Well Skinster. That was sobering reading for a fine Sunday morning.
Do I believe him? In a word, yes. I do believe that what will look very much like civilization collapse will happen and sooner than we think. Every day we get more bad news.
Speaking for the third world, I would simply assert that it does not have the resources or stability to be more than an observer in this process. Its response will be completely defensive and local.
For the first world, the problem will be apathy. As long as we first world citizens have a modicum of comfort we will do little. There is no leadership.
Speaking of the USA specifically, we have a major political party that has decided to hang its future on denial. Its leadership has made the calculated decision to ignore the overwhelming evidence and collect money for it campaigns from people who stand to see diminished profits through even the most simple steps to slow the inevitable progression of this problem. They (the republicans) have decided to ensure the deaths of millions or even billions of people, coldly and dispassionately, so that they can get a check from XYZ company. They have promulgated a disinformation campaign aimed at the least educated and most impressionable of our citizens. Now they want to spend a trillion dollars on "infrastructure"; not one penny of it to mitigate the problems we already face from climate change. They will run in the 2020 election on the unthinkable platform that global climate change is:
Bad science.
Dramatically overblown.
God's will.
None of which, is even debatable except the last one and that only if we choose to believe that global climate change is another 'Noah's Flood" and for about the same reasons. Just look. We actually have people serving in the senate of the United States of America who have said, on record, that an increase in atmospheric carbon is good because "plants like it".
Democrats in the meantime are talking about this issue but not very loudly. Why? Because scaring people does not work very well for getting elected. Oh sure it is fine to scare people over some light brown person in the Middle East who you can fairly easily blow to pieces but to scare them over a killer that does not differentiate between Christian or Muslim, white or black or immigrant and citizen does not get votes. From any of them.
So I suspect this about right. Though hope springs eternal, I will probably not live to see the real collapse. Neither will most of the people in power today. The saddest people for me to image are the young republicans who will live to see just how amateurishly they have been duped. The climate if their lottery ticket. But unlike a lottery ticket, if they win and the climate does not bring them down, there is no payoff.
Americans and Europeans should have to spend a week in Beijing. They should have to understand what awaits us just in the easily visible.
China is already the third leading cause of air pollution
in the United States.What they will never understand is that even if we clean up the visible effects of air pollution we have not solved the problem. A traffic cop in Guangzhou China has a life expectancy of 42 because of respiratory illness. Now. But this problem is not about you, youngster, getting emphysema from jogging in the morning. It has gone way beyond that. Your future's are dark. You have little chance to enjoy what will soon be seen as the idyllic life that my generation enjoyed. Our wars, famines, and economic events will seem like parlor games to what you will suffer. If you are under 40 your best bet is to somehow contrive to become very rich or high up in the military. Otherwise.......