A scientist has made the shocking claim that there’s a 49% chance the world will end in just 25 years. Jared Diamond, American scientist and historian, predicted civilisation could collapse by 2050. He told Intelligencer: “I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.”
Diamond explained that fisheries and farms across the globe are being “managed unsustainably”, causing resources to be depleted at an alarming rate. He added: "At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted.
“Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably.”
The Pulitzer Prize winning author warned that we must come up with more sustainable practices by 2050, “or it’ll be too late”.
Optimistic
Well I already knew I wouldn’t manage to retire…
Nostradammit!
“Why 49% and not 50%?” “I wanted it to sound more accurate than it is”
Because it’s a simple way of saying “We’re not quite over that most likely outcome line yet, but we’re getting there.”
Totally. I assume his error margin is about 30 times that difference
I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.
Emphasis added. That’s a pretty big bit of weasel-wording there, the world “as we know it” has changed drastically in the past 25 years. Things that we thought were indispensable to the proper functioning of the world order - such as, for example, the lack of a pudding-brained pedophillic fascist in the White House - are no longer operative. Yet we’re muddling along well enough, all things considered.
Things are rapidly changing in so many ways right now. Projecting that far forward with any confidence is a bit of a fool’s errand.
That’s a pretty big bit of weasel-wording there
Absolutely, the world today is also not as we knew it in the 25 years ago, and it’s very different compared to the 70’s, where the future looked a bit more rosy.
“Popsci author repeats claim he’s been using for decades to sell books that most anthropologists question”.
Man, sometimes I think newspapers and traditional media should be banned from reporting on science at all. I am very critical of social media and what Internet does to communication, but I’ll admit that the extremely focused experts that communicate on a narrow field for a living do a much, much better job of parsing published claims than traditional generalist news ever did. I am exhausted of impossible galaxies, stars that “should not exist”, healthy superfood, cures for cancer and world-ending events.
Any good broad-scale critique fro anthropologists that’s worth reading? I’ve only read one of his books, nearly 20 years ago, but most of what I’ve heard him say has seemed more or less on point.
All I have is what you can get by looking him up, and I am definitely not an expert. I’m saying that this one guy referencing his one model for his one theory of society-as-ecology deserves a more nuanced headline than “the world is ending in 25 years”. If I can speak on anything here it’s on the reporting.
He isn’t even saying anything that controversial when you dig through to the actual statements, which is a constant of mainstream news reporting on science news. “With all these things, at the rate we’re going now, we can carry on with our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we won’t be able to continue it any longer” is barely any more severe of a warning than any climate scientist or ecologist has been making about these things for the past four decades.
Hell, if anything he seems to be less concerned than the average Lemmy denizen:
He explained: "As for what we can do about it, whether to deal with it by individual action, or at a middle scale by corporate action, or at a top scale by government action - all three of those.
"Individually we can do things. We can buy different sorts of cars. We can do less driving. We can vote for public transport. That’s one thing.
“There are also corporate interests…I see that corporations, big corporations, while some of them do horrible things, some of them also are doing wonderful things which don’t make the front page.”
Post that around these parts, you’ll get people calling you a corporate shill for even entertaining that personal behaviour has an impact in this process or that any corporation is doing anything positive.
Don’t hear the Express go “dude on the Internet thinks it’s high time we ban cars before we all die”, though.
Where’s that remind me bot? Remind me in 2049
Wow, Jared Diamond and a tabloid.
This seems no more or less likely than before.
He’s playing it very save with 49%. As if he knew math or something
Yeah, that was another red flag. Margins of error on any kind of calculation like this are going to be big; “roughly half” would be a strong claim. Coming out with an exact percentage about a social sciences issue is crackpot territory.
I was gonna say… Was briefly concerned until I saw Jared Fucking Diamond’s name.
Honestly is he a scientist? Does he do science,or just find shit that supports his idea.
Edit, I did a bit of googling and it does appear he is still publishing papers, but it feels like he has been beating the “we all gonna die” drum for a long time now.
He’s makes his money as a popular writer, and actual historians say he’s a hack.
MIT predicted society would collapse by 2040 back in the 70s.
That was a pretty good prediction then. “World will end” is obviously a stupid wording, but the point is clear. The entire food supply chain as it is today will collapse, the question is just when it will happen and if we will have completely switched to indoor farming before then.
Almost there
Do you have a link to that study?
I see the Limits of Growth study was based on the work of an MIT scientist, perhaps that’s the prediction mentioned.
This isn’t news.
And this isn’t a news community.
That’s WAY later than I thought!
This is cause for celebration! 🎉
yep, sounds like we can start worrying about that in about 20 years then.
