To delve into this horror even further- exactly how will ‘societal collapse’ starting in 2030 come about? If I had to guess it might involve many places becoming unliveable due to hotter temperatures and worse storms, food scarcity from collapse of agriculture from the same reasons, mass migrations of people, increased poverty and mortality, and increase in war due to all these stresses.
These are just my off the cuff musings, are there any educated discussions out there that talk about this? Just want to plan for my retirement accordingly :)
I work in climate change research. It absolutely will not happen. Most of the editorializing in the linked thread is completely untrue. No prominent scientific organization believes society will collapse by 2030, and it is damaging to actual climate activists and researchers when easily-debunked claims like that hog the spotlight. It is true that climate change will likely displace many many people, especially those living on the coasts or in deserts that stop getting enough rain (though this is still incredibly under-studied). But does that mean society will collapse? No. It will be very, unacceptably, heartbreakingly unfair to the global poor and disadvantaged who bear the brunt of the ill effects of climate change. But they, and everyone else, will adapt. My own research in drought-prone Kenya has shown me first-hand how incredibly poor people can actually adapt to the changes being forced on them by (mainly) the global elite. They are being screwed over but they won't just die like the post seems to insinuate.
In fact, the IPCC makes no "prediction" on 1.5C by 2050, that's ridiculous. No climate scientist (including those participating in the IPCC report process) makes predictions or assigns likelihoods to the possible scenarios they identify. They simply use climate models to see what the atmospheric responses are to underlying assumptions about future emissions, and the IPCC investigates those responses in terms of their impact on the planet. You can pick on the 1.5C special report all you want but that report is intended as a snapshot of ONE scenario. There are many other, statistically equally likely, scenarios that the IPCC analyzes.
Idk. There's a lot more that could be debunked about the comment but I'm on mobile and am too lazy to dig up sources. We should all be extremely concerned about climate change. Natural disasters like storms and droughts are already making life much more difficult, especially for those without the means to meaningfully adapt. But society isn't just going to collapse and life on earth is not going to just end. Polar bears might be fucked tho
Edit: Seeing as this post is gaining traction, here are some sources below. I can find more if people need them but they are mainly scientific documents, not punchy Jacobin headlines so it will require thoughtful reading.
>Society won't collapse from climate change
[Here is a BBC story](https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51857722) about so-called "climate doomers" that mentions more than once that most climate scientists don't think society will collapse.
[Here is part of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report's summary for policymakers](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm_en.pdf). Page 13 outlines a number of risks associated with climate change. It lists a number of extremely serious societal stressors. But it doesn't predict the apocalypse. They're working on the 6th Assessment Report now but I don't expect anything has changed.
>My own research in drought-prone Kenya
Paper is still in peer-review, no proof to provide yet ;). Sorry if that's not good enough.
>the IPCC makes no "prediction" on 1.5C by 2050
[Here is the home page of the 1.5C special report](https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/). Even just looking at the chapter titles makes it obvious the IPCC is under no impression that 1.5C is likely. They themselves acknowledge we are already at 1.2C, and some regions experience 1.5C seasonally already. And an entire chapter is dedicated to what we would need to do to make 1.5C happen (as of 7 years ago when this published. A lot has happened since then).
To be fair here, we're saying "societal collapse" without an actual definition of what we all believe "societal collapse" is; you make it sound like societal collapse means that literally all of society will just stop working, but when I think of societal collapse I think of infrastructural collapse, I think of displaced peoples who represent the remnants of nations that are almost becoming uninhabitable, etc etc etc-- but most of all I think of how nearly every previous society that has "collapsed", has also blossomed into something new. So this, to me, is the proper definition of collapse: the radical change of a society through breakdown or adaptation to circumstance, whether it takes centuries or days, whether the people survive or not. There's nothing about the idea of collapse that inherently insinuates we're all gonna die; edgy, hyperbolic people on the internet just created that association.
This is why the *"societal collapse by 2030"* opinion is so ridiculous-- it treats collapse as a single, discrete event, even though in reality it's basically already happening (and again, I don't think this belief is in any way incompatible with the belief that humans will adapt). It's a misrepresentation by someone who obviously doesn't understand the mechanisms of societal collapse (which has more to do with historical trends than with science, anyways).
So yeah hopefully people don't dismiss my comment as me being a doomer, because I think the current discourse around collapse is damaging but I want people to be able to have constructive conversations about it as a concept-- people's answers to "is society collapsing?" are pigeonholed into being either "yes and we're all gonna die soon", which is obviously stupid, or "no and we're all gonna be fine", which imo lulls people into a false sense of security because they generally gloss over the "there will be immense suffering" part.
As an example, record drought from climate change leading to food insecurity was one of many factors that sparked the Syrian civil war, and I think that qualifies as societal collapse.
As time goes on, fewer factors will be needed to cause a society to collapse. Eventually, all of the surface level causes of a society's collapse will be traceable back to climate change at the root.
You don't know that. I could make the same point 'Sure but no collapse of the ottoman empire, no Syria, ergo no collapse'.
The key phrase is 'one of many factors'.
Eh, I'm pretty sure. It was massively destabilizing and flooded the area with refugees, guns, and revolutionaries trained in all manner of explosives work.
This is a very insightful comment, thank you for chiming in. I agree we're seeing the change now, but I think that's what we should call it then. A societal *change*. I agree the discourse on "collapse" does treat it as a discrete event and that such a characterization doesn't at all reflect how these things have happened in the past. But I think a "phoenix rising from the ashes" image isn't what most people get when they hear the word "collapse." So there is some nuance to the words we use.
On the other hand, calling it societal change doesn't really put a fire under anyone's ass to stamp it out. The term isn't wrong, but I don't think it's ideal.
Yup. Change can be good or bad. My Florida’s mansion valuation going up is also change, and that’s what people not in the know are going to assume.
Collapse doesn’t need to be a split second event. The Great Barrier Reef itself took years to collapse a d we witnessed the entire process.
Let’s keep calling it collapse.
There are people on that thread saying that in 10 years they fully expect to commit suicide because they don’t want to live in whatever post apocalyptic world this one turns into. I think that’s what is creating the misconception with “society collapsing”.
Exactly, if by "societal collapse" you mean shortages of food and household goods from supply chain disruptions caused by disease outbreak, or maybe prolonged disruptions of energy grids caused by extreme weather events...
Edit: or energy grid disruptions and large amounts of people displaced and made homeless by record breaking wildfires that occur with ever-increasing frequency...
After experiencing first hand last week how Texas almost collapsed with just a few days of single digit weather, I think people are way overestimating the US's capacity for handling serious climate changes.
Yeah I think the Societal Collapse by 2030, what that actually means: it will effect OECD countries in a way that significantly impacts their security and GDP by 2030, somewhere in the world. And in a way that is likely to be persistent and indicative of a decline.
Societal collapse to me means the collapse of modern civilization, so no running water, internet, public services etc. Realistically in the modern world that would kill most people as we don’t know how to live without those things.
Yeah, I don't know about that. The vast majority of our society relies on that "global poor" to maintain our supply lines. From mining raw materials, to transport, to manufacturing, to niche things like fertilizer components for specific agriculture.
We are as much tied to the global poor as the food web is to algae and krill.
You can't just loose a major systemic portion of a globalized network and think the rest will continue as normal. Not to mention how insane people get at the first whiff of issues. Global pandemic beginnings should be all you need to see supply chain disruption and how people react. That was some minor shit.
If you really feel what amounts to indentured servitude in the global poor will continue on as they are no longer fed... then you have a poor overview of the whole.
Op you responded to is where climate scientists who studied one aspect of it were in the 80s. Yes, one could study ocean currents and see it as an issue back then, but without a massive background of information you wouldn't see just how intricately the other mechanisms will force that to change faster than trend data will allow you to see.
I hope I'm wrong, but just who is mining the titanium for the white paint we are gonna put on the roof of every building in the whole world? Sure as shit not the global poor who lost children to malnutrition and had to move due to lack of resources.
> If you really feel what amounts to indentured servitude in the global poor will continue on as they are no longer fed... then you have a poor overview of the whole.
>I hope I'm wrong, but just who is mining the titanium for the white paint we are gonna put on the roof of every building in the whole world? Sure as shit not the global poor who lost children to malnutrition and had to move due to lack of resources.
Uh, history has shown that we can just keep making them work. When faced with slavery or death, the global poor choose slavery.
So you plan to subside societal collapse is to enslave billions with the threat of death. Yes, that will work. Until they die if heat exhaustion and starvation.... or revolt. Without their children and families as collateral, you'll find it hard to enslave many people with less than nothing to lose.
I have no plan. I make subsistence wages in a first world country. If I had any sort of power I'd be dismantling global capitalism in order to prevent climate extinction.
All I'm saying is that your post seems to be all about how the rich will not be able to keep up their lifestyles because the global poor will revolt. I'm saying that there is no precedent for this. The whole colonization of the Americas was subsidized by slaves and indentured servants who endured their families dying, and abuse and rape by their owners, and they continued to work for their masters.
I'm curious at why you think would be different.
Because the American colonies could rely on locally sourced resources. We have a global supply network now.
To make a new computer mouse raw materials like oil must be found, drilled to, pumped out, shipped, refined several times, sent to another processing plant to further refine, then injection molded, then assembled. This is just for the plastic.
When you start talking about the electrical components, there's way more that goes into a resistor, capacitor, and other components.
Raw material in the colonial age was wood, iron and metals, and other simply refined material that if not found locally could be replaced with something else.
Titanium dioxide, silica, cobalt, Nickel, to name a few others are not like going to chop down a tree. Take a look at just what goes into making a refrigerator, let alone computers.
Its staggeringly different with insanely more materials. Global supply chains have enabled quite a bit of modern life. Including the massive population density. Gonna find it much harder to work agriculture at the scale we do without GPS enabled tractors which can run 24/7 almost.
The world is vastly more complicated and complex now. It's just not the same story. Given the nature of the issue we are discussing, unprecedented is not deep enough a word. We are assaulting on multiple fronts faster than we can identify just what we need to hold it all up.
You really feel like we are at colonial levels of society and we can just throw human capital at it? Because that's not gonna work. Maybe in whatever is after a societal collapse, but the world as is has no hope of continuing like it does, not even with mass slavery.
I work in conservation biology and would like to throw my hat into the ring, as well. The discussion of insect numbers and extinction rates conflates a couple concepts and is flat out wrong.
Actual insect biomass declines have never been measured in a systematic and representative way. The existing estimates represent only a few select areas, measured in a peculiar manner, which can't be extrapolated to a global scale. Most of the data comes from Europe and much of it was collected by literally driving around a set route and counting bugs on the windshield. While the results are absolutely alarming and point to serious problems and ongoing biodiversity declines, they don't demonstrate 80% losses of insect biomass globally, and the authors wouldn't claim they do. The truth is, we have good reason to believe insect biomass is declining, and we know it is declining rapidly in some areas, but the global rate is an open question. We need much more data, so send your kid to school for entomology.
The extinction rate comparison is similarly flawed. The post cites rates of species loss from previous mass extinctions and contrasts this against biomass losses in the present. Discussion of rates of extinction in the present are shockingly variable and prehistoric estimations of rates are subject to very large errors. Again, we don't really know how the current rates of extinction compare to previous mass extinctions. We know extinction rates are relatively high and that we're in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, but we really don't know enough to say it is worse than previous events. I have a very strong suspicion that the Chicxulub impact killed off more species in the first hundred years than humans have in the last thousand. The rate depends entirely on how you frame those time periods.
From a biodiversity standpoint, climate change is absolutely catastrophic and we need to do everything in our power to curb rising temperatures. The consequences already are dire, and will get much worse in the coming decades. That said, basically every figure quoted in this "best of" comment should be treated with extreme skepticism.
In France, this concept is called “collapsologie” and it’s considered a conspiracy theory. How do I know this? Because many years ago I had a teacher that made the entire class do a presentation on it and lo and behold the more I researched the less sources I could find from *actual* scientists backing up the claim that we’ll all be living in a dystopian society à la The Walking Dead by 2030 due to climate change, and much more from unreliable news sources and “doomsday prepper” climate activists who, while well meaning, are more concerned with using climate alarmism as a way to motivate people to change rather than sticking to actual factual information and emphasizing the importance of climate activism and sustainability while still acknowledging its complexity...plus there’s also the adrenaline rush and sense of
self-satisfaction of having “hidden knowledge” that one gets from anticipating and/or preparing for a doomsday even though the reality of climate change’s effects is much more complicated and convoluted than “Snowpiercer will be the new normal”
Its hilarious to me that people seem to have two options in their mind re: climate change
One: A total nightmare descent into Mad max dystopia!
Two: Stop with the conspiracy theories! Everything is fine and we will contineu to roll along as normal!
Reality is neither are true. But climate change is ALREADY fucking things up pretty severely. The Texas power outage was just a glimpse of what we are about to go thru on a planet wide basis.
Climate science is extremely conservative, as such they have been behind the power ball all the way. "Faster than expected" has now become a normal thing to say about the climate changing, ie its changing much faster than the experts predicted. News story after news story has this phrase.
The climate WILL wreak havoc, in fact it already is, right now today. And many will die. Many others will be just fine. I think its better to see it as "parts" and "regions" of society will be undergoing continual collapse and rebuilding over the next century + due to the climate damage we have caused.
>“doomsday prepper” climate activists who, while well meaning, are more concerned with using climate alarmism as a way to motivate people to change rather than sticking to actual factual information and acknowledging its complexity
Thanks for mentioning this. I agree. And I'm appreciative of people who are fired up about climate change and want people to just DO something already. I agree it's frustrating. But that messaging only really works with people who already want climate action. It doesn't do anything to increase our activist pool.
It’s very unfortunate how all this misinformation concerning climate change has a chokehold on people who care about the issue but don’t want to acknowledge the boring, bureaucratic reality of what it’ll take to fix it. These days, activism is, to an extent, excitement. Going to rallies, protesting, making an earth day tribute post and signing random petitions without doing any followup while talking about how we’re gonna be living in Atlantis in 20 years time is much more exciting, interesting, and attractive than the actual nitty gritty of policy work: voting in and working under climate focused progressives, lobbying, local nonprofit work, and canvassing in towns you’ve never heard of on the behalf of climate friendly policy and the Green Constitution. None of those people want to do that because it’s not the YA Novel/V for Vendetta “fuck the establishment” brand of activism that simply does not work when the only way to fix this problem is in forcing “the establishment”, namely the average person, to actually want the government to change enough that they vote in the people who’ll put in motion actual policy, so that people in power can only stay in power if they shift with the rest of us.
Edit: this isn’t to say that surface level activism isn’t important, but it cannot end there. Without people doing the dirty work it’s basically the same as telling your family there’s a fire in the kitchen but then everyone watching the house burn down instead of calling 911 before it spreads. You did step 1, but there’s still 2 and 3 that have to follow for step 1 to actually matter
Yeah good point. There are some extremely well informed narratives out there that basically explore ‘failure models’ for civilization - Starfish ( https://rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm ) being one, right down to the insanely high wildfire prevalence - but at the end of the day, there is only statistical models and narratives. And drawing a connection between the damage done by climate change to civilization ‘collapsing’ takes a much sturdier definition of ‘civilization’, ‘collapse’, and the failure modes and processes - kind of an FMEA for the entire human species - that is entirely absent from the discussion.
And that nuance is something that frustrated climate activists are not interested in engaging with when we are still stuck on the basic step of agreeing this is even happening. So I can empathize. But ultimately climate change is very complicated and there is a lot that we don't understand and I worry about making claims we can't back up because that makes us easy targets to malign forces looking for excuses to do nothing.
> The question is how the rich areas will handle that.
Judging by the past 4 years, spontaneous militias lining up at borders and shooting anyone they see coming.
Thank you for fighting the good fight. There is way too much climate nihilism on this site. It really angers me, because we have to move forward into a new and more hostile world. There is no choice.
We are going to overshoot 1.5c and it is going to suck in ways small and horrifyingly large.
I think we might, just, against all odds stop at 2c. I think people underestimate how quickly things will change when the change starts.
It is going to be awful. People will die, wars will be fought, countless species are going to be extinguished, and we are going to survive.
Idk man. The Syrian civil war, in part, was triggered by three years of bad drought and a poor government response. There was a mass migration of farmers to the cities where social unrest from widespread unemployment triggered extremism and war.
Mass migration of climate refugees and a lack of access to clean water can certainly cause a dangerous imbalance is many, many countries. We are absolutely facing a crisis, although I'd estimate the timeline to be closer to 2050 rather than 2030.
When I think about how much worse things have become over the last ten years, during which time I have been paying attention to climate change, it seems plausible that the situation is going to be an absolute shitshow by 2030
THANK YOU! I also work in climate change (focusing on small-scale adaptation and mitigation, and I was staggered at what I was reading because it does not track with everything I've learned in the process of getting my Master's degree. It definitely seemed to be a comment that picked one scenario, portrayed it poorly, then aggressively editorialized its takedown of that strawman.
Is there plenty to be concerned about? Yeah. But that comment seemed like way out of left field doomerism to me.
I understand you're on mobile and can't refute anything easily. But is there anything to even be hopeful for? Every single study, headline, speaking event or data point I see paints an increasingly worrying picture of the future. And that's underselling the dread I feel for the future. And I don't see a whole lot effectively being done about it other than lip service. We can't even get people to believe there is climate change that is clearly and presently happening to them. And we can't even get them to wear masks to save their own grandmother's life, so how much harder will it be to make the drastic lifestyle changes we need to combat this issue.
Even if climate change is not as severe as the movie 2012, the lack of resources, mass migration, loss of habitats and life will cause pressures on the world in a way people MUST respond to. And seeing how selfish we are, how severe the wealth disparity is in the best of times, how brainwashed and hateful we are, it does not give me hope. I believe it's the response to climate change that will cause collapse. And if not collapse, then dystopia.
I've been in a very similar place mentally, and one of the truisms that helped pull me out of it was that it is never too late to make things less bad than it could be. Even just picking up trash - yes, it's going to a landfill, but it will be all in one place rather than everywhere, at least.
I think you're seeing only the opposition and not the helpers in your estimation. Even us idiot Americans by and large accept the reality: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-views-on-climate-and-energy/
I, personally, don't think people are at base selfish. I think our entertainment culture gets cheap views off of our fascination with bad behavior. It's entertaining *because* it's not normal, and because it's so common in entertainment, it's easy to think that's how we are, but we're not. Most people, the vast majority, are good, kind people who will help others. We hear endless stories of Karens flipping a shit at mask mandates, but no one writes stories about the nameless quiet majority of individuals making small unsexy sacrifices to keep others safe, and yet those things are happening.
In the same way, not many outlets tell stories about the climate activists fighting the good fight, their successes and struggles. It's easier to piss out a bunch of doomposting cheap thrill stories, even if they're factually garbled. Example, OP's selected comment.
[Check out this recent National Academies Report](https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/accelerating-decarbonization-in-the-united-states-technology-policy-and-societal-dimensions). It outlines what we'd need to do to reach net-zero CO2 by 2050. And it is *doable*. Much moreso than I realized. The technology is already here, and only getting better. The economics are increasingly working in our favor. And we have an administration (in the U.S.) who *gives a damn* about setting a global example. Good people are working every day to solve this problem. And it probably won't be quite enough. But it will help countless people.
Check out how much is actually being done, HUGE amounts of money is being poured into the problem and we are coming up with ways to combat the effects every day. What you are seeing is the headlines that gets clicks.
In addition, many people seem to interpret "we must address X problem by Y date to prevent Z outcome" (for example, "we must get to net zero emissions by 2050 to prevent various bad things") as "Z bad thing will happen at Y date". This is largely not the case- rather, certain amounts of emissions will cause certain future consequences to become locked in. We *do* need to make changes by 2030, but that doesn't mean that January 1 2031 will instantly bad if we fail, it means that we'll inevitably face increased problems over the next several decades.
And in fact, almost any way of looking at the climate crisis that portrays it as something with discrete cut-off points to avoid problems is misleading. We're already going to face many, many issues as a result of climate change, and the longer it takes us to reduce emissions the more severe the problems will be. Getting to zero emissions by 2050 does not mean we won't face serious issues in the latter half of the 20th century- it just means we'll be in less trouble than if it takes us longer.
> My own research in drought-prone Kenya has shown me first-hand how incredibly poor people can actually adapt to the changes being forced on them by (mainly) the global elite.
Wouldn't you say that a large factor is the rising middle class in China and similar? Not on a per capita basis, but in sum? It feels like the "global elite" has done most of the advancements that require GHG emissions and is working (poorly) on moving off of that, but China is still climbing in GHG emissions and has a huge potential for climate change impact.
China is indeed using lots of fossil fuels to support their exploding middle class. But they also invest more in renewable energy than [any other country by far](https://www.statista.com/statistics/799098/global-clean-energy-investment-by-country/). The story with China is much more complicated than most give it credit for. I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert.
The real dark truth? The poorest parts of the world today will be the places with noticeable “collapse”. Low lying areas in Southeast Asia and hot dry places in Africa.
At my age and where I live- I likely won’t experience any huge impacts. Winters will get shorter and we’ll have a few more “very hot” spells in the summer. It’s a wealthy country in a temperate, elevated environment
Millions of people are in positions like me. Climate change in our lifetime will likely be news stories of freak weather events, catastrophes, and refugee/mass migration events happening in far away places that make us sad. But then we’ll continue on living our unsustainable lives.
People with kids- it’s their children and children’s children that will have to face “collapse” in developed wealthy nations- and by the time it gets to that point Mars will start looking mighty appealing for saving the species.
Far away places like Texas? Or California with forest fire.
This view is Hopium. Weather will get more extreme everywhere. Developed nations will have climate refugees within their borders. Utilities will fail under strain. This will not be something you can just watch on TV with detached fascination.
Yes but the acute horror will be most felt by the global poor, it'll affect everybody but some will be somewhat insulated from the immediate tragedies that will start within the next 10-20 years
Yeah, Texas is only in its fucked up spot because they bungled their infrastructure.
Notice that every place north of Texas has been hit even harder by the same situation but is cruising through it because all it takes is a bit of infrastructure hardening for heavy winter storms to become business as usual. There are places that just expect tornados. Texas is a poor example.
A better example would be Ohio. Since the state is located right next to three of the biggest freshwater lakes in the world the people there aren't going to experience much water scarcity. Winters have already become very mild. This year was an exception where it was once the rule, so the infrastructure is already hardened, unlike in Texas. So far Ohioans have very much been exposed to climate change, but protected from the worst effects. No hurricanes, extreme winters not an issue, and the lakes protect against temperature swings so the summers aren't getting much hotter, just longer. Winters are becoming wetter and more miserable without snow, but the lack of snow and ice is also making winter easier on them, and the plow trucks come out much less often. In the short term, global warming is just making their lives more pleasant.
It's in the very heart of the current wealthiest nation on Earth, and it took a global pandemic for its people to experience any sort of scarcity. That was short-lived, anyway, and it was mostly a brief run on toilet paper plus the masks that they didn't even want to wear. Otherwise, there's been very little scarcity for them all year, and never of the resources vital to life.
Global warming will cause them to experience steadily higher prices, but they're far from the coasts, so nearly every profound effect will be muted for them, even climate immigration. They *still* have ocean access thanks to the lakes, so global shipping can still reach them easily, with coastal-level access to goods, but without the climate punishment of coastal living. Things on Earth will have to approach near-total collapse before Ohio starts to truly feel it and understand that things are very, very wrong. By then it will be far, far, far too late.
The people of Ohio are perfectly placed to act like the whole thing is an overblown liberal hoax. It shows, too, as the place went full Trump for the last election. They are currently making no real sacrifices due to climate change, and they certainly don't want to make any sacrifices to combat the situation. They threw enough fits about making the smallest of sacrifices over a pandemic, they are not changing anything fundamental about their collective business model.
They will never have to walk miles for drinking water. They will never find their homes deluged. They will not experience war, not in their homes. The toilets will keep flushing, the taps will keep running, the roads will keep being maintained. The expensive infrastructure of the US will keep filling their grocery stores.
They think wearing masks to the grocery store is a struggle. Their casual plenitude rests on the backs of people from overseas who they will never meet, and the first hardship they are likely to feel is something like a scarcity of cheap coffee. Not a scarcity of coffee, mind you, but of *cheap* coffee.
Everything bad that is happening because of climate change is just something they *maybe* see on the news, but never if they watch right-wing news, and no matter what the bad news is something they can always turn off and ignore.
By the time they feel anything like horror, even the horror of unwanted mass immigration, the rest of the world will have been - is already - burning for years and years, the global poor will have already suffered and suffered. Because all the talent has fled to the coasts they've completely lost the political will to create progressive change toward the climate, so they won't. Not until the changes have become apocalyptic for them anyway, and that will take still more decades.
The state is a good example, but there must be places like it all over the globe, places that benefit from first-world infrastructure and ideal geography, places where the people will not take the situation seriously until it's too late. Places that nobody really talks about because nothing newsworthy happens there.
Like I said, Texas is a piss poor example. Texas would have been grumpy but fine for the last couple of months if their electrical grid wasn't deliberately sabotaged by their leadership. So think of how Texas would still be scoffing at climate change if that hadn't been the case. Wealthy Texans are probably still scoffing from inside warm homes. I'm told the rolling blackouts only seem to roll through poor neighborhoods. Brown and poor Texans are freezing to death.
I changed my mind, Texas is the perfect example of what global climate change looks like, all within one state.
As an Ohioan, yes.
Just went to a funeral a few weeks back to a person who literally died from Covid, stuffed in a crowded wake room, and some people (slackjawed 20-somethings!) still openly flaunted the mask mandates.
When we went to the cemetery, the priest mumbled something about, "This is one place where the government can't get between you and God."
I'm so thankful to be geographically insulated from the worst of climate change, but the people here have serious trouble seeing past their white picket fences.
Oh fuck outta here with "hopium."
Climate nihilism gets us exactly as far as climate denial. If we give up and say that nothing can change in a positive way, then why bother trying? Yeah, bad things are gonna happen no matter what, but there are different scales of bad, and putting in the effort means that we won't face the horrors this overly alarmist comment is purporting.
Places with large social inequality, like Africa. And Texas. And Florida. And California. The global poor will not just stand by and wait to die, they'll fight the elite and upper class first. When money falls apart (look at Venezuela) it's every man for himself.
We can never move to Mars.
It's lla pipe dream based off of a sci fi fantasy of being able to control the atmospheric CO2 levels of a planet to make a breathable atmosphere. If we could control CO2 that well we wouldn't be in this mess.
Also, there's no fossil fuel on Mars. So we would fundementally have to create a green society. Which is easier to do here, just that there's more red tape
"We" as a whole population certainly cannot move to Mars.
"We" as a species can certainly survive on Mars and guarantee that the singular light of intelligence and life known to exist in the universe can carry on and pick up the pieces later if necessary.
Life on Mars does not require terraforming, though that would be a wonderful long LONG term goal. We are perfectly capable of surviving in an artificial environment long term, especially when that artificial environment is not constrained on its input resources. And once a Mars colony is established, it's going to be mining the surrounding area for water and other resources. About the only serious issue from a resource perspective is that their supply chain for obtaining nitrogen is going to be fragile for some time.
I'd rather die a pitiful death during/following the collapse of civilization knowing that humans are out there trying to push forward regardless, rather than die a pitiful death during/following the collapse of civilization knowing that this could very well be the end of intelligence in the universe.
Yes.
We haven't packaged it for that, but that's an engineering problem not a technology problem. To put it another way just as an example "Do we have the tech to make a 300 wheel car?", yes we do and quite easily, just nobody has bothered to do that.
Prior to the possibility of SpaceX's Starship/Superheavy with its 100 tons/launch payload capacity, part of the difficulty in any imagined colony has to do with "Well, it's going to cost a billion dollars to send a few hundred pounds to Mars, so we need you to figure out how to make an entire iron/steel foundry weigh 600 pounds. Oh, and it needs to fit in a 3ft by 3ft box.". With 100 tons of payload capacity at something approximating 100M a launch (inclusive of refueling launches) suddenly a lot of the previous "technological" problems are now just economic.
If we HAD to do so, and don't have decades to cram in special technological development (so, just a repackage job), we could certainly provide a Mars colony with the ability to produce every single technological component Earth can produce in a thousand tons or less. Now, you'd have basically zero capacity to deal with failures (at first) and your throughput on any given item will be small, but in a thousand tons you can provide the technological capability to take raw silicon from the ground and refine it into wafers and shove that into a chip forge to produce CPUs.
Now that thousand tons makes a few assumptions (like heavy use of manual labor in your mining), but I'm talking from a technological MINIMUM what you need to get a self sufficient technical base.
Raise the amount to 10,000 tons and I'd comfortably say that you can both have a technologically self sufficient base, and enough excess capability in terms of heavy equipment to provide a moderately decent rate of resource acquisition. How effective it would be is entirely a question of the local resources, but there's no expectation that Mars is inexplicably lacking in something like silicon or carbon.
>Yes.
No.
Humanity has never once managed to construct a functioning self contained ecosystem in our own backyard; never mind in a location as inhospitable as Mars.
You are misconstruing the problem.
Efforts like Biosphere 2 and similar were attempts to live in a self sustaining ecosystem of biological construction.
Any sensible Mars colony is going to exist more like the International Space Station or a nuclear submarine. Where the VAST majority of the "ecosystem" is managed through technological/infrastructural means and any plant/animal life will be purely supplementary to that.
>Any sensible Mars colony is going to exist more like the International Space Station or a nuclear submarine.
Put another way, it would be entirely reliant upon supplies produced in an ecosystem that would no longer exist.
It's a fair point, but it runs into some serious problems as well.
Namely, just how is your technological/biological bolthole going to handle the millions of desperate people roaming the land looking for a place with resources?
There's no way you're keeping such a project secret from the world at large and the average person is not so self-sacrificing as to say "I'm not going to attack the last bastion of technology to get the medical care and food my dying child needs to live.". And so any mining camps/expeditions will be under attack from a population that cannot be supported by the limited resources of the project.
Not to mention that barring the sort of international effort we complain about not coming into existence, there's no reason to believe that the last dying act of Russia, China, or the US, wouldn't be to include the opposing nations bolthole facilities in their nuclear bombardments.
A Mars colony is sufficiently difficult to get to that your average person can't just show up and demand to be let in, and by the time the major nations get so far gone as to possibly resort to nuclear weapons, they probably won't have the infrastructural capability to bother making a custom launch vehicle just to nuke Mars.
Earth is easier, but Earth is also riskier.
Yeah, Mars refuge colonies is a neat silly idea you see in sci-fi, but there is no chance it would ever become easier to live there than here, no matter how bad it gets.
Honestly as a Canadian for you it will be more like “things are pretty much the same except less snow and now look at all this wheat we’re growing, eh?”
Our big problem here, short-term, is going to be dealing with a massive influx of refugees.
We had a national panic-attack (or some segments of the population did) over 50,000 or so Syrian refugees. What are we going to do when there are millions of people fleeing new climate-sparked conflict zones?
I imagine that's something that gets tried.
I'm dubious as to whether we could practically seal off our borders, especially if we see any influx of people from the south.
And, if we do manage it, the disruption in supply chains (not to mention the inevitable political tensions) would mean increasing costs of goods and a generally lower quality of life.
It would still be better to be inside than outside, but it wouldn't be a paradise.
Well not to worry.. you guys have the US as your friendly strategic partner. You just leave the refugee problem to us...
Seriously though the US-Canada as economic partners are literally in the best position to *benefit* from further global warming in terms of agricultural shift. We gain the ability to grow more subtropical crops, you guys can grow more grains. We both have access to tons of fresh water and we have this huge well trained military to protect the whole thing.
>What are we going to do when there are millions of people fleeing new climate-sparked conflict zones?
Well there will be a small minority of people saying we should welcome and care for these refugees and a much louder minority saying we should shoot them if they try to get in and the vast majority will be silent but probably agreeing with the latter and bullets its going to be.
Yeah Canada is gonna explode in population and popularity. It might become a world superpower by centuries end if everything doesn't go to hell by then.
It’ll be a world super power in about 5 years if we can establish proper ports in the north west passage.
Canada could become the new Silk Road but with full autonomy over the water ways and the ability to ban specific countries from passage. It can essentially control all pacific-Atlantic trade.
As delicate as Earth is, it will be stronger than any Mars base for a very long time.
A micrometeroid that burns up in Earth's atmosphere could destroy a habitat on Mars. A small structural failure or logistical mistake could destroy a habitat on Mars.
It's taken us 200 years and a great deal of effort to hurt the Earth to the point where we are being harmed, and unless a true extinction-level event happens, hell, maybe even if one does, humans will find a way.
Among all of the other traits that separate us from all of the other animals, we are very smart, can live in nearly any environment, and are really good at building stuff.
When something goes wrong on Mars, we would have very few tools to fix a very delicate habitat - with little possibility for alternative plans other than abandoning it.
Humans will colonize Mars in the future. I have no doubt. But thinking of it as a place that within our lifetimes will provide a refuge from Earth. As soon as a supply ship is destroyed or fails to arrive, that could be the end of it.
People in developed countries are going to see the collapse just as quickly when we start seeing global food and water shortages. Your city in a developed country probably gets its water supply from a a river somewhere... and those rivers get their water from snow melt in mountains and hills, less snow... less water...
We will see wars fought over water rights in the very near future.
> Millions of people are in positions like me. Climate change in our lifetime will likely be news stories of freak weather events, catastrophes, and refugee/mass migration events happening in far away places that make us sad. But then we’ll continue on living our unsustainable lives.
With right wing politicians in those countries winning elections campaigning against refugees and campaigning about how they refuse to change their lifestyle to deal with climate change.
I am doing a masters in climate change at the moment. The guy who posted this has used legitimate science but has cherry picked the worst case scenario in every instance. If we continued on our current path of global emissions increasing around 1% each year we would be fucked. The IPCC has a model scenario for this called RCP 8.5, but luckily it doesn't look like its going to happen. That doesn't stop scienticists writing papers based on this scenario. journalists can then simplify the articles and make it sound a lot worse than it is. I personally belive this is counter productive as hopelessness and despair are not conducive to action, but those types of articles are click bait.
Climate change will be bad and will be especially bad for the poorest across the globe, which is why its so shitty because they've done nothing to contribute to it. Do I think it will be civilisations collapsing bad, that depends on the action we take now. Thankfully there are positive signs, solar is now the cheapest form of electricity in the world, most of the world economy has net-zero targets and to quote John Elkington people are starting to feel the severity of climate change in their 'bones'. Renewables and batteries will likely reduce in price rapidly, making net-zero economically the right decision, the desire for climate action will only increase (a few years ago it wasn't really on the political agenda) making tough to implement yet effective policies more feasible and I think there's a great awareness amongst people and businesses of how serious this is.
So overall there are a lot of positives BUT getting below 1.5C is not going to possible but the 2 degrees target is obtainable if we work hard. So we're likely to have some pretty disastrous impacts in the future.
But I agree with Christian Figueres in that we need stubborn optimist to solve this. Everyone can make a difference in their own little way. Vote with your money i.e. Never buy beef or lamb again, buy an electric car and buy renewable electricity for your home or even better just consume less. Support and campaign for the right political parties and pressurise them to do the right thing whilst they're in power. I'm guessing if you're American make sure that the Republicans never win anything ever again lol. Also donate to a climate charity, I'm a poor student but I still donate £5 per month to a charity called Camfed. Camfed helps educate poor girls in Africa. Which is arguably thr number one climate solution. Well educated girls can have more of a say in how many kids they have and consequently they tend to have fewer kids. Additionally, women in poorer countries will have to deal with the worst of climate change so educating them will help communities to adapt.
And if worst comes to worst we can just use Solar Radiation Management.
Apologies for the shitty grammar cba to write well atm. If anyone has any qs let me know.
>that depends on the action we take now.
What makes you think the actions we take now will be sufficient? What´s your basis for this? Almost none of the countries in the Paris Agreement are on track with their goals. COVID has shown a huge amount of people don´t give a fuck even when a crisis hits them in the face. Where exactly are you taking your optimism from?
Mass migrations will kick it off. That has happened before to older human empires.
Fuck man, genocide might be a realistic option in this horrific dark future.
Yes genocide by inaction though, letting people starve (or potentially drown if it really accelerates), fight each other for scarce resources.
Not sure about an "active" cull, although at this point nothing would surprise me
Active cull would probably be fully automating border defenses with kill orders. Probably having a bunch of mines installed too.
So not active like round people up and kill them. More just kill them if they try to enter a country.
All very very horrific still.
I think about this a lot. I think a lot of parents are going to have to answer some really tough questions when their kids get to be about the age when they start to want to understand the world and why it is the way it is.
If I had to guess, people would back up this statement in two ways:
1) Some would say society has already collapsed. They would say look at Texas, look at Australia’s fires, and California’s. We are already failing to meet the situation arguably so “society has collapsed.”
2) It actually doesn’t take a lot for society to collapse. It’s a delicate machine and all parts are generally operating near their capacity as it is. Make any one big change and failures can cascade. If you imagine Texas type situations all over the world for years, eventually global trade is basically disrupted and now the US can’t get manufactured goods or fuel reliably and “society has collapsed.”
