Prolonged Priapism posted:

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.

Overflight posted:

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.

Wanderer posted:

You probably need to talk to a therapist.

Rime posted:

No. This is all so, so, so wrong that I do not even know where to start. Should I talk about the destruction of Assyria, where Greeks camping beneath the shattered walls of Nineveh two centuries later didn't even know who built that city which once housed half a million people? Where the now-tribal survivors of Assyria didn't know who they were? Should I talk about the predations of ilk like Ghengis Khan and Tamerlame, who functionally destroyed civilization in asia, levelling cities and slaughtering percentages of the human species?

Should I address the fall of eastern Rome, where cities and villages were sacked en-masse by Germanic tribes, who then set themselves up as petty dictators paying taxes to Byzantium by bleeding Roman peasants? Speak of the immediate decline in living standards across Italy during that period? The collapse of the public works networks, failure of sanitation, complete depopulation of major metropolitan centres like Rome due to plague and starvation? The fleeing of peasants from the hinterlands, as brigands raided their holdings to rape and pillage? The destruction of trade and implosion of classical culture?

Should I talk about how all that affected the common person in a single lifetime? Should I talk about how we didn't even know almost all of our own ancient history up until the 20th century?

Hell, we don't even need to go back centuries to find a good example. I brought up Syria several pages ago. Two decades of a drought worse than any in the past thousand years caused that country to fall into war and anarchy. By any stretch of the imagination, civilization has "collapsed" in Syria right now. That took less than five years to happen.

Yeah, sure, people live on. That doesn't mean it was pretty or easy for anyone involved.

Rime posted:

Hell, we don't even need to go back centuries to find a good example. I brought up Syria several pages ago. Two decades of a drought worse than any in the past thousand years caused that country to fall into war and anarchy. By any stretch of the imagination, civilization has "collapsed" in Syria right now. That took less than five years to happen.

Yeah, sure, people live on. That doesn't mean it was pretty or easy for anyone involved.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

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.

Squalid posted:

If /r/collapse is a bunch of survivalists fantasizing about the road warrior style post-apocalypse this thread is a bunch of depressives dreaming about how they and everyone else will finally be able to die

Squalid posted:

If /r/collapse is a bunch of survivalists fantasizing about the road warrior style post-apocalypse this thread is a bunch of depressives dreaming about how they and everyone else will finally be able to die

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?

Prolonged Priapism posted:

The range of possible futures is large. Unprecedented catastrophe is certainly possible. Collapse similar to historical examples is possible, though there are many scenarios, some much worse than others. Maybe the world just sort of limps along as ad-hoc adaptive measures are put in to place scattershot. It's also possible that we get our collective poo poo together and actually make the world better in the face of this crisis. Which scenario is most worth our attention? Our discussion? In a thread called "Climate Change: What is to be Done?"

Squalid posted:

If /r/collapse is a bunch of survivalists fantasizing about the road warrior style post-apocalypse this thread is a bunch of depressives dreaming about how they and everyone else will finally be able to die

Prolonged Priapism posted:

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.

Overflight posted:

Any thoughts and plans that I have (which again, I emphasize are purely hypothetical) have to do with minimizing my suffering in case everything falls apart. I don't want to spent 12 hours a day digging in the dirt. I don't want to have to learn self defense to protect myself against raiders. I simply don't think that my life is worth all that trouble to preserve IF things come up to that point.

Overflight posted:

Squalid posted:

Your fears and anxieties are derived from a chemical imbalance in your brain and have merely fixated upon climate change as a justification for feelings that exist independent of any circumstance. Your worries about fighting off raiders and subsistence farming indicate your specific fears are more directly tied to the tropes of fantasy film and literature than anything indicated by real research on the climate and economy.

Here's a wikipedia article covering serious research into the actual impact which should, unless you live in Bangladesh, assuage your fear of impending disaster, if not perhaps your fears for your friend's children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change#Distribution_of_impacts

Grouchio posted:

I wish to make a thread that analyses where and when climate change affects the world over via regional ecological crises.

quote:

We project CO₂ will reach about 380 ppm by 2000.

