Of all the reasons society could collapse this century, climate isn’t one of them.
Not saying climate won’t eventually be an issue that can cause society to collapse, but the histrionics we’re seeing are going to be counter-productive. It’s the same sales tactic a sleazy used car salesman would use.
“It’s a crisis! Everything is terrible! BUY NOW! BUY NOW! BUY NOW! OR YOU’LL BE DEAD FOREVER!!!”
The demographic cliff we’re seeing 20 years from now is far more likely to cause society to collapse. China is projected to see its population drop in half. Most western countries are going to have more than one retiree for every working age person.
Ironically, once the demographic bomb goes off, climate will be a much easier to solve problem since we’ll have all these solar panels and virtually nobody to use all the power.
There’s a lot of dangers to our civilization right now. The global debt bomb set to go off is going to be a problem in the next 10 years, but nobody seems to care about that despite the imminent and long lasting consequences.
Despite that, the threats people seem most concerned about are important but not imminent. There’s a reason people are particularly worried about this thing among all the threats out there.
The economy is a social construct. We could change the whole system if we really wanted to.
Our climate is a real, physical, thing. Just like the food we eat or the houses we live in. Destroying those things are far more irreversible, with far more consequences, than an economy that can be fixed.
It’s like worrying about the economy while chopping down the last tree on an island.
I’ve got a hypothesis about that on an anthropological side of things.
Is anxiety about climate change causing the demographic cliff, or is economic stress causing something primal in our minds to be terrified about ecological concerns?
Reality is that the environment is in better shape in western cities than it has been for centuries. Just 50 years ago many cities were horribly polluted in ways you could immediately see and smell (and in a lot of Chinese cities we get to see) and today they’re in much better shape, but we’re hunter gatherers and so when we feel like we’re working too hard just to stay alive and we’re not getting our basic needs met something kicks in where we wonder if nature, the provider of all we have, is in trouble.
It makes a lot of sense to me that we can sense that our lives are getting more difficult and so our hunter gatherer instincts are kicking in leading to anxiety about the ecology that provides for us. We would have had millions of years to hone such instincts, and the humans who didn’t could have actually killed themselves off like yeast in strong wine.
It’s a bit weird that you’re looking for a psychological explanation while ignoring the obvious one: massive amounts of scientific analyses are pointing towards our environments changing at rates only seen during times of mass extinction. I’m not extrapolating economical issues to ecological concerns, I’m listening to people who have spent their whole lives studying these topics.
There’s lots of scientific and mathematical evidence for a lot of threats. Some of those are much more imminent than climate change. Yet of all those things, it’s this one thing, a long term threat that isn’t going to fully manifest until after you’re dead, and possibly after your kids are dead, that has captured the popular imagination.
I think it would be crazy not to look for a psychological explanation.
Here’s a bunch of imminent threats we know can happen or are happening that will or could have a major impact on very short timelines:
The global debt levels are reaching civilization threatening levels.
The population bomb is going to go off, leading to mass suffering as in some countries there will be 2 retirees for every working person. The fact that populations are increasing in Africa isn’t relevant to all the other continents.
The end of the Pax Americana is arguably occurring right now and that’s going to have major global civilizational ramifications since global trade relies on the American Empire, and high technology depends on global trade. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, fields full of automobiles were stuck at the factory solely because we couldn’t get electronic parts from Asia. Imagine if a conflict were to cut that supply line. Now imagine for all the supply chains that are relying on globalized materials.
Loss of biodiversity not directly related to climate change is at crisis levels due to things like plastic pollution in the waterways and overuse of fertilizer causing massive dead zones in large bodies of water. We could kill off the global ecosystem before climate change has a chance to harm us.
The era of antibiotics is ending. Overuse of antibiotics partially in hospitals but more importantly in commercial farming is leading to mass antibiotic resistance which will set humanity back 150 years in terms of dealing with common diseases caused by bacteria.
