The Pillars of Human Dominance and the Path to Ecological Collapse: A 21st-Century Reckoning

07 Wednesday May 2025

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Pollution

Tags

Climate Change Denial, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Civilizations, Degrowth, Ecological Overshoot, Energy Transition, Fossil Fuel Dependency, Green Revolution, Haber–Bosch Process, Hubris of Man, Planetary Boundaries, Systemic Collapse, The Anthropocene Age, Weapons of Mass Destruction

Introduction: The Paradox of Progress

Humanity’s ascent from a marginal species to a planetary force is a tale of ingenuity, ambition, and unintended consequences. Over millennia, four foundational innovations—the control of fire, the Agricultural Revolution, the Haber-Bosch process, and fossil fuels—enabled humans to overcome biological and ecological constraints, catalyzing explosive population growth. Yet these same advancements have propelled us into ecological overshoot, a state where our demands on Earth’s systems outstrip its capacity to regenerate. By the 1970s, humanity crossed this critical threshold, entering an era of debt-driven consumption fueled by finite resources. Compounding this crisis are weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—technologies of annihilation with no purpose but destruction—and the deliberate suppression of climate science by fossil fuel corporations, which prioritized profit over planetary habitability.

As we approach 2050, the consequences of this trajectory loom: destabilized ecosystems, collapsing biodiversity, and a climate system veering toward irreversible tipping points. Yet even as renewable energy expands, systemic barriers—transmission bottlenecks, industrial inertia, and geopolitical fractures—paint a sobering picture of the future. A 2025 J.P. Morgan report, Heliocentrism: Objects may be further away than they appear, underscores that the energy transition remains linear, not exponential, with renewables accounting for just ~2% of global final energy consumption. This reality forces a reckoning: the path to sustainability will be neither swift nor absolute. The same species that mastered fire and split the atom now faces a choice—adapt or perish.

1. Control of Fire: The First Spark of Dominance

The mastery of fire, achieved by early hominids like Homo erectus roughly 1.5 million years ago, marked humanity’s first departure from the natural order. Fire provided warmth, protection from predators, and the ability to cook food, which unlocked greater caloric intake and spurred brain expansion. Archaeological evidence, such as charred bones and hearths in Kenya’s Koobi Fora region, suggests controlled fire use became widespread by 400,000 BCE. Fire also became a tool for landscape engineering. Indigenous societies used controlled burns to flush out game, clear land for foraging, and cultivate fire-resistant plants. In Australia, Aboriginal fire-stick farming shaped ecosystems for millennia, creating savannas that supported human communities but reduced biodiversity.

This early manipulation of ecosystems set a precedent: humans could reshape environments to suit their needs, a power that would escalate dramatically. By improving survival rates and enabling migration into colder climates, fire supported gradual population growth. However, its impact was localized—a far cry from the global transformations to come.

2. The Agricultural Revolution: Taming Nature, Unleashing Growth

Around 10,000 BCE, in the Fertile Crescent, the Neolithic Revolution began. Humans domesticated wheat, barley, and legumes, while in Mesoamerica, maize emerged as a staple. Simultaneously, animals like goats, sheep, and cattle were tamed, providing meat, milk, and labor. This shift from nomadic foraging to settled farming was not inevitable; climate stability after the last Ice Age likely played a role. Agriculture generated food surpluses, enabling population densification and labor specialization. Pottery, metallurgy, and writing emerged, as did social hierarchies—rulers, priests, and warriors. Cities like Uruk in Mesopotamia and Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley thrived, housing tens of thousands by 3000 BCE.

Farming demanded deforestation, irrigation, and monocultures. In Sumer, excessive irrigation led to soil salinization, collapsing yields by 2000 BCE. Similarly, Easter Island’s deforestation for agriculture triggered societal collapse by 1600 CE. Yet Earth’s carrying capacity seemed vast enough to absorb these early failures. Global population surged from ~5 million in 10,000 BCE to ~300 million by 1 CE. Agriculture’s success, however, hinged on exploiting new lands—a strategy with finite limits.

Today, industrial agriculture faces a parallel crisis. Synthetic fertilizers and fossil-fueled machinery have boosted yields but degraded 40% of global soils. The J.P. Morgan report warns that topsoil erosion now outpaces replenishment by 10–40 times, threatening 90% of soils by 2050. Regenerative practices remain niche, hampered by short-term profit motives and entrenched supply chains.

3. The Haber-Bosch Process: Cheating the Nitrogen Cycle

By the late 19th century, population growth strained agricultural systems. Natural fertilizers—guano from Peru, manure from livestock—were insufficient. Scientists warned of mass starvation as nitrogen, critical for plant growth, became scarce. In 1909, German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch industrialized ammonia synthesis, reacting atmospheric nitrogen (N₂) with hydrogen (H₂) under high heat and pressure. The Haber-Bosch process effectively “fixed” nitrogen from the air, creating synthetic fertilizers. By 1940, global ammonia production reached 4 million tons annually.

Post-World War II, synthetic fertilizers became the backbone of the Green Revolution. High-yield crop varieties, like Norman Borlaug’s dwarf wheat, depended on nitrogen inputs. From 1950 to 2000, global grain production tripled, supporting a population boom from 2.5 billion to 6 billion. Today, half the nitrogen in human tissues originates from Haber-Bosch. The process tethered agriculture to fossil fuels (hydrogen is derived from methane) and flooded ecosystems with excess nitrogen. Runoff into waterways causes algal blooms and dead zones, like the 6,500-square-mile zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Nitrous oxide (N₂O), a byproduct of fertilizer use, is a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than CO₂.

The J.P. Morgan report highlights a stark trade-off: without Haber-Bosch, Earth’s carrying capacity would plummet to ~3–4 billion. Yet decarbonizing fertilizer production remains a distant goal. Green hydrogen, produced via renewable-powered electrolysis, costs 4–5x more than methane-derived hydrogen, and scaling it would require unprecedented investment in wind, solar, and grid infrastructure.

4. Fossil Fuels: The Engine of Overshoot

The 18th-century harnessing of coal unlocked unprecedented energy density. James Watt’s steam engine (1776) powered factories, railroads, and ships, enabling mass production and global trade. By 1900, coal supplied 90% of the world’s energy. The 20th century belonged to oil. The internal combustion engine revolutionized transportation, while petrochemicals spawned plastics, pesticides, and synthetics. From 1950 to 2000, oil consumption grew sixfold, fueling suburbanization, globalization, and consumer culture.

Fossil fuels powered the pumps, tractors, and fertilizer plants of industrial agriculture. Between 1960 and 2000, irrigated land doubled, much of it relying on diesel pumps draining ancient aquifers. In 1971, humanity’s resource demand first exceeded Earth’s annual regenerative capacity, according to the Global Footprint Network. This “overshoot day” has crept earlier yearly, landing on July 28 in 2023. Of particular interest is this day’s arrival if the world consumed like citizens of any particular country. For Qatar, that day would fall on February 6; for the United States, March 13; for China, May 17.

Fossil fuels enabled this rupture by accelerating resource extraction, driving climate change, and entrenching inequality.

The J.P. Morgan report underscores fossil fuels’ enduring role. Despite record solar installations, renewables account for just 7% of global electricity generation. Natural gas, touted as a “bridge fuel,” will remain critical for grid stability and industrial processes. Global LNG export capacity is set to grow 33% by 2030, with Europe increasingly reliant on gas to offset coal phaseouts.

5. Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Ultimate Unsustainability

The 1945 Trinity test marked humanity’s entry into the Anthropocene. Nuclear arsenals grew to over 70,000 warheads during the Cold War, enough to destroy civilization multiple times over. Though stockpiles have decreased to ~12,119 today, modernization programs in the U.S., Russia, and China keep the threat alive. Nuclear testing alone has left lasting scars: the Marshall Islands remain uninhabitable after 67 U.S. tests, while Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan reports elevated cancer rates from Soviet explosions.

The production of WMDs diverts resources—$91.4 billion spent globally on nuclear arms in 2024 could fund renewable transitions. WMDs exemplify humanity’s disconnect from ecological stewardship. Unlike earlier tools for survival, they serve no purpose but annihilation, reflecting a mindset that prioritizes dominance over coexistence.

6. Suppressed Science: The Fossil Fuel Industry’s Betrayal

Internal documents reveal that Exxon scientists, in the 1970s, accurately predicted the trajectory of CO₂-driven global warming. A 1982 memo stated fossil fuel use would cause “potentially catastrophic events” by 2050. Instead of acting, Exxon, Shell, and Chevron funded groups like the Global Climate Coalition to sow doubt. From 1989 to 2015, the Koch Brothers funneled $145 million to climate denial groups. This playbook mirrored Big Tobacco’s tactics, delaying regulatory action for decades.

Had global CO₂ emissions peaked around 2000, it might have been possible to limit warming to 1.5°C. Instead, emissions have continued to rise, reaching record levels in 2024. The J.P. Morgan report notes that methane leaks from U.S. gas basins, detected via satellite, are 4–5x higher than industry reports—a stark reminder of systemic opacity.

Ecological Overshoot: Symptoms of a Planet in Distress

The Earth is hemorrhaging life. Vertebrate populations—mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles—have plummeted by 73% since 1970, a collapse that mirrors the unraveling of ecosystems worldwide. This staggering loss, documented by the World Wildlife Fund (2024), is compounded by an “insect apocalypse,” with pollinator species vanishing at 1–2% annually. These creatures, vital to food systems and biodiversity, are succumbing to habitat destruction, pesticides, and climate disruption.

Even the planet’s lungs are failing. The Amazon rainforest, once a carbon sink absorbing 5% of global CO₂ emissions, now emits more greenhouse gases than it captures due to rampant deforestation and wildfires. Meanwhile, Arctic permafrost—thawing decades ahead of scientific projections—risks unleashing 1,400 gigatons of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than CO₂ over 20 years.

Humanity’s exploitation of finite resources has pushed Earth’s systems to the brink. Freshwater withdrawals in critical regions like the North China Plain exceed recharge rates by 300%, draining aquifers that sustain millions. Industrial agriculture, reliant on synthetic fertilizers, has poisoned waterways with nitrogen runoff, creating dead zones like the 6,500-square-mile graveyard in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Road to 2050: Scenarios for Humanity

If emissions continue, warming could reach 2.4–2.7°C by 2050, triggering cascading crop failures, mass migration of 216 million, and uninhabitable zones in the Gulf Coast and South Asia. Aggressive renewable transitions might limit warming to 2°C, but legacy damage—acidified oceans, depleted soils—would still cause widespread famine and conflict.