We estimate now that the doubling time is about 100 years

quote:

"BP recognizes that the existing trend of increasing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is not consistent with limiting the global average temperature rise to 2°C or lower."

quote:

Please explain why you have not conducted any scenario analysis based on a low-carbon scenario

ExxonMobil is committed to disciplined investing in attractive opportunities through the normal fluctuations in business cycles. Projects are evaluated under a wide
range of possible economic conditions and commodity prices that are reasonably likely to occur, and we expect them to deliver competitive returns through the cycles.
We do not publish the economic bases upon which we evaluate investments due to competitive considerations. However, we apply prudent and substantial safety
margins in our planning assumptions to help ensure robust returns. In assessing the economic viability of proved reserves, we do not believe a scenario consistent with
reducing GHG emissions by 80 percent by 2050, as suggested by the “low carbon scenario,” lies within the “reasonably likely to occur” range of planning assumptions,
since we consider the scenario highly unlikely.

quote:

Exciting new technologies such as LED lighting are purported to reduce energy use, therefore emissions. Today, thanks to LEDs, it's not just the inside of buildings that are lit up at night, but the outsides as well. In cities such as London and New York, entire buildings globe blue and red, lit with millions of LEDs that each use a fraction of the energy of their incandescent counterparts - or would do if incandescent lights have been used to illuminate cityscapes on the vast scale we see today. The response to lighting efficiency has been to consume more energy and therefore increase emissions. Yet again human nature has got us into trouble.

quote:

An analysis from Sandia National Laboratories, a US energy research center, looks at this phenomenon and concludes: The result of increases in luminous efficacy has been an increase in demand for energy used for lighting that nearly exactly offsets the efficiency gains essentially 100% rebound in energy use.

Martian posted:

Another thing I wondered about is that people in this thread have been saying that electric cars will not help against climate change as long as we still use fossil fuels to generate electricity. I don't think that that's entirely true. As I understand it big power plants are much more efficient than any small combustion engine. Also, electric cars mean you don't need to transport gasoline to thousands of gas stations. I mean, electric cars driving on electricity from fossil fuels are obviously still very bad and only a tiny step forward, but it's still better than cars with a combustion engine.

Paradoxish posted:

Saying that something isn't good enough isn't the same as saying we shouldn't do it. Electric vehicles aren't nearly good enough without a massive overhaul of our energy infrastructure, and electric cars themselves can't be deployed on a meaningful scale without a massive overhaul of our transportation infrastructure. People are gloomy because we're starting to realize that we aren't dealing a problem that's fifty years out, we're dealing with a problem that's already happening. So electric cars are cool, and helpful, and will probably reduce emissions over the long run, but it's hard to be optimistic when you realize that the bai ttle you thought you were fighting five or six years ago is already lost.

Paradoxish posted:

Saying that something isn't good enough isn't the same as saying we shouldn't do it. Electric vehicles aren't nearly good enough without a massive overhaul of our energy infrastructure, and electric cars themselves can't be deployed on a meaningful scale without a massive overhaul of our transportation infrastructure. People are gloomy because we're starting to realize that we aren't dealing a problem that's fifty years out, we're dealing with a problem that's already happening. So electric cars are cool, and helpful, and will probably reduce emissions over the long run, but it's hard to be optimistic when you realize that the battle you thought you were fighting five or six years ago is already lost.

StabbinHobo posted:

"everyone" out of a job isn't really the problem

the problem would be 10 - 100k jobs a month getting automated

thats the thing about capitalism, things don't even have to go down, they just have to go up more slowly to cause shitstorms

oxsnard posted:

This is an interesting thread.

Just wanted to chime in that electric cars are loving stupid, wind and especially solar are a waste of taxpayer dollars, and the only thing that will save us is a concerted effort to push for 80% plus nuclear power world wide.

At that point we can look at EVs, as we need to take the low hanging fruit first.

