Pull yourselves together. The previous century had trench warfare, famines, WWII, The Khmer Rouge, the cultural revolution, the Spanish flu, polio, threat of a nuclear holocaust, threat of overpopulation, AIDS, Imperial Japan, Apartheid, lobotomies, etc. Most of that stuff is now under control and probably will be for your kid's entire life. There's no chance global warming will be anywhere near as bad as many of those things for anyone alive today. For even further in the future, we have no idea.
Your despair is probably a result of being fed emotionally manipulative stories from the news and social media for too long. The real world has never been better, and it hasn't stopped improving. Try looking at some of Bill Gates's writing for inspiration. That's somebody who's not afraid to see the bright side of life while not ignoring the dark.
> Pull yourselves together. [snip 20th century bad stuff]. Most of that stuff is now under control and probably will be for your kid's entire life. There's no chance global warming will be anywhere near as bad as many of those things for anyone alive today.*
Umm. I'm pretty sure that drought, mega storms, wildfires, famine, and mass migrations of refugee populations (just to start) will spawn horrors in the 21st century at least as bad.
I mean, consider that some of the worst events in the 20th were essentially triggered by the great depression. As a civilization, we're going to have to withstand stressors far more severe than that before the 21st century is out.
You need to put some numbers to those disasters. We already have all of them without global warming. We're much better at coping with them than we used to as well.
People have put numbers to it. Climate scientists have been literally weeping in interviews because of what they know. These are things that you just have to read for yourself to get a sense of the scale of the problem. But here's some exercises if you actually want to learn about this and you're not just going to hand-wave away unpleasant notions:
1. Read about the Permian Triassic extinction event (The Great Dying). That involved somewhere between 1200 - 2000 ppm CO2. We're emitting CO2 at least an order of magnitude faster than what led to that event. We still have at least 800 ppm to go to get to that scale, but if the permafrost decides to start belching everything up, we'll be heading there very, very quickly. Feasibly by the end of the century.
2. Do the math on how much excess carbon is in the atmosphere right now compared to the ice core data from the past 800,000 years. That ranged from around 180 - 300 ppm that changed gradually on the scale of thousands of years. That range is what humans have lived in for the existence of our particular species. Now, take the extra 120+ ppm and determine just how much material that actually is. How much mass. Now, do the math on how much of that carbon an average forest can absorb. Or any of these direct air capture technologies.
There is so much data out there. It's easily available. It's far easier emotionally to just plaster over this with general skepticism and blind faith in technological progress though. You can sealion all you want, demanding other people produce things on a platter for you to digest, but you're not going to really understand until you look at it directly anyways. You don't have to be a climate scientist to crunch some of the numbers.
You should explicitly state the logic you're implying and the conclusions. That way, if there are any embarrassing mistakes, they'll be obvious. Are you saying that with 1200-2000ppm, we'll have another extinction event? That it will include humans? Also that we expect to reach that concentration in our childrens' lifetimes? Those claims together are certainly not what scientists predict, so I don't know if you're wrong or using some other logic that I didn't infer correctly from your words.
None of those will compare to climate change. All of those events, bad as they were, were over in the relatively short term. Climate change is going to be all of that, a hundred times worse, and whatever anyone does at the time isn't going to fix it.
Your optimism is the result of living through the era of apparently limitless [0] energy and resources and the resulting development it has enabled. But the books don't balance. We can't possibly go on on this trajectory without the house falling down around us.
This only factors in economic damage from the higher temperature. It's not looking at floods, extreme weather, and definitely not looking at second-order effects - mass migrations, increased risk of war etc.
It is an absurd fantasy to imagine that the only effects of global warming in the next hundred years will be economic contraction (though note that economic contraction YoY itself is almost unheard of in the US and Europe, and will bring dire consequences).
It's also an absurd fantasy that you can predict the future in technological advancements on a 100-year scale either. Not to mention the intractibility of climate modeling over that time period.
Considering a few years ago people were worried about the problems of jobs being automated away, you might imagine a little climate change creating extra work for people would be good for social cohesion.
But it's all just a bunch of bozos with PhD's and masters degrees.
TL;DR: Asssumming one can translate different lattitudes' GDPs to that of a planet undergone global climate disruption is ... an exceedingly dubious proposition.
[0] shows estimates of sea level rise from ~0.5m up to 2.5m by 2100. This alone will induce catastrophic flooding in some of the world's most populous cities and regions.
[1] covers some estimates of how prevalent wet bulb temperatures of >35C (the upper limit for a healthy adult to survive outside in the shade) will become. Any heatwave in this area will kill many vulnerable people and will stop almost any outdoor economic activity.
