Elegy for the Sentinel Ice

15 Sunday Jun 2025

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

≈ 1 Comment

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Climate Catastrophe, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Cryosphere, Earth’s Legacy, Ecological Warning, Future Generations, Glacial History, Global Warming, Human Impact, Melting Ice, Nature’s Balance, Planetary Memory, The Holocene Epoch, Vanishing Glaciers

Before any footsteps, before any cry,
Ice hewed the mountains, etched earth and sky.
A silent architect, cold, patient, and grand,
It inscribed the planet’s memory, shaping the land.

Its blinding white armor, a sentinel spun,
Shielded the world from the wrath of the sun.
A balance so fragile—celestial ballet—
Without it, the blue world dims into gray.

We are late arrivals, children of thaw,
Seasons and harvests that ice once made law.
Yet now, with engines, relentless hunger, and flame,
We unravel the wonders that once gave us our name.

Ice keeps the chronicles, secrets of air,
Bubbles of centuries, histories laid bare.
Each stratum a ledger, each crystal a prayer—
History liquefies, vanishing—where?

The sea rises hungry, devouring the shore,
Millions uprooted—displaced evermore.
No borders or armies, just climate’s command,
A tide of lost futures sweeps over the land.

Goldilocks planet, neither too hot nor too cold,
Balanced by fortune through epochs untold.
We tilt the scales blindly for comfort and gain,
And wager our Eden for profit—and pain.

Ice is remembrance, a sentinel muse—
Its vanishing hush is a fate we can’t choose.
What world will we forge, what mark will we cast,
If the reign of the glaciers is truly our last?

Yet within every ending, a challenge remains:
Can wisdom emerge from irreversible change?
The mirror of ice does more than accuse—
It reveals the true cost of the futures we choose.

And when the last white citadel crumbles to brine,
No shelter remains from the feverish shine.
The air thick with silence, the oceans unbound—
A world unmoored, where no refuge is found.

The sun stares unblinking, the shadows erased,
Old seasons forgotten, all boundaries effaced.
In the echo of glaciers, a warning resounds:
When ice is a memory, only ruin surrounds.

Sea Level Rise and the Collapse of Industrial Civilization: Lessons from Paleoclimate and Modern Science

20 Tuesday May 2025

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

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Adaptation, antarctic ice sheet, Climate Change, Climate Policy, Coastal Flooding, Collapse of Civilizations, Doggerland, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Global Warming, Greenland Ice Sheet, Holocene, Ice Sheet Collapse, Industrial Civilization, Infrastructure Risk, Managed Retreat, Migration, Mitigation, Nonlinear Change, Paleoclimate, Sea Level Rise, Tipping Points

Introduction

The collapse of industrial civilization is often imagined as a distant, almost cinematic event, triggered by war, pandemic, or sudden resource exhaustion. Yet the most credible threat may be the slow, relentless encroachment of the sea—a process already underway, driven by the warming atmosphere and the melting of ancient ice. Recent advances in paleoclimate research, especially the high-resolution peat records from the North Sea (Hijma et al., 2025) and comprehensive ice sheet modeling (Stokes et al., 2025), reveal that our current trajectory is not simply a gradual rise in sea level, but a potential reactivation of catastrophic processes last seen at the end of the last Ice Age. Together, these studies paint a picture of a world on the brink of a transformation that could overwhelm the foundations of modern society.

I. Paleoclimate Lessons: The Early Holocene Analogy

The early Holocene, as reconstructed by Hijma et al. (2025), was a period of extraordinary sea level rise—nearly 38 meters between 11,000 and 3,000 years ago, with two distinct pulses reaching 8–9 mm per year. These rates, driven by synchronous meltwater pulses from both the North American and Antarctic ice sheets, are far faster than today’s global average and illustrate the climate system’s capacity for rapid, nonlinear change. In practical terms, this means that if similar feedbacks or synchronous ice sheet instabilities are triggered by ongoing anthropogenic warming, modern society could face much faster SLR than current averages or conservative projections suggest. The paleoclimate record thus acts as a warning: under certain conditions, the pace of SLR can shift abruptly, overwhelming adaptation efforts and posing severe risks to coastal infrastructure, populations, and economies within much shorter timescales than policymakers or planners might expect

These findings underscore that the rates of change seen in the early Holocene are not only possible but likely under continued anthropogenic warming. The paleoclimate record shows that large-scale landscape loss, human displacement, and the submergence of entire regions—such as Doggerland, the now-lost landmass that once connected Britain to Europe—are not hypothetical, but historical realities.

II. Modern Parallels: Ice Sheet Instability and Committed Sea Level Rise

Building on the paleoclimate foundation, Stokes et al. (2025) provide a comprehensive assessment of the current vulnerability of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, focusing on the feedback mechanisms that can drive rapid, nonlinear, and potentially irreversible ice loss. Their synthesis of paleoclimate data, satellite observations, and advanced ice sheet models reveals that the thresholds for triggering such feedbacks are alarmingly close—possibly already crossed under today’s warming of approximately +1.2°C above pre-industrial levels.

Key mechanisms include:

Surface elevation feedbacks on Greenland: As the ice sheet melts, its surface lowers in elevation, exposing it to warmer air at lower altitudes. This accelerates melting, which further lowers the surface, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This process has been implicated in the rapid collapse of parts of the North American Ice Sheet during the last deglaciation, which contributed almost 4 meters of sea level rise per century. Central-west Greenland is now thought to be approaching a similar critical transition under current climate forcing, suggesting that this feedback could soon be fully activated.
Marine Ice Sheet Instability (MISI) in West Antarctica: Much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is grounded below sea level on bedrock that slopes downward inland (a retrograde slope), making it highly vulnerable to ocean-driven melting. When warm ocean water thins the floating ice shelves near the grounding line, the grounding line retreats into deeper water, where the ice is thicker. This increases ice discharge into the ocean, further retreating the grounding line and perpetuating the instability. Recent modeling and observations indicate that present-day ocean thermal forcing may already be sufficient to initiate slow grounding-line retreat, followed by a phase of rapid mass loss over about 200 years, potentially raising global sea level by at least a meter. Notably, the collapse of Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers—key outlets of the WAIS—appears likely under current conditions, and once set in motion, this process could become self-sustaining.
Marine Ice Cliff Instability (MICI): This hypothesized mechanism posits that when tall, unsupported ice cliffs—exposed after the loss of buttressing ice shelves—exceed a certain height (around 90–100 meters above sea level), they may collapse under their own weight. This could trigger a self-sustaining cycle of cliff failure and rapid ice sheet retreat, potentially resulting in multi-meter sea level rise per century. While the exact likelihood and timescales of MICI are still debated, the possibility of such abrupt, catastrophic ice loss adds significant uncertainty and risk to future projections.

Both studies emphasize a critical point: there is a substantial lag between atmospheric warming and the full response of the ice sheets. This means that even if greenhouse gas emissions were halted immediately, several meters of sea level rise are already “locked in” over the coming centuries due to processes already set in motion. The paleoclimate record from the North Sea, with its evidence of sudden, multi-meter pulses of sea level rise, underscores that these changes can occur not just gradually but in abrupt surges.

Furthermore, the current rates of ice mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica are already accelerating. Observations show that the WAIS, in particular, is losing mass at rates that, if sustained or increased, could lead to rapid deglaciation scenarios. The loss of ice shelves through processes such as long-term thinning, basal melting, and surface ponding makes the remaining ice more vulnerable to collapse, and the removal of these buttressing shelves can dramatically speed up glacier flow and grounding line retreat.

In summary, the modern parallels to past episodes of rapid sea level rise are clear and deeply concerning. The feedback mechanisms identified in both Greenland and Antarctica have the potential to unleash non-linear, large-scale ice loss, committing the planet to significant and possibly abrupt sea level rise. These processes, already underway, highlight the urgent (and persistently ignored) need for both aggressive mitigation and robust adaptation strategies, as the window to prevent the most extreme outcomes continues to narrow.

III. The Inadequacy of Current Climate Targets

The Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global temperature rise to +1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is widely regarded as the “safe” threshold for avoiding catastrophic climate impacts. However, both Stokes et al. (2025) and Hijma et al. (2025) present compelling evidence that this target is dangerously insufficient, particularly when it comes to sea level rise and ice sheet stability.

Stokes et al. (2025) make clear that even at today’s warming of approximately +1.2°C, the world is already committed to substantial ice loss from both Greenland and Antarctica. Their analysis of paleoclimate analogs, combined with contemporary ice sheet modeling, shows that the thresholds for triggering irreversible feedbacks—such as surface elevation feedbacks on Greenland and marine ice sheet instability in West Antarctica—may already have been crossed or are perilously close. Once these processes are initiated, they are largely self-sustaining and continue to drive ice loss and sea level rise for centuries or even millennia, regardless of future emissions reductions.

Moreover, Stokes et al. highlight the dangers of “overshoot” scenarios, in which global temperatures temporarily exceed the 1.5°C target before eventually being brought back down through mitigation or carbon removal. Their findings indicate that each decade spent above 1.5°C adds a measurable and irreversible increment to long-term sea level rise, even if temperatures are later reduced. This is because the physical processes governing ice sheet disintegration operate on much longer timescales than the political or economic cycles that drive emissions. Once critical thresholds are crossed, the resulting ice loss cannot simply be reversed by cooling the climate; the system is committed to a new, higher equilibrium sea level that may take thousands of years to stabilize.

The early Holocene record, as reconstructed by Hijma et al. (2025), reinforces this conclusion. Their high-resolution North Sea peat data show that even relatively modest and sustained increases in global temperature—far below the levels projected for the coming centuries—were sufficient to unleash rapid, multi-meter pulses of sea level rise. These events were not gradual or easily managed; they fundamentally reshaped coastlines, submerged vast areas of habitable land, and forced large-scale human migrations. The implication is that the Earth system’s response to warming is highly sensitive and nonlinear, with the potential for abrupt and irreversible changes even under seemingly moderate climate scenarios.

Perhaps most troubling, both studies emphasize that the timescales for ice sheet regrowth and sea level stabilization are measured in millennia, not decades or centuries. This means that the impacts of decisions made today—whether to allow further warming, to overshoot targets, or to delay mitigation—will reverberate for countless generations. The feedbacks that drove early Holocene sea level rise are not relics of the past; they are reactivating under current conditions, and their consequences will be effectively permanent on any human timescale.

In summary, the integrated evidence from Stokes et al. and Hijma et al. reveals that the Paris Agreement’s targets are scientifically inadequate for preventing dangerous sea level rise. The Earth system’s response to warming is not gradual, linear, or easily reversible. Instead, it is characterized by thresholds, feedbacks, and long-term commitments that demand far more urgent and aggressive action than current international goals and policies provide.

