Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued
Off the keyboard of Irv Mills
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Published on The Easiest Person to Fool on September 29, 2020
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| Kincardine's breakwall awash in the waves |
This is the second half of a post that I cut in two because it was just too long (6000+ words). If you haven't read the first half yet, it would be a good idea to do so—what follows will make more sense that way.
That first half finished with a discussion of the problems with fossil fuels as an energy source for our civilization. It's last paragraph is repeated below. Today, we'll go on from there, looking at other inputs that are problematical for our civilization.
Energy, renewable sources
But, you may say, if fossil fuels are no good what about renewable energy sources? There are large amounts of energy available from sources like hydro, biomass, wind, solar and so forth. And they don't involve adding more CO2 to the atmosphere—even biomass is only adding CO2 that was recently taken out of the atmosphere and will be taken out again as more biomass grows. A great many people today believe that renewables can replace fossil fuels and solve both our surplus energy and climate change problems. In fact, it has become very unpopular to challenge that idea, but I am afraid I must do just that.
The problems with switching over to renewable energy sources can be divided into three areas.
- the political will to do so
- the economic means to do so
- the technical feasibility of doing so
Political Will
It is clear that we will have to switch to renewable energy sources if we wish to become sustainable. But it is also clear that, as we'll see in a moment in the section on technical feasibility, renewable energy sources will not be able to support the level of growth and consumption that many of us are accustomed to, and they certainly won't be able to extend that level of prosperity to the poorer parts of the world.
For the overwhelming majority of people, lifestyle is not negotiable. And our current lifestyle demands continued growth and ever increasing prosperity—consumption, convenience, comfort and entertainment. I haven't noticed anyone rioting for the sort of austerity measures that I believe a switch away from fossil fuels would require. So, any plan that can't provide continued material progress is unlikely to be seriously considered, much less implemented. Yes, of course, I realize that we could change our lifestyle, and indeed circumstances may well force us to do so. My point is that most of us don't want to change the way we live, and will resist any attempt to get us to do so.
Plans like the "Green New Deal", which promise to create jobs and stimulate economic growth while switching over from fossil fuels to renewables, are intended to be more palatable. But there is good reason to think they are not economically or technically possible. And, if they were seriously undertaken, they might well make things worse, requiring the consumption of even more fossil fuels in the huge construction project that this switch over would require. This would mean further increases in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and would make climate change even worse, bringing about collapse even more quickly. Certainly not what the Green New Deal promises, but what it is likely to deliver.
The Economic Means
The surplus energy problem that I spoke of last time, and the resulting continued economic contraction that is going on, make it seem unlikely that we will have the wherewithal for such a major construction project in the years to come—we are looking at spending trillions of dollars building solar panels, windmills, storage facilities and an enhanced grid. Most of which will only make the surplus energy problem worse.
Technical Feasibility
For me, this is the real deciding factor. Let's consider the technical problems with renewable energy sources in general and then have a look at the issues with specific types of renewables. This will make it clear why I think a switchover to renewables is simply not doable, without drastic changes to our lifestyle.
The current fossil fuel infrastructure—coal mines, oil and gas wells, shipping, rail cars, pipelines, refineries, storage, distribution and retail facilities, and the equipment we have set up to use those fuels—is actually quite compact, owing to the concentrated nature of those fuels. They contain a lot of energy in a small, light package, and this has been the key to their success.
Renewables are more diffuse and require extensive infrastructure to gather and concentrate them to the point where they are useful. Already we are seeing what I call "energy sprawl" spreading across the countryside in the form of wind turbines and solar panels. But the amount of energy we are getting from this sprawl is tiny compared to our total energy use.
The renewable energy that is being proposed as a solution (wind and solar, mainly) comes largely in the form of electricity. Unfortunately, only about 20% of the energy we use today is used in the form of electricity. The rest is used directly in the form of refined fossil fuels to power transportation and to supply heat for industrial processes, space heating and so forth. The two biggest obstacles are electrifying heavy transportation (trucks and ships), and using renewable power to provide heat for manufacturing things like steel and concrete.
Switching over to renewables not only requires us to build huge amounts (5 times more than we currently have) of electrical generation, all of it powered by renewable energy sources, but also that we switch our transportation fleets and industrial infrastructure over to use electricity instead of fossil fuels as a power source.
This a big job that the "powers that be" don't really seem very interested in undertaking, and there are large chunks of it that we don't even know how to do as yet. I'll borrow a term from the nuclear industry here: "paper reactors". Solutions that so far only exist on paper have a tendency to take longer than predicted to implement, and cost a lot more money than expected. Time and money are two things that we don't have in great supply these days.
The power grid, which in most areas is just barely coping with peak loads, will also have to be beefed up by a factor of five to cope with the switch over to an all electric economy. But using the electricity from renewables presents some significant problems for the grid. Our civilization treats the power grid as an infinite source of energy which is available 24/7. In order to provide this, the grid needs energy sources that are "dispatchable". That is, energy sources can be turned on and off at will and ramped up and down as needed to cope with varying loads. This is usually done using a combination of coal, oil, natural gas and hydroelectricity, all of which are to some extent dispatchable.
But wind and solar are anything but dispatchable. The wind blows when it will, and there are often long periods without any wind at all over large geographic areas. The sun shines only during the day, except when there is cloud cover, and solar panels are often be covered with snow in the winter. None of these variations corresponds in any way to the normal variations in load that the grid experiences. In fact, to make even small amounts of intermittent renewable energy fit into the grid, highly dispatchable energy sources like combustion turbines (jet engines connected to generators, burning jet fuel) must be left spinning on standby, ready to compensate instantly when renewables falter.
This hardly makes the grid any "greener" at all. One solution would be to have a way of storing electrical power which could then be used to fill in when renewables let us down. Pumped storage of water is one alternative that is a mature technology. Water is pumped uphill to a reservoir when surplus power is available and then runs down hill through turbines to generate power when extra is needed. The problem is scalability—there are limited locations where reservoirs exists at the top a large change in elevation and near a supply of water. Batteries or compressed air on the scale that is needed here so far only exist on paper, and further development seems likely to run up against some fundamental physical limits.
Even if all these issues can be solved, we'd end up with a grid that is less resilient and more complex—more susceptible to failure.
It should also be noted that equipment like wind turbines, solar cells and batteries have a limited life. This poses two problems—when they wear out, they have to be replaced, and the old equipment has to been gotten rid of. Hopefully recycled, but more likely just disposed of.
A late addtion: Bev, one of my regular readers, pointed out in the comments below something that I had failed to make clear: while the energy from renewables is renewable, the equipment itself is built with largley non-renewable materials, and using up the quantity of materials we are talking about will no doubt lead to new resource depletion problems. It also takes fossil fuels to build, deliver, install, operate, maintain, repair and eventually decommision that equipment. Someday we may be able to power some of those steps with renewables, but initially and for the foreseable future, it's hard to see if there is really any net reduction in the use of fossil fuels when you look at the whole process.
And finally, even if all the technical problems could be solved, wind and solar do not have very good EROEIs, and would make our surplus energy problem even worse.
To bring this all home, let's take a look at the specific forms of renewable energy that we might turn to if we want to get off fossil fuels.
Power from biomass, basically firewood, is a very mature technology, and it has many advantages. While it is produced only during the growing season, it can be harvested and stored for use during winter. It is quite dispatchable and its EROEI is reasonably high, depending on how far it has to be hauled from the forest to where it is going to be used. Unfortunately, it is not highly scalable, since it competes with agriculture for land at a time when we are struggling to grow enough food for the world's growing population.
Hydroelectric power is another mature technology, with good dispatchability and a high EROEI. It is somewhat seasonal and it is not very scalable since most good locations are already in use. Developing the few remaining feasible locations would mean flooding large areas of land with environmental consequences that we should likely see as unacceptable.
Wind power is quite scalable, but intermittent and not dispatchable at all. It's EROEI is in the high teens, which is borderline for our needs, and probably lower if you take storage facilities into account.
Solar power is quite scalable, but intermittent and not dispatchable at all. It's EROEI is quite low, in the mid single digits, less if storage facilities are included in your calculations.
Nuclear fission power is not really a renewable since it relies on finite supplies of fissionable fuel. If a nuclear powered economy is to keep growing, it will run out of fuel in a surprisingly short time, even if spent fuel from the current generation of reactors can be processed for use in newer reactors. Nuclear has limited dispatchability, being best suited to supply base load. It has pretty good scalability, except that it takes a long time to build new nuclear plants, and we would need a lot of them to replace fossil fuels. We must also overcome many political and safety issues before starting to build more nukes. Lastly, the EROEI of nuclear is around 9, largely due to the complexity and safety features involved, so it only makes the surplus energy problem worse.
Nuclear fusion power isn't renewable either, though it's fuel is much more common than fissionables. But it is a "paper technology"— usable fusion reactors have been "just thirty years in the future" since the middle of the twentieth century, and will likely always be so. If we did somehow find the money to finish developing this technology, it would be very expensive to build, and its EROEI would likely be very low due to its high degree of complexity.
All in all, this is not an encouraging picture. You can see why I am so doubtful about switching from fossil fuels to renewables. One the one hand we desperately need to get off fossil fuels to get climate change under control. On the other hand we desperately need fossil fuels (or the elusive "something equivalent") to supply surplus energy to maintain our growing economy and the lifestyles it enables.
I have no confidence that we will even try to address this seemingly unresolvable conflict, and that is one more reason that I am expecting collapse.
Further, as the weighted average of the EROEIs of all a civilization's energy sources declines it is not just economic growth that suffers, but also the ability to maintain infrastructure. This includes the ability to build high tech equipment, including things like solar panels and wind turbines. At some point, as our industrial civilization continues to collapse, we will find ourselves restricted to low tech renewables and unable to maintain a large scale power grid. We'll be forced to drastically reduce our consumption of energy, and to adapt our use of energy to the intermittency of the sources, rather than the other way around.
So far I have only addressed the problems with energy inputs to our civilization, but there are other inputs that also present significant challenges.
The Ecosystem, and ecosystem services
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| Figure 2, from my last post |
The circle enclosing industrial civilization in the diagram above is misleading in that it would tend to suggest there is a boundary separating civilization from the environment, when it is really just another part of the environment. I have use a dashed line, hoping to indicated that many things flow freely between our civilization and its environment. There is a whole category of such things—inputs to our civilization—that we are absolutely dependent upon. Often referred to as "ecosystem services", these inputs are things we tend not to be aware of, in much the same way as fish are not aware of water.
They include breathable air, potable water, a reliable climate and moderate weather, arable soil, grasslands, forests and the animals living on/in them, waters and the fisheries they provide, and so on. These things are available to us free of charge and we would simply could not do without them.
It is important to understand that the ecosystem can only supply its services at a certain maximum rate—its carrying capacity. If we use those services at a higher rate, the ecosystem suffers and that carrying capacity is reduced. Many of the waste outputs of our civilization can also damage the ecosphere, again reducing its carrying capacity. And we continue to convert nature into farms, roads and cities, yet again reducing its carrying capacity.
This has created the current situation where we are temporarily in "overshoot", using more than 100% of the planet's carrying capacity. We are able to do this because there is a certain amount of stored capacity within the system. Drawing on that capacity has lulled us into a false sense of security. But rest assured, the situation is temporary and shortly the damage to the ecosphere will become obvious, and its declining ability to support us will have disastrous consequences.
To put some numbers on this, in the early 1970s when The Limits to Growth was published, we were using about 85% of the planet's carrying capacity. There was, at that point, at least hypothetically, an opportunity to put the brakes on economic growth and start living sustainably. Of course, we did not do so and now we are using around 165% of that carrying capacity. If we bring the poorer part of the world up to a standard of living similar to that of the developed nations, it would take about 500% of that carrying capacity to support the human race. Many suggest we should do exactly that, as a matter of social and economic justice.
It is hard to disagree with that, in and of itself. But long before this happens, of course, the ecosphere will have collapsed and suffered a drastic decrease in its carrying capacity.
Three factors are involved in our impact on the ecosphere: population, affluence (consumption) and technology. This can be represented by the equation I=PAT.
Population and affluence are politically sensitive subjects, so many people have focused on using technology to reduce our footprint. This is known as "decoupling", since the aim is to decouple rising population and consumption from their effects on the ecosphere, to allow growth to continue without having harmful effects. It turns out decoupling has not yet even begun and is very unlikely to ever be achieved. It is largely a myth. Here are a couple of links (1, 2), to articles that go into this in detail.
In addition to promoting myths about decoupling, those who do not wish growth to stop quibble about exactly what the planet's carrying capacity actually is and just how far into overshoot we currently are. This accomplishes nothing, since whatever that carrying capacity actually is, continued exponential growth will quickly take us past it into overshoot.
So it would seem we should do something about population and/or affluence. Population is such a hot button issue that one can hardly discuss it in polite company. Understandably so, since reducing population must involve either reducing fertility or increasing the death rate. Indeed people have been accused of being "eco-fascists" because they see the need to reduce our population, and look to the most populous areas as the first place to take action. I think "eco-fascist" is a reasonable term, since the most populous areas are also the poorest places on the planet and our impact on the ecosystem is the product of both population and affluence. In the developed world our consumption is so high that even though we have far fewer people, our impact is much larger than that of the poorer parts of the world.
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| Figure 3 |
As this chart (Figure 3) shows, the richest 10% of the planet's population does close to 60% of the consumption. The richest 20% does over 75% of it (17.6+59=76.6). So, reducing consumption in the more affluent parts of the world would be a good start to coping with our problems because it would immediately take us out of overshoot and give us some breathing room to address the damage we've been doing to the ecosystem.
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| Figure 4 |
As this revised consumption chart (Figure 4) shows, if we could reduce our consumption by 50%, it would reduce our ecological impact down to 82.5% of the planet's carrying capacity, while actually increasing the consumption level of the lowest seven deciles of the population, and only reducing the consumption levels of the top three deciles. This would seem to satisfy our yearning for social and environmental justice and significantly delay, if not prevent, collapse. But since the most affluent people, those in the tenth decile, are also in control of the situation, it seems unlikely that we'll make a serious attempt to implement that solution unless we are forced to do so by events beyond our control that bear a strong resemblance to collapse.
You may say that our population problem exists because our capacity to provide food has increased and our capacity to reproduce has responded, not the other way around. I don't disagree, but I don't think it is very useful to point that out. Deliberately cutting back on food production and letting people starve in order to reduce our impact on the ecosystem is morally repugnant. It is also not particularly effective since the poor would be effected first and they are not the major contributors to our impact on the ecosystem.
It has also been observed that as countries get richer, their birthrate goes down. Extrapolating current trends (including continued development in the developing nations), the UN calculates that our population will top out around 10 billion late this century and then begin to decline. They would tell you that all we have do is hang on until then and all will be well. But again, I disagree. Long before our population reaches 10 billion, especially if nothing is done to reduce our rate of consumption, the ecosystem will collapse and its carrying capacity will crash down to a level that can support only a tiny fraction of our present population. I think 10 to 20% would be an optimistic prediction.
Overuse of Fossil Water
This post is already quite a bit longer than I usually aim for, and I have only covered what I see as the most urgent input and output issues. There are many other areas that I haven't begun to cover, and which I will have to leave for another day. But there is one more input issue that I just can't leave out, and that is the depletion of fossil water.
Many of the important agricultural areas around the world rely on irrigation, and water for that irrigation is pumped out of fossil aquifers. That is, underground reservoirs that took hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate. The current rate of use is many times greater than the current rate of replenishment, and it is only a matter of time, and not much time, until they run dry.
The consequences for agriculture will seriously debilitate our civilization's ability feed us.
Summing it all up
We have seen again and again, from the start to the finish of this post, and the previous one, that resource depletion of various sorts, and depletion of the sinks into which we dispose of our wastes, seriously threaten our civilization. Any one of these issues is enough, all on its own, to compromise that civilization's ability to provide us with the necessities of life. In other words, to bring about collapse. And many of them interact in ways that just make the situation worse.
But inputs and outputs are not the whole story. The interior workings of our civilization are replete with issues that threaten its ongoing survival. Next time, we'll have a close look at some of those issues.
Links to the rest of this series of posts, Collapse, you say?
- Collapse You Say, Part 1, Introduction, Tuesday, 30 June 2020
- Collapse, you say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs, Wednesday, 30 September 2020
- Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued, October 7, 2020
Collapse, you say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs
Off the keyboard of Irv Mills
Follow us on Twitter @doomstead666
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Published on The Easiest Person to Fool on September 29, 2020
Discuss this article at the Kitchen Sink inside the Diner
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| Waves breaking along the Lake Huron shore—and this on a relatively quiet day. |
The title of this series of posts comes from the typical reaction you get when suggesting that our civiiization might be collapsing, "Collapse you say, surely not!" In my last post I said that I am convinced it is already happening or at least will happen at some point soon. Then I went on to explain what I mean by collapse—the process by which a civilization declines in its ability to provide the necessities of life to its members, the end result being that people are forced to fend for themselves or perish.
It seems to me that this is in fact happening today—that for all but a tiny minority at the "top", things are getting continually worse. The how and why of this process is the subject of this post and the ones that follow it.
The means of production and distribution that provide us with the necessities of life in modern industrial civilization require certain inputs and produce certain outputs. Today I want to the look at the problems posed in acquiring those inputs and disposing of those outputs.
I would guess that it's clear that by inputs I mean the energy and materials required to make the things we need. But what I mean by outputs may be less clear. I am not referring to the goods that are produced from the inputs, but the waste products produced in the process and the garbage that is left over when we are done using those goods.
But why should these inputs and outputs constitute problems?
Conventional thinking has our civilization in a box, separate from our planet and its ecosphere. The inputs (energy and materials) our civilization uses come from sources that are seen as essentially infinite and the outputs (waste heat and waste materials) are discharged into sinks that are also seen as being essentially infinite in size. Given all that, no reason is seen for progress—economic growth in this context—not continuing for the foreseeable future. This way of looking at things typifies some of the blind spots of modern thinking on economics and business.
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| Figure 1 |
Figure 1 illustrates what I am talking about. As long as there were relatively few people on our planet, and they weren't consuming excessively, it's easy to see how we might have looked at things this way. But now that we are well on our way to filling up the planet—or more likely well beyond that point—this is no longer valid. And sure, many people are aware that this is a very unrealistic picture, but the people who are running things, even those who verbally acknowledge the realities, continue to act as if there are no limits built into the system. In a future post we'll look at why this is so, but for now it suffices to say that it truly is the case.
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| Figure 2 |
First of all, our civilization exists on a finite planet, entirely within that planet's ecosphere, with no real separation from it (note the dashed border). Our inputs are taken from that finite source and our wastes are discharged back into that same finite space, used as a sink for waste heat and all our material wastes. This has some truly nasty consequences.
Inputs and outputs come in two forms: energy and materials. Energy flows from more concentrated to less concentrated forms, and regardless of where it comes from, is eventually radiated away from the planet as waste heat. Because of this, at any one level, we only get to use energy once. Materials stay around and can be reused, but generally change from more organized forms to less organized, (and less useful) forms as time passes.
For the planet itself, on the relatively short timescales we are considering, the only significant inputs and outputs are in the form of energy—sunlight in and waste heat out. This means that the planet isn't a closed system and incoming energy can be used to arrange matter into more complex forms, converting the energy used to a less concentrated form in the process. That's the good news—the rest of the news is bad.
Outputs
Let's look at outputs first, since that will make it easier to understand some of the problems with inputs. As I said, the outputs I am talking about are the wastes from processes within our society, and the garbage left over when we are done with the products of those processes. We simply throw these things away, but the trouble is that there is no such place as "away". The sinks into which we dispose of wastes are part of the very same environment where we get our inputs from, so this is much like shitting in our own nest. And in a great many cases it is not necessary at all. Many of these end products could, with relatively little effort, be fed back into the processes, and not treated as "wastes" at all.
That we haven't "circularized" our use of materials is a really bad sign. Why we continue to do this is inherent to the internal workings of our civilization and I'll go into the details of that in a future post. For now it is sufficient to understand that as long as that civilization exists in its present form, it's outputs will continue to be a problem.
There are a great many different types of pollution, but for our purposes today I'll concentrate on two particular type of waste—carbon dioxide and methane.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is produced in the burning of fossil fuels and biomass, and in the processes we use to make things like steel and concrete, essential building materials of our civilization. CO2 is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect and consequently climate change, and is also the cause of ocean acidification.
Methane (natural gas, CH4) has been touted as a replacement for coal and oil since it gives off less (but not zero) CO2 when burned. But it is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Between the wellhead and where it is used a great deal of methane leaks into the atmosphere—probably enough to overshadow any reduction in CO2 released by burning natural gas instead of other fossil fuels. Methane is also produced during the decay of organic matter and by the digestive systems of many animals. Warming due to climate change is releasing methane currently trapped in permafrost and in methane clathrate hydrates at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, further intensifying the warming process.
Ocean acidification the lesser known evil twin of climate change, occurs when CO2 is dissolved in water. An estimated 30–40% of the carbon dioxide from human activity released into the atmosphere dissolves into oceans, rivers and lakes. Some of it reacts with the water to form carbonic acid. Some of the resulting carbonic acid molecules dissociate into a bicarbonate ion and a hydrogen ion, thus increasing ocean acidity (H+ ion concentration).
Increasing acidity is thought to have a range of potentially harmful consequences for marine organisms such as depressing metabolic rates and immune responses in some organisms and causing coral bleaching. A net decrease in the amount of carbonate ions available may make it more difficult for marine calcifying organisms, such as coral and some plankton, to form biogenic calcium carbonate, and such structures become vulnerable to dissolution. Ongoing acidification of the oceans may threaten food chains linked with the oceans.
(Thanks to Wikipedia for the last two paragraphs.)
These are food chains that we sit at the top of, with many people, especially in poorer nations, relying heavily on seafood for protein.
Climate change has been in the news a lot lately, with a wide range of people expressing concern about its negative effects on our future. If, despite this, you are still a doubter or denier, you're in the wrong place on the internet, and need not bother leaving any comments. In my experience, if you scratch a climate change denier, you will find beneath the surface a rich person who is worried about losing their privilege.
So, climate change is real and it is driven by increases in greenhouse gases (CO2 and CH4 among others) in the atmosphere which cause the planet to retain more of the sun's heat. It has also been called "global warming", since it causes the overall average temperature of the planet to going up. The high latitudes in particular are already experiencing temperature increases. Eventually this is going to cause enough melting of glaciers to make for a significant increase in sea level.
In the meantime, climate change is also causing more frequent and heavier storms, which combined with even small increases in sea level, are causing a lot of damage along the oceans' shores. Such storms are also causing more frequent and serious flooding of many rivers.
Climate change is also intensifying droughts in many other areas, and in some of those areas this is leading to wild fires.
How does all this tie into collapse?
