While it’s too late to prevent #ClimateBreakdown and the #collapse of civilization, it’s not too late to prevent more violence and brutality like what we’re witnessing in #Gaza and many other places around the world.
Keep protesting. Keep resisting. Keep standing up for what’s right, no matter how much it hurts.
With the World Stumbling Past 1.5 Degrees of Warming, Scientists Warn #Climate Shocks Could Trigger Unrest and #Authoritarian Backlash
Most of the public seems unaware that global temperatures will soon push past the target to which the U.N. hoped to limit warming, but researchers see social and psychological crises brewing.
Part of me can see how much nicer our world might be without any humans in it. Ecosystems could find their own equilibrium, unhindered by industrial pollution. Species could expand again and diversify, free of competition from the endless growth of factory farms, freeways, and parking lots.
It would take much time, centuries or even millennia, for the sky to regain its natural clarity, the forests to regrow, and the rivers to run clean. Even longer than that, probably, for all of the plastic eventually to degrade and disappear.
But someday, someday… the Earth would once again be a beautiful place.
It’s a lovely vision, and yet I’m torn. Because to get there means the suffering and death of billions of people. I wish there was a way to prevent that.
Love both of these insights and I think It would be great if we could fix it. I just don't think that, for various psychological reasons, we will.
Which is why I have to go with the argument that the sooner we go extinct the better. Perhaps we will create and consume something that will that will make us infertile and that will be the cause.
This book was written in 1982 but, even so, outlines the psychology of #collapse really well: 'Overshoot, The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change' by William R. Catton, Jr.
I get this. I think my 'relaxing into it' is, in part, my way of dealing with my near certainty that #collapse and consequent #MassExtinction are now inevitable.
I have a timescale of 2040 for #CivilisationCollapse, by which time my life will be almost run. The lives of my daughter and grandson, however, will not and I am fearful for them.
This is psychologically very challenging and, I guess my cheering on of human #extinction is mostly an emotional response to my #Doomism
Sorry if it's not helpful, but I find it difficult to respond otherwise.
Love all of this and agree with all of it, except 'the peak of the Industrial Age is near'.
I believe we are already past it, or what I call #PeakCivilisation and are already on the downward slope.
I put the peak at either the 2008 financial crash or the 1973 oil crisis. The current rising food prices and increase in general inflation are not going down as the #ClimateCrisis increasingly makes agriculture more difficult and #ExtremeWeather events cause increasingly serious financial loses worldwide. We are on the downward slope and not going back.
For some properly researched and modelled figures regarding #collapse, the Journal of Industrial Ecology have published some research entitled 'Recalibration of limits to growth: An update of the World3 model'. You can read the whole article here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13442
Note that food production is less than 50% of the 2024 figure by 2050. Industrial output is less than 25%. Population has declined by about 0.5 Billion.
OK, so maybe 2040 is a bit pessimistic for 'grow your own food or die' but please note that population is less than 50% by 2100.