Many people are saying it folks: 4 degrees of warming by the end of the century (even as soon as 2070s) is a real possibility. How much longer do you think the :lmayo: countries in the north can hang on under these conditions?
Collapse is a process, not an event.
Things will be the same but worse, then the same but worse, then the same but worse.
Nah that’s the thing, the flying apart spectacularly is rare. There’ll be big events, be if from weather or social collapse, but even those will only be the end of everything for the people directly effected, for everyone else it’s the status quo but worse.
When the collapse makes you into a refugee either because of a heatwave so bad your town is uninhabitable, or a hurricane or a bomb destroys your house, it’ll reasonably feel like everything flying apart spectacularly, but to everyone else it’s just another news headline and another instance of the same but worse.
When I say "flies apart spectacularly" I don't mean "we all decide at 12:00 GMT on Tuesday to stand up, don our hockey masks and chaps, and maraude in our Australian muscle cars," but that systems will continue to work until they can't any more and then the pressure/stress has to be released. I'm sure the Eastern Bloc in 1988 felt everything was going to be same but worse forever but things got real weird real fast starting in 1989.
I don’t mean “we all decide at 12:00 GMT on Tuesday to stand up, don our hockey masks and chaps, and maraude in our Australian muscle cars,”
well, but...uh, that's not entirely out the question tho, right? I mean i'm down. "Thunderdome Tuesdays"
There's a festival in Nevada where people do this for a long weekend every year. It's called "Wasteland Weekend". The Humongous usually shows up and makes people pancakes.
we all decide at 12:00 GMT on Tuesday to stand up, don our hockey masks and chaps, and maraude in our Australian muscle cars
Well it's on my calendar now.
Yes, this is like how people misunderstand the fall of the Roman Empire. It wasn't a sudden cataclysm that made it collapse overnight, or even a few years. It was hundreds of years of slow decline leading up to that. For the periphery of the empire, collapse came much more quickly than the imperial core, it's not as if everyone had the same collective experience.
the flying apart spectacularly is rare.
Global warming is a disaster with no precedent in history. It's a disaster that is happening everywhere in the entire world without exception, effecting planetary systems that usually take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to change. It's happening in step with the Sixth Great Extinction and an ever more precarious global economy. And it's accelerating much, much faster than even recent worst case predictions.
Global South will be fucked too , India and Pakistan have had terrible heatwaves every year for the last few years.
To me, the more important question is whether the southern countries will be able to take collective action against the north before that happens. The workers and resources of the global south are necessary for northern prosperity. If they wait until the north takes action because it is as devastated by climate change as the south is, then it will be too late for the south.
Hopefully, a sufficiently large block will organize to withhold their land and their labor to force action on climate before the worst of it happens.
But this is all Kaiju politics. As someone in the global north, it doesn't really change my on the ground organizing.
Me too :lenin-laugh:
What I meant was I might as well be saying, "I hope Mothra can team up with Godzilla in time to stop King Ghidorah from completely destroying Okinawa before he moves on to the mainland."
This is a great point. It's exciting to see countries like Ecuador and Panama striking for, and getting, the changes needed to help their actual population, and standing up to Amerikkkan billionaires. I really hope that more countries in Latin America follow suit, and create feelings of solidarity among the working class in the US while at the same time destroying US hegemony.
I think that the biggest idea we as regular working people need to understand, is that the world as we know it will not "collapse" until long after our own individual lives have collapsed. Do you think that the bourgeois will allow regular working people to continue to enjoy quality of life while their institutions crumble? I think that we will know the answer to the question of 'when' at that point in time when our own lives start to feel hopeless and destitute. (Not to imply that you don't already consider this when asking the question, but as someone who routinely asks myself this kind of question, I arrive at this answer more often than not.)
Climate Leviathan makes a pretty compelling case that capitalism (and by extension the global North) probably won't fully collapse under climate chaos but will adapt and evolve away from neoliberalism, while being challenged by growing anticapitalist spheres of influence (climate mao and climate x). As Matt says, things will stay the same but just worse.
Or maybe Mad Max by 2030. Who knows.
Climate is a hyper object. It's foundational to most other parts of society. So I don't think there be a political crisis that will be seen as purely caused by climate. Did people drown because climate change lead to rising water levels which broke a levee which flooded a town, or did a refusal to fix infrastructure cause it? The debate will always be around short term human action. If the other guy was in charge would people have been evacuated in time?
I think collapse will come from some other disaster, most likely a Carrington Event-level solar flare, and climate change will play a huge impact in slowing society from recovering. Even one with half the intensity will cause mass chaos, and with our terrible power grids and just-in-time manufacturing of essential replacement parts, it could knock power out to large swaths of the world for months.
Also on the short list would be a large volcanic eruption creating a volcanic winter for a couple of years.
One of the scariest things I've ever seen depicted in a movie is in Bladerunner 2064 where a solar flare has already fried all the electronics on earth - everything from financial records to digital photo albums all gone - but neoliberalism lurches onward regardless.
I thought they were talking about the movie but I guess that's BR 2049, and but there'll be a TV series set in 2099? Now I don't know if this solar flare even happened or if it's just bort's fever dream
I think she was just fucking around while referring to BR 2049. there is definitely a plot point in the movie about a big blackout that wiped out records, but it is not explicitly named as a Carrington Event
most likely a Carrington Event-level solar flare
Good news everyone, it might happen as early as 2025 https://wired.me/science/sun-solar-storm-2025-impact-on-earth/
Article says 2-3 percent chance of such ahhh event in the 2020s, and that it'd cause enough damage to take maybe a decade to fix
Essentially every decade will have a 2-3 percent chance of this happening, as the sun's activity runs on an 11 year cycle. This is going to happen eventually, and we are completely unprepared for it, as evidenced by how long the grid goes down for even when there are localized issues.
Yeah it's on the list of things that keep me abusing substances to avoid thinking about. I really don't know how civilization would survive when all the machines we need to fix everything get fucked at the same time
Depends what you mean by "collapse". The USA might not live out the decade.
New Zealand might be able to struggle on under a climate autarky until 2080 or so, whenever China's agriculture finally fails and the trade that hasn't already been stopped by the lack of viable large scale sea transport ends.
But "The West" as some kind of coherent entity, even if it's lost its global hegemony? Sometime between 2045 and 2060.
Never. "Collapse" from climate change is the secular version of the Rapture, especially if you're talking about the global North.
Some time after the rest of the world near the equator has become unlivable.
The global North will still have winters. Which will bring relief each year.
Let's average the answers to get a sort of 'wisdom of the crowd' thing going like the time Galton found the weight of the moo at the fair (look it up)
