A scientist has made the shocking claim that there’s a 49% chance the world will end in just 25 years. Jared Diamond, American scientist and historian, predicted civilisation could collapse by 2050. He told Intelligencer: “I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.”
Diamond explained that fisheries and farms across the globe are being “managed unsustainably”, causing resources to be depleted at an alarming rate. He added: "At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted.
“Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably.”
The Pulitzer Prize winning author warned that we must come up with more sustainable practices by 2050, “or it’ll be too late”.
We need to send a bunch of scientists to the edge of the
galaxyglobe to create a foundation that will help reduce the duration of the chaos to only a millennia.
Calling Jared diamond a historian is just nonsense.
The minute I saw his name I rolled my eyes.
Move along nothing to see here.
So that’s why I planned to live in mountains and grow my own food. I thought I was high. Thanks Science.
Civilization doesn’t equal the world. Life will carry on and heal from the damage us ‘smart apes’ have done in our hubris.
Yeah, obviously. But that doesn’t do my child a damn bit of good now does it?
Is that what you think people are worried about? Planetary death has never really been on the table, that’s just the ignorant parroting things that were misunderstood.
I have a kid too, and it eats at me.
But I find comfort in the fact that life will carry on, even if my kid can never have the future I hoped for him when he was born.
It’s what gives me some comfort. Taking a larger perspective than just worrying about how humanity will fair.
Yeah this is just a diversion from the misanthropic
This argument frustrates me greatly. Humans are far more adaptable than most other species, and the damage we are already doing to less adaptable species and ecosystems is incalculable and irreversible. We will kill off much of Earth’s life long before we manage to destroy ourselves.
Species are going extinct at a rate of 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the normal “background rate” of extinction, driven by habitat loss, climate change, and pollution. Every species that we drive to extinction represents a multi-billion year legacy that will never return. Arguing that life will continue after the collapse of humanity is only partly true. There are a hell of a lot of species that will never continue, because our actions destroyed them.
We’re also roughly at the halfway point of Earth’s ability to support complex life, which emerged about a half billion years ago and has roughly another half billion years before the increased heat of the aging sun disrupts carbonate weathering to the extent that one of the main pathways of photosynthesis is no longer possible. Yes, during that 500 million years, in the absence of ongoing anthropogenic extinction, species will again diversify to fill the gaps. But there will be no tigers or elephants or rhinoceros after humanity, just as there were no non-avian dinosaurs after the asteroid.
I’m not making an argument. I’m learning to identify with a bigger picture for my sanity.
My heart weeps greatly for all of the species that are going extinct on this planet.
And I find some hope that life itself will continue here, even if it’s not complex life. Life has survived extinction events before. Life is adaptable.
I’m trying to be less attached to the form life takes, because I can’t stop climate change.
So it’s something that gives me peace. It’s not an argument that what is happening is right. Because it’s not.
“civilization” doesn’t even include humanity or technology.
“Why 49% and not 50%?” “I wanted it to sound more accurate than it is”
Totally. I assume his error margin is about 30 times that difference
Because it’s a simple way of saying “We’re not quite over that most likely outcome line yet, but we’re getting there.”
“Popsci author repeats claim he’s been using for decades to sell books that most anthropologists question”.
Man, sometimes I think newspapers and traditional media should be banned from reporting on science at all. I am very critical of social media and what Internet does to communication, but I’ll admit that the extremely focused experts that communicate on a narrow field for a living do a much, much better job of parsing published claims than traditional generalist news ever did. I am exhausted of impossible galaxies, stars that “should not exist”, healthy superfood, cures for cancer and world-ending events.
Any good broad-scale critique fro anthropologists that’s worth reading? I’ve only read one of his books, nearly 20 years ago, but most of what I’ve heard him say has seemed more or less on point.
All I have is what you can get by looking him up, and I am definitely not an expert. I’m saying that this one guy referencing his one model for his one theory of society-as-ecology deserves a more nuanced headline than “the world is ending in 25 years”. If I can speak on anything here it’s on the reporting.
He isn’t even saying anything that controversial when you dig through to the actual statements, which is a constant of mainstream news reporting on science news. “With all these things, at the rate we’re going now, we can carry on with our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we won’t be able to continue it any longer” is barely any more severe of a warning than any climate scientist or ecologist has been making about these things for the past four decades.
Hell, if anything he seems to be less concerned than the average Lemmy denizen:
He explained: "As for what we can do about it, whether to deal with it by individual action, or at a middle scale by corporate action, or at a top scale by government action - all three of those.
"Individually we can do things. We can buy different sorts of cars. We can do less driving. We can vote for public transport. That’s one thing.
“There are also corporate interests…I see that corporations, big corporations, while some of them do horrible things, some of them also are doing wonderful things which don’t make the front page.”
