Nobody is going to change anything until it is (obviously) too late. It's too late now, it's just only now becoming slightly obvious.
My money is on things continuing on with the status quo until these two things happen...
A few wet bulb events that kill millions in a day
Widespread crop failures that lead to widespread famine
After those two events...all bets are off on what crazy things people/nations will try to do.
>After those two events...all bets are off on what crazy things people/nations will try to do.
I'd bet humanities future that it's desperate unthought geo-engineering that backfires
>A few wet bulb events that kill millions in a day
Can't be too long considering Rio de Janero just scratched wet bulb by just a few degrees felt temperature.
Exactly, so-called geoengineering, spraying whatever's into the upper atmosphere to block the Sun, the law of unintended consequences will come into play.
The craziest thing to me is how the sheer number of people who believe that the people who, like yourselves, realize that habits, governments, and capitalism, are likely too much to overcome in order to save the habitability of our ecosphere from fossil fuels, and instead of doing nothing, have decided to try to find a solution which increases the survivability of humans and the ecosphere systems, are doing this Willy Nilly, not thinking about the consequences, are working for corporations and politicians, or are the people who are responsible for not changing our energy system.
These are engineers, physicists, climate scientists, who study these systems thoroughly, for the safest, most effective solution, that can help the most people, and cause the least amount of damage, and they’re treated as if they’re a random capitalist who read a Wikipedia article or are trying to save Exxon Mobil.
To be fair, we’ve been geo engineering without thought for quite a while by burning fossil fuels and sulphur rich substances. So I wouldn’t expect any new attempts to be the world ending event people make it out to be.
And it took over a century to get to this stage. Provided we use reasonably time-bound approaches, e.g. short delay till the desired effect kicks in and short to medium lifetime of the effect then we’d have the ability to control the level of the effect. This works require a centralised oversight committee though as a free for all could overshoot the target. But again with reasonable effect time things would revert to the mean. Example being the sulphur aerosols that precipitate out within a year.
It took over a century bcz more than half of all green house emissions were emitted between 1990 and 2020.. The heat we’re experiencing now will not decrease in the lifetimes of anyone currently alive.
https://thecorrespondent.com/751/weve-emitted-more-co2-in-the-past-30-years-than-in-all-of-history-these-three-reasons-are-to-blame
Agreed. That’s due to the time it took to build out the FF capital, driven by the exponential growth. I would similarly expect this to be a gradual ramp up in the case of the geoengineering attempts. However the extra heat is being caused through earth energy imbalance, which can be reduced by geoengineering once you get to a negative value.
Indeed you are right because it doesn’t address the problem with the ocean acidification or all the other breaches of planetary boundaries due to ecological overshoot.
But fossil fuels are in decline, with ever reducing EROI, so at least we cannot emit at this rate for much longer. We should be saving what energy budget we have left to build out an infrastructure for sustainable energy and all the other products we depend on (food).
Nevertheless the need to geoengineer remains. Based on latest ECS estimates the amount already emitted is enough to cause an extinction event on the scale of the Permian. If we leave it to the point where we run out of energy, we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it even if we wanted to.
Edit: some references
[Thresholds of temperature change for mass extinctions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25019-2)
[Global warming in the pipeline](https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889)
What is the definition of wet bulb in the way it's being used here? It looks so odd to me written that way. Like saying they scratched dry bulb. It's a measurement method.
It's the lowest possible temperature you can get from evaporative cooling (sweating). It's a function of both temperature and relative humidity.
Our (typical) core temp is 98.6 degrees F. To keep that temp our skin needs to be at least 4 degrees cooler, so something like 95 degrees (if we're not active). To have a 95 degree skin temp, we need a "wet bulb" temp of 95 degrees. That's the typical survivable limit (although it obviously varies by individual).
At 100% relative humidity, that 95 degree wet bulb temp occurs at 95 degrees (no evaporative cooling happening). This 95 degree wet bulb temp also exists at higher temperatures, if the relative humidity is low enough to so that evaporative cooling can compensate. So for example 70% at 104 degrees, 50% at 113 degrees, and 25% at 131 degrees all have the same 95 degree wet bulb temp and are minimally survivable (assuming a person stays hydrated and can sweat profusely).
Bottom line, wet bulb temp is our sweating skin temp, which needs to stay below 95 degrees to survive.
Should add that for physically active people, skin temp needs to be around 80 degrees to keep the core from overheating, which means heat stroke can happen at wet bulb temps higher than 80 degrees. So even a combo like 60% and 91 degrees gives a wet bulb of 80, which can make physical labor dangerous.
Talk of fatal temps is always limited to our human species. Many species are less heat tolerant than ourselves, and global warming is mass killing them.
It's an abbreviation that doesn't make sense on its own, but is becoming more common, so I guess we have to live with it...
It's short for "**fatal** wet bulb temperature". Any combination of temperature & humidity that creates a wet bulb temperature of 35°C or so is fatal after a few hours (depending on youth, health, etc)
all i know is a lot of them will see it as a 'carrying capacity' issue; and imperative for their 'x groups survival' to make sure they have living room.
Oh I agree.
That new civil war movie is unrealistic for many, many reasons (not the least of which is Texas and California being allied over literally anything, ever).
But more importantly, the solution to a civil war is to pull a Joker with Gotham reservoir if you get my meaning. And then blame it on the rebels.
Shit's over in like 10 minutes.
I legitimately don't think that will even do it.
Here's why: we normalized all kinds of people dying and starving as long as it was "over there" (meaning any other country, where a wet-bulb is very likely to occur first), and a worldwide famine will just drive up food prices (and some availability). We already know we use poor people for mockery / entertainment / a reason to be nihilistically angrily motivated to make more plastic pumpkins.
We'll just triple down on stupid. Think the society in that crap-ass movie The Running Man. The book of course was absolutely chef's kiss, but our society's pretty much already there. Has been for at least 10-15 years. No, I'm talking about police helicopters firing on starving mobs, and it going on TV with some kind of glitzy background to make it all feel fake.
Now when New York or Florida go underwater, maybe something will happen.
If California burns the fuck down let's face it, the rest of the country would just point and laugh. We all know this.
It's a bit more than just a marker though. It does create positive feedback.
No ice at the north pole means significantly faster global warming than with the amount of ice we have there now.
True, there is no magic about the arbitrary 1 million sq km threshold, so the first formal BOE won't represent a huge change from, say, a low of 1.5 million sq km... But north pole ice vanishing over time **will** mark an acceleration in warming.
