I think people have a hard time imagining what its going to be like. They assume we’ll just wake up one day and it will be Mad Max outside your window. It will be much more incremental.
Covid is probably the best analogy, it was a shock, there were major reactions and societal changes, but it got better over a couple years. It will probably be a lot like that, except the getting better part.
It will just slowly get worse and worse until you can hardly recognize the world around you. Floods getting slightly worse every year, hurricanes getting a bit stronger, insurance going higher until people just stop buying it, famines, gas price increases, food shortages.
Remember how people flipped out about not being able to buy TP? Wait until you can’t buy coffee, then bread, and clean water becomes scarce, thats when shit gets real and we revert to survival of the fittest, or who has the most ammo.
Politicians will promise quick and easy solutions, none will work. We’re in for a less comfortable, convenient world probably in most of our lifetimes. I’ll be moving north, and at least +500 ft above sea level.
Yeah that is going to be a huge factor in reducing the quality of life. If people think we have issues with overwhelming migration now, they are in for a surprise when it reaches into the billions of people with no other choice
The reality is Western countries aren’t going to bother accommodating climate refugees. Full on Fascism is still relatively fringe, but when your average person starts to feel the real fear and insecurity from the climate crisis it will be embraced. Walls and detention centers will be expanded, those seeking refuge in the “civilized” world will be met with bullets and gas chambers. There will be no safe havens.
I think people have a hard time imagining what its going to be like. They assume we’ll just wake up one day and it will be Mad Max outside your window. It will be much more incremental.
Yup, just look at what happened in Acapulco after it was hit by Hurricane Otis, people started looting and the security forces were helpless. Or in Greece when people blamed and hunted down refugees for causing wild fires.
On a larger scale, there will be wars over water or resources, crop failures, great famine, climate refugees
Politicians will promise quick and easy solutions, none will work. We’re in for a less comfortable, convenient world probably in most of our lifetimes. I’ll be moving north, and at least +500 ft above sea level.
Going for north isn’t a great idea, remember the wild fires in BC? Also there’s scientific journal where they run simulations, the northern part of America, Europe experiencing a deep freeze.
The problem with your supposition is that the supply chain recovered and everyone got their toilet paper eventually. In the coming collapse, there’s no toilet paper again ever.
You can do what I did. Move to a geologically stable area, make a fortress, not a house, and get solar panels and your own cistern for water. A pro grade freeze dryer so you can build up a food supply. And enough guns and bullets to hold what’s yours. Oh and bidets on all your toilets, no toilet paper ever again, plus your pooper is considerably cleaner. Which as a bonus is wonderful for the environment as it cuts down on dead trees.
I think people have a hard time imagining what its going to be like. They assume we’ll just wake up one day and it will be Mad Max outside your window.
I think that is how people describe it. People explain a sort of failure cascade and don’t go into much detail about the timeframe will take place over.
Even people who accept and believe climate change is real are unwilling to make any personal sacrifices and magically think some scientists somewhere will just solve the problem.
Nobody is coming to your rescue, the planet will save itself from the plague that is our industrial society. We could pretty easily fix this, but it would be politically unpopular, and therefore, won’t happen.
My hippie commune friend here in the US says that the “tragedy of the commons” began as a lie of the landed gentry in Britain. In law school it’s taught as a fact.
It’s not even that people are unwilling, the problem is that personal sacrifices are a mere drop in the bucket compared to industry pollution.
The problem with industry pollution is that it happens in the shadows. Supporting greener products is fantastic, but so many are in dire situations where they are unable to spend the money to support the extra cost.
Also, a lot of the companies who are “reducing their carbon footprint” are doing it by shady or insignificant means. John Oliver did a segment on it, and I remember one company basically paid to “protect” an area of forest that was already protected by the government from logging etc. So, this company “offset” their carbon footprint with land that wouldn’t have been used for resources either way.
The real clowns are the ones thinking the everyman is making more impact than the massive corporations. People making personal sacrifices won’t fix this.
And what would it take to stop those corporations? Individual actions. Be it voting in an election or with your wallet, it’s our society that continues to not only allows those corporations to exist but to grant them every right to do so. The only alternative to a social rethinking would be the violent overthrow of capitalism and an authoritan installation of some alternative. And nobody could seriously want that.
