“A new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature found that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current – of which the Gulf Stream in a part – could collapse around the middle of the century, or even as early as 2025.” It could shut down in the same length of time it takes for a human to reproduce: IE: 9 months, that’s how precarious our predicament has already become! “A vital system of ocean currents could collapse within a few decades if the world continues to pump out planet-heating pollution, scientists are warning – an event that would be catastrophic for global weather and ‘affect every person on the planet.” No mention of the six dozen “Feedback loops” that we have already triggered nor the ongoing war mongering that ensures that all emissions will continue on the “Hockey Stick Trajectory” That Michael E Mann can no longer see!
We are just one “Black Swan” away from this set of living arrangements unravelling, but the slowing down of the AMOC doesn’t meet the definition of a “Black Swan”, it’s entirely predictable and underway now, not long off in a future we don’t have.
From Professor Guy McPherson’s substack post: Will AMOC Kill Us All? “More than 12,000 years ago, the rapid melting of glaciers caused the AMOC to shut down. Within a decade, temperature fluctuations in the Northern Hemisphere reached 10-15 degrees Celsius, or 18-27 degrees Fahrenheit. The president of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the research studies mentioned in this video, said the shutdown of the AMOC “would affect every person on the planet – it’s that big and important.” One observation I would make is that the changes we are witnessing today are happening at orders of magnitude faster than any previous similar event. Science Snippets: On the Rate of Environmental Change
“New research shows how last year’s warming melted ice in Greenland that increased flows of fresh, cold water into the North Atlantic, upsetting ocean currents in ways that lead to atmospheric changes.”
The January 2021 episode of Nature Bats Last featured a discussion with Arctic research scientist and oceanographer Jim Massa. The episode is embedded here:
Jim has also delved into the slowing down of the AMOC, he quotes Professor McPherson’s work on the AME.
“The peer-reviewed paper in Nature Communications echoes the article at MIT News. The Abstract of the peer-reviewed paper includes this important line: “reduced Meridional Overturning Circulation nutrient upwelling decreases biological activity.” Science Snippets: Ice Melting, North and South
We have destabilised the atmosphere and the ocean currents, we are rapidly spiralling into a completely new paradigm. Capitalism and Industrial Civilisation is a “Confidence game”, we face multiple threats that could trigger a collapse that another former guest on Nature Bats Last, Arthur Keller labelled “The Only Realistic Scenario”.
I first wrote about “The Best Kept Secret in Climate Science”, in my 2016 article titled: “Global Dimming Keeping the Planet Habitable”. That blog has many more relevant links in the comments section for the inquisitive. The embedded video on “Global Dimming” is a “must watch!” That article refers to the phenomena of the planet warming after 911 when all the planes were grounded in the USA, with the subsequent decline in aerosols, followed by immediate warming. The warming spike was directly linked to the decrease of aerosols, additional to our crack like addiction to emitting CO2, CH4, the most prolific greenhouse gas H2O and other greenhouse gases. Lion Simons mentioned in the video below that a warmer climate holds 7% more water vapour for every 1C we broil the planet. In mountainous regions it can be as much as 15%! Each 1 Degree C We Warm the Planet adds an additional 7% Increase in Moisture into the Atmosphere. “On this episode, Nate is joined by climate researcher Leon Simons to unpack recent trends in global heating during 2023 and potential explanations and subsequent projections for the coming year. While the connection between human emitted greenhouse gasses and global warming is scientifically agreed upon, the other complexities and feedbacks of our climate system are still just beginning to be understood. Today, Leon theorizes on the intensity of aerosol masking from particulates such as sulfur, based on the connection between recent changes in marine fuel sulfur requirements and corresponding climate data. How will the global trend towards aerosol reductions affect near and long term global heating? What does this catch-22 mean for potential future climate action and policy? How should we be thinking about creating a more simplified global system in response to the unknown unknowns of our potential future climate?”
More great work above from Leon Simons explaining the warming suppressed by the “Aerosol Masking Effect,” what Dr James E Hansen calls “Our Faustian Bargain”, what my friend and colleague Guy McPherson termed, “The Best Kept Secret in Climate Science”. Leon refers to Michael E Manns recent nonsense as a “Straw Mans Argument”, how refreshing and courageous of him. I’ve called out Michael E Manns “Strawman’s Argument” in my blog post titled: Scientific Mal-Practice from the Mann Himself
I’ve been studying “Collapse” since I visited Mayan Ruins in Central America and similar ruins in Southeast Asia in the early 1980’s. None of those civilisations expected to fail yet fail they did. The collapse of industrial civilisation will trigger the loss of aerosols, we’ll also see the melt down of 450+ nuclear power stations, 1200 spent fuel pool fires and tens of thousands of leaking chemical plants and oil wells. Perhaps the aerosols from that scenario will be more than the AME today. We’ve never carried out this experiment before, so all bets are off. As with all my blog posts as new data comes in, I add it to the comments section. Feel free to leave a comment so when I add more information you’ll get a notification.
