That Chasing Coral documentary is well worth looking at. They had the perfect metaphor - the divers were filming a dying reef, and staying on a floating bar/club just above it where people were partying.
Any diver, snorkeler, or spear fishermen can tell you reef ecosystems are in serious trouble.
And it's certainly not just warming temperatures, it's also acidification, overfishing, destructive fishing with dynamite and cyanide, and overwhelming volumes of plastic and trash in the ocean. It's fairly rare to find a reef that doesn't have garbage embedded in it today.
Hardly seems like news to anyone remotely sentient. Economic 'growth' at a real physical level is straightforward entropy increase. Complex evolved systems are destructured to fuel & supply crude technological systems.
Expect more of this until most complex living systems collapse.
Humans have solved many seemingly intractable problems related to economic growth on the local and national level, such as smog, acid rain and the pollution of water sources. And at least have indefinitely delayed many man-made problems on the global level, like a thermonuclear war and racially-defined empires.
Will we have to adapt and possibly vacate large parts of the world? Yes. Will we have to look into hydroponics for seafood and other luxuries we have today? Possibly. But let's not give up hope. Negativity can lead to lack of action and there are millions, if not billions of lives at stake, and those of endangered species or large mammals for those who think there are already too many humans on this planet already. Canada, Alaska and land in developed countries in northern climates are well-positioned for climate change relative to other parts of the world. Maybe we could look at protecting vast swathes of open land, such as the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge or parkland in the western United States. There's incremental things everyone can do that make a huge difference.
That's true, and I don't think the situation is technically hopeless. Human (& nature's) ingenuity & adaptability can go far.
But right now ignorance is a much starker risk than hopelessness. The vast majority of people in wealthy countries still have increasing consumption as their top priority. And people in poorer countries are aspirants to the same. This leads to the abyss. Much of our amazing ingenuity is directed towards trivia, consumer-training, warfare etc, and far from being widely challenged, this trend seems to be accelerating. It's hard to imagine us not falling into a series of wars for diminishing spoils as the physical systems we're embedded in collapse.
So as I said, I don't think the situation is technically hopeless. There's much we could do. I doubt we'll do it. But I'm absolutely certain we won't do it if most of our population maintains the dulled Panglossian-consumerist perspective.
> Will we have to adapt and possibly vacate large parts of the world?
Coming from a nation that specialises in imprisoning & torturing asylum-seekers, by the way, I must comment on this point. Hundreds of millions of people (mostly poor) live in these areas that will need to be 'vacated'. Do you think they will be welcomed? Where? And when they are not, that peace will be possible? And that we can deal with these huge global challenges while simultaneously fighting the inevitable wars?
Unlikely. Humans are always adverse to strange cultures and people. For sure, it's going to be tough. Tough for people who crave stability and status quo, and much tougher for those who have to leave their homes and communities where they grew up and face hostile regimes.
Can we please stop thinking of anti-immigration attitudes of just being racist and fear of culture ? Here's the reason why old-style socialists were anti-immigration:
1) labor is the source of income of pretty much everyone. But mostly for the poor.
2) labor is a market. This means that every immigrant that comes and works here lowers the rewards for labor. Since they don't generally come with high training, this cost is pretty much exclusively borne by the poor.
This has gotten much worse over time. Specifically, there is this thing called "secular stagnation" and while there's many ways to describe it, one way is this : total labor demand in society was growing until the early 80s, and since then it's been between constant and slowly dropping, depending on economic conditions. There are actually slightly less jobs today than in 1980, and the population has kept increasing, and exactly what you'd expect to happen has happened : everybody who depends on "generic" labor is now worse off.
Socialists added to this that outlawing immigration in fact puts much more pressure on bad regimes by creating a pool of unhappy people in their countries that of course can destabilize their regimes. So an anti-immigration attitude everywhere would in fact put serious pressure on bad regimes to improve.
So let's please stop putting this culture shock/racism forward as the only reason to be anti-immigration. If I had to quantify, I'd say that this is the main reason for no more than 15% or so of people with anti-immigration attitudes. Most poor are anti-immigration because whilst they cannot articulate the economic consequences of immigration very well, they can directly feel them in their own lives.
...And expect that collapse to be sudden (relatively speaking) and take a baffled majority by surprise. Then expect conflict, trending more and more to desperation and violence.
There are no waves of violence washing towards developed nations from Bangladesh. But it's going to come at some stage, from some similar quarter, and will hardly be unjustified. They are paying the price for 'our' insatiable greed.
That article, sorry, is total bullshit. The rain season flooding large areas is neither new, nor strange. The same happens in a third of India, and large parts of Africa and I'm sure you can find the same phenomenon in areas around the equator in the Americas as well.
Mass flooding during the wet season, with the "Monsoon" rains is the most predictable, normal and obvious thing in the world. But western audiences mostly don't know that. Monsoon rains are so bad that without protection from the rain, people can die from just how much water there is in the athmosphere. (If it's raining, that means the water in the atmosphere is more than 100%. If it's more than 37 degrees out and it's raining, that means there's more than 100% water inside your windpipe and inside your lungs. That means it's equally raining inside your lungs, and this can cause drowning. So you can't walk around in a Monsoon. That's how bad it can be. Luckily, because that's common knowledge it's not very common)
The reason for most of the phenomena in the article is simply because in Bangladesh there is a general movement of people from areas like those that flood. These areas get abandoned, because the children can make more money in the cities and vastly prefer that over what their "traditional way of living" can offer. Then these areas get abandoned by everyone out of necessity, and swallowed by nature. Flooding is something that I'm sure is the "drop that makes the bucket overflow" for many young people, but it is not the cause of what's happening. And especially, rising sea levels do not make any difference here. If anything, economic inequality in Bangladesh is to blame.