You cannot overthrow capitalism without social rethinking. I mean, you could force people at gunpoint if that sounds like a good plan to you, only then we’d have a capitalisic people that has been told to have every right to overconsume (by people like you, in this thread) for decades.
When you absolve people of their individual responsibility the only way out of capitalism will be by force. Not against corporations, but against the people.
Great insight. An ideological system cannot simply be declared dead nor overthrown. This explains incredibly well why communism has typically led to an enriched and “more equal” ruling class. The economy and its laws may have changed, but people and their desires did not.
To truly have a change, the people have to change their thinking and wants. Marx either naively assumed this would be easier than it is, or his work is meant to describe a very large timespan.
And I do think we’re moving in the right direction. I know this article is very pessimistic, but trends are going the right way. And to quote Mr. Rogers, “look to the helpers” – there’s people working on green energy. There’s people trying to foster more communal thinking.
I’m not a fan of Marx, but I think it’s correct he’s talking about longer timespans. It’s sort of an evolutionary approach. He assumes the core motivations are there, but he (correctly IMO) models people as having different personalities based on their circumstances. A person fighting a bear is a rage and fear filled war machine. A person who’s well fed and comfortable is pretty generous overall and could maybe be trusted with making decisions for others’ best interests.
His idea communist society is a feedback loop: economic abundance (oxymoron if defined technically I know) makes people less selfish, and less selfish people use resources in a way more optimized for global value rather than local value.
I don’t like the way Marxism over-idealizes, over-simplifies things, and I think it’s very dangerous how things are left out, but at least he’s mostly right about the aspects he doesn’t ignore.
Yeah I think it makes a lot of sense viewing it as how our society will evolve.
I vaguely recall that Marx himself didn’t like Marxists. I remember my world history teachers mentioning something about how the actual person behind the -ism is often not a proponent of it.
Fuck that. Companies don’t care about consumers anymore, they’ll just choke out any competing alternative until they’re the only choice left. It’s been seen time and time again, massive corporations only change in the face of heavy regulations. Anything you read or hear about how change has to start with individual action is just propaganda to place the burden on common people and avoid calls for regulations which would actually force change.
But how do we get those regulations if not, in last consequence, by individual action? Personal responsibility specifically includes the need to vote and get socially and politically involved. We can’t just sit around and tell people to wait if and when the right regulations come along. We together are the people who have to fight for them.
Right. In terms of personal sacrifice, turning down the heat is ineffective compared to sacrificing the fun activities of a Saturday to decide late four hours to reading papers and writing to your congresspeople.
IMO the only way to effectively manage atmospheric content is through financial incentives and the simpler the better. Any activity that puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere needs to be taxed, any activity that pulls them out needs to be subsidized.
Then the rates of those incentives need to be calibrated via measurement and feedback to the point where it eliminates existential threat.
But I can’t do that directly, so if I’m gonna do my part for climate change it needs to be something around (a) find out whether I’m right about my theory of what would work and (b) selling the idea to others.
Shivering in the cold to avoid using natural gas isn’t doing shit for me or anyone else.
Lemmy (and Reddit) react pretty aggressively to this data point, but it’s true nevertheless: meat consumption. Meat consumption is the single most powerful impact you as an individual have when it comes to climate change, and it’s significantly ahead than everything else.
Would a healthy dose of ecoterrorism against the top 100 most lucrative brands in the world be better? Yes. Does removing animal products from your diet also significantly reduce emissions? Yes.
As a biologist, I can’t tell you how to live your life and what decisions are worth it or not. But if you’re asking what impact you could have, this is it, it’s not a mystery or speculative assumption - cut out meat from your diet.
I’m not even a vegan. But things are what they are. We can’t pretend this isn’t true just because meat tastes good.
In that case, it’s not true that “even people who accept and believe climate change is real are unwilling to make any personal sacrifices” because many people have given up meat for the climate.
That’s just convenient defeatism. People are part of societies and are sensitive to choices others make. It does not save the sharks if you stop eating shark fin soup. But when there was a campaign against shark fin soup in China, and people actually chose to eat less of it, then that does have an impact on the shark population. Things can change surprisingly fast. It’s just a drop in the bucket, but we’re several billion people dripping into it. The collective impact of significantly reducing animal product consumption is important enough to try for it.