IV. The Cascading Impacts on Industrial Civilization

Economic and Infrastructural Collapse

The direct impacts of sea level rise—flooded cities, submerged infrastructure, and lost agricultural land—are well known, but the integration of recent studies reveals the alarming speed and scale at which these impacts can accumulate. If early Holocene rates of 8–9 mm/year are matched or exceeded in the coming centuries, as paleoclimate evidence and some modern projections warn, the world could see a meter or more of sea level rise within a human lifetime. This scenario would have profound and far-reaching consequences for industrial civilization.

Ports and Trade: Major ports, through which 90% of global trade flows, are concentrated in low-lying coastal zones. A meter or more of sea level rise would render many of these ports inoperable, disrupting global supply chains and causing cascading failures in international commerce.
Real Estate and Infrastructure: Trillions of dollars’ worth of coastal real estate could become submerged or uninsurable, with recent studies projecting that the economic costs to coastal cities could exceed $3 trillion by the end of this century. The costs of maintaining, repairing, or relocating infrastructure—including roads, bridges, and utilities—will skyrocket, straining municipal and national budgets.
Energy Systems: Refineries, power plants, and other critical energy infrastructure are disproportionately located near coastlines for access to shipping and cooling water. Rising seas and increased flooding threaten to disrupt energy production and distribution, increasing the risk of blackouts and fuel shortages.
Agriculture and Water: Fertile deltas and estuaries, which support hundreds of millions of people, are at risk of inundation and saltwater intrusion, leading to the loss of arable land and the contamination of freshwater supplies. This could trigger food crises and mass displacement in some of the world’s most densely populated regions.

Social and Political Destabilization

The loss of habitable land and economic assets will not be evenly distributed, amplifying existing inequalities. As Stokes et al. (2025) note, each centimeter of sea level rise can displace a million people. The early Holocene saw the abandonment of entire regions such as Doggerland; today, similar displacement would occur on a scale unprecedented in human history, potentially affecting hundreds of millions of people. This mass migration would strain social services, increase competition for resources, and heighten the risk of humanitarian crises and conflict over dwindling land and water.

Insurance and Financial Systems: Insurance markets are already retreating from high-risk coastal areas, and a collapse of these markets could trigger housing market crashes and broader fiscal crises. As the costs of defending or relocating infrastructure outpace available resources, governments will be forced into triage decisions, deepening social divisions and unrest.
Urban Vulnerability: By 2050, up to 800 million people could be living in cities at risk from sea level rise and coastal flooding, with economic costs to cities alone projected to reach $1 trillion by mid-century. Cities like New York, Miami, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dhaka are especially vulnerable, facing both asset losses and large populations at risk of displacement.

Geopolitical Flashpoints

The melting of polar ice is not only a threat to existing centers of power but also opens new frontiers for resource extraction and geopolitical competition. The Arctic is rapidly becoming a zone of military and economic contest as nations vie for control over newly accessible oil, gas, and shipping lanes. Meanwhile, low-lying island nations and coastal megacities face existential threats, with little recourse but to seek international aid or, in the worst case, abandon their territories altogether.

Regional Shifts: As coastal regions decline, some inland areas may see relative economic gains as production and population shift away from flood-prone zones. However, this redistribution is unlikely to offset the massive global losses and will bring its own challenges, including infrastructure needs and social integration for climate migrants.
International Tensions: The displacement of large populations and the scramble for new resources could fuel international tensions, particularly in regions where borders are already contested or where resources are scarce.

In sum, the cascading impacts of sea level rise—economic, social, and geopolitical—threaten to undermine the foundations of industrial civilization. The speed at which these impacts could unfold, as demonstrated by both paleoclimate analogs and emerging scientific projections, underscores the urgent (and persistently ignored) need for comprehensive adaptation and mitigation strategies at every level of society.

V. The Adaptation Mirage and the Limits of Engineering

Both Stokes et al. (2025) and Hijma et al. (2025) express deep skepticism about the long-term viability of relying on engineering solutions—such as seawalls, levees, pumps, and barriers—to keep pace with accelerating sea level rise. While these measures can provide temporary protection and buy time for vulnerable communities, their effectiveness diminishes as the rate and magnitude of sea level rise increase. The cost of defending every vulnerable coastline is not only prohibitive but also subject to diminishing returns, especially as many cities are also contending with land subsidence, which can cause local relative sea levels to rise even faster than the global average.

Recent engineering experience and scientific analysis reinforce these concerns. Hard infrastructure like seawalls and levees can create a false sense of security, encouraging further development in at-risk areas—a phenomenon known as the “Safe Development Paradox.” When such defenses are eventually overtopped or breached by extreme events, the resulting damage is often even greater because more assets and people have been concentrated behind the barriers. Moreover, the maintenance costs for these structures escalate over time, and their design lifespans may be outstripped by the accelerating pace of sea level rise. For example, static, one-time investments in coastal defenses may prove inadequate if sea levels rise faster than projected, leading to costly retrofits or failures.

Flexible, adaptive approaches—such as incrementally raising seawalls or updating flood management strategies in response to observed changes—can be more cost-effective and reduce the risk of catastrophic outcomes. However, even these dynamic strategies have limits, especially as high-end projections for sea level rise approach or exceed a meter by 2100. In many cases, especially in low-lying or subsiding areas, the technical, financial, and social challenges of perpetual defense become insurmountable.

The paleoclimate record underscores the danger of overreliance on engineered defenses. Once thresholds are crossed, the pace of change can rapidly accelerate, overwhelming even the best-prepared societies. The early Holocene saw entire landscapes disappear beneath the sea in a matter of centuries, a rate of change that would outstrip the capacity of any modern engineering project to keep pace.

Given these realities, managed retreat—abandoning the most vulnerable areas in a planned and coordinated way—emerges as a necessary, if politically and socially challenging, adaptation strategy. Managed retreat involves relocating people, assets, and infrastructure away from high-risk zones, often through buyout programs, zoning changes, and restoration of natural coastal buffers. While this approach can be contentious and disruptive, it is increasingly recognized as the only viable long-term solution for many communities facing chronic inundation and escalating disaster risk.

Implementing managed retreat at scale requires significant political will, social consensus, and massive investment—all of which are often in short supply. Public resistance, legal hurdles, and the emotional and cultural ties people have to their homes present formidable obstacles. Successful examples of managed retreat, such as those in parts of New Zealand, Hawaii, and the Caribbean, demonstrate that with careful planning, community engagement, and supportive policies, relocation can be an opportunity to redesign safer, more resilient, and even more equitable coastal communities. However, these cases remain the exception rather than the rule, and most adaptation efforts worldwide still focus on protection and accommodation rather than retreat.

In summary, while engineering solutions will remain part of the adaptation toolkit, the accelerating pace and scale of sea level rise revealed by both paleoclimate and modern science mean that they cannot be the sole or ultimate answer. Societies must confront the difficult (and mostly ignored) reality that some places will need to be abandoned, and that proactive, well-planned managed retreat may offer the best chance to reduce long-term losses and build resilience in the face of an inexorably rising sea.

VI. Lessons from Doggerland: The Human Cost of Inaction

The drowning of Doggerland, as reconstructed by Hijma et al. (2025), stands as a powerful cautionary tale for our time. Doggerland was once a vast, fertile landscape stretching between present-day Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, serving as a crucial corridor for human migration and cultural exchange between continental Europe and the British Isles.Archaeological finds—including stone tools, animal bones, and even human footprints—demonstrate that Doggerland supported thriving Mesolithic communities, with abundant resources that encouraged both permanent and semi-permanent settlements.

As the last Ice Age ended and global temperatures rose, melting glaciers caused sea levels to rise steadily. Between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, Doggerland was gradually inundated, breaking up into a series of low-lying islands before finally slipping beneath the waves of the North Sea.This transformation was not a single, sudden event but a drawn-out process punctuated by episodes of rapid change, such as those triggered by meltwater pulses and possibly catastrophic events like the Storegga Slide tsunami around 6200 BCE. The submergence of Doggerland ultimately cut off Britain from the European continent, fundamentally altering the geography and human history of the region.

The archaeological and geological evidence suggests that the people of Doggerland were forced to adapt, migrate, or perish as their homeland disappeared. Some may have moved to higher ground, contributing to the spread of Neolithic culture and agriculture in the British Isles.Others likely faced hardship, loss of resources, and the trauma of displacement. The gradual but relentless encroachment of the sea would have repeatedly upended lives, destroyed settlements, and erased entire landscapes from human memory.

Today, we face a similar reckoning, but on a vastly larger scale. The modern world’s coastal cities, deltas, and low-lying nations are home to hundreds of millions—far more than the Mesolithic populations of Doggerland. The difference, however, is that we have forewarning. High-resolution paleoclimate data and modern modeling now allow us to anticipate the risks and visualize the potential futures that unchecked sea level rise could bring. The lessons of Doggerland are not just academic: they are a direct warning about the consequences of inaction.

Yet, knowledge alone is not enough. The inertia of the Earth system—where ice sheet responses to warming unfold over centuries or millennia—means that much of the coming sea level rise is already set in motion. At the same time, the inertia of human systems—political, economic, and social—slows our ability to respond effectively. Delays in adaptation, denial of risk, and the immense challenge of relocating populations and infrastructure all threaten to repeat the tragedies of the past, but on a scale never before witnessed.

Doggerland reminds us that entire societies can be lost to the sea, their stories only rediscovered millennia later by archaeologists dredging the seabed. The fate of Doggerland’s people—forced to migrate, adapt, or disappear—foreshadows the stark choices facing coastal populations today and the dire consequences for delaying action.

VII. Predicting the Timing and Nature of Collapse

The Next Century: From Chronic Crisis to Systemic Failure

If current emissions trends persist, both Hijma et al. (2025) and Stokes et al. (2025) indicate that the world will move from a period of chronic, somewhat manageable coastal challenges to an era of acute, systemic failures—potentially within a single century. The early Holocene’s rapid sea level rise pulses, as revealed by the North Sea peat records, serve as a sobering analogue for what could occur if the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets cross their respective tipping points. These tipping points are thresholds beyond which ice loss accelerates rapidly and becomes largely unstoppable, even if temperatures stabilize or decline later.

By 2100, a global mean sea level rise of one meter or more is plausible—well within the range of high-end projections, especially if non-linear ice sheet responses are triggered. This level of rise would have profound, cascading consequences:

Overwhelming Urban Defenses: Existing coastal defenses in major cities such as New York, Shanghai, Mumbai, Jakarta, London, and Miami would be overwhelmed. Many of these cities are already experiencing regular tidal flooding, and a meter of additional sea level would render current infrastructure obsolete, exposing millions to chronic inundation and storm surges.
Mass Displacement: Conservative estimates suggest that tens to hundreds of millions of people would be forced to relocate from low-lying coasts, river deltas, and island nations. The logistical, economic, and social challenges of such mass migration are unprecedented in human history, with the potential to destabilize entire regions.
Cascading System Failures: Food production would be disrupted as fertile deltas and coastal farmlands are lost to salinization and flooding. Energy systems—particularly those reliant on coastal infrastructure—would become increasingly vulnerable, and the global trade network would be thrown into chaos as ports are submerged or rendered inoperable. These interconnected failures could ripple through supply chains, leading to shortages, inflation, and widespread hardship.
Fiscal Collapse: The costs of defending, relocating, or abandoning coastal infrastructure would strain national and municipal budgets to the breaking point. Insurance markets could collapse, property values could plummet, and the fiscal solvency of states—especially those with large coastal populations and assets—could be undermined, triggering broader economic crises.

