Society could unravel in the next 10 years leading to mass starvation, true enough. One of the factors that keeps food on the table is a minimum level of stability. War, disease, climate change, some unprecedented natural disaster, mass hysteria... all could trigger social collapse. Thanks to habit, inertia, politics, economics, crying children, etc. people tend to get up and do what needs to be done, and society doesn't unravel.

Climate change experts generally mark out some future time -- 2050 or 2100 -- as a time by which some environmental change will have occurred that will be destabilizing. There is no comfort to be taken in disaster striking in 2029, 2050, or 2100 because expected future disasters are foreshadowed in the present, just not very efficiently.

Southern Florida, for instance, is expected to first turn into a bog, then a swamp, and finally just be covered up with sea water altogether -- maybe by 2100. How is this registering among Floridians? Denial, for one. People who now live in Florida, or who want to move there for the sunshine, warm weather, and the lively society, all have a similar interest in not facing facts. Especially if you have a house you want to sell, it's a good idea to discourage gloomy thoughts about salt water intrusion. Real estate agents aren't anxious to tell buyers about salt water pooling in their back yard, even though they are miles from the ocean.

So it is that buying and selling houses continues in Florida.

No body in the midwestern US is abandoning farmland, even though climate change is altering agricultural equations. A 10 year investment seems to be safe; a 20 year investment is probably OK; a 30 year investment is risky, and planning for 2100 is out of the question. Farmers know that several minor changes in frost dates, heavy rain fall, storms (hail, wind), or disease vectors can wipe out a year's EDIT: profit production.

What will cause agricultural collapse is likely to be a few bad years followed by a few more bad years that prevents financial recovery. A few bad years is all that is required to shift from large crop surpluses to large crop shortages. Global crop shortages affect poorer, less developed countries much more severely than it does richer developed countries. But destabilized poor countries can be highly inconvenient for the better off--remember the turmoil that Syrian war refugees caused as they surged towards Europe. Consider it a dress rehearsal.

How is this registering among Floridians? Denial, for one. — Bitter Crank

Yep. The Atlantic has been encroaching on the whole east coast for about 200 years. In recent years they resort to making sand banks to protect real estate, which means digging up a bunch of sand from one part of the coast and moving it to another. The result is the ocean encroaches faster where they dug it up. And that leads us to the real issue: vulnerable people. As always, they are the ones who will really suffer. When NYC starts to go under, the rich will move. The poor will lose everything and wander toward Minnesota.

The odd thing about this analogy is that you seem to have it the wrong way round. The permawarmers acknowledge that every few years, the temperature will go down for a bit but overall, the long term trend is steadily or unsteadily upwards. And the permafrosties are always saying it's going down or is about to go down, and the reason for it going up is not the reason that has been theorised for 100 years, burning fossil fuels raising CO2 in the atmosphere, but random woo and the hot air of climate scientists. — unenlightened

Well, people should understand the difference with weather and climate.

My point is that when people choose what they want to hear, you get an audience that will want to hear one thing and actually isn't open to change it's views and then the presenter can fall into pleasing tje crowd. That would mean a permafrostie/warmer changing his or her view would irritate the old crowd that followed him or her, while the previously "other side" would just sneer at him or her "finally coming to senses".

An example from real life (from financial world). I followed this one financial commentator who was quite permabear in 2007 onwards promoting gold and raw materials investments etc. Yet in 2011 he got totally fed up with gold narrative, stopped talking about a raw materials supercycle and really got angry of one guest forecasting oncoming hyperinflation. This angered a lot of his followers and for a while lead to heated debate until he simply stopped answering to listeners questions and commentary. Likely his audience simply changed. (With gold he was proven correct. Now btw he is starting to be bearish again)

But back to actual issue: The problem is that when scientists present the dire "alarmist" predictions and they don't come to be true, this is just brushed aside as the alarmism is seen as to have been beneficial to "wake up" people to the problem and/or to get the medias attention to the issue.

