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'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.
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.
I don't think anyone is arguing against that. He's arguing that humanity is doomed. That's an order of magnitude difference.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Climate change has an actual and real potential to end our species in the relatively near future. We have already kicked off a mass extinction event that has only just begun. I "offered backing" for this in other comments in this thread, discussing it with someone who demonstrated a willingness to have a conversation, not just debate-bro-reddit-style demand evidence from me for something any decent climatologist would straight up tell you.
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.
I agree with pretty much all of this except for the last bit, which is a lot to get into right now (other species that existed globally going extinct, the surprising youth of our species, genetic bottlenecks pointing to how insanely close we've already come to extinction when climate change wasn't an issue or was so much slower as to hardly be a comparison now, etc.) All that aside, taking everything you said into account, it's still folly not to recognize human extinction in the near future (geologically speaking) as a real possibility and worth considering. Especially given how many unknowns still exist with respect to feedback loops.
But what I was mostly refuting when I first replied to you was the claim that recognizing human extinction as a possibility is "agency-murdering nihilism." And I hope I did that. Again, for me that recognition has gone quite a ways towards making me a better leftist.
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.
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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."
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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.
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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
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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).
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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.
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I don't think anyone is arguing against that. He's arguing that humanity is doomed. That's an order of magnitude difference.
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.
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.
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And known pedant.
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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.
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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
yeah, plural billions dead seems likely.
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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.
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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.
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I did say that? I'm not trying to dunk on you.
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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.
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.
Climate change has an actual and real potential to end our species in the relatively near future. We have already kicked off a mass extinction event that has only just begun. I "offered backing" for this in other comments in this thread, discussing it with someone who demonstrated a willingness to have a conversation, not just debate-bro-reddit-style demand evidence from me for something any decent climatologist would straight up tell you.
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.
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.
yeah, that's my read as well.
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).
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.
I agree with pretty much all of this except for the last bit, which is a lot to get into right now (other species that existed globally going extinct, the surprising youth of our species, genetic bottlenecks pointing to how insanely close we've already come to extinction when climate change wasn't an issue or was so much slower as to hardly be a comparison now, etc.) All that aside, taking everything you said into account, it's still folly not to recognize human extinction in the near future (geologically speaking) as a real possibility and worth considering. Especially given how many unknowns still exist with respect to feedback loops.
But what I was mostly refuting when I first replied to you was the claim that recognizing human extinction as a possibility is "agency-murdering nihilism." And I hope I did that. Again, for me that recognition has gone quite a ways towards making me a better leftist.
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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.
deleted by creator