/sci/ - Science & Math

How likely is a civilizational collapse, or even just a massive population die off in developed countries in the current century?

>>9889689
I don't know, but if there is something we could do there isn't much time left before it's too late.

Why are humans so fucking retarded?

>>9788836
yep, we're fucked in general.
the economic clusterfuck is just getting worse,
there is an energy crisis incoming around 2050,
and on top of that the environment will fuck us to top it off.

so yeah, maybe in like 10 000 years we'll see some space.

>>9659070
>Is this hyperbole?
Not at all. In fact, this is an understatement. Climate change would cause so much death that not even a hundred holocausts would match it.

>>9639058
>Are you optimistic about the future of humanity?
No.
>why not?
Pic related.

>http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm

>Even if greenhouse emissions stopped overnight the concentrations already in the atmosphere would still mean a global rise of between 0.5 and 1C. A shift of a single degree is barely perceptible to human skin, but it’s not human skin we’re talking about. It’s the planet; and an average increase of one degree across its entire surface means huge changes in climatic extremes.

>Six thousand years ago, when the world was one degree warmer than it is now, the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska was desert. It suffered a short reprise during the dust- bowl years of the 1930s, when the topsoil blew away and hundreds of thousands of refugees trailed through the dust to an uncertain welcome further west. The effect of one-degree warming, therefore, requires no great feat of imagination.

>“The western United States once again could suffer perennial droughts, far worse than the 1930s. Deserts will reappear particularly in Nebraska, but also in eastern Montana, Wyoming and Arizona, northern Texas and Oklahoma. As dust and sandstorms turn day into night across thousands of miles of former prairie, farmsteads, roads and even entire towns will be engulfed by sand.”

>What’s bad for America will be worse for poorer countries closer to the equator. It has beencalculated that a one-degree increase would eliminate fresh water from a third of the world’s land surface by 2100. Again we have seen what this means. There was an incident in the summer of 2005: One tributary fell so low that miles of exposed riverbank dried out into sand dunes, with winds whipping up thick sandstorms. As desperate villagers looked out onto baking mud instead of flowing water, the army was drafted in to ferry precious drinking water up the river – by helicopter, since most of the river was too low to be navigable by boat. The river in question was not some small, insignificant trickle in Sussex. It was the Amazon.

I don't see how it could possibly not happen.

Is modernity sustainable?

Is this sustainable?

>>9122048
The problem is not overpopulation it's the way we live. The global market economy has created a synthetic ecology that treats the living world that we depend on as an externality. Capitalism and its sociopathic values that allow for usury, and the privatization of land and labor make the problem of negative externalities in market economics much worse. Neoliberalism and corporate-state command economies make it worse still.
It's easy to scapegoat such complex, systemic problems on an easily identifiable correlation such as overpopulation. The truth is we are overpopulated because the global consumer culture is throughly detached from its place in the living world.
Truth is we would not even be overpopulated if we lived in the real world.
The solution? Anarchy, and deep ecology. We need to live in a world where you can only receive ends from your own work or mutual aid, and the living world we live in is allowed to live. We can still have markets, we just need to manage externalities before they become externalities, using the science of ecology to manage our resource allocation. I'm not claiming I actually know all the answers, I'm claiming that they exist, and I'm claiming I know the problem.

>>9114558
Pssst
Hey idiot
The extinction event is what is causing the Ethiopians trouble.
Global capitalism is the problem. The poor people of Africa are at the mercy of foreign corporate-states.
Protecting Africa's ecological integrity is essential for maintaining stable earth systems, and feeding Africans,
If you think we can survive independent of earth you are incredibly naive.

>>9114272
Do nothing.

>>9110966
>why ecology
It's the ethical imperative.
People need understand their place in the world. With the advent of global consumer culture people have been completely alienated from the world they live in and the causal repercussions of their actions. The result of which puts civilization in existential danger with the living world it exists in.
All life is constantly involved in ecological interaction, we have synthesized an ecology that treats the living world we depend on for life as an externality, this is not okay. People have forgotten most of what they used to know and they don't know that they do not know. Ecological illiteracy now threatens our survival. Biodiversity loss (this isn't just species diversity, it's the loss of life in many constants at many scales structural complexity, abundance, functional diversity, spatial connectivity) and shifting baselines are causing the synergistically enslaved entropy in the living world to break down. Order follows from the parameters constraining it.
Not to mention ecology is the bests way to introduce systems thinking, dynamical systems, complexity and emergence, networks, and it is by its very nature applicable to the understanding of every aspect of living.
Knowing your place in the world you should be the most basic knowledge, this knowledge has been largely lost to global society.