Storm surges, high winds, river flooding and wild fires are doing a great deal of damage to human settlements, at a time when our economy is struggling and the added cost of rebuilding can scarcely be afforded. Especially since we tend to rebuild in the same areas, leaving rebuilt settlements just as exposed as they were before.
The effects of climate change on agriculture are even more serious. In the ten or so millennia since we started practicing agriculture the climate on this planet has been particularly friendly to that endeavour. Farmers have been able to count on reliable temperatures and rainfall. This is now starting to change and as the rate of that change picks up over the coming decades, it is going to be very challenging to adapt to. This at a time when we are struggling to keep up to the demands of a growing and ever more affluent population for food and when there is little left in the way of wilderness to expand our farms into.
Even if climate change was the only problem we faced, it is serious enough to place the continued survival of our species into question. We are facing, to quote Jem Bendell, "inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction."
The threat of climate change is serious enough that most people who worry about such things at all are concentrating on it alone. Unfortunately, they are largely ignoring looming problems with the inputs required by our civilization.
Inputs
The problem with inputs is "resource depletion". We live on a finite planet and we can really access only a small part of it—the lower part of the atmosphere, the oceans and a few thousand feet at the top of the crust. Within that volume, there are finite supplies of the resources that we rely on.
Several problems result from the way we access and use those resources.
We generally access the lowest hanging fruit first. This means that the most convenient, easily accessible and highest quality resources get used up first. That makes sense as far as it goes, but it means as time goes by we are forced to use less easily accessible and lower quality resources. This takes more energy and more complex equipment, and is more costly.
Many of the resources we rely on are non-renewable—there is a finite amount of them on this planet, and "they" aren't making any more. Further, we use them in very wasteful ways. It is important to be aware here that, even at best, there is always some irreducible waste in our use of any resource, but currently we tend to make things, use them once and throw them "away". This means that depletion of many resources is happening thousands of times more quickly than it really needs to, and as I said in the section on outputs, that waste is accumulating in the environment.
Some of the resources we use are renewable, but the processes by which they are renewed work at a limited rate. We are using many of these so called renewable resources at greater than their replacement rate, and so they too are becoming depleted.
Conventional economists will tell you that when a resource starts to get rare, its price goes up, encouraging the development of substitutes. This is true to some limited extent, but many of the most critical resources simply have no viable substitutes. Not unless we are willing to make significant and unwelcome changes to the way we live.
At this point, we should look at some specific resources and the unique problems each of them presents.
Energy, Fossil fuels
Despite what conventional economists would tell you, energy (not money) is actually the keystone resource for our economy. Nothing happens inside our civilization without energy as an input and degraded energy (waste heat) as an output. Money functions as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value, all of which is very useful, but energy is what makes the economy function and grow. About 80% of that energy currently comes from fossil fuels (primarily coal, oil and natural gas). The remaining 20% comes from sources that we can only access using equipment that is both made using fossil fuels and powered by them.
So, our civilization is utterly dependent on having a cheap and abundant supply of fossil fuels. "Peak Oil" enthusiasts have been saying for decades now that we'll soon run out of oil and things will come to a grinding halt. In fact, though, there are still large quantities of hydrocarbons to be found in the earth's crust, so you might ask, "What's the problem?"
Well, there are two problems with continuing to burn fossil fuels.
One is the consequences for the climate of burning hydrocarbons and releasing ever larger amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is a very serious problem, for which we are having trouble finding and implementing any sort of solution.
The other problem, I'll be calling it "the surplus energy problem", is in many ways more complex and more serious.
Because we use various forms of technology to access energy, many people think that technology makes energy, and with improved technology we can always make more energy. Or, in this case, access the difficult to access hydrocarbons that currently remain in the ground. But in fact, the opposite is true—technology uses energy and won't work without it.
The energy that remains after we've powered the processes used to acquire that energy is referred to as "surplus energy." For instance, the technology used to drill oil wells and pump crude oil out of the ground uses energy. Back in the day, it used to take the energy equivalent of about one barrel of oil to get 100 barrels of oil out of the ground, leaving a surplus energy equivalent to 99 barrels of oil. This is usually expressed as "Energy Returned on Energy Invested" (EROEI), in this case 100/1, giving an EROEI of 100. Another way of looking at this is to talk about the Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE). In this case that would be 1/100, or 1%. Note that both these numbers are just bare numbers without units, and most significantly without a dollar sign in front of them. The "money cost" of energy is another thing entirely and since it is influenced by speculation on future supply and by fluctuations in demand (as we have seen in 2020 during the pandemic) it is not a reliable indicator of the actual cost of energy in energy terms, or the future availability of energy.
Conventional oil discoveries have not been keeping up with depletion for some time and our use of conventional oil actually peaked in the last few years. So we have been forced to switch to lower quality and more difficult to access sources. Conventional oil today has an EROEI ranging from 10 to 30. Tight oil and gas (from fracking), heavy oil and the "dilbit" (diluted bitumen) made from tar sands all have EROEIs less than 5, or ECoEs of 20% or greater.
"So what?" you might say. As long as the net amount of energy available is sufficient to power our civilization, what's the problem? Well, it's not just the amount of energy available from any particular source that really counts, but the EROEI. Or more precisely the weighted average of the EROEIs of all the various energy sources an economy uses. That number needs to be around 15 or more to keep that economy growing.
When the average EROEI goes below 15, growth slows and eventually stops and it becomes difficult to raise enough capital to even maintain existing infrastructure. Why our civilization needs to grow is a topic for another day, but it certainly does. This is what most people are missing about energy. Yes, a country can use debt to finance access to low EROEI energy resources in order to keep the economy going. But only for a while, until its economy contracts to the point where things begin to fall apart. This is certainly the case in the US. Fracking has made sufficient energy available, at what seems like a reasonable dollar price, but the real economy is mysteriously contracting, and debt is continually growing. Both economists and politicians, while putting on a brave face, are hard pressed to do anything about it, because they don't understand the surplus energy problem.
As we saw in the section on "Outputs", there are pressing reasons not to continue burning fossil fuels. But even if that were not the case, it would not be possible to continue running a growth based industrial civilization on the low EROEI fossil energy sources now available to us. For this reason alone, collapse seems like a sure thing to me, and I would say it has been underway since oil production in the continental U.S. peaked in the early 1970s.
But, you may say, what about renewable energy sources? Like non-conventional fossil fuels there are large amounts of energy available from sources like hydro, biomass, wind, solar and so forth. A great many people today believe that renewables can replace fossil fuels and solve both our surplus energy and climate change problems. In fact it has become very unpopular to challenge that idea, but I am afraid I must do just that.
This post ened up at over 6000 words long, enough to try the patience of even my most loyal readers. So I have split it in two at this point, leaving the second half for my next post, which will pick up from here and cover renewable energy sources, ecosystem services and fossil water.
Links to the rest of this series of posts, Collapse, you say?
- Collapse You Say, Part 1, Introduction, Tuesday, 30 June 2020
- Collapse, you say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs, Wednesday, 30 September 2020
Black Saturday in Oz: December 7th, 2009
Off the keyboard of John of Wallan
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Published originally on the Doomstead Diner January 4, 2019
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Black Saturday: 7th December 2009, Victoria Australia.
180 people died, 450,000 ha (1,100,000 acres) burnt,7,562 people displaced,Over 3,500 structures destroyed, including over 2,000 houses.
The statistics sound bad enough. They dont tell half the story.
The area:
I live in Wallan Victoria. This is the start of the “high country” 50km dirrectly North of the Melbourne CBD, with Pretty Sally Mountain (Tiny by any other continents standards), being the first major rise you come to. My 2 acre rural/ residential property is about half way up Pretty Sally.
To my North is the town of Kilmore, where one of the main fires started when some overheated power lines failed. East of Kimore is Whittlesea and Kinglake, where I regularly go to cut firewood eith in the local state forest or on a private property. From Kinglake to Marysville further East again is thinly populated mountainous bushland with samll towns and farms all along the outskirts of Melbourne. It had been a place where saw mills popped up in the late 19th century to feed growing melbourne, then migrant workers after WW2 built holiday cabins due to slightly cooler conditions and low prices. Plenty of hippies, loggers, farmers and retirees. Marysville is a tourist town with a small winter sky field nearby on Lake Mountain. Most of Melbourne’s water catchments are in this area due to relatively high rainfall and pristine bushland relatively close to the main population centres.
The lead up:
The weeks leading up to Black Saturday had been hot and dry. I was in one of my many “in between jobs” moments, and was driving a semi truck for a local recycling firm taking 40 foot containers to and from the Melbourne docks to pay the bills. Pretty cushy job in hindsight. Spent 8 hours of a 12 hour shift sitting in a plush Volvo cab waiting for containers to be loaded. All week I had been listening to the radio. All week we were told of the expected weather for Saturday to be worse than anything previously seen….. The week was bad enough, Every day over 40 degrees, and I think we had a 45 degree day which broke a record in the previous week.
I can remember looking at the ambient temperature reading on the dashboard of the truck while sitting on the blacktop at the docks in the line waiting to get unlaoded: 52 degrees! I jumped out of the truck to get the paperwork and it hit me like a hot iron. The radiant heat off the road actually burned the skin.
The BOM (Beaurea of Meterology) and the CFA (Country Fire Authority) had looked at the conditions and knew something really bad was coming. The FDI (Fire Danger Index) had literally gone off the scale. We were in uncharted territory. The usual warnings and preparations would be tottaly inadequate, as we all found out in hindsight.
Saturday was forecast for 100km Notherly winds, 45 degrees and very low humidity. The Area was tinder dry due to ongoing drought. In hindsight no one was prepared. Not by half.
The temperature on Saturday eventually hit 46 degrees and set a new record. No matter what you think, I can tell you that is fucking hot. Add 100km/h winds and thats a furnace. (115f and 60mp/h in the old scales).
Saturday:
Saturday started out hot and windy, as expected, and got worse as the morning went on. I worked from 6 in the morning and knocked off at lunchtime. I drove an old 1991 4 cylinder Holden Jackaroo 4WD (Isuzu trooper outside Australia. I still use it for firwood collection!), and was driving North along the Hume Highway, struggling to do 80km/h into the 100km/h hot headwind. About 20km from Wallan when I got a call from my wife: “There is a fire Wallan is being evacuated”.
I looked up and saw the relatively thin black plume of smoke from the Kilmore East fire in the distance and told her we are ok. Fire was to the NE and wind was dirrectly from the North. I though it would miss us, but suggested she call her uncle in Kinglake and warn them. More on this call later…
When I got home I started to get the hoses out and ready, fire extinguishers at each door and dressed me and my 2 lads head to toe in long sleeve cotton shirts and pants, boots and hats. I got them both on hoses and told them to walk up and down hosing the hedges around the house and each other, They made a bit of a game of it. In hindsight the lads were too young and we were ill prepared. Luck was with us that day. Other not so much.
It was so hot and the wind was so strong that literally a minute after hosing each other down we were dry. It was like standing in front of a hair drier on the hottest settings. Trees and plants we had watered the day before wilted in the heat despite having wet feet. They could not pump water up to the leaves fast enough. I grew up in the dry hot arid areas of Western NSW, so I was used to the heat. This was like nothing I remembered growing up.
The fire came 10km to the NE of our place. Then the wind changed to a Westerly a bit before 4pm from memory, and we watched as the fire went from being 1km wide fire front with 20km long flanks travelling South, pretty well following the Hume Highway to a fire front now 20km long travelling due East uphill into tinder dry thick bushland.
The local police Sergeant at Whittlesea later told us how he was trying to keep ahead of the fire front that day to warn and divert oncoming traffic. He was at Wallan East when the wind changed to a Westerly, and he drove his Ford Territory towards Wittlesea at 160 km/h (100mph) The fire beat him. The fire front was travelling much faster than the winds. The intense heat generated its own weather, with fire tornados and smoke cloud lightning reported.
We watched from my deck as the line of fire went up over the hills towards Kinglake and was gone within an hour. Everything in its path burnt almost instantly. Eucalyptus trees exploded as the heat boiled the oil out of the leaves and burned like a saturn 5 rocket engines with rolling fire balls travelling across the tree tops maybe 200m in front of the main fire front on the ground. This continual spotting way ahead of the fire front meant no fire break was big enough and fire fighters cound not attack the fire front as it soom engulfed them from all sides.
It was not a gentle rolling preductable fire. It was like a fan forced blacksmiths forge, but everywhere across the Eastern horizon. The landscape left behind was like a swept floor. No leaves or even ash. Just dirt and black tree trunks. The fire had burnt everything to fine ashes and the wind had blown it all away. Dense forest was now see through, with only blackened, leaf free trunks.
A mate of mine is a local volunteer CFA Captain. He said that day was the worst he had seen. They could not fight the fire front due to its speed and intensity. His words were; “If I put a crew in front of the fire, I am killing them.” When the wind change came he found himself in front of the fire. He and his crew took shelter in a local petrol station in Wandong of all places. He said the concrete car spaces around the bowsers was the only place that was not on fire! Once the fire front went past they went back to blacking out and mopping up.
The fire hit Kinglake West where I cut firewood at an uncles place a bit after 4:00pm. The uncle and aunt who we had warned earlier, completely ignored our warning, and did everything wrong. They somehow survived. Many of their neighbours did not. They were all home watching TV, not listening to reports or news or keeping an eye on things, despite a week of warning leading up to the day. They saw the fire and smoke, panicked and jumped in the car and drove through it. At the main road, after an arguament they turned left. They survived when a turf farmer 2km down the road waved them in to his property along with about a dozen other cars and had them in the middle of his Instant turf paddock with the sprinklers going while alll around the fires raged. If they had turned right they probably would have died like so many others did that day. Their house burned down and they lost everything. This house had originally been the old Italian migrant grandfathers hoiliday house he built in the 60’s his son had inherited. It was a besser block walls with tin roof. Pretty fire resistant you would think. It took less than 25 minutes to burn by the owners account. The fire front went through and flattened everything, and was gone. The next door property owned by the Itlian migrant’s Brother, 60m away in a bit of a gully down by a creek survived unharmed. No one was home there. Luck of the draw.
The speed and ferocity of the fire that day is hard to imagine. You can see footage of flames horizontal for 20 or 30 meters, but it is still hard to comprehend. I saw a fire travel up over the horizon in real time in a matter of minutes. It traveled from here to Kinglake quicker than I used to ride it on my old 750 Honda, and we used to run that road pretty damn quick in the days before speed cameras were everywhere. It literally swept the landscape clean. The temperatures melted steel structures which offered little protection. There were no containment lines. The fire just went in the wind dirrection and nothing could stop it. The fire front was so fast it literally blew over some properties and gullies which survived, while all around them the intense heat generated from the winds destroyed everything once it caught alight. We found the ride on lawn mower at Kinglake some weeks later. It was in the middle of a patch of grass. All that was left of the motor was the steel crank sitting straight up in the air. The alloy Briggs & Stratton engine had melted away completely, and the thin metal floor and wheels had oxidised to rust.
I stayed up to midnigt that night keeping watch and listened to the radio broadcasts. Next day I called my parents who live interstate, as I do most Sundays, and without any warning broke down and cried on the phone remembering what I had seen. I still choke up telling the story of that day.
120 people died in the main Kinglake/ Whitlease/ Kilmore East fire. Around 400 injuries were reported. A lot more were psychologiclly affected. The uncle never recovered and is a shaddow of his former self with major nervous complaints and other health issues which I attribute to that day. A few weeks after the fire I was traveling through town with his son and we turned up the neighbours driveway only to be confronted by the tell tale sign of blue police tape across the drive. The neighbours did not live there any more. Pretty confrontling. We did not say much for the rest of the drive home. The local pre-school at Kinglake lost quite a few children. (Pre-school is usually 3 to 5 year olds) The aunty used to assist there before the fires. The Uncle and Aunt were quite religious before the fires. Now I am not so sure. Pretty well everyone in the area suffers from PTSD in my opinion.
The tourist town of Marysville to the East was the worst hit I saw. It was just wiped off the map. We visited about 12 months after the fires when the clean up crews had already been through and were shocked to see the whole town was just an empty paddocks with a few transportable huts set up where the main street shops were. It looked like a new subdivision had just been put in. Roads, gutters and light posts and no buildings where once had been a shpping strip and residential area. It only had 1 road in and out. There was significant loss of life at Marysville as well as the property damage.
For several years afterwards people were still living in caravans or tents trying to rebuild or just pick up the pieces where they could. The uncle stayed 2 years in the next door house his uncle, (the other brother), had built while his house was rebuilt to comply with new and supposedly better fire regulations.
For at least 12 months I regularly saw cars driving around with melted bumpers or scorched paint. Many people moved out of the area. Many people were not found, or if they were found could not be easily identified.
I wish I could say there were some lessons learned from that day. If there was they were very small and certainly not widely adopted. The area has now been rebuilt with more homes than before, and many young families are moving into the area as Melbourne grows, and one of the worlds worst housing bubbles forces people into cheaper areas they can better afford.
I have become very vigilant every summer since that day. I keep an eye on weather forecasts a week in advance and every year I do some basic fire prevention preps around the house. Mow lawns, check pumps, sprinklers and hoses, put extinguishers at doors, clean gutters, etc. Its not enough. Never will be. Only way to guarantee survuival on a day like that is to be not in the area. Every fire season we have local fires, the worst came within 200m of the house a few years back and we had choppers flying overhead bombing the front. I think I posted some photos of this a few years back. I had the sprinklers on and was preparing to defend the property. That day was hot but nothing like the conditions on Black Saturday.
So many people blame others for the shit storm that day. I still have to bite my tongue to not get into arguaments. The uncle and his wife blame everyone for their loss: The police did not warn us. The fire brigade did not warn us or save our house, The government did not allow land clearing. The grrenies would not allow enough back burning operation. I heard it all. It was all baseless bulllshit.
The week leading up to the fires was media saturation on how bad Satuday was going to be. No fire fighter could stop that blaze, and half the state was on fire so no one is going to get a personal warnign call or visit. There is only one answer; You have to help yourselves, and if you cant dont be there.
At least twice since black Saturday I have rung the uncle and warned them of fire in the area. To my amazement both times we got the same response as Black Saturday: We are ok you are panicking for nothing. I will not be calling anyone from now on. I will be busy patroling outside and watching the CFA warnings site. I will no longer concern myself with trying to help those who will not help themselves.
The fires affected me. I am usually pretty level headed and calm in a crisis, and have dealt with stressful and confronting scenarios calmly such as giving first aid to injured people after an accident on several occaisions, or preparign for fires in the area, or putting out a car fire in the city while others panicked! (Fucking heap of shit Landrover. Should have let it burn!)… It usually hits me afterwards. My property was not dirrectly impacted by the fires that day, but I still choke up remembering it or telling a story about it. It also down right makes me angry when people blame others for what happened that day and dont take any personal responsibility.
After the fires the State Governemnt gave a lot of assistance packages to local areas as well as individuals. All those who lost houses got a cheque for $50K to assist rebuilding. This tax payer money was generously given away to make it seem like the Governemnt had done something…. A lot of people did not have proper insurance in the fire area, and the Government sold it as a way of helping them get back on their feet. I have a problem with this. I went without to ensure my property was insured. Others saved on insurance and got $50K. Others had insurance, but still got the $50K.
The fire services introduced a new leel of fire danger in the aftremath of Black Saturday: Catastrophic. It pretty well means if a fire gets away your fucked. Only safe option is to be not in the area. Only safe way to be not in the area is leave the day before. The fires burn so hot and travel so fast that leaving once a fire has started in the area is deemed to be more dangerous than sitting tight. There were a lot of fatalities from people fleeing in cars that day who either crashed due to poor visability or who got caught in the fire storm and the car overheated and they died from the radiant heat.
Interestingly there were fewer major burns injuries after the fires than expected. I remember reading a medical article which said that as a percentage of casualties, major burns was much less than usual for bushfires. The accepted theory is that the speed and ferocity of the fires meant that those caught in the open did not survive. It was just too hot. Those who managed to take shelter survived with usually minor burns.
The Future:
There are fires every year around here. This part of the planet is the bushfire capitol of Australia, if not the world! There will be another Black Saturday soon. A day where any fire is not controlable. Maybe this year, or maybe the next, or the one after that. Climate change is real. Heat waves are becoming more regular and rainfall paterns are changing. We are now getting some 1 in 100 year weather events, either extreme hot or cold, wet or dry every 10 years or so, and every year seesm to be the hottest on record.
Population growth in Australia is still going strong, mainly due to high net migration. It the only way our politicians can engineer ecconomic growth to ensure they get re-elected. Sydney is getting land locked, and prices are rediculous even compared to Melbourne’s rediculous prices. Melbourne is now the fastest growing city in Australia, and it is expected to overtake Sydney in population in a few years. More and more outer suburbs are popping up to cater for the growing population adding to very fast urban sprawl. Low interest rates is causing one of the worlds biggest housing bubbles here in Oz making housing afordablity very low. More and more people are moving out to the mountain areas to take advantage of cheaper housing. More and more areas where we should not be building are getting subdivided and family homes are being built. It is a recipe for disaster.
Insurance companies are starting to wise up about fire insurance in high risk areas. Many companies will not give policies in high risk areas, or have jacked up premiums to be unafordable. As a result the Government is trying to guarantee insurance for areas where no company want to insure against fire, either through incentives or regulation. Either way once again us tax payers will foot the bill for fire damage in a fire zone. If the area is too risky to insure, it is too risky to live in!
When the next fire goes through it will be a another disaster.
Responding to Collapse, Part 2: Climate Change
Off the keyboard of Irvine Mills
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Published on The Easiest Person to Fool September 15, 2018
Discuss this article at the Environment Table inside the Diner
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| These squash just climbed up and helped themselves to a seat. |
The title for this series of posts started out as "Preparing for collapse", but in my last post I immediately went into a rant about how I see a hard, fast, world-crippling collapse as pretty improbable. What I'm observing instead is a slow collapse that has already been happening for several decades and will continue for several more, albeit with much the same end result as a fast collapse. KMO, one of my favourite podcasters and a follower of this blog, suggested a better title would be Responding to Collapse, and that's what I'll be using from now on. Thanks, KMO.
Of course, I expect that the degree of collapse will become more intense as time passes, and it is that which we should try to prepare for (or respond to). Times will become gradually harder and occasionally bad things will happen that make things quite a bit worse all at once. But things will be much worse in some areas than others and if you are clever you can arrange to be where you'll miss the worst of it. Though if you think you can arrange to miss all of it, you're kidding yourself.
Over the next few posts I'll be offering some rules of thumb for surviving collapse. But always remember not to follow any rule off a cliff. Look at your own current circumstances and adjust my ideas fit.
All of what I am suggesting here only works if the great majority of people ignore my advice or, more likely, never hear it in the first place. One of our biggest problems, now and for quite a while yet, is that there are too many people living on this planet. If a great many people where to head in the direction I am pointing, the advantage of being there would immediately go away.
