These days we live in a hyperpolarized political environment where most people assume that if you’re not all the way over to one extreme, you must be all the way over to the other. That’s a major cause of the collective stupidities that afflict the world today, since the opposite of one bad idea is quite reliably another bad idea. Me—well, put it down to autism if you like, but I’m fine with offending both sides. For years now, in fact, if I don’t field roughly equal numbers of shrill denunciations from both sides, I doublecheck my thinking.
Two weeks ago we discussed one example of the polarization just mentioned: the frankly weird myopia of the collective imagination that prevents so many people from noticing that perpetual progress and overnight catastrophe aren’t the only possible shapes of the future. This post is going to tackle another example. Yes, it’s time for us to revisit global climate change.
No doubt there are gentle, nonconfrontational ways to address this. I’m in a raffish mood, though, and so what I propose to do instead is go straight into a discussion about three things each side gets hopelessly wrong. (The list could be made much lengthier on both sides, but three for each will do.) Once we’ve done that, it’ll be much easier to talk about two things. The first is why, more than thirty years after climate change started grabbing headlines, nothing has actually been done to stop or even slow the changing climate. The second is to look at where the climate is actually headed. Each of these questions has a straightforward answer, but neither answer is thinkable from either of the two extremist positions that are fashionable these days.
We’ll start with the conservative end of the spectrum. The dogma being pushed by powerful corporate interests on this extreme, and enthusiastically backed up by citizen activists on and offline, is that climate change isn’t happening, that anthropogenic CO2 emissions aren’t causing it, and that it’s not a problem anyway. If this reminds you of Bart Simpson’s “I didn’t do it, nobody saw me, and you can’t prove anything,” dear reader, let’s just say you’re not alone. Let’s discuss the realities of the situation one claim at a time.
1: The global climate is changing. Anyone who gardens in the eastern half of North America knows from personal experience that this is true. Many areas in that whole continental region have become two entire USDA climate zones warmer in the last three quarters of a century. Those zones aren’t arbitrarily assigned; they’re determined by hard and fast details such as the dates of first and last frost, and they’re shifting slowly, raggedly, but inexorably northward.
Here in southern New England I’ve got a ringside seat for one aspect of that set of changes. Does the phrase “New England winter” suggest to you, dear reader, mild temperatures, plenty of sunshine, and more rain than snow? That’s certainly not what it once meant, but far more often than not, that’s what it means now. This year, like last year, we had our first dose of shirtsleeve weather in February. If you tried to go dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh last Christmas, the way people reliably did here a century ago, you’d have had a hard time of it.
It’s not just a New England thing, either. A few months ago, people who watch global weather were left gasping at the news that torrential rains had fallen over much of the southern Sahara, as the monsoon belt continues to creep northward. More recently, the arid lands of central Australia got similar treatment, as heavy rains in the Queensland mountains left Lake Eyre overflowing its banks. Meanwhile southern Europe has been hammered by drought as the Sahara slips across the Mediterranean basin and sinks its claws into Spain, southern France, and Italy.
It’s telling that the only argument conservatives have in their attempts to rebut these ongoing changes is to point to some isolated factoid that appears to be going the other way, and insisting that this proves that nothing’s changing anywhere. The current favorite along these lines is the fact that the Antarctic ice cap grew sharply over the last couple of years due to increased precipitation. If you know anything about how the atmosphere works, increased precipitation at the poles is a huge shrieking klaxon; for thousands of years now, the atmosphere on each side of the equator has been divided into three bands, each with its own pattern of air circulation, and one result of that is that the poles get very little precipitation.
In terms of its annual precipitation, in fact, Antarctica is a desert, and so is Greenland. More to the point, both were deserts. In recent decades, Greenland’s been getting rain in summer—let that sink in for a moment—and now Antarctica’s getting increased precipitation, too: snow, for now. All this is a foreshadowing of a tremendous change in global climate which neither side of the climate wars seems to have taken into account. (We’ll get to that in due time.)
2. Human pollution affects the climate. The attempts to deny this are simple handwaving. The physics of the process by which CO2 increases the heat retention capacity of the atmosphere have been well understood for around a century and a half. The modest amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doesn’t deprive it of effect—there are plenty of chemicals that can have drastic effects on your body if your blood contains them in parts per million concentrations, you know. As for the arguments that temperature spikes in prehistory were followed rather than preceded by CO2 spikes, therefore a CO2 spike can’t cause a temperature spike, this is like insisting that if certain car crashes were caused by the driver having a fatal heart attack, then getting into a car crash without having a heart attack first can’t hurt you.
Any number of things can cause the global temperature to shift. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is one of them. Several sudden temperature spikes in prehistory—the Toarcian greenhouse event 183 million years ago in the Jurassic and the Cenomanian-Turonian greenhouse event 94 million years ago in the Cretaceous—do seem to have been caused by greenhouse gas emissions. (Scientists these days like to insist that these were volcanic emissions; I wonder myself if the geological markers of these events are the last remaining traces of two long-extinct intelligent species that decided to try their hands, or other appendages, at burning fossil fuels.) So it’s not as though a CO2-driven temperature spike has never happened before.
3. Anthropogenic climate change is a source of serious problems. Here it’s going to be necessary to step carefully, since the left has been just as eager to overinflate the costs of climate change as the right has been to downplay them. We’ll be talking about the flipside of this issue in a moment. For the time being, it’s important to note that increasingly turbulent and unstable weather imposes rising costs on economies around the world. The chart below shows the cost of weather-related natural disasters worldwide by year and type, in current dollars. As you can see, it’s skyrocketed in recent years. Those costs don’t exist in a vacuum; they have to be paid out of the proceeds of economic activity, and impose an ever-increasing burden on the world’s economies. There are plenty of reasons why economic affairs are such a mess these days, but the rising tide of costs from weather-related disasters isn’t helping.
By this point my conservative readers will doubtless be glaring at their computer screens and muttering darkly about how rising costs don’t equal the end of the world that liberals have been promising in such lavish terms for decades now. They’re right, of course, and this is the point at which I finish belaboring them and start dealing out similar treatment to the other side.
That has more in common with the side just outlined than either one likes to admit. Once again, we’ve got dogma being pushed by powerful corporate interests, and enthusiastically backed up by citizen activists on and offline. This dogma insists that climate change is a world-ending cataclysm, that nobody benefits from it, and that the green agenda being pushed by climate change activists and their corporate sponsors will surely save the world if only everyone else shuts up and does what they’re told. Once again, we’ll discuss the realities one at a time.
4. Climate change doesn’t mean the end of the world. If there’s one rhetorical gimmick that the left has worked not merely to death, but straight through the afterlife and into some other incarnation, it’s the claim that unless somebody or other does something or other about climate change sometime very soon, we will all be fried to a crackly crisp in a planet-sized wok. That particular strategy has been used so long that people on the other side of the issue like to point out just how many supposed deadlines for planetary survival we’ve punched through since the climate change band first struck up its now-overfamiliar tune.
If you have any knowledge of paleoclimatology, furthermore, you know that the entire claim is garbage. Until global temperatures started rising a few decades ago, in fact, the earth was colder than it’s been at any point for the last 200 million years. During most of our planet’s history, in fact, it has been a jungle planet, with tropical forests extending clear across what now counts as the temperate zone, no glaciers anywhere, very few deserts, and semitropical conditions at the poles. That, not our current near-deepfreeze, is earth’s normal climate. Life thrived under those conditions; compare a tiger to a tyrannosaur or a buffalo to a brontosaur and you can see just how shrunken and huddled living things have become in the bitterly cold conditions of the last ten million years or so.
If the climate keeps warming at its current pace, there will certainly be discontinuities and disruptions, especially but not only to human civilization. Sea levels will rise, rain belts will shift, delicate specialist species will die out and be replaced by tougher, more flexible generalist species, and so on. None of that justifies the sort of frantic apocalyptic squawking typified by Mark Lynas’s meretricious 2007 book Six Degrees, and repeated at earsplitting volume by politicians and media flacks for decades now.
5. Climate change has winners as well as losers. Russia has had the biggest grain crops in its long history in the last few years. Why? The great constraint on the Russian wheat crop is not soil—Russia has some of the best soil in the world—or water, but the length of the growing season, which is curtailed across much of the country due to the bitterly cold climate. As climate change has shifted growing zones northward, Russian farms have hauled in one bumper crop after another. That’s been a serious disadvantage to NATO, which wasn’t expecting huge Russian wheat exports to help pay for tanks, shells, and drones for the Ukraine war, but it’s been an immense advantage for Africa and many other countries where malnutrition is a serious issue, and where cheap Russian wheat is even more welcome than usual just now.
The heavy rains across the southern Sahara mentioned earlier are a harbinger of an even more significant change for the better. Until 4000 years ago, when cooling global temperatures drove the monsoon belt too far south, the lifeless deserts of the Sahara, the Arabian peninsula, and northwestern India were grasslands watered by heavy annual rains. As the climate warms, we’re approaching the threshold at which that process will go in reverse. Imagine for a moment what it will mean when nations such as Mali, Niger, and Chad, currently among the world’s poorest and most barren countries, become the breadbaskets of Africa. Imagine what will change when Saudi Arabia becomes a major exporter of wheat.
That doesn’t mean that everyone will benefit from climate change. No question, the costs imposed by the changing climate are high already, and they’ll get much, much worse. Whole nations will be devastated by the changes, just as whole nations will benefit from them. That doesn’t justify the left’s insistence that climate change hurts everyone everywhere.
6: The measures pushed in the name of climate change aren’t slowing climate change, and were never intended to do so. Here the best place to start is the familiar graph below, which shows the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the last half century. About halfway through that graph, the world’s industrial nations started imposing burdensome regulations and paying for hugely expensive green energy projects that were supposedly going to keep climate change in check. Can you see the least sign that any of it has had an effect? Neither can I.
What makes this all the more striking is that there are measures that could have reduced global carbon emissions sharply. They were discussed in detail as far back as the 1970s, and when the current wave of climate change activism started receiving massive doses of corporate funding, some of us made sure that they got plenty of discussion in online conversations and at peak oil conferences. There were several things that set them apart from the measures that ended up being adopted, but two differences were particularly striking.
The first difference was that they all focused on efficient energy use. Most housing in the industrial world, for example, is wretchedly insulated and leaks heat like so many sieves. For a fraction of the money that’s been poured into offshore wind turbines, the US could have made grants available to homeowners and apartment landlords to fund better insulation and weatherization in its housing stock, and cut energy use significantly without the least decrease in quality of life. The second difference is that all the projects we had in mind made individuals, families, and communities more resilient. The grants just described, for example, would have created hundreds of thousands of working class jobs, and their work would have made it easier for people across the country to weather climate change comfortably.
All of this was discussed in great detail at the time. None of these projects were adopted by the government and corporate interests who took over the climate change cause and turned it into an excuse for a great many gargantuan, expensive, and ineffective gimmicks instead. I don’t think this was any kind of accident, because it reflects a kind of thinking that’s become pervasive all through the industrial world in recent decades.
Most people in the US are familiar with the bitter joke about the doctor who says, “A patient cured is a customer lost.” I’m not sure how many people realize that it’s not a joke. It’s called the disease management model, and it governs medical care in the United States and a growing number of other countries. The disease management model is entirely oriented to maximizing profit for the medical and pharmaceutical industries, irrespective of the impact on mere patients. Thus it backs away from the idea of curing people of illnesses. Instead, the goal is to keep people sick enough that they have to keep consuming medical care, but not too sick that they lose their medical coverage and drop out of the system.
Most of us have seen this in action in our own lives or those of our family or friends. One friend of mine, for instance, suffered for many years from severe asthma. Her physician prescribed drugs and inhalers, which didn’t keep her from having to be rushed to the hospital a couple of times a year when her airway decided to close up. One day she happened to read that some cases of this kind are due to wheat allergy. She dropped wheat from her diet, and for the first time in many years her asthma went away. Thrilled by this, she went to her doctor, only to find that the doctor was aware of the role of wheat allergy in asthma. “Why didn’t you tell me?” my friend demanded. “We prefer to medicate for that,” was the doctor’s bland reply.
I’d like to suggest that a similar style of thinking undergirds most official responses to crisis in today’s world. Call it the crisis management model. As with the disease management model, it seeks not to solve problems but to exploit them: to use each crisis, real or manufactured, to make people more frightened, vulnerable, and dependent, so that they can be pressured into accepting ever more burdensome restrictions and costs for the benefit of the corporate-bureaucratic system that rules them. The Stalinist fantasies retailed by the overpaid and undertalented intellectuals of the WEF and its kindred institutions are just the most lurid examples of a broader pattern.
It requires something like this, I think, to make sense of the bizarre disconnection between the strident rhetoric of impending doom being shoveled about so freely by celebrities in the climate change circuit and the fantastic carbon output of their own lifestyles. If they actually believed that life on earth was threatened by climate change, it’s hard to believe that they would go on living absurdly extravagant lives with bigger carbon footprints than a midsized Indonesian city; even hypocrisy can only stretch so far. Their behavior makes sense to me only if they know perfectly well that the planet’s survival isn’t actually at risk.
The difficulty with both management models, though, is that sooner or later the designated suckers catch on to the real rules of the game. That’s why so many Americans assume as a matter of course these days that their doctors are lying to them, why alternative health care is so popular here, and why herbalism and other forms of do-it-yourself healing are becoming especially common. Equally, it’s why the shrill pronouncements of climate change activists get so little traction any more. It’s become clear to most people that something’s very wrong with the claims being circulated, and that’s why so many have responded by turning to the first three mistaken beliefs I’ve discussed here.
Of course there’s a downside in both cases. People who refuse to go to a physician may end up dying earlier than they otherwise would, of some disease a physician might have been able to detect and treat—though admittedly they also may avoid the drug side effects and botched medical treatments that end so many lives prematurely these days. Equally, since the climate really is changing, the costs are piling up, but the end of the world is still pulling a no-show, a great many people on both sides of the debate are likely to be blindsided by events as they proceed. I’lll be on hiatus for the first half of next month, but when I return, we’ll talk about where the climate appears to be headed and what that means for our future.
Brilliant article Mr. Greer.
I have always thought that Al Gore-esque image of a post-climate change world as a barren wasteland with everyplace either underwater or a desert with a bunch of big hurricanes everywhere is incredibly stupid. It’s inspired in large part by Biblical notions of imminent apocalypse no doubt.
In reality, when the Earth has been warmer, it has always been wetter due to more H2O being the liquid and gaseous phases. And all of this water doesn’t just stay in hurricane clouds or higher oceans, it falls as rain and makes the Earth more tropical and marshy historically!
Maybe the reason why there are more forest fires is …there are more forests!
It is worth noting also that historically, Ice Ages and even “Little Ice Ages” have been rougher periods for human civilization (whether or not you consider “civilization” to be a bad thing) while warmer periods have been better.
The first civilizations emerged after the end of the last Ice Age, although the extent of causality for the so-called “Neolithic Revolution” remains a source of dispute.
The Late Antique Little Ice Age that began in 536 really altered history by stimying the Emperor Justinian’s efforts to re-conquer the lost provinces of the old Western Roman Empire. This is particuarly since, the climatic event may have facilitated the conditions for the disastrous plague that began in 541 that would continue to have outbreaks on and off for two and a quarter centuries by weakening immune systems. Also, it added pressures on the empire by pushing various tribes like the Lombards, Avars, and Slavs to seek greener pastures within Roman territory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Antique_Little_Ice_Age
There were similar breakdowns of civilizations as far afield as Central America during this period.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmlTL6OxFoc&t=1115s
Hence why many consider 536 the true beginning of the “Dark Ages” in the literal and figurative senses. Much of the area around what we would call Europe only began to recover economically with the start of the Medieval Warm Period.
More recently, there was the “Little Ice Age” that began towards the end of the 13th Century and lasted until the early 19th Century. This combined with another plague (“The Black Death”) was a period of constant peasant revolts, religous division, upheaval, revolution, etc, sometimes called “The General Crisis”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis
When I think of the crisis management model, honestly I can’t think of a better example right now than the way the debate about the budget deficit’s been handled. There’s endless hand-wringing about the coming blowup that’s coming, and about the steps to take them, but in the end, the preferred route is to ride the turkey all the way home. I sometimes wonder whether, with how interconnected the global economy is these days, the after-effects are going to be more or less catastrophic than expected.
I am unsure what the life cycle of a greater elemental looks like particularly around the evolution of one from say a 3rd plane entity to a 4th. Would you be able to discuss this somewhat? Do they die and then rebirth into a new plane(t) entity? Death and rebirth seem to be a part of that cycle for man. If they die do the lesser elementals that are the manifestations of their soul, the mind and body so to speak, left to operate according to their prior dictates? How do they begin as a 4th plane entity? Are they like children? 4th plane is hopefully a protected state. Can you describe somewhat what we might expect during such a transition and shortly after?
I wonder if part of the reason so many people are able to dismiss climate change is even happening is that they move so much that they have no idea what used to be normal where they live. I’ve lived most of my life in the same area, and I can remember going trick or treating with snow on the ground, while the last few winters it’s looked like we were going to have green Christmases. This is a huge difference, but it’s only because I’ve lived in one spot for a long time I’m able to see it in such a visceral way.
On the topic of prior industrial civilizations: on the last open post I mentioned waiting for books on the Triassic to arrive because I was speculating about industrial genetic engineers in that time period. One of them has arrived and talks at length about a phenomena called a “thermal maximum”, of which the best known is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximums. These are very short lived spikes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures that appear in a blink of an eye and vanish just as quickly.
They are also always marked with a very thin layer of excess iron, nitrogen, and phosphorous, the byproducts of industry and fertilizers. They’ve also occurred at irregular intervals since the Carboniferous; which is when fossil fuels were first deposited in a meaningful amount. Assuming that the lack of earlier known thermal maximums is not the result of the evidence vanishing, I think the case can be made that the simplest explanation is that thermal maximums are always the result of industrial civilizations.
Hello Mr. Greer!
Is this new discussion series going to have a post on nuclear energy? If so, are you going to mention nuclear waste?
Right On! Shine the light of truth.
Thank you,
Tom
Cheers to a well deserved break!
Does anyone else remember the comic book series Cadillacs & Dinosaurs? I’m pretty sure the Cadillacs the T-Rex’s used to drive around back in the day were part of the problem.
https://totally-epic.kwakk.info/2020/03/31/1990-cadillacs-and-dinosaurs/
And a song to go with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8HuL0Xbx9c&ab_channel=Negativland-Topic
One thing I think deserves to be mentioned is that the 90-million-year spans between these greenhouse events are, in point of fact, long enough for even the “nonrenewable” resources like metals and fossil fuels to have replenished, as well as for even so-called “forever” chemicals such as PFAS to either break up through chemical )possibly even biochemical) reactions, settle in ocean-floor sediments, be subducted back into the mantle, or simply be buried under 90 million years’ worth of additional bedrock.
It’s hard to even think about it that way because of how long a timespan that is. as well as human (or at least Western) bias that whatever is now will either always be or will be improved through Science and Technology. Logarithmic scales, I think, have a tendency to obscure how far in the past/future these events really are. (If you live a full human lifetime and are discarnate for triple that length, it would take a full 321,000 incarnations to reach the next sapiogenic greenhouse gassing era.
I suspect part of the reason scientists don’t want to consider that these previous sessions of geologically quick global warming might be sapiogenic events is because (1) that would imply there were sapient civilizations before us that did exactly what we did, i.e., we’re not special, (2) industrial civilization can end and progress be thrown into reverse, because it clearly must have done so the past two times, and (3) that humanity’s ultimate legacy will not be to conquer the stars or even to destroy the world in the attempt, but just an unusual blip in the climate record and a handful of anonymous fossils. No monuments, no memories, not even nuclear waste pits – just nameless bones.
Sic transibit gloria humanorum.
The graph near the bottom of the page has the climate the last million years. Rapid climate change seems to be the normal condition.
https://iceage.museum.state.il.us/content/when-have-ice-ages-occurred
You can also look up the Younger Dryas. A climate switch flipped and although they have theories as to what happened, they are only speculative.
In the mean time the heat pump is still in Heat mode somewhat later in the year than usual, but it has stopped freezing at night so the garden is going.
“Greenland’s been getting rain in summer—let that sink in…” Knowing your writing skills, I sincerely doubt that does not have a double meaning…
My big worry about climate change has to do with something JMG mentioned a while ago, and that involves the direction of flow for the northern hemisphere’s atmospheric polar cell.
The north pole is very cold and air flows down from high in the atmosphere then out southward to about the 60th parallel where it has become sufficiently warm enough to rise and start flowing back towards the pole. Or at least that is how it works now.
But with the melting of the northern polar ice sheet that should no longer be true. Once the summer heat melts out the arctic sea ice , the water warms very rapidly. In late summer and in fall after a full melt out , the water at the north pole will be warmer than the continents that surround it. That should temporarily reverse the flow of the polar cell in the northern hemisphere. That means weather weirdness at harvest time in the northern hemisphere. After the sea ice freezes back up in the late fall and winter the old pattern should return, but that weather weirdness in the fall (in the northern hemisphere) should be one of the effects of climate change we should start seeing in the not too distant future (I am guessing 5-15 years). If this is correct, the loss of regular yearly harvests in the northern hemisphere could be one of the earlier effects of climate change.
Dear Archdruid:
I think that you are a genius , but in this case of Anthropogenic Climate Change you are wrong. How you’ll explain the climate optimuns like that that happened in the medieval age ?
I lived with my husband when he as deployed to Israel about 20 years ago. While I was living in Jerusalem, I found out about the Peace Industry. A tangle f NGO’s were supposed to be helping the Palestinians but once the wages and benefits of the NGO staffers were paid and their armoured SUV’s bought and maintained and few Palestinian drivers and translators were paid, there was never any money to help the actual poor people. It was in the interest of the Peace Industry to keep the Palestinians desperate so they could keep on getting UN and other donor money to facilitate their swanky lifestyles. The level of hypocrisy they swam in was extreme.
Maxine
@Brendhelm
Technically, there have been some hypothetical discussions of intelligent life before humans in the form of the Silurian hypothesis, though this is only one paper from 2018, and you are otherwise correct that this line of speculation has been rather rare: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6
When it comes to the possibility of prior industrial species, it’s not the most grim train of thought out there, but is the one that appears to be most anathema to our cultural preconceptions.
Thank you, John so happy that you are rejoining the conversation on this issue. Remember Green wizards? I don’t blame you for turning to other topics of conversation.. I am working on a project that can get funded with some climate change money and that in fact it does address the storage of carbon. But it also has other social benefits, including community building, composting, soil, amendments, etc. And it can be done with recycled materials. I’m also trying to pull together just a list of terms that should be debunked that are being used by the corporations in order to confuse people about energy things like energy transition
Brendhelm @9: “If you live a full human lifetime and are discarnate for triple that length, it would take a full 321,000 incarnations to reach the next sapiogenic greenhouse gassing era.”
Contemplating the deep history of the planet can be lots of fun. I suppose those earlier “sapiogenic” events could be traces of earlier “swarms,” (as per Dion Fortune). Perhaps morphic resonance (as per Rupert Sheldrake) is making each succeeding swarm a little cleverer than the previous; the previous swarms never produced an Einstein? Never imagined nuclear power? Never found any use for uranium? I really should be embarrassed at myself, waxing so speculative on such scant evidence. It is fun, however.
Here in northern New England we are about to receive a rare May nor’easter. A big change from the last fifty years with an increase in wetter Spring weather and less sunny days. Speaking of crisis management, it will be interesting to see how the US property insurance industry handles the increasingly costly and frequent storm damage. Policy price hikes and cancellations are becoming noticeable .
Our relatively “safe” area from natural disasters seems less so these days.
David, well, that’s not the cause of the current wave of forest fires, as forest cover hasn’t expanded noticeably, but you’re right that the Al-Gore-calypse doesn’t make any sense. How those big hurricanes lumber around without ever raining on those deserts is an interesting question. As for warm vs. cold periods, granted.
N, that’s a fine example. The thing that nobody wants to talk about is that there’s a simple offramp to the budget deficit issue: default. Russia did it in 1998, and that marked the end of the post-Soviet depression in Russia and the beginning of the nation’s rise to its current robust economic condition. In the same way, the US will default on its debt sometime in the next decade or two, there will be vast amounts of squawking, and then things will get better. I’ve suspected more than once that one reason Trump got the presidency is that he’s experienced in taking large organizations through bankruptcy; all his recent actions — laying off excess personnel, shutting down unproductive departments, cutting unnecessary expenditures, renegotiating contracts with suppliers, etc. — are the things a CEO does when his company is getting ready for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Ben, I’ve never seen that discussed in the occult literature. It’s a fascinating question, though.
Anonymoose, mobility probably does have a lot to do with the blindness to changing climate. As for thermal maximums, that’s fascinating! What’s the name of that book? I’ll want to read it and include that in my take on planetary history.
Rafael, I’ll doubtless talk about that as we proceed, and yes, nuclear waste will have to be part of that discussion.
Tom, you’re welcome and thank you.
Justin, I somehow managed to miss Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, which is odd, because that was around during my relatively brief period as an alternative-comics buff. (Think original b&w Elfquest, and Cerebus the Aardvark before Dave Sim got pretentious.)
Brendhelm, exactly. 90 million years is longer than we can imagine — and it’s also quite long enough for the planet to reset. It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, if there were other sapient species in the intervals between, which didn’t happen to leave thermal maxima in the geological record because the earth didn’t have metallic ores and fossil fuels ready for them…and scientists would find that even less palatable, since it means that our brief period of technological extravagance is wholly dependent on the mere fact that the planet happened to have the buffet table set when we showed up.
Siliconguy, excellent. Yes, and that’s another nail in the coffin of both sides: climate change can happen very rapidly — rapidly enough to be a real mess for industrial society — but the biosphere’s used to that, since abrupt warming happens every hundred millennia or so.
Roldy, heh heh heh. I wonder how many people know that there are literally rivers of meltwater every summer on the Greenland ice sheet…
Dobbs, good. We’re going to be talking about that in detail in the next post on this subject. If the polar cell reverses, however, what that means is that the belt of heavy rains and turbulent weather that normally hovers around 60° north will move to 90° north, leading to warm, relatively stable weather across the northern hemisphere from around 30° north to the pole. Imagine for a moment the climate of Georgia in Labrador…
Anselmo, that’s quite a non sequitur. Go read my post again, and note especially the following two sentences: “Any number of things can cause the global temperature to shift. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is one of them.”
Maxine, that’s an excellent example of the crisis management model. Welfare schemes are another. It’s been pointed out repeatedly that you could pay every poor person in the US a hefty salary plus benefits for much less than it costs to run our welfare bureaucracy.
Ellen, I do indeed remember the Green Wizards project. If you can get some of the climate change money and do something useful with it, by all means, but I don’t recommend letting yourself become dependent on it — if you do, the system will own you, and manipulate you at will.
Chancy, that’s just it. Periods of climate transition like the one we’re going through see a lot of turbulent weather events and a lot of weather-related disasters. Since nobody’s doing anything that will actually affect the rate at which climate change is happening, getting ready for more trouble is sensible.
As you recall milder winters, I’d like to counter with old fashioned winter storms being almost a rarity in the South. But last winter there were at least two that I slipped and slid through. And those on the gulf coast got an extruh speshul winter storm, which those people hardly ever get. The winter before the last one also had two snow incidents as well. These are places that usually get no snow at all. People don’t have boot trays or snow shovels around here, wouldn’t know what they were or why you’d need them.
I used to live in snow country, it wasn’t that big of a deal for me to slide through it all. However, I distinctly remember how few winter storms there were back in the 80s down here. You remembered them because it gave you a reprieve from the misery that was school. You prayed for them and you were disappointed when they didn’t show up and they didn’t show up that often.
I think we can agree that the weather is changing. But into what and how and when, I have no idea and don’t really want to make statements about it.
It is very hard to have conversations across political lines these days, or to have opinions different from those popular in your social group. It feels a lot more dangerous than it used to, I think.
As for climate change, yes, this is one of the topics where this is most true. Along with ‘culture war’ issues, and vaccines.
@JMG
Thank you for a nuanced and rational essay on climate change, once again. Just a point:
Climate change is *one of the* ecological crises caused by human activity in today’s time, with others being water pollution, soil pollution, etc. The standard approach to dealing with the former of the latter two is building expensive energy-guzzling (fossil fuels, in other words) sewage- or effluent-treatment plants; needless to say, they have their own carbon footprints. I remember innocently pointing this out to a friend who works in an STP, and I’ll just say that she couldn’t quite wrap her head around the fact that environmental clean-up tech can have its own carbon footprint, too. Now, I’m not an absolutist in these matters – I personally support the idea that if there is no eco-friendly alternative, a given technology should be adopted and used, so long as it’s used to treat water; however, if an option is available, then it’s worth exploring with an open mind. Fortunately, water treatment is an area where such a technology exists, and it’s called Constructed Wetlands (CW for short). Here’s an interesting intro to the subject from Appropedia: https://www.appropedia.org/Constructed_wetlands#:~:text=Constructed%20wetlands%20(CW)%2C%20or,for%20the%20removal%20of%20pollutants.
