Celestial Weasel ([info]celestialweasel) wrote,
@ 2009-06-04 19:52:00
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Mr Weasel's Big Poll Of Ecodoom
Poll #1411053 The big poll of ecodoom
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 23

I expect civilisation as we know in to have, in 50 years

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survived
15 (65.2%)

collapsed due to climate OMFGWAGTDBBQ
1 (4.3%)

collapsed due to energy shortage (overall or readily transportable)
1 (4.3%)

collapsed due to the technological singularity
0 (0.0%)

survived in some sense but not as we know it due to the singularity
2 (8.7%)

collapsed due to some other reason (stated below or in comments)
4 (17.4%)

Other reason for collapse?

Over the timescale of 50 years I expect climate change

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To have made little impact due to there not being much of it
2 (8.7%)

To have made little impact due to ingenious mitigation strategies
2 (8.7%)

To have made the world considerably shittier for the world's poorer inhabitants
19 (82.6%)

To have wiped out billions of the world's poorer inhabitants
0 (0.0%)

To have lead to the collapse of civilisation except in small pockets
0 (0.0%)

To have turned the world into a Venus like inferno
0 (0.0%)

I believe that the generally excepted mathematical models of climate change

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Are accurate
15 (71.4%)

Are coincidentally right (models wrong, conclusions right)
3 (14.3%)

Are accidentally wrong
3 (14.3%)

Are deliberately wrong just like in that nice Mr Creighton's novel
0 (0.0%)

Bad-ass geoengineering solutions for climate change

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Will not be necessary
0 (0.0%)

Will be tried and fail
8 (34.8%)

Will not be tried for political reasons
9 (39.1%)

Will not be tried due to needing energy we don't have
4 (17.4%)

Will succeed
2 (8.7%)


(20 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]vicarage
2009-06-04 07:14 pm UTC (link)
What, this climate model what I've been this afternoon... Lovely piece of work, if you ignore the output routines.

I expect a tragedy of the commons.

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[info]celestialweasel
2009-06-04 10:01 pm UTC (link)
I'm sure the output routines, too, are lovely in their way.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
the models
[info]jackfirecat
2009-06-04 07:37 pm UTC (link)
As Dave Stainforth WNLJ would I think say, there are too many of them for that to be answerable on 'are right' or 'are co-incidentally right' - some of them will be wrong, since they differ.

But overall, right on the whole, to degrees, since climate change is happening and some of the models have been accurate so far.

And doing a meta-analysis of all the models in order to generate predictions for governments is bad science (they're different models; they don't 'add up' like that): tut, tut, Met Office.



Edited at 2009-06-04 07:58 pm UTC

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[info]juggzy
2009-06-04 07:55 pm UTC (link)
"geeks will save the world. Be nice to us"

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[info]autopope
2009-06-04 08:00 pm UTC (link)
Something Unexpected Will Happen (and I'm not talking about the singularity or the rapture or whatever -- those are Expected, if only by a vocal minority in each case).

Reality is Stranger Than We Can Imagine.

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[info]zengineer
2009-06-05 08:33 am UTC (link)
I sort of agree in the sense in that for instance the internet was poorly predicted and past science fiction societies are laughably different from our world.
Generally however reality seems pretty ordinary to me. My dad worked doing pretty much what I do. His dad did pretty much the same (only on ships). The biggest event in my grandparents life was the second world war but even then when they talk about it the ones who were in England went to work teaching and as a shop worker and the ones who went to war were involved in the normal confusion, hardship and boredom with moments of injury and death that seem to have been a soldier's lot throughout history. If the past has not contained discontinuities why should we predict that the future will?

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[info]autopope
2009-06-07 01:52 pm UTC (link)
The past has contained discontinuities -- and some of them we barely notice.

My grandfather (born 1892-ish) was one of thirteen children, of whom eight survived to adulthood.

My father was one of two children, both of whom survived into their eighties.

That generation gap (between 1900 and 1950 in the developed world) marks a huge discontinuity, both social and medical, which is still echoing down the years -- we call it the "demographic transition" when we notice it at all -- and is largely due to the advent of antibiotics and vaccination against childhood diseases and the long-term second-order consequences of the state retirement/pension system.

