keep thinking we'll run out of food and water. We won't. It'll get more expensive as cheaper sources run out, sure, but we won't run out.
We are already seeing population declines in various countries. We are seeing population collapse in many species worldwide. You don’t need to wait for methane releases or burning the last drop of petroleum… it is here.
The constructive thing to do is figure out what world do you want to live in … one where the abandoned houses and office buildings lay as tombstones to an opulent past of plentiful labor and an ever growing standard of living driven by technological advances ..
look around you and soak it all in - this is as good as it gets.
Now comes the hard part.
If someone wanted to invest in OTG self-sufficiency, then they would need a remote, defensible homestead with wind and storm resistant agriculture and a durable water source. It's a waste of time and money unless someone enjoys the catharsis of microfarming and already has plenty of money.
Beyond geoengineering stopgaps, like a solar shield, I do not see any credible solutions. Unfortunately, the natural/artificial dichotomy bias and the belief that humans can do nothing at all correctly will prevent action and doom modern civilization. Installing a shield at L1 is our best hope, but would cost hundreds of billions or trillions.
Sadly, this is another issue that has been deeply, cynically, and intentionally politicized, when it is in fact an observable scientifically validated human-created ongoing cataclysm.
Doing something is a survivial necessity for all of humanity, but sadly it will be too late before it is clear to everyone.
On the flip side, we're not seeing any slowdowns. Oil companies are already calculating the billions of dollars of future profit they'll get from extracting the oil they know is in their fields, and so far no one is able to get them to stop.
That does seem to be the current plan, insofar as there is any such thing as a plan; fossil fuel consumption continues to increase, year after year.
Yes, this is why. Not because it’s an incredibly hard problem affecting all 8B people on this planet. Glad you sorted it out!
Stop placing the blame on politicians and oil companies, not because those groups are defensible, but simply bc it won’t advance the issue: the average person does not want to reduce their quality of life. That’s why.
Don't believe me? Try to get a bike lane installed in your city at the fraction of the cost of car infrastructure, and see how many death threats you get. I wish I was joking.
Apocalypse chasers always have one thing in common...
https://fee.org/articles/rejoice-the-earth-is-becoming-green...
Maybe you can stock up on food, water and ammunition, buy solar panels and batteries and so on. Maybe you build yourself a vegetable garden, even with a medicinal herb corner. Fine.
But what when your appendix starts to hurt? What if your precious batteries need servicing? Where will you buy pesticide and fertiliser to keep your garden producing? I just don't think a single person, or an atomic family, can cover all these specialisations. And even if you could, the hungry zombies from the collapsed society will come, and there's only so much ammo you can stockpile.
No, if society collapses, there's no escape, and we're dead. Dying of hunger might be the nice and gentle thing to wish for then. So preparing for that particular eventuality is a waste of time. You just can't prepare. Might as well cross our fingers and hope that, yes, it will be hot, climate will be terrible, but somehow humanity will plod on. At least in my locale.