Next Big Future: Sorry Collapsitarians, Doomers and Dystopians a Full Collapse Will Not Happen
DaveMart
· 8 months ago
Great fight back against the do0msters. Things are going to be tough, but we ain't dead yet! Just one comment on geo-engineering to keep global warming under control. The basic technology is simple, instead of going to space based systems or using chemical reactions etc, in principle warming effects can be countered by using of the order of 60,000square kilometers of reflective material in a hot desert area. Obviously there would still be regional effects, but it would counter overall warming. If you choose whatever figure you like per square meter for the reflective material, you still only come out to costs of the order of a couple of hundred billion. Countering GW doesn't have to be high tech or break the bank.
oceanconveyor
· 8 months ago
Conversion to alternative fuels from fossil fuel will take years, mostly due to the failure of our Congressional leadership, which has been under the influence of coal lobbyists pharmaceutical lobbyists,gun control lobbyists. and Bernie Madoff lobbyists for years; a permit and construction of a nuclear reactor from start to completion takes 7 years. The excitement over biofuels such as algae, and human garbage, as fuels is years away from production; viable, but far from being " on-line : And Co2 does not disappear, or vaporize with a wand like effect, because humanity has said " enough "...it is Nature that rebels, not us. The impact of global warming is not fully understood by our entire scientific community, given the complexities of interaction, and this ridiculous term " geo-engineering ", reflecting some kind of GOD likepower to reverse engineer the damage to the Planet ,is an insult to any intelligent person. Nuclear war is not necessary to create havoc....military analysts are acutely aware that a nuclear explosion at 80,000 feet will destroy all electrical equipment...EMP, on the Eastern seaboard, and an explosion 200 miles high will completely destroy all digital equipment, destroy our SCADA, and make life for all citizens, extremely hard to function for at least a year in the entire U.S.. The damage to the global economies by derivatives, CDS, and black box strategies has yet to be managed, much less understood by our economists who do not work on Wall Street, much less understand how these derivatives were created.....the future of capitalism is the issue, not a doomsday scenario. I would argue that the the issue is not one of doomsday, as much as understanding "Change and Inevitable Surprises " unfolding on Planet Earth, without solutions or policies to effectively combat these changes.
nextbigfuture
· 8 months ago
If we are in a non-serious crisis where we are still using business as usual to deal with things then you still have the bureaucracy and permit and the blah, blah, blah so then a nuclear reactors takes 7 years to make. But if we somehow find ourselves in situation that has deteriorated to the point where we have to do things faster, then we go into the american football equivalent of the 2 minute drill. The no-huddle offense. Then permits are auto-granted (like no court ruling wire taps) and reactors are built as fast as we can physically build them. This becomes more like 2 years and going faster as we streamline the designs.
The alternative fuel conversion taking years is again an artifact of business as usual. If we change the local and other laws and have the national guard take the big cars and trucks and turn the factories over to light weight hyper-efficient vehicles then everyone would have electrified 2, 3 or 4 wheel cycles. Electric engines can easily handle lightweight vehicles and still get up to highway speeds and they can be safe because they would only be running into other light weight vehicles.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/06/geoengineering... Benford has a proposal that possesses the advantages of being both one of the simplest planet-cooling technologies so far suggested and being initially testable in a local context. He suggests suspension of tiny, harmless particles (sized at one-third of a micron) at about 80,000 feet up in the stratosphere. These particles could be composed of diatomaceous earth. "That's silicon dioxide, which is chemically inert, cheap as earth, and readily crushable to the size we want," Benford says. This could initially be tested, he says, over the Arctic, where warming is already considerable and where few human beings live. Arctic atmospheric circulation patterns would mostly confine the deployed particles around the North Pole. An initial experiment could occur north of 70 degrees latitude, over the Arctic Sea and outside national boundaries. "The fact that such an experiment is reversible is just as important as the fact that it's regional," says Benford.
Is Benford's proposal realistic? According to Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, "It appears as if any small particle would do the trick in the necessary quantities. I've done a number of computer simulations of what the climate response would be of reflecting sunlight, and all of them indicate that it would work quite well." He adds, "I wouldn't look to these geoengineering schemes as part of normal policy response, but if bad things start to happen quickly, then people will demand something be done quickly."
EMP can be shielded against. The military and some others have hardened facilities and equipment. Basically faraday cages like wrapping the equipment in metal foil.
MSimon
· 7 months ago
Love to see those electrified cycles going down Michigan Ave. in Chicago on a minus 20 F day with a 40 mph breeze.
That is going to be an easy sell.
nextbigfuture
· 7 months ago
2-4 wheel vehicles can be enclosed. Also, it is possible to wear ski gear where people can go downhill at 40mph at those temperatures. I have personally gone skiing at those temperatures. You can buy the gear in Canada at Mountain Equipment coop (MEC) and other stores. MEC gear is the best. In the US, go to a ski shop or REI. For 2012, there is the Segway/GM PUMA.
Also, sometimes old people will need more help getting around. This is not something that will be new. It is something that happens now.
There is the possibiity of mass production of exoskeletons like the Lockheed HULC or the japanese HAL suit ($4200) to help old people with future mobility.
kurt9
· 8 months ago
The doomsday people usually suffer from some form of emotional trauma, probably from their childhood. I knew one of these guy a long time ago. He was a financial doomsday guy (he was too smart to believe in any of the other variants of doomsday) but also had the compulsive need to believe that AIDS was going to wipe out much of the promiscuous heterosexual population (he was not gay) by 2000 (this was in the mid to late 80's when it was still believed that AIDS represented a significant threat to heterosexuals).
Of all of the doomsday believers, he was by far the most rational and coherent. Yet, he became a complete nut over the years. The rest of them are certifiable.
GoatGuy
· 8 months ago
Sigh...
The grist of the doomsayer's mill is also apparently the grist of the rebuttal mill. Doom-n-Gloom folks cite all sorts of "gotcha" events that have a non-infintessimal probability of happening at some point in the historically near future (i.e. decades to hundreds of years). Accomodationists cite rebuttals that catastrophic events have safety-valve alternatives that can be implemented with a degree of rapidity that may not be overservable in the present, but possible when viewed as a wartime reaction.
Except for "acts of God" type events, just about every other disaster scenario is mitigated to a degree and finally accomodated by bouts of civilizational "flu", from which we recover, and act in a new way.
The Luddites, freaks, conspiracists, and random doomsayers ... just don't deserve a rebuttal. They're gum stuck to warm pavement, broken eggs in a fresh dozen, cow-pies on the night-time country stroll.
The Ecology-nuts are to some degree credible, since we are logging the tropics to death, strip-mining whole mountains to rubble, polluting the oceans abysses and coastal waters world-wide... but you know, as BW posits things have a tendency to restructure themselves ecologically. It might not be the SAME ecology, but where there is water, circulation, turnover ... there is change.
Our ability to "handle the issues" is hardly ever realistic when taken in the catastrophe scenario. It is realistic though when the cataclysms develop over sub-century timescales. WW1 and WW2 didn't just "break out overnight". The British (and Europeans in general) knew full well what was coming, and what had to be sacrificed (or more importantly, conserved), and did so. More people in WW1 perished due to the friggin' influenza virus than from the war itself. What was the reaction to that dual war? The institution of large-scale hospitals, recovery facilities, sanitation, sterilization, new use of blood transfusions, plasma extraction and use. It was in no way 'nice', but humanity built new technologies, reservoirs of medicines, people, material and techniques to handle the global pandemic.
Sorry, but just as I don't buy the Gore trip that the whole ecology of the planet is going to "flip" when some critical threshold is exceeded, I also don't believe that we're going to cut all emissions out of the goodness of our concern and go "renewable" overnight.
As an example: just drive up to a promintory overlooking a large city. It doesn't have to be LA or NYC or SF or London. Just go up one clear evening with binoculars, and overlook the city. You'll see thousands of miles of roads, tens of thousands of kilometers of plumbing, electrical grid, stores, service providers, houses, schools, civic buildings, parks, waterways, freeways, industrial districts, shippers, trains ... "stuff". Think about the energies needed to destroy completely what you are looking at. Nuclear - yes, it would most certainly wipe out the whole thing in a big bang.
BUT ... there are thousands of cities. Hundreds of thousands towns. The resilience of the infrastructure is probably far greater (except for key 'regional' facilities such as refineries, aquaducts, dams, and the like) than people reckon. Yes, it can be broken. Yes, it will be shitty for a while. But yes, we're all industrious, creative, resilient and flexible enough to accomodate the changes, work with them, and recover.
That said, I also think that it is concomittant on our public-planning folks to have really workable "big fuggin disaster" plans in place that prevent 'socioeconomic gridlock' in the event of a really OMG event. The highest probability of an OMG event would be a sophisticated on-the-cheap infrastructure attack by fanatical terrorists. After that, only the seismic shelf collapse of the Canary Islands, random oceanic asteroid collisions and a sudden shutdown of the Atlantic conveyer belt would be "catastrophe" enough to thwart all public-emergency planning.
But you know? I'm not expecting those in my lifetime.
Nuclear war? Not probable. Everyone knows that it spells doom for billions. I just don't think that humanity collectively is that "into" its immolation. Auto-da-Fe, anybody?
GoatGuy
Snake_Oil_Baron
· 8 months ago
I would like to see more planning to mitigate the more likely smaller scale disasters. EMP weapons and major solar storms may be rare but building transformers which are resistant or even stocking up on replacements would reduce the massive headaches we would experience. More importantly, work on making towns and cities able to function if cut off for a few days or longer by massive natural disasters is crucial. In addition to traditional disaster preparedness, development of flexible, small-scale manufacturing to meet specific needs could be incouraged and emergency energy sources sequestered.
