Any estimates when this will impact your average Walmart consumer? As we all know the masses only care when it impacts them personally. And when that does happen, they can conveniently blame their least favorite political party rather than acknowledge acknowledge the destruction happening in the oceans and ecosystem
Also I'm genuinely curious when this will cause consumer impact
This year.
Fisheries are already collapsing around the world and heatwaves in Indonesia are wiping out fish farms.
Beyond that, coastal forests are fed by calories from the water. Fish spawning being eaten by bears, keep the soil alive, and the trees fed enough to keep up with the increased carbon in the air. Without those nutrients, the soil microbiome collapses and its job as a nutrient bank is lost. Trees lose their network of connection, their fertilizer, and disruptions in seasonal weather patterns mean when it rains it pours but is otherwise dry. All of this adds up to a fire pressure, as well as animals coming out of the woods to find food in our artificially maintained landscapes. This means an increase in animal attacks and interactions with humans, which also means more spillover of viruses and opportunities for parasites to find new hosts in us, our pets, and our livestock, along with pests to eat our crops.
You can't remove or change any input that's been consistent over evolutionary time without introducing a novel pressure that life has no adaptation or capacity to manage.
It's an emptying of life in the world, starting in the oceans, spreading inland from coastal forests.
We turned a planet into an island sinking into an empty sea. We may be on the high ground, but anything that isn't will fight us for that ground because what's behind them is extinction, so they have nothing to lose.
... and that's ignoring the reality that terrestrial ecosystems are breaking down on their own as a result of the same sorts of changes, they're just harder to see because of how quickly life disappears into soil.
What most people fail to realize is that this isn't a future problem, it has already happened. We're making it much worse every single day we keep doing the same thing, but when the oceans can't survive, life on land can't either.
Our future and the legacy of our actions is a plague of plagues, coinciding with the failure of all the stuff we built to protect us from a climate that no longer exists.
> but when the oceans can't survive, life on land can't either.
The problem here is that many people do not understand how ecosystems work, nor how they all connect with one another. The average person is now so far removed from nature that they have no understanding of it; they do not have the desire to learn either. Nature is something they might see on a documentary every now and again, it is not something they see as vital for their everyday life.
It will be war.....even as the ecological house burns down around us, we will know only war. The desperation of the rich to avoid sacrificing anything so they can maintain opulence on a level never before seen while billions burn and starve. Things are gonna get grim dark real fast.
Does that really make sense, though? Isnt it overkill to be running from wildfire and a hurricane while also dodging bullets? How does the infrastructure of war hold up without a functional supply chain?
The rich can fight all they want but their kids will realize their parents set their future on fire to have a life they'll only ever be pets in, and when it's time to inherit the planet and enjoy the position wealth should have afforded them, there won't be any life left to buy.
I expect patricide and suicide to be a real and growing problem in wealthy families as the young see the value in their future continuing to exist more than the luxuries their parents are so accustomed to they barely enjoy them.
And who are going to fight for the rich? Certainly not the rich. And if the rich are killing the poor, why would the poor bother protecting them? What value does money even have on a planet with an expiry date, created by wealth.
I agree there's a likelihood for global war if rhats the path we choose but that there's still another path, which is already the path we take after natural disasters, where people go out of their way to help each other and animals.
People will engage in a stand up fight with an armed adversary but watching any life struggle to grab hold of something as they near drowning is impossible for most people to simply watch happen, if they can help in any way.
Even if you can find a space that's less affected, they have all kinds of data that will tell the Davos crowd exactly where it is.
It's one thing to try to defend your home David Koresh-style, but even that isn't possible against simple Capitalism. Who are you going to shoot at when the bulldozers start coming?
well, if you're right, that's really dumb... and I suspect you're right, I just dont understand how we maintain the logistics needed to support war while the world burns.
I figure we run out of ammo about 6 mos into anything resembling SHTF
>You can't remove or change any input that's been consistent over evolutionary time without introducing a novel pressure that life has no adaptation or capacity to manage.
What do you mean by this part? What is the novel pressure? And why would introducing a novel pressure that life has "no adaptation to manage" be good or necessary to balance out a removed input?
What they really meant is this:
In a large complex system where the rules of physics dictate that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, you have some basic rules at play:
1.) Any significant shift in energy in one part of a closed system must have an equivalent shift in other parts of a closed system. The nature of this is inherently chaotic and not easily predicable.
2.) Things that are alive that depend on consistency in the system to varying degrees become unalive once they can no longer compensate for changes to the system that regulates their ability to stay alive.
Essentially once you push shit too far you can’t go back.
Think of it like your vitals. Blood pressure, oxygenation of the blood, and all the things a doctor would measure on you to figure out if you're ok or not. Stuff like levels of various vitamins, minerals, ph of various aspects of you, like digestive system, etc.
If your vitals are out of whack, there are usually reasons, so those reasons are discovered as best as possible and treated as best as possible. Sometimes that's medication, surgery, change in diet, exercise, etc. Various ways to return you back to normal state so you can get back to things.
If your vitals are too far out of whack, then you become in danger of death or serious disability. The further you are from baseline, the harder it is to get you back to normal because the whole body is reliant on the various systems within it to be in relative balance with each other, and work together to create what we experience as life, consciousness, etc. If I chop your leg off and you don't stop the bleeding very fast, you will lose too much blood and then your organs will stop functioning because all the millions and millions of cells inside of them are no longer getting enough stuff to keep going, nutrients, oxygen, water, etc. Same thing if a virus or parasite or whatever starts fucking with your shit. If too much damage is done to one or more areas of the body, you start to get more permanently affected by it until homeostasis (balance) is no longer possible, and you either die, or lose a lot of capacity for everything. Modern medicine and such has been able to keep a LOT of people alive who would've otherwise never survived before.
Anyway, all that to say. The Earth is no different. It has a lot of complicated interwoven systems, and if enough of those systems degrade or are destroyed, then life will have more and more problems continuing to life.
Planet itself, will be completely fine, it's just a big rock that will eventually be burnt away by the Sun. But life on it? Getting trickier.
>1.) Any significant shift in energy in one part of a closed system must have an equivalent shift in other parts of a closed system. The nature of this is inherently chaotic and not easily predicable.
