The most realistic outcome is the exaggeration of all the most negative aspects of society today. There will be mass starvation, in first and third world countries. Countries will hoard their resources jealously, and wars will break out over trade deals between the countries that can still overproduce food. Severe weather will become more common, do more damage, and the areas that they hit will no longer be able to recover between events. Shantytowns will make a comeback as people's homes and livelihoods are destroyed by water, fire, wind, etc.
As certain areas of the planet become uninhabitable, there will be a mass migration of people beyond which the world has ever seen. Think of all the problems that Syrian refugees have "caused" in European countries. Now imagine if there were thirty more countries being evacuated like Syria. Immigrants will number in the hundreds of millions, coming from all corners of the globe, looking for some place where they won't die of dehydration or drown in a never-ending monsoon.
Immigration policy will become the only politics that matter. The rallying cry for people will change from "immigrants are stealing our jobs" to "immigrants are stealing our water". Xenophobia will become the driving force behind fascism, and acts of violence towards immigrants will become terrifyingly commonplace. Groups like the proud boys or the neo nazis in greece will get larger and become real political entities, not just fringe groups, and they'll openly organize raids against refugee camps and immigrant communities. There will be people elected to congress who were caught on video beating a refugee with a stick, and it helped them in the polls.
Contd.
If you're wondering what Everytown, USA will look like, it's going to be the same, but worse. No sandblasted hellscapes unfortunately. advertising will still be everywhere, cell phones will still work, Walmart and Dollar General will still be the primary shopping locations outside of major cities. There will be more homeless people, congregating in camps on the outskirts of towns, or moving in caravans across the country. Mass housing will become more common, with big buildings of small, cheaply built apartments for people with next to no income. In that recent chapo episode, I think it was Matt who said that the stacks of mobile homes from Ready Player One was actually a prescient depiction of living in the future. There will be a lot less fresh food at the grocery store, and more synthetic stuff. More people will be riding bikes, not because they want to, but because they can't afford gas for their car anymore. Lawns will dry up, and urban greenery in general will become sparse, as water can no longer be spared for aesthetic purposes. In gated and heavily defended wealthy communities, flowers in the street median will be an obnoxious display of wealth.
Jobs will disappear, not unlike what happened this year. Any profession that relies on food or produce will be strangled by rising costs. Restaurants close, secondary and tertiary goods like honey, beer, wine, jam will experience a reversion of the indie boom of the last twenty years, until only the largest, most mass produced brands are available in stores. The majority of well paying jobs will finish transitioning from production to the service industry, with most successful people just staying at home and working for some online toothbrush subscription company. Crime will skyrocket as the pressures of unemployment, homelessness, and rising food costs force anyone below the upper class into poverty. Gun sales will increase, violence will come quickly and frequently in day to day life. Shooting a homeless woman because she tried to grab your groceries in the Walmart parking lot won't even warrant calling the police.
I think you're right. And it saddens me to think that so many things we should be doing now in desirable ways, will be done out of necessity later for survival. I'm taking about things like, getting rid of the water-guzzling lawns, riding bikes, and having more dense housing in cities.
I can add to the list: growing your own food, maybe consumer products that last longer will become a thing, or at least there will be more of a niche in repairing stuff and making things last longer, fuel efficient cars and generally driving and flying less. All that basically means living in sustainable ways. Massive, American-style consumption is not sustainable. I saw a facebook thread last night about people being too bored eating at home every night to be able to do the coming lockdowns where restaurants are fully closed. Over-consumption is like a drug addiction. Its only going to end if we recognize we have a problem, which we won't because capital needs it profits, or when we run out.
You're correct, but a lot of these things will happen even if climate change magically stopped tomorrow because we discovered cheap fusion or something
The book just straight up tells you what's the worst case scenario. The book is based on this article which does the same but with less pages.
Thanks for the link, I haven't read this before.
If crop yields fall 10% for every increase in global temperature of 1 degree, then we'll likely see a fortress America (even more so than it is now) in our lifetimes to hold North America's grain producing regions. If you think concentration camps as a response to Latin American immigration is bad now, then just wait a few decades until the US is gunning people down at every border who are trying to escape their too hot or famine environments.
Were easily heading for 4 to 6 degrees of warming the pace we're going and the fact that the US is unwilling to slow down.
Like, agriculture on a civilizational scale is just... not going to be possible by 2100. Any gains in agriculture we could get from an extended growing season further north will be fucked by inclement weather (too much flooding/dryness during planting too much flooding during harvest). The area between the tropics will be a no-go zone for people - if you cross through it you will die of heat because it will be at the wet-bulb temperature year-round. Almost every coastal area flooded, which means essentially every city. Billions of people displaced.
Its not an exaggeration to say fallout style complete collapse of civilization. But that would be 2100, the road to that looks like neo-feudalistic eco fascism like Children of Men.
This is preventable and we can change things, but the timeline is constricting and we can't do it under capitalism. We must have a revolution by the end of the decade or there is little hope for humanity as a technological species in a global society.
This. I have close pretty much 0 hope for actual systemic change, but to avoid terminal doomer thoughts I like to tell myself that we have a decent amount of time to advance technology to fight climate change.
realistically well before that point capital will force radical geo-engineering attempts on us.
Probably not with good results.
Depends where you live. In the US, it will suck but not be anything apocalyptic on a societal level. Miami, Phoenix, lol, but the rest of the country will look fairly "normal"
If you're in the Indian subcontinent, yeah, it's gonna brutal and horrifically barbaric.
Probably one the countries which will be least impacted, although storms will become more and more intense damaging the west coast
Pretty bad fam. Like, after a couple of degrees of warming we won’t have enough food for most people bad.
It will be really slow, I feel like mid 21st century geopolitics won't resemble anything that came before. Food will scarcify, massive death and immigration, dictators will likely rise to protect the bourgeoisie from the growing poor. But it might take decades for capitalism to "collapse".
It will never collapse, just transform and adapt to both the changing climatic circumstances as well as the changing needs of the ruling class. Capitalism is not some special separate system, it is just a variation of the same parasitic exploitative socio-economic approach that emerged thousands of years ago and has spread throughout the whole world since. As such "capitalism" as a relatively new iteration of the same approach will not collapse, instead it will evolve into a more optimal parasitic system to reflect the times, more optimal for the ruling class that is. Thus "capitalism" can never collapse it can only be forcibly collapsed. Nature and the passage of time are not on our side, we absolutely have to take the situation and our future into our own hands.
50 years after cathastrophic collapse i could see some kinda mad max canticle for leibowitz, but im leaning more on a protracted children of men scenario because i dont think the collapse will be so sudden and universal, but go in bouts and very uneven. be about the powerful nationstates holding on to "normalcy" with whatever resources and energy they can hoard by increasingly nasty methods.
Honestly, Judge Dress with just a splash of Mad Max in the places most deeply hit by climate change imo.
E: I meant Judge Dredd but I'ma keep it like this
Fallout but w/o nukes or Children of Man?
Stop watching spectacle and open up an book