The J.P. Morgan report Heliocentrism: 15th Annual Energy Paper (2025) casts significant doubt on the feasibility of a full global transition to 100% renewable energy by mid-century, citing systemic, economic, and technological barriers. While solar and wind capacity are expanding rapidly, the report emphasizes that the energy transition remains linear, not exponential, and faces critical limitations:

The “Final Energy” Challenge

Renewables account for just ~2% of global final energy consumption (not just electricity), projected to rise to 4.5% by 2027. Electricity itself represents only ~20% of global energy use, with fossil fuels still dominant in transportation, industrial heat, and manufacturing. Even if solar generation doubles by 2027, it would supply less than 5% of total energy needs. Industrial sectors like steel, cement, and chemicals rely on fossil fuels for 80–85% of their energy, and electrifying these processes remains prohibitively expensive without breakthroughs.

Grid Limitations and Infrastructure Gaps

Transmission Bottlenecks: U.S. transmission line growth lags far behind Department of Energy targets, with annual additions at ~1,000 miles vs. the 6,000–10,000 miles needed by 2035.
Transformer Shortages: Delivery times for transformers have ballooned from 4–6 weeks in 2019 to 2–3 years due to supply chain constraints and aging infrastructure.
Intermittency: Even in renewable leaders like California, wind and solar + storage meet 75%+ of demand in only 26% of annual hours. Baseload fossil fuel or nuclear power remains essential for reliability.

Economic and Geopolitical Risks

China’s Solar Dominance: China controls 80% of solar manufacturing (polysilicon, wafers, cells), creating supply chain vulnerabilities. U.S. tariffs and efforts to build domestic capacity are progressing slowly.
Cost Inflation: Rising U.S. solar PPA prices (due to tariffs, insurance premiums, and interest rates) and Europe’s energy price spikes (5–7x higher than China/India) threaten affordability.

Industrial and Thermodynamic Realities

Steel, Cement, and Aviation: These sectors lack scalable green alternatives. Renewable jet fuel costs 4–6x more than conventional fuel, and synthetic fuels face energy deficits (e.g., producing synthetic methane requires 3x more energy input than output).
Hydrogen Hurdles: Green hydrogen remains uneconomical ( $85-$ 165/ton CO₂ abatement costs) due to electrolyzer expenses, leakage risks, and energy losses in conversion.

The Fossil Fuel “Bridge”

The report argues that natural gas will remain critical for grid stability and industrial processes for decades. Global LNG export capacity is set to grow 33% by 2030, and regions like Europe increasingly rely on gas to offset coal phaseouts.

Nuclear’s Uncertain Role

While nuclear power offers zero-carbon baseload energy, the OECD has struggled to build new plants due to cost overruns, regulatory delays, and public opposition. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) remain unproven at scale, with projected costs of $15–20 million/MW—far above competitive thresholds.

Conclusion: A “Hybrid” Future, Not 100% Renewables

The report concludes that a 100% renewable global economy by 2050 is unrealistic without unprecedented breakthroughs in grid infrastructure, energy storage, and industrial decarbonization. Instead, it envisions a hybrid system:

Solar/wind dominance in electricity (50–70% by 2050), paired with gas/coal + carbon capture for backup.
Nuclear and geothermal filling gaps in baseload power.
Fossil fuels persisting in heavy industry and transportation until 2040–2050.

In short, the report underscores that the energy transition is a century-scale industrial shift, not a rapid revolution. Without radical policy interventions, global cooperation, and trillions in infrastructure investment, fossil fuels will remain entrenched—even as renewables expand.

A global “Marshall Plan” deploying degrowth economics and regenerative agriculture could stabilize populations. Yet this requires dismantling entrenched power structures—a prospect hindered by nationalism and corporate influence.

The more we accept the likelihood of collapse, the more urgently we must act as if it’s avoidable. To abandon agency is to accelerate the cancellation of the future; to cling to salvation myths is to blind ourselves to adaptation. The path forward is neither hope nor despair, but a third space: ethical endurance.

The Triad of Extinction: How Climate Change, Nukes, and Poisoned DNA Are Unraveling Our Future

06 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

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6th Mass Extinction, Albedo Loss, Amazon Die-Off, AMOC Collapse, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Authoritarianism, Biological Annihilation, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corruption, Dystopic Future, Fascism, Forever Chemicals, Genetic Erosion, Greenland Ice Melt, Human Bottleneck, Human Extinction, James Hansen, Jeremy Grantham, Megadrought, MegaFires, Microplastic Pollution, Nuclear Radiation, Nuclear War, PFAS, Polycrisis, Radioactive Waste, superstorm

Introduction: Converging Existential Threats

Humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of crises—climate breakdown, nuclear instability, and environmental toxicity—that together threaten to unravel global civilization within decades. Recent research (Rehman and Laura, 2024; Armstrong McKay et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2024) reveals that these threats are not isolated but deeply interconnected, each amplifying the other in a dangerous feedback loop. Climate change is eroding the foundations of nuclear deterrence, while nuclear infrastructure is buckling under environmental stresses it was never designed to withstand. Meanwhile, the insidious accumulation of toxic chemicals, microplastics, and radiation is degrading human genetic viability (Louis et al. 2023; Yang et al. 2023; Zhang et al., 2024). This essay synthesizes the latest studies to argue that civilization is approaching a collapse threshold between 2040 and 2100, with cascading disasters that could render large parts of the Earth uninhabitable and push humanity toward a slow, genetically degraded extinction.

The Nuclear-Climate Nexus = “Ultimate Threat Multiplier”

The erosion of nuclear stability in our warming world manifests most visibly in the breakdown of traditional deterrence models. The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which maintained an uneasy peace during the Cold War, relies on rational actors valuing self-preservation above all else. Yet climate change is creating conditions where this fundamental assumption no longer holds true. As drought-stricken nations face agricultural collapse and water wars, as rising seas swallow coastal cities, and as mass climate migration overwhelms borders, the calculus of national survival becomes distorted. A desperate nuclear-armed state, facing what its leaders perceive as existential threats from climate impacts, may abandon restraint and consider previously unthinkable options.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapse is projected by 2038–2045 due to synergistic feedback loops not fully accounted for in earlier models, including:

Accelerated Greenland meltwater discharge (1,500 Gt/year by 2045) and Arctic methane releases (tripling previous estimates), which disrupt North Atlantic salinity and density-driven circulation.
Stratocumulus cloud loss and Southern Ocean carbon sink saturation, which amplify warming and reduce the ocean’s ability to buffer CO₂, pushing the AMOC past its tipping point earlier than projected.

These factors compound freshwater input and warming, collapsing the AMOC sooner than Hansen’s 2050–2070 estimate (Hansen et al., 2025). Such an event would disrupt global agriculture, displace hundreds of millions, and intensify competition for dwindling resources.

The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), a 60-year-old agreement dividing the rivers of the Indus Basin between India and Pakistan, is teetering on the brink of collapse. Rising tensions over Kashmir, accelerating climate change, and India’s growing hydroelectric ambitions have turned water into a weapon in all but name. Pakistan, already one of the world’s most water-stressed nations, warns that Indian dam projects like Ratle and Kishenganga violate the treaty’s terms, threatening agriculture for 220 million people who depend on the Indus. Meanwhile, Delhi accuses Islamabad of weaponizing the treaty’s dispute mechanisms to stall development. With talks stalled and glaciers retreating, the region faces a perfect storm: by 2040, the Indus could lose 40% of its flow, turning water scarcity into a nuclear flashpoint. As the Spin Times notes, “The treaty was designed for a world of abundance, not climate catastrophe.” Without radical cooperation, the lifeline of South Asia may become its noose.

Meanwhile, the melting Arctic has ignited a dangerous race for resources and strategic dominance, with Russia leading the charge by militarizing thawing coastlines to secure newly accessible oil and gas reserves, while NATO scrambles to reinforce its presence in response (Gricius 2025). As ice retreats, near-collisions between submarines in newly opened shipping lanes (US Navy, 2024) and malfunctioning early-warning systems due to permafrost thaw (Boulègue and Kertysova 2018) dramatically increase risks of accidental conflict. The region’s vast untapped resources – including an estimated 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of its oil (USGS, 2023) – have transformed what was once a frozen buffer zone into a strategic geopolitical prize. This toxic combination of military posturing, climate-driven technological failures, and intense competition for energy wealth has created the world’s most volatile nuclear-climate flashpoint, where the mechanisms meant to prevent conflict are being undermined by the very environmental changes making confrontation more likely (Rehman and Laura, 2024).

Climate change is also degrading the human and technical safeguards of nuclear deterrence. Peer-reviewed research reveals a silent threat eroding military effectiveness: extreme heat. When temperatures exceed 38°C (100°F), soldiers experience reaction times up to 27% slower (Lisman et al. 2019), transforming critical split-second decisions into potentially fatal delays. Even mild 2-3% dehydration – nearly inevitable in field operations – doubles cognitive errors during essential tasks like marksmanship and surveillance (US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine 2020). While cooling gear like ice vests lowers physiological strain, it fails to restore complex cognitive functions; a 2022 study showed no significant improvement in threat detection or problem-solving despite reduced core temperatures (Rintamäki et al. 2022). Most alarmingly, cognitive decline often begins before soldiers perceive physical exhaustion, leaving them unaware they’ve compromised mission-critical skills until they’ve already misjudged threats or forgotten orders (Taylor et al. 2021). These aren’t theoretical concerns – with every 1°C increase above 32°C, working memory performance drops by nearly 5% (Armstrong et al. 2016), while marksmanship errors triple in 40°C heat compared to temperate conditions (Lisman et al. 2019). As climate change intensifies, these findings from controlled military trials reveal an urgent need to address heat’s cognitive battlefield effects before they claim lives in real-world operations.