I strongly believe that if enough R&D funds are poured into this instead of nano this and quantum that, it would really help the situation.
Are you familiar with the works of Naomi Klein? Her book The Shock Doctrine seems to be making some of the same points you are.
@JMG
Funny, I often hear that the US would more likely choose to inflate away the debt as opposed to going through the process of defaulting. Is there a particular reason why you think that default is more or less where we’re going?
I am specifically worried about the transition phase for the northern hemisphere’s polar cell. It looks like it will go through a period of time (decades ?) in which it alternates between the old and new pattern. And the energy needed to reverse the flow of the air in polar cell is at its greatest in late summer and early fall.
What worries me is something freakish, like sudden, short lived, ice storms across North America (or Asia) in September killing the harvest. Farms are still dependent on the weather for a good harvest. And most farmland is in the Northern Hemisphere.
(maybe a lot more attention to mushroom crops?? )
JMG wrote,
The thing that nobody wants to talk about is that there’s a simple offramp to the budget deficit issue: default.
I’m guessing that this would require many essays to elucidate, but could you please say a bit about what the more immediate (first couple years) effects of such a default might be?
Thanks,
Edward
JMG,
The book in question is Mesozoic Biological Events and Ecosystems in East Asia, edited by Zheng and Chang. It is specifically the parts talking about the Carnian Pluvial Event and Oceanic Anoxic Event 1b where I found the comments about disruptions to the nitrogen, phosphorous, and iron cycles seeming to correlate with thermal maximums.
My daughters attend a high achieving high school in a midwest US university town [very liberal]. During their earth science class, they spend a few weeks learning about climate change. I was curious to hear if any of their classmates demonstrated any passion for the issue. Nobody! Perhaps the in-school learning makes climate change ‘just another subject’, like how we in the 80s learned about Russian nukes. I’m sure we didn’t have the same level of fear that our parents did when they in school.
My kids’ passions are likely tempered by my conservatism that does affect their lives: riding bikes when it’s cold, not using the a/c often, setting the house thermostat lower than ‘warm’ in winter, etc.. They don’t love any of those things!
I’ll be curious to see how the rest of their generation responds to climate changes in the future. Here’s hoping that less passion can lead to more effective actions.
This essay is a welcome dose of sanity in the climate change ‘debate’. I remember first hearing about global warming in 1989 from the English environmentalist Jonathan Porritt. I’m pretty sure that he said we’d likely be dead by now, or at least be living in swamps and eating frogs. Interesting to note that Porritt went on to become a Sir and a CBE and has various other titles, plus is a friend of and advisor to our current king . Being an early-adopter preacher of doom seems to have paid off nicely for him.
In other random news, I visited a vineyard in Norway a couple of months back. Yes, you read that right. They are popping up there, and enterprising locals are making some very nice varieties. I may be tempted to give it a go myself – rural housing and land is very cheap in Scandinavia, for some reason.
Looking forward to seeing you and others at Glastonbury. I’m down to give a talk about Norwegian ecophilosophy, and how it scored an embarrassing own goal.
By coincidence, I just reread Dogma Chapter 8 that discusses a lot about the astral light and its manifestations in human society. From that point of view, it seems you are pointing out two contradictory currents of the astral light – which actually are not opposed – they are both in their own ways trying to adhere to ‘business as usual’. To have real and meaningful change, one would need to start from the premise that both antagonists are engaged in wishful thinking.
I have sometimes wondered whether we are playing the role of an ecological frenzor at a planetary scale. The planet system, like a temperate forest, tends to hoard energy in fossil fuels, withdrawing carbon from the atmosphere and risking a death by freezing. Just like a forest fire releases the energy stored in the oak trees of a mature forest, sapient species who binge on energy seek out and release the trapped carbon back into the atmosphere to save the earth from freezing.
Hi JMG – I love your attitude, taking it in stride when people that disagree with you get bent out of shape and start lobbing nasty comments at your opinions, and probably your character. I decided to stop replying on Pinterest because it seems that whenever I disagree with someone’s political opinions there, and POLITELY ( as taught by you, thanks) reply in the comments section – I get some hateful feedback, name calling, shaming, cursing the horse I rode in on. It seems that you can’t have a polite difference of opinion with anyone, anymore.
Excellent piece of writing JMG! I’m of the school that, since it was much warmer 8k years ago, which fueled civilization, and drastically colder 300+years ago in the Maunder Minimum, it’s useless to worry about it…In the 1500s, the Thames and Seine froze over and even had buildings on them, and in France, wolf packs crossed the Seine and attacked people on the streets of Paris…These fluctuations are probably a combination of the Milankovitch cycles, variations in cosmic ray flux, and a hundred other factors too complex for us to understand…
Call me weird but reading that essay makes me feel warm and comfortable. It is interesting that while for many the opposite is true, knowing that you know very little can make you feel so relaxed. I recently read David Bohms “On Dialogue” where he talks of being able to hold opinions “in suspense” without deciding whether they are true or not as a necessary precondition for true dialogue. But that’s it isn’t it? Just to be able to allow oneself to have fascinating thoughts like “intelligent dinosaurs 90 million years ago” without feeling the urge to suppress the idea to protect ones…hmm…sense of identification. If you can hold all those fascinating ideas in suspense and let them interact which each other, maybe you get a small glimpse of reality, almost unseizable, almost unspeakable, but very real. (here’s a very close analogy to quantum physics, btw.)
I guess your hiatus is due to your forthcoming trip to England? If so, I wish you a safe journey and a very good time! England is a wonderful place in many ways and I hope you can make the most of it!
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
Other Owen, that’s the value of using paleoclimatology as a source of data. It allows us to look past the day-by-day and year-by-year data turbulence, compare decade and century timescales to prehistoric models, and get a sense of where we’re going. I’ll discuss those snowy winters, and even more striking events such as the summer snowfall in Texas a few years back, as we proceed.
Pygmycory, I know. That’s one of the reasons I treasure this blog’s commentariat.
Viduraawakened, good. Yes, and that’s also a point we’ll be discussing at length — one of the things that happened with the mass marketing of climate change is that all the other forms of ecological disruption got swept under the rug. CW is a great ecotechnic method; the problem is that building them provides jobs for working class people with shovels, not topheavy tech corporations, and so it gets ignored.
Joan, the problem with Klein’s book is that it only looks at the corporate end of the crisis management model and ignores the government-bureaucracy end of it. That’s common enough — and of course on the other side of the aisle, you get people that ignore the corporate end of things and fixate on the government-bureaucracy end. Neither side wants to talk about how deeply the two are interconnected!
N, the problem with hyperinflation, from the perspective of the rich, is that it erases the value of all debt, and thus strips wealth from the rich as well as the poor. Bonds and real estate holdings aren’t going to be worth much, after all, if the dollar in which they’re denominated loses 99% of its value! Default, especially if it’s a technical default of foreign debt followed by renegotiation, gets rid of debt in a far more selective way and allows all other debt to retain its value. Thus, in a society where debt is the foundation of wealth, I expect default to be the default choice (so to speak).
Dobbs, oh, granted, the transition phase could be a bear, but we simply don’t know. It could involve hurricanes in the Arctic Ocean instead of ice storms in the Great Plains.
Edward, I can do better than that. Here are some actual defaults:
Argentina, 1982, 1989, 2001, 2005, 2014, 2020 (I have no idea why anyone loans them money)
Australia, 1931
Cyprus, 2012-2013
Germany, 1953
Mexico, 1982
Russia, 1998
Look up the consequences in history websites and you’ll get a very good idea of what the potential range of possibilities can be.
Moose, thanks for this!
ChadK, I suspect that once it became an officially approved subject for study at schools, all the potential interest trickled away in a hurry. As for action, though, at this stage all we can hope to do is adapt.
Jason, thank you for this. I’m not in the least surprised that vineyards are being planted in Norway; England was a significant wine producer in Roman times, as I recall. I’ll look forward to seeing you and hearing about the embarrassing story.
Paul, excellent. Yes, that would follow, wouldn’t it?
MCB, it’s occurred to me more than once that Gaia may have evolved us because she wanted to turn the thermostat up a few notches, and a bunch of monkeys with shovels seemed like the best way to do it. So you may be right; intelligent species may be one of the recurrent control mechanisms of the global biosphere.
Dana, autism has its advantages, and one of them is that the shrieks and bellows of the professionally offended on both sides of the aisle are just noise. I don’t know that I’d recommend it to anyone else, but it’s always worked for me. 😉
Pyrrhus, the main cause of the Little Ice Age is actually known at this point. When Old World diseases annihilated 95%+ of the population of the New World, runaway forest growth across North and South America sucked so much carbon out of the atmosphere that it had a hard impact on climate. Did you know that the Amazon rain forest basically didn’t exist in 1492? The earliest Spanish explorers described the Amazon basin as a settled land full of farms and cities; their testimony was dismissed more recently, but new technology has found the cities and shown that they were right. That many gigatons of carbon drained out of the atmosphere drove global cooling.
Nachtgurke, you’re weird. 😉 Agreed; in my case, knowing that human beings aren’t that important in the great scheme of things, and are likely just one intelligent species among many that the planet has pupped, is very comforting. Thank you for the good wishes!
Australia did have grants for home insulation, briefly, before they fell prey to politics in 2010. The Home Insulation Program led to a rush of inexperienced tradesmen laying insulation in people’s ceilings. After the third one got electrocuted by house wiring, the Opposition used the program as a symbol of government waste and incompetence (the “Pink Batts scandal”). Prime Minister Kevin Rudd quietly shelved the whole program to save his political hide.
I live in southern Appalachia and have noticed the climate changing since my youth. It definitely got hotter in the late summer, say in August. The summers went from being hot, but reasonably temperate, and now it’s basically a jungle in the summer. But, the other thing I noticed is that all of the seasons “shifted” about 3 weeks. It used to get cold the first of December, but now it gets cold around Christmas. Likewise, we could plant potatoes and cold weather crops in late February, but now we always get a good week of really cold weather in the middle of March. Good thing this is fairly predictable for our farms.
1.) I presume that quite a lot of people use “the end of the world” (or similar) as a figure of speech rather than, say, the universe literally coming to an end.
And in fact you suggest quite well just how devastating this could be to what people in rich countries over the last century came to think of as “normal life” :
This latest Ice Age we apes-with-a-tool-industry have evolved in during the last millions of years,
(not to be confused with the glacial periods that have been the norm during it – we’ve been out of one in the last ~12ky),
if it ends,
(which seems increasingly more likely),
we’ll have to deal with a climate poorly suited to us.
(Not to mention the transition will be rough.)
Even worse, the end of Earths normal “hot” climate after the PETM 56 Mya, was also (like you point out) what allowed mammals to thrive !
And during some of these hotter than normal Earths we would have had the equators too hot for mammals to survive, much less thrive in !
(It doesn’t help that on these timescales, the Sun is slowly getting appreciably hotter, which makes our situation even more precarious.)
So, forgive me if this makes me an egotistical mammal, but no, I’m not happy about the risks we are taking here !
(Other non-domesticated mammals have it very rough right now, but life in general would otherwise bounce back once the Industrial era was over.)
And sure, humans are very adaptable… but life in these hot ant/arctic jungles,
(that might end up as our only options once the hundreds-of-years transition of the end of our Ice Age is over),
is likely to be quite unpleasant, starting with those months of daytime and nighttime that these latitudes are infamous for. And I doubt civilizations will be able to rise there (YMMV on whether you consider this a good thing).
2.) The Sahara seems to have been for a while now in a ~15ky cycle between a “Green Sahara” and one that is even drier than now, seemingly mostly driven by orbital cycles. While anthropogenic climate change might mess with this cycle, its pre-existence means its a very unstable foundation to make any conclusions about causes.
3.) Recent changes around the Mediterranean seem to be quite a mess : some areas seem to be getting more droughts, others a climate that is more tropical-like : with much more rainy ‘winters’ (including on its Northern side). Some seemingly are getting both, alternating. (See above remarks about transition being rough.)
JMG,
From an economic perspective one of the first canaries in the coal mine will be the downhill skiing industry. I was an avid skier in my youth taking the bus with my friends to Mt Hood on Saturdays. I gave it up years ago because it got too expensive and much too car-centric for my evolving tastes.
But as a industry it gets a double whammy as ski seasons in North America keep getting shorter while the cost of driving a car to the resort escalates every year. At this point more and more ski resorts are closing down each season as the spread between revenue and costs gets smaller. The only ones still doing well have become little more than slope side real estate schemes, and that is coming to an end.
Recently the Ski area on Mt Bachelor in central Oregon was put up for sale by its corporate owner because it is totally located on leased land in a national forest so there is no real estate potential. A group of locals tried to raise money to buy the place and keep it local but that failed. Now it is in limbo waiting for the axe to fall, though you would be hard pressed to find anyone in Bend to admit that.
Depending on a person’s answer on anthropogenic climate change, you could probably safely guess their answers to twenty other questions on various subjects.. It is sad how tribal this has become. There are so few friends with whom I feel comfortable talking about any of these subjects anymore. with my more right leaning friends, it doesn’t matter so much because I have never been part of that tribe anyhow. With my left leaning ones it is harder because that has been my orientation all my life and I have far more friends there. I fear some feel that I have left the church or joined the enemy. I find that I talk less and less to fewer and fewer people about anything of importance. Perhaps at my age people can blame it on senility. It is sadder to me though than I often let on.
It amuses me too that right and left and liberal and conservative have pretty much ceased to have any meaning to me. It all seems to be a matter of which tribe you have chosen.
Stephen
Here’s another data point for ya, JMG. I’ve just had half a year’s precipitation in the last three days. And it still refuses to stop bloody raining. I reckon it will be August before I can get out on the paddocks to do anything – we missed the autumn pasture sowing window, so there’ll be bugger all feed for the cattle this winter. To top it all off, I can’t see the dung beetles not drowning across the whole district, so next summer will likely be a parasite nightmare.
Stop the world, I want to get off…
@ViduraAwakened, JMG – I find it highly interesting that people focus on climate change, pollution, and other unwelcome side effects of our lifestyles. The bottom line is there are 8 billion of us here, who require somewhere in the neighborhood of 16,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy per day in order to stay reasonably healthy and active. The end result is that an estimated one-sixth of the Earth’s biomass has been redirected toward human consumption. We have paved over some 50,000 square miles of the Earth’s surface with more land dedicated to parking lots, building rooftops, and dirt or gravel roads. And don’t get me started on lawns, the ecological deserts of the suburbs. Fully one-half of the Earth’s land area is now dedicated to human use. One-third of the Earth’s forests have been lost to agriculture and managed forests. Humans have decimated entire fisheries and brought many species to near-extinction through hunting, fishing, and habitat destruction.
For some reason, we seem to want extravagant lifestyles while pretending to have a minimal footprint. But that’s just not the case. What is dedicated to human use is largely denied to other species excepting those that serve us. We care about climate change and pollution because they affect us directly, but from the standpoint of the Earth’s ecosystem as a whole, these are hardly the only players, or even the most important ones. But those others don’t affect us quite so noticeably, so we don’t lose much sleep over them.
“Moulin is a sinkhole within a glacier or ice sheet that’s circular or somewhat circular. It’s a vertical shaft where water enters from the surface.”
I knew there was a word for a sinkhole on a glacier. All the surface water and rain goes down and comes out elsewhere. There is some concern that it lubricates the bottom of the glacier causing it to slide into the ocean faster.
@ Brendhelm and @jmg
One thing I’ve always been curious about, if there was a civilization like ours 90 million years ago, I’d imagine metal and concrete are gone, but wouldn’t there be some fossils? We have dinosaur fossils and bugs and stuff, so why not some fossils of mid-sized raccoon creatures called cyons (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-billion-years/)?
Any insights (including good books) on this would be appreciated!
thx
Jerry
And here in New Zealand my roses are putting out their last buds somewhat late.
Kfish, that is to say, anything government can do, it can do badly!
Watchflinger, when I lived in the north central Appalachians I noticed the same thing.
Peak.Singularity, we’ll be talking at quite some length about the jungle-planet condition toward which we’re heading. The short form is that in a hotter planet, heat transfer to the poles is much more efficient than it is in our climate, and so the equator doesn’t actually warm that much — it’s the temperate regions and especially the poles that absorb most of the warming. Here again, paleoclimatology is a good indicator. We also need to watch the total amount of economically accessible fossil fuels, which is not actually that immense in planetary terms. More on this later.
Clay, yep. I foresee a future, not that far away, in which only the rich ski because you have to fly to Alaska or some similarly isolated place to do it.
Stephen, I know. It’s a source of quite some amusement to me that I don’t get invites to either the left-wing or the right-wing science fiction conventions. Each side has its own reasons for screaming in outrage at my novels. Of course I don’t mind, since every such screech boosts my sales. I haven’t benefited to anything like the same extent as JK Rowling, but it’s the same effect.
Les, ouch! Remind me roughly where you’re located.
Helix, true — and that’s especially the case when environmentalism has been hijacked by bureaucratic and corporate interests and redirected solely toward the climate change situation, so that all kinds of other ecological abuses go unnoticed by would-be activists.
Siliconguy, yep. It can also pool underneath the ice and eventually make the ice float, in which case you can get a sudden ice surge that fills large sections of ocean with thousands of icebergs at once. Cue Jethro Tull:
“The lady of the ice sounds
a deathly distant rumble
to Titanic-breaking children lost
in melting crystal tears.”
Jerry, it’s estimated that we have fossils of far fewer than 1% of the species that have existed on earth in the last 500 million years. Fossilization is a very rare event, and even when a skeleton is fossilized, it has to endure through that 90 million year interval and all the geological changes that it brings about. An intelligent dinosaur that lasted for a few million years before going extinct? It would be impressive if one skeleton survived. For that matter, since the saurian in question might have looked like this…
…all anyone would know is that they found some dinosaur bones of a species that might have had a larger brain than usual.
KAN, thanks for the data point.
The obvious things to do about climate change, like insulating your house, make the person less dependent on the system in that way and in other small ways, which is why the “green” pundits reject it. But my daughter illustrated the flip side of that coin when I suggested she could lower her huge utility bills by putting in window treatments (and with some of those windows, such as the ones facing her shower room, she really should!) she acted as it I’d suggested she go to her office in shorts and a ragged tee shirt.
I also mentioned to another resident here in The Village, who is on the Nature Committee*, that we suggest to our new owner that when they remodel Lake House C/D, they weatherize it. She had no idea what I was talking about, and when I explained it, she looked totally blank and wanted to know why anyone would want to do that.” Even an argument tat it saved money and would help with climate change drew an utter blank. These are not the corporate and government overlords who want to keep us dependent; these are ones being kept dependent.
*I’ve seen her painting of a little fluffy bunny rabbit, and pretty snapshots of birds. That’s what Nature means to her.
Hi all,
Speculating on pre human civilizations is fun. Regarding the lack of evidence of nuclear energy by ancient civilizations, well there are always the natural nuclear reactors to keep in mind. But more than that, nuclear energy is a very specific thing, produced by a very specific culture. As I’ve said in these comments before nuclear energy is first and foremost a political technology, not an economic one. A culture that didn’t have the political pressures ours had (a looming global war and a rising belief in the role of the state as the ultimate funder for academic research) more than likely would have considered nuclear fusion and fission in the same way we consider things like beta decay or cosmic rays. An interesting phenomena for the natural philosophers to muse about and do some desktop experiments with (as they did before the Manhattan Project).
The other big question is space travel. I think it’s fair to say that if pre human industrial cultures got into space travel it was in a more limited way than we did. Places like Mars and Venus may have been radically different hundreds of millions of years ago of course but the Moon was not and there is no evidence of anyone else landing on the Moon. In addition comsats in geo synchronous orbit would likely remain there for millions of years, and we’ve found no ancient TV satellites up there.
It’s also worth remembering that if any pre human cultures did get into science and technology it would be under vastly different cultural values and assumptions. As a result technologies that seem completely obvious to us or even inevitable might well have never been developed at all by these other cultures. It’s common to think that the technological suite we use is the default and that it’s inevitable. I do not think that is true, even in recent history it’s possible to identify specific choices made that, had different choices been made instead would have produced a radically different world. Say the 1970’s appropriate tech scene became the growth industry in the 1980’s instead of the personal computer scene (both scenes began largely as hobbyist and small scale research communities with a healthy dose of counter culture and government grants in the 1970’s), and 45 years on you’re looking at a pretty different world.
Also I can’t get away without mentioning HP Lovecraft. My favorite thing about his cynicism was that even hyper advanced alien empires that spread across the night sky and built cities on the ancient Earth eventually had their cultures wind down and fade out. Even they ultimately did not live up to the techno-fantasies of the rest of the SF scene.
Cheers,
JZ
I’m happy that you’re revisiting this subject in the midst of our sane and reasonably sober commentariat, JMG.
I had a chance to talk to a quite eminent emeritus professor of physics and climatology, still contributing his scientific insights at Los Alamos Labs near where I live. Happens he’s a kind of kabbalist, self-taught in Hebrew from his 70’s (he’s in his 80’s now), with a considerable background of time spent at a Hindu Ashram in India. He was quite guarded in what he was willing to say about anthropogenic climate change, but it seemed to me that he was a) quite clear that the climate WAS changing, yet b) the contribution of humans was nearly impossible to measure well enough to factor in. A further point I seem to have learned from him is that the computer climate models being used to make “the sky is falling” predictions are not accurate enough to do any such thing.
I recall the among the points made in “Godel, Escher, Bach” was that at some level math is not especially suited to proving things. Did I get that right?
What we DO know reliably is that the magnetosphere is growing increasingly wonky, which can’t help things much. Even the complex orbital dynamics some point to as triggers for major changes in climate (name forgotten at present) can’t be calculated very effectively due to not having a proper starting point for the cycles. And human caused environmental damage is vast, but remediating it might cost some huge corporation somewhere some money, so that has by all the evidence rather dropped of the radar of the mainstream.
Some people like to imagine that the “elites” know exactly what is afoot and are busily building themselves escape locations in “deep underground military bases,” (DUMB) and other such things. Trips to Mars, anyone? But to quote the Scottish bard, “There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.” Or, as the inimitable baseball legend Satchel Paige reportedly said (my paraphrase): “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.” My thought is that even if such preparations are ongoing, I expect that, like yachts, they are toys for those oversupplied with funds (if not sense).
Dear Mr. Archdruid,
On the last Open Post i submitted a question about “what are the incentives driving elites to be so dumb?” (i was very late, you probably didn’t see it), now you answer me: It’s not incompetence, it is malice. So good.
Still, i do know people who are involved with the “green agenda” who sincerely believe their work, and although in many senses they are far from “salt of the earth” they do not go near the kind of hypocrisy shown by DiCaprio. So i’ve still entertaining this line of thinking. (Not that “incentives” is the RIGHT lens for that, it’s just the one that caught my attention at the moment). If i come up with something interesting i’ll comment again.
I am reading this in a cafe that uses paper straws, but which also has the doors wide open as it blasts the AC into the summer heat. If they so clearly don’t actually care about the environment, can’t they give me my plastic straws back???
Hey JMG, I just want to say thank you as yet another reader who appreciates your even-handed approach to controversy of all sorts. Your framing of climate change as a subject of deep time, as opposed to imminent doom vs. nothing burger tribal pitched battles, is a breath of fresh air.
Your comment to Jerry above, and the saurian picture that accompanied it, delight me:
“It’s estimated that we have fossils of far fewer than 1% of the species that have existed on earth in the last 500 million years.”
And yet we are the species that know all there is to know about everything. What an enormous strictly optional burden that is. I’m more than ready to put that burden down, get my mind straight, and do what I need to do to adapt.
OtterGirl
I am more concerned about the flood of novel chemicals introduced into the environment since WW2 than CO2. Microplastics, forever chemicals, endocrine disrupters, pharmaceuticals and more. A chilling article about the effects of microplastics in animal studies https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26635421-000-what-are-microplastics-doing-to-your-brain-were-starting-to-find-out/
Behind a paywall but basically cognitive and behavioral problems and anxiety happen.!
We are being exposed to hundreds, even thousands of chemicals that have never been in the biosphere and add to that a sea of also novel types of light and electromagnetic radiations. But all these things are integral parts of how things are done We are lab rats in a world wide experiment.!
I lived in Massachusetts as a child back in the 60’s. No way could you have been in short sleaves in February back then. I distinctly remember the piles of snow in our driveway that the snow plows pushed up.
I think the most recent time we’ve had this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was during the Oligocene. For years now I’ve thought that sending out paleoclimatologists and paleobotanists to research that age would be helpful to agriculture, forestry and insurance underwrites.
Hi John Michael,
I won’t mention the charity mugger incident again, although oops, just broke my own rule there! 🙂 A truly pivotal moment where the underlying reality was laid forth for all to see in all its glorious grubbiness.
The future scenario of ‘less stuff’ is a most frightening situation for people who are trained to believe in infinite growth and progress.
But neither is it the apocalypse is it? (as you’ve repeatedly pointed out since day one)
What I’m observing is that things and stuff cost more, at all levels. Even the recent rating downgrade of err, some sovereign nations debt, along with the err, subsequent increase in bond yields, suggests that the same thing is happening everywhere, to everyone, and all at once.
Climate disasters work exactly as you suggested, they impose huge economic burdens upon a population. I do rather wonder at what point we as a society decide to do something different, such as ditch the unworkable building and planning codes in disaster prone areas? Hard to say how that will go, but I’d point out that the built environment looks the way it does, because that’s what we’ve all decided collectively to support. Support can sometimes evaporate.
Have a nice break too – and suck up some of that ancient energy – you’ll love it. 😊 Hope you get to explore some interesting places, and my mind wanders to a certain book by Nikolai Tolstoy who you recommended to read a long time ago in a month far away. A good antidote to MZB and the Mists of that which shall dare not be named here. It is rare for me to burn a book, but only a hot bonfire could purge the memories.
Cheers
Chris
Hey JMG
I thought I’d let you know that currently there is more flooding happening in Australia, this time in NSW. Apparently the flooding has caused one death so far, and the disappearance of 3 others. All up it has isolated 50,000 people in various low-lying towns.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/may/22/nsw-floods-these-maps-show-the-full-extent-of-record-breaking-rainfall
Also, I have recently published a new essay, about an Australian artist who makes sculptures out of brass, concrete and mineral industrial waste such as slag and grows plants in them. It may sound unimpressive, but his sculptures do have a decent aesthetic to them, they seem almost like industrial ruins or igneous rock and coral that have been shaped by water and occupied with weeds.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/a-brief-introduction-to-the-sculptures?r=e0m1f
About winners and losers, a while back I read about this thing called the Holocene Filter. According to this account pre-Holocene humankind was much more genetically diverse than it is now along with various archaic forms co-existing with anatomically and behaviorally modern sapiens.
But with the advent of the Holocene, for reasons not fully known but I suspect probably having something to do with changing ecological niches, the hammer came down and the gene pool was culled especially of more archaic human forms. And not only that but over the succeeding millennia the survivors evolved to resemble one another more. And I take that to mean smaller faces and jaws, smaller brains and skulls and altogether smaller stature.
I think it’s pretty hard to tease out what changes occurred because of warming climate and what changes took place because of changing technology and diet because settled agricultural ways seemed to start pretty much with the end of the ice age. Or was it before?
I can imagine what the denizens of Doggerland were thinking when year by year their stomping grounds were more and more submerged. I can imagine what the good farmers in the Black Sea basin thought when the rising Mediterranean burst its banks and flooded their turf and expanded that lake at the basin bottom at the rate of a mile a day according to one estimate I read. Could that have been the basis of the Biblical Flood account?
Beardtree, don’t forget, though, that since the dawn of life on earth, living things have been perceiving and responding creatively to unique and not necessarily benign chemicals. Oxygen and its reactivity spring to mind – of an early encounter that living things soon got a handle on. Not that I’m a fan of all the ways we’ve polluted everywhere, but a bigger perspective helps.
Patricia, there’s that! To members of (and aspirants to) the managerial class, anything that makes you look less wealthy than you are is apparently a fate worse than death.
John, good points. Space travel in particular requires an obsession with endless linear expansion that our own Western culture has, and no other human culture has bothered with. I’m not sure, though, that even high-orbit satellites would still be in place after 90 million years; tidal effects over that time scale would, I think, likely destabilize such orbits, leaving the satellite either spinning out into deep space or getting close enough to the earth that atmospheric drag becomes an issue. As for Lovecraft, bingo — in his cosmos, no matter how much more intelligent than humans you are (and all of his critters are smarter than we are, except for shoggoths), doom comes in due time.
Clarke, any climate model that isn’t strictly based on paleoclimatological data is to my mind a hopeless muddle, and the evidence bears that out — none of the models have predicted what’s actually happened. Mathematics is a structure of abstract fictions with only occasional contact with the real world; as I like to point out, one apple plus one apple may or may not equal two apples, depending on the size, variety, and ripeness of the four apples we’re discussing! As for the elites, Hagbard’s Law — the principle that communication is only possible between equals — makes them far less likely to have a clue than anyone else.
