Kevin Hester and Kevin Sandbloom from Black Bear News discuss the unraveling of the biosphere, the convergence of ecological collapse, the re-rise of fascism and the attendant risks as the planets ecology and social order both stumble toward collapse.
“Because of social taboos, despair at the state of our world and fear for our future are rarely acknowledged. The supression of despair, like that of any deep recurring response contributes to the numbing of the psyche”,from The Greatest Danger by Joanna Macy
The Australian Bureau of Meterology currently has us on El Nino “Watch” with a prediction that we may enter a new El Nino in the southern hemisphere spring. “An El Niño event has been predicted for the end of the year, leaving farmers already struggling with a devastating five-year drought facing disaster.The Bureau of Meteorology announced the odds of an El Niño system forming this year are now twice as high as normal.” Weather catastrophe: Farmers crippled by the ‘worst drought in 100 years’ are facing another TWO YEARS of scorching temperatures and no rain
We are in the early stages of runaway global warming that will lead inevitably to the total loss of habitat on planet earth. What geoengineering lengths will the psychopaths in the military industrial complex go to to slow down the armageddon? I believe we will see an orchestrated nuclear winter. The Inevitability of Nuclear War and Subsequent Nuclear Winter When a nuclear detonation takes place, if your fortunate not to be in the targeted zone, question the empires narrative, the likelihood of a “False Flag” being used is very high.
To fully understand the severity of the converging crises we face it is imperative to understand that when civilisation collapses or a major event shuts down the airline industry we lose the cooling effects of “Global Dimming”. This was shown in stark relief when after 911 in the USA unfolded and commercial airline flights were cancelled for the first 3 days scientists recorded an immediate 1C + temperature increase. View the BBC documentary Global Dimming here;
The interview with Professor Paul Ehrlich titled “The Annihilation of Nature” mentioned in the interview is embedded here;
I was recently interviewed for an episode of “Moving Forward” by Rob Steimetz where we discussed the reasons why I have been an activist since my youth. Click on the “Moving Forward” link above.
We discussed how I became an ocean sailor, experiences with being in war zones in Ireland and Mozambique and running from rogue elements of the Israeli Defense Force in Kathmandu after I challenged their fascist behaviour.
The main purpose of the interview is to encourage young activists to become involved in social movements, to question everything, including the movements ‘leaders’ and to discover how rewarding it can be personally.
Some of the closest friendships I have formed over the years have been on the front lines of activism.
I made a few enemies along the way as you could imagine challenging the nations “religion” Rugby.
In the early 1980’s HART, the New Zealand anti-apartheid organisation received a letter penned by Nelson Mandela in his prison cell on Robin Island where he wrote “You shone a ray of sunshine into a very dark cell”. One of my closest friends Marx Jones was imprisoned for flying a small plane over a game of Rugby at Eden Park when he threw out flour ‘bombs’ and a banner reading “BIKO” , the You Tube video of the action is embedded here;
I was recently interviewed on national television in New Zealand about a dangerous stand of 100 trees that were poisoned and left standing on a cliff edge adjacent to a busy shipping channel. The article is embedded here
The July 2018 episode of Nature Bats Last on The Progressive Radio Network covered two recent articles published by Professor Andrew Glikson from the Australian National University.
Professor Glikson was unable to connect for the live show so I read cruical aspects of the articles and have added my analysis and observations.
The audio is embedded here;
Central to the show was this article published in Global Research titled “The Methane Time Bomb and the Future of the Biosphere”.
Methane release from permafrost
“Early warnings are manifest. Expeditions along the East Siberian Arctic Shelf in 2011 led by the Russian scientists Igor Semiletov and Natalia Shakova identified a large number of km-size sea bed structures from which methane plumes were bubbling. The East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) is reported to be highly perforated and close to thawing”.
I quoted Joanna Macy from her article titled “The Greatest Danger” in context of talking about the severity of the multitude of crises we face; “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.” As a “Blue Water” ocean sailing skipper, I am obliged to consider worst case scenarios and strategies in the event of a catastrophic failure of my vessel and the implications that could have for my passengers, crew and myself ( in that order). I suspect one of the reasons I am so involved and vocal in the climate/extinction crises, when most won’t even acknowledge their existence, is that my life experiences have prepared me for the unfolding shipwreck we are all experiencing. It’s not in my nature to avoid the issue, it would go against everything I have learned in 16 ocean passages and hundreds of coastal races and the experience of living in two war zones. The Greatest Danger
I will be making another submission to the “Ministry of the Environment” where I shall quote Canadian scientist William Rees. At the 1hr 10min mark William Rees says “The Scientifically neccessary is politically unfeasable. The politically feasable is scientifically irrelevant”.Therein lies the nub of the predicament we find ourselves in. Nothing being proposed is relevant to the severity of the multitude of converging crises we face.
