The post-peak die-off; The MonteQuest scenario.

Rogozhin

Post peak die-off and the global warming element add up to quite the 'proper fvck' of our species Smile

Noone want's to hear that we've brought it upon ourselves besides the few posters on this forum. Wink

Rogo

Revi · Fusion Joined: Apr 25, 2005 Posts: 3521 Location: Maine

I know all about overshoot and the odds against us, however I prefer to adopt the Roberto Benini approach, like in Life is Beautiful. I teach kids and the doomer approach is a real turn off. It's pretty much a turn off to everyone. I advocate a simpler life not because I see it as a cure for overshoot and dieoff, but just as a way of not making things worse. We have halved our fossil fuel use in the past 5 years in my house, and saved money doing it. We live a better life than before, and are producing half the CO2. I don't know if it will save the planet, but it sure has saved us. I call it the Treehugger Deluxe lifestyle. It's really fun as well. We can really only live one day at a time. Tomorrow could be a nightmare, but I prefer not to tell my students that. Instead, like Roberto in the movie I tell them that we're building a tank! They love it. We're recycling every week, and they just made T-shirts with a world burning up and the slogan, "Talk is Cheap" around it. I think that they know instinctively what is going on. People aren't motivated by fear. They are motivated by hope.

Heineken

I don't think they'd let you teach doomer science to schoolchildren, Revi, even if you wanted to. Whether that is a good thing, I don't know. What always motivated me most, as a student (including a very young student), was the truth, even unpleasant truth.

Today's students will be most affected by the impending disasters, and maybe sooner than later. So, do they have a right to know the whole, unvarnished truth?

I agree that, as a coping mechanism, hope is useful. Sort of like a drug.

I operate on two tracks myself, doom and make-the-most-of-today.

neocone · Heavy Crude Joined: Sep 23, 2006 Posts: 256

Okies... by 2010 I predict there won't be enough food around to feed that many people... some will just have to die off for thermodynamic reasons.

Those predictions below sound like those made by futurists in 1890 saying London was going to be swamped in horse manure by 1940 from the growth in horse traffic on the streets.

The human mind can only think linearly and cannot understand the exponential function, or exponential crashes... But that's another subject altogether.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fuse on the 'Population Bomb' Has Been Relit;While the Developed World Deals with a 'Birth Dearth,' Populations Are Exploding in Developing Nations. What the First World Should Do to Help..

Prospects for stabilizing the world's population have taken a blow. If not reversed, it will have huge economic, environmental, and political impacts. Two years ago, the UN projected that the number of people on this planet would reach 8.9 billion by 2050. It has revised that projection to 9.2 billion. In 43 years the world's population will increase by 2.5 billion, equivalent to the number of people on Earth in 1950. Talk of a "birth dearth" remains true for most industrial countries but the US, with a high rate of immigration, legal and illegal, is an exception. There is a decline in world foreign aid for family planning, from $723 million in 1955 to $442 million in 2004. There are 200 million women in the developing world who need contraception, and the result is increasing unwanted pregnancies, rising rates of unsafe abortion, and increased risks to the lives of women and children. The population of developing countries will rise from 5.4 billion to 7.9 billion in 2050. In that time, the number of people in the developed world will remain largely unchanged. The UN projection assumes that women age 15 to 19 in 2005 will have 2.5 children during their lives. That's the average for the world. It takes 2.1 children per mother for a population to stabilize. The UN projects the fertility rate will fall to 2.05 by 2045-50. The rapid rise in the world's population has been of concern. All those extra people will need more space, food, water, and other natural resources. This can worsen global warming and harm other species. It is also unsustainable. There is a correlation between countries with very young populations and those experiencing civic conflict. This is relevant to the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur (Sudan), and Gaza. Between 1970 and 1999, 80% of all civil conflicts occurred in countries in which 60% or more of the population was under age 30. Governments and businesses in countries with young populations have a difficult time providing so many youths with education and "meaningful employment." Women in Iraq, where 69% of the population is under 30, have an average of 4.2 children. Afghan women have seven children with 73% of the people under 30. In Sudan, women have an average of 4 children, 68% of the population is under 30. A study points out that the 8 new civil conflicts between 2000 and 2004 have risen in nations with very young populations. Key remedies include improving access in poor nations to family planning and reproductive health services plus education and economic opportunities for women.

