A question that I've been mulling over for the most of 2020 is when can I honestly expect the United States to no longer exist, because honestly I don't see this nation as very stable and it's pretty clear to most of us that the neoliberal world order is already on a shaky foundation that could very easily collapse from climate change. Places like California and Australia are catching fire on a regular basis now, much of the American Southwest has giant population centers with no fucking local water source, and cities like Miami, New Orleans, and to a lesser extent New York City are at fairly high risk of flooding from potential sea level rises. Increased temperatures shifting ideal arable land Northward which would at the very least require a vast movement of American agricultural land to meet the changing climate. At the absolute very least there's bound to be a mass migration away from Arizona, Southern California, New Mexico, West Texas, Utah, Nevada, Florida, and Louisiana from there either being no water or too much
The point is, I'm 20 years old and I completely expect to see the collapse of this nation in my lifetime. My personal guess is sometime around 2075-2085 after the negative effects of global warming get too out of hand and major disasters happen on a regular basis, combined with the rapidly decreasing material conditions for the vast majority of the United States causing tens if not hundreds of millions to be homeless, without secure food and or/water, healthcare, or have any of the basic necessities of life to be available to them; and the United States is going to be so full of angry, desperate dissidents that no amount of police violence can hold it together and the nation just falls apart into millions of not ideologically but defacto anarchist communes of people scratching out an existence digging up their yards to plant potatoes and corn
But that's just my take, what do you guys think the next 100 odd years are going to look like in this country?
Are "future historians" really unlikely? It's not like global warming will wipe out all potential for civilization, it would just force it to develop along dramatically different lines (possibly within a few centuries). Right?
If climate change isn't fought soon, it's entirely possible that global industrial civ will collapse wholesale because of agricultural collapse and the lack of ports from sea level rise, and remaining high tech enclaves won't be able to maintain the tech base for urban farming at a local level.
Combine that with lack of consistent seasons and multiple crop failures a decade, which make hunter gatherer (who can survive harsh climates, but only if they are consistent) and pre-early industrial cultures untenable, and you have maybe 20-100 million pastoralists herding goats and a few pockets of remaining agriculture in long term stable microclimates like Lake Baikal.
These will have to hold out for 500-1500 years while climate settles down. Wouldn't take much to destroy remaining literary traditions, or even wipe these groups out.
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I'm an (ex) scientist, though not a climatologist, and I'm sure we have a good understanding of the world or I would not be so doomer from all the papers I've read on 4+ degrees of warming. But I'm not sure anything I've seen in the last 20 years has shown a willingness to "do what we must to survive".
We know enough to keep industrial civ alive, yes. Theoretically.
We don't know enough to keep it alive without access to large-scale trade, which we may well not have. Where are your processors going to come from? You going to build them yourself locally? You got the sand for that? You got the rare earth metals and other reagents for that? While you're at it, hope you've got everything you need to sustain the haber-bosch process at an industrial scale. And indoor plumbing, and hopefully anesthetic.
Maybe you want to retreat to Steam Train level. Hope you have access to a whole bunch of things that required a globe spanning colonialist empire to bring together. Sure you can synthetically crack rubber in a lab, but will you have the resources to enlarge at scale in the midst of climate panic?
The supply chains for something as simple as a pencil are stunningly long and complex and many places will not have those resources available locally. Climate change means no ports. It also means political strife, which means reduction of overland trade.
We can stop this for the most part with a global command economy and carbon scrubbing. Failing that we could start developing technologies for a self contained city-state size industrial base. I see no signs of either being done even at the theoretical level.
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Well the time for them to start doing that as a logical choice was 1995. If they wait until their actual quality of life is under threat, all they can do is eat the poor until their tech base collapses due to lack of economy of scale, then flee to NZ/Mars and live in a box until death. There are decades of lead time for climate change decisions, and it wont hit every rich person at once. That's the issue.
The rich in stable countries will happily throw their fellows in countries undergoing collapse under the bus, and loot the bones to maintain their lifestyle. Till there's nothing left to loot.
There is a neat project called Collapse OS, https://collapseos.org/, which some people are working on. I hope they still are anyways. I read about it last year. The premise is that there will be a time, perhaps soon, when new computers are inaccessible but e-waste and old electronics will be abundant. So they want to make a reliable and simple operating system that can be used on old hardware, perhaps Frankenstein devices, made by connecting various things together.
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I agree, I think that as long as a nuclear war doesn't break out the chances of the human species as a whole surviving and adapting to climate change is rather high. The problem of course is that the adjustment will not be pleasant for billions of people.
posted unironically as the west fails to deal with a pandemic on a comical scale
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fair enough
But is industrialization strictly necessary to pass down significant amounts of human knowledge or nah? The printing press and rising literacy rates came about long before the industrial revolution.
No, but I think complex agriculture might be. There aren't a lot of Pastoral Civilisations with rich written literary traditions.
:sicko-yes: