[ExI] Inevitability of the Singularity (was Re: To Max, re Natasha and Extropy (Kevin Haskell)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 12:39:26AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:

> Global Warming may be a big problem, but not so large as the overall
> economy, IMHO. So I agree with Samantha on this one. However, a 2-4 C

Global warming can push 2 gigapeople over the brink of starvation.
This will trigger migrations and wars, including wars with the potential
to turn nuclear. (But, hey, what is a nuclear war compared to burning
issues the "teh economy"?)

This is not a financial or even economic crisis. It is far, far worse.
We're facing a systemic crisis through confluence of some ten factors, 
but the core driver behind all these is overshoot. This is serious, 
and it needs to be addressed three to four decades ago.

> change can have pretty large impacts... Probably the biggest single
> risk of global warming I am aware of is the chance that the gulf
> stream will stop circulating. That would honestly be very bad for
> Europe, causing it to develop a climate similar to Canada at the same

That's distinctly a first world problem.

> latitude. Looking at the globe, this would be bad, really bad.
> Probably good for somewhere else, but we have a lot of infrastructure
> in Europe, and it would be a real shame to lose that. This may be one
> reason that Europeans are generally more alarmed about GW than
> Americans.
> 
> The problem is that so many people aren't concerned about it, that it
> will likely be impossible to do anything about it.

Climate change is only one aspect of overshoot, and even there you're completely
ignoring major issues like precipitation shifts and food crop loss
leading to starvation and war, ocean acidification and anoxification
with further degradation of sea ecosystem and food web, infrastructure
destruction due to extreme weather events and multiple other factors
which we'll learn as the situation develops.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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