“MORE than 300 million people in the US and Canada face the growing possibility of electricity shortages beginning as early as this year and continuing to 2028. In a recent report, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation – an international regulatory authority – projected that a majority of regions in the US and Canada will have insufficient electricity supply to reliably meet demand during extreme weather conditions. A few may even see interruptions under normal weather conditions.”
“Let’s return to that first sentence: “MORE than 300 million people in the US and Canada face the growing possibility of electricity shortages beginning as early as this year and continuing to 2028.” Wait, what? Electricity shortages will stop after 2028? How? Naturally, there is no mention of aerosol masking, the best-kept secret in climate science. Professor James E. Hansen has said and written many times that the aerosols will fall out of the atmosphere in about five days. According to a peer-reviewed, open-access paper published on 15 June 2021, the loss of aerosol masking will lead to a substantial increase in planetary warming: 55% globally, and 133% over land. Most of us live on land. As I have indicated previously in this space, we passed the 2 C Rubicon several months ago, according to governmental bodies representing a few countries. These governmental bodies were catching up to Andrew Y. Glikson, who wrote that Earth had surpassed the 2 C mark in his 9 October 2020 book, The Event Horizon. Furthermore, as nearly as I can tell, additional heating of Earth is a one-way street. Once the planet warms, cooling it is a rather challenging task.”
“According to a member of a think tank in Washington, D.C. as published in the paper by United Press International: The report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation found that North America’s peak demand – the highest amount of electricity needed in a given period – is rising faster than at any time in the past five years. The sharp increase also represents a reversal of a decades-long trend involving falling or flat growth in demand.”
All of the above written, slightly edited, and spoken work, is from my friend and colleague Professor Guy McPherson. Subscribers to Guy’s Sub stack posts can comment directly and read the whole embedded script at the following link: Science Snippets: Much of North America Faces Electricity Shortages this Year
After being intrigued by this latest analysis, the electrician in me decided to dive in deeper and have a closer look at the threat. For the record, I had full electrical registration in Aotearoa NZ and have a High Voltage Switching and Protection Qualification from the London Electricity Board. I worked at the Sun Alliance Computer Centre located at Lennox Wood, West Sussex in 1987, only after working there for 6 months did, I find out the computer centre, one of Britian’s first “Intelligent Buildings”, what an oxymoron, was a backup computer installation for the British Ministry of Defence. All of the Group 4 security guards were supposedly ‘ex’ military but over beers, after long runs together, I realised I was working in the belly of the beast. The entire property was surrounded by a moat, and we had the same electronic gate system that was installed at the US Embassy in Beirut. One day my pager bleeped, and a message came up saying: “Blocker discharge”. I made my way to the security gate and found a small car with its rear axle and suspension ripped off and hanging form the blade of the ‘blocker’ that was built into the road, anyone following a pre-approved car into the complex without swipe access discharged the blocker and ‘bam’. The poor young woman who was running late for work just had her car ripped in two. As a result of obtaining that HV qualification, I worked on high voltage substations when rehabilitating the port of Beira in Mozambique in support of the front-line states resisting the Apartheid State to the south. The point of all of the above Is I have some expertise in this field and feel reasonably qualified to comment.
Delving into the story I discovered: “Musk also indicates that the growth of generative AI in computing in the form of chatbots has been rapid, allowing users to generate content and images within a moment’s notice. He added that the adoption and rapid growth of the technology in computing is increasing by a factor of ten every six months. “I’ve never seen any technology advance faster than this,” says Musk.” Can anyone else spot the exponential function here?
To my knowledge the energy required to power AI has not been fully incorporated into the paper above that Guy quotes so, as always, it’s worse than previously thought.
Readers of this blog will know I have a long-standing involvement in the anti-nuclear movement. On that note, I’d like to specifically address this aspect of Guy’s blog piece: “As if those challenges are not bad enough, there is also the issue of nuclear facilities as one means of generating electricity. Nuclear power plants require grid-tied electricity to operate. What happens when the grid fails, even locally?”
“Vulnerability to extended power outages stemming from grid collapse triggered by terrorism, technological accident, cyber attack or geomagnetic storms is understood to mean the widest possible spectrum of immediate and downstream consequences for our nations critical infrastructure. Regrettably few realistic plans are in place for dealing with this risk especially as it pertains to three primary energy systems of strategic significance to the United States – nuclear power, chemical manufacturing and natural gas supplies. The author argues that greater sustained attention is needed to upgrade the resilience of these systems, foster greater sharing of remedies among them to offset the worst effects of grid collapse which exceeds 15 consecutive calendar days and build collective avenues of enhanced risk mitigation against such scenarios.” From the ResearchGate paper: Grid Collapse Security, Stability and Vulnerability Issues: Impactful Issues Affecting Nuclear Power Plants, Chemical Plants and Natural Gas Supply Systems
Feel free to add your comments below and as always, I will update the comments section with additional information as it comes in, until the lights go out, pardon the pun.
