X Rebellion scientists v Jem Bendel’s Deep Adaptation

for your consideration….

Excerpts from Robert Hunziker’s July 17, 2020The Sky Is Falling – Yes – No’, counterpunch.org

“The sky is falling is one of the more disturbing thoughts in society today, as to whether climate change is on a fast track collision course with doomsday amidst a collapsing society.

In that regard, according to the details of a scathing review by ScientistsWarning.org (“SW”) of Jem Bendell’s wildly popular “Deep Adaptation” the answer is no, not yet. Society is not ready to keel over, as postulated in Bendell’s paper.

Whew! Climate change handwringers, sleepless nights, can take a deep breath, exhale and relax based upon the critique of Bendell’s very popular paper, which crystal balls the “end to society” within only decades, or less, depending.”

Excerpts fromThe faulty science, doomism, and flawed conclusions of Deep Adaptation; The claim that runaway climate change has made societal collapse inevitable is not only wrong – it undermines the cause of the climate movement’, Thomas Nicholas, Galen Hall, Colleen Schmidt, 14 July 2020, scientistswarning.org and oddly enough: opendemocraacy.net

“As members of Extinction Rebellion and other climate movements, we have been overjoyed at the success of our movement in ringing the alarm about climate and ecological breakdown, and in applying pressure to the UK government, as well as other governments worldwide. As members of the science community, we have also found comfort in a movement dedicated to telling a truth that has for decades been obscured by corporate public relations campaigns and misinformation.

Many scientists support Extinction Rebellion or are active members, lending some immediate authority to our message of climate and ecological emergency. The need for peaceful civil disobedience has been explicitly supported by over a thousand scientists. Arrested Extinction Rebellion activists received support during their trials from high-profile scientists acting as expert witnesses. As scientists ourselves, we support our movement’s goal of halting greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss rapidly and equitably, but we also know that doing so successfully requires clarity about what science can and cannot tell us. Such clarity is especially important now. In the past few years we have seen a troubling trend: a few figures in the climate movement using science — or what looks like science — to justify increasingly dire and prophetic, but ultimately unsupported, claims about the future.” […]

Hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded ‘Deep Adaptation’ and the paper has significantly impacted the ideology and strategy of climate movement organizations like Extinction Rebellion. People have changed their life plans based in large part on this paper’s predictions. It is therefore past time to show that Deep Adaptation is wrong — not least because Bendell’s brand of doomism relies heavily on misinterpreted climate science that undermines the credibility of his claims. In fact, Deep Adaptation consistently cherry-picks data, cites false experts, puts forward logical fallacies, and disregards robust scientific consensus. Bendell defends himself by offering unsupported reasons for activists and the public to distrust mainstream climate science. In all of these regards, Deep Adaptation mimics the practices that deniers of global warming have wielded for decades.”

Back to Robert Hunziker:

“Of considerable interest to SW and subject of its sharpest criticism, the core of Deep Adaptation’s argument is dependent upon two feedback loops (1) Arctic ice melt and (2) methane release from permafrost. According to SW, Bendell’s reliance upon those two feedback loops triggering and cascading the climate system into hells’ fiery hole is not a correct assessment of scientific fact. It’s only speculation. […]

“Collapsing permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic is happening 70 years earlier than scientists expected, to wit: “Observed maximum thaw depths at our sites are already exceeding those projected to occur by 2090” by Louise M. Farquharson et al, Climate Change Drives Widespread and Rapid Thermokarst Development in Very Cold Permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic, Geophysical Research Letters, June 10, 2019.”

Also from Robert Hunziker, July 24, 2020, ‘Thawing Arctic Permafrost

“It’s no surprise that first prize, or the blue ribbon, for exceeding 2°C above baseline goes to the Arctic with permafrost that covers 25% of the Northern Hemisphere. Recognition is long overdue, as it’s been totally neglected far too long by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This crucial nugget of knowledge comes by way of a recent virtual science session (1:27:50 in length) sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences.

