You know what, maybe I did judge a book by its cover. Let's take a look a the next several sequential usages of "climate", no cherry picking!
> This is something the average climate activist doesn’t seem to understand. Even if we could stop climate change, our civilization would still have the problem of dwindling resources.
> To accomplish that, the damage we’ll do to the environment could potentially outweigh the damage done by climate change.
> If you don’t believe me, I’m going to quote a letter written by experts in Earth science and delivered to the United Kingdom’s Committee on Climate Change a few years ago.
> And unfortunately, climate change is making it harder to grow these trees. Droughts and floods are making them struggle to survive, and tapping too much of the sap (which is used to make rubber) can kill them. Plus, they are very vulnerable to white root disease, and climate change is making leaf blights like that more common.
...and its exactly what you would expect from the title.
Useless as a guide to predicting the future, but quite useful for future Elon Musks, who looked at the inevitable end of cheap fossil fuels and saw a business opportunity.
If something is a must-solve problem, well, tautologically, that means it must be solved, and there will be willing buyers for solution venders.
We've been hearing about the collapse of civilization for a very long time, for a variety of reasons. This doesn't really offer anything new other than another prediction that it will happen soon.
What it does is explain why society didn't collapse in the 70s / 80s like some predicted. We have been living on borrowed time, relying on over consumption of finite resources.
Unless we invent miracle tech, we are fucked. And then there is the climate crisis, which will require massive geoengineering because we waited too long. No one knows if we can avert that crisis or how bad it will get.
That explains why collapse will happen without change. It doesn't explain why it'll happen "soon". Borrowed time from limited resources can last a while.
> Borrowed time from limited resources can last a while.
In the past 30y more fossil fuels have been consumed than at all time before. Ok maybe peak oil has occured around now. But that's certainly not the case for overall fossil use. Or GHG emissions. That's still increasing.
Cutting down rain forest? Fishing? Many minerals & metals: all similar stories. The list goes on.
Every civilization that operated like that in the past, did collapse. It's only a matter of time.
For these civilizations, effects were localized. And a good # of people may have gotten out & moved elsewhere. But this time it's global. Good luck staying safe if logistics & social structures break down around the world.
Life has existed for billions of years. Not all of it was 'over' consuming or else none would have survived to this day.
There is no guarantee the sun can provide as much energy as we're consuming on an ongoing basis. That's because oil and other minerals built up over hundreds of millions of years. We're on track to consume all that's within reach in a few centuries.
All living creatures are living on borrowed time the minute they're born and not immediately devoured.
I have a feeling the next set of predictions will explain away why the current ones were wrong, just like has happened every time since Malthus and even before that.
That doesn't mean I think crises will not happen. But at this point I'm very skeptical of claims of inevitable worldwide collapse, doubly so when a timeline is provided.
Another victim of Vaclav Smil's intententional deceptions:
> But gasoline is just one small part of our precarious civilization. As explained in the book, How The World Really Works, there are at least four other things we need: cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia. And they all require fossil fuels.
Key falsehood: "And they all require fossil fuels". Luckily, no they don't.
At least this guy probably doesn't have the same reach as Vaclav's richest dupe, Bill Gates, so the damage will be more contained.
Plastics can be synthesized from most carbohydrate gases.
You can make most carbohydrate gases from water & CO2 from the air. The problem is that it's very energy-intensive, so the best way to create such plastics is by using excess renewable energy (e.g. peak solar) to create renewable carbohydrates.
Currently, the tech has not been economically scaled yet, due to being new, and also not enough renewable capacity being available.
He's the Jordan Peterson of climate change. Spends half his time making snide digs at his opponents and then goes right into sophistry and word salad when he finds himself on tricky ground:
> Interviewer: “Tell me more about what’s happening on the energy front.”
> Smil: “We haven’t made a single correct move in energy.” […]
> Hydroelectricity is the best, the most sustainable—I hate that word, sustainable. That’s the best form of renewable energy there is today, right? Because it runs all the time. Wind—well, you know, even in Manitoba, it’s not there 75 per cent of the time…. People feel constrained to be publicly correct to build a wind turbine farm…. Why do we do these stupidities, right? Well, because we feel renewable energy is only solar and wind, right? Not hydro apparently. Most people don’t think that way.”
> Interviewer: “You mentioned you dislike the word sustainability.”
