Category: By Other Authors

By Nate Hagens: Reality 101 Short Courses

 

Reality Check Ahead

Today Nate Hagens released a new series of short courses on the human predicament created for the University of Minnesota NEXUS ONE freshman program.

More information on Nate’s educational initiatives can be found at the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future (ISEOF).

You can also find another excellent Reality 101 course by Nate here.

 

Reality 101 Short Course #1: Metacognition in the Anthropocene

 

Reality 101 Short Course #2: The Fossils that Power the Global Economy

 

Reality 101 Short Course #3: The Real Stock Market

 

Reality 101 Short Course #4: Finding Resilience in an Age of Turbulence

By Tad Patzek: On the Green Queen’s Race

red-queen.jpg

I wrote about the Red Queen’s race for diesel fuel here.

Tad Patzek today wrote about the Green Queen’s race for electricity.

http://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/2019/07/green-new-deal-iv-any-other-paths.html

Tad begins by pointing out that a recently update climate model is predicting more than 1 degree of additional warming than the previous model for our current CO2 levels. That’s bad news but seems consistent with what we observe every day in the news.

Then Tad gets to his main point:

…since 2004, the annual increases of total electricity consumption in the world have outpaced all electricity production by all PV arrays in the world…

This means that the Green Queen is not only not keeping up, she’s not even in the race. Except for one year, 2009, when the economy crashed.

Annual Electricity Change vs. Total PV Electricity

And we haven’t even begun to replace the other 84% of fossil energy that we use for non-electricity applications like heating, fertilizer, tractors, trucks, trains, ships, planes, mining, steel, cement, glass, etc..

Thus, there are no other paths but to shrink, shrink more and transit away from fossil fuels.

Once again I observe that facts don’t matter and denial defines our species.

By Geoffrey Chia: Open Letter to Extinction Rebellion

Who Wants Change

Extinction Rebellion is the most promising new global organization dedicated to forcing action on our ecological and climate emergency.

Their #1 demand is for governments to stop denying reality:

Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.

Dr. Geoffrey Chia, in an open letter to Extinction Rebellion, commends them on their good intentions but points out that they are as deeply in denial as the governments they criticize.

http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/2019/06/29/open-letter-to-extinction-rebellion/

h/t James

One of your demands is that official bodies tell the Truth and declare a climate emergency. You were told by the IPCC last year that humanity had 12 years before it would be too late to do anything. That was a LIE. The fact is that it was and is already far too late to prevent global catastrophe. There is NO carbon budget left. These realities were apparent even back in 2013 following the IPCC fifth assessment report, when the only scenarios the IPCC could imagine where disaster could be avoided required time travel into the past or technologies which did not exist and certainly could not be scaled up even if they did exist (as expressed by climate scientists Dr Kevin Anderson and Dr Hugh Hunt). The science based facts behind these assertions are summarised here: 6.

Truth is determined by careful and comprehensive collection of accurate data, by hard objective scientific scrutiny using the principles of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, including mathematical analyses, which must not be polluted by political or economic vested interests. The IPCC processes had long been watered down by political interference, which seriously underestimated the magnitude and speed of global warming, in order to justify foot dragging by national so-called “leaders”.

The reason we have not yet experienced the full horrific consequences of 415ppm CO2 (in reality, there is a much higher CO2 equivalent, around 500ppm) is because of time lag due to thermal inertia. Atmospheric temperature rises have been buffered by the cool oceans and the melting ice masses. Those buffers are being exceeded, they are being overwhelmed, as every second passes. If you think the unprecedented shocking weather extremes over the past 15 years were disastrous at barely 1 degree Celsius atmospheric global average temperature rise, there is far more and far worse to come. More than 4 degrees rise is irreversibly baked into the cake based on EXISTING greenhouse gas concentrations. That is as certain as the law of gravity. Hell is coming no matter what. The best thing you can do is get ready for it. But time is short and you must act NOW before the imminent global economic collapse steals away all your options.

Let us consider the absolute best imaginable outcomes for your group. What will happen if you are immediately 100% effective today in achieving all your social and policy goals?

