It seems to me that i read a laboratory had been able to produce bits of tissue using a 3D layering device loaded with the appropriate material--collagen, probably. Then placed in a bath of cells for a while, and then inserted into a mouse. The construct performed like a graft of natural tissue. Some tissues, like liver or possibly pancreatic tissue, or maybe retina tissue would be especially useful.

3D layering certainly has a future, but as you say, probably in a factory environment. It IS interesting technology. I can see a future for it in fabricated food, like... lab grown meat-like material. The obvious use, though, is in one-off objects, like a complicated piece for an unusual but important machine, or unique fashion items.

What we really need is replicator technology from the second generation of Star Trek. Say, you want a Rolex watch instead of a Timex, or fine Italian shoes instead of a pair from Walmart.

I like the Guardian 85% of the time; I always like the comments section when they are opened below an editorial. The Guardian readership seems to be quite insightful, and often display a nice casual cleverness:

Guy Hubbard

Hydrogen cats

Notfamousanymore ---> Guy Hubbard

Realistically we need to start with hybrid cats, then move onto electric cats. Hydrogen cats would be a bit too lightweight. I'm sticking with my traditional cats for now though.

Not deep but at least civilized.

We really do need to get rid of the car -- but I don't see it happening before the last barrel of oil gets sucked out of the earth.

What experiences have you learned from that could help us rebuild after something like this? — TogetherTurtle

Not many helpful experiences, myself. The main thing would be that one can travel a long way on a bicycle, especially if the weather is nice. Like, 50 to 100 miles. I do short errands on the bike in winter if it's not too cold, and if the streets are passable.

I don't know too much about them, but I'd recommend looking at the traditional Amish. The Amish are not, apparently, against all machinery. Some Amish woodworkers use small steam engines to power air compressors which supply their tools with power. So I have heard.

and reading about horsepower -- actual horse power. Horses could provide power for boats, for instance. No, they did not swim and pull the boat. They walked on a treadmill in the middle of the boat and the treadmill turned the propeller. The same approach could be used to pump water, for instance, or run a coarse cut saw. Horses were used to move big houses--using the leverage of pulleys, not by simple brute strength. The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the 19th Century by McShane and Tarr, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Or, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America, by Greene. Harvard U. Press, 2008. Try ABE Books or Alibris for a used copy.

Someone (James Howard Kunstler) provides a reasonably good picture of post-apocalypse life and skills. In his 4 part A World Made by Hand series (novels, more or less) Kunstler depicts life in an upstate New York town after some sort of collapse. The electrical grid is gone, no radio/TV/telephone, no gasoline, no gas powered machines, no central government, etc.

People struggle, work very hard, pool and use whatever knowledge they have, to put together a much simpler life. As one would expect, people who are severely injured or get very sick die. There are food shortages. There is conflict. A much reduced community forms and survives--not only in this one town, but in various places around the country. Recovery is spotty and fragile.

Kunstler writes about environmental issues; his books include The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century; Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation.

One can OD on converging catastrophes. I fully believe they are on the way BUT in the mean time there is no advantage in going crazy with all the bad news out there. The World Made by Hand is uplifting without being even slightly pollyanna-ish.

If you like post-apocalyptic fiction, Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, is a 1949 post-apocalypse classic. 99.9% of everybody dies in a plague. That's disposed of very quickly. The rest of the novel is about how a tiny remnant carry on. 1949 was pre-global warming (as an issue); TV had hardly made an appearance in '49. The freeway system hadn't been built yet. ETC. It's interesting to compare Earth Abides to A World Made By Hand.

Who will survive a barely survivable global disaster?

Probably the survivors will be those with the most adaptable set of skills for surviving. People who know how to grow food using hand tools, for instance. People who know how to preserve food without electricity. People who have enough skill to fashion shelters, make simple clothing, treat wounds, and so forth. These people certainly exist -- and they aren't survivalists. They are people like a billion peasants who already survive this way. People like the Amish who use horsepower and hand tools.

