Jeff Gibbs, the director of Planet of The Humans was the guest on the July episode of Nature Bats Last. The episode is embedded here:
“Statement from Director Jeff Gibbs On The Censorship Campaign Against “Planet of the Humans”
May 26, 2020
“This attempt to take down my film and prevent the public from seeing it is a blatant act of censorship by political critics of my movie. It is an attempted misuse of copyright law to shutdown a film that has opened a serious conversation about how parts of the environmental movement have gotten into bed with Wall Street and so-called “green capitalists.” There is absolutely no copyright violation in my film. This is just another attempt by the film’s opponents to subvert my right to free speech.”
“Opponents of my film, who do not like it’s critique of the failures of the environmental movement, have worked for weeks to have my film taken down and to block me from appearing on TV and on livestream. Their efforts to subvert free speech have failed, with nearly eight and a half million people already viewing the film on YouTube. These Trumpian tactics are shameful, and their aim to stifle free speech and prevent people from grappling with the uncomfortable truths exposed in this film is deeply disturbing.”
“PEN America, which was founded in 1922 and fights for the free speech of artists in the U.S. and around the world, came out strongly and denounced the initial attempt to censor this film, and we hope all champions of free expression condemn this act of censorship. We are working with YouTube to resolve this issue and have the film back up as soon as possible.”
I have been sceptical of Bill McKibben since I attended and spoke on a panel at a climate change conference at Victoria University Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2006. McKibben was the keynote speaker who pretended to cry when talking about AGW. I was with a group of indigenous speakers from the South Pacific Islands, Kiribati and the Solomon Islands. They agreed with me that he lacked credibility.
I will also note that 350 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere was never safe. The target set and promulgated by 350.org was never safe, the 1.5C / 2C guardrail set by the IPCC was patently never safe.
The next episode of NBL will feature a conversation with Dr. Sid Smith, Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Hampden-Sydney College and General Secretary of the Green Party of Virginia. We will be discussing his presentation titled: How to Enjoy the End of the World.
The next episode will broadcast live on Tuesday afternoon at 3pm EST, the 4th of August in the United States. If you miss the broadcast, you can find shows in the archives at PRN.fm, the podbean, or at Stitcher, and feel free to rate us on iTunes.
“Dr. Bradshaw is the Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology at Flinders University, where he directs the Global Ecology Laboratory and is also Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. He heads the Flinders Modelling Node of the latter organization. Professor Bradshaw has published some 300 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 11 book chapters and 3 books. His book titles include The Effective Scientist, published by Cambridge University Press and, from Chicago University Press and co-authored by occasional guest on this show Professor Paul Ehrlich, Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie. In total, his work has been cited more than 20,000 times. Bradshaw is co-Head of the Ecology Section of the Faculty of 1000 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Australia. He was awarded the 2017 Verco Medal from the Royal Society of South Australia, a 2017 Rockefeller Foundation ‘Bellagio’ Writer’s Fellowship, the 2010 Australian Ecology Research Award from the Ecological Society of Australia, the 2010 Scopus Young Researcher of the Year, the 2009 HG Andrewartha Medal, and a 2008 Young Tall Poppy Science Award. He is regularly featured in Australian and international media for his research. The Professor’s blog has been visited more than 2.3 million times.” Quoting Professor Guy McPherson
Links to Professor Bradshaw’s published works are embedded here, his personal blog with a subscription option is Conservation Bytes
“More than 99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct”. See the short presentation at the top of the Professor Bradshaw’s blog for more on that diamond of information and lets get over our human hubris and invincibility.
We have previously discussed on the show Professor Bradshaw’s work with Professor Paul Ehlich. That episode is embedded in the following link: Professor Paul Ehrlich returns to Nature Bats Last
Until recently I assumed that at least Tardigrades would get through the extinction bottleneck. That has recently be called into question as we discussed on the show and below;
“Tardigrades are tough little critters. When conditions get nasty, they can dry out, reconfigure their bodies and enter suspended animation – called dessication – for years. You can throw virtually anything at them: frozen temperatures, zero oxygen, high pressures, the vacuum of space, cosmic radiation, and even being boiled.”
