I heard about this dubious award via Your Medieval Future. Why did it take so long for this guy to get the award?…
And here is Senator Inhofe’s politically polarizing response, spoken like a true anti-science zealot and mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry:
I am truly honored that yet another radical environmental group has given me an award for my efforts to put a stop to President Obama’s far-left global warming agenda,” Senator Inhofe said. “The Center for Biological Diversity should be pleased to know that my award will have a prominent place in my office, along with all the others I have been proud to receive over the years. As the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, I have worked every day to expose the radical left’s extremist agenda aimed at ending American production of oil, gas, and coal because of the devastating consequences it will have on the American people.
Despite the fact that some of us are intelligent enough to see the coming collapse from unmitigated depletion of the earth’s non-renewable resources, overpopulation, climate disruption from the massive burning of fossil fuels worldwide, the human-induced 6th mass extinction, CO2-acidification of the oceans, and the resultant destruction of our modern industrial agriculture base, we are all lumped into the category of ‘radical left extremists‘ for recognizing such scientific realities. In Inhofe’s world, there is no environmental crisis and humans can adapt to whatever toxic sludge pile industrial civilization creates out of the planet. In a world where the true conservatives are those who want to keep the planet habitable for humans, people like Senator Inhofe will ensure that we all face the same fate as that of the extinct Dodo bird.
Much more and devastating disasters is what will need to happen, so says David Attenborough, before any meaningful action is taken:
…Asked what was needed to wake people up, the veteran broadcaster famous for series such as Life and Planet Earth said: “Disaster. It’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? Even disaster doesn’t do it. There have been disasters in North America, with hurricanes and floods, yet still people deny and say ‘oh, it has nothing to do with climate change.’ It visibly has got [something] to do with climate change.”
But some US politicians found it easier to deny the science on climate change than take action, he said, because the consequence of recognising the science on man-made climate change “means a huge section from the national budget will be spent in order to deal with it, plenty of politicians will be happy to say ‘don’t worry about that, we’re not going to increase your taxes…’
The related article to the above video is here. In other words, we won’t act in time to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. He also says there is no need for scaremongering because the facts are frightening enough. Death by a thousand cuts will be how this ship goes down. The insurance industry predicts a future of increasingly destructive natural disasters due to climate change:
A couple of weeks ago, Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance firms, issued a study titled “Severe Weather in North America.” According to the press release that accompanied the report, “Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” The number of what Munich Re refers to as “weather-related loss events,” and what the rest of us would probably call weather-related disasters, has quintupled over the last three decades. While many factors have contributed to this trend, including an increase in the number of people living in flood-prone areas, the report identified global warming as one of the major culprits: “Climate change particularly affects formation of heat-waves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity.”
Munich Re’s report was aimed at the firm’s clients—other insurance companies—and does not make compelling reading for a general audience. But its appearance just two weeks ahead of Hurricane Sandy seems to lend it a peculiarly grisly relevance. Sandy has been called a “superstorm,” a “Frankenstorm,” a “freakish and unprecedented monster,” and possibly “unique in the annals of American weather history.” It has already killed sixty-five people in the Caribbean, and, although it’s too early to tell what its full impact will be as it churns up the East Coast, loss estimates are topping six billion dollars.”
That’s right folks. The world’s largest and well established insurance companies are not only not in denial, they are pricing and operating with Climate Change firmly in mind. And their expertise seems to be yielding an accurate analysis. Which is important to them because their fortunes are at stake.
As Attenborough points out, all the different countries, races, and cultures of the world would have to agree to one plan of action in order to avoid certain disaster from the burning of fossil fuels. This has never happened in the history of the world. And the likelihood of it happening now is nil. No wonder Guy McPherson is so pissed off. The futility of our predicament has most certainly sunk in. What are the chances of anyone giving up fossil fuels when industrial civilization cannot continue without them? What was that famous saying of Derrick Jensen?…
If your experience is that your water comes from the tap and that your food comes from the grocery store, then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on them…
And so industrial civilization will defend its growth-oriented, resource-depleting, environment-degrading way of life until a ravaged Earth pulls it from our cold, dead hands. The worldview of scientists like Lynn Margulis and Enzo Tiezzi would seem to be correct. We were one billion in 1802; 2 billion in 1927; 3 billion in 1961; 4 billion in 1974; 5 billion in 1987; 6 billion in 1999, and finally, in 2011, 7 billion. In 2025, if climate chaos does not exponentially accelerate, we will be 8 billion, and in 2050, 9 billion, and in 2070, 10 billion. Is this population acceleration a sign of the end of the human species, just like bacteria which multiply exponentially to consume the last bit of nourishment in their closed Petri dish, and then, suddenly, all die.