Also, the ability of nations to reconstruct a nation or nations after a regional colapse like when Putin and Mugabe get done dismantaling their societies needs to be improved. Saddam showed that thirty years without preventative maintenence can really deteriorate an infrastructure. If North Korea ever gains freedom the entire nation will need extensive infrastructural first-aid.
oceanconveyor
· 8 months ago
I generally appreciated the blogs posted on the doom and gloom issues; most were intelligent insights that may have been overlooked, and truly not well understood by the Luddites, but at least triggered a host of responses, proving that people are reading and thinking about major issues regarding carbon sequestration, CO2 pollution, and alternative strategies to fossil fuels. It would appear that answers to global warming, and ancillary issues, are all available for production right now, and it would only take the legislative process to enact laws that effect or alter current implementation , incentives, tax breaks, and liberal " lets get going " policies, but Congress can hardly solve the current economic crisis, and continues to fail America in inspiring leadership. This blah, blah, nonsense about nuclear reactors being built in 2 years, comes from some one watching " Aliens " too many times, when Paul Reiser as Carter Burke comments " see those atmospheric processors, you know, we make them " ! I have evidenced first hand, the speedy process of building the Shoreham Nuclear Facility, and the net result was plain and simple...the A.E.C. would not issue a permit, the plant was one big firecracker, and the costs are still being carried by native Long Islanders today. Indeed, technology has improved, more safety concepts introduced, but the risks are still there, and the spent rods, well, we can send them to New Jersey.. FutureGen was shut down by the D.O.E. because they were spending huge amounts in finding a solution to sequestration, and finally just gave up on the project. I am quite aware of Faraday shielding for our military forces, which is very limited ,and still must be connected to a grid....there is no shielding for our Cities-----you would need a nanotech umbrella of carbon nanotubes to protect the Cities. Read the current issue of Military and Aerospace, February, 2009 by John Keller who writes a Special Report on EMP Attack. Many solutions have been provided in these current blogs, particularly solutions to the most complex problems created by mankind....and with hope and optimism, maybe these geoengineering solutions can work for mankind in the future. But Antartica is still melting, the damage by the Exxon-Valdez is still present today, herbicides used prolifically still destroy our water supplies, acid rain breaks down the biological process completely ( yes, I live in the Adirondacks ) animal species are gone, forests leveled, and these issues alone are just not enough to motivate the legislative forces into action, the public is still uneducated about environmental damage, and everyone offers their expert analysis, and expert answers, but I do not evidence any tangible, or evident solutions to these problems.
nextbigfuture
· 8 months ago
Futuregen had some cost issues but most of it was a $500 million math error in the budget. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/science/earth... Futuregen looks to be reinstated as part of one of the stimulus packages.
China is continuing with coal to gas and coal to liquid projects.
If the situation was more desperate then the rulebook could be modified.
I could beat Mike Tyson at his peak.
It would involve not following boxing rules. By bringing lots of guns, tasers and other people. OR using the rules of the International Chess Federation. Many things become possible with different rules or no rules.
Yes, I understand the risks of nuclear plants. But the question would be what are those risks relative to an actual doomer scenario.
I agree that this is not likely to develop and we can stay in our bureaucratic zone.
But some of the bureaucracy like 17 years for FDA drug approval or 5 years for the paper work on a nuclear plant does not increase safety and the delays are costing lives.
Did sarbanes oxley help prevent a financial crisis ?
Does airport security really make things safer or is it a Kabuki theatre of sham security ?
Some regs are useful but there needs to be streamlining while still maintaining actual security there should assessment and measurement of what is working and what is not. There should be accountability for excessive delays.
The Indian Raj system of bureaucracy cost them lots of economic growth and kept a billion people in poverty longer. that has a cost in lives and quality of life.
Bureaucracy and erring on the side of excessive caution has a cost. that cost is actually severe. But there is little accountability on excessive bureaucracy.
oceanconveyor
· 8 months ago
Yes, we both could beat Mike Tyson with an assortment of weapons, and your point is well taken and received with optimism. With regard to Sarbanes-Oxley, the current rules are ineffective and costly; yet, when my partner and myself proposed an accounting system that cost one-tenth of existing costs, and was more effective in financial control, our plan was not accepted by the S.E.C., as the Big 5 had lobbied the S.E.C. and business community on complex sytems and rules, that proved ineffectual and way too costly.
Point : The Lobbyists at Work Again, defeating common sense and practical methodology. You are right about excessive bureaucracy----high cost, no return, and no accountability. Great response. Thanks.
Tom_Craver
· 8 months ago
Lots of good comments. I'd like to add a link to a post about global warming in an IEEE energy blog.
The blog post itself isn't so remarkable, though it is commenting on how many people in the US think GW is exaggerated (40% and rising).
What amazed me was the comments section. This is in a blog that gets linked to by an email list that goes out to IEEE members (electrical engineers) - so while these commenters are not climate scientists, they are pretty uniformly intelligent and skeptical - meaning they expect claims to be backed up by evidence, and if they are interested in something, they do their research. They are NOT your average Joe/Jane who will accept something if they just hear enough important people tell them it's true.
So what's so amazing? I read most of the comments responding to the post, and *every one I read* was skeptical about or disbelieved in global warming! Opinions ranged from something mild like "We haven't studied it enough to make such strong claims" up to "There's plenty of evidence to say that GW is a crock and those who advocate it are ignorant of the real science".
Either there just aren't that many GW advocates among electrical engineers, or the GW disaster advocates realized that their usual tactics of implying that skeptics are dumb or ignorant or corrupt or evil just wouldn't fly in that forum.
Tom_Craver
· 8 months ago
I agree that there are many ways we can avoid collapse from any particular disaster scenario. And yet... past civilizations, with people about as smart as today, HAVE collapsed. Usually the collapse wasn't due to a sudden dramatic event, but to long failure to face and deal with problems.
Maybe they were overpopulating and over-using resources of an island - they COULD have cut back on their population and restricted cutting of trees and area of planted ground - but perhaps that would have upset people. Easier to let it slide and hope that someone will figure it out later.
Or a vast empire might find itself weakening from the effects of its success on its people - allowing them to become lazy and push off responsibility, and tolerant of corruption in their leaders and officials. It was easier to compromise and negotiate and let things slide and patch up problems when they hit, rather than anticipate and prevent them or change their behaviors to become more resilient. If each little disaster seemed to leave the empire a bit shabbier and weak, well, they could always get around to fixing that up later, right?
So I don't think it's lack of options that causes a civilization to collapse. It's lack of will, lack of urgency, perhaps faith that if things go wrong they can always be fixed after the fact, because that's always worked before. Often, they'd could see that past exertions to prepare appeared to be unnecessary. They built and trained large armies - but after a surge of conquests, found that those armies didn't ever meet any foe that they couldn't easily defeat. And laws to execute corrupt officials perhaps started to seem to extreme, after they found that tolerating corruption didn't immediately lead to the end of their civilization.
In our own case - how long have we put off dealing with the question of what to do when the oil starts to run low? 30 years now? Doesn't seem to have caught up with us yet - so no worries - we'll fix it when it becomes necessary. We got ourselves worked up over Y2K - but really it seems to have been greatly over-blown. Terrorists tried to take down the World Trade center but failed? Eh - what are the chances they'd try that again - and if they do, we'll go over there and stomp them good - surely we don't need to be so eternally vigilant to rumors and warnings about jets and buildings? Medicare and Social Security will run out of funding pretty soon? Well, we seem to be able to just keep running up the national debt any time we run into a financial crisis - we'll probably be able to figure out a solution to those problems when they finally arrive. Housing prices seem to just keep going up and up - no way they could fall is there? Or if they did, so what - a few billion dollars will surely be enough to solve any financial difficulties that causes? Our big navy and army and air force don't seem to be all that useful in the sorts of wars we're fighting now, let's cut them back, and while we're at it, lets build robots to do the fighting so we don't have to put our kids so much at risk. We all know drugs are a social problem, but rather than really deal with it, we choose the "feel righteous" solution of drug prohibition, despite the chaos that is creating in our cities and Mexico. We all know that - but it's easier to just keep on doing it. Expansion into space? Hey, we've got clever little robots to do that for us, don't we? What profit could we get out of creating colonies on the moon and Mars? Let's put it off until we develop some better/cheaper launch technology.
Relax, take things easy, don't worry so much - I'm sure things will all just work out...eventually.
iconoclast421
· 8 months ago
The entire world is run by eugenicists. And the people about to be exterminated are living in complete denial and ignorance.
And somewhere inbetween you have people who are somewhat aware that something stinks... but they dont care because they are quietly positioning themselves as far away from the cattlecars as possible. While simultaneously denying that the cattlecars even exist. I'm speaking metaphorically about cattlecars, but surely if you're reading this you must be aware of how systematically people were slaughtered during the holocaust. And you must also be aware that such systematic killing can only be done with the help of some kind of fascist architecture... just look at IBM's role in the (first) holocaust. You have to be completely blind not to see that the same architecture has been rebuilt, only even bigger. It is just waiting to be taken over by fascism.
What kind of warning signs do you look for? Oh how about mass nationalization of large swaths of industry? check
Incredible levels of apathy and ignorance? check
I could go on, but what is the point? You either see it or you dont. Its too late in the game to not understand this stuff. But most people dont, so the course IS set. There will be a die-off. There will be mass exterminations. There will be all sorts of unspeakable evils, because people just deny it all, like drug addicts. and when you really analyze what has been going on... drug addicts are exactly what we are. Even if you think you "dont do drugs", rest assured that too is just denial.
I revisited that youtube clip where some guy is demonstrating his overunity water heater. Fascinating device! But our society is just so completely ignorant that we will tolerate 50 million views of Hanna Montana clips and all that other nonsense, but this guy receives so little attention. That right there is proof positive that we are headed fast down a road to unprecidented destruction. Believe whatever you want to believe, but you simply cannot deny the fact that most people are too ignorant to support themselves in any kind of realistic environment. They are completely dependent on someone else to do their thinking for them,, and until they wake up they are going to be ripe targets for another holocaust, or even more likely, perpetrators of another holocaust.
DrBalthar
· 8 months ago
Well I think there are two things. If civilization goes down the hill, it will be:
a) in this century. If we make it through this with all the major troubles we are facing without going down we will be more or less save.
b) Most likely a human induced collapse. Either technological or social.
The main problem I see as a lot of previous posts have pointed out although technology and science-wise we have advanced tremendously in the last 500 years, socialogicaly we haven't. We basically still have all the same major problems we used to have 500 years ago. (Inequality in rights / resources / opportunities, war, hunger, slavery, killing, racism, ignorance) Yep all there the last time I checked.
Second the social problems will be increasing with the technology advancements we have created in the last 50 years. As the economist Jeremy Rifkin already pointed out in 1995 in his book the end of labour all modern workforce societies due to technology advancements are stearing into a 20:80 society. That means only 20% of the population is needed to generate the wealth of a nation. What do we do with the 80 percent or the large majority?
No one seems to have a solution for this or even thought about that, people in charge political or economical are so big in denial of this. But with the latest financial and economical crises the crack can already be seen. The level of unrest if this problem will not be addressed adequately will be tremendous, because it will be close to home and people will see & feel it and can't deny or push it away like all the bigger problems like resource deplation or climate change. And the US with there non-existent social system are in the worst position to face this right now. Who wonders to what extreme they would go to!
And worst of all there are no technological fixes for social problems!
cipi604
· 8 months ago
This article underlines the idea that nothing said has credibility unless it's backed up by numbers. I wonder how much information he knows to come to such conclusions? I believe that he doesn't have a clue about what he's talking about. For example:
1.There is no such thing as voluntary reductions in energy demand, it's forced by the laws of nature. 2.We are not in a world war, so rationing food without the people taking the streets it's out of the question. 3.Transitions are not simple or rapid. 4.Myth busted by 1,2 and 3. 5.AGW requires the system to work indefinitely. 6.Arthur C. Clarke said that we got stuck to a lower level than he was expecting. 7.A loser on such a war would be the one who has no chance but a war to have it. The more you fight, the faster you suffocate. 8.Technologies aka technical-fixes are based on the same system that is going into a coma. 9.At this point comes into play the economic model called globalisation. Our system is designed for a constant spin, once stopped it goes into a coma.You can't reboot finite resources. 10.He's way off, we have at least 23.000 nuclear bombs. http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nukestatu...
