The Forest Tipping Point Hidden in the Leaves

19 Saturday Sep 2026

Posted by xraymike79 in Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Mental Health

Tags

Amazon Dieback, Anthropogenic Climate Change, Boreal Forests, Canopy Scorch, Carbon Sink Failure, Cascadia Heat Dome, Civilizational Risk, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Tipping Points, Ecological Collapse, Ecological Grief, Ecosystem Function, Extreme Heat, Foliar Mortality, Forest Dieback, Forest Resilience, Hydrological Disruption, Photosynthetic Failure, Planetary Boundaries, Terrestrial Coral Bleaching

When the Canopy Burns Without Fire

Forest collapse may not first appear as a blackened horizon, a clear-cut hillside, or a continent of dead trunks. It may begin in the leaves.

A few days of impossible heat. Needles turning red. Canopies shifting into orange and brown across mountainsides that, only days earlier, appeared healthy and permanent. Trees remain standing. The forest still resembles a forest from a distance. But the living photosynthetic surface through which it cools the air, moves water, stores carbon, grows, reproduces, and sustains its innumerable inhabitants has been damaged.

The 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome offered a warning from this future. In late June, temperatures in parts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia rose far beyond historical experience. Heat records were not merely broken; they were shattered. The event killed hundreds of people, strained hospitals, buckled roads, devastated crops, and exposed the fragility of places assumed to be insulated from extreme heat. It also injured forests at a scale only now becoming fully visible. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported more than 250 deaths in the United States and more than 400 in Canada, alongside severe impacts on health systems and agriculture.

The familiar explanation for forest die-off is drought. The soil dries. Trees close the microscopic pores in their leaves to conserve water. Photosynthesis slows. Carbon reserves decline. Water transport inside trunks becomes impaired. Insects, fungi, and fire arrive. Trees die.

That story remains true. But it is incomplete.

The heat dome revealed another pathway. Extreme heat can damage or kill foliage directly, pushing leaves and needles beyond their thermal limits. This does not mean drought was irrelevant. Water stress, heat, intense sunlight, high atmospheric demand for moisture, species traits, slope, aspect, and microclimate can interact. But the event showed that drought-centered accounts of forest mortality can miss a more immediate danger: direct heat injury to the photosynthetic tissues through which trees function.

The heat dome was, in the words of one tree physiologist, an uncontrolled test of the thermal tolerance of trees in their native environments. The results were visible from space. Across more than 1,000 square miles of western Oregon and Washington—nearly the size of Rhode Island—canopies that had been green before the event turned red and orange, sometimes within hours. The warning was not simply that forests had become too dry. It was that a few days of unprecedented heat could damage the living surfaces through which a forest feeds itself, cools the land, and prepares for the next season.

The forests of Cascadia were not simply thirsty. In many places, their foliage was heat-damaged at a scale that drought alone does not fully explain.

In a 2025 Global Change Biology study, researchers used satellite imagery, aerial surveys, and field observations to identify heat-scorch damage across 293,546 hectares of forest in western Oregon and Washington—about 4.7% of the forest area assessed. Healthy green foliage had turned red or orange soon after the event. Western redcedar, western hemlock, and Sitka spruce were disproportionately affected, including in old-growth stands where those species dominate the canopy. Read the study: “Extreme Heatwave Causes Immediate, Widespread Mortality of Forest Canopy Foliage.”

This is especially grave in old-growth forests. An old tree is not merely a larger unit of carbon storage. It is accumulated time: a canopy architecture built over centuries, a stabilizing structure for shade, moisture, fungi, lichens, insects, birds, mammals, and seedlings. A plantation can be replanted. An old-growth forest cannot be reconstructed on the timetable of a human emergency.

The distinction matters. Conventional accounts of forest decline often imagine a slower sequence: soil moisture falls, hydraulic systems fail, stored carbon is depleted, and mortality follows through accumulated stress. The 2021 heat dome suggested that extraordinary heat can compress that sequence—or partly bypass it—by injuring the leaves and needles through which trees maintain photosynthesis in the first place.

A tree does not need to be uprooted, burned, or deprived of water for years before its ecological function begins to fail. Under extraordinary heat, the biological machinery that captures sunlight, exchanges gases, and builds living tissue can be damaged. The forest can lose the capacity to do what makes it a forest.

Inside every leaf and needle, sunlight is converted into the sugars that power growth, repair, reproduction, and chemical defense. When extreme heat disrupts those living surfaces, a tree may remain upright while losing part of the means by which it feeds and protects itself.

A Forest Can Stand and Still Fail

This is not coral bleaching. Corals bleach when thermal stress disrupts their relationship with the symbiotic algae that help feed them. Forests do not lose symbiotic algae in the same way. Yet the comparison remains useful. A recent Nature Climate Change commentary described the Pacific Northwest canopy-scorch event as a terrestrial analogue of coral bleaching—not because the mechanisms are identical, but because both reveal what happens when heat exceeds the tolerances of the living tissues that power an ecosystem.

A reef can remain physically present after bleaching. Its structure endures. Its skeletons persist. Yet its metabolism, reproduction, ecological complexity, and ability to recover may be profoundly diminished.

So too with a forest.

Modern society has learned to mistake structural persistence for ecological health.

A forest is often considered intact if trees remain upright. A river is considered alive if water still flows through its channel. A fishery is considered productive if boats still return with something in their holds. A civilization is considered stable if lights remain on and markets continue opening.

This is one of the central deceptions of ecological decline. Systems can retain their outward form while losing the functions that once made them resilient.

A forest can still be green while becoming hotter, drier, more fragmented, more flammable, and less diverse. It can retain mature trunks while its seedlings fail. It can preserve portions of its canopy while its food web thins. It can continue absorbing carbon while absorbing less than before. It can still appear healthy from an airplane or highway while becoming less capable of surviving the next drought, insect outbreak, fire season, or heat wave.

The 2021 heat dome made this hidden decline visible. The red and orange foliage that appeared across Cascadian forests was not merely an aesthetic change. Leaves and needles are the photosynthetic skin of the land. Through them, forests absorb carbon, build wood, cool landscapes, influence water movement, sustain fungi and insects, feed birds and mammals, shade streams, stabilize soil, and contribute to rainfall far beyond their boundaries.

When this tissue is injured, the effects do not remain at the level of the leaf.

A weakened tree becomes more vulnerable to drought. A damaged canopy provides less shade and cooling. Dead foliage, branches, and later tree mortality can add to fuel loads. Stressed trees can become more susceptible to disease and insect attack. Lower productivity reduces the resources available for growth, defense, reproduction, and recovery.

If the next heat shock comes before the forest has rebuilt foliage, replenished carbon reserves, produced viable seedlings, and restored its ecological relationships, the damage compounds.

Five years later, the full toll remains difficult to measure. Some trees refoliated. Some forests contained wet refuges, deep-rooted species, or microclimates that offered partial protection. But heat injury does not necessarily end when the heat wave does. A damaged canopy can leave a tree with diminished carbon reserves, weaker defenses, and less capacity to endure the drought, disease, insects, and heat that follow. Mortality may be delayed, distributed across years, and mistaken for ordinary decline. The heat dome was not only a disaster measured in the days it lasted. It may prove to be an ecological wound whose consequences unfold over decades.

Resilience is not the ability to survive one shock. It is the ability to recover before the next shock arrives.

That is the threshold now coming into view.

The Terrestrial Bleaching Event

Coral reefs offered an early warning. They showed that ecosystems can be pushed past thermal limits with shocking speed. A reef may survive one bleaching event, and in some cases recover. But repeated events arriving before recovery is complete turn resilience into attrition.

Forests may be entering an analogous era.

The analogy should not be stretched beyond its meaning. Trees are not corals. Canopy scorch is not the breakdown of a coral–algae symbiosis. But both phenomena reveal an unsettling truth: ecosystems shaped by long periods of climatic stability may not be equipped for the pace, magnitude, and recurrence of modern heat extremes.

The danger is not only the death of individual organisms. It is the loss of a system’s ability to perform the work upon which other life depends.

A forest stripped of functional foliage loses more than color. It loses cooling capacity, water-cycling power, carbon uptake, reproductive capacity, ecological defenses, and the ability to support the interdependent life beneath and around it.

The landscape may still be beautiful. It may still be called wilderness. It may still be entered into a carbon registry, valued in a real-estate listing, or photographed for a tourism campaign.

But its margins have narrowed.

This is the distinction that matters: a standing forest is not necessarily a functioning forest.

The Recovery Trap

A forest does not need to vanish in a single catastrophe to undergo a regime shift. It need only be pushed repeatedly beyond its capacity to recover.

The mechanism is straightforward:

Extreme heat → Foliar injury → Reduced photosynthesis

→ Weakened trees and lower ecological function

→ Greater drought, disease, insect, and fire vulnerability

→ Canopy loss, carbon release, and reduced cooling

→ Hotter, drier, more flammable conditions

→ A greater likelihood that the next shock will exceed recovery

This is not an inevitable sequence in every forest. Species differ. Soils differ. Elevation, latitude, groundwater, slope, biodiversity, fire history, logging, fragmentation, and local climate all matter. Some forests contain refuges: deep-rooted trees, cooler valleys, wet soils, intact food webs, or microclimates that permit survival under conditions lethal elsewhere.

But uneven vulnerability does not make the danger smaller. It makes it harder to see.

There may be no single day when “the world’s forests collapse.” There may be no universal temperature at which every ecosystem crosses the same threshold. The process may instead unfold as a patchwork of local and regional failures: a drying southern Amazon, a repeatedly burned boreal zone, a Mediterranean woodland unable to regenerate after fire, a mountain forest weakened by heat and beetles, a Pacific coastal forest unable to recover from recurring canopy scorch.

The global crisis will not necessarily announce itself as one synchronized event. It may emerge through the accumulation and interaction of many regional failures, each one making the next more likely.

This is why the language of tipping points should be used carefully. A tipping point is not a date on a calendar. It is a loss of reversibility: a point after which the forces driving decline become stronger than the forces restoring what was lost.

In forests, that point may be reached when heat waves, droughts, fires, pests, and land clearing arrive faster than trees can regrow, seedlings can establish, soils can rebuild, and ecological relationships can reassemble.

The forest does not have to disappear. It only has to become something less capable of returning.

Uneven survival may become one of the ways collapse is denied. A shaded ravine remains green. A wetland grove persists. A well-watered garden tree survives. These exceptions are real and precious. But they can also be mistaken for proof that the larger system is secure, even as hotter slopes, degraded margins, and poorer communities absorb the accumulating losses.

The Forest Makes Its Own Weather

Forests are not passive scenery beneath the atmosphere. They help make the atmosphere.

Through evapotranspiration, trees draw water from the soil and release it into the air. This movement of moisture can cool landscapes, influence clouds, support rainfall, and help sustain regional circulation patterns. Forests are not merely recipients of climate. They are participants in climate.

This means that forest loss can deepen the conditions that caused it.

A 2026 Science Advances study found that forest loss intensified meteorological drought across more than half of the affected terrestrial regions it examined. The authors found significant drought intensification in boreal and tropical forest-loss regions, with the strongest effects in boreal areas. They link this to shifts in precipitation, land-surface temperature, evapotranspiration, and albedo—the proportion of sunlight reflected back into space. Read the study: “Forest loss intensifies meteorological drought in more than half of Earth’s climate zones.”

The consequences differ by biome. In tropical forests, losing trees can reduce evapotranspiration and atmospheric moisture recycling, contributing to hotter and drier conditions. In boreal forests, changing albedo and reduced moisture transport can decrease precipitation even where immediate surface-temperature effects are more complicated.

The point is not that every act of forest loss produces the same climatic outcome everywhere. It does not. The point is that forests are active components of the hydrological and energy systems around them. Their removal or degradation can alter those systems in ways that make drought, heat, and fire more likely or more severe.

Climate change kills forests. Forest degradation can, in turn, intensify regional climate stress.

A damaged forest becomes less able to protect itself from the conditions damaging it.

In the Amazon, this feedback is especially alarming. The rainforest is not simply a vast collection of trees that stores carbon. It is a continental hydrological engine. Moisture recycled through its vegetation influences rainfall across South America, including regions far from the forest itself.

A 2026 Nature study found that deforestation lowers the global-warming threshold at which large-scale Amazon forest degradation becomes likely. In the study’s framework, absent deforestation, the estimated critical global warming level was around 3.7–4.0°C. At deforestation levels of roughly 22–28%, the threshold for damaging ecological shifts became substantially lower. Read the study: “Deforestation-induced drying lowers Amazon climate threshold.”

The lesson is not that the Amazon will flip all at once into savanna at a known percentage of forest loss. Forest thresholds vary across geography. Some regions may be more resistant than expected; others may be more vulnerable. Deep-rooted forests and wet refuges may endure longer. Degraded margins may fail early. Local dieback can precede basin-wide transition by decades.

Scientific uncertainty does not make the Amazon safe. It reflects uneven thresholds and incomplete knowledge of a system already under converging pressure from deforestation, fragmentation, fire, drought, heat, and global warming.

The Weakening of Earth’s Buffers

Industrial civilization behaves as if forests were an optional amenity: scenery for recreation, timber for construction, land awaiting development, or carbon credits awaiting sale.

But forests are part of the planetary infrastructure beneath modern life.

They influence temperature and rainfall, store carbon, stabilize slopes, filter water, moderate floods, and sustain the pollinators, seed dispersers, food webs, soils, and watersheds on which other life depends. They provide material, food, medicine, and cultural continuity for human communities—especially Indigenous peoples whose knowledge and survival remain inseparable from living forests.

Their decline therefore does not remain a conservation problem.