Post that around these parts, you’ll get people calling you a corporate shill for even entertaining that personal behaviour has an impact in this process or that any corporation is doing anything positive.
Don’t hear the Express go “dude on the Internet thinks it’s high time we ban cars before we all die”, though.
Wow, Jared Diamond and a tabloid.
This seems no more or less likely than before.
He’s playing it very save with 49%. As if he knew math or something
Yeah, that was another red flag. Margins of error on any kind of calculation like this are going to be big; “roughly half” would be a strong claim. Coming out with an exact percentage about a social sciences issue is crackpot territory.
I was gonna say… Was briefly concerned until I saw Jared Fucking Diamond’s name.
Honestly is he a scientist? Does he do science,or just find shit that supports his idea.
Edit, I did a bit of googling and it does appear he is still publishing papers, but it feels like he has been beating the “we all gonna die” drum for a long time now.
He’s makes his money as a popular writer, and actual historians say he’s a hack.
I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.
Emphasis added. That’s a pretty big bit of weasel-wording there, the world “as we know it” has changed drastically in the past 25 years. Things that we thought were indispensable to the proper functioning of the world order - such as, for example, the lack of a pudding-brained pedophillic fascist in the White House - are no longer operative. Yet we’re muddling along well enough, all things considered.
Things are rapidly changing in so many ways right now. Projecting that far forward with any confidence is a bit of a fool’s errand.
That’s a pretty big bit of weasel-wording there
Absolutely, the world today is also not as we knew it in the 25 years ago, and it’s very different compared to the 70’s, where the future looked a bit more rosy.
MIT predicted society would collapse by 2040 back in the 70s.
That was a pretty good prediction then. “World will end” is obviously a stupid wording, but the point is clear. The entire food supply chain as it is today will collapse, the question is just when it will happen and if we will have completely switched to indoor farming before then.
Almost there
That model keeps getting tweaked and rerun, as others have mentioned, its from 'The Limits to Growth, otherwise known as the ‘World 3 model’.
In this one, instesd of measuring ‘pollution’, which was…fairly difficult to get accurate data on… they just used CO2 instead.
Pretty much same result, we are pretty much at the peak of modern civilization right now.
IIRC, thats a screen grab from Paul Beckwith, a pretty well renowned climate scientist… he has a youtube channel, he puts out like a 20ish slide powerpoint recapping other recent climate studies every week or so …
Basically we are fucked, all our climate models from 5 or 10 years ago were actually too optimistic, we already blew through 1.5C, the SMOC, the Anatactic part of the thermohaline cycle, already collapsed a decade ago, and we did not notice untill the last few months.
We are tracking closer to the ‘8.5C by 2100’ level of climate sensitivity models than anything else.
Insurance companies are basically already abandoning roughly the lower third of the US, too much climate disaster danger, can’t afford to insure homes and neighborhoods.
UK Society of Actuaries recently put together their own risk assessment, from the ground up instesd of top down as the World 3 model… they are also predicting massive losses, economic damage, begging governments and insurance companies and banks to adopt mitigation strategies.
Do you have a link to that study?
I see the Limits of Growth study was based on the work of an MIT scientist, perhaps that’s the prediction mentioned.
LtG has been pretty on point with its modelling compared to real life data since its publication.
BUT LtG wasn’t a prediction for the end of the world, it was/is a model of interconnected metrics about our society at large and to illustrate two points:
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You cannot have infinite growth in a finite system.
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Society has to maintain a harmony of these metrics to prevent itself from collapsing.
Basically what happened after its publication, a bunch of economists attacked it with their can openers. Some whackjobs claimed the club of rome was an illuminati front, a few scientists recalibrated the model with updated data, showing evidence in its favour and the world moved on ignoring it and the myriad of other climate warnings
See also:
Complex systems collapse theory/paradigm.
Societies throughout history more or less accrue complexity costs in a similar fashion as big, poorly managed software projects accrue technical debt.
It all keeps working untill it doesn’t, and then, rather rapidly breaks.
If you do not actually maintain and preserve the integrity of foundational systems, and build a more extravagant/expansive set of systems atop that foundation… well, castles made of sand wash into the sea, eventually.
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Optimistic
Well I already knew I wouldn’t manage to retire…
Well at least this means there’s a 50% chance I won’t need the retirement savings that Im not going to have
This isn’t news.
And this isn’t a news community.
That’s WAY later than I thought!
This is cause for celebration! 🎉
yep, sounds like we can start worrying about that in about 20 years then.
24
Not sure if you’re celebrating because that’s earlier than you thought, or later than you thought…
Extra time! I wouldn’t have given us 5.
I think it’s easy to forget the scale and momentum of the thing… But yeah, the longer we go without scaling back our energy and resource consumption the harder we’re gonna hit that wall.
Nostradammit!
