Well said. Ultimately knowing that it is too late (for those with the power) to prevent the feedback loop is not truly defeatist - or its opposite. Defeat and victory are no longer relevant here, the Climate Change Game (which we were never playing) is over, the scores are tallied.
I don't need to believe that 'my civilisation' will successfully survive after I die in order to want to improve it somewhat, or prepare for potential future generations. I try not to attend to such matters out of the expectation of success/reward or failure/punishment (y'know barring the part where me-want-eat), but because it is preferable for the world to be harmonious regardless of its fate. It's a happy coincidence that adaptation to climate/biodiversity collapse is also extremely compatible with, if not contingent upon, the kinds of systemic transformations I work towards.
"Before the doompill, chop wood, carry water. After the doompill, chop wood, carry water."
We are all going to die.
We're not all going to die. Which is to say we are all going to die, but everyone has always been all going to die forever, so we're not unique or special in that regard.
We are unique and special in that we have foresight into the string of natural catastrophes that's going to kill billions of people, and that's well underway, but that's a far-cry from an extinction event. Way more of a slower, preventable Black Death for someone in the imperial core.
I mean when you lament that are not people 'are not getting it', you seem to indicate you think they should also think that. Which, why are we wanting people to take the Denethor route on this again?
I mean, if you want to adopt this floating point gnosticism of "the models say we're all going to die horribly, so we need to take that as a given", you're welcome to, but I don't think we should want that to be the default leftist position because it's bad science and bad philosophy of science
The world being utterly fucked because if the climate is more or less the default consensus of climate forecasts. How is it bad science?
Because contrary to depictions like "The Martian", numerical models don't output things like "world is utterly fucked". They spit out norms and aggregate quantities and if you're lucky interval estimators. "World is utterly fucked" is editorializing, defensibly if "utterly fucked" is conservatively construed and indefensibly if utterly fucked is liberally construed.
Look, it's not going to be pleasant, you're going to see billions of premature deaths from this, but the who and where of those deaths are all inexact, inductive predictions. Absolutely none of models and I doubt any of the scientists (certainly not the ones I know personally) are saying we're all going to die (from this).
I'm a philosopher of science specializing in climate models. I think your presentation was fine. The models are very clear that we're entering a regime that will cause vast swaths of the Earth to become hostile to human life for large parts of the year. This is a catastrophic emergency.
700 other things, will work will come to be will impact and change the climate and our lives specifically
See, you can't do that, because no one can, because these systems are coupled in inexhaustibly complex ways. Even the coupling of system of climate models is inexact. I know this because I have my PhD work was in numerical models of systems very similar to climate models. I know enough about it to not let someone else's finite-element NS solution ruin my weekend.
It's cheap, easy and free, to say online that 'we're all going to die of climate change', but it's one of ways of saying something that sounds smart without ever actually saying anything at all. It's the tired twitter-style argumentation of offhandedly making a prediction that will not and cannot be validated that no one will remember when the bill comes due.
Negligicing the death of billions is cool too, yeah one way to put it is definitely that it "will not be pleasant".
200 million people died in the 20th century due to the combined effects of alcohol and tobacco, but no one makes it a personality facet to post online about "death stalks the land, great bilious clouds of poison and tar churn out of every dive bar while inside men are drowned in cirrhotic frenzies, it's only a matter of time for me". We have a moral obligation to do what (little) we can to stop the capitalist death machine that is driving this climate catastrophe, and to help individuals in it's path when and where we can, but I'm also not terribly impressed by your pretending to deeply, personally care about abstracted projected megadeaths to shore up a shoddy intellectual position.
Look, 700 migrants just drowned off a single boat in the Med, for reasons adjacent to and attributable to climate change. Neither of us are doing anything about it, so I don't see what moral benefit your or my doomerism offers them.
but you just argued with the former cth mod
And known pedant.