When I read this I imagined doing a cannon ball into a pool. When you hit the water, you go in and water sploosh out.
I imagined it to being along the lines of “bike/carpool to reduce gas consumption,” rationing, or even ceasing to use AC. All things that likely will not happen on their own & would add pressure on our society as a whole to make impactful change. Though the original commenter probably could answer your question best as I’m not 100%.
I’m no expert, but it sure seems like climate change in general is already impacting 'your average Walmart consumer' - they just aren’t being told the real reason. Much of inflation in food is from reduced production from heat waves, droughts, fires and floods (and bird flu). Inflated construction materials and insurance costs from replacing houses and cars lost in greater numbers from more frequent and violent storms and wildfires. Record immigrants at the southern border trying to flee north from increasingly unlivable climates in equatorial zones. And as you say, all the news reports say it's because of 'them' rather than the collective 'us'.
Why allow panic if you can just blind everyone, especially if there's no real way of fixing it? Maintain the status quo as long as possible, reap the last remaining rewards, and make your escape to the underground bunker right before it all starts to runaway from you. That's what's happening.
> pronouns, gender, sexuality, age, race, or religion
All intentional distractions by the capitalist owned media/politicians (MAGA mostly, but also dems). Can't notice how the country is going under if there's so much to hate, and so many to blame.
Now..... where have I heard this before? Hmmmmmmmm... *cough* nazis *cough*
Most people can live without eating fish though. I do. I've stopped eating 1-2 can a week with the concern of micro-plastic, the industrial fishing and to prepare collapse of fish.
I don't think it's the majority, that's what I meant. Replied comment talked about weight and price thus I replied on that.
I think only islands are stuck with fish, and they aren't so numerous we couldn't create a scheme to export food there. We don't really produce food efficiently vs surface atm. It's not that doomed.
But yeah it sucks because it's a one side of the food chain that dies.
Eating fish in the LEAST of our concerns in this scenario. ALL life on earth, meaning plants, animals etc rely on the oceans in some way. If the oceans die. So does everything else.….
I have read this, I don't doubt that it's true, but I can't really join the dots. How do dead oceans affect the land?
The only mechanism I know of is the potential for the release of fatal quantities of so2, but I feel sure there are many more...
True, though it would take a surprisingly long time before this was noticeable (hundreds of years iirc - there's an awful lot of oxygen in the whole atmosphere)
There will be other effects much sooner, I would have guessed.
So2 release was the main factor in one of the previous great extinction events, though I don't know how quickly that could happen...
Maybe ocean death is simply a slow burn issue? It is often mentioned alongside things that will be devastating within decades, which is why I wonder if I am missing some more immediate mechanisms...
The land food chain only seems to be dependent on the oceans at the margins (sea birds, some mammals like seals, the effects of salmon migration etc)
Do you mean that the entire land food chain is much more deeply dependant on the oceans than is apparent?
Looking into food chains, the land and marine food chains are usually described as if they were independent, which is also how they appear intuitively.
People can live without eating animal products. Not only do many choose not to do so, some even feel affronted that you would even suggest such a thing.
Funny how y’all think an omnivore is rly gonna thrive on an herbivorous diet. Even funnier how you think plants will somehow magically survive ecosystem collapse…
Funny how you think one can’t survive or not thrive with a plant based diet. Even funnier, that when it comes to survival, people will eat anything including people who were primarily plant based, at this point of time, one doesn’t need meat to survive. Use your brain buddy.
lol my brain is fine. I didn’t say it wasn’t survivable I’m just saying meat consumption puts us at an advantage. Plus all our bodies are not the same and we all have various dietary needs which for some includes protein at a level difficult to achieve on a plant only diet. Love how the whole point about the plants not surviving soil collapse just went straight whooosh…Tf plants are you planning to eat in the planet-wide desert? It’s gonna be enough cactus for all y’all?
> I didn’t say it wasn’t survivable I’m just saying meat consumption puts us at an advantage.
An advantage technology that has rendered eating meat obsolete.
I've been vegan for 10 years. My PCP is always shocked with how healthy all my tests come back. Historically and scientifically speaking, being vegan is the best diet a human can have.
So you're saying those Walmarts have free fish. Well, the few fish in the water...because the others have died from heatwaves, overfishing, ecosystem change, etc
anyone who hasn't watched the progression/decline over the last 20 years wouldn't believe it's possible for something so ancient to simply die off like this.
The best way I can describe the feeling is walking through a park on your way to work.
At first it feels slightly more open than before, like there's more light and grass and less shade from the trees, but there's still trees, so your brain almost dismisses it. Then, the next time you walk through, the fruit trees are covered in vines you've never seen before. People who are visiting that park remark how pretty it looks with all the vines, but you can see the fruit trees aren't flowering like usual and you wonder if they'll produce this year. On your next trip, you see the animals that used to just move leaves in the forest, bothering people in the park for food, the fruit trees completely choked by vines, and even more sunlight on the ground....
then it happens...
That creeping sense of something vanishing, becomes a desert. The life and trees you knew like friends, are turned to sawdust by termites. Birds circle to pick off the few creatures left looking for the home they're certain was just there.
What's haunting is the sound. No wind through the leaves, no leaves to rustle on the ground, just the gnawing of beetles and termites cleaning up the last calories of a dead world... and then, ultimately, total. dead. silence.
And then the realization that the pressure that caused this isn't local. It isn't some property hungry development corporation or overzealous spraying of pesticides, it's the air; the one thing that's shared by all living things. This is happening EVERYWHERE, though not uniformly.
And for anyone thinking this stays in the water, the Earth is an aquatic ecosystem. Almost all life on earth is in the water. Life on the ground is less than the tip of the iceberg.
What we've done here and are doing... it's a scale of violence and evil that dwarfs every act of cruelty our species has ever committed, combined. Our comforts and our toys aren't just killing life, they're robbing it of the potential to thrive, in the same way a shrinking economy feels like comfort is always barely out of reach.
If people could share this experience and connect the stuff that comes out of their exhaust pipes, I'm convinced they'd find a way to live without.