The webcast is entitled: Thawing Arctic Permafrost: Regional and Global Impacts, hosted by John P. Holdren, Teresa & John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Fortunately, he provides what amount to a Cliffs Notes transcript, including:

“According to Dr. Natali, the Arctic temperature anomaly is already 2°C warmer than the long-term average. The consequences include sea ice loss, melting of Greenland ice sheets, and permafrost thaw.

Permafrost thaw is monitored by boreholes drilled at depths of 20 meters (66 feet) throughout the Arctic. Thus, measured temperature changes avoid seasonal dynamics. These deep permafrost temperatures, in some instances, have been measured for up to 40 years. Results: Permafrost temps are markedly warming across the board, regardless of season.

Of note, Northern Hemisphere permafrost contains 1100-1500 billion tonnes of carbon in the form of ancient organic matter. For comparison purposes, this is twice the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere, and it is three times as much carbon as in the world’s forest biomass.
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And here’s the distressing part (one of many): Fieldwork by scientists proved that permafrost is already a “net emitter of CO2,” this after thousands of years as a “carbon sink,” but no longer! As such, thousands of years of one of the largest carbon sinks on Earth erased by recklessness of human-generated over-heating ecosystems.

Not only that, according to Natali, permafrost thaw alone is equivalent to ~25% of the IPCC’s allowable emissions to stay below 1.5°C. Yet, the IPCC does not include permafrost in its carbon budget, meaning there’s a very nasty surprise down the line for the rah-rah climate mitigation crowd.
………………………………………………..
“Dr. Anthony has done fieldwork throughout Russia with a lot of work in Siberia (a hothouse nowadays). Her research focuses on thermokarst, lake formation, and greenhouse gas methane.

Per Dr. Anthony, current climate models in the world do not include carbon emissions from thermokarst lakes. Yet, they’re plentiful with millions of thermokarst lakes expanding and releasing methane all across the Arctic.
…………………………………………………
Meanwhile, after years of handwringing and gushing teardrops of green sympathizers, the world is still 80% dependent upon fossil fuels, a fact revealed by Dr. Holdren at the close of his presentation. That’s very troubling.

According to Dr. Anthony: The East Siberian Arctic Sea is a place where “we’ve seen really large numbers of CH4 [methane molecule] release.”

The following was not discussed in the webcast: Temperatures were recently 30-34C (86-93F) in the East Siberian Arctic Sea (ESAS) region, which region is equivalent in size to Germany France Gr Br Italy and Japan combined and with 75% of the area in 50-80m, shallow waters, allowing quick and easy CH4 release from the subsea permafrost without oxidation. Drilling by other scientists has discovered enormous quantities of frozen methane, and noticeable thinning of the subsea permafrost. Trusted sources that closely follow CH4 (methane) emissions in the ESAS region are of the opinion: “It may be out of control.” But, it’s important to note that’s anecdotal information.

Also, disconcertingly, the heaviest season for methane release into the atmosphere has only just begun.

Making matters even worse, at the Top of the World, Arctic Ocean sea surface temperatures, which this time of year are typically 0.3°C (32°F) were recently 12°C (54°F). That’s downright spooky!

Postscript: Scientists have identified the first active methane gas leak in Antarctica, announced July 22nd, discovered by researchers led by Andrew Thurber/Oregon State University, who commented: “I find it incredibly concerning.” (Source: Andrew R. Thurber, et al, Riddles in the Cold: Antarctic Endemism and Microbial Succession Impact Methane Cycling in the Southern Ocean, The Royal Society, July 22, 2020).

Which nations burn the most fossil fuels?  Resource watch says:

“Nearly 15 billion metric tons of fossil fuels are consumed every year. Three countries use more fossil fuels than the rest of the world combined: China, the United States and India. Together, these countries consume 54 percent of the world’s fossil fuels by weight, according to the Global Material Flow Database developed by the UN Environment Programme.”

And the largest carbon footprint on the planet is always noted as ‘the US Military’.

As of July 29, RT.com is reporting reports that over 2.5 million hectares of forest are burning in several regions of Siberia.

World sea temperatures, updated daily. 

SPEI global drought map, updated at the beginning of every month.