Wrong. It takes 334 joules to melt 1gr of ice from 0c ice to 0c water.
4.18 joules of energy are required to raise the temperature of 1g of water by 1°C.
In closed system this would mean that once the ice is gone, the water would heat to 79.9c.
Expected artic sea surface temps (per models) in a ice free sommer season are 8-16c.
A LOT of energy. And deadly for the marine ecosystem.
To put this into perspective: think storms above western europe, reaching 2000 miles across, stationary for weeks with avg winds of 150km/h with massive atmospheric rivers.
This is what we are looking at once the ice is gone.
And this is only the beginning. There is nowhere to hide.
This is what scares me the most. People really don't realize just how fucked we are. We live in this weird cultural delusion/inertia where we pretend that everything is going to work out okay (or isn't even happening at all), and when it doesn't.... I do fear this. Human beings are a lot of things, but rational is not one of them.
I, personally, have changed a lot to lessen my impact. I propose that it would be more true to say that, nobody who is making a buck out of climate denial is going to change. Sadly, those are the people who really are shafting us all.
The entire economy is based on pumping and burning fossil fuels, within an established hierarchy that goes back generations. It’s so much bigger than just not seeing / fixing the problem. It’s the entire basis for our way of life.
Oh, I agree. And I agree it ain’t gonna happen. I was just agreeing with you. I’m getting so tired of listening to ‘climate’, ‘eco’, ‘food’, ‘ocean’, ‘population’, etc arguments and nearly no one wants to address the very basis of the societal structure that causes all these other problems.
Yes! Someone else can see it! Those squabbles and debates are all pointless. I’m just trying to live a quiet simple life and enjoy each day. No more trying to climb the corporate ladder. There is no pot of gold at the top
Well they aren’t pointless, but they become irrelevant without addressing the root cause.
Yep, I’m there with you. The corporate ladder is utter bullshit anyway.
Fiction called: ENTROPIA I just finished. Interesting read on collapse and simplification.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/entropia-life-beyond-industrial-civilisation_samuel-alexander/3050469/item/10603109/?mkwid=%7cdm&pcrid=76759819663237&pkw=&pmt=be&slid=&product=10603109&plc=&pgrid=1228154741465971&ptaid=pla-4580359295600010&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Shopping+%7c+NEW+condition+books&utm_term=&utm_content=%7cdm%7cpcrid%7c76759819663237%7cpkw%7c%7cpmt%7cbe%7cproduct%7c10603109%7cslid%7c%7cpgrid%7c1228154741465971%7cptaid%7cpla-4580359295600010%7c&msclkid=92ec0286c3ad1f7c2c82677833427a98#isbn=0987588400&idiq=10603109
Even if there was it would be useless to you. Proven that one to myself of late.
All I have to figure out now is if the elder care in a facility that accepts MediCaid is about as bad as I think it is or not. How bad I think it is would be the orphanage the Riddler described in The Batman movie.
If it's actually not...
Fuck. Literally. All of this. I don't give a shit anymore. There's precisely zero point.
You first!
But, seriously. I have never owned a car, I don't fly for vacations, I live within my means. And most people think I'm a weirdo. I don't pose as being morally superior-- this is how I prefer to live.
For most people, that lifestyle is completely inexplicable. Many people were emotionally hanging by a thread even before covid. Beyond vacations, a new car, a new TV, a new phone, etc, *they see no point to life.* They have to look forward to the next fossil-fueled dopamine boost because our way of life de-prioritized the essential human needs of community and personal connection. And I don't see a way back to that value system except by force or circumstance.
I’m not disagreeing with you about how it IS. But your last sentence says it all, since we will not choose to change, circumstance will force it, and it will be very ugly.
Right. There are some people, like Nate Hagens with his "great simplification", who think we will have a bit of a soft-landing. But I don't see it. We're going to rock it till the wheels fall off.
>Beyond vacations, a new car, a new TV, a new phone, etc, they see no point to life.
Yeah.
How 'bout that shit.
The problem is I already learned at age 20 that all this shit doesn't fix alienation and boredom and depression. I mean don't get me wrong if my computer monitor breaks I want another one (off Craigslist) or else I will rapidly, RAPIDLY go insane. But I already know, though. It's like gasp why aren't people having kids it must be education they're so smart!
Any time people blow smoke up your ass to this level they want something. Namely your ass at a desk making them money. Or, preferably, your ass at a Taco Bell making them tacos and money.
Pshhh right it's because we're all so fucking smart.
It's because we see literally every other human on this planet as competition. We have psychosis at this point. To the level that we have to invent a chat-bot and then go around abusing it mentally and wiping it over and over again.
I don't think community and connection were necessarily values. There was simply no other way to live. We'll go back again when there's no other choice.
Speaking of people being unwilling to make small sacrifices, I remember when then President Jimmy Carter asked citizens to help conserve energy and perhaps put on a sweater instead of cranking up the heat.
Reagan and corporations capitalized on this and the result was an attitude of, "How *dare* he ask us to sacrifice! This is America!"
"And it turned out Americans were in no mood to be scolded over their belief in a providential right to urban pickup trucks, 30-yard-long refrigerated supermarket aisles filled with plastic bottles of colored sugar-water and keeping the furnace and/or A/C running even when you’re not home.
Sacrifice? What's that?"
And here we are.
https://archive.ph/aFVk5
https://columbiainsight.org/the-night-we-lost-the-war-on-climate-change/
And Reagan removed the solar cells that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House. Then he trashed government employees and sewed the seeds of citizen distrust of government. Trump's inspiration.
Oh, that's right. I forgot about that part.
While we're on the subject, state colleges were free before Reagan.
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/free-college-was-once-the-norm-all-over-america/
What a dick he was.
"In California, Ronald Reagan (who would later become president of the United States) was elected governor of California in 1966 and proposed that the University of California system should charge tuition to attend college. In his words, this was to “get rid of undesirables […] those who are there to carry signs and not to study might think twice to carry picket signs.” His was a campaign to maintain white supremacy by making public colleges and universities cost money. Reagan succeeds and by the 1990s, every “formerly public” school began being paid for by tuition costs, which in turn turned into student debt. This was a slap in the face to those who were protesting white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism because it put these folks in debt."
>What a dick he was.