During the 2024 Mediterranean heatwave, French nuclear technicians made near-violations of safety protocols (Euronews 2024). Infrastructure vulnerabilities compound these risks—coastal reactors like Florida’s Turkey Point face repeated flood barrier breaches (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2024), while inland plants, such as France’s Rhône River reactors, are forced to reduce output during droughts (The Guardian 2022). The nearly 600 catastrophic 2010 Russian wildfires—which burned over 1 million hectares (NBC News 2010)—escalated from an environmental disaster to a potential nuclear crisis as flames threatened some of Russia’s most sensitive atomic facilities. As temperatures hit record 40°C highs (Al Jazeera 2010), three critical nuclear risks emerged:

Mayak’s Toxic Legacy
Fires came within 8 km of the Mayak chemical combine, where Soviet-era radioactive waste ponds risked evaporation, potentially exposing “enough plutonium to build dozens of nuclear weapons” (Bellona 2010). While officials claimed the facility was safe, satellite imagery showed fires burning in heavily contaminated forests nearby.
Sarov’s Close Call
At Russia’s primary nuclear weapons design lab in Sarov, flames advanced to within 5 km before 2,000 emergency workers dug firebreaks and deployed aircraft (Al Jazeera 2010). The government evacuated all nuclear materials—an unprecedented precaution (NBC News 2010).
Chernobyl’s Sleeping Threat
In Bryansk near Chernobyl, fires risked resuspending radioactive cesium-137 into the atmosphere. While Russian authorities downplayed dangers, Bellona (2010) warned that burning contaminated peat could create “radioactive smoke plumes capable of traveling hundreds of kilometers.”

The Unlearned Lesson
Though Russia avoided catastrophe, the events exposed fatal flaws in nuclear safety planning for climate emergencies. As one firefighter told NBC (2010): “We were fighting two enemies—the flames and the invisible radiation we couldn’t monitor.” With climate change increasing wildfire intensity globally, the 2010 crisis remains a stark warning about protecting nuclear infrastructure in the Anthropocene.

Given these compounding threats, the risk of a nuclear confrontation by 2050 is high. This projection is based on the convergence of climate-driven conflicts over water and arable land, nuclear escalation risks in South Asia and the Arctic, and the erosion of deterrence stability due to global warming.

The Toxic Triad: How Modern Pollutants Are Corrupting Human DNA

In the coming century, humanity may face an existential threat not from war or natural disasters, but from the gradual decay of our genetic integrity. A toxic triad of radiation, PFAS, and microplastics/nanoplastics is silently compromising human DNA, with consequences that could culminate in mutational meltdown and eventual extinction by 2150 (Zhang et al., 2024). This insidious crisis operates on a timescale beyond typical political or environmental concerns, making it one of the most underappreciated—yet potentially irreversible—dangers to our species.

Radiation’s Lingering Scourge

Every human alive today carries traces of radioactive isotopes like strontium-90 and cesium-137 in their bodies – a permanent legacy of over 2,000 nuclear tests conducted since 1945 (UNSCEAR, 2008). While these global background levels are low, they form an invisible baseline of contamination that compounds the dangers of acute radiation exposure near disaster sites like Chernobyl and Fukushima, where chronic exposure has been shown to increase mutation rates by 1.5-3 times (ICRP, 2020).

Studies of wildlife in exclusion zones reveal devastating biological consequences: rodents exhibit 40% smaller litters (Mousseau et al., 2014), while birds suffer from altered brain development and reduced lifespans (Møller et al., 2012). If human populations are subjected to similar conditions – whether through nuclear accidents, waste leaks, or prolonged exposure in contaminated regions – the accumulation of cancerous mutations, immune dysfunction, and infertility could render entire communities biologically unviable (Dubrova et al., 1996).

Even if we avoid the consequences of a nuclear exchange, the specter of abandoned nuclear infrastructure in a post-collapse world will haunt future generations eking out an existence littered with decaying reactors, unsecured waste repositories, and forgotten meltdown sites that continue to seep radiation into ecosystems unchecked. Without maintenance, spent fuel pools could boil dry, triggering new fires and releases of cesium-137, strontium-90, and plutonium – isotopes with half-lives spanning centuries (EPA, 2024). The ruins of nuclear power plants, once symbols of technological progress, may become persistent death zones, forcing survivors into a permanent state of nomadic avoidance.

PFAS: The Indestructible Genetic Saboteurs

The world is facing a silent reproductive crisis driven by “forever chemicals” (PFAS), which contaminate 99% of human blood globally through food packaging, non-stick cookware, and even pesticide-treated crops like soy and peas (Agency for Toxic Substances Disease Registry, 2021; Calafat et al., 2007;Sonnenberg et al., 2023). Peer-reviewed research reveals these chemicals are catastrophic to human reproduction: sperm counts have plummeted by 50% worldwide since 1970 due to PFAS disruption of testosterone synthesis (Levine et al., 2022), while women’s ovarian reserves have dropped by 40%, with exposed populations suffering triple the rate of birth defects (Trasande et al., 2024). Most alarmingly, PFAS permanently alter human biology by binding directly to sperm DNA, suggesting their mutagenic effects may cascade through generations (NIH, 2023). The crisis is amplified by modern agriculture – pesticides used on legumes like peas chemically synergize with PFAS to worsen reproductive damage (Minnesota Legislative Reference Library 2025), while bioaccumulation means a single PFAS-contaminated fish can carry 100 times the “safe” exposure limit (Barbo et al. 2023, 115165). Unlike conventional toxins that eventually break down, PFAS persist for millennia in the environment and human bodies, creating an ever-growing burden of genetic corruption passed from parents to children (Cousins et al., 2022). This intergenerational poisoning represents one of the most insidious public health threats in history, as each new generation inherits a greater toxic load than the last (Trasande et al., 2024).

Microplastics: The Invisible Genetic Invaders

Microplastics are silently infiltrating our bodies—and the consequences are terrifying. Emerging research reveals these tiny plastic particles, now found in human blood (Leslie et al. 2022), organs, and even unborn babies (Ragusa et al. 2022), trigger DNA damage and oxidative stress (Yang et al. 2022), sharply increasing risks for cancers of the liver, lungs, and colon. Once ingested or inhaled, they migrate to vital organs, causing chronic inflammation and cellular dysfunction (Deng et al. 2021)—corroding the liver’s ability to detoxify and the kidneys’ capacity to filter. Even more alarming, microplastics breach the blood-brain barrier (Shrivastava 2022), disrupting neural pathways and potentially accelerating neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Their chemical additives—phthalates, BPA, and heavy metals—wreak havoc on hormones (Vandenberg et al. 2023), linked to plummeting fertility rates, childhood developmental disorders, and metabolic collapse. Worse yet, they may cripple immune defenses (Facciolà et al. 2023), leaving the body vulnerable to pathogens and chronic illness. With microplastics contaminating everything from seafood to drinking water (WHO 2022), this isn’t a future threat—it’s a full-blown public health emergency.

The most alarming discovery about microplastics isn’t just what they’re doing to us—it’s what they might do to our descendants. Groundbreaking animal research reveals that prenatal exposure to microplastics causes a 28% increase in germline DNA damage (p<0.01) and induces transgenerational epigenetic changes that persist for three generations (Zhang et al. 2023). These microscopic invaders don’t just harm exposed individuals—they appear capable of rewriting the genetic legacy of entire lineages. These changes occurred at exposure levels already detected in human placentas (Ragusa et al. 2022). Though human impacts remain unproven, the mouse models present a chilling warning: we may be conducting an uncontrolled experiment on the future of our species.

Synergistic Collapse: The Road to Mutational Meltdown

Individually, each of these threats is concerning. Together, they create a feedback loop of genetic degradation that could push humanity past a point of no return. isolated populations—whether due to climate collapse, societal fragmentation, or radiation-contaminated “dead zones”—may experience mutational meltdown. This phenomenon, observed in critically endangered species like the vaquita porpoise, occurs when harmful mutations accumulate faster than natural selection can eliminate them (Robinson et al., 2022). Theoretical models (e.g., Lynch et al., 2021) suggest that small, isolated populations may face long-term risks from mutation accumulation.

In a post-collapse world, small bands of human survivors—poisoned by the lingering toxins of our fallen civilization and stripped of modern medicine—could face a genetic death spiral. As radiation, PFAS, and heavy metals ravage their DNA, collapsing populations below 1,000 would trigger a catastrophic feedback loop: each generation more inbred than the last, accumulating debilitating mutations until fertility crashes below replacement levels. This ‘mutational meltdown’—observed in Chernobyl’s wolves and near-extinct species like the vaquita porpoise—could render pockets of humanity biologically non-viable within 10 generations (Lynch et al., 2021; Kardos et al., 2021). The survivors’ only hope? Ancient strategies of strict exogamy and ruthless culling of the genetically compromised—if they can organize such measures amidst the chaos.

Unlike sudden extinction events (asteroid impacts, nuclear war), genetic erosion is a slow, invisible crisis—one that unfolds across generations (Zhang et al., 2024). Early symptoms—rising infertility, escalating cancer rates, and increased birth defects—may be dismissed as isolated public health issues (Trasande et al., 2024). But these are the warning signs of a deeper collapse. By the time the broader pattern becomes undeniable, the toxic triad of radiation, PFAS, and microplastics may have already pushed humanity into an irreversible decline (Levine et al., 2022). The very mechanisms that once ensured our survival—adaptation and genetic diversity—could be rendered obsolete by the cumulative weight of our own pollution.

Global Trade Collapse in an AMOC-Disrupted World: A Cascading Failure

The collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—projected as early as 2038–2045 in this timeline—would not just alter climate patterns; it would trigger the disintegration of global trade networks within decades. Here’s how the dominoes fall:

Phase 1: Fracturing (2020–2050) – The Unraveling Begins

The collapse of the AMOC between 2038–2045 triggers immediate shocks to global systems. Europe plunges into abrupt cooling, with temperatures dropping 3–5°C within decades, devastating wheat and barley production (Global Tipping Points Report 2023). Simultaneously, the tropics face intensified droughts, crippling rice and soybean exports. By 2035, the U.S. Corn Belt reports 40% losses in maize yields, while food prices skyrocket 300–500% as nations impose export bans. Climate migration explodes, with 1.5 billion displaced people overwhelming borders by 2050. Authoritarian regimes exploit the chaos, enforcing draconian laws and militarizing their borders. Global trade still limps along, but fuel shortages and port disruptions make shipments unreliable.

