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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, China, China's Massive Coal Consumption, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Greenhouse Extinction, Greenhouse Gases, Liquefied Natural Gas, Mass Die Off, Peak Oil, Peter D. Ward, Synthetic Natural Gas, Toxic Growndwater, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming - the Mass Extinctions of the Past - and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future, Water-Energy-Food Nexus
On my downtime right now and trying to recoup from doomer fatigue, but the following story simply reinforces my belief that industrial civilization will die at its own hands while taking the rest of the living planet with it in a manmade greenhouse extinction event. Capitalism gives humans the perverse incentive to value death and artificial wealth over life and nature’s wealth. Note to self – must read everything by Peter Ward.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
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Kevin Moore said:
“We always come back to corporations and money-lenders promoting what is good for corporations and money-lenders in the short term, using their propaganda outlets to brainwash the masses.
Control of the masses via widespread distribution of misinformation commenced shortly after the invention of the printing press, and went into ‘hyper-drive’ in the last decades of the twentieth century.”
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In a paradigm of global capitalism, the following is a predictable behavioral outcome:
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And this sounds very familiar…
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Pingback: China’s plans to cut coal pollution will unleash another environmental catastrophe instead
A couple of Peter Ward quotes:
I
The consequence of all of that melted freshwater from Greenland ice caps entering the North Atlantic oceanic conveyer belt system: “The conveyer is powered by the density and temperature difference of its seawater at different geographic areas and depths. Freshwater entering the system in the North Atlantic would be particularly significant. South of Greenland is the area where previously warm Atlantic Ocean seawater, which had made its way from the tropics off the Caribbean, finally cools enough to sink into deep water. Warm water has more salt ions, and once it cools, its density is higher than surrounding water.
But the injection of fresh water, with a much lower density because of its lack of salt ions, would effectively stop the conveyer or perhaps shift where it starts and stops on the surface. A rising sea level would drown cities, but a conveyer belt shift would kill people, lots of them, because of the great effect it would necessarily have on climate in European agricultural areas. It can be surmised that a suddenly cooled, cropless European subcontinent with its large population would by necessity look toward still-arable lands to make up food loss. Here’s hoping under this scenario that the Europeans have enough cash in reserve to buy an awfully large volume of food for centuries to come.
Peter D. Ward – UNDER A GREEN SKY – BACK TO THE EOCENE
II
Battisti: Time was ticking by; I knew this man was frightfully busy. He had received the offer of a professorship at Harvard, the ultimate compliment, but eschewed that offer, deciding to stay in the Pacific Northwest and part of a team of people at the University of Washington at the forefront of climate research, and much good, societally and scientifically, was the result. I felt embarrassed to be taking so much of his time, but he was not squirming or looking at the clock; he began talking faster and faster, carrying us into the new old world, and in the process alternately fascinating and scaring me. The inadequacy of the models to explain why a world with carbon dioxide levels of 800 parts per million could have been warm enough to allow crocs and palms in the Arctic and Antarctic was brought up. So what is wrong with the models? I asked. Clouds, he replied. The models do a very poor job of simulating clouds. Clouds are the wild cards, controlling opacity of the atmosphere to light, changing albedo, Earth’s reflectivity, but also, if in the right (or for society, in the wrong) place, they act as super greenhouse agents. It is in very high parts of the atmosphere, the altitude where jumbo jets cross the world, where the change in clouds will be most important. Global warming could produce a new kind of cloud layer, clouds where they are not currently present, thin, high clouds, higher than any found today, completely covering the high latitudes and affecting the more tropical latitudes as well, but even that is a misnomer, as most of Earth will have become tropical at that time.
Take me there, I said, and he did, a verbal journey. We started first in the Arctic, in winter. Trees can now grow everywhere, but all their leaves are gone, because we are in the months-long winter night. There is some light coming from a filtered full moon. There are no low clouds to be seen, but the moon is almost obscured by hazy high clouds, and the moonlight has an unfamiliar cast to it. There are no stars, and Battisti tells me that the haze above is high and ever present. There would be no starry nights, and, in summer, no perfectly clear days. High haze and high, thin clouds would see
to that. A most notable aspect of this Arctic world is presence of lightning, gigantic bolts that seem to come from nowhere, and as my eyes adjust to the dim light, I can see that many of the trees are blackened, from fire. The surface is warm, but in the long night the air aloft is cold even in this globally warmed world, and lightning is common.