In the following embedded Flinders University presentation Professor Bradshaw jokes that his colleagues describe him as Dr or Professor Doom. This subtle form of gas lighting has stoked scientific reticence as the extinction event accelerates, discouraging the less courageous scientists from telling you what they really think is unfolding. Professor Guy McPherson and I admire Professor Bradshaw’s courage, professionalism and scientific integrity. BRAVE | There’s No Plan(et) B – What you can do about Earth’s extinction emergency.
Professor Bradshaw and I discussed the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Embedded below is the trailer to a new documentary titled “Murder On The Reef”
All my time at sea over 16 ‘blue water’ passages and hundreds of races taught me the importance of the “Precautionary Principal”. The prudent skipper needs a wide margin of error. Caution and prudence seems to have been cast to the wind as the dominant culture grinds the living planet into dust.
Next months guest will be Jeff Gibbs, director of “Planet of the Humans” recently censored off You Tube for daring to question the renewables sector.
“John Doyle is a long time EU staffer stationed in Brussels. Stuart Scott was asked to make a ‘reality-check’ presentation to UN aid agencies with responsibility ( for) climate change in May 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland. Here is John’s ‘catastrophe-check’ to UN aid agencies. Diplomacy is the art and science of posturing, distortion and fabrication about underlying false and ideological mental positions about reality. We are operating under a global political network of self-delusional agencies and individuals who seem to believe that if they just keep repeating a false narrative about Reality it will become true and real.”
In the above presentation John Doyle mentioned the imminent threat of European cities facing “Wet Bulb Temperatures”, I have covered that issue previously here:
Additionally it was mentioned that we could lose the Arctic Sea Ice later this year! The consequences of that are described in the following embedded link; Cascading Consequences of the Loss of Arctic Sea Ice
“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.”
Our former guest on Nature Bats Last on PRN.FM Robert Hunziker has recently published the following on Counterpunch: “Earth at 10°C above pre-industrial is unimaginable. It’s a deadly horrifying thought, but as shall be explained herein, it should not be dismissed out of hand.”
“The following story might be labeled as reckless, and it might be criticized as a fearmongering piece of journalism and probably will be. Nevertheless, “10C Above Baseline” explores a dystopian world envisioned by John Doyle, Sustainable Development Policy Coordinator of the European Commission in Brussels.” 10C Above Baseline
Corroborating John Doyle’s analysis is the following post from Sam Carana’s Arctic News Blog:
“How much could temperatures rise? As the image shows, a rise of more than 10°C (18°F) could take place, resulting in mass extinction of many species, including humans.”
“How fast could such a temperature rise eventuate? As above image also shows, such a rise could take place within a few years. The polynomial trend is based on NASA January 2012-February 2017 anomalies from 1951-1980, adjusted by +0.59°C to cater for the rise from 1750 to 1951-1980. The trend points at a 3°C rise in the course of 2018, which would be devastating. Moreover, the rise doesn’t stop there and the trend points at a 10°C rise as early as the year 2021.“Abrupt Warming – How Much And How Fast?
Don’t expect the psychopaths at the helm of our sinking, burning ship to stand idly bye as the planet incinerates. I expect to see a false flag attack on Russia or China by the empire of chaos creating a nuclear winter. If you think that’s an insane suggestion have a close look at the lunatics in power in Britain and Washington. The Inevitability of Nuclear War and Subsequent Nuclear Winter
Time is very short, seize the moment.
To understand the true severity of our predicament it is imperative to connect as many disparate, peer reviewed analysis, as are available and to then apply the precautionary principal. Below is a synthesis of peer reviewed papers and some audio and video explanations of them.
