Population crisis, peak oil, 'kids these days', rando 'not enough people believe in my ideology' driven crisis, 'Rome fell because people did a thing I don't like'...
It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.
> The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Fair enough though not the point I was trying to make :)
The parent mentioned "kids these days" and also "It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.".
Whether Socrates actually said this (or some other famous or not so famous guy from over 2000 years ago), it does show that that assessment is probably very very correct. And very funny to read indeed. Even if you don't agree with all of the parts of the statement (I don't) you will most probably find some you'd agree with. YMMV if you don't have kids :)
OTOH, Socrates lived through the rise of Athens to prominence (their great generation?) and the generation he complains about would have been the ones to stop it's decline (our boomers -millenials.)
(So his observations could be of a cultural cycle rather than what every generation experiences from each perspective.)
Malaria is largely the same - we have better treatment options but it is still the same disease.
Society is very much not the same - for one pedastry is a severe crime instead of an accepted institution. Insensitivity to changing circumstances hints at a fixed belief. If your compass always points to the same place on the dial as north it is broken. Not to mention that nearly everybody loves luxury - that is partially why it is expensive above and beyond production price!
Climate change definitely is the next one. It is most surely happening, and probably faster than we want or expect, but if you listen to scientific consensus (eg. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report), it is pretty clear that, while serious and troublesome issue, it most definitely is not an existential threat.
It will cause mass migration and refugee crises as coastal cities and low lying areas slowly flood. That seems inevitable at this point.
That could maybe lead to wars, and nuclear war is still an existential threat.
If the changes somehow disrupt the ability to support cereal crops in the northern hemisphere (which actually is also the biggest risk from nuclear winter), that could lead to widespread starvation and more wars. Not an existential crises necessarily, but not pretty.
No large coastal city will become flooded on a permanent basis. Building levees is just too easy and cheap relative to cost of giving up on a city, just ask medieval Dutchmen. By the way, the scientific consensus for predicted sea level rise in the worst temperature growth scenario is still less than 1 meter by 2100. That’s less than the difference between low and high tide. Some areas will get flooded (eg large parts of Florida Everglades), but 1 meter is really not a big deal.
Similarly, there is no reason to be very concerned about crops: we already are able to grow crops in a very wide variety of climates, and we have cultivars specially selected for local climate conditions. While climate change is very fast on geological scale, it’s rather slow on human scale, which gives us plenty of time to adjust our crops and farming patterns.
This is the biggest reason why climate change is not an existential threat: we are not going to sit on our thumbs, and watch the steamroller slowly ride over us, at speed of 1 cm per day. That’s not going to happen: mitigating the problems associated with climate change is rather simple, relative to other problems our societies solve on a regular basis, and we have a lot of time for it.
> No large coastal city will become flooded on a permanent basis. Building levees is just too easy and cheap relative to cost of giving up on a city, just ask medieval Dutchmen.
Levees don't work in south Florida. Well, they work to stop water that comes in horizontally above ground level, but in south Florida floods usually come in by bubbling up through the porous ground.
Yes. Miami needs to move a few meters straight up. This is quite possible. Galveston, TX [1] and Chicago [2] did that a century ago. Miami Beach is raising some main roads, finally. Here's Miami's flood zone map.[3]
Worldwide, cities on river deltas face problems. Mostly in Asia. New Orleans is the only US city built on sand flatland at the mouth of a huge river. Asia has several of those.
New York is building a seawall around lower Manhattan. The West Coast isn't that vulnerable because the coast is mountainous. Even in areas of LA that look flat, go a few blocks inland and you're up 10m or so above sea level. The parts of SF built on fill may have problems.
This isn't the end of the world. But some cities will need rebuilding.
It appears that in the case of Galveston and Chicago, the government paid to raise the streets and sidewalks, and it was up to private property owners to deal with it themselves.
In the USA, is that even possible anymore? I've been to both Galveston and Chicago, and you can see oddities here and there in some neighborhoods. In many cases, homes were not actually raised - the main floor became a basement and above it new doors were made into the existing walls!
In a lot of locations, you cannot have a basement and get flood insurance. So what poorer people did in Galveston and Chicago is no longer an option.
