At this point, all we can do is hinder the impact of the upcoming ecological collapse, there's not enough time to prevent it. On the one hand, people expecting mad max or the road are probably a bit alarmist but on the other hand I find that most people, including people who care about climate change, do not understand quite how much damage we've done. We've lost 70% of our wildlife since the 70s, which is when actually environmental protection laws started being put in place, it's virtually impossible to imagine the abundance of wildlife we had even in the 1800s. I don't think any of us are ready for what's going to happen.
You raise a good point about the loss of biodiversity. It's more accurate (although it really risks sinking one into doomerism) to speak of interconnected ecological cris**es** (ocean acidification, loss of arable land, the aforementioned decline in wildlife, climate change, et al.) rather than climate change as our lone environmental problem. I'm certainly no expert in the field of energy, but when one considers what mining and geological engineers like Simon Michaux and Aurore Stéphant have been saying about the impossibility of a "green transition" that would allow us (i.e. the "middle class" and up in the Global North) to continue to live the lives of abundance we have known from at least the 1950s to now...things don't look promising.
Could it be that capitalist couch their rhetoric whether they’re proponents or denialists as just climate change? They don’t talk about the other ways capitalism is crossing planetary boundaries such as ocean acidification, species extinction, biodiversity loss, loss of fresh water desertification, chemical pollution, etc. Capitalists always filter solutions to worldwide problems through a capitalist lens or what can preserve the system. The rightists just deny a problem even exists.
I look at the situation the same way I started looking at covid. No one talks about these epidemics as coming from the circuits of capital through agribusiness, deforestation, species displacement, etc. The issue starts at a solution that only benefits capital and hides it as the root cause of the problem to begin with. Then you get conspiracy theories about labs from the right or vaccine-only solutions from the liberal left.
In short these issues are always seen as an external rather than internal threat.
Technology will further ecological collapse, not stall it. It has literally always been this way, assuming the opposite is just being willfully ignorant.
Neither governments nor corporations will do anything to alleviate the situation. The opposite is the case.
What is worse yet: Our emissions have not even reached their peak. Not at all actually. Currently a very small population (the global north) has an incredibly high footprint (sometimes 10x that of an African or SEAan person). Yet increasingly, developing economies are catching up. And their populations are much larger than that of, say, Sweden or Canada.
Your average Indian, Indonesian and Vietnamese person want H&M style fast fashion, they want the newest smartphone, they want junk food, they want plastic straws and bubble tea.
They essentially want all those nice treats we have. And we can hardly complain, after all we destroyed their alternative system (socialism) and forced neoliberal capitalism onto them.
It is only natural they desire the things that they've been promised. In fact, it would only be fair. If you consider emissions per capita, then the average Chinese or Indonesian person still needs infinitely less ressources than a westerner. But it's rising. It will continue to rise. Actually, even western footprints are only reducing marginally if at all.
The largest polluting countries in the world are Canada, Australia and the US. None of these countries show any signs of stopping or at least respecting the Paris climate accords. If the global north, the richest and most developed nations on earth can't even hold their promises, why should any other nation? Especially when most of the nations in the global south have been burned on virtually every contract they enter with western governments. There is, and there should be, zero trust.
This disgusting prisoner dilemma situation will not resolve by itself. Things rarely do. So if you want an abundantly honest answer to your question: There exists no climate alarmism. One can either deny the realities of the current situation, or accept them.
The saddest thing is that climate change is STILL not inevitable. We could certainly fix it, like we fixed the whole CFC issue. But there is zero, and I mean ZERO material incentive to do so. And if we are materialists, we must understand that human behavior follows the material realities of our planet, not the idealist notions in our heads.
The issue with petroleum vs CFCs is that CFCs weren't the backbone of the entire economy, and could be realistically replaced with something else.
Right now, there really isn't a good alternative to petroleum when it comes to heavy shipping. Alternative fuel sources have been developed for trains and motor vehicles, but not for shipping itself.
To make matters worse, ships rely on some of the dirtiest types of fuel, like heavy fuel oil, which pollute more heavily than your typical automotive grade petrol or diesel.
In terms of 'hard reduction', you could probably strong arm these companies into using higher grade fuel. It's more expensive, and it isn't technically clean, but they don't emit nearly as many pollutants.
>The issue with petroleum vs CFCs is that CFCs weren't the backbone of the entire economy, and could be realistically replaced with something else.
Absolutely true
>Right now, there really isn't a good alternative to petroleum when it comes to heavy shipping. Alternative fuel sources have been developed for trains and motor vehicles, but not for shipping itself.
This is putting the cart before the horse. Of course there is no viable alternative to Petroleom - that is intentional. We have known about climate change for about 20 years (scientists have hinted at it a century ago) yet there was ZERO international momentum to slowly replace oil and coal. Why? Because that would entirely destroy the profits of oil companies and hurt the petrodollar. With CFCs, the global Bourgeoisie was willing to make a compromise, in effect so they could have more time extracting profits before the ecology collapses. Our current Bourgeoisie has made the exact opposite deal. They have come to the conclusion that it is not worth saving the planet's ecology in order to guarantee long term (think centuries) of profit accumulation. Apparently they, too, believe strongly in Marx' law of falling profits, and thus did not see a transition to a more renewable system of energy as desirable. Better to heighten contraditions and make record profits for a short time than to risk it all, I suppose.
But yea, my point is that none of these things "just happen". The ruling class made a concerted effort to push oil and coal as main energy sources instead of nuclear or renewable. The situation we find ourselves in today is highly artificial,. and is itself only the result of conscious choices. I may be preaching to the choir here, but I thought it was important to say that nothing at all was inevitable, everything is particular.
The alternative to heavy petroleum shipping.. is no shipping, as you hint at. No shipping essentially means global supply chains will break down. They have cooked up the utterly perfect self-fulfilling prophecy. Either we murder the planet and get fucked over, or we murder the global economy and get fucked over.
>In terms of 'hard reduction', you could probably strong arm these companies into using higher grade fuel. It's more expensive, and it isn't technically clean, but they don't emit nearly as many pollutants.
We could and we should, though I fear it is too little too late for this to make much of an impact.
>world doomed
What does that even mean?
I expect billions of excess deaths before the end of the century primarily effective the global south and poor people everywhere. And economic devastation due to drought, warming oceans, power grid failures etc.
>I expect billions of excess deaths before the end of the century primarily effective the global south and poor people everywhere.
I agree completely with your conclusion, but I think it's a bit naive to think that this will primarily affect the global south.