Daily CO2 earth: July 27, 413.36 ppm, down slightly from April: 416.18, and this during global  lockdown

By any site’s account, the Amazonian Rain Forest (the planet’s lungs) has been disappearing due to drought and wildfire, subsurface water is decreasing, and is accelerating under Jair Bolsonaro’s surge in mining and agribusiness.  ‘The Amazon is at a tipping point.’

A number of civil societies are suing Bolsonaro, as Brazil’s 60% of the rain forest is turning into a carbon emitter, rather than a carbon sink.

Small wonder that so many are seeking the loving embrace, comfort, and psycho-spiritual guidance from the Deep Adaptation collective as this tragedy gallops further into runaway chaos.

More another day on Jem Bendell’s answers to critics, new posts, and his collective.

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

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We are on the road to hell. We have built a massive civilization engine that is changing this planet on an increasingly faster schedule. Civilization didn't expand on a large scale until the Holocene Epoch, where temperatures were so moderate and predictable that the planet could support large scale open agriculture, which is critical to a civilization of billions of inhabitants. As we inexorably warm up the biosphere we pass tripping points where the actual state of the climate is switched. The killer, literally, will be when we can't grow enough food for the planet's population. Plants slow down their growth and they do unfortunate things, like refuse to flower. After peak temperatures of 30 deg C crop output begins to decline. Both the US and Western Europe growing regions are right in that range today.
The disturbance to the climate is on a huge scale. We have about 1000 gigatons of excess CO2 in the atmosphere plus we are adding about 40 gigatons more per year. There are very few human endeavors that deal in that scale, except fossil fuels. We could almost solve this problem technically, but we are nowhere socially. Economic expansion, the need for energy 24/7, capitalism, the desire to make war, and to not disturb the political order are keeping us from commiting to the large scale projects that we need to solve this problem. The technical side of the problem is a challenge at this point. There is no clear road map to getting us there. How do we produce the terawatt hours of 24/7 energy that an expanding world demands and not emit CO2? How do we sequester the 40 gigatons emitted each year and clean up the 1000 gigatons already in the atmosphere?

Here's the killer- We need to get back to 375 ppm of CO2 to return to the Holocene epoch to be safe. And in this process probably need to go lower to rebuild ice on the planet and safely preserve mid-term carbon storage. The planet is a big state machine and we need to return it to a favorable stable state, fairly soon. I do not think that there is an alternative. We know what worked, how do we get there? I think that alternative paths have high probabilities of failure.

I'm not at all confident that wind and solar can do the job. I don't see how they can scale and where we are going to get the storage required to make them 24/7 energy sources. If we are serious about this project then we have to discuss the elephant in the room, nuclear. Reaction to this is a big emotional negative. Well, do we need it or not? If we do need it and you don't want it because you are emotionally concerned about the risks then the game is over. Can we make fusion work in a short timescale? Maybe. I don't know. There are lots of new promising projects. Here's my point, outline a path to success and show us how it works.

Same issues with carbon sequestration. I did a paper project to sequester all of the 1000 excess gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere. The good news is that it's possible. The bad news is that it is a massive project in size and cost. It cannot be financed in a capitalist economy. There is no opportunity to sell some byproduct except in the margins. It has to be financed as we do the war machine. But we can't have both, and that would require a massive change in human behavior.

I think that it's really going to come down to incremental adaptation in a world constantly changing for the worse. That implies winners and losers and constant war.

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Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.

wendy davis's picture

@The Wizard

comment; an essay in its own right. you've covered so many ingredients and vectors that i'll need to answer in parts after i paste your opening thoughts into my word document and and paragraph breaks.

yes, the planet is on the road to hell, but of course it didn't have to be this way, esp. due to capitalist consumer nations. growing enough to feed the planetary populace is already a major problem: se the global drought ma, and i didn't even include any global potable water maps. i'll take you at your word on temps and flowering, as you seem to know your stuff. but a few things about agriculture in the US:

most is factory ag, and many crops are GMO, thank you bill gates. the 'breadbasket' aquifers have been vastly depleted, and most are poisoned already. the central valley of CA has been over-farmed so much that the elevation has dropped a foot-two feet a year, and while drought is a culprit, farmers did more wells to water their crops. i have no idea how the water tables are in europe, for instance, nor the precipitation variables in these hot times. our SW corner of CO has had about two inches of rain in the past two months, one and a quarter of them last week in our 'summer monsoons'.

