Societal Collapse Due to Climate Change Now Inevitable Jem Bendell BA PhD [pdf] (opens in new tab)

Excerpt:

"There are three main factors that could be encouraging professional environmentalists in their denial that our societies will collapse in the near- term. The first is the way the natural scientific community operates. Eminent climate scientist James Hansen has always been ahead of the conservative consensus in his analyses and predictions. Using the case study of sea level rise, he threw light on processes that lead to “scientific reticence” to conclude and communicate scenarios that would be disturbing to employers, funders, governments and the public (Hansen, 2007). A more detailed study of this process across issues and institutions found that climate-change scientists routinely underestimate impacts “by erring on the side of least drama” - (Brysse et al, 2013). Combined with the norms of scientific analysis and reporting to be cautious and avoid bombast, and the time it takes to fund, research, produce and publish peer-reviewed scientific studies, this means that the information available to environmental professionals about the state of the climate is not as frightening as it could be. In this paper I have had to mix information from peer-reviewed articles with recent data from individual scientists and their research institutions to provide the evidence which suggests we are now in a non-linear situation of climactic changes and effects."

If society collapses even for just one generation, that's the end game. There isn't enough readily available energy available on the surface to restart society. We depend on large amounts of energy and energy requiring infrastructure to get the remaining oil and gas to the surface for consumption. China might have enough accessible coal (I simply don't know) but if there is a societal collapse for a generation or so and if they do have accessible coal today it's likely to be sufficiently valuable in the interregnum that it too will be stripmined away before society is able to try to recover. (Solar, wind, and energy all take far too much education to get running at large scale, and educated individuals are likely to be in equally short supply of society collapses for a generation).

We have to keep society running. We won't have the energetics to get it started again if it stops.

Alarmism. Societal change is inevitable, societal collapse is not. Society has survived a hell of a lot. Chinese society survived the Mongols. European society survived losing a third of its population to the black plague. Is climate change going to wipe out a third of the world population anytime soon? I doubt it.

> Some of the people who believe that we face inevitable extinction believe that no one will read this article because we will see a collapse of civilisation in the next twelve months when the harvests fail across the northern hemisphere.

OK, I gather that means fall 2019. If that were going to happen, I'd have expected some drop-off in 2018 harvests. And I don't see news about that.

But let's see what happens this year.

> They see social collapse leading to immediate meltdowns of nuclear power stations and thus human extinction being a near-term phenomenon. Certainly not more than five years from now.

That's still possible, I guess. But it too seems like a worst possible case.

But whatever, I'll be happy if the next decade or two is ~OK.

Sorry but this is getting silly. You dont get to claim scientific basis without being able to demonstrate your conclusions. This is speculation not actually scientifically demonstrated.