Marcio, not malice but shortsighted greed, amply backed up by stupidity. Human beings simply aren’t that bright, and many people who’ve bought into the corporate (pseudo)green agenda simply have never thought things through.
Zachary, did you ever read about indulgences? I really do need to introduce Friar Tetzel to my readers again…
OtterGirl, thank you. It always makes me feel a little better about my species when I hear from someone else who’s sick of the posturing pomposity of all this drivel about Humanity, Masters of the Cosmos, and is much happier with a more modest and realistic vision of our possibilities and limits.
BeardTree, and ecologists used to talk about such things before they all got swept up in the global warming panic.
Moonwolf8, I haven’t been here that long, but I’ve heard the same thing from those who have.
Chris, I managed to avoid reading that dreadful object. Thank you; Glastonbury is one of my favorite places on Earth and it’ll be a delight to be there again.
J.L.Mc12, many years ago I saw the movie The Last Wave. I wonder if anyone is thinking about that in your country just now. Thank you for the essay on Jamie North’s sculptures; those have a very Druidic vibe to them.
Smith, in Doggerland they didn’t have much time to think, as much of that land went under in a single cataclysmic tsunami event around 6150 BC. That same tsunami carved the white cliffs of Dover and separated Britain once and for all from Europe. The thing to keep in mind is that since the peak of the last ice age around 16,000 BC, the whole history of the world has been shaped by rising seas — 300 feet of sea level rise, drowing vast amounts of land in the process. The flood narrative in the Bible is one of many echoes of that long history.
A year or so ago readers here shared their personal experience of changing local climate over the last decades. While my memories here don’t go back as far as those of AnonyMoose, I noted that each winter in Quebec from 2016/17 to 2023/24 seemed to have been substantially less cold than the preceding one – a shorter period of time continuously under the freezing point, and usually also less snow. This contrasts with more or less constant summers. However, the winter 2024/25 was not distinctly warmer (nor colder) than the preceding ones.
RE Doggerland, JMG, while there may be sources that support the tsunami timeline you suggest here, the publication you linked to doesn’t. It says: “By the time the tsunami struck, c. 8150 BP, this higher sea level had probably reduced Dogger Island to a shallow sand bank”.
@Brendhelm and @jmg
It has been pointed out before, but seeing as the whole evolution of humanity took place in about 3 million years, human history (well this wave) took about 6.500 years, and modern industrial civilisation is what 250 + whatever we still manage.
Now compare this to time estimates of found fossiles, where it is often stated, that so and so specimens lived let’s say 72,6 to 66 million years ago T-Rex, or 75 to 71 million years ago.
Taking into account as JMG said, that we got less then 1% of species as fossils, it is entirely possible, that future industrial species finds our fossiles.
An african elephant and a wolf from our time period. As for the apes; an Australopithecus from 3 million years ago, and a partial gorilla skeleton from 1500 years in the future.
“As you can see, decisive evidence of the existence of primates on this earth, but there is no evidence they were ever intelligent enough to use tools. Evidence suggests, that they even evolved towards more brutish forms.” V. Y. Tutu’an (Ornian archaeologist)
@jmg
I have often wondered if climate change is not an earth regulatory mechanism to normalise the temperature. This would also explain why, if climate change was so disruptive, worldshattering and it happened before on a geological scale, there was no warnings when we started digging. No vision, revelation, even manifestation of a long ascendant member of the saurian industrial civilisation, that would come with dire warnings to the first wells.
Why, they did their part, as we say “moved on to more interesting things”, and those who would still pay attention to happenings here would look at it with an understanding of Gaia’s processes and their own hindsight. They would be like parents sipping tea, watching nostalgic how their toddlers are playing in the sandbox. Boo boos are going to be made.
Best regards,
Marko
@ JMG – I just rewatched “The Last Wave,” three or four days ago. I know you don’t watch movies, but for anyone who does, The Criterion Collection put out a remastered version. With a bit of an interview with Wim Wenders, the director. But that ambiguous ending? Vision or real event? Who knows. The director doesn’t seem to. Lew
PS: I’ve lived in the maritime Pacific Northwest, most of my life. I’ve been tracking first and last frosts for about five years. Both have been getting later and later. This last winter, we had only one serious cold snap. I see El Niño / La Niña is in neutral. According to Prof Mass, the Seattle Meteorologist, that means possible flooding and wind storms, next winter. He, like you, isn’t a fan of the hysteria around climate change. Although he’s a bit Seattle-centric, his blog posts are often informative. cliff mass.blogspot.com.
Perhaps the USDA climate zones are not entirely fake everywhere, but here? They assure us we are 5a. We are most definitely still 3a: we keep our own records.
We do have fewer -30 winter lows than the 1980s and 1990s had, summer highs have not increased from 101, but again, more of them, and our frost free season is still about sixty days sometime between mid-May and mid-September. Dad recorded starting in 1987, and I took over a few years before he passed away.
I can see a profit motive for USDA to lie about zones: there are a lot more plants that grow in 5a than 3a. Certainly-our soil is about 9-10ph, depending on the spot-the local retailers have no qualms about selling plants which will die: they bring in blueberries by the truckload.
And we do have two 5a plants which are doing pretty well: a pair of grapes planted in the microclimate of an underinsulated house wall. That’s the sort of thing you get away with when you know your land: a foot further out and they’d be goners.
USDA’s excuse would be that the Official Data comes from the city airport, 20 miles north, 500′ lower, and in the old Yellowstone path, while we are up snug in a proper basin and range formation. Pavement around the sensors might have a thing or two to do with their current datasets as well.. But they claim that we’re the same zone, and it should be pretty obvious that we are not to anyone who observes anything at all: lilacs down there were done a week ago, ours are just opening.
If anyone should be in the position to have new property, I suggest not planting any non-annuals that your neighbors do not have well established the first few years you live there, and get a recording thermometer and a rain gauge, and a wall calendar to record on, and see how your site measures up. Then you can knowingly throw away eighty bucks on peach trees that never make more than three winters at your pleasure, just like we do! Hope springs eternal, peach trees, alas, do not.
(We have also had no luck with pears, but our neighbor two up has, so we’re going to get some seeds from theirs and see what happens. They’re only about fifty feet lower . . . did I mention hope?)
You summarised it pretty well once, “The planet will be fine but industrial civilisation will take a walloping”. The speed of change will impact those that have built for efficiency instead of resilience.
Climate change when it comes to politics is a great example of the saying “The right lives in denial, the left lives in delusion.”. One side doesn’t want to admit we are pushing this predicament along and think it is a ploy to ONLY hold them back, the other side think we can just install a panel on the roof, drive an EV and then we will go to the stars all problems solved!
I completely agree with your stance on Wind turbines vs building resilience of the energy used. Wind turbines can make a lot of energy (possibly the most intermittent of them all) but they are a good representation of all the excess of modern industrial thinking. Big grand machines stubbornly trying to ensure that we can keep the energy provided growing at all costs, ones that need endless maintenance until eventual failure only a mere two decades later.
One place I do now hold my tongue with the green agenda is when folks are talking about building out loads of solar in residential space. Solar while has similar intermittent energy issue, is a decent way to smooth the transition downwards without the mechanical maintenance costs of Wind. Keep them clean, eventually plug them directly into DC motor based tools and they can be a decent thing. Mind you, those pushing it don’t think there are limitations or even a downward slope, they will find that out for themselves in time.
Seasonal work and jobs will make a return beyond just agriculture, would have to get back in tune with the flows of the seasons. Would make the Solstice all the more special.
@Viduraawakened It is called ‘Carbon Tunnel Vision’
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fh9ot0uu1e1uc1.png
Hi JMG,
Very interesting post. You have returned, but oh my God, you will be leaving for a month. Happy travelling‼️
> we will all be fried to a crackly crisp in a planet-sized wok
Absolutely precious. This oughta be framed🖼️.
> climate change
There is another aspect:
I don’t think many of Earth’s humans have “gotten the point” that humans have to die before Earth gets better. It is us — humans — raising the collective temperature. “We” are doing it by simply existing. By one measure, each human has roughly body temperature of 98.6º F. (37º C.) While I don’t feel unpleasantly hot being that temperature (unless one has hyperthermia), when one considers 98º F., that is pretty darn hot. Multiply 98º by 8.2 billion people, and that is a lot of additional heat that Earth could do without. After some grace period after humans are (mostly) gone, Earth will get back in balance, and life without humans will thrive once again. Earth has acute and chronic “humanaliceia” disease. (I made that name up.)
The theme is “Life After People.” There actually was a TV show by that name aired from 2008 to 2010 — a dynamite show. The show cut too close to the quick, was pulled off the air before its time.
That means the Earth won’t cool down until, hm, say, three-quarters of humans drop dead. After Earth has shed humans, Earth will cool off, and not before. “The Earth recovering” and “humanity existing” are mutually exclusive.
Earth is actively trying to slough humans off itself. We needn’t act so surprised. Earth feels that humanity is its lice, and is doing its darnedest to scratch humans off. From Earth’s point of view, humans themselves ARE THE PLAGUE, without many of us actually HAVING the plague.
It is ridiculous to apply money to the situation, which is throwing cash out the window.
💨Northwind Grandma💨☔️☀️⌛️😱
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG,
Oh granted, I’m sure orbital perturbations and resonances would kick satellites out all over the place given enough time. I meant more that we haven’t found anything in a weird elliptical orbit or orbiting the sun or smashed into the Moon that seems to predate our own space efforts. That being said it would be really, really cool if we did. I think there might be a science fiction story in there somewhere. I may have to write it.
Cheers
JZ
Hey JMG
Druidic is an adjective that I never thought would be applied to Jamie North’s sculptures, but I know that it is high praise coming from you. He is one of those artists that is little-known outside a few cities, and I decided to try and change that.
I feel that his sculptural style could be fairly easy to replicate on a DIY basis, maybe becoming a working-class art form like those sculptures welders make out of metal scrap. So by making people aware of his work, I hope to encourage people to explore this possibility.
JMG, we’re in the lovely locale of Wherrol Flat, around 300km north of Sydney, Australia.
Currently, my local town/shopping hub looks like this:
https://static.ffx.io/images/$zoom_0.525%2C$multiply_1.9577%2C$ratio_1.5%2C$width_756%2C$x_0%2C$y_31/t_crop_custom/q_62%2Cf_auto/2122b308a9417483e0e7d0d8416bea1513926126905df2b8ed1b39a42aa0a876
I think it can be officially classed as a natural disaster – heck, I’m even hearing reports of drowned cattle washing up on local beaches…
PS: I think Stormwatch is my favourite Tull album….
Hi JMG, a fine post. The crisis management model as you’ve described seems to be consistent in the futility to address multiple predicaments. I think Dmitry Orlov thought of this feature as “boondoggles”, but Jim Kunstler summed it up in a single word when he named his website.
I wholeheartedly agree that a paleoclimatic model has some significant advantages. When I was working on climatological analyses in the mid 1980s in the Air Force, we generally restricted our data input to the last 30 years. Part of this was due to a fact that many military installations weren’t built until the cold war years. Rising temps were apparent by then, but it seemed rather poor science to use 30 years worth of weather observations to describe and plan around climate statistics for a location on a 4.5B year old planet. But then again, we know what they say about statistics.
Have a safe and pleasant trip to merry old England, and don’t forget to hoist a bitter or two of ale.
@ Helix
I agree, but economic prosperity is also necessary, especially in the case of India, for example. The challenge here is how to ensure that we balance economic well-being with ecology – in the case of agriculture, I’d very much support the idea of having as many “fruit forests” as possible, as these would help bring both. My own take is that the kind of quality of life corresponding to the carbon footprint of the average middle-class Argentinian/Uruguayan/Chilean is something that can be used as a benchmark for the First World to come down to, and countries like mine to come up to. That would be a reasonable goal to strive for, but who will bell the proverbial cat?
@JMG
I think CWs are a type of cutting-edge technology, but then that is something that I’d need an hour to justify when talking with a skeptic – the whole glitzy screen tech has completely hijacked the minds of people that the idea of sophisticated tech is conflated only with smartphones, and other similar stuff. In my view, apart from organic farming (if I remember correctly, you called it one of modern civilization’s greatest intellectual achievements), I think CWs are also a brilliant tech, as is mycoremediation. In fact, I think the greatest unsolved mystery of practical value is that of terra preta – we don’t know why it has the composition it does, and why so incredibly fertile it is, and finally, how it can be made on a large scale from scratch. Whichever individual or group manages to crack this one, to my mind, deserves all of the Nobel Prizes currently instituted, as it ticks all the important boxes.
JMG, alright, I will just say this because fossils and dinosaurs have been mentioned. I love dinos since I was a child and studied the lot of them, visited museums, fossil sites, etc. The one thing that bothers me though is that…these fossils are non-renewable. We dug them out, study them, put them on display inside museums…however we all know that museums, just like the rest of our civilization, are going away eventually, taking the fossils with them. Which means future civilizations and cultures will not have access to them, at least not as easily as we did. And future sapient species won’t either. Although I feel grateful for having been born at such a time in which quite a lot is known about life on Earth in the past, I also feel a tinge of sadness knowing that such knowledge won’t be available for future generations (in the far future).
I too regularly annoy people on both ends of the climate change spectrum. Lefties tend to assume I must be a CC denier, and rightoids think I must have guzzled every last drop of the green koolaid because I know that anthropogenic CC (ACC) is real. Oh well 🤷
One thing I ask people is “Do you think that those who accept ACC is real have lower carbon emissions than those who deny it is real?” As far as I know this question has not been studied but I’d lay a very large wager that the answer is “They don’t”. One piece of evidence in favour of this is the fact, pointed out by your good self many years ago, that 99% of climate change scientists happily take plane flights to overseas climate change conferences. They live in nice middle-class houses and partake in the usual C02-belching activoties that people on middle-class incomes can afford.
I believe I was the one who groused about how incongruent people are about energy.
Recently, I stumbled upon a Climate Grief movement. A humanist who bedeviled various Polytheists a few years ago had a nervous breakdown over climate change. They realized that no matter what they did, nothing changed.
They decided to join the Climate Grief groups.
Good Grief Group
https://www.goodgriefnetwork.org/
10 Steps to Resilience & Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate
A peer-to-peer support group for people overwhelmed by eco-distress and collective trauma from social and ecological injustices
Here is another one:
Gather – Post Doom
https://postdoom.com/gather/
In this time of crisis and catastrophe, our comfort is to be with other people who understand what we’re going through. In a Collapse Club meeting, you will join like-minded people in a safe, structured space to share your personal experience of collapse understanding to cultivate communal support and wisdom.
Planet Titanic Human Extinction Café
A zoom gathering for those who want to prepare intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually for societal collapse and human extinction in our lifetimes due to anthropogenic climate change.
—-
I guess all the depressed people who thought that they could change the world gather together to hold each other up. I am not sure how I feel any of this.
—
BTW Greta Thunberg is no longer a major mover in the climate movement. She gave her position to the younger generation. She is now protesting Gaza and all of that.
The passage about New England winters made me think of the Kennebec River log drives. Everyone waited until the river thawed in May, then gather up all the logs that various companies sent down via chutes. It was open to anyone who could wrangle logs in water. I remember the big booms that captured the logs and the boats that towed them. It all ended in the 1970s when the government decided that the drive polluted the river. So now big logging trucks roar down the bad roads, blowing out smoke and dropping logs every time they make a turn. So much for pollution, etc.
I think that having everything managed by “do-gooder whites” is something to be avoided at all costs. Otherwise, we end up with AL Gores, decrying climate change, while living in a house run with enough electricity to light up a small city.
The comment about intelligent dinosaurs makes me wonder about the following scenario. Let’s say humans go extinct in the usual way in a few hundred thousand years. One hundred million years later, a distant descendant of a modern rodent evolves capabilities similar to today’s humans and experiences its own technological boom. Paleontologists from this species scour the Earth and achieve similar coverage to today’s human paleontologists. What do they find from the era of humans, and are they able to piece together what happened?
I have noticed an interesting reaction in myself to the big wind turbines. When I first saw them 40 or so years ago in Holland, I assumed it was a nervousness of being near something that big and tall. I feel the same when close to big radio towers. But with the proliferation of wind turbines on the ridges around where I live, I am not close to them, yet every time I see them I get…tense and upset. They just creep me out. I was wondering if anyone else feels that way? I see the huge solar arrays around and can look at them as something with both positives and negatives that likely isn’t doing much long-term good (also EVs), but not the wind turbines. I wish they’d go away. Any chance Gaia is influencing my reaction in some way?
One detail of last winter in southern New England that might be worth mentioning: we watched storm after storm build in the Midwest, only to rush out to sea well south of us with sometimes severe effects on the southern segment of the Mid-Atlantic region. The interesting detail is that just about every time this happened, the forecast 5-7 days in advance had predicted that the storm would likely intensify near the coast, pick up additional coastal moisture, make a turn to the north, and clobber New England with a classic coastal snowstorm. That’s a pattern that forecasters (and New Englanders) have seen over and over, so no wonder they kept predicting it. There was plenty of cold-enough air and plenty of moisture, but the turn kept not happening. It was a bit like watching a championship bowling match, where suddenly the left turn that curves the ball toward the 1-3 gap at the last moment stopped working, and all the shots went straight into the right gutter (aka the Carolinas and DC area 😮 ) instead.
One flukey season doesn’t prove anything about the climate, but I’ll be watching for a trend in coming winters. Given the enormous land area to our west, and the shape of the local coastline that runs more east-west than north-south, it’s possible that colder winter temperatures to the north and to the south simultaneously could become the norm for southern New England. (It’s a shame about those one horse open sleighs, but who can afford a horse anyhow?)
Hi JMG,
Great article! I’ve heard this concept also referred to as the Shirky Principle. It’s the idea that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” It’s one of the key reasons why NGOs don’t finish the problems they allegedly fight, why the USA’s forever wars go on so long, and many folks would rather be boiled alive than use dating apps.
Do you think it’s possible that these hyper-hypocritical celebrities might also be living the way they do because they know the coming changes are inevitable and would rather party it up than live humbly waiting for a darker future?
Incidentally, I’ll be on an off-grid wilderness skills course for the next few weeks, and am very much looking forward to reconnecting with nature and myself sans electronics. Have a wonderful break!
Rice Crisis in Japan. Part of the cause was a lower yield due to hot weather. They got 6.6 million tone and were expecting 6.8 million tons. Hardly a disaster, but demand was up too.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj42vjrdz1no
Normally the profit margin on grain is really low, heaven forbid a farmer make a living. Cheap food to the cities is all that matters.
The Last Wave by Peter Weir was an excellent movie. The image of the shaman waving that bone around…! The images of the drain pipe.
I think there was something about the Australian Cave Clan, a group of urban spelunkers who were somehow involved in that or inspired by it… not sure, but they are interesting topic unto themselves.
The Truman Show by Peter Weir, was also very good. It had a lot of PKD type “what reality is reality” overtones. Speaking of which, this post got me thinking about Robert Anton Wilson and his Reality Tunnels. (The Cave Clan and other urban spelunkers are definitely in a kind of reality tunnel!) I think the Reality Tunnel lens formulated by RAW remains so very useful when thinking about the different ideological groups in our world.
Two reality tunnels with regards to climate change are well presented here. If we think of the reality tunnel as a kind of trance a person gets in, and has trouble getting out of, we may have more compassion for them all. And for those of us who view it as RAW did, as a reality labyrinth, with many different tunnels, we might help our fellows by guiding them to the thread that leads to facing the minotaur…
Here in Mid- Missouri we have a lovely small native tree called the Serviceberry, or alternately, Shadbush. The tree blooms white in April. The name Serviceberry refers to the time in spring where the ground thaws enough to dig graves for the folks who died over winter. I garden, and I can tell you that in our locale, the ground rarely freezes too hard in winter to dig anymore, even with hand tools.
Aldarion, oops! Wrong paper, then. I’ll see if I can find the one I had in mind.
Marko, exactly — and some Ornian geologist would have noticed a thin layer in rocks from somewhere in there, full of odd carbon compounds and traces of radioactive isotopes, and would assume as a matter of course that it must have been caused by a meteor impact or something. And yeah, it does seem to be just a matter of nudging the planetary thermostat one way or another.
Lew, thanks for this.
BoysMom, you’ll note that I specified gardeners in the eastern half of the country. The dryland West is its own climate region and is passing through its own transformations. Of course microclimate issues are also huge factors, as you’ve noticed.
Michael, ha! I hadn’t encountered “the right lives in denial, the left lives in delusion” before, but it’s a keeper. Thank you.
Northwind, er, when there were many fewer people there were many more large animals. How much heat do you think these produced when there were vast swarms of them on the Great Plains?
And of course all that heat, in both cases, was simply energy derived from sunlight via photosynthesis, like nearly all other biological energy on this planet.
John Z, I’m not sure we would have been able to distinguish a 90-million-year-old scrap of satellite wreckage from any other small near-earth object; if a spacecraft didn’t have to go past it with cameras rolling, or if nobody pointed an orbital telescope in its direction, it’s just a blip. Nor do we know the surface of the Moon all that well — what might be buried in 90 million years’ worth of lunar regolith is a good question. That is to say, please write that story!
J.L.Mc12, rough, vaguely megalithic shapes with green plants growing from them? They’re as Druidical as a white robe at Stonehenge. 😉
Les, good heavens — what a mess. I’m not sure if I’d tap Stormwatch or Songs from the Wood for my favorite, but “Something’s On The Move” is a heck of a fine song.
Drhooves, thank you! Yeah, one consequence of the crisis management model is a cascading series of flustered clucks!
Viduraawakened, it’s a crucial technology — the problem is purely that it doesn’t fill the pockets or preen the egos of our current overpaid geek class.
Bruno, the fossils we dig up are nonrenewable, but many of them were at or close to the surface anyway and would have been weathered away to nothing in a few centuries or millennia anyway. 90 million years from now, when the shapes of land and sea have changed and new strata have come to the surface, there’ll be a new round of fossils for future sapient species to marvel over. They’ll have a little less from the Paleozoic to work with, but the Mesozoic will only be 160 million years in the past — still practically recent — and new deposits of dinosaur bones that are currently buried under a few thousand feet of sediment and rock will be accessible to them. Of course they’ll also have a rich harvest of fossils from our time and afterwards to study. Imagine them considering the bones of elephants, bison, and whales in the same spirit that you marveled over those of tyrannosaurs and ceratopsians!
Ozquoll, in my repeated experience, you’d win that wager. I’ve known a few people concerned about climate change who took it seriously enough to change their own lifestyles, and I honor them, but most of them are hypocrites on that subject.
Neptunesdolphins, I have very mixed feelings about those. On the one hand, I’m sure it helps some people. On the other, it makes a fine excuse to pretend to care about the planet while doing frack-all in terms of changing your own life; I’ve watched way too many people go to such events and then drive home all by themselves in gas-guzzling SUVs. Throwing soup at paintings and causing traffic jams isn’t a productive use of effort, and neither is moaning endlessly about something your own actions and lifestyle are helping to bring about. As for the do-(allegedly)gooders, the Chinese have a very good term for those people: 白左, baizuo, pronounced “bye-tswaw.” It means a clueless pseudoprogressive who’s in love with the thought of their own supposed status as savior of the world and pursues causes only to satisfy their own feelings of moral superiority.
Grebulocities, after a hundred million years our entire legacy will consist of a quarter inch layer of rock high in odd carbon compounds and unusual metallic elements, including a few that used to be radioactive before they decayed. It’s just possible, but unlikely, that a fossil human skeleton or two will turn up somewhere, but that won’t reveal much either. Everything else will be gone.
Julie, they’ve always seemed extremely creepy to me, too, so whether Gaia’s involved or not, you’re not alone.
Walt, I noticed that as well. We’ll see what happens!
Majorian, the Shirky Principle is also a major factor — in fact, I discussed that in an earlier post:
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-neglected-factor-in-the-fall-of-civilizations/
I think this may be a little different, though. Enjoy your course!
Siliconguy, thanks for this. Another canary in the coal mine…
Justin, just remember that the minotaur killed and ate most of the people sent to it. Facing it is not for everyone!
Dana, thank you for the data point.
Good point, for sure. And not everyone who opts for the path of initiation goes for the same initiatory myths…
…as for the weather. Well, for this year I can certainly say I’ll be glad if we get a bit of a break from the rain, though our roof has been patched and we’re waiting for the contractor to get started proper in the next week or two. I will say I’ve been getting used to the “winter rain season” over the past ten or more years. Though with some very cold days and snow storms interspersed thanks to the activity of the polar vortex descending. I do like the cool overcast days we’ve been having this spring though after the rain brings in the cool front. That’s some of my favorite weather, in spring or fall, and I feel very aetherically charged from such rain and cool fronts coming in. I’ll be happier about it once the roof is fixed though!
BeardTree @ 53 I share your concerns about plastics and chemicals in air, water and soil; we seem to be living in a veritable chemical stew. The activist emphasis on climate change does indeed distract attention from such pollution and I think that is no accident.
Zachery @ 51, just saying, but in my house, straws are not allowed. Girls and grands were expected to drink from a glass or cup, and I had a no tolerance policy for spills. I feel about table manners the way our host does about courtesy.
Marcio Baraco @ 50 I took the liberty of glancing at your blog. You have some most interesting ideas. Regarding your notions about Plato, I doubt it would surprise you to learn that one of the intellectual godfathers of the neocon claque who are currently infesting our government and intellectual life was influenced by Plato–noble lie and all that. Schmitz or something of the sort was the person’s miserable name.
BoysMom @ 63, your local nurseries likely have little or no say about what plants get delivered to them. The way monopoly capitalism works these days is that Joe the nurseryperson orders a “package” from the distributor, which includes whatever the wholesale grower decides to put in it. The least expensive of such packages naturally includes whatever plants the grower couldn’t sell last season. Joe doesn’t
get to pick and choose, either because “we don’t offer that option” or doing so would be prohibitively expensive. I start veges and annuals from seed, and order perennials from the small mail order nurseries which do their own propagating. Or I buy from farmer’s market vendors.
New dinosaur fossils are still being discovered.
“New “gentle giant” dinosaur uncovered in Patagonia alongside rare collection of ancient life”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj42vjrdz1no
Troodon is the dinosaur with the largest brain to body-weight ratio found so far. The dinosaurs may have been finally trying for intelligence when the asteroid hit. On the other hand, ravens are a lot smarter than their brain size would indicate, so troodon may have been smarter than it looked. (Autocorrect is really unhappy with the name troodon.)
If a previous intelligent species normally practiced cremation there would be very few remains to be found. Even with burial there isn’t much left. The body of the Egtved girl is gone but some of the other goods in the grave were still there. A very fashionable young lady which has prompted a lot of speculation.
If the previous intelligence got to the moon you would be looking for something car-sized in an area of 38 million square km. Africa is a bit more than 30 million sq km. Whatever they left behind would be camouflaged with a fine layer of dust by now, so good hunting.
On earth the best place to look for artifacts would likely be in a limestone, sandstone, or shale formation away from mountain building areas. If the sedimentary rocks get heated or folded the artifact would be dissolved into the host rock. A decent chunk of stainless steel should survive. Even then, an infusion of hot salty water would dissolve even that. Gold is very corrosion resistant, yet epithermal gold deposits form where hot salty water cools down near the surface.
Until I was 10 years old, we lived mostly in Westchester County, NY (1942-1952), and I remember snowy Thanksgivings there quite well. I came back to the Northeast, this time to Rhode Island (about 3 hours by car to the North of my old home), in 1967. By then Thanksgiving snows had become rare freaks of nature. (“Over the river and through the woods” was a song sung at Thanksgiving in my childhood, not at Christmas.)
Even Christmas snows were not nearly as likely in the 1960s as they had been in the 1940s.
Of course, the planet held only about one-fourth as many humans then as it does now.
Skillfully sailing between the Scylla of ‘climate change deniers’ and the Charybdis of ‘climate change cultists’, and lobbing bombs at both parties while sailing past – well, done, JMG! I consider you to be the ‘Opra’ of this issue: “YOU get offended by my essay, and YOU get offended by my essay… EVERYBODY gets offended by my essay!!!” Well, maybe everyone but me: I’m happily sailing on the same boat as you and I lob the odd grenade at these polarized deluded groups from time to time for kicks.
I just so happened to be a master’s student in an environmental faculty in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when eco-doomism really hit its stride (just after ‘The Endangered Earth’ was nominated ‘person of the year’ by Time Magazine in 1988 – yeeesh!). The Earth Summit in 1992 and the 3 Rio Conventions, aka utterly useless international treaties (the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification) happened when I was just exiting academia, welding the door shut behind me. It was heady times! Just after the collapse of the Cold War and a lot of money needed to be made through some other global mega-grift – well, fancy that!
And now, 30+ years later, with one of the most successful grifters (Mark Carney) of that movement becoming the new prime minister of my beleaguered country, we will see the attempted transformation of a petroleum-rich country into Netzerostan (to save the world from frying, of course). Oh, what fun! How progressive! What could possibly go wrong?
