Alright, so we pump energy into a chaotic system and obviously the extremes will get more exteme. Stronger hurricanse, colder hurricanse and snap freezes, deeper floods, wet bulb events further north than you think possible, whatever. This is the known unknown.

I am existentially afraid of the unknown unknowns. At what point do the phytoplankton I’m currently breathing the poop of have a mass extinction event? All of human civilization is about to drown on dry land and I spend 5 days a week maintaining software that charges people for turning on their lights.

I crave death I crave oblivion death to america death to capitalism death to me.

  • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    Last time an anoxic ocean event happened, terrestrial surface temperatures were about 12 C higher than they are now; there’s plenty of other stuff that’ll kill you before we come anywhere near that.

                  • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    5 months ago

                    You aren’t responding rationally to the world ending, you’re responding irrationally to untreated mental illness. You have anxiety. You are drinking to self-medicate. You are posting on the internet to seek validation. There are plenty of excellent and reasonable arguments being made in this thread, and none of them are going to help you because whether or not the world is going to end soon is not the root cause of the way you feel.

                    You don’t have any information that the rest of us don’t have. We also feel the crushing weight of a potential future full of suffering and death on a global scale, but it’s clear that most of us aren’t responding to it in this way. Even people who agree on the merits, that things are fucked and getting worse, aren’t behaving the way you’re behaving, and that should give you pause.

                    I’m not saying that your worries are unfounded, because that’s frankly irrelevant. I’m saying that your response to those worries is unhealthy. You either need to find a way to accept the state of the world, or find a way to channel your energy into changing it, but you won’t stop suffering if you can’t find a way to interrupt your current pattern of thought and behavior.

                    I can guarantee you with absolute conviction that arguing on the internet about whether or not the biosphere might hypothetically collapse one day will not solve anything for you.

      • ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        The systems that govern out societies are far more fragile than the ecological systems. Global trade will break down well before the phytoplankton will die off. War, chaos and, (hopefully) revolution will come before human extinction.

        In that period of chaos, there is hope that new just societies will emerge, which can navigate and control the changing climate. It is our job now to lay what groundwork we can for them to emerge.

        Yes this is apocalyptic but its not doomer.

        • BigHaas [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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          5 months ago

          Global trade will break down well before the phytoplankton will die off.

          You have no evidence for this and no reason to believe this.

          • ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            5 months ago

            My man, we’re not going to continue shipping oil across the ocean when there’s no phytoplankton. We’re not going to be able to do much by that point.

            Those “other things” are going to break the trade systems sooner than later. You already the trade routes slow down to covid. You’re seeing it again with Ansarallah in the Red Sea. More things like that are coming.

              • ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                5 months ago

                Apocalyptic but not doomer

                Its gonna suck but we can survive this. Its like being a prepper but you prep by being a part of a community instead of hording guns and spam alone in a bunker. The bigger and more mobilized the community is the better off you are.

                Practical anarchism will become very relevant. Mutual aid, affinity networks, etc. You don’t have to be an anarchist to do them. It’s just gonna be good praxis as capitalist society breaks down.

                Just find like minded people IRL. Its the solution to all doomerism.

    • BigHaas [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      5 months ago

      Let me give a more sober response lol.

      The plankton are just an example of a species we rely on. There are dozens of these species, and we know from the recent snow crab die off that mass death events will happen and no scientists can predict them.

      I think if we make it another five years without the first massive famine occuring we will be very very lucky. Should this urgency motivate some different tactics? Like maybe we could do something other than book clubs? Idk that’s all drunk me was trying to say.

      • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        There’s plenty of stuff happening that you personally can’t predict that might kill you; you’re still more likely to die in a car accident than you are in a famine, even with the new risks posed by climate change.

        The cold truth of it is there already are famines - East Africa is dealing with simultaneous droughts and locust outbreaks and has been either severely food insecure or in famine since 2020. There will be more famines in the future, and they’ll largely impact the already poor areas of the global south who can’t afford to easily import food. There’ll be production failures in the North as well, but we could take a 50% hit to our food production and still have enough to feed everyone - that’s how much we waste. Prices will likely go up, yields will go down, quality will be lower, but we in the North will have enough food for a long time. If it makes you feel better.

        Yes we absolutely should be doing more but I imagine those of us who have figured out what to do are out having an adventure-time and not posting about it on Hexbear.