Nate, that last bit from Peter about the natural process of evolution rapidly producing tuskless elephants really did cheer me up. I've been at this information gathering process about as long as you have been. Actually 30 years for climate disruption. Except I came at it from the opposite direction, with decades of knowledge of natural ("alternative") forms of medicine and biology, and then plunging into study of climate, politics, history and now economics during the last 20 years. Even so, I learn so much from these podcasts of yours, and I am so grateful for them. My only wish is that I could wave a magic wand and instill an irresistable desire in more people to listen to them. Everyone who does goes crazy loving them, but so few will take the time. The levels of resignation in the US among the older half of our generations seems amazingly high. I'm at a loss as to how to make a dent in it after years of trying. All I get from others in answer to the question "How to break through" is some version or other of "Give up," which is just more resignation.
Thank you for a great conversation. I know that young people are really very stressed, as you have pointed out. I hope one day you can address the great “moral injury” of our time. Young people who are aware of science feel betrayed and also feel like that betrayal is ongoing, and full-tilt at that. We also sure do need to develop a meta narrative that will help give people a shared sense of meaning and a shared sense of being deeply engaged in making a way for life together. Do hope you do have Peter Ward back for more. I hope you are able to discuss scientific literacy further as well. Thank you both very much for sharing this conversation.
I was betrayed by my own family. I was a climate activist in the late 80s and through the 90s. My family blasted Rush Limbaugh and fox news 24/7 and mocked me. I had to go no contact. It was traumatic and felt like terrorism. They died. Like a getaway. Take all you can and F everyone and everything else. This is the kind of trauma few people talk about and it was certainly "anti social" to talk about it over the past 20 years. Now here we are.
The only way that humans can live in a sustainable and renewable fashion is as hunter-gatherers with a global population of maybe several million, as they did before the agricultural revolution.
Lives gonna be pretty simple after the great culling, tho. Wonder how far back things be pushed. To medieval / Roman, with a rather decent degree of societal organisation and technical skill - how to build carts, ships, work iron, weaving, pottery, and defend those against ravaging bands? Early agriculture with some animal husbandry thrown in ? Still need to know how to grow crops, but there's plenty of knowledge about that amongst ppl, far more than how to make a loom or build a wooden ship. Or back to hunting collecting, and hopefully some larger animals survive so we don't need to just hunt down mice, rats or the odd rabbit or crow. Might be different around the world, tribes separated by larger tracts of inhospitable overheated dry lands. Don't think the survive areas will look anything like Avatar tho.
... as a German Biologist - Peter Ward is a highly impressive Biologist and Role Model for the World. As the World has no respect for Persons like Ward we self extinct easy...
Wouldn't it be a wonderful and miraculous thing if Nate Hagens and like-minded contemporaries would have a national platform on mainstream media! The fact that it will never happen is an eye-opening, existential reality that is as confounding as any ecological dilemma we face.
These guys both believe that masks stop respiratory viruses. How many decades of research do we need for virtue signalers like this to clue in? No wonder Ward's students are stressed out. He likely was one of the 98% of climate scientists that wrote the paper in 1989 that claimed that all coastal cities would be depopulated by year 2000 due to sea level rise. He's not a scientist. He's a stamp collector. I don't deny that environmental degradation and resource depletion are most likely unresolvable issues. But science is about the search for disconfirmatory evidence. Ward is doing the opposite.
The Flooded Earth was one of the first climate change books that didn't pull punches and wasn't afraid to speculate on the worst case scenarios. You can see it's influence in later books like The Uninhabitable Earth which in turn have influenced a lot of the discussion and activism. Thanks for this unflinching (and reliability disturbing) conversation.
Love your podcast from a person who takes a deep science approach with a multidiscipline approach. I first read one of Peter's earlier books in a Paleontology course way back in 1997. I'm not sure I agree with his 800ppm of CO2 being a tipping point nor that CO2 was the major cause of mass extinctions. but I do like his emphasis on sulfur dioxide. What he didn't mention is both in the air and water a good amount of sulfur dioxide converts to sulfuric acid. That helped create the Permian extinction from the Siberian traps as well as the Deccan Indian traps of the KT extinctions. Both have been correlated with high pyrite sediments on the ocean floor. (FeS) 55million year ago heat wave had a 5000ppm CO2.not 1000ppm The oyster failure in Puget sound has been linked to pH 5 -5.5 which is the range when carbonates start to dissolve. On a side note one of the best indicators of stupidity is oversimplification and trying to explain things using only one or two variables. Greta and current climate end of times freaks want to blame CO2 and fossil fuels for everything. 90% of atmospheric heating comes from water vapor. That means anything that causes more evaporation will increase heat retention. Another source could be all the BTU's we create. Every motor, every transmission of electricity loses at least 50% of its efficiency to waste heat. Urban heat islands are often 5 degrees hotter. Forests are 10 degrees cooler. I could go on but I'm sure your aware of other sources. Oversimplification also comes from ADHD and any short attention span behavior. Social media, video games, click bait, texting, failure to read anything past 500 words, movies that jump from scene to scene every few seconds, all contribute to this short attention span. 20 year olds today except for the top 10% know less today than 30-50 years ago despite the internet which should have made them smarter. Anyway keep teaching for that is our best hope.
