sad mammal/Doomerism, the collapse of civilisation, and thinking errors


2024-09-26

A vertical two-panel meme. The first shows a soldier in a gas mask riding a jeep with a mounted LMG, from the perspective of a back seat passenger. The soldier is turned to face the camera, and the panel is captioned 'Hey friend listen, I know the world is scary right now but'. The second panel is a zoom on the soldier's face, captioned 'Its [sic] gonna get way worse'

Probably accurate.

Welp

  • Do not go assuming anything I say here is correct. Even I'm not entirely confident about it.
  • Maybe warrants an ⚠️infohazard warning⚠️ for personal psychic damage potential

Doomerism and hand-waving

The concept of doomerism points to real thinking errors which are grounded in pessimism. But this concept also makes it easy for people to dismiss uncomfortable ideas via accusations of doomerism. It's a psychologically easy means of enabling pathological optimism - "I don't want to consider the possibility that you are correct. This sounds like doomer-speak. Thus, you are incorrect."

The weight of evidence

Unfortunately, there is a staggering weight of evidence that we're pretty fucked.

I find it difficult to reach true conviction in my beliefs about collapse, because I'm (I like to think) reasonably aware of how fallible human minds, and mine in particular, are, and the staggering complexity of the moving parts involved. Despite this, the sheer weight of evidence for it being real and imminent, and to some frustratingly unknown degree my own psychology, leaves me of the opinion that it is indeed real and imminent.

The theoretical grounding of the argument for collapse is typically found in the concept of overshoot, first applied to humanity by William R. Catton Jr. back in 1980[1]. An microcosmic example. In 1944, 29 reindeer were introduced to St. Matthew Island in Alaska[2], where they found abundant food and a lack of natural predators. By 1963 their population had ballooned to 6,000. And by 1966, a mere three years later, it was 42. Their population had overshot the carrying capacity of their habitat, and suffered a dramatic collapse due to habitat degradation and food scarcity. By the 1980s, there were no reindeer left on the island.

It seems that we're so deep into anthropocentrism we don't consider the possibility that humanity could be vulnerable to the same effect. But this is a hubristic and delusional belief, itself a psychological product of the anthropocene. We are, of course, just as subject to natural laws as any other species. Human exceptionalism will have a lot to answer for in this regard.

The human population of Earth has, like that of the Alaskan reindeers, ballooned. Our habitat is undergoing multifarious and wanton degradation. Food sources are not yet scarce, but we're starting to see some instances of agricultural yield loss due to extreme weather and soil nutrient depletion induced by intensive farming methods[3]. One example of the effects can be seen in the causes and consequences of India's 2023 rice export ban. Many recent papers have attempted to model the probability of simultaneous global breadbasket failures, and it is not considered to be unlikely.

Hubris also presents itself in the context of our liminal understanding of how this planet's climate and biosphere function. For example, the concepts of tipping points and feedback loops in climactic systems have only recently started to garner attention. And now they have, they feel like things which should have been painfully obvious. Such is our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit. And yet, we can't help but continue jeapordising the functioning of the systems keeping the planet habitable for us.

I don't wish to get too far into the weeds of specific evidence here - there's plenty to read elsewhere, and I'm presently more concerned with the psychological and sociopolitical aspects of this. But a good way of framing an overview of the situation might be found in the Stockholm Resilience Centre's work on planetary boundaries. These are a set of boundaries within which the planet should remain a long-term viable habitat for humans, and as of 2023 we have blasted through six of nine[4]. We're probably just about to blow through a seventh[5] - which is to say, oceans are becoming too acidic to sustain life. I'm sure there are criticisms of

A two-panel meme. The first shows a soldier in a gas mask riding a jeep with a mounted LMG, from the perspective of a back seat passenger. The soldier is turned to face the camera, and the panel is captioned 'Hey friend listen, I know the world is scary right now but'. The second panel is a zoom on the soldier's face, captioned 'Its [sic] gonna get way worse'

Daily Sea Surface Temperature (Climate Reanalyzer, University of Maine Climate Change Institute) (as at 26/09/2024)

I don't think much needs to be said about this. It is and should be alarming. After decades of absorbing some proportion of global warming and atmospheric carbon dioxide, the ocean appears to have lost its ability to act as a global heatsink.

We're already descending the ladder

There's a tendency to think of collapse as being something that'll happen in the future. Perhaps the near future, but not now. However, it's already happening. It's just that the most extreme effects are being felt by people outside of the anglosphere bubble and thus largely out of our sight. But, if people were to take the time to look, most would be able to observe direct evidence of climate and biosphere collapse in their own backyards.

The most obvious directly evident example is that the weather is changing. Growing up in 90s England, robust winter snowfall was a pretty reliable occurrence. I have fond memories of spending days most winters engaged in sledging and snowball fights. But good snow is now a rarity[6].

Another is terrestrial insect dieoff. Perhaps you've noticed that a long drive no longer means needing to scrape off a bug-splattered windshield. Or simply that there are fewer insects in your garden. Institutionally, we only started to realise this was happening in the 2010s, but there's now plenty of empirical evidence[7][8]. It's not even thought that climate change is principally responsible for this - instead, habitat destruction and pesticide/insecticide use.

Looking outside of our direct experience, we can see that extreme weather is increasingly common.

Partially as a consequence of extreme weather, we've seen the number of climate refugees start to increase dramatically. There's no need to even look outside of the anglosphere. There are plans to cede Fairborne, UK, to the sea some time in the 2050s, as it will no longer be pragmatic to maintain flood defences. Many Floridians have found their homes to be uninsurable, as insurers find that it's no longer profitable to offer coverage in parts of America.

Increasing extreme weather, climate refugees

Contention for water - India/Pakistan et al.

And yet, in light of all this, GHG emissions continue to increase. Silly AI bubble and massive datacentres, wanton emission.

Addressing some typical counterarguments

"The energy transition will save us"

Put simply, it's a pipe dream. There aren't anywhere near enough known material reserves on Earth to build even the first generation of hardware for a renewable grid transition[9], assuming (as everyone outside of the degrowth sphere - so, practically everyone - seems to) that today's energy demand levels are sustainable.

Electric vehicles themselves are an awful solution.

People are not prepared to even consider the idea of degrowth, which was the only ever realistic solution.

"Things have always improved in the past"

This is so obviously fallacious that I don't think it even requires much rebuttal. It is true that human history thus far has tended towards betterment. But past performance is not indicative of future results. Industrial human society, let alone the anthropocene, is very new and unprecedented territory. And neither of these things being absent prevented the collapse of every single civilisation which preceded ours.

"Science will fix it"

Nobody has been able to scale carbon capture. And yet, to enable net zero carbon accounting tricks, the IPCC just assumes this will happen. I hope that they're right, but doubt it, and clearly this is a very dangerous game to play.

The IPCC serves as a good example of how our insitutions disincentivise addressing the problem, as it has been thoroughly politically captured.

It's not impossible that technology will save the day somehow. Just exceedingly unrealistic.

What we can expect are increasingly desparate attempts at geoengineering, which will probably have undesirable consequences.

"World leaders have it in hand"

In a manner of speaking, yes. They know collapse is inevitable, and will maintain the status quo until it's impossible to do so.

Why are we incapable of clear-eyed analysis/understanding and effective action?

And why not degrowth? Psychology, vested interests, capitalism, infinite growth paradigm (mirrors human population expansion - overshoot)
Also consider relevance of neurodivergence (in seeing/assessing this)?

The idea of effective climate action is difficult, because the only credible path is degrowth. This could hardly be more antithetical to the global economy, predicated as it is on the myth of infinite growth. Enormous institutional resistance would need to be overcome. And, who's going to accept a reduction in their standard of living for the sake of something they don't really believe in anyway? It's totally electorally untenable.

How to live with it

Humans have always had to live with the knowledge that nothing, including ourselves, is permanent. We're fantastically inventive at responding to this with "copes". How often have you heard someone talking about "their legacy", as if that means something? Religions promise glorious afterlives (which, to me, seems like an obvious means of social control). Pyramids were at least pretty cool.

But, ultimately, nothing lasts. Nothing was ever going to last. That does not mean that nothing has value. Quite the opposite - things which are not scarce cannot have value.

The late Michael Dowd introduced a concept he called "post-doom"[10]. Similar to how Camusian absurdism offers a development of nihilism past despair, post-doom offers a development of climate doomerism. It calls for a clear-eyed acceptance of what's happening, and will happen, rather than retreat into hope or cope. Civilisation won't last, but it was never going to - perhaps we'd have expected it to last, to some indeterminate degree, longer, but it turns out that it's us who are going to be the ones around when the music (gradually, haltingly) stops. Ho hum.

To hope (hopium) or deny would be absurd, because they only serves to postpone despair and, in the meantime, rob us of properly valuing the lives we have now. These are short-sigted comforts.

The only sensible response is to come to acceptance. From there we can live boldly and with gratitude.

It's a hell of a journey, though.

something about the gulf between intellectual and actual belief, e.g. changing your lifestyle due to this

Resources

This is just stuff I've read and drawn from, rather than specifically cited

TODO format citations properly (Harvard?)

Plan

  1. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change ↩︎

  2. When Reindeer Paradise Turned to Purgatory ↩︎

  3. Global Climate Change Impact on Crops Expected Within 10 Years, NASA Study Finds I'd note that this study used a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario. But, given emissions continuing to increase, this seems reasonable. ↩︎

  4. Katherine Richardson et al., Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries.Sci. Adv. 9, eadh2458(2023).DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh2458 ↩︎

  5. World's oceans close to becoming too acidic to sustain marine life, report says ↩︎

  6. State of the UK Climate 2019 See figure 3.3, "Snow". ↩︎

  7. The collapse of insects, Reuters ↩︎

  8. Meta-analysis reveals declines in terrestrial but increases in freshwater insect abundances ↩︎

  9. Assoc Prof Simon Michaux - The quantity of metals required to manufacture just one generation of... ↩︎

  10. Post-doom, Michael Dowd ↩︎