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Alice Friedemann, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Economic Collapse, Gross Inequality, Peak Oil, Social Unrest, The Energy Skeptic
I was talking to investigative journalist and energy expert Alice Friedemann via email about some of the topics we deal with here and she has formulated her thoughts in a post on her indispensable website ‘The Energy Skeptic‘. I’m reblogging it here because it really gives you an idea of the embodied energy within our massively built up civilization and what is required to maintain it. Add the destruction that climate chaos will bring along with the ever-growing wealth disparity around the world and it becomes clear that our current way of life, and perhaps our species, is not going to be around for much longer.
Cascading failure + Liebig’s Law + Supply Chain Breakdown = Collapse of civilization
Declining supplies of high-quality, easy-to-get fossil fuels with no alternatives ready to replace them (ever) is the #1 issue, because with oil all problems can be solved until its use depletes every other resource. But meanwhile it’s a fountain of life, a pill that cures all diseases, allowing the destruction of the most remote rainforests, depletion of all schools of fish, and even the growing of food without soil on rocks with enough fertilizer.
The #2 issue is that all of our infrastructure was built when energy was extremely cheap and plentiful, with an EROI of 100:1. Now the EROI of some oil is down to as little as 10:1, and at best 30:1. So we don’t have enough fossil fuels left to replace and often maintain our infrastructure:
Concrete. Roads, bridges, buildings, airports, and anything else made of cement is not going to last — a century from now concrete will be nothing but rubble.
Oil & Natural Gas pipelines. The 2.6 million miles of oil and natural gas pipelines are rusting apart. According to the PHMSA, “Pipelines deliver trillions of cubic feet of natural gas and hundreds of billions of tons of liquid petroleum products every year. They are essential: the volumes of energy products they move are well beyond the capacity of other forms of transportation. It would take a constant line of tanker trucks, about 750 per day, loading up and moving out every two minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to move the volume of even a modest pipeline. The railroad-equivalent of this single pipeline would be a train of 75 2,000-barrel tank rail cars everyday.” (U.S. Dept of transportation pipeline & Hazardous materials Safety Admin).
Coal. Just like oil, coal has peaked, and the easiest to get at and highest energy coal has already been mined. We’re probably past the “peak energy” of coal, and the dregs are low quality or too remote to mine. How are you going to transport this remaining coal if the roads and bridges have crumbled? Even if there were still viable oil or gas pipelines left that happened to be near a coal mine, you’d use up most of the energy in the coal to liquefy it and move it by pipeline. The clock is ticking on coal mining.
Electric grid: It’s rusting and unprotected from cyberattacks. In addition, due to deregulation, it’s falling apart and not being maintained properly — it used to be triple-plated (a failure in one part still left two other intact components for electricity to flow through and buffer the grid from failure), now it’s barely single-planted. See my Electric Grid Overview for details.
The #3 issue is that supply chain failure from financial collapse, wars, and social unrest will make maintenance of the existing complex system impossible in some places, and since the world is so inter-dependent, and there are single points of (supply-chain) failure, that will affect even stable, peaceful nations. Key and essential products absolutely essential to operating today’s complex society will stop being made — forever — because microchips and other specialized tools and vehicles will require fossil fuel energy, materials, infrastructure, and knowledge that won’t be available when the world emerges from the first collapse. Read the rest…
And my laptop is about to go out. The battery is not charging even though I have the recharger plugged in to a wall socket. 17% capacity left before I blink out. I’m out in the middle of nowhere right now and won’t be able to get this fixed till Friday.
16%… Goodbye for now.
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‘Declining supplies of high-quality, easy-to-get fossil fuels with no alternatives ready to replace them (ever) is the #1 issue, because with oil all problems can be solved until its use depletes every other resource.’
????? WTF!
How does burning oil ‘solve’ escalating CO2 emissions?
How does burning oil ‘solve’ ocean acidification?
How does burning oil ‘solve’ the problem of dependence on oil to produce and distribute food?
The #1 issue is abrupt climate change.
Every day that mass combustion of fossil fuels continues brings closer the day the Earth overheats.
Interestingly, I have just watched a documentary on the extinction of Neanderthal humans. It was abrupt climate change that terminated the species because, although they were well evolved to survive glacial conditions, they were maladapted for savannah conditions that followed deglaciation.
I do agree with Alice with respect to the breakdown of complex systems.
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(back up to 42% now :))
The key wording there is “until its use depletes every other resource.” The externalities of fossil fuels, when accounted for, mean that we are depleting a stable climate, depleting the ocean’s habitability, and ‘extincting’ the entire planet.
As Alice sardonically states…
“But meanwhile it’s a fountain of life, a pill that cures all diseases, allowing the destruction of the most remote rainforests, depletion of all schools of fish, and even the growing of food without soil on rocks with enough fertilizer.“
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That’s a fairly perverse use of the word depletion, i.e. increase in level of pollution = depletion of unpollutedness.
‘But meanwhile it’s a fountain of life,’
I think of oil as a ‘fountain of death’. Anything or anyone who gets near it gets contaminated and their quality of life falls. Otherwise known as: where there’s oil there’s trouble.
I guess it’s all in the perception.
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For Industrial Civilization, fossil fuels are life. Nobody ever said the current mode of living for humans was conducive to Earth’s web of life.
There’s a lot about our current mode of living that is “perverse”, but 99% of the population does not see it that way.
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Independent UK today:
‘Half of all seven-year-olds in the UK are not exercising enough to stay healthy – remaining inactive for between six and seven hours every day, a major study has revealed.
The researchers, who surveyed 7,000 children between May 2008 and August 2009, also found a “striking” gender gap, with girls far less active than boys. Only four in 10 girls achieved minimum recommended activity levels of an hour or more a day, compared with 63 per cent of boys.