Sen. Bernie Sanders said corporate leaders should look in the mirror before lecturing the American people on ways to tackle the deficit. After the heads of more than 80 big companies issued a statement Thursday on deficit reduction, Sanders released a report detailing how many of the companies headed by the same CEOs have avoided taxes, sent American jobs overseas and took taxpayer bailouts. “There really is no shame,” Sanders said. “The Wall Street leaders whose recklessness and illegal behavior caused this terrible recession are now lecturing the American people on the need for courage to deal with the nation’s finances and deficit crisis. Before telling us why we should cut Social Security, Medicare and other vitally important programs, these CEOs might want to take a hard look at their responsibility for causing the deficit and this terrible recession.
Next we have Physicist Paul Beckwith’s open letter to the Canadian PM about the destruction of our food supply by way of human-induced eco-collapse. This letter should be sent to all leaders of industrialized nations.
Click to go to original…
And finally we have poetic justice in the form of what has been dubbed a ‘Frankenstorm’ bearing down on the seat of power in the U.S. As nature continues to drop hint after hint to those in charge, how much longer can the fossil fuel PR machine of climate change denialism continue to pull the wool over the eyes of the public?
Physicist Paul Beckwith explains here how this ‘Frankenstorm’ is a result of anthropogenic climate change:
All storms veer to the right in the northern hemisphere due to the spinning of the earth (1 revolution per day). Except when there is a tilted high pressure region northward and it has to go left and there is a massive low pressure region left that sucks it there as well. Why the high pressure ridge and massive low pressure? Because the jet stream is wavier and slower, a situation that is happening more and more often, because of massive sea ice decline this summer. Which is due to Arctic amplification feedbacks. Which in turn is due to rising greenhouse gases. Which is due to humans.
I noticed that reader Tall commented on this site’s ‘About’ section with a link to Charles C. Mann’s new article:
The crux of the argument is the following (from an audio interview with the author)…
…All species are the same at some fundamental level. They are all living creatures, and all species seek to increase, to multiply, and to fill the Earth… If we are serious as conservationists then we should recognize that human beings are just another species, and they have the same impulses that animate bacteria. And the natural course of events for us will be to fill up the Earth, consume all the resources, and then kill ourselves off. And that would be the normal thing for us to do. So that conservation, the idea that we should hold back, was in fact deeply unnatural, almost perverse from the point of view of biology, to imagine we would be doing this [conservation] …
This thinking goes along with the theme of ‘Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?‘ From a purely primordial urge for survival, we are no different than other organisms. But we are intelligent enough to recognize that what we are doing will lead to our own extinction in the not too distant future. I don’t believe any other species has that ability to forecast the future and see dangers. So perhaps the battle for humanity is partly recognizing that we have these basic biological impulses to multiply and consume, but that such urges will eventually lead to our own extinction. This is where embracing climate and environmental science as well as biophysical economics will go a long way in halting our own self-destructive behaviors. It may well take a much greater materialization of our ongoing ecological crisis before the powers-that-be internalize that message.
Periodically I will edit my RSS feeds and add to my videos/movies and notes/documents sections if I find something interesting. I came across the following documentary tonight and watched it in its entirety. It’s about renegade architect Michael Reynolds. He experiments with creating self-sufficient housing for the future. He’s fully aware of the unfolding global crisis and he funnels his creative energy into dealing with that reality. The film is well worth your time, but I found the latter half of the film even more interesting, especially his dealings with the sclerotic New Mexico State Legislature and the seemingly insurmountable hurdles of trying to pass a bill that would allow for new ideas in sustainable housing. The word games and wheel-greasing that goes on in government is in full display as Mike tries for years to get his bill approved.