So yeah, I'm still a doomer. I believe only in numbers.Numbers never lie, people do.
nextbigfuture
· 8 months ago
1. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pressroom/fhwa0826.htm federal highway driving miles down by 100 billion miles in the USA. 2. Yes the point is that is circumstances started to become as dire as a world war then there would be rationing of food and it would be accepted. Thus the scenario of a civilization deathspiral without passing through the rationing and counter measures phase is completely wrong 3. Transitions can be rapid. The current business as usual transition will be 20-30 years long. But electric bicycles are produced at over 100 million per year and use over 20 times less metal and other resources as a car. Electric bikes and light scooters can achieve highway speeds and there is bike racing gear that would allow vehicle to not spike up. Especially if there was simultaneous removal or segregation of big cars and trucks 4. China is achieving a far faster buildout of electric and other infrastructure. Faster build of hydro-electric and nuclear power. Even faster build is being enabled with new factories and designs 5. anti-global warming duration depends upon the methods. Once the switchover to non-carbon systems is done then the remaining CO2 would be removed through natural processes over about 3000 years. However, that can be accelerated by building out the CO2 removal systems. There is also carbon sequestering and biochar. Carbon sequestering is at the ten million ton per year level. The total man made CO2 is at about 26 billion tons per year. 6. so what ? Clarke said a lot of stuff. I can give you plenty of quotes of technical optimism and predictions of space elevators etc... Plus show me the link 7. this makes no sense 8. system is not going into a coma. There was a great depression and yet countries were still able to spin up for WW2 and the economic boom after it. 9. system is not stopping. The financial reboot is cancellation of debtand re-issuing currency this has been done many times. Argentina, Germany, etc... 10. The very link you have shows that the number of high alert weapons are about 2000 for the USA and 2000 for Russia. Plus the megatonnage on those bombs is far less
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_arms_race The US stockpile of weapons peaked at over 30,000 bombs with over 20,000 deployed Russia/USSR peaked at over 40,000 bombs Megatonnage was over 20,000 megatons (for the US stockpile alone in 1960) and now it is at about 2000 megatons
You only have one statistic in your post. I am not impressed.
wes_george
· 8 months ago
Gooday from Downunder. I'm not a doomer. Just an old man. Me thinks you all are barking up the wrong tree, mates. Sure, human extinction isn't going to happen short of an asteroid the size of Manhattan colliding with the Earth. And the AGW apocalypse is just the latest secular rerun of the End Times theme. It's only so popular because it is imagined to be a useful sociopolitical trope by a certain section of our polity and media elite. How cunning to blame bad weather on your political opponents!
What is more probable within our lifetimes is a world war, superficially like the last world war but utterly different in important aspects. The Goatguy seems to think we always bounce back from big wars better than before. Not so this time, because the circumstance--population, ecology, resources have finally reached the end of their tethers, that's assuming Moore's Law and technological innovation come to a grinding halt in order to divert that energy into protracted total war. In fact, our civilization is utterly unsustainable without a continued increase in the pace of creative innovation driven by free markets of ideas, goods and services. Total war is the ultimate socio-eoconomic paradigm shift.
Therefore, the next great war will usher in with it a new global dark age of decline in human health, rights, wealth, science, the arts, liberties of all kind, free trade, travel, information exchange and bring on massive ecological damage like nothing we have seen yet. The death toll from disease alone will be on the order of many magnitudes greater than WWII, in part because our populations live dependent on fragile and complex systems. Simply turning off power and denying petrol and medical care to a region like, say, Texas for a year would result in millions dead from disease. This was not the case in 1940. America will not be isolated from the direct effects of war as it was during the 20 th century.
And you Yanks are to be blamed! That's right. No, you're not going to start it through aggression, but by letting your nation become weak and allowing Pax Americana to fall into a state of decline to the point it can be challenged by your totalitarian collectivist friends in Asia and elsewhere. Once you become sufficiently weak, your natural enemies will form coalitions politically, economically and finally militarily against you. It won't last, but that's how it will start. Like a pack of wolves on a great mighty, but old war horse. And then they will come for the rest of us.
In point number 7, you say "The US would not lose" an all out war. Typical American cocksureness. Sure, if it were fought today and on your terms. But what about in 2025 and on the Chinese's terms?
Americans are famous for their geopolitical naivete. The new President is perhaps the most naive ever to occupy the White House. Granted, he's a sharp suit, but unfortunately the last cowboy in office will now certainly not go down as the dumbest American president in history, or even the decade, when the Great Yankee sagas are composed on sheepskin by firelight in 2050 in a hidden valley somewhere high in Utah (or Maine) beyond the range of Chinese fighter bombers.
Historians of the next great war will mark the lead up to war to the great national debt and subsequent destruction of the US dollar as the global currency. Obama will give America EU-style socialism at the price of destroying the nation's global economic hegemony. Once the dollar is no longer the global currency, the massive debt, up to 70 percent of the US GNP, will be owed in a coalition currency largely controlled by China, if not officially, then by sheer economic muscle.
US military power is only sustainable because the US dollar is the world's currency. No strong dollar, no global super power. No Pax Americana and the Chinese will attempt the coup de grace to impose Pax Orientalis. Now I understand that some of Obama's old mates like William Ayers would welcome Chinese totalitarian rule in America, but I believe that even in a weakened state the American people will reject foreign rule even if it means war. Perhaps more insidious is the American naive belief in the genuine goodness of all of humanity. We can work with the Iranian, Hamas, the Taliban, the Russian and China, be friends, unclench our fists. The problem lies in the clash of civilizations. The Chinese, a 6,000 year old civilization are no more likely to adopt the American barbarisms of constitutional rights and liberty for all, we the people hokum than the Taliban. Nor do Americans understand the huge sense of entitlement the Chinese feel as the center of the earth to form Empire. China, by the way, is already a vast empire of different nations and races held together only by brutal totalitarian force. They know they're destined to rule the world.
As one pundit put it recently: imagine if the roles were reversed in the middle east. Imagine if Israel was a weak jewish enclave in Gaza and Hamas was as mighty as the Israeli army is today. Wonder how long that Jewish enclave would last? Now imagine that the US was as weak as China is today (or was) and that China is as strong as the US. Imagine if China was the global super power and the US navy pinned against the California coast line. The world would be a different place altogether. And unless the US eventually totally submitted, war would be the results. Note that the US has treaty obligations that could trip a Sino-US war in half a dozen hot spots across the Pacific and Indian ocean whenever China chooses. So the war will begin when and where your enemy choses, not on your terms.
It will start as a Chinese led coalition totalitarian empire with Russia and others, but that will break down pretty quickly. Invasions will occur. Nukes will be exchanged. But not all at once like the old cold war scenario. Mutually assured destruction will turn out to be as much a myth as nuclear winter as long as they are used tactically against states that don't have nuke strike back capacity. The few big nuclear states will hold their fire on each other. Nuclear states will pass along nukes to non-nuke allies for one off tactical use here and there. The US will be forced to use tactical nukes too, because your other forces will be too weak to hold the balance.
Pick your favorite hot spot to set the war off. Maybe Iran will try to nuke Israel. China take back Taiwan? Who knows? It could be a minor incident we can't possibly imagine today. We can be sure that Western appeasement due to weakness will be manipulated in a game of Real Politik as it was before WWII to the advantage of the aggressors. But I digress. The real cause of the war is US economic policy created in March 2009 which marks the beginning of the end for American global power.
It will be a slow and long war like Orwell's 1984 war, almost endless. It will wreck democracy, certainly in places like Mexico, Indonesia, India and Turkey first, then the EU, the US will be the last to succumb to a national security state run from the Pentagon. The US Allies won't have the industrial capacity reserve advantaged they had over the Axis in 1939. The population and resource balance will favor Asia and its middle eastern allies. The aggressors will have far more soldiers to toss like chafe into the wind. Demographics will be powerful tide against the West. Moreover, endless conflict and high death tolls will suit the totalitarian regimes and fuel their economies, while being highly corrosive to our own culture of liberty and abundance.
Texas and Mexifornia will pass back and forth between armies at first then warlords in the later dark ages following. See the Afgan-Paki frontier for a taste of things to come. San Francisco or some other US target will almost certainly be nuked at some point, but by an NGO proxy, so retaliation in kind will be most difficult. Australia will become a mineral resource colony of China and the Australian people slave labour. The great victory of the Chinese axis will come not because they will ever be able to unconditionally defeat North America but because America will have to adopt some version of the totalitarian military statism to survive in a state of constant war. Perhaps once the last spark liberty is extinguished in America then it will be possible to negotiate unclenched fists with totalitarian regimes, after all you'll no longer pose a cultural threat to them.
So, I hope you'll sleep well tonight knowing that you've cleverly shown the world is utterly safe from an Old Testament-style apocalypse. mates. Good on ya. Maybe tomorrow you blokes will wake up and smell the coffee and make a post about how America can save its economy and the US dollar and therefore Pax Americana and ultimately the whole bloody rest of the free world from a very nasty future. Because America's continued strength is all that stands between everything your Founding Fathers' cherished and a second Dark Age.
cbpelto
· 8 months ago
TO: wes_george RE: Excellent!
Great item, your comment. Pretty much 'spot-on'.
You might want to check out my comments (below) vis-a-vis 'Old Testament' aspects.
Regards,
Chuck(le) [The feminist movement collapsed one milli-second after the first impact. -- Niven and Pournelle, Lucifer's Hammer]
nextbigfuture
· 8 months ago
China will not attack the USA even if china's economy is three times the US economy for decades. The USSR had far less economy but had nuclear bombs and military. The US would still have deterrent. Plus if China is economically successful and sufficient to develop a superior military then why would they attack what they would already own. they would have tens of trillions in T-bills and US companies and buildings etc...
China and the USA will not have a war over Taiwan. China wants an undamaged Taiwan to come back. If I want my x-girlfriend back, it does not make sense for me to kill her and shove her in the basement. the economic union of china and Taiwan is well under way. President Ma of taiwan is opening up economic trade and other ties. Heading toward a trade block arrangement.
