the old ceremony posted:

we are heading for a massive extinction event, yes. it is a few centuries in the future and will be caused by a combination of equatorial regions becoming uninhabitable, the desertification of farmland, and ecosystem collapse at the microbial level that will devastate crops. none of us are going to see that. we'll see the start of it. what i'm expecting in the next few decades, which most of us will see, is a pandemic that spreads through livestock. obviously that's a pretty conservative guess because we've already had swine and avian flu, and our international agricultural system is apparently custom designed to create big reservoirs for disease, full of stressed malnourished perfect hosts with no immune systems, and then spread infected animals all over the world in as little time as possible.

i'm choosing not to worry about geological-level threats like methane bubbles, for the same reason i'm not worried about celestial threats like asteroids. a chunk of rock from space could smash the earth like a fishbowl before i finish this post, and a methane bubble from the siberian permfrost could turn the planet into venus by the end of next year. but the chance of that happening is low, and if it does happen there is absolutely nothing i can do about it. nobody reading this thread can do anything about it either. it's good on an intellectual level to be aware of those threats, it instills a sense of humility, but if they are at the forefront of your mind all the time all they're going to do is paralyse you with anxiety. we joke about suicide being the most ethical option right now, but it should go without saying that it's not. the last thing the planet needs is people who know what's actually going on removing themselves from the global think tank that is going to save us. i know it's hard when you're depressed, but the most useful thing you can do, personally, right now, is to choose one of the many existential threats facing us and think about how you, personally, right now, can start working on it.

for example, i am dedicating my life to working in the national park system and maintaining and enriching the few pristine ecosystems that we have left. when our food bowls collapse, which they will, the national parks will be able to support a limited amount of agriculture to protect the population. i am working on developing an integrated system of crops and livestock that makes use of australia's natural processes instead of fighting them - the traditional european method of just obliterating great tracts of natural vegetation and filling the torn-up soil with wheat is working less and less effectively every year, and we will eventually hit a point where pumping the earth full of chemical fertilisers is just not going to make up for the loss of the microbial kingdoms that allow flora to live in this incredibly harsh environment. while working in agriculture i'll be monitoring biosecurity, and will be focusing on under-utilised species that will weather any livestock-based pandemics that may break out over the coming years. i'm probably not going to come up with a cure for whatever disease ends up loving us over in the end or anything grand like that, but i can absolutely lay the groundwork in my lifetime to make sure there's a segment of australia that will still be habitable for both humans and animals in a few hundred years when the earth has reached its hottest point.

the secret is to start small. right now i'm growing native desert trees in pots in my backyard, and saving up for a few acres of land somewhere remote. as the drought intensifies and ageing farmers flee the inland, farms are getting cheaper and cheaper. within about two years i hope to have ~50 acres undergoing rehabilitation. i can't really plan any further than that because these changes are happening so fast that climatologists can't keep up with them, but it's not unthinkable that in ten years i could have a thousand acres. if i met up with five or six people who have the same idea, we could have ten thousand acres. that's enough private land to host a bunch of critically endangered species and perpetuate a viable yield of crops, and that means that in five hundred years, long after i've died and been forgotten, there will be human beings still living in australia.

just remember this. the human species is not going to die out. we are the first of generations. we only have a single lifetime in which to work; the miracles happen after we're dead. the time to act is now. think about what you can do; choose what you will do; and start doing it.

Rime posted:

This is a good post, this is what more posters in this thread should think like when it comes around to this again rather than just despair.

I am the triple thread. I am Rope Access Technician, and I will shortly be licensed to handle commercial explosives. I can program computers, weld without gasses, and manage bee hives. I'm working on becoming a qualified wilderness guide: not because I care about yuppies paying me to hike up mountains with them, but because the vast amount of knowledge that career requires will become invaluable if things go south. If the timeline of decline is slow and I'm old when things really collapse, hey, I like my life and I make a lot of money doing what I do. I will be using that money to buy a acrage here on the BC coast which will be above any conceivable sea level rise in my lifetime, surrounded by one of the oldest surviving off-grid populations in North America. Every. Single. Day. of the week I am either biking, running, hiking, or climbing mountains to keep myself in shape, on top of studying.

Yes, the world as we knew it growing up is gone, that's life. Yeah, there's a powerfully strong possibility that we won't recognize our civilization in ten years, but as I've pointed out many times before: that's the nature of human existence. You are citizen in the last days of Byzantium: Do you sit in the city and clutch your faded family heirlooms, sobbing while the Turks beat down the walls? Or do you GTFO and build the best life you can?

TheBlackVegetable posted:

It's just all happening so goddamn fast

Digiwizzard posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVekJTmtwqM

Chadzok posted:

personally I've devoted my life to the research and creation of sentient AI that will hopefully wipe us all out, starting with homesteaders and beekeepers...