24
Not sure if you’re celebrating because that’s earlier than you thought, or later than you thought…
Extra time! I wouldn’t have given us 5.
I think it’s easy to forget the scale and momentum of the thing… But yeah, the longer we go without scaling back our energy and resource consumption the harder we’re gonna hit that wall.
Gestures broadly at everything
Problem:
What’s sustainable for 7 billion people (now) isn’t sustainable for the population in 2050.
https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-98-billion-2050-and-112-billion-2100
“World population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100”
We need a plan to either sustainably feed 10 billion people or dramatically reduce the population.
Most of the northern hemisphere isn’t even making 2 per couple. It is Africa which keeps churning out babies to be blunt
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/birth-rate-by-country
What we have also seen is education and rising economies reduce the birth rate. If we want to actually curb things: the trend of reducing foreign aid is going to make things worse
Seems to me like the latter is the likely outcome.
A scientist has made the shocking claim that there’s a 49% chance the world will end in just 25 years.
100% it will not, no scientist worth anything would ever make such a moronic claim.
A possibility could be that civilization will end, but that’s not the same as the end of the world, it’s just the end of civilization.
The earth may change in ways that make it uninhabitable for humans, but that’s not the end of the world, “just” the end of humanity.
It’s very hard to take people serious when they make such obviously erroneous (stupid) claims.Most likely it’s an American, and it’s just USA that will end, because Americans tend to think USA = The World.
no scientist worth anything would ever make such a moronic claim.
He didn’t. It would have taken you five seconds to read the excerpt OP posted and notice that the actual quote is “I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.”
He didn’t say the world will end. He didn’t even say that civilisation will end. He said that the social order we enjoy today could collapse. But rather than take five seconds to notice that, you decided to yell about nothing because it was more important to voice your opinion than it was to check your facts.
I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.”
EXACTLY, so no scientist would make the previous stupid claim, just as I described, meaning it’s probably poor journalism editorializing what the scientist really claimed.
Do you really think I should have made my post LONGER? Further describing how and why it’s stupid, can you really not see it from the part I described?
Do you really think I should have made my post LONGER?
No but you could’ve made it much shorter by cutting out the commentary based only on the headline and didn’t read the article.
My comment was NOT based on the headline, read again…
I made a quote from the selected parts OP used!
And disregarding the bullshit I receive for it, my comment is actually factual and correct, contrary to the article and the criticism of my comment.I quote a part that is CLEARLY in error, as I stated NO serious scientist would write such bullshit.
I think you’re being, not only pedantic, but also just wrong. “The world will end” is a perfectly apt description to just about anyone about what is going on. The world will be uninhabitable for A MAJORITY of life that currently exists.
Permian extinction: last time shit like this happened, temps rose 10°C over 10,000’s of years. Still killed 90% of ALL LIFE. To be so arrogant as to presume that the USA collapsing would not have any knock on effects on the rest of the world. To presume that what kills of humans would do nothing to any other life. To presume that that scientist is a moron who just LOVES AMERICA so very much, because why else would he say things that make me feel bad?
I think you’re being, not only pedantic, but also just wrong.
What part of what I quoted can’t you read? It’s not being pedantic, it’s a matter of facts. Calling it the end of the world is extremely poor semantics, and poor semantics lead to poor understanding.
The world will be uninhabitable
That’s not the end of the world either. I described that VERY clearly.
Permian extinction:
Exactly, and that was not the end of the earth either, even the end of all life on earth is not the end of the earth. You may call it merely semantics, I call it facts. Poor semantics result in poor understanding.
49% chance the world will end in just 25 years
Giant meteor coming to wipe out all of the world’s life?
predicted civilisation could collapse by 2050
Oh, so just the collapse of current civilisation. That’s happened many, many times already.
While not a good thing for those experiencing it, consider this. As we look back on previous civilisations, would we consider ours to generally be the best up to now? I’d say so. Perhaps what comes next will be even better.
The collapse of a particularly large civilisation is usually a slow affair that is difficult even to spot from the inside as it’s happening (consider the slow crumbling of the USA currently for example).
So while it is a period of turmoil and not a small amount of suffering, it’s not like everybody is going to die and humanity will go extinct, or anything.
Oh, so just the collapse of current civilisation. That’s happened many, many times already.
Collapse of local civilizations has happened a lot of times. Collapse of the global civilization has not happened yet. And previous collapses happened often improved the living conditions for big parts of the population, because they were farmers who no longer had to support the ruling classes after the collapse. Collapse of food production and distribution when e.g. only 1% of the population are professional farmers (in Germany) will be fundamentally different.
