So Will 2012 Be Just Another Year?

[tsig]

Do you think you can post a witty one liner and fool all the people reading this that you actually "won" this exchange?

Dafydd and yourself have demanded over and over again that I "prove" what I'm saying.

So I post a short video where a scientist explains, using science, why what I'm saying is true.

The response from the pair of you has been:

(a) not watching it and (b) dismissing it because the scientist in question happened to agree with me.

I mean....the level stupidity being displayed here is mind-boggling. You've demanded evidence, I provided scientific evidence, and you've dismissed it on the grounds that since it backs up my claims, it must be wrong!

Then, to top it all off, you accuse ME of "irony".

Meanwhile, the rest of the people on this board are either ignoring this thread completely, or for some reason don't feel compelled to intervene and explain to you how stupid your behaviour is, which doesn't say much for them either.

I've been avoiding posting because I hate stirring up idiots.

 

[ClarkDickensen]

Ecological sustainability has nothing to do with profits. It's not on the corporate/business agenda, apart from as a means of selling things to certain parts of their customer base (leading to "greenwash.")

I guess that's uncontroversial. I'd find it more interesting to consider feasible alternatives. How can economies involving millions of people and billions to trillions of decisions realistically operate with incentives other than profit?

I'd like to see something more solid than "we'll figure it out" or "let's just solve it locally". Say we accept Ahmed's argument that social progress is the more important variable than material wealth, how can we reliably quantify that to make sure resources aren't wasted on inefficient projects?

I can see no way the existing monetary system can be kept going beyond 2015, but politics is likely to mean it collapses sooner than that. By 2020, nobody will be left doubting that a major transition has started.

I don't see convincing evidence for that. Switch the last digits and the odds should be in your favor, but without data on why the next three years should lead us to chaos, there's no plausible reason to accept these claims.

 

[Agatha]

Assume for the purposes of this thread that I am deaf, or (if you prefer) that I am otherwise unable to view youtube videos.

Can you explain the impending EOTWAWKI in your own words?

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Hi Clark,

I guess that's uncontroversial. I'd find it more interesting to consider feasible alternatives. How can economies involving millions of people and billions to trillions of decisions realistically operate with incentives other than profit?

I'd like to see something more solid than "we'll figure it out" or "let's just solve it locally". Say we accept Ahmed's argument that social progress is the more important variable than material wealth, how can we reliably quantify that to make sure resources aren't wasted on inefficient projects?

Not very easily. On the other hand, there's no chance of figuring it out unless we can get past the propaganda-and-denial stage. At the moment most people have no real idea how serious the problems are, and you only have to look at this thread to see what denial looks like. At the moment we can't even have a sensible debate about this in the mainstream media. That we are having so much trouble having a sensible debate about it even on a bulletin board like this doesn't look good either, but there are places on the internet where you can deal publicly with the realities without the sort of problems we're having here.

Anyway...the first thing is educating people. Only then can we seriously consider the solutions, as you are suggesting we do now. The problem is that not only do the solutions have to be implemented at a local level, and will involve more integration at a local level, they are also going to have to emerge from a local/regional/national level because in all those cases there are a different cocktail of problems. In some places the main problem is the infrastructure is very oil-dependent (e.g. suburban America). In others the main problem is going to be water security (e.g. Australia, southwestern US, parts of the middle east), or lack of mineral resources (e.g. Japan), or serious overpopulation (China, India), or climate change (low-lying countries like Holland)...and the list goes on.

You are really talking about the economic system though. I think the only answer is to use the tax system to encourage whatever sort of changes we collectively decide are most important. We should start by confiscating the profits of all privately-owned all companies and distributing the proceeds to the people. Then we need to deal with the banks.

I don't see convincing evidence for that. Switch the last digits and the odds should be in your favor, but without data on why the next three years should lead us to chaos, there's no plausible reason to accept these claims.

I'm saying 2015 after reading an article about the amount of sovereign debt coming up for renewal in that time. I'm afraid I can't remember where the article was and I probably won't be able to locate it. But 2015 was the point when even if all the politicians were working together to stop the system from collapsing (instead of protecting their own interests or those of the people they are supposed to represent), the debt figures start getting really silly. I honestly don't think it is going to last that long though, and I'm saying that in response to the political problems currently being experienced in the eurozone. There is a limit how far you can push the citizens of a democracy before they over-rule the status quo at the ballot box, or bring their country to a halt with strikes and demonstrations. The Greeks can't be pushed any further, and the Spaniards aren't far behind them. And when TSHTF in the UK it's going to be much worse than either of those two. As for the US...it will be the last major western nation to go under, because a lot of people running from the chaos elsewhere will buy dollars in the desperate hope that TPTB are capable of keeping BAU going. But eventually reality will arrive and when it does then the rest of the world better take a few paces back, because the American people aren't likely to respond well to the collapse of their currency, their economic empire and their dream.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Assume for the purposes of this thread that I am deaf, or (if you prefer) that I am otherwise unable to view youtube videos.

Can you explain the impending EOTWAWKI in your own words?

