Guy McPherson and the Nemesis Effect at the ‘Age of Limits’ Conference, Part One

09 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 36 Comments

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Antarctic Ice Melt, Arctic Ice Melt, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Guy McPherson at the 'Age of Limits' Conference, Inverted Totalitarianism, James Hansen, Mass Die Off, Nature Bats Last, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Runaway Climate Change, The Nemesis Effect, Tim Garrett

I have yet to meet Guy McPherson, but with a blog entitled “Collapse of Industrial Civilization”, it appears inevitable. Who else on Earth has such an unvarnished view of the horror show modern man is orchestrating? Truth delivered up with no hidden agendas is a very bitter and difficult pill to swallow, but being a true radical means getting at the root of the problem irrespective of “ideological and/or theological prejudice“, or as Guy says…

For those wanting to keep abreast of the deteriorating habitability of the planet, Guy posts periodic updates to the unfolding climate chaos here.

There exists no high quality recording of Guy’s speech at the most recent “Age of Limits” conference that I know of. In order to review his talk I watched this clip and studied his powerpoint slides which he sent me and which are posted here.

I’m certain that many who attend Guy’s speeches don’t internalize all the information he sets forth, fore if they did, their language would lose all the culturally ingrained phrases of hope for any kind of eleventh hour rescue by our technology-worshipping society. If there were a fix, don’t you think we would have implemented it by now before setting off a list of unstoppable positive feedback loops, known and unknown? Hell, even the much-trumpeted cleanliness of natural gas has turned out to be a farce. A recent study shows methane release from natural gas production is much higher than was known.

We seem to be leaking greenhouse gases from every orifice. Yes Moore’s law and the illusion of infinite progress have brainwashed everyone into believing mankind is immortal, forever in control of primal earth forces. In 2000, Chris Bright of the Worldwatch Institute introduced the term “nemesis effect” which refers to the cumulative effect of multiple stressors and conditions that lead to unanticipated consequences. Taken as a whole, the information in Guy’s speech equates to a global nemesis effect which is taking the planetary biosphere past the threshold of human habitability.

After stating the “benefits to the biosphere” from the collapse of industrial civilization, he presented a brief history of climate science’s implication of man as the primary culprit of climate change:

Benefits to the Biosphere from the Collapse of Industrial Civilization

– will slow down climate chaos, but too late to stop it.

– will terminate human population overshoot which is proceeding currently at the rate of 217,000 per day (births minus deaths every single day).

– will slow or stop the 6th Great Extinction proceeding at a pace of roughly 217 species per day (conservative estimate).

– will terminate environmental decay such as the soil we wash away into the oceans, the air we foul, the water we pollute, and all the other consequences of industrial civilization.

Brief History of Climate Change Science and the Pinpointing of Human-Induced Climate Change

In 1847, George Perkins Marsh is credited with being the first person to have implicated human activity as the source of climate change.

In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, considered the father of climate change science, predicted a 1 degree Celsius rise by the year 2,000. Few quote him today because he thought that a slight warming of the atmosphere would be a good thing for human agriculture. In the end, no such benefits will result from human-induced climate change due to the extreme weather swings and our oil-dependent agricultural system…

So much for global warming being beneficial

Last year, James Hansen (et al), pointed out that extreme weather events of all kinds (hot, cold, wet and dry) are becoming more frequent. In fact, their statistical analysis of historical data (as opposed to computer modelling of future events) demonstrated that extreme events (i.e. more than 3 standard deviation above or below average) are now ten times more likely than they used to be…

Our Oil-Dependent Agricultural System Spews CO2

Over the past 40 years, about 2 billion hectares of soil – equivalent to 15% of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined) – have been degraded through human activities, and about 30% of the world’s cropland have become unproductive. But it takes on average a whole century just to generate a single millimetre of topsoil lost to erosion.

Soil is therefore, effectively, a non-renewable but rapidly depleting resource.

We are running out of time. Within just 12 years, the report says, conservative estimates suggest that high water stress will afflict all the main food basket regions in North and South America, west and east Africa, central Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East, south and south-east Asia.

Unfortunately, though, the report overlooks another critical factor – the inextricable link between oil and food. Over the last decade, food and fuel prices have been heavily correlated…

Past Predictions of Mass Extinction and Human Die-Off

Despite the rantings of wingnuts like Alex Jones, free-market ideologues, and conspiracy theorists, the following warning given in 1986 by Robert Watson, who was the director of NASA’s upper atmospheric program at that time, remains prescient…

A dramatic loss of ozone over antarctica proves the “greenhouse effect” is real and presages a gradual warming of the Earth that threatens floods, drought, human misery in a few decades and – if not checked – eventual extinction of the human species, scientists warned Tuesday…

Recent Findings of Hansen and the NASA scientists…

James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned Wednesday that human-made climate change could lead to the deaths of millions of species.

“If we continue with business as usual this century, we will drive to extinction 20 to 50 percent of the species on the planet,” he told Current TV host Eliot Spitzer. “We are pushing the system an order of magnitude faster than any natural changes of climate in the past.”

In a recently published study, Hansen and his team concluded that the drastic increase in record high temperatures in recent years could be directly traced to human-made climate change, particularly the increase in greenhouse gases…

Large-Scale Climate Assessment Projects

Guy then goes into some large-scale climate assessment studies which do not include data for:
(a) Positive Feedbacks (tipping points)
(b) Economic Collapse

Back in 1990, the U.N. Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases warned:

Beyond 1 degree C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.

Our Dying Oceans and Back to the Future with Mass Extinctions

CO2 levels are now at 400ppm which does not account for methane and other greenhouse gases accumulating from human activity. CO2 has never exceeded 280 ppm in the last million years (based on actual readings of atmospheric chemistry from Antarctic ice-core data.) The last time greenhouse gases were at 400 ppm was three million years ago — a time when no humans existed. Humans have managed to radically alter the chemistry of the atmosphere to such a degree as to replicate pre-historic levels when no humans walked the Earth.

Phytoplankton has plummeted in the last century due to ocean warming and acidification:

A 2012 Science study found that the pace of ocean acidification today is ten times faster than during the PETM – the most rapid acidification event in the geologic record. Looking as far back as 300 million years, the study found that at current trends the projected rate of acidification of the world’s oceans will be the worst ever – worse than all the major extinctions of this time span: the end-Cretaceous, the end-Triassic, and even the end-Permian 250 million years ago, when 96% of marine species went extinct.

The current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 million years of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.

Considering the projections of increasing temperatures from the numerous large-scale assessments listed above, we can logically predict that the remaining phytoplankton, the base of the food chain, will suffer catastrophically.

Can CO2 Emissions and Economic Growth Be Decoupled?

Even with the economic meltdown of 2008, carbon emissions only slowed temporarily, quickly rebounding in 2010.

What this implies is that only a complete collapse will prevent runaway climate change. Others seem to agree. A censored 2012 study [original paper here] by University of Utah professor Tim Garrett explains that energy efficiency gains actually accelerate global energy consumption and CO2 emission rates and that only collapse can stop this process:

…Taking [a] global perspective with respect to the economy, the implication is that efficiency gains will do the exact opposite of what most claim it will do. If technological changes allow global energy productivity or energy efficiency to increase, then civilization grows faster into the resources that sustain it. The consequence is that energy consumption and CO2 emissions accelerate.

CO2 emissions can be stabilized despite efficiency gains. But this is possible only if decarbonization occurs as quickly as energy consumption grows. At today’s consumption growth rates, this would require roughly one new nuclear power plant, or equivalent, to be deployed each day. Barring this, since wealth and energy consumption rates are linked, it can only be through an economic collapse that CO2 emissions rates will decline. If the size of civilization enters a long and profound decline then wealth, energy consumption and CO2 emissions will all decrease at roughly the same rate. If the collapse is sufficiently rapid then it may be possible to maintain atmospheric CO2 concentrations below levels that are normally considered dangerous.

Perhaps there is a way out of this admittedly grim sounding double-bind. But Jevons’ Paradox tells us that it will not be by way of increasing energy efficiency. Quite the opposite…

From an interview with Garrett:

Although it “feels good to conserve energy,” he said, “there shouldn’t be any pretense that it will make a difference.”

These views, both radical and controversial, will be published this week in Climate Change, an online academic journal edited by renowned Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. Other research journals declined to publish Garrett’s research.

Garrett believes current options to potentially avert climate change — increased energy efficiencies, reduced population growth and a switch to power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, as well as underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning — are “not meaningful.”

“Fundamentally, I believe the system is deterministic,” Garrett said. “Changes in population and standard of living are only a function of the current energy efficiency. That leaves only switching to a non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power source as an available option.” Some economists are critical of his approach, but his solution is targeted to solve economic issues as “physics problems,” looking at civilization as one big problem instead of calculating individual problems based on population growth, increasing energy efficiency and other things.

“I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have,” he said. Garrett treats civilization as a “heat engine” that “consumes energy and does ‘work’ in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy,” he said.