In general, drop the “this is a nonsense solution, we should do this other thing instead”. We need to do all the things to survive this. Focus on making others with the same goal stronger, convincing them to do this other thing too, instead of ridiculing their efforts.
He’s not wrong. There’s no way to coordinate any boycott of any product on the scale you’d need to shut down an entire industry, especially one so deeply tied to human culture.
My guy, it’s the truth. It’s not possible to coordinate any boycott of any product on the scale you’d need to to effectively reduce climate change. There are too many people with too many diverse opinions, worldviews, and situations for it to be possible or effective. You need a better plan that’ll actually work instead of just moralizing it because you’re angry at everyone else.
This @pintdrunkenelephant guy’s a reactionary dog with a bone they can’t let go of. An antagonist and contrarian, the antithesis of what they preach, unable to see the big picture, and nothing will ever be good enough for them till the world burns. I wouldn’t bother mate.
Margaret Atwood was spinning a yarn in the Maddadam trilogy when she wrote that alpha gal allergy was created by ecoterrorists trying to cut mammal consumption. But maybe she’s on to something. Will people start intentionally spreading Lone Star ticks? It’s already estimated to be the third most common food allergy in the US and growing fast. Even in folks that have the alpha gal antibody but no anaphylaxis, it’s thought that it causes a massive increase in risk of stroke from causing build up of unstable arterial plaque.
“Meaningful”, as in, “even if I alone do it this will somehow stop climate change”? Not possible, very obviously.
Meaningful as in “if everyone would adapt that mindset we’d be half way to the solution” - there are many, many options. Vegan diet, fuck cars, use public transport, buy local, vote green (or the closest approximation available), support sustainable companies, less consumerism in general, change your electricity provider, get politically involved, social activism, convince your friends and family…
Pick and chose as many as you want and can and you start becoming part of the solution.
People don’t like to hear things like this because it means they are truly powerless. But its absolutely true. None of those sacrifices mean shit in the face of the actions of massive corporations. And no, change in lifestyle won’t make these companies adapt. The global market is so interconnected at this point that things like boycotts are meaningless. If a company that sells pork suddenly finds people in their area are eating less pork, they aren’t going to downsize. They’re going to find a different market to keep selling the same amount, or more, even if they have to ship it across the globe.
I honestly think a person should be asking themselves “If I alone did this, would it make a change?”
But those actions aren’t going to be installing solar panels on your house. They’re going to be things like writing a book or learning how to connect with people you disagree with.
I wish everyone had alpha gal allergy. Beef and pork production would cease and you’d stop seeing dairy put into every fucking packaged food on earth (chicken ramen? Dairy! God fuck on a Tuesday morning it drives me batty). If climate change keeps going, there will soon be lone star ticks everywhere! Bwhahahahahahahahah!
Check your carbon footprint! You can choose to starve to death. You can choose to buy brand A which has 99% as big carbon impact as brand B!! Oh wow the differences! Regulating business is communism!!
You can either ignore it or slowly go insane. Noone will listen, we are all going to die quite horrifically. I can’t ignore it so i just hope i go mad before i feel the suffering.
I’d be far more worried about society collapsing from the economic damage caused by leftist authoritarians in government using this excuse to greatly expand their power and regulate and control all human activity.
Man, it’s hilarious that you think the primary concern we should be having considering this news is how someone might use this to somehow gain supreme executive power through environmental regulations.
Can’t… I was permanently suspended for mass reporting content that was promoting hate and violence. I guess one of the terrorist supporting mods didn’t appreciate me reporting all his buddies and got me suspended for “Report Abuse”
There’s currently 5 bushfires burning around my state and it’s only mid spring in the southern hemisphere. Last year we experienced devastating floods across the country on a scale we’ve never seen before. A few years before that we had one of the worst bushfire seasons in history.
Honestly it’s probably someone just burnt out from reading everyday how screwed we are. Whens the last time we got some actual good news it just doesn’t happen anymore.