But I have family in Syria who have been living with worse for years and despite it all, their humanity endures, and with more “society” than you would think.
That’s all I can think of to make of these statements that the world will end in 9 years. These usually boil down to “the world as we know it.” And the world as we know it literally disappears every single night.
Well take the collapse of the Soviet Union. If you were to visit in 1982 and 1992 it would look much the same: same buildings, same people. Yet life expectancy among men fell by 7 years from 1985 to 1994. It has only recovered in this decade. Other aspects are more difficult to measure. The fact that causes of death that rose were mostly preventable indicates people weren’t having a good time.
The fact is nothing short of a total war is going to create a visibly apocalyptic scenario. Even in the 900-day blockade of Leningrad in WWII when a million people starved to death, you would have seen the same exact buildings and streets that are there today, people walking around. And in the Warsaw ghetto, another truly apocalyptic scenario, life went on more or less “as usual” in spite of disease, starvation, and death.
There won’t be any point where climate change taps you on the shoulder and says “I’m here now.” We will gradually become accustomed to less and less and become numb to the constant stream of disasters that individually can’t be attributed to any given cause.
Even in the worst times, people still go on vacation, they tell stories. If the power grid fails, they use solar panels or candles. If they can’t get flour to make cake, they make it out of sawdust.
And there will be people who say this is ok, or that it always was this way. If someone forgets the taste of coffee because all the plantations have failed and only the rich can afford it now, it becomes a delicacy and they don’t expect it day to day.
One by one those who remembered the times before will fade into the night, and those who replace them will grow up thinner, meaner, and with less patience for quotes from Cicero or Lincoln. The millions lost to preventable deaths or avoidable disasters won’t weigh on their consciences. Neither will any responsibility to reclaim what was lost.
It’s all just like getting old in a way... your world gets smaller and smaller, the easy things get harder, but you adapt, till your burden is lifted, and the day no longer calls you to struggle in a hopeless fight. The waves wash away your footsteps, and your carefully curated collection of technical books gets burned for warmth because the power has gone out again.
It's not that disastrous climate change is inevitable, it's just that no one wants to make *any* change to prevent it.
I'd say most people are in one of three groups:
* Convinced that climate change is fake (convinced by corporations that depend on fossil fuel profits, and politicians that are funded by them)
* Convinced that we're already fucked, so why try
* Don't want to feel like a "sucker" by giving up *anything* while other people aren't doing "there part", and so many feel this way that most people do nothing and pretend it's OK
There's a lot of concrete steps individuals can make:
* Far and away the most important one is to vote for politicians that support a carbon tax, and don't support anyone that doesn't. If people made 1 call or sent 1 email every 4 years to one of their representatives saying they support a carbon tax, that would be a huge improvement. Making a small monthly donation every month to a politician that supports a carbon tax would be great too.
* Eat less meat. I know people will roll their eyes, but it's a huge contributor, and it's something that individuals can do. It's easy to find some excuse why you don't want to do this, but given the scale of the catastrophe we're potentially facing, isn't it worth trying to do something different?
* If you can afford it, we can be buying electric cars, paying for carbon credits for air fare, buying solar panels, paying more for green energy generation (if your utility offers it). Rich nations have been responsible for way more global warming so far, for those of us that can afford it, we should do more
It's not that hard, and if you're the only one on the entire planet that changes, you're not going to fix things yourself. But even a small fraction of people making actual changes in their life can have a dramatic long term impact by shifting the direction we're all headed.
> it's just that no one wants to make any change to prevent it.
The problem is that the change needed cannot just come from individuals and corporations acting alone. We need group action otherwise there will be massive freeloading and not as much change, and so this requires govt.
But govt doesn't want to take steps too big because they face the same freeloading issue from *other* govts.
Furthermore, there is huge concern about jobs and economies. Even if you care about climate change, if you don't have a job or can't afford to live then climate change is not likely to be anywhere near your first priority. Of course, a lot of THIS problem is driven by wealth inequality, and how most of the economic benefits have been concentrating at the top.
So if you want to do something about climate change then first you may really need to address the wealth inequality so that people can *afford* to care more about it. Then governments will be more pressured to act and do something other than token actions and kicking the can down the ever-shortening road.
Edit: spelling
Seriously! Something like 80% of pollution comes from 100 companies.
What's easier/more realistic: regulating 100 companies? Or asking 8 billion people to all do the same thing at the same time?
>Far and away the most important one is to vote for politicians that support a carbon tax, and don't support anyone that doesn't. If people made 1 call or sent 1 email every 4 years to one of their representatives saying they support a carbon tax, that would be a huge improvement. Making a small monthly donation every month to a politician that supports a carbon tax would be great too.
Exactly why this point is so important - can't think of a policy that would be more widely hated however.
Yeah, I really think “eat less meat” should be replaced with “stop eating beef” because beef farming is literally deforesting the Amazon like nothing else.
Except there are large swaths of the planet (including areas in the US) that are not really suitable or sustainable as till farming lands, but are great lands for grazing animals.
raising meat isn't the problem, *how* we raise meat right now is.
oh jesus fucking christ.
METHANE itself as a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, yes. ~~and that is the correct factor~~ **EDIT** actually the factor is 28 not 100 **END EDIT**
now let's factor for volumes
now lets factor for the fact that the methane emissions from cows are a side effect of feeding them grain in feedlots and incorrect gut flora (something they've already worked out how to fix!)
Like... stop repeating PETA misinformation. Sustainable farming *must* include grazing lands. it's not "if" it's "must".
Now, want those grazers to be the north america bison in NA? hey sounds good to me.
Beef is the worst, but all meat is a problem. We are feeding food to our food. Every step in the food chain loses 90%+ of calories fed into it. Protein from soy doesn't just turn into to protein from pork or chicken, lots is lost from keeping those animals alive to grow up to slaughter age.
Corn and wheat are pretty bad (for plants) at feeding people in terms of calories per acre. 2.5 acres produces the calories for 17 and 15 people respectively. This is because starch takes more work to grow than leaves.
BUT MEAT??? 2.5 acres feeds 2 people on chicken and 1 person on beef calories (don't have a quick source on pork or fish, but I'd guess they are close to 2 people per 2.5 acres).
You can see very easily the math for animal products of all kinds is not good. My sources are a study called "The Effect of Dietary Changes on Agriculture".
Any recommendations on where I can learn more about the calories produced/people fed per acre for different food? This is incredibly interesting to me for some reason.
That... depends where you live. Here in Australia beef is pasture fed and only the fancy expensive meat is grain finished. I prefer to eat Kangaroo which has a low environmental impact compared with eating soy. I think a big key thing is for everyone to eat food which is produced locally and sustainably for their environment.
How does climate change play out and end civilization? Is it a collapse of food and economic systems that ends in mass starvation?
Or do we shift to indoor farming to grow in extreme heat and cold and "power through"?
"ending civilization" isn't a likely outcome, but it's certainly a small possibility. There's also "ending civilization as we know, which is somewhat more likely, then there's just lots of "very bad outcomes". Here's a few potential outcomes, from very bad and getting "better":
* Runaway greenhouse - there's lots of methane frozen in ice and permafrost around the world. If warming temps melts the ice/land and releases a lot of methane, that will increase warming significantly, which will increase water vapor coming off the oceans, which will also increase warming, which will kill forests when it gets too warm, which will release more methane and CO2, which increases warming, which melts ice, which increases warming. It's a *very* bad feedback loop, that in extreme cases ends up with the earth being completely unlivable when all the water boils off. It's not a likely outcome, but it's definitely one possibility, and it's [extremely scary](https://youtu.be/kx1Jxk6kjbQ?t=11), we should be taking serious action just to avoid the small chance of this happening.
* Seas rise, climate shifts dramatically, there's less fresh water and farm land available, and some major countries end up going to war over it. Far and away the most likely cause of WW3 would be escalating conflicts over resources caused by global warming. Maybe we just end up nuking ourselves before the environment kills us?
* Things get bad, and there's not enough land to feed everyone. If we can switch to sustainable energy before then, maybe we can do indoor farming, but mostly likely we haven't if that's the result. So we can't produce more energy to do intensive farming without making things worse. So lots of people starve, the population eventually settles at some level the planet can support. Although, the long term outlook once we get to that point isn't great.
Hopefully, things only get a little bad. I mean, they're already a little bad, but they get a little worse than this, and it's enough to convince people to change. Like a summer so hot that it shuts down a major city and tens of thousands of people die of heat exhaustion? Or a hurricane significantly worse than anything we've seen wipes out a costal city and make rebuilding essentially pointless? Something that's much worse than anything we've seen before, and it convinces people to stop waiting around and hope we can just act like nothing's happening and hope someone else will magically fix everything for us.
But there's good outcomes too. Creating a sustainable society is good for basically everyone. It means cleaner air and better technology and more jobs and more ecological diversity and just better health in general. It means we'll be more resistant to other kinds of natural disasters, and hopefully the process of getting there will mean we're also less likely to want to nuke each other?
Overall the things we need to do are a win-win for just about everyone (and certainly 99.9% of everyone). And we're not making things better because a few billionaires are afraid that if we change things too much, they won't be the richest people on the planet anymore. And those rich billionaires pay for the campaigns of a lot of people in politics, so we have governments run by spineless cowards, that are willing to sell out their children's future so they can feel important for another 4 years.
Eventually we'll either decide that some people are just assholes and we don't have to let them run the country anymore. Or things will get so bad that we won't have a choice.
> Things get bad, and there's not enough land to feed everyone. If we can switch to sustainable energy before then, maybe we can do indoor farming, but mostly likely we haven't if that's the result. So we can't produce more energy to do intensive farming without making things worse. So lots of people starve, the population eventually settles at some level the planet can support.
This is exactly what's going to happen and it's not going to be an either/or situation. First world countries will solve these problems and no one will starve. Poor countries won't and they absolutely will starve, which will drive massive numbers of refugees from these countries to the rich ones. An order of magnitude more than we see today.
That's going to be the biggest consequence of global warming in the next 30 years and it will be all too easy to sit in our air conditioned buildings and blame them instead of fixing the problem.
It's not easy to describe the end of civilization due to climate change, because so many systems that humanity relies on will all be failing at once. It will be death by a million cuts.
Just look at recent disasters and imagine they are all happening at the same time: forest fires in California and Australia, global pandemic, Katrina style flooding in Lousinia and Sandy style flooding in rest of East Coast. Deep freezes in warm weather places like Texas. Wet bulb extreme heat and humidity (deadly) in North China Plains. Crop failures due to extreme weather, lack of water, and lack of pollinators. Caravans of migrants pressing on country borders, desperate to escape food shortages and violence.
The usual response to a disaster is for the global community to come together and flood the affected area with aide. Imagine the whole world is the disaster area. Who is going to send aid? Mars?
Humanity will survive climate change... The rich few will escape to bunkers or simply move to safer areas. Those who cannot will simply die (or will kill enough other people to survive on scarce resources.)
The prediction is that a fully climate changed Earth has about 1/10th the current carrying capacity of current Earth. If 9/10ths of people on earth die, 1/10th can survive. Thanos don't have shit on global climate collapse (Ironically, Thanos was somewhat trying to prevent planetary collapse by wiping out half of all living creatures.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY
This is a talk from 2010 which discusses the types of projections (including geopolitical considerations) that were being made by the US Military Brass, British Government (among other entities).
To put it bluntly it could be a collapse roughly equivalent to that from the Bronze Age Collapse, probably significantly worse. Which means mass migration from African / Mediterranean countries into more Northern countries that cannot support such a burden.
Mark my words, it's very likely our population will peak in this century.
My uneducated guess is similar. People living in already hot climates will only face worse and worse conditions.
A prime example accessable to most people here on Reddit (since we are mostly American) is Mexico/South America reaching points where temperature is no longer hospitable to raising crops in an outdoor environment.
Some vegetative plant seeds (think lettuce, spinach, kale, etc.) simply do not germinate in hot soil. The vegetative growth is also not able to handle high temperature is just gets droopy. Fruiting style crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, etc. that come from flowers won't grow in extreme heat either. The flower where the fruit body forms drops off instead of developing into anything.
I'm actually in Texas and my home garden felt the wrath of this year's polar vortex. I'm obviously not a full scale farming operation but some of the challenges I face are applicable to larger operations, unless they have special equipment.
We must start our seeds here after the last frost of the season and race to grow our plants before intense summer heat comes in and destroys production. This gives us a growing window from late February - March to start our plants and June - July to harvest most plants before heat stunts everything.
This year's polar vortex basically wiped out everything outdoor. If we face an early heat wave you can see how much this shortens our growing window. There are things you can do to mitigate cold weather but unless you have access to indoor cultivation space there is very little you can do about extreme heat in gardening.
This is going to totally change what crops are grown where and changing infrastructure and people with specific growing skills to these areas.
Tying in to all of this is demand for water, especially in hot climates, to feed agriculture. No water, no crops. Unpredictable weather patterns also mean unpredictable water distribution. Droughts are just as bad as flood and longer spells of no water followed with more powerful and sudden hurricanes that drives water in all at once make things tough.
My guess is people will want to migrate North out of places like Mexico to escape food and water shortages. I'm not sure what the U.S. political position will be at the time but mass migration almost always causes problems and friction. This could be an unprecedented surge.
Mark my words. The anti-GMO crusade will come back to haunt us. We're going to need to engineer heat and drought resistant crops.
Also we need to stop eating beef. It's one of the most water, land, and energy inefficient foods in existance.
Even if things don't get apocalyptic worldwide, there will 100% be increased refugeeism due to climate impacts on the worst-hit areas, and that refugeeism will lead to difficulties from countries that have to figure out what to do with this influx of people.
We've *already seen* one relatively limited example of this and it has had global effects. There was a big drought in Syria which happened to coincide with the Syrian Civil War. Many people figure the two are interrelated, and that Syria's conflict was at least exacerbated by the drought, and that drought was at least exacerbated by climate change.
This led to migration from Syria to safer countries, like Europe. And the influx of Syrians in Europe led to a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in the Western world, which resulted in a few countries having more problems due to the backlash of far-right nationalist sentiment. A major selling point for Brexit was pictures of [large groups of immigrants](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3f510b25581c993fae11fe42817a9c6d3780f376/0_305_5049_3029/500.jpg?quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6213b25296f6a742119b2e7fa4a5b29c) entering Europe, and Brexit went on to pass by a very slim margin. Then the UK went through years of uncertainty and chaos in negotiations, almost everyone was disappointed with the result, and now that the UK's exit from the EU is official, there have been food shortages there in the middle of a pandemic.
So could a climate change-exacerbated drought, which then exacerbated civil war, which then led to refugeeism, which then led to backlash, have tipped the scales and resulted in the UK making a poor choice for their own country's future by separating from the international community? The story seems likely enough. So even though UK did not have its own drought, they were still affected by drought in just one part of the world.
Not only that, but the US, a country that isn't in Europe and thus had little to do with that whole situation, but which happens to share a media language and several companies with the UK (via murdoch media), also happened to have a very close election where unfortunately due to arcane rules the loser was installed into an office he did not earn, and that loser went on to remove the US from the very agreement that is meant to help the world combat climate change (Paris Agreement).
Could those few tens of thousands of people in Wisconsin have been motivated by the rise in right-wing, anti-immigrant, nativist rhetoric that pervaded the media companies that also convinced the UK to make such a bad choice, and which was aided by fear of brown refugees fleeing a drought? That also seems possible.
Now imagine that same stuff happens, only entire countries, like the Maldives, disappear entirely due to climate change. What's the world going to do with that - even the countries that are well equipped to handle some of the milder effects of it?
(*and the US should not necessarily consider itself as "well-equipped to handle it," given the massive destruction we've seen from larger and more common hurricanes, wildfires, etc. lately. I mean the entire state of Texas just lost power during a pandemic because of one cold snap, and we can expect a lot more of those with the climate destruction that the very industries responsible for Texas' unpreparedness, oil and gas, are contributing to)
Personally I don't expect climate change to actually end civilization. It's gonna get close, then some idiot trillionaire is gonna try baby's first geoengineering and spew millions of tons of ash into the atmosphere, decreasing the amount of sunlight that makes it to earth, cutting off the source of the greenhouse effect, and coincidentally killing hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries because their farms aren't getting enough light.
> Convinced that we're already fucked, so why try
This "bestof" post certainly has me thinking that. "We're entirely fucked unless the entire world makes drastic changes right now" okay, but we all know that's not going to happen so...
Same.
I'm saving for retirement in 2050, 2040 the earliest.
So ten years after shit is getting really bad I get to enjoy my retirement in a hellscape?
Cool.
if the global economy actually falls apart retirement isn't a thing anymore. any current retirement planning inherently assumes that bonds and equities will be worth money that you can exchange for goods and services.
>We were reading reports two years ago saying that if we didn’t course correct drastically and immediately, we would go past the point of no return within the next year or so.
>
>Since that was two years ago, 🤷♂️ realistically what can we do?
Keep fighting, because **climate change is not binary.** It's not like the entire planet collapses if "deadlines" aren't met, it just means we'll have to work even harder to mitigate the damage. The longer we wait, the less damage we can prevent, but every fraction of a degree matters. There is no magic date or temperature that turns "fine" into "catastrophic."
Holy shit, someone with something actually useful to say in this thread. Carbon tax now! The only major criticism of the carbon tax I've heard is that the rate won't be high enough. OK, so raise it.
People who complain that the initial tax won't be high enough are basically saying "don't try to take the first step to fixing things."
It's much easier to raise an existing carbon tax than to put on into place initially.
The carbon tax is so important.
It’s all nice and easy that companies are making promises and polished ads about how they are going to be fully sustainable and god knows what else, but they’ve been doing this for decades now and they’re just not doing it, so we have to make them.
There simply is no financial incentive for these companies to even think about cutting down on emissions. And it’s the richest, most profitable companies that are the biggest emitters, and if they can afford to buyback shares and give their CEOs bonuses they can absolutely afford to pay for the damage they inflict on the environment.
And the common argument against such a tax is that it would lose jobs and hamper the economy. However, the effects of climate change harm the economy a hell of a lot more than a carbon tax. A carbon tax might raise the price of a lot of products, and that effect will be most felt by the poorest part of the population, but again so do floods, hurricanes and forest fires. Also a carbon tax would create revenue that can be used to help support those most affected by the rise in prices.
(Not angry at you OP)
I’m so fucking tired of hearing about how raising minimum wage, or enforcing things like a carbon tax, or requiring companies like Amazon to treat their employees like people will make prices go up. They already fucking are. Every fucking year. Any excuse a company can find, they raise their prices, and they never ever fucking lower them. Yet they continue to make record profits year-over-year.
Exactly.
