“Your Ignorance Makes Me Ill and Angry”

11 Monday Mar 2013

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

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Disaster Capitalism, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Graceful Shutdown, Hard Shutdown, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Nuclear Waste, Profitting off Disaster, Resource Wars, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%

A few noteworthy news stories came across my desk. If anyone still believes the human race will suddenly become endowed with a collective enlightenment to stop throwing its fossil fuel garbage into the air and avert climate chaos, theses recent news articles should put that pipe dream to rest. The first two are further confirmation that we are on a fast track to nowhere with human-induced climate change. 2012 CO2 levels increased by 2.67 parts per million and marked the second biggest jump since records began in 1959, bringing the planet to just under 395 parts per million (ppm). 1998 has the record with a CO2 jump of 2.84 ppm.

Also, this graph courtesy of the Early Warning blog:

A widely reported study recently confirms that the Earth has not been this warm in 11,300 years. See the spike at the end of the graph up above; that’s from man’s frantic industrial activities over the last few hundred years which have actually reversed what should have been a continued cooling trend. Plants are responding to this aberrant spike in global temperature by migrating northward.

Some major institutions of industrial civilization are taking note of this reality while others are not. Firstly, the U.S. military is reaching out to foreign governments in order to prepare for what will be a humanitarian catastrophe:

…when it comes to pragmatic military planning, Locklear said he is increasingly focused on another highly destabilizing force.

“The ice is melting and sea is getting higher,” Locklear said, noting that 80 percent of the world’s population lives within 200 miles of the coast. “I’m into the consequence management side of it. I’m not a scientist, but the island of Tarawa in Kiribati, they’re contemplating moving their entire population to another country because [it] is not going to exist anymore.”

The US military, he said, is beginning to reach out to other armed forces in the region about the issue.

“We have interjected into our multilateral dialogue – even with China and India – the imperative to kind of get military capabilities aligned [for] when the effects of climate change start to impact these massive populations,” he said. “If it goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.’- source

While on Wall Street, investors are accepting the mindset that climate change is inevitable and instead of investing in “green energy”, they are taking a more catastrophic approach:

Working under the assumption that climate change is inevitable, they’re investing in businesses that will profit as the planet gets hotter. (The World Bank says the earth could warm by 4C by the end of the century.) Their strategies include buying water treatment companies, brokering deals for Australian farmland, and backing a startup that has engineered a mosquito to fight dengue, a disease that’s spreading as the mercury climbs…

…When investors think about global warming, “there is an overemphasis of its negative impacts,” says Michael Richardson, head of business development at Land Commodities, which advises rich individuals and sovereign wealth funds on purchases of Australian farmland. The company’s pitch: The gloomy prospect of hotter temperatures, scarce arable land, and rapidly rising populations will make inland cropland Down Under—far from rising seas yet close to Asia’s hungry customers—more valuable…

To which a reader makes the following comment about this shameless profiting from doom:

SOX – Sarbanes-Oxley reports that most global insurance companies are not prepared for the havoc that is to be unleashed from climate chaos:

…This could be disastrous for the global economy. As Ceres notes, the global economy would be paralyzed without insurance lubricating commerce. And since the insurance industry is also a major institutional investor-to the tune of $5 trillion-bad bets on companies exposed to climate change risk could erode insurers’ own balance sheets and their ability to cope with multiple Sandy’s in the years to come. Not to mention liability from litigation arising from customers such as power plant operators whose emissions contribute to climate change. “A substantial proportion of the revenue generated by insurers is derived from investment returns,” the Ceres report notes. “Just as climate change may substantially increase insured losses, it may also adversely affect the investment performance that insurers rely on to meet their liabilities.’

In his latest post, scientist Brad Jarvis talks about a “hard shutdown” versus a “graceful shutdown” of industrial civilization:

I have not read the book “Lights Out,” but I imagine one of the devastating consequences of a “hard shutdown” would be the loss of energy to nuclear plants and those unspent fuel rods sitting there like ticking time bombs.

U.S. reactors have generated about 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel, of which 75 percent is stored in pools, according to Nuclear Energy Institute data. Spent fuel rods give off about 1 million rems (10,00Sv) of radiation per hour at a distance of one foot — enough radiation to kill people in a matter of seconds. There are more than 30 million such rods in U.S. spent fuel pools. No other nation has generated this much radioactivity from either nuclear power or nuclear weapons production…

Even though they contain some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet, U.S. spent nuclear fuel pools are mostly contained in ordinary industrial structures designed to merely protect them against the elements. Some are made from materials commonly used to house big-box stores and car dealerships…”

Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools in the U.S.: Reducing the Deadly Risks of Storage

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind. – source

Chomsky Poses a Question

07 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, ALEC – American Legislative Exchange Council, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumer Culture, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Gross Inequality, Henry Bemis, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Noam Chomsky, The Elite 1%, The Twilight Zone, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

In his latest essay, Chomsky asks the simple question, “Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?” And when he says “capitalism”, he means the true capitalism we have today here in America in which capital has corrupted and usurped government regulation and legislation to the (N)th degree. Crony capitalism is the same as unfettered capitalism which is the end result of all types of capitalism if they are left to play out to their inevitable conclusion, something Chomsky calls “really existing capitalist democracy” or RECD for short.