Well, shit is definitely getting progessively worse. However, are we really at the point where the best narrative has shifted from “climate catastrophe in 30 years or so” to “the end of human civilisation in less than 100 years”?
One is trying to scientifically predict how massive climate systems beyond our current understanding may behave, while the other is just promoting doom hyperbole for clicks. You don’t have to look at the URL to realise it’s a massive multimedia organisation looking for clicks.
Skimming through the report, though, I see no mention of “collapse of society” like the hyperbole in the article. It mentions the collapse of various natural and socioeconomic systems, but the article is nowhere near as reasonably measured as the paper.
That’s my beef here, the article is doing a disservice to the paper by exaggerating things for clicks.
You’re going to have hundreds of millions of migrants coming into our countries because they literally have no other place to exist. Of course that will lead to wars, oppression, and genocide. Will the collapse be so bad that there is no human civilization left? I can’t imagine that. But will the civilization look anything like what we’d hope or find acceptable today? Hard to imagine that, either.
That being said, scientists have been hyperbolic for decades because no one gives a fuck unless you use terms like the end of civilization / life as we know it. They only have so many tools to get people to pay attention and from what I can tell none of them have worked, other than I feel there’s an uptick in people choosing not to have kids because the future looks so bleak.
It’s either “the sky is falling” and nothing happens (because of all the work we actually did, like y2k, the ozone hole, or acid rain) or “this might be a problem someday” and nothing gets done.
Y2K was a real threat, and it was with significant coordinated effort that it was resolved.
The ozone hole was (and still is) a significant threat, which was mitigated somewhat by a coordinated effort to stop using CFCs. Unfortunately, there are many more gases that cause huge threats to the protection that the upper atmostphere provides, which have by in large gone unacknowledged by human civilisation as a whole.
Personally, I work in high voltage electricity, and I’m acutely aware of the problems with SF6 as a greenhouse gas (insufficiently regulated under the 1992 Kyoto protocol) and how the exponential growth of SF6 electrical switchgear and subsequent inevitable leaks contributes to a hugely under-represneted threat, which is subject to a 20 year delay for the gas to transition from leaks on the surface to gases distributed throuhgout upper atmosphere.
There are indeed very serious and immediate threats facing humanity, but this article does little to draw attention to them, instead distracting with bullshit hyperbole that is only backed up by a url that leads to:
Of course that will lead to wars, oppression, and genocide.
This isn’t scientists being hyperbolic, you’ve invented that on your own just now.
That being said, scientists have been hyperbolic for decades because no one gives a fuck unless you use terms like the end of civilization / life as we know it.
No, they haven’t. If you actually read scientific literature you will find a balanced argument that generally takes into account the previous estimations, regardless of whether or not they were proven false or correct. The only thing you find when you look into the claims of this Vice.com article is:
Mass forced movement of people and cultures have always led to wars, oppression, and genocide. Sometimes it starts with those that are moving and sometimes it starts with those that are already there, but it happens all the time.
Just to add on to what you’ve said here, basically we could potentially have Israel vs Gaza all over the world. That situation is horrific and there are no good guys, just bad guys and victims on both sides. I don’t want to see that all over the world.
Scientists have not been hyperbolic. If anything, so far, they’ve been very cautious abut their statements.
I still remember reading headlines about “likelihood of global warming” then “probably caused by human activities” because 90% level of confidence is not enough, you need more data until you can reach 95% or 98% confidence before boldly writng “most probably”.
But in their “probably” they predicted we would see more floods, droughts, violent storms, all of these happening one after the other causing devastation.
And Ô surprise: we see floods, droughts and storms following each other and causing devastation. Yet our leaders will claim “no one could have predicted all of that would happen at once!”.
Now they start telling us our civilization could collapse (“could” must be what? 75% confidence level???)
We’re going to spend 20-25 years claiming they exagerate, another 20-25 years saying “well, they maybe right, but we can’t change things too fast because that would be unreasonable and the people would not accept it”.
By the time, we will start reading articles stating no matter what we do now, we can only push out the end a bit, but we’re doomed. And the first reactions will be “those damned scientists always exagerate and use hyperboles”.
Yes, to be fair I meant science journalism. Scientists themselves seem quite content to research and collate data and offer dispassionate answers, which is why few people read the academic papers. Other than that clarification, we are in agreement.