my guess is that most crops's flowers also need to be pollinated by bees, which are in short supply at this point, including spraying fields with pesticides. but i do remember that corn ears won't fill out in high temps, which is one reason that i'd thought even fifteen years ago that global warming might lead to globally cooperative ag might fly, but not so much, eh?
and then the crops would have to be shipped by sea, likely refrigerated, which invention for railroad cars and ships made another huge difference to BigAg.

but i do get a boot out of many here and at other sites talking about growing our own food, forgetting how many climate zones and altitudes, and reliable growing seasons actually comprise the US.

now i'd had to take a crash course to recall the various forms of carbon sequestration and storage, and had forgotten there were two distinct types: biological and geologic. which sort did your paper imagine and cost out?

part II on wind, solar, and nuclear energy as i'm able, and thank you, Wizard.

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wendy davis's picture

@The Wizard

one of the big issues has always been that ‘renewable energy’ is not the same thing as ‘sustainable energy’. including: what sort of carbon footprint would/does it take to build wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear plants, and the minerals (lithium and other rare earths chokeholds, plus ‘resource wars’) needed for storage capacity for solar?

same for electric cars and trains as a panacea: the electricity is generated somewhere, and most likely either either by coal or hydroelectric plants, but building new dams for the latter is very questionable.

now china leads the way in building solar panels, but that’s due to the nations long reliance on coal, and changing over massively doesn’t look promising in time.

nuclear: is it actually sustainable given there’s no safe way to store the spent fuel rods?

it may be a different animal, but hanford nuclear station is still leaking some of the 56 million gallons of radioactive sludge stores there, and it goes...everywhere down hill, with no stabilization in sight (nor the funds nor political will to do so). and of course the DOE’s carlsbad WIPP site just houses ‘low-level radioactive waste’, doesn’t it? like from rocky flats? fusion i know zip about, save for many claim that it’s *safe* nuclear power.

yes, changes will be incremental, if at all, and yes, most of us will lose, some will win, as with the long forecast coming global depression.

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Roy Blakeley's picture

@wendy davis My solar panels, for example, supposedly reach a break even point (produce as much energy as it takes to make them) in about two years. In reality it will depend on where you live, but one reaches break even pretty soon. If they are made using energy from coal-fired power plants, the break-even point will be much later. Good insulation is relatively cheap and has relatively low energy input. I have a fairly large house, but with 5.5 kw of solar panels, a decent air conditioner and good insulation, my electric bills are very low (like $35 for July with $15 of that in fixed costs that have nothing to do with electric usage).

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wendy davis's picture

@Roy Blakeley

i suppose solar panels aren't equal, either, in terms of life spans, nor are storage batteries. but good on you for running such an energy efficient operation. we built a small, very well-insulated (although i cannae remember the R values right now) passive solar house before much was known about it, and oooof, did we overdo the 'gain' side of the equation!

around here, few have air conditioners, as it's so dry that evaporative coolers work well.

our electric co. is a co-op, but i'm sure prices per KW hour vary greatly. PG&E in CA seems to be a rotten organization. non-sequiter, there, sorry, but 'known for starting fires' pinged into my head.

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@Roy Blakeley

break even point would be that at which the energy required to produce *and* dispose of the panels at the end of their working life, no?

An issue here in Japan - my city is rated the best in Japan for solar (and is likely best for wind power also). Lots of rooftop solar, arrays of panels shoehorned into vacant lots and unused farm fields plus some large-scale arrays covering what used to be tidal wetlands.

Around a mid-sized nuke plant's capacity added in just a few years.

Aside from the impact on land that otherwise might be productive in other ways, the issue of how the panels will ultimately be disposed of has been kicked down the road, recycling being currently impracticable...

Wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of these sites end up "orphaned" with taxpayers footing the bill for cleanup.

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What will have the most impact on society is the rate of change of the climate. If we have a hundred years to prepare and adapt that will be much more feasible than scrabbling to survive after a rapid decade-rate change.