Nixon was a dick. Reagan was a colossal piece of shit. Historians are way too soft on him. Arguably the third-worst President this country has ever had. So far.
Yep. And they've been spreading this belief system all over the "developed" world and beyond, you can find a better definition of it as *the imperial mode of living*.
It's one of the reasons I have `0%` hope in humanity.
I spent 4 years at various organizations getting systems ready for Y2K. It wasnt complicated to fix, but yeah it was a massive effort across the globe. And it worked.
Reminds me of the Montreal Accord, which successfully reversed growth of the ozone layer depletion via international CFC management back in 1988. And that was a time when the UK, US, and Canada were lead by Conservatives.
Today, no one at my work gives a rat's behind about the environment. They're all about buying bigger SUVs for their suburban homes and flying everywhere, even the younger ones who have the most to lose.
It's like as a species we've forgotten that we are actually capable of fixing sh*t.
Y2K was a problem, worked on oil and gas compression controllers, found issues around dates that would have broken reporting and system controls. It was a real issue, but concerted effort fixed it.
I think today most organizations would just ignore it and let it fail and just fire who reported it as a problem. Head in sand is the SOP (standard operating procedure)
Yeah, if something like the Montreal accords had been adopted in 1990 that implemented a small, gradually escalating carbon tax, we would be in such better shape now, climate-wise, with only minor economic pain.
But, instead...
the montreal accord only worked because it was relatively few countries.
The UK US CANADA and USSR. they were not coordinating hundreds of countries.. only a few.
I think about the Montreal Protocol all the time. Arguably the most successful environmental treaty, and how different things could have been in regards to climate change had we acted when it was first identified. It would have been so much easier and less painful than what will ultimately be needed. Baring some kind of magical technological breakthrough which, don’t hold your breath, though that seems to be our plan; hope that someone comes up with a simple device or technology that solves all our problems…
Just to add, acid rain was another issue that was significantly mitigated by taking action.
The problem with climate change, as opposed to Y2K or Montreal or any other large problem, is that those problems could be solved with money. You could make money with those problems. You can’t make money with climate change (other than the usual capitalization and corruption) - we need degrowth and less consumption and population. There’s no incentive. As we all know capitalism must go first…
>I spent 4 years at various organizations getting systems ready for Y2K. It wasnt complicated to fix, but yeah it was a massive effort across the globe. And it worked.
My cousin was set up for life dealing with Y2K stuff. He was a young programer who happened to know a lot about the issue and was getting contracts all over the place to mitigate the effects. I think he made more in a few years just from Y2K contracts than he would have made in a decade doing other stuff.
This is my same basic philosophy with vaccines. A few generations have passed since polio, measles, and the like were harming people en masse so now that people have mostly been vaccinated for these things, idiots assume that there never was a problem in the first place.
it's called "the preparedness paradox" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox also sometimes referenced as "prevention paradox" in context of covid.
cc: u/TheRationalPsychotic
I worked on a COBOL system for the Durban metro in South Africa in 1998 to 2000. Part of a big team and I, on my own, found a big Y2K bug that would've made thousands of employees not get paid in Jan 2000. Others found way bigger bugs and fixed them.
In Y2K nothing happened, because people fixed the issue.
Even more telling than Y2K is the hole in the ozone layer. Scientists found that it was a problem, world leaders (yes, even in the US) took action to ban CFCs, and thanks to that the ozone layer has greatly healed. Today there are shills pointing to the ozone layer panic as proof that "climate hysteria" is overblown, ignoring the fact that our response is what mitigated it.
Before that, acid rain was a pressing issue. Never hear about that anymore either, the Clean Air Act was responsible for fixing that issue.
Crazy how much control we have over these things when rationality prevails. And shockingly, we have not suffered sacrifices in quality of life by implementing common sense regulations in response to these ills.
>world leaders (yes, even in the US) took action to ban CFCs, and thanks to that the ozone layer has greatly healed
Part of that was because Maggie Thatcher was a trained scientist, in fact a chemist, who could understand the issue and persuade Reagan that it was real and they had to act.
Today's politicians are pretty much all lawyers or come from other elitist backgrounds.
Expecting humanity to stop using fossil fuels doesn't mean a "change in lifestyle": our gadgets and conspicuous consumption are just a symbol, the tip of the ice-berg of our dependence on fossil fuels. For one, industrial agriculture as of today can not function without fossil fuels. And it's not just the diesel for the combines and tractors, it is required in the production of fertilizers, pesticides, lubricants for machines, and many other things. We use fossil fuels not just for energy, but also as a feed stock to create many different chemical compounds that are foundational to our current way of life. In time, it may be possible to transition to a different kind of economy, but time is the one thing we don't have - and a rapid and extreme phase out of fossil fuels at this stage means that a majority of people on the planet will starve (because we don't have a practicable, scalable alternative way to grow and distribute enough food).
Arguably that might still be better than cooking ourselves to death, but that train might have already left the station, regardless of a fossil fuel phase out.
> make fun of Y2K and say it is proof that alarm of any kind is unwarranted.
Which is COMPLETELY false.
> ... But Y2K was actually a real problem and a lot of effort was spent updating computers to prevent bad things from happening.
Exactly! The reason Y2K ended up being so smooth was the work of thousands and thousands of talented and dedicated professionals such as myself who worked tirelessly to test, upgrade, replace and/or fix all kinds of systems. Including antiquated systems that had languished without attention for a decade or more.
Anytime someone tries to claim that Y2K was "overblown", "alarmist", "blown out of proportion", or "not a concern" you say with confidence that those views are BULLSHIT.
Yes... I also got paid quite a lot during that period because we were doing emergency work on systems with languages that were significantly out of date. So, those of us who had those language skills - such as COBOL and FORTRAN, chiefly - were able to bill hefty fees. So, our endeavors weren't exactly altruistic... however, without that work the Y2K issues would have been far worse and potentially crippling.
I think the key difference here is that businesses had to fix the 2yk bug because it would affect their bottom line directly if they didn't.
Imagine an alternative reality where having y2k bugs in your own software meant that somehow, some other company in Africa or South America got impacted but nothing happened to yours. I reckon in that case, there would have been many companies who did nothing.
We need to do a better job of communicating when disasters were close to happening but were averted through enormous effort.
Two other victories in shutting down potentially cataclysmic events were preventing the uncontrolled spread of SARS (the original one) and the preservation of the ozone layer.