The findings, in research published in the BMJ Open journal, come a day after official figures showed the Olympic legacy may have had a negligible impact on the activity levels of young children.
Despite hopes that the Olympic and Paralympic Games would “inspire a generation” to take up sport, a survey of 2,000 children by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport found that just under half of five- to 10-year-olds had not been encouraged to take up a sport because of the Olympics and, of those who did, only around a third said they had been encouraged “a lot”.
Professor Carol Dezateux, of the University College London Institute of Child Health, a senior author of the BMJ study, said that the gender differences in exercise levels were “striking” and called for policies to promote more exercise among girls, including dancing, playground activities, and ball games.
“The results of our study… strongly suggest that contemporary UK children are insufficiently active, implying that effort is needed to boost [physical activity] among young people to the level appropriate for good health,” the authors of the study write.
Population-wide interventions would be needed, they said, including policies to make it easier for children to walk to school, in a bid to increase physical activity.’
When I grew up 99% of children walked to primary school, and spent evenings, weekends and holidays running around. Obesity was almost unknown.
Television and cars, and the change in the nature of society have been ‘killing’ younger generations, and it has been getting worse by the decade.
Of course, baseline shift makes obesity, lethargy, and all the medical complications they induce, the new norm.
We keep scanning for signs of the impending financial-economic implosion, yet somehow what Kunstler described as a society of pole dancers and waiters held together by financial fraud keeps kicking the can down the road.
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A powerful piece.
Yet those of us who know what’s going on are merely damaging our heads on walls.
Trying to broach this subject with a friend recently—his response was a blank: “you seem to think energy is important”
At that one tends to give up
The only missing piece of our jigsaw in the above article was health: http://www.endofmore.com/?p=578
Our entire medical infrastructure is supported by fossil fuel input. Without the ‘factory’ backup, your doctor may know what ails you but will have no more means to cure you than his medieval counterpart.
This is the bit of ‘downsizing’ that no one dare admit to. We think we have defeated disease, but in fact the little critters that make us all sick have merely been on a 100 year vacation to regroup and mutate themselves into newer and more deadly forms.
what we have done is clear out their weaker brethren, leaving vast new spaces for the stronger ones to recolonise. Those vast new spaces are us, in case you were wondering
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Working in the medical field, I realize this and it gives me the chills.
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Really, as bad as oil and coal have been, they are just accelerants in the destruction of the biosphere. Civilization was already on its way toward terracide before the fossil fuel age. I think the single worst object man ever came up with was the plow, but there are others. It would be interesting to figure just how long it would take for a fossil-fuel-less civilization to get to where we are in pollution and resource depletion……probably several more hundred years.
But think of how quickly deforestation was already happening before 1850, all over the world. Depletion of soils had been going on for 10,000 years. Slavery provided much of the energy requirements back then, along with wood, and draft animals (another form of slavery). Population continued to grow and grow. It was not an idyllic time. It was not going to end in a pretty way.
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A “fossil-fuel-less civilization” would take a hell of a lot longer than a few hundred years to deplete resources. Essentially, it would never be able to deplete resources on a global scale as we are currently doing, and the human population would be a minute fraction of what it is today. See the comment by ‘End of More’.
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Europe in the 14th century was on the brink of being unable to feed its people. It was only the discovery of, essentially, another unused world that saved Europe, and then the rape and pillage of the New World began. By even the 17th century Europeans were roaming all over the Americas extracting tin and silver and gold and removing the forests, destroying the soils. And because of this new pristine wealth, population was exploding here, there and everywhere, meaning lots more unsustainable use of forests and soil.
Only fossil fuels would have caused global warming, but mankind was on a roll in abusing the earth, using resources in an unsustainable way, over populating, and increasingly using new technology to rape the earth in more efficient ways.
Competition for resources has been the driving force for man since agriculture began. I don’t think many realize how destructive agriculture is, and the empire culture that inevitably comes about from the competition of agricultural societies. It allows population to soar, ruins every ecosystem, sustains armies to conquer new areas to destroy with the plow. It is unrelenting. It may not have changed the climate, but the world would have soon, within maybe a couple hundred years from now, become a place of horror.
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I agree. The mere fact that humans left Africa and eventually colonized virtually every continent and island would seem sufficient indication that we never lived “sustainably”, ever, anywhere. If there was plenty of food and everyone was getting along, why would people risk death and set off on migrations over harsh land and sea to unknown perils?
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Your would have to read “The End of More’ to understand.
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From the book ‘The End of More’:
“Two centuries of intensive fossil fuel use have driven advances in agriculture, science and medicine that have given the world’s population greater opportunities for survival and wellbeing than ever before, although only a small proportion of people have access to them. Prior to that, nature’s checks and balances kept population growth at a relatively stable and sustainable level that is unlikely to have exceeded 500 million by 1,500ce, the end of the medieval period . Population numbers remained within the carrying capacity of their immediate environment, in other words , the number of people who could be supported matched available resources. The forces of nature killed off any attempt to exceed these limits.“
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People emigrated and colonized every nook and cranny they could. The fact that we are over seven billion now and adding over 200,000 per day fits the exponential function. Population numbers did not remain within the carrying capacity of their immediate environment, as stated. If they had we would all still be in Africa.
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I thought it was clear that fossil fuels powered the overpopulation boom.
“Energy – especially fossil energy – has driven resource extraction, the construction of human habitat, and food production, all of which have created the necessary physical conditions for population growth.”
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Famine and plagues kept the population in check…
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PF Getty said:
“I don’t think many realize how destructive agriculture is, and the empire culture that inevitably comes about from the competition of agricultural societies.”