Lithium ion batteries and solar panels have ridiculous energy input to output yields. China burns a bunch of diesel (mining) and coal (manufacture) to make these things. Its thermodynamically inefficient and serves to make a bunch of idiots feel better. The externalized economic and environmental costs in most of the "renewable" space is shameful.

Not sure if this has been posted yet but here's a good summary:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

oxsnard posted:

Isaac0105 posted:

Don't be so optimistic about nuclear. I can understand why people would be so sympathetic towards it- it's not oil, it's not coal, the idea of nuclear tickles the mind about its possibilities (especially in light of possible tech improvements, like breeder reactors or fusion). But I'd really like to emphasize that as a solution it is not permanent. Even if we manage to make a global nuclear transition (a gargantuan if) then uranium is still a non-renewable resource and we would just be kicking the ball down the road, pushing forward the inevitable collapse and downsizing that our civilization needs to undergo. Possible tech advances are not a way out of this because they don't exist right now - believing that they will be around to bail us out seems just a form of faith to me. And further, I suspect that even if these fusion/thorium/breeder reactors come around, there will be some other resource limit that will knock them on their rear end anyway later down the road. Remember that even if the fuel for something like fusion is insanely abundant, what might not be so abundant are the rare metals and minerals that will be required to construct these new reactors (and maintain them).

quote:

Safety is also an issue. I think people in this thread feel a bit smug with regard to the question of nuclear safety, because this question tends to attract a lot of irrational panic and religious doomsday beliefs. So indeed I agree that the people who claimed Fukushima would wipe out all life around the Pacific in a year were a bit silly to say the least, but that doesn't mean that nuclear is safe. Chernobyl was bad enough in my opinion - the figures of excess deaths range between thousands and hundreds of thousands (a few say millions). I am not trying to say that this is guaranteed to wipe us all out or something but it is very likely that at the very least, nuclearization of world energy means the permanent risk of Chernobyls and Fukushimas, constituting a massive safety risk, meaning nuclear is not safe.

quote:

Finally gently caress electric cars. The only solution to cars is "into the landfill" I would say. A big problem a lot of green types seem to have is the idea that we can have the society we have right now, except everything will be run using green energy sources. It really is an adorably naive idea. What is far more likely is that before the end of the century, the personal car will be dead, along with every social configuration depending on it (such as suburbia)

Isaac0105 posted:

Don't be so optimistic about nuclear. I can understand why people would be so sympathetic towards it- it's not oil, it's not coal, the idea of nuclear tickles the mind about its possibilities (especially in light of possible tech improvements, like breeder reactors or fusion). But I'd really like to emphasize that as a solution it is not permanent. Even if we manage to make a global nuclear transition (a gargantuan if) then uranium is still a non-renewable resource and we would just be kicking the ball down the road, pushing forward the inevitable collapse and downsizing that our civilization needs to undergo. Possible tech advances are not a way out of this because they don't exist right now - believing that they will be around to bail us out seems just a form of faith to me. And further, I suspect that even if these fusion/thorium/breeder reactors come around, there will be some other resource limit that will knock them on their rear end anyway later down the road. Remember that even if the fuel for something like fusion is insanely abundant, what might not be so abundant are the rare metals and minerals that will be required to construct these new reactors (and maintain them).

Safety is also an issue. I think people in this thread feel a bit smug with regard to the question of nuclear safety, because this question tends to attract a lot of irrational panic and religious doomsday beliefs. So indeed I agree that the people who claimed Fukushima would wipe out all life around the Pacific in a year were a bit silly to say the least, but that doesn't mean that nuclear is safe. Chernobyl was bad enough in my opinion - the figures of excess deaths range between thousands and hundreds of thousands (a few say millions). I am not trying to say that this is guaranteed to wipe us all out or something but it is very likely that at the very least, nuclearization of world energy means the permanent risk of Chernobyls and Fukushimas, constituting a massive safety risk, meaning nuclear is not safe.

blowfish posted:

Nice piece of fish posted:

Isaac0105 posted:

