Tag: Future

Climate Change

Carbon-neutrality by 2050

(Originally published on December 15, 2020. First major revision on June 13, 2022. This is the second major version.) A few years after carbon-neutrality became an official goal in the Paris Agreement of 2015, one after the other, governments started to announce that their countries would be carbon-neutral by 2050 or a little bit later. Richer countries generally opted for 2050, while China and India, for example, aimed for 2060 and 2070, respectively. The promise of carbon-neutrality by 2050 (or 2060, or 2070) is a cheap promise, however, as the target is so far in the future that it doesn’t...
Climate ChangeEconomics

Rent, Profit, and Degrowth – A Postscript to “Capitalism and Climate Collapse”

In Capitalism and Climate Collapse, I argued that catastrophic climate collapse cannot be avoided under capitalism because capitalism requires economic growth, economic growth requires energy growth, energy growth requires extensive burning of fossil fuels, and extensive burning of fossil fuels causes catastrophic climate collapse. To avoid collapse, we need to shrink the economy – that is, degrowth – to a sustainable level with respect to energy requirements, and then switch to a steady state economy to stay at that level. What exactly that sustainable level is is debatable, but regardless of whether it’s closer to one third of current closer...
Climate Change

SotA-R-10: Combined Models 4 and 5 Suggest 62% Change of Exceeding 3°C of Average Global Warming

(This is part 9 of the “Stages of the Anthropocene, Revisited” Series (SotA-R).) The previous episode in this series explained a few problems of the last iteration of the model used to better understand feedbacks between climate change and socio-political and economic circumstances (i.e. “Model 4”). Additionally, in another recent post, I mentioned that the relation between atmospheric carbon and warming is probably better treated as linear, with time lag explaining the discrepancy between a linear equation and the current level of warming. Furthermore, that post also addressed the issue of tipping points (and other neglected feedbacks), leading to an...
Climate Change

The Probability of the End of Civilization in the 21st Century

Climate scientists have been calling recently for more research into warming scenarios of 3°C and above because such scenarios are dangerously neglected. According to mainstream models such levels of warming are by no means impossible or even unlikely, and would have catastrophic effects. Luke Kemp and ten colleagues write: Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. The answer to the question in this quote is obviously “yes”, but that’s...
Climate Change

The New Denialism

The old denialism denied the reality of climate change. Funded by the fossil fuel industry it spouted disinformation and lies and fostered doubt. It changed climate change from an objectively observable fact into a political “opinion”. The old denialism is dead. Not even the fossil fuel industry denies climate change anymore. A new denialism has replaced it, however. The new denialism doesn’t deny climate change. In the contrary, it emphatically affirms it. The new denialism doesn’t deny that climate change is a serious problem either – it admits that too. What the new denialists deny is how big the crisis...
Climate Change

(Not) Too Late for What?

Some people seem to believe that it is too late to fight climate change. Others seem to believe that this kind of fatalism is as dangerous as climate change denialism (because both effectively advocate not doing anything). It’s hardly a secret that I’m rather pessimistic about climate change and its effects – just have a look at what I’ve written about the topic before – but that doesn’t mean that I think that it is “too late” to fight climate change. Rather, I think that the notion of it being “too late” (or not) in this context is nonsensical. The...
Climate ChangeSocial Issues

Lessons from the Ongoing Disaster (for the Next One)

Presumably, you are aware that we’re in the middle of a disaster. That’s unpleasant – to say the least – but it’s also quite instructive. There is much we can learn from the ongoing disaster and humanity’s responses to it. But whether we can use those lessons to avert the even bigger disaster looming on the horizon is questionable. Rather, it seems that the most important thing that we can learn from the corona crisis is that we as a species may very well be incapable of avoiding catastrophy. ignore and deny For months, the general attitude of most governments...
Climate Change

The Lesser Dystopia

(This is part 3 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In On the Fragility of Civilization, I argued that due to the slowly compounding effects of an increasing number of relatively localized “natural” disasters caused (directly or indirectly) by climate change, a vicious circle of failing disaster management, economic decline, civil unrest, and hunger will trigger a cascade of collapsing societies, eventually leading to global societal collapse in roughly 25 to 30 years from now (give or take a half decade). The world during and after collapse will be very different from what most of us have ever experienced,...
Climate Change

On the Fragility of Civilization

(This is part 2 in the No Time for Utopia series.) Doom has always been a major attraction for some, perhaps even many people. There are whole subgenres of extreme (heavy) metal built on the aesthetics of death, doom, and decay. But “doom” in the form of extreme pessimism about the (near) future is also increasingly common in discussions about climate change and its effects. In Stages of the Anthropocene I tried to look into the more distant future. Whether what I found is an example of “doom” in this sense is debatable – at least I didn’t predict human...
Climate Change

Fictionalism – or: Vaihinger, Scheffler, and Kübler-Ross at the End of the World

In 1911 the now almost forgotten German philosopher Hans Vaihinger published Die Philosophie des Als Ob (The Philosophy of ‘As if’) in which he argued for something approaching global fictionalism. In the preface to the second English edition of his book he wrote: The principle of Fictionalism . . . is as follows: “An idea whose theoretical untruth or incorrectness, and therewith its falsity, is admitted, is not for that reason practically valueless and useless; for such an idea, in spite of its theoretical nullity may have great practical importance.” Fictionalism is the view that claims in some area of...