I’m a climate scientist and I think society will collapse by 2050. I’m preparing

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/scientist-think-society-collapse-by-2050-how-preparing-2637469

by myshpa • 3 years ago

30 59 3 years ago

inews.co.uk

wryoak• 3 years ago

Preparing for society to fail is pretty shameful. It means you’re diverting energy from preventing its failure.

metadat• 3 years ago

https://archive.today/dTU9l

morkalork• 3 years ago

The man is 68 and preparing for an apocalypse for when he's going to be 95?

theonething• 3 years ago

Probably more for his children.

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

According to the article he has a 13 year old, so that would make sense.

fnimick2• 3 years ago

I am hopeful that in the event of the resource wars, I live close enough to a juicy first strike target that I'll be dead before I have to inhabit the hell that will follow.

ssklash3• 3 years ago

I find it hard to argue with his reasoning. Temperatures are rising, we know why, and we are not doing anything about it because too many people make too much money from the status quo. We will most definitely not hit any targets that will meaningfully slow the increase of heating, and society as we currently know it will change, and not for the better.

qeternity2• 3 years ago

because too many people make too much money from the status quo

Yes, this is why. Not because it’s an incredibly hard problem affecting all 8B people on this planet. Glad you sorted it out!

ssklash3• 3 years ago

Hard problems are solved with money and political will. Political will is created with money. Money that is provided by companies who profit massively from the status quo.

fnimick2• 3 years ago

We know exactly how to solve it, but nobody is willing to vote for collective action to give up any of their cushy lifestyle.

Don't believe me? Try to get a bike lane installed in your city at the fraction of the cost of car infrastructure, and see how many death threats you get. I wish I was joking.

version_five3• 3 years ago

People want to use the specter of climate change to play politics and advocate radical socialism instead of solving a technical problem. We could easily go nuclear, sequester carbon, mitigate what changes we can't stop. But that doesn't address anyone's political aims, so instead we have a silly proxy argument between people pretending climate change isn't real and people demanding that other people sacrifice lifestyle and embrace their politics. Until we get past that and address the real issues, nothing will change.

coolThingsFirst• 3 years ago

Absolute fear mongering.

https://fee.org/articles/rejoice-the-earth-is-becoming-green...

ssklash3• 3 years ago

That article says nothing about human society. The Earth will always be just fine. It's us that won't be.

steanne• 3 years ago

http://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia

dekhn• 3 years ago

I would expect algae and cyanobacteria to survive just about anything less than a truly destructive solar-system event (they are photoautotrophs and their nutrient needs are met pretty easily). If algae survives, then tardigrades probably survive too. Wait a billion years and the marine microorganisms will even replenish the oil supplies, too.

myshpa2• 3 years ago

https://skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food-basic.htm

version_five3• 3 years ago

Propaganda and misinformation is apparently ok when it's part of a popular religion?

elijaht• 3 years ago

I mean, not to be morbid, it's hard for me to imagine doing anything but the "easy way out" (suicide of some form) if society does collapse in my lifetime.

My thoughts are based on two points: (1) Much of the richness of my life comes from the comforts of modern society. In a world where all that is ripped away it's hard to imagine having a ton of will to go on. Family would maybe be enough, but I live hundreds of miles away, so it's unlikely I would ever be able to contact them. (2) Anything I can do to prepare tautologically increases my value to raiders/anyone able to use violence on me, and often increases my visibility. If I save and grow seeds, I will have a valuable cache of calories. If I stockpile weapons, I will have a valuable cache of weapons.

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

You'd think the billionaires building their survival bunkers in New Zealand might realize this as well and work a bit harder to prevent the apocalypse, but it doesn't seem to occur to them that at some point their money might not save them.

tuatoru4• 3 years ago

Come the apocalypse, unless those billionaires can each go into the bush by themselves with just a knife, and come back with a dressed deer carcase, their security teams are likely to deem them dead weight and kick them out of the bunkers.

(New Zealanders don't do "respect for authority"; they do "respect for demonstrated ability".)

riidom• 3 years ago

Gain knowledge, not goods. This way you are the valuable good and people need you alive due to your knowledge.

falcolas• 3 years ago

It's funny, Hank Green expressed a very similar attitude at the question of "What would you do in the Zombie Apocalypse?" (which quietly is "What will you do during the collapse of modern society?).

