[DesuMaiden]

I believe doomerism is illogical and based on too little empirical evidence. I am studying psychology right now, and one of the most important lessons in psychology is that correlation doesn't imply causation. For example, Michael Ruppert says that when oil became ubiquitous human population started to increase rapidly. And Michael Ruppert makes it sound like oil becoming ubiquitous was the cause of the rapid population increase. But there Is actually very little evidence for this causation and effect relationship.What I am saying is that oil did not cause the human population to rapidly grow.

So there must be another cause to the rapid increase in population during the past 100-200 years. Or perhaps oil was only one factor that caused the rapid increase in population. Since oil did not cause the rapid increase in population, removing oil from the world economy might not cause the population to decrease. Perhaps the world isn't overpopulated?

Either way, I stopped being a doomer. I believe the world will significantly change when peak oil happens, but it is not like the end of the world.

[Subjectivist]

De Nile, not just a river in Africa...

[Pops]

Surpluses from industry and FFs allowed us more leisure time to investigate things like germ theory, plant genetics, tool improvements. That led us to discover this-n-that, which caused the mortality rate to fall faster than the birth rate, which caused the population to increase.

My opinion is, consideration of the weaknesses of the current system is just good old fashioned pragmatism; shit happens, so being totally unprepared for a glitch is foolish. How prepared a person decides to become depends on how much they worry, the more worry, the more they might want to do to ease their mind.

Paraphrasing Yogi, the hardest thing to predict is the future, so better to hedge whatever bet..

[Apneaman]

I have heard it before from burnt out Doomers. It's an understandable emotional position to relieve severe and often debilitating anxiety that can effect your whole life. I have heard many doomers comment on how it destroyed otherwise stable relationships. If you can't change the facts then change your mind. Apes do it all the time. It's normal and is an adaptive behavior for individuals. Unfortunately, it is maladaptive for techno industrial carbon man. Your study of psychology must surely have convinced you that our technological evolution has out stripped our psychological/emotional evolution by orders of magnitude. A lizard brained ape with nukes. Of course you're forgetting that no population can increase without food energy, so you need to address how such increases for that came about - look to the Haber–Bosch process - 7 plus billion is impossible without it. I empathise with you, but if you're going to put it out there....................

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

[Pops]

I think if a person can't bring themselves to do anything proactively in the face of possibly profound change I'm not sure what benefit there is to sitting and fretting - or tapping out endless streams of death watch posts.

[Sixstrings]

Perhaps the world isn't overpopulated?

Well.. it's like this.. every time people thought the planet was "overpopulated," some new food and energy advances came along that just exponentially increased the population even more.

There's actually quite a bit of open space, on the planet. Africa. Alaska's pretty much empty, my goodness the entire "flyover" middle of the whole USA is essentially "empty," serious population wise. North and South Dakota, etc. Russia's a massive country, and "empty," for its size.

Then look at a place like Mexico.. and India.. and countries in Asia.. it's actually quite amazing how many people it's possible to pack into a place.

Having said all the above, more and more population does have a real environmental effect.

In the US -- we just do not have the fish, that we used to. Where I live, back in decades past (listening to older folks), you could just go out in the water and fish all day and bring in all kinds of big fish. Now you can't. The fish are far fewer, and they are much smaller. Local restaurants do not even serve local fish, or even American fish. It's things like tilapia, raised in fish tanks in China. And "grouper" from "Vietnam." And then more and more exotic fish, deep water species from Antarctica.

Yes Desu we can fit a lot more population still, and yes maybe life goes on and it is not "the end of the world," it's just that our idea of what the world is, is what changes. "The world" can be a diverse Aamazon jungle or it can be a Sahara desert. If people grew up in the desert then that's what they're used to, makes no difference to them.

Either way, I stopped being a doomer. I believe the world will significantly change when peak oil happens, but it is not like the end of the world.

Well, good for you.

Extremism is never correct, whatever the topic is.

Its smart to keep a balanced perspective, and don't get caught up in something that's just all doomer.

Regardless of peak oil, it's still important to protect the environment though, those are very real issues.

