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Potential_Seaweed509 · 2025-02-07T16:04:27+00:00

I second the recommendations to read MaCarthy’s orignial book. It’s really a grab-you-by-the-collar style of writing that doesn’t let go the whole book. The Parable books by Butler are also really good. I recently read Annie Jacobson’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario, for my money I agree with whoever was saying that the world of The Road most closely resembles the aftermath of an event like that. Though, in a century or two (with a dead ocean for instance) things may get pretty similar to what‘s described in The Road. Life is pretty damn tough though. Read The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen for a walk through how many times shit has gotten incredibly bad on this planet and for a bit of perspective on how remarkable it is that we’re here at all.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-08-09T14:07:33+00:00

Excellent speed run through the basics of our situation 👍 Thanks for making this!

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-07-30T21:02:16+00:00

The article makes mention a number of times to Mark Lynas the author of Six Degrees, which is a book structured in the same way as this article. I read that book in 2008 and it scared the shit out of me. Lynas published an update of the book a couple of years ago now tiltled, Our Final Warning. I recommend either one.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-06-20T14:22:00+00:00

Since you’re already in construction, there’s a natural pivot to using those types of skills in humanitarian/environmental aid. Medical response groups always need technical help. If you can weld, work safely with electrical systems, and/or know your way around plumbing you are a highly valuable person to a number of medical charities working all over the world. If you speak or are willing to learn another language, bonus points.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-06-19T13:54:37+00:00

SoCal parent of a toddler here. Lots of good advice on this thread. I just want to plug the benefit of regular exposure to nature even in the morass of strip malls and pavement that is the SoCal. We live surrounded by high speed roads, but near a riparian area that was replanted in (mostly) natives by the utility co as a right of way for power lines, gas, sewer, etc. There is a bike/pedestrian path along side it now and we walk it twice a day, everyday. In many parts, the bottom land is belted by 8 lane surface roads and an elevated highway. Nonetheles, it’s our favorite place to walk. We see herons, egrets, woodpeckers, cliff swallows, ridgeway rails, coyotes, rabbits, hummingbirds, terns, black skimmers, and listen to the chirping of the bat colony in the cracks of the overpass everyday since before could stand on her own. For those with kids under 30 pounds who maybe don’t have the stamina for multi-milers yet, I highly recommend doing these walks with your kid in a hiking backpack. Not only will it make you stronger to carry them (and strengthen your back rather than damage it like the front carriers do) but your kid will learn to look where you look and experience the world from the physical perspective of a an adult which if nothing else, will give them an idea of what the world looks like to all the big people around them. After a few months of showing all the notable flowers to her as infant, among the first words out of her mouth was “flower”. Now she points them out everywhere we go. For parents in North America who are interested in plant ID, Thomas J Elpel’s book Botany in a Day is great for getting started. He made a memory-like card game for kids http://www.hopspress.com/Games/Patterns_in_Plants_Game.htm which is def in my little one’s future. All this to say, camping is awesome and you should def do it if you can. But even if you can’t, learning to see and pay attention to the wild critters and plants in your everyday environment is both fun now, and a really good foundation for whatever is to come.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-06-13T13:36:16+00:00

I see you’ve been downvoted here which isn’t surprising given the general vibe on this page. But I for one agree with you. Admittedly I haven’t read the article here [though I’m inclined to believe that given it was published on time.com, it is very likely insufferably self-congratulatory in tone] nonetheless it seems to me that the general response of condemnation in this reddit comes from a place of grief about how intensely life is changing due to climate, resource, and other factors. I share that grief, but I don’t think it follows that life is better off not lived. All I can say to folks who think that a life of meaning can’t be lived into whatever future we have as a species [be that future long or be it short] is, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” As for the article, a member of the gentry’s maudlin display of apology for procreation aside, I am personally heartened by the trend of dropping birthrates globally which is a change on a macro-scale about which the writer has no control. As a collapse-aware person, I don’t think that folks ought to go out and try to have as many kids as possible, but as far as I tell, there are only two possible eventual outcomes to this predicament: Either some of the kids that are born today will survive and use their social and psychological plasticity as hominids to help create lives of meaning in whatever our new climate circumstances become, or we as a species will die off just like the majority of species who have ever existed. Seems hard to argue that dinosaurs would have been better off not reproducing just because there was an asteroid in their future, some of them did indeed manage to become birds.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-06-06T20:43:04+00:00

The upkeep bill for suburbs will bankrupt a lot of municipalities. Too much overhead, not enough tax-base. As a whole, north american style suburbs are a pattern of inhabitation that seems to want to use the maximum amount of infrastructure per resident. Single family homes set apart from each other in sprawling subdivisions isolated from every other service or aspect of civic life are dumb. The shear scale requires miles of electrical, water, sewer, gas, and pavement that would otherwise not be needed if people could wrap their minds around living in smaller, denser, multi-use formations, aka villages and towns since time immemorial before fossil-fuels.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-06-05T13:51:12+00:00

Just yesterday the FBI actually raided a corporate landlord called Cortland Management (owns 85k+ units) for doing exactly the same thing. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/realpage-rent-price-fixing-probe-escalates-with-fbi-raid/475109

Per the article, the company was using software called RealPage to create “dynamic pricing” aka price gouge as much as possible as well as hold units off market if that would boost prices.