Clearly neither the 1.5C nor the 2C Rubicon’s of anthropogenic warming were ever safe. Nor was 350ppm of CO2 in the Atmosphere for that matter. How did we get ourselves into this nightmare?
Nobel Laurate William Nordhaus is quite possibly the single most deadly human to have ever lived. Nordhaus, an economist at Yale was the first corporate shrill to suggest that 2C was both achievable and safe. It was neither but we were collectively sold the lie. The Myth of 2C Being Safe and Achievable
“We know quite a bit more about climate science than we did in 1977. And real scientists knew, even way back then, that economists were not to be treated as scientists. It’s small wonder Nordhaus shared the politically motivated Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018. I wouldn’t have been surprised had he been given the Nobel Peace Prize, thus joining fellow partners-in-crime specialists-in-genocide Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.” From the essay “Extinction Foretold, Extinction Ignored”
An economist who understands the importance of Arctic Sea Ice, the danger of “Wet Bulb Temperatures”, the AMOC slowing down and that William Nordhaus, who came up with the terminal 2C Rubicon of warming, that sealed the fate of the entire ecosystem, is a complete and utter fraud. We were defrauded of the entire ecosystem by Capitalism, fancy that!
As the El Niño builds to a terrifying crescendo, that won’t peak before April 2024, the Pacific’s Coral Reefs will become stressed, and a bleaching event will unfold as it did in the 2016 El Niño. What is our response? TEPCO and the Japanese government have decided to dump 1.3million tons of radioactive water into my beloved Pacific Ocean. After careful consideration the criminal cohort in Japan have decided to take the cheapest option and dump the radioactive sludge into the adjacent Pacific Ocean.
In the video below, I mentioned that Sea Surface Temperatures hit 38C off the coast of Florida. Here’s the evidence: “Sea surface temperatures of more than 38C (100.4F) have been recorded off the coast of Florida – potentially setting a new world record.” Sea temperature off Florida reaches 38C- potentially a world record.
We discussed the compounding consequences of the Pacific Ocean being irradiated thanks to TEPCO, the Japanese Government and Fukushima Daiichi. The very same people who triggered this disaster, by building a sea wall half the size their own analysis called for. My Polynesian neighbours are furious. Niue and Tuvalu ‘concerned, dismayed, disappointed’ with Fukushima release
After our discussion above about grief, I found this spectacularly good article.” The phrase “climate dread” better legitimizes the real and tangible threat coming toward us.” Stop Calling It “Climate Anxiety.” It’s Climate Dread.
Professor McPherson has a Substack account named after his website Nature Bats Last, where subscribers can comment and ask Guy questions directly. Nature Bats Last
Pauline Schneider’s thoughts on this discussion can be read at the following embedded link: Great Barrier Reef’s End Days
“The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite…” Jules Verne
Will the latest El Niño Southern Oscillation be the death knell for: The Largest Living Organism on Earth.? The Great Barrier Reef has yet to recover from the 2016 El Niño. It takes a coral reef approximately 15 years to recover from a significant ‘Bleaching Event”, clearly, there will be no respite for an already ailing complex organism. That’s all happening, before Japan takes the cheapest option and dumps millions of gallons of radioactive sludge, being described as filtered water, into my beloved Pacific Ocean. Here’s a question for informed readers. Could the sludge have been injected into a depleted oil well, rather than be simply dumped into the adjacent ocean? I’d love to know if that was a possibility, not considered, due to the cost! Brace for grief, our own and more importantly, that of our youth, as day by day the realisation that they have next to no future, will trigger what I have previously described as: The Coming Tsunami of Grief. I refuse to be the last generation of elders, lying to the last generation of youth. The Kids Are Not Alright: How Young People are Dealing with Climate Anxiety A seminal event like the collapse of the GBR would shake this set of living arrangements to the core, then there will be another similar event, rinse and repeat. A perfect example is the collapse of the Emperor Penguin colonies in Antarctica. Capitalism and Industrial Civilisation is a “Confidence Game”. Losing something this significant or a city or region of people to Wet Bulb Extremes, will undermine all confidence in the future and this civilisation will unravel rapidly. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario
“Australia’s south-east is in for a marine heatwave that is literally off the scale, raising the prospect of significant losses in fishing and aquaculture.”
The embedded article above is another example of The Guardian pretending to cover the catastrophe but downplaying the cumulative effects. I’ve called out that strategy before on this blog at: The Rogues Gallery of the Climate Enemy Within.
Photo above, me and my beloved coral.
