This article raises a lot of suspicion, and it has many of the hallmarks of bad reporting.<p>- The Vice piece is shallow and didn't investigate the claims and arguments of the cited article (And what's with the authors photo? Is Zing Tsjeng really serious about this?);<p>- The author of the paper, Jem Bendell, is not an academic in climate science nor in sustainability, but in "Sustainability Leadership", a field in Management;<p>- The paper reads like an opinion piece.<p>- The paper, as provided in the author's website, makes reference to the journal to which it was intended in the past tense, which raises the question of whether it is the original or an edited version;<p>- Many of the references cited in the paper are from news websites, and only a few are proper scientific articles: I was expecting a lot, lot more;<p>And the worst red flag of them all:<p>- After being rejected by a not exactly relevant yet serious journal, the author made it public nonetheless, hinting at some form of censorship of an inconvenient opinion.
Don't let tales of a collapse of civilization lead to an immediate collapse of your judgement and focus.<p>This article is full of doom and gloom. Many predictions are made, and they are conveniently quoted as someone else's:<p>"Some of the people who believe that we face inevitable
extinction believe that no one will read this article because we will see a collapse of civilisation in the next twelve months when the harvests fail across the northern hemisphere" (written around 12 months ago)<p>I for one won't hold my breath.
Until we include the cost on the environment within the cost of our goods things will not change. When we do we will encourage a wave of environmentally friendly innovation. It will take a lot of courage for any government to do this.<p>I’ve started the seed of a small political party in the UK which will push for Envionmental Economics - <a href="https://weOptimise.it" rel="nofollow">https://weOptimise.it</a> / <a href="https://twitter.com/weoptimiseit" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/weoptimiseit</a>
I came to the realisation that human world is fucked about 3 years ago. Haven't seen anything in the last few years to change my mind. We might be able to push it a few decades into the future but there will be a reckoning as the real choice is to let a few hundred million die today or few billion in the future.
Direct links to the paper:<p><a href="http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf</a><p>(audio version)
<a href="http://lifeworth.com/DeepAdaptation.mp3" rel="nofollow">http://lifeworth.com/DeepAdaptation.mp3</a>
> <i>How near? About a decade.</i><p>Okay Al. Still waiting on that dramatic increase in frequency and ferocity of hurricanes, but I guess I'll add this one to my calendar.<p>> <i>ou only needed to step outside during the record-breaking heatwave last year to acknowledge that 17 of the 18 hottest years on the planet have occurred since 2000.</i><p>Wildly untrue. Perhaps if you add "since records began in 1850" it could maybe be valid.
Just my two cents: Climate change threats are being over-hyped by those people/companies who stand to benefit from "green" energy/society.<p>These orgs are spreading propaganda to high-school teens by telling them lies sprinkled with a bit of truth and causing them to protest because the teens on average cannot make a better judgment then people with decades of experience.<p>Nothing is going to happen. I for one wont hold my breath.
I'm currently about half-way through "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells [1] and it comes to similar conclusions: its too late to stop this thing, it's going to be very bad, and it's going to happen sooner than you think. Its a very hard thing to honestly face, and I'm not entirely sure I have yet.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586541/the-uninhabitable-earth-by-david-wallace-wells/9780525576709/" rel="nofollow">https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586541/the-uninhabi...</a>
It might be that big-picture thinking and the future, generally, is terrifying rather than climate change in particular.<p>It is challenging to construct a realistic long-run scenario of a happy future that is sophisticated and meaningful. And at the global scale even the recent past sounds pretty horrific if you spell it out. The fact that the global situation is improving rapidly doesn't balance out the fact that being subjected to a 1950s standard of living would be potentially abusive today (no mobile, no connection to the internet, questionable access to goods, etc, better or worse depending on where you live).<p>Part of the trouble I have with climate change as an imminent emergency is there are actually quite a few civilisation-level threats at the 200-500 year timeframe. Resource depletion, progress in weapons research, fragility of logistic chains to disruption, disease. The actual impacts of climate tend to be contributing aggravations to what are honestly concerns more driven by overpopulation.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...</a><p>When the dinosaurs lived the world was 10 celcius warmer. ~200 million years later the world was 14 celcius warmer than today. Life thrived worldwide. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene</a><p>Global warming is good for the earth.<p>Every 200,000 years there's a huge spike in warming. Which if you look at: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:Carbon_Diox...</a><p>Notice the CO2 circle showing the last 1000 years; but if you circled the entire green line from about ~20,000 years. There's huge spike that couldn't possible be human activity.<p>It doesn't even appear like we are in control.
I used to get depressed thinking that I wouldn't live long enough to see the sci-fi future where we're all immortal cyborgs with minds in the cloud.<p>So in a purely selfish sense, I guess "right now is the peak of human civilisation, the future is all melting ice caps and resource wars until we die off completely in 2500" is reassuring?
I've been through similar bouts of lethargy and depression over climate change as described in the article. It can really get overwhelming when thinking of the future to come, what can we do but just try move forwards with our lives?
I’m relaxed about climate change. Photovoltaics have grown at a compounding average rate of 40.5% over the last 20 years, going from 0.566 GW in 1998 to ~512 GW in 2018.<p>World power use (all forms, not just electricity) are currently around 18 TW. At current trends, we exceed this in June 2029. By June 2034, we should be overproducing by a factor of 5, which makes up for the difference between nameplate capacity and actual average output. By 2037 you do that <i>and</i> have enough overproduction you don’t need batteries to store energy at night, just make interconnections between existing power grids worldwide, because you can afford 75% losses (if you want to, which you might not).<p>On the other hand, I am concerned with biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle issues, antibiotics resistance, and non-renewable use of phosphorus.
It is so strange to me the effort people will go to with things like guns to protect themselves from the highly unlikely.<p>Yet we're having these debates about what to do about climate change which is looking very likely.<p>We should be working on it, if we end up being wrong then the very worst case is we've gotten ourselves off our dwindling fossil fuel supply a bit early.