“As glaciers melt, sea levels rise at an accelerate rate and intense hurricanes and wildfires increase, by a factor of ~3 since early in the 20th century, unthinkable consequences of runaway global warming and nuclear wars loom. A new Orwellian age of fake news, half-truths, cover-ups and false flags is becoming the order of the day. The Orwellian Climate and Faustian Bargain Professor Glikson has agreed to be my guest on the 7th August at 3p.m. E.S.T. on Nature Bats Last on PRN.FM Feel free to post any questions you’d like him to answer in the August episode directly in the comments section of this blog below.
The photo above is methane bubbles percolating through the water column to the surface in the Arctic.
Before taking your children on “The Trip of a Lifetime” consider this;
“Tourism, including flights, hotels, food and even the production of souvenirs, emitted the equivalent of 4.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2013, the most recent data available, or 8 percent of all man-made greenhouse gases, up from 3.9 billion in 2009, it said.” Indulging ourselves with tourism in a climate crisis is omnicide. “Booming tourism emits 8 percent of greenhouse gases, study shows”.
“The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) simply blows out of the water anything else that’s been attempted in human history.”
“As currently planned, it will involve some 7,000 separate infrastructure or extractive industry projects scattered across 70-odd nations, with a total price-tag of $8 trillion. It’ll span half the planet — from Asia to Africa, Europe and the South Pacific. It’ll affect every facet of human endeavor, in one way or another.”
It will be business as usual on steroids.
It’s way past the time that we need to get our heads out of our arses or our slave owners ones and be realistic about the fact that the juggernaut we are strapped into has already careened off the cliff. The only two things I can see derailing this latest lunacy is war or the collapse of industrial civilisation, which is in-itself now an extinction event for our favourite species due to the loss of ‘Global Dimming’ ,with it’s attendant temperature spike and the meltdown of 350 + nuclear plants and their more horrific 1300 odd spent fuel pool fires.
I expect we’ll get both as the last few resource wars are fought to our bitter end.
To get a sense of perspective lets look at just one of the 7000 projects courtesy of The Third Pole
Will Two Chinese Dams affect the Belt and Road Initative?
“China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG)received the licence to develop the West Seti dam in 2011 after the Australian firm SMEC, which held the permit for over a decade, failed to raise investment for the project.”
“CTG representatives are now asking the government to guarantee a 17% return on investment besides issuing a sovereign guarantee. If these conditions are not met, they say the project will not be feasible.”
A 17% guaranteed return with a sovereign guarantee! Every predatory investor on the already crippled planet will compete for some skin in that ‘game’.
Now factor in the dire consequences of the other 6999 projects. Starting to get my drift are we?
By all means lower your carbon footprint however you can but lets keep a sense of perspective on where we are at. All the squirly lightbulbs, electric cars, solar panels, wind generators and best of intentions in the world won’t mitigate the carbon footprint of a small fraction of this series of projects.
It’s way past the time that the so called alternative energy options are able to mitigate our predicament to date, especially considering the 10 to 30 year lag between emissions and when we see their full consequences manifest, let alone this latest nightmare. The inertia in the system is enormous.
We need to stop lying to ourselves and our youth that the department of capitalism that markets renewables to the unquestioning is a viable ‘alternative’ in the bigger scheme of things.
The carbon emissions alone from such a series of projects will be mind boggling but wait, there’s always more;
“In biodiversity and environmental terms, again, it’s the worst thing we’ve seen anywhere — and in the past forty years, I and my colleagues have seen some pretty horrific stuff in the Amazon, Africa, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. I actually think the BRI will have a greater net impact on ecosystems than it does global warming.”
Recently on this blog I referred to the removal of 150 to 200 species every day as the ultimate game of Climate Change and Extinction Jinga Imagine the chaos this proposal will have on the already precarious situation we find ourselves and our other earthlings in!
It is imperative that we Join the Dots and be honest with ourselves and those we love when facing the climate/extinction crises. We are so far up shit creek that the nonsense being espoused by the Green and Left Parties on renewables and carbon quotas by some far off date like 2030 or 2050 needs to be challenged and dismissed for the snake oil it really is. It’s little more than re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic after the stern has sunk below the irradiated, plastercised, hypoxic “Canfield Ocean”.