Phase 2: Regression (2050–2100) – The End of Globalization

By the 2060s, the fossil fuel economy collapses as oil production dwindles and renewables fail. Scavenged solar panels and wind turbines operate at 30% efficiency, with no capacity to replace degraded components. Diesel shortages paralyze trucks and cargo ships, stranding goods in ports. Hyperinflation destroys fiat currencies, and societies revert to barter systems—food, ammunition, and fuel become the new gold. Antibiotic resistance renders 99.8% of modern drugs useless by the 2070s, leading to a resurgence of pre-industrial mortality rates. Industrial supply chains disintegrate; electronics, pharmaceuticals, and machinery become either locally improvised or extinct. The internet fractures into disconnected regional networks, and governments lose control over crumbling infrastructure.

Phase 3: Post-Collapse (2100–2150) – A Scavenger World

By 2100, global civilization has shattered into isolated enclaves. Coastal megacities drown under rising seas (Earth.com 2025), while inland survivors fight over abandoned mines, landfills, and dead factories for scrap metal and rare-earth materials. The planet’s biomes have been reduced to “ghost ecosystems”—monocultures of invasive species and genetically engineered survivors, with over 90% of terrestrial vertebrates extinct (IPBES 2023). The few remaining functional states rely on nuclear-powered ships and militarized trade routes, but piracy and storms make long-distance commerce nearly impossible. Mutational meltdown accelerates in inbred populations, with 60% of births exhibiting severe defects by 2150. The toxic legacy of PFAS, radiation, microplastics, and countless other industrial chemicals and toxins ensures that even if societies stabilize, genetic erosion may doom humanity to gradual extinction. What remains is not a global civilization, but a patchwork of neo-feudal warlords, subsistence farmers, and scavenger tribes—living in the shadow of a world that was.

Final Note: The Tipping Point Is Near

This timeline assumes no large-scale intervention whereby collapse could be mitigated—but current trends suggest disintegration is more likely than adaptation (IPCC, 2023). The AMOC’s collapse isn’t just a climate crisis; it’s the death knell for the interconnected world. The interplay of climate chaos, nuclear instability, and genetic decay creates a plausible pathway for civilizational collapse by 2100 and human extinction thereafter. While nuclear confrontation is a near-term risk, genetic erosion may ultimately prove more insidious (Zhang et al., 2024).

Jeremy Grantham (2025) warns that accumulating environmental toxins are reaching a “civilization-threatening threshold” that could undermine both economic systems and biological life. The report argues that “the twin crises of chemical pollution and biodiversity loss now represent an existential risk comparable to climate change.” His analysis aligns with my current thinking, although his population estimates are far too conservative and hopeful. You would have to assume economic and social structures will stay in place to believe we won’t have a major population crash (80-90%).

Grantham’s Recent Analysis relates to the Collapse of Modern Civilization

Grantham’s analysis places toxicity at the heart of several existential threats facing humanity, alongside climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and systemic flaws in capitalism. The article outlines how toxicity accelerates societal decline through:

Demographic Collapse: Falling fertility rates and aging populations undermine economic productivity and social stability.
Ecosystem Disruption: The loss of biodiversity due to chemical pollution threatens food security and ecosystem services essential for human survival.
Economic Fragility: Legal liabilities for chemical producers and declining populations challenge growth-dependent capitalist systems.
Cultural Shifts: Reduced libido and changing family dynamics weaken societal cohesion.

Together, these factors create a feedback loop that could destabilize modern civilization unless urgent action is taken to regulate harmful chemicals and address broader systemic issues.

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The City’s Grammar

24 Monday Mar 2025

Posted by xraymike79 in Collapse of Industrial Civilization

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Authoritarianism, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corruption, Fascism, Genocide, Mental Health

He arrived believing light meant welcome home,
Each open hand a mirror of his own.
His trust lay open like an unlocked door;
he hadn’t learned what locks were even for.

But doors he’d trusted opened into walls,
And laughter learned to echo down the halls.
The light he’d followed home was baring teeth;
He learned the city’s grammar underneath.

No demons here—just men who kept a tab,
Whose open hands concealed the coming grab.
They fed on him with contracts, not with claws;
The city’s teeth were hidden in its laws.

He knelt where only rats and rain could see,
And let the dark ask what he’d ceased to be.
It took his coat, his coins, his final breath—
But something in his blood refused his death.

He gathered what the city hadn’t taken:
A name, a pulse, a faith not yet forsaken.
The night demanded he lie down and stay—
He answered it by walking into day.

He walked not past the dark but through its length,
And forged a kind of language from his strength.
The boy who came mistaking light for home
Now bore true light like marrow, blood, and bone.

Beneath My Tongue

22 Saturday Mar 2025

Posted by xraymike79 in Collapse of Industrial Civilization

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Authoritarianism, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corruption, Fascism, Genocide, Mental Health

At nine I folded something into thirds
And pushed it down before I had the words.
It lives beneath my tongue still, patient, curled—
the first secret I swallowed from the world.

At work I answer emails, nod, agree,
A fluent ghost of who I’m meant to be.
My colleagues think I’m easy, calm, polite.
They’ve never heard me bargain with the night.

It happened in the kitchen, after three.
No ceremony. Nothing warning me.
The folded thing I’d kept began to unfold.
It had my face. It was nine years old.

Its eyes were open but the lids were wrong—
They blinked real slow, like time had stretched too long.
It wore my Sunday shirt, soaked in red.
I saw it start to speak. I fled.

That night I poured a drink and went to bed.
I told myself I’d dreamed the shirt, the red.
But now I feel him standing where I stand—
Not asking to be held, just to hold my hand.

I tell you this not as a man made whole,
But as a hand still reaching for his soul.
He’s still standing in that kitchen. Still nine.
The silence was never his. It was mine.

Wall of Denial

08 Saturday Mar 2025

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Consumerism, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Anthropocene Mass Extinction, Capitalist Alienation, Chemical Pollution, Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumer Culture, Consumerism, E-Waste, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Gaia, Global Elite, Sea Level Rise

A seahorse grips a Q-tip in the gyre.
I double-tap and scroll a little higher.
My straw becomes a pelican’s last meal.
I swipe the knowing from my eyes; it can’t be real.

The glacier calves; I vote for cheaper gas.
We crown the con man, mow the burning grass.
I know the script. I read it anyway—
A smiling extra in my own decay.

We kiss with lips that have forgotten why.
You ask. I’m fine. We smile. We lie.
Your hand finds mine like muscle memory—
Two ghosts rehearsing who we used to be.

He watches the flood from forty floors above.
The bourbon’s good. The glass is thick enough.
A child’s shoe bobs by on the evening news—
He flips the channel. What else would he choose?

The pipeline bleeds where the aquifer ran dry.
A drone strike hums beneath a quiet sky.
We cracked the bedrock for the last of what was there—
The well is empty. So is every prayer.

My daughter asks me what the glacier was.
I show her photographs. She nods because
That’s what you do with fairy tales and myth—
I hold her hand. It’s all I have to give.

Author’s Note: Revised 12/29/2025

A Second Trump Term Will Prove Even More Deadly For Americans

25 Friday Sep 2020

Posted by xraymike79 in Peak Oil

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD), Carl Sagan, Censorship, Center for Disease Control (CDC), Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, Conspiracy Theories, Coronavirus Pandemic, COVID-19, Deregulation, Dicatorships, Donald Trump, Fake News, Fascism, Gerrymandering, GOP, Herd Immunity, Joe Biden, Jordan Klepper, Louis DeJoy, MAGA rallies, MegaFires, Police Brutality, Politicization of Science, Regulatory Capture, Sea Level Rise, Vladimir Putin, William Barr

“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.” ~ Trump

Who would have guessed that a reality TV “star”, con-artist, and political hack would be the one person to shake America’s institutions of government to their core? Then again, Hitler was a down-and-out artist before he became a dictator. Lots of people warned that this time with D.J. Trump would come even before he finagled his way into the White House. From his days of swindling hundreds, if not thousands, of small business contractors and workers to laundering money and defrauding the U.S. government, his tenure as president has been no less riddled with corruption, back-stabbing, lying, and cheating. Since Trump cannot retain power through the traditional means of tinpot dictators via military coup, he is using an army of lawyers who will question every mail-in ballot and use every legal maneuver in an attempt to render the 2020 election results null and void. This summer, Trump began a campaign to sabotage mail-in voting after falsely claiming it was fraught with fraud and then hiring one of his unscrupulous cronies, GOP Megadonor Louis DeJoy, to cripple the U.S. postal service. However, the GOP plan to destroy majority rule really kicked into gear with their ‘gerrymandering on steroids’ strategy which was hatched more than a decade ago when right-wing strategists concluded that taking over state legislatures would enable them to redraw districts and control the outcome of elections.

Over the last four years, Trump has amassed a laundry list of skuldugery such as abusing his high office to delegitimize any reporting critical of his administration by labeling it “fake news”, exacerbating an atmosphere of doubt, mistrust, and suspicion of the government by perpetuating numerous conspiracy theories, stoking racial tensions with incendiary rhetoric while ignoring the mounting anger over police brutality, perverting the rule of law by stacking the courts with unqualified GOP-friendly judges, installing a henchman named William Barr to run the DOJ and help give the president autocratic powers, and politicizing science by censoring government researchers and dismantling science-based health and safety protections. All of these tactics have been used by dictators of foreign countries to eliminate opposition leaders and control the population. Muzzling of scientists is a global problem that is getting worse. Trump has single handedly made the US a pariah on the world stage as he cozies up to dictators while belittling and undercutting traditional Western allies. In fact, America’s reputation in the world is the lowest it’s been since such surveys began two decades ago. There’s no hiding that Trump would love nothing more than to turn America into a Russian-style dictatorship where he could rule for life, rob the public purse at will, and kill dissidents with impunity.

Had Trump properly handled the pandemic that continues to upend the economy and ravage people’s lives, 90% of U.S. coronavirus pandemic fatalities could have been prevented. Life would be drastically different from what we are experiencing today. By January 2021, pandemic fatalities in the U.S. are projected to more than double from their current number of over 200,000. This will be Trump’s macabre achievement for his criminally negligent handling of this pandemic. He was able to do much more than when he proclaimed he could stand on 5th Avenue, shoot someone, and get away with it. In fact, due to his lack of leadership, downplaying of the virus, obfuscation of CDC reporting, and failure to enact a coherent national plan, he will have killed more Americans than whom died in World War II. By comparison, that’s twenty-five to fifty times the number of Americans who die on average in any given year from the flu. Trump may blame China, the WHO, Democrats, or anyone else for unleashing this plague, but it was his deliberate and willful abdication of his duty as president to protect public health and safety that has created his coronavirus killing fields. Who hasn’t heard the Bob Woodward tapes from early February 2020 of Trump explicitly saying that the virus is much more deadly than any strenuous flu and extremely contagious? All the while he has downplayed the danger to the public, even going so far as to say it was a “hoax” by the Democrats? To this very day, he perpetuates these lies while corralling his cult followers into close quarters for his self-aggrandizing MAGA rallies. His followers are oblivious to the fact that they serve as nothing more than disposable props at these grotesque events. He mocks masks, the most effectiive tool we have against the virus. He likes to claim that his China travel ban saved many lives but, like so many things he says, the opposite is true. His ban had many holes and actually may have worsened the outbreak in the United States. In addition, Trump’s downplaying of the virus has allowed it to fester in the U.S. and likely mutate into a more contagious strain; whether it transforms into something more deadly is all a matter of a genetic roll of the dice. Experts are fearing a double whammy from both the flu and the COVID-19 coronavirus this winter.

With historic megafires raging along the entire west coast in the new normal of inferno seasons, Trump tells climate scientists directly to their face that “it will get colder, just wait and see” and “I don’t think science knows about climate.” In the meantime, he’ll be spending millions shoring up his golf course properties from the rising seas. Over eight feet of sea level rise is already locked in from Antarctic ice melt alone, even if Paris climate agreements are fulfilled. As Biden says, Trump is a “climate arsonist.” At this point, I cannot help but view anyone who supports this catastrophic president as anything other than a traitor to their own country.

At a time where compassion and honesty are most in need as our civilization runs headlong into the limits of a finite planet, the world appears to be going in the opposite direction of more magical thinking, selfish nationalism, and diminishing human rights. The destruction Trump has done is real and four more years of him will guarantee further damage for decades to come. For instance, many of the dozens of environmental regulations that Trump has rolled back will likely be permanently cemented into place by Trump-appointed judges. These rollbacks are already causing countless premature deaths in the U.S. The amount of carbon his legislative actions will have put into the atmosphere by 2035 is estimated to be the equivalent of Russia’s annual emissions. The EPA will become a shell of its former self, having been completely usurped by corporate interests to pollute without restraint. Other countries are already following America’s lead of completely disregarding the threat of anthropogenic climate disruption. Any semblance of democracy will be shredded as Trump’s swamp of greed, corruption, and white nationalism runs amok. Conspiracy theories will run rampant as daily life becomes ever more precarious in a climate of fear and science becomes completely subjugated by economy, polity, and religion. There is a prescient quote from Carl Sagan that warns of the dystopian world we are well on our way to creating:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

I shudder to think of the hellscape that awaits us with another term of Trumpian chaos. There are only two choices before us in our American corporatocracy, so let’s be pragmatic about our dire situation. I’ll take take Biden, the corporate friendly centrist who has a plan to contain the virus and a two trillion dollar climate change strategy, any day of the week over Trump, a corporate fascist masquerading as a populist who never had any national plan to effectively contain the virus and believes climate change is a hoax. Of course there are many other issues that make Biden the sane choice between the two. It’s comical how the Right-wing propaganda machine has painted Biden as some sort of bumbling socialist puppet, especially when you consider that Wall Street’s own analysts say that a Biden administration would be neutral to positive for them. Under Trump’s direction, the very wealthy were given big tax breaks that allowed them to pay less than the working class for the first time in history. And due to Trump’s gross mismanagement, our government’s budget deficit will soon exceed the size of the nation’s entire economy for the first time since World War II. A growing body count of dead Americans that rivals the biggest war fatalities in our nation’s history is happening as a result of Trump’s sociopathic response. Trump’s latest hairbrained scheme is to allow the American population to build herd immunity to the novel virus. Never mind that in the process we would incur fatalities in the millions and collapse the healthcare system which would raise the death toll even higher, or the fact that scientists doubt the population would even ever be able to reach such levels of immunity. Someone, please tell me how Trump has made America great again.

The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised

28 Tuesday Jan 2020

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

≈ 71 Comments

Tags

Abrupt Climate Change, Anthropocene Extinction, Australian Bushfires, Climate Change Denial, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Extinction of Man, Fossil Fuel Industry, Omnicide, Overpopulation, Rupert Murdoch

“3D visualization” of the Australian fires by Anthony Hearsey, compiled from NASA satellite data collected across the span of a month/an injured koala bear sits alone on the ‘apocalyptic’ Kangaroo Island

The year is 2020 and climate change-related disasters are in full swing while at the same time, the most influential country in the world is under the leadership of someone who calls scientists “foolish fortune tellers.” Australia, another country being led to its slaughter by the willfully and criminally ignorant, is literally going up in flames as we speak. Its rich millennia-old evolutionary legacy is disappearing before our eyes. The pictures of charred kangaroo corpses entangled in barbed wire fences and koala bears curled up in the fetal position as they tried to flee the fires are gut-wrenching and should be a wake-up call to our leaders. The platypus, another of the country’s iconic creatures, is dying off in drought-stricken cesspools. To make matters worse, recent heavy rains are causing massive fish kills as bushfire ash washes into rivers. More than a billion creatures(excluding frogs, insects, other invertebrates, or livestock) are estimated to have perished, and the wildlife that do manage to survive the country’s apocalyptic conditions are now at risk of starvation. Scientists fear these fires are causing the extinction of entire species of insects which play a vital role in “processing waste, pollination, providing nutrition for other species, and myriad other ecological functions.” While warming at twice the global rate from humanity’s fossil fuel binge, Australia continues to be the biggest net exporter of coal in the world, thus fueling its own conflagration.

The Australian mega-fires are not a one-off, but just the latest manifestation of an increasingly disrupted global climate system. Australia’s fate was predicted by scientists many years ago. The forever legacy of greenhouse gas emissions means the dust won’s settle in any time scale appreciable to humans. Sea levels will continue to rise for millennia, droughts and storms will grow in frequency and intensity, thousand-year rains will become common occurrences, entire ecosystems will unravel, and the human experiment will undoubtedly come to an end. To quote an Australian on Reddit:

This is what disturbs me about my countrymen. This is not just a one-off terrible event, this is a permanent step down, a large nail in our collective coffin. Long before we recover from this, we will suffer it again, and again. Those poor animals. Worse than being glorified, or not televised, our collapse is being looked at without seeing. It is misunderstood and denied.

For those not from here I’d say that one can’t overstate what is happening here, it is truly awful. We will never recover.

Australia’s annual fire season is only at its midpoint, yet the massive pulse of carbon from these bushfires is now estimated at 900 million tons —double the country’s annual emissions. As horrific as the fires have made life on land, what’s happening in Australia’s oceans out of site and mind is equally disturbing, but of course this is not confined to Australia. Scientists have found that a ‘heat blob’ in the north Pacific ocean killed a million seabirds and wiped out 100 million cod.

We are destroying the life support systems to which all creatures, including man, are dependent, yet it does not appear that any climate disaster no matter how catastrophic will alter mankind’s tragic path to extinction. Wiping out an entire continent’s flora and fauna does not register on the Stock Market. No number of five-alarm fire warnings planet Earth sends will be heeded by this cabon-fueled corporate kleptocracy which carries us all toward a very dark future. Why would we expect any differently from an economic paradigm that tolerates no disruption as it plunders the planet in search of the almighty dollar? A report from two years ago called Australia’s extinction crisis a “national disgrace” and described its institutions tasked with protecting threatened plants and animals as “broken”. We see today that nothing has changed to prevent Australia’s natural treasures from disappearing into the black void of the Anthropocene extinction, never to be seen or heard from again. In fact, current assessments show extinction rates are accelerating:

Nature is in ‘unprecedented’ decline. A substantial proportion of assessed species are threatened with extinction and overall trends are deteriorating, with extinction rates increasing sharply in the past century.
This decline is a direct result of human activity, the most devastating being changes in land and sea use, including natural habitat destruction.
Since 1980, greenhouse gas emissions have doubled, raising average global temperatures by at least 0.7 degrees Celsius. 75% of fossil fuel burning and anthropogenic CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere has occurred since 1970; their effects are just beginning to be felt.
In the near future, climate change is expected to surpass the impacts of land and sea use change as well as other drivers(direct exploitation of organisms, pollution, invasive alien species).
Increased human population and per capita consumption is a key driver of the above.
By destroying the foundations of Earth’s interconnected web of life, we are threatening our own health and existence.

I am loath to repeat these numbers because no price can be placed on intact ecosystems, but the economic costs of this year’s fire season in Australia are estimated to be approaching $100 billion, the costliest natural disaster in that country’s history. And in the U.S., the last decade has been ‘unprecedented‘:

The U.S. billion-dollar disaster damage costs over the last decade (2010-2019) were also historically large, exceeding $800 billion from 119 separate billion-dollar events. After adjusting for inflation, the U.S. experienced more than twice the number of billion-dollar disasters during the 2010s than the 2000s decade: 119 versus 59…Clearly, the historically large U.S. losses from hurricanes and wildfires over the last few years have further skewed the total distribution of extreme weather costs. This increase reflects a combination of increased exposure, vulnerability and the fact the climate change is playing an increasing role in the frequency of some types of extremes that lead to billion-dollar disasters.

The finance industry is starting to see that climate change is an existential crisis, yet offer no alternative to their ideological stalemate of infinite growth on a finite planet. In fact, they believe that the personal sacrifices needed to halt greenhouse gas emissions will create a public backlash towards such efforts. In other words, business-as-usual will rule the day until the hard laws of physics, chemistry, and biology make our bubble economy impossible. We’re undergoing that process right now as anthropogenic climate disruption returns planet Earth to the chaotic climatic conditions of the Pleistocene —a time in which organized societies and agriculture will be impossible. Water shortages, degraded soils, and loss of pollinators will only compound the problem. No amount of accounting tricks will bring back the habitability of the planet.