This is already starting to play out in some parts of the world where things are getting bad enough politically, economically and/or climate-wise that many are leaving in desperation. I am talking about places like the Middle East, North Africa, Venezuela and to some extent even Puerto Rico, where people are leaving for the mainland U.S. in droves. As the numbers of refugees mount the welcome they receive gets less enthusiastic. But bear in mind that the only real choice you will have in this situation is to be part of the influx of refugees or to be among of those who are welcoming it. I would say that the latter role is very much preferable. A timely move, before things get serious, can put you on the right side of things.
And those of you who applaud their government for clamping down on immigrants and immigration, consider this: if your government is so ready to mistreat "those people", how long will they hesitate to treat you similarly when it becomes convenient? Better to take part in the political process (vote, as a minimum) and work towards a government with more humane and progressive policies.
Some of those bad things that might make you want to move will be caused by climate change and today I'd like to focus on the negative effects of climate change, specifically higher temperatures and changing rainfall patterns.
I should say in advance that if you are in denial about climate change, please go somewhere else where you'll be more welcome. I simply don't have the energy or inclination to engage with you. As far as I am concerned it's happening, we're causing it by adding CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and it's going to get worse for quite a while yet. Especially since it doesn't seem like we are going to do anything about reducing green house gas emissions until collapse forces us to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels and our level of consumption in general. At the same time, I give very little credence to those who talk about near term extinction of the human race. That's way too much of an easy way out, and little more than an excuse for inaction.
Much of how we have come to live over the last few thousand years was determined by the climate, which has been fairly stable and accommodating to the way we practice agriculture. Based on this, we have been a very successful species, at least if you judge by how we have spread over the planet and how our population has grown. During the last couple of centuries energy from fossil fuels has enabled us to become even more "successful". We have overcome some challenges that had previously been insurmountable and managed to feed an ever growing population.
The Green Revolution involved some "improved" plant varieties that give startlingly better yields in response to optimized irrigation, fertilization and pest control, all of which have been facilitated by the ready availability of cheap energy. Unfortunately, this has involved the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels, the water in fossil aquifers, and deposits of potash and phosphorous.
We've managed to live and even farm in areas that were previously deserts. and we've been able to ship food from all over the world to areas where the population couldn't even remotely be supported by local agriculture. But the days of cheap fossil fuels, fertilizers and pesticides, abundant fossil water, and low cost worldwide shipping (with refrigeration as needed) are coming to an end at the same time as the climate is going crazy. We're are going to have to adapt as best we can.
So, let's have a closer a look at the consequences of climate change.
There is no doubt that the climate is warming worldwide and will continue to do so. That warming is much more intense in the high latitudes, leading to melting of major ice shields in Greenland and Antarctica. Mountain glaciers are also melting and disappearing at an alarming rate. To make matters worse, the water and land exposed by melting ice is much less reflective that the ice was and retains more of the heat from the sun rather than reflecting it back into space, leading to even more warming.
Ice is only about 89.5% as dense as sea water. This is why about 10% of the mass of an iceberg sticks out of the water, and why when ice floating in sea water melts, it does not change the level of the water. So the ice covering the Arctic Ocean will have no effect on sea level as it melts. But ice sitting on land does increase sea level when it melts and runs into the sea. This is true of the ice in Greenland and in mountain glaciers, and of much of the ice in Antarctica.
The loss of mountain glaciers also effects the way in which precipitation is stored and flows into rivers and we'll get to that in a moment, but for now, let's concentrate on sea level rise.
Interestingly, sea level isn't the same everywhere. When we speak of altitudes "above sea level" we are talking about "Mean Sea Level", which is an average level of the surface of one or more of Earth's oceans. But what we are concerned about here is the actual sea level at any particular location, and this can differ quite a bit from one location to another, and from one time to another, as the sea is in constant motion, affected by the tides, wind, atmospheric pressure, local gravitational differences, temperature, salinity and so forth. In addition to melting ice, sea level has been increasing during at least the last century as the oceans have heated up due to climate change. Further, many human settlements are built on river deltas, where subsidence of land contributes to a substantially increased effective sea level rise. This is caused by both unsustainable extraction of groundwater (in some places also by extraction of oil and gas), and by levees and other flood management practices that prevent accumulation of sediments from compensating for the natural settling of deltaic soils.
Here is an interactive map that illustrates what areas will be flooded as sea level rises. You can select the amount of rise and scroll around and zoom in to see the effect on the parts of the world that interest you most.
When I initially looking at that map, even with the sea level rise set to the highest level, it didn't seem all that bad—there will be lots of dry land left. But, zooming in and giving it a little further thought, I realized that the missing piece of information is what currently occupies the relatively small areas that would be flooded—a whole lot of people, many of whom are living in the world's largest and most economically important cities.
It's hard to nail down how many people will get their feet wet for any particular increase in sea level, but I did find one article that discusses this in some detail.
The writer says,
"Current estimates for the absolute maximum sea level rise, if the glaciers at both poles melted, range from 225 to 365 feet, with the latter being more likely accurate. If sea levels rose that much, coastal lands would be depressed several meters and transgressive erosion would also occur. So, for instance, even though Long Island has many points that are above 300 feet or so, none of it would survive the transgressive erosion because it is all glacial till. It is hard to extrapolate from the numbers above to a 100+ meter rise, and improper to do so, but consider that if the human population is concentrated near the seas, and 10% live below the 10 meter line, then it is probably true that well more than half live below the 100 meter line, and many more within the area that would be claimed by the sea through erosion and depression."
But while all that ice may well melt eventually, most sources predict that sea level will only go up a few feet during this century. That would be less destructive, but even moderate increases in sea level combined with more severe and more frequent storms, and with tides (if the timing of those storms is bad), will result in previously unheard of damage to seaside settlements. We've already seen some of this with Katrina, Sandy and several storms (Harvey, Irma, Maria) in the fall 2017, that hit the Gulf Coast, Puerto Rico and Florida. As I write this, Hurricane Florence is heading for the Carolinas. It promises to last longer and bring with it a lot of rain due to the unusually high temperatures associated with it
Clearly, you'll want to be away from the seashore. But you don't want to jump from the pan directly into the fire, so we need t look at what other climate change related problems you might face farther inland. In an attempt to increase the content value of this post, I found some more maps which illustrate the effect climate change is going to have over the coming decades.
- Projections of Future Changes in Climate, by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
- Regional Maps on Migration, Environment and Climate Change, Environmental Migration Portal
- Visualizing a Warmer World: 10 Maps of Climate Vulnerability, by Stefanie Tye, Emily Nilson and Lauretta Burke, World Resources Institute
- Climate—How is climate changing? Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness
Climate change is a global problem, but in my search it became obvious that quite a lot more information is available for the U.S. and Canada, and since many of my readers are from North America, I'm including some of that information here.
- Nine maps that show how climate change is already affecting the US, by Brad Plumer, Vox
- Future Climate, National Climate Assessment, U.S. Global Change Research Program
- New maps highlight changes coming to Canada’s climate, Prairie Climate Centre
- Monthly Temperature and Precipitation Delta Maps, Prairie Climate Centre
Looking at those maps and a lot of other study led me to the following conclusions:
Tropical storms can do quite a bit of damage fairly far inland—look at what Maria did to Puerto Rico—even the mountainous inland parts of the island. This is something to take into consideration if you currently live in the Caribbean, near the gulf coast of the U.S. or near the eastern board of the U.S. Tropical storms in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are not something we hear much about in the mass media in North America, but they do happen and have lots of potential for damage to human settlements. If you live where this happens you're probably well aware of it and can take it into account in your plans.
People are often proud of the way they have managed to rebuild after storms, and this is fine if you're talking about storms that only happen once a century or so. But as storms become more frequent the financial resources to rebuild every few years will dwindle away. The best time to move is when things have recovered nicely from the most recent storm, but well before the next one. Of course, if it looks like recovery isn't going to happen, then it's time to get out, regardless of the cost.
It always astonishes me the way people are willing, perhaps even eager, to build or move into accommodation on the floodplains of rivers. The story is always that the river floods only very rarely and hasn't flooded in a long time. Now that sounds to me like a promise that flooding can be expected shortly even without climate change. But as climate change brings more violent storms even outside the tropics and changes in the pattern of precipitation and spring melting of the winter snow pack, more frequent floods are a certainty. So don't be fooled when moving into a new area—stay away from floodplains and areas likely to be undercut by erosion.
Heat waves are becoming more common everywhere, but particularly in the tropics. Many areas will eventually get to the point where they will be uninhabitable for large parts of the year if you don't have air conditioning or housing designed to cope. As always, the poor will be hardest hit.
The lack of water can be just as much of a problem as too much.
Already deserts are expanding and they will continue to do so, consuming the semi desert areas surrounding the desert where people have been living and are now forced to leave. This is already happening in North Africa and the Middle East and is the root cause of a lot of political unrest.
Droughts are becoming more common and are striking areas that traditionally have not suffered droughts. The Pacific Northwest, including California and British Columbia, is one such example. Even areas such as the one where I live, which is getting slightly more precipitation overall, are suffering from changes in when the precipitation happens. In the case of southern Ontario, we're getting more precipitation in fall, winter and spring but less in the summer. This is a problem for agriculture hereabouts, which has traditionally relied on getting a sufficient rain in the summer.
There are areas in the southwest of the U.S. that have traditionally been seen as deserts, but during the twentieth century were made to bloom, using water from pump from fossil aquifers and rivers dammed and diverted. Unfortunately the aquifers are just about depleted and all the water in the rivers is being used while demand still grows. As precipitation decreases and temperatures increase even at higher altitudes, there is less accumulation of snow and glaciers melt away, meaning that rivers fed by melting snow and ice run dry earlier in the summer, if they run at all.
There is a great deal to be said about areas outside of North America, but this would require a lot more research on my part and delay the publication of this post even more. But I was reading recently that Spain and Portugal are experiencing a severe drought, and it is expected to get worse.
People have difficultly responding rationally to these sorts of problems. Slowly increasing temperatures, slowly rising sea levels and slowly spreading desertification are the kind of thing that we tend to let future generations worry about, thinking it's not going to happen here, not just yet anyway. Then one day it does happen and many are caught unprepared.
Catastrophes that happen irregularly and unpredictably, like storms, heat waves, droughts and forest fires, are the kind of thing we live through and convince ourselves won't be happening again anytime soon. But as climate change progresses, they will become ever more frequent and more difficult to recover from.
Don't be caught in denial—where ever you are, you'll be experiencing some negative effects from climate change. But in some places, those effects will be overwhelming and the only viable response is to move away. Better to be well ahead of the rush. If you own property, better to get it sold while there are still buyers who haven't caught on to what's happening.
So, you're looking for a place that is, and will continue to be:
- well above sea level
- not at the top of a bluff overlooking the sea that is being gradually eroded away
- not situated so as to take the full brunt of tropical storms
- not in the floodplain of a river
- not in a desert or semi-desert that relies on water from fossil aquifers that are being depleted faster than they are replenished or rivers fed by glacial melt water
- not subject to hot season temperatures or heat waves that are not survivable if the power goes out or you can't afford air conditioning
- receiving enough rain to allow for agriculture
- with a growing season and soil that will support agriculture
In addition to the problems caused by climate change, the other two main concerns of this blog (resource depletion and economic contraction) are going to see most of us becoming quite a bit poorer, and not relying on anything that uses much energy, including shipping things in from far away. Most of our own food will have to be grown locally and the smaller amount of "stuff" we consume will be made locally.
In a future post (coming soon) I'll be talking about coping with the challenge of finding and fitting into a community that can survive under these conditions. For now I'll just say don't assume that collapse will relieve you of the necessity of earning a living in the growth based capitalist economy. It's going to take a long time to switch over to a low energy, low consumption, non-growth economy and in the meantime, most of us will have to keep a foot in both worlds, and initially mainly in the currently existing world.
So any plan for a move will have to take into account the necessity of earning a living where ever you go. You may well find that the pressure of earning a living pushes you in the opposite direction from what collapse related planning would indicate is best.
Next time I'll look at the socio-economic side of things—the problems caused when we are surrounded by too many people and by too few, often at the same time.
Michael – The Path of Total Destruction
Off the keyboard of RE
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Published on the Doomstead Diner on October 14, 2018
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We've been tracking the progress of Michael Inside the Diner in our Strafing Run of Mother Nature thread since before he ever made it to Cuba, as we do with most cyclones that are either exceptionally huge and potentially destructive or which look like they have the potential to impact the FSoA in some location. We also watch the storms in the Pacific that generally hit the Asian continent also, but since most of the Diners live in the FSoA, these storms get more attention.
At the beginning, Michael didn't look like much, a Cat 1 bound for Cuba, but the track projected by the Supercomputer Models took it through the gap betwen Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula and into the Gulf of Mexico. The projected track made a beeline for the Panhandle of Florida, and thus it became a Hurricane worth watching, despite the fact it was only Cat 1 at the time.
Once into the "abnormally" warm waters of the Gulf, Michael went through not one, but 3 cycles of rapid intensification, or "Bombogenesis". In the matter of 3 days, he went from a pipsqueak Cat 1 Hurricane to a devastating Cat 4 on the Landfall between Panama City and Mexico Beach in the Panhandle of Florida, getting stronger all the time, even through two eyewall replacement cycles. On landfall where the eyewall hit, the devastation is so complete it looks like a Nuclear Bomb was detonated.
You can Google many more pics or find Slideshows of the aftermath on other websites to see a zillion like the above, I'm not going to drop a whole bunch more of those here. Suffice it to say that these Beachfront Resort Communities are going to be quite some time in returning to BAU, if they ever do. Also similarly devastated was Mexico Beach, Apalachicola and Tyndall Air Force Base. On the latter, all to the good there.
What we will look at in this article is the development and Path of Total Destruction that Michael took from the time he passed Cuba and entered the Gulf of Mexico until he exited the shores of the FSoA into the Atlantic, now predicted to make a beeline as a post tropical storm across the pond and headed for Europe. The images you will see here come from the marvels of modern technology courtesy of the NOAA, the NHC and the NWS. The satellites shoot in various wavelengths, Visible, Infrared, and Short Wave Infrared. Also a new color composite with simulated day/night layers. Also, Doppler Radar which gives a Techs-on-the-Ground look at the ground level precipitation coming down. This technology, along with the supercomputers and weather models that have been developed has totally revolutionized the prediction of Hurricane landfalls. The accuracy of this technology is really only about 5-10 years old. The track for Michael was right on, basically from the moment it became a named storm right up until it left the FSoA. It remains to be seen if the track prediction holds true for a projected journey across the Atlantic as a post-tropical storm to possibly also threaten Europe.
This technology dramatically reduces the loss of life, giving people the time to prepare or to GTFO of Dodge. The 2nd choice there for Michael if you lived along the Panhandle coastline being the only intelligent choice. Further inland, you might try to ride it out if you live in a well built structure like a Monolithic Dome, but on the Coast a Cat 4 (nearly a Cat 5) positively FLATTENS everything.
Anyhow, that's enough words for today on Michael, now the story will be the aftermath and the cleanup which will take a while to play out. Michael cut such a huge swath over such a long distance in a highly populated zone that it's going to be a very long and difficult cleanup, along with the restoration of power. About the only thing you can be sure of is it will get done faster than the cleanup got done (it still isn't) in Puerto Rico. For now, lets just follow Michael as he makes his way in to do a Strafing Run on the Southeast Coast of the FSoA, starting with when he grazed Cuba to make it into the GoM.
Michael runs the gap between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula as a Cat 1
Michael crosses the Gulf of Mexico rapidly intensifying from a Cat 1 to a Cat 4 in the matter of 3 days.
Michael makes his approach on the Panhandle of Florida to begin his Strafing Run
Michael makes First Contact betwen Panama City and Mexico Beach, dropping the equivalent of a Nuclear Bomb across the Beachfront resort communities of the Florida Panhandle.
Michael traverses Florida to move into Georgia, still at Hurricane Strength
Michael strafes Georgia and moves on for a Strafing Run on South Carolina and North Carolina, recently innundated and devastated by Hurricane Florence.
Michael finishes with the Carolinas to bring misery to Virginia and Maryland
Michael makes his final Strafing Run on the FSoA East Coast exiting out of New York to head back into the open waters of the Atlantic, traveling at a high rate of speed.
…and now for his next act, Michael is predicted to make a Trans-Atlantic crossing of the Pond as a Post-Tropical storm, headed for Europe for another Strafing Run before he is done.
By the time Michael makes it over to Europe, he won't be packing anywhere near the power he had on arrival in Florida in terms of wind speeds and destructive capacity, but still probably will be carrying with him a prodigious amount of rainfall which can also be quite devastating. We will see what effect Michael has on the European continent.
For next week here in the FSoA, the cleanup and recovery operations begin, but typically the MSM is already leaving this story for the other ongoing disasters endemic to the Collapse of Industrial Civilization, that they are also blissfully unaware is underway. How many will still be without power in week from now, will we ever know or hear about it? Probably not. Attantion spans are very short on these things, particularly when you have so many of them come in such a short interval of time.
Its Not The Heat. It’s The Stupidity
Off the keyboard of Category5
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Published on The Doomstead Diner on August 8, 2018
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C5 Says, Its Not The Heat. It’s The Stupidity
With your sweaty host, Category5.
(Thanks, J.T., J.S. and T.M. for the donations. Its been put to good use for a future article)
There is only one subject worth talking about. THE subject. The Heat.
Ya. I know I said I wouldn’t be back till the winter once all the chores and Honey, Do before the Apocalypse, lists of the year.
Much of those tasks haven’t been getting done though. It’s TOO FUCKING HOT. I have been bogging down. It has been like trying to build things while dog paddling through a swimming pool of humidity. I feel like Golom. “The light. It Burns me, Precious”. I have been hiding out in the house to avoid dying. I work in 15-20 minute spurts, then come back into the house drenched in sweat. Sweat that does not evaporate. That does not cool the body.
More so, there is almost no wind. The irony is, one of those, Honey, Do tasks is to build a short tower to put up the wind generator that has been sitting in storage for the last 5 years. We live on a wind path… but no wind.
Stationary weather fronts. The jet stream bogs down. It is the exact same issue that made last winter, fucked up cold.
It was nice that people kept revisiting my epic drunken rant, C5 Explains Why It Is So Fucking Cold, https://darkgreenmountainsurvivalresearchcentre.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/c5-explains-once-again-why-it-is-so-fucking-cold-2017-2018-its-hurricane-harvey-part-ii-stupid/
I only bring it up because I pointed out how that cold was related to last years heat and hurricanes. This year is no different. It is connected. The weather didn’t magically appear from the sky god. WE did this. We all did it. I did it. I accept responsibility for my part.
Still, some of the things I have heard said make me face palm. Its not the heat. Its the stupidity.
One of those epic face palm moments, was a popular article that got around that said something like, “We cant fully attribute this heat wave to global warming. Its also about the warm oceans and the jet stream…To early to tell…”
ARE……..YOU………..FUCKING………KIDDING ME! Well, bend me over and fuck me slowly. Clearly, the human race is too stupid to live. It takes “A Special Kind Of Stupid” to not be able to connect the warm ocean to heat or jet stream to warm air and ocean.
Its not even worth me wasting my time to complain about the tighty whity righty, man made global warming deniers.
The Super Face Palm inspiring moments are coming from the denialist LEFTIES. You heard me correct. The lefties. The progressives. The ones who’s personal identity of moral superiority comes with the idea that they believe in global warming and they are fighting those evil capitalists. Yup. They have a different type of denial. going on… but it is just as lethal… if not more. The devil is in the details.
Denial- Wind and Solar power will save us. Electric cars will save us. Revolution against the capitalists or nationalists or republicans will save us. The right type of government will save us. Technology that doesn’t exist will save us.
I call this DENIAL, not because of the impossibility of those things happening, but because its deceptively passive. They are not doing the needful because… the devil in the details… they are waiting for someone else to save them while doing NOTHING. Its in the descriptive parameters of the phrasing.
Scientists aren’t going to save you. The technology doesn’t exist for a reason…because it doesn’t exist. Worse, by repeating this shit over and over, its teaching others to be passive…waiting for salvation, while putting all their focus on blaming others and politicing.
And that gets us to our first read. Other than that the heat is present constantly in my thinking as I wade through my own survival adaptions… and just strait up survival, the reason I decided to do this post… instead of just waiting for the winter to write… was to post this article-
Time For Some Climate Honesty-Half Truths Are Doing No Good- once again, by Chris Martenson
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/114254/time-some-climate-honesty
Another Honorable Mention read, encase you missed it.
(Finally, Civilizational collapse is tied in… but he ruins it at the end with the worn out “Solution”)
Before I get to the final read, there is one other face palm moment I hear from The Denialist Progressives. Its, “We cant address Climate Change till we address inequality”.
Though, it is a logical position, it’s sort of like saying we will wait until Jesus returns and the Kingdom comes down to earth. Inequality aint going away. Its baked into the cake. In fact, it’s about to get a whole lot worse with climate change.
Hey, “Save as many as you can” is one of my catch phrases. But once you have saved as many as you can, if you take just one more person, everyone dies. You row the lifeboat away from the drowning before they overwhelm the lifeboat. You close the gate and put armed guards in the towers. Its hard to hear…but it really is the only “Moral” option left.
So, this next awkward read goes into the, “I am trying to scare the shit out of you”, category, to shake you from DENIAL. Consider it an intervention.
http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/forum/index.php/topic,11419.msg159010.html#msg159010 (Scroll down once you get there)
Top lines to pay attention to are- “Just like that….. there’s hundreds of millions on the way when things get bad enough.
They will overwhelm the borders, and “society” will double in size over a few short weeks… collapsing all infrastructure – water, sanitation, roads, housing, police…..
The police were stretched with the 60 million people of the UK, they are completely ineffective at 110 million.
The UN can only drop aid by air, and gangs form, most people getting no food, the gangs hording everything.
The army can’t enter due to world condemnation of military involvement.
People starve, crime is rampant, disease everywhere.
And in one short month, society is reduced to the level it would be after a nuke attack.”
And that’s just scratching the surface. Consider the social chaos we have recently seen as people freak out over a few million refugees. Now change millions to billions as large swaths of the earths surface can no longer sustain life, and what can sustain life, can’t feed them without being stripped of future life or regenerative sustainability. The real issue isn’t really carbon input. Its too many humans. Humans that cannot survive… if not for all that carbon input.
And that is why no body is in any big rush to halt Anthropomorphic Climate Change.
Just a reminder. The heat this year is the result of carbon inputs from 30 years ago. This is as good as it will ever be. If you cut off all industrial society today, ALL of it, You still have 30 more years of warming to happen (not including the feedback loops of methane… and ozone depletion) just to stop from getting worse and it will remain that way for umpteen thousands of years.