  • Even if all carbon emissions cease today, the world is still committed to more than 4 degrees Celsius eventual global average temperature rise which will render large scale agriculture impossible. This means civilisation, the hallmark of which is the existence of cities, will no longer be possible. Small scale agriculture in a few selected climate resilient pockets may still be possible.
  • Large scale carbon sequestration is a fantasy and will never be undertaken because our bogus economic system will not allow for it and even if we can develop those technologies, we will not have the energy resources to do it. Geoengineering insanity will cause more problems than they address.
  • Immediate cessation of emissions will also mean immediate curtailment of global food production which is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels. This will cause billions to starve. In the medical management of patients, knowingly inflicting harm is not an option. However allowing nature to take its course (in some cases – such as untreatable terminal cancer) is acceptable, indeed unavoidable. As a matter of course, billions will die this century due to oil/resource depletion, ecosystem collapse and climate catastrophe and the consequences thereof (warfare, epidemics etc). Inevitable near term economic collapse is also absolutely certain due to institutional fraud and impending energy collapse.  It is those events which will most effectively and drastically curtail carbon emissions, not your activism.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about the looming general die-off. You can however take steps to reduce the likelihood that you and your family and friends will die horribly in the next few decades. Please note that nobody’s survival is guaranteed. All anyone can do is increase the probability of their survival.

The remainder of Chia’s letter is a little too over the top with hyperbole for my taste but the gist of his advice to extinction rebellion members is probably correct: It’s too late to save civilization, focus on saving your members.

Here is another post by Geoffrey Chia that I thought was pretty good.

By Geoffrey Chia: What you should not say in public…

 

By Gail Zawacki: On Themism and Seeking Scapegoats for Reality

Themis

Gail Zawacki in her latest excellent essay introduces “Themist”, a new name for doomers, that tiny group of mutants with defective denial genes, that I belong to.

Gail succinctly summarizes why we Themists believe know what we believe know, and discusses a new trend to blame Themists for causing civilization’s imminent collapse.

I’m a Themist and proud of it. Come and get me you denying idiots, I’m right here.

http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2019/07/in-praise-of-themis.html

1. Consciousness and Denial

In tandem with consciousness, humanity developed a deeply embedded penchant for denial. It’s a terrific survival strategy that evolved to help blind us to the pain of animals we hunt and eat, the terror of the victims of wars we wage on our neighbors, the monstrosity of slavery, the injustice of male chauvinism, the senselessness of death, and ultimately the fearsome gaping maw of meaninglessness in the vast unfeeling universe.

Our denial, entrenched in our genes, also enables – even requires – us to believe fantasies, to embrace spirits, to shun truth, to subscribe to the illusion of free will, to follow charlatans, and to pretend our hopes and prayers can shape reality.

 

2. WASF

Fact: there exists no natural mechanism that will slow the acceleration of anthropogenic global heating in any timeframe useful to life on earth. It is only reasonable to expect that it’s going to get hotter and hotter, faster and faster, for at least hundreds of years. Even if anthropogenic emissions cease today or in a decade, heating will still increase at an accelerating rate. Amplifying feedbacks such as albedo and forest die off and methane release from melting permafrost combined with the longevity of CO2 already released assure an uninhabitable climate in the fairly near future.

Once you understand that greenhouse gases will continue to trap energy from the sun as long as they persist, everything else – climate sensitivity and latent ocean warming and inertia in the system – is so much hoohah. The idea that technology yet to be invented will remove CO2 is no better than a religious tenet, and it will never be deployed at a scale that matters given the vast quantities that have already been released (and continue to be released).

 

3. Humans are incapable of change

As convincing as the physical effects documented by science are, it’s also and crucially ever more irrefutable that humans are simply not equipped to behave any other way than to grow without voluntary restraint, until we deplete the resources we need to survive, and overwhelm the environment with pollution until it is so toxic that it is poisonous to virtually all forms of life. We are basically an invasive species with no more self restraint than yeast.

This is where even the most dire voices about climate change often err.  It’s not libertarianism, or capitalism, or western civilization that has led us to this predicament – rather it is humanity’s exponential growth, in numbers and complexity, in technological capability, medical advances, and consumption.  The imperative to grow and consume is primordial and we cannot eliminate that biological trait despite our desire to believe in free will.

 

4. Apocaloptimists attacking doomers – as worse than deniers 

Overwhelming evidence – that impacts are faster and sooner than predicted, that tipping points have been irrevocably crossed, that amplifying feedbacks are beyond human influence, that global warming is run amuk with no natural mechanisms or magic technology to ameliorate inexorable heating – is leading more people to conclude that civilization (if not our species and most others) is doomed. Right now, there is an increasingly vocal contingent who are vigorously attacking the nebulous doomer community.