First, Chomsky proclaims the obvious fact that RECD is incompatible with true democracy and that civilization cannot survive under RECD with its corporate-run government passing as faux democracy. He then asks whether a functioning democracy under a capitalist system would make a difference.

For the litmus test, Chomsky confronts the most apparent and grave danger facing mankind – environmental catastrophe, an unfolding crisis we here at this site are very familiar with. As is often the case in an RECD, what the public wants and what the corporate forces ruling the country demand are two very different things. To illustrate this divergent reality, Chomsky quotes from recent studies by Kelly Sims Gallagher in the current issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In contrast to well over a hundred countries which have enacted renewable energy policies and targets, the U.S. “has not adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the national level to foster the use of renewable energy.”

And it’s not by lack of public desire that such renewable energies have not been enacted. On the contrary, the vast majority of Americans have favored such action in order to avert the very environmental catastrophe currently threatening life as we know it. But as Chomsky wryly comments:

The fact that the public is influenced by science is deeply troubling to those who dominate the economy and state policy.

Now to combat this influence of science on the minds of the common people, our corporate overlords have used one of their lapdog lobbyist groups, ALEC, to enact legislation with the Orwellian title “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” which would actually cast a cloud of doubt over the science of climate change by forcing schools to allow alternative interpretations, i.e. climate change denial:

The ALEC Act mandates “balanced teaching” of climate science in K-12 classrooms. “Balanced teaching” is a code phrase that refers to teaching climate-change denial, to “balance” mainstream climate science. It is analogous to the “balanced teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in several states.

Of course this “balanced teaching” won’t include the views of those much more astute scientists who have accurately said that the IPCC’s climate models and forecasts have been and continue to be much too conservative and optimistic. The corporate intrusion into America’s classrooms will undoubtedly include viewpoints from people who say that CO2 is good for the planet and that God would not allow man to destroy himself.

Again, Chomsky explains that such dumbing down of the populace is done intentionally to serve the short-term profit motives of our corporatocracy. Keeping the masses ill-informed and living within a cloud of propaganda and infotainment is the primary objective of the ALEC legislation. Creating a country full of Al Bundys and Homer Simpsons has been an ongoing process since the inception of a post-World War II Consumer Culture. When the primary tool for constructing a nation’s identity – “The Media” – is motivated by money, society is destined for a meltdown. We are following the doctrine of ‘preordained destiny’ right into the annals of extinction alongside the dinosaurs and the Dodo bird.

…Within the RECD system it is of extreme importance that we become the stupid nation, not misled by science and rationality, in the interests of the short-term gains of the masters of the economy and political system, and damn the consequences.

These commitments are deeply rooted in the fundamentalist market doctrines that are preached within RECD, though observed in a highly selective manner, so as to sustain a powerful state that serves wealth and power.

Chomsky compares the corporatocracy’s willful ignorance on human-induced climate change to that of the ongoing banking crisis and the financial sector’s criminal behavior in disregarding “systemic risk”, i.e. the risk of collapsing an entire financial system or entire market. The systemic risk of continuing to exploit fossil fuels is more blatantly obvious every week, month, and year that passes. Enjoying 20/20 hindsight and taxpayer-funded bailouts won’t be an option for a crash of the global biosphere.

Environmental catastrophe is far more serious: The externality that is being ignored is the fate of the species. And there is nowhere to run, cap in hand, for a bailout.

In future, historians (if there are any) will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions – actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival.

Those historians will observe that the richest and most powerful country in history, which enjoys incomparable advantages, is leading the effort to intensify the likely disaster. Leading the effort to preserve conditions in which our immediate descendants might have a decent life are the so-called “primitive” societies: First Nations, tribal, indigenous, aboriginal.

The countries with large and influential indigenous populations are well in the lead in seeking to preserve the planet. The countries that have driven indigenous populations to extinction or extreme marginalization are racing toward destruction.

Over four centuries of commodifying the planet and two centuries of wallowing in a fossil fuel high have turned the industrialized world into crazed drug addicts marching towards their own destruction. It is only the planet’s unindustrialized “primitive people’ who remain clear-minded enough to act rationally and wisely. By all estimations, having even a semi-functioning democracy under a capitalist system would exponentially improve our odds of survival; but under the current regime, no living thing will get out alive when glorified apes dressed in suits are flinging shit and wielding weapons of mass destruction.