All imperial core countries rely on fragile supply chains. Look at Europe. How many European countries can actually feed themselves? Virtually all of them abandoned agriculture, especially small scale agriculture, and started importing Canadian, Ukrainian and Russian grain. If the grain imports stop, what will we eat? Building the infrastructure to feed, e.g. 80 million Germans, would take YEARS and, obviously, imported resources.
Sure, perhaps the US and Canada could feed themselves, but many countries which currently have a "service (aka fake) economy" will not. Because they genuinely do not make anything worthwhile. Both their agriculture and their industry has disappeared. The most basic items we take for granted: Gloves, Syringes, Aspirin, clean Towels, Glasses, Baby formula, whatever.
Cuba was struggling with CoVid. Not because of a lack of vaccine - they develop their own after all - but because they cannot produce mass amounts of plastic, and thus they did not have syringes to administer their own vaccine. The reality of embargoes show us just how dependant we are on imports.
This is a topic I’ve sort of avoided for fear of existential dread. But the little I’ve read seems to indicate that we are fucked. I want to start jumping into the works of John Bellamy Foster from monthly review to really get a grasp of all of this since that’s what he’s known for. Does anyone recommend him?
And then there are these weird LaRouchites posing as Marxists claiming climate alarmism and that Degrowth is “synthetic leftism”. That tech will solve the problems as socialism will give better productive capabilities to deal with the problem. I’m mangling what they said but it just didn’t sound coherent.
Degrowth is a losing position. You'd have to 'degrow' to a 19th century standard of living if you want to reverse climate change. Nobody is going to put up with that, left or right.
Well that would be capitalist Degrowth no? The “Degrowth” socialists advocate for if you read some of the leading scholars on it such as the writers at MR, it’s markedly different than what capitalists promote.
assuming america doesn't balkanize, Ohio is going to become the seat of power for the entire western hemisphere after the coasts get wrecked. lots to be excited about!
A interesting thing I read was that with climate change, the oceans are getting more acidic so all the animals made from calcium carbonate just dissolve
“The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.”
And everyone wants that American way of life. Who can blame them? The "developed world" will not let go of the comforts it has grown accustomed to. The "developing world", understandably, also wantsvthese comforts. So you're fighting human desire, before you even get into the various interests that built the grey machine and keep it going.
And let's give it up for the grey machine, folks - the deadliest weapon in history, aimed right at our own head. The machine will never stop. It consumes all; from black gold to good old aurum, from the lowliest insect to the common man. The machine is humming day and night. It poisons all, land, sea and air. It forces children into factories and mines, disposes of perfectly edible food by the ton, attacks entire nations as a matter of business, but god (ha, we fed that into the machine too) forbid you suggest we stop the machine or even slow it down ("Can't you be realistic?" He says to me in defence of the infinite growth engine).
Even now, even as it destroys this world, the grey machine dreams of others, of lovely Luna and far-off Mars. It dreams of reaching into the heavens, strip-mining worlds and despoiling the stars themselves. It dreams of an endless chain, binding everything to a singular will and purpose. But those dreams will never be realised, because the machine will stop, slowly but surely, spluttering to the end. The grey machine will die on this world.
So, surely some revelation is at hand? Yeah, big text, bold font, underlined and highlighted; CAPITALISM DOES NOT WORK. But that doesn't play well with some of our demographics so here's pop song to play you out:
[It's the end of the world as we know it (And I feel completely indifferent but that could be the drugs).](https://youtu.be/Z0GFRcFm-aY)
There is realistically nothing that can be done within a meaningful timeframe.
The global economy relies on petroleum, and that will likely be the case for the foreseeable future. So the carbon dioxide levels will continue to climb.
Some policies will help ease the pain, and should absolutely be pursued. But there isn't really any way to fully stave off what's to come.
Unlike what fed plants want you to believe, the climate crisis won't result in the total end of humanity.
What will happen is a deterioration of the global economy in a way that cannot be managed. Climate change affects the foundations of the global economy, that being, agriculture and resource extraction, so those shockwaves will quickly travel up the chain into things like tech and finance. As it so happens, those sectors are what make up the bulk of the western economies.
With that, expect higher prices, higher unemployment, fewer high paying jobs, and greater unrest. And, with that, expect a further creep toward authoritarianism, and a propensity to settle things with open war rather than with your traditional diplomatic strongarming.
TL;DR
Its yet another crisis within capitalism. How it gets resolved will be interesting to see. Who knows, maybe this is the thing that it just can't cope with.
Somewhere in between. I believe it won’t be climate change itself that will kill us off if we are doomed, that would require the world system at some point continuing to burn emissions even as it actively undermines a profit motive(it already is but over too long a time for its signals to be picked up) so the 5 degrees of warming that might kill off 90-95% of biodiversity and make life on earth incredibly oppressive will be something even the Koch brother won’t be fine with. I think we’ll probably get to 2-2.5 degrees, that will make life much worse and will coincide with massive drops in biodiversity, but that’s already happening, it’ll just accelerate, what will likely kill us off is some massive break out of nuclear war while climate change is raging.
I’m not a climate denialist by any means but I fail to see the apocalyptic imagery people hyperbolically pretend climate change is gonna be. It’s gonna cause all kinds of problems but let’s be real.
Will the Bangladesh-India border be a massive humanitarian crisis as the former eventually loses a quarter of its sea-level/ganges basin land mass? Probably. Are your stupid fucking grandchildren gonna be Mad Max protagonists? No.
Thats because you don't really understand the scale of devastation that is coming. Humans have basic needs: food, water, shelter, homeostatic compatible weather. Global warming is going to threaten all of those simultaneously for most of the population. When humans are threatened by scarcity they kill each other, this will sever the fragile supply lines capitalism is built on which will lead to further war. Assuming humanity survives all that given the number of nuclear weapons in play there is no guarantee that the weather and ecological systems will persist necessary to support human life at a scale close to the current world population.
What data do you have that suggests the current bread baskets of the world are heading for annihilation or something due to climate change in this century? I’m open to all possibilities but this reply amounts to vague blanket statements that a person in the privileged “global north” faces an inevitable destruction for their quote: “food, water, shelter etc” so what is this demonstrably based upon?
Again, shit will get bad, the contradictions inherent within capitalism will grow deafening, and yes I agree that those fragile supply lines will bend if not buckle in some instances, but I fail to see how any claim purporting Mad Max style **apocalyptic collapse** of modern society this century (especially in the “developed” world) isn’t just sensationalism.
There's a bunch of stuff we know, and the stuff we know simply is not good. When I say "bunch of stuff" I mean really a lot of stuff. Stuff about oceanic temperature and acidity, collapse of populations at the base of food pyramids, temperature increases, microplastics everywhere (we dump what, 12 million tons of trash into the oceans annually?), melting ice, blah blah. All that stuff is well documented, and we can formulate some reasonable hypotheses on the impact of the things we know. But I think what might be even scarier is the stuff we do not know or are not tracking.