It can become a public-health crisis when wildfire smoke spreads across continents and compounds already widespread respiratory illness. It can become a water crisis when watersheds lose their capacity to regulate snowmelt, infiltration, runoff, and sediment. It can become a food crisis when regional rainfall becomes less reliable and heat destroys crops. It can become an economic crisis when homes, roads, power grids, farms, insurance markets, hospitals, and municipal budgets are repeatedly overwhelmed by cascading disasters.

It can become a political crisis when governments respond to systemic ecological failure with temporary relief, emergency declarations, and increasingly coercive management of scarcity rather than confronting the conditions producing it.

The 2021 heat dome made this connection visible. It killed people in homes without air conditioning, created severe pressure on health systems, and inflicted major agricultural losses. The forest damage did not cause those deaths by itself. But the same atmospheric event that killed people also injured forests that help buffer future heat, water stress, and fire. See the USDA overview of the 2021 Northwest heat dome.

Industrial society responds to forest decline with the instruments it knows best: salvage operations, replanting targets, carbon offsets, risk maps, insurance adjustments, and plans for “resilience.” Some of these measures may reduce harm locally. None can substitute for the climatic conditions under which a forest can regenerate. A seedling is not an old-growth canopy. A carbon credit is not a watershed. And a map of ecological collapse is not a reversal of its causes.

This is how ecological breakdown becomes civilizational breakdown: not through a single cause, but through the deterioration of the systems that once absorbed shocks before they reached human bodies.

The Boreal Warning

In the north, the danger takes another form.

Boreal forests and their soils hold vast quantities of carbon accumulated over long periods. They now exist across landscapes increasingly shaped by hotter summers, drought, insect outbreaks, unusually large fires, and thawing permafrost. When fire burns deeply into organic soils or destabilizes permafrost zones, the loss is not merely the visible forest canopy. It can involve old carbon stores, altered hydrology, weakened ground stability, and ecological transformations that persist long after flames are gone.

Recent research warns that increasing wildfire threatens the historic carbon-sink role of boreal soils and can destabilize northern permafrost critical zones. Read the 2026 Communications Earth & Environment study: “Wildfires destabilize permafrost critical zones in northern high latitudes.”

Canada’s 2026 climate assessment similarly reports evidence that increasing water stress is reducing forest carbon uptake through higher tree mortality, particularly in western Canada. The assessment warns that these pressures are likely to limit the future carbon-absorption capacity of boreal forests. Read Chapter 9 of Canada’s Changing Climate Report: “The role of the carbon cycle in climate change.”

This does not mean every northern forest has become a permanent carbon source, nor that a single fire season settles the question. Forest carbon balance varies across space and time. Some forests recover. Some regrow rapidly. Some may temporarily absorb more carbon after disturbance.

But civilization does not need every forest to fail at once for climate risk to worsen. It is enough that major carbon stores become less dependable precisely when industrial society requires them to remain dependable.

Many net-zero pathways, implicitly or explicitly, assume that land and ocean sinks will continue absorbing substantial quantities of carbon dioxide. If forests absorb less carbon because of heat, drought, mortality, and fire—while disturbed soils and burning landscapes release more—then emissions targets calculated on older assumptions become even less adequate.

The arithmetic of climate stabilization changes.

And the planet does not negotiate with accounting conventions.

An Uncounted Threat

The future danger is not that canopy injury alone will suddenly erase humanity. Large-scale human mortality has no single cause. It emerges from intertwined failures: lethal heat, crop loss, water scarcity, infectious disease, wildfire smoke, infrastructure breakdown, displacement, conflict, inequality, state failure, and the political choice to preserve wealth and power while abandoning the vulnerable.

Forest decline belongs within that chain.

A forest that no longer cools a region can intensify heat exposure. A forest that no longer recycles moisture can deepen drought. A forest that burns repeatedly can fill the air with smoke and release stored carbon. A forest that fails to regenerate becomes a poorer watershed, a poorer habitat, a poorer store of biological resilience, and a less reliable foundation for communities that depend upon it.

When such failures occur in multiple regions at the same time, they do not remain local.

They move through grain markets and insurance systems. Through migration routes and electricity grids. Through hospital admissions and water restrictions. Through the price of food, the availability of housing, the stability of governments, and the capacity of people to care for one another amid repeated emergency.

This is why the forest heat threshold deserves to be recognized as more than another environmental concern. It may be one of the underappreciated mechanisms by which a warming world erodes the conditions required for complex societies to endure.

The crisis is not simply that forests may die.

It is that forests may lose the ability to live as forests before we recognize what has been lost.

And by the time the trunks fall, the process may already be well underway.

Last Rites for a Dying Civilization

31 Friday May 2024

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

≈ 101 Comments

Tags

Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Arctic Blue Ocean Event, Authoritarianism, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Fossil Fuel Industry, Geoengineering, Global Pandemic, Greenwashing, Mass Coral Bleaching, Microplastic Pollution, Overpopulation, Peak Soil, Planetary Tipping Points, Resource Wars, Techno-Fix, Techno-Optimists, The Black Plague, The Limits to Growth

When the Black Death struck Europe in the Middle Ages, the fundamental values that held society together broke down. Husbands and wives abandoned each other and mothers abandoned their children. This void of ethics that overtook the population is described in Boccaccio’s Decameron, considered a masterpiece of Italian prose and a documentary of life during that time. The book describes the sense of hopelessness that spread throughout the world, because it did not matter what stature one held in life or what one did or did not do to avoid the disease, all were subject to its lethality. Some implored their God in vain while others pursued a carpe diem spirit in an attempt to grab the last bit of pleasure from life when they were able. The common explanation for the indiscriminate devastation wrought by the Black Plague was God’s punishment for human wrongdoing. Nothing in human behavior has changed since then and I believe the ecological overshoot that man finds himself in today, manifested most prominently as climate chaos amongst a myriad of other threats, will cause humans to question the futility of life and their existence just as did those victims of the bubonic plague. A recent study has found that climate chaos is indeed worsening neurological diseases and mental health disorders. Another study found that people are denying climate change as a form of self-deception necessary to maintain their psychological health.

Since those Dark Ages, mankind has developed the ability to accurately track and predict our own demise. Vast networks of satellites and other data monitoring tools are informing us that the planet is becoming increasingly more inhospitable for the vast majority of life on Earth, yet we plod onward, ignoring another plea by the world’s scientists. A reassessment of the Limits to Growth Study and its World3 model using different calibrations was done 6 months ago and the results are the same, which is to say that humanity is still following business-as-usual and heading for collapse within the next two decades:

...the model results clearly indicate the imminent end of the exponential growth curve. The excessive consumption of resources by industry and industrial agriculture to feed a growing world population is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.

All the expertise and modern technology we possess will not be coming to save us; there is no techno-fix or deus ex machina remotely scalable to the planetary crises we face. Emergency atmospheric geoengineering schemes won’t save us at this point. Can’t we just suck the 900 billion tons of CO₂ out of the atmosphere that we have spewed since the beginning of the industrial revolution? No. It bears repeating that the spiking Keeling curve is non-reversible on human timescales.