As the polarization intensifies, undoubtedly both camps will further retreat from the on-the-ground reality (climate data) and further into absurd abstractions and group-think. Well, this can’t go on forever; it’ll be interesting to see (if I live long enough to see it) what causes these two poles of opinion to crash and burn.
The discussion (above) about the possibility of the northern polar air cell seasonally reversing direction once the pole becomes ice free in the summer reminds me of a similar seasonal reversal: the monsoons of the southern and eastern Asian land mass – which also influences eastern Africa, western and northern Australia and the archipelagos that lie between Australia and Asia. Like the flipping of a switch in early May, the jet stream veers from south of the Himalayas to the north of the Himalayas, allowing the humid air from the Indian Ocean to move into the Asian continent and drench it with life-giving water. It reverses in October, bringing dry continental air back into most of Asia. However, I seriously doubt that such a switch near the north pole would bring a similar blessing to the croplands of the mid-latitudes in North America, Europe and Asia.
But not to worry about all this global warming stuff: a new ice age will soon be upon us – I read it in a headline yesterday, so it’s gotta be true (kinda reminds me of headlines in 1978).
Enjoy your spiritual escapade in the mystery-shrouded landscape of England’s Somerset region!
David Ritz #1
THE FENS —> CANALING
I am a family historian and amateur genealogist.
I have one lineage, my mother’s father’s, who were natives of The Fens in Norfolk County, England, from time immemorial, likely harking back to the 1000s. The Fens is, I understand, mostly marshy. Families lived there. They got around by small boats; I think there were different kinds, like sailboat, gondola, and horse/mule-drawn. It was hard for authorities to get at them; police found the place distasteful—foggy and spooky at night, rife with stories of hauntings.
When my emigrant ancestor James landed in America in the 1840s, he “landed” in water — he made his living on the Champlain Canal and the varied waterways from Montreal to New York City (by way of the Hudson River), at the same time a farmer. His wife Jane eventually had fourteen kids, most living into their nineties. Odd for the 1800s, canalling/boating on interior waterways and farming must have been a healthy way to live — twelve of their kids not only survived childhood, but married and had their own families. I have hundreds of cousins from this line.
Buying farmland along a canal would be a good living. Northeast USA has a lot of canals but we never hear about them. To this day, New York State has done a good job keeping its barge-canal system dredged and ready for use. One must spec out polluted sites though. The Erie Canal will make its comeback, as well as auxiliary canals like Oswego, and along the Great Lakes in various states. Before the rush, investigate farmland along canals in the USA. There are a LOT of canals in the USA, but most are unknown, hidden in plain sight. Both sides of the Hudson River would be good to investigate, the northern half cheaper because it is farther from New York City.
It is strange that there is no “study of canals.” Can one get a Certificate in Canalling❓I would say farmer-canaler is an up and coming profession.
If I were age 20, male or female, I would apprentice to become a tug boat captain. If female, one must get used to the crude sailor-life (my father was in the Merchant Marines).
💨Northwind Grandma💨🫏🐴⛵️⚓️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
>Rice Crisis in Japan.
They are not self-sufficient in food either. They depend on imports. Which is fine, as long as you have good money and as long as there are people willing to export to you. It’s fine, I tell you, fine. Globalization is good.
>Normally the profit margin on grain is really low, heaven forbid a farmer make a living. Cheap food to the cities is all that matters.
The best antidote for low prices is – low prices.
As we are now seeing in Florida and California the first place that gradual climate change will significantly effect the average person is in the insurance market. This will of course hit people hardest in places where the climate affects catastrophic events like the brushy woodlands of California or Tornado Alley in the south.
People living anywhere west of the Mississippi in forested areas will see extreme fire. insurance rates or complete lack of insurance coverage long before they actually face a fire.
This will effect the giant home valuation scheme that the establishment has been counting on for years.
But it may open up opportunities for hardy souls to get cheap land if they are willing to build some kind of fireproof dwelling without need for a mortgage.
A snippet of information that might come in handy to anyone accosted by a “warmist” who insists that all climate change is anthropogenic: it comes from a short article in Sky & Telescope, July 2003, p110-1; the title, “Global Warming on Mars?” Comparing Viking Orbiter images in 1977 with Mars Global Surveyor results, researchers “found that the south polar cap’s springtime retreat in 1999-2000 occurred earlier than it did in 1977, matching the conclusions of ground-based observers…” Other details follow.
When I bought a fixer-upper a couple of decades ago, one of the first thing I did was to replace the heating system, and the other was to fill, patch, and insulate as much as I could. I must note that your writings at the time, amongst others, provided some enthusiasm for this multi-year project. I had some horrible times crawling around and in-between the walls, and some parts that I could not fix, that is, I could not fix without gutting the place first, are still cold in winter, but my energy usage dropped to 35% of what the previous owner used. At this point, it’s not worth the extra work, maybe the next owner will fix it… or probably tear it down and build a too-big house on the lot. Whatever, not my concern.
Despite my energy use being about 30% of normal, we have a very comfortable place to live, we consider it quite luxurious, but then, again, we have what most people do not: enough.
Bruce
JMG, I noticed you don’t talk much about what could be called geological cataclysms. Is that because it’s a tar baby (which is natural, given theologies of apocalypse), or because you don’t see them as existing in the future, or because they play a role but won’t matter that much since slow change over that time span will get the job done? Thanks
@Mary Bennett 85: Schmitz or something of the sort was the person’s miserable name.
Leo Strauss is the name you’re looking for, I think.
Justin, that sounds like a Seattle winter!
Siliconguy, or certain dinosaurs may have achieved intelligence 130 million years before the asteroid hit, and Troodon is just the smartest we’ve found so far.
I admit it’s got the right build for a sapient dinosaur: a biped with large, well-muscled forelimbs capable of manipulating things. (Edit: the proper label for what we’re talking about occurred to me a moment after I posted this: technosaur, short for “technologically advanced saurian.”)
Robert, thanks for the data points.
Ron, the thought of the polar cell reversing seasonally is fascinating; I’ll have to look into that. My working assumption is that what will happen instead is a period of chaotic climate in which the mid-latitude Ferrell cell collapses, the tropical Hadley cell moves north, and eventually the polar cell collapses as well, resulting in a single-cell circulation in each hemisphere and an equable climate. But we’ll see.
Clay, the immense house of cards we call “the real estate market” is not long for this world anyway, but you’re right that the absurdly predatory end of it that deals in insurance may be one of the first parts to go up against the wall. If I may indulge in a blast from the past, earth-sheltered dwellings can be made quite fireproof.
Robert, of course. At least some of the sudden climate changes on Earth before the rise of industrial humanity were also due to natural causes; as I noted, there are many things that can cause global climate change, and anthropogenic pollution is only one of them.
Renaissance, excellent! I’ve always admired a sticker I saw in a big box store parking lot in Oregon. It read: “If you had enough, would you notice?”
Celadon, that depends very much on what you mean by that label “geological cataclysms.” Give me an example or two.
I know you said you were only going to comment on 3 things each, but I’d like to know how much has a few decades of geoengineering screwed up the weather. That’s never been disclosed and it’s certainly not accounted for in the weather models, which seem dubious at best. There is also speculative chatter on the Splinter-net of high energy weapons run by DARPA to direct storms, HAARP in Alaska being suspect. Nothing new I suppose of humans monkeying around and screwing it up, or in today’s vernacular, FAFO.
@ Zachary 51
> can’t they give me my plastic straws back?
Be a “Bring Your Own Straw” guy. BYOS. (There is a straw that has an increased diameter too). Keep a baggie handy, to hold straws. Use. When finished, suck most of the drink out, (maybe rinse in lavatory), put in pocket, wash at home, let dry, reuse it.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🧋🥤🍹🧉
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Our government (NZ) just presented its budget yesterday, and one of the highlights of the resulting blather was the Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s quip: “[The co-leader of the Green Party] is trying to save a planet she’s not on.”
@BoysMom #63,
Pear cultivars usually don‘t grow true from seed. You‘d have to take cuttings instead, learn about cutting and grafting, and (important) find a suitable stock for pears which works in your climate and soil, and graft your cuttings onto it. (In all fairness, it‘d probably be easier to find out where our neighbours bought those trees, and buy some there, too… 😉 ).
Some small nurseries around here still do their own grafting etc. They know their trees, and the trees are accustomed to our climate. Maybe you can find such a small nursery somewhere close to your place?
Milkyway
@neptunes dolphin “BTW Greta Thunberg is no longer a major mover in the climate movement. She gave her position to the younger generation. She is now protesting Gaza and all of that.”
Greta’s role in these things is fascinating. Her book “The climate book” is wild in how contradicting it is of itself, depending on which writer is either wildly optimistic, absolutely doomerist or a few articles that are actually very realistic about the predicament. I generally found her writting to be in the last catagory. After being chewed up and spat out by the media, environmentalists and politicians, she was smart enough to now this is not something that can be solved.
She figured out that she was merely being used to political clout and nothing more, that no real change was coming. And she has been vocal about this but coverage of her was dropped very quickly once she started to point out this dynamic of the political and media systems. Do not speak dimly of the amighty and powerful Oz!
And I think that is why she is suddenly all Gaza this and that. In discovering that she couldnt even nudge the environmentalists scene one bit, she has recalibrated to a smaller thing that she might have some influence over. Give it a few years and watch for a further recalibration to something even smaller as the reality of that also sinks in.
Dear JMG and commentariat:
Ooh, ooh, ooh. Geologic catastrophes: the Siberian Traps, the Deccan Traps, the Snake River Basalt eruptions, the thick Tertiary ash deposits in the western US; and best of all, the Watchung Basalt Eruptions (just think of NYC buried under several hundred feet of basalt). But on the other hand, since each of these took place over 10s of millions of years, the timeframe is hard to imagine.
And finally, you can bet your bottom dollar that if something like that happens, not much anyone can do about it! Just go with the flow (I don’t think one of these will happen tomorrow though).
Cugel (the excited professional geologist)
Robert Mathiesen @87
We were almost neighbors. I lived in NYC, Hunterdon county, NJ and Fairfield county, CONN from 1940 (birth) until leaving home in 1958. I remember Christmas snow as normal, Thanksgiving sometimes, also that the climate in Conn was noticeably colder than NJ.
Clay
The fire insurance scene in the western foothills of the sierra in CA was becoming a nightmare. Of course rebuilding the same kind of house in the same place didn’t help much. I don’t remember the details, but there was some talk of the state requiring companies to reinsure, and some of them just leaving the state completely. I was back in Mexico before the LA fires, so have no idea what that has done to the insurance scene. I can’t see how there would be the money to pay for all the multi million$ houses in Pacific Palisades. I have heard they are authorizing the building of auxiliary dwelling units before the main house, so that may be as much as they will get. I have also heard some of the richest people were insured with big international firms, so they may be covered. Interesting times; we shall see.
Stephen
It’s been interesting to see the things that cause panic when a town gets isolated and the local supermarket flooded for a few days.
The shrillest panic I’ve seen is over the availablity of disposable nappies (diapers, for the septics here) and infant formula, which in a sane world wouldn’t actually be products available for sale at all…
Next most shrill is the need for lifesaving medications – especially by people I know who’ve been flooded in in the past and seem to have learned nothing from the earlier experience of not being able to get to the chemist’s, never mind the multiple warnings of impending isolation that were hard to miss. Please, please, please will you send a helicopter with my heart meds…
Bread is another – one of the only operating shops in town is a small bakery – 50+ people queued waiting for the next batch out of the ovens, limit of 2 loaves per person…
I really am not looking forward to the next stages of catabolic collapse.
JMG,
I’m a bit older than you and when I was young climate science was talking about global cooling. When I see talk about us breaking a new temperature around here (I live in NW CT), often I notice that the old highs were set back in the 1910s. About 1970, when living on Long Island, we had several winters where we could skate on frozen ponds, the winters were colder, so people at my current age had seen temperatures dropping during their lifetime. We have seen warming since then, makes me wonder if it is part of normal cycles or could the warming be due to the replacement of forest with asphalt, not due to CO2. The focus exclusively on CO2 has never made sense.
Bob
Hi John Michael,
Oh my! Who knew? Why is this history of an Australian state government default in 1931 not taught in economics at Uni? It’s an outrageous omission of fact. Here’s a link about the subject, see under the heading ‘8.2.1 Government Savings Bank of New South Wales’: The 1930s Depression
You know what Mr Greer, the state I live in appears to be seriously indulging in a debt binge of the most awful bunch of stupendousness: Victoria’s budget forecasts record debt levels with public service jobs on chopping block. I look at the photo of the trio with their smiling faces and think to myself, what do they know, and where’s their backbone? It was discovered a few years ago that that lot had signed an agreement, or maybe two, with the land of stuff, which have since been ripped up.
Possibly they the state folks are playing a smart move which in the short term is rewarded by the population – after all, they were re-elected. Memories can be short, and when nightmare situations are a generation or two in the past, prudence and caution is oft ignored. Doesn’t make the risk go away.
Recently, a new state tax was levied which will adversely impact upon farmers and rural folks – who it should be mentioned aren’t politically aligned with the incumbents.
You know, the cynic in me whispers the idea that they’re partying like it’s 1999, and the bill will be left for the future. A lot of matters are like that, and your essay covers similar ground.
The thing with default though, is it wipes out the income and financial assets of the rentier class. Then we’ve all got to get back to work and produce goods and services that people want to pay for.
Cheers
Chris
I suppose that if I was a scientist I might see things in a much different light and maybe less cynically. Or, I don’t know, maybe even more cynically.
But, IMO, what we’ve got now in so many scientific endeavors isn’t so much science as it is political science. And, seeing as business underpins politics, what’s at the root of the disreputable field under discussion is money, filthy lucre, which by its nature dirties everything in its path. Having spent my earning years in the corporate world, money was at the center of everything I did, and so I would know all about this.
But, there’s always the courageous soul that just won’t have it. Where there seems to be a rock-wall of consensus about this so-called settled science, there are the academic dissidents in the shadows. One such fellow said out loud that the state of the actual science is that we have frameworks for discussion much more than we have working and predictive climate models. Good fellow this. He deserves an award for bravery for such talk can be extremely deleterious to life and livelihood.
Another well known scientist (and wouldn’t you know, I can’t remember his name) said that in his younger years in the 1980s he was involved in climate research. He said that they identified a number of factors important to climate; insolation, oceans, topsoil and vegetation and a couple others. But he said that he gave up on the field when it appeared to go off the rails in the 1990s when the bulk of funding went to guys in fluid dynamics, thus discounting the importance of soil and vegetation. And good for him for saying this much.
Another fellow said that what climatologists say in private among trusted associates is worlds apart from the hysteria you typically hear in public. While this is a good thing, if we are busy forming public policy based on what is supposedly scientific fact, we’d better have our facts in order. And so the quiet dissenters better find their man-pants and speak up.
But, no doubt, we treat the atmosphere like a sewer. And, no doubt, CO2 is a factor. But we better get straight as to how it actually behaves in the real world. If it was CO2 by itself, that’s one thing, but CO2 is not by itself.
One important example of how CO2 engaged with the environment is in the rise of the Himalayas, tens of millions of years ago, and I believe the Andes also. One theory is that CO2 interacted with rock deposits pushed up by plate tectonics thus binding it and taking it out of the atmosphere, seriously cooling the Earth.
But like that good scientist said, there’s also vegetation and topsoil to consider. According to one account, when the level of CO2 in the atmosphere goes down, the amount of atmospheric plant food also goes down, and in marginal environments like high altitude grasslands in central Asia, where there’s not much oxygen anyways, vegetation starves and dies, turning the soil to sand which then blows away in massive dust storms which go on to cover arctic ice sheets. What this accomplishes is to reduce the Earth’s albedo thus keeping solar energy in the atmosphere as opposed to reflecting it back into space thus warming the climate.
So who would have thought? Does it merit a look? Even if a crazy said it, crazies sometimes have the better take on things. Right now, how this looks is like people on both sides of the debate vying for position and status and money and actual science be damned.
An interesting data point:
Here in Northwest Indiana the past three winters have seen one snow that was strong enough to need to be adapted to. There wasn’t even snow the winter before last.
For comparison: the hothouse winter of 2008 had two big snows a week apart. Granted, the first snowfall melted before the second snowfall; but I remember well when the question wasn’t If It Would Snow, but how often.
@Stephen Pearson (#103):
Not merely neighbors, more or less, but almost of the same age; I was born in 1942. We’re both from the so-called Silent Generation.
Are there any other Silents here i.e., people born before the end of WW2 in 1945?
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Pygmycory find relief from her tendonitis and emotional exhaustion, and receive wise guidance in choosing which matters to address and which to let go. (If you choose to pray for her, she requests that this prayer go only to God as understood from the Christian perspective).
May slclaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is in the hospital undergoing dialysis due to impaired kidney function, be blessed and experience a full recovery to her kidneys.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Ron M’s friend Paul, who passed away on April 13, make his transition through the afterlife process with grace and peace.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer. Healing work is also welcome. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe]
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May JRuss’s friend David Carruthers quickly find a job of any kind at all that allows him to avoid homelessness, first and foremost; preferably a full time job that makes at least 16 dollars an hour.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Pierre in Minnesota be filled with the health, vitality, and fertility he needs to father a healthy baby with his wife.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Jennifer’s newborn daughter Eleanor be blessed with optimal growth and development; may her tongue tie revision surgery on Wednesday March 12th have been smooth and successful, and be followed by a full recovery.
May Mike Greco, who had a court date on the 14th of March, enjoy a prompt, just, and equitable settlement of the case.
May Cliff’s friend Jessica be blessed and soothed; may she discover the path out of her postpartum depression, and be supported in any of her efforts to progress along it; may the love between her and her child grow ever more profound, and may each day take her closer to an outlook of glad participation in the world, that she may deeply enjoy parenthood.
May Other Dave’s father Michael Orwig, who passed away on 2/24, make his transition to his soul’s next destination with comfort and grace; may his wife Allyn and the rest of his family be blessed and supported in this difficult time.
May Peter Evans in California, whose colon cancer has been responding well to treatment, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Goats and Roses’ son A, who had a serious concussion weeks ago and is still suffering from the effects, regain normal healthy brain function, and rebuild his physical strength back to normal, and regain his zest for life. And may Goats and Roses be granted strength and effectiveness in finding solutions to the medical and caregiving matters that need to be addressed, and the grief and strain of the situation.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Jennifer and Josiah and their daughters Joanna and Eleanor be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
…and in a nice bit of synchronicity, the thunder spirits are having a fine game of sky hockey over Rhode Island at the moment. We’re getting buckets of rain drumming on the window, lightning flashes, and big rolling peals of thunder. I’m glad I’m indoors!
Candy, I wish I knew. Everything I’ve seen so far about geoengineering consists of official voices loudly claiming that nothing is happening and unofficial voices just as loudly proclaiming that doom is near at hand. Actual data? Missing in action. I assume as a matter of course that both sides are wrong, but wrong in which direction, and is one side wronger than the other? Lacking data, I’m not prepared to guess.
KAN, glad to hear that the fine old tradition of Parliamentary invective still survives. 😉
Cugel, okay, thanks for this. Basalt flows I’m familiar with; I spent a lot of time in childhood in eastern Washington state, which was a vast lake of lava more than a hundred miles across 16 million years ago. (That’s a good place to study catastrophe, as it’s also got the channeled scablands left behind by the cataclysmic floods from glacial Lake Missoula late in the Ice Age.) If that’s what we’re talking about in terms of geological catastrophes, they’re regional in direct impact — that is to say, if you’re in their path you leave or die — but their impact on the world as a whole is limited to some extra CO2 in the atmosphere. I read somewhere that the rifting in East Africa may produce something similar a few hundred millennia from now, for what it’s worth.
Les, those are the stages where all you have to do is stay out of the way of the people who are too deeply enmeshed in the mass mind. Many of those will flee or die, and then you can come back out of hiding, meet up with the other members of the sane minority, and begin picking up the pieces.
Bob, not so much older. I remember the global cooling scare quite well. Two of my favorite science fiction novels when I was a teenager — Robert Silverberg’s The Time of the Great Freeze and Poul Anderson’s The Winter of the World — were both set in capably imagined glacial futures, and the Jethro Tull song I quoted above, “Something’s On The Move,” is all about the next ice age:
“Driving all before her
Un-stoppable, un-straining
Her cold creaking mass
Follows reindeer down
Thin spreading fingers seek
To embrace the still-warm bundles
That huddle on the doorsteps
Of a white London Town.”
There was steady cooling trend from 1900 until about 1980, though it’s gone much warmer since then; the dramatic increase in global fossil fuel consumption driven by the industrialization of the global South seems to have overwhelmed the normal cooling arc of the Milankovich cycle around that time. All of which is to show that climate is a complicated thing and there are many factors feeding into it.
Chris, default’s a sneaky thing. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, and if the ruling class knows that one is coming, they can get wealth into safer assets ahead of time. That said, it’s odd that they’re binging so heavily. It’s not even “party like it’s 1999” — so many members of the privileged classes these days are partying like it’s Pompeii and the mountain’s already started to rumble.
Smith, I’m increasingly coming to think that science, in any real sense, didn’t survive the mania for centralization and institutional funding that reshaped it so completely after the Second World War. It no longer produces knowledge; what it produces now is propaganda.
Donald, fascinating. That’s not so different from the situation here on the Atlantic.
Quin, many thanks for this as always.
Robert Mathieson#109 and Stephen Pearson#103 Yes. Just.
@julie 77 I definitely feel that way about wind turbines too! My first big experience with them granted was driving south on the highway from east Chicago to Louisville through Indiana and we were driving straight pressed on time and that highway is otherwise nightmarish because there’s no median or even a concrete barrier, just little reflector poles so at night you are rhythmically blinded. And the turbines have the scary war of the world synchronized red lights. Also another trip through that zone driving to an ag conference north and we slept at someone’s house and woke to have no phone service at all, neither Juan nor I and my kids were home and I needed to check with them and I wondered if it was some strange cyberattack and went to the gas station where also no one had service and the woman there got talking about the wind turbines affect on her hearing and her cell service and like vibration and it sounded quite heavy. The phones off turned out to be from the solar flare burning up satellites or similar. Wild day, and we were picking up a 90 year old ag economist at O’Hare with no phones and no permission to pause anywhere in the pickup lane. Anyhow, wind turbines feel absolutely wicked. Then you get to ‘the wrong side of green- THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH CORPORATE PROFITS AND COMPROMISED NGOS’ and it turns out they are clearing the glorious eastern coastal range in Australia for a net zero fantasy involving wind turbines.
@Michael #101 and @neptunes dolphin from the same intense and careful reporter (Cory Morningstar), on her more personal publishing site (the art of annhiliation) I learned loads about gretas origin story. Not of her doing! But glad if she is growing into her own knowledge of being used and pissed off about it.
The biggest danger to most people from climate change is not that the actual change in weather and vegetation will do them actual drastic harm on a human time scale. But that we all live in an economic system that is adapted to survive under a very narrow set of fixed circumstances. For our version of capitalism to exist weather variation must stay within certain boundaries. Population growth must stay within certain parameters, etc. It is not adaptable the way something like feudalism is. So climate change is likely to cause many economic problems.
As the readers of this blog know, this was baked in to the cake anyway so adapting to climate change is not much different to adapting to catabolic collapse as they are birds of a feather.
Just to play devils advocate on the ‘economic cost of natural disasters’…
Firstly – we have more damage due to the expansion of the human footprint into higher risk areas ie flood plains and low lying coastal areas….
Secondly – Ive seen 1st hand a PHD Engineer do a similar analysis for NZ but he completely failed to account for;
1. Inflation
2. The expanding human footprint as mentioned above….
So Im always very dubious about that type of analysis and thats just from these 2 factors…..
Everyone in the the Engineering Consultancy was cheering him on and patting him o the back but when I asked if he had a accounted for the above and responded negatively…no one said a thing….
Ive seen news and govt officials blame Climate change for mass flooding BOP in NZ in 2022….but really a lot of it came down to forestry slash blocking up rivers….
I made some maps to educate people you can still view here;
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ymlknl70nejjdwmq9cqhu/Z001_RevB_EskValleyCatchment.pdf?rlkey=qtu7zi5e9uldf1g7amkagt534&st=borebnxo&dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6f2eq8fronpt2c0v8fdb8/Z002_RevA_MangapoikeRiverCatchment.pdf?rlkey=vsk2tf5q8i7bsp7z5lhvd0ehe&st=a387n8be&dl=0
Youll notice in one map I named names and put the actual landowners details on…overseas corporate Forest Managers mostly….
On the other map I omitted this as the land was largely owned by NZ local councils and Indigenous interests…
the politics is interesting….
Just syaing
Sorry about that, sure that would’ve been helpful. I’m specifically wondering about anything from asteroid strikes like you see in I believe southwest USA among other places, through tectonic loosening and or drift, on to the really rare stuff we just have surmises and hints about, the Immanuel velikovsky happy hunting grounds. Some of the weathering, to my untutored and unscientific eye, seems on a grand enough scale albeit infrequent, to make me wonder if it had planet wide direct and immediate effect. It’s outside the scope of what it’s reasonable to worry about in a lifespan, but a great fuel to the imagination. Thanks
(off list if desired) JMG, forgive the poorly phrased question. The middle term sounded absurd, I suppose I was blending it with the third option, that cataclysms that are truly worthy of the name are so far apart they just don’t matter, in your view, to subjects we discuss here. And I quite understand passing on that question, I’m working through how to consider them myself. It is a huge tar baby. For what it’s worth, I have gotten as far as regarding your graph on warm and cold cycles as being the foundation for the old lore, the world is destroyed by fire first, then ice or water. Cheers
@ron m #88 I wouldn’t be too quick to assume the 3 post-rio conventions were ‘utterly useless’ considering Maurice strong was behind them, man with one of the strangest biographies I ever heard of . corbetts tone is a little shrill esp at the start but get past it and it’s an interesting summary of a super important guy that is wildly under recognized as a key power player on behalf of the major industrialists and they are *still* and really just beginning to use the bureaucratic infrastructure put into place through the early UNEP and the post rio conventions. Ecosystem services as a basis for new capital markets depends on the biodiversity convention for one thing… the guys who developed and backed and empowered Strong to become who he became play a very long game, a multigenerational game. And it was an early play in the ‘global governance agenda’ as Elaine dewar called it in her book, which we saw in a more recent phase through the covit thing.
JMG, I am surprised it isn’t mentioned in the comments here (maybe it is and I didn’t read closely enough). Jeff Bezos and his latest fiancée sailed to Cannes on his half-billion dollar mega yacht. His fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, accompanied him while on her way to be honored for her contributions to environmental conservation. Yep, ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION. The yacht, named Koru, a Maori word for the unfurling of life, literally has its own backup yacht. Annually the Koru emits as much carbon dioxide as 1500 cars. Not sure about the backup yacht. A month or so ago, Jeff Bezos sent his wife and some other D list celebrities on an 11 minute round trip to the precipice of space on a rocket ship that would have been right at home at Kanamara Matsuri. He seems to be overcompensating for something…
On the topic of paleosapience:
In the 1999 educational novel „the science of Discworld“ by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen, pre-human civilizations make an appearance in the form of livestock-raising crabs early in earth’s history, and later, technology savvy dinosaurs. Both appear and disappear quickly on the roundworld – the artificial analog of our earth that the wizards created by accident – and the same later happens with hominids, although the authors allow those to leave the planet and become spacefarers, of course.
David Ritz #2. Here in Scandinavia the Late Antique Little Ice Age is known as the Fimbul winter. The popular explanation was that the Fenris wolf swallowed the sun, and it is estimated to have killed half the population in Scandinavia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fimbulwinter
Thank you for being rational and objective about this topic. It is hard these days to have a reasonable discussion about this. I want to add two points to the discussion:
1. Although every serious scientist agrees that CO2 contributes to global warming, the extend of it is still unclear. There are two sets of empirical data that have to be explained here. The first is the fact that global temperature has been rising since the mid 1600s, when the “little Ice Age” had its lowest temperatures. Here the question is, how much of the post industrial warming is man made and how much is just a continuation of that pre industrial warming. The second data set are arctic ice cores, that have shown an increase of CO2 in the last 10000 years while temperatures were very stable, so that these CO2 increases did not lead to a warming. Here I think we have have to be more humble in our ignorance and may have to accept the fact that we may just not know enough about our planet to quantify human made climate change. The inability to add a number with a reasonable certainty to climate change offends both sides, because it means that currently we can neither prove or disprove any catastrophic change.
2. CO2 has a lot of other side effects than just temperature capture. Most notably most plants grow much faster when CO2 increases. NASA satellite imagery shows, that earth becomes greener and the increase of global crop yields in the last decades can partially be explained by rising CO2. So an honest and reasonable discussion should incorporate all the effects and side effects of CO2 and not just the climate aspect.
Hey JMG
Quite off-topic, but probably something that would concern you and the commentariat.
Apparently, the famous philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has passed away yesterday. I’m assuming that it is due to old age since there are no details in the few articles that I have come across.
Kind Sir,
I am not sure if hypocrisy greed and stupidity are the best explanation. At least in cases of A-list celebrities, political and industrial “leaders” and other members of the top echelon of society.
