Another chilling report by Thom Hartmann who quotes Sam Carana’s blog “The Arctic-news blog” [1] about our unfolding extinction event obviously prompted by Dr. James E. Hansen’s latest paper.
Thom posits that: “If we to don’t get started we too might go the way of the dinosaurs”. Thom fails to grasp the 10 to 20 year lag in cause and effect.
Whilst Thom discusses the methane threat he gives no reason why we won’t go extinct. We are emitting carbon at the rate of 10 times more than the PETM extinction. Games up folks, now the only debate is around how much time we have. Notice how many of these kinds of articles are being published just recently? When not if the arctic methane lets go it will be game over for this ecosystem in a very short time frame.
Professor Guy McPherson collaborated with Pauline Panagiotou Schneider to develop this eventuality from a book Guy wrote called ” Going Dark” into a documentary available on You Tube.
Guy will be visiting NZ in November to speak about this.
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[1] From Sam Carana’s Arctic News blog, Sunday 13 March, 2016. Rise 2016-2026: ‘If levels of carbon dioxide and further greenhouse gases do keep rising, there will additional warming over the next ten years. Even with dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, temperatures can keep rising, as maximum warming occurs about one decade after a carbon dioxide emission, so the full wrath of the carbon dioxide emissions over the past ten years is still to come’.
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As early as 1989 and probably much sooner the UN new that urgent action on climate change was imperative. They made a conscious decision not to do anything.
“UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”
“Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.”
“He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.”
“As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.”
“Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.”
″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said.
“UNEP estimates it would cost the United States at least $100 billion to protect its east coast alone.”
“Shifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands, while the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in time, according to a study by UNEP and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.”
“Excess carbon dioxide is pouring into the atmosphere because of humanity’s use of fossil fuels and burning of rain forests, the study says. The atmosphere is retaining more heat than it radiates, much like a greenhouse.”
“The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.”
“The difference may seem slight, he said, but the planet is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the 8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago.”
“Brown said if the warming trend continues, ″the question is will we be able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.″
As I lie awake on Rakino Island NZ, 3400 miles south of Bikini Atoll, bullets of wind explode across the bay,as the ever increasing ferocity of the storm shakes not just the walls and windows of the house but the bed inside, I am shaken from my slumber and forced to ponder the arrival of Dr James E Hansen’s “Storms of our Grandchildren”.
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Hour by hour, day by day, our climate catastrophe unfolds as Hansen has said in his latest paper, in a non linear fashion. Exponentially now, as the situation spirals toward dystopia and an ungovernable world, I reach out for a dose of reality to pass these shaky times. Historian and chronicler of contemporary fascism, John Pilger joins me on my shaky isle.
J.P. makes the irrefutable point that the USA (Terrorist Nation #1) is stalking Russia via the first card carrying Fascist Government in Europe since Franco’s rule ended and China in the South China Sea, with the newly militarised Japan ready now to again wage war on overseas territories as a result of P.M. Shinzo Abe, himself from a long line of fascists, changing the Japanese constitution,which had, since the end of the “Second World War to end all Wars”, forbidden such action.
For today’s full article by John Pilger, click here: A World War has Begun: Break the Silence, who writes:” A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.” Very soon it will be obvious to everyone that the energy balance of this planet has been irrevocably lost and the bio-system we survive as a parasite within,is unraveling. In the coming days, weeks or months the psychopaths in the US who pretend to not believe in global warming, will reach for the ultimate geo-engineering tool, Nuclear War.
One hair-brained possibility to slow down the inevitable extinction of most if not all complex life-forms on this planet, is to detonate nuclear weapons with the purpose of throwing enormous quantities of dust into the stratosphere to increase global dimming and to reduce the amount of longwave solar radiation from entering the inner atmosphere. This eventuality is to me now a foregone conclusion, how they go about it will depend on how soon they act.
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I envisage a number of scenarios. A small nuclear device is smuggled into North Korea or Iran and surreptitiously detonated in the ultimate ” False Flag” and the government in which ever country is chosen is immediately lambasted for their incompetence and mendacity for developing such nuclear capabilities. Within days we will be able to measure the cooling effect this has had on the global temperature and computer modeling will indicate how many more need to be used and to what effect. This approach has the benefit of having ” A Rogue state”, an indispensable ingredient of US foreign policy.