We are being distracted by corporate NGO’s that need you to sign near worthless online petitions and for you to send money for their very survival. Many of them are now little more than another one of the corporations that are grinding the living planet into dust. I saw a petition today that was petitioning the White House that Slaves Built. WTF are you thinking petitioning the White House? Whatever you’re smoking is making you delusional. Don and the other swamp rats await the rapture. Runaway abrupt climate change is a gift from their evangelical ‘God’.
If your reading this blog regularly, you’ll know that the situation is extremely dire from what we know but there is so much we have yet to grasp and uncover. There can only be a host of so called “Black Swan Events” waiting to appear when we least expect.
There is a veritable “Shit Storm” coming ready or not. Everything is happening faster than previously thought.
Since the dawn of Industrial Civilisation we have been involved in a giant game of Jenga and the pieces to the puzzle are our fellow earthlings. One by one we have been removing them from the intricate fabric of the biosphere and now as collapse is unfolding most sapiens fein surprise and shock. We cannot continue to condemn to extinction 150 to 200 species every day without eventually facing the consequences. That time is now, the piper is calling. Death by a thousand cuts to the biosphere is just that, extinction now beckons. Everyone who has played ‘Jenga’ will know that as each piece is removed, the entire edifice becomes more and more unstable until Collapse unfolds. Anyone paying any attention to the climate/ extinction crises can see how unstable the biosphere has already become, so much for 2C being safe. ,yet so few are courageous enough to face the severity of the multiple crises that are now unfolding in a non-linear trajectory.This denial of the now obvious leaves us totally unprepared for the imminent collapse, the outcome of every ‘game of Jenga’. “One of the greatest shortcomings of the human race is it’s inability to comprehend the exponential function” A quote from the late, great Albert Bartlett;
Two scientists that I have previously interviewed on my radio show Nature Bats Last who are courageous enough to face the perfect storm are Professors Guy McPherson a personal friend of mine and Paul Ehrlich
Jenga image courtesy of Ken Avidor, a link to Ken’s great work is embedded here;
I refuse to be the last generation of elder to lie to the last generation of youth. They have been robbed of a future, at the very least they deserve the truth.
At the 13 minute mark in the following embedded link from “Collapse Chronicles“, Judy and Dan Dourson talk about the Collapse of the Southern Appalachian Forests and Judy mentions the analogy of Jenga. Those forests are dying today and yesterday, not long off in the future. Factor in the 10 to 30 year lag between emissions and when their full consequences are felt and any clear headed analyst will understand that the situation is much more dire than has manifest to date with a shit load of warming and chaos already baked in. Governments and the large NGO’s talking about their emissions scenarios for 2030 and beyond are delusional. Unfolding in parallel to the climate crisis is the collapse of the insect populations on this planet, without insects we cease to exist; “This point was underlined last week when tweets from the naturalist and TV presenter Chris Packham went viral after he commented on the absence of insects during a weekend at his home in the New Forest. Packham said he had not seen a single butterfly in his garden, and added that he sleeps with his windows open but rarely finds craneflies or moths in his room in the morning. By contrast, they were commonplace when he was a boy.” “Our generation is presiding over an ecological apocalypse and we’ve somehow or other normalised it,” he later said.
Everything we know, love and need for our own survival is going away. Soon the living will envy the dead. I am often attacked for speaking about the ongoing 6th great extinction but for me it is a means of; 1) Managing my grief and 2) It is a mea-culpa to all of the species either driven to extinction or on the brink of it. At the very least we need to take ownership of the crimes we have committed every time we turn on a light or drive to the liquor shop (Guilty as charged).
Make the most of every day, time is infinitely shorter than most comprehend. Be nice to each other, only love remains.