> Smil: “Yeah, absolutely hate it [the word sustainability] because there is no such thing. Sustainability cannot be defined. Sustainable for what? Over next year? Over 10 years? Over a millennium? On a local basis, on a planetary basis? I mean, there are so many time and space dimensions to it you cannot define what is sustainable. If somebody is boasting that what they are doing is sustainable, it’s a total laugh. There is no sustainable thing.”
I encourage everyone to read Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin.
https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Despair-Environmentalists-P...
IMO, this is the most important book written in the 21st century. Don't read the whole thing, just read the first chapter. The first chapter will give you what you need to know.
Here's a summary:
Every new person born has a mouth to eat, but they are not a useless eater. They are also born with hands to work. They work to produce what they consume. We ensure they consume no more than they produce with a system called money.
The more dense a population, the higher the per-capita income. This is because the main thing that determines your standard of living is the technology your society has access to. The technology your society has access to is directly proportional to the total number of man-years lived before that date. This is because humans create tech at a constant level. For every X man-years lived, a new invention will be created. Every person is both with a mouth to eat, hands to work, and a brain to invent.
But won't we run out of resources? Sure, we ran out of whale oil. That did not matter. We invented a bad replacement (town gas) which killed a lot of people, then we invented a better replacement called electric lights. Humanity marches on.
And we solved problems using methods we hadn't even conceived of yet. I'm confident we will figure out new and innovative ways to solve problems in ways that aren't really even imaginable
So I think the argument made in this article doesn't preclude all of that. Production is always converting a resource into a more useful resource, moving it to a more organized and useful state, reversing entropy. Some of those resources are very limited and in significantly more demand than can possibly be made available. That demand is often inelastic; human beings will die if they can't get it.
I'm personally pretty much with you on these points. Minds solve problems, people find a way. I think claims of a worldwide collapse are absurd. But I think crises will happen, as they always have, and it's important to consider blind spots.
> Civilization collapsed quickly but temporarily a few years ago because of a virus.
No, it didn't. I think you might be experiencing a hallucination.
How many people within 50 miles of you starved to death during this "collapse" of civilization?
I've seen this from my adopted mom. She claimed 6 or 7 people she knew died of COVID-19, then when I asked her for names she named people I knew were still alive.
> Every new person born has a mouth to eat, but they are not a useless eater. They are also born with hands to work. They work to produce what they consume. We ensure they consume no more than they produce with a system called money.
Is this a clever side-step to mask a ecological catastrophe with market economics (e.g. the environment didn't collapse, the market just solved a resource allocation problem by making food unaffordable to ?illions, nothing to see here).
> The more dense a population, the higher the per-capita income. This is because the main thing that determines your standard of living is the technology your society has access to. The technology your society has access to is directly proportional to the total number of man-years lived before that date. This is because humans create tech at a constant level. For every X man-years lived, a new invention will be created. Every person is both with a mouth to eat, hands to work, and a brain to invent.
No matter what your population density, your society will not be able to build a perpetual motion machine.
They're also not making more arable land (vertical farms are not a substitute), which is ultimately what those dense cities are dependent on.
> But won't we run out of resources? Sure, we ran out of whale oil. That did not matter. We invented a bad replacement (town gas) which killed a lot of people, then we invented a better replacement called electric lights.
That's fallacious reasoning. As they say: past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Just because in the past one s substitute could be found for an exhausted resource, that doesn't mean a substitute can be found for every needed dwindling resource in the future.
> Humanity marches on.
Sure, but how many? If it's 500 million, what about the 7.5 billion that didn't make it?
> Is this a clever side-step to mask a ecological catastrophe with market economics (e.g. the environment didn't collapse, the market just solved a resource allocation problem by making food unaffordable to ?illions, nothing to see here).
Dr. Zubrin's main point is: look at history. So let's look at history. Does a growing population increase hunger or decrease it? Throughout all of history increasing population is correlated with decreasing hunger. If a "scientist" can not even look at the existing data to see that EVERY SINGLE TIME it contradicts their hypothesis, then that is not a scientist. See "Merchants of Despair" for a more eloquent explanation than I could ever give.
> No matter what your population density, your society will not be able to build a perpetual motion machine.
I don't see the relevance.
> They're also not making more arable land (vertical farms are not a substitute), which is ultimately what those dense cities are dependent on.
The goal is not to maximize arable land. The goal is to feed everyone. Our modern crops can produce much more on the land we have than humans could ever produce before.
> As they say: past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Just because in the past one s substitute could be found for an exhausted resource, that doesn't mean a substitute can be found for every needed dwindling resource in the future.