Wendy, I'm glad you brought this topic to the fore. Thank you.

Without having read the paper or its criticisms in depth, I lean towards the Deep Adaptation scenario of runaway positive feedback cycles. Real-world observations of ice melt and temperature anomalies for the last few years have always exceeded expectations, and we are discovering new sources of greenhouse gas emissions, e.g. your mention of thermokarst lakes. As the saying goes, reality is what takes you by surprise.

You mention Arctic water temperatures, but didn't they have a heat wave a couple months ago in Siberia where it exceeded 100F air temperature in the Arctic Circle? Siberia is melting. Infrastructure is sinking into what was once permafrost.

Deforestation is accelerating, especially now that Bolsonaro has recovered from his (I still suspect fake) bout of COVID-19.

If the change is a non-linear transition to a step function driven by previously un-modeled and/or unexpectedly rapid feedback, there's not much we can do to prevent it. But we may as well put a fraction of the resources and energy which we put into cars, jets, ships, and tanks into efforts to slow the rate of change. We should devote a goodly proportion of our resources into the "X Rebellion" fight-the-curve model.

We should hedge our bets. We would be very wise to decentralize critical aspects of society: food, energy, medicine, clothes, etc. We must not depend on a cross-Pacific supply chain for essentials like medical materiel. Food, as well, should not depend on cross-continental routes from farm to table, although the ability to shift resources rapidly over thousands of miles could save a lot of lives and communities. Decentralized and distributed nodes tend to be much more robust than highly centralized networks, as in industrial process control theory. This goes for food, for energy, for the "goods" we need and for the ones we deeply desire, like medicines and music players. What I'm arguing for here is to put a screeching halt to our inertia (yes, motion has inertia) and make a deep adaptation. I strongly suspect we'll need much more than even a heroic effort at "sustainability". If I'm wrong, what have we lost? We'll have built a more robust and probably more enjoyable society. If I'm right, we get a chance to avoid mega-suffering.

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

near yakutia, russia, at latitude 73 degrees N, iirc (i'd even found a graphic to demonstrate that location a couple weeks ago). their forest fire fighters had decided to let the fire burn, but as three other regions are on fire, local citizens are petitioning to put it out, dues to the choking air quality (my RT link).

rate of change, oh, my yes. but the evidence seems to be in that the feedback loops of methane clathrate (hydrate), plus the melting permafrost emissions and no longer white, bright, and reflective of sun rays...doesn't bode well. and as you indicate, the rate of change is vastly outpacing predictive models.

decentralizing would be a great idea, for food, akin to the 'locavore movement'. yanno what we'd eat here save for end of summer produce? cows, pinto beans, and wheat. ; )
but a you say, high speed transportation can be a big advantage in life-saving situations.

i'd been musing about the Wizard's End War, pump the money into carbon sequestration, etc. in the middle of the night, and once again:

It's this #ShitHoleNation that is not only one of the big 3 fossil fuel burners, but is also the greatest exporter of War, Violence, and Terrorism (war by other means, sanctions, etc.) on the planet.

i'm agnostic about turkey and what remains of libya, but were it not for the US, would any other nations need such weapons of defensive war against the US? thug pompeo is purportedly seeking 'regime change' in china now, as he and his CIA/special ops flacks have been trying in iran?

sorry for the digression; i'll hush now and make some toast and address some birthday cards.

i couldn't find a single source that demonstrated that the antarctic ice sheets are also thawing, and as i understand it...from below.

but yes, mitigate when practical. and jem bendell agrees. ; )

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@wendy davis

We're spending more than the next ten countries on guns and bombs, in the name of security. Where we don't already have enemies, we create them. If we used half of that treasure mitigating climate change in an attempt to slow the rate of change, we would be far more secure.

But even that effort might be wasted. I think we've lost our chance to mitigate rapid climate change. However, many of the things we would do in that effort, such as distributed solar power, would help us survive climate catastrophe by making our energy supply more robust and less prone to failure. A solar center in post-Maria Puerto Rico opened up communications and saved lives. So let's go with what I'll call X-Rebellion efforts; they're not mutually exclusive with deep adaptation resilience to catastrophe.

