Tags
Climate Change, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Heat Wave, Switzerland's Melting Glaciers
Hello fellow realists (aka ‘doomers’ in the eyes of optimist-biased public). I’m traveling right now and presently find myself in Parker AZ where the temperature reads 109F in my vehicle. My AC only works when I’m traveling on the highway, so I’ve stopped at a friend’s house here to cool down before venturing out on the road again. A patient of mine told me that this Saturday the temperature could hit 124F, a new record. They call this place, and the communities along the Colorado River between California and Arizona, the ‘Devil’s Armpit’. I had to verify that it really was projected to be that hot:
123F or 124F, what the hell is the difference at that point? With the Colorado River drying up, the mega-cities of the Southwest will likely become ghost cities in the not too distant future. The Federal government will step in to arbitrate the Southwest’s water wars in order to ensure that the critical resource of water is only allocated to food production, nothing else. Las Vegas just opened up a water park last month and another one is now in the works. What water problem? A fellow blogger agrees with me on the fate of the Southwest…
…As for the Southwest, you’re absolutely right. A severe crisis is ongoing there now. We’ll probably start to see serious community collapse as early as the 2020s with migrations following starting in the 2030s on our current path. Water will probably be the first inhibitor but heat will be terrible. Desalination may be possible in some places that have access to coastal estuaries. But a rising sea level makes that mitigation a challenging prospect…
Meanwhile on another continent, the Swiss are wrapping their glaciers in blankets to ward off the heat. I shit you not:
Our sinking ship will see a dwindling number of chairs being rearranged as humans scurry around like ants in a disturbed anthill. Sad to see this happen, but Mother Nature giveth and she taketh away in equal measure. In the great scheme of things, all that wealth of industrial civilization that was built off the back of our fossil fuel slaves appears to have been only a mirage. It’s past 8pm now and the sun is down. Time to hit the road.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
I think we can predict the American response to this dire situation:
1. Purchases of air conditioners will increase.
2. The corporate media make no connection whatsoever between climate extremes and profligate energy use.
3. The Obama administration will keep publicly silent on the whole climate chaos matter whilst secretly encouraging fracking, mountaintop removal, deep-water drilling, coastal drilling and Arctic drilling,
4. The locals will drill deeper to get at water they cannot currently extract from ancient aquifers; the market for multi-stage pump systems will take off.
5. Insurance companies will describe heatstroke deaths, fires, tornadoes etc. as ‘acts of God’, and will raise premiums..
6. Corporate industrial farmers will demand (and get) government subsidies to allow some semblance of business-as-usual to persist to the bitter end.
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Oh, so true. Perfect.
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The economy and corporate consumerism are sacrosanct. Your bullet points are right on the $money$.
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Megadrought in U.S. Southwest:
A Bad Omen for Forests Globally
Scientists studying a prolonged and severe drought in the southwestern U.S. say that extensive damage done to trees in that region portends what lies in store as other forests worldwide face rising temperatures, diminished rainfall, and devastating fires.
by caroline fraser
As brutal fires torch tinder-dry dense forests and neighboring homes in the American West, researchers are examining the relationships between drought, wildfire, and a warming climate, predicting mass forest die-offs and prolonged megadrought for the Southwest. These forces are accelerating, they say, and already transforming the landscape. Unchecked, they may permanently destroy forests in the southwestern U.S. and in some other regions around the world.
More:
http://e360.yale.edu/slideshow/megadrought_in_us_southwest_a_bad_omen_for_forests_globally/203/1/
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Yep, once again you two hit it right on the head! To add another “interesting” tidbit, many of our nuclear plants, but specifically Hanford and Oak Ridge, are degrading, leaking and bursting into flame indicating the destabilization the nuke industry promised us all would NEVER happen. So add radiation contamination from all the spent fuel being temporarily stored all over the planet to that spewing from Fukushima and still around from Chernobyl to the mix of factors leading directly to our demise in short order – especially once the electrical grid fails (which follows from economic collapse, agricultural collapse, Peak Oil, a huge solar EMP, superstorms, well placed earthquake and or volcanic eruption, sea level rise and more).
Climate change is here to stay and will usher us right out of existence. So much for homo-stupid-beyond-belief (I couldn’t find the Latin translation – maybe homo bardus incredibilis comes close enough) that kills himself off despite having this oh-so-big brain.
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meant to add this:
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Just a note:
Kudos to our Robert Scribbler. Great job on your blog with this:
For some reason I missed that you have a blog, and a good one.
Thanks.
