It's not just young people. I'm 56 and I'm going through a pretty serious personal existential crisis w.r.t. climate change. I think even the people who are worried about it don't realize quite how serious the situation is. I used to feel pretty confident that all of the really bad shit would not happen until after I was dead. I'm not nearly so confident any more. I now think there is a significant chance that I could live to see massive famines and the concomitant collapse of technological civilization. I've been losing quite a bit of sleep over it for a while now.
I'm not convinced that climate change has a high probability of ending technological civilisation[0]. Even large-scale climate wars might not end it.
The scenarios that fall short of ending civilisation, e.g. losing hundreds of millions of lives to famine or war, are obviously still very bad. This is not to downplay climate change in the slightest. It's just... at some point, people start dying, and that frees up ecological carrying capacity again. You need to make pessimistic assumptions about a lot of positive feedback loops in ecological and social collapse to predict that all human civilisation is going to be wiped out in the sense of regressing back to before the industrial revolution.
You think if a billion people lose monsoon water, some of them won't put together a hand-made virus to wreak revenge on the wealthy nations responsible for the carbon burn and for climate denial? I mean, maybe, people have a capacity for good, but also for anger and revenge.
Carbon caused climate change isn't a carry-ing capacity / overpopulation / over utilization issue (and is now somewhat dwarfing those issues). It is a big change that has some chance of devastating a lot of biological based support systems all at the same time.
The risk to technological civilization is not in the direct effects, but in the human mediated effects. Not that leaving on yeast and water would be that good.
What's your estimate of the probability of collapse, and why?
I'd put it in the low single digits or maybe lower, on the basis that a cascade of things need to go wrong: first you need a climate scenario that exceeds the IPCC estimates, then you need significant damage or conflict, then you need a potential collapse event to emerge from the conflict, then the event has to trigger collapse on its own or other events have to occur and combine with it.
Curious to hear your thoughts though, because I haven't put firm numbers on anything or looked deeply into any of the research on collapse specifically.
You are asking to predict what people will do in the future. Not a historically profitable venture. Having the Monsoon rains stop dropping snows into the Himalayas would be super bad. Just flooding Bangladesh with a meter or few meters would displace a lot of people less popular than Floridians. Is Montana going to take a few million Muslim refugees?
But maybe like Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent book, it will all work together and we will make a new carbon based cryptocurrency backed by the bankers, switch to blimps and all ends well. I have kids and am teaching them to corporate with people rather than become preppers, so I guess I am optimistic de facto.
I'm asking to put some numbers on our predictions in a conversation that's already had us predict what people will do, as a tool to dig deeper into the factors that could lead civilisation to collapse.
Being totally accurate when predicting the future is impossible, but discussion of the factors is useful in its own right.
I have to disagree. You are asking for a path integral when the local derivatives of various paths are clear, and In a problem space where things can always get worse. Each moment in each place lets climb the curve towards better reality.
Can you explain what I'm meant to be getting out of this 47 minute long review of current climate indicators?
I understand that climate change is progressing rapidly, is going to cause very bad things to happen (my earlier comment mentioned hundreds of millions of human deaths as an example), and should be mitigated. What I question is whether the total collapse of industrial civilisation as a result of climate change is likely to occur. This is as opposed to economic stagnation, famine, war, widespread desertification, unliveable wet-bulb temperatures, or anything else short of a total collapse.
Depends on your meaning of collapse. If you mean extinction of only humans, that's not gonna happen. Even in total nuclear fallout, few people will survive underground.
> economic stagnation, famine, war, widespread desertification, unliveable wet-bulb temperatures
For most people those are collapse and it's definitely going to happen and will come much sooner. The video shows it's going on the worst case scenario way.
100%. Thanks to globalization and just-in-time economy, supply chains are already overextended and on the brink of failure. Once the first cracks set in, the consequences will cascade until most of agro-industrial production will grind to a halt.
I can't tell if you are being serious, but just to be clear: I do not think that climate change is "scary because of nukes". Climate change is scary in its own right. Global famine is going to be very unpleasant whether or not it sparks WW3. But we do have nukes, and nukes + climate change could bring about the end of civilization in my lifetime with probability much greater than zero. And, what is scariest of all, most people's behavior indicates that this possibility is not even on their radar screens. Most people are still behaving as if the really serious shit is several generations away. It's not. The wolf is at the door, as you say, much closer to 10 years than 100.
You are assuming the supporting environment of the survivors will remain intact enough to allow recovery. That is a somewhat optimistic viewpoint. Most everything in the natural environment will be consumed before people start to die off in significant enough numbers. That will leave the survivors with something that is somewhat less than pristine, and will likely take several generations to recover to some semblance of previous carrying capacity and certainly with enormously reduced biodiversity.
God we did manage to fuck ourselves good and proper.
Climate change is bad but technological collapse doomerism is completely unsupported by science.
People like the romance of dramatic and exciting extremes, of paradise and apocalypse. The mundane probability of having to adapt to somewhat worse conditions isn't that entertaining.
