Question about doubt and the future of the world

Discussion in 'The big picture' started by greeny, Dec 10, 2006.

  1. greeny

    greeny Junior Member

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    Since I bought this laptop about seven months ago I have been on a huge learning curve about the future of our world.
    Now I find myself not being able to resist mentioning to almost everyone I meet that times are going to change regarding climate, oceans, oil and the economy. It seems to me that there is an urgent need to inform people ( I feel that my own situation is pretty ok for self sufficiency.)

    I have bought the videos the Power of Community and The End of Suburbia and intend to show them in town. Fantastic dvds...
    But the responses I get from a lot of people are " Oh we expected the whole system to end 30 years ago and it hasn't......" shrug

    They don't believe it will happen and I start to worry that perhaps I am over-reacting. I have my own self doubts because I am new to this information, and have not been reading that much until this year.

    Could I be wrong? Is there a way that we have become over pessimistic
    with peak oil?
    By the time it runs out could there will be sufficient alternatives?

    Could I be wrong that the economy is heading towards an amazing implosion?

    I just told a friends son and his new family that they should try to live in a place which did not depend on fossil fuels for essentials like heating. He didnt want to hear it and I wonder if I am putting people under uneeded stress.
    Help me people do you have doubts too? :)
     
  2. Richard on Maui

    Richard on Maui Junior Member

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    There have been doomsayers forever. The evidence right now however is extrememly compelling that something is going give in a pretty catastrophic way.
    I think the best way to prepare is to focus on positive solutions, which are good things to do in their own right, whether or not the planet is about to meltdown. Remember to enjoy the beauty of every day and every moment. Let that be your motivation to do good.
     
  3. Honeychrome

    Honeychrome Junior Member

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    I agree with Richard- focus on positive solutions. Personally I find that working toward a lifestyle that is more self-sufficient, sustainable, low impact and less consumerist is more fun, satisfying and interesting than the mainstream alternative. Fast food, shopping and passive entertainment are about the most BORING things in the world and I really think a huge number of people live a life of those things because they've been made utterly unaware of the alternatives. And you can't 'talk' them into considering something different- people tend to shut down when presented with dire predictions, facts, etc., etc.- the best you can do is lead by example. It may take a while, but often you'll be surprised and people who seemed utterly disinterested will start to ask questions. I'm speaking on an individual basis of course- if you look at it in terms of whole large segments of society you'll get overwhelmed and depresses (at least I do!).
     
  4. sz

    sz Junior Member

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    Greeny - I know how you feel!

    Even though it sounds like you've talked to way more people about the subject than I have, I've had pretty much the same results. No one wants to hear about it. The best response you usually get is being brushed off, but some people become downright angry.

    It's *hard* to engage an unpleasant reality until you have to. That's how I feel about it. I have to forcibly remind myself that the world I live in is probably going to change - and dramatically - in my lifetime due to declining oil reserves and environmental problems. I don't really want to; it forces me to face a lot of unpleasant possibilities, but I don't really see any alternatives.

    Sometimes I wonder if I'm overly concerned about the matter. I think it's like Richard says - there have been doomsayers forever, but the evidence on peak oil and environmental changes is pretty strong. I think that is what makes our worry for the future much more significant than, for example, the decades-long cold-war communist nuclear-annihilation fear we endured here in the US.

    In the end, the best thing you can do is to focus on positive actions. You can take care of your own needs and those of your family. You can choose to live a lifestyle that should help you survive these problems if and when they do occur. You can dis-engage from the corporate monster that is eating our lives, 40 hours at a time.

