Healthy babies, to be specific. Because worldwide, infant and child mortality has fallen greatly; and is still falling; and will almost certainly continue to fall.
In premodern societies, meaning pretty much the entire world before 1820 or so, between a fifth and a quarter of all kids died before their first birthday. Then, of the survivors, roughly about another fifth-to-a-quarter died before their fifth birthday. Then, of those survivors, about 10% died before their 20th birthday. If you do the math, that means that every baby had roughly a coin-flip chance of living to adulthood. The exact numbers varied by place, time, and circumstances. But worldwide, that was the general state of affairs.
Today, worldwide about 96% of babies survive their first birthday. Of all babies born worldwide, about 90% live to reach age 20.
That’s a worldwide average. In developed countries, those numbers are “over 99%” and “around 99%”. In the most dangerous, backwards and unhappy corners of the world the numbers are much lower, but they’re still high by historical standards. A baby born in Afghanistan or Niger or the Democratic Republic of the Congo today, in 2026? Has better odds than a baby born in the England of George III and Pitt the Elder.
Nigeria today has an infant mortality rate about what the US had in 1946, when the Baby Boom got started. The Boom peaked around 1952. The infant mortality then (a bit over 3%) is about what you find in current-day Bangladesh. Pretty much the entire human race today faces a lower rate of infant mortality than that faced by our parents and grandparents.
This doesn’t get much discussed, perhaps because it’s a “what about all the planes that land safely” kind of story. Also, when one discusses long-term positive trends, academic friends may become restive and start murmuring about teleological errors and Whig History.
But I think it’s really interesting. That’s partly because it really is very good news, but also — putting my nerd hat on — because this almost certainly represents a permanent and irreversible change in the human condition.
(A pause here to define the topic: we’ve been talking about pro-natalism lately. This isn’t that. Today’s discussion is not about whether people should have more babies. It’s about what’s happening with the babies that people are actually having.)
Right, so. Infant mortality has been falling steadily, worldwide. Why?
Well, a lot of reasons. Here’s one: there’s a cluster of technologies around childbirth. And, neat thing: many of those technologies? Including ones that have a dramatic effect on infant mortality? Are cheap; simple; pretty easy to make and use; and widely, almost universally available. (1) A few examples:
— Basic medical equipment. Stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, thermometer, scalpel, forceps… all of those are simple devices that are available everywhere. Hypodermics are ubiquitous and very, very cheap. Reliable pulse oximeters are $10 on Amazon.
— Antisepsis. You can do basic antisepsis with alcohol. Alcohol is everywhere. (Reasonably pure alcohol solutions are a late medieval technology.)
— Antibiotics. A bunch of different antibiotics are very cheap, and several are surprisingly easy to produce. All the antibiotics that end in -cillin, for instance? Those can literally be made by a careful high school student in a cellar. Even the poorest developing country can make them (though as a practical matter, it’s usually cheaper and easier to import). (2)
— A bag-and-valve mask, with oxygen. B&V masks are everywhere; decent quality reusable ones are less than $50. Bottling oxygen, also very widely available — it’s 19th century technology. (Really. Oxygen was first bottled in 1868, and bottled oxygen was fist used in medicine in 1885.)
— The germ theory of disease. Just knowing that microbes cause infection, and can be transmitted by touch, fluids, coughing, etc., is a huge leap forward. And you can implement that with things like masks and disposable gloves that, say it again, are dirt cheap, widely available, and easily made anywhere. And “newborns have weak immune systems, so keep them clean and away from sick people” — we didn’t know that a couple of hundred years ago! But now we do know it, and we’re not going to un-know it.
— And of course, basic education in maternal health and childbirth. Basically, training midwives up to a certain standard. To grossly oversimplify, most of the world is already doing this. The certification standards in developed countries are pretty high (some years of experience plus several years of higher ed), but that’s almost certainly overkill. It turns out that while advanced education is nice to have, you can get significant reductions in infant mortality from even very basic education and training.
(1) There’s also an intermediate class of childbirth-related technologies that are not simple in the sense that they could be locally manufactured in a developing country, but that are nevertheless cheap and widely available. Ultrasound machines, for instance, are moderately complex bits of tech that are manufactured mostly in wealthy and middle-income countries. But you can buy a Chinese-made portable ultrasound scanner for a few thousand dollars, well within the reach of a hospital or clinic in a developing country. Similarly, oxytocin — a very useful tool for inducing labor, empowering contractions, and reducing uterine bleeding — requires a somewhat delicate solid-state chemical synthesis, and so is produced in only a dozen or so countries. But it’s available everywhere, worldwide. (3)
(2) These days, developing countries have a lot more industry than you might think. To give one example, Uganda currently has a couple of million college graduates, a modest but real local chemical industry, and several large pharmaceutical factories. (I visited a couple of them back in my former career.) The money may be South Asian, the equipment may be Chinese, but the technical staff are almost entirely Ugandans, and they know their stuff. I’m not sure if they currently produce antibiotics or oxytocin, but there’s no question that they could if they wanted to.
(3) Although — deep cut nerd here — oxytocin was first used medically in 1909, while its modern synthesis wasn’t developed until around 1960. Where did medical oxytocin come from, for those fifty years? From slaughterhouses. Oxytocin can be extracted from the pituitary glands of mammals. We use the synthetic stuff because it’s purer and safer, but we could still get it from the local meat packer.
So: because these technologies are cheap, simple, robust, useful, and very widely distributed, their uptake and use is likely to be permanent. It’s very hard to imagine a global catastrophe that would eliminate the ability to distill alcohol or the knowledge that microbes cause disease. In order to go back to premodern levels of infant mortality, we would literally have to bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age.
Okay, that’s the technological side. What about the political / social aspect?
Well, it turns out that keeping babies alive is a very popular policy. So much so that even truly corrupt and extractive regimes, overseeing unpleasantly patriarchal societies, will usually invest some resources in maternal and infant health. Like, the infant mortality rate in the Islamic Republic of Iran? Currently about 1/10 of what it was when the Islamic Republic was founded back in 1979.
And if your leadership is obsessed with National Greatness, well, healthy babies make sense there too. (4)
(4) Authoritarian and blood-and-soil regimes tend to converge on iconography of a happy / contented mother with a healthy baby (with baby usually either ungendered or male).
Which is very obnoxious, but healthy babies? Still a good thing anyway!
And creepy propaganda aside, maternal and child health makes economic sense too. From a cold blooded fiscal /economic POV, modest investments in basic maternal and infant health? Can give ridiculously large payoffs down the line.
And then of course, healthy babies are better than sick or dead babies. Isn’t that pretty close to a moral absolute? The advances that have reduced infant mortality have eliminated millions and millions of heartbreaks and tragedies, saving countless human lives. You have to work pretty hard (4) to not see that as a vast and great Good Thing.
(4) Although I’ve seen people try.
The limited available evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers and human societies of the deep past also had very high infant, child, and pre-adult mortality. Whether it was as bad as premodern agricultural societies is less clear, but it was definitely much worse than pretty much anywhere in the modern world. A baby born in Somalia today almost certainly has much better odds than a baby born into some Paleolithic tribe of wanderers.
So, to loop it back: the case for this being a permanent and irreversible change in the human condition is pretty strong. And I’d suggest that this has implications for everything from current political economics to the long-term evolutionary future of humanity.
