> For the record, I've been what could accurately be called a climate change alarmist for over three decades now.
It must be tiring, eh? I imagine it's a microcosm of the experience of a Jehovah's Witness; you continually have some new threshold of irreparable doom, which you keep having to punt off 5-10 years, even though your sense of certainty that everything is doomed is never alleviated.
Somehow too, despite no significant warming or sea level rise over that time, you've moved up your level of expectation that we are doomed - you're doubling down on the hypothesis, huffing doom headlines like gasoline out of a bag. Can't be good for your mental health or your long term legacy planning.
> A primary 'doomer movement' in the 1970s when I was growing up was population. Even among the most forward thinking, optimistic people of the time, few if any could imagine our planet being able to feed 8 billion people.
Turns out that this was a double edged sword; massive amounts of propaganda in response to the population problem resulted in responsible people in the West using birth control and having fewer children, while the irresponsible here and the backward elsewhere continued their existing breeding strategy unabated. The result, of course, is that Africa is going to have several billion people by 2100 depending on the projection you prefer, without doing anything to increase its own capacity to feed its people without charity from the West. As our own birth rates plummet, we're forced to resort to mass immmigration to shore up the labour force, resulting in turn in the watering down and decay of our culture and any institutions that are fundamentally Western in nature.
Not sure that worked out the way anyone wanted, really.
> Yes, accept that there's a strong probability that human civilization will collapse in the lifetime of Millennials.
I honestly see no reason to believe this is true. If it does happen, it's not going to be because of climate change - that's still a long ways out on any reasonable projection. No, it's going to be because of classic civilizational decay, not unlike what happened to Rome, as we debase our currency, sacrifice our values, allow our cities to fall to organized crime and violence, and watch our institutions crumble under the force of 'woke' people who have never created any value in their short, pointless lives.
It must be tiring, eh? I imagine it's a microcosm of the experience of a Jehovah's Witness; you continually have some new threshold of irreparable doom, which you keep having to punt off 5-10 years, even though your sense of certainty that everything is doomed is never alleviated.
Somehow too, despite no significant warming or sea level rise over that time, you've moved up your level of expectation that we are doomed - you're doubling down on the hypothesis, huffing doom headlines like gasoline out of a bag. Can't be good for your mental health or your long term legacy planning.
> A primary 'doomer movement' in the 1970s when I was growing up was population. Even among the most forward thinking, optimistic people of the time, few if any could imagine our planet being able to feed 8 billion people.
Turns out that this was a double edged sword; massive amounts of propaganda in response to the population problem resulted in responsible people in the West using birth control and having fewer children, while the irresponsible here and the backward elsewhere continued their existing breeding strategy unabated. The result, of course, is that Africa is going to have several billion people by 2100 depending on the projection you prefer, without doing anything to increase its own capacity to feed its people without charity from the West. As our own birth rates plummet, we're forced to resort to mass immmigration to shore up the labour force, resulting in turn in the watering down and decay of our culture and any institutions that are fundamentally Western in nature.
Not sure that worked out the way anyone wanted, really.
> Yes, accept that there's a strong probability that human civilization will collapse in the lifetime of Millennials.
I honestly see no reason to believe this is true. If it does happen, it's not going to be because of climate change - that's still a long ways out on any reasonable projection. No, it's going to be because of classic civilizational decay, not unlike what happened to Rome, as we debase our currency, sacrifice our values, allow our cities to fall to organized crime and violence, and watch our institutions crumble under the force of 'woke' people who have never created any value in their short, pointless lives.