The Groper posted:

How do you mean? I'd say humans have overshot and collapsed in nearly every environment we've ever been in at one point or another, and now we've taken the party world-wide.

e: They looted, they raided, they held whole cities for ransom for fresh supplies of cheese crackers, avocado dip, spare ribs and wine and spirits, which would now get piped aboard from floating tankers.

The problem of when the drink is going to run out is, however, going to have to be faced one day.

The planet over which they are floating is no longer the planet it was when they first started floating over it.

It is in bad shape.

Paradoxish posted:

It's not really, though. Nothing that's happening is going to literally end the world or civilization as we know it. The problem is that it's never been true that climate change is a problem for future generations. It's a problem for our generation. We're feeling the effects of it right now and if we want to avoid the worst possible outcomes for the future then we need be undertaking massive decarbonization in the west within a decade.

The issue isn't optimism vs. pessimism, it's that we keep deluding ourselves into thinking that we have drastically more time to address this issue than we really do.

Rime posted:

Humans did not exceed the natural carrying capacity of the planet in prehistory. That's an idiotic assertion.

Nocturtle posted:

If super-intelligent AI ever comes to pass it'll likely appraise the situation and construct us a nice little playground/reservation with rounded-off corners and constant guidance to make sure we don't start stabbing each other with cutlery. This is probably the best possible scenario for humanity in the long run, as we can't clearly can't act in our long-term best interests. I can't even be angry about it, if you give a chimp a gun and it starts shooting people you don't blame the chimp. Whoever put us in charge of a planetary ecosystem was just irresponsible.

Nocturtle posted:

Contributing to the development of large-scale sustainable food production might be the best way for individuals to address climate change. Humans are adaptable and well adapted to hot climates but it's only 3 missed meals before social order breaks down. It would be nice if we figure this out fast enough to prevent the developing world from starving but this sitchensis post lays out what will probably happen instead.

Digiwizzard posted:

The problem with posts like Sitchensis is that it still frames climate change as a problem that will happen elsewhere, to some poor slaves somewhere. This is incorrect. Places like China and India maybe in deeper overshoot then everywhere else, but they consume an order of magnitude less resources per capita, and a time when families lived in close communities sustained by farming still exists within living memory. They live with an understanding that the world is deeply unfair and unjust, and don't have unrealistic delusions of grandeur about the future promised to them.

In contrast, Westerners are going to be far more humbled by collapse. At the moment most Westerners operate under the assumption that Capitalism will create a post scarcity automated utopia, when in actuality it's just going to bring massive famines, and the failure of this promised future is basically the Death of God. It's really difficult to live with this traumatic shock. To exacerbate this, most Westerners have no practical knowledge of farming or building, but instead are mostly trained in a virtualized economy that produces nothing. It would only take 3 days of disruption to the trucking system before Supermarkets run empty. What happens then? FEMA doesen't have the capacity to feed the entire country.

Arglebargle III posted:

Yeah propose for me a casual chain where climate change causes food to not be moved from produces to markets on a timescale of one week.

Thug Lessons posted:

Even leaving aside all the climate cultism, why on earth would there be disruption to the trucking system, of all things?

quote:

1. The oil market may be oversupplied at present, but we see it returning to balance in 2017e

2. By that stage, effective spare capacity could shrink to just 1% of global supply/demand of
96mbd, leaving the market far more susceptible to disruptions than has been the case in
recent years

3. Oil demand is still growing by ~1mbd every year, and no central scenarios that we recently
assessed see oil demand peaking before 2040

4. 81% of world liquids production is already in decline (excluding future redevelopments)

5. In our view a sensible range for average decline rate on post-peak production is 5-7%,
equivalent to around 3-4.5mbd of lost production every year

6. By 2040, this means the world could need to replace over 4 times the current crude oil
output of Saudi Arabia (>40mbd), just to keep output flat

7. Small oilfields typically decline twice as fast as large fields, and the global supply mix relies
increasingly on small fields: the typical new oilfield size has fallen from 500-1,000mb 40
years ago to only 75mb this decade

8. New discoveries are limited: last year the exploration success rate hit a record low of 5%,
and the average discovery size was 24mbbls

9. US tight oil has been a growth area and we expect to see a strong recovery, but at 4.6mbd
currently it represents only 5% of global supply

10. Step-change improvements in production and drilling efficiency in response to the downturn
have masked underlying decline rates at many companies, but the degree to which they
can continue to do so is becoming much more limited

Digiwizzard posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KfVJBNX2U4
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9wSgViWVAfzUEgzMlBfR3UxNDg/view

Thug Lessons posted:

Okay, here I'll refer you to the past two decades of empirically-disproved peak oil predictions. Every year since 2000 or so has been called "the year of peak oil" but in reality oil production rises year on year. But even were peak oil real, I have no idea why you think we would prefer starving to death rather than re-allocating the scarce resources to the distribution system.