The poor will lose everything and wander toward Minnesota. — frank

That's why we plan to blow up the bridges over the Mississippi, tear up the freeways in Wisconsin, and start installing minefields and electrified barbed wire fences along the border between Iowa and Missouri. We're breeding wolves, aggressive wild turkeys, belligerent buffalo, and other natural riff-raff repellents. Wisconsin plans on using stampeding dairy cattle as a deterrent. Several hundred holsteins can be quite intimidating. Iowa will turn itself into one giant corn maze.

What, no reintroduced cloned Woolly Mammoths to go with rest of the natural riff-raff? What better way to combat climate change than with an ice age critter.

:up:

Just a reminder of the specific topic here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5222/the-climate-change-paper-so-depressing-its-sending-people-to-therapy/p1

Thanks for that in-depth summary!

Science is all about repeatability, — Marchesk

That is a highly controversial statement. Which epistemological principle requires repeatability specifically?

Shows 3 year global trend of dropping temperatures. — King in the Desert

Are you sure you know what a trend is?

Look at the primary source, the IPCC assessment report:
https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_05.pdf — King in the Desert

How old is that report?

1. it predicts that we should have experienced an 15-18 degree C increase in global temperatures by now.

look at the global temperatures now, last winter, we were only 0.1 degree above the global mean.

that is not just a wrong prediction, you are not even in the same ballpark. — King in the Desert

From the executive summary of that report:
"near the Earth's surface, the global average warming lies between +1.5°C and +4.5°C, with a "best guess" of 2.5°C"

Where did you get your number from?

2. It predicts that rainforest would have lost 20% of its precipitation and would shrink due to climate change

completely false, precipitation is increasing. Again they are off not by a little, but by an order of magnitude. — King in the Desert

Again, from the executive summary:
"Precipitation: (...) the global average increases (...) by 3 to 15%..."

You probably tripped over this sentence:
" Total deforestation of the Amazon basin could reducee rainfall locally by 20%".

But that is talking about a specific hypothetical.

I downloaded the paper and searched for "nuclear". I found one very brief and passing mention.

Other intellectual disciplines and traditions may be of interest going forward. Human extinction and the topic of eschatology, or the end of the world, is something that has been discussed in various academic disciplines, as you might expect. In theology it has been widely discussed, while it also appears in literary theory as an interesting element to creative writing and in psychology during the 1980s as a phenomenon related to the threat of nuclear war. The field of psychology seems to be particularly relevant going forward.

Until shown otherwise, I'm happy to accept that the author is an intelligent, well educated expert in his field. And yet, he felt comfortable presenting an academic paper proposing an imminent catastrophic threat presented by climate change, which includes only the most passing reference to nuclear weapons.

What makes this interesting is that the author is clearly not stupid or uninformed, but is better described as an intellectual elite. So understanding such a glaring omission is not as simple as just dismissing the author as a wacko. It seems we have to look elsewhere for an explanation.

The problem would seem to be much larger and more worrisome. That is, the author is writing in a culture suffering from a mass delusion, and is simply doing what all of us do, what is declared "normal", "reasonable", "sensible". He's ignoring the threat from nukes. He's fitting in within the group consensus, and probably wisely so because if he weren't willing to pay the price of conformity to the group think he would likely be casually dismissed as being just another alarmist riding a hobby horse, which is not a very good way to advance one's academic career.

Academics do their work within a fairly tightly controlled group consensus. They have to color pretty closely within the lines. And so if all of us are blindly ignoring the threat of nuclear weapons, they have to as well, or risk brand damage to their career.

But the truth is likely more that the author has internalized the mass delusion himself, and thus sincerely sees no conflict in leaving nuclear weapons out of a catastrophic climate change warning discussion. After all, that's what everyone else is doing, so the author is guilty of nothing more than being normal.

However, none of this changes the fact that it's not possible to have an intelligent discussion about a pending climate change catastrophe without including the subject of nuclear weapons as an integral part of such an investigation. Thus, if one is looking for intelligent discussion of such matters it would likely be best to invest one's time in writings from another more insightful author, should one be able to find one.

That is a highly controversial statement. Which epistemological principle requires repeatability specifically? — Echarmion

Methodological naturalism.

The main issue in this thread isn't with climate change predictions, it's with societal collapse predictions, which are not scientific, even if the reasons for predicting a collapse are scientific.

Consider the analogy with predictions about future automation displacing a large percentage of jobs. The studies about current technology might be sound, but prediction about how the technology will be applied and how workers and employers will adapt are not well understood.

an inevitable near- term social collapse due to climate change. — Abstract

We've been hearing this doom and gloom for decades. Centuries if you include Malthus. In the 1970's people feared global cooling. The doom and gloom never comes true, but it's a winner when it comes to political fundraising.

Methodological naturalism.

The main issue in this thread isn't with climate change predictions, it's with societal collapse predictions, which are not scientific, even if the reasons for predicting a collapse are scientific.

Consider the analogy with predictions about future automation displacing a large percentage of jobs. The studies about current technology might be sound, but prediction about how the technology will be applied and how workers and employers will adapt are not well understood. — Marchesk

What does methodological naturalism have to do with repeatability?

And I don't see how you go from "social processes are not well understood" to "therefore predictions about social processes are unscientific".

I have a plan for the OP. Ditch the dubious article and read up on AMOC shut down. It's not expected to happen in this century, but it could, and it would count as a global catastrophe. It wouldn't wipe out civilization, but it would drastically change the world.

Obviously it wouldn't wipe out the species because we've been through it before. We just don't remember it.

The advantage is that you get to float the concept of catastrophe in a truly scientific way. Everybody wins.

Indeed. Notable ones in the past 50 years or so:

Population bomb: no way we can feed several billion people.
Silent Spring: chemicals like DDT would wipe out birds and other animal population.
Rainforest deforestation: Amazon will be cut down in a couple decades.
Ozone depletion: everyone will be getting skin cancer from the sun.
Acid Rain: northern forests will die off.
Peak oil and various minerals: we'll run out and civilization will crash.
Animal population declines: means major extinction is on its way.
Carrying capacity: The Earth can only support 4 billion people.

Now all of those have been or still remain problems. But the worst case scenarios have not come to pass. Animal populations have a tendency to recover (often when protectives measures are taken). New oil fields and mineral deposits are discovered with better means of mining them. DDT was banned, air pollution in developed countries has declined, the rate of deforestation went down, the green revolution happened, and improvements in technology change the carrying capacity equation.

Also, our understanding of the environment improves as do the computer models over time. So predictions are adjusted. The key point is that society adapts and changes over time.

I suspect that good responses to the article would deal with its 'theory of adaptation' and possible socio-economic organisational strategies that might work irrespective of the doomy-gloomy plausibilities. — fdrake

So I'm thinking about what I might do as say a gardener, in terms of perhaps building in micro climates to allow a greater diversity of plants, in contrast to a sort of conservation attitude, kind of encouraging adaptive change in the ecosystem. Grapes in Scotland already, between the raspberries. Baobabs in case it turns dry between the sitka. Eco systems will tend to move North, so help out the slow-moving bits, like trees.

What does methodological naturalism have to do with repeatability? — Echarmion

A scientific prediction has to be based on experiments and observations that can be reproduced. Otherwise, human bias and experimental flaws can be mistaken for real results. We should always be cautious with any single paper or experiment. There always needs to be confirmation.

And I don't see how you go from "social processes are not well understood" to "therefore predictions about social processes are unscientific" — Echarmion

I didn't say "social processes" in the generic sense. I said societal collapse, which is quite specific, and would mean the global society we have today.

So please, if you want to put this research in bin with the Mayan Apocalypse and Millenium Bug, do so, but politely leave it out of the thread (personal opinion, not moderator opinion). — fdrake

Get lost with that crap.

Societal problems could happen. It's not a bad idea to prepare for that possibility.

The problem is that there's no way in hell to justify an idiotic claim like "2. Social collapse will be worldwide, and in the next 10 years or so."

Thanks to old age and Better Living Through Chemistry, I am not worried about nuclear weapons or global warming. BUT, as you have pointed out, nuclear weapons have been, are, and will be an abiding threat to global civilization. We don't know from which launch pad or submarine the threat will be made manifest, and we don't have to have an all-out nuclear war for dire consequences to ensue.

A few nuclear weapons knocking out critical oil infrastructure in the Middle East; 1 nuclear weapon destroying the Houston, Texas refining and chemical industry; just 1 bomb going off in Manhattan, or in Washington, D.C., or London, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing, Mumbai, Bangalore, or Karachi (and so on) would be a great disaster with far reaching political and military consequences. And it could be a bomb for each of the above.

It is possible for a nuclear weapon to be detonated outside of national command and control safeguards. It doesn't have to be official national policy; it could be a rogue, or terrorist-sponsored event. And, of course, it could certainly be national policy to get rid of adversaries by nuking them.

The fact is, there are numerous threats to the environment coming from all sorts of sources. Fortunately they aren't all dire. But just to site one example of environmental change with potentially non-catastrophic but destructive consequences:

When North America was glaciated, all of the small earthworms that were native were scrapped off. The former worm-occupants had not recovered their range after 15,000 years. Europeans introduced a number of exotic species to North America -- like honey bees and big, fat earth worms. The big fat worms, which we refer to as 'night crawlers' and like to use as fish bait, have been spreading northward from their introduction sites. They have now infiltrated into the hardwood forests where they are causing a problem. They are eating all of the leaves that fall on the ground.

You will probably say "that's what worms are supposed to do". True enough, but they do such a good job that the ground under the trees is left bare, or at least much more thinly covered by leaves. When it rains, there is nothing to slow the movement of rainwater down hillsides which the formerly uneaten leaves were good at doing. This washes away a lot of the worm castings (their dung) which is excellent fertilizer for trees, and it leads to erosion and soil loss.

The trees aren't dying because of the worms, but the soil situation is slowly changing. All because of bigger earth worms. This is a (rare) case where bigger is not better.

The fact is, there are numerous threats to the environment coming from all sorts of sources. Fortunately they aren't all dire. But just to site one example of environmental change with potentially catastrophic but destructive consequences:

There are several episodes of arboreal diseases which show us that forests can be ravaged by disease. 4,000,000,000 (billion) edible nut-bearing chestnut trees died between 1900 and 1950. The species has not recovered. Dutch elm disease has wiped out most of the elm trees in North America and Europe. All native species of ash are susceptible to the diseases the emerald ash borer carries, including the trees planted in many cities to replace elms.

There are various diseases and insect pests affecting forests all over the world. This is nothing new, but trees are made more susceptible to diseases by warming climates.

The fact is, there are numerous threats to the environment coming from all sorts of sources. — Bitter Crank

True, but none of them can bring civilization crashing down in 30 minutes. When one has a loaded gun in one's mouth that is the only issue. Once the gun is removed, ok, then other issues merit our attention.

Dr Jem Bendell is a Professor of Sustainability Leadership and Founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria (UK).

He focuses on leadership and communications for social change, as well as approaches that may help humanity face climate-induced disruption.

A graduate of the University of Cambridge, he had twenty years of experience in sustainable business and finance, as a researcher, educator, facilitator, advisor, & entrepreneur, having lived & worked in six countries. Clients for his strategy development included international corporations, UN agencies and international NGOs. The World Economic Forum (WEF) recognised Professor Bendell as a Young Global Leader for his work on sustainable business alliances. With over 100 publications, including four books and five UN reports, he regularly appeared in international media on topics of sustainable business and finance, as well as currency innovation. His TEDx talk is the most watched online speech on complementary currencies. In 2012 Professor Bendell co-authored the WEF report on the Sharing Economy. Previously he helped create innovative alliances, including the Marine Stewardship Council, to endorse sustainable fisheries and The Finance Innovation Lab, to promote sustainable finance. In 2007 he wrote a report for WWF on the responsibility of luxury brands, which appeared in over 50 newspapers and magazines worldwide, and inspired a number of entrepreneurs to create businesses in the luxury sector.

This is not an impressive resume for discussion on climate change.

I agree with Brett above.

Just to be clear, this not some way out nut job cherry picking statistics to make a radical fruitcake conspiracy theory. This is an expert in the field. — unenlightened

From the CV there given, I would say this guy is a career communications person. When he states as his academic career "twenty years of experience in sustainable business and finance", then has gotten into the very trendy Davos circles on the WEF and gives TedX talks, yep, no wonder can he write something that will shock and awe ordinary people. Likely because he has been giving talks to people all his life and obviously and knows what sells.

It's like the classic way how in Washington policy circles you sell US Foreign Policy to Americans that are otherwise quite ignorant of the outside World: "Scare the shit out of them!!!"

Yes, and all this overwrought discussion triggered by an old snake oil salesman.

:up:

Yes, and all this overwrought discussion triggered by an old snake oil salesman. — Brett

But wait. You're just saying that because you disagree with him, right?

I think some of you are entrenched in a certain view and that keeps you from studying the document mentioned in the OP with an open mind.

What I want you to consider is that as the glaciers melt, less light is reflected back to space. The glaciers are melting, so that's why we should accept the real possibility that a cascade of events is about to unfurl ending in worldwide social breakdown.

If you cant accept that, will you please prove that it's wrong?

none of them can bring civilization crashing down in 30 minutes. — Jake

This is true. A full-out exchange of bombs among the existing nuclear powers would result in massive fire storms which would greatly extend the initial blast damage, and would throw up so much soot and dust into the upper atmosphere that climate would start cooling rapidly. The world would not freeze, but agriculture might dwindle to virtually nothing for a few years -- long enough for the survivors to starve. Then there is radiation on top of everything else, and a lost of vast stores of resources.

Humpty Dumpty was bagging his trash
when overhead there burst a bright flash.
There was no time for the egg to expire
Sir Oval turned ash in the nuclear fire.

Another thing I want you people to think about is: why aren't more scientists saying that it's too late to do anything about AGW? Why aren't we turning to strategies for adaptation?

I already know that some of you skeptics are going to say that it's because we don't know what to prepare for. AMOC slowdown? AMOC shutdown? Who gets wetter? Who gets dryer? Who gets colder? Who is under salt water?

What's happening is that you're getting too wrapped up in statistics. Simply look at the weather since 2002 and you'll see the urgency.

I think some of you are entrenched in a certain view and that keeps you from studying the document mentioned in the OP with an open mind. — frank

I read over the document, looking at the summary and conclusion in particular. I didn't see anything that was very compelling. I have thought we were screwed for some time. It isn't just the amount of CO2 lurking in the tundra and and the frozen methane ambush at the bottom of the ocean. It isn't just the physics and chemistry.

Our human behavior is just not very tractable (long run, short run) in the face of very difficult problems with uncertain solutions. WE cast the bleak light on our future. Nations can mobilize for war with remarkable speed and success, but generally wars are pretty concrete: We will kill them or they will kill us and these are the weapons we need to make. The country with the most resources and the most factories has a huge advantage.

Just try to train a group of slightly interested people what goes into the compost bin, the recycle bin, and the trash bin, never mind changing their entire lifestyle. (I understand this because I'm not able to change my lifestyle either.)