This observation generalizes: Throughout the world, indigenous societies are struggling to protect what they sometimes call “the rights of nature,” while the civilized and sophisticated scoff at this silliness.

This is all exactly the opposite of what rationality would predict – unless it is the skewed form of reason that passes through the filter of RECD.

Our present predicament is best described by a commenter in regards to the short film ‘Time Enough at Last‘:

Wrecking the Earth: Planetary Tipping Points Refuted

04 Monday Mar 2013

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

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Barry W. Brook, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Does the terrestrial biosphere have planetary tipping points?, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, James Hansen, Mass Die Off, Michael E. Mann, Paul R. Ehrlich

I would like to believe that planetary tipping points do not exist and that the activities of 9 billion humans cannot “break the planet”, rendering it uninhabitable for future generations, but on just an intuitive level I feel this is wishful thinking. So it was with some surprise that I saw the following article:

A group of international ecological scientists led by the University of Adelaide have rejected a doomsday-like scenario of sudden, irreversible change to the Earth’s ecology.

In a paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, the scientists from Australia, US and UK argue that global-scale ecological tipping points are unlikely and that ecological change over large areas seem to follow a more gradual, smooth pattern…

…A tipping point occurs when an ecosystem attribute such as species abundance or carbon sequestration responds rapidly and possibly irreversibly to a human pressure like land-use change or climate change.

Many local and regional-level ecosystems, such as lakes and grasslands, are known to behave this way. A planetary tipping point, the authors suggest, could theoretically occur if ecosystems across Earth respond in similar ways to the same human pressures, or if there are strong connections between continents that allow for rapid diffusion of impacts across the planet.

“These criteria, however, are very unlikely to be met in the real world,” says Professor Brook. “First, ecosystems on different continents are not strongly connected. Second, the responses of ecosystems to human pressures like climate change or land-use change depend on local circumstances and will therefore differ between localities.”

The scientists examined four principal drivers of terrestrial ecosystem change ? climate change, land-use change, habitat fragmentation and biodiversity loss ? and found they were unlikely to induce global tipping points.

Co-author Associate Professor Erle Ellis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says: “As much as four fifths of the biosphere is today characterised by ecosystems that locally, over centuries and millennia, have undergone human-driven regime shifts of one or more kinds. Recognising this reality and seeking appropriate conservation efforts at local and regional levels might be a more fruitful way forward for ecology and global change science.

I would have to disagree that ecosystems on different continents are not connected. The health of one ecosystem affects other ecosystems globally. For example, the loss of the Arctic and its albedo effect has global repercussions for climate patterns such as is discussed here:

…A difference in temperatures between the Arctic and areas to the south is usually the main driver of the wave flows, which typically stretch 2,500 and 4,000 km (1,550-2,500 miles) from crest to crest.

But a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, blamed on human activities led by use of fossil fuels, is heating the Arctic faster than other regions and slowing the mechanism that drives the waves, the study suggested…

In a recent article by Tom Zeller Jr. entitled ‘Tipping Points: Can Humanity Break The Planet?‘, we get to hear what a couple of noted scientists think about this new paper downplaying planetary tipping points:

Being a human, I care not whether planet Earth will survive humanity, but whether we humans will survive the environmental onslaught of our own activities. Of course the Earth will continue on without us, but that’s an empty consolation for the human species whose time in history will soon be forgotten on a planet left uninhabitable for our children. So do planetary tipping points exist or can humans do whatever they like with no real world effect to the global biosphere? I guess we’ll soon find out. Keep in mind that there is no precedent in the past 2.5 million years for the kind of rapid, human-induced global warming the Earth has been undergoing since the onset of the industrial revolution. We are in uncharted territory.

Up Shit Creek in Water Wars, Sinkholes, and more AGW Feedback Loops

01 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Basic Rules of this Website, Cyber-Warfare, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Brane Space, Climate Change, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Peak Water, Resource Wars, Vice Media, Water Mining, Water Wars

I ran across this series on America’s water crisis by Vice Media. It was published just a few months ago so it’s recent; I highly recommend watching all three. For me, part three was the most riveting because I have relatives there and that state is my neighbor. As always, water is diverted to where the money is, and no amount of public protest or scientific studies and research will stop the juggernaut of elite monied interests, the natural environment and Main Street be damned.

On a related topic, another report has been published of one more climate feedback loop for us to worry about. This time biodiversity loss in the form of disappearing top predators will increase CO2 by a whopping 93%:

Add this factor of predator die-off to the long list of known and unknown feedback loops such as permafrost melt, clathrate methane release, the disappearing albedo effect, increased atmospheric water vapor, growing acidity and warming of the world’s oceans destroying this vital CO2 sink, and the global die-off of forests which negates yet another massive CO2 sink.

