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The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

ourworldindata.org

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Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#51

Post by throwanapple »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #27
joe_the_user wrote: post #4

If we're talking the general state of the world... The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then. I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.

>Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. While we could be doing better, we've made immense strides over the past ten years, to the point where we've already avoided the worst outcomes and could possibly even limit the rise to 2°C and avoid most harm altogether. At least, according to Kurzgesagt. https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw

Any thoughts on this response video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCuy1DaQzWI

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#52

Post by trasz »

safety1st wrote: post #45
nostromo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare. https://ourworldindata.org/famines

In 2017 when that article was last updated, yeah sure. Not sure you can make that declaration in 2022. The combination of record poverty caused by Covid lockdowns and food supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Ukraine has put millions of people worldwide in famine conditions: https://www.reuters.com/world/world-faces-unprecedented-glob... Exactly how bad it will get remains to be seen. But the causes of famin…

FWIW, China has a very long history of famines. Twentieth century wasn't an outlier - although in the West it's been heavily publicised for propaganda reasons.

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#53

Post by trasz »

carapace wrote: post #29
29athrowaway wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can now grow enough food to feed the world We grow food on topsoil. Topsoil is soil with microorganisms, worms and insects in it. You cannot grow food on sterile soil. Topsoil takes a long time to form, and very short time to be consumed. We are using topsoil at a higher rate than it is replenished. The rate at which we use topsoil increases over time. We are very wasteful with our use of topsoil. We discard ugl…

We're learning to grow food in ways that increases the amount and fertility of topsoil, so it's not a foregone conclusion. E.g. Permaculture, Syntropic and Regenerative agriculture, etc. Check out the transformation of the Loess Plateau in China. It was rendered into a wasteland by bad farming practices and then re-vegetated and revitalized: http://eempc.org/lessons-of-the-loess-plateau/

Not to mention things like the seawater rice: https://www.bloombergquint.com/china/chinese-scientists-disc...

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#54

Post by tsimionescu »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #20

I'm only 47 years old. I've lost count of the number of things that improved exponentially during my life time. More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress. Perhaps a different way to look at things is that while people are causing no end of trouble for each other, the planet they live on, etc. they also have a knack for just continually figuring out…

> More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress.

The vast majority of scientific advances in the last hundred years happened before World War I and right after - most notably, special and general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Computing was discovered right after WWII, as was the transistor. Lisp and FORTRAN are older than 50 years. We landed on the moon more than 50 years ago.

Nothing discovered since the 70s compares to the advances in science and technology made in the first half of the twentieth century.

Edit: tone. Also, remembered that flight was also discovered in the first part of the twentieth century, as was radio transmission. Basically the world went from steam and letters and thinking about mechanics roughly in terms discovered in the 1600s to planes, mass media, computers and understanding the structure of matter and space time from 1900 to 1960. Anything that happened since then is only minor iterative improvements.

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#55

Post by andrepd »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #20

I'm only 47 years old. I've lost count of the number of things that improved exponentially during my life time. More has happened in the last half century than in all of humanity before that in terms of scientific progress. Perhaps a different way to look at things is that while people are causing no end of trouble for each other, the planet they live on, etc. they also have a knack for just continually figuring out…

It's amazing how many people don't get that these three things can, and are, true at the same time.

Yes, things are so much better: child mortality keeps falling, people in extreme poverty have (slowly) fallen, wars are less frequent.

Yes, things are awful: climate catastrophe is incoming, income inequality is pushing gilded age levels, democracy has been backsliding for the past 20 years, there are more slaves today that at any point in history.

Yes, things can be better: we have not reached the end-stage in political and economic development, and we will move to something better than neoliberal capitalism, we can tackle climate change with massive concerted action.

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#57

Post by imtringued »

revskill wrote: post #42

The world is aweful because the economic and political system is aweful. They're aweful because they're run by aweful people, who should spend time on something else rather than being a bad leader. And they're aweful because of the world is aweful.

Instead of getting cause and effect backwards over and over again maybe one should think that the reverse is true instead?

It is so easy to blame politicians because that means you get to blame someone else.

What if the economic system is broken to begin with and the only thing you can do is shift the suffering away from your interest group to another interest group?

In other words, the economic system itself has created interest group politics.

From that perspective having better leadership is irrelevant. Not even a centrally planned economy can be the solution since it can only shuffle the suffering around.

What is the underlying problem? Increasing your personal share of wealth without creating new wealth aka rent seeking. If politicians were merely in the business of getting rid of rent seeking, their "competence" would hardly matter.

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#58

Post by tsimionescu »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #27
joe_the_user wrote: post #4

If we're talking the general state of the world... The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then. I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.

>Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. While we could be doing better, we've made immense strides over the past ten years, to the point where we've already avoided the worst outcomes and could possibly even limit the rise to 2°C and avoid most harm altogether. At least, according to Kurzgesagt. https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw

> While we could be doing better, we've made immense strides over the past ten years, to the point where we've already avoided the worst outcome

This is only perhaps true if you project the current progress into the future as if this is a foregone conclusion. That is dangerously wrong - most of what has been done to combat global warming is the table stakes, the things that its easy to do and should have either been done decades ago, or are simple economic shifts (transitioning some coal power to wind and solar).

But reaching net 0 emissions is going to be extremely hard, much harder than halving our past emissions. And we have to do that in the next 30-40 years to avoid 2 degrees of warming, which is already catastrophic.

To get to net 0, we would have to replace virtually all transportation in the world with BEVs (cars are easy to replace, planes, trucks and cargo ships almost impossible, and definitely not in 30 years).

We will need to produce at least twice as much electricity as today while closing virtually all coal and gas power plants (but we don't have anywhere near enough energy storage to run the whole grid off renewables, nor is there any realistic chance to do so in the next 30 years).

And finally, we will have to close down the vast majority of industrial animal farming pursuits, which supply much of the world's food.

There is no real chance that the current rate of improvement will lead anywhere close to curtailing emissions enough to avoid 2-3 degrees of warming. Plus, the appetite for these changes may well sour as the bigger impact ones will come to pass.

Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better

#59

Post by tsimionescu »

seibelj wrote: post #9
joe_the_user wrote: post #4

If we're talking the general state of the world... The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then. I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.

The world went through an ice-age while humans were alive and struggling. The world may be warming because of humans, but we have the ability with technology to adapt.

No one is claiming humanity will go extinct. But during that ice age there were probably less than 100k living in the whole world. With technology and our current spread, we won't go so low, but a planet 3-4 degrees hotter is nowhere near able to sustain 7B people. Not to mention the terrible migration and resource wars we'll see as hundreds of millions if not billions of people have to leave places where temperatures routinely rise over livable standards.
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