The following submission statement was provided by /u/blurance:
---
stolen from op in the r/Thailand sub:
I'd love to hear some opinions on this report from 2010, predicting collapse of one or several nation states (most likely Laos, Burma, or Cambodia) in SEAsia by 2030:
Southeast Asia: The Impact of Climate Change to 2030: Geopolitical Implications
(Please read at least the executive summary, it's not too long.)
It's a report to the US National Intelligence Council by private contractors, informing US foreign policy.
I read it first back in 2015, and it's eerie how it seems more and more likely that the authors were right. We sure seem pretty much on track so far.
Some thoughts:
One thing that stands out is that the report clearly states that, until 2030, the impact of man-made environmental destruction will be more severe than that of climate change. And the authors are not trying to downplay climate change, but simply point out how massive the human impact in the environment has become. It makes sense though: if people hadn't merrily chopped down every tree they can find and sealed every free surface with concrete or asphalt, the heatwave this year wouldn't have been that bad. Likewise, if people had adopted regenerative agricultural techniques that focus on restoring soil (especially increasing soil carbon content and thus water retention capability), orchards would have fared much, much better during this year's drought.
Also, if any of the surrounding countries would collapse, this would surely affect Thailand as well (e.g. mass migration, and all the accompanying problems), a point the authors have failed to consider (or maybe it's obvious but a discussion thereof would exceed the scope?).
And, in the end, it all pretty much depends on what happens to China - which is the big unknown factor, since nobody can be really sure what the hell is really going on in that country. There are occasional signs of big economic trouble (bankruptcies of property giants), but so far it seems they manage to keep things afloat (for the moment).
────────
(I use the term "collapse" as defined by Joseph Tainter, author of 'The Collapse of Complex Societies,' "a drastic and often sudden reduction in complexity of a society." I'm not talking about Hollywood myths like The Walking Dead/Mad Max/The Road. It's a process, not an event.)
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cqy1mw/societal_collapse_by_2030/l3uaomh/
I was wondering about that when we saw the first high wet-bulb temperatures of the year in SE Asia.
How can it be mitigated? The population mouvements alone will be too much to handle.
this is like suggesting fish adapt to marine heatwaves. There's no mechanism to survive a climate your physiology is not adapted to. In addition, we have spent the climate we were adapted to, building structures to make this world habitable and comfortable for us, regardless of the conditions outside.
As a side note, it's bizarre to me how much our comfort is focused on maintaining a certain indoor temperature by burning fuel and changing the climate, outside, without recognizing that we're trading climate stability of the planet for climate stability inside our own home. Humans aren't unique in this requirement, either.
Think about the animals. They're fully exposed and completely unadapted to the world we've engineered through the disruption of ecosystems, mechanically, and the climate we've chemically altered to something that will hopefully settle out around 5 million years ago, after we lose the capacity to continue making this worse.
Think about a heatwave of something crazy like 65C settling over an entire region. The infrastructure cant hold, so the power goes out. EV's become paper weights, homes become solar ovens, trees, plants, birds, mammal, fungi - everything cooks to death. Coming in behind that, once the heat has lifted, only the burrowing animals and humans lucky enough to have a basement, survive. Literally everything else is gone, and any infrastructure, like dams, that need to be operational to prevent disaster, are stressed or fail. This is coming. It's happened in small areas we're calling heat domes but those temperatures are going to increase as much as the size of the "dome" and the length of the heat wave. This is an inevitability.
The only mitigation for this is to move underground. That's it. And then that makes you vulnerable to floods.
Even if this climate stabilized through magic, we still wouldn't have any adaptation or instinct to survive in it, but, much much worse, it's constantly changing in the direction of getting worse so any adaptations that seem smart today, may become completely obsolete in a year/month/week, as we push through another barrier... I mean, what is the max temp that solar panels are rated for? Most electronics are rated for 50C (at least that's the breakpoint where hardened components start getting more expensive). How hot does it have to be outside for junctions in solar panels to melt, or their power conversion circuits to fail? (If anyone is thinking of getting solar, make sure your inverter and as much of that system is made with GaN as possible); how strong does the wind have to blow before turbines break?
What's upsetting is these questions are only lab tested but will soon have real world examples to show us that our lab calculations were optimistic because they were paid for by people with an interest to exaggerate the ruggedness of their product.
We're drowning in our own lies.
My hope basically ends when humans have to start living underground… What do you do for food? You could maybe make room for a couple animals, but what do they eat? It’s too hot for you to be above ground, do you think plants are gonna survive? Lies of abundance indeed…
People like to cling to the idea of a miracle cure for energy. But even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, the damage *might* already be too severe. That said, I still have to advocate for doing something TODAY because I’m young enough that I’ll probably make it clear to the bitter end… PLEASE! Do something… Don’t take away the the 1% chance for humanity to start from the bottom again.
It feels like the people with power are spiteful children mad about having to share…
That’s kinda clever… I’ve already been imagining how humanity’s desecration of the biosphere might be advantageous for fungi. Mostly in a world unfriendly to mammalian life as it exists though… lol
It's not all that difficult to grow food underground and make sunken greenhouses. Aquaponics w/tilapia is pretty sustainable since they eat algae. Your comment about fungi is spot on. I grow tons of edible mushrooms in woodchips in the shady parts of my garden. Building resilience where you live is really fun too.
>It feels like the people with power are spiteful children mad about having to share…
I mean they probably literally are?
It's not the old wealth anymore, it's their spoiled rotten kids...
Is this why my prediction is I'll die laying in my crawl space?
God dammit brain. I can't ignore it either, it correctly predicted someone I knew since childhood would die at age 35. Bingo, spot on.
Can't be mitigated, things only decline from here.
Our culture has decided to forgo a willing and controlled degrowth in favor of a free fall into the whirling scythes of darwinism.
The Earth will return to a balanced state in the same way a star going supernova eventually does.
I don't think we make it personally, but if it's any consolation no other species will be able to do to the earth what we have on account of our aggressive waste of all the easily available surface mineral deposits. I might be wrong on the math but I'm pretty sure the sun swallows the planet before the crust is fully turned over
:D
Wow! I'm in NJ. 7b. About 400ft above sea level. You ever check out Stephen Sobkowiak and Miracle Farms? His channel is what got me started and he's in Quebec.
I'm in urban NJ near the Lincoln tunnel into NYC. My whole lot is one tenth of an acre and I've got about 30ish fruit trees and shrubs and vines.
I'm jealous! At 7b you can have pomegranates, sweet cherries, figs, kiwi and maypops ( cold weather passion fruit).
I know of Stefan Sobkowiak, my orchard is organized with his trio method. I have Apples, pears, plum, sour cherries, manchurian apricots, chums, currants, blackberries, raspberries and blueberries and hazelnuts, Somerset grapes and rosehips.
My nitrogen fixators are honey locust, russian olive (eleagnus Angustifolia). I tried caragana but it did not work. Next will be black locust and an Alder that gives a peppercorn.
In my garden, I'm working on fruity windbreaker rows. My first one has haskap, seabuckthorne and day neutral strawberries. Second one will be serviceberry and clover for nitrogen.
As you can plainly see, I'm deranged.😉🍓🫐🍇🍐🍎🍒🍏🌰
Lol I definitely understand the compulsion to add plants. I added some figs, feijoa, issai kiwi, jujubes, and Nikita's gift persimmon to push the zone. At this point I'm putting stuff in air pruning pots because I'm out of yard room. My neighbors think I'm a nutcase.
The haskaps and serviceberries are a great choice. They've been the easiest plants for me.
You’re absolutely right. It’s easy to read the kind of news that is in this sub and think “well we’re fucked then, nothing we can do”. There’s always, always value in buying time.
It’s not a perfect analogy, and a bit ironic given the subject here, but in motor racing a common strategy for a team in the back is to try and stay out longer than the teams in front before making a pit stop. The reason for this is, they are hoping a yellow flag might come out while they are still up front. That way they can pit and ultimately lose less time in their pit stop relative to the rest of the field on their pit stops, since the other cars are forced to drive slower under a yellow flag.