I mean I think it's important to be clear when stated positions don't hold up to rigorous logical scrutiny, not because we have any obligation to have logically coherent positions (because no one does certainly not me lol), but because they're a certain type of impressionable dweeb (me 10 years ago) that will adopt positions because they seem ostensibly logically sound, and I don't really think we should evangelize doomerism.
When I was like 10 a documentary on the big crunch at the local planetarium left me horrified for like 6 months. So when someone says thinks like "we're all gonna die", I am gonna caveat it all to heck as appropriate just as a matter of principle.
We are all going to die.
this isn't true in the most literal sense. we have a couple of opportunities to avert the worst crises, but even beyond that, we won't all die. most will and it will be bleak but people have been finding ways to survive against impossible odds for at least 2 million years. our way of life has an expiration date and our society, as presently constructed is doomed, but many people will survive. probably not most, and the vulnerable among us are fucked, but it's not going to be all of us, even if the earth warms by 6 degrees.
Haven’t really thought about how capitalism is going to deal with resource shortages, but it’s definitely going to be bad
idk mate, that discussion doesn't really clarify anything. "we're all going to die" is indisputably going too far and it's a meme that needs to die. it's an agency murdering nihilism - we can do things in the present to limit the damage. it's a rhetorical point but I think it undercuts your argument. you can't cite science and slip to vibes without people rightly calling you on it.
I'm not invalidating the rest of your argument. I mostly agree with you. I just don't think "we're all going to die" is a responsible point. this isn't a gotcha - it's about effective rhetoric.
"we're all going to die" is indisputably going too far and it's a meme that needs to die. it's an agency murdering nihilism
No it's not. It's not going too far to recognize a very real possibility, even if there is still hope that we might be able to avert it. And it is absolutely NOT agency-murdering nihilism to not stick one's head in the sand and pretend it can't happen. To me, the possibility (even likelihood) that our limited time is nearing its limit, encourages me to do everything I can to improve people's lives and material conditions here and now and bask in the fleeting time we do have on this globe, both as individuals and as a species.
No it's not. It's not going too far to recognize a very real possibility, even if there is still hope that we might be able to avert it.
Look either you're talking about how we're all going to die generally, in which case there's nothing we can due to avert it, or you're saying "we're all going to die of climate change", which implies a Venus level degradation of the biosphere that none of the models seem to pointing toward, or you're inappropriately assigning probabilities of death of unspecified large numbers of people to specific individuals.
All I'll say in response to this is that I know exactly what u/LegaliiizeIt means when they talk about some people here willfully misreading and misrepresenting others with pedantry and debatebro nonsense.
Look if you don't want to mount an intellectual defense for the claim "climate change is going to kill us all", that's absolutely okay you are under no obligation to, but I want everyone to know that's position being offered without any backing.
anything is possible - we can't know the future - but I've read no studies that suggest that literally everyone is going to die. I encourage you to read the whole of the IPCC reports. the summaries leave a lot out and the actual data paints a bleaker picture than what's in the top-level summaries - but I saw nothing that supports the idea that an extinction level event is likely. the clatharate gun would have to go off for that to happen and all indications at present are that the thawing of the permafrost is not resulting in a spike in methane levels because plants are growing in the former permafrost and repurposing the methane.
the actual data paints a bleaker picture than what's in the top-level summaries
There's a reason for that. I've read of meta studies that show climate scientists deliberately downplay how bleak the situation really is, mostly because of political pressure but also because they are afraid of mistakenly spreading paranoia.