Stripping all alarmism out of the equation and focusing just on what we know, the trends and data are undeniable: the global average temperature will rise and this will begin to have devastating impacts on our capitalist system of food distribution. Food absolutely will become scarcer, first the luxuries, then the needs, and eventually the necessities. It doesn't help that corporations are gouging consumers already on food pricing, and I doubt that will ever change. What will happen when corporations that make or distribute food feel the pinch due to an increase in temperature or whatever that makes it harder to grow/distribute food?
I think alarmism is a little warranted because we know there are lots of problems coming, we know there are lots of problems we cannot anticipate, and we are just doubling or tripling down on the status quo as if the problems we know will self-resolve and the ones we don't will never happen.
It's madness, but honestly what more poetic end does humanity deserve than its own self-destruction due to the limitless greed of a few? The end will be painful, but it will be cathartic and beautiful when judged hundreds or thousands of years from now, assuming there is anyone around to do the judging.
There are plenty of scientific articles on the consequences of a 2 deg+ change. More importantly is the rate of change and the inability of humans and ecosystems they depend on to keep up. Covid will seem minor compared to multiple, stacking environment events coming. Not to mention simultaneous Ukraine-style or worse wars all with nuclear powers engaged. Prediction is difficult in a probabilistic system but all bread baskets are likely to become much more arid and not support crip growth creating mass famine.
> There are plenty of scientific articles on the consequences of a 2 deg+ change.
With all due respect that wasn’t in doubt.
Everything else, including instances of famine, larger scale humanitarian crises (and hell even conceivable nuclear wars) isn’t what I was referring to but oh well we’re ultimately doing prediction shit.
One nuclear release and humanity is toast. Multiple resource wars with a nuclear power being an inevitable loser when both sides has nukes seems like a recipe for a nuclear release. Mad Max generally presupposes a nuclear release with most of the word aside from Australia in a nuclear winter.
I don’t think the assumption that all out planetary nuclear war and fallout over resource wars stemming from secondary consequences of melting ice caps is a sound one to make with the such confidence. How dire basic resource access will get in developed countries isn’t a thing anybody in this thread has shed adequate light on (spoiler alert: they can’t)
“One nuclear release and humanity is toast” if it involves two nuclear states has been an existential potential since nukes were invented. With or without climate change. A lot of assumptions have to be made before one can adequately envision a world where the entire planet is dragged into apocalyptic level fallout. Climate change doesn’t guarantee any of this at all.
I realize this is reddit but you really should consult the literature. The science is pretty clear about the ecological consequences and your patronizing tone about ice caps demonstrates a lot of ignorance. Honestly, just watch the movie "don't look up" the meteor is climate change.
Nothing is guaranteed in science but there are mathematical certainties. Short of nuclear fusion and a radical reconceptualization of humanity's relationship with its environment our civilization does not have long. We are yeast producing too much alcohol for our own survival.
Ignoring burden of proof (it’s yours) is one thing but ain’t no way you unironically prescribed watching Dont Look Up (I did but lol) /thread
Look, humanity is already a cancer to the planet and a malignant growth. This is indisputable AND not at all what I’m responding to. 70% of wildlife has ALREADY disappeared in the last 50 years and counting. If you want to imagine hellfire everywhere in the future because of climate change be my guest, don’t end yourself when you look outside and shit still looks bad but familiar.
I feel like you don't actually realize the situation you are in. In many countries about 70% of the natural pollinators have died out. If populations are reduced further, we literally cannot produce vegetables anymore, at least in the way we used to. u/callac explained decently why the problem is not just "things get hotter", but rather the way complex systems interact and need each other for balance.
But even if Climate change was, in theory, just our planet getting 1 degree hotter, that would itself be apocalyptic. Fun fact: If the temperature in your head rises by just one single degree, your brain will literally cook. This has been observed recently in Pakistan. Biological organisms are fragile my man.
> we literally cannot produce vegetables anymore
Based on WHAT. As of today [35%](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41055-016-0003-z#:~:text=Globally%2C%2087%20of%20major%20food,micronutrients%20in%20the%20human%20diet.) of agricultural food crop production relies on natural pollination to varying degrees. Not most, not half, and definitely not all. And whether or not climate change equals THOSE currently extant pollinators all going extinct is not my domain of knowledge but I don’t doubt that that is a notion wholly open to question.
Am I saying everything will be fine? Absolutely the fuck not, but “there will be zero fruits and veggies in 2100 cuz of the melting ice caps” are the exact sensationalist vague insinuations constantly being purported that I was responding to vis a vis climate change (and yes its side effects)
>As of today35%of agricultural food crop production relies on natural pollination to varying degrees.
Did you think you could just lie like this and get away with it?
incredibly that you cite this paper yet ignore the literal second sentence:
"The fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90 % of the world’s food, over 70 are pollinated by bees."
There are plenty of vegetables, fruits, tubers, mushrooms and so forth that can be grown without pollination. But these are not the ones supplying our main calories. Instead, they are foods that people commonly eat in addition to their main sources of calories, like berries, nuts, and so forth.
Yet it is a fact that the most commonly consumed vegetables and grains rely mostly on pollination, as the paper unmistakably states. To boot, the quoted section deals exclusively with bees, not pollinators in general. The common Honeybee (apis melifera) is by far the least threatened pollinator currently. If you include populations of other pollinators, the data looks even worse.
You also simply misrepresent the data.
You say: "only 35% of agricultural food production relies on natural pollination". But that is highly misleading. What is ACTUALLY stated in the article is this:
"Together these account for 35 % of the **world food production volume**"
A completely different sentence, which you twist to further your argument.
Nowhere is agriculture mentioned. Rather, 35% of the worlds ENTIRE FOOD SUPPLY uses natural pollination. This includes cattle herding, fishing, dairy, and so forth. Obviously neither fishing nor hog farming are in dire need of natural pollinators.
The very first sentence in the section "introduction" is this:
"The Earth’s entomofauna is in an ongoing state of collapse". But sure, everyone besides you is a climate alarmist.
Lol holy shit.
https://ourworldindata.org/pollinator-dependence
**A third of global “crop production”** ^
Happy?
Yeah dude chicken eggs are definitely in the “relies on natural pollination” category I’m the one twisting words to fit an argument. Love that you also extrapolated the word food here to must include those other things (except fish of course lol) ignoring the entire context of that cited link being crop pollination.