These are just 2 easily quantifiable numbers that will directly make life much harder in the next century (and the problems won't stop in the century after that). The second order effects can also be imagined.
Thank you, but that doesn't quantify catastrophe. I mean numbers of dead, cost in dollars, etc. Maybe we can cope with those 35 degree events by staying in air conditioned buildings like people already do in SE Asia. Maybe cities can move. The world's biggest(?) (Shenzhen) didn't really exist at all 80 years ago, or even 40 years ago.
Here [0] is a study that found that, with the current trend, climate-related deaths per year in 2100 will be near the total infectious-disease related deaths per year today.
Also, Shenzen is only ~20th biggest city in the world [1], and its age is the exception, not the rule. The majority of the world's most populated cities are older than the countries they are located in, many of them being continuously inhabited since prehistoric times. Also, while creating a new city and populating it is possible with somewhat limited human harm (though rural->urban migration has its human impact, to be sure), deopopulating and moving a city of tens of millions (say, New York City, which sits at 10m elevation) is an entirely different scale of human displacement.
I assume you're using that 85 deaths / 100000 annually which is for the worst case scenario of RCP8.5. With the more reasonable RCP4.5, it's only 14/100000, less than road deaths today. Road death rates have already plummeted by a factor of several over the past few decades. So we've already suffered far worse than the effects of 2100 climate change just from the direct danger of cars.
Since we'll probably continue to have improvements in safety, diseases, etc. between now and 2100, the world should be a safer place for humans by then. So it doesn't make sense for people to worry their kids will suffer a bad world due to climate change. They'll most likely enjoy a better world than us despite climate change.
Did you mention preshistoric occupation to suggest that continuous occupation is necessary for a city? That surely helps but if an area has to be vacated, people will obviously go somewhere else, probably another place that was already occupied. Cities renew themselves anyway within the climate change kind of time frame. Buildings usually aren't designed to last more than 50 or 100 years. People obviously don't last longer than that either. So cities of 2100 will likely contain mostly new buildings and people that don't exist today, while today's ones will be gone. They'll effectively be whole new cities. I don't see why that renewal can't coexist with a gradual move inland. Not starting from scratch, just putting new development slightly more on the landward side of the city than before.
> Since we'll probably continue to have improvements in safety, diseases, etc. between now and 2100, the world should be a safer place for humans by then. So it doesn't make sense for people to worry their kids will suffer a bad world due to climate change. They'll most likely enjoy a better world than us despite climate change.
I am sorry, but this is just delusional. Perhaps the biggest catastrophes will be averted, but only with great effort that our children and grandchildren will have to endure.
Quantify these catastrophes and the effort that will be needed to avert them.
Bear in mind that civilization will collapse without the great effort of people doing their jobs and keeping everything working, climate change or not. So great effort is going to happen regardless. It's not a tragedy that people work.
Droughts followed by famines will become the order of the day in most of the world, wars will be fought for access to water, refugee crises the likes of which haven't been seen since for maybe 2000 years, greatly increasing the risk of nuclear holocaust (which is already at an all-time high, with the USA unilaterally withdrawing from its treaty with Russia, and exploring low-yield nuclear weapons), the rise of surveillance states now becoming possible to a degree that was barely even dreamed of before our time, a (mild) global pandemic showing how brittle our systems are and how much our leaders are willing to put economic benefit ahead of human life, the new rise of fascism in the US and Europe - we are well on the way to the worse centuries in recent human history.
Make no mistake: there is absolutely no doubt that climate change, on its current unchecked path, will end human civilization as we know it. That is not to say that there won't be a human civilization in 100 years, but there is no way for the current system to resist flooding of some of the world's largest cities and other densely populated areas, probably physically displacing more than 500 Million people, heat waves that will kill a healthy adult in the shade in much of the warmer regions, extreme weather events becoming increasingly common and more severe, and all of the consequences of these items - drought, famine, wars over land and drinking water, massacres to contain the migration of the hundreds of millions of people that will be displaced.
And of course, essentially every dollar of GDP growth that we currently make is only increasing the problems above, and will continue to do so on the current path.
The only way to avert the catastrophe is to drastically change our civilization today - to stop burning any fossil fuel or methane gas today, literally (yesterday would have been better), and take on all of the major economic overhaul that entails. Every day we continue to burn fossil fuels, to raise livestock in industrial numbers, to burn down forests etc is increasing the magnitude of the catastrophes to come (it is too late to completely avoid catastrophe, we can only hope to make them milder).