All the worst parts of the Book of Revelations comes to mind.
So…what am I doing to save my own life, back on my doomstead. Back to the irony of me putting up this wind tower. I haven’t been all that exited about doing this job.. One of the down sides of wind power (besides the battery storage issues) is that it is a mechanical device. That means, they wear out quickly. It will require lots of upkeep and replacement parts. Parts mined, shipped, industrial manufactured, shipped again, warehoused and shipped again. Its nothing remotely close to renewable or carbon friendly. Lets not fool ourselves. I don’t. But it will make a cool lawn ornament that will be the envy of our morally superior progressive friends and paranoid, tighty righty survivalists alike. I just wont tell them when it breaks down and it’s really just just a huge lawn Whirly Gig. Hopefully, it doesn’t launch itself into our, also very sexy, solar panels or greenhouse, during the next hurricane, super storm or micro-burst…. or burst into flames from lack of oiling, spewing burning plastics into the tinder dry grasses, right at the point of high winds.
This year has all been about upgrades to do with super storms. Next year, I have decided to completely change direction and fully put my mind to FIRE STORMS… because that is also coming. That is even more daunting.
So….What have I really been doing to save my own life? Yesterday, I began opening a hole in the floor of our house to get underneath. I can only belly crawl to a few places. I have been digging on my belly, hopefully getting to the place where I have a place to sit upright in the cooler earth. I’ll dig a small test hole to see if it just fills with melt water next spring before risking digging further. We’ll see.
Well, back to my hidey hole. See you in the winter unless some other disaster forces my pen.
How to Survive When, NOT IF, Catastrophic Climate Change Makes Earth’s Climate Unsuitable For Humans
Off the keyboard of A. G. Gelbert
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Published on The Doomstead Diner on March 30, 2018
How to Survive When, NOT IF, Catastrophic Climate Change Makes Earth's Climate Unsuitable For Humans
By Anthony G. Gelbert
During many periods in human history, some were doing just fine and others lived on the edge of starvation in a constant state of collapse. Abrupt changes in climate, such as that caused in France by a massive Laki volcanic eruption in Iceland in 1783, have resulted in famine induced starvation. In that case, starvation was followed by social upheaval and revolution, instead of collapse. Civilization in Iceland was nearly wiped out with that eruption (over one third of the population was killed), but did not collapse.
For a collapse to occur, the society destroying pressure must last longer than a decade or so. For example, natural climate alterations that produced lengthy droughts caused some ancient starving civilizations to eventually collapse.
SNIPPET From the March 21, 2016 article, "Ten Civilizations or Nations That Collapsed From Drought", by Jeff Masters:
Drought is the great enemy of human civilization. Drought deprives us of the two things necessary to sustain life–food and water. When the rains stop and the soil dries up, cities die and civilizations collapse, as people abandon lands no longer able to supply them with the food and water they need to live. While the fall of a great empire is usually due to a complex set of causes, drought has often been identified as the primary culprit or a significant contributing factor in a surprising number of such collapses. Drought experts Justin Sheffield and Eric Wood of Princeton, in their 2011 book, Drought, identify more than ten civilizations, cultures and nations that probably collapsed, in part, because of drought. As we mark World Water Day on March 22, we should not grow overconfident that our current global civilization is immune from our old nemesis–particularly in light of the fact that a hotter climate due to global warming will make droughts more intense and impacts more severe. So, presented here is a "top ten" list of drought's great power over some of the mightiest civilizations in world history–presented chronologically.
Collapse #1. The Akkadian Empire in Syria, 2334 BC – 2193 BC.
Collapse #2. The Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, 4200 years ago.
Collapse #3. The Late Bronze Age (LBA) civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean. About 3200 years ago, the Eastern Mediterranean hosted some of the world’s most advanced civilizations.
Collapse #4. The Maya civilization of 250 – 900 AD in Mexico. Severe drought killed millions of Maya people due to famine and lack of water, and initiated a cascade of internal collapses that destroyed their civilization at the peak of their cultural development, between 750 – 900 AD.
Collapse #5. The Tang Dynasty in China, 700 – 907 AD. At the same time as the Mayan collapse, China was also experiencing the collapse of its ruling empire, the Tang Dynasty. Dynastic changes in China often occurred because of popular uprisings during crop failure and famine associated with drought.
Collapse #6. The Tiwanaku Empire of Bolivia's Lake Titicaca region, 300 – 1000 AD. The Tiwanaku Empire was one of the most important South American civilizations prior to the Inca Empire. After dominating the region for 500 years, the Tiwanaku Empire ended abruptly between 1000 – 1100 AD, following a drying of the region, as measured by ice accumulation in the Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru.
Collapse #7. The Ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) culture in the Southwest U.S. in the 11th – 12th centuries AD. Beginning in 1150 AD, North America experienced a 300-year drought called the Great Drought.
Collapse #8. The Khmer Empire based in Angkor, Cambodia, 802 – 1431 AD. The Khmer Empire ruled Southeast Asia for over 600 years, but was done in by a series of intense decades-long droughts interspersed with intense monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that, in combination with other factors, contributed to the empire's demise.
Collapse #9. The Ming Dynasty in China, 1368 – 1644 AD. China's Ming Dynasty–one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history–collapsed at a time when the most severe drought in the region in over 4000 years was occurring, according to sediments from Lake Huguang Maar analyzed in a 2007 article in Nature by Yancheva et al.
In this image, we see Kurdish Syrian girls among destroyed buildings in the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane on March 22, 2015. Image credit: Yasin Akgul/AFP/Getty Images.
Collapse #10. Modern Syria. Syria's devastating civil war that began in March 2011 has killed over 300,000 people, displaced at least 7.6 million, and created an additional 4.2 million refugees. While the causes of the war are complex, a key contributing factor was the nation's devastating drought that began in 1998. The drought brought Syria's most severe set of crop failures in recorded history, which forced millions of people to migrate from rural areas into cities, where conflict erupted. This drought was almost certainly Syria's worst in the past 500 years (98% chance), and likely the worst for at least the past 900 years (89% chance), according to a 2016 tree ring study by Cook et al., "Spatiotemporal drought variability in the Mediterranean over the last 900 years." Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases were "a key attributable factor" in the drying up of wintertime precipitation in the Mediterranean region, including Syria, in recent decades, as discussed in a NOAA press release that accompanied a 2011 paper by Hoerling et al., On the Increased Frequency of Mediterranean Drought.
A 2016 paper by drought expert Colin Kelley showed that the influence of human greenhouse gas emissions had made recent drought in the region 2 – 3 times more likely.
Full article with lots of great pictures: https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/ten-civilizations-or-nations-that-collapsed-from-drought.html
As Dr. Jeff Masters evidenced above, extended drought, sometimes alternating with other harsh climate conditions like intense rains, can lead to starvation. Long wars exacerbate the situation, leading directly to collapse.
In addition to the above, there is another climate change based collapse level attack on human civilization, one that is 100% unavoidable now, that has wreaked havoc in the past.
SNIPPET from the March 23, 2018 article, "Humanity has contended with rising seas before — and it didn’t go well for us", by Alxandru Micu:
The Neolithic revolution was the first major transformation humanity had paused — the transition foraging to farming. Spreading out from the Middle East, this wave of change took peoples used to hunt and forage wherever they pleased and tied them down, hoe in hand, to sedentary — but oh so lucrative — farms and fields.
Around 7,600 years ago, however, the revolution paused — no new agricultural settlements seemed to pop up in Southeastern Europe around the time, existing communities declined, and the progress of civilization as a whole came to a standstill. Up until now, we didn’t have any inkling as to why this happened, but new research from the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and the University of Toronto sheds some light on this mysterious period.
According to their findings, this lull in progress was due to an abrupt rise in sea levels in the northern Aegean Sea. Evidence of this event was calcified in the fossils of tiny marine algae preserved in seafloor sediments.
The impact this event had on societal dynamics and overall development during the time highlights the potential economic and social threats posed by sea level rise in the future, the team says. Given that climate-change-associated changes in sea level are virtually unavoidable, the team hopes their findings will help us better prepare for the flooding ahead.
“Approximately 7,600 years ago, the sea level must have risen abruptly in the Mediterranean regions bordering Southeastern Europe. The northern Aegean, the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea recorded an increase of more than one meter. This led to the flooding of low-lying coastal areas that would have been ideal areas for settlement,” says lead author Professor Dr. Jens Herrle.
The evidence supports a link between the two timeouts in the Neolithic revolution and the flooding events. The event 8,400 years ago coincides with archaeological findings suggesting that settlements in low-lying areas were under significant hardship from encroaching seas and other associated climatic changes. The renewed rise just 800 years later likely amplified these communities’ woes, keeping them from making the transition to agriculture.
“The source of this may have been Lake Agassiz in North America. This glacial meltwater lake was enclosed in ice and experienced a massive breach during this period, which emptied an enormous volume of water into the ocean.”
Past fluctuations in sea levels have already had a significant effect on human history during the early days of agriculture, the authors note, warning that it would be unwise to dismiss the challenges it will place in our path in the future.
https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/aegean-sea-rise-8257346/
The article goes on to repeat the overly conservative estimate from the IPCC of a rise by up to "one meter over the next 100 years". That is the same IPCC that predicted the amount of ice depletion we have at present at the poles would not occur until 2070. That is the same IPCC that has NOT figured in the contribution of ice loss from Greenland to global sea level rise in any of the models.
So, if you are a logical person, I recommend you count on 3 to 6 meters, at least, of sea level rise several decades before the end of the century. As Peter Ward says (The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps by Peter D. Ward]) ,over 25% of the world's arable land is near sea level and will be flooded. Most major airports along coastlines will be flooded. Every harbor facility in the world will require a staggering amount of land fill to raise them as the sea level goes up. Most coastal real estate, currently highly assessed in value, will be flooded and become worthless.
By the way, the latest science indicates that rapid sea level rise will be accompanied by a large increase in volcanic eruptions (which might slow down the heating due to a temporary increase in aerosols), and and increase in earthquaqe activity. The volcanic aerosols, at most, will be a minor speed bump on the way to intolerable climate caos. So, please don't count on volcanic eruptions to 'save us' from global warming hell. That is wishful thinking.
I am not a voice "crying in the wilderness" on this issue. I will provide you some screenshots from the video of a scientist who recently wrote the book, "Waking the Climate Giant". He predicts a continued increase in volcanic activity, now observed in the data, due to terrain bounce from melting land ice and increased pressure on the surrounding seabed, as the the global average temperature increases. It's not the volcanoes that are increasing the heat, it's the greenhouse gases that are causing massive ice melt that, in turn, triggers earthquages and volcanic eruptions. Read his book if you disagree. I just watched the video but I think he is spot on.
On Earth, destructive climate change was not catastrophic before. The difference now it that the entire globe will be impacted. Humans have never lived on a planet with an average temperature of 3° C above pre-industrial. We will pass that mark up a half century before 2100 and continue towards PLUS 4° C and beyond, with no available technological or natural negative feedback mechanism to stop the continued acceleration, not slowing, of the rate of increase in temperature.
Already our atmosphere is being distorted by global warming to the point of pushing the dry subtropical bands on either side of the tropics towards their respective pole, thereby increasind drought conditions in highly populated areas and a large percentage of hitherto arable terrain.
SNIPPET from the February 2, 2016 article, "The mystery of the expanding tropics", by Olive Heffernan
As Earth's dry zones shift rapidly polewards, researchers are scrambling to figure out the cause — and consequences.
One spring day in 2004, Qiang Fu was poring over atmospheric data collected from satellites when he noticed an unusual and seemingly inexplicable pattern. In two belts on either side of the equator, the lower atmosphere was warming more than anywhere else on Earth. Fu, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, was puzzled.
It wasn't until a year later that he realized what he had discovered: evidence of a rapid expansion of the tropics, the region that encircles Earth's waist like a green belt. The heart of the tropics is lush, but the northern and southern edges are dry. And these parched borders are growing — expanding into the subtropics and pushing them towards the poles.
Tropical forest losses outpace UN estimates
Cities that currently sit just outside the tropics could soon be smack in the middle of the dry tropical edge. That's bad news for places like San Diego, California. “A shift of just one degree of latitude in southern California — that's enough to have a huge impact on those communities in terms of how much rain they will get,” explains climate modeller Thomas Reichler of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Elsewhere, there is evidence that tropical expansion is affecting the ocean. Where the Hadley cell descends, bringing cool air downward, it energizes the ocean and whips up currents to high speeds. This energy powers the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich waters towards the surface, which feeds some of the world's most productive fisheries. But there are hints that some of these regions are suffering because of shifts in the Hadley cell.
These upwelling zones could move south over time, or get weaker or stronger, depending on what happens to the Hadley cell, says Cook. In any case, it means that fishing communities that rely on these resources will not be able to count on traditional patterns.
On land, biodiversity is also potentially at risk. This is especially true for the climate zones just below the subtropics in South Africa and Australia, on the southern rim of both continents. In southwestern Australia, renowned as one of the world's biodiversity hotspots, flowers bloom during September, when tourists come to marvel at some of the region's 4,000 endemic plant species. But since the late 1970s, rainfall there has dropped by one-quarter. The same is true at South Africa's Cape Floristic Province, another frontier known for its floral beauty. “This is the most concrete evidence we have of tropical expansion,” says Steve Turton, an environmental geographer at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.
Turton worries that the rate of change will be too rapid for these ecosystems to adapt. “We're talking about rapid expansion that's within half or a third of a human lifetime,” he says. In the worst-case scenario, the subtropics will overtake these ecologically rich outposts and the hotter, drier conditions will take a major toll.
https://www.nature.com/news/the-mystery-of-the-expanding-tropics-1.19271
Vermont is already experiencing the economy harming effects of climate change. A Vermonter, concerned about this, wrote about it. He has a right to be.
Watching Nature Collapse March 24th, 2018 by George Harvey
Sometimes it seems the best of everything is passing away.
SNIPPET:
A few years ago, someone threw a peach pit into shrubbery on the front yard of the house where I live. The tree that sprouted from the peach pit is now bearing fruit. Neighbors have paw-paw trees growing in their yards. But Vermont’s maple sugar industry, and the apple orchards, and the blueberry fields are all suffering. Vermont is fast becoming a place unlike what it has ever been, and it is not an improvement.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/24/watching-nature-collapse/
Don't look at what he wrote as the "new normal" and just think we can 'adapt' to climate change by growing different crops and so on. This is the leading edge of climate that will soon, much sooner than many think, become intolerable for crop growing. We are not just on a treadmill moving in the wrong direction; our velocity on that deadly treadmill is increasing. Please keep that in mind so you are not lulled into thinking it would be 'nice' to grow palm trees in Burlington. Yes, the fossil fuel industry 🦖 does continue to try to pitch the 'warmer weather good' out of context propaganda happy talk. They'll do anything to keep their profit over people and planet suicide machine going. Stupid is as stupid does.
All these deleterious effects of Catastrophic Climate Change will continually get worse, not for a decade or so, but for over a century.
Temperatures unsuitable for human life are baked in for at least a couple of centuries, even if we stopped the insanity of constantly making things even worse by going on a crash program to stop burning fossil fuels. Yeah, we have to do that. Yeah, if we don't, we are all dead. But, regardless of what we do, it will take a while to catch up to all of us. I write this for those who, though sadly unable to stop the insane suicidal "business model" of the biosphere killing fossil fuel fascists, wish to survive as long as possible.
I wish to stress that, though many confused voices out there do not wish to face this, the one unifying aspect of the present threat to human civilization is Catastrophic Climate Change, NOT lack of fossil fuel based energy.
Have I got your attention? Good.
Then, look at this graphic from the Video, "Waking the Climate Giant", and ask yourself if it reflects our current situation:
The above graphic is already correct in its prediciton. In 2017 (the emissions data was for the years 2014, 2015 and 2016) the greenhouse gas emissions INCREASED. Consequently, there is a very, very high probability that the collapse of our civilization will occur much sooner than we think.
Some humans in different parts of the globe are already well acquainted with living on the edge of collapse. I am absolutely certain that many jungle tribes in Brazil, Ecuador and Peru, RIGHT NOW, live on the edge of starvation in a constant state of collapse, while most of the city dwellers nearby live not much better, but still avoid starvation.
My point in this quixotic exercise in hard truth logic is that the lack of food in the past has eventually triggered revolutions, not collapse of the civilization. It is after the social upheaval, when no solution to the lack of food problem is found, such as is in LONG WARS of aggression or extended harsh climate conditions, that collapse ensues.
People tend to fear other people more than deleterious climate. People can certainly be a threat to your life and stuff, but Catastrophic Climate Change is a much greater threat to everything you hold dear, past, present and future.
Catastrophic Climate Change is worse than a long war of aggression because it will last much longer than a human lifetime.
The climate change problem is intractable, but I believe some WILL beat it for maybe a century or so. For example, there are places near the equator with very high mountains. A world heated plus 4° C by around 2060, despite happy talk by certain wishful thinkers, will kill off most humans. BUT, in high mountains, the tree line will move way up while the temperature becomes temperate, even at the Equator. I stress the equator, though RE will vigorously disagree, because human civilization in a low food environment with over acidified seas (no easy fish or whales or seals to catch = NO ESKIMOS) with poor available sunlight is not a recipe for long term survival, even if the temperature is mild enough to grow crops.
There is a mountain in Ecuador (Chimborazo) about 20,000 feet high that will, because of the horrendously altered atmosphere, get plenty of rain even at high altitudes. There are several other candidates in the HIGH tropics around the world. This will enable the folks living there to grow enough food, thanks to an ABUNDANCE of sunlight all year round, with low tech methods. They just might be able to ride out the fossil fuel burning stupidity that dooms most of human civilization. 
The tree line, the highest point on a mountain that trees will grow, varies between 5,000 feet and up to 13,000 feet above sea level. It varies so much mainly because of wind chill, though the length of the summer growing season is important as well. A tree in relatively mild wind conditions can grow all the way up to the maximum recorded tree line altitude at temperature well below freezing (down to minus 40° F =- 40° C 
), provided its roots can get enough water.
Trees can have liquid water in their tracheal elements at such low temperatures because of a wonderful combination of two factors. The first is that the 'pumping' mechanism of a tree is more a sucking mechanism than a pumping mechanism. The transpiration of water vapor into the atmosphere at the branch leaf pores creates negative pressure on the water molecules inside the tree (as long as the tracheal elements vacuum is not breached by air intrusion).
Water molecules, as they travel up the inside of tree, aided by capillary action as well as transpiration, can be stretched by as much as negative 25 atmospheres! That is how those Giant Sequoias can move up to a 130 gallons of water a day over a 100 feet vertically.
The second factor is that the water in the tracheal elements, in addition to being thoroughly stretched, is extremely pure. This prevents the crystalization of water around non-water substances that would normally trigger freezing at 0° C. But, when the wind is howling during below freezing temperatures, the wind chill can cause the water in the tree to freeze and eventually kill the tree.
The closer to the equator a high mountain tree is located, the longer it's growing season will be. If the growing season is too short, like in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the tree line is only about 4,500 feet.
SNIPPET from an article about the Tree line:
The elevational limit of such suitable summer conditions varies by latitude. In Mexico, for example, treeline occurs somewhere around 13,000 feet, whereas farther north, in the Tetons, for instance, it occurs lower, at approximately 10,000 feet. Again, it’s a ragged line that may vary by hundreds of feet on any mountain, depending largely on shelter and exposure.
Because the elevational treeline is so closely tied to temperature, many suggest that it could be a particularly sensitive indicator of global climate change. Presumably, rising temperatures would increase the elevation of treeline in any locale, altering forest distribution and potentially ousting rare plant communities – and their inhabitants – that now exist above treeline. Although the specific physiological mechanism of treeline formation is not fully understood, there is growing photographic and other evidence of upward shifts in treelines worldwide.
A PLUS 4° C (and still going up) atmosphere by around 2060 will enable trees to grow at much higher altitudes. For every degree increase in average global temperature, a corresponding increase in humidity of at least 7% to 13% will take place. We will have an atmosphere expanding vertically, but also with increased humidity. This will accelerate warming because water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, but the good news is that high mountain areas will, in some areas, experience more rain higher up.
As noted at the beginning of this article, humans need water and other adequate growing conditions in order to have a viable civilization.
The Catastrophic Climate Changed world of 2060 will be a stormy place. The over acidified, mostly dead oceans, will be full of giant waves. The winds during storms will be off the charts in comparison to what we experience now. High up in the mountains, some type of barrier will need to be erected to keep the fierce winds from destroying the crops.
Finally, those hardy folks who carve out a life in year-round sunny high mountains will have to deal with UV radiation. It is a fact that, at present, the UV levels at around 10,000 ft. and above are particularly hazardous to humans.
However, with the expanded atmosphere in an overheated planet, this is the one area I see as hopeful for humans and animals living on very high mountains. You see, in said expanded atmosphere of plus 4° C and above, the massive increase in humidity will inhibit UV radiaiton.
Nevertheless. Since the equator alpine areas are infamous for high UV radiation, it would be prudent to plan to plant crops that have high UV tolerant foliage, like tubers. Hopefully, the greatly increased humidity will help protect the High Mountain Human Heroes.
SNIPPET:
Everyone is exposed to UV radiation from the sun and an increasing number of people are exposed to artificial sources used in industry, commerce and recreation. Emissions from the sun include visible light, heat and UV radiation.
The UV region covers the wavelength range 100-400 nm and is divided into three bands:
UVA (315-400 nm)
UVB (280-315 nm)
UVC (100-280 nm).
As sunlight passes through the atmosphere, all UVC and approximately 90% of UVB radiation is absorbed by ozone, water vapour, oxygen and carbon dioxide. UVA radiation is less affected by the atmosphere. Therefore, the UV radiation reaching the Earth’s surface is largely composed of UVA with a small UVB component.
Environmental factors that influence the UV level
Sun height—the higher the sun in the sky, the higher the UV radiation level. Thus UV radiation varies with time of day and time of year, with maximum levels occurring when the sun is at its maximum elevation, at around midday (solar noon) during the summer months.
Latitude—the closer the equator, the higher the UV radiation levels. 
Cloud cover— UV radiation levels are highest under cloudless skies. Even with cloud cover, UV radiation levels can be high due to the scattering of UV radiation by water molecules and fine particles in the atmosphere.
Altitude—at higher altitudes, a thinner atmosphere filters less UV radiation. With every 1000 metres increase in altitude, UV levels increase by 10% to 12%.
http://www.who.int/uv/uv_and_health/en/
What do you think are the chances of human civilization achieving what the following graph says we HAVE TO DO?
