Excellent tutorial on the ongoing Arctic unraveling from Paul Beckwith who you can find at PaulBeckwith.net with a chilling reference to the inevitable desperate geo-engineering possibilities.
“Syria’s two main waste-water treatment plants, for Aleppo and Damascus, are virtually destroyed, according to the ICRC which helps disinfect nearly 80 percent of the country’s water.”
Attacking the water supplies and infrastructure is a War Crime against the civilian populations of these war ravaged regions as they get hotter and our carbon crisis gets worse, clean water and electricity for keeping food fresh and aircon when we approach our wet bulb temperature are imperative.
Denying either of these to the civilian population including those in hospitals, the very young and the elderly and infirm is nothing short of a War Crime under the much ignored Geneva Conventions.
“On April 22 (Earth Day), US Secretary of State John Kerry, with his granddaughter in his lap, signed the international commitment that is supposed to slow the pace of anthropogenic climate disruption.
“The commitment, which was the result of the 2015 Paris Climate Conference last fall, was signed by more than 150 countries at the UN. Its aim was to limit global temperature increases to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial baseline levels.
“The problem is, three days before Kerry made his symbolic signature, NASA released data showing that the first three months of 2016 are already nearing the lower limit of the Paris talks’ threshold, 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial baseline temperatures.
“Already Too Late? By July 2015, the planet, already having been warmed by 1 degree Celsius over preindustrial temperature levels, was already halfway to the politically agreed upon goal of aiming to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius.” Article continues at link above.
We were warned and we didn’t listen. First of all in 1847 by George Perkins Marsh and then, even by the UN in 1989 and more recently by Professor Guy McPherson, who will be returning to NZ in November 2016.
If anyone wants to be involved in the tour contact me. Time is shorter that you think.
Here is a great example taken from hundreds of excellent examples.
Recently there has been limited coverage in social media circles and to a lesser extent in the MSM about the collapse of the Great Barrier Reef which has been portrayed as another ” Bleaching Event”.
It is not simply a bleaching event, it is the collapse of the marine food web which will lead to the the extinction of most if not all complex life on this planet.
‘Off Hollywood, scientists witnessed the collapse of a minivan-sized coral colony that had started growing more than three centuries ago, when the Spanish ruled the peninsula. As recently as September, live coral tissue covered 90 percent of the colony’s surface, making it among the oldest living things in the state. By December it was almost completely dead, said Brian Walker, a Nova Southeastern University research scientist, who found widespread mortality in corals in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.’ Continues at above link.
We have exceeded all of our planetary boundaries and we have psychopaths at the helm of our sinking ship, armed to the teeth. They will fight to the bitter end. Nowhere on the planet do I see a political party planning for the collapse of society and our biosphere. We go into collapse leader-less, with thousands of nuclear weapons on a hair trigger. The human movie can only end badly, very badly and very soon and we take the rest of the complex life-forms with us down the cul de sac of extinction. More on ‘The Collapse of Industrial Civilisation‘, here.
Dahr Jamail and Guy McPherson discuss this same subject here: ‘Mass Extinction: It’s the End of the World as We Know It‘: “Today’s current scientific and observable evidence strongly suggests we are in the midst of the same process – only this time it is anthropogenic, and happening exponentially faster than even the Permian mass extinction did.” Continues at link.
Industrial civilisation is a heat machine that is killing the living planet and cowboy capitalism is at the helm of our sinking ship.
Karl Marx was vilified for his criticisms of capitalism’s infinite growth paradigm where in reality Infinite growth on a finite planet was always unsustainable and now is knocking at the door. ———-
Also very good: ‘The Pain You Feel Is Capitalism and the living planet dying‘: “It can be very confusing to know that you won’t find a decent job, pay off student loans or put in a down payment on a house in the next few years — even though you may have graduated from a top-tier university or secured glowing references from all those unpaid internships that got you to where you are today.
“Even if you are lucky enough to have all of this going for you, you’ll still be one among hundreds of applicants for every job you apply for. And you’ll still watch as the world becomes more unequal, with fewer paid opportunities to do what you feel called to do in your work or for your life path.
“What’s more, you won’t find much help from your friends because most (if not all) of them are going through the same thing. This is a painful and difficult time that is impacting all of us at once.
“There will be people who tell you it’s your fault. That you aren’t trying hard enough….” .
“Australia’s lack of action on pollution reduction targets has made the country a laughing stock on the international stage, according to senator Larissa Waters“, and “Australia’s lack of follow-through on climate change will leave the Great Barrier Reef ‘completely cooked’ despite it signing the Paris climate deal, the Greens say.”
If Australia meets it’s carbon targets which is highly unlikely it will still cook the Great Barrier Reef.
The mostly likely scenario is that the emissions are being understated. The oceanic incubators have been fried, a perfect mirror of the entire biosphere.
2C would be dangerous, 4C would call into question the survivable of everything we know. 6C, the IPCC worst case scenario would be unsurvivable and guarantee the meltdown of 450 nuclear power stations and there 1200 spent fuel pool fires.
Climate deal won’t stop Great Barrier Reef from getting ‘cooked’, say Greens [1].
———- ———-
[1] ‘Australian Greens, (commonly known as The Greens) is an Australian green political party.’
Today Kevin updated his podcasts, call it fifteen, call it twenty. Not the rub. But what matters is, his best 19 formal, serious sit down interviews are shared and carefully compiled here under Interviews.
“The Earth sizzled in March with the most unusually warm month in recorded history as average land surface temperatures easily exceeded levels deemed by scientists to constitute dangerous climate change.”
2 degrees C was never going to be safe and dangerous climate change is upon us now. “However, the first three months of 2016 were not only the warmest on record for surface temperatures by 0.28 degrees–set a year earlier–they also beat the same period in 1998 by 0.45 degrees during a similar strength El Nino, NOAA said.”
How can this be anything but Runaway Abrupt Climate Change. The answer will come in the next few months as the Northern summer kicks in. We will also get to see if the warm blob in the Eastern Pacific that Robin Westenra reported on remains to attack the GBR or dilutes into a semblance of normality, I have me doubts. An excellent short podcast, here:
Population overshoot, peak everything, a crack like addiction to carbon has pushed us to and over the cliff of our planets boundaries.
All the low hanging fruit has been plucked and in many ways wasted on indulgent extravagance. The piper is calling and the movie is coming to a climax, the clarion call has been ” FIRE” and rather than act the warning has been ignored.
More discussion, in excellent piece by by Nafeez Ahmed: ‘Parliamentary group warns that global fossil fuels could peak in less than 10 years, where it says: ‘A report commissioned on behalf of a cross-party group of British MPs authored by a former UK government advisor, the first of its kind, says that industrial civilisation is currently on track to experience “an eventual collapse of production and living standards” in the next few decades if business-as-usual continues.
‘The report published by the new All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Limits to Growth, which launched in the House of Commons on Tuesday evening, reviews the scientific merits of a controversial 1972 model by a team of MIT scientists, which forecasted a possible collapse of civilisation due to resource depletion‘.
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 