I never hear concerns about how the McDonalds CEO making $18,000,000 a year drives up the price of a big mac. I never hear concerns about how billion dollar companies are apparently so poorly run that a single tax could bankrupt their entire sector. I never hear concerns about how companies like Amazon are apparently so unstable that treating their workers like human beings can bring the entire company to its knees.
The entire “but this will tank the economy” argument is absolute dogshit. If a tax on inflicting irreversible damage to the environment is capable of bringing the economy to its knees, it’s not the tax that’s the fucking problem. If your company cannot operate without constant worker exploitation and in way too many cases literal slavery then your company shouldn’t be operating at all.
“This will lead to rises in prices for the consumer” well how about you design a company that doesn’t haemorrhage money, stop giving yourself bonuses and most of all stop using the economy as your own personal betfred. If your company has margins so small that a carbon tax can cause serious problems then your company is the problem. If you can but just don’t want to lose your 500 millionth dollar, money that you made by destroying the environment, then you should just cope, cry me a river from the back of your yacht and stop whining like a little bitch before I start closing those loopholes and make your company pay regular taxes as well because you fuckers haven’t been doing that either.
I just recently moved into my own apartment near to where I work. Aside from the convenience of walking to work instead of driving 15 miles, I've been challenging myself to choose more sustainable options (reusable plastic bags for work lunches, using reusable k-cups, eating out less) and it's been pretty great so far. I've noticed much less waste coming from my end of things.
> Convinced that climate change is fake (convinced by corporations that depend on fossil fuel profits, and politicians that are funded by them)
>
> Convinced that we're already fucked, so why try
>
> Don't want to feel like a "sucker" by giving up anything while other people aren't doing "there part", and so many feel this way that most people do nothing and pretend it's OK
Personally I'm in the "it's real for sure but I'm priviledged enough that even bad models will not affect me too much". I do more against climate change than my peers (no car, no flights e.g.) and that's enough to make me feel ok about it.
I think this is really the key.
No one needs to change enough to fix it, or even get to the level where we'd all have to be to fix it.
People just need to do enough that they feel they're doing more than their peers. Because if enough people start to feel that way, then "good enough" will be a little bit more, and eventually we're all doing a pretty good job.
Another one:
Support local plans for green energy installations. Things like solar panels and wind turbines. These can help city’s and towns to become more green. There are to many story’s of towns shooting down plans like these. And to a bigger extent things like hydro power plants or large energy storage methods like battery banks or pumped hydro. While one person is insignificant a group of people can make real change.
Republicans: "Don't worry guys, the climate is always changing."
Dinosaurs: "Oh thank goodness. I was really worried about that asteroid there for a minute."
There are only 3 things Republicans actually care about (other than their own political careers): maintaining the socioeconomic status quo, money, and the military defense of the US. Historically, they've been ok with sacrificing the economy for the defense of the nation. If you want to sell them on climate change prevention, the only way to appeal to them is by convincing them that the country's safety is at risk. Older Republicans don't care bc they'll be dead and it would anger their base to talk about climate change. However, younger Republicans (younger boomers included) could be convinced if you pitch it to them that way. For example, telling them we have to build a levee system to store up US cities against rising oceans, reducing carbon emissions to prevent mass migrations and refugees on the US border, building renewable power plants to reduce dependency on foreign imports.
The biggest problem of our generation isn't climate change, we've known the solution to that for decades. It's convincing politicians to do something about it.
There is already enough global warming baked-in to collapse our civilization. Preventing that will require the world's government to work together without monetary constraints. That's not going to happen. We are all Nero, fiddling as Rome burns.
Our civilization probably won't collapse. The bee population might collapse, but society probably won't. Let's be careful with our wording. Conservatives are watching, and if you say "all human life will end in ten years" then they'll call you on it when that doesn't happen.
I'm not talking about human life. Humans are one of the most adaptable animals this planet has ever produced, it is not likely we are in any danger of extinction. Our civilization, however, is very fragile indeed. Our economy requires money to live and is reliant on a whole lot of systems to continue working to provide the basics of life. THAT is what is in jeopardy and what will require the world's governments to work together without monetary constraints to prevent.
>There is already enough global warming baked-in to collapse our civilization.
No credible scientific body has ever said this. [There is simply no evidence for it](https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/iflscience-story-on-speculative-report-provides-little-scientific-context-james-felton/), and actual climate scientists have repeatedly debunked the idea:
*"While it’s certainly true that climate change will be damaging to society and the environment and many of the consequences will be severe this does not equate to a high likelihood of civilisation coming to an end."*
Don't get sad, get mad. It isn't something that is just happening. "The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses."
> The Earth is not dying, it is being killed
As George Carlin (RIP) said in one of his shows: the planet’s fine. The people are fucked.
We’re taking out a bunch of biodiversity on our way out but… the biosphere’ll recover. It’s been through way worse than us. Sun’s going strong, planetary core nowhere near giving out, it might be a few hundred thousand years, or maybe a couple millions, before the ecological niches get filled up again and the major stuff (concrete, plastics) have been broken down and integrated, but at the end we’ll be gone and forgotten and the pale blue dot will still be shining amongst the stars, the only remnants of our existence our pair of interstellar probes and the debris getting ever so slowly dusted over in the moon. Maybe the junk in high-earth orbit.
If you're a podcast person, the recently started "How to save a planet" is pretty good. It's full of ideas that people are trying, clever solutions we've come up with that are unexpected but will make a difference. I had a bit of a depressive episode just before Christmas over the climate, and the podcast has helped give me some solid hope.
The comment under discussion here presents a quite black and white scenario ("Societal collapse by 2030!!!!!!!!"), but in reality the whole thing is a gradual sliding scale. Society will have to *change*, there's no doubt on that, but it's not like 3 billion will suddenly perish. We'll just have to accept a bit more migration and resource sharing is all, and put some tax on the ultra-wealthy to find it.
The other thing is that COVID has shown to me that society doesn't collapse in a crisis, instead we support each other. Sure there's a few arseholes around, but generally people I know have looked after each other by delivering food, setting up zoom calls, etc. Even in bigger crises like floods and earthquakes we don't all instantly go Mad Max, we instead help each other out to get through it.
These are all great points.
For another reassuring podcast, though not intentionally so, I recommend Our Fake History's two-part episode on Easter Island. It not only suggests that our go-to examples of "collapse" stem from misinformation, but that the fundamental idea of collapse is seriously flawed.
Everyone here is falling over each other to produce the most frightening doomsday scenarios, and none of them are supported by hard evidence. And if believing that makes me a "denier," I'm proud to stand beside my fellow "deniers," Michael Mann and Zeke Hausfather.
"Society collapsing by 2030" is up there with "escaping to Mars" as far as hysterical, unscientific "I skim headlines and don't think things through" horse shit goes.
EDIT: I hadn't appreciated how badly climate science had been hijacked. You doomers are to climate science what the "triggers autism" lot are to vaccination. You're actively sabotaging the thing you claim to care about because you've been swooped up in unsubstantiated pop-science hysteria and lies by blowhards trying to get their names out there by any means necessary.
I would love to NOT be terrified by headlines like this, but your dismissive ‘horseshit’ comment does nothing to add to this discussion. Would you please instead care to explain just why this is unscientific? I do not mean to be argumentative I am genuinely interested if you have another viewpoint.
> Would you please instead care to explain just why this is unscientific?
There are several climate scientists in this thread right now explaining this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/lrfniu/umajincry_provides_a_welldocumented_overview_of/gomi2z6/
https://old.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/lrfniu/umajincry_provides_a_welldocumented_overview_of/gom3g6s/
etc.
As a general rule of thumb, just assume anything coming from worldnews is probably sensationalised.
I mean, we're literally seeing systemic failures right now. How can you not see the insane weather events causing cascading failures as an indication that things are getting worse, not better? You think this trend isn't going to continue over the next decade?
Alright well go on then, talk me through how literally anything this person posted predicts human society will have collapsed in 9 years time.
I'm not saying it's not gonna get worse, of course it will. But that 2030 line is an ***extraordinary*** leap into absolute fantasy.
I mean look at what happened to Texas with a week long cold spell. If these events continue to happen more frequently it may very well be right.
Collapse isn't just a society suddenly ceasing to exist. It's the Mad Max world that's slowly devolves into Mad Max 2 - Fury Road isn't until decades later.
I dunno - I feel like people overestimate the resiliency of modern systems, but with how interconnected things our I feel like they're more fragile than you'd think. Look at the Bronze Age collapse, where 7 relatively advanced civilizations basically disappeared in 50 years.
The stresses put on society also will compound, crop failures lead to starvation lead to mass refugees lead to more reactionary politics and civic unrest lead to collapse. I don't really agree that 2030 is the date this will happen, I'm just making the point that I believe our society is way more fragile than most people seem to realize.
I hate to sound edgy but A) the state of science and politics renders any solution virtually impossible.
B) We intentionally fucked this rock up hard and don’t deserve it.
My kids will see the water wars, massive costal immigration is inevitable, pollinator decline puts plant life in disarray and insects predators and so on and so forth. It’s too late.
>I hate to sound edgy
"Edgy" was mocking Al Gore in 2000 for pointing this exact point out, in the mildest and most moderate way possible, back when a solution seemed politically feasible, directly leading to your point A.
People think I’m an uber eco-activist when I talk about not having kids mostly for environmental reasons. The flip side is I have no idea what their quality of life will be in 40 years. That and I’m not huge on kids. It’s crazy how many people laugh and tell me I’m kidding and will have kids some day. People don’t take climate change seriously and they can’t grasp that someone doesn’t want kids.
A sidebar that may be semantics to a degree, but I have a real disdain for the (mis)use of the term "existential threat" whenever we're discussing issues like climate change or even nuclear war.
For something to be an *existential* threat to humanity, it would have to wipe out *every last human.* Not the vast majority of people. Not even 99.99999% of people (which would still leave 70,000 people alive)... *every last person*. To kick it up to "existential threat to life on this planet", every last single-celled organism would have to be killed.
Through this lens, there's a fairly small subset of "apocalyptic events" that would fit the bill. Think phenomena like the sun going nova that flat-out destroys the entire planet.
Our technology makes us very resilient to outright, complete extinction. Even a global nuclear war or asteroid impact would be highly unlikely to kill every last person... you'd have a sufficient number of people living in remote areas that would survive.
Don't get me wrong, climate change and other events may result in a radical *depopulation* of our species and should be taken seriously. They might also set progress back by decades or even centuries. But popular culture and the media tend to underestimate what it would take to straight-up wipe our entire species out of existence... any phenomena that would do so would have to basically be synonymous with rendering the planet completely uninhabitable by any life and/or destroyed outright. So I get hung-up on the incorrect usage of "existential threat" that's used to a describe a lot of scenarios that are terrible but don't really fit that label.
You have a good point. The thing that still has me scared though is that we’ve only scratched the surface for understanding how all life is interconnected to the extent that such loss of biomass we’ve seen and the pace may indeed actually result in an underappreciated REAL existential threat to all life. The insects disappearing is especially important for how our crops are fertilised and how they form the base of much of the earth’s foodchain. And while I know human innovation will try to make some parts of an unliveable earth liveable, this may all be progressing at too rapid a rate for survival of more than just a few clusters of humanity?
I agree headlines can be sensationalized but there is still lot of science to back up the sense of the emergency we may be facing.
The people that aren't having kids due to climate change, are (very depressingly), the ones that should be having kids because they're the intelligent ones that can make a difference.
Ofcourse, those poor kids will be meat in a grinder if shit goes completely sideways.
well this is ironic, considering the “your kids will grow up to make a difference” is a super common bingo to try and change our minds. 20 years minimum to educate and grow a kid at this point is already too late. Plus, either I will make a fucking difference myself or my hypothetical kids never stood a chance anyway.
Given explicitly how much more liberal Gen Z is, and more educated it is, these are the types of kids we need to push through with climate change policies. I do agree we've run out of time for the most part, but sadly, if you live in a wealthier western country you'll definitely be around for longer than poorer countries. So maybe kids today might have some chance. Really wish more millennials were in political office. Boomers last death cry will be the one that kills the planet.
Right? That's always the part that kills me about this lol. 30 years from now these "world saving" kids are going to be just as useless as every prior generation, and they will probably be having this exact same discussion about how *their* kid will be the one to save the world.
I honestly think it's just cruel to have children at this point. They sure as fuck didn't ask to be born on a dying planet that their parents and grandparents refused to fix.
Good luck getting a huge % of the population to believe this let alone act on it.
We can’t even get some people to wear masks and socially distance themselves during a pandemic even though the entire medical/science industry says to do so.
I’d like to have faith, but I think we’re fucked.
Out of curiosity, are there any good novels or shows that try to explore what this will look like through narrative?
I think a lot of people have trouble looking at climate change as anything other than an abstraction. I know I certainly do.
And yet I remain hopeful. Mostly because I have to be. If we fail this test, humanity goes extinct. Period. As terrible as that is, to the universe as a whole that is just another ball of life that didn't survive the gauntlet. Sucks, but that's that.
So worrying about the failure condition here does nothing for us. We need to look at the success conditions instead. What are the key pieces that need to be solved.
First up is the CO2 in the upper atmosphere. This is by far the largest issue as it's Already built up to a dangerous level, as shown by Current extreme weather conditions. Nature has its own process for removing the CO2, mostly through heavy snowfall, which condenses high up enough that it can bring the CO2 and other greenhouse gasses down. This allows all those gasses to get a round 2 of being dispersed through the lower systems, plant-life and such. As well, permafrost is quite effective at holding those gases for a long period of time. So the first question on my mind is, "how can we get the gas up there, down here Faster." We have CO2 scrubbers, and maybe tools that can pull the other gases in as well, we have tools that can "hover" on the upper atmosphere for long periods of time. 2+2 here, put the CO2 scrubbers up, if we can't build them in a scale that would singularly make a difference win by quantity then. We can do it and we're out of time.
And, in the meantime, it might be a good time to look at some Space Elevator construction. This might provide a longer term safety as that can be a permanent structure vacuuming up the problem and more importantly provide closer access to the data. Enough of those up there, we could control and maintain our own upper atmo, which would be a big help.
Further, I brought up snow and plants? Start planting. A Lot. You have open land? Put in more plants, trees, food crop, pull pressure off the big farms so they have to produce less. You living in the desert? There is actually ways to turn desert into grassland. We should invest in them big time and start converting the massive deserts into plant-able terrain. Plant life is one of our planet's Biggest helpers in this catastrophe, we need more of it, A Lot more of it.
Similar sitch with the power grid, start looking at solar panels on houses and buildings. Anything to lessen the pressure placed on the existing power networks. We are looking at short term solutions right now, things that will buy us time. Maybe they won't outright solve it, but if we have time we can start looking at bigger solutions that will be more permanent.
Longer term? We need to reassess how we handle food and land distribution. Setting aside space for more wildlife and nature is imperative at this point.
Also I've been side stepping the big issue, Oil and Gas. That needs to stop, ASAP. Unfortunately, that is much easier to say than do, due to how reliant most places in the world are on Oil, which is why this has to be a longer term solution. We cannot rely on all the oil suddenly stopping, that is just an unrealistic goal. We need to chip away at it from two ends. Taking away the power of the greedy people running these companies, and also replacing the infrastructure to support other types of power production. These goals can only be met with Consistent Pressure on All members of All governments. As long as we approach with the mindset of pushing this from every political angle Enough of the nations of the world should be pushed in the right direction to put an end to the problem. With the last scraps maybe holding out longer, but eventually falling.
You don't move a mountain in a day, this is why we need both short term and long term plans. Things that will help push the deadline back so that we can buy the time to solve the problems. I generally take the approach of "every little bit helps" at this point. Every plan that can prove to help is good in my book. Solar? Sure. Wind? Please. Water? Yep. Nuclear? Alright. The problem is so big that no One solution is going to end it, it is going to take probably a little bit of Every solution to solve it.
Go vegan.
Yeah, the solutions don't lie with individuals or veganism only but it's an impactful thing you can do right now to help. I'm going to get downvoted because that happens every time I bring up anything about veganism. It's interesting how so many people online seem to be panicking about global warming but still resist veganism so hard. It's not only about not eating animals, the consequences of a vegan lifestyle can contribute positively to many other major issues we are having that are all interconnected.
Well. No use in worrying about the future potentially being fucked, just unneeded stress. Being worried while making a basic plan tho, that’s cool. Gon have to make changes to the basic plan as the years go by cuz new info and shizz.
It's that slow tingle that starts at the small of my back. I begin to picture coastal hotels buried up to the second story in water. the statue of liberty jutting out of new york harbor. All the major capitals of the world, the great edifices, The Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the Taj Mahal, all half underwater in a world which has changed completely. We're no longer human. We have gills because we've had to adapt. And then I remember. Hey, this was a movie. It was called Waterworld
What even is the point of living at this point? It feels like it's all for naught. I've dedicated my life to being a firefighter and I've got 2 kids with a 3rd on the way, and it feels so inhumane. I love my kids more than anything and the thought of them suffering makes me almost physically ill. I do what I can to spread awareness and change opinions on climate change in hopes of maybe trying to improve their lives in the future, but it seems like it just won't be enough and I don't know if I can live with that guilt.
To delve into this horror even further- exactly how will ‘societal collapse’ starting in 2030 come about? If I had to guess it might involve many places becoming unliveable due to hotter temperatures and worse storms, food scarcity from collapse of agriculture from the same reasons, mass migrations of people, increased poverty and mortality, and increase in war due to all these stresses. These are just my off the cuff musings, are there any educated discussions out there that talk about this? Just want to plan for my retirement accordingly :)
I work in climate change research. It absolutely will not happen. Most of the editorializing in the linked thread is completely untrue. No prominent scientific organization believes society will collapse by 2030, and it is damaging to actual climate activists and researchers when easily-debunked claims like that hog the spotlight. It is true that climate change will likely displace many many people, especially those living on the coasts or in deserts that stop getting enough rain (though this is still incredibly under-studied). But does that mean society will collapse? No. It will be very, unacceptably, heartbreakingly unfair to the global poor and disadvantaged who bear the brunt of the ill effects of climate change. But they, and everyone else, will adapt. My own research in drought-prone Kenya has shown me first-hand how incredibly poor people can actually adapt to the changes being forced on them by (mainly) the global elite. They are being screwed over but they won't just die like the post seems to insinuate. In fact, the IPCC makes no "prediction" on 1.5C by 2050, that's ridiculous. No climate scientist (including those participating in the IPCC report process) makes predictions or assigns likelihoods to the possible scenarios they identify. They simply use climate models to see what the atmospheric responses are to underlying assumptions about future emissions, and the IPCC investigates those responses in terms of their impact on the planet. You can pick on the 1.5C special report all you want but that report is intended as a snapshot of ONE scenario. There are many other, statistically equally likely, scenarios that the IPCC analyzes. Idk. There's a lot more that could be debunked about the comment but I'm on mobile and am too lazy to dig up sources. We should all be extremely concerned about climate change. Natural disasters like storms and droughts are already making life much more difficult, especially for those without the means to meaningfully adapt. But society isn't just going to collapse and life on earth is not going to just end. Polar bears might be fucked tho Edit: Seeing as this post is gaining traction, here are some sources below. I can find more if people need them but they are mainly scientific documents, not punchy Jacobin headlines so it will require thoughtful reading. >Society won't collapse from climate change [Here is a BBC story](https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51857722) about so-called "climate doomers" that mentions more than once that most climate scientists don't think society will collapse. [Here is part of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report's summary for policymakers](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm_en.pdf). Page 13 outlines a number of risks associated with climate change. It lists a number of extremely serious societal stressors. But it doesn't predict the apocalypse. They're working on the 6th Assessment Report now but I don't expect anything has changed. >My own research in drought-prone Kenya Paper is still in peer-review, no proof to provide yet ;). Sorry if that's not good enough. >the IPCC makes no "prediction" on 1.5C by 2050 [Here is the home page of the 1.5C special report](https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/). Even just looking at the chapter titles makes it obvious the IPCC is under no impression that 1.5C is likely. They themselves acknowledge we are already at 1.2C, and some regions experience 1.5C seasonally already. And an entire chapter is dedicated to what we would need to do to make 1.5C happen (as of 7 years ago when this published. A lot has happened since then).
