The term under discussion was “societal collapse”. If climate change causes societal collapse, then we’d be lucky to keep local electricity generation still running; we certainly wouldn’t have the ability to maintain any sort of wide-scale network. If you can maintain an internet, then your society hasn’t collapsed.
I see it all the time on /r/climatechange. There are a few opinions to that effect for instance at NASA (from the government granted but from 2024: Is it too late to prevent climate change? - NASA Science)
I do not believe it myself one way or another. But a more immediate problem is we are in no way close to net zero and are in fact going in the opposite direction and increasing emissions.
Now I think I understand societal collapse.
Some low-lying islands with thousands of people – but not millions of people – on them will likely be abandoned. Unlike with, say, Manhattan, holding back rising seas will be too expensive. Then their society has collapsed. It seems that Tuvalu (population 10,600) is the U.N. nation most at risk. No web sites. But the occasional high tide visitor could still get some kind of satellite-phone internet.
U.S. climate policies are a big factor – maybe the biggest – in global climate change that has high risk of destroying Tuvaluan society. We are wrong to do that. I take it seriously.
But no wide-scale planetary network? Sounds implausible. If someone was on the fence with whether a bigger effort should be made to address climate, and I predicted that kind of societal collapse, I think they would rightly dismiss me.
I can more see years, or decades, without global networking, after nuclear war.
Others will express their opinion that societal collapse can happen while still having an internet. Plus its conceivable that some areas won’t have internet, while others will. What would that be called? (even today, some areas don’t have internet)
If we stopped all carbon emissions, I agree that temperatures would remain well elevated for many centuries, but feedbacks would continue to drive up temperatures moderately for some time, namely ice albedo feedback (shrinking ice cover exposes darker land and water) and methane release from thawing permafrost.
There is also a remote possibility – not supported by current models but possible – of low-probability high-impact events like drastic ice sheet collapse or sudden methane release causing runaway climate change even with no further emissions. There is evidence in the paleoclimate record for such climate tipping points. The longer emissions continue, temperatures continue to rise and ice structures continue to weaken, the closer we move to this possible regime.
US is near the top of the list with China & India as I recall. We have the resources to have done far more than we have, but chose not to.
India has probably done the least. China seems to now be doing the most of the big contributors to greenhouse gas.
Some data from ourworlddata.
-
Current Annual Emitters (Total GHG): China, U.S., India, EU27, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Iran, and Canada are the top 10.
-
Historical Contributors (Cumulative CO₂ 1750–2024): The United States leads (roughly 24%), followed by China, Russia, Germany, and the UK.
-
Per Capita Emitters (High intensity per person): Saudi Arabia, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
Here’s how I look at “how much time we really have left.”
We have many decades during which global warming can be reversed.
But it is already too late to reverse all impacts.
The biggest problem with waiting is that the longer you wait, the more the global hegemonic power or powers will only be able to address it with some radical geoengineering project that has winners and losers. It’s hard to know who the winners and losers would be. But the countries that lose will be motivated to go to war against the winners.
The longer you wait, the more big mitigation can only be handled by radical geoengineering (such as reducing sunlight reaching earth). The quicker you act, the more likely it is that unpredictable radical geoengineering can be avoided, or at least made less radical.
So the best time to address climate was yesterday, but second best is always today.
Why do you think we have many decades left to address the problem? I think this is the crux of the disagreement.
Well, how? Where would you get the parts? How would you maintain the infrastructure? Where would you get the power or fuel? Where would you get the tools, raw materials and expertise for all of the above?
A worldwide societal collapse would be something like the Bronze Age Collapse, but worldwide. The trade, technology, economic and state systems all falling apart or reverting to a much simpler level, even where the population hasn’t vanished entirely.
We aren’t talking about just an economic depression, we’re talking about “do people even still know how to make computers?”
What impacts do you think can be reversed? Ice sheets are not coming back, nor will sea levels fall, for a great many centuries, and during that time temperatures will remain elevated and may even increase for a time, while regional climate disruptions and extreme weather events will likely continue for quite some time.