Sure.

I believe that the massive expansion in the human population since the start of the industrial revolution is almost entirely due to the technological advances that have allowed us to make such good use of fossil fuels. It is true that there are all sorts of secondary reasons why the population is soaring out of control (e.g. improvements in medical knowledge) but when you think how many of these secondary factors would never happened without fossil-fuel-based industrialisation I think it is clear that the Industrial Revolution was primarily driven by fossil fuels. That's pretty much what "Industrial" means - doing stuff with machines powered by something other than humans/animals. Most importantly, agricultural industrialisation has allowed us to increase crop yields by several multiples since the start of the IR.

We are now facing multiple crises caused by our industrialised way of life, and the scale upon which humanity now influences the global ecosystem. Climate change is probably the scariest of these, but the really bad stuff is still a few decades away in that case. But Peak Oil is the most important threat from the point of view of the existing economic system and industrial base. That's because oil is (by far) the most important and useful non-renewable natural resource. And I am increasingly confident that the peak in global oil production has already happened in the period of 2005-2008. We are right now entering the start of the downslope. We are at the point where global supply can just about keep up with demand, and that's after taking into account the "demand destruction" that has already happened because of persistently high oil prices.

Also, our monetary system is broken. This is partly because of poor regulation of the banks and unethical/illegal behaviour by the banksters, but there's even more serious problems than that. Firstly the system requires infinite growth but the world is finite. Secondly we are using a global "fiat" currency system and history shows us that all fiat currencies eventually collapse, usually after about 40 years. Ours is 41 years old (since Nixon cut the last link between the dollar and gold.)

So we have a fundamental resource/population problem, a broken monetary system, an economic system which is not fit for purpose, a political system which is incapable of delivering long-term results because all democratically-elected politicians can't see past the next election, and a general public in the western world, especially the US, which don't really have the first clue what is actually going on (although many of them must surely be beginning to wonder how bad this is going to get...?)

Put the whole picture together and what we've got is not lots of separate crises but a fundamentally broken global economic/political system and an underlying physical resource problem which would still be terrifying even if we could sort the economic/political system out (and we can't.)

There's only one way this story can end now, and it is with some sort of systemic breakdown. Literally The End Of The World As We Know It and the beginning of new and more difficult era that we might call "scarcity industrialism" or "de-industrialisation."

Underlying the whole sorry story is a basic fact about ecology. The rest of the Earth's ecosystem has not been able to respond quickly enough to the appearance of a creature with an entirely new survival strategy: pure brainpower. We have been so busy overcoming every obstacle nature could throw at us that we've taken over the entire ecosystem and now the obstacle we are faced with is ourselves.

It all boils downs to this: there's too many humans on this planet, and our political/social/cultural/psychological mechanisms are hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with this particular problem, because all of these things are naturally "pro-human*."

* Pro-humans-alive-today. Never mind the poor buggers who are going to have to deal with the long-term consequences (i.e. our children.)

 

[Johny2x4]

There´s gonna be someone very disappointed when the time comes.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

There´s gonna be someone very disappointed when the time comes.

Yes. Lots of them.

 

[Limbo]

We are now facing multiple crises caused by our industrialised way of life, and the scale upon which humanity now influences the global ecosystem. Climate change is probably the scariest of these, but the really bad stuff is still a few decades away in that case.

Do you feel that climate change is entirely due to our influence, or might a solar cycle also be contributing?

 

[Limbo]

There's only one way this story can end now, and it is with some sort of systemic breakdown. Literally The End Of The World As We Know It and the beginning of new and more difficult era that we might call "scarcity industrialism" or "de-industrialisation."

Yep, it sure looks that way.

"Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the systemic breakdown is a symbol of a spiritual fact, what would that fact be?

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Just you son.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5JCrSXkJY&feature=related

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Do you feel that climate change is entirely due to our influence, or might a solar cycle also be contributing?

Lots of things influence the large-scale variations in climate, but compared to the current changes due to human influence, all the other causal factors are irrelevant.

Having said that, the worst/biggest threat is not so much what humans do from now on but the potential consequences of the positive feedback effects. While the political world is being split between those who understood how serious the threat already was and those who are in denial or just don't care, the scientific world is currently trying to figure out why the data coming in is so close to the worst-case scenarios. And the emerging consensus is that there has been an under-estimation of the likely consequences of the feedback mechanisms kicking in (and also we may not yet have identified all of them.)

If you want me to explain more about this then I am happy to do so.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Yep, it sure looks that way.

"Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the systemic breakdown is a symbol of a spiritual fact, what would that fact be?

I'm not totally sure what the question means, but I'll do my best to answer it.

The breakdown isn't a symbol of anything. It's a physical event. If you are asking me for the most relevant "spiritual fact" (not that there are such things) then it would have to be the "fact" that spirituality shares with ecology: the whole system is a Whole System.

Everything is connected together. It's all one system. This is just as true whether you're a Dawkinsian skeptic who knows his ecology or a mystic with a very poor grasp of science. The only difference between the two of them is the scope of the sytem in question, or the respective beliefs about what does and doesn't exist, or how the parts are connected.