“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”. The Greatest Danger by Joanna Macy
In this months episode of Nature Bats Last on PRN.FM podcast, I was honoured to re-interview Professor Paul Ehrlich on his book “The Annihilation of Nature”, the show is embedded here:
“The numbers are sobering: Over all, there has been a human-driven decline in the populations of all species by 25% over the past 500 years, but not all groups have suffered equally. Up to a third of all species of vertebrates are now considered threatened, as are 45% of most species of invertebrates. Among the vertebrates, amphibians are getting clobbered, with 41% of species in trouble, compared to just 17% of birds—at least so far. The various orders of insects suffer differently too: 35% of Lepidopteran species are in decline (goodbye butterflies), which sounds bad enough, but it’s nothing compared to the similar struggles of nearly 100% of Orthoptera species (crickets, grasshoppers and katydids, look your last).“The Sixth Great Extinction is Underway and We’re to Blame;
Johns Hopkins University Press, The Annihilation of Nature
Published on Apr 23, 2015
“In this beautiful book, three of today’s most distinguished conservationists tell the stories of the birds and mammals we have lost and those that are now on the road to extinction. These tragic tales, coupled with eighty-three color photographs from the world’s leading nature photographers, display the beauty and biodiversity that humans are squandering.”
For a slide show of the wonderful photo’s and illustrations in this book click on the following link;The Annihilation of Nature
“The oft-repeated claim that Earth’s biota is entering a sixth “mass extinction” depends on clearly demonstrating that current extinction rates are far above the “background” rates prevailing between the five previous mass extinctions. Earlier estimates of extinction rates have been criticized for using assumptions that might overestimate the severity of the extinction crisis. We assess, using extremely conservative assumptions, whether human activities are causing a mass extinction. First, we use a recent estimate of a background rate of 2 mammal extinctions per 10,000 species per 100 years (that is, 2 E/MSY), which is twice as high as widely used previous estimates. We then compare this rate with the current rate of mammal and vertebrate extinctions. The latter is conservatively low because listing a species as extinct requires meeting stringent criteria. Even under our assumptions, which would tend to minimize evidence of an incipient mass extinction, the average rate of vertebrate species loss over the last century is up to 100 times higher than the background rate. Under the 2 E/MSY background rate, the number of species that have gone extinct in the last century would have taken, depending on the vertebrate taxon, between 800 and 10,000 years to disappear.” Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction.
I mentioned in the interview; “The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) simply blows out of the water anything else that’s been attempted in human history. As currently planned, it will involve some 7,000 separate infrastructure or extractive industry projects scattered across 70-odd nations, with a total price-tag of $8 trillion. It’ll span half the planet — from Asia to Africa, Europe and the South Pacific.”
It’s hard for me to think where the sand, let alone the energy for this project will come from,considering to all intents and purposes we have consumed the planets ‘construction sand’ already.China’s Global Infrastructure Initative Could Bring Environmental Catastrophe
Also mentioned was this quote from Joanna Macy: “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”. 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”.Joanna Macey: The Greatest Danger
The author of this blog has decided to have the conversations no one wants to have, obviously this is not a marketing proposition. “Without hope, goes the truism, we will give up. And yet optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilisation is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognises he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives.” ‘We’re doomed’: Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention.
Guilt tripping young people that they have to fix the unfixable is unconscionable . As long as the military industrial complex rages around the world all the squirly light bulbs, solar panels and wind generators on the planet count for nought. The issue isn’t should we use these faux ‘renewables’ but what we expect the outcome to be. By all means lower your carbon footprint just don’t try and bullshit us that it will make a measurable difference. The Second Law of Thermodynamics; The Gaping Hole in the Middle of the Circular Economy
Almost no one in the affluent (Effluent ) west wants to give up the overseas holidays enough to extend their childrens lives: Booming tourism emits 8 percent of greenhouse gases, study shows “And on current trends, the trillion-dollar tourism industry will emit 6.5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions by 2025, the review said, making it one of the fastest-growing source of the planet-warming gases that governments are trying to cut.” Have a great holiday kids, it could well be your last.
For quite possibly the best brief round up on abrupt climate change check out the following explanation: Overview Of Abrupt Anthropogenic Climate Change “The Great Dying wiped out at least 90% of the species on Earth due to an abrupt rise in global-average temperature about 252 million years ago. The vast majority of complex life became extinct. Based on information from the most conservative sources available, Earth is headed for a similar or higher global-average temperature in the very near future. The recent and near-future rises in temperature are occurring and will occur at least three orders of magnitude faster than the worst of all prior Mass Extinctions. Habitat for human animals is disappearing throughout the world, and abrupt climate change has barely begun.” The Real Truth About Health
Tragically for the biosphere and the continuation of complex life on this planet the “Precautionary Principle’ has been cast to the winds as we plunge headlong, full speed ahead into the climate / extinction crisis, not only by failing to meet the pathetically weak aspirations of the non binding Cop21 Climate Agreement in Paris, we fail to allow for the unknown or so called “Black Swan” events that will almost certainly continue to manifest as we navigate blindly through these unchartered, peril filled waters.