    Even if *none* of these predictions that we fear came true, you'd still be living a life that tread lightly on the environment, and you'd get to have the satisfaction of being more directly engaged with the natural world, with supplying your own needs, and with leaving your small patch of earth in better shape than how you found it.

    sz
     
  5. gardenlen

    gardenlen Group for banned users

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    yes focus on the positives and especially in your little picture, you change the things in your life and encourage by example (yes a slow row to hoe i know but the only way) and not a lot are doing this. in the big picture there are so very few of us who have any idea of change and what can be done to turn things around, the masses simply have no idea hey?

    their heads are filled with sport, soapies and simply trying to manipulate the system so they can live from day to day.

    try to control and change only what you can control and change, there are lots that you have no control and very little influence over. we are pensioners on a gov' pension having bit difficulties simply living as the gov' dilutes the spending ability of waht we are given in favour of encouraging girls from the age of 12 to have babies by offering them huge bonuses.

    so with that in mind we try to set our system up for our needs, you know grow waht we can cut back water and power use where we can and re-use especially water. and for those of us on the pension these 2 commodities of right (as i see it for a modern compassionate society) are going to get a whole lot more expensive, if society isn't that way then our communities are going to ahve these people trying to live without using power and water just so they can buy food.

    len
     
  6. macree

    macree Junior Member

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    Hey Greeny,
    I agree with all of the above - and if my lifestyle changes to be more sustainable and tread more lightly were in response to what turns out to be a big con - that's ok too - cause it's important anyway.

    There is too much info on too many aspects of climate change, biosphere destruction, peak oil etc from credible sources for me to do other than take it seriously. I've found catching up with people who think similar and into doing something about it (through the Relocalization Network, ALS and here) has been good to keep my faith that there are people out there working for positive change.

    Cheers
    Ree
     
  7. hedwig

    hedwig Junior Member

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    the reason why the Stern report had so much sucess is because it was positive. It said that people has to be creative invent new things and so on. Even if it did not tell the whole truth - better 80%people cahnging their livestyles lat's say 20% than 5% 100%.

    Here in Autralia people tend to search individual solutions too the prroblem like growing vegetables DYO water heaters and so on. Very important.

    But meanwhile politicians do what they like. I miss very much all these huge demonstratins, occupations of building sites and so on. It is so difficult even discuss something political, they don't react.

    I think both ways are important: go on with your permie livestyle but go out as well! Organize Fight!
     
  8. heuristics

    heuristics Junior Member

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    Greeny - the people who say they were told the world was ending 30 years ago are right - the evidence and key indicators of global climate change and peak oil were becoming obvious in the 70s.

    In Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth he uses the old frog in boiling water analogy - you know, put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it'll jump right out, put a frog in lukewarm water and turn up the heat, it'll stay put and cook.

    We've now had 30-40 years to DO SOMETHING in terms of changing environmental practices and developing oil energy alternatives.

    I have just procured my own copy of An Inconvienent Truth yesterday and have already watched it five or six times.

    It is scary to understand how much of what was theory and conjecture 15 years ago, 5 years ago, 1 year ago is REALITY now in every news bulletin that goes to air every night.

    """We"" dont know how to read the warning signs. Every single news bulletin carries some snippet that "proves"global warming or Peak oil, but the segments aren't packaged or presented that way. We have to learn how to read the sub-text.

    The people who shrug their shoulders with indifference dont understand time. 30 years in terms of global time is not even one nano-second of a nano-second.
    WE think 30 years is a long time - but it is not even 1/2 of an average lifetime.
    AS Al Gore says, in the space of one average "BabyBoomers" average lifetime (1948?-2025??)
    the world has gone from 2billion people to 9billion people. All sorts of resources like water, soil, forests have been depleted and despoiled.

    People get angry with you because at the level of our "collective unconscious" we all KNOW the truth when we meet it. And the truth is the current paradigm of corporate greed and political corruption and individual indifference has destroyed this planet in pretty much just one century.

    Think about the world in 1907 and now.... is that much change over just 100 years fast or slow??? Its 650,000 years since the last ice age, so I say change in the last century has been mind-stunningly fast!
    I have photos of my property from the 70s, 80s, 90s and early 2000s. Almost unrecognisable. Never has it been so dry. OK, one drought is not climate change, but it is evidence that conditions can and do change astonishingly fast.