There is NO WAY in God's (formerly good) Earth that we can avoid a climate that is almost entirely unsuitable for human life. The above graphic illustrates that. Anyone who thinks that we can do what needs to be done to avoid a PLUS 4° C (and above!) climate that will kill most humans and cause the extinction of thousands of other vertebrate species is engaging in magical thinking. 
ALL the people near the surface in the tropics will die as crispy critters, period. Those in temperate zones will perish too. Those near the poles who live near the surface will last as long as the food they have lasts. Unless they can maintain some geothermally heated and powered high tech greenhouse CITY that includes PLENTY of crop growing quality light and plenty of water, they will die too.
I might add that those greenhouse giant domes, both near the poles ond on high equatorial mountains, had better be MASSIVELY strong. The storms that will visit them and the wind speeds they will face in a PLUS 4 ° C planet 
will make any recent hurricane look like a gentle breeze.
The giant greenhouse domes situated in the high equatorial mountains would have to be something like the U.K. Eden Project Domes, but way up high on a mountain. In England they have an enclosed rainforest in these domes. They need to be ten or twenty times bigger for an equatorial alpine community. If the post collapse alpine community could control the atmospheric pressure in the giant domes, more UV protection is guaranteed and more comfortable living for humans too.
For those still worried about fellow humans trying to kill you for your stuff, remember that high mountains are a natural defense against warlike humans during the initial phases of the Climate Change Caused Collapse. The heat lower down will eliminate any human threat after a couple of decades.
STOP thinking you are going to live on planet that has the remotest resemblance to the one you have lived in all your life. THAT is WISHFUL THINKING! The LEAST of your problems is going to be worrying about the "zombie" humans getting your stuff.
NOTE: I pose these issues for your discussion. I will not argue the merits of them beyond this comment. If you disagree with anything I said, then you are entitled to be as wrong as you like. 
The Strafing Run of Mother Nature 3: The Dimming Bulb Aftermath of Irma
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Published on The Doomstead Diner September 12, 2017
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A while back I wrote a series of articles called "The Dimming Bulb", discussing our decreasing ability to keep electric power moving through the copper wires of our electric grids to the end Konsumer as we slide down the Seneca Cliff on the far side of the Age of Oil. This aspect of energy decline in availability and affordability is often overlooked in the face of all the problems that come from the transportation industry and lack of fuel for the Carz and Trux. In fact though, it may well be that lack of ability to keep electricity moving through our metro areas with high populations and a voracious need for this power may be what brings TEOTWAWKI before lack of gas for Happy Motoring does.
Just about everything in our society depends on having electricity on demand. To begin with, the residential konsumers of the JUICE in Florida are currently watching their freezers defrost and if they are not cooking or drying the meat they have stored, they are going to lose a lot of food to begin with. All the large municipalities have sewage treatment plants that use gobs of electricity. How well and how long these can be run on backup generators is an open question.
You definitely CANNOT run all the streetlights of a city like Miami or even fucking Naples on backup generators, so until you have general grid power restored those suckers are LIGHTS OUT. Would you feel safe walking around the streets of Miami with no streetlights functioning?
A day after the Big Event everyone is breathing a "sigh of relief" here that they "dodged a bullet", but the real problems of recovering from such a broad swath of devastation remain ahead. It remains an open question exactly how quickly Florida Power & Light can restore the grid statewide, and until they do BAU for people without power just isn't possible. How many currently have potable water coming out of the taps? No statistic on that is available AFAIK. How many have had their carz ruined and can't get to work, if they still have a job to go to? Somehow I doubt many people will be stopping at Starbucks tomorrow for a Frappucino on the way to work. How are people who have little to no savings and live paycheck to paycheck going to pay their rent if they lose the next 2 weeks of work?
I woke up just in time this morning to see Irma make landfall in the Florida Keys here in the FSoA. Not much in the way of Newz or Info coming out of the Keys since then. I imagine Key West was pretty much flattened St. Maarten's style, although maybe not quite so bad since she hit in Key West at low Cat 4 wind speeds. She picked up some translational speed from the crawl speed across the north Cuban coastline, scooting up to 14 MPH to make the rest of the trip across the straights to make a second landfall near Naples, FL on the West Coast.
This location for GROUND ZERO disappointed some Doomophiles who were hoping for a full on Eyewall decimation of the skycrapers and hotels in Miami, which did not occur. The concept that we "dodged a bullet" here or that this event was a "dud" because Miami wasn't completely wiped out is only in the mind of the Kollapsnik who was looking forward to total devastation of that city.
What occurred instead was a much more widespread event, over the whole of the Florida Peninsula. It could have been much worse of course, either a run up the east or west coast would have kept hurricane strength longer and brought more storm surge in. Instead, after making landfall in Naples, Irma worked her way into the interior, more or less targeting Orlando and Disney World while the wind speeds dropped to Cat 1 and then to tropical force winds. As I write this now, she is just south of Orlando, and points north of the former center and eye are still being hit with powerful rain bands, along with possible Tornadoes hitting along that route.
From here, she is scheduled to head north into Georgia still packing Tropical Force winds and a lot of rain is destined to fall around Atlanta with some decent remaining wind behind it, so you are going to get more flash flooding and more downed power lines in that neighborhood as well by the end of the week. All of which speaks to the INFRASTRUCTURE problem, which is the real problem here, not the wind speeds Irma had on landfall in one particular location. This is a behemoth which is affecting the entire Florida peninsula and beyond.
The main issue already obvious tonight is that 7M Florida Power & Light Konsumers of Energy are currently without power. This exceeds the record previously held by Wilma with about 3.5M customers without the JUICE, and that is a LOT of wire to restring over a very broad area. Currently, Houston 2 weeks after Harvey STILL has about 200K Energy Konsumers without power, and they didn't lose near so many with Harvey, and distributed over a much smaller area. Irma has basically taken out the electrical system of the entire state of Florida!
In any number of ways, you can say FL "dodged a bullet" here, in that it could have been much worse if Irma hadn't decided to do a Strafing Run on Cuba before heading for the FSoA. Heading for the West Side of FL, Miami was spared the worst of a dead on hit from the eye wall, although they still lost 3 cranes, have plenty of flooding and the power is out to most of the county. The West Coast track turned out less bad than expected also, as the Eye moved inland pretty early so Tampa/St.Pete was spared inundation from storm surge.
Less Bad than Expected was of course much less bad as what occured in St. Martens and Barbuda, and also apparently across the north Cuban coastline inclduing Havana, where stories are still sketchy from at this point but they are apparently still under a lot of water, with many of the new Tourists Hotels in bad shape. I don't think anyone will be booking vacations in Cuba anytime in the near future.
Far as Florida is concerned, although no single location got the ULTIMATE in destruction (well, except maybe Key West which probably got flattened). 7M 12M customers without electric power is a LOT of wire to re-string! According to the "authorities", they have 17,000 linemen including an undisclosed number from out of state ready to spring to the job on Monday Morning of getting the JUICE back to their Florida customers, who are currently sweltering in the Florida heat & humidity without HVAC while their Frozen TV Dinners go bad in the Freezer. Considering after 2 weeks there are STILL around 200K people without power in Houston, one can figure it will take at least a month to get the full grid back online in FL, since the outages are spread over a much wider area.
Waking up Monday morning, we are in the post-coital phase of the intimate contact with Irma, and for the most part the pols are indeed crowing about how we "dodged a bullet". Miami took some flooding, sure, but they flood all the time these days. OK, we lost 3 cranes, but we have dozens of them! OK, the power is still out, but no problem, the crews from Florida Power & Light will have the lights back on in a jiffy! Back to BAU in Miami in no time! 🙂
The NEW UPDATE though is that it's not 7M without power, now it's up to 12M! That's basically the whole fucking state of Florida, they only have a total population of 20M! From WaPo:
That was the grateful mantra on the lips of many on Monday, even as an estimated 12 million Floridians prepared for a dark night without air conditioning in the muggy post-storm swelter. Though there was significant property damage in the Florida Keys and in some parts of southwest Florida, officials said it was remarkable that so far they are investigating just a small number of fatalities that came as the storm made landfall. It was unclear how many were directly related to the storm.
The lack of electricity across most of South Florida was the most pressing and crippling problem. Millions could remain in the dark for days or even weeks as utility companies struggle to navigate impassable roads and floodwaters to slowly restore power.
Things not so good over in Naples though, and even worse down in the Florida Keys, where the "authorities" won't be letting anyone back in until at least Tuesday while they asses the integrity of all the bridges connecting this string of low-lying islands built up as Tourista Resorts over the course of the Age of Oil. This is the "Margaritaville" neighborhorhood Jimmy Buffet made famous. When Jimmy first hit it big time as a rock star, the first thing he did was buy himself a yacht and park it in Margaritaville as a getaway if things ever went south for him. After that he got into planes too. As has become obvious here, Magaritaville and the Banana Republics may SEEM like bucolic safe havens in the good times, but they have their own set of risks and overall are not sustainable in the least in the way they are currently inhabited.
Doing still WORSE than the Florida Keys are the Tropical Paradises of St. Maartens and Barbuda, which actually did get hit full on by Irma while she was a Cat 5 packing 185 MPH wind speeds. Both islands basically LEVELLED, and now descending into chaos while their various Colonial Owners the Brits, Frogs and Little Dutch Boys scramble to organize up food aid and police protection from roving gangs of Zombies. All three countries are sending in additional Police/Military to try and restore "order" on these islands. Ex-Pats are huddled in their McMansions in fear of the next Home Invasion, although they probably have nothing left to eat either, since anyone stupid enough to be living in a McMansion in one of these places probably did not have a large supply of Preps either. These are the type of folks who go out the day before a hurricane is due to hit to buy batteries and bottled water. That is prepping up to them.
Economically, it's hard to see how these islands will ever recover to be the Retirement Paradise they were for apparently about 75,000 Brits, not sure how many Frogs or Dutch Boys. The cost to restore Barbuda was estimated in one article to be around $100M. There were something like 1600 people living on Barbuda when Irma came knocking on the door for a short vacation there, so that comes to $62,500 per person, which includes the poor locals who serve as maids and cooks and drivers as well as the retirees who are mostly living on pensions. You think any of them has $62,500 to pony up here to rebuild the infrastructure? Hell no, the Brit Goobermint will have to do it, and they can't even maintain the infrastructure on their own island these days.
Beyond this, MOST if not all of the Ex-Pats whose Mailbox Money incomes drove the economy will not stay in these places now, they are going to grab the first plane flight or boat ride out of there and never go back. Carnival Cruise lines is already sending ships for them. The infrastructure won't be rebuilt for a long time, if ever. The Brits, Frogs and Dutch are not going to fork over the money necessary to rebuild these places, they are total money losers now and for the forseeable future. The income generation capability they had as Tourista destinations is gone. All they will do is try and get the current set of Ex-Pats out of the place and then let the locals Twist in the Wind. Best they can hope for is that their citizenship as a Homo Sap born in one of these colonies will allow them to move to the Home Country, but they don't have much money to make that trip and probably no relatives or support structure to grab onto once they get there. They have a bit higher status than the refugees from Syria and Afghanistan, but not much.
There probably will be consolidation of these people on the islands that did not take such a bad hit, which will of course only serve to strain their resources also. The destitute Newbies will be despised by the locals and a drain on their own limited resources.
Electric power is only part of the problem of course, MOLD & MILDEW are a bigger problem long term. One has to remember that many of the flooded "buildings" aren't buildings at all, they are trailer homes which if they were flooded, the owner simply waits for the water to recede then puts all his stuff out to dry in the hot Florida SUN. Except by the time he does this a few days later, the MOLD has already taken hold, and it is almost impossible to get rid of when it does in a trailer. McHovel owners can strip out drywall and MAYBE eradicate mold, but getting it out of a trailer when it takes a grip is about impossible. You have to TOTAL it at this point and send it to the Land of Away in some junkyard or landfill, but the people who own them and live in them usually can't afford to replace them. Add another Human Soul to the list of Homeless People.
Because this wasn't the "Ultimate Disaster" it might have been, the MSM will likely quickly forget it as they have already forgotten about Harvey & Houston despite the fact more than 200,000 people remain without power and over 20,000 are still in shelters. There will be a new and better disaster to focus on in short order. It will likely take quite some time to get all the electric power restored, if they can even do that before the next one rolls ashore. Meanwhile, these repair bills don't come free you know, Da Federal Goobermint doesn't just hand out free money to fix up your local grid. The money is loaned to the Municipal Goobermint, which then has to raise taxes in order to pay for this new Bond Issue. Problem here would be that local Municipal Goobermints in FL (and everywhere else) ALREADY can't collect enough taxes for bills they ALREADY have! You think cutting a few more Teachers of Sanitation Workers off the payroll will pay to restring all the wire in Florida? Not too likely. However, for BAU to continue forward, these loans MUST be issued out, and they will be backed by the Full Faith & Credit of Da Federal Goobermint, which of course itself is ALSO quite bankrupt.
This will keep working until it doesn't.
The Strafing Run of Mother Nature 2 – The Path of Total Destruction
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Published on The Doomstead Diner September 10, 2017
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…or perhaps, the Eve of Destruction
As I begin writing this article, it is 3PM Alaska Time on Thursday, September 7, 2017. Cat 5 Hurricane Irma has already begun her Strafing Run to destroy Industrial Civilization even faster than it can do it by itself. Irma follows closely on the heels of Harvey, which focused it's attention on the center of the Oil based economy, Houston, Texas and left it in ruins. In "normal times", Houston and the cleanup would still be the focus of the MSM newz, since most of the area is still a complete disaster scene. Even FEMA admits it is a cleanup which will take "years". These are not "normal times" however, they are the "NEW Normal Times".
In the New Normal, there is a new and bigger disaster every week, which is great for a Collapse Observer and Writer, but not so great for the millions of people living in a given disaster zone. Even while these climate related disasters get ever larger and more frequent though, you have a large cadre of Politicians (mostly Repugnants) who remain deniers of Climate Change or Ocean Heating. Which is pretty amazing they can get away with since we have direct data from Da Goobermint's own agency of the NOAA that shows unequivocally that the Total Heat Content of the Oceans has risen over an order of magnitude since 1975.
What happens when you put a pot of water over more heat? Do you get more steam or less steam? More, duh. So in this case, the Ocean is putting more water vapor up into the atmosphere. The Global Oceans are just a very big pot of water. More water vapor in the atmosphere means more water available to come down in buckets once the system moves its way over a land mass. It also means a lot more energy available to the storm, because on falling DOWN, all the energy stored in raising the water UP gets released. Remember the Law of Conservation of Energy. "Energy is neither Created nor Destroyed, only transformed from one form to another". In this case, the heat energy used to crank the water UP into the atmosphere is mostly transformed on the way DOWN into mechanical energy reflected in the terrific wind speeds we are now getting with these behemoths.
Irma made her first landfall in the Antilles and Virgin Islands, to absolutely devastating results on some of the islands, which were basically levelled. Some of the worst hit were St. Maartens and Barbuda, but few of them got away unscathed. Death toll numbers coming in from those islands are currently in the low double digits (publicly), but communications have been out there for a couple of days and rescue teams can't make it to many areas on these islands either. The Death Toll there will undoubtably rise over the coming days/weeks/months ahead, but for now everyone's eyes are turned toward each new destination on the Strafing Run of Irma.
As I pick up on writing this article on Friday, Irma finished her Strafing Run on the Carribean Islands, and made her way to the North Shore of Cuba. As you can see above, what she left in her wake in the Virgin Islands was a wasteland. The above satellite photograph is of the island of Barbuda Before & After. Not only the McHovels of the Locals and the McMansions of the Ex-Pats were flattened, so was all the vegetation as well. The island was basically stripped of every Palm Tree that grew there over the last 20 years at least. Maybe they can put in Plastic ones with spring loaded breakaway bases that will lay flat in the next Cat 5, then spring right back up after it is over! I'm sure the Touristas won't notice the difference!
Little Newz at all coming from Cuba, even though it's a few hours since Irma made First Contact there, but NOAA Sat imagery shows it has been raking the coastline which is scattered with numerous fishing villages all now undoubtable completely flattened. Hopefully, the Cubans in those locations found some refuge, although given storm surge and the fact these folks do not have a whole lot of transport ability to do a Bugout, it's hard to see where they would shelter or how. Will we ever get accurate casualty numbers out of Cuba on this? Unlikely.
Tonight here from my perch in Alaska I just watch the Satellite Imagery from the NOAA website to see when Irma makes her turn Northward to Strafe Florida. The track has moved progressively westward through the evening as Irma has lingered longer than expected by the computer models devasting the north coast of Cuba. In the latest RGB image I opened, it looks like the turn may be beginning. These things come agonizingly slow for the doom watcher.
On the latest & greatest Sat & Track forecasting from NOAA, It looks like First Contact comes from the Western/Gulf side, which might be good because it is slightly less populated than Miami-Dade, but on the other hand bad because it keeps Miami in the NE Quadrant of the Hurricane for the entire time it traverses the Florida Straights, where it is projected to further strengthen. It's already back to Cat 5 status, and southern Florida is already feeling the effects from the Outer Bands, with 25,000 Energy Konsumers already without power and Irma hasn't even left the north shore of Cuba yet! She has tracked far enough along that coastline now that Hurricane force winds are battering Havana, given the immense size of the storm.
As I awaken on Saturday morning here in my Perch on the Last Great Frontier, Irma still is pummeling the north coast of Cuba, and my mistake, the archipelago Keys along the north coast are no longer populated by mostly fishing villages. This area has seen a lot of development since the FSoA and Cuba decided to "normalize" relations, which amounts to allowing Amerikan Touristas being allowed to Vacation in Cuba and Amerikan Banksters to further exploit Cuba. Which also means those islands on the northern edge of Cuba have seen a lot of resort hotel development over the last couple of years. They are TOAST. The Insurance industry will take a nice hit from this Strafing Run also.
Irma's jog westward in the forecasts has made some changes to the devastation to come here in the FSoA, depending on how well it holds up. As of now, it looks like instead of skirting the East Coast of Florida, she will skirt the West Coast. In both scenarios, the Florida Keys will be decimated. There are old-timers down there who refuse to leave, they are goners. But if you are 70 years old and on Social Security living in your Van because there is no affordable housing down there anymore for any but the 1%, WTF else would you go? And just how far could you GTFO of Dodge at this point? Maybe you could make it to Jacksonville…maybe depending if you could get gas along the way. If you didn't make the decision to GTFO of Dodge 2 Days ago, you are SOL now. You will stay where you lay, and you will either make it through the maelstrom or you won't.
Meanwhile on the Mainland of Florida, they are now in a complete state of PANIC. The folks who did not get out early are now lined up in Traffic Jams and can't find available gas at the convenience stores to keep moving on their Bugout to the house of some relative in Atlanta. The folks who could not Bugout at all because they don't have a car are now lined up outside "shelters" to hunker down for the duration of the storm. These shelters are generally hastily organized from large facilicities with a lot of space available, Talladega Speedway in Alabama for instance is opening up the racetrack for Refugees from Irma, and inside the local Miami area pretty much every school gymnasium is being set up as a shelter, but the reality is there are far too many people living in this zone that you could possibly shelter them all in buildings that are sturdy enough to withstand the winds, and then if you get inundation from Storm Surge you are equally fucked in a concrete building as a stick built one, if the water rises above one story in height you will be flooded. Beyond that over the course of a day or two is the Potable Water problem and the Sanitation problem in these shelters. Toilets don't flush once the water rises past ground level. Further down the line the problem is what do you do with the people living in the shelter after Irma blows through town and they no longer have homes, just piles of flooded rubble? It's not like they can go back to the McHovel and take up BAU life again just because it stopped raining.
Before we get to the problem of how to get them OUT of the shelters once they are in them is the problem of getting them IN to the shelters before the storm arrives. Finally after days of dawdling on this, Da Goobernator of Florida Rick Scott ordered a "mandatory evacuation" for much of south Florida, although it really isn't mandatory for most people, just they are told nobody will come to rescue them if they get in trouble. Homeless people though are forced into shelters under a law which says people who pose a danger to themselves can be forcibly removed.
The problem getting the people IN to the shelters is that there are TONS of people now looking for shelter as they read or watch more about the devastation in the Virgin Islands, and there just aren't that many good shelter locations available. Basically every decent size school built from concrete has been turned into a "shelter" over the last 2 days, but that doesn't mean they have cots or water or food in supply there. IF you manage to get in, you better have your own air mattress and sleeping bag at the very least, or you will have a real uncomfortable couple of days sleeping on a hard floor in the gym.
There is also no guarantee many of these shelters won't suffer from many of the same problems the stick built McHovels will face as Irma rolls into town. If the neighborhood is inundated by Storm Surge, school gymnasiums are no more water tight than a McMansion is, and the water will flood the ground floor of the building at least. If there is a 2nd Story, refugees might move their sleeping bags up there, but most school gyms don't have a 2nd story. They also don't usually have an emergency generator to keep the lights on either, so if/when they go out, the gym is plunged into darkness, with 1000 strangers surrounding you and a real racket coming from outside that sounds like you are standing behind the jet wash of the engines on a Boeing 747, or if you are right on the Eyewall maybe a Sonic Boom. If you are not completely terrified by this time, you have more fortitude than me. I would be shitting myself.
We're moving into the afternoon here, and Irma STILL has not made the right hand turn to Go North to Florida from Cuba. Cuba has been hammered all day by hurricane force winds all along the north coast, and little in the way of newz has emerged from there to this point. The Eyewall is close enough to Havana now they must be getting hurricane force winds and on-shore storm surge. Forward speed of the storm has slowed to the crawl speed of 6 mph, which is making all of this interminably slow for the Collapse Observer, and orders of magnitude worse for anyone who happens to be on the Path of Total Destruction. I can go faster than that in an electric Cripple Cart at Walmart! The longer the hurricane force winds hang out in your neighborhood, the worse the destruction. Hard to say whether suffering 1 hour at Cat 5 is worse than 2 hours at Cat 4. Both are not good scenarios though.
Jeff Masters at WU and the NOAA all predict that Irma will take the hard right hand turn north to the West Coast of Florida sometime today. I stay tuned to the NOAA website and their Satellite imagery to watch for this today here from my safe computer workstation on the Last Great Frontier. I count myself lucky, because at one time I DID live in Melbourne, Florida, for a short year-long gig job coaching gymastics for a couple of women I absolutely despised for the way they ran their program. But it was money I needed, and it was a job. So far though, this turn has not occured, and the possibility does exist that Irma may drift into the GoM further, missing the Florida Coastline altogether. That would spare Florida and a lot of people who did EVAC & BUGOUT will be mighty pissed off, but it wouldn't remove the danger that Irma poses, because once inside the GoM waters and roaming again, she would regather strength and finding a new place to go on a Strafing Run would be chosen by the Finger of God. Maybe she would set her sights on NOLA, who knows there?