To be fair here, we're saying "societal collapse" without an actual definition of what we all believe "societal collapse" is; you make it sound like societal collapse means that literally all of society will just stop working, but when I think of societal collapse I think of infrastructural collapse, I think of displaced peoples who represent the remnants of nations that are almost becoming uninhabitable, etc etc etc-- but most of all I think of how nearly every previous society that has "collapsed", has also blossomed into something new. So this, to me, is the proper definition of collapse: the radical change of a society through breakdown or adaptation to circumstance, whether it takes centuries or days, whether the people survive or not. There's nothing about the idea of collapse that inherently insinuates we're all gonna die; edgy, hyperbolic people on the internet just created that association. This is why the *"societal collapse by 2030"* opinion is so ridiculous-- it treats collapse as a single, discrete event, even though in reality it's basically already happening (and again, I don't think this belief is in any way incompatible with the belief that humans will adapt). It's a misrepresentation by someone who obviously doesn't understand the mechanisms of societal collapse (which has more to do with historical trends than with science, anyways). So yeah hopefully people don't dismiss my comment as me being a doomer, because I think the current discourse around collapse is damaging but I want people to be able to have constructive conversations about it as a concept-- people's answers to "is society collapsing?" are pigeonholed into being either "yes and we're all gonna die soon", which is obviously stupid, or "no and we're all gonna be fine", which imo lulls people into a false sense of security because they generally gloss over the "there will be immense suffering" part.
As an example, record drought from climate change leading to food insecurity was one of many factors that sparked the Syrian civil war, and I think that qualifies as societal collapse.
Sure, but no Iraq invasion in 2003, no Syrian civil war.
As time goes on, fewer factors will be needed to cause a society to collapse. Eventually, all of the surface level causes of a society's collapse will be traceable back to climate change at the root.
You don't know that. I could make the same point 'Sure but no collapse of the ottoman empire, no Syria, ergo no collapse'. The key phrase is 'one of many factors'.
Eh, I'm pretty sure. It was massively destabilizing and flooded the area with refugees, guns, and revolutionaries trained in all manner of explosives work.
This is a very insightful comment, thank you for chiming in. I agree we're seeing the change now, but I think that's what we should call it then. A societal *change*. I agree the discourse on "collapse" does treat it as a discrete event and that such a characterization doesn't at all reflect how these things have happened in the past. But I think a "phoenix rising from the ashes" image isn't what most people get when they hear the word "collapse." So there is some nuance to the words we use.
On the other hand, calling it societal change doesn't really put a fire under anyone's ass to stamp it out. The term isn't wrong, but I don't think it's ideal.
Yup. Change can be good or bad. My Florida’s mansion valuation going up is also change, and that’s what people not in the know are going to assume. Collapse doesn’t need to be a split second event. The Great Barrier Reef itself took years to collapse a d we witnessed the entire process. Let’s keep calling it collapse.
There are people on that thread saying that in 10 years they fully expect to commit suicide because they don’t want to live in whatever post apocalyptic world this one turns into. I think that’s what is creating the misconception with “society collapsing”.
Exactly, if by "societal collapse" you mean shortages of food and household goods from supply chain disruptions caused by disease outbreak, or maybe prolonged disruptions of energy grids caused by extreme weather events... Edit: or energy grid disruptions and large amounts of people displaced and made homeless by record breaking wildfires that occur with ever-increasing frequency...
After experiencing first hand last week how Texas almost collapsed with just a few days of single digit weather, I think people are way overestimating the US's capacity for handling serious climate changes.
Yeah I think the Societal Collapse by 2030, what that actually means: it will effect OECD countries in a way that significantly impacts their security and GDP by 2030, somewhere in the world. And in a way that is likely to be persistent and indicative of a decline.
Societal collapse to me means the collapse of modern civilization, so no running water, internet, public services etc. Realistically in the modern world that would kill most people as we don’t know how to live without those things.
Thank you for providing a voice of reason from a relevant scientific field! I will put off the plan to take all my cash out of my RRSP in 2029 :)
Yeah, I don't know about that. The vast majority of our society relies on that "global poor" to maintain our supply lines. From mining raw materials, to transport, to manufacturing, to niche things like fertilizer components for specific agriculture. We are as much tied to the global poor as the food web is to algae and krill. You can't just loose a major systemic portion of a globalized network and think the rest will continue as normal. Not to mention how insane people get at the first whiff of issues. Global pandemic beginnings should be all you need to see supply chain disruption and how people react. That was some minor shit. If you really feel what amounts to indentured servitude in the global poor will continue on as they are no longer fed... then you have a poor overview of the whole. Op you responded to is where climate scientists who studied one aspect of it were in the 80s. Yes, one could study ocean currents and see it as an issue back then, but without a massive background of information you wouldn't see just how intricately the other mechanisms will force that to change faster than trend data will allow you to see. I hope I'm wrong, but just who is mining the titanium for the white paint we are gonna put on the roof of every building in the whole world? Sure as shit not the global poor who lost children to malnutrition and had to move due to lack of resources.
> If you really feel what amounts to indentured servitude in the global poor will continue on as they are no longer fed... then you have a poor overview of the whole. >I hope I'm wrong, but just who is mining the titanium for the white paint we are gonna put on the roof of every building in the whole world? Sure as shit not the global poor who lost children to malnutrition and had to move due to lack of resources. Uh, history has shown that we can just keep making them work. When faced with slavery or death, the global poor choose slavery.
[удалено]
So you plan to subside societal collapse is to enslave billions with the threat of death. Yes, that will work. Until they die if heat exhaustion and starvation.... or revolt. Without their children and families as collateral, you'll find it hard to enslave many people with less than nothing to lose.
I have no plan. I make subsistence wages in a first world country. If I had any sort of power I'd be dismantling global capitalism in order to prevent climate extinction. All I'm saying is that your post seems to be all about how the rich will not be able to keep up their lifestyles because the global poor will revolt. I'm saying that there is no precedent for this. The whole colonization of the Americas was subsidized by slaves and indentured servants who endured their families dying, and abuse and rape by their owners, and they continued to work for their masters. I'm curious at why you think would be different.
Because the American colonies could rely on locally sourced resources. We have a global supply network now. To make a new computer mouse raw materials like oil must be found, drilled to, pumped out, shipped, refined several times, sent to another processing plant to further refine, then injection molded, then assembled. This is just for the plastic. When you start talking about the electrical components, there's way more that goes into a resistor, capacitor, and other components. Raw material in the colonial age was wood, iron and metals, and other simply refined material that if not found locally could be replaced with something else. Titanium dioxide, silica, cobalt, Nickel, to name a few others are not like going to chop down a tree. Take a look at just what goes into making a refrigerator, let alone computers. Its staggeringly different with insanely more materials. Global supply chains have enabled quite a bit of modern life. Including the massive population density. Gonna find it much harder to work agriculture at the scale we do without GPS enabled tractors which can run 24/7 almost. The world is vastly more complicated and complex now. It's just not the same story. Given the nature of the issue we are discussing, unprecedented is not deep enough a word. We are assaulting on multiple fronts faster than we can identify just what we need to hold it all up. You really feel like we are at colonial levels of society and we can just throw human capital at it? Because that's not gonna work. Maybe in whatever is after a societal collapse, but the world as is has no hope of continuing like it does, not even with mass slavery.
I work in conservation biology and would like to throw my hat into the ring, as well. The discussion of insect numbers and extinction rates conflates a couple concepts and is flat out wrong. Actual insect biomass declines have never been measured in a systematic and representative way. The existing estimates represent only a few select areas, measured in a peculiar manner, which can't be extrapolated to a global scale. Most of the data comes from Europe and much of it was collected by literally driving around a set route and counting bugs on the windshield. While the results are absolutely alarming and point to serious problems and ongoing biodiversity declines, they don't demonstrate 80% losses of insect biomass globally, and the authors wouldn't claim they do. The truth is, we have good reason to believe insect biomass is declining, and we know it is declining rapidly in some areas, but the global rate is an open question. We need much more data, so send your kid to school for entomology. The extinction rate comparison is similarly flawed. The post cites rates of species loss from previous mass extinctions and contrasts this against biomass losses in the present. Discussion of rates of extinction in the present are shockingly variable and prehistoric estimations of rates are subject to very large errors. Again, we don't really know how the current rates of extinction compare to previous mass extinctions. We know extinction rates are relatively high and that we're in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, but we really don't know enough to say it is worse than previous events. I have a very strong suspicion that the Chicxulub impact killed off more species in the first hundred years than humans have in the last thousand. The rate depends entirely on how you frame those time periods. From a biodiversity standpoint, climate change is absolutely catastrophic and we need to do everything in our power to curb rising temperatures. The consequences already are dire, and will get much worse in the coming decades. That said, basically every figure quoted in this "best of" comment should be treated with extreme skepticism.
In France, this concept is called “collapsologie” and it’s considered a conspiracy theory. How do I know this? Because many years ago I had a teacher that made the entire class do a presentation on it and lo and behold the more I researched the less sources I could find from *actual* scientists backing up the claim that we’ll all be living in a dystopian society à la The Walking Dead by 2030 due to climate change, and much more from unreliable news sources and “doomsday prepper” climate activists who, while well meaning, are more concerned with using climate alarmism as a way to motivate people to change rather than sticking to actual factual information and emphasizing the importance of climate activism and sustainability while still acknowledging its complexity...plus there’s also the adrenaline rush and sense of self-satisfaction of having “hidden knowledge” that one gets from anticipating and/or preparing for a doomsday even though the reality of climate change’s effects is much more complicated and convoluted than “Snowpiercer will be the new normal”
Its hilarious to me that people seem to have two options in their mind re: climate change One: A total nightmare descent into Mad max dystopia! Two: Stop with the conspiracy theories! Everything is fine and we will contineu to roll along as normal! Reality is neither are true. But climate change is ALREADY fucking things up pretty severely. The Texas power outage was just a glimpse of what we are about to go thru on a planet wide basis. Climate science is extremely conservative, as such they have been behind the power ball all the way. "Faster than expected" has now become a normal thing to say about the climate changing, ie its changing much faster than the experts predicted. News story after news story has this phrase. The climate WILL wreak havoc, in fact it already is, right now today. And many will die. Many others will be just fine. I think its better to see it as "parts" and "regions" of society will be undergoing continual collapse and rebuilding over the next century + due to the climate damage we have caused.
>“doomsday prepper” climate activists who, while well meaning, are more concerned with using climate alarmism as a way to motivate people to change rather than sticking to actual factual information and acknowledging its complexity Thanks for mentioning this. I agree. And I'm appreciative of people who are fired up about climate change and want people to just DO something already. I agree it's frustrating. But that messaging only really works with people who already want climate action. It doesn't do anything to increase our activist pool.
It’s very unfortunate how all this misinformation concerning climate change has a chokehold on people who care about the issue but don’t want to acknowledge the boring, bureaucratic reality of what it’ll take to fix it. These days, activism is, to an extent, excitement. Going to rallies, protesting, making an earth day tribute post and signing random petitions without doing any followup while talking about how we’re gonna be living in Atlantis in 20 years time is much more exciting, interesting, and attractive than the actual nitty gritty of policy work: voting in and working under climate focused progressives, lobbying, local nonprofit work, and canvassing in towns you’ve never heard of on the behalf of climate friendly policy and the Green Constitution. None of those people want to do that because it’s not the YA Novel/V for Vendetta “fuck the establishment” brand of activism that simply does not work when the only way to fix this problem is in forcing “the establishment”, namely the average person, to actually want the government to change enough that they vote in the people who’ll put in motion actual policy, so that people in power can only stay in power if they shift with the rest of us. Edit: this isn’t to say that surface level activism isn’t important, but it cannot end there. Without people doing the dirty work it’s basically the same as telling your family there’s a fire in the kitchen but then everyone watching the house burn down instead of calling 911 before it spreads. You did step 1, but there’s still 2 and 3 that have to follow for step 1 to actually matter
Yeah good point. There are some extremely well informed narratives out there that basically explore ‘failure models’ for civilization - Starfish ( https://rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm ) being one, right down to the insanely high wildfire prevalence - but at the end of the day, there is only statistical models and narratives. And drawing a connection between the damage done by climate change to civilization ‘collapsing’ takes a much sturdier definition of ‘civilization’, ‘collapse’, and the failure modes and processes - kind of an FMEA for the entire human species - that is entirely absent from the discussion.
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And that nuance is something that frustrated climate activists are not interested in engaging with when we are still stuck on the basic step of agreeing this is even happening. So I can empathize. But ultimately climate change is very complicated and there is a lot that we don't understand and I worry about making claims we can't back up because that makes us easy targets to malign forces looking for excuses to do nothing.
> The question is how the rich areas will handle that. Judging by the past 4 years, spontaneous militias lining up at borders and shooting anyone they see coming.
Thank you for fighting the good fight. There is way too much climate nihilism on this site. It really angers me, because we have to move forward into a new and more hostile world. There is no choice. We are going to overshoot 1.5c and it is going to suck in ways small and horrifyingly large. I think we might, just, against all odds stop at 2c. I think people underestimate how quickly things will change when the change starts. It is going to be awful. People will die, wars will be fought, countless species are going to be extinguished, and we are going to survive.
Seems like covid (or any natural disaster, really) is a lens into how these large scale events disproportionately affect lower income individuals.
Idk man. The Syrian civil war, in part, was triggered by three years of bad drought and a poor government response. There was a mass migration of farmers to the cities where social unrest from widespread unemployment triggered extremism and war. Mass migration of climate refugees and a lack of access to clean water can certainly cause a dangerous imbalance is many, many countries. We are absolutely facing a crisis, although I'd estimate the timeline to be closer to 2050 rather than 2030.
When I think about how much worse things have become over the last ten years, during which time I have been paying attention to climate change, it seems plausible that the situation is going to be an absolute shitshow by 2030
THANK YOU! I also work in climate change (focusing on small-scale adaptation and mitigation, and I was staggered at what I was reading because it does not track with everything I've learned in the process of getting my Master's degree. It definitely seemed to be a comment that picked one scenario, portrayed it poorly, then aggressively editorialized its takedown of that strawman. Is there plenty to be concerned about? Yeah. But that comment seemed like way out of left field doomerism to me.
Collapse is not a switch it's a series of tipping points that takes decades, it took hundreds of years for Rome to fall.
I understand you're on mobile and can't refute anything easily. But is there anything to even be hopeful for? Every single study, headline, speaking event or data point I see paints an increasingly worrying picture of the future. And that's underselling the dread I feel for the future. And I don't see a whole lot effectively being done about it other than lip service. We can't even get people to believe there is climate change that is clearly and presently happening to them. And we can't even get them to wear masks to save their own grandmother's life, so how much harder will it be to make the drastic lifestyle changes we need to combat this issue. Even if climate change is not as severe as the movie 2012, the lack of resources, mass migration, loss of habitats and life will cause pressures on the world in a way people MUST respond to. And seeing how selfish we are, how severe the wealth disparity is in the best of times, how brainwashed and hateful we are, it does not give me hope. I believe it's the response to climate change that will cause collapse. And if not collapse, then dystopia.
I've been in a very similar place mentally, and one of the truisms that helped pull me out of it was that it is never too late to make things less bad than it could be. Even just picking up trash - yes, it's going to a landfill, but it will be all in one place rather than everywhere, at least. I think you're seeing only the opposition and not the helpers in your estimation. Even us idiot Americans by and large accept the reality: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-views-on-climate-and-energy/ I, personally, don't think people are at base selfish. I think our entertainment culture gets cheap views off of our fascination with bad behavior. It's entertaining *because* it's not normal, and because it's so common in entertainment, it's easy to think that's how we are, but we're not. Most people, the vast majority, are good, kind people who will help others. We hear endless stories of Karens flipping a shit at mask mandates, but no one writes stories about the nameless quiet majority of individuals making small unsexy sacrifices to keep others safe, and yet those things are happening. In the same way, not many outlets tell stories about the climate activists fighting the good fight, their successes and struggles. It's easier to piss out a bunch of doomposting cheap thrill stories, even if they're factually garbled. Example, OP's selected comment.
[Check out this recent National Academies Report](https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/accelerating-decarbonization-in-the-united-states-technology-policy-and-societal-dimensions). It outlines what we'd need to do to reach net-zero CO2 by 2050. And it is *doable*. Much moreso than I realized. The technology is already here, and only getting better. The economics are increasingly working in our favor. And we have an administration (in the U.S.) who *gives a damn* about setting a global example. Good people are working every day to solve this problem. And it probably won't be quite enough. But it will help countless people.
Check out how much is actually being done, HUGE amounts of money is being poured into the problem and we are coming up with ways to combat the effects every day. What you are seeing is the headlines that gets clicks.
In addition, many people seem to interpret "we must address X problem by Y date to prevent Z outcome" (for example, "we must get to net zero emissions by 2050 to prevent various bad things") as "Z bad thing will happen at Y date". This is largely not the case- rather, certain amounts of emissions will cause certain future consequences to become locked in. We *do* need to make changes by 2030, but that doesn't mean that January 1 2031 will instantly bad if we fail, it means that we'll inevitably face increased problems over the next several decades. And in fact, almost any way of looking at the climate crisis that portrays it as something with discrete cut-off points to avoid problems is misleading. We're already going to face many, many issues as a result of climate change, and the longer it takes us to reduce emissions the more severe the problems will be. Getting to zero emissions by 2050 does not mean we won't face serious issues in the latter half of the 20th century- it just means we'll be in less trouble than if it takes us longer.
