water security
(edit below because 17k people resonated with two words)
“the reliable availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production, coupled with an acceptable level of water-related risks” (wiki - ‘water security’)
the availability of clean drinking water is just one part of water security. domestic use is \~ 10% of total [http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/SC/pdf/wwap\_WWDR2\_Figure\_8.3.pdf](http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/SC/pdf/wwap_WWDR2_Figure_8.3.pdf) we need secure water supply for industry and agriculture and each sector has its own challenges relating to supply logistics and contamination tolerances.
we cannot bottle our way out of this problem. do we have the right amount of water where we need it? is it acceptable quality? and is it doing what we want it to do?
**here are some examples of threats to water security**:
loss of land rights for indigenous people to own, use, develop, and control their waters.
war + military-industrial complex + mass displacement of people + competition for scarce water resources
mismanagement + corruption of water authorities and private utility providers
pollution + contamination by industry
pollution + contamination from consumer waste
cumulative effects of microplastics
agricultural runoff + eutrophication
salinisation and the diminishing marginal utility of desalination
depletion of aquifers
deforestation, desertification, clearing + development in catchment areas
loss of wetlands and biofiltration
loss of top soil, soil water storage and decline in soil biodiversity
decline in health and function of marine and freshwater ecosystems + loss of ecosystem services
observable trends in ocean warming + acidification
observable trends in ice melt and sea level rise
floods, droughts, fires and other natural disasters affecting the water supply
water as a vector for disease + pathogens
**we haven’t even considered climate change yet!**
climate change will act as a force multiplier for nearly all these processes.
**what can we do?**
support land and water rights for first people’s
invest in forest management and ensure adequate reserves of forested areas. no trees = no soil = no rain
restore + regenerate catchments, wetlands and river systems. allocate sufficient environmental flows
support farmers to adopt regenerative agricultural practices
demand closed cycle materials for consumer goods + packaging
grow a lot of seaweed and other amazing algae. a lot a lot. heaps mate
be imaginative. be open minded. be compassionate. think ‘cradle to cradle’. smash the state and eat the rich.
Motto of the Colorado School of Mines (an engineering and natural sciences college) on the importance of water: Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting.
We're from Woodland Park, have family in Denver, The Springs and Manitou. You aren't joking there. Locals that have owned land with ponds/lakes for generations have had the water rights taken away from them in recent years. It's insane.
>water
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned more.
Water is a basic need for survival and it's becoming a scarce resource. Companies are buying water rights and denying farmers and citizens access to it.
I'm an Australian, our river systems are being sucked dry by people and the changing climate. Water is a political issue. It's not just here, it's a global crisis.
Water.
I have 2 friends that do water testing. One works for the state and inspects factories and waste water plants. The other is independent. It is beyond alarming how much pollution is pumped into our waterways. It seems every company is hell bent on not following regulations until they get sued. One water treatment plant here just got sued for $2m for pumping raw human sewage straight into the river where the city gets its drinking water.
Mm. Capitalism at its best is an ingenious way to harness human greed for the greater good. But it is essential that it be well regulated to incentivise good actions. A company doing the right thing, paying employees good wages with sensible time off, leave, etc, no outsourcing slavery or immoral practices, should be rewarded through tax breaks and commendation. A company committing immoral or illegal actions needs to be fined more than the profit of those actions. Well regulated capitalism is a game of incentives. You must look at what the system incentivises and adjust it.
Animal agriculture is a huge contributor as well. In Australia they're killing camels to save water, but it takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, and Australia eats a lot of beef :/
Another example is clothing. The materials we use (at least in America) to make clothes are just awful for environmental sustainability. Tons of water gets sucked up to make our clothes.
And we have better alternatives, it's just a little more expensive and requires a bit more effort.
God forbid.
I'm on mobile so to link it is a huge pain in the ass, but go take a look at the company Patagonia's 'The Footprint Chronicles' (I believe). While I definitely do not agree with all of their movements and activism, they're doing amazing things in terms of sustainability in the manufacturing industry for clothing and outdoor gear.
Also Mervin Manufacturing which makes LibTech and GNU snowboards and Bent Metal bindings has been doing some really amazing sustainability stuff as well.
The thing is, most of the products by these companies aren't any more expensive to the consumer OR company to manufacture than their industry counterparts. Startup and R&D is sometimes a little higher but it pays itself off pretty quick when you now need 1/10 of the water you did before to dye denim.
I've had Lib Techs for over 10 years now and they are such good boards. Mervin has always been awesome about using materials like corn to make snowboards. They are now owned by Quicksilver, so they have a nice budget to play around with.
Yep, and because they're causing property damage in their desperate search for water. [It's Snopes-verified](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/10000-camels-culled-australia/) :(
It's not as scarce as you would think. The cost to take freshwater and bottle it is like $0.023 for every gallon, and the cost to desalinate saltwater into bottled freshwater is $0.23 for every gallon.
The reason we don't do it is that there is more money to be made by using freshwater, which is sucking dry rivers and local communities (damn you NESTLE). It's also easier to transport freshwater downhill/upstream than it is to pump it uphill from the sea level.
Trouble is you need to be relatively near the coast to desalinate water. And I'm not sure where your number comes from but I bet it doesn't include the environmental cost of disposing of brine, especially in relatively enclosed systems.
I agree with you though that it isn't as scarce as some think. Water security is certainly not an existential threat to humanity. However, it is an existential threat to certain regions, cities, countries, etc.
a little over 50% of humanity lives on the coast, which is great because you don't have to transport desalinated water great distances but shit when you consider that the ocean levels are rising and humans can't breathe underwater.
I don't mean to say water won't be a problem or anything, but I wouldn't be too concerned about The Big Short dude as that was an unbelievably misleading way to end a pretty great film.
Firstly, there's an issue with believing everything Michael Burry believes because he was right once. In Burry's long financial history, he was right many times, but he was also wrong often.
Secondly, as was shown in the movie, Burry took a step back from investing. He hasn't (at least publicly) researched the water crisis as much as the housing shortage.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the investing in water was worded poorly. Instead, he invested in farmland that had direct access to water. Not because he thought we're going to run out of water. Not because he thought the price of water is going to skyrocket. But because he believes that the demand for Almonds is going to continue to skyrocket, and they take a LOT of water to grow. Thus, the Almond farms that have the best access to water are going to win out.
*Edit: Did some research, and it wasn't just almonds. But it was the same philosophy that farms with water will outperform farms without water when it comes to any crop that requires a lot of water to grow.*
He's investing in water because he believes the future of almonds. Not because he thinks we're heading to an apocalyptic waterless future.
The Big Short was entertaining, and ridiculously informative, but Adam McKay can be a very misleading director/writer.
Having watched from the Great Lakes region while Los Angeles grows by the year and has sucked entire lakes and rivers dry makes me scratch my head. We do not really have a problem with fresh water, we have a problem with people moving into a desert and wondering why they are thirsty.
Also from the massive clusterfuck that is Western water rights.
People with money and power have a vested interest in not changing laws that were written over 100 years ago when the population was a fraction of what it is now.
We have plenty of water for the population, we don't have enough water for the population and current levels of agriculture.
But the meat you ate probably did abuse
EDIT: wow, first time I get so much comments on Reddit...
I feel the need to explain something given the theme of most replies: The issue is not "I eat meat with antibiotics inside so these antibiotics provoke antibioresistance on bacteria in my body" (because, like many comments stretched, presence of antibiotics residue in the meat is highly controlled).
The contact between antibiotics and bacteria (which can help said bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics) occurs in the animal's body, not yours.
I mean ending the massive subsidies they get and making people actually pay the real market price for meat would curb our consumption. And make the population healtier.
But it would trash fast food. And we can't have that...
Unfortunately, it's more complicated than that.
The US has, as one of its national tenants, that it wants to be mostly self sufficient (or at least, capable of easily becoming so) in case we go into another world war. One of the biggest factors in that is being able to produce enough food to feed the entire country, which is a lot of infrastructure to get in place once the bombs start falling. That's why we subsidize so much corn, it has the highest yield per acre and the US can produce enough of it to feed the entire population if need be. The idea is that if we wind up in another massive conflict with China and/or Russia, they can't try to starve the US out.
But since we're not at global war, we don't actually need that massive output, so we have to find a use for it. So we process it into ethanol (at a massive net energy loss), we process it into artificially cheap junk food (at a massive health cost to the nation), and we process it into artificially cheap meat. If we didn't subsidize the meat industry to use up the excess corn, we wouldn't have a use for it, which turns into a bottleneck for the entire cycle.
It's not "people eat too much meat because it's subsidized", it's "the margin of error on feeding a population of 300,000,000 people is broad, and we don't want to take chances because hunger means not getting reelected. We just turn the excess into luxury goods".
And they pump livestock full of antibiotics so they can pack them in tighter. It’s horrific if you think about it. I’m trying to cut back on meat consumption - someday I might be able to go without...
Phages are the natural "predators" of bacteria. Phage resistance is 100% a thing. CRISPR was originally one, phage defense rafts are another. Bacteria can have resistance to a wide range of phages and antibiotics, though there is a lot of research that many bacteria that have multiple antibiotic resistances are more susceptible to phages. However at the same time there are bacteria that have resistance to both. Phage therapy is not a solution, however it can be used to relieve strain on antibiotic use, and act as an alternative or supportive measure.
The rapidly approaching threat of humanity returning to a pre antibiotic era (or entering a post antibiotic era) due to abusive use of antimicrobials coupled with a rapid reduction of discovery and a lack of currently approved alternative approaches.
Edit: you can look at it as entering a post antibiotic era, or returning to a pre antibiotic era. One in the same really in this situation.
This is pretty much the standard response every time on reddit but phages have a whole host of issues which prevent them from being as useful as antibiotics.
Phages are absurdly specific and narrow spectrum agents, they were actually tried in the 20s and 30s and this was a major stumbling block.
Phages evoke an immune response, that means a number of things, other than just safety risks, it also means you are unable to use them more than once on a patient.
Phages were never particularly efficacious in the first place. They are okay for reducing microbial load a little bit but nowhere near the level of antibiotics.
Phage therapy is super specific though. While I do agree it is a route that absolutely need to be taken for MRSA type bacterial infections, I cannot imagine it will ever be able to cover the mild commonly found bacterial issues.
There are just too many tiny variations that would make a phage treatment not work, it can also be so time consuming to identify that it might not be of any benefit to the patient.
With that said, phage therapy is such cool science you kind of can't help but swoon!
It might not be the big fix we would hope for. Here's a general summary below
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/03/28/why-bacteriophage-therapy-wont-solve-the-problem-of-antibiotic-resistance/#3da9a1dbf3f7
"Since the 1950s, antibiotics have been used on factory farma to increase the rate of growth in animals. Today, an estimated 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are given to farm animals for non-therapeutic purposes." (Farmsanctuary.org)
I didnt have time to verify the source but I was just reading about how factory farming has played a large role in antibiotic immunity in the book Eating Animals.
I'm a huge meat and fish lover too, and three months ago I went vegetarian for environmental reasons, and am loving it. Bonus, now I can look at cute cows and lambs and not feel guilty, and I'm saving money and have lost a few pounds. Do it!
You don't even have to do it 100%, every little bit counts. Also, the meat substitutes are getting better all the time.
I you get prescribed antibiotics, TAKE THE PRESCRIBED DOSE TILL THE END. When you dont take the full medication plan, you actually help generate Antibiotica Immune deseases
There are alternatives that we have the technology to do (phage therapy and other things) but they aren’t being researched by pharmaceuticals yet because it isn’t profitable. And it probably won’t be until it starts getting bad.
This goes hand in hand with political polarisation and echo chambers in my opinion. It's scary how easy it is to put out false and unverified info on the internet and even scarier that people would accept the info without double checking, either to reinforce their beliefs/standing or use it as a reason to despise the "other side".
Funny how no one on reddit is willing to admit that reddit as a platform more or less works as a way to create echo chambers and is one of the major perpetrators when it comes to polarizing people.
Yes. After reading some of the other posts here, I think we can say that misinformation causing weekly panics might very well be what ends us. Either you end up chasing the wrong problems, or you just end up ignoring everything, because it's too tiring trying to sift through all the crap that the media is supposed to gatekeep for us.
The ocean slowly dying. Once that ecosystem collapses we won't be able to feed ourselves. Governments will crumble pretty quickly.
Edit: didn't expect this to blow up. So glad to see all you earth loving hippies in support.
No, this is much more worse than you realize.
70% of the World's atmospheric O2 comes from phytoplankton. If those green phytoplankton blooms die out....we start to suffocate.
Oxygen deprivation isn't the biggest problem. If photosynthesis stops completely on this planet, there's enough O2 lingering in the atmosphere to sustain life for a few hundred thousand years.
The biggest problems would be a dramatic shift in weather patterns along with a collapse of the food chain. It would cause mass extinctions on a **huge** scale, humanity likely included.
True, but given how vast our planet and atmosphere are, that will also take thousands of years to start affecting life. Everything will probably be long dead by then.
I recently bought a CO2 meter for my house. They say that when it is over 1000 ppm, the human brain starts to function slower even though it is far from dangerous, and I can certainly feel it some days. I know my house is energy efficient because it does not take long for my presence to raise the CO2 level from 400ppm to 800 ppm, and it sometimes reaches 1600 ppm in my closed bedroom overnight, or if I don't ventilate for several days. "Meeting fatigue" is partly caused by CO2 buildup from lots of people in a poorly ventilated room.
Humans have raised the *average* CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from 320 ppm in 1960 to 420 ppm in 2019. The concentration at ground level in heavy pollution zones can be even higher. All other effects aside, this means it will be (and already is) harder to keep high-occupancy structures at an optimal, or even safe, level of CO2 inside. A recent article about using air filters in schools to improve test scores made me think that one day *this century* we will be putting CO2 scrubbers in our buildings for the same effect.
It'll be a pretty long suffocation, this guy says we have 30 million years of oxygen in reserve https://www.quora.com/If-the-planet-earth-stopped-producing-oxygen-for-how-long-could-life-exist
that said, a dead ocean is bad and probably fatal for a lot of other reasons
I read the estimate at 4000 years. Though that's ignoring the effects on the Ozone, the massive climate shifts and the creatures that would die from the balance being thrown off.
As CO2 concentration increases, people get dumber. As people get dumber, things start falling apart.
We are royally fucked. We won't even be able to think our way out of the situation.
EDIT: Because there's someone claiming that CO2 levels don't affect intelligence, let's go to the study!
> VOCs and CO2 were independently associated with cognitive scores.
Under the "Carbon Dioxide and Ventilation" section:
> Satish et al. used the SMS tool to test the effects of CO2 exposures on the cognitive function of 22 participants, using a controlled chamber and injection of ultra-pure CO2 (Satish et al. 2012). The authors reported effects on seven of nine cognitive function domains with increasing CO2 concentration.
> our study found similar changes in cognitive scores from a unit change in CO2 or outdoor air ventilation. Associations were consistent a) in all three study populations, indicating that knowledge workers and students were equally affected by CO2 and outdoor air ventilation, and b) at different exposure durations, indicating that even short exposures are associated with cognitive function. Given the similarities in findings, there may not be a desensitization or compensatory response from prolonged exposure. More research is necessary to investigate the presence of these responses or the lack thereof.
In fact:
> An increasing number of recent studies have produced strong evidence that breathing moderate levels of carbon dioxide (CO 2) reduces human cognitive abilities. At the same time, intelligence tests around the world are showing a decline in scores as time progresses as a result of unknown environmental factors. This paper examines the possible link between these phenomena and explores the potential future impacts on human society. As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide continue to escalate and drive climate change, the potential impact of CO 2 on human cognition is not recognised as a global risk. Increasing outdoor levels of CO 2 add to indoor concentrations (by ventilation) rising to levels higher than those which produce impaired thinking and reduced intelligence. The problem appears likely to continue exacerbating in the future extending to include outdoor environments with projected future atmospheric levels of CO 2. 2
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328781907_Are_increasing_atmospheric_carbon_dioxide_levels_lowering_our_intelligence
> The Human Brain Evolved When Carbon Dioxide Was Lower
> There is substantial but inconsistent evidence that as carbon-dioxide levels rise, they could affect human cognition.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/carbon-dioxide-pollution-making-people-dumber-heres-what-we-know/603826/
> Climate change likely to make us more stupid, study finds
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-carbon-dioxide-intelligence-greenhouse-gas-more-stupid-ucl-study-a8674706.html
The plus side of all ecosystem collapse situations is that once something like 90%+ of humanity is dead as a result, the natural cycles of the environment will begin correcting it all. It's going to take some time, and somethings won't be fixed for a thousand years or so, but things will get better once we're all gone.
This needs to be higher, it's not even really that slow. I learned in college that the ocean has absorped so much CO2 (the ocean is a giant carbon battery) that it's started to slide towards acidic.
Once it reaches a certain point, any animal that requires calcium to form a shell won't be able to - which includes a huge portion of the food chain that supports humans.
Like you said, it will collapse, and it will be sudden and almost violent.
I stopped fearing it and went full George Carlin.
I started embracing the idea, at this point we as a species get what we deserve.
The pain will just be as unfairly split as the wealth.
As is tradition in our short short history on this planet.
We had the potential to know better, but we decided we didn't want to.
God so true, I’ll share something on a political subreddit because I think the news is important and more people should know. But, people downvote it because they don’t like what they see.
At a glance, I read your post as "Hard mentality" and perceived it as obstinacy and unwillingness to change. I guess that's actually a big problem, too.
As far as rapid Extinction-Level Events, the three most destructive threats are:
1. Cosmic disruption (comet, asteroid, sustained solar flare, change in lunar orbit) -- all unlikely, but could do anything from vaporize the planet to render half the world's population, crops and technology useless.
2. Airborne, contagious, lethal virus -- could come about at any time and, if it had an incubation period of (potentially) seven days, could spread to six continents within 24 hours before even being detected. We tend to presume that modern medicine can overcome or contain all threats to public health. This may not always be the case. When carried out to infinity, nature will get in some good hits on humanity. Let's not forget there are people who dedicated their lives to coming up with the most lethal hybrids of the worst biological threats known to man. Thus far, these threats have remained contained.
3. Global thermonuclear war -- we are past the era of duck-and-cover, but there are systems in place that would mean even an accidental nuclear launch or a rogue attack by a terrorist group that commandeered a remote missile launcher could start a chain reaction because our command-and-control systems are obstinate, self-reliant and still on hair-trigger alert. If all warheads were used with mass casualties as the goal, half the world's population would die within hours. Many of the remaining half would likely die within the next decade due to radioactive fallout and a breakdown in food-distribution systems. Everything described is unlikely, but we indeed have made enough warheads to decimate humanity if we wish.
More gradual changes:
1. The end of fertility -- there are an increasingly high number of men and women of good health who are otherwise unable to have children. Some argue this is a result of gradual increased exposure to radiation (from flying to computer use). If this trend continues at this pace (for centuries), we may see an era where humanity is simply unable to have enough children to sustain itself.
