At first I thought there was a typo and the article meant 1812. But no. They really mean 812.
As someone in their late 20s, I don’t see how the future of Earth in another half-century is anything but bleak.
As someone in their late 20s, I don’t see how the future of Earth in another half-century is anything but bleak.
If there's a silver lining it's that on time scales of tens of millennia we might have avoided descending into another glacial period - which would be disaster for the northern hemisphere, erase Russia and Canada, and wipe out a sizable or even majority share of current crop production. It's tough to say if that would even matter to humans so far into the future, but maybe it's a small consolation.
The next ten generations or so are going to have some incredible challenges to overcome.
Humans are the most adaptable species on the planet. We can purposefully manipulate our environment for our purposes. Our adaptability will help us going forward.
When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain.
Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
Don't forget the prediction of mass starvation made in the 1970s for the 80s, updated to the 90s then the 2000s and so on and so forth.
Galactic gloom and doom is probably written into our genes which is why it makes its way into almost every western religion. Armageddon. We need to balance our natural proclivity for gloom and doom with plausible scenarios like pandemics, asteroid strikes, obesity epidemic, population declines instead of fantasy one that never come to pass or ones we have no control over.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003358...
This didn't happen at any significant scale; I mean there were (correct) concerns about geopolitical forces leading to things like the mid 80s ethiopian faminei impact but no concern about wide spread starvation.
There was concern about mass starvation in the earlier part of the century, and it was pretty well founded. This changed due the "green revolution" and massive increase in food production.
What this shows is that predictive models can be made obsolete by new technology.
Unfortunately, a lot of people take the wrong lesson from that. The assumption that new technology will arrive in time to address a well predicted problem is dangerously irrational.
That isn't even close to the GP's argument. The steelman is every generation encounters existential problems that get exaggerated to apocalyptic proportions but that history is also a very long story of those existential problems being dealt with in one way or another. (And in the voice of GP "I lived through one such cycle")
The black-pilled people would counter that civilization today has an unprecedented number of ways in which to destroy itself and so that destruction is inevitable.
The counter to the black pill is that it's missing historical information which shows humanity has been successfully walking this tightrope for far longer than anyone thinks.
And then leaders of superpowers talked to each other, signed treaties, and decided not to start a nuclear war, because nobody likes dying.
> When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain.
So nations signed treaties and laws to limit sulfur and NOx emission, which worked.
> Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
Yep, treaties and laws. No more CFC, no more ozone hole.
> I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
OK I'll grant you that this was overblown a bit.
OP wasn't saying that they weren't real issues. In fact they were all serious! I think he was saying there's nothing good about falling into a nihilist hole. Living together on Earth is hard and takes cooperation. There's plenty of room for the innovators but no room for the defeatist.
> Academic analysis of the peer-reviewed studies published at that time shows that most papers examining aspects of climate during the 1970s were either neutral or showed a warming trend.
I'm too young to have read anything about Global Cooling during the 1970s, but I can confidently say that, by 2021, I've seen way more "Ha ha scientists warned about Global Cooling in 1970s which makes the theory of Global Warming invalid!" than actual "Scientist So-and-so warned that the Earth is Cooling." It's basically historical revisionism for selling an agenda.
"Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect."
i.e. even in the 70s scientist were worried about warming because they saw concerning data.
people getting concerned out about nonsense in the press has been with us since there was a press (cf 80s satanic panic) ... but that doesn't mean people being concerned about something in the press is nonsense.
Well, actually the Russians ran out of money.
Take a step further back. As Thomas Sowell says, economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods that have competing uses. In a free economy, money is how we organize that. But even if we had infinite money, that wouldn't give us more of anything else. It would just mean that everything cost infinite dollars to buy.
The problem that the Soviet Union had was that their economy couldn't produce enough to supply their military competition with the US. "Ran out of money" is one way of describing that, but the literal number of rubles in circulation is not at all the issue.
As a pithy summary of what happened to the USSR, that's not bad. As a summary of nuclear non-proliferation it's ahistorical.
That said, just because some people take hysteria to the extreme doesn’t mean the threats aren’t real. The nuclear annihilation one in particular came down to a handful of people steering the ship blind and somehow not running into the rocks while their first mates were screaming at them to turn the other way.
I vividly remember my teacher in High School asking the students to raise their hands if they thought there would be a nuclear war with the USSR in their lifetime, and I was the only kid in my class who didn't think there would be.
I imagine that there would be a similar response now, if you asked a bunch of kids if civilization was going to collapse due to global warming in their lifetime.
Doesn't mean that global warming isn't a problem, just like nuclear war wasn't a problem; it just means that people have a hard time evaluating risk and likelihood.
They only have to be right once, sure, but the entire fabric of existence is working against 'them' to make sure it will never happen.
That's not off the table at all, it's just not talked about much anymore.
To take your argument seriously, past performance does not predict future results. The fact that we've avoided disaster in the last 80 years does not mean we will be so lucky with climate change. It's certainly not a reason to ignore the risks - the ozone hole situation improved because the nations of Earth took united and conclusive action to halt it by banning CFCs.
That was a significant risk at one point.
> When that didn't happen, we would all suffocate because all the forests would die due to acidrain.
Eh? Who told you that?
> Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
That was a serious, but ultimately very tractable problem, with an expensive but feasible solution, which was taken.
> I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
See answer two.
Global warming is most similar to number three, but the solutions are far, far more expensive, and may have been left too late.
Ultimately "something bad nearly happened, but it was averted" doesn't form a great basis to assume that the next very bad thing will also be averted.
Then we would all die of skin cancer due to the ozone-hole.
I actually remember the nuclear effects from Tjernobyl, glad I didn't die then.
In all of those cases they were massive problems that took massive efforts to fix. Have you heard of SO2 scrubbers? The Clean Air Act? The Montreal Protocol? The bunch of dead liquidators in Chernobyl?
For that matter you missed tetraethyl lead gasoline additives, dioxins, asbestos, and cigarettes. There are too many massive problems and too frequently there are greedy (evil?) people fighting to keep the status quo.
What's different is that global warming has been blunted by icecap melting, ocean warming, and ocean thermal expansion. We've used up our budget, and it will get abruptly worse. The sheer quantity of energy is beyond any prior problem humanity has ever created and you can't bargain with thermodynamics. Now it's our turn to deal with a problem, like previous generations did in the examples you mentioned.
Things are really speeding up! Half of all CO2 emissions by humans have been since...1990. https://ieep.eu/news/more-than-half-of-all-co2-emissions-sin...
Global emissions are higher than they were in 1990, and higher than the average over these last 30 years. And still increasing.
Exponential growth in smart people working on solutions for example. 1 year ago no one assumed that we would have 4 working vaccines already deployed to millions of people.