Look up "blue ocean event". The BOE could lead to the loss of the jet stream in 10-20 years. After that, God only knows what is going to happen. The really big problem is that we won't know where the rain will fall, and so we won't know where to plant, and so we could have global famine. If you think covid was bad, you ain't seen nuthin'. And even that will not necessarily lead directly to the collapse of civilization, but I'm not optimistic about the ability of our political leaders to handle the situation gracefully and without starting WW3.
Exactly: our civilization, comfort, enjoyment and ease is built upon the relatively predictable and stable weather patterns.
Why would anyone take the risk of messing with that?
It's as though they assume that there will be generalized devastation but there will be some "safe place" which some powerful group can defend and use.
Instead it's possible that maybe for one year New Zealand will be great, but then there will be no rain for 10 years, while previously uninhabitable Brighton (UK) will be a lush, tropical paradise for a couple of decades. Everyone will haul their gear to Brighton and massacre the indigenous, but then everything will change again, etc.
Or we could stop driving 2000Kg of metal to get to our jobs or buy a bag of chips and keep all the tourists at home that are destroying Venice and leaving their feces and plastic containers all over the Himalayas.
The reason people find this line of argument frustrating is that it's always presented in a weird, dismissive tone which makes it clear you already didn't like the things you're proposing to get rid of. If you want to persuade people who are attached to their 2000Kgs of metal, it'll be more productive to include some examples of things you'll have to give up even though you like them.
OK, I'll stop driving my 2000kg of metal tomorrow. The first grocery shop is 25 minutes walking, one way. Maybe with a good degree of planning my family won't starve. But we also need to go to work and school, and these are not within walking distance. Sadly, I have to take that back: I won't stop driving my 2000kg of metal, because I don't see how we can possibly live without it. (We're living within the boundaries of a large North American city, not even in the suburbs.)
It can get drowned out in online arguments sometimes, but a lot of people do articulate a vision for that problem. They believe that American urban planning makes it unreasonably hard and expensive to build walkable cities, and most people would want to live in one if they were more available. Vox gives a good overview of areas people are working in to enable walkable cities: https://www.vox.com/22662963/end-driving-obsession-connectiv...
North American urban planning is absolutely terrible. The problem is that all proposals I've seen are still insufficient at preventing excessive greenhouse emissions. Perhaps I am wrong. Prove it by pointing to a single 100k city (or larger) that has sustainable greenhouse emissions, when including food & durable goods.
And as to the more general argument you can get away with it as long as you have been voting for every proposal to increase taxes to pay for public transport and prevent centralization of services and stores.
I'm afraid I do not buy it. I have lived in what are supposed to be the most car-bound US environments and also in the countryside and it is all a matter of choice: not just personal choice (which I will agree can be a displacement from central planning), but most especially of people choosing low taxation over public services every time.
I can't see how you can possibly continue to live as you have done with your 2000Kg of metal. In fact it's looking very probable that you will be accelerating a decline in many aspects of your life.
Sure. I lived in SoCal without a car for a few years in my youth, so it's possible. Until the first child. At a mature age, I'll take up biking just after I get that knee replacement I've been postponing for a while and learn to bike with a kid on my shoulder. Throw a couple more hours in a day and I'm game.
Joke aside, even if we were to stop driving a car and flying a plane in US (the biggest pop-enviro boogeymen) it will cut 25% of USA greenhouses emissions. US greenhouse emissions is 15% of the world. Completely eliminating the automobile and the plane from US will only cut global emissions by less than 4%. The world energy usage is growing at 1% per year, so all that was accomplished was to push the inevitable about 4 years into the future.
Lets up the ante and ban the automobile & plane globally. (Or wipe US economy off the map). That would only save 15% of global emissions, i.e. push the inevitable 15 years into the future.
Here's a challenge: go find a city of non-trivial size that is living a sustainable life according to Paris accord energy targets. Bikes, Passivhaus, local agriculture, solar rooftops, windmills, the works. You won't find any, other than perhaps 3rd world slums. The only known lifestyle that fits the Paris accord energy envelope is subsistence agriculture. And we can't go back to subsistence agriculture, there is too many of us.
It's not a negotiation in which there is give and take. It's _your_ last chance to do something to do something which can benefit both of us. I already have had a low carbon footprint for decades due to being "one of those environmentalists". I have little left to cut to improve _your_ life. What can you do to help?
This scenario is highly speculative and recent research has cast a ton of doubt on the assertion that melting ice is causing weaker jet streams. People are desperate for doomsday scenarios…
54 and likewise. I've been aware of IPCC reports for a couple decades now, just kind of monitoring what they've been saying and noticing that more often than not, the media reports only the best-case scenarios while at the same time the worst-case scenarios are actually what's come to pass and much more quickly than expected. The denialism in this thread baffles the hell out of me.
The near-term collapse of technological civilization has the silver lining that wild things will have a chance to recolonize the planet. The alternative—a world of ever increasing control and declining standard of living for almost everybody on behalf of a tiny few—is far more terrifying to me.
When I was in elementary school (early 90's) we were taught that half of New York would be underwater by 2020. Obviously didn't happen. Stop reading the news, they're fear-mongers and outlandish predictions have been happening for decades.
