Salt Fish posted:

Just to be clear, when I post "lol worlds done in 10 wrap it up" that's not per se literal. (I posted that and made that one guy made sorry I guess).

Having said that, if you take the +40F temps we had this winter and apply them in summer everyones dead, that's it. You can't have summer be 140F for 12 hours at a time and survive. AC won't save you because the power grid is toast once we get there.

So is that going to happen in the next 10 years? I don't know, and that's a big loving problem. It actually could happen, and even you can say it WILL happen, maybe its a question of what % of the earth is going to have multiple days at 140+. But we are getting some firsthand experience that +2C means for 1 day a month its +20C hotter and that's so much more serious than people realize right now.

uguu posted:

Does anyone else sometimes ask themselves "what if we're wrong?". What if we're just conspiracy nuts with an aggravated sense of self-importance and nothing better going on in our lives?

fanfic insert posted:

i cant find anything on this, do you have a link? I'm finding a bunch of results about higher levels of pfas in eggs but nothing on it being fixed

Hubbert posted:

We should always be asking ourselves that question; critical re-assessment and reflection is always a good thing. I personally thought we'd be in a 1970s-style oil crisis by now, and yet, here I still am with egg on my face.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:

Remembering the paper about ice cores in Greenland showing double digit degree changes in under a decade.

maxwellhill posted:

did i make that game unprogressable by refusing to buy a politician

Rectal Death Alert posted:

it's entirely possible that the system refusing to allow short term collapses leads to a larger long term one down the road so i reserve the right to be doomer even if we keep managing to pull our hands out of the machinery just in time

fanfic insert posted:

Had a bit of a cackle at this one

(sorry bout the lovely machine translation)

Hubbert posted:

We should always be asking ourselves that question; critical re-assessment and reflection is always a good thing. I personally thought we'd be in a 1970s-style oil crisis by now, and yet, here I still am with egg on my face.

Rectal Death Alert posted:

it's entirely possible that the system refusing to allow short term collapses leads to a larger long term one down the road so i reserve the right to be doomer even if we keep managing to pull our hands out of the machinery just in time

Dokapon Findom posted:

Abiotic oil is real

Rectal Death Alert posted:

This is accurate. The person from this thread that posted in Doomsday Econ claiming the end of industrial society within 10 years. That requires the belief that earth will become incompatible with human life for any period of time at all. That's the extreme end of the degrees of 100% destruction presented almost impossibly fast.

Optimists are still in the realm where large scale destruction is impossible and it's just a matter of whether we have to deal with the pain and discomfort of 15% destruction somewhere else they don't have to personally experience. Worst case would be experiencing a disaster that inconveniences them.

Even if the clathrate gun is really, actually, fully, finally firing we would probably have 20-80 years before things get so bad we just can't maintain global industry anymore.

Another issue is that "Collapse" is so broad of a term. One person sets it at the end of the human species and another sets it at the end of the human dollar.

BRJurgis posted:

Part of the problem is collapse starts to seem the only thing disruptive enough to lead to meaningful change. The longer this lasts, the more difficult/impossible constructive change becomes, and the greater the "find out" bill (for somebody else to pay!)

How do you argue against "I can't do anything about it so why stress" or "I'll be dead before that"? They're not wrong... but like, whose job is this?

Xaris posted:

technology will save us if things get that bad, relax

blatman posted:

technology wont save me because im poor and broke

blatman posted:

technology wont save me because im poor and broke

Colin Mockery posted:

Actually I hear places like Canada are making great gains in making medical care like MAID available to the poor and broke

Hubbert posted:

We should always be asking ourselves that question; critical re-assessment and reflection is always a good thing. I personally thought we'd be in a 1970s-style oil crisis by now, and yet, here I still am with egg on my face.

Ignore_Me posted:

Except that we were. Fossil fuel production was facing an imminent catastrophic supply/demand mismatch until the emergence of fracking and alternative oil drilling methods enabled us to change when and where we extract crude hydrocarbons. You didn’t get your “told you so” moment because similar to the Y2K software issue, the very real crisis you were observing was met with actions that actually subverted the threat. Unlike switching date codes in a computer however, we cannot repeat the fracking trick. Once all the reachable crude dries up, there will be no moving on to greener pastures oil rich deserts. Just because the fossil fuel crisis didn’t shut the lights off for us doesn’t mean it can’t and won’t do it to your kids if they’re still around by then.

quote:

The crucial word in that last sentence, though, is “temporarily.” Technically speaking, fossil fuels aren’t actually nonrenewable resources—the Earth regenerates them from organic material buried in sediment—but the process takes tens of millions of years to go from dead fish to light sweet crude. In terms that mean anything to human history, in other words, once a bucket of coal, a barrel of oil, or a cubic foot of natural gas is burnt, it’s gone, and the time it’ll take for the Earth to produce another is on the same scale as the interval that separates us from the last dinosaurs. Since fossil fuels power the tractors, produce the fertilizer, fuel the trucks and ships, and provide energy and raw materials for nearly all of the food and other products that have allowed our planet’s population to balloon to between four and eight times the maximum figure for all earlier history, that’s not exactly a minor issue.