As I said, If a "scientist" can not even look at the existing data to see that EVERY SINGLE TIME it contradicts their hypothesis, then that is not a scientist.
> Sure, but how many? If it's 500 million, what about the 7.5 billion that didn't make it?
You might be experiencing a hallucination. I believe there are currently close to 8 billion people on this planet. Please tell me how many people you think are on this planet. If you think there used to be 8 billion people on this planet, and that 7.5 billion of them died, please tell me when that happened and what year you think it is right now.
For every problem (verly likely) there is one (or more) solution, human evolution teach this, but anyway human nature is the best candidate for the causes of any trouble...
"two things are infinite, universe and human stupidity, about the first i still have doubts - A.Einstein"
Ah yes, a hyperobject, a system so big for your head that you should take our word for it, but not so big as to preclude us from asking you to do so. Do these people have superhuman brains or something?
Everything is a hyperobject. The sun, the atmosphere of Jupiter, the asteroid belt, the human brain even. We don't just shut up and stop trying, we grasp what we can. And we are pretty good at it. A man references the hyperobject as the reason it's hopeless to try, and then continues to use the interplay between climate, economics, human behavior, the biome, the water cycle, and predicts concrete predictions. He must be one of those big brains that we should just shut up and listen to.
Its ok to admit you cant truly grasp something, in fact its a mark of wisdom. The collective output and understanding of the world's scientists is equivalent to that of a superintelligence, you alone will never come close.
I have an uncle who knows a lot more facts about climate change than I do, and uses them to great effect in arguing that its not real.
Collective output? How does that work, each one looks at a different part? Might we do the same?
I can admit when I don't grasp something. But I'm not going to defer to someone else who says that it's incomprehensible to anyone but them. A statement like that should set your bullshit detector off immediately, unless you like being sacrificed atop a pyramid.
A hyperobject is supposed to be something so large and complex that no human mind is capable of grasping it. I'm not the one invoking this unfalsifiable definition, some of those claiming to understand it however, are. That's obviously disingenuous and should immediately set off your bullshit alarm.
The comments here clearly illustrate why it's hopeless. Most people, when confronted, are unwilling to even believe that any of this is really happening.
- A lack of clarity about actual problems. This list conflates too many things together that aren't existential threats and are aspirational values. The actual root-cause threats are climate change, politi-economic inequality, industrial meat & dairy agriculture, antibiotic resistance, pandemics, and war.
- Lack of leadership resulting in Tragedy of the Commons from unwillingness to be the "adult".
Overpopulation isn't an existential threat. It's been bemoaned since the 1960's. It's bullshit.
The world is already at 30% generation of all energy from renewables and climbing rapidly.
FF extraction won't be as "necessary" and will be replaced by alternative products and processes.
Reality is the reality. Making the future better will take being honest, making difficult decisions soon, and enforcing specific policies to avoid real catastrophes, not academic ones.
At least in the industrialized nation states, an interruption of the supply with food or other basic goods, may be even a significant disturbance, will lead to collapse.
Would redefining the value of currency in terms of the natural resources available help curb their depletion? Kind of like the gold standard [1], but in terms of Earth's resources in general?
This is why we need AGI. Civilization is unsustainable. Without a godlike intelligence to fix things, it will collapse, probably within the next 200 years. Maybe much sooner.
50 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] thread>How do I know this? Let’s start with humanity’s biggest problem. No, it’s not climate change. It’s something most people have never even heard of.
> This is something the average climate activist doesn’t seem to understand. Even if we could stop climate change, our civilization would still have the problem of dwindling resources.
> To accomplish that, the damage we’ll do to the environment could potentially outweigh the damage done by climate change.
> If you don’t believe me, I’m going to quote a letter written by experts in Earth science and delivered to the United Kingdom’s Committee on Climate Change a few years ago.
> And unfortunately, climate change is making it harder to grow these trees. Droughts and floods are making them struggle to survive, and tapping too much of the sap (which is used to make rubber) can kill them. Plus, they are very vulnerable to white root disease, and climate change is making leaf blights like that more common.
...and its exactly what you would expect from the title.
If something is a must-solve problem, well, tautologically, that means it must be solved, and there will be willing buyers for solution venders.
Unless we invent miracle tech, we are fucked. And then there is the climate crisis, which will require massive geoengineering because we waited too long. No one knows if we can avert that crisis or how bad it will get.
