Preparing for An Unfriendly Future (Climate Change, Authoritarianism, etc)

[Ran]

20 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

And isnt the poverty line kinda sus? Like if you earn 2 dollars a day or something you are considered not poor.

It's not suspect, it's just wildly misunderstood. From the World Bank:

Quote

We start with the poverty line defined by each country, which usually reflects the amount below which a person’s minimum nutritional, clothing, and shelter needs cannot be met in that country. Not surprisingly, richer countries tend to have higher poverty lines, while poorer countries have lower poverty lines.

However, when we want to identify how many people in the world live in extreme poverty across countries, we cannot simply add up the national poverty rates of each country. This would be the equivalent of using a different yardstick in each country to identify who is poor. That’s why we need a poverty line that measures poverty in all countries by the same standard. 

In 1990, a group of independent researchers and the World Bank examined national poverty lines from some of the poorest countries in the world and converted those lines into a common currency by using purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates. The PPP exchange rates are constructed to ensure that the same quantity of goods and services are priced equivalently across countries. Once converted into a common currency, they found that in six of these very poor countries around the 1980s the value of the national poverty line was about $1 per day per person (in 1985 prices). This formed the basis for the first dollar-a-day international poverty line.

The IPL of $1.90, which is going to be used until fall 2022, was derived as the mean of the national poverty lines of 15 poor countries in the 1990s, expressed in 2011 PPPs. The selection of these 15 poor countries was based on limited data at the time. With the gathering and analysis of new data from other low-income countries, we have expanded the reference group. The IPL is now derived as the median of the national poverty lines of 28 of the world’s poorest countries, expressed in 2017 PPPs. For more details about the methodology used in deriving and updating the IPL, see this blog and working paper. For how the IPL has been updated in the past, see Ferreira et al. (2016) and Ravallion et al. (2009).

It's a global metric meant for global goals, such as those that the IPCC is talking about when it accesses climate change. Country-specific goals should use country-specific metrics. The World Bank's goal is to reduce extreme poverty to 3% or less of the world's population by 2030. The number is about 9% now, and was 44% in 1981. 

[Conflicting Thought]

26 minutes ago, Ran said:

It's not suspect, it's just wildly misunderstood. From the World Bank:

It's a global metric meant for global goals, such as those that the IPCC is talking about when it accesses climate change. Country-specific goals should use country-specific metrics. The World Bank's goal is to reduce extreme poverty to 3% or less of the world's population by 2030. The number is about 9% now, and was 44% in 1981. 

i know its a global metric, im questioning its validity. i mean the world bank and the poverty line  metric are not without criticism, its not like an objetctive fact, its not even clear if it is the best method of calculating world poverty. 

what do you make of this for example https://qz.com/africa/1428639/world-banks-measure-of-poverty-is-flawed/ 

"...World Bank poverty estimates have come in for a lot of criticism. For example, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, has pointed out that there’s often a large gap between national poverty lines and the international poverty line stipulated by the bank."

"For example, more than 55% of South Africa’s population lives below the country’s upper poverty line, of 1,138 South African rand ($80) a month. But, according to the World Bank, only 18.85% of the South African population lives in poverty. This suggests that the international poverty lined touted by the World Bank systematically underestimates the extent of global poverty. This point is partially acknowledged in this year’s report. Accordingly, the World Bank proposes new and higher poverty lines—$3.20 and $5.50 a day, respectively. According to the report, almost half the world’s population lives below the $5.50 a day poverty line. However, we need to go further than this—indeed, the World Bank’s widely touted story of historically low poverty levels must be rejected."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337335330_A_critique_of_the_Income_Poverty_Line_and_Global_Multidimensional_Poverty_Index 

still reading this one, but i put it as an example of crtiticism.

[Ran]

The poverty line is about extreme poverty. The critique that those living below the upper poverty line in South Africa are more numerous than those living beneath the extreme poverty line seems factually correct but seems to entirely misunderstand the difference between the things being measured. It doesn't seem like a good-faith criticism, IMO.