I do have fair confidence though that the NOAA models are correct here only one day out from Lower 48 landfall, and the West Coast of Florida looks highly probable at this point. Biggest population center likely to take a big hit here would be Tampa, and Tampa Bay is perfectly set up for an enormous Storm Surge, probably close to 20' on the current projected track.
If in fact both the NOAA and Weather Underground get this one WRONG though and Irma moves further West in trajectory and misses the Florida Peninsula entirely, the whole Weather industry of Meteorologists Weathermen will take an ENORMOUS hit it their credibility. The costs even before the storm hits in terms of the evacuations and the lost bizness and wages to workers are enormous already, and all based on PREDICTIONS the Weathermen are making. If this turns out to be a DUD for South Florida, first off you will have a lot of Finger Pointing and Blame Game being pitched around. and second it will make people less likely to GTFO of Dodge the next time one of these behemoths is targeting the neighborhood. Even with the Supercomputers and the great Algos on the job these days, even just one day out, a variation of a couple of degrees in the track makes a big difference as to where the mother fucker will make landfall and when. Strength at landfall also is a tossup right up until First Contact. In this case, while also delaying the northward direction change, Irma has also slowed down substantially in translational movement, only plodding along now at 6 mph. That means she will spend more time over the warm waters of the Florida Straights, which means more time to regain strength after her Strafing Run on Cuba. She might even make it back up to a Cat 5 during this period, in which case she doesn't have to hit Miami dead on to wreak devastation, the wind field is so large it will cover all of southern Florida, and Miami would be in the worst position in the NE quadrant for that wind field and storm surge.
So even at this fairly late juncture, you can't really say for sure where Irma will hit in the Lower 48, or with how much strength or how much damage will be inflicted on Industrial Civilization in that neighborhood. It does look likely though that the damage will be severe, even if Miami doesn't take a full on direct hit from the Eyewall. The bigger picture as we know from both Harvey and Katrina is that in reality, the biggest costs come not from exactly how powerfully a hurricane arives at on the Saffir-Simpson scale, but how much water gets dropped down on a given neighborhood in a given period of time. Houston suffered its greatest problems not from Wind Speeds, but from inundation of rainwater measured in FEET, not inches. In this case, the most likely inundation comes from Storm Surge all the way up the West coast of FL if Irma stays offshore. She will make landfall somewhere though, if not Tampa than maybe north of there towards Tallahassee. Of course, to have real big media impact the landfall needs to be near a major Big Shity, So that would dampen the psychological impact and the MSM will say "we dodged a bullet".
OK. PUBLICATION TIME has arrived here on the Diner for the Sunday Brunch article. As of now, all the Livestream Cameras that AZ (one of the Diners) put up Inside the Diner are now offline with NO SIGNAL. I'll leave this installment of The Strafing Run of Mother Nature with the latest update of the NOAA Sat Animated GIFS in nice RGB colors. Still moving at an intemrinably slow 6MPH, now moving NW and likely to make a close hit on Key West as First Contact. Unless she takes a more NNW track though, she will miss the FL West Coast entirely and collide with the North American continent somewhere around Pensacola, or even NOLA. That would be a hoot.
If JM & BH at WU and all the Code Jockeys running the models at the NOAA are right though, tomorrow will see a few million Retired Floridians experiencing FAST COLLAPSE, with virtually the entire state destined to lose electric power. It will be quite some time if ever if it is all restored.
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You.
I Told You Not to Worry About the Climate
Off the keyboard of Thomas Lewis
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Published on The Daily Impact June 20, 2017
Discuss this article at the Environment Table inside the Diner
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“This is the Captain speaking. First, let me make this absolutely clear: there is no reason to worry.”
On a mid-morning in May, the telephone rang in the modest home of the mayor of Tangier, a village of 470 people on tiny Tangier Island, 12 miles off the coast of Maryland in the Chesapeake Bay. It was the president of the United States calling. If you lived there, you would not know which to think more odd; that the president was calling James “Ooker” Eskridge, or that Ooker was in his house to take the call, on a fair-weather weekday, and not on the water crabbing (he had been warned the call was coming).
If you live anywhere else on the planet Earth, you will be hard put to decide which part of the ensuing conversation was the most strange.
The President had seen something on television, which is what stimulates his cumbersome thought processes. The piece on CNN documented the fact that Tangier Island was slowly but inevitably disappearing as the waters of the Bay responded to global climate change. In the mid-1800s, Tangier Island sprawled over 2,000 acres, and was home to watermelon farmers, dairymen and a variety of entrepreneurs other than watermen. By 1997, only 768 acres of land were left, 83 of them habitable. Today, the island is even smaller.
The island is losing ground because it is
- sinking, in response to the retreat of the glaciers that until 10,000 years ago or so bore down on the crust of New England and bulged up the crust farther south;
- being subjected to fiercer and more frequent storms;
- beings immersed by water that is expanding because it is getting warmer every year, and that is being augments by melting glaciers and ice caps around the world. Geologists calculate that until around 1900, sea levels in the Chesapeake Bay rose at an average of three feet per thousand years, and have risen three feet in the one hundred years since. Tangier is now losing nine acres of land a year to erosion and rising tides.
All but the sinking are directly attributable to climate change, a consequence of human pollution. All of this has been known, confirmed and re-checked for many years now, so it is perhaps not surprising that a President who has not shown himself to be especially up-to-date on the problems of the real world would be moved, on learning of the island’s predicament, to reach out. To say what, one wonders. To offer sympathy? Or support? Federal aid for the inevitable migration of the inhabitants of the island to somewhere else?
None of the above. The president called the mayor to say, and I’m quoting here, “Don’t worry about it.” The island has been there for a long time, the President astutely observed, and he expressed his confidence that the island would still be there a long time from now. The mayor should not worry, but be happy.
So the water’s rising a hundred times faster than in previous millennia — don’t worry about it. So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that Tangier Island will be habitable for at most another 50 years, possibly as few as 20. Why would anyone worry?
But what is truly astonishing about this conversation — the part that is breath-stopping, jaw-dropping, vertigo-inducing, stupefying — is not the consummate ignorance of the President, with which we are all now familiar, but of the Mayor, who agrees with Trump that there is nothing to worry about because there is no such thing as climate change, and the consequent rising of the seas. “I’m out there on the water every day,” says Ooker, “and I don’t see it.”
Perhaps he marks the waterline on the outside of his boat every day, and seeing no change from day to day, has concluded that the water cannot be rising.
By coincidence, in the same week Scientific American published a story about the struggle to save Deal Island, also in the Chesapeake Bay, from an identical onslaught by rising tides, a struggle complicated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Deal Island, just like those who live on Tangier Island — don’t believe in climate change.
It’s as if the captain of the Titanic had assembled the passengers, formed them up on the tilting deck, up to their asses in water on the silent, motionless, burbling ship and said, “Don’t you worry about a thing. This ship brought us here all the way from England and there’s no reason to think she won’t take us the rest of the way.”
Depressing enough. But what makes one truly suicidal is the way the passengers are cheering, and agreeing, and saying to each other, “That’s our kind of captain.”
Svalbard Global Seed Vault: Seed Saving-Cum-Taxidermy (part 2/3)
Off the keyboard of Allan Stromfeldt Christensen
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Published on From Filmers to Farmers on July 26th, 2017
With a bit of ice on the floor depositers could almost ride the seeds right on in
(photo by Global Crop Diversity Trust)
As odd as it sounds, I can't help but think that it's so ridiculously easy to point fingers at the short-sightedness of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that not only is it also all-too-easy to label it as the "Vault of Doom", but that this can lead one to miss out on the much more dire issue of what the Vault represents in the present.
If we look at the Vault's layout, it turns out that the access tunnel from its main door was designed and built to slope downwards, a rather questionable idea when you think about the effects that gravity tends to have on permafrost and snow when they get above 0℃. Why in the world was the Svalbard Global Seed Vault designed in such a way? As put by Hege Njaa Aschim of the Norwegian government (owner of the Vault),
The construction was planned like that because it was practical as a way to go inside…
In other words, the vault was designed with depositing seeds in mind, not withdrawing them. I'm venturing into the land of absurdity again, because if you know anything about seed saving then you know that it is in fact extremely beneficial to keep seeds stored in complete darkness, although it's also just as true that black holes can be a tad too dark.
Silliness aside, one of the two primary issues regarding the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is that of in-situ seed saving versus not simply ex-situ seed saving but extreme-sport ex-situ seed saving. In-situ seed saving is the practice of constantly growing seeds out every year or every few years, a practice which regenerates the seeds before they die out.
Ex-situ seed saving on the other hand is the process of storing away seeds for extended periods of time, done so in cold, dark conditions so that the seeds go dormant. This approach (sometimes getting rather hi-tech and more energy-intensive with things like stainless-steel liquid-nitrogen storage vats) enables the life span of the seeds to be theoretically extended to decades, possibly even centuries, which is much longer than the handful of years many seeds generally last for.
That all being so, one big problem with the ex-situ method is that the seeds are not only frozen in space but also frozen in time. Because by having their evolution – their continual adaptation – halted, there's the very real possibility that a packet of seeds brought out of their 100-year or so dormancy will lack the characteristics – the genetic capabilities – to fend off a blight or some other scourge that appeared during their "hibernation". As a result, the seeds could be left with virtually no in-built defence and therefore have virtually zero chance for survival.
Conversely, in-situ seed saving is the embodiment of adaptation to place. Try growing out a bunch of seeds from the same packet but in two different locations – locations which would inherently have varying conditions – and what you'll eventually get is a branching lineage whereby the seeds attain different characteristics. This is due to the unique adaptations that occur thanks to the seeds' opportunity to adapt to their locales, not to mention the characteristics that each generation of seeds get selected for by their stewards.
So while one might say that the seeds saved in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are not only the epitome of ex-situ seed saving and the non-existence of adaptation (call it Globalized Seed Saving if you will), but one could also say that the Vault itself couldn't be a greater representation of the dismissal of place and adaptation. For as was explained by Arne Kristoffersen, a former Svalbard coal miner, most coal mines in the area weren't built like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault with their entrance tunnels sloping downwards, but with their entrance tunnels sloping upwards:
For me it is obvious to build an entrance tunnel upwards, so the water can run out. I am really surprised they made such a stupid construction.
Perhaps Kristoffersen has a flair for hyperbole to go along with what appears to be consternation for incompetence, for as he also put it,
[A]s it is today, the whole entrance will be filled up with water and this will freeze and it will be blocked after a few years, so it will not be possible to get into the seed vault. There will be a big iceberg in the tunnel.
Hyperbole aside, one might nonetheless think that the hard-earned knowledge and time-worn practices of the locals would have been given prime attention when designing and constructing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. But don't forget: this is ex-situ seed saving, something in which conditions of the place are specifically dismissed as something that needn't be taken into account. For although Kristoffersen was in fact involved in an initial planning meeting for the vault, he unfortunately wasn't a part of the following development of the plans.
Downwards the tunnel goes!
In effect, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is not only the ex-situ saving of seeds, but the ex-situ saving of seeds in an ex-situ structure. Because while ex-situ seed saving inherently ignores changing conditions of climate and other variables, the designers behind the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are either huge fans of the brilliance of the eminent architect Frank Lloyd Wright, or, and as mentioned in part 1, astoundingly failed to take into consideration – or at least take very seriously – changing conditions due to climate change.
With all these mishaps and dismissals in mind, I think one seriously has to wonder about not only the efficacy of such extreme-sport ex-situ seed saving, but also the motivations behind this globalized approach to the saving of seeds. Because from what I've read there seems to be some rather surreptitious reasoning behind the supposed need for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the first place, one example coming from a recent statement made by the lead partnership coordinator for the Global Crop Diversity Trust, Brian Lainoff. In what I can't help but see as, at best, another attempt at damage control, Lainoff recently stated that
Something as mundane as a poorly functioning freezer can ruin an entire collection, and the loss of a crop variety is as irreversible as the extinction of a dinosaur, animal or any form of life.
Let's put aside the fact that it was discovered on December 16th of 2014 that an electrical connection in the Vault's refrigeration unit had rusted away, got covered in chunks of ice, shut down the cooling system, that there was no back-up, that a technician had to fly in from nearly 1,000 km away the next day, that the part needed – sourced from Italy – wouldn't arrive until after Christmas, and that a temporary fix only managed to be put in place by borrowing a part off a freezer from a nearby supermarket.
Because if you didn't notice, it looks to me like there's a bit of sleight-of-hand that Lainoff is attempting to pull off by trying to equate a loss in a genebank to the complete extinction of a crop variety. This is, however, not what inherently happens at all. While genebanks do preserve the genetic material of such things as wild seeds meticulously gathered from the wild, they also serve as a backup for the seeds actively used by farmers and gardeners. That is, genebanks aren't simply "collections" of seeds for geneticists to work with but, like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, are backups themselves.
But if we take Lainoff at his surreptitious word, what might therefore be inferred is that seeds kept in genebanks are nothing but "collections", "collections" that if lost imply extinction. Moreover, since the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a backup to hundreds of genebanks, this would imply that it is but a "collection" of "collections". Meanwhile, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault's approach to the possible loss of these "collections" (extinction) is not to engender the dispersion of those "collections" amongst actual users of seeds who would provide a decentralized method of preservation, or to even engender a stronger network of backups between genebanks, but to make a centralized "collection" of "collections". Since the ultimate result of "collections" is "ruination" (as can be inferred by Lainoff's fearmongering), one could infer then that the purpose and destiny of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is to become the greatest one-off extinction event of the past 10,000 years. Because are we to believe that of the 1,700+ genebanks out there the only one that can't be decimated is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault? Might it not be even safer to have Elon Musk store a backup to the backup to the backups on Mars?
Because yes, disasters of all sorts have decimated, and will continue to decimate, collections of seeds held at genebanks. An earthquake pulverized Nicaragua's national seed bank in 1971, a hurricane flattened Honduras' national seed bank in 1998, a typhoon flooded a Filipino seed bank in 2006, and during the US-led invasion in 2003 it was the looting of Iraq's museums that garnered all the media's attention but the country's national seed bank that got destroyed. However, and using the latter case as an example, the most important seeds had previously been duplicated by Iraqi scientists and were stored away for safekeeping way over in another seed bank in Aleppo, Syria.
This idea then of backing up seeds held in genebanks is by no means a novel idea unique to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Furthermore, to think that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is safe from refrigeration problems (known to not be true), exempt from the ravages of climate change (also known to not be true), or impervious to the ravages of Miss Murphy (who's your ideal blind date?) is not only foolhardy, but megalomaniacal.
But lo and behold, if like me you thought Lainoff could get rather surreptitious, it appears to me that Fowler himself can get downright slimy. For as he stated himself two years ago,
It is out in the real world – that makes it vulnerable because you have typhoons, hurricanes, natural disasters and pests that come along. If you've got a crop, an heirloom variety, a traditional variety, somewhere in Africa, and you say, that's great, it's going to adapt to climate change – well, maybe not. If it doesn't have the right traits, your farmer is going to starve or go out of business long before that crop will naturally adapt through mutation.
Fowler's got a problem with… "the real world"?
Regardless, natural disasters certainly do happen. Moreover, it is absolutely correct that in-situ seed saving by no means inherently implies the adaptation of seeds to the vagaries of climate change. Nonetheless, how is it that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is supposed to ameliorate any of this? If seeds out in "the real world" aren't able to "naturally adapt through mutation", then what chance do seeds frozen away in stasis – which have zero opportunity for adaptation of any sort – have in comparison? And even if some seeds did exist in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that could assist that oh-so-unfortunate starving-and-on-their-way-to-bankruptcy African farmer, and that such seeds could even be identified, and quickly enough, how are said seeds supposed to help said African farmer when seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are explicitly only allowed to be withdrawn by their depositors (genebanks)? On top of that, there isn't just one starving-and-on-their-way-to-bankruptcy African farmer but dozens, hundreds, thousands of them. Are they all going to get seeds from supplies withdrawn from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, sourced from a genebank which may very well be on a whole other continent?
In other words, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault provides no benefit or viable alternative to the condemnations that Fowler bestows upon in-situ seed saving, his words being more like framed arguments tossed forth in order to suit a particular point of view.
That being so, if it isn't necessarily seeds themselves and the stomachs that need them the most that Fowler and the Global Crop Diversity Trust are out to protect, then what exactly can the underlying motive of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault be?
We'll get to that in the final part of this series.
Svalbard Global Seed Vault 1
Off the keyboard of Allan Stromfeldt Christensen
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Published on From Filmers to Farmers on July 21st, 2017
Well, at least it was made sure that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault looks real pretty
(photo courtesy of Johann Fromont)
The sheer sensationalism of doom-laden Internet headlines doled out by journalists raised on Hollywood disaster movies (and now clickbait) recently reared their ugly head again, this time in regards to the venerated Svalbard Global Seed Vault. I'm no fan of what some have misleadingly nicknamed the "Doomsday Seed Vault", but with journalists narrowly clamouring on about some recent hiccoughs that the Vault experienced does the greater catastrophe that the Vault represents get obfuscated. Those recent hiccoughs are certainly nothing to scoff at (as I'll explain), but by missing out on the greater implications they imply does the fundamental problems of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault get missed, those being that not only is the Vault not a "Doomsday Seed Vault" but, and as I'll explain in part 2, that it transforms seed saving into something akin to the art of taxidermy.
To backtrack a bit, in 2003 Cary Fowler – scientist, conservationist, biodiversity activist, and co-author with Pat Mooney of the excellent 1990 book Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity – had the idea of creating a storage facility that would provide a backup for the seeds currently stored in the world's 1,700 genebanks (and then some). While saving and preserving seeds is currently something that the "average" person tragically generally pays little to no mind to, if there's one thing more crucial and fundamental to our civilization than fossil fuels then that something would be seed saving, a practice which preceded industrial civilization by about 9,800 years or so. That being so, making backups of seeds, and even backups of backups of seeds, might very well be the most wise thing us humans cultivating away on this planet can do.
Unless, that is, one wants to be rather monolithic – perhaps even megalomaniacal – about it all.
While the Vault's construction tab of US$9 million was entirely covered by the Norwegian government (which in turn owns the Svalbard Global Seed Vault), storage of seeds in the vault is entirely free to users thanks to those costs being covered by the Norwegian government as well as an organization called the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The moniker "Doomsday Seed Vault" is an undeserved misnomer though, because as described on the Global Crop Diversity Trust's website, "The purpose of the Vault is to store duplicates (backups) of seed samples from the world’s crop collections". In other words, the purpose of the Vault is emphatically not to be a knight in shining armour that rescues humanity from some Hollywood-esque apocalypse, which in one sense renders the "Doomsday Seed Vault" nickname somewhat verbose.
To facilitate its publicly-stated mission, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is located on the remote Norwegian island of Svalbard, and while the Vault itself is located 130 metres above sea level so as to be out of harm's way if even all of the world's icecaps melted, it's also tunnelled more than 100 metres into the side of a mountain, a mountain far from any active fault lines and whose surrounding permafrost can keep the seeds perpetually chilled. The idea, as put by Åsmund Asdal of the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre, is that "This is supposed to last for eternity".
That is, that's the idea.
Because when what I presume was some of the world's greatest minds got together to see to it that the seeds of some of the world's most important food crops were saved for posterity, the one calamity that the designers apparently failed to take into account is so absurd that I don't think there's even a witty remark witty enough to describe it. So I'll just go ahead and say it: The one calamity that the designers of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault didn't take into account was… climate change?
Really?
From what I can tell I don't think I'm too far off the mark here. Because to backtrack again, here's what recently happened: First of all, and according to NASA and NOAA, the most recent year (in this case 2016) was once again the warmest on record. Secondly, and according to Ketil Isaksen of Norway's Meteorological Institute, "The Arctic and especially Svalbard warms up faster than the rest of the world" (due to what is known as polar amplification). Thirdly, while permafrost of course has an air of permanence to it, it can nonetheless be damaged and made vulnerable when dug into – like when you dig a 100 metre tunnel into it. Combine those three together and what you get is a lot of white stuff melting. To be a bit more specific, and as the New York Times put it just last week,
[W]ater – torrents of it, rush[ed] into the entrance tunnel of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault… [B]ecause the water had short-circuited the electrical system, the electric pumps on site were useless… Local firefighters helped pump out the tunnel until the temperature dropped and the water froze. Townspeople from the village at the mountain's base then brought their own shovels and axes and broke apart the ice sheet by hand.
How is it possible, you might ask, that such an event could happen to the facility meant to "store duplicates (backups) of seed samples from the world’s crop collections"? Well, as stated by Hege Njaa Aschim of the Norwegian government, it turns out that
It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that.
Come again? "Extreme weather" – climate change – didn't fit into the "plans" that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault designers and caretakers had in mind for how the permafrost was supposed to behave (as other statements by the Norwegian government have reiterated)?
A lot of water went into the start of the tunnel and then it froze to ice, so it was like a glacier when you went in.
Uhh… seriously?
So although the ice was subsequently "hacked out", this is only the beginning of the absurdity entailed in this story. Because as Aschim also stated – almost giving one the impression that these seed savers of seed savers are holding out for positions in the Donald Trump administration – "The question is whether this is just happening now, or will it escalate?"
Come again and again? The owners of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are questioning whether or not climate change is going to "escalate"? For real?
Putting aside this absurdity beyond all absurdities, the fact remains that none of the seeds were actually lost in the "flood", a "flood" that supposedly wasn't really a flood. Because as Fowler put it himself,
Flooding is probably not quite the right word to use in this case. In my experience, there's been water intrusion at the front of the tunnel every single year.
Damage control? You can decide for yourself. Because as Fowler also stated,
The tunnel was never meant to be water tight at the front, because we didn’t think we would need that. What happens is, in the summer the permafrost melts, and some water comes in, and when it comes in, it freezes. It doesn't typically go very far.
So okay. Is that to say the designers of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault didn't actually mind too much water making its way in through the front door and freezing on the inside, or that they – Fowler included – didn't really anticipate that climate change might have an effect on all that cold white stuff surrounding the Vault? Whichever it actually is, US$1.6 million has now been earmarked for investigations on how to improve the access tunnel (I'll get to that in part 2), the conclusions due in early-2018. In the meantime, US$4.4 million is being spent on constructing such things as a waterproof wall and drainage ditches.
Anyhow, Fowler also stated that
If there was a worst case scenario where there was so much water, or the pumping systems failed, that it made its way uphill to the seed vault, then it would encounter minus 18 [degrees celsius] and freeze again. Then there’s another barrier [the ice] for entry into the seed vault.
In other words, Fowler appears to be stating that not only is he the open-minded kind of guy that likes to go on blind dates, but that he likes to be set up with those who have a penchant for S&M and who go by the name of Miss Murphy. There are of course a lot of Miss Murphys out there who are itching to lay down their unique interpretation of the Law, one of those Laws possibly emanating from Greenland via what is known as glacial isostatic adjustment.