The post cold-war era of relative peace is ending. While the risk level is presently low, global tensions are rising between nuclear powers, and it’s possible we see a nuclear war in our lifetimes.
Before climate change becomes an issue, the problems with global trade could put oil and gas as a major problem for many nations because for the most part where oil and gas live is not where the people who use the most oil and gas live. Witness Europe being cut off from Russian oil & gas. A few strategic strikes and Russia could be totally cut off from global energy markets, and that’s just one example. We don’t have enough renewables to make up for even a small amount of the energy we use from these fuels today.
Critical infrastructure is extremely fragile in most developed nations. A relatively small number of agents with relatively low-tech means could cripple key infrastructure and there wouldn’t even be anyone around to see it. That’s fine for one event, but it doesn’t take a lot of events to completely shut down an economy because there’s no power and limited telecommunications. Many major manufacturers and systems such as water treatment, power, manufacturing are far behind in cybersecurity and highly susceptible to focused cyberattacks. Systems that would have been air gapped 20 years ago are now often connected to the Internet to provide operational intelligence, providing a vector for problems
Silviculture and engineered forests are highly dangerous to some of the massive forests we rely on. The British Columbia pine beetle epidemic has massively damaged that province’s massive forests and part of the reason is monoculture from forests replanted with a monoculture after being harvested.
At any moment, a major solar flare hitting earth could destroy most of our technology in a way that might not be recoverable in a generation. There was a major solar event early on in the electrical age that caused fires. Today we rely on electricity so much and in such precision devices that a similar spike might destroy too much technology to replace. A much smaller event about 10-20 years ago took out the power grid in Quebec, and that’s without the trouble of the same event causing global issues. Right now new major transformers are on a queue years deep.
Genetic engineering of microbes is a relatively mature science at this point, bad actors today could potentially engineer a supervirus that is more dangerous than COVID. Given how much COVID harmed civilization, a real threat that’s more like airborne ebola could end global civilization, and if it was spread clandestinely all at once it could be killing people before the government even realizes it’s here.
Genetic engineering of humans is in its infancy, but is already possible. Unwise genetic tinkering will have knock-on effects that could end civilization. For example, if everyone were to jump on a bandwagon to implement the mighty-mouse gene in human populations, we’d have strong, long lived humans who eat more food and are much more aggressive. Alternatively, if we commonly cured things we considered genetic defects that were actually prophylaxis against something (the same as sickle-cell trait is protection against Malaria in Africa), we could leave our species defenseless against some situation we didn’t recognise but was mitigated in some people’s DNA.
The degradation of soil and land due to unsustainable agricultural practices, deforestation, and urbanization is threatening food security and ecosystem services. Soil is a vital resource that supports life on Earth, but it is being eroded and depleted at an alarming rate. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 95% of our food comes from soil, but 33% of global soils are already degraded. Soil degradation reduces crop yields, increases greenhouse gas emissions, and affects water quality and availability. If not prevented and restored, soil degradation could lead to famine and environmental collapse. This is one of the things believed to have led to the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization.
The drive towards bureaucratic authoritarianism even in liberal democracies is a dangerous trend. In eras like the bronze age collapse, such authoritarian regimes has led to civilizational collapse. Our need to control everything has a massive danger of causing the end of our civilization.
Freshwater resources are strained for reasons other than climate change, such as pure mismanagement. We built cities in the middle of deserts, and that has meant that the limited water resources have been stretched more and more thin. In addition, you have situations like Nestle bottling water from one water shed where it’s purchased and drank in another water shed, further displacing fresh water supplies. The Nile river is being dammed by Ethiopia, and that’s going to cause full-scale war in Egypt, with Sudan stuck in the middle. That megaproject is being constructed right now, and it’s just one example of freshwater resources being a potential flashpoint for a world war.
It wouldn’t have hurt my feelings any if you had kept it to 5! :)
You’ve got a couple on there that I wouldn’t have included, but they are also in areas I haven’t examined for impact, so …
There are a couple where I actively disagree with you, but, again, my lack of expertise means I can’t actually mount arguments.
