No, you are not. Not even close. Go read about our reality.
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
But, you say, you don’t want to be depressed. That’s fine, but the only acceptable alternative emotion is fury. Get out and do something about it then.
I suspect one of the first symptoms that will trigger an, “Oh, Shit” for the general Western populace is when we start having food shortages due to widespread crop failure. Countdown to cannibalism has begun.
Golgafrinchan Captain@#1:
Countdown to cannibalism has begun.
“Soylent Green is cops and rich people!”
Unfortunately, there won’t be nearly enough.
I made the mistake of reading about half of that, thinking about my 9-year-old boy, and almost throwing up at my desk.
It’s like watching nuclear warheads in slow motion.
We’re doomed.
Don’t try to tell me I’m not depressed enough. You have no idea how depressed I am.
15,000 watts of photovoltaic on the roof. Plans for a wind turbine. Trading in the current SUV on a plug-in hybrid. And I’m planting trees that will be really big when they’re grown. I’ll see how many kilotons of carbon I can get back into the ecosystem.
There’s always my beachfront property in Otisburg…
Yup. I personally recommend buying large tracts in Greenland.
Not going to read that, because it isn’t worse than I think. It can’t be, because I’ve understood for years that we’re facing a mass die-off of billions of people from famine and disease. I’m usually roundly ignored when I bring it up, or called some version of “alarmist kook.”
But I’ll say it again:
If things keep going exactly the way they are, we’ll be faced with a period of human suffering, misery, and death unlike anything we’ve ever seen in recorded history. WE HAVE TO PREPARE. There’s still time to do that, to mitigate to some extent the horror that’s coming.
We have to invest massive resources in things like climate controlled indoor farms. We have to secure and update our fragile power grid. We have to stop dumping poison into the water. There are thousands of big things we need to start doing, right now, because every day we delay will mean millions dead. If we don’t start adapting yesterday, we won’t be here tomorrow.
On the bright side, we don’t have a LIP* percolating up through carbonates metamorphosing massive amounts of limestone and, in the process, dumping millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Yet.
Back when I first became aware of global warming, my fears focused on what would happen when the fossil fuel industry, and their lackeys and lapdogs in politics, decided that yes, global warming is real and the way to solve it is through nuclear winter (though, to be fair, that has also been denied by the powers that be). A full-blown nuclear would bring the temperatures down and, as a bonus, reduce the number of mouths to feed. Glares in the direction of sabre-rattling Trump who has wondered what the point of nuclear weapons is if we don’t use them.
Now, I figure that a full nuclear exchange would kill about the same percentage of the population that global warming will, but it’ll just do it quicker. Either way, we be screwed.
*Large Igneous Province — LIPs have been associated with the multiple extinction events from the late Permian through the mid-Jurrasic and really do provide an explanation for where the carbon came from.
This is already under way, and has been for quite a while. While food shortages haven’t directly affected the “Western populace,” that’s certainly driving social disruption in parts of the world resulting in large numbers of refugees trying to get into the West. In fact, climate change driven social disruption and low-level conflict have been recognized by the US military for some time, as well as the impact on base placement and population relocation.
I saw an article in Scientific American recently about dead zones in the oceans. The map showed lots of orange dots close to the coast all around the world indicating dead zones. And then there are large areas of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans identified as dead.
My personal fear is the enormous reservoirs of frozen methane hydrates sitting at the bottom of the continental shelf right off our coast. The seas are warming. There are earthquakes. What could go wrong.
Now I need a xanax.
It didn’t even touch on what happens if a major methane hydrate eruption should encounter a source of ignition. It would hit like a vacuum bomb with the force of a nuclear weapon, a city-busting fireball capable of utterly flattening coastal cities like Oxford.
I pity all parents.
To me the worst part of it is that the consumption is disproportionately by the US (i.e: the planet’s wealthiest denizens) – when, inevitably, people start to blame overpopulation, they’ll be pointing in the wrong direction. The problem was not caused by the waves of immigrants that will be created, it’s the US baby boomer upper and middle class that did it. My people.
