[sunweb]

If we are posting, we are all doomers. By our very activities, we are dooming the next generations to a very different world then most of us experienced. I take ownership for mine:
I am polluting our ground water by using the natural gas from fracking. I am creating havoc in the oceans by spilling life-killing oil. I am also plasticizing the oceans. I am also limiting or eliminating species after species in the ocean, on the land, in the air. I am putting my medicines into the rivers and the water supply. I am greedily creating food sources that only I control. I am removing the topsoil. I am gouging huge holes in the earth. I am burning coal and creating nuclear waste for thousands of years to come for my flat screen television, my computer and my DVD player. I am putting mercury and acids into the air, water and life. I am melting the ice caps and the glaciers. I am heating the planet to drive my snowmobile, my wave runner, and my four-wheeler (I don't have a flat screen TV or snowmobile, my wave runner or my four-wheeler) to drive to any damn place I want. I am using many people globally to cater to my many whims.

I saw the DVD “What a Way to Go” yesterday. It was very well done in listing the freight train laden with our woes coming straight at us. The many speakers continually said, “we are doing this” and “we are doing that”. They must have been talking about me. Because I am aware of these things and more and I keep doing it.
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/just-say-i.html
John Weber
Busy in Northern Minnesota doing all these things and more.

[Newfie]

GregT,

I think what Tanda was driving at was that E's origional post drew attention to the COMMENTS posted in relation to the article. I took it as trying to reflect upon how others outside our little PO community see the subject of doom.

E was not commenting on the article itself.

[GHung]

GregT,

I think what Tanda was driving at was that E's origional post drew attention to the COMMENTS posted in relation to the article. I took it as trying to reflect upon how others outside our little PO community see the subject of doom.

E was not commenting on the article itself.

Most folks outside our PO community (in the US anyway) are worried about when the potholes on their commute are going to be fixed, or how to get their kid on the right sports team. That said, I see many folks who seem to have an underlying sense that things aren't going well for global civilization. Cracks appearing (witness Trump's popularity), but most folks don't have much wiggle room. They are fully occupied with the complexities of 21st century life, one day at a time, so they dismiss the Cassandras, or ignore them. Such has it always been. Don't stir their cognitive dissonance. As is the case with Trump, many will just throw shit at the wall to see what sticks.

[Newfie]

I think that's right, people SE nse an underlying problem, a nagging terror in the back of their minds. I think that's what is in part behind the increasing divisions in our society, they are just starting to retreat to their compounds (church, BLM,etc) they can't articulate the danger, but there is a change in the air as before a thunderstorm or hurricane.

[ennui2]

I do think the peanut gallery under LTG articles is populated by people whose denial is a form of self-protection. The more strident the denialism the more they may be harboring some fear of accepting the truth. However, I think Trumpism is simply the response of people who feel they're losing something (power, wealth, status). No different from the shattered egos of any country or demographic that feels they've been humiliated in some way, which is usually followed by bringing in a "strongman", scapegoating, and/or the instituting Jim Crow style laws. Uneducated whites fighting a culture-war against an increasingly global and techno/intellectual society, increasingly brown and socially liberal, is not really "doom".

[GHung]

"....an increasingly global and techno/intellectual society, increasingly brown and socially liberal, is not really "doom"."

It is to people who, deep inside, feel they can't compete. I know people like this; "They're stealing our jobs! They're taking over OUR country!" They're RAPING our women! That's doom in their little worlds.

People have always had a need for (virtual) doom. Scary movies. Zombies (really?). Ancient religious texts and myths. Ghost stories. Brothers Grimm. Poe. The Bible is full of doom. People eat that shit up. But when 'doom' meets reality (or even a suggestion of that), people don't handle it well. They love movies about California tumbling into the sea, but will flat-out deny looming things like global warming or economic collapse. They're addicted to virtual cognitive dissonance but avoid the real thing like a plague. That would require them to re-think their world views and change their behaviors. Many simply don't have the capacity to do that, and they know it. Better to put bumper stickers on cars; "In case of Rapture, this car will be unoccupied".

[Plantagenet]

The concerns people in the US and the EU have about doom aren't based on feelings or worries about the future. Things are actually getting worse in their own lives right now. This is most people's daily reality.

People respond strongly to changes in their own financial situation. The MSM doesn't report it, but in the US, the workforce is shrinking and wages are falling. People know that from their own lives or what they see happening around them. Many people have lost their jobs and then can't find work and are now "out of the workforce" or forced onto disability.

And it isn't getting better. The MSM won't report it, but wages continue to fall at an unprecedented rate in the USA right now.

The dramatic drop [in US wages] was buried in an Aug. 9 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said that officials have radically revised their prior claim that wages grew 4.2 percent in the first quarter, from January to March.

“Real hourly compensation decreased 0.4 percent after revision, rather than the previously-published increase of 4.2 percent,” the BLS admitted. Compensation also fell another 1.4 percent in the second quarter, from April to June, the BLS admitted in the same report. That’s a 2 percent drop in wages just since December.

Thats coming on top of the huge losses many families suffered during the 2008-9 financial collapse, and the steady shrinkage in the US work force and concomitant rise to a record poverty rate, the failure to control health care costs, the record number of folks on "disability" and out of the workforce entirely that we've seen since 2009. And older boomers are now retiring, mostly without pensions.

Slow-motion creeping economic doom is the everyday reality for most Americans today.