A long time ago, in what feels sometimes like a galaxy far, far away, I used to blog about this point quite a lot. This was in the heyday of the peak oil movement—the last sustained attempt to get people in the industrial world to pay attention to the fact that their lifestyles depend on finite resources and those resources are running up increasingly hard against supply constraints. The language of carrying capacity and overshoot was central to my blogging in those days.

Every time I talked about this, without exception, I fielded criticisms from two opposing viewpoints. On the one hand were the people who insisted that progress was invincible and surely sometime very soon, once the price of oil rose high enough, somebody would come up with some even more cheap and abundant source of energy to replace the ones we were wasting so extravagantly. On the other hand were the people who agreed that no substitute for oil would be found but insisted that the end of the fossil fuel era would be sudden and cataclysmic, a vast apocalyptic event that would crush industrial society in a matter of months if not days and cause instantaneous mass dieoff worldwide. It was somewhat odd, you have to admit, to find myself simultaneously denounced as a hopeless pessimist by one set of critics and a blind optimist by another set, but that was how it turned out.

Nearly two decades have now passed since world conventional petroleum production peaked and began a ragged decline. In retrospect, it’s clear that my critics were wrong and I was right. The price of oil, which was around US$10 a barrel at the turn of the millennium, is now fluctuating between US$70 and $90 a barrel. Countless attempted replacements for fossil fuels have been pushed onto the market; those that haven’t failed completely have become niche-market products making no noticeable dent in fossil fuel use. Meanwhile the great apocalyptic event that so many people loved to predict has pulled a no-show.

What happened instead is, ahem, what I predicted back in the day. As conventional petroleum reserves plateaued and began to lose ground, frantic efforts to find additional reserves were padded out by the breakneck extraction of inefficient, low-grade sources of liquid fuels—anything and everything that would keep fuel tanks filled, no matter what the cost or the consequences. That’s why the old technology of hydrofracturing was dusted off and applied to shale deposits across the United States, squeezing out a large but temporary burst of natural gas liquids and light oil, while Canada and Venezuela poured vast amounts of money and energy into digging up tar sands and extracting thick, high-sulfur gunk from them.

These were less useful than they seemed. It takes energy to extract, refine, and ship fossil fuels. Light sweet crude from shallow wells and good hard anthracite coal from shallow mines take very little energy to extract. In the case of the best grades of light sweet crude, this worked out to 1/3 of 1% of the energy in the oil having to be used to extract it—but those grades are rare now, because we pumped and burnt them all. The worse the grade, the more energy has to go into extracting and refining the crude oil, and the less energy is left over to do everything else that energy does in a civilization. While fossil fuel production has climbed steadily year after year, in other words, the availability of energy to society has faltered—and in lockstep, just as population ecology would predict, birthrates have fallen.

They’ll continue falling, too, because there is no energy source within reach of our species that can replace fossil fuels at the rate we’re using them. At the beginning of the industrial revolution, the Earth’s fossil fuel deposits were the largest concentration of easily accessible, highly concentrated chemical energy in the known solar system. Our species used them with reckless abandon, and built a vast array of technologies specifically designed to make use of their properties. Sure, it would have been possible to build an equally vast array of technologies to use some other resource, but we didn’t, and attempts to start making that happen in the 1970s ended up being scrapped in the decade that followed. So here we are.

The consequences of sustained population contraction are the stinger in the tail of our current predicament, because it wasn’t just our technologies that were designed around the short-term condition of rapid growth driven by abundant fossil fuel energy—so were our economies. It seems like simple common sense to most people nowadays that assets will on average increase in value, investments will yield a return, and businesses will make a profit. Stop and think about that for a minute, though. Why does this happen? Because the economy grows every quarter. Why does the economy grow every quarter?

Ignore_Me posted:

Except that we were. Fossil fuel production was facing an imminent catastrophic supply/demand mismatch until the emergence of fracking and alternative oil drilling methods enabled us to change when and where we extract crude hydrocarbons. You didn’t get your “told you so” moment because similar to the Y2K software issue, the very real crisis you were observing was met with actions that actually subverted the threat. Unlike switching date codes in a computer however, we cannot repeat the fracking trick. Once all the reachable crude dries up, there will be no moving on to greener pastures oil rich deserts. Just because the fossil fuel crisis didn’t shut the lights off for us doesn’t mean it can’t and won’t do it to your kids if they’re still around by then.