Scientists haven’t been hyperbolic. However articles like this one most definitely are, and they do a disservice to the scientists’ claims by doing so. All in the name of getting a few extra clicks.
The present is too bleak for many people to choose to have kids. It's simply unaffordable in terms of time and money for a lot of people. Rent is unaffordable, both partners have to work but daycare is unaffordable, food and medical are expensive, schools are increasingly fucked up. Then you add the future uncertainty (or rather, probability of dystopia), and why would anyone do that?
I know people will say “we were casual about it and now look where we are”… but looking at this title, I can already see the debatable points before going into the argue… which is going to create that debate, since the majority of people aren’t going to go into the article anyway.
I could be wrong and there is no way to prove or disprove my belief, but I think humanity would be more united working towards a solution if the majority of media stuck to purely facts. Ultimately, it should have the same content and less divisiveness over projected opinions.
Yeah, see I’m not saying that the article isn’t pointing in the right direction, rather that it is generally wrong in its assertions. In doing so, it is actually causing harm by discrediting objective truth with a narrative filled with flawed hyperbole.
It’s long been a thing that “all the ice is going to melt in 30 years” - for the past 100 years that’s been the best estimate scientists could make. Now, it’s actually happening, and scientists are scrambling to make better predictions - but they do so with a solid understanding of the previous predictions.
However this article does disservice to that effort, because it’s just stretching the previous hyperbole as far as it can with the goal of attracting viewership, rather than with the goal of spreading news in the hope that people will be better educated to make better decisions as a society, and as a species.
Any scientist worth their salt wouldn’t be stating so concretely what might happen in 100 years.
My observation about this is that we’ve moved from an era of asking whether or not climate change is real to one where we try to figure out how serious it is going to be.
Like I’m not even clear on what is meant by collapse.
In a period of just 50 years, major stable empires simply ceased to exist, and it’s believed that sudden (much less dramatic) changes to the climate induced this.
Personally, I think that is down to most scientists actually facing the reality. Previous expectation was that humanity will be able to adapt to some degree of changes with some sacrifice - then 2020~2021 demonstrated that assumption to be false.
“Global daily mean temperatures never exceeded 1.5-degree Celsius (°C) above pre-industrial levels prior to 2000 and have only occasionally exceeded that number since then,” the researchers noted. “However, 2023 has already seen 38 days with global average temperatures above 1.5°C by 12 September—more than any other year—and the total may continue to rise.”
I’ll tell you the best part, and it’s irreversible
The Gulf Stream really is weakening, a new study confirms: a finding which has profound implications for one of the biggest weather systems on our planet. When the Gulf Stream changes, so does the climate
Hello good day to you fellow Lemmy user, i will promply explain how it works. See, the hoax is to get you to spend money on you don’t need, while viewing corporations as eco-friendly whilst they utilize it as an excuse cheapen the cost of resources and give you worse products. Source here. Henceforth, the entire thing is in fact a hoax. Thusly I hope this clears up any confusion about us anti climate changers
Edit: Fellow lemmiers, why do you downdoot me today?
If only there were some body of governance that could regulate things for an entire society. Too bad mankind never had any tools like that. Oh well. Enjoy growing gills.
On the contrary, the issue remains that climate change doesn’t exist at all, conversely it is made up, a faux issue that benefits corporations. Ergo, you really should not worry about it, in my opinion (imo)
Where in the source that you linked does it say that a switch to electric stoves is an aspect of greenwashing?
Also to argue that is bad faith. Obviously corporations will want to greenwash themselves and provide us with cheap products. That’s their whole MO. However, that doesn’t mean that a product is bad de facto. That’s like arguing that because corporations producing solar panels have an interest in selling us solar panels, that solar panels are really actually not better for the environment than fossil fuels. I’ll give you credit for only forcing me to read a Bernie Sanders op ed, but your argument doesn’t make sense and your source doesn’t support it.