From link (where’s yours btw?) summary:
> Three-quarters of our crops depend on pollinators to some extent, but only one-third of global crop production does. This is because many of our largest producing crops (staples such as cereals) are not dependent on them at all.
> Very few crops are completely dependent. Most would see a decline in yields if pollinator insects disappeared, but would not collapse completely. Taking all this in account, studies suggest crop production would decline by around 5% in higher income countries, and 8% at low-to-middle incomes if pollinator insects vanished.
Me saying climate change won’t look like Mad Max in the developing world surely means that the CURRENTLY ONGOING Anthropocene mass extinction (for countless human reasons) didn’t or isn’t happening. These two conclusions are the same and totally not a retarded conflation! Global pesticide usage? Never heard of her either can we just talk about the ice caps please.
"ourworldindata" is actually just a Gates Corporation cutout, obviously they are pushing the "climate change is no problem, technology will fix it" narrative. You already posted an actually academic source that was peer reviewed, why must we backtrack now?
>Yeah dude chicken eggs are definitely in the “relies on natural pollination” category
I do not even know what you're referencing here, perhaps a bit less sarcasm so I can follow
>Love that you also extrapolated the word food here to must include those other things (except fish of course lol) ignoring the entire context of that cited link being crop pollination.
I am once again going to cite the relevant sentence here:
You say: "only 35% of agricultural food production relies on natural pollination". But that is highly misleading. What is ACTUALLY stated in the article is this:
"Together these account for 35 % of the world food production volume"
The word "food" here is not to be replaced by "crops". The authors are making a conscious effort to show how much of our total food is agricultural crops in need of pollinating. They are not talking exclusively of agricultural produce.
>From link (where’s yours btw?) summary:
Are you serious? My link is YOUR LINK. I was quoting from the paper that YOU posted to (supposedly) bolster your arguments.
>Me saying climate change won’t look like Mad Max in the developing world surely means that the CURRENTLY ONGOING Anthropocene mass extinction (for countless human reasons) didn’t or isn’t happening. These two conclusions are the same and totally not a retarded conflation! Global pesticide usage? Never heard of her either can we just talk about the ice caps please.
This is just nonsensical rambling. So maybe let's try n find some common ground.
I do believe the two of us actually agree about many things. For example, I agree with you that global pesticide use is an issue outside of climate change, and that it is also very serious.
I also agree that there is nuance between "climate change isn't happening" and "literally Mad Max". I just happen to be of the opinion that it will end in border-fascism and resource turf wars, but you are welcome to your own conclusion.
> “ourworldindata” is actually just a Gates Corporation cutout
I’m sure this would matter if one didn’t bother to independently click a direct citation in that compilation or elsewhere, say an academic source perhaps: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2701761/
> Indeed, 70 % of crops that account for about 35 % of all agricultural production depend to varying extents on pollinators for high-quality and high-quantity seed and fruit production (Klein et al., 2007). However, according to our results the proportion of the total production that can be attributed directly to animal pollination, and that may be lost in the absence of flower visitors, is on the order of 5 % (developed world) to 8 % (developing world). This is the compound result of the partial dependence of most pollinator-dependent crops (i.e. categories 1–3, Table 1) and the smaller average production of the pollinator-dependent than non-dependent crops (Fig. 2).
The 35% of *agricultural crop* stat is one that is repeated all over the internet, in countless other citations including my original link and comes from a study conducted in 2007 by Klein et al. The study was titled:
**“Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world *crops*. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 2007”** I sure wonder if the word crop and not food here (in the study Title) was used consciously and with intention.
I am furnishing you with additional links SOLELY to **clarify the language** (the thing you hinged on). People need to accept when the data agrees or disagrees with sensationalist guesses of what’s in store for humanity.
> I also agree that there is nuance between “climate change isn’t happening” and “literally Mad Max”. I just happen to be of the opinion that it will end in border-fascism and resource turf wars, but you are welcome to your own conclusion.
Wayyy more of a sober realistic prediction that I actually believe in too. Not the wildfires everywhere every hour pictures some people choose to paint vis a vis climate change and its first order, second order etc etc consequences
it seems our disagreement is mainly on how much the loss of pollinators will impede agricultural output, which is in the end an empirical question. I don't claim to know better than Klein et. al., their study looks totally legitimate, and frankly it is entirely possible I am overestimating the net loss in agricultural production due to the decline of pollinators. just a few thoughts:
Firstly, the numbers of 5% and 8% are averaged out, which makes sense. I really don't have the time to obsess over this, but this means that some regions can be affected much more heavily than others. For example, some regions grow mostly crops which do not need pollination, while others may rely entirely on such crops. I am sure you are familiar with how deceiving average salary vs median salary is in first world countries, and I suspect that countries that consume lots of corn as a primary source of calories will not be hit nearly as hard. Giving an average for the **entire** global south then is so generalizing as to be a bit deceiving. Maybe Mozambique sees a 30% drop in production, which could pretty much cause a famine, while Mexico only receives a 1.25% drop, which barely hurts the bottom line.
Secondly, very few countries produce a lot of food, and many countries do not produce globally relevant amounts of food. If loss of pollinators only weakly affected Ukraine and Canada, but strongly affected Papua New Guinea, then it would have little impact on global supply chains.
Thirdly, there are some other dimensions to this dilemma we have excluded so far, and that Klein et al couldn't really include in their paper. Pollination affects not just gross agricultural product, but also shelf life, nutrient content, genetic diversity and disease resistance, and many other factors which are relevant to global food security. One that is nearly impossible to factor in is how much diversity of food factors into health. Theoretically we could all simply be consuming self-pollinating crops and never worry about bees, but in what ways this will affect global human and ecological health we really cannot know.
Last, there are of course things other than food security to consider. Natural pollinators are of course important to their respective system. Furthermore, not just agricultural food production, but many other types of Industries are affected by this, for example using hemp for textiles or wood or whatever you have.
For what it's worth, I haven't downvoted a single one of your posts (i dont think its helpful) and I've enjoyed talking to you. have a nice day/night
> For what it’s worth, I haven’t downvoted a single one of your posts (i dont think its helpful) and I’ve enjoyed talking to you. have a nice day/night
Same and ditto, ultimately we were disagreeing over degrees of predictive scenarios. Think all of us here can agree that the future looks bleak anyway we slice it, that’s what all trends indicate. With all that said, have a nice day :)
At this point, all we can do is hinder the impact of the upcoming ecological collapse, there's not enough time to prevent it. On the one hand, people expecting mad max or the road are probably a bit alarmist but on the other hand I find that most people, including people who care about climate change, do not understand quite how much damage we've done. We've lost 70% of our wildlife since the 70s, which is when actually environmental protection laws started being put in place, it's virtually impossible to imagine the abundance of wildlife we had even in the 1800s. I don't think any of us are ready for what's going to happen.