Ominous Signs of Disturbing a Fragile Planet

Following in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau’s 1851 observations of flowering plants, Richard Primack, a professor of biology at Boston University, and his then-graduate student, Abe Miller-Rushing, observed the habits of the same species and found drastic changes:

…An analysis of Thoreau’s observations, those of another 19th-century naturalist and their own modern records indicate the first flowering date for 43 of the most common species has moved up by an average of 10 days. What’s more, species that aren’t shifting their flowering times in response to warmer springs are disappearing…

Recently, researchers at Penn State reconfigured the habitability zones for planets and Earth was calculated to be much further to the edge of what is called the ‘Goldilocks Zone’. The Goldilocks Zone is defined as…

…a narrow belt around a star where an orbiting planet would be warm enough to support life, but cool enough that life wouldn’t just go around bursting into flames all the time, a factor that can significantly delay evolutionary development. The term was introduced nearly two decades ago, and hasn’t been substantively updated since then.

Guy said that this suggests “relatively minor changes in the chemistry of the planet will produce significant impacts that might take us out of the habitable zone for humans.”

Back in 2010, researchers calculated the maximum wet-bulb temperatures reached in a high carbon dioxide emissions future climate scenario:

Reasonable worst-case scenarios for global warming could lead to deadly temperatures for humans in coming centuries, according to research findings from Purdue University and the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Researchers for the first time have calculated the highest tolerable “wet-bulb” temperature and found that this temperature could be exceeded for the first time in human history in future climate scenarios if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate…

…”Whole countries would intermittently be subject to severe heat stress requiring large-scale adaptation efforts,” Huber said. “One can imagine that such efforts, for example the wider adoption of air conditioning, would cause the power requirements to soar, and the affordability of such approaches is in question for much of the Third World that would bear the brunt of these impacts. In addition, the livestock on which we rely would still be exposed, and it would make any form of outside work hazardous.”…

…”We found that a warming of 12 degrees Fahrenheit would cause some areas of the world to surpass the wet-bulb temperature limit, and a 21-degree warming would put half of the world’s population in an uninhabitable environment,” Huber said….

Since 1998, global surface air temperatures have flattened despite continued increases in greenhouse gases. Climate change deniers have used this as proof that there is no human-induced climate change happening. Where is all the heat going? Into the deep oceans…

…If extra heat is temporarily stored elsewhere thanks to natural climate variations, we won’t necessarily notice it.

But sooner or later it will inevitably emerge, which means that the current slowdown in warming may well be balanced by a period of rapid warming in a few years — nobody knows how many — from now. Scientists have always said that global warming would proceed in fits and starts, not in a smooth upward trend in temperatures…”

– source

Another factor (global dimming or the aerosol effect from Asian industrialization) causing the dampening of current surface air temperatures in the last 15 years was mentioned in a previous post by David Wasdell:

…The effects of global dimming have been enhanced during this period [Asian Industrialization] by the mixing of more surface heat down to deeper ocean water, by the dominance of La Nina (cooler) conditions in the Pacific, and by a prolonged period of minimal solar radiation. The absence of temperature increase has also blocked all amplification from the temperature-dependent feedback mechanisms…

Unstoppable Feedback Loops

The following list of positive feedbacks are identified by Guy (with one added by me) as irreversible, although the last one appears to be hampered by the increasingly treacherous conditions that the resource extraction corporations are faced with as they try to set up shot in the melting and warming Arctic. I have added links to articles and essays, a few of which are very recent and add new information about these feedback loops (increased CO2 from hidden fires in the Amazon, boreal forest migration, and loss of top predators)

Standing on the Beach of Doom and waiting at the  Last Chance Saloon for the waves to come in…Brace for Impact.

Irreversible Positive Feedback

1.) Methane hydrates are bubbling out the Arctic Ocean (Science, March 2010)

2.) Warm Atlantic water is defrosting the Arctic as it shoots through the Fram Strait (Science, January 2011)

3.) Siberian methane vents have increased in size from less than a meter across in the summer of 2010 to about a kilometer across in 2011 (Tellus, February 2011)

4.) Drought in the Amazon triggered the release of more carbon than the United States in 2010 (Science, February 2011)

Using an innovative satellite technique, NASA scientists have determined that a previously unmapped type of wildfire in the Amazon rainforest is responsible for destroying several times more forest than has been lost through deforestation in recent years…

…In years with the most understory fire activity, such as 2005, 2007 and 2010, the area of forest affected by understory fires was several times greater than the area of deforestation for expansion of agriculture, according to Morton. The study goes further and fingers climate conditions – not deforestation – as the most important factor in determining fire risk in the Amazon at a regional scale…

…The new knowledge about the scope of understory fires could have implications for estimates of carbon emissions from disturbed forests. How experts account for those emissions depends on the fate of the forest – how it is disturbed and how it recovers.

“We don’t yet have a robust estimate of what the net carbon emissions are from understory fires, but widespread damages suggest that they are important source of emissions that we need to consider,” Morton said…

5.) Peat in the world’s boreal forests is decomposing at an astonishing rate (Nature Communications, November 2011)

…The planet’s boreal forests won’t expand poleward. Instead, they’ll shift poleward. The difference lies in the prediction that as boreal ecosystems follow the warming climate northward, their southern boundaries will be overtaken by even warmer and drier climates better suited for grassland.

And that’s a key difference. Grassland stores a lot of carbon in its soil, but it accumulates at a much slower rate than is lost from diminishing forests…

6.) Methane is being released from the Antarctic, too — over ten tens more carbon than parts of the Arctic (Nature, August 2012)

7.) Russian forest and bog fires are growing (NASA, August 2012)

8.) Cracking of glaciers accelerates in the presence of increased carbon dioxide (Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, October 2012)

9.) The Beauford Gyre has apparently Reversed Course (U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, October 2012)

10.) Exposure to sunlight increases bacterial conversion of exposed soil carbon, thus accelerating thawing of the permafrost (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2013)

11.) Summer ice melt in Antarctica — highest level in 1,000 years and the most rapid melting has occurred in the last 50 years (Nature Geoscience, April 2013)

I would add one more here…

12.) The Disappearance of Top Predators accelerates CO2 emissions (Nature Geoscience, Feb 2013)

People play a big role in predator decline and our study shows that this has significant, global implications for climate change and greenhouse gases,” says Atwood.

“We knew that predators shaped ecosystems by affecting the abundance of other plants and animals but now we know that their impact extends all the way down to the biogeochemical level.

Reversible Positive Feedback?

13.) Arctic drilling was fast-tracked by the Obama administration during the summer of 2012

Stations of the Crass

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by darbikrash in Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Peak Oil

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Capitalism, Class Consciousness, Consumerism, Corporate State, Crass, Empire, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Margaret Thatcher, Marx's 'Capital', Mass Media Manipulation, Meritocracy, Nick Cave, Pemberton Textile Mill Fire, Poison Girls, Poverty, Punk Rock, Rana Plaza Garment Factory, Ronald Reagan, Slave Labor, Sweatshop Factory, Tanzeen Sweater Factory Fire, The Elite 1%, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Vi Subversa, Walmart

Do they owe us a living- of course they f*cking do!

White Punks on Hope

The fine art of visualization has always been the domain of the artist, savant, musician, and others ostensibly outside of the obfuscation of bourgeois economics. Unfettered by the crushing gravitational pull of media propaganda, mainstream thinking and the lure of cash for the “right” perspective, occasionally an individual, a group, or infrequently, a culture emerges that can shed the blindness of false class consciousness and reveal what is hidden.

Some emergents are forgettable, some pedantic and clichéd, but all can be admired for at least daring to speak freely.

Reconstituted from the false promise of the ‘60’s hippie culture, and responding to the nihilism that infected an entire generation of Reagan and Thatcheresque refugees, a dissident core began to emerge.

The natural format given the disappointments of the ‘60’s was a hardened, cynical and violent counterculture vehemently opposing the peace, love, psychedelics, and innocence doctrine of the earlier eras.

Isolated from the mind numbing bombardment of institutionalized media messaging, alienated by the false promises of a decaying wage labor economy, and profoundly impacted by the specter of diminishing social mobility, the coming of age young adult was left with an inchoate rage against an unknowable and seemingly undefinable malaise.

It is said that the root of anger is fear. Fear of the unknown and unknowable, fear of denial of sustenance income, fear of failure, but mostly fear of prospects of mandatory participation in a system consisting of equal parts alienation, exploitation, and the active and unwilling transfer of wealth from those that produce to those that are the ownership class.

Lacking the clarity of class consciousness, what we are left with is fear and anger.

While much of the mainstream society is content with empty promises of lottery winnings, Las Vegas flights of fancy, and stores stocked with useless goods giving the perception of abundance, choice and liberty, those that are fearful and angry see other perspectives, and from these perspectives we can formulate a different narrative.