I first dived the Great Barrier Reef in 2001. I skippered a 37ft yacht from Micronesia to Cairns, then we sailed 800 miles down the GBR, diving every day for 6 weeks, before sailing the boat back to Aotearoa NZ. At the time, a marine biologist in Cairns conducted a seminar that I attended, and he said that the reef had only a generation of life left in it. His opening gambit in the lecture was “Turn to the person sitting beside you, pat them on the back and congratulate them for being the last generation to dive the Great Barrier Reef, before it dies”! Those were the days before abrupt climate change, when contemporary climate change awareness was in its infancy (George Perkins Marsh 1847 accepted). I thought he was exaggerating for effect, as people think I am doing now. He was right, I long to be proven wrong. I have Zero interest in being proven right. I don’t believe that my marine biologist tutor really understood how fast our climate change catastrophe would unfold, but his estimate on the reef’s life expectancy appears, tragically, spot on. In 2016, during the last significant El Niño Southern Oscillation, Cyclone Winston pummelled Fiji with wind speeds in excess of 220 miles/ hour, then dumped an enormous amount of rain on the Australian coast and in the Coral Sea, cooling both, had Winston not wrought its havoc, the reef would have been in far worse shape.Tropical Cyclone Winston Causes Devastation in Fiji
“The ENSO Outlook is currently at El Niño Alert, having met criteria 1, 3 and 4 – see below.”
“When El Niño Alert criteria have been met in the past, an El Niño event has developed around 70% of the time.” ENSO Outlook: An Alert System for the El Niño-Southern Oscillation The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is ultra conservative. Other analysis implies that the nascent El Niño will be very strong. “The latest weekly values in the Niño 1+2 region (eastern Pacific) and Niño 3 region (east-central Pacific) are surpassed only by 1997, with records dating back to 1981. All indications are that this El Niño will peak as a strong, canonical event either very late in 2023 or early in 2024. The atmospheric response, measured by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), has trended toward El Niño but continues to lag behind the oceanic progression.” Many thanks to Tomas Reis on Twitter/X
Professor Guy McPherson and I have been beating the drum of Abrupt Climate Change together now for a decade. We’ve been branded ‘Alarmists”. Damn straight, we are alarmed. The Rate of Change is the critical detail. Guy goes into that aspect of the great unravelling below:
Delve into all the embedded links above to verify where I got my information from and add your own thoughts below. I always ‘populate’ the comments section of my blogs with additional evidence as it gushes forth, feel free to join the team by adding your thoughts and any other evidence corroborating or refuting my analysis. By dropping a comment you’ll get a notification of any additional evidence coming to light. “The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite…” Jules Verne
As we circle the drain of collapse and extinction, the corporate media pretend to cover the poly-crises we face but report on the great unravelling as if it’s a future issue, rather that fully underway today, driven by the six-dozen feedback loops I know of, the ones we’ve yet to discover, and the “Black Swans” that we either haven’t thought of or we simply ignore. This muddying of the waters will only get worse as we circle the drain of collapse.
In this article I’ll give some examples and some tools to drill down into the quagmire, that the corporations are deliberately constructing. This is a continuation of the strategy the Tobacco Industry used to fool us last century. That strategy killed hundreds of millions, this new one will kill over eight billion of us. Let’s start with the title article that led to this post, published by The Independent and distributed further by MSN. I’ll quote aspects of the corporate disinformation and add my critique, in bold type, from now on. Current climate path will lead to collapse of life on Earth, say scientists
“Failing to limit the global temperature to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels could trigger tipping points and lead to the collapse of life on Earth, two climate scientists have warned.” Could? there is zero doubt, words like this are injected to create doubt, when there is none. As I’ve pointed out numerous times on this blog, the corporate media and their subservient paid scientists continually move the baseline to bullshit about how much anthropogenic warming we have triggered.Baseline Temperature dishonesty at the Edge of Extinction. Using 1750 as a baseline we are at or around 2c now. Going back in time to include the Iron Age and Bronze ages we are at least 2.29C, hence all the chaos unfolding now, not at some long off date we’ll never get to see. The following data and analysis courtesy of @SamCaranafrom theArctic News Blog: What is pre-industrial? “The Paris Agreement called for aspecial reportby the IPCC on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways. In the report, the IPCC first defines pre-industrial as “the multi-century period prior to the onset of large-scale industrial activity around 1750”. Yet, the IPCC then proceeds to use the period 1850-1900 to “approximate” pre-industrial. This raises the questions, has the IPCC beendownplaying the temperature riseand is this continuing? “ Any corporate media, and worse still alternative media uncritically quoting the IPCC are part of the problem. The above paragraph from my article titled: Using “Pre-Industrial” as a Measure of Anthropogenic Warming was an Omnicidal, Irreversible Mistake.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that current climate policies will leave the Earth between 2.5C and 2.7C hotter by 2100 compared with pre-industrial levels.” I have previously documented the collusion between the corporates and the IPCC which was created by the corporations to protect capitalism from activist scientists like my colleague and dear friend Professor Guy McPherson. It’s Time to Acknowledge the Spectacular Success of the IPCC.
Even the ultra-conservative Dr James E Hansen has admitted that 10C is baked in with existing emissions already in the atmosphere, I note he has tried to back pedal on his original post, no doubt after having copped flak from the corporate owned US Congress. “For example, the present greenhouse gas forcing is 70% of the forcing that made Earth’s temperature in the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum at least +13°C relative to preindustrial temperature.“Global warming in the Pipeline 19 May 2023 James Hansen
Digest that for a second and remember there is a long lag between emissions and when their full effects manifest. We have been led to believe that there is ‘only’ a 10-to-20-year lag between emissions and their full impacts being felt. That’s true for most emissions but large pulses, like massive forest fires can take centuries to work their way through the climate system. Not only is the CO2 released back into the atmosphere in a classic feedback loop, but the carbon sinks that these forests represented are gone, forever.
“Our results suggest that as CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, the full warming effect of an emission may not be felt for several decades, if not centuries.”
There has been much debate about the time lag between when emissions are dumped into the atmosphere and when we feel the full effects.
Warming from Methane is to all intents and purposes effectively immediate, hence some of the shocking heat in the Northern Hemisphere.
Carbon on the other hand can take up to centuries to manifest due to being released at scale.
As the Northern Hemisphere’s forest’s burn huge quantities of carbon are released in large, short pulses.
The chaos we are seeing now doesn’t include the last 20 years emissions at least.
It also debunks the Liar Michael E Mann who recently said, for a dumbed down US audience, that “If we stop emissions now warming will stop”.
The Guardian plays a clever role in pretending to cover the unfolding extinction event by always injecting some form of “If we just start now”. I’ve been hearing that nonsense for decades. No corporate media will tell us the whole truth, we only get the edited highlights. ““We are currently losing species at a faster rate than in any of Earth’s past extinction events. It is probable that we are in the first phase of another, more severe mass extinction,” he said. “We cannot predict the tipping point that will send ecosystems into total collapse, but it is an inevitable outcome if we do not reverse biodiversity loss.” “Ecosystem collapse ‘inevitable’ unless wildlife losses reversed.”
“The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is often attacked for being too strident in its warnings about global warming. But a subset of critics charges just the opposite: that the organization is too conservative in its analysis and predictions.”
“The newest criticism of the IPCC is launched by a team that includes James Hansen, possibly the world’s best-known climate scientist. And while his group could be accused of cherry-picking, it picks the most important cherry by confronting a key conclusion of the IPCC: that the world will be more or less okay if people keep total global temperature from climbing more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which can be done by limiting humanity’s cumulative CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels to about 1000 gigatons. That’s the conclusion expressed in the panel’s newest study, the Fifth Assessment Report. (The 3000-page IPCC behemoth won’t be released until next fall, but the preliminary text was leaked nearly a year ago, and the revision process is taking place largely in public.) And the 2-degree temperature goal has been cited in international agreements dating back to the mid-1990s.”
“The reality, though, is worse than the IPCC says, according to a new policy paper by Hansen, the longtime head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and 17 fellow authors. The paper, published today on the website PLOS One, argues that to keep future generations safe from the worst effects of climate change, the world needs to aim for no more than a 1 degree Celsius temperature rise over preindustrial levels. That would require the world to limit total fossil fuel CO2 emissions to about 500 gitatons—and we’ve already put 384 GtC into the atmosphere, according to the authors.”
What looks like, on the face of it, a good article from Popular Mechanics it implies that even 1C is possible and that we still have a “Carbon Budget”, clearly that is nonsense, and we are broke, ie; we have zero carbon budget. Climate Scientists: IPCC Is Wrong—We Need a 1-Degree Limit on Warming
Professor Guy McPherson and I have been crucified for the last decade for pointing out what for us is a clear as day. The overriding issue is the rate of change the planet is going through. “As every ecologist knows, and apparently very few other people, the rate of environmental change is among the most important factors controlling the continued survival of individuals, populations, and species. If the environment occupied by an individual or a species changes, then the individual or the species must change. Evolution by natural selection is typically a relatively slow process, requiring at least one generation and usually many generations to ensure adaptation. For species such as Homo sapiens, our ability to procreate comes at a relatively late age, thereby guaranteeing a minimum of a few decades for adaptation to occur.”
Science Snippets: On the Rate of Environmental Change
The Convergence of the Next El Niño–Southern Oscillation & the Arctic Sea Ice Minimum
To get the most from this article drill down into the embedded links. When reading corporate media, remember they have share prices to maintain, keeping you and your children in the dark is a cynical economic decision. Feel free to add your own comments below and subscribe to the blog to join the crew on this final voyage. Brace for imminent impact.
“I have reported on the dire impacts of global peak oil at guymcpherson.com for many years. My reports from August 2007 onward indicate the potential for peak oil to terminate industrial civilization. Information I discovered a few years later indicates that stopping or even slowing industrial activity will cause our extinction. Our extinction could result from a reduction in aerosol masking or the meltdown of some of the world’s nuclear facilities. The latter phenomenon would cause stratospheric ozone to be stripped away, thereby causing extremely rapid planetary heating. Again, I have reported these findings previously in this space. Responses to my freely available work, rooted in evidence, have included denial, non-evidentiary argumentation, and a coordinated defamation campaign that effectively removed me from public service. But enough about me.”
“A reduction in aerosol masking has caused regional increases in temperature that have led to regional increases in precipitation, as indicated by peer-reviewed research I have shared in this space. Fortunately, these impacts have not yet gone global. Rather, they have remained regional in scope, beginning in the area around Wuhan, China, where the pandemic broke out. Regional increases in temperature and subsequent increases in precipitation followed the pandemic to India, Europe, and the northeastern United States.” All of the analysis above is via Professor Guy McPherson’s Substack post Titled: Science Snippets: Global Peak Oil Remains an Existential Threat
Science Snippets: Global Peak Oil Remains an Existential Threat
Colleagues and I in the dynamic group Peak Oil have previously debated this subject. Join us for the latest developments as we circle the drain of Peak Oil triggered collapse.
Readers of this blog know that I concentrate on the climate and extinction crises and the contemporaneous issue of the re-rise of fascism and unfolding collapse. Collapse isn’t an event, it’s a process, a process that is clearly underway. Aotearoa New Zealand has just closed it’s one and only oil refinery, yes, you read that right! I filled out an Official Information Act submission to find out what are NZ’s strategic reserves. The government department responsible refused to divulge what we have in reserve! We are led by Donkeys. Not having a refinery means we’d suffer societal collapse in a matter of weeks of a blockade of our territorial waters being enforced, by whoever, “Friend or Foe”. Remember France was supposedly our ally when they blew up the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior murdering Fernando Pereira in downtown Tamaki Makaurau. The Insanity of Aotearoa New Zealand Closing it’s One and Only Oil Refinery
A Metaphor for a Dying Planet. I’ve completed 16 ocean passages in the Pacific Ocean on small yachts between 37 and 75 feet. More than half of them as skipper. I sailed 5000miles in the 37-footer at an average speed of 4/5knots! Surfing the boat down 15 metre ocean swells at double our hull speed, accompanied by Dolphins and Pilot Whales, followed by an 800-mile sail down my beloved Great Barrier Reef, diving every day for 6 weeks before crossing the Tasman Sea via Lord Howe Island and back to Aotearoa New Zealand. I sailed a transit of the Mediterranean Sea from Gibraltar to Greece, pre-GPS satellite navigation. That 1200 miles doesn’t count as an “Ocean Passage” as it’s an inland sea.
Every skipper has to have a plan in the back of her or his mind, how they would act when the vessel is sinking, on fire or otherwise compromised and how to respond, bearing in mind everyone is looking to you for answers and some have daggers in their eyes and no doubt in their pockets or life jackets! I’ve spent 4 decades considering my response.
I’ve saved a few yachts in distress, each were frightening and the challenge dangerous. Shit can go wrong very fast on the ocean. Especially when it has already gone wrong, and you’re flung into the rescue, often without a moment’s preparation, often during extreme weather events, once after an evening of Scotch Whiskey I was roused from my slumber and into the storm we rode! My rescue of Sea Toy was a cracker! First came the rescue and after the Shark Attack! Shark Attack at Minerva Reef I once asked a mate to come as crew on one of my ocean passages and he replied, “No way Hester, shit always happens on your watch”. So, it seems!
The Sinking of the Titanic (Hour by Hour)
Had I been the Skipper of the Titanic, this is what I would have done, immediately after the untimely rendezvous with the iceberg.
What Elon Musk would call an “Unscheduled Disassembly” began unfolding within minutes of impact!!! Orwell and Huxley would be cackling like banshees at that double speak!
Your first responsibility to the passengers and crew, is to burst the crew into action, first on mitigation of the immediate danger and then to come up with an ongoing strategy to protect the vessel, passengers and crew. Instilling confidence and leadership at this crucial moment is imperative. Everyone needs to be reassured the captain and crew have this ‘under control’ or at least have a “Plan”. Leadership is imperative.
The captain, the vessel designer and the engineers knew that because of the Titanic not having full height bulkheads, an omission due to allowing “Bean Counters” to decide how safe to make the vessel, that the boat was doomed! Did they tell everyone? Of course, not. Remember the capitalists behind the construction jinxed the vessel by describing it as being “Unsinkable”! No other skipper in the history of our species would vomit up that hubris.
My next ‘command’ would be to release everyone from steerage, otherwise known as “Cattle Class” and ask them to assemble in the massive First Class lounges. I’d have food waiting for them. First, we divide our “Human Resources”, how I despise that notion, into teams. Nurses here, tradesmen here, families, the disabled, the elderly and children here.
Then I instruct all the tradesmen and able bodied to start ripping down the satin curtains and their miles of curtain rope and by combining the deck furniture and squabs, etc together, we start making rafts to be strung between the lifeboats that designated members of the crew are launching. The aforementioned accountants decided that they only needed lifeboats for the first-class vultures/passengers so a battle for the life rafts was preordained, by design. The ‘second-class’ passengers were caged below deck.
When the Titanic sunk the seas were dead calm, pardon the pun. The opportunity to successfully save the vast majority of the passengers was at hand but the ongoing class war killed most of them, including the wealthiest of them, because the ruling class, whose ego’s had sunk the ship, only thought of themselves. They died as a direct result of that class war. Now to get to the real point of the story:
We are on Planet Earth, which should have been called “Planet Ocean”, heading rapidly into the abyss of abrupt climate change and extinction. If I were the skipper of this ship, I’d let everybody know that the ships on fire, that’s clear to see and it’s sinking “Faster than previously thought” and that no one is coming to the rescue. In my own country, Aotearoa New Zealand, as a government policy, I would buy as much staple foods as possible on the global markets and stockpile them in multiple “Strategic Reserves” around the country, employing local rural people as their own “Civil Defence” force, community involvement is imperative. Borrow the fucking money, if necessary, money will clearly be worthless soon, as will be debt. After New Zealand recently closed down it’s only oil refinery, yes you read that correctly, I’d buy as much diesel as I could store, old oil tankers are an immediate way to store fuel, in an emergency. During the Covid lockdowns oil had a negative value at times. I submitted an Official Information Act request to find out what are Aotearoa New Zealand’s strategic reserves of petrol, diesel and grains and the faux liberal Labour government declined to answer my request! That’s how insane our predicament has become! Oil crash explained: How are negative oil prices even possible? The Insanity of Aotearoa New Zealand Closing It’s Only Oil Refinery To understand the importance of diesel read Alice Friedemann’s epic book “When the Trucks Stop Running”.
Because no one will admit how far over the cliff we have careened, our moronic ‘leaders’ are preparing for a world that simply no longer exists. Fortunes will be made, and millions wasted on ridiculous attempts to hold back the rising seas. As Paul Henry said to Guy McPherson when interviewing him at TV Three “We may as well shout at the tide not to come in” Humans ‘don’t have 10 years’ left thanks to climate change – scientist
Climate change has always been about the class war and racism. 50 years ago my dear departed dad said to me “If we don’t overthrow capitalism, it will make the planet uninhabitable”. Here we are, staring down the barrel of abrupt, non-linear climate change with governments worldwide continuing to target growth as an indicator of “Progress” when in reality it’s killing us and quite possibly all complex life on our beleaguered planet.
Infinite growth on a finite planet is clearly unsustainable. Edward Abbey the “Desert Anarchist” said “Infinite growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”. Planet Ocean has terminal cancer, and we are the carrier. The Pain You Feel Is Capitalism and the Living Planet Dying.
“The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite…”
As World War Three progresses with the proxy war in Ukraine grinding the nation and its war weary people into dust, we need to pay close attention to the second front. The systematic demolition of US Dollar Hegemony.
We are witnessing epochal changes in the global economy with the independent states, centred around the BRIC’s nations, now trading oil in their own currencies. This development represents an existential threat not ‘just’ for US Dollar hegemony but for US military and industrial hegemony in what has rapidly become a multi-polar world. China and to a lesser extent Russia are masters of “Soft Power”. The controlled demolition of US dollar hegemony is clearly underway.
Let’s take a field trip to the frontlines. Batton down the hatches, it’s going to be one hell of a transition, let’s hope we survive it! I would rate our chances as slim because of the mendacity existing in the USA and the impossibility of it meeting it’s debt obligations once the Greenback is no longer the worlds reserve currency.
“Brian Berletic and Danny Haiphong discuss the HUGE implications of Saudi Arabia taking steps to join China in forging peace in the Middle East.”
“The BRICS collective, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is working on a common currency in an attempt to ditch the US dollar and push back against America’s dominance. The move comes as Moscow and Beijing call for de-dollarisation in the face of Western sanctions”. Dumping the Dollar: Will a new BRICS currency replace the US currency for trade?
“As the United States combats a recent flood of countries ‘de-dollarizing‘ – trading commodities in other currencies, the last thing that was needed was French President Emanuel Macron amplifying this message.“ If Macron keeps talking like that, I can feel an “Arab Spring” being forced on France.
“March 31, it was reported that France became the first European country in the West to sign a trade agreement allowing payment in yuan instead of dollars or euros. The state-owned company Total, the world’s second-largest LNG giant, was the first to carry the flag of de-dollarization, signing the first LNG purchase agreement with a Chinese state-owned oil company to pay in yuan, while the gas was imported from the United Arab Emirates. This new landscape in global energy markets and international reserve asset space now suggests that the role of the U.S. dollar is being weakened or shared, especially as landmarks of de-dollarization by several major Middle Eastern oil-producing countries, represented by Saudi Arabia, Iran and others, continue to emerge and be exploited. The European Central Bank, Switzerland, Japan, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the Bank for International Settlements have formed a digital currency development group to bypass the centrality of the dollar. The SHTA trade facility being developed in Switzerland to help the Iranian central bank settle cross-border has also carried out a number of international transactions that bypass the dollar settlement. Switzerland has officially started the process of building a yuan hub, replacing some of its dollar reserves with yuan by selling off dollars in the international reserve space.”
I take the same position as the “view of the highly respected French anthropologist, Emmanuel Todd.” ” We are now one errant missile away from World War III. Some go so far as to argue that World War III has already begun.” De-Dollarization. A discussion at the Valdai Club in Rome.
We have never been in a more dangerous position that we are today, the Cuban Missile Crisis notwithstanding. During the Cuban Missile Crisis all of the parties were at least sane. I would question that today looking at the pathology existing on Capitol Hill.
The USA is broke, and the end of US dollar hegemony is clearly underway. Imagine, a nuclear armed bankrupt whose normal reaction to a ‘problem’ is to bomb it!!!!!
All declining empires in history lash out at their victims and take their vassal states down with them, tragically this declining empire is nuclear armed and controlled by the sociopaths of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.
We are witnessing the end of an era, or should I say the end of an error?
It’s hard for me to not see this leading to an armed conflict between the collapsing “Empire of Chaos and the new Russia/China led axis! The Empire of Chaos phrase is attributed to the wonderful geo-political analyst Pepe Escobar. “The third and the final stage on the new economic order transition will involve a creation of a new digital payment currency founded through an international agreement based on principles of transparency, fairness, goodwill and efficiency.” “I expect that the model of such a monetary unit that we developed will play its role at this stage. A currency like this can be issued by a pool of currency reserves of BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India and China] countries, which all interested countries will be able to join”. Pepe Escobar: On the Dawn of a New Global Financial System
“To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” ~ #HenryKissinger
“Countries worldwide are dropping the US dollar: De-dollarization in China, Russia, Brazil, ASEAN”.
Ben Norton’s courageous work can be found at Geopolitical Economy Dot Com German foreign minister: ‘We are fighting a war against Russia’ “We are fighting a war against Russia”, Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told the Council of Europe. “We can fight this war only together” she said, calling to send tanks and more weapons to Ukraine.”
If the German Foreign Minister thinks their country is at war with Russia, why wouldn’t we?
I’ve previously covered on this blog the environmental implications of all this warmongering: ““U.S. Military World’s Largest Polluter – Hundreds Of Bases Gravely Contaminated Producing more hazardous waste than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined, the U.S. Department of Defense has left its toxic legacy throughout the world in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, pesticides, defoliants like Agent Orange and lead, among other pollutants.” “One of the most recent testaments to the U.S. military’s horrendous environmental record is Iraq.” “U.S. military action there has resulted in the desertification of 90 percent of Iraqi territory, crippling the country’s agricultural industry and forcing it to import more than 80 percent of its food. The U.S.’ use of depleted uranium in Iraq during the Gulf War also caused a massive environmental burden for Iraqis. In addition, the U.S. military’s policy of using open-air burn pits to dispose of waste from the 2003 invasion has caused a surge in cancer among U.S. servicemen and Iraqi civilians alike.” Militarism’s Role in the Sixth and Possibly Last ‘Great’ Extinction
What happened the last time a major oil producing nation decided to walk away from the Greenback? “Before the fall of Tripoli and his untimely demise, Gaddafi was trying to introduce a single African currency linked to gold. Following in the foot steps of the late great pioneer Marcus Garvey who first coined the term ”United States of Africa”. Gaddafi wanted to introduce and only trade in the African gold Dinar – a move which would have thrown the world economy into chaos.” Libya: Ten Things About Gaddafi They Don’t Want You to Know
The Empire of Chaos demonised Colonel Gaddafi because he was the greatest Pan-African in history imho. He was murdered because he was creating a unified African Union. The colonial powers run by their corporations would have none of it, so they had him murdered, much to the delight of the monster Hillary Clinton. His legacy in Africa will outlive the Greenback.
“Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War:
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 