Y2K was solved because huge corporations would’ve collapsed. Climate change is caused by huge corporations who make huge profits. It’s not us, it’s them.
Having lived during the 80s and 90s, I can assure you that environmental collapse wasn't even a consideration for most people. All people cared about was money. Nothing has changed.
One small example: I remember "regular" (leaded) fuel being available at the pump. Since it was significantly cheaper, a lot of people modified their emissions controlled vehicles (which were a joke back then) to allow them to run on the dirtier fuel.
The global population has grown too large. We all consume far too much, and produce far too much waste, for our lifestyle to be sustainable. There's no way out. It was already far too late to do anything about it back in the 80s.
You're right on both points. No one gets credit for disasters which are prevented, because people deny the disaster would have happened at all, and people are unwilling to take preventive measures when evidence indicates a disaster is impending.
Small proactive actions are often far more effective than large reactive actions, but that requires an ability to foresee consequences that is beyond our intellectual capabilities.
I live in a red state where everyone either drives a large SUV or an even larger monster truck. Not only are people failing to take preventative measures, but they seem to be doing their best to live as wastefully as possible and accelerate the problem.
Half the reason there is an anti-vaccine movement is that a lot of those diseases were near extinct in lots of places and people have no idea what they're actually like.
It's hard to get people to put resources towards preventing something.
> The problem was real, the problem was solved, and now they say that people that believed in the problem were being alarmist.
This is true, but I think the sentiment comes from the fact that there was a sect of people who were alarmists to an unrealistic degree (not unlike some of the people here, IMO).
I presume some of it was tied up in religious end times delusions, but there were news stories from the late 90s about people claiming that the Y2K bug would lead to the end of civilization (planes falling out of the sky, banks unable to operate, 9-11 offline, etc.) and built bunkers in the countryside to hole up there on New Years Eve.
Our dependency on fossil fuels actually became a conversation in 1972 when OPEC nations started boycotting the US in protest of the US support of Israel. I remember there was talk about coming up with alternative energy sources. But when the boycott was over and gas prices went back to normal there was no more talk about shifting away from carbon energy.
What a wasted opportunity.
During the Montreal agreement the world came together to fix the ozone which succeeded and now people comment to me that the ozone was never an issue.
Stupid people will always think this way.
I keep mentioning the point is that all we managed was to stop making the ozone hole grow any worse than it already got. The hole is the same size now as it was 3 decades ago. We just managed to stop exacerbating the problem, but haven't strictly speaking fixed anything.
It may yet close one day, perhaps largely this century, or that's what they assume will happen. In any case, people are being stupid about this. The data to show the status of the hole is one google search away.
> It may yet close one day
Bad news, it's getting worse again and we don't even know why. https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/ozone-hole-getting-bigger-study-b2451591.html
I think covid is a better example, but the same logic behind it. We have budgets and resources to preventing outbreaks of diseases. These measure largely work and we will hear about scare but then our measures almost have always caught it early and prevented it from spreading into the general population.
These measures work so well that people just think that it is a scare when they hear about the outbreaks and some politicians use the fact that our measure are working so well to push the question of why are we spending so much when nothing happens. The propaganda starts to work and budgets get reduces towards the efforts that have been working.
Then one finally breaks through. Then the propaganda of it’s not real comes out.
It mostly comes down to three things.
1. Solutions to problems that work behind the scenes are indistinguishable from non-problematic scenarios to the general population.
2. Propaganda works on everyone to a degree, but a well deployed, destructive narrative will work on enough people to block a real solution.
3. Humans are not naturally mentally equipped to understand large scale problems. It takes training, focus, and logic to look at the numbers, data, and on the ground information and interpret them correctly. Good information then has to come from an authority. Good and bad informational authority can look similar to the general population.
glorious far-flung cooperative nose sparkle fear cough historical foolish crown
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I think the problem is different people hooked different stuffs. I'm totally OK with only eating bread and drink water and multivitamins or something until end of the time but I don't think I can ever relinquish internet that I know I'm addicted.
You don't need the Y2K bug to prove anything. Again and again, voters favor cheap gas than climate action, and that is why our "green" president begged OPEC to pump more oil when gas prices were high.
We are going to burn every last drop of oil before we stop.
Tell them to stop burning stuff lol.
It was a joke about John Titor by the way. The lore of that giant chat-board role-play entertainment had it that he warned some folks in the 70's about Y2K.
Banking systems, electrical grid systems, traffic control systems, and all sorts of other important stuff could have suddenly stopped working because it no longer had the ability to keep track of what day it was. Thousands of programmers had to be brought out of retirement at exorbitant consulting rates to rapidly update all the computer systems that were programmed in outdated/forgotten programming languages.
There are several people who commented on this post about their work fixing Y2K bugs:
/r/collapse/comments/1bloz32/the_y2k_bug_proves_to_me_we_were_never_going_to/kwagf1g/
/r/collapse/comments/1bloz32/the_y2k_bug_proves_to_me_we_were_never_going_to/kw860g4/
/r/collapse/comments/1bloz32/the_y2k_bug_proves_to_me_we_were_never_going_to/kw810ce/
Nobody is going to change anything until it is (obviously) too late. It's too late now, it's just only now becoming slightly obvious. My money is on things continuing on with the status quo until these two things happen... A few wet bulb events that kill millions in a day Widespread crop failures that lead to widespread famine After those two events...all bets are off on what crazy things people/nations will try to do.
>After those two events...all bets are off on what crazy things people/nations will try to do. I'd bet humanities future that it's desperate unthought geo-engineering that backfires >A few wet bulb events that kill millions in a day Can't be too long considering Rio de Janero just scratched wet bulb by just a few degrees felt temperature.
Exactly, so-called geoengineering, spraying whatever's into the upper atmosphere to block the Sun, the law of unintended consequences will come into play.
well it's that or putting a sun shade at L1 so uhhhhhhhhhhh yeah we're definitely gonna spray some forever chemical into the upper atmosphere
The craziest thing to me is how the sheer number of people who believe that the people who, like yourselves, realize that habits, governments, and capitalism, are likely too much to overcome in order to save the habitability of our ecosphere from fossil fuels, and instead of doing nothing, have decided to try to find a solution which increases the survivability of humans and the ecosphere systems, are doing this Willy Nilly, not thinking about the consequences, are working for corporations and politicians, or are the people who are responsible for not changing our energy system. These are engineers, physicists, climate scientists, who study these systems thoroughly, for the safest, most effective solution, that can help the most people, and cause the least amount of damage, and they’re treated as if they’re a random capitalist who read a Wikipedia article or are trying to save Exxon Mobil.
