We are the generation that is likely to witness the destruction of our Earth.
I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse unfolding
by Joëlle Gergis
Dr. Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer based at the Australian National University. She is a lead author of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report, and an expert advisor to the Climate Council.
This is what the people who work on the reports think, you've seen the carefully diluted results that get published. When I say that the reports understate the problem I'm not being critical of the scientists involved, but the process that precludes them from stating the truth as they see it.
...The relentless heat and drought experienced during our nation’s hottest and driest year on record saw the last of our native forests go up in smoke. ... During Australia’s Black Summer, more than 3 billion animals were incinerated or displaced, our beloved bushland burnt to the ground. ... Recovering the diversity and complexity of Australia’s unique ecosystems now lies beyond the scale of human lifetimes. What we witnessed was inter-generational damage: a fundamental transformation of our country. Then, just as the last of the bushfires went out, recording-breaking ocean temperatures triggered the third mass bleaching event recorded on the Great Barrier Reef since 2016. This time, the southern reef – spared during the 2016 and 2017 events – finally succumbed to extreme heat. The largest living organism on the planet is dying.
As one of the dozen or so Australian lead authors involved in consolidating the physical science basis for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment report, I’ve gained terrifying insight into the true state of the climate crisis and what lies ahead. There is so much heat already baked into the climate system that a certain level of destruction is now inevitable. What concerns me is that we may have already pushed the planetary system past the point of no return. That we’ve unleashed a cascade of irreversible changes that have built such momentum that we can only watch as it unfolds.
...
The truth is, everything in life has its breaking point. My fear is that the planet’s equilibrium has been lost; we are now watching on as the dominoes begin to cascade.With just 1.1C of warming, Australia has already experienced unimaginable levels of destruction of its marine and land ecosystems in the space of a single summer. More than 20% of our country’s forests burnt in a single bushfire season. Virtually the entire range of the Great Barrier Reef cooked by one mass bleaching event. But what really worries me is what our Black Summer signals about the conditions that are yet to come. As things stand, the latest research shows that Australia could warm up to 7C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.
...
The revised warming projections for Australia will render large parts of our country uninhabitable
...
She goes on, I don't want to excessively quote the article.
6C in 80 years will kill practically everything. It's not just the absolute temperature, it's the rate of change. 7C above "pre-industrial" (I'm assuming here she is referring to the 1880s average) takes us to about 21C global average temperature, just shy of "hot house Earth". And the train doesn't stop in 2100.
They say that we're moving too fast, that we need to wait for more studies, but you can't work too fast. They say it will cost too much, but you can't spend too much money, it will take all the money there is and that won't be enough. They describe the changes called for as "radical", but you can't take any change off the table.
Also from the Guardian last month:
Dear America, we too have seen red skies in Australia
Dear America,
We too have seen the orange afternoon sky, and felt the soft, strange sensation of soot falling like rain, and watched the edges of the curtains glow in an amber haze long after nightfall.
We too have purchased masks and air filters, and had windless days where it’s been hard to breathe, and inhaled smoke from thousands of kilometres away and wondered if we should be worried about a wheeze that wasn’t there before.
...
They talked of the Pyrocene age and how they read somewhere that there are only 100 harvests left...
Note: I've heard more like 30 harvests left without factoring in climate change, which of course accelerates the change. From a different article:
The UN has warned that the world’s soils face exhaustion and depletion, with an estimated 60 harvests left before they are too degraded to feed the planet, and a 2014 study in the UK found matters are not much better, estimating 100 harvests remaining.
Back to the original article.
Dear America, we can tell you what happens next – we’re almost a year ahead, your friends at the bottom of the world, speaking from the future.
We can tell you that in the months after the event, when you can breathe again, women who were pregnant during the fire gave birth to babies facing potential long-term health risks.
We can tell you that even the worst fire season in living memory was not enough and that three billion animals dead or displaced is not enough and species pushed to the brink of extinction is not enough and even the birds falling from the sky in a “mass die-off” (a portent so obvious that it feels straight out of the Old Testament) is not enough to make the leaders panic and DO SOMETHING about man-made global heating.
