Orbis Tertius posted:

this paper owns

quote:

With the rapid depletion of this chemical energy, the earth is shifting back toward the inhospitable equilibrium of outer space with fundamental ramifications for the biosphere and humanity. Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown.

Rectal Death Adept posted:

https://twitter.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1493986604561707011?t=wA9xBKAbjJ7XlyuCknYoRQ&s=19

Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:

no seriously the disney things are great, it gets all the insane disney fans in one place which they don't want to leave and no one else ever has to go there. it's perfect

Pepe Silvia Browne posted:

yeah but it's gonna create a bizarre underclass of like doordash and uber drivers who have to dress in half-assed Goofy costumes

emTme3 posted:

i found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4534254/

it's maybe the best summary of the planetary thermodynamics of our situation i've ever found. these guys are maximally doom-brained.



the whole thing is extremely good poo poo, and it doesn't take long to make the case.

Minera posted:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/938617374339366973/944055949302329424/1645074618639.webm

emTme3 posted:

i found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4534254/

it's maybe the best summary of the planetary thermodynamics of our situation i've ever found. these guys are maximally doom-brained.



the whole thing is extremely good poo poo, and it doesn't take long to make the case.

Tempora Mutantur posted:

literally without, they say that the 1029 is actually the super optimistic take because humans cannot actually eat significant portions of the biomass they're using for that calc (it's pure caloric energy counts by mass if I understand) nor is it counting the energy needed to actually harvest and convert the mass into food (such as the energy to fuel cannibal hunters in your example, or the energy to use a stove, or the energy and resources to repair existing stoves for example)

what a time to be alive!

Complications posted:

lol no

There were 1200 years of biomass consumption at the opimistic take left in 1990 and then 1020 or so in 2000. Given growth since 2000 that means we have something like 600-800 years left or less. At that rate I'd say we have a good solid 60-80 years of unlimited growth left before the line crosses the zero marker so it's obviously not that bad, yet. Plenty of time for everybody who's alive to enjoy themselves without reservation before our great grandchildren flex their unlimited human ingenuity and solve the problem at the last minute like all the cool movie heroes do.

RIP Syndrome posted:

If it dropped by 180 years from 1990-2000 and we assume the following decades are the same (and not, say, worse), we optimistically have 36.666 (repeating of course) years left until the remaining biomass can sustain humanity at a basic metabolic rate for precisely zero years. Many of us will still be alive to get made fun of some more for our doomerism and relive society's turnaround in heroic docudrama form

Complications posted:

Death by 2050!

Laterite posted:

thinkin about who gets to eat the last reeses peanut butter cup in existence

Laterite posted:

thinkin about who gets to eat the last reeses peanut butter cup in existence

Complications posted:

Death by 2050!

Paradoxish posted:

think about this: humanity goes extinct before the last reeses peanut butter cup can be found and consumed

emTme3 posted:

i found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4534254/

it's maybe the best summary of the planetary thermodynamics of our situation i've ever found. these guys are maximally doom-brained.



the whole thing is extremely good poo poo, and it doesn't take long to make the case.

Cloks posted:

soylent green is a documentary from the future

The Protagonist posted:

Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal

Trabisnikof posted:

lol at "2021: COP26 Goals blocked by China and India"

Rodney The Yam II posted:

Yeah its good people

Hubbert posted:

Violent overnight attack at Coastal GasLink site in B.C. leaves workers shaken, millions in damage

Hubbert posted:

Violent overnight attack at Coastal GasLink site in B.C. leaves workers shaken, millions in damage

The Oldest Man posted:

I re-watched The Big Short the other day and had something of an epiphany about this and maybe why our society is so catastrophically bad at undervaluing risk and overvaluing optimism.

When you 'go long' on a stock (or buy into/espouse/act in accordance with) the notion that something will be better in the future you are effectively making yourself a prophet of good news. This thing is good, and specifically, I (and you!) can benefit from my foresight on this subject. There are many ways that prophetic foresight manifests social value, like "buy these stocks and you'll make money" or "buy a house, you'll have a secure future" etc. but the basic premise remains the same: I know something is going to be good, and I can use that foreknowledge to profit myself by joining that venture and by sharing my insight so that others join as well. The social utility of people who display this behavior is obvious; you don't have much of a community or society without people banding together for common benefit.

