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We are fucked, and nothing short of ful on global war communism could unfuck it. We should have been carbon negative by twenty years ago, "carbon neutral" by "2050", will do shitload of fuck all.
global war communism is still likely, just only after many billions of people die.
(disclaimer: the last 2 cannibals sharing the meat of the third-to-last cannibal counts as global war communism)
i believe even for that it's way too late, we are on course to a natural chain reaction for climate change in about 12 years, meaning the entire humanity needs to be carbon neutral by that time, so basically even if we switched to global war communism absolutely right now it would be difficult to achieve that in such a short time span
I have degrees in geology and climatology-
Yes we are, like way worse than people understand. People won’t literally be burning up and dying but the global climate patterns are reacting in a far more extreme and far less predictable way than we thought. The threat to stability across the world is so incomprehensibly immense at this point that I don’t even really know how to describe it other than the fact that entire climate zones can and will he turned on their head over the next 100 years and the Human social and political consequences are almost immeasurable
I think humans are too hard 2 kill for near term extinction but a population reduced to a few million individuals in polar, alpine and subterranean habitats is definitely plausible
That's a wildly doomer take even with the most dire predictions of climate change, you can't just casually speculate about the death of over 99% of the population
A 7 celsius temperature increase by 2100 completely within the realm of possibility. Over the past several hundred millions years, global temperature has only varied 18 degrees celsius.
Such an increase will be 5 degrees celsius higher than any temperature humans have lived through. This is over the course of one century.
It is possible that the Earth can only sustain a few million people under conditions never before experienced by humanity, when the rate of change has never been seen in Earth's history.
It is possible that the Earth can only sustain a few million people under conditions never before experienced by humanity, when the rate of change has never been seen in Earth’s history.
The carrying capacity of the Earth now or in the future is unknown and could change wildly. Who's to say that innovation won't keep up with population, to some degree? Where would we be without antibiotics, vaccines, modern farming advancements, none of which existed before 1900?
The past century has seen the most change for humans in their history, the outcome of that shouldn't be assumed as negative. It can absolutely be hard to hold onto hope with the way the future looks, but I really hate replies like this that are just "we're probably fucked lol," it accomplishes nothing but spreading a shitty apathetic attitude that nothing can be done.“we’re probably fucked lol,”
Where did I say that? You are projecting way too much lmao
Yes. It is. That is a possibility people need to grapple with. I'm not saying that's guaranteed nor that people should be fucking babies & give up.
I've been playing that Frostpunk game lately and it definitely makes me appreciate just how hard dealing with climate apocalypse will be, but also that no matter how bad things get you always need to keep going.
We're definitely going to see a collapse of nationalism just from crumbling infrastructure and the need for cities to become self sufficient quickly.
I expect in the next 30 years (sure, much sooner, but also beyond 30) portions of the world will experience seasonal wet bulb conditions requiring evacuation and climate refugees. Same with hurricanes, wildfires and droughts.
My doomsday prediction is that we are left to rely on forming localized tribes for survival. It will basically be "green capitalism", where the tribes that have access to green tech and green practices will be able to survive better. For example, a bunch of houses with solar panels and a microgrid might be able to keep things going pretty well. They will benefit by also growing their own food and composting, etc. So my idea of preparation is planning a sustainable community.
Humans are too adaptable in my opinion to be completely wiped out, but society existing at its current extent may not be possible in the distant future. We already produce more than enough to take care of the global population, the issue is distribution
I ask this genuinely: can you give me some examples of weather being more extreme and less predictable in the past 100 years than the 100 years before that? It feels like it's unlikely we have accurate earth-wide weather reporting from the past 200 years that would be an apples-to-apples comparison. And I find it difficult to believe we can take a sample of only a few decades and make any sort of long term prediction out of it since virtually nothing else works that way.
poster didn't say anything about weather now compared to the past. It's about changes scientists expected as the planet heats up compared to changes actually observed. Glacier melt, sea ice extent, stuff like that. Things are happening more rapidly and in ways that hadn't been expected.
It’s not the weather, though weather patterns can and will change as well as ocean temperatures change. It’s the gradual change in climate that will be the driving factor. We aren’t trying to predict weather, we are predicting long term climate and that has become a massive challenge
Sorry, but on this one there's still more work to be done.
The scientific community is shifting from "mitigation" (preventing climate change) to "adaptation" (surviving climate change) and is heavily emphasizing policy/behavior/environmental solutions that can do both ( the IPCC report calls these "synthesis" goals ). Additionally, there is a lot of work being done to integrate climate solutions with Sustainable Development Goals like poverty alleviation and reproductive freedom.
Def look into climate adaptation and find out what initiatives are going in your community/what others are doing and which may be important for your community to enact to help people get prepared. Reach out to members of your community who will need the most help dealing with the effects of climate change (eg, infectious diseases, heat waves, extreme weather events, flooding) and find ways to do what you can to help them.
Reach out to members of your community who will need the most help dealing with the effects of climate change (eg, infectious diseases, heat waves, extreme weather events, flooding) and find ways to do what you can to help them.
I think being able to actually deal with the fallout of climate change will require us to, on an international scale, rationally plan production and resource allocation, while facilitating the movement of people without regard for national borders. Or in other words, we need socialism to effectively deal with even the consequences of climate change.
I think leaving “adaptation” largely up to the whims of the capitalists will effectively be guaranteeing adaptation by virtue of mass death and suffering. I don’t think this is something that can be avoided by mutual aid on the local level.
