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Okay, decided to create this little poll to ascertain what others think about the most proximate cause/threat to bring down world wide Industrial Civilization. I seek one even realizing that several could in a synergistic manner lead to or cause collapse. I wish to gauge what others might think as to which ONE poses the most immediate threat.

Well P, I did say world wide Industrial Civilization. Basically bring every country to its knees. As it is yes some have already collapsed for instance Venezuela.

I picked nuclear war for the simple reason that the nuclear club is constantly growing. There are what, a dozen nuclear weapon states now? Add in the US weapons deployed to countries like Turkey and known but plausible denial states like Isreal. Throw in civil wars, thefts, mistakes or downright incompetence. Mix it all up and what do you get? The odds that someone will accidentally have an explosion, or deliberately attack someone else grows with every additional player in the game.

Soon I believe someone will make the mistake of thinking use will be in their own interest. When that happens the first one or dozen or however many they have will get used on their enemy or enemies. What happens after that is liable to be a free for all as whomever gets struck hits back at the suspected user even if it wasn't they who made the attack. Just as an example, North Korea smuggles a weapon into Mumbai, India. India retaliates against Pakistan, who in turn fires back at India. A typhoon bows fallout over Iran, which has just developed weapons and they join in on the attack. Isreal decides a nuclear Iran is too great a threat to be allowed to exist so they strike Iran destroying the Holy city of Qum. Firm there things spiral out of control. It could take hours, weeks or months for all the parties to get involved, but once it starts I don't know what can stop it from going on until nobody is able to keep dropping the cursed things on other people.

Sounds unfortunately, quite plausible Subject.

Well collapse of Industrial Civilization world wide does not necessarily mean the death of all humans world wide. After all, we managed to get by for thousands of years without our Industrial Civilization. lol.
P.S. albeit in smaller numbers

pstarr wrote:Anyway, as per the topic. Peak oil will be the death of us all.

The problem I have with the Peak Oil choice with this poll is the word "Immediate". Even if Peak Oil actually happened tomorrow (or has aleady occurred), it would likely take decades for COLLAPSE to follow. (Substitution, making do with far less, etc. are viable coping strategies that will get used if necessary, even if doomers refuse to admit it).

This has been my primary objection to the constant drumbeat of short term doom. It's not that the pessimists are wrong that we have several to many long term problems we're doing little or nothing about (except fanning the flames by growing the population and producing/consuming more globally). It's that the likely problems aside from something like nuclear war are unlikely to be quick.

I picked economic chaos (as an outlier), as that could be quite sudden and ripple around the world within a day -- although it would take awhile for industrial collapse to truly follow -- assuming that TPTB and magical money printing, etc. couldn't somehow forestall the worst of the consequences.

The nuclear war bit is certainly the scariest. With all the big and/or very badly behaved players.... If it became widespread it would certainly change the AGW curve.

Interesting that we have had two votes for climate change and yet none for water/food shortages. Yet will not perhaps the most immediate and worse effect of climate change be the ruin of agricultural productivity. If that is so then the immediate and direct cause of collapse will be food shortages due to the indirect cause of climate change.

All of the above, in no certain order.... Economies are most vulnerable, but part-and-parcel of a global systemic mess of over-consumption.

Too many humans. Not enough planet.

I was just about to say, Climate change will cause global crop failures which leads to famines and pandemics, which result in collapse of supply systems, that causes economic collapse.

Peak oil is out the window. Never to rear it's ugly head again before the rest happens. Unconventional sources put the final nail in the coffin. Somehow we got around EROEI.

Cid_Yama wrote:I was just about to say, Climate change will cause global crop failures which leads to famines and pandemics, which result in collapse of supply systems, that causes economic collapse.

Peak oil is out the window. Never to rear it's ugly head again before the rest happens. Unconventional sources put the final nail in the coffin. Somehow we got around EROEI.

Energy return trends did not reverse, and the global economy still requires the opposite of diminishing returns.

I voted economic chaos. Infinite exponential growth, in a finite environment, is a physical and mathematical impossibility. All of the econo-speak in the universe, does not trump physical reality.

Financial crisis -->
Credit freeze -->
Supply chain cross-contagion -->
Near simultaneous world wide economic collapse -->
Mass human die-off



Read the Korowicz paper, dagnabit!

http://www.feasta.org/wp-content/upload ... rowicz.pdf

As to the poll:

Social upheaval

Water/Food shortages

Economic chaos.

Disease/Pandemic

I want to pick these four as most the immediate threats, but I can only pick one. I guess economic chaos leads to the other 3, but the other 3 reinforce the economic chaos. And these are all a direct result of peak oil, which is one of the other choices I didn't pick. Your poll makes no sense.



---Futilitist

Nice replies, as for no sense to this poll , it seems from the voting that people felt they're was some sense. I was looking for which one of those options would be the prime catalyst to be the one that first initiated global collapse or got the ball rolling you can say. Again we all can see that most will reinforce each other and overlap however one of them would be the first one to initiate the dreaded sequence of collapse. At least that is my humble opinion. I think Whatever you are identifying Economic chaos as the principle first initiator of Collapse.

I went with peak oil as the initiator of global collapse. A resource limit can not be modified by throwing money at it or other manipulations that can be exercised to keep the monetary system going. A true oil depletion rate of 5-7%, with no other scalable alternatives on the table, would destroy the global economy in very short order. You would probably get some other side effects such as hyperinflation, nuclear war, starvation, etc as part of the general collapse scenario.

You get economic collapse at some point but it is not the initiating event. There are an infinite number of games that can be played with a fiat monetary system. You can't play that game with a finite resource. At least not for very long.

Good observations Cog.

But if it is peak oil, not economics as causative, this suggests that the economy will cope all the way down to a lean state before collapsing ie. Lack of oil needed for food = collapse, rather than lack of oil for growth, or lack of oil for the non food economy. I chose economics, because there will still be lots of oil when collapse comes, it will just be too expensive to get. I also don't see a smooth winding down of the non essential economy.

But what does the word expensive mean? If I drill, frack, go to the Arctic, no matter what I do on that front, does there not come a time when there simply isn't any more oil to be had? Regardless of price?

I get that expensive oil has an affect on global economies. No money for consumer items. Is not expensive oil reflective of the ease of extraction?

Just sort of throwing it out there.