Abstract:
“Climate change and human activity are dooming species at an unprecedented rate via a plethora of direct and indirect, often synergic, mechanisms. Among these, primary extinctions driven by environmental change could be just the tip of an enormous extinction iceberg. As our understanding of the importance of ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem identity advances, it is becoming clearer how the disappearance of consumers following the depletion of their resources — a process known as ‘co-extinction’ — is more likely the major driver of biodiversity loss. Although the general relevance of co-extinctions is supported by a sound and robust theoretical background, the challenges in obtaining empirical information about ongoing (and past) co-extinction events complicate the assessment of their relative contributions to the rapid decline of species diversity even in well-known systems, let alone at the global scale. By subjecting a large set of virtual Earths to different trajectories of extreme environmental change (global heating and cooling), and by tracking species loss up to the complete annihilation of all life either accounting or not for co-extinction processes, we show how ecological dependencies amplify the direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of planetary diversity by up to ten times”.“Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change”
One of the co-authors of the above peer reviewed article Professor Corey Bradshaw was interviewed on Radio Ecoshock. That interview is embedded here: The Rules of Extinction
“It gets unimaginably worse by the day, of course. Recent information from the peer-reviewed journal literature finally caught up to me in concluding the Sixth Mass Extinction could annihilate all life on Earth. A paper in Scientific Reports draws this conclusion based upon the rate of environmental change, consistent with my own conclusions. More than a decade after I began pointing out in this space the importance of interactions between organisms, particularly the relatively unknown yet important microbes, microbial life is deemed important in a synthetic paper in the 18 June 2019 issue of Nature Reviews Microbiology: “[Microbes] support the existence of all higher lifeforms and are critically important in regulating climate change.” Five-and-a-half years after I described the horrors of interacting factors, a paper in the 21 December 2018 issue of Science concludes such interactions are tremendously important.” “Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored”.
Below is a comprehensive overview of our predicament from my co-host on Nature Bats Last on the Progressive Radio Network.
Professor McPherson’s latest peer reviewed paper is embedded here:
“The new study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows that even with extremely conservative estimates, species are disappearing up to about 100 times faster than the normal rate between mass extinctions, known as the background rate.”
“Paul Ehrlich and others use highly conservative estimates to prove that species are disappearing faster than at any time since the dinosaurs’ demise.” Stanford researcher declares that the sixth mass extinction is here:
Our predicament can only be worse than we know and our tenure on this planet less certain than even the most pessimistic of us surmise. The Black Swan‘s are circling, the likely hood of another threat to this set of living arrangements arriving before the current threat abates is a certainty and then rinse and repeat.
“A catastrophic loss in biodiversity, reckless destruction of wildland and warming temperatures have allowed disease to explode. Ignoring the connection between climate change and pandemics would be “dangerous delusion,” one scientist said.” “How Climate Change Is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease”
These literally are the “Good Old Days”.
The May 2020 episode of Nature Bats Last on the Progressive Radio Network featured a discussion with Kirkpatrick Sale about what we believe to be the unfolding collapse of industrial civilisation and his latest book on the subject titled “The Collapse of 2020”.
The episode is embedded here:
Kirkpatrick Sale has a Facebook page where people can follow his work on social media. The page is embedded here:
Kirkpatrick has kindly agreed to come back on the show towards the end of the year assuming this set of living arrangements is still hanging together and that’s a big ‘if’, considering how precarious the situation is today and we will have witnessed another Arctic Sea Ice melt season by then. More information on the cascading effects of the loss of sea ice can be accessed here; Cascading Consequences of the Loss of Arctic Sea Ice.
Feel free to subscribe to this blog and leave a question for Kirkpatrick in the comments section below. I will endeavour to address them on our subsequent interview, should fate allow it to proceed.
“The Collapse of 2020” can be purchased here
The April episode of Nature Bats Last featured an interview with Paul Gunter from Beyond Nuclear. The show is embedded here:
I asked Paul about what I believe was the murder of nuclear whistle blower Karen Silkwood. Paul reiterated my contention that she was murdered by agents connected to the nuclear industry. The police were obviously colluding with the murderers by turning a ‘blind eye’ to the disappearance of her evidence folder that she had with her enroute to a meeting with a journalist from The New York Times. The Killing of Karen Silkwood: The Story Behind the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Case
“Challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. nuclear industry has asked the Trump administration to ensure nuclear workers, suppliers, and vendors will have access to nuclear plants and personal protective equipment (PPE) during the 2020 spring and fall refueling outage seasons and beyond.” COVID-19 Threatens Outages Scheduled at 97% of U.S. Nuclear Sites in 2020
“Fires are common inside the “Zone of Alienation”, a circle with a 30-kilometre radius that surrounds the old nuclear plant and is fenced in barbed wire.
But the current blazes are larger than normal and are stirring up radiation as they burn grass and forests.
Winds could spread fires to remnants of the nuclear plant and authorities are trying to protect the critical infrastructure in the exclusion zone: Radiation levels rise as fires burn near Chernobyl’s former nuclear power plant
Many thanks to the team at PRN.FM who still managed to record the show remotely from the studio due to the lockdown. It’s taken a long time for it to have been uploaded to the archive which reminds me how tenuous our predicament has become. Imagine being banned off the streets in total lockdown and no internet. That time is coming, sooner or later. Think about it.