Cites source that opens with satire agreeing with their point but then explicitly says the opposite:
If this is what you believe I would respectfully disagree and I would urge you to get on the phone and call friends and family around the country to hear about what their communities are experiencing. I would also suggest that you check out (reliable) websites and take a look at what’s going on in virtually every part of the world. If you do, here’s what you’ll find. […]
Scientists look at a lot of things – gas trapped in ice, tree rings, glaciers, pollen remains, even changes in the Earth’s orbit – to study the natural changes in our climate going back millions of years. What these natural changes tell us is that it normally takes thousands of years for the earth to warm just a couple of degrees. The temperature increases we’ve seen in just the past century should have taken almost a thousand years.
Are you really trying to tell me that a good solution to our hollowed-out working class AND the climate crisis is to transition as rapidly as possible to renewable energy and sustainable tech that we design, develop, and produce in our own country???
You sound like a communist grrrrrr!
(I hope my sarcasm comes across. I’m very tired as I type.)
Unfortunately, good induction cooktops are not available everywhere. And certainly not available for cheap. Where I am, there are no 4 hob cooktops available.
Also, induction and electric cooktops need cookware that has flat bottom. However, constant heating and cooling of cookware means over time, the bottom will develop a curve for most of them.
This unfortunately means that gas stoves are not going anywhere, at least in Asia and Africa which are cost sensitive markets.
India has banned AliExpress, Banggood etc for years.
Also there are some available on Amazon but those hobs have a bad reputation here because they’re mostly used by college students living in hostel.
And finally, even if my parents agreed to get one, we’ll have to do kitchen remodelling because the kitchen counter doesn’t have any wall sockets for it.
It’s really wild how committed dumb people are to receiving Darwin awards for them and their families.
“Vaccines don’t work and are a hoax, and it’s unrelated people who agree with me are dying from COVID at a higher rate.”
“Liberals want to take away my red meat every day of the week and limit how much high fructose corn syrup soda I drink in a day, but screw them. Unrelated, my whole family has diabetes and older members strangely have heart disease and colon cancers…”
People who treat science as a dirty word really seem to have higher all cause mortality. So bizarre and unexplainable.
The big food companies and healthcare industry want to keep you alive and consuming as long as possible. How shut you feel in the meantime doesn’t affect their bottom line as long as you don’t figure out the connection.
But the healthy people are subsidizing their shirt eating habits with our insurance rates and Medicare taxes. So Darwin and Maddie don’t get a chance to fix this problem and we end up baking our planet.
There’s only three examples in there, one of which was a true ban but already overturned, and the other two are changes to code that will ban them situationally in the future for new buildings, and aren’t even in effect yet
They’re literally not banned according to that article
Honestly, while it’s very much an unpopular opinion, at this point I think it’s unconscionable to add to that next generation and I definitely secretly judge my peers who do so as making an incredibly selfish decision likely dooming that child to a quite depressing future by the time they reach adulthood themselves.
Also, one of the worst things you can do for the environment in a developed nation is have a child.
Yeah, I’ve had a hobby over the past few years looking into the history of a particular apocrypha text, and its antinatalism is one of the more interesting features, with a great line like this:
A woman in the crowd said to him, “Lucky are the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you.”
He said to [her], “Lucky are those who have heard the word of the Father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, ‘Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.’”
This line is broken up into two different parts in the gospel of Luke (11:27 and 23:29) but the inherent parallelism makes me think it was originally a call and response as it then appears in the Gospel of Thomas above.
You also have the antinatalism in one of the surviving lines from the lost Gospel of the Egyptians where Salome asked “how long will death continue?” And the response was “as long as women bear children.” Followed by her asking if she’d done well in not having any.
It’s interesting how across history it’s inherently a position that dooms itself to obsolescence when it appears due to adherents dying out without passing it on, even if the inherent merit of it remains true from one age to another.
So we socially have a collective anchoring bias towards seeing procreation and “be fruitful and multiply” as such a good thing, even though this is simply a platform with an inherent survivorship bias and not necessarily actually a good thing at all.
I could not have worded it better myself. It is absolutely a survivorship bias. Those who believe it is good to have children will have children and pass on those beliefs, while those of us who recognize the inherent ills of procreation do not.
And then due to the relatively small number of us, we are written off as psychopaths or pessimists for acknowledging the realities of the situation.