The World Bank certainly acknowledges that this sort of metric is very abstract, but that it has led to concrete action and concrete advances is true. As the article notes, the World Bank has also tracked two other figures -- poverty levels beneath $3.20 a day for lower middle income nations and poverty levels beneath $5.50 a day for upper middle income nations -- and per their report (PDF), since 1990 those living below $3.20 a day went from 55.5% of the population of the world to 24.1% in 2017, and for $5.50 a day that figure went from 67.3%  to 43.6% in that same frame.

 

[SeanF]

12 hours ago, Ran said:

It's not suspect, it's just wildly misunderstood. From the World Bank:

It's a global metric meant for global goals, such as those that the IPCC is talking about when it accesses climate change. Country-specific goals should use country-specific metrics. The World Bank's goal is to reduce extreme poverty to 3% or less of the world's population by 2030. The number is about 9% now, and was 44% in 1981. 

It’s undeniable that extreme poverty - while not eliminated - has become far less common worldwide, in my lifetime.  GDP per head has limitations as a measure of well-being, but its rise does mean fewer deaths from famine, or disease, and rising literacy.

[DMC]

Just saw this article on Vox.  Thought it belonged here - “How do you go through the world and not be bitter and angry?”  Stoicism, explained - 

Quote

Stoicism is having a bit of a moment.

Wherever you look — books, podcasts, newsletters, YouTube videos — you’ll find plenty of content about how the Stoics can help us live better lives today. [...]

To me, the proof of the philosophy and its universality is that back to back, its two most influential thinkers are someone of extreme privilege and someone of extreme powerlessness. I think it works for both in that the central tenet of the philosophy is: Focus on what you control, focus on the response to the things that are outside of your control. Do the best you can in the world within which you exist.

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

4 hours ago, SeanF said:

It’s undeniable that extreme poverty - while not eliminated - has become far less common worldwide, in my lifetime.  GDP per head has limitations as a measure of well-being, but its rise does mean fewer deaths from famine, or disease, and rising literacy.

I've been petitioning the World Bank to bring more awareness to death by infected paper cut, but who knows if they're listening or not.  

[Maithanet]

Ran, I appreciate your points, and think that your argument that the future isn't as bad as it can appear is reasonable. 

However, what I have felt for 20+ years on climate change is not that climate change will kill (or massively set back) humanity.  Instead, my big fear has been that as climate change makes resources scarce, making it harder to maintain/improve the standard of living that humanity will make things worse.  What will happen when tens of millions of Bangladeshi homes are underwater, and those people flee into India or China?  Nothing good.  Or subsistence farming collapses across much of the developing world?  And the list of climate challenges leading to political instability goes on and on (extreme heat, water wars, biodiversity loss, etc).

Everywhere you look you can see some impact of climate change making stability and predictability harder.  You are right that unpredictable does not equal terrible, but it is just very hard to be optimistic about the future when we know that the challenges are growing geometrically. 

[Kalbear]

To echo what @Maithanet says above we have a great example of this in Ukraine. A war causes countries in Europe to start doing more coal-fired energy to offset the loss of natural gas. A war in europe causes the US to accelerate oil drilling projects. We are getting or about to get more famines and more food issues because of the lack of exports of wheat from Ukraine. And we are in summer now - its gonna be a lot worse come winter. 

And that's with a relatively "standard" geopolitical cause. What starts happening when countries under actual disaster pressure start pushing? 

 

[Heartofice]

6 minutes ago, KalVsWade said:

To echo what @Maithanet says above we have a great example of this in Ukraine. A war causes countries in Europe to start doing more coal-fired energy to offset the loss of natural gas. A war in europe causes the US to accelerate oil drilling projects. 

 

In the short term yes, in the longer term it's created a greater impetus to move away from fossil fuels due to the realisation that supply of that fuel could be taken away at any moment.