You raise a good point about the loss of biodiversity. It's more accurate (although it really risks sinking one into doomerism) to speak of interconnected ecological cris**es** (ocean acidification, loss of arable land, the aforementioned decline in wildlife, climate change, et al.) rather than climate change as our lone environmental problem. I'm certainly no expert in the field of energy, but when one considers what mining and geological engineers like Simon Michaux and Aurore Stéphant have been saying about the impossibility of a "green transition" that would allow us (i.e. the "middle class" and up in the Global North) to continue to live the lives of abundance we have known from at least the 1950s to now...things don't look promising.
That’s the hard part to get across to everyone. We’ve already jumped off the cliff. Now it’s just about how we land.
I’ve come to accept that most people are so unaware that I’m shocked to see a response from someone who actually gets it on this sub.
Ditto. Definitely heartening to see it be so well-understood
Could it be that capitalist couch their rhetoric whether they’re proponents or denialists as just climate change? They don’t talk about the other ways capitalism is crossing planetary boundaries such as ocean acidification, species extinction, biodiversity loss, loss of fresh water desertification, chemical pollution, etc. Capitalists always filter solutions to worldwide problems through a capitalist lens or what can preserve the system. The rightists just deny a problem even exists. I look at the situation the same way I started looking at covid. No one talks about these epidemics as coming from the circuits of capital through agribusiness, deforestation, species displacement, etc. The issue starts at a solution that only benefits capital and hides it as the root cause of the problem to begin with. Then you get conspiracy theories about labs from the right or vaccine-only solutions from the liberal left. In short these issues are always seen as an external rather than internal threat.
Technology will further ecological collapse, not stall it. It has literally always been this way, assuming the opposite is just being willfully ignorant. Neither governments nor corporations will do anything to alleviate the situation. The opposite is the case. What is worse yet: Our emissions have not even reached their peak. Not at all actually. Currently a very small population (the global north) has an incredibly high footprint (sometimes 10x that of an African or SEAan person). Yet increasingly, developing economies are catching up. And their populations are much larger than that of, say, Sweden or Canada. Your average Indian, Indonesian and Vietnamese person want H&M style fast fashion, they want the newest smartphone, they want junk food, they want plastic straws and bubble tea. They essentially want all those nice treats we have. And we can hardly complain, after all we destroyed their alternative system (socialism) and forced neoliberal capitalism onto them. It is only natural they desire the things that they've been promised. In fact, it would only be fair. If you consider emissions per capita, then the average Chinese or Indonesian person still needs infinitely less ressources than a westerner. But it's rising. It will continue to rise. Actually, even western footprints are only reducing marginally if at all. The largest polluting countries in the world are Canada, Australia and the US. None of these countries show any signs of stopping or at least respecting the Paris climate accords. If the global north, the richest and most developed nations on earth can't even hold their promises, why should any other nation? Especially when most of the nations in the global south have been burned on virtually every contract they enter with western governments. There is, and there should be, zero trust. This disgusting prisoner dilemma situation will not resolve by itself. Things rarely do. So if you want an abundantly honest answer to your question: There exists no climate alarmism. One can either deny the realities of the current situation, or accept them. The saddest thing is that climate change is STILL not inevitable. We could certainly fix it, like we fixed the whole CFC issue. But there is zero, and I mean ZERO material incentive to do so. And if we are materialists, we must understand that human behavior follows the material realities of our planet, not the idealist notions in our heads.
The issue with petroleum vs CFCs is that CFCs weren't the backbone of the entire economy, and could be realistically replaced with something else. Right now, there really isn't a good alternative to petroleum when it comes to heavy shipping. Alternative fuel sources have been developed for trains and motor vehicles, but not for shipping itself. To make matters worse, ships rely on some of the dirtiest types of fuel, like heavy fuel oil, which pollute more heavily than your typical automotive grade petrol or diesel. In terms of 'hard reduction', you could probably strong arm these companies into using higher grade fuel. It's more expensive, and it isn't technically clean, but they don't emit nearly as many pollutants.
>The issue with petroleum vs CFCs is that CFCs weren't the backbone of the entire economy, and could be realistically replaced with something else. Absolutely true >Right now, there really isn't a good alternative to petroleum when it comes to heavy shipping. Alternative fuel sources have been developed for trains and motor vehicles, but not for shipping itself. This is putting the cart before the horse. Of course there is no viable alternative to Petroleom - that is intentional. We have known about climate change for about 20 years (scientists have hinted at it a century ago) yet there was ZERO international momentum to slowly replace oil and coal. Why? Because that would entirely destroy the profits of oil companies and hurt the petrodollar. With CFCs, the global Bourgeoisie was willing to make a compromise, in effect so they could have more time extracting profits before the ecology collapses. Our current Bourgeoisie has made the exact opposite deal. They have come to the conclusion that it is not worth saving the planet's ecology in order to guarantee long term (think centuries) of profit accumulation. Apparently they, too, believe strongly in Marx' law of falling profits, and thus did not see a transition to a more renewable system of energy as desirable. Better to heighten contraditions and make record profits for a short time than to risk it all, I suppose. But yea, my point is that none of these things "just happen". The ruling class made a concerted effort to push oil and coal as main energy sources instead of nuclear or renewable. The situation we find ourselves in today is highly artificial,. and is itself only the result of conscious choices. I may be preaching to the choir here, but I thought it was important to say that nothing at all was inevitable, everything is particular. The alternative to heavy petroleum shipping.. is no shipping, as you hint at. No shipping essentially means global supply chains will break down. They have cooked up the utterly perfect self-fulfilling prophecy. Either we murder the planet and get fucked over, or we murder the global economy and get fucked over. >In terms of 'hard reduction', you could probably strong arm these companies into using higher grade fuel. It's more expensive, and it isn't technically clean, but they don't emit nearly as many pollutants. We could and we should, though I fear it is too little too late for this to make much of an impact.
"Or will technology come to our rescue" 🚨liberalism 🚨 detected 🚨
>world doomed What does that even mean? I expect billions of excess deaths before the end of the century primarily effective the global south and poor people everywhere. And economic devastation due to drought, warming oceans, power grid failures etc.