 

[Limbo]

UE, as the systemic breakdown progresses and societies become more and more de-industrialised, do you forsee shamanism becoming more and more vital to survival as it was in ages past?

 

[Complexity]

If you want me to explain more about this then I am happy to do so.

To quote William Blake, "Enough! Or too much."

 

[dafydd]

Here is a reminder, Johny....

Dafydd and yourself have demanded over and over again that I "prove" what I'm saying.

So I post a short video where a scientist explains, using science, why what I'm saying is true.

The response from the pair of you has been:

(a) not watching it and (b) dismissing it because the scientist in question happened to agree with me and (c) posting [more] infantile remarks like the one quoted in the post.

I mean....the level stupidity being displayed here is mind-boggling. You've demanded evidence, I provided scientific evidence, and you've dismissed it on the grounds that since it backs up my claims, it must be wrong!

No, I do not think that the video counts as evidence. If you want to call that stupidity, fair enough. You are free to make up your own definitions of words.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

UE, as the systemic breakdown progresses and societies become more and more de-industrialised, do you forsee shamanism becoming more and more vital to survival as it was in ages past?

The honest answer to that is that I have no idea. I'm not entirely sure what the connection was between human tribal life and shamanism in the past (it was widespread, but I'm not sure whether it aided survival or existed for other reasons). I also don't know what sort of civilisation is going to emerge at the end of the coming transition, or how long it is going to take.

Edited by kmortis : 

Removed to comply with Rule 11

 

[PixyMisa]

Having said that, the worst/biggest threat is not so much what humans do from now on but the potential consequences of the positive feedback effects. While the political world is being split between those who understood how serious the threat already was and those who are in denial or just don't care, the scientific world is currently trying to figure out why the data coming in is so close to the worst-case scenarios.

The worst case scenario would have everyone already dead. So what you mean is that observations tend towards the more extreme end of the range of predictions based on previous observations and best available theories.

Which is bad, sure, but a hell of a lot less dramatic.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

The worst case scenario would have everyone already dead.

No. I am talking about models of climate change, and the worst case scenarios don't have everybody dead until the second half of this century.

So what you mean is that observations tend towards the more extreme end of the range of predictions based on previous observations and best available theories.

Which is bad, sure, but a hell of a lot less dramatic.

"Drama" is a non-scientific concept. How "dramatic" a person thinks this stuff is all about their interpretation and other factors than the actual science. All that matters is that both of the poles are getting warmer so quickly that they are almost outside the range of estimates provided by previous models. This is especially true in the North. The rate of loss of permanent ice in the Arctic is shocking. Ten years ago people were predicting an ice-free Arctic ocean (in the summer) by 2050. It now looks like it could happen as soon as 2015. There's two reasons for this "anomaly." Firstly the poles are warming faster than almost anybody predicted they were going to, and secondly, ancient ice takes more energy to melt than recently-formed ice and that means that once an area has melted once it is much more likely to do so again the following year.

 

[PixyMisa]

No. I am talking about models of climate change, and the worst case scenarios don't have everybody dead until the second half of this century.

That's my point. There's no accepted scenario under which everyone is dead from climate change in the second half of this century. There are however worst-case scenarios under which everyone is already dead. Those scenarios are simply wrong.

Paul Gilding is a scientist.

Really? What is his field? Where did he study? What has he published?

He doesn't describe himself as a scientist, nor does he list any scientific training or work at all.

 

[Limbo]

The honest answer to that is that I have no idea. I'm not entirely sure what the connection was between human tribal life and shamanism in the past (it was widespread, but I'm not sure whether it aided survival or existed for other reasons). I also don't know what sort of civilisation is going to emerge at the end of the coming transition, or how long it is going to take.

That's a good answer.

I've undergone the shamanic ego-death initiatory crisis, and so I've had an interest in this topic not only for that reason but because of its important place in comparative mythology and Jungian psychology.

Shamanism can ease our transition and it can keep us alive once the transition is complete.

It can ease our transition through ayahuasca ceremonies. When taken under the supervision of shamans, ayahuasca can cure:

Depression
Anxiety
Panic attacks
Sleep disorders
ADHD
Drug abuse
Alcohol abuse
OCD, Obsessive Compulsive disorder
Schizophrenia
Violent behavior
Anti-social disorder
Neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s
Cancer

and it can give us:

Improved general physical health
Increased mental clarity
Improved relationships
Improved outlook on life
Increased sense of purpose
More spiritual in life
Happier sense of well being
More self confidence
Calmer
More compassion/empathy
Increased energy
Improved concentration
Improved anger control
Feeling more centered
More humble
Quicker healing time
Better creativity

There is probably an ayahuasca workshop somewhere near you. Having experienced my share of entheogen ceremonies I guarantee it's worth the effort.

We must shamanize as much of the human race as possible.

http://boingboing.net/2008/04/16/ayahuasca-church-spr.html

http://www.realitysandwich.com/video/ayahuasca_monologues_chris_kilham