Mind blown! Thank you so much! All of this is so interesting and soooo relevant. As a farmHer, I see so much nature and the changes in nature on a micro level. Your views and your guest are so welcome as my conscious grows to see farther than my own plot and the strugles we must embrace that are ahead. I farm in Appalachia, the most northwest corner of NC. Last summer all my springs were dry for seven weeks. I nearly gave up! Now I realize it may be my new norm. Holding space here in my temperate rain forest that once was.💚💪
This is the most important interview and this channel. We have to avoid this fate. Remember we caused it. We can. Fix it. But not without cooperative effort.
We can't fix it. US pumped more oil and gas last year than ever. We're deforesting faster than ever. We're at the thick end of 420ppm carbon now, a 50% increase in a geological picosecond. And we're still making it worse every single day.
Thanks guys - it's good to hear you outline clearly & concisely your thoughts & opinions on a cornucopia of facts interconnected to our survival as a species. Oceanographer Jim Massa's VLOGs discuss the Ocean Heat Content (OHC) as being a sleeping giant, having accumulated 93% of the additional insolation energy trapped (over & above the pre-industrial carbon cycle equilibrium) by CO2 rising from 280ppm to 420ppm (+ other GHgases). That heat is not being drawn down to deep water because of upper surface stratification (top ~700 meters) - the point being that all this extra heat energy has to go somewhere & so more will diffuse upwards accelerating the heating of the atmosphere. (The OHC has other potential implications for the AMOC)
Understanding the specific heat of water and the implications is so crucial and probably the most important scientific fact we should teach young people... It's also obvious by the fact that we boil water for cooking and use ice to cool or drinks.... But still most people think this is only about atmospheric temperature alone, sadly..... Jim would make a great guest for sure!
No human can live totally alone. But even if someone could drop out of society completely to minimize their impact, they would only address 1/8,000,000,000th of the problem of human overshoot. Hagens and his brilliant compatriots, seek to MAXIMIZE their impact through selfless efforts to reach out and educate us as to our dilemma so that we can steer the conversation to better outcomes.
Peter's voice needs to be heard!!! Thank you for sharing. I am a big fan and have read almost all his books. From Rivers in Time to a New History of Life, Under a Green Sky, the Life and Death of Planet Earth and so on, his writing captivates me. It puzzles me how he remains under the radar of so many important circles yet is so well respected and cherished in others.
"If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, ..........." If? If? How could anyone not at least learn from this? Enjoyment, well I wonder if I'm evolving to enjoy bad news.
It is amazing that the ongoing chaotic cosmic interactions and cycles - at every level and scale - can simply create, then destroy and then recycle everything! And we are just lucky to have this rare chance to experience it as evolving but equally unstable and chaotic human beings.
Yes, we are going to get to 1000ppm. Why? Because nobody is taking into account all the methane deposits, such as methane hydrates. The Russian scientist that studied just the hydrates around the continental shelf of Siberia estimates there is well over 400ppm CO2 equivalent just sitting there ready to be released.
Hey, please tell Dr. Ward that he should try to get his update of The Flooded Earth published again, because a kid named Stephen Markley just published a 900 page novel with Simon & Schuster called The Deluge, and they are pushing it hard. From the reviews, it sounds like he was channeling Under a Green Sky and TFE, both of which I have read twice. So I hope the update gets translated back to English from German soon.
You guys sure are cheerful! I know so even more cheerful! Guy McPherson says there's 60 feedback loops, and if anyone of them trips we're all dead. He says they're all tripping before 2030. The main one he references is methane in the Arctic. Why is he wrong? I mean why bother trying to get the issues out there if we're already doomed?
It’s not easy to see a positive or even survival outcome. Seeing doom everywhere isn’t easy either! But without some optimism movement forward is constrained. Stuart Brand’s “we have become like gods and we better get good at it” comes to mind. Never before in history has a single species had so much agency and choice over the future we create. Time to make the best outcome our task.