This blue water, ocean sailor can’t believe the risks that are being taken by failing to follow the “Precautionary Principle” and not preparing for possible worst case scenarios that could literally unfold any day now. The failure of the scientific community to convey the urgency of the crisis is a dereliction of duty.
We have increased the atmospheric loading of H2O relative to the CO2 forced warming we have dumped into the atmosphere and more significantly, into the oceans, every second of every minute of every hour of every day, week, month and year for the last 300yrs and there is no respite insight. This feedback loop and it’s consequences are largely ignored.
As well as losing heat and water vapour into the atmosphere, as we wipe out the marine food web with acidification and the lunacy of vacuming up the Krill, we lose the carbon sequestering species and the oceans become carbon emitters rather than sinks. That feedback is non-linear just like the sea ice albedo feedback loop.
In this brief clip some of the luminaries of the climate world speak of known and unknown “Black Swan” possibilities with close to no sense of urgency;
With regards to the Arctic Sea Ice and it’s resultant feedback loop, normally sober commentators describe us as having “Fallen off a Cliff”.
““We’ve fallen off a cliff,” said Rick Thoman, a climatologist at the National Weather Service in Alaska, in a tweet.
When I asked former guest on my radio show, Nature Bats Last on the Progressive Radio Network Professor Andrew Glickson, “How long before we see “Canfield Oceans” he replied “We’re seeing them now”.
When, not if, we get a large, anomalous discharge of methane during this summer melt season or another substantial surprise, like the stalling or worse still the collapse of the AMOC we will sooner or later reach a tipping point when the public at large will realise that we have crossed the rubicon and are heading into the abyss. Very, very quickly we could and imho will see a collapse of confidence in our civilisation.
We are one “Black Swan” event away from seeing the collapse of industrial civilisation and the end to complex life on this planet. Don’t for a nano-second believe we have a decade or two, the tipping point could arrive tomorrow or could have unfolded by the time the reader finds this humble contribution to the debate.
Talking about the worst case scenarios we are facing is considered alarmist yet ignoring them is mal-practice.
As I chronicle the unraveling of the biosphere, I am finding more and more credible experts coming to the same conclusions: From a lecture titled “Stop Fascism: Chris Hedges in Portland Oregon”. “But even as we stand on the cusp of extinction we lack the ability to free ourselves from the myth of human progress” ( at the 38 minute mark).” “There is a familiar check list for extinction, we are ticking every one of them .”
Normally Chris Hedges skirts around our imminent extinction but not today. In this great presentation he calls out the cowboy capitalism that has ground the living planet into dust. Hedges also ridicules Donald J. Trump as the “Idiot in chief”.
I’ve added this presentation to the comments section of my blog post on Chris Hedges titled ; The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies.
The May episode of Nature Bats Last featuring an interview with Sandra Kahn and Paul R. Ehrlich is “Embedded Here”
“There’s a silent epidemic in western civilization, and it is right under our noses. Our jaws are getting smaller and our teeth crooked and crowded, creating not only aesthetic challenges but also difficulties with breathing. Modern orthodontics has persuaded us that braces and oral devices can correct these problems. While teeth can certainly be straightened, what about the underlying causes of this rapid shift in oral evolution and the health risks posed by obstructed airways?”
“Sandra Kahn and Paul R. Ehrlich, a pioneering orthodontist and a world-renowned evolutionist, respectively, present the biological, dietary, and cultural changes that have driven us toward this major health challenge. They propose simple adjustments that can alleviate this developing crisis, as well as a major alternative to orthodontics that promises more significant long-term relief. Jaws will change your life. Every parent should read this book.”
“Without hope, goes the truism, we will give up. And yet optimism about the future is wishful thinking, says Hillman. He believes that accepting that our civilisation is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognises he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives.”
Guilt tripping young people that they have to fix the unfixable is unconscionable.
As long as the military industrial complex rages around the planet all the squirly light bulbs, solar panels and wind farms on the planet count for nought.
Let’s not be the last generation of elder to lie to the youth about the severity of the multitude of exestential crisis they face.
Professor McPherson and I discussed the tragic die off of Little Blue Penguins on the coast line around my home on Rakino Island and the Noises Island Group “Penguin habitat destroyed, chicks wiped out by storms battering New Zealand coastline” Sadly it’s adults as well as chicks that are sucumbing! The marine ecosystem is collapsing on my coastline now, not long off in the future.