>>9095407
>(accounting for .3% of total airborne carbon)
thats alot, espacially with the reduction in carbon sinks. if you would take into account apocalyptic biodiversity loss, widespread hydrological change, deforestation, changes in ocean salinity, temperature, population distributions, nutrient cycling, trophic interactions, recruitment and much more
i could go on for quite some time my point is we are experiencing widespread earth system change and the collapse of synergetically enslaved entropy. The issue is far more complex than co2.
When you break it down the reasons for the geologically unprecedented change we are experiencing can be generalized as; shifting baselines, biodiversity loss and the resulting absence of resilience and adaptive capacity, making earth systems unable to deal with entropy.
we are fucked and you need to understand the ecological side to get how fucked we really are
>we are having a slight impact
wrong

>>9092419
>pot scarcity
good luck with that
haven't you heard? Its 7/11 Armageddon.
try to enjoy the hell we bought with heaven

>>9061501
>everyone hates us
>we only destoryed the entire fucking planet what's the big deal?

>>9056304
>are do to developing nations
WRONG
they are due to devolping "nations" being systematically destoryed and pillaged for resources and labor(aka capital) by developed nations. you have state actors and international finance pushing market liberalization so the land and coastal waters can be opened up to economic colonialism by international corporations, which are in principle totalitarian entities unaccountable to the public and only required to fulfill one obligation, bring profit to the shareholders. The problems are not getting better, they are getting exponentially worse and will continue to do so.
People in "developing nations"are losing everything they have and so are you. this will really sink in as we run out of earth to "develop"
pic related
you dont know and you dont know that you dont know

>>9029449
No, we do worse than the aborigines ever could
Pic related, it's what you pay for at Walmart.

>>9012326
Ukraine and North Korea don't have market economies. Reminder that capitalist economies like the USA and China are destroying life at an unsustainible rate, changing the climate and it's literally the end. Of course industrialization is not inherent to capitalism, but comand economies focused on profits are like the state capitalism of China or the corporate state of the USA. Pic related. Economic colonialism through market liberalization has completley destoryed the small pockets of hope in the world like the Amazon Southeast Asia and subsaharan Africa, most unfortunately the ocean.
Capitalism isn't about money which is just a value, you can have money in anarchism or communism too and much more besides capitalism. Capital is something that can be capitalized like land you never touch, someone else's labour, harming other people in any number of nasty ways, debt,ect, literally anything. You would know more about what an economy is if you weren't completley brainwashed by the media, this post >>9012316
Is correct.

>>8969896
Wew lad
>free markets
>capital
Pick one
How can a market be free if you have to be obscenely wealthy to be an agent?
>Not allowing corporations to implement economies of scale in production for simple goods like food is incredibly irresponsible, and with current populations doing so would either completely trash the planet or starve 1/3 of the global population.
>industrial agriculture
>not already completley trashing the planet
>not already starving 1/3 the worlds population(soon to be 9/10)
Picture related.
No man would be working in a field all by themselves, unless they just wanted to. Humans are cooperative animals. Without capitalism we would see desuburbanization and the re emergence of human ecological systems in the "devolped world" Decentralized coops would be more economically benifical for more people involved. Getting paid for your work instead of the bare minimum your boss can get away with. As an ecosystem scientist I will testify that it is by far more ecologically sound than industrial agriculture.
>capital has a role
Strongly disagree

>>8963448
Market liberalization results in the destruction of ecological systems and the traditional agriculture they support, for timber, fish, minerals and fossil fuels. The natives are striped of liberty to freely live in their home and are not agents in this process. The freshly raped earth is planted with large scale monocultures that destory soil and are susceptible to famine and drought do to the loss of biodiversty. The nativies are given a penance for their economically forced labor if they are lucky enough not to be wiped out by paramilitary upon market liberalization, as is happening to the native congenese right now for example. The produce is taken to the international market supply chain. The profits are taken by the bankers and FDI'ers to build superyatchs and patronize their nanny-states. Or in the case of China the state just pillages by itself.
>market liberalization would result in an agricultural boom
That's busts into poverty and famine as has been clearly demonstrated many times over. The world bank makes its transactions quasi-transparent, and you can read all about it on its website. FDI is a different mater.
>redditors andbtheir lies.
I don't blame you for not being informed.
The power of propaganda isn't in what it says, it's what it prevents from being said. You hear a lot about starving Africans from the corporate media but the circumstances are always obfuscated.

>>8949695
>I'm just saying that we can't stop trying to improve our country because of people saying that "their" land is sacred.
>improve your country
im a ecosystem scientist and you're a fucking retard. you might aswell nuke yourselves.could very well be the straw that breaks the earths order-parameters if climate change and biodiversity loss dont do it first.
educate yourself before you go and destroy what is by far "Brazils" most valuable property,
i would personally skullfuck every native american on the planet to death to prevent that damn from being built. i feel for them but this is existential danger i am talking about.
besides only the elite will benefit from it and everyone else will pay the price