It’s sad, and it’s extremely annoying. But at the end of the day, I’m at least doing my part by not throwing another person unwillingly into this mess to be both a perpetrator and victim
It’s pretty arrogant to assume that your pessimistic outlook on the future is the only valid or reasonable one. Human quality of life, on average, has pretty consistently improved since the industrial revolution.
I’m hopeful that as a greater proportion of people aren’t scrambling to survive day to day more of us can turn to the issues of environmental protection and remediation.
Me choosing to hope for a Star Trek future is no less valid than your belief in the inevitability of the Mad Max future.
Broadly, human quality of life has pretty consistently improved for as long as there’s been humans actually.
It’s happened faster than before in the past 100 years.
It’s happened quite a lot over just the past 20 on many measures.
It’s accelerating rapidly.
But alongside that acceleration and improvement has been knowingly playing a dangerous game in maximizing short term gains in exchange for long term consequences on which we developed technologies to increase the potential debt we were taking on for short term rewards.
Perhaps there will be a deus ex machina that averts disaster and delivers us from paying those debts we’ve brought on ourselves.
I too hope that’s the case.
But to me it’s irresponsible and presumptuous to gamble somebody else’s future on that hope.
“The world is going to end” has been a line for as long as there’s been lines to be written down.
And yes, it’s consistently a false prophecy.
But “not one stone will be left of these buildings around you” tends to be correct given a long enough time scale and in places in the world today it becomes true for neighborhoods or cities literally overnight.
The world may or may not end. But what we really need to worry about is the survival of civilizations under significantly increasing pressures. Because “the end of civilization” is potentially much, much worse to go through than the end of the world. The sun explodes? It’ll be over quick. There’s famine so bad people start eating their neighbors? Nuclear fallout poisoned the land around you? The oceans die?
Maybe not the best environments to raise a child, even if humanity overall will ultimately survive.
A baby born today will have microplastics inside their body when born and we’ve seen the most rapid change in global environment in millions of years, seeing changes that previously took tens of thousands change in decades. And they’d be born into a world with a so called “Doomsday clock” at a second away by scientists symbolically showing how close we could come to an end for an entirely different reason from why many other scientists today think we have less than a century of civilization.
The past performance may no longer be the best predictor of future returns.
I think we agree on the state of the world, and even that civilisation is worthy of continuation. So the question is, which is more likely to end civilisation, an entirely preventable apocalypse that we already have all the tools needed to perfect against without even materially losing quality of life?
Or no children ever being born again? Because I was responding to people suggesting that this was the only reasonable option.
Individual choices not to have children seem extremely unlikely to suddenly reflect a universal avoidance of having children, and given the world was working pretty fine with populations of only a billion people in the past, especially given automation is coming along which can replace a large number of people within the workforce, even a global drop in population to 50% or 20% of what it is today would likely be more than fine. Sure, a drop to 0% for a prolonged time would spell the end of humanity, but that assumes conditions and forecasts don’t improve such that people resume having kids.
As for “we already have all the tools needed to protect against without any material loss of quality of life” - not sure what hopium you rely on, but that’s patently not the case for most of the existential threats we face.
In theory we have had the technology to end all wars and have peace on earth since at least the invention of the drum circle and singing Kumbaya. Weirdly that hasn’t happened yet.
The existence of theoretical solutions is very different from the probable solutions given the various complex competing interests and short-sighted myopia dominating the majority of decision makers.
You said it was unconscionable to have children, so by your metric no-one should have children. If you’d like to walk that back and concede you were being hyperbolic feel free to so!
Again, I agree with you, I agree that a smaller population would be a Good Thing. But the shock to society/civilisation of even a 50% reduction in birthrate could be just as savage as the impacts of climate change. We’d be back to encouraging elders to commit suicide rather than being a burden on society.
I also think that there’s not a lot of point to civilisation if we aren’t aiming for people to be happy and fulfilled, and for a lot of people raising a family is the biggest contributor to their happiness and fulfillment. You dismissing that of hand and judging those people for wanting what makes them happy seems pretty mean and uncaring.
The existence of theoretical solutions is very different from the probable solutions given the various complex competing interests and short-sighted myopia dominating the majority of decision makers.
Again, I agree! But I do think that the existing technical solutions should be proof against the despair that you are peddling.