... you might want to add why Derrick Jensen is an authority instead. From a quick google search he just appears to be some random anprim guy that wrote some environmentalist books. Bill Gates has his foundation that is working to mitigate climate change, so I'd say he at least has some qualification since he is presumably in contact with scientific authorities. What does your guy have?
Not that I am in any way a fan of anprim thinking, but anyone with massive vested interest in the perpetuation of present day power dynamics (eg massive wealth) has negative starting authority when it comes to evaluating the quality of that world and the value of its preservation.
Jensen, in addition to being a prolific author, is one of today's leading environmental and social philosophers. The only reason you know or care about who Gates is, is because he became very wealthy from predatory business practices. Kind of a stupid reason to pay attention to someone.
I care about what Gates says because he's founded one of the world's largest charity organizations and has done a great deal to reduce human suffering as well as specifically a lot of work in regard to climate change. Being rich alone doesn't matter to me, I don't give a damn what e.g. Jeff Bezos has to say about the matter.
Being a prolific author doesn't mean much to me and neither does being an environmental philosopher in this context. Someone like Peter Singer definitely is an authority on environmental ethics, but on the effect of climate change/the ecological state of the world I don't see why anyone would consider him an authority.
> I care about what Gates says because he's founded one of the world's largest charity organizations
So your criteria for who is and is not worth listening to is "rich man who gives a lot of money to charity." Wealth is not some kind of superior substitute for expertise or insightful ideas. Unfortunately this seems to be a popular delusion today; that does not make it any less stupid.
Extreme poverty has been on a constant decline only as defined by the world bank (by choosing an arbitrary dollar amount of 1.90 international dollars that could barely buy some food, but not medicine or shelter).
In real terms, it has been stagnant or increasing, especially as people who were living well off the land have been forced to participate in the monetary economy or die of starvation.
And even by the world bank standards [0], the only gains have been because of China (a planned economy that has ignored any american or european economic orthodoxy), and to a lesser extent, India, which has mostly advanced by freeing itself from the burdens of colonialism (before colonialism, it was one of the richer areas of the world). In sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty has actually been increasing.
> In sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty has actually been increasing.
According to your source, only in absolute terms, not in relative terms. Ideally, both should go down of course, but it does mean a smaller percentage of Africans live in extreme poverty today than they did 25 years ago.
> a planned economy that has ignored any american or european economic orthodoxy
I implore you to look up how China’s economy functions. It is successful because they threw away the majority of the “planned economy” bits of communism and have a capitalist economy. They have a stock market, citizens invest in companies they choose, starting a business doing whatever you want is easier there than many places in the US, businesses fail all of the time. None of those are features of a planned economy.
> and to a lesser extent, India, which has mostly advanced by freeing itself from the burdens of colonialism
It has little to do with that and more to do with making themselves globally competitive in many sectors (IT and outsourcing being obvious ones). They also operate under a capitalist economy that fosters these successful projects.
> In real terms, it has been stagnant or increasing, especially as people who were living well off the land have been forced to participate in the monetary economy or die of starvation.
Funny how people throw out actual concrete definitions and then say things like “In real terms” without providing any kind of definition. Maybe start by defining that.
Furthermore, the amount of people who were “living off of the land” are included in the 1.90 figure measured by the world bank. That’s not based on receipts at the grocery store or tax returns.
Finally, the number of people “living well off of the land” (who just were fucked if they got meaningfully suck btw) is vanishingly small compared to how many were “living malnourished off of the land”.
You are looking at how China's economy functions today in a few cities, and not how it functions in the vast majority of the rest of the country. More importantly, while China has mostly or entirely gotten rid of the planned economy, it's success has come in large part because of massive monetary interference by the state in the economy, protectionism, forcing western companies to give up some of their IP to do business there, and of course a good dose of slave labor, like every successful economy in history unfortunately (I am absolutely opposed to this last one, and it is one of the things we have profited most from in Chinas's growth).
Countries that moved from a planned economy to capitalism under the IMF and WB's guidance have generally rushed to privatize their industry, have accepted and dutifully implemented all international IP treaties, have opened up their arms to foreign investors and sold their industries to them, and are almost all in much worse situations than China, with no hope of regaining the lost ground for now.
For India, I will only say one thing - India would not have been an IT powerhouse if it had been under colonial rule. The British wanted cotton and spices and other raw or lightly processed materials from India, and that is what it would have been forced to do - same as the path the American colonies rebelled against. Industrializationa and high-technology was for the mother land, not the colonies, in the horrible economic principle of the 'competitive advantage'.
