The climate is a stickier wicket but not as in the end times bag as it being perceived.
read the latest IPCC reports(
which i consider to be highly conservative as a result of fossil fuel companies and various governments in place that have vested interests in paying to downplay the information in regards to how horrific the situation is with our climate), you'll come to recognize at best what you've just said is a misconception.
During the 80s we thought the hole in the ozone would doom us all, we thought that acid rain would doom us all, we thought the rainforests would be gone by now and doom us all, we thought the whale populations were doomed, we thought we'd have a nuclear war somewhere in the world by now dooming us all to nuclear winter. Hackers, drugs, a race war, near earth asteroids, chemical and biological weapons, famines, plagues, wars, y2k, etc...
we've literally been counting the second to doom on the end of the world clock for more than 50 years. and it both reminds me of the crazies who waited for the day the mayan calander told us the world would end.
hypothetically speaking, i get into a car and drive that car. i get into a car crash. i walk away miraculously unscathed. flash forward a few years down the line, i get into another car crash and once again, barely anything happens to me besides a graze. surely, i'll survive the next car crash because i survived the past two? right?
leaving aside the flawed logic in this sentiment aside, it seems as if you're of the thought that the problems you've listed out were just clear-cut, present and immediate dangers that somehow got resolved through human ingenuity/willpower, the overestimation of them as merely minor problems or eschatological concerns on the part of people who weren't very well-versed in the processes of collapse to say the least and attributed it to the supernatural (
in their defense, they did not have access to the same amount of information that we do nowadays, but please don't place supernatural doomsday predictions as being in the same category as scientific evaluations, both use an entirely different process in reaching their conclusions )- as opposed to recognizing them as overtime processes that constantly work in the background(
some of which still exist to this day) as most people just focused on their own lives and successes(
or failures, take your pick), merely kicking the can down the road for as long as possible and forgetting about them entirely if only to make their own lives easier.
Some shit got better, some got worse, and we are not going to be dead next week, month or even next year.
throughout my post history have you noticed i haven't actually placed any hard dates? rather than resort to strawmans of my position, i'd actually reckon you try to wrestle with the idea that we've most likely underestimated climate change and what it means to live in a world that's become unstable and large swaths of it uninhabitable.
Some of us were just hoping to be around to see some greatness and maybe watch the start of the next age of wonders for humanity.
and you're actually trying to tell me this isn't you coping? a techno-utopian age influenced by millenarianism(
at least in the secular, transhumanist, technological sense) and self-preservation? i mean theres nothing wrong with wanting to live a better life with better prospects- im sure most of us would want something like that- simultaneously i think theres a point in time where we start to let biases and emotional stakes get involved- turning realistic benefits into fantastical technologies that promise to uproot and change our lives permanently.
the problem with profits of doom is that when people internalize hopelessness they stop having things to work toward, and when they stop working towards a better tomorrow then they cause the doom they feared. It's self fulfilling prophesies.
no, its the other way around , "doomism" is something that is brought about by the
inaction against climate change, it doesn't
promote it. this is something that is being driven into our lives on the daily as the walls start to close in on us and the metaphorical noose tightens around our necks.
that's kind of the issue i have with people with like Michael Mann who have a tendency to hyper-fixate on the climate "doomers" as opposed to the denialists, attempting to color the "doomers" as being a different stripe of denialists- oftentimes trying to be "positive"/"optimistic" in the face of adversity. toxic positivity does not help anyone and only ensures people will continuously make the wrong decisions in regards to something like the climate collapse(
like having children in a world where they will most likely die prematurely as an example). its almost as if he's trying to compensate for his inability(
not out of incompetence or malice, but sheer scope of the problem) to do anything about the situation by going after a fairly small minority of people who've recognized the crux of the issue compared to the larger portion of the population that remains unaware and willfully ignorant(
if not resistant entirely to learning about the issue).
In don't look up, the doom is all at once and even then they had the chance and ability to change the course of things. And they f-ed it up.
our doom is less certain, will take longer than a human lifetime to happen, and there are so many variables that we can manipulate to get non-doom outcomes that still look like struggle and complete changes to the world and humanity but are not the end of the world or people...
mostly using it as an analogy, not as a reference point for how our collective future will look overall. when it comes to the other forms of collapse(economic or (geo)political) i'd probably be hard-pressed to agree with you considering these are usually gradual decays marked by significant events of failure at certain points of time- which is a lot more digestible given the circumstances,"limping" our way along towards a less appealing future as you'd put it.
however environmental collapse at this point in time, is an exponential process that once started, cannot be stopped. more precisely i'm referring to the runway greenhouse effect occurring, caused as a result of tipping points we failed to avert in a timely manner(
the common example i've listed throughout a few of my posts being the ice caps melting and releasing more greenhouse gases in the process)- worsened by additional positive feedback loops we tripped off in the process of doing so.