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Doom is not quite the right word, at least in the apocalyptic connotation… it is too eventful, punctual, eschatological, teleological, suggesting a particular point of no return. Especially when combined with the word horizon, which suggests a point we can’t see beyond, a climatic singularity. Uncharted system dynamics? Cascading failures? Suffering? Wet bulb death zones? Crop failures? Another pandemic? Population collapse? Yes yes yes yes yes maybe maybe. But not a doom horizon. So fatalistic a term… does it simply function to absolve ourselves of the chilling experience of actually taking the time to think through what the world looks like beyond “the horizon” - absolution we seek simply because the truth is it will be terrible, but only incrementally so, and in a recognizable rather than unrecognizable way. We can attempt to think through how things will play out, given what we already see happening and simple assumptions about power dynamics. People will live through it all, especially the wealthy (cutoff threshold: unknown; or rather, where is the elbow/knee between suffering and resilience? I don’t know) - some of whom will experience some degree of climate shock (cf. the palisades, Malibu etc for a recent example) but will largely find ways to continue exploiting their advantages to survive, even thrive, while others will suffer the incrementally normalized dangers of simply being alive, like frogs slowly boiling in someone else’s kitchen. People will keep fucking, having kids, trying to work shitty jobs, trying to work fun jobs, doing science and research, making music and bad reality television shows and brilliant novels and bad novels, crossing continents for better lives (whether that’s economic opportunity or merely to escape climatic incompatibility with life) while others resent them for it, and people will continue to post on Hacker News long diatribes lamenting the state of things. I do think it is accurate to say we are *doomed* to this in the sense of being *fated* to it though. I guess what I am saying is that to call what will happen a doom horizon is just a hood we put over our own eyes because it is too upsetting to really think with nuance about the most probable trajectory. |
My word choice and vocabulary was pretty poor, I also don't think humanity will die.
But more than the gradual climate degradation, I fear we'll have an increasing number unforseen failure modes that will make it pretty hellish to survive (e.g. whole swaths of land/water accidentally poisoned, non human viruses we can't properly deal with, environment adapts in ways that is a lot more unfavorable to us than we assume). As you point out, I'd bet on uncharted system dynamics leading to cascading failures.
If life continues while slowly getting worse I'd see it as a win, the worse scenario being a lot bleaker with people barely maintaining a viable number of human to keep society going.
It's not fate and I'm part of the generation that truely didn't give a damn about climate for most of it's life...which is perhaps why I feel I'm not in a position to just assume everything will be shitty but somewhat fine and the next generation will just be slightly worse.