don't feel doomish, but roger this hallam
Roger Hallam
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1553133892860878848.htmlIt is a week since the highest temperatures in thousands of years hit the UK.
It is now an objective reality that this civilisation will collapse at some point in the early 2030s. Long tail possibilities are the late 2020’s and the late 2030’s on the other side.
Why? Forget global averages 1.5C, 2C – that’s all political distraction. What will bring down the system is physical and biological HARD STOPS and the compounding secondary effects cascading through the system.
These are objective. Like putting a bullet through someone’s brain. They die. They have nothing to do with social predictions – i.e. complex systems. This is Newtonian cause and effect.
The key is to look at extreme weather events over the next 20 years. The most important stats are the progressions of the recent past projected into the near future. Record high temperatures are going up by approximately .5C a year e.g. 2019 – 38C 2022 40C in the UK.
We can do a linear projection therefore that the UK will hit up to 45C heat by 2030 and 50C by 2040 – this is the cool temperate zone scenario.
Project that onto the warm temperate areas where it is now 45C to 50C (Portugal 47C, Scilly 49C), and we can project up to 55C by 2030 and 60C by 2040. In tropical areas where the present limit is around 55C at present we are looking at 60C by 2030 and 65C by 2040.
Of course there are good reasons to argue that the yearly average increases will be exponential, not linear, particularly as the
#Arctic ice will be melted in the summer around 2030/35 according to peer reviewed papers. These then are conservative projections.
Moving up the normal distribution curve, let’s say each zone will experience 30 plus days of temperatures around 5C less than the record high temperature each year.
Okay go and do the maths on the following hard stops – these have come from news stories over the past few weeks:
- You cannot fly a plane at temperatures over 48C
- You die within 6 hours at humid temperatures of 50C
- Major rivers dry up at 40C – (think transport routes)
- Internet centres cannot function over 35C
- Roads, runways, railway tracks and wiring melt at 40C
- Most food crops cannot grow and die at temperatures over 30C
Add in other predictions from the past few years:
- Vietnam will be periodically 90% under water within decades (think rice production)
- Indian wheat production will be 30% down by 2030
- The US costal property price bubble will burst at some point in the mid to late 2020s
- 20% of Australian forest on average will burn down by 2040
- 30% of London houses will be subsiding by mid century
- Lakes in the US West will be empty by the late 2020’s
- The Amazon will pass the 20-25% cut down tipping point into collapse within the next 10 years
- 20% plus, the US western regions will be burning each year by the mid 2030s.
Some of these predictions are messy and certainty fetish scientists, co-opted by the system, will find holes in them like holocaust deniers find holes in the assessment that 6 million jews died in Nazi Germany (maybe it was 5.5?).
These lines of argument have nothing to do with clear cool risk analysis and everything to do with another determinism: the psychological literature shows that most people cannot accept what they do not like.
By the 2030’s this civilisation will be gone, in the sense that regimes in the tropics will have collapsed, and those in warm and cold temperate zones will have become either right wing or left wing state socialist enterprises.
This state socialism has nothing to do with politics – it is what happens in societies facing existential breakdown.Carbon rationing and then rationing of everything else is inevitable.
Functional regimes will be putting all their surplus resources into geo engineering. Disfunctional ones will be collapsing into various cults of nihilism and thus disintegration.
If there is a future, it will now be post-nature. That is a future where the whole geo-physical system is controlled by human technologies – just as happened with agriculture systems over the past half century. We are prisoners of our technologies.There is a research job here for some people to collect all the predictions and do projections in a more systematic way – get in touch with me if you can do this.
The absolute imperative now is
#CivilResistance to ensure that the transition to what comes next is democratic and egalitarian rather than fascist and genocidal.
If we fail, our young people will experience terrible deaths before they reach middle age. Face your responsibilities at this time.