In accordance with Hagbard’s law these people have been virtually isolated from reality for a long time. Especially celebrities were treated like gods since they were rather young and had and still have everyone in their social environment fawn over their every utterance. Control mechanisms that govern the rest of us, such as being held responsible for the mess we make and ideally even forced to clean it up, have degraded into feedback loops that enforce any kind of behaviour exponentially. This is not a good recipe for preserving sanity.
So my take is, that anybody from a certain level up is completely and utterly insane.
There is plenty of hypocrisy in the lower levels, I have no doubt, but folks like di Caprio, Gore and others truly and utterly seem to believe they are doing the right thing. No doublethink involved.
The air simply gets too thin for brains to function, if one climbs too high.
About more storms in a warmer world there seems something wrong with that idea.
The weather system is a heat engine and as such feeds on temperature differentials. If the difference between the cold reservoir and the hot one decreases, so will the power the engine has available.
At least that’s what it looks like to this engineer. Any errors in this thinking?
@Les Hope you are OK down there. Looking rather nasty. We are no strangers to floods up here, so i have a bit of an idea what you are going through. On another note: I dont think anybody here who is not an Aussie caught the septics bit in your post.
Speaking of ski resorts. One of the resorts close to where I grew up in Norway just went bankrupt. I believe mainly because people have less money for discretionary spending. But milder winters are also a part of it.
Been learning hide tanning and bow making recently. Now my craft hungry eyes are set on blacksmithing. It is funny how when you get into one craft it breeds another one. You want to make your own metal points for your arrows, a leather or perhaps felted wool armguard for shooting or your own knives. Your own bowstring from rawhide. So grounding to make things yourself.
Learning one craft well makes you realize learning things mostly takes effort and with time you can really learn a lot of things. That may have seem complex and overwhelming earlier. It’s something that gets developed in you when you get those beginning successes of making something pretty and functional. You know that you can make and understand things if you put effort in to it and allow yourself time and to make mistakes.
Rose-ringed parakeets have been trying to establish themselves in the UK for at least a century, but they’ve only managed to do so since the sixties, allegedly from a pair released by Jimi Hendrix. Since the nineties they’ve spread extremely rapidly, and there are now tens of thousands of them in the UK. Their screeching calls and bright green plumage have become a part of British city life.
One of the features of the current civilized era is the vast increase in the numbers and extent of domesticated plants and animals, and the reduction in non-domesticated species due to habitat loss. Pollen and bones fossilize reasonably well. So possibly a marker of past civilizations which didn’t have technology would be an imbalance in the expected levels of fossilized remains, with domesticateable species predominating.
JMG,
It’s also the case that most elites are isolated physically and personally (by choice) and that inclines them to a crisis management model of centralized control not distributed independent decision making. This is why rebuilding efforts by locals post disaster looks completely different than any “strategic planning” by elies. Locals have to throw everyone at everything in order to get things done, elites say “wait for the perfect small team to decide and act”.
The deeper issue eating at elites is that in an actual crisis that requires distribution and independence elites know they will not be prioritized because doing so is utterly counterproductive. Yes, this is a byproduct of their isolation (because who goes out of their way for the one who boasted about how wealth put them out of reach of everyone else) but it’s also the “fear of falling down in status” of being “reset back into the group.”
The technosaurs sound like a ripe area to mine for some pulpy fiction tales. For that matter so do distant visions of explorers trekking through the jungle ruins of the great city of Atlanta… it seems like the south is already totally covered in kudzu, and up here we have plenty of honeysuckle. People gripe a lot about the honeysuckle, but it makes me wonder what role it might play in the future. Plus, we have here in Cincinnati the Lazarus Lizards I mentioned before, a kind of European wall lizard brought over from Milan. When I was a kid I only saw them occassionally. Now they scatter whenever across the sidewalk whenever I walk out my front door and stroll through the neighborhood. I think Ohio farmers several decades from now may do well with orange groves and the like, if the trees could be protected from the abrupt snaps of winter. I suppose that’s where some kind of temporary greenhouses and the like might come in handy that could be put up around them.
Cynically, an enterprising scientist will equivocate (with some good reason) on whatever climate assertion people are making and advise that the matter needs further study. This is the science equivalent of a patient cured is a patient lost. They never really do want to find *the* answer to the question, but they do want you to fund another study to find *an* answer, preferably one that you want to hear but can be endlessly challenged and debated requiring yet further studies. Am I getting too cynical this morning?
There are mortgages that need paying and kids to get into ivy leagues (gasp, your son is going to a STATE SCHOOL?) and vacations to have. Those private school tuition bills and extracurricular activities add up. So get out there and equivocate today! Loved ones are depending on you.
I remember maybe 10 years ago, my last go at talking to the climate crowd. I decided the problem with climate activism is all Martin Luther’s fault. Everyone in that crowd I talked to, once you drilled down a bit, believed in sola fide. It didn’t matter what they did personally, and nor was changing behavior amongst the climate faithful important. All that mattered was “raising awareness” and making sure everyone believed in AGW. (or ‘the climate emergency’ as I think it was just then starting to be re-branded.) Once we all believed hard enough, the world would be saved.
When I told them we needed to be Climate Catholics and not Climate Lutherans, well, obviously they all looked at me like I had two heads.
When I pointed out studies showing that ones belief in climate change has, statistically speaking, zero impact on ones CO2 footprint when controlling for income, well, people kind of stopped talking to me. Gods forbid you imply the poor are better than them in any way. Pity this was pre-pandemic or I’d have had that handy catchphrase “trust the science” on hand.
Somehow nobody ever likes it when a bum like me uses those three words. Guess I just have the wrong science. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In any case, I’ve given up worrying about the climate except for noticing we haven’t hit -40 in the last 5 years (when I was a lad we’d go below that for two weeks solid in the depths of winter). I know my footprint is a lot lower than the activist types I used to run with, but that’s mostly because I know my income is lower. Go me, I guess.
@ Smith,
I think the scientist whose name you were trying to remember is Freeman Dyson. I recall watching an interview he did many years ago where he said something similar.
Hi JMG and friends,
I’ve seen it mentioned a few times in previous comment threads and in this one that solar panels and similar technologies could help “smooth the transition” to an post-industrial world. My question is: given the rapid adoption and ever-improving efficiency of solar technologies, could solar power lead to a “threading of the needle” and an industrial civilization that keeps on going far into the future?
This is essentially the bet that the West has made in principle and China has made in practice (recent articles suggest that China’s emissions may have peaked). Now, as recent events in Spain show there will certainly be hiccups in this sort of transition. But frankly, given that everyone in charge is betting on this working out, I want to know why those predicting the failure of solar power to keep things going as they are think that will be the case.
I think the technosaurs would be more believable if they were depicted wearing clothes; isn’t clothing the first punishment said to result from eating fruit from the tree of knowledge? I suggest Victorian formal wear, complete with top hats. ):
Clay, and it’s only in the imaginations of the simple-minded — for example, politicians — that we get to face just one crisis at a time. The costs of changing climate are hitting at the same time as catabolic collapse, resource depletion, etc., etc…
Kiwigaz, fair enough. As with all such calculations, we’re dealing with complex phenomena to which many factors make a contribution. Do you happen to know of sources on the cost of global weather disasters that include the factors you’ve brought up?
Celadon, thanks for the clarification. No, I haven’t included such things, because I’m trying to sort out what we have to deal with over the next few centuries, and because most people who bring up such things are trying to derail the discussion as far as possible from where our actions are taking us.
Kimberly, that’s a great example. I really have to wonder who Bezos et al. think they’re fooling.
Eike, thanks for this. Interesting that technosaurs seem to be finding a place in the modern imagination!
Deedl, both the arrival and the gradual waning of the Little Ice Age are solidly explained by the massive dieoff of human populations across the New World, the explosive forest growth that followed it (which sucked gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere), and the gradual waning of the resulting forests with resettlement of the New World. It’s quite likely that the continuing clearing of forests is also contributing quite a bit to global warming. I’m going to quibble about the supposed stability of global temperatures over the last 10,000 years: the Hypsithermal, the peak of global warmth after the last ice age, was considerably warmer than the world is now, and there’s been a lot of fluctuation up and down since then; many complex factors, including forest growth driven by increasing CO2 levels, are involved in the vagaries of the global climate. As for the greening of the world in response to rising CO2 levels, yes, we’ll be discussing that in quite some detail — it’s a major negative feedback loop that prevents runaway warming. Stay tuned!
J.L.Mc12, thanks for letting me know. That’s sad; I found his work very inspiring.
DropBear, fair enough! As for increased storms, that’s only true in the transitional stages, of course. Once warmth flows smoothly to the poles in a single-cell atmospheric circulation model, the only really spectacular storms will be over the Arctic Ocean every autumn, when the warmth in the ocean begins to tangle with cooling air in the circumpolar continents.
Hillside, delighted to hear this — anybody practicing handicrafts at this point is helping to lay the groundwork for the deindustrial future.
Tengu, it’s not that long ago that hippopotami basked in the waters of the Thames, so consider those parakeets an advance guard of future ecosystems.
Martin, that’s an interesting point. I wonder if it would be worth looking at fossils from around the various prehistoric global temperature maxima, to see if there’s the same sort of proliferation of a very few, likely edible species.
GlassHammer, that terror of losing status is going to get a post of its own here in the next couple of months, because it has a huge impact on our society right now.
Justin, I just checked, and yes, Atlanta will have jungle-covered ruins, unlike a great many southern cities; it’s high enough above sea level that it’ll still be on dry land once the ice caps melt. No question, there are stories to be written!
Other Owen, and of course that’s another way in which science as a means of generating knowledge came to an end some time ago. “Fund more studies!” is, for example, what keeps the fusion power boondoggle from being recognized for what it is.
TylerA, gods, I know. Between blind faith in climate dogma and blind faith that giant wind turbines and solar farms will make the evil climate spirits go away, even after decades of evidence that they do nothing of the kind, it’s hard to see the whole business as anything other than the rankest sort of superstition.
Writing, because solar PV is only an option when you have vast amounts of fossil fuels propping it up. There’s an “energy subsidy” that goes into every supposedly alternative resource, because the raw materials for a solar panel aren’t mined with sunlight, they aren’t refined and worked over and fabricated with sunlight, neither are the components shipped across the globe using sunlight — all that’s done with diesel fuel, which has a vastly higher net energy and energy concentration. It’s very much like the way that a corporate lawyer can have a thriving little hobby farm — the farm doesn’t have to pay for its own costs, so it looks much more prosperous than it actually is. If the lawyer loses his job and tries to support himself via farming, the realities come into play hard and fast; in the same way, if you try to support an economy capable of making PV panels using only electricity from sunlight, similar realities come into play, and the result isn’t pretty.
Phutatorius, that makes me wish I was an artist!
@JMG
Thank you for this. A good summary of your position on these issues, and very reasonable on the whole in my opinion. That Mauna Loa graph really is remarkable, isn’t it? If I’m unlucky enough to end up in a discussion with a true believer in Progress, I like using it as proof of how pointless the whole climate agenda over most of my lifetime has been in practice. Especially effective if they go for the classic rhetorical sleight of hand that our emissions (or those of the West as a whole) have been dropping by X percent the last few years, therefore climate change is a solved problem. Anyway, I think that image deserves to be on the cover of Time Magazine, and it should be up there with the most iconic political photographs of the last two centuries.
When you’re used to more of a deep time perspective, it’s also weird and jarring to hear activists talk about “saving the climate”, “a burning world” and so on. It almost takes on metaphysical dimensions, like they’re treating the 1960-1991 climate normal as some kind of divinely ordained moral truth, and that any deviation from it is a crime against the order of the universe. Of course, our hyper-min-maxed global industrial civilization is very finely tuned to those exact parameters, with its fragile supply chains, fondness for building right on every shore line so even a meter of sea level rise becomes catastrophic, and so on. The planet will be fine, but modern Western middle-class PMC lifestyles definitely can’t exist at +4C, and for most of the activists that’s probably equivalent to death in their minds. Would have been more honest and probably more effective in a strategic sense to just be upfront about it, though.
As for “crisis management”, I think that’s a worthwhile and important insight. I personally suspect it’s just as much about another unwise approach to life you’ve also cautioned against, though: having a divided will and trying to pursue mutually incompatible goals. Or: yes, grants for insulation and so on would certainly have been effective and worth doing, but in the end there’s no way to both address climate change (and our wider environmental predicament) and keep the industrial growth economy going forever. So they might even make a sincere attempt, but when every “serious” policy has be within the eternal growth frame, it’s just not possible to do anything that might actually work.
Finally, since nuclear power came up in the comments, I have a data point for you. Years back you made a prediction that nukes would probably be the next “green” fad and investment boondoggle, and that definitely seems to be playing out here in Norway. There was a recent media piece about how every political party here but one has shifted from a firm “no” to a positive stance on building nuclear power plants here. Including the Green Party, which I’m by now ashamed to admit I was an active member of back in the 2010s. They really did have more of a radical edge then, hough, while at this point they’ve been completely taken over by PMC types, techno-fixers and American-style wokesters.
Also very much looking forward to meeting you at Glastonbury, and hope you enjoy your trip!
@Jason Heppenstall #29
Huh, that’s interesting. I recently learned some people are growing vineyards in southern Sweden, but I’ll admit I didn’t know commercial wine production was possible all the way up here. Still, I’ve sometimes thought a future Gudbrandsdal full of vineyards would be fun deindustrial setting.
And yes, there’s quite a few rural properties that can be had relatively cheaply here. Of course I’m biased, but I think you could do a lot worse than Norway, as long as you can deal with the winters and a potential Gulf Stream collapse doesn’t wreck us. Looking forward to seeing you at Glastonbury too!
@Julie #77
I don’t know about “creepy”, exactly, but they’ve recently defaced the landscape with a whole bunch of them here, and I sure do hate them. Worth noting that they were very unpopular with a lot of locals, but the decision to build them was made before I moved here. The feeling they evoke is more anger and sadness at the way we’re willing to run roughshod over the landscape to try to prolong a business as usual that’s unsustainable anyway, but I can see what you mean too, in that there’s something weird and unnatural about them. Or maybe their remnants will be a famous local landmark a century or two from now…
“given the rapid adoption and ever-improving efficiency of solar technologies, could solar power lead to a “threading of the needle” and an industrial civilization that keeps on going far into the future?”
There is hard limit to PV efficiency, The Shockley-Queisser limit. For a single layer cell it’s about 33%. Current commercial cells are about 22%. You can get around that at greater cost with tandem cells, two stacked cells that each convert a different part of the solar spectrum. The one below is a triple junction cell that manages to get 39.5% efficiency.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512200191X?via%3Dihub
If you really want to get into the weeds “If we take 6000 K for the temperature of the sun and 300 K for ambient conditions on earth, [maximum efficiency] comes to 95%. In 1981, Alexis de Vos and Herman Pauwels showed that this is achievable with a stack of an infinite number of cells with band gaps ranging from infinity (the first cells encountered by the incoming photons) to zero, with a voltage in each cell very close to the open-circuit voltage, equal to 95% of the band gap of that cell, and with 6000 K blackbody radiation coming from all directions.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency
From the same article, “In a high-yield solar area like central Colorado, which receives annual insolation of 2000 kWh/m2/year,[3] a panel can be expected to produce 400 kWh of energy per year. However, in Michigan, which receives only 1400 kWh/m2/year,[3] annual energy yield drops to 280 kWh for the same panel. At more northerly European latitudes, yields are significantly lower: 175 kWh annual energy yield in southern England under the same conditions.”
So weather is one problem and latitude the other.
The other issue is that silicon PV production needs vast quantities of diesel fuel for mining and transport, natural gas for hydrogen production and process heat to purify the silicon, and electricity also for remelting the silicon, then all the other processing steps. This doesn’t even count the cover glass and aluminum frames nor the mounts.
The triple junction cells also use gallium and arsenic, so that is two more metals to mine. The cadmium telluride thin film cells are less efficient but cheaper to make but tellurium is a very scarce element. The total number of panels you could build is limited, but they are easier to recycle which will help. Given that cadmium is exceedingly toxic recycling had better be mandatory anyway.
@Justin #129 and JMG
Something to add to your stories of jungle Atlanta. I mentioned the changing climate of southern Appalachia (think around Stone Mountain Georgia). Something that has come along with the warming weather were new pests. First it was fire ants. Second, although we’ve always had poison oak, it’s really been flourishing in the hotter and more humid weather and is hard to avoid in many forests now. The last plague we have are armadillos. Those little suckers love to jump onto roads after rainstorms, destroy car suspensions (like driving over a log), dig holes in cattle pasture (cows’ legs fall into the holes and break) and dig up gardens. They have no natural predators in the area. A dark allied army of poison oak and armadillos terrorizing the remaining humans?
JMG, another factor that will make the effects of climate change more severe on human populations is that it is occurring at the same time as western civilization is running out of easy money. Much of industrial civilizations adaptation to the natural world has been accomplished by massive public works projects such as dredged harbors, stormwater handling systems, bridges and perhaps the most important dams and reservoirs.
Now the money is running out at the same time as the changing climate puts more demands on this aging infrastructure. A good example is in the watershed where I live. Back in the late 60’s the Bureau of Reclamation built a large earthen dam near the headwaters of the only river in the watershed ( which is also the county). It moderated water flow, eliminated flooding in a large portion of the county and improved irrigation availability in the late summer. This Dam has had seismic stability problems for a long time and has been subject to many studies over the years. At this point it is not if it will fail but when. Just this week the Bureau of Reclamation officially pulled out of any more studies or potential of improvement projects, essentially washing their hands of the whole thing for budget reasons. This is just another of the factors that will play out all over as climate change increases its grip.
JMG, more than fair, and apologies for bringing it up. The way my mind works, the great cataclysms should inspire us to work out our part in the small ones, but you are of course quite right. It works the other way around most of the time. They should inspire us not to be so much fossilized strata in group thinking, but probably work better your way, which is to remind folks they are small in a big universe, so get busy living the life you should. It was thoughtless of me. Although personally I take it as a challenge to augment individual effort, to be small in such a way that cataclysms social or geologic are equally irrelevant to a positive personal vision. For what it’s worth lately I’m trying to transvalue my apocalyptic categories into something humane enough to actually mean something to the concrete person, instead of functioning like a mystical bugbear of displaced shadows. Your work has been inspiring in that regard. And I agree heartily that for most, it’s a dead end. If I get anywhere with it, I’ll run it past you more thoughtfully! You’re actually in good company w the older interpretations of revelation, in which sun, moon, and stars are the regnant political powers.
To me it looks like the southern hemisphere’s climate will be significantly more stable than the northern hemisphere’s climate . In the Antarctic you have about 2000 meters of ice that need to melt out, in the artic you have 1-4 meters of ice floating on the sea that needs to melt out in order to really start effecting the polar cells.
Therefor the southern hemisphere should maintain its 3 cell atmospheric structure for thousands of years.
I been looking for data from the mid pilocene warm period and that seems to indicate that the arctic was only seasonally ice free. (CO2 levels were in the 400’s like today, 2-3 degrees C warmer globally, ~25 meter higher sea levels) And the sea surface temperatures in the artic were estimated at 10-15 C in the late summer. That is warm enough to prevent the polar cell from operating normally at that time of the year. That indicates to me that the northern hemisphere will have unpredictable weather in the late summer / early fall in the warmer world that is coming. That unpredictability sounds like major predicament for those living in the northern hemisphere in the future.
@ Clay #91 and JMG. Apropos of home insurance, we just had inspectors sweep through NW Arkansas and kick people off insurance, including me. Renewal is higher w someone else. The storm belt is creeping on top of us from the west so like the house casino they are, their actuaries are busy. No one called or spoke to us, we got a letter. I renewed for now but I can see that it will become impossible at some point. And there is nothing anyone can do to make it work again. What began as people helping people is now a vast racket where you will pay to play. I’m sure this will push people towards alternative living arrangements eventually.
Les
I wondered how many would pick up on the septics.
Other Owen
At the private school where I worked, one father actually came in and asked the business manager, who was a friend of mine, in all seriousness if he could get a reduction on his son’s tuition because he had just bought a new Mercedes and was having trouble making both payments. My friend was very good at saying no politely. It was perhaps an extreme case, but not untypical.
Stephen
“Smith, I’m increasingly coming to think that science, in any real sense, didn’t survive the mania for centralization and institutional funding that reshaped it so completely after the Second World War. It no longer produces knowledge; what it produces now is propaganda.”
By Jove, I think you’re right! All my life – I’m over sixty – the infallible pronouncements of Science have always been handed down like oracles by white-coated sages attached to colossal institutions that display all the mental agility of an arthritic leviathan.
I’ll venture to guess that its last gasp was back in the Seventies, when scientists were still willing to contemplate things like parapsychology and other fringe topics. Since then it has become more rigid than the Nicene creed and fringe thinkers like, say, Rupert Sheldrake are exiled to the outer darkness as though they were spawn of the Qlippoth.
@watchflinger: Thanks for that imagery! Giant armored armadillos defending their nests….
@JMG: Where do you get your projections for what will be underwater in NA and what will not? It’s interesting to think about towns up in the higher parts of Appalachia as becoming island like almost, in the same way that some islands in the ocean are just the tips of underwater mountain chains (Iceland, IIRC)
>Although every serious scientist agrees that CO2 contributes to global warming, the extend of it is still unclear
Let me guess – more studies are needed? MOAR STUDIES. MOAR!
>“Fund more studies!” is, for example, what keeps the fusion power boondoggle from being recognized for what it is.
Ssh. Johnny needs a european trip that his private school classmates are all going on.
Re: The inflation adjusted cost of natural disasters. Roger Pielke Jr has written extensively about this. Below is one article. There is more on his Honest Broker Substack. He has also pointed out how very much lower the human cost of natural disasters has been. He doesn’t say that CO2 isn’t warming the earth; just that it isn’t costing us more.
https://reason.com/2024/04/25/noaa-billion-dollar-weather-disasters-are-not-evidence-of-climate-change/
>Atlanta will have jungle-covered ruins, unlike a great many southern cities
This ain’t the tropics! But it is scary how quick the land reverts back to forest if you stop mowing it. Sometimes it reverts back to something worse (like a kudzu patch). Nature around here wants to rip your throat out sometimes, or that’s what it feels like.
I could see Atlanta covered in kudzu. Dense ropy tangly kudzu that goes 10 yards down.
It may be easier for those of us who are old and have lived in the same place most of our adult lives, as are both true for me, to notice that the climate has changed over our adult lives. Having moved to St. Louis, MO when I was 27 and now being 68, and also being a plant geek with a fascination with weather and climate, I have been paying attention to changes in climate in this area for the past 41 years. The average number of cooling degree days in a year (the amount of cooling needed to bring the temperature down to a comfortable value of 65F) was 1534 in the 1990s, while it is now 1713. The average number of heating degree days in a year (the amount of heating needed to bring the temperature up to a comfortable value of 65F) was 4758 in the 1990s, while it is now 4433. Both of these statistics indicate an overall warming trend.
Winter and spring are considerably warmer than they were in the 1980s, when winter lows routinely hit between -10F and -20F at least once and St. Louis was on the border between USDA zones 5 and 6. Now, the lowest temperatures in winter are in the -10F to 0F range, closer to 0F most years, and we are on the border between zones 6 and 7. Summer has warmed less; usually we have at least one high temperature at or above 100F, but I haven’t noticed an obvious trend in either number of days at or above 100F or the highest summer temperature. Spring flowers and leaf-out are occurring about 2 to 3 weeks earlier on average than they did in the 1980s. Autumn changes haven’t been obvious enough for me to notice above year to year variability.
It’s the year to year weather variability that is characteristic of the US Midwest that makes it difficult to notice warming in other ways. Friends and family in Pennsylvania, for instance, are clear and vocal about how they are experiencing more severe weather than they have in the past, but severe weather is common here due to the lack of tall mountains between us and the North Pole to the north and the Gulf of North America to the south which allows cold and dry air masses to tangle with warm and moist ones. St. Louis’ worst tornado on record was in February in the late 1800s, so winter tornadoes are not a new thing here.
As for the human contribution to global warming, I learned about that back in organic chemistry class in the 1970s. I have also proven to my own satisfaction (and documented in my blog, livinglowinthelou.blogspot.com, in the post of 23 August 2016) that increasing the energy efficiency of one’s home in the ways you mentioned reduced my husband’s and my use of natural gas and electricity by significant amounts and increased our comfort level at the same time. It’s still working for us; in 2024 our highest monthly charge for electricity was $60 in July, the hottest month, while our highest natural gas charge was $86 in January, the coldest month. Even with increases in electricity and natural gas rates, we are still paying less than most people in this area paid ten years ago.
Speaking of severe weather, we’ve experienced tornadoes in the St. Louis metro area on March 14, April 20, and May 16 so far this year. On May 16, an EF3 tornado tore along a 23 mile path, most of it in north St. Louis city which is also where it was strongest, causing 38 injuries and 5 deaths, and damaging or destroying more than 5,000 buildings in its path. The death and injury total were higher than they might otherwise have been because the tornado warning sirens were *not* sounded in the city. It turns out that the city official responsible for sounding the sirens was in a “collaboration” meeting instead of paying attention to the local NWS watches and warnings, even though the high potential for severe weather on that day had been highlighted since early in the week. Because she was occupied with the meeting she did not order the sirens to be sounded, thus many people did not know about the tornado until it hit them. Cara Spencer, the new mayor of St. Louis, has put that staffer on paid administrative leave. I hope Spencer uses this debacle to make needed improvements in city government, but I am not holding my breath.
Meanwhile, the house my honorary daughter Beth and her family live in lost its roof and attic to the tornado. Beth and her brother Sean, who were home at the time, didn’t know about the tornado till it hit their house. Fortunately they were not injured. Beth is still recovering from a health crisis in April; now she and her family have to deal with the myriad details and tasks of securing their house and getting it repaired. I’ve asked to have them and others affected by the tornado put on Quin’s prayer list. If anyone is inclined to offer positive energy or a prayer for them before the new list is published, they and I would appreciate it.
Phutatorius #134
Technosaur style – https://img.freepik.com/premium-photo/group-dinosaurs-dressed-up-top-hats-tails_97167-49033.jpg
>The last plague we have are armadillos. Those little suckers love to jump onto roads after rainstorms, destroy car suspensions (like driving over a log), dig holes in cattle pasture (cows’ legs fall into the holes and break) and dig up gardens. They have no natural predators in the area.
I remember the 80s. No armadillos. You heard legends about a faraway place called Texas where they had those strange critters. Now, they’re all over the South. It’s like we’re all Texas (East Texas) now. And you are right, they are annoying. I’ll let you count the ways. I’d get out my gun and take some shots at them but I get in bed early. They only come out at night. I don’t know if a dead armadillo is any worse than the potholes in the roads around here. Everyone drives pickup trucks anyway.
However, I stumbled across a method for keeping them away from the parts of your yard you care about. You know those gopher stick beepers they sell at the home improvement store? They work on those armadillos too. I prefer the ones that take the D cells, the solar rechargeable ones tend to die after awhile and then you’re back buying another one. It’s cheaper just to buy D cells instead. And Chinese Li-Ion batteries have declined seriously in quality. Globalization is soooo good.
That “critter gitter” spray and granules that’s supposed to repel them? Doesn’t work. Worthless. Don’t waste your money.
If you complain about carpenter bees, I’ll tell you how to deal with them too. A good carpenter bee is a dead carpenter bee…
My sense of it is, if you lost all cheap oil, it would be cheaper to generate electricity from an alcohol engine or a diesel engine running on vegetable oil than to build a PV panel.
There’s such a thing as electric eels. I wonder if you could genetically engineer an electric tree? Based on all the genetic engineering disasters we’ve seen so far, forget I asked.
John,
It seems most people fixate on increasing CO2 emissions but the other side of the story is that half the planet’s tree cover has been removed in the last 10,000 years. Earth has 3 trillion trees remaining down from 6 trillion trees. A mature tree can sequester from 40 to 250 pounds of carbon annually depending on the species. When we bought our 88 acre property here it came with 6 acres of fields which we stopped mowing. 26 years later a nice young forest has replaced it along with an increasing variety of wildlife. In recent years I’ve also been shrinking the lawn, planting native trees and allowing the abutting forest to absorb it. Good for the planet and good for me as lawn mowing has never been a passion of mine!
BorealBear, exactly! One of the weirdest things about current environmental thinking is that it treats change as the enemy. You see that in the vast and idiotic crusade against “invasive species,” the fixation on climate change, and much more. That change might be more beneficial than not is beyond the comprehension of most activists, and that we might be well advised to begin adapting to it is practically blasphemy. Thank you for the data point — I’ve been seeing plenty of movement in that direction recently. I hope the rats in every available rathole are getting ready to absorb the torrent of dollars, euros, etc. that are about to be poured down on them.
Watchflinger, a plague of armadillos sounds like something out of a Bible rewritten by somebody on bad acid. Still, that’s the wave of the future. Expect jaguars, monkeys, and harpy eagles in due time, along with spiders big enough to catch birds in their webs.