That still leaves nearly a dozen. I’m not convinced that any one of them is sufficient on it’s own, but any 2 or 3 in combination? Sure. I’m a doomer for a reason. :)
One of the reasons my personal focus was on climate change was that I thought properly addressing that would fix most of the rest as a side effect. I now think that pretty much all the disasters awaiting us have the same root cause: selfishness. As long as we are unable to care for anyone or anything other than ourselves, we will never solve any problem worth solving.
People talk about various tipping points for their pet disaster. I think the real tipping point happened in 1980.
Everyone hates on the Boomers because things got worse under their watch, but if you look deeply into it, I think they were already living in a decline compared to the peak of their parents and they were just trying to deal with it, just like Millennials and Gen Z are today. Some of the other consequences of the decline ended up looking like they really helped the boomers out.
Plastics really got started in the 1930s, and exploded from there. A lot of the worst excesses we’re seeing are a result of the post-war boom and people trying to keep an unsustainable party going forever.
The PET bottle (of which there are 500 BILLION manufactured every year) was invented in the mid-70s, the US left the gold standard because the government had spent 20 years overspending to stick it to the Soviets and they couldn’t keep the world military industrial complex going without letting debt explode, inflation and gas prices exploded, globalization started sending manufacturing to places that don’t follow the same standards more environmentally conscious nations do, and so on.
The industrial revolution was already arguably 200 years old at that point so it isn’t as if carbon use would have dropped at all in another scenario, but I think a lot of the 15 problems I listed would be a lot less prominent if the so-called “greatest generation” hadn’t pulled out all the stops to keep the party going forever. I guess you could even argue that their parents and grandparents also contributed by making changes to the financial system and so on that sowed the seeds of all the wasteful practices.
The core for me is that by focusing on one and only one problem to the exclusion of all the others, and doing it on a per-country basis the way we have, it’s first of all not helping and often making the many problems worse – The debt problem and many of our waste problems are going to get way worse if we try to consume our way out of the fossil fuel consumption problem, for example, and right now we’re largely just outsourcing our bad practices to other countries that don’t care about it like we do. “We’re net zero now because we have Russia dig up all the fossil fuels for us and we have China process them so our ledger says we didn’t have to use hardly any carbon even though we’re consuming all this”
I think you are missing a few key external inputs with your theory. Yes populations in Western and Asian societies are predicted to drop, however African populations are still predicted to rise and that will blunt the level of population decline overall.
We may not be able to adapt our agriculture and industry to climate change fast enough. Once these industries suffer catastrophic setbacks or supply chain disruption they may never come back on line especially if we live in a world of constant crisis and change.
Finally there are external inputs that humanity doesn’t control that may take the place of industrial emissions which could create a feedback loop that humanity can’t break even if we set our emissions to zero. Google methane release from permafrost melting of you want a good example. There are also large stores of methane deep within the ocean that could be released if sea temperature rise as well.
There is a very good chance that if humanity enters a climate change induced “dark age” that we may never recover as a species. Most of the easily accessed resources that underpin our society were exhausted early on in our industrialization. A society trying to rebuild in the aftermath of a complete collapse may not be able to rebuild as there are no easy resource inputs to harvest to jump start the process. We may not get a second chance to correct our mistakes as a species.
Your last point is something I’ve never thought about but makes a lot of sense. Humans living in the aftermath of our collapse probably won’t be able to go through another industrial revolution without easy access to resources like coal, oil or peat. Guess it’s for the better though, since a collapse likely means we’ll have already fully screwed the environment once.
The second Industrial Revolution could be built upon the garbage of the first, perhaps? It’s not like all that metal and solar capacity will just disappear.
Of all the reasons society could collapse this century, climate isn’t one of them.
Not saying climate won’t eventually be an issue that can cause society to collapse, but the histrionics we’re seeing are going to be counter-productive. It’s the same sales tactic a sleazy used car salesman would use.