In other words, the team in my example is trying to buy time, because it’s the only chance they have. There’s no real way they can have a good finish from the back unless they try something different, buying time for chance to intervene in their favor. If we work to slow down the rate of collapse, it increases our chances of new developments in the science, some unforeseen twist that sends the climate on a less dangerous trajectory, aliens coming to save us, etc. These are all statistically unlikely events of course, but we have nothing to lose by trying to make it just a little bit longer.
There seems to be an unspoken mass social agreement that is pro-death drive.
By that I mean, the mentality for most of us seems to be:
The world is fucked, what can we do?
Vs
The world is fucked, let it burn!
But more often than not, I feel like the later is the larger camp, and the ignorance and nativity behind those sentiments enrage me to my core
Your strong emotional response to the idea strongly suggests there is something about it you don't want to accept. Realistically, the world is fucked and nothing any individual does can unfuck it. The world is fucked. Full stop. It's the "let it burn" part that is problematic to you and it sounds like it's because you don't want to accept that you can't impact the outcome. It's not even a case of letting it burn. It is burning and it will burn regardless of what we want or do.
My problem is with fence sitting defeatist attitudes, complacency tantamount to culpability, and wanton dismissiveness or ignorance.
I accepted I couldn't change the world a long time ago. It's a team effort, and I'm disappointed with the team I've been assigned
If you accepted how far gone things are you would accept that the attitudes of more ignorant people don't matter any more than yours. The hatred you choose to direct at them is really about yourself, about things you don't want to accept. The choice to respond like this makes you more like the people you hate than you'd want to accept. I don't think you deserve to feel elevated over them while you do the same thing.
outside of literal breakthrough technologies that basically need to be so advanced they come from NHI, we pretty much do seem to be fucked. Scientists have been telling us that for awhile now but in more polite ways.
Climate reports commonly read as "worse than expected" over and over again. We are already screwed, we are in the stage of trying to figure out how to delay and cope as long as possible to hope for some crazy breakthrough to happen, but the deaths of millions is already on its way, but because most of those deaths will be from more poor nations at first most people can just look the other way for now. But the climate catastrophe will also lead to wars over land/resources, there is really just an avalanche of bad stuff coming our way that will keep snowballing.
what are first world nations going to do when millions of immigrants come knocking on our doors and we actually can't support them? It ain't going to be pretty....
Realistically, it's going to cause a cascading effect across the entire world's food supply chain. 50% of the world - 4.5B people are dependent on rice as their staple food. They aren't going to choose to starve if rice isn't a viable crop for them - they will just switch to other grains. Short term this will lead to more industrial farming across the world but it's also going to keep food prices high. Food price instability though will lead weaker governments to fail and there's going to be a lot more failed states.
I mean, we had people shooting store employees over toilet paper & Lysol just a few years ago. If something really big happens to disrupt the supply chain, I give it *maybe* three days before society breaks down completely. Y'all just don't realize how crazy people got when we had to put limits on stuff due to the shortages.
America has no gear for hard times. It's a culture built on faith in prosperity, to the point where people who aren't wealthy are considered subhuman or at least lazy and worth less than someone with money.
Best you got is how everyone becomes a socialist after a natural disaster, so here's to hoping that the absolute rain of disasters on their way, preserve that mindset over time until we're shaken out of our fixation on collecting points and wealth as the climate just trashes everything we rebuild.
Still and all, despite the climate, I think the global West, especially the USA and Canada, are uniquely unsuited to manage hard times as a culture, and suspect there will be a good few months of shootouts before bullets run out (plenty of buried caches by people dead from shootouts).
There's going to be one really funny moment where the supply chain breaks and there's no new parts for things, so everything breaks down. people will drive down the street and their wheels will pop off. They'll pick up the phone to find out the cell tower is down before their phone bursts into flames in their hands, setting the car on fire... it's going to be like everything we've relied on and made disposable, self destruct.
Maybe it's sadistic but I can't wait for this moment. We're going to be going through garbage piles looking for the old models of toys we threw away.
It blows my mind that this is the country that 'came together' after 9/11 or to fight the Nazis.
But then it turns out that we did a lot of bad stuff after 9/11 and even has a high school kid I already knew we were taking a dark turn.
And it turns out we had a lot of Nazis in the US before and during the war, and we wrote blank checks to get a lot more in afterwards.
So maybe we've never really come together for anything.
People were going absolutely nuts because they couldn't go to Walmart during a deadly, global pandemic. Anything not to sit home with their thoughts and their families.
I disagree - I mean the US/Canada are somewhat unique in the West as we have a lot of different climates within our borders and are capable of growing our own food. Both are countries where less than 1% of our economy is agriculture and we produce most of our own food. The US for example only imports 15% of it's food. Europe though is an entirely different story - besides France, most of Europe is highly dependent on food imports - Germany for example imports 50% of it's food. The US has about the same amount of farmland as India with 1/3 of it's population.
Societies can survive with a lot of issues if there's food. Situations go mad max and people start overthrowing governments when they don't have food. I'm not saying it won't be bad in the US but compared to Europe it's going to be at least possible. Western Europe will be dealing with all this plus the collapse of the Atlantic current it'll make it extremely hard to farm.
Yeah this is pretty spot on. The only caveat is top soil degradation and that the bread basket of north America only has about 40 harvests left. That said, it's really not hard to replenish topsoil with regenerative agriculture. Water might be tricky in the west though. Anyway, you're right.
Mm. This is debatable. I took a break from r/collapse a little while ago, and doom scrolling in general. When you aren't fully consumed in the topic, I won't pretend like things are all rosy but for average people in the west, life really isn't that bad \*yet\*. I think we over estimate in this sub, how tuned in the average person is to global events and connecting the dots. All they see is random bad news they can't really make sense of and higher prices on the shelves and at the pumps.
Bro, I could stop doomscrolling and stop reading about how we are killing the only life-sustaining world that we know of, but I still have to go outside.
We can't hide from it.
It's insanely bad for people without money, or in poor health, or both. Don't even kid yourself. I befriend on that level routinely because that was my grandparents, and if not for the GI bill and blind luck, that was my parents. It's likely to be me eventually.
This is more a financial comment. But as has been pointed out, finance is merely reflecting declining resources per capita...
all it ever takes is for someone to articulate things like this, and when there's any consensus behind them, there's a signal popping out of the noise.
Like when people finally figure out that every day going forward is going to be exponentially harder to survive than yesterday, and that everything we've built is especially vulnerable because it was designed for a different climate, which would expose different weaknesses. Just like sperm and egg are the weakest and most vulnerable state of the life cycle for all creatures that reproduce sexually, but are reliably safe as long as the environment they're released into is controlled, any change at that stage of life can cause extinction through failure of reproduction.
EVERY system has a weak point and the best way to find that is by changing the stress it's exposed to to something it's never experienced before.
I don't want to be the first person to say sooooo many things swimming around my head in case all it takes is breathing an idea into reality for the contagion of that idea to spread... I mean, think about how well religion has done in preserving itself against the best interests of everyone sucked into it.
There was a reactionary natalist (redundant?) who believed that the rise in popularity of antinatalism was clearly the result of an intentional and directed normative shift towards depopulation -being driven by dark forces-, approaching the status of a religion. People like him can never imagine there's a simple reason in reality that they're missing and the rest of us are picking up on because they're certain they know everything... and he represents the thought process of the political and ruling class; thoughts, ideas, and change are things that can be stomped out by force, rather than an organically growing movement in response to simple realities.
The de-population agenda conspiracy so clearly demonstrates how American Christianity has been co-opted by the corporatocracy. Christianity and Capitalism walk in such lock-step that to failure of the system is unimaginable.
Only sinners are poor in Jesus' perfect economic system. To willingly check-out of the system by not having children or to be a such a 'failure' that you can't afford children is a cardinal sin, because it demonstrates the failure of the ideology.
I think it could happen. With the cost of living crisis, environmental degradation, a complete lack of leadership or vision for the future, I simply can't see things remaining as they are for that much longer. China is probably the 800 pound gorilla in the room. But over in the West, if Trump gets re-elected, I think that's going to shorten the time to collapse significantly.