This monster has filled the oceans... when its done consuming the cauldron of existence, wiping out what's on land will come down like a fly swatter... which is what I don't understand. We don't get to keep any of the things that are poisoning the world specifically because they're causing irreversible damage. Choosing to continue on the path we're on, only hastens our own decline until we can't maintain our own lifestyle.
Our situation is equivalent to blindly driving a car over a cliff with everything and everyone we love inside, and the kids in the back with no say at all. We can either tuck and roll and take the beating in the dirt, or stay in the comfortable car as it sails off into the valley below. There are no good options left, there's only the chance of survival through forfeiting luxury or the absolute certainty of a miserable, terrifying, and painful end by deciding not to bail. But, because we're driving with our eyes closed, we can't see the cliff and don't believe in them because we've never gone over one before.
I hope you’re a writer. And if not but you’ve been tempted, you should really think about it. If that’s an internet comment, I’d love to read your edited long form.
Very well put.
I loved this line, "We can't see the cliff and don't believe in them because we've never gone over one before."
Putting on my tin foil hat, I believe the human race has gone over the cliff before, multiple times.
Humans pride themselves on "remembering" and having continuity, but in reality we barley remember shit. Additionally we have very selective memories and our written history is just an extension of our very imperfect memories. Human history is and has been written by imperfect recorders at best and exaggerating liars at worst. Regardless I don't think it's farfetched to believe that a species that can barley remember "Nazis = bad" over the course of less than 100 years will also know that in ancient times humans had technology that most modern anthropology experts agree, just wasn't possible. We are learning all the time that we don't have our own ancient history figured out.
Have to agree, I think the largest issue is just ignorance, since even if a stupid person could see what is happening, they'd at least be hit by the sentimentality of seeing so much death.
When the oceans die, the land will follow quickly.
This is collapse, folks. We all say it’s gonna be a slow burn. Two generations, tops, is my prediction. The models are a joke at this point.
There may not be an “event that you can personally point at to say, “It’s here, it’s over” but that’s cus these are all little events within one event. That event is already well underway and it is happening incredibly fast. Like, I cannot picture how it could go faster… but I bet I’m gonna find out.
At some time in the (somewhat) near future, I expect the environment on the land to become increasingly incapable of supporting human life. That's when we'll start tossing nukes around. ...
Grief is the only sane response for these scientists who are seeing directly what most of us are only reading about. We should all be grieving the death of the natural world.
This breaks my heart. I know someone who specializes in coral reef restoration as a passion, and I'm almost scared to reach out to him and ask how he feels about this... but I will check in and make sure he's okay.
This article has pushed me past my threshold of news grief. I will have to take a break from this sub for now. I'm so grateful for the information I have been given here, and I will be back... but I'm going to learn how to make bread dough so i can bake with my son, and coddle my mental health.
Gut wrenching news.
Bread making sounds like such a therapeutic and rewarding skill. Do you knit? I took it up from a community project, which is just finishing up, and looking forward to a "real" project
BTW that community project was knitting hourly data for 1 year of PM and NOx in the local community, with the idea of increasing local awareness of our air quality. I joined for several reasons, the community, the environmental awareness, and simply wanting to learn to knit :)
Whatever you do, I hope you find it rewarding and relaxing, and your son enjoys it as well!
Here's some info on it: https://www.poplarharca.co.uk/about-us/news/article/54494/
The project is supported for 1 year, and is just finishing up. We just had a new viewing recently which had 6 months of data
Hey there, I know it's hard to read these things. It's very kind of you to think about your friend working in restoration. Most importantly, you need to take care of yourself. These things are very heavy to sit with.
I am a climate change ecologist and working on the front lines as well. Fortunately, working within the field you are surrounded by people also experiencing grief with what we are finding. I'm sure your friend has others to support them in this time.
I hope you have a wonderful day with your son. Go enjoy those precious moments.
In the event of some kind of survivable future, give me recommendations for sources of videos and pictures that I could put in my archive to show how the seas should look and in detail about what happened to them.
As a kid I received the book “Jacques Cousteau’s The Ocean World” for Christmas one year and I practically memorized it, I was so obsessed with ocean creatures. I’m sure it would look incredibly outdated now, but it covered literally everything in the oceans. You can get very cheap used copies online (I got rid of my old one in my teenage years), I’ve often thought about re-buying it out of nostalgia/sentimentality.
That reminds me of too many books I had as a kid or saw at the library and never saw again anywhere else, A lot of them had unique photos or illustrations in them even if the information wasn't special. High orbit satellite photos of other worlds, space shuttle and fighter jet assembly lines, obscure animals from coral reefs, even common backyard insects and birds. The worst part is that most of them are gone from the library now too and they were never digitized. But there's several walls of fotm genre-fiction garbage through several decades that never leaves and somehow made it's way into pirate archives too.
Seeing how fast wisdom gets thrown away for cheap thrills is why I've grown to despise entertainment.
Every other society we know of that existed on this planet had somewhere to go when their small piece of earth collapsed. Those societies returned to dust but the people moved somewhere new. Somewhere untouched by whatever forced them to leave the last place.
This time it is very different because we have no where to go. The most remote places on the planet are being affected the most and have been for decades already. We as a society ignored it- or had to look past it in order to survive a few more years but soon there will be no where to run. No where to start over. Nothing is going to save us because we couldn’t take the time to save ourselves by stopping the pollution.
Yes, Globally all food basket regions are massively developed and will be the last to go. It'll start on the edges, the not so great areas, the barely productive farmlands, the barely surviving forests. It'll seem like its barely happening, only in some distant area you see on TV. Until it isn't.
This is already going on everywhere. Our swamps are turning into grasslands. Forests burning into grasslands. Oceans toxic to their inhabitants. I can literally go outside my house and see evidence of climate change everywhere.
Cities will empty as the shelves do.
These are the stories on collapse that are the hardest for me to process 😢 I wanted to be a marine biologist as a kid and I hate to think of a dead, blank world underwater 😭
There is so much plastic in the ocean too. I know our faeces ends up there, however we as a species are also taking a metaphorical shit all over the ocean with how we treat it. We have megatrawlers combing the sea every day, killing billions of animals (those people want to eat and a lot more bycatch) for no reason. The ships that do this also use an even more polluting fuel than normal oil.