Much of the sniping and scapegoating begins with the hostile accusation that doomers, merely by existing, are encouraging inaction. This is patently absurd, since inaction has been and remains the default position ever since humans first noticed that burning fuel has consequences. No contribution by doomers towards defeatism accounts for the ever-increasing Keeling curve that measures CO2 concentrations, or the refusal of governments to meet climate treaty goals.

 

5. No fun

An especially pernicious assertion by this “shoot the messenger” crowd is the common claim that doomers are secretly desirous of a catastrophic end for humanity. I doubt there is a single doomer who finds any comfort whatsoever in either the inevitability of extinction or their own individual role in it. Every doomer I’ve ever interacted with, and there have been many, has agonized and mourned – and some have even gone crazy with grief and guilt and committed suicide. It’s not fun being a doomer, which is why there are so few of us.

Many doomers began as former devoted progressives, who fought long and hard before awakening with enormous ambivalence to the sad verity that humanity is not going to change. I personally learned about the tenacity of denial the hard way, first from trying to alert the world to the death of trees (a massacre that seemed perfectly obvious to me over a decade ago but invited unending ridicule) and second, from encountering so many “light” doomers – who will forever remain convinced, no matter how much archeological evidence refutes it, that the noble primitive and peaceful and sustainable indigenous savage was ever really a thing.

By Tim Watkins: The Green Deal is Hopium

Hopium

Tim Watkins has emerged as one of the most accurate and articulate communicators of our predicament.

In today’s essay Watkins clearly explains both our problem and our options.

There isn’t a hint of denial here.  Well done!

http://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2019/03/06/the-green-deal-is-hopium/

 

To express our predicament as simply as I can, it is this:

  • In order to prevent environmental collapse bringing about the death of more than six in every seven humans on the planet, we (all of us) simply have to stop using fossil carbon fuels today.
  • But if we stop using the fossil carbon fuels that currently provide the world with 85 percent of its power, our highly complex and interconnected oil-dependent economy will crash; resulting in a global famine that will kill more than six in every seven humans on the planet anyway.

 

In the USA, meanwhile, what purports to be a debate about the environment has been largely co-opted on both sides of the growing political divide into a debate about the economics of public spending. The Democrat Party version of the green new deal is little more than a debt-based job-creation and public healthcare scheme with some windmills and solar panels providing a veneer of greenwash. The Republican Party – or at least the minority who don’t think climate change is a hoax – in contrast, seek to cut public spending and green energy subsidies in favour of carbon taxes and free market pseudo-solutions. Neither side inspires much confidence in addressing the full scope of the human impact crisis that is breaking over us.

 

As with any other oil-based technology, wind turbines and solar panels are subject to diminishing returns which leave green deals dead in the water. But resource depletion is an even greater problem simply because humanity consumed all of the cheap and easy fossil carbon and mineral resources in the two-decade long blowout of the post-war boom. Our problem is not just that we cannot improve the technologies we currently have, but also that we no longer have access to the resources to re-fight World War Two or to purposelessly launch humans anywhere beyond a low earth orbit.

 

The vain hope that by shovelling vast amounts of fiat currency at lithium ion batteries we will somehow transcend the laws of physics is a siren song that takes us even further away from even mitigating the crisis before us. Indeed, the ability of states and banks to continue to create fiat currency out of thin air is itself only possible because of the illusion that there will be sufficient additional energy and mineral resources available in future to repay the debt we are running up today. When that illusion is shattered – as it very nearly was a decade ago – the resulting stagflation will put paid to any chance of deploying a fraction of the windmills and solar panels required even to maintain the standard of living currently endured by a growing precariat in the developed states.

 

If we leave matters to Mother Nature – assuming no energy breakthrough arrives to save the day – then the collapse of the environment just as our critical infrastructure fails is going to result in a massive cull of the human population via some combination of war, plague and starvation. We might mitigate this, however, by embarking upon a managed de-growth that begins with a radical shrinking of our material consumption to bring us (in the developed economies) to the standard of living of sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, we will have to take some seriously unpleasant decisions in order to shrink the population back to a more sustainable level – for example, rationing healthcare to the under 50s (I’m 58 by the way) and enforcing birth controls far more draconian than China’s infamous one-child policy. I have no expectation that anyone is going to vote for this; I just put it forward as a slightly more benign alternative to sitting back and waiting for nature to put an end to most of our species.