But as noted, for some reason it doesn’t get much talked about. It’s a huge departure from the historical norm that just seems to be… taken for granted.
Some of this is because in the developed world it’s old news (although not /that/ old — again, as recently as the 1940s, the US had infant mortality rates worse than much of the developing world today). And today it’s happening in the developing world, and who really cares about good news from Senegal or Laos? Also, even though it affects everyone and everything, issues relating to childbirth and infancy are hard-coded as Woman Stuff.
Oh, and it annoys people who want to be relentlessly negative about the future.
Which, whatever, guys.
But anyway. Permanent and irreversible change in the human condition — for the better.
{ 59 comments… read them below or add one }
NomadUK 02.03.26 at 3:15 pm
RFKJr is working hard to fix that.
Dave 02.03.26 at 3:32 pm
Yo, this is great but let’s don’t crow so loud that RFK Jr can hear. He’ll take it as a personal challenge, try to turn this ship around.
afeman 02.03.26 at 3:58 pm
I figured that a big chunk of that ~50% gained was thanks to vaccines, which go unmentioned here. Is that not the case?
It would be relevant to questions of reversibility with respect to the political/social aspect, as is being demonstrated right now in the US.
Admittedly, the demonstration seems overwhelmingly unpopular, and will probably become more so as we rediscover empirically why we administer them in the first place.
Murali 02.03.26 at 4:26 pm
I feel that you’re tempting fate here. All it takes is for some RFK type to get it into his head that antibiotics cause autism or something and next you know, the germ theory of disease will be a political issue. We thought that the vaccine thing was settled, but now diseases we thought eradicated are making a comeback.
Doug Muir 02.03.26 at 8:08 pm
I didn’t mention vaccines because 1) I wanted to focus on the stuff that was cheap, easy to make, and pretty much universally accessible — which some vaccines are, but others aren’t; and, 2) everybody focuses on vaccines.
A recent Lancet study (link below) has vaccines responsible for about 40% of the reduction in infant mortality since 1974. Which is great! But once you go back before 1974, the incidence of vaccination worldwide crashes fast. Yet most of the decrease in mortality worldwide happened before that. So if you’re looking at the macro-level total, worldwide since 1820, vaccines are probably something like 15%-20%. Which — again — is great! But at that continents-and-centuries level, they don’t dominate as much as you might think.
— Now this gets a little complicated because vaccines don’t exist in a vacuum. So, for instance, the measles vaccine has probably saved more lives, historically, than any other single vaccine. Why? Because historically, measles was a major killer.
It isn’t in the US or Europe today. Even if a kid is unvaccinated and gets measles, their chance of dying is around 0.1%. (Still very bad odds! One in a thousand chance of your kid dying is /very bad odds/!) That’s because most kids in the US or Europe today are well nourished, have access to decent health care, and aren’t heavily exposed to a lot of other pathogens.
But when kids /are/ malnourished, /don’t/ have access to decent health care, and /are/ exposed to a lot of other pathogens — which was the situation for lots of kids historically, and in much of the developing world until recently — the death rate from measles can rise as high as 30%. That’s because measles is a team player. By itself, it’s not a major killer. But it synergizes aggressively. Among other things, measles is an immunosuppressant. A relatively mild one; it’s not HIV. But if you’re a baby who’s already somewhat immunosuppressed from poor nutrition, or who is in an environment full of opportunistic pathogens…
(This also helps explain why, when people in the developing world hear about anti-vaxxers, the default reaction is dumbfounded astonishment. Like, if you’re a fortysomething person living in Tanzania or Burundi? Good chance you have childhood memories of kids in your kindergarten or grade school class dropping dead from measles.)
Anyway: yes, RFK is a bad person. But I’m kind of more interested in the “permanent change to the human condition” aspect?
Doug M.
Paper: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00850-X/fulltext
MisterMr 02.03.26 at 10:07 pm
Irrelevant for the OP, but the third “mother with child” Is not from the fascist period, it is a modern one from Forza Nuova, an extraparliamentary neofascist group (not the guys currently in the governament).
For those who are curious it reads:
Births at the historical minimum!
Italy needs sons [or daughters, it’s generic]
Not of gay unions and immigrants
#incometomothers [meaning a governament paid income for mothers]
J-D 02.04.26 at 12:17 am
Well, somebody hasn’t been reading dystopian science fiction.
Tm 02.04.26 at 9:01 am
I recently read up about the smallpox vaccine – which historically was the first immunization, going back centuries in the form of variolation and then from the late 18th century in the form of vaccination, inoculation with cow pox (vacca = cow).
Apparently before immunization, the mortality rate during smallpox epidemics was 10-20%. It was so high that most people gladly underwent the dangerous variolation procedure (which was basically a controlled infection), and the vaccination quickly became mandatory in many jurisdictions. Are there figures how much this contributed to declining child mortality?
Zje low child mortality that all of us are nowadays so used to is indeed an amazing world historical social progress. It can’t be stressed enough how big this is, and also how difficult it is for us to even imagine that it could be different. Which is dangerous. It really frightens me how reckless many people think about these matters. The tendency to focus on how everything is allegedly rotten and getting worse (which isn’t true but is constantly being claimed even around here) so why not just burn it all down could lead – well is alreading leading – to very dangerous consequences. And no, this is not whig history or panglossianism, it’s about realistic perspective.
D. S. Battistoli 02.04.26 at 9:23 am
I love this post and I’m pretty sure that I get the rhetorical approach you take. At the same time, I think you can play to the same corners of the hall that you currently do without using “backwards [. . .] corners of the world” as an undefined catch-all, or asking “who really cares about good news from Senegal or Laos?” (for the first of these countries, the most timely answer is obviously: the hundreds of millions of people who followed the AFCON final on one form of media or another). Now, I get that you’re not just asking a rhetorical question, you’re asking a sarcastic rhetorical question with a Modest Proposal edge, but you’re also doing so on a blog that can go twelve years between mentions of Senegal. (By the way, researching that sentence taught me that Chris loves Ousmane Sembène’s magisterial Les bouts de bois de Dieu, which, like your celebrations of occasional reasons to be cheerful, is just one of the frequent reminders of the great catholic wonder that is Crooked Timber).
I most heartily apologize for picking a bone with how, rather than what you write. I just feel that you don’t need to tag that base to get your point across.
Doug Muir 02.04.26 at 1:50 pm
Tm @ 6, I don’t have figures on smallpox, but I’ll note that variolation had a relatively modest impact — the majority of people weren’t variolated. Variolation in Europe was largely restricted to the middle and upper classes, along with a few special categories such as soldiers. Smallpox outbreaks were still regularly killing large numbers of people until compulsory vaccination started showing up in the mid-1800s.
WRT your concern about us forgetting and becoming reckless — on one hand, yes, this is a real risk. We see it with vaccines, and in other areas as well. However, I think it’s pretty unlikely for the stuff I listed in the post — i.e., the big issue with antibiotics is people overusing and abusing them, not people deciding they’re wicked and dangerous.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 02.04.26 at 2:07 pm
M. Battistoli @8, thanks for the kind words about the what. On the how, I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I will note that, in my previous career as a USAID project manager, I did spend a fair amount of time in Senegal — also in Rwanda, Tajikistan, Palestine (West Bank), Tanzania, Uganda, DR Congo, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, with shorter visits to Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, Guinea, Ethiopia, and a bunch of others I forget right now. So if I use language like “dangerous, backwards and unhappy corners of the world”, that’s not coming from a place of ignorance about those particular corners, nor from a lack of sympathy or respect for the people who live there.