Turns out that the sheer weight of all that ice on neighbouring Greenland has pushed its landmass down by what might be a thousand feet or so, and since the land is "bouncing" back up – and at increasing speeds – due to the melting ice, this could result in "reactivate[d] faults, increase[d] seismic activity, and [increased] pressure on magma chambers that feed volcanoes". In fact, "of particular concern is the continental shelf around Greenland, where a massive melting of the ice sheet might trigger earthquakes strong enough to trigger underwater landslides which in turn could generate tsunamis". Just last month a tsunami did in fact strike the coast of Greenland due to what was believed to be a magnitude four earthquake, and as was stated by a Danish news agency, "for such an earthquake to hit Greenland was 'not normal'". And so while none of this is "normal", it also turns out that "The same process is affecting the islands of Iceland and Svalbard, which also have ice caps", and that "crustal uplift in Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard is accelerating".
Might such a climate change-induced glacial isostatic adjustment cum underwater landslide cum tsunami not only emanate from just the right spot off of Greenland's coast but also make its way through the inlet leading to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault? To make a guess, I'd say probably not. Nonetheless, Miss Murphy's chock-full of interesting tricks up her sleeve, and you never know what her wild imagination will come up with as she goes about laying down the Law with what should probably be known as:
The Vault of Doom!
The location of the scene in the upcoming movie where everybody is gathered around the monitor next to the Vault's doors that won't open, their mouths agape as they watch – thanks to the video feed provided by the Destructo-Cam© – all the seeds getting destroyed (photo by Ralph Lee Hopkins)
The Sixth Extinction: A Seneca Cliff in the Making
Off the keyboard of Ugo Bardi
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Published on Cassandra's Legacy on July 15, 2017
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Sometimes, my colleagues make me think of the old joke, "I wouldn't want to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." That happened to me once more when I read an interview to Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin that was published with the title "We are NOT in the sixth mass extinction", ("The Atlantic," June 13, 2017). Here, Erwin states that the idea that we are in the sixth extinction is just "junk science".
To date, the majority of extinction studies have been biased towards terrestrial species and charismatic megafauna and we know relatively little about changes in the abundance and ranges of the shelly marine invertebrates that would provide a direct link to mass extinctions in the fossil record.
From custodians of deep time, we need quantitative assessments of the fossil record of the present and future earth in order to accurately size up current biotic changes with the same filter through which we see the past.
Although extinctions are rare, the ecological ghosts of oceans past already swim in emptied seas.
You see the point? So far, we have focussed on the extinction of "charismatic" species, from the past one of mammoths, giant sloths, and the like to the ongoing ones of Elephants, tigers, cheetahs, and others. However, a true mass extinction sees the disappearance, or at least the the near disappearance of common species such as marine invertebrates. But that doesn't appear to be happening, yet.
There follows that, if someone in a remote future were to examine the fossil record for our times, he/she/it wouldn't see, not yet at least, the same kind of disastrous "Seneca Collapse" of the most common species that we see for the "big five" mass extinctions. Once a true "End-Permian-like" extinction were to start, it would be so rapid and destructive that nobody would be alive, discussing it.
That's it, folks: the title "We are NOT in the sixth mass extinction" simply means "we are not YET in the sixth mass extinction", but there are plenty of ongoing extinctions that prefigurate a true mass extinction ("emptied seas") for a non-remote future. That's because we know that most of the past mass extinctions (and perhaps all of them) were caused by the same phenomenon that's ongoing nowadays: the release of large amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Said in other words, imagine you are falling from the 10th floor. You are not yet splattered on the sidewalk and, if you really want to be precise, you shouldn't say that you are in the same condition of other people who fell from the same window in the past. Who knows? You might fall on something soft, or maybe learn how to fly while en route. Precision is precision, right?
So, the position taken by Dr. Erwin is scientifically correct, although it doesn't change what we know about the ongoing extinctions (and, as a personal opinion, I normally avoid branding the work of my colleagues as "junk science," even though I may not agree with them). We didn't go through a mass extinction, yet, because it is just beginning. The problem is that the meaning of the article in The Atlantic, and in particular its title, will NOT be generally understood. On the contrary, it will give plenty of ammunition to the throngs of those who claim that "CO2 is plant food," "the Earth is getting greener," "global warming is good for people"; and the like. It is already happening. As usual, when scientists say something that some people judge unpalatable, they are cheaters and liars. When a scientist says the opposite, he is suddenly defined as reliable.
I don't think Erwin is to be faulted in particular for this disaster in scientific communication. It happens all the time and especially when you stumble on journalists who tend to sensationalize what you tell them. Unfortunately, as scientists, we haven't yet learned how to communicate science to the public.
Navigating 21st Century Hopelessness
Off the keyboard of Lucid Dreams
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Published on The Doomstead Diner July 16, 2017
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Is our techno-industrial way of life fundamentally benevolent? Is it advisable to continue perpetuating a civilization that is predicated by non-renewable fossil energy sources as well as unsustainable rates of renewable resource extraction? Our civilization requires an ever growing GDP to be considered healthy. This is a measure of production in terms of consumption. Our literal benchmark for the health of our society is based on how much we can consume in a year as a nation. The reason for this is to create monetary profit for the individuals of this society whom have shares in the corporations controlling this production. The actual physical wealth of the world is subjugated to the tune of dollars and cents. To make this pathway possible it requires a proletariat class willing to sell their lives for an hourly rate. This hourly rate is the lowest possible rate so as to not reduce the profit that’s stolen from the resources of the Earth and the energies of its peoples. This hourly rate is about making money and not about stewardship of any kind. It does not have to be like this, but that is a delusory sentiment based on idealism.
The road to ruin for our species began with agriculture. Before agriculture emerged there was no need for money, and so it did not exist. Agriculture allows for civilization which requires money to function. With the creation of money we stratify into economic classes of people. Once money is created life becomes about servicing this need for monetary acquisition. Before money life is about engaging with nature to acquire food, fuel, fiber, medicine and shelter. In aggregate these actions create a healthy human culture. Agriculture allows for money and removes the limiting factors for our numbers. Before agriculture the limiting factor is the amount of food that can be sustainably hunted and gathered. The hunter/gatherer life is mostly nomadic as we follow the animals and plants through the seasons which define their lifecycles. Our lives are imbued with rich somatic meaning as we engage with the body of nature. We are from this Earth, and we inhabit it as a corporeal being made of the elements. We evolved both physically and spiritually within the framework of our physical Earth. Our health depends on engaging with nature to create life and its meaning. The fall from paradise began with domestication which is nothing less than the taming of wild nature. Domestication is tandem to agriculture and literally creates civilization. What is being civilized if not the opposite of wild? The two are anathema to one another.
Agriculture means that we stop moving around. It means that we domesticate ourselves as well as the wild beasts of nature. It sets up the conditions that allows for a great competition between us and nature. All of a sudden our culture becomes one of domination and control rather than harmony. Being rooted in one place we begin building monuments to hubris. We get bored and invent competition. We stockpile food and create war and plague. We set up the conditions for disease and famine and warfare (although nomadic people still do occasionally fight with opposing tribes). We argue and debate and create inequality amongst our people. Life becomes a struggle to create meaning and avoid boredom. Eventually, as we move further and further from our natural origin, habitat, and culture the enchantment of being evaporates. We are left with a driving urge to consume to fill this void of meaning that emerges due to our domestication. Time continues forward and our habits create technologies to service convenience. We become lazy and our bodies grow fat with our sedentary nature which arises from our domesticated captivity. No longer do we need our bodies for anything more than acquiring money. We then want pleasure to fend off boredom and meaninglessness. Life is no longer about dancing in the wild where we are from and where we return to. Civilization is nothing more than something to do in the great illusion that we create for ourselves. This is the way that it is. The Matrix was born with the first surplus of cereal grain.
Is there anything that can be done about this? It seems to me that we are at the end of this failed experiment in hubris. There is no harmony in domination and control and consumption. There is only waste, disease, and poison by way of ecocide and genocide. Our quest for the production of unlimited energy against the gradient of entropy has created cancer. In the end we cannot dominate nature. Aside from money the quest for domination is the great fallacy of civilization. We cannot think our way out of the limiting factors of ecology. Our modern techno-industrial civilization will run out of the fossil blood that sustains it. We will lose the capacity to safely maintain the nuclear power plants that liter the surface of the Earth. They will spew out DNA damaging clouds of radioactivity as they have already begun doing. The rain will become poisonous to life. As we fight to continue this failing technotriumphalism we will continue increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere which will continue heating the human supporting biosphere. Natural disasters will continue increasing in number and severity. Our hubris has metastasized into a cancer that will shrink our settlements as the habitable regions atrophy. Nothing is going to stop this process now. All that remains is answering the question of what to do about this inevitability. We have entered into the age of doom.
There is no escaping this destiny that we have perpetuated. The most unfortunate aspect about this hopelessness is that man cannot live without hope. Hope makes life worth living. Is hope itself a delusion? What are we to hope for? The nature of existence is a destiny with death. The time we have between birth and death needs to be animated by meaning. Meaning is derived from a harmony with all life. Our civilization is marked by domination and control. There is no harmony in control. The great struggle is finally about the nature of life because life wants to live. We must maintain ourselves within the boundary of our skin while we are here walking the Earth. The overwhelming desire is to do this devoid of pain and misery. The tragedy of man is to think that he can avoid his own nature by the creation of a technological utopia. Life cannot be about domination and control, but that is what man forces it to be. We are teetering in a suspended animation just before the moment of expiration. We are flailing about in denial of this process of resolution. Maturation as a species must culminate in an acceptance of suffering and death. We must accept our temporary nature, stop struggling, and lie down in the great current of life. We swim against this entropic process everyday as we participate in this civilization. We collectively attempt to keep the center from flying apart under the pressures of our own technologically created centrifuge. We struggle in vain against the pressures of physical dissolution. We create illusions to fight against the natural process of becoming to fall apart.
The first act was rife with physical struggle within the framework of existing in harmony with nature. Hubris arose and we thought we could become gods using the power of physical manipulation. We thought we could master the universe with our cleverness. We are collectively a breaking wave, and nothing will stop the pull of gravity as we are recycled back into the void which we originally manifested from. Idealism is nothing more than the ravings of a mental lunatic. Idealism is a delusion that is born from the struggle to acquire more than we need. Fighting against entropy is finally not worth it. Yet this fight is what it means to inhabit a physical body.
In the final analysis life must be about observing beauty. Without beauty it is not worth living. We have made a mess of this beautiful blue/green orb that’s floating about the universe. We have partied our way to desolation. Yet the Earth keeps spinning around in outer space in its dance with the sun that sustains us. Every morning the sun reemerges to give us another day of life. Our great challenge is to honor this life by creating beauty and not it’s opposite. We have created a lot of ugliness. Maybe the secret to this 21st century hopelessness is to learn how to make beauty out of malevolence. Or maybe we should just stop struggling and accept the final act of misery which we have written for ourselves? Or maybe we can simply embrace our collective ugliness with grace? Without love and beauty this great struggle that is life is not worth it. The greatest challenge that we face is learning to love and observe beauty even as love and beauty vanish under the oppression of our own collective delusions.
The nature of a body is to act. How are we to act? We should act to minimize suffering for all sentient beings while honoring our bodily nature. Every day is a new day to make the right decisions. Yet every day requires a certain amount of money. This is why my conclusion is that a lifestyle that requires no money is the only truly benevolent lifestyle. That lifestyle is a fiction in this world we have created. This world is quite literally hell on Earth. Therefore we must learn to love and find whatever beauty we can while in hell. We must not resist as we realize our ultimate destiny of assimilation with the machine we have created. I’ve tried finding work arounds to the truth that life is suffering, but the only way to win is to let go, stop resisting, and accept the nature of this great delusion. Manifestation is transience in action, and our resistance arises within that transience only to dissolve back into the void that is death. All that is created within that resistance is more suffering. Yet still we must act in the world, and how should we act when our actions only serve to create more suffering? The heart of our civilization is the creation of suffering, and to participate only adds to this toll. Not participating in this civilization can be our only spiritual redemption. For the life of me, and my children, I cannot figure out how to not participate.
Biomass is a Common
Off the keyboard of Patrick Noble
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Published on FEASTA on July 3, 2017
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by Patrick Noble
The mass of life is composed of countless interconnections. It flows between species and between generations of each species. Nevertheless, all those flows are tributaries to a final optimum Major Sea of Earth’s biomass.
Let’s consider a human community (house- hold/parish/village/town/city/nation state/world) as a communal biomass flowing between generations. Let’s also consider that communal biomass flowing through its living terrain – from species to species – increasing in speed, or diminishing in speed – sometimes sequestered in a dry plain of motionless, lifeless physics – but for our purpose, always ending, in a final, optimum mass – the Minor Sea of those particular community inter-connections.
Here’s a thing, which it may be wise to keep in mind – no one knows what life is.
Here’s another – Once upon a time, there was no life on Earth and it shall be so again.
Here’s yet another for those who falsely equate carbon cycles with life cycles – After all life has gone, carbon, or the energy derived from it, will always remain.
Carbon and life cannot be inter-changed for the purpose of climate (atmospheric carbon dioxide) calculations.
The central consideration for atmospheric carbon dioxide projections is not the mass of carbon. It is the mass of life.
This leads me to some other very simple propositions.
1 – If we bury life in a “carbon sump” or in an “embedded carbon structure” then we have diminished a life cycle. We have not taken carbon from the atmosphere and sequestered it in terrestrial mass. Rather, we have diminished the power of life to regenerate. We have weakened photosynthetic carbon capture and some linear solar energy. In the process, we have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and diminished the mass of life.
It is plain that if we bury all life, we end all photosynthesis. A carbon sump is one stepping stone (metaphor well chosen) towards the same.
2 – If we burn life, we diminish life (as in a carbon sump) and we also release combustion gas, to the same degree as fossil fuel. It follows that burning biomass has a greater carbon dioxide effect than burning fossil fuels.
3 – Life has expanded to an optimum mass, despite its gradual (occasionally sudden) sequestration in peat bogs, coal gas and oil reserves and other fossil rocks (calcium & so on). Atmospheric carbon dioxide has been more or less Gaia regulated, despite those sequestrations, and despite volcano and forest fire. Nevertheless, points 1 and 2 remain true. It follows that the linear solar contribution gives leeway for both some “embedded structure” and for some biomass burning.
Of course, we need timber for building houses. Sunlight provides leeway for growing timber trees. It also provides a little leeway for some domestic heating.
Only within that leeway can we call properly-managed forestry, “renewable forestry”.
Bear in mind that even within that leeway, our wood chip boilers and woodstoves have slightly greater carbon dioxide effect than fossil fuels. It follows that within that leeway, we’d do better to burn coal, gas and oil, while managing agriculture and forestry for maximum, optimum, photosynthetic biomass.
This writer thinks that the unexpected rapidity of climate change has been caused by the academic consensus that non-land-use-change biomass burning can be entered in carbon budgets as carbon neutral. Had the consensus given the burning of timber and arable crops the same carbon dioxide effect as fossil fuels, then I propose that climate predictions would be far less optimistic than at present.
***
Burning either biomass, or fossil mass within that more or less safe counter-balancing solar leeway presents a social problem. That burning must be at “pre-industrial” levels and I suspect at less than that. UN figures put world population for years 2015 at 7.349 billion, for 1800 at 1 billion and for 1600 at 580 million.
By 1600 in the UK, forest cover had been stripped to far less than today because of a rapacious demand for house and ship timbers and for domestic fuel. By 1680 coal had prevented economic collapse.
Today, we can hope that electricity will arrive to prevent current economic collapse. Most accept the folly of burning fossil fuels to produce that electricity. Plainly, burning biomass to that end, must be the pinnacle of folly.
But also, consider this – my benign Ash-scented woodstove – with timber from “sustainable” local woods, or hedge-rows, makes my house-hold one of privilege. If I claim the privilege, then I remove that privilege from others. If I claim to live within the solar leeway, then I have enclosed a common by my right to deny that solar leeway to others. Imagining that the world population in 1600 was largely “pre-industrial”, I tentatively project that only 1 in 3 house-holds in the world can be permitted a domestic coal, or wood stove today. (imagining a house-hold of 4)
That figure of 1 in 3 families holds only if we burn nothing at all for both transport and electricity generation. In any case, there is wildly insufficient acreage in the UK to grow biomass for the current population’s domestic heating. 1 in 3 for the world, may prove closer to 1 in 30 households for the population density of the UK. Our problem is not burning fossil fuels, but burning any kind of fuel. Our problem is burning.
We have wind, water, solar and (if we think we can trust an amoral monopoly supply) nuclear sources for electricity generation. Then, as we’ve explored in previous articles, direct traction from wind and water for factories and work-shops. We can remove energy demands of transport by removing the need for transport – that is by living as we’ve always lived until very recent history – with both work and pleasure but a step, or cycle ride from our doors – and then we can have a vibrant international and far more egalitarian trade by sail power.
There is hope. Living within our ecological means returns economic choices to the ingenuity and dexterity of citizenship – technologies and tools may be devised less behind intellectual property walls and more in quiet garden sheds, fields and work-shops. Attempts to green current ways of life (supplied by irresponsive, irresponsible monopolies) are roads to climate chaos and despair.
***
Plainly, biomass is a common. It is the primary common. Moreover, the greatest mass of bio lies in that thin layer of top soil on which all economies depend and which some, including this writer, have enclosed as their own and called fenced property.
Plainly, since the greatest city is only ever an emergent property of the efficiencies of fields, if we can grow enough food, then all the rest can follow. Economic biomass, including mass of humanity, food, and materials (timber, paper, fabrics and so on) flows back and forth, between species and between the generations of species we call an ecology.
Let’s consider some fields.
Regulating the speed of life is the whole art of husbandry. It is also the whole art of durable settlements. Crops flow into a biomass of people and must flow out again to the fields which produced those crops. Shorter & smaller cycles flow through gardens and allotments.
The whole agricultural metabolism of towns, fields, gardens and the cultural techniques to connect them is complex, evolved and evolving. The trial and error of husbandry, cuisine, transport and emerging trades are what we call an agriculture.
Gazing across a patchwork of fields, I can see that speed presented in the deepening or paling green of rotations. The colours reveal the velocity of life as it travels between species – the deeper the green, the faster the flow and so the increase of biomass.
Lazily copied from A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2014.
Consider two fields which have been provided with an optimum allotment of wastes to maintain their fertility. If I return a larger share to field one, I’ll receive a high crop yield, but some of that waste will be mineralised by soil fauna and not taken up by the crop. Nutrients will be lost as gas to the air and as minerals to water courses.
Field two will receive a less than optimum biomass and the crop yield will fall
.
Optimum crop yield for both fields – field one, plus field two will be lower than the total yield had wastes been divided equally.
We can see that story of two fields replicated across farms, parishes, regions and nation states. Human nature being what it is, some will appropriate more wastes than others – increasing their farm yield (& bank balance) but reducing the optimum yield (& bank balance) of the community as a whole.
That is a classic tale of the tragedy of the enclosures.
As uncertain weather patterns likely with climate change increase, so communities will become more anxious to achieve maximum, optimum food supply. To achieve that, wastes (sewage, green waste, food waste, processing bi-products and so on) must be divided strategically. They could be administered rather like water rights in Mediterranean communities, or the rotation of medieval strip fields.
The following is also copied from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Some commons to be restored into the fabric of my midsummer night’s dream– roads, market squares, harbours, soils, water, biomass….
But all other commons are as nothing compared to commons of biomass. Just as towns, roads and trades are emergent properties of agriculture, so agriculture emerges from the flows of biomass between species to and from human cultures.
Biomass cycles from field to city and back again. That flow is obviously a common and a common good if managed by good common law.
The cabbage I sell in the market place has common biomass, but also the value of being a cabbage.
So, I ask for a cabbage price to pay for the labour of producing it. To value a common is to enclose it. My valued cabbage is an enclosure valued at my labour value.
But the sewage and waste leaf produced from the cabbage must return to the common flow of biomass. Unless a biomass equivalent is returned to my field, I cannot grow as many cabbages in the future, because the fertility of my soil has been diminished by one cabbage.
So, the common produces value (enclosed common), but common law asks for that value to be returned, so that the common can keep producing value and so that succeeding generations can continue to provide themselves with cabbages.
In effect, I can as good as “own” a field without owning its soil, biomass, or water. These are commons to be protected.
It is accepted that commoners own the means to the responsibilities of the common.
***
This brings me to a current and highly unpleasant (dis- convivial) fashion amongst those who happen to have land property. It is the claim of carbon sequestration as virtue. Those who don’t own land property can claim no such virtue. This fashion is taken to extremes by those who are fortunate to control a grass paddock or two. They need do nothing in particular – just walk the boundaries and claim carbon dispensation – perhaps to set against, let’s say a holiday flight… Meanwhile, much of UK’s large grass acreage would provide better economic, ecologic and photosynthetic contributions in its natural state – that is as woodland.
Carbon property is as destructive as land enclosure – both command rent (or dispensation) without social return.
(I don’t like the term sequestration for soil fauna, whose biomass flows variably between plants and animals and back. It is appropriate for the stillness of fossil strata, peat bogs and embedded structures)
A few years ago, a grower claimed that his large inputs of compost removed enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to justify bi-annual holiday flights. He based a lecture tour on this assertion. He provided a composting site for local green waste and I’m sure, made very good compost and distributed much of it not for himself, but others. Nevertheless, in any enduring culture, that green waste should have been returned to a great many more fields and farms. The sequestration/holiday flight balance is nonsense.
I mention the above, because those sequestration claims have not been challenged. The suicidal claim by IPCC and the Paris Accord that burning arable and forest biomass can be accounted carbon neutral, remains similarly unchallenged.
These are no small errors. The correction is central to the maintenance of human cultures.
(September 2016)
Featured image: wood fire. Author: Iuriatan Felipe Muniz. Source: http://www.freeimages.com/photo/wood-fire-1192159
From the Ground Up to Concrete Solutions
Off the keyboard of Albert Bates
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Published on Peak Surfer on June18 & 25, 2017
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Ground Up
Over and over again during the workshop we heard that “farmers are conservative,” “nobody is going to pay for something that takes years to show its worth,” and “unless you spend the time to make it, you won’t even be able to get any.” This is where biochar is today in agriculture. Its a better mousetrap in the midst of a huge rodent epidemic and still, most people can’t even buy any.
Because we are busy with the workshop we can’t easy cut out the time to pen a blog, so we taped (feebly, using a collection of devices such as phones and voice recorders) a segment of one talk we gave during the week. Enjoy.
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Concrete Solutions
We screen grabbed these images off earth.nullschool.net when we were looking at Tropical Storm Cindy on June 19. The top image shows Earth’s oceans. Red is hotter than normal. Blue is colder than normal. The Polar seas are colder than usual because of all the fresh ice water from melting glaciers and ice shelves.