"A given?" Please. Right now even human survival over the next century isn't a given, let alone an unprecedented shift in energy production which (according to you) is a given because of a pilot project and an underdeveloped technology. All I am calling for is realism. Even if something like fusion was already well developed (say we had a few relatively safe working reactors that are producing more energy than it takes to run them) I would say that the transition would be very far from a given. Let alone in our actual situation.

quote:

I'm not sure what connotation "looking forward to collapse" is supposed to have. Rest assured I meant that we should look forward to it in the sense that one looks forward to a big disaster that it might be a good idea to prepare for, not as some kind of fun adventure that we should embrace because it will take us back to the golden age of hunter-gatherer tribes.

And finally, the rise and fall of civilization is not a morality play. What causes a fall is not "good people" "loving up badly" but a set of systemic factors which sweep away all the people caught up in it. The fall of civilization will not be prevented by "good people who do what is necessary". Maybe delayed, maybe softened, but not prevented, trust me.

quote:

My specific take on safety is this - supposing that I did agree with you and blowfish on the necessity and the inevitability of a global transition to nuclear, I would still highly prefer if there existed this swarm of highly agitated nuclear pessimists who yell "safety" into the ears of everyone responsible for the construction and maintenance of nuclear reactors. To pressurize them into keeping to their safety standards, you see. Failing this, please don't expect nuclear to actually be the "safest method of power generation".

Isaac0105 posted:

"A given?" Please. Right now even human survival over the next century isn't a given, let alone an unprecedented shift in energy production which (according to you) is a given because of a pilot project and an underdeveloped technology. All I am calling for is realism.

blowfish posted:

If we build breeders, or thorium reactors, or extract uranium from the sea, or develop fusion reactors, then those technologies could power our current civilisation beyond the scope of any long term policies we currently are or want to implement, i.e. for long enough.
You will also note that the first reactor to over power any electrical equipment was a breeder reactor (EBR-1), that Russia just started up a commercial-scale breeder, and that India is currently building a commercial-scale thorium reactor prototype (bog standard CANDUs could already burn Thorium as an alternative fuel anyway if anyone bothered). It's not like doing this poo poo is impossibly hard.


Why do you think the fall of civilisation is an inevitable event that might as well be physical law, is what I'm asking.


The vast majority of the world's nuclear power plants are lovely cold war leftovers operating past their original design lifespan. They aren't getting replaced in part because new plants have a much harder time getting approved despite being much safer. Still, even with a fleet of hand-me-down ancient reactors, and literal Chernobyl style RBMKs still operating, nuclear has an excellent safety record (or, depending on how you look at it, a less terrible safety record than everything else).

Isaac0105 posted:

If we build breeders, if we do thorium, if this and if that (and if some more) and then it's also an if that it will "power our current civilization for long enough". Reactors require plenty of rare resources to construct, what if we run out of those, even if we have enough reactor fuel? What if "we" (whoever we is supposed to be) cannot ensure a global scale transition to nuclear? It's not like "we" are living under some kind of highly organized and socially responsible world government, you know.

quote:

If you look at history, civilizations have a habit of falling. I already posted about this once - it can take many forms. I think it would be extreme to say they are all destined to fall all the way back to the stone age, but that's not really what I am arguing. I am saying that progress doesn't last forever, that some kind of fall will take place. The fall will be towards a society with a lower degree of complexity, what exactly it will be, I don't know (there's different scenarios and endpoints).

quote:

And about the last thing you said - when are you expecting this consciousness change towards a new nuclear age to take place? Techno-optimists like you always seem to be banking on some decisive moment when civilization will suddenly see the light and undergo some epic scale transformation to a bright new tomorrow. Maybe 20 years for now we will have even more run down cold war leftover reactors and still no fusion in sight? Do you really think that is less likely than a world dotted with fusion and breeder reactors? Civilizations really don't have these kinds of unprovoked transformative moments - the only time they transform at all is when they get a kick in the balls so fierce that the sheer pain shatters its delusions, making it scramble to adapt in chaotic and unpredictable ways.