World News

Totally. I assume his error margin is about 30 times that difference

The collapse of society "as we know it" where we as a species cannot survive by following the same.lifestyle we have depended on in the past.

Our company helps manage a significant percentage of a critical piece of nationwide infrastructure. With what I see everyday, my wife and I have decided to buy fertile land that can be farmed and has its own source of subterranean water so that we can grow enough food to survive (we already switched to plant based diets). We also are investing heavily so that our home can be "off-grid". Summer is covered, but we are still working on winter power generation.

We are not at "prepper" level, but if you're building a new home, why not try to build in some resiliency?

This is something historians struggle with, because "Collapse" has happened before, the most famous of which might be the Bronze Age Collapse, or the fall of the western Roman Empire in 473. Needless to say, those didn't result in human extinction, or even the extinction of human habitation in those locations (so Greece was inhabited before the Bronze age collapse, but that predates Classical Greece, which we think of as it's golden age, and one for humanity).

Specifically, it was (natural) climate change or political turmoil (those usually go hand in hand) making long established trade routes and subsistence patterns untenable, and with it, destroying the power of the people who controlled that trade. There was a reduction in trade, as the elites had the money to import, and the disposition to distinguish themselves from the lower classes. There was certainly some population reduction, because food was not moving as much, and populations were reduced to what the locality could support. I want to note that at this point, we see migrations (although we do see violence). I want to thank Patrick Wyman's podcast for teaching me this answer.

So I think, in this case, I think its likely we see this. The current power structure will probably not survive, although pockets of it may hold on in places, and maybe even survive into the next iteration (so think about the Catholic Church, an ancient roman institution survives to this day). Instead, I expect to see local polities spring up, holding on to or rejecting various aspects of the old world. A process of balkanization implies the rest of the world looks on in horror, but I expect to see some process of it happening everywhere. Immediately, these fragments will resemble the world we recognize, but in the centuries that follow, the world will become unrecognizable to us.

I think its also important to note that like, the destruction of the social order, which would suck for a lot of reasons (like the development of technology like vaccines), doesn't necessarily mean a "dark age." Some knowledge was lost (like Roman concrete in the fall of Rome) but I dont think the fall of the modern world precludes the loss of electricity, or motor vehicles, or even something like the telephone.

no more strawberry frosted doughnuts at Dunks.

I was thinking the same thing so I looked him up and he has a BSc in biochemical science (Harvard) and a PhD from Cambridge in biophysics of the gallbladder. Colour me shocked. Still, kind of stepping outside his zone of expertise on this grand statement.

I’d rather the magic 8 ball make our decisions than most politicians. We’d have a higher chance of survival

He's playing it very save with 49%. As if he knew math or something

That model keeps getting tweaked and rerun, as others have mentioned, its from 'The Limits to Growth, otherwise known as the 'World 3 model'.

In this one, instesd of measuring 'pollution', which was....fairly difficult to get accurate data on... they just used CO2 instead.

Pretty much same result, we are pretty much at the peak of modern civilization right now.

IIRC, thats a screen grab from Paul Beckwith, a pretty well renowned climate scientist... he has a youtube channel, he puts out like a 20ish slide powerpoint recapping other recent climate studies every week or so ...

Basically we are fucked, all our climate models from 5 or 10 years ago were actually too optimistic, we already blew through 1.5C, the SMOC, the Anatactic part of the thermohaline cycle, already collapsed a decade ago, and we did not notice untill the last few months.

We are tracking closer to the '8.5C by 2100' level of climate sensitivity models than anything else.

Insurance companies are basically already abandoning roughly the lower third of the US, too much climate disaster danger, can't afford to insure homes and neighborhoods.

UK Society of Actuaries recently put together their own risk assessment, from the ground up instesd of top down as the World 3 model... they are also predicting massive losses, economic damage, begging governments and insurance companies and banks to adopt mitigation strategies.

Well at least this means there's a 50% chance I won't need the retirement savings that Im not going to have