As for the matter of practicing honest self reflection to ensure that your brain doesn’t melt inside of a climate despair echo chamber, this is very good advice and is the main element that factors into the social stigma I have suffered in talking about these topics with close friends and colleagues who are usually otherwise onboard with these issues.

Like, “No buddy, I’m not running around like chicken little prophesizing to you the exact date that the sky will fall. You aren’t getting my emotionally driven hysterical response. You are receiving an opinion on the matter which is a RESULT of the amount of time I have spent reflecting upon the available information and its implications. It is you who is responding emotionally in your unflinching denial to even briefly consider that what I’m saying might be a rational conclusion”.

Out entire global population has been conditioned by propaganda to believe that any argument we hear which emotionally charges us must be inherently dismissible because if it were true it would be more ‘boring’. We are all walking versions of the r/nothingeverhappens subreddit, ready to dismiss anything and believe in nothing.

I’m not a soothsayer and I have no idea what specific shape the future takes, because I don’t care that’s stupid. I can look at its general outline and tell it’s completely hosed. Because the present is currently hosed.

Xaris posted:

yep. coincidentally america has hit ALL TIME HIGHS! on oil production

Xaris posted:

One of the funniest things about America guzzling one of it's last remaining shots of oil-morphine to keep the party going is that KSA and RU still have a lot more oil. once America has tapped itself out trying to keep $3/gal gasoline for SUVS to frolick to-and-fro the suburbs to the strip malls, lest americans devolve into civil unrest, is that once it's gone it's gone. We could have doled it out slower, but no, we gotta get maximum profits right now this minute. so we'll be beholden to KSA and RU who have no desire to want to continue with the petrodollar, and because we've printed like $30 trillion dollars and gave it all to shareholders, the petrodollar is worthless without being literally the petrodollar.

get ready for some fun $20+/gal gas in the future -- that's going to completely destroy the entire american way of life (good, i'm actually excited). i'm looking forward to the end of burger nation

Fell Mood posted:

Yeah people using peak oil as an example always irritates the hell out of me. It happened! It happened almost exactly as predicted! A fair amount of what's happened over the last 25 years is us trying to paper over the consequences. The core disconnect was average people thinking peak oil meant literally running out of oil.

KaptainKrunk posted:

This is 70% true. There very much was still the assumption about the less sophisticated Peak Oilers that there'd be an obvious sign of crisis (total decline in liquids, rapid increase in prices, economic crisis). They underestimated how the system could both find alternative, less efficient supplies and externalize the problems out or downward. It wasn't so much a failure of understanding the economics or ecology but of capitalism.

Struensee posted:

https://taenk.dk/forbrugerliv/mad-og-indkoeb/pfas-i-oekoaeg-hvad-skal-du-goere

Xaris posted:

One of the funniest things about America guzzling one of it's last remaining shots of oil-morphine to keep the party going is that KSA and RU still have a lot more oil. once America has tapped itself out trying to keep $3/gal gasoline for SUVS to frolick to-and-fro the suburbs to the strip malls, lest americans devolve into civil unrest, is that once it's gone it's gone. We could have doled it out slower, but no, we gotta get maximum profits right now this minute. so we'll be beholden to KSA and RU who have no desire to want to continue with the petrodollar, and because we've printed like $30 trillion dollars and gave it all to shareholders, the petrodollar is worthless without being literally the petrodollar.

get ready for some fun $20+/gal gas in the future -- that's going to completely destroy the entire american way of life (good, i'm actually excited). i'm looking forward to the end of burger nation

Paradoxish posted:

Yes, but this sort of thing happens with everything, including climate change. Any sort of negative prediction automatically gets lumped in with the most insane poo poo imaginable. When the world doesn't immediately collapse, the people who were originally saying that nothing was wrong claim victory and use that to continue justifying inaction.

It's not just a lack of nuance; it's that the only acceptable position is one where you pretend that a problem doesn't exist and that you should do nothing, because any other position is the same thing as donning a tinfoil hat and building a bunker in your backyard.

Colin Mockery posted:

https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1771201408978534415

lol

lmao

SA Forums Poster posted:

This is just the top inch of the ocean, right? Still super crazy bad. Is there any more data of what is happening further down, temperature?

Is there a tracker like this for the Pacific Ocean?

Xaris posted:

technology will save us if things get that bad, relax

Xaris posted:

technology will save us if things get that bad, relax

Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted: