When the ecosystem collapses, I'm going to do what every intelligent, well-prepared person will do.

[Binkie The Clown]

I'm going to die.

And so will you.

And on the bright side, so will Donald Trump and his gang of idiots.

[FreepFryer]

1. Oh NOES! Jump overboard! Give it up! Roll over! FYI: DISCOURAGERS ONLY ENCOURAGE US (n/t)

[FreepFryer]

2. Followup - the only thing worse than being a Trumpist is resigning oneself to Armageddon. (n/t)

[defacto7]

5. I think the point is "collapse" nt

[FreepFryer]

8. Collapse is far from inevitable. Self-adopted helplessness only helps Trumpism. (n/t)

[defacto7]

10. Although I appreciate your optimism,

optimism isn't synonymous with reason nor is pessimism synonymous with the promotion of Trumpism. I think too much of either muddle the facts. They tend to balance each other out so our view is relevant to our action.

[FreepFryer]

16. It's not optimism. I firmly believe that we have the means and the numbers - now, the will. (n/t)

[defacto7]

17. Great to hear! nt

[sue4e3]

3. what is the point of this post?

Yes we are all going to die. We are going to do that with or without any collapses

[Binkie The Clown]

9. The point is...

Most people seem to think they are going to stand aside, apart from it all, and watch the world collapse.

No. You won't be standing aside watching it from the outside. You, and I, and everyone we know will be very much victims of the collapse.

Why bring that up? Because we damn well better start doing something right now to prevent it. And nobody will get off their fat asses to do something until they realize the urgency of the problem.

And to those who say this post means I'm rolling over and accepting it, they got it backwards. We better start realizing that this is not something abstract that will affect the other guy. This is something that WILL kill us if we don't get serious about solving the problem. Now. Not next month. Not next year. NOW.

You, yes you, have a loaded gun pointed right at your face. Right now. Do something, damn it!

In the grand scheme of things, nothing else matters right now. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS right now.

Not March madness.
Not shutting down puppy mills.
Not cruelty to farm animals.
Not what's the latest tech gadget.
Not have you read any good books lately.
Not the Broccoli diet.
Not the gay pride marches.
Not equal pay for equal work.
Not high fashion.
Not Grammy or Oscar awards.
Not a one of your favorite liberal causes matters at all when there's no human life left on the planet.

We are hurtling full speed toward the extinction of the human race, and until each individual person comes to realize that "I will die when the ecosystem fails." "My children will die when the ecosystem fails." "My friends and family will die when the ecosystem fails."

Not only will this kill some remote, pitiable brown people on the other side of the globe, that we can tsk-tsk about from the safety of our bunker. This will kill us all. And until we come to our senses and realize that, we are doomed.

Put down that video game and do something now. Do something or die.

[defacto7]

11. That's exactly what I thought you were getting at.

I agree. It's exactly that serious.
And we are approaching inevitability if we haven't already past that point. But I'll fight to the last even if it's to make the point that I didn’t give up. Maybe miracles happen.

[sue4e3]

15. My point was you are singing to the choir here

almost all of us are just trying to survive knowing That there is a gun pointed at our face , at our childrens face . While we(or I) fight every day in every way we(or I) can. That doesn't mean I want to hash it out here while I deal with it. I think most people on this site feel the same . I could be wrong ,but the rate at which people post once something very bleak comes up, just to get it down to where we don't have to look at it, or the fact that no one comments on them, pretty much says I'm right. We are going to die and I want that to be a long time from now. We are under a threat that says that probably is not likely. Do you feel better now that we discussed it here where everyone already knows it? For the record I don't play video games or own a phone

[Verbose Matthias]

18. I Take an Odd Sort of Comfort from This One Fact:

The planet doesn't give a SHIT what any of us believes. We can acknowledge the reality of global warming, or we can stick our goddamn heads in the sand. Earth will continue following the laws of physics and chemistry, and our continued inaction will indeed result in the deaths of all humans.

[OKIsItJustMe]

21. Actually, this is not true

Our beliefs affect our actions, and our actions affect the planet.

The planet “cares” a great deal about our beliefs.

[gopiscrap]

22. welcome to DU

[defacto7]

4. I'm going down into my secret underground cavern

enter my personal cryogenic capsule and wait there for 5000 years.. or so... then return to the surface, at which point I'd probably go back to my cryogenic capsule for another 5000 years. Repeat as necessary.
You have one of those, right? Costco I think.

[ThoughtCriminal]

6. Knock, Knock!

Who's there?

Armageddon!

Armageddon who?

Armageddon tired of waiting for the Apocalypse!

[meadowlark5]

7. No, they'll head on over to their missile silo condos in the middle of Kansas

and ride it out.

I watched the real estate agent for that doomsday condo missile silo on Smerconish's show and it's all set up for the rich people to live for about 2yrs underground.

