An insightful discussion of Collapse. Have you read the "Collapse Studies" classics, or is this your own analysis? Just curious to see if we have a common framework of ideas and references we can use.
I liked a lot of your ideas. We could have a great discussion on the forms and characteristics of various types of Collapse.
Until recently I have been thinking of the Climate Crisis as being a form of slow Collapse. I was influenced by this documentary.
One of the best documentaries on climate change I have seen came out in 2010. It was called “Earth 2100”. If you haven’t seen it here’s a link to it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDqRpM72Odg
Hosted by ABC journalist Bob Woodruff, the two-hour special explored what “a worst-case” future might look like as climate change plays out over the 21st century.
The show documents the life of a fictitious storyteller, “Lucy” born in 2009 as she describes her life through the 21st century. The program presents snapshots of the Earth in the years 2015, 2030, 2050, 2085, and 2100 with analysis by scientists, historians, social anthropologists, and economists, including Jared Diamond, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Peter Gleick, James Howard Kunstler, Heidi Cullen, Alex Steffen and Joseph Tainter.
It is a little bit dated but its strength is that it shows how climate change is going to play out over the lifetime of a person born in 2009. It really gives you a sense of what’s in store for the children who are being born today.
It portrays a "slow collapse" scenario. Until recently I saw it as the most likely. That has recently changed.
The Crisis Report — 08 (part two)
I’m going to be blunt. We have already locked in 4C-5C of warming.
Because of the deteriorating food situation, I now think we are looking at a "fast collapse".
The next five years are going to be brutally hard on the world.
Over a billion people will probably die of hunger. That's a "direct effect" of the heat spike. How they die, how we handle that globally. Will decide how high the "secondary death toll" becomes.
If those billion people decide to "die hard" and Global brush wars start flaring up everywhere. Then the death toll will multiply rapidly.
Imagine 8 or 9 "Ukraine" scale wars breaking out globally over the next four years. Plus hundreds of smaller scale "conflicts" as regional areas go to war over things like a lake or access to a river.
A billion people starving can become 2 or 3 billion people dying very easily.
The next five years are the first "Climate Shock" to our current World Order. We still have inertia, people mentally are still living in the old times. There is still the feeling that we can get "back to normal".
Plus we still have tremendous physical reserves. There are still supply chains working. Electricity is still flowing. We can still mobilize and respond to disasters.
We still have deep reserves but getting through the next five or six years is going to burn through them. If we don't use that time to reconfigure and prepare.
Well, the next spike or the spike after that, will cause collapse.