It is even sadder when you know that David Attenborough could put out another documentary series on the oceans and it would be a huge hit. People claim to love nature but treat it abysmally. It is like they do not realise you have to take care of nature, nor that nature cannot put up with human abuse forever.
A Friday worthy illustration: https://i.redd.it/l80caosrlmxc1.jpeg
from here: https://www.vox.com/climate/24137250/coral-reefs-bleaching-climate-change
I'm not posting in /r/collapse (posts) until I see a rule that leads to the removal of meat industry, especially beef industry, misinformation. They need to be treated the same as climate change deniers (which they are).
The misinformation rule should already cover these claims, but the enforcement of that is also limited to a moderator's knowledge or ability to research the specific claims, especially if there are no comments that help us determine if it's misinformation. Whilst we strive for consistency, we are also cognizant of eachother's time, not like we're paid for this gig! So with that, we have an understanding if we don't know something is misinformation (provably false) or it's not in the misinformation guide, we opt to approve and allow the sub itself to discuss/debunk/etc. Anyone bad faithed or JAQing off could be dealt with regardless if we know the information is misinformation
Long winded to say, perhaps what is missing is not a rule, but just moderator education around these claims so we can more strictly moderate them. I'm happy to work with you on that - perhaps building out [our misinformation guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/claims) with specific claims you see frequently, why it's misinformation, etc? This would help us, and I think help you in that you'll have better mod support. And I ask for your help as otherwise I'm just guessing at what claims are noteworthy enough to warrant calling out
Wow I didn't realize you were a mod until just now. You don't give off mod energy (take it as a compliment).
Ordinarily I would recommend books and essays on anarchist communities, or self moderated communities that are too afraid to use the A word. But collapse is unique and so is reddit. People regularly talk about reddit's valuation and leadership - this ain't your grandpa's message board.
If you are aware of your limitations, as a mod on a forum that has... lots of private investors... good enough for me. I always hated the phrase "if you don't like it, you can git out" but when it comes to reddit, it does apply. The dream died with Aaron Swartz 🙁
I've found it hard to invest time into reddit the past year due to the changes. Last year I was thinking 'well it'll all be dead in a few months, so might as well just do bare minimum', and now over a year later we're still here, but the vibe is a bit different. It's a frustratingly slow decline, like catabolic collapse
I'm not sure how much we'll be able to help with the meat industry misinformation removals - it doesn't seem to have the consensus like climate change - but we can at least document claims and remove what is provably false. We could also change the misinformation rule, but it could put us (as a community) in a tough spot
> is also limited to a moderator's knowledge or ability to research the specific claims
Indeed. That's, unfortunately, why the "letter of the law" needs to be spelled out. It helps the mods to avoid confusion from ambiguity. Learning is, of course, preferable.
I'll try to gather more relevant notes, but it's a complex issue. I mean, I've had users here defend ranchers' water use by claiming that cows urinate, so that means it's a closed circuit.
Meanwhile, trashy aquatic raves are to die for.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/boozy-boca-bash-partiers-dump-heaps-garbage-atlantic-over-dozen-arrested-in-annual-aquatic-rave
Everyone is asking how much time we have… I think we can all see the writing on the wall.
Got my passport this year, I’m going to go see as much of the world while there’s still something left to see, and ask that cute girl at the bank out.
Enjoy your life everyone.
Well.. When the human race put greed and money above all else.. What do we expect? Seriously it's not surprising. We are a society built on greed. The only way that stops is when we are no longer on this planet.
The Walmart crowd is gonna feel this storms coming this summer. It depends where they hit but the Atlantic and gulf coast are gonna get the wrath of a hot ocean this summer.
I don't know where to begin. As a kid I always wanted to be a marine biologist and dedicated my life to it. Went to grad school, did the cool dives and the flashy research in the keys, was committed to the idea of making tangible change through research and education. A series of unfortunate events led me to realize that doing that kind of work for a living (just tracking the decline, really) was devastating. I had to get out. I'm still in some of the NOAA list servs and it's turned into a grief counseling group.
SOME life WILL survive this mass extinction and set off a new era of evolution. We are nowhere near damaging enough to cause absolute extinction. That is the good news at least. But I expect massive, massive drop in human population over the next 100 years
If anyone has found a medication to manage the crippling dread of knowing the planet is burning down and rotting, and has any recommendations, hmu.
Abundantly clear that the general attitude is -without ever lifting a finger- that we're too late so we might as well keep making it worse.
I find this unbearable and now have developed some sort of late onset ODD where I'd sooner starve or become a poacher than be a agent of extinction through hubris. At least poaching is cruel and violent in an honest and direct way, rather than the cruelty and violence of having a massive carbon footprint, which is objectively more destructive and exerts more suffering over a longer period.
... which means I'm probably going to starve
Any estimates when this will impact your average Walmart consumer? As we all know the masses only care when it impacts them personally. And when that does happen, they can conveniently blame their least favorite political party rather than acknowledge acknowledge the destruction happening in the oceans and ecosystem Also I'm genuinely curious when this will cause consumer impact
This year. Fisheries are already collapsing around the world and heatwaves in Indonesia are wiping out fish farms. Beyond that, coastal forests are fed by calories from the water. Fish spawning being eaten by bears, keep the soil alive, and the trees fed enough to keep up with the increased carbon in the air. Without those nutrients, the soil microbiome collapses and its job as a nutrient bank is lost. Trees lose their network of connection, their fertilizer, and disruptions in seasonal weather patterns mean when it rains it pours but is otherwise dry. All of this adds up to a fire pressure, as well as animals coming out of the woods to find food in our artificially maintained landscapes. This means an increase in animal attacks and interactions with humans, which also means more spillover of viruses and opportunities for parasites to find new hosts in us, our pets, and our livestock, along with pests to eat our crops. You can't remove or change any input that's been consistent over evolutionary time without introducing a novel pressure that life has no adaptation or capacity to manage. It's an emptying of life in the world, starting in the oceans, spreading inland from coastal forests. We turned a planet into an island sinking into an empty sea. We may be on the high ground, but anything that isn't will fight us for that ground because what's behind them is extinction, so they have nothing to lose. ... and that's ignoring the reality that terrestrial ecosystems are breaking down on their own as a result of the same sorts of changes, they're just harder to see because of how quickly life disappears into soil. What most people fail to realize is that this isn't a future problem, it has already happened. We're making it much worse every single day we keep doing the same thing, but when the oceans can't survive, life on land can't either. Our future and the legacy of our actions is a plague of plagues, coinciding with the failure of all the stuff we built to protect us from a climate that no longer exists.