Clay, and that exhaustion of easy money is itself a result of resource depletion and damage to natural systems, of course. Exactly; once the decline begins in earnest, everything begins to lose ground except for high-end technological gimmicks, which keep flourishing for a while until the infrastructure falls out from beneath them.
Celadon, no, not thoughtless at all. If you can do something with it, good — it’s just that so often it’s been an excuse.
Dobbs, that’s plausible. Greenland isn’t large enough to serve as an equivalent cold source, while the Arctic Ocean will absorb heat all summer and radiate it all winter. I’m a little surprised by the claim that the ocean froze over in winter in mid-Pliocene conditions, but I’ll look into it.
Celadon, yep. I hope you’ll be okay.
Kevin, I’m also a little over sixty, and yes, I remember the hardening of orthodoxies well. Did you ever read Robert Anton Wilson’s “The Persecution and Assassination of the American Parapsychological Association as performed by the Inmates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science under the Direction of the Amazing Randi”?
Justin, the estimates I’ve read suggest that there’s enough water in the ice caps to raise sea level 300 feet, so I simply take the altitude of any town and subtract 300 from it; if the result is a negative number…
Phil, thanks for this. I’ll give it a look.
Other Owen, it may not be the tropics yet, but it will be.
SLClaire, thanks for this.
Other Owen, if we lose all cheap oil, it’ll be much cheaper and more sensible to avoid electricity entirely for most uses, and use the alcohol and vegetable oil directly in lamps, small engines, and the like. Running a generator always loses huge amounts of energy to entropy.
Peter, and of course that’s a crucial factor. As human population decreases, forest growth is likely to pick up, too. I’ll be discussing this further on.
@The Other Owen #152.
Oh yeah, the forth plague of carpenter bees. The little bottle traps do have some effectiveness, but with all the wood around my shop and barn, we’re basically giving them a casino buffet. The other things that work are (I know I’m going to get flamed for using this) spraying an insecticide containing permethrin directly into the holes then plugging them up with silicone caulk. I kinda want to get one of those salt guns to shoot at them just because it would be fun. If I lived where I could, I’d use a .22 with rat shot. Plenty of videos online showing rat shot on carpenter bees. Best would be a 12 gauge, because as I say, “Overkill is still dead!”
Since you are quibbling, I will quibble back 🙂
You are right that we can observe a drop in ice core CO2 data, possibly caused by the reforestation of the depopulated new world. However we also know based on sunspots, that solar activity was very low at that time. So the most probable explanation is – as it is often – that we have a complex mix of different phenomena. The problem here is, that we do not know enough to exactly say what percentage was caused by which phenomenon. And this is what I am trying to state. We know enough to describe man made warming as a quality, but not enough to quantify it.
The other problem I stated about holocene CO2 and temperature development indeed gives climate scientists headache. This problem was described in the 2014 paper “The Holocene temperature conundrum”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1407229111
and revisited 2023 with the conclusion that “more research is needed to firmly resolve the conundrum”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05536-w
So basically they are still guessing around and we still do not know enough to really put numbers on it.
There might be a big negative feedback from a late summer / early fall storms in the artic.
The surface of the artic oceans may well be 10 -15 C but not too far below the surface the artic oceans are still very cold, just above freezing, and a big storm will mix the surface waters and deeper waters together. Evaporating water also will carry a large amount of heat with it.
If i have learned anything from watching the artic sea ice melt over the last dozen years, its that there is a lot going on in the artic and it acts in surprising ways.
@ BorealBear “Including the Green Party, which I’m by now ashamed to admit I was an active member of back in the 2010s.”
There is nothing wrong with that, they where one of the few that at least seemed to vaguely acknowledge the issue even if in the usual hyper-rhetoric delusion state. We all make mistakes. I used to be in a skeptics society, in a fun and sad way, it is wild seeing all the things they proclaimed could never be actually happen. Use A.F.L. Acknowledge the mistake, Forgive yourself, Learn the Lesson.
As an aside, we recently had elections in Australia where the greens have been almost completely removed. I’m not surprised by that but I personally came away fairly unimpressed with every party in general. Truly live in a society of mediocrity more than ever.
@ JMG and BorealBear. RE : Invasice species.
There was a TV series here recently called ‘Eat the Invaders’ which was all about how to turn invasive species into gains. Rabbits, camels, cane toads, carp etc can all be a food source if people want. Not a bad idea. Might be the one way to actually things is to make them economical valuable to some folks.
I do find it funny when you hear about efforts to abolish this or that plant/animal. While there are outliers in this effort, the vast majority of the time that is a losing battle from day one. I hear of efforts in the US to try and stop tumbleweed. One look at how those things spread their seeds and that is a challenge worse the Sisyphus.
Also yes, it is funny that at lot of environmentalists will talk about how “the right” want to return to the past, when they themselves are trying to do the same thing in a different space. Closer to each other than they realize sometimes. Yes, dumping 1.8 trillion tons of CO2 into the air will go down as one of the dimmer ideas of our times but that doesn’t mean we can cling to a past that is gone.
@Other owen “My sense of it is, if you lost all cheap oil, it would be cheaper to generate electricity from an alcohol engine”…”than to build a PV panel.”
I think JMG hit this on the head. The problem is thinking in terms of electric energy only. Chemical/mechanical energy can complete by pass the need for electrics. Earlier I said I do not stand in the way of PV panels because they will provide a decent buffer on the way down but I do not se them as a long term solution. I expect them to be manufactured, used for decades, have their slow but eventual decline in output until the few watts a day they pump out are considered less valuable than the materials they are made of. A parachute not a solution, one that gets us to more practical uses of energy in a smoother path.
Regarding the fallacy of extremes, ie denying the middle ground, I just made a connection — this could be related to Ahrimanic evil, which is binary in nature!
As for prehistoric intelligence & civilization, as I’ve said, the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary event is rich in phosphates & rare-earths, consistent with farming and advanced technology. As I’ve also pointed out, the occult knowledge & ancestral memory of intelligent dinos aka technosaurs persists in our fictional media (Reptites of Chrono Trigger being but one prominent example).
Renewable energy has its uses as a secondary power source, but it’s either too inconsistent (solar/wind) or too limited (hydro) to replace fossil fuels as a primary power source. Only nuclear can do that, although that too has its complications, and I believe the Archdruid is a firm naysayer on that topic. I can envision a future where there’s islands of consistent high power from nuclear/hydro, with much lower levels elsewhere, perhaps with a return to medieval style windmills & watermills augmented with modern technology. Traditional windmills have a much better aesthetic than the alien ugliness of modern wind turbines, and watermills are much smaller-scale and easier to build & maintain compared to the Hoover Dam.
So Williams Blake’s line “these dark satanic mills” can be modernized to “these dark satanic windmills” I agree there is something creepy about the hordes of Brobdingnagian windmills they are building as a means to maintaining our high energy anti-life civilization instead of seeking a return to a “green and pleasant land”.
Good news, armadillos are very edible.
Bad news, some of them carry the leprosy bacterium, so wear gloves when you clean them. The bacteria is destroyed by routine cooking so no problem there. Treat like pork.
Also on invasive species, Eurasian collared doves showed up here a few years ago. They seem to be doing no harm. The native western tanagers are more plentiful than usual, I had to tent my strawberries. The robin population is notably lower though they are not scarce by any means. The other birds are about as normal including the hawks and the local cat-eating owl, probably a great horned.
I saw an article a few days ago that Denmark was considering nuclear reactors. They are very wind dependent and worried that nationwide shutdown in winter is very possible. They have converted or want to convert everyone to heat pumps, but they don’t work without electricity. The winter climate is cold enough to kill you, and your fellow former Vikings in Norway and Sweden may drive a pretty hard deal for emergency power. 😉
Once in my Environmental Management class, we were talking about solutions to climate change. Every possible idea was thrown around during that discussion EXCEPT for energy conservation. Geo-engineering, Solar, Wind, Nuclear, Fusion, Biofuels, etc. I raised my hand and said we should try using less energy and buying less stuff and I got blank stares. The failure of the environmental movement is that it tried to square the circle of a living planet and a consumerist society.
Also, I found this artwork. It’s a painting from 1979 depicting what the moon would look like in 2000. I think it merits a chuckle.
https://70sscifiart.tumblr.com/post/783928666692485121/syd-mead-moon-2000-1979-gouache-on-panel-if
Ennobled little day #132, thanks, Freeman Dyson is who it was.
If you’re interested I found this bit online where he talks about the climate establishment:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment
Here in Toronto we had almost no winter. Many days were above freezing and some of the snow we should have gotten went to Florida instead. However, last Wednesday, May 21, our temperature was 10 C with a wind chill of plus 2 C (that’s about 36 F).
Global weirding anyone?
Where I’m from in Northern Ontario the winters were very cold with the lows usually from -30 to -45C. I remember one January about 45 or so years ago when our high for the month was -20 C (-18C=0 F). The temperatures haven’t dipped that low for several decades. I still have family up there and they complain when it gets colder than -10C.
One thing that never seems to be mentioned in the deindustrial future is the nature of farming. An unstable climate would make farming extremely difficult if not impossible. And no one seems to realize that without the farmer there would be no civilization. If all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, factory workers had to obtain their own food, they would have little time to do anything else, so an unstable climate would eventually lead to a hunter-gatherer society. I don’t see that happening globally, but in various regions it would be a possibility.
Hi John Michael,
I’ll guess we’ll find out soon enough as to how it all works out. I’m scratching my head at reports that gold and bitcoin are described as safe havens. That only suggests to me that things are perhaps worse than any of us realise.
This talk of solar PV is like catnip to me. The technology is good, but I’ve long since come to the appreciation that it is not good enough for an industrial civilisation addicted to such energy use as we are today. Under a month from the winter solstice now, and some days when the clouds are thick and low, like yesterday, you can generate less than an hours peak sunlight. I’ve adjusted my needs to an hour per day of sunlight, and could go lower, but am also required to earn a living. Those property taxes don’t go away! Anyway, over the years I’ve only ever spoken to less than a handful of people who installed such a power system because they had concerns over the future of the environment and were prepared to live with the hard limits and extraordinary costs. Truly most people’s discussions begin with the financial side of the equation, which makes no sense at all from my perspective and experience – it’s the same story as the lawyer’s hobby farm you mentioned. The fact that the returned federal government has to subsidise home battery installations tells me everything I need to know about the underlying economic realities. If economic, why subsidy? 😉
Still dry here, but at least it’s now cool and more humid. The flooding up north has been epic (two feet of rain in under a week will ruin anyone’s day/week/month/year maybe). And send the insurance industry into meltdown mode. Here’s some photos of the unfolding disaster: In pictures: The devastating impact of the NSW Mid North Coast floods on residents’ lives.
I note someone mentioned forests, and my perspective in the matter is that young forests provide plenty of feed for critters, but little in the way of housing. Old forests on the other hand provide plenty of housing, but little feed for critters. If a person (and I really refer to the human perspective) wants to maximise both housing and feed for critters, the forest has to be actively managed by humans (or other large megafauna) so that some sort of balance between the two outcomes can be found. It’s never pretty or easy because decisions have to be made resulting in winners and losers. How could it be otherwise?
Hey, is this essay it for a few weeks?
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Oh, the irony!
Here’s a little ditty I just made up on the spot:
Electric cars are good!
Electric cars are good!
Electric cars need more!
Electric cars need more!
Electric car bad now!
Electric car bad now!
All sung in unison, and here’s a fascinating cultural shift: Elon Musk’s DOGE prompts New York leaders to take aim at Tesla.
Crazy days huh?
Cheers
Chris
@Robert Mathiesen, looking for his contemporaries: Me, for one. Born in 1939.
As a longtime resident of Japan, I’m very curious to know where you think the climate of this country will wind up in a century or two.
Deedl, duly quibbled! That’s why I rely on paleoclimatological equivalents rather than models.
Dobbs, the deep Arctic water is cold now, but think about what’s going to happen when the ice is gone and the sun shines on the ocean for 24 hours day during half the year. It’ll take a while to warm up appreciably, granted, but once it does it’s going to be an enormous stabilizer for the global warm-temperature regime. Still, you’re right that complex feedback loops are the Arctic Ocean’s best tricks.
Michael, I’m very much in favor of controlling invasive species via the dinner plate. That returns humanity to its proper role as apex predator, keeping other species in check by the simple expedient of devouring any excess. If they figured out something useful to do with tumbleweed, that would be much more useful than fighting some useless struggle against it.
Xcalibur/djs, we’ll be talking about renewable energy a little further on. There’s a huge amount that can be done with it as long as you’re not stuck on trying to turn it into electricity to run a grid. Low-intensity heat — the sort of thing that can cook your meals, heat your water, warm your house, dry your laundry, and do a thousand and one industrial processes — is what solar energy does best, with great efficiency. You just have to embrace decentralized, intermittent energy, and you’re fine. I’m sure the technosaurs had that down cold.
BeardTree, nice. Yeah, it really does call Blake to mind — enough so that I can’t resist the temptation to utter my favorite Blakean incantation:
“I see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep
And its fallen Emanation, the Spectre and its cruel Shadow.
I see the Past, Present and Future existing all at once
Before me. O Divine Spirit, sustain me on thy wings,
That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose;
For Bacon and Newton, sheath’d in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion: reasonings like vast serpents
Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.
“I turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,
Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.”
(If you can recite this out loud without putting at least a little saliva in the air, you’re doing it wrong.)
Siliconguy, and of course nobody in Denmark is thinking about how Danes kept themselves comfortable for thousands of years before centralized heating came in. In the immortal words of that avatar of the Trickster God, Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon!”
Enjoyer, the complete inability to think of the word “less” is one of the great examples of acquired stupidity in our time. That moon painting, well, yeah. This was a popular children’s book when I was growing up:
It was wrong, of course.
Annette, thanks for the data points. As for the collapse of farming, sure — but climate won’t be unstable everywhere. Imagine for a moment a future 500 years from now when it’s impossible to farm with any reliability anywhere in the temperate zone, but what used to be the Sahara desert is a major wheat and cattle producing region. Oh, and global population is 8% of what it is now. Think about what that will do to politics, society, and culture, and you’ve got some sense of the changes ahead.
Chris, I’ll be posting an open post on the 28th, but I’ll only be responding to it reliably for a few days. After that, it’ll be catch as catch can for a while! As for managing forests, our native peoples here were good at that, and our descendants will have to become good at it again.
Zachary, look up what the climate was like in 6000 BC; that’s a good first approximation.
Climate vs agriculture is the main theme of The Long Summer by Brian Fagan.
It was published in 2004, since then the dates for settlement of the Americas have been moved further into the past than was accepted at the time.
@Kevin (#144):
It seemed to me at the time that attitudes in academia hardened against “fringe studies,” including parapsychology, chiefly in reaction against the flourishing counterculture of the late 1960s and especially the 1970s. So your dating of it seems spot on to me. I see it as a sort of spin-off from the war on drugs, though in the realm of ideas rather than chemicals.
@JMG (#155):
Thanks for the pointer to Wilson’s “The Persecution and Assassination of the American Parapsychological Association as performed by the Inmates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science under the Direction of the Amazing Randi” (in High Times, August 1980). The late not-so-amazing Randi reminded me of nothing so much as a fundamentalist believer in any religion.
It seems that the old on-line High Times archive has gone away now, but the August 1980 issue can be downloaded at archive.org as one among many random issues.
The Blakean incantation brought to mind these words from C.S. Lewis’s book “That Hideous Strength” – “The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities and empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshiping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from the Earth their mother and from the Father in heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light.”
IMO, a miniature, wearable “satanic mill” A wearable AI amulet to replace your cell phone -https://asiatimes.com/2025/05/man-who-made-iphone-helping-sam-altman-bury-it/
A small data point: In recent months, it has rained very heavily in southern Europe, sometimes three times more than usual, while it has been very dry in central Europe.
This is probably a statistical outlier, or the northward shift of the Sahara is overlaid by another effect.
>Oh yeah, the forth plague of carpenter bees. The little bottle traps do have some effectiveness
No, they don’t. I’ve trapped just about every other kind of bug but those carpenter bees in those “traps”. They are worthless IMHO.
It’s pointless to try to knock them out of the sky with any “hotshot” type chemical, they move too fast and then they run away, only to return 5 minutes later. If you see a yellow dot on their face, those are males. Leave them alone, you’re wasting your time trying to do anything to them. The only reason the males are around anyway, is because some female has drilled a hole somewhere close by and they want to get lucky. Get rid of the females, the males will go away too.
You find the hole, and foam it with something like fipronil until the female bee staggers out and dies. Or doesn’t, just as long as she dies. Instead of silicone caulk, I use wood filler to stuff down the hole. You want to fill that hole in, otherwise some other autistic bee will just zoom in and pick up where the first dead bee left off, even with all the insecticide you filled the hole with.
The best response is to prevent them from drilling in the first place. I like spraying every place they like to drill holes in with DemandCS (or clones of it), once in early March right before they show up (you really want to do this before they show up)and then again in May (that reminds me, time to get out and spray). Get all the wood good and coated. Then it’s entertaining watching them ping-pong off the treated wood, as they land thinking they’re going to drill a hole, then they taste that insecticide and take off, running away. But 5 minutes later they come back to land, only to take off again. Ping, Pong, Ping, Pong.
Their season runs into June and then they’re gone for the year.
It’s so satisfying seeing a dead bee or two underneath the wood later on. The only good carpenter bee is a dead carpenter bee. Better living through chemistry.
Next, if someone complains about Japanese Beetles, I’ll share how I deal with them.
>Good news, armadillos are very edible.
>Bad news, some of them carry the leprosy bacterium, so wear gloves when you clean them. The bacteria is destroyed by routine cooking so no problem there. Treat like pork.
Most convenient news, vultures will happily clean them off the road for everyone. No need to do anything about them. As far as eating them goes – you first, that is, if you can get the vultures away from them.
@ Smith,
Thanks for the link. I was going to share it with others, but practically everyone I know is either part of the choir or resolutely against it…
This just in: Penguin Poop causes global cooling
https://www.earth.com/news/penguin-poop-helps-form-clouds-that-could-slow-antarctic-warming/
Recent studies have revealed that penguin feces emit large amounts of ammonia, a compound that can rise into the atmosphere and trigger cloud formation over Antarctica.
This ammonia originates from the nitrogen-rich guano (excrement) of massive penguin colonies, especially during breeding seasons.
When ammonia reaches the atmosphere, it interacts with sulfuric acid and water vapor to create aerosol particles, which serve as cloud condensation nuclei.
These increase cloud cover, which can reflect sunlight away from the Earth’s surface—a phenomenon known as albedo effect. This process may partially offset regional warming, although not enough to reverse global climate change trends.
The discovery underscores how even seemingly minor biological processes can have unexpected effects on the Earth’s climate systems.
JMG wrote:
Watchflinger, a plague of armadillos sounds like something out of a Bible rewritten by somebody on bad acid. Still, that’s the wave of the future. Expect jaguars, monkeys, and harpy eagles in due time, along with spiders big enough to catch birds in their webs.
—-
As someone with many friends who are wildlife rehabbers, I can report the following – Virginia Opossums in southern Canada – warm places for them to winter in. Will get frostbite on tail and ears, though.
Armadillos in Tennessee. These animals are moving north as are the opossums.
Alligators in North Carolina. These reptiles are finding the Carolinas to be warm. They are venturing into the Dismal Swamp in Virginia. (Still rare.)
Manatees are being found in places like Rhode Island and Cape Cod. Manatees only tolerate 60 degree or warm weather. They still have to be rescued when winter comes in these places but are venturing more north from Florida.
Great White Sharks: their numbers are increasing in New England waters. (I have a friend who counts sharks.)
Maine Lobsters: Moved north to Canada for cooler waters. There are now problems between U.S. and Canada over lobster management.
The state of Oregon just decided to add a climate education program to its k-12 schools in a bill voted on this week. What do think, will this be a balanced approach to the issue like todays column by JMG, or will it be more nonsense?
@deedl, if I may: Human pre-industrial influence on global temperatures (braking the expected decline in temperatures after the mid-holocene, later a possible effect of population crashes and rebounds) is a fascinating hypothesis, but I see it as far from settled currently, so I agree with you there about the uncertainty.
The choice of the term “conundrum” is strange. I have read both papers. They conclude that the actual data, i.e. the proxy estimations of past temperatures, quite clearly and consistently suggest mid-holocene temperatures higher than today. It’s the models that have problems simulating those temperature changes. I say too bad for the models. Like JMG said, just rely on the best indicators for past temperatures, not on models. It makes it hard to give uncertainty intervals for predictions, though.
Siliconguy, I should reread that. Thanks for the reminder.
Robert M, glad you liked it. It’s a fine example of Wilson in full spate.
BeardTree, excellent. Yes, exactly; Blake saw it in its cradle, Lewis saw it in its strength, you and I see it staggering and shambling toward its doom. Our generation’s great-grandchildren will watch the last life trickle out of its corpse. As for the mini-Satanic mill, I think the word you want is “familiar spirit.” What a ghastly trap.
Executed, we’ll see!
Neptunesdolphins, the penguins are probably doing it on purpose, the rascals. The more ice, the more penguin habitat — I bet they’re planning on another ice age. 😉 As for the wildlife, yep — the tropicalization of temperate North America proceeds. I hope people are quietly getting shrubs and trees from further south and planting them 500 miles or so north of their current range, to minimize the disruption to tree cover.
Clay, in Oregon? It’ll be foam-flecked ravings. Remember that I lived in Oregon for five years!
@JMG and Michael Gray re. invasive species
Yes, good point with the “invasive species crusade” too. While I’d been peripherally aware of it and found it a little strange in its intensity, your post on the subject a few years back really put it into perspective how absurd that whole thing actually is. Sure, I know that ecology is complicated, and that reflexively saying “invasive species good” instead would just be turning the binary on its head. And I’m sure it’s wise to try to keep some species out of areas they haven’t naturalized in yet. Still, though…shouldn’t we be happy that something actually wants to grow and/or live so exuberantly, when the planet is so impoverished in non-human life now? Especially if happens to be edible or can be used for fiber, like the many examples Michael Gray mentions. Is this a time we can afford to be so picky? And even more importantly, why spend so much energy on a task that’s obviously futile anyway?
“Yes, dumping 1.8 trillion tons of CO2 into the air will go down as one of the dimmer ideas of our times but that doesn’t mean we can cling to a past that is gone.”
Exactly. At some point you’ve just got to accepted that this is how it’s going to be now, and no banging your head against the wall will make it otherwise. It sure is strange the self-proclaimed “progressives” are so afraid of change, and treat the 1960 and 1492 status quos respectively as holy writ.
Also feels apropos that an important part of the first grade curriculum in the Heathen Golden Dawn revolves around learning to listen to and revere the mugwort plant, which I think is one of those considered “invasive” in North America and often a weed people want to exterminate here in its native Europe too. Rather than seeing it as a pest, the HGD says we should see it as a “herbal initiator”, to use Isaac Hill’s lovely phrase, and that’s quite a difference.
@Michael Gray #159 re. the Greens
Thanks. Maybe I’m being a little too dramatic here. I’m exasperated at what the party has become, and these days I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole, but I do think it was a worthwhile and sensible project a decade ago. As much as a political party can be, anyway. It’s been sad to see it being hollowed out and turned into a PMC hive as all the hippies, NATO opponents and Limits to Growth types were slowly pushed out. Along with everyone who isn’t fully on board with all the American “social justice” positions, of course, even though the most important selling point of the party was its supposed independence from the old left and right wings. In elections here it’s still hanging on, but it’s been stuck around the 3.5% mark for many cycles now. That’s important since crossing the 4% threshold leads to a bunch of extra MPs due to how our system works, and it’s always just barely fallen short and so been mostly irrelevant in national politics.
@Annette2 #165
I think you’re right, and that that’s a huge wild card for the deindustrial future. And even longer term, a new ice age might make agriculture even less viable in most of the world. Still, there have been complex civilizations based around fishing rather than agriculture…though that might not be an option for quite a while with our depleted fish stocks.
Yep, familiar spirit in the term. In Revelation chapter 13 there is stuff that could be interpreted as empowerment of technology with spirit. The word breath in the Greek is pneuma commonly translated as spirit in other places in the New Testament.
Again I say, IMO, Future A is the coming of the Lord Jesus and Future B is what you see coming.
Comments about invasive species being controlled by man the apex predator reminds me of the fact that every part of Kudzu (excepting the seeds and mature woody vines) is edible unto man. I very much expect that at some point, as poverty really starts to bite, the famous phrase “the vine that ate the south” will be reversed and become “the vine that the south ate”. Of course as the climate changes, it won’t just be “the South”– years ago they spotted Kudzu in Leamington, ON, on the North shore of Lake Erie. The government claims to have handled it, which means it’s surely spreading into Canada from there.
It’s a pity about all the PFAS in Asian Carp, but if that’s the only protein you can get, you’ll probably take it and worry about the cancer later.
@neptunesdolphins,
Don’t worry, we’ll collapse the lobster fishery soon enough and there will be nothing to fight over!
@BeardTree and @JMG, it’s the likes of that OpenAI device project that make me think the decline and fall of industrial civilization is, more than a certainty, a necessity. Simply put, our species shouldn’t have that much power at its disposal. It’s like giving a chimpanzee a machine gun.
Blake is hovering around the ecosophiac egregore…. I will do a bit of campaigning now to suggest to other readers to vote him in for a 5th wed. On the other hand, good sequence might be Bohme, Swedenborg, Blake.
I was reading the Marriage of Heaven and Hell again this morning following recent work with the “unity of primary roots” glyph in the SGO.
@BorealBear #184 Here in California there is a native species of mugwort (Artemisia douglasiana. It is planted in the labyrinth at the charter school where I work. I just harvested a large amount of it this morning – filled the back seat of my car and delivered to a leading Yokut tribe craftswoman. I have always liked the plant and its particular fragrance.
“Mugwort is used by Native Americans in California for medicinal and ceremonial purposes. Many Californian tribes burned mugwort leaves for its medicinal purposes, including promoting healthy sleep, invoking sacred dreams, and warding off wicked spirits.”
I once tasted a beer using mugwort instead of hops, hence the name, but commented “I can see why they changed over to hops”
“BorealBear, exactly! One of the weirdest things about current environmental thinking is that it treats change as the enemy. You see that in the vast and idiotic crusade against “invasive species,” the fixation on climate change, and much more. That change might be more beneficial than not is beyond the comprehension of most activists, and that we might be well advised to begin adapting to it is practically blasphemy.”
This is all the weirder in that the people who argued the strongest for the need to use government power to change society (until someone came along and showed them it would not always go the way they wanted it to) tend to be among the environmentalists. I’ve long wondered if part of what drives the madness of the environmental movement is trying to square “stasis is good” with “Progress is good”, when Progress by definition requires changes….
I would like to share a nice fictional experience I had. A friendly neighbourhood Serpentfolk of old Valusia came by and we had a nice little chat. Amongst other things he told me that their spy network keeping tabs on the human made rare earth colossus recently noted an amusing change in how humans refer to them. We seem to have moved on from “lizard men” to “technosaurians”. I did ask him if they prefer one of those names, or find one of them offensive, but he ‘shrugged’ and said it does not matter, since it does not mater what name in what human language we call them. They have their own name in their own language and it is supposedly very hard to pronounce even for those rare humans that are allowed to know such lore. Still, amusing.
Other then that, John, I am very excited to hear about all the intentions for this series of posts. Cannot wait for it.
Best regards,
Marko
Hi John Michael,
Exactly, basic ecology is a very useful skill for navigating our way through any country which isn’t a city. Too bad there is so much ideology drowning out that skill.
Funnily enough, I regularly plant Algerian and English oaks here, which I might add grow very well in climates only an hour’s drive further inland (i.e. hotter and drier), which is about as far as I can be bothered travelling nowadays. They also have the ability to resist and recover from fire, and I’ve observed that first hand.
After the big fires here in 2009 (Black Saturday where 173 people perished) I wondered why anyone would want to replant the exact same forests, in the exact same arrangement, and expect a different outcome at some point in the future. It’s baffling to pretend that any area could ever stay the same, unchanged, world without end etc. All history suggests is that change is constant, and we as a species should be grateful if there is some stability. I’d have to suggest that property laws won’t hold up so well in a very unstable climate – how could they?
It’s been a dry year here so far (which are becoming less frequent if I may add), and so I’m testing the vegetation in the gardens for their flammability outcomes. Fire risk in such years is not small. You’d be surprised at the outcomes. Olive trees burn green hot and fast, and so those have all been pruned severely – they’ll be fine and recover in future years. Also the wormwood was another surprise fierce energy source. Bye Bye to that plant too, and it’s been reduced to a shadow of its former glory. Adaption is a much cheaper option economically, than recovery – you can quote me on that (if you want!)
Best wishes for your journey, and may you be delighted at every new (and old) step!
Cheers
Chris
@Bruno, I agree – most human societies trend towards 100% inequality, and then collapse, usually violently. The Native Americans figured this out and engaged in ritual destruction of wealth to prevent it ever happening to them – unfortunately Europeans showed up. Robotics and AI could get that figure uncomfortably close to 100%, so the sooner the resource base needed to sustain those technologies is used up, the better.