When you 'go short,' the premise is inverted: you are making yourself a prophet of bad news. This thing is bad, you shouldn't participate in it, you should bet against it, you should avoid it. The thing is, this isn't symmetrically valuable to being the bringer of good news. There's no immediately obvious way that others can profit from a forecast of a bad outcome the way that they can from a forecast of a good outcome. So what's the value of the bad news bringer to the community? If everyone listens to them, and the thing they are warning about doesn't happen/bad outcome avoided, the obvious value is zero. Even if they were clearly, obviously correct (and that often isn't the case), you don't profit by listening to the guy who says the '08 housing bond market is hosed or who says the barn being raised is going to collapse (I'll get to short-selling in a sec) and staying out of it, you simply avoided some potential hypothetical losses - but the people tied to those endeavors are pissed because you kept others from supporting you. If no one listens and the event happens, everyone is pissed at you anyway because you knew and didn't stop them.

In the financial markets they had to specifically legalize short selling equities in the 30s because there was no incentive to step up and publicize even a very accurate forecast of bad news. Sure, you could avoid losses and maybe help others avoid losses, but avoiding losses is not a symmetrical incentive to gaining profits. Legalizing shorts helped balance that out by creating a financial vehicle for people to make huge piles of money if they were right (according to the market, in the future) that something was not going to work out. But there's something interesting about the way short sales are structured (partially fixed by options trading) that I think speaks to the asymmetry of optimism and pessimism in our society: if you go long, your gains are potentially unlimited but your losses are capped. If you go short, your gains are capped, but your losses are potentially unlimited. Betting a good outcome will occur is structurally less risky than betting a bad outcome will occur.

Now apply the same exact lens to poo poo like COVID or climate change. Where is the social or economic penalty for being wrong over and over and over on the side of optimism? It's extremely limited. Now look at the other side: you err on the side of caution (or hell, don't even make any errors but just talk about it a little too much) and you're a doomer, a chicken little, etc. Bottom line is, you can prognosticate incorrectly many many more times on the side of optimism and get away with it because we are socially conditioned to treat 'going long' and being optimistic as both more inherently valuable and less risky than 'going short' and being pessimistic. And when you can consistently profit from pathological optimism without suffering the consequences of your rosy view of the world, regardless of the actual outcomes, you can leverage that profit into greater and greater influence on the rules of the game - you can protect your bets by making it harder to bet against you. The status quo of our economic system is pathological optimists making pathologically optimistic bets and hiring other pathological optimists to run the optimist betting machinery, do PR for the bets being made, and write that no one could have predicted a bad outcome in the charred aftermath when those bets fail.
Pathological optimism at some point stops being the most profitable strategy and becomes the only acceptable strategy.

So what's the value of any of this navel-gazing?

In the 08 market collapse, the big optimistic betters almost all got cover from the government first to unwind their bets and then to sell off the crap they couldn't unwind when they turned out to be catastrophically wrong because our entire social and economic order is based on optimism being the default correct stance. Think about this for a second: we have baked in the correctness of pathological optimism into our culture to such a radical extent that even when we knew it was wrong to a degree that put the entire country's financial system in jeopardy of total collapse, the response was to pause the whole machine, change the rules, and make sure we protected the pathological (even fraudulently pathological) optimists from the consequences of their own terrible wagers before we started the machine up again.

That was in a system where the outcomes could be rigged to protect the gamblers when they were on the 'right' side. So what the gently caress happens when the system is the global climate or a pandemic and you can't bully it or cheat it or rig it so that the pathological optimist bet always pays out the way our society needs it to? In this society, anyone who says "things are going to get worse" becomes the equivalent of a crazed doom-saying prophet on the street corner because our society is no longer equipped to deal with the possibility of optimism being wrong. The prediction of the possibility (or likelihood) of a bad outcome is automatically apocalyptic because we can no longer prepare for or fix bad outcomes.

So don't be a doomer, you're really harshing everyone's vibe.

Paradoxish posted:

just lol if you think adaptation is actually better or easier, especially at a local level

spent years volunteering with a group that lobbied/worked on climate-related resiliency projects and it's a loving dead end where you just constantly run into people with an immediate economic interest in preventing any kind of change whatsoever

the reason everything is poo poo and completely vulnerable to even relatively minor climate disruptions is because that was the cheapest way to do it, and absolutely no-loving-body is ever willing to consider the possibility that a costlier alternative is worthwhile

Cup Runneth Over posted:

Hubbert posted:

Violent overnight attack at Coastal GasLink site in B.C. leaves workers shaken, millions in damage

emTme3 posted:

i found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4534254/

it's maybe the best summary of the planetary thermodynamics of our situation i've ever found. these guys are maximally doom-brained.



the whole thing is extremely good poo poo, and it doesn't take long to make the case.