I think we can safely shorten that time span to no more than 50 years. Right now I’m with my family, so postings will be light to nonexistent until the beginning of October when I will essentially be in seclusion once again to read more often and study the state of the world. As I write this post, one particular story that stands out is the discovery by Russian scientists of ‘methane fields’ exceeding 1 kilometre escaping from the Laptev Sea, as elaborated upon by Arctic News. In the views of these scientists, methane plumes like the ones they are observing could be catastrophic to this planet’s climate. Other than some obscure website, is anyone talking about the destruction to our food supply that climate change will surely bring about? Make no mistake, this is real news as opposed to the MSM’s three-ring political circus or the perverse reporting of decadent Hollywood parties to toast the christening of a new luxury jaguar car.
Many scientists are saying that the only thing that will save us is global coordinated action and a Manhatten project of geoengineering to halt any further damage from our CO2 emissions and its catastrophic impact on the environment. Others have lamented the total failure of governments to look after the well-being of their people:
Fossil fuel companies are still making profits despite the fact that climate change is so clearly upon us. Our politicians are putting corporate interests above scientific warnings and failing in their duties to the public.”
– link
The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street were initially grassroots movements which evolved as a response to the gross social inequalities of neoliberal capitalism. Washington inadvertently created both movements through their push of the aforementioned economic policies which have made a few extremely wealthy at the expense of those country’s populations. In the near future, the issue of corporate profits over the environment will become a driving force for future social unrest and revolt.
In the end, our ill-conceived exchange of fossil fuels for a stable biosphere will be worse than a zero-sum game when you take into account the hell that climate change will wreak. On our present course, we will be left with an uninhabitable planet. We have only seen the beginning inklings of what human-induced disasters such as drought, ocean acidification, deforestation, and mass species extinction will mean to industrial civilization which has become completely delusional about its “victory” over nature:
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” ~ Frederick Engels
The Earth giveth and she taketh away. Short-sightedness, greed, and conceit are traits undeserving of long-term survival on this once generous but now scorned planet.
Speaking on climate change in the video above is Sir Robert Watson, retiring chief scientist at Britian’s Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs. He is warning that governments cannot afford to do nothing about greenhouse gas emissions, irrespective of the current state of the economy. He says the hope of restricting the average global temperature rise to 2C is “out the window”.
If we continue the way we are, we’ve got a 50-50 shot of a 3 degree [Celcius] world – and I would not rule out a 5 degree [Celcius] world.
~ Dr Bob Watson
Hell on Earth is coming to a reality near you:
Here’s the edition of the Royal Society journal that came out of the conference on 4 degrees C of warming. Read through it and see if you think “hell on earth” is an exaggeration. Desertification, water shortages, agricultural disruptions, rising sea levels, vanishing coral, tropical forest die-offs, mass species extinctions, oh my. Kevin Anderson, one of the lead scientists involved, was moved to say that “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.” ~ Grist
The findings point to a link between rapid sea ice loss and enhanced rate of climate warming, which could penetrate as far as 900 miles inland. In areas where permafrost is already at risk, such as central Alaska, the study suggests that periods of abrupt sea ice loss can lead to rapid soil thaw.
Thawing permafrost may have a range of impacts, including buckled highways and destabilized houses, as well as changes to the delicate balance of life in the Arctic. In addition, scientists estimate that Arctic soils hold at least 30 percent of all the carbon stored in soils worldwide. While scientists are uncertain what will happen if this permafrost thaws, it has the potential to contribute substantial amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Arid regions will become much more dry, and wet regions will experience much more rain due to the warming planet, according to scientists:
A paper in Science today finds rapidly changing ocean salinities as a result of a warming atmosphere have intensified the global water cycle (evaporation and precipitation) by an incredible 4 percent between 1950 and 2000. That’s twice the rate predicted by models.
These same models have long forecast that dry areas of Earth will become drier and wet areas wetter in a warming climate—an intensification of the water cycle driven mostly by the capacity of warmer air to hold and redistribute more moisture in the form of water vapor…
…But the rate of intensification of the global water cycle is happening far faster than imagined: at about 8 percent per degree Celsius of ocean warming since 1950.
At this rate, the authors calculate:
The global water cycle will intensify by a whopping 16 percent in a 2°C warmer world
The global water cycle will intensify by a frightening 24 percent in a 3°C warmer world
…The changes will not be uniform across the globe, but trend toward increased drying of arid areas and increased flooding of wet areas.
And the resulting changes in freshwater availability are likely to be far more destabilizing to human societies and ecosystems than warming alone.
“Changes to the global water cycle and the corresponding redistribution of rainfall will affect food availability, stability, access, and utilization,” says lead author Paul Durack at the University of Tasmania and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
When dealing with a crisis that threatens the very existence of the human species, a rational society would not put the issues of cost-effectiveness and inconveniences to the economy above all else as the deciding factors for taking action. But that is what we are doing, allowing the “ALMIGHTY MARKET” to decide our fate. As explained in another post, this deference to “THE MARKET” to solve such a seemingly abstract problem like climate change is essentially condemning our children to a horrible fate. Climate change is not going to respect or accommodate ‘THE MARKET’, our lifestyle, and mankind’s hubris; it will just wipe us right off the face of the Earth like the pesky and bothersome vermin we have become.
You only have to look at the following graph(click to enlarge) from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2012 to understand how much industrial civilization is locked in to fossil fuels. Do you see that thin dark orange line just below the grey band representing coal? Yeah, that’s renewables.
We are so overly dependent on the high energy density of fossil fuels that the system resists change, with those in charge of it even spending large sums of money to alter public perception on the pernicious effects of burning these CO2-emitting energy sources. The advantages of hydrocarbons, summarized by Tom Murphy, have lured us into drinking an addictive and poisonous elixir:
Fossil fuels are cheap and reliable and are their own storage and allow transportation by car, truck, ship, airplane, and fit seamlessly into our current infrastructure.
Reasons for why carbon emissions will continue their upward trend are described in this article:
• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These “locked-in” emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.
“It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking,” warned Birol.
• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.
“People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide,” said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world’s nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels.
• Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled. “The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago,” said Birol…
…Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said the global emissions figures showed that the link between rising GDP and rising emissions had not been broken. “The only people who will be surprised by this are people who have not been reading the situation properly,” he said.
In 2009 China consumed 96.9 quads. In 2012 their total is estimated to reach 110.7. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 4.54%. That’s twice as fast as the DOE has predicted going forward.
I’ll remind readers that my estimate for energy consumption in 2035 for China is 247 quads–more than twice what the DOE estimates. Recent growth supports my higher estimates.