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I dont see doomers here, i see people who arent afraid of the truth. My thoughts on increased warming are as follows:
A rigid power structure will not survive it
Plants like kenaf will thrive in it
People who lay under kenaf will stay cool in it
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This site is for people who are in stage 4 and 5 of the Loss and Grief process. I won’t ban you for now, but if you become a nuisance, then I’ll have to swat you like a fly.
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Did you really say that? Interesting. Me I do not know what stage I am in because I have been waiting impatiently for the whole show to go over the cliff. The sooner or better. My issue is overpopulation and always will be. And I have figured out a way to get it cut down to a manageable size. Take out the humor gene. They will be jumping off those cliffs once they realize what a mess this all is.
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Yes, overpopulation is the problem that underlies all others, yet it’s the one subject that is taboo to talk openly about. There is no political or social solution that is acceptable, thus we march onward over the cliff.
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From Orion magazine:
Dark Ecology
Searching for truth in a post-green world
Excerpt:
If the green movement was born in the early 1970s, then the 1980s, when there were whales to be saved and rainforests to be campaigned for, were its adolescence. Its coming-of-age party was in 1992, in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. The 1992 Earth Summit was a jamboree of promises and commitments: to tackle climate change, to protect forests, to protect biodiversity, and to promote something called “sustainable development,” a new concept that would become, over the next two decades, the most fashionable in global politics and business. The future looked bright for the greens back then. It often does when you’re twenty.
Two decades on, things look rather different. In 2012, the bureaucrats, the activists, and the ministers gathered again in Rio for a stock-taking exercise called Rio+20. It was accompanied by the usual shrill demands for optimism and hope, but there was no disguising the hollowness of the exercise. Every environmental problem identified at the original Earth Summit has gotten worse in the intervening twenty years, often very much worse, and there is no sign of this changing.
The green movement, which seemed to be carrying all before it in the early 1990s, has plunged into a full-on midlife crisis. Unable to significantly change either the system or the behavior of the public, assailed by a rising movement of “skeptics” and by public boredom with being hectored about carbon and consumption, colonized by a new breed of corporate spivs for whom “sustainability” is just another opportunity for selling things, the greens are seeing a nasty realization dawn: despite all their work, their passion, their commitment and the fact that most of what they have been saying has been broadly right—they are losing. There is no likelihood of the world going their way. In most green circles now, sooner or later, the conversation comes round to the same question: what the hell do we do next?
More: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277
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Pingback: With ‘Warm Storm’ at Its Heart and Heatwaves Rushing in From The Sides, Arctic Sea Braces for Major Blow | robertscribbler
From Mike Sosebee on NBL:
…. committed to another project starting in the fall having to do with the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s (SNWA) wicked plan to steal water from the Great Basin Aquifer in northern Nevada to funnel it south to flush toilets and water golf courses in Las Vegas. SNWA borrowed Mulholland’s playbook in stealing water from the Owens Valley almost 100 years ago. Remember Chinatown? The consequences of the pipeline will be the destruction of the last pristine high desert ecosystem in North America and the indigenous cultures of the Shoshone/Paiute that have lived there durably for millennia. The SNWA Pipeline will be the largest single public project in human history. Like the Titanic, it will be the metaphor of our time.
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I blogged about that very subject here:
Burning Down the House
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I read every word of “Burning Down the House” and you put it exactly right. What I’d like to express is to put the pipeline in the context of a moral and emotional argument. Expressing facts to an unmoved public hasn’t been effective. TPTB depend on this complacency on the part of the proletariat in order to push through the evil agendas.
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Sounds interesting and worthwhile. I can’t believe we actually thought about moving there. That city will suck the last drop of water from the Colorado River with the 3rd intake pipe they are constructing. It goes right to the bottom of Lake Meade, like a tub drain:
Ponzi Schemes and Pitchforks
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Smoking essay Mike! Keep it coming.
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Bought the movie, liked it. Goes on the shelf with “What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire”
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That’s my favorite all time movie about our times. What A Way To Go. It woke me up. Changed me forever. Love the haunting music in it.
What is the other movie you are mentioning?
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Sosebee’s movie, of course…
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‘What I’d like to express is to put the pipeline in the context of a moral and emotional argument. Expressing facts to an unmoved public hasn’t been effective’ ‘
In my experience nothing we say or do makes any difference. The last time I spoke to my local council (5th June) I pointed out that they were worse than the Nazi who ran the death camps because those Nazis, despite doing truly awful things to Jews, gypsies, and political prisoners etc. DID LOVE THEIR OWN CHILDREN and did everything they could to protect their own children, whereas the CEO, mayor, council officers and most councillors apparently do not love their own children/grandchildren and will not lift a finger to protect them. Indeed, practically all council policy is geared to making everything that matters much, much worse for the next generation.
