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My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

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Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#51

Post by schimmy_changa »

dane-pgp wrote: post #41
XorNot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's making a rather broad claim from a rather specific one, even if the adherents have a lot of ideological overlap. Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).

> but it hasn't happened yet To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February: > In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes. [0] https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-…

Yes, but the term 'Peak Oil' implies the catastrophic and sudden crash in the availability of oil, not in the slow decrease in production due to alternatives. (Don't get me wrong, I'd like production to decline much faster for climate reasons!)

The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives and society would be trapped between a rock and a hard place because of that. Again, not necessarily for better, humans figured out more technologically advanced ways to extract oil to avoid this outcome (fracking and tar sands).

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#52

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Havoc wrote: post #42

Why would pollution be exponential?

Because, once electricity is no longer available, and you can't get coal from long distance, people burn wood or trash or dried grass or whatever they can get their hands on. If the alternative is freezing, you don't care about the pollution you're generating.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#53

Post by iaw »

yongjik wrote: post #45

> One reason for this is that in Herrington’s words, “the scenarios do not significantly diverge until 2020.” After that point, the scenarios start to diverge drastically ... This sounds more like a selection bias. If any model drastically diverged from reality earlier, then it would have been already discarded, and we won't be talking about it. So, we'll be only talking about models that start to diverge around 2020…

Having dabbled with chaotic heavily dynamic systems in college I actually disagree. It may be that our system was in a relatively stable highly linear regime and we just knocked it out into a non-linear chaotic region that we can't escape even if we cut emissions entirely.

Chaotic systems do some scary unpredictable things, I wish I shared your confidence.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#54

Post by overscore »

johnisgood wrote: post #25
overscore wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an infantry soldier and learnt very fast how fragile the logistics of necessities can be in the modern world. I don't believe that world civilisation will collapse (at least not in any way that can be prepared for), but I have moved out of the city, begun to farm organically, and have a plan to cook and live without mains power or fuel for months on end. I know people think I'm a nutjob, but I've also seen firs…

> live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea. Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear. Otherwise your life sounds pretty desirable. I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways). I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)

> Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear.

It is actually the only thing that keeps me up at night. I am crew on a lifeboat and need to live within a certain distance from the boathouse, otherwise I would move tomorrow. The RNLI is too important a part of my life to leave behind otherwise. I may be able to afford some land higher up (60m+ in the future).

> I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways).

I am definitely not self-sufficient (especially not socially)! I could maybe take care of my family for one calendar year (one growing season and one winter), but it's a maybe. If we're talking about a situation where people are physically (violently) competing for resources, then I'd be in the same boat as everyone else (by design, I'd add - I have no desire to be the lone survivor behind a fence or whatever while other families starve).

> I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)

Thanks! It actually happened because I gave up on living in a city. Certainly, there's a lot of people I knew in SF/Bay Area, London, and Dublin who could do what I did overnight (probably even as a side project), but don't, so I don't think funding is the limiting factor for most.

I hope things work out for you. I know it's trite to say online, but if you decide to do it, it's certainly a path you can take. It will involve sacrificing other paths not taken, though - the bill for opportunity cost escapes no-one.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#55

Post by jacobr1 »

XorNot wrote: post #22
sillysaurusx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilizat…

That's making a rather broad claim from a rather specific one, even if the adherents have a lot of ideological overlap. Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).

The problem with most these malthusian style analyses is a presumption of a first-order system within their models. Human society is more able to adapt than deer herds, between both social changes and technology with second and third order effects.

Peak oil, is correct is some sort of technical sense, but continues to be consistently misforecast due to underestimating both technical innovation and exploration. Cost-effective reserves grew much faster than depletion, and now we also have alternatives and increased efficiencies that have reduced/flatlined consumption even as feasible capacity continues to increase. That doesn't mean there isn't some finite limit (and even if there wasn't, that we wouldn't want to limit CO2 regardless) but that the modeling process is just too simple.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#56

Post by OliverGilan »

Qem wrote: post #28
sillysaurusx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilizat…

> It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. The same thing, but now with 7 billion+ people. It's a lot of deforestation just to feed all these campfires.

Except we aren't running out of forests any time soon [1] and they're actually growing back to levels we haven't seen in decades.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offse...

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#57

Post by dane-pgp »

Havoc wrote: post #42

Why would pollution be exponential?

CO2 pollution would be exponential if it were proportional to energy usage and if energy usage increased linearly with economic development and if economic development were exponential. Fortunately neither of the first two conditions are true.

Consider the buried lede in this 2019 article[0] from the Guardian:

> But in a positive signal for the future, the [UK's Office for National Statistics ] said both domestic and consumption-based emissions had fallen since the 2008 financial crisis.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/21/britain-is-g...

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#58

Post by forz877 »

tanbog4 wrote: post #10
premium-gecko wrote: post #6

The Club of Rome is some odious stuff. It seems to be a group of academic doomsayers who like to play around with toy models in order to justify quasi-communism and other goals related to neo-Malthusian beliefs. They may be the primary progenitors of using toy models to cast the bones and make scary predictions about the future, especially with regard to climate alarmism. From The Limits to Growth : "In searching for…

I guess if you keep saying the same thing will happen repeatability eventually you'll look like you predicted something. Even a broken (analogue) clock tells the right time twice a day.

The problem is people are expecting the asteroid impact, or the single point where "civilization is collapsed."

These aren't helpful and aren't realistic. Even historical societal collapses happen over periods of centuries, often.

It's foolish to simply dismiss threats because people make bad predictions. We can already see increases in rare weather events right now, and these have already had significant geopolitical consequences (e.g. Syria).

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#59

Post by deregulateMed »

titzer wrote: post #32
sillysaurusx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilizat…

There are multiple, independent studies that have concluded that global human society has gone into overshoot. So much so that it is an unwritten consensus on that. There's even this site[1] that calculates the day of the year when humanity has consumed that year's entire resources and is dipping into annual overshoot. [1] https://www.overshootday.org

"studies" are not the same as science.

That being said, I'm a doomer but because AI.

Re: My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”

#60

Post by chestertn »

When I was an undergrad I discovered blogs about peak oil, the limits to the growth, and Turchin’s cliometrics. As an adolescent I really enjoyed Asimov’s Foundation and all of this knowledge resonated with me.

I had a fried who read Von Mises’ Human Action and he labeled me as a neo-Malthusian . And, according to his “school of thought”, my understanding of the world and economics incorrect. We had many interesting discussions about what we thought we knew.

Now I’m in my 30s and my thought has changed drastically. I believe that reductionist (materialistic) approaches to analyze human endeavor are misguided. There is a bit of hubris in thinking that a computer simulation can predict the entirety of human action. I am definitely not suscribed to the Austrian school of thought, however.

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