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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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I didn't used to believe in this, and I'm still, say, maybe ambivalent? But I do think there's a real chance that we start seeing some serious shit in this regard in the near future, trends that happen slowly and then all at once.

There's no real chance we start seeing some serious shit - we are already seeing serious shit. 2024 is the hottest year on record, beating out... 2023 for the top spot. Corals all over the world are bleaching and dying and we're already seeing temperature zones marching away from the equator and towards the poles.

I highly recommend the following article, because I think it is the most reasonable take on the issue that I've seen. https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/

I recommend reading 'Apocalypse Never'. The coverage of climate-related injuries to ecosystems in the media is inadequate. Journalists are not neutral at all, nor are they competent.

we're already seeing temperature zones marching away

And? That article itself notes planet used to be much warmer and there were no real issues with that. The fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects are obviously just that- fantasies.

Did you even read the article?

The points you're raising have already been brought up and dealt with. I'm not familiar with Apocalypse Never, but from reading the back of the book and how it talks about climate activism not being effective that's actually a point raised in the article itself:

Protest marches and virtue signaling do nothing to keep the resulting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Nor do the wind farms, rooftop solar panels, and other pork barrel projects that have been marketed so heavily using climate change as a sales pitch Nor, for that matter, do any of the other gimmicks that have been so heavily promoted and praised by corporate media. If you doubt this, dear reader, take a good look at the chart of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and see if you can find any sign that any of these things have slowed the steady increase in carbon dioxide one iota. If the point of the last three decades of climate change activism was to slow the rate at which greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere, the results are in and the activists have failed. Nor is there any reason to think that doing more of the same will yield anything else; what’s that saying about doing the same thing and expecting different results?

Furthermore...

And? That article itself notes planet used to be much warmer and there were no real issues with that.

Compare that to:

Second, an equable climate may sound great in the abstract, but getting there’s not going to be so fun. To begin with, melting the polar ice caps will raise sea levels three hundred feet. While it will take centuries for this process to complete, even the first steps along that route will play merry hob with the global economy, flooding most of the world’s large cities and a vast amount of other real estate, erasing entire nations from the map, forcing mass migrations, crippling ports and other trade facilities, and the list goes on. Meanwhile the weather isn’t simply going to pop right into an equable condition; to judge from what’s currently happening, the climate belts will keep on lurching unsteadily toward the poles a little at a time, causing droughts, floods, famines, and other entertainments. A thousand years from now things may be great, but that’ll be small consolation to you, or to the generations who have to deal with the rest of the change.

If you want to have an actual discussion about the merits of the article and Greer's position I'm here for it 100%, but you have to actually argue against what he's written rather than just some imaginary gestalt of all the articles on the climate you've read in the past. Telling someone that "fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects are obviously just that" doesn't even reach the level of being wrong when the person you are talking to has explicitly criticised apocalyptic fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects in the essay you're trying to attack.

I skimmed it.

world’s large cities and a vast amount of other real estate, erasing entire nations from the map, forcing mass migrations, crippling ports and other trade facilities

And is that a big deal? 'Erasing entire nations from the map and mass migrations' is just history. Unlike the US which has 300 years of not much happening, we've got like 2 millenia of actual history in Europe. It's pretty much mostly forgotten by everyone normal. People are capable of dealing with history. Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history.

Reason I skimmed it is because I find him to be a noise generator.

He's just another primitivist engaged in wishful thinking about how this stinking complex industry he doesn't understand is all going to end, wholly ignoring that heavy industry is the source of state power and as such, indispensable. Short of some devastating bioweapon killing enough people to prevent sufficient populations to survive until the last book rotted, nothing can end industry. Even a devastating nuclear war would only result in a decline to late 19th century level in the unaffected parts of the world, followed by rapid rebuilding.

Greer's problem is that he is just way, way too pompous and takes himself too seriously. Whatever he says that's novel is wrong. Recently he has ticked off a particularly angry British man and .. yeah.

but from reading the back of the book

Well you should read it. It goes over, in sometimes tedious detail, about how the present-day environmental movement evolved. It's a pretty infuriating book and it makes very clear environmentalism is actually not about the environment.

I skimmed it.

You didn't read it and your critiques have no value because you do not understand the position you're attempting to argue against. You're not engaging with the material being presented, and you don't even seem to understand the underlying reasoning. Even beyond that your position is an incomprehensible joke - "Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history." Did you even read your own post? Dying is actually something most people consider to be a problem!

Well you should read it. It goes over, in sometimes tedious detail, about how the present-day environmental movement evolved. It's a pretty infuriating book and it makes very clear environmentalism is actually not about the environment.

Sure, I'm willing to read it - though I probably won't be finished by the time this thread is dead, which is why I gave my reply after reading about the book and not after I'd finished reading it. But John Michael Greer has been making this exact point for decades now! He has written multiple articles explaining why the environmentalist movement has failed, how it failed and what people can do to move on in a world shaped by that failure. He explicitly and overtly attacks a lot of the scams like Goldman Sachs' carbon pricing scheme and even in the essay you refused to read he explicitly points out that the entire environmentalist movement has done absolutely nothing to change the trajectory of carbon emissions.

If you're going to complain about someone being a noise generator, take a look at yourself - you spouted a whole bunch of nonsense because you couldn't even be bothered reading a single essay while expecting me to go read an entire novel.

John Michael Greer is like Zeihan. Someone who says wrong things with great conviction and never apologizes or express remorse at having said that.