May 21, 2007 Christian Science Monitor

joewp

threadbear · Expert Joined: Jan 22, 2005 Posts: 7783

gg3

Like so much else, it'e not an either/or but an and/both.

On one hand, the high probability of a catastrophic collapse within our lifetimes.

On the other hand, the high probability that groups of motivated individuals can at least preserve pockets of civilized/cultured human society, where liberty and justice are still the norms, scientific method is still understood, and a reasonable level of technology is available. And the almost-certainty that, after the dieoff phase has run its course, the knowledge and values preserved in those out-of-the-way places will re-emerge to define the paradigm of the age that follows.

Hope isn't a drug, it's a combination of neuropeptides; so are despair, cynicism, and selfishness. Hope and its allies and opposites are all brain chemistry, which is to say, empirical facts on the ground. What matters is what we do. And thus what matters is to motivate people to do what they can.

IMHO the best motivator is a combination of alarm, urgency, hope, and love. Alarm at the ecological facts, urgency to make the needed efforts quickly, hope that those efforts will at least sustain oneself and others within one's own community or sphere of action, and love both of those within one's sphere of action and of nature & humanity in-general.

Cynicism, snark, despair, and baseless beliefs that someone or something else will solve the problem (false hope), are counterproductive because they discourage or diminish the needed efforts. Hatred and fear are counterproductive because they divert efforts into unproductive activities.

Realistically no one knows for certain what is going to become of each specific geographic area. So you take your best data and make your best efforts, and trust that nature & evolution will work it out in the long run as they have for scores of millions of years.

TheTurtle

Revi · Fusion Joined: Apr 25, 2005 Posts: 3521 Location: Maine

Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst is the best advice we can give. I think that we are doing that. I hope that our area is able to weather the storm. We'll see. Wailing and whining won't help anyway. We will have to keep our rivers clean, keep the trees from being taken away and made into cellulosic ethanol to keep somebody's SUV going in Massachusetts, and keep as much of our electricity here in the state as possible. It may sound like we're being selfish, but it's going to be important for us to keep our natural resources, or sell them for the most we can get in the near future.

Kids should know the truth, I agree. However I think that they shouldn't be overwhelmed with the whole dieoff thing. It's too much, and they are young. They'll make a world anyway. They will be dealing with harsh realities for their whole lives. Why burden them with how badly we have screwed things up?

Heineken

killJOY · Fission Joined: Feb 21, 2005 Posts: 2510 Location: ^NNE^

Doly · Expert Joined: Dec 03, 2004 Posts: 4041

Revi · Fusion Joined: Apr 25, 2005 Posts: 3521 Location: Maine

gg3

Looks like we're converging on a sane approach here. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, tell the truth without histrionics, and teach people at the level where they can learn.

Revi, your high school kids getting mad, are the equivalent of China and India. They're just on the verge of getting to where they have access to "all of this" and then someone comes along and tells them "sorry, not for you." By analogy, getting to the head of the gas line just as the gas station runs out of gas.

This is a central problem we are going to have to deal with: managing peoples' expectations such that they don't go ballistic when their expectations are thwarted by the course of events.

With highschool classes one could do simulation exercises of whatever kind, based on some fairly simple moral precepts such as the Golden Rule. And then after it seems the class has learned the lesson, later on bring up events from the news and plug them into that frame of reference.

With China and India, who knows?, but whatever is likely to work (if anything), will require that those of us in the affluent West stop flaunting what we have and then cutting back relentlessly. In fact, flaunting for the sake of flaunting otherwise known as crass ostentation, has become the de-facto norm at least in the US since about the early 1980s, so what we have is a cultural trait that runs against a whole range of what used to be considered commonsense moral values. This, and its implications, should be picked up in another thread for further exploration.

Heineken