Someone, I think it was here, asked in comments why billionaires and the ruling class don't see what's at stake. I think they do. They're on the top of the heap, they have the absolute best of everything this world has to offer, and they know that nothing is going to stop what's coming. So why wouldn't they keep the system going as long as possible?
I don't think that it's an accident that the masks are coming off. They can't even be bothered to lie to us any more.
Comments
There are some even here
that believe extinction of the human race by natural phenomena is not possible.
Mother will decide that argument.
20 years ago I believed that the race had 150 years to go.
10 years ago I believed that we had 100.
Currently I believe it to be less than 70 years.
Of course the unnatural phenomena like nuclear war could make it less.
In short, I may or may not see the end to humans.
My children may and their children almost certainly will.
There's only one huge downside to humans going extinct....We'll take damned near everything with us if we can.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
But heaven forfend that there be a proportionate response.
Forget proportionate response; that would probably start with the slaughter of hundreds of millions of people. Yet people who set fire to trucks, and kill no one, are called terrorists, and spend a long time in jail, while worlds die.
Someone tell me again why non-violence is the right approach. (I know it's the immediately safer approach for the individual, but the right approach?)
Oh there's plenty to do.
They just don't want to do it. They think their privilege is security when in fact it's collective doom.
They need to be overthrown.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Please make it so n/t
Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation
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Agree 100%
The wealthy just think it doesn't apply to them. It's all "little people" problems. Their wealth insulates them from the lowly average citizen. Their allegiance is to the land of dollars. Biggest problem with the wealthy is they reproduce even more clueless and callous offspring that take over the reins of power. And there are numerous Harvard MBA flunkies drooling at the prospect of being hired to keep them wealthy, Harvard lawyers to protect them. After all, they're the rich kids classmates.
Remember, the world's biggest carbon footprint belongs to...
...*drumroll* THE U.S. MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!!! *confetti falls, balloons rise*
There's a reason I keep referring to it as Morgoth. The time has come to focus fire. Everything else is a fatal distraction.
#TulsiOrGravelOrBust
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
YES!!!
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
2030 or bust.
2030 or bust. The folks at Arctic News think it’s 2024.
We are indeed witnessing it. I apologize to Gaia every day. So sorry we are killing you. So much beauty abounds and it is struggling so.
This
And this bears repeating.
Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation
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I grieve more than apologize
Gaia, or evolution, or Nature, pick your term, produced our species as an experiment, as it does all species. We were very successful. We colonized every continent but Antarctica, we thrived in every environment - desert, forest, tundra, you name it. We are unspecialized, generalists ready and willing to turn our hand to anything, after our primate ancestors were driven from the African forest (driven out of the Garden?) by climate change and had to adapt. We took the fruit of the tree of knowledge too far, delving, burning, building - accumulating wealth, aka capital. We didn't have to foul our own nest. It was the excesses of capitalism, born out of the Western desert religions which denied Nature and the female principle, which drove things to a fever pitch.
We are not separate from Nature. If we fail, Nature's process failed - temporarily. There have been other mass extinctions, and life changed. I like to quote the perhaps apocryphal line from Admiral Hyman Rickover: "Go ahead, have a nuclear war. In a billion years an intelligent race will evolve." But I think it likely that a minority of humans will survive. It won't be pretty.
(I write this while listening to multiple radio versions of the garage-rock classic "Dirty Water": "I love that dirty water ... you're my home". Synchronicity.)
But I grieve. Deeply. It will hurt very much to see things I love pass, and to experience the enormous suffering in our path.
remember this- 50 years ago
the message was ignored.
now it may be too late.
oh god
pride of man
broken in the dust again- QMS
can't say we weren't told
from 1968
Good old Iron Eyes
"More Irish than the Irish" was A Thing with the Norman invader families, once they had settled down and intermarried with the natives.
And here and there, now and then, we find someone who is "More Native American than the Native Americans". Like Iron Eyes Cody, born Espera di Corti of full Sicilian ancestry both sides. He went Hollywood early, got lots of jobs as an extra (almost always playing Native Americans because he looked the part), and eventually began to believe he really was one. And he worked his tush off for Native American causes, too, in between film gigs. His coworkers knew, but nobody snitched.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
I had no idea!
thx.
Best face up...
