There was a support group in an area I used to live in. It vaguely included NTHE in the name. And frankly I might have been better off if I had never participated. I did get to talk about my feelings on climate change, so that was nice. But the drama and infighting was unreal for a group with the ostensible purpose of discussing the likely upcoming extinction of our species. I suspect the topic was so far outside the Overton window it just attracted people accustomed to being on the fringe. Even the one or two we made friends with were too unstable to maintain a friendship.

So I recommend against describing your social group in terms of doomers, or extinction, or anything that will seem like too much for most people to accept. If I wanted to start a social gathering of some sort I would maybe make the focus on climate change or prepping or something that more people can consider realistic. Then just try and get to know the people who show up. Odds are some of them will have similar views and be looking for people they can talk with.

Of course I have also introduced the concept to a few open minded people who took it seriously and have embraced it (so far). That’s another approach. It’s pretty obvious something is different now and things are getting worse. There are some people who don’t know why and would like to. It’s a crap shoot though. Many (especially parents) just can’t deal with it. But some can. So if you can have a real conversation with someone you know, give it a try. Talk about James Hansen’s projections, or how we can’t fix the climate damage we’ve done, or whatever your thing is and see how they take it.

Maybe there is hope to avoid extinction and for things to improve. I can’t predict the future any better than anyone else. But almost every climate prediction made so far has turned out to be optimistic including those published by the IPCC. We are entering an era unprecedented in human history. The latest paper from James Hansen states that “Eventual global warming due to today’s GHG forcing alone – after slow feedbacks operate – is about 10°C.” And that’s if we stop all emissions today. The earth hasn’t seen temperatures like that for something like 40 million years. We’re more resourceful than any other creature in history, so it’s possible some of us will survive. But life will look nothing like it does today.

And I think it’s too late for Florida in any scenario.

Have you read the pinned post at the top of this community, The Busy Worker’s Handbook to the Apocalypse? It’s a long read, and pretty far outside the Overton window for normal conversation, so if you aren’t a doomer already it might be hard to swallow. But the case it makes is pretty solid. Here is a highlight from it “we’ve put over a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere that we cannot remove, along with other GHGs it will warm the globe by at least 4°C by 2100 (even if all emissions stopped today), agricultural failure is imminent within a decade or so.” He means agricultural failure on a global scale. And with that comes the collapse of our rather brittle industrial civilization, not in 100 years, but probably in the next 10 or 20.

The best we have now for removing CO2 from the air is a plant in Iceland. It can sequester about 4,000 tons per year. Occidental is still building a plant in Texas they say will remove 500,000 tons per year and could scale up to twice that. But even scaled up we would need about 38,000 of those plants just to keep up with the CO2 we release in a year, never mind catching up with the over 2 trillion tons we already have released (over half of which was absorbed by the oceans). We can’t stop what’s coming.

It’s not just the end of industrial civilization and adapting to new challenges. It’s the end of the stable climate we need to grow food for ourselves at scale. And without that society as we know it doesn’t exist.

I’m convinced that there is no way to avoid a climate induced environmental collapse, and there never was. The entirety of our evolution has been a competition for resources where the winner reproduces their genes better than the loser. Fossilized carbon is the most valuable resource the planet has to offer. It powered the industrial revolution and provided the energy to create the society we live in today. And it fueled the largest growth in human population in history. We compete bitterly with each other (on a national level) to have access to fossil fuels. And any group of us who decides to reduce their usage for the benefit of the earth will simply be allowing another group to use ‘their’ share of fossil fuels. And the altruistic group will suffer while watching the other group prosper. We don’t have the ability as a species to think ahead for the good of the planet. It’s never been a useful survival strategy. It’s our nature to compete, each of us wanting more for ourselves or our group, regardless of the consequence for others. So we will continue to extract and burn until it’s no longer possible. I see no alternative.

As far as how I come to this conclusion, it’s hard to say. I think there is a logical thread here that leads me to a reasonable, if pessimistic, conclusion. Maybe something in my history killed my faith in the collective good of humankind. Maybe game theory points this way. Not sure. I want to say my opinions and observations are self-evident, but probably everyone thinks that about their own ideas.