[Conflicting Thought]

i think the world bank has biases tho, they have an interest in showing how capitalism is good and working for the benefit of the humanity becouse they export neoliberal policies trough their loans

[Ran]

29 minutes ago, Conflicting Thought said:

i think the world bank has biases tho, they have an interest in showing how capitalism is good and working for the benefit of the humanity becouse they export neoliberal policies trough their loans

Please define neoliberalism in your own words, so I have an understanding of what you actually mean by it.

[felice]

23 hours ago, KalVsWade said:

Also, I will note that it is measuring prosperity largely in one way only - gdp growth. It's fair to say that it's hard to measure it other ways, but general production levels do not say, for instance, how many people are employed or have families or other life values.

And it doesn't care what is being produced. If the country is going flat out producing flood barriers, emergency housing, and military equipment for crowd control, GDP goes up, but I wouldn't say that makes it more prosperous than it was before rising sea levels turned a significant fraction of the population into refugees.

[Luzifer's right hand]

11 hours ago, felice said:

And it doesn't care what is being produced. If the country is going flat out producing flood barriers, emergency housing, and military equipment for crowd control, GDP goes up, but I wouldn't say that makes it more prosperous than it was before rising sea levels turned a significant fraction of the population into refugees.

The financial sector is also part of the equation IIRC.

[Zorral]

Supply chains --

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-05/us-factory-boom-heats-up-as-ceos-yank-production-out-of-china?

Quote

 

.... The construction of new manufacturing facilities in the US has soared 116% over the past year, dwarfing the 10% gain on all building projects combined, according to Dodge Construction Network.

There are massive chip factories going up in Phoenix. Intel is building two just outside the city. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is constructing one in it.

And aluminum and steel plants that are being erected across the south, including in Bay Minette, Alabama (Novelis); Osceola, Arkansas (US Steel); in Brandenburg, Kentucky (Nucor).

Read More: ‘The Big Short’ Investor Sees Retrenchment of Globalization

Near Buffalo, New York, all this new semiconductor and steel output is fueling orders for air compressors that will be cranked out at an Ingersoll Rand plant that had been shuttered for years.

Scores of smaller companies are making similar moves, according to Richard Branch, the chief economist at Dodge. Not all are examples of reshoring. Some are designed to expand capacity.

But they all point to the same thing — a major re-assessment of supply chains in the wake of port bottlenecks, parts shortages and skyrocketing shipping costs that have wreaked havoc on corporate budgets in the US and across the globe. ....

 

 

[James Arryn]

Forgetting the hard science stuff, there are two active mindsets at play here, both of which have been true of most people at most times.m

 

1) I am the only me there’s ever been, therefore I will be witness to The Big Events. 
 

2) We have reached the peak of being and things will pretty much always be like now.

 

Neither of these are terribly rational, yet both have existed forever in people. The first generation of Xtians were a literal death/apocalypse cult who pretty universally believed Jesus was returning in their lifetimes, for example. So have pretty much every generation of Xtians since, of the ones who believe in Apocalypse. At the same time, people living in what we used to call the Dark Ages thought they were living at the zenith of human development. Before you say ‘no, wait, they knew about Rome’ I’d say don’t presume their rubric prioritized technology the way we do. They prioritized spirituality and thought the rise of the church as the dominant political force was where it’s at. Etc.

 

But for all the eye rolling at the environmental ‘panic’, the people saying basically ‘yeah, we have our share of problems but real change is not coming’ are no more grounded in realism, possibly less. Aside from inertia, there is literally nothing in history to suggest that collapse isn’t inevitable. Except, yeah, like everyone else who has ever lived, we think we’re the place where humanity was destined to settle. I mean, not really, everyone knows that fads and fashions change, but not real, deep down societal collapse change. Except, it always does.
 

If you think we have cause to think things will always be ~ thus, especially with an American tech/cultural dominant globe playing out ~ as the status quo indefinitely because what would change, imagine a Roman in the 3rd century. They haven’t been the dominant culture for a piddling 30-80 years, they looked back on centuries that looked back on centuries. Move east to Constantinople in the, say, 8th century and those centuries have great great great great great grandparents. So how/why would it ever not be thus? How secure in the real, down-to-earth-damn-the-alarmists realtalk would the ‘calm down, no end is nigh’ sighing counter-narrative have been grounded? 
 