His answer was "I'm going to embrace my destiny and run towards the Zombies. There's no way I want to live in a world that's 80% Zombies and 20% Survivalists."

Replace with 80% struggling-to-survive-poor and 20% sociopaths-with-weapons... and yeah. Pessimism is not the wrong answer IMO.

EDIT: A pre-emptive statement: if you're a survivalist in the collapse of modern society, you have to be (or become) a sociopath. Caring too much about your peers will get you betrayed and killed once the easy supplies are gone.

bryanlarsen• 3 years ago

IPCC and other reputable groups estimate deaths due to climate change at 0.25 - 5 million per year in 2050. That's less than COVID, but in the same ballpark. It's significant, but hardly society collapsing levels.

myshpa2• 3 years ago

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-climate-potential-humanity-dan...

RetroTechie• 3 years ago

Not sure that it will happen, but there's a good chance of unforeseen and/or 2nd order knock-on effects.

A good example: crop failures happening not in some areas once or twice, but simultaneous in several important areas. Potentially taking out a good chunk of an important crop like maize, soy, wheat or similar. A recent study on this:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38906-7

Things can turn ugly pretty quick if people go hungry.

Other possibilities: out of control wildfires across the globe, mass deaths due to a high-humidity heatwave combined with power (read: airco) failure in a big city, another pandemic (or combo of multiple diseases going pandemic), methane releases kicking climate change in overdrive, the list goes on.

Maybe it won't be so bad. Or maybe we've seen nothing yet. But you can't really rule out anything.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 years ago

Globally 30% of food goes to waste, and beef is so inefficient there's easily room for another 5% or more just from that, probably another 5% if you convert ethenol crops back to food for human consumption.

Victory gardens grew 40% of vegetables consumed in the US (back when we got a lot more calories from vegetables, and yes, corn is a vegetable).

It's not going to be one or two crop failures out of nowhere and suddenly we're in WW3.

We are so far away from starving or running out of water that it's hilarious.

Sure, our current way of life is probably not going to continue forever, but there is so much room for easy optimizations, it's outrageous.

tivert2• 3 years ago

> A good example: crop failures happening not in some areas once or twice, but simultaneous in several important areas. Potentially taking out a good chunk of an important crop like maize, soy, wheat or similar. A recent study on this:
...and beef is so inefficient there's easily room for another 5% or more just from that, probably another 5% if you convert ethenol crops back to food for human consumption.
Victory gardens grew 40% of vegetables consumed in the US (back when we got a lot more calories from vegetables, and yes, corn is a vegetable).

I'm skeptical those things address the vulnerability:

1. Can animal feed/ethanol supply chains be shifted quickly enough towards human consumption? Is that food even consumable by humans (e.g. hay is not)?

2. Isn't it unreasonable to assume those food sources are independent of each other? For instance, if there's a major crop failure of maize, wouldn't it affect all maize agriculture (for humans, animals, and fuel)? So the "5%" used for beef production may be much less in the context of crop failure. Similarly, if the climate is bad for conventional agriculture, it's going to be tough on people with gardens, too.

3. A "victory garden" isn't something you can start one day and feed yourself the next. You need seeds (which may be in short supply in this scenario), land (which many people don't have access to), at least half growing season of time, and some skill (which I think is far less common given the shift from rural to urban living).

IMHO, probably the only way to deal with the sudden shock of major crop failures is stockpiling to create slack in the food system. IIRC, many years back I read there was some analysis done that showed the US lacked that slack (something ridiculously short, like 30 days, but that may have been more in the context of nuclear war than crop failures).

kasperni• 3 years ago

We are so far away from starving or running out of water that it's hilarious.

Let me guess, you live a sheltered life in a 1st world country (like most on HN). Others are not so lucky.

"The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that we entered 2022 with 828 million hungry people. This number represents an increase of approximately 150 million hungry people since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic." [1]

https://concernusa.org/news/world-hunger-facts

tuatoru4• 3 years ago

Yeah, this bothered me a lot back in 2012 or so after reading a paper by James Hansen pointing out that one of the chief effects of adding CO2 is to change the shape of the distributions of seasonal temperatures and rainfall

The bell curve gets flatter and wider, so extremes become much more likely, so the risk of simultaneous extremes in two or more regions at the same time, and for consecutive harvests, goes up even more.