That comment followed on from over 80 pages of factual information covering the economic, environmental and social collapse which are underway, which is why I often I refer to it all as Life at the End of Empire on the Planet of the Maniacs.
Derrick Jensen was perhaps the first to say that industrial culture is insane, and that most people caught up in the culture are insane and unreachable.
Just how completely bonkers they are is demonstrated by the latest piece of madness concocted by NZ central government planners and Auckland City:: a plan to build a rather short underground rail link through a rather large hill in the centre of the highly-urbanised city. This has been described as ‘the biggest project in New Zealand’s history;, and construction is planned to commence 2017-2020, just as we expect to fall precipitously off Hubbert’s net energy curve..
Based on extensive study of practically all the factors involved, I personally doubt that present economic arrangements will still be functioning beyond 2015.
. .. .
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Good job Kevin. Excellent comparison with the Nazis and their love of their kids. Never thought of it like that.
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Kevin Moore sez: “Derrick Jensen was perhaps the first to say that industrial culture is insane, and that most people caught up in the culture are insane and unreachable.”
I’ve repeated this trope aloud from time to time, though I don’t recall whom I was quoting or paraphrasing. For those inside the bubble, or the hologram as Bageant called it (note blog subtitle), it’s impossible to understand what is meant by “insane.” In my experience, the accusation just draws blank stares. But the term is accurate on its face: we (most of us, anyway) committed to a path of self-annihilation and steadfastly refuse to see it.
I dunno about your comparison with the Nazis. People even today with some of the most destructive short-term objectives truly believe what they’re doing is for the benefit of posterity and their own children, whom they really do love, even if those same objectives consign us all to … well, you know.
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My ‘worse than Nazis who ran death camps’ comparison applies particularly to people in positions of power who have been presented with irrefutable evidence, year after year for many years, that we are headed for collapse of the food supply (as a consequence of falling off Hubbert’s Curve), have been given irrefutable evidence that emissions are taking us rapidly towards Near Term Extinction (particularly focusing on the triggering of positive feedbacks), and then those very same people vote for or implement policies geared to squandering even more energy and resources and raising emissions! These same people will not put one cent into any initiatives geared to reducing the forthcoming suffering.
As previously discussed, nothing we say or do makes any difference. All so=called planning is based on irrational thinking, rorts, kick-backs etc.
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Agree with most, but there was an old guy here I got to know very well, deceased, RIP, who was very humble, honourable, honest, from a background of great poverty and hardship, local mayor and on the council and all that stuff, with great power and influence, basically left wing, ‘for the people’. We discussed the hippies and ecofreaks building illegal hobbit houses in the woods, trying to live ethical and sustainable lifestyles.
He called it ‘wanting to live like rabbits’ hahaha. It was impossible to explain to him re CO2, ecology, etc, because he had no scientific education. He’d been fighting all of his life to improve people’s living conditions so that they could have what he saw as a better life. It was a completely sincere and honest and honourable position. Just a totally different and obsolete paradigm.
He wasn’t a nazi, of the kind you describe, kevin. He was quite prepared to listen to opposing voices. I would keep my views to myself, and he’d tell me what had happened in the council meetings ‘Do you know what they are saying now ? They want to let the farms return to the wild ! Have you ever heard such nonsense !’
He was baffled, because he could not comprehend the logic behind the propositions, because, for sixty years, he’d been trying to ‘modernise’ life in this area, to raise standards, for water quality and transport, and public services and medical care and employment, and all the rest. And now there’s these crazy people who want to go back to living like rabbits. For him, it was bizarre.
He had my full sympathy. I did try to gently suggest that there was the bigger picture to be considered, re climate change, etc., but although he’d listen, it was impossible to make any real progress. His son had become a millionaire, as a welder on oil platforms, now employing 800 people as a subcontractor. He wouldn’t hear of anything that faulted the oil industry. If only only could be found here, for him, that would be a miracle come true.
Like Kuhn said, re paradigm shifts, they have to wait for a generation to die. Unfortunately, sometimes that’s a luxury we cannot afford, the physics doesn’t care about our views and opinions.
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So true ulvfugl. Most people believe what they believe and simply cannot jump ship to some new idea, especially one that says things are, essentially, hopeless.
I haven’t convinced anybody of what I know, and I have lots of facts to support my position. And, of course, how can one compete with a global media system deadlocked in a position that says global warming is unproven science and simply in a confused state?
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