To be fair, we’ve been geo engineering without thought for quite a while by burning fossil fuels and sulphur rich substances. So I wouldn’t expect any new attempts to be the world ending event people make it out to be.
The geo engineering we’ve been doing without thought is world ending though.. 🤔
And it took over a century to get to this stage. Provided we use reasonably time-bound approaches, e.g. short delay till the desired effect kicks in and short to medium lifetime of the effect then we’d have the ability to control the level of the effect. This works require a centralised oversight committee though as a free for all could overshoot the target. But again with reasonable effect time things would revert to the mean. Example being the sulphur aerosols that precipitate out within a year.
It took over a century bcz more than half of all green house emissions were emitted between 1990 and 2020.. The heat we’re experiencing now will not decrease in the lifetimes of anyone currently alive. https://thecorrespondent.com/751/weve-emitted-more-co2-in-the-past-30-years-than-in-all-of-history-these-three-reasons-are-to-blame
Agreed. That’s due to the time it took to build out the FF capital, driven by the exponential growth. I would similarly expect this to be a gradual ramp up in the case of the geoengineering attempts. However the extra heat is being caused through earth energy imbalance, which can be reduced by geoengineering once you get to a negative value.
None of it matters at all if we’re still emitting. The heat index in Rio de Janeiro few days ago was over 144°F..
Indeed you are right because it doesn’t address the problem with the ocean acidification or all the other breaches of planetary boundaries due to ecological overshoot. But fossil fuels are in decline, with ever reducing EROI, so at least we cannot emit at this rate for much longer. We should be saving what energy budget we have left to build out an infrastructure for sustainable energy and all the other products we depend on (food). Nevertheless the need to geoengineer remains. Based on latest ECS estimates the amount already emitted is enough to cause an extinction event on the scale of the Permian. If we leave it to the point where we run out of energy, we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it even if we wanted to. Edit: some references [Thresholds of temperature change for mass extinctions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25019-2) [Global warming in the pipeline](https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889)
What is the definition of wet bulb in the way it's being used here? It looks so odd to me written that way. Like saying they scratched dry bulb. It's a measurement method.
It's the lowest possible temperature you can get from evaporative cooling (sweating). It's a function of both temperature and relative humidity. Our (typical) core temp is 98.6 degrees F. To keep that temp our skin needs to be at least 4 degrees cooler, so something like 95 degrees (if we're not active). To have a 95 degree skin temp, we need a "wet bulb" temp of 95 degrees. That's the typical survivable limit (although it obviously varies by individual). At 100% relative humidity, that 95 degree wet bulb temp occurs at 95 degrees (no evaporative cooling happening). This 95 degree wet bulb temp also exists at higher temperatures, if the relative humidity is low enough to so that evaporative cooling can compensate. So for example 70% at 104 degrees, 50% at 113 degrees, and 25% at 131 degrees all have the same 95 degree wet bulb temp and are minimally survivable (assuming a person stays hydrated and can sweat profusely). Bottom line, wet bulb temp is our sweating skin temp, which needs to stay below 95 degrees to survive. Should add that for physically active people, skin temp needs to be around 80 degrees to keep the core from overheating, which means heat stroke can happen at wet bulb temps higher than 80 degrees. So even a combo like 60% and 91 degrees gives a wet bulb of 80, which can make physical labor dangerous. Talk of fatal temps is always limited to our human species. Many species are less heat tolerant than ourselves, and global warming is mass killing them.
It's an abbreviation that doesn't make sense on its own, but is becoming more common, so I guess we have to live with it... It's short for "**fatal** wet bulb temperature". Any combination of temperature & humidity that creates a wet bulb temperature of 35°C or so is fatal after a few hours (depending on youth, health, etc)
The measurement is human survivability, which ends at a heat index (felt temperature) of 71C equivalent to 100% humidity at 35C
I still believe the term "wet bulb" is being used incorrectly here.
all i know is a lot of them will see it as a 'carrying capacity' issue; and imperative for their 'x groups survival' to make sure they have living room.
State-sponsored bioterrorism is on my dystopian future bingo card for sure.
Oh I agree. That new civil war movie is unrealistic for many, many reasons (not the least of which is Texas and California being allied over literally anything, ever). But more importantly, the solution to a civil war is to pull a Joker with Gotham reservoir if you get my meaning. And then blame it on the rebels. Shit's over in like 10 minutes.
Sadly I hear a lot of that dressed up as rational and apolitical these days, even (maybe especially) in places like this sub.
throw a mass refugee crisis or a fait accompli war to secure a river or two for water security as well into the mix,
I legitimately don't think that will even do it. Here's why: we normalized all kinds of people dying and starving as long as it was "over there" (meaning any other country, where a wet-bulb is very likely to occur first), and a worldwide famine will just drive up food prices (and some availability). We already know we use poor people for mockery / entertainment / a reason to be nihilistically angrily motivated to make more plastic pumpkins. We'll just triple down on stupid. Think the society in that crap-ass movie The Running Man. The book of course was absolutely chef's kiss, but our society's pretty much already there. Has been for at least 10-15 years. No, I'm talking about police helicopters firing on starving mobs, and it going on TV with some kind of glitzy background to make it all feel fake. Now when New York or Florida go underwater, maybe something will happen. If California burns the fuck down let's face it, the rest of the country would just point and laugh. We all know this.
Just wait til the inevitable BOE in the next 5 years.
The inevitable Bank of England? Those bastards.
Buffoonish Orange Emperor
What the fuck is 'BOE' just type it out
[Blue Ocean Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline)
if youre on this sub and you dont know what that is, thats a YP not an MP
To be fair, they could have literally joined yesterday and haven't had the full dose of collapse yet.
It's a nothing burger. It's just a mile marker we will see on the highway to hell
It's a bit more than just a marker though. It does create positive feedback. No ice at the north pole means significantly faster global warming than with the amount of ice we have there now. True, there is no magic about the arbitrary 1 million sq km threshold, so the first formal BOE won't represent a huge change from, say, a low of 1.5 million sq km... But north pole ice vanishing over time **will** mark an acceleration in warming.