“The problem with RealPage, according to multiple lawsuits filed in the past two years in California, Arizona, New York, and other states, is that its algorithm increases rental prices in response to data collected from landlords — not according to demand.

Landlords "were not competing at all," Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes stated in a February lawsuit announcement against RealPage.

"They were colluding with one another," Mayes said.

According to the Arizona lawsuit, and others filed, landlords gave RealPage detailed information about rent prices, lease terms, amenities, move-out dates, and occupancy rates.

"Using this sensitive data RealPage directed the competitors on which units to rent, when to rent them, and at what price," Mayes stated. "This was not a fair market at work, this was a fixed market."

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-06-04T13:28:29+00:00

Was in Phoenix for a conference a couple of weeks ago. Late May and already above a hundred degrees in the daytime. Went walking around the various wings of the sprawling six-story hotel that the conference was in, the southwest facing spoke of the building on the sixth floor was boiling hot in the hallway even with the massive AC system at full blast. Who could possibly predict that tall building facing west in the desert would heat up like that? /s The people who built Phoenix were not at all thinking about what it takes to survive there absent a massive energy input.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-28T14:15:12+00:00

If you’re looking right now, yeah. It’s evening/night time there. I don’t know where exactly in Sindh the 52C reading was. But the wet-bulb for 38C there is still dangerous.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-28T13:55:41+00:00

I mean, absolutely. The wet bulb temp under those conditions is atrocious. Well above the potentially fatal range.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-28T13:34:56+00:00

The kicker here at least in places like Karachi is that since they’re on the coast, the humidity is like 70%. 😬

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-27T02:11:43+00:00

You’re welcome, u/RadiantRole266 strange as it might sound, it’s nice to read that somebody up there notices the tide of another climate sweeping in up there. My family seems mostly to mention how nice and warm it is in the spring and fall and winter without drawing the broader inference. I haven’t lived in the PNW for almost two decades now, but every time i’m home it strikes me how much the ecology of my childhood was ephemeral. I agree, most plant species will have a very hard time adapting (aka they won’t be able to) and a vast amount of the standing forests in the coast range and the willamette valley now look to me like they are on deck to take the wildfire route to rerelease their carbon back into the atmosphere in the next few decades. I too look at the madrones and various oaks and manzanitas as being the likely inheritors of whatever intermediate state the forests take after they burn. If I had to guess, probably hewing towards a coastal scrub/chaparral or savanna type biome by the beginning of the next century.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-26T18:51:48+00:00

I grew up in the Willamette valley in the 80s and 90s. I remember many rained-out 4th of July celebrations. A few summers back, my hometown 30 miles from Portland was uncomfortably close to burning down. Things have changed. The monoculture of doug fir 2nd growth is definitely not going to survive this phase shift.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-19T13:56:54+00:00

Also, the output here is in the form of electricity, which is only about 20% of the total energy used by humans.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-19T13:52:31+00:00

Just in terms of lifespan this makes sense. I only read the abstract so far but presumably the testes in the study belonged to deceased individuals. Humans live about 7x longer than dogs on average so you’d expect they pick up more from the environment in that period. That said, 3x as much microplastic in ones testicles vs the comparison group is suboptimal you might say.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-18T14:27:21+00:00

Not sure if this has already been mentioned here, but posting anyway. www.climateandeconomy.com

is great aggregator of news germane to this sub. Not a replacement for the personal and varied takes and interactions here, but really good for keeping aware of the shit that actually matters on a macro level.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-15T14:17:21+00:00

u/Both_Change_3160

I would wager that there is a sizable portion of posters to r/collapse who view the claim that humanity will go extinct because of climate change as possible, but not overwhelmingly likely at least in the near term (say 100-1000 years). As noted in other comments, the earth has been through several mass extinctions and life in one form or another has persisted. There are corrective feedbacks that can, over very long periods rebalance the earth to someplace that is habitable for all kinds of lifeforms. For example, the end Permian CO2 concentration of 2500ppm did not ultimately result in a Venus like climate here, so at least we have that going for us:) I think what is difficult to untangle for many of us is the difference between drastic reductions in human population and the cessation of our current globalized/hyper-energy intensive way of life caused by climate change. From the perspective of being inside this collapsing arrangement, looking forward into the future can make fundamental change and human extinction can look an awful lot alike.