One such example was the ‘80’s punk collective Crass, consisting of Steve Ignorant, Penny Rimbaud, Eve Libertine, and Joy DiVerve and artist Gee Vaucher (whose work is featured here). This group was noteworthy as they had a reasonably well organized collective, and took particular satisfaction in critiquing the then active Falklands War, exposing the Thatcher administration as capitalizing on this act of State violence to bolster her home image.

They raised the ire of the US government as well as MI5 when they concocted a staged phone call between Reagan and Thatcher purporting to disclose US targeting of Europe with nuclear weapons as a response to the Soviet cold war threat.

Unfortunately, such antics that reach the highest forms of power are rare, and mostly we are left to view the world through the right side of a telescope, with a viewfinder supplied by the dissident.

From Her to Eternity

In the same vein as Crass, and at the same time, the punk band Poison Girls emerged from the collective with its unlikely front person, radical feminist and middle aged housewife Vi Subversa.

Vi Subversa provided vanguard class consciousness to young women of the day, as well as instructive peer examples questioning authority and male dominated counterculture. Illuminating and ridiculing female subservient expectations were (and still are) important steps to overturning bourgeois politics.

Venom laced vocals coupled with a whiskey toned, gravelly delivery were the hallmarks of the ska infused sound.

Our metaphoric viewfinder gives multidimensional focus to our predicament, a field dimension of time, space, geography, and focal plane, and while connected to a large scale telescope from the vantage point of the proper end, we can see the interconnectivity of capital over space and time, the diffuse tendrils of exploitation and alienation as they span continents.

The heft of the knurled wheel belies its frictionless connection as we spin the focusing knob through a dizzying kaleidoscope of images rapidly scrolling past the optic.

The wheel slows, the images in the telescope coalesce, and we can bring into focus a strange scene of dust, smoke, and the smell of charred wood and bodies. The date is Jan 10^th 1860, and the location is Lawrence, Massachusetts, the site of the Pemberton Textile Mill, which has just collapsed and killed 145 workers, mostly immigrant women and children. In what will become a disturbing scene of repetition throughout the next 1 ½ centuries, the factory was expanded in a frenzy of production, with new floors added to substandard codes. The floors were supported by iron pillars, and the new floors were promptly laden with heavy machinery. During that fateful January day, the machines were all running simultaneously, and the cumulative harmonics of the machinery started a destructive oscillation in the iron support beams- and they failed catastrophically, bringing the entire structure down in seconds and trapping nearly 600 people.

Later that evening, in the process of extricating the trapped women and children, who were singing to console each other as the rescuers labored to clear the wreckage, a lantern was kicked over and ignited the oil soaked floor material, incinerating the trapped women.

Capital from the very beginning has sought access to immigrants, minorities and other disenfranchised and marginalized members of society to fulfill its boundless needs for low cost labor, and as a bonus, it prefers those that cannot protest or defend themselves.

The Mercy Seat

Another whimsical spin of the viewfinder knob advances us to March 25th, 1911, in New York City, where once again we image a collapsed building and smell the arid stench of burning flesh. 50 years of Industrial Revolution has changed very little it seems, robber barons are in their ascendancy and the accumulation of profits at enormous social cost is in full swing.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory has just burned to the ground, extinguishing the lives of 146 immigrant women and children. Once again, capital has attached its tentacles to the downtrodden and dispossessed, with wide spread deployments of factories incorporating abominable working conditions- hastily constructed with regard only for profits, blocked safety exits and locked fire escapes, where they existed at all, no doubt to minimize any theft of materials or unauthorized leaving of the workspace, no matter the circumstances.

The conventional wisdom of the 19th and early 20th century was that the working class was essentially a criminal class, particularly children were deemed to be vagrant and much better off in the throes of a 14 hour work day in the factories than “running the streets” getting into trouble. The narrative continued to adult males, who were portrayed as alcoholics, deadbeats, and candidates for debtor’s prisons if not “gainfully” employed in the service of the factories.

In this fashion, capital had begun its now time honored strategy of concocting false narratives meant to valorize and link its banal pursuit of profits at the expense of others, to peer reviewed social behavior “worthy” of the eager to please citizen. At various points the narrative linked religion, purity of purpose, and virtue with populating the various factories at the beck and call of capital.

The impressive aspect of this sham is the degree of acceptance that the calculus of exchanging wage labor for sustenance income is able to achieve. Tens of thousands are drawn off small farms for work in the factories, unwittingly substituting self dependence and true independence for wage servitude.

It is tempting to dismiss these tragic events as anomalies, but in fact the conditions in these factories were widespread, and a good representation of typical conditions.

We’ll close this vignette with a chilling account from Nick Cave (of Birthday Party fame)
as he recounts his appointment with the electric chair.

…….In Heaven His throne is made of gold
The ark of his Testament is stowed
A throne from which I’m told
All history does unfold.
Down here it’s made of wood and wire
And my body is on fire
And God is never far away.
Into the mercy seat I climb
My head is shaved, my head is wired
And like a moth that tries
To enter the bright eye
I go shuffling out of life
Just to hide in death awhile
And anyway I never lied……….

War to the Palaces, Peace to the Huts

It came by mail wrapped in cellophane like some type of indiscreet porn magazine, the spring issue of Jacobin magazine. You can of course get it online, but I prefer the hard copy, the artwork, the acid smell of high quality paper and above all the irony and hypocrisy of receiving such a publication in my predominantly Republican neighborhood.

Emblazoned though the wrapper was the large font, bold lettering from the heading above, the other side a schematic of a guillotine with the notation “some assembly required”.

Indeed.

You might be tempted to think that advances in material science and structural engineering over the last nearly century and a half would preclude the chances of such a disaster such as happened in 1860 Massachusetts from ever happening again, but you would be wrong.

On April 24th of this year, the eight story Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh, trapping more than 3000 people, and ultimately killing more than 1100, mostly women and children. The building collapsed due to the improper addition of new upper floors necessary to accommodate production expansion. A power outage occurred on the day of the collapse, and when the power generators restarted the machinery oscillations precipitated the building collapse. Sound familiar? Serious structural cracks were observed the day before the collapse, but the recalcitrant workers were threatened with the loss of one month’s pay if they did not enter.

So they went in.

Just a few months prior, the nearby Tanzeen sweater factory caught fire and 117 workers were burned to death.

Bangladesh has about 5000 garment factories, employing about 4 million workers, 90% whom are women. The Bangladeshi workers earn about $37 per month compared to the “extravagant” Chinese wage rate of $350 per month. Because of this wage disparity, Bangladesh is the second largest manufacturer of textiles (and growing) as they displace the more expensive Chinese competition.

The vast majority of these exports are shipped to the US and the UK. A growing percentage of these garments are part of the West’s recent obsession with the so-called “fast fashion” movement, wherein consumers purchase what amounts to disposable clothing items which knock off the latest high couture fashion look at bargain basement prices.

Much of the remaining garments are T shirts and other undergarments for which consumers will not spend money.

About 2 dozen of the Bangladeshi members of Parliament own garment factories.

These facts illustrate the connectivity that the bourgeoisie political economy demands between capital, the levers of government, the exploitation of workers, and to the point of this post, the complicity of the consumer who can’t be bothered if children are being roasted alive in the manufacture of their underwear.

The mortal enemy of capital is transparency. As has been the case since the publication of “Capital” in 1867, the primary weapon of obfuscation is the focus on the means of exchange, e.g. the free market, and to hide the means of production where the atrocities reside.

But beyond this is the ugly, unspeakable truth. The consumer must have 3 for $5 T shirts, $.59 burritos and $1 cheeseburgers- because this my friends is sustenance survival. This is how the capitalist economy stair steps its way down the death spiral. Alternating between investing in production efficiencies in the form of machine automation, labor beat downs in the form of union busting, and dismantling the regulatory environment to further externalize costs, the last rung on the ladder is reducing sustenance costs of the worker. Why? Because profits are determined not by supply and demand as bourgeois neoclassical economics would have you believe, but by labor value. And in the face of an oversupply of willing workers, wage labor is largely determined by how cheaply the worker can be sustained. It is no coincidence that Walmart is the world’s largest company (measured by employee headcount), the capitalist economy makes room for any firm that works hard to globally reduce the sustenance costs for the US labor pool.

The Feeding of the 5000

I often get dragged into dinner party ruminations with libertarians, a hopeless ideology if there ever was one, particularly the Austrian version, and I am regularly subjected to patience shearing metaphors illustrating liberty and a tiny, impotent government as a way to correct the improprieties of global capitalism.

One of the more popular metaphors is the illustration of a marathon race, such as the Boston marathon. It goes something like this, our intrepid racers have a personal responsibility to train for the race, and based on the efficacy of their training and dedication, expect to race against a field of peers. The role of the race organizers (government) is simply to layout effective course markers and to administrate the race, prevent cheating, etc. The government must not interfere with the race, may not assist weaker racers, and may not impede stronger participants.