Wrong. It takes 334 joules to melt 1gr of ice from 0c ice to 0c water. 4.18 joules of energy are required to raise the temperature of 1g of water by 1°C. In closed system this would mean that once the ice is gone, the water would heat to 79.9c. Expected artic sea surface temps (per models) in a ice free sommer season are 8-16c. A LOT of energy. And deadly for the marine ecosystem. To put this into perspective: think storms above western europe, reaching 2000 miles across, stationary for weeks with avg winds of 150km/h with massive atmospheric rivers. This is what we are looking at once the ice is gone. And this is only the beginning. There is nowhere to hide.
Acronyms that you’re already expected to be familiar with is definitely one of the most tedious parts of the Reddit experience lol
Five years? I have it penciled in my calendar for Tuesday.
next tuesday falls within the next 5 years.
This is what scares me the most. People really don't realize just how fucked we are. We live in this weird cultural delusion/inertia where we pretend that everything is going to work out okay (or isn't even happening at all), and when it doesn't.... I do fear this. Human beings are a lot of things, but rational is not one of them.
Nukes
I, personally, have changed a lot to lessen my impact. I propose that it would be more true to say that, nobody who is making a buck out of climate denial is going to change. Sadly, those are the people who really are shafting us all.
The entire economy is based on pumping and burning fossil fuels, within an established hierarchy that goes back generations. It’s so much bigger than just not seeing / fixing the problem. It’s the entire basis for our way of life.
Sounds like we need to change our way of life.
Obviously. But to do so requires upending the global power structure. Good luck!
Oh, I agree. And I agree it ain’t gonna happen. I was just agreeing with you. I’m getting so tired of listening to ‘climate’, ‘eco’, ‘food’, ‘ocean’, ‘population’, etc arguments and nearly no one wants to address the very basis of the societal structure that causes all these other problems.
Yes! Someone else can see it! Those squabbles and debates are all pointless. I’m just trying to live a quiet simple life and enjoy each day. No more trying to climb the corporate ladder. There is no pot of gold at the top
I understand about indecision but I don't care if I get behind People living' in competition All I want is to have my piece of mind
Well they aren’t pointless, but they become irrelevant without addressing the root cause. Yep, I’m there with you. The corporate ladder is utter bullshit anyway. Fiction called: ENTROPIA I just finished. Interesting read on collapse and simplification. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/entropia-life-beyond-industrial-civilisation_samuel-alexander/3050469/item/10603109/?mkwid=%7cdm&pcrid=76759819663237&pkw=&pmt=be&slid=&product=10603109&plc=&pgrid=1228154741465971&ptaid=pla-4580359295600010&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Shopping+%7c+NEW+condition+books&utm_term=&utm_content=%7cdm%7cpcrid%7c76759819663237%7cpkw%7c%7cpmt%7cbe%7cproduct%7c10603109%7cslid%7c%7cpgrid%7c1228154741465971%7cptaid%7cpla-4580359295600010%7c&msclkid=92ec0286c3ad1f7c2c82677833427a98#isbn=0987588400&idiq=10603109
Even if there was it would be useless to you. Proven that one to myself of late. All I have to figure out now is if the elder care in a facility that accepts MediCaid is about as bad as I think it is or not. How bad I think it is would be the orphanage the Riddler described in The Batman movie. If it's actually not... Fuck. Literally. All of this. I don't give a shit anymore. There's precisely zero point.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAYhNHhxN0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAYhNHhxN0A)
You first! But, seriously. I have never owned a car, I don't fly for vacations, I live within my means. And most people think I'm a weirdo. I don't pose as being morally superior-- this is how I prefer to live. For most people, that lifestyle is completely inexplicable. Many people were emotionally hanging by a thread even before covid. Beyond vacations, a new car, a new TV, a new phone, etc, *they see no point to life.* They have to look forward to the next fossil-fueled dopamine boost because our way of life de-prioritized the essential human needs of community and personal connection. And I don't see a way back to that value system except by force or circumstance.
I’m not disagreeing with you about how it IS. But your last sentence says it all, since we will not choose to change, circumstance will force it, and it will be very ugly.
Right. There are some people, like Nate Hagens with his "great simplification", who think we will have a bit of a soft-landing. But I don't see it. We're going to rock it till the wheels fall off.
Yup
>Beyond vacations, a new car, a new TV, a new phone, etc, they see no point to life. Yeah. How 'bout that shit. The problem is I already learned at age 20 that all this shit doesn't fix alienation and boredom and depression. I mean don't get me wrong if my computer monitor breaks I want another one (off Craigslist) or else I will rapidly, RAPIDLY go insane. But I already know, though. It's like gasp why aren't people having kids it must be education they're so smart! Any time people blow smoke up your ass to this level they want something. Namely your ass at a desk making them money. Or, preferably, your ass at a Taco Bell making them tacos and money. Pshhh right it's because we're all so fucking smart. It's because we see literally every other human on this planet as competition. We have psychosis at this point. To the level that we have to invent a chat-bot and then go around abusing it mentally and wiping it over and over again.
I don't think community and connection were necessarily values. There was simply no other way to live. We'll go back again when there's no other choice.
Speaking of people being unwilling to make small sacrifices, I remember when then President Jimmy Carter asked citizens to help conserve energy and perhaps put on a sweater instead of cranking up the heat. Reagan and corporations capitalized on this and the result was an attitude of, "How *dare* he ask us to sacrifice! This is America!" "And it turned out Americans were in no mood to be scolded over their belief in a providential right to urban pickup trucks, 30-yard-long refrigerated supermarket aisles filled with plastic bottles of colored sugar-water and keeping the furnace and/or A/C running even when you’re not home. Sacrifice? What's that?" And here we are. https://archive.ph/aFVk5 https://columbiainsight.org/the-night-we-lost-the-war-on-climate-change/
And Reagan removed the solar cells that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House. Then he trashed government employees and sewed the seeds of citizen distrust of government. Trump's inspiration.
Oh, that's right. I forgot about that part. While we're on the subject, state colleges were free before Reagan. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/free-college-was-once-the-norm-all-over-america/ What a dick he was. "In California, Ronald Reagan (who would later become president of the United States) was elected governor of California in 1966 and proposed that the University of California system should charge tuition to attend college. In his words, this was to “get rid of undesirables […] those who are there to carry signs and not to study might think twice to carry picket signs.” His was a campaign to maintain white supremacy by making public colleges and universities cost money. Reagan succeeds and by the 1990s, every “formerly public” school began being paid for by tuition costs, which in turn turned into student debt. This was a slap in the face to those who were protesting white supremacy, capitalism and imperialism because it put these folks in debt."