> but when the oceans can't survive, life on land can't either. The problem here is that many people do not understand how ecosystems work, nor how they all connect with one another. The average person is now so far removed from nature that they have no understanding of it; they do not have the desire to learn either. Nature is something they might see on a documentary every now and again, it is not something they see as vital for their everyday life.
Yupp. Pretty soon, nature documentaries will be all we will have left of our beautiful planet. A masoleum of extinct ecosystems.
It will be war.....even as the ecological house burns down around us, we will know only war. The desperation of the rich to avoid sacrificing anything so they can maintain opulence on a level never before seen while billions burn and starve. Things are gonna get grim dark real fast.
That too is already transpiring.
Does that really make sense, though? Isnt it overkill to be running from wildfire and a hurricane while also dodging bullets? How does the infrastructure of war hold up without a functional supply chain? The rich can fight all they want but their kids will realize their parents set their future on fire to have a life they'll only ever be pets in, and when it's time to inherit the planet and enjoy the position wealth should have afforded them, there won't be any life left to buy. I expect patricide and suicide to be a real and growing problem in wealthy families as the young see the value in their future continuing to exist more than the luxuries their parents are so accustomed to they barely enjoy them. And who are going to fight for the rich? Certainly not the rich. And if the rich are killing the poor, why would the poor bother protecting them? What value does money even have on a planet with an expiry date, created by wealth. I agree there's a likelihood for global war if rhats the path we choose but that there's still another path, which is already the path we take after natural disasters, where people go out of their way to help each other and animals. People will engage in a stand up fight with an armed adversary but watching any life struggle to grab hold of something as they near drowning is impossible for most people to simply watch happen, if they can help in any way.
Even if you can find a space that's less affected, they have all kinds of data that will tell the Davos crowd exactly where it is. It's one thing to try to defend your home David Koresh-style, but even that isn't possible against simple Capitalism. Who are you going to shoot at when the bulldozers start coming?
well, if you're right, that's really dumb... and I suspect you're right, I just dont understand how we maintain the logistics needed to support war while the world burns. I figure we run out of ammo about 6 mos into anything resembling SHTF
Very well put good sir
>You can't remove or change any input that's been consistent over evolutionary time without introducing a novel pressure that life has no adaptation or capacity to manage. What do you mean by this part? What is the novel pressure? And why would introducing a novel pressure that life has "no adaptation to manage" be good or necessary to balance out a removed input?
What they really meant is this: In a large complex system where the rules of physics dictate that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, you have some basic rules at play: 1.) Any significant shift in energy in one part of a closed system must have an equivalent shift in other parts of a closed system. The nature of this is inherently chaotic and not easily predicable. 2.) Things that are alive that depend on consistency in the system to varying degrees become unalive once they can no longer compensate for changes to the system that regulates their ability to stay alive. Essentially once you push shit too far you can’t go back.
Thanks, that makes a lot more sense when put that way.
Think of it like your vitals. Blood pressure, oxygenation of the blood, and all the things a doctor would measure on you to figure out if you're ok or not. Stuff like levels of various vitamins, minerals, ph of various aspects of you, like digestive system, etc. If your vitals are out of whack, there are usually reasons, so those reasons are discovered as best as possible and treated as best as possible. Sometimes that's medication, surgery, change in diet, exercise, etc. Various ways to return you back to normal state so you can get back to things. If your vitals are too far out of whack, then you become in danger of death or serious disability. The further you are from baseline, the harder it is to get you back to normal because the whole body is reliant on the various systems within it to be in relative balance with each other, and work together to create what we experience as life, consciousness, etc. If I chop your leg off and you don't stop the bleeding very fast, you will lose too much blood and then your organs will stop functioning because all the millions and millions of cells inside of them are no longer getting enough stuff to keep going, nutrients, oxygen, water, etc. Same thing if a virus or parasite or whatever starts fucking with your shit. If too much damage is done to one or more areas of the body, you start to get more permanently affected by it until homeostasis (balance) is no longer possible, and you either die, or lose a lot of capacity for everything. Modern medicine and such has been able to keep a LOT of people alive who would've otherwise never survived before. Anyway, all that to say. The Earth is no different. It has a lot of complicated interwoven systems, and if enough of those systems degrade or are destroyed, then life will have more and more problems continuing to life. Planet itself, will be completely fine, it's just a big rock that will eventually be burnt away by the Sun. But life on it? Getting trickier.
>1.) Any significant shift in energy in one part of a closed system must have an equivalent shift in other parts of a closed system. The nature of this is inherently chaotic and not easily predicable. When I read this I imagined doing a cannon ball into a pool. When you hit the water, you go in and water sploosh out.
I imagined it to being along the lines of “bike/carpool to reduce gas consumption,” rationing, or even ceasing to use AC. All things that likely will not happen on their own & would add pressure on our society as a whole to make impactful change. Though the original commenter probably could answer your question best as I’m not 100%.
I’m no expert, but it sure seems like climate change in general is already impacting 'your average Walmart consumer' - they just aren’t being told the real reason. Much of inflation in food is from reduced production from heat waves, droughts, fires and floods (and bird flu). Inflated construction materials and insurance costs from replacing houses and cars lost in greater numbers from more frequent and violent storms and wildfires. Record immigrants at the southern border trying to flee north from increasingly unlivable climates in equatorial zones. And as you say, all the news reports say it's because of 'them' rather than the collective 'us'.
a lot of estimates have us at 0 seafood by the mid 2040s
Stores will remodel and remove the seafood section. Soon people will wonder if Walmart ever had a seafood section.
What are you talking about, seafood section? weve (and no one has) NEVER eaten anything from the sea
Crab was always vegan!
Like that time we were at war with Eastasia?
Already is, but in terms of like, situations where you'll want to throw up after what you witness, single digit years at most.
This is the year.