“We sadly continue to break records in the CO₂ rise rate,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO₂ program at Scripps. “The ultimate reason is continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels.” ~ May 8, 2024

The rate of ocean warming has nearly quadrupled since the late twentieth century, doubling since 1993. In the last twelve month, ocean heating has been on a tear, shattering records consistently. The world is currently undergoing the fourth global coral bleaching event on record, the second in the last decade, and the Great Barrier Reef is suffering its worst bleaching event in recorded history. This year’s hurricane season will likely be a record-breaker. The oceans are starting to release all that thermal energy we have been unceremoniously dumping into them. At one time, oceans seemed like an endless sink for the emissions from humanity’s nonstop consumption of fossil fuels, but that appears to be coming to an end. The world’s rivers are warming and losing oxygen even faster than the oceans. In contrast to those grim stats, humanity is set to consume more resources in the next 30 years as we have since the dawn of civilization. We have already consumed the future and are now, as they say, eating the seed corn.

We have breached tipping points and set in motion positive feedback loops that are accelerating non-linear ecological changes. Six of nine major planetary boundaries have been broken. Our unintended and haphazard experiment with complex Earth systems will unleash a Pandora’s box of deadly consequences. The current rate of CO₂ change is unprecedented for the past 50,000 years. We have already passed the 1.5C warming threshold set by the Paris Agreement to prevent the irreversible and worsening effects of climate change. A recent study warns that as we add more and more CO₂ to the atmosphere, its potency for warming is stronger at higher atmospheric concentrations than an equivalent increase at lower atmospheric concentrations. The polar regions are warming four times faster than the rest of the planet and have been undergoing fundamental changes to their ocean/ice system which will affect all life on Earth. An ice-free Arctic is just around the corner. In a warming world, pathogens will be looking for ways to exploit the fast-changing environment, potentially creating the next global pandemic for people or destroying our food supply. The tree line, as well as animals, are expanding northward as the climate heats up and the ice melts. Nearly a third of all tree species are now endangered by our radically changing environment. The clear blue waters of Alaskan rivers are turning orange and rusty brown by the heavy metals being released from melting permafrost. The oceans are also turning green due to the shift in phytoplankton population from warming waters.

The insurance industry, the backbone of the global economy, is beginning to buckle: “I believe we’re marching toward an uninsurable future.” As is typical of our modern-day society, the hypocritical insurance industry is heavily invested in fossil fuels while simultaneously warning about the looming destruction from climate change. Billion dollar disasters are increasing while the time between such disasters is decreasing. This continual rebuilding that needs to be done more often would be another doom-loop cycle for our crumbling civilization, considering the carbon emissions required in such repair and reconstruction. Compound extreme weather and climate events, combinations of two or more extremes (hazards) that occur concurrently or sequentially, are also increasing and expected to grow many fold over in the future. These compound weather events will inevitably create a perfect storm that will one day permanently destroy supply chains and economies by acting as a constant disruptor to stability. It would have the same effect as a monster cyclone, or hypercane, traveling the globe in perpetuity, waxing and waning in strength but never dying, and leaving a path of destruction wherever it roamed. A stable climate no longer exists to support the reconstruction of what once was. Walden Thoreau’s words seem very prescient today: “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” With corporations also gobbling up single-family homes to monopolize the real estate market in America, we can officially say that the American dream of owning a home is dead. George Carlin always said you had to be asleep to believe anything about the American Dream.

I have been hearing about the need to abandon fossil fuels since President Carter put solar panels on the White House 45 years ago. I am still waiting for the techno-optimists to explain to me how they will save us from this new age we have created, known as the Pyrocene or Age of Fire; rest in peace, Holocene. We could also call our modern-day clusterfuck the Plasticene or Age of Plastics. Scientists are finding the stuff in every nook and cranny of the planet, including Antarctic krill, men’s testicles, and throughout the human body. If you drive a vehicle, you are contributing to the primary source for microplastics in the environment, tires, which account for 78%. Just as they lied about their knowledge of the catastrophic effects from burning their fossil fuel products, so too did the oil and plastics industry lie about their greenwashing fraud called recycling.

I never get an adequate, rational answer to our conundrum, because there is none. ChatGPT provides no better insight than the techno-optimists. The problem of a planet overrun by humans will resolve itself in short order and be recorded in the geologic fossil record after we put a cherry on top of this fossil fuel orgy, flattening the planet into a glass parking lot with nuclear weapons. That is another part of human nature that we will never escape…warfare. We seem to be one twitch away from WWIII and the next Stone Age. In fact, there are nearly 200 armed conflicts raging around the world right now, the largest number in decades. This marked uptick in violence could be an ominous sign of a violent new era. From the 2023 Armed Conflict Survey:

“The accelerating climate crisis continues to act as a multiplier of both root causes of conflict and institutional weaknesses in fragile countries…”

We are on the verge of authoritarian rule as global conditions break down and people embrace centralized solutions. Xenophobia will grow and borders will be shut down, sources of food and energy will be fought over and secured, and rationing of resources will be enforced.

After studying our ecological overshoot for several decades, I have some observations that must be accepted as fact:

“Renewable” energy is not displacing our massive fossil fuel consumption at all, but only serving as a small addition to the total global energy consumption.
“Renewable” or alternative energy, such as solar and wind, is dependent on fossil fuels for its manufacture, installation, maintenance, and eventual disposal.
The so-called “Energy Transition” away from fossil fuels is pure techno-hopium and will never materialize.
The general public and many scientists don’t understand the math and physics involved in transitioning a $100 trillion global economy, dependent on hydrocarbons, to intermittent alternative energy sources.
No such “Energy Transition” can be accomplished without radical reductions in resource consumption. This is antithetical to the basic biological urge for expansion by most organisms, including humans, and current trends illustrate this behavior. We also keep finding more ways to consume evermore energy. On top of this, the World Bank is urging faster economic growth for emerging economies in order for them to repay mounting debts.
Governments are ill-equipped to deal with industrial civilization’s complex polycrisis because effective solutions would undermine economic growth.

The latest deadline to ‘save the planet’ is now two years from now, according to a UN Climate Change official. No doubt another arbitrary date given to justify someone’s job and department budget. According to Global Footprint Network’s calculations, humans have been in overshoot for over half a century. Others would say that we have been in overshoot since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, surviving only by mining the Earth’s soils. Like fossil fuels, the vast nutrient store of soils represents a unique one-time gift that has been squandered by agricultural erosion. Without petroleum and arable soils, the Earth will only support perhaps 5% of the present global population, as it did before the advent of agriculture. Considering that we are being constantly blindsided by faster-than-normal and worse-than-expected findings from scientists, I suspect there are far less food harvests left for us than we think. Hotter temperatures and pollution are hastening the destruction of topsoil. Our temporary extension of Earth’s carrying capacity for humans is coming to an end. Once Earth’s life support systems start to unravel, the grotesquely inflated human population will crash. In the meantime, “Memento moriturum; maxime faciunt vitae!”