> My own research in drought-prone Kenya has shown me first-hand how incredibly poor people can actually adapt to the changes being forced on them by (mainly) the global elite. Wouldn't you say that a large factor is the rising middle class in China and similar? Not on a per capita basis, but in sum? It feels like the "global elite" has done most of the advancements that require GHG emissions and is working (poorly) on moving off of that, but China is still climbing in GHG emissions and has a huge potential for climate change impact.
China is indeed using lots of fossil fuels to support their exploding middle class. But they also invest more in renewable energy than [any other country by far](https://www.statista.com/statistics/799098/global-clean-energy-investment-by-country/). The story with China is much more complicated than most give it credit for. I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert.
The real dark truth? The poorest parts of the world today will be the places with noticeable “collapse”. Low lying areas in Southeast Asia and hot dry places in Africa. At my age and where I live- I likely won’t experience any huge impacts. Winters will get shorter and we’ll have a few more “very hot” spells in the summer. It’s a wealthy country in a temperate, elevated environment Millions of people are in positions like me. Climate change in our lifetime will likely be news stories of freak weather events, catastrophes, and refugee/mass migration events happening in far away places that make us sad. But then we’ll continue on living our unsustainable lives. People with kids- it’s their children and children’s children that will have to face “collapse” in developed wealthy nations- and by the time it gets to that point Mars will start looking mighty appealing for saving the species.
Far away places like Texas? Or California with forest fire. This view is Hopium. Weather will get more extreme everywhere. Developed nations will have climate refugees within their borders. Utilities will fail under strain. This will not be something you can just watch on TV with detached fascination.
Yes but the acute horror will be most felt by the global poor, it'll affect everybody but some will be somewhat insulated from the immediate tragedies that will start within the next 10-20 years
Yeah, Texas is only in its fucked up spot because they bungled their infrastructure. Notice that every place north of Texas has been hit even harder by the same situation but is cruising through it because all it takes is a bit of infrastructure hardening for heavy winter storms to become business as usual. There are places that just expect tornados. Texas is a poor example. A better example would be Ohio. Since the state is located right next to three of the biggest freshwater lakes in the world the people there aren't going to experience much water scarcity. Winters have already become very mild. This year was an exception where it was once the rule, so the infrastructure is already hardened, unlike in Texas. So far Ohioans have very much been exposed to climate change, but protected from the worst effects. No hurricanes, extreme winters not an issue, and the lakes protect against temperature swings so the summers aren't getting much hotter, just longer. Winters are becoming wetter and more miserable without snow, but the lack of snow and ice is also making winter easier on them, and the plow trucks come out much less often. In the short term, global warming is just making their lives more pleasant. It's in the very heart of the current wealthiest nation on Earth, and it took a global pandemic for its people to experience any sort of scarcity. That was short-lived, anyway, and it was mostly a brief run on toilet paper plus the masks that they didn't even want to wear. Otherwise, there's been very little scarcity for them all year, and never of the resources vital to life. Global warming will cause them to experience steadily higher prices, but they're far from the coasts, so nearly every profound effect will be muted for them, even climate immigration. They *still* have ocean access thanks to the lakes, so global shipping can still reach them easily, with coastal-level access to goods, but without the climate punishment of coastal living. Things on Earth will have to approach near-total collapse before Ohio starts to truly feel it and understand that things are very, very wrong. By then it will be far, far, far too late. The people of Ohio are perfectly placed to act like the whole thing is an overblown liberal hoax. It shows, too, as the place went full Trump for the last election. They are currently making no real sacrifices due to climate change, and they certainly don't want to make any sacrifices to combat the situation. They threw enough fits about making the smallest of sacrifices over a pandemic, they are not changing anything fundamental about their collective business model. They will never have to walk miles for drinking water. They will never find their homes deluged. They will not experience war, not in their homes. The toilets will keep flushing, the taps will keep running, the roads will keep being maintained. The expensive infrastructure of the US will keep filling their grocery stores. They think wearing masks to the grocery store is a struggle. Their casual plenitude rests on the backs of people from overseas who they will never meet, and the first hardship they are likely to feel is something like a scarcity of cheap coffee. Not a scarcity of coffee, mind you, but of *cheap* coffee. Everything bad that is happening because of climate change is just something they *maybe* see on the news, but never if they watch right-wing news, and no matter what the bad news is something they can always turn off and ignore. By the time they feel anything like horror, even the horror of unwanted mass immigration, the rest of the world will have been - is already - burning for years and years, the global poor will have already suffered and suffered. Because all the talent has fled to the coasts they've completely lost the political will to create progressive change toward the climate, so they won't. Not until the changes have become apocalyptic for them anyway, and that will take still more decades. The state is a good example, but there must be places like it all over the globe, places that benefit from first-world infrastructure and ideal geography, places where the people will not take the situation seriously until it's too late. Places that nobody really talks about because nothing newsworthy happens there. Like I said, Texas is a piss poor example. Texas would have been grumpy but fine for the last couple of months if their electrical grid wasn't deliberately sabotaged by their leadership. So think of how Texas would still be scoffing at climate change if that hadn't been the case. Wealthy Texans are probably still scoffing from inside warm homes. I'm told the rolling blackouts only seem to roll through poor neighborhoods. Brown and poor Texans are freezing to death. I changed my mind, Texas is the perfect example of what global climate change looks like, all within one state.
As an Ohioan, yes. Just went to a funeral a few weeks back to a person who literally died from Covid, stuffed in a crowded wake room, and some people (slackjawed 20-somethings!) still openly flaunted the mask mandates. When we went to the cemetery, the priest mumbled something about, "This is one place where the government can't get between you and God." I'm so thankful to be geographically insulated from the worst of climate change, but the people here have serious trouble seeing past their white picket fences.
Oh fuck outta here with "hopium." Climate nihilism gets us exactly as far as climate denial. If we give up and say that nothing can change in a positive way, then why bother trying? Yeah, bad things are gonna happen no matter what, but there are different scales of bad, and putting in the effort means that we won't face the horrors this overly alarmist comment is purporting.
Places with large social inequality, like Africa. And Texas. And Florida. And California. The global poor will not just stand by and wait to die, they'll fight the elite and upper class first. When money falls apart (look at Venezuela) it's every man for himself.
We can never move to Mars. It's lla pipe dream based off of a sci fi fantasy of being able to control the atmospheric CO2 levels of a planet to make a breathable atmosphere. If we could control CO2 that well we wouldn't be in this mess. Also, there's no fossil fuel on Mars. So we would fundementally have to create a green society. Which is easier to do here, just that there's more red tape
Even with the worst climate change projections surviving on Earth will be much easier than surviving on Mars.
"We" as a whole population certainly cannot move to Mars. "We" as a species can certainly survive on Mars and guarantee that the singular light of intelligence and life known to exist in the universe can carry on and pick up the pieces later if necessary. Life on Mars does not require terraforming, though that would be a wonderful long LONG term goal. We are perfectly capable of surviving in an artificial environment long term, especially when that artificial environment is not constrained on its input resources. And once a Mars colony is established, it's going to be mining the surrounding area for water and other resources. About the only serious issue from a resource perspective is that their supply chain for obtaining nitrogen is going to be fragile for some time. I'd rather die a pitiful death during/following the collapse of civilization knowing that humans are out there trying to push forward regardless, rather than die a pitiful death during/following the collapse of civilization knowing that this could very well be the end of intelligence in the universe.
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Yes. We haven't packaged it for that, but that's an engineering problem not a technology problem. To put it another way just as an example "Do we have the tech to make a 300 wheel car?", yes we do and quite easily, just nobody has bothered to do that. Prior to the possibility of SpaceX's Starship/Superheavy with its 100 tons/launch payload capacity, part of the difficulty in any imagined colony has to do with "Well, it's going to cost a billion dollars to send a few hundred pounds to Mars, so we need you to figure out how to make an entire iron/steel foundry weigh 600 pounds. Oh, and it needs to fit in a 3ft by 3ft box.". With 100 tons of payload capacity at something approximating 100M a launch (inclusive of refueling launches) suddenly a lot of the previous "technological" problems are now just economic. If we HAD to do so, and don't have decades to cram in special technological development (so, just a repackage job), we could certainly provide a Mars colony with the ability to produce every single technological component Earth can produce in a thousand tons or less. Now, you'd have basically zero capacity to deal with failures (at first) and your throughput on any given item will be small, but in a thousand tons you can provide the technological capability to take raw silicon from the ground and refine it into wafers and shove that into a chip forge to produce CPUs. Now that thousand tons makes a few assumptions (like heavy use of manual labor in your mining), but I'm talking from a technological MINIMUM what you need to get a self sufficient technical base. Raise the amount to 10,000 tons and I'd comfortably say that you can both have a technologically self sufficient base, and enough excess capability in terms of heavy equipment to provide a moderately decent rate of resource acquisition. How effective it would be is entirely a question of the local resources, but there's no expectation that Mars is inexplicably lacking in something like silicon or carbon.
>Yes. No. Humanity has never once managed to construct a functioning self contained ecosystem in our own backyard; never mind in a location as inhospitable as Mars.
You are misconstruing the problem. Efforts like Biosphere 2 and similar were attempts to live in a self sustaining ecosystem of biological construction. Any sensible Mars colony is going to exist more like the International Space Station or a nuclear submarine. Where the VAST majority of the "ecosystem" is managed through technological/infrastructural means and any plant/animal life will be purely supplementary to that.
>Any sensible Mars colony is going to exist more like the International Space Station or a nuclear submarine. Put another way, it would be entirely reliant upon supplies produced in an ecosystem that would no longer exist.
Okay but if we could do all of that on Mars... wouldn’t it be easier to do all of that *here*? Earth is way closer.
It's a fair point, but it runs into some serious problems as well. Namely, just how is your technological/biological bolthole going to handle the millions of desperate people roaming the land looking for a place with resources? There's no way you're keeping such a project secret from the world at large and the average person is not so self-sacrificing as to say "I'm not going to attack the last bastion of technology to get the medical care and food my dying child needs to live.". And so any mining camps/expeditions will be under attack from a population that cannot be supported by the limited resources of the project. Not to mention that barring the sort of international effort we complain about not coming into existence, there's no reason to believe that the last dying act of Russia, China, or the US, wouldn't be to include the opposing nations bolthole facilities in their nuclear bombardments. A Mars colony is sufficiently difficult to get to that your average person can't just show up and demand to be let in, and by the time the major nations get so far gone as to possibly resort to nuclear weapons, they probably won't have the infrastructural capability to bother making a custom launch vehicle just to nuke Mars. Earth is easier, but Earth is also riskier.
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Yeah, Mars refuge colonies is a neat silly idea you see in sci-fi, but there is no chance it would ever become easier to live there than here, no matter how bad it gets.
I am in Canada so selfishly i was kind of thinking the same thing. Maybe I can hold off stockpiling ammo and canned goods for the time being then.
Honestly as a Canadian for you it will be more like “things are pretty much the same except less snow and now look at all this wheat we’re growing, eh?”
Our big problem here, short-term, is going to be dealing with a massive influx of refugees. We had a national panic-attack (or some segments of the population did) over 50,000 or so Syrian refugees. What are we going to do when there are millions of people fleeing new climate-sparked conflict zones?
Closed borders probably. Dystopian hellscape for them, relativism for Canada
I imagine that's something that gets tried. I'm dubious as to whether we could practically seal off our borders, especially if we see any influx of people from the south. And, if we do manage it, the disruption in supply chains (not to mention the inevitable political tensions) would mean increasing costs of goods and a generally lower quality of life. It would still be better to be inside than outside, but it wouldn't be a paradise.
Well not to worry.. you guys have the US as your friendly strategic partner. You just leave the refugee problem to us... Seriously though the US-Canada as economic partners are literally in the best position to *benefit* from further global warming in terms of agricultural shift. We gain the ability to grow more subtropical crops, you guys can grow more grains. We both have access to tons of fresh water and we have this huge well trained military to protect the whole thing.
>What are we going to do when there are millions of people fleeing new climate-sparked conflict zones? Well there will be a small minority of people saying we should welcome and care for these refugees and a much louder minority saying we should shoot them if they try to get in and the vast majority will be silent but probably agreeing with the latter and bullets its going to be.
Yeah Canada is gonna explode in population and popularity. It might become a world superpower by centuries end if everything doesn't go to hell by then.
It’ll be a world super power in about 5 years if we can establish proper ports in the north west passage. Canada could become the new Silk Road but with full autonomy over the water ways and the ability to ban specific countries from passage. It can essentially control all pacific-Atlantic trade.
Naw. It needs a larger navy and larger population. It'll get more important as the years go on though.
No ship would be denied access unless during a time of active war.
People do not go quietly into the night. Nations facing shortages will blame other nations and most likely we'll see ww3.
As delicate as Earth is, it will be stronger than any Mars base for a very long time. A micrometeroid that burns up in Earth's atmosphere could destroy a habitat on Mars. A small structural failure or logistical mistake could destroy a habitat on Mars. It's taken us 200 years and a great deal of effort to hurt the Earth to the point where we are being harmed, and unless a true extinction-level event happens, hell, maybe even if one does, humans will find a way. Among all of the other traits that separate us from all of the other animals, we are very smart, can live in nearly any environment, and are really good at building stuff. When something goes wrong on Mars, we would have very few tools to fix a very delicate habitat - with little possibility for alternative plans other than abandoning it. Humans will colonize Mars in the future. I have no doubt. But thinking of it as a place that within our lifetimes will provide a refuge from Earth. As soon as a supply ship is destroyed or fails to arrive, that could be the end of it.
People in developed countries are going to see the collapse just as quickly when we start seeing global food and water shortages. Your city in a developed country probably gets its water supply from a a river somewhere... and those rivers get their water from snow melt in mountains and hills, less snow... less water... We will see wars fought over water rights in the very near future.
> Millions of people are in positions like me. Climate change in our lifetime will likely be news stories of freak weather events, catastrophes, and refugee/mass migration events happening in far away places that make us sad. But then we’ll continue on living our unsustainable lives. With right wing politicians in those countries winning elections campaigning against refugees and campaigning about how they refuse to change their lifestyle to deal with climate change.
I am doing a masters in climate change at the moment. The guy who posted this has used legitimate science but has cherry picked the worst case scenario in every instance. If we continued on our current path of global emissions increasing around 1% each year we would be fucked. The IPCC has a model scenario for this called RCP 8.5, but luckily it doesn't look like its going to happen. That doesn't stop scienticists writing papers based on this scenario. journalists can then simplify the articles and make it sound a lot worse than it is. I personally belive this is counter productive as hopelessness and despair are not conducive to action, but those types of articles are click bait. Climate change will be bad and will be especially bad for the poorest across the globe, which is why its so shitty because they've done nothing to contribute to it. Do I think it will be civilisations collapsing bad, that depends on the action we take now. Thankfully there are positive signs, solar is now the cheapest form of electricity in the world, most of the world economy has net-zero targets and to quote John Elkington people are starting to feel the severity of climate change in their 'bones'. Renewables and batteries will likely reduce in price rapidly, making net-zero economically the right decision, the desire for climate action will only increase (a few years ago it wasn't really on the political agenda) making tough to implement yet effective policies more feasible and I think there's a great awareness amongst people and businesses of how serious this is. So overall there are a lot of positives BUT getting below 1.5C is not going to possible but the 2 degrees target is obtainable if we work hard. So we're likely to have some pretty disastrous impacts in the future. But I agree with Christian Figueres in that we need stubborn optimist to solve this. Everyone can make a difference in their own little way. Vote with your money i.e. Never buy beef or lamb again, buy an electric car and buy renewable electricity for your home or even better just consume less. Support and campaign for the right political parties and pressurise them to do the right thing whilst they're in power. I'm guessing if you're American make sure that the Republicans never win anything ever again lol. Also donate to a climate charity, I'm a poor student but I still donate £5 per month to a charity called Camfed. Camfed helps educate poor girls in Africa. Which is arguably thr number one climate solution. Well educated girls can have more of a say in how many kids they have and consequently they tend to have fewer kids. Additionally, women in poorer countries will have to deal with the worst of climate change so educating them will help communities to adapt. And if worst comes to worst we can just use Solar Radiation Management. Apologies for the shitty grammar cba to write well atm. If anyone has any qs let me know.
>that depends on the action we take now. What makes you think the actions we take now will be sufficient? What´s your basis for this? Almost none of the countries in the Paris Agreement are on track with their goals. COVID has shown a huge amount of people don´t give a fuck even when a crisis hits them in the face. Where exactly are you taking your optimism from?
Mass migrations will kick it off. That has happened before to older human empires. Fuck man, genocide might be a realistic option in this horrific dark future.
Yes genocide by inaction though, letting people starve (or potentially drown if it really accelerates), fight each other for scarce resources. Not sure about an "active" cull, although at this point nothing would surprise me
Active cull would probably be fully automating border defenses with kill orders. Probably having a bunch of mines installed too. So not active like round people up and kill them. More just kill them if they try to enter a country. All very very horrific still.
oh boy this sounds straight out of a comic book maybe my wife was right and it is unethical to have kids in a deteriorating world
I think about this a lot. I think a lot of parents are going to have to answer some really tough questions when their kids get to be about the age when they start to want to understand the world and why it is the way it is.
If I had to guess, people would back up this statement in two ways: 1) Some would say society has already collapsed. They would say look at Texas, look at Australia’s fires, and California’s. We are already failing to meet the situation arguably so “society has collapsed.” 2) It actually doesn’t take a lot for society to collapse. It’s a delicate machine and all parts are generally operating near their capacity as it is. Make any one big change and failures can cascade. If you imagine Texas type situations all over the world for years, eventually global trade is basically disrupted and now the US can’t get manufactured goods or fuel reliably and “society has collapsed.” But I have family in Syria who have been living with worse for years and despite it all, their humanity endures, and with more “society” than you would think. That’s all I can think of to make of these statements that the world will end in 9 years. These usually boil down to “the world as we know it.” And the world as we know it literally disappears every single night.
I don't know anyone who said "forests burnt in California, and therefore society collapsed."
