Nowadays people relocate to the city because that's where the jobs and money are. When I was young, I chose not to do that. In my mind, the tourism industry in rural Quebec offered a better quality of life than the big city economy. As far as I'm concerned, civilization is rural and dotted with villages.
Enormous amounts. I saw one estimate recently - I have no idea how accurate it might be however, but it was from a serious site - that London could drop annually by as much as 20c if the AMOC goes. That seems an excessive claim tbh, but then when you look at its actual latitude...
And that's just southern England. The Arctic gets one hell of a lot less solar radiation.
It used to be thought they took millennia. No matter how long they take, I think it's a given that trying to establish a new civilisation at the Ground Zero of a new glaciation period is probably going to face some serious challenges.
In 'ZAMM/LILA' (I forget which), Pirsig posited that cities were a semi-conscious level far beyond the capability of the mortals within to comprehend: much as our own cells cannot comprehend the ego that dominates the individual collective body.
But just as individual mortal humans grow old and die, to the amazement of cells....
'Language' (Along with intelligence), are inherent to all living things. It may be more or less complex, but always existent.
The Washington Post just published an article that Joe Rogan used to basically tell Bernie, who he was interviewing, that climate change is a hoax or very close to one. The article basically said that after scientists collected and processed the data, rigorously, they found that we are in the middle of a general cooling period, and that in ages past the Earth was sometimes and on average, much hotter than now.
Sadly, WP is doing the yoemen's labor of keeping people ignorant of what that really entails. As your article correctly points out, yeah there will still be a planet an probably still humans, but the conditions (easy access to energy and materials) that led to stable prosperity will be gone. Uncertainty will be the daily reality, and the population will be much smaller likely after some horrifying wars.
But WP doesn't tell you that - it just tells the average reader that it was hotter in the past, and they let the imagination of the reader go to the logical conclusion that 2.0C increase in GAT is somehow no big deal.
Palm trees in northern Canada? What is wrong with that?!
Try telling them that means most of the current world we know will be uninhabitable and we will no little prosperity, and somehow you are the crazy one.
This much hotter / much cooler thing make no sense.
It's all a matter of timescale. During some periods, Earth was hotter and at some other periods, Earth was much colder. And indeed, on the very long term, that is averaged on 100s of millions of years, Earth is actually hotter than it is now. So no ice cap and palm trees on the Groenland latitudes is the normal state of things.
But none of this means anything when it comes to human lifespan. Not even to civilization and maybe just barely to the whole human history...
I'm reading Human Rewilding in the 21st Century by James M. Van Lanen, which, among other things, show just how much Graeber and Wengrow got wrong. It's been fascinating! So much we don't know.
Reading Graeber and Wengrow, I found their description of human history far too idealistic. Or to put it another way, far from being sufficiently deterministic. So an other point of view might be useful.
There is a great deal that we do not know about paleoclimates. In previous, hotter periods with aligators in the arctic circle, the temperature had a mych lower gradient around the globe.
It is unknown how the earth produced this equible climate, but it did not have large deserts (hyper arid areas), oceon dead zones, or wet bulb temperatures at the equator that were fatal to mammals. The fossil record and the geology paint a picture of world that is tropical or subtropical almost everywhere. The most plausible explanation that I've seen is that the Hadley cells switched from 3 Hadley cells per hemisphere to 1 per hemisphere.
The big question is less about the final state and more about the transition. Large mammals have lived successfully in equible climates that were more than 4 degrees warmer, but an exstinction even between here and there would definitely ruin humanity's day.
I think hunter-gatherer societies are the most likely. At least for a while until some new form of society starts to build. Civilisation is inherently unsustainable so I don't see one emerging on the back end of this collapsing one. Of course, 8.2 billion people can't hunt and gather on this planet (which is the only one we have), so there is bound to be a mass die-off. The time-line is unknown, though.
I’m deeply skeptical that the Graeber-Wengrow thesis was simply an extension of Graeber’s anarchist-socialist ideology. But even on its own terms, the argument strains credibility. At best, it overgeneralizes from a few outliers—sites like Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük—which were exceptional, not representative.
A seasonal gathering place for ritual, feasting, or drunken mating festivals is not a city. And calling these sites “egalitarian” just because we don’t see palaces or elite homes is misleading. Hierarchy can exist without stone monuments—through ritual authority, monopolies on knowledge, or informal power structures.
The broader idea that cities emerged from a neat, gradual accumulation of agricultural surplus has become a lazy meme. In reality, subsistence farming today rarely produces any substantial surplus—so why assume early farmers, with worse tools and less knowledge, did better?
Omer, Moav and Pascalis (2020) offer a more realistic account: surplus didn’t arise from abundance, but from coercion. Grain is storable, visible, and taxable—making it ideal for appropriation by elites backed by weapon-wielding thugs. Marvin Harris noted that the very idea of “surplus” is a projection—modern assumptions about wealth and efficiency read backward onto cultures that had no such framing.
The reality looks messier, more contingent, and far less egalitarian than Graeber and Wengrow wanted it to be.
As for humans and cities, perhaps we need to employ Occams razor. Humans love to party and we love our drugs. Could we simply have gotten together because we love festivals and a good time? Did agriculture come about because we developed an affinity for beer and wanted an abundant and reliable supply? Hmmm...
Nowadays people relocate to the city because that's where the jobs and money are. When I was young, I chose not to do that. In my mind, the tourism industry in rural Quebec offered a better quality of life than the big city economy. As far as I'm concerned, civilization is rural and dotted with villages.
With the collapse of AMOC, surely the northern glaciation will begin again?
If so, forget any "Arctic civilisation". Unless it's by Neanderthals/Sami.
Let's say the AMOC collapses by 2040. How much glaciation do you think can happen in 40 years, by which time we're at +4^ C, and heading for +5?
Enormous amounts. I saw one estimate recently - I have no idea how accurate it might be however, but it was from a serious site - that London could drop annually by as much as 20c if the AMOC goes. That seems an excessive claim tbh, but then when you look at its actual latitude...
And that's just southern England. The Arctic gets one hell of a lot less solar radiation.
Well, colour me pink. I thought glaciers took decades to form.
It used to be thought they took millennia. No matter how long they take, I think it's a given that trying to establish a new civilisation at the Ground Zero of a new glaciation period is probably going to face some serious challenges.
In 'ZAMM/LILA' (I forget which), Pirsig posited that cities were a semi-conscious level far beyond the capability of the mortals within to comprehend: much as our own cells cannot comprehend the ego that dominates the individual collective body.
But just as individual mortal humans grow old and die, to the amazement of cells....
'Language' (Along with intelligence), are inherent to all living things. It may be more or less complex, but always existent.
Anyway, I'll shut-up, lol.
The Washington Post just published an article that Joe Rogan used to basically tell Bernie, who he was interviewing, that climate change is a hoax or very close to one. The article basically said that after scientists collected and processed the data, rigorously, they found that we are in the middle of a general cooling period, and that in ages past the Earth was sometimes and on average, much hotter than now.
Sadly, WP is doing the yoemen's labor of keeping people ignorant of what that really entails. As your article correctly points out, yeah there will still be a planet an probably still humans, but the conditions (easy access to energy and materials) that led to stable prosperity will be gone. Uncertainty will be the daily reality, and the population will be much smaller likely after some horrifying wars.
But WP doesn't tell you that - it just tells the average reader that it was hotter in the past, and they let the imagination of the reader go to the logical conclusion that 2.0C increase in GAT is somehow no big deal.
Palm trees in northern Canada? What is wrong with that?!
Try telling them that means most of the current world we know will be uninhabitable and we will no little prosperity, and somehow you are the crazy one.
This much hotter / much cooler thing make no sense.
It's all a matter of timescale. During some periods, Earth was hotter and at some other periods, Earth was much colder. And indeed, on the very long term, that is averaged on 100s of millions of years, Earth is actually hotter than it is now. So no ice cap and palm trees on the Groenland latitudes is the normal state of things.
But none of this means anything when it comes to human lifespan. Not even to civilization and maybe just barely to the whole human history...
I'm reading Human Rewilding in the 21st Century by James M. Van Lanen, which, among other things, show just how much Graeber and Wengrow got wrong. It's been fascinating! So much we don't know.
Sounds interesting.
Reading Graeber and Wengrow, I found their description of human history far too idealistic. Or to put it another way, far from being sufficiently deterministic. So an other point of view might be useful.
There is a great deal that we do not know about paleoclimates. In previous, hotter periods with aligators in the arctic circle, the temperature had a mych lower gradient around the globe.
It is unknown how the earth produced this equible climate, but it did not have large deserts (hyper arid areas), oceon dead zones, or wet bulb temperatures at the equator that were fatal to mammals. The fossil record and the geology paint a picture of world that is tropical or subtropical almost everywhere. The most plausible explanation that I've seen is that the Hadley cells switched from 3 Hadley cells per hemisphere to 1 per hemisphere.
The big question is less about the final state and more about the transition. Large mammals have lived successfully in equible climates that were more than 4 degrees warmer, but an exstinction even between here and there would definitely ruin humanity's day.
I think hunter-gatherer societies are the most likely. At least for a while until some new form of society starts to build. Civilisation is inherently unsustainable so I don't see one emerging on the back end of this collapsing one. Of course, 8.2 billion people can't hunt and gather on this planet (which is the only one we have), so there is bound to be a mass die-off. The time-line is unknown, though.
I’m deeply skeptical that the Graeber-Wengrow thesis was simply an extension of Graeber’s anarchist-socialist ideology. But even on its own terms, the argument strains credibility. At best, it overgeneralizes from a few outliers—sites like Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük—which were exceptional, not representative.
A seasonal gathering place for ritual, feasting, or drunken mating festivals is not a city. And calling these sites “egalitarian” just because we don’t see palaces or elite homes is misleading. Hierarchy can exist without stone monuments—through ritual authority, monopolies on knowledge, or informal power structures.
The broader idea that cities emerged from a neat, gradual accumulation of agricultural surplus has become a lazy meme. In reality, subsistence farming today rarely produces any substantial surplus—so why assume early farmers, with worse tools and less knowledge, did better?
Omer, Moav and Pascalis (2020) offer a more realistic account: surplus didn’t arise from abundance, but from coercion. Grain is storable, visible, and taxable—making it ideal for appropriation by elites backed by weapon-wielding thugs. Marvin Harris noted that the very idea of “surplus” is a projection—modern assumptions about wealth and efficiency read backward onto cultures that had no such framing.
The reality looks messier, more contingent, and far less egalitarian than Graeber and Wengrow wanted it to be.
Honest, you views on the energy situation are sound. On global warming...highly debatable.
https://realclimatescience.com/#gsc.tab=0
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
https://climatethemovie.net/
As for humans and cities, perhaps we need to employ Occams razor. Humans love to party and we love our drugs. Could we simply have gotten together because we love festivals and a good time? Did agriculture come about because we developed an affinity for beer and wanted an abundant and reliable supply? Hmmm...