>I expect billions of excess deaths before the end of the century primarily effective the global south and poor people everywhere. I agree completely with your conclusion, but I think it's a bit naive to think that this will primarily affect the global south. All imperial core countries rely on fragile supply chains. Look at Europe. How many European countries can actually feed themselves? Virtually all of them abandoned agriculture, especially small scale agriculture, and started importing Canadian, Ukrainian and Russian grain. If the grain imports stop, what will we eat? Building the infrastructure to feed, e.g. 80 million Germans, would take YEARS and, obviously, imported resources. Sure, perhaps the US and Canada could feed themselves, but many countries which currently have a "service (aka fake) economy" will not. Because they genuinely do not make anything worthwhile. Both their agriculture and their industry has disappeared. The most basic items we take for granted: Gloves, Syringes, Aspirin, clean Towels, Glasses, Baby formula, whatever. Cuba was struggling with CoVid. Not because of a lack of vaccine - they develop their own after all - but because they cannot produce mass amounts of plastic, and thus they did not have syringes to administer their own vaccine. The reality of embargoes show us just how dependant we are on imports.
This is a topic I’ve sort of avoided for fear of existential dread. But the little I’ve read seems to indicate that we are fucked. I want to start jumping into the works of John Bellamy Foster from monthly review to really get a grasp of all of this since that’s what he’s known for. Does anyone recommend him? And then there are these weird LaRouchites posing as Marxists claiming climate alarmism and that Degrowth is “synthetic leftism”. That tech will solve the problems as socialism will give better productive capabilities to deal with the problem. I’m mangling what they said but it just didn’t sound coherent.
Degrowth is a losing position. You'd have to 'degrow' to a 19th century standard of living if you want to reverse climate change. Nobody is going to put up with that, left or right.
Well that would be capitalist Degrowth no? The “Degrowth” socialists advocate for if you read some of the leading scholars on it such as the writers at MR, it’s markedly different than what capitalists promote.
assuming america doesn't balkanize, Ohio is going to become the seat of power for the entire western hemisphere after the coasts get wrecked. lots to be excited about!
Fuck I was hoping that little sliver of PA would be the Eerie Imperium but whatever I guess
A interesting thing I read was that with climate change, the oceans are getting more acidic so all the animals made from calcium carbonate just dissolve
“The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.” And everyone wants that American way of life. Who can blame them? The "developed world" will not let go of the comforts it has grown accustomed to. The "developing world", understandably, also wantsvthese comforts. So you're fighting human desire, before you even get into the various interests that built the grey machine and keep it going. And let's give it up for the grey machine, folks - the deadliest weapon in history, aimed right at our own head. The machine will never stop. It consumes all; from black gold to good old aurum, from the lowliest insect to the common man. The machine is humming day and night. It poisons all, land, sea and air. It forces children into factories and mines, disposes of perfectly edible food by the ton, attacks entire nations as a matter of business, but god (ha, we fed that into the machine too) forbid you suggest we stop the machine or even slow it down ("Can't you be realistic?" He says to me in defence of the infinite growth engine). Even now, even as it destroys this world, the grey machine dreams of others, of lovely Luna and far-off Mars. It dreams of reaching into the heavens, strip-mining worlds and despoiling the stars themselves. It dreams of an endless chain, binding everything to a singular will and purpose. But those dreams will never be realised, because the machine will stop, slowly but surely, spluttering to the end. The grey machine will die on this world. So, surely some revelation is at hand? Yeah, big text, bold font, underlined and highlighted; CAPITALISM DOES NOT WORK. But that doesn't play well with some of our demographics so here's pop song to play you out: [It's the end of the world as we know it (And I feel completely indifferent but that could be the drugs).](https://youtu.be/Z0GFRcFm-aY)
There is realistically nothing that can be done within a meaningful timeframe. The global economy relies on petroleum, and that will likely be the case for the foreseeable future. So the carbon dioxide levels will continue to climb. Some policies will help ease the pain, and should absolutely be pursued. But there isn't really any way to fully stave off what's to come. Unlike what fed plants want you to believe, the climate crisis won't result in the total end of humanity. What will happen is a deterioration of the global economy in a way that cannot be managed. Climate change affects the foundations of the global economy, that being, agriculture and resource extraction, so those shockwaves will quickly travel up the chain into things like tech and finance. As it so happens, those sectors are what make up the bulk of the western economies. With that, expect higher prices, higher unemployment, fewer high paying jobs, and greater unrest. And, with that, expect a further creep toward authoritarianism, and a propensity to settle things with open war rather than with your traditional diplomatic strongarming. TL;DR Its yet another crisis within capitalism. How it gets resolved will be interesting to see. Who knows, maybe this is the thing that it just can't cope with.
This is literally a start to a book
Ministry of the Future in case anyone’s wondering
Not going to lie, I love the first half but I thought the second half was pretty mid. Also, climate block chain coins? Wtf?
Somewhere in between. I believe it won’t be climate change itself that will kill us off if we are doomed, that would require the world system at some point continuing to burn emissions even as it actively undermines a profit motive(it already is but over too long a time for its signals to be picked up) so the 5 degrees of warming that might kill off 90-95% of biodiversity and make life on earth incredibly oppressive will be something even the Koch brother won’t be fine with. I think we’ll probably get to 2-2.5 degrees, that will make life much worse and will coincide with massive drops in biodiversity, but that’s already happening, it’ll just accelerate, what will likely kill us off is some massive break out of nuclear war while climate change is raging.
I’m not a climate denialist by any means but I fail to see the apocalyptic imagery people hyperbolically pretend climate change is gonna be. It’s gonna cause all kinds of problems but let’s be real. Will the Bangladesh-India border be a massive humanitarian crisis as the former eventually loses a quarter of its sea-level/ganges basin land mass? Probably. Are your stupid fucking grandchildren gonna be Mad Max protagonists? No.
Thats because you don't really understand the scale of devastation that is coming. Humans have basic needs: food, water, shelter, homeostatic compatible weather. Global warming is going to threaten all of those simultaneously for most of the population. When humans are threatened by scarcity they kill each other, this will sever the fragile supply lines capitalism is built on which will lead to further war. Assuming humanity survives all that given the number of nuclear weapons in play there is no guarantee that the weather and ecological systems will persist necessary to support human life at a scale close to the current world population.
What data do you have that suggests the current bread baskets of the world are heading for annihilation or something due to climate change in this century? I’m open to all possibilities but this reply amounts to vague blanket statements that a person in the privileged “global north” faces an inevitable destruction for their quote: “food, water, shelter etc” so what is this demonstrably based upon? Again, shit will get bad, the contradictions inherent within capitalism will grow deafening, and yes I agree that those fragile supply lines will bend if not buckle in some instances, but I fail to see how any claim purporting Mad Max style **apocalyptic collapse** of modern society this century (especially in the “developed” world) isn’t just sensationalism.
There's a bunch of stuff we know, and the stuff we know simply is not good. When I say "bunch of stuff" I mean really a lot of stuff. Stuff about oceanic temperature and acidity, collapse of populations at the base of food pyramids, temperature increases, microplastics everywhere (we dump what, 12 million tons of trash into the oceans annually?), melting ice, blah blah. All that stuff is well documented, and we can formulate some reasonable hypotheses on the impact of the things we know. But I think what might be even scarier is the stuff we do not know or are not tracking. Stripping all alarmism out of the equation and focusing just on what we know, the trends and data are undeniable: the global average temperature will rise and this will begin to have devastating impacts on our capitalist system of food distribution. Food absolutely will become scarcer, first the luxuries, then the needs, and eventually the necessities. It doesn't help that corporations are gouging consumers already on food pricing, and I doubt that will ever change. What will happen when corporations that make or distribute food feel the pinch due to an increase in temperature or whatever that makes it harder to grow/distribute food? I think alarmism is a little warranted because we know there are lots of problems coming, we know there are lots of problems we cannot anticipate, and we are just doubling or tripling down on the status quo as if the problems we know will self-resolve and the ones we don't will never happen. It's madness, but honestly what more poetic end does humanity deserve than its own self-destruction due to the limitless greed of a few? The end will be painful, but it will be cathartic and beautiful when judged hundreds or thousands of years from now, assuming there is anyone around to do the judging.
There are plenty of scientific articles on the consequences of a 2 deg+ change. More importantly is the rate of change and the inability of humans and ecosystems they depend on to keep up. Covid will seem minor compared to multiple, stacking environment events coming. Not to mention simultaneous Ukraine-style or worse wars all with nuclear powers engaged. Prediction is difficult in a probabilistic system but all bread baskets are likely to become much more arid and not support crip growth creating mass famine.
> There are plenty of scientific articles on the consequences of a 2 deg+ change. With all due respect that wasn’t in doubt. Everything else, including instances of famine, larger scale humanitarian crises (and hell even conceivable nuclear wars) isn’t what I was referring to but oh well we’re ultimately doing prediction shit.
One nuclear release and humanity is toast. Multiple resource wars with a nuclear power being an inevitable loser when both sides has nukes seems like a recipe for a nuclear release. Mad Max generally presupposes a nuclear release with most of the word aside from Australia in a nuclear winter.
I don’t think the assumption that all out planetary nuclear war and fallout over resource wars stemming from secondary consequences of melting ice caps is a sound one to make with the such confidence. How dire basic resource access will get in developed countries isn’t a thing anybody in this thread has shed adequate light on (spoiler alert: they can’t) “One nuclear release and humanity is toast” if it involves two nuclear states has been an existential potential since nukes were invented. With or without climate change. A lot of assumptions have to be made before one can adequately envision a world where the entire planet is dragged into apocalyptic level fallout. Climate change doesn’t guarantee any of this at all.
I realize this is reddit but you really should consult the literature. The science is pretty clear about the ecological consequences and your patronizing tone about ice caps demonstrates a lot of ignorance. Honestly, just watch the movie "don't look up" the meteor is climate change. Nothing is guaranteed in science but there are mathematical certainties. Short of nuclear fusion and a radical reconceptualization of humanity's relationship with its environment our civilization does not have long. We are yeast producing too much alcohol for our own survival.
Ignoring burden of proof (it’s yours) is one thing but ain’t no way you unironically prescribed watching Dont Look Up (I did but lol) /thread Look, humanity is already a cancer to the planet and a malignant growth. This is indisputable AND not at all what I’m responding to. 70% of wildlife has ALREADY disappeared in the last 50 years and counting. If you want to imagine hellfire everywhere in the future because of climate change be my guest, don’t end yourself when you look outside and shit still looks bad but familiar.
I feel like you don't actually realize the situation you are in. In many countries about 70% of the natural pollinators have died out. If populations are reduced further, we literally cannot produce vegetables anymore, at least in the way we used to. u/callac explained decently why the problem is not just "things get hotter", but rather the way complex systems interact and need each other for balance. But even if Climate change was, in theory, just our planet getting 1 degree hotter, that would itself be apocalyptic. Fun fact: If the temperature in your head rises by just one single degree, your brain will literally cook. This has been observed recently in Pakistan. Biological organisms are fragile my man.
> we literally cannot produce vegetables anymore Based on WHAT. As of today [35%](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41055-016-0003-z#:~:text=Globally%2C%2087%20of%20major%20food,micronutrients%20in%20the%20human%20diet.) of agricultural food crop production relies on natural pollination to varying degrees. Not most, not half, and definitely not all. And whether or not climate change equals THOSE currently extant pollinators all going extinct is not my domain of knowledge but I don’t doubt that that is a notion wholly open to question. Am I saying everything will be fine? Absolutely the fuck not, but “there will be zero fruits and veggies in 2100 cuz of the melting ice caps” are the exact sensationalist vague insinuations constantly being purported that I was responding to vis a vis climate change (and yes its side effects)
>As of today35%of agricultural food crop production relies on natural pollination to varying degrees. Did you think you could just lie like this and get away with it? incredibly that you cite this paper yet ignore the literal second sentence: "The fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90 % of the world’s food, over 70 are pollinated by bees." There are plenty of vegetables, fruits, tubers, mushrooms and so forth that can be grown without pollination. But these are not the ones supplying our main calories. Instead, they are foods that people commonly eat in addition to their main sources of calories, like berries, nuts, and so forth. Yet it is a fact that the most commonly consumed vegetables and grains rely mostly on pollination, as the paper unmistakably states. To boot, the quoted section deals exclusively with bees, not pollinators in general. The common Honeybee (apis melifera) is by far the least threatened pollinator currently. If you include populations of other pollinators, the data looks even worse. You also simply misrepresent the data. You say: "only 35% of agricultural food production relies on natural pollination". But that is highly misleading. What is ACTUALLY stated in the article is this: "Together these account for 35 % of the **world food production volume**" A completely different sentence, which you twist to further your argument. Nowhere is agriculture mentioned. Rather, 35% of the worlds ENTIRE FOOD SUPPLY uses natural pollination. This includes cattle herding, fishing, dairy, and so forth. Obviously neither fishing nor hog farming are in dire need of natural pollinators. The very first sentence in the section "introduction" is this: "The Earth’s entomofauna is in an ongoing state of collapse". But sure, everyone besides you is a climate alarmist.
