This is not a thread for Doomers

[RobertEarl]

This is a thread for those who think we can survive.

You know, survive; that this society can survive pretty much intact even after one, or more, of the following real life scenarios happens.

A very large asteroid smacks the earth.

Global warming leads to acidic oceans, 10 foot higher sea levels and a greatly altered climate right in your back yard.

Radiation from the 430+ nuclear power plants is, one way or another, unleashed much the same as Chernobyl, or Fukushima.

A sun spot releases a Coronal Mass Ejection that ends up directly hitting earth and thereby burning up our electric grid.

I need ya'll not Doomers to chime in and tell me that there is some hope. That even after one of these weapons of mass destruction does its deed, I will still be able to get groceries, turn on my overhead lights and tune into to the latest personal outrage on DU.

I need some hope, dammit. Give me hope!!

[LiberalEsto]

1. Cheer up -- humans will manage to evolve

[NoOneMan]

5. Evolution doesn't take place overnight

The issue of today is that the environmental changes occurring today vastly exceed rates in the past. We cannot fit enough human generations in (not counting the generations needed of other organisms that our ecosystem depends on), before this reaches critical mass, such that we can adapt to the changes in order to survive.

And remember, natural selection works via death. We've been subverting the process for at least 10K years. Its only when nature begins culling us that we will "evolve" (and that doesn't in itself suggest adaptations towards sentience), and we may not be able to adapt before nature finishing such culling. This isn't your great-grand-apes' catastrophe

[NoOneMan]

2. "Global warming leads to acidic oceans, 10 foot higher sea levels and a greatly altered climate...."

10 million scallops dead in Canada thanks to overly acidic water
PH levels have dropped from 8.2 to 7.3 over the last 3 decades.


Metro Vancouver storm surge a climate-change preview
According to B.C. government estimates, ocean levels could rise up to 80 cm at Nanaimo and up to 120 cm in the Fraser Delta by 2100, due to climate change.

Altered climate? Check the E&E forum. Its already here. This isn't a "doomer" thing. Its a rejection of flat-earthin it.

[femmocrat]

3. Do you really sit around thinking about such scenarios?

Maybe you need a vacation?

[zappaman]

4. well...

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/doomsday-preppers/videos/prepper-profile-robert-earl/

[femmocrat]

12. Thanks.

[RobertEarl]

14. Vacation, eh?

Imagine if FEMA took a vacation?

How about all the planners and such?

No, all you've offered is just mindless 'what? me worry'.

You should get down on your knees and thank all those who do look out after the innocent people and make plans for alleviating their problems.

I guess you and zappa would just as soon ambulances and the police went on vacation?

Yep. Neither of you offer any hope.

[femmocrat]

16. Never assume.

I just can't spend my golden years worrying about things that will never happen. Life is short. Let's party instead.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

6. Well, there is a wee bit of hope.

If you check the levels of all greenhouse gasses, not just CO2, available at this page, you'll notice, if you scroll down to the table that gives the yearly levels of each, a column over on the right that gives you the yearly percent increase. Up until 1989, it was pretty consistently 2% or more. Since that year, there's only been one that featured a 2% increase. In this century, we're running very close to 1% per year.
On the other hand most of that reduction in the rate of increase is due to the Montreal Protocol and its continuing effects in bringing down the levels of CFC's.
On the third hand (left foot?), the US has reduced its CO2 emissions by a whole bunch the last few years.
On the fourth hand (right foot?), that trend stalled out over the past year.

I'm out of appendages, I think.

[hobbit709]

7. I don't fret over thikngs like asteroids or CME's.

There's absolutely nothing that can be done about those by humans. And in the 4.5 billion years this planet has been here it's happened more than once. We may be the first species that has managed its own extinction but the cosmic level ones are nothing we can alter.

[RobertEarl]

9. Right. But nothing we can do?

See, you have no hope to offer. I was afraid of that type response.

[hobbit709]

11. Well there's one thing you can do if a mountain size asteroid comes this way.

Bend over and kiss ass goodbye.

[Scootaloo]

27. We're innovative, but we're not wizards

And I swear to all the gods of human delusion, if you say "but we landed on the moon!" Imma come after you with a foam noodle. Trigonometry and solid-fuel rockets do not equate the ability to deflect a flying mountain, or shield us from a magnetic ejaculation from the killer ball of plasma we're swinging around annually.

[hunter]

8. All your ancestors, going back to the beginning of life on earth, managed to survive and reproduce.

Imagine that!

[RobertEarl]

10. Back to the future?

So you have no hope for this society being able to survive with groceries and all that?

[hunter]

21. I like to think I know how to walk or swim away from trouble.

That seems to have worked out okay for all my human ancestors.

Wherever the wars and famines were, they were not.

My wife and I both have outspoken Irish ancestors who escaped the famines and the English hangman's noose. One of mine jumped off a ship in San Francisco. I've another ancestor who walked away from the Civil War. There were no computer databases to track people then. A good man was as he claimed to be, and women didn't get drafted.

My wife's Irish ancestors ended up in Catholic Mexico and bad-old-days frontier Chicago. Later on they were immigrant farmworkers.

Another of my ancestors, a continental European ancestor, was a mail order bride to Salt Lake City who decided she didn't like sharing a husband so she ran off with a U.S. government surveyor. Many of her less radical cousins and their descendent's did not survive the great wars of Europe.

I think the Mormons still consider her survival some kind of unpaid debt. But they never come to my house to collect it. With interest it's well into the multi-millions now. No pair of nicely dressed and polite Boy Elders on Bicycles is ever going to collect that, especially with my non-existent credit rating. So they don't bother me. In fact, I think they avoid me.

I don't think this society is going to survive, there's actually no way it can, but we this society, might come up with some better society.

I've got enough solar panels to read and write at night, enough blankets to stay warm, and I know how to grow food organically if my other skills fail me. My wife and I abandoned automobile commuter society in the 'eighties and we've been fortunate enough that it's worked for us ever since. In our current situation gasoline is a luxury, not a necessity. I like to believe it's possible to create that sort of society for everyone.

If not, I can always embarrass my kids and go back to my invisible semi-homeless guy gig that was my most common state between ages 17 and 25 years old, well, at least so long as my dumpster diving body holds out. The manager of Taco Bell used to give my single man high functioning Autistic self her timed-out throw it away food, but that's a very twisted and sometimes sordid story. Her girlfriend tried to kill herself in my bathtub but I broke the door lock. They're still married, I'm married, and it's all worked out, long past moments of extreme terror.

My parents are even more eccentric than I am. They retreated to a tropical rain forest. They drink and wash in the water that falls on their roof. They eat local produce. I've never seen their retirement home. It's too far to swim, thousands of miles, and I can't afford the airfare. Maybe someday. But we can talk on the phone and send e-mails with photographs. How awesome is that?

[Jefferson23]

13. Lots of hope out there to buy ahead of time.

[RobertEarl]

15. Ahead of time?

That's why I need some hope. There seems to be so little 'Ahead of time' thinking. Upthread someone told me I should go on vacation. SMH.

[Jefferson23]

17. You could, then pick up the duck tape on the way back home.

Duck tape = hope.

[longship]

18. First, there's little danger for USA from Fukushima.

Yup! There's stuff being poured into the Pacific, but thank goodness that it gets diluted before it reaches our shores. There's little evidence that it's having any effect on sea food. Thank goodness. But we need to keep watch. And what the fuck do you do with the waste?

The biggest danger we all have right now is climate change. That's the real biggie. The big issue is that there is a huge political obstruction to any science which would state that we have a problem. We will likely pay dearly for that because the cost increases dramatically as we delay reparations. I don't see anything around this if we don't take action soon. The climate scientists agree. The oil companies do not.

Asteroids are inevitable. But they are all long term. Thank goodness because it will take a long time prediction to avoid disaster when it comes. There's the b612 Foundation and NASA planetary science doing their best. The Chelyabinsk meteor last year was an awakening. We are going to get this done. We need to keep funding NASA, because this is a job they know how to do better than anybody. They have their top people working on it, but with too little funding. But I think we've got this one.

[Jgarrick]

19. All right...let's look at each of these scenarios one by one:

A very large asteroid smacks the earth.

Well, that depends on one's definition of "large", doesn't it? If an asteroid with a diameter of about a mile hit the earth, it would be civilization-wreaker. It would probably land in one of the oceans...which is bad. We're talking thousand-foot high tidal waves impacting the world's coastal cities and a nuclear winter. Some civilization would probably survive, but it would knock us back a century or ten. If the asteroid is smaller, the effects would be smaller as well. Of course, if it's much bigger (say, 7 to 10 miles wide, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs) you can kiss humanity goodbye. Make it 50 miles wide and you can say goodbye to anything above the level of a cockroach.

The good news is that there's virtually no chance of an asteroid even 1 mile wide hitting us for the forseeable future. Any asteroids of that size (and considerably smaller) has been discovered and its orbit mapped out.

Of course, there's the chance that a comet from the Oort Cloud could come out of nowhere and slam into us, which much the same results...but the chance of that happening anytime soon is extraordinarily small.

Global warming leads to acidic oceans, 10 foot higher sea levels and a greatly altered climate right in your back yard.

Even were such a worst-case scenario to come to pass, it
a) Isn't likely in your lifetime.
b) Wouldn't result in civilization being wiped out, although it would have a drastic impact on it.

Radiation from the 430+ nuclear power plants is, one way or another, unleashed much the same as Chernobyl, or Fukushima.

What...all at once? We've had 2 such events in half a century. Even were the rate of such disasters to increase by a factor dramatically, it wouldn't be a civilization-wrecker. Mind you, from a personal perspective I wouldn't want to be downwind of one.

A sun spot releases a Coronal Mass Ejection that ends up directly hitting earth and thereby burning up our electric grid.

Now this one could be a civilization-wrecker. Were such an event to occur (and one did 1859!) it could destroy the entire power grid, resulting in hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of deaths. It's estimated that a coronal mass ejection of such magnitude occures every 500 years or so. Isn't that a cheery thought?

[RobertEarl]

22. CME would be a wreck

All the nuclear spent fuel pools need electricity to keep the pumps running so the pools do not overheat and blow up. Take out the grid and BOOM!

And as for the nuke disasters, the Japanese have recently concluded that we can expect one disaster every 7 years. And that is just major ones. We are pretty much on track for a nuclear problem rising every year, given Hanford and now WIPP in the last two years.

Sea rise- could happen rapidly were a Greenland glacier to slide, or an ice shelf in Antarctica were to make a move. A minimum 10 foot rise in short order would flood many major cities. And ports. Flood our ports and mass transportation of food and fuel can be written off.

I appreciate your attempt but as you can see you are just wishcasting. <grin>

[muriel_volestrangler]

30. CMEs are already prepared for

A CME typically takes 3 to 5 days to reach the Earth after it leaves the Sun. Observing the ejection of CMEs from the Sun provides an early warning of geomagnetic storms. Only recently, with SOHO, has it been possible to continuously observe the emission of CMEs from the Sun and determine if they are aimed at the Earth.

http://hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov/sftheory/spaceweather.htm

SOHO is at the L1 Lagrangian point, between the Sun and the Earth. It has the Sun permanently in view, and monitors the state of the Sun. We thus get 3 to 5 days warning of CMEs, and the grid operators can disconnect parts to ensure minimal damage.

[Motown_Johnny]

35. How about a gamma ray burst?

The entire planet fried in seconds.


Prepare for THAT!

[Rex]

20. Where will you be when the big one hits?

Think about it.

[RobertEarl]

23. On the intertube is where I'll be

I almost forgot: Yellowstone!

[pinboy3niner]

25. Careful, they have cliffs there

Remember that the things that scare you most may not be the things that do you in.

"Hell, the fall will probably kill you."

[Rex]

32. Yeah and we are so overdue.

HA. I will be glued here too...talking with you guys about our eminent destruction.

[AverageJoe90]

24. There is legitimate reason to be hopeful about climate change, TBH.

Renewable energy continues to make strides like never before. More and more people are becoming aware of ACC in the world in general. I could go on but this should be enough.

[Scootaloo]

26. Depends on what you're talking about

Humans will survive. We might hit some more bottlenecks like the Toba event, which could put us very close to the brink... but barring such immediate catastrophe, we're a pretty adaptable bunch; Grandpa H. erectus probably weathered worse, and he did so for nearly two million years.

The exception would be that nuclear event you're talking about. That would fuck us real good. Humans are bad at radiation. Not that most mammals are particular good with it, but we seem to be especially sensitive (possibly due to long childhoods, long lifespans, and being buck-ass naked)

And since humans are social animals, there will undoubtedly be some sort of society to the very end.

If you're hinging on modern high-tech information-age society surviving any of that though... Well, maybe in some highly limited form. I hate to keep plugging the book in these threads, but I believe Paolo Bacigalupi captures a pretty good change of advanced society in the peak of climate change, post-oil in "The Windup Girl." A return to human and animal labor for energy needs, some scattering of renewable energy harvesting, a return to wind power for sailing, with much human effort going towards preserving what we have left.

[RobertEarl]

28. Finally!!

A glimmer of hope!!

Have you heard about the Russian population in decline?

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/02/world/plunging-life-expectancy-puzzles-russia.html

[Scootaloo]

29. That article is nearly 20 years old

As for hope... well, like i said, it depends on what sort of "society" you're talking about. So long as there are two humans on hte planet, there will be some sort of human society.

Don't pin your sights on some semi-utopian high tech future, though. The only way to get there is if we throw our remaining fossil fuel energy resources into expanding solar, tidal, and geothermal energy right now. Even then we're going to take a hit when the oil becomes too expensive to pump; our understanding of civilization is as dependent on the by-products of oil energy production as it is on the energy itself.

And of course, it's already too late to stop global warming; that moment came and passed more than thirty years ago. That one's going to hit us, unless some absolute genius comes up with a method of rapid carbon-sinking and storage. Not impossible, of course, but the scale and speed needed mak it an unlikely proposition - like I say upthread, we're not wizards. Climate change is then, pretty inevitable.

We'll live. Lots of other stuff will live too. It'll be a mass extinction, when taken in full... but more akin to the late Pleistocene extinctions; nothing like the K-T event, much less the Permian Event.

If you're asking if out current society, with its nation-states, global trade, electrical and information grids, and all of that will survive? No. In fact the nation-state part of that is already decaying back into tribalism, in large part due to the increasing fragility of oil-based economics and trade - at least in places where nation-sates weren't always a thin veneer over existing tribalism.

[CFLDem]

31. I'm right with you, buddy!

These doomers often lack proper historical context and likely embrace doomism to give their lives a modicum of meaning beyond their own lifetimes.

[MrScorpio]

33. Hit the Road, Cormac McCarthy style. nt

[Motown_Johnny]

34. The human race will end, it is inevitable.

The entire planet will eventually, no longer support life. All the stars in the galaxy, and even in the universe, will someday burn out. All life everywhere will end.



Eat Drink and be Merry for tomorrow, or some several million or billion years from now, we all shall die.

[snooper2]

36. I'm sorry, but one of those scenarios is happening on June 23rd 2014

So, it's up to you what you want to do-

If you have any stuff you want to get rid of though I might be interested!


Could you post a list?

[Blue_In_AK]

37. It may be possible that a few humans will survive.

Wasn't there a time in our far distant past when the anthropologists theorize that there were only a few thousand of our species alive? We have an amazing ability to procreate.

It's just a shred of hope, anyway.