He then took me south, to the midlatitudes where most of the world’s population lives now, in our time, to Seattle, in fact. The city that I had been so familiar with is gone: The Space Needle is now a 400- rather than 600-foot monument, emerging from the sea like a societal middle finger directed at the human generations before that had created this world. Here too the sky is different, but this is daytime, and its color has changed. The distribution of plants and the omnipresence of dust in the summertime due to the drying of the continents in the midlatitudes has changed the very color of the atmosphere; it is strangely murky as yellow particles merge with the blue sky to create a washed green tinge, a vomitous color, in fact. Gone too are the periodic cold and wet fronts that hit the Pacific Northwest every three or four days in winter. These storms are gone, the climate tranquil, kites a thing of the past in this world. Palm trees are everywhere. Finally, on to the tropics, and here there is nothing but destruction. Unlike the midlatitudes, where storms have subsided to a calm tranquility, here the violence of hurricanes has only increased.
The tropics have warmed, which breeds more ferocious storms, but storms with shorter tracks, no longer menacing the regions that had once feared them most. They stay confined in the tropics, but because the world has warmed, there is far less wind shear now, and wind shear is a tamer of hurricanes. But with it gone, they are unchecked, monster storms, category 5 hurricanes now the norm, and newer, higher categories have been invented. There are no crops here, and there is little human habitation.
To the North Atlantic, to see the conveyer system. In the twenty-first century, it had stopped, for some decades, and Europe had indeed cooled. The alarmists had predicted quite wrongly that Earth was finally sliding into the much overdue ice part of the ice ages, but this cooling was regional to Europe and short; the rocketing carbon dioxide levels saw to that, shooting well past any chance of a global glaciation as so often happened over the last two million years. But the conveyer had not stayed shut down for long; now it was chugging away, but in a far different geography than before. The superheated warm water of the tropics headed north as before, but the sinking happened well south of its original Greenland location. Now the vast quantities of water slightly cool while heading north and sink in the midlatitudes, and the water sinking is very different from the cold, oxygenated water of before. This is warm water that no longer can sink to the abyss, and thus the delivery of oxygen to the bottom of the ocean has stopped. The deep ocean is now a graveyard, warm deadly water bathing species that had evolved and adapted for something quite different, and the start of the mass extinction is already under way. The ocean is returning, rapidly, to its most common ancient state, the anoxic state, and already poison is accumulating on the bottom, hydrogen sulfide concentrating, year by year.
How did we get to this future? I asked. Easy, Battisti said. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by 1 part per million per year, just like clockwork. But every year from then on, the rate increased, until by the year 2000 it was increasing by 2 parts per million per year. By the middle part of the twenty-first century, it was increasing at 4 parts per million. The reason was simple. The vast multitudes in India and China had all demanded, and bought, a car for every house, and were now moving toward two cars in every garage, as their North American and European fellow world citizens had long enjoyed. Now two cars in garages were appearing in most houses in the Middle East and North African shores, places with the highest birth rates on the planet. In the twenty-first century, the human population hit nine billion, and a goodly percentage of them drove to work each day.
Peter D. Ward – UNDER A GREEN SKY – THE NEW OLD WORLD
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“”The glaciers of the Himalayas are melting so fast they will affect the water supplies of a population twice that of the US within 22 years, the head of the world’s leading authority on climate change has warned.”
And that’s just the Himalayas and the rivers flow out of their glaciers toward South Asian regions including India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. There are similar glaciers along the mountain ranges of western South America that supply water to other hundreds of millions of people – they are all at risk, too. We’re even seen it here in the United States, with last year’s drought in the West. Glaciers are changing in Europe, and the regions of Tanzania supplied by the famous “Snows Of Kilimanjaro,” are drying up in ways that are creating serious drought problems for the people in those parts of Africa.
Contrary to what the front groups funded by the fossil fuel industry would have you believe, climate change doesn’t just mean the winters are milder. Or the plants have more carbon dioxide.
It means that hundreds of millions of people will be displaced, will starve, and will die. It means wars. It means famines. It means raging forest fires and the death of grasslands. It means the acidification of our oceans and the destruction of our ocean ecosystems. It means that we stand on the edge of tipping points that hurtle humanity toward extinction.
Yes, extinction.”
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19061-global-warming-about-to-claim-half-a-billion-people
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It’s already too late to actually do anything about any of this, since the effects of CO2 pollution lag by about 30 – 40 yrs. So even if we stopped ALL burning of fossil fuels right now, we’d still feel increasingly worse weather and all the predicted effects for years to come!
Once word finally gets out to the masses it’s going to cause hysteria and chaos everywhere. Before long word won’t even need to be spread because it will be plain as day to everyone trying to live a “normal” life in chaotic times. Food will become harder and harder to grow, fishing will be non-existent (unless you acquire a taste for jelly-fish), even breathing will become problematic as all the noxious gases pluming out of the oceans, lakes, streams, tundra and the like start blowing around killing large numbers of humans and animals (which has already started if you frequent the jumping jack flash blog for daily updates.
It’s not a pleasant thought experiment – how bad it’s going to get – and it isn’t easy either with so many variables to consider. Social upheaval will become commonplace everywhere as temperatures and humidity levels become unbearable. Winters may go from short and mild with little to no snowfall to huge months-long snowstorms, and/or icy with gale force winds in one year. i’m just waiting for all the H7N9 -type flu viruses to spread around too. One thing is for sure – an awful lot of people are going to die in the coming years and conditions aren’t going to be conducive to life for much longer.
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You forgot the plague of insects:
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http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/intense-debate-over-wording-of-landmark-un-climate-change-report-set-to-run-to-the-wire-8842209.html
Not that it really matters, since we now know that, however dire the report, few will take any notice. And governments will continue to promote economic growth and degradation of the environment, plus a few non-solutions.
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Nice summary of the stages of awareness leading to enlightenment (by Oliver at Dave’s blog):
Human attitude / Reason
– I don’t care about Reality / I am stupid, or living in denial
– I want to understand what’s going on / I am curious
– I’m now worried that the biosphere is endangered / I am thoughtful
– I care a lot about what’s happening / I am inspired
– I want to help protect the biosphere / I am motivated
– WTF, people must be deaf and blind! / I am frustrated
– I think humans won’t change enough / I am doubtful
– I give up, we’re fucked / I am depressed
– I’ll keep observing but the outcome is certain / I am aware and calm
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Very true, although I seem to move up and down the last five.
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The Guardian tells us:
‘What the Stockholm meeting will deliver is the distillation of the first part of a much larger report. The fifth assessment report – called AR5 in the climate science jargon – will come in three parts. Friday brings the summary of the first part – on the physical basis of climate science – and on 30 September, the full report behind this summary will be available in an unedited form. It will not be fully edited and published online until January 2014, and printed later next year.
The other two parts of the report – likely to run to thousands of pages and drawing on hundreds of scientific papers – will come next March and April, using a similar process of a four-day meeting of scientists leading to a summary document and then a full report published later. Those parts will examine the probable effects of climate change, and the ways in which the world can tackle the problem.
The final report encompassing all three parts – known as the synthesis report – will not be ready until October 2014, where it will be presented at a conference in Copenhagen.’
So, after another 13 months of doing nothing (other than promoting faster meltdown) , governments will gather at a conference and decide to do nothing (other than promote a faster meltdown). The rules of ‘the game’ demand it.
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Hi Kevin, Yes, They care not for their children and grandchildren. Most making the decisions believe they’ll be safely dead when the SHTF really seriously. Plus the momentum and inertia of the current setup is beyond our ability to stop. The analogy so often used is a runaway train. Whether you make fast or painfully slow decisions the result is the same.
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http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/27/global-warming-breach-2c-threshold
‘Global warming is likely to surpass the previously recognised danger threshold of a 2C average increase in temperature, according to the world-leading climate scientists meeting in Sweden this week.
On the eve of the 2013 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientists involved are understood to have reached agreement in principle on key topics as the week of negotiations draws to a close.
By 2100, the average projection for how much warming will occur is expected to be slightly above the 2C threshold, considered to be the temperature above which it is considered that climate change will damage the global environment.’
Oh good, there has been no damage to the global environment, and we can carry on damaging the planet for another 90 years before there is any damage.
Ocean acidification? I guess that doesn’t fall into the category of climate change or warming, so can be ignored.
Non-linear, self-reinforcing and mutually reinforcing climate feedbacks?
Ever get the feeling you’re living on the wrong planet?
(UNIPCC scenario does imply ever faster money-printing by central banks for the next 90 years and no peaking of oil extraction, of course.)
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The apocalypse is now a commercial… LOL(no need for English here)
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http://www.theguardian.com/environment/interactive/2013/sep/27/climate-change-how-hot-lifetime-interactive
I entered my youngest grandchild’s year of birth.
Up between 2,2 and 4.7oC in his lifetime (if there is no runaway greenhouse)..
The halfway point will presumably be pretty grim.
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…Over two decades, Dr. Gibson and his colleagues have tracked the diversity of mammals on the islands. In Friday’s issue of the journal Science, they report that the extinctions have turned out to be distressingly fast.
“Our results should be a warning,” said Dr. Gibson. “This is the trend that the world is going in.”…
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The first species to ‘sort of‘ understand its own demise….
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We have shifted the planet to an entirely new and different state, much more hostile to human survival, a jurassic-like carbon rich atmosphere, anoxic-acidified-lifeless oceans, driven the entire biosphere to the brink of extinction and collapse, melted most of the cryosphere… the speed of those planetary, global changes is much faster than in any previous mass extinction event… we have transformed the vast majority of land vegetable cover (jungles, forests, rainforests, etc) into massive swaths of monoculture, that is, deserts, all in the name of feeding 7 billion homo ‘sapiens sapiens’, biodiversity has hit a new low point, as most scientists warn us we are already living through the 6th massive extinction event (sorry, this time no asteroid or massive volcano eruption, this extinction event is entirely of our own making), billions of cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, etc yet every single relevant wild species on land and sea is tethering on the brink of extinction… Its no surprise our behaviour has been compared to ALIENS ON PLANET EARTH and also as a) cancer b) virus c) parasite d) infection … just looking at our planet from space becomes evident there is a cancer on planet earth, as everything is now covered with cities, towns, factories, mines, farms, and endless monoculture fields… we have transformed the most amazing and precious treasure on this planet, its rich biodiverse 5 million plant & animal species into a huge monoculture factory of a couple hundred domesticated crops and animals… just as we transform food into sh!t, we have transformed the most beautiful jungles and rainforests into sugar cane and palm oil monocultures for ‘biofuels’…
Keep on the fantastic job, xray mike, i’ve been following your blog for over half a year now and i am very happy to have found a group of people like you and others like kevin moore, ulfglf, f.trinoli, paul f getty and others who are aware and awaken to the
predicament facing the human race, and that fully understand the implications of runaway climate chaos, ocean acidification, melting arctic, greenland, glaciers, the two hundred species that go into extinction every day, methane clathrate gun, and
so many other surprises that came from unleashing the pandora’s box, the gateway to hell of 400ppmCO2…
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Hi qscwsxesz,
Good comment, inspired me to write something for mike, I sent a draft, we’ll see if he approves, time will tell.
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qscwsxesz: Good to have another like-minded (ie. grounded in reality) person to compare notes with and commiserate on the way down and out, welcome via
xraymike’s beneficence to us all.
All the signs you mentioned (and the many you left out, but i’m sure are aware of) point to a rapid collapse. Now, how long “rapid” is, on a geo-logic or anthropomorphic time scale (e.g. the Mayans seem to have just disappeared over a very short time, but that could have been about a century), is the subject.
So we’re actually living through the beginning of an extinction event, the extent to which we are not privy, meaning that at some point, it not only becomes exceedingly obvious to all sentient life that “something’s not right”, but proceeds downward from there in some steep trajectory of interacting events based on systems, networks, and effecting the entire biosphere. Plateaus of a few years or a decade (maybe) of somewhat stable, yet depleted and severely diminished ecological situations may create pockets of humanity living in desperate survival mode with all the usual life-sustaining systems in severe and continual decline.
That would include the air becoming toxic, beyond the level in which breathing creatures live, with increasingly excessive amounts of methane, hydrogen sulfide, ozone, and the like – that also negatively effect plant life. The water of the earth will contain so much rained out radiation with long half-lives, that aquatic based species will cease to exist or be unable to adapt – even in mutated forms, and that includes all life that ingests water also (most of the biology of the planet). Now that will take some time, but surely, once an enormous amount of radiation is released, the results (as we’ve seen from Chernobyl, and even Three Mile Island if you get honest reporting) and as we’re currently witnessing with the on-going Fukushima disaster become apparent within a lifetime (which timeframe will be diminishing also).
Others see what would be called a “slow” extinction event, where it takes say five centuries for the changes to the entire global system of life to disassemble the chains and life ceases after a relatively long time (in human terms) of suffering.
