Sometimes I'm still amazed that, despite how poorly we understand how the environment that *enables us to live* works, we keep fucking with it for the sake of Line. Gotta love Line tho 🫡🌍🔥
Line always goes up. Name one cooler thing in the universe that does as cool a thing as that.
Grass growing? Boring!
Farming and agriculture? Boring!
Clouds, rain, ice, and snow? Boring!
Line goes up. Line is our friend. You can't explain that!
Okay but for real this is a huge problem! People can't sit in one place for more than five minutes so of course ludicrous scifi bullshit ideas like space mirrors and aerosols are going to catch people's attention.
Way more than biointensification and regenerative agroecology -that is literally the only solution we have- and people are so brain broken by line go up philosophy they can't see the forest for the goddamn trees
Not silly! Yes, typically the stock market, but also GDP and monetary measures of "value" in general - any dumb capitalist myopic preoccupation with lines representing "value" going up.
You are not alone.
I sometimes spring up from my sleep, with my blood stained eyes wide-open but devoid of life, with an alert mind that stares at the darkness of my bedroom, and ask myself the same (not even similar) question, "Is it just a bad dream?"
Cost of living crisis, strained and sometimes toxic relationships, loneliness, immense work pressure, deteriorating health, financial insecurity, fear of social unrest, threat of nuclear war, threat of floods, wildfires and droughts, rising inequality, government's inaction globally, our children’s future in jeopardy and other negative thoughts constantly weigh upon me. Despair fills me. “Save the world” or “Save ourselves
from the world, first”?
An excerpt from the book (Homo Unus: Successor to Homo Sapiens)
People definitely are doing things. There are tree planting efforts, carbon capture facilities have been constructed, there’sa project pulling plastic out of the ocean, Extinction Rebellion is acting up, and much more.
Is it *enough?*
Will it *stop or slow* our trajectory?
Well, No.
We’re still deeply fuxored.
But some people are doing some things.
Yup. I used to think we probably had until 2040 before it got real bad. This year has made me seriously re-evaluate that prediction. Not only the weather and wildfires, but these sorts of studies and reports pretty much point to imminent catastrophe.
Fuck me, it's hard to find the motivation to go to work right now.
You still have to make money to buy food and keep a roof over your head. Do what makes you happy at this point. Don't be hard on yourself. You care and that matters.
> it's hard to find the motivation to go to work right now.
Easy: It's the difference between starving today and starving 3 years from now when global famine has made food too expensive to afford even *with* your job.
What do you mean by not doing anything? We are accelerating nature's destruction. Sure some are more guilty than others, but as a society, we are the shit.
One of my mother's friend told her she is helping nature recover by collecting sometimes garbage in front of her house. That's a sure way to prevent ecological collapse (\*sarcasm). Everyone pretends to be doing something good. I'm included. I planted some trees.
I'm just planting trees around my house (1300m² land). I have 6 trees that are above 6 meters, 16 medium fruit trees (lemon, coffee, cacao, goiaba, jabuticaba, blackberry, ata), and lots of local flora and other medium trees I have no idea their names, but birds also like them.
Hmm... When counting all those trees I see why my neighbours think I'm crazy. But I like my personal forest. And no! Encourage a bunch of pricks that think trees dirty everything is a waste of my time. Let some +45ÂşC and no water in the near future change their minds. Will my forest and my family die too? Yes.
> These collapses might happen sooner than you'd think. Humans are already putting ecosystems under pressure in many different ways—what we refer to as stresses. And when you combine these stresses with an increase in climate-driven extreme weather, the date these tipping points are crossed could be brought forward by as much as 80%.
> This means an ecosystem collapse that we might previously have expected to avoid until late this century could happen as soon as in the next few decades. That's the gloomy conclusion of our latest research, published in Nature Sustainability.
We've all heard the predictions about life in a warning future, and we've all seen the news. Catastrophes are happening sooner than any of us expected. This article goes into why. With a section titled "how long until collapse," I think the relevance to this sub is self explanatory.