If you are winning economically, you do not have to fight. Every nation wants to cozy up with the new sugar daddy.
wes_george
· 8 months ago
You missed my point nextbigfuture:
If the totalitarian Chinese economy is three times the US economy then you can kiss your butt goodbye long before "decades" have past. What would the US deterrent be in 2040? B-52 bombers and 75-year old nukes? "Economic success" means something entirely different to a totalitarian empire than a liberal democracy. The x-girlfriend analogy is apt, but in the hands of mentally ill psycho rather than a nice boy from a good family from Kansas. (which is what your sociological horizon appears to be, no shame it that. You're lucky. Be grateful.)
You did concisely sum up the most dystopian, collapsitarian scenario imaginable short of The Apocalypse: "If china is economically successful and sufficient to develop a superior military then why would they attack what they would already own?" Good point, Toto, but, Hello, I thought you weren't a doomer? Or perhaps more to the point-- why doesn't that totally freak you out?
Surely, you aren't so naive to think it would be OK to be "owned" by China?
Is this what Arnold Toynbee meant when he wrote about great civilizations commit cultural suicide first, long before being conquered from the outside? Tell me I am reading way too much into your comment. That you understand the absolutely unique place the US constitution and Bill of Right occupies in the history of civilization and that you understand the regressive authoritarian Chinese Stalinist statism is only reconcilable with American concepts of liberal democracy as long as the US is the world economic and military world hegemon.
Please rerun your thought experiment with new inputs this time informed by 20th century history and socio-political reality: What does it mean to say China owns America? (Clue: See Tibet for some widely understood effects of being owned by China.)
But let's not get too case specific. A close look at the decades preceding WWI and WWII reveals striking parallels to today. Obviously, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does spiral out fractal patterns which can be empirically identified. Game theory combined with complex system analysis suggest that one can roughly forecast nonlinear system behavior in the presence of similar strange attractor paradigms. That's what this bloody blog is all about, isn't it?
nextbigfuture
· 8 months ago
Being "owned by China" is not a collapsitarian -in terms of 90% loss of life scenario. Or necessarily any loss of life. It is not desirable to go that far down that road, but clearly unless things change that is the straight line projection. The US is selling itself to China at a few hundred billion per year in "normal" years.
China took back Hong Kong. That would be the more similar scenario. Do whatever you want but do not speak out against the leadership or try to overthrow it. How much more unlike this is the US ? Rotating between democrat party machine and the republican. Buying influence via lobbyist.
The UK faded as the top power. China lost world top power status 500 years ago.
China does not care if other places have democracy or dictatorship. See the deals they are cutting in Africa. Other places are the external territories. You trade and work with them. China is tough enough to manage expansion to govern would involve more headaches and not be more useful.
The US can control how this plays out, but the US would have to get its own financial and political house in order. I will be writing more about this. http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/03/chinas-2008-an...
1.Of course they are driving less, but it was because they got high oil prices=>stagflation=>economy crashed = laws of nature. They are driving less because they can't afford it anymore not because suddenly they decided it's for a noble cause. 2.Agriculture works with oil and natural gas. It doesn't work on electricity. And about rationing... you starve the people, you get a revolution.Starving people don't stay calm, or work anymore. 3.Biking requires FOOD. Food requires agriculture. Agriculture requires oil and natural gas. You can't bike 80km/day (US average). You can't bike in the winter. 4.Oil decline is >> faster than what China or whoever can build in time. Nuclear requires engineers, technicians, fuel and a lot of time to be built. Hydro it's just a drop in the ocean in comparison with the actual imputs offered by hidrocarbons. 5.No oil and gas = no AGW. But who cares about the CO2 when your kids are starving, and you don't have a job. 6.It was a documentary. 7.It makes a lot of sense, because for example USA is importing 60-70% of the oil it needs.The more they fight, the more they consume. No exports=No oil=No food=No transport=No civilization. In just 5 short days you have all the stores empty. 8.With liquid fuels shortages, everything stops. The system goes into a coma in less than 2 weeks. Back then, when USA had the first depression, they were the #1 oil exporter and #1 oil producer. Now they are at the other end of the list. Back then EROEI was 100:1, now it's 15:1. After the war they had a boom because they had a lot of cheap energy and resources, nowadays you have very expensive fuels + shortages of all kinds. 9.Argentina, Germany ... and so on... they got help (resources/food) comming from abroad. This is not the case anymore, especially if you are in a war over them.Plus that you can't eat paper money. In the presence of shortages and lower energy every year, the financial system goes bust in no-time.You can't have credit if you can't grow anymore. 10. Far less is still enough for a small die-off.
I don't need statistics, you wrote the article, you try to convince the people, not me. I was just proving to you... that you have to prepare, and really fast. Don't be impressed, be safe.
nextbigfuture
· 8 months ago
1. There is still oil and people are driving less. 2. There will be oil and natural gas. See below. So no starvation. 3. Electric bikes. Sitting on electric mopeds. You can use a moped in the winter. 4. Oil field decline is not projected faster than 6%. Some of more pessimistic decline is 4.5% per year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_megaprojects There are still oilfields being added. Natural gas production is increasing. When people are desperate enough they will drill off the coast of california, and in Alaska's protected area Even if there was export land hoarding of oil and no exports there would still be oil in the USA plus there is biofuels and synthetic fuels and coal to liquid. You do not drop below 30% of current levels. 5. Peak oil and global warming can both be handled 6. So what. One sentence from A Clarke. 7. Your numbers are wrong. The navy has nuclear powered ships. The 8 million barrels per day of oil, ethanol, biofuels plus imports from Canada which would still flow are nearly 10 million barrels of oil per day. 50% of current levels. You would divert what is needed to the military if needed to capture other oil supplies. 8. See 7. 9. Not going to happen. Already listed the actions for emergency financial system reboot and handling physical shortages 10. Yes starvation happens sometimes in Africa. Happened in China in the 1950's. there is far more margin for adjustment in the wealthy places.
It's called, by insurance companies an 'Act of God'. And, according to research, it's happened five times in recorded history.
Enjoy,
Chuck(le) [Once more I shall shake the Earth.....]
cbpelto
· 8 months ago
P.S. Forgot to mention that the mean time between such 'events' has been about 720 years. But the last one was almost 1500 years ago. Not that these things run like a well-ordered bus-scheduled, but....well....you know.....
Brett_McS
· 8 months ago
A slow run down with no single collapse point is the way it would go. There is too much diversity and resilience at a small local level to allow a sudden collapse. The problem is at the national/state level. New infrastructure, new power generation are due soon, or overdue and yet there is nothing significant on the horizon being planned, let alone being built. It's like the wheels and gears have been so clogged with rules and regulations casually and unthinkingly built up during the easy times that the engine doesn't work anymore, only few have noticed because we're coasting along at the moment. This leaves us very vulnerable to unforseen shocks.
cbpelto
· 8 months ago
TO: Brett_McS, et al. RE: That's....
A slow run down with no single collapse point is the way it would go. -- Brett_McS
....pretty much the way it was going with what was left of the Roman Empire. It was all being 'ground down' by the barbarians. THEN....
....around 540 AD, there seems to have been the last of the 'events' I mentioned above. At that time, there are reports from two Irish and one French source that indicated there might have been a cometary impact. The Irish have a 'legend' of "two lords of light descending from the sky to the earth" and an Irish priest reports that the sky was black for several days. Also, about the same time a Frenchman reports seeing a comet. Then there are the Chinese of the time saying that crops did not grow well for several years.
Regards,
Chuck(le) [History repeats itself....now and then....]
Brett_McS
· 8 months ago
Can't disagree. The point is that a nation that becomes sclerotic is very vulnerable to just about any sort of crisis, like a weakened body. Some old people near death just expire in their sleep one night as their life force runs down, but most old people actually die, in the end, from an infection of pneumonia.
cbpelto
· 8 months ago
TO: Brett_McS RE: The 'End'
An interesting analogy, that.
The way I see the collapse of civilizations is pretty much the way you describe death taking a 'weakened body'. For example, the Roman Empire.
Weakened by centuries of corruption and moral lassitude, with malicious 'bacteria' attacking it continually, it is holding on. Then a new element—pneumonia—is added, which is virulent and does the old 'body' in.
At this point, the 'bacteria' come in and feast on what remains of the body. And new bodies are generated which war with each other for dominance. These bodies, once a dominance is established, either singular or collective, thrive in the place of the former body. That is until they become 'sclerotic' themselves and the decline part of the cycle begins once more.
Regards,
Chuck(le) [History repeats itself.]
escutcheonblot
· 8 months ago
I agree that civilization will probably not collapse. Ours never has, has it? The collapse of the Roman Empire was not the collapse of civilization. It was sustained in the Byzantine Empire, Persia, India, and China...not to mention the monasteries of the Catholic Church, especially in Ireland.
But hundreds of millions probably died as a result of that cataclysm, and the number would be at least ten times as great for a comparable collapse of say, the US, Europe, or China.
The Amish will endure whatever...the new Irish monks of the 22nd century.
cbpelto
· 8 months ago
TO: escutcheonblot RE: Please Explain Away....
The collapse of the Roman Empire was not the collapse of civilization. -- escutcheonblot
....the Dark Ages. The Romans are no longer with us, escutcheonblot.
I think you're confusing the collapse of a civilization with the iradication of mankind. There's something of a 'difference'.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Chuck(le) [I've fallen and I can't get up. -- Roman Empire]
P.S. Also reportedly said by the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Minoan and a number of other civilizations that are no longer with us.
escutcheonblot
· 8 months ago
I haven't confused anything, Chuck.
The question was Civilization, not Roman Civilization. Civilization, without any pre-qualifiers, is by default the human one. And even Roman Civilization did not disappear completely, as it was perpetuated in the monasteries of the west, and in Byzantium in the east until its fall in 1453, nearly a thousand years after the last Roman emperor in the west.
Don't be so provincial...American or even Western Civilization is not the same as Human Civilization, as much as I treasure the former.
I don't believe I conflated the two issues...eradication of mankind, and the collapse of civilization...they are quite different. Though both would of course involve death in horrifying scale.
Human Civilization has never, to our knowledge, collapsed. Of course if it had, (an 'Atlantis' event?) by definition, we would not know about it.
But otherwise thank you for your helpful lecture on 'difference(s)'.
yours ever,
EB
P.S. The Incas say hi. Eradication sucks.
cbpelto
· 8 months ago
TO: escutcheonblot RE: Yeah....Right.....
I haven't confused anything, Chuck.
The question was Civilization, not Roman Civilization. -- escutcheonblot
Tell me when you gradaute from high school....
Regards,
Chuck(le) P.S. Where's the Incan and Aztec cvilization?
escutcheonblot
· 8 months ago
How brilliantly you've disposed of all my points, Sir, or Madam!
I bow to your superior wit, knowledge, grammar, and spelling.
What an ornament you must be to your own society
With great affection,
EB
cbpelto
· 8 months ago
TO: escutcheonblot RE: It Is Blatantly Apparent....
How brilliantly you've disposed of all my points, Sir, or Madam! -- escutcheonblot
...that English is a secondary, if not tertiary, language for you.