Even if China succeeds in building the 150 nuclear plants they aspire to over the next 50 years, they will still be burning more coal in 2035 than the entire world burns now.
The Chinese economy, as I predicted, will start to struggle and even sputter at times between now and then. But if the history of other developing countries is any example, that won’t affect energy consumption nearly as much as one might think. In the United States, that Great Depression? Didn’t affect our energy consumption curve. – link
Lastly, how are we doing on transitioning away from our greenhouse gas emitting, industrial agriculture model of food production? As Stuart Staniford conjectured in his essay ‘Fallacy of Reversibility‘, industrial agriculture has become even more dominant in the age of peak oil, but with adverse effects to the environment:
…The farm bill is not only the centerpiece of United States food and agriculture policy, it is also a de facto climate bill. And in this respect, both the Senate and House versions of the legislation are a disaster waiting to happen…
…The proposed farm bill — Senate- or House-style, take your pick — would make American agriculture’s climate problem worse, in two ways. Not only would the bill accelerate global warming by encouraging more greenhouse gas emissions, it would make the nation’s farms more vulnerable to the impacts of those emissions…
…Except in a technical aside, neither the bill passed by the Senate or by the House Committee on Agriculture even mentions climate change.
Coal and cars are blamed, but agriculture is also a major contributor to global warming: by some estimates, it accounts for roughly a third of emissions globally. The industrialized, meat-heavy food system of the United States takes a heavy toll on the atmosphere; it takes an enormous amount of fossil fuel to run farm equipment and harvest the mountains of corn that fatten livestock. And most fertilizers contain nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 298 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a century.
Both of the farm bill proposals would maintain agriculture’s large climate footprint, mainly by continuing to skew subsidies toward a mere handful of commodity crops. The “big five” — wheat, rice, soybeans, cotton and above all corn — have received 84 percent of subsidies since 2004, according to the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group critical of the practice. Subsidies increase with output, encouraging farmers to run highly mechanized operations that plant “fence row to fence row” and apply oceans of fertilizer and pesticide, all of which boost emissions.
But industrial agriculture’s ability to produce gargantuan amounts of food also makes it exceptionally susceptible to climate change. Relying on vast monocultures — the miles and miles of cornfields one passes when driving in Iowa — captures economies of scale. But that lack of diversity invites trouble. A monoculture’s uniformity means that if temperatures spike or a new pest arrives, the damage is likely to spread throughout the entire planted area. By contrast, the diversified landscapes of organic agriculture — corn planted between, say, other vegetables and chicken pens — tend to limit damage.
Farmers can best boost resilience to climate change, scientists say, by improving their soil’s fertility and capacity to retain moisture. That means cutting back on chemical fertilizers, which kill many of the microorganisms that ventilate soil, and shifting to compost and manure fertilizers and crop rotations.
Instead, leading lobbyists for agribusiness want to retain the current production system but shift the mounting climate risks to the taxpayer. Both versions of the farm bill would expand the $11 billion crop insurance program, a move championed by the National Corn Growers Association. The Senate bill, for instance, would authorize $3.8 billion a year for additional insurance.
But neither version would require farmers to take other measures to reduce their climate vulnerability, like investing in healthier soil. In fact, the draft bills would actually make it harder for farmers to do that because the expanded crop insurance would be paid for by cutting the Conservation Stewardship Program, which helps farmers improve their land’s ecological health…
So it looks like we are going balls out in our race toward oblivion. A technologically advanced civilization, once known for sending spacecrafts to distant planets, looks to be headed toward a bleak existence of huddling in subterranean caves and scavenging for insects to eat.
Without a doubt, climate change is the elephant in the room that no country is dealing with in a manner that reflects its dire consequences for humans and every other living creature on planet Earth. The oceans grow more acidic and warm, eventually to turn into lifeless and hypoxic dead zones. Tropical jungles continue to disappear under bulldozers to make way for monoculture industrial farming. Forests fall to invasions of beetles and burn from epic wildfires in a warming planet. Vast tracts of farmland are desiccated by relentless drought while the government continues its mandate of turning food into fuel for this country’s mammoth population of vehicles. The central banks continue to print money for the hedge funds and casino capitalists to speculate in “THE MARKET”. And the masses, bombarded with infotainment of carnival politics and Hollywood gossip, walk around in an entertained stupor, comforted in the belief that industrial civilization is infallible and exempt from the laws of physics and bankruptcy of an overexploited planet. Like an obsessive compulsive lunatic, growth is still the word that drips from the tongue of every mainstream economist, politician, and captain of industry. Global coal consumption continues its inexorable rise upward, with astronomical consumption predictions heralded for the distant future…
Intelligence, cooperation and foresight are of no use in a system which is intransigent to change. The final, calamitous destination over the cliff and down into the abyss seems clear to a few, but most still hang onto hope and miracles, the beliefs of desperate and delusional men. Scientists are astonished to see changes happening that just a few years ago were predicted only to become reality by the end of this century. A new study says that extreme scenarios are no longer unthinkable:
A new study to be published in the next issue of Current Science predicts up to 2 degrees rise in temperature in India as early as the 2030s. Climate change’s catastrophic effect, it seems, is here faster than anyone had expected.
A two degrees rise in the average global temperature is considered the danger line beyond which climate change will have intense impacts. Till now the general belief was that there is enough time to avert what scientists call ‘catastrophic’ climate change. Perhaps not any more…
…a large section of people find such extreme scenarios hard to believe. So how reliable are these projections? “Scientists are not speculating,”says R K Chaturvedi, the lead author of the study and a national environmental science fellow . “Our findings are based on robust climate models. In fact, for the first time, we have used an average of 18 climate models to arrive at a finding which will have a smaller margin of error. These models have managed to predict our past correctly. So if the temperature rise in the past has been predicted correctly and we have compared them with real data, why will it throw up incorrect projections for the future?”
Ravindranath reaffirms that the situation is serious. “Jammu and Kashmir and a few other parts of the Himalayan region will be the worst affected. The region is projected to experience the highest mean warming up to 8 degrees by 2080s. I’m not joking when I say there will be no snow in Kashmir. The only way to remember snow fall in Kashmir will be to watch the old Shammi Kapoor flick Junglee,” he says wryly.
Even scientists not connected with the study agree that a future doomsday scenario is possible. “The findings are quite reasonable,” says S K Dash, head of the department of Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at IIT Delhi. “Not many studies have been done based on so many climate models . Therefore, the results of this study are likely to be reliable. Our own studies have shown that India has experienced an average temperature rise of about 1.2 degrees in the past 100 years. So it’s not strange to assume a two degrees rise by 2030,” he says.
Many scientists feel that India, especially , would feel the heat of this projected change in temperature more than others. Sudhir Chella Rajan, professor at the department of humanities and social sciences at IIT Madras, who recently evaluated India’s National Climate Action Plan on Climate Change, says that India is more vulnerable because of a variety of reasons. “First, our vast size and geography has hot spots like the Himalayas and the coastal areas. Then there is poverty. The poor are not resilient enough to deal with intense impacts like very warm periods or even floods. That’s why it’s time we reacted faster to this impending disaster.
Scientists are recording the dying of the planet we once knew, but for all intents and purposes, their work is like that of a pathologist studying a body post-mortem. The process we have unleashed is now unstoppable. A team of scientists are now looking more closely at the disappearing forests:
…Until recently, however, ecologists hadn’t really focused on drought-induced die-offs as a discrete category of forest trauma. That began to change, Anderegg said, after a meeting in Austin, Texas, last year. “Several of us decided to sit down, put our heads together and begin to look at the possible effects.”
They looked at dozens of individual studies, and found plenty. The loss of a forest’s dominant tree species has a ripple effect on all the other species that live there, by changing the amount of sunlight that reaches the forest floor; changing the mix of nutrients that enter the soil as leaves or needles decompose; allowing soil to wash away, especially on steep slopes, and — in some cases, at least — encouraging more fires….
…Forests are not only affected by climate; they also affect it. A living tree absorbs carbon from the air; kill the tree, and the carbon stays in circulation to trap heat. Not only that, as the tree decays, the carbon locked inside is gradually released back into the atmosphere. “It’s a double whammy,” Anderegg said….
…Broadly speaking, there are huge gaps in what scientists know. “This whole area has been fairly under-studied until now,” Anderegg said. “We need more research with a really wide net.”
To try and coordinate it, he and several colleagues have created a collaborative website to share knowledge about drought and tree mortality. The urgency of such research is only underscored by the 2012 drought, the worst to hit the U.S. in more than 50 years.
“The droughts of the early 2000’s caught us by surprise,” Anderegg said. “This one is our chance to pay attention as it unfolds.
Desperate calls for geoengineering and a “binge” on nuclear plants to avoid runaway climate change are now surfacing in the headlines:
A leading British academic has called for accelerated research into futuristic geo-engineering and a worldwide nuclear power station “binge” to avoid runaway global warming.
Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, said both potential solutions had inherent dangers but were now vital as time was running out.
“It is very, very depressing that politicians and the public are attuned to the threat of climate change even less than they were 20 years ago when Margaret Thatcher sounded the alarm. Co2 levels are rising at a faster than exponential rate, and yet politicians only want to take utterly trivial steps such as banning plastic bags and building a few windfarms,” he said.
“I am very suspicious of using technology to solve problems created by technology, given that we have messed up so much in the past but having done almost nothing for two decades we need to adopt more desperate measures such as considering geo-engineering techniques as well as conducting a major nuclear programme.”…
…Wadhams, who is also head of the polar ocean physics group at Cambridge and has just returned from a field trip to Greenland, was reacting to evidence that Arctic sea ice cover had reached a record low this summer.
This latest rate of loss is 50% higher than most scenarios outlined by other polar scientists and coincide with alarming new reports about a “vast reservoir” of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, that could be released in Antarctica if the ice melts equally quickly there. Greenpeace said last night that it agreed with the academic’s concerns but not with his solutions.
“Professor Wadhams is right that we’re in a big hole and the recent record sea ice low in the Arctic is a clear warning that we need to act. But it would be cheaper, safer and easier to stop digging and drilling for more fossil fuels,” said Ben Ayliffe, the group’s senior polar campaigner.
“We already have the technologies, from ultra-efficient vehicles to state-of-the-art clean energy generation, to make the deep cuts in greenhouse gases that are needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Unfortunately, we’re still lacking the political and business will to implement them,” he added.
Wadhams, who has done pioneering work on polar ice thinning using British naval submarines from 1976 onwards, said these latest satellite findings confirmed his own dire predictions.
And they feed into the alarming scenarios that the Arctic Methane Emergency Group have been warning about.
“What we are now seeing is a fast collapse of the sea ice that means we could see a complete loss during the summer by 2015 – rather than the 20 to 30 years talked about by the UK Meteorological Office. This would speed up ocean warming and Greenland ice cap melt and increase global ocean levels considerably as well as warming the seabed and releasing more methane.”
Asked whether the latest evidence made a ban on drilling for carbon-releasing oil and gas necessary as Greenpeace has contended, Wadhams said “philosophically” such exploration made little sense. “We have been conducting a global experiment with the burning of fossil fuels and the results are already disastrous and this would accelerate them,” he argued saying that there were also practical worries because of the enormous difficulty of dealing with any spillage or a blowout under moving ice where oil would get trapped inside the ice in a kind of inaccessible “oil sandwich’…
Julian Cribb, the science writer who gained some notoriety with his letter to the journal Nature urging a rename of the not-so-wise Homo sapiens, has written a recent essay entitled ‘March of the Dead Zones‘. Are we quickly cooking the oceans into a state of mass extinction as has happened in Earth’s ancient past?
…The cause of Dead Zones is well understood: they are driven by the avalanche of nutrients which humanity dumps in the oceans – from agriculture, sewage, leaky landfills, urban stormwater, soil erosion, industrial and vehicle emissions. This rich nutrient soup provides the food source for vast blooms of algae – and as these die off they sink to the sea floor and decompose causing blooms of bacteria which strip the essential oxygen from the water column, often resulting in fish kills – their most visible impact. They are also hastened by global warming, which stratifies the water, trapping the stagnant water and preventing it from mixing with the oxygen-rich surface layer.
What many people do not realise is that some of the worst extinctions in the history of life on Earth occurred because of a process very similar to this. In the biggest of the lot, the Great Death of the Permian around 252m years ago, an estimated 95 per cent of marine species were wiped out – rugose corals, nautiloids, armoured fish, trilobites – never to be seen again.
What triggered it is still a scientific mystery – an outbreak of volcanism, striking asteroids, a giant solar storm, colossal seabed methane eruptions: who knows? – but the geological evidence points to a massive global spike in CO2 levels, accompanied by rapid planetary warming, huge outbreaks of anoxia (loss of oxygen from seawater) and the destruction of marine habitats. One thing is fairly clear – by the end of it all fungi and moulds were rulers of the Earth, feasting on the dead.