Marcus Ranum@13, Something broadly similar happened to me many years ago: I observed that (I don’t now recall the exact numbers) that, at that time, the States had 5% of the world’s population and consumed 25% of the world’s nonrenewable resources. The wingnut I was speaking to said (paraphrasing),
Marcus, you are correct! We crapped all over the future, but we will have the easiest time of it. I keep thinking of the Syrian conflict but on a global scale. I keep going back to the slogans of my youth: think globally and act locally. You are lucky enough to have the means to make yourself carbon negative. Do that first. After that? I’m still looking for suggestions on that. I may get stuck in a tree planting wind turbine erecting perseveration.
“do something about it”
Too late. It’s already happening. But there is some good news (for the planet, I mean). From your link:
“scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.”
Killing off 90% of humanity is the best remedy. So a bit less enthusiasm (even if highly understandable) about your grand children might be appropriate. I know I won’t blame my (only) son if I never become a granddaddy.
I can confirm @8 Vucodlak’s judgment. It’s not worse than I’ve been thinking for at least 10 and probably 15 years. That’s why I pointed this out to my son as soon as he was old enough to get it. Did you, PZ?
Fortunately I don’t have to prepare. I’ll be dead anyway before things get really bad. And Vucodlak’s proposals won’t be nearly enough. Only decreasing human population to 10% of what it’s now will do.
@10 Robro: no need to fear what will happen anyway.
If cosmic justice existed, the people who would suffer would be the climate change deniers preventing any real action from being taken rather than their great-grandchildren.
Marcus:
Unfortunately, it’s the asshole billionaires who are most likely to survive. The more money you have, the better placed you are to deal.
I’m grateful I won’t live to see the worst of this (or be killed by it), but my heart breaks for all those much younger than myself, just as it does for all those currently displaced by climate change. Human nature is hardly saintly to begin with, and it’s going to get so much worse.
I decided not to ever have kids when I was in college. I just didn’t want to make new people and feed them into the nuclear war that, at the time, I saw as inevitable. I still see it as inevitable, but “some say the world will die in fire, others in ice…” in retrospect I wonder if I could have done more to destroy the American empire than I did. The US’ constant war footing and saber-rattling also has a humongous carbon footprint. They burned several million gallons of jet fuel ferrying high explosive from Saudi Arabia to Yemen last month. Last month. The fossil fuels aren’t just spent flying congressmen around in comfort, the endless war machine is a great ecological disaster.
Delenda America.
Everyone will have to slow down making babies long enough for the death rate to tear down that obscene global overpopulation, which is ultimately the root cause of every environmental problem we face.
It’s either doing it that way – the sane way – or it will be done in uncontrollably nasty ways. We still have a choice.
The popular sentiment voiced by so many (“I’ll be dead anyway so it doesn’t matter” and similar) strikes me as nothing other than irresponsible and selfish.
anchor@#20:
The population bomb is not the problem. It’s the rich people bomb.
Turns out farmers are pretty carbon neutral. It’s factories to make iPhones and bombs that do most of the damage. You could probably get rid of 4/5 of the global population and – if the survivors were Americans – you’d still have a problem.
Two years ago I started seriously reading up on the problem of climate change, and unfortunately I was imaginative enough to see the scale and the time frame in which the scenarios listed in this article could play out. It hit like a hammer. I had just fathered a second son, and I was captured by an instant paralyzing anxiety over the future of my two children. I was sleepless for nights and incapable of getting any joy out of every day life, desperately grasping for any purpose to do anything that should pay off in their future, thinking it would all end too early for them, and in horrible misery. I started hating my job for doing something utterly insignificant, time-wasting in the face of what was looming. We’re on the eve of the most devastating, despairing disaster mankind has ever needed to cope with, and it would be a slow but accelerating descent into famine and disease and war. The Second World War was the last human catastrophe we grew up to look back upon as a thing that should never happen again, yet I can’t help but think that along the way, we will wreak even greater atrocities on ourselves, and that this time there would be no hope of salvation.
