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Hello Sailor posted:It's Trabisnikof. Anyone who doesn't agree with him is in some stage of climate change denial. Hey guys we are gonna nullify the effects of this emission impulse injected into a complex system through political action! Impulse response isn't real!
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Apr 8, 2016 13:32
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Yeah, we're doomed. That's life. In the states in particular, we're fairly isolated from the cycle of life that has in general defined existence on Earth. People die. Civilizations die. You rise, you live for a bit, you die. I used to be deeply bothered by this when I was younger. Then you realize that this is normal. You live, you do the best good you can, and you don't get in a tizzy when it becomes clear that you're facing the end. So many people have faced their end knowingly. This has happened so many times, and, well, they got through it. I get that it can look grotesque to look at death or the prospect of others (or, in this case, pretty much everyone) being royally screwed. Continue. Do the best good you can regardless. The universe is okay. You'll live better and be able to do more good if you can personally accept it.
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Apr 8, 2016 17:24
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Potato Salad posted:Yeah, we're doomed. That's life. For me, the thing about that is that it's hard to deal with that viewpoint without also surrendering to nihilism. Yeah, I can do some good now, but as selfish as it seems, I'd like there to be a tomorrow I'm doing this good for. I'd like to have at least a little time to enjoy a perfect world before I go. Call it naive, call it selfish, but I'd like it if humanity stuck around long enough for spaceships, thank you very much.
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Apr 8, 2016 17:51
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Potato Salad posted:Yeah, we're doomed. That's life.
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Apr 8, 2016 17:55
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TACD posted:The stage immediately preceding this is 'climate change can be effectively tackled within our current economic system.' No, literally the final stage of climate denial is "yes climate change is real, yes it is bad, yes humans are causing it, but we waited too long, so better do nothing!" The post I was quoting was arguing against long term thinking, which is as anti-adaption/anti-mitigation a mindset as one can imagine. The scale of climate change is such that it is far from too late to mitigate some suffering. Inglonias posted:For me, the thing about that is that it's hard to deal with that viewpoint without also surrendering to nihilism. Yeah, I can do some good now, but as selfish as it seems, I'd like there to be a tomorrow I'm doing this good for. I'd like to have at least a little time to enjoy a perfect world before I go. Call it naive, call it selfish, but I'd like it if humanity stuck around long enough for spaceships, thank you very much. Yeah I never imagined we would live in a perfect world. With as horrible life can be already across the world, the goal seems quiet lofty (but still noble).
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Apr 8, 2016 17:59
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Inglonias posted:For me, the thing about that is that it's hard to deal with that viewpoint without also surrendering to nihilism. Yeah, I can do some good now, but as selfish as it seems, I'd like there to be a tomorrow I'm doing this good for. I'd like to have at least a little time to enjoy a perfect world before I go. Call it naive, call it selfish, but I'd like it if humanity stuck around long enough for spaceships, thank you very much. Well the reason you think this way is because the concept of progress in the West is something comparable to a religion. You think surrendering the idea of progress towards a better and brighter future is "nihilism" but that has less to do with reality and more to do with the "my god failed" effect. The idea of progress is dead, industrial civilization will be dead soon but humanity might still go on. That should be enough of a tomorrow for you to do good for.
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Apr 8, 2016 18:22
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Isaac0105 posted:The idea of progress is dead, industrial civilization will be dead soon but humanity might still go on. That should be enough of a tomorrow for you to do good for. Of course your doomsday premise has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. If anything, our civilization will be more industrial not less because of it.
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Apr 8, 2016 18:41
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Isaac0105 posted:Well the reason you think this way is because the concept of progress in the West is something comparable to a religion. You think surrendering the idea of progress towards a better and brighter future is "nihilism" but that has less to do with reality and more to do with the "my god failed" effect. But... ...can I at least still shitpost on forums dot somethingawful dot com after industrial civilization collapses? EDIT: Trabisnikof says yes, so I guess I feel better now. Inglonias fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Apr 8, 2016 |
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Apr 8, 2016 18:42
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please shut the gently caress up about "stages of climate change denialism" as if like half the US doesn't still thinks global warming is fake and gay because God made us stewards of the Earth 
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Apr 8, 2016 19:09
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Dubstep Jesus posted:please shut the gently caress up about "stages of climate change denialism" as if like half the US doesn't still thinks global warming is fake and gay because God made us stewards of the Earth It was cold yesterday. Half the US thinks that means Climate Change is disproved once and for all.
