[Newfie]

Yes, and it get dicier. We could easily have localized “die off” or “collapse” while we don’t here in NA; India and Africa come to mind.

Dominica lost 20,000 people out of 70,000 due to Maria. They moved off island. At least one well spoken local man is saying there are all sorts of problems due to cc induced increased rain fall. Still get the same amount of rain but it’s coming in deluges; wrecking roads and farms. Just 3rd hand info.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'Y')es, and it get dicier. We could easily have localized “die off” or “collapse” while we don’t here in NA; India and Africa come to mind.

Dominica lost 20,000 people out of 70,000 due to Maria. They moved off island. At least one well spoken local man is saying there are all sorts of problems due to cc induced increased rain fall. Still get the same amount of rain but it’s coming in deluges; wrecking roads and farms. Just 3rd hand info.

[evilgenius]

I think the whole concept of talking about humans in a Malthusian way causes us to lose sight of something. In order to entertain that idea we have to embrace our givens as normally distributed, so that we can understand change according to statistics. Things in the economic sphere, where competition reigns, are normally distributed. Nevermind wealth inequality for one minute. But the thing that empowers progress, and staves off Malthus, is not normally distributed.

Creativity is not normally distributed. It follows the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the creativity is done by twenty percent of the people. They like to get paid, but they don't engage in what they do for money. It's got more to do with purpose. The amount of money they make places them within hierarchies. Those hierarchies are important, as they provide a yardstick for many people. Even if they don't enter into the pursuit of creativity for money, and have a hangup about selling out, they will understand which things are so unprofitable that they ought to be avoided. So, obviously, money always plays some role.

One can also argue an evolutionary interpretation exists, where humans constantly search out their environment. At some point in a society employing division of labor there are not enough positions where real creativity can take place. Those positions where creativity can take place are staffed by the twenty percent. In deference to natural distribution, it shouldn't really matter who occupies any particular job. No one group or normally appearing person is more or less eligible. How to do anything can be taught. The degree of specialization, taking away from a need to operate within the context of a bigger picture all the time, helps to ensure this. It gives people a less complex pallet to work with. Under capitalism, we have come to understand that most of these should appear in sales or marketing positions. But that view discounts all manner of scientists and artists who would put out at the same level, regardless of pay. And it is this search of the environment which provides new solutions to new problems all the time. These people are always working because the things they do require they occupy their minds with them in a deep way. In a very real sense, these people exist because society has reached a certain level of complexity, enough to allow for the division of labor which excludes them.

[onlooker]

I think Ibon and Tanada are much too sanguine about the implications and consequences of climate change. From the literature major climate change is a game changer for life on this planet. You cannot make assumptions as though this CHANGE will be summarily adapted to. We are talking of a possible Mass Extinction Event, which implies conditions not conducive to most life currently inhabiting the Earth. On top of that we have the continued degradations and depletions of ecosystems and their resources along with a possible meltdown of Nuclear reactors worldwide if the Economic system crashes. And it can crash as at some point a critical shortage of FF can prevent any transition to other energy sources and also severely cripple the world civilization and its Economy.

So, I am sorry to rain the parade of the more optimistic but I am seeing things developing in much more bleak terms.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'I')You cannot make assumptions as though this CHANGE will be summarily adapted to.

[onlooker]

Yes Ibon, I admit, I get a bit carried away with my "own" narrative. It just that reading on climate induced climate change is chilling. We all are agreeing that severe consequence are coming. It is just that I hope you and others are right and adaptation will be possible. I admit I am rooting for my species

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'Y')es Ibon, I admit, I get a bit carried away with my "own" narrative. It just that reading on climate induced climate change is chilling. We all are agreeing that severe consequence are coming. It is just that I hope you and others are right and adaptation will be possible. I admit I am rooting for my species

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', '
')About 3 years ago CId predicted we have 5 years before humans will go extinct. 3 years have now gone by. That means we only have 24 months left for extinction to happen.

[onlooker]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', 'Y')es Ibon, I admit, I get a bit carried away with my "own" narrative. It just that reading on climate induced climate change is chilling. We all are agreeing that severe consequence are coming. It is just that I hope you and others are right and adaptation will be possible. I admit I am rooting for my species

[Newfie]

My problem, and it’s a personal one, is that I can see both sides of the argument. And I find it difficult to find the balance between the “let it go” and “fight for survival.”

Frankly I’ve come to accept that my opinions and positions and even emotions are somewhat schizophrenic, mad if you will. But then again, when a sane man is trapped in an insane asylum its only logical to feel the world has been turned topsy turvy. It will make you feel mad. How is a logical person to react to an insane world?

PS: When I typed “topsy turvey” spell check turned into “Democrat Republican Party”!!! No shit, honest. How insane is that?

What I’ve been ATTEMPTING to do is to listen to the various arguments, listening with compassion and empathy, not beligerance. There are pearls here and there, apparently pearls do grow in both oysters and BS. I kind of take them and hold onto the best and see where they naturally fit in this 4 dimensional (time) jig saw puzzle I’m working on. I have no box for this mess so I don’t know what the final picture is to look like. And right now? I’ve got a MESS!