I believe these people are engaging in wishful thinking and not accounting for all the interactions and vast complexity of the system we’re examining (like ignoring the many feedback loops we’ve triggered climatically). The dependency of everything on all conditions being perfect (or within a narrow range, beyond which the system is incapable of operating sustainably or at all) causes the rapid die-off in my estimation. We can look at it in piecemeal fashion, evaluating, for example, the effects on the food supply chain that Peak Oil by itself would have, and project some number of years into the future that the system, via “workarounds” and our usual “problem-solving” approach, would leave us before some period, beyond which, there would be no reliance on any vestige of the old system to provide energy or the conditions to live on the scale that humanity is at now.
However, if simultaneously, large crop production is suddenly and irreversibly constrained by damage to normally “bread-basket” regions of the planet, I believe the results would set off the immediate breakdown of civilization and with it law and order, massive social upheaval, failure of governments, rioting on a country-wide scale, and other problems making life-spans exceedingly short. Damage to crop production anywhere would be due to a whole host of interrelated factors like fires, floods, periods of intense heat, or long-term drought, pestilence, locusts and other predatory pests, plant diseases stemming from the toxic atmosphere we continue to poison, soil depletion, pollinator extinction, radiation, and the like indicate that combing effects would rapidly and continuously decrease the amount of time until all life would be gone.
This has been a short analysis of merely ONE of the critical systems sustaining humanity. There are so many others that I leave it to the reader to conjecture and respond.
The day awaits.
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Climate deniers are criminals:
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The world’s most powerful corporations (which have more clout than most nations) are totally dependent on:
1. continued extraction of carbon that nature sequestered tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, and its conversion into carbon dioxide [forever].
2, keeping the bulk of society from recognising the long-term consequences of extracting fossil fuels and burning them [forever].
3. maintaining house-of-cards financial arrangements [forever].
Practically every business, large or small, is totally dependent on the continued extraction of sequestered carbon and its conversion into carbon dioxide in order that raw materials can be converted into saleable stuff, be transported and consumed etc. Even businesses that are not directly involved in physical resources are still dependent on electric systems and transport systems that ultimately dependent on conversion of fossil fuels into waste., .
The entire financial system is totally dependent on the continued extraction of sequestered carbon and its conversion into carbon dioxide.
I don’t know whether this site gets many new visitors, but everyone who has been following for more than a few weeks knows that present living arrangements are totally unsustainable and that TPTB will do whatever they can to avoid changing present living arrangements.
As Tom has noted, it’s almost certainly too late to prevent NTE, but if it were possible to prevent runaway greenhouse, what could be done in the face of opposition form the greatest economic, financial, political, military and propaganda forces on the planet? .
On the other hand, the bankster’s Ponzi scheme is clearly getting close to the end of the line: Bernanke describes the US economy as showing signs of a good recovery, yet dare not even attempt to slow the Fed’s ‘printing presses’.
All the indications are that the mayhem will become a global phenomenon between 2015 and 2020, and that NTE will occur some time between 2030 and 2080.
Since most governments act as agents of money-lenders and corporations, we can expect governments to continue to do what they have done since the environmental and energetic threats became evident in the 1970s: promote business-as-usual.
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“There have been fewer than 20 terror-related deaths on American soil since 9/11 and about 364,000 deaths caused by privately owned firearms,” Porter wrote. “If any European nation had such a record and persisted in addressing only the first figure, while ignoring the second, you can bet your last pound that the State Department would be warning against travel to that country and no American would set foot in it without body armour [sic].” – UK Columnist: World Should Intervene to Stop U.S. Gun Epidemic
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Most of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere (about 80ppm of it) was put there by Britain, France, Germany, the USA, Japan and Russia. Those nations pushed humanity to the cliff edge between 1780 and 1980.
China will push humanity over the edge (though if we look at per capita emissions and what fossil fuels are being used for, the USA is the major problem).
The blame game will become one of the most interesting aspects of the collapse. The present mayor of the district I live in has attempted to blame the previous administration for the mess he has created over the past 3 years. Since he was a professional liar for decades (politician) before becoming mayor, anyone with a brain doesn’t believe a word he says. ..
Sadly, there are still many who are easily deceived.
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And here we have the astounding, breathtaking, ignorance of the scientifically illiterate moron who is in charge of UK Climate Policy
People have doubts about near term extinction !
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/30/owen-paterson-minister-climate-change-advantages
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War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Surveillance is Privacy. Global Warming is good.
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Another problem with China and other rapidly industrialising nations: They will be forced by public pressure to clean up their particulate pollution (aerosols) as the West did, and that will give another big boost to global warming.
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