“If the fracturing of our once stable climate doesn’t terrify you, then you don’t fully understand it!”
“While those of us working in the climate science field know the true picture, and understand the implications for our world, most others do not,” he wrote. “And this is a problem — a big one.” Scientists Terrified by How the Climate is Falling Apart The above embedded article elicited the video response below from my friend and colleague Professor Guy McPherson.
I have curated a number of articles below showing the orchestrated litany of lies from people pretending to cover the climate and extinction crises. As always, the technique is to shift the baseline dates so that they can pretend that we’ve had much less anthropogenic warming than we’ve in reality triggered. I covered this issue previously, Baseline Temperature dishonesty at the Edge of Extinction Sam Carana at the Arctic News Blogspot is one of the few prepared to address the science and be realistic about the severity of our predicament. We’ll start with the truth and then get to the lies.
“It’s time to stop denying how precarious the situation is.”
“Remember the Paris Agreement? In 2015, politicians pledged to hold the global temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pledged they would try and limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Well, an analysis by Sam Carana shows that it was already more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial when the Paris Agreement was reached.” 2C Crossed The Rogues Gallery of the Climate Enemy Within
Narrative Control at the Edge of Extinction.
As we circle the drain of collapse and extinction, the corporate media pretend to cover the poly-crises we face but report on the great unravelling as if it’s a future issue, rather that fully underway today, driven by the six-dozen feedback loops I know of, the ones we’ve yet to discover, and the “Black Swans” that we either haven’t thought of or we simply ignore. This muddying of the waters will only get worse as we circle the drain of collapse. “Current Climate Path Will Lead to Collapse of Life on Earth”
The average person is incredulous when I say that Industrial Civilisation can and probably will collapse in the next two or if we’re ‘lucky’ three years. Sixteen ocean passages on small yachts, two years living in war zones and six decades of risk taking, have taught me the value of the “Precautionary Principle” and how your luck can evaporate, in a flash. “The precautionary principle has been adopted universally in different environmental instruments. It states that if there is risk of severe damage to humans and the environment, absence of incontrovertible, conclusive, or definite scientific proof is not a reason for inaction.” I will be surprised if this set of living arrangements survives more than two more melt seasons in the Arctic. I’ve been collaborating with Professor Guy McPherson for over a decade now and clearly his overall hypothesis heavily influences my personal views and synopsis. I was a spectacularly reluctant adherent to Guy’s scholarly work. For the first year or two I responded to Guy’s work with every one of Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s “Stages of Grief”: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance. Acceptance is key to navigating this, the perfect storm. It does not equate to “Giving Up”. No one would accuse a terminal cancer patient of “Giving Up” and like it or not the diagnosis for the ecosystem is terminal. How we manage Planetary Hospice is up to us. If you’re on Facadebook you can see me ‘Giving Up” at the not-for-profit rewilding project at the Rakino Island Nursery where I volunteer, I’m the “Water Boy”.
Let’s start by having a look at it from the perspective of losing the Cryosphere, our planetary thermostat:
“Losing the remaining Arctic Sea Ice and its ability to reflect incoming solar energy back to space would be equivalent to adding one trillion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, on top of the 2.4 trillion tons emitted since the Industrial Age, according to current and former researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.” “At current rates, this roughly equates to 25 years of global CO2 emissions.” Cascading Consequences of the Loss of Arctic Sea Ice.
We are on the cusp of triggering a Blue Ocean Event (BOE) in the Arctic, there are a multitude of consequences that will accelerate our predicament from that event, not the least of them being the destabilising of the methane clathrates, especially vulnerable are those under the shallow East Siberian Arctic Shelf as documented by Dr Natalia Shakhova and her research partner Igor Semiletov and others. “Significant quantities of methane are escaping the East Siberian Shelf as a result of the degradation of submarine permafrost,” says Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. She and her team collected data – at a great cost – to show that vast areas are releasing plumes of methane gas, which is escaping into the atmosphere.” “Arctic storms speed up release of methane plumes” The above hyperlinked article is 11 years old; the destabilisation is accelerating.