Our lives today are lived in accordance with social constraints arising from medical/technological progress that would have struck our grandparents as bizarre if you'd tried to tell them about it. (All children expected to survive to adulthood? Women able to control their reproductive lives? Families with more than two children seen as weird?)

Fact is, we normalize our existential state to such an extent that we often don't notice the huge discontinuities in our past. c.f. Agatha Christie in the 1940s: "I never expected to be so rich that I could own a motor-car, or so poor that I could not employ a maidservant" -- much less both at the same time.

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[info]zengineer
2009-06-08 10:01 am UTC (link)
In some sense it does depend on what you mean by a discontinuity. Without doubt in the UK infant mortality is now rare rather than normal as it was only 100 years ago. From around the middle of last century you became more likely to suffer from diseases of over eating than from malnutrition and (in my mind the biggest discontinuity) from the 1930s we began to be able to cure bacterial diseases first with sulphnamides and then antibiotics. Hind sight is always rather acute but I can see why these were historically predictable. Cell phones which have made social interaction more spontaneous were predicted (for instance in Star Trek or more accurately by Fred Pohl). In the near future I can see genetic sequencing linked to monoclonal antibodies will start to cure all cancer with cell surface markers in a few years, and a few years after that sequencing linked to viruses might well allow all cells with genetic changes to be eliminated potentially curing all cancer. This will be expensive but will be a major change. The reason I would not class this as a discontinuity is that people will still mostly live for 3 score and ten (or maybe five score) and then suffer the system collapse wide collapse that means that doctors can't cure old age. The body is a network of inter-relating systems and evolution will act to remove things that kill you young but not preserve mechanisms that have a longer than design life robustness.
What I would call a discontinuity is one that fundamentally changes the way we live. Nuclear devastation, pandemics or destruction of ecosystems that destroy civilization would fall into that category. So would the strong AI of Neil Asher or Iain M Banks. Arguably we have had negative discontinuities in the Black Death or the collapse of prominent empires but I find it harder to think of positives (perhaps anti-bacterials).
In general I think that the world progresses by small continuous improvements (but then I am an engineer and we tend to conservatism) and would prefer to reserve the term discontinuity for the truly radical things that affect me and everyone I know.
Did I just argue that a cure for cancer is not radical? My argument must be a bit weak.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Bad-ass geoengineering solutions for climate change
[info]jackfirecat
2009-06-04 08:55 pm UTC (link)
are already underway in China with its huge divert the rivers program.

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Re: Bad-ass geoengineering solutions for climate change
[info]celestialweasel
2009-06-04 10:02 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, good point. I should have specified that it was supposed to be ones to prevent it.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]pmcray
2009-06-04 09:21 pm UTC (link)
I think there will a WWI-WWII-level Black Swan at some point in the next 20 years. This may well be directly or indirectly linked to climate change, but there are plenty of other risk factors around. It does seem as though anthrogenic climate change is occurring, but there are certainly many ways that its effects can be mitigated. If necessary, WWII/Cold War-scale megaengineering approaches will be tried. Just don't expect a lot of people not to die. Within 50 years, I think we will have build a Goodian ultraintelligent machine and thus some kind of Singularity will have happened. Again, it probably won't be a Soft one.

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[info]celestialweasel
2009-06-04 10:05 pm UTC (link)
Perhaps we should have another poll. We can take bets, in case anyone is around to collect on them.

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[info]zengineer
2009-06-08 10:15 am UTC (link)
We would need a good definition of what a post singularity person is so that one could collect from another.

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in the end I just skipped the question
[info]cleanskies
2009-06-04 10:43 pm UTC (link)
Did you mean to say "generally excepted mathematical models"? It makes the question a lot more complicated. You also needed a "broadly" between "are" and "accurate".

I've never really seen the singularity as a world destroyer or something that'll change everything beyond recognition (or something to fear, for that matter*) -- my best feeling about it is "more of the same, but better" -- and I think it might be in the frame for sorting out climate change -- though not through badass geoengineering, more through slow-push and multiple co-ordinated tiny solutions.

*I for one welcome our silicon overlords.

