A common characteristic at the end of an empire is that many of the empires subjects and victims are aware of the coming collapse, whilst the hedonistic ‘Emperors’, rulers, dictators and those closest to them who benefit the most from the exploitation of their subjects, the living planet and all it’s species, seem oblivious or in denial.
The standard response after a civic official or a military commander works up the courage to tell the emperor of the impending chaos and the inability to sustain the unsustainable, is the knee jerk reaction to “Shoot the Messenger”.
The small community on the planet who have come to understand the severity of the multiple crises we are facing and accept our impending extinction, become the latest and soon to be last messengers to be shot. Many of the readers of this blog have “Taken one for the team” due to their commitment to pointing out the extinction elephant in the room. Don’t underestimate the role that you are playing, the youth deserve the truth.
The much vaunted IPCC has come out with their latest fantasy prognosis stating that we have ‘only’ 12 years to avoid irreversible, dangerous climate change.
Explain to me how 29 years after the U.N. said we had only 11 years, we still have 12? One of us is struggling with the maths of extinction. Check out Albert Bartletts presentation on the exponential function below which will go some way to explaining how quickly the unraveling will unfold and why most can’t seem to grasp where we’re at;
“One of the greatest shortcomings of the human race is it’s inability to understand the exponential function” Albert Bartlett.
How is it that just a few scientists like Meyer Hillman, James Lovelock, Malcolm Light, Sam Carana from the Arctic News Blog, Guy McPherson et al are prepared to speak about the unfolding 6th great extinction and that it involves our species as well as the 150 to 200 we exterminate daily?
All the scientists who have been appointed to the IPCC collect substantial salaries and research grants from either governments, corporations or tertiary institutions funded by the very same economic order that is literally grinding the living planet into dust. Only the most courageous and honest are capable of talking about the end of everything when the first thing they will lose is their salaries and research grants.
As a generalisation, another thing they have in common is being middle and upper class. You won’t find many class warriors in the IPCC with a few exceptions from the developing world who are bearing the brunt of the collapse now, not long off in the future.
The IPCC repeats the mantra “If we just start now” or some such nonsense that fails to understand the pathology of capitalism and the military industrial complex. The cognitive dissonance at the edge of extinction is an amazing case study in psychology.
Ok then, why wouldn’t the large NGO’s like the Rockerfeller funded 350.org and Greenpeace tell us the truth?
The two I have mentioned above and many more have been corporatised and employ legions of dedicated climate warriors both paid and unpaid. Maintaining ‘cash flow’ in an NGO requires them to make compromises to appease their funders, often at the expense of their supporters and their scientific knowledge. Remember the days they all warned us about crossing tipping points? We never hear the them mentioning them now that we have over 6 dozen in the rear view mirror!
Recently the Greenpeace UK offices suffered the indignity of being picketed by climate warriors disgusted by GP’s downplaying of the crises. “Time is running out for the planet and Greenpeace just got a massive wakeup call”.
Massive kudos to the amazing activists from Extinction Rebellion who confronted Greenpeace.( @ExtinctionRebellion on Twitter).
In 2016 Professor Guy McPherson and I toured Aotearoa N.Z. for the second time together speaking to the public about the true severity of the crises we face and Guy was interviewed by a local journalist named Rachel Stewart, she seems to have had an epithany since meeting the good professor;
“Hope is useful. It keeps us going, and preserves a measure of mental health. Without it, we suffer enormously. Have I given up hope? Yes, some time ago. Do I feel better for it? In a weird way, I do. It’s a relief of sorts. Not because I don’t need to try any more – I’ll always push for action – but because accepting the blindingly obvious feels more real, and breeds another emotion that will be useful in the days ahead. Bravery; You can go a long way on bravery, courage, heart. It can ensure a clarity of thought, and a willingness to embrace what Buddhists have banged on about for millennia. That is, living in the moment.“Don’t say I didn’t warn you”
My response to the issue of ‘hope’ and the merits of facing the true severity of our predicament is summed up wonderfully by the amazing Joanna Macy in her December 2017 article “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.”
Managing our grief and maintaining our sanity whilst incarcerated in the insane asylum known as industrial civilisation is and will continue to be one of our greatest challenges.
There are a number of courageous artists using their talents to deliver the news that none of us ever wanted to here. I’ll embed a few of them below, be sure to subscribe to these three You Tube channels venturing where few are courageous enough to go.
In no particular order;
How fast could this set of living arrangements disappear? A little known risk we face is that when industrial civilisation collapses we lose the “Global Dimming” or the aerosol masking effect. Almost as much warming as we are experiencing today has been filtered out by the pollution we have ejaculated into the atmosphere blocking out solar radiation from reaching the earths surface. When Industrial civilisation collapses we lose that dimming effect and within about 6 weeks we will have a doubling of the present day warming, this will wipe out crop production almost immediately.