Predictions In 2007 McPherson predicted the USA's trucking industry would collapse by 2012 due to peak oil, quickly followed by the interstate highway system.[18] In 2008 he predicted the end of civilization by 2018 due to peak oil, "If you're alive in a decade, it will be because you've figured out how to forage locally."[19] In 2012 he predicted that global warming will kill much of humanity by 2020.[20] In 2016 he predicted that humanity and most lifeforms will be extinct due to global warming by mid-2026.[21] In 2017 he predicted that global temperatures would be 6° C above baseline in mid-2018 and that Earth would have no atmosphere by the 2050s.[22] In June 2018 he implied that industrial civilization was about to collapse in September 2018, followed by a 1 degree C immediate additional temperature jump due to the end of reflective aerosol production, which would rapidly somehow end all "complex multicellular organisms" on Earth.[23][24] rationalwiki.org/wiki/Guy_McPherson
Optimism and pessimism are flip sides of magical thinking. Develop a practice of embracing uncertainty, which in some Eastern traditions is the field of all possibilities, and a practice of doing what transition necessitates within the limits of your circumstances, whether the practice is sufficient or not.
@@shonufftheshogunArigato gozaimasu, brother. "It's the end of the world so just go home and die" is an unacceptable response when what we've been doing for the first 30 years is comparatively nothing. Doomism is just another excuse to continue doing nothing.
I'm glad you can't pull the trigger on those coyotes, Nate. They are complex enough to possess a mind, and I equate complexity with greater sensitivity. That is what my intuition tells me. I've had to bludgeon Northern Water Snakes, in past years, when they have acquired an appetite for my coy and goldfish. I've always had respect and appreciation for the many varieties of snakes. So it was a painfully forced march on my part, to rid the pond of these creatures that were here millions of years ahead of me. That, or watch them pick off these expensive, and beautiful fish, one by one.
I Thought Carl Sagan, Neil Degrasse Brian Cox and Sabine Hossenfelder we’re the best science communicators(heavily astrophysics based). I have found a new best in ecological economics. Thanks Nate and guests!
... I'm a big fan of Professor Ward - got (almost) all of his books, so I have listened to him on many recordings - both audio and video (many of these are available on TH-cam !) - so I am fairly familiar with his voice ... poor guy was obviously having sinus problems during this interview 🤧
Peter Ward books available on TH-cam? I did not know of this. I've got Green Sky and New History of Life but Rare Earth is hard to find and expensive when you do.
Nate: you’re a gentleman and a scholar. Thank you for doing what you do. Let us know when your class is out! Dr ward: if you’re out there: You too are a gentleman and a scholar. Did your book scare the shit out of me? Absolutely. But I had to get through the geology first lol.
As horrific as it may sound, I have come to objectively believe that the very best hope for the life of planet Earth is the elimination of the human species. Who knows? Perhaps in another million years there might be a species that evolves that recognizes the symbiotic importance of its environment to itself. One can only hope. "Life' is a miraculous thing manifested in many ways by many things. Not just human life.
@Tina Clark’s ghost why? Who gives a sh!t about brahms? I mourn all those millions of geniuses that will never be born because we're too ignorant and insatiable to examine why life is worth living. But it seems like for some aesthetic pleasure is already the answer. To me, the idea that listening to brahms is our highest contribution to nature is just a thin hair better than collective suicide.
@@kvaka009 We had a great time. It was significant and potent. Ending doesn't cheapen it or downgrade it. Just as every life begins and ends. Only a child or psychopath wants to grasp forever. All we ever have/had was the present.
@maxotaurus5140 yes, but suicide by over indulgence? Count me out. I'll try to prevent the "inevitable" until I can't. Dying before you're dead is just as unhealthy.
Nate can you or somebody else make a template on how to get people to understand our collective predicament. So that people form other countries can understand the problems we face?
Thank You. Note that some major fossil fuel reserves are located in regions which will shortly become 'no-go' areas for humans, so I agree with Nate...
tremendous guest! I love the podcast, it's incredibly informative and excels at making complex concepts simple to understand. Thanks for the work put into it.
... Near the end of the video, Nate Hagens mentions " an amazing economy in the near term ", but what is (largely) ignored in the talk is the not-so-amazing economy of the poor in some areas : specifically Brazilian lumber-cutters (not the Companies themselves, as such, but the workers) that depend on their jobs to survive and the subsistence farmers that burn parts of the rain forests to clear land that is not already owned by someone else. There are many other examples of people damaging the environment to survive, due to a lack of any other work. Not everyone is taking ivory or shark fins or tiger penises for trinkets, soup and Viagra substitutes ... the wealthy here in the west AND elsewhere need to share some of the blame for the wealth we sucked out of many poor nations - both as Colonial powers and modern day resource extractors - and we need to insist that the Governments of the source countries help their people as part of the deal !
its challenging to think about global heating as your silver SUV drives almost a mile and half to the supermarket for more instant penguin glucose with endangered rhino horn protein powder on sale.
This conversation is really depressing at 37 minutes. Reminds me of why Dave Chappelle says he won't smoke weed with black people anymore. I only smoked weed with a dude from the hood once, but he was starting going on about how crack babies don't have a chance in this world.