People who can cooperate with others reasonably well will have an advantage. Bright, imaginative practical people will do better than coders, philosophers, astrophysicists, and the like.

Many of us would die if electrical power disappeared. Pull cars and gasoline from the scene and more of would die. In all, probably around... 5 billion? 6 billion? It isn't that 5 or 6 billion people are just too stupid to live, it's that 4, 5, or 6 billion people have become dependent on 20th century technology. Most of us lost the pre-high technology skills of the 19th century. We don't farm; we don't do large-scale gardening; we don't treat our own wounds; we don't build so much as an outhouse. We've become very highly specialized.

How many of us, in the post-disaster age, would know what to do with a female cow if we had one? How much food does a cow need? How does one keep a cow producing milk? What if one decides to eat the cow: how does one kill and butcher a cow? How does one keep the meat from spoiling in a couple of days? Will a vegan be able to chop a chicken's head off, rip off the feathers, pull its guts out, and cook it (assuming that there happens to be no organic, gluten free, non-gmo, pesticide free tofu laying about). How many vegans will be able to make tofu, assuming they happen to have a bushel of soy beans?

My paternal great grandparents (I'm 72) farmed before there was electricity, antibiotics, gasoline, autos, and the like. They had to have many of the skills I'm talking about.

One promising sign is that a lot of people are learning how to grow hops and brew beer. Somebody needs to find temperate zone plants that produce caffeine.

Hey, you found the lost post in two minutes. You are not, apparently, all that confused.

'Moment of reckoning': US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports — xraymike79

My city and county collect trash, recyclable paper, glass, metal, and plastic, yard waste and compostable kitchen waste (which includes paper towels and tissues). Composting turns kitchen and yard waste into a product that gets used for landscaping (particularly highway landscaping and parks). Trash is burned for the most part, as is recyclable material for which there is little demand. At one time the recycling operation could sell most of what they collected. Much less so now.

The big municipal incinerator generates steam for the downtown Minneapolis area -- heating and hot water. At least some of the garbage goes for a good cause. The city says it is a safe operation, but I would not buy a house near it. It doesn't stink, at least. Does the incinerator produce toxic waste products? Of course. You can't burn garbage and plastics without producing at least some toxic products coming out of the stack.

That's so obvious, I don't know why I didn't get it right away!

I wasn't sure about that either. I'm sure most people here have thought it, if they did not say it in so many words.

Nobody has said so yet: a rapid response to the climate and multivariate environmental crises affecting the planet would be an immediate economic disaster for the world. Slamming the brakes on oil production, electrical generation, auto manufacture, meat or dairy heavy diets, and more would send the world economy into a steep nosedive and crash. Had we seriously addressed the problem 40 or 50 years ago, a more gradual braking would have been possible without causing financial ruin to billions of very ordinary people without the means to protect themselves from unprecedented financial calamity.

Climate protection and environment preservation change would still have been painful, but it would have been doable without brutal suffering the world over. It's the difference between abrasions on the elbows, knees, and face and perforations of the skull, chest, and abdomen.

So now we don't have 50 years for a graceful transition.

Thanks, a nice succinct review.

Another problem that prevents action is that ordinary individuals can not individually do anything that will make a difference. We are encouraged to recycle. I do, faithfully, but as far as the difference it makes: pfffft. If we all did the same sensible and strategic things, say all 3 billion people in the industrialized world, that would make a big difference. When was the last time such a thing happened?

Probably 100,000 wealthy, powerful movers, shakers, and not clearly benevolent overlords could bring about drastic changes in short order if they so chose. They are not so choosing at this point.

Which is really scary — Wayfarer

It is, indeed, really scary.