At some point my wife pulled me away from a growing depression and said I needed to focus on the here and now, and although she did not grasp the scale of it as much as I did, reminded me that we should take an effort to give our children at the very least an agreeable, and if possible carefree younger years. It feels like singing songs on a way to a funeral. I dread the day that I tell them what that future has nothing in hold for them to look forward to – I expect they will face terrible, terrible wars somewhere down the century.
I do realize there is still a tiny window to make changes to avoid the most catastrophical of scenario’s. We’re doing our token things – 100% green energy contract, limited car use (and saving up to switch to electric), we’re almost entirely vegetarian now – but I realize it is small change, and I have been out wondering ever since how we could help sway public opinion to the “OMG we must do something” worldwide ASAP.
Any tips on fighting off the paralyzing depression, I’d like to hear it. I already have the fury over the seemingly widespread indifference and disregard by politicians and skeptics. I grasp desperately for inklings of positive news on our accelerating momentum to phase out fossil fuels, our efforts to improve meat alternatives, and any area of trees saved. Not enough, I know. But something.
Oh, by the way I think it would help if the you lot over there on the other side of the big pond would march to Washington and throw out the current destructive administration. We have no time for their antics.
Above all, I need hope.
One of the many reasons I’m not having children is global warming. It’s unethical to bring a life into a world that we know will be suffering like we’ve never before suffered. It’s also a tiny way to reduce carbon emissions by limiting the population.
In a few billion years the exploding sun will envelop the earth anyway. humans are simply speeding up the inevitable.
But then again, there’s always this…
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/health/cdc-nuclear-attack.html?&target=comments&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&modref=HPCommentsRefer&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0#commentsContainer
Marcus Ranum @21: “The population bomb is not the problem. It’s the rich people bomb….Turns out farmers are pretty carbon neutral…”
Global warming isn’t the only environmental catastrophe we face. What makes you think Americans or any privileged elite (‘rich people’) anywhere would survive (or want to) on a planet denuded and befouled by nominal attempts to sustain and ‘secure’ the needs of a grossly overpopulated world? This isn’t a question of who gets to survive. It’s a question of global mass extinction, and I’m not talking just about precious humanity. Its amazing that while we’re in the process of snuffing the life out of our planet some still seem to imagine that agricultural activity, energy production and technological innovation, manufacturing, distribution of products etc that allow the growth of civilization and its economies are the problem rather than the obscene scale to which those activities must be applied. Do I really need to point out that international tension, conflict and the threat of war is also exacerbated by overpopulation? Meanwhile you can give all non-human species the excuse that it really wasn’t the fault of humans for not being able to recognize they were too many, but actually it was the fault of that pesky tiny subset of rich humans who got wealthy serving all those people who wanted their own slice of a dwindling pie. I’m sure they’ll understand as they drop away into oblivion ahead of us. Surviving humans can console themselves that they’ve ‘won’.
mnb0: ‘“do something about it”
Too late. It’s already happening.’
Bullshit! This isn’t some video game where you just lose and get a game over. Yes, it is too late to avoid significant consequences. They’re locked in now. However, our actions will determine whether the consequences are significant or severe or catastrophic. And everything we do now to limit carbon going into the atmosphere not only limits climate change, it buys us time to come up with new technology, for solutions to penetrate the economy and for people to generally extract their heads from their asses.
WHAT YOU DO FREAKING MATTERS!
It seems pretty obvious that one effect will be increasing numbers of refugees from the warmer parts of the world as they become less and less habitable. Given the xenophobic reaction of much of the populations in the US and Europe to the existing refugees, the likelihood of more death and conflict is also obvious.