It's stunning to me that such knowledgeable people talk about life in 2080. How will the planet not experience total ecological collapse way before then, making life for humans impossible. We're already on the cusp, w the disappearance of insects, mammals, amphibians and sea life. Temps are inevitably going to rise for at least the next 10 years and human population shows no sign of decreasing. It's as though we are driving towards a cliff, and even though we know that we are accelerating. And the cliff is quickly eroding, causing the distance between us and it to shrink exponentially.
They also didn't mention the likelihood that many or most of the reactors at the world's 400+ nuclear power plants will eventually no longer be able to be safely maintained in the face of ever-worsening climate breakdown--threatening all species on the planet, not just ours.
One thing, all these TH-cam videos about "people from the future" like "2540" or just 2080 I know are another reason to be BS without investigating lol.
An inspiring as well as worrying talk by two expert deep thinkers. However, my ears pricked up when towards the end they both celebrated their attachment to their dogs, something they incidentally share with eco-activist Chris Packham in the UK. If we need to cut population, massively cut per-capita consumption in the rich countries, and dial back on environmental footprint generally, how do we justify manufacturing animals for company, especially ones that are largely carnivorous predators, while the remnant of natural vertebrate life is squeezed into a 4% corner? I think that needs to be examined.
But they think dinosaurs may have been warm blooded, I guess with crocodiles being archosaurs that must have come later. But why couldn't mammals move away from sea, possibly to higher altitudes? The argument seems too general
The Undesigned Universe - Peter Ward “ . . . it is these ocean state changes that are 1:02:28 correlated with the great disasters of the past impact can cause extinction but 1:02:35 it did so in our past only wants[once] that we can tell whereas this has happened over 1:02:40 and over and over again we have fifteen evidences times of mass extinction in the past 500 million years 1:02:48 so the implications for the implications the implications of the carbon dioxide is really dangerous if you heat your 1:02:55 planet sufficiently to cause your Arctic to melt if you cause the temperature 1:03:01 gradient between your tropics and your Arctic to be reduced you risk going back 1:03:07 to a state that produces these hydrogen sulfide pulses . . . “ th-cam.com/video/Ako03Bjxv70/w-d-xo.html
@Sunshine Cloudyday Humans and our livestock now outweigh wild land animals 50:1. There are way too many of us and we are taking more than our share. All propped up by fossil Carbon as energy. Which will soon be leaving us. Things will be much smaller and simpler once again in the near future.
@Sunshine Cloudyday As famjne and water shortages develop in competing areas like India,Pakistan and China you can expect these Nuclear equipped nations to use these weapons ! Also the technology is increasingly available for advanced bioweapons in more and more countries ! The number i hear used most often is that we must cull the planet to no more than 2 billion human population for the biosphere to recover !
@Sunshine Cloudyday I think Erlich said in a recent interview we netto add about 250 thousand people per day. In the sixties that was 100 thousand people.
I wonder if the repopulation of humans is also a response to war deaths, and if continual deaths by war resulted in the female was self-fertile changing to what we have today?
Volkswagen and Volvos? European cars are quite a bit lighter and more efficient than American ones. Don't forget who has got the highest emissions per capita.
Everytime I hear 2100 I think about a stage 4 lung cancer patient worrying about if he will have Alzheimer.
Nate, that last bit from Peter about the natural process of evolution rapidly producing tuskless elephants really did cheer me up. I've been at this information gathering process about as long as you have been. Actually 30 years for climate disruption. Except I came at it from the opposite direction, with decades of knowledge of natural ("alternative") forms of medicine and biology, and then plunging into study of climate, politics, history and now economics during the last 20 years. Even so, I learn so much from these podcasts of yours, and I am so grateful for them. My only wish is that I could wave a magic wand and instill an irresistable desire in more people to listen to them. Everyone who does goes crazy loving them, but so few will take the time.
The levels of resignation in the US among the older half of our generations seems amazingly high. I'm at a loss as to how to make a dent in it after years of trying. All I get from others in answer to the question "How to break through" is some version or other of "Give up," which is just more resignation.
Can't believe there was Peter Ward content up for a year and l didn't know. He and Peter Brannen are my absolute favourites.
Thank you Nate and Peter for continuing our planetary education
It's amazing that we are even here. Inexplicable really. The universe is a wonder. The whole thing is alive somehow.
Many thanks to Nate and Peter. Let’s preserve what we have left. Make that job one.
Thank you for a great conversation.
I know that young people are really very stressed, as you have pointed out.
I hope one day you can address the great “moral injury” of our time. Young people who are aware of science feel betrayed and also feel like that betrayal is ongoing, and full-tilt at that.
We also sure do need to develop a meta narrative that will help give people a shared sense of meaning and a shared sense of being deeply engaged in making a way for life together.
Do hope you do have Peter Ward back for more.