In the end, we are going to go with Mills’ option simply because it is the only one that fits with our underlying quasi-religion of progress. If material science provides us with the hoped for technological breakthrough – most likely one that unlocks the full potential of the atom (simply because of the vast potential energy within the nucleus as opposed to that released by breaking electron bonds) – then the kind of technologies available to future humans will be about as puzzling to us as a smartphone or a GPS satellite would have been to our Neolithic ancestors. If, as is far more likely, the technological breakthrough fails to put in an appearance, then irrespective of how many windmills and solar panels we manage to erect before our resources run out, this civilisation and possibly our entire species is done.

By xraymike79: The Inconvenient Truth of Modern Civilization’s Inevitable Collapse

Ways to Reduce Your CO2 Emissions

Xraymike79 doesn’t write very much anymore, but when he does, he’s awesome.

Here are a few excerpts from today’s essay that stood out for me, but the whole thing is worth your time.

https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2019/02/19/the-inconvenient-truth-of-modern-civilizations-inevitable-collapse/

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

 

Douglas Theobald, in his study at Brandeis University, calculated that there is less than a 1 in  102,860 chance that all life did not arise from a common ancestor. In other words, humans are related to all life on Earth and share much of their DNA with other organisms. Despite earning the title of ‘superpredator‘, humans are dependent on intact and functioning ecosystems. Our chances for long-term survival are ultimately tied to the health of the planet, yet we are carrying out ecocide on a planetary scale. Being a mere 0.01% of all life on Earth, humans have managed to destroy 50% of wild animals in just the last fifty years and 83% since the dawn of civilization around 3,000 B.C.. Who knows how many plant species have gone extinct:

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

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

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

These disturbing headlines indicate to me that the Sixth Mass Extinction is gathering pace and the real stock market underlying our very existence and survival is crashing before our eyes!!!

 

Humans recognized decades ago the threats they are now facing, yet nothing was done due to political inaction and industry malfeasance which continues to this very day. The scientists who wrote The Limits to Growth decades ago were expecting our political institutions to take action back in the 1970s, but they were met with ridicule and now we stand at the doorstep of modern civilization’s collapse. Political inaction and regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry appear to be intractable barriers that have condemned the human race to a hellish future. Anyone waiting for some sort of seminal climate change event that is going to galvanize the world’s leaders into action will be tragically disappointed. If seeing the world’s coral reefs dying, its glaciers disappearing, permafrost melting, and the steady uptick in extreme weather events does not spur them to action, it is much too late to hope that any single event will ever do so. The time to act would have been before we were seeing all these environmental degradations and tipping points, not afterward. There is no way to put the CO2 genie back in the bottle. A myth that many uninformed people hold is that biospheric health will quickly bounce back after we humans get our act together. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the damage we are already seeing is irreversible on human time scales. Positive feedbacks were already occurring at less than 1°C of warming. Many carbon sinks are on the verge of becoming or have already become carbon sources. As we race toward a nightmarish future with no realistic way to stop, we leave behind a “forever legacy” that will haunt mankind for the rest of eternity.

 

By Tim Morgan: Primed to Detonate (O O Canada)

Maple Leaf Falling

Today’s essay by Tim Morgan is a must read.

https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/147-primed-to-detonate/

Morgan has developed new metrics for measuring the health of economies that are grounded in an understanding of the energy that drives our civilization.

Here he considers 4 risk factors:

  1. Debt: Instead of using the conventional debt to GDP ratio Morgan backs out the portion of GDP created by the spending of borrowed money to obtain a ratio of debt to prosperity that better represents the actual debt risk.
  2. Credit Dependency: This is the ratio of incremental debt to incremental growth and represents the “ponziness” of an economy.
  3. Systemic Exposure: This metric takes a broader view of risk by considering an economy’s dependence on its financial sector and is calculated as the ratio of financial assets to prosperity.
  4. Acquiescence Risk: This metric represents the change in discretionary prosperity and is a good measure of expected social unrest when the next financial crisis occurs.

Morgan compares these risk factors for various countries and concludes that Canada is among the top 6 riskiest countries on the planet.

SEEDS risk matrix, end-2018

Other observations include:

  • China is a ponzi bomb waiting to detonate.
  • Ireland, Holland, Britain, Japan and China are accidents waiting to happen.
  • Ireland is the craziest country on the planet.
  • France has the highest social unrest today for good reason.