Unlike many people, though, I don’t find myself hating anyone because of this. Ultimately the reason that humans are messing the climate up so much is that people want a better standard of living. This is true not just of the wealthy or people in wealthier countries, but of most people everywhere. I find it impossible to hate or blame people for wanting a better life.
“Scientists explain what New York Magazine article on “The Uninhabitable Earth” gets wrong”:
Seventeen scientists analyzed the article and estimated its overall scientific credibility to be ‘low’.
A majority of reviewers tagged the article as: Alarmist, Imprecise/Unclear, Misleading.https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabitable-earth-gets-wrong-david-wallace-wells/
Which works better: climate fear, or climate hope? Well, it’s complicated:
mnb0 wrote:
It won’t fix anything. Currently, the world’s 20% richest use 76% of the world’s energy. If the remaining 10% is mostly made up of the richest 20% (and those with wealth and power are always in the best position to weather the storm), it’s still going to be a huge problem. We need less defeatism and less blaming of poor overpopulated nations, and more feet on the ground doing work to help mitigate the worst of this.
@robro #10,
Yeah, “Western” was an edit from my first pass. We’ve been insulated from many of the impacts that have already begun. I’ve seen certain foods becoming scarce or expensive at the grocery store, but that’s about it. Other populations are not so
luckyprivileged.@Duckbilled Platypus #22
I try to focus on changing what I can, realizing I can’t change everything. Every thing we ever do changes the world, albeit to a puny degree. The change comes when enough puny differences from enough people add up to something monumental. Yeah, it may not happen, but I can’t give up (I have 2 kids and an appointment to get neutered). My realist side is pretty depressed. My optimist side tells my realist side to stop being a pessimist.
Looking at previous generations and seeing their major blind-spots, I used to wonder what things the next generations would look at about us and say, “what a bunch of assholes.” I’m pretty sure I now know the biggest one.
I recommend eating good quality chocolate, while there’s still some available at a reasonable price. Soon there won’t be any more good stuff, just chemical poison created by American “food” corporations and artificially coloured like the shit it really is.
33 fine do mind if I do!
I am not so sure it is the rich and powerful who survive collapse of “civilization”
I would bet on the poor rural “peasant” having a better chance, for them it is not as big of a change except for maybe relocation they already know how to survive on their wits and not to depend on their familial wealth and power which will not mean as much when the power structure that it depends on is in collapse
unclefrogy wrote:
I wouldn’t. It was not usually the nobility that starved during famines. There are many ways to preserve power when existing structures start to crumble. Private mercenary armies have been tremendously popular throughout history and they still exist today even if they now operate under a less obvious name (i.e. “Private Security Contractors”). If I bring an army to your door and demand taxes because you’re farm my land (or at least land I’m claiming as my own), what are you gonna go? Most likely: pay up, so that my hired thugs don’t carry out their threats.
Only Climate-change deniers could read ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ to their kids/grandkids as a bedtime story. To the deniers, it’s just another fairy tale.
To Marcus
The reverse is (also) true. If you leave just the poor farmers alive, the population will continue to grow. The only long-term solution that can possibly overcome fiat problems (e.g. get political support) that avoids lots of death from starvation (and other causes) is to raise the developing world to something like the European standard of living in order to stop population growth, and figure out how to do that in a sustainable way, including basically no carbon emissions.
PS:
The best plan that I’ve seen involves:
1- Lots of nuclear power.
2- Synthetic gasoline produced from nuclear electricity and CO2 from the air.
3- Lots of negative carbon emissions, powered by lots of nuclear power. Specifically something like this method:
http://www.theenergycollective.com/roger-arnold/2381301/the-carbonate-solution-part-1-brute-force
France managed to convert most of their electricity to nuclear in a few decades, and they weren’t in any particular rush.
I call for a massive rollout of existing safe nuclear designs, and several billions of dollars (at least) in research and commercial prototyping of next-gen designs (i.e. the IFR aka S-PRISM reactor, and a MSR like ThorCon), and several billions more with the goal of commercial prototyping as soon as possible plants that produce gasoline from CO2, water, and electricity.