We are at the conversion of collapses..economic, climatic, and biologic.
I often think had we stayed the course of the Carter energy policy how different things would be. Back in the 70's was the time to act. Sadly, we're past the tipping point now. As MA mentioned, once the arctic sea ice is gone...the disaster will cascade.
So as I often say, treasure every day, make the time you have left as high a quality as you can, find joy in nature and your friends. We know as individuals we will die. That same form of acceptance can also apply to our species. However, as someone up thread said, we'll take most of the biosphere with us.
It didn't have to be this way.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
I remember the absolute delight with which
Reagan dismantled the solar panels on the White House. That’s what comes of allowing senile fools run things.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
Those same solar panels are still functioning
Though no longer mounted on the white house
https://www.treehugger.com/whatever-happened-jimmy-carters-solar-panels-...
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2018/10/solar-thermal-panel-instal...
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
I saw that the panels had been located a while back.
I have such a sense of loss about those panels and the road not taken.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
That was the sign of doom
Those panels were symbolic of a change in cultural direction, not much in themselves, but we could have gone so differently than we did. Spit on Reagan!
A few years before, I read about a company called Solarex. They ran their factory on their own PV panels. The boss was quoted as saying, around '76, that with a million dollar development grant they could make rooftop solar affordable and common within a year. Six months later they were bought by fossil, eventually BP. Nothing more heard. A mention here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BP_Solar
"In 2010, it closed down the factory at Frederick, Maryland.[8] BP Solar was closed on 21 December 2011 when BP announced its departure from the solar energy business."
We had the opportunity, in good time. Capital blew it.
I keep thinking of an old Jethro Tull song.
Most of it doesn’t apply, but these words keep echoing in my mind:
Old Charlie stole the hammer
And the train it won’t stop going
No way to slow down
~Locomotive Breath
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
granted that i may be an outlier on this,
but i can't even imagine that with all the money and all the will in the world, that it's reversible, so many tipping points have already passed. not to mention that every nation, NGO would seize on their own solutions. for bill gates, it's small nuclear power stations around the globe. but any 'solutions' would take time, and leave its own carbon footprint.
how does one restore the arctic permafrost, no longer a carbon sink, but a methane emitter? how does one restore the amazon rainforest and its depleted water table? how does one remove the gigatons of dissolving plastic in the oceans?
remember that even after 5 months of global lockowns, the carbon PPM had risen? methane feedbacck loups were posited as part of that reason.
funny, but jem bendell is now calling what will come 'societal collapse', rather than...was it: the 6th extinction? i've forgotten. but he does seem to be intuitivey correct in offering courses in adaptation, grief and acceptance.
i'd had cause this a.m. to dig up bolivia's Cochabamba accords: 'World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth; Building the People's World Movement for Mother Earth
People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, April 24, 2010
it opens:
thanks for bring this diary, woods dweller
It's reversible
But not in our lifetimes. I read a paper by Susan Solomon (explicator of the ozone hole) around 15 years ago. She estimated it would take 1000 years for CO2 levels to fall back to pre-industrial levels if we stopped emitting GHG then.
Who knows how long it will take, now.
We can't reverse the situation. We can slow the rate of change to give us and other species time to adapt. Maybe.
PS: I'm seeing a lot more about GHG from tundra; more than just methane and CO2, volatile organic compounds, VOCs. Thanks for pointing me that way.
We can save the planet and human civilization - it's long shot
We need to spend about $10Trillion a year on research and then deployment of carbon capture, conversion and sequestration. We are very late and even with this the consequences are going to be severe. To give you some perspective on this amount of money global GDP is about $80T, total military spending in 2018 was $2T. Concurrently we need zero carbon energy sources and that's going to have to be nuclear. Sorry, I wish that were not so. Every other program for environmental sustainability will be useful to build a civilization that is environmentally stable ... on the other side of this immediate crisis.
How will it happen? We have bits and pieces already from Australia, Russia wheat harvest in 2010, California, the Arctic, etc. Global temperature rise combined with chaos in factors like temperature and moisture will reduce crop yields to the point that we cannot feed 9-10 Billion people. When will this happen? It's hard to say because weather is chaotic. It will be random, but the probability will increase until there is world wide famine and resource wars, and total destruction of habitats. It could start with a vengeance in the late 2030s or wait until the latter half of the 21st century. Right now we have about one year's supply of food in storage globally. We need to increase that to 3-5 years to buy time.
When we have a chance to analyze why we got ourselves into this predicament I think it will come down to expansion without limit, and resource use without being willing to pay the real price. Consider that most of the excess CO2 molecules have a tiny label that says "made in the USA". How did we use that fossil fuel resource? Mainly so that an average 170 lb person could sit in a two ton steel vehicle driving to work, and so that we don't have to build our living spaces to be energy efficient. This is pathetic and is an act of spitting on Mother Nature and our grandchildren. But it built a large, wealthy, militarily aggressive civilization as fast and as cheap as possible. Congratulations, you got what you built.
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
We inherited this mess
It has been left to us to witness the consequences
In a more progressive world we would have in place
means to capture the methane expansion into usable energy
converting the waste to nontoxic chemicals
same with carbon capture -- convert to controlled compounds
with all of the combined waste we generate
a world-wide cooperation and focus
may be a way to mitigate destruction
can we, as a species, rise up to the challenge?
the rulers must loosen their grip somehow
for us to survive
overcome
question everything
food storage
No, the world does NOT have a year's worth of food in storage. "Ending stock" is what is left over when the new harvest comes in. This is generally computed for grains, to that you would have to add living livestock. Ending stock plus current production is, happily, greater than one year (otherwise famine would already be upon us).
FAO Cereal Supply and Demand Brief
For 2020 (dated 8 Oct) the world's (ending) stock to use ratio is 36.2%, or about 130 days.
So the world could just barely scrape by a 36% worldwide shortfall. There is flexibility is reducing livestock herds, sending more animals to slaughter, and in recent years from cutting corn used to produce ethanol as a gasoline additive. So a couple of years of serious crop failures worldwide would exhaust the ending stocks. After that your stocks and livestock herds would be pretty much gone.
Increasing the ending stocks is a great idea. First you have to increase production, which is problematic in an environment where we are facing shortfalls. You also need to increase storage, since an extra 200+ days of storage doesn't currently exist. Grain in bulk storage doesn't last forever, you have pest/mold/fungus issues. And of course someone has to pay for all that. Governments (who else?) would have to be aggressively buying grains and storing them, then selling the ageing grains at a discount (why else would someone buy them?) into the market instead of dumping them, buying high and selling low. Call it the "Strategic Grain Stockpile".
But in the end you face the same issues as individual food storage -- then what? We're scraping the top of the temperature range where agriculture has been practiced, with nowhere to go but up. It's not like agriculture is going to recover after a couple of bad years, any more than the Arctic sea ice is going to recover. At best it's a bridge, but a bridge to what? It comes back to the question of how you're going to feed people without conventional agriculture. Increasing inventories could add two or three years time to get that done. It doesn't address the underlying problem.
Having said that, I would be in favor of eating for another two or three years.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
Thanks, well said!
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
External costs
"resource use without being willing to pay the real price"
I think in economics it's called external costs (never studied it). These are costs that don't have to be entered in a spreadsheet for calculating profit. These are costs that are borne by the general population - a form of subsidy. Costs in the sense of the dollars spent to remediate pollution, costs in the sense of disease, disfigurement, premature deaths. Costs in the sense of having to abandon drowning coasts and burning forests. It's often hard or impossible to trace the causative source of these costs. What caused your cancer: PFAS, VOC, kepone, dioxin, ultraviolet; was it Exxon or BP who caused your house to flood? By ignoring these costs, the investor class reaps trillions in profits. If we factor in these costs, the expense of intervention seems much more reasonable.
Many people refer to the cost of doing nothing, which is enormous. That's an external cost.
It would be just and proper to recover these costs from the investors and owners.
There is one enormous barrier
Preventing us from even trying to slow it down, or explore what can be done. That barrier is the people in power/i.e. those with money. They see the planetary crisis as a poor people's problem. They have had so much privilege for so long that they believe they will make it through and be all right. That is what their bunkers of various kinds are all about, part of the reason they own houses/property in various places around the world. They think they will just go live in the safe one when the need arises.
Some rich man was quoted saying that Covid is a poor people's disease. These people are unable/unwilling to see that we are all connected. Their power and their denial of how serious the situation is, and that it will impact them spells the planet's and humans doom. And we don't have time. The earth's clock has run out.
I do believe roaches, rats, flies and mosquitoes will survive, and probably a few other pests.
Yup, the rich believe they can buy their way out of any crisis
I read an article long time ago by a famous "futurist". So famous I forgot this name. Anyway, he was paid some big dollars to meet with a group of mega-wealthy to talk what he fore saw. He told them that the best thing they could do was to help fix the problems: make the future a good one. Instead, they were more interested in being their version of high priced "preppers" The only advice he could offer them in that regards was to make their security/guards part of their community so as not to turn on the rich guys. They ignored even that.
Buying an island or living in a yacht in the Caribbean may make them safe from "urban unrest" for a short period, but not from an global environmental collapse or for sure a nuclear war.
Major denial
you can’t make people understand what they don’t want to. They deserve the suffering coming to them. The rest of us don’t.
One article not sure if it's same guy MrWebster mentions
https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1
This is bullcrap.
The Earth will survive long past us. There is no danger to the Earth as a whole.
In the past, temperatures have been 14 degrees *Celsius* higher on average than they are now (see the Early Eocene period or the Late Cambrian). Guess what? Life was thriving during those periods. Here, we are talking about a plus 2, maybe plus 4 or even 7 degree Celsius rise and people are claiming the Earth is doooooooomed!!! The evidence is there. Open your eyes and see it. The Earth is in no way doomed.
Link
Humans may or may not be doomed. There is really no reason physically that we cannot survive a temperature change of those magnitudes. The only real question is will we destroy ourselves because we are not mature enough to adapt and work together.
Could go either way in my estimation. I do think that it is very likely a huge downsizing of human populations is coming in future centuries--mostly because of water access and reduced arable land. Still, that in itself will solve the problem. It may take 10,000 years to re-adjust, but as the air clears of particulates slowly, temperatures will inevitably come back down when there are zero to 100 million people left on the planet.
Not exactly
Life does not thrive at those temperatures. The PETM was the 5th mass extinction, 90% of marine species went extinct, 95% of terrestrial species went extinct. It's almost too hot for life. Add in the carbon we've extracted and released and it might push the Earth over the top.
I suspect thermophillic bacteria that live in Yellowstone geysers may survive, but I don't have hopes for much more than that. Sea worms at volcanic vents in ocean trenches too.
The Earth will be fine, it might still have some life on it, but there won't be any humans.
Homo Sapiens evolved around 340,000 years ago. Genus homo about 4 million years ago. We're a cool climate species. Notably Homo Sapiens has not coexisted with an ice-free Arctic. Possibly genus Homo as well, there's at least one paper that claims that the minimum 2.5 million years ago was just that, and it hasn't been ice free for over 4 million years.
The burden of proof is on anyone claiming we can survive outside the climate we've evolved in. The Persian Gulf and parts of Pakistan are already experiencing wet bulb temperatures that can be life threatening.
This is already the hottest global average temperature where agriculture has been practised. Australia, a major wheat exporter, is running out of land to grow wheat as the agricultural zones shift south (towards the pole).
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
No, no, no
Your post is simply FULL of misinformation.
The PETM, from Wikipedia, on Ocean life:
and on land life:
Almost too hot for life, eh?!? Increase in mammalian abundance--including primates(!!!) (isn't that us?!?). Seems I met your burden of proof.
Also, plants did just fine during the PETM, thank you very much.
Really hate the Earth is exploding, sky is falling nonsense. Now, large-scale agriculture may collapse--at least to the extent that it cannot feed 8 billion people. That I'll agree with. It will be horrible--that I'll agree with. Humans may not survive--but that'll depend on our own stupidity or intelligence, not anything to do with our evolutionary makeup (look around and tell me how humans survive handily in Greenland and the Sahara desert when we didn't evolve there).
But, life on Earth will go on until the Sun expands about 700 million years from now. (If nuclear war results, however, all bets are off--but, life probably will survive at the rat and cockroach level.)