03-08-2021, 02:36 AM
(03-07-2021, 07:39 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: My earlier posts suggest to me that the projected Crisis of 2100 will likely be very intense. Of course, that would be a life time into the future, so I will be long gone. (I still hope to get a glimpse of the next 2T-gives me something to look forward to in my old age). If that 4T should be resolved with reasonable success, we can project a Dionysus type 2T about a century from now.
BTW, my comments aren't based on any particularly rhythm or cycle, just that most 4Ts have been quite intense.
If Global Warming should be as nasty as the scariest projections suggest, then the Crisis of 2100 could be as devastating as that of 1940. In general we now take agricultural productivity for granted, but should large swaths of the world's most productive farmland disappear under rising seas (such land is often alluvial river deltas close to sea level) and climatic patterns be disrupted elsewhere with heat waves, droughts, and floods, then people of the time might endure famines that destabilize shaky political systems. If you thought that the demagogues of the 1930's were horrific, then wait till you see what awaits Humanity when mass death from famine strikes places not accustomed to it. Social programs cannot create food, and there is no technological fix for hunger.
The world's most productive farmland may be... Bengal. A relatively small area supports over 200 million people in Bangladesh and northeastern India, and almost all of it is but a few meters above sea level. The Ganges and Brahmaputra draw nutrients from the Himalayas that crops need... and the Ganges delta is one of the most densely-settled rural areas in the world. It barely produces enough food for the people who live there... but try doing without that food production. Where do 200 million peasant farmers go in the event of inundation of the land that they work? That is simply Bengal.
If you thought Soviet-style collectivization was bad, at least the recent freehold farmers still get the questionable privilege of survival as serfs on collective farms. Maybe Humanity can adapt to slow changes in climatic patterns, and perhaps if sea levels rise slowly enough the soils eroded from distant mountains will keep up with the rising sea level.
Nobody knows how swiftly climatic change will happen... but the faster that it happens, the more catastrophic an effect it will have upon the food supply. People will not go gently into that good night, for it is not a good night.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.