Unfortunately, the reality is that the biggest impediment to solving global warming is not the global warming deniers. It’s the environmentalists because of their anti-nuclear position and their delusional beliefs regarding the workability of other green power sources with current or near-future tech. That’s why many green movements are funded by fossil fuel companies – they’re the perfect “useful idiots” to fight against their only real competition, aka nuclear power.
PPS:
And yes, I expect most people here to believe the green nonsense. It’s one of the most disheartening things that I’ve ever seen. The entire green energy movement is a sham, lead by liars and frauds, and filled with dupes and fools. In that sense, it’s quite comparable to any religious group.
I still try to convince people, because I care, even though the rational part of me knows that most people here will just write me off as a crank and ignore me – and listen to the goddamned liars and frauds in the green energy movement.
PPPS:
We also need a real global tax on carbon emissions, with import tariffs for those countries that won’t play ball.
“Cap and trade” schemes are generally shams that are designed to enrich bankers and not to reduce carbon emissions.
It’s still worth making efforts to curb greenhouse emissions, but at this point the choice is between partially uninhabitable and entirely uninhabitable. I’m not sure how much more CO2 we need before the only place fit for humans will be antarctica, but I expect to hit that point in the next ten years.
A quick hat tip to Richard Hoffmore for linking to the response from climatefeedback.org. This is an excellent review from responsible climate scientists–not a denier among them. It illustrates why climate scientists are concerned but not panicked about our prospects.
Also, Enlightenment Liberal, 1990 called and they want their energy technologies back. You utterly ignore the fact that the price of energy from renewable sources is crashing. Nukes have a role, but 1) it is much smaller than you suggest, 2)they cannot be deployed rapidly enough to be of significant assistance, 3) nobody is currently building nukes, 4) all the concrete that goes into building nuke plants has a significant CO2 footprint, 5) Nukes only work with a large grid, whereas the future energy economy is more likely to be a network of smaller grids linked together for managing emergencies.
Intermittent power sources like solar and wind do not matter, because they cannot power an industrial society, because they are intermittent, and because there is not a workable energy storage technology. Green technologies other than solar and wind (and nuclear) cannot scale to the scale that we need. The rest of the world is going to industrialize, and they’re going to use coal unless we have something that is at least within the same ballpark in terms of cost, and that’s an insolvable fiat problem. In the future, we should expect many uses of energy to move to electricity, and thus it’s entirely reasonable that we should expect at least 3 KW per person, and possibly at high as 7 KW. For 10 billion people, that’s 30 TW. Compare that to the roughly 2.5 TW of electricity capacity today, and it’s clear that the only thing which can scale to these numbers is nuclear.
Read what I wrote already. I already wrote that France went from almost 0 nuclear to almost 80% electricity from nuclear in about 20 years, and they were not in any hurry to do so. We can do it in time to be significant.
Furthermore, next-gen designs can be built faster than current designs (which can built already sufficiently quickly).
Something that I wish to change.
Also, some countries are using and building nukes. France still has a lot of nuclear power. South Korea is a model of using nuclear power. Russia and China are also building nuclear. (China is taking the “all of the above” approach when it comes to research, which we should also do for research, but the time has come for applied engineering to happen and to start testing and deploying technologies that will work now.)
Which IIRC is about 1% of the equivalent emissions from coal, IIRC. Combined with the other elements of the plan that I proposed above (synthetic gasoline and negative emissions), and it just might be enough.
Asinine green fantasies. The entire green energy movement is a sham, built on lies by frauds and liars. Just think about what you just wrote. How are you going to make your industry work when it’s powered by intermittent solar and wind? The usual answer from so-called green experts and other green fools is to do the exact opposite of this, and upgrade the electrical grid and add even more interconnections, in order to “smooth out” the intermittencies of solar and wind through sufficient geographic distance (which doesn’t work, but that’s another conversation which I’m happy to go into). Green fools also say that they will solve the intermittency problem through distributed smartgrids. Such a system would arguably be the biggest and most complicated thing that humanity has ever made – exactly the opposite of this ridiculous “back to Earth” Gaia-worshiping anti-industrial fantasy that you propose.
