DOOM, or The Official 2016 US Election Thread
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Just saw your edit. Precisely my thinking.
With climate change I have various thoughts: 1) the planet is robust and can take a lot, 2) ecology has its own rhythms and phases which we can't do much about, for example, the extinction of the dinosaurs, or the Ice Ages, 3) human behaviour (and success) has had an effect on these rhythms, but it's not something that can be solved by Green Campaigns, or recycling, or International Agreements, 4) it could possibly be solved, or improved, or lessened, by technological innovation.
So, in the short term, which is human rather than planetary history, the resurrection of nationalism and religion in its current fighting forms, is more alarming and potentially terminal.
So, in the short term, which is human rather than planetary history, the resurrection of nationalism and religion in its current fighting forms, is more alarming and potentially terminal.
Youre mostly wrong about 1/2/3. We have compressed tens of thousands of years of warming into decades and are now at the brink of a catastrophic transition. The science is very very clear. We are doing this, and if we stop producing carbon at industrial rates it will help enormously.
We can ameliorate or avoid the worst effects by recognising the problem, going onto a war footing and investing - which is where I agree with you, technology is perhaps our only hope.
That is not to say that I dont think nationalism is also a huge threat - though, I would see nationalist authoritianism as the manifestation that needs to be tackled head on.
We can ameliorate or avoid the worst effects by recognising the problem, going onto a war footing and investing - which is where I agree with you, technology is perhaps our only hope.
That is not to say that I dont think nationalism is also a huge threat - though, I would see nationalist authoritianism as the manifestation that needs to be tackled head on.
But I guess 4 depends more upon wasteful human behaviour, the innovations made by the most successful economies, who polute the most. You won't stop Planet Earth from dying one way or the other. The extremes are: do humans destroy themselves with nuclear weapons before the planet dies, or do we find somewhere else to go before the Solar System expires? The rest is details, unless you are religious.
The sun isnt going to burn out for another 3.5 billion years. Anthropogenic warming has the potential to destroy almost all life on earth (and, for all we know, all life in the Universe) within 2 centuries.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
But these civilization-threatening issues are all just different heads of the same monster - or at any rate, they feed into each other in a way that makes it of limited to use to discuss them in isolation. As climate change and population growth makes resources scarcer and scarcer, people are going to get more and more tribal in their struggles to maintain access to the necessities of life. Green-oriented parties are going to be ever more marginalized because they lie overwhelmingly on the social and economic left, which an increasingly nativist and authoritarian electorate is going to be more and more hostile to.
And when I say "nationalism" in the general sense, I think religious fundamentalism can be grouped in with that. Consider the triangulation between Christian fundamentalism in the USA, extreme nativist/white nationalist sentiment and a visceral loathing of science in general and especially climate science, while the corresponding relationship between the petrochemical industry and Islamic fundamentalism in the MENA region has been exhaustively analysed.
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