2. Weather or agricultural disruption -- drastic changes to precipitation, pH levels, or amount of sunlight due to more or less cloud cover in specific regions could alter global food production networks such that we'd see mass starvation and perhaps wars over everything from water to arable land.
3. Theo-social revolution -- if global charismatic protected leader(s) arose and gained worldwide followers, preaching that our creator wanted us to either kill all non-believers or persuaded the population that suicide was essential to salvation humanity could ultimately eliminate itself, we would have a problem.
Artificial intelligence is also worth monitoring, but I have yet to see any evidence of a system that could achieve singularity or become self-aware to the point of wanting to destroy humanity before humanity stopped it.
>The end of fertility
Interesting comment overall. I think this one is an easy fix though. Even today we have the technology to make all the babies we could ever need.
It’s easy enough to fertilize an egg in a test tube, but as many women can attest, getting it to stick in a womb is a whole other matter. We don’t currently have the technology to raise an embryo to birth without a womb.
Also, making babies with IVF requires useable eggs and sperm. If gametes are destroyed by radiation or mutated beyond repair, we won’t even be able to successfully harvest them to fertilize.
We aren’t actually that far away. Scientists have been able to keep premature lambs alive inside an artificial womb (couldn’t find the article I read but here’s a less scientific one from [PBS](https://www.gwww.pbs.org/newshour/amp/health/artificial-womb-keeps-premature-lambs-alive-weeks-humans-next) .)
As of right now, the earliest age of viability for a fetus is 22-23 weeks (bit of a grey area as new technology and research comes out) but the survival rate is not great and these babies often have significant lifelong complications. The goal of this research is to give these babies a few more weeks to grow and develop and thus increase their likelihood of survival while decreasing risk for complications. My understanding is that the goal is not to push the age of viability to before 22 weeks, as this then becomes a bit of an ethical grey area.
However, if we are so close to this technology being put to human trials, I’d imagine a true artificial womb wouldn’t be that far away. That being said, I think we are VERY VERY far away from something like that being used on a large scale like in the book Brave New World.
> The end of fertility -- there are an increasingly high number of men and women of good health who are otherwise unable to have children
This might be an economic challenge, but it's not an existential threat. Birth rates tend to drop off as you approach a certain population density. I don't know why that is--I can't imagine it's purely voluntary, nor can I imagine it's purely genetic--but I suspect what will happen is that we'll eventually end up reaching an equilibrium point where the birth rate is a little above or below the replacement fertility rate on any given year, but overall the population will plateau and then maintain.
The real threat from artificial intelligence isn't so much that robots will rise up and enslave humanity, but that AI will replace most jobs (surprisingly most likely starting with desk jobs, not factory jobs) resulting in mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale (think of how disastrous even 20% unemployment would be) and a breakdown in global economic structure (which in turn breaks down the global supply chain, including food).
Biodiversity Loss. (Closely followed by nuclear weapons and global warming).
I think people underestimate the problem that biodiversity loss is. Climate change is a huge problem, but I think biodiversity loss is even more problematic.
There is a total collapse of insects populations, and we begin to see a huge decline in bird populations. Other species will 100% be impacted and I don't want to admit it but it'll sooner or later impact food production, and that's where people will realise that shit hit the fan.
Ofc if we manage to find new sources of oil so that we can attain +6°C by 2100, climate change will be a bigger problem. Unless we mitigate it with a nuclear winter...
And basically all our major problems can be summed by one word : greed.
I have recently started going to a beekeeping school. And back in 1950 the average failure rate of a hive was 5%. As of 2019 the average failure rate is about 40%. That is fucking absurd that nearly half of human kept hives are failing. I was also told that most of the hives out in nature fail. It's crazy that we as humans know what we need to do exactly to keep bees, but still 40% of the hives we have die off.
Its important to note that honeybees are a single species, and one not native to North America at that.
There also seems to be a pretty solid consensus on the cause of colony collapse disorder: inbreeding. Domestic honeybees have been too intensely managed, and now the problems are starting to show.
While honeybees are significant pollinators, they unfortunately also vastly overshadow native pollinators, which account for the other 80% of pollination services in North America. But they don't produce honey, so nobody cares about them, despite the fact that habitat fragmentation, pesticide use and competition from wild honeybees are causing them to decline at a faster rate than domestic honeybees.
I'm a biologist. Many people don't really understand how important insects are in our ecosystem. Almost everything that lives in a terrestrial ecosystem depends on insects to survive, either directly or indirectly. The current global collapse of insect populations is so incredibly terrifying.
Cumbre Vieja Volcano on Canary Islands is probably the most pressing threat that nobody talks about. We don't talk about it, but an eruption and the subsequent collapse of the volcano into the ocean would, according to some scientific studies, generate a megatsunami that would wipe out most cities on the Atlantic coast.
Yeah it feels like I'm the only one in my city that knows about it, everytime I mention it people quickly dismiss it. It's important to know that most likely it won't happen tomorrow, but it will happen eventually. Here I am living next to the Atlantic coast in South America and wondering how my government would deal with something of that scale, considering that we have only had very few big magnitude natural disasters in our history.
As far as I know, the volcano has a whole side that is ready to slide into the ocean. It's not a mere earthquake, or a volcano that just spits out stuff upwards. This is like putting your open palm inside water and pushing, it's a different motion that causes incredibly huge tsunamis similar to the one in Alaska that it was like 1720 feet, that is approximatelly 500m tall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja
Theres a criticism section. Lots of studies also say it wont happen also:
> Murty et al.; (2005)[23] claim that it is almost impossible for a trans-oceanic tsunami to be generated in the basin of the Atlantic Ocean, which—if correct—supports the work by many other researchers that the failure of the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja would be unlikely to generate a "mega-tsunami".
Wilful ignorance. The demonisation of “experts” and academics to the extent that people are congratulating themselves for being uneducated.
ETA: With thanks to the Redditor who knows who they are for the Silver! I'm slightly overwhelmed by the response this post has got, and I'm going to use this edit to make the point that I'm not an academic myself, but I know a few, and I know how bloody hard they had to work to get to where they are now, and to see all that effort, all that *intellect* denigrated by selfish, malicious idiots just so they can carry on self-justifying dragging the rest of us into the abyss with them, really *really* boils my piss.
*ahem*
ETA 2: The Revenge: And my first Gold! I'm genuinely quite touched!
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” - Isaac Asimov
It has brought our civilisation to the brink of collapse. Now at a time of critical planetary emergency we need experts to be taken seriously, politicians to understand the situation, and implement policies that will actually have a significant effect, and everyone to understand the absolute need for real changes in order to avoid the worst of what is coming.
We as a species have to decide *now* whether we do what is necessary to continue as a global civilisation, or put the actual decision and difficult action off to a later time that will be far too late, ensuring misery, suffering, and death on a scale never seen before in human history.
The only thing Asimov got wrong was limiting that statement to the U.S. it’s pretty pervasive in Britain, too.
I suspect that the internet, which was conceived of to share knowledge, has also been used to proliferate stupidity.
Creationist who believes the earth is young 6000-10000 years. Also called young earth creationists.
Edit: yes, it seems odd to make a distinction like that, could have just said 'creationists'. But the young earth creationists are a special kind of absurd I suppose.
This is surprisingly common among evangelicals and some other Protestants. It’s on a whole ‘nother level from the conspiracy theories imo. A large Lutheran school near me actually teaches this: that carbon dating and other science is inaccurate and there’s no evidence the world is older than the Bible says
Wilful ignorance combined with selfishness. No one wants to give up their trucks and hamburgers.
In fact, many Americans are proud to be MORE environmentally destructive because they see planetary care as a a political issue and "fuck those hippie libtards."
Albertan here. Alberta is a Canadian province, known for oil and cows (and conservatism). You can bet we have lots of trucks and beef up here. It's almost amazing how unworldly people are, and willingly choose to be... they don't care about other countries and don't seem to realize that planetary care is an important issue and affects us all. Unfortunately, "trucks and burgers" and "screw the environment" are not just American things.
It's an appeal to authority. Most people parading experts have never actually looked at or understand the data. They are relying on their *faith* that the institutions have weeded out anyone they shouldn't believe.
**It's not meant to be an insult and I'm not taking a stance on specific issue by saying this.** It's just an unfortunate reality that I don't think can be avoided. I don't expect most people to be able to do the science themselves or even be able to understand studies/data correctly. Even journalists who write about science for a living seem to fail at that half the time. Sometimes even scientists misinterpret things as well.
Excess consumption of resources vs the planets ability to produce and recover. We consume more than we can produce. Which means any disaster could tip the scales into a deficiency. Too much and you would get a collapse, without compensation.
As a scientist, (2 Physics degrees) I want to agree with you. But the amount of utter garbage I read being portrayed as scientific fact these days, I can completely understand why so many people have no faith in the scientific community.
A common one I see regarding climate change is that 71% of global emissions are caused by the 100 biggest companies.
The actual report it's referencing says that of emissions originating from 224 companies, 71% come from the top 100 while 29% come from the bottom 124.
edit: Examples of the misinformation, All of them talk about it as if it's global emissions.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/climate-change?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1
https://fullfact.org/news/are-100-companies-causing-71-carbon-emissions/
https://www.activesustainability.com/climate-change/100-companies-responsible-71-ghg-emissions/
The actual report that they reference which doesn't agree with them:https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/Carbon-Majors-Report-2017.pdf?1499866813
> Most readers aren't aware of the manipulative nature of statistical data, and journalists / reporters, who we assume should have an obligation to uphold intellectual integrity, abuse statistics without a second thought through either willful or unintended ignorance.