————
Agriculture goes back much further than the often quoted “10,000 years ago”, as recent findings have revealed:
http://phys.org/news/2012-03-foraging-farming-year-revolution.html
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2 comments.
1. Mike, you said: “… Add the destruction that climate chaos will bring along …”. This imho is not the most efficient, nor most correct, way to state this factor. I’d rather say the same thing with a statement similar to this one: “add the destruction that climate chaos increasingly brings along – there is already much of it, yet even more will be happening in observable future”. The key difference is to let reader know about both future, but equally also about present destruction from climate chaos. If space allows, recent or present example of such destruction is also very good to give – something like http://en.ria.ru/russia/20130822/182896604.html , which happens right now, and is an absolutely devastating flood out there; water is already more than 0,5 meters higher than it EVER was during 100+ years of observation, – and it is projected to get 1+ meters higher than it ever was, during next few days. Very approximate estimates of damages caused up to date are already about money equivalent of billions of dollars, and this will very likely increease, possibly many-fold, as catastrophe still intensifies there ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_China%E2%80%93Russia_floods ). So you see, the destruction that climate chaos brings alone – it’s not in the future. It’s already here, and the scale is already large – i am positive you know about many other _unprecedentally_ destructive climate/weather events of last couple years. Thus it’s already a serious factor to how things go on, one which people need to know about. Because it seems noone can predict where something really deadly happens next, and when. Here in Moscow, during last few years, we had unprecedentally strong rains, temporary flooding parts of Moscow; famous heat wave of summer 2010, killing tenths of thousands, and causing billions in damage to businesses and health; “icy” rains during winter – events which not even most old people never saw before, – causing large damage to electric grids in the region by the ice forming on electric lines, and breaking bones of thousands of people – that’s how many were all those naive/unlucky/clumsy enough to trip off while walking on all that extremely slippery ice formed after ice rains.
2. While i agree with much, if not with all, of what is said in your article here about factors and drivers of collapse of modern industries and civilization, – i also must add that analysis presented suffers from one serious flaw: namely, it’s ine-sided. Indeed, there are many other facts and processes which are “on the other side” – i.e., one which reinforce and prolong grlobal industrial civilization. Without doubt, you’d have to agree with at least few of such must exist – if only by a mere coincedence. Why those are not analyzed along with factors which accelerate / cause the collapse?
I’ll name few things which i consider being evry significant forces which prolong / reinforce presently existing industrial civilization, through prolonging / reinforcing functional parts of said civilization (such as infrastructure). Without further details, i’ll just name a few:
– greed;
– needs;
– debts;
– laws;
– feeling personal responsibility and honoring the duty of not causing catastrophic failues for other people;
– good science;
– political will (real political will i mean – not the circus fed to public in mass media; i mean political will of powers that be – quite few individuals and institutions who have very practical goals, such as, for example, national security and sovereignty some few countries still put very large resources and money to achieve or improve).
Without those and other factors of stability and resilience, global industrial civilization would already be in ruins. It’s not. For good or ill, there are quite many capable and willing humans who maintain it despite major damages, so far.
The question of how and when civilization would collapse can only be answered if both sorts of factors, – both destructive and supportive, – are taken into one’s consideration together, side by side.
I am not the most competent person to attempt such an answer, but i have a whisper of my intuition. It says – middle 2030s will be the big end of GIC. How right or wrong my intuition is on this subject, i do not know, of course; but i know my intuition us generally correct in majority of cases. Anyhows, we’ll see.
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“the #1 issue,” is overpopulation. All of the problems we face today is because of population and the need for huge masses of people using resources we are running out of because of over population.
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Pingback: Cascading failure + Liebig’s Law + Supply Chain Breakdown = Collapse of civilization
Just got a message from Alice and thought I’d post it while on my lunch break. Will say more when I get the time.
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‘Peak oil, coal and natural gas will save us’.
It would be comforting if this were true but the evidence is stacked against it..
As the reserves of easily extracted oil, coal and natural gas have deplete there has been a trend towards utilising fossil fuels with ever lower EROEI; this results in increased CO2 emissions per unit of energy extracted. There are huge quantities of low quality fossil fuels yet to be extracted, and the worse the energy predicament becomes, the greater the incentive to extract them.
I think we have already witnessed the extension of the life for industrial civilisation that has come about as a result of going after everything -deep-water oil and gas,, fracking, tar sands etc.- and there is every indication that TPTB will ram through laws that ensure every last scrap is made available to the extractors, whatever the environmental consequences. And anyone who poses a significant threat to the industrial-financial-military complex will be annihilated.
Six or eight years ago emeritus professor Guy McPherson was optimistic that collapse of Industrial Civilisation would preserve some of the living planet. More recently he has reverted to the position he held a decade or so ago, that the use of fossil fuels will ruin everything.
The big questions are:
Have we reached global geochemical tipping points?
What are we doing to prevent catastrophe?
The answers are:
We don’t know for sure that we have passed tipping points but we probably have.
Humanity is doing nothing whatsoever [collectively] to prevent catastrophe. Indeed, humanity is doing almost everything possible to bring forward catastrophe.