[KaiserJeep]

I am convinced that the endless parade of Zombie movies, Zombie TV series, and even Zombie commercials is because people can sense the impending Doom. I have never found Zombies the slightest bit entertaining, I only viewed the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead once
and was bored - dead is dead, don't be foolish. (Curiously, I love a good campy vampire movie, especially the Hammer Films classics.)

I'm also not sure I could ever regard anybody else as somebody to be killed, either - even if they are trying to steal my food. Doubtless I would be a failure as a doomsteader because of this. But we have to behave as civilized people, or our genes simply are not worth preserving.

Think about how angry all those Democrats are gonna be to discover that the Government in a pinch is not their Nanny, and is not gonna take care of them.

[ennui2]

The topic was what people really think about doom, aka real doom, not the everyday ebb and flow of history. If we blur the lines on what doom is to this extent then there's really no point having a discussion anymore. Someone slips on a banana peel and it's doom. The fact this site tends to fixate so much on "lesser" dooms (or petty annoyances like Obama bowing for the Saudi King) is a sign that real doom isn't here yet.

[GHung]

Gosh, ennui, what's your definition of "real doom"? Only one image isn't real.

After the Indian Ocean Tsunami, killing 230,000 people in 14 countries. Not doomy enough?



What if Miami Beach looked like this? Doomy enough?






"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one…"



...Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

[Plantagenet]

Someone slips on a banana peel and it's doom.

Not really. Thats just a little accident. Get up and brush yourself off and keep on going.

But when people lose their jobs and have to live the rest of their lives in poverty, then thats doom for them and their families.. Most people's self identity is closely linked to their jobs and income.

Tens of millions of good paying manufacturing jobs have disappeared from the US economy over the last 20 years thanks to NAFTA and other free trade treaties. Most new jobs in the US today are as McDonald's counter people, bartenders, telemarketers, etc. Its a bummer.

And most people believe its going to get worse. For the average American, thats doom. Thats why what used to be called the "working class" in the US is largely backing Trump. They know they and their children face certain doom if things don't change.


Cheers!

[ennui2]

Gosh, ennui, what's your definition of "real doom"? Only one image isn't real.
After the Indian Ocean Tsunami, killing 230,000 people in 14 countries. Not doomy enough?

Nope. The current extreme weather events are only warmup acts for AGW doom.

Also remember that population wasn't even knocked back that much due to the various conflicts and holocausts of the 20th century.

We need to have widespread crop failures and famine or a major nuclear exchange before it's TEOTWAWKI.

The body-count at present is negligible in proportion to our total size. In other words, the population needs to flatten out and go negative, as per LTG, and that takes a whole lot more than a few flooded coastlines and some wandering refugees and whiney white Trump supporters.

[Plantagenet]

Two "Dooms" that are inevitable.

1. Doom by peak oil

I still think peak oil will cause huge problems, when it finally happens. It won't be long until Ghawar peaks in KSA and the world will lose 6 mm bbls/day of oil from that one field. As additional supergiant legacy oil fields peak and then decline, there will come a day when fracking shale will not be able to produce enough oil to keep up, and we'll be at Peak Oil. It will happen 10-20 years later then Colin Campbell predicted, but its inevitable that we are going to hit peak oil eventually. Once the world hits peak oil economic catastrophe is inevitable.

AND Peak Oil could happen next year or the year after that. Waiting for peak oil has been like waiting for Godot, but unlike Godot peak oil will indeed eventually arrive.

2. Doom by anthropogenic greenhouse warming (AGW) and sea level rise.

Greenhouse Warming is coming on faster then most models predicted. We are already seeing bigger droughts and floods and killer heat waves. But I think it will be sea level rise due to AGW that will cause "Doom" in the next 50 years. Even a one meter rise in sea level would cause the abandonment of parts of almost all coastal cities, and the loss of huge areas of densely inhabited deltas in India, China, Africa, the US, EU, etc. etc. Hundreds of millions of people will gradually be displaced. Huge areas of farmland will be underwater. The global economy will be unsustainable.

AGW and global sea level rise are now inevitable.


Sea level rise will result in parts of Boston and other coastal cities being abandoned

[sparky]

.
" The date used above was 1950. We have more/bigger bombs than in 1950 "
that's a valid point and I concede ,with no reservation whatsoever
as for doom I also agree that the critical number is not so much the high falluting weaponry as the population size , 1950 population was ~2.5 billions , that's now ~ 7 billions and still rising .
in my mind any attempt to solve today problems is rendered void by tomorrow population
2 billions third world scratch farmers will destroy more of the world than any nukefest
and with far less chance of speedy recovery

[Shaved Monkey]

I just parked myself near here and grew fruit and vegetables and planned for retirement

[careinke]

I just parked myself near here and grew fruit and vegetables and planned for retirement

That will make a nice reef someday....

[Shaved Monkey]

The great barrier reef is just off the coast you can actually step/swim(national park you cant walk on the reef) on to it just north of the photo.
The big sand dune in the foreground was dumped there by a cyclone about 20 years ago.

[kiwichick]

@ shaved .............if ph levels keep dropping and oceans temperatures keep rising there won't be any reefs .........anywhere

[Shaved Monkey]

I know
and I also know I cant personally stop the inevitable doom,all I can do is live a happy life, without causing too much damage and maybe help make people a little aware.
This monster is too powerful, has too many strong friends and is very hungry, it can not be killed, it has to die of natural causes and it will.
Im just eating pop corn in paradise watching and waiting for it to die.

[Newfie]

The Overshoot Predator at work.

We found the enemy and he is us.