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', '
')
What I’ve been ATTEMPTING to do is to listen to the various arguments, listening with compassion and empathy, not beligerance. There are pearls here and there, apparently pearls do grow in both oysters and BS. I kind of take them and hold onto the best and see where they naturally fit in this 4 dimensional (time) jig saw puzzle I’m working on. I have no box for this mess so I don’t know what the final picture is to look like. And right now? I’ve got a MESS!

[Newfie]

Tanada,
To go back a few posts I want to tell you my opinion on how far we will fall se will fall technologically. Our opinions differ, and this is not to convience you otherwise but to explain how I’ve come to be less sanguine.

In my career I did a lot of work on the remnants of the Pennsylvania RR system. At one time, early 1900’s the PRR was quite advanced and had lots of capital. The things they did with the relatively simple technologies were quite amazing. So on the one hand that’s good, all our much ballyhooed advancement and capital spending has not much improved how the trains run on time. So we can achieve 90% of the beneifit with much simpler methods. Clearly that can not be said for other industries.

The USA simply does not produce or understand much of our high tech. Most communications engineers have no idea of how a simple rotary dial telephone system works. I know, I’ve had to explain it to them. They may be brilliant in fiber optic transmission but the s no clue that they are ignorant of 95% of what is required to make the overall system work. We have an extremely high level of specialization.

I recall instances of calling a factory, when we had such things, to get assistance and being told “Oh, the guy that designed that is out today, no one else understands it.” Or a gentleman working to design a digital communications system where the routers software was specific to that company and that model of router. He was working on it for months. When I asked who was going to support this he said “Guys like me.” The problem was the client had no guys like him, nor did the manufacturer. He was cobbling together stuff in his lab no one would be able to support. I also have seen companies put in new systems only to have the industry drop the standard leaving them stranded.

I would advise my clients to not go high tech New wave but to buy popular systems that had a good reputation and a large installed base. My advice was seldom if ever followed.

Even where high tech stuff is manufactured it is done in relatively small enclaves where there is a concentration of the needed expertise. But many things are much worse, an iPhone comes from something life 50 countries, each with a specific expertise which may not exist anywhere else. When a earthquake hit Taiwan some years ago it whipped out 90% of solid state hard drive manufacturing for a couple of years because almost all plants on earth that did it were in a very small radius hit by the quake.

These are my experiences that make me think that as we reduce population it’s possible hat we will loose these concentrations of expertise. They will sink out and then some piece of technology will be gone. Like the finger reader on an iPhone, which itself comes from some few countries, anyone that fails will stop iphone production.

I see very little awareness to this vulnerability. PERHAPS our military is sensitive to it, I don’t know. But if anyone is looking to keep a fatherland manufacturing design/build base alive it should be them. I dread the thought that our planes and ships are run on Chinese microprocessors and code.

Sorry for being so verbose and scattered.

[onlooker]

Newf, not to speak for Tanada and what I am sure will be an erudite post but he will probably reply that you are selling us humans and our ability to innovate ,adapt and be resilient short. I do believe that Kaiser has informed that digital info/media can be preserved now for a long time.

I also believe that in many places we can reinvent society in accord with the circumstances. My big concern is our continued impact on the Environment and its status going forward. Though Ibon with his expertise has assured us that Nature is alot more resilient than we realize. Well, I guess that should be understood that it presumes reasonable population levels which is not currently the case in some places

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'T')anada,
To go back a few posts I want to tell you my opinion on how far we will fall se will fall technologically. Our opinions differ, and this is not to convience you otherwise but to explain how I’ve come to be less sanguine.

In my career I did a lot of work on the remnants of the Pennsylvania RR system. At one time, early 1900’s the PRR was quite advanced and had lots of capital. The things they did with the relatively simple technologies were quite amazing. So on the one hand that’s good, all our much ballyhooed advancement and capital spending has not much improved how the trains run on time. So we can achieve 90% of the beneifit with much simpler methods. Clearly that can not be said for other industries.

The USA simply does not produce or understand much of our high tech. Most communications engineers have no idea of how a simple rotary dial telephone system works. I know, I’ve had to explain it to them. They may be brilliant in fiber optic transmission but the s no clue that they are ignorant of 95% of what is required to make the overall system work. We have an extremely high level of specialization.

I recall instances of calling a factory, when we had such things, to get assistance and being told “Oh, the guy that designed that is out today, no one else understands it.” Or a gentleman working to design a digital communications system where the routers software was specific to that company and that model of router. He was working on it for months. When I asked who was going to support this he said “Guys like me.” The problem was the client had no guys like him, nor did the manufacturer. He was cobbling together stuff in his lab no one would be able to support. I also have seen companies put in new systems only to have the industry drop the standard leaving them stranded.

I would advise my clients to not go high tech New wave but to buy popular systems that had a good reputation and a large installed base. My advice was seldom if ever followed.

Even where high tech stuff is manufactured it is done in relatively small enclaves where there is a concentration of the needed expertise. But many things are much worse, an iPhone comes from something life 50 countries, each with a specific expertise which may not exist anywhere else. When a earthquake hit Taiwan some years ago it whipped out 90% of solid state hard drive manufacturing for a couple of years because almost all plants on earth that did it were in a very small radius hit by the quake.

These are my experiences that make me think that as we reduce population it’s possible hat we will loose these concentrations of expertise. They will sink out and then some piece of technology will be gone. Like the finger reader on an iPhone, which itself comes from some few countries, anyone that fails will stop iphone production.

I see very little awareness to this vulnerability. PERHAPS our military is sensitive to it, I don’t know. But if anyone is looking to keep a fatherland manufacturing design/build base alive it should be them. I dread the thought that our planes and ships are run on Chinese microprocessors and code.

Sorry for being so verbose and scattered.

[KaiserJeep]

There are a whole set of problems with "The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization" meme which has been the staple of the Doomer mindset for decades.

I chose the wording of the above sentance deliberately. The obvious historical parallel and the one everybody can easily relate to is that famous 6-volume set of books by the 18th Century English Historian Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

There simply are very few parallels to the prior situation and today. For one thing, there is the problem of scale. The Roman Empire at it's Zenith had the population of a single modern city. Another problem is complexity, as modern civilization is highly technological, and an amalgum of many many cultures and religions and traditions.

The bottom line for me is that I reject the very concept of a decline and fall. In fact I believe the extreme opposite - no capabilities that exist today will ever be lost under any circumstances, as we regress to lower levels of energy consumption and - inevitably - as our population falls due to less available food, each new generation will enjoy a higher level of technology and the only constant will be change.

I have spoken before about my beliefs that digital technology is a great booster of efficiency. The persistence of the ICE vehicles using compter engine management is in fact a prime example. Next year's 2019 model F-150 pickup truck, for example will probably meet or exceed the Obama-imposed 32mpg standard, even though it has been rolled back. It will do so in air-conditioned comfort with an 8-speed automatic transmission and power everything, plus a rust free aluminum body.

The productivity possible with digital computers is near universal, and the network is reaching into the jungles and deserts of all continents from the poles to the equator. You can today exchange E-mails with reseachers in Antarctica, camel-riding Tauregs in the Sahara, your sons in a submerged submarine, or even the occupants of the International Space Station. The conveniences and efficiencies of this digital world wide network will never be relinquished by anyone, once acquired.

YES, there are relatively few who can re-create digital devices using just silicon, energy, and traces of other elements to infuse silicon semiconductor microdevices. I studied such tech as an undergraduate, it was complex and all too much like Chemistry even in the 1970's, and it isn't any simpler today. Yet I have frequently used CAD software which resulted in custom ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) being created to implement my computer designs. We have a system for this and for all other elements of implementing technology, and only a handful in the whole world need to understand the details, and only of their own small piece of the puzzle. High Tech needs relatively few people and only a small amount of resources, but the productivity it enables everywhere means that it will always be present, and it will never regress. Indeed, with digital bit-perfect and permanent storage, the movies and sound recordings made by Thomas Edison, and the even earlier pre-Civil-War photographs, will never perish once digitized.

We literally are a new hybrid species of human and networked digital devices. My Grandkids will never know any other world. My kid only got a brief glimpse of the non-digital world, and we ourselves are the last generation to have grown to maturity on a non-networked planet.

We are entirely obsolete and the new hybrid species has replaced us in the World. Nor do we have the capability to understand the present implications of technology, much less predict the future.

[Newfie]

Tanada,

And I agree with pretty much your entire post.

Where we MAY be talking past one another is that I’m saying (crudely put) our tech cutting edge won’t survive a collapse. I think you are saying tech won’t cause collapse.

Yes? No?

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'T')anada,

And I agree with pretty much your entire post.

Where we MAY be talking past one another is that I’m saying (crudely put) our tech cutting edge won’t survive a collapse. I think you are saying tech won’t cause collapse.

Yes? No?

[KaiserJeep]

Tanada, I hope very much that you are correct about that 3 billion humans figure. I like it better than the 1 billion figure that I picked just because that was the figure around 1800 when the whole overpoupulation problem started.

Coal is the wild card. I hate the stuff, it's the dirtiest and most dangerous form of FF. But once cheap oil is gone, there's not much else left. I think the key to success or failure lies in whether or not we can renew the infrastructure of our entire civilization to be more energy efficient.

I'd love to say nuclear, but there is simply too much irrational hysteria about nuclear energy.

Because that was the other thing about that 1 Billion figure. That was a low enough figure not to require any further burning of FF's, because it was low enough to make it on renewables alone. But with 3 billion humans, I speculate that you need to burn some coal as well.

[Newfie]

Good points by both. It also demonstrates how complex the whole system is, how many variables there are. LTG did not model the downward slope and stated that the best their model could do was find the inflection points because after that everything became so chaotic that the model lost credibility. I suspect that is true.

Tanada, one thing I’ve not heard you address is soil depletion.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('KaiserJeep', '
')
I'd love to say nuclear, but there is simply too much irrational hysteria about nuclear energy.

.