Doug M.
SamChevre 02.04.26 at 2:08 pm
Most of what you mention is driving the reduction in neonatal mortality. What’s the big factors in reducing mortality between 1 year old and 20 years old? Is it just antibiotics and vaccines, or are there other key things also? (Better understanding of rehydration for diarrhea, maybe?)
Tm 02.04.26 at 3:25 pm
Doug: there are plenty of people out there who believe in some version of “we don’t really need all of this hich tech medicine we could be just fine with using mother nature’s healing powers” or similar. Which is a belief that only appears plausible because people have no understanding how things would be without the hated hightech medicine.
JFK jr and other quacks after all do have a following and there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that his reckless anti-science policies are getting any popular pushback. He could literally be killing millions (he’s a committed social darwinist who clearly believes that we shouldn’t use science to protect the weak) and it’s hard to see anybody stopping him. The recklessness I’m referring to is not so much careless individual behavior, it’s institutional recklessness made possible by popular indifference, and that is exactly what’s happening in the US.
I also observe that our elites have in general taken precisely the wrong lessons from the Covid pandemic. They are cowardly afraid of an outspoken anti-science minority (it was alsways a minority but it got like 80% of the media attention), have become afraid to defend vaccination and other common sense public health policies, and governments not just in the US have opted for cutting research and education and investment in health care. I’m afraid these tendencies are far more serious than you acknowledge. Add to that the increasing strain of climate related stresses on health care systems and the likelihood of further pandemics (and make no mistake, we’ll be even worse equipped to deal with them than in 2020) and I’m not so optimistic about mortality staying low.
Caroline Mullan 02.04.26 at 4:19 pm
The Taliban in Afghanistan have effectively stopped training female doctors and midwives in the country, and says that women cannot be treated by male doctors. If that continues it’s hard to see how infant mortality can remain low there.
Doug Muir 02.04.26 at 4:35 pm
SamChevre@10, it’s mostly driven by a vast reduction in infectious diseases. Vaccines, antibiotics, clean drinking water, food safety regulations, sewer systems, public health campaigns generally.
— antibiotics, man. Fun fact: plague, the old Black Death, is still with us. In fact, in the late 19th century it jumped to becoming endemic in North America, because it found a new animal reservoir in North American rodents. (If you see a prairie dog that looks sick? Stay well off.) Every few years it will kill someone in Colorado or Nebraska.
So why don’t we have outbreaks of plague? Because the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, hasn’t ever developed resistance to antibiotics. So one shot of penicillin will stop a plague infection dead. The occasional deaths only happen when someone doesn’t get diagnosed in time.
If we didn’t have antibiotics… well, there’s also a vaccine, but it’s not great: nasty side effects, incomplete protection. So it’s antibiotics that are keeping the Black Death from ever coming back.
Anyway. Secondary but still important: better safety generally, including everything from less violent crime to fire safety. Like, dying in a fire was a much, much bigger risk in premodern times. We remember city-wide fires like London, Istanbul or Osaka, but fires that consumed a house or a neighborhood were horribly common.
Doug M.
Michael Cain 02.04.26 at 4:55 pm
Somewhere here I have transcribed copies of letters written by some of my ancestors circa 1819 living in southeastern Iowa to their families in Kentucky. (Side note: at the time, federal law was that such settlements were illegal.) In addition to the requests for iron goods, and praise for the richness of the soil, there were notes of births and deaths. The attitude towards child mortality was very casual. Kids just died. Frequently.
D. S. Battistoli 02.04.26 at 5:49 pm
Doug M @9: Thank you. I might only note that in my original comment @7, I had not employed ad hominem argumentation: I did not say that you belonged to a set of people unqualified to use such rhetoric. You’ve been usefully clear across your posts about how your professional experience contributes to your remarkable knowledge base and outlook. Rhetoric, however, may be distinguished from both content and perspective. And, having attempted to make a point across two comments, I will hold my piece after reiterating that I find your points, at a level of content and at a rhetorical level overall, quite well-constructed and persuasive.
Doug Muir 02.04.26 at 9:41 pm
Caroline @14, Afghanistan will indeed be a horrible test case. The Taliban isn’t giving out a lot of reliable public health information, but there’s pretty clearly a women’s health crisis already, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
(A detail wrt midwives: the Taliban has said that women can’t go to medical, nurse or midwife school any more. But there’s still a pool of existing midwives. And apparently the Taliban are making sure that /their/ wives and daughters have access to these.)
That said, I’ll be mildly surprised if it doesn’t get better — not tomorrow or next week, but within the next few years. Letting women and children die of easily preventable illnesses doesn’t make a lot of economic or political sense. If I understand correctly (and to be clear, IANA Afghanistan expert), the reason this is happening now is because various players and factions within the Taliban leadership are trying to virtue-signal against each other: who’s the most hardline? And legislating against women is a relatively safe and easy way to do this, because women are already politically powerless.
But I don’t think this can last. The Taliban leadership is pretty full of themselves right now: they defeated the mighty United States, after all. And they’re ruling over a country that’s mostly quiescent. But they’re interpreting this as “therefore, we can do as we please”, which is almost certainly going to bite them at some point.
Doug M.
Gareth Wilson 02.05.26 at 3:43 am
The TV series Six Feet Under had a character wonder why there’s a single word for a child with dead parents, but no word for a parent with a dead child. Of course that’s because for most of history having a dead child is not unusual enough to need a specific word, but the character thought that having your child die was too horrific a concept to even be named. Even with a TV character it’s a nice illustration of the change.
Doug Muir 02.05.26 at 9:24 am
— follow-up to @14 and @18: A couple of other things. Better nutrition pretty much everywhere is another big factor. Huge, really. These days, most people worldwide are getting decent basic nutrition. This was firmly not the case in premodern times. It’s not so much that people aren’t dying of famine (though they mostly aren’t, and that’s great too) as that people aren’t weakened by malnutrition and thus made more vulnerable to illness or accident.
Another big one: worldwide dramatically increased standards of personal hygiene. The great majority of humanity now wash their hands, brush their teeth, bathe at least semi-regularly, and regularly change their clothes.
There are a number of nasty diseases that are spread by body lice (like typhus) or fleas (like plague). But we don’t hear much about such diseases these days, because people who bathe and change clothes regularly are a lot less likely to have body lice or fleas. And as the parasites become less common, societal standards change from “everyone has lice, nbd” to “visibly having lice is repulsive”. (This is a real thing, and something that has happened and is happening worldwide — in much of the world, within the last generation or two.)
A lot of these positive developments synergize. Like, I mentioned above that antibiotics are our firewall against the Black Death ever coming back? Well, that plays really well with people having fewer fleas, because that means we’re a lot less likely to contract plague in the first place.
(I suspect that improved personal hygiene may be another long-term change to the global human condition… but that’s perhaps a topic for another post.)
Right, back to work.
Doug M.
Laban 02.05.26 at 9:50 am
Up to a point, Mr Muir. But I take your main point that some knowledge – like the germ theory of disease – is so widely spread that it can surely not be put back in the box.
OTOH there are a few clouds on the horizon. This treaty expired today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_START
As of now there seem to be no limits but economic ones on what the US, Russia and China can do as far as developing, testing and producing nuclear weapons.
Antibiotics. My worry is resistance. In countries like India they are bought over the counter, no prescription needed.
And there’s our old mate climate change, here in the UK we’ve had maybe one day of short-lived snow this winter but weeks and weeks of rain – our third very wet winter in a row following a very dry summer, not enough of a hay crop to feed beasts kept in from the boggy fields.
Churchill wrote an entertaining passage in the first volume of his “History Of The English-Speaking Peoples”, imagining what a citizen of late Roman Britain, falling asleep and waking up in 1933, would think.
“He would have the same sense of belonging to a society which was threatened, and to an imperial rule which had passed its prime. He would have the same gathering fears of some sudden onslaught by barbarian forces armed with equal weapons to those of the local legions or auxiliaries. He would still fear the people across the North Sea, and still be taught that his frontiers were upon the Rhine. The most marked changes that would confront him would be the speed of communications and the volume of printed and broadcast matter. He might find both distressing. But against these he could set chloroform, antiseptics, and a more scientific knowledge of hygiene. He would have longer history books to read, containing worse tales than those of Tacitus and Dio. Facilities would be afforded to him for seeing “regions Cæsar never knew”, from which he would probably return in sorrow and wonder. He would find himself hampered in every aspect of foreign travel, except that of speed. If he wished to journey to Rome, Constantinople, or Jerusalem, otherwise than by sea, a dozen frontiers would scrutinise his entry. He would be called upon to develop a large number of tribal and racial enmities to which he had formerly been a stranger. But the more he studied the accounts of what had happened since the third century the more satisfied he would be not to have been awakened at an earlier time.”
Laban 02.05.26 at 10:25 am
Then there’s the argument put forward by John Gribbin in his 2011 book “Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique”.
“If say, nuclear war or an asteroid strike created worldwide famine and devastation, the survivors would not be able to rebuild back to our level. Why ? Because we have extracted and used up all the natural resources — like metal ores and fossil fuels — that were easy to get to.”
Our current extraction methods for oil, gas, coal, copper and iron ore are dependent on us already having machines made of copper and iron, and energy produced from oil and gas. Our mining methods would go back to digging big pits by hand like coltan miners in Africa.
Oh, the knowledge. We’d better keep a lot of books, because all that stuff Google have digitised (or the hundred-plus books on this PC) won’t be available with no electricity.
Doug Muir 02.05.26 at 12:03 pm
Laban @15, I’ve seen that argument before and I have no patience with it.
Metals? Walk into the ruins of Chicago or wherever, break a chunk of reinforced concrete, and there’s the rebar — more steel than existed anywhere on Earth before 1200 or so. Dig into the ground and there are metal pipes and cables everywhere. Look up and there are high-voltage towers and lines stretching for thousands of miles, containing millions of tons of steel and copper, already refined and easily harvested. There are immense amounts of metal and other resources bound up in existing infrastructure and durable goods.
A hypothetical post-nuclear-war society might plausibly face various resource constraints, sure. You can have that conversation. But “no more metals”? That’s nonsense on stilts. People have been repeating it for literally decades without, as far as I can tell, ever actually looking around them and thinking “huh, actually there’s a lot of metal out there”.
Fossil fuels? This was a valid concern 20 years ago. Today a huge and rapidly growing chunk of the world’s power is coming from wind and solar. A nuclear war isn’t going to do much to these very widely distributed power sources.
(We’re not even close to exhausting fossil fuels anyway. Fracking, for instance, provides a cheap and relatively low-tech way to get your hands on lots of natural gas quickly. A bunch of countries prohibit fracking for environmental reasons, and that’s fine. But if we really needed fossil fuels fast? You can do basic fracking with pretty crude technology, and it could provide decades of cheap natural gas for your hypothetical recovering civilization.)
Do I have to say that nuclear war would of course be ghastly and horrific, and knock civilization well back? I suppose I do. But it wouldn’t end civilization, and the survivors would absolutely be able to rebuild.
Again, the “we’ve used up all the resources” argument seems to just get repeated over and over because, well, isn’t it obvious? — but without any actual analysis behind it. So if you know of a paper on this, feel free to forward it. I’ve never seen one.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 02.05.26 at 12:14 pm
Laban @14, “but what about doom?”.
Climate change isn’t going to do a thing about infant mortality. Nuclear war would, but a post-nuclear-war society would still have germ theory and hygiene, stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs, antisepsis and antibiotics.
Antibiotic resistance: we’re near the start of what’s going to be a long seesaw struggle. TLDR, bacteria don’t evolve resistance unless they need to, and resistance usually has fitness costs, so they usually un-evolve it as soon as they don’t need it or it stops working. So in theory we can fend off resistance indefinitely by switching up our antibiotics. On one hand that’s complex and challenging, but on the other hand we’re already close to having a large enough suite of antibiotics to do that. I don’t want to pooh-pooh resistance, it’s a real concern, but right now it looks very much like a long-term solvable problem.
Oh, and there are a bunch of bacterial infections that for various reasons simply can’t evolve resistance — syphilis is probably the most notable, but there are lots more.
TLDR, we’re just not going back to premodern levels of infant mortality. Like, ever.
Doug M.
Tm 02.05.26 at 1:34 pm
Doug, your numbering is off … this happens when comments are approved out of order.
Laban 02.05.26 at 4:22 pm
Some wind turbines and solar panels would doubtless exist after a nuclear exchange, but what would they power?
(And the argument isn’t that the resources are used up but that the low-hanging ones have been. No oil ooozing out of the ground at Titusville any more. I take your point about scrap/recycling though.)
steven t johnson 02.05.26 at 6:47 pm
In a low population density culture, is disease epidemic? I’m not so sure it is, judging from the Great American Experiment, where new population in the Americas didn’t seem to perpetuate many diseases, even after later urbanization. There’s the issue of animal reservoirs, but how would they survive a nuclear apocalypse. I’m not sure how well the germ theory of disease would transmit in generations with little epidemic disease.
Also, so far as personal hygiene is concerned, class issue do seem relevant. Bathing in ice cold water in winter because your status as a forced laborer doesn’t allow for hot water doesn’t seem to be a guaranteed habit, for instance.
My guess is post-nuclear civilization will center on those locations where a government of sorts survived. Their health departments would transmit the basics of health I think. But theories in the head of sturdy survivors roaming the cratered landscape, not so sure about them…
Doug Muir 02.05.26 at 8:26 pm
“In a low population density culture, is disease epidemic?”
…where do you think human diseases came from?
Like, malaria is literally older than humanity. It’s been with us since we were clever chimps, and it stayed with us just fine when we were low-population-density hunter-gatherers.
Denser and urban populations will have /more/ epidemic disease, yes. Absolutely. And ceteris paribus, so will societies with lots of domestic animals. But hunter-gatherers and other low-density human populations have no shortage of endemic infections, including a bunch that particularly target kids.
Like, you know how before vaccines and antibiotics, diphtheria killed vast numbers of babies and small children every year? Well, we’ve found diphtheria DNA in human teeth from — give me a sec [googles] — 11,000 years ago, well before agriculture, domestic animals, or cities.
“I’m not so sure it is, judging from the Great American Experiment, where new population in the Americas didn’t seem to perpetuate many diseases, even after later urbanization.”
uhh… what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1721_Boston_smallpox_outbreak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1793_Philadelphia_yellow_fever_epidemic
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/21/7/15-0397_article — the measles epidemic of 1713. You know the colonial preacher Cotton Mather? It killed his wife, their housemaid, their two-year-old daughter, and their newborn twins.