In the past 30y more fossil fuels have been consumed than at all time before. Ok maybe peak oil has occured around now. But that's certainly not the case for overall fossil use. Or GHG emissions. That's still increasing.
Cutting down rain forest? Fishing? Many minerals & metals: all similar stories. The list goes on.
Every civilization that operated like that in the past, did collapse. It's only a matter of time.
For these civilizations, effects were localized. And a good # of people may have gotten out & moved elsewhere. But this time it's global. Good luck staying safe if logistics & social structures break down around the world.
There is no guarantee the sun can provide as much energy as we're consuming on an ongoing basis. That's because oil and other minerals built up over hundreds of millions of years. We're on track to consume all that's within reach in a few centuries.
I have a feeling the next set of predictions will explain away why the current ones were wrong, just like has happened every time since Malthus and even before that.
That doesn't mean I think crises will not happen. But at this point I'm very skeptical of claims of inevitable worldwide collapse, doubly so when a timeline is provided.
> But gasoline is just one small part of our precarious civilization. As explained in the book, How The World Really Works, there are at least four other things we need: cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia. And they all require fossil fuels.
Key falsehood: "And they all require fossil fuels". Luckily, no they don't.
At least this guy probably doesn't have the same reach as Vaclav's richest dupe, Bill Gates, so the damage will be more contained.
You can make most carbohydrate gases from water & CO2 from the air. The problem is that it's very energy-intensive, so the best way to create such plastics is by using excess renewable energy (e.g. peak solar) to create renewable carbohydrates.
Currently, the tech has not been economically scaled yet, due to being new, and also not enough renewable capacity being available.
> Interviewer: “Tell me more about what’s happening on the energy front.”
> Smil: “We haven’t made a single correct move in energy.” […]
> Hydroelectricity is the best, the most sustainable—I hate that word, sustainable. That’s the best form of renewable energy there is today, right? Because it runs all the time. Wind—well, you know, even in Manitoba, it’s not there 75 per cent of the time…. People feel constrained to be publicly correct to build a wind turbine farm…. Why do we do these stupidities, right? Well, because we feel renewable energy is only solar and wind, right? Not hydro apparently. Most people don’t think that way.”
> Interviewer: “You mentioned you dislike the word sustainability.”
> Smil: “Yeah, absolutely hate it [the word sustainability] because there is no such thing. Sustainability cannot be defined. Sustainable for what? Over next year? Over 10 years? Over a millennium? On a local basis, on a planetary basis? I mean, there are so many time and space dimensions to it you cannot define what is sustainable. If somebody is boasting that what they are doing is sustainable, it’s a total laugh. There is no sustainable thing.”
https://www.desmog.com/vaclav-smil/
Here's a summary:
Every new person born has a mouth to eat, but they are not a useless eater. They are also born with hands to work. They work to produce what they consume. We ensure they consume no more than they produce with a system called money.
The more dense a population, the higher the per-capita income. This is because the main thing that determines your standard of living is the technology your society has access to. The technology your society has access to is directly proportional to the total number of man-years lived before that date. This is because humans create tech at a constant level. For every X man-years lived, a new invention will be created. Every person is both with a mouth to eat, hands to work, and a brain to invent.
But won't we run out of resources? Sure, we ran out of whale oil. That did not matter. We invented a bad replacement (town gas) which killed a lot of people, then we invented a better replacement called electric lights. Humanity marches on.
I don't. They inherit the labor of many centuries, they can continue it.
Some technical innovations help the earth, sewage treatment for example. Others, as you highlight, don't, like fossil fuels.
I'm saying I'm hopeful that more od the former will save us from the latter.
Developing new technology is a gift, a legacy to pass down to future generations.
I'm personally pretty much with you on these points. Minds solve problems, people find a way. I think claims of a worldwide collapse are absurd. But I think crises will happen, as they always have, and it's important to consider blind spots.
Civilization collapsed quickly but temporarily a few years ago because of a virus. Have we forgotten already?
It's all very fragile.
No, it didn't. I think you might be experiencing a hallucination.
How many people within 50 miles of you starved to death during this "collapse" of civilization?
I've seen this from my adopted mom. She claimed 6 or 7 people she knew died of COVID-19, then when I asked her for names she named people I knew were still alive.
Is this a clever side-step to mask a ecological catastrophe with market economics (e.g. the environment didn't collapse, the market just solved a resource allocation problem by making food unaffordable to ?illions, nothing to see here).