Your expectations might be too high. Have you used an ordinary home printer recently? You got it for free, sort of, but the frequent ink refills you have to buy are expensive. They are wonderful little printers until they aren't any more. How much do you think the 3D printing stocks will cost? How messy will a 3D printing failure be? What if you don't like the product the machine printed--will Amazon.scam cheerfully refund your purchase? FINE PRINT: seller is not responsible for operator errors or privately owned equipment failures.

Whether it works or not, it will be just another way of moving money out of your pocket into somebody else's.

Our problem is that the complexity of global warming, and everything connected to it, is overwhelming. It's not too difficult to grasp -- lots of people have -- but the necessary responses involve too many literal and figurative global changes in life over a very short time span.

One response is to dismiss the threat -- Hanover. A second response is to propose all sorts of solutions which amount to magical thinking (many of us). A third response is to contemplate our demise (some of us). The difference in the three responses has nothing to do with intelligence or technical acumen. It's personality. Hanover in Hell would see opportunities. Unenlightened in Eden would see problems. These aren't flaws. Hanover can't help being Hanover, no more than Bitter Crank can help being Bitter Crank, or Unenlightened being Unenlightened.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming by David Wallace-Wells (published Feb. 2019) takes the view that there is very little hope for the future, not zero but not a lot. We are running out of time and we probably will not be able to change fast enough. Wallace-Wells doesn't give an end date, only that the synergistic effects of intensive agriculture, population growth, CO2, methane, and consequent global warming may prove to be insurmountable challenges and may result in our near extinction sooner than we might like to think. We'd like to think our extinction in terms of maybe a couple of million years. We should probably be thinking in terms of several decades to a couple of centuries.

Is the book worth buying? If one is well informed about this stuff already, no. Wallace-Wells pulls the familiar (and occasionally unfamiliar) information together and makes a range of generally depressing projections. As a gift to a friend or relative who thinks there is nothing to worry about, the book might be helpful, but it is just as likely to cause a mental shutdown of cognitive dissonance.

The book preaches to the choir of doom. That's not a bad thing, just that for the already well-informed, the cost of the book might better be spent on alcohol.

Some people are obsessed with racism, sexism, various ------phobias, isms, diets, and what not without it improving their ethical framework, as far as I can tell. It's just their specialty. They could have been civil war buffs, or been fanatics about the Victorian novel, fungi, Nazi uniforms, raising orchids or canaries, or whatever. It just that raising canaries isn't much of a platform from which to pontificate, whereas racism or veganism and the like are superb soap boxes.

Marxism was my favorite platform from which to criticize other people, so I'd rather talk about class than race. Gender fluid sounds more like some sort of exudate than anything else. Here's a tissue - wipe it up. Actually, in the real world, most people do not go about their day obsessing over oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia, decolonizing science, straight white males, gender identity, the ethics of a lamb chop, or class warfare.

Some people, though, live in an echo chamber where their private concerns get amplified. The amplification can be (isn't always) unhelpful. Excessive amplification (like, from one's marxist study group or the local antiracism club) can produce an unhealthy hyper vigilance, where one sees racism or predatory capitalists behind every tree and under every bush.

Flomot — TheMadFool

Was ist das?

Don't you have a response to my discussion of the difference between mass consumption and capitalism?

Digital products are perfect for automated reproduction. To some degree many actual, material products are heavily automated too. Printing, for instance, which produces real substantive products (books, packaging, etc.) has a lot of automation built in. For example, o the newest presses, a camera photographs and numbers each printed page or sheet; at the same time, computers keep track of all sorts of machine operation.

IF the packaging customer finds a package (especially if it is expensive packaging) has a flaw, they will look for the tiny number on it which corresponds to the photo of that sheet; from this information it can be determines who, exactly, was sitting at the controls at that instant, and probably what they were doing at that precise moment. The computer is also, to some extent, the supervisor.

Why all this automated observation?? Because the presses are so extremely expensive, the products they print come out of the press extremely fast, and the media on which the machine is printing can also be expensive. Time is money, too.

And it's a good thing, in many ways. A lot of work people do is inordinately tedious, whether it's lab work, factory work, printing, packaging software, teaching, etc.