Colonial America and Canada /were/ healthier than their cousins in England and France, and they had lower infant mortality rates too. But that’s crawling over a very low bar. The America of Jefferson and Adams had higher infant, mother, and child mortality rates than the Democratic Republic of the Congo does today.
Doug M.
steven t johnson 02.05.26 at 8:53 pm
I believe most diseases originate as zoonoses spreading in relatively dense populations. For some generalist diseases, the target population is larger and denser than simply the human population. The importance of animal reservoirs I thought was well-known.
You’re other question, “uhh…what?” forgets that the first new population in the Americas came from Asia and spread throughout the continent. I believe the Columbian exchange of diseases was so one-sided because the new populations of the Americas hadn’t bred so many epidemic diseases. Your specific example of diphtheria I thought to be specifically wrong, diphtheria being a disease introduced into the New World. I didn’t know that had been refuted.
engels 02.05.26 at 8:55 pm
Some wind turbines and solar panels would doubtless exist after a nuclear exchange, but what would they power?
Skynet
Doug Muir 02.06.26 at 12:17 am
“I believe most diseases originate as zoonoses spreading in relatively dense populations.”
Mm, not really. Lots of infectious diseases are ancient, long predating domestic animals or cities.
Sure, a lot of the highest profile, most destructive, big-name diseases started as zoonoses: plague, influenza, smallpox, measles, salmonella, typhoid, tapeworms, and of course rabies. But there are a bunch more that have been around forever. I mentioned malaria and diphtheria; tuberculosis is another, as are streptococcus, yellow fever, Guinea worm, and gonorrhea. More recent (last ~500 years) emerging diseases are a mix: HIV started as a zoonose, but typhus and cholera didn’t, and we’re still not sure about COVID.
Very very broadly speaking, bacterial and protist pathogens are less likely to be zoonotic in origin and/or to have an animal reservoir; multicellular parasites are much more likely (like, almost all of them — Guinea worm is a rare fastidious exception); and viruses and fungi are in between.
“the first new population in the Americas came from Asia and spread throughout the continent.”
Ah, I misunderstood you — thought you were talking about the European colonists.
Well, the pre-contact Native Americans definitely had a lighter disease burden than their Old World counterparts. But it’s not clear whether that was because they had fewer domestic animals, or fewer cities, or because they came to the Americans as small nomadic founder populations through a high-latitude bottleneck — thus winnowing out not only any pathogens that needed large populations, but also any that couldn’t tolerate Arctic conditions.
Anyway, “fewer” isn’t “none”. Pre-contact Native Americans had to live with yaws, tuberculosis — a milder strain than the Old World version, but still TB — scarlet fever, rabies, hepatitis, whooping cough, amebic dysentery, and a bunch of bacterial infections and parasitic worms. Still better off than their Old World contemporaries, to be sure — but definitely not living in a germ-free Eden.
Doug M.
Moz of Yarramulla 02.06.26 at 1:13 am
Some wind turbines and solar panels would doubtless exist after a nuclear exchange, but what would they power?
Residual electronics, most likely. Not least because getting usable electricity out of them requires electronics.
It’s hydropower that would likely stay revolutionised. Knowing about electricity means that any tribe that can build a dam can transport the power from that further than our ancestors could. So even a very crude water wheel powering a permanent magnet generator, a few hundred metres of metal wire hung off trees, then another motor/heater means you can build your mill or oven or whatever where it’s convenient rather than having to build it at the bottom of the river valley. Usefully, above the floodline.
Solar powered cellphone ‘repeaters’/cell towers are now readily available to civilians, I suspect many readers of this blog have them unknowingly – if your “wifi router” has 5G it’s likely either already acting as a nanocell for your phone or it’s a config change away from doing that. You’re more likely to find that someone in a poor country has the same gadget but knows that it’s a cellphone tower because they’re selling phone connectivity to their neighbours. They may even have fibre internet and sell that too.
Doug Muir 02.06.26 at 8:49 am
“Our current extraction methods for oil, gas, coal, copper and iron ore are dependent on us already having machines made of copper and iron, and energy produced from oil and gas. Our mining methods would go back to digging big pits by hand like coltan miners in Africa.”
Why would a nuclear exchange cause all the world’s mining equipment to suddenly stop working?
‘Because there’d be no more fuel or replacement parts!’ — why not? ‘Because civilization will have collapsed!’ — assuming your conclusion.
“We’d better keep a lot of books, because all that stuff Google have digitised (or the hundred-plus books on this PC) won’t be available with no electricity.”
[looks around house, which contains hundreds of books]
[considers neighbors’ houses, many of which also contain hundreds of books]
[stares in local library, more hundreds of books; county library up the road, thousands of books; large bookshop two towns over]
[contemplates four university libraries within 100 km, each with hundreds of thousands of books]
— so a nuclear exchange would somehow make all the world’s physical books to just magically disappear. Literally tens of billions of books, spread all over the world.
Okay.
“Some wind turbines and solar panels would doubtless exist after a nuclear exchange, but what would they power?”
Is this a real question? ‘What good is electricity, anyway?’
Like, just for starters, you could keep the lights on? ‘Oh there wouldn’t be any lights’ — LED lights, which are everywhere, have lifespans measured in tens of thousands of hours. That’s years if you run them continuously, decades if you only use them a few hours a day. When they run out, of course you’ll be sitting in the dark… unless your community can master the art of creating light bulbs, which date back to 1879. Of course, for that they’d need glassblowing, a highly advanced technology which dates back to [checks] the first century BC.
— Look, you can make some serious arguments about which technologies would and wouldn’t be available after a major nuclear exchange. You can discuss what resource constraints would actually exist — there would definitely be some! — and how hard it might actually be to climb back up to a 21st century standard of living. But ‘all machinery would stop immediately stop working, also no more books’ is not doing that work.
Doug M.
steven t johnson 02.06.26 at 6:10 pm
Doug Muir@33 Speaking as someone who keeps thinking of getting a brass plate engraved “Branch Library” for my front door, I do have to wonder how many personal libraries would actually be useful in keeping civilization going. I’m not sure a collection of the last twenty years’ Booker Prize novels would be so much better than the entire Left Behind series or the Stephen King book club (there really was such a thing!) in helping survivors maintain water purification. All those grandfather’s collections of patriotic biographies of presidents and generals will be a grand help to re-building society. I suspect I have a lot more science than most, yet most of it is popular science.
University libraries, yes, except for those in metropolitan areas where blast, fire and wreckage damage or even destroy them. And those in safely suburban areas which are not in fallout zones.
But enough humor: Might you give a thumbnail review of a book called The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell, 2014?
Hidari 02.06.26 at 8:22 pm
@33
Someone needs to write a book (not me, I’m too lazy) about why we are so addicted to fictions (because that’s what they are) of total apocalyptic catastrophe. I don’t mean in the past, I mean now.
For example, and especially with regards to recent geopolitical events, people started to talk about nuclear war again, and the old cliches were wheeled out about how nuclear war ‘would be the end of the human race’ and so on. Which of course, ignores the extent to which nuclear arsenals have been cut since 1986 (when the human race had the most nukes). In 1986, we had about 70,000 nukes or thereabouts. Now we have c.12,000 and no that is not nearly enough to wipe out the human race, or even to destroy ‘Western civilisation’. Sure, if for some incomprehensible reason all countries on planet Earth decided to fire all their nukes at the same time*, it would be absolutely horrendous. But the end of the human race, or even ‘civilisation’? No, not at all.