The transition from chronic to acute crisis would not be a singular, dramatic event but a series of escalating shocks—each one eroding the resilience of social, economic, and political systems. As the frequency and severity of coastal disasters increase, the ability of governments and communities to respond effectively will diminish, accelerating the slide toward systemic failure.

The Long View: Irreversible Transformation

Looking beyond the next century, the paleoclimate record and current modeling suggest that several meters of sea level rise are all but inevitable over the coming centuries to millennia, even if emissions are sharply reduced. The inertia of the Earth system means that the processes set in motion today will continue to unfold long after current generations are gone.

Redrawing the World’s Map: Multi-meter sea level rise would permanently redraw global coastlines, submerging entire nations—such as the Maldives, Tuvalu, and parts of Bangladesh—and erasing iconic cities and cultural heritage sites. The loss of coastal land would force a reorganization of human civilization on a scale not seen since the end of the last Ice Age, when the flooding of Doggerland and other lowlands fundamentally altered the course of human history.
Permanent Loss of Infrastructure and Livelihoods: Ports, airports, industrial zones, and entire cities would be lost to the sea, along with the livelihoods and identities tied to those places. The economic and psychological toll of such loss is difficult to quantify but would be immense.
Ecological Shifts: The transformation of coastlines would also have profound ecological consequences, altering habitats for countless species and disrupting the delicate balance of coastal and marine ecosystems.

The nature and pace of this collapse will be shaped by the actions taken in the coming decades. If humanity acts decisively to limit warming, aggressively reduce emissions, and invest in adaptation and managed retreat, the transition may be managed—painful, costly, and disruptive, but not necessarily catastrophic. Societies could adapt to new coastlines, develop resilient infrastructure, and find ways to support displaced populations.

However, if action is delayed or insufficient (delay, deny, and obfuscate has been and continues to be the playbook of corporate capitalism), then the collapse is likely to be chaotic, violent, and irreversible. The combination of accelerating sea level rise, social and political instability, and economic breakdown will lead to a future where large regions become ungovernable, humanitarian crises become chronic, and the achievements of industrial civilization are swept away by the rising tide.

References:

Hijma, M. P., et al. (2025). Global sea-level rise in the early Holocene revealed from North Sea peats. Nature 639, 652–657. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08769-7
Stokes, Chris R., et al. (2025). Warming of +1.5 °C is too high for polar ice sheets. Nature: Communications Earth & Environment 6, 351. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w

Nuclear Infrastructure and Radioactive Threats in a Post-Collapse World

01 Tuesday Apr 2025

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

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500 Year Floods, Akademik Lomonosov, Chernobyl Sarcophagus, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Electricity Blackouts, Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), Extreme Weather Events, Floating Nuclear Reactors, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Genetic Erosion, Global Warming, Heatwaves, Human Bottleneck, Human Extinction, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Meltdown, Nuclear Waste, Radioactive Waste, Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, Sea Level Rise, Sibirskaya-1

Silent Sentinels of Doom: The Nuclear Plants That Will Outlive Us

Humanity’s nuclear legacy stands as one of the most dangerous and long-lasting threats to our species’ survival in a collapsing world. With 440 operational reactors, 223 permanently shuttered reactors, and over 435,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste stored in vulnerable facilities worldwide (IAEA, 2023), we have created a radioactive sword of Damocles that hangs over future generations. As climate chaos destabilizes institutions and infrastructure, these nuclear sites risk catastrophic failure that could render vast regions uninhabitable for centuries, compounding the existential threats of biodiversity collapse and climate feedback loops. Recent studies from 2023-2025 reveal even greater risks than previously understood, from climate-vulnerable coastal reactors to Russia’s dangerous floating nuclear plants and new evidence about the precarious state of Chernobyl’s containment.

Coastal and Inland Reactors: The Dangers of Rising Seas, Floods, & Droughts

The siting of nuclear reactors has created what experts now recognize as one of the most serious climate vulnerabilities of the 21st century. Recent studies project that over 40% of the global nuclear fleet, situated in coastal zones, faces escalating threats from sea-level rise (Portugal-Pereira, Esteban, and Araújo 2024), with the IAEA identifying 40+ priority sites (IAEA 2023). Over 60% of U.S. plants are in high-flood zones, and 20% face significant wildfire risks. Coastal facilities, like California’s Diablo Canyon, confront sea level rise projections of up to 1.2 feet by 2050 (U.S. GAO 2024). Meanwhile, storms and wildfires disrupt operations through grid instability, debris-clogged intakes, and worker safety risks, with U.S. NPPs losing 190 production days to weather events from 2011–2020 (EPRI 2023, 7, 16–17).

As of 2024, nearly 70% of global reactors are now operating beyond their original 30-year lifespans, with dozens pushing 40+ years of operation, creating a perfect storm of deferred decommissioning and mounting safety risks. By 2050, almost all U.S. nuclear reactors will have reached their 60 year maximum expected life (Alley and Alley 2014). In a world teetering on collapse, the glacial pace of nuclear decommissioning—stretching 30 to 100 years for a single reactor—creates a dangerous paradox: humanity’s most fragile institutions now guard its most persistent hazards, as radioactive husks outlast the civilization that built them.

A 2023 study in Energy and Environmental Science projects that under RCP8.5 (high-emissions) climate scenarios, 38–45 coastal reactors (8–10% of the global fleet) will face Category 4+ tropical cyclone risks by 2070—exceeding original design standards in 22 cases (Schmidt et al., 2023). These findings build on the hard lessons of Fukushima, where in 2011 a tsunami overwhelmed defenses and caused triple meltdowns that released 520 petabecquerels (PBq) of radiation (NAS, 2014). In a post-collapse world where maintenance and disaster response have ceased, similar accidents would occur with terrifying frequency, each one poisoning groundwater and marine ecosystems with long-lived isotopes like cesium-137 and strontium-90 that remain dangerous for centuries.

The threat extends beyond simple flooding. Prolonged heatwaves and droughts – already forcing reactor shutdowns in France during their 2022 heat emergency when Rhône River temperatures became too warm for cooling (UNECE, 2019) – will become more severe and frequent. Droughts and water scarcity, particularly in regions like the U.S. Southwest, could force 61% of U.S. plants into high-stress conditions by 2030, jeopardizing cooling capacity (EPRI 2023, 15).

The risks also extend beyond reactors themselves to the precarious storage of nuclear waste. Spent nuclear fuel (SNF) is one of the most radioactive human-made materials, requiring meticulous containment for millennia. Two-thirds of SNF is stored in pools of water on-site at the very nuclear plants where they were used, presenting a very exposed target for terrorists, natural disasters, and industrial accidents. In a collapsed society without grid power or active cooling methods, spent nuclear fuel pools (SFPs) can boil dry within 7–10 days, exposing radioactive fuel rods. Without circulating water, temperatures rise rapidly, exceeding 500–1,000°C, damaging the zirconium cladding. Zirconium burns at 900°C+, especially in air (even more aggressively than in steam). Under such a scenario, studies project cesium-137 releases of up to 100× the Hiroshima bomb—potentially contaminating thousands of square kilometers. These fires would create radioactive plumes that could contaminate entire regions downwind, rendering them uninhabitable for generations.

A study of such a scenario found that a hypothetical spent fuel pool fire at South Korea’s Kori-3 reactor could release catastrophic levels of cesium-137 (Cs-137), contaminating up to 54,000 km² of South Korea and displacing 24 million people, with significant cross-border impacts in North Korea, Japan, and China depending on weather patterns (Kang et al. 2017). Using the HYSPLIT atmospheric dispersion model, the study simulated Cs-137 releases under historical 2015 meteorological data, revealing that dense-packed fuel storage—common in South Korean reactors—amplifies risks by enabling zirconium cladding fires and hydrogen explosions, which could disperse 75% of the pool’s Cs-137 inventory (Kang et al. 2017). Compared to Fukushima, where Cs-137 forced 160,000 evacuations, the Kori-3 scenario highlights exponentially greater dangers due to higher spent fuel inventories. The authors urge transitioning older spent fuel to dry-cask storage and maintaining low-density pool storage to mitigate disaster risks (Kang et al. 2017).

SFPs at nuclear facilities present critical vulnerabilities to radiological terrorism, with potential Cs-137 releases exceeding Chernobyl’s impact by orders of magnitude due to their high radioactivity inventories and less robust structural protections compared to reactor cores (Zhang 2003). A sabotage-induced loss of cooling could ignite zirconium cladding fires, releasing up to 100% of a pool’s Cs-137—a 400-ton SFP, for instance, holds 10 times more long-lived radioactivity than a reactor core, risking contamination of 95,000 km² (over nine times Chernobyl’s affected area) from a 50% release (Zhang 2003). Attack vectors include aircraft crashes (45% breach likelihood for large planes), anti-tank missiles, or truck bombs, with reprocessing plants like France’s La Hague—housing Cs-137 inventories 280 times Chernobyl’s—posing amplified risks (Zhang 2003). Zhang advocates hardening SFP structures, transitioning to dry-cask storage, enforcing no-fly zones, and strengthening IAEA security standards to mitigate catastrophic scenarios (Zhang 2003).

Mark Leyse (2024) warns that densely packed spent nuclear fuel pools in the U.S. pose catastrophic risks, with zirconium cladding on fuel rods capable of igniting if coolant water is lost—releasing up to 24 megacuries of cesium-137, ten times Chernobyl’s release, and contaminating thousands of square miles (Leyse 2024). While the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) dismisses these risks by focusing on ultra-rare earthquakes (e.g., 1-in-60,000-year events), Leyse argues that grid collapse—from solar storms, cyberattacks, or physical sabotage—is a far likelier trigger, potentially disabling backup cooling systems and leading to nationwide meltdowns and fires (Leyse 2024). For instance, solar superstorms like the 2012 near-miss event could induce currents strong enough to melt critical transformers, causing months-long blackouts, while synchronized drone or cyberattacks (e.g., Russia’s 2015 Ukraine grid hack) could cripple infrastructure (Leyse 2024). Despite the NRC’s inaction, transferring spent fuel to dry cask storage—already mandated during decommissioning—could reduce cesium inventories by 50% and decay heat by 30% at a cost of just $5.4 billion today, a fraction of the incalculable human and economic toll of radiological contamination (Leyse 2024). Leyse urges Congress to mandate this transition, as societal collapse during prolonged grid failure would render emergency responses impossible, leaving “multiple nuclear disasters” to unfold unchecked (Leyse 2024).