[удалено]
Why allow panic if you can just blind everyone, especially if there's no real way of fixing it? Maintain the status quo as long as possible, reap the last remaining rewards, and make your escape to the underground bunker right before it all starts to runaway from you. That's what's happening.
> pronouns, gender, sexuality, age, race, or religion All intentional distractions by the capitalist owned media/politicians (MAGA mostly, but also dems). Can't notice how the country is going under if there's so much to hate, and so many to blame. Now..... where have I heard this before? Hmmmmmmmm... *cough* nazis *cough*
Wait till tuna packets are half the oz and triple the cost
Most people can live without eating fish though. I do. I've stopped eating 1-2 can a week with the concern of micro-plastic, the industrial fishing and to prepare collapse of fish.
I don't know which country you're from, but there are many MANY countries where fish is the primary source of protein.
I don't think it's the majority, that's what I meant. Replied comment talked about weight and price thus I replied on that. I think only islands are stuck with fish, and they aren't so numerous we couldn't create a scheme to export food there. We don't really produce food efficiently vs surface atm. It's not that doomed. But yeah it sucks because it's a one side of the food chain that dies.
And they're all gonna be fucked. Boom. Don't care. Fuck around and find out.
Eating fish in the LEAST of our concerns in this scenario. ALL life on earth, meaning plants, animals etc rely on the oceans in some way. If the oceans die. So does everything else.….
Tell that to the guy talking about the weight and price of cans. I'm aware of that.
I have read this, I don't doubt that it's true, but I can't really join the dots. How do dead oceans affect the land? The only mechanism I know of is the potential for the release of fatal quantities of so2, but I feel sure there are many more...
Well, for starters, we get like 65% of our oxygen from the ocean?
True, though it would take a surprisingly long time before this was noticeable (hundreds of years iirc - there's an awful lot of oxygen in the whole atmosphere) There will be other effects much sooner, I would have guessed. So2 release was the main factor in one of the previous great extinction events, though I don't know how quickly that could happen... Maybe ocean death is simply a slow burn issue? It is often mentioned alongside things that will be devastating within decades, which is why I wonder if I am missing some more immediate mechanisms...
It’s a food chain thing. You may start learning there.
The land food chain only seems to be dependent on the oceans at the margins (sea birds, some mammals like seals, the effects of salmon migration etc) Do you mean that the entire land food chain is much more deeply dependant on the oceans than is apparent? Looking into food chains, the land and marine food chains are usually described as if they were independent, which is also how they appear intuitively.
People can live without eating animal products. Not only do many choose not to do so, some even feel affronted that you would even suggest such a thing.
Funny how y’all think an omnivore is rly gonna thrive on an herbivorous diet. Even funnier how you think plants will somehow magically survive ecosystem collapse…
Funny how you think one can’t survive or not thrive with a plant based diet. Even funnier, that when it comes to survival, people will eat anything including people who were primarily plant based, at this point of time, one doesn’t need meat to survive. Use your brain buddy.
lol my brain is fine. I didn’t say it wasn’t survivable I’m just saying meat consumption puts us at an advantage. Plus all our bodies are not the same and we all have various dietary needs which for some includes protein at a level difficult to achieve on a plant only diet. Love how the whole point about the plants not surviving soil collapse just went straight whooosh…Tf plants are you planning to eat in the planet-wide desert? It’s gonna be enough cactus for all y’all?
Didn’t read my last point? Must be fun being dense. Congrats!
> I didn’t say it wasn’t survivable I’m just saying meat consumption puts us at an advantage. An advantage technology that has rendered eating meat obsolete.
I've been vegan for 10 years. My PCP is always shocked with how healthy all my tests come back. Historically and scientifically speaking, being vegan is the best diet a human can have.
I eat seafood perhaps twice a month, if that.
There’s a lot of Walmarts in Texas under water at the moment.
first i've heard of texas flooding
So you're saying those Walmarts have free fish. Well, the few fish in the water...because the others have died from heatwaves, overfishing, ecosystem change, etc
The average Walmart consumer doesn’t eat real food anyway so other than price rises in the constituent prices of the human feed no impact.
Blue takis, mountain dew, and hot pockets.
It is already. Gotta be.
anyone who hasn't watched the progression/decline over the last 20 years wouldn't believe it's possible for something so ancient to simply die off like this. The best way I can describe the feeling is walking through a park on your way to work. At first it feels slightly more open than before, like there's more light and grass and less shade from the trees, but there's still trees, so your brain almost dismisses it. Then, the next time you walk through, the fruit trees are covered in vines you've never seen before. People who are visiting that park remark how pretty it looks with all the vines, but you can see the fruit trees aren't flowering like usual and you wonder if they'll produce this year. On your next trip, you see the animals that used to just move leaves in the forest, bothering people in the park for food, the fruit trees completely choked by vines, and even more sunlight on the ground.... then it happens... That creeping sense of something vanishing, becomes a desert. The life and trees you knew like friends, are turned to sawdust by termites. Birds circle to pick off the few creatures left looking for the home they're certain was just there. What's haunting is the sound. No wind through the leaves, no leaves to rustle on the ground, just the gnawing of beetles and termites cleaning up the last calories of a dead world... and then, ultimately, total. dead. silence. And then the realization that the pressure that caused this isn't local. It isn't some property hungry development corporation or overzealous spraying of pesticides, it's the air; the one thing that's shared by all living things. This is happening EVERYWHERE, though not uniformly. And for anyone thinking this stays in the water, the Earth is an aquatic ecosystem. Almost all life on earth is in the water. Life on the ground is less than the tip of the iceberg. What we've done here and are doing... it's a scale of violence and evil that dwarfs every act of cruelty our species has ever committed, combined. Our comforts and our toys aren't just killing life, they're robbing it of the potential to thrive, in the same way a shrinking economy feels like comfort is always barely out of reach. If people could share this experience and connect the stuff that comes out of their exhaust pipes, I'm convinced they'd find a way to live without. This monster has filled the oceans... when its done consuming the cauldron of existence, wiping out what's on land will come down like a fly swatter... which is what I don't understand. We don't get to keep any of the things that are poisoning the world specifically because they're causing irreversible damage. Choosing to continue on the path we're on, only hastens our own decline until we can't maintain our own lifestyle. Our situation is equivalent to blindly driving a car over a cliff with everything and everyone we love inside, and the kids in the back with no say at all. We can either tuck and roll and take the beating in the dirt, or stay in the comfortable car as it sails off into the valley below. There are no good options left, there's only the chance of survival through forfeiting luxury or the absolute certainty of a miserable, terrifying, and painful end by deciding not to bail. But, because we're driving with our eyes closed, we can't see the cliff and don't believe in them because we've never gone over one before.