My last post was in September 2023, and since then, the state of the planet has gotten considerably worse. I feel like the 2030’s will be the decade when the wheels start coming off this ride of industrial civilization. Until I speak to you all again, please enjoy those blue skies and store-bought food while they last. And remember, industrial civilization is a heat engine and it will suddenly break one day!

Runaway Climate Change in the Arctic is Just The Beginning

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 45 Comments

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Arctic Meltdown

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

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

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

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

Hyper-exponential Increase of Temperature in the Arctic Area

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consequences and Implications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drought, Fires and Tree Death: Ignoring Die-Offs Until It’s Our Own

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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

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'A Great Aridness', Bark Beetle Infestation, Climate Change, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Tipping Points, Craig D. Allen (U.S. Geological Survey), Droughts in the U.S. Southwest, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Mass Die Off, Phoenix, Pinyon Pine Tree Die-Off, Shrinking Colorado River, William deBuys

As I mentioned in my previous post, Capitalism, Population Growth, & Climate Change, I’m reading a book on the present and future effects of anthropogenic global warming to the American Southwest as well as the entire world.

The Southwest drought of the early 2000’s, accompanied by the massive bark beetle infestation, killed over 2.6 million acres of mostly piñon(pinyon) pine. Pinyon pines are an interesting tree, living for up to 800 years and producing a tasty edible nut considered to be a “super food”. Studies by Craig D. Allen (U.S. Geological Survey) tell us that climate change is making droughts, historically normal occurrences in the Southwest, a killer for that region’s trees which usually can withstand such events, but not under the prolonged higher temperatures that human-induced global warming brings. These sustained higher temperatures have been identified as the “critical factor in provoking widespread tree mortality.” With a 4°C increase in temp and all other factors remaining the same, a five fold increase in pinyon tree death has been estimated by recent studies. The problem with that estimate though is that all other factors will most certainly change: less snowfall will diminish the benefits of the albedo effect, more retained heat from the sun and altered rainfall patterns will dry out the soil and increase erosion, and elevated levels of dust in the air will also factor into this vicious feedback loop to shrink mountain snowpack and increase evaporation. Fires and insect infestation will be seasonal events of ever-increasing intensity. And the demise of desert cities like Phoenix, dependent on a shrinking Colorado River, will inevitably follow.

…The team developed a Forest Drought-Stress Index that combines the amount of winter precipitation, late summer and fall temperatures, and late summer and fall precipitation into one number.

“The new ‘Forest Drought-Stress Index’ that Williams devised from seasonal precipitation and temperature-related variables matches the records of changing forest conditions in the Southwest remarkably well,” said co-author Thomas W. Swetnam, director of the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

“Among all climate variables affecting trees and forests that have ever been studied, this new drought index has the strongest correlation with combined tree growth, tree death from drought and insects and area burned by forest fires that I have ever seen.”…

…“Atmospheric evaporative demand is primarily driven by temperature. When air is warmer, it can hold more water vapor, thus increasing the pace at which soil and plants dry out. The air literally sucks the moisture out of the soil and plants.”…

…These trends, the researchers noted, are already occurring in the Southwest, where temperatures generally have been increasing for the past century and are expected to continue to do so because of accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere… – lnk

Here’s what the benchmark drought of 2001-2002, a harbinger of future hi-temp droughts in the Southwest, did to pinyon trees:

From my post ‘Climate Tipping Points: The Global Die-Off of Forests‘, we know that forests all over the planet are dying and that mass die-offs of these areas are only a matter of time. The arid regions of the world like the U.S. Southwest are the most sensitive biomes on the planet and will be the first areas to exhibit catastrophic die-off from climate change.

This excerpt from the book I’m reading should scare the hell out of you (he’s talking about the 2001-2002 U.S. Southwest drought):

Does ‘industrial-capitalist carbon man’ give a fuck about trees? Certainly not if they get in the way of profit and ‘development’.

Tipping Points for Runaway Climate Change: West Antarctic Ice Sheet

28 Friday Dec 2012

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

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A Perfect Circle, Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Chaos, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Tipping Points, CO2 Emissions, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Faulty Climate Models, Global Famine, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, Inverted Totalitarianism, James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Mass Die Off, Methane Time Bomb, Resource Wars, Runaway Climate Change, Sea Level Rise, West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt, Zombification of the Planet

Amongst all the drama of the fiscal cliff, the story that should have gotten front page space this week is that the Antarctic is melting much faster than previously thought. In my post ‘Burning the Candle at Both Ends‘, the recent finding that the Antarctic was indeed losing ice came as a revelation to many and dispelled the popular belief amongst the global warming ‘denialist’ crowd that the South Pole ice sheet was increasing. The situation has now gotten more dire:

What are the ramification of this? We’ve released another ticking methane time bomb and opened up one more pandora’s box of known and unknown feedback loops:

…Half the West Antarctic ice sheet and a quarter of the East Antarctic sheet lie on pre-glacial sedimentary basins containing around 21,000bn tonnes of carbon, said the scientists, writing in the journal Nature.

British co-author Prof Jemma Wadham, from the University of Bristol, said: “This is an immense amount of organic carbon, more than 10 times the size of carbon stocks in northern permafrost regions.

“Our laboratory experiments tell us that these sub-ice environments are also biologically active, meaning that this organic carbon is probably being metabolised into carbon dioxide and methane gas by microbes.”

The amount of frozen and free methane gas beneath the ice sheets could amount to 4bn tonnes, the researchers estimate…

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 August 2012 13.00 EDT

And what will happen to coastal communities? If one were to perform a linear projection of sea level rise from recent records, then you would get the following results:

…Currently, sea level is rising at the rate of 3 mm each year. Given 1″ = 25 mm, this means by the end of the century a rise of 87 (yrs) x 3 mm / yr. = 261 mm or (261 mm/ 25 mm/in) = 10.44 inches – enough to wash away roughly one third of S. Florida and most of the sea level areas of the Atlantic coast…

But this year’s shocking display of rapid ice melt in the Arctic and Greenland, in addition to new findings of the Antarctic warming at twice the rate as was previously thought, should be enough to tell you that future trends involving systemic changes in the environment will most certainly be exponential in nature, not linear. In other words, such effects as sea level rise will be orders of magnitude greater than what has been predicted:

…IPCC (2007) suggested a most likely sea level rise of a few tens of centimeters by 2100. Several subsequent papers suggest that sea level rise of ~1 meter is likely by 2100. However, those studies, one way or another, include linearity assumptions, so 1 meter can certainly not be taken as an upper limit on sea level rise…

…Hansen (2005) argues that, if business-as-usual increase of greenhouse gases continue throughout this century, the climate forcing will be so large that non-linear ice sheet disintegration should be expected and multi- meter sea level rise not only possible but likely. Hansen (2007) suggests that the position reflected in IPCC documents may be influenced by a “scientific reticence”…

…Perceived authority in the case of ice sheets stems from ice sheet models used to simulate paleoclimate sea level change. However, paleoclimate ice sheet changes were initiated by weak climate forcings changing slowly over thousands of years, not by a forcing as large or rapid as human-made forcing this century. Moreover, in a paper submitted for publication (Hansen et al., 2013) we present evidence that even paleoclimate data do not support the degree of lethargy and hysteresis that exists in such ice sheet models…

…The increasing Greenland mass loss in Fig. 1 can be fit just as well by exponentially increasing annual mass loss, a behavior that Hansen (2005, 2007) argues could occur because of multiple amplifying feedbacks as an ice sheet begins to disintegrate. A 10-year doubling time would lead to 1 meter sea level rise by 2067 and 5 meters by 2090. The dates are 2045 and 2057 for 5-year doubling time and 2055 and 2071 for a 7-year doubling time.

However, exponential ice loss, if it occurs, would encounter negative (diminishing) feedbacks. Our simulations (Hansen and Sato, 2012) suggest that a strong negative feedback kicks in when sea level rise reaches meter-scale, as the ice-melt has a large cooling and freshening effect on the regional ocean. Such a slowdown in the rate of sea level rise would be little consolation to humanity, however, as the high latitude cooling would increase latitudinal temperature gradients, thus driving powerful cyclonic storms (Hansen, 2009), and coastlines would be continually moving landward for centuries.

West Antarctic ice is probably more vulnerable to rapid disintegration than Greenland ice, because the West Antarctic ice sheet rests mainly on bedrock below sea level (Hughes, 1972). The principal mechanism for mass loss from West Antarctica is warming of the ocean, melting of West Antarctic ice shelves, and thus increased flux from the ice sheet to the ocean.

The several analysis methods compared by Shepherd et al. (2012) concur that the West Antarctic ice sheet mass imbalance has grown since 2005 from an annual mass loss of 0-100 Gt ice to a recent annual mass loss of 100-200 Gt ice (Fig. 4 of Shepherd et al.)…

There are roughly seven billion humans on Earth at this time, all of whom have a death sentence hanging over their head via anthropomorphic climate change. Perhaps this partly explains the recent popularity of zombies and the ‘walking dead’ in our culture. Forthright thoughts on this subject from a scientist commenting at the Arctic Sea Ice Blog:

The first signs have appeared of what will be a mass culling of the human population by way of famine in the decades to come:

…According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, global wheat production is expected to fall 5.2% in 2012 and yields from many other crops grown to feed animals could be 10% down on last year.

“Populations are growing but production is not keeping up with consumption. Prices for wheat have already risen 25% in 2012, maize 13% and dairy prices rose 7% just last month. Food reserves, held to provide a buffer against rising prices, are at a critical low level. It means that food supplies are tight across the board and there is very little room for unexpected events,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the FAO…

My youngest son, who is eight years old, shocked me last week with a certain question. I don’t talk about the subject matter of this blog to him for obvious reasons. He asked me whether in the future the world would become a sort of technological paradise or a destroyed planet. I couldn’t answer his question. I didn’t even want to try.

New C.I.A.-Commissioned Report on Climate Change Stresses to Civilization

12 Monday Nov 2012

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

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Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, Center for International and Security Studies, Central Intelligence Agency, Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis, Climate Change, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Tipping Points, Cluster of Extreme Events, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Drought in America's Bread basket, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Frankenstorms, Inverted Totalitarianism, John D. Steinbruner, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Water, Resource Wars, Sea Level Rise, Social Unrest

A newly released study commissioned by the C.I.A. entitled Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis highlights the vulnerabilities of our globalized economy to climate change. Of particular interest is the section on energy. To summarize:

1.) Oil is the most highly integrated commodity of globalized trade. Its tightly interconnected market was created in the aftermath of the OPEC embargoes of the 1970’s to prevent its manipulation by political actors. Its integration is said to be fully complete to the point that any disruption in the global oil system will cause an economic ripple effect throughout the world. Rapid oil consumption in China and India without a corresponding increase in production has left the oil market extremely tight (i.e. Peak Oil).

2.) Due to the facts stated above, any changes in climate could easily disrupt the world’s energy system. For example:

(a.) Tropical storms and sea-level rise can disrupt production, refining, and transport of petroleum since a large percentage of oil refining and processing are located in coastal areas vulnerable to such storms and floods. This is true in the U.S., Europe, China, and India. An example would be Hurricane Katrina and Rita in 2005 which disrupted oil and gas operations of off-shore rigs, coastal refining, and transport via sea ports and pipelines.

(b) Drought will cause oil refining disruptions since that process requires large amounts of water. If the drought is accompanied by higher temperatures, the scarcity of water will be exacerbated because the oil refineries will require even more cooling by water. A warming planet will also cause infrastructure damage (pipelines and drilling platforms) in Arctic operations due to collapsing earth from the melting of permafrost.

We are entering an era in which not only the global energy system is vulnerable, but the social, agricultural, and technological infrastructure is also at the mercy of climate disruptions. They were all designed around assumptions of moderately stable climate conditions, and as climate exceeds boundary thresholds, these infrastructures will break. As was demonstrated by Hurricane Sandy recently in New York/New Jersey with the power outages, gas shortages, and Nuclear plant shutdowns. The droughts this past summer in the U.S. midwest show the fragility of our food system whose development assumed fairly stable weather patterns and rainfall.

A quote from the study:

…The fundamental science of climate change suggests that continued global warming will increase with frequency or intensity (or both) of a great variety of events that could disrupt societies, including heat waves, extreme precipitation events, floods, droughts, sea-level rise, wildfires, and the spread of infectious diseases. Underpinning many of these extreme events is an acceleration of the global hydrological cycle. For each 1.8° F (1° C) increase in the global mean surface temperature, there is a corresponding 7 percent increase in atmospheric water vapor. Because warm air holds more water vapor than cool air, this leads to more intense precipitation. Essentially, warm air increases evaporation from the ocean and dries out the land surface, providing more moisture to the atmosphere that will rain out downwind. Water vapor is also a powerful naturally occurring greenhouse gas. As such it is the source of a very positive feedback to the coupled climate system that amplifies any external forcing by a factor of approximately 1.6…

We’ve passed a tipping point with the Arctic ice melt which has set off other feedback loops (Arctic amplification, methane release from permafrost melt, loss of the albedo effect, alteration of the Jet Stream, Greenland glacier melt, etc) and tipping points, some of which we are not even aware of, as the study acknowledges:

…there may be other processes in the Earth system, not yet identified, that have tipping points that could lead to abrupt climate change. Because of such gaps in knowledge, the possibility of such events occurring in the next decade or so cannot be totally discounted…

I would say “God help us” if the traditional farming lands -the bread baskets of nations- become dust bowls, but that’s exactly where we are headed with climate change and no miracle is going to fall out of the sky to save us.

Map Updated 11/07/12

Drought Disaster Designations Map (PDF, 504KB)
Text-only (accessible) version
Map shows designations due to drought across the country under USDA’s amended rule. Any county declared a primary (red) or contiguous (orange) disaster county makes producers in that county eligible for certain emergency aid.