RE: Please Let Me Explain
You seem to disregard the fact that there are no Romans around, preferring to point out that we are still 'civilized'. This despite the obvious fact the Roman civilization no longer exists. You seem to think that because their descendants exist that 'civilization', i.e, the Roman form, did not 'collapse'.
However, in a later comment you seem to recall that the Incan Civilization is no longer with us. At the same time not recognizing that the descendants of the Incas are still with us. That as well as the Aztecs. Let alone the Mayans and Anazasi.
You seem to be rather 'selective' in your recognition.
Regards,
Chuck(le) P.S. When and where did you graduate from high school? I ask because I'd like to know how far our vaunted American education system has collapsed since I graduated in '69.
uknowbetter
· 8 months ago
I can has collapse and Obama will give it to me.
MSimon
· 7 months ago
You should study Jevon's Paradox. Increased efficiency in the use of a resource causes increased resource use.
Jevon was a Brit economist in the 1860s interested in coal.
Of course he did not count on increased efficiency in coal extraction so he did not get everything right. We do see the effect re:CFLs. With increased efficiency in light production more light is desired and the amount of added light more than compensates for the increased efficiency.
nextbigfuture
· 7 months ago
if increased efficiency lets you use more for the same cost then you will use more. But if you are forced to greater efficiency and prices are higher so you do not buy more then overall usage goes down. This was the case when prices for oil went up to $4/gallon. Driving miles went down and oil usage went down.
Malthusian_Kerfoffel
· 5 months ago
Imagine each one of us is a yeast cell in a bottle of sugar-water. The sugar sustaines us and is non-renewable. Our population grows exponentialy and we will soon run out of food. Some of our yeast-leaders foresee the coming collapse and call for switching to alternative foods (there are none) and better use of the food we have. Then comes rationing, starvation and (ultimately) the Final Chapter.
Just before the end, some optimistic yeast say we can think our way out of this dillemma. They are wrong but denouncing good thoughts does nothing to help either. Tell me how this yeast-model differs from humanity living on a finite globe.
nextbigfuture
· 5 months ago
We can leave the finite globe. It is matter of time to develop the technology and enable easy movement between planets and then beyond. This site covers the technologies and plans for achieving this. If things reached a point where it was clearly necessary then the technology we already have could be used to launch material using the nuclear cannon concept developed at this site as a variant of the project Orion pulsed propulsion technology. Then the regular launch systems would only have to launch people. All their supplies could go up with this other system. Five thousand commerical jets move a few hundred people at a time and 100 million people over one year.
Also, in terms of current carrying capacity and energy. In the developed countires, we are producing several times the food that is needed for people to eat and not starve.
Factory mass produced deep burn nuclear can provide the energy for ten times our current usage level for twenty thousand years. It is not so much food but cheap and abundant energy that our civilization needs to grow.
The "petri dish" [carrying capacity of the earth] can be made larger with the technology that we have or are developing. That is even before we make more dishes by getting off of the earth. The solar system can sustain ten thousand times the number of people on the earth. So we are no where near the end. The rationing is only needed if we have some kind of mismanagement/transition issue which is temporary.
stussy
· 4 months ago
Its not any one thing we have to worry about.
We will face many obstacles along the way. We can talk all we want, but we should be prepared, and raise our odds for survival.
Yes we have come very far, but at the same time for the last 50 years we have been stagnant. We have raised our standard of living\laziness, but we have also raised massive populations reliant on a few subsatantial populations that are holding the rest up.
Have you ever been in a large city and witnessed the panic in a disaster? I have and it was only a small one. At the same time it was a large one. August 2003, North East America and South East Canada were without power. The blackout affected an estimated 10 million people in Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states. Katrina is another example but I dont need to reference that for you.
There is a positive for connectivity/globalization, and there is a negative.
Under globalization we share, and a few benefit of the mass population, as in our Democracys.
The problem occurs when under democracy, if we ruin a country we can move to another country.
Under Globalization if we ruin the Earth, its not so easy to move on.
I would say our planet is at near maximum capacity, but our economy requres growth to function.
When each person equals pollution of one form or another, we can no longer afford a larger population.
With increase in population and a decrease of trees, and an increase in of CO2. We will arrive at problems of the earths chemistry. Combine this with increased chemical use, farming, fishing and water use....And human kinds tandancy for war rather than peace.
I am trying in many ways to make myself self reliant.
You can can/jar food Grow your own Hunt your own Use preserves SELF PRESERVASION
I am not waiting for some new invention
lolandlolandlol
· 2 months ago
1.You forget (or have no idea of) EROI, Energy return on investment. 2.You forget (or have no idea of) growing complexity that you so called 'solutions' create.
A.CTL produce more CO2 and have a little EROI same for tarsand and other joke. B.Biofuel is an energy lost, negative EROI, a great source of CO2, a great cause of soil and water polution and depletion. And will also cause greater food shortage. And the fabulated cellulosic ethanol miracle will cause a depletion and lost of humus that will mineralize our soils (desertification process). C.Hydrogen have an EROI so negative that nothing more is needed to show the absurdity of it. D.The geoengineering joke, is very symptomatic of this culture magic thinking. -You will need a lot of energy to do it. -You will produce a lot more CO2 that will force you to more geoingineering... -You will need to divert a lot of resource to do geoingineering -You will need to switch people from productive task to this avoid collapse task (more complexity)
And all the so call 'solution' are flawed and only put us in a more desperate situation. The only way to avoid collapse is down sizing civilization in a more simple one. No magic thinking or flat earth ideology will prevalover physics laws.
All Comments
Just one comment on geo-engineering to keep global warming under control. The basic technology is simple, instead of going to space based systems or using chemical reactions etc, in principle warming effects can be countered by using of the order of 60,000square kilometers of reflective material in a hot desert area.
Obviously there would still be regional effects, but it would counter overall warming.
If you choose whatever figure you like per square meter for the reflective material, you still only come out to costs of the order of a couple of hundred billion.
Countering GW doesn't have to be high tech or break the bank.
The alternative fuel conversion taking years is again an artifact of business as usual. If we change the local and other laws and have the national guard take the big cars and trucks and turn the factories over to light weight hyper-efficient vehicles then everyone would have electrified 2, 3 or 4 wheel cycles. Electric engines can easily handle lightweight vehicles and still get up to highway speeds and they can be safe because they would only be running into other light weight vehicles.
CO2 can still be there are plenty of options:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/geoengineering...
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/06/geoengineering...
Benford has a proposal that possesses the advantages of being both one of the simplest planet-cooling technologies so far suggested and being initially testable in a local context. He suggests suspension of tiny, harmless particles (sized at one-third of a micron) at about 80,000 feet up in the stratosphere. These particles could be composed of diatomaceous earth. "That's silicon dioxide, which is chemically inert, cheap as earth, and readily crushable to the size we want," Benford says. This could initially be tested, he says, over the Arctic, where warming is already considerable and where few human beings live. Arctic atmospheric circulation patterns would mostly confine the deployed particles around the North Pole. An initial experiment could occur north of 70 degrees latitude, over the Arctic Sea and outside national boundaries. "The fact that such an experiment is reversible is just as important as the fact that it's regional," says Benford.
Is Benford's proposal realistic? According to Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, "It appears as if any small particle would do the trick in the necessary quantities. I've done a number of computer simulations of what the climate response would be of reflecting sunlight, and all of them indicate that it would work quite well." He adds, "I wouldn't look to these geoengineering schemes as part of normal policy response, but if bad things start to happen quickly, then people will demand something be done quickly."
Again under military mobilization levels - the CO2 capture from the air technologies would be rolled out in scale
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/co2-capture-fr...
EMP can be shielded against. The military and some others have hardened facilities and equipment. Basically faraday cages like wrapping the equipment in metal foil.
That is going to be an easy sell.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/04/general-motors...
2010-2011 there is the Think City electric car for about $25,000
http://gas2.org/2009/03/16/think-city-an-afford...
There is the Reva electric car for India
http://www.revaindia.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REVA
Tata Motors is close to an electric car
http://cleantech.com/news/3358/tata-motors-prog...
BYD has China's electric car $22,000
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122928340145004...
Also, sometimes old people will need more help getting around. This is not something that will be new. It is something that happens now.
There is the possibiity of mass production of exoskeletons like the Lockheed HULC or the japanese HAL suit ($4200) to help old people with future mobility.
Of all of the doomsday believers, he was by far the most rational and coherent. Yet, he became a complete nut over the years. The rest of them are certifiable.
The grist of the doomsayer's mill is also apparently the grist of the rebuttal mill. Doom-n-Gloom folks cite all sorts of "gotcha" events that have a non-infintessimal probability of happening at some point in the historically near future (i.e. decades to hundreds of years). Accomodationists cite rebuttals that catastrophic events have safety-valve alternatives that can be implemented with a degree of rapidity that may not be overservable in the present, but possible when viewed as a wartime reaction.
Except for "acts of God" type events, just about every other disaster scenario is mitigated to a degree and finally accomodated by bouts of civilizational "flu", from which we recover, and act in a new way.
The Luddites, freaks, conspiracists, and random doomsayers ... just don't deserve a rebuttal. They're gum stuck to warm pavement, broken eggs in a fresh dozen, cow-pies on the night-time country stroll.
The Ecology-nuts are to some degree credible, since we are logging the tropics to death, strip-mining whole mountains to rubble, polluting the oceans abysses and coastal waters world-wide... but you know, as BW posits things have a tendency to restructure themselves ecologically. It might not be the SAME ecology, but where there is water, circulation, turnover ... there is change.
Our ability to "handle the issues" is hardly ever realistic when taken in the catastrophe scenario. It is realistic though when the cataclysms develop over sub-century timescales. WW1 and WW2 didn't just "break out overnight". The British (and Europeans in general) knew full well what was coming, and what had to be sacrificed (or more importantly, conserved), and did so. More people in WW1 perished due to the friggin' influenza virus than from the war itself. What was the reaction to that dual war? The institution of large-scale hospitals, recovery facilities, sanitation, sterilization, new use of blood transfusions, plasma extraction and use. It was in no way 'nice', but humanity built new technologies, reservoirs of medicines, people, material and techniques to handle the global pandemic.
Sorry, but just as I don't buy the Gore trip that the whole ecology of the planet is going to "flip" when some critical threshold is exceeded, I also don't believe that we're going to cut all emissions out of the goodness of our concern and go "renewable" overnight.
As an example: just drive up to a promintory overlooking a large city. It doesn't have to be LA or NYC or SF or London. Just go up one clear evening with binoculars, and overlook the city. You'll see thousands of miles of roads, tens of thousands of kilometers of plumbing, electrical grid, stores, service providers, houses, schools, civic buildings, parks, waterways, freeways, industrial districts, shippers, trains ... "stuff". Think about the energies needed to destroy completely what you are looking at. Nuclear - yes, it would most certainly wipe out the whole thing in a big bang.