You should disambiguate Capitalism, on the one hand, and "An Ideology of Mass Consumption" on the other.

Consuming goods does not make one rich. Indeed, one can end up broke -- and many people do go broke buying stuff. What consumption does for the individual is allow him or her to display "signs of affluence" which may or may not be empty symbols. Capitalism benefits from mass consumption (its a necessary part of many economies, certainly), but the wealth of capitalists is gained by exploiting the labor of workers. Capitalism is older than any "ideology of mass consumption".

There have always been a small club of wealthy and powerful people who were able to spend money on ostentatious consumption (the Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and Romanovs, for example). Later on industrialists (capitalists) accumulated great wealth (Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Krupp, et al). These very rich entrepreneurs could afford to build huge mansions and large yachts, and fill them with luxury goods. None of this is what I take to mean an "ideology of mass consumption".

Mass consumption began after the industrial revolution, of course, and slowly developed among the classes well removed from the uber-rich. Henry Ford began a project of planned consumption when he raised the pay of at least many of his workers to a level high enough that they could (eventually) afford to buy one of the cars they were making. Ford engineers researched the survivability of Ford parts, and when they found a part that was barely worn after other parts were shot, it was cheapened. Ford's idea was that consumers should not buy 1 car per lifetime, but many cars per lifetime. That was great for his capitalist enterprise, and cheap cars appealed to the consumer. Later on car sales would be driven by mostly superfluous annual style changes--great style, in many cases, but transient style none the less.

The merchandizers developed the means for consumers to see and buy far more goods than Ford cars. Sears, Wards, Macy's, Daytons, Hudsons, I. Magnin, etc. built a huge retail infrastructure where the ideology of mass consumption could be instantiated. Everything from ladies underwear to air compressors could be had conveniently.

Urban areas facilitated another means to instantiate consumer ideology: the housing project. After WWII a huge number of houses were built, financed, and sold under the auspices of the Housing and Urban Development Administration.

The ideology of mass consumption, based on cars, houses, and furnishings--facilitated further by extensive infrastructure, road and mass transit building--grew like kudzu (a noxious vine) across the land scape between say, 1920 and 1980, tempered by the Great Depression and WWII.

HAVING became BEING. Having an attractively furnished house & late model car represented both good things (transportation and shelter) but also of having "arrived". Status required a minimum of money (earned in the capitalist work place), and on top of that a successful deployment of symbols.

Mere clothes, cars, and houses were not enough. The clothes, cars and houses had to display the right values. A house worth x dollars in an integrated neighborhood didn't count for very much. Much better that the house was located in a neighborhood which displayed the values to which leaders aspired. Tasteul, affluent, white, safe. Nothing wrong with that, in my opinion. (What was wrong was that there was no separate but equal; there was no tasteful, affluent, black, safe. For the blacks it was the shithole, basically. And not much else.

Buying one's clothes from Sears or Wards was perfectly acceptable for the immobile working class. Quality was good, prices were affordable (cheap), and you could get it delivered to your house (just like Amazon). But if one wanted to climb the hierarchy, one had better buy better than Wards. Eventually you would need very good tailored suits, nicely fitted shirts, Florsheim Shoes (this is for the 1950s, you understand), black socks please; regulation tie. Not too wide, not too narrow, nothing even remotely loud or garish, for God's sake. You'd better drink the right liquor in decent glassware, smoke the right cigarettes or cigars, etc.

That's the ideology of consumption: Being by buying.

Of course the ideology moved down the demographic. The right Jordan running shoe was worth killing the wearer to get, which happened every now and then down in the ghetto. TV brand, hair do, which church you went to, etc. were as much a part of the ideology of consumption, being by buying, as the fine, very expensive wardrobe was that was made in Italy.

For the most part, I don't expect animal to have the kind of thoughts we do. That is NOT to say they have no resources to operate in a difficult world.