Agree to a degree. Solutions are needed at all levels. There's no question that we need high-level systemic change (I personally also don't think capitalism can possibly prevent, much less reverse, climate change). And we also need people on the ground watching out for each other. There are people already suffering from climate change no matter where you are -- for example, the homeless, ppl with outdoor/poor working conditions, the elderly are all at-risk during extremely hot days and heat waves. Someone needs to help the old person who lives alone get a window AC installed in their apartment to protect them during heat waves.
Just like we can't put the blame for solving climate change solely on individuals (it'll take way more than everyone driving less and reducing meat intake), we also can't deny the things we as individuals can do today, especially for climate change adaptation.
Yes. And there's still plenty of constructive work to do. I've struggled with doomerism for years (hopelessness, despair, suicidal ideation) and I've only recently made some progress with it.
I will die anyway, you know? Should my head roll on the battlefield, I want to take out as many enemies as possible. Every day I live and breathe, I can try to create even a tiny amount of positive change.
Letting go of hope is NOT about giving up. It's about taking the power away from hope as a prerequisite for happiness, and for making meaningful progress towards Socialism.
In the words of Matty C., "a life spent in pursuit of the virtuous end will be a more rewarding life and a more meaningful one than one that acknowledges reality and accommodates itself to it."
If you're 65 the rest of your life might be ok
If you're 20 you're fucked
This is a far more complex question than anyone here is (probably) qualified to answer. Even in my day job, which deals with climatology frequently, I couldn’t tell you definitively one way or the other. Mostly, that’s because the consensus is something like “it depends”.
It depends on where you live, what measures at remediation we take over the next century, what adaptations we pursue as a society, etc. It’ll be “good” for some regions, and very bad for others. I don’t believe in being climatepilled. You apply pressure where you can, and you don’t stop. You adopt the Grandpa Munster (Al Lewis) mindset:
I've been in the struggle over 70 years. It doesn't bother me I may not win. After doing X amount of time or years, don't throw your hands up in the air because, you see, everybody wants 'the win'. They want it today. It doesn't happen. The struggle goes on. The victory is in the struggle, for me. And I accepted that a long time ago.
However challenging things get over the next X number of years, adopting a personal outlook of resignation, nihilism, or apathy won’t serve you in the pursuit of creating a meaningful, impactful, and personally fulfilling life wherever and however you can.
Where do you think this border wall was coming from? In the coming century, when Americans are loosing their shit, you bet there will be a wall built toot sweet.
Struggle with this all the time. Hard to stay motivated to do anything besides full hedonism. Go check out /r/collapse to fully black pill
If it helps - the way I think about it, it's like a terminal diagnosis. You thought you'd live a long life, reach your seventies or eighties, and now it turns out you really only have a couple decades of good health left. After that, who knows what havoc your disease will wreak on your body. But eventually it's okay, because we were all gonna die anyway, and it really just puts the rest of life in perspective. You understand what is really meaningful to you, what you need to do before you can't anymore, and you start deliberately targeting those goals. If people can be joyful and find purpose knowing they only have X amount of years left before a painful decline, then hopefully so can I.
Yeah, this is a great way to think about it and intellectually something I try to do. But emotional it still bums me out, both for my own personal life, but also just for the future of humanity. It's like thinking about how there are probably billions of planets in the universe that could support human life, but I'll certainly never visit them, or even know for sure if they exist. And as we're going, humanity won't either.
Depends on what you mean by "totes fucked". I think the worst consequences are basically unavoidable, but it's probably not an extinction event. It will however lead to the collapse of a lot of nations, but likely not the ones in the imperial core, and lead to more mass migration events. So the "totes fucked" aspect will be whether our reaction will be to move toward more equitable distribution of the resources and land we have, or if we adopt some form of ecofascism. So I guess it's up to you whether you want to fight for a better world within the reality of climate change, or whether you'll give up and live under a fascist government.
This is pretty much my understanding, ya. I feel like the doomer catastrophizing is really counter-productive, and also not particularly prescient. You don't paint an apocalyptic image, but you don't paint a pretty one either. I think you have it
Nah, we're not totes fucked. Climate change is coming, yes. And it will make life much, much harder for everyone, but especially for those for whom life is already hardest.
It's not the end of the world; that's just capitalist realist catastrophizing. It could mean extreme unrest and suffering in a lot of places. The only thing that is certain that the stronger and faster we respond right now, the better life will be for generation after generation of people ahead of us.
Unfortunately, capitalist empire won't give up that easily. It's not The End. It's most like The Time When Everything Is Way Shittier For Everyone Now Somehow, Because People In The Past Were Selfish and Greedy.
Fossil Capital and an upcoming book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm detail how we can actually combat climate change. We're likely fucked, but it's possible that we're not. If you want some real doomer hours, check out David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
The description is incredibly based. I cannot wait for this book. Fossil Capital was a magisterial account of how the switch to coal was precipitated by wanting control over labourers rather than any sort of price concerns, and shows how climate change is specifically because of capitalism, and not just "human nature" or anything like that. This one, however, seems even more awesome.
The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven’t we moved beyond peaceful protest?
In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop–with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.
Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women’s suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.
depending on your definition of "totes fucked," the answer is yes
possible future paths are between Amaryllis and The Road, and what leftism can do now is to try and point things in the direction of the former rather than the latter
It also depends on who you mean by "we" in the near future. Places closer to the equator are more fucked than places away from it.
One statistic I read recently that will stick with me:
Cities will grow steadily hotter: current warming means everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is effectively moving southward at about 12.5 miles a year.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/climate-emergency-130-degrees/#fnr-*
Civilization will collapse within our lifetimes. Climate change is one of the reasons. It's far worse than most people think.