It’s a meritocracy, where one succeeds or fails on the merits of their own preparation, strength, and moral character. (Note the strong moralistic sub text)

Having put forth such a compelling case for self reliance, the argument quickly reverts to familiar claims of moral decay, lack of self sufficiency, and reliance on a nanny state for prosperity as causality for the contemporary tribulations of capital.

But due to the voluntary nature entering a race for the sole purposes of recreation, I think we can see this is a false narrative.

A better descriptor of the real world might be more accurately likened to the running of the bulls at Pamplona Spain.

With one exception- and that is that the race is now mandatory, and everyone must run. Run until you can run no more and are trampled or gored.

So the masses flee in terror, inches ahead (or sometimes behind) the sharpened point of the bull’s horns. It’s everyman for himself in this valorized blood sport, the low frequency rumble of cloven hooves just behind you, the hot breath of flared nostrils and the spray of animal spittle on the back of your neck. You run.

To the side of you a woman falls, immediately trampled under the cascade and fury of hooves, muscle and fur. A blur of sinew and flank, she disappears amid screams and dust. You run.

Like a bad Camus novel, one by one they fall around you, stricken, stumbling from exhaustion, they fall, as this race has been going on a long time, and will continue until you die. If you should be so lucky as to pull ahead of the masses, pushing and elbowing your way to the fore, you soon learn that you do not have to be faster than the bulls, just faster than the guy behind you. Jostling and pushing- tripping others to buy precious time, the bodies consumed under the stampeding livestock slow the herd so you may advance.

Once ahead you can run unhindered, free of those who would grab your shirt before they are pulled under, selecting short cuts and back alleys, gaining first yards, then blocks of advantage. Some get so far ahead they may stop to enjoy respite in a side café, but the rumble on the horizon, the rising dust, and the distant screams makes these stops short and full of worry.

When you see the tip of the horn and fully appreciate the nature of the race, you will never forget. It damages you in such a way as there is no recovery, remove yourself from the carnage and you will still run reflexively, in fact you will always run reflexively, from this point on.

And a very few get so far ahead they can never be caught by the herd, they are miles ahead in different cities and different countries, some do not even know there is such a race.

And so they buy their own bulls.

Travesty in the Garden of Gethsemane

But the hypocrisy is noticed by the mailman when he delivers my magazine. He chuckles at the irony. The interconnectedness and extant participation in the bourgeois economy cannot be subverted by hollow protest, not rectified by reading or writing.

The focusing wheel on our telescope is spun once more with a mighty thrust. It freewheels, and in the optics we see clouds, oceans, and continents. The continuum in time is passed through, the geography changes, the images begin to settle down.

We see a town that looks familiar. Your town. The focus sharpens and we see a house that seems familiar. Your house. We see a bedroom that seems familiar. Your bedroom. And in the dresser we see a neatly stacked pile of T shirts with blood stains on them. Your shirts.

My shirts.

Staring Into the Abyss

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Canfield Ocean, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dystopic Future, Extinction of Man, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Technophiliacs, The Anthropocene Age, The Great Cleansing

I’ll admit, I don’t really read far into any of the scientific analyses. They all point the same direction: massive discontinuity and unpredictability, what some describe as nonlinear. Armed as I am with only a modest science education, the most basic fact still able to be grokked by the masses is that we live on a water world, where oceans are both the base of the food chain and the creator/regulator of the air we land-based creature breathe. The oceans need not die in their totality before withdrawal of their support functions kills us, yet we behave as if it’s all expendable. We can’t even admit such basic biological mechanisms, so the oceans are simultaneously overharvested and used as dump sites for everything. Real smart, like the rest of collective mistakes.”

~ Brutus

Hello fellow collapsitarians, train wreck rubberneckers, concerned citizens, and everyone in between. My time for respite from the horrors of capitalist industrial civilization has arrived wherein I let this site sit fallow for a couple of weeks. When I rail against capitalism, this doesn’t by default make me a proponent of communism or any other ‘ism’. Globalized capitalism is what has conquered the world and it happens to be the current ‘ism’ destroying the biosphere with the industrial efficiency and speed of a Nazi gas chamber. The time to have created another ‘ism’ which may have saved humans from omnicide has long since passed. We are hurdling towards the end of the Anthropocene and into a period I call ‘The Great Cleansing’, whereby Mother Nature scrubs the Earth of all the hubristic artifacts and baggage of modern man. Of course there will quite a bit of noxious material that she’ll have to deal with and absorb such as radioactive waste, plastics, and CO2, but what is a few million years of remediation when compared to the Earth’s age of nearly 5 billion years with perhaps another 7.5 billion to go until consumed by the Sun. Despite all the insults and neglect that she has suffered at our hands, she will probably allow a small tribe of humans to survive the bottleneck. It would be a shame for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to have no beneficiaries, would it not?

What was our major downfall? I think we put too much faith in technology. Indeed we have used our big brains to solve many seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but we’ve put our technological cleverness on a pedestal at the expense of everything else. Technology has become the God of the 21st Century, the saviour for all of industrial civilization’s increasingly complex and insoluble problems. Granted, it has allowed man to search the stars and decode the DNA of life, but in the process it has clouded our memory of where we’ve come from, the womb from whence we were born. We’re just temporary visitors here with no preeminent right to rule the world above all other living things, and it looks increasingly like we have overstayed our welcome. While Homo sapiens are busy arguing about who or what is responsible for their current predicament, Mother Nature is slowly ramping up her fury. Geophysical forces on a planetary scale have been unleashed; they can no longer be contained by the scientific computations and laboratory tinkerings of mankind. The die has been cast and our fate sealed. No geo-engineering scheme or whiz-bang techno fix can contain her. As the Arctic melts away, followed by the Greenland ice sheet, and then the West Antarctic, our coastal cities will succumb to the sea. Jet streams and hydrologic cycles will transfigure themselves. Our once hospitable and stable seasons for agriculture will become erratic, the water sparse, and the land barren. The great oceanic currents will stall and break down, creating the anoxic and purple-hued waters of a ‘Canfield Ocean‘. As Paul said, the human race is “living in some kind of fantasy land, a land in which truth is avoided”, but a handful of us have peered into the abyss of the unfolding eco-apocalypse, and the stark reality of mankind’s own extinction has been seared into our brains.

How do we go on from here? …one day at a time. What once was important has become trivial. This would include all of the trappings and illusions of mainstream culture. Functioning in this “fantasy world” and going through the motions seems otherworldly and fake. We feel like blurting our what we know to those around us, but we can’t. There’s a straitjacket awaiting us at the nearest insane asylum. No one believes what the cold hard facts and trends have told us after we discarded the rose-tinted glasses society demands everyone wear. And why should they? It’s a traumatic experience to the psyche. Everything about the world you have been taught, all the myths of eternal progress and man’s place in the universe, comes crashing down in a thousand pieces.

So the question remains of how to live in a world of illusions and fakery. Gravitate towards that which is real. Shut off your TV and walk outside to breath in the summer air and run your fingers along the bark of an ancient tree, hike into the wilderness and watch the stars at night, spend one-on-one time with those close to you. They don’t need to know what you know; most will refuse to believe the facts even when meticulously laid out before their eyes. Leave them in their comfort zone, at least for a little while longer or until they become curious. A citizen of modern industrial civilization who confronts the horrific future awaiting their unsustainable way-of-living is like a drug abuser trying to deal with his self-destructive addiction. Both are under the spell of a very powerful force that does not let go until death. They are prisoners, mentally and physically. To talk about this dark subject, the collapse of industrial civilization and mankind’s impending extinction, join a group of like-minded people. Such clubs seem to be growing these days.

It’s a bit odd talking into the ether of the internet to people I will never meet or hear the voices of, but such a venue is really the only place a dissident voice can be heard in today’s atomized and one-dimensional society. For the reasons discussed above, I cannot speak of these disturbing topics to anyone else. This is my only outlet.

Fire Up The Next Great Extinction Event!

27 Monday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

1250now.org, 350.org, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Drought in America's Bread basket, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Global Famine, Methane Time Bomb, National Climate Assessment Report, Peak Water, Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction, Release of Ocean Methane Hydrates, Robert Hunziker, Sarah Palin, Social Unrest

When a former hedge fund manager uses the word “extinction” seven times in his article, that tends to get my attention. Robert Hunziker has written a new article entitled America’s Ecological Precipice which is an overview of many of the things we have been talking about here. He identifies two primary threats from the Arctic which is currently in runaway climate change:

(1) The warming Arctic alters the atmospheric jet streams, bringing in its wake embedded droughts similar to the 2012 blistering drought, the worst drought since the 1950s.

(2) Additionally, and more critically, the warming Arctic is flat-out releasing methane into the atmosphere like there is no tomorrow, threatening to heat up the entire planet, which, over time, could turn into a worldwide scorcher, possibly triggering an extinction event.

He mentions that the Arctic Methane Emergency Group [AMEG] has decided to quantify the amount of methane that is now escaping into the atmosphere from these Arctic areas. I was not aware of this, and I have not seen any data from them.

Based upon eight (8) joint Russian/American scientific expeditions into the Arctic under the aegis of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University Alaska Fairbanks, methane fields of a breathtakingly fantastic scale have been discovered with plumes over a half-mile wide spewing methane directly into the atmosphere in concentrations 100 times higher than normal. The Russian and American scientists have never before experienced anything of such magnitude, and in addition to powerful emissions from shallow waters where over 100 readings were recorded, it is spewing up from within cracks in the Arctic ice in the open seas far from land.

Moreover, the quantities of methane in the continental shelf alone are so huge and overwhelming that only 1% or 2% of the methane released could lead to an unstoppable chain reaction of runaway overheating of the planet.

Along these lines, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group is deciding to quantify, for the first time ever, the results of runaway climate change, leading to the probability of an extinction event on planet earth. Unfortunately for those who choose to disregard concerns about climate change, this could happen within their lifetimes, or their children, or grandchildren. Nobody knows for sure.

The most current readings from NOAA show a continual rise in global CH4 levels:

I suspected the Arctic readings would be off the chart, and indeed they are, according to those published at methane-hydrates.blogspot.com. Just to put in context those values in the chart below, levels of CH4 have historically been much lower, except in times of mass extinction:

In 2010, methane levels in the Arctic were measured at 1850 nmol/mol, a level over twice as high as at any time in the 400,000 years prior to the industrial revolution. Historically, methane concentrations in the world’s atmosphere have ranged between 300 and 400 nmol/mol during glacial periods commonly known as ice ages, and between 600 to 700 nmol/mol during the warm interglacial periods. It has a high global warming potential: 72 times that of carbon dioxide over 20 years, and 25 times over 100 years,^[43] and the levels are rising. Recent research suggests that the Earth’s oceans are a potentially important new source of Arctic methane.^[44]

…The Earth’s atmospheric methane concentration has increased by about 150% since 1750, and it accounts for 20% of the total radiative forcing from all of the long-lived and globally mixed greenhouse gases (these gases don’t include water vapor which is by far the largest component of the greenhouse effect).^[47] – source

These sky high methane emissions are from East Antarctica and appear to be from methane hydrates in the form of free gas bubbling up through the ice sheet. The danger is that such emissions appear to be escalating not only over Antarctica, but also on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and in the Arctic. Just recently, a Russian ice base had to be evacuated due to the thinning ice in the Arctic. This is a foreboding sign of that which is to come.

Like the 350.org which campaigns in vain to stop the inexorable rise in CO2, there is now a similar group for methane emissions, called 1250now.org which aims to keep global CH4 below that level. As they say, the genie is already out of its bottle and such efforts are merely psychological exercises of comforting self-delusionment. At the same time, the heads of industry are just trying to figure out how to exploit the stuff in order to burn it.

I’ve strayed a bit from Hunziker’s original article so getting back to it, he describes how lackadaisical the U.S. government has been in response to such dire climate change warnings like that coming from the National Climate Assessment report which stated the following:

Threats to human health from increased extreme weather events, wildfires and air pollution, as well as diseases spread by insects and through food and water;

Less reliable water supply, and the potential for water rights to become a hot-button legal issue;

More vulnerable infrastructure due to sea-level rise, bigger storm surges, heavy downpours and extreme heat;

Warmer and more acidic oceans.

On the topic of our vanishing water supply and the state of America’s High Plains Aquifer, “one of the world’s great aquifers responsible for about 30% of America’s irrigated land,” Hunziker writes :

The recent extreme drought of 2012 across America’s breadbasket has brought the seriousness of a shortage of water to a crescendo as the Kansas Geological Survey reported that average water levels dropped nearly a third of the total decline since 1996… over a period of only two years! Or, put another way, 1/3 of the total 17-year drawdown of the aquifer occurred in 2 years. This is not a telltale signal of gathering disaster. Rather, the possibility of an impending collapse of the ecosystem is at the doorstep!

But most amusing is the story of GOP sweetheart Sarah Palin and her total flip-flop on the reality of climate change. When she was governor of Alaska back in 2007, she wholeheartedly endorsed taking action to ameliorate the effects of climate change:

At the time, Governor Palin stated: “Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is also a social, cultural, and economic issue important to all Alaskans… As a result of this warming, coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice, record forest fires, and other changes are affecting, and will continue to affect, the lifestyles and livelihoods of Alaskans.

But then when she joined McCain’s 2008 presidential ticket, her brain was apparently run through the Republican anti-science indoctrination machine and viola! She instantly became a climate change denier:

…Once Palin joined the Republican ticket, within 12 months, she dismissed climate science as “snake oil.”

…Nowadays, the politicians in Alaska, very much aware of the changes in the polar region, are positioning Alaska as a gateway for shipping traffic and production of oil beneath the increasingly ice-free seas of Arctic waters. And, Palin’s brief legacy of concern about a viciously changing climate evaporated into thin air. Poof… gone!

Money in American politics, like most other places in the world, corrupts absolutely. Money is all that is needed for smarmy politicians to turn their backs on the future of their own children. I hope they can eat all that worthless currency that’s flying off the money presses because real food is going to be hard to come by in the future, especially when the hungry masses are climbing your palace walls to raid your pantry:

According to NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, Kansas will be 4 degrees warmer in winter without Arctic ice, which regularly generates cold air masses that flow southward into the U.S. (You’ve probably heard weather forecasters say the following hundreds of times: People in the middle part of the country had better button up. We’ve got an Arctic Cold Front hitting this weekend and temperatures will drop 15-to-20 degrees overnight.) But, with an ice-less Arctic, this legacy of cool Arctic air serving to regulate the climate in the U.S. will be mostly gone, ineffective.

As follows, the problem for Kansas: Warmer winters are bad news for the wheat farmers’ requirement for freezing temperatures to grow winter wheat, and during summer, warmer days rob Kansas of precious soil moisture, drying out valuable wheat crop. Which means Kansas will increasingly depend upon one of the world’s largest aquifers, which is already drying up in certain locations, even if drought conditions are not present.

Devouring the ‘Seed Corn’ to Maintain the Present

25 Saturday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 48 Comments

Tags

America's Crumbling Infrastructure, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecocide, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, EROEI, Infinite Growth Paradigm, Mass Die Off, Natural Gas Bubble, Resource Wars, Roger Blanchard Ph.D., Thermal Equilibrium Between Oceans and Atmosphere, Thermal Inertia of the Oceans, unwashed public

At the end of this post is a paper being worked on by Roger Blanchard Ph.D.[rblanchard@LSSU.edu]. He is a chemistry instructor at Lake Superior State University as well as author of several books, among them ‘The Future of Global Oil Production‘. This paper, which I assume is still in progress, is important for several reasons, one of which is the discussion on the lag time of CO2 and methane (CH4) greenhouse effects in the atmosphere as well as thermal inertia which, in this case, refers to the slow rate at which the stored heat in the ocean is transferred to the atmosphere in order to reach thermal equilibrium. The author remarks that “Few people appreciate thermal inertia and its consequences. I expect future generations to suffer the consequences for that lack of appreciation or caring.” The oceans have absorbed about 90% of the additional heat created from greenhouse gases caused by human activity. Thermal equilibrium between the ocean and atmosphere will take decades to occur:

Global warming hasn’t paused, it’s accelerating, especially in the oceans, according to a new study published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL)…

…The scientists found that over the past decade, while surface air temperatures have not risen very much, there has been a warming of the deep oceans that is unprecedented over the past 50 years. They also found acceleration in the overall warming of the Earth. Consistent with previous research, they concluded, “In the last decade, about 30 percent of the warming has occurred below 700 meters, contributing significantly to an acceleration of the warming trend.” [Surprising Depth to Global Warming’s Effects]…

…The authors suggest that more heat is being transferred to the deep ocean layers, due to changes in wind patterns associated with an ocean cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. However, as Kevin Trenberth explained, this process is only temporary. Sooner or later the warming at the surface will accelerate once again, he said, adding, “…it contributes to the overall warming of the deep ocean that has to occur for the system to equilibrate. It speeds that process up. It means less short-term warming at the surface, but at the expense of a greater, earlier, long-term warming, and faster sea-level rise.”…

When the ocean cycles change state again, these models tell us that we can expect to see a rapid warming of temperatures at the surface. Another study published just this month in the journal Nature Climate Change has concluded that accelerated ocean warming can explain the slowed surface-air warming in recent years. Lead author Virginie Guemas noted, “If it is only related to natural variability then the rate of warming will increase soon.”

Contrary to claims that global warming has paused, the overall warming of the Earth has accelerated over the past decade. While we have experienced a respite in warming at the surface, it is a temporary one which will eventually be replaced by a rapid warming of surface air temperatures…

When we combine the temperature increase of a future loss in global dimming or the aerosol effect as well as the thermal equilibrium being eventually reached between the oceans and atmosphere, a large amount of global warming is in the pipeline to further strengthen current positive feedback loops and deepen the environmental collapse. Blanchard’s paper goes on to discusses the reasons behind the U.S. natural gas bubble which also apply to fracked oil wells.

