
Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf] - Pausanias
http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
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Pausanias
Excerpt:

"There are three main factors that could be encouraging professional
environmentalists in their denial that our societies will collapse in the
near- term. The first is the way the natural scientific community operates.
Eminent climate scientist James Hansen has always been ahead of the
conservative consensus in his analyses and predictions. Using the case study
of sea level rise, he threw light on processes that lead to “scientific
reticence” to conclude and communicate scenarios that would be disturbing to
employers, funders, governments and the public (Hansen, 2007). A more detailed
study of this process across issues and institutions found that climate-change
scientists routinely underestimate impacts “by erring on the side of least
drama” - (Brysse et al, 2013). Combined with the norms of scientific analysis
and reporting to be cautious and avoid bombast, and the time it takes to fund,
research, produce and publish peer-reviewed scientific studies, this means
that the information available to environmental professionals about the state
of the climate is not as frightening as it could be. In this paper I have had
to mix information from peer-reviewed articles with recent data from
individual scientists and their research institutions to provide the evidence
which suggests we are now in a non-linear situation of climactic changes and
effects."

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yodon
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.

~~~
purplezooey
_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.

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Causality1
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.

~~~
mc32
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.

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monocasa
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.

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mirimir
> 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.

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ThomPete
Sorry but this is getting silly. You dont get to claim scientific basis
without being able to demonstrate your conclusions. This is speculation not
actually scientifically demonstrated.