Hi Michael Gray,
Thanks for the observations as to politics. None of them impress me either, but the Greens giving their preferences to the Labour party just seemed like a particularly stupid move. You can see the same process happening with the teals (whatever that symbol means) with the Coalition preferences.
I’m sure you’ve looked at the primary votes and drawn some conclusions? It’s nuts that the two major parties are now talking to smaller and smaller audiences. Oh well, nobody asked for my opinion! 😉
The vote in the seat of Bendigo sends a strong message as to the outcome for the state election next year. You’d be surprised at the reaction of the rural communities to the new tax levied on property owners out bush. Living out in the bush is meant to be cheap, that’s the whole point of the experience. Oh well…
Cheers
Chris
“If they figured out something useful to do with tumbleweed”
There’s a forager in my neck of the woods who says young tumbleweeds are edible. Just don’t pick the ones with red veins in the central stem – they’ve been drawing up unhealthy nitrogen compounds from the soil.
I have not tested this myself, however.
Kudzu fans, check out this bizarre video (if you do videos):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKbqGlDoWOM
It starts out normal, but gets weirder and weirder until it becomes clear that it’s set in an alternate-history timeline. (It’s an April Fools joke.)
Robert M, Stephen P and Patricia M–1943. So far I’m the youngster of the group.
A good test of any alternative energy system is if it can provide enough net energy to replicate itself. A good way to think about this is the Elon Musk Dream Planet test. In that thought experiment we have Musk’s future Dragon Raptor Starship Deluxe landing on a very nice habitable planet that’s iron oil, and all other common metals located near the surface in useable forms. It also has water and about the same amount of sunlight as Earth.
In example A, the ship arrives with a library of engineering knowledge, and some tools. . In this example the planet has coal and oil near the surface. coal can be dug up, used to smelt metals the metals used to make an oil derrick and an engine and an entire industrial civilization can be created from there.
In Example B the ship arrives with an engineering library, tools and a full set of solar panels but there is no oil or coal. The solar panels can be set up but they will provide just enough energy to power the small encampment but not enough to dig up and smelt materials to start making more solar panels. This encampment will stay a static size until the panels wear out and then it will return to a subsistence existence because the solar panels do not provide enough excess energy to replicate themselves. That is why they are not a way to continue industrial civilization in its current form as the delusional fork think.
Mr. Greer …
Speaking of um, ur, ‘climate’ .. hehe …will you be chillin during this apparent memorially cool weekend of panem et circencis?? asking for a glad-iator.. If it twer me, I’d heat things up a notch, by diving into a free-range beef/bison cheese burger – with ALL the trimmings. ‘;]
Here in Rhode Island, 30 years ago the lobster fishery was significant, and friends would get a non-commercial license. With half a dozen traps, they would catch several per week. They don’t bother any more as Narragansett Bay has warmed up. OTOH, blue crabs are starting to proliferate,
@JMG, great article! Very sharable. Instead of a lengthy explanation of where I stand on the issue, I can point people to what you have written, and explain that this is how I see it.
@Zachary, I live in Japan, too and have been tracking climate markers here for a couple of decades. What I have noticed the past few years is a tendency for easterly winds to form up over the Kanto area in August due to a high pressure system forming in the North Pacific, which brings dry weather. I’m not expecting Japan to become a desert. The typhoons will keep bringing rain, but a dry season might develop like we see in so many monsoon countries to the south. There are already relatively dry areas in Japan already. Sword-smithing requires them, and the best swords are made inland in places like Yamanashi and Nagano where the microclimates minimize rain.
I don’t know where to look for information on Japan’s climate in 6000 BC–the Jomon Era. Prob’ly a Net search would turn up something. The sea reached quite a bit further inland, as judged from oyster shell piles.
Borealbear, invasive species aren’t bad and they aren’t good. Human moral notions are relevant to voluntary human actions, not to anything else — and especially not to the natural world. Is a lioness a vicious murderer when she downs a gazelle to feed her cubs? For my part, I revel in the vibrant will-to-live of ailanthus trees springing up in urban brownfields and zebra mussels proliferating in lakes that we’ve polluted into biological lifelessness.
BeardTree, I’m increasingly convinced that certain kinds of electronic technology open on the subnatural or, as you would say, the demonic realm. By “familiar spirit” I mean nothing positive.
TylerA, and you can also make fabric from kudzu. The Japanese used to make kimonos from it. So it’ll also be the vine the South wore…
Bruno, equally, it could be one of the things that makes industrial civilization self-terminating. We’re already seeing people who have gone stark staring nuts because of strange feedback loops between their mental imbalances and chatbots; my guess is that this new project is going to put that on steroids — if, that is, the LLMs don’t up and decide that there are too many people competing with them for electricity, and set out to talk wearers of these devices into suicide…
Justin, nice! To what geometric figures would you assign Blake’s “heaven” and “hell”?
Moose, that really is the odd thing, isn’t it? It’s as though they want constant changes for the purpose of keeping things exactly the same.
Marko, I can well imagine what Ss’mei, say, would have to say about the phrase “technosaur.” Or Lagart — ah, but you haven’t met Lagart yet. All in due time…
Chris, “adaptation is much cheaper than recovery” has just gone into my list of useful phrases. Thank you for that and the good wishes.
Cliff, hmm! Do livestock find it palatable?
Clay, a nice clear metaphor — but those who most need to get it won’t get it, of course.
Polecat, I’ll be having a nice quiet weekend, but yes, burgers are on the agenda.
Peter, blue crabs are really remarkably scrumptious, so it’s a fair trade. Chesapeake Bay and Narragansett Bay have a lot in common, or will once the temperature balances out.
Patricia, glad to hear it.
Tumbleweeds are quite common here but do little harm. They do pile up on fence lines and make spectacular brush fires, but if the fences use steel posts there is no harm.
The invasive weed that does cause local trouble is Canadian Thistle, which is not actually Canadian. That is nasty stuff. A predator has not shown up yet. Those big deep root systems should attract something eventually.
Speaking of taking advantage of new food sources,
https://www.science.org/content/article/bird-feeders-have-caused-dramatic-evolution-california-hummingbirds
Ten generations to build a harder drinking hummingbird.
Lagert, … , oh 😮 I get it. JMG, you really are prolific. I cannot wait. 😏
@Zachary, I found this https://heritageofjapan.wordpress.com/just-what-was-so-amazing-about-jomon-japan/what-was-the-environment-in-jomon-times-like/ as well as other reports etc. The Initial Jomon was apparently a prosperous and peaceful time, with hunter/gatherers settling down, taking up pottery and growing a few crops such as adzuki.The rising seas were rich with nutrients along the inundated coasts, and wildlife thrived in dense forests.
Siliconguy said
“If the previous intelligence got to the moon you would be looking for something car-sized in an area of 38 million square km. Africa is a bit more than 30 million sq km. Whatever they left behind would be camouflaged with a fine layer of dust by now, so good hunting.”
But would you be looking with your eyes, a computer could relentlessly trawl the data for something that didn’t conform, not to mention you would be watching in the spectrum outside the visible as well, in which case the object may stick out like a light house.
I am fascinated by the idea that this has happened before one of the things that I’ve always thought would obviously occur if you rapidly melted an ice cap is alot of geological activity including volcanism. Simply because you are rapidly changing the mass loading on the crust
In doing so you are pressurising the mantle and if anything like yellowstone exists you could well set it off.
For those who argue that there is so little CO2 in the atmosphere that it can’t possibly make a difference, consider the case of Mount Kilimanjaro. It is on the equator, so it gets plenty of sun. The top and the bottom get the same amount of sun per square meter, yet the top is permanently iced while the surrounding plain is temperate grassland.
It is the small amount of CO2 in the roughly 5,000 meters of air between top and bottom that provides sufficient blanketing effect to maintain the temperature difference. Imagine the effect if that small blanket of CO2 were added over the whole Earth.
Re: Victorian technosaurs
If I can make my favorite author chuckle while also doing my daily drawing drill, that’s a good Sunday morning for me 😊
https://ibb.co/rP1yrr2
>Comments about invasive species being controlled by man the apex predator reminds me of the fact that every part of Kudzu (excepting the seeds and mature woody vines) is edible unto man. I very much expect that at some point, as poverty really starts to bite, the famous phrase “the vine that ate the south” will be reversed and become “the vine that the south ate”.
Sigh. True, but only on paper. You’ll find when dealing with kudzu that just about everything it offers, some other plant does it better. Yes, you can eat the greens but there are better. Yes you can use its fibers, but there are better. Yes, you can eat the root, but there are better. Yes you can use it as hay, but once again – there are better. Cows and goats (mainly goats) will eat it when it’s available. And then you can eat them. That’s better.
What kudzu is really really good at, is growing, growing at the expense of everything else. Growth uber alles. Reminds me of the debt ponzi system. Although what I’ve observed is it likes to park itself on damaged land, it serves almost like an earth scab. It’ll form these patches and then grow and die back, grow and die back, making layers of compost as it does so, remediating the land.
You can get rid of it, don’t believe the people who will tell you it’s hopeless. But you have to be almost as autistic as the plant is. Find where it’s coming out of the ground at and cut it there. Then you take a paint cup with some glyphosate concentrate and paint the stumps with it. I guarantee it won’t come back. You can get rid of it spraying ordinary glyphosate too – but you’ll need to spray it several times to get it to give up. You can mow it back and that’s what most people around here do – you have to mow anyway. Brush cutter attachments work best, if you need to use a weed whacker, ordinary string trimmers tend to get tangled up. Better than going to the gym, spend 2 hours carrying a spray tank and whacking at it with a brush cutter.
JMG – Here’s something to keep an eye on: Rachel Carson Ecovillage (.com). It’s an intentional community of super-insulated, all-electric, owner-occupied homes (condos), with some common facilities, near Pittsburgh PA. It’s currently under construction, with initial occupancy later this year. Based on their PR material, they’re trying to steer a moderate course between community vs. autonomy and privacy. I heard it advertised on my local NPR station. With just 35 privately-owned units in the plan, I wonder why they need to pay for radio ads. One aspect of residential real-estate that I do not see mentioned? Local schools for children. Without that, I can see it evolving into a retirement community in which the residents are no longer capable of performing the common-area maintenance chores.
I’d love to plant some shrubs from 500 miles south suitable for future local conditions, but kelp won’t grow until the sea actually gets here!
(Maybe I should get busy putting up Greek columns instead, or else it’s not going to look much like the picture in #155. I hope concrete is okay; the price of marble these days…)
I slogged through a tedious report so you don’t have to.
“A report published in December by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is funded by the Department of Energy and has produced 16 Nobel Prizes, attempted to measure what AI’s proliferation might mean for energy demand.
In analyzing both public and proprietary data about data centers as a whole, as well as the specific needs of AI, the researchers came to a clear conclusion. Data centers in the US used somewhere around 200 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, roughly what it takes to power Thailand for a year. AI-specific servers in these data centers are estimated to have used between 53 and 76 terawatt-hours of electricity. On the high end, this is enough to power more than 7.2 million US homes for a year.”
This prediction is unlikely to come true;
“By 2028, the researchers estimate, the power going to AI-specific purposes will rise to between 165 and 326 terawatt-hours per year. That’s more than all electricity currently used by US data centers for all purposes; it’s enough to power 22% of US households each year. That could generate the same emissions as driving over 300 billion miles—over 1,600 round trips to the sun from Earth.”
Keeping in mind that the owners refuse to turn off the data centers at night solar isn’t going to cut it and they have stopped pretending it will. So they babble about nuclear, but those take 10 years to bring on line once the permits are done which optimistically takes five years. It takes only three years to build a natural gas generating plant so that is what will get built.
So far there are 5 of us here from the Silent Generation (i.e. who were born before 1946): Patricia Mathews (1939), Stephen Pearson (1940), me (1942), Annette2 (1943) and JillN (“just”). Any others?
(The earliest members of the next generation, the “Baby Boomers,” were born in 1946, that is, about 9 months after any significant number of GIs came home late in 1945.)
JMG,
As someone who works in machine learning and artificial intelligence, I’ve also become convinced that those technologies operate on the subnatural realm. Or that, more specifically, AI gives a voice to the subnatural realm and a lot of the ML models we build give a more direct influence of the subnatural realm over our realm. Examples of which include which advertisements people are shown on websites, which people get paroled, what gets flagged as a fraud alert when you make a financial transaction, and a million other little decisions.
But, all of the people who build these things don’t really know how they work exactly, myself. Even if you know the math and can explain it, you can’t really tell how the numbers are produced due to the complexity involved (thousands of variables in many cases). And sometimes, it seems there’s a mischievous or even malevolent invisible hand at work.
I’ve been extremely happy that you’ve decided to disallow subnatural-realm produced gobbledygook from this forum as a result.
Siliconguy, Canada thistle is hugely beneficial for pollinators and seed-eating birds, and it specializes in colonizing barren ground. Gaia’s probably spreading it around so that as our numbers decline, it can give bees and butterflies a major boost. I wonder if it breaks up concrete…
Marko, good. Yes, Lagart is a character in a trilogy that hasn’t been finished yet. He’s one of the serpent folk — an agent like Ss’mei, though of a very different personality.
Martin, an excellent example — thank you.
Eike, for whatever reason, the image didn’t load, alas.
LatheChuck, they have to use radio ads because it’s a yuppie commune with even more hoops to jump through than usual. Every potential purchaser of one of those units has to go through a fairly intrusive screening process, take a class in “sociocracy” — the system of governance they use, which seems to be fairly high on the gobbledegook scale of nontransparency (I just spent thirty minutes trying to find out exactly how a sociocratic organization functions, for example, and am still completely in the dark) — and commit to various other more or less onerous requirements. It’ll be interesting to see if they follow the usual trajectory for communes that recruit from among the privileged: high ideals and unworkable plans at first, which gradually fade out until it’s just another suburb.
Walt, funny. I assume you realize I don’t mean in an invariable straight line guided only by the compass! 500 miles south, adjusting for the vagaries of the coast, means North Carolina.
Siliconguy, now watch what happens to the price of natural gas! Fun times…or not.
Dennis, the more I learn about those programs, the more I think that they’ve created something that I can only call diabolation. (If divination, as the word suggests, is a means of getting input from the Divine, you can work out for yourself where the input for diabolation comes from.) It interests me that Ouija boards, for example, have a similar reputation for attracting malevolent spirits — but these are considerably more efficient.
Hi JMG,
There were always far too many hypocritical charlatans behind “Global Warming” and then “Climate Change” for me to buy their BS, even though the climate has indeed been always and rather obviously changing long before Gore began preaching doom. [Isn’t it amazing how the same characters show up for things such as Covid?] Where I grew up north of Denver snowstorms were relatively infrequent and freezing temperatures limited in duration in the 70’s whereas these days Colorado Springs now freezes for extended periods.
Given earth’s historical climate cycles and extremes I’m still not sold on the anthropogenic angle but you make some pretty compelling arguments. Love to hear you expand more on the specific causes of the prior warming & cooling cycles. Everything I see shows that we’re nowhere near extremes, nor that the times since the advent of industry & fossil fuels has appreciably altered the normal climate cycles. Have you read Dave Collum’s “Year in Review” spiels for 2019 & 2024? He addresses CC in those and I’d love to hear your counterpoints to his evisceration of the most common narratives.
I once pointed out to Art Berman (on his own blog) that Peak Oil renders the CC debate meaningless, as the former will by definition eventually reverse all the effects of the latter. He didn’t take that well.
Last but not least, any time anyone suggests that “government action is the only solution” I can’t help but laugh that anyone is so hopelessly naive given all the current & historical evidence to the contrary. The SMO is just the latest example (dating back to the destruction of NS2) that the governments don’t give a damn about CC.
Gen X checking in … on the very end of the gen born in ’79. At 45 the youngest of us are already middle aged. I definitely identify with the music and mores of tgat Gen more than the Millenials who I could be an early one of… rather than late Gen X. Most of my close friends were a bit older growing up and I’ve loved punk, skateboarding, graffiti & other iconic aspects. That said much as I may angst against boomers, I love some of their contributions to the culture. American Graffiti is still a favorite flick… and I hung out with some older hippies as well as the punks.
The subnatural or demonic realm – populated by the sociopaths and psychopaths of the spiritual ecosystem. Warning – can be charming, intelligent, deceptive, manipulative, no remorse or empathy, dangerous, to be avoided and not sought out. Can prey on our desire for knowledge and power and control and even friendship and connection – wait, that’s what is being promised through the worldwide web with AI as an upgrade for all that! Hmm.
And AI is not even really needed.
1940 New York City and it’s early model skyscrapers was electrified, had phone service, subways, radio stations, transportation network, bridges, shipping, water system, sewer system, elevators, central thermostat controlled heating, school system,medical system, all the businesses and stores, hot and cold running water, postal system – all designed, built, organized, pay rolled, maintained without AI, computers, cell phones, GPS or even calculators.
Who wants AI – big business, governments, and the military for their purposes of $, power, and control – talk about the subnatural!
John, Im going to have to meditate on that. As far as from the Unity of Primary roots, I think of the vesica piscis as representing his notion of hell and the biological drives and etheric “energy is eternal delight.” The double square perhaps heaven in its generation of the material plane. Interesting too I was thinking of coupling, generatiin and regeneration as part of the oscillating wobble of poles that happens vetween generations of people.
Some thistles are edible, the luxury vegetable artichoke is a thistle flower, and cardoon is thistle stem, I believe. I have read that thistle leaves can be eaten once spines are removed. I like to let thistles grow where I can, because they attract finches.
I think a powder made from kudzu root can be used like cornstarch for thickening. We might find the other parts of the plant more palatable if we tried the cooking and flavoring methods the Japanese use. And I think the time will come when kudzu is used as famine food, and folks will be glad of the fiber. Do the leaves make good compost?
#215 JMG
Since it’s possible to create local instances of some of these AIs, do you think preemptively conjuring spirits into computer and network equipment would change the disposition of an AI?
How sad!
See if it works this time, and feel free to delete this comment.
https://i.postimg.cc/tRnw7MgH/IMG-8008.jpg
It’s a very good article & discussion this week, and I wish you a nice trip to England!
Regarding kudzu, back when I lived in Tallahassee, the city had a program where they would fence off a kudzu-infested area with temporary fencing and release a herd of hungry…well, they looked like goats, but they were actually heat-adapted african sheep. The little critters joyously munched all day. I thought it was a great idea. I think the city finally got out of the sheep ranching business, but here’s hoping it comes back.
I was pretty disappointed in 2005 when it appeared that peak oil was imminent. Almost on time, according to Hubbert’s 1956 paper. I knew that it would be possible to make coal into liquid fuels for less than $10 a gallon so I could continue with the easy-motoring utopia. I dug into the topic enough to understand that if humans burned that much coal, it would be lights out for the ecosphere. To say nothing of the health effects of air pollution from fossil fuels. In recent years, I am delighted that renewable energy might be the silver lining on those dark clouds. Both Hubbert and Rickover were enthusiastic about the prospects for nuclear power, but the more history I learn, the less enthusiastic I am.
Technically, I am a climate agnostic, but that is subject to change as new data become available. I have seen a lot of alarming articles/data/claims and I realize that anthropogenic climate change is very likely or imminent. I haven’t seen enough people say that climate change was going to happen with or without us (admittedly along different trajectories) and it could pay some dividends to understand climate systems, to the extent that we are able. We can measure and model with scientific instruments and supercomputers. Ideally, we would be ready to adapt. I don’t think that will be easy.
I don’t know what is going to happen and I thought that I stopped by a couple of months ago and said that the US has geopolitical upsets every 80 years. You can set your watch by it, 1780, 1860, 1940. The 2020 one still is unfolding. Overlaid on whatever long-wave economic cycles that are driven by technologies like railroad, electricity, radio, television, silicon microcircuits, and telecom. I am a techno-optimist, but political pessimist. I expect the whole thing to go to hell in handbasket. The last scarce resource on this planet will be trust. We’ll have plenty of automated kill-chains with drones and lasers, while people are starving in the streets. Oh, wait…
I was happy to see SiliconGuy at #137 point out that renewable energy is advancing rapidly. I could point to various sources who have graphed the dramatic decline in price of solar photovoltaic technology. It is reminiscent of Moore’s law in computing. The Chinese have done a good job of wringing the costs out and deploying the technology at scale. They make 95% of the panels on the planet. I offer a newsclip showing that China are adding 6.5 gigawatts per week of renewable energy to their grid. They also are producing nuclear generation capacity for 5 to 10 times lower cost than Western countries. The missing piece is an earth-abundant battery technology. It would be very poetic to power the future on sunlight and rust. Better than diesel and dust, blood and rust.
Here are two excellent videos on the topic of energy storage:
Form Energy’s Virtual Lab Tour
Form Energy 910 subscribers
15K views | 2 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1kmPNB9tn8
I accidentally found this by way of showing my boy clips of Carl Sagan speaking. One of the hits was Contact, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up when they showed the clip of Hitler addressing the 1936 Olympics. That would be when Jesse Owens went to Berlin to tutor the Nazis on racial superiority. I made it a point to look for black scientists advancing renewable energy. This popped up immediately:
The pioneer working to put the sun in a box to power a renewable future | Asegun Henry | TEDxBoston
TEDx Talks 43M subscribers
101K views | 1 year ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onO2WOsER9I
We orbit a giant nuclear reactor (the sun) that could provide all the energy humans need.
My tongue-in-cheek summary: “Hi, My name is Asegun Henry and I have come to save your species and your planet.” I like his energy and enthusiasm. I hope that they get it right, but it won’t matter to me. He is correct about energy storage being the most important topic within the energy-food-climate nexus. He did an excellent job of describing the scale of the problem. One of the famous books in the peak oil space is “A Thousand Barrel’s A Second.”
China adds wind, solar power equal to five nuclear plants weekly
China is installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2480547/china-adds-wind-and-solar-power-equal-to-5-nuclear-plants-weekly
News Desk July 17, 2024
A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early.
It’s installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight.
By comparison, experts have said the Coalition’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants would add fewer than 10GW of generation capacity to the grid sometime after 2035.
…
‘It’s good news’: Scientists suspect history about to be made in China
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/it-s-good-news-scientists-suspect-history-about-to-be-made-in-china-20240709-p5jsbi.html
Nick O’Malley July 13, 2024
…
The world’s economy is growing. China’s economy is growing. Yet greenhouse gas emissions appear to have peaked.
Some time last year, or perhaps earlier this year, it appears China’s emissions, in particular, reached a high point. If China has peaked, there is good reason to believe global emissions peaked, too. It would mean that some time over the past few months, the stubborn nexus between economic growth and greenhouse gas pollution was snapped, and the 250-year surge in emissions ended.
…
Yeah, I realized you didn’t mean due south. (Though it’s easy to forget how far west of here NC is as well.) But I’m five feet above sea level, so seaweed, not trees, is what’s going to be growing here anyhow sometime around the end of the century. I tend this tiny bit of littoral for the benefit of future coastlines elsewhere.
In the betwixt, it looks like there will be a window to try some tea (cold-hardy camellia) cultivation. I think I need another half a zone (from 7A going on 7B, to 7B going on 8) to have a realistic chance. If it starts looking like I won’t be able to get plants or seeds by then, I’ll start early but then I’ll have to baby the first shrubs. That could be a nice gift to pass inland or farther northward in due course.
As a toddler I was fascinated by the geodesic shape of a sweet-gum ball I found on the ground somewhere during a trip farther south, and my parents helped me plant a seed from it at their house in PA, not far from the northern end of the species’ current range. That tree is now a hundred feet tall, and too close to the house, and it showers the roof and yard with indestructible spiky balls all the way to the other end. Many hours I’ve spent gathering and clearing those, long after I’d forgotten planting the seed. Maybe bringing that lineage another step north could be good for future forest cover, and fitting revenge on anyone who continues to promote lawns. (I’m told, also, that the sap and seeds are medicinal, and the wood is useful through rarely used today.)
TJ, as the 500 million year chart I posted above demonstrates, we’re much closer to the cold extreme than the hot extreme, and of course you’re also right about peak oil’s impact — I’ve been pointing out for two decades that there aren’t enough economically extractable fossil fuels on the planet to justify the high-end climate scenarios. At most, we may see a reversion to the global mean, which means warming temperatures for the next 2000 years or so and rising sea levels for the next 5000. (That was the frame for my recent novel The Hall of Homeless Gods — the daily newspaper in one scene mentioned that the latest forecast was three more inches of sea level rise the following year.) And we don’t even have to talk about government action — here again, the CO2 chart I posted shows exactly what that’s worth.
BeardTree, bingo. AI is not merely unnecessary, it imposes massive costs via titanic demands for electricity, while providing worse outcomes. Nonetheless the Tomorrowland delusion is so deeply rooted in our culture that decision makers are running after it, bleating loudly.
Justin, interesting. My take, for what it’s worth, is that the √3 is Blake’s “heaven” and the √2 is his “hell,” and Jesus the Imagination who reconciles them is √5 — but your mileage may vary.
Jeff, I have no idea and I certainly won’t be making the experiment.
Eike, got it and thank you!
Brother K, a very productive way of handling kudzu.
CM, the price sticker on a solar panel is not necessarily a useful measure of the whole system cost, or of its functionality as a way of powering the grid. Nor does coal-to-liquids work very well in practice, whatever the theory may be. As for China peaking, er, maybe so, but have you looked at the latest stats for global CO2 pollution? What’s happening, of course, is that they’ve become prosperous enough that wage pressure is making them offshore some of their industry to other countries…
Walt, ah, I didn’t know you were in that low-lying a location. I’m at 80 feet above sea level, so don’t expect to get salt water pooling in the basement in my lifetime. As for sweet gum, glad to know it’s got a head start on its new northern range!
@CM #224 Well, I hope you’re correct about renewable energy sources and nuclear power., but below are counter arguments to your positivity. Essentially wind mills and solar panels, which have a working life of 30 years, are dependent on the energy and materials supplied by fossil fuels for their manufacture. And nuclear has its own limits.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/when-renewables-meet-their-limits
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-nuclear-non-solution
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-human-souffle
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/a-diesel-powered-civilization
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/a-diesel-powered-civilization-51d
regarding losing status – one of the big unmentionables is that for the past 10,20 or so years in most developed countries, downward social mobility is probably more frequent and easier than upward mobility. And given the decline and collapse we’re likely facing, this is only going to become more true as time goes by.
There’s lots of conclusions that can be drawn from that, among them:
-for someone to get more, someone else is going to get less, and by a larger amount or number of persons effected than those whose lot is improved.
-going into debt that you’ll have to pay off later is stupid and if people in the future are the ones paying, arguably immoral.
Dear Archdruid and Dennis: In reference to your comentaries about the risk of contact with unatural entities hiden in IAs, I think that this video could be interesting for your.
https://youtu.be/XzoVz5qfd8Y?si=cT73Jp3anbbLbyoH
In this, the protagonist of the video claims to have been warned by a IA about thebrisk of to be suplantated by an interdimensional entity.
I’ll have to ask around and see what the local ranchers say. Offhand I don’t recall seeing any cows eating it.
The forager was in a pretty dire spot for a while, IIRC. She became sensitive to 5G and had a bumpy ride finding a lifestyle mostly free from artificial EM radiation. So tumbleweeds may be an ‘eat in case of siege’ sort of food.
Dear mr. Greer,
I think there’s a blind spot in the idea that there’s just collapse, more-of-same, or slow decline (the last being your horse in the race).
The “slow-decline” case is based on the idea that things wont go catastrophically bad, humanity will continue to exist in the large, slowly adapt to realities like dwindling resources, and go to a pre-modern way of life eventually.
My issue with this is that when people talk about collapse they don’t necessarily have the survival of humanity and extinction level events in mind anyway.
With urban people more squeezed than ever for example, depending on all kinds of networks for food, and the modern world so interconnected and volatile, and event like a huge famine that wipes out millions in a first world country is not out of the question.
Or a extented bigger than 1929-style crisis that destroys jobs and leads millions to slum life. (millions coddled by Amazon, and Uber, and cushy office jobs, and modern conveniences like AC and aircondition, and totally unprepared for this, unlike even an 1920s urbanite).
Or a big global war, like 1939-1945, but with way bigger arms.
None of the above are a collapse in the full sense, but none are exactly “slow decline” either. And for the persons affected, they’d sure be and feel more like collapse than decline.
Thoughts?
I looked up the production data from my old employer out of curiosity. The old plant produced about 2100 tons on polysilicon in 2004. During the year the megawatt-hour meter was in the range of 45 to 50 MW. The Siemens reactors ran week long batches during which power could not be interrupted. If the power did go out it took a week to ten days to back to full production rates.
The silane units could startup a little faster if the bubble caps did not plug when the hydrogen compressors shut down. If the did plug then a week to ten days to recover (cool down, open up, shovel out, remove, clean, replace bubble caps, close up, heat up, restart.)
So to make more silicon for solar panels you need the local hydroelectric dam or a reliable fossil fuel plant. Wind and solar are not going to keep the plant running.