More to the point, we are animals, and we reach down, they reach up toward common feelings. For instance, one can play a perfectly satisfactory game of hide and seek with one's dog. We understand the game, they understand the game, and a good time can be had by all.

We come together on some intellectual tasks too -- like which cup is the hunk of dog chow located, after moving the three cups around. I'm not certain of this, but I think the dogs pay attention to the movement of the cups, Smart dogs, of course, not morons.

Our death will not be a negative ultimately. It could, in fact, be a good thing if you think about it the right way. — RosettaStoned

Well, Mr. or Ms Negativity, our passing may or may not be tragic, but what about all the other species? Looked at in the right way, the passing of monarch butterflies, or lions, or whales, or eagles, or snails, or orchids might be truly tragic.

What I am doing is trying to find a stress-relieving context in which to fold our own species-death. So far I have not been successful.
— Bitter Crank
Could you expand on that? — frank

I suppose Jews and others, contemplating the unfolding Holocaust of which they were the designated victims; or Aboriginal peoples watching their homelands slip away from them and become someone else's homeland -- all these people may have felt a profound grief of not merely dying, but dying and knowing they were the last (or nearly last) of their kind.

Some deaths are more final than others. A person dying who departs from a thriving community knows that he follows others, and believes that others will follow him into the grave, and many more will live on.

It would be a far greater sorrow to know that my death, or yours, moves the counter one space closer to "zero" of people surviving, and that there will one day be no more of our kind. In epidemiology there is a "Patient Zero" who begins the chain of transmission, and there is a last patient when the epidemic is over. In our supposed extinction event, there will be a "Last one", after which there will be none.

Now at 7+ billion, soon to be 8 billion, worrying about extinction may seem unhealthfully morbid.

I read a book, "Uninhabitable Earth" which doesn't claim that we will become extinct (on an uninhabitable earth), only that our species could be extinguished, and sooner than we might think possible. I'm not recommending the book. There is nothing new in it, and the author isn't claiming that we have 10 years left, or 25 or any other number. ONLY this: Given enough bad luck, given enough bad decisions, given enough environmental policy paralysis and inertia, given enough unfortunate synergies, given enough unforeseen disasters and misfortunes, we could arrive at the point where our goose might be cooked well done, and we would join the mass extinction sooner than we thought.

Our demise is neither a slam dunk nor so unlikely we don't have to think about it. It's only a distinct possibility in the cards. We are not dealing and there are a few rounds to be played. Time will tell.

The author's main point is that we have not accomplished much of anything in terms of reducing CO2/methane emissions since we discovered how badly things could turn out severel decades ago.

I discovered that Europeans might not have brought the American Bison close to extinction. — frank

I thought that large numbers of buffalo were wantonly shot -- and not slaughtered, maybe just skinned for their hides -- as a way of depriving the plains Indians of food. Is that true? Don't know for sure at this moment.

I was all eager to tell my schoolmates what awesome things I had experienced.

None of them listened to me at all. — ssu

People hate getting upstaged by volcanoes. The nerve! I feel for you. It must have been a crushing experience.

Yellowstone erupting might be too much though.. — ssu

I have a bad cold and feel terrible, so Yellowstone can go ahead and blow up. I'm ready to get it over with. Will it be too much? Dunno. The last time it covered a good share of the great plains with a thick layer of volcanic ejecta. Would stuffing a large H bomb down Old Faithful's throat trigger it?

GO YELLOWSTONE!

My apologies for seizing on 1 word and running with it. Bad practice on my part. I'll slap myself around as punishment.

It's just that I don't think today's American celebrity culture is anything very new and I don't see a bold line between celebrity and acting. Over the years a lot of actors and actresses became famous because they were just really good at their work -- and incidentally became celebrities. But they weren't brainless manikins of the sort that show up on BrainDead TV shows.