Critics of the hypothesis will say that it will contaminate everyone equally which it will but runaway global warming will very quickly make this planet uninhabitable, limping along for the bunkered few will appeal to the most mentally ill of these nutcases. Buying some time and giving the psychopaths an excuse to use the weapons they have been itching to use in anger for the last 81 years is a dream come true on the scale of ” The Rapture”. Remember many of these people are fundamentalist Christians awaiting such a time ……. perhaps they think it is their gods will.
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Only time will tell and time is short. This will be a subject I will be discussing with Eric Draitser in an upcoming podcast for Counterpunch.
The greatest experiment in the history of human kind is underway This planet may have warmed 5C in just 13 years once before and those same dynamics are unfolding as we are chucked under the abrupt climate change bus by an indifferent global political leadership lead by capitalist interests only interested in BAU.
The worlds bankers like John Key will be running from the pitchforks when the world wakes up to the state of climate emergency we are obviously heading for like an out of control freight train.
5C by the way is probably unsurvivable for most complex life forms
‘If you dig deep enough into the Earth’s climate change archives, you hear about the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. And then you get scared.
This is a time period, about 56 million years ago, when something mysterious happened — there are many ideas as to what — that suddenly caused concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to spike, far higher than they are right now. The planet proceeded to warm rapidly, at least in geologic terms, and major die-offs of some marine organisms followed due to strong acidification of the oceans.’ Click here for full article continuation.
We have had the warmest winter in the Arctic in living memory with temperature anomalies of well over 10C.
This summer melt season will be like no other:
‘Climate Warming Accelerating Carbon Loss From Thawing Arctic Soils, Warmer, wetter conditions in the Arctic are accelerating the loss of carbon stored in tundra and permafrost soils, creating a potential positive feedback that further boosts global temperatures, a Dartmouth College study finds…‘ Click link here for continuation.
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El Nino did not play the largest role in why February was the most abnormally warm month ever recorded // Published on Mar 20, 2016
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If I wasn’t prepared for this I would be terrified of the consequences but I have been expecting this every day.
Good to see that they aren’t attributing the spike wholly to the El Nino.
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I have been following this dirty war against the Syrian people for the last 5 years and I have watched the Syrian Arab Army remain united, dedicated and efficient. I watched Canadian election monitors cover the election where Bashar Al Assad won over 80% of the vote in an election deemed fair by the monitors and former President Jimmy Carter.
The empire behind this war never figured on the loyalty, dedication nor cohesion of the Syrian Army and have been daily surprised by their application to the task at hand.
My brother Noel Hester, Jim Gladwin and I have also known the speaker Tim Anderson for over 30 years and trust his judgement completely. In his new book he debunks the lies about barrel bombs and chemical weapons use by the government.
The Syrian people fight fascism on behalf of us all and I am proud to call myself a friend of Syria and her people.
We cannot trust a word that the MSM say about this conflict. Hands Off Syria.
As this site pages and posts gets buffed out and certainly under very heavy and–as yet–provisional construction, Kevin asks us to remind you, that as yet, not all pages are by him.
He will be very involved and have a hand in all features and content, but to start, we agree for dk to rough out the frame as it were, then he will make heavy and ample revision.
This site is not meant to be broadcast, but not a secret, not hidden.
” I’m afraid that there could indeed be a temperature rise of several degrees, e.g. of 3.5°C (6.3°F), a decade from now, while the rise could be as high or even higher than 10°C (18°F), depending on how the various elements will work out over the years and assuming that no geoengineering will take place.” Sam Carana.
I find it difficult to believe that there will be complex life on this planet much above 4C but definitely not humans. Flora won’t be able to adapt to the speed of this temperature increase and as global food supply collapses the Imperialists will fight over habitat.
Habitat wars my subject in the next episode of Extinction Radio.
Banner and bridge bottom left, the Volcanic Island Rangitoto top
Over 30 years ago, I alongside thousands of other Kiwis blockaded our harbours in Auckland and Wellington to prevent the Imperialist nuclear powered and armed navies of Britain and the USA from entering our ports as part of our campaign to make NZ Nuclear Free.
I can’t remember how many times I was told ” You’ll never stop those ships”. Those people were wrong and the rest is history.
It was a major victory for the global anti-nuclear movement and acted as a motivator for our like minded activists world wide. It even had us ‘kicked out’ of the ANZUS military alliance, another great result.
Then 5 years ago today a magnitude 9 earthquake struck 231 miles north of Tokyo that generated a massive tidal wave destroying the coastline for many miles particularly in Fukushima Prefecture where it destroyed infrastructure along the coast knocking out both incoming and outgoing power to the 6 Nuclear Reactors at Fukushima Daiichi.
As a cost cutting exercise when the plants were built TEPCO the operator of the 6 plants, built a much smaller sea wall than was necessary to protect the plants.
The wave swept ashore knocking out the incoming and out going power and swamped the plants sea side reactors knocking out the emergency generators that were built in the plant basements.
So began the single worst industrial disaster of all time. Worse than Bhopal, The Deep Water Horizon, Chernobyl and all others.
TEPCO knew within hours that they were dealing with multiple meltdowns and they launched into damage control mode at the plant and in the media.
They immediately began lying to us which has continued for the next 1825 days.
I firmly believe that Honshu with a population of over 100 million should be evacuated. Obviously this is impossible and hence why it hasn’t happened. Imagine what would be said and done if this type of disaster happened near a large metropolis like New York??
The glorious victory we won the day NZ was declared ” Nuclear Free” was effectively lost.
The plant has been bleeding radionuclides into the Pacific now for 5 years, day and night, with an unknown number of hundreds of tonnes of highly radioactive water entering the Ocean and an immeasurable quantity of isotopes entering the atmosphere from the escaped coriums which are now somewhere below the three plants that have melted down in what is know as ” The China Syndrome”.
Fukushima Daiichi was built on a dry river bed at the foot of a beautiful mountain range.
When the plants melted down clouds of radioactive fallout literally rained down on the surrounding countryside making it uninhabitable.
Now whenever it rains on Honshu additional radiation is washed down from the mountains into my / our beloved Pacific Ocean.
There is an extremely high probability that arterial water is also washing across the molten and highly radioactive coriums and bleeding out to sea.
The Fukemobile showing signs of wear after 3 yrs!
Today I took for the 2nd year my ” Fukushima Daiichi is Never Going Away” banner down to the Auckland Waterfront with my great mate and activist Marx Jones, renowned for being the pilot of the plane from the now infamous ” Flour Bombing Test at Eden Park” during the anti-apartheid days in NZ. We hung the banner off a bridge in the faces of thousands of Kiwis as they drove to work at peak hour.
Get the message?
I have previously done this action as part of a global campaign to raise awareness about this ongoing catastrophe and you will see people doing this world wide over the next 24 hrs.
I had a lovely conversation with two NZ Police personal who came onto the bridge, checked that I had fixed the banner securely and didn’t hassle me in any way, shape or form. They were delightful in fact.
I had a second conversation with a pedestrian crossing the bridge who addressed me with ” I see you’re back again, another year passed has it ?” he recognised me from last years action.
Our friendly ” Boy and Woman in Blue coming to visit!
We got talking about the lack of media coverage generally and I said ” It is one of the two biggest cover ups of all time. The severity of Fukushima Daiichi and the fact that runaway abrupt climate change is of itself an extinction event”. He replied ” Maybe that is a good thing all things considered.” Man, between the two cops and this near stranger the pragmatism was amazing. It does go to show how engaged some of us are with our unfolding climate and biosphere crisis. Over the last 5 years I have learned an enormous amount about nuclear from Sean Arclight,, Ray Masalas, John Bertucci. and Mimi German the power behind Radcast. and Facebook group No Nukes North West. and another great Facebook group. ” The Rainbow Warriors”. I would suggest if you wish to know more about these issues join them. Fukushima Daiichi is Never going away. I was interviewed on “Nuclear Hotseat” about our anti-nuclear activities here in Aotearoa N.Z. In the interview embedded here I made one mistake about meeting Peter Wilcox in the police paddy wagon after my boat was sunk by the police and I was arrested. Subsequently I discovered it wasn’t Captain Wilcox it was another Greenpeace activist name unknown.
This is a discreet photo I took of the approaching lovely ” Old Bill”.
Eight years ago today I addressed this audience on Waiheke Island.
I made one bad mistake, it wasn’t Peter Wilcox who I was arrested with it was another Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior crewman!
“In many areas of Russia the mean air temperature during the winter of 2015-2016 exceeded the norm by 4-5°C. In Siberia, Yamal and Taimyr it reached 7-8°C above normal, and on the Arctic islands in the Barents and Kara Seas – as much as 10-12°C above normal, the Hydrometeorological Centre of Russia writes.”
“Never before have the anomalies in mean seasonal air temperature been as large,” the weather forecasters say. “The mean air temperatures have been higher than normal in nearly all of Russia’s territories.”
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 