Does anyone really think we’ll be worrying about reduced labor capacity in 2050 due to climate change? Or will we be fighting just to find enough food to stay alive?

Well, yes they think that business-as-usual will continue and technological wizardry will solve any and all problems of a collapsing ecosystem. Mankind will be driving electric cars and taking trips to distant planets. Here’s some common sense advice for such foolish thinking:

What will life soon be like here on Earth. I’ll let blogger Copernicus describe it to you:

David Suzuki has forecast (‘It’s A Matter of Survival’, Harvard Univ. Press, 1991 with Anita Gordon) the first year of no seasons as 2040. However, if global warming is accelerating (much higher CO2 concentrations added each year, hence higher solar insolation by about 2 W/m^2 per year) then that date could arrive as early as 2025, if not sooner. What it will mean is that an essential thermal equilibrium will be reached in our planetary atmosphere so effectively, no more winters, summers or even intermediate (Spring, fall) seasons anywhere. That will also mark the emergence of much higher mean global temperatures, probably as high as 60-65F. Locally[Colorado], we can expect to see highs of 115F-120F and covering much larger areas for much longer (heat ‘waves’ will be more like heat seasons, lasting months.) Relatively cooler breaks, say with highs of 85-90, will likely appear in what used to be northern winters.

With the much more consistent high temperatures, pests of all types will proliferate, so we can expect to see more worm-parasite infestations for example, as well as dengue fever rivaling what we have now with West Nile Fever. Cholera, c. diff. and amoebic dysentery will also not be unheard of as our water resources continue to be used up and polluted, i.e. by fracking. All in all, it will be a world that few will enjoy living in, other than the very rich – who, unlike the rest of us – will be able to afford their own off the grid power stations, so won’t be rendered too uncomfortable when the main grids crash from over use.

Be happy as long as you are getting snow, even 2′ at a time, because it means that first year of no seasons is still a ways off!

The video below was produced several years ago, but is still prescient:

Mankind’s Infantilism and the Death of the Planet

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

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

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Peak Oil, Poverty, Self-Delusion of Man, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

Hello my fellow Earthlings. We think we’re so fucking clever, don’t we. We’ll probably revert to our rodent instincts and burrow underground when the shit really hits the fan. With the eco-apocalypse fast approaching, the best way for the human species to redeem itself would be to voluntarily undergo a cultural and spiritual transformation on a global scale. When I say spiritual, I mean honoring the ground we walk on and not some false deity. Science, not mythology, is the basis for my beliefs. This Earth is all we really have. Start caring for it and respecting it with the same reverence and homage we pay to our electronic toys of mass distraction, i.e. TV, iphones, video games, computers, etc…

Know that this culture of self-worship and materialism is sending our species to the dustbin of failed evolutionary experiments, most certainly by the end of this century if not mid-century. The evidence is all around us if only we care to open our eyes.

Below is a video I put together to illustrate the suffocation of the real world beneath the concrete, steel, and asphalt world humans have superimposed on it. We have worked to replace what is genuine and long-lasting with something that is artificial and unsustainable. And all the science says this world we have created from fossil fuels cannot be maintained in the long run, not even with so-called renewable energy. On top of that mess, we are wrecking the planet’s biosphere and ensuring that our descendants will have no chance to experience nature or a habitable planet. We have quite literally destroyed our only true home, leaving us vulnerable to the vicious elements of the outside world which are growing ever worse in the form of climate change, resource depletion, and environmental degradation.

I’m afraid that confronting this civilization-ending calamity is not a solo endeavor, but must be a global undertaking. As someone said on this site before, the success of a society, be it an ancient tribe or a technologically advanced people, depends on whether there is cooperation and shared sacrifice. I don’t have to tell you that in today’s world, such traits are in short shrift. Individualism and self-interest dominate over any sort of collectivism and altruism. Self-glorification and the almighty profit motive are not going to solve these problems. The solution for global ecological destruction will not be found in an accounting scheme or any other such capitalist interest.

It’s time to face what we have done to the planet and ourselves. I don’t expect any such great awakening to occur. I’m fairly confident that we will stumble along into total collapse with all the usual mayhem that ensues in such an event – drought, famine, pestilence, and war. We humans had such promise, but we’re throwing it all away. If only we would grow up.

Havoc-Wreaking Megadroughts in the Cards

22 Friday Feb 2013

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

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

2013 Weather and Climate Summit, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Extreme Weather Events, Inverted Totalitarianism, Jeff Lukas - Senior Research Associate of Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, Las vegas, Mass Die Off, Megadrought, Peak Water, Projections of Declining Surface-Water Availability for the Southwestern United States, Shrinking Colorado River, The Unsustainability of Mega-Cities

The usual suspects of drought, famine, pestilence and war come to mind when one thinks of a future population crash. The ongoing drought in America’s bread basket appears to be just a foretaste of what’s in the climate chaos pipeline.

A quick review of the effect that climate change has on the global hydrologic cycle would be useful before we talk about the last study on drought.

…Climate change will also lead to changes in global rainfall patterns, intensifying both droughts and floods across the globe. The Clausius-Clapeyron equation dictates that the saturation vapor pressure of water increases nearly exponentially with temperature. Therefore, a warmer atmosphere will allow for more evaporation of water and an intensification of the hydrologic cycle, leading to increases in rainfall in some regions and decreases in others. At the present, rainfall has increased in the mid- and high-latitudes and in the tropics, while it has decreased in the sub-tropics. If global average temperature increases by 2 °C, dry-season precipitation in northern Africa, southern Europe, and western Australia is projected to decrease by ~20%, and that in the southwestern United States, eastern South America, and southern Africa to decrease by ~10%, which will have a profound impact on crop productivity and water resources. For comparison, the American “dust bowl” in the 1930s was the result of a ~10% decrease in rainfall over a decade. A reduction in mountain snow pack and glaciers will also exacerbate stresses on water resources. Climate change is also predicted to increase the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, heat waves, heavy precipitation events, and flooding. Additionally, if global average temperature increases by 1.5- 2.5 °C, approximately 20-30% of plant and animal species will be at risk of extinction. As in the case of rising sea level, these consequences of climate change are irreversible on a 1,000-year timescale because temperature increases caused by elevated CO2 are expected to persist for that time period even if carbon emissions are fully curtailed [Solomon et al., 2009; IPCC, 2007]…

Now for the current study(actual report is here) which says that we are only eight years away from a life-altering megadrought:

Beginning in just eight years, we could see permanent climate conditions across the North American Southwest that are comparable to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years. (1)

The latest research from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University published in December 2012 has some truly astounding news. The megadroughts referred to in the paper published in Nature Climate Change happened around about 900 to 1300 AD and are so extreme that they have no modern counterpart for comparison (these megadroughts will be referred to in the following as the “12th century megadrought”). The research was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

We have been warned for decades that we would be facing a megadrought if we did not do something about climate pollution. We did not, and now according to the projections of a new study, that is just what the future may hold. And remember, projected conditions similar to the worst megadrought in 1,000 years would be the baseline conditions. Dry periods, which we normally refer to as drought times today, would be superimposed on top of the megadrought extremeness…

…The results of the new research are critically deserving of an alarmist tone. That we could slip into profound continuous drought so soon is certainly a surprise to most of us, to say the least. The typical consensus opinion of unrestrained climate pollution impacts by the year 2100 only tells us that permanent drought will come to many parts of the world and, basically, that dry areas could become drier. The news that we could be experiencing permanent drought on the scale of megadrought proportions – beginning in only eight years – should be considered a global threat of the highest order…

…This “most severe, but temporary, long-term decrease in flow recorded” is the concept we need to understand. This is the megadrought reference. A 10 percent reduction beginning 2021 to 2040 is extreme enough for these researchers to compare the average conditions projected for the very near future to the 12th Century megadrought. This single message is critical and it was missed by popular reporting. Just to be sure I am clear: this quote “temporary, but long-term decreases in flow” here refers to these 75- to 200 year-long megadroughts, the last one occurring about 1,000 years ago or in the 12th Century. These droughts were temporary, like the droughts of today, but in the near future, conditions comparable to these droughts will be the average climate condition. Dry periods that we know as drought today will be on top of megadrought dryness…

From ‘Climate Normals Are History‘:

And from a recent talk by Jeff Lukas, the Senior Research Associate of Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado:

On January 17, 2013, Jeff Lukas, the Senior Research Associate of Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado, gave an hour-long presentation at the most recent Weather and Climate Summit. The take-away from his presentation is this: droughts will be getting worse, no question about it. Cause: climate change. Time-frame: already started. And a potential megadrought, a phenomena that hasn’t reared its ugly head for at least 150 years, poses a real and serious risk that needs to be planned for…

…Megadroughts, are generally considered to be periods of 20 years or longer where continuous, or mostly continuous extreme drought covers a very large area, typically about 1/3 of the lower 48 (US states). And they’re as bad as they sound – maybe worse.

If such a drought happens, the Colorado River’s flow will drop drastically. The Bureau of Reclamation, which estimates that 25% of the US food supply is grown using Colorado River water, has already done a study to simulate a megadrought; results: Glen Canyon Dam hydro plant would have to stop generating power for about 20 years (two separate stretches of 10 years during the simulation). Both lake Mead and Lake Powell would see water levels drop by about 100 feet…

Jeff Lukas explained in his talk that there have been times in the past 1,000+ years when drought was so bad that the Colorado River (which supplies both Lake Mead and Powell) flowed at 25% below its current flow rate. And that very low level of flow was sustained for decades. Lukas says that such a scenario is definitely possible today. In fact, he says it is such a high risk that it needs to be planned for.

…For those that don’t know, the Colorado River is already maxed out. The Southwest has seen some of the highest US population growth over recent decades, and coupled with farming demands, the river water is nearly all spoken for…

…He concludes that drought is seriously underestimated as a severe threat – even if a megadrought doesn’t develop in the near-future. Because of warming he says there will be more drought than we’ve ever seen before. And the droughts that would otherwise be moderate will now be severe – intensity will ratchet upwards with temperature. He also says that trends of the past several years are worrying when compared to the record that dates back to the year 750…

If a megadrought does unfold, past episodes may be a guide to the future. Lukas outlines a few of the effects that have been uncovered regarding past megadroughts: sand dunes forming in western Nebraska (i.e. no plants, just sand), more frequent wildfire, and rapidly dropping lake levels. One consequence that Lukas didn’t talk about was how drought-killed plants stop pulling CO₂ out of the air.

…Right now, the dams and reservoirs along the Colorado can capture and store runoff, even from severe rainfall events, but only up to their maximum storage capacity, which is around 60 million acre feet, or about 4 years worth of water demand. Groundwater can be pumped up (i.e. wells) in many places, but that resource is already in sharp decline.

The Horror of a Disaster Carnival Cruise Vs. The Unfolding Eco-Apocalypse

16 Saturday Feb 2013

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

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

6th Mass Extinction, Antibiotic-Resistant Pathogens, Arrogance of Man, Capitalism, Carnival Cruise Ship Triumph, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Global Tree Die-Off, La Posada Hotel, Mass Die Off, Methane Clathrate Gun, Peak Antibiotics, Tina Mion

After eating dinner at Arizona’s historic La Posada hotel in Winslow, I walked around the building and discovered a large section of the second floor filled with paintings by artist Tina Mion. I wondered why such interesting and subversive paintings would be featured in a touristy establishment. Ah, she owns the place with her husband. One particular painting struck me as emblematic of the eco-apocalyptic times we are living in. Of course if you simply watched the mainstream news and listened to their talking heads, then you really have no idea what I’m writing about. For you, the most earth-shattering news as of late is the Armageddon of the Carnival cruise ship, the Triumph, and its horror of “no working toilets, limited power and scarce food.” Ironically, this scenario is what the human race will have to look forward to in the larger context of modern man’s ecological overshoot; the Earth’s life-support systems continue to degrade and collapse from the weight of industrial civilization’s ravenous over-exploitation and consumption. Meanwhile, the masses are shocked and dismayed at the breakdown of a luxury liner. Nevermind that such cruise ships, packed with party-going consumers, sail across dying oceans that have been trawled clean of most fish species. Such is the ‘selective awareness’ of industrial capitalist carbon man.

Getting back to Tina Minion’s painting which I took a picture of because I think it’s so symbolic of the present day:

What are the latest headlines which have grabbed my attention?…

Warming is particularly problematic for moose in northern Minnesota. The moose population in the northwestern part of the state plummeted from about 4,000 animals in the mid-1980s to less than 100 animals by the mid-2000s.

Biologists attribute most of this decline to increasing temperatures: when it gets too warm moose typically seek shelter rather than foraging for nutritious foods needed to keep them healthy. They become more vulnerable to tick infestations, which have proliferated as the region has warmed.

Ticks leave moose weakened from blood loss and with hairless patches where they tried to rub off the ticks. Without protective hair, these animals can die from cold exposure in the winter. Individual moose infested with 50,000 to 70,000 ticks — ten to twenty times more than normal — have been documented…

As you might expect, moose are also in trouble in the few other portions of the U.S. where any are left at all, including some areas where moose were essentially gone until fairly recent, still tenuous recoveries. NWF’s Wildlife Promise blog offered this observation yesterday:

Moose were once found as far south as Pennsylvania before over-hunting and habitat destruction wiped them out from much of the eastern United States. Populations in places like Massachusetts are still re-establishing a foothold.

But in New Hampshire, the impact of warmer temperatures on moose are clear and dire. Researchers say New Hampshire moose are literally being eaten alive by ticks. Moose there have to deal with 30,000 ticks at a time in a normal year, but in recent warm years, moose carry as many as 150,000 ticks.

The moose die of anemia, a lack of healthy red blood cells. After the unseasonably warm winter in 2011, they think that it’s likely that all calves born the previous year were killed along with 40 percent of adults.

Being the apex predator won’t save us from the same fate of other large mammals that our currently dropping like flies all around us in what one reader has called “The First Mass Murder of Life on the Planet”. Seeing how extensively we have disassociated ourselves from the natural world, i.e. the foundation for our existence, I would wager that man is probably the only living creature on the face of the earth that cannot innately sense that its time is up. Elaborate and contorted twisting of reality is a special talent of the human species.

…It turns out that aspens generally use shallow soil moisture, which evaporated quickly with increased temperatures during the summer drought of 2002. They then looked at climate data finding that these high temperatures were part of a long-term increasing trend, likely linked with climate change, a unique feature of this drought that separates it from earlier less damaging droughts.

“Forests store about 45 percent of the carbon found on land,” remarked William. “Widespread tree death can radically transform ecosystems, affecting biodiversity, posing fire risks, and even harming local economies. Rapid shifts in ecosystems, particularly through vegetation die-offs could be among the most striking impacts of increased drought and climate change around the globe.”…

…This study pinpoints the trigger of this loss — summer temperature was the most important climate variable for explaining aspen death by drying out surface soil and stressing the trees’ water-transport system. Joe Berry, a co-author and Carnegie staff scientist, noted that understanding how and where the trees get their water was key to unraveling cause and effect in this study. “Since there is a very strong upward trend in Colorado summer temperatures, they could link tree death to climate change,” said Chris Field, director of the Carnegie department. This study is a milestone in linking plant-level physiology measurements with large-scale climate to predict vulnerability to climate change in these forests.

Interestingly, this type of climate-change hot summer drought actually occurred again in 2012, which could indicate more tree die-offs are in the pipeline for the near future.

No, we won’t survive the global die-off of forests. Fake plastic trees and monoculture forests won’t help.

And about that methane clathrate gun:

Thawing permafrost is emitting more climate-heating carbon faster than previously realised. Scientists have now learned that when the ancient carbon locked in the ice thaws and is exposed to sunlight, it turns into carbon dioxide 40 percent faster.

“This really changes the trajectory of the debate” over when and how much carbon will be released as permafrost thaws due to ever warmer temperatures in the Arctic, says researcher Rose Cory of the University of North Carolina…

…“All the evidence, in my opinion, suggests we’re on our way to a three to five degree C world,” Watson told participants at the symposium.

When Watson was chair of the IPCC from 1997 to 2002, optimism was high there’d be a global agreement to limit emissions. “We were hopeful that emissions would not go up at the tremendous rate they are rising now,” he told the Climate News Network, a UK journalism news service.

“(Now) all the promises in the world, which we’re not likely to realise anyway, will not give us a world with only a two degree C rise.

Well, at least we’ll be able to feed ourselves, or maybe not…

To make the future even more brutish and short for any survivors, pathogens once thought to be conquered are building resistance to all antibiotics:

A successful book in the genre of science fiction or horror is said to have effectively created the “suspension of disbelief” in the reader. I say that industrial civilization uses this same tactic to make you, one of its countless minions, believe that all is well under the dominant socio-economic system, that human progress will continue, that nature is an intrinsically worthless entity unless it’s dominated and rapaciously exploited by man, and that the accumulation of material wealth is the end-all and be-all of life. If you reject these precepts of our current social paradigm, then you quickly realize how empty and doomed the system is that we currently live and toil under. Paradoxically, my stress level has been reduced after I came to the conclusion that most everything valued and sought after in the proverbial “Rat Race” of global capitalism is an absolute fraud and joke. Once you realize we’re being lead to a smoking pile of ruin, most things you thought were important suddenly lose all value and significance.

Somehow I just don’t think anyone will be selling T-shirts that say, “I survived climate change and the eco-apocalypse.”

They’re Laughing at Us…

04 Monday Feb 2013

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

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, David Attenborough, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Mass Die Off, Overpopulation

Alien 1: “Lets zip over to Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha where exists that one habitable planet overrun by its egomaniacal, carbon-burning organisms.”

Alien 2: “You mean the ones that call themselves ‘wise’, but which have completely disassociated themselves from their planet’s life-giving qualities. They have a very bad habit of wielding their technology in a half-hazard and suicidal manner.”

Alien 1: “Yeah that’s the one. I’m surprised they’ve made it this far with all those mushrooming obliteration devices they have stockpiled.”

Aliens 1,2, & 3: “HA! HA!” Look at that! They’re cooking themselves with those carbon-burners… all to support a fleeting lifestyle of high energy and resource consumption.”

Alien 2: “Don’t they know it’ll all be gone very soon and they’ll be left with a moonscaped planet that has the temperature of Venus?”

Alien 1: “Some of them do, but most appear to be prisoners of their own self-indulgent delusions. They refuse to listen no matter how much the sentient minority jump up and down to try to get their attention.

It seems that this earthling species spends most of its time attempting to accumulate more and more of these paper and metal tokens by converting all of their planet’s resources into these fictitious symbols of wealth.”

Alien 3: “The situation looks to be rather grim down there. They don’t seem to have any sort of self-constraint. I believe one of their own even called their species a plague on the planet.”

Alien 2: “Did anyone listen to him?”

Alien 1: “No, the few who heard him mostly just got offended and went back to the business of obsessing over economic growth and accumulating evermore of those paper tokens.”

Alien 2: “Really? Well, what if we install some emergency buttons at strategic locations around the planet to limit their activities? I’m sure the self-aware among them would consider activating such devices.”

Alien 1: “Alright then. Let’s see what happens…”

The Violence and Coercion of the So-Called free Market (Guns, Slaves, & Steal)

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate Neo-Colonialism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Economic Collapse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Hydro-Colonialism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Military Industrial Complex, Neoliberal Capitalism, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Poverty, Resource Wars, Roberto De Vogli, The Elite 1%

My internet is still down, but will hopefully be back up by tomorrow night so I can put out a few posts I was contemplating. In the mean time, an interesting excerpt from a new book by Roberto De Vogli, associate professor in global health at the University of California Davis and University College London.

Excerpt…

And of course it continues today as has been discussed in previous posts on this site. So much for the “free market”.

The Illusion of Money and the End of Nature

27 Sunday Jan 2013

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

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Austerity for the Poor, Barack Obama, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Globalization, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Privatization, Regulatory Capture, The Elite 1%, The Illusion of Money, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

In order to understand why the world is locked into a blind stampede over a cliff, you have to understand how the world runs, i.e. its socio-economic system. A large percentage of the population doesn’t understand that the world is ruled by multinational corporations or that the citizenry are simply disposable pawns with no voice in their fate.

The capital that flows around the world, betting on essential staples of life and demanding that barbaric austerity measures be imposed upon the masses, is an entity of its own. It’s a massively destructive force that enslaves people and rips apart the environment. In the Banana Republic of America where a once thriving middle class was sold down the river, nearly half of workers will have a budget of $5 per day when they reach retirement age. Maybe McDonald’s will create a 99 cent meal to cash in on that starving demographic. Oh, they already have…

As far as the environment goes, it is a doormat for the creation of money:

To get a better understanding of America’s place in the global corporatocracy which is ushering in the social and environmental apocalypse, we turn to the author of ‘The Elements of the Corporatocracy‘ and his blog where he posted ‘How the U.S. Corporatocracy Fits in the Global Scheme‘, an excerpt of which follows:

When you have such an immovable supersystem of puppet governments and marauding transnational corporations running the show, radical movements questioning and trying to change the status quo are easily co-opted or crushed, a recent example being the Occupy movement. In a world where extinction of the human species is guaranteed by climate chaos and the myriad of other crises created by industrial capitalism, a slow and incremental regimen of change is not what is needed to stave off collapse. Unfortunately, the entrenched interests of the financial elite and the nation-states they control won’t allow for any sort of abrupt and profound transformation. As Professor Julian Cribb has correctly identified, a culture of money worship and the mass delusion of money’s illusory value is at the heart of the global crisis. The high priests of money are protected at the expense of all else:

Show me a democracy that has an impoverished public life and I will show you one dominated by oligarchs and plutocrats driven by profit maximization that will do anything to get over. Gangster activity is what it is. Scandal after scandal and when you get caught, you PAY MONEY, you don’t go to jail. Plutocrats wage class war, getting away with CRIMES (mortgage fraud, market manipulation, insider trading, securities fraud) every day. But get caught with a bag of weed in the hood and you are in the system, for LIFE. ~ Cornell West

For humans living under such a capitalist society, money determines whether you can eat or not, whether you have shelter or not, whether you can clothe yourself or not, or whether you can afford medical treatment or not. Quite literally, if you have no money in a capitalist society, you die. Money in today’s globalized capitalist system is everything.

When President Obama speaks about confronting climate change, he does so with the mindset of keeping the current capitalist power structure in place. Because of this self-defeating approach, everything he says is rendered useless rhetoric.

Putting aside the gross social inequalities and injustices of our current system, you tell me how we can avert disaster with the following realities:

Without changing the socio-economic system under which we live, no real solutions for the multiple civilization-ending crises we face can be properly addressed. There is an expiration date for this unending conversion of the natural world into fake symbols of wealth hoarded and squandered by a greedy few…