I'm afraid the problem will fix itself soon enough. WW3 could be around the corner according to the people behind the Doomsday Clock. Climate change will cause famine, natural disasters and mass migrations. Poverty, overpriced health care and a lack of common social structure (every man for himself) will lower the life expectancy again after decades of increase.
The big problems are going to be when unstable weather patterns destroy food harvests and we end up with huge famines and wars over food crops and liveable habitats. Currently the world's food production is very much just-in-time, so there's going to be hungry people. Civilisation is only ever three meals away from collapse.
- Increasing disruption caused by climate change. Extreme weather events, environmental refugees, conflicts over water, famine.
- Antibiotics becoming increasingly ineffective
- Living in a massively connected world. Emergent diseases, trans-national political movements, terrorism, weakened states pushed to the point of collapse.
50 years:
- Severe disruption caused by climate change. Large-scale movement of people and animals from uninhabitable areas, frequent resource conflicts.
- Food shortages caused by habitat depletion. Famine and death. Breakdown of international trade.
- Pressure towards authoritarian government systems as a response to the above. Fascism, militarism, large-scale conflict.
I'm not convinced any of these things will be caused by demand shocks and material scarcity due to overpopulation, but rather, if at all, through coordination and resource allocation failures (politics, war, corruption).
I'm afraid the world is falling apart. Global inequality and poverty are growing. Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the top 1%. Areas of the United States are even resembling the 3rd world now. The Middle East situation is a quagmire from which is hard to see a way out of and getting worse. A superpower confrontation seems possible either with Russia or China. Arms trade is really massive and the threat of nuclear extinction still hangs over us. Lastly we're destroying hope for decent survival with global warming.
There's going to be global famines within my lifetime and a refugee crisis measurable in the hundreds of millions of people. I would say the death toll is unfathomable, but the IPCC makes it very clear that countries worth of people will die.
The Hell I see is the Hell the science has determined is all-but certain: the next 80 years will be a series of tragic trending videos, distant, until it directly affects _you_.
You could argue that the chaos is already starting.
My faith in humanity is so low at this point that I expect the solution could just as easily end up being global conflict that significantly decreases the population, rather than actually fixing anything. Poor countries will suffer terribly long before rich countries give a flying fart about it.
Id imagine its going to be a global phenomenon, global warming, dwindling resources leading to more wars. Not sure how we can infinite growth our way out of this
These threats will probably add up together. When you have economic decline and harder conditions, it's a sure receipe for wars to start.
We already have some local food shortages here and there caused by climate change which are somewhat smoothed out by global trade for now but that's only the beginning right now so I don't know how long it's going to last.
Part of me feels like we are well on our way. His framing is primarily around climate and food supply but if you consider society at large, but if you look through other lenses there's already deeper cracks in the foundation so to speak. More and more people are hitting retirement age without enough, or any, savings. More and more people are living paycheck to paycheck while adding a tad of credit card debt each cycle. When folks can work hard and barely survive, is that really a functioning society? How long before something goes from not functioning well to fully collapsing?
I don’t see complete collapse - but I do see the doom of billions. The security states that have been set up over the past decades, the increased hostility to migration, all of this is a prelude for what inevitably follows, when vast diaspora try to find a better life outside of their bankrupt, climate-change-ravaged countries.
It’s going to get ugly. Being anything but wealthy in a sufficiently wealthy country is going to be uncomfortable, to say the least.
There will be famine, fire, flood, pestilence, and all the rest - but unless we entirely lose our heads, which isn’t impossible but remains less than probable, humanity will go on, chastened and winnowed.
Nah, reading the ipcc reports and predictions, the worst case is a bunch of poor people in poor countries will suffer, and a refugee crisis on the scale of 100-300M will happen, which in turn will trigger wars and diseases that actually kill people. Syria being a good example of what this looks like as it already happened there (exactly as predicted by the ipc almost a decade earlier btw), and according to them, pakistan is next. As for the rich countries, there will be significant infrastructure costs, a nasty realization about border control, but most will be fine. Even countries like the netherlands that are at exceptional risk solved a problem like this in the 15th century.
If by screwed you mean 2% of the population dying due to climate change, and roughly the same amount of total infrastructure damage then sure, were screwed, but its not a civilizational threat.
Not to say it isnt bad, the loss of biosphere and the unique and irreplaceable information it contains is an absolute tragedy.
Probably a more relevant point - war, famine, plague and chaos are still things that happen in 2020. It would be helpful if the population at large accepted that bad things happen in prosperous places and prepare for them.
The climate-driven thing is topical, but you don't need climate change to have a 1 in 1,000 year drought. JIT production would have doomed any society up until around 1800AD and it really hasn't been tested all that well in the last 70 years in wealthy and peaceful nations.
if you look at things like Leningrad siege during WW2, or the mass famine caused from communism, things don't look good...
1. People will resort up to canibalism to survive, and cheat/steal/fight to get some food (ww2 concentration camps)
2. Humanity will have hard time to adapt, and by the time it does, millions will be already dead. (see the mass starvation caused in slow motion in Ukraine by Stalin, and in China by the great leap, and in many african countries)
You're not going to like it, and it's not much of a solution anyway. Time. Many generations and quite possibly civil war or outright war between nation states.
Humanity does not have a very good track record when it comes to learning from the past, so we are set to repeat history a couple of more times before we get it right. Let's hope I'm wrong about this, but the rate at which all the stable parts of the world are de-stabilizing is uncanny.
People keep pointing to studies that prove that the world is becoming less violent but I'm reminded of the sailors proverb that a real storm is preceded by a sense of calm.
If we don't get our act together soon, a climate disaster and millions to billions of ensuing refugees may put a kink in the infinite growth economic model in the next few hundred years.
Interestingly that's similar to one hypothesis as to how the Bronze Age collapsed - climate refugees from a non-man-made disaster destabilizing a complex economy where each civilization relied on another for goods and services.
“Probably ok” doesn’t seem adequate to cover wildfires, large scale storm flooding in areas which weren’t previously prone to it, tropical diseases becoming endemic, etc. We probably won’t have massive famines but we’re definitely going to have cost increases and reduced availability which a lot of people are going to have a hard time with. People who aren’t rich are going to struggle with all of this at the same time, especially when homeowners insurance starts meaning you can’t get a mortgage (or sell your home to someone who’ll need one).
I agree. This is a runaway train. The poor and undeveloped countries are going to have massive drought and starvation. Eventually, the dangers will be real enough to matter. It will also accelerate less rapidly after 1B people die. This is particularly sad as it could be avoided.
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