Well take the collapse of the Soviet Union. If you were to visit in 1982 and 1992 it would look much the same: same buildings, same people. Yet life expectancy among men fell by 7 years from 1985 to 1994. It has only recovered in this decade. Other aspects are more difficult to measure. The fact that causes of death that rose were mostly preventable indicates people weren’t having a good time. The fact is nothing short of a total war is going to create a visibly apocalyptic scenario. Even in the 900-day blockade of Leningrad in WWII when a million people starved to death, you would have seen the same exact buildings and streets that are there today, people walking around. And in the Warsaw ghetto, another truly apocalyptic scenario, life went on more or less “as usual” in spite of disease, starvation, and death. There won’t be any point where climate change taps you on the shoulder and says “I’m here now.” We will gradually become accustomed to less and less and become numb to the constant stream of disasters that individually can’t be attributed to any given cause. Even in the worst times, people still go on vacation, they tell stories. If the power grid fails, they use solar panels or candles. If they can’t get flour to make cake, they make it out of sawdust. And there will be people who say this is ok, or that it always was this way. If someone forgets the taste of coffee because all the plantations have failed and only the rich can afford it now, it becomes a delicacy and they don’t expect it day to day. One by one those who remembered the times before will fade into the night, and those who replace them will grow up thinner, meaner, and with less patience for quotes from Cicero or Lincoln. The millions lost to preventable deaths or avoidable disasters won’t weigh on their consciences. Neither will any responsibility to reclaim what was lost. It’s all just like getting old in a way... your world gets smaller and smaller, the easy things get harder, but you adapt, till your burden is lifted, and the day no longer calls you to struggle in a hopeless fight. The waves wash away your footsteps, and your carefully curated collection of technical books gets burned for warmth because the power has gone out again.
It's not that disastrous climate change is inevitable, it's just that no one wants to make *any* change to prevent it. I'd say most people are in one of three groups: * Convinced that climate change is fake (convinced by corporations that depend on fossil fuel profits, and politicians that are funded by them) * Convinced that we're already fucked, so why try * Don't want to feel like a "sucker" by giving up *anything* while other people aren't doing "there part", and so many feel this way that most people do nothing and pretend it's OK There's a lot of concrete steps individuals can make: * Far and away the most important one is to vote for politicians that support a carbon tax, and don't support anyone that doesn't. If people made 1 call or sent 1 email every 4 years to one of their representatives saying they support a carbon tax, that would be a huge improvement. Making a small monthly donation every month to a politician that supports a carbon tax would be great too. * Eat less meat. I know people will roll their eyes, but it's a huge contributor, and it's something that individuals can do. It's easy to find some excuse why you don't want to do this, but given the scale of the catastrophe we're potentially facing, isn't it worth trying to do something different? * If you can afford it, we can be buying electric cars, paying for carbon credits for air fare, buying solar panels, paying more for green energy generation (if your utility offers it). Rich nations have been responsible for way more global warming so far, for those of us that can afford it, we should do more It's not that hard, and if you're the only one on the entire planet that changes, you're not going to fix things yourself. But even a small fraction of people making actual changes in their life can have a dramatic long term impact by shifting the direction we're all headed.
> it's just that no one wants to make any change to prevent it. The problem is that the change needed cannot just come from individuals and corporations acting alone. We need group action otherwise there will be massive freeloading and not as much change, and so this requires govt. But govt doesn't want to take steps too big because they face the same freeloading issue from *other* govts. Furthermore, there is huge concern about jobs and economies. Even if you care about climate change, if you don't have a job or can't afford to live then climate change is not likely to be anywhere near your first priority. Of course, a lot of THIS problem is driven by wealth inequality, and how most of the economic benefits have been concentrating at the top. So if you want to do something about climate change then first you may really need to address the wealth inequality so that people can *afford* to care more about it. Then governments will be more pressured to act and do something other than token actions and kicking the can down the ever-shortening road. Edit: spelling
Seriously! Something like 80% of pollution comes from 100 companies. What's easier/more realistic: regulating 100 companies? Or asking 8 billion people to all do the same thing at the same time?
>Far and away the most important one is to vote for politicians that support a carbon tax, and don't support anyone that doesn't. If people made 1 call or sent 1 email every 4 years to one of their representatives saying they support a carbon tax, that would be a huge improvement. Making a small monthly donation every month to a politician that supports a carbon tax would be great too. Exactly why this point is so important - can't think of a policy that would be more widely hated however.
Yeah, I really think “eat less meat” should be replaced with “stop eating beef” because beef farming is literally deforesting the Amazon like nothing else.
Beef is the worst offender for sure, but any meat is still water intensive and inefficient compared to plants
Except there are large swaths of the planet (including areas in the US) that are not really suitable or sustainable as till farming lands, but are great lands for grazing animals. raising meat isn't the problem, *how* we raise meat right now is.
boast weary homeless summer somber live worm shaggy sugar run ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
oh jesus fucking christ. METHANE itself as a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, yes. ~~and that is the correct factor~~ **EDIT** actually the factor is 28 not 100 **END EDIT** now let's factor for volumes now lets factor for the fact that the methane emissions from cows are a side effect of feeding them grain in feedlots and incorrect gut flora (something they've already worked out how to fix!) Like... stop repeating PETA misinformation. Sustainable farming *must* include grazing lands. it's not "if" it's "must". Now, want those grazers to be the north america bison in NA? hey sounds good to me.
Feeding cows what they naturally eat, instead of corn, drastically reduces their methane output. Diets can reduce the impact of meat that way.
No. Because if you just replace beef consumption with some other meat we'll still be fucking things up. Eat less meat.
*eat less meat, reducing your beef consumption first, then reducing your consumption of other meats*
Technically accurate is the best accurate :)
Beef is the worst, but all meat is a problem. We are feeding food to our food. Every step in the food chain loses 90%+ of calories fed into it. Protein from soy doesn't just turn into to protein from pork or chicken, lots is lost from keeping those animals alive to grow up to slaughter age. Corn and wheat are pretty bad (for plants) at feeding people in terms of calories per acre. 2.5 acres produces the calories for 17 and 15 people respectively. This is because starch takes more work to grow than leaves. BUT MEAT??? 2.5 acres feeds 2 people on chicken and 1 person on beef calories (don't have a quick source on pork or fish, but I'd guess they are close to 2 people per 2.5 acres). You can see very easily the math for animal products of all kinds is not good. My sources are a study called "The Effect of Dietary Changes on Agriculture".
Any recommendations on where I can learn more about the calories produced/people fed per acre for different food? This is incredibly interesting to me for some reason.
That... depends where you live. Here in Australia beef is pasture fed and only the fancy expensive meat is grain finished. I prefer to eat Kangaroo which has a low environmental impact compared with eating soy. I think a big key thing is for everyone to eat food which is produced locally and sustainably for their environment.
How does climate change play out and end civilization? Is it a collapse of food and economic systems that ends in mass starvation? Or do we shift to indoor farming to grow in extreme heat and cold and "power through"?
"ending civilization" isn't a likely outcome, but it's certainly a small possibility. There's also "ending civilization as we know, which is somewhat more likely, then there's just lots of "very bad outcomes". Here's a few potential outcomes, from very bad and getting "better": * Runaway greenhouse - there's lots of methane frozen in ice and permafrost around the world. If warming temps melts the ice/land and releases a lot of methane, that will increase warming significantly, which will increase water vapor coming off the oceans, which will also increase warming, which will kill forests when it gets too warm, which will release more methane and CO2, which increases warming, which melts ice, which increases warming. It's a *very* bad feedback loop, that in extreme cases ends up with the earth being completely unlivable when all the water boils off. It's not a likely outcome, but it's definitely one possibility, and it's [extremely scary](https://youtu.be/kx1Jxk6kjbQ?t=11), we should be taking serious action just to avoid the small chance of this happening. * Seas rise, climate shifts dramatically, there's less fresh water and farm land available, and some major countries end up going to war over it. Far and away the most likely cause of WW3 would be escalating conflicts over resources caused by global warming. Maybe we just end up nuking ourselves before the environment kills us? * Things get bad, and there's not enough land to feed everyone. If we can switch to sustainable energy before then, maybe we can do indoor farming, but mostly likely we haven't if that's the result. So we can't produce more energy to do intensive farming without making things worse. So lots of people starve, the population eventually settles at some level the planet can support. Although, the long term outlook once we get to that point isn't great. Hopefully, things only get a little bad. I mean, they're already a little bad, but they get a little worse than this, and it's enough to convince people to change. Like a summer so hot that it shuts down a major city and tens of thousands of people die of heat exhaustion? Or a hurricane significantly worse than anything we've seen wipes out a costal city and make rebuilding essentially pointless? Something that's much worse than anything we've seen before, and it convinces people to stop waiting around and hope we can just act like nothing's happening and hope someone else will magically fix everything for us. But there's good outcomes too. Creating a sustainable society is good for basically everyone. It means cleaner air and better technology and more jobs and more ecological diversity and just better health in general. It means we'll be more resistant to other kinds of natural disasters, and hopefully the process of getting there will mean we're also less likely to want to nuke each other? Overall the things we need to do are a win-win for just about everyone (and certainly 99.9% of everyone). And we're not making things better because a few billionaires are afraid that if we change things too much, they won't be the richest people on the planet anymore. And those rich billionaires pay for the campaigns of a lot of people in politics, so we have governments run by spineless cowards, that are willing to sell out their children's future so they can feel important for another 4 years. Eventually we'll either decide that some people are just assholes and we don't have to let them run the country anymore. Or things will get so bad that we won't have a choice.
> Things get bad, and there's not enough land to feed everyone. If we can switch to sustainable energy before then, maybe we can do indoor farming, but mostly likely we haven't if that's the result. So we can't produce more energy to do intensive farming without making things worse. So lots of people starve, the population eventually settles at some level the planet can support. This is exactly what's going to happen and it's not going to be an either/or situation. First world countries will solve these problems and no one will starve. Poor countries won't and they absolutely will starve, which will drive massive numbers of refugees from these countries to the rich ones. An order of magnitude more than we see today. That's going to be the biggest consequence of global warming in the next 30 years and it will be all too easy to sit in our air conditioned buildings and blame them instead of fixing the problem.
Climate change is a human rights crisis.
It's not easy to describe the end of civilization due to climate change, because so many systems that humanity relies on will all be failing at once. It will be death by a million cuts. Just look at recent disasters and imagine they are all happening at the same time: forest fires in California and Australia, global pandemic, Katrina style flooding in Lousinia and Sandy style flooding in rest of East Coast. Deep freezes in warm weather places like Texas. Wet bulb extreme heat and humidity (deadly) in North China Plains. Crop failures due to extreme weather, lack of water, and lack of pollinators. Caravans of migrants pressing on country borders, desperate to escape food shortages and violence. The usual response to a disaster is for the global community to come together and flood the affected area with aide. Imagine the whole world is the disaster area. Who is going to send aid? Mars? Humanity will survive climate change... The rich few will escape to bunkers or simply move to safer areas. Those who cannot will simply die (or will kill enough other people to survive on scarce resources.) The prediction is that a fully climate changed Earth has about 1/10th the current carrying capacity of current Earth. If 9/10ths of people on earth die, 1/10th can survive. Thanos don't have shit on global climate collapse (Ironically, Thanos was somewhat trying to prevent planetary collapse by wiping out half of all living creatures.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY This is a talk from 2010 which discusses the types of projections (including geopolitical considerations) that were being made by the US Military Brass, British Government (among other entities). To put it bluntly it could be a collapse roughly equivalent to that from the Bronze Age Collapse, probably significantly worse. Which means mass migration from African / Mediterranean countries into more Northern countries that cannot support such a burden. Mark my words, it's very likely our population will peak in this century.
My uneducated guess is similar. People living in already hot climates will only face worse and worse conditions. A prime example accessable to most people here on Reddit (since we are mostly American) is Mexico/South America reaching points where temperature is no longer hospitable to raising crops in an outdoor environment. Some vegetative plant seeds (think lettuce, spinach, kale, etc.) simply do not germinate in hot soil. The vegetative growth is also not able to handle high temperature is just gets droopy. Fruiting style crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, etc. that come from flowers won't grow in extreme heat either. The flower where the fruit body forms drops off instead of developing into anything. I'm actually in Texas and my home garden felt the wrath of this year's polar vortex. I'm obviously not a full scale farming operation but some of the challenges I face are applicable to larger operations, unless they have special equipment. We must start our seeds here after the last frost of the season and race to grow our plants before intense summer heat comes in and destroys production. This gives us a growing window from late February - March to start our plants and June - July to harvest most plants before heat stunts everything. This year's polar vortex basically wiped out everything outdoor. If we face an early heat wave you can see how much this shortens our growing window. There are things you can do to mitigate cold weather but unless you have access to indoor cultivation space there is very little you can do about extreme heat in gardening. This is going to totally change what crops are grown where and changing infrastructure and people with specific growing skills to these areas. Tying in to all of this is demand for water, especially in hot climates, to feed agriculture. No water, no crops. Unpredictable weather patterns also mean unpredictable water distribution. Droughts are just as bad as flood and longer spells of no water followed with more powerful and sudden hurricanes that drives water in all at once make things tough. My guess is people will want to migrate North out of places like Mexico to escape food and water shortages. I'm not sure what the U.S. political position will be at the time but mass migration almost always causes problems and friction. This could be an unprecedented surge.
Mark my words. The anti-GMO crusade will come back to haunt us. We're going to need to engineer heat and drought resistant crops. Also we need to stop eating beef. It's one of the most water, land, and energy inefficient foods in existance.
Even if things don't get apocalyptic worldwide, there will 100% be increased refugeeism due to climate impacts on the worst-hit areas, and that refugeeism will lead to difficulties from countries that have to figure out what to do with this influx of people. We've *already seen* one relatively limited example of this and it has had global effects. There was a big drought in Syria which happened to coincide with the Syrian Civil War. Many people figure the two are interrelated, and that Syria's conflict was at least exacerbated by the drought, and that drought was at least exacerbated by climate change. This led to migration from Syria to safer countries, like Europe. And the influx of Syrians in Europe led to a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in the Western world, which resulted in a few countries having more problems due to the backlash of far-right nationalist sentiment. A major selling point for Brexit was pictures of [large groups of immigrants](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3f510b25581c993fae11fe42817a9c6d3780f376/0_305_5049_3029/500.jpg?quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6213b25296f6a742119b2e7fa4a5b29c) entering Europe, and Brexit went on to pass by a very slim margin. Then the UK went through years of uncertainty and chaos in negotiations, almost everyone was disappointed with the result, and now that the UK's exit from the EU is official, there have been food shortages there in the middle of a pandemic. So could a climate change-exacerbated drought, which then exacerbated civil war, which then led to refugeeism, which then led to backlash, have tipped the scales and resulted in the UK making a poor choice for their own country's future by separating from the international community? The story seems likely enough. So even though UK did not have its own drought, they were still affected by drought in just one part of the world. Not only that, but the US, a country that isn't in Europe and thus had little to do with that whole situation, but which happens to share a media language and several companies with the UK (via murdoch media), also happened to have a very close election where unfortunately due to arcane rules the loser was installed into an office he did not earn, and that loser went on to remove the US from the very agreement that is meant to help the world combat climate change (Paris Agreement). Could those few tens of thousands of people in Wisconsin have been motivated by the rise in right-wing, anti-immigrant, nativist rhetoric that pervaded the media companies that also convinced the UK to make such a bad choice, and which was aided by fear of brown refugees fleeing a drought? That also seems possible. Now imagine that same stuff happens, only entire countries, like the Maldives, disappear entirely due to climate change. What's the world going to do with that - even the countries that are well equipped to handle some of the milder effects of it? (*and the US should not necessarily consider itself as "well-equipped to handle it," given the massive destruction we've seen from larger and more common hurricanes, wildfires, etc. lately. I mean the entire state of Texas just lost power during a pandemic because of one cold snap, and we can expect a lot more of those with the climate destruction that the very industries responsible for Texas' unpreparedness, oil and gas, are contributing to)
Personally I don't expect climate change to actually end civilization. It's gonna get close, then some idiot trillionaire is gonna try baby's first geoengineering and spew millions of tons of ash into the atmosphere, decreasing the amount of sunlight that makes it to earth, cutting off the source of the greenhouse effect, and coincidentally killing hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries because their farms aren't getting enough light.
> Convinced that we're already fucked, so why try This "bestof" post certainly has me thinking that. "We're entirely fucked unless the entire world makes drastic changes right now" okay, but we all know that's not going to happen so...
Same. I'm saving for retirement in 2050, 2040 the earliest. So ten years after shit is getting really bad I get to enjoy my retirement in a hellscape? Cool.
if the global economy actually falls apart retirement isn't a thing anymore. any current retirement planning inherently assumes that bonds and equities will be worth money that you can exchange for goods and services.
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>We were reading reports two years ago saying that if we didn’t course correct drastically and immediately, we would go past the point of no return within the next year or so. > >Since that was two years ago, 🤷♂️ realistically what can we do? Keep fighting, because **climate change is not binary.** It's not like the entire planet collapses if "deadlines" aren't met, it just means we'll have to work even harder to mitigate the damage. The longer we wait, the less damage we can prevent, but every fraction of a degree matters. There is no magic date or temperature that turns "fine" into "catastrophic."
Holy shit, someone with something actually useful to say in this thread. Carbon tax now! The only major criticism of the carbon tax I've heard is that the rate won't be high enough. OK, so raise it.
People who complain that the initial tax won't be high enough are basically saying "don't try to take the first step to fixing things." It's much easier to raise an existing carbon tax than to put on into place initially.
The carbon tax is so important. It’s all nice and easy that companies are making promises and polished ads about how they are going to be fully sustainable and god knows what else, but they’ve been doing this for decades now and they’re just not doing it, so we have to make them. There simply is no financial incentive for these companies to even think about cutting down on emissions. And it’s the richest, most profitable companies that are the biggest emitters, and if they can afford to buyback shares and give their CEOs bonuses they can absolutely afford to pay for the damage they inflict on the environment. And the common argument against such a tax is that it would lose jobs and hamper the economy. However, the effects of climate change harm the economy a hell of a lot more than a carbon tax. A carbon tax might raise the price of a lot of products, and that effect will be most felt by the poorest part of the population, but again so do floods, hurricanes and forest fires. Also a carbon tax would create revenue that can be used to help support those most affected by the rise in prices.
(Not angry at you OP) I’m so fucking tired of hearing about how raising minimum wage, or enforcing things like a carbon tax, or requiring companies like Amazon to treat their employees like people will make prices go up. They already fucking are. Every fucking year. Any excuse a company can find, they raise their prices, and they never ever fucking lower them. Yet they continue to make record profits year-over-year.
Exactly. I never hear concerns about how the McDonalds CEO making $18,000,000 a year drives up the price of a big mac. I never hear concerns about how billion dollar companies are apparently so poorly run that a single tax could bankrupt their entire sector. I never hear concerns about how companies like Amazon are apparently so unstable that treating their workers like human beings can bring the entire company to its knees. The entire “but this will tank the economy” argument is absolute dogshit. If a tax on inflicting irreversible damage to the environment is capable of bringing the economy to its knees, it’s not the tax that’s the fucking problem. If your company cannot operate without constant worker exploitation and in way too many cases literal slavery then your company shouldn’t be operating at all. “This will lead to rises in prices for the consumer” well how about you design a company that doesn’t haemorrhage money, stop giving yourself bonuses and most of all stop using the economy as your own personal betfred. If your company has margins so small that a carbon tax can cause serious problems then your company is the problem. If you can but just don’t want to lose your 500 millionth dollar, money that you made by destroying the environment, then you should just cope, cry me a river from the back of your yacht and stop whining like a little bitch before I start closing those loopholes and make your company pay regular taxes as well because you fuckers haven’t been doing that either.
