#civilisation collapse

[ancientstuff]

Climate change may have toppled Hittite Empire: study

Three years of extreme drought may have brought about the collapse of the mighty Hittite Empire around 1200 BC, researchers have said, linki

Well, I'm in Auckland and right now it kind of feels like it might topple OUR empire/civilisation, so this doesn't surprise me.

[awed-frog]

Turns out every single civilisation in history collapsed as a result of climate change, growing inequality, environmental degradation and bad use of available resources, so that’s the good news for today.

[projektnomad]

[thoughtlessarse]

Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction

A controversial MIT study from 1972 forecast the collapse of civilization – and Gaya Herrington is here to deliver the bad news

At a UN sustainability meeting several years ago, an economic policy officer came up to Gaya Herrington and introduced himself. Taking her name for a riff on James Lovelock’s earth-as-an-organism Gaia hypothesis, he remarked: “Gaya – that’s not a name, it’s responsibility.”

Herrington, a Dutch sustainability researcher and adviser to the Club of Rome, a Swiss thinktank, has made headlines in recent days after she authored a report that appeared to show a controversial 1970s study predicting the collapse of civilization was – apparently – right on time.

Coming amid a cascade of alarming environmental events, from western US and Siberian wildfires to German floods and a report that suggests the Amazon rainforest may no longer be able to perform as a carbon sink, Herrington’s work predicted the collapse could come around 2040 if current trends held.

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[goldentortoise]

Are we on the road to civilisation collapse?

Studying the demise of historic civilisations can tell us about the risk we face today, says collapse expert Luke Kemp. Worryingly, the signs are worsening.

[bsahely]

The Fallacy of Endless Economic Growth / A Bibliography of Limits

The Fallacy of Endless Economic Growth / A Bibliography of Limits

Reproduced from: https://psmag.com/magazine/fallacy-of-endless-growth

The Fallacy of Endless Economic Growth What economists around the world get wrong about the future. Christopher Ketcham May 16, 2017 Nubes, 2011.

(Photo: Alejandro Durán)

The idea that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet is the unifying faith of industrial civilization. That it is nonsensical in the…

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[sharkie91kp]

My 3rd tattoo! Kreator - Civilisation Collapse :D

[wotfigo]

The American Dream. Disappearing One Sanction At A Time

Even the people who insist most loudly that it’s all onward and upward from here don’t believe it any more, and those for whom the old optimism stopped being more than a soothing shibboleth a long time ago are hunching their shoulders, shutting their eyes tight, and hoping that things can still hold together for just a little while longer. It’s not just that American politicians and pundits are insisting at the top of their lungs that the United States can threaten Russia with natural gas surpluses that don’t exist, though that’s admittedly a very bad sign all by itself. It’s that this orgy of self-congratulatory nonsense appears in the news right next to reports that oil and gas companies are slashing their investments in the fracking technology and shale leases that were supposed to produce those imaginary surpluses, having lost a great deal of money pursuing the shale oil mirage, while Russia and Iran pursue a trade deal that will make US sanctions against Iran all but irrelevant, and China is quietly making arrangements to conduct its trade with Europe in yuan rather than dollars. Strong nations in control of their own destinies, it’s fair to note, don’t respond to challenges on this scale by plunging their heads quite so enthusiastically into the sands of self-deception. To shift temporal metaphors a bit, the long day of national delusion that dawned back in 1980, when Ronald Reagan famously and fatuously proclaimed “it’s morning in America,” is drawing on rapidly toward dusk, and most Americans are hopelessly unprepared for the coming of night. They’re unprepared in practical terms, that is, for an era in which the five per cent of us who live in the United States will no longer dispose of a quarter of the world’s energy supply and a third of its raw materials and industrial products, and in which what currently counts as a normal American lifestyle will soon be no more than a fading memory for the vast majority. They’re just as unprepared, though, for the psychological and emotional costs of that shattering transformation—not least because the change isn’t being imposed on them at random by an indifferent universe, but comes as the inevitable consequence of their own collective choices in decades not that long past. The hard fact that most people in this country are trying not to remember is this: in the years right after Reagan’s election, a vast number of Americans enthusiastically turned their backs on the promising steps toward sustainability that had been taken in the previous decade, abandoned the ideals they’d been praising to the skies up to that time, and cashed in their grandchildrens’ future so that they didn’t have to give up the extravagance and waste that defined their familiar and comfortable lifestyles. As a direct result, the nonrenewable resources that might have supported the transition to a sustainable future went instead to fuel one last orgy of wretched excess. Now, though, the party is over, the bill is due, and the consequences of that disastrous decision have become a massive though almost wholly unmentionable factor in our nation’s culture and collective psychology. From; http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/refusing-call-tale-rewritten.html