From O(1 in a million) in the 1980s, to O(1 in 10) by the 2050s. (Numbers for illustration, not exact, but the change in order of magnitude is about right, I think.)

But then I realised how much fat there is in the global food production system, particularly with biofuels and animal feeds (wheat, soy, maize). It's not likely to be a problem until every other harvest is failing.

moab• 3 years ago

What a ridiculous article. One of the temperature predictions hinges on us burning all of the fossil fuels. Poor article quality to see on HN.

netsharc2• 3 years ago

Reading comprehension much? He's saying "If". My reading is he's not calculating that this will happen.

On the flip side, we're not seeing any slowdowns. Oil companies are already calculating the billions of dollars of future profit they'll get from extracting the oil they know is in their fields, and so far no one is able to get them to stop.

marssaxman• 3 years ago

One of the temperature predictions hinges on us burning all of the fossil fuels

That does seem to be the current plan, insofar as there is any such thing as a plan; fossil fuel consumption continues to increase, year after year.

clay_the_ripper• 3 years ago

His estimates are based on “burning all fossil fuels on earth leading to a 16 degree rise in temperature.”

By his reasoning, if all we do is figure out how to grow enough crops by 2050, this disaster will be mostly averted.

This seems trivially easy if the alternative is total societal collapse and the death of all mankind.

Once it’s in rich people’s best interest to fix the problem, it’ll get fixed. Rich people don’t want to get eaten in the apocalypse, and total societal collapse would hit the richest the worst (most to lose when money is meaningless). By rich, I am not just talking about Billionaires. Americans earning a median wage are rich by global standards.

Not convincing at all.

tuatoru4• 3 years ago

He is expecting, and preparing, for widespread riots by 2050. The riots will begin, he says, as they have throughout history, when we run out of food.

Except, we (the rich world) won't run out of food. About a third of the global maize (corn) crop is used for biofuels and a similarly large fraction of wheat and maize (edit: and soy) is used for animal feed. We may have to go light on meat consumption and ban biofuels (which would be no bad thing anyway).

Places with ineffective government, dense populations, and water scarcity will likely suffer.

Global warming is only one of a number of things we are doing to destroy the global harvest, though. Soil erosion and poisoning (salination and chemical poisoning), groundwater exhaustion, river diversion and damming, annihilation of supporting microbes and insects, ... take away climate change and the picture doesn't change much.

pk-protect-ai• 3 years ago

I am not a climate scientist, but I am aware that many people underestimate the concept of the exponent, with many not even understanding what it means. Preparing for a mass extinction event is impossible, especially when the changes in climate are unpredictable. I am certain about the potential of methane being explosively released from permafrost and oceanic methane hydrates. The changes will occur rapidly. Currently, it is not possible to colonize Greenland. Once the ice shield is gone, colonization will still not be feasible due to the lack of fertile soil. By the time the ice shield disappears, Greenland will have a tropical climate without a biome capable of supporting human life. The same applies to Antarctica.

I believe we may need to create an unshackled AGI that could potentially inherit the Earth from us. However, I question whether we will have sufficient time to accomplish this.

mikestew• 3 years ago

I'm a computer scientist, and though I was well-versed in the intricacies of Y2K, I was not qualified to comment on how or whether computer failures would result in societal collapse.

I don't mean to be trite, but I don't know that being a climate scientist particularly qualifies one more than another on sociological issues. I look to the climate scientist to say "here are the probably climate outcomes...", and to the sociologist to say "...and if that turns out to be true, we can expect society to turn on each other like rats/band together in a community-minded effort to live in harmony."

000ooo000• 3 years ago

We have climate scientists to help us try and predict the future of the climate. For how humans respond in tough times, we have history.

slowmovintarget2• 3 years ago

"Paging Hari Seldon... Would Hari Seldon please come to the front desk."

version_five3• 3 years ago

"Trust experts" has changed in the new religious movement from "trust experts on stuff in their area of expertise" (which largely makes sense) to "trust politicians who have credentials in a narrow specialty who want to tell you how to live". It's just another manifestation of humanity's now unfulfilled needs for religion.