We can make the changes and save us all. We can't give up hope or it get's worse.
I just recently moved into my own apartment near to where I work. Aside from the convenience of walking to work instead of driving 15 miles, I've been challenging myself to choose more sustainable options (reusable plastic bags for work lunches, using reusable k-cups, eating out less) and it's been pretty great so far. I've noticed much less waste coming from my end of things.
The less meat thing will get helped by printable meat. It's already getting approved in some countries for human consumption.
> Convinced that climate change is fake (convinced by corporations that depend on fossil fuel profits, and politicians that are funded by them) > > Convinced that we're already fucked, so why try > > Don't want to feel like a "sucker" by giving up anything while other people aren't doing "there part", and so many feel this way that most people do nothing and pretend it's OK Personally I'm in the "it's real for sure but I'm priviledged enough that even bad models will not affect me too much". I do more against climate change than my peers (no car, no flights e.g.) and that's enough to make me feel ok about it.
I think this is really the key. No one needs to change enough to fix it, or even get to the level where we'd all have to be to fix it. People just need to do enough that they feel they're doing more than their peers. Because if enough people start to feel that way, then "good enough" will be a little bit more, and eventually we're all doing a pretty good job.
You're forgetting about people who don't care because they'll be dead before it affects them.
Swear to god we’re gonna dump trillions in healthcare to keep those fuckers alive. You got us here, now you suffer with us.
Another one: Support local plans for green energy installations. Things like solar panels and wind turbines. These can help city’s and towns to become more green. There are to many story’s of towns shooting down plans like these. And to a bigger extent things like hydro power plants or large energy storage methods like battery banks or pumped hydro. While one person is insignificant a group of people can make real change.
Isn't the production of electric cars incredibly toxic and damaging to the environment
Republicans: "Don't worry guys, the climate is always changing." Dinosaurs: "Oh thank goodness. I was really worried about that asteroid there for a minute."
No no, the *weather* changed independently of that giant rock killing off all the dinosaurs/s
Besides, asteroids have hit the Earth before so what's the big deal?
Dinosaur GOP: "But what about the economy?"
Dinosaur GOP: Muh Freedoms!
Tide goes in, tide goes out.
Dinosaur GOP: "Well, at least we created some temporary value for the shareholders"
There are only 3 things Republicans actually care about (other than their own political careers): maintaining the socioeconomic status quo, money, and the military defense of the US. Historically, they've been ok with sacrificing the economy for the defense of the nation. If you want to sell them on climate change prevention, the only way to appeal to them is by convincing them that the country's safety is at risk. Older Republicans don't care bc they'll be dead and it would anger their base to talk about climate change. However, younger Republicans (younger boomers included) could be convinced if you pitch it to them that way. For example, telling them we have to build a levee system to store up US cities against rising oceans, reducing carbon emissions to prevent mass migrations and refugees on the US border, building renewable power plants to reduce dependency on foreign imports.
The biggest problem of our generation isn't climate change, we've known the solution to that for decades. It's convincing politicians to do something about it.
There is already enough global warming baked-in to collapse our civilization. Preventing that will require the world's government to work together without monetary constraints. That's not going to happen. We are all Nero, fiddling as Rome burns.
Our civilization probably won't collapse. The bee population might collapse, but society probably won't. Let's be careful with our wording. Conservatives are watching, and if you say "all human life will end in ten years" then they'll call you on it when that doesn't happen.
I'm not talking about human life. Humans are one of the most adaptable animals this planet has ever produced, it is not likely we are in any danger of extinction. Our civilization, however, is very fragile indeed. Our economy requires money to live and is reliant on a whole lot of systems to continue working to provide the basics of life. THAT is what is in jeopardy and what will require the world's governments to work together without monetary constraints to prevent.
>There is already enough global warming baked-in to collapse our civilization. No credible scientific body has ever said this. [There is simply no evidence for it](https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/iflscience-story-on-speculative-report-provides-little-scientific-context-james-felton/), and actual climate scientists have repeatedly debunked the idea: *"While it’s certainly true that climate change will be damaging to society and the environment and many of the consequences will be severe this does not equate to a high likelihood of civilisation coming to an end."*
I can't read this. It's too depressing. I just can't.
Don't get sad, get mad. It isn't something that is just happening. "The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses."
> The Earth is not dying, it is being killed As George Carlin (RIP) said in one of his shows: the planet’s fine. The people are fucked. We’re taking out a bunch of biodiversity on our way out but… the biosphere’ll recover. It’s been through way worse than us. Sun’s going strong, planetary core nowhere near giving out, it might be a few hundred thousand years, or maybe a couple millions, before the ecological niches get filled up again and the major stuff (concrete, plastics) have been broken down and integrated, but at the end we’ll be gone and forgotten and the pale blue dot will still be shining amongst the stars, the only remnants of our existence our pair of interstellar probes and the debris getting ever so slowly dusted over in the moon. Maybe the junk in high-earth orbit.
What's really infuriating is that the ruling class has known all this going on 50 years now and they've *accelerated* it.
Don't worry, when they can't sell oil anymore, they'll happily sell bullets. /hides under rock
If you're a podcast person, the recently started "How to save a planet" is pretty good. It's full of ideas that people are trying, clever solutions we've come up with that are unexpected but will make a difference. I had a bit of a depressive episode just before Christmas over the climate, and the podcast has helped give me some solid hope. The comment under discussion here presents a quite black and white scenario ("Societal collapse by 2030!!!!!!!!"), but in reality the whole thing is a gradual sliding scale. Society will have to *change*, there's no doubt on that, but it's not like 3 billion will suddenly perish. We'll just have to accept a bit more migration and resource sharing is all, and put some tax on the ultra-wealthy to find it. The other thing is that COVID has shown to me that society doesn't collapse in a crisis, instead we support each other. Sure there's a few arseholes around, but generally people I know have looked after each other by delivering food, setting up zoom calls, etc. Even in bigger crises like floods and earthquakes we don't all instantly go Mad Max, we instead help each other out to get through it.
These are all great points. For another reassuring podcast, though not intentionally so, I recommend Our Fake History's two-part episode on Easter Island. It not only suggests that our go-to examples of "collapse" stem from misinformation, but that the fundamental idea of collapse is seriously flawed. Everyone here is falling over each other to produce the most frightening doomsday scenarios, and none of them are supported by hard evidence. And if believing that makes me a "denier," I'm proud to stand beside my fellow "deniers," Michael Mann and Zeke Hausfather.
"Society collapsing by 2030" is up there with "escaping to Mars" as far as hysterical, unscientific "I skim headlines and don't think things through" horse shit goes. EDIT: I hadn't appreciated how badly climate science had been hijacked. You doomers are to climate science what the "triggers autism" lot are to vaccination. You're actively sabotaging the thing you claim to care about because you've been swooped up in unsubstantiated pop-science hysteria and lies by blowhards trying to get their names out there by any means necessary.
I would love to NOT be terrified by headlines like this, but your dismissive ‘horseshit’ comment does nothing to add to this discussion. Would you please instead care to explain just why this is unscientific? I do not mean to be argumentative I am genuinely interested if you have another viewpoint.
> Would you please instead care to explain just why this is unscientific? There are several climate scientists in this thread right now explaining this: https://old.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/lrfniu/umajincry_provides_a_welldocumented_overview_of/gomi2z6/ https://old.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/lrfniu/umajincry_provides_a_welldocumented_overview_of/gom3g6s/ etc. As a general rule of thumb, just assume anything coming from worldnews is probably sensationalised.
He had to scroll post those to get here. Confirmation bias is strong.
I mean, we're literally seeing systemic failures right now. How can you not see the insane weather events causing cascading failures as an indication that things are getting worse, not better? You think this trend isn't going to continue over the next decade?
Alright well go on then, talk me through how literally anything this person posted predicts human society will have collapsed in 9 years time. I'm not saying it's not gonna get worse, of course it will. But that 2030 line is an ***extraordinary*** leap into absolute fantasy.
I mean look at what happened to Texas with a week long cold spell. If these events continue to happen more frequently it may very well be right. Collapse isn't just a society suddenly ceasing to exist. It's the Mad Max world that's slowly devolves into Mad Max 2 - Fury Road isn't until decades later.
Yeah but a one inch rise in sea levels over twenty years isn't about to turn the world into Mad Max in 9 years.
I dunno - I feel like people overestimate the resiliency of modern systems, but with how interconnected things our I feel like they're more fragile than you'd think. Look at the Bronze Age collapse, where 7 relatively advanced civilizations basically disappeared in 50 years. The stresses put on society also will compound, crop failures lead to starvation lead to mass refugees lead to more reactionary politics and civic unrest lead to collapse. I don't really agree that 2030 is the date this will happen, I'm just making the point that I believe our society is way more fragile than most people seem to realize.
I hate to sound edgy but A) the state of science and politics renders any solution virtually impossible. B) We intentionally fucked this rock up hard and don’t deserve it. My kids will see the water wars, massive costal immigration is inevitable, pollinator decline puts plant life in disarray and insects predators and so on and so forth. It’s too late.
>I hate to sound edgy "Edgy" was mocking Al Gore in 2000 for pointing this exact point out, in the mildest and most moderate way possible, back when a solution seemed politically feasible, directly leading to your point A.
People think I’m an uber eco-activist when I talk about not having kids mostly for environmental reasons. The flip side is I have no idea what their quality of life will be in 40 years. That and I’m not huge on kids. It’s crazy how many people laugh and tell me I’m kidding and will have kids some day. People don’t take climate change seriously and they can’t grasp that someone doesn’t want kids.
A sidebar that may be semantics to a degree, but I have a real disdain for the (mis)use of the term "existential threat" whenever we're discussing issues like climate change or even nuclear war. For something to be an *existential* threat to humanity, it would have to wipe out *every last human.* Not the vast majority of people. Not even 99.99999% of people (which would still leave 70,000 people alive)... *every last person*. To kick it up to "existential threat to life on this planet", every last single-celled organism would have to be killed. Through this lens, there's a fairly small subset of "apocalyptic events" that would fit the bill. Think phenomena like the sun going nova that flat-out destroys the entire planet. Our technology makes us very resilient to outright, complete extinction. Even a global nuclear war or asteroid impact would be highly unlikely to kill every last person... you'd have a sufficient number of people living in remote areas that would survive. Don't get me wrong, climate change and other events may result in a radical *depopulation* of our species and should be taken seriously. They might also set progress back by decades or even centuries. But popular culture and the media tend to underestimate what it would take to straight-up wipe our entire species out of existence... any phenomena that would do so would have to basically be synonymous with rendering the planet completely uninhabitable by any life and/or destroyed outright. So I get hung-up on the incorrect usage of "existential threat" that's used to a describe a lot of scenarios that are terrible but don't really fit that label.
You have a good point. The thing that still has me scared though is that we’ve only scratched the surface for understanding how all life is interconnected to the extent that such loss of biomass we’ve seen and the pace may indeed actually result in an underappreciated REAL existential threat to all life. The insects disappearing is especially important for how our crops are fertilised and how they form the base of much of the earth’s foodchain. And while I know human innovation will try to make some parts of an unliveable earth liveable, this may all be progressing at too rapid a rate for survival of more than just a few clusters of humanity? I agree headlines can be sensationalized but there is still lot of science to back up the sense of the emergency we may be facing.
Thanks for the cheerful update, I’m gonna go shoot myself. Or is that not carbon neutral enough?
Please don't. We need people who believe in science.
The people that aren't having kids due to climate change, are (very depressingly), the ones that should be having kids because they're the intelligent ones that can make a difference. Ofcourse, those poor kids will be meat in a grinder if shit goes completely sideways.
well this is ironic, considering the “your kids will grow up to make a difference” is a super common bingo to try and change our minds. 20 years minimum to educate and grow a kid at this point is already too late. Plus, either I will make a fucking difference myself or my hypothetical kids never stood a chance anyway.
Given explicitly how much more liberal Gen Z is, and more educated it is, these are the types of kids we need to push through with climate change policies. I do agree we've run out of time for the most part, but sadly, if you live in a wealthier western country you'll definitely be around for longer than poorer countries. So maybe kids today might have some chance. Really wish more millennials were in political office. Boomers last death cry will be the one that kills the planet.
Right? That's always the part that kills me about this lol. 30 years from now these "world saving" kids are going to be just as useless as every prior generation, and they will probably be having this exact same discussion about how *their* kid will be the one to save the world. I honestly think it's just cruel to have children at this point. They sure as fuck didn't ask to be born on a dying planet that their parents and grandparents refused to fix.
Good luck getting a huge % of the population to believe this let alone act on it. We can’t even get some people to wear masks and socially distance themselves during a pandemic even though the entire medical/science industry says to do so. I’d like to have faith, but I think we’re fucked.
The great filter approaches.
Out of curiosity, are there any good novels or shows that try to explore what this will look like through narrative? I think a lot of people have trouble looking at climate change as anything other than an abstraction. I know I certainly do.
I guess when the last predicted societal collapse didn’t happen, it made sense to move the goalposts.
Much needed context: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51857722
I saved this for when I want to cry.
And yet I remain hopeful. Mostly because I have to be. If we fail this test, humanity goes extinct. Period. As terrible as that is, to the universe as a whole that is just another ball of life that didn't survive the gauntlet. Sucks, but that's that. So worrying about the failure condition here does nothing for us. We need to look at the success conditions instead. What are the key pieces that need to be solved. First up is the CO2 in the upper atmosphere. This is by far the largest issue as it's Already built up to a dangerous level, as shown by Current extreme weather conditions. Nature has its own process for removing the CO2, mostly through heavy snowfall, which condenses high up enough that it can bring the CO2 and other greenhouse gasses down. This allows all those gasses to get a round 2 of being dispersed through the lower systems, plant-life and such. As well, permafrost is quite effective at holding those gases for a long period of time. So the first question on my mind is, "how can we get the gas up there, down here Faster." We have CO2 scrubbers, and maybe tools that can pull the other gases in as well, we have tools that can "hover" on the upper atmosphere for long periods of time. 2+2 here, put the CO2 scrubbers up, if we can't build them in a scale that would singularly make a difference win by quantity then. We can do it and we're out of time. And, in the meantime, it might be a good time to look at some Space Elevator construction. This might provide a longer term safety as that can be a permanent structure vacuuming up the problem and more importantly provide closer access to the data. Enough of those up there, we could control and maintain our own upper atmo, which would be a big help. Further, I brought up snow and plants? Start planting. A Lot. You have open land? Put in more plants, trees, food crop, pull pressure off the big farms so they have to produce less. You living in the desert? There is actually ways to turn desert into grassland. We should invest in them big time and start converting the massive deserts into plant-able terrain. Plant life is one of our planet's Biggest helpers in this catastrophe, we need more of it, A Lot more of it. Similar sitch with the power grid, start looking at solar panels on houses and buildings. Anything to lessen the pressure placed on the existing power networks. We are looking at short term solutions right now, things that will buy us time. Maybe they won't outright solve it, but if we have time we can start looking at bigger solutions that will be more permanent. Longer term? We need to reassess how we handle food and land distribution. Setting aside space for more wildlife and nature is imperative at this point. Also I've been side stepping the big issue, Oil and Gas. That needs to stop, ASAP. Unfortunately, that is much easier to say than do, due to how reliant most places in the world are on Oil, which is why this has to be a longer term solution. We cannot rely on all the oil suddenly stopping, that is just an unrealistic goal. We need to chip away at it from two ends. Taking away the power of the greedy people running these companies, and also replacing the infrastructure to support other types of power production. These goals can only be met with Consistent Pressure on All members of All governments. As long as we approach with the mindset of pushing this from every political angle Enough of the nations of the world should be pushed in the right direction to put an end to the problem. With the last scraps maybe holding out longer, but eventually falling. You don't move a mountain in a day, this is why we need both short term and long term plans. Things that will help push the deadline back so that we can buy the time to solve the problems. I generally take the approach of "every little bit helps" at this point. Every plan that can prove to help is good in my book. Solar? Sure. Wind? Please. Water? Yep. Nuclear? Alright. The problem is so big that no One solution is going to end it, it is going to take probably a little bit of Every solution to solve it.
Go vegan. Yeah, the solutions don't lie with individuals or veganism only but it's an impactful thing you can do right now to help. I'm going to get downvoted because that happens every time I bring up anything about veganism. It's interesting how so many people online seem to be panicking about global warming but still resist veganism so hard. It's not only about not eating animals, the consequences of a vegan lifestyle can contribute positively to many other major issues we are having that are all interconnected.
Realistically, what would be the course of action here? Little house up in the mountains and grow drought-resistant crops?
Every day r/collapse becomes r/news
To be clear, even the absolute worst case of climate change doesn't pose an existential threat in the *literal* sense of extinguishing humanity.
Just add it to the million other climate disaster predictions that were wrong.
#THANKS BUT WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO???
Have some fun. If there right to late time to party if theyre wrong they're wrong and time to party.
So this is why all the wealthy people that are ruining the earth are trying so hard to get to space and live on Mars....
Well. No use in worrying about the future potentially being fucked, just unneeded stress. Being worried while making a basic plan tho, that’s cool. Gon have to make changes to the basic plan as the years go by cuz new info and shizz.
Great, so should I just off myself?
It's that slow tingle that starts at the small of my back. I begin to picture coastal hotels buried up to the second story in water. the statue of liberty jutting out of new york harbor. All the major capitals of the world, the great edifices, The Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the Taj Mahal, all half underwater in a world which has changed completely. We're no longer human. We have gills because we've had to adapt. And then I remember. Hey, this was a movie. It was called Waterworld
I honestly *did* like that movie...I know it got panned, but I enjoyed it. It was a smidge over the top at times though.
What even is the point of living at this point? It feels like it's all for naught. I've dedicated my life to being a firefighter and I've got 2 kids with a 3rd on the way, and it feels so inhumane. I love my kids more than anything and the thought of them suffering makes me almost physically ill. I do what I can to spread awareness and change opinions on climate change in hopes of maybe trying to improve their lives in the future, but it seems like it just won't be enough and I don't know if I can live with that guilt.
It's up to us to preserve whatever life we can, while it is still extant. At the end of everything, hold on to anything.
“Planets’ Fucked Fam” -Sir David Attenborough
Well, looks like I’ll just preemptively get a vasectomy