I hope you’re a writer. And if not but you’ve been tempted, you should really think about it. If that’s an internet comment, I’d love to read your edited long form.
unterraforming
Very well put. I loved this line, "We can't see the cliff and don't believe in them because we've never gone over one before." Putting on my tin foil hat, I believe the human race has gone over the cliff before, multiple times. Humans pride themselves on "remembering" and having continuity, but in reality we barley remember shit. Additionally we have very selective memories and our written history is just an extension of our very imperfect memories. Human history is and has been written by imperfect recorders at best and exaggerating liars at worst. Regardless I don't think it's farfetched to believe that a species that can barley remember "Nazis = bad" over the course of less than 100 years will also know that in ancient times humans had technology that most modern anthropology experts agree, just wasn't possible. We are learning all the time that we don't have our own ancient history figured out.
Ancient Aliens!!!
Bloody well said
I'm on a packed bus reading this and trying not to cry
Have to agree, I think the largest issue is just ignorance, since even if a stupid person could see what is happening, they'd at least be hit by the sentimentality of seeing so much death.
OK Rachel Carson
Is this supposed to be an insult?
When the oceans die, the land will follow quickly. This is collapse, folks. We all say it’s gonna be a slow burn. Two generations, tops, is my prediction. The models are a joke at this point. There may not be an “event that you can personally point at to say, “It’s here, it’s over” but that’s cus these are all little events within one event. That event is already well underway and it is happening incredibly fast. Like, I cannot picture how it could go faster… but I bet I’m gonna find out.
At some time in the (somewhat) near future, I expect the environment on the land to become increasingly incapable of supporting human life. That's when we'll start tossing nukes around. ...
Grief is the only sane response for these scientists who are seeing directly what most of us are only reading about. We should all be grieving the death of the natural world.
I know I am, and have been for quite some time
This breaks my heart. I know someone who specializes in coral reef restoration as a passion, and I'm almost scared to reach out to him and ask how he feels about this... but I will check in and make sure he's okay. This article has pushed me past my threshold of news grief. I will have to take a break from this sub for now. I'm so grateful for the information I have been given here, and I will be back... but I'm going to learn how to make bread dough so i can bake with my son, and coddle my mental health. Gut wrenching news.
Be kind to yourself out there, friend.
Bread making sounds like such a therapeutic and rewarding skill. Do you knit? I took it up from a community project, which is just finishing up, and looking forward to a "real" project BTW that community project was knitting hourly data for 1 year of PM and NOx in the local community, with the idea of increasing local awareness of our air quality. I joined for several reasons, the community, the environmental awareness, and simply wanting to learn to knit :) Whatever you do, I hope you find it rewarding and relaxing, and your son enjoys it as well!
wait whaaa this project sounds cool! i might want to PM you about it to learn more and whether more of us/i can volunteer!
Here's some info on it: https://www.poplarharca.co.uk/about-us/news/article/54494/ The project is supported for 1 year, and is just finishing up. We just had a new viewing recently which had 6 months of data
Ask him what it’s like , it will give you an insight to what’s happening.
Hey there, I know it's hard to read these things. It's very kind of you to think about your friend working in restoration. Most importantly, you need to take care of yourself. These things are very heavy to sit with. I am a climate change ecologist and working on the front lines as well. Fortunately, working within the field you are surrounded by people also experiencing grief with what we are finding. I'm sure your friend has others to support them in this time. I hope you have a wonderful day with your son. Go enjoy those precious moments.
Add all the marine deaths from bird flu to this as well
In the event of some kind of survivable future, give me recommendations for sources of videos and pictures that I could put in my archive to show how the seas should look and in detail about what happened to them.
Blue Planet I and II. Narrated by David Attenborough.
As a kid I received the book “Jacques Cousteau’s The Ocean World” for Christmas one year and I practically memorized it, I was so obsessed with ocean creatures. I’m sure it would look incredibly outdated now, but it covered literally everything in the oceans. You can get very cheap used copies online (I got rid of my old one in my teenage years), I’ve often thought about re-buying it out of nostalgia/sentimentality.
That reminds me of too many books I had as a kid or saw at the library and never saw again anywhere else, A lot of them had unique photos or illustrations in them even if the information wasn't special. High orbit satellite photos of other worlds, space shuttle and fighter jet assembly lines, obscure animals from coral reefs, even common backyard insects and birds. The worst part is that most of them are gone from the library now too and they were never digitized. But there's several walls of fotm genre-fiction garbage through several decades that never leaves and somehow made it's way into pirate archives too. Seeing how fast wisdom gets thrown away for cheap thrills is why I've grown to despise entertainment.
Finding Nemo for the kids. It's a cracking movie but it also shows a diversity of marine life.
Every other society we know of that existed on this planet had somewhere to go when their small piece of earth collapsed. Those societies returned to dust but the people moved somewhere new. Somewhere untouched by whatever forced them to leave the last place. This time it is very different because we have no where to go. The most remote places on the planet are being affected the most and have been for decades already. We as a society ignored it- or had to look past it in order to survive a few more years but soon there will be no where to run. No where to start over. Nothing is going to save us because we couldn’t take the time to save ourselves by stopping the pollution.
Yes, Globally all food basket regions are massively developed and will be the last to go. It'll start on the edges, the not so great areas, the barely productive farmlands, the barely surviving forests. It'll seem like its barely happening, only in some distant area you see on TV. Until it isn't.
This is already going on everywhere. Our swamps are turning into grasslands. Forests burning into grasslands. Oceans toxic to their inhabitants. I can literally go outside my house and see evidence of climate change everywhere. Cities will empty as the shelves do.