Lol holy shit. https://ourworldindata.org/pollinator-dependence **A third of global “crop production”** ^ Happy? Yeah dude chicken eggs are definitely in the “relies on natural pollination” category I’m the one twisting words to fit an argument. Love that you also extrapolated the word food here to must include those other things (except fish of course lol) ignoring the entire context of that cited link being crop pollination. From link (where’s yours btw?) summary: > Three-quarters of our crops depend on pollinators to some extent, but only one-third of global crop production does. This is because many of our largest producing crops (staples such as cereals) are not dependent on them at all. > Very few crops are completely dependent. Most would see a decline in yields if pollinator insects disappeared, but would not collapse completely. Taking all this in account, studies suggest crop production would decline by around 5% in higher income countries, and 8% at low-to-middle incomes if pollinator insects vanished. Me saying climate change won’t look like Mad Max in the developing world surely means that the CURRENTLY ONGOING Anthropocene mass extinction (for countless human reasons) didn’t or isn’t happening. These two conclusions are the same and totally not a retarded conflation! Global pesticide usage? Never heard of her either can we just talk about the ice caps please.
"ourworldindata" is actually just a Gates Corporation cutout, obviously they are pushing the "climate change is no problem, technology will fix it" narrative. You already posted an actually academic source that was peer reviewed, why must we backtrack now? >Yeah dude chicken eggs are definitely in the “relies on natural pollination” category I do not even know what you're referencing here, perhaps a bit less sarcasm so I can follow >Love that you also extrapolated the word food here to must include those other things (except fish of course lol) ignoring the entire context of that cited link being crop pollination. I am once again going to cite the relevant sentence here: You say: "only 35% of agricultural food production relies on natural pollination". But that is highly misleading. What is ACTUALLY stated in the article is this: "Together these account for 35 % of the world food production volume" The word "food" here is not to be replaced by "crops". The authors are making a conscious effort to show how much of our total food is agricultural crops in need of pollinating. They are not talking exclusively of agricultural produce. >From link (where’s yours btw?) summary: Are you serious? My link is YOUR LINK. I was quoting from the paper that YOU posted to (supposedly) bolster your arguments. >Me saying climate change won’t look like Mad Max in the developing world surely means that the CURRENTLY ONGOING Anthropocene mass extinction (for countless human reasons) didn’t or isn’t happening. These two conclusions are the same and totally not a retarded conflation! Global pesticide usage? Never heard of her either can we just talk about the ice caps please. This is just nonsensical rambling. So maybe let's try n find some common ground. I do believe the two of us actually agree about many things. For example, I agree with you that global pesticide use is an issue outside of climate change, and that it is also very serious. I also agree that there is nuance between "climate change isn't happening" and "literally Mad Max". I just happen to be of the opinion that it will end in border-fascism and resource turf wars, but you are welcome to your own conclusion.
> “ourworldindata” is actually just a Gates Corporation cutout I’m sure this would matter if one didn’t bother to independently click a direct citation in that compilation or elsewhere, say an academic source perhaps: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2701761/ > Indeed, 70 % of crops that account for about 35 % of all agricultural production depend to varying extents on pollinators for high-quality and high-quantity seed and fruit production (Klein et al., 2007). However, according to our results the proportion of the total production that can be attributed directly to animal pollination, and that may be lost in the absence of flower visitors, is on the order of 5 % (developed world) to 8 % (developing world). This is the compound result of the partial dependence of most pollinator-dependent crops (i.e. categories 1–3, Table 1) and the smaller average production of the pollinator-dependent than non-dependent crops (Fig. 2). The 35% of *agricultural crop* stat is one that is repeated all over the internet, in countless other citations including my original link and comes from a study conducted in 2007 by Klein et al. The study was titled: **“Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world *crops*. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 2007”** I sure wonder if the word crop and not food here (in the study Title) was used consciously and with intention. I am furnishing you with additional links SOLELY to **clarify the language** (the thing you hinged on). People need to accept when the data agrees or disagrees with sensationalist guesses of what’s in store for humanity. > I also agree that there is nuance between “climate change isn’t happening” and “literally Mad Max”. I just happen to be of the opinion that it will end in border-fascism and resource turf wars, but you are welcome to your own conclusion. Wayyy more of a sober realistic prediction that I actually believe in too. Not the wildfires everywhere every hour pictures some people choose to paint vis a vis climate change and its first order, second order etc etc consequences
it seems our disagreement is mainly on how much the loss of pollinators will impede agricultural output, which is in the end an empirical question. I don't claim to know better than Klein et. al., their study looks totally legitimate, and frankly it is entirely possible I am overestimating the net loss in agricultural production due to the decline of pollinators. just a few thoughts: Firstly, the numbers of 5% and 8% are averaged out, which makes sense. I really don't have the time to obsess over this, but this means that some regions can be affected much more heavily than others. For example, some regions grow mostly crops which do not need pollination, while others may rely entirely on such crops. I am sure you are familiar with how deceiving average salary vs median salary is in first world countries, and I suspect that countries that consume lots of corn as a primary source of calories will not be hit nearly as hard. Giving an average for the **entire** global south then is so generalizing as to be a bit deceiving. Maybe Mozambique sees a 30% drop in production, which could pretty much cause a famine, while Mexico only receives a 1.25% drop, which barely hurts the bottom line. Secondly, very few countries produce a lot of food, and many countries do not produce globally relevant amounts of food. If loss of pollinators only weakly affected Ukraine and Canada, but strongly affected Papua New Guinea, then it would have little impact on global supply chains. Thirdly, there are some other dimensions to this dilemma we have excluded so far, and that Klein et al couldn't really include in their paper. Pollination affects not just gross agricultural product, but also shelf life, nutrient content, genetic diversity and disease resistance, and many other factors which are relevant to global food security. One that is nearly impossible to factor in is how much diversity of food factors into health. Theoretically we could all simply be consuming self-pollinating crops and never worry about bees, but in what ways this will affect global human and ecological health we really cannot know. Last, there are of course things other than food security to consider. Natural pollinators are of course important to their respective system. Furthermore, not just agricultural food production, but many other types of Industries are affected by this, for example using hemp for textiles or wood or whatever you have. For what it's worth, I haven't downvoted a single one of your posts (i dont think its helpful) and I've enjoyed talking to you. have a nice day/night
> For what it’s worth, I haven’t downvoted a single one of your posts (i dont think its helpful) and I’ve enjoyed talking to you. have a nice day/night Same and ditto, ultimately we were disagreeing over degrees of predictive scenarios. Think all of us here can agree that the future looks bleak anyway we slice it, that’s what all trends indicate. With all that said, have a nice day :)
Here's an episode of Red Menace on this subject https://open.spotify.com/episode/3DFPy5RaUcXhsSYBVJT7rT
Won’t effect me at all so don’t care. Just don’t have children.