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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”

#61

Post by hi5eyes »

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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54714692 China's forest carbon uptake 'underestimated'

reforestation is booming, not to discount how devastated green heavy regions like the amazon are

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

#62

Post by dane-pgp »

cletus wrote: post #31

So two things spring to mind with this and any doom scenario or predictions: 1. People tend to exaggerate such doom. The reasons for this vary. A lot of the time it's unknowing. It could be as simple as assuming a constant function will remain constant beyond normal boundaries. Or that a dynamic function will continue forever. Or it's sometimes disingenuous (eg to promote a particular agenda or simply to gain more at…

> 4. At different points in the Earth's history it has been both substantially hotter and colder than it is now;

The atoms in your house were much hotter when they were being formed by fusion inside a star, but that doesn't mean you'd be happy about someone committing arson.

I'm saying it's not really relevant whether Earth has experienced higher temperatures before, what matters is how long it will be able to support 8 billion humans for.

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #11
thewarrior wrote: post #3

I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built. I really wish we had a l…

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…

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by tamaharbor »

tablespoonsruby wrote: post #37
falcolas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A relatively simple lockdown was enough to drastically impact our “just in time” supply and manufacturing system. We’re still recovering from that, and likely will be for months, if not years. Even mere rumors of TP shortage caused such a shortage to actually occur through mostly social interactions. Larger scale disasters will definitely screw things up for us all.

There actually was a shortage--of residential TP, due to people spending more time at home instead of at work, where commercial TP is used.

Luckily, diarrhea is/was not a Covid symptom, else things could have been a lot worse.

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

#65

Post by whall6 »

thewarrior wrote: post #3

I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built. I really wish we had a l…

Try Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

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

#66

Post by XorNot »

tablespoonsruby wrote: post #37
falcolas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A relatively simple lockdown was enough to drastically impact our “just in time” supply and manufacturing system. We’re still recovering from that, and likely will be for months, if not years. Even mere rumors of TP shortage caused such a shortage to actually occur through mostly social interactions. Larger scale disasters will definitely screw things up for us all.

There actually was a shortage--of residential TP, due to people spending more time at home instead of at work, where commercial TP is used.

There wasn't really much of a shortage though - at any given time there were warehouses full of residential toilet paper, what their wasn't was capacity to keep supermarket shelves stocked when regular customers all suddenly doubled their purchasing pattern.

A supermarket stocks maybe 150 packs but sees well over that in foot traffic per day: if a relatively small number of people simultaneously think "hmm, I might need more this week" then it's pretty easy to empty the shelves.

This of course gets compounded by the group of craven **holes who decided "this is my time to get rich!" and also realized it's not that expensive to buy out every pack in a store because toilet paper is not expensive.

The well managed supermarkets reacted to this by doing per customer day by day rationing, which smoothed shelf stock levels out a lot almost immediately: if there was a problem, it's that we don't have enough automated systems to detect and level this off: it's pretty reasonable in fact to have basic prohibitions against single purchasers buying "wholesale" level quantities out from supermarkets, and directing them to the regular supply chain system when they try.

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

#67

Post by thewarrior »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #11
thewarrior wrote: post #3

I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built. I really wish we had a l…

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…

I don’t think that peak oil has been truly debunked. Conventional oil production has indeed peaked and shale has come in to fill in the gap. However shale oil is a lot more expensive and this does propagate throughout the economy.

Right now oil prices are still at 75 dollars a barrel. That’s still much higher than before we hit peak conventional oil. It could be one reason we never really recovered from 2008.

It seems to me that we are stuck in an “oil price strait jacket”. Demand keeps rising until the price shoots up and then goes down hard but making a lot more oil isn’t feasible either. We could be in a long slow energy stagnation. This is evident in the amount oil imported into Europe for eg.

Shale oil has probably saved us from an outright disaster.

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

#68

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #11
thewarrior wrote: post #3

I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think. Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built. I really wish we had a l…

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…

A cursory reading of history is enough to show that civilisations collapse regularly.

It's not possible to comment on this topic credibly without being aware of this.

As for "flexible social norms" - there was an attempted coup in the US, South Africa is on fire, Brazil is literally on fire, and the UK is opening up to Delta having apparently persuaded itself that 50,000 cases and 500 hospital admissions a day aren't a problem.

And we're not even close to being done yet.

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

#69

Post by titzer »

pfdietz wrote: post #44

I remember someone took one of those global models and noticed all the equations were time reversible. So they asked "what does the model 'predict' the past looked like?" And it turned out the model predicted the world population was infinite sometime in the 1800s. :) I have very little faith in any of these models.

The beauty of open mathematical models is you can show your work. So show your work. Link? Study? Paper?
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