What I do agree with is that there seem to be quite a few fairly attractive bodies-without-brains who have become famous for being famous without ever having done anything particularly remarkable. Aren't the Kardashians an example of that? But this isn't entirely new either -- people have lusted after fame (achieved by hook or crook) for a long time, whether there was anything fame-worthy about them or not.

Let's get in the time machine; repost without the word 'insanity'. We'll see.

The fear of getting nuked at that time was real enough (I remember it). Some people called the situation insane, the anti nuclear warfare people (SANE not an acronym, for a change) in particular (Bertrand Russell was one). The rank and file weren't insane for being worried; it was the military industrial political elite that were insane.

I'm not sure how many people think the world is going to end in 10 years -- not too many, I would guess. It wouldn't be insane of someone to think that -- it might be merely premature or slightly neurotic to think that today. What is INSANE is the world's corporate/government elites being unwilling to make the necessary decisions to seriously cut CO2 emissions rather than just slowing the growth rate.

it seems to me that it’s originally an American phenomenon. — Brett

Are you trying to tell us that before America there were no celebrities? There have been celebrity singers, the heart throb actors, popular whores, the public's favorite gladiator, and so forth since the get go. What happened in in the 1920s up to the present is that the big movie / radio / television stars could parade their careers in print and electronic media, and not just here, but in Europe, Asia, and South America.

Look @Wallows, you are of course wrong to confuse customer service with prostitution. It's management's job to figure out how the customer will get fucked. Management is the Great Whore of Babylon, not the worms in customer service. Your job is to clean up afterwards. It's dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

What made your job difficult is that you weren't allowed to say, "Of course ma'am, this washing machine is a total piece of shit. You should know at your age that it's a bad idea to buy capital goods at K-Mart's Scratch & Dent, Remainders, and Clearance Warehouse. Did you somehow think you had walked into Macys, or something? And no, we're not taking it back. You see that big blinking red sign over the door that says "NO RETURNS! NO REFUNDS! -- EVER"? Now get off our property before we call the police.

Which insanity? The insanity of nuclear weapons or the insanity of building backyard fallout shelters?

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was, indeed, pretty crazy -- and did it ever go away? Not much. Whether the Soviets were going to attack us or not, and regardless of how many bombs they did or did not have, we all had been led to believe they were wicked enough to trigger MAD. (We were just as likely to trigger MAD, and we had more bombs.) At the time it made sense for the citizen to take note of where the public fall out shelters were, whether they were ready, or whether their own basement would suffice.

clean air, good animal husbandry will do most of the work against tuberculosis. — unenlightened

Good animal husbandry will help prevent the transmission of TB from cows to humans, but unless we apply animal husbandry to the humans who have TB and transmit it to others, checking cows is only part of the solution. I have a very strong preference for fresh, unpolluted air, but clean air doesn't do much to prevent TB transmission. The healthy person sitting next to someone with active TB in fresh, clean air will still get infected -- as soon as they would in dirty air.

Now that we have multi-drug resistant TB, animal husbandry of sick humans is even more important.

And then one fine century someone will start digging in the right place to find us, and they'll be soooo amazed. — frank

They might be digging with their dextrous six (or horrors, eight) legs. Smart spiders discovering cans of RAID™ designed to kill their forebears. Arachnid rage would incite a pogrom against the intellectually sophisticated, and dexterous rat species, the mammalian princes of the future.

We are headed for extinction. It's just a question of when. And this is my question for you: what does it mean to accept that? — frank

That is a profound question; it's probably worth a thread of its own, but in that thread we would be back here in a flash, so... there is that.

I'm sort of, kind of, in a way reconciled with my own death. On most days I don't welcome it, but death is our common and inevitable fate. Death could have come decades earlier, so... I'm grateful to be alive today.

I feel... "sad" isn't the word; I feel a great grief that our species might (could... probably will? definitely will?) become extinct. Of course, eventually we would be extinct no matter what--but the extinction related to the dying sun is too far off to worry about. An extinction in the next 500, 1000, or 5000 years--or next week--is grievous unto despair. It is grievous to hear of the last of another ancient species dying, and we do not hear of the thousands of "the last of their kind" that die every year.