Digiwizzard posted:

Lithium-Ion Batteries (energy density: 2.63 MJ/L) have no hope of replacing Diesel fuels (energy density: 35.8 MJ/L) for the heavy industry and logistics networks we need them for. Especially not in the time frame that would we need to implement them. Even just putting that aside and solely focusing on replacing Cars and Light vehicles to ease pressure on oil, in order to create 3 million EV's it would consume 100% of the world's lithium production. That's less than 1% of the current gasoline vehicle fleet.

Digiwizzard posted:

Peak Oil is a scientific fact. People who try to deny it are perhaps even more bafflingly stupid then Climate Change deniers. Even a 3 year old can understand that if you have a limited amount of something, and consume it at exponentially greater rates, you're going to run out of it.

As for why people would choose starve to death instead of correctly allocating resources, it's a good question. We should ask that to the current billion living today who are suffering through famine despite the planet producing more than enough food to feed them. Why did they choose to go into famine? Maybe it was not their choice. Oh well, I'm sure Capitalism and the markets will respond sensibly to a permanent and lasting energy crisis.

Digiwizzard posted:

Leonardo Maugeri's report is unavailable but I can tell you for certain that the premise of that blog post is full of poo poo. It's 2017 now and every oil company is in breathtaking levels of debt from selling off their oil under cost. There isn't 1000 years of $70 a barrel oil, there's a limited amount of lovely poor quality EROEI oil that will become exponentially more expensive as demand skyrockets while supply declines. In fact, it can rapidly become so expensive that much of our infrastructure can't be sustained.

Digiwizzard posted:

The oil prices didn't decline due to an increase in production. There hasn't been any discovery of massive new oil fields that could provide that production. Oil prices have been driven down by OPEC by dumping their reserves on the market to bankrupt everyone else in non-conventional oil (and, possibly at the behest of the US to squeeze out Venezuela and Russia)

quote:

Now those reserves are gone and those Shale Companies are teetering towards bankruptcy. Either oil prices skyrocket in order to even begin servicing their debt, or the oil companies fold and prices skyrocket anyway due to an even more severe oil shortage.

quote:

9. US tight oil has been a growth area and we expect to see a strong recovery, but at 4.6mbd
currently it represents only 5% of global supply

Digiwizzard posted:

quote:

The United States also produces other liquids that are used in the crude oil refining process, or that are added to refined petroleum products, or that are used by the petrochemical industry and other consumers.

In 2016, the United States produced an average of about 8.9 million barrels of crude oil per day (MMbd), about 3.5 MMbd of hydrocarbon gas liquids (natural gas plant liquids and liquefied refinery gases), and about 1.1 MMbd of biofuels, for a total petroleum production of about 13.5 MMbd.

Total petroleum consumption averaged about 19.6 MMbd in 2016. The difference between petroleum production and consumption is mainly made up of net imports (imports minus exports) of petroleum, changes in petroleum inventories, and petroleum refinery processing gain.

Chadzok posted:

I guess that translates to "I don't have any more decent points for you guys to shoot down."

I'm all for doomsday scenarios dude but the evidence really isn't in favor of that particular one. Rest assured though, death is certain.

Thug Lessons posted:

Again, y'all have been saying this for the past 20 years. Never happened. It's time for peak-oilers to put up or shut up.

Digiwizzard posted:

Well, I suppose we're all going to find out soon enough.

Digiwizzard posted:

No, it's just the same resignation you get to when arguing with a climate denier. You can show people the numbers and show how there's no way it can possibly add up, but rational facts and figures don't matter after a while. People have a religious belief in technological progress and ignore anything to keep that dream alive.

Digiwizzard posted:

Yeah I'm sure the markets will all respond calmly and rationally to oil shock, trillions of dollars of infrastructure will all be replaced by electrified rail, renewables and thorium power plants within the next decade. Everything will be just fine.

Thug Lessons posted:

Doubt it. We've been right about to run out of oil for the past century, and when we blow past the next predicted peak the peakers will do what they always do, move the date back. Or they'll just find something else to doom about. The stuff coming out about food security lately is pretty scary, so my bet is on that.

Chadzok posted:

Ok - so in your mind, peak oil is a scientific fact, and within the next decade will cause global calamity.
What sort of source or evidence, if any, could convince you of a different set of conclusions? Who would you trust?
And if it didn't happen, would that just shift the timetable to the next decade?