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Apr 8, 2016 19:16
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Dubstep Jesus posted:please shut the gently caress up about "stages of climate change denialism" as if like half the US doesn't still thinks global warming is fake and gay because God made us stewards of the Earth We are stewards of the Earth. We are making Earth a better place by making absolutely damned sure we will not be here in another 150 years.
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Apr 8, 2016 19:22
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Dubstep Jesus posted:please shut the gently caress up about "stages of climate change denialism" as if like half the US doesn't still thinks global warming is fake and gay because God made us stewards of the Earth Actually, 64% of Americans are concerned about global climate change and 59% of Americans believe we have already begun to see the effects of climate change. But seems like facts have gone extinct in this thread.
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Apr 8, 2016 19:25
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Trabisnikof posted:If anything, our civilization will be more industrial not less because of it (climate change). I very highly doubt that, unless you've got a few dozen Saudi Arabias of oil stashed away under your bed.
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Apr 8, 2016 19:27
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Isaac0105 posted:I very highly doubt that, unless you've got a few dozen Saudi Arabias of oil stashed away under your bed. What does that have to do with anything? It almost sounds like you're making a peak oil argument here or something. (Hint: low carbon intensity industry is still industry) Global climate change is going to require continuing use of technology and industry to mitigate the harm we've caused and adapt to the lovely planet we've made for ourselves. If rainfall or heat patterns shift forcing the relocation of agriculture, we're going to need every tool in the industrial ag toolbox to minimize food shortages. Metals and rare earths will continue to need to be mined and shipped around the world to build low/no carbon power, to bring electric vehicles global, etc. Some sort of "return to the woods" mentality won't work in the face of climate change.
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Apr 8, 2016 19:33
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Isaac0105 posted:The idea of progress is dead, industrial civilization will be dead soon but humanity might still go on. That should be enough of a tomorrow for you to do good for. This is something I've been thinking about for a while. I mentioned /r/collapse a couple of pages ago. I ran across it last summer while I was reading about climate change, in the run-up to the Paris summit, and it's a clearing house for a lot of disparate voices: accelerationists, economic doomsayers, survivalists, preppers, etc. I've stopped back by there every so often out of some loose-tooth impulse, to see what they've dug up this time that's proof of an imminent, total system breakdown. To believe anything else is "hopium," best disregarded; the accepted, proper reaction is to stoically accept one's fate and start investing heavily in gold, ammunition, and isolated, fertile land. The common line running through most of it, however, is a basic lack of imagination, which leads to an inability to see beyond an initial conclusion. We have a lot of problems; many cannot be conveniently solved (peak copper/helium/phosphates/oil); many are intrinsic to the current system, and thus cannot be solved without adjusting or abandoning the system (climate change, third world exploitation, income inequality, general capitalism downsides); therefore we'll be extinct by 2030/2050/2100 and/or living in a post-crash libertarian hellscape within a decade. Charitably, it's wishing the whole thing would burn down, so something nominally better can be built; uncharitably, it's a bunch of sad sacks wanting to be the biker gang or mall enclave in a zombie apocalypse movie. However, a lot of the individual problems that fall under the umbrella of general environmental despoiling and/or climate change are being worked on, are at least theoretically solvable, and even if the solutions and adaptations aren't being as urgently pursued as we'd all prefer, they are being pursued. Climate change is fascinating in this regard, because even if it isn't as motivational a topic in culture or politics, it's already having a serious impact in areas like renewable power, architecture, corporate planning, and military research. We're rapidly going into a period where climate concerns are going to come to the fore in most parts of modern life, likely faster than we think; electric transportation running off solar power, a decentralized renewable power grid, the (re)birth of the regenerative economy, our existing infrastructure replaced with whatever comes next, you name it. As I mentioned before, Western civilization is culturally hardwired to expect and even look forward to a big, flashy apocalypse. Christianity's mythology is built on them--the Flood, the Rapture, the Second Coming--and that influences us, even those of us who aren't religious. On some level, we all expect the asteroid to hit, the plague to break out, or the San Andreas fault to go off, and we likely always will. If you're expecting civilization to crumble or the species to go extinct from this, you're not studying