Methane Hydrates – Extended Interview Extracts with Natalia Shakhova
“Over 10 years ago Dr Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov warned of a 50 billion tonne discharge of Methane from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf at “Any time”. It’s been leaking at various levels ever since, but the dreaded “Clathrate Gun” has yet to manifest. In a subsequent video Dr Peter Wadhams said he thought there were 100’s of billions of tonnes of CH4 under the shallow shelf and surrounding region. Possibly as much as four times more than that hypothesised above. When it does destabilise, the warming will be near instantaneous and will devastate crop growth in the Northern Hemisphere. Ice-sheet-driven methane storage and release in the Arctic
“The heat in December 2023 was felt most strongly in the Arctic, as illustrated by the NASA image below, showing anomalies above 1951-1980 as high as 9.9°C. “ Seafloor methane tipping point crossed in 2024?
“President Niinistö pointed out that, although the impacts are currently visible in the Arctic, they will ultimately affect each and every inhabitant of our planet. “There will be enormous consequences worldwide. As the ice melts, sea levels will rise. As the ice melts, solar radiation will not be reflected back – instead its energy will further warm the water and accelerate global warming.” President Niinistö in Arkhangelsk: If we lose the Arctic, we lose the whole world Clearly, we have lost the Arctic!
Let’s have a look at it from a fire perspective. “The Smokehouse Creek fire has so far scorched more than 1m acres – 1,600 sq miles – across the Texas Panhandle, as well as tens of thousands of acres in Oklahoma. It stretches over an area larger than Rhode Island, making it the largest ever wildfire in Texas, and the second-largest in US history, according to modern fire records.” A visual guide to the Texas wildfire
Dr Guy R McPherson – March 2024 Presentation in Westerly, Rhode Island
Why aren’t more scientists aligned with Guy and my timeline?
2) There is a long-held disdain for people talking about “The End Times’, most of which stem from pseudo religious mumbo jumbo, our position is rooted in Science.
5) Research grants are generally forerunners to develop marketable data or products. Arctic researcher Dr Jason Box tweeted: “If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.” He copped enormous pushback and has never been so radical since! Scientific reticence and the monetary system sunk our ship! 6) Climate sensitivity has been grossly underestimated and very few of us are prepared to admit our failure. In 2017 I published an article titled: Full Earth System Sensitivity to CO2 has been Grossly Underestimated The analysis was based on the work of David Wasdell from the Apollo Gaia Project. “In this one-hour long presentation by Professor David Wasdell of the Apollo Gaia Project he explains that we have no available carbon budget and that we are on a trajectory of well over 10 degrees C.”
I woke up one morning to find this observation from Professor Peter Wadhams who has spent more time under and on the Arctic Sea Ice that any other scientist to my knowledge: “The analysis of climate sensitivity by David Wasdell is very important. I have been through it with him several times and am convinced of its validity. I mentioned it in “A Farewell to Ice”. The point is that here is a big difference between the short term sensitivity, which is used to calculate warming over a few years, and the long term sensitivity which represents how much warming the earth is going to be subjected to if you don’t add more CO2 but let the effects of the present levels work their way fully through the climate system. Short term sensitivity is 2-4.5 C, but long term is more like 10C. The crime of IPCC and other modelling outfits is that they are aware of this difference between short and long term, but still use the short term value even when they are doing hand-waving studies of what is going to happen over the next century or two. In fact it;’s not just the case that the magic 1.5C or 2C warming is already “baked in” to the global system – in fact the baked in figure is more like 4-5 C. Hence the vital need for carbon drawdown. Best wishes Peter Wadhams”.
How and why does the collapse of Industrial Civilisation equate to an extinction level event for most if not all complex life on the planet? When industrial civilisation collapses, we will have over 450 unattended nuclear power stations melt down and approximately 1200 spent fuel pool fires erupting into a radioactive inferno the like of which has never happened before on this planet. Spent Nuclear Fuel Management Poses a Major Threat to the United States. American exceptionalism writ large, radiation respects no borders. Most chemical plants and oil wells will leak and burn once unattended.
When Industrial Civilisation collapses, we lose the “Aerosol Masking Effect”, what Dr James E Hanson labelled “Our Faustian Bargain”, there has been at least 1C of masking, perhaps a1.5C and Hansen said the aerosols will fall out of the atmosphere in as short a time as a week. No flora can adapt to those sorts of global perturbations. The Aerosol Masking Effect, a Deep Dive into Our “Faustian Bargain”
I accept and expect this post will be incredibly triggering for readers. Here’s the deal. Leave a comment below, contact me any time after January 1 in 2026 and I’ll send you a bottle of quality New Zealand wine so that we can all celebrate us being wrong!