Life itself is a complex system that radically altered its environment - and here we are now, billions of years later.
I'm not a climate change denier. The problem is very real, it's huge, it's definitely caused by us, and it needs to be addressed by taking a variety of vigorous measures. I just don't see it as a mandatory death sentence. There are some ways to deal with it, and we'll figure out more if needed.
> Life itself is a complex system that radically altered its environment - and here we are now, billions of years later.
We are replacing complex systems maintained by homeostatic dynamic stabilities with simple systems requiring continuous inputs from the very systems we're deconstructing. And we're doing so on drastically asymmetrical time scales -- we're increasing the complexity of the replacement systems orders of magnitude more slowly than we are deconstructing existing ones.
> I'm not a climate change denier. The problem is very real
Climate breakdown is not the problem. It's just the most exigent of literally hundreds of breakdowns caused by a malignant ideology (unending so-called economic growth). We have only 50-70 harvests left due to rapid topsoil loss. Freshwater is disappearing fast. Most ecosystems on the planet are in various stages of collapse.
> There are ways to deal with it
If we put all hands on deck and made it a global priority, we might avert the complete breakdown of the stable climate our agriculture depends on. Whether this would be enough to deal with other crises is questionable. It would be worth trying.
But the question is irrelevant, because all hands are not on deck. They're mostly working on trivia, warfare, and further ecosystem destruction. There isn't the slightest hint that we are ready to deal with any of our global crises (indeed, on most issues, we're slowly retreating into national, mutually-hostile bunkers).
> We are replacing complex systems maintained by homeostatic dynamic stabilities
Yes because sudden unsustainable population explosions of animal and plant species is strange, weird, and never happened unless humans were responsible for it.
Oh wait. Nope. It's in fact ridiculously common. Areas that have had the same fauna and flora for thousands of years are a rare exception, they're not common at all. Exceptions include of course extreme environments like deserts or ice sheets.
Rapid unsustainable change is the norm in nature, not the exception.
That means that human population growth fueled by fossil fuels is not strange, nor will it be anywhere near as destructive as advertised.
> unending so-called economic growth
Okay, now look up what happened to species whose growth stagnates. Now, don't get me wrong. After a total disaster, their populations usually remain over zero for millions of years, so they don't quite go extinct, or perhaps I should say, not very quickly. They do however lose 90%+ population in a short time.
That seems like a much preferable way of living, doesn't it ?
> We have only 50-70 harvests left due to rapid topsoil loss. Freshwater is disappearing fast. Most ecosystems on the planet are in various stages of collapse.
This is the norm, not the exception. Also, they're in a state of change, not collapse. The end result is simple: we will need to adapt, and failure to adapt will affect humans in the exact same way it will affect every other species.
> Ah. The faith-based solution.
Well, having the economy adapt worked for thousands of years, and most attempts at forcing a fix from above are documented disasters.
I don't get it. Just how many examples of governments forcing change ending in disaster do people need to admit that they do not have a solution. That they are not in fact any better than, for example, the early 20th century socialists and that their solutions, however well-intentioned and however "true" and non-corrupt and ... their execution will be, it can't work ?
The problem is that you need to come up with a solution, not one that would work in theory if you had total and complete willing obedience of 100% of the world population, you need a solution that would mostly work if 90% of your own party was doing their very best to sabotage it, with 50% of the higher up posts in the party taken up by malevolent psychopaths. Why ? Because they will. Look at Bill Clinton, arguably leader of progressive America for over a decade, and then remember that he used his power to force women to have sex with him. And on the other side of the coin, there's Trump. Grabs 'em by ... Those are the people in charge. This is the real world.
Post anything on this topic, and a bunch of strange things happen. For a forum for people who pride themselves on being rational, it sure is full of irrational, fact-averse deniers. Or, at the other extreme, you get all these fire-and-brimstone doom predictions.
People overestimate the impact of climate change. Yes it will lower GDP, destroy property, and weather will kill more people, but most nations are vastly more wealthy than they where even 50 years ago and that represents a lot of slack before people end up starving etc.
People will pay more on food which will mean they can't spend as much on rent or a mortgage which will lower the value of real estate. However, that's just another shift in a long line of them.
Even say a 20% drop in world GDP over 20 years, which would significantly increase suffering, is less dramatic than generally assumed.
Life is going to be just fine, but complex lifeforms with an endless list of needs and dependencies like us are utterly screwed. As for “figuring it out” what does it tell you that the smartest people with the best education on the topic have been screaming bloody murder for decades? It’s been figured out, people just won’t accept the solutions.
"Using a new method of measuring krypton and xenon ratios in Antarctic ice core, an estimated temperature rise of just 0.1°C over the last 50 years was determined. This is well below many other estimates of ocean temperature increase. Mean global ocean temperature increased by 2.57 ± 0.24 degrees Celsius over the last glacial transition (20,000 to 10,000 years ago)."
"Our precision is about 0.2 ºC (0.4 ºF) now, and the warming of the past 50 years is only about 0.1 ºC," he said, adding that advanced equipment can provide more precise measurements, allowing scientists to use this technique to track the current warming trend in the world's oceans. "
From Newsweek. Of interest, Newsweek had a cover story in 1975 titled "The Cooling World" that suggested cooling "may portend a drastic decline for food production."
A 1974 Time magazine article "Another Ice Age?" painted a similarly bleak picture:
"When meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe, they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age."
I guess the pendulum swings back and forth for some of these news sources.
https://www.netflix.com/title/80168188