“In 2014, one of New Zealand’s most respected scientists, Alison MacDiarmid, commented that, “Rock lobster was the third most trophically important benthic invertebrate group in the region [Hauraki Gulf ] before human arrival. Rock lobster are now the least important”. “Backing her is another scientist, marine ecologist Tim Haggit. In 2016 Haggit said the numbers of crayfish are so low in the Gulf that they no longer contribute to the marine ecology. Crayfish are “functionally extinct”.
A link to the marine heatwave in Tasman Sea breaking records which we discussed is embedded here
Also mentioned via Kevin Lister the author of The Vortex of Violence and Why we are losing the war on climate change:
“The UN Talanoa Diaolgue is the key initiative that came from COP21, which said that “ambition must be increased on climate change to limit temperature rises to 1.5degC,” and it is the attempt to garner ideas and ways forward to this end.”
“Our submission to this has just gone in; a summary of the key points in the 70 pages that make it up are:
Atmospheric CO2 is already at unsurvivable levels which will lead to sea level rises of up to 30m and catastrophic temperature rises, yet it is still increasing at a rate that is faster than exponential.There is an unspoken paradox with climate change; as climate change intensifies then the increasing competitive rivalries between nations that it causes prevents the co-operation needed to agree to the mutual sacrifices needed for a zero carbon economy.The coal reefs started dying and the Arctic polar ice cap started melting in 1980 when CO2 was 336ppm, thus the world then was already well on the way to disaster. So, planning for a 1.50C temperature rise is a suicide note; this target needs to be replaced with a new target, which is that the maximum temperate rises should not exceed 0.5OC over the pre-industrial baseline. ANY temperature rise will lead to catastrophic heating due to the interacting nature of the amplifying effects such as methane, sea ice melt and increased water vapour content, so if the temperature increases to 1.50C (which is where we most likely are today) it will lead to unstoppable temperature increases. It also means that even the more radical 0.50C target that we propose could be too high.”
“NO measurable levels of CO2 have been sequestered by natural processes since the start of the industrial revolution and natural processes will take approximately 250,000 years to return the planet to an upper CO2 threshold of stability (approx 300ppm), and even at this level of CO2, then sea levels would be at least 10 meters higher than today. So even the emergence of a zero-carbon economy tomorrow would not help due to the persistence of legacy CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans.”
“There is a very high level of hysteresis (irreversibility) in the climate system caused by ocean heat content and ice albedo loss, but in particular due to the logarithmic relationship between CO2 and radiative forcing. The implications of this have been completely ignored by policy makers.”
“Proposed methods for CO2 removal from the atmosphere that the COP temperature projections are based on, such as BECCS and DAC are so fundamentally flawed, they are likely to add more CO2 to the atmosphere than they will take out.”
“The only way of removing CO2 is through bio enhancement, such as increasing carbon content in soils and biomass in the oceans, but natural limits means this will most likely take thousands of years to remove sufficient CO2 for a return to stability.”
“To survive we must immediately start a solar radiation management program, and marine cloud brightening is probably the only option, in as much that it is scalable, controllable and sustainable over long periods. The scale of the cooling needed will increase at least exponentially with delay, and as we will soon be at the point where the climatic changes under way will be irreversible then there is a moral imperative to make an immediate start.”
“The techniques that we develop now for climate restoration (cooling and bio enabled CO2 sequestration) must be capable of continued operation by future societies that have become dysfunctional due to the pressures imposed on them by climate change.”
To explain the dire predicament we find ourselves in Robin Westenra has just published this article showing with data from Sam Caranas’ excellent Arctic News blog that we are now at 1.73 C above the true baseline
Professor McPherson was interviewed for an article in the New York Magazine titled “The Unhabitable Earth” This article went on to become the most read article ever published by the magazine. In a total breach of journalist ethics David Wallace Wells failed to credit Professor McPhersons input.
At NBL we acknowledge what is happening in our dying biosphere and we refuse to lie to the youth.We are sleep walking to extinction. The true severity of the crisis can only be understood when you “Connect the Dots” and also remember that we do not know the whole story and the unknowns can only make the situation worse than we know. We are staring at the ultimate Black Swan event, one like no other.
Many thanks to the callers who phoned in with interesting, emotional responses. Managing our grief going forward will be one of our greatest challenges. We’re Sleepwalking Ino A Mass Extinction’ Say Scientists
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 