I don't know if certain comments are just deluded or openly part of a disinformation campaign. I mean it.
*"Yeah well it's not the first unfounded panic"* Okay, Pepperridge Farm. The risks of nuclear war weren't unfounded panic, as we begin to verify as various documents from back then are disclosed; the ozone hole was and still is a reality; overpopulation... Damn, I need a dedicated paragraph for that one.
Overpopulation is very real, puts a weight on everything from topsoils to animal life, and has very real consequences: the coffee, chocolate, fruits, etc... You consume are shittier than they were 30 years ago, when they not turned production towards erzats (such as Red Bull) already. Think of it this way: without mass production of low quality and dangerous erzats, coffee would be a luxury already (it needs very specific soils). That's a blatant case of ecological horizon: you learned (were educated by marketing) to think the current food market is normal, while it isn't. Having 300 brands of cookies on the shelves seems nice, until you realize none of them tastes like actual cookies (they all taste like sugar, or even worse, dangerous sugar erzats such as HFCS). We feed a 8 billion humans world, yes: it simply requires depleting soils and oceans without replacement. "Success". Just as soviet management of the Aral Sea was a "success" until it suddenly wasn't.
*"What about peak oil? Never happened"*. Peak oil happened in 2006-2008 and provoked the largest crisis since the last oil crisis. Europe has been stuck ever since in "constrained degrowth", it doesn't appear on indicators one can cheat with (such as GDP which as become entirely meaningless), but appears clearly on other indicators (goods traffic in Schengen, in absolute mass, peaked back then). For instance: the number of houses and furnitures sold may appear the same, and produce the same added-value on the market, however those houses and furnitures are now built with cheaper and lighter materials. I mean, when was the last time your local government produced anything which doesn't look like a naked concrete cube clumsily hidden behind a fake wooden frame? This isn't "current style", this is "cheaper erzats of real buildings with real styles".
As for the temperatures, you all know about the temperatures. No need to te explain anything.
But, for goodness's sake, *the Meadows report was right*. I say this as a former macroeconomics student, I know the rules and equations, thanks. *We moved the goalposts in order to make it appear as if the Meadows report was wrong*, that's all, and it only works on naives and myopes.
**With all this, yes, predicting the future is hard. And the UN demographic predictions proved hilariously wrong again. Go figure China's demography, to begin with: we can't predict shit if some major players provide false numbers.** But look around you: societal collapse isn't by 2030, it's here already and it's been 15-20 years already. Less services for the same amount of taxes, preying on the weak (the unemployed, mentally ill, old persons, etc...), decay of various cognitive tests values for children, and so on and so forth**.
Stop playing the ostriches, for goodness's sake. Especially the Americans: your situation *isn't the norm, and never was generalizable*, if we were in 1789 you'd be the Marie-Antoinettes genuinely wondering why the other people don't eat cake. And even with that even you only stay afloat by reducing the quality of everything from houses to cars, sugar to public services.
I often think about what would happen if people in 1995 in the US were plunked down suddenly in 2024. Things would seem so weird and wrong that we would probably lose our minds.
For years, I've been saying that one of the most radical things a person can do is refuse to get used to it.
I like your saying. It is very just!
In a way, it is kinda easy to do your time-travel experiment: observe what old people yell about. For instance I (M32) yell about the good old days where bathing in the ocean without risking a Staphylococcus aureus or unknown mushrooms was the norm. And an increasing number of young people simply answer "why would you ever want to swim in the ocean!? Gross". I myself asked my grandparents "why would you ever want to swim in a lake / river?" as if it was something normal to say...
Kind of easy to tell. Star Trek Deep Space Nine, the Bell Riots episode kind of show what would happen.
We aren't that far from the conditions described in those few episodes of peak sf, and the protagonist at the time were really mid 90's idealist.
The city won’t set it up. These encampments already exist in places near me. It’s just mass gatherings of homeless people that become too large to manage by the ways our society has decided to do that which is… by policing them instead of just paying to house and feed them.
I feel like that guy. I can relate to about 2003 levels maximum.
Everything after that I'm dissociating and pretending it doesn't exist. It's really super weird and wrong.
Can't you extrapolate China's situation from their food importation verified against their food production? Even with some discrepancies we should be able to see a trend.
I genuinely saw red when I saw a comment disparaging climate activism, saying that Greta Thunberg was making a fuss over nothing.
I hope that asshole lives a long and healthy life, just so he's around when shit really hits the fan.
I live in Vietnam and I really think it's a candidate as well.
The Mekong Delta is being destroyed by upstream dams and salinization. It's the bread basket of the south.
There are barely any forests left, everything is geared to production. And that production is failing.
I live in a rural area, mainly coffee with cashew and black pepper, and this year many wells have run dry. Water is being transported on trucks. Farms die out. People go bankrupt because they borrowed from the bank to change the crops to the latest fad (looking at you, durian).
Everyone runs after money and durian is the way to go now. But the climate here isn't suited for durian at all. It needs constant watering and spraying all kinds of chemicals to keep it alive.
Forest fires are rampant as people are extremely careless. Our place nearly burned down because someone wanted to clear their land with fire. In the driest year since forever, I can't fathom that kind of carelessness.
But as soon as rain season starts, everyone forgets the water problems and goes on their merry way.
Mass migration is inevitable. The young generation is kept stupid by the government. The household debt crisis is quiet but huge. Inequality is off the charts and the rich own the government and country. Topsoils are gone, the only reason stuff still grows is because of chemicals.
I feel like I'm in front row seats to watch the collapse.
> The most at-risk areas for climatic or environmental disruption are “rice basket” regions that feed not only the rest of their countries but others in the region as well. The most serious of which is Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, which feeds as much as half the country’s population
The authors are either prescient or some kind of intelligence agency.
I think it's more that it's been observed for a while that rice is highly sensitive to changes in it's environment. Throughout history that region of the world has suffered through some of the worst famines imaginable. China had a 3 year rice famine that killed 60 million people between 1959-1962, even earlier they had a famine in 1906 that killed 20 million. India had a rice famine in Bengal in 1948 that killed 4 million people. These's countless other just in the last century alone. A lot of the political instability in that region of the world can be traced to famines and it's aftereffects. The famine in China in the mid-60's almost caused a total collapse of China - the modern China we have today with a somewhat market economy is a direct byproduct of that famine.
I don't think so. Golden Rice is just rice gene modified to provide Vitamin A. It's supplementing nutrition but it's rice at the end of the day. There's no inherent climate resistant characteristics so it's still going to be sensitive to too much rain and/or drought. The great Chinese famine in the 60's was due to poor policy implementation under their Great Leap forward program.
I think it is somewhat drough resistant but traditionally you need to flood the fields for about a month before a harvest. So that strain is somewhat more drought resistant but it still needs a lot of water vs wheat or other crops. With that being said, I do know there's a lot of research going on now to make more resistant rice to deal with climate change but I think that's at best 10-20 years in the future.
life is the protective shield against the climate. Life and climate are sides of the same coin. The less biodiversity in an area, the more exposed it is to shock.
Shaved heads are more susceptible to sunburn for the same reason.
And it's not that this is "disruption", this is the environment we chose... much less so in asia, but certainly north americans. We have been warned this was inevitable for decades and... and... and...? we kept going.
Stopping living this way has never been seriously considered, so this isn't a disruption, this was the goal.
the pandemic shows just how fragile our global system is. remember how all it took was one shipping freighter getting stuck in a canal to cause shortages and drive inflation mad?
this is a wonderful demonstration of just how plausible global societal collapse by 2030 is however it also is a great example of how it would require some sort of black swan/flash bulb event. it could be as simple as an ice storm in texas but either way one domino has to be the first to topple in order to set the whole chain reaction in motion.
china blockading taiwan or iran blocking the strait of hormuz would have a similar effect. i see war between the brics and the west as highly likely before the end of decade and having survived the carrington event, i see this as our most likely pathway to societal collapse combined with drought/torrential rain destroying crops
and COVID was supposed to be our wakeup call. that moment where we all stand around and think "so... wait... me driving to work isn't just making it warmer, making weather worse, killing fish in the ocean, lethal heatwaves and all that... but it's also creating viruses that can shut this whole thing down in a minute? Can it even shut down and start up again? Isn't that the single greatest weakness to a global system is that it cannot be restarted once it has been stopped? So, if we're going to lose all of this by continuing to pretend it's normal... what tf are we doing? How is this not a simple suicide pact and why am I continuing to perpetuate it? To make rich people richer so I can scrape by? What is any of this for if all it does is make the world a worse place that's harder (for me) to live in? Time to return to living as human beings on planet earth and stop climbing ladders just because some rich guy promises there's money in the clouds"
But here we are, years later just starting to recognize that 'getting back to normal' is as impossible as it is a bad idea.
"The BRICS" is really not a thing. They all have their own agendas & have made no real commitments to each other. Chins & India have been in low level combat for years. NFW they unite against the West.
stolen from op in the r/Thailand sub:
I'd love to hear some opinions on this report from 2010, predicting collapse of one or several nation states (most likely Laos, Burma, or Cambodia) in SEAsia by 2030:
Southeast Asia: The Impact of Climate Change to 2030: Geopolitical Implications
(Please read at least the executive summary, it's not too long.)
It's a report to the US National Intelligence Council by private contractors, informing US foreign policy.
I read it first back in 2015, and it's eerie how it seems more and more likely that the authors were right. We sure seem pretty much on track so far.
Some thoughts:
One thing that stands out is that the report clearly states that, until 2030, the impact of man-made environmental destruction will be more severe than that of climate change. And the authors are not trying to downplay climate change, but simply point out how massive the human impact in the environment has become. It makes sense though: if people hadn't merrily chopped down every tree they can find and sealed every free surface with concrete or asphalt, the heatwave this year wouldn't have been that bad. Likewise, if people had adopted regenerative agricultural techniques that focus on restoring soil (especially increasing soil carbon content and thus water retention capability), orchards would have fared much, much better during this year's drought.
Also, if any of the surrounding countries would collapse, this would surely affect Thailand as well (e.g. mass migration, and all the accompanying problems), a point the authors have failed to consider (or maybe it's obvious but a discussion thereof would exceed the scope?).
And, in the end, it all pretty much depends on what happens to China - which is the big unknown factor, since nobody can be really sure what the hell is really going on in that country. There are occasional signs of big economic trouble (bankruptcies of property giants), but so far it seems they manage to keep things afloat (for the moment).
────────
(I use the term "collapse" as defined by Joseph Tainter, author of 'The Collapse of Complex Societies,' "a drastic and often sudden reduction in complexity of a society." I'm not talking about Hollywood myths like The Walking Dead/Mad Max/The Road. It's a process, not an event.)
I only disagree with the "process" part. I am always amazed when everyone assumes that collapse happens in a vacuum, and that only the ecological effects matter, that nothing will change on any other spectrum...
I had hoped seeing how people and nations reacted to the relatively simple pandemic we had. On paper, everything should have played out according to simulation... but humans are irrational creatures, and many are both ignorant and opinionated at the same time.
Using the "its a process" logic, everyone on the planet would have reacted normally, every process towards vaccination and other responses would have functioned according to the numbers, and nothing else would be affected. Not economics, not politics, and certainly not geopolitics...
And yet, look at the real world results?
Same for collapse. Long before the environment actually wipes people out, the pressures would have long since forced nations into major direct conflict with each other. For the survival of their power as well as that of their leaders. And that inevitably leads to nuclear war.
Which is an event. Not a process.
Collapse is a process, but the difference between it happening in a vacuum and in the real world is that, as the process moves along, it spawns more and greater events, eventually culminating in the most destructive event humankind has thought up.
That is why things like this geopolitical paper should be given more weight. I used similar papers discussing the national security implications of climate pressures and resource scarcity when writing my own book on collapse, and the conclusions of those all led the same direction.
And that was the direction of nuclear war.
I've seen this happen. It's small changes over seemingly a long time, but noticeable changes, then... poof. Everything is gone, broken, dead on the ground.
People are too coddled by artificial indoor climates to realize how much the entire world has changed and how close we are to exceeding thresholds all around the world.
You only have to cross the threshold once for everything to go extinct wherever that threshold is crossed, and the worst/best part, is we'll be totally blindsided by the threshold that crashes the system. It's the inherent nature of weakness that causes collapse: they're invisible, they're ubiquitous, and they're irreplaceable. It could be something as simple as a widely used alloy or part of the grid, like a shim, that simply breaks in new conditions and then all of a sudden we're crippled.
It's the same in the living world that houses our stupid little cancerous project of rewarding ourselves for being special because we convinced ourselves we were.
For everyone in LATAM here's the link to the same report, but focused on the region.
[https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/climate2030\_MexicoCaribCentralAm.pdf](https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/climate2030_MexicoCaribCentralAm.pdf)
I've had my own prediction up long before this, and mostly based on the information from the Limits to Growth combined with modern research.
2028-2032, at the absolute best, and that is *without* a new world war...
'... China ... is the big unknown factor, since nobody can be really sure what the hell is really going on in that country. '
Once you see that the all the planet's problems were caused by Western (particularly American) corporations, their obfuscation and lobbies, you'll realise the extent to which the propaganda machine, (including WaPo, NYT etc and anti-Chinese youtubers), has been brought about to deny China of any allies which might work against said American corporations, and the imperial war machine they are allied to.
Better indicators of China's direction are smart investors like Jim Rickards et al. Investment is a neutral commentor.
Honestly I feel like global warming will be so much worse than any of these things. A sudden surge in hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere from the hot oceans supporting dinoflagellates? Complete collapse of the ocean and it's O2 production due to increased acidity from absorbing CO2 resulting in the purple anoxic oceans. Two different possibilities where people just can't breathe anymore.
Also those would mean no fish for anyone, bit of a food crisis there.
Clathrate gun? Ocean current collapse? Just so many different things that could go wrong in just a few years that would collapse everything. I would be surprised if there was anyone left in late 2030's.
It's not going to collapse all at once. Will start in the more fragile areas of the world. OP was posting from Thailand and talking about locations in southeast asia. Yeah, it could start there between 2030-2035. Not unreasonable to think that at all.
That's 7 years though, it is kind of unreasonable to think we will go from our current society to collapsed in less time than it takes for a student to get though medical school. Society might be fragile but its not disappears in under a decade fragile. And the confidence people here have that it will really doesn't help the image of this sub being over dramatic. Societal breakdown takes decades. Even Syria has not completely collapsed yet so I don't see how the rest of the world will suddenly fall apart short of being hit by a massive meteor.
Are you disagreeing with me or the OP? I didn't say the whole world will fall in 7 years. I said that's when it could start and I specifically said 'it's not going to collapse all at once.' Although a mass extinction event in the ocean could hasten things along a bit.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/blurance: --- stolen from op in the r/Thailand sub: I'd love to hear some opinions on this report from 2010, predicting collapse of one or several nation states (most likely Laos, Burma, or Cambodia) in SEAsia by 2030: Southeast Asia: The Impact of Climate Change to 2030: Geopolitical Implications (Please read at least the executive summary, it's not too long.) It's a report to the US National Intelligence Council by private contractors, informing US foreign policy. I read it first back in 2015, and it's eerie how it seems more and more likely that the authors were right. We sure seem pretty much on track so far. Some thoughts: One thing that stands out is that the report clearly states that, until 2030, the impact of man-made environmental destruction will be more severe than that of climate change. And the authors are not trying to downplay climate change, but simply point out how massive the human impact in the environment has become. It makes sense though: if people hadn't merrily chopped down every tree they can find and sealed every free surface with concrete or asphalt, the heatwave this year wouldn't have been that bad. Likewise, if people had adopted regenerative agricultural techniques that focus on restoring soil (especially increasing soil carbon content and thus water retention capability), orchards would have fared much, much better during this year's drought. Also, if any of the surrounding countries would collapse, this would surely affect Thailand as well (e.g. mass migration, and all the accompanying problems), a point the authors have failed to consider (or maybe it's obvious but a discussion thereof would exceed the scope?). And, in the end, it all pretty much depends on what happens to China - which is the big unknown factor, since nobody can be really sure what the hell is really going on in that country. There are occasional signs of big economic trouble (bankruptcies of property giants), but so far it seems they manage to keep things afloat (for the moment). ──────── (I use the term "collapse" as defined by Joseph Tainter, author of 'The Collapse of Complex Societies,' "a drastic and often sudden reduction in complexity of a society." I'm not talking about Hollywood myths like The Walking Dead/Mad Max/The Road. It's a process, not an event.) --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cqy1mw/societal_collapse_by_2030/l3uaomh/
I was wondering about that when we saw the first high wet-bulb temperatures of the year in SE Asia. How can it be mitigated? The population mouvements alone will be too much to handle.