 But, ultimately, wrong. Ozymandius is the model for any and all times. There will come a time, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves entirely, when the world will discuss our way of life and systems and ideologies and religions as anthropology and history and mythology. And we have no more or less assurance that we aren’t on the precipice of a major decline or fall than any Egyptian or Assyrian or Mongol or Inca or Minoan or w/e of yore. 
 

edit: another assumption that’s prevalent is that we enjoy ourselves more than in history. I mean, I suppose it depends on what you enjoy, but unless the answer is work, then…no. We think our 40-60 hour work week is a sign of progress, but that’s only contrasted against the absolute zenith of sisyphusian existence, ie the early onset of the Industrial Age, ie ~ Victorian into Edwardian. But contrasted with literally any time in history before that and we spend a lot more of our life working and a lot less spending time with our family or just plain relaxing than at any time in history. In fact modern consumer culture is based on a kind of three trick Monty mentality, where our lives are devoted to working to afford Things which we don’t even have the time to enjoy because we need to work so much to afford things which we don’t…etc. Especially true in America and increasingly true for countries which increasingly follow the American model. But take a ore-industrial farmer.
 

Yes, he had very long work days, back breaking dawn to dusk/ish ones…for a few brief periods of the year. But as the day was dictated by the sun and the seasons, a lot more of his/her day than ours was spent communing by candlelight or at festivals (which were so common to many cultures as to approach a majority) or just sleeping. If the sun isn’t up when you go to work or come home from work, you are already working beyond the constraints of a most pre-industrial peoples.
 

Now add something like…winter. Or high summer. Aside from maintenance and livestock care, not much to do on the farm outside of planting and harvest seasons. Lots of downtime with the family. Yes, those lives were shorter than ours, on average, and diseases and childbirth and the like loomed much larger, but can we really say they enjoyed their lives less while they had them? Again, depends on how much you enjoy your job.  

[Werthead]

The heads of MI5 and the FBI held a joint meeting in London today and sent a series of very strong warnings that China is the largest geopolitical challenge that will have to be dealt with in the future, with them having a strong confidence that China will attempt to resolve the Taiwan situation in a way that will trigger the world's biggest crisis in terms of business and supply chains alone.

They wanted people not to take their eye off the ball on China whilst Russia is making more noise.

[Rippounet]

On 7/4/2022 at 8:54 PM, Ran said:

In fact, all the SSPs do in fact forsee a more prosperous future world, as also noted also in Kal's Carbon Brief article.

Have you actually read the article you linked to?
I can get the article through my university, but it doesn't seem to be available via sci-hub, which suggests you may have linked the paper without reading it.
I'm curious to know how you understand this key passage:

Quote

This section presents the main results from the SSP projections, analysing key indicators and growth drivers at global level and for selected regions. These projections provide a basis for quantitative analysis of environmental impacts associated with economic activity, but by themselves ignore the feedbacks from such environmental impacts to the economy.

Tell me if I have trouble reading English here, because it sure looks as if the SSPs are based on various economic projections in order to predict emissions, but the SSPs do not attempt to assess what the damage to the economy and socio-economic conditions will be, perhaps for the very obvious reason that disastrous climactic effect will in fact lower emissions by fucking killing people.

On 7/4/2022 at 8:54 PM, Ran said:

So long as we all understand that the best science we have does not suggest doomsday for humanity or the planet, we're on the same page.

You mean the science that comes from the IPCC, NASA, the CIA, and dozens of universities? That all say the same thing, that things will be terrible between the tropics by 2050, threatening the lives of more than 3 billion people?

Have you, for example, seen this map published by NASA in March, and do you understand what it means?

Edit: ah ok, the whole thing seems to be two years old, but NASA brought attention to it last March...
https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3151/too-hot-to-handle-how-climate-change-may-make-some-places-too-hot-to-live/

On 7/4/2022 at 8:54 PM, Ran said:

And the scientist you suppose is a fraud is one of the leading architects of the very same SSPs used by the IPCC, and has been a lead author on several of its panels...