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Related to poverty, you're right, I probably should have given a definition. Extreme poverty means not having access to one or more of the the basic necessities of life - water, enough food not be malnourished, enough shelter not to die of hypothermia or heat, and access to medical care to survive the most common diseases in your region. If you have only these basic necessities and nothing else, you are still poor, but not living in extreme poverty.
From what I understand, the monetary threshold for these should be somewhere around 15 dollars per day to get out of extreme poverty (note that this 'income' includes begging, access to communal resources etc). There are of course many opinions on this number. However, the 1.9 USD value is pitifully low, and you can easily check that yourself: please think about what you can buy for 3 USD in you region each day, without any kind of borrowing, begging, living off the land, sharing etc (as those are already included in the number). Would you consider yourself to not be in extreme poverty?
Note that if we look at malnourishent, the percentage and number of people who are malnourished has stayed roughly the same since we started collecting data (1981), after increasing steadily up to ~2000.
And about people living off the land, they are indeed included in the data since 1981, but not in the data since 1800, as often presented.
Edit: and yes, you are right that people living off the land were usually doomed if they got significantly sick. But this is also true of, for example, everyone living on minimum wage in the US today, so I fail to see what's improved.
> But this is also true of, for example, everyone living on minimum wage in the US today, so I fail to see what's improved.
No it’s not and it takes a shocking amount of willful ignorance to suggest otherwise. If you become very ill in the US you just show up to an ER and they fix the problem. The ER cannot refuse you because you are poor. You deal with bankruptcy/hospital negotiations after. This brings me to my next point.
If you are on minimum wage in the US, there is Medicaid (and additional government health coverage in some states like California) for low income households. Not only do you get health coverage at minimum wage, it doesn’t even bankrupt you if you’re making use of the resources available.
If you’re living off the land, you eat some contaminated fruit and you die. You get a bad infection, you die. You get a bad gash, you might bleed out or get an infection and die. Bad water, giardia, maybe dead. These are all trivial for anyone to get fixed in the US and they are effectively non-issues (for people who actually seek treatment).
Additionally, entire classes of problems that plagued nomads (contaminated water, hookworm, etc) are gone because of drinkable tap water (a few fucked up communities not-withstanding) and sewage systems.
Your equivocation between those living off the land and a minimum wage US worker indicates to me you’ve never experienced low income life nor realize how many benefits of society you can still enjoy. Public education, libraries, OTA TV, parks, heating assistance (in the north at least), food stamps, Medicaid, discounted housing, etc.
If you can’t see how that’s better than living off of the land, I suspect your beef is with the lifestyle of modern civilizations and no amount of income will satisfy your comparison.
First of all, all of your examples just show that someone living for minimum wage in the US is actually making way more than 42 USD/day ((7.25 USD * 40h work week) / 7 days) by the WB standards, as all those additional protections are counted in the adjusted income. How would the poverty stats look if you took extreme poverty to be 40 USD/day?
Secondly, you can live off the land and still live in a country with a functional health system. I'm not discussing nomad hunter-gatherers here, just people who don't live off a wage, like traditional farmers and rural tribes (who still have money from trading their goods for example, and can live pretty wealthy lives, but contribute disproportionately little to GDP).
Overall the point was that people can and have been living outside of any standard of poverty for a long time in areas that nominally have very little GDP per capita, and are often getting counted as extreme poverty in stats older than 1981.
Related to medical coverage, I was thinking more along the lines of cancer or serious chronic diseases, not acute poisoning or broken limbs. The kind of diseases that not only cost serious money to overcome in a privatized health system, but also destroy your ability to work and earn money when you're whole livelihood is dependent on a wage - even if Medicaid can cove the direct medical expenses.
Everybody must die from something so how could anybody possibly not be in poverty by this standard? Do you only count diseases which can be treated with enough money?
If a new cancer treatment was discovered but it was incredibly expensive, perhaps requiring a team of specialists to provide exclusive continuous care to the patient for the entire rest of their life, then almost nobody could afford it and suddenly the entire world would be plunged into extreme poverty through lack of access to it. So you obviously have to accept that not everybody can have access to all possible lifesaving medical care if the world doesn't have the resources to provide it. There are already some personalized cancer treatments that come close to that. These are a net improvement for healthcare but they look like a regression by making poverty relatively worse.
You're probably right that extreme poverty is increasing if you keep broadening the definition as people get wealthier.
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Your despair is probably a result of being fed emotionally manipulative stories from the news and social media for too long. The real world has never been better, and it hasn't stopped improving. Try looking at some of Bill Gates's writing for inspiration. That's somebody who's not afraid to see the bright side of life while not ignoring the dark.