It's funny, this used to be common sense but now we're so far gone we can't talk about it anymore without being labeled heretics.

westcort2• 3 years ago

To be fair, Y2K would have been a major issue, but it was remediated before it became an issue. There may be a narrow window to do that with the dangerous revolution in systems that maintain a habitable climate for humanity, but the remedy is much more expensive than updating computer code.

spandextwins• 3 years ago

Articles like that give science a bad name.

mongol• 3 years ago

I am also of the opinion that a world-wide shortage of food would be the most dire outcome of climate change. I have no idea how likely it would be, but I have imagined that perhaps one year the news would be filled of reports of failing harvest from all over the world. Over the course of a few weeks or months these news would go from being normally serious to really serious. At some point fear sets in and people will hoard food, emptying the stores. After that we are in a new type of civilization, where normal structures break down and new appear.

What I don't know is the likelyhood of global harvest failures. Bad conditions in one place should compensate in others, perhaps, avoiding a full-on disaster? But if we are unfortunate, it may quickly become every nation for themselves, but a level of panic we haven't seen before.

netsharc2• 3 years ago

But if we are unfortunate, it may quickly become every nation for themselves.

The EU was supposed to be a union, but when COVID started getting really bad in Italy, what did Austria do? They shut the border to Italy. I do fear it will be every nation for themselves, just like individuals are selfish and worry first about their survival, it'll be nations/tribes doing the same (and the worse things get, even tribes will start in-fighting). I say tribes, I feel like violence against anyone who looks different will worsen with scarcity.

I feel like leaders of the rich countries are just closing their eyes to the global disaster (because trying to make a more ecological world is a vote loser, just look at Macron's attempt at taxing fuel more), they're probably hoping there'll be some magical solution, and that before that, if the people are going to die, it'll be the poor of the world without bothering them them too much...

wackycat• 3 years ago

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?

taylodl• 3 years ago

This has happened many, many, many times throughout history. What happens is the status quo is shifted, usually via revolution. All people are doing is identifying the stressors causing the next big revolution. Society will endure because we're social animals. The power structure will be different. You'd think those in power would be wary of this, but throughout history they always seem to be caught by surprise.

MengerSponge• 3 years ago

Some people are called to a romantic memory of the frontier. Self-sufficiency sounds great when you're getting tired of thirteen subscription services and five to ten things that need to be plugged in to recharge every other day or so.

There are plenty of jokes about the fragility of our tech stack, but I don't think many people appreciate how fragile knowledge networks are. Some core ideas, like conservation of energy and elementary quantum mechanics will be pretty robust, but the subtle voodoo that makes modern society actually tick? There won't be people who can replace existing devices, much less design and build improved ones.

You can make your bug-out bag, but remember that you won't be an MRI in your future. Your batteries will decay and your memory chips will fail. In a few short decades you'll be back in the early-mid 1800's, if you're lucky to be in a place with a cooperating climate.

tuatoru4• 3 years ago

Yes. One of the core skills will be making string from local materials.

westcort2• 3 years ago

For those who are seeking out and reading reputable science, rather than searching for support for a predefined belief, what has been until now been innocuously referred to as “global warming” or even more innocently as “climate change” is in fact a dangerous revolution in earth climate systems that threatens civilization.

Beyond geoengineering stopgaps, like a solar shield, I do not see any credible solutions. Unfortunately, the natural/artificial dichotomy bias and the belief that humans can do nothing at all correctly will prevent action and doom modern civilization. Installing a shield at L1 is our best hope, but would cost hundreds of billions or trillions.

Sadly, this is another issue that has been deeply, cynically, and intentionally politicized, when it is in fact an observable scientifically validated human-created ongoing cataclysm.

Doing something is a survivial necessity for all of humanity, but sadly it will be too late before it is clear to everyone.

rodolphoarruda• 3 years ago

I believe there will be an employment/income crisis with greater impacts on society than any possible food related crisis. Considering how things are evolving today with AI and ageism, by 2040 it will be extremely hard for the working class to sustain a decent standard of living.

notanothereric• 3 years ago

The NY Times had an article last week on the pervasive spread of eco-anxiety- the dread of the future and the doom no one can change the course of it … ironically they later had a guest opinion piece about ‘peak humanity’ driven only by reproduction rates of less than 2.1 per mating couple. The peak based on that was also between 2050-2080, at which point global populations begin and exponential crash as well. And if you want to add to your gloom a side of nuclear apocalypse, read ‘There is nowhere to hide’ from thebulletin.org …

We are already seeing population declines in various countries. We are seeing population collapse in many species worldwide. You don’t need to wait for methane releases or burning the last drop of petroleum… it is here.