Do you seriously fucking think we will just ‘bounce back’ from this situation we all find ourselves in?
Forget it. It’s delusional to expect we’ll recover from this ‘event’. Paradigm shifts are like tipping points in the climate system. You can only see them in the rear view mirror and most of them are irreversible.
There was a strong school of thought that we were facing the early stages of collapse before this “Black Swan” appeared. Last September we interviewed French rocket scientist and systems thinker Arthur Keller on his conclusion and wonderful You Tube presentation “Collapse, The Only Realistic Scenario” The collapse Arthur foresaw is unfolding as we speak and dutifully ‘self-isolate’.
I’ve just entered my 6th decade on this planet. What we are witnessing is unprecedented in all human history. Never before in history have the emperors told the serfs to “stay home and we’ll pay you.”
No one. Absolutely no one is in control and no one has ever been here before. Think of the mediocrity we have ‘leading us’ as this predicament unfolds. If you think Boris and Donald are going to lead us out of this mess you have rocks in your head.
I was three years old when a magic bullet entered the back of President Kennedys head and blew his brains out in the same direction the bullet entered ! Miraculous it was, apparently. Murder Most Foul
The last vestiges of fake democracy in that country were finally extinguished with that ‘magic bullet’ and to this day the dominant culture has instilled such an extreme version of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ in people ensuring that it is ‘normal’ to accept the impossible and you’re a conspiracy theorist to point out the bleedingly obvious deception. Go along with the charade if you wish but I won’t play that game. No one can convince me that infinite growth on a finite planet is sustainable. Our chickens have come home to roost. Lock, stock and two smoking barrels.
As I grew up, I heard my parents denouncing the Vietnam war, I’ve seen war myself in Mozambique and the occupied six counties of Ireland. I know what it smells like. I’ve seen the destruction and the psychological damage done to those communities. Remember, “No soldier returns from war uninjured”.
During my entire lifetime, imperialist capitalism has been raping and pillaging the planet, wiping out indigenous cultures every where it goes and grinding the natural world into dust. Of course it has a fucking end point. The unsustainable can’t be sustained forever. Everywhere has been raped and plundered. There are no far off undiscovered lands left to be exploited. All the low hanging fruit has been plucked, we’re circling the drain. This is what the end game looks like.
Organised, psychopathic, Armani clad gangsters have been gaming the system all my life and now they have lost control like all junkies eventually do.
Why the fuck are you all acting surprised?
Never before have I seen governments telling their people to “stay home and we’ll post you a cheque.” All of a sudden they have magical money, like the bullet we discussed earlier, that they have just plucked from the sky and they are raining it down on the banksters in the trillions and on the ‘self-isolated’ in the thousands. Notice a recurring theme here? Money for nothing and the chicks for free.Cognitive dissonance reins supreme.
When governments all around the world are giving away money you know that they have lost total control. Becareful, you could be killed by helicopter money.
Let’s have a think about what this ‘timely’ virus has achieved.
Contemporaneous with the outbreak of the virus the global economy was on life support. The US Fed’ has been pumping trillions of brand new dollars into the system to try and keep the ponzi scheme going and it staggered along until the game changing ‘Self Isolation’ took effect. Never before has a populace been so effectively corralled. The protests in France extinguished overnight. Protests around the world wiped out completely as Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan continue to be bombed into the dark ages as the military industrial complex bank the contemporaneous profits as the weapons are used and orders placed for more. Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia and China all sanctioned for not kowtowing to the “Empire of Chaos”.
The independent states listed above have been moving to de-dollarize their economies. They started to trade oil in anything but the greenback. Before this ‘event’ the dollar was teetering on the brink of collapse and then out of the blue, a distraction.
The monsters murdered Muammar Gadaffi because of his plan to create a gold backed dinah to trade oil in and his unflinching support for the African Union. The next distraction will be war against the independent states, it’s what funds Wall Street.
In his novel “The Sun Also Rises” Hemingway describes how the end comes about when you lose everything. One character asks;”How did it happen”, the other responds “Gradually and then suddenly”. Ring any fucking bells?