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It’s too late to do things to prevent catastrophe. Long-term, our CO2 corresponds to nearly +6C above pre-industrial, if to look into paleo records of temperature and CO2. Methane has tripled since pre-industrial, – and huge methane hydrate deposits in Arctic are already destabilized, showing unprecedented increase of methane emissions into the athmosphere since ~2010. Planet has already warmed up nearly 1,0C in compare to pre-industrial. It will get well beyond 2C in a few decades, as clathrates in Arctic start to do nearly gt-scale outgassing annually, and thermal inertia of the ocean is gradually overpowered by radiative forcing of greenhouse gases (process which takes a few decades). Even spraying aluminium oxides, which is perhaps already happening on a scale of some couple millions tons every year (my means of jet fuel additives which contain chemicals which are transformed into Al2O3 during fuel combustion in jet engines) – and which might well be responsible for temporary slowing of temperature rise during 2000s, – even this is just a little delay of the inevitable; at best, jet planes on a scale possible today will be flying for some 2-3 more decades, and then, peak oil, economics in convulsions, increasing heat content of the oceans causing further climate chaos and destruction. Aerosols settle down in some 1..3 years. Once much/all of spraying stops, and once coal power plants, diesels, industrial turbines also stop – most of the dirt, soot and intentional dimming agents up there made by these will be gone in 1…3 years. But CO2 won’t be gone – it stays around for centuries. Melting Arctic clathrates of shallow continental shelves won’t be gone – they’ll keep outgassing methane for at least a few century, as there are thousands of gigatons of them in polar regions, and that takes a long time for most of those to melt and release the methane.
It’s too late to prevent catastrophe.
But it’s still not too late to do whatever we can to prepare for it, to give our sons and grandsons some working tools, technologies, methods which would be possible to maintain / replace within some local community. It’s not too late to study where and how mankind went as wrong as to destroy (at least) majority of its own life-support systems. It’s not too late to try and invent a social system which would be able to enable humans to live without hurting their environment, but instead reinforcing it. It’s not too late to save important knowledge on sturdy, resilient, non-electronic mediums for our kids and grandkids to refer to when all things electronic will start to fail – and no new ones would be possible to make. It’s not too late to put more effort in preserving and guarding (from ourselves!) at least some, if few, natural ecosystems and regions – i applaud doubling of global area of national parks and reserves which happened relatively recently.
But to put efforts to prevent it – is a waste of time and effort. Especially considering the fact that majority of mankind do not give a damn about it, and that many of powers that be – corporations, governments, – are so powerful and so willing to be ruthless, manipulative, corrupting, controlling whenever they see someone / something as a threat. To anyone who wants to make any real difference, i’d say: don’t try to change everyone around, don’t try to change corporations, don’t try to change governments – it’s a losing game. Instead, find those few who think like you do (it might be difficult, but do it!), and do what little mammals did when dinosaurs were ruling the Earth: run away, hide well, prepare for harsh future, make some reserves – very well hidden, with that!, – and, if at all possible, find ways to be useful to powers that be, too – even cooperate with them, whenever possible.
In a way, many people who read things here – are like prisoners in a strange Nazi death camp; not usual one, but one where for 1 prisoner there are many hundreds, possibly thousands, guards. However, ALL thoes guards are terminally ill, but they don’t know it – yet prisoners know it. This is our situation. We are prisoners, in a way, of existing industrial systems. We know those systems, along with majority of mankind – those who are sticking to all the goods of the system, – are terminally ill; they will die in observable future, through deteriorating environments to below-minimum-support levels (life-support or tech-support, or both). So you see, if we are such prisoners, and we know guards will relatively soon all die, – what we do?
– Do we attempt to fight them? Sure not. We’re outnumberred and outgunned. Besides, guards have guns, and fences, and towers – while we do not (i.e., like grass roots movements vs tried and true supression and civil unrest mitigation structures of governments, vs tried and true special services and intel).
– Do we attempt to escape the camp? Hell yes, we do! If there is a hole in a fence and noone’s looking, we bette get away from that place, and to run as far as possible; because, once guards would start to die in numbers, – chaos and panics and anger will be plenty, and in the process of their own conflicts, some of those guards may well kill many of us prisoners of the camp (current industrial system).
– But, do we attempt to cure the terminal illness of all (or at least, many of) those guards in order to PREVENT their deaths? Do we attempt to prevent the disaster and to continue to do in fact MISERABLE existance within the camp (system)? And, do we attempt to cure those guards DESPITE our knowledge that it’s too late to do so anyways, because tissue damage to some of their vital life-support organs is so great that all those guards simply do not have enough to remain alive for much longer, so it’s just a matter of time they die anyways?
I say, if we do, then we are idiots, and should not be surprised if nature does what it does to most idiotic species: flush out to extinction.
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It’s like screaming tsunami at the Full Moon Party on Koh Phangan in Thailand. Everyone’s in a psychedelic state of mind and the warning is beyond meaningful comprehension. The lunatics continue partying until the moment the warm water blindsides them in the full light of the moon.
There’s no longer time to remove people from the beach, they’re wasted out of their minds. Save whatever amount of wealth and energy you may have to save yourself and loved ones, and as Tnioli says, keep it hidden, desperate people do desperate things, including killing you and your family to get whatever you might have.
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Sending Earth to Venusian levels is impossible in any case, though. Physically. Ones of known and countless times confirmed in practice laws establish a simple fact: a hot body (in our case, Earth) radiates heat to nearby cooler environment (in our case, near-Earth space) in amount proportional to 4th power of temperature difference.
This is calculated in Kelvins, so on a scale of few degrees celcius effects of this are relatively small, but the larger warming becomes, the more powerful it gets. This is massive negative feedback to any large-scale warming. Venus is only able to remain as hot as it is (~470C average surface) because it’s 1,5 times closer to the sun – means Venus gets 1,5^2=2,25 times more Sun’s energy per square meter than Earth.
Another major thing is that Earth has much higher gravity than Venus, which means hydrogen gets away from Earth MUCH slower than it gets away from Venus. What we see on Venus is only possible with relatively very little hydrogen around (read – no water). Earth is still massively abundant with water. Then there are some other factors in our favor also present. So in absolutely worst physically possible case (no nearby supernovae or alike killer, though!), it’ll take hundreds of millions of years for Earth to lose much of now present hydrogen (and thus, water). Hansen himself explains more: http://junkscience.com/2013/04/16/hansen-debunks-al-gores-venus-scenario-for-warming-only-plausible-on-billion-year-time-scale/ .
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According to Hansen we have plenty of fossil fuels to push us to runaway warming if we choose to burn them. I think a very good case can be made that when the amplifying feedbacks are factored in (which they never are) we have ALREADY condemned earth to runaway warming.
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Probability of runaway warming even if all, or mostly all, burning of fossil fuels stops tomorrow, is close to 100% indeed. Global dimming off, then give it few decades for main part of thermal inertia of oceans to be overpowered by increased greenhouse without man-made dimming present, and we’re at least +3 above pre-industrial. At least. Which means positive feedbacks such as less-albedo-means-more-warming-means-even-less-albedo-and-so-on – get on big time, and there we go, runaway.
Runaway does not mean Venus-like, though. It won’t be Venus-like, as i tried to explain above. Yet, even “modest” 6…10 degrees C of global mean surface warming is definitely catastrohpic.
By the way, xraymike79, i don’t remember “Earth 2100” documentary among videos in the right column of your blog. I think it definitely deserves a spot there. Here it is on youtube, in HD. Excellent work. Some good scientists.
One of practical uncertainties, perhaps the main one, is global nuclear exchange. If massive enough to trigger long enough nuclear winter, it may form so much ice all around the globe that there would be a change for a new, “strange”, equilibrium to form up: high CO2 (remains for centuries) providing extra warming, but high ice cover (comparable or higher to ice ages) providing extra albedo, and thus, cooling. It’s even worse than runaway warming, though, because if it’d be that huge ice cover to be able to compensate for man-made extra greenhouse, then as time goes on, in a few centuries, CO2 levels would inevitably drop, means extra warming would gradually give up – making Earth to become colder and colder still. Ice age like never before.
Of course, nuclear exchange of this proportions, – we probably talk thousands megatons near-surface, – and following nuclear multi-year winter would be even more disastrous than runaway warming, though. So i mention it only to explain why i said “close to 100%” and not simply “100%” in the 1st paragraph.
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China and Japan present fascinating examples of a civilisation gone wrong.
I am no expert on China but I believe it had its origins around 4,000 years ago and established semi-sustainable practices that persisted until the British and Americans arrived in the nineteenth century with fossil fuel powered gunboats. Without the interference of Europeans and Americans, the Chinese civilisation may have persisted for many more centuries.
As it is, China has adopted most of the unsustainable, self-destructive practices of the west, and it now headed straight towards catastrophe. Yet how could it have been otherwise?
As I understand it, the Japanese civilisation is around 2,500 years old. For centuries it was in conflict with its Chinese and Korean neighbours. Yet it was largely sustainable and self-sufficient, even when it cut itself off almost completely from trade. The Portuguese and Dutch attempted to open it up with no success. 30 million people provided for themselves for centuries. Again, it was the British and the Americans who upset the stable arrangements and put Japan on course for catastrophe.
Having peaked early, Japan is now well on the way to becoming the first major basket case of the industrialised world.
As with China, had Japan not been ‘opened up’ (and had the rest of the world not stripped the oceans and put the Earth’s geochemistry out of balance), Japan’s civilisation may have persisted for many more centuries.
Having been born in England, I am saddened to witness it progressively being converted into Orwell’s Airstrip One.
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I don’t think it matters who opened the Jenie’s lamp, though. One or other regional civilization would do it anyways, perhaps a bit later, if UK folks wouldn’t do.
After all, all those civilizations in Asia, – China and Japan included, – could easily decide to stay non-fossil-fuel ones. Indeed, it’d be as easy as farmers simply preferring to stay how they were. But of course, fossil fuels are so much convinient and appealing, very few, if any, could resist. Fossil fuels “infected” regional civilizations worldwide not because UK and/or US people were forcing FF-based technologies (even if they did – it was a secondary factor); FFs infested the world because humans around the world DID want to get things done easier and/or faster and/or in higher amounts. Chinese people and japanese people – most of them at least, – were and are no exception.
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Can’t say I know an awful lot about premodern China, but many years ago I read about the destruction of huge swaths of China that took place many centuries ago…….forested, beautiful ecosystems were traded for agriculture, and soon erosion and depletion of nutrients left the area unfarmable. The people moved on, and to this day those areas are rocky wastelands incapable of sustaining anything.
With or without FF, the plow would have eventually decimated every ecosystem on earth that could possibly produce a few crops. With FF it is going much more quickly, of course, and global warming will destroy even unplowable areas of the globe.
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No reason to even dream about us making big moves to decrease carbon and climate change:
“While the Obama administration presses forward with plans to deal with climate change, Congress remains steadfast against taking action. It’s not easy to find a scientist who will agree with that point of view. But Republicans have found an ally in a climate scientist by the name of Judith Curry.
Curry actually entered the public eye in 2005, with a paper in Science magazine warning that hurricanes were likely to become more intense as a result of climate change. But in the years since then, she’s soured on the scientific consensus about climate change. Her mantra now is, “We just don’t know.””
http://www.npr.org/2013/08/22/213894792/uncertain-science-judith-currys-take-on-climate-change
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“In the latest setback of the spiraling crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, operator TEPCO announced on Thursday that it had discovered radiation hotspots near contaminated water storage tanks, while a nuclear expert warns that the disaster may even be “much worse” than has been claimed.”
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/08/22-8
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“…A Texas-sized bonanza! Extracting oil and gas from the Permian Basin, indeed, is now like wringing a sponge, only the sponge never seems to go dry. Residents of Barnhart, for example, a tiny Texas town southwest of San Angelo along the northern edge of the arid Edwards Plateau, have witnessed the fracking boom from their own front porches. Views once full of mesquite and acacia trees are now dominated by oil derricks and the infrastructure of fracking: massive water and fracking fluid tanks, huge pumps and trucks filling the roads and ferrying materials and chemicals. But it’s not just the views that have changed. Over the past year, residents have begun to notice weak water pressure, increased sand accumulation in toilets and sinks and, most recently, wells going dry everywhere. In an arid climate and in the middle of a historic drought, they’re trading water for oil…”
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“…Petrunova believes the ring would have been worn on the pinkie finger of a man’s right hand.
The hole would have allowed its wearer to sneakily pour poison into a glass with the flick of his finger, the archaeologist said in a statement from Bulgaira’s Kavarna municipality.
Petrunova thinks the ring could be linked to Dobrotitsa, a noble who ruled the region in second half of the 14th century.
“This explains many of the unexplained deaths among nobles and aristocrats close to Dobrotitsa,” local officials in Kavarna said…”
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Earth Overshoot Day was this past Tuesday…
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Iodine he’s talking about indeed does cause that cancer. Lots of that cancer happened after Chernobil. Good news are, this particular Iodine isotope (i forgot the number), which is radioactive and which is continuosly forming up in working nuclear reactor, has a half-life time of ~8 days, IIRC. This means, if there is any outburst of it, and initially (for example) there is a total of 1 ton of that iodine out, then merely by its own radioactive decay, the amount of this isotope after 1 month will be 1/16 tons ( = 62,5kg), after 3 months it’ll be 0,41 kg of it remaining ( = 410 gramms), and after a single year, there will be 0,0000000184 grams of it. That’s merely by its own completely self-driven isotopic decay – even before any consideration about how much of it gets buried and taken into far ocean during that year. So, you see, it is only practically dangerous during couple months after reactor leak.
Spent fuel rods give out relatively very low (in compare to working reactor) levels of fission, which continuosly generates relatively very low amounts of that radioactive iodine isotope. Once that iodine is far from any fission matherials, though – such as when it leaks out, – there is no more intense radiation to maintain that iodine radioactivity; natural decay literally removes most of it from environment in a matter of couple weeks, and practically all of it in a matter of couple months.
The short decay time of this iodine is good in terms of less long-term pollution, but it’s bad in term of intensivity of radiation this isotope produces (per unit of its mass). Basically, for any radioactive isotope, the shorter is its decay time, the deadlier the thing is (in terms of ionizing radioactivity at least – no chemical properties considered).
For readers who are not familiar with decay of radioactive isotopes, i heartily recommend to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay . For further details about the isotope i as well as the guy in the video spoke about, one can read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131 .
As for Cesium-137, yes, this is much more dangerous, yes, lots of it went out and even many times more is still sitting there in fuel rods and ponds, yes, at worst (say, another major earthquake in the area), it could be some ~80 times larger cesium-137 emission than what happened in Chernobil, and yes, cesium-137 is one major long-term radioactivity builder – it’s decay time of ~30 years is long enough to keep causing trouble even a century after its emission, while in the same time being short enough to ensure that this matherial emits fairly dangerous amount of radiation per unit of its mass. Suffice to say that nowadays, most areas which are still dangerous to enter in and around Chernobil – are only dangerous because of large amount of cesium-137 present.
However, in Fukushima case, at least so far, vast majority of cesium-137 ended up in the ocean. Cesium-137 sinks very well, and IIRC, currents near Fukushima are generally going into open, far ocean.
But even if _all_ of that cesium would end up in the athmosphere, – it wouldn’t be a threat to existance of humans world-wide. Yes, it’s ~80 times more than what world got from Chernobil – but, in the same time, it’s only half of total Cesium-137 emount mankind have put into the athmosphere up to date (total is combined cesium-137 so far emitted by Chernobil plus all the athmospheric nuclear weapons tests plus all the cesium-137 emissions of nuclear fuel reprocesasing plants).
So, even cesium-137, which in fact is the main danger there at Fukushima, is often over-reported. Would it be massive? Yes. Would it likely render much of Japan abandoned? Quite possible. But, would it bring life-threatening amount of radioactivity to most of the world? Nope. It’s just a half of cesium we already HAD. Rather quietly, with that. And we don’t see millions dying out of radiation sickness, do we. So, 50% more, if instant emission, could kill several millions in most unfortunate case, but definitely it’d still be a scratch as far as 7+ human population is considered.
Meltdown of and emissions from many dozens, possibly few hundreds nuclear power plants, which is likely to happen after GIC collapse, is quite the danger. That’s why i write repeatedly about the need to aim for locations of post-collapse local lower-tech civilization “oases” which are as far from nuclear power plants and fuel storages as at all possible. Distance, time, large bodies of water and especially high elevation – are one’s best friends post-collapse, that’s for sure.
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As well as being the Age of Denial it is the Age of Consequences
We are living in the period in history when multiple follies of humanity’s past seriously erode our capacity to live well as individuals, and erode the ability to maintain collective arrangements.
Needless to say, the longer the denial continues, the worse the consequences become.
Therefore, we are also living in the Age of Stupid
.
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I think you had mentioned or requested this documentary. I’ve added it to my list of films.
Here it is…
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Yes, that’s it.
‘This is a film that demands action…’
Many years have passed, and what action has there been?
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Quite possibly it’s been alot of action Kevin. Thing is, any serious action can’t be made known to public. This is really obvious to me.
Say, you’re Titanic captain. Unlike real case, though, you KNOW that quite soon (say, in some few days), the ship will go down. And also unlike real case, you KNOW that you have lifeboats for not some ~40% of passengers, but for less than 0,5% of passengers.
So those are our circumstances at the moment.
So, you’re that captain. You, Kevin. Would YOU just sit back and wait? Nope. You’d do alot of action. But, will majority of passengers KNOW about what you’re doing?
Again, you have lifeboats for less than 0,5%. Oh, and unlike real Titanic, you can’t call for help whatsoever. Nobody’s out there to bring you more lifeboats or send another ship to pick up your crew and passengers.
So WHAT exactly you would be doing?
Perhaps, you’d see to make more lifeboats with what scarce resources you have (and may be they do – mount Yamantau and alike). Perhaps, you’d see to ensure that among those relatively few that will end up in lifeboats, there would be enough experienced sailors, and enough good-willed man to ensure order, possibly a doctor, etc. And may be they do – what with recent massive screening for potential candidates for one-way trip to Mars, i heard many many thousands were interviewed, dozens thousands; while manned flight to Mars, least base on it, is still technologically DECADES away (life support needed to keep humans alive to Mars is mindblowingly difficult problem). Perhaps you’d try to do some alterations to your Titanic, whatever relatively minor thing you and your crew could do, – if not to prevent, then at least to delay the sinking, in hope for a miracle if nothing else, or in hope to build just few more lifeboats before it goes down. And may be they do – read about aluminium oxide spraying, refer to US patent 5003186 in particular, issued 1991 IIRC.
But. Would you do those things, or any other things you’d try to do, openly? Would you let majority of passengers to know that your Titanic will very certainly sink in a couple days, give or take a few, – and there can be no help from outside, with that?
If you a psycho who like to see people suffer, and who do not care about _anyone_’s survival, – then most surely you’d let everybody know, and enjoy the panic, hostilities, “circus” aboard. In mostly any other case, you wouldn’t let passengers (the public) know. 1st, it puts them into emotional suffering (it ain’t pleasant to know one is doomed to relatively soon unnatural death from which there is no salvation). 2nd, letting passengers (public) know about imminent catastrophe, among other things, produces one very undesirable effect: a run to lifeboats. Massive run. Fights for lifeboats. Fights for single sits in lifeboats. Overloading. destruction of lifeboats by those who failed to secure themselves a seat – some few guys in any big crows are always like “if i am going down, then, hell, they ALL go down with me!!!”.
So, i’ll repeat my 1st words again now: quite possibly it’s been alot of action Kevin. Thing is, any serious action can’t be made known to public.
But now i would add: and let’s pray we wouldn’t become aware about this sort of action. Because if we and majority of world population would become aware, then it most likely would mean that it failed.
You dig?
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F.T.
If I were the captain of the Titanic I would not be spending my time smashing up every lifeboat to make sure that not one person survives. I would not be tossing every life preserver overboard. I would not have the engines set on full speed ahead.
The global elites are smashing up lifeboats and have set course to hit the iceberg as quickly as possible. That is why I regard them as completely insane.
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@F.Tnioli
Philosopher Zygmunt Bauman explains why most of us are afraid to acknowledge that no one is in control of our teetering civilization.
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@ Kevin,
Humans have done stuff like this….
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Some good work here :
Climate models don’t include many potentially important components – feedbacks, in particular – but also a handful of other issues and limitations. So just how important are these feedbacks? After reviewing the latest research, I’ve arrived at a new set of climate estimations based on the current climate models, but including key feedbacks like permafrost carbon. The results are stark. Many people may find these results sickening and I encourage careful deliberation before sharing these findings with others who are not deeply tuned-in to the latest climate science.
http://www.fairfaxclimatewatch.com/blog/2013/02/what-the-models-dont-show.html
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‘One explanation for the lack of concern is an incorrect perception, based around the belief that a linear relationship between input and output will continue. Looking at past climate demonstrates such a presumption is substantially and patently false.’
Even before we consider positive feedbacks, it is abundantly clear that linear relationships do not apply.
Take the CO2 content of the atmosphere; that has been increasing in a non-linear manner (more than exponential) for many decades.
Consider the relationship between saturated water vapour pressure and temperature; that is clearly non-linear (vapour pressure increases rapidly with increasing temperature).
The Earth has a great tendency to occupy one or the other of two ‘climate troughs’: very warm or very cold.
The more I see of ‘decision-makers’ the more convinced I am that they are utterly clueless about practically everything, including finance and economics that they claim to particularly understand.
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The following will likely sound close-to, or even beyond-insane. If so, one of us needs a a reality check. If you’re easily bothered, you may not like what follows, but not knowing can be worse than knowing. So here we are, wondering about climate change. It is, without any doubt, a critical time of transition for the global climate. And it could be a rough ride.
To appease the folks who’re calling for “a safe 2 degree” climate limit, the scientists tell us that global emissions must now drop at a rate approaching 10% per year. At that rate, there would be massive economic losses. And consider how seriously people take their financial condition. In Egypt, the country is descending into violence because the citizens were tired of not getting their fair share of the economic pie. You can call it a fight for liberty if you want, but liberty from what – if not poverty or the threat of impoverishment?
Here’s your problem: if we cut global emissions by 10% per year, there’s a pretty solid chance a lot of people in your country, wherever you are on this planet, will have to go without power, both on an intermittent basis, and in the sense of losing the ability to use as much of it as usual. Power means gasoline, electricity, heating oil, and natural gas. These are all really central things to your life.
So let’s cut to the heart and call this what it is: we are spiraling into a state of environmental collapse up against a wall of economic and social collapse that both independently could translate to what seems insane, but isn’t: global or nearly-global collapse of civilization. This is serious.