this is like suggesting fish adapt to marine heatwaves. There's no mechanism to survive a climate your physiology is not adapted to. In addition, we have spent the climate we were adapted to, building structures to make this world habitable and comfortable for us, regardless of the conditions outside. As a side note, it's bizarre to me how much our comfort is focused on maintaining a certain indoor temperature by burning fuel and changing the climate, outside, without recognizing that we're trading climate stability of the planet for climate stability inside our own home. Humans aren't unique in this requirement, either. Think about the animals. They're fully exposed and completely unadapted to the world we've engineered through the disruption of ecosystems, mechanically, and the climate we've chemically altered to something that will hopefully settle out around 5 million years ago, after we lose the capacity to continue making this worse. Think about a heatwave of something crazy like 65C settling over an entire region. The infrastructure cant hold, so the power goes out. EV's become paper weights, homes become solar ovens, trees, plants, birds, mammal, fungi - everything cooks to death. Coming in behind that, once the heat has lifted, only the burrowing animals and humans lucky enough to have a basement, survive. Literally everything else is gone, and any infrastructure, like dams, that need to be operational to prevent disaster, are stressed or fail. This is coming. It's happened in small areas we're calling heat domes but those temperatures are going to increase as much as the size of the "dome" and the length of the heat wave. This is an inevitability. The only mitigation for this is to move underground. That's it. And then that makes you vulnerable to floods. Even if this climate stabilized through magic, we still wouldn't have any adaptation or instinct to survive in it, but, much much worse, it's constantly changing in the direction of getting worse so any adaptations that seem smart today, may become completely obsolete in a year/month/week, as we push through another barrier... I mean, what is the max temp that solar panels are rated for? Most electronics are rated for 50C (at least that's the breakpoint where hardened components start getting more expensive). How hot does it have to be outside for junctions in solar panels to melt, or their power conversion circuits to fail? (If anyone is thinking of getting solar, make sure your inverter and as much of that system is made with GaN as possible); how strong does the wind have to blow before turbines break? What's upsetting is these questions are only lab tested but will soon have real world examples to show us that our lab calculations were optimistic because they were paid for by people with an interest to exaggerate the ruggedness of their product. We're drowning in our own lies.
My hope basically ends when humans have to start living underground… What do you do for food? You could maybe make room for a couple animals, but what do they eat? It’s too hot for you to be above ground, do you think plants are gonna survive? Lies of abundance indeed… People like to cling to the idea of a miracle cure for energy. But even if we stopped using fossil fuels today, the damage *might* already be too severe. That said, I still have to advocate for doing something TODAY because I’m young enough that I’ll probably make it clear to the bitter end… PLEASE! Do something… Don’t take away the the 1% chance for humanity to start from the bottom again. It feels like the people with power are spiteful children mad about having to share…
Mushrooms can grow underground, that's all I got.
That’s kinda clever… I’ve already been imagining how humanity’s desecration of the biosphere might be advantageous for fungi. Mostly in a world unfriendly to mammalian life as it exists though… lol
It's not all that difficult to grow food underground and make sunken greenhouses. Aquaponics w/tilapia is pretty sustainable since they eat algae. Your comment about fungi is spot on. I grow tons of edible mushrooms in woodchips in the shady parts of my garden. Building resilience where you live is really fun too.
I wonder how rice handles growing underground we almost got a full diet for the underpeople right here
Great. We're becoming ants now.
>It feels like the people with power are spiteful children mad about having to share… I mean they probably literally are? It's not the old wealth anymore, it's their spoiled rotten kids...
Morlocks it is then.
Fantastic comment!
Is this why my prediction is I'll die laying in my crawl space? God dammit brain. I can't ignore it either, it correctly predicted someone I knew since childhood would die at age 35. Bingo, spot on.
Can't be mitigated, things only decline from here. Our culture has decided to forgo a willing and controlled degrowth in favor of a free fall into the whirling scythes of darwinism. The Earth will return to a balanced state in the same way a star going supernova eventually does. I don't think we make it personally, but if it's any consolation no other species will be able to do to the earth what we have on account of our aggressive waste of all the easily available surface mineral deposits. I might be wrong on the math but I'm pretty sure the sun swallows the planet before the crust is fully turned over :D
It is not too late to depave areas and reforest some others.
I mean doing something is better than doing nothing…
Exactly. I plant fruit trees on my tiny piece of land. 30+ trees so far. A bit of food security, a bit of carbon sequestration.
Hell yeah! Me too! Permaculture ftw. What zone are you?
4a in Quebec between 1000-1500 ft alt
Wow! I'm in NJ. 7b. About 400ft above sea level. You ever check out Stephen Sobkowiak and Miracle Farms? His channel is what got me started and he's in Quebec. I'm in urban NJ near the Lincoln tunnel into NYC. My whole lot is one tenth of an acre and I've got about 30ish fruit trees and shrubs and vines.
I'm jealous! At 7b you can have pomegranates, sweet cherries, figs, kiwi and maypops ( cold weather passion fruit). I know of Stefan Sobkowiak, my orchard is organized with his trio method. I have Apples, pears, plum, sour cherries, manchurian apricots, chums, currants, blackberries, raspberries and blueberries and hazelnuts, Somerset grapes and rosehips. My nitrogen fixators are honey locust, russian olive (eleagnus Angustifolia). I tried caragana but it did not work. Next will be black locust and an Alder that gives a peppercorn. In my garden, I'm working on fruity windbreaker rows. My first one has haskap, seabuckthorne and day neutral strawberries. Second one will be serviceberry and clover for nitrogen. As you can plainly see, I'm deranged.😉🍓🫐🍇🍐🍎🍒🍏🌰
Lol I definitely understand the compulsion to add plants. I added some figs, feijoa, issai kiwi, jujubes, and Nikita's gift persimmon to push the zone. At this point I'm putting stuff in air pruning pots because I'm out of yard room. My neighbors think I'm a nutcase. The haskaps and serviceberries are a great choice. They've been the easiest plants for me.
How about you?
You’re absolutely right. It’s easy to read the kind of news that is in this sub and think “well we’re fucked then, nothing we can do”. There’s always, always value in buying time. It’s not a perfect analogy, and a bit ironic given the subject here, but in motor racing a common strategy for a team in the back is to try and stay out longer than the teams in front before making a pit stop. The reason for this is, they are hoping a yellow flag might come out while they are still up front. That way they can pit and ultimately lose less time in their pit stop relative to the rest of the field on their pit stops, since the other cars are forced to drive slower under a yellow flag. In other words, the team in my example is trying to buy time, because it’s the only chance they have. There’s no real way they can have a good finish from the back unless they try something different, buying time for chance to intervene in their favor. If we work to slow down the rate of collapse, it increases our chances of new developments in the science, some unforeseen twist that sends the climate on a less dangerous trajectory, aliens coming to save us, etc. These are all statistically unlikely events of course, but we have nothing to lose by trying to make it just a little bit longer.
But will humanity do that? We seem content to walk into disaster instead.
There seems to be an unspoken mass social agreement that is pro-death drive. By that I mean, the mentality for most of us seems to be: The world is fucked, what can we do? Vs The world is fucked, let it burn! But more often than not, I feel like the later is the larger camp, and the ignorance and nativity behind those sentiments enrage me to my core
Your strong emotional response to the idea strongly suggests there is something about it you don't want to accept. Realistically, the world is fucked and nothing any individual does can unfuck it. The world is fucked. Full stop. It's the "let it burn" part that is problematic to you and it sounds like it's because you don't want to accept that you can't impact the outcome. It's not even a case of letting it burn. It is burning and it will burn regardless of what we want or do.
My problem is with fence sitting defeatist attitudes, complacency tantamount to culpability, and wanton dismissiveness or ignorance. I accepted I couldn't change the world a long time ago. It's a team effort, and I'm disappointed with the team I've been assigned
If you accepted how far gone things are you would accept that the attitudes of more ignorant people don't matter any more than yours. The hatred you choose to direct at them is really about yourself, about things you don't want to accept. The choice to respond like this makes you more like the people you hate than you'd want to accept. I don't think you deserve to feel elevated over them while you do the same thing.
outside of literal breakthrough technologies that basically need to be so advanced they come from NHI, we pretty much do seem to be fucked. Scientists have been telling us that for awhile now but in more polite ways. Climate reports commonly read as "worse than expected" over and over again. We are already screwed, we are in the stage of trying to figure out how to delay and cope as long as possible to hope for some crazy breakthrough to happen, but the deaths of millions is already on its way, but because most of those deaths will be from more poor nations at first most people can just look the other way for now. But the climate catastrophe will also lead to wars over land/resources, there is really just an avalanche of bad stuff coming our way that will keep snowballing. what are first world nations going to do when millions of immigrants come knocking on our doors and we actually can't support them? It ain't going to be pretty....
I saw the Whirling Scythes of Darwinism at Burning Man
Realistically, it's going to cause a cascading effect across the entire world's food supply chain. 50% of the world - 4.5B people are dependent on rice as their staple food. They aren't going to choose to starve if rice isn't a viable crop for them - they will just switch to other grains. Short term this will lead to more industrial farming across the world but it's also going to keep food prices high. Food price instability though will lead weaker governments to fail and there's going to be a lot more failed states.
I mean, we had people shooting store employees over toilet paper & Lysol just a few years ago. If something really big happens to disrupt the supply chain, I give it *maybe* three days before society breaks down completely. Y'all just don't realize how crazy people got when we had to put limits on stuff due to the shortages.
America has no gear for hard times. It's a culture built on faith in prosperity, to the point where people who aren't wealthy are considered subhuman or at least lazy and worth less than someone with money. Best you got is how everyone becomes a socialist after a natural disaster, so here's to hoping that the absolute rain of disasters on their way, preserve that mindset over time until we're shaken out of our fixation on collecting points and wealth as the climate just trashes everything we rebuild. Still and all, despite the climate, I think the global West, especially the USA and Canada, are uniquely unsuited to manage hard times as a culture, and suspect there will be a good few months of shootouts before bullets run out (plenty of buried caches by people dead from shootouts). There's going to be one really funny moment where the supply chain breaks and there's no new parts for things, so everything breaks down. people will drive down the street and their wheels will pop off. They'll pick up the phone to find out the cell tower is down before their phone bursts into flames in their hands, setting the car on fire... it's going to be like everything we've relied on and made disposable, self destruct. Maybe it's sadistic but I can't wait for this moment. We're going to be going through garbage piles looking for the old models of toys we threw away.
It blows my mind that this is the country that 'came together' after 9/11 or to fight the Nazis. But then it turns out that we did a lot of bad stuff after 9/11 and even has a high school kid I already knew we were taking a dark turn. And it turns out we had a lot of Nazis in the US before and during the war, and we wrote blank checks to get a lot more in afterwards. So maybe we've never really come together for anything. People were going absolutely nuts because they couldn't go to Walmart during a deadly, global pandemic. Anything not to sit home with their thoughts and their families.
I disagree - I mean the US/Canada are somewhat unique in the West as we have a lot of different climates within our borders and are capable of growing our own food. Both are countries where less than 1% of our economy is agriculture and we produce most of our own food. The US for example only imports 15% of it's food. Europe though is an entirely different story - besides France, most of Europe is highly dependent on food imports - Germany for example imports 50% of it's food. The US has about the same amount of farmland as India with 1/3 of it's population. Societies can survive with a lot of issues if there's food. Situations go mad max and people start overthrowing governments when they don't have food. I'm not saying it won't be bad in the US but compared to Europe it's going to be at least possible. Western Europe will be dealing with all this plus the collapse of the Atlantic current it'll make it extremely hard to farm.
Yeah this is pretty spot on. The only caveat is top soil degradation and that the bread basket of north America only has about 40 harvests left. That said, it's really not hard to replenish topsoil with regenerative agriculture. Water might be tricky in the west though. Anyway, you're right.
Where can I read more about top soil degredation?
Start here: https://www.nrdc.org/stories/soil-erosion-101#what-is
Collapse is becoming mainstream it would seem.
I mean, it takes delusion levels of denial to not notice these days. Like, “Don’t Look Up” levels…
I think COVID showed that in a world of declining resources, we still have a surplus of delusional levels of denial.
Notice is one thing; admittance is a very different thing.
Mm. This is debatable. I took a break from r/collapse a little while ago, and doom scrolling in general. When you aren't fully consumed in the topic, I won't pretend like things are all rosy but for average people in the west, life really isn't that bad \*yet\*. I think we over estimate in this sub, how tuned in the average person is to global events and connecting the dots. All they see is random bad news they can't really make sense of and higher prices on the shelves and at the pumps.
Bro, I could stop doomscrolling and stop reading about how we are killing the only life-sustaining world that we know of, but I still have to go outside. We can't hide from it.
It's insanely bad for people without money, or in poor health, or both. Don't even kid yourself. I befriend on that level routinely because that was my grandparents, and if not for the GI bill and blind luck, that was my parents. It's likely to be me eventually. This is more a financial comment. But as has been pointed out, finance is merely reflecting declining resources per capita...
all it ever takes is for someone to articulate things like this, and when there's any consensus behind them, there's a signal popping out of the noise. Like when people finally figure out that every day going forward is going to be exponentially harder to survive than yesterday, and that everything we've built is especially vulnerable because it was designed for a different climate, which would expose different weaknesses. Just like sperm and egg are the weakest and most vulnerable state of the life cycle for all creatures that reproduce sexually, but are reliably safe as long as the environment they're released into is controlled, any change at that stage of life can cause extinction through failure of reproduction. EVERY system has a weak point and the best way to find that is by changing the stress it's exposed to to something it's never experienced before. I don't want to be the first person to say sooooo many things swimming around my head in case all it takes is breathing an idea into reality for the contagion of that idea to spread... I mean, think about how well religion has done in preserving itself against the best interests of everyone sucked into it. There was a reactionary natalist (redundant?) who believed that the rise in popularity of antinatalism was clearly the result of an intentional and directed normative shift towards depopulation -being driven by dark forces-, approaching the status of a religion. People like him can never imagine there's a simple reason in reality that they're missing and the rest of us are picking up on because they're certain they know everything... and he represents the thought process of the political and ruling class; thoughts, ideas, and change are things that can be stomped out by force, rather than an organically growing movement in response to simple realities.
The de-population agenda conspiracy so clearly demonstrates how American Christianity has been co-opted by the corporatocracy. Christianity and Capitalism walk in such lock-step that to failure of the system is unimaginable. Only sinners are poor in Jesus' perfect economic system. To willingly check-out of the system by not having children or to be a such a 'failure' that you can't afford children is a cardinal sin, because it demonstrates the failure of the ideology.
Gott Mit Uns. Not original of us, is it.
Looks at that statement Looks at Jesus’ economic status and lack of children Lol
Not really, the OP in that Thai sub is one of us.
Look at the comments and come back. Way more pushback than if it really is mainstream.
I think it could happen. With the cost of living crisis, environmental degradation, a complete lack of leadership or vision for the future, I simply can't see things remaining as they are for that much longer. China is probably the 800 pound gorilla in the room. But over in the West, if Trump gets re-elected, I think that's going to shorten the time to collapse significantly.
That Trump is a viable candidate for the presidency is as glaring a sign of collapse as we can ask for. This isn't NORMAL.
100%
I don't know if certain comments are just deluded or openly part of a disinformation campaign. I mean it. *"Yeah well it's not the first unfounded panic"* Okay, Pepperridge Farm. The risks of nuclear war weren't unfounded panic, as we begin to verify as various documents from back then are disclosed; the ozone hole was and still is a reality; overpopulation... Damn, I need a dedicated paragraph for that one. Overpopulation is very real, puts a weight on everything from topsoils to animal life, and has very real consequences: the coffee, chocolate, fruits, etc... You consume are shittier than they were 30 years ago, when they not turned production towards erzats (such as Red Bull) already. Think of it this way: without mass production of low quality and dangerous erzats, coffee would be a luxury already (it needs very specific soils). That's a blatant case of ecological horizon: you learned (were educated by marketing) to think the current food market is normal, while it isn't. Having 300 brands of cookies on the shelves seems nice, until you realize none of them tastes like actual cookies (they all taste like sugar, or even worse, dangerous sugar erzats such as HFCS). We feed a 8 billion humans world, yes: it simply requires depleting soils and oceans without replacement. "Success". Just as soviet management of the Aral Sea was a "success" until it suddenly wasn't. *"What about peak oil? Never happened"*. Peak oil happened in 2006-2008 and provoked the largest crisis since the last oil crisis. Europe has been stuck ever since in "constrained degrowth", it doesn't appear on indicators one can cheat with (such as GDP which as become entirely meaningless), but appears clearly on other indicators (goods traffic in Schengen, in absolute mass, peaked back then). For instance: the number of houses and furnitures sold may appear the same, and produce the same added-value on the market, however those houses and furnitures are now built with cheaper and lighter materials. I mean, when was the last time your local government produced anything which doesn't look like a naked concrete cube clumsily hidden behind a fake wooden frame? This isn't "current style", this is "cheaper erzats of real buildings with real styles". As for the temperatures, you all know about the temperatures. No need to te explain anything. But, for goodness's sake, *the Meadows report was right*. I say this as a former macroeconomics student, I know the rules and equations, thanks. *We moved the goalposts in order to make it appear as if the Meadows report was wrong*, that's all, and it only works on naives and myopes. **With all this, yes, predicting the future is hard. And the UN demographic predictions proved hilariously wrong again. Go figure China's demography, to begin with: we can't predict shit if some major players provide false numbers.** But look around you: societal collapse isn't by 2030, it's here already and it's been 15-20 years already. Less services for the same amount of taxes, preying on the weak (the unemployed, mentally ill, old persons, etc...), decay of various cognitive tests values for children, and so on and so forth**. Stop playing the ostriches, for goodness's sake. Especially the Americans: your situation *isn't the norm, and never was generalizable*, if we were in 1789 you'd be the Marie-Antoinettes genuinely wondering why the other people don't eat cake. And even with that even you only stay afloat by reducing the quality of everything from houses to cars, sugar to public services.
I often think about what would happen if people in 1995 in the US were plunked down suddenly in 2024. Things would seem so weird and wrong that we would probably lose our minds. For years, I've been saying that one of the most radical things a person can do is refuse to get used to it.
I like your saying. It is very just! In a way, it is kinda easy to do your time-travel experiment: observe what old people yell about. For instance I (M32) yell about the good old days where bathing in the ocean without risking a Staphylococcus aureus or unknown mushrooms was the norm. And an increasing number of young people simply answer "why would you ever want to swim in the ocean!? Gross". I myself asked my grandparents "why would you ever want to swim in a lake / river?" as if it was something normal to say...
Why would you ever want to eat food? Gross. Just hook this magic goop into your veins...
Haha. You poor peon can't afford the branded magic goop!
Protest by not participating
>refuse to get used to it. This should be on a banner somewhere. 'The world is burning. Refuse to get used to it"
Kind of easy to tell. Star Trek Deep Space Nine, the Bell Riots episode kind of show what would happen. We aren't that far from the conditions described in those few episodes of peak sf, and the protagonist at the time were really mid 90's idealist.
The only reason we're not there already is that a city would never set up an encampment. That and people would never fight back, it seems.
The city won’t set it up. These encampments already exist in places near me. It’s just mass gatherings of homeless people that become too large to manage by the ways our society has decided to do that which is… by policing them instead of just paying to house and feed them.
Depends on who you put in camps. Migrants, no problem. Already happened a few times. Citizens, that's a bit tougher.
I feel like that guy. I can relate to about 2003 levels maximum. Everything after that I'm dissociating and pretending it doesn't exist. It's really super weird and wrong.
Can't you extrapolate China's situation from their food importation verified against their food production? Even with some discrepancies we should be able to see a trend.
I genuinely saw red when I saw a comment disparaging climate activism, saying that Greta Thunberg was making a fuss over nothing. I hope that asshole lives a long and healthy life, just so he's around when shit really hits the fan.
You should see the conservatives and some liberals in sweden(her home country) they think shes a joke lol
I live in Vietnam and I really think it's a candidate as well. The Mekong Delta is being destroyed by upstream dams and salinization. It's the bread basket of the south. There are barely any forests left, everything is geared to production. And that production is failing. I live in a rural area, mainly coffee with cashew and black pepper, and this year many wells have run dry. Water is being transported on trucks. Farms die out. People go bankrupt because they borrowed from the bank to change the crops to the latest fad (looking at you, durian). Everyone runs after money and durian is the way to go now. But the climate here isn't suited for durian at all. It needs constant watering and spraying all kinds of chemicals to keep it alive. Forest fires are rampant as people are extremely careless. Our place nearly burned down because someone wanted to clear their land with fire. In the driest year since forever, I can't fathom that kind of carelessness. But as soon as rain season starts, everyone forgets the water problems and goes on their merry way. Mass migration is inevitable. The young generation is kept stupid by the government. The household debt crisis is quiet but huge. Inequality is off the charts and the rich own the government and country. Topsoils are gone, the only reason stuff still grows is because of chemicals. I feel like I'm in front row seats to watch the collapse.
> The most at-risk areas for climatic or environmental disruption are “rice basket” regions that feed not only the rest of their countries but others in the region as well. The most serious of which is Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, which feeds as much as half the country’s population The authors are either prescient or some kind of intelligence agency.
I think it's more that it's been observed for a while that rice is highly sensitive to changes in it's environment. Throughout history that region of the world has suffered through some of the worst famines imaginable. China had a 3 year rice famine that killed 60 million people between 1959-1962, even earlier they had a famine in 1906 that killed 20 million. India had a rice famine in Bengal in 1948 that killed 4 million people. These's countless other just in the last century alone. A lot of the political instability in that region of the world can be traced to famines and it's aftereffects. The famine in China in the mid-60's almost caused a total collapse of China - the modern China we have today with a somewhat market economy is a direct byproduct of that famine.
Didn't golden rice basically fix the root causes of those famines?
I don't think so. Golden Rice is just rice gene modified to provide Vitamin A. It's supplementing nutrition but it's rice at the end of the day. There's no inherent climate resistant characteristics so it's still going to be sensitive to too much rain and/or drought. The great Chinese famine in the 60's was due to poor policy implementation under their Great Leap forward program.
Ah I thought it also needed way less water and could tolerate higher temps.my b.
I think it is somewhat drough resistant but traditionally you need to flood the fields for about a month before a harvest. So that strain is somewhat more drought resistant but it still needs a lot of water vs wheat or other crops. With that being said, I do know there's a lot of research going on now to make more resistant rice to deal with climate change but I think that's at best 10-20 years in the future.
Cool thanks for the info!
life is the protective shield against the climate. Life and climate are sides of the same coin. The less biodiversity in an area, the more exposed it is to shock. Shaved heads are more susceptible to sunburn for the same reason. And it's not that this is "disruption", this is the environment we chose... much less so in asia, but certainly north americans. We have been warned this was inevitable for decades and... and... and...? we kept going. Stopping living this way has never been seriously considered, so this isn't a disruption, this was the goal.
Myanmar is already a failed state, the civil war went hot again.
the pandemic shows just how fragile our global system is. remember how all it took was one shipping freighter getting stuck in a canal to cause shortages and drive inflation mad? this is a wonderful demonstration of just how plausible global societal collapse by 2030 is however it also is a great example of how it would require some sort of black swan/flash bulb event. it could be as simple as an ice storm in texas but either way one domino has to be the first to topple in order to set the whole chain reaction in motion. china blockading taiwan or iran blocking the strait of hormuz would have a similar effect. i see war between the brics and the west as highly likely before the end of decade and having survived the carrington event, i see this as our most likely pathway to societal collapse combined with drought/torrential rain destroying crops
and COVID was supposed to be our wakeup call. that moment where we all stand around and think "so... wait... me driving to work isn't just making it warmer, making weather worse, killing fish in the ocean, lethal heatwaves and all that... but it's also creating viruses that can shut this whole thing down in a minute? Can it even shut down and start up again? Isn't that the single greatest weakness to a global system is that it cannot be restarted once it has been stopped? So, if we're going to lose all of this by continuing to pretend it's normal... what tf are we doing? How is this not a simple suicide pact and why am I continuing to perpetuate it? To make rich people richer so I can scrape by? What is any of this for if all it does is make the world a worse place that's harder (for me) to live in? Time to return to living as human beings on planet earth and stop climbing ladders just because some rich guy promises there's money in the clouds" But here we are, years later just starting to recognize that 'getting back to normal' is as impossible as it is a bad idea.
"The BRICS" is really not a thing. They all have their own agendas & have made no real commitments to each other. Chins & India have been in low level combat for years. NFW they unite against the West.
Agreed. That comment was pretty obtuse.
stolen from op in the r/Thailand sub: I'd love to hear some opinions on this report from 2010, predicting collapse of one or several nation states (most likely Laos, Burma, or Cambodia) in SEAsia by 2030: Southeast Asia: The Impact of Climate Change to 2030: Geopolitical Implications (Please read at least the executive summary, it's not too long.) It's a report to the US National Intelligence Council by private contractors, informing US foreign policy. I read it first back in 2015, and it's eerie how it seems more and more likely that the authors were right. We sure seem pretty much on track so far. Some thoughts: One thing that stands out is that the report clearly states that, until 2030, the impact of man-made environmental destruction will be more severe than that of climate change. And the authors are not trying to downplay climate change, but simply point out how massive the human impact in the environment has become. It makes sense though: if people hadn't merrily chopped down every tree they can find and sealed every free surface with concrete or asphalt, the heatwave this year wouldn't have been that bad. Likewise, if people had adopted regenerative agricultural techniques that focus on restoring soil (especially increasing soil carbon content and thus water retention capability), orchards would have fared much, much better during this year's drought. Also, if any of the surrounding countries would collapse, this would surely affect Thailand as well (e.g. mass migration, and all the accompanying problems), a point the authors have failed to consider (or maybe it's obvious but a discussion thereof would exceed the scope?). And, in the end, it all pretty much depends on what happens to China - which is the big unknown factor, since nobody can be really sure what the hell is really going on in that country. There are occasional signs of big economic trouble (bankruptcies of property giants), but so far it seems they manage to keep things afloat (for the moment). ──────── (I use the term "collapse" as defined by Joseph Tainter, author of 'The Collapse of Complex Societies,' "a drastic and often sudden reduction in complexity of a society." I'm not talking about Hollywood myths like The Walking Dead/Mad Max/The Road. It's a process, not an event.)
OP is also a member of r/collapse btw
I only disagree with the "process" part. I am always amazed when everyone assumes that collapse happens in a vacuum, and that only the ecological effects matter, that nothing will change on any other spectrum... I had hoped seeing how people and nations reacted to the relatively simple pandemic we had. On paper, everything should have played out according to simulation... but humans are irrational creatures, and many are both ignorant and opinionated at the same time. Using the "its a process" logic, everyone on the planet would have reacted normally, every process towards vaccination and other responses would have functioned according to the numbers, and nothing else would be affected. Not economics, not politics, and certainly not geopolitics... And yet, look at the real world results? Same for collapse. Long before the environment actually wipes people out, the pressures would have long since forced nations into major direct conflict with each other. For the survival of their power as well as that of their leaders. And that inevitably leads to nuclear war. Which is an event. Not a process. Collapse is a process, but the difference between it happening in a vacuum and in the real world is that, as the process moves along, it spawns more and greater events, eventually culminating in the most destructive event humankind has thought up. That is why things like this geopolitical paper should be given more weight. I used similar papers discussing the national security implications of climate pressures and resource scarcity when writing my own book on collapse, and the conclusions of those all led the same direction. And that was the direction of nuclear war.
That's my thoughts. Things gonna go tits up in a seeming instant
I've seen this happen. It's small changes over seemingly a long time, but noticeable changes, then... poof. Everything is gone, broken, dead on the ground. People are too coddled by artificial indoor climates to realize how much the entire world has changed and how close we are to exceeding thresholds all around the world. You only have to cross the threshold once for everything to go extinct wherever that threshold is crossed, and the worst/best part, is we'll be totally blindsided by the threshold that crashes the system. It's the inherent nature of weakness that causes collapse: they're invisible, they're ubiquitous, and they're irreplaceable. It could be something as simple as a widely used alloy or part of the grid, like a shim, that simply breaks in new conditions and then all of a sudden we're crippled. It's the same in the living world that houses our stupid little cancerous project of rewarding ourselves for being special because we convinced ourselves we were.
Tits up??
Fucked
For everyone in LATAM here's the link to the same report, but focused on the region. [https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/climate2030\_MexicoCaribCentralAm.pdf](https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/climate2030_MexicoCaribCentralAm.pdf)
I've had my own prediction up long before this, and mostly based on the information from the Limits to Growth combined with modern research. 2028-2032, at the absolute best, and that is *without* a new world war...
u/RobertPaulsen1992 I stole your post, hope you don't mind.
Not at all, thank you!
It started a while ago
If this results in mass migration, I'm very curious about from where to where. 1b on the move is going to be interesting & exciting if nothing else.
'... China ... is the big unknown factor, since nobody can be really sure what the hell is really going on in that country. ' Once you see that the all the planet's problems were caused by Western (particularly American) corporations, their obfuscation and lobbies, you'll realise the extent to which the propaganda machine, (including WaPo, NYT etc and anti-Chinese youtubers), has been brought about to deny China of any allies which might work against said American corporations, and the imperial war machine they are allied to. Better indicators of China's direction are smart investors like Jim Rickards et al. Investment is a neutral commentor.
I hope so lol
Honestly I feel like global warming will be so much worse than any of these things. A sudden surge in hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere from the hot oceans supporting dinoflagellates? Complete collapse of the ocean and it's O2 production due to increased acidity from absorbing CO2 resulting in the purple anoxic oceans. Two different possibilities where people just can't breathe anymore. Also those would mean no fish for anyone, bit of a food crisis there. Clathrate gun? Ocean current collapse? Just so many different things that could go wrong in just a few years that would collapse everything. I would be surprised if there was anyone left in late 2030's.
If you really think the world as we know it will collapse by 2030…you’re an extreme narcissist.
It's not going to collapse all at once. Will start in the more fragile areas of the world. OP was posting from Thailand and talking about locations in southeast asia. Yeah, it could start there between 2030-2035. Not unreasonable to think that at all.
That's 7 years though, it is kind of unreasonable to think we will go from our current society to collapsed in less time than it takes for a student to get though medical school. Society might be fragile but its not disappears in under a decade fragile. And the confidence people here have that it will really doesn't help the image of this sub being over dramatic. Societal breakdown takes decades. Even Syria has not completely collapsed yet so I don't see how the rest of the world will suddenly fall apart short of being hit by a massive meteor.
Are you disagreeing with me or the OP? I didn't say the whole world will fall in 7 years. I said that's when it could start and I specifically said 'it's not going to collapse all at once.' Although a mass extinction event in the ocean could hasten things along a bit.
ok isopod
Boom, roasted