Same with climate change: yes it will be bad, but when climate scientists talk about ‘unparalleled warming’ they mean centuries and millennia as opposed to millions of years or tens of millions of years. There is literally no conceivable way that climate change could wipe out the human race, or anything remotely close to it, in the 21st century, or even the 22nd. The maths for that don’t math.
So the point in the OP is simply and obviously correct. There is no conceivable way (at the moment) that we would lose the 99%+ of the population of Earth ‘needed’ such that people lose the ability to read English, or the basic rudiments of the scientific method are lost, meaning that we go back to some ‘primitive’ stone age type of anti-civilisation. Just…not going to happen.
Not this century in any case.
*And just have a think about how incredibly unlikely that is, incidentally. The US goes to war with Russia and then somehow Pakistan gets involved? How? Why?
Doug Muir 02.07.26 at 6:22 pm
“Might you give a thumbnail review of a book called The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell, 2014?”
It seems to have started a microgenre of such books, usually with titles like “The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding a Civilization”. I know for sure of two others, and I’m pretty sure there are at least a couple more. (There are of course dozens if not hundreds of “YOU can Survive the Apocalypse!” prepper books, but that’s a slightly different thing.)
The only one of the rebuild-civilization books I’ve read was Ryan North’s How To Invent Everything. It was okay.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 02.07.26 at 6:45 pm
Hidary @35, yes, all of this exactly. Suggesting that nuclear war might be in any sense survivable is seen by many as morally reprehensible.
Going into a bit more detail: people may get quite sharply annoyed when you start asking questions like “does Australia also get destroyed? or Africa, or South America?” Or “what assumptions exactly are going into your nuclear winter model?”
Climate change, very similar. There’s not really room for what you might call a center-left position: “climate change is real, it’s going to be bad, it will be worse if we don’t act, so we /should/ act, and quickly — but it’s not going to destroy civilization, ffs; get a grip, man.”
You know that Douglas Adams quote about fairies in the garden? “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” Well, there’s a mirror image to that. Like, isn’t it bad enough? Does it have to be literally The Doom Of Everything?
The psychology of it, well, I think there’s several things going on here but picking them apart goes beyond the scope of a week-old comment thread.
Anyway, permanent and irreversible change in the human condition, and for the good.
Doug M.
engels 02.07.26 at 7:02 pm
Reasons to be cheerful: nuclear war won’t be that bad (reminds me of an Eric Idle song…)
notGoodenough 02.07.26 at 10:16 pm
I must admit, as positions go “the real problem with climate change is we’re simply not complacent enough about it” is certainly…heterodox.
I’m not sure if this intended in the “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.” sense, but…
My understanding of what m’ colleagues in climate science mean when they talk about the end of civilisation is they are referring to the globally integrated, high-energy, stable system supporting billions of people at current living standards (characterised by reliable, large-scale food production; stable nation-states and governance; global trade, finance, and supply chains; dense urban populations; high-energy infrastructure such as electric grids, transport, healthcare; and predictable climate envelopes that agriculture and cities depend on). This is not a claim that humanity will go extinct, or that all societies will collapse simultaneously, or that no organised societies will remain anywhere; rather it means that the standard of living will drop noticeably and the previously fairly reliable threads between societies will noticeably fray or snap altogether.
In this context, the claim that climate change will not destroy civilisation (for the sake of f or otherwise) is a claim that it is impossible for climate change above 3 degrees to affect the global supply chains currently in existence – personally, this strikes me as a somewhat optimistic assessment, but I will be happy to be convinced otherwise.
Perhaps you could start with food supply chains (e.g. 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.171047; 10.48550/arXiv.2504.08857; 10.1038/s41598-024-65274-z) and explain why they are sufficiently robust that we should not afford this such a degree of concern…
John Q 02.08.26 at 12:11 am
I’ve read, and indirectly contributed to, the IPCC summaries on agricultural effects (I’m originally an ag/resource economist). My tl;dr take is that as long as we hold warming below 3 degrees C, effects on food production will be negative but manageable, and this is true for most human impacts, like natural disaster. The really big problems with 2-3 degrees of warming are
* Species extinction and ecosystem loss (this is already bad, and will get a lot worse).
* Risk of a tipping point that takes us well beyond 3 degrees.
LFC 02.08.26 at 4:17 am
This is a minor point, but the OP refers to the U.S. baby boom peaking in 1953. I thought the peak year was 1957; however I’m not going to look it up right now.
Hidari 02.08.26 at 11:23 am
‘Does it have to be literally The Doom Of Everything?’
But as the posts that follow yours make clear, many people (most of them Extremely Online) have come to see the expression of apocalyptic predictions of the future or at least, apocalyptic predictions of potential future events as being expression of their own political virtue, so it has become almost impossible to have coherent or meaningful conversation about these topics. For example:
(Me): ‘Nuclear war would be the worst thing in the history of humanity. It should not be fought! We should get rid of all our nuclear weapons! However, having said that, we should get a sense of proportion. There is no conceivable way according to our current understanding of the laws of physics and biology that nuclear war* could wipe out ‘all life on earth’ or even ‘all human life on earth’. Indeed it’s extremely unlikely that even ‘Western civilisation’ would end after a nuclear war, in any absolute sense.’
(My opponent, angrily) ‘So you are saying that nuclear war would be fun, eh? I suppose you think we should have a nuclear war right now? Eh? Fascist!’
*Given current nuclear ‘stocks’ of the nuclear weapons we currently have available to us.
engels 02.08.26 at 1:30 pm
Some Sunday afternoon reading while we’re waiting for Hidari’s spreadsheet/Slate column:
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/nuclear-war-would-cause-global-famine-and-kill-billions-rutgers-led-study-finds
engels 02.08.26 at 1:55 pm
Eric Idle dressed as a scorpion turns to camera:
https://bigthink.com/life/who-what-survives-nuclear-war/
Doug Muir 02.08.26 at 2:11 pm
“I must admit, as positions go “the real problem with climate change is we’re simply not complacent enough about it” is certainly…heterodox.”
Mild irritation at being clumsily straw-manned, but that’s par for this particular course. Moving on.
” they are referring to the globally integrated, high-energy, stable system supporting billions of people at current living standards (characterised by reliable, large-scale food production; stable nation-states and governance; global trade, finance, and supply chains; dense urban populations; high-energy infrastructure such as electric grids, transport, healthcare; and predictable climate envelopes that agriculture and cities depend on). ”
Yes. That’s what I’m talking about.
There are a couple of ringers in that list — “predictable climate envelopes” are, by definition, going to be a lot less common. (They’re becoming less common already.) And the level of integration of global trade is and always has been a political choice: that’s become more obvious in the last year, but it has always been true.
But high-energy, high-tech, urbanized civilization, with an average standard of living as high or higher than we enjoy today? The vast majority of humanity living well above subsistence levels? A clear majority of humans food-secure and having access to electricity, the internet, running water, and basic health care? And a large minority — billions of people — enjoying what today we’d call a comfortable middle-class existence?
Yeah, that’s going to be a thing. Climate change isn’t go to break that.
“The standard of living will drop noticeably” — from what? From today right now? You’re saying that climate change will at some point stop economic growth dead, and then will /reverse/ that economic growth back to “noticeably” below the level of 2026?
That’s an extreme claim!
As is often the case with extreme claims, it’s advanced as something that’s simply obvious, and that any reasonable person would surely agree with. But, you know, /citation needed/.
[paper] — That paper is a review paper on supply chain challenges. It’s saying that there will be serious challenges, and these will probably lead to serious problems up ahead, especially if not addressed soon/now.
Which /I completely agree with/. But that paper is saying stuff like “a lot of rain-fed agriculture will have to invest in irrigation to keep working” and “current harvesting of fish stocks are unsustainable” and “our grandchildren will probably be eating less beef, because beef prices may double or triple”.
All of which are perfectly plausible! And all of which a are a /very long way/ from saying “Urban high-tech civilization is going to collapse! “There are going to be serious challenges to our food supply chains” does not translate into “So get ready to follow Lord Humungus across the Great Waste!”
And bringing it back: what is the /point/ of doomerism? “Because we need people to be scared!” is the usual answer, but that doesn’t seem very well thought through.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 02.08.26 at 2:34 pm
Oh yeah: I was literally waiting for the “hair mussed” quote. Came quicker than expected.
Doug M.
Doug Muir 02.08.26 at 2:43 pm
John @40, the latest IPCC projections say it’s unlikely we’ll hit 3 degrees Celsius before 2100. It’s possible we might never reach it. On this point I’m rather pessimistic. My strong suspicion is that we will act, but piecemeal and too slowly. But it’s definitely decades away — certainly at least 60 years, probably 75, might be over 100. Which means we’ll have lead time to prepare.
I’ll note that once we get past 2060 or so, we’re probably looking at a slowly declining global population. That raises its own set of issues, but it will mean fewer people to feed.
Doug M.
notGoodenough 02.08.26 at 4:24 pm
John Q @ 40
I’m not sure if this was intended as a response to my comment, but in case it is, respectfully I see nothing in what you’ve said or the IPCC AR6 Working Group II (which admittedly is the last one I’ve read covering this topic – perhaps there may be a more recent one?) that particularly contradicts what I’ve said.
notGoodenough 02.08.26 at 4:24 pm
Hidari @ 42
I haven’t seen anyone in this thread accusing you of saying nuclear war is fun or calling you a fascist, and frankly speaking if you are intending to position yourself as “the reasonable person in the room” then this sort of egregious mischaracterisation hardly lends you any credibility as someone desirous of meaningful or coherent conversation about this (or indeed any) topic.
There are, at time of writing, 4 comments between @37 which you reference and this @ 42 which you accuse of making it “almost impossible to have coherent or meaningful conversation about these topics”. Please, by all means, quote the offending text – explain, in detail, what in these comments was so egregious, so “Extremely Online” and “apocalyptic”, such an “expression of their own political virtue” as to be reasonably characterised by your “example”.
But by all means, let us have some degree of proportionality.
From my perspective, every degree raised is an increase in risk, represents environmental harm and the ratcheting of the world towards being more fragile, likely means greater immiseration and suffering of the most vulnerable and least powerful people, and all of which is entirely needless and will only happen to whatever extent it does in large part because a few people sitting on hordes of riches that would mortify even the most avaricious dragon of literature might otherwise be slightly less incalculably wealthy.
Were you actually engaging in discourse rather than merely slinging insults, I would agree that this will not represent the extinction of humanity, and likely much of modern civilisation would survive (indeed, I believe I’ve already stated that quite clearly in my previous comment); what I struggle to see is why this situation should be anything other than a cause to wake up every morning in an incandescent fury at the exploitative system which has led us to this point, and those who have propped it up.
notGoodenough 02.08.26 at 4:44 pm
Doug Muir @ 45
I apologise that my admittedly somewhat flippant sarcasm came across as intentional straw-manning. In my defence, being one of the many people experiencing the “career limiting” effects of being correct too early (combined with delightful state mandated violence at the behest of the wealthy and powerful) does make me a just a smidge sensitive to seeing people rolling their eyes about “being too negative”.
I have said no such thing, and will express my own mild irritation at being clumsily straw-manned (is this really what passes for CT commentator standards now?).
What I am saying, in simple terms, is that going above 3 degrees will likely negatively impact major crops in many – potentially all – regions, with yield potential declining sharply as local temperatures exceed optimal physiological ranges for crops like wheat, rice, maize and soy, as well as negatively affecting agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and aquaculture, hindering efforts to meet human food needs, and increasing risks of malnutrition in some parts of the world [1 – 5]. That it would plausibly negatively impact human productivity [6], aggravate disease [7], increase migration [8], increase the risks of political instability, as well as likely negatively impact economic activity – though admittedly it is difficult to predict the exact extent [9]. It would increase the probability of many complex ecosystems (forests, coral reefs, wetlands) undergoing irreversible changes, species loss acceleration, and ecosystem services (pollination, fisheries productivity, water regulation) declining sharply [10]. Transportation and logistics may well be affected [11 – 13]. And some regions and sectors may approach or even exceed their ability to effectively adapt [14]. Moreover, as there is a non-linear escalation of risk, increasing towards and above 3 degrees increases the likelihood of simultaneous stressors, which in turn increasing the probability of broad supply chain disruptions and economic losses, rather than causing isolated impacts.
Personally, I don’t think it so exceptionally unreasonable as to characterise this as “the standard of living will drop noticeably”, but feel free to explain otherwise (I can’t help but note your own lack of citations, so including some in your response would be appreciated).
Yes, and I suppose if I had said “Urban high-tech civilization is going to collapse!” or “get ready to follow Lord Humungus across the Great Waste!” you might have a point. As it is…
I think that mitigating the more extreme climate change is perfectly plausible, providing the world acts – I also think that the world has shown not nearly sufficient action to date to warrant believing with a high degree of confidence that we will avoid hitting 3 degrees. I would lean on the framing (and I simplify, but not I think egregiously so) of a continuum of escalating systemic risk as temperature rises, in which the structural stability of modern, interconnected global systems could be overwhelmed. Again, perhaps one might argue this is on the pessimistic side of the envelope, but I don’t find this position so obviously, laughably ludicrous as you appear to do so – nor do I think it deserving nothing but the sort ridicule and scorn you are cheerfully lobbing my way. I am certainly open to being convinced otherwise – but I would welcome a well-evidenced rebuttal rather than…this.
Please point out exactly what I have said that may reasonably be characterised as “doomerism”?
I would take the time to note that the position of “climate change is real, it’s going to be bad, it will be worse if we don’t act, so we /should/ act, and quickly” is what I have repeatedly said on CT (and, y’know, in a lot of other places), and seems pretty in alignment with my previous comment. The quick action is – after all – what I have devoted my scientific career (such as it is!) towards (though I emphasise my status as a tiny part of a much more impressive community); had I genuinely been inclined to “doomerism”, this would have been a rather quixotic decision, no? I would also note that this position is also what climate activists have been saying for…oh…about 40 years. For some strange reason I don’t seem to recall this being cheered as a sensible position, or being universally accepted (e.g. “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars”).
For myself, while I don’t agree with the position, I think I do have some sympathy for the people looking at the trajectory of the world and feeling despair, because I think this is less a cynical tactic than the consequence of experiencing what seems like a never-ending uphill battle against people who can cheerfully call upon a dozen or so think tanks to lobby and undo what took years to put into place.
Certainly, I find myself having more sympathy for those who are despairing than I do for the wealthy and powerful people who have staunchly set themselves against what progress that has been made all in the name of maximising shareholder value.
Your millage, perhaps, varies on this.
[1] ISBN 978-92-64-08686-9
[2] SIXTH ASSESSMENT REPORT: Working Group II – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
[3] UN Climate Panel Special Report on 1.5 Degrees Global Warming, Chapter 3.5: Avoided Impacts and Reduced Risks at 1.5 ° C Compared with 2 ° C of Global Warming
[4] 10.1016/j.agsy.2019.05.010
[5] 10.1007/s10640-025-01065-y
[6] 10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00170-4
[7] 10.1038/s41558-022-01426-1
[8] 10.1007/s10584-019-02560-0
[9] 10.1088/1748-9326/adbd58
[10] https://www.science.org.au/our-work/resources-reports/reports-publications/risks-australia-3degc-warmer-world
[11] 10.1007/s11069-023-06054-2
[12] 10.3390/logistics9010032
[13] 10.3390/su14073880
[14] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf
LFC 02.08.26 at 9:03 pm
Re nuclear war, which has come up:
I recently heard a former U.S. govt analyst argue that the end of the new START treaty is a good thing b/c the current U.S. nuclear arsenal is not large enough to deter Russia and China simultaneously. This seems to me v. dubious given (among other things) the level of ‘overkill’ in the current U.S. nuclear arsenal and the fact that some of it is on highly mobile submarines (the relevance of which would take a bit too long to go into right now).
I also don’t see much point in debating whether nuclear war would be “only” a catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions or whether it would actually end civilization (whatever that means exactly).
Maxlex 02.08.26 at 11:18 pm
I think a lot of the disagreement here comes from trying assign a binary (doom/not doom) to a vastly complex event: The future of all human civilisations over an undefined time period. Perhaps you could try assigning a score to the scenarios you’re envisioning?
For example, you could count one point for every human at their current standard of living. That gives us 8.3 billion points. Covid cost us… 7 million points, looks like, not counting standard of living changes. If you doubled the living standards of the poorest half (no, I don’t know what doubling means in this context) you’d increase our score by 4 billion.
I admit it’s a crude measure, but it’s better than binary. Feel free to spend 5 minutes to come up with a better one.
Oh, and in attempt at keeping it on topic, I’ll add that Doug’s permanent, irrevocable change doesn’t really impact the score at all, since birth rates tend to decline with greater infant survival.
Tm 02.09.26 at 8:24 am
Suppose that less than 3 degrees censius of warming can still be handled, in the sense that civilization will survive but many hundreds of millions and maybe even billions of people will be displaced with all the horror that comes with such a mass wave of dosplacement (and I’m not particularly confident that civilization will survive this, when I observe the horrible effects of far smaller refugee movements on our politics; last century, fascism was contained to a handful of countries and it caused the most catastrophic war in history, now it looks very possible that all global powers will be fascist in a few years).
There is still no particular reason to be confident that we will manage to keep it below 3 degrees. You all know that the latest carbon emission data are record high, despite the fact that we have supposedly begun to decarbonize! To my knowledge, most IPCC scenarios always assumed that we are by now on the reduction path, but we simply are not. The best news we can cling to is currently “we might have reached peak carbon”. Great.
JQ mentioned tipping points, which is kind of the point. We simply cannot expect the effects of the climate crisis to develop linearly. There will very likely – nah there are already – positive feedback loops the effects of which we cannot even fathom. What is true is that this won’t happen tomorrow, we – some of the 8 billion people now alive – still have decades of relatively good lives before us.
But from everything we know, both about the physics and about the politics of climate change, there is really really absolutely no reason to postulate that the effects of climate change will be limited to some threshold that will allow industrial civilization to continue. We can still hope, but the likelihood that civilization will be if not destroyed then radically transformed is definitely above zero. To claim otherwise isn’t helpful.
Tm 02.09.26 at 8:38 am
Let me be clear that we can still prevent the worst, keep warming to 3 degrees (which will have absolutely horrendous consequences) or maybe even keep it to 2 degrees (which will have terrible consequences but won’t end civilization). But there is absolutely no guarantee! None.
Hidari 02.09.26 at 1:45 pm
@45 ‘And bringing it back: what is the /point/ of doomerism? “Because we need people to be scared!” is the usual answer, but that doesn’t seem very well thought through.’
The point of doomerism is the point of doomerism about nuclear war, broadly extended, which, as you correctly pointed out, is this: ‘Suggesting that nuclear war might be in any sense survivable is seen by many as morally reprehensible.’
This is the key point. People in these kinds of discussions, unless they are actually physical scientists in a seminar room, are not trying to find Truth. They are trying to strike moral poses, in the hope of obtaining praise from others who agree with them, and expressing incredibly (and indeed unrealistically) pessimistic predictions about hypothetical future events is conceptualised in many circles as being a highly moral position to have, so that’s what people say (whether they in fact believe it is a different issue).
Another issue is that in light of recent developments in the US political landscape, being highly optimistic about the future is now ‘Right-wing coded’,* and this, so to speak, has collateral effects, so if you don’t think that nuclear war will wipe out literally every single human being on Earth, you run the risk of people thinking you agree with Elon Musk about Martian colonisation and AGI happening a week on Tuesday.
I mean the general point of the OP, about infant mortality, is self-evidently and obviously true, but people don’t like the implications of this because it doesn’t fit into current assumptions about the ‘correct’ and moral way of talking about the future. Hence the pushback.
*Ipso-facto, therefore, adopting a pessimistic view of the future is now seen as being ‘left’ or ‘left-liberal’ coded. This is of course the precise opposite of the 1960s, when these positions were reversed.
Tm 02.09.26 at 3:24 pm
I had to laugh so hard when I read that Musk is now downsizing his Mars project to Moon. So lighten up everybody, in 10 years max there will be “self-growing” cities on the Moon. Who ever claimed “There is no planet B” now have egg on their faces!
engels 02.09.26 at 7:34 pm
“In the 60s the Left was more nonchalant about nuclear annihilation, and still would it be if it wasn’t not for extremely online virtue signallers” is certainly an original “take”.
Safwaan 02.11.26 at 3:13 pm
I think this stuff and generally positive news largely doesn’t get heard because of multiple reasons: firstly, our brains are primed to see threats and find negative things as it helped us protect ourselves during us being hunter gatherers, so we biologically are wired to pay attention to negative thins happening around the world, and birth rates are just one of many. Secondly, the media has a huge role to play in this, as their whole purpose is propaganda and making you too scared to do anything about major issues and give up, they want to demoralize you with so much bad news 24/7 that you get sick of everything, and lastly, because it’s something you can use to fear monger and act like a savior with. Quite interesting nearly ALL of the right wing is enamored with white birth rates, which really show their and generally the west’s true aim. It still is very white supremacist, and only uses minorities like brown and black peoples as tokens for their agenda, both parties do this, and have since forever. Slavery and that attitude towards non whites never stopped, it just morphed and became more subtle, the right just is more outspoken about it because those kinds of people gravitate towards their beliefs.
Tm 02.11.26 at 10:44 pm
Maybe Not to worry is the best strategy… Boy I hate this discourse.
„The world is closer than thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said.
Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach.“
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/point-of-no-return-hothouse-earth-global-heating-climate-tipping-points
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322%2825%2900391-4