    Change in nature is not linear. There are ups and downs peaks and troughs.
    But the trend is what we should study.
    The trends evident over the past 30 years are terrifying.

    The people who dont want to listen to you expect some sort of big bang fireworks conclusion to the end of the world, but in truth we are frogs in a pot, slowly slowly boiling to oblivion.
     
  9. RobWindt

    RobWindt Junior Member

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    Snipped from https://www.casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/

    My Children's Century Part I
    ...My oldest child was born in 2000, my youngest in 2005. We are a long lived folk, and if they are fortunate, they might well live to see 2100. A child born in 1900 who died in 2000 might have lived through scores of wondrous things - beginning without electric lights or running water, riding in horse-pulled buggies, and ending driving a car, using a computer and living in a world where almost anything seems possible. For my children, born right around the turn of the 21st century, the experience, if we do not arrest climate change, will be very nearly the reverse of that of the child born in 1900. That is, in every way my children's lives will be poorer, sadder, less promising and more dangerous as they approach 2100. This is the exact opposition of what parents want for their children. And yet, that is the world we are bestowing upon them.

    I do not miss the irony that my children, because of their number and the culture they are living in are contributing to the problem - despite the fact that we consume significantly less than the average family, my children contribute much more to global warming than almost any children in the world. In October of 1999, when the six billionth person on earth was born, she was declared to be a little girl from India. I was pregnant with Eli then, and it is worth noting that that little girl's future is endangered in part by the ordinary luxuries of my children's lives. We should not forget her presence as we go through this century - in fact, it is very important that we not. Wealthy nations are literally killing poor people by the millions by our choices, and climate change is poised to accelerate this - it may well be that we are killing other people's children by the billions by the middle of the century, all so we can have our cars and our computers. We need to start calculating the cost to other people of our actions.

    I would also remind readers that this assumes that the *only* crisis that faces us is climate change, which is almost certainly not the case. I will discuss how things like over fishing, peak oil, peak natural gas and agricultural depletion complicate this picture in a second part to this essay, coming up when I get around to it. But for today, let us just pretend that climate change is the only thing that matters, and that we can vault ahead a few years, to 2025.

    Eli will be 25 years old, and the young woman from India will be 26. Now both Romm and Monbiot, and most climate change science I have read agrees on one thing - that the climate change we anticipate up to 2025 is already pre-ordained. There is little or no chance that we can avoid this much disaster. We've already done the deed, and we must live with the consequences. It is possible we could make things worse than this, if we work hard enough, but whether or not we change our lives, we are committed to this level of transformation. It may be that we are even further committed that that - a 2 degree change in world temperatures is considered to be a point at which things begin to take on a life of their own. Soils are less able to absorb carbon at high temperatures. Permafrost in the northern hemisphere begins to melt and emit carbon and methane. The Antarctic ice sheet begins to be seriously affected. The rainforest begins to die and our ability to capture carbon is significantly reduced. Polar Bears are probably toast. And the Potsdam Institute has argued that there is at least 30% chance that we have *ALREADY* exceeded this limit, according to Monbiot. But I will choose to stay within optimistic limits, and assume that if we work hard and fast, we can prevent the worst of things.