Last week I visited a small slice of heaven; The Farm in Summertown, TN. The Farm is [one of] the oldest intentional communit[ies] in the country and has been home to Albert Bates, author of The Biochar Solution amongst other books, for decades.
Biochar experimentation at The Farm spans the gamut from soil amendment to building material to humanure additive which then moves over to worm bins for some final processing. Just walking around the various natural buildings and permaculture filled ambiance was enough to inspire, but actually getting my hands dirty making biochar plasters, cement mixes, bricks, filtration devices with other like-minded folks was soul boosting.
We visited a nearby farmer that feeds his livestock (pigs, goats, poultry) an earthy blend of biochar mixed with lightly fermented whey and grains which they gobbled up greedily. We used rather grand outhouses that mitigated odors and reduced nutrient leaching with a blend of biochar and sawdust. And we shared stories of our mutual journeys, lessons learned and best practices along the biochar continuum.
What I really enjoyed about this experience, especially compared to attending biochar and other related conferences which tend to pack an enormous amount of information into back-to-back 15–20 minute sessions all day long for 3 days, was the more relaxed pace, the ability to get to know everyone there and hear about their own particular biochar experiences. The other fun part was leveraging everyone’s tools and backgrounds to take certain ideas further — such as the chardboard paper which I wrote about nearly 3 years ago. Albert had a contraption that was able to measure the electromagnetic shielding of the chardboard which was pretty substantial, roughly 90% reduction!
For those of you that have the time and desire to experience truly sustainable living, I highly recommend a visit to The Farm. Staying in the Fairy House, a cozy earthbag building with a living roof provides the quietest sleep you could ever dream of….
Cementing History
|
| Pantheon Oculus, Rome (126 CE) |
Quicklime (calcium oxide) is a white, caustic, alkaline, crystalline solid at room temperature, but feeling an urge to go back to rock, it will draw CO2 from the air unless slaked with water. Slaked lime is what the Romans and Chinese used for mortars and plasters. It is what Michelangelo in 1511 spread across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and painted the image of God into. In the 1820s scientists learned that when heated to >4,000°F (2,200°C) it emits an intense glow. That feature was used broadly in theater productions before electric lighting — limelight.
Suppose that, instead of leaving it to chance, we supply lime with carbon? One easy way to do that would be to mix biochar with cement and let it harden in the open air. You could replace sand in concrete or mortar. This is convenient because construction-grade sand is getting harder to come by and is experiencing rising demand (and price).
Run the Research
• All biochar admixtures had less weight loss due to moisture evaporation. Mortar mixes with char have better water retention. This may lead to improved strength. “In this way, biochar seems to play a role as a self-curing agent.”
• The workability of mortar decreases as the percentage of biochar increases.
• 5–10% biochar replacement is similar to 20% replacement with fly ash (the toxic residue of cement making and other industries).
• Up to 5% biochar shows an increase in compression strength.
• All char additives outperformed control bending strength, compression & fracture energy.
• Coffee powder did better on compression tests.
• Hazelnut shells did better on flexural (MOR) and fracture energy tests.
• Hazelnut shells’ irregular morphology creates “perfect bond with surrounding matrix.”
• Coffee powder has higher silicates which could work as an accelerator helping to speed up the hydration process. It stabilized at 7 days.
A study by Khushnood et al, Carbonized nano/microparticles for enhanced mechanical properties & electromagnetic interference shielding of cementitious materials (2016) tested mechanical & shielding properties of cement using peanut shells and hazelnut shells at 6 different concentrations.
• All char additives outperformed flexural strength of control (2.96 MOR).
• Hazelnut shells optimized at .25% (5.44 MOR).
• Peanut shells optimized at .25% (5.43 MOR).
• Fine aggregates increased fracture toughness.
Hans-Peter Schmidt points to concrete fire resistance as more important than most people realize. In the 1999 tragedy on the autobahn through Mont Blanc, 39 people died when a Belgian transport truck carrying flour and margarine caught fire in the tunnel. The fire burned for 53 hours and reached temperatures of 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), mainly because of the margarine. While it is unlikely biochar in tunnel cements or plasters could have filtered air quickly enough to save the lives of those who suffocated from the toxic smoke, we can at least say that the repairs to the tunnel afterwards would have been easier had fire not damaged the concrete of the tunnel.
If just one percent of the sand going into the 25 billion tons of new concrete each year were replaced with biochar, 250 million tons of biochar would be sequestered. With a carbon content of 82–98 percent, that biochar is the CO2 equivalent of 738- 882 million tons per year (205–245 MtC). At present rates of emissions, we’d need to sequester 5.6 billion tons of carbon (GtC) per year just to get to carbon neutrality, 25 times more than this example. Alternatively, the biochar industry could raise its ambition and replace 25 percent of construction sand worldwide with char-crete.
Biocomposites
A “composite” is when two or more different materials are combined together to create a superior and unique material. The prefix, “bio,” means that the composite takes natural fibers including wood or non-wood (e.g. leaves and grasses) and blends them with a matrix (binder) made from either renewable or non-renewable sources (lime, clay, plastics, old tires).
In 2016 DeVallance et al investigated hardwood biochar as a replacement for wood flour in wood-polypropylene composites. Wood-polypropylene composites are used in building construction, automotive and consumer products. The study combined biochar at rates of 5%, 15%, 25%, and 40% by weight with wood and plastic to make alternative composites to traditional wood-plastic composites. The findings:
• All biochar rates increased flexural strength by 20% or more
• Tensile strength was highest with 5% biochar
• Tensile elasticity was highest with 25% and 40% biochar
• Water absorption and swell decreased
• Biochar additions showed improved thermal properties.
All this academic research is good, but it hardly matters until it gets out of the classroom and laboratory. This is why Schmidt was in Nepal making kilns and showing biochars properties to the homeless after the earthquake in April, 2015, and why Draper is working with engineering students from RIT to design biochar concrete roof tiles in Nicaragua.
• Each tile weighs around 14 to 16 lbs
We made chardobe brick and compressed CINVA ram brick. We made grout for a tile bench. These exercises were a tiny drop in the ocean of what is required to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but they showed the potential.
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Biocomposite “ore” from recycled polystyrene
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Polystyrene waste at a Japanese fish market, by beth
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Water Commons Thinkery Report
Off the keyboard of Mark Garavan
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Published on FEASTA on June 27, 2017
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A Thinkery on Water Commons was held in UCC on Friday, June 23rd. This event was jointly organised by Feasta’s Water Commons group and Orla O’Donovan from UCC, Patrick Bresnihan from TCD, and Kevin Flanagan. There were a total of sixty participants. The event was over-subscribed with quite a number of people therefore unable to attend. The Thinkery was however recorded for video and this should be available in a month or two.
The following is a very brief Report on the event. There were five parts to the Thinkery, each of which lasted an hour.
The first part was facilitated by Roisin O’Gorman from the Theatre Department of UCC. She guided participants in a bodily exercise designed to enable us connect with the water within us. We are after all composed of at least 50% water. This was a very calming exercise which also involved challenging our dominant metaphors of field and space in favour of water metaphors such as flow, pool, lapping and so on.
Next, Patrick Bresnihan led a dialogue with Miriam Planas who is a leading figure in the Barcelona movement Aigua es Vida and is a member of the European Water Movement. Her contribution explored the campaign in Barcelona to reclaim popular control of the local water supply from private, corporate interests. A central concept in this is the principle of ‘Re-Municipalisation’ which has become a very important political principle in many parts of Europe. The idea is to get municipal authorities, which are subject to democratic authority, to re-take ownership of the water supply and distribution. A significant spur to this has been the very high number of people whose water supply has been cut-off by the private corporate providers due to non-payment of fees. In this sense, re-municipalisation offers one model for commoning water.
Orla O’Donovan then facilitated a dialogue with Marco Iob from the Italian Forum of Water Movements and the European Water Movement. He reported on the highly significant popular political campaign in Italy to ensure public ownership of the water supply. This centred on the principal of water as a public good and not as a commodity to be bought and sold in market conditions. This campaign culminated in a popular consultative referendum in which more than 50% of the Italian electorate voted in favour of the public control of water. This democratic mandate has however been so far ignored by the Italian government and mainstream political parties.
From left to right: Roisin O’Gorman, Patrick Bresnihan, Mark Garavan, Marco Iob, Orla O’Donovan, Myriam Planas, and Chas Jewett
Mark Garavan next dialogued with Chas Jewett who is a Lakota-Dakota indigenous American from South Dakota. Chas placed her nation’s concept of water within the wider narrative of deep oppression and genocide of the indigenous peoples of the American continent since the European Conquest 500 years ago. She gave searing personal testimony of systemic abuse and violations of native people. Chas was a leading organiser of the recent Dakota Pipeline protests. These protests have mobilised native resistance and brought many native young people to political engagement. In this way, she ended on the hopeful note that indigenous perspectives offer a crucial cultural resource for how we might connect with the natural world and its multiple elements and energies.
Finally, a highly engaged discussion took place among the participants. It is impossible for me to do justice to this. Key themes however were:
¬ Our collective responsibility to protect our water and planet
¬ How commoning water offers the optimum mode to achieve this as neither corporate nor State interests can be fully trusted to act in support of the people’s interests
¬ How it is important that we move beyond a management-oriented and ‘othering’ attitude towards water and ask questions such as how do we relate to water and accommodate ourselves to what water itself wants to do
¬ How we must recognise that water is not just ‘without’ but also ‘within’ – the water within us connects us to the water without and everything flows together
The event was a genuinely inspiring and hopeful experience. Johannes Euler from the Feasta Water Commons group travelled over from Germany to participate. We hope to build on this event with further gatherings and proposals in the near future.
Mark Garavan, Co-ordinator Water Commons Group
Paleofuturism
Off the keyboard of Albert Bates
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Published on Peak Surfer on June11, 2017
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According to Danish politician Karl Kristian Steincke, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Steincke was cataloging a comment made in the 1937–38 session of the Danish Parliament (without translation: “Det er vanskeligt at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden”), which if you consider what befell Denmark shortly thereafter, was prescient.
Romm says that historically,
[R]ecord CO2 levels are accompanied by record temperatures and record sea level rise. We haven’t hit the temperature levels we can expect from current CO2 levels, and by the time we do, CO2 levels will be even higher. Sea level rise can take even longer to catch up but the latest science says we are headed towards worst-case scenario levels, 3 to 6 feet (or more), by century’s end.But now CO2 levels have surpassed those seen not just during modern civilization, but during all of human evolution. Indeed, current levels haven’t been seen for many millions of years.
Monthly levels of heat-trapping CO2 hit nearly 410 parts per million (ppm) in May. How do we explain that? Only one way. What were once natural sinks have become sources, as CO2 reservoirs trapped in permafrost, ocean clathrates, forests and soils heat up and start to release their stores.
2015 and 2016 showed the two biggest annual jumps in actual atmospheric CO2 levels.
Many factors — the depth of the gas hydrates in sediments, strong sediment and water column sinks, and the inability of bubbles emitted at the seafloor to deliver methane to the sea-air interface in most cases — mitigate the impact of gas hydrate dissociation on atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations though. There is no conclusive proof that hydrate-derived methane is reaching the atmosphere now….
The most revealing of Romm’s charts was, for us, this one from Yale360, to which we have added a few labels for clarity:
The people of Jebel Irhoud were certainly sophisticated. They could make fires and craft complex weapons, such as wooden handled spears, needed to kill gazelle and other animals that grazed the savanna that covered the Sahara 300,000 years ago.
“We used to think that there was a cradle of mankind 200,000 years ago in East Africa, but our new data reveal that Homo sapiens spread across the entire African continent around 300,000 years ago. Long before the out-of-Africa dispersal of Homo sapiens, there was dispersal within Africa,” study author Jean-Jacques Hublin said in a statement.
“CO2 levels have surpassed those seen not just during modern civilization, but during all of human evolution. Indeed, current levels haven’t been seen for many millions of years.”
By adding more labels to the Yale360 chart, we can date the appearance of our bipedal, hominid-like ancestors to a recent point along the timeline when climate — and particularly the weather in Northern African savannahs — went from considerably warmer and wetter to highly variable but within a hospitable range (180–280 ppm CO2 and plus or minus 2 degrees C). That describes the period 250,000 to 300,000 years ago. Then, suddenly in geological terms, 11,700 years ago the last glacial maximum passed and in rushed the extremely comfortable and stable Holocene, that flat blue line across the chart. For as long as we have had stomachs and skeletons, we have never existed outside a 180-280 ppm world.
Even if sea levels rise 300 feet and cover coastal cities, those minerals will still be visible in the sedimentary record. That’s because landmarks like the Washington Monument and the Smithsonian will collapse into piles of rubble — signatures that are later preserved as highly unusual lens-shaped pockets underground, distinct from their surroundings in both shape and minerals. The Washington Monument, for example, will eventually be a lens-shaped pocket composed of limestone where no other limestone is found. And the pocket that was once the Smithsonian will contain so many rare minerals that they could not possibly have formed so close together in nature. To boot, they will be surrounded by the vast array of the man-made minerals we use every day.
There is nothing at all like this in the geology of the past 4.5 billion years on Earth,” Zalasiewicz says. “It is tragically different.”
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
The Way
Off the keyboard of Albert Bates
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Published on Peak Surfer on June 4, 2017
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"Patterns of regenerative thinking augur regenerative patterns of living and the reverse is also true."
In a Wired interview in 2011, Kevin Kelly described the idea this way:
Really, we should think of ideas as connections,in our brains and among people. Ideas aren’t self-contained things; they’re more like ecologies and networks. They travel in clusters.
Historical examples are the Yosemite rock climbers Camp 4 in the 1930s, Building 20 at MIT, the Algonquin Round Table, Silicon Valley, Soho, Burning Man, the North Beach of the Big Island in the 1950s, Greenwich Village, the Panhandle flats in the Haight in the 1960s, Glastonbury, Akwesasne, the affinity groups at Seabrook, the bioregional congresses, the World Social Fora, the UN climate summits, and the Amazonian Shamanism conferences.
We have been lucky to stumble into a number of those scenes; so many we sometimes wonder if we are Forrest Gump.
Lucky stars have led us to be present at the birth of the Noho loft art and music scene, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the Winter Soldier hearings, a blithering Nixon at sunrise on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the first Earth Day in Central Park, the Longest Walk, the conspiratorial Leningrad public baths on Saturday nights, the bioregional Consejos de Visiones at Meztitla and Condor, sundry Earth Summits, the ecovillager gatherings at Findhorn in 1995 and Istanbul in 1996, Viridian design, the post-millennium peak oil conferences, and the Kinsale College birthing of Transition.
The scenius we are most familiar with, although it encompasses and interpenetrates many of these others, is of course The Farm. As one of the longest floating crap games of the past century, it remains a dynamically evolving scene: a creative hub for the world midwives’ conspiracy, the cabal of alternative education advocacy, an incubator for progenitors of cool tech, and lately, a climate-reversal counterdevelopment seeding group, including, but not limited to, we ecovillage, regrarian, permaculture and alt.fuels evangelists.
The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors that Kelly described:
- Mutual appreciation — risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
- Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — as soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
- Network effects of success — when a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
- Local tolerance for the novelties — the local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.
Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.
What Brian Eno called scenius, Stephen Gaskin used to call “the juice.” In a paper we delivered to a history conference in Illinois in 1987, we attempted to describe a series of intellectual and technological steps that guided the first 16 years of The Farm, but cautioned that we could not try to fathom how it came into being. “How juice moves from place to place and time to time would be an interesting exploration,” we said.
Lao Tsu (literally the “Old Boy” because he was born with a small white beard), put these ideas into poetry. We think it silly when we have to take off shoes and give up our toothpaste at the airport, but when Lao Tsu tried to leave China they told him he couldn’t leave until he had written down all he knew. In the Tao Te Ching, the 72 gems of wisdom left with a border guard, Lao Tsu summarized his findings in order that he be allowed to leave.
The first verse is the Old Boy’s disclaimer: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
Alan Watts observed that this famous opening line also showed Lao Tsu to be a punster, but you have to understand a bit of Chinese to get it.
“Tao” means the way, or course, of nature, but it also means to speak. So in Chinese, the first character is this:
The first character is “the way.” The next is “can” or “can be.”
The third is again “the way,” but it could also be “spoken”
What Lao Tsu says in one entendre is that he can’t really describe the way, because it is ineffable; if he could describe it then it would not be true. The way that can be spoken is not the way.
In the other entendre Lao Tsu says it cannot be taken as a way. The way that can be “way-ed,” or traveled, is not the way.
Do you think you can make the world a better place? I do not think you can. It is already perfect.
This is also the point Kelly labored to underscore, which is that scenes, and hence scenius, cannot be created. The best we can hope for is to recognize them when, for whatever extraordinary confluence of good fortune, they seem to arise. And when that happens, the best we can do is to not step on them.
That may be so, but maybe not. Scenius with the grand historicity of a Yosemite Camp 4 cannot be stamped into existence. But the conditions to potentialize scenius can be laid by design. Daniel Wahl, in Designing Regenerative Cultures, provides these basic ingredients:
- Transformative Innovation
- Biologically Inspired
- Living Systems Thinking
- Health and Resilience
In his forward to Wahl’s book, David Orr offers a nuanced challenge. It is Patricia Scotland’s “And, so?” question. We have developed an ecosystem of solutions. How do you get this to scale? Holistic design is akin to the core nature of religion, Orr says, “a discipline binding us all together in our stewardship of the Earth as a shared habitat and the underlying assumption to be shared is that we are more worthy together than apart.”
Orr then takes it a step farther. He says the five billion poor, soon to be 7 or 9 billion, must be empowered with free energy, free clean water, free pressed-brick shelters, and free Internet access. In return they will innovate and create infinite wealth with a regenerative aspect. We hear this, and we shudder a bit.
This is also what Buck Fuller used to say, and many others before and after him. It’s become kind of holy grail in Silicon Valley or at Burning Man — liberating ideas will liberate masses. It philosophically underpins the UN Sustainable Development Goals — the essence of neoliberalism. But….
If I am worthy then show me the way.
First, the whole modern amusement park ride is scaffolded on cheap, available, abundant energy, soon to be a bygone. Sooner than you imagine, those Microsoft server farms that are allowing you to read this will brown out, flicker, and die. Kevin Kelly again:
A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without LEDs or cathode ray tubes, without solid state computer chips, without telephone lines, without long-distance signal repeaters, without electrical generators, without high-speed turbines, without stainless steel, iron smelters, and control of fire. None of these concrete inventions would exist without the elemental inventions of writing, of an alphabet, of hypertext links, of indexes, catalogs, archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recapitulate a web page you have to recreate all these other functions. You might as well remake modern society.
Second, imagining 7 billion hominids empowered with free everything opens the gates of Hell unless they are restrained from reliving the patterns of their collective past, only worse. Historically, when provided abundant food and energy the hairless two-leggeds have been as locusts. Without some countervailing ethic of restraint, should Orr’s wish comes true, this fragile blue orb becomes Easter Island.
Wahl says that which must change is more mental than physical, and in this we are agreed. Lately with the climate march for science, Paul Hawken’s Drawdown tour, and the debate over fake news and science suppression we have been hearing, over and over, people we respect make pledges of allegiance to the gods of science as if they were saying a rosary. But we know that scientists — and even more-so academics — are inherently conservative defenders of the rote and two or more steps behind the vanguard. Who are the vanguard? Artists like Brian Eno, or the cabal that gathers in a scenius to thrash out the hard truth. Moreover, they then endeavor to actually make the change they've lived go viral.
Patterns of regenerative thinking augur regenerative patterns of living and the reverse is also true: living together or coming together can change your mind or open new frontiers. We have witnessed this phenomenon in ecovillage communities all over the world. Designing the future — any future beyond mid-century — requires redesigning a collective consciousness, our psychodemographic. We are already doing this with the hardware gateways to cyberamphibian transits, and with permaculture, ecosystem restoration camps and ecovillages in the non-virtual world.
Ecovillages do it with eco-covenants; social contracts that build all eight forms of capital, externalizing nothing.
Our travels to Marrakech and Zhejiang last year made clear to us that the role of ecovillages is key. They are a viral carrier — patient zero. Don’t be put off by the hippy or elitist veneers of many of the prototypes; those were leading edge experiments by the fringe-dwelling creatives. Any change for humanity arrives only after extreme vetting. At that point they become nearly inevitable.
To quote Wahl,
“Sustainability is not a fixed state to reach and then maintain, it is a community-based learning process aimed at increasing the health and resilience of our communities, our bioregional economies, ecosystems, and of the planetary life-support system as a whole.”
We say “nearly inevitable” because there are still countercurrents and eddies that can drown us. There are no guarantees. The odds against success are high.
Feeling the wind at our back, we edge the kite closer to the power zone.
If you want to be reborn, let yourself die. If you want to be given everything, give everything up.
Echoes in Eternity
Off the keyboard of Ugo Bardi
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Published on Cassandra's Legacy on June 7, 2017
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President Trump's decision to exit the Paris agreement has been correctly vilified almost everywhere outside the US, but some commentators noted that Trump may have done the right thing, even though for the wrong reasons. It seems that for many politicians and industrialists, the Paris treaty was seen as the perfect tool to appear to be doing something while at the same time doing nothing. Personally, I tend to agree with this interpretation, especially from what I know about Italian politicians.
So, here is a link to a text where Trump's decision is discussed in these terms. I am impressed by Graham Readfearn's statement that the Paris treaty was seen by the coal industry as a way to get financed for "clean coal" and other useless technologies. Again, knowing the people involved in this kind of tricks, it doesn't surprise me at all.
In the end, Trump's attempt to revitalize dying industries, such as coal, are bound to fail and this may give a bad reputation to some bad ideas that really deserve that. And that may create a momentum for doing the right things as argued, for instance, by Jean-Marc Jancovici.
What we do now will echo on the future of our planet and for a long time to come.
Here is an excerpt from Graham Readfearn
"At least two coal companies, Peabody Energy and Cloud Peak, had tried to convince Trump to remain in the Paris deal. Oil and gas giants Exxon and Conoco also voiced support for the Paris deal.
This internal fight represented two different approaches from a fossil fuel industry trying to sustain itself. One approach is to bulldoze and cherry-pick your way through the science of climate change and attack the UN process — all to undermine your opponents’ core arguments.
Another approach is to accept the science but work the system to convince governments that “clean coal” and efficiency gains are the way forward.
The latter was exactly the rationale reportedly deployed by coal firms like Peabody Energy and Cloud Peak.
According to White House officials quoted by Reuters, these firms wanted Trump to stay in the Paris deal because this gave them a better chance of getting support for “low-emission” coal plants. They might also get some financial help to support the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology."
Knarf plays the Doomer Blues
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