There is no protector in the universe charged with preventing extinctions. There have been 5 mass extinction events on this planet that we can't be blamed for. It is likely that mass extinction events occur every day somewhere in the universe. So, that's just...

What I am doing is trying to find a stress-relieving context in which to fold our own species-death. So far I have not been successful.

So it may be that what we are is so fragile that it can't adapt to even moderate change. There are a lot of flora and fauna like that. — frank

Two points: First, our fragility. Take the "wet bulb" relationship between heat and humidity. Humans can not do work and survive outside (literally, die) when high humidity and temperatures above 99ºF combine. We die from heat stroke because we can't dump enough heat through sweating and evaporation. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun; the rest of us stay in the shade.

There are several large food producing areas, like (southern North America, SE Asia, South Asia, etc.) where low elevation, high humidity, and normally high temperatures are going to severely cut into the time people can work outside on food production. That's a problem.

Second, flora and fauna. A lot of plants are pretty tolerant, but there are limits. Food plants (corn, soy, rice, fruit, grains, seed crops, etc.) have been bred to be more tolerant, but there are limitations on how far breeding and yield can go. As for fauna, you've probably heard about the declining insect populations. In some places it's a decline, in others it's a crash. This is a pretty bad harbinger of things to come. Insects are a key part of the biological web; bees aren't the only pollinators, a lot of insects prey on other insects, many birds depend on insects for food, and so on.

The insect population reflects the complexity of environmental problems. Heat, herbicides (eliminating "weeds" that many insects require for food), pesticides (many kinds), mono cropping (whole regions of nothing but corn or soybeans), etc. So it isn't just one thing (like rising global temperatures) that could upset the applecart. It's negative synergism.

but I'm going to butt out now — Baden

Thank you.

Do you think we should actively engineer adaptation? Or should we let Nature tell us where to put our resources? — frank

Nature will be indifferent to our problems and will not tell us anything. She has seen it all before.

One of the adaptations that we might well make is dropping dead in large numbers when we can no longer feed ourselves or provide enough drinking water. That is how nature solves over-population problems when the excess population becomes insupportable.

We will all become vegetarians because that will be the best bet for the next meal, never mind the ethics of eating meat. Some people will probably try what cannibals call "long pig".

Life will become simpler for many people. Many of us will not set foot in dreary offices again. We may never have to deal with another bureaucrat for the foreseeable future. If we don't get picked off by the local gang of liars, thieves, knaves, and scoundrels, we might do OK for a few more days. Or, we will be part of the Liars, Thieves, Knaves, & Scoundrels Benevolent Association until we are liquidated by a larger, better armed gang, like the Karing Kannibals Konsortium.

I don't know. On the upside, there is the fairly pleasant A World Made by Hand. On the downside there is The Road. Which book it will be, don't know.

What I do believe is that extensive adaptive solution-engineering will probably not be possible. Some people say we could power the world with either fission or fusion. Both of those solutions run up against the critical problem of many many tons of rare elements that would be needed for either method of energy production. Fission and fusion reactors won't last forever, and will have to be replaced. Each new reactor will suck up another large order of elements that just aren't plentiful.

For those who think agriculture will just move north into the tundra, think again. The thawing tundra is made up o peaty frozen vegetation and is centuries from being soil that wheat can grow on.

Even if society takes 50 to 100 years to fall apart completely, we are already on a down hill slope. There just won't be a happy ending, I am afraid (and I am afraid).

I think some of you are entrenched in a certain view and that keeps you from studying the document mentioned in the OP with an open mind. — frank

I read over the document, looking at the summary and conclusion in particular. I didn't see anything that was very compelling. I have thought we were screwed for some time. It isn't just the amount of CO2 lurking in the tundra and and the frozen methane ambush at the bottom of the ocean. It isn't just the physics and chemistry.