    When Eli is 25, the world will be considerably different than the one I was born into, particularly for coastal residents. I grew up very near the ocean, and the ocean shaped my and my thinking. My friend Laura Yim, from Hawaii, once argued that people who live near water really do think differently. And I think there's some truth there, although I can't quantify it. But in 2025, coastal areas will be much more dangerous places than the ones we live in presently. We'll most likely be having hurricane seasons like the one in 2005 on a regular basis. Virtually all of Eli's beloved grandparents live near the coast, and all will be in their 70s and 80s in 2025. It is extremely likely that none of them will be able to age in place in their homes, because the hurricanes will be too frequent and elderly people are often unable to do what is necessary to escape them. By 2020, no matter what we do, world sea levels will have risen significantly, and the Greenland ice sheet will probably have melted - whether we want it or not, we can no longer avoid that disaster. There are currently 75 million people in danger from storm surges - that number is predicted to rise steadily over the next decades to 200 million. Imagine an evacuation and dispersal and rebuilding project on the scale of New Orleans first every five years, then every 3, and finally, the abandonment of the most dangerous places, no matter how much we value them.
    In addition, rising sea levels will mean that countries like Bangladesh that are below sea level will begin to be reclaimed steadily by the sea. 1/3 of Bangladesh will probably be underwater by 2025 Millions of people will be refugees from the sea, including, most likely, our own parents. But our parents will have the luxury of escaping to family - relocating millions of desperately poor people displaced by sea level rises will far more horrible. Monbiot observes,
    “...the connection between cause and effect seems so improbable. By turning on the lights, filling the kettle, taking the children to school, driving to the shops, we are condemning people to death. We never choose to do this. We do not see ourselves as killers. We perform these acts without passion or intent” (Monbiot, 22)

    One of the consequences of our actions is that 2025, each of us in the first world who hangs on to our luxuries and priveleges will be, documentably, killing people by our actions on regular basis. We do this now to a degree, but the level of our homicides will rise demonstrably. I don’t know if Eli, who is autistic, will be able to understand that he is part of a people who every year will, by their choices and without passion, kill more people than Hitler. What kind of person will that make us? How will we view ourselves/ How will we live with ourselves? What kind of children will that create, when we have become unconscious monsters?

    As sea levels rise, salt water will contaminate many of the coastal cities of the world's drinking water. Mumbai, Bangkok, Lima, Tokyo, Miami - all of them depend on groundwater sources that are not so very much above sea level. It may well be by 2025 that some of those cities are rendered uninhabitable, and the populations too turned into refugees. Certainly, island nations like Tuvalu and native peoples in Alaska will have lost their homes entirely. Try, for a moment, to identify. Imagine you live in a place where your home, and your family's home, where the graveyards of your deceased family members and your whole world and community are. Now imagine that because we can't stop burning fossil fuels far away, that whole world is going to be destroyed. Is it hard to imagine? Well, wait a few years and you won't have to if you live in an American coastal city.

    Some 10% of the animal species in the world will be extinct. Eli has trouble with language - but he knows Zebra, Rhinoceros, Tree Frog, Polar Bear, Walrus. There is an excellent change that 2025, some of those animals will no longer live in the world with us. They will be gone forever, as mythical as the dinosaurs that so fascinate my children.

    We can expect more heat waves, and more drought over the next few decades. In the southwest, according to Elizabeth Kolbert, who derives the figures from NASA, the probability of severe summer drought every summer in the southwest approaches 100% in climate models. The Midwest is nearly 50%. Much of Australia is 75%. We can anticipate that the heat waves will kill more people - yet another reason our now-elderly parents will probably not be able to stay in their own homes, because elderly people, including millions of baby boomers, will be terrifically vulnerable to heat death.

    By 2030, we can expect China to have had grain yields fall by 30%. The same is true in Europe and the US - and since in 2007 we are already eating our grain reserves, we can expect hunger to start affecting people all over the world, including people in the US.

    Drought in many of the world's bread baskets make famine a virtual certainty in some places. Ethiopia is already experiencing famine caused in part by climate change induced drought. A child Eli's age in Ethiopia will go hungry much of the time. I do not know about Eli. The little girl in India will almost certainly experience food shortages, water shortages, disease from water contamination, and massive heat waves. There is a not-insignificant chance that that little girl may not be alive in 2025 because of our actions in the west.