He could be Greta Thunberg herself, it doesn't change the fact that in that interview he was full of shit and mislead everyone who read it.

On 7/4/2022 at 9:27 PM, Ran said:

that number is now looking like maybe 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial averages in 2040.

No, that is absolutely not what the forecasts say. At the COP 26, Alok Sharma was fighting tears because it is now widely understood that we have already failed to avoid +1,5°C. To be more accurate, in order to limit global warming to +1,5°C, we'd have to cut emissions by more than 40% (that's from the IPCC) yesterday, which is obviously not happening. Another way to put it is that we need to reduce emissions 10 times faster than we currently are (that's from Stanford researchers). In fact, we've been so bad at reducing emissions that it is now very possible that we reach +1,5°C in the next five years (that's from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)).

On 7/4/2022 at 9:27 PM, Ran said:

Just as the forecasts can under-estimate things, they can over-estimate things.

Again, no. There was some uncertainty, but the more we know the more we can tell that we're much closer to the "worst-case" scenario, that what little measures that have been implemented so far have had little to no impact, and that global warming is in fact happening fast.

On 7/4/2022 at 9:27 PM, Ran said:

If you are wedded to doom and gloom, we're psychologically not going to be able to meet halfway or change one another's minds.

There is no "meeting halfway" on the science. There are those who understand what the reports and articles say, and those you spread bullshit and lies.

Kal has also been quicker than me to point out that you are strawmanning. We're not discussing the end of the world but a devastating disaster affecting billions of people that the scientists are pretty much unanimously predicting within three decades. It is incredibly callous to try to deny what is going to happen.

 

[Rippounet]

On 7/6/2022 at 4:01 PM, James Arryn said:

Forgetting the hard science stuff, there are two active mindsets at play here, both of which have been true of most people at most times.

1) I am the only me there’s ever been, therefore I will be witness to The Big Events.

2) We have reached the peak of being and things will pretty much always be like now.

That's a false dichotomy, but a nice piece of writing nonetheless.

The hole I'd poke here is the definition of "The Big Events." Once you start studying history, you see these all over the place. As a random factoid, a colleague of mine recently explained to me how momentous the 1214 battle of Bouvines was (I had no idea).
Point is, if a Big Event is a major evolution in world history, then Big Events happen very regularly because world history is constantly evolving... It really depends what definition you want to use (are you looking more at politics, economics, religion, social events, sports... etc).
However, even using a pretty "restrictive" definition, I think we are in fact about to be witnesses to some truly momentous events, as the world descends into a "dark age" of unimaginable chaos and death.
It's funny how Seldon's psychohistory comes to mind: just like in Asimov's Foundation, the decline itself is inevitable, but if we truly accepted what's coming, we could considerably shorten the length of the dark age.

[HoodedCrow]

Well, there was a huge climate change, so that entire species of dinosaurs became extinct, birds survived, and mammals survived in a tree rat sort or form. But, hey, the Mormons bought high ground in Florida…thinking ahead.

[Rippounet]

I assume everyone is aware that Europe is facing a particularly intense heatwave (some articles say it's the worst in 200 years), hitting hard Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, France, and (soon) the UK.

The bad news is that recent events (the spring drought and the June heatwave) and recent studies are showing that crops are now badly threatened (at least in Spain, Italy, and France). The good news is that things are being said that weren't just a few years ago (in France, a heatwave was linked to global warming in 2018 only). There's a growing acceptance of "sobriety" (especially in the energy sector - for obvious reasons), and adaptation (like, planting mil and sorgho rather than wheat and corn). Some falsely reasonable positions (like Macron saying we can't live like the Amish) are now openly mocked on national TV. Some experts have become celebrities in just a few weeks (hydrologist Emma Haziza here: she's been working on these issues for around 15 years, but had her first TED talk last May)
We're still a long way from seeing any political measures, but with awareness exploding, I expect actual changes to finally start happening.