End Game Redux
Peak Oil reposted an article – The Fire This Time, which like many collapse-meme essays, deals with our near-term future.
There is a nice cross-reference chart that indicates (accurately enough) that all outcomes will end in failure.
However… there are some errors which I’ll cover.
First – The author needs to do more research. It’s called wet-bulb respiration and it affects all living things.
To quote a friend / blog poster on my site:
“Thermoregulating in a +6 °C or more world is not in the realm of the possible for primates (and virtually all other multicellular organisms) – which is to say nothing of continuing food sources (access) under a chaotic climate regime of escalating extremes. [Human] biology has very real (definitive) energetic limits, and ‘near term’ biosphere conditions, which we are in no way adapted for, are all but assured.”
Humans cannot survive an increase of 7°C or higher temperatures. 7°C increase destroys all life on Earth. This is the end game for all living things. It’s well docoumented on my site.
Admitting that this is likely, or even a virtual certainty, but not fully realizing what that conveys, leads to the wrong response. Embracing this life, right now, is indeed the “very best” we can do. But even this is not a “survival strategy”, even in the near-term, which I will focus on next.
Hoarding food is now the ONLY viable strategy for short-term survival of humans (next decades). You do this because you still want to live for as long as you can, so that you can continue to embrace life – and try to enjoy what is left. You cannot do this when you are starving to death.
There will be nothing growing and nothing to eat once temperatures increase 4°C in our food producing regions. This is projected to happen in our lifetimes (even if you are 50 years old now).
“There is time to imagine potential future scenarios… ” – I suppose if you want to waste the remaining time of your life, you can do this, but you will not achieve or accomplish anything nor make any difference in the “now”, which is all that matters. You will actually be shortening your life by failing to “do” what can actually be done.
The constant speculation on “what to do” is a misguided exercise being desperately grasped, but note where this comes from. We already know what to do, endless articles have covered this more then adequately, now YOU go do it. Needless to say, this is being ignored wholesale.
Industry, business and government know what to do – but will ignore this too, as long as possible, determining that immediate short-term profits are more important.
Humanity, especially Americans who refuse to believe virtually any fact, is simply far more comfortable embracing incessant denial.
The end result however, will be the same. We die. All of us. Soon. There will be a stupendously large scramble for the absent “exits” to find refuge and a safe place to be.
All this “planning” and “adaption” will prove to be moot. It will be asses and elbows right to the bitter end, as we scramble enmasse to stay alive. This is what humans do, demonstrated throughout our entire history as a species, particularly when survival is at stake. We are not going to go down peacefully, holding hands – we NEVER have. All notion of peace, negotiation and civilized will have long departed.
Food will be the greatest lack of all as global production plummets to virtually zero long before the heat (and extreme events) kills off all life. Many will die of starvation long before then.
Personally, I find articles like this entertaining, but on a deeper level, it’s just a grasp at “how the hell do I learn to cope with this impending doom and end game to my life” by the authors. Most desperately want to find some peace in all of this – and if at all possible, a peaceful solution. The harsh facts of human nature and existence, demonstrated by our history (past and present) is no such outcome actually exists.
Refusal to accept this is just another form of denial. Knowing the end is coming and why, is only a small part of the whole picture. Knowing further that we will not go peacefully is no comfort. There will be many who will ignore this, choosing instead to live their lives embracing hope. There is nothing wrong with that fundamentally. But the error is made when they naively expect everyone else to do the same – they will not.
It’s worth also looking at the personalities involved that seek to instill hopium. They represent the epitome of hundreds of thousands of years of human existence and development, advocating peace, hope, life, living, future, joy, entertainment and so much more. They are admirable precisely because of these points. But they are poorly equipped to adapt emotionally and physically to a harsher world, and they will not survive as long as those that are, having refused to acknowledge the base facts that make one human survive (longer) then another.
In other words – they are not what we need to garner the best advice for survival, lacking skill, experience and judgement. I do not promote such people for survival for this reason, although I do admire them for their personal philosophy and perspective. I expect they’ll be pretty useless when it comes to trying to stay alive in a increasingly brutal world looking for sustenance, having ignored that real adaption means far, far more then “embracing collapse” or some other such nonsense. Nobody will “embrace collapse”, only idiot authors write such garbage out of desperation, secretly knowing their toast.
The naivety expressed is actually dangerous for the rest of us, because it creates another false set of illusions about “how” we might adapt, or mitigate, or survive. This is becoming problematic. It fairly prevalent now in the collapse literature. The people who write these things are not the best equipped to give advice, theory, understanding or direction. The world they embrace and are “from” is ending. This evidence abounds everywhere. The world that is coming is utterly alien to them. They’re not adjusting very well and as a result, they’re advising many of the wrong things.
To demonstrate this point more clearly, imagine you are faced with the future being projected – intolerable heat, extreme events, displaced refugees and growing hunger. This bears down on you. Every. Single. Day. Growing in intensity and suffering until it becomes truly insufferable.
Looking back, you belatedly realize that all your hopium did nothing. You’d rather have something to eat. Or some place safer to be. Watching your kids die of starvation will be unbelievably painful. Or freezing to death in the “storm of the century”.
The failure to adapt to real life, and do what you can about it, becomes the deciding factor on your actual existence. THIS is what is not being talked about and even rejected by hopium authors, probably because they don’t actually have a clue what to do. The world they once knew is long gone and they were simply unable to keep up to the changing realities.
In the end – this will mean life or death, possibly even decades of living lost, where those equipped would have lived more.
But even in the larger context, this isn’t about “time” or how long you get to live, it’s always about how you live – until you are forced to survive – and then the rules change (and so do you, if you can). Plenty of collapse authors completely fail to realize this transition point exists. But once all the hand-holding stops, reality will set in.
So my advice is to live your life now, while you still can, while still doing all you can for the future reality and how harsh things will be. Don’t ignore what it will mean in the future to survive.