What any good climate scientist will tell you is that we fundamentally don't know all the feedback loops we have already tripped and know even less about ones that will inevitably be tripped. For example, it's looking likely that Venus was once a lot more Earth-like in terms of what we consider habitable but now for reasons (volcanism?) that aren't entirely clear, it's surface is utterly inhospitable even for extremophiles. We could have already tripped a runaway greenhouse effect without yet recognizing the exact mechanism, but we do know we are changing the climate in ways faster than at any other time outside of mass extinction events. (And we are in the midst of a mass extinction event already, just at the very beginning of it - hence the term anthropocene). Earth has been cold enough in the past, likely several times, that it was completely frozen over, with maybe the exception of a narrow band around the equator. Earth has also been hot enough that animal life has only been able to survive at the poles. Humanity would not survive this. Humanity, despite our spread and obvious adaptability, is also an extremely fragile species for reasons similar to why technology that requires complex supply chains is fragile to sudden shifts.
Human extinction in the next few centuries is not by any means far fetched. That's not to say it's guaranteed, of course, but pretending like it's not in the cards is naive.
There's a reason for that. I've read of meta studies that show climate scientists deliberately downplay how bleak the situation really is, mostly because of political pressure but also because they are afraid of mistakenly spreading paranoia.
yeah, that's my read as well.
We could have already tripped a runaway greenhouse effect without yet recognizing the exact mechanism, but we do know we are changing the climate in ways faster than at any other time outside of mass extinction events.
the present models do their best to accommodate for these unknowns. they're likely wrong and things might be even worse than predicted - we can only account so well for the things we don't know - but the worst case models for runaway CO2 warming don't lead to the earth becoming Venus. they lead to the Earth becoming something like what it was during the Jurassic. it's methane warming that will actually annihilate humanity and the current data on that front is cautiously optimistic (see my earlier point about plants absorbing the methane trapped in the permafrost).
Humanity, despite our spread and obvious adaptability, is also an extremely fragile species for reasons similar to why technology that requires complex supply chains is fragile to sudden shifts.
this contradicts the biological record. human species have adapted to thrive in more environments than literally any other species on earth, excepting the extremophiles. that's not to say that extinction is impossible, only that it's going to take more than displacing the vast majority of people and a collapse of the food chain. if plants are growing, pockets of humanity will find a way to eke out an existence.
It’s good to organize now because we still have to live and aren’t dead yet. Being a bloomer is unnecessary unless you’re trying to make people comfortable.
i'm usually immune to these but
WoW private servers
still doesn't play vidya much at all
when exposed to [anything] goes on rants for hours on end
/nightwalk/
GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE
Last seen on social media 5 years ago
implying this person wouldn't doomscroll Twitter 9 hours a day
If I can't Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub, I don't want to be part of your Yo da dub dub.
Emma Scatman
There is no hope for a leftist movement starting in the United States (or anywhere in the west for that matter), but that doesn’t mean we should give up on our comrades in the global south
I’m sure someone said this when they were at the top of the titanic deck in 1912
Me: The twilight of my life will be spent in the shadow of a dying world, tortured by the knowledge of what we had and what was thrown away to make room for a rich man's comfort. I will not know peace at the end.
Also me: wowee sure seems like a good idea to live near a major population center and not have very many survival skills :)
The best survival skills are social organization and knowing when to flee the country.
Clinton impeachment for childhood, stolen election and 9/11 for puberty, dual wars for teen years (into 20s), 2008 crash for graduation, covid for 30th bday, not to mention the climate disaster every year or so.
I think it's important to point out that the Post WW2 prosperity that curdled into neoliberalism is an absolute anomaly and if you were a worker at any point in time prior, you might not have the impression that things were going to improve or that your kids would have a meaningfully better lot in life.
What I'm saying is that the feeling is normal. People lived through the dissolution of economic orders and states all the time. Just keep living, just keep pushing.
Worker riots, strikes, and overall anger were key factors throughout history and I feel the US is the aberration due in part to the WWII prosperity and CIA/FBI guided psyops.
I try to remain optimistic, but unfortunately living in the west means a society where despite things turning worse and worse due to the various contradictions of capitalism and the liberal democratic system... the people embrace fascism en masse. That and the liberal and fash race to the bottom and world war 3 - both sides convinced the other is weak and would back down at a certain point of the escalation. Or at least the narrative is shifted to make it seem so and drive leftists into despair.