the problem hard enough. You shouldn't be saying "we aren't adapting"; you need to read the science, design, and energy journals and ask yourself, "How are we already adapting?" Even if absolutely no new technologies arise in the next ten or twenty or fifty years that affect the situation, you can already see the shape of what's coming as a result. More importantly, now is the time to start working towards affecting that shape. I do agree that it's a mistake to buy into the idea that we can innovate ourselves into a cleaner version of the same system; we can't simply install solar panels, put up some wind turbines, and expect everything to move along roughly as it does now. There are likely to be sharp changes in how we live, good and bad; I'd be surprised if travel doesn't get harder, for example, and I'd expect our diets to change whether we like it or not. We're also likely to be moving into a phase where we end up with fewer and fewer physical goods, due to scarcity, changes in manufacturing, and simple lack of demand (3D printing is only getting cheaper). But outright collapse? No. It's a big, reactive system, and unless there's a vast, sharp threat from outside of it (supervolcano eruption, drug-resistant influenza epidemic, etc.), it's already reacting. I'd be more inclined to think industrial civilization will end due to automation than due to climate change. Isaac0105 posted:I very highly doubt that, unless you've got a few dozen Saudi Arabias of oil stashed away under your bed. We won't need them. There's a lot of research going on into alternatives.
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Apr 8, 2016 19:51
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Wanderer posted:But outright collapse? No. It's a big, reactive system, and unless there's a vast, sharp threat from outside of it (supervolcano eruption, drug-resistant influenza epidemic, etc.), it's already reacting. I'd be more inclined to think industrial civilization will end due to automation than due to climate change. I think there are two things working against your post. The first is that while most doomsday theories are wrong, only 1 needs to be right for it to actually become doomsday. I'm not saying that global warming is going to be a doomsday scenario, but we have to evaluate it on it's own merits, and the existence of unrelated unlikely scenarios doesn't inform the severity of the issue. The 2nd thing working against your post is that global warming is not a sharp instantaneous problem. It will be 100 years or more before the worst effects are realized. While this does give us some time to react it present a different problem; the actions we take today will only register in 50+ years. This means that we need to act preventatively before the problem presents itself. This is the most dangerous facet of global warming because our systems cannot respond in real time, greatly contributing to the effects we'll end up experiencing.
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Apr 8, 2016 19:58
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Salt Fish posted:I think there are two things working against your post. The first is that while most doomsday theories are wrong, only 1 needs to be right for it to actually become doomsday. I'm not saying that global warming is going to be a doomsday scenario, but we have to evaluate it on it's own merits, and the existence of unrelated unlikely scenarios doesn't inform the severity of the issue. I'm more talking about our cultural doomsday fetish than the likelihood thereof. Even if you aren't yourself Christian, pop culture is steeped in it, especially within living memory. That leads to a society that's weirdly in love with its own potential destruction. Salt Fish posted:The 2nd thing working against your post is that global warming is not a sharp instantaneous problem. It will be 100 years or more before the worst effects are realized. While this does give us some time to react it present a different problem; the actions we take today will only register in 50+ years. This means that we need to act preventatively before the problem presents itself. This is the most dangerous facet of global warming because our systems cannot respond in real time, greatly contributing to the effects we'll end up experiencing. That's the thing. We are taking preventative measures. You might disagree about the form those measures are taking (i.e. the occasional discussion in this thread about how, were some among you made the God-Emperor of Mankind, there would be so many thorium reactors you guys), and those measures certainly aren't as wide-ranging or as intensive as the situation demands, but measures are being taken. I think I've said it before, but D&D tends to overvalue direct, political/governmental reaction, and ignore/undervalue independent, academic, and corporate action. It's also a very American forum, so anything that isn't happening here tends to get ignored unless it's a disaster. You miss a lot that way. Here's a pretty decent follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/carbonremoval
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Apr 8, 2016 20:18
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Wanderer posted:I think I've said it before, but D&D tends to overvalue direct, political/governmental reaction, and ignore/undervalue independent, academic, and corporate action. It's also a very American forum, so anything that isn't happening here tends to get ignored unless it's a disaster. You miss a lot that way.