Our human behavior is just not very tractable (long run, short run) in the face of very difficult problems with uncertain solutions. WE cast the bleak light on our future. Nations can mobilize for war with remarkable speed and success, but generally wars are pretty concrete: We will kill them or they will kill us and these are the weapons we need to make. The country with the most resources and the most factories has a huge advantage.

Just try to train a group of slightly interested people what goes into the compost bin, the recycle bin, and the trash bin, never mind changing their entire lifestyle. (I understand this because I'm not able to change my lifestyle either.)

none of them can bring civilization crashing down in 30 minutes. — Jake

This is true. A full-out exchange of bombs among the existing nuclear powers would result in massive fire storms which would greatly extend the initial blast damage, and would throw up so much soot and dust into the upper atmosphere that climate would start cooling rapidly. The world would not freeze, but agriculture might dwindle to virtually nothing for a few years -- long enough for the survivors to starve. Then there is radiation on top of everything else, and a lost of vast stores of resources.

Humpty Dumpty was bagging his trash
when overhead there burst a bright flash.
There was no time for the egg to expire
Sir Oval turned ash in the nuclear fire.

:up:

The fact is, there are numerous threats to the environment coming from all sorts of sources. Fortunately they aren't all dire. But just to site one example of environmental change with potentially catastrophic but destructive consequences:

There are several episodes of arboreal diseases which show us that forests can be ravaged by disease. 4,000,000,000 (billion) edible nut-bearing chestnut trees died between 1900 and 1950. The species has not recovered. Dutch elm disease has wiped out most of the elm trees in North America and Europe. All native species of ash are susceptible to the diseases the emerald ash borer carries, including the trees planted in many cities to replace elms.

There are various diseases and insect pests affecting forests all over the world. This is nothing new, but trees are made more susceptible to diseases by warming climates.

The fact is, there are numerous threats to the environment coming from all sorts of sources. Fortunately they aren't all dire. But just to site one example of environmental change with potentially non-catastrophic but destructive consequences:

When North America was glaciated, all of the small earthworms that were native were scrapped off. The former worm-occupants had not recovered their range after 15,000 years. Europeans introduced a number of exotic species to North America -- like honey bees and big, fat earth worms. The big fat worms, which we refer to as 'night crawlers' and like to use as fish bait, have been spreading northward from their introduction sites. They have now infiltrated into the hardwood forests where they are causing a problem. They are eating all of the leaves that fall on the ground.

You will probably say "that's what worms are supposed to do". True enough, but they do such a good job that the ground under the trees is left bare, or at least much more thinly covered by leaves. When it rains, there is nothing to slow the movement of rainwater down hillsides which the formerly uneaten leaves were good at doing. This washes away a lot of the worm castings (their dung) which is excellent fertilizer for trees, and it leads to erosion and soil loss.

The trees aren't dying because of the worms, but the soil situation is slowly changing. All because of bigger earth worms. This is a (rare) case where bigger is not better.

Thanks to old age and Better Living Through Chemistry, I am not worried about nuclear weapons or global warming. BUT, as you have pointed out, nuclear weapons have been, are, and will be an abiding threat to global civilization. We don't know from which launch pad or submarine the threat will be made manifest, and we don't have to have an all-out nuclear war for dire consequences to ensue.

A few nuclear weapons knocking out critical oil infrastructure in the Middle East; 1 nuclear weapon destroying the Houston, Texas refining and chemical industry; just 1 bomb going off in Manhattan, or in Washington, D.C., or London, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing, Mumbai, Bangalore, or Karachi (and so on) would be a great disaster with far reaching political and military consequences. And it could be a bomb for each of the above.

It is possible for a nuclear weapon to be detonated outside of national command and control safeguards. It doesn't have to be official national policy; it could be a rogue, or terrorist-sponsored event. And, of course, it could certainly be national policy to get rid of adversaries by nuking them.