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From TPM Reader JS …
I think you’re spot on that climate is the underlying stressor. Since we live in such a complex society, it’s usually hard to see down to the fundamentals how easy it is to disturb. Covid showed that just a few failures can rapidly spread. We’re never that far away from a collapse.
But what impressed me about a book I recently read about the collapse of Sub-Roman Britain was a phrase the author repeated, and I’m not sure it’s his, anyway, it was “the four horseman ride together.” In other words, some natural disasters happens, say, a famine, and then disease results, then war, and so on. I’m struck that, apparently, one day, the government just stopped sending bullion to back coins, and a warlord took almost the entire army to Gaul to where they had a mint to get the soldiers their pay and just never went back.
We have seen that with the things you mentioned. Climate has caused (if that’s the right word) migration, perhaps most consequentially with the migrations to Europe in the mid 10s. Russia took advantage of the political instability to divide politics in the US and EU. Then we had Covid, and while there’s no evidence I’m aware of that climate was a factor in Covid jumping to humans, if humans did it it still more or less fits this framework of a rapidly decelerating exponential curve where everything seems to get faster but in the moment still seems continuous.
All of the stress from these events makes people more and more angry and the cycle spins.
So my musing would be that the long foretold climate collapse has already begun. It sure looks like a collapse of civilization in Syria and Iraq where ISIS spread. Caravans of foreigners wandering through Europe definitely also has strong 5th century vibes, including the Ukrainians.
Like you, I grew up in Southern California and after a lot of places in between, I’m back in the same basic area. The weather here isn’t like what you remember when you grew up, if you’ve visited. It rhymes, maybe, but it doesn’t repeat. June gloom often comes earlier or later. Rain is much more volatile, sometimes wetter, sometimes dryer, and the wet rains now tend to be quicker and more violent. If you lived near the beach, you didn’t used to need air conditioning. Now if you don’t have it, life is miserable for several weeks a year and dangerous to older people.
Some places, like the small town I live in, are being forced to consider options like connecting to the state water system (because it’s most likely to get “bailed out” if there’s a failure) or cooperating locally to bring about desalination. Otherwise, we will have to either run out of water or kill off a lot of local agriculture. It’s collaps-y either way.
I’m not a believer in the inevitable Malthusian collapse, or, at least, I think a smarter use of still existing resources can avoid that for at least centuries. But a dumb use of bad resources—climate change/fossil fuels—can do it all on its own. This makes me a bad fit for the environmental activist world, but I consider myself a died in the wool environmentalist of my own stripe.
I’m not a doomer at all. But I believe being aware of the problem is the first step. I find that even died-in-the-wool climate change activists don’t actually act like it’s real. They don’t install air conditioning if they lived somewhere that didn’t need it 20 years ago and things like that.
Of course you say these things and everyone says you’re a wailing Cassandra, but look at the events just of the last 10 years, and the Russia/Syria/EU stuff and it’s right there happening. Turns out that wailing Cassandras are also a forerunner of collapses.