BUT ... there are thousands of cities. Hundreds of thousands towns. The resilience of the infrastructure is probably far greater (except for key 'regional' facilities such as refineries, aquaducts, dams, and the like) than people reckon. Yes, it can be broken. Yes, it will be shitty for a while. But yes, we're all industrious, creative, resilient and flexible enough to accomodate the changes, work with them, and recover.
That said, I also think that it is concomittant on our public-planning folks to have really workable "big fuggin disaster" plans in place that prevent 'socioeconomic gridlock' in the event of a really OMG event. The highest probability of an OMG event would be a sophisticated on-the-cheap infrastructure attack by fanatical terrorists. After that, only the seismic shelf collapse of the Canary Islands, random oceanic asteroid collisions and a sudden shutdown of the Atlantic conveyer belt would be "catastrophe" enough to thwart all public-emergency planning.
But you know? I'm not expecting those in my lifetime.
Nuclear war? Not probable. Everyone knows that it spells doom for billions. I just don't think that humanity collectively is that "into" its immolation. Auto-da-Fe, anybody?
GoatGuy
Also, the ability of nations to reconstruct a nation or nations after a regional colapse like when Putin and Mugabe get done dismantaling their societies needs to be improved. Saddam showed that thirty years without preventative maintenence can really deteriorate an infrastructure. If North Korea ever gains freedom the entire nation will need extensive infrastructural first-aid.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/science/earth...
Futuregen looks to be reinstated as part of one of the stimulus packages.
China is continuing with coal to gas and coal to liquid projects.
China has faster nuclear reactor construction times. The high temp reactor is targeted for 2 year construction times
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/chinas-high-te...
The Westinghouse AP1000 has claims of 3 year construction times
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCost...
Those kinds of construction times are being targeted in China
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/02/constr...
China completed an aP1000 module factory in 11 months
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/westinghouse-a...
China appears on track to completing its first AP1000 in about 4 years. Later versions will be done faster.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN_Sanmen_exc...
If the situation was more desperate then the rulebook could be modified.
I could beat Mike Tyson at his peak.
It would involve not following boxing rules. By bringing lots of
guns, tasers and other people. OR using the rules of the International Chess Federation.
Many things become possible with different rules or no rules.
Yes, I understand the risks of nuclear plants. But the question would be what are those risks relative to an actual doomer scenario.
I agree that this is not likely to develop and we can stay in our bureaucratic zone.
But some of the bureaucracy like 17 years for FDA drug approval or 5 years for the paper work on a nuclear plant does not increase safety and the delays are costing lives.
Did sarbanes oxley help prevent a financial crisis ?
Does airport security really make things safer or is it a Kabuki theatre of sham security ?
Some regs are useful but there needs to be streamlining while still maintaining actual security there should assessment and measurement of what is working and what is not. There should be accountability for excessive delays.
The Indian Raj system of bureaucracy cost them lots of economic growth and kept a billion people in poverty longer. that has a cost in lives and quality of life.
Bureaucracy and erring on the side of excessive caution has a cost. that cost is actually severe. But there is little accountability on excessive bureaucracy.
Point : The Lobbyists at Work Again, defeating common sense and practical methodology. You are right about excessive bureaucracy----high cost, no return, and no accountability. Great response. Thanks.
http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/2009/...
The blog post itself isn't so remarkable, though it is commenting on how many people in the US think GW is exaggerated (40% and rising).
What amazed me was the comments section. This is in a blog that gets linked to by an email list that goes out to IEEE members (electrical engineers) - so while these commenters are not climate scientists, they are pretty uniformly intelligent and skeptical - meaning they expect claims to be backed up by evidence, and if they are interested in something, they do their research. They are NOT your average Joe/Jane who will accept something if they just hear enough important people tell them it's true.
So what's so amazing? I read most of the comments responding to the post, and *every one I read* was skeptical about or disbelieved in global warming! Opinions ranged from something mild like "We haven't studied it enough to make such strong claims" up to "There's plenty of evidence to say that GW is a crock and those who advocate it are ignorant of the real science".
Either there just aren't that many GW advocates among electrical engineers, or the GW disaster advocates realized that their usual tactics of implying that skeptics are dumb or ignorant or corrupt or evil just wouldn't fly in that forum.
Maybe they were overpopulating and over-using resources of an island - they COULD have cut back on their population and restricted cutting of trees and area of planted ground - but perhaps that would have upset people. Easier to let it slide and hope that someone will figure it out later.
Or a vast empire might find itself weakening from the effects of its success on its people - allowing them to become lazy and push off responsibility, and tolerant of corruption in their leaders and officials. It was easier to compromise and negotiate and let things slide and patch up problems when they hit, rather than anticipate and prevent them or change their behaviors to become more resilient. If each little disaster seemed to leave the empire a bit shabbier and weak, well, they could always get around to fixing that up later, right?
So I don't think it's lack of options that causes a civilization to collapse. It's lack of will, lack of urgency, perhaps faith that if things go wrong they can always be fixed after the fact, because that's always worked before. Often, they'd could see that past exertions to prepare appeared to be unnecessary. They built and trained large armies - but after a surge of conquests, found that those armies didn't ever meet any foe that they couldn't easily defeat. And laws to execute corrupt officials perhaps started to seem to extreme, after they found that tolerating corruption didn't immediately lead to the end of their civilization.
In our own case - how long have we put off dealing with the question of what to do when the oil starts to run low? 30 years now? Doesn't seem to have caught up with us yet - so no worries - we'll fix it when it becomes necessary.
We got ourselves worked up over Y2K - but really it seems to have been greatly over-blown.
Terrorists tried to take down the World Trade center but failed? Eh - what are the chances they'd try that again - and if they do, we'll go over there and stomp them good - surely we don't need to be so eternally vigilant to rumors and warnings about jets and buildings?
Medicare and Social Security will run out of funding pretty soon? Well, we seem to be able to just keep running up the national debt any time we run into a financial crisis - we'll probably be able to figure out a solution to those problems when they finally arrive.
Housing prices seem to just keep going up and up - no way they could fall is there? Or if they did, so what - a few billion dollars will surely be enough to solve any financial difficulties that causes?
Our big navy and army and air force don't seem to be all that useful in the sorts of wars we're fighting now, let's cut them back, and while we're at it, lets build robots to do the fighting so we don't have to put our kids so much at risk.
We all know drugs are a social problem, but rather than really deal with it, we choose the "feel righteous" solution of drug prohibition, despite the chaos that is creating in our cities and Mexico. We all know that - but it's easier to just keep on doing it.
Expansion into space? Hey, we've got clever little robots to do that for us, don't we? What profit could we get out of creating colonies on the moon and Mars? Let's put it off until we develop some better/cheaper launch technology.
Relax, take things easy, don't worry so much - I'm sure things will all just work out...eventually.
And somewhere inbetween you have people who are somewhat aware that something stinks... but they dont care because they are quietly positioning themselves as far away from the cattlecars as possible. While simultaneously denying that the cattlecars even exist. I'm speaking metaphorically about cattlecars, but surely if you're reading this you must be aware of how systematically people were slaughtered during the holocaust. And you must also be aware that such systematic killing can only be done with the help of some kind of fascist architecture... just look at IBM's role in the (first) holocaust. You have to be completely blind not to see that the same architecture has been rebuilt, only even bigger. It is just waiting to be taken over by fascism.
What kind of warning signs do you look for? Oh how about mass nationalization of large swaths of industry? check
Incredible levels of apathy and ignorance? check
I could go on, but what is the point? You either see it or you dont. Its too late in the game to not understand this stuff. But most people dont, so the course IS set. There will be a die-off. There will be mass exterminations. There will be all sorts of unspeakable evils, because people just deny it all, like drug addicts. and when you really analyze what has been going on... drug addicts are exactly what we are. Even if you think you "dont do drugs", rest assured that too is just denial.
I revisited that youtube clip where some guy is demonstrating his overunity water heater. Fascinating device! But our society is just so completely ignorant that we will tolerate 50 million views of Hanna Montana clips and all that other nonsense, but this guy receives so little attention. That right there is proof positive that we are headed fast down a road to unprecidented destruction. Believe whatever you want to believe, but you simply cannot deny the fact that most people are too ignorant to support themselves in any kind of realistic environment. They are completely dependent on someone else to do their thinking for them,, and until they wake up they are going to be ripe targets for another holocaust, or even more likely, perpetrators of another holocaust.
a) in this century. If we make it through this with all the major troubles we are facing without going down we will be more or less save.
b) Most likely a human induced collapse. Either technological or social.
The main problem I see as a lot of previous posts have pointed out although technology and science-wise we have advanced tremendously in the last 500 years, socialogicaly we haven't. We basically still have all the same major problems we used to have 500 years ago. (Inequality in rights / resources / opportunities, war, hunger, slavery, killing, racism, ignorance) Yep all there the last time I checked.
Second the social problems will be increasing with the technology advancements we have created in the last 50 years. As the economist Jeremy Rifkin already pointed out in 1995 in his book the end of labour all modern workforce societies due to technology advancements are stearing into a 20:80 society. That means only 20% of the population is needed to generate the wealth of a nation. What do we do with the 80 percent or the large majority?
No one seems to have a solution for this or even thought about that, people in charge political or economical are so big in denial of this. But with the latest financial and economical crises the crack can already be seen. The level of unrest if this problem will not be addressed adequately will be tremendous, because it will be close to home and people will see & feel it and can't deny or push it away like all the bigger problems like resource deplation or climate change. And the US with there non-existent social system are in the worst position to face this right now. Who wonders to what extreme they would go to!
And worst of all there are no technological fixes for social problems!
1.There is no such thing as voluntary reductions in energy demand, it's forced by the laws of nature.
2.We are not in a world war, so rationing food without the people taking the streets it's out of the question.
3.Transitions are not simple or rapid.
4.Myth busted by 1,2 and 3.
5.AGW requires the system to work indefinitely.
6.Arthur C. Clarke said that we got stuck to a lower level than he was expecting.
7.A loser on such a war would be the one who has no chance but a war to have it. The more you fight, the faster you suffocate.
8.Technologies aka technical-fixes are based on the same system that is going into a coma.
9.At this point comes into play the economic model called globalisation. Our system is designed for a constant spin, once stopped it goes into a coma.You can't reboot finite resources.
10.He's way off, we have at least 23.000 nuclear bombs. http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nukestatu...
So yeah, I'm still a doomer. I believe only in numbers.Numbers never lie, people do.
federal highway driving miles down by 100 billion miles in the USA.