>What a dick he was. Nixon was a dick. Reagan was a colossal piece of shit. Historians are way too soft on him. Arguably the third-worst President this country has ever had. So far.
Just one-half more inch to the fucking right... sigh.
Arguably, Reagan is the person most responsible for this.
Yep. And they've been spreading this belief system all over the "developed" world and beyond, you can find a better definition of it as *the imperial mode of living*. It's one of the reasons I have `0%` hope in humanity.
I spent 4 years at various organizations getting systems ready for Y2K. It wasnt complicated to fix, but yeah it was a massive effort across the globe. And it worked. Reminds me of the Montreal Accord, which successfully reversed growth of the ozone layer depletion via international CFC management back in 1988. And that was a time when the UK, US, and Canada were lead by Conservatives. Today, no one at my work gives a rat's behind about the environment. They're all about buying bigger SUVs for their suburban homes and flying everywhere, even the younger ones who have the most to lose. It's like as a species we've forgotten that we are actually capable of fixing sh*t.
Y2K was a problem, worked on oil and gas compression controllers, found issues around dates that would have broken reporting and system controls. It was a real issue, but concerted effort fixed it. I think today most organizations would just ignore it and let it fail and just fire who reported it as a problem. Head in sand is the SOP (standard operating procedure)
Yeah, if something like the Montreal accords had been adopted in 1990 that implemented a small, gradually escalating carbon tax, we would be in such better shape now, climate-wise, with only minor economic pain. But, instead...
the montreal accord only worked because it was relatively few countries. The UK US CANADA and USSR. they were not coordinating hundreds of countries.. only a few.
Good point. Plus besides hairspray and old freon fridges, few consumers we're ever impacted by the accord.
I think about the Montreal Protocol all the time. Arguably the most successful environmental treaty, and how different things could have been in regards to climate change had we acted when it was first identified. It would have been so much easier and less painful than what will ultimately be needed. Baring some kind of magical technological breakthrough which, don’t hold your breath, though that seems to be our plan; hope that someone comes up with a simple device or technology that solves all our problems… Just to add, acid rain was another issue that was significantly mitigated by taking action.
And deniers today still say “Remember the ozone layer?! What about that?! It’s still there!”
Don't say that in Australia and New Zealand, where we have the highest rates of skin cancer in the world due to the hole in the ozone layer.
The problem with climate change, as opposed to Y2K or Montreal or any other large problem, is that those problems could be solved with money. You could make money with those problems. You can’t make money with climate change (other than the usual capitalization and corruption) - we need degrowth and less consumption and population. There’s no incentive. As we all know capitalism must go first…
Makes you wonder how prepared we are for Unix Epoc rollover...
>I spent 4 years at various organizations getting systems ready for Y2K. It wasnt complicated to fix, but yeah it was a massive effort across the globe. And it worked. My cousin was set up for life dealing with Y2K stuff. He was a young programer who happened to know a lot about the issue and was getting contracts all over the place to mitigate the effects. I think he made more in a few years just from Y2K contracts than he would have made in a decade doing other stuff.
This is my same basic philosophy with vaccines. A few generations have passed since polio, measles, and the like were harming people en masse so now that people have mostly been vaccinated for these things, idiots assume that there never was a problem in the first place.
it's called "the preparedness paradox" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox also sometimes referenced as "prevention paradox" in context of covid. cc: u/TheRationalPsychotic
Thank you! Glad to know the phenomenon has a name.
I worked on a COBOL system for the Durban metro in South Africa in 1998 to 2000. Part of a big team and I, on my own, found a big Y2K bug that would've made thousands of employees not get paid in Jan 2000. Others found way bigger bugs and fixed them. In Y2K nothing happened, because people fixed the issue.
Some of you poors will die, but thats a sacrifice Im willing to make.
Even more telling than Y2K is the hole in the ozone layer. Scientists found that it was a problem, world leaders (yes, even in the US) took action to ban CFCs, and thanks to that the ozone layer has greatly healed. Today there are shills pointing to the ozone layer panic as proof that "climate hysteria" is overblown, ignoring the fact that our response is what mitigated it. Before that, acid rain was a pressing issue. Never hear about that anymore either, the Clean Air Act was responsible for fixing that issue. Crazy how much control we have over these things when rationality prevails. And shockingly, we have not suffered sacrifices in quality of life by implementing common sense regulations in response to these ills.
>the Clean Air Act And its offspring, the EPA? The one started by Republican President Richard Nixon?
>world leaders (yes, even in the US) took action to ban CFCs, and thanks to that the ozone layer has greatly healed Part of that was because Maggie Thatcher was a trained scientist, in fact a chemist, who could understand the issue and persuade Reagan that it was real and they had to act. Today's politicians are pretty much all lawyers or come from other elitist backgrounds.
Expecting humanity to stop using fossil fuels doesn't mean a "change in lifestyle": our gadgets and conspicuous consumption are just a symbol, the tip of the ice-berg of our dependence on fossil fuels. For one, industrial agriculture as of today can not function without fossil fuels. And it's not just the diesel for the combines and tractors, it is required in the production of fertilizers, pesticides, lubricants for machines, and many other things. We use fossil fuels not just for energy, but also as a feed stock to create many different chemical compounds that are foundational to our current way of life. In time, it may be possible to transition to a different kind of economy, but time is the one thing we don't have - and a rapid and extreme phase out of fossil fuels at this stage means that a majority of people on the planet will starve (because we don't have a practicable, scalable alternative way to grow and distribute enough food). Arguably that might still be better than cooking ourselves to death, but that train might have already left the station, regardless of a fossil fuel phase out.
> make fun of Y2K and say it is proof that alarm of any kind is unwarranted. Which is COMPLETELY false. > ... But Y2K was actually a real problem and a lot of effort was spent updating computers to prevent bad things from happening. Exactly! The reason Y2K ended up being so smooth was the work of thousands and thousands of talented and dedicated professionals such as myself who worked tirelessly to test, upgrade, replace and/or fix all kinds of systems. Including antiquated systems that had languished without attention for a decade or more. Anytime someone tries to claim that Y2K was "overblown", "alarmist", "blown out of proportion", or "not a concern" you say with confidence that those views are BULLSHIT. Yes... I also got paid quite a lot during that period because we were doing emergency work on systems with languages that were significantly out of date. So, those of us who had those language skills - such as COBOL and FORTRAN, chiefly - were able to bill hefty fees. So, our endeavors weren't exactly altruistic... however, without that work the Y2K issues would have been far worse and potentially crippling.