“It’s a crisis! Everything is terrible! BUY NOW! BUY NOW! BUY NOW! OR YOU’LL BE DEAD FOREVER!!!”
The demographic cliff we’re seeing 20 years from now is far more likely to cause society to collapse. China is projected to see its population drop in half. Most western countries are going to have more than one retiree for every working age person.
Ironically, once the demographic bomb goes off, climate will be a much easier to solve problem since we’ll have all these solar panels and virtually nobody to use all the power.
You do realize we are reliant on the climate to grow the food we eat and get the water we drink… right?
What do you think will happen when those things come under strain?
There’s a lot of dangers to our civilization right now. The global debt bomb set to go off is going to be a problem in the next 10 years, but nobody seems to care about that despite the imminent and long lasting consequences.
Despite that, the threats people seem most concerned about are important but not imminent. There’s a reason people are particularly worried about this thing among all the threats out there.
The economy is a social construct. We could change the whole system if we really wanted to.
Our climate is a real, physical, thing. Just like the food we eat or the houses we live in. Destroying those things are far more irreversible, with far more consequences, than an economy that can be fixed.
It’s like worrying about the economy while chopping down the last tree on an island.
10 years is a stretch. 1-2 years max.
Climate change is a huge factor in why I’m not having children. So in that sense it plays its own role in this demographic cliff.
I’ve got a hypothesis about that on an anthropological side of things.
Is anxiety about climate change causing the demographic cliff, or is economic stress causing something primal in our minds to be terrified about ecological concerns?
Reality is that the environment is in better shape in western cities than it has been for centuries. Just 50 years ago many cities were horribly polluted in ways you could immediately see and smell (and in a lot of Chinese cities we get to see) and today they’re in much better shape, but we’re hunter gatherers and so when we feel like we’re working too hard just to stay alive and we’re not getting our basic needs met something kicks in where we wonder if nature, the provider of all we have, is in trouble.
It makes a lot of sense to me that we can sense that our lives are getting more difficult and so our hunter gatherer instincts are kicking in leading to anxiety about the ecology that provides for us. We would have had millions of years to hone such instincts, and the humans who didn’t could have actually killed themselves off like yeast in strong wine.
It’s a bit weird that you’re looking for a psychological explanation while ignoring the obvious one: massive amounts of scientific analyses are pointing towards our environments changing at rates only seen during times of mass extinction. I’m not extrapolating economical issues to ecological concerns, I’m listening to people who have spent their whole lives studying these topics.
There’s lots of scientific and mathematical evidence for a lot of threats. Some of those are much more imminent than climate change. Yet of all those things, it’s this one thing, a long term threat that isn’t going to fully manifest until after you’re dead, and possibly after your kids are dead, that has captured the popular imagination.
I think it would be crazy not to look for a psychological explanation.
Could you list, say, 5 threats of similar danger that will likely occur before climate change manifests strongly enough to impact my life?
Here’s a bunch of imminent threats we know can happen or are happening that will or could have a major impact on very short timelines:
The global debt levels are reaching civilization threatening levels.
The population bomb is going to go off, leading to mass suffering as in some countries there will be 2 retirees for every working person. The fact that populations are increasing in Africa isn’t relevant to all the other continents.
The end of the Pax Americana is arguably occurring right now and that’s going to have major global civilizational ramifications since global trade relies on the American Empire, and high technology depends on global trade. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, fields full of automobiles were stuck at the factory solely because we couldn’t get electronic parts from Asia. Imagine if a conflict were to cut that supply line. Now imagine for all the supply chains that are relying on globalized materials.
Loss of biodiversity not directly related to climate change is at crisis levels due to things like plastic pollution in the waterways and overuse of fertilizer causing massive dead zones in large bodies of water. We could kill off the global ecosystem before climate change has a chance to harm us.
The era of antibiotics is ending. Overuse of antibiotics partially in hospitals but more importantly in commercial farming is leading to mass antibiotic resistance which will set humanity back 150 years in terms of dealing with common diseases caused by bacteria.