If you don't believe me, go back and read his Peak Oil stuff. He has been wrong for decades.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2008-08-31/review-long-descent-john-michael-greer/

I was half convinced that Peak Oil would have required actually investing in coal to liquid and increase oil prices and could cause a slowdown.

Would have been a problem, as it's dirty and investment heavy, requiring coal mining and vast chemical plants of the kind Americans and their provincial subjects aren't really good at building anymore.

Luckily, fracking came into use and Americans turned from net importers into exporters.

This was JMG back in '08

Drawing on the theory of catabolic collapse touched on earlier, Greer next outlines in detail how our predicament is likely to play out during the decades and centuries ahead. Greer’s theory of catabolic collapse—well-known within peak oil circles—shows how civilizations headed for collapse tend to decline in a gradual, downward stairstep of repeated crises and recoveries. They don’t undergo the sudden, catastrophic free fall envisioned by diehard peak oil doomers. This theory makes for truly fascinating reading, and is included in its entirety as an appendix.

How will our own society’s catabolic collapse proceed? Greer sees us on the verge of a couple of decades of economic contraction, chronic energy shortages, declining public health, political turmoil and vanishing knowledge and cultural heritage. This crisis period, he predicts, will be followed by a respite of perhaps 25 years or so, during which industrial civilization’s newfound relief from the lavish energy demands of universal motoring and electrification, climate-controlled buildings, modern medicine and other present-day amenities will buy it a little breathing room. But this respite will, in turn, be followed by another round of crises that will rid our civilization of further layers of social complexity, and so on.

Eventually, the developed world will assume an agrarian lifestyle built around local communities and sustainable resources. But this change will happen so slowly that no one alive today will be around to witness the end result. Thus, Greer maintains, our energies should be focused not on surviving the end of industrial civilization, but on making it through the imminent crisis period that will be but one brief interval within that larger context.

It's hard to overstate how absurd this is.

which industrial civilization’s newfound relief from the lavish energy demands of universal motoring and electrification

Without electricity, everything gets a 100x less convenient and harder. Even if somehow oil production collapsed and we returned back to street cars and trains and expensive EVs, electricity could never go away. Without it you're back in 1850s.

Nobody can afford to stop making electricity.

I'm going to raise the flag again by saying we can massively prevent the impact we, as a species, have on the climate if we nuke every single industrializing nation and ensure nobody ever goes past subsistence farming. During COVID, China saw relatively clear, pollution-free skies.

I mean that's a non starter, especially when the climate feel-gooders realize how it looks when you notice all the people that would have to accept an energy-poor non-industrialised serf future are various shades of brown, but, you know. The planet's at stake.

Perhaps so, but at those times there probably weren't cities of millions of people lying more or less at sea level.

There are entire countries built below sea level now.

If the sea level were to raise by 50 m over a few centuries, people could deal with that.

There would have to be some sort of discontinuous break for climate change to have a serious effect on human civilization.

People keep on predicting that climate change will cause more famines and storm deaths. But, over time, human deaths from famine and storms have been going down, not up. Human capacity to deal with the climate increases far faster than the climate changes. Unless the world deindustrializes, there will never be another Bhola cyclone which killed 300,000 people in 1970.

Climate change predictions often call for a 1 or 2% decrease in total global GDP due to climate change in the next 50 or 100 years. Frankly, this is small potatoes. And furthermore, it's quite easy and cheap to mitigate the worst effects of climate change if we cared to do so. (We don't).

That's not to say climate change isn't bad. It is. It will have many negative consequences for the natural environment and may cause some species to go extinct. This is bad and we should strive to prevent it.

But humans will be fine.

The Migration Period starting 300 AD ultimately resulted in the fall of Rome and a massive decrease of technology on the European continent. A billion people moving away from the equator (after the first wet bulb events), and later several billion people moving away from coastal areas (after they're sick and tired of rebuilding after getting flooded every year) easily have the capacity to "seriously effect human civilization".

It doesn't have to. Unprecedented development of infrastructure for those people and an unthinkable change of culture (both of the migrants and the native people they join) could mitigate this. So could unprecedented violence at the borders.

I'm a pessimist. The west doesn't have the capacity for either of those options.

Yeah, climate change isn't a "threat of human extinction" type of problem (unless we're missing something big and Venusy, which is far-fetched), but I could see 1 or 2% decrease in total global GDP being a serious underestimate. The theme I keep seeing in climate change predictions is devaluation of land. A large number of major coastal cities having to simultaneously move inland would be pretty bad, even if it was a relatively gradual process.

A large number of major coastal cities having to simultaneously move inland would be pretty bad, even if it was a relatively gradual process.

It's going to be very gradual on a human time scale. How gradual? Think 1 meter of sea level rise in the next 100 years, assuming no mitigation.

The cities won't move, but lower lying areas will see marginally less development over time, so the population center of the cities will gradually shift inland. In extremely valuable areas like lower Manhattan, there won't be any retreat, just more money spent on land reclamation. Amsterdam and New Orleans are already below sea level.

Think 1 meter of sea level rise in the next 100 years, assuming no mitigation.

Sea level has been rising (possibly slower than that) for several thousand years. We know this because there are underwater archaeology sites like Doggerland and Heracleion (that one may be more a matter of localized geology) where people at one time lived on dry land.

Admittedly the rates of rise may be changing, but assuming a null hypothesis of completely static sea levels seems wrong too.

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