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Apr 8, 2016 21:33
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Oracle posted:America is in the top three polluters in the world though, so we do have an outsize effect on what's gonna happen. I think we're #2 behind China? We also drive a lot of external pollution to create products we consume here.
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Apr 8, 2016 22:09
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Oracle posted:America is in the top three polluters in the world though, so we do have an outsize effect on what's gonna happen. I think we're #2 behind China? Yeah, you're not wrong. A lot of what's going to happen will have to happen here. However, that same American focus means you miss a couple of things that are worth talking about. Algae Tec in Australia, for example, is a startup dealing with algae farming; they're establishing a production facility for making algae-based food, which is one of the odds-on favorites for feeding people in a post-oil world. More importantly, the same company is working on algae as biofuel, and algae farming in general is a potential useful carbon capture technology. There was an interesting article I read earlier that I can't find again about how you can grow potable spirulina in the dark, which forces it to use dissolved carbon in the water around it to grow. You lose out on some biomass, but it's one of several ways that have been suggested for using algae as a filter to help remove carbon from seawater. Also, as of Wednesday, there's another Australian group that's marketing solar cells you can make with a 3D printer. There's another company with a similar product in Israel that was using them to help electrify rural India. I suppose my tl;dr here is that climate change is what's shaping the future, but it's probably not what's going to end the future.
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Apr 8, 2016 22:17
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I think the trend for a long time now has been more toward the reimposition of slavery than a general breakdown or collapse. Global slavery has been on the rise for a long time, and human life is cheaper than ever. Human life is worth almost nothing in some parts of the world, and some people are worse off than even 19th century slaves. A slave in 1850s America could be worth $40,000 in today's money, but a slave nowadays might cost an average of $90. Killing a slave back then was a big deal, but now, if you get sick or otherwise can't work, you'll probably just get dumped or killed, since you're worth next to nothing anyway, and are easily replaceable. And then you have wage slavery as well. Climate change is going to bring about more mass migrations, more human trafficking, and millions more highly vulnerable people ripe for exploitation. Human life is going to be worth even less than the abysmal state it's in now. Perhaps with the trend of rapidly increasing wealth and power inequality, it could be even more difficult to challenge the centers of power. There was a discussion on nuclear weapons earlier in the thread, and I read an Orwell essay earlier that I thought was interesting: You and the Atom Bomb quote:It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak. The essay is obviously a bit dated, but it's an interesting point. Orwell didn't have climate change on his mind, but he thought that the world may have been headed toward an age as "horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity." We are living in an age of tyrannical weapons, and it's difficult to imagine something happening to actually topple something as powerful as the USA. I wonder if the USA would not simply endure for another couple hundred years, with the wealth and power held at the top of society being so enormous that no one could challenge it without being crushed like a bug. Those at the bottom are kept down. They perish or are driven into slavery over the course of many decades. A lot of right wingers in the USA even now support slavery, as long as it's for the blacks, foreigners and the poor. This could also be a situation where, as I mentioned earlier, a nation could end up using nuclear weapons against its own people, or against another non-nuclear opponent, in order to assert their authority and because they can't retaliate.
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Apr 9, 2016 01:38
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Uranium Phoenix posted:There's always good news. The Paris Summit was good news. The anti-fracking movement developing in many parts of the country is good news. Up in Washington, the Lummi Nation and local activists have put the breaks on a large coal terminal, and will likely defeat it. Awareness on climate change is slowly building back from the deficit caused by corporate campaign to deny reality. It's not much, but it's there. I would add to this that there's been some very good work at the level of global finance to redirect energy behind climate change mitigation. In just a handful of years the UNPRI has been able to convince/bring on asset owners and managers that oversee trillions of dollars. Some are just greenwashing, but there's some serious finance being marshalled behind pushing markets to do their part.
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Apr 9, 2016 04:30
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Kenzie posted:Global slavery has been on the rise for a long time Someone using absolute numbers ITT.
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Apr 9, 2016 17:30
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computer parts posted:Someone using absolute numbers ITT. Newsflash: Slaves are PEOPLE. More PEOPLE are in slavery than ever before. What does it matter to those HUMAN BEINGS if a smaller percentage of the world population is enslaved? "Good news Slave! A lower fraction of the world's population is in bonded labor than ten years ago! Now get back to work or I'll beat you!"
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Apr 9, 2016 17:35
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Apocalypse is not the only common trope of Western civilization, the idea of progress is another one. In fact the two tropes are tied together - they are both non-reality based, essentially religious concepts, adapted for a secular world from our Christian ancestors. After all, many Christians even today believe that the world is heading towards a culmination - doom and devastation for the material world (just read Revelations) accompanied with spiritual ascension for the elect who have faith in Christ. The secular world changed it so that instead of striving towards heaven, the struggle has become to create a heaven on Earth - a gradually improving and humane, increasingly wealthy world society, which is to be created through the use of applied science and humanistic education. The problem is that this world view is just as misguided as what the Christians believe, in fact it's moreso - the Christians are at least clever enough to set their heaven beyond the reach of empirical falsification. Our civilization is almost certainly not progressing towards the better and it's hubristic to claim otherwise. If you don't believe me, look through history - you'll find countless examples of civilizations and societies which rose, reached an apex and then fell. You'll find no examples of civilizations which managed to escape this cycle. Even truly ancient states like China have went through ups and downs - the glories of the apex of one dynasty alternating with devastating eras marked with foreign invasions, civil war and the rule of warlords. So it's more or less a tautology to say that our civilization will fall. The only place where there might be room for disagreement is what the configuration of fall will be. Here history gives us plenty of different scenarios. You have collapse followed by a Dark Age (Roman), a decline coupled with disasters (Islamic), the rise and fall of dynasties (Chinese civilization) and other scenarios beyond these. I'd bet on a more dramatic fall though, simply because of the number of massive issues we are going to face. My whole point is that it isn't just climate change - it's also resource depletion, rising inequality and economic instability, just to name a few. Our world has to become many things in a short time frame - a world with a steady state, low carbon economy, which simultaneously needs to wrestle with issues of development (in the context of a steady state world economy, how do you work on that?) the degradation of public institutions (see - everything in the United States), the rise of extremist demagogues (see - the United States) and about a dozen other problems. And so you see when you tell me that there are parts of the system that are adapting, that says nothing at all to me. It's not an argument because the presence of an ongoing process of adaptation - or an ongoing process of problem mitigation - does not mean that this will be successful. There have been plenty of examples to show this. Just one - you have Cicero in the Roman Empire foreseeing the causes that would lead to the decline of Roman society and Cato and the Liberatores working to stop the slide of Rome towards a de facto empire. The result - Cicero is beheaded, Cato loses and commits suicide, Brutus and Cassius lose and pay with their life. Rome becomes an empire and begins its slide into the abyss - moral and institutional decline at first, material later. Putting faith in technology is also exactly that - a form of faith. I'm not one of those who thinks technology has been all bad but it most certainly has not been all good either. I personally think that technology is a mixed bag - the introduction of every technology is a kind of social experiment which has both upsides and downsides for society. You have to account for both, and usually it is impossible to ensure that everything you get is good, while keeping away the bad. Beyond that, there's the problem of getting society to change. Both you and Trabisnikof seem to have a premise to your thinking - that society might not change easily, but it changes, especially once we have the technology we need. This is especially true with Trabisnikof (low carbon economy is a thing - yeah but will be it an actually existing thing, on a sufficient scale?). So take just one challenge - transition away from an oil economy. This has numerous sub-challenges associated with it. The first is that many of the alternatives are also fossil fuels (coal, natural gas), which is obviously not a good idea if we want to stop climate change. Then the non-carbon energy resources have their own problems - not as portable, requiring energy conversion or mass-scale and energy-expensive replacement of capital which was previously fossil fuel powered, and so on. Finally oil is not just used to produce energy - it's also used to produce chemicals, such as plastic (required by industry) or some pesticides (required by industrial agriculture). So all in all, the fall is going to happen. I suspect it's going to be steep. I have my doubts about the transition away from carbon - at best it will bring us a few downsized but functioning regions around the world (Europe maybe?) as most of the world adapts badly or not at all. Just to add to all that, I'd like to say though - it's not wrong for you to call out attention to the "doomsday" mentality. I'd argue that there are indeed plenty of people talking about collapse whose belief in doomsday takes on religious elements. Guy McPherson (who predicts human extinction by 2030) is a good example of this - but the thing is, he gives off plenty of warning signs beyond just talking about doomsday. For instance - his huge manifesto is backed with profoundly unscientific citations from YouTube videos, cherry-picked blogs and guardian opinion columns. He is also prickly, irritatingly self-righteous and responds poorly to criticism.
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Apr 9, 2016 17:37
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Placid Marmot posted:Newsflash: More people probably die to Satan worshippers today than any point in the past.
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Apr 9, 2016 17:38
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Since the media tends to focus coverage on climate skeptics and deniers far more than the scientific community, what can stop them from doing so? Why do these deniers have so much power over the US sheeple? And is it mainly old media that perpetuates this? Hopefully fewer people are falling for this bullshit.
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Apr 9, 2016 19:33
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Grouchio posted:Since the media tends to focus coverage on climate skeptics and deniers far more than the scientific community, what can stop them from doing so? Why do these deniers have so much power over the US sheeple? Partially, but another part is that media have largely turned towards a mealy mouthed fair-and-balanced style of reporting, which (except in the case of blatant political drum-beating like with Fox News) boils down to taking a story, looking for two sides on it, and giving both sides the same air time or article space, without any critical evaluation of claims besides quoting both sides saying the other side is poo poo.
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Apr 9, 2016 19:39
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:Partially, but another part is that media have largely turned towards a mealy mouthed fair-and-balanced style of reporting, which (except in the case of blatant political drum-beating like with Fox News) boils down to taking a story, looking for two sides on it, and giving both sides the same air time or article space, without any critical evaluation of claims besides quoting both sides saying the other side is poo poo. I've been reading Naomi Klein for class lately.
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Apr 9, 2016 19:44
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Grouchio posted:Which translates into less people than necessary believing that climate change is serious/a thing because...? Because it implies climate change denial is a position with merits that is seriously debated by Smart People, because the average citizen is not educated to evaluate the evidence presented on most topics.
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Apr 9, 2016 19:46
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Our lack of restrictions on Freedom of the Press (like the ones Canada or the UK has) is seriously going to be the end of US someday.
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Apr 9, 2016 19:58
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Grouchio posted:Our lack of restrictions on Freedom of the Press (like the ones Canada or the UK has) is seriously going to be the end of US someday. Not that the UK is better at the moment, because their restrictions don't seem to do anything beyond protecting individual subjects of attention (especially if rich and/or powerful) in practice.