You mention the Antarctic. Huge portions of the oceanic ice shelves are collapsing due to being melted from underneath by warming ocean currents. These ice shelves are the brakes preventing the land-based shelves/glaciers from sliding into the ocean and causing massive flooding from sea level rise. There was a lot of hoopla this past year of the first scientific expedition to actually reach and study particular ice shelves. We still know relatively little of Antarctic ice dynamics; our models are based on sparse information, which is why we keep getting surprised by reality.

The Greenland ice sheets are sliding off due to meltwater from the surface draining down and lubricating the glaciers. This would be the Inconvenient Truth scenario of a sudden pulse of cold fresh water interrupting the Atlantic current loop. Large parts of Europe will freeze, not to mention who-knows-what will happen to rainfall and storm patterns.

Here's a tidbit from Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-16/americans-tear-up-old...
The article mentions bread machine scarcity. We were lucky to find one in a thrift shop (hands too arthritic to knead).
Just the disruption in the consumption cycle due to a few months of pandemic is killing farmers. Imagine long-term droughts and flood events (hmm, 2019? How long did it take for Missouri River bottomland to dry out?).

We need to stop wasting resources playing silly dominance games. It's quite possible that the pandemic will break the empire and let the rest of the world go on with resilience.

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

"imaginary enemies", and oh yes they are. the Axis of Evil nations are now called more honestly "The Great Competitors" as in: challenging Western Hegemony.

your off-the-cuff explanation or the antarctic ice sheets is as wsws had described it, but with no linked studies, i hadn't brought it. and yes, the study, iirc, had used submersibles to gather the evidence.

i suppose various communities could fund solar power as in puerto rico; didn't the radio station come back on line to notify citizens of protocols, areas not to travel, medical help available and so on?

as to what you'll call x-rebellion efforts, i'm not really sure what they are, as per their castigations against jem and deep adaptation in the OP: undermining their nonviolent efforts supported by a thousand scientists', etc. is their funding that's at stake? the sole kinetic effort (lol) i'd seen noted was a film of a mess of XRs atop an electric train in london (iirc) pelting folks with veggies and fruit as they were waiting to board the train after work. how brilliant! but then i haven't kept up. ; )

farmers (agriculturalists, dunno small or large) are also deprived of the school lunches market, a considerable lot of food...and especially milk.

glad you found a breadmaker at a thrift store; with my crap knees, on 3-loaves-of-bread day here (tues, in fact) i now do at least two sponge risings before the final flour for the gluten formations, making kneading easier and time shorter.

thank you, pindar's revenge.

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@wendy davis
combined with laziness (grin) led to me using the phrase "X-Rebellion efforts". What i refer to is the standard (maybe another poor choice of word; what is now standard?) effort to fix climate change by renewable energy, bringing back rail, reducing air travel, etc.

These steps have their place. The Puerto Rico incident I referred to was described in Naomi Klein's book on the exploitation of Puerto Rico's misery post-Maria, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists. She described a solar-powered community center, a fairly small facility, which allowed people to charge cell phones and run dialysis machines. Even such a small energy center had a significant impact on alleviating problems from the hurricane. The survivability of extreme events would go way up if every block or neighborhood has a house with such capability. At a larger scale, if the power grid had local sources such as community solar installations, the grid would be more able to survive weather/fire/ice-storm impacts. I wish we'd cover all those huge parking lots in solar panel shade.
(BTW, the US can instantly set up command-and-control, communications, and surveillance almost anywhere in the world, but we couldn't air-drop generators, radios and crews ahead of Maria?)

OT - I used an electric mixer in place of kneading for a while. I had a little yeast on hand (for mosquito traps) which I cultured in sugar water to extend it. Lactobacillus is slow! Pandemic adaptation. I learned as I went. Still learning. Gotta have those pizza crusts.

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

than i'd been pinging, then. this was a solar-powered small broadcasting radio tower.

may i say again: the ruling elites decide what they want for us. translation: political will, funding. i really am trying to be philosophical on the "new normals" which may go on devolving until...they're stopped. but i was reading far too much last night and this am. on too many other cases that are afoot, and am allowing myself the stupid luxury of being a but cynical and depressed.

my mixer has bread hooks, and a i'd let my nine-year old sourdough die somehow, i've been making fake sourdough with a bit o' milk soured with vinegar, and a tsp of yeast for 3 loaves.

oh, but hey! congress will delay their summer vacation to pass a new Stim bill! ain't they swell buzzards?

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@wendy davis
Mix an equal amount of flour and water, then soak and mix in a little of your yeast. Allow the mixture to sit until it forms the sourdough sponge. This may take quite awhile the first time. And the starter will continue to improve over time. Your first loaves aren't likely to be very sour. But it should keep getting better.

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@FuturePassed

before this year and the yeast shortage. Actually, I haven't baked much bread since the 80s, very busy most of that time. But I took a shot at making starter last Spring by just mixing some flour and water and letting it stand; it bubbled up soon. I tend to only add a little yeast before letting the dough raise. I don't do multiple raises or anything complicated, and it works for sandwiches. And pizza!
Lotsa stuff online about starter and hooch and feeding. I tend to just remove liquid from the top before feeding. I've made some VERY sour loaves, tempered with rosemary.

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wendy davis's picture

@FuturePassed

i'd made mine the french way: adding to the flour/water mix a C. or so of unwashed organic red grapes, let it stand until the bobbles rise (fermentation), no store yeast at all. dunno how i'd managed to kill if after all those years, either.

why i haven't started a new one is likely complicated by: a new fridge w/ oodles of wasted space (esp. tall things like quart mason jars), increasing holes in my short-term memory, and that i'd killed the last one makes me...kinda nervous, too.

but i'll try to imagine it through again...and see what pops; so i thank you again for helping me to image it, Future Passed. it was indeed tastier! i'd also often added dill seed and weed, but i'm not able to score that seed bulk, although the wonderful local natural foods store owner still allows us to order thru her store, cost plus 15%, as the former owner had. the UNFI catalog, iirc.

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@pindar's revenge

can be very fast, and not always in the direction that broader trends would suggest.

The Dryas cooling periods came on quickly during a period of rapid warming and the effects persisted for centuries - so putting all our bets on "the planet is burning up" may not be the smartest thing to do.

Fully agree with the case you make for decentralization of production and decision making - makes for a far more resilient society - but will have to be fought for as the current elites are all about centralization, with themselves in control.

Decentralization was that I thought the Greens were about originally, but they seem to have lost that thread somewhere along the line.

It seems that there is a recent, compelling case for volcanoes to have initiated the Dryas cooling events:

Global Cooling 13,000 Years Ago Was Caused by Volcanic Eruptions, Not Meteors

But quite a number of other hypotheses have been advanced to explain them and there is no clear explanation why, after cooling persisted for 1300 years (Younger Dryas) that it would end with sudden, dramatic warming...

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magiamma's picture

Just out today from Nature

Past perspectives on the present era of abrupt Arctic climate change

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0860-7

This is the abstract. Cost 8.99$

Abrupt climate change is a striking feature of many climate records, particularly the warming events in Greenland ice cores. These abrupt and high-amplitude events were tightly coupled to rapid sea-ice retreat in the North Atlantic and Nordic Seas, and observational evidence shows they had global repercussions. In the present-day Arctic, sea-ice loss is also key to ongoing warming. This Perspective uses observations and climate models to place contemporary Arctic change into the context of past abrupt Greenland warmings. We find that warming rates similar to or higher than modern trends have only occurred during past abrupt glacial episodes. We argue that the Arctic is currently experiencing an abrupt climate change event, and that climate models underestimate this ongoing warming.

Here’s an article about the study

https://www.norceresearch.no/en/news/arctic-warming-satisfies-criteria-f...

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Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation

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wendy davis's picture

@magiamma

now, and i'm sure it's just me, but it's like reading a foreign language translated by teh google translator.

but the gist, as i get it, is that as the ice breaks up, it warmer sea warms the air temps, and the abrupt events of the past are moving northward.

wondering about the melting of greenland's permafrost, i bingled, and found little info after 2017 like this from NOAA, nothing on methane clathrate release, just peat fires, and melting ground, which are bad enough.

thanks for exercising my brain a bit, magi. ; )

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@magiamma

"...climate models underestimate the current warming in the north. In the real world, temperatures have risen earlier and over a larger area than model simulations have indicated."

Thank you for that link. Since I don't have journal access anymore, Science Daily (https://www.sciencedaily.com) has been my main source of current state of the art. I recommend your link for scary reading.

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While we're focused on ice melt, permafrost, methane clathrate, massive fires and other massive sources of carbon, there's little mention of the main carbon sink: the oceans.

When carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid. There's a quickie on the chemistry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification . Other good sources: https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/ocean-acidification , https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-coasts/ocean-a...

There are two things to consider here: the future ability of ocean to swallow carbon, and the ecological impacts of this change in water chemistry.

I don't know what effect this acidification might have on the stability of methane clathrates, which are mainly on the ocean floor. Methane clathrate is mainly destabilized by increasing temprature. The release of methane from this substance could turn the ocean into a net source of carbon.

A lecturer at NOAA reported around 10 years ago that the ocean had already reached the saturation point for carbon uptake. I don't have a peer-reviewed link for this, but he said his findings kept him up at night.

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

thank you. now i can't recall from earlier reports whether or not it's increased acidification or just sunlight that's caused the breakdown of abysmal level of plastic breaking down and covering the coral reefs and marine life, but recently i'd added a report similar to this (although it'd thought it came from an author at counterpunch, but it must have been from the same study):

Our life is plasticized’: New research shows microplastics in our food, water, air
, originally at Monga Bay, mid-July:

Microplastics, plastic pieces smaller than 5 millimeters, have become increasingly prevalent in the natural world, and a suite of studies published in the last three years, including several from 2020, shows that they’ve contaminated not only the ocean and pristine wildernesses, but the air, our food, and even our bodies.

Past research has indicated that 5.25 trillion plastic pieces are floating in the ocean, but a new study says that there are 2.5 to 10 times more microplastics in the ocean than previously thought, while another recent study found that microplastic “hotspots” could hold 1.9 million pieces per square meter.

Other emerging research suggests that 136,000 tons of microplastics in the ocean are being ejected into the atmosphere each year, and blowing back onto land with the sea breeze, posing a risk to human health.

Microplastics are also present in drinking water, and edible fruits and vegetables, according to new research, which means that humans are ingesting microplastics every day.

the fruits and veg study:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935120305703

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@wendy davis

is worth a whole other essay. IIRC correctly, they have found lots of it everywhere they've looked, including in seafood.
They've also found Roundup in most vegetables, beer, and wine.

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

and was accused as so often for my 'low vibrational thinking'. and...so it goes.... ; )

but sure, many of us have been tacking captain (?) moore as having reported on the first plastic garbage gyres, and what is/was in them including any number of trapped large sea creatures, like dolphins. up to five gyres now? sorry, my holey memory lasts for about 5 minutes now.

old n in the way wd.

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@wendy davis @wendy davis

affects the plastic much. Ocean acidification is a complex buffering cycle with 2 way reactions that tends to hold the pH close to a given value; the water doesn't actually get very acidic; it stays on the basic side of pH 7. Sunlight is more efficient at breaking the chemical bonds of the plastic polymers.
(grin) I think I still have the OAINTW cassette. Listening to it the last few years, it actually seems kinda weak compared to the old-timers - more fire in the belly. Has its high points, tho.
It's too easy to spiral down the bleakness rabbit hole. Just remember Adm. Hyman Rickover's ("father of the nuclear navy") career-ending comment: go ahead and have a nuclear war, in a billion years an intelligent race will evolve. Now isn't that a positive vib?

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wendy davis's picture

@pindar's revenge

and so much of it covers the ocean floors, coral reefs as well.

but your adm. rickover quote reminded me that yes, evolution will start over, including cockroaches. and i've always loved this R Cobb cartoon:

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@wendy davis

Reminds me of Crown Of Creation

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