It’s useful to keep in mind that the transition from the last glacial maximum to the current inter-glacial took place over a period of around 10,000 to 12,000 years and this is typical of the natural rate of climate forcing. Whereas we’ve recklessly dumped more CO2 into the atmosphere in just the few hundred years since industrialization than the typical CO2 differential between glacial maxima and inter-glacials. Mother Nature does not like being rushed and pushed around, and the result is increasingly severe climate instabilities. Those instabilities will continue even if all net new carbon emissions stopped tomorrow because the atmosphere is already so overloaded with carbon.
And incidentally, FTR I think geoenginering to mitigate global warming is a terribly misguided and dangerous idea where unintended consequences are practically guaranteed. The realistic solution to climate change is a combination of emissions reduction and adaptation.
It should also be noted that we are already at the warm end of the “icehouse” climate - that’s what an “inter-glacial” is. It seems quite likely that we are going to push the climate into the more common “greenhouse” climate that humans have never existed in, but has constituted the majority of Earth’s existence. Such a climate will be stable; at that point even reducing greenhouse gas output to zero is unlikely to do anything.
Which means that the answer to when the glaciers will reform or the sea levels drop could be anything from “tens of millions of years” to “never”. Long after humanity has presumably gone extinct for one reason or another in any case.
The good news / bad news is that reaching a stable new climate regime will take a great many centuries and more likely, millennia. This gives us time to save what’s left of the planet that we and all modern life is adapted to, including probably with massive Direct Air Capture (DAC) installations that we will hopefully have in the future, sequestering carbon back underground where it originally came from. But this is not the same as “reversing” climate change, and DAC may have its own issues.
If we do allow things to deteriorate to a stable greenhouse regime, that would mean the loss of all polar ice, sea levels would rise catastrophically, and the Earth would be unrecognizable. This falls under the definition of “climate tipping point” and runaway climate change. As has often been said, this planet has survived worse catastrophes, but much of the fragile and inter-dependent life forms on it have not. Hence the speculation that we may be facing yet another mass extinction.
Yes; that’s the problem with all the speeches over the years about how “the planet will survive”. Of course the world will survive, if anything this is a return to normality from the planet’s “perspective”.
That doesn’t do us a whole lot of good, however. Humanity could be rendered extinct and the planet would do just fine.
In fact it would do better. Humans are the most environmentally damaging species that has ever existed on Earth, constantly at odds with the natural world, and if we don’t get our act together very soon and assume responsibility for the existential climate threat we have created, well, the planet will indeed be better off.
You miss my point. My point isn’t whether the internet is working or not….my point is people’s definition of societal collapse is different. While your definition includes the cessation of the internet, other people’s definition of societal collapse is not that extreme.
I’d venture that some people are claiming we are in societal collapse right now, yet the internet is working.
You’ve set the bar to a more extreme measurement than other people might. Yet my point for this thread is we can’t really know if we correctly predicted collapse if we don’t clearly agree to a definition of what collapse includes.
That just means they’ve set the bar so low as to have no meaning.
The Internet is one of the early things that would go in even a mild collapse; it takes an interlinked global civilization to maintain.
Yes, I agree with you there. Which is part of the complexity to asking this question. Some will be so pessimistic that it is ridiculous and clearly wrong; while others might be similarly ridiculously optimistic
This. One way of looking at it is to consider the legend of Atlantis. When our descendants get to the point when they tell tales about us in the way that the Ancient Greeks spoke of Atlantis, we’d have reached a societal collapse.
And they were correct. The receding of democracy globally and the collapse of the American empire have been accelerated by climate catastrophe.
I think that an even better example would be the Mycenaeans, who preceded the Classical Greeks. The Greeks despite only a few centuries afterwards looked at the Mycenaean ruins and named the style Cyclopean, because they felt no mortals could build like that and credited the mythical Cyclops instead.