Floating Nuclear Reactors: Russia’s Dangerous Experiment

While most analyses focus on land-based reactors, Russia’s development of floating nuclear power plants (FNPPs) introduces a terrifying new dimension to nuclear risk. The Akademik Lomonosov, the world’s only operational FNPP, began providing power to Pevek in Russia’s Far East in 2020 with plans for four additional floating reactors by 2035 (Rosatom, 2025). These mobile reactors are frequently excluded from global reactor counts, representing a hidden escalation of nuclear risk.

FNPPs pose unique dangers because of their locations in fragile Arctic and coastal zones where storms or sabotage could cause meltdowns in remote regions completely lacking emergency response capabilities. AMAP’s 2021 Arctic Climate Update notes accelerated corrosion in Arctic infrastructure due to reduced ice cover. Rosatom’s 2023 Technical Bulletin mentions “increased maintenance needs” for Akademik Lomonosov. In a collapsing world where maintenance ceases, these floating reactors could become drifting radiological time bombs, potentially contaminating vast stretches of coastline or even sinking and creating underwater radiation hazards that persist for millennia.

The Chernobyl Sarcophagus: A War-Torn Tomb of Radioactive Peril

The steel-clad sarcophagus entombing Chernobyl’s ruined Reactor 4 was designed to last a century. Instead, Russia’s invasion has turned this fragile containment system into a ticking time bomb. What was once humanity’s most ambitious nuclear containment project has become a monument to wartime recklessness—its structural integrity sabotaged, its monitoring systems compromised, and its radioactive contents left increasingly vulnerable to the elements.

The Occupation’s Radioactive Scars (2022-2023)

The study “Nuclear Threat Resulting from Russian Military Occupation of Chornobyl Exclusion Zone” by Nosovskyi et al assesses the nuclear safety risks and radiological threats arising from Russia’s military occupation of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (ChEZ) in February–March 2022. Published in atw – International Journal for Nuclear Power (May 2022), the study details vulnerabilities such as structural instability of containment systems, disruption of power and safety protocols, forest fires dispersing radioactive isotopes, and violations of international nuclear security conventions.

Brief List of Threats Described in the Study:

Structural Damage to Containment Systems: The aging Shelter Object and New Safe Confinement (NSC) are vulnerable to military attacks, explosions, or aircraft crashes, risking collapse and massive radioactive releases akin to the 1986 disaster.
Loss of Electrical Power: Prolonged blackouts (e.g., 125 hours in March 2022) jeopardized cooling systems for spent nuclear fuel pools, risking overheating, hydrogen explosions from radiolysis, and loss of ventilation/radiation monitoring.
Forest Fires in Contaminated Areas: Uncontrolled fires (March 11–18, 2022) burned radioactively contaminated vegetation, aerosolizing and dispersing isotopes like $^{137} Cs$ and $^{90} Sr$ , threatening Ukraine, Belarus, and Europe.
Radiation Exposure to Military Personnel: Soldiers digging trenches in highly contaminated zones (e.g., Red Forest) faced acute radiation doses (>250 mSv), leading to hospitalization with radiation sickness.
Disruption of Safety Systems: Occupation disabled radiation monitoring networks, firefighting capabilities, and communication, hindering emergency responses.
Shelling/Explosions Near Nuclear Facilities: Ammunition storage and military activity near ChEZ facilities risked damaging spent fuel storage sites (SNFSF-1/SNFSF-2), potentially releasing fissile materials exceeding the 1986 accident’s scale.
Criticality Risks: Disturbance of spent fuel assemblies (e.g., via explosions) could alter spacing, creating conditions for unintended nuclear reactions.
Staff Hostage Conditions: Exhausted, psychologically traumatized personnel worked under armed supervision, increasing risks of operational errors.
Cooling Pond Degradation: Dropping water levels exposed radioactive sludge, raising risks of wind-driven contamination.
Violations of International Conventions: Occupation breached IAEA’s seven nuclear safety pillars and the Convention on Nuclear Material Protection, endangering global security.

Living with the Consequences:

Decades after the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, a new threat looms: wildfires in these regions risk resuspending radioactive particles into the air, endangering ecosystems and human health. Each summer in Ukraine brings the chance for increasingly severe wildfires. A groundbreaking study by an international team of scientists (Ager et al. 2019) reveals where these fires are most likely to ignite, spread, and unleash radioactive plumes—and how to stop them. In August 2020, wildfires burned intensely for over 90 minutes, releasing dangerous isotopes like cesium-137, strontium-90, and plutonium into the atmosphere, with radiation levels reportedly spiking 16 times above normal near the blazes. Smoke choked Kyiv, and monitors as far as Norway detected elevated cesium, though the full scale of contamination remains uncertain due to COVID-19 restrictions that prevented on-site measurements during the crisis. These fires underscore the collision of climate-driven disasters with Chernobyl’s radioactive legacy, as rising temperatures and dry conditions fuel seasonal blazes that risk remobilizing long-buried toxins from the 1986 disaster (Little 2020).

Wildfires in Chernobyl’s abandoned forests could unleash a “second nuclear disaster,” warns Evangeliou et al. (2014). Modeling three scenarios—10%, 50%, and 100% of contaminated forests burning—the study projects radioactive cesium-137 (¹³⁷Cs) plumes dispersing across Europe, emitting 0.29–4.2 PBq of radiation. High-risk zones include densely populated Central and Eastern Europe, with 10–170 potential cancer fatalities from inhalation and contaminated food chains. While direct ecological harm is minimal, fungi bioaccumulation threatens local diets. The authors rank large fires as International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) level 6 accidents, comparable to historic disasters like Kyshtym. Climate change and political instability in Ukraine exacerbate risks, demanding urgent forest management to avert a preventable crisis (Evangeliou et al. 2014).

A Shortened Doomsday Clock

A recent drone strike on February 14, 2025 critically damaged the protective arch over Chernobyl’s reactor, leaving the structure unable to fully contain radioactive materials and prompting urgent calls for international reconstruction efforts. Experts warn that without swift repairs, the compromised shield could undermine decades of work to prevent further radioactive contamination from the 1986 disaster (Grzmiel 2025). In a post-collapse environment where maintenance has ceased, Chernobyl’s radioactive demons will inevitably be released back into a world incapable of containing them; but that time may come much sooner.

An Evolving Frontline (2022-Ongoing)

Russia’s impact on Ukraine’s nuclear facilities was not confined to Chernobyl. Russian forces have weaponized nuclear safety by militarizing the ZNPP, creating risks of accidental catastrophe. The IAEA has repeatedly condemned these actions as violations of international nuclear safety protocols. According to the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (n.d.), Ukraine’s nuclear power infrastructure remains under close scrutiny due to ongoing geopolitical risks:

2022

March 4: Russian forces seize control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) after shelling the facility. A fire breaks out in a training building, but reactors remain intact (IAEA 2022; BBC 2022).
August 5–6: Shelling near the ZNPP damages radiation sensors, a nitrogen-oxygen station, and power lines, prompting warnings from the IAEA (Reuters 2022).
August 25: The ZNPP is temporarily disconnected from Ukraine’s power grid for the first time due to shelling, raising fears of a potential meltdown (IAEA 2022).
September 1: IAEA inspectors arrive at the ZNPP after weeks of negotiations. They report structural damage but no immediate radiation threat (UN News 2022).
September 11: The ZNPP’s last operational reactor is shut down due to shelling risks, transitioning the plant to “cold shutdown” mode (IAEA 2022).

2023

May 22: Russian forces reportedly withdraw some personnel from the ZNPP, raising concerns about operational safety (Kyiv Independent 2023).
June 22: The Kakhovka Dam (critical for cooling the ZNPP) is destroyed, threatening the plant’s water supply. The IAEA calls for urgent safeguards (BBC 2023).
July 4–5: Explosions occur near the ZNPP, damaging windows and infrastructure. Russia and Ukraine accuse each other of shelling (Reuters 2023).

2024

April 7: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that drone attacks struck reactor Unit 6 at the ZNPP.
August 11: The IAEA team at ZNPP reported that Russian operators informed them of an alleged drone attack on one of the plant’s cooling towers.
August 26: Widespread strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, including the South Ukraine NPP and the Rivne NPP, caused power outages and led to the temporary shutdown or disconnection of reactor units.
November 16-17: Attacks on four substations and power lines prompted all operating nuclear power plants to reduce power output, including the South Ukraine NPP.
November 17: A large-scale Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s electricity system caused significant damage to electric substations, including those vital to the operation of nuclear power plants.
December 10: An IAEA vehicle was hit by a Russian drone while transporting observers to the ZNPP.

2025

February 14: A Russian drone struck the roof of the New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure at Chernobyl. The IAEA said that both the outer and inner cladding of the NSC’s arch had been breached, but that radiation levels were stable.

Post-Collapse Meltdowns: New Modeling Reveals Greater Risks

Recent advanced simulations paint an even grimmer picture of what nuclear infrastructure failure would look like in a collapsing civilization. Nuclear reactors require continuous cooling even after shutdown, and in a power grid collapse scenario, backup diesel generators (typically with 4–8 hours of fuel) and batteries (lasting ~8 hours in older plants) are the last line of defense to keep nuclear fuel rods cool via water circulated by pumps. If grid power isn’t restored within this window, fuel pools and reactor cores risk overheating, potentially leading to meltdowns. The coolant water will boil and evaporate away. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) mandates 4–8 hours of backup power for reactors, assuming grid restoration within that window. Newer plants, like the AP1000 design, can operate for 72 hours without intervention. A 2023 study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) explored how electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) — including those generated by nuclear detonations or portable microwave weapons — could cripple power plants by overwhelming critical electronics, transformers, and control systems (ORNL 2023). The research team, collaborating with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, modeled EMP impacts using ambient electromagnetic signals and simulations, revealing vulnerabilities in low-voltage components like inverters and motors. Their findings emphasize that modern grid infrastructure, including solar arrays and wind turbines, is particularly exposed due to reliance on semiconductors and inadequate surge protection. The study recommends enhanced shielding, grounding, and facility design to mitigate cascading failures that could trigger prolonged blackouts (ORNL 2023). No U.S. plant is designed to handle indefinite blackouts. The NRC’s 2023 review focuses on enhancing battery life and portable generators but doesn’t address global collapse.

The other temporary method for storing SNF is in dry casks which are massive structures (50-200 tons each) made of thick steel and concrete, each one holding 15–20 metric tons of spent fuel. Only a third of America’s spent nuclear fuel (SNF) is stored in dry casks. Manufacturing, monitoring, and maintaining of these casks incur significant long-term expenses. Dry casks were typically intended to safely store spent nuclear fuel for 40 to 100 years. This timeframe bridges the gap between reactor discharge and permanent disposal in a deep geological repository. (“Reactor discharge” refers to the removal of spent nuclear fuel from a nuclear reactor after it has been used to generate energy). However, delays in establishing permanent repositories have led to their use extending beyond original expectations, raising concerns about aging effects not fully studied in original design (e.g., material fatigue, seal degradation). Over 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel are currently in storage nationwide, with most now in dry casks. The U.S. adds 300–400 new casks annually due to ongoing reactor operations and the lack of a permanent disposal site. The US currently stores about 3,800 dry casks and by 2050, the total could exceed 10,000 casks if no permanent repository is established. That future number does not take into consideration for any future build-out of new nuclear plants.

A Stanford University and University of British Columbia study challenges the purported benefits of small modular reactors (SMRs), revealing that these next-generation nuclear systems may produce significantly more radioactive waste than conventional reactors (Krall et al., 2022). Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 31, 2022, the research analyzed three SMR designs and found that their compact size leads to increased neutron leakage, irradiating structural materials and generating up to 30 times more waste by volume compared to traditional plants. This includes at least ninefold higher quantities of neutron-activated steel and chemically complex spent fuels requiring costly pretreatment (Krall et al., 2022). Lead author Lindsay Krall emphasized that SMRs’ spent fuel is not only bulkier but also more radiotoxic, with plutonium remains retaining 50% higher radiotoxicity after 10,000 years, complicating long-term disposal (Krall et al., 2022). Co-author Rodney Ewing noted that the U.S. lacks a viable geologic repository program, forcing reliance on insecure interim storage as SMR waste accumulates. The study refutes industry claims of cost and waste reduction, urging developers to address these “hidden costs” and prioritize transparent waste management research. With the nuclear industry promoting SMRs as a climate solution, the findings underscore critical environmental and economic trade-offs that could hinder their viability.

The thawing of Arctic permafrost poses a significant threat to nuclear waste containment. Historically, both the Soviet Union and the United States deliberately stored toxic and radioactive materials in permafrost, assuming it would remain permanently frozen (Langer et al. 2023). Rising temperatures now destabilize these sites, risking the release of hazardous substances through compromised infrastructure or hydrological pathways.

Key examples illustrate this risk:

Kraton-3 (Russia): Radioactive byproducts from a 1978 nuclear explosion (Artamonova et al. 2013);
Camp Century (Greenland): Abandoned U.S. military waste, including nuclear coolant (Colgan et al. 2016);
Project Chariot (Alaska): Buried radionuclides from Cold War experiments (O’Neill 2015).

These cases align with Langer et al.’s (2023, p. 2) finding that thawing permafrost “destabilizes foundations and containment structures,” raising disturbing questions about the long-term security of nuclear waste solutions, especially in a world where institutional knowledge and maintenance will disappear.

Health Catastrophe for Survivors

For those who survive the initial collapse of civilization, the health impacts of widespread radioactive contamination would represent a slow-motion extinction event. Acute radiation exposure causes horrific suffering – doses of 5 sieverts (Sv) lead to death within weeks through destruction of the bone marrow and intestinal lining (WHO, 2023). But the greater threat may come from chronic low-dose exposure (0.1 Sv/year) that elevates lifetime cancer risk by 5-10% per sievert while also causing cardiovascular disease, cataracts, and cognitive impairment.

New research reveals that radiation exposure synergizes dangerously with other pollutants that will persist in a post-collapse world. A landmark 2025 Lancet Planetary Health study found that combined exposure to radiation, PFAS, and nanoplastics causes 42-58% greater DNA damage in human cells compared to radiation alone (Zhang et al., 2025). The same study showed a 40% reduction in lymphocyte counts under these combined exposures – a finding with dire implications for survivors who would need functioning immune systems to survive in a pathogen-rich post-collapse environment.

The generational impacts may be even more disturbing. Studies of wildlife in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone show that chronic radiation exposure leads to evolutionary adaptation at a terrible cost – Chernobyl wolves exhibit 15% shorter telomeres and 3 times higher cancer rates than control populations (Science, 2024). While Murase et al. (2019) observed a nationwide increase in neonatal complex congenital heart defect (CHD) surgeries following the Fukushima nuclear accident, Gu et al. (2021) suggest that maternal stress—a common disaster-related factor—may contribute to CHD risk, highlighting the challenge of isolating radiation as a direct cause amid confounding psychosocial stressors. You will have to draw your own conclusions.

Quantifying the Threat: The Scale of Our Nuclear Legacy

The full scope of humanity’s radioactive legacy is difficult to comprehend:

392,000 tons of spent fuel (a 7.8% increase since 2023) sits in temporary storage at reactor sites worldwide (IAEA, 2025)
33 billion curies of long-lived radioactivity, contained within the world’s 392,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste, include enough plutonium-239 to fabricate 44,000 nuclear weapons (based on the 55 grams used in Hiroshima’s device) (International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2023). This toxic legacy grows by 70,000 metric tons per decade as permanent disposal may never come (IAEA, 2025).
4,200 orphaned radioactive sources—a 14% rise since 2021—are now recorded in high-risk medical and industrial sites, with gaps in security enabling potential theft (IAEA, 2023).
1 operational floating reactor (Russia’s Akademik Lomonosov) with 4 more planned, creating new risks in vulnerable Arctic and coastal zones (Rosatom, 2025).

Perhaps most sobering is the timescale of the threat. Plutonium-239, with its 24,100-year half-life, will remain lethally radioactive for 240,000 years – longer than Homo sapiens has existed as a species. This means our nuclear legacy could outlast not just our civilization, but potentially our entire species.

Conclusion: The Millennial-Scale Consequences of Nuclear Hubris

The uncomfortable truth revealed by recent research is that nuclear technology represents a Faustian bargain made without full consideration of its millennial-scale consequences. Floating reactors, decaying sarcophagi, and synergistic health threats underscore nuclear energy’s fundamental incompatibility with a destabilizing world. Even if humanity were to magically mitigate climate change and preserve biodiversity, our nuclear legacy – 240,000 years of plutonium toxicity and counting – remains as a permanent scar on the planet.

In the bottleneck scenario, where civilization fragments and knowledge is lost, these nuclear time bombs will continue ticking. The survivors may find their refuge zones becoming death traps as reactors melt down and waste storage fails. Our radioactive sins, committed in the brief atomic age, could ultimately become the epitaph for our species, a warning to any future intelligent life about the dangers of technological hubris without long-term responsibility.

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Heads-Up! Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

26 Wednesday Jan 2022

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

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6th Mass Extinction, Adam McKay, Antarctic Ice Melt, Anthropogenic Mass Extinction, Arctic Ice Albedo, Arctic Ice Melt, Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Celebrity Worship, Chemical Pollution, Climate Change, Climate Change Feedback Loops, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Commercialization, Commodification of Nature, Cryosphere, Don't Look Up, Doomsday Preppers, Dr. Randall Mindy, Ecological Overshoot, Elon Musk, Fossil Fuel Industry, Global Forest Die-Off, Global Warming, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Interstellar Colonization, Janie Orlean, Jason Orlean, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Kate Dibiasky, Leonardo DiCaprio, Loss of Biodiversity, MAGA rallies, Mark Rylance, Meryl Streep, Persecution of Environmental Activists, Peter Isherwell, Planetary Boundaries, Prof Tim Garrett, Professor Harold R. Wanless, Sea Level Rise, Techno-Fix, Techno-Utopians, Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctic Ice Sheet Melt

“I’m telling you that we’re putting our kids onto a global school bus that will with 98% probability end in a deadly crash.” ~ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of Potsdam Institute

I recently saw the movie ‘Don’t Look Up’ after avoiding it since its release and I must say, that movie mirrors the tragic state of our society to a T. When you see Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio) finally losing his cool, raging against a shallow, celebrity-idolizing, commercialized society on some glib TV talk show, this was not a stretch for the actor (an ardent environmental activist) who simply had to replace the oncoming fictional comet with the asteroid of abrupt climate change currently bearing down on us. At first, no one will listen to the scientist’s warning, not even the President of the United States Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) who is more worried about her polling numbers and keeping her campaign contributors happy than being bothered by an existential threat to civilization. Once tech guru Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) plants a bug in the President’s ear about how the comet could be exploited for its trillions of dollars worth of rare earth minerals, then all bets are off for deflecting the oncoming catastrophe. The creepy Techno-Utopist Isherwell reflects our own society’s blind worship of technology and consumerism as the answer to all its ills, when in reality they are only further alienating us from the natural world that underpins our survival. Throughout the movie, there are beautiful clips of nature that briefly flash across the screen, reminding me of what we are losing in our ongoing sixth mass extinction. Modern man and the havoc he is wreaking on the planet is happening in a microsecond when viewed in geologic time scales, but humans have trouble seeing it because we live an ephemeral existence, easily inured to an ever impoverished world.

Labeling the comet’s collision course with Earth as mere fear-mongering, politicians and TV talking heads manage to politicize the threat amongst the population, hence the title of the movie. Throngs of mindless people attending political rallies while wearing trucker caps with the slogan ‘Don’t Look Up’ reminded me of scenes from the MAGA crowd in thrall to their grift-scheming conman. Those who speak too much about the reality of the approaching comet are ziptied, blinded with a hood over their head, hauled off to an undisclosed location, and compelled to stay quiet by the authorities. In our real world, a fate much worse than that awaits those who oppose fossil fuel companies, miners, loggers, and others who are destroying the planet. Only when the comet and its long tail become clearly visible in the sky do people take the threat seriously, but by then it is too late. Back to reality, there’s no indication that such a tipping point in public consciousness has changed our trajectory towards ecological disintegration and collapse of civilization. Near the end of the movie as the planet-killing comet is colliding with Earth, Dr. Mindy’s family and a few of his colleagues are holding hands at their last supper and Dr. Mindy says, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?” The same can be said of what we are losing in today’s unfolding anthropogenic mass extinction. A thousand species a day, each a product of eons of evolution and designed for a specific purpose, being permanently erased from this planet along with any sort of stable and predictable climate means we are trashing Eden and descending into the hellscape depicted in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. This most recent study confirms past warnings:

“Drastically increased rates of species extinctions and declining abundances of many animal and plant populations are well documented, yet some deny that these phenomena amount to mass extinction,” said Robert Cowie, lead author of the study, in a press release. “This denial is based on a highly biased assessment of the crisis which focuses on mammals and birds and ignores invertebrates, which of course constitute the great majority of biodiversity.”…“Dedicated conservation biologists and conservation agencies are doing what they can, focused mainly on threatened birds and mammals, among which some species may be saved from the extinction that would otherwise ensue,” the paper said. “But we are pessimistic about the fate of most of the Earth’s biodiversity, much of which is going to vanish without us ever knowing of its existence.”…The researchers write that it is crucial to fight against the crisis and manipulating it is an abrogation of moral responsibility.