I hope you are able to discuss scientific literacy further as well.
Thank you both very much for sharing this conversation.
I was betrayed by my own family. I was a climate activist in the late 80s and through the 90s. My family blasted Rush Limbaugh and fox news 24/7 and mocked me. I had to go no contact. It was traumatic and felt like terrorism. They died. Like a getaway. Take all you can and F everyone and everything else. This is the kind of trauma few people talk about and it was certainly "anti social" to talk about it over the past 20 years. Now here we are.
So good to know I am not alone in my thinking. I have to hug my dog every day just to remind myself of the beauty that still exists in our world.
We're looking at more than a great simplification. We're looking at a great culling. At this point it's unavoidable. We're fucked.
It’s already under way 💉 Yes, we most assuredly are..
Got that right!
The only way that humans can live in a sustainable and renewable fashion is as hunter-gatherers with a global population of maybe several million, as they did before the agricultural revolution.
@@TheSonicfrog I agree.
Lives gonna be pretty simple after the great culling, tho. Wonder how far back things be pushed. To medieval / Roman, with a rather decent degree of societal organisation and technical skill - how to build carts, ships, work iron, weaving, pottery, and defend those against ravaging bands? Early agriculture with some animal husbandry thrown in ? Still need to know how to grow crops, but there's plenty of knowledge about that amongst ppl, far more than how to make a loom or build a wooden ship.
Or back to hunting collecting, and hopefully some larger animals survive so we don't need to just hunt down mice, rats or the odd rabbit or crow.
Might be different around the world, tribes separated by larger tracts of inhospitable overheated dry lands. Don't think the survive areas will look anything like Avatar tho.
... as a German Biologist -
Peter Ward is a highly impressive Biologist
and Role Model for the World.
As the World has no respect for Persons like Ward
we self extinct
easy...
... LOTS of us respect AND listen to people like Peter Ward ... AND Michael Mann and James Hansen. All is not lost - yet ...
Very informative. Thanks ---- Yikes Nate! This is a year old... bring Peter back for an update!
Ditto 💙
Wouldn't it be a wonderful and miraculous thing if Nate Hagens and like-minded contemporaries would have a national platform on mainstream media! The fact that it will never happen is an eye-opening, existential reality that is as confounding as any ecological dilemma we face.
These guys both believe that masks stop respiratory viruses. How many decades of research do we need for virtue signalers like this to clue in? No wonder Ward's students are stressed out. He likely was one of the 98% of climate scientists that wrote the paper in 1989 that claimed that all coastal cities would be depopulated by year 2000 due to sea level rise. He's not a scientist. He's a stamp collector. I don't deny that environmental degradation and resource depletion are most likely unresolvable issues. But science is about the search for disconfirmatory evidence. Ward is doing the opposite.
The Flooded Earth was one of the first climate change books that didn't pull punches and wasn't afraid to speculate on the worst case scenarios. You can see it's influence in later books like The Uninhabitable Earth which in turn have influenced a lot of the discussion and activism.
Thanks for this unflinching (and reliability disturbing) conversation.
Love your podcast from a person who takes a deep science approach with a multidiscipline approach. I first read one of Peter's earlier books in a Paleontology course way back in 1997. I'm not sure I agree with his 800ppm of CO2 being a tipping point nor that CO2 was the major cause of mass extinctions. but I do like his emphasis on sulfur dioxide. What he didn't mention is both in the air and water a good amount of sulfur dioxide converts to sulfuric acid. That helped create the Permian extinction from the Siberian traps as well as the Deccan Indian traps of the KT extinctions. Both have been correlated with high pyrite sediments on the ocean floor. (FeS) 55million year ago heat wave had a 5000ppm CO2.not 1000ppm The oyster failure in Puget sound has been linked to pH 5 -5.5 which is the range when carbonates start to dissolve. On a side note one of the best indicators of stupidity is oversimplification and trying to explain things using only one or two variables. Greta and current climate end of times freaks want to blame CO2 and fossil fuels for everything. 90% of atmospheric heating comes from water vapor. That means anything that causes more evaporation will increase heat retention. Another source could be all the BTU's we create. Every motor, every transmission of electricity loses at least 50% of its efficiency to waste heat. Urban heat islands are often 5 degrees hotter. Forests are 10 degrees cooler. I could go on but I'm sure your aware of other sources. Oversimplification also comes from ADHD and any short attention span behavior. Social media, video games, click bait, texting, failure to read anything past 500 words, movies that jump from scene to scene every few seconds, all contribute to this short attention span. 20 year olds today except for the top 10% know less today than 30-50 years ago despite the internet which should have made them smarter. Anyway keep teaching for that is our best hope.
wow how did i miss this one.......really great talk
Mind blown! Thank you so much! All of this is so interesting and soooo relevant. As a farmHer, I see so much nature and the changes in nature on a micro level. Your views and your guest are so welcome as my conscious grows to see farther than my own plot and the strugles we must embrace that are ahead. I farm in Appalachia, the most northwest corner of NC. Last summer all my springs were dry for seven weeks. I nearly gave up! Now I realize it may be my new norm. Holding space here in my temperate rain forest that once was.💚💪
Wow. That’s discouraging to hear. I was thinking my water sources east of Black Mountain were secure. But combine that with a forest fire . . . 😳🔥🔥🔥🥺
This is the most important interview and this channel. We have to avoid this fate. Remember we caused it. We can. Fix it. But not without cooperative effort.