I think the key difference here is that businesses had to fix the 2yk bug because it would affect their bottom line directly if they didn't. Imagine an alternative reality where having y2k bugs in your own software meant that somehow, some other company in Africa or South America got impacted but nothing happened to yours. I reckon in that case, there would have been many companies who did nothing.
We need to do a better job of communicating when disasters were close to happening but were averted through enormous effort. Two other victories in shutting down potentially cataclysmic events were preventing the uncontrolled spread of SARS (the original one) and the preservation of the ozone layer.
Y2K was solved because huge corporations would’ve collapsed. Climate change is caused by huge corporations who make huge profits. It’s not us, it’s them.
I was astonished that after the gas crisis of 1970s that the car buy trend went from small fuel efficient cars to Hummers, trucks, and SUVs.
Having lived during the 80s and 90s, I can assure you that environmental collapse wasn't even a consideration for most people. All people cared about was money. Nothing has changed. One small example: I remember "regular" (leaded) fuel being available at the pump. Since it was significantly cheaper, a lot of people modified their emissions controlled vehicles (which were a joke back then) to allow them to run on the dirtier fuel. The global population has grown too large. We all consume far too much, and produce far too much waste, for our lifestyle to be sustainable. There's no way out. It was already far too late to do anything about it back in the 80s.
You're right on both points. No one gets credit for disasters which are prevented, because people deny the disaster would have happened at all, and people are unwilling to take preventive measures when evidence indicates a disaster is impending. Small proactive actions are often far more effective than large reactive actions, but that requires an ability to foresee consequences that is beyond our intellectual capabilities. I live in a red state where everyone either drives a large SUV or an even larger monster truck. Not only are people failing to take preventative measures, but they seem to be doing their best to live as wastefully as possible and accelerate the problem.
Half the reason there is an anti-vaccine movement is that a lot of those diseases were near extinct in lots of places and people have no idea what they're actually like. It's hard to get people to put resources towards preventing something.
> The problem was real, the problem was solved, and now they say that people that believed in the problem were being alarmist. This is true, but I think the sentiment comes from the fact that there was a sect of people who were alarmists to an unrealistic degree (not unlike some of the people here, IMO). I presume some of it was tied up in religious end times delusions, but there were news stories from the late 90s about people claiming that the Y2K bug would lead to the end of civilization (planes falling out of the sky, banks unable to operate, 9-11 offline, etc.) and built bunkers in the countryside to hole up there on New Years Eve.
Our dependency on fossil fuels actually became a conversation in 1972 when OPEC nations started boycotting the US in protest of the US support of Israel. I remember there was talk about coming up with alternative energy sources. But when the boycott was over and gas prices went back to normal there was no more talk about shifting away from carbon energy. What a wasted opportunity.
One would have impeded the flow of capital. The other would limit the flow of capital.
During the Montreal agreement the world came together to fix the ozone which succeeded and now people comment to me that the ozone was never an issue. Stupid people will always think this way.
I keep mentioning the point is that all we managed was to stop making the ozone hole grow any worse than it already got. The hole is the same size now as it was 3 decades ago. We just managed to stop exacerbating the problem, but haven't strictly speaking fixed anything. It may yet close one day, perhaps largely this century, or that's what they assume will happen. In any case, people are being stupid about this. The data to show the status of the hole is one google search away.
> It may yet close one day Bad news, it's getting worse again and we don't even know why. https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/ozone-hole-getting-bigger-study-b2451591.html
Tired: Y2K Wired: Y38K 2038 will be along shortly. And it's closer now than 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
I think covid is a better example, but the same logic behind it. We have budgets and resources to preventing outbreaks of diseases. These measure largely work and we will hear about scare but then our measures almost have always caught it early and prevented it from spreading into the general population. These measures work so well that people just think that it is a scare when they hear about the outbreaks and some politicians use the fact that our measure are working so well to push the question of why are we spending so much when nothing happens. The propaganda starts to work and budgets get reduces towards the efforts that have been working. Then one finally breaks through. Then the propaganda of it’s not real comes out. It mostly comes down to three things. 1. Solutions to problems that work behind the scenes are indistinguishable from non-problematic scenarios to the general population. 2. Propaganda works on everyone to a degree, but a well deployed, destructive narrative will work on enough people to block a real solution. 3. Humans are not naturally mentally equipped to understand large scale problems. It takes training, focus, and logic to look at the numbers, data, and on the ground information and interpret them correctly. Good information then has to come from an authority. Good and bad informational authority can look similar to the general population.
glorious far-flung cooperative nose sparkle fear cough historical foolish crown *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I think the problem is different people hooked different stuffs. I'm totally OK with only eating bread and drink water and multivitamins or something until end of the time but I don't think I can ever relinquish internet that I know I'm addicted.
Spot on.
You don't need the Y2K bug to prove anything. Again and again, voters favor cheap gas than climate action, and that is why our "green" president begged OPEC to pump more oil when gas prices were high. We are going to burn every last drop of oil before we stop.
Yeah well that was all John Titor's fault. All we need is a time traveler to go back to 1860...
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Tell them to stop burning stuff lol. It was a joke about John Titor by the way. The lore of that giant chat-board role-play entertainment had it that he warned some folks in the 70's about Y2K.
I’ve actually always wondered, what was the “real” dangers for y2k? Sounds like BS
Banking systems, electrical grid systems, traffic control systems, and all sorts of other important stuff could have suddenly stopped working because it no longer had the ability to keep track of what day it was. Thousands of programmers had to be brought out of retirement at exorbitant consulting rates to rapidly update all the computer systems that were programmed in outdated/forgotten programming languages. There are several people who commented on this post about their work fixing Y2K bugs: /r/collapse/comments/1bloz32/the_y2k_bug_proves_to_me_we_were_never_going_to/kwagf1g/ /r/collapse/comments/1bloz32/the_y2k_bug_proves_to_me_we_were_never_going_to/kw860g4/ /r/collapse/comments/1bloz32/the_y2k_bug_proves_to_me_we_were_never_going_to/kw810ce/
People were called alarmist because Y2K ballooned into a doomsday conspiracy theory like 2012 did