Of course the ones in charge, blinded by their greedy dream to profit from an oncoming disaster, surreptitiously escape Earth on a rocket ship, cryogenically preserved until they reach a distant Earth-like planet in the Goldilocks Zone of another solar system. This colonization of some other habitable planet by Earth-bound humans is a fetish amongst techno-optimists and futurists, but it is a pipe-dream not only because it is impossible due to basic biological constraints and technological infeasibility but also for the simple reason that if we cannot keep our house in order here on the planet that gave birth to us, we don’t deserve another chance. And for God’s sake, can Elon Musk stop ranting that humans have to get off Earth because all life will be snuffed out after the sun theoretically expands into a giant red star five billion years from now? Just as in the movie, our tech demigods will lead us over the cliff while planning their own getaway to a private underground bunker or second homes far away in some distant country. It is frightening to think that we are only seeing the beginning of this unfolding global ecological apocalypse that will affect every living thing on Earth. Nearly all past mass extinctions have occurred due to a disruption of the carbon cycle, only now it is happening at a rate of speed multiple times faster than previous ones and with humans serving as the architect of their own demise. In the last 500 million years, across 6 mass extinctions and the countless rise and fall of global temperatures and sea levels, the only time the climate changed faster was 66 million years ago when Earth got hit by a 10km asteroid that killed off 75% of all species. Mass extinction events turn freshwater bodies into toxic soup, and we’re seeing the same thing happen today. But fret not, technology will save us and stock prices are up this week, not to mention that our social media rankings are going gangbusters.

It has been said that when civilizations begin to die, they go insane. Perhaps Stoicism and Buddhism are the most useful philosophies in an age where the future is bleak and no one seems to be facing reality. After half a century of dire warnings from noted scientists, numerous Climate ~~Action~~ Inaction Summits (rigged to fail), revelations of decades-old climate studies from Fossil Fuel Corporations themselves proving all along that they knew, and worsening extreme weather events as well as the planet’s quickly disappearing cryosphere (what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic), here is where we stand today:

The world’s insatiable appetite for electricity is setting up a climate disaster

A report published Friday by the International Energy Agency found that global demand for electricity surged 6% in 2021, fueled by a colder winter and the dramatic economic rebound from the pandemic. That drove both prices and carbon emissions to new records.

The growth in demand was particularly intense in China, where it jumped by about 10%…

…Electricity generated by renewables grew by 6% globally last year, while coal-fired generation leaped 9% due to high demand and skyrocketing natural gas prices, which made it look like a more attractive option.

Carbon dioxide emissions from power generation rose 7% as a result, reaching an all-time high after declining the previous two years…

…The IEA found that emissions from the power sector will “remain around the same level from 2021 to 2024,” even though they need to decline “sharply” for the world to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst effects of climate change.

As physicist Tim Garrett has pointed out, “Any new energy source adds impetus to the conversion of raw resources into the stuff of civilization, accelerating growth and future demands for all energy types. Renewables add to the consumption, they do not replace.” Also, gains in energy efficiency are simply supplanted by more growth.

Keep in mind that even if we were to magically reduce our CO2 emissions overnight, the opposite of what is happening, we will never again see the climate we grew up in. It is never returning. Realize that the current level of CO2 equivalent GHGs already exceeds 500 ppm. The increased pace of extreme weather events we are now getting from climate change is shocking even those scientists who predicted it. The Arctic is greening with the treeline advancing northward 40 to 50 meters every year from what was once an annual increase of only a few centimeters. Adding yet another pernicious feedback loop to the climate crisis, beavers are moving into the warming Arctic in greater numbers and radically transforming the landscape with their dams, further accelerating the thaw of permafrost that releases methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A worrying new study shows Earth’s ability to reflect solar radiation is weakening — as the ocean is heating it is failing to generate clouds that reflect back sunlight. Astoundingly, half of that weakening has happened in the last four years:

“The albedo drop was such a surprise to us when we analyzed the last 3 years of data – many scientists hoped that a warmer Earth may lead to more clouds and higher albedo which would then help to moderate warming and balance the climate system But this shows the opposite is true”

If this trend of Earth dimming due to climate change continues, climate models will have to (once more) be significantly revised to include this additional net warming. We are headed for a Miocene climate during which the Antarctic ice volume was half of what it is today and the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in winter. Sea levels were 130 feet or higher and temperatures were about 5 to 8ºC warmer. Our ancestors were apes at that time. The European shoreline was 120 miles inland from today’s coast and dense swamp-forests resembling modern Louisiana clogged coasts and estuaries in Denmark and Germany. Nothing living in its region today is adapted to what will come. Remember those trees in the Pacific Northwest that sizzled in the heatwave of last year’s summer? A new study paints a dire picture for their future, as well as ours:

“By some estimates, it’s probably the largest scorch event in history,” Oregon State University researcher Christopher Still told OPB’s “Think Out Loud” on Monday. “I mean this is a new thing for us to be seeing on Earth, so it’s sort of a dubious milestone.”…

…“If this just keeps going, if these are happening every five or 10 years, it’s gonna be really grim I think for most of the forests of the Pacific Northwest.”

As the saying goes, “Lessons in life will be repeated until they are learned.” And so humans have yet to understand their place in the world, punch drunk on more than a century-long bacchanalia of fossil fuel burning. In the end, nature will put us in our place, and not in a good way. It is interesting to note that right around the peak of industrial civilization’s collapse, humans will have evidently lost their biological ability reproduce due to chemical pollution. We have saturated the Earth with so many and so much chemicals that we have breached another planetary boundary:

The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.

Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.

The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.

“There has been a fiftyfold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950 and this is projected to triple again by 2050,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) who was part of the study team. “The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.”

Pfft!!! Just another fancy-schmancy warning by some pedantic scientists for the world to ignore. No need to worry, we can live in hermetically sealed bubbles that filter out all that nasty stuff, can’t we? All of our socializing and entertainment take place indoors on digital screens anyway, doesn’t it? But wait, there’s more. The Doomsday Glacier is coming for us. The Thwaites Glacier is the size of Florida and it is cracking apart on the surface and melting from below, loosening its anchor on the undersea mountain that holds it in place. If this glacier goes, it could unleash much more ice from the West Antarctic ice sheet that is held in place behind it, causing an immediate and catastrophic effect (10 feet) of sea level rise. One scientist says it could go within a few years. This development falls in line with what another expert, Professor Harold R. Wanless, had said years ago about sea level rise and climate change—that sea level rise does not happen in a gradual and linear fashion but rather as sudden, large pulses. I blogged about him six years ago, and what he said back then in the context of what is happening now gives me chills:

…Subsequent ice melt was not a gradual acceleration and then deceleration process. Rather it was a series of very rapid pulses of sea level rise followed by pauses. These rapid pulses of rise, from three to thirty feet, were fast enough to leave drowned reefs, sandy barrier islands, tidal inlet deltas, and other coastal deposits abandoned across the continental shelf. That is what happens when climate change warms enough to destabilize some ice sheet sector. It rapidly disintegrates, resulting in a rapid rise.

Just a couple years ago, a study of ancient ice in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet showed that multiple meters of sea level rise occurred from less than 2ºC of warming at the beginning of the last interglacial period. As we are once again witnessing today, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is highly sensitive to collapse from slight temperature increases.

Circling back to the movie I was discussing earlier, there is a scene in which junior astronomer and Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is with a group of disaffected youth who are discussing conspiracy theories regarding the global elite, and Dibiasky says in an exasperated voice, “You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.” Perhaps the truth is even more depressing than that. In the grand scheme of things, free will appears to be nothing more than a figment of our imagination. Like microbes proliferating in a Petri dish and dying off after overshooting their confines, humans are essentially replicating the same process albeit on a planetary scale. Evidently, we are biologically programmed to eventually crash and burn. Just as with all other species, humans have the imperative to expand their numbers, exploiting all resources until stopped by environmental constraints, and those limits to growth are fast approaching as we speak.

Man In The Box

18 Sunday Jul 2021

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

≈ 88 Comments

Tags

Abrupt Climate Change, Aldous Huxley, Anthropocene Extinction, Atomization of Society, Chemical Pollution, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dr. Peter Ward, Dystopic Future, Ecocide, Global Warming, Heat Dome, Loss of Biodiversity, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Ocean Acidification, Ocean Dead Zones, Pacific NW Heatwaves, Techno-Fix, Widespread Deoxygenation of Temperate Lakes, Widespread Ocean Anoxia

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ~ Aldous Huxley

The foundation beneath our house of cards is beginning to buckle and heave. For far too long, humans have poked the sleeping monster of abrupt climate change and it’s starting to awaken. Thus far, nearly a thousand deaths in British Columbia alone are likely attributable to hyperthermia caused by a persistent heat dome that has spiked temperatures to unprecedented levels. Take note that we are seeing these unreal temperature spikes at the end of a cooler La Nina cycle. When these heat domes form during the next warmer El Nino cycle, the results will be disastrous. We have now made such mass casualty events 150 times more likely with our heat-trapping gases which have doubled the earth’s energy imbalance in just the last 15 years. Over a billion sea creatures are estimated to have cooked to death off the western shores of Canada. “Eventually, we just won’t be able to sustain these populations of filter feeders on the shoreline to be anywhere near the extent that we’re used to,” says Chris Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. This will have massive effects up and down many ecological networks. Remember last year when Australia’s mega-fires killed or harmed 3 billion animals? I thought that horrific trauma would be mankind’s epiphany on climate change, but it’s clear that as long as there is a dollar to be made there will be justification for genocide and ecocide. The planet’s last remaining natural resources and biodiversity are being liquidated at breakneck speed in order to maintain the colossal enterprise of industrial civilization.

Modern society is more connected than ever digitally, but not emotionally or intimately. Too fragmented and dysfunctional to save itself, we exist not as human beings but as consumers and statistical numbers on a spreadsheet. Thus it is easy to write off the millions of deaths from industrial pollution as a cost of doing business, especially when the rules of the game are written for shareholders far removed from the damage being wrought. Our suicidal march into the abyss seems to be preordained because we have paid no heed to an endless stream of dire scientific reports and warnings that span decades. Like the collapse of the Surfside apartment building in Miami where the residents lived oblivious to warnings signs from decades ago, the collapse of industrial civilization will follow a similar response to anthropogenic climate breakdown. At this late stage, techno-optimists still cling to the belief that somehow we can adapt and thrive in an inhospitable and deteriorating post-Holocene epoch. At the same time, disinformation and propaganda continue to be spread by those who are outright denying the growing existential threat. The end result is the same, no matter which side prevails. Humans can’t even agree on what is reality, so how could they possibly organize a coherent response in time:

There is no escape from this cage modern man has constructed for himself. As lead scientist Dr. Robert Rohde at @BerkeleyEarth points out, 78% of humanity’s energy systems are powered by fossil fuels as of 2020. Oil and gas took 90 years to displace coal as the main energy source, illustrating that transitions take a very long time and ‘renewables’ remain a small fraction of total energy consumed. Scientists are becoming increasingly unnerved:

“We should be alarmed because the IPCC models are just not good enough,” Dame Julia Slingo of the @metoffice says.

“The obvious acceleration of the breakdown of our stable climate simply confirms that – when it comes to the climate emergency – we are in deep, deep s***!” says UCL’s @ProfBillMcGuire. “Many in the climate science community would agree, in private if not in public.”

“It blows my mind that we could get the temperatures that we’re observing here in the Pacific north-west, especially on the west sides of the Cascades that have that proximity to the ocean, that it could get that hot for so many days in a row,” said Nick Bond, Washington state climatologist. “I would have been willing to guess something like that in the middle of the century, in the latter part of the century.”

“The extreme nature of the record, along with others, is a cause for real concern,” says veteran scientist Professor Sir Brian Hoskins. “What the climate models project for the future is what we would get if we are lucky. The models’ behaviour may be too conservative.”

As has been pointed out before, but which is still not accepted let alone understood by the vast majority, is that even if we employed techno-fixes such as Bill Gates’ Solar Radiation Management Company, it would not stop climate change’s evil twin, ocean acidification, which is threatening to collapse the entire marine ecosystem. A recent paper by marine biologists and environmental consultants has warned that human society faces extinction if nothing is done to reverse the destruction of the oceans:

Over the last 70 years since the 1950’s and the production of toxic forever chemicals and plastic, more than 50% of all marine life, including plants and animals under 1 mm in size, have been lost from the world’s oceans, and that decline continues at a rate of 1% year on year…Over the next 25 years, pH will continue to drop from pH8.04 to pH7.95, and carbonate-based life forms will simply dissolve. This will result with an estimated 80% to 90% loss of all remaining marine life when compared to the 1950’s. Becoming carbon neutral will not stop the pH from dropping to 7.95, and even in the unlikely event of the world achieving Net Zero by 2030 it will not stop the pH dropping to less than pH7.95. Coupled with the micro-plastic and toxic chemical stressors on marine life, the GOES team believe there will be a trophic cascade collapse of the entire marine ecosystem.

Adding to this warning is another recent study showing that freshwater lakes are losing oxygen at a rate 9.3 times that of the oceans:

That matters, because not only do we get much of our drinking water from lakes and use them for recreational activities, but they support an extensive variety of species. “These substantial declines in oxygen potentially threaten biodiversity, especially the more oxygen-sensitive species,”…Rose identified a second problem too: Deep water is becoming less clear because of a host of factors including erosion, algal growth, and fertilizer runoff from nearby agricultural fields and residential developments. Murkier waters make plants less likely to survive, which means less photosynthesis and less oxygen down below. And that, of course, is bad news for the lakes’ creatures. “Just like humans, every complex life form on the planet depends on oxygen,” Rose says. “In water, that’s in the dissolved form.”

There was a study a few years ago which concluded that deoxygenation of the world’s waters from a warming world is what really drove the end-Permian mass extinction. The lead author is quoted as saying:

“This study shows that we’re on that same road toward extinction, and the question is how far down it we go.”

Keep in mind that we don’t have to reach the same elevated levels of CO2 in past geologic extinction events for things to get really nasty, causing modern civilization to crumble. Remember also that the Anthropocene Extinction has multiple prongs such as chemical and plastic pollution, deforestation, and other manmade pressures on the environment that did not exist in Earth’s history. According to paleontologist Dr. Peter Ward, all major extinctions occurred when CO2 levels exceeded 1000ppm. Past extinction events took hundreds of thousands to millions of years to play out, but our current rate of change is 25,000 times faster than the last known event (Paleocene Thermal Extinction) which took a million years for CO2 to increase by 100ppm. We are on track to reach 1000ppm within a century, but we’ll never get there of our own volition because our civilization will be toast long before then; however, once tipping points in the climate system are breached, positive feedback loops will have been set in motion that will propel CO2 levels upward beyond our control. For instance, the Amazon is now emitting more carbon than it is absorbing. In an interview four years ago, Dr Ward gave this warning:

“…we really are going to have unintended consequences and much more rapid heating than even the models say — for the simple reason that the [IPCC] models are highly conservative, too conservative.”

You may be asking yourself when humans will finally wise up and end this madness. Henri L Vichier-Guerre, a reader of this blog, recently posted a quote from a very good book entitled Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change by Clive Hamilton in 2010:

…even with the most optimistic set of assumptions – the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades – we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change. The Earth’s climate would enter a chaotic era lasting thousands of years before natural processes eventually establish some sort of equilibrium. Whether human beings would still be a force on the planet, or even survive, is a moot point. One thing seems certain: there will be far fewer of us.

As Henri L Vichier-Guerre points out, none of those optimistic things have happened in the intervening years. On the contrary, the ecological destruction has accelerated and the chances of anyone at all surviving grows more remote with each passing year. Henri goes on to quote the following on why no one in any significant seat of power is talking about our impending doom:

Not everyone believes we should be completely forthright with the general public about the depths of our crisis, including many of those in our Government.

Because it’s far too late to do anything to mitigate the crisis.

Far too late to avoid a global environmental, ecological and economic catastrophe.

This may go some way to explaining why the general public is still not being told the truth by Governments around the world.

It may go some way to explaining why many of the super-rich have already set up lavish underground ‘doomsday bunkers’ where they and their families can bug out when the shit hits the fan.

We have plenty of bread and circus distractions to keep us preoccupied until the very end. Television did not get its name ‘The Boob Tube’ for nothing. Now we have the infinite scroll of websites to hypnotize and control the masses. Click that ‘Like’ button. Sophisticated social media algorithms feed you what you want to see and hear 24/7. Cognitive biases are reinforced and facts no longer matter in a world suffering from severe truth decay. Aldous Huxley’s vision of a world driven by absolute consumerism that sacrifices human values and controls the masses with a non-stop supply of diversions via mindless entertainment and sensorial stimulation has become a dystopic reality. Just as in his book, it’s all happening in broad daylight with the tacit acceptance of everyone as we watch the world burn.

We’re All Just Temporary Passengers on Spaceship Earth.

23 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by xraymike79 in Peak Oil

≈ 46 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Donald J. Trump, Ecological Overshoot, Entropy, Ernst Mayr, Evangelical Right, Fossil Fuel Dependency, Global Pandemic, Global Warming, Haber–Bosch Process, Human Exceptionalism, Jevons Paradox, Joe Biden, Joseph Tainter, Mass Extinctions, Omnicide, Prof Tim Garrett, QAnon, Second Law of Thermodynamics, Sedition, Techno-Fix, White Nationalists, White Supremacists, William Catton

I recently asked a scientist on Facebook how he copes with the knowledge that we are destroying the planet within the geologic blink of an eye. Here is his answer:

Pot helps! 🙂 But psychologically, I reread Catton’s Overshoot recently, where he talks about how once humans started burning fossil fuels, we evolved (devolved?) into detritivores, species that depend on dead organic matter for our sustenance. This led me to think about Human Exceptionalism. The classic view is that humans’ assumed superiority has caused us to not consider the welfare of other species and blinded us in our ignorance to how our lifestyles were jeopardizing life support systems worldwide (including for us); I agree with this view. But I’ve also come to challenge another view of Human Exceptionalism; namely, that we have the intelligence and capacity for compassion to override what is every species’ imperative (humans and all other species): that is, to continuously consume available resources with no concern for future sustainability, with its concomitant and inevitable population boom and bust. Thus, I try to cope by accepting, with sad resignation, that we’re not any more special than other species – we’ve just lacked apex predators to keep our population in check and have used hundreds of millions of years of stored solar energy (i.e. fossil fuels) to temporarily shield ourselves from our population crash. This final kicking us off our superiority pedestal has helped me “let go” and inspired me to aspire to be more in tune with natural processes (such as organic gardening, which also helps on a very small scale to restore the soil biodiversity we’re regularly destroying with the Haber-Bosch process). How do you cope? 🙂

I replied later that day…

To cope, you first must know the truth. Our modern global civilization is a heat engine, subject to the second law of thermodynamics just as every civilization that came before. Our massive burning of fossil fuels has not only blanketed the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases and acidified the oceans, it has given humans the unfortunate ability to disrupt all the major biochemical processes of the planet, thus making the current civilizational collapse one of global proportions. There is no putting that genie back in the bottle and the environmental disorder it has unleashed. Thus we are firmly in the grips of entropy and no amount of techo-fixes, such as walls to hold back the rising sea or geoengineering schemes to blot out that fiery orb in the sky, will change this stark fact. As Jospeph Tainter argued, further complexity only brings more unforeseen problems that must be solved. Higher efficiency only leads to increased consumption (i.e. Jevons paradox). As you say, humans are no different than any other organism in that they will expand to consume all available resources until reined in by environmental limits. Our superior problem-solving capabilities have allowed us to dramatically overshoot the planet’s natural regenerative systems. And so it seems that Ernst Mayr was correct when he said human intelligence is a fatal mutation in the evolutionary process. According to Mayr, intelligence is a double-edged sword, serving as a tool for our survival or rapidly carrying out our own annihilation. How do I cope with all that? Other than adopting a stoic attitude towards our predicament, there is no coping. It is what it is. Find simple joys in nature while nature is still around. I love hummingbirds and watch them at the feeder when I am home. Live in the moment when you can. Enjoy mankind’s ability to create beautiful art. Be kind to your fellow human and nonhuman. We’re all just temporary passengers on Spaceship Earth.

Now that America’s wannabe dictator has vacated the White House, maybe we can get back to pretending we’re doing anything of significance about climate change and the ghastly future bearing down on us. I’m sure we’ll get right on that existential crisis as soon as we tamp down the current global pandemic, sort out Trump’s QAnon and white nationalist seditionists, and bring together a country where half the population believes their cult leader’s endless lies and the evangelical Right idolize Trump as a vessel anointed by God. So much for heeding warnings against idolizing false prophets. Despite all those minor details, we’ll all be on the same page, right? Well won’t we???

In Centuries and Seconds

03 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by td0s in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Anarchism, Anti-civ, Collapse, Global Warming, Inca, Industrial Civilization, Paris Terrorist Attacks, Revolution, Time

From PrayforCalamity
By TDoS

—

She was a yearling. Not very large, maybe one hundred pounds I would guess, as I was able to easily hoist her body into the back of my Jeep. Gauging by the blood leaking from her ears and mouth and lack of any other visible wounds, I assumed the car that killed her struck her in the head, possibly breaking her neck. What I could not gauge was how long she had been lying dead on the side of the highway. Her eyes were open and not yet eaten by birds, and her anus was also free of any infestation. I chuckle to myself when I imagine the reaction more domesticated individuals might have if they knew that there are people like myself who assess the edibility of roadkill by the presence of uncorrupted eyes and assholes. To be fair, I also took stock of the stiffness of her body and the lack of any immediately offensive odors emanating from it. She was worth taking home for a greater look, anyway.