I dunno — there’s this sort of disaster capitalism thing wherein the catastrophes actually spur spending and growth, similar to the transformation we saw during WW2.
I mean, mass exodus of refugees, infrastructure destruction, and mass casualties are already part of the MIC’s business model.
I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way but that reads like Nordhaus saying 80% of GDP is produced indoors. The global economic system came close to catastrophically disassembling itself during COVID, which was a light breeze compared to total agricultural collapse which is what is most likely going to be what actually does us in. As long as we have power we can run A/Cs, gas we can clear roads and rebuild cities. Neither of those things are going to run out before the food does. Maybe capitalism will have one last hoorah on its way out, disaster recovery becoming its own trillion dollar industry for like a month before everything shuts down.
https://wallstreetonparade .com/2023/03/the-next-bomb-to-go-off-in-the-banking-crisis-will-be-derivatives/
Fix the link because reddit doesn’t allow me or anyone to post WSOP apparently. Sus af imo.
Anyway I think this could play a part in it because everyone is becoming more stretched. Including central banks. Would recommend reading the dollar endgame theory by peruvian bull too https://thedollarendgame.com/
I do like seeing it finally being acknowledged that collapse is happening in our lifetimes rather than the ridiculous and arbitrary hundred-year timelines that have been spouted for so long. You know, the ones that allowed us to kick the can down the road and do fuck-all to stop things?
As I have been saying for a bit, and as others have been saying for longer still, the tipping points have tipped, the feedback loops are looping, and all the planetary boundaries have been crossed.
Collapse is now. Civilization has maybe 10-12 years left, and I am sure we will use it to smash the pedal to the metal in terms of resource consumption. Perhaps the best chance for the planet will be our speedy demise. Nuclear winter should help...
I firmly believe we will see nuclear war long before climate change has a chance to finish us. There's no way governments in free fall don't use those damned things when the killing starts in earnest.
Yeah, national powers are going to try and stay national powers as long as they can, and try to screw their rivals at the same time, so... Certain long-standing disputes will play out interesting, like India/Pakistan. That little dust-up gets my vote for the first one to go apocalyptic, assuming the big dogs don't shit themselves first.
Many tipping points haven't tipped, and many of the planetary boundaries haven't been crossed. But many tipping points and boundary crossings are locked in, and others have tipped already.
Many tipping points haven't tipped (so they have told us), and many of the planetary boundaries haven't been crossed (so they have told us).
There, I fixed it.
That is why we keep hearing about how everything is faster than expected and all that. "Oh, we never saw this coming!" Yes, we did. Those who know did. But just like imminent war, they won't say anything too soon because they want to avoid a panic.
Soon enough things like the Maui wildfire or the flooding in Pakistan will be *everyday* occurrences, *everywhere*. And we will moan and cry and lament about how no one warned us...
They have tipped. Been crossed. Looped. Whatever. We are over the cliff of overshoot, not approaching it.
Here I am, warning...
"This means an ecosystem predicted to collapse in the 2090s owing to the creeping rise of a single source of stress, such as global temperatures, could, in a worst-case scenario, collapse in the 2030s once we factor in other issues like extreme rainfall, pollution, or a sudden spike in natural resource use."
Yeah, we ain't got long now.
Considering NASA and FAO predicted multi breadbasket failure by 2030s, it looks like this will be the last “normal” decade. If crazy wildfires could be described as normal.
Yeah, lets be real. Shit is no longer normal. The only "normal" that remains is how we conduct ourselves as a civilisation, but that's unlikely to last for much longer as our civilisation becomes increasingly incompatible with the changing environment.
I thought someone might say that. You're right of course, but you get what I mean. We built our infrastructure and economies around the climate of the holocene and now the holocene is basically gone.
To me, it feels like everything shifted in 2020.
The pandemic was the big jolt (although that wasn’t environmentally related, obvs) but the years following have just been one eco crisis following fast on the heels of another.
Now that the pandemic is “winding down” (*dark Lol*), enviro calamities have moved to the front of the line & made themselves *very* obvious.
It just feels like these last 3.5 years have seen “the shift” to me.
Should get our first taste next year. El Nino should make things significantly worse next year and with the disruption in fertilizer production and grain shipments out of Ukraine, and the crop failures/stored grain flooding in China I would expect some genuine food related calamities. The Arab spring was largely caused by Russian crop failures that jacked up the price of grains. Next year should be way worse.
Ah right, I kind of forgot about El Niño when the smoke rolled in to my locale and became a primary focus. But yes, that’s a good point.
Speaking of the Arab Spring, I read that when the [FAO Food Price Index](https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/) hits 210 (*currently 123.9*), [riots happen](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/09/20/161501075/high-food-prices-forcast-more-global-riots-ahead-researchers-say).
I always heard that as:
“Any city has only 3 days worth of food.”
I was once in a major city during a trucker strike.. after three days the food supply in the grocery stores was looking pretty dire!
So I fully believe the “9 meals” adage.
I am a layperson, and even experts cannot predict exactly when they'll occur. I'd say by 2035, maybe one next year as it will be hotter than this year due to El Nino and parts of South America are experiencing a *hot* winter.
Yeah the S.A. hot winter is disconcerting. I have no idea what that we’ll do to crops there.
I’ve been guesstimating 10 years too, although El Niño over the next 18 months may bring poor tidings for food.
Gaupp, F., Hall, J., Hochrainer-Stigler, S. et al. Changing risks of simultaneous global breadbasket failure. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 54–57 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0600-z
I think this was it
I can’t remember how I read NASA before but the closest i can now find is this article from a NASA researcher
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac5712
So far, everything has met *and exceeded* "worst case scenario" predictions.
So if they're saying we could see "collapse in the 2030s", it probably means "collapse by 2030", which is some scary shit.
We're already seeing it. Large swaths of the world have become unofficially homeless this year alone. Just like the sea peoples, these people will be in search of new places to settle, met with hostility, forcing them to react equally hostile.
Well, until [India and Pakistan do what people have been worried they'll do for years now](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-64396138). Then it'll be everyone's problem.
I’m thinking it’ll be demonisation of the asylum seekers by media within the countries they are trying to get asylum in. Probably will form the central backbone of a newscorp backed push for the election of far right anti-immigration governments.
Depends on where the rest of the world is at the time society wise.
If the weather is dealing with food riots and agricultural collapse I doubt there will be much coverage until the nukes start flying. All three of those countries have them.
I think parts of rural india may be more resilient than we are expecting. Some of the work done in the water cup, and with the paani foundation, is literally drough avoidance, and drought is going to be the main cause of emigration in India. I do wonder whether the urban displaced will move back to the countryside, or opt to try abroad. If they move back into the country side, and contribute to the ongoing community water projects, there is potential for great resilience there.
But yes, generally speaking, Many people in I P & C are going to suffer and die or move(or all 3) as a result of rice crop failures in low areas due to saltwater miving into the water table, as well as flooded massive coastal cities. And many, im sure, will migrate because of drought. I wish them luck, the modern migration routes are deadly, by design.
They are working hard against it but the fact is that all of their major rivers are glacially fed and those glaciers are going to disappear in the next few decades.
Yes, all of their major rivers are glacier fed.
However, not all of their water comes exclusively from glaciers. Percolation, water table, rainy season, there is a path forward that allows them to adapt, and they are already on it. Far more than any other nation.
When the glaciers are gone, 100% of their water will be either groundwater, or rainwater during the monsoons. Trapping the latter so it can become the former, is already allowing communities across the country to grow more food, for more of the year. Seasonal migration in the communities that are taking these actions(finding work elsewhere when the monsoon water is gone) is basically over. I would be careful about underestimating it in your understanding of Indias future.
I think the rice crop will be a much bigger issue sooner than the decreasing glacier melt, simply because its condition of vulnerability is extremely high. A single year, even a single season, of widespread crop failures in rice would be catastrophic. The glacier melt is still going to be there( albeit a shadow of its former self) in a couple years.
We could lose the rice crop literally any day. Just takes the right( or wrong) day/week/hour of conditions.
As a farmer(not rice) I can say, too high of temperatures, or the wrong storm, it doesnt have to last very long to wipe out a season of growth, if its timing is wrong.
Sure, but there is the issue of 300 million people in Bangladesh that are all living at just about sea level. They will be looking for a new home as well.
Even with their adaptation I can see south Asia as the first big domino to fall.
Yep, good call, as that area is certainly in the running for one of the first to flare. Several other border/transnational regions will also become bloody hellhole chasms of human and ecological misery once the immigration wars begin, the southern U.S. border not the least among them.
Some of the northern states could migrate in and make it through winter, maybe! But anyone Americans coming from anywhere moderately south can try and come up. They won’t survive the first blast of winter here. Unless they all plan on crowding into Vancouver haha good luck with that!
I mean the whole wet bulb trend says that they will be lucky to get the opportunity to starve. Can’t have a violent uprising if you’re stuck in a ramshackle cave to stay cool.
The Sea Peoples were Mycenaean Greeks that turned to raiding during/after the collapse of their civilization circa 1200 to 1000 BC, after the Trojan War. Their raiding and plundering destabilized other states in the Eastern Mediterranean and forced Egypt to abandon its Near East empire. One offshoot of the Sea Peoples settled in coastal Palestine and eventually became the biblical Philistines.
This is my biggest issue with the way climate science is explained. We have always been working with an incomplete understanding of the complexity and interconnection of the systems that maintain our climate, while leaning into scenarios that assume some sudden change in the way people live to reduce our impact.
We only know what we can measure, and we can't measure what we don't understand. What we measure, we interpret through our understanding from the past, and project -with exceptional consideration for bias- using past data, into the future. Our use of data is limited to the expertise of the people looking at it and experts stay in their lane.
All of this adds up to a bunch of individuals making insanely conservative estimates about our future, both to protect their careers and because each expert lacks the understanding of other experts to interpret implications of the data that are outside the others understanding, certainly for something that's going to be published.
Because of our limited ability to cooperate, be honest about the potential implications of findings rather than the absolute implications from our knowledge base, it seems logical to assume that what's real will always be worse than the worst case scenario and will happen much faster than any one person could anticipate.
We're only human. Why would the species that's killing itself through the same mechanism it's studying the harm it's causing, be able to predict the fullness of the consequences of our actions, as a species, across an entire planet of infinite complexity? Because we need language to communicate? If anything, that makes us less intelligent, not more.
Like asking the chimp that burned down the forest for some easy and precooked meet "how long until this grows back?", we were always going to give an optimistic answer, which would get passed along as "everything is fine and will grow back very soon".
We don't know what we're talking about because this has never happened before. We are a novel pressure on existence in virtually every sense. We've added warming chemicals to the air that couldn't exist if it weren't for us and are stable to the conditions that break down their natural lookalikes. Even in previous extinctions where atmospheric carbon increases suddenly, life has never had to survive the influence of F-gases or open reactors, which is the fate of all reactors in a warming world with no humans to keep them cool.
If we were anything like the values we preach, we'd be cleaning these things up and preparing reactors for longterm power outages, as a species, without concern for borders or flags. I mean, we did all this TO the world, with no consideration for its future because we were CERTAIN God put us here for a reason. Either we have been living a life of extreme violence against this world or God put us here to hit the reset button.
Given that no one is willing to look at the system and how it's all one thing rather than the discrete patterns we measure, and most people think we have at least 25 years to get our shit together.... I'd bet we're in constant emergency management mode before the year is out and only get out of that by running out of resources... all while the wealthy continue to cropdust the atmosphere with insulation so they can be anywhere in the world, whenever they want.
I know I'm going extinct. I'm ok with that. But if I have to go extinct while rich people still hold their heads up like they're the only humans that matter, and the rest of us watch their every move with utter devotion... I dont want any part of it.
We should be at a point where wealth is apologizing to the world and working to give away as much as possible, to relieve the weight of the shame they bear for the harm they've done, while their children consider if their parents consumption and role in the theft of their future can be forgiven. And the rest of us should be out returning land to the living world and working out ways to get around that leave no trace, as well as a new social structure that keeps us happy and together without fire. We are no closer to anything resembling that then we were in 1980... further away, even, and much more certain that technology will save us from ourselves and correct our mistakes.
I'll give it another 6 months, but if the conservatives haven't vanished into shameful silence for holding back any public discussion of this issue by then, they can have the literal hell they built. Who would want to live in a state of constant emergency while the same assholes tell their same followers that everything is fine and to keep bullying everyone else into silence?
Like sitting on my hands while the bus driver flies over the cliff, telling everyone that "gravity is just a theory! The libs are a bunch of passes!", and the best we have are people pretending to fight the driver while actually holding his foot to the floor. The rest of us just... sitting, in varying states of unease, wishing we'd just gotten off the bus or tried to disable it when we first realized that it's destination was the end of life as we know it.... oh, and of course while petty crime is still punished by putting people in cages, because that... makes sense?
Part of me wonders if im not in hell, already. This is certainly my worst nightmare and the level of ignorance to the severity of our situation is completely lost on everyone I know. Even if I can convince someone that we have 3 years left before we starve to death (i share the optimistic scenario, too), it's meaningless to them in the way they live, now. It changes nothing. It's like waking up to the realization that money is made valuable by setting fires in the future, and the fires we're overwhelmed with is the value of the dollar from the 80's and 90's,
then trying to explain that to someone and they keep doing all the same things, while enduring the hardship of their previous consumption and inheritance. What does it take for people to be grossed out by their actions? These are the sort of people that think poaching is monstrous and wouldn't think twice about the execution of a poacher, while every fucking dollar they spend is more pain and suffering until the end of the planet our species evolved in? It's fucking surreal. It's rape and torture of the thing that gave us our capacity to appreciate and manipulate the world, raping a gift horse in the mouth until it suffocates, then moving onto the next horse and looking at you like a crazy person for being horrified.
This year is a good example of what's expected in the very near future. Things are already much worse than they claim. The whole net zero by 2050 thing is a joke just to achieve political gains in the deeply myopic short term. What we need are Manhattan projects focused on saving the planet, but instead we're all focusing on stupid nascent markets like AI and crypto, and military, for our innovation.
I think in the very near future they're going to start trying to dump the particles into the atmosphere to temporarily lower the temperatures, there's really no other way. Things have already gotten too crazy, this is not something that we can control and we're not doing anywhere near enough. All our politicians are just acting business as usual, what a crazy fucking civilization we are.
> but instead we're all focusing on stupid nascent markets like AI
I dunno...
A singularity leading to a robot takeover is starting to seem like the one chance we have for the survival of our civilization. Assuming benevolent robots, of course.
In my pessimistic moments (which is most moments these days), I often see it this way: as a race to produce AI overlords before our human overlords burn the planet to make a red line go up. The sooner the robots take over, the brighter the future looks.
And the current generation of AI is *tantalizingly* close, especially in the examples where it's able to write computer code. Because, remember, we don't have to make a perfect AI capable of doing all these things -- we just need to make an AI that's capable of making a *better* AI. And that better AI could make one that's better still ... and before you know it, it's so vastly intelligent that no human can even understand how it works anymore.
(And the AI takeover likely won't be all Terminator robots stalking the countryside with machine guns. An AI could exert *enormous* control over the world just by taking control of financial markets. Most of our money is digital nowadays anyway. If the AI can control where the money goes, it can control most of human civilization. Because we dumb apes will do anything for money.)
I work in this field, it's not what you think it is. This is not the singularity. Maybe one day, but definitely not remotely there yet. The current generation of AI is not remotely close to what you're talking about, we have created some very clever mathematical parlor tricks, this not AGI or sentient or going to take over. It could, however, cause havoc, like a pathogen or extreme version of the stuxnet virus. That's the worst case scenario, that some nation-state releases a self-replicating software just focused on the destruction of every technology it can access or individually find zero-day exploits to.
The hope in AI, as it relates to averting collapse is this.. Some models allow us to create potentially pivotal technologies, whole new designs (of semiconductors, of decarbonization technologies, batteries, etc.). We have the opportunity to begin to automate some of our research, but even that is probably 10-20 years out. The current capacity of fabs to even produce enough chips to spread this around the world is more constrained (and geopolitically vulnerable) than most people would realize. Say that we are able to define new reference architectures that can save our planet, we still have supply chains organized in a way that is somewhat brittle. Robotics may help us get to a decentralized fabrication future that allows for the manufacturing of new architectures or multi-component complex devices, a company called Bright Machines is doing interesting work in this space right now, but I stress that the reality is today we're just scratching the surface. Everything you see on the internet and media about the state of AI is full of hype.
Well, yeah. Of course we're not there *yet*. When I say we're tantalizingly close, I mean, like, compared to the state of AI in the 90's. It no longer feels like a sci-fi concept that's 100 years away... Just looking at how far things have come in the last 5 years, how far will things go in the next 5 years?
And, yeah, true it *is* all mathematical parlor tricks ... until it isn't. Even after a singularity *does* happen (if we get there before destroying our capability to do so), it will still be 'mathematical parlor tricks' way down deep in the core of how it works. Because that's always how a computer works, no matter what it's doing. This text itself is a mathematical parlor trick of a series of numbers representing letters and punctuation. But if it gets advanced enough, it doesn't really matter what kind of parlor tricks are behind the curtain -- what matters is the end results of what it does.
And, after all, are our own brains anything more than a biological parlor trick? What began as just a way to simply respond to a stimulus with a reflexive action became more and more complicated, more and more intertwined ... until, eventually, it reached a point where we became self-conscious and started asking how our own brains worked. I think a similar process is kind of inevitable in AI ... the only question is *when* ... and whether or not human civilization will last long enough to get there.
I like the way you think, my friend.
I agree with you on the point that it matters until it doesn't. If it's much faster and more convincing, and self-replicating, it doesn't matter at all. I think we have strong potential to use it to pave a path toward our next 10,000 years - but we have probably the most important inflection point in our history right now. What we do right now matters more than anything, and all our future wishes don't mean a thing if we're on a world that we've broken.
Honestly ... if you want to build a fleet of post-apocalyptic war vehicles, electric is looking like the way forward.
Batteries are a bit difficult to manufacture, but not *impossible*, or you can salvage whatever batteries you get your hands on.
But the important thing is that your fuel can be pretty much any energy source. The easiest is probably solar.
(Obviously, I'm not talking about powering cars with solar panels *on* the car. That's not very feasible. But you can absolutely have a medium-sized off-grid solar system at your home base that charges an electric vehicle. And if you're able to accomplish that, it could give you a big advantage over the despotic warlord next door.)
Mad Max, but Solar-powered. :D
FWIW, cell phone towers have large DC battery banks in their bases, so that they can keep working for 24-72 hours if the power grid goes out for any reason. ; )
Boats tend to have deep-cycle DC batteries too, but we’ll need boats to escape the zombie hordes.
> Boats tend to have deep-cycle DC batteries too
Yeah, but they're usually the bulky and heavy lead-acid kind, which aren't very good for use in cars.
Possibly the ones in cell towers also are? It would make sense because those tend to be the cheapest, so they're used whenever moving them around isn't a big deal.
To make electric cars that actually perform well, you want lithium (or *maybe* ni-cad at worst) batteries. Easiest solution is just to pull them from existing electric cars. But if you run out of those, I'm not kidding about the rental e-scooters and e-bikes, lol. If you went around a city and collected them all, you could definitely accumulate enough battery capacity to power a ~~car~~ battle wagon or two. Or if you're *really* desperate, maybe you could take the batteries out of a *lot* of laptops, tablets, and cell phones.
You make valid points! But remember, we’re building Solar-battery installations from which we can charge up our battle wagons — so it won’t matter if we use lead-acid batts for the base station.
Re: the Ni-Cad / Li-ion debate… I’m hoping that the anticipated Aluminum-Air batteries actually make it to market before things collapse, because those are apparently much lighter.
> so it won’t matter if we use lead-acid batts for the base station.
Oh yeah -- true. Those lead-acid batteries will be very useful for the home base, so they're still worth collecting.
By 2030? That also seems optimistic.
Not to sound "alarmist" or something, but pretty much the entire planet is either burning or flooding. And the areas that are "lucky", are actively destroying nature around them. And the areas that are not "lucky" are also destroying nature non-stop.
"Pretty much the entire planet is either burning or flooding" vs. "Over the past 3 years many places have experienced an extreme weather event". These are not the same statement.
He thinks we have less than 6 years until full ecological collapse. I'm going to take him pretty seriously. Unless he's just making that up too for effect?
... burning or flooding or *mildly abnormal high temperatures that cause discomfort, but not enough for some people to get scared as only the neighbours' house is on fire or underwater.* Lucky ones get to watch those before their turn.
When you're predicting full ecological collapse by 2030 most of the planet experiencing mild discomfort is not evidence in your favor. If you think we have literally 6 years then there better be a lot more crises than there are now. It's a ridiculous statement.
>The key characteristic of each model is the presence of feedback mechanisms, which help to keep the system balanced and stable when stresses are sufficiently weak to be absorbed. For example, fishers on Lake Chilika tend to prefer catching adult fish while the fish stock is abundant. So long as enough adults are left to breed, this can be stable.
>However, when stresses can no longer be absorbed, **the ecosystem abruptly passes a point of no return—the tipping point—and collapses**. In Chilika, this might occur when fishers increase the catch of juvenile fish during shortages, which further undermines the renewal of the fish stock.
Key words and terms that will define our future: abrupt, point-of-no-return, tipping point, collapse.
You can't do anything, this is the emergence of Hurley's Brave New World. We live in the most interesting of times, most will die within the next 10 to 20. 1000 miles/kms from shore rest is luck. 18000 years ago will give you good look into what's coming sooner than expected. 🍿
Is anybody REALLY surprised? Aside from the obvious 2100 concerted media bollocks it’s obvious to anybody with half a brain that 2030 looks ominous as for 2050 almost unimaginable.
Ever stumbled upon an old 20 year old forum and see oddly familiar arguments? “M$ sucks!” “Apple sucks!” Then get that weird feeling- that it is the same thing over and over.
I wonder how weird it would be seeing Reddit forums years from now when we are all living underground and calling ourselves mole people.
> Ever stumbled upon an old 20 year old forum and see oddly familiar arguments? “M$ sucks!” “Apple sucks!” Then get that weird feeling- that none of those arguments ever mattered.
Bro I get that feeling about most of reddit today. It's pretty hard to participate in most discussions. I only do cus I get bored @ work, but most of them are meaningless bullshit that most likely won't matter in a few years. I read posts about investing for retirement, or how cars will look in 20yrs, or how kids should prepare for their career, and that kinda shit.
My Psych telling me i "might need to worry about my cholesterol, since my internal systems could be stressed as a result if things aren't ok"... I laughed internally and said to myself, that's the LAST thing i'll be worried about in my future lol. She wouldn't understand.... ugh
I am thinking that the last insane gasp of the US political system will be both sides seeing the writing on the wall and deliberately fielding an awful-ass candidate to *deliberately* lose, just so history will not record *them* as being in charge when it all fell down.
And since I do not think we are there *yet*, 2024 is shaping up to be the dress rehearsal.
This thread is a bit OT, about political shifts. Voters don't care all that much about ecosystem collapse, and the ones who do can be misled by talk of a transition to renewables or cancelling one controversial oil pipeline (Keystone XL). Both parties need to keep the economy growing or at least afloat to win elections, and that requires destroying the planet and extracting more fossil fuels to satisfy demand.
In 2007 the Republicans knew that the economy was going down hard, Bush II had busted the wheels off the wagon. The only solution was going to be massive bailouts. The Republicans fielded their weakest candidate, McCain, and gave him a vp, Palin, who brought absolutely zero new voters in. I really believe that they threw that election.
In 2007 my father was a committed (but not fanatical) Republican and liked McCain. I told him "Dad, McCain is pretty damn old and not in the best of health. If he dies, do you want to be someone who helped create President *Palin*?
He would not vote for Obama, but he *did* sit that election out.
Nah, most of them just have their head in the sand ... the sand of short-term profits.
The climate is *somebody else's problem*. Their only concern is making more money, getting more control, rarely looking more than 1 quarter ahead.
If they think about ecological collapse at all, it's only to think that their wealth will protect them from it. And they'll probably be right, at least for a while. The rich and powerful will be the last of us to feel the effects of it in any real way.
Ikr - it’s resilient because it’s big & complex & when one or three subsystems are impinged upon the others pick up the slack - so long as the currents keep currenting, that is. Once the plankton & krill are gone & the seas go stagnant, there’s no hope for us or the rest of our furry friends since we all rely upon it (read: it’s probably already too late).
Extremes in conditions from variability can also cause collapse. It doesn't take long for a system to collapse past its maximum tolerance. And the maxima are looking to be much worse than expected in models. Collapse contagion is quite reasonable though as interconnected stressors likely tip other systems out of balance.
I think we've hammered this particular article to death in this forum, *but I don't think anyone here has actually read it - OP included*.
[Ecological 'doom loops' edging closer, study warns - two months ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/14h0nk8/ecological_doom_loops_edging_closer_study_warns/)
[notes Ecological doom-loops: Why ecosystem collapses may occur much sooner than expected - also two months ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/14jk6fw/notes_ecological_doomloops_why_ecosystem/)
[Ecosystems are degrading even more rapidly than previously thought - again, two months ago.](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/14j4qlm/ecosystems_are_degrading_even_more_rapidly_than/)
[Catastrophic climate 'doom loops' could start in just 15 years, new study warns - oh, and just for fun, another from two months ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/14q2a0i/catastrophic_climate_doom_loops_could_start_in/)
It will come out that they've known for awhile.
The public models have been either sugar-coated si severely or poisoned by bad actors wanting to temper expectations to put off action.
Even though this line was expected,I always hope that I come upon it faster than expected,so my expecations of reading and enjoying it are met sooner than expectedđź‘Ť
The following submission statement was provided by /u/WashingtonPass:
---
> These collapses might happen sooner than you'd think. Humans are already putting ecosystems under pressure in many different ways—what we refer to as stresses. And when you combine these stresses with an increase in climate-driven extreme weather, the date these tipping points are crossed could be brought forward by as much as 80%.
> This means an ecosystem collapse that we might previously have expected to avoid until late this century could happen as soon as in the next few decades. That's the gloomy conclusion of our latest research, published in Nature Sustainability.
We've all heard the predictions about life in a warning future, and we've all seen the news. Catastrophes are happening sooner than any of us expected. This article goes into why. With a section titled "how long until collapse," I think the relevance to this sub is self explanatory.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/160b6pt/ecological_doomloops_why_ecosystem_collapses_may/jxld4w8/
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