Yes, I agree, right now no one should have children. If in a decade we have benevolent AIs doing work for everyone and universal basic income and peace on Earth, this should probably be reassessed. But as of this moment right now, everyone should not have children. What I’m saying is that your argument this would have higher odds of disaster than other things is baseless as we both know that not everyone will stop having children even if they should.
We’d be back to encouraging elders to commit suicide rather than being a burden on society.
We literally already are back at that with some of what’s going on with the euthanasia program in Canada in practice, even if that wasn’t in the intended design.
for a lot of people raising a family is the biggest contributor to their happiness and fulfillment
Sure about that?
Most people think of their children as making their lives better. Yet many studies have found that those without children value their lives more than those with children.
Well I’ll keep in mind that cures for cancer in mice should be proof against despair should anyone I know or love come down with it.
Yes, if your loved one comes down with a cancer that can be cured by applying existing technologies, not ones that have been tested in mice, but ones that are currently being used successfully to treat patients you should not despair!
Worry? Stress? Generally be concerned? Fucking riot if the government starts limiting/preventing access to that treatment? Yeah sure, that would be a healthy response. But despair? No way!
Oh, so there are scalable technologies to bring climate change back to decades earlier levels in existence already and not just in theory in research? Is that what you’re claiming?
Not to reverse current climate change, but we aren’t living in the Mad Max reality just yet.
But the technologies needed to seriously limit climate change and achieve Paris agreement commitments do exist. It’s really just employing solar, wind, and batteries at scale, electrifying what we can, and using biofuels for the rest.
And the IPCC plans don’t require people to give up having families for a generation.
Nonsense! The IPCC reports include perfectly reasonable science based action plans to address climate change and prevent the Mad Max future.
It’s politics that supports the current plan of emitting as much as possible as fast as possible. It’s people like you who have given up and embraced doomer pessimism that make it so hard to build the political captial needed for change.
You understand the problem. You should know that it’s solvable. Don’t give up before the fight is over!
We also had decades to prevent climate change from happening and look how well we tackle it now.
I’m confident we’ll have a plan to prevent that collapse that’s due within 100 years, but to keep it reasonable, its execution will be spread over 100 years, and we think about starting in 80 years providing everything goes well in the meantime.
That’s my plan. I didn’t ask to be born into this shit. The day the human race is wiped out is the day the Earth can finally start to heal, and maybe produce a species that will do better.
While I agree with the premise, I don’t agree with just giving up. I’ll be doing what I can to save what’s left until it’s gone and after that I’ll be trying to restore it until the oceans die and I suffocate, along with everyone else. Seeing how many other people are still driving cars and taking flights, I doubt my input will have any effect but that doesn’t matter.
That one person that is still trying to fix this shit could be the difference between annihilation and salvation. Don’t give up.
I don’t think we’ll be around to see the oceans dry up. We probably will be around to see water wars, floods, and civilization collapsing. Look on the bright side, you’re probably more likely to die from cannibalism than lack of oxygen.
The oceans won’t dry up, the life in them (specifically phytoplankton) will die off when the water is too acidic and hot to support them. Phytoplankton produce the vast majority of the oxygen we breath and without them every oxygen breathing species on this planet will die, which obviously includes us. They are called a keystone species for a reason.
I misread your comment, sorry. Also, I didn’t know that, thanks for explaining. So shouldn’t the surplus of trees and plants due to high CO2 offset that a bit? Besides that, I think that society will collapse and the majority of the population will die off before we ever see that happen, but you are right, some of us might be around for that.
IIRC terrestrial plants only create ~20% of the worlds oxygen, and this percentage is further reduced with areas being ‘developed’. Not to mention all the land that is used for forestry and agriculture. Plants are growing faster since they can create sugars at higher rates with all the CO2, but I highly doubt it’s enough balance out the potential loss of marine ecosystems. Losing those wouldn’t only affect oxygen levels, but it would also affect any and all animals that depend on those ecosystems as a food source. Thus, plants that rely on animals for pollination or spreading seeds will eventually die off too, leaving only plants that rely on wind even further reducing oxygen production.
It reminds me about how people talk about not caring about how they treat their bodies because they’ll die early anyways, but they don’t realize that what it really affects is their quality of life as they get older
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