So environmentalism is a real cause, it's not just a doomer thing that you're just prepping for -- the air needs to be clean, pollution in the water supply matters, there really are valuable / interesting species that will be gone forever, if there are no environmentalists to make an issue of them and care about it, etc.

[hvacman]

Welcome back, DM.

While studying psychology, be sure to read some of the works of Dr. Viktor Frankl, the 20th century's most influential psychiatrist not named Freud or Jung. He demonstrated both through his teachings and his life how to not be a doomer in the face of "doom". Here is one of his quotes - it sounds a lot like the journey of change you have been on...

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

[jesus_of_suburbia]

I can tell you from first-hand experience, and being someone of similar age, that adopting the doomer mindset led me to rush into a lot of decisions out of fear that the end was looming. There are some things I missed out on and deeply regret as a result of that thinking. I'm not in denial about the potential for some bad things to happen this century. However, since I don't know the timing of these events and how they will affect me personally, it doesn't make sense to dwell on and freak out about the future.

[Strummer]

every time people thought the planet was "overpopulated," some new food and energy advances came along

Except for quite a lot of cases when no advances came along and millions of people died.

You seem to be suffering from a very strong case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias.

[tom_s2]

Desu, good for you. You figured it out and moved on. Some people take decades to do that, and some people never do.

I've been observing doomsday groups of various kinds for a long time now, as a weird interest. I've known some people who were so mired in unfalsifiable thinking that they prepared for doomsday, over and over again, for 30+ years. Some people on this board have been preparing over and over again for 10+ years.

You figured it out and moved on fairly quickly. Good for you.

-Tom S

[davep]

Desu, good for you. You figured it out and moved on. Some people take decades to do that, and some people never do.

I've been observing doomsday groups of various kinds for a long time now, as a weird interest. I've known some people who were so mired in unfalsifiable thinking that they prepared for doomsday, over and over again, for 30+ years. Some people on this board have been preparing over and over again for 10+ years.

You figured it out and moved on fairly quickly. Good for you.

-Tom S

And there are the "moderates" who plan for a better future without necessarily hunkering down with their ghillie suits and black guns.

[GregT]

Desu, good for you. You figured it out and moved on. Some people take decades to do that, and some people never do.

I've been observing doomsday groups of various kinds for a long time now, as a weird interest. I've known some people who were so mired in unfalsifiable thinking that they prepared for doomsday, over and over again, for 30+ years. Some people on this board have been preparing over and over again for 10+ years.

You figured it out and moved on fairly quickly. Good for you.

-Tom S

Then there are those who completely ignore repeated calls by the authorities to prepare for natural disasters. There are those that completely ignore the signs all around them that we are destroying the earth's natural ecosystems, and there are those that aren't paying any attention at all to the issues at the forefront of discussions being taken up by international policymakers.

In Desu's case this is a good thing. Many of us were beginning to get a bit concerned with the extent of his doomerism. Others, on the other hand, are in a complete state of denial. You know who you are.

[GHung]

What is "doomerism" anyway? Just another label, IMO. On the other hand, if one thinks that planetary systems can continue to support an ever-growing human population without severe consequences to quality of life (ours and other species) and that the unquestionable die-off of other species as a result of human behavior doesn't matter, I submit one is an utter fool in denial. The real question is: are humans in a state of overshoot relative to their environment and, if so, what can/will they do about it? So far, collectively, they haven't done a damn thing. What will be the consequences of that?

There are plenty of examples in history and nature of populations exceeding the carrying capacity of their environment. Therein lies the answer.

This time it's global.

[Sixstrings]

Except for quite a lot of cases when no advances came along and millions of people died.

You seem to be suffering from a very strong case of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias.

Well, yep, I get that. But our SPECIES has always survived. The closest call that homo sapiens had was about 70,000 years ago. A super volcano eruption aggravated an already ongoing climate change cycle, the ash in the skies blocked the sun out and the earth got even colder and we had a die off -- our species got down to just a few hundred pairs, small bands of survivors in Africa isolated from each other by thousands of miles. An extremely precarious, endangered species situation.

I tell this story repeatedly on this forum, because it's so fascinating.

How Human Beings Almost Vanished From Earth In 70,000 B.C.