Patrick Farnsworth will be interviewing Truthout reporter and author Dahr Jamail on Last Born in the Wilderness in the next few days and I will be interviewing Dahr on my and Professor McPhersons radio show Natur Bats Last in January when his latest book “The End of Ice” is published on January 15th . Dahr will be touring Aotearoa N.Z. with me speaking about the book and the journey writing it in July 2019 assuming this set of living arrangements and still staggering along.
I’d also recomend following Patrick Farnsworth’s blog and Facade Book page “Last Born in the Wilderness”
Soon the living will envy the dead, get living while you still can and refrain from dumping on the last generation of youth the burden of trying to fix the unfixable. Doing so is both cruel and immoral imho.
I'm an anti-imperialist, environmental activist and blue ocean sailor, who is passionate about the earth and all it's inhabitants without favour. Brace for imminent impact as we bare witness to the non-linear unraveling of the biosphere and habitability disappearing for most if not all complex life on the only habitable planet we know of. To quote President Niinistö in North Russia: ‘If We Lose the Arctic, We Lose the World’. Folks we have lost the Arctic.
Kevin Hester 
Malcolm light is still pushing “renewables” as our energy solution.
One of his links https://news.stanford.edu/2018/02/08/avoiding-blackouts-100-renewable-energy/ says that we could keep the grid up without blackouts using only renewables.
Stanford isn’t some moonbeam school for nitwits, it has some very high caliber scholars but I think their wrong.
Like all “think tanks” they have tunnel vision, what about AGRICULTURE?
“Renewables” produce NO raw materials that are essential to power & feed our agricultural system & no battery is energy dense enough to power farm machinery.
The more energy dense a battery is, the more unstable & dangerous they become. Remember those exploding cell phone batteries?
There is also no mention of anthropomorphic climate change either & how that will affect us in so many ways.
How can a TECHNOLOGY that converts low density natural energy, inefficiently into electricity replace a energy dense RESOURCE?
To me, it just doesn’t compute.
But then, I’ve always been poor in math.
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An excellent article. I suggest also that he reads my book “A Farewell to Ice” which makes all these points. Peter Wadhams
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Thank you very much for the education you have provided me over the years Peter.
Dahr Jamail stayed at my home on Rakino Island last year and devoured “A Farewell to Ice” in a couple of days. He references it often in his climate dispatches regularly.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/21/farewell-to-ice-peter-wadhams-review-climate-change
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DAM! I HAD a reply here but now it’s GONE! WTF happend to it?
I’ll just ask the question I had at the end of that post, I wonder what Peter Wadhams thinks of “renewables”?
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I’m sure everyone here is shaking their heads at the latest mindboggling IPCC disconnect that was just published. Wow, no worries! We’ve got another 12 years to party, folks! Let us jet to Tahiti and do some ‘eco-tourism’ and then maybe we can head to Europe for the snowboarding season! Anybody with me?
Things are just fine, right? Let’s go shopping!
Well, as long as we don’t happen to live in Mexico Beach and Panama City, or all of the ‘Lost Coast’ of Florida and the 2 million rotting dead chickens Hurricane Michael left in Georgia as it continued to run right up into the flooded polluted zones of North and South Carolina that are stinking the place up something fierce after a few weeks of warm weather with all of those millions of pig and chicken corpses rotting in the heat after Hurricane Florence. And then add in the blown-out pig manure ponds, and coal ash ponds in the rivers. Wow. Nothing to see here, folks, right?
And we shouldn’t bother to look around the globe at what else is falling apart in other people’s lands. It would distract us from…keeping the economy afloat.
Of course by this time everyone here has probably read the latest arctic.blogspot article and are emitting deep troubling sighs which is most likely putting a major damper on that party scene we were hoping for. But don’t despair, the IPCC has got your back!
Or somebody’s back anyway. Probably not ours thinking a bit deeper into that idea.
Kevin, you used the term ‘insane asylum.’ How utterly appropriate. Though I’ve never actually been to an official government approved facility I certainly can see your point having read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest decades ago. As analogies go, I’d say you’ve hit the nail on the head with what we see going on around us. We watch the stuffy suits being so serious, so official, so…intense in their need for our unquestioning trust in their…official-ness. Their doing their best to be convincing and all of their manipulating is of course justified in order to keep the lid on. Don’t panic they cry. Trust us! Keep shopping!
One wonders if they sleep well at night. If they do sleep well, are they sane or is that the behavior of the insane? Do they ignore their own disquieting questions that surely must linger in the back of their consciousness or are they so blinded that they really don’t have any reservations about what they bleat to the other sheeple?