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Apr 9, 2016 20:15
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You're not off base about the difficulty of the transition. And certainly the political landscape is going to change over our lives. But I think you're sort of over-emphasizing what it means for a civilization to fall. I don't know all that much about history, but wouldn't the two most recent examples be the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolving of the colonial empires (mainly Britain)? Sure, the political structure of the world changed a lot (and maybe some people that wouldn't normally get invaded or have a famine did), but for most people in most places not that much changed. Flags changed, prices went up or down, more or less foreigners would come by your town. For the heads of state and the capital city I'm sure it felt like the world was ending, but what about farmers in the fields a hundred or thousand miles away? I assume you're American. I am too, and I think we're particularly vulnerable to this kind of worrying, since It Hasn't Happened To Us Yet. We're the dominant culture, world hegemon for basically all of living memory. That will change some day, no question. Maybe in some sort of global war/famine with billions dead, but probably not. I dunno, I just have a hard time imagining a random Italian or Brazilian or Indian dude (let alone somebody from Africa) thinking clearly about climate change and doing quite the same sort of hand-wringing. They're aware their lives or their descendants lives may get harder, or a lot harder, but they also know that, well, that's how it's always been. And people get by. I'm not trying to minimize the reality of what's coming, but I do think (reasonably well off) Americans in particular tend to overreact, because we've had it so good and so easy for so long. The rest of the world is a little more realistic. We need to be more optimistic. Not personally, or as a personality trait, but politically. Optimism as a political stance, a policy. Yes, poo poo is hosed up and bullshit, but things will change. That's trivially true. Better or worse is up to us. Better is hard to imagine if people don't even seriously believe it's possible. So you have to be optimistic. Isn't climate change the closest thing to the "alien invasion/world killer asteroid unites the world" fantasy we're going to get? "If only there was some terrible outside threat to everyone, we could drop our differences and work together and save the world." Well, here it is. It's terrible, but we (theoretically) could only get this problem if we also have the technical means to solve it. It's up to us. If enough of us do the right thing, things will improve. There's a quote from Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain (recently released as part 1 of Green Earth, a condensed single volume edition of his Science in the Capitol climate change trilogy), where a Buddhist monk is giving an informal talk at NSF headquarters in DC: quote:"But, when we come to what we should do, it returns to the simplest of words. Compassion. Right action. Helping others. It always stays that simple. Reduce suffering. There is something—reassuring in this. Greatest complexity of what is, greatest simplicity in what we should do. Much preferable to the reverse situation." And then a little later: quote:"One of the scientific terms for compassion," Drepung said, looking around the ceiling as if for the word, ". . . you say, altruism. This is a question in your animal studies. Does true altruism exist, and is it a good adaptation? Does compassion work, in other words? You have done studies that suggest altruism is the best adaptive strategy, if seen from the group context. This then becomes a kind of . . . admonishment. To practice compassion to successfully evolve—this, coming from your science, which claims to be descriptive only! Only describing what has worked to make us what we are. But in Buddhism we have always said, if you want to help others, practice compassion; if you want to help yourself, practice compassion. Now science adds, if you want to help your species, practice compassion." That last line gets a laugh, and the talk goes on. One of the main characters is deeply affected, though, and as the books go on he becomes less cynical and rigidly rational. KSR is a great writer, and this trilogy about the possible effects of climate change and possible scientific/technological/political/societal reactions is definitely worth reading.
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Apr 9, 2016 21:26
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Prolonged Priapism posted:I'm not trying to minimize the reality of what's coming, but I do think (reasonably well off) Americans in particular tend to overreact, because we've had it so good and so easy for so long. The rest of the world is a little more realistic. Well put. I was thinking about this while I was at the gym, and the whole post puts it into better words than I think I'd be capable of today. There are a lot of problems ahead of us, and society is likely to be very different at century's end, but we know what most of the problems are, we already have people working to solve them (decarbonization, air capture, blue crude, algae biofuels, vertical/urban farming, biochar, GreenWave kelp/mussel farms, using cement to sequester CO2, the Great Green Wall, etc.), many of them can be solved, and the larger media/cultural landscape is still stuck on certain entry-level concepts. Once you step outside of that central, unfortunate narrative, the shape of the problem shifts. There's probably a follow-up here, where a lot of the steps that will have to be taken are exactly the kind of thing that flies in the face of certain cherished American tenets. Witness, for example, the "rolling coal" fad, or rich Californians trying to contravene the water rationing last year. We still fetishize the individual in a way that is almost specifically designed to impede decarbonization, and that's the kind of thing that only shifts in crisis or over generations.
