This July 2nd, 2019 edition — episode 128 of Nature Bats Last features a conversation with Rory Varrato, who invited Professor Guy McPherson to testify before the New York City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection. A day after Guy and others testified, New York City declared a climate emergency. Rory Varrato is a founding member of Extinction Rebellion New York City. He is also a Ph.D. student and research assistant in the Philosophy and Education Program at Columbia University. There’s more: He is also Graduate Coordinator for the Freedom and Citizenship Program in the Center for American Studies at Columbia University. And there’s even more: Rory is also Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University.
Rory, welcome to Nature Bats Last on the Progressive Radio Network.
Todays episode is embedded here:
Co-host Kevin Hester mentioned the luncacy of relying on nuclear energy in a time of abrupt climate change and the fact that this week nuclear plants were facing closure as a heatwave grips Europe. So much for nuclear being a ‘solution’ to burning hyrdo carbons. The nuclear lunatics see climate change as an ‘Business Opportunity’; French NPPs Face Threat of Shutdown as Water to Cool Nuclear Reactors Sizzles Due to Heat Wave
We discussed a recent presentation by Dr James Hansen with him lauding the merits of nuclear energy in a time of abrupt climate change, the nuclear insanity know’s no limit and the fact that he thinks a carbon tax will make a difference at this very late stage is patently nonsense and a non starter. Professor McPherson critiques Hansen’s position and points out that he isn’t qualified to comment on the evolutionary consequences of non-linear warming. The presentation is embedded here: James Hansen, Ph.D. – The Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity – Offstage
I discussed the following quote’s first from Jem Bendell :“Getting busy with action can be a distraction from full acceptance of our predicament, where our predicament is that we don’t know. We don’t know what the best things to do are anymore and we don’t know whether what we do with the best intentions will work.” The source of the quote and a wonderful interview with Jem is embedded here;
Then I quoted Ruppert Read: “If people are feeling paralysed right now, I think it is probably because they are stuck between false hopes. On the one hand, there is the delusive lure of optimism, the hope that there will be a techno-fix that will defuse the climate emergency while life more or less goes on as usual. This is, I believe, in a desperately-dangerous way keeping us from facing up to climate reality.”‘Civilisation is finished’
That’s a rap folks, good luck everyone,time is extremely short.
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The children are rebelling, the ice is melting, the weather is already chaotic and the feedback loops are multiplicative. How do we navigate the perfect storm when we know that our only habitable spaceship is hurtling into the abyss at the early stages of non-linear, chaotic, runaway warming.
As an offshore, blue water ocean sailor, I have always had at the back of my mind the possibility of having to declare a ‘Mayday’ and the order to abandon ship. This emergency is different as there are no lifeboats and there are no emergency services coming to the rescue. Soon there will be no internet to post pictures of the unfolding chaos or to search how to grow something to eat as habitat and the biosphere immolates.
I had the honour of hospicing my darling mother as she slipped away, they were the most honest 6 weeks of our life together. I had another experience recently where I looked after Sandra Wihongi, one of my tribes members on Rakino Island as she departed this mortal plane. She joked that she would come back as a Hawk and keep an eye on me! I see hawks daily!
Done right hospice can be a wonderful experience. Let’s try and do it well on a planetary level.
As I write this the “Empire of Chaos” as Pepe Escobar calls the USA appears on the brink of attacking Iran. Pepe writes that the Iran could crash the global economy by closing the straights of Hormuz. Were that to happen we could well see the loss of Global Dimming which could double the level of anthropogenic warming in a matter of weeks. We really are a day to day, week to week proposition. That’s the brink militarism has brought us too.
Whilst no one will get out alive, despite what the likes of the charlatan Elon Musk would like you billionaires to believe, there are many things we can do as we watch the chaos unfold. Failing to prepare is the same as preparing to fail.
Knowledge of and acceptance of our predicament can be a lonely, isolating place to be, in many respects it’s the first challenge we need to face. First and foremost it’s imperative to find like minded souls to share our grief with. There has never in the history of our species been a more important time to form a ‘Tribe’ and to cut the dead wood free.
One of the world leaders in triggering this debate recently has been Jem Bendell with his seminal paper that no referee journal was prepared to publish because the ramifications were and are so dire.
“I am releasing this paper immediately, directly, because I can’t wait any longer in exploring how to learn the implications of the social collapse we now face,” explained the author Dr Bendell, a full Professor of Sustainability Leadership.” Check out his paper: Deep Adaption here:
Jem has set up a Facebook Group for just this purpose to help us find like minded people who are having the conversation few are prepared to have. “Getting busy with action can be a distraction from full acceptance of our predicament”.
Check out Positive Deep Adaption
Quite possibly our greatest challenge will be managing our own grief, that of our loved ones and the children and youth in our lives, next come our neighbours and then complete strangers. Any day now we will have 1 billion very, very angry young people on the planet. Start thinking now about what you intend telling them. I shall say “I tried and failed”.
My personal “Antidote to despair” has been to volunteer at the not for profit Rakino Island Nursery where we propagate native trees for a rewilding program. For me it represents my final act of rebellion in a life of rebellion.
“We do not see ecological grief as submitting to despair, and neither does it justify ‘switching off’ from the many environmental problems that confront humanity. Instead, we find great hope in the responses ecological grief is likely to invoke. Just as grief over the loss of a loved person puts into perspective what matters in our lives, collective experiences of ecological grief may coalesce into a strengthened sense of love and commitment to the places, ecosystems and species that inspire, nurture and sustain us. There is much grief work to be done, and much of it will be hard. However, being open to the pain of ecological loss may be what is needed to prevent such losses from occurring in the first place.“Hope and mourning in the Anthropocene: Understanding ecological grief.
“How do we live with the fact that we are destroying our world? What do we make of the loss of glaciers, the melting Arctic, island nations swamped by the sea, widening deserts, and drying farmlands?”
“Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy.” The Greatest Danger by Joanna Macy
Recently I had the pleasure of hearing and meeting Stephen Jenkinson sometimes known as “The Grief Walker”. Stephen was a guest on Nature Bats Last and was interviewed on the Peak Prosperity podcast.
My good friend and staff reporter at Truthout.org Dahr Jamail was recently interviewed on Radio Ecoshock where he discussed his latest book “The End of Ice”and navigating hospice.
The episode is embedded here
Professor Guy McPherson and I will continue to chronicle the great unraveling until the curtain falls on Industrial Civilisation which because of the aerosol masking effect and the melt down of 450 nuclear plants and their attendant 1300 spent fuel pool fires is a mass extinction event for the planet.
There have been five previous mass extinction events on this planet. We have the dubious honour of watching the sixth unravel live and direct. If we were coal miners we’d be neck deep in dead canaries.
Good luck everyone,make the most of every day, love with passion as “At the edge of extinction, only love remains.” GMP.
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality” Ernesto Che Guevara.
To get the most from this article click on the embedded links, this really is the perfect storm.
The June 2019 episode of Nature Bats Last on the Progressive Radio Network featured co-hosts Professor Guy McPherson and Kevin Hester interviewing Meteorologist Nick Humphrey. The episode is embedded here:
Some background on Nick Humphrey:
Nick was recently interviewed on Radio Ecoshock in an episode titled Harsh News from the Weatherman.
Another excellent interview with Nick via Environmental Coffee House; I recomend subscribing to these two excellent channels.
“This is the slowest corn planting in recorded history, besting the 1995 record of 50% planted for this week.”
The unfolding collapse of the industrial food production in the US, Argentina, Europe and Australia.
Similar issues are unfolding in Mozambique where cyclone Idai has devestated croplands and destroyed the city of Beira where I worked on a development project in 1991. Most of these people were poverty stricken before Idai blasted and then washed everything they had away.