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Re: in the end I just skipped the question
[info]celestialweasel
2009-06-05 09:22 am UTC (link)
Oops.
I am sure our silicon overlords will welcome your fealty which they will discover when they spider the LJ archives. If they haven't already.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Clarifications
[info]applez
2009-06-05 01:19 am UTC (link)
1. Technological progress has been something of a continuing series of remortgages on natural resources. I'm 50:50 on whether we can pull another series of rabbits out of the hat on the fundamental selfish energy economics we've locked ourselves into, by the year 2050. -80% global emissions at a minimum is a big job, and there are too many people who don't understand the connection between their lifestyle and global impacts.

2. By considerably shittier, that may be particularly literal, and lethal. I can see several countries bowing to ingrained xenophobia at the waves of migrants (by various guises) seeking refuge.

3. I think most models are by in large accurate. There are still some significant variables to investigate and validate, but the conclusions are largely correct (and have been for nearly 10 years with reasonably high confidence).

4. Bad-ass geoengineering will be attempted in last ditch job-creation ways, and I suspect it will be a mix of too little too late, and working cross-purposes.

What has me particularly worried was to see how quickly Americans did (and continue to) accept(-ed) limits on liberties for security in the wake of 9/11 ... that doesn't bode well for a United States (against the X).

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[info]zengineer
2009-06-05 08:21 am UTC (link)
Bad-ass geoengineering will be tried, after all "Since time immemorial man has dreamed of blotting out the sun." C.M. Burns.
I see lots of people building wind farms and nuclear power stations and refusing to build coal power stations. I see cars getting broadly more fuel efficient and a massive political will to tax as many people off the road as they can electorally get way with. Ecodoom doesn't seem such a big threat.

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[info]applez
2009-06-06 12:26 am UTC (link)
I wonder if we'll see a return of pollution=solidarity.* Building perpetually disintegrating cars at low cost is a jobs-maker, and it's unfair/inequitable/unNationalist to deny the rural poor the inexpensive mobility they need. Also, buses and trains move people, not money.

On a longer timescale, I wonder how much will change for my country when the Baby Boomers attenuate from political & cultural dominance. I can only be hopeful.

*I'd bet even money that China's air "problem" will be recast as "daring geoengineering" on Pinatubo albedo principles.

Edited at 2009-06-06 12:27 am UTC

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[info]zengineer
2009-06-06 08:41 pm UTC (link)
On cars I expect not. In the US the car safety QANGO (NHTSA) seems rather opposed to that and globally there is an ethos of continuous improvement from the more successful car makers (I worked for Nissan).

My feeling is that the time of the baby boomers is already passing. Obama is after all a bit young to be a baby boomer.

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I wonder how things will turn out
[info]applez
2009-06-07 03:41 am UTC (link)
re: cars - after the failure of legislating electric cars in the US in relatively convenient times, I have no particular expectations for Obama's venture to reform the poorly managed giants at +$1300/unit for improved performance on public criteria of health & environment.

Also, there's a bubble of grumbly opinion among even the low-6-figures types in liberal meccas that Obama should/will be limited to one term if they don't get 1997, or at least 2004 again, fast. They range from Obama's age bracket to even younger. I don't know if that's an opinion that will be contained, or become cancerous.

How the Baby Boomers in Congress perform and any age-shift (which will be amazing, after the jerrymandering, though the 2010 census is coming up) we'll see in upcoming Congressional elections will give me a better idea of how attenuated that generation will become in broader society. I'm concerned that there's every indication that Baby Boomer-era disagreements and positions are not being considerably modified or moderated by next-gen adherents. In the cacophany of expectations, the older hands still have a firm grip on the agenda.* It'll be exciting to see if Obama shakes that up in his second term. :-)

*I mean this in all spheres of US society. The majority national narrative for lifestyle, values, and definitions of success for my age bracket and younger is little changed from that generation's at different age milestones. There is a massive gap between reality and expectation, but that punkified "Leave It to Beaver" narrative just hasn't gone away quite yet. I don't know if my society is at the cusp of a radical transition or is going to fall back into comfort zones which Obama may be quite happy to sustain.


Edited at 2009-06-07 03:45 am UTC

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