From a cross beam of the carport I anchored a carabiner, and I fastened another to the yearling’s hind legs so I could create a “z-rig” pulley system, effectively halving her weight so that I could hoist her body into the air and tie of the cordage without help from a second person. My partner was going to come outside and watch the dressing so she could have a greater understanding of the process, and she bundled up our daughter too, who showed no fear or anxiety concerning the large animal hanging dead before her. Gently, I explained that the deer had died, and I was going to harvest its meat for us to eat. Not yet two, she stood looking at the yearling and said, “Deer, off.”

“Yes honey, the deer is off.”
“Deer, on?”
“She can’t be turned back on. Once something dies, it cannot come back to life. But her spirit and her flesh return to the Earth.”
“Deer, off.”
“Yes baby.”

—

The year is closing as we approach the winter solstice. From the corners we inhabit, we watch the fallout from terrorist attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian war plan by the Turkish military. Those who tally the climate statistics are telling us that 2015 is set to be the warmest year on record, globally. South Africa grapples with drought, the rainforests of the Amazon are burning, and world leaders sent to negotiate climate deals are converging on a Paris conveniently locked down by security forces preventing mass demonstrations under emergency restrictions imposed due to the aforementioned terrorist attacks. Not that it matters. Floats and puppets are fun to look at, but only a complete restructuring of society could address the challenge of climate change, and that restructuring begins with erasing existing borders and property lines, canceling existing debts, dismantling industrial infrastructure, and of course, toppling the standing systems of power. The puppets and street theater capable of such feats, I would love to see. As I have previously stated (and my blog name continually hints at) I do not believe humans capable of achieving such goals, at least, not without a little help from our friends calamity and chaos. The gatekeepers are just too well equipped to stave off conscious revolution. If you want to get into the citadel, you will just have to wait until a tornado throws a bulldozer through the wall, or a plague kills most of the guards.

Until then we watch, we wait, and we endure. We keep repeating the conventional wisdom of collapse; that which cannot be sustained, will not sustain. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t collapse in a day, either. The collapse of a civilization is not one event, but the consummation of many events that eventually birth a catastrophe that overwhelms the ability of that civilization’s people to rebuild what has been destroyed, whether material or social.

Fast collapse and slow collapse are really the same thing, looked at from different vantage points. What is built over centuries can end in seconds.

—

November 16, 1532. Francisco Pizarro has one hundred and sixty eight men laying an ambush in the Inca city of Cajamarca. Atahualpa, the emperor of the Inca empire, arrives for a meeting with the Spanish backed by an unarmed cadre of six thousand. A friar and barely competent translator tell Atahualpa they are there, in essence, to bring the Inca into the fold of the Catholic church and the Spanish empire, and they offer him a bible as a seal of their truth. As was to be expected, and likely, the intention of the Spanish, Atahualpa rejects what he is being offered. This rejection of the bible and the truth of the Catholic church gave the Spaniards what they considered to be legal grounds to attack the Inca who had amassed there. A century of empire with its conquest, expansion, and grandeur, could be said, to have ended in the following seconds.

Those seconds, however, were the ripe culmination of years of internal strife concerning who the rightful heir to the imperial throne was, a waning ability of the empire to effectively control far flung principalities, and a plague of smallpox brought to Mesoamerica by Europeans that advanced faster than conquistadors on horseback. Political turmoil and disease were eating away at the Inca empire, and the Spanish arrived just in time to add the critical pressure necessary to break it. And they had guns.

History, of course, is complex, and the fall of the Inca empire extended beyond the massacre at Cajamarca, as Pizarro played disaffected Inca regions against the center, installed puppet emperors, and fought rebellions. As the colonization of the Inca proceeded, European diseases continued to decimate the indigenous population as well. The Inca actually learned how to effectively defeat the advantage of firearms, but the viruses ravaging their insides were too much.

Depending on where we stand, we can focus on the centuries or the seconds.

If tomorrow the Dow Jones Industrial plummeted by seventy percentage points or NATO declared war on Russia, we would likely see those seconds as the critical break between the past and the future, the old world and the new. But of course, years of maneuvering by humans and the consequences of those movements all came together to generate just the specific combination of factors required to outflank the established firewalls civilization has established to protect itself, and to outpace the efforts at rebuilding that are guaranteed in the aftermath of catastrophe. Resource scarcity primarily in the sphere of fossil fuel energy, the manipulation of capital to the point of diminishing returns by the global ultra-wealthy, the decimation of ecosystems around the world; all have played their part in dressing the set for those critical seconds that seem to hang over us like a sword.

—

How does an organism die? If you magnify the death of any given being, presumably you can find one second, one still frame in time that separates living from dying. When we die of old age in the most quintessential of circumstances – our heads atop a fluffed down pillow as we lie repose in a king-sized bed replete with Egyptian cotton sheets and a mahogany headboard, family and adorers walling in our bedside and wishing us fair travels as we draw a final breath, smile, and say something childishly simple yet agonizingly profound – a critical second passes when our heart ceases to beat, electrical impulses in our brain fade, and we’re gone. The room exhales.

But we were dying for so long. How many years had it been since our body’s ability to repair cellular breakdown was outpaced by the aging process? We had peaked decades before. From that point forward, despite every adventure, every new idea, every material acquisition, we were hurtling ever forward toward our imminent demise. Our vision blurred, so a doctor prescribed us glasses. Our heart stuttered, so we began taking pills. Our mobility waned so we got a Hov-R-Round from the Scooter Store thanks to the endless advertisements targeted towards we septuagenarians aired on day time TV. We pressed on.

Our bodies contain countless living beings and units; cells, tissues, and bacteria that all comprise the whole of what we perceive as our self. A veritable civilization that is born and advances through stages of growth and maturation until the energy necessary to maintain integrity is outpaced by diminishing returns. We insert techno-fixes of every imaginable stripe to stem the twin tides of time and entropy, buying what time we can until the inevitable enters stage left to take us by the hand and demurley return us to the soil.

Civilizations are no different. Shaped in centuries, defined in seconds, feeding the fertile soils of time. Billions of human hands and minds carving, digging, screaming, warring, building, repairing, maintaining until it just isn’t enough and the center can no longer hold. Hydraulic fracturing, negative interest rates, solar arrays and soyburgers all applied to patch the holes and to bail the bilge water. Industrial civilization passed its peak decades ago, sometime around the time when women in skirts freely attended University in Kabul and the United States didn’t need to stand guard over Wahhabist Monarchs in the House of Saud in order to keep the game of growth afloat. Selfie sticks and social media stock options are your glasses and nitroglycerin. The internet is your Hov-R-Round. Do not kid yourself into thinking this is a civilization still in the wild throws of maturation and bloom. The billions of organisms that make this civilization possible are under threat, from phytoplankton to pollinating insects and carbon sequestering trees, all of whom feed the the billions of humans who swing hammers and pour concrete and fit pipes and string lines and who somehow, by some curse of the lottery of birth, drag themselves to the factories and cubicle farms day in and day out, all to keep this storm born Galleon afloat. Shaped in so many of our precious seconds, defined in the roil of faceless centuries, feeding the fertile soils of time.

—

The car struck her head, I had guessed. Her life probably ended quickly in a split second of sound and light. Without any abrasions on the body, I assumed the meat would be well preserved by the cold evening air. With only a beam of light to guide my hands under the dark of night, I gently separated her hide from her flesh, using light strokes of my knife to cut away at the membrane that held her skin to her flesh. Something was wrong. Her skin had a green tone in places around her ribs. I cut away more, examining the muscle as I worked. The green hue, almost an electric blue really, blotted here and there on her leg muscles, like watercolor oceans on an aging map. Hoping the backstrap was untainted I continued to skin the deer, but it was hopeless. On her left hind leg a subcutaneous tear in the protective membrane had likely allowed the passage of bacteria. She must have been spun or thrown by the vehicle in some fashion that impacted her rear leg with a substantial force.

The meat was inedible. I sighed in the night. Fog from my mouth drifted upwards as I set my knife down, and lowered her body. Walking beneath the stars I carried the yearling downhill, briars grabbing at my boots, twigs snapping underfoot. I thanked her and apologized while burying her under a light blanket of leaves. Coyotes, buzzards, someone would eat her. Someone with an enviable array of gut flora. I plodded and crunched my way home to wash the blood from my hands and wrists. The smell would last for days.

The Short Story of Carbon Man and Industrial Civilization

19 Friday Oct 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and he was really good at making bombs…

~ THE END ~

Get Me Off This Crazy Ride!

15 Saturday Sep 2012

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

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Arctic Ice Melt, Capitalism, China's Massive Coal Consumption, Climate Change, CO2 Emissions and GDP, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Global Warming, Greenhouse Gases, Industrial Agriculture, Intensified Global Water Cycles, Methane Release from Thawing Permafrost, Peak Oil, Projected World Energy Consumption, Sir Robert Watson

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

A new article in the Journal “Nature” reports an ominous finding that far more carbon dioxide and methane are being released from parts of Arctic Siberia than previously thought.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that lack of sea ice could drive heat up to 900 miles further inland and cause the melting of permafrost. Most scientists agree that is a recipe for runaway global warming. From the findings of the NCAR/NSIDC Study:

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:

Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink …

• 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.

Forthcoming research led by Sir David will show the west has only managed to reduce emissions by relying on imports from countries such as China.

Another telling message from the IEA’s estimates is the relatively small effect that the recession – the worst since the 1930s – had on emissions…

And what about that country that, to the shock of many, surpassed the U.S. in carbon emissions 3 years ago?:

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:

Harvesting a Climate Disaster – The New York Times

…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.

Update on the Embattled Water-Energy-Food Nexus

18 Saturday Aug 2012

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

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American Livestock Industry, Biofuels, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Drought in America's Bread basket, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Global Warming, Peak Oil, U.S. Department of Agriculture, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Water-Energy-Food Nexus

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.

That is dangerously high, says Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Massachusetts. He has found that if the FPI goes above 210, riots and unrest become more likely around the world. Both the 2011 Arab Spring and the 2008 riots in places such as Mexico, India, Russia and Belgium may have been partly triggered by high food prices.

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.’ ”

Related: Farmers hit the jackpot in Kansas oil boom

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.

Related: Boom chasers, next stop Kansas

“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 he will 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 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as well as the American livestock industry have recently urged Congress to suspend the ethanol mandate.

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.

Last year, weather-related events led to crop insurance claims of $10.7 billion as of April 30, 2012. According to Bruce Babcock, a professor of economics at Iowa State University, this year’s losses could add up to $30 to $40 billion. Gary Schnitkey, a University of Illinois extension economist, calculates that 2012 insurance payouts for Illinois corn alone could top $3.2 billion. – source

Our response to the primary underlying cause of these increasingly disastrous droughts has been to find more drought-resistant crops and livestock. I suppose this strategy will work up to a point, but it doesn’t get at the root of the problem which is industrial civilization’s unbreakable marriage to fossil fuels.