The post cold-war era of relative peace is ending. While the risk level is presently low, global tensions are rising between nuclear powers, and it’s possible we see a nuclear war in our lifetimes.
Before climate change becomes an issue, the problems with global trade could put oil and gas as a major problem for many nations because for the most part where oil and gas live is not where the people who use the most oil and gas live. Witness Europe being cut off from Russian oil & gas. A few strategic strikes and Russia could be totally cut off from global energy markets, and that’s just one example. We don’t have enough renewables to make up for even a small amount of the energy we use from these fuels today.
Critical infrastructure is extremely fragile in most developed nations. A relatively small number of agents with relatively low-tech means could cripple key infrastructure and there wouldn’t even be anyone around to see it. That’s fine for one event, but it doesn’t take a lot of events to completely shut down an economy because there’s no power and limited telecommunications. Many major manufacturers and systems such as water treatment, power, manufacturing are far behind in cybersecurity and highly susceptible to focused cyberattacks. Systems that would have been air gapped 20 years ago are now often connected to the Internet to provide operational intelligence, providing a vector for problems
Silviculture and engineered forests are highly dangerous to some of the massive forests we rely on. The British Columbia pine beetle epidemic has massively damaged that province’s massive forests and part of the reason is monoculture from forests replanted with a monoculture after being harvested.
At any moment, a major solar flare hitting earth could destroy most of our technology in a way that might not be recoverable in a generation. There was a major solar event early on in the electrical age that caused fires. Today we rely on electricity so much and in such precision devices that a similar spike might destroy too much technology to replace. A much smaller event about 10-20 years ago took out the power grid in Quebec, and that’s without the trouble of the same event causing global issues. Right now new major transformers are on a queue years deep.
Genetic engineering of microbes is a relatively mature science at this point, bad actors today could potentially engineer a supervirus that is more dangerous than COVID. Given how much COVID harmed civilization, a real threat that’s more like airborne ebola could end global civilization, and if it was spread clandestinely all at once it could be killing people before the government even realizes it’s here.
Genetic engineering of humans is in its infancy, but is already possible. Unwise genetic tinkering will have knock-on effects that could end civilization. For example, if everyone were to jump on a bandwagon to implement the mighty-mouse gene in human populations, we’d have strong, long lived humans who eat more food and are much more aggressive. Alternatively, if we commonly cured things we considered genetic defects that were actually prophylaxis against something (the same as sickle-cell trait is protection against Malaria in Africa), we could leave our species defenseless against some situation we didn’t recognise but was mitigated in some people’s DNA.
The degradation of soil and land due to unsustainable agricultural practices, deforestation, and urbanization is threatening food security and ecosystem services. Soil is a vital resource that supports life on Earth, but it is being eroded and depleted at an alarming rate. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, 95% of our food comes from soil, but 33% of global soils are already degraded. Soil degradation reduces crop yields, increases greenhouse gas emissions, and affects water quality and availability. If not prevented and restored, soil degradation could lead to famine and environmental collapse. This is one of the things believed to have led to the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization.
The drive towards bureaucratic authoritarianism even in liberal democracies is a dangerous trend. In eras like the bronze age collapse, such authoritarian regimes has led to civilizational collapse. Our need to control everything has a massive danger of causing the end of our civilization.
Freshwater resources are strained for reasons other than climate change, such as pure mismanagement. We built cities in the middle of deserts, and that has meant that the limited water resources have been stretched more and more thin. In addition, you have situations like Nestle bottling water from one water shed where it’s purchased and drank in another water shed, further displacing fresh water supplies. The Nile river is being dammed by Ethiopia, and that’s going to cause full-scale war in Egypt, with Sudan stuck in the middle. That megaproject is being constructed right now, and it’s just one example of freshwater resources being a potential flashpoint for a world war.
