http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te...pocalypse.html
My predictions for the next 20 years or so:
Natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes and typhoons, earthquakes, and droughts will afflict more people than ever, at greater costs than ever, in poor nations and rich alike.
Epidemics of infectious diseases will threaten large populations and could even spread rapidly across large swaths of the planet.
Crops will fail and people will starve.
Wild fires, biodiversity loss, forest die-offs, and other signs of global ecosystem stress will continue to rise.
Civil strife will flare up in trouble spots around the world, some predictable, others unexpected, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in a state of misery and despair, prompting waves of migration, outstripping the financial resources necessary to respond, and severely testing our diplomatic and aid capabilities.
Availability of high-quality water will be stretched to the limits in many places around the world.
New extremes of temperature and other weather phenomena will be recorded in more and more places.
That’s right: Millions will die; still more will be displaced; nations and economies will teeter at the edge of disaster as populist demagogues rise, regional stabilities are tested, and environmental despoliation expands.
Judging by the attention it’s getting on the various scientist and environmental listservs that find their way into my inbox, the recent New York Times Magazine profile of the writer and environmental activist Paul Kingsnorth has hit a highly resonant chord. Having accepted that (as the REM song goes, and the article is led) “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” Kingsnorth is retreating to “rural Ireland” to wait out the coming climate-change-induced collapse of civilization, teach his children the skills necessary to survive without a supermarket, and enjoy good wine. It sounds lovely, actually—I wish I had the courage to do something like that.
Of course, even if the climate change apocalypse that Kingsnorth accepts as inevitable magically failed to materialize, every one of my dire predictions would still be likely to come true. Climate change, added on top of all the other causes of these problems, will often make things worse. But for the most part there will be no way to tell which ones are worse than they would have been anyway, or how much worse they have become. So it’s not that apocalyptic fears about climate change are utterly fantastic—climate change may well exacerbate a range of serious and potentially even disastrous problems—it’s that the monomaniacal, apocalyptic version of climate change gives us a picture of the world that is so incomplete that it’s much worse than simply wrong. Worse because, just like religious and political orthodoxy, it cannot be falsified. On the contrary, everything that goes wrong simply reinforces the conviction that there is just one explanation for all our problems—climate change—and that there is only one thing we can do to keep the world from collapsing—stop burning fossil fuels. And thus, worse because the climate-change-as-apocalypse orthodoxy thereby radically narrows the range of viewpoints we are willing to tolerate and the range of options we are willing to consider for dealing with complex challenges to our well-being like natural disasters and infectious disease and poverty and civil strife.
It’s actually hard not to sympathize with Kingsnorth. He’s sad about how things are changing; he likes nature the way it is now, not the way it was before humans settled in Ireland, or not the way it will be after another 100 years of human’s muddling through from one crisis to the next, desperately clinging to technology as the eternal antidote to our follies. The real problem is not the few Kingsnorth’s who actually have the mettle to drop out; it’s the hysterics that they leave behind who insist, often in the name of science, that all the suffering to come will have only one true cause, and that redemption can be achieved only by following one true path. No matter that long and sad human experience teaches us where such absolute orthodoxies lead. Indeed, with climate change being blamed for almost everything these days, the one phenomenon that seems to have escaped the notice of scientists, environmentalists and the media alike is that, perhaps above all, climate change is making us stupid.
"hysterics that they leave behind who insist, often in the name of science, that all the suffering to come will have only one true cause, and that redemption can be achieved only by following one true path. "
bull . how about some links to such imaginied hysterics. straw man.
The threats from corporations and the lifestyles, behaviors they promote, and others they impede, are not "one", but many.
So now that climate change is established, find the goofballs that flee in fear, and make that the argument.
Classic.
Its gonna cause economic problems, it already has, but we will survive. It's not a comet. It's just funny that conservatives, who claim to understand business and long term economic health, are still in denial.
Indeed, with climate change being blamed for almost everything these days, the one phenomenon that seems to have escaped the notice of scientists, environmentalists and the media alike is that, perhaps above all, climate change is making us stupid.
It's seems that conservatives are most likely to catch the stupid bug on this one.
it's the great irony of technology. it makes us more ignorant.
try going out and surviving in the wilderness for two days.
i took a girl camping once and all she complained about was her makeup running and to take her home. if we were in an apocalyptic situation, most people would die not from fallout, but from ignorance.
Darrin, the once 'true' believer, has now completely given up on arguing the science. He will not argue that the glacier won't melt over the next several hundred years. No, he is now delving into the world of qualitative semantics in what adjectives to use in describing said mechanism.
What a sophist bag.
Makeup while camping? Too bad a grizzly didn't come eat her face off tbh.
What is sad, is that some heads will dishonestly use such arguments for doing nothing, when very modest risk avoidance actions are viable, cheap, and quite possibly very beneficial overall even if there were no risks associated with manmade climate change.
Worse still are those whose bizarre irrational faith in some sort of Free Market diety that can do no wrong will endlessly parrot ty articles that advocate doing nothing in the face of obvious risks as if the risks aren't don't exist.
Eyup.
It is deliciously ironic to me when arguing with conspiracy nuts that they accuse me of logical fallacies in making my arguments, and then repeatedly make some of the most logically flawed assertions one can make.
In a similar vein are the idiots who say that there is no scientific proof of manmade climate change, and therefore we should do nothing, because doing something would cause a huge economic disaster.
Yet when I ask for proof that doing something will cause a huge economic disaster, I get jack and the same kinds of tap dancing I get when I ask Cosmored for proof that the moon landings were faked.
All of which makes me VERY mindful of the economic entrenched interests would stand to lose the most if competing technologies and products come into the market. Those interests would fight tooth and nail, and as dishonestly as the tobacco companies did.
Such interests would take every opportunity to fund people making ty, emotional hot-button arguments in the hopes that hordes of useful idiots would parrot those ty arguments without much critical thinking.
Camping isn't so comfy. I'm about to go for four days.
You going to Flipside this year?
aww. baseline bum cares.
(grizzly bear)
would love to but i'm stuck in australia. i'd go to uluru but they don't even let you climb it anymore. no point.
wiki just says it's strongly discouraged. does it lie?
no from what i hear they have it protected or fenced off. the indigenous threw a fit over people climbing it so it's off limits now.
This guy, Paul Ehrlich, would tend to agree with you.
How Should We Look at the Chances of Climate Catastrophe?
http://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/chance...e-catastrophe/
Keep in mind, he is the author of "The Population Bomb".at the comments below his article.
I would be more apt to read the things you post if I thought you would read or listen to what I posted.This guy, Paul Ehrlich, would tend to agree with you.
How Should We Look at the Chances of Climate Catastrophe?
http://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/chance...e-catastrophe/
Keep in mind, he is the author of "The Population Bomb".
These days I feel little compunction to give people the courtesy that I know they will not extend to me and I got that way by arguing with 9-11 twoofers, creationists, and people who believe the moon landings are faked.
As I have said before, you would get part way through anything I post, give up and stop reading/listening, not unlike what Mouse or Cosmored does when given evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
That is the point at which I stop taking linked material seriously. Sorry.
Murica needs to buy me a boat if climate change is such a big deal.
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