Cheap and abundant fossil fuels have given us modern science and technology which have allowed humans to feel detached and independent from nature, but when this civilization inevitably collapses we will once again be at the mercy of the natural world. If we have destroyed the biosphere and set in motion a mass extinction event at a time when we strongly need to rely on nature, then our prospects for survival are very grim indeed! Yet another study released this week shows that Earth’s biodiversity is crashing under a perfect storm of global warming, extreme weather events, and human activity. Collapse of industrial civilization and its vast amount of specialization along with a simultaneous planet-wide ecological collapse can very easily lead to human extinction. It’s not hard to imagine a Third World War being ignited by deteriorating environmental conditions and resource depletion as nations fall under the sway of propaganda from demagogues inciting fear, hatred, and violence.

With Earth Overshoot Day arriving ever earlier each year, we have arrived at the last stage of global civilization’s doubling time. The next twenty years will be the final tick of the clock in which our mass resource extraction, consumption, and waste irreparably damage the planet’s regenerative abilities and life support systems. Decades of greenwashing, empty rhetoric, and regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry have brought us to this precipice:

As you can see, any mitigation efforts at this late date rely heavily on the fantasy of carbon capture with nonexistent technologies that, truthfully, will never scale up to the enormous problem. To some degree or another, we are all in denial of what is unfolding in our final century as we go about our daily lives within a set of living arrangements completely incompatible to the survival of our descendants. Everyone is riding the peak of industrial civilization as we watch the world fall apart on our smart phones and LED TVs. In the meantime, the nightly news drones on about hyperpartisan politics and economic growth. That barely a vague mention is made in the news cycle of the most important story in mankind’s history tells you all you need to know about who controls mass media and why the story of our imminent demise will remain buried.

Our fossil record will be comprised mainly of plastics, radioactive waste, and billions of human bones and that of our domesticated animals. The remnants of wild animals will be extremely rare since we have supplanted them with our livestock. All civilizations, especially complex ones, eventually collapse. Ours, like many before, will be undone by overshoot of the environment’s carrying capacity, albeit this time on a planetary scale and with no second chance for a do-over.

The Inconvenient Truth of Modern Civilization’s Inevitable Collapse

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

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

≈ 66 Comments

Tags

"Renewable" Energies, 6th Mass Extinction, Abrupt Climate Change, Alternative Energy, Antarctic Ice Melt, Climate Change Denial, Climate Tipping Points, David Buckel, Donald Trump, Douglas Theobald, Ecocide, Food Shocks, Fossil Fuel Industry, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Lee Kump, Loss of Biodiversity, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Nate Hagens, Omnicide, Overpopulation, Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction, Runaway Climate Change, The Anthropocene Age, The Great Dying

“My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
~ David Buckel

Today’s global consumption of fossil fuels now stands at roughly five times what it was in the 1950s, and one-and-half times that of the 1980s when the science of global warming had already been confirmed and accepted by governments with the implication that there was an urgent need to act. Tomes of scientific studies have been logged in the last several decades documenting the deteriorating biospheric health, yet nothing substantive has been done to curtail it. More CO2 has been emitted since the inception of the UN Climate Change Convention in 1992 than in all previous human history. CO2 emissions are 55% higher today than in 1990. Despite 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction and an international treaty that entered into force in 1994, manmade greenhouse gases have risen inexorably. If it has not dawned on you by now, our economic and political systems are ill-equipped to deal with this existential threat. Existing international agreements are toothless because they have no verification or enforcement and do not require anything remotely close to what is needed to avoid catastrophe. The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, with the top four in the past four years, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Ice loss from Antarctica has sextupled since the 1970s and Greenland’s pace of ice loss has increased fourfold since 2003. The Arctic ocean has lost 95% of its old ice and total volume of ice in September, the lowest ice month of the year, has declined by 78% between 1979 and 2012. With grim implications for the future, Earth’s air conditioner —the cryosphere— is melting away.

An article from a few months ago lays bare the reality that throughout the past two hundred years and with recent “alternative” or “renewable” energy sources, humans have only added to the total energy they consume without ever having displaced the old, polluting ones. An alternative energy outlook report by Wood Mackenzie foresees that even in a carbon-constrained future, fossil fuels would still make up 77% of global energy consumption in 2040. The world economy remains hopelessly tethered to fossil fuels. We are kidding ourselves if we think there will be any sort of orderly transition to sustainability with which modern civilization appears to be wholly incompatible. We are, as Nate Hagens says, energy blind.

Modern civilization has become so intertwined with petroleum-based products that their remnants are now found in our excrement. It seems no living thing can escape microplastics, not even the eggs of remote Arctic birds. This should come as no surprise if you look at the scale of the problem. Plastic production has grown from 2 million metric tons in 1950 to roughly 400 million metric tons today(more than 99% of plastics made today are with fossil fuels and only a tiny fraction of it recycled). There are five massive oceanic gyres filled with pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other human detritus; one of the these gyres, named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is three times the size of France and growing exponentially. The health and environmental effects are grim; organized society may not even be around to examine the long-term effects of these persistent synthetic materials:

“Health problems associated with plastics throughout the lifecycle includes numerous forms of cancers, diabetes, several organ malfunctions, impact on eyes, skin and other sensory organs, birth defects” and many other impacts, said David Azoulay, a report author and managing attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law…”And those are only the human health costs, they do not mention impacts on climate, impacts on fisheries or farmland productivity.”

Making things more efficient and convenient has its limits, but humans keep trying to beat the consequences of Earth’s dwindling natural resources while ignoring the environmental costs. Jevons paradox be damned! To make matters worse, the fossil fuel industry has employed a well-financed and highly effective global disinformation campaign to confuse and sow doubt in the public mind about the reality of climate change. And to top it all off, we have a leader who reinforces the ignorance of climate change deniers:

It’s a cruel irony that this President’s emergency declaration for building a border wall comes at a time when migration from Latin America is near a 40-year low and the majority of those now seeking asylum are families fleeing climate change-related disasters. This President and the craven politicians who line up behind him are an abomination! At a time when compassion, cooperation, and scientific reasoning are needed to deal with the multiple crises we face, politicians are instead conjuring up xenophobia, racism, and conspiracy theories. As inequality grows and the once-stable climate continues to unravel, expect the super-rich to barricade themselves behind heavily fortified mansions while treating climate refugees and the most vulnerable among us with extreme prejudice. A new study shows increasingly severe weather events are fueling the number of ‘food shocks’ around the world and jeopardizing global security:

These “food shocks” —or, sudden losses to food production— are hitting local communities hard, in addition to impacting the global economy, with long-term implications. “Critically, shock frequency has increased through time on land and sea at a global scale,” the study notes. “Geopolitical and extreme-weather events were the main shock drivers identified, but with considerable differences across sectors.”

Douglas Theobald, in his study at Brandeis University, calculated that there is less than a 1 in 10^2,860 chance that all life did not arise from a common ancestor. In other words, humans are related to all life on Earth and share much of their DNA with other organisms. Despite earning the title of ‘superpredator‘, humans are dependent on intact and functioning ecosystems. Our chances for long-term survival are ultimately tied to the health of the planet, yet we are carrying out ecocide on a planetary scale. Being a mere 0.01% of all life on Earth, humans have managed to destroy 50% of wild animals in just the last fifty years and 83% since the dawn of civilization around 3,000 B.C.. Who knows how many plant species have gone extinct:

Hawaii is losing plant species at the rate of one per year, when it should be roughly one every 10,000 years. “We have a term called ‘plant-blindness’… People simply don’t see them; they view greenery as an indistinguishable mass, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals…”

The bedrock of our food, clean water and energy is biodiversity, but its loss now rivals the impacts of climate change. Without biodiversity, our food sources, both plants and animals, will succumb to diseases. Microbes and hundreds of different life forms interact to make soils fertile. Without them, soils will be barren and unable to support life. Monocultures can only be held together through artificial means(fossil fuels, inorganic fertilizer and toxic pesticides) and are highly vulnerable to diseases, yet industrial monoculture farming continues to dominate the globe. Most Worrisome are the recent studies indicating that biodiversity loss raises the risk of ‘extinction cascades’. Insect numbers, the base of the terrestrial food chain, are in steep decline and starfish, a common keystone species in coastal ecosystems, are facing extinction due to some sort of wasting disease likely caused by climate change:

“Many of these outbreaks are heat sensitive. In the lab, sea stars got sick sooner and died faster in warmer water… A warming ocean could increase the impact of infectious diseases like this one…We could be watching the extinction of what was a common species just 5 years ago.”

And here is Professor Stephen Williams discussing the recent mass death of Australia’s flying fox bats in which 30,000 —a third of their remaining population— died in a single extreme heat wave:

“A lot of tropical species are much closer to the edge of the tolerances, so they very much are the ‘canary in the coalmine’ for the world in what’s going to start happening with climate change…The fact that we’re now seeing things endangered occur in places that you would’ve thought to be pretty secure, that’s the scary bit…I suspect the next wave of extinctions is going to be mostly due to extreme events — extreme climate events like heatwaves.”

These disturbing headlines indicate to me that the Sixth Mass Extinction is gathering pace and the real stock market underlying our very existence and survival is crashing before our eyes!!! Four of the last five mass extinction events were preceded by a disruption of the carbon cycle. When renowned paleoclimatologist Lee Kump was asked whether comparisons to today’s global warming and that of past mass extinctions are really appropriate, he ominously said, “Well, the rate at which we’re injecting CO2 into the atmosphere today, according to our best estimates, is ten times faster than it was during the End-Permian. And rates matter. So today we’re creating a very difficult environment for life to adapt, and we’re imposing that change maybe ten times faster than the worst events in Earth’s history.” Humans are recreating the past extinction known as The Great Dying at a much faster pace and at many more human-forced levels that leave no ecosystem on Earth intact.

By orders of magnitude, the human endeavor has grown much too large for the Earth to support; climate change, plastic pollution, and biodiversity loss are just a few of the symptoms of this global ecological overshoot. The people who have studied this problem for years and from every angle have come to the same conclusion —technology simply won’t save us, but that won’t stop humans from experimenting. By far the most effective way to reduce future emissions and resource consumption is to reduce human birth rates, yet the global population is still increasing at about 90 million people per year despite the geographic shift in fertility rates.