With so much ash, dust and vapor in the air, Sam Kean says it's a safe guess that Toba "dimmed the sun for six years, disrupted seasonal rains, choked off streams and scattered whole cubic miles of hot ash (imagine wading through a giant ashtray) across acres and acres of plants." Berries, fruits, trees, African game became scarce; early humans, living in East Africa just across the Indian Ocean from Mount Toba, probably starved, or at least, he says, "It's not hard to imagine the population plummeting."

Then — and this is more a conjectural, based on arguable evidence — an already cool Earth got colder. The world was having an ice age 70,000 years ago, and all that dust hanging in the atmosphere may have bounced warming sunshine back into space. Sam Kean writes "There's in fact evidence that the average temperature dropped 20-plus degrees in some spots," after which the great grassy plains of Africa may have shrunk way back, keeping the small bands of humans small and hungry for hundreds, if not thousands of more years.

So we almost vanished.

But now we're back.

It didn't happen right away. It took almost 200,000 years to reach our first billion (that was in 1804), but now we're on a fantastic growth spurt, to 3 billion by 1960, another billion almost every 13 years since then, till by October, 2011, we zipped past the 7 billion marker, says writer David Quammen, "like it was a "Welcome to Kansas" sign on the highway."

In his new book Spillover, Quamman writes:

We're unique in the history of mammals. We're unique in this history of vertebrates. The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast — above the size of an ant, say or an Antarctic krill — has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.

But our looming weight makes us vulnerable, vulnerable to viruses that were once isolated deep in forests and mountains, but are now bumping into humans, vulnerable to climate change, vulnerable to armies fighting over scarce resources. The lesson of Toba the Supervolcano is that there is nothing inevitable about our domination of the world. With a little bad luck, we can go too.

We once almost did.
http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c

I'm just saying that for PRACTICAL purposes, if you're worried about our SPECIES not surviving -- then no, that won't happen from AGW, and there is no "peak oil" anyway.

Homo sapiens is so crafty it can live just about any extreme environment, with stone age tech that is still ingenious -- from the walrus bone snow goggles of inuit, to the robes of Bedouins that function as air conditioning in the scorching hottest desert on earth.

Of course, what we are really talking about, is survival of our civilization and we're talking about preventing the human catastrophe of a massive die-off.

So those are the rational concerns, along with the very real threat to the environment. Other species are going extinct, because of us. We've actually pretty much cut down all the trees -- north america and europe were once COVERED with forests. This is the lungs of the planet, you cut down too many trees and that must surely effect climate somehow, I would just assume.

Rainforest in Brazil is still getting cut down. We're removing ecosystems all across the planet -- where is the point where it must stop?

The oceans could acidify. The gulfstream could shut down.

Barring a massive meteor impact, or another supervolcano, our species won't go extinct from it though. (although the history of species, generally, is that they all go extinct -- evolution is fluid, nothing in nature is permanent, and few species have stayed the same. They evolve into new branches of species, or they die out, mostly they just die out and then new ones evolve all over again, that's the fact of history)

But anyhow, yes the environment is an important issue, it does matter.

What are we disagreeing about, Strummer? That I'm not a "peak oil" doomer? (I never was)

I'm interested in the actual truth and reality, not what would fit into a "doom" narrative.

I've told this story before, too: I've got an antique local newspaper from the 1920s I picked up at a yard sale. One of the articles is "oil men fear the oil will run out."

The rational fact is that, they simply found more oil to drill and new tech to discover more and extract it. Then the advent of oil tankers and global oil exports and imports (they didn't have that in 1920).

Deep sea drilling. Then tar sands in Canada, then onto shale -- there is A LOT of shale in the world, holy cow. Look guys the oil is just not gonna "run out."

We'll actually transition from it, long before it ever gets close to that last drop extracted from the deep sea floor, and those last tar sands cooked up, and the last shale processed in Mongolia or somewhere.

P.S. anyhow, arguing about peak oil does not matter if everyone agrees on transitioning from fossil fuels, whatever one's reasons are peak oil, climate change, or just efficiency and competitive markets and not relying hydrocarbons alone.

[GHung]

Gosh, Six.... Transition to what? Where will the energy and resources to implement that transition come from? And, since virtually all of our activities so far have resulted in further degradation of our environment, how do we transition in a manner that doesn't further reduce the carrying capacity of said environment? As I've always said, some (a lot) of forcing will be required, and environmental forcing doesn't bode well for a small planet of 7+ billion humans.

The math seems pretty simple: Too many humans; not enough planet, especially when the vast majority of those humans continue to work the problem in the wrong direction.

[GregT]

Homo sapiens is so crafty it can live just about any extreme environment, with stone age tech that is still ingenious -- from the walrus bone snow goggles of inuit, to the robes of Bedouins that function as air conditioning in the scorching hottest desert on earth.

"If the interaction between CO2, ocean acidity and nutrient supply to phytoplankton and other ocean-going creatures isn't something you can wrap your head around, try this: Every second breath you take is due to phytoplankton. Those single cells generate the lion’s share of the world's O2. “If they're out of balance,” says Trainer, “the rest of life on earth is going to be out of balance.”

http://crosscut.com/2014/06/aboard-rv-m ... on-baskin/

Ocean acidification in of itself has the potential to put an end to us 'crafty' humans. Survival might be a tad difficult without oxygen. Not to mention the fact that if the ocean currents are stalled, and ocean mixing no longer takes place, the resulting increase in H2S will be more than enough to finish off most all life on Earth. The larger mammals will be the first to be eradicated. IE: us.

Unless of course you believe that some of us will live happily ever after in sealed underground caves. If it ever came down to that, would life still be worth living?

Maybe it would be smarter to listen to our scientists, instead of letting everything continue to spiral out of control, just because we don't like thinking about unpleasant outcomes.

[Sixstrings]

Gosh, Six.... Transition to what? Where will the energy and resources to implement that transition come from? And, since virtually all of our activities so far have resulted in further degradation of our environment, how do we transition in a manner that doesn't further reduce the carrying capacity of said environment?

Well man, I don't know, I'm no scientist but I've just been on this forum for enough years now to see all the things that everyone said "can't work out" -- actually work out.

I should have BOUGHT Tesla stock two years ago, instead of writing POSTS on a forum about it. Good lands that stock is up almost TEN TIMES in just two years. Apparently this stuff is "working out," and apparently it really is the future.

I just see the reality out there -- the tar sands "worked out," the shale "worked out," there are 300,000 EVs on roads in the USA -- it "worked out." Battery tech development, more EVs and cheaper ones on the way, more solar tech development. It really never was "doom." Brazil did a great job switching to sugar cane ethanol, a long time ago. (sugar is so much better than corn)

OTOH -- they're cutting their rain forest down, too. To grow the sugar to make the ethanol. At least a sugar crop scrubs CO2 from the air, too, so there's that.

GHung, I do not see a lack of energy in the world. Oil, shale, tar sands, SOLAR -- that's the big one, Musk is right, this star we've got in the sky is actually a very large fusion reactor.

But even man-made fusion reactors, are on the way too. Where is the lack of energy?

The math seems pretty simple: Too many humans; not enough planet, especially when the vast majority of those humans continue to work the problem in the wrong direction.

The ultimate "answer" is the same answer from our species' past history, in the Sinai bottleneck and Africa. We need to break out of the bottleneck, eventually. In the past, that was the Sinai and once homo sapiens branched out of that they very quickly spread out across the entire planet.

The current "bottlneck" is just being on this planet. Space development is the ultimate answer.

Musk is really right on these big issues and they all tie together:

EV's + batteries + solar + space development to branch us off the planet.

(by the way, look, I'm not an eco hater -- I'm on board with all the climate change and eco stuff, what more can I do. I'm voting bernie sanders for goodness sake. I can't get more green than that. I just don't see it as total doom, there is still a bright future out there, but you know what -- society actually needs the doomers, to push everyone else along, to be the cassandras and slow down / prevent tragic extinction like maybe the last rhino in the world gone forever, or the last manatee in florida, so okay. We need the alarmists and the doomers, don't change. )

[GregT]

Musk is really right on these big issues and they all tie together:

EV's + batteries + solar + space development to branch us off the planet.

If you truly believe the above Six, then there is absolutely no point in attempting to communicate with you.