“A new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature found that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current – of which the Gulf Stream in a part – could collapse around the middle of the century, or even as early as 2025.” It could shut down in the same length of time it takes for a human to reproduce: IE: 9 months, that’s how precarious our predicament has already become! “A vital system of ocean currents could collapse within a few decades if the world continues to pump out planet-heating pollution, scientists are warning – an event that would be catastrophic for global weather and ‘affect every person on the planet.” No mention of the six dozen “Feedback loops” that we have already triggered nor the ongoing war mongering that ensures that all emissions will continue on the “Hockey Stick Trajectory” That Michael E Mann can no longer see!
We are just one “Black Swan” away from this set of living arrangements unravelling, but the slowing down of the AMOC doesn’t meet the definition of a “Black Swan”, it’s entirely predictable and underway now, not long off in a future we don’t have.
From Professor Guy McPherson’s substack post: Will AMOC Kill Us All? “More than 12,000 years ago, the rapid melting of glaciers caused the AMOC to shut down. Within a decade, temperature fluctuations in the Northern Hemisphere reached 10-15 degrees Celsius, or 18-27 degrees Fahrenheit. The president of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the research studies mentioned in this video, said the shutdown of the AMOC “would affect every person on the planet – it’s that big and important.” One observation I would make is that the changes we are witnessing today are happening at orders of magnitude faster than any previous similar event. Science Snippets: On the Rate of Environmental Change
“New research shows how last year’s warming melted ice in Greenland that increased flows of fresh, cold water into the North Atlantic, upsetting ocean currents in ways that lead to atmospheric changes.”
The January 2021 episode of Nature Bats Last featured a discussion with Arctic research scientist and oceanographer Jim Massa. The episode is embedded here:
Jim has also delved into the slowing down of the AMOC, he quotes Professor McPherson’s work on the AME.
We have destabilised the atmosphere and the ocean currents, we are rapidly spiralling into a completely new paradigm. Capitalism and Industrial Civilisation is a “Confidence game”, we face multiple threats that could trigger a collapse that another former guest on Nature Bats Last, Arthur Keller labelled “The Only Realistic Scenario”.
I first wrote about “The Best Kept Secret in Climate Science”, in my 2016 article titled: “Global Dimming Keeping the Planet Habitable”. That blog has many more relevant links in the comments section for the inquisitive. The embedded video on “Global Dimming” is a “must watch!” That article refers to the phenomena of the planet warming after 911 when all the planes were grounded in the USA, with the subsequent decline in aerosols, followed by immediate warming. The warming spike was directly linked to the decrease of aerosols, additional to our crack like addiction to emitting CO2, CH4, the most prolific greenhouse gas H2O and other greenhouse gases. Lion Simons mentioned in the video below that a warmer climate holds 7% more water vapour for every 1C we broil the planet. In mountainous regions it can be as much as 15%! Each 1 Degree C We Warm the Planet adds an additional 7% Increase in Moisture into the Atmosphere. “On this episode, Nate is joined by climate researcher Leon Simons to unpack recent trends in global heating during 2023 and potential explanations and subsequent projections for the coming year. While the connection between human emitted greenhouse gasses and global warming is scientifically agreed upon, the other complexities and feedbacks of our climate system are still just beginning to be understood. Today, Leon theorizes on the intensity of aerosol masking from particulates such as sulfur, based on the connection between recent changes in marine fuel sulfur requirements and corresponding climate data. How will the global trend towards aerosol reductions affect near and long term global heating? What does this catch-22 mean for potential future climate action and policy? How should we be thinking about creating a more simplified global system in response to the unknown unknowns of our potential future climate?”
More great work above from Leon Simons explaining the warming suppressed by the “Aerosol Masking Effect,” what Dr James E Hansen calls “Our Faustian Bargain”, what my friend and colleague Guy McPherson termed, “The Best Kept Secret in Climate Science”. Leon refers to Michael E Manns recent nonsense as a “Straw Mans Argument”, how refreshing and courageous of him. I’ve called out Michael E Manns “Strawman’s Argument” in my blog post titled: Scientific Mal-Practice from the Mann Himself
I’ve been studying “Collapse” since I visited Mayan Ruins in Central America and similar ruins in Southeast Asia in the early 1980’s. None of those civilisations expected to fail yet fail they did. The collapse of industrial civilisation will trigger the loss of aerosols, we’ll also see the melt down of 450+ nuclear power stations, 1200 spent fuel pool fires and tens of thousands of leaking chemical plants and oil wells. Perhaps the aerosols from that scenario will be more than the AME today. We’ve never carried out this experiment before, so all bets are off. As with all my blog posts as new data comes in, I add it to the comments section. Feel free to leave a comment so when I add more information you’ll get a notification.