It's all so tiresome.
What helps me is trying to understand all these processes by making myself familiar with theory.
If I'm going to get thrown into the woodchipper as a dirty foreigner on the Heimat of the German Volk, I'd like to at least understand how it happened.
It's a dark, depressing and entertaining (in a dark humor way) world, but living and resisting it becomes a thing done of spite. And the small displays of solidarity, such as listening to healthcare workers my mother knows start praising labor unions at an unpolitical social event without me having said a word all evening or being visibly leftist in any way, does bring a smile to one's soul.
It makes you think that a better world, as far away as we are from it at this moment, is not an impossibility.
When I was doing shift work with two jobs and paying off my student loans I kind of came to the conclusion that much of the world we live in is fake. This isn't "real life" it's a delusion and even if you wake up the rest of the world sleeps. Real life to me are the indisputible things that we can all experience and have to contend with. Growing up, learning, communing with friends, being outside that's all real.
Anything that you can opt out of by virtue of being rich is fake and not something I'm going to take seriously as I would be missing on the core experience of life otherwise.
Even as a kid I would hear the phrase "reality is what you make of it" and think that, no, the people with power created the reality that's best for them and you either fit neatly into that or you starve and die.
I mean with that knowledge, if youre not the power haver and your base instinct tells you not to eat shit, you have to see the contradictions of our stupid society and do your best to hide in them.
I try to have hope, people say "things were bad all throughout history, it's always been bad, etc" but like, all throughout that history the globe had ice at its poles and a functioning jet stream sooo
I try to educate myself and stay positive, I talk to my coworkers about the problems of our society and economic system, but idk how you stay sane knowing that the planet you live on now has a hard expiration date. It's like some Junji Ito cosmic horror shit you've gotta deal with just to live these days.
and on top of everything the MSM is trying to gaslight us into thinking climate scientists werent properly warning the public on how bad climate change would be
im pro rehabilitation but some lobbyists/politicians get
enjoy the 6d8 psychic damage
Catch-22: Scientific communication failures linked to faster-rising seas https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4057045-catch-22-scientific-communication-failures-linked-to-faster-rising-seas/amp/
I’m sure capitalists will just give up being capitalists if you ask them really nicely
It’s not so much that I don’t expect good things to happen, it’s that I expect the average level of thing happening to go down as time passes.
Good things happen, just less and less of them over time
I cannot stand having casual conversations in public or wherever and the other person mentions any themes about collapse or decline. I've tried talking about a book or theories that addressed these issues decades ago. I've tried the more aloof approach and suggest we'll all die one day regardless. I have never had a productive conversation around things getting worse, usually I'm just stuck listening to some morons complete lack of understanding why this all sucks.That fucking Simpsons meme about trying nothing and having no ideas just fills my thoughts.
before collapse kills data centers i wanna watch the simpsons :(
Dont worry. The world cant end before I watch One Piece and all the seasons of the Simpsons.
And I'm still chipping away at Detective Conan and the regular hour long specials that count as a single episode.
This is actually a great point because I think capitalist realism and technology realism go hand in hand
I don't know I think the collapse of the old imperial powers will make room for something better to come up.
If Rome hadn't fallen then there wouldn't have been the changes that ultimately resulted in people being better off now than they were under the Romans. Just wish we didn't have to be the ones that lived through the collapse
Not really the point of this post or anything, but I can't help myself when it comes to this topic. Basically everyone immediately lived better after they were no longer under the Roman thumb. The vast majority of people in the Roman empire were rural laborers whose surplus was expropriated by the cities and who got nothing in return. The less powerful and less centralized successor states extracted less from the rural population. The idea that the collapse of Rome was in any way at all a tragedy (or that there was really a "collapse" at all - there was more of a very gradual transition) is basically a reactionary myth.