– financial problems related to the recent glut in drilling which will affect future gas extraction projects

– the most productive shale gas deposits are peaking already

– the most productive shale gas deposits are being exploited first, leaving lower quality reservoirs as the remaining untapped places (low EROEI or EROI)

In 2007,roughly 9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) was spent to purchase the energy used by the U.S. economy to produce the goods and services that comprised the GDP. Over recent decades that ratio has varied between 5 and 14 percent. The abrupt rise and subsequent decline in the proportion of the GDP spent for energy was seen during the “oil shocks” of the 1970s, in mid-2008, and again in 2011. Each of these increases in the price of oil relative to GDP had large impacts on discretionary spending—that is, on the amount of income that people can spend on what they want versus what they need. An increase in energy cost from 5 to 10 or even 14 percent of GDP would come mainly out of the 25 percent or so of the economy that usually goes to discretionary spending. Thus changes in the amount we spend on energy (much of which goes overseas) have very large impacts on the U.S. economy since most discretionary spending is domestic. This is why each significant increase in the price of oil (and of energy generally) has been associated with an economic recession, and it suggests that declining EROI will take an increasing economic toll in the future. – source

So I’m wondering what energy and finance resources our children and grandchildren will have left to fix the ecological wasteland we are leaving behind, if such a clean-up were even possible. There will be no clean-up, let alone mining of asteroids. The Skagit River bridge collapse, one of 69,000 structurally deficient bridges which haven’t been updated in decades, is just the latest sign of America’s neglected and crumbling infrastructure. Money printing cannot go on forever in a world of depleting energy.

Modern economic growth is based on systematically carrying out all three of the following:

Using up renewable resources faster than they can be replenished.
Generating wastes faster than the environment can absorb them.
Exhausting non-renewable resources.

Any system predicated on these actions will not survive indefinitely.

The short term profit-seeking, Darwinian paradigm of capitalism will abdicate to nature the responsibility of dealing with pollution and ecocide and resource depletion; nature will exact its revenge by culling the human population through wars, famine, disease, and eco-collapse. According to the tenants of capitalism, only the fittest will survive. This fear in the unwashed masses of a coming societal collapse and nature’s retribution is based on reality and is a primary source for the obsession with future dystopian societies and post-apocalyptic stories in American pop culture.

Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian #5

25 Saturday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

EdBassMaster, Hunger Games, M.C. Escher, Milton Waddams of 'Office Space', Weekend Funnies for the Depressed Collapsitarian

If M.C. Escher had been a construction worker…

If your future outlook includes visions of ‘Hunger Games’…

I busted a gut watching these. This Youtube comedian has been around for a while, but I just recently discovered him…

‘Office Space’ Humor

Milton Waddams: And I said, I don’t care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I’m, I’m quitting, I’m going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they’ve moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn’t bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it’s not okay because if they take my stapler then I’ll set the building on fire…

Not funny, but interesting…

Words to live by…

The Superorganism of Capitalist Industrial Civilization

24 Friday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Nate Hagens, Peak Oil, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, Two-Tiered Justice System, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

I was thinking about something Nate Hagens said:

On a higher level, we have a superorganism, our civilization, which has accessed an energy gradient the same way that old growth forests have.

The human population makes up this superorganism’s myriad of cells. The nervous system is made up of the various mediums that transmit information – internet, television, phone, print media, etc… The circulatory system is the transportation system providing paths of production and distribution – roads, bridges, trains, airline and shipping routes, etc… Of course energy, primarily oil and fossil fuels, are the life-blood that fuels this system. If you have ever tried to fight against this Leviathan, you will have its immune system, the law and security apparatus, thrust upon you so that you may be hammered into conformity or isolated and quarantined in a tiny prison cell. Of course there are many malcontent cells within the belly of the beast, but capitalist industrial civilization is fortified with self-perpetuating social structures which ensure its survival.

Take for instance its education system which churns out countless drones who lack the ability to think critically and are filled with fragmented and specialized knowledge which prepares them as cogs for the corporate world. Everything, including one’s relationship with fellow humans, is reduced to a “business relationship” or “investment”. The various institutions of modern society are configured to reinforce capitalist industrial civilization. The media are corporate mouthpieces and echo chambers for the dominant capitalist system – materialism, conspicuous consumption, atomization and alienation of man from nature and from his own humanity, etc… The entertainment industry fosters an acquisitiveness for high consumption lifestyles. It relies on the corporate state to mass market and mass produce these values. The primary metric of social worth in the corporate state is money, and the class which has managed to accumulate vast sums of it are those who have usurped the levers of governance. You have heard of the two-tiered justice system we have in this country which coddles the elite and discards everyone else. Thus the ethos of society flows downward from those who have at their disposal the power to mold and influence society’s perceptions and norms.

I talked about this in the essay Kill the Messenger:

Will man go extinct? He certainly seems to be doing everything in his power to make sure it happens:

…the worship of an economic system that reduces everything to a financial object.

…the continued exploitation and burning of an increasingly more expensive and environmentally damaging energy source which is causing the climate to swing out of control with various feedback loops.

…the dismantling and perversion of regulations and the rule of law to satisfy greed and a grossly unjust social hierarchy.

…the indoctrination of the population into a materialist society detached from the appreciation of nature’s fundamental role in our survival.

…the degeneration of public debate into infomercial sound bites by way of mass media manipulation.

…the wholesale destruction of the natural world and the latest attempts of a so-called green economy to monetize every bit of nature in order to save capitalism.

…and the spread of the above described culture through globalization.

If you think about the modern globalized civilization as a super-organism, then you come to realize how futile it is to think that an organism, any organism, would voluntarily starve itself or constrict its own growth. If you plant a tree in a pot, it will eventually become root-bound or send its roots over the lip of the container or straight through the ceramic wall. This is exactly what our capitalist industrial civilization is doing.

It has utilized every resource available to sustain growth, and now speaks of manipulating the weather in order to avoid the threat that climate chaos poses to its vitality. As far as mineral depletion, there has even been plans drawn up to mine asteroids for their deposits. The next frontier is to break the bonds of Earth itself. But we have irreparably cracked the vase that is our home. The Arctic will soon have an annual “window” in September through which the sun’s rays will work their way inside, prying that annual crack ever wider every year. In addition, we have pushed most other species, the building blocks of biodiversity, out of their habitat and onto the one-way path of extinction. The life-giving fluids of our vase have slowly been poisoned and acidified by the waste from our fossil fuel energy slaves. The hydrologic cycle within our little world has been hopelessly fouled with. The superorganism of capitalist industrial civilization is now starving the majority of its cells in order to keep healthy a few of its privileged cells who sit in places of power and Mammon worship. This potted plant or superorganism we call industrial civilization is looking rather pale and shriveled these days. As a matter of fact, it’s like a tree whose bark has been peeled off. It’s still standing at the moment and it does not know it’s dead, but its days are surely numbered.

The hope of environmentalists can no longer be that this corrupt system will run out of energy(Peak Oil), that the money presses will break down, or that it can be changed through capitalist schemes of “greening the economy”. The only thing that would have stopped the destruction would have been to build a new system that holds the health of the natural world as the primary metric through which all human activity is viewed and planned. Suffice it to say that such a system would not have been capitalism. Of course such a sentiment would brand you as an “eco-terrorist”, but the purpose of this essay is not to give hopium, but to describe the entrenched power structure which has laid waste to the environmental movement and our planet. Although small and ineffective, individual acts of moral courage and sacrifice are all that is left as this Beast of industrialized civilization tumbles to the ground, dying from self-inflicted wounds too numerous to count.

Since I was young, I knew I’d find you
But our love was a song sung by a dying swan

And even now you’ll hear me calling
You’ll hear me calling
And in your dreams you’ll see me falling, falling

Breathe in the light
I’ll stay here in the shadows
Waiting for a sign, as the tide grows
Higher, and higher, and higher…

Runaway Climate Change in the Arctic is Just The Beginning

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 45 Comments

Tags

Aerosol Effect, Arctic Ice, Climate Change, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, David Wasdell, Environmental Collapse, Envisionation, Global Dimming, Global Famine, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Methane Release from Thawing Permafrost, Release of Ocean Methane Hydrates, Runaway Climate Change, The Apollo-Gaia Project, West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt

An astute reader has directed me to a couple of brilliant, just-released videos done by David Wasdell (produced by Envisionation) which bring into focus the rapid changes that are occurring in the Arctic and what the horrific implications are for the rest of the planet. I have watched both videos and posted an abbreviated version of them below. The original transcript of the two videos is here. We can see that even the worse case scenarios plotted by mainstream climate models have grossly underestimated what is happening in the Arctic. As Mr. Wasdell states, “The Arctic… is the fastest moving response to global warming and climate change anywhere on the planet.”

One of the reasons for the Arctic’s rapid temperature increase is that it is not being shielded by industrial pollutants that once came from the Northern Hemisphere. The aerosol effect is now coming primarily from the burning of poor quality coal in Asia(China and India). From roughly 1940 to 1980 there was a massive increase in power production during the Great Acceleration of the West. Remember the acid rain and smog from the 50’s and 60’s? In 1970, the U.S. Congress imposed acid emission regulations through the Clean Air Act which was strengthened two decades later in 1990. Sulfate and nitrate levels in precipitation decreased by some 40 percent since that time. This lifted the manmade protective aerosol shield, also called “global dimming”. Temperatures then started to rise again, but have leveled off since 1997 due to the recent industrialization of China and India, the effect of which has been to artificially cool down global temperature once more.

The effects of global dimming have been enhanced during this period [Asian Industrialization] by the mixing of more surface heat down to deeper ocean water, by the dominance of La Nina (cooler) conditions in the Pacific, and by a prolonged period of minimal solar radiation. The absence of temperature increase has also blocked all amplification from the temperature-dependent feedback mechanisms.

All of these eras(The Great Acceleration, The Clean Air Act, and Asia’s Industrialization) and their effect on global temperature are shown in the chart below:

Climate-change deniers are of course crowing and saying “Although carbon dioxide concentrations have gone on increasing, and emissions are running at a higher rate than when temperature was still rising, temperature has not changed. So obviously it is independent of carbon dioxide. So we can forget all about climate change and continue to use fossil energy without any worry about contributing to global warming!” That is a complete and utter myth!

Remember what happened after the Second World War? The same thing is happening today.

So what happens when Asia, specifically China, cleans up and improves its air quality? Global temperatures will rise again.

The Arctic Meltdown

Free from the effects of global dimming that heavy post WW II industrial activity produced in the northern hemisphere, the Arctic air is relatively clean, as compared to the rest of the world right now. The greenhouse effect from CO2 is therefore allowed to occur uninhibited at a much faster rate, setting off numerous positive feedback loops:

– increased Arctic temperature raises water-vapor concentration which in turn elevates the heating

– floating ice and land-based ice begin to melt and more sea and land surface is exposed to the sun’s rays, inducing further ice melt from the diminishing Arctic albedo effect

– the sea heats up from the disintegration of floating ice and the land heats up from diminishing ice cover

Hyper-exponential Increase of Temperature in the Arctic Area

The worst-case prediction by current climate models of an ice-free Arctic by about 2075 are way off mark because they employ crude linear extrapolations that do not account for complex, self-reinforcing feedback loops. the Arctic will actually experience its first occurrence of zero ice area at the end of September 2015 according to Wasdell’s studies.

Through the use of submarine-based sonar measurements and satellite data, a PIOMASS graph of yearly minimum Arctic ice volume or mass has been constructed which also shows the first occurrence of no floating Arctic sea-ice in 2015.

Another graph, known on the internet as the Arctic Death Spiral, shows the collapse in the total volume of Arctic ice measured in thousands of cubic kilometers. The center of the graph is zero and the values increase up to 30km³ as you move out from the center. Each year is represented from 1979 up to 2013 in a clockwise orientation. Each month of the year has its own color and is plotted in a clockwise fashion as well. Being the month with the least amount of ice cover, September is the innermost line represented by the color black.

You can see that September ice volume plunged from 7km³in 2009 down to 3.3km³in 2012. Indeed all months of each successive year are pulling downwards towards the center of zero ice volume. According to these calculations of total ice volume melt, the first year of an ice-free September moves up one year earlier to September 2014.

In the 1980’s, the mass of floating Arctic sea ice at the end of September was staying roughly stable. By the 1990’s it was losing about 4.5 thousand cubic kilometres per decade. In the 2000’s that moved up to about 7.8 thousand cubic kilometres per decade, while in the last three years the decadal rate has surged to around 13.8 thousand cubic kilometres. So we have another of these behaviours in which the smaller the mass becomes, the faster the rate of loss. The behaviour is not linear, it is represented by an exponential curve…

…And then there is one other thing to take into account:

Ice does not just melt and thin gradually to a wafer as would be implied in these projections. When it reduces to about 45 centimetres thick it begins to break up under the impact of waves and tides and storms. The result is a lot of brash, smaller broken pieces of ice. Now broken ice of this nature melts very much faster because warmer water and warmer air and solar energy can get round to its exposed surfaces. The melt-rate increases dramatically. These curves that we have been exploring take no account of this final break-up.

So, while we would expect the first occurrence of zero ice by the end of September 2014, there is a distinct possibility that under the impact of ice break-up (of which interestingly we were already seeing signs in March 2013) the Arctic Ocean could be ice free at the end of September in 2013.

Consequences and Implications

– Runaway Climate Change in the Arctic: The CO2 trigger has set off multiple factors such as the water-vapour feedback, the ice-albedo feedback and other positive feedback loops to exponentially accelerate ice loss in the Arctic as shown in the above graphs.

– Increasing Ice-Free Window: As mentioned earlier, September is the month with the least amount of ice and each successive year has seen a smaller and smaller volume of ice at that time. We are approaching the year when September will be ice-free, leaving the door open for the sun’s rays to heat up the ocean and further accelerate ice loss in the Arctic. This is like a burglar getting a foothold in a door that has been cracked open, allowing him to use his crowbar to fully pry open up the door that was once safely closed. An ice-free month of September that will soon open up in 2014 or 2015 will allow the sun’s solar energy to expand that ice-free window year after year after year.

– Accelerating Temperature: The expanding ice-free window described above will accelerate average temperatures upwards year after year after year, intensifying all feedback loops.

– Tundra Impact: Warmer Arctic temperatures flow over the land, melting tundra permafrost and releasing methane as well as activating bacteria which feed on exposed dead vegetation which in turn release even more CO2 and methane. The melting Tundra takes longer to refreeze in Autumn which further decreases snow cover. Melting Tundra releases warm waters which runs off into the northern seas, warming and desalinating shallow coastal surface waters.

– Methane Release: Wave energy, tidal behaviour and storm effects from a warming and increasingly ice-free Arctic are acting to disturb ancient methane deposits at the sea floor. These methane deposits are called “clathrates”, a combination of methane and ice crystals. The warmer the water gets, the more methane is allowed to reach the water’s surface and escape into the atmosphere. Fossil ice filled with ancient plant matter and detritus is also beginning to melt and release methane. The combination of Tundra methane and deep-sea methane escaping into the atmosphere further increases the greenhouse effect, enabling methane release to speed up and create an even more potent greenhouse effect. Thus another runaway feedback process has been activated.

– Melting Greenland Ice-Cap: The melting is accelerating and releasing water into the glacial cracks and down into the base of the ice sheet, enabling the calving of glaciers and discharge of icebergs into the sea.

…So the collapse of the ice-sheet could become exponential and could happen quite quickly. As that occurs, large quantities of cold fresh water are discharged into the North Atlantic and that can have significant effects on the drivers of the Gulf Stream, the thermohaline circulation. As that slows down (and we would expect it to under these conditions) then the heat that at presently comes via ocean currents to the north- western seaboard of Europe begins to decline. In a strange anomaly, the rate of change of temperature in north-west Europe will slow down as Arctic temperatures climb.

– Sea-Level Rise: The melting of the Greenland ice-cap would have catastrophic consequences for civilization and its large percentage of coastal urban centers. Up to about seven metres of global sea-level change could happen on a decadal basis. The West Antarctic ice field is also subject to melting and disintegration, although at a much slower pace than Greenland, which would act to raise sea levels even higher.

– Jet-Stream Behaviour: The energy of the Jet Stream is driven by the difference in temperature between the Arctic and the warm sub-tropical air of lower latitudes. As the Arctic warms and the temperature difference decreases, the jet stream around the North Pole begins to slow down and get sluggish or mangled. Colder northern air is being pulled south and warmer tropical air is being sucked up north to the Arctic, further warming the Arctic. This change in the jet stream causes “blocking patterns of extreme drought, extreme rain, extreme cold, extreme heat, and extreme unpredictability.”

And that is where the nub comes. With extreme unpredictability food production is disrupted in the bread-baskets of the northern hemisphere. We are talking about the corn and wheat-producing areas of North America and Europe, of Russia and the Ukraine, and across to the wheat and rice producing areas of northern China. We have already seen major loss of food production capacity in the northern hemisphere as a result of what has already taken place. Over the next few years that will accelerate significantly. There are economic issues; there are humanitarian issues; there are political issues that all stem from that instability. We are already seeing hedge funds and pension and other investment funds buying up future food in anticipation of future shortages and high prices that all stem from this phenomenon. That means it is going to be very difficult for the poorer countries of the world to buy food on the open market to enable their populations to survive. It will be even more difficult for the Aid agencies to buy up surplus food (which is in short supply and much more expensive) for distribution in conditions of humanitarian disaster. Because of the economic spin-off there will be financial destabilization in the wake of food shortages. That leads inevitably to political destabilization. So we have some really important issues to deal with that all stem from the implications of the phenomena we are now understanding in the terms of Arctic Dynamics.

– Impact on Global Dynamics: What we see in the Arctic – runaway climate change – could be in store for the rest of the planet which, at the moment, is still in stasis. Once the “aerosol effect” or “global dimming” of industrial pollution is removed, we will see further temperature increases. Other positive feedback loops which are specific to various regions of the world could come into play like they have in the Arctic.

The implications of jet-stream behaviour and Arctic dynamics could spin-off into our economics, into our food production, into abandonment of the poor, into the inability to sustain a population of 8, 9 or even 10 billion people, into our survival as a species. All this will inevitably follow unless we are able to intervene, to slow it down, to bring it to a halt and reverse it. Without that intervention, global dynamics hold a dark future for humanity and a dark future for the biosphere of which we are a part. It is time to take action, not only for the Arctic but for the whole global crisis in which we are all involved.

Geoengineering and Capitalism

20 Monday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 14 Comments

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, American Enterprise Institute, Capitalism, Climate Change, Clive Hamilton, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Growth, Environmental Collapse, Geoengineering, Industrial Revolution, The Anthropocene Age

What would a capitalist society and its Technophiliacs do to solve a problem of their own making, a problem caused by the burning of fossil fuels, overconsumption, urban sprawl, and our wasteful industrialized way-of-life? As one former oil executive put it, “Climate change is a waste management problem.” So instead of actually dealing with the problem head on, industrial civilization will try everything it can to circumnavigate the problem, allowing CO2 emissions and our unsustainable lifestyles to persist. This is where geoengineering becomes the tourniquet for our moribund society. Here’s what the pro-business right-wing think tank, American Enterprise Institute, has to say about tinkering with our damaged atmosphere:

…We can shrug off or deny the problem, as politicians, particularly in the US, often do. That’s reckless. But what if corporations shoulder more costs and lead the technological charge, all for a huge potential payoff? That could be a game changer. In a nutshell, that’s the realpolitik argument for geoengineering….

…Let’s hope entrepreneurs do more than just smell profits. If visionary geoengineers are lucky enough to succeed, it’s going to cost big bucks over decades. If there is no business case for tackling climate change–no money to be made –it simply won’t happen. Let’s hope we are unleashing enlightened capitalist forces that just might drive the kind of technological innovation necessary to genuinely tackle climate change.

As long as there’s a dollar to be made, the enlightened self-interest of capitalism can keep the fires of climate chaos at bay. Now we can burn all those dirty unconventional oils without losing sleep. Only capitalism can manage to turn the prospect of self-extinction into a money-making venture.

In his essay “The Philosophy of Geoengineering“, Clive Hamilton tells how CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution have suppressed the next Ice Age that would have occurred in roughly 50,000 years and that with further anticipated CO2 build-up by modern man, we may well suppress future glaciation for the next 500,000 years.

Nothing humans have ever done approaches the momentousness of this fact. Our activities have so changed the climatic future that we have over-ruled one and perhaps several ice ages. The Earth will take tens of thousands of years to reach a new equilibrium following the pulse of carbon emissions sent into the atmosphere by humans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Only then might the era of human-induced global warming approach an end.

It is for this reason that the Anthropocene represents not only a new epoch in geological history but a new epoch in human history, comparable only to the arrival of settled agriculture and the industrial revolution…

Thus the Anthropocene Age was coined to reflect the planet-altering force that modern man has become. Since 1950 and the “Great Acceleration”, mankind’s environmental impact tripled. Debate has been heated as to when exactly the Anthropocene Age began, with some scientists including the advent of farming 8,000 years ago, but not until the late 18th century when man’s industrial activities kicked into gear did humans begin to truly overshoot their environment on a planetary scale. By not recognizing this fact, industrial capitalism and consumerism of modern time are excused for their environmental destructiveness and unsustainable nature.

...The dispute is not merely academic. One implication of [William] Ruddiman‘s early Anthropocene‘ hypothesis is that if humans have been a planetary force since civilization emerged then there is nothing fundamentally new about the last couple of centuries of industrialism. In this view, it is in the nature of civilized humans to transform the Earth, and what is in the nature of the species cannot be resisted. By focusing attention on ‘humankind‘ in general rather than the forms of social organization that emerged more recently, the Anthropocene becomes in some sense natural. In this view, global warming is not the product of industrial rapaciousness, an unregulated market, human alienation from nature or excessive faith in technology; it is merely the result of humans doing what humans are meant to do, that is, using the powers Prometheus gave us to better our lot. This gives rise to a relaxed view about human impacts on the natural world; Ruddiman himself seems quite comfortable with the idea that over the next 200 years all economically accessible fossil fuels may be mined and burned…

The early Anthropocene hypothesis is interpreted as exonerating modern humans of blame for environmental decline…

…Perhaps the defenders of the ‘good Anthropocene’ intuitively understand that if the beginning of the new epoch is located at the end of the eighteenth century, with a step-change in the 1950s, then we must ask what was distinctive about those times. The answer of course is the inception of industrial capitalism and then the turbocharged era of industrial expansion that followed World War 2, a surge only intensified with the era of hyper-consumerism that washed over the rich world in the 1990s and 2000s. If free-market industrialism and ‘affluenza‘ are the source of the problem then perhaps they must be constrained, a suggestion that raises conservative hackles…

Thus we are mental and physical prisoners of a social system which treats everything on Earth as a commodity, reducing it to an object of exploitation for profit:

…The thinking that gives rise to geoengineering is the same thinking that first creates the world as an object suitable for technological manipulation. As a result, the only global warming escape routes that occur to us are technological ones, whether they be new forms of low-emission energy, carbon capture and storage or engineering the climate. So this view prompts the rhetorical question: How can we think our way out of a problem when the problem is the way we think?

This morning the main topic on Democracy Now was goengineering:

Climate Lag Time and Where We Are Headed

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 15 Comments

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Climate Change, Climate Lag Time, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Eco-Apocalypse, Extinction of Man, John Cook at the University of Queensland, Lake El'gygytgyn, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Professor Julie Brigham-Grette, Professor Peter Sammonds of the University College London, Professor Scott Elias of the Royal Holloway University in London, Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Contrary to what some may have you believe, future climate projections gleaned from current models have not accurately predicted how truly dire the future is for all living things on Earth. In order to get a true reading of what is in store for us, Prof Julie Brigham-Grette lead her team to a remote meteor crater in Russia where Lake El’gygytgyn rests. What makes this spot special is that this area has never been disturbed by glacier erosion, leaving behind a perfect sediment record of the Earth’s climate dating back millions of years.

Lake El’gygytgyn may be the only place in the world that has this incredible unbroken record of sediments going back millions of years,” said Prof Scott Elias, at Royal Holloway University of London. “When you have a very long record it is very difficult to argue with.

A 2011 study in the journal Paleoceanography showed that during the Pliocene Epoch [~ 4.6 to 2 million years ago] the Earth’s CO2 levels were at the level it is today (400ppm). At that time, temperatures were 8 degrees Celsius warmer in the Arctic summer than they are today. Humans have ramped up the CO2 level so high and in such a short period that the Earth’s climate system has not yet fully reacted to this drastic atmospheric change. This is what we call the climate lag time. In 2005, Hansen estimated the “climate lag time” to be between 25 to 50 years.

An article on this subject given to me by Gail from Wit’s End mentions the “climate lag time” as well:

There is a time lag of up to 30 years for the temperature to be forced up by the extra CO2 in the atmosphere, so the scientists’ findings give a clue to what to expect by the middle of the century…

When looking at these recent Lake El’gygytgyn findings, the NTE estimates of Guy McPherson don’t seem all that strange after all:

My feeling is we have underestimated the sensitivity, unless there are some feedbacks we don’t yet understand or we don’t get right in the models.”

Prof Robert Spicer, at the Open University and not part of the new study, agreed: “This is another piece of evidence showing that climate models have a systematic problem with polar amplification,” ie the fact that global warming has its greatest effects at the poles. “This has enormous implications and suggests model are likely to underestimate the degree of future change.“…

“I think we will feel the effects of climate change quickly – in years or decades – because changes in the Arctic sea ice bring changes in the circulation of the atmosphere and the oceans,” says Elias. ” Arctic sea ice keeps that entire region cool and when it melts, the dark ocean revealed absorbs even more heat.”

Recent wet and cold summer weather in Europe, for example, has been linked to changes in the high level jet stream winds, which in turn have been linked to melting Arctic ice, which shrank to its lowest recorded level in September. Climate change has also already increased the likelihood of extreme heatwaves and flooding .

“Clearly the Arctic is warming very, very rapidly at the moment,” said Prof Peter Sammonds, at University College London. “And if all the sea ice goes, there is no good reason why it might come back again.

In other eco-apocalyptic news, the public (including JMG) are still asleep at the wheel:

Scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change stands

Posted: Thu, 16 May 2013 14:10:00

I think we are a little too late for instituting policy change. The Earth will do that for us.

We Have Failed Miserably On Climate Change

From The Guardian:

It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.