We can't fix it. US pumped more oil and gas last year than ever. We're deforesting faster than ever. We're at the thick end of 420ppm carbon now, a 50% increase in a geological picosecond. And we're still making it worse every single day.
Thanks guys - it's good to hear you outline clearly & concisely your thoughts & opinions on a cornucopia of facts interconnected to our survival as a species. Oceanographer Jim Massa's VLOGs discuss the Ocean Heat Content (OHC) as being a sleeping giant, having accumulated 93% of the additional insolation energy trapped (over & above the pre-industrial carbon cycle equilibrium) by CO2 rising from 280ppm to 420ppm (+ other GHgases).
That heat is not being drawn down to deep water because of upper surface stratification (top ~700 meters) - the point being that all this extra heat energy has to go somewhere & so more will diffuse upwards accelerating the heating of the atmosphere. (The OHC has other potential implications for the AMOC)
Understanding the specific heat of water and the implications is so crucial and probably the most important scientific fact we should teach young people...
It's also obvious by the fact that we boil water for cooking and use ice to cool or drinks....
But still most people think this is only about atmospheric temperature alone, sadly.....
Jim would make a great guest for sure!
No human can live totally alone. But even if someone could drop out of society completely to minimize their impact, they would only address 1/8,000,000,000th of the problem of human overshoot. Hagens and his brilliant compatriots, seek to MAXIMIZE their impact through selfless efforts to reach out and educate us as to our dilemma so that we can steer the conversation to better outcomes.
You two are the best.
Thanks for the show.
I love these explanations!
I fear we have tripped some triggers that won't reset for a very long time.
I had to watch this one again! Thanks Sensei Nate!
Peter's voice needs to be heard!!! Thank you for sharing. I am a big fan and have read almost all his books. From Rivers in Time to a New History of Life, Under a Green Sky, the Life and Death of Planet Earth and so on, his writing captivates me. It puzzles me how he remains under the radar of so many important circles yet is so well respected and cherished in others.
Awesome conversation once again!
"If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, ..........."
If? If? How could anyone not at least learn from this? Enjoyment, well I wonder if I'm evolving to enjoy bad news.
It is amazing that the ongoing chaotic cosmic interactions and cycles - at every level and scale - can simply create, then destroy and then recycle everything!
And we are just lucky to have this rare chance to experience it as evolving but equally unstable and chaotic human beings.
Yes, we are going to get to 1000ppm. Why? Because nobody is taking into account all the methane deposits, such as methane hydrates. The Russian scientist that studied just the hydrates around the continental shelf of Siberia estimates there is well over 400ppm CO2 equivalent just sitting there ready to be released.
Hey, please tell Dr. Ward that he should try to get his update of The Flooded Earth published again, because a kid named Stephen Markley just published a 900 page novel with Simon & Schuster called The Deluge, and they are pushing it hard. From the reviews, it sounds like he was channeling Under a Green Sky and TFE, both of which I have read twice. So I hope the update gets translated back to English from German soon.
You guys sure are cheerful! I know so even more cheerful! Guy McPherson says there's 60 feedback loops, and if anyone of them trips we're all dead. He says they're all tripping before 2030. The main one he references is methane in the Arctic. Why is he wrong? I mean why bother trying to get the issues out there if we're already doomed?
It’s not easy to see a positive or even survival outcome. Seeing doom everywhere isn’t easy either! But without some optimism movement forward is constrained. Stuart Brand’s “we have become like gods and we better get good at it” comes to mind. Never before in history has a single species had so much agency and choice over the future we create. Time to make the best outcome our task.
We need to help a few make it through the bottleneck - the Big Crunch.