I've heard about it for the last 30 years, glaciers that should be melted aren't, cities that should be underwater aren't, none of the alarming predictions have come true. In 30 years someone will be telling me just wait...
We are not scared because of “the news” we are scared because of the graphs of temperature over time. Look at the plot. Find the +1.5C on the y axis. Now find where the plot crosses that on the x axis.
We have like 15 years. Perhaps you dont think +1.5C does anything to farming?
More than 50 people just died from flooding of hurricane remnant in the Northeast just a few days ago. And Sandy really did put lower Manhattan under water causing huge damage. More of that is coming.
Honestly I simply can`t be bothered to search for a source that was in a newspaper and on TV 30 years ago. These predictions have been happening for a long time, I lived through them.
I`m not a climate change denier, but shitty predictions definitely hurt the cause of legitimate concern.
Of course anyone in the Gen X/older millennial category should know what I'm talking about anyway (unless they slept through the first decade of their schooling).
The predictions of a few individuals 30 years ago don't have nearly the same weight, at least to me, as the predictions of an international body of climate and earth science experts with 30 years of data and modelling experience behind them.
Another advice reportedly from Texas, regarding fighting rising temperatures: just crank up the goddamn air conditioner.
We had advices like that from former president. Ideas like "if you don't run testing for COVID, you don't have many positives" should surely be accepted enthusiastically on HN.
/s
Seriously, why it should matter if CNN talks about that or not? Don't facts rule, and rule pretty assertively here?
South Florida floods constantly and the situation is getting worse year by year. Regular tides are now higher than ever and causing problems for residents. The creep is slow until it's not.
That's something that can certainly happen in the lifetime of my grandchildren, if I have any. The problem is that even a two or three foot rise in seas (the current projection for Miami in 2060) requires trillions of dollars across the world so sewage and other nice features of civilization continue to operate.
The short term existential crisis is economic instability and mass migration leading to unpredictable warfare. The long term existential crisis is that south Florida really is gone along with the place where something like half of all humans live, the ocean life that supports billions of people dies out, and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns cause entire ecosystems to fail taking out huge chunks of humanity in addition to war over the remaining resources.
You are absolutely right about seeing the rise of civilization. Being a witness to the development of personal computers and the internet has been an incomparable privilege. But no, I am not at all excited about seeing it come to an end. I'm a big fan of civilization. I'm quite certain that watching it wind down is not going to be fun at all.
Civilisation as we know it, and perhaps even humanity is in the process of ending. The ending is inevitable, whether it is now or nearer to the heat death of the universe.
If you can personally try and affect change, then you should do it. But more likely, you are a slave to the same system that everyone else is. I'd recommend working on acceptance at this point.
> whether it is now or nearer to the heat death of the universe
That makes a huge difference. Even having it wind down over a period of a few thousand years, or even a few hundred, would be a hell of a lot better than what is looking like the increasingly likely prospect of having it wind down in a few decades. That is going to cause an incalculable amount of pain.
Damn nice hate. OP was saying how he is losing sleep over climate change.
The requirements involved with contributing to slowing (or stopping) climate change do not include worrying about it. If you are losing sleep, you would benefit from changing your attitude towards it.
Civilisational decline is a constant. It is coming. Accept it now, and work to delay it if you can make a meaningful change. If not, don't lose sleep over it.
I'm doing what I can to invest in future green tech and trying to limit my consumption. I am NOT losing sleep over the fact that we probably don't have much more of a future as a race.
In your comment above, the last half semi-conflicted with the first half, which could easily be interpreted to imply that we shouldn’t really worry or do anything about it. Individually, that may be somewhat true / useful. But on a societal level it is quite harmful when it comes to climate change. I think that is why you are taking heat.
What you are saying would make sense if we ignore the context of the conversation. OP is losing sleep, which is a common way of telling the reader that their mental health is suffering due to wrestling with the concept of climate change and how society is underprepared for it.
If we ignore all that, then it sounds like I'm saying to give up. But if we take the context into account, it is evident that I'm actually giving OP advice on how to mentally and emotionally survive the coming apocalypse.
Though, maybe I should have been more clear.
> which could easily be interpreted
Perhaps there are more than one way in which to interpret certain concepts? Or maybe I'm interpreting your comment wrong?
I agree that there is a lot to do to mitigate damage, and that complacency does not help. But posting meme responses neither mitigates damage, or reduces complacency. In my experience these kind of responses tend to reinforce complacent attitudes.
I can't see how someone posting their attitudes to climate change is "getting in the way." It's useful to know that people are starting to feel this way.
Maybe you could post your own attitudes and provide some justification for them instead? This may convince the other poster to change theirs. Currently your comment is pointless.
The money we spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars could have paid for true energy independence using renewables. We have a pending budge proposition to try and address it but some say we can't afford it.
How can we afford endless war but not afford investing in power that civilization needs but doesn't kill us?
Ok, I "tried this", and thinking about it did nothing to help the problem.
I try to choose the most useful response, which for me is volunteering time in organizations that develop solutions. This way I can use my personal expertise and contribute something, however small. If I find a more useful path, then I will take it.