A few meters? That's the scenario where there's some runaway global warming and all the poles melt, right? Actual observed sea level rises are measured in millimeters per year. Historical trends can't lead to Miami needing to move several meters up unless you're talking about, like, 1000 years from now.
There are some problems with the assumption of a flooding crisis. The historical record from tide gauges have been retroactively altered over time, to make apparent level rises in modern times worse and level rises in older times less so (this seems to be a common theme with data from climatologists - they rewrite historical datasets to make the magnitude of changes seem larger).
Additionally at some point they switched to satellites and stopped using tide gauges but it's not clear that's more accurate and may actually be less accurate (but it did make the rises seem larger, so there's a conflict of interest there). In particular, NOAA and NASA disagree by a large amount on what the actual level of rise is. NOAA say it's about half what NASA say it is.
You can't look at historical trends because it's not rising linearly. Most of the warming and melting will happen in the last decades of this century. That's part of what makes it easy to underestimate.
But you are right that it will keep rising for a thousand years or more. But now at that timeframe we're talking 6-12 meters or more.
This is all in the fairly conservative public estimates that so far have underrepresented the pace and scale of change.
Will happen, according to academic models that have been frequently wrong in the past. Projecting prior trends forwards doesn't get you anywhere near meters of rise, that's my point. And no they have not so far under-represented the pace and scale of change, far from it. That's the kind of revisionist history that makes arguments about climatology fruitless. How can we even debate the accuracy of such forecasts when the past is inverted like that? Here's the sort of thing that was actually predicted, from an AP news report in 1989:
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.
It's thirty years later now and the temperature rise since then has been at the very lowest end of the most conservative estimate (which was itself so wide that it was basically useless and hardly an estimate at all).
We're going to have sea level rise in the region of 1-2 metres by end of the century, and 5-10 longer term.
Levees are expensive, and not always viable. It depends on the geography, the wealth of the city / county, the porosity of the ground, etc.
Some places will be sure to use levees, some won't.
With regards to crops, we don't know the outcome. If the Gulf stream stops or some regions dry out it could greatly affect crop yield, especially over the short-term. And that's all that matters for starvation to occur. The term year average yield isn't as important as this year's harvest.
It will most likely not do all this. It s sad and bad, it's happening and our fault, but there has been costal cities in trouble before, people already mass migrate in time of despair without the need for the climate, and wars happen for far less.
You can roll up agonizing in fear, or you can prepare yourself for a bit of struggle. We can help lower the impact, but there's no reason to panic.
Most likely the impact on humanity will be minimal, if not the impact on life itself will be medium, and the Earth will spin a few more cycles with or without us.
This doesn't really matter, and we should just take it calmly, and talk to each other. No need for end of the world nuclear war hysteria.
I'm fine with taking things calmly. But what your advocating is the ostrich approach to problems.
That's just being blind about the problems. Nuclear war is all one of the biggest existential threats to civilization. It didn't end with the cold war.
Think of all the close calls we've had. Now look forward 100 years, what's the odds it happens? 1000 years? 10000?
We're our own worst enemy and our civilization is the biggest threat to civilization.
Related to that, destabilizing weather patterns in general - a few weeks ago the polar vortex dipped further south in the US than ever before and Texas was caught really off-guard.
First of all, people can move themselves. They don't need someone else to move them.
Floridians have a continent of 49 other states to move to.
The Bangladeshis are in a tougher spot, since they're approaching 200 million and might need to cross a political border.
If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands.
>If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands.
The "if" is funny. There's already many hundreds of millions of poor people around the world that have the borders closed to them. I don't see why 200M extra poor Bangladeshis wouldn't suffer the same fate.
And there is no reason to believe Siberia will be habitable, at least not in exactly the timeframe it needs to be to offset other habitable areas that are lost.
Climate change will be a slow moving, albeit accelerating, series of crisis that will grind those who are poorer and don't have the power to move to suffer losses.
I find this comment naive in the extreme. There is a strong overlap between areas subject to the worst impacts of climate change, and areas hosting some of the poorest people in the world (or in their countries).