Predictions
In 2007 McPherson predicted the USA's trucking industry would collapse by 2012 due to peak oil, quickly followed by the interstate highway system.[18]
In 2008 he predicted the end of civilization by 2018 due to peak oil, "If you're alive in a decade, it will be because you've figured out how to forage locally."[19]
In 2012 he predicted that global warming will kill much of humanity by 2020.[20]
In 2016 he predicted that humanity and most lifeforms will be extinct due to global warming by mid-2026.[21]
In 2017 he predicted that global temperatures would be 6° C above baseline in mid-2018 and that Earth would have no atmosphere by the 2050s.[22]
In June 2018 he implied that industrial civilization was about to collapse in September 2018, followed by a 1 degree C immediate additional temperature jump due to the end of reflective aerosol production, which would rapidly somehow end all "complex multicellular organisms" on Earth.[23][24]
rationalwiki.org/wiki/Guy_McPherson
Optimism and pessimism are flip sides of magical thinking. Develop a practice of embracing uncertainty, which in some Eastern traditions is the field of all possibilities, and a practice of doing what transition necessitates within the limits of your circumstances, whether the practice is sufficient or not.
@@shonufftheshogunArigato gozaimasu, brother. "It's the end of the world so just go home and die" is an unacceptable response when what we've been doing for the first 30 years is comparatively nothing. Doomism is just another excuse to continue doing nothing.
I'm glad you can't pull the trigger on those coyotes, Nate. They are complex enough to possess a mind, and I equate complexity with greater sensitivity. That is what my intuition tells me.
I've had to bludgeon Northern Water Snakes, in past years, when they have acquired an appetite for my coy and goldfish. I've always had respect and appreciation for the many varieties of snakes. So it was a painfully forced march on my part, to rid the pond of these creatures that were here millions of years ahead of me. That, or watch them pick off these expensive, and beautiful fish, one by one.
I Thought Carl Sagan, Neil Degrasse Brian Cox and Sabine Hossenfelder we’re the best science communicators(heavily astrophysics based). I have found a new best in ecological economics. Thanks Nate and guests!
... I'm a big fan of Professor Ward - got (almost) all of his books, so I have listened to him on many recordings - both audio and video (many of these are available on TH-cam !) - so I am fairly familiar with his voice ... poor guy was obviously having sinus problems during this interview 🤧
Peter Ward books available on TH-cam? I did not know of this. I've got Green Sky and New History of Life but Rare Earth is hard to find and expensive when you do.
Thank you for sharing this profound information!
Nate: you’re a gentleman and a scholar.
Thank you for doing what you do.
Let us know when your class is out!
Dr ward: if you’re out there:
You too are a gentleman and a scholar. Did your book scare the shit out of me? Absolutely.
But I had to get through the geology first lol.
As horrific as it may sound, I have come to objectively believe that the very best hope for the life of planet Earth is the elimination of the human species. Who knows? Perhaps in another million years there might be a species that evolves that recognizes the symbiotic importance of its environment to itself. One can only hope. "Life' is a miraculous thing manifested in many ways by many things. Not just human life.
So it was all just a waste ey? Nothing worth trying to preserve? Let's just fold them? I guess it's a legit firm of nihilism.
I mourn the loss of musicians to play and other humans to hear Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. 🥺😢
@Tina Clark’s ghost why? Who gives a sh!t about brahms? I mourn all those millions of geniuses that will never be born because we're too ignorant and insatiable to examine why life is worth living. But it seems like for some aesthetic pleasure is already the answer. To me, the idea that listening to brahms is our highest contribution to nature is just a thin hair better than collective suicide.
@@kvaka009
We had a great time. It was significant and potent. Ending doesn't cheapen it or downgrade it. Just as every life begins and ends. Only a child or psychopath wants to grasp forever. All we ever have/had was the present.
@maxotaurus5140 yes, but suicide by over indulgence? Count me out. I'll try to prevent the "inevitable" until I can't. Dying before you're dead is just as unhealthy.
Nate can you or somebody else make a template on how to get people to understand our collective predicament. So that people form other countries can understand the problems we face?
Thank You. Note that some major fossil fuel reserves are located in regions which will shortly become 'no-go' areas for humans, so I agree with Nate...
interesting stuff
I knew the world was doomed years ago when a saw a mink teddy bear in a catalog.
Thank you, Peter Ward and Nate! The planet 🥀🌏🌍🌎🌹🤯will be fine! Humanity is doomed... 😢😢😢
when the Seas turn into Soda Pop, ...people will notice.
Can Mesocosmen help? and also colder arctic oceans with OAE to restore temperature difference?
What is a realistic equal consumption level for each person in the world before nature takes a rest from poisoning and global warming?
tremendous guest! I love the podcast, it's incredibly informative and excels at making complex concepts simple to understand. Thanks for the work put into it.
I’m at Columbia now. What should I take? Who should I seek out and talk to?
Feedback, people, feedback! Let’s hear it!
Nate, get a couple of livestock guardian dogs. 😉
Thanks
... Near the end of the video, Nate Hagens mentions " an amazing economy in the near term ", but what is (largely) ignored in the talk is the not-so-amazing economy of the poor in some areas : specifically Brazilian lumber-cutters (not the Companies themselves, as such, but the workers) that depend on their jobs to survive and the subsistence farmers that burn parts of the rain forests to clear land that is not already owned by someone else.