A couple quotes from the film:
Politics does slowly, slowly grind things out, and that’s fine if we had hundreds and hundreds of years on this planet. We have decades left on this planet of life as we know it. And American politics is a fucking dinosaur that is not going to make it. It’s just going to come to a grinding halt…
…The American dream in my opinion is in the toilet. It’s history. It’s gone. The American dream is now how do we survive the future. It’s not having an eight bedroom home with eleven bathrooms. It’s not having a career and a lawn and all the amenities. It is simply how do our children and children’s children even have a chance at life.
Halloween is around the corner and it’s become a bit of escapism for me from the real monsters sitting at our doorstep. When I was a kid I never had any idea or warning from my peers that everyday life would be wrought with so many bloodcurdling terrors. Such realities as climate change and ocean acidification are ever-present boogeymen slowly and methodically stalking us. Compounding the fear was the revelation that the cause of such civilization-ending phenomena stemmed from our exploitation of energy sources serving as the very foundation for our economy. We were killing ourselves and no one could stop it! This is a scenario more frightening than anything dreamed up in a Hollywood horror movie.
Delving deeper into these subjects only brings more unease as we learn that our self-inflicted eco-collapse is happening concurrently with the depletion of our carbon-based energy sources. Good God! Our food supply is at risk! We’re running straight for a cliff! Surely if we turn on the television set we will be greeted with warnings of our impending calamity, and our leaders will be doing everything in their power to save us. Holy Christ! Television has devolved into a mere propaganda tool of corporations! The politicians are whores to big business! The democratic process and elections are no more than an ultra-expensive ‘reality tv’ series funded by monied interests! The Supreme Court, along with all other mainstream institutions, has become a puppet of the corporatocracy.
Well then certainly the captains of industry will be intelligent enough to steer us away from this approaching doom. For the love of God! They are corrupted as well! The masses are simply pawns in their game of profit accumulation and market domination! The purpose of the Security and Surveillance State is to protect the interests of the elite and crush dissent! The Earth is just another planet to be commoditized by the ‘Free Market’, a force looked upon as more tangible and important than anything in nature! We’ve constructed a dual reality in which money is more important than air, water, and soil! God help us!!!
My last hope is that I can talk to people about all this scary stuff and maybe get some consolation. For the love of God! They all think I’m a doomsday nut and don’t want to hear about any of it! They say that I’ll be locked up in a mental institution if I keep talking about such crazy things, or I’ll get caught up in the net of Homeland Security for rocking the boat! Everyone is going about their daily lives as if none of what I point out is real and that things will go on as they have in perpetuity! “Technology will solve everything,” they say. “Don’t worry about it!”
You see, I wasn’t kidding about the frights of Halloween being pretty lame when compared to what’s confronting us in the world of globalized industrial civilization.
It’s late and I’m about to nod off, but a few headlines caught my eye. The first is on plastics and its growing ubiquitousness in the natural world. If you read an earlier post I did on this subject, then you’ll know that plastics may well be the one thing that will persist long after industrial civilization has passed into the ether of history. Plastics and nuclear waste will be the lasting reminders of carbon man. As the following article explains, this stuff is showing up in the dark, cold depths of the melting Arctic.
Click to go to original article…
In other news, the ominous threat of a cataclysmic global release of methane from ocean floors is continuing to develop, increasing the possibility of runaway climate change…
A changing Gulf Stream off the East Coast has destabilized frozen methane deposits trapped under nearly 4,000 square miles of seafloor, scientists reported Wednesday. And since methane is even more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas, the researchers said, any large-scale release could have significant climate impacts.
Using seismic records and ocean models, the team estimated that 2.5 gigatonnes of frozen methane hydrate are being destabilized and could separate into methane gas and water.
It is not clear if that is happening yet, but that methane gas would have the potential to rise up through the ocean and into the atmosphere, where it would add to the greenhouse gases warming Earth.
The 2.5 gigatonnes isn’t enough to trigger a sudden climate shift, but the team worries that other areas around the globe might be seeing a similar destabilization.
“It is unlikely that the western North Atlantic margin is the only area experiencing changing ocean currents,” they noted. “Our estimate … may therefore represent only a fraction of the methane hydrate currently destabilizing globally.”
The wider destabilization evidence, co-author Ben Phrampus told NBC News, includes data from the Arctic and Alaska’s northern slope in the Beaufort Sea.
And it’s not just under the seafloor that methane has been locked up. Some Arctic land area are seeing permafrost thaw, which could release methane stored there as well.
An expert who was not part of the study said it suggests that methane could become a bigger climate factor than carbon dioxide.
“We may approach a turning point” from a warming driven by man-made carbon dioxide to a warming driven by methane, Jurgen Mienert, the geology department chair at Norway’s University of Tromso, told NBC News.
“The interactions between the warming Arctic Ocean and the potentially huge methane-ice reservoirs beneath the Arctic Ocean floor point towards increasing instability,” he added.
OK that’s enough information to put me soundly to sleep. Wake me up when the ‘Methane Time Bomb’ nightmare is over. The pot starts to boil, but the frogs are still comfortable…
Below is an interesting video documenting the issue of climate change over the last 25 years amongst our ‘talking head’ politicians. It amounts to a lot of lip service while global fossil fuel usage escalates. Could it be that our present way of life just isn’t possible without carbon energy? Without some unforeseen breakthrough in energy and a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, the answer is yes. Current alternative energy sources won’t fill the gap. Can we power down from the globalized industrial economic model to a more sustainable, smaller human-scale economy? Yes, but it would be radically different from what we have now and social power would have to decentralized into the hands of local communities. Even with an environmentally benign energy source, we would still be running into other planetary barriers with our infinite growth economic model.
The “C” Word: Climate Change Goes Missing From 2012 Election:
In this short video, science historian Naomi Oreskes gets at the heart of why we fear withdrawal from our carbon-based way of life.
The price of inaction is obviously too great to ignore – possible runaway climate change, mass starvation, and the collapse of modern civilization. Yet the inertia of the system, corporate dominance of the global economy, and the self-interests of our elite prevent the steps required to avert disaster.
Commodification, economic growth, financial abstractions, corporate power: aren’t these the processes driving the environmental crisis? Now we are told that to save the biosphere we need more of them. ~ George Monbiot
Certainly building personal resilience and preparedness may help you in the short-term, but what about your children and grandchildren? We are all at risk from a global ecological collapse, no matter how big your food vault or how robust your off-the-grid homestead. Getting involved with those who want to change the system is not a waste of time.
Having lived in the Mohave desert for about a decade, I had the dubious pleasure of enduring its scorching summer temperatures which can push 130° Fahrenheit. Without the usual creature comforts of modern industrial civilization like air conditioning, refrigerated foods and drinks, and piped-in water, life is such inhospitable places would be brutal if not impossible. What if such desert heat was the norm across the land surface of the planet? Then extreme places of desert heat like the Mohave desert would become dead zones for any living plant or animal we have known. Instead of peaking at around 130° F, it would reach unthinkable, Venus-like temps of greater than 200° F. Depending on the source you use, the average land surface temperature that we humans have enjoyed is 13° to 17° Celsius or 55.4° to 62.6° Fahrenheit. For the ocean surface, the average is about 17 °C (62.6 F). According to new research concerning the time of the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction or ‘mother of all extinction events’, there occurred yet another mass extinction within that time span called the Smithian-Spathian extinction in which lethal global warming developed. The average land temperature in the tropics was an unimaginable 122-140°F (50-60°C)with average sea surface temperatures of 104°F (40°C). Such intolerable temperatures resulted in a massive ‘dead zone’ belt around the Earth:
Plant and animal life had it rough 250 million years ago. As if to add insult to injury, the end-Permian mass extinction was quickly followed by yet another mass extinction, what’s called the Smithian-Spathian extinction. New research suggests that the Earth got excruciatingly hot during this period, creating a veritable ‘dead zone’ in tropical areas, what forced the remaining animal life to head to the poles. And it lasted for nearly 5 million years.
According to research done by Yadong Sun and Paul Wignall of the University of Leeds, UK, this was hottest era on Earth since it cooled down from its initial molten formation. Their study has reset notions of just how hot our planet can get — a disturbing bit of insight that could reset current models of climate change on Earth.
The Smithian-Spathian extinction was time that characterized the shift from the Permian era to the Triassic, just before the emergence of the dinosaurs. By this point, the mysterious Permian Extinction had reduced the life on Earth to a select group of insects, plants, marine life (like fish, coral, sea lilies, and ichthyosaurs), and terrestrial animals (like insects and the reptilian tetrapod).
Sun and Wignall’s research indicates that during this time, the heat at the tropical regions reached an astounding 50 to 60°C (122°F to 140°F) on land, while the waters at the surface reached 40°C (104°F). They were surprised to discover that the water could get that hot; previous estimates assumed that sea-surface temperatures could not surpass 30°C (86°F). Moreover, at 40°C, most marine life dies and photosynthesis stops…
…What happened? Essentially, the superhot Earth was caused by a breakdown in global carbon cycling. Normally, plants help regulate temperature by absorbing CO2 and burning it as dead plant matter. But without plants, the CO2 levels rose unchecked, causing a spike in temperatures. Specifically, the researchers estimate that at least 12×103 gigatons of isotopically depleted carbon as methane was injected into the atmosphere…
…My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming…
Are we in the beginning phases of walking headlong into another mass extinction of our own creation, altering the chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels? If you’ve been reading this blog, then you know about feedback loops and tipping points and their consequences if humans continue to force changes in the delicate ecosystems of this planet. Monthly reports from the NOAA are not very comforting:
…The average global temperature across land and ocean surfaces during September was 0.67°C (1.21°F) above the long-term 20th century average. This temperature ties with 2005 as the record warmest September in the 133-year period of record. The Northern Hemisphere tied with 2009 as second warmest on record, behind 2005. The Southern Hemisphere also ranked second warmest on record, behind 1997. It was also the highest departure from average for any month in the Southern Hemisphere since May 2010…
The difference between now and 250 million years ago is that profit-seeking corporations were not around to hoodwink the denizens of the planet into perpetuating their own extinction…
…despite its history and today’s unprecedented riches from science, the U.S. has begun to slip off of its science foundation. Indeed, in this election cycle, some 236 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, several major party contenders for political office took positions that can only be described as “antiscience”: against evolution, human-induced climate change, vaccines, stem cell research, and more. A former Republican governor even warned that his own political party was in danger of becoming “the antiscience party.
Or the fact that the belief in an unfettered free market has become sacrosanct…
…In order to understand the fervor of this continued popular support for failed policies, it is important to grasp the utopian, quasi-theological nature of neoliberal ideology. In the neoliberal worldview, the self-regulating market is not a merely human construct, but a form of naturally-occurring “spontaneous order” that produces optimum outcomes and maximum individual freedom if left completely unfettered. (13) It is, as Karl Polanyi pointed out in “The Great Transformation,” a radically utopian vision that rests on a blind faith that markets are essentially part of the natural order. (14)
On the political right, this faith has reached its fullest expression, ultimately moving markets into the realm of the sacred, where their legitimacy cannot be questioned. In this utopian setting, regulation is not merely ill advised; it is a violation of natural law that is nearly sacrilegious…
We’re not wiser, just more manipulative and conniving…
Locked within the Earth for millions of years was an energy source that fueled the rise of Humans and gave them dominion over every last inch of the planet. With traces of industrial chemicals and junk even finding its way into orbit around Earth, no corner of the planet escaped the tinkering hand of man.
His large brain gave him the ability to invent and build an army of machines to do his bidding. From their creation and until the last day of their operation, these fossil fuel-powered machines served man tirelessly in every conceivable manner, from personal transportation to food production.
Soon the lifeblood of this automated empire began running short, driving man to evermore extreme measures of securing carbon energy in order to feed his world of machines. Water, air, and land were sacrificed to keep the system going.
But For every force, there is a counter force. For every positive, a negative. The counter weight to man’s unrelenting urge for carbon was the inexorable build-up of atmospheric CO2 as the rest of the world rushed to join industrial civilization. The world’s leaders flew to popular vacation spots and drank cocktails while discussing the growing menace of climate change:
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That is precisely what global leaders entrusted with the stewardship of the world are doing. Their lives revolve around glittering banquets and long and dreary conferences, where they listen to each other in endless process-driven negotiations – so far from the reality of the day-to-day hardships of more than half of humanity.
A domino of numerous climate tipping points was set into motion, upsetting a once-benign climate. At first, fire seasons grew longer with more frequent and intense conflagrations. Ocean corals turned white from warming waters. The Arctic melted with astonishing speed, unleashing a host of warming feedback loops. Small, imperceptible temperature changes that took decades to occur were now happening more rapidly.
