"Is It Thunderdome Yet?" A Rolling Looming Apocalypse Thread

I live not that far from Sandpoint, mentioned in that Morford article, and know people who live there and such. I don't know what he's missed in the past but basically every August since I moved here in 2006 has had a defined "fire season" with at least a couple of days of smoke and haze. This year is definitely dramatically worse, but still.

Where I live isn't woody enough to have actual fire dangers, but prevailing winds and so much of Washington on fire led to horrible air quality for a couple of weeks, like measurably hazardous and at least one day it was the worst in the country by far. A couple of weeks ago it was super dire - sun blotted out, eyes watering when you went outside, constant smoke smell, burning lungs, not being able to see houses a couple blocks away, etc. Thankfully we have central air conditioning and could just hole up inside for a couple of days, though we did have to change the furnace filter which had basically turned very dark gray.

I swear there's something in human evolution that makes you edgy and stressed when it constantly smells like smoke, like you're constantly preparing to flee for your life.

The basic tenor of the article was extremely heightened fear and anxiety, verging on paranoia, but on the other side of the coin, humans seem to have a very limited ability to imagine a future as anything other than a duplicate of the past. That article challenges that myopia and tries to convey a sense of a drastically changed and intimidating future, and even if it isn't accurate in detail (predictions seldom are) I'm glad it tries to penetrate our complacency about climate change.

take your pick:

http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2015/12/50-doomiest-graphs-of-2015.html

"animal mass mortality events, 1940-2012" is always the one that freaks me out the most, but lately I've been reading a lot of trend studies about future heat waves in the Middle East and India making large areas uninhabitable.

oh, you mean this one?

http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-gQP9Miz3nAA/VXh4L7oYBfI/AAAAAAAAbyw/zXSCYHUqZ2E/image%25255B7%25255D.png?imgmax=800

If India is the 2nd most populous nation on earth and a large percentage of its land area becomes "uninhabitable", I wonder what is expected to happen to the hundreds of millions of people who currently inhabit the land that becomes "uninhabitable"?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/science/intolerable-heat-may-hit-the-middle-east-by-the-end-of-the-century.html
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/extreme-heatwaves-could-push-gulf-climate-beyond-human-endurance-study-shows

bump

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/

i always do the 'i'll probably be dead by then' math when i hear these stories

I always think about my wife's granddaughters :(

fortunately i have no offspring or roots and don't intend to, too young

human innovation will always find a way to outpace ecological degradation. that's why the fertile crescent is such a great place for farmers right now

Monkeys in Florida have deadly herpes, so please don’t touch them

alternatively: floridians, keep touching those monkeys

(honorable exceptions for alfred and neanderthal obv)

http://mimg.ugo.com/200901/22094/cuts/Klaus_288x288.jpg

wheeeeee

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the symbolic Doomsday Clock a notch closer to the end of humanity Thursday, moving it ahead by 30 seconds after what the organization called a “grim assessment” of the state of geopolitical affairs.

“As of today,” Bulletin president Rachel Bronson told reporters, “it is two minutes to midnight.”

In moving the clock 30 seconds closer to the hour of the apocalypse, the group cited “the failure of President Trump and other world leaders to deal with looming threats of nuclear war and climate change.”

The organization — whose board includes 15 Nobel Laureates — now believes “the world is not only more dangerous now than it was a year ago; it is as threatening as it has been since World War II,” Bulletin officials Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert Rosner wrote in an op-ed published Thursday by The Washington Post. “In fact, the Doomsday Clock is as close to midnight today as it was in 1953, when Cold War fears perhaps reached their highest levels.”

obligatory

https://images.genius.com/d9a3002a29dbe437b351788a2bfb18db.1000x1000x1.jpg

geoff johns does not need the publicity

this is what happens when you fuck with alan moore, geoff

love how old this thread is

rmde re Trump 'not dealing with' an impending nuke threat he is the major cause of

In this instance, I took 'not dealing with looming threats' to essentially mean 'failing to correct the mistake nature made by allowing him to be born in the first place'.

what rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches towards etc

there are threads like these all the time. apocalyptic imagery is found throughout history. it is popular fiction. we love feeling so special.

it is getting old as fuck though. i read a review of the new Cornelius song on Stereogum and it was like "I can't believe he can even imagine a future". give me a break.

okay guys shut it down adam is, like, so over it - the united opinion of the world's experts that we are heading for drowned cities, failed crops, and millions of people literally cooking alive around the equator within decades is a popular fiction

T/S: 15 Nobel laureates vs Adam

When next the poles change places, the consequences for the electrical and electronic infrastructure that runs civilization will be dire. The question is when that will happen.

https://undark.org/article/books-alanna-mitchell-spinning-magnet

at this point it's hard not to think that the earth itself is trying to kill us all

The general idea is, justified through truly painful torture and dismembering of modern physics, mathematics and geology (primarily by the methods of ignorance and blatant denial), that the Earth’s crust sometimes shift suddenly in relation to the rotational axis, causing massive changes to the crust. And as with all true crankery, the hypothesis predicts an immanent cataclysmic event.

http://americanloons.blogspot.fr/2014/04/988-richard-noone.html

5/5/2000 we are...er were...doomed

“Recalculating”

I read 5/5/2000 around 1990 or so, sometime between sequels to Chariots of the Gods & Foucault's Pendulum, & I remember the author urging people to join his cult crew in rural Illinois where he was gonna build a hovercraft to survive the floods caused by the polar ice caps melting. I wonder if anyone took him up on it, and what happened?

i can guarantee this much: they survived the floods

lol

at this point it's hard not to think that the earth itself is trying to kill us all

self defense

I’ve watched enough science television to know that the earth is in the universe and the universe is nothing if not a giant engine of destruction that wants to blow itself up again and again so actually our death drive as a species is even deeper than our genes, it’s in our elements, man

you can't fight entropy dude

that's why i don't go to the gym

"When next the poles change places" will be the opening number of Hair 2

something something screen doors

If the earth ever talks with the other planets they probably say “why you still got that life all over you, dude?” And Earth goes “I know I know it just happened by accident” And Mars is like “...OK, lady”

Jupiter constantly giving its moons the eye to make sure they aren’t even thinking about having some life

Fun to think of the biosphere as basically like a bad case of athlete's foot that the earth has allowed to get wildly out of control.

at least any life which might be hanging in there under the ice on europa has had the good sense to keep it basic and sustainable so far, let's hope they don't get too ambitious

Mars gonna feel pretty stupid when one of our probes turns out to not have been sterilized correctly

mars, the bringer of war and the forgetter of condoms

Japan heatwave declared natural disaster as death toll mounts

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/23/rising-temperatures-linked-to-increased-suicide-rates

Brazil museum fire: ‘incalculable’ loss as 200-year-old Rio institution gutted

War, Famine, Death and badly maintained public buildings with dodgy wiring.

Someone connected with the museum completely broke down into sobbing anguish on bbc WS earlier. Some talk that it could be related to underfunding - shock horror - Building with priceless cultural/historic/archaeological treasures, rather than poor ethnic minorities burns to the ground because of austerity.