The multiplying Dead Zones in the world’s oceans today not only resemble the Permian event on a local scale in terms of what drove them – but have two additional drivers: overfishing and pollution from the 83,000 chemicals which humans manufacture on the land and then carelessly liberate into the global environment.
The biggest contributors of all are the 110 million tonnes of nitrogen, 9 million tonnes of phosphorus and other nutrients which we unleash into the planetary ecosystem every year as we try to feed ourselves. That is off-the-scale compared with what the pre-human Earth circulated naturally.
The really unsettling fact is that, if we continue to depend upon agriculture for our food supply, then humanity’s dependence on artificial fertilisers is likely to double by the 2060s – and so will our indiscriminate release of nutrients into the world’s rivers, lakes and oceans. That release, in turn, will spawn more and larger Dead Zones – like that affecting 22,000 square kilometres of sea at the mouth of America’s Mississippi river…
Below is a screen shot of a project called the Interactive Map of Eutrophication & Hypoxia (low-oxygen dead zones) which have spread to nearly 500 sites, all in places where there is significant human development along the oceans and seas of the world.
A study from late last year, indicates that the latest warming of the planet will be catastrophic to the Earth’s aquatic life, turning much of the oceans and seas into oxygen-depleted ‘dead zones’:
…Their study, published in Nature Geoscience, showed that the average global temperature rise of around at least two degrees Celsius between the peak and the end of the last Ice Age (between about 10,000-20,000 years ago) had a massive effect on the oxygen content of seawater.
“The warmer the global average temperature, the more extended the oxygen minimum zones are, so the volume of these oxygen-poor water bodies is more extended during warm periods than in cold periods,” Jaccard said.
What is worrying is that, currently, global average temperature is predicted to rise by at least two degrees in the coming century due to climate change. This is of a similar magnitude to the warming the planet has undergone since the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago.
“So we would assume that if, indeed, temperatures are increasing in the next 100 years, these oxygen minimum zones would also increase in volume and that the general oxygen concentration of the ocean will decrease,” Jaccard said.
And what is more: “our analysis has shown that not only was absolute temperature important, but also the rate of change, so the faster the warming, the more expanded these zones are…
Along with the rest of the planet, our oceans have indeed been heating up. Here’s a quick screen shot I just did to show you a mere sliver of the destruction these rising temperatures are bringing:
A study to be published Sept. 15 issue in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology indicates that the demise of the dinosaurs was preceded by the death of ocean life via greenhouse gases that warmed the oceans. This sounds eerily similar to what we are doing to ourselves with the burning of fossil fuels. In place of CO2-spewing volcanic eruptions, we have millions of cars, planes, factories, coal-fired energy plants and an endless list of other fossil-fuel burning machinery doing the same:
The demise of the dinosaurs, thought to have been caused by an asteroid, wasn’t the only mass extinction around that time, according to new international research.
Evidence suggests that many species of ocean organisms were killed by volcanic eruptions before the asteroid impact. The eruptions took place in India, filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that warmed the globe and caused seafloor life to die.
“The eruptions started 300,000 to 200,000 years before the impact, and they may have lasted 100,000 years,” said study lead author Thomas Tobin at the University of Washington in a press release.
The scientists discovered this earlier extinction when they studied fossils from Seymour Island near Antarctica. The island has an unusually thick bed of sediment, where more sediment than normal accumulated in each time period.
This allowed the researchers to date fossils more precisely and create a detailed timeline. They used the prehistoric changes in Earth’s magnetic field to date each fossil sample.
“I think the evidence we have from this location is indicative of two separate events, and also indicates that warming took place,” said Tobin.
“It seems improbable to me that they are completely independent events.”
The first extinction event may have seriously affected some species, making them unable to survive the second extinction, although there’s no evidence for this yet….
Since the Earth’s oceans constitute 90% of the biosphere, a significant percentage of the planet’s total biomass is marine microorganisms, producing more than half of the entire global oxygen supply and serving as a vast sink for much of human-generated CO2. If we destroy the oceans, we will exterminate ourselves. The Earth will not bat an eye. No God will appear to prevent it. No technological solution will arrive to fix it. And no amount of empty platitudes and wishful thinking will mend it. The inexorable process of time and evolution will march on, creating other life forms to fill our vacancy. Humanity had its chance and blew it.
Don’t you think it’s kind of ironic that humans will become extinct from the burning of the very substance that enabled the ascent of the technological age and modern man’s ability to live in electrified and modernized comfort? Our fossil fuel slaves will have become our executioners. I recall hearing some indigenous South American tribesman saying that the people of industrial civilization are just children playing with deadly machines. They know not what grief they have brought unto themselves by raping the Earth of her treasures.
“We are now appearing to wage war on life in the sea with sonars, spotter aircraft, advanced communications, factory trawlers, thousands of miles of long lines, and global marketing of creatures no one had heard of until recent years. Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species…
The concern is not loss of fish for people to eat. Rather, the greatest concern about destructive fishing activities of the past century, especially the past several decades, is the dismemberment of the fine-tuned ocean ecosystems that are, in effect, our life-support system.
Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.
The ocean is a living system that makes our lives possible. Even if you never see the ocean, your life depends on its existence. With every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, you are connected to the sea…” ~ Sylvia Earle
In a previous post entitled ‘Free Market Blinders and the Coercion of Industrial-Corporate Capitalism‘, I posted arguments on why the free market ends up being anything but free. In the pursuit of profit, the shortest path taken includes usurping the instruments of the state. It also means all problems are forced into the ‘free market’ box and what comes out are phony solutions that only serve capitalism such as the scheme of carbon trading which has been described as “halfway between fantasy and fraud.”
Due to the lag time of its effects, climate change is a problem that the ‘free market’ cannot fix:
…This is the sort of problem that democracies and free markets are mostly incapable of solving. Politicians who have to come up for reelection every two to four years aren’t good at annoying business interests in order to solve problems that won’t even show up in a significant way for the rest of their lifetimes.
And even in its most ideal form, the logic of “free market solutions” is predicated on companies getting punished by angry consumers if they don’t do the right thing. There are all sorts of things wrong with this approach, of course: if a bunch of people die due to food poisoning, it’s not as if it’s always easy to identify where in the production chain the problem occurred, or which corporations to punish by not buying their product (not to mention the obvious fact that the deaths should have been stopped by regulation and oversight in the first place.) But in its most simplistic form it might work if the impact of corporate malfeasance is immediate.
But how does a “free market solution” work when it comes to carbon emissions? Whom do consumers punish? Whom do consumers reward? On what timescale? By the time the problem is advanced enough to penetrate consumer consciousness, it will have been far, far too late for the market to change organically.
And that’s, as I’ve said before, why climate change is such a threat to the conservative enterprise. It’s not just that big energy interests would be impacted. It’s that the entire conservative model of problem solving would be rendered obsolete if the realities of climate change were accepted in our public discourse.
So absent some sort of organizational metamorphosis for human societies, business interests will continue to divide nation states against one another as politicians in the major industrialized democracies dawdle and pretend the problem will go away.
CO2 levels continue to rise despite the sham carbon trading scheme (NOAA):
As you can see from the following video, the warming effects of the CO2 we have been pumping into the atmosphere over the last 130 years are becoming much more pronounced (this video is from NASA and only goes up to 2011).
In regards to the future stability of the human race, consider the conclusions from top climate scientists in a recent article of the highly regarded journal Nature:
The mean global temperature by 2070 (or a few decades earlier) will be higher than it ever has since the human species evolved.” [Human-induced climate change creates] “the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.” “The net effect is that once a critical transition occurs, it is extremely difficult or even impossible for the system to return to its previous state.”
You see, the problem is that we are bringing on these changes to the climate and environment so rapidly that we, along with many other species, will NOT be able to adapt in time. Certainly our food supply will be in grave danger as weather patterns shift and droughts become more intense. The vast and expensive infrastructure we built to take advantage of the stable climate that we enjoyed in the past will no longer apply. Imagine a game of musical chairs with the entire global population scrambling for the last remaining seat. That’s the future in which a chaotic climate makes the access to dwindling resources even more tenuous. Arguing over cause and effect as we all go over the cliff is not an option, but that is the avenue we are taking.
There is unequivocal evidence that Earth’s lower atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; sea level is rising; and snow cover, mountain glaciers, and Arctic sea ice are shrinking. The dominant cause of the warming since the 1950s is human activities. This scientific finding is based on a large and persuasive body of research. The observed warming will be irreversible for many years into the future, and even larger temperature increases will occur as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. Avoiding this future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.
The results of industrial civilization’s binge on fossil fuels are happening in full Technicolor right before our eyes:
This NASA map, based on satellite data, shows the new record-low summer sea ice extent of 1.58 million square miles in the Arctic Ocean, as recorded on August 26. The amount of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean at the end of summer is now 45 percent lower than the average from 1979 to 2000. The black dot represents the region surrounding the North Pole. (NASA) – link
This graph, prepared by the University of Washington’s Pan Arctic Ice Ocean Model Assimilation System (PIOMAS) shows the precipitous drop in the volume of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Since this graph was prepared, PIOMAS estimates that the volume of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen farther, to 3,500 cubic kilometers — a decline of 72 percent compared to the average from 1979 to 2010. (Polar Science Center/Applied Physics Laboratory/University of Washington) – link
Looking around at those… around me – family, friends, acquaintances and random faces in the crowd of apathy – the level of complacency is so concentrated I can taste it, yet I can’t even describe how bad it tastes. I’m not really talking about the understanding people lack about the numerous predicaments we face as a species – that’s definitely there too… but what I’m talking about is even worse. It’s the assumption that we can just go about our day to day lives, doing our day to day work, having our day to day fun… and humanity will eventually heal itself, no matter how bad the injuries sustained.
This is a cultural phenomenon that has infested the Western world, and refuses to be eradicated. It is where many of us ultimately place our hope and stake our lives, sometimes without even realizing we are doing it. We previously discussed the entertainment enemas that have penetrated modern culture (and the lives of deluded teenagers) in Culturally Programmed Myths of Omnipotence. They have given us the vision that we can always become bigger, “better” and stronger as individuals and nations, evolving towards God-like glory, no matter what obstacles are in our way – all of the stories about superheroes, vampires, werewolves, wizards, robots and aliens – it’s all about the propaganda of pernicious power.
We even see this mentality taking root in academia and scientific research through the field of “transhumanism” (very well portrayed in the documentary, TechnoCalyps). As you can probably guess from the name, transhumanism tells us that we are on the way to becoming something more, something other, than human beings. Forget random mutation and natural selection, the transhumanist says – we can circumvent all of the slow evolutionary nonsense that we only theorized about a century ago. Now we can transform ourselves into a new species over the course of a few decades with the help of modern technology and “intelligent designers”. Just a little bit ironic, don’t you think?…
Surfing the net last night, I see Guy McPherson is trying to pierce the self-delusional bubble described above, but to no avail…
The process of industrial civilization’s collapse has been happening for some time now. It’s not a sudden overnight occurrence that can be appreciated by the fight-or-flight reflexes and here-and-now sensory stimulation of humankind. As the natural world slowly retreats and disappears under the expansion of humans, subsequent generations are normalized to an increasingly biodiverse-poor environment. What appreciation does a child have for an animal only seen in books? In a recent essay by Guy McPherson entitled ‘Global Madness‘, he writes:
If silence is the perfect music, then we’re about to have the (musically) perfect planet. But I doubt we’ll be pleased with the silence as we slip, one by one, into the abyss of unconsciousness.
As the invading cacophony of industrial civilization fills the air – car traffic, fire alarms, ambulance sirens, jet planes, bulldozers – the animal and insect voices of the natural world are extinguished, never to be heard from again. For the last forty years, Bernie Krause has been recording those now-absent sounds of nature:
…such is the rate of species extinction and the deterioration of pristine habitat that he estimates half these recordings are now archives, impossible to repeat because the habitats no longer exist or because they have been so compromised by human noise. His tapes are possibly the only record of the original diversity of life in these places.
“A great silence is spreading over the natural world even as the sound of man is becoming deafening,” he writes in a new book, The Great Animal Orchestra. “Little by little the vast orchestra of life, the chorus of the natural world, is in the process of being quietened. There has been a massive decrease in the density and diversity of key vocal creatures, both large and small. The sense of desolation extends beyond mere silence.
“If you listen to a damaged soundscape … the community [of life] has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus.”
Hawaii, he says, is the extinction capital of the world. “In a couple of centuries since the islands were populated by Europeans, half the 140 bird species have disappeared. In Madagascar, 15 species of lemur, an elephant bird, a pygmy hippo and an estimated half of all the animals have gone extinct.”
Even partially disturbed habitats lose much of their life for many years, says Krause. Recordings of a meadow in the Sierra Nevada mountains east of San Francisco before the surrounding forest was selectively logged in the 1980s sounds very different to when Krause returned a year later…
A recent study helps prove how interwoven ecosystems are and that anything other than a holistic approach to conservation is futile:
…Lead researcher Dr Frank van Veen of the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation said: “Our experiment provides the first proof of something that biologists have argued for a long time: predators can have indirect effects on each other, to the extent that when one species is lost, the loss of these indirect effects can lead to further extinctions. Although our study focused on insects, the principle would be the same for predators in any ecosystem, ranging from big cats on the African plains to fish in our seas.
“Our research highlights the fact that a ‘single species’ approach to conservation can be ineffective and even counter-productive. For example, protecting cod could lead to increased fishing pressure on other predatory fish which then, by the mechanism we have demonstrated here, could lead to further negative effects on the cod…
The feeble attempts humans make at saving the myriad of flora and fauna that support us is now called “conservation triage“. The web of life is looking more like a moth-eaten doily cloth beneath the morbidly obese feet of humanity:
…Even in our existing system we practice a form of triage by simply not funding recovery efforts for species that we don’t think we can afford to save. Many conservationists are saying, ‘Look, it would be much better if we had a more explicit, more rational system for making these decisions.’…
“Many species are threatened by climate change and there’s a concern that some species may be too far gone in some sense to save, that there may be forces that are too broad, too far along and that species is essentially a lost cause,” she said.
On Facebook, Amy J. Loiselle said there is one crucial element left out of this conversation: the impact of humans on other species.
“In all the conversations about species extinction there is hardly ever any mention of the continued impact of human population growth on the environmental problems we face,” she wrote. “This is driving extinction, climate change, poverty etc. All the other ’causes’ are directly related to increases in human numbers. Without solving this problem there is no foreseeable way to solve any of these other problem.
Choosing to control human population goes against a basic drive found in all species to ensure its survival – the desire to reproduce. Being the apex species with no predators does pose a bit of a problem with nature’s ability to check and balance our numbers. Of course the microscopic world of viruses and bacteria will create a growing threat to us in the post-antibiotic and post fossil fuel world:
Drug-resistant organisms will spread across the country in ever increasing numbers, and we are not going to be bailed out by the pharmaceutical industry,” said Gilbert, a physician at Providence Medical Center in Portland. “There is nothing in the pipeline. It takes up to 15 years to bring a new drug through the approval process.
…Long before the actual Runaway emerges, we can expect a host of exotic diseases will spread across the world and wreak havoc – and all the fools clamoring for warm temperatures (e.g. for “longer growing seasons”) will wish they were dead. Especially as we’re already losing efficacy of anti-biotics from over-use(See, e.g. Global Climate and Infectious Disease:The Cholera Paradigm, in Science, Vol. 274, 20 December, 1996, p. 2025.)
If people think the current invasion of West Nile fever is bad, wait until they’re faced with dengue fever (which I caught in the West Indies – and which can – after the 3rd successive bite-infection – lead to hemorraghing from all body orifices). Wait until cholera becomes endemic and other hitherto unseen (and unheard of) diseases appear. Then the morons will understand the enormous downsides of their ‘warmer’ world and huge price for their ‘longer growing seasons’.
Mostly understated in all the talk of exotic disease incursions, is the real risk we will be swamped by parasites throughout the country and even the world…
Will man go extinct? He certainly seems to be doing everything in his power to make sure it happens:
…the worship of an economic system that reduces everything to a financial object.
…the continued exploitation and burning of an increasingly more expensive and environmentally damaging energy source which is causing the climate to swing out of control with various feedback loops.
…the dismantling and perversion of regulations and the rule of law to satisfy greed and a grossly unjust social hierarchy.
…the indoctrination of the population into a materialist society detached from the appreciation of nature’s fundamental role in our survival.
…the degeneration of public debate into infomercial sound bites by way of mass media manipulation.
…the wholesale destruction of the natural world and the latest attempts of a so-called green economy to monetize every bit of nature in order to save capitalism.
…and the spread of the above described culture through globalization.
Guy McPherson, being the anti-establishment voice that he is, says he’s even received death threats against himself. This goes to show how much inertia and willful ignorance are built into the current system. ‘Kill the Messenger’ is the modus operandi of industrial civilization and Empire.
“This time series shows the 2012 year-to-date temperature through July, which was the warmest first seven months of any year on record for the lower 48. The year-to-date evolution of the contiguous U.S. temperatures for each year back to 1895 are also shown, with the five warmest and five coolest years highlighted.The January-July 2012 contiguous U.S. average temperature was 56.4°F, 4.3°F above average. The data for 2012 are preliminary.”
“This time series also shows the 2012 year-to-date temperature through July. Outcome scenarios based on persistence of temperature from August through December, the remaining five months of 2012, are shown. The January-July 2012 contiguous U.S. average temperature was 56.4°F, 4.3°F above average. The data for 2012 are preliminary.” And the following is a map of extreme global weather for July 2012(click to enlarge): At this point, even if you don’t believe humans have anything to do with these extreme weather events which have grown progressively worse, the fact is that the climate is no longer falling within historic parameters from the records that have been kept over the last 116 years. An epic climate event is underway and there are 7 billion people in its path. Our leaders and the ‘captains’ of industry act as if they are powerless to do anything about it, much less alter our dependance on fossil fuels. In fact, we’re scrambling to the thawing Arctic to exploit more carbon-rich resources to cook. Nearly all scientists acknowledge that the release of CO2 from humankind’s burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution is the primary factor in today’s abnormal weather events. And recently, even former Koch-funded climate scientist deniers are changing their tune on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. It’s worth repeating the mind-blowing computation that we, the industrialized world, burn more than 100,000 tons of fossil fuel every hour. Certainly this has caused the acidification of the world’s oceans. A startling report from late last year stated:
The acidification of the world’s oceans from an excess of CO2 has already begun, as evidenced recently by the widespread mortality of oyster larvae in the Pacific Northwest. Scientists say this is just a harbinger of things to come if greenhouse gas emissions continue to soar.
Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) — Mercury contaminated every fish studied in 291 U.S. streams and rivers tested by scientists, and one in four had levels unsafe for people who eat average amounts of fish, a government report said today.
And in July a confrontational piece in the New York Times, written by marine ecologist Roger Bradbury, states rather bluntly:
IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation.
And:
Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have two features in common. First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line with global economic growth, so they can double in size every couple of decades. Second, they have extreme inertia — there is no real prospect of changing their trajectories in less than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are unstoppable and irreversible.
And:
Coral reefs will be the first, but certainly not the last, major ecosystem to succumb to the Anthropocene — the new geological epoch now emerging.
As blogger it’ll-all-end-in-tearsputs it, “The naming of the epoc feels like an appropriately hubristic climax to our age. The consequences of our prolonged war on the ecosystems that support (not serve…) us might well be coming around to extract their own price.”
Funny thing about the environment that we abuse and take for granted on a daily basis…Everything seems OK, until it suddenly isn’t.
I don’t know about you, but I like things to be somewhat predictable and dependable. It appears, however, that we have transgressed Mother Nature one too many times. Consider that at a one degree celsius increase, marked changes to the climate include the USA midwest becoming a desert with the remaining topsoil blowing away. The thinning polar ice caps and melting permafrost will release methane which is twenty times more potent than CO2:
Two new research papers published today improve our understanding of the planet’s methane emissions, and might raise worries about the role of the gas in warming the planet. The first suggests that there may be extensive methane deposits under the Antarctic ice sheets. Meanwhile, the second concludes that emissions of the gas from Arctic permafrost have been underestimated.
Island nations will flood. Forest fires will be more frequent. The frequency and intensity of storms will increase. Between a 1 and 2 degree increase, the albedo effect is diminished at the poles where sunlight reflects back into the atmosphere. Trees stressed from drought will also add more CO2 than O2. The world’s rivers will shrink. Countries will become destabilised and unleash waves of ecological and political refugees in search of H20, food, and fuel. Between a 2 and 3 degrees increase, life becomes unbearable as soils emit more CO2, forests such as the Amazon burn away and release vast amounts of stored carbon, and the basic essentials of life (water, food, and fuel) become scarce. Nations wither and disappear.
And yet there will still be people who think it’s all a conspiracy.
Apocalyptic headlines seem to be daily occurrences now. Here’s just a few headlines that grabbed my attention over the last week(click on them to go to the original article):
Form the article:
Why do we care?,’’ Abdalati, an ice scientist, asked. ‘‘This ice has been an important factor in determining the climate and weather conditions under which modern civilization has evolved.’’
Scientists sometimes call the Arctic the world’s refrigerator and this is like leaving the fridge door open, Scambos said.
‘‘This is kind of a knob on global weather,’’ Wagner said. ‘‘We don’t know the impact yet of fiddling with it.
When people in my house leave the fridge door open, I get pissed and close it. The electric bill goes up due to an overworked fridge trying to cool the food. The Earth, unfortunately, has no ability to shut the door that the human species has permanently torn off its hinges, irreparably destroying the thermostat. On the other hand, the Earth doesn’t really care that we have doomed ourselves to extinction.
Back in 2009, a Lieutenant Vasquez of the U.S. Navy made the following comments which sum up how industrial civilization is perpetuating its own demise:
“It makes me uneasy anyway to think that we’re going to let a trend caused by global warming – the melting of the ice – allow us to explore and exploit more fossil fuels, which led to the warming in the first place.
“That seems wrong-headed to me, but nevertheless it’s likely to happen and there’s already a debate about exactly who’s got the rights to the minerals and the oil that’s there under the Arctic continental shelf, and how to go about exploiting it.
“It’s unfortunate, from a broader view, understanding the science of what the future holds, but I think it’s inevitable because oil and gas are going to be extremely valuable in the coming century as supplies dwindle.”
~~~~~~
From the article:
Tree-ring chronologies from long-term climate records show the western U.S. drought is already the most severe of the past 800 years. It will exceed the 1930s-era Dust Bowl with more consecutive dry years.
Less rainfall is expected in the U.S. West in each of the next 80 years than the annual average level during the drought of 2000 through 2004, the op-ed continues. Schwalm (an earth scientist), Williams (a geographer) and Schaefer (a National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist) analyzed that extreme drought in a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Climatologists say we will experience reduced agricultural productivity, scarcer water resources and carbon sequestration (plants turning carbon into oxygen). The climatologists previously reported in a scientific journal that drought already has halved the amount of carbon dioxide they normally photosynthesize.
OK, that’s enough to scare any of us who studied biology out of our wits. But there’s more.
Major river basins show flow reductions of 5 to 50 percent. Western crop yields are down by 13 percent, with many local cases of crop failure….
Right now we are living in the glory days known as the “wet years”. Our descendants, if there are any, will look back in anger at their forefather’s myopic and self-destructive worship of economic growth and profit at the altar of an economic system they proclaimed to be the greatest the world has ever seen – capitalism. As has been said by a few wise people, “We can either save ourselves, or we can save capitalism.”
…Climate change is projected to increase the frequency, intensity, and duration of droughts, with impacts on many sectors, in particular food, water, health and energy,” WMO secretary general Michel Jarraud said. “We need to move away from a piecemeal, crisis-driven approach and develop integrated risk-based national drought policies.”
Mannava V K Sivakumar, director of WMO’s climate prediction and adaptation branch, says only Australia has a national policy toward drought and the advantage of a policy – rather than a disaster management, which some countries have – is that national action is required no matter who is in political power.
Australia’s government says its 2004 policy is no longer sufficient to deal with climate change, however, and over the past two years it has tried a pilot programme in western parts of the country aimed at shifting from a crisis-oriented approach to risk management.
Sivakumar said the agency is also encouraging more continuing support especially for “the poorest of the poor”, small farmers whose daily wages determine whether they and their families will eat on any given day.
If you’ve been paying attention, our system of transnational capitalism and globalization has ushered in a global land grab which I blogged about here. From where I’m sitting, there appears to be no concern for what’s really sustainable or socially just, but what the monied interests can steal from the weakest and most impoverished living on our planet.
Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world’s population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.
Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world’s leading water scientists.
“There will not be enough water available on current croplands to produce food for the expected 9 billion population in 2050 if we follow current trends and changes towards diets common in western nations,” the report by Malik Falkenmark and colleagues at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) said….
…”Nine hundred million people already go hungry and 2 billion people are malnourished in spite of the fact that per capita food production continues to increase,” they said. “With 70% of all available water being in agriculture, growing more food to feed an additional 2 billion people by 2050 will place greater pressure on available water and land.
As George Dvorsky points out: “…it’s not enough for the researchers to suggest that switching to a non-meat based diet is the solution. Agriculture in general takes a tremendous toll on the environment and is a major contributor to the ongoing depletion of water reserves. It’s estimated, for example, that in the US, withdrawn surface water and groundwater use for crop irrigation exceeds that for livestock by about a ratio of 60:1. The issue, therefore, would seem to be one about the production of potable water and the development of more sustainable agricultural techniques…”
But I really don’t think we’ll be able to pack in a few more billion people on this planet at our current rate of destruction. Cannibalism might be how some get their allowance of meat in the future.
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from the article:
Life in the world’s oceans faces far greater change and risk of large-scale extinctions than at any previous time in human history, a team of the world’s leading marine scientists has warned.
The researchers from Australia, the US, Canada, Germany, Panama, Norway and the UK have compared events which drove massive extinctions of sea life in the past with what is observed to be taking place in the seas and oceans globally today.
Three of the five largest extinctions of the past 500 million years were associated with global warming and acidification of the oceans – trends which also apply today, the scientists say in a new article in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
Other extinctions were driven by loss of oxygen from seawaters, pollution, habitat loss and pressure from human hunting and fishing – or a combination of these factors….
…“It is very useful to look back in time – because if you forget your history, you’re liable to repeat it.”…
…“We need to understand that the oceans aren’t just a big dumping ground for human waste, contaminants and CO2 – a place we can afford to ignore or overexploit. They are closely linked to our own survival, wellbeing and prosperity as well as that of life on Earth in general.
“Even though we cannot easily see what is going on underwater, we need to recognise that the influence of 7 billion humans is now so great it governs the fate of life in the oceans. And we need to start taking responsibility for that.”…
…we need to stop releasing the CO2 that drives these massive extinction events, curb the polluted and nutrient-rich runoff from the land that is causing ocean ‘dead zones’, manage our fisheries more sustainably, and protect their habitat better….
I recall a quote from Philippe Cousteau Jr., the grandson of world-renowned environmentalist Jacques Cousteau:
“I could cut my leg off, I could cut my arm off, I could gouge my eye out, I’d still probably survive, but not very well, and that’s what we’re doing to the ocean.
“It’s the life support system of this planet. We’ve been dumping in it, we’ve been polluting it, we’ve been destroying it for decades, and we’re essentially maiming ourselves… It’s not a question of whether the oceans can take anymore. The ocean can’t take any more. They couldn’t take any more fifty years ago.
”The question is, ‘when are we going to stop?”
Yes, that is the question of the ages. And the answer is that we won’t stop until our economic system collapses.
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…And the above article near my own stomping grounds. You know things are going haywire when flood insurance is needed for a suburban neighborhood located in the desert.
I’m working on adding graphics and trimming down a couple videos made from an extraenvironmentalist podcast of interviews with energy specialists Chris Nelder and Gregor Macdonald; but in the meantime, here is an update on the water-energy-food nexus exacerbated by climate change which I blogged about here. The social consequences are spelled out:
…US farms are already crippled: the Department of Agriculture says the corn (maize) crop is likely to be the worst since 1995. As a result, the Food Price Index (FPI) of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization rose 6 per cent in July, to 213.
More unrest is likely in the next year, although we cannot predict where, says Bar-Yam. That depends on how governments respond… – source
…and on the energy and water front:
…Power plants are a hidden casualty of droughts, says Barbara Carney of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in Morgantown, West Virginia, because they are completely dependent on water for cooling and make up about half the water usage in the US. That makes them vulnerable in a heat wave. If water levels in the rivers that cool them drop too low, the power plant – already overworked from the heat – won’t be able to draw in enough water. In addition, if the cooling water discharged from a plant raises already-hot river temperatures above certain thresholds, environmental regulations require the plant to shut down.
One nuclear plant in Connecticut recently had to shut down because the sea water used for cooling was too warm. Nationwide, nuclear generation is at its lowest in a decade, with the plants operating at only 93 per cent of capacity.
Nuclear is the thirstiest power source. According to NETL, the average nuclear plant that generates 12.2 million megawatt hours of electricity requires far more water to cool its turbines than other power plants. Nuclear plants need 2725 litres of water per megawatt hour for cooling. Coal or natural gas plants need, on average, only 1890 and 719 litres respectively to produce the same amount of energy….
Bio fuel thirst
Reports of how much energy the US has generated this summer won’t be released for some months, he says. The North American Energy Reliability Corporation’s most recent report (PDF) calls the drought outlook “not optimistic” for energy, but says that most of the US should be able to meet its energy demands this year. The exception is Texas, where resources are expected to be tight.
Utility-scale power isn’t the only energy source being hurt by the drought, however. With corn harvests expected to be as low as 75 per cent of normal yields, biofuel production is also suffering. Compared to other energy sources, biofuel production requires the most water.
…Arjen Hoekstra of the University of Twente in the Netherlands calculates the total water use of different industries – including not just cooling but every step in the supply chain as well. According to his “water footprint calculator”, biofuels require orders of magnitude more water than any other energy source… – source
Some farmers profit from the energy industry’s scramble for water while other farmers are fearful, holding back water for their crops…
…Select Energy sources water for oil companies in drilling hotspots across the country, and some landowners can make between $70,000 and $85,000 over the course of a year and a half by selling the water in their ponds to the company, said Mike Wilson, a regional sales manager at Select Energy.
But many landowners aren’t as willing to give up their water now that supplies have become so scarce.
“Farmers are scared about the water supply, too,” said Jeff Gordon, CEO of Texas Coastal Energy Co., a small oil company that began exploring in Kansas last year. “They are now saying, ‘We need to save our water for our crop and our livestock.’ ”
With two oil wells slated to be drilled in the next month, Texas Coastal is considering drilling its own water well at a cost of between $10,000 and $25,000.
Otherwise, it would have to pay to truck water in from out of state or buy it from local farmers and ranchers. Either method could add 3% to 4% to the overall cost of drilling an oil well. Depending on the size of the well and the amount of water required, that could add up to between $20,000 and $200,000.
To the oil companies, it’s worth it. With oil prices hovering around $90 a barrel and the cost to produce a barrel of oil only around $15, the profits are huge, said Gordon, whose company is still aggressively leasing mineral rights, which gives it rights to drill on certain properties.
If the drought worsens or persists for too much longer, however, it could threaten the oil boom, particularly among the smaller drilling companies that can’t afford the added costs and delays, he said.
“That can cripple a drilling company, as lack of water can basically suspend operations,” he said.
Petro River’s Alba said the drought won’t affect his current drilling plans, but hewill carefully assess water availability before expanding into other areas of Kansas.
Scrambling to get the oil companies to stay: Mike Lanie, the economic development director in Harper County, which is at the center of the oil boom, is determined to keep oil companies from pulling out. – source
The financial drain on the system from the drought…
The U.S. government recently announced it would buy $170 million in various meats to help drought-stricken farmers. Other costs to the taxpayer from this epic drought include payouts from federal crop insurance programs:
Crop insurance losses: Your tax dollars on the hook
The drought of 2012 is also likely to result in record payouts from the federal crop insurance program. This taxpayer-funded program subsidizes insurance for farmers and also partially compensates private insurers, with additional emergency assistance that kicks in during extreme events like the current drought.
Nature
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
