244

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

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] 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

244 points (99.2% liked)

World News

39040 readers

1011 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.