Thread by @SteB777

I want to bring attention to something critically important, and which there's almost no understanding of.

There's no general understanding of how resilient our civilization will be to climate and ecological shocks, and no one is studying it. Really!

1/🧵pnas.org/doi/full/10.10…

When those such as @RogerHallamCS21 have warned that billions could die, he's been widely attacked for misrepresenting the science.

So what does the science actually say? Well nothing really, there is no realistic science about this. No one is actually studying it.
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The crucial issue is how will our system, our civilization, respond to climate and ecological shocks. Because to feed and support 8 billion people - many of which live in cities - we need long supply chains, and an organized economy to facilitate this.
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How will our system, our civilization, respond to those climate and ecological shocks, and how will it change the human system's ability to support and sustain the current population?

Absolutely no one knows or is attempting to research that. Not even enough to make a guess.
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It seems to me, that this is all about articles of faith. Beliefs that our system/civilization will always be like this, because it's special, and nothing will change that. That any decline would be a slow and could be halted, not a sudden collapse.
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I've never understood this faith based belief, as the modern global system, has only really emerged after WW2, even if it had older roots. Actually, the system as it is now, is really very young, just decades old. So it is not a well-founded belief.
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Things like the 2008 financial crash, demonstrate just how vulnerable our system is to in-built wobbles, let alone major changes and shocks to our system, from things such as climate change, ecosystems and biodiversity decline, parameters which wholly sustain our economy.
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What we need to understand is that our present system, is a system, totally reliant on lots of underlying processes, and that any change to these underlying processes, parameters, would profoundly change our whole civilization.
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Climate, and ecological shocks, will profoundly change how our system operates, our political systems, our governance, our economy, the financial system, and our societies i.e. our people and their attitudes. Nothing will be unchanged, and all will be radically altered.
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There is frightening ignorance about how this will alter our societies. With most making the wholly unrealistic assumption, that our societies and civilization will just be much like they are, just a bit tattier and frayed at the edges. This is utterly unrealistic.
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For a long time it's been forecast, that climate impacts alone, will result in more wars and global instability. Masses of climate refugees, would totally destabilize the world as it is. I'm not even mentioning the bigger ecological picture.
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All we can say with absolute certainty, is that it is going to be much, much different, to what almost everyone imagines, well at least all those in positions of power and influence.
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The other certainty is these changes, will make things worse. Our whole system is already crumbling, and not just in the UK. Almost all large countries have this systemic rot of some form. Climate change etc, will just make the situation much worse.

13/theguardian.com/politics/2024/…

I suspect the main reason there's a total lack of research into this, is the powerful fear what it would uncover, and what it would say about them.

Also politicians are still selling the old it's going to be much better in the future lie. It's also very complex.
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In other words, even an attempt to study it, would likely reveal it's probably beyond our abilities to understand it, and that the powerful in our society, have led us down a very dangerous rabbit hole. Enough to block any investigation and research.
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The last thing the rich and powerful want the public to know and understand, is that they have no idea what they are talking about, and that all the things they are promising the public about the future, are false. So they'd far rather not know.
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A lot of those climate and ecological/biodiversity impacts, are now locked in, to a certain degree. So whilst we can stop it getting really dire, in the future, there are still going to be great adversities, because of current ecological overshoot.
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All these futurists, talking about carbon removal technology, geo-engineering, the techno-optimists, seem not to have thought about, even for a second, what sort of future system is going to be implementing their imaginary technology.
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The assumption throughout is that governments will come together to fix these problems. Really?

Just look at the last 30 years of COP talks, where all they had to agree on, was a strategy to phase out fossil fuels. Hardly a model of this envisaged future cooperation.
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It's utterly bizarre, that in a world of political madness, increasingly crazy politicians, sabre-rattling, power play, and outright science denial, with crumbling societies, that governments will suddenly all come together to cooperate. Unrealistic is a total understatement.
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I'm not even going to attempt here, to forecast future scenarios, only to make people aware, that we are totally flying blind.

I'm pretty sure most people assume someone is studying this, when they're not.
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A small clique of scientists, optimists, go around trying to assure people everything is fine, and activists and other scientists are just doomers.

People probably mistakenly think they have some expertise in this, which they don't actually have.
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To be clear about this, climate science doesn't study the stability of our civilization, to climate shocks.

Yes, climate science, looks into sea level rise, extreme weather, future climates, but this tells us nothing about the state of our civilization, in response to this.
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So if a climate scientist assures you it will not be catastrophic, they are not offering any sort of scientific opinion, because they've never studied the impacts on our societies and civilization, and how they'll respond to these shocks. They're just personal opinions.
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We do need some general understanding of this, but currently there is none, no real research or investigation at all.

Certainly not the massive interdisciplinary research that would be necessary, to simply scope the situation.
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By scoping the situation. I mean just trying to get a preliminary grasp of the whole situation, it would be intended to study. This in itself, would need to be a massive enterprise. It might be realized we need new fields of science and methods, just to get a handle on it.
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One conclusion of such a massive interdisciplinary study, maybe that it is too complex for us to say too much about the situation. However, if that is the case we need to know this.
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No one really understands the current system, how it works, how it arose. Even if a lot like to pretend they do know this and understand it.

This is what facilitates this blasé attitude to the future, where people can say anything they want, without fear of contradiction.
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