Having dabbled with chaotic heavily dynamic systems in college I actually disagree. It may be that our system was in a relatively stable highly linear regime and we just knocked it out into a non-linear chaotic region that we can't escape even if we cut emissions entirely.

Chaotic systems do some scary unpredictable things, I wish I shared your confidence.

Sure, I do agree that the world, especially the climate system, may veer off into uncharted territory soon. (Maybe it already started.) I'm just saying these particular "predictions" don't seem to contain any useful information. Anyone can say "things can go wrong." Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right.

> Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right.

Not only may you be right, you are in fact guaranteed to be right. Of course, predicting exactly when things go wrong is another ballgame altogether.

Edit: the downvotes on HN are becoming so reactionary lately, it feels like it's slowly turning into reddit. Or maybe people just aren't familiar with Poincaré recurrence, etc.?

Perhaps the uncouth voting on HN is a further sign of impending societal collapse.

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think you are right. I guess it depends on specificity of predictions. In one white paper I called some of the current trends of 2021 ( granted, I personally believed they were relatively apparent, but I did have some arguments over my assumptions ).

This is just the Mayan calendar phenomena. Just because something is old and accurate up until today doesn't meant that it actually predicts the end of the world.

The Mayan calendar also doesn't predict the world would end in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon#Maya_reference...

There is just one inscription predicting that a particular god would do something (that's not clearly understood) at that time. Charles Mann suggested that it could be just as plausible to interpret the "investiture" when this god comes to Earth as a kind of party or celebration, and not a cataclysm.

Luckily there are many models that show divergence from the norm many years ago and continue to show stable and accurate predictions. Like the IPCC reports, and well, most climate CO2 models. Now it's less about determining if divergence is occuring and more about the slope of the divergence.

Will we have societal collapse at 2 degrees or 3 degrees warming seems speculative but the general consensus is that it'll be in range of bad to terrible to apocalypse.

All eyes on those slope lines!

And yeh, phone your representatives and demand faster and more consequntial action!!

I’ve lost hope in politics, I’m buying a sturdy helmet and hoping for the best.

Yeah I watched a cspan question and answer session and one dinosaur-aged Republican representative from West Palm Beach Florida sounded so backwards. He was saying that we shouldn’t transition to green energy because of all the coal miner jobs that will be displaced by green energy jobs. It seemed like he was just being difficult or corrupt because Florida doesn’t even have any coal mines or coal mining jobs! Also, it’s not like people can’t go get new income sources or start new businesses.. I think the issue is that many of these retirement-age folks don’t care because they aren’t expecting repercussions or negative externalities in their remaining short lifespan.

The situation around global warming would be a lot different if the environmentalist Al Gore hadn’t lost to conservative George Bush. The election hinged on a narrow Florida Supreme Court decision of 5-4 over the votes and controversial butterfly ballots. Based on that decision, Bush won the USA presidential election by only 537 votes. The 3rd party spoiler effect from the Green Party was also to blame since Florida isn’t yet advanced enough to have ranked-choice voting.

US Supreme Court.

And there's a very good chance the entire world look different if Gore won. There may have not been a 9/11, for one. There would have certainly not been an Iraq war.

We’ll never know for sure, but this seems like revisionist history and motivated reasoning. Gore and his advisors supported regime change in Iraq when he was in office and intelligence failures didn’t suddenly start in early 2001, nor were they restricted to the United States.[0]

It’s possible that the tone around climate change would have been different under a Gore administration, but the entire composition of Congress would also have looked different after the mid-terms in response to a Democratic president making sweeping changes to the economy (as it was republicans already controlled the Senate for half of Bush’s time in office, and the house for three quarters). The fiscal conservatism of 90s republicans may have stayed intact instead of accepting large deficits as they did under Bush.

The feature and bug of the US system of democracy is that radical change is hard to do and disagreements can’t be steamrolled over. Sometimes the right person can have an enormous effect on the course of history (Washington, Lincoln, FDR), but it’s unlikely Gore was one of those people.

[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/why-al-gore-wo...

It was not intelligence failures that got us into Iraq. The politicians lied us into the war on purpose and hid, obstructed, and made up the intelligence as they saw fit. One of the biggest crimes in American history should be remembered correctly.

It was exactly what is stated in the article: shortage of energy. US consumes several times more energy per capita than even Europe. At the same time industrial output of US is small and diminishing with every year.

US needs more oil. Hence all the wars. Iraq - oil. Libya - oil. Syria - oil (US occupied all oil deposits in Syria where and extracts it without giving anything back to the people of Syria).

Afghanistan - I'm not sure, but considering that during US occupation, production of heroine in Afghanistan went up orders of magnitude, and many visitors to Afghanistan reported that US guarded poppy fields, probably it was due to drugs. Kill two birds with one stone: get rich from selling drugs, finance other wars and coups with drug money, and flood geopolitical enemies that happen to be located next to Afghanistan borders with the most powerful drug.

The next target will be also rich in oil, although it would be definitely said that it's only because of lack of democracy in the said country.

In two decades of reading about it I've seen this oil theory many times but I haven't seen anything that convinces me that it was the real motivation. The closest strategic explanation was the neocons' PNAC letters which were basically just bravado about America throwing its weight around to maintain their global dominance. Reprehensible stuff.

If it wasn't the real explanation then nothing America does makes any sense. There have been a notable lack of invasions of African, Asian, European or South American countries. The Middle Easterners aren't that different from everywhere else - except they have lots of oil.

Military industrial complex? “Alleged” weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Islamic extremists? Politicians wanting to appear tough on crime? Avoiding another 1970s energy crisis? Islamic suicide bombers / terrorists?

I don’t know.

> The next target will be also rich in oil, although it would be definitely said that it's only because of lack of democracy in the said country.

Haiti.

It was just a minor coup at the USA backdoor.

The next victim of US military incursion will be oil rich country. There's no reason for incursion if it is not going to be profitable for the US.

If there's "no democracy" in some country but also no valuable natural resources, it's not worth spending expensive missiles and bombs. E.g. dictatorship in Cambodia would be always safe as there're little gains in occupying Cambodia.

Same for Haiti. It doesn't mean that US won't intervene with cheaper methods like assassinations and/or propaganda.

US literally prints money, it's very easy for them to set up media outlets publishing propaganda non-stop 24/7 in almost every country on Earth.

FAANG monopolies are also a big part of this picture. They all censor all anti-american views and push propaganda. E.g., if you're from Russia, and you register on YouTube, you'll see Navalny channel in recommendations for months, even if you explicitly block his channel and channels of his associates. Facebook regularly blocks pro-Russian persons, groups and posts (including published in Russian in Russia). Many Netflix series (and Hollywood movies) continue to picture US as the exceptional country with exceptional people ("chosen by God") while all the rest are third-world worthless thrash (see Narcos, for example). Also, almost all the villains in Hollywood movies are Russian (Tenet is the recent example).

> The next victim of US military incursion will be oil rich country. There's no reason for incursion if it is not going to be profitable for the US.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. See e.g. https://www.worldoil.com/news/2010/1/27/haiti-could-have-lar...

What natural resources did Afghanistan have that was worth 20 years and trillions of dollars?

It takes a while to plan and execute something like 9/11. This is not one guy with an IED in Kabul. The pilots got their licences for that specific purpose. That alone takes months.

Bush became president in January 2001. You think Al Qaeda was like "oh no, Gore lost? Let's proceed with that airplane plan" right there and then? Like they even remotely care if it's a dem or Rep.

Yeah, it probably wouldn't have changed anything.

But US intelligences services might have caught it, by sheet chance if history was to replay with slightly different variables. Just saying, they got lucky.

Consequences of 9/11 certainly could have looked different, if the US was less focus on oil and less concerned about confronting the Saudis.

For sure. Obama played kindly with Putin, no worries about Ukraine invasion in Europe. He prevented a global conflict for sure, thanks to his kindness and openness /s

And not just the hanging chads, right? I don't think it's controversial, in hindsight, to say that Jeb Bush conspired with GW to steal the election. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jun/06/uselections200...

I’m not so sure. A lot of people don’t remember this, but GW Bush ran to the left of Al Gore on climate policy in 2000. Bush proposed using the clean air act to reduce the CO2 output of power plants to voters in September 2000 [1].

Christine Todd Whitman was nominated as administrator of the EPA to enact the policy. Lobbying by the fossil fuel industry changed the direction of this policy and because of push back, Bush took the opposite direction of the policy he campaigned on.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uhLvnKOClYXtJ8ZdjJM43

If Gore won there would be no global warming movie and the movement might not have taken off. Gore would have been to entangled in 911 make global warming a priority.

The green party not winning is the shame. Never blame a third party for a majority party not winning. If they caused Gore to lose hopefully he tries harder to win over 537 people next cycle.

I don’t blame the third parties. I blame not having ranked choice voting.

Then you are participating in a self fulfilling prophecy. The oil and gas lobby won't stop calling. Nor will the car industry lobby and all the other industry groups. So if you don't call (or vote, for that matter) the cause is lost and what you think about politics. But you contributed to it by inaction, so don't blame others.

I am a huge fan of Nassim Taleb and his book Fooled By Randomness really impacted the way I look at a lot of doom and gloom scenarios. His notion of fat tailed events/tail risks along with survivors confirmation bias is a central theme of many of the risks he describes.

So as an example, if in October 2019 someone said a virus outbreak that could be largely prevented would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over climate change, you would be laughed at. Yet here we are. The largest hidden risk is often what is right in front of our eyes that we don’t acknowledge as a risk.

For example if there is a >9 magnitude earthquake due to San Andreas fault, I have zero doubt California has any preparedness and if will even be able to airlift millions of people even though everyone knows it’s a ticking time bomb.

>For example if there is a >9 magnitude earthquake due to San Andreas fault, I have zero doubt California has any preparedness and if will even be able to airlift millions of people even though everyone knows it’s a ticking time bomb.

At least people are retrofitting buildings in CA to prepare for the San Andreas.

This is nothing compared to the real big one:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...

On top of this, there are usually two Cascade Range eruptions a century. We've had 0 so far in the 21st. Could Rainier go?

A new virus isn't any less likely to occur tomorrow just because covid emerged. Expect another in your great-grandchild's lifetime, or sooner.

20% of USA children are obese and +75% of USA adults are overweight/obese. Expect heart disease complications (and death from diseases that take advantage of it as a comorbidity) to be more common. Yet people refuse to acknowledge what they're doing to themselves.

Expect plastic to be a collective hangover for our species in the near future.

Nothing lasts forever, and the past 100 years is just a single lifetime for some tortoises. We swirl and float in a chaotic world with the collective memory of a goldfish, and our conversations revolve around fears of interpersonal violence.

I wish we could be frank and seek an honest understanding of ourselves, our world, and its risks, but I've made my peace (I'm only a human as well). May we live in boring times, and roll with the changes!

thanks for the article, it was a great read. I wonder what new research on the cascadia subduction zone had happened since 2015 when it was published - and what changes in the forecasts might have to be made post-COVID-19, given new data on disaster preparedness.

To add context, I found the source for current art on this: https://pnsn.org/outreach/earthquakesources/csz

> if in October 2019 someone said a virus outbreak that could be largely prevented would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over climate change, you would be laughed at.

Firstly, why would someone laugh? Pandemics with a 100k death toll are a fairly regular occurrence, even in modern society. OTOH if you said 1M + most of the world under some form of home quarantine, lockdown or travel restrictions for well over a year, that would have been laughed at.

Second, it's hard to attribute deaths to climate change directly. Natural disasters kill people every year. Who can say with absolute certainty that the death toll in this or that incident would have been lower if not for climate change?

Third, on a longer timescale climate change absolutely has the potential to kill more people than Covid.

> Firstly, why would someone laugh?

Well, we see people and even political groups laughing at the idea of a virus outbreak that kills 100k even today, isn't it?

Now picture it without the benefit of hindsight.

Why did western society failed so hard at containing the virus when countries like South Korea were already leading by example at the start of Q1 2020.

A few people, sure, but for the most part what I've seen people attacking is the idea that the Covid pandemic is some kind of unique crisis that demands an aggressive response.

Also, South Korea has very much not contained Covid. They've relied on fairly strict social distancing measures to stop cases outright going exponential, but those cases are still there and all indications are that an increasing proportion of infections have been going undetected since the start of the pandemic. (There's no way of knowing the exact number because they don't seem to have any program to measure the actual infection rate, unlike some other countries, and their level of testing is frankly pretty poor compared to the western world these days.) Those measures are also no longer sufficient, with cases reaching new record highs most days for the last week or so.

> would be lead cause of over 100k deaths over climate change

What does that even mean?

It means if one was asked to bet on an event between 100k death from a virus outbreak and 100k death from climate change, one would place their bet largely on climate change. Even though we have been warned the hidden systemic risk of pandemic preparedness l.

Virus / bacteria outbreaks have been common throughout history. They come quickly and often enough. About 3 or 4 come every 100 years. So you can expect one every 30 years.

Our last 4:

"Spanish Flu" in 1918-1919 "Asian Flu" in 1957-1958 "Hong Kong Flu" in 1968-1969 "Swine Flu" (H1N1) in 2009-2010

History teaches us to bet on viruses happening at anytime. Climate change deaths will be much slowier

You live in a bubble. The majority of people still deny climate change entirely.

Source? A quick google search would suggest that around 70% of Americans agree that climate change is real. That's way too low, but still a solid majority.

According to an UN poll, 65% of Americans and 64% of the world think that climate change is a global emergency [1]. In every questioned country, a majority said it's a global emergency.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/27/un-globa...

Did these UN polls consider that people holding these views might not answer to UN polls? I encourage you to try looking for how these questions were answered in polls done by local researchers. At least in Europe, the ratios are the other way around all around the eastern half. In my own country, less than 30% believe climate change is a risk, and even less believe it's caused and/or resolvable by humans - I'm surprised the UN polls say otherwise as not even the EU dares to claim these amounts of approval. Perhaps the UN asked for "any climate change whatsoever" as opposed to "human-driven climate change" - a significant difference...