The great unraveling is showing signs of the non-linear stage of the predicament we find ourselves in. More than Half of US Corn Unplanted
Here’s Nick’s latest post about the methane threat from his Patreon Page; The Latest on the Threat for Abrupt Methane Release from the East Siberian Sea
I can honestly say this is one of my favourite interviews on Nature Bats Last. The honesty and frankness of Nick Humphrey is inspirational. I predict he will go on to be a world leader in chronicling the unraveling of the biosphere.
“One of the greatest shortcomings of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function” Albert Bartlett.
It’s critically important to understand the fact that we are in the non-linear stage of the unraveling, change will happen with a rapidity that will make previous predictions meaningless. Dr Michael Mann et al’s “Hockey Stick Theory” writ large, even though he can no longer envisage it.
If we were coal miners we would be neck deep in dead canaries. Good luck everyone, soon the living will envy the dead.
In the March episode of Nature Bats Last on PRN.FM co-hosts McPherson and Hester interview the legendary, Professor Paul Ehrlich. The episode is embedded here Dr Ehrlich is the Bing Professor of Population Studies in the Department of Biology of Stanford University and president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology . He is a renowned biologist and ecologist best known for his warnings about the consequences of human population growth.
Wediscussed Paul Ehrlich and Sandra Kahn’s recent book JAWS, you can find more information on this important book here:
Further information and a brilliant documentary on the ‘Aerosol Masking Effect’ or Global Dimming is embedded here
Dahr Jamail, staff reporter at Truthout.org and renowned Martha Geldhorn award winning journalist published his latest book “The End of Ice” on January the 15th 2019.
There are a few audio glitches on Dahr’s microphone but they don’t persist. We joked after that they were reflective of industrial civilisation teetering on the brink of collapse;
Mentioned in the interview was a new project of collaboration between Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil
We further discussed the recent work of Jem Bendell and his paper on “Deep Adaption” and Rupert Read’s recent presentation filmed at Churchill College, 7 November 2018.
“A research paper concluding that climate-induced collapse is now inevitable, was recently rejected by anonymous reviewers of an academic journal.”
“It has been released directly by the Professor who wrote it, to promote discussion of the necessary deep adaptation to climate chaos.”
Dahr will be touring Australia in June and Aotearoa N.Z. in July, details will be posted on this blog as presentations are organised, subscribe to the blog for updates on the tour and the great unraveling generally. Contact me should you wish to be involved in anyway in both the Aotearoa NZ tour or the June tour in Australia
Good luck everyone, we are so going to need it. This photo was taken by Kevin Hester when he and Dahr dived “The Poor Knights marine reserve” doing research for “The End of Ice”.
In the interview below clinical psychologist Peter Miller interviews Professor Guy McPherson and Kevin Hester about the psychological ramifications of reporting on and living through the unraveling of the biosphere as the sixth great extinction gains momentum in a non-linear fashion.
Below is the Joanna Macy quote I read out and the embedded link to her excellent essay “The Greatest Danger”.
“Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy.” The Greatest Danger; Joanna Macy
Additionally I mentioned the seminal work recently released by both Jem Bendell and Rupert Read which I have covered previously on this blog here;
Jem Bendell on Deep Adaptation, Climate Change and Societal Collapse;
The BBC “Global Dimming” documentary we mentioned is embedded in a previous blog post on this website here;
Professor McPherson and I will be interviewing Truthout.org staff reporter Dahr Jamail on his latest book “The End of Ice” in this months episode of Nature Bats Last on the Progressive Radio Network at 3pm EST on the 5th of April, 9.00 am on the 6th Kiwi time, the episode will be up loaded to the Nature Bats Last archive a few hours after the show has been broadcast.
Good luck everybody, we sure are going to need it.
In most Western cultures there is a tradition of saying “Happy New Year” as one year draws to a close and another beckons. As we stumble relentlessly into another anthropogenically warmed January, in a time of abrupt climate change, there will never be another “Happy New Year” for the biosphere or any of the awake sapiens or other earthlings.
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Aldo Leopold.
“Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The suppression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response, contributes to the numbing of the psyche. Expressions of anguish or outrage are muted, deadened as if a nerve had been cut. This refusal to feel impoverishes our emotional and sensory life. Flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstatic. We create diversions for ourselves as individuals and as nations, in the fights we pick, the aims we pursue, and the stuff we buy.” The Greatest Danger; Joanna Macy
Anyone paying attention can see that both the biosphere and the global economy are teetering on the brink as the early stages of collapse are unfolding. Many of us nursing our ecological wounds wouldn’t normally lament the collapse of industrial civilisation but understanding the implications of the loss of “Global Dimming” and the attendant 1 to 1.5C temperature spike from masked warming and then the melt down of the worlds 450 nuclear power stations and their 1300 spent fuel pool fires makes the prospect of the collapse of the capitalist cancer that is killing the living planet a terminal sentence for the biosphere. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Soon the living will envy the dead.
On December 28th on this blog I published an article titled “This Civilisation is Finished. Rupert Reid, Paul Ehrlich and Jem Bendell.
Embedded are You Tube presentations from Rupert Reid and Paul Ehrlich and Jem Bendell’s seminal paper all predicting that relatively soon we will see the collapse of industrial civilisation. Paul Ehrlich’s interview in The Guardian begins “A shattering collapse of civilisation is a “near certainty” in the next few decades due to humanity’s continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich.”
I believe Paul Ehrlich, who I interviewed previously on my and Professor Guy McPhersons radio show Nature Bats Last is being overly cautious after being heavily attacked over some of his predictions in his 1968 book “The Population Bomb”not coming to pass.
What Paul and Anne Ehrlich couldn’t have known in 1968 was the ‘Green Revolution’ fueled by our crack like addiction to fossil fuels would allow the already balooning of the human population to escalate dramatically. This aspect of overshoot has compromised the natural world enormously.
In his seminal book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” Joseph Tainter points out that the more complex a society becomes the more vulnerable to collapse it is. There has never been a civilisation in history remotely as complex as this one. There in lies the mortal danger we face as the lunatics juggling the global economy create ever more debt out of no where and continue to juggle ‘Chickens and Chainsaws’
In 2008 the global economy teetered on the brink of collapse due to unsupportable mountains of debt, Lehman Brothers bank collapsed and threatened to bring down the entire global economic system and the ‘solution’ the gangsters came up with was more debt. The global economy has all the hall marks of a classic ponzi scheme.
Desperate times call for desperate people to literally try anything to avoid the worst scenarios unfolding. When faced with the economic collapse of an empire one of the ‘go to’ options is war.
António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, told global leaders this week that “The world has less than two years to avoid “runaway climate change.” WTF does anyone think can or will be done in 2019 to avoid runaway climate change when we are already in it? I note that the UN said in 1989 that we had 10 years to avoid dangerous climate change. How can we have 1 year left 30 years after having only 10?
We are being lied to at the edge of extinction, why would we be surprised?
Right on Christmas 2018 the US “Plunge Protection Team” was mobilised to discuss financial markets amid a rout on Wall Street. What can we expect them to come up with between canapes, champagne, cocaine and hookers and in Donald Trumps case cheeseburgers?
All we can be certain about is that we teeter on the brink of a collapse that can and will mark the extinction of most if not all complex life on this fragile planet.
I was in Berlin one week before the Berlin Wall came down which triggered the collapse of the East German state and shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was not one hint of the coming collapse on the streets of East or West Berlin yet a week later the game was effectively over for the Eastern Block of nations. This collapse being much wider spread will be infinitely faster and terminal, not just for nation states but for the entire biosphere.
Wishing you all the best for the coming new year with some gallows humour from the brilliant Katie Goodman and her sisters;
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
This photo was taken by Kevin Hester when he and Dahr dived “The Poor Knights marine reserve” doing research for “The End of Ice”.