It wouldn’t have hurt my feelings any if you had kept it to 5! :)
You’ve got a couple on there that I wouldn’t have included, but they are also in areas I haven’t examined for impact, so …
There are a couple where I actively disagree with you, but, again, my lack of expertise means I can’t actually mount arguments.
That still leaves nearly a dozen. I’m not convinced that any one of them is sufficient on it’s own, but any 2 or 3 in combination? Sure. I’m a doomer for a reason. :)
One of the reasons my personal focus was on climate change was that I thought properly addressing that would fix most of the rest as a side effect. I now think that pretty much all the disasters awaiting us have the same root cause: selfishness. As long as we are unable to care for anyone or anything other than ourselves, we will never solve any problem worth solving.
People talk about various tipping points for their pet disaster. I think the real tipping point happened in 1980.
Everyone hates on the Boomers because things got worse under their watch, but if you look deeply into it, I think they were already living in a decline compared to the peak of their parents and they were just trying to deal with it, just like Millennials and Gen Z are today. Some of the other consequences of the decline ended up looking like they really helped the boomers out.
Plastics really got started in the 1930s, and exploded from there. A lot of the worst excesses we’re seeing are a result of the post-war boom and people trying to keep an unsustainable party going forever.
The PET bottle (of which there are 500 BILLION manufactured every year) was invented in the mid-70s, the US left the gold standard because the government had spent 20 years overspending to stick it to the Soviets and they couldn’t keep the world military industrial complex going without letting debt explode, inflation and gas prices exploded, globalization started sending manufacturing to places that don’t follow the same standards more environmentally conscious nations do, and so on.
The industrial revolution was already arguably 200 years old at that point so it isn’t as if carbon use would have dropped at all in another scenario, but I think a lot of the 15 problems I listed would be a lot less prominent if the so-called “greatest generation” hadn’t pulled out all the stops to keep the party going forever. I guess you could even argue that their parents and grandparents also contributed by making changes to the financial system and so on that sowed the seeds of all the wasteful practices.
The core for me is that by focusing on one and only one problem to the exclusion of all the others, and doing it on a per-country basis the way we have, it’s first of all not helping and often making the many problems worse – The debt problem and many of our waste problems are going to get way worse if we try to consume our way out of the fossil fuel consumption problem, for example, and right now we’re largely just outsourcing our bad practices to other countries that don’t care about it like we do. “We’re net zero now because we have Russia dig up all the fossil fuels for us and we have China process them so our ledger says we didn’t have to use hardly any carbon even though we’re consuming all this”
I think you are missing a few key external inputs with your theory. Yes populations in Western and Asian societies are predicted to drop, however African populations are still predicted to rise and that will blunt the level of population decline overall.
We may not be able to adapt our agriculture and industry to climate change fast enough. Once these industries suffer catastrophic setbacks or supply chain disruption they may never come back on line especially if we live in a world of constant crisis and change.
Finally there are external inputs that humanity doesn’t control that may take the place of industrial emissions which could create a feedback loop that humanity can’t break even if we set our emissions to zero. Google methane release from permafrost melting of you want a good example. There are also large stores of methane deep within the ocean that could be released if sea temperature rise as well.
There is a very good chance that if humanity enters a climate change induced “dark age” that we may never recover as a species. Most of the easily accessed resources that underpin our society were exhausted early on in our industrialization. A society trying to rebuild in the aftermath of a complete collapse may not be able to rebuild as there are no easy resource inputs to harvest to jump start the process. We may not get a second chance to correct our mistakes as a species.
Your last point is something I’ve never thought about but makes a lot of sense. Humans living in the aftermath of our collapse probably won’t be able to go through another industrial revolution without easy access to resources like coal, oil or peat. Guess it’s for the better though, since a collapse likely means we’ll have already fully screwed the environment once.
The second Industrial Revolution could be built upon the garbage of the first, perhaps? It’s not like all that metal and solar capacity will just disappear.
Confidently incorrect.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_periods_and_events_in_climate_history
Check out the common era /AD section.