There are many other examples of people damaging the environment to survive, due to a lack of any other work.
Not everyone is taking ivory or shark fins or tiger penises for trinkets, soup and Viagra substitutes ... the wealthy here in the west AND elsewhere need to share some of the blame for the wealth we sucked out of many poor nations - both as Colonial powers and modern day resource extractors - and we need to insist that the Governments of the source countries help their people as part of the deal !
its challenging to think about global heating as your silver SUV drives almost a mile and half to the supermarket for more instant penguin glucose with endangered rhino horn protein powder on sale.
What happens to elephant breeding rituals without tusks? I sure hope that doesn’t create a problem.
What happens to human breeding rituals, without elephants ? (anything? just musing)
This conversation is really depressing at 37 minutes. Reminds me of why Dave Chappelle says he won't smoke weed with black people anymore. I only smoked weed with a dude from the hood once, but he was starting going on about how crack babies don't have a chance in this world.
Nate, how about getting professor Guy McPherson from Nature Bats Last, He projects human extinction by 2030.
There's other channels for that. Guy is a bit heavy handed on most determining factors
It's stunning to me that such knowledgeable people talk about life in 2080. How will the planet not experience total ecological collapse way before then, making life for humans impossible. We're already on the cusp, w the disappearance of insects, mammals, amphibians and sea life. Temps are inevitably going to rise for at least the next 10 years and human population shows no sign of decreasing. It's as though we are driving towards a cliff, and even though we know that we are accelerating. And the cliff is quickly eroding, causing the distance between us and it to shrink exponentially.
They also didn't mention the likelihood that many or most of the reactors at the world's 400+ nuclear power plants will eventually no longer be able to be safely maintained in the face of ever-worsening climate breakdown--threatening all species on the planet, not just ours.
One thing, all these TH-cam videos about "people from the future" like "2540" or just 2080 I know are another reason to be BS without investigating lol.
An inspiring as well as worrying talk by two expert deep thinkers. However, my ears pricked up when towards the end they both celebrated their attachment to their dogs, something they incidentally share with eco-activist Chris Packham in the UK. If we need to cut population, massively cut per-capita consumption in the rich countries, and dial back on environmental footprint generally, how do we justify manufacturing animals for company, especially ones that are largely carnivorous predators, while the remnant of natural vertebrate life is squeezed into a 4% corner? I think that needs to be examined.
But they think dinosaurs may have been warm blooded, I guess with crocodiles being archosaurs that must have come later. But why couldn't mammals move away from sea, possibly to higher altitudes? The argument seems too general
The Middle East can build more of Masdar City cities. Basically Coober Pedy with the internet of things
The Undesigned Universe - Peter Ward
“ . . . it is these ocean state changes that are
1:02:28 correlated with the great disasters of the past impact can cause extinction but
1:02:35 it did so in our past only wants[once] that we can tell whereas this has happened over
1:02:40 and over and over again we have fifteen evidences times of mass extinction in the past 500 million years
1:02:48 so the implications for the implications the implications of the carbon dioxide is really dangerous if you heat your
1:02:55 planet sufficiently to cause your Arctic to melt if you cause the temperature
1:03:01 gradient between your tropics and your Arctic to be reduced you risk going back
1:03:07 to a state that produces these hydrogen sulfide pulses . . . “
th-cam.com/video/Ako03Bjxv70/w-d-xo.html
Still, no mention or plan to reduce the population size.
@Sunshine Cloudyday The rate may be leveling off but there will still be enormous growth in the foreseeable future.
@Sunshine Cloudyday Humans and our livestock now outweigh wild land animals 50:1. There are way too many of us and we are taking more than our share. All propped up by fossil Carbon as energy. Which will soon be leaving us. Things will be much smaller and simpler once again in the near future.
@Sunshine Cloudyday As famjne and water shortages develop in competing areas like India,Pakistan and China you can expect these Nuclear equipped nations to use these weapons ! Also the technology is increasingly available for advanced bioweapons in more and more countries ! The number i hear used most often is that we must cull the planet to no more than 2 billion human population for the biosphere to recover !
@Sunshine Cloudyday I think Erlich said in a recent interview we netto add about 250 thousand people per day. In the sixties that was 100 thousand people.
Thanks us gov for policing the world's shipping containers.. where the hell were you in 2008 in America?
I wonder if the repopulation of humans is also a response to war deaths, and if continual deaths by war resulted in the female was self-fertile changing to what we have today?
Volkswagen and Volvos? European cars are quite a bit lighter and more efficient than American ones. Don't forget who has got the highest emissions per capita.
i will miss food......i like food.......soon food will be only for the rich and the lucky
I hate food. Fruits are okay so look forward to more tropics
Guy doesnt understand Polar Gradient...