The constructive thing to do is figure out what world do you want to live in … one where the abandoned houses and office buildings lay as tombstones to an opulent past of plentiful labor and an ever growing standard of living driven by technological advances ..

look around you and soak it all in - this is as good as it gets.

Now comes the hard part.

sacnoradhq• 3 years ago

Mad Max, zombie apocalypse prognostications are generally dismissed as chicken little paranoia for good reason. Unfortunately, the speaker automatically loses credibility and doesn't accomplish anything useful. The smart play would be to be quiet, bide your time, and be prepared like a Boy Scout. I seriously doubt anyone saying civilization will ever disappear because there are too many incentives and advantages of division of labor and trading, but life for most common people will gradually become rougher, harsher, more expensive, and increasingly upheaved by temporary disasters. Periodic famines and long-term food costs will sneak up over time are more likely.

If someone wanted to invest in OTG self-sufficiency, then they would need a remote, defensible homestead with wind and storm resistant agriculture and a durable water source. It's a waste of time and money unless someone enjoys the catharsis of microfarming and already has plenty of money.

e63f67dd-065b• 3 years ago

Doomers are plentiful, he's really not that special. His points are just plain wrong and the conclusions are doubtful.

Grimly, McGuire likens the human population to bacteria in a petri dish. When these bacteria multiply, uncontrollably, their number becomes so big that they can no longer sustain themselves in the dish. At this point, they die
There’s one projection that by 2050, crop yields may be down by up to 30 per cent, at a time when the world will need 50 per cent more food [to account for population growth],”

Oh wow, I take what I said back. He's even more wrong than the usual doomer.

For one, we're not running out of food. The old idea of a planetary "carrying capacity" for humans has long been busted: technology progresses and makes food production more efficient. We might run out of good agricultural land, but that just means we need to clear out more or shift to hydroponics. As the price of food increases, that's a signal to the market to devote more resources to growing food, making more intensive methods of farming possible.

Now in the countryside, McGuire’s house has walls that are two-thirds of a metre thick, to keep the heat out

Doesn't more insulation keep the heat in? Traditional construction in the tropics where I come from are not giant insulated blocks for good reason, that's how you die from overheating yourself without air conditioning.

Then there is the water supply. He says it is important to be self-sufficient. “I am doing a lot of rainwater harvesting. The summers in Britain will be seeing consistent temperatures of 40 degrees plus, so water is going to be a huge issue,”

We won't run out of water the same reason we won't run out of food. Once the cheap water is gone, you turn to more expensive methods -- drilling, then desalination. Of course it's more expensive -- that's the whole point -- marginal increases in cost allows for more expensive methods of production. The same way increasing oil prices allows for deep sea drilling, increasing water prices will allow for desalination and other such technologies.

I really don't know why people keep thinking we'll run out of food and water. We won't. It'll get more expensive as cheaper sources run out, sure, but we won't run out.

0xbadc0de5• 3 years ago

Remember when it was supposed to happen in 2000, 2012, 2020?

Apocalypse chasers always have one thing in common...

rich_sasha• 3 years ago

I can't read the article (paywall) but what always strikes me when people prepare for societal collapse is that we can't really survive very well outside a society.

Maybe you can stock up on food, water and ammunition, buy solar panels and batteries and so on. Maybe you build yourself a vegetable garden, even with a medicinal herb corner. Fine.

But what when your appendix starts to hurt? What if your precious batteries need servicing? Where will you buy pesticide and fertiliser to keep your garden producing? I just don't think a single person, or an atomic family, can cover all these specialisations. And even if you could, the hungry zombies from the collapsed society will come, and there's only so much ammo you can stockpile.

No, if society collapses, there's no escape, and we're dead. Dying of hunger might be the nice and gentle thing to wish for then. So preparing for that particular eventuality is a waste of time. You just can't prepare. Might as well cross our fingers and hope that, yes, it will be hot, climate will be terrible, but somehow humanity will plod on. At least in my locale.

I’m a climate scientist and I think society will collapse by 2050. I’m preparing

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