> The more dense a population, the higher the per-capita income. This is because the main thing that determines your standard of living is the technology your society has access to. The technology your society has access to is directly proportional to the total number of man-years lived before that date. This is because humans create tech at a constant level. For every X man-years lived, a new invention will be created. Every person is both with a mouth to eat, hands to work, and a brain to invent.
No matter what your population density, your society will not be able to build a perpetual motion machine.
They're also not making more arable land (vertical farms are not a substitute), which is ultimately what those dense cities are dependent on.
> But won't we run out of resources? Sure, we ran out of whale oil. That did not matter. We invented a bad replacement (town gas) which killed a lot of people, then we invented a better replacement called electric lights.
That's fallacious reasoning. As they say: past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Just because in the past one s substitute could be found for an exhausted resource, that doesn't mean a substitute can be found for every needed dwindling resource in the future.
> Humanity marches on.
Sure, but how many? If it's 500 million, what about the 7.5 billion that didn't make it?
Dr. Zubrin's main point is: look at history. So let's look at history. Does a growing population increase hunger or decrease it? Throughout all of history increasing population is correlated with decreasing hunger. If a "scientist" can not even look at the existing data to see that EVERY SINGLE TIME it contradicts their hypothesis, then that is not a scientist. See "Merchants of Despair" for a more eloquent explanation than I could ever give.
> No matter what your population density, your society will not be able to build a perpetual motion machine.
I don't see the relevance.
> They're also not making more arable land (vertical farms are not a substitute), which is ultimately what those dense cities are dependent on.
The goal is not to maximize arable land. The goal is to feed everyone. Our modern crops can produce much more on the land we have than humans could ever produce before.
> As they say: past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Just because in the past one s substitute could be found for an exhausted resource, that doesn't mean a substitute can be found for every needed dwindling resource in the future.
As I said, If a "scientist" can not even look at the existing data to see that EVERY SINGLE TIME it contradicts their hypothesis, then that is not a scientist.
> Sure, but how many? If it's 500 million, what about the 7.5 billion that didn't make it?
You might be experiencing a hallucination. I believe there are currently close to 8 billion people on this planet. Please tell me how many people you think are on this planet. If you think there used to be 8 billion people on this planet, and that 7.5 billion of them died, please tell me when that happened and what year you think it is right now.
If we end civilization let it be for something more substantial than "my sand grains are the wrong shape".
For every problem (verly likely) there is one (or more) solution, human evolution teach this, but anyway human nature is the best candidate for the causes of any trouble...
"two things are infinite, universe and human stupidity, about the first i still have doubts - A.Einstein"
Everything is a hyperobject. The sun, the atmosphere of Jupiter, the asteroid belt, the human brain even. We don't just shut up and stop trying, we grasp what we can. And we are pretty good at it. A man references the hyperobject as the reason it's hopeless to try, and then continues to use the interplay between climate, economics, human behavior, the biome, the water cycle, and predicts concrete predictions. He must be one of those big brains that we should just shut up and listen to.
I have an uncle who knows a lot more facts about climate change than I do, and uses them to great effect in arguing that its not real.
My uncle is also an idiot.
I can admit when I don't grasp something. But I'm not going to defer to someone else who says that it's incomprehensible to anyone but them. A statement like that should set your bullshit detector off immediately, unless you like being sacrificed atop a pyramid.
It only takes a couple days of temperature being inhospitable for the plants and animals we rely on to die en mass.
The resulting food shortages will destroy humanity in parts around the world. This will effect advanced and primitive economies alike.
The effect of elevation on climate is especially interesting for those looking for a viable place to live at 600 ppm CO2 levels: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333837663/figure/fi...
- A lack of clarity about actual problems. This list conflates too many things together that aren't existential threats and are aspirational values. The actual root-cause threats are climate change, politi-economic inequality, industrial meat & dairy agriculture, antibiotic resistance, pandemics, and war.
- Chicken-little learned helplessness attitude, excusing inaction.
- Lack of leadership resulting in Tragedy of the Commons from unwillingness to be the "adult".
Overpopulation isn't an existential threat. It's been bemoaned since the 1960's. It's bullshit.
The world is already at 30% generation of all energy from renewables and climbing rapidly.
FF extraction won't be as "necessary" and will be replaced by alternative products and processes.
Reality is the reality. Making the future better will take being honest, making difficult decisions soon, and enforcing specific policies to avoid real catastrophes, not academic ones.
At least in the industrialized nation states, an interruption of the supply with food or other basic goods, may be even a significant disturbance, will lead to collapse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard