This is orthogonal as to whether a collapse is around the corner or not. If you look at the science in the IPCC report, combine with the inability to hit every single emissions target defined in every single climate treaty. It seems civilization collapse is on the table.
Also:
We probably are already at 2C locked in: https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-26...
Billions of refugees by 2100: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648...
Etc.
If we don't drastically reduce emissions in the next decades, it seems very probable that this global civilization will end. Which might not be a bad thing in the long run, but in the short term it will cause a lot of suffering.
We're in a sports car hitting the gas as we head towards a cliff and you're talking about how much better the interior is on this new model compared to the last.
At the same time the rate of population growth has decreased and is projected to go negative within a few decades.
Sure, lots of things are still getting worse, but "getting worse more slowly" is progress. No reason to get complacent but in my opinion doom sayers do more harm than good by promulgating the nihilistic philosophy that we're all doomed anyways, so fighting our problems doesn't do any good.
Production of food has increased along with our unsustainable use of fossil fuels and the other products needed to do so. Topsoil is disappearing at an alarming rate.
I don't think a person sounding the alarm that we'll have depleted our fish stocks within 25 years, or are losing an incredible amount of topsoil each year, or are heading for dramatic climate changes that will cause an increase in disasters is a doomsayer. They're just living according to what every scientific report says. Being optimistic won't change a disruption in food supply or mass migration due to shifting weather patterns.
The past was an ongoing disaster worse than any westerner can imagine.
Try to imagine near 50% child mortality on a global scale in 1800.
That's the past. Today even the poorest regions in Africa have "only" ~15% child mortality.
Waste water cleaning plants were built, so human excrement wasn't dumped to the sea anymore. At some point district heating replaced coal and wood burned in houses. Double and triple glazing arrived. The metro started operating in the eighties, replacing a lot of buses. Lead gasoline was banned in the nineties as well. Cars got electronic ignition, fuel injection and catalytic converters. Diesel engines started having tightening regulations every few years. Waste water treatment was upgraded to even remove nitrogen. New bicycle highways were made, the metro is being extended, tram lines are being built, and just a few weeks ago many diesel bus lines were replaced by Chinese electric ones.
Some things have gotten better, some things have gotten worse. But not everything has gotten worse.
and https://v.redd.it/ayd4itr1kqg71
Marine life halved in few decades https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/marine-wil...
The sea in total is not doing great, because of agricultural emissions.
You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.
It's hard to believe it's due to financial games exclusively: people are better off in real terms.
Inequality is a problem because when members of your community are living in very different conditions, the cohesion of said community is undermined, but worrying about inequality is the archetypical first world problem: a problem nonetheless, but a problem that presumes you've come a long way.
Just as it is generally claimed by scientists that there are a bunch of different problems coming to humanity when ecosystems collapse, temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees celsius, there's not enough freshwater to go around...
it might be stretch to claim etc. etc. but nobody is making that claim, the claim is that humanity is not reducing emissions and not doing anything significant to handle when the bills come due for the last century of everything improving!
on edit: changed is a bunch to are a bunch - is a bunch is probably still correct but are a bunch sounds more correct to my ear.
The problem is that it's advantageous for everyone to continue to externalize the costs and let everyone else pay the bill[0].
Since everyone is doing the externalizing, no one is paying the bill. Since no one is paying the bill, the resource will be exhausted sooner or later.
The resource in question is the resilience of our own biological life support system; we're wrecking it, both by by our predatory over exploitation and by pollution. We're destroying the foundations of our own survival.
I don't know if it's true, or if it's even something we can falsify at any moment in history, but stable civilizations have collapsed, and it's worth understanding that it could happen to ours too.
so this seems sort of like the old joke about jumping off the skyscraper and as you fall past the 10th floor say "so far so good", only now the person falling is doing cocaine and says "things are only getting better!"
We're burning the planet.
... in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about, when taking quantitative state-produced stats at face value, and with naive extrapolation (and ignoring statistical fluctuations, black swans, etc).
E.g. "the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars". Global warming is already a big factor and is only expected to be more so in the future.
And that's not even before any real battle for resources such as water, crops, and dwindling minerals start, mass immigration due to climate change brings its own conflicts and challenges, the decline of the US hegemony brings forth new hegemonical and tons of peripheral claims, and lets not even count inflation and other pressures (including boomer-era people coming to retirement age en masse with lots of savings issues in the US, and broken pension systems in Europe). I haven't even mentioned a possible permanent (or long term) covid mutations situation (we're already 2 years in, and measures already had a huge impact on economies).
>Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me.
Not to make it sound like equivalent times, but jewish people had an extremely hard time imagining their German co-patriots would try to kill them too, plenty of such historical accounts from pre/early WWII, even up to the point they were already dealing with force registration in ethnicity lists, deportations, and so on.
I'm curious by what kind of metrics the world was better 100 years ago. You're arguing against a strawman: there are challenges ahead != we were better off before.
There were a lot of extremely dirty industrial processes which we are doing much better now (in the developed countries at least), superfund sites in the US and their equivalent in other industrialized nations as the known locations, but it did not reach the global scale yet, plus, what they buried or just left in the ground where the factories spilled it is still there now for the most part.
I think that in quite a few ways we've gotten better, sure, but partly by kicking the can down the road instead of actually solving issues such as sustainable energy or water use instead of drawing from and heavily relying on exhaustible stores, as well as not having closed loops with the things we produce.
Higher temperatures (climate change, not the same as pollution).
Worsening infrastructure (the US, for example, is turning into a developing world country in many areas) as opposed to the era of great infrastructure projects, from scryscrappers and railways to the interstate system .
Lower/flattening productivity increases (as opposed to continuous productivity booms 100 years ago).
Lower/flattening invention rate (the low hanging fruits ended circa 1950-60).
More surveillance (in fact more, even at solely the state level, than even Stazi had, and with infinite potential for targeted surveillance).
Thining middle class (as opposed to incresing middle class 100 years ago).
Hugely increased inequality.
Crumbling pension systems (as opposed to pension systems being developed 100 years ago).
There are also a few tricks such "we're getting better" treatises use:
1) use the progress in countries starting from a very low bar to offset regressions in more developed countries (and since the third world countries have higher population, use an average state to shove it to the face of doubters who see their own lives and those of their countries/societies get worse and worse). This is kind of like averging Jeff Bezos' and mine wealth (kinda: what it does it says since e.g. 1 billion people went from $1/day to $2/day this is a huge 200% increase, who cares is another billion went from $100/day to $80/day and falling...).
2) take official measurements (made to make states and organizations affecting change look good) as the ground truth
3) when convenient, compare with say a century back, not 30 and 40 years back (e.g. when people didn't even have the notion of a pension, not when you expected and got one).
4) ignore any qualitative metric.
Fair enough
> Worsening infrastructure
If you're claiming that infrastructure 100 years ago was of lesser quality than today, you're living in an alternate reality.
> Lower/flattening productivity increases
False when increases taken in real terms: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RTFPNAUSA632NRUG It's pretty much a line as straight up as it gets.
> Lower/flattening invention rate
As in? Science is working worse now?
> More surveillance (in fact more, even at solely the state level, than even Stazi had, and with infinite potential for targeted surveillance).
That's hard to judge. Yes, modern states have more potential for surveillance, but they arguably can get away with less abuse than they used to.
> Thining middle class (as opposed to incresing middle class 100 years ago).
Very nice how you take the first derivative.
> Hugely increased inequality.
As much as people love talking about it, 'inequality' is a vague term. Are we talking income or wealth? Worldwide, US or Europe?
Worldwide, inequality has dramatically decreased (both income and wealth). Income inequality in the US is slightly higher than post war, but marginally so. The charts they show you don't have the origin at zero, that's all.
> Crumbling pension systems
In countries that have nationalized pension systems (which aren't actually a bad thing imo), pensions are generally pay-as-you-go. If pension systems are not sustainable it's simply because politicians love using them as the 21st century grain dole: they aren't crumbling for any fundamental reason other than the political unwillingness to do the honest thing and cut benefits.
> 1) use the... > 2) take... > 3) when...
I have no axe to grind and absolutely nothing to defend. If 'those treaties' do that, they are wrong. I like talking about concrete, factual statements though, "our society is getting worse" is something that's been said for literally millennia.
> ignore any qualitative metric.
Can you point out some qualitative metric that isn't just "life was better X years ago because I was X years younger?" Because let's be honest, that's what most "qualitative metrics" boil down to. As imperfect as it might be, data is at least an honest attempt to understand the world.
Additionally the metrics being called out are things like the World Bank's poverty statistics, which applies fairly arbitrary definitions of income-based poverty that in many cases would identify people otherwise labelled "food insecure" as "not in poverty". The definitions are also applied globally and by their nature adjusted over time, which can skew the results. And even if all of these limitations are ignored most of the "improvements" are localized in China.
I'm not going to defend primitivism because I think the problem today is mostly a matter of distribution and resource inefficiency but for a metric that has gotten worse over time (though again not in the 100 year view for obvious reasons) consider leisure time. Hunter-gatherer societies spent considerably less time on sustaining themselves than the 40+ hours per week the average modern human spends working a job, doing household chores and shopping.
The problem is that a lot of the ills don't neatly fit into metrics and even when you try to do so, you have to rely on self-reporting for a lot of them. For example for most workers industrialization massively increased alienation from their work, remote work (but also on the opposite end the need to relocate for career advancement) has drastically increased social isolation, enclosure and the increasing commodification of leisure activity also have take their toll, and social media has increased the spread of disinformation, replaced social interaction with public performance and has been a massive cause of social anxieties.
And of course the thing is that a lot of the problems we have can't just be fixed by a clever improvement because their causes are intrinsic to the system. You can try to reduce overproduction and improve recycling but the best consumer action to help the environment is not to consume and the best industrial action to help the environment is not to produce. But considering how much of our economy hinges on demands people didn't know they had for things they didn't know they need (not just production but also sales, advertising, financing, sales and advertising for the financing, debt collection, sales and advertising for the debt collection to the companies doing the financing, insurance for the companies doing the financing, sales and advertising for the companies doing the insurance, and so on) that just translates into "killing jobs" and "ruining the economy".
The worst 10% today do about as well as majority of West was doing back then. And the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars.
But well, this is perspective of a Polish person. My country lost 25% of the population during wars with Sweden, 90% population of Warsaw. And then another 20% in WWII, and another 90% of Warsaw was lost. My grandmother lived through that. Later, during communist regime she managed to escape Poland right before Martial Law in 80' to Netherlands. My mother was persecuted after that due to contacts in the West.
Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me. Not everyone is peaceful to the east, but at least their tanks are not in Poland. That's progress too.