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Apr 9, 2016 21:48
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Prolonged Priapism posted:You're not off base about the difficulty of the transition. And certainly the political landscape is going to change over our lives. But I think you're sort of over-emphasizing what it means for a civilization to fall. I don't know all that much about history, but wouldn't the two most recent examples be the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolving of the colonial empires (mainly Britain)? Sure, the political structure of the world changed a lot (and maybe some people that wouldn't normally get invaded or have a famine did), but for most people in most places not that much changed. Flags changed, prices went up or down, more or less foreigners would come by your town. For the heads of state and the capital city I'm sure it felt like the world was ending, but what about farmers in the fields a hundred or thousand miles away? The poo poo is this? If you know nothing about history, why are you spitballing about events in complete ignorance? "Not much changed for people", are you crazy? The fall of the USSR was loving horrific, not just in Russia but in all of the eastern bloc states as well. It lead to twenty years of civil wars and genocides. Millions of people starved, or were murdered when their neighbours decided to dredge up a pre-soviet blood feud. Half a continent went from a very high standard of living and technology on par with the west, to (using an example from Vanadzor in Armenia) using advanced crystal-growth boxes to cultivate potatoes to survive. The Soviet farming system ceased to exist during privatization. Farmers one week were begging on the streets homeless the next, their career sold to gangster who liquidated the assets for scrap. Like, holy loving poo poo, I know westerners are ignorant when it comes to all things Soviet, but to say that implosion was just a "changing of flags" for the people living there is beyond idiotic. 
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Apr 9, 2016 23:08
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Rime posted:The poo poo is this? If you know nothing about history, why are you spitballing about events in complete ignorance? "Not much changed for people", are you crazy?
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Apr 9, 2016 23:14
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Rime posted:Like, holy loving poo poo, I know westerners are ignorant when it comes to all things Soviet, but to say that implosion was just a "changing of flags" for the people living there is beyond idiotic. Fair enough. You're right that I'm not really knowledgeable about the human cost of the Soviet collapse. And I wasn't really trying to be glib, but the whole "flag change" thing was meant to cover not just these most recent collapses, but all of them throughout history. Many of which, I think, would probably have been gradual to the point of almost not being noticeable to many of the people living through them. At the extreme end there's the case of the Native Americans in North America, where Europeans came in and destroyed basically everything that had been there in a century or two. A continent depopulated. But still, it took several generations. Individuals certainly saw their tribes/alliances decimated, but no one individual saw the complete collapse from pre-contact society to scattered populations on reservations. That's not to minimize the genocide, but I think doomsayers are imagining witnessing destruction on that scale. It's not likely, and when it's happened in the past, it usually hasn't been fast enough to see in one lifetime. I guess the closest thing to that would be the Black Plague, where significant fractions of national populations died in just a few years. But as awful as that was, life went on. Civilization as a whole didn't end. And he brought up Rome, with the pivotal political/moral collapse around Caesar's time, and the end of the Republic. Big events in quick succession looking back two thousand years later. But for the general population all around the Mediterranean? We can say their civilization went in to decline right then and there, but for the common person was the establishment of the Empire the defining moment of their lives? They all saw it going down hill right then (once they heard it had happened, of course)? Or did mundane concerns like tax policy changes and military reorganization end up being the biggest changes they saw in their towns and villages? I'm not saying there weren't uprisings and famines etc. There were. But not everywhere. Not most places. The point is that human societies and civilizations have been through a lot of shocks. I'm not trying to trivialize any of them. But "collapse of civilization" is vague to the point of uselessness. If we're going to talk about it, we need to say what it actually means. Otherwise people will project whatever random poo poo they have in their head - whether it's a too-rosy idea of what happened in the former USSR, or an exaggerated collapse of Rome.
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Apr 10, 2016 00:49
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As bad as this sounds, shouldn't we start heavily pushing for subsidized euthanasia (as in "non only can you do this judgment and pain free whenever you want, we will even pay an institution or next of kin of your choice to do so)? It would alleviate the ones remaining and provide a good option for those who don't want to stick around to see any of this happening.
AceOfFlames fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 01:48
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Overflight posted:As bad as this sounds, shouldn't we start heavily pushing for subsidized euthanasia? It would alleviate the ones remaining and provide a good option for those who don't want to stick around to see any of this happening. We have that, it's called the Second Amendment.
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Apr 10, 2016 01:55
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overflight stop fantasizing about killing yourself.
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Apr 10, 2016 01:56
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