With respect to the "If" statement around countries closing their borders - seriously, where have you been? The sudden and significant rise in popularity of the far-right in Europe almost coincides to the Syrian refugee crisis, and that was roughly one million people. In my country (Australia) we give our Pacific islands neighbours platitudes while still pushing coal on the rest of the world, and then indefinitely detain those seeking asylum for years (including years after they've been assessed as legitimate refugees). Countries are now proposing the Australian approach to "protect" their own borders. To think that this issue (of climate-change forced population movements) will not cause existential threats for those people is plainly wrong.
it's not an overnight disaster, so it won't work like that.
people are moving to Miami in droves right now and there's a big push to turn it into the next Silicon Valley. that's an aspirational goal and future facing in a geography that's among the most vulnerable to climate change. they know we can solve slow moving disasters.
I just read a study showing this europe crops crisis.
And to the parent of this thread we keep seeing constant research showing IPCC is off (sometimes wayy off) in their worst case (e.g. we're there or past it in many respects).
Armagedon is the last battle. To me that's what climate crisis is and how we need to look at it and take immediate action. We battle and win or we lose and it's really really really bad.
Maybe others have better examples of worse than imagined climate problems, but here is one I read from Reddit/HN last week.
New research shows faster slowing Gulf Stream. I can't find the exact thread that summarized - it did a direct comparison to the recent article to IPCC showing IPCC's worst case is not even close to as bad as the new measured slow down.
A few sources below, one decade old one says 10x from IPCC's worst and the recent article showed even faster slowdown; like on the scale of a less than a century we could be past a tipping point. When it tipped in the past it made europe very cold and rose eastern us sea levels a lot.
From my understanding, this would affect staple crops in Europe (google says europe 300 tonnes, us at 440), help melt a LOT more ice & sea level rise etc.
I think that the faster than expected melting ice in greenland we're seeing also increases the slowdown?
"totally unexpected decline in the AMOC of about 30% - far greater than the range of interannual variability found in the climate models used for the IPCC assessments" "10 times as fast as predicted by climatemodels."
> And to the parent of this thread we keep seeing constant research showing IPCC is off (sometimes wayy off) in their worst case (e.g. we're there or past it in many respects).
Of course, that's expected. Even if you assume that IPCC is 100% on point, then with p-value threshold of 0.05, you'd expect 1 in every 20 studies to show that IPCC is off.
The real question is whether the scientific consensus changes by the time the next IPCC report comes out. Maybe it will, we shall see. At the same time, consider what kind of message you are sending here: you are asking everyone to not listen to scientific consensus, and instead promote alarmism, because there are a few studies that challenge the consensus.
There is nothing wrong with challenging the consensus, that's how we get progress, but how do you want to win trust of the society, which is required to deal with this planet-wide situation, when, right after the (mostly won) fight for people to stop with denialism and believe the science, you turn around and say "yeah, that consensus we asked you to believe, instead of a handful of contrarian papers, is not what we actually want you to believe, instead you should believe this other handful of contrarian papers"? That's only going to sow distrust and alienate people.
I'm more asking that we take dramatic, drastic, and gigantic efforts to 'fight' the 'last battle' on climate change if you will take this thread metaphor lol
i agree with you on the nitty gritty for a general audience. mostly i dont think bogging down the public with research helps and it's way too often used in bad faith to do the opposite by industry and certain political groups acting in their own interest
on the other hand
on the other hand if like half the country experiencing some weather catastrophe in the last 5 years doesnt do it im not sure ;( so i do think we need more fear and for sure a lot more alarm, but yeah probably not alarmism in the sense i think you are probably referring to
The effect of the Gulf Stream on European climate isn't as large as often made out to be. The simple fact that Europe is on the western side of a continental landmass accounts for a huge portion of its climate - air travelling west to east over the ocean absorbs warm moisture and heats up, as the wind travels east across land it sheds that moisture via rain and becomes dryer and colder.
It's one of the reasons why Vancouver and London have similar climates, and both never get as cold as either of New York or Vladivostok, both of which are to the south of them.
interesting. the study i read did mention the UK as a big effect if it slows down, would get much colder. and maybe im not understanding the west to east air over ocean, isn't that specifically what we're talking about slowing down / potentially worst case stopping or totally changing?
It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.