2. Yes the point is that is circumstances started to become as dire as a world war then there would be rationing of food and it would be accepted. Thus the scenario of a civilization deathspiral without passing through the rationing and counter measures phase is completely wrong
3. Transitions can be rapid. The current business as usual transition will be 20-30 years long. But electric bicycles are produced at over 100 million per year and use over 20 times less metal and other resources as a car. Electric bikes and light scooters can achieve highway speeds and there is bike racing gear that would allow vehicle to not spike up. Especially if there was simultaneous removal or segregation of big cars and trucks
4. China is achieving a far faster buildout of electric and other infrastructure. Faster build of hydro-electric and nuclear power. Even faster build is being enabled with new factories and designs
5. anti-global warming duration depends upon the methods. Once the switchover to non-carbon systems is done then the remaining CO2 would be removed through natural processes over about 3000 years. However, that can be accelerated by building out the CO2 removal systems. There is also carbon sequestering and biochar. Carbon sequestering is at the ten million ton per year level. The total man made CO2 is at about 26 billion tons per year.
6. so what ? Clarke said a lot of stuff. I can give you plenty of quotes of technical optimism and predictions of space elevators etc... Plus show me the link
7. this makes no sense
8. system is not going into a coma. There was a great depression and yet countries were still able to spin up for WW2 and the economic boom after it.
9. system is not stopping. The financial reboot is cancellation of debtand re-issuing currency this has been done many times. Argentina, Germany, etc...
10. The very link you have shows that the number of high alert weapons are about 2000 for the USA and 2000 for Russia. Plus the megatonnage on those bombs is far less
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_arms_race
The US stockpile of weapons peaked at over 30,000 bombs with over 20,000 deployed
Russia/USSR peaked at over 40,000 bombs
Megatonnage was over 20,000 megatons (for the US stockpile alone in 1960) and now it is at about 2000 megatons
History of the nuclear stockpile
http://docs.nrdc.org/nuclear/files/nuc_86010002...
You only have one statistic in your post.
I am not impressed.
What is more probable within our lifetimes is a world war, superficially like the last world war but utterly different in important aspects. The Goatguy seems to think we always bounce back from big wars better than before. Not so this time, because the circumstance--population, ecology, resources have finally reached the end of their tethers, that's assuming Moore's Law and technological innovation come to a grinding halt in order to divert that energy into protracted total war. In fact, our civilization is utterly unsustainable without a continued increase in the pace of creative innovation driven by free markets of ideas, goods and services. Total war is the ultimate socio-eoconomic paradigm shift.
Therefore, the next great war will usher in with it a new global dark age of decline in human health, rights, wealth, science, the arts, liberties of all kind, free trade, travel, information exchange and bring on massive ecological damage like nothing we have seen yet. The death toll from disease alone will be on the order of many magnitudes greater than WWII, in part because our populations live dependent on fragile and complex systems. Simply turning off power and denying petrol and medical care to a region like, say, Texas for a year would result in millions dead from disease. This was not the case in 1940. America will not be isolated from the direct effects of war as it was during the 20 th century.
And you Yanks are to be blamed! That's right. No, you're not going to start it through aggression, but by letting your nation become weak and allowing Pax Americana to fall into a state of decline to the point it can be challenged by your totalitarian collectivist friends in Asia and elsewhere. Once you become sufficiently weak, your natural enemies will form coalitions politically, economically and finally militarily against you. It won't last, but that's how it will start. Like a pack of wolves on a great mighty, but old war horse. And then they will come for the rest of us.
In point number 7, you say "The US would not lose" an all out war. Typical American cocksureness. Sure, if it were fought today and on your terms. But what about in 2025 and on the Chinese's terms?
Americans are famous for their geopolitical naivete. The new President is perhaps the most naive ever to occupy the White House. Granted, he's a sharp suit, but unfortunately the last cowboy in office will now certainly not go down as the dumbest American president in history, or even the decade, when the Great Yankee sagas are composed on sheepskin by firelight in 2050 in a hidden valley somewhere high in Utah (or Maine) beyond the range of Chinese fighter bombers.
Historians of the next great war will mark the lead up to war to the great national debt and subsequent destruction of the US dollar as the global currency. Obama will give America EU-style socialism at the price of destroying the nation's global economic hegemony. Once the dollar is no longer the global currency, the massive debt, up to 70 percent of the US GNP, will be owed in a coalition currency largely controlled by China, if not officially, then by sheer economic muscle.
US military power is only sustainable because the US dollar is the world's currency. No strong dollar, no global super power. No Pax Americana and the Chinese will attempt the coup de grace to impose Pax Orientalis. Now I understand that some of Obama's old mates like William Ayers would welcome Chinese totalitarian rule in America, but I believe that even in a weakened state the American people will reject foreign rule even if it means war. Perhaps more insidious is the American naive belief in the genuine goodness of all of humanity. We can work with the Iranian, Hamas, the Taliban, the Russian and China, be friends, unclench our fists. The problem lies in the clash of civilizations. The Chinese, a 6,000 year old civilization are no more likely to adopt the American barbarisms of constitutional rights and liberty for all, we the people hokum than the Taliban. Nor do Americans understand the huge sense of entitlement the Chinese feel as the center of the earth to form Empire. China, by the way, is already a vast empire of different nations and races held together only by brutal totalitarian force. They know they're destined to rule the world.
As one pundit put it recently: imagine if the roles were reversed in the middle east. Imagine if Israel was a weak jewish enclave in Gaza and Hamas was as mighty as the Israeli army is today. Wonder how long that Jewish enclave would last? Now imagine that the US was as weak as China is today (or was) and that China is as strong as the US. Imagine if China was the global super power and the US navy pinned against the California coast line. The world would be a different place altogether. And unless the US eventually totally submitted, war would be the results. Note that the US has treaty obligations that could trip a Sino-US war in half a dozen hot spots across the Pacific and Indian ocean whenever China chooses. So the war will begin when and where your enemy choses, not on your terms.
It will start as a Chinese led coalition totalitarian empire with Russia and others, but that will break down pretty quickly. Invasions will occur. Nukes will be exchanged. But not all at once like the old cold war scenario. Mutually assured destruction will turn out to be as much a myth as nuclear winter as long as they are used tactically against states that don't have nuke strike back capacity. The few big nuclear states will hold their fire on each other. Nuclear states will pass along nukes to non-nuke allies for one off tactical use here and there. The US will be forced to use tactical nukes too, because your other forces will be too weak to hold the balance.
Pick your favorite hot spot to set the war off. Maybe Iran will try to nuke Israel. China take back Taiwan? Who knows? It could be a minor incident we can't possibly imagine today. We can be sure that Western appeasement due to weakness will be manipulated in a game of Real Politik as it was before WWII to the advantage of the aggressors. But I digress. The real cause of the war is US economic policy created in March 2009 which marks the beginning of the end for American global power.
It will be a slow and long war like Orwell's 1984 war, almost endless. It will wreck democracy, certainly in places like Mexico, Indonesia, India and Turkey first, then the EU, the US will be the last to succumb to a national security state run from the Pentagon. The US Allies won't have the industrial capacity reserve advantaged they had over the Axis in 1939. The population and resource balance will favor Asia and its middle eastern allies. The aggressors will have far more soldiers to toss like chafe into the wind. Demographics will be powerful tide against the West. Moreover, endless conflict and high death tolls will suit the totalitarian regimes and fuel their economies, while being highly corrosive to our own culture of liberty and abundance.
Texas and Mexifornia will pass back and forth between armies at first then warlords in the later dark ages following. See the Afgan-Paki frontier for a taste of things to come. San Francisco or some other US target will almost certainly be nuked at some point, but by an NGO proxy, so retaliation in kind will be most difficult. Australia will become a mineral resource colony of China and the Australian people slave labour. The great victory of the Chinese axis will come not because they will ever be able to unconditionally defeat North America but because America will have to adopt some version of the totalitarian military statism to survive in a state of constant war. Perhaps once the last spark liberty is extinguished in America then it will be possible to negotiate unclenched fists with totalitarian regimes, after all you'll no longer pose a cultural threat to them.
So, I hope you'll sleep well tonight knowing that you've cleverly shown the world is utterly safe from an Old Testament-style apocalypse. mates. Good on ya. Maybe tomorrow you blokes will wake up and smell the coffee and make a post about how America can save its economy and the US dollar and therefore Pax Americana and ultimately the whole bloody rest of the free world from a very nasty future. Because America's continued strength is all that stands between everything your Founding Fathers' cherished and a second Dark Age.
RE: Excellent!
Great item, your comment. Pretty much 'spot-on'.
You might want to check out my comments (below) vis-a-vis 'Old Testament' aspects.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The feminist movement collapsed one milli-second after the first impact. -- Niven and Pournelle, Lucifer's Hammer]
The USSR had far less economy but had nuclear bombs and military. The US would still have deterrent.
Plus if China is economically successful and sufficient to develop a superior military then why would they
attack what they would already own. they would have tens of trillions in T-bills and US companies and buildings etc...
China and the USA will not have a war over Taiwan. China wants an undamaged Taiwan to come back. If I want my x-girlfriend back, it does not make sense for me to kill her and shove her in the basement. the economic union of china and Taiwan is well under way. President Ma of taiwan is opening up economic trade and other ties.
Heading toward a trade block arrangement.
If you are winning economically, you do not have to fight. Every nation wants to cozy up with the new sugar daddy.
If the totalitarian Chinese economy is three times the US economy then you can kiss your butt goodbye long before "decades" have past. What would the US deterrent be in 2040? B-52 bombers and 75-year old nukes? "Economic success" means something entirely different to a totalitarian empire than a liberal democracy. The x-girlfriend analogy is apt, but in the hands of mentally ill psycho rather than a nice boy from a good family from Kansas. (which is what your sociological horizon appears to be, no shame it that. You're lucky. Be grateful.)
You did concisely sum up the most dystopian, collapsitarian scenario imaginable short of The Apocalypse: "If china is economically successful and sufficient to develop a superior military then why would they attack what they would already own?" Good point, Toto, but, Hello, I thought you weren't a doomer? Or perhaps more to the point-- why doesn't that totally freak you out?
Surely, you aren't so naive to think it would be OK to be "owned" by China?
Is this what Arnold Toynbee meant when he wrote about great civilizations commit cultural suicide first, long before being conquered from the outside? Tell me I am reading way too much into your comment. That you understand the absolutely unique place the US constitution and Bill of Right occupies in the history of civilization and that you understand the regressive authoritarian Chinese Stalinist statism is only reconcilable with American concepts of liberal democracy as long as the US is the world economic and military world hegemon.
Please rerun your thought experiment with new inputs this time informed by 20th century history and socio-political reality: What does it mean to say China owns America? (Clue: See Tibet for some widely understood effects of being owned by China.)