Here’s what 10% cut in emissions per year would look like [if started in 2018], versus natural growth in demand for global energy and what percent below that normal demand the world would be at:
http://www.fairfaxclimatewatch.com/blog/2013/08/a-quick-and-clean-solution-to-the-climate-crisis-rationing.html
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As commenter Charles Zeller notes…
“Dr. Dressler did not mention the amplifying feedback of biologically sequestered carbon transforming into methane and CO2: methane hydrates, Siberian methane vents, Amazon drought, boreal forest peat decomposition, permafrost melt, forest fires, bog fires.”
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Timing a Rise in Sea Level
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“The only thing stronger than fear is hope.”
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Stonehenge rediscovered.
This provides a fascinating insights into purpose of megalithic rings that were constructed at a time of great transition, and interestingly, the idea of giving the people hope is explored.
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Another chapter in the sad tale of how Earth became a silent and depauperate world at the hands of modern man…
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http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/08/are-the-levels-of-fukushima-radiation-hitting-north-america-harmless.html
Low Level Radiation: Deadly … Or Harmless?
Posted on August 23, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog
Cutting through the Misinformation
In response to the news that mass quantities of highly-radioactive water are flowing from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean – and that the radioactivity is spreading to North America – the usual suspects are saying that that low-level radiation won’t hurt anyone.
Indeed, some are advocating intentionally dumping all of Fukushima’s radiation into the sea as a “safe” solution.
(And some folks are pretending that a little radiation is good for you.)
The truth is quite different.
Even Miniscule Amounts of Radiation Can Be Dangerous
A major 2012 scientific study proves that low-level radiation can cause huge health problems. Science Daily reports:
Even the very lowest levels of radiation are harmful to life, scientists have concluded in the Cambridge Philosophical Society’s journal Biological Reviews. Reporting the results of a wide-ranging analysis of 46 peer-reviewed studies published over the past 40 years, researchers from the University of South Carolina and the University of Paris-Sud found that variation in low-level, natural background radiation was found to have small, but highly statistically significant, negative effects on DNA as well as several measures of health.
The review is a meta-analysis of studies of locations around the globe …. “Pooling across multiple studies, in multiple areas, and in a rigorous statistical manner provides a tool to really get at these questions about low-level radiation.”
Mousseau and co-author Anders Møller of the University of Paris-Sud combed the scientific literature, examining more than 5,000 papers involving natural background radiation that were narrowed to 46 for quantitative comparison. The selected studies all examined both a control group and a more highly irradiated population and quantified the size of the radiation levels for each. Each paper also reported test statistics that allowed direct comparison between the studies.
The organisms studied included plants and animals, but had a large preponderance of human subjects. Each study examined one or more possible effects of radiation, such as DNA damage measured in the lab, prevalence of a disease such as Down’s Syndrome, or the sex ratio produced in offspring. For each effect, a statistical algorithm was used to generate a single value, the effect size, which could be compared across all the studies.
The scientists reported significant negative effects in a range of categories, including immunology, physiology, mutation and disease occurrence. The frequency of negative effects was beyond that of random chance.
***
“When you do the meta-analysis, you do see significant negative effects.”
“It also provides evidence that there is no threshold below which there are no effects of radiation,” he added. “A theory that has been batted around a lot over the last couple of decades is the idea that is there a threshold of exposure below which there are no negative consequences. These data provide fairly strong evidence that there is no threshold — radiation effects are measurable as far down as you can go, given the statistical power you have at hand.”
Mousseau hopes their results, which are consistent with the “linear-no-threshold” model for radiation effects, will better inform the debate about exposure risks. “With the levels of contamination that we have seen as a result of nuclear power plants, especially in the past, and even as a result of Chernobyl and Fukushima and related accidents, there’s an attempt in the industry to downplay the doses that the populations are getting, because maybe it’s only one or two times beyond what is thought to be the natural background level,” he said. “But they’re assuming the natural background levels are fine.”
“And the truth is, if we see effects at these low levels, then we have to be thinking differently about how we develop regulations for exposures, and especially intentional exposures to populations, like the emissions from nuclear power plants, medical procedures, and even some x-ray machines at airports.”
Physicians for Social Responsibility notes:
According to the National Academy of Sciences, there are no safe doses of radiation. Decades of research show clearly that any dose of radiation increases an individual’s risk for the development of cancer.
“There is no safe level of radionuclide exposure, whether from food, water or other sources. Period,” said Jeff Patterson, DO, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility. “Exposure to radionuclides, such as iodine-131 and cesium-137, increases the incidence of cancer. For this reason, every effort must be taken to minimize the radionuclide content in food and water.”
“Consuming food containing radionuclides is particularly dangerous. If an individual ingests or inhales a radioactive particle, it continues to irradiate the body as long as it remains radioactive and stays in the body,”said Alan H. Lockwood, MD, a member of the Board of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
***
Radiation can be concentrated many times in the food chain and any consumption adds to the cumulative risk of cancer and other diseases.
(there’s much more)
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Another horrible positive feedback:
http://www.climatecodered.org/2013/08/the-astounding-global-warming-impact-on.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ClimateCodeRed+%28climate+code+red%29
26 August 2013
The astounding global warming impact on our oceans that will reduce cloud cover and bring tears to your eyes
Ocean acidification will just not kill significant ocean ecosystems, but add even more to global warming
by David Spratt
Another significant global warming positive feedback that will add even more to future temperature rises has been identified by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. End result: Perhaps another half a degree of warming this century.
New research just published in Nature Climate by Katharine Six and her colleagues shows that as oceans become more acidic (by absorbing increasing volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to form carbonic acid), the amount of a compound called dimethylsulphide (DMS) in the ocean decreases.
More at above URL
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