Category: Climate

By Robert Marston Fanney: How Climate Change is Spurring a Global Refugee Crisis to Rapidly Worsen

“Over the past two weeks, news of the plight of a swelling wave of refugees fleeing to Europe has filled the mainstream media. We looked on in horror at reports of innocent human beings fleeing destabilized countries in the Middle East, of people suffocating while stuffed into the backs of trucks, of drowned children washed up on the shores of nations their families had hoped would care for them.

It’s all a part of a growing global mass migration. A tragic dislocation and diaspora. But this time it’s not only birds, or polar bears, or fish, or walruses, or insects, or plants that are being forced to move by habitat and food loss, by toxified environments or by increasingly dangerous weather. It’s human beings too.”

How Climate Change is Spurring a Global Refugee Crisis to Rapidly Worsen

By Eric Holthaus: The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here

A nice update on climate change by Rolling Stone magazine.

“Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state’s Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.”

The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here

By Eric Holthaus: Earth’s Most Famous Climate Scientist Issues Bombshell Sea Level Warning: More than 10 feet in 50 years

I observe that each new forecast is worse than the previous best guess.

Just what you’d expect from a non-linear system with self-reinforcing feedback loops that is past its tipping point.

Earth’s Most Famous Climate Scientist Issues Bombshell Sea Level Warning

All Roads Lead to the Same Destination

Most experts think Greece’s debt is unpayable and must be written down, yet the ECB has to date been unwilling to do so. Why?

I have been arguing from intuition that they can’t. This article provides some data to explain the impossible situation Europe faces.

The Greek Bluff In All Its Glory

Tim Garrett has shown that there’s no way out from catastrophic climate change. I think it’s also becoming clear that we have no way out from a peak oil debt driven economic collapse.

So what’s going to cause us the most pain first?

My bet is on economic collapse. But the climate is putting up a pretty good fight and may pull ahead. Or maybe the climate will trigger an economic collapse.

All roads lead to the same destination.

Peak Oil and Debt

Greeks, on the one hand, want to maintain their standard of living and need debt to do so. Banks, on the other hand, want to grow their business and are motivated to loan more. When physical constraints to growth exist, like peak oil, this is a deadly mix. If you get in over your head on debt then both parties will experience a lot of pain.

The bigger picture is that most countries in the world are living well beyond their means, and equally important, their means are in decline due to peak oil. The main mechanism we use to live beyond our means is to grow debt faster than income. This works for a while but only delays, and then makes MUCH worse, the inevitable day of reckoning.

I think it is time we had an adult conversation and took action to acknowledge we are living well beyond our means and that our means are in decline.

We should shrink the public sector to a level we can afford without debt.  If you value public services then vote to keep them with higher taxes. Debt only works when growth is possible. We must stop using debt in a post peak oil world.

Debt is analogous to CO2. We could (or could have) collapsed the economy and held at less than 2 degrees, which would have been painful, but we chose not to and are now on a path to a much worse fate.

By Richard Smith: China’s Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse

This is the best article I’ve read on China and is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the difficulty of us voluntarily doing anything to make climate change less bad.

This article seeks to explain why China’s environmental crisis is so horrific, so much worse than “normal” capitalism most everywhere else, and why the government is incapable of suppressing pollution even from its own industries. I begin with an overview of the current state of China’s environment: its polluted air, waters, farmland and the proximate causes, including overproduction, overdevelopment, profligate resource consumption, uncontrolled dumping and venting of pollutants. I then discuss the political-economic drivers and enablers of this destruction, the dynamics and contradictions of China’s hybrid economy, noting how market reforms have compounded the irrationalities of the old bureaucratic collectivist system with the irrationalities of capitalism resulting in a diabolically ruinous “miracle” economy. I conclude with a précis of the emergency steps the country will have to take to take to brake the drive to socio-ecological collapse, with dire implications for us all.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-capitalist-ecological-apocalypse

My Certainties and Uncertainties

I’m certain peak debt will result in a financial crisis soon.

I’m certain peak oil will send us back to at best a medieval life style.

I’m certain we’ll experience 2 degrees of warming no matter what we do.

I’m certain 2 degrees of warming will be really really bad.

I’m certain we cannot make climate change less bad without shrinking the economy.

I’m certain we won’t voluntarily shrink the economy.

I’m not certain that dramatically reducing CO2 emissions, regardless if voluntary or forced, will stabilize things at a new survivable level and avoid extinction.

A lot of smart people that I respect think we have already triggered irreversible self-reinforcing feedback loops and it’s too late to stop catastrophic climate change.

It sure would be nice to see more people acting to prove these people wrong.

Popes and Words

Since CO2 emitted is proportional to dollars earned and spent I am very interested to see if the Catholic church withdraws capital from investments and dramatically reduces their expenditures.

If they don’t then the Pope is just spouting ineffective words like almost everyone else that wants to do something about climate change.

We must shrink the economy.

There is no other way to make the future less bad.

Refugees Coming or Going?

I was beginning to worry that refugee Californians would be moving to our already over-populated Comox Valley but now that we are drying out too we have other things to worry about.

It’s time for our local governments to freeze all new business and residential development in the valley.

Hopefully that might encourage some people to leave.

Century of Water Shortage Ahead?

Efficiency

Tim Garrett shows that efficiency is an accelerator of economic growth rather than a means of conservation. It’s not hard to understand.

If a company increases its efficiency it will produce more profits which can be reinvested to grow the business.

Or if you insulate your home and spend the savings on an annual trip to Hawaii you will stimulate the economy and emit more CO2 than had you not insulated your home.

Efficiency can mitigate overshoot if you capture the dollar savings from the efficiency and prevent them from being spent. For example, tax all the efficiency gains and then bury the tax revenue. You could use the taxes to retire public debt but then you’d have to find a way to prevent the government from borrowing more money to replace the retired debt.

In addition, an efficient economy tends to be brittle and less resilient. For example, most businesses to increase efficiency have reduced inventories and their associated carrying costs by relying on just in time deliveries from all over the globe. If something were to disrupt global shipping and/or the credit system it depends on, most businesses would grind to a halt, including your grocery store, in a few days. Efficiency is not always a good idea. Sometimes it is wise to have some fat in the system.

Efficiency can and should be used to lessen the impact on our standard of living as the economy contracts. However people should realize that all of the low hanging fruit for efficiency has already been harvested.

I wrote more about efficiency here.

The biggest opportunities for reduced consumption are now lifestyle changes.