“MORE than 300 million people in the US and Canada face the growing possibility of electricity shortages beginning as early as this year and continuing to 2028. In a recent report, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation – an international regulatory authority – projected that a majority of regions in the US and Canada will have insufficient electricity supply to reliably meet demand during extreme weather conditions. A few may even see interruptions under normal weather conditions.”
“Let’s return to that first sentence: “MORE than 300 million people in the US and Canada face the growing possibility of electricity shortages beginning as early as this year and continuing to 2028.” Wait, what? Electricity shortages will stop after 2028? How? Naturally, there is no mention of aerosol masking, the best-kept secret in climate science. Professor James E. Hansen has said and written many times that the aerosols will fall out of the atmosphere in about five days. According to a peer-reviewed, open-access paper published on 15 June 2021, the loss of aerosol masking will lead to a substantial increase in planetary warming: 55% globally, and 133% over land. Most of us live on land. As I have indicated previously in this space, we passed the 2 C Rubicon several months ago, according to governmental bodies representing a few countries. These governmental bodies were catching up to Andrew Y. Glikson, who wrote that Earth had surpassed the 2 C mark in his 9 October 2020 book, The Event Horizon. Furthermore, as nearly as I can tell, additional heating of Earth is a one-way street. Once the planet warms, cooling it is a rather challenging task.”
“According to a member of a think tank in Washington, D.C. as published in the paper by United Press International: The report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation found that North America’s peak demand – the highest amount of electricity needed in a given period – is rising faster than at any time in the past five years. The sharp increase also represents a reversal of a decades-long trend involving falling or flat growth in demand.”
All of the above written, slightly edited, and spoken work, is from my friend and colleague Professor Guy McPherson. Subscribers to Guy’s Sub stack posts can comment directly and read the whole embedded script at the following link: Science Snippets: Much of North America Faces Electricity Shortages this Year
After being intrigued by this latest analysis, the electrician in me decided to dive in deeper and have a closer look at the threat. For the record, I had full electrical registration in Aotearoa NZ and have a High Voltage Switching and Protection Qualification from the London Electricity Board. I worked at the Sun Alliance Computer Centre located at Lennox Wood, West Sussex in 1987, only after working there for 6 months did, I find out the computer centre, one of Britian’s first “Intelligent Buildings”, what an oxymoron, was a backup computer installation for the British Ministry of Defence. All of the Group 4 security guards were supposedly ‘ex’ military but over beers, after long runs together, I realised I was working in the belly of the beast. The entire property was surrounded by a moat, and we had the same electronic gate system that was installed at the US Embassy in Beirut. One day my pager bleeped, and a message came up saying: “Blocker discharge”. I made my way to the security gate and found a small car with its rear axle and suspension ripped off and hanging form the blade of the ‘blocker’ that was built into the road, anyone following a pre-approved car into the complex without swipe access discharged the blocker and ‘bam’. The poor young woman who was running late for work just had her car ripped in two. As a result of obtaining that HV qualification, I worked on high voltage substations when rehabilitating the port of Beira in Mozambique in support of the front-line states resisting the Apartheid State to the south. The point of all of the above Is I have some expertise in this field and feel reasonably qualified to comment.
Delving into the story I discovered: “Musk also indicates that the growth of generative AI in computing in the form of chatbots has been rapid, allowing users to generate content and images within a moment’s notice. He added that the adoption and rapid growth of the technology in computing is increasing by a factor of ten every six months. “I’ve never seen any technology advance faster than this,” says Musk.” Can anyone else spot the exponential function here?
To my knowledge the energy required to power AI has not been fully incorporated into the paper above that Guy quotes so, as always, it’s worse than previously thought.
Readers of this blog will know I have a long-standing involvement in the anti-nuclear movement. On that note, I’d like to specifically address this aspect of Guy’s blog piece: “As if those challenges are not bad enough, there is also the issue of nuclear facilities as one means of generating electricity. Nuclear power plants require grid-tied electricity to operate. What happens when the grid fails, even locally?”
“Vulnerability to extended power outages stemming from grid collapse triggered by terrorism, technological accident, cyber attack or geomagnetic storms is understood to mean the widest possible spectrum of immediate and downstream consequences for our nations critical infrastructure. Regrettably few realistic plans are in place for dealing with this risk especially as it pertains to three primary energy systems of strategic significance to the United States – nuclear power, chemical manufacturing and natural gas supplies. The author argues that greater sustained attention is needed to upgrade the resilience of these systems, foster greater sharing of remedies among them to offset the worst effects of grid collapse which exceeds 15 consecutive calendar days and build collective avenues of enhanced risk mitigation against such scenarios.” From the ResearchGate paper: Grid Collapse Security, Stability and Vulnerability Issues: Impactful Issues Affecting Nuclear Power Plants, Chemical Plants and Natural Gas Supply Systems
Feel free to add your comments below and as always, I will update the comments section with additional information as it comes in, until the lights go out, pardon the pun.
Clearly neither the 1.5C nor the 2C Rubicon’s of anthropogenic warming were ever safe. Nor was 350ppm of CO2 in the Atmosphere for that matter. How did we get ourselves into this nightmare?
Nobel Laurate William Nordhaus is quite possibly the single most deadly human to have ever lived. Nordhaus, an economist at Yale was the first corporate shrill to suggest that 2C was both achievable and safe. It was neither but we were collectively sold the lie. The Myth of 2C Being Safe and Achievable
“We know quite a bit more about climate science than we did in 1977. And real scientists knew, even way back then, that economists were not to be treated as scientists. It’s small wonder Nordhaus shared the politically motivated Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018. I wouldn’t have been surprised had he been given the Nobel Peace Prize, thus joining fellow partners-in-crime specialists-in-genocide Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.” From the essay “Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored”
An economist who understands the importance of Arctic Sea Ice, the danger of “Wet Bulb Temperatures”, the AMOC slowing down and that William Nordhaus, who came up with the terminal 2C Rubicon of warming, that sealed the fate of the entire ecosystem, is a complete and utter fraud. We were defrauded of the entire ecosystem by Capitalism, fancy that!
As the El Niño builds to a terrifying crescendo, that won’t peak before April 2024, the Pacific’s Coral Reefs will become stressed, and a bleaching event will unfold as it did in the 2016 El Niño. What is our response? TEPCO and the Japanese government have decided to dump 1.3million tons of radioactive water into my beloved Pacific Ocean. After careful consideration the criminal cohort in Japan have decided to take the cheapest option and dump the radioactive sludge into the adjacent Pacific Ocean.
In the video below, I mentioned that Sea Surface Temperatures hit 38C off the coast of Florida. Here’s the evidence: “Sea surface temperatures of more than 38C (100.4F) have been recorded off the coast of Florida – potentially setting a new world record.” Sea temperature off Florida reaches 38C- potentially a world record.
We discussed the compounding consequences of the Pacific Ocean being irradiated thanks to TEPCO, the Japanese Government and Fukushima Daiichi. The very same people who triggered this disaster, by building a sea wall half the size their own analysis called for. My Polynesian neighbours are furious. Niue and Tuvalu ‘concerned, dismayed, disappointed’ with Fukushima release
After our discussion above about grief, I found this spectacularly good article.” The phrase “climate dread” better legitimizes the real and tangible threat coming toward us.” Stop Calling It “Climate Anxiety.” It’s Climate Dread.
Professor McPherson has a Substack account named after his website Nature Bats Last, where subscribers can comment and ask Guy questions directly. Nature Bats Last
Pauline Schneider’s thoughts on this discussion can be read at the following embedded link: Great Barrier Reef’s End Days
“The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite…” Jules Verne
Will the latest El Niño Southern Oscillation be the death knell for: The Largest Living Organism on Earth.? The Great Barrier Reef has yet to recover from the 2016 El Niño. It takes a coral reef approximately 15 years to recover from a significant ‘Bleaching Event”, clearly, there will be no respite for an already ailing complex organism. That’s all happening, before Japan takes the cheapest option and dumps millions of gallons of radioactive sludge, being described as filtered water, into my beloved Pacific Ocean. Here’s a question for informed readers. Could the sludge have been injected into a depleted oil well, rather than be simply dumped into the adjacent ocean? I’d love to know if that was a possibility, not considered, due to the cost! Brace for grief, our own and more importantly, that of our youth, as day by day the realisation that they have next to no future, will trigger what I have previously described as: The Coming Tsunami of Grief. I refuse to be the last generation of elders, lying to the last generation of youth. The Kids Are Not Alright: How Young People are Dealing with Climate Anxiety A seminal event like the collapse of the GBR would shake this set of living arrangements to the core, then there will be another similar event, rinse and repeat. A perfect example is the collapse of the Emperor Penguin colonies in Antarctica. Capitalism and Industrial Civilisation is a “Confidence Game”. Losing something this significant or a city or region of people to Wet Bulb Extremes, will undermine all confidence in the future and this civilisation will unravel rapidly. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario
“Australia’s south-east is in for a marine heatwave that is literally off the scale, raising the prospect of significant losses in fishing and aquaculture.”
The embedded article above is another example of The Guardian pretending to cover the catastrophe but downplaying the cumulative effects. I’ve called out that strategy before on this blog at: The Rogues Gallery of the Climate Enemy Within.
Photo above, me and my beloved coral.
I first dived the Great Barrier Reef in 2001. I skippered a 37ft yacht from Micronesia to Cairns, then we sailed 800 miles down the GBR, diving every day for 6 weeks, before sailing the boat back to Aotearoa NZ. At the time, a marine biologist in Cairns conducted a seminar that I attended, and he said that the reef had only a generation of life left in it. His opening gambit in the lecture was “Turn to the person sitting beside you, pat them on the back and congratulate them for being the last generation to dive the Great Barrier Reef, before it dies”! Those were the days before abrupt climate change, when contemporary climate change awareness was in its infancy (George Perkins Marsh 1847 accepted). I thought he was exaggerating for effect, as people think I am doing now. He was right, I long to be proven wrong. I have Zero interest in being proven right. I don’t believe that my marine biologist tutor really understood how fast our climate change catastrophe would unfold, but his estimate on the reef’s life expectancy appears, tragically, spot on. In 2016, during the last significant El Niño Southern Oscillation, Cyclone Winston pummelled Fiji with wind speeds in excess of 220 miles/ hour, then dumped an enormous amount of rain on the Australian coast and in the Coral Sea, cooling both, had Winston not wrought its havoc, the reef would have been in far worse shape.Tropical Cyclone Winston Causes Devastation in Fiji
“The ENSO Outlook is currently at El Niño Alert, having met criteria 1, 3 and 4 – see below.”
“When El Niño Alert criteria have been met in the past, an El Niño event has developed around 70% of the time.” ENSO Outlook: An Alert System for the El Niño-Southern Oscillation The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is ultra conservative. Other analysis implies that the nascent El Niño will be very strong. “The latest weekly values in the Niño 1+2 region (eastern Pacific) and Niño 3 region (east-central Pacific) are surpassed only by 1997, with records dating back to 1981. All indications are that this El Niño will peak as a strong, canonical event either very late in 2023 or early in 2024. The atmospheric response, measured by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), has trended toward El Niño but continues to lag behind the oceanic progression.” Many thanks to Tomas Reis on Twitter/X
Professor Guy McPherson and I have been beating the drum of Abrupt Climate Change together now for a decade. We’ve been branded ‘Alarmists”. Damn straight, we are alarmed. The Rate of Change is the critical detail. Guy goes into that aspect of the great unravelling below:
Delve into all the embedded links above to verify where I got my information from and add your own thoughts below. I always ‘populate’ the comments section of my blogs with additional evidence as it gushes forth, feel free to join the team by adding your thoughts and any other evidence corroborating or refuting my analysis. By dropping a comment you’ll get a notification of any additional evidence coming to light. “The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite…” Jules Verne
As we circle the drain of collapse and extinction, the corporate media pretend to cover the poly-crises we face but report on the great unravelling as if it’s a future issue, rather that fully underway today, driven by the six-dozen feedback loops I know of, the ones we’ve yet to discover, and the “Black Swans” that we either haven’t thought of or we simply ignore. This muddying of the waters will only get worse as we circle the drain of collapse.
In this article I’ll give some examples and some tools to drill down into the quagmire, that the corporations are deliberately constructing. This is a continuation of the strategy the Tobacco Industry used to fool us last century. That strategy killed hundreds of millions, this new one will kill over eight billion of us. Let’s start with the title article that led to this post, published by The Independent and distributed further by MSN. I’ll quote aspects of the corporate disinformation and add my critique, in bold type, from now on. Current climate path will lead to collapse of life on Earth, say scientists
“Failing to limit the global temperature to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels could trigger tipping points and lead to the collapse of life on Earth, two climate scientists have warned.” Could? there is zero doubt, words like this are injected to create doubt, when there is none. As I’ve pointed out numerous times on this blog, the corporate media and their subservient paid scientists continually move the baseline to bullshit about how much anthropogenic warming we have triggered.Baseline Temperature dishonesty at the Edge of Extinction. Using 1750 as a baseline we are at or around 2c now. Going back in time to include the Iron Age and Bronze ages we are at least 2.29C, hence all the chaos unfolding now, not at some long off date we’ll never get to see. The following data and analysis courtesy of @SamCaranafrom theArctic News Blog: What is pre-industrial? “The Paris Agreement called for aspecial reportby the IPCC on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways. In the report, the IPCC first defines pre-industrial as “the multi-century period prior to the onset of large-scale industrial activity around 1750”. Yet, the IPCC then proceeds to use the period 1850-1900 to “approximate” pre-industrial. This raises the questions, has the IPCC beendownplaying the temperature riseand is this continuing? “ Any corporate media, and worse still alternative media uncritically quoting the IPCC are part of the problem. The above paragraph from my article titled: Using “Pre-Industrial” as a Measure of Anthropogenic Warming was an Omnicidal, Irreversible Mistake.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that current climate policies will leave the Earth between 2.5C and 2.7C hotter by 2100 compared with pre-industrial levels.” I have previously documented the collusion between the corporates and the IPCC which was created by the corporations to protect capitalism from activist scientists like my colleague and dear friend Professor Guy McPherson. It’s Time to Acknowledge the Spectacular Success of the IPCC.
Even the ultra-conservative Dr James E Hansen has admitted that 10C is baked in with existing emissions already in the atmosphere, I note he has tried to back pedal on his original post, no doubt after having copped flak from the corporate owned US Congress. “For example, the present greenhouse gas forcing is 70% of the forcing that made Earth’s temperature in the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum at least +13°C relative to preindustrial temperature.“Global warming in the Pipeline 19 May 2023 James Hansen
Digest that for a second and remember there is a long lag between emissions and when their full effects manifest. We have been led to believe that there is ‘only’ a 10-to-20-year lag between emissions and their full impacts being felt. That’s true for most emissions but large pulses, like massive forest fires can take centuries to work their way through the climate system. Not only is the CO2 released back into the atmosphere in a classic feedback loop, but the carbon sinks that these forests represented are gone, forever.
“Our results suggest that as CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, the full warming effect of an emission may not be felt for several decades, if not centuries.”
There has been much debate about the time lag between when emissions are dumped into the atmosphere and when we feel the full effects.
Warming from Methane is to all intents and purposes effectively immediate, hence some of the shocking heat in the Northern Hemisphere.
Carbon on the other hand can take up to centuries to manifest due to being released at scale.
As the Northern Hemisphere’s forest’s burn huge quantities of carbon are released in large, short pulses.
The chaos we are seeing now doesn’t include the last 20 years emissions at least.
It also debunks the Liar Michael E Mann who recently said, for a dumbed down US audience, that “If we stop emissions now warming will stop”.
The Guardian plays a clever role in pretending to cover the unfolding extinction event by always injecting some form of “If we just start now”. I’ve been hearing that nonsense for decades. No corporate media will tell us the whole truth, we only get the edited highlights. ““We are currently losing species at a faster rate than in any of Earth’s past extinction events. It is probable that we are in the first phase of another, more severe mass extinction,” he said. “We cannot predict the tipping point that will send ecosystems into total collapse, but it is an inevitable outcome if we do not reverse biodiversity loss.” “Ecosystem collapse ‘inevitable’ unless wildlife losses reversed.”
“The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is often attacked for being too strident in its warnings about global warming. But a subset of critics charges just the opposite: that the organization is too conservative in its analysis and predictions.”
“The newest criticism of the IPCC is launched by a team that includes James Hansen, possibly the world’s best-known climate scientist. And while his group could be accused of cherry-picking, it picks the most important cherry by confronting a key conclusion of the IPCC: that the world will be more or less okay if people keep total global temperature from climbing more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which can be done by limiting humanity’s cumulative CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels to about 1000 gigatons. That’s the conclusion expressed in the panel’s newest study, the Fifth Assessment Report. (The 3000-page IPCC behemoth won’t be released until next fall, but the preliminary text was leaked nearly a year ago, and the revision process is taking place largely in public.) And the 2-degree temperature goal has been cited in international agreements dating back to the mid-1990s.”