A warming planet opened the door for exotic tropical diseases to spread northward and around the globe. Talk of adaptation to human-induced climate change became a cruel joke. Torrential floods and crop-withering droughts of biblical proportion occurred more regularly, propelling the hungry masses to riot. The food vaults of impoverished countries were the first to be raided, followed soon after by those of wealthy nations. Weaker nation states fell first as their resource-strapped and overwhelmed governments collapsed under the weight of climate-induced starvation and energy blackouts. Various desperate geoengineering schemes were carried out in a hail Mary attempt to save man and his fossil fuel-addicted way of life, but to no avail. The master had become the slave; servile devotion to an unsustainable mode of living turned around to bite us in the ass. An overdrawn Earth had come calling to collect on humanity’s debt and close the account. Within the blink of a geologic eye, the habitability of the planet for humans as well as most other creatures had disappeared.
The following excerpt is from a recent U.N. assessment on the state of the world and food production. It’s not a pretty picture, but despite alarm bells ringing, our trajectory of ecological collapse is still firmly on track…
Click to go to full letter:
The human rights of people and well-being of the planet first? Don’t make me laugh. There’s that oxymoron again – sustainable development. Given the track record of the U.N. on solving problems, rest assured there won’t be any radical ideas coming out of that institution that might threaten capitalism’s death grip on the planet. If there’s no money to be made, resource to be exploited, or economic growth to be had, then it won’t get done. Period.
…From the UK Guardian article discussing the above U.N. assessment:
…Failing harvests in the US, Ukraine and other countries this year have eroded reserves to their lowest level since 1974. The US, which has experienced record heatwaves and droughts in 2012, now holds in reserve a historically low 6.5% of the maize that it expects to consume in the next year, says the UN.
“We’ve not been producing as much as we are consuming. That is why stocks are being run down. Supplies are now very tight across the world and reserves are at a very low level, leaving no room for unexpected events next year,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UNFood and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). With foodconsumption exceeding the amount grown for six of the past 11 years, countries have run down reserves from an average of 107 days of consumption 10 years ago to under 74 days recently…
…In a shocking new assessment of the prospects of meeting food needs, Lester Brown, president of the Earth policy research centre in Washington, says that the climate is no longer reliable and the demands for food are growing so fast that a breakdown is inevitable, unless urgent action is taken.
“Food shortages undermined earlier civilisations. We are on the same path. Each country is now fending for itself. The world is living one year to the next,” he writes in a new book.
According to Brown, we are seeing the start of a food supply breakdown with a dash by speculators to “grab” millions of square miles of cheap farmland, the doubling of international food prices in a decade, and the dramatic rundown of countries’ food reserves.
This year, for the sixth time in 11 years, the world will consume more food than it produces, largely because of extreme weather in the US and other major food-exporting countries. Oxfam last week said that the price of key staples, including wheat and rice, may double in the next 20 years, threatening disastrous consequences for poor people who spend a large proportion of their income on food…
…“The geopolitics of food is fast overshadowing the geopolitics of oil.”
…“The situation we are in is not temporary. These things will happen all the time. Climate is in a state of flux and there is no normal any more.
“We are beginning a new chapter. We will see food unrest in many more places.
“Armed aggression is no longer the principal threat to our future. The overriding threats to this century are climate change, population growth, spreading water shortages and rising food prices,” Brown says.
Further reading…
Food prices from 1990 to the present…
And an open letter(10-12-2012) by Professor Christopher Rhodes on our looming problem of Peak Phosphorus…
Our politicians should be running on a platform of issues concerning basic survival at this point.
Despite the fact that some of us are intelligent enough to see the coming collapse from unmitigated depletion of the earth’s non-renewable resources, overpopulation, climate disruption from the massive burning of fossil fuels worldwide, the human-induced 6th mass extinction, CO2-acidification of the oceans, and the resultant destruction of our modern industrial agriculture base, we are all lumped into the category of ‘radical left extremists‘ for recognizing such scientific realities. In Inhofe’s world, there is no environmental crisis and humans can adapt to whatever toxic sludge pile industrial civilization creates out of the planet. In a world where the true conservatives are those who want to keep the planet habitable for humans, people like Senator Inhofe will ensure that we all face the same fate as that of the extinct Dodo bird.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 