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Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

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Re: Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

#21
post #7

Alarmism. Societal change is inevitable, societal collapse is not. Society has survived a hell of a lot. Chinese society survived the Mongols. European society survived losing a third of its population to the black plague. Is climate change going to wipe out a third of the world population anytime soon? I doubt it.

A big difference now is the ease of mobility. A catastrophe in equatorial Africa a thousand years ago didn’t result in mass migration to Southern Africa. A catastrophe today will result in massive mobilization from one locale to another. The only example I can think of of mass migration was the steppes peoples but even that wasn’t that quick to happen.

There's not a lot of great data from that time period, but another potential example is the bronze age collapse which was in part caused by a mass migration of "the sea peoples" into the great empires of the time.

The societal collapse so great that we forgot and had to reinvent writing after it had existed for millennia.

Re: Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

#22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than letting human society collapse though. If that’s what you really believe will happen.

That cannot be the logical follow-through. A collapsing society can do its best to recover - a nuked and destroyed, murdered wasteland cannot. Climate-precipitated societal collapse is surely preferable to all over a large-scale nuclear war that is suggested to have been unilaterally invoked, tantamount to murder of billions and multiple genocides. That kind of 'solution' has no place in reasonable discourse about cl…

Logically, Indian and Chinese societies are distinct entities from each other and from American society.

It makes logical sense for american society to nuke Chinese and Indian society to prevent american societal collapse.

Or maybe this whole societial collapse thing is just fear mongering and it's not as big a deal as they say it is??????

Re: Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

#23
post #20
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> moving production to vastly less efficient areas overseas As a staunch, lifelong environmentalist, I am astounded to hear such advocacy attributed to my milieu: this is the first I am hearing of it. How did you come to this belief about the climate-concern platform? Edit: the closest sentiment I could find in the OP was this: > Examples include withdrawing from coastlines, shutting down vulnerable industrial facili…

I think their inference is that by proposing higher (pollution kerbing) standards for already industrialized nations versus developing economies, one is virtually doing just that.

I don't know to what you're referring, but it doesn't resemble Deep Adaptation.

Re: Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That cannot be the logical follow-through. A collapsing society can do its best to recover - a nuked and destroyed, murdered wasteland cannot. Climate-precipitated societal collapse is surely preferable to all over a large-scale nuclear war that is suggested to have been unilaterally invoked, tantamount to murder of billions and multiple genocides. That kind of 'solution' has no place in reasonable discourse about cl…

Logically, Indian and Chinese societies are distinct entities from each other and from American society. It makes logical sense for american society to nuke Chinese and Indian society to prevent american societal collapse. Or maybe this whole societial collapse thing is just fear mongering and it's not as big a deal as they say it is??????

It does not make sense to do that, unless you're a psychopath.

Re: Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

#25
If society collapses even for just one generation, that's the end game. There isn't enough readily available energy available on the surface to restart society. We depend on large amounts of energy and energy requiring infrastructure to get the remaining oil and gas to the surface for consumption. China might have enough accessible coal (I simply don't know) but if there is a societal collapse for a generation or so and if they do have accessible coal today it's likely to be sufficiently valuable in the interregnum that it too will be stripmined away before society is able to try to recover. (Solar, wind, and energy all take far too much education to get running at large scale, and educated individuals are likely to be in equally short supply of society collapses for a generation).

We have to keep society running. We won't have the energetics to get it started again if it stops.

Re: Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

#26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logically, Indian and Chinese societies are distinct entities from each other and from American society. It makes logical sense for american society to nuke Chinese and Indian society to prevent american societal collapse. Or maybe this whole societial collapse thing is just fear mongering and it's not as big a deal as they say it is??????

It does not make sense to do that, unless you're a psychopath.

The world is full of psycho paths. Maybe GP should think about that before they try to claim society will collapse because of climate change.

Someone's gonna take such a serious charge seriously.

Re: Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

#27
post #25

If society collapses even for just one generation, that's the end game. There isn't enough readily available energy available on the surface to restart society. We depend on large amounts of energy and energy requiring infrastructure to get the remaining oil and gas to the surface for consumption. China might have enough accessible coal (I simply don't know) but if there is a societal collapse for a generation or so…

We have to keep society running. We won't have the energetics to get it started again if it stops.

That's what I tell myself lying in bed every morning.

Re: Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

#28
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) nuking some combination of India and China No one is advocating for #2 or anything like it because it's a completely incompetent and reprehensible idea.

Better than letting human society collapse though. If that’s what you really believe will happen.

Pitting societies against each other when we all live on the same planet is appalling amoral trolling. I choose that we all survive together.

Re: Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

#29
> Some of the people who believe that we face inevitable extinction believe that no one will read this article because we will see a collapse of civilisation in the next twelve months when the harvests fail across the northern hemisphere.

OK, I gather that means fall 2019. If that were going to happen, I'd have expected some drop-off in 2018 harvests. And I don't see news about that.

But let's see what happens this year.

> They see social collapse leading to immediate meltdowns of nuclear power stations and thus human extinction being a near-term phenomenon. Certainly not more than five years from now.

That's still possible, I guess. But it too seems like a worst possible case.

But whatever, I'll be happy if the next decade or two is ~OK.

Re: Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf]

#30

If you believe climate change is going to lead to complete societal collapse, your primary policy remedies are 1) geoengineering, or 2) nuking some combination of India and China (a subset of option 1, but practical with existing tech). However, almost every global warming proponent advocates deindustrializing the west and moving production to vastly less efficient areas overseas. Why does this discrepancy persist?

Your first sentence is a logical fallacy (your second clause does not follow from the first) and casually introduces the topic of intentional murder and genocide of billions of people. You're the first to bring that suggestion up, but you attribute the idea to non-existent 'others'. Your next sentence is also a logical fallacy and AFAIK is simply untrue: "almost every...decentralizing the west"? I've never heard of a…

William S. Burroughs satirized that approach in several of his novels. What I find is this, however: https://books.google.de/books?id=rbJvbXXvYUgC&pg=PT94&lpg=PT...

> Horn mentions The Club of Rome as a big player in the global conspiracy game. They are heavy into cutting down population.

> Me too, before they breed their peasant assholes into the sea.

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