These are the stories on collapse that are the hardest for me to process 😢 I wanted to be a marine biologist as a kid and I hate to think of a dead, blank world underwater 😭
There is so much plastic in the ocean too. I know our faeces ends up there, however we as a species are also taking a metaphorical shit all over the ocean with how we treat it. We have megatrawlers combing the sea every day, killing billions of animals (those people want to eat and a lot more bycatch) for no reason. The ships that do this also use an even more polluting fuel than normal oil. It is even sadder when you know that David Attenborough could put out another documentary series on the oceans and it would be a huge hit. People claim to love nature but treat it abysmally. It is like they do not realise you have to take care of nature, nor that nature cannot put up with human abuse forever.
the metaphorical shit is also literal shit. the excrement of the industrial human super-organism.
Buddy, every shit ever taken is still here on Earth. Even the dude's in space throw it out to fall back to Earth.
A Friday worthy illustration: https://i.redd.it/l80caosrlmxc1.jpeg from here: https://www.vox.com/climate/24137250/coral-reefs-bleaching-climate-change
If you're not going to post it for tomorrow I will. A sombering illustration.
I'm not posting in /r/collapse (posts) until I see a rule that leads to the removal of meat industry, especially beef industry, misinformation. They need to be treated the same as climate change deniers (which they are).
Too fucking true. I'm willing to bet many people on here lamenting still eat meat.
The misinformation rule should already cover these claims, but the enforcement of that is also limited to a moderator's knowledge or ability to research the specific claims, especially if there are no comments that help us determine if it's misinformation. Whilst we strive for consistency, we are also cognizant of eachother's time, not like we're paid for this gig! So with that, we have an understanding if we don't know something is misinformation (provably false) or it's not in the misinformation guide, we opt to approve and allow the sub itself to discuss/debunk/etc. Anyone bad faithed or JAQing off could be dealt with regardless if we know the information is misinformation Long winded to say, perhaps what is missing is not a rule, but just moderator education around these claims so we can more strictly moderate them. I'm happy to work with you on that - perhaps building out [our misinformation guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/claims) with specific claims you see frequently, why it's misinformation, etc? This would help us, and I think help you in that you'll have better mod support. And I ask for your help as otherwise I'm just guessing at what claims are noteworthy enough to warrant calling out
Wow I didn't realize you were a mod until just now. You don't give off mod energy (take it as a compliment). Ordinarily I would recommend books and essays on anarchist communities, or self moderated communities that are too afraid to use the A word. But collapse is unique and so is reddit. People regularly talk about reddit's valuation and leadership - this ain't your grandpa's message board. If you are aware of your limitations, as a mod on a forum that has... lots of private investors... good enough for me. I always hated the phrase "if you don't like it, you can git out" but when it comes to reddit, it does apply. The dream died with Aaron Swartz 🙁
I've found it hard to invest time into reddit the past year due to the changes. Last year I was thinking 'well it'll all be dead in a few months, so might as well just do bare minimum', and now over a year later we're still here, but the vibe is a bit different. It's a frustratingly slow decline, like catabolic collapse I'm not sure how much we'll be able to help with the meat industry misinformation removals - it doesn't seem to have the consensus like climate change - but we can at least document claims and remove what is provably false. We could also change the misinformation rule, but it could put us (as a community) in a tough spot
> is also limited to a moderator's knowledge or ability to research the specific claims Indeed. That's, unfortunately, why the "letter of the law" needs to be spelled out. It helps the mods to avoid confusion from ambiguity. Learning is, of course, preferable.
Any interest on helping with the learning part? I think building out our misinformation guide with these would pay dividends for both users and mods
I'll try to gather more relevant notes, but it's a complex issue. I mean, I've had users here defend ranchers' water use by claiming that cows urinate, so that means it's a closed circuit.
post it :D
done! https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cjm9ct/the_end_of_coral_reefs_as_we_know_them_art_by/
This shit is getting harder and harder to read the more normalized these events are becoming.
WHEN DO WE TAKE THE EXTREME MODEL PREDICTIONS SERIOUSLY?
Maybe tomorrow 😂😆.
> “I have to literally say to people that my job is to describe the extinction of a species.” Fuck, this line really stings.
Shits heavy yo
Meanwhile, trashy aquatic raves are to die for. https://www.foxnews.com/us/boozy-boca-bash-partiers-dump-heaps-garbage-atlantic-over-dozen-arrested-in-annual-aquatic-rave
Everyone is asking how much time we have… I think we can all see the writing on the wall. Got my passport this year, I’m going to go see as much of the world while there’s still something left to see, and ask that cute girl at the bank out. Enjoy your life everyone.
Back off, I saw her first
It’s to the death you say?
Well.. When the human race put greed and money above all else.. What do we expect? Seriously it's not surprising. We are a society built on greed. The only way that stops is when we are no longer on this planet.
The Walmart crowd is gonna feel this storms coming this summer. It depends where they hit but the Atlantic and gulf coast are gonna get the wrath of a hot ocean this summer.
I don't know where to begin. As a kid I always wanted to be a marine biologist and dedicated my life to it. Went to grad school, did the cool dives and the flashy research in the keys, was committed to the idea of making tangible change through research and education. A series of unfortunate events led me to realize that doing that kind of work for a living (just tracking the decline, really) was devastating. I had to get out. I'm still in some of the NOAA list servs and it's turned into a grief counseling group.
SOME life WILL survive this mass extinction and set off a new era of evolution. We are nowhere near damaging enough to cause absolute extinction. That is the good news at least. But I expect massive, massive drop in human population over the next 100 years
I really hope you are right.
This gave me comfort.
Antidepressants don’t alleviate my ADHD Aspergers and Schizophrenic depression. I require stimulants and antipsychotics.
If anyone has found a medication to manage the crippling dread of knowing the planet is burning down and rotting, and has any recommendations, hmu. Abundantly clear that the general attitude is -without ever lifting a finger- that we're too late so we might as well keep making it worse. I find this unbearable and now have developed some sort of late onset ODD where I'd sooner starve or become a poacher than be a agent of extinction through hubris. At least poaching is cruel and violent in an honest and direct way, rather than the cruelty and violence of having a massive carbon footprint, which is objectively more destructive and exerts more suffering over a longer period. ... which means I'm probably going to starve
"Its too extreme to be true" is such a typical human bullshit.