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Hottest January on record sees the world reach 1.7°C warming mark | January was the hottest on record, at 1.7°C above the pre-industrial average for the month. (www.newscientist.com)

submitted 9 months ago by i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world

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This means there has been a 12-month period in which average global surface temperature was more than 1.5°C above the 1850 to 1900 average

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[-] vexikron@lemmy.zip 12 points 9 months ago

Except its not a black swan at all. We absolutely knew this was possible, was coming, is now here.

[-] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 5 points 9 months ago

We were pretty sure something was coming – what I think the "black swan" will be is the speed at which things will go to shit, and the actual depth of the shit we're going to find ourselves in very shortly

[-] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

It's also called "gray rhino" event. It's big, obvious, heading straight toward you but you still choose to ignore it.

[-] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 1 points 9 months ago

Again: we know something is going to go wrong, but we don't know what'll be the first thing to shit the bed. I wrote a longer comment about this

[-] vexikron@lemmy.zip 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Well even then, if you actually looked into this sort of thing, its been obvious for a while.

Historically, as studied by anthropologists, historians, sociologists, its been known for a while that civilizations collapse due to:

Massive Famines

Unexpected Broad, Rapid Climate Shifts

Massive Internal Political/Civil Unrest

Foreign Invasion

Massive Plagues

Insulated Ruling Class making absurd decisions to maintain their own power at the cost of the actual stability of their society

Collapse of Vital Trade Routes

Neglect and Failure of Vital Infrastructure

Financialization of the Economy, writ large

...

Now sometimes it can be just one of these, but usually its a few.

Most current societies/nation states are currently experiencing or will very soon be facing nearly all of these combined.

I suggest you read John Michael Greer's Catabolic Collapse book or watch some of the videos about it for an overview of the basic idea that complex societies tend to respond to crises by becoming more complex, which is the exact opposite of what you would want to do from a big picture, hindsight perspective, but is more or less unavoidable due to human psychology and socio/political/economic dynamics of human organized societies.

...

You are right that the vast majority of people will be surprised by the speed of collapse, logarithmic vs linear basically.

But the people who have been in charge of our societies either did, do, or should know or should have known about this.

[-] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Oh that's a whole 'nother thing entirely. I meant purely from an environmental perspective that my bet is that not only will the temperature increase continue to speed up much faster than expected, but that we're probably going to see some crucial ecological system go really spectacularly to shit – at a guess something related to the oceans, or could even be something like runaway warming (speedrun to Venus, yay!).

None of the events we've thought of have a very high probability of happening according to climate models, but our capability for modeling systems as complex as a whole planet's climate and all its ecosystems is… well, it's not zero, but that's about it. The likelihood of something unexpected going to shit is pretty high, and after it does happen we'll all go "oh, we should have seen this coming".

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who came up with the concept, had this to say regarding "Black Swans" (I've not been capitalizing it, oh no!):

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme 'impact'. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme 'impact', and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.

this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024

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