    Whether or not we have famine and drought, by 2025, the world will be under considerable economic stress. Several estimates suggest that we may have to devote up to 30% of the *world's* wealth to remediate the effects of climate change. That means billions and billions of dollars that could have done other things will never be used for bringing safe water to that child in India, or improving access to AIDS treatments in Africa. And it will almost certainly strain the economy of the US, and such strains are never good for disabled people. By 2025, Eli will have aged out of the school services offered to children, and because he is autistic may (or may not) still be unable to live independently. We can expect to see the costs of dealing with global warming take priority over the needs of the most vulnerable people in the US. So my husband and I anticipate that fewer resources will be available for our son, and that we will probably have to both care for displaced parents and also for our disabled child. We adore him, and we do not particularly regard this as burdensome, but we are also very fortunate. For millions of parents who have more disabled children, climate change will almost certainly do them direct, specific harm.

    The rest of this is a little more speculative, but not very. It is possible that we will succeed in stopping climate change, but as I noted earlier, there is a 3 in 10 chance that it is already too late - that we're already committed to our 2050 future. And a recent report in Science https://climateprogress.org/ demonstrates that we may have significantly underestimated the rate at which sea levels rise. We are already nearly 1/2 way there 2 degree warming - we have only a decade, at most, to reduce our emissions down by 17 times the amount we were prepared to reduce them under the Kyoto treaty.

    By 2050, the Arctic ice will be gone, and the permafrost will be mostly melted. The world's temperatures will have risen significantly. Simon will be in his late 40s, possibly a father himself, and trying to envision the world his children will grow up in, while struggling (we hope not too much), to care for his aging parents who will be in their 70s and 80s. Simon at five is fascinated by geography, so it is disturbing to know that much of the world that he lives in will be different. Much of Micronesia, for example, will be gone entirely. Major cities that may be abandoned by this point because of repeated flooding and lack of fresh water include Miami, New Orleans, Shanghai, Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kolkata, Mumbai, Karachi, Lagos, Buenos Aires and Lima. The actual shape of the world will be different, as chunks of our land become sea again.

    Simon loves rainforests. He's fascinated by the animals that live in them, and the environment itself. By 2050, enormous parts of the worlds' rainforests will become savannah, as the heat and increasing drought turn them into grasslands. Thousands of species that live only in rainforests may well die. Simon knows all their names now - Tapir, Quetzal, Gorilla, Capybara... I wonder, when they aren't there anymore, will he still know their names? The loss of the rainforests will accelerate global warming, and displace millions of indigenous people. It will be the end of medicines and plants that can live only in that environment. Up to 1/3 of the planet's total biodiversity will be gone.

    Almost 2/3 of the world's population relies on rice, which likes warmth and humidity, but not too much. Rice cannot flower (and thus set the seed we eat) at above 35 degrees Celsius. Rice yields fall by 15 percent with every degree of warming according to the International Rice Research Institute. By 2050, with between 3 and 4 degrees of warming, rice yields may well have fallen by 1/2, putting more than half the world’s population of people at risk of hunger and starvation.

    Our own food depends on adequate water and reasonable temperatures, both of which are likely to be in short supply. A recent analysis of the potential consequences of global warming for California suggests that by mid-century, much of California will be experiencing severe water famine. Simon has a cousin, Jake, in LA. Will Jake have anything to drink? Will he, like children in India, walk each day to fill his bucket from an contaminated well, or wait for the water trucks to arrive in the hot sun? The same report argued that California's agriculture will be largely dead by then. Will Californians be the new Okies, abandoning their state? California has done more than almost any state in the nation to minimize emissions, but it has not been enough.

    Much of the western half of the US will no longer be able to produce food - so the east will have to take up the slack. Will there be enough to around for Simon and his family? Or will everyone sit, watching the harvests and praying? Wars are often fought over scarce resources - water has already fueled wars. Will Simon watch his children march away to fight over food or water somewhere? Where will I pray for my grandchildren to come home from?

    The young woman born just before the turn of the millennium in India might even be a grandmother by now, if she still lives, despite the floods and the water shortages, the hunger and heat waves. She and Simon will be thinking about the future. What will they see. Will they have much hope? Certainly, they will not be able to dream, as parents do, that their children’s future will be better than their own lives.