“The reality, though, is worse than the IPCC says, according to a new policy paper by Hansen, the longtime head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and 17 fellow authors. The paper, published today on the website PLOS One, argues that to keep future generations safe from the worst effects of climate change, the world needs to aim for no more than a 1 degree Celsius temperature rise over preindustrial levels. That would require the world to limit total fossil fuel CO2 emissions to about 500 gitatons—and we’ve already put 384 GtC into the atmosphere, according to the authors.”
What looks like, on the face of it, a good article from Popular Mechanics it implies that even 1C is possible and that we still have a “Carbon Budget”, clearly that is nonsense, and we are broke, ie; we have zero carbon budget. Climate Scientists: IPCC Is Wrong—We Need a 1-Degree Limit on Warming
Professor Guy McPherson and I have been crucified for the last decade for pointing out what for us is a clear as day. The overriding issue is the rate of change the planet is going through. “As every ecologist knows, and apparently very few other people, the rate of environmental change is among the most important factors controlling the continued survival of individuals, populations, and species. If the environment occupied by an individual or a species changes, then the individual or the species must change. Evolution by natural selection is typically a relatively slow process, requiring at least one generation and usually many generations to ensure adaptation. For species such as Homo sapiens, our ability to procreate comes at a relatively late age, thereby guaranteeing a minimum of a few decades for adaptation to occur.”
Science Snippets: On the Rate of Environmental Change
The Convergence of the Next El Niño–Southern Oscillation & the Arctic Sea Ice Minimum
To get the most from this article drill down into the embedded links. When reading corporate media, remember they have share prices to maintain, keeping you and your children in the dark is a cynical economic decision. Feel free to add your own comments below and subscribe to the blog to join the crew on this final voyage. Brace for imminent impact.
“I have reported on the dire impacts of global peak oil at guymcpherson.com for many years. My reports from August 2007 onward indicate the potential for peak oil to terminate industrial civilization. Information I discovered a few years later indicates that stopping or even slowing industrial activity will cause our extinction. Our extinction could result from a reduction in aerosol masking or the meltdown of some of the world’s nuclear facilities. The latter phenomenon would cause stratospheric ozone to be stripped away, thereby causing extremely rapid planetary heating. Again, I have reported these findings previously in this space. Responses to my freely available work, rooted in evidence, have included denial, non-evidentiary argumentation, and a coordinated defamation campaign that effectively removed me from public service. But enough about me.”
“A reduction in aerosol masking has caused regional increases in temperature that have led to regional increases in precipitation, as indicated by peer-reviewed research I have shared in this space. Fortunately, these impacts have not yet gone global. Rather, they have remained regional in scope, beginning in the area around Wuhan, China, where the pandemic broke out. Regional increases in temperature and subsequent increases in precipitation followed the pandemic to India, Europe, and the northeastern United States.” All of the analysis above is via Professor Guy McPherson’s Substack post Titled: Science Snippets: Global Peak Oil Remains an Existential Threat
Science Snippets: Global Peak Oil Remains an Existential Threat
Colleagues and I in the dynamic group Peak Oil have previously debated this subject. Join us for the latest developments as we circle the drain of Peak Oil triggered collapse.
Readers of this blog know that I concentrate on the climate and extinction crises and the contemporaneous issue of the re-rise of fascism and unfolding collapse. Collapse isn’t an event, it’s a process, a process that is clearly underway. Aotearoa New Zealand has just closed it’s one and only oil refinery, yes, you read that right! I filled out an Official Information Act submission to find out what are NZ’s strategic reserves. The government department responsible refused to divulge what we have in reserve! We are led by Donkeys. Not having a refinery means we’d suffer societal collapse in a matter of weeks of a blockade of our territorial waters being enforced, by whoever, “Friend or Foe”. Remember France was supposedly our ally when they blew up the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior murdering Fernando Pereira in downtown Tamaki Makaurau. The Insanity of Aotearoa New Zealand Closing it’s One and Only Oil Refinery
Kevin Hester is currently living on Rakino Island, a small island in the Hauraki Gulf near Auckland, New Zealand, monitoring the unravelling of the biosphere and volunteering at the Rakino Island Nursery is currently developing a proposal to create a marine reserve near by. The Island has no grid tied electricity or reticulated water. I catch my own water from the roof and generate my electricity from the ample solar radiation on the island.
My Submission to the Ministry of the Environment
Kevin Hester, Dropping Anchor in an Exponential World
Kevin Hester 