EL@41,
Oh, the Strawmanity! I really had to look twice to see that you were responding to my post. You certainly didn’t respond (at least not effectively) to anything I said. Storage technologies are also progressing VERY rapidly–albeit not as rapidly as renewables, but much more rapidly than nukes.
Look, dude, I’m a physicist. I often work at cyclotrons, with radioactive sources, etc. I am hardly anti-nukes. The problem is that NOBODY wants them, and there will likely be better solutions very soon.
So, please, feel free to educate yourself with information less than 2 decades old any time you wish.
@Golgafrinchan Captain #32
Thanks for that. Yes, that’s the spirit I try to move on with. For the sake of our children, we just cannot give up. Screw the people who slip into apathy over this.
And thanks @Roger Hoffmore for that article, really helps putting things in a proper perspective. I should follow that website.
No they are not. They are not rapidly progressing on the relevant measure: energy cost of construction and operation. There is a reason why – with AFAIK only a few minor government-subsidized exceptions – the only grid-scale energy storage in use is pumped water and hydro dams, and even this technology is way off the mark.
Here is an introduction and an indirect link to a peer reviewed paper that explains the EROEI problem in detail:
https://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
The following is a more visceral introduction to this topic, looking at the the two most obvious technologies, pumped water and electro-chemical batteries.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/
And remember that the blog above is only dealing with a battery that is (3 TW)(7 days), e.g. the current US. Imagine the battery for the world when the rest of the world has industrialized a bit, e.g. (30 TW)(7days), or even (70 TW)(7 days). That’s the actual scale that we need.
A political and social problem, which are generally easier to solve than inventing a radical new technology.
Based on wishful thinking in defiance of all of the known evidence.
PS:
It would help matters tremendously if you stop waving your metaphorical dick around, and instead point out actual inaccuracies, and propose a plan that will actually work now.
The thing that I hate most about green assholes like yourself is that we have a serious problem that we needed to solve decades ago. In this very thread, everyone else is discussing how we’re screwed, “the sky is falling”, etc., and they may not be wrong. Yet, even now, you say “it’s progressing fast enough, let’s just wait”. That is the most irresponsible thing that I have ever heard. We need to solve it now, and with conventional and next-gen nuclear, we can do that. You propose to stick your head in the sand while the sky is falling. Unbelievable.
@35
famine is just one of the effects of climate change and is but one of the steps in the collapse of society it is the end result of climate change.
During the early stages you might gather up a large army and try to enforce your will on those around you. A large modern army depends on a functioning modern technological economy. Economies seldom thrive during long protracted famine conditions which will be confined by political borders.
So how do you feed this army? How do you supply this army with the other needed supplies weapons and transportation?
Short term with stores but long term well there will be difficulties. Further what will you offer for compensation to this army to do your bidding and what part of the population will populate this army from? What kind of money would you use?
The marginal peasant eking some small living on the margins has a good chance to be the ones who will carry the species forward.
The question that leads me to think along those lines is What happened to the Maya when they collapsed almost everything about them was lost except the population. There was no one to carry on the learning and power structures that had developed.
just how long do you think it would take the children of the rich and powerful learn to take care of themselves?
are the rich and powerful not rather like the Bad guys in water world running around in the last tanker searching for the last oil which they need to enforce their power?
While at the margins the poor are hanging on and continuing to make babies.
uncle frogy
sorry for the dropped out word here and there and the extra ones as well. I hope that it is not to hard to make out what I am trying to say.(if anyone even reads any of it)
I passed depression long ago going down.
uncle frogy
Enlightment Liberal:
Also Enlightenment Liberal:
I think we’re done here.