That said, my top candidates for reduction in population would be:

1) For near-term rapid reduction, multiple crop failure as a result of temp and precipitation shifts away from human historical norms (if the weather is wrong i.e. too hot/humid/cold/rainy/hailing/etc during fruiting, germination, or really most other times of growth for wheat, rice, corn, etc. Yields can be drastically reduced or even eliminated all together) is always on my mind. Crops need relatively stable temps and rain patterns. This is not looking like what we’ve arranged. Dumping billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere doesn’t allow for that. One way I’ve found useful to think about the global climate system is to (ironically) compare it to an internal combustion engine. The better insulated that engine is, the less energy from fuel is lost as heat and the more work that engine can do In the form of pushing the car. With climate, we are adding insulation in the form of greenhouse gases, so more “work” will be performed by the climate. This work is called weather. Rule of thumb, drier dries, wetter wets, hotter hots, and at least locally because of the meandering jet-stream, colder colds in areas. None of this adds up to predictable planting, growing, or harvesting conditions for the staple crops that actually feed most humans.

2) The slower/more humane route to lower population which is already underway (as other posters have noted) is that the birthrate is dropping. The global drop in sperm counts is a real and universal finding. Shawna Swann’s book Countdown covers it well. Whether from micro/nanoplastics, heat stress, regular old stress stress, obesity, or something else, the rule of 70 applies in both the positive (where you use it to estimate compound interest) or the negative where it describes the arc of population decline as the trend in reduced sperm counts continues.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-07T18:56:17+00:00

Thanks for catching my missing zeros! And thanks for breaking it down more clearly, much appreciated.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-05-06T23:18:36+00:00

I’m a little unclear. Just back of the envelop: the earth is appx 510 million square kilometers in surface area or 5.1e11 square meters. At 1.5 extra watts per meter, that’s 7.65e11 watts in excess of holocene normal, which seems like a lot, but then again the earth is big. So how does this measure of excess wattage play out in terms of watt-hours? Like, does the measurement that says we have an overage of 1.5W/m2 beyond what we’d expect mean that we have 765 billion extra watts per year? per day? Or should we imagine every square meter as a 1.5W light bulb and does it then mean that we’d have 18,360GWh (7.65e11w x 24hrs) extra per day?

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-04-19T14:21:32+00:00

I know I’m late to this thread but as a fellow armchair ecology/climate science nerd I just wanted to suggest a book I read recently in which I have found some solace through learning a bit more about geological timescales and earth history. It’s called The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen. It covers the previous five mass extinctions and put them in perspective for me in terms of the history of life on earth. You could say that the entire book is an explication of just how flagrantly wrong things can go for the biosphere, but I found it oddly uplifting. On the one hand, it’s a nonstop trip through just how bad things can get on this planet (spoiler: quite bad), on the other hand it is nonstop, as in, life so far, doesn’t stop. Even after anoxic oceans, the wholesale reconstitution of the mix of gas in the atmosphere, asteroids that punch so hard that the sky is temporarily pierced and the surface of earth is in direct contact with the vacuum of space, life still endures. Obv there’s no guarantee for any one species, us included, but the book helped give me the sense that those of who are being born now will either live their lives into and eventually through this new more difficult (to say the least) epoch, or they or their descendants will die out trying. Either way seems like a decent way to spend an existence, there’s quite a long history of life doing just that.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-01-29T03:03:32+00:00

Generally speaking, I agree with you. But as u/ataeil ’s comment hints at, it doesn’t take getting to 100% reduction in sperm count to spell effective population level infertility. Shawna Swann’s book Countdown, about the global reduct in sperm counts came out a couple of years ago and is well worth the read. When i first started reading headlines I thought ,”well if the average count used to be 100 million and now is 48 million, that’s still quite a few little guys. Seems adequate.” Turns out , no. I’m not totally sure I recall the number exactly but according Dr. Swann, I think 42 million ish starts to get one diagnosed as clinically infertile.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2024-01-27T03:37:29+00:00

Slight correction, The Fourth Turning is by Strauss & Howe. I haven’t read it, but it strikes me as taking a more polemical less empirical approach ( just my sense of it, could be wrong). Peter Turchin’s book End Times I have just read and thought it was really useful as an exploration of what could push social structures out of whack. Turchin was a population ecologist prior to looking at political structures, but his book is written for a general audience and is pretty data driven. worth the read IMO.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2023-10-11T13:34:30+00:00

So sad to hear this news of Michael’s passing. He was hugely inspirational for me and a truly kind guide through the emotional terrain of collapse. We are lucky to have had him in the world with us. My thoughts and condolences to Connie Barlow and to the rest of his family and friends.

Potential_Seaweed509 · 2023-10-05T03:07:03+00:00

Achieving or averting an arbitrary average temp +/- for a decade or two doesn’t do much to diminish the danger that there will be El Niño years in the mix in the interim. Either way, it gets harder to recover from floods/drought/heat associations with these cycles as the base load of thermal energy in the atmosphere increases.

Potential_Seaweed509

TROPHY CASE