More like half-millennia that we'll be dealing with the fallout from climate change. The next 50 years won't even be the fastest paced period of change. It's pretty bleak.
If there's a silver lining it's that on time scales of tens of millennia we might have avoided descending into another glacial period - which would be disaster for the northern hemisphere, erase Russia and Canada, and wipe out a sizable or even majority share of current crop production. It's tough to say if that would even matter to humans so far into the future, but maybe it's a small consolation.
The next ten generations or so are going to have some incredible challenges to overcome.
Try to read the best models for the next 50 years by serious scientific groups like the IPCC. Try to ignore the denialist and alarmist reports that get to the front page of newspapers.
The future will be different, and we will have to adapt. But to see it as bleak is to embrace the pessimistic interpretation, which while sometimes accurate isn't always the best way to view things.
Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet. We can purposefully manipulate our environment for our purposes. Our adaptability will help us going forward.
I'm not an expert on this, but 'ran out of money' doesn't sound like a real explanation for the collapse of a government. That state has the authority to make money, it can't simply run out of it's own currency.
A country can print as much currency as it wants. In that sense it cannot run out of money. What it can't do is print as much currency as it wants, and still have people want that currency, or have them accept it at the previous value. In that sense a country certainly can run out of money.
Take a step further back. As Thomas Sowell says, economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods that have competing uses. In a free economy, money is how we organize that. But even if we had infinite money, that wouldn't give us more of anything else. It would just mean that everything cost infinite dollars to buy.
The problem that the Soviet Union had was that their economy couldn't produce enough to supply their military competition with the US. "Ran out of money" is one way of describing that, but the literal number of rubles in circulation is not at all the issue.
But if you spend that "own" currency on building military equipment that doesn't work instead of farming to feed your citizens, that "own" money doesn't spend very far when buying from outside sources.
What about global cooling scare[1], which obviously turned out to be nothing but I'm sure was used to scaremonger people?
OP wasn't saying that they weren't real issues. In fact they were all serious! I think he was saying there's nothing good about falling into a nihilist hole. Living together on Earth is hard and takes cooperation. There's plenty of room for the innovators but no room for the defeatist.
> Academic analysis of the peer-reviewed studies published at that time shows that most papers examining aspects of climate during the 1970s were either neutral or showed a warming trend.
I'm too young to have read anything about Global Cooling during the 1970s, but I can confidently say that, by 2021, I've seen way more "Ha ha scientists warned about Global Cooling in 1970s which makes the theory of Global Warming invalid!" than actual "Scientist So-and-so warned that the Earth is Cooling." It's basically historical revisionism for selling an agenda.
I still think cooling is a larger long-term threat than warming. Warming is a temporary disruption for humans, but the biosphere will, overall, flourish. Cooling is more of a general threat to Earth life, and it's pretty sure to happen. We are subject to periodic ice ages. The difference, I guess, is that the warming is upon us NOW, while the ice age is potentially 50,000 years off.
If you believed that humans are causing global warming, then you wouldn't have to worry about the possibility of global cooling: we can obviously put a stop to that if we ever find ourselves facing the onset of a real ice age.
Technically, we're experiencing an ice age, albeit the tail-end of one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation If it ends, things don't look good for us; we'd have to re-do all our infrastructure at the least.
"Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect."
i.e. even in the 70s scientist were worried about warming because they saw concerning data.
people getting concerned out about nonsense in the press has been with us since there was a press (cf 80s satanic panic) ... but that doesn't mean people being concerned about something in the press is nonsense.
> Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon.
That's not off the table at all, it's just not talked about much anymore.
To take your argument seriously, past performance does not predict future results. The fact that we've avoided disaster in the last 80 years does not mean we will be so lucky with climate change. It's certainly not a reason to ignore the risks - the ozone hole situation improved because the nations of Earth took united and conclusive action to halt it by banning CFCs.
I remember a New Agey book talking about California becoming an island, the Mississippi River flooding the Great Plains essentially splitting the US in two, and Florida being completely underwater... by like 1990.
That said, just because some people take hysteria to the extreme doesn’t mean the threats aren’t real. The nuclear annihilation one in particular came down to a handful of people steering the ship blind and somehow not running into the rocks while their first mates were screaming at them to turn the other way.
True, but it means that you maybe shouldn't partake in extreme hysteria.
I vividly remember my teacher in High School asking the students to raise their hands if they thought there would be a nuclear war with the USSR in their lifetime, and I was the only kid in my class who didn't think there would be.
I imagine that there would be a similar response now, if you asked a bunch of kids if civilization was going to collapse due to global warming in their lifetime.
Doesn't mean that global warming isn't a problem, just like nuclear war wasn't a problem; it just means that people have a hard time evaluating risk and likelihood.
Please, I remember we would all die a horrible death due to a nuclear armageddon.
When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain.
Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
In all of those cases they were massive problems that took massive efforts to fix. Have you heard of SO2 scrubbers? The Clean Air Act? The Montreal Protocol? The bunch of dead liquidators in Chernobyl?
For that matter you missed tetraethyl lead gasoline additives, dioxins, asbestos, and cigarettes. There are too many massive problems and too frequently there are greedy (evil?) people fighting to keep the status quo.
What's different is that global warming has been blunted by icecap melting, ocean warming, and ocean thermal expansion. We've used up our budget, and it will get abruptly worse. The sheer quantity of energy is beyond any prior problem humanity has ever created and you can't bargain with thermodynamics. Now it's our turn to deal with a problem, like previous generations did in the examples you mentioned.
Wow, 1 generation survived all kinds of terrible events, so it surely means this was all made up and that there's no problems that could eventually lead to catastrophy over a 'long' period of time that is more than the lifespan of one human being.
> 1 generation survived all kinds of terrible events
That isn't even close to the GP's argument. The steelman is every generation encounters existential problems that get exaggerated to apocalyptic proportions but that history is also a very long story of those existential problems being dealt with in one way or another. (And in the voice of GP "I lived through one such cycle")
The black-pilled people would counter that civilization today has an unprecedented number of ways in which to destroy itself and so that destruction is inevitable.
The counter to the black pill is that it's missing historical information which shows humanity has been successfully walking this tightrope for far longer than anyone thinks.
Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the 1970s for the 80s, updated to the 90s then the 2000s and so on and so forth.
Galactic gloom and doom is probably written into our genes which is why it makes its way into almost every western religion. Armageddon. We need to balance our natural proclivity for gloom and doom with plausible scenarios like pandemics, asteroid strikes, obesity epidemic, population declines instead of fantasy one that never come to pass or ones we have no control over.
> Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the 1970s for the 80
This didn't happen at any significant scale; I mean there were (correct) concerns about geopolitical forces leading to things like the mid 80s ethiopian faminei impact but no concern about wide spread starvation.
There was concern about mass starvation in the earlier part of the century, and it was pretty well founded. This changed due the "green revolution" and massive increase in food production.
What this shows is that predictive models can be made obsolete by new technology.
Unfortunately, a lot of people take the wrong lesson from that. The assumption that new technology will arrive in time to address a well predicted problem is dangerously irrational.
....8000 years from now, as part of the normal interglacial cycle, which is exactly what I said. And given that civilization is less than 10000 years old, just returning to the previous ice age would technically fulfill the quote you tried so hard to pull out of context. Did you actually even read the entire abstract?
30 years ago my mum said the same about the coming next 30 years. I am not saying that your hunch is wrong. I just want to caution that people were thinking similarly a while back. Don't underestimate the will and resourcefulness of men.
If you acknowledge the negative effects of potential growth, do you also see the upsides of it?
Exponential growth in smart people working on solutions for example. 1 year ago no one assumed that we would have 4 working vaccines already deployed to millions of people.
I am told day-in and day-out about how awesome this exponential growth thing is. Month after month, year after year, they just keep stuffing this exponential growth right up my in face without me even asking for it. Exponential growth has got the entirety of the world's mindshare behind it. It's not enough to just constantly scramble everything and revolutionize everything, and eat everything up. Ya can't even utter a word against it; everyone must bend a knee to it. It's the only model that anyone seems to be able to think of. "Circle the wagons, someone criticized it!" The reality is that we get nothing but exponential growth, and promises of more exponential growth. It's the only future we see now. It's the only answer have to any kind of problem. What are we going to do about all this debt? Exponential growth. What are we going to do about retirement? Exponential growth. What are we going to do about the climate? Exponential growth. How are we going to feed our exponential growth? More exponential growth. We're addicted to exponential growth mindset and we are now incapable of imagining anything else. No, I don't need to constantly mouth platitudes about the upsides of it, not anymore. Not after the rivers and fields I frequented as a kid are choked with garbage and plowed under for subdivisions. But oh yeah, exponential growth. Everybody loves it. Can't say a word against it. Like a watermelon growing in a lightbulb. This exponential growth thing isn't gonna work out in the end, people. But hey, your computer is fast, you little ingrate.
As someone in their late 20s, I don’t see how the future of Earth in another half-century is anything but bleak.