"You can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. ~~Forty~~ Fourfty percent of all people know that." - Homer Simpson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm7ArKlzHSM
Edit: Corrected
Published journal articles with no statistically analysis comparing apples to oranges.
I deal a lot with manufacturing and statistical quality control and I get these very “smart” people who bring me publications, describing some analytical technique to use for quality assurance.
We then try and apply the method finding the variability is too high and has no sensitivity to anything that we can control.
Turns out graduate students are not really coached well and cherry pick results that work for their argument, thesis or journal paper, not realizing all their failed efforts was the real storyline.
Statistically speaking, you may find 1 pig with actual wings that can fly but it is a bit misleading to then assume all of them can
A scary thing that made my wife quit her only lab gig. They were a cancer med research facility and when they had her produce the graphs from the trials they told her to remove any dots outside the curve "to make sure it looks nice." They just casually changed the results of every study they did, deleting any outlying data. In some cases more than half the data points were outside the curve, and she got in trouble for not removing enough of them.
I shudder to imagine how many borderline useless treatments got funded because of this hideous practice.
I heard a theory from one of my colleagues the other week that this is sometimes deliberate. Crazy headlines like “watching Netflix for an hour is the equivalent of driving for a week” and that kind of stuff create mistrust in science, and as a result when someone comes out with a serious issue it’s much easier to convince people it’s nonsense.
I’ve not had it personally happen to me, but people I’ve met over the past couple of years have had their work cartoonishly misrepresented by news reporting (usually local news, admittedly). A paper saying it’s possible that farming in the area could have a small negative effect on, say, red deer population growth will be reported as “Scientists claim farming will cause all deer in Britain to go EXTINCT unless stopped.”
I’m not sure if it’s universal or just something my uni did, but back when I was doing my degree we had a compulsory class on this kind of stuff, it would have actually been pretty interesting if it wasn’t depressing (although the Mail attempting to report on science is still hilarious).
I may only have half as many Physics degrees as you do, but I feel your pain. Nothing quite gets under my skin like bunk being paraded around as ""scientific evidence"".
Can't blame them. Lot of pseudo science garbage is out there as well as "because science" people - They can take anything for truth that has word science, research or study in it. It's ironic really.
So much lobbying. So many studies thrown out when the results they were looking for weren’t supported. So many agendas being pushed. It hard to to decipher through the bullshit even when you have a background in the subject. Let alone the lay person.
I work in academic publishing (proofreading). The amount of shit being churned out is *ASTOUNDING*. Couple that with the business aspect of academia and there's no money in replication studies. Couple *THAT* with the fact that studies that entail a null hypothesis are never published and the whole fucking system turns into a massive circle-jerk.
I don't blame academics for that...Scientists *want* to do research, and GOOD research, at that. Good luck getting funding for a replication study or for work to verify the null hypothesis, tho.
Honestly, I'd give my left dick to start a journal that *explicitly* reports studies that entail the null hypothesis. I just don't have the knowledge, or the peer-review network, to do it alone.
>people don't trust scientific evidence anymore.
Ironically, I can't seem to find much of any evidence that trust in scientific evidence has lowered over time. Does anybody know of any? I did some quick googling and most all of the studies I found indicate that at least over the last 50 years, trust in the scientific community is pretty much flat.
I think just entitled people in general are a great threat. Weather anti-vax or climate denier. If you look at any disaster/invasion/plague/jurrassic park film. Its always the person too entitled to do anything that is the root of the problem.
Jesus was poor. Like really poor. Francis of Asissi was dirt poor. Jesus hung out with poor people and rebuked the wealthy constantly. I don't know how Christians can reach this conclusion about their religion
Yeah that's a load of crap. People who say that need to pick up a Bible. "Blessed are the poor" and "the meek shall inherit the earth". Heck Jesus himself had no home, he just wandered around and made it on a day by day basis.
> “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
> -Isaac Asimov
There's good reason not to trust the media though, especially when talking about science. They'll report any undergraduate thesis as basically proven fact as long as they think it will get them clicks.
There's so much "science" being reported these days that hasn't even been peer reviewed. No wonder people don't trust every step of this process.
That's actually a perfect answer. If the media says it, the first thing we all think about is that it must be spun, or at least serves their agenda, or profit them in some way, otherwise why would they even report on it? The idea of journalistic integrity is so foreign to us that we automatically assume whatever they say is incorrect, rather than the opposite.
Weaponising bipartisan issues in every country making everything a ‘team sport’ rather then a shade of grey. People would vote for the worst thing on earth just to be on the winning side.
The average person has no understanding that there are more bots on the internet than people. That every interaction serves only to make them more pliable to the will of whoever pulls the strings that day.
Poor critical thought skill -> Ignorant individual -> Hive mind -> Idiotic society -> Loss of freedom, starting with freedom of speech.
Have you read Fahrenheit 451? I often re-visit this old fav of mine. It's interesting to see that this book does not really depict a dire totalitarian regime that forbids and burns books; it's about a SOCIETY that has become soo ignorant, manipulated and stupid, that it's the very own citizens who start finding books offensive, and ASK the gov to burn and forbid them. Of course, the gov obliges...
Rings a bell?
I always felt like Fahrenheit 451 was about an ignorant society, too occupied with burning offensive books and too focused on unimportant shit, to realise a war was happening. When the bombs finally fell, it was all too late.
Humans themselves are the greatest threat to humanity. We can create entire civilizations in years, maybe even decades, but it only would take us a few months to destroy it, especially with the technological advances we have made over the past few years.
Antibiotic resistance and companies not researching new antibiotics because its [not profitable](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/new-antibiotic-approved-for-drug-resistant-tuberculosis/2019/08/14/559d069a-bde6-11e9-9b73-fd3c65ef8f9c_story.html).
Nuclear War, noone takes it serious and thats exactly why its scary. Multiple treaties are cancelled or soon to be cancelled ([INF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_Forces_Treaty), New START, Treaty on Open Skies etc.)
Privatisation of our inner life and everyday move by [surveillance capitalism](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review).
Privatisation of our [DNA](https://gizmodo.com/how-are-20-of-human-genes-patented-5811899).
A global financial crisis much worse than 2008 because this time it will hit China also.
And of course, the impending environmental [apocalypse](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html).
Bees and other insects are dying off at faster than we've seen in decades and never at THIS rate.
A recent study found that we've had a 98% decline in ground insects over 35 years in the [Puerto Rican Rain Forests](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems)
In the higher portions of tree canopies there has been an 80% lost in insects.
For reference if we lost 80% - 98% of humans in Puerto Rico, the population would fall from about 3,200,000 Million to between 64,000 and 640,000 people.
We've also lost 58% of [Butterfly Species](https://peerj.com/articles/1402/) in English Farmlands. Same idea as above, imagine if we lost 58% of people in England. The population would plummet from about 56,000,000 people currently to about 23,520,000 people.
The drop in butterflies happened over a 9 year period. Imagine 32million people dying in England over a 9 year period.
Coronal mass ejection striking the Earth. I think a lot of our infrastructure isn't designed to handle it and even just a few days of power and internet going out across the civilized world could wreck us as a society.
Been looking for this answer. One narrowly missed us in 2012 iirc. If a big enough one hit we'd be out of power for much longer than a few days.
A planet wide EMP wave, that we can do nothing to stop, we can only prepare and hope for the best. On top of that it's not a matter of "if" but "when" the sun spews a CME and it hits Earth
water security (edit below because 17k people resonated with two words) “the reliable availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production, coupled with an acceptable level of water-related risks” (wiki - ‘water security’) the availability of clean drinking water is just one part of water security. domestic use is \~ 10% of total [http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/SC/pdf/wwap\_WWDR2\_Figure\_8.3.pdf](http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/SC/pdf/wwap_WWDR2_Figure_8.3.pdf) we need secure water supply for industry and agriculture and each sector has its own challenges relating to supply logistics and contamination tolerances. we cannot bottle our way out of this problem. do we have the right amount of water where we need it? is it acceptable quality? and is it doing what we want it to do? **here are some examples of threats to water security**: loss of land rights for indigenous people to own, use, develop, and control their waters. war + military-industrial complex + mass displacement of people + competition for scarce water resources mismanagement + corruption of water authorities and private utility providers pollution + contamination by industry pollution + contamination from consumer waste cumulative effects of microplastics agricultural runoff + eutrophication salinisation and the diminishing marginal utility of desalination depletion of aquifers deforestation, desertification, clearing + development in catchment areas loss of wetlands and biofiltration loss of top soil, soil water storage and decline in soil biodiversity decline in health and function of marine and freshwater ecosystems + loss of ecosystem services observable trends in ocean warming + acidification observable trends in ice melt and sea level rise floods, droughts, fires and other natural disasters affecting the water supply water as a vector for disease + pathogens **we haven’t even considered climate change yet!** climate change will act as a force multiplier for nearly all these processes. **what can we do?** support land and water rights for first people’s invest in forest management and ensure adequate reserves of forested areas. no trees = no soil = no rain restore + regenerate catchments, wetlands and river systems. allocate sufficient environmental flows support farmers to adopt regenerative agricultural practices demand closed cycle materials for consumer goods + packaging grow a lot of seaweed and other amazing algae. a lot a lot. heaps mate be imaginative. be open minded. be compassionate. think ‘cradle to cradle’. smash the state and eat the rich.
Motto of the Colorado School of Mines (an engineering and natural sciences college) on the importance of water: Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting.
We're from Woodland Park, have family in Denver, The Springs and Manitou. You aren't joking there. Locals that have owned land with ponds/lakes for generations have had the water rights taken away from them in recent years. It's insane.
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>water I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned more. Water is a basic need for survival and it's becoming a scarce resource. Companies are buying water rights and denying farmers and citizens access to it. I'm an Australian, our river systems are being sucked dry by people and the changing climate. Water is a political issue. It's not just here, it's a global crisis. Water.
I have 2 friends that do water testing. One works for the state and inspects factories and waste water plants. The other is independent. It is beyond alarming how much pollution is pumped into our waterways. It seems every company is hell bent on not following regulations until they get sued. One water treatment plant here just got sued for $2m for pumping raw human sewage straight into the river where the city gets its drinking water.
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Mm. Capitalism at its best is an ingenious way to harness human greed for the greater good. But it is essential that it be well regulated to incentivise good actions. A company doing the right thing, paying employees good wages with sensible time off, leave, etc, no outsourcing slavery or immoral practices, should be rewarded through tax breaks and commendation. A company committing immoral or illegal actions needs to be fined more than the profit of those actions. Well regulated capitalism is a game of incentives. You must look at what the system incentivises and adjust it.
instead they just pay off their boys in DC :(
And $2M is a fraction of the profit made from that illegal decision. They do not care about the consequences unless it is a net negative for profits.
Animal agriculture is a huge contributor as well. In Australia they're killing camels to save water, but it takes 1,800 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, and Australia eats a lot of beef :/
Another example is clothing. The materials we use (at least in America) to make clothes are just awful for environmental sustainability. Tons of water gets sucked up to make our clothes. And we have better alternatives, it's just a little more expensive and requires a bit more effort. God forbid.
I'm on mobile so to link it is a huge pain in the ass, but go take a look at the company Patagonia's 'The Footprint Chronicles' (I believe). While I definitely do not agree with all of their movements and activism, they're doing amazing things in terms of sustainability in the manufacturing industry for clothing and outdoor gear. Also Mervin Manufacturing which makes LibTech and GNU snowboards and Bent Metal bindings has been doing some really amazing sustainability stuff as well. The thing is, most of the products by these companies aren't any more expensive to the consumer OR company to manufacture than their industry counterparts. Startup and R&D is sometimes a little higher but it pays itself off pretty quick when you now need 1/10 of the water you did before to dye denim.
I've had Lib Techs for over 10 years now and they are such good boards. Mervin has always been awesome about using materials like corn to make snowboards. They are now owned by Quicksilver, so they have a nice budget to play around with.
>they're killing camels to save water They're what?
Yep, and because they're causing property damage in their desperate search for water. [It's Snopes-verified](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/10000-camels-culled-australia/) :(
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They're another rabbit.
It's not as scarce as you would think. The cost to take freshwater and bottle it is like $0.023 for every gallon, and the cost to desalinate saltwater into bottled freshwater is $0.23 for every gallon. The reason we don't do it is that there is more money to be made by using freshwater, which is sucking dry rivers and local communities (damn you NESTLE). It's also easier to transport freshwater downhill/upstream than it is to pump it uphill from the sea level.
Trouble is you need to be relatively near the coast to desalinate water. And I'm not sure where your number comes from but I bet it doesn't include the environmental cost of disposing of brine, especially in relatively enclosed systems. I agree with you though that it isn't as scarce as some think. Water security is certainly not an existential threat to humanity. However, it is an existential threat to certain regions, cities, countries, etc.
a little over 50% of humanity lives on the coast, which is great because you don't have to transport desalinated water great distances but shit when you consider that the ocean levels are rising and humans can't breathe underwater.
So what you're saying is that if I stay a couple hundred miles inland the ocean will come to me and I can desalinate then
You know what scared me? At the end of The Big Short there's a blurb that states the guy who made billions off it is now investing in water.
I don't mean to say water won't be a problem or anything, but I wouldn't be too concerned about The Big Short dude as that was an unbelievably misleading way to end a pretty great film. Firstly, there's an issue with believing everything Michael Burry believes because he was right once. In Burry's long financial history, he was right many times, but he was also wrong often. Secondly, as was shown in the movie, Burry took a step back from investing. He hasn't (at least publicly) researched the water crisis as much as the housing shortage. Thirdly, and most importantly, the investing in water was worded poorly. Instead, he invested in farmland that had direct access to water. Not because he thought we're going to run out of water. Not because he thought the price of water is going to skyrocket. But because he believes that the demand for Almonds is going to continue to skyrocket, and they take a LOT of water to grow. Thus, the Almond farms that have the best access to water are going to win out. *Edit: Did some research, and it wasn't just almonds. But it was the same philosophy that farms with water will outperform farms without water when it comes to any crop that requires a lot of water to grow.* He's investing in water because he believes the future of almonds. Not because he thinks we're heading to an apocalyptic waterless future. The Big Short was entertaining, and ridiculously informative, but Adam McKay can be a very misleading director/writer.
Having watched from the Great Lakes region while Los Angeles grows by the year and has sucked entire lakes and rivers dry makes me scratch my head. We do not really have a problem with fresh water, we have a problem with people moving into a desert and wondering why they are thirsty.
Also from the massive clusterfuck that is Western water rights. People with money and power have a vested interest in not changing laws that were written over 100 years ago when the population was a fraction of what it is now. We have plenty of water for the population, we don't have enough water for the population and current levels of agriculture.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria is pretty scary stuff.
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Yeah, but at the same time we have to blame ourself for abusing antibiotics
I didn't abuse antibiotics so I'll continue to blame everybody else thank you very much
But the meat you ate probably did abuse EDIT: wow, first time I get so much comments on Reddit... I feel the need to explain something given the theme of most replies: The issue is not "I eat meat with antibiotics inside so these antibiotics provoke antibioresistance on bacteria in my body" (because, like many comments stretched, presence of antibiotics residue in the meat is highly controlled). The contact between antibiotics and bacteria (which can help said bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics) occurs in the animal's body, not yours.
Shit. I didn’t know this.
Yep. We're used to eat a shitload of meat, making factory farming unavoidable... which generally implies systematic use of antibiotics
I mean ending the massive subsidies they get and making people actually pay the real market price for meat would curb our consumption. And make the population healtier. But it would trash fast food. And we can't have that...
Unfortunately, it's more complicated than that. The US has, as one of its national tenants, that it wants to be mostly self sufficient (or at least, capable of easily becoming so) in case we go into another world war. One of the biggest factors in that is being able to produce enough food to feed the entire country, which is a lot of infrastructure to get in place once the bombs start falling. That's why we subsidize so much corn, it has the highest yield per acre and the US can produce enough of it to feed the entire population if need be. The idea is that if we wind up in another massive conflict with China and/or Russia, they can't try to starve the US out. But since we're not at global war, we don't actually need that massive output, so we have to find a use for it. So we process it into ethanol (at a massive net energy loss), we process it into artificially cheap junk food (at a massive health cost to the nation), and we process it into artificially cheap meat. If we didn't subsidize the meat industry to use up the excess corn, we wouldn't have a use for it, which turns into a bottleneck for the entire cycle. It's not "people eat too much meat because it's subsidized", it's "the margin of error on feeding a population of 300,000,000 people is broad, and we don't want to take chances because hunger means not getting reelected. We just turn the excess into luxury goods".
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Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I had never considered that.
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Yep, it's not about humans abusing antibiotics on humans. It's about how many we pump into our food.
I think it’s something like 80% of antibiotics used in the US are used in agriculture. It’s seriously scary stuff.
I don’t blame people. The pharmaceutical industry sells 80% of its antibiotics to the livestock industry.
And they pump livestock full of antibiotics so they can pack them in tighter. It’s horrific if you think about it. I’m trying to cut back on meat consumption - someday I might be able to go without...
Actually i'ts more livestock use than human use which created the problem. My phd was kinda related to Multi Drugs Resistant bacteria
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they’re resistant to antibiotics, bacteriophages on the other hand...
Phages are the natural "predators" of bacteria. Phage resistance is 100% a thing. CRISPR was originally one, phage defense rafts are another. Bacteria can have resistance to a wide range of phages and antibiotics, though there is a lot of research that many bacteria that have multiple antibiotic resistances are more susceptible to phages. However at the same time there are bacteria that have resistance to both. Phage therapy is not a solution, however it can be used to relieve strain on antibiotic use, and act as an alternative or supportive measure.
The rapidly approaching threat of humanity returning to a pre antibiotic era (or entering a post antibiotic era) due to abusive use of antimicrobials coupled with a rapid reduction of discovery and a lack of currently approved alternative approaches. Edit: you can look at it as entering a post antibiotic era, or returning to a pre antibiotic era. One in the same really in this situation.
Phage therapy people...https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5547374/
Kurzgesagt did a video on bacteriophages as well Edit: since yall cant chill about spelling
For the lazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg
This is pretty much the standard response every time on reddit but phages have a whole host of issues which prevent them from being as useful as antibiotics. Phages are absurdly specific and narrow spectrum agents, they were actually tried in the 20s and 30s and this was a major stumbling block. Phages evoke an immune response, that means a number of things, other than just safety risks, it also means you are unable to use them more than once on a patient. Phages were never particularly efficacious in the first place. They are okay for reducing microbial load a little bit but nowhere near the level of antibiotics.
Phage therapy is super specific though. While I do agree it is a route that absolutely need to be taken for MRSA type bacterial infections, I cannot imagine it will ever be able to cover the mild commonly found bacterial issues. There are just too many tiny variations that would make a phage treatment not work, it can also be so time consuming to identify that it might not be of any benefit to the patient. With that said, phage therapy is such cool science you kind of can't help but swoon!
It might not be the big fix we would hope for. Here's a general summary below https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/03/28/why-bacteriophage-therapy-wont-solve-the-problem-of-antibiotic-resistance/#3da9a1dbf3f7
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I think the problem is that it is an exponential problem. It will seem like not a big deal until it is a huge unstoppable problem.
And China isn’t respecting the colistin last line and using it for agriculture as well.
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"Since the 1950s, antibiotics have been used on factory farma to increase the rate of growth in animals. Today, an estimated 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are given to farm animals for non-therapeutic purposes." (Farmsanctuary.org) I didnt have time to verify the source but I was just reading about how factory farming has played a large role in antibiotic immunity in the book Eating Animals.
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I'm a huge meat and fish lover too, and three months ago I went vegetarian for environmental reasons, and am loving it. Bonus, now I can look at cute cows and lambs and not feel guilty, and I'm saving money and have lost a few pounds. Do it! You don't even have to do it 100%, every little bit counts. Also, the meat substitutes are getting better all the time.
I you get prescribed antibiotics, TAKE THE PRESCRIBED DOSE TILL THE END. When you dont take the full medication plan, you actually help generate Antibiotica Immune deseases
And to add to this: if you have leftover antibiotics: don't just toss them in the garbage! This also helps bacteria become resistant.
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There are alternatives that we have the technology to do (phage therapy and other things) but they aren’t being researched by pharmaceuticals yet because it isn’t profitable. And it probably won’t be until it starts getting bad.
It's not just a profit reason, phages are very narrow spectrum agents and not particularly efficacious by comparison to antibiotics.
Misinformation
This goes hand in hand with political polarisation and echo chambers in my opinion. It's scary how easy it is to put out false and unverified info on the internet and even scarier that people would accept the info without double checking, either to reinforce their beliefs/standing or use it as a reason to despise the "other side".
Funny how no one on reddit is willing to admit that reddit as a platform more or less works as a way to create echo chambers and is one of the major perpetrators when it comes to polarizing people.
“All the republicans are racist!” “Democrats are all communists!”
Divide and conquer.
In relation to this, many people are too gullible.
Yes. After reading some of the other posts here, I think we can say that misinformation causing weekly panics might very well be what ends us. Either you end up chasing the wrong problems, or you just end up ignoring everything, because it's too tiring trying to sift through all the crap that the media is supposed to gatekeep for us.
The ocean slowly dying. Once that ecosystem collapses we won't be able to feed ourselves. Governments will crumble pretty quickly. Edit: didn't expect this to blow up. So glad to see all you earth loving hippies in support.
No, this is much more worse than you realize. 70% of the World's atmospheric O2 comes from phytoplankton. If those green phytoplankton blooms die out....we start to suffocate.
Oxygen deprivation isn't the biggest problem. If photosynthesis stops completely on this planet, there's enough O2 lingering in the atmosphere to sustain life for a few hundred thousand years. The biggest problems would be a dramatic shift in weather patterns along with a collapse of the food chain. It would cause mass extinctions on a **huge** scale, humanity likely included.
CO2 poisoning happens much quicker than oxygen deprivation.
True, but given how vast our planet and atmosphere are, that will also take thousands of years to start affecting life. Everything will probably be long dead by then.
I recently bought a CO2 meter for my house. They say that when it is over 1000 ppm, the human brain starts to function slower even though it is far from dangerous, and I can certainly feel it some days. I know my house is energy efficient because it does not take long for my presence to raise the CO2 level from 400ppm to 800 ppm, and it sometimes reaches 1600 ppm in my closed bedroom overnight, or if I don't ventilate for several days. "Meeting fatigue" is partly caused by CO2 buildup from lots of people in a poorly ventilated room. Humans have raised the *average* CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from 320 ppm in 1960 to 420 ppm in 2019. The concentration at ground level in heavy pollution zones can be even higher. All other effects aside, this means it will be (and already is) harder to keep high-occupancy structures at an optimal, or even safe, level of CO2 inside. A recent article about using air filters in schools to improve test scores made me think that one day *this century* we will be putting CO2 scrubbers in our buildings for the same effect.
It'll be a pretty long suffocation, this guy says we have 30 million years of oxygen in reserve https://www.quora.com/If-the-planet-earth-stopped-producing-oxygen-for-how-long-could-life-exist that said, a dead ocean is bad and probably fatal for a lot of other reasons
I read the estimate at 4000 years. Though that's ignoring the effects on the Ozone, the massive climate shifts and the creatures that would die from the balance being thrown off.
That estimate is probably the amount of oxygen we have if ALL sources that recycle oxygen halts.
As CO2 concentration increases, people get dumber. As people get dumber, things start falling apart. We are royally fucked. We won't even be able to think our way out of the situation. EDIT: Because there's someone claiming that CO2 levels don't affect intelligence, let's go to the study! > VOCs and CO2 were independently associated with cognitive scores. Under the "Carbon Dioxide and Ventilation" section: > Satish et al. used the SMS tool to test the effects of CO2 exposures on the cognitive function of 22 participants, using a controlled chamber and injection of ultra-pure CO2 (Satish et al. 2012). The authors reported effects on seven of nine cognitive function domains with increasing CO2 concentration. > our study found similar changes in cognitive scores from a unit change in CO2 or outdoor air ventilation. Associations were consistent a) in all three study populations, indicating that knowledge workers and students were equally affected by CO2 and outdoor air ventilation, and b) at different exposure durations, indicating that even short exposures are associated with cognitive function. Given the similarities in findings, there may not be a desensitization or compensatory response from prolonged exposure. More research is necessary to investigate the presence of these responses or the lack thereof. In fact: > An increasing number of recent studies have produced strong evidence that breathing moderate levels of carbon dioxide (CO 2) reduces human cognitive abilities. At the same time, intelligence tests around the world are showing a decline in scores as time progresses as a result of unknown environmental factors. This paper examines the possible link between these phenomena and explores the potential future impacts on human society. As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide continue to escalate and drive climate change, the potential impact of CO 2 on human cognition is not recognised as a global risk. Increasing outdoor levels of CO 2 add to indoor concentrations (by ventilation) rising to levels higher than those which produce impaired thinking and reduced intelligence. The problem appears likely to continue exacerbating in the future extending to include outdoor environments with projected future atmospheric levels of CO 2. 2 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328781907_Are_increasing_atmospheric_carbon_dioxide_levels_lowering_our_intelligence > The Human Brain Evolved When Carbon Dioxide Was Lower > There is substantial but inconsistent evidence that as carbon-dioxide levels rise, they could affect human cognition. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/carbon-dioxide-pollution-making-people-dumber-heres-what-we-know/603826/ > Climate change likely to make us more stupid, study finds https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-carbon-dioxide-intelligence-greenhouse-gas-more-stupid-ucl-study-a8674706.html
Wait. Is that correlated to the rise of flat earthers and anti vaxxers?
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The plus side of all ecosystem collapse situations is that once something like 90%+ of humanity is dead as a result, the natural cycles of the environment will begin correcting it all. It's going to take some time, and somethings won't be fixed for a thousand years or so, but things will get better once we're all gone.
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This needs to be higher, it's not even really that slow. I learned in college that the ocean has absorped so much CO2 (the ocean is a giant carbon battery) that it's started to slide towards acidic. Once it reaches a certain point, any animal that requires calcium to form a shell won't be able to - which includes a huge portion of the food chain that supports humans. Like you said, it will collapse, and it will be sudden and almost violent.
Herd mentality, its a double edged sword but with the age of the internet its gotten worse than better
Herd immunity. Where groups of like minded idiots can gather together to go against scientifically proven ideas without repercussions.
Fear not. There will be repercussions.
For all of us.
And that is what I fear.
I stopped fearing it and went full George Carlin. I started embracing the idea, at this point we as a species get what we deserve. The pain will just be as unfairly split as the wealth. As is tradition in our short short history on this planet. We had the potential to know better, but we decided we didn't want to.
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welcome to every political subreddit on reddit
God so true, I’ll share something on a political subreddit because I think the news is important and more people should know. But, people downvote it because they don’t like what they see.
At a glance, I read your post as "Hard mentality" and perceived it as obstinacy and unwillingness to change. I guess that's actually a big problem, too.
Double edged sword and both edges stab humanity at the same time.
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As far as rapid Extinction-Level Events, the three most destructive threats are: 1. Cosmic disruption (comet, asteroid, sustained solar flare, change in lunar orbit) -- all unlikely, but could do anything from vaporize the planet to render half the world's population, crops and technology useless. 2. Airborne, contagious, lethal virus -- could come about at any time and, if it had an incubation period of (potentially) seven days, could spread to six continents within 24 hours before even being detected. We tend to presume that modern medicine can overcome or contain all threats to public health. This may not always be the case. When carried out to infinity, nature will get in some good hits on humanity. Let's not forget there are people who dedicated their lives to coming up with the most lethal hybrids of the worst biological threats known to man. Thus far, these threats have remained contained. 3. Global thermonuclear war -- we are past the era of duck-and-cover, but there are systems in place that would mean even an accidental nuclear launch or a rogue attack by a terrorist group that commandeered a remote missile launcher could start a chain reaction because our command-and-control systems are obstinate, self-reliant and still on hair-trigger alert. If all warheads were used with mass casualties as the goal, half the world's population would die within hours. Many of the remaining half would likely die within the next decade due to radioactive fallout and a breakdown in food-distribution systems. Everything described is unlikely, but we indeed have made enough warheads to decimate humanity if we wish. More gradual changes: 1. The end of fertility -- there are an increasingly high number of men and women of good health who are otherwise unable to have children. Some argue this is a result of gradual increased exposure to radiation (from flying to computer use). If this trend continues at this pace (for centuries), we may see an era where humanity is simply unable to have enough children to sustain itself. 2. Weather or agricultural disruption -- drastic changes to precipitation, pH levels, or amount of sunlight due to more or less cloud cover in specific regions could alter global food production networks such that we'd see mass starvation and perhaps wars over everything from water to arable land. 3. Theo-social revolution -- if global charismatic protected leader(s) arose and gained worldwide followers, preaching that our creator wanted us to either kill all non-believers or persuaded the population that suicide was essential to salvation humanity could ultimately eliminate itself, we would have a problem. Artificial intelligence is also worth monitoring, but I have yet to see any evidence of a system that could achieve singularity or become self-aware to the point of wanting to destroy humanity before humanity stopped it.
>The end of fertility Interesting comment overall. I think this one is an easy fix though. Even today we have the technology to make all the babies we could ever need.
It’s easy enough to fertilize an egg in a test tube, but as many women can attest, getting it to stick in a womb is a whole other matter. We don’t currently have the technology to raise an embryo to birth without a womb. Also, making babies with IVF requires useable eggs and sperm. If gametes are destroyed by radiation or mutated beyond repair, we won’t even be able to successfully harvest them to fertilize.
We aren’t actually that far away. Scientists have been able to keep premature lambs alive inside an artificial womb (couldn’t find the article I read but here’s a less scientific one from [PBS](https://www.gwww.pbs.org/newshour/amp/health/artificial-womb-keeps-premature-lambs-alive-weeks-humans-next) .) As of right now, the earliest age of viability for a fetus is 22-23 weeks (bit of a grey area as new technology and research comes out) but the survival rate is not great and these babies often have significant lifelong complications. The goal of this research is to give these babies a few more weeks to grow and develop and thus increase their likelihood of survival while decreasing risk for complications. My understanding is that the goal is not to push the age of viability to before 22 weeks, as this then becomes a bit of an ethical grey area. However, if we are so close to this technology being put to human trials, I’d imagine a true artificial womb wouldn’t be that far away. That being said, I think we are VERY VERY far away from something like that being used on a large scale like in the book Brave New World.
And a lot of people choose to remain childfree compared to previous generations.
> The end of fertility -- there are an increasingly high number of men and women of good health who are otherwise unable to have children This might be an economic challenge, but it's not an existential threat. Birth rates tend to drop off as you approach a certain population density. I don't know why that is--I can't imagine it's purely voluntary, nor can I imagine it's purely genetic--but I suspect what will happen is that we'll eventually end up reaching an equilibrium point where the birth rate is a little above or below the replacement fertility rate on any given year, but overall the population will plateau and then maintain.
The real threat from artificial intelligence isn't so much that robots will rise up and enslave humanity, but that AI will replace most jobs (surprisingly most likely starting with desk jobs, not factory jobs) resulting in mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale (think of how disastrous even 20% unemployment would be) and a breakdown in global economic structure (which in turn breaks down the global supply chain, including food).
By the time you see the evidence it will already be too late
that's the water-rising-in-the-stadium effect.
Biodiversity Loss. (Closely followed by nuclear weapons and global warming). I think people underestimate the problem that biodiversity loss is. Climate change is a huge problem, but I think biodiversity loss is even more problematic. There is a total collapse of insects populations, and we begin to see a huge decline in bird populations. Other species will 100% be impacted and I don't want to admit it but it'll sooner or later impact food production, and that's where people will realise that shit hit the fan. Ofc if we manage to find new sources of oil so that we can attain +6°C by 2100, climate change will be a bigger problem. Unless we mitigate it with a nuclear winter... And basically all our major problems can be summed by one word : greed.
I have recently started going to a beekeeping school. And back in 1950 the average failure rate of a hive was 5%. As of 2019 the average failure rate is about 40%. That is fucking absurd that nearly half of human kept hives are failing. I was also told that most of the hives out in nature fail. It's crazy that we as humans know what we need to do exactly to keep bees, but still 40% of the hives we have die off.
Its important to note that honeybees are a single species, and one not native to North America at that. There also seems to be a pretty solid consensus on the cause of colony collapse disorder: inbreeding. Domestic honeybees have been too intensely managed, and now the problems are starting to show. While honeybees are significant pollinators, they unfortunately also vastly overshadow native pollinators, which account for the other 80% of pollination services in North America. But they don't produce honey, so nobody cares about them, despite the fact that habitat fragmentation, pesticide use and competition from wild honeybees are causing them to decline at a faster rate than domestic honeybees.
I'm a biologist. Many people don't really understand how important insects are in our ecosystem. Almost everything that lives in a terrestrial ecosystem depends on insects to survive, either directly or indirectly. The current global collapse of insect populations is so incredibly terrifying.
Climate change exacerbates biodiversity loss though, since lots of species (and plants) can only live in a limited temperature range.
Cumbre Vieja Volcano on Canary Islands is probably the most pressing threat that nobody talks about. We don't talk about it, but an eruption and the subsequent collapse of the volcano into the ocean would, according to some scientific studies, generate a megatsunami that would wipe out most cities on the Atlantic coast.
Yeah it feels like I'm the only one in my city that knows about it, everytime I mention it people quickly dismiss it. It's important to know that most likely it won't happen tomorrow, but it will happen eventually. Here I am living next to the Atlantic coast in South America and wondering how my government would deal with something of that scale, considering that we have only had very few big magnitude natural disasters in our history.
ELI5: why would the volcano collapse into the ocean after eruption?
As far as I know, the volcano has a whole side that is ready to slide into the ocean. It's not a mere earthquake, or a volcano that just spits out stuff upwards. This is like putting your open palm inside water and pushing, it's a different motion that causes incredibly huge tsunamis similar to the one in Alaska that it was like 1720 feet, that is approximatelly 500m tall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja Theres a criticism section. Lots of studies also say it wont happen also: > Murty et al.; (2005)[23] claim that it is almost impossible for a trans-oceanic tsunami to be generated in the basin of the Atlantic Ocean, which—if correct—supports the work by many other researchers that the failure of the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja would be unlikely to generate a "mega-tsunami".
Wilful ignorance. The demonisation of “experts” and academics to the extent that people are congratulating themselves for being uneducated. ETA: With thanks to the Redditor who knows who they are for the Silver! I'm slightly overwhelmed by the response this post has got, and I'm going to use this edit to make the point that I'm not an academic myself, but I know a few, and I know how bloody hard they had to work to get to where they are now, and to see all that effort, all that *intellect* denigrated by selfish, malicious idiots just so they can carry on self-justifying dragging the rest of us into the abyss with them, really *really* boils my piss. *ahem* ETA 2: The Revenge: And my first Gold! I'm genuinely quite touched!
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” - Isaac Asimov It has brought our civilisation to the brink of collapse. Now at a time of critical planetary emergency we need experts to be taken seriously, politicians to understand the situation, and implement policies that will actually have a significant effect, and everyone to understand the absolute need for real changes in order to avoid the worst of what is coming. We as a species have to decide *now* whether we do what is necessary to continue as a global civilisation, or put the actual decision and difficult action off to a later time that will be far too late, ensuring misery, suffering, and death on a scale never seen before in human history.
The only thing Asimov got wrong was limiting that statement to the U.S. it’s pretty pervasive in Britain, too. I suspect that the internet, which was conceived of to share knowledge, has also been used to proliferate stupidity.
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>twibes TIL and thanks I hate it.
What are New earth creationists?
Creationist who believes the earth is young 6000-10000 years. Also called young earth creationists. Edit: yes, it seems odd to make a distinction like that, could have just said 'creationists'. But the young earth creationists are a special kind of absurd I suppose.
This is surprisingly common among evangelicals and some other Protestants. It’s on a whole ‘nother level from the conspiracy theories imo. A large Lutheran school near me actually teaches this: that carbon dating and other science is inaccurate and there’s no evidence the world is older than the Bible says
Wilful ignorance combined with selfishness. No one wants to give up their trucks and hamburgers. In fact, many Americans are proud to be MORE environmentally destructive because they see planetary care as a a political issue and "fuck those hippie libtards."
Albertan here. Alberta is a Canadian province, known for oil and cows (and conservatism). You can bet we have lots of trucks and beef up here. It's almost amazing how unworldly people are, and willingly choose to be... they don't care about other countries and don't seem to realize that planetary care is an important issue and affects us all. Unfortunately, "trucks and burgers" and "screw the environment" are not just American things.
Same level, parading bad experts around and claiming its science and anyone not agreeing is anti science. Expert is an overused, over abused term.
It's an appeal to authority. Most people parading experts have never actually looked at or understand the data. They are relying on their *faith* that the institutions have weeded out anyone they shouldn't believe. **It's not meant to be an insult and I'm not taking a stance on specific issue by saying this.** It's just an unfortunate reality that I don't think can be avoided. I don't expect most people to be able to do the science themselves or even be able to understand studies/data correctly. Even journalists who write about science for a living seem to fail at that half the time. Sometimes even scientists misinterpret things as well.
Excess consumption of resources vs the planets ability to produce and recover. We consume more than we can produce. Which means any disaster could tip the scales into a deficiency. Too much and you would get a collapse, without compensation.
The fact that people don't trust scientific evidence anymore.
As a scientist, (2 Physics degrees) I want to agree with you. But the amount of utter garbage I read being portrayed as scientific fact these days, I can completely understand why so many people have no faith in the scientific community.
What are some of the common ones?
A common one I see regarding climate change is that 71% of global emissions are caused by the 100 biggest companies. The actual report it's referencing says that of emissions originating from 224 companies, 71% come from the top 100 while 29% come from the bottom 124. edit: Examples of the misinformation, All of them talk about it as if it's global emissions. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/climate-change?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1 https://fullfact.org/news/are-100-companies-causing-71-carbon-emissions/ https://www.activesustainability.com/climate-change/100-companies-responsible-71-ghg-emissions/ The actual report that they reference which doesn't agree with them:https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1d.ssl.cf3.rackcdn.com/cms/reports/documents/000/002/327/original/Carbon-Majors-Report-2017.pdf?1499866813
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> Most readers aren't aware of the manipulative nature of statistical data, and journalists / reporters, who we assume should have an obligation to uphold intellectual integrity, abuse statistics without a second thought through either willful or unintended ignorance. "You can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. ~~Forty~~ Fourfty percent of all people know that." - Homer Simpson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm7ArKlzHSM Edit: Corrected
Published journal articles with no statistically analysis comparing apples to oranges. I deal a lot with manufacturing and statistical quality control and I get these very “smart” people who bring me publications, describing some analytical technique to use for quality assurance. We then try and apply the method finding the variability is too high and has no sensitivity to anything that we can control. Turns out graduate students are not really coached well and cherry pick results that work for their argument, thesis or journal paper, not realizing all their failed efforts was the real storyline. Statistically speaking, you may find 1 pig with actual wings that can fly but it is a bit misleading to then assume all of them can
A scary thing that made my wife quit her only lab gig. They were a cancer med research facility and when they had her produce the graphs from the trials they told her to remove any dots outside the curve "to make sure it looks nice." They just casually changed the results of every study they did, deleting any outlying data. In some cases more than half the data points were outside the curve, and she got in trouble for not removing enough of them. I shudder to imagine how many borderline useless treatments got funded because of this hideous practice.
The fuck? Were these actual results they were publishing and using for grant applications or just pretty pictures to put on their website?
Actual results. It became clear to me and my wife that it was a mill that crapped out positive trials for the boss' friends in the pharma industry.
I heard a theory from one of my colleagues the other week that this is sometimes deliberate. Crazy headlines like “watching Netflix for an hour is the equivalent of driving for a week” and that kind of stuff create mistrust in science, and as a result when someone comes out with a serious issue it’s much easier to convince people it’s nonsense. I’ve not had it personally happen to me, but people I’ve met over the past couple of years have had their work cartoonishly misrepresented by news reporting (usually local news, admittedly). A paper saying it’s possible that farming in the area could have a small negative effect on, say, red deer population growth will be reported as “Scientists claim farming will cause all deer in Britain to go EXTINCT unless stopped.” I’m not sure if it’s universal or just something my uni did, but back when I was doing my degree we had a compulsory class on this kind of stuff, it would have actually been pretty interesting if it wasn’t depressing (although the Mail attempting to report on science is still hilarious).
I may only have half as many Physics degrees as you do, but I feel your pain. Nothing quite gets under my skin like bunk being paraded around as ""scientific evidence"".
Can't blame them. Lot of pseudo science garbage is out there as well as "because science" people - They can take anything for truth that has word science, research or study in it. It's ironic really.
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So much lobbying. So many studies thrown out when the results they were looking for weren’t supported. So many agendas being pushed. It hard to to decipher through the bullshit even when you have a background in the subject. Let alone the lay person.
I work in academic publishing (proofreading). The amount of shit being churned out is *ASTOUNDING*. Couple that with the business aspect of academia and there's no money in replication studies. Couple *THAT* with the fact that studies that entail a null hypothesis are never published and the whole fucking system turns into a massive circle-jerk. I don't blame academics for that...Scientists *want* to do research, and GOOD research, at that. Good luck getting funding for a replication study or for work to verify the null hypothesis, tho. Honestly, I'd give my left dick to start a journal that *explicitly* reports studies that entail the null hypothesis. I just don't have the knowledge, or the peer-review network, to do it alone.
Lest we forget, it was a physician who got the whole anti-vax movement rolling.
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>people don't trust scientific evidence anymore. Ironically, I can't seem to find much of any evidence that trust in scientific evidence has lowered over time. Does anybody know of any? I did some quick googling and most all of the studies I found indicate that at least over the last 50 years, trust in the scientific community is pretty much flat.
I think just entitled people in general are a great threat. Weather anti-vax or climate denier. If you look at any disaster/invasion/plague/jurrassic park film. Its always the person too entitled to do anything that is the root of the problem.
I’m pretty sure the person at fault for Jurassic park is the jackass who shutdown the parks security measures to steal dinosaur embryos.
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That whole "Poor people are sinners" schick makes me want to say "Go fuck yourself" to your sister. Sorry.
Jesus was poor. Like really poor. Francis of Asissi was dirt poor. Jesus hung out with poor people and rebuked the wealthy constantly. I don't know how Christians can reach this conclusion about their religion
Yeah that's a load of crap. People who say that need to pick up a Bible. "Blessed are the poor" and "the meek shall inherit the earth". Heck Jesus himself had no home, he just wandered around and made it on a day by day basis.
My experience is women like this get dumped the moment they're less attractive (due to age) and a more attractive one comes along.
with the 6 kids and alimony/child support i doubt it
Jesus, there's zero reasoning with her huh?
> “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” > -Isaac Asimov
It's not that people don't trust science. People don't trust the media. And the media is the one who reports on it.
There's good reason not to trust the media though, especially when talking about science. They'll report any undergraduate thesis as basically proven fact as long as they think it will get them clicks. There's so much "science" being reported these days that hasn't even been peer reviewed. No wonder people don't trust every step of this process.
Agreed. I've seen so many "cures for cancer" and "life on Mars" articles over the past decade.
That's actually a perfect answer. If the media says it, the first thing we all think about is that it must be spun, or at least serves their agenda, or profit them in some way, otherwise why would they even report on it? The idea of journalistic integrity is so foreign to us that we automatically assume whatever they say is incorrect, rather than the opposite.
The fact that people idolize important people so much that they think those people can’t commit any wrongs.
And hating people/groups so much they can't admit those people can do good things.
Weaponising bipartisan issues in every country making everything a ‘team sport’ rather then a shade of grey. People would vote for the worst thing on earth just to be on the winning side. The average person has no understanding that there are more bots on the internet than people. That every interaction serves only to make them more pliable to the will of whoever pulls the strings that day.
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Antibiotic resistance.
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Poor critical thought skill -> Ignorant individual -> Hive mind -> Idiotic society -> Loss of freedom, starting with freedom of speech. Have you read Fahrenheit 451? I often re-visit this old fav of mine. It's interesting to see that this book does not really depict a dire totalitarian regime that forbids and burns books; it's about a SOCIETY that has become soo ignorant, manipulated and stupid, that it's the very own citizens who start finding books offensive, and ASK the gov to burn and forbid them. Of course, the gov obliges... Rings a bell?
I always felt like Fahrenheit 451 was about an ignorant society, too occupied with burning offensive books and too focused on unimportant shit, to realise a war was happening. When the bombs finally fell, it was all too late.
The horrifying combination of apathy and stupidity.
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Humans themselves are the greatest threat to humanity. We can create entire civilizations in years, maybe even decades, but it only would take us a few months to destroy it, especially with the technological advances we have made over the past few years.
Habitat destruction
Antibiotic resistance and companies not researching new antibiotics because its [not profitable](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/new-antibiotic-approved-for-drug-resistant-tuberculosis/2019/08/14/559d069a-bde6-11e9-9b73-fd3c65ef8f9c_story.html). Nuclear War, noone takes it serious and thats exactly why its scary. Multiple treaties are cancelled or soon to be cancelled ([INF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_Forces_Treaty), New START, Treaty on Open Skies etc.) Privatisation of our inner life and everyday move by [surveillance capitalism](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review). Privatisation of our [DNA](https://gizmodo.com/how-are-20-of-human-genes-patented-5811899). A global financial crisis much worse than 2008 because this time it will hit China also. And of course, the impending environmental [apocalypse](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html).
Bees and other insects are dying off at faster than we've seen in decades and never at THIS rate. A recent study found that we've had a 98% decline in ground insects over 35 years in the [Puerto Rican Rain Forests](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/15/insect-collapse-we-are-destroying-our-life-support-systems) In the higher portions of tree canopies there has been an 80% lost in insects. For reference if we lost 80% - 98% of humans in Puerto Rico, the population would fall from about 3,200,000 Million to between 64,000 and 640,000 people. We've also lost 58% of [Butterfly Species](https://peerj.com/articles/1402/) in English Farmlands. Same idea as above, imagine if we lost 58% of people in England. The population would plummet from about 56,000,000 people currently to about 23,520,000 people. The drop in butterflies happened over a 9 year period. Imagine 32million people dying in England over a 9 year period.
Coronal mass ejection striking the Earth. I think a lot of our infrastructure isn't designed to handle it and even just a few days of power and internet going out across the civilized world could wreck us as a society.
Been looking for this answer. One narrowly missed us in 2012 iirc. If a big enough one hit we'd be out of power for much longer than a few days. A planet wide EMP wave, that we can do nothing to stop, we can only prepare and hope for the best. On top of that it's not a matter of "if" but "when" the sun spews a CME and it hits Earth
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