How to keep ourselves sane is a strange question when society tells us in oh-so-many-subtle-ways that it is we who are wearing the tin foil hats and are therefore already not quite sane in their oh-so-official estimation. Revel in our aberrations? The old joke about when the inmates take over the asylum comes to mind, but then so does the reality that the inmates have always been those people risen to great wealth and power. They wouldn’t be where they are, at the top of the social pyramid, without being mind sick.
Time for a big, deep sigh from way down inside. Managing our grief and staying sane. Yep, I understand that concept. I’ve already been asked by a young snowboarding student from last year if I would be willing to teach his older cousin this winter season. I teach for free, a gift from an old surfer/boarder guy to the kids, so of course I’ll fit her to one of my kid-sized boards and spare boots and gloves and goggles and throw one of my shop’s hats on her head. She’s stoked and they both are already watching snowboarding videos in anticipation.
And a mom of another 12 year old (now 13) student also from last winter asked if I could teach her so she can go ride with her daughter this winter. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the daughter will probably be riding with her age group and not so much with mom, but certainly, I’ll take her up and get her going. Surfing mountains is fun!
I talk climate with all my students, honest climate not IPCC, and for some funny reason that makes them even more hungry to ride as much as they can. If what you love to do is going to disappear, does that cause a reverse reaction in our species? Funny.
Now, if it will only snow enough to make it happen. With the El Nino setting up in the Pacific already, it looks like here in the Pacific Northwest may get another of those ‘missing winters’ due to the massive looping of the Jet Stream that happened in the 2014/15 season. I certainly hope not.
From the dry zone south of Canada (no Fall rains worth mentioning yet), do something fun every day. What’s the point of being here if you don’t?
sealintheSelkirks
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“What is being done is very, very far from enough. So we are nearly in front, to some extent, of the end of the world, at least the end of our world. So we really have to do something and we have to do something right now… In a few years or a few tens of years [decades] the world will have drastically changed. I mean we are building a huge desert, animals are dying and humans are going to die… I am a physicist and I know for sure that an infinite exponential growth in a finite world is just impossible. That’s elementary mathematics. So what we are doing right now cannot last for a long time. So in physics what is happening right now is called an instability. And when a system is unstable, it means that it is going to crash. So to some extent we know that the planet Earth is going to crash. And we know when, I mean in a few tens of years, not in two centuries. So something has to be done, and of course things that have to be done might be unpopular.” – Aurelien Barrau, astrophysicist and philosopher
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A View to a Kill (of a planet):
The use of material resources will double globally by 2060 and will cause a serious environmental impact, according to a study released on Monday by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
According to the data, by 2060 the world will consume 167 gigatonnes (Gt) annually of these material resources, compared to the 79 Gt that were used in 2011.
The report indicated that the use of metallic materials will go from 7 Gt per year in 2011 to 19 Gt in 2060, while that of non-metallic minerals, such as construction materials like sand, gravel and others, will grow from 35 Gt in 2011 to 82 in 2060.
This takes into account annual global economic growth of 2.8% on average.
According to the OECD, this increase will cause a serious impact on the environment, since a large part of greenhouse gas emissions are due to the management of primary and secondary material resources.
If by 2011 these emissions represented about 40 Gt of carbon dioxide equivalent, results indicate that by 2060 they will reach 75 Gt of CO2 equivalent.
Click to access highlights-global-material-resources-outlook-to-2060.pdf
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Ya gotta laugh ( gallows humour) that the OECD can’t see collapse intervening!
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Pretty crazy, “use of material resources will double globally by 2060”! Ha ha ha!
We will have collapsed long before then!
Just WHERE will we get the ENERGY to mine those resources?
Do they actually BELIEVE that “renewables” can generate the energy, mine the raw materials & manufacture what we demand even by 2030 especially when those “renewables” are also tied to fossil RESOURCES?
What kind of la la land are they living in? It’s certainly not on our poor, ravaged, dying planet.
At my home, I have flocks to very hungry birds emptying the feeders, insects are just not available for them as they used to be.
This summer, what there was of it through all the SMOKE from our ongoing FOREST FIRES, saw the swallows once again not breeding, they just looked at the nest boxes but never built a nest, they flew south again, ALONE, no young!
I was UTTERLY DISGUSTED at how Trump was gushing over the MONEY he would get for weapons of mass death from the murderous, head, hand & food chopping Saudi prince as he leered at Trumps drooling over getting more MONEY from them!
Yemen is being bombed by the US & the Saudis into mass starvation, tens of thousands of civilians have died in that one sided war!
Such male animals deserve EXTINCTION, too bad we can’t save the decent people.
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Sheila, as Lily Tomlin once said (and I paraphrase) You can never be cynical enough to keep up.
I don’t really expect much after 2025. Scary. One bad harvest in the Midwest, drought or deluge it doesn’t matter which. Been close to it a few times in the last few years. Honestly, the haywire deterioration is just too obvious everywhere, and the atmosphere collapse is accelerating so fast…oh darn.
Nobody can keep up with what is going on as there are just too many different disciplines to read into. Everything is being affected, in every niche of the biosphere. Absolutely overwhelming deluge of information.
The amount just with climate/ocean/ice worldwide in sheer volume buries one, even a speed reader. Add in…everything else going on?
Kevin nailed it; the insane asylum.
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Peter Wadhams: I just ordered your book from Powell’s Books in Portland. The only independent bookstore I go to online though I do walk into small non-chain stores down in the city. I can say I never bought a book from Amazon so I’m glad I found a copy at Powell’s. There were two left! And I can honestly say I’m not exactly looking forward to it…and I’m sure you know what I mean by that.
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On a happier note, Hey Kevin. I’m about to have Part II of my 7,000 word ‘Gathering of the Tribe’ riversurfing piece published in Riverbreak Magazine (online pub only). Part I was published last May and it opened the riversurfing season in Europe and here. Part II is closing it as I just approved the final draft & pics & vids from the editors and sent it back this week. It’s a HAPPY story and I may not read much that can be considered even close to fricking happy (not reality anyway), but at least I can write a fun one!!
Trying to do something fun every day. Small joys come from unexpected places I’ve noticed.
sealintheSelkirks
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Collapse by Bitcoin – a new way!
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/uoha-bcp102518.php
People are really starting to wake up – this important video (released in 2015) has already 179 views!
“As goes the Arctic, so goes the entire climate structure… This [September Arctic sea ice volume] is going to hit zero by the middle part of the next decade, and the problem with that is that it completely changes the structure of the climate… these clathrates are gorgeous. They’re boxes of water with methane contained in them and these clathrates contain three times as much chemical energy as all fossil fuels… they contain this methane and as they warm, they release it… Just 0.5% of that carbon contained in just that upper couple of meters in Siberia and Northern Alaska, 0.5% of that released into the atmosphere equals all fossil fuel burning worldwide. ” –James Anderson (Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry, Harvard)
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As smart & educated as Steven Hawkings was, HOW could he believe that humans could spread out into other solar systems???
He had to have known how distant those stars are & how many generations any space ship would have to travel to reach them.
Remember Biosphere 2? it could only support it’s crew, POORLY, for two years, O2 was down to only 14%, most vertebrates had died, the water was contaminated, they couldn’t grow enough food or produce enough O2 to survive, a spaceship on it’s way to a distant star couldn’t just open the hatch & step out into a livable world, they would all DIE long before they could get anywhere near another solar system.
We can’t terraform Mars either, it’s soil is toxic, no nutrients a plant could use, no breathable air, radiation at ground level is lethal, any human on Mars would soon be DEAD.
If we kill this living planet through STUPIDITY & GREED, we will become as extinct as the Dodo bird & many other animals we killed off.
Those who still believe that “renewable” TECHNOLOGY can replace the RESOURCES found in fossil resources is an IGNORANT IDIOT!
How could anyone believe you could replace a RESOURCE with a TECHNOLOGY that DEPENDS upon that same resource to exist???
I would love to see them use “renewables” to manufacture more “renewables” from mine to finished product using ONLY “renewables”!
That’s not possible!
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“Any short-term material gain of ours is a loss for the world around us. Renewables only accelerate this process.” – Tim Garrett, a professor at the University of Utah since 2002. Most of his research has been focused on the complex interplay between aerosols, clouds, precipitation, radiation and climate, key ingredients in the of understanding climate change.
https://nephologue.blogspot.com/2018/07/
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WELL SAID KEVIN SIR….BUT I AM VERY MUCH NERVOUS ABOUT HOW THE HELL WE ARE GOING TO DECOMMISSION THE 450 NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ALL OVER THE WORLD…..IT ACTUALLY TAKES MAX 60 YEARS TO TOTALLY DECOMMISSION A SINGLE NUCLEAR POWER PLANT….N THERE ARE 450 WHICH ARE GOING TO TURN OUR EARTHS TEMPERATURE, SIMILAR LIKE VENUS….WITH IONIZING RADIATIONS IN THE EARTHS ATMOSPHERE…..WE ARE ALREADY DOOMED GUYS….THERE’S NO WAY LEFT FOR OPTIMISM…..
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