    In 2075, Isaiah will be 72 years old, and he will certainly be elderly in a world much less friendly to seniors than the one his grandparents aged into. Food shortages, if we do not stop climate change, are likely to be widespread. By 2075, tropical diseases may make it to our area. Malaria was once endemic as far north as Connecticut - it will be back. Millions of children worldwide die from malaria every year - there is a chance that one of my great-grandchildren will be among them.

    Isaiah loves to visit his grandparents in Boston and New York City. By 2075, both cities may well have to be abandoned. The odds are that Isaiah will never take his children on a ride on the swan boats, or to the museum of natural history if we don't stop climate change. The history of those places, and a million places we value around the world will probably be gone. There may be no British Museum, no Sydney Opera House any longer. My great-grandchildren will learn about the places that many of the most important events of their history took place - but they will never see them, and those places will be very different than they are today.

    Isaiah may tell his grandchildren fairy tales about creatures that once were - snow leopards and polar bears, walruses and penguins. They will most likely be only stories. And too, he will tell them the fairy tales of what it was like to never be hungry, or too hot, sick from tropical diseases or to have economic security. His grandchildren will dream of snow - even in upstate NY. The costs of dealing with climate change now begin to exceed entire GNPs. Nations go bankrupt just trying to feed and house their people - the estimated costs of facing climate change now permanently curtail the economy, meaning that millions of people struggle to get by. Famine is widespread all over the world.

    Much of the ocean is now too acidic and too depleted to support life. Back when Simon was in his 40s, most harvestable fish in the world had already been eaten. Now the very capacity of the ocean to produce life of any kind is being eroded. The coral reefs are gone.

    And Isaiah has grown up and into old age in a world where literally billions of people have died because of the actions of human beings who did not care enough to stop it. How will that change him? What kind of person will he be, knowing that he is the product (and the victim) of a society full of people who knew that we were killing children in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, and knew that we were killing our own grandchildren, and still didn't stop. I would hope that my children would love and remember me at the end of my life, and after my death. I wonder if we can hope for that, given the world we are bestowing upon them. Will they understand that we didn't really mean it? I don't think I would.

    At the end of this century, in 2100, Asher, my baby who has just taken his first steps, will be 95 years old. G-d willing , he will still be around to remember the world he was born into. By this point, sea levels may have risen enough to inundate every nation up to 30 miles from the coast. Much of his past and his family's past will have been given back to the seas. The world's temperature may have risen as little as 6 or as much as 11 degrees. If it is the latter, there is a good chance that the question Asher will face at the end of his life is the question of whether anyone will be alive by the end of the next century. The world will be as warm as it was at the time of the Permian extinction, when much of the planet's life suddenly died off.

    The climate of upstate NY will probably be similar to the climate of Georgia, and may be as warm as south Florida, but as dry as Israel. The glorious green lushness of the place I live may well be gone, and Asher and his family will attempt to feed themselves from a place utterly different than the one he was born into. Much of the earth will be desert. There will certainly be fewer people and less wealth.

    His world will bear less resemblance to the one we live in that any of us can imagine. Who knows what the biggest losses will be, what my sons will remember and mourn. Or perhaps they will not remember - the last time temperatures rose so much virtually all of the four footed animals on earth died. Perhaps there will be no one left to remember. I do not know. But we must work under the assumption that the worst case scenario is possible, and that whatever we must do to avoid this is worth the short-term consequences.

    The price may be high. We may have to give up our air conditioners, our 70 degree winter homes, our vacations, our private cars, some of our wealth and a good deal of our comfort. But so what? Isn't it worth it?

    I will discuss solutions and the impact of things like peak oil in my sequel, forthcoming. In the meantime, the best thing that anyone can do is cut radically back on your emissions, consumption, driving, and other carbon behavior, and then *TELL PEOPLE* - tell your government, tell your friends, tell your neighbors. Explain why, and you would choose, voluntarily, to have less so that others can live.

    Posted by jewishfarmer
    https://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/ ... art-i.html
     

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