The study talks about what it terms a “cluster of extreme events” resulting from large-scale climate processes, causing catastrophes in separate and distant areas of the globe. Trying to deal with such widespread and seemingly unrelated disruptions would quickly overwhelm the global community’s resources. An example given was in the year 2010 with the massive drought and forest fires in Russia and the epic floods in Pakistan:

…The two events were linked by more than just their proximity in time. The meteorological pattern that lead to the Russian heat wave, in which the large-scale upper-level wind flow developed a strong and persistent ridge, also contributed to the development of the meteorological pattern that resulted in the Pakistani floods —a downstream leading trough (Lau and Kim, 2012). The fact that these two extreme events corresponded in time with each other and with a single larger meteorological pattern was unusual but not totally unexpected. Circulation events like this one, which cause some event clusters, are known to occur but are not well resolved in current climate models…

…If climate events and extremes were independent in a statistical sense, the likelihood of a cluster or a compound event of any size could easily be estimated mathematically. But as the above example makes clear, extreme events in different parts of the world can be driven by common underlying forces and thus have an intrinsic relationship such that when one such event occurs, the likelihood increases that other extreme events linked to them by common causes will also occur. In statistical language, such events are called dependent.

The changing climate zones also enable the spread of tropical diseases and pests. Outbreaks of new virus strains would tax healthcare delivery systems:

…Climate events might also put stress on global health systems in various ways, most of them hard to predict. As discussed in the next chapter, climate change is expected to alter the ranges of disease vectors or pathogens in ways that expose large human populations to diseases to which they have not been previously been exposed. This could lead to a rapidly increasing demand for treatments and supplies that may not have been adequately stockpiled. If such health problems arise in combination with a disruption of supply chains for critical inoculations or medications, the potential for a severe health crisis could grow dramatically. Again, the effects might be felt far from the locations where the climate events occur. Climate events, especially when they occur in clusters, can also stress the capacity of international disaster response and humanitarian relief systems and thus cause harm in places that are not directly affected by the events but that need international assistance for other reasons…

A New York Times article, which talks about this study, quotes the author:

“You can debate the specific contribution of global warming to that storm. But we’re saying climate extremes are going to be more frequent, and this[Hurricane Sandy] was an example of what they could mean. We’re also saying it could get a whole lot worse than that.”

Mr. Steinbruner, the director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, said that humans are pouring carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases into the atmosphere at a rate never before seen. “We know there will have to be major climatic adjustments — there’s no uncertainty about that — but we just don’t know the details,” he said. “We do know they will be big.”

The study was released 10 days late: its authors had been scheduled to brief intelligence officials on their findings the day Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, but the federal government was shut down because of the storm.

How ironic is that? The authors of this study had to postpone their meeting with U.S. intel authorities because of a climate chaos event.

Here’s what else is ironic…

…as the need for more and better analysis is growing, government resources devoted to them are shrinking. Republicans in Congress objected to the C.I.A.’s creation of a climate change center and tried to deny money for it. The American weather satellite program is losing capability because of years of underfinancing and mismanagement, imperiling the ability to predict and monitor major storms.

More Evidence of Overly Conservative IPCC Estimates Hiding the Coming Catastrophe

10 Saturday Nov 2012

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

≈ 14 Comments

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A Less Cloudy Future: The Role of Subtropical Subsidence in Climate Sensitivity, ApocaDocs, Arctic Ice Melt, Atmospheric Scientists John Fasullo and Kevin Trenberth, Climate Change, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe, Inverted Totalitarianism, Javier Sethness-Castro, Mass Die Off, Methane Release from Thawing Permafrost, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Overly Conservative IPCC Estimates

As is generally known by those studying the most important issue of our time, the forecasts by the IPCC are on the conservative side with scientists overly cautious not to include predictions which may be perceived as too pessimistic. A new study in the Science Journal shows that actually the more pessimistic climate models are much more accurate:

It’s important to note that the IPCC estimates do not fully take into account feedback loops and tipping points. Below is an excerpt from “Imperiled Life: Revolution against Climate Catastrophe” by Javier Sethness-Castro (2012):

…A 2009 study on climate change performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology–less optimistic and thus perhaps more realistic, for example, than the IPCC’s reports to date regarding the prospect of achieving significant carbon emission reductions in the near future–finds there indeed to be a chance that temperatures will increase 7.4°C (13°F) over preindustrial temperatures by the century’s end, with a 90 percent chance that the temperature increase would range between 3.5°C and 7.4°C (4.8°F-13°F).(75) The study’s authors are quick to clarify that even their decidedly bleak conclusions might be underestimates, as they, like the IPCC, do not fully account for the various feedback mechanisms that could arise given catastrophic climate change. NASA’s Dennis Bushnell, for his part, estimates that the average global temperature increase expected during this century once these feedbacks have been accounted for would amount to between 6°C and 12°C (10.5°F-21°F).(76) Warming of such apocalyptic proportions would be entirely horrific: it should be remembered that it was a 6°C (10.5°F) increase that triggered the end-Permian mass extinction.(77)

Though a matter of controversy among climatologists, there is reason to fear that overheating beyond these levels could induce a runaway greenhouse effect that would give rise to what Hansen terms “the Venus syndrome,” whereby climatic change abruptly delivers Earth to a state resembling that of Venus, where life simply cannot exist.(78)…

And another two news stories from the last few days with more ominous signs of possible acceleration into climate chaos:

I’m finding it harder to carry on with blogging about reality without compartmentalizing all this grim news into some dark recess of my brain, only to be unlocked at night when I read up on this subject. I live two lives – one in the fake world that we all mill around in like zombies in order to survive… and the other in this blog researching the coming apocalypse. No wonder the Apocadocs turned to humor to deal with this stuff.

The Short Story of Carbon Man and Industrial Civilization

19 Friday Oct 2012

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

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Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Talks, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Ecological Sacrifice Zones, Environmental Collapse, Geoengineering, Global Warming, Greenwashing, Machine Fetishism, Mass Die Off, Space Junk

Locked within the Earth for millions of years was an energy source that fueled the rise of Humans and gave them dominion over every last inch of the planet. With traces of industrial chemicals and junk even finding its way into orbit around Earth, no corner of the planet escaped the tinkering hand of man.

His large brain gave him the ability to invent and build an army of machines to do his bidding. From their creation and until the last day of their operation, these fossil fuel-powered machines served man tirelessly in every conceivable manner, from personal transportation to food production.

Soon the lifeblood of this automated empire began running short, driving man to evermore extreme measures of securing carbon energy in order to feed his world of machines. Water, air, and land were sacrificed to keep the system going.

But For every force, there is a counter force. For every positive, a negative. The counter weight to man’s unrelenting urge for carbon was the inexorable build-up of atmospheric CO2 as the rest of the world rushed to join industrial civilization. The world’s leaders flew to popular vacation spots and drank cocktails while discussing the growing menace of climate change:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That is precisely what global leaders entrusted with the stewardship of the world are doing. Their lives revolve around glittering banquets and long and dreary conferences, where they listen to each other in endless process-driven negotiations – so far from the reality of the day-to-day hardships of more than half of humanity.

A domino of numerous climate tipping points was set into motion, upsetting a once-benign climate. At first, fire seasons grew longer with more frequent and intense conflagrations. Ocean corals turned white from warming waters. The Arctic melted with astonishing speed, unleashing a host of warming feedback loops. Small, imperceptible temperature changes that took decades to occur were now happening more rapidly.

A warming planet opened the door for exotic tropical diseases to spread northward and around the globe. Talk of adaptation to human-induced climate change became a cruel joke. Torrential floods and crop-withering droughts of biblical proportion occurred more regularly, propelling the hungry masses to riot. The food vaults of impoverished countries were the first to be raided, followed soon after by those of wealthy nations. Weaker nation states fell first as their resource-strapped and overwhelmed governments collapsed under the weight of climate-induced starvation and energy blackouts. Various desperate geoengineering schemes were carried out in a hail Mary attempt to save man and his fossil fuel-addicted way of life, but to no avail. The master had become the slave; servile devotion to an unsustainable mode of living turned around to bite us in the ass. An overdrawn Earth had come calling to collect on humanity’s debt and close the account. Within the blink of a geologic eye, the habitability of the planet for humans as well as most other creatures had disappeared.

Oh, and he was really good at making bombs…

~ THE END ~

Browbeaten Scientists Not Telling the Public the Full Truth

19 Wednesday Sep 2012

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

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Feedback Loops, Climate Scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, David Roberts, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Free Market Ideologues, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, The Elite 1%

Is it still possible to limit climate change to a 2 degree increase? If we don’t take into account the loss of sulfate parasols as a result of our emissions controls and if we close our eyes to the multiple feedback loops that have already been unleashed and which, in and of themselves, could dwarf anthropogenic emissions, then it might be possible in such a theoretical and hypothetical world.

(click to enlarge)

But a theoretical and hypothetical world and a world of brutal reality are two very different things. Humans must ultimately answer to brutal reality which discards all of the fabricated economic theorems and pie-in-the-sky myths about the techno-supremacy of modern man that we delude ourselves with. So the cold and hard reality is “No, we are well and truly fucked!” Despite decades of warnings by scientists, we have kept on burning fossil fuels and continue to do so as I write this post. As a matter of fact, growth in fossil fuel consumption is baked into our economic system as far into the future as we care to fantasize. We have backed ourselves into a corner where the only salvation left is some sort of globally coordinated Manhattan project of geo-engineering. And how likely is that to occur, let alone succeed? As David Roberts reports in his latest essay ‘Freaked-out climate scientists urge other freaked-out climate scientists to speak up, fight Man‘, our current enslavement to an infinite growth economic paradigm precludes such a possibility:

…Can we make the radical changes necessary to meet that challenge? No, say climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows in a recent commentary in Nature Climate Change, not “within orthodox political and economic constraints.”

There is no political or economic constraint more orthodox than the primacy of economic growth. No solution to climate change that threatens economic growth can get any traction at all — even the most “alarmist” climate hawks fear to tread there. Which is too bad, Anderson and Bows say, because “climate change commitments are incompatible with short- to medium-term economic growth (in other words, for 10 to 20 years).” What’s worse, “work on adapting to climate change suggests that economic growth cannot be reconciled with the breadth and rate of impacts as the temperature rises towards 4 °C and beyond.” In other words: We either give up economic growth voluntarily for a little while or suffer a climate that will reverse economic growth long-term…

…Anderson and Bows stress that, “within orthodox political and economic constraints,” hitting such a target is wildly unlikely. Absent some pretty revolutionary political and economic changes, it won’t happen. For obvious reasons, scientists shy away from saying this kind of thing in public. They don’t want to depress people or come off as “political.” However, say Anderson and Bows, “away from the microphone and despite claims of ‘green growth’, few if any scientists working on climate change would disagree with the broad thrust of this candid conclusion.”…

The article goes on to explain how our scientific community is hamstrung and browbeaten into reciting and presenting only evidence without expounding upon and revealing what the consequences of those findings will be for humanity:

…scientists remain reticent, often assuming that “the most effective way of engaging is by presenting evidence, without daring to venture, at least explicitly, broader academic judgment.” This kind of just-the-facts reticence, Anderson and Bows say, is neither warranted nor wise given the urgency of current climate circumstances:

[W]e need to be less afraid of making academic judgments. Not unsubstantiated opinions and prejudice, but applying a mix of academic rigour, courage and humility to bring new and interdisciplinary insights into the emerging era. This would be controversial enough in itself. Various social and professional incentives work against academic researchers speaking out beyond their narrow specialties. And there is an entire cottage industry devoted to scolding climate scientists for going “beyond the science” to political analysis or policy advocacy. These latter sins, they are warned, threaten their status as “trusted brokers.” (Because the trusted-broker thing is working so well so far, climate-wise.)

What else can you do, though, when danger of such unthinkable scope and permanence is looming and humanity’s actions in the coming decade will determine the fate of future generations? I mean, it sounds like a sci-fi movie, but it’s real. What can you do if you’re one of the scientists who understands how dire the situation is? These are not ordinary times.

And in conclusion, the article talks of something I have posted about here – the failure and inability of the free market to solve this civilization-ending problem of climate change:

Anyway, as controversial as it is to ask climate researchers to venture broad social and economic judgments, the specific critique that Anderson and Bows offer is even more likely to make some of their straight-laced colleagues wince. It has to do with the “catastrophic and ongoing failure of market economics and the laissez-faire rhetoric accompanying it.” Specifically, market economists (and the politicians and scientists in thrall to them) suffer the “misguided belief that commitments to avoid warming of 2°C can still be realized with incremental adjustments to economic incentives.” They urge their colleagues:

Leave the market economists to fight among themselves over the right price of carbon — let them relive their groundhog day if they wish. The world is moving on and we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures.

One of the objectives of this blog was to speak truth to power and reveal where the human race is headed. Now that we know our final outcome, our predicament is analogous to being diagnosed with terminal cancer. You people reading this post are an infinitesimal percentage of the global population who are privileged, or perhaps cursed, to be in possession of such depressing knowledge. Where do we go from here? What do we do? How do we live our lives knowing what we know of the dismal future of the world’s youth? The entire edifice of human civilization will become a worldwide ghost city before this century ends. Perhaps the only thing left to do is live each day as if it were our last because there really is no future without some miraculous, radical, and global social change accompanied by unprecedented global cooperation. Those in charge of such matters have chosen temporary preservation of the current system over the long-term survival of our species. Evil and suicidal or foolish and ill-informed… Which is it that best describes the self-destructive choices that have been made?

A truly frightening time-lapse visualization by the NOAA of the Arctic Ice Melt: