The last collapse happended to the natives of a whole continent just a few centuries ago by new types of disease. I don't think they expected that, so they didn't need to be wrong, it just happened.
I could make the (true) argument that while this almost (their descendants are still around) happened, all of humanity was not extinguished.
But it's an interesting point. While the world never ends, entire peoples and nations do get extinguished with some regularity, and having people around who always look for ways this can happen could serve a credible evolutionary purpose, even though they're almost always wrong.
Their civilization did collapse though. There are different people living on all that land but I don’t think anyone seriously is worried about people or cockroaches going extinct
The phrase “since the dawn of humanity” is doing a lot of work in this comment. On a long enough timeline, the “world has ended” multiple times. This isn’t doomerism, it’s a pragmatic view from a biologist’s perspective.
Also as others pointed out, you misinterpret or misrepresent the interviewee’s words by placing “the end of the world” alongside TFA’s as though a thoughtful discussion with domain experts (in biology) is the same as the ravings of apocalyptic cranks.
Do you have an argument besides the ad hominem directed at “these people among us”?
Pretty much no one is arguing the world is going to end soon. Putting your own interpretation onto arguments. Mostly people are arguing the world is heading into huge sociological, logistical, political,scientific, immigration challenges and god knows what else kinds of problems through climate change.
Sticking your head in the ground and going la la la not happening, it’ll be ok, pretending people are suggesting the end of the world when they aren’t isn’t going to help and that is what people are protesting about.
I’d like to think we’d come up with solutions because I think there is some hope,but comments like this make me lose hope as I think it shows people with no hope or vision for change and improvement.
Pretty much all religions have some belief that the material world will come to an end. The Wikipedia article has details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology
I think religions are worldviews that appeal to universal human needs. If they all converge on some variation of Doomsday, that says something about human nature.
We atheists have to fill this need in other ways. When I was young it was nuclear war, after the Cold War it's been mostly environmental disaster. Now AI is coming up as a new candidate.
You're right that no one serious implies the literal death of every single human. A big enough disaster fills the need well enough.
This is of course just my personal speculation. I can't prove it, and have been wrong many times before.
We have come up with solutions though. The solution is see what happens and deal with it as it comes, while using what time we have left to try and climb further up the tech tree so that we have more technological ability to deal with it as it comes. It's a far better solution than the tyranny of the mediocrity of government bureaucracy people are pushing as the alternate.
It’s the same logic as saying, “I played russian roulette 5 times, I will win the 6th time as well”.
Without an understanding of why it worked in the past, there is statistically no reason to believe it will work again.
Also, you can read human history as a record of societal collapse. Sure they recovered, it took sometimes hundreds of years for the history we know of. Since we talking climate and it may take hundreds if not thousands of years to stabilise again, one could argue, this is the scale of collapse we’re looking at. Humans could very well survive, but I wouldn’t call returning to the stone age something we should strive for…
It’s far from a complete solution, but it works well enough that the future described in the article is much more a dark fantasy than a likely reality.
The "solution" you're showcasing only addresses global warming, not climate change, nor any of the other facets of the environmental crisis (e.g. biodiversity collapse, ocean acidification, soil depletion, fresh water pollution, etc...).
Techno-solutionism at its finest!
I don’t think anyone is arguing that it is a viable alternative to eventual decarbonization of the economy. Or if people are, they aren’t doing so in good faith.
But it does very effectively prevent anything even approaching a “collapse.” Relatively cheaply, even.
I mean it depends on your perspective. Because you could also think that preventing only one of the multiple crisis we are facing won't be enough to perceptively delay the breaking point.
When we willing and trull obey all the laws of Maker of the universe, then we will be prepared for the future crises that is to come. In fact, it already here with us. Climate Change!!! Lets carefully look into the real motive of this phrase
We are talking about technology as such not necessarily economically competitive.
I wouldn't consider the technology of solar engineering mentioned in your link economically competitive either.
Doable but not cheap.
The same is true for the technology to prevent climate change. It exists but it was expensive.
Interestingly, it's still expensive now because even though the basic technology is cheaper, the timeframe is much shorter, so we have to achieve more in less time than if we had started earlier.
Once the effects of climate change become too expensive or inconvenient for the ruling class you mean, which might be never since they are really good at shielding themselves from consequences.
I wholeheartedly agree though am questioning whether shielding will actually work if effects of climate change become dire… not just for the ruling class personally but in the way that made them and keeps them a ruling class.
Keep in mind that 70% of the pollution comes from 100 companies.
We discuss spending more money and taking extreme measures (shall we darken the clouds? bullshit) instead of taxing these fuckers out of existence and calling it a century.
Please expand on the tension between the competing passages of “We have the technology to pause the worst effects..” and “It’s far from a complete solution”.
Your average war movie is much more apocalypse porn than Civil War. Civil War was a "this would suck, seriously" experience, not fantasizing & idolizing which the word porn implies.
Also, I need to immortalize a typo that I made writing the above paragraph:
Right. I'm also getting old and I've learned not to worry about things I can't change. If the world decides through inaction to find out about the veracity of current predictions where our path is taking us, I'll be along for the ride. Whether I want to or not.
As logical as it is, I think advocacy of “degrowth” is a sure formula to put the far right in the driver’s seat and anyone who is seriously concerned about survival as forming another ingroup-outgrouo thing needs and answer to that.
"degrowth" is one of those things you don't actually need to believe in, the world will do it for us if we don't do it first. I just want to minimize the collateral damage.
If folks refuse, so be it, I did my ethical duty in making sure they were well informed.
> "degrowth" is one of those things you don't actually need to believe in, the world will do it for us if we don't do it first. I just want to minimize the collateral damage.
Worked in OT a long time, an old saying is that you either schedule downtime to perform maintenance or the hardware will gladly do that for you.
It's the same with climate, we either suck the cost of rearranging how we live now or we are going to hit a wall with the foot still down on the gas, expecting constant growth.
"Optimise" is never a neutral verb, we always optimise /for/.
Growth-above-all capitalists observe, correctly, the correlation between economic output and human wellbeing, and assume, incorrectly, a relationship that is both purely and directly causal and straight-up linear.
What if we optimise for human wellbeing and build a society that works less like a Prescott Pentium 4 and more like an iPhone? Figure out what really matters and then set about doing more with less.
(Answers that will be uncomfortably socialist for some - public-ish goods being more efficient in many cases than private everything, and uncomfortably technocratic for others, but tough...)
Because doing more with more is running out of runway. And in this game, you can't just declare bankruptcy and start again. There's no second chances here.
the word "degrowth" isn't mentioned once in this interview fwiw. it's actually a rational take on resiliency in the face of an uncertain future, built upon the realities of biological change and history.
“De-growth”, like communism, is perfectly logical until you start talking about implementation. Then it starts sounding like A Modest Proposal. Who has to sacrifice? Who isn’t allowed to build, or have kids, or use specific technology? I have this funny suspicion it would end up being poor people
And who ends up paying in a world that doesn't get its act together on sustainability? Hell, who's paying right now? Who's had their country invaded or their political system up-ended to keep cheap oil and cheap goods flowing to the West?
I'm not saying degrowthers have all the answers, but any critique should be weighed even-handedly against a realistic view of the shortcomings of what we have now and where it's taking us.
Who talked about sacrifice? De-growth is not about sacrifice, it's about changing the perspective on what is considered "good" and "desirable". I don't know why people are always so scared of de-growth, what you are describing with sacrifices is about decolonialism and global equalization. Ultimately if you are against such changes, you should champion neo-colonialism and make sure to promote racism so that you don't have to sacrifice anything and continue living at the expense of the poorer parts of the world...
When I think “de-growth”, one of the first things I think of is China’s One-Child Policy.
1. How does the OCP “stop” colonialism?
2. If what you mean by “changing the perspective on good and desirable” is restricting who can have children and who can’t, then obviously people are going to be upset with you?
Ok, then we don't have the same definition of de-growth. China is very much growth oriented, although in a different way than the collective West.
2. I think that has more to do with eugenics than degrowth, degrowth is asking how many children is desirable, if you want 10 children, first you need to think about women and how desirable it is for them to be pregnant for 7-8 years of their lives, going through labor 10 times etc... Especially if 9 of those 10 children will live till 70, what good are you achieving there? World domination with your genes? XD
Asking people to not have kids sounds pretty undesirable and anti-democratic too, but it the desirability of it should be debated publicly for sure.
Also would you have 10 kids in a world where abundance is not a given? Where it's hard to afford a nanny, or even find one, etc...
Second coming, rapture etc are not unique to religious nutcases. It appears to be a mental disease that afflicts the atheist PhDs and others alike.
Over the last 100 years, average temperature (of whatever use this metric is) has gone up 1.5 deg C. Meanwhile life on this planet has flourished. Planet’s green cover has increased. Humans are better off on pretty much every metric.
"Flourished" in the context having the background extinction rate 2-3 orders above the normal is a bit overoptimistic if not intentionally misleading. Yes, we have far more cows that there were ever been, or far more units of a narrow set of crops than ever.
But that is not a full system, in particular, a sustainable one. And the signals that things are decaying fast, at least for what matters for our civilization, are all around. And they are not just about climate or the natural world.
If you consider that transhumans or posthumans will so far exceed natural humans, and you have no choice but to ascend with them to a world of brilliance that we cannot imagine OR languish in some dingy naturalist backwater, then the story of the rapture is real! :D Those left behind are in hell.
You need to educate yourself some more my friend.
You could start with the latest IPCC report's summary.
Green cover won't tell you much about loss of insects, marine wildlife, microorganism in the soil, etc...
Also I'd be interested in which specific metric you speak about when talking about humans being better off and which studies you are refering too. You'll reckon that if you don't even trust a widespread scientific consesus, I'll have a hard time trusting a random person on the interwebs.
Let’s say there has indeed been loss of insect life for the sake of argument due to “climate change” on account of human activity and that the knob can be turned back by some magical calibration of human activity.
As a chief beneficiary of such activity (clearly you are using a modern computing/communication device from a climate controlled space to access a frivolous internet chat forum), why don’t you take responsibility and the lead? Perhaps give up your computer(s), phone(s), automobile, refrigerator, television and quit commuting and vacationing away from your local park and live off the land by growing vegetables.
You know you can show us the ropes and kick start a global movement that will turn the knob.
Sundays on HN are a weird thing. It’s the only day of the week when I see the nutty anti-car takes, de-growth takes, climate doomerism, etc. Monday through Saturday, tech news (mostly). Sunday, unhinged nutballism.
People dependent on cars for nearly all their activities, find it very hard to imagine a world where they are not. Many of them have shaped their entire lives around cars. They live in places where the closest grocery store is 20 minutes away by car. Where it’s barely safe to cross the street in front of their house on foot.
Folks in these situations think the idea of not using a car to get around is crazy, because in some ways it is. It’s not the majority of people though. In the US the majority of people, 70%, live within 2 miles of all their basic needs. That’s the distance that more than 25% of people living in Denmark choose to ride a bike for an errand rather than drive.
No, we talk about the evidence we do have and use that to convince people.
I’ve talked to a lot of climate deniers (unfortunately). These people may be saying and doing ignorant things but largely they are not stupid. They know when you make unfalsifiable claims, and that becomes part of their justification to ignore you.
"degrowth" is one of those things you don't actually need to believe in, the world will do it for us if we don't do it first. I just want to minimize the collateral damage.
If folks refuse, so be it, I did my ethical duty in making sure they were well informed.
I guess it serves some evolutionary purpose, since it's so deeply ingrained.
We've done quite well with these people among us so far, despite them always, since the dawn of humanity, being wrong.