Humans recognized decades ago the threats they are now facing, yet nothing was done due to political inaction and industry malfeasance which continues to this very day. The scientists who wrote The Limits to Growth decades ago were expecting our political institutions to take action back in the 1970s, but they were met with ridicule and now we stand at the doorstep of modern civilization’s collapse. Political inaction and regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry appear to be intractable barriers that have condemned the human race to a hellish future. Anyone waiting for some sort of seminal climate change event that is going to galvanize the world’s leaders into action will be tragically disappointed. If seeing the world’s coral reefs dying, its glaciers disappearing, permafrost melting, and the steady uptick in extreme weather and wildfire events does not spur them to action, it is much too late to hope that any single event will ever do so. The time to act would have been before we were seeing all these environmental degradations and tipping points, not afterward. There is no way to put the CO2 genie back in the bottle. The Earth cannot even begin to reach a new climate state until humans stop emitting the roughly 40 to 50 gigatonnes of CO2 per annum and stop altering and destroying global ecosystems. This fact is our daily nightmare.

A myth that many uninformed people hold is that biospheric health will quickly bounce back after we humans get our act together. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the damage we are already seeing is irreversible on human time scales. Positive feedbacks were already occurring at less than 1°C of warming. Many carbon sinks are on the verge of becoming or have already become carbon sources. As we race toward a nightmarish future with no realistic way to stop, we leave behind a “forever legacy” that will haunt mankind for the rest of eternity.

The Trumpocene: Darkness Gathers

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Cyber-Warfare, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Automation, Biological Diversity, Capitalism, Carl Sagan, Climate Change Denial, Conspiracy Theorists, Coral Die-Off, Corporatocracy, Cyber-Warfare, Deforestation, Donald Trump, Endocrine Disruptors, Fairness Doctrine, Fake News, Free Market Ideologues, Gary Kasparov, Gaslighting, Martin Luther King, Michael E. Mann, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Ocean Acidification, Overthrow Project, Peak Net Energy, Rush Limbaugh, Slave Labor, Techno-Fix, The Global Elite, The Trump Wall, Trumpocene, TV Sensationalism

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” – Gary Kasparov

With each passing day, the mental stability of our narcissistic, megalomaniacal president is increasingly being called into question by those unnerved from his erratic behavior. The unhinged press conferences, comically embarrassing meetings with world leaders, and uncensored tweets reveal just how illiterate, delusional, and divisive America’s first reality TV president truly is, and the consequences won’t be confined to the imaginary world of a television screen. The irony is that the very news media networks whom the president disparages on a daily basis were instrumental in getting him elected, allowing Trump’s circus to hog the headlines in an ‘issues free’ campaign. Trump received $1.9 billion in free media coverage, 190 times as much as he paid for while the major networks made tons of revenue off Trump’s theatrics. Driving this symbiotic relationship is the fierce competition for ratings determining the advertising revenue and bottom line of these corporate-owned news networks. The media exploited Trump’s sensationalist behavior for profit, helping to drive his campaign to the top of this money-grubbing pyramid scheme. We are, as Neil Postman mused, amusing ourselves to death. Most of these networks are now busy trying to contain the monster they helped create. The other great irony is that America is getting a taste of its own medicine after having meddled in other country’s elections for decades; the CIA was one of the early developers of cyber warfare and is one of the world’s most ruthless practitioners of it.

Of the many Trump lies glossed over by corporate media, the most dangerous one is that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. The Trump administration is riddled with like-minded Flat-Earthers bent on dismantling the EPA and stoking fossil fuel consumption. In Trumpland, alternative facts are as valid as any empirical evidence. Scientists are being muzzled and the masses are being gaslighted. Conspiracy theories, hearsay, and pure fantasy have replaced meaningful public discourse. We have a demagogue working to blind everyone to what scientists are telling us and our own eyes can see. A civilization which cannot discern the truth cannot make rational decisions for the future, let alone the present. Trump’s kleptocracy will flourish in such an environment while repeating the mantra, “It’s all about the American people.”

The loss of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 was an important milestone in America’s decline towards a “post-truth” culture, paving the way for the “outrage industry” and talk radio demagogues like Rush Limbaugh. Twitter is the new bully pulpit for a tyrant-aspiring charlatan, and his antics serve as a useful tool for distracting the public from the right-wing agenda of extreme deregulation and privatization, otherwise known as the Overthrow Project. The biggest danger of wealth inequality is capture of the political system by the elites. This has already happened in America and abroad to the extent that there is now a new globalized elite who have more fealty towards each other than their country of origin, completely lacking positive feelings and loyalty towards their own native lands. The existing oligarchy is being strengthened at the expense of an already polarized and economically disenfranchised society. The Trump regime is corporatism on steroids.

As the famous saying goes, “There’s a sucker born every minute” and Trump is just the latest huckster to exploit them. His rhetoric appeals to people’s emotions and raises their dopamine levels, but facts have a tendency to get in the way of a good story. Trump’s base of supporters, however, appear immune to facts that contradict their leaders’s disinformation. One of his big campaign pledges was to bring back the manufacturing base of the U.S. and revive the Rust Belt, but this promise rings hollow in the age of techno-capitalism. Machines have taken over manufacturing and Trump’s protectionist policies will in all likelihood accelerate this process. AI promises to bring even more radical disruption to the job market:

At a time when the Trump administration is promising to make America great again by restoring old-school manufacturing jobs, AI researchers aren’t taking him too seriously. They know that these jobs are never coming back, thanks in no small part to their own research, which will eliminate so many other kinds of jobs in the years to come, as well…

In the US, the number of manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979 and has steadily decreased ever since. At the same time, manufacturing has steadily increased, with the US now producing more goods than any other country but China. Machines aren’t just taking the place of humans on the assembly line. They’re doing a better job. And all this before the coming wave of AI upends so many other sectors of the economy.

Trump’s fake stance on protecting American workers will not unwind decades of globalization, unrelenting automation, or the machinations of corporate capitalism. His promise to reignite the coal industry is yet more empty rhetoric; independent energy experts at BNEF dismantle his claim:

Coal power is just too costly and inflexible, explains BNEF: “Super-low-cost renewable power — what we are now calling ‘base-cost renewables’ — is going to force a revolution in the way power grids are designed, and the way they are regulated.”

When you add the revolution in cheap fracked gas — which Trump has pledged to double down on — it’s no surprise the country shut down over 40 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations since 2000…

It’s also being driven by a collapse in the export market, as countries from Europe to Asia also move away from coal because of its economic and human cost…

So Trump won’t be bringing back the domestic coal industry. And even if he could, he can’t bring back the jobs because it’s the coal industry itself that wiped out most of those jobs through productivity gains from “strip mines and machinery”…

Conveniently ignoring the harmful environmental impacts and the fact that illegal immigration has been on the decline for the past decade, the proposed Trump Wall is an expensive monument to xenophobia and misguided fears. No wall will prevent those determined to circumvent it, but if you listen to the engineers and experts who actually have experience working at the border, then it’s not a solid continuous wall(projected to take 16 years to complete) but a partial fence that would be more effective and feasible, and that’s if you believe that Americans will take the place of those millions of migrant farm workers who leave their homes every year to plant, cultivate, harvest, and pack America’s fruits, vegetables and nuts, in addition to the millions of other low-skilled and low-paying jobs that immigrants perform. Capitalism thrives on the back of cheap labor, but even these jobs are not safe from machines.

What kind of world is going to support all this labor-saving, hi-tech gadgetry when its creators are too short-sighted to maintain the habitability of the planet for their own descendants? There is no deus ex machina to prevent catastrophic collapse of the oceans nor is there one to stop catastrophic climate change. Industrial civilization is a one-hit wonder for which there are no solutions that scale up to the mountain of problems it has created. Dealing with the environmental costs of fossil fuels is the classic “prisoner’s dilemma” whereby the incentive to cheat for short-term economic gain prevents the cooperation needed by everyone. The economic, legal, and moral framework to tackle climate change simply does not exist. The invisible hand of the “free market” has turned into the boot of environmental catastrophe.

Primates, mankind’s closest biological cousins in the animal kingdom, are in steep decline because they have the “misfortune of being concentrated in areas rich in certain resources precious to their sapient but ravenous cousins.” Not even our fellow human beings can escape war and death when they live atop coveted resources, so what chance does any other species have?

“People have argued that we only have to worry about human-caused extinctions if we do something that causes the loss of 80 or 90 percent of species on the planet,” said UC Berkeley environmental scientist James W. Kirchner.

“Our analysis shows that even if the human impact is much smaller than that – 20 or 30 or even 50 percent of species – it’s still going to take 10 million years for the Earth to recover. That is well past the expected life span of the human species, or even of the genus Homo.” – Link

The study quoted above was from the year 2000 and has the usual hopeful spin:

“It is not preordained that high levels of human-caused extinction have to happen,” Kirchner said. “Our future depends on what we choose to do on a national and international level, as a society. Those decisions are critical because they will have very long-lasting consequences.”

Not surprisingly, we have failed to heed that advice. Scientists say our rampant road building has dissected the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments too small to support significant wildlife. A new study covering 130 countries finds deforestation rises with incomes in developing economies and never reverses. This is particularly troubling because Africa is a developing continent with some of the world’s largest tracts of remaining undisturbed forests and biodiversity hotspots. Biodiversity loss is an existential threat comparable to climate change. The glaring warning from all these studies is that the Western way of life exported across the entire planet has brought us to a point of cataclysmic overshoot. Business-as-usual only exacerbates the crisis:

Real-world CO₂ emissions have tracked the high end of earlier [IPCC] emissions scenarios, and until the currently wealthy countries can produce a large decline in their own emissions per capita, it is dubious to project that emissions per capita in the less developed countries will not continue on a trajectory up to the levels of currently wealthy countries…[The top 10% of the economically wealthy in the world produce almost as much total GHG emissions as the bottom 90% combined]… – Link

Trump peddles the false hope of regaining material wealth for a collapsing middle class with his slogan “Make America great again”, but after being elected, is giving more power and riches to those who have created this environmental and social catastrophe. Capitalism is, as Martin Luther King observed, “socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.” Nonetheless, in the bigger scheme of modern civilization’s looming collapse, the ‘Trumpocene’ amounts to nothing more than polishing the brass on the Titanic.