But let's not get too case specific. A close look at the decades preceding WWI and WWII reveals striking parallels to today. Obviously, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does spiral out fractal patterns which can be empirically identified. Game theory combined with complex system analysis suggest that one can roughly forecast nonlinear system behavior in the presence of similar strange attractor paradigms. That's what this bloody blog is all about, isn't it?
China took back Hong Kong. That would be the more similar scenario. Do whatever you want but do not speak out against the leadership or try to overthrow it. How much more unlike this is the US ? Rotating between democrat party machine and the republican. Buying influence via lobbyist.
The UK faded as the top power. China lost world top power status 500 years ago.
China does not care if other places have democracy or dictatorship. See the deals they are cutting in Africa. Other places are the external territories. You trade and work with them. China is tough enough to manage expansion to govern would involve more headaches and not be more useful.
The US can control how this plays out, but the US would have to get its own financial and political house in order. I will be writing more about this.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/03/chinas-2008-an...
http://nextbigfuture.com/search/label/china
The US needs to embrace the next technology and re-organize the economy for maximum growth and development.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/10/update-of-mund...
2.Agriculture works with oil and natural gas. It doesn't work on electricity. And about rationing... you starve the people, you get a revolution.Starving people don't stay calm, or work anymore.
3.Biking requires FOOD. Food requires agriculture. Agriculture requires oil and natural gas. You can't bike 80km/day (US average). You can't bike in the winter.
4.Oil decline is >> faster than what China or whoever can build in time. Nuclear requires engineers, technicians, fuel and a lot of time to be built. Hydro it's just a drop in the ocean in comparison with the actual imputs offered by hidrocarbons.
5.No oil and gas = no AGW. But who cares about the CO2 when your kids are starving, and you don't have a job.
6.It was a documentary.
7.It makes a lot of sense, because for example USA is importing 60-70% of the oil it needs.The more they fight, the more they consume. No exports=No oil=No food=No transport=No civilization. In just 5 short days you have all the stores empty.
8.With liquid fuels shortages, everything stops. The system goes into a coma in less than 2 weeks. Back then, when USA had the first depression, they were the #1 oil exporter and #1 oil producer. Now they are at the other end of the list. Back then EROEI was 100:1, now it's 15:1. After the war they had a boom because they had a lot of cheap energy and resources, nowadays you have very expensive fuels + shortages of all kinds.
9.Argentina, Germany ... and so on... they got help (resources/food) comming from abroad. This is not the case anymore, especially if you are in a war over them.Plus that you can't eat paper money. In the presence of shortages and lower energy every year, the financial system goes bust in no-time.You can't have credit if you can't grow anymore.
10. Far less is still enough for a small die-off.
I don't need statistics, you wrote the article, you try to convince the people, not me. I was just proving to you... that you have to prepare, and really fast. Don't be impressed, be safe.
2. There will be oil and natural gas. See below. So no starvation.
3. Electric bikes. Sitting on electric mopeds. You can use a moped in the winter.
4. Oil field decline is not projected faster than 6%. Some of more pessimistic decline is 4.5% per year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_megaprojects
There are still oilfields being added. Natural gas production is increasing.
When people are desperate enough they will drill off the coast of california, and in Alaska's protected area
Even if there was export land hoarding of oil and no exports there would still be oil in the USA plus there is
biofuels and synthetic fuels and coal to liquid.
You do not drop below 30% of current levels.
5. Peak oil and global warming can both be handled
6. So what. One sentence from A Clarke.
7. Your numbers are wrong. The navy has nuclear powered ships. The 8 million barrels per day of oil, ethanol, biofuels plus imports from Canada which would still flow are nearly 10 million barrels of oil per day. 50% of current levels. You would divert what is needed to the military if needed to capture other oil supplies.
8. See 7.
9. Not going to happen. Already listed the actions for emergency financial system reboot and handling physical shortages
10. Yes starvation happens sometimes in Africa. Happened in China in the 1950's. there is far more margin for adjustment in the wealthy places.
RE: I Guess....
....you forgot to consider THIS particular scenario.
It's called, by insurance companies an 'Act of God'. And, according to research, it's happened five times in recorded history.
Enjoy,
Chuck(le)
[Once more I shall shake the Earth.....]
RE: That's....
....pretty much the way it was going with what was left of the Roman Empire. It was all being 'ground down' by the barbarians. THEN....
....around 540 AD, there seems to have been the last of the 'events' I mentioned above. At that time, there are reports from two Irish and one French source that indicated there might have been a cometary impact. The Irish have a 'legend' of "two lords of light descending from the sky to the earth" and an Irish priest reports that the sky was black for several days. Also, about the same time a Frenchman reports seeing a comet. Then there are the Chinese of the time saying that crops did not grow well for several years.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[History repeats itself....now and then....]
RE: The 'End'
An interesting analogy, that.
The way I see the collapse of civilizations is pretty much the way you describe death taking a 'weakened body'. For example, the Roman Empire.
Weakened by centuries of corruption and moral lassitude, with malicious 'bacteria' attacking it continually, it is holding on. Then a new element—pneumonia—is added, which is virulent and does the old 'body' in.
At this point, the 'bacteria' come in and feast on what remains of the body. And new bodies are generated which war with each other for dominance. These bodies, once a dominance is established, either singular or collective, thrive in the place of the former body. That is until they become 'sclerotic' themselves and the decline part of the cycle begins once more.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[History repeats itself.]
But hundreds of millions probably died as a result of that cataclysm, and the number would be at least ten times as great for a comparable collapse of say, the US, Europe, or China.
The Amish will endure whatever...the new Irish monks of the 22nd century.
RE: Please Explain Away....
....the Dark Ages. The Romans are no longer with us, escutcheonblot.
I think you're confusing the collapse of a civilization with the iradication of mankind. There's something of a 'difference'.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[I've fallen and I can't get up. -- Roman Empire]
P.S. Also reportedly said by the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Minoan and a number of other civilizations that are no longer with us.
The question was Civilization, not Roman Civilization. Civilization, without any pre-qualifiers, is by default the human one. And even Roman Civilization did not disappear completely, as it was perpetuated in the monasteries of the west, and in Byzantium in the east until its fall in 1453, nearly a thousand years after the last Roman emperor in the west.
Don't be so provincial...American or even Western Civilization is not the same as Human Civilization, as much as I treasure the former.
I don't believe I conflated the two issues...eradication of mankind, and the collapse of civilization...they are quite different. Though both would of course involve death in horrifying scale.
Human Civilization has never, to our knowledge, collapsed. Of course if it had, (an 'Atlantis' event?) by definition, we would not know about it.
But otherwise thank you for your helpful lecture on 'difference(s)'.
yours ever,
EB
P.S. The Incas say hi. Eradication sucks.
RE: Yeah....Right.....
Tell me when you gradaute from high school....
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. Where's the Incan and Aztec cvilization?
I bow to your superior wit, knowledge, grammar, and spelling.
What an ornament you must be to your own society
With great affection,
EB
RE: It Is Blatantly Apparent....
...that English is a secondary, if not tertiary, language for you.
RE: Please Let Me Explain
You seem to disregard the fact that there are no Romans around, preferring to point out that we are still 'civilized'. This despite the obvious fact the Roman civilization no longer exists. You seem to think that because their descendants exist that 'civilization', i.e, the Roman form, did not 'collapse'.
However, in a later comment you seem to recall that the Incan Civilization is no longer with us. At the same time not recognizing that the descendants of the Incas are still with us. That as well as the Aztecs. Let alone the Mayans and Anazasi.
You seem to be rather 'selective' in your recognition.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. When and where did you graduate from high school? I ask because I'd like to know how far our vaunted American education system has collapsed since I graduated in '69.
Jevon was a Brit economist in the 1860s interested in coal.
Of course he did not count on increased efficiency in coal extraction so he did not get everything right. We do see the effect re:CFLs. With increased efficiency in light production more light is desired and the amount of added light more than compensates for the increased efficiency.
Just before the end, some optimistic yeast say we can think our way out of this dillemma. They are wrong but denouncing good thoughts does nothing to help either. Tell me how this yeast-model differs from humanity living on a finite globe.
Also, in terms of current carrying capacity and energy. In the developed countires, we are producing several times the food that is needed for people to eat and not starve.
Factory mass produced deep burn nuclear can provide the energy for ten times our current usage level for twenty thousand years. It is not so much food but cheap and abundant energy that our civilization needs to grow.
The "petri dish" [carrying capacity of the earth] can be made larger with the technology that we have or are developing. That is even before we make more dishes by getting off of the earth. The solar system can sustain ten thousand times the number of people on the earth. So we are no where near the end. The rationing is only needed if we have some kind of mismanagement/transition issue which is temporary.
We will face many obstacles along the way. We can talk all we want, but we should be prepared, and raise our odds for survival.
Yes we have come very far, but at the same time for the last 50 years we have been stagnant. We have raised our standard of living\laziness, but we have also raised massive populations reliant on a few subsatantial populations that are holding the rest up.
Have you ever been in a large city and witnessed the panic in a disaster? I have and it was only a small one. At the same time it was a large one. August 2003, North East America and South East Canada were without power. The blackout affected an estimated 10 million people in Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states. Katrina is another example but I dont need to reference that for you.
There is a positive for connectivity/globalization, and there is a negative.
Under globalization we share, and a few benefit of the mass population, as in our Democracys.
The problem occurs when under democracy, if we ruin a country we can move to another country.
Under Globalization if we ruin the Earth, its not so easy to move on.
I would say our planet is at near maximum capacity, but our economy requres growth to function.
When each person equals pollution of one form or another, we can no longer afford a larger population.
With increase in population and a decrease of trees, and an increase in of CO2. We will arrive at problems of the earths chemistry. Combine this with increased chemical use, farming, fishing and water use....And human kinds tandancy for war rather than peace.
I am trying in many ways to make myself self reliant.
You can can/jar food
Grow your own
Hunt your own
Use preserves
SELF PRESERVASION
I am not waiting for some new invention
2.You forget (or have no idea of) growing complexity that you so called 'solutions' create.
A.CTL produce more CO2 and have a little EROI same for tarsand and other joke.
B.Biofuel is an energy lost, negative EROI, a great source of CO2, a great cause of soil and water polution and depletion. And will also cause greater food shortage. And the fabulated cellulosic ethanol miracle will cause a depletion and lost of humus that will mineralize our soils (desertification process).
C.Hydrogen have an EROI so negative that nothing more is needed to show the absurdity of it.
D.The geoengineering joke, is very symptomatic of this culture magic thinking.
-You will need a lot of energy to do it.
-You will produce a lot more CO2 that will force you to more geoingineering...
-You will need to divert a lot of resource to do geoingineering
-You will need to switch people from productive task to this avoid collapse task (more complexity)
And all the so call 'solution' are flawed and only put us in a more desperate situation. The only way to avoid collapse is down sizing civilization in a more simple one. No magic thinking or flat earth ideology will prevalover physics laws.