But when they surface, the mutants that survive will attack them and eat their heads

[kimbutgar]

14. There was a show called name of the game in the early 70's

Oneepisode was called Los Angeles AD 2017. Where the pollution was so bad the rich lived underground.

"L.A. 2017" is a 1971 episode of the NBC television series The Name of the Game. Sometimes referred to as "Los Angeles: AD 2017" (the name of Philip Wylie's subsequent novel based on his script) or "Los Angeles 2017", this was a science fiction piece, shot for only $375,000. The director, the 24-year-old Steven Spielberg, used camera angles to drive his first movie-length television episode across and remarked in later years that the show "opened a lot of doors for me".

A publisher, Glenn Howard (Gene Barry), finds himself suddenly plunged 46 years into the future only to learn that the people of Los Angeles are living underground to escape the pollution. A fascist America is run like a corporation with a number of vice-presidents. The police department of the subterranean Los Angeles is led/managed by psychiatrists.

At the end, Howard wakes up to discover it was all a dream—although there is a chilling final image of dead birds that hint at a troubled future ahead.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._2017

I got a copy from a website specializing in old tv. This episode was so prophetic now it's scary.

[Tanuki]

12. Steve Bannon's involvement in the Biosphere project is interesting.

My guess is that he was seeking to develop safe space for the elite to hang out after destroying Earth's climate, and making our planet uninhabitable for the rest of us.

https://newrepublic.com/article/141102/steve-bannon-used-believe-science-now-hes-americas-top-climate-villain

[kimbutgar]

13. Have you been watching BBC America planet earth 2?

Man may not survive but plants and animals will evolve to survive.

[NNadir]

19. How comforting. This I assume, would be in lieu of doing something about it. n/t

[pscot]

20. OK. Starting today. No more coal

We need a global ban on coal, now. Without that or similar, we're going right off the edge so time is of the essence.

[GliderGuider]

23. Not just coal. All FF.

No coal, no gas, no oil. Zero. As of today.

That's what it would take to freeze the global average CO2 concentration at 405. That in turn would slow down (but not stop) global warming.

So...
If we don't do something meaningful about it, it's game over - from catastrophic climate change.
If we do do something meaningful about it, it's also game over - from catastrophic energy shortage.

Guess which one our civilization will choose?

In this situation I don't give a tinker's damn what people decide to do about it. Do whatever you feel is right.

[pscot]

24. Zero is about what we'll do

based on current trends. We're drifting toward catastrophe. I worry that were approaching a climate singularity. You can almost feel the tipping points trembling on the brink.

[NNadir]

25. We are using 170% as much coal as we were using in 2000.

Worldwide carbon budgets by fuel type

If we cut coal out tomorrow, more than 50% of the people who log on repeatedly to the internet to claim that Fukushima is the only environmental issue that matters would be sitting in the dark, never mind burning fossil fuels to post their ignorance on the internet.

In the meantime we are also using 144% as much gas as we used in 2000, and 117% as much oil.

Coal amounts to only 44% of current emissions.

Nobody is making any serious effort to eliminate coal, except maybe the Chinese, since Chinese account for 20% of the 7 million air pollution deaths per year. They are only marginally interested in climate change.

Worldwide, there are no reasonable and workable plans to do it. In this country half the people don't "believe" in climate change, and the other half propose ideas that haven't worked, aren't working and won't work.

On the left, many of us - not me - but the majority of us seem to think that daydreaming about a solar and wind wonderland with billions of tons of batteries will save the day. This is an exceedingly stupid and unsustainable idea.

The first step in "doing something about it" would involve lessening our contempt, right and left, for scientists and engineers. We do know what we're talking about, but no one in the general public is willing to listen.

That's not going to happen, most likely, but the feeling that it won't should not prevent anyone who can do something to do as much of it as is possible.

[pscot]

28. Australia is digging twice

what they were in in 2000. If we can't stop burning coal we are well and truly fucked.

[NNadir]

29. It can be done; whether it will be done is another question entirely. n/t

[democratisphere]

26. I guess when everyone is dead, none of us will care.

Mother Earth will be glad when all of the humans are gone.

[Binkie The Clown]

27. So true.

[hunter]

30. I'm looking forward to learning new skill sets.

Like cannibalism.

I figure all I have to do is lay low until the gun-nutter neighbors are down to their last bullets. Then I'll just wait until I hear their final shots, wives, kids, themselves. Free meat! Dinnertime! There will even be enough for my dogs.

It will be as easy as finding food in the garbage is today, a skill I acquired as an off-his-meds lunatic living in my car in a church parking lot, sometime after I quit high school and before I graduated from a fancy university, back in the later half of the 20th century. (Don't tell my parents I was ever that fucked up. From my rock-bottom young-adult car-living awfulness my first step back up into ordinary society was living in the garden shed of an insane Vietnam War vet... I fled when he asked me to inventory the contents of the crawl space under his house. I was afraid of what I might find. He had one of those little carts down there that ordinary people use to work under cars.)