A time is coming when what we do to Earth is completely overshadowed by what Earth does to us. We have already condemned the planet to an ice-free Arctic and no amount of techno-fixes will return it to its former state. Were humans to disappear today from the Earth, the after-effects of our massive fossil fuel binge would reverberate for aeons. The last time there was an ice-free Arctic was during the Eemian period 125,000 years ago at the height of the last major interglacial period, but the CO₂ levels of today are much higher now and causing the climate to change at a rate that is 170 times that of natural forces with much more warming to come. According to a new study, manmade global warming is replicating conditions that triggered an abrupt sea level rise of several meters in the ocean around Antarctica some 15,000 years ago. The damage done is irreversible not only on a human timescale or a civilizational time scale, but a species timescale. The total global carbon dioxide emissions load from the onset of the industrial revolution is enough to push the next ice age back by 100,000 years and only deep geologic time will significantly remediate the chemistry of a CO₂-spiked atmosphere. The same is true for ocean acidification. The natural process of continental rock weathering to neutralize all of the CO₂ from human activity that is entering the oceans would take hundreds of thousands of years. Plankton blooms, a key part of the entire marine food web and the biological carbon pump, are being disrupted by warming, acidifying oceans. The Great Barrier Reef is expected to be completely dead within the next two decades and 98% of all reefs around the world gone by mid century. The latest research indicates ocean acidification is much worse for corals that previously thought.

Manmade persistent organic pollutants(POPs) such as PCBs and flame retardants can be found in the most remote places on Earth such as the 36,000-foot-deep Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean where researchers tested crustaceans and found them to contain 50 times more POPs than crabs living in one of China’s most polluted rivers. Once these endocrine-disrupting compounds settle into the sediments, they can remain there for thousands of years before being disturbed and recirculated into the environment once again as a contaminant. Microplastics less than 5mm in size are ubiquitous in the environment, having been documented in the waters of both the Arctic and Antarctic and recently found on 73% of Britain’s beaches.

The irrational ramblings of a demagogue won’t change a shifting earth laying waste to a once rich ecosphere and grinding to dust the landmarks of modern man. Delusions and protestations have no bearing on the laws of chemistry and thermodynamics.

The Stark Realities of Baked-In Catastrophes

02 Saturday Apr 2016

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

≈ 45 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Climate Change, Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Capitalism, Climate Change Denial, CO2 Emissions, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Economic Hitman, Environmental Collapse, Intensified Hydrologic Cycle, Mangled Jet Stream, Noam Chomsky, Sea Level Rise, Sustainability, Techno-Fix, The Unsustainability of Mega-Cities, Warren Buffett

In a civilization gone mad with delusions of grandeur, we’re left with tatters of human sociability held together by rancid mythologies.

Despite human fossil fuel burning recently reported to be “flat”, CO2 levels have been on a tear for the last six months, reaching new worrying levels which have some wondering whether permafrost melt may be contributing to the unusually high spike if no decline happens soon. The giant holes in Siberia serve as an ominous sign. Considering that the current El Niño is contributing only 10% to what we are now seeing, runaway global warming may be accelerating worldwide. But don’t worry, Warren Buffett says climate change is no more of a problem than the Y2K bug and will be profitable through increased premiums and inflation.

Ever dire studies continue to reaffirm worst case scenarios, making clear to anyone paying attention that Earth in the next century will be unrecognizable from its current state. Basic planetary geography and atmospheric conditions will be altered through warming oceans and rising sea levels which are now increasing faster than at any time in the past 2800 years. On average, sea levels were between 50 and 82 feet higher the last time CO2 levels were at 400ppm. Glaciologist Jason Box expects ice melt from the West Antarctic to become the biggest contributor to sea level rise in the coming decades due to a feedback loop not in the climate models. CO2 levels have been increasing around 3ppm per year, a twentyfold increase since pre-industrial times when the highest recorded increase was 0.15 ppm per year. We’ve long since passed the tipping point of melting Arctic summer sea ice; 300-350 ppm of CO2 was the threshold for many parts of the climate. These changes are irreversible on a timescale of human civilizations. Even if all human industrial activity magically ceased today, the footprint man has already left will be felt for eons.

In our warming world, the hydrologic cycle is changing and creating extreme weather; crop-destroying droughts and floods are becoming more frequent. The Jet Stream is transforming into something different, becoming wavier with higher ridges and troughs prone to stagnating in the same region. As global temperatures rise over time, hotter air will be trapped under these layers of high pressure from a mangled Jet Stream, cooking everything to death. Rising winter temperatures are beginning to destroy the “winter chill” needed for many fruit and nut trees to properly blossom and produce maximally. Climate change is also disrupting flower pollination and pushing fish toward the North/South poles, robbing poorer countries at the equator of crucial food resources. In a new study, marine scientists are surprised to find a disturbing trend in the increasing numbers of a specific type of phytoplankton, coccolithophores, which have been “typically more abundant during Earth’s warm interglacial and high CO2 periods.”

Homo sapiens have only been on the planet for the equivalent of a few seconds in geologic time but have managed to overwhelm and foul up all of earth’s natural processes and interdependencies, leaving a distinct layer in the sedimentary record. There is nothing modern humans do that is truly sustainable. Here are a few glaring examples:

Techno-fixes are built into the IPCC’s projections for maintaining a habitable planet for humans.
Money megacities spend for adapting to climate change is linked more to protecting valuable capital than vulnerable people (Capitalism is doing an outstanding job of converting the planet into dead dollars.)
Nuclear Power: “Even if there were no issues like meltdown or waste proliferation, the cost and time for planning, permitting, and constructing nuclear plants is prohibitive. The Arctic ice will already be gone.
Japan prime minister: We came within a “paper-thin margin” of nuclear disaster and the evacuation of 50 million people in 2011
Germany’s carbon dioxide emissions increased by an estimated 10 million tonnes from 2014 to 2015, in a blow to the country’s claims to climate leadership.
New study published in the journal Environmental Pollution shows that urban soil can emit up to 72% as much CO2 as fossil fuels burned within a city and at a rate of up to twice that of rural soils.
90% of Indigenous in Brazil’s Amazon Suffer Mercury Poisoning: A new study shows that water and food sources for 19 Indigenous communities have been massively affected by illegal mining.
Satellite images suggest tropical forests from the Amazon to the Philippines are disappearing at a far more rapid pace than previously thought, a University of Maryland team of forest researchers say.
African elephants ‘killed faster than they are being born’
Desertification in China is a major problem for Beijing, as the country’s deserts are growing, threatening environmental, economic, and political stability.
The environment is now being destroyed by corporations in the name of green growth. Sham greenwashing projects are created, funded, and enforced by the IMF and World Bank.
Unknown continental-scale process is dumping phosphorus into streams and lakes across the U.S.
According to a new study, efforts to curtail world temps will almost surely fail: “A person living today uses about four times as much energy as a person did in the early 1900s.”
Greenpeace says China increasing coal-fired capacity: “There is a very rapid and accelerating net increase in coal-fired generating capacity”
UN envoy warns of environmental activist murder ‘epidemic’
Remember this headline from 2013?: Arctic methane release could cost economy $60 trillion -study. Our response was to go on a fracking binge which increased our methane emissions by some 30%.
While the resource intensity of GDP may be falling (less resources needed to produce 1$ worth of goods/services), the absolute decoupling of resource use, emissions, pollution, etc from GDP growth is the only thing that matters and that is not happening. If the world’s population continues to grow as projected and current lifestyles do not change, global resource consumption will increase anywhere from 2 to 5 times by 2050. It defies logic that a continually growing economy would be able to reduce its resource intensity down to near-zero to achieve a sustainable ecological footprint.
According to recent research, even if we converted 100% of farmland to reforestation projects it would only lower temperatures 0.45C by the end of the century. Converting half of global farmland to reforestation would result in just a 0.25C drop. Other recent studies have come to the same conclusion:

No amount of reafforestation or growing of new trees will ultimately off-set continuing CO2 emissions due to environmental constraints on plant growth and the large amounts of remaining fossil fuel reserves,” Mackey says. “Unfortunately there is no option but to cut fossil fuel emissions deeply as about a third of the CO2 stays in the atmosphere for 2 to 20 millennia.

Relying on machines for answers to the existential problems of a species run amok with planet-destroying tools and weaponry is rather ironic and tragic. We’re locked-up inside a complexity trap of our own making. The human propensity for tool-building coupled with our discovery of fossil fuels has created a set of living arrangements in which we are now enslaved to those machines and tools. The globalized capitalist economy externalizes its destruction and atrocities, keeping the masses in a state of ignorance and denial. Our corporate overlords are not conscientious citizens, but mindless organizations whose sole purpose is to grow profits no matter the external damage done to society and the environment. Between the economic oil hitmen who ensure that profits flow smoothly and GOP politicians who openly espouse their science illiteracy, a hospitable climate for future humans seems remote. Hopeful delusions have given way to the stark reality of our predicament as scholars like Noam Chomsky who originally started his career fighting for a modicum of social justice have now set the bar at just the chance of human survival. Despite the best efforts of scientists, environmentalists, and activists, the wealthy countries most able to do something won’t “get it” until famine, disease, and war come to their country. All is being left for the almighty ‘free market’ to sort out at the same time that climate change, a conflict multiplier, ramps up.

The sixth mass extinction gathers steam and climate inertia works to catch up to the catastrophic ecological collapse already baked-in. All the while, modern man engages in the spectacle of tribal politics(building walls, exuding military strength, recapturing past glories of their nation) and presidential candidates discuss the size of their penis.

For those who come to understand modern man’s predicament, it can either be the ultimate mind fuck or an epiphany that helps a person appreciate the fragility of life, the urgency of living in the here and now, and the grand cosmic joke of a global, hi-tech civilization that arose from the burning of ancient fossil remains only to have those fumes become a deadly curse, extinguishing any trace of our lofty accomplishments…

The fossil record, Plotnick points out, is much more durable than any human record.

“As humanity has evolved, our methods of recording information have become ever more ephemeral,” he said. “Clay tablets last longer than books. And who today can read an 8-inch floppy?” he shrugged. “If we put everything on electronic media, will those records exist in a million years? The fossils will.”
– Link