I’ve been closely following the progression of the virus around the planet and thanks to Albert Bartlett I am aware of the danger of the exponential function. This virus will probably eventually infect us all as the rate of infections is now exponential and governmental responses have always been too little, too late ensuring it’s spread. Remember it’s always the economy first, the inhabitants last.
Health systems worldwide are collapsing at the beginning of the catastrophe which has many months or years to run. Our complex system of ‘On demand’ supply networks depend on Business As Usual to maintain the flow of everything we take for granted being available and as you may have noticed BAU shut down recently. Already some nations are banning grain and other food exports.
I simply cannot see how Western culture can continue as millions of people start dropping dead around us and the entire human population of the planet are living, eating, drinking and working in fear. This soulless system isn’t designed to survive these dynamics. Nor are the fragile humans caught up in the maelstrom.
I’m not ‘Fearmongering,’ I’m laying out what I see before me without the manic attachment to sugar coating our predicament that this culture has incubated. Unsupported ‘positivity’ is delusion, I’m more inclined to hope for the best and plan for the worst.
To quote Joanna Macy from her 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.”
Convert whatever resources you have into food asap. There is zero guarantee that this set of living arrangements will hold together much longer considering the threats we know it is under with the next ‘Black Swan’ hovering in the wings about to appear.
If this event hasn’t already tipped us over, either the next one or the one after will. They will continue to appear thick and fast.
On that note, I’ll get back to early stage runaway abrupt climate change. Remember that other, non-linear existential threat we face?
My co-host on Nature Bats Last and I have been drawing attention to the loss of the Aerosol Masking Effect from the shut downs happening around the planet. Professor McPherson sums up that aspect of the predicament below;
Good luck everyone, the predicament can only be worse than we know.
Michael Dowd and I recorded this interview in September 2019 in his “Post Doom’ series. It’s just been uploaded to You Tube as part of a series with the link to the rest embedded below.
We discussed how we are trying to navigate through this fast unfolding paradigm and how we manage our grief.
Part of my grief management system is to volunteer at the Rakino Island Nursery. It’s working well for me and the bird life on Rakino Island as mentioned in the interview.
My interview is one in a series conducted by Michael Dowd with many interesting participants. The entire series can be found here;
We discussed my collaboration with Dahr Jamail and our research dive at the Poor Knights Marine Reserve for his latest book titled “The End of Ice”. I’ve added a few photo’s below taken on that dive;
Before the Corona virus appeared, the economic system was teetering along like a delusional drunk on a cliff edge. Now a “Black Swan” like no recent other, has been injected into the collapse parthenon. In the video discussion below Professor Guy McPherson, Peter Miller and Kevin Hester discuss the possibility that COVID19 could be the domino to if not trigger collapse, be a catalyst to speeding up our decent into the abyss.
In this recent article from ‘The Atlantic’ is a report titled “The Modern Supply Chain is Snapping”. This supply chain is already ‘Snapping’ when we are in the very early stages of this pandemic.
We discussed the ‘Ponzi Scheme” that is latest Wall St Bailout; “The New York Federal Reserve Bank said it will offer $1 trillion of overnight loans a day through the end of this month to large banks. That is in addition to $1 trillion in 14-day loans it is offering every week.”Federal Reserve to lend additional $1 trillion a day to large banks.
Click on the embedded links for verification of the information discussed, subscribe to the blog for the unvarnished analysis as we circle the drain. The predicament can only be worse than we know.
“Whatever the reason for extinction, it always has to do with an environmental parameter that has changed, costing certain species their competitive advantage. But as extinction shocks reverberate up and down the food chain, nature always finds ingenious ways to recalibrate the system, achieving a new delicate balance each time between predator and prey. Any life form that disrespects this balance, wanting more for itself, eventually meets its match. Invasive species, super-multipliers, even most viruses, all have an achiles heel: their strength is actually their biggest weakness. The more parasitic a species is on an ecosystem, the more dependent it is on it, and the more sensitive it becomes to environmental perturbations. Behind their tough exterior, predators hide a fragile nature. They can become extinct almost as easily as their victims.” Collapse Means Collapse
Former guest on the show Mimi German called in and asked George for his opinion of this article written by Professor Guy McPherson titled: Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored
Photo credit: 6th Mass Extinction woodcut print by Nat Morley (2019)
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
