Could global warming usher in an age of dictatorships

Great Debates
1

According to Howard Bloom and his writing about social organisms and the people that populate them, when life is going nice the social organism tends to be deeply concerned about individual rights and individual feelings. However when times are hard individuality is crushed and the social organism takes on a more dictatorial role. After the trauma & hardship of WW1 there were numerous dictatorships and movements to promote dictatorship all over the world, which just lead to more trauma in the form of WW2 and the cold war. Luckily that is largely over but there are still remnants of all those dictators with things like North Korea, which could restart the whole process of sending society running towards dictatorship all over again if it launched nuclear weapons. I don’t have either of Bloom’s books on me at the moment but I am basing this on the idea that this is true and reliable, that people turn to dictatorship and strong leaders when times are tough.

So assuming global warming (I just watched a Nova special about global dimming and how global dimming is masking the effects of global warming for the time) really does crush world economies, set back development in the poor world by 60 years and set back scientific research by a couple of decades, what will be the political fallout? Will 91 of the world’s governments still be liberal democracies, or will abusive dictators take over all over the world, leading to more problems that will take the world a century or two to pull out of? You can argue that it took the world 40-80 years to recover from the trauma of WW1 and the depression as these led to the USSR, the Cold war, the Nazis as well as numerous smaller dictatorships in the world (Blackshirts, Spanish fascists, KKK in the US). The world is a far better place now than it was before WW1 (some of the most evil countries of 60 years ago like Japan and Germany have excellent human rights records now), but it took a long time to get here.

Would predicting a mass of dictatorships all over the world, with a few holdouts of democracy in the developed world (where democracy is more established) be feasable, and only after a century of political discontent and rebellion going back to the world we know today which is largely democratic with alot of respect for human rights?

2

Ha. That should say ‘usher’ in the title.

3

I’d split hairs and say that people do not turn to dictatorial or strong leaders in times of crisis. These types of leaders see the weakness, and take control. I cannot think of one of your examples that did not involve some sort of violence as part of coming to power.

With that caveat, Yeah. If the climate changed to the point where their economies were collapsing, the same countries would be vulnerable to being taken over by dictators.

4

How can you “set back” scientific research? You can retard it, but you can’t make the knowledge already gained go away.

5

Drastically set back the pace of research would be a better way of phrasing it.

6

To a degree isn’t that what ID arguments are about? There are already Fundamentalist Countries that try to Cherry Pick the Science they allow to be taught.

Wesley Clark: I wonder if Western Europe is more resistant to a return to dictatorships having lived through Hitler and under the near threat of Stalin.
I can almost envision the US surrendering too many rights for protection until we end up under a dictator. I see Western Europe and especially the UK holding out better.

Jim

7

Yeah, I’d think that much of western europe would hold out alot better due to their experiences with following dictators as a solution to trouble. However if it did happen I think the developing world would go to hell pretty quickly, which is sad because virtually all of them are making inroads towards democracy and freedom.