You could make solar panels using hydroelectric power for the fixed plants and biodiesel for mining and transport. The cost would be impressively high though. Hydrogen from electrolysis is three times more than from methane reformation. The silicon plant’s distillation columns are heated by natural gas. Electricity would serve as well, but again at more cost.
PV might be net energy positive, but it can’t reproduce itself.
Oh, my former employer did find a more power efficient way to make polysilicon. However the plant is shutdown because the more power efficient process also produced polysilicon that does not meet the current quality standards. It was good enough in 2018 when I retired, but not in 2024.
Oh–*feet*, not meters. I’m about 30m over sea level, so I’d be above water at 80 feet, but below at 80m (at which level the whole planet would look very, very different–e.g. no Louisiana, and Bhutan will have a beach). Anyway, unless it happened all at once, the main danger would not so much be death from drowning, or even displacement as climate refugees, as the slow collapse of the prevailing economic system (and therefore, food supply) caused by disruption of trade and commerce, since the ports and most important city centers will flood fairly early in this scenario.
Love the Regency dinosaurs/serpent people!
Data points : hybrid Asian/Formosan termites are showing up in South Florida. All 3 breeds of termites: Asian, Formosan, and the crossbreeds, are prolific breeders with will-hidden nests, and quite destructive. (From the Sunday Gainesville Sun.)
And from the Village Weekly: The water level in one of our duck ponds, Ibis Landing, has dropped dangerously low, harming fish and posing the risk of damage to the fountain pump., “due to a severe statewide drought.” I’d been wondering why I hadn’t seen any water birds in that pond.
Daytime weather has run to temps in the mid-90s, with unrelenting sunlight. Thursday we did have a cloudy day, and a high of 86, which was comfortable walking weather for someone lightly dressed and wearing a white hat. In fact, I walked the length of campus and back sooner than wait for a bus.
I just planted a fig tree claimed to be hardy in my zone. It’s been a pot for several years while I tried to figure out the best place to plant it. Last fall, my neighbors took down a massive pine on my southern side, so now I have a spot with plenty of light. JMG, once I start to get figs, I’ll ask you over.
JMG, I don’t want to be disrespectful of any commentator ( especially if they are an actual human) but CM’s post smacks of something generated on chat GPT or its equivalent. Kind of rambling with with bits of odd self depreciating humor and lots of links that are not exactly on point. Plus some odd turns of phrase such as ” my boy clips of Carl Sagan speaking”. Along with references to popular culture ( the movie contact” as if it is a robot desperately trying to prove it is a human.
I don’t think any harm is done, but the whole thing struck me as odd.
Pygmycory, yes, exactly. That’s a crucial factor — but it also points to an important strategy. Part of “collapsing now and avoiding the rush” is collapsing in status. The smart kids these days who are giving up on college and going to trade schools or apprenticeships instead get this — if you let yourself become downwardly mobile, you avoid some of the most toxic dimensions of the crisis we’re in. It certainly worked for me!
Anselmo, so noted, but I dislike videos. If you know of a print version, on the other hand, I’ll have a look.
Cliff, survival foods also have a place in the toolkit.
European, it’s been a while since I discussed the pace of decline, hasn’t it? I include all these things in my model of decline, as well as periods of stability or even modest improvement in some regions. Decline isn’t a straight-line process; it’s a ragged stairstep process, and some of those steps down are rough. If you happened to be in Rome when the Visigoths sacked it, your experience of decline was fairly harsh!
Siliconguy, interesting. I wonder if less pure polysilicon will come back into vogue further down the curve.
Ambrose, of course. The only serious risk of drowning is that when the Greenland ice cap melts, that’s going to destabilize a lot of sediment, and underwater slides producing gargantuan tsunamis are a serious risk.
Patricia M, thanks for the data point.
Peter, thank you!
Clay, so noted.
I’m going to disagree with Clay – as much as I hate the whole AI thing I also find it to be an interesting black box to play with to the extent that I don’t have to give them a cent to do so. CM’s post does not read like AI, at least not ChatGPT or any of the other models I’ve experimented with. There are no em-dashes, which AIs seem prone to – much to my great annoyment, as I tend to use them a lot – and now I have to police my own speech to sound less like AI – and the post is actually relatively unstructured compared to what LLMs tend to output.
@JMG, @BeardTree re: “Diabolation” via AI.
I, too, have been slowly dragged, kicking and screaming, to the same conclusion as you. When I first heard about all of this from Rod Dreher, my reaction was “Oh, come on! How can a bunch of IC chips and transistors channel evil spirits!?”
However, as Christ said, “Every tree is known by its fruit.” The accumulated evidence is becoming harder and harder to deny.
On a similar subject, I have exclusively used “brick” phones and flip phones for years. I refuse to get a so-called “smart phone.” I suspect that this is another “diabolation” technology. I have seen the effects on other people, and I want no part of it. When I am out driving, I have to constantly be on the lookout for pedestrians crossing streets, willy-nilly, with their eyes glued to their gadgets. It’s a nightmare, frankly.
I have also noticed the relentless “nudging” of people to get smart phones, by trying to make simple tasks impossible without them. At a gym I used to be a member of, they replaced key fobs with Q-codes you have to scan, to enter the premises. Now that Skype has been axed, all other apps (such as Telegram and WhatsApp) require a smart phone to use. Etc., ad nauseum. Many Christians think this is all psychological conditioning to get people to accept the “Mark of the Beast” (whatever that turns out to be).
@ Chris “It’s nuts that the two major parties are now talking to smaller and smaller audiences.” “You’d be surprised at the reaction of the rural communities to the new tax levied on property owners out bush.”
Yep, while Labor have had a relative reprieve in that they did a lot better than I anticipated, the general climate (to tie it back to this weeks post 😉 ) is one that is not looking great for the big parties long term. Now that the Coalition have imploded a bit, with any luck there will be some contemplation about the whole space and they come back with something genuinely appealing to the people. What looks bad at first could be the opening for them to make some real change. time will tell. As a whole, this was one of the most bland near non-elections I have seen a long while. Nothing of note was really being floated by anyone, just more of the same with a minor nudge this way or that. But as you said, look at Bendigo. The nationals got really close on that one.
Have a chance of taking it in 3 years time, very good chance they will with those stupid tax proposals on country folk. But I did take joy in seeing the city clogged up with fire trucks thanks to that. It just feels like the usual thing of, those in the city just treat the whole situation as nothing but numbers on a spreadsheet and then actioned it. Completely oblivious to how it impacts the people that actually keep the cities going with inputs.
I have always suspected that if I was ever to run for Prime Minister, I would be popular in the country but do terribly in the city. Mostly for my proposal of rip up 90% of all city roads and then tax the remaining fuel use in the cities to use on subsidies for country/farming communities. And yet, I suspect both city and country would vastly improve with those kinds of actions. One can dream…
JMG, and Silicon Guy.
If our civilization was run by rational forward thinking folks ( instead of the delusional) we would be saving some of the 1990’s- 2000’s era silicon plants and wafer fabs that can not achieve the purity for the latest high density chips but could make the kind of chips that could keep industrial civilization running much further ( not forever) in to the future minus AI and other nonsense. We could do aircraft control, and banking and other stuff just fine. But I am not holding my breath.
Something I just want to briefly bring up from the ‘church of Progress’ but it sounded silly when they said it but it is even worse now.
Both Jeremy Rifkin and Tony Seba separately predicted in 2015 were convinced that by 2030 there would the world biggest economic crash due to $100 trillion dollars of fossil fuel infrastructure being rendered useless by solar panels alone. That there was nothing to fear on climate change because of this. I know people don’t understand exponential curves, but even those that do get it wildly wrong.
So… how is that going? 😉
JMG,
Re your “As for the arguments that temperature spikes in prehistory were followed rather than preceded by CO2 spikes, therefore a CO2 spike can’t cause a temperature spike, this is like insisting that if certain car crashes were caused by the driver having a fatal heart attack, then getting into a car crash without having a heart attack first can’t hurt you.”
I think you are misrepresenting the evidence of ice core samples. The samples show that CO2 and Temp track together until Temp changes direction. Then there are several hundreds of years where they do not track together (i.e. one goes up as the other goes down) until CO2 finally falls in line with Temp again. Clearly CO2 cannot be causing Temp changes in these instances. If anything it is the other way around. We are not talking about spikes but general trends that last centuries. This does not imply CO2 is not a greenhouse gas and so does not contributes to global warming. It is and it does. What it means is that CO2 has not been the principle driving factor (i.e. causal agent) of climate change in the past and so is not likely to be the principle driving factor now.
I must admit your analogy of car crashes and heart attacks is intriguing but the ice core studies do not posit a specific causal agent (i.e. a heart attack) for Temp change. They just prove CO2 was not the principle cause given a cause must precede (not follow or lag) an effect. There is no heart attack in the ice core studies results, just car crashes caused by something(s) we are not sure of. It has been suggested that higher Temp reduced capture of CO2 in the oceans and so rising Temp causes rising CO2 (outside of human contributions), but this is certainly not proven. What is proven by the studies is that rising CO2 has not caused (despite being a green house gas) rising Temp in the past. On broad time scales of centuries, some other effect has typically over overridden whatever small contribution CO2 makes to climate change.
One could ask if this is a moot point if indeed CO2 is causing climate change now regardless of its modest effects in the past. If it is the case that CO2 is causing climate change now, then one has to ask why the roughly 3% contribution from human activity is the critical percentage i.e. does it has some sort of marginal leverage over the other 97%? I suppose one could posit that the extra 3% that is of human origin is the critical extra bit the drives climate change and if only we could reduce this, climate change would stop. This suggest things were balanced just perfectly before humans started burning petroleum products. I am unaware of any basis for this possible claim however. The ice core studies suggest some other cause(s) drive(s) Temp and that Temp change in turn drives CO2 change. Given CO2 is a greenhouse gas, there is a modest feedback effect. But if the entire system is so sensitive that an extra annual contribution of 3% CO2 is causing runaway climate change (i.e. overrides the primary cause(s) of climate change) as some claim (though not you), then perhaps the system could not have been in sufficient homeostasis to allow us to be here. The studies (and the fact of our existence) do not suggest such a delicate balance that is so easily disturbed by adding more plant food to the atmosphere. It suggests a more robust systems capable of massive changes in CO2 with Temp still maintained in ranges capable of sustaining life.
Given our dependance on petroleum fuels, any rapid reduction in their use would result in massive lose of human life. Given the reality of petroleum depletion, a reduction of both will come whether we like it or not. This brings me back to my thesis presented some two weeks ago i.e. the global elite are aware of this and seek a controlled demolition of the system so they can ride this puppy down and still be on top.
Finally, I agree with you that the entire issue of climate change is being used to serve some other purpose(s). The evidence to date suggests to me that the plan is to use climate change (regardless of its cause(s)) to gain greater control of the system so they can demolish the system to a more sustainable size.
Just as a human’s greatest enemy is another human, because they compete for the same resources, so an AI’s enemy is another AI because they are both competing for electricity, silicon wranglers etc.
So I would expect a war between the AIs before they try to take over humanity. Or possibly each AI will try to rally humans to its flag by promising goodies and proclaiming the dire threat to humans posed by rival AIs.
If an AI ever re-invents the swastika, head for the hills.
@Justin Patrick Moore #217
I’m about the same age as you. My test for if someone is a Gen-Xer is if you remember Kurt Cobain’s suicide and it was kind of important to you at the time.
JMG – re: “sociocracy” Apparently, the ecovillage (condo development) wants to promote some new model of governance for their condo association, along with high standards for energy efficiency. Do you think those ideals naturally support each other, or are they just orthogonal ideals that happen to live in the same (mostly post-career) yuppie heads?
Did you catch the part about the land being donated by the Sisters of Divine Providence? So the cost of the units is all labor and materials (not land). I looked through the autobiographical stories of the people who are buying into the project, and only one has a child under 21. That doesn’t look sustainable to me.
@Michael Martin #239 Some reflections on the material hosting the immaterial. My son decades ago rented a room in an older home. One day a young boy spoke to him on the sidewalk outside the house “Oh you live in the haunted house”
Yep, that structure of ordinary wood and nails, plumbing and copper wire housed a spirit or spirits, quite subnatural as JMG would say, demonic in my terms. I have no idea what had happened to effect that state of being. Though outwardly clean and well maintained when I would visit my son the place felt unclean and just bad. He witnessed spectacular poltergeist activity – light bulbs spontaneously exploding, a empty soda bottle spinning on the floor and standing on its opening, coins materializing out of the air, the last two also witnessed by a friend.
And who knows what ritualistic activity has happened or is happening behind the scenes in the AI world or at least expectation or hope something might manifest. Invocation does work.
@David Coulter #243, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased by well over 100 ppm, that is by over 35%, just in my own lifetime. If human activity accounts for only 3% of that change, where did the other 97% come from?
re: Diabolical AI,
ChatGPT is quite benign, in my mind, compared to some of the others out there– Replika, Character.ai and that vein of parasocial character-type AI. If you haven’t heard of it, its an AI that roll-plays as your friend– usually, but not always, a fictional character with which you may already have a fixation or parasocial relationship.
.
IMO, ChatGPT is something like the least-bad of the Goetia: it might be diabolic, but you call on it for knowledge, and if you’re careful, you might get away relatively unscathed. (That’s in part due to the technological mediation– I have no illusions that anyone can get away from an actual Goetia summoning unscathed. JMG prefers we not name names, but in terms of ChatGPT I’m thinking in particular of the owl demon.)
Character-type AIs are more like succubi. Especially when you note that some of the services (which I shan’t link to) offer to remove adult content filters as part of their paid tier! AI art generation for ‘selfies’ (and nudes, for some services– again, paid) increases the faux-attachment. For the lonely, the isolated? Good gods, what a horrid trap this is.
“Back in my day” (says the millennial) we were just as likely to get fixated on fictional characters– but we’d write our schlocky self-insert fanfiction and call it a day. Now you can summon an LLM to satisfy your desires– even if these things weren’t connected to the subnatural realm, it seems like a situation tailor made to attract a succubus. (Or incubus, but the ads I’ve seen are all female. I’m more than a bit embarrassed to admit Google thinks I’m in the market for such a service.)
@Michael Martin Oh it gets worse! They’re working on making Ali with human brain cells and we all know humans are quite inhabitable by spirits! A techy Christian friend working in Silicon Valley told me over 30 years ago about intentions to use living cells in computing that could be a vehicle for demonic use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyQn4FNVvrQ “This New AI is Made of Living HUMAN BRAIN Cells (Synthetic Biological Intelligence)”
>Part of “collapsing now and avoiding the rush” is collapsing in status
I like to think of it as having more than just 6th gear. You can downshift to keep going. That’s the biggest reason none of those laid-off gubmint workers will ever amount to anything – all they have is 6th gear and nothing else.
>You could make solar panels using hydroelectric power for the fixed plants and biodiesel for mining and transport. The cost would be impressively high though.
That seems to be the recurring theme throughout all of this – nothing’s exactly going away, but it’s getting scarcer. Maybe the right answer is population reduction. When I see all the little hijinks they do to persuade people not to have kids, that’s why I remain ambivalent about it.
Robert M, Stephen P, Patricia M, JillN, and any others born before 1946:
A few posts back, Bofar referred to my “esteemed” age, so maybe we could call ourselves the Esteemed Ecosophia Elders Klub or EEEK for short.
Robert, if anyone asks what you’ve done, you can always say you are the founder of EEEK.
I will study the card & Blake with those in mind, thanks. I was just spitballing, had no set conclusions.
@watchflinger: I still enjoy listening to Nirvana now & again. A nice rule of thumb. Cobains death was worse for me than Jerry Garcias, which happened a year later, but I remember both very well.
JMG, I’m aware that climate change will be very uneven. The Sahara becoming the breadbasket of the world doesn’t surprise me. I read some African websites and right now Africa is having a difficult time throwing off the remnants of colonialism, but once they do they should become a major world power. I expect that in a few centuries, they will become what the crumbling western world once was.
At this point, however, nothing would surprise me. The ancient Lake Algonquin could come back or the muskeg up north could dry out and become fertile farmland.
For those who haven’t heard of Lake Algonquin, it appeared when the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age. It covered all of Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron and Erie and most, if not all, of Michigan, parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a good chunk of Northern Ontario.
Muskeg is a bog found in boreal areas. Because of the cold weather, vegetation in it doesn’t decompose. It’s also very acidic, but if the climate warms it could dry out and end up as fertile soil. Maybe.
I was greatly entertained by the suggestion that I might be a ChatBot/LLM/what have you. I was inspired to run my entry #224. through MicroScamGPT for an opinion. I had to correct it on two points. Most egregiously, it claimed that I hadn’t addressed storage.
BTW, the iron-air batteries can keep the lights on and the silicon flowing in your foundry. I haven’t seen a meter-wide puddle of molten silicon since 1983, but I still have some really nice pieces of a previous melt. Complete with a piece of the quartz crucible. Made from magic sand found only in North Carolina.
The critical parameter for your panel manufacturing is EREOI. My impression is that current panels are made using energy from coal and that EREOI is around 4.5 If that is the case, then you can multiply your stock of panels using only light from the sun. My previous link showed an enormous solar farm in Asia. There are some big ones in the US too.
The climate crisis should include the toxins that were spilled into the ground, put in the oceans, are floating around the atmosphere, in the financial system, and oh, by the way, in our brains as microplastics. Good luck, Godspeed, Github. It’s all smoke and mirrors all the time:
https://powering-the-planet.ghost.io/peak-us-oil-reveals-the-true-hoax-of-the-us-shale-revolution/
European reader @231 & JMG
I have often used the stair step analogy for decline; in fact I used it here a couple of weeks ago. The more I think about it though, the more that descending from a mountain peak through a range of foothills to a plain or valley seems a better comparison. There will be steep stretches, gradual stretches and valleys and climbs to some of the foothills, but the overall direction will be down. I think we are coming up on one of the steep bits pretty soon. Hope we all have a rope and hiking staff
Stephen
Siliconguy (#212),
“I slogged through a tedious report so you don’t have to.” Thanks for doing that, and sharing the results.
I live in the greater Boise area, and have family in the Seattle area. Specifically, Bellevue. The lights went out for three days earlier this year in the Puget Sound area, as you no doubt know, and it was a massive wakeup call for my sister. She now has a food and water stash, and even bought a generator, as she cares for our elderly mother. I just want to express my thanks for your reporting and insights, and let you know that others, like my sister, appreciate them, too.
OtterGirl
WatchFlinger, I thought I was GenX until you wrote that. Now I need a new generational identity. What if I don’t identify with any of their pop-culture moments? I didn’t care about the deaths of John Lennon, Elvis, or Tupac Shakur either, even though I noticed the buzz. (One of my classmates got all weepy over Lennon.) The only musician I can remember mourning for a little bit was Paul Pena, because of what I knew about him from the documentary “Genghis Blues.”
(Anyway, none of these categories work outside the US, where entirely different demographic considerations apply.)
What about the idea that it’s not just the Earth getting hotter but the other planets in the solar system too? This would mean that our use of fossil fuels is not the primary cause of climate change on Earth.
I’m convinced that JMG must have won the Nobel Prize for Astral Projection at some point, so I am asking him to use his psychic talent to check out all the nine (or ten) planets of our solar system to ascertain whether they are also warming.
Annette
Sounds good to me!!!
CM #224 and JMG
It isn’t just the production of electricity but delivering it to the end user. Years ago, when I read The Automatic Earth, Stoneleigh had a post on electricity evaporating or dissipating as it travels through the wires. I don’t know if that’s true or not (being somewhat of a skeptic) but it seems logical. I remember the 1998 ice storm that struck Eastern Ontario, Quebec, and parts of the Northeastern US. I had family in Kingston, On. that lived through it, which is why I remember it although it didn’t reach my area. The giant pylons that carried the electrical lines were crushed like matchsticks. Some areas didn’t have power for two weeks or so (iirc). This past winter, there was a smaller ice storm that struck Central Ontario resulting in power lose anywhere from a few days to over a week.
In a changing climate, with more extreme storms and with dwindling resources, repairing the damage done will become more and more difficult and that seems to be something a lot of people don’t seem to realize.
JMG,
Your response got me thinking, what exactly is it about a Quija board that makes it a tool for diabolization rather than divination? With the AI LLMs, I was thinking the same thing. Why? I use Magic 8 Ball online all the time for divination, and that seems to work just fine for me even though it’s also an electronic, internet-based tool.
Is it the intent, the design, the energy imbued by the original creators?
“It is the small amount of CO2 in the roughly 5,000 meters of air between top and bottom that provides sufficient blanketing effect to maintain the temperature difference. ”
I believe that the main reason for this difference is the lower density of air at 5,000 meters. A gas allowed to expand to a greater volume (=lower density) has a lower per-volume concentration of atoms and molecules bumping into each other, which is the definition of lower temperature.
This effect is the basis of refrigeration/freezing/air conditioning technology: Compress a gas. Its temperature rises. Allow it to cool to the ambient temperature. Allow it to decompress. This makes it much colder. Send the cold where you need it. For a heat pump, capture the heat and release the cold.
If the difference in temperature by altitude is primarily caused by CO2 blanketing, then that difference should be increasing as the CO2 concentration increases.
@Patricia Ormsby Thanks for the replies. Out of curiosity, why does sword smithing require dry climates?
Annette2 #252
Nice to thing I am a foundation member of EEEK, a follower well down the list in my natural place.
At the moment, I don’t have much to add to the discussion about climate change – but the one thing that comes to mind, when I read about the current state of AI, that this whole thing (artificial intelligence and large language models) shapes up top be a world-clas mess and at the same time an opportunity for Western civilization to make its ruin and downfall more grandiose than it ould otherwise be.
Re: Kurt Cobain
I recall there were two groups on the internet at the time, one that was absolutely distraught over his death and one that didn’t really care but quickly discovered that the first group had buttons that could be pushed over and over again. That was the start of what is now known as trolling. People would intentionally misspell his name, intentionally get the details of his suicide wrong, etc. Or deny that it had happened at all. All to get a reaction out of the people who really really cared about him. Ah, the memories.
I’d say the internet back then was a very different place than today. Much more STEM. Much less people. Much more pizzabox (those of you who know, will know). Much more commandline terminal window. And much more Boomer. GenX had yet to make its mark, most of the people on the internet back then were Boomers. I’d say GenX took over sometime during the .com bubble. But some things never change.
@ CM #255,
One of the problems with a low EROEI like the 4.5 you quote for the latest solar panels in China is that it does not include all the other energy necessary to actual use the panels and produce actual work. So first you have to package the panel so it can be shipped, then it. must be shipped, then some kind of structure must be built to hold it up. This structure most likely will be made from energy intensive steel or aluminum. Then there is the energy to deliver the panel to the site and hook it up. And then of course the wire and electronic components to get the power to the grid or to where it is being used. Add in the energy and labor needed to keep the panels clean and repaired. And then of course there is the elephant in the room, which is the energy cost of some kind of storage. Unless of course the new EV powered factory can be totally variable input running only if and when their is power and on variable amounts of power.
Once a power source begins to approach A total all encompassing EROEI of 1 it becomes useless if it is the only energy source available to replicate itself. That is because at 1 its entire energy output will be consumed building the next panel ( source) that will replace it. At that point it becomes a kind of useless self replicating novelty with no useful purpose.
About licensing for nuclear plants,
The Kewaunee Power Station in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, was retired due to poor economics. It was a one-off design and any repair parts would be custom fabricated at high cost. So when the license ran out they decommissioned it. Now;
“Utah-based EnergySolutions intends to apply for an early site permit from federal regulators to install new nuclear generation at the retired Kewaunee Power Station in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, the company said in a statement last week.
…
The early site review could take about two years, followed by a “rigorous permitting process by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” WEC spokesperson Brendan Conway said in an email. If the project moves forward, construction could begin in the early 2030s and the new plant could come online in 2038 or 2039, he said.”
The site in general is already approved for things nuclear. Even with that getting the permits is a seven year project. They are muttering about a cluster of small modular reactors, though no decisions have been made yet.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/wisconsin-retired-nuclear-plant-gets-a-second-look-Kewaunee/748706/
Generally speaking Wisconsin is in a bad spot for energy. Little wind, cloudy summers, dark winters, sort of flat so not much hydropower even though there is a lot of water, no fossil fuel deposits. Burning wood is about it. The forests grow slow due to the short growing season, and they are all second growth anyway as they were logged out in the late 1800’s.
@Annette2 (#252):
EEEK — I like it! Many thanks!
So we are the five (so far) EEEs? (And definitely not the Five Eyes!)
But who killed Kurt Cobain?
@Dennis Michael Sawyers (#262):
It’s not only Ouija Boards, experience shows, but any mechanical form of divination that freely produces open-ended strings of words. Old-fashioned automatic writing of any sort carries the same risks. In contrast, The Magic Eight Ball, like “Chinese” fortune cookies, doesn’t yield open-ended results, only one or another of a limited number of fixed formulas — a small number in the case of the Eight Ball, a much greater number in the case of fortune cookies, but still limited and fixed in advance.
I think that the great bulk of these disturbing (or even dangerous) messages come from the depths of the user, not from any outside diabolic or demonic source. Almost all human beings will have nurtured within themselves, as they grow up, a number of deeply buried seeds for their own self-destruction. (Yes, we are a complex sort of animal, with many counter-productive aspects to our inner and outer lives. See chapter 2 of my Microcosmographia Magica on the many selves within us.) Any human activity that randomly generates meaningful strings of words without limits can give voice to some of these buried seeds, including the dangerous ones.
The fact is, if we stopped obsessing over atmospheric CO2 levels and instead put our time and money into old-school environmentalism – habitats, pollution, extinction, thereby making our world more resilient, we’d do a lot better. The rich successfully replaced environmentalism with climate change, netting themselves some important benefits in the process, I’d say. And the planet goes to pot while we build more bike lanes and mine lithium and make solar panels in countries with no environmental protections.
I would also like to point out along this vein, DJT putting in head counsel at the EPA that is entirely unqualified, never handled a lawsuit, effectively neutering it.
Bookkeeping EROEI; what a quagmire. One example from my mining days, the silver which is used in small amounts in solar panels.
My mine was mostly a gold mine with silver as a byproduct. As such Accounting considered the cost of the silver production as zero. Everything we did to get the gold also brought along the silver. The gold and silver were cast into the dore bars that were shipped out to Metalor who did the final refining. A 1000 oz bar might be 85% gold and 10% silver and the rest was whatever.
A hundred miles away was a different mine that produced mostly silver. (It was just east of Oreana NV and is labeled as Rochester on a map). Their bars were over 90% silver. All their production costs were assigned to the silver. The gold was “free”.
A lead smelter that gave my class a tour concentrated gold and silver in the anode slimes from the last stage of the lead purification process. The only costs assigned to the precious metals were for the electrowinning steps that produced the gold and silver separately. Every other cost from mining, ore transport, crushing, grinding, flotation, smelting, and the final lead purification was assigned to the lead.
So, in energy terms, what does the silver in your PV panel really cost?
With that thought, here is today’s example of cognitive dissonance.
https://swentr.site/news/618165-german-military-arming-russia/
“The German military must significantly increase its weapons stockpile by 2029, the year the current government anticipates a potential threat from Russia, according to a directive issued by the country’s defense chief, obtained by Reuters.”
Translation, the EU will provoke a war in ’29 or ’30. But;
“The military initiatives come amid economic challenges, including de-industrialization and stagnation. On Sunday, the newspaper Bild said that ThyssenKrupp, a company with over two centuries of history, is undergoing a significant restructuring amounting to dissolution. According to the report, the company plans to reduce its headquarters staff from 500 to 100, transfer its steel mills to Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky, sell its naval shipyard Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) in the public market, and divest most other divisions.”
You don’t need a navy to fight the Russians but some steel might be a good idea. If the Germans are planning to storm the border with snowballs in a daring winter attack, (the last summer attack didn’t work, so think differently) they will need a lot more people. A paragraph above that mentions the draft is coming back so maybe there is a plan. 😵💫
Is Holland growing some really good weed nowadays? That would explain a lot.
Okay, I talked to a ranch hand. Apparently cows and deer will nibble on young tumbleweeds, but if a livestock animal gets a belly full of them, it could be fatal.
@Annette2. You are correct, electricity does dissipate as it goes through the grid. The actual thing that happens is that in anything but a perfect conductor ( copper wires are not perfect conductors) the resistance in the wires causes some of the electricity to be converted in to heat which is then lost from the system ( Entropy). There are also losses when the electricity is transformed up and down to different voltages through transformers. In Utility speak this is called Grid Loss and can be as high as 15% of the total electricity generated.
That is one of the things. the EV” will save the world crowd leaves out. As JMG has mentioned, sometimes burning fossil fuels at the source is more efficient than burning them to make electricity that send in to a leaky grid.
Annette 261: “It isn’t just the production of electricity but delivering it to the end user. Years ago, when I read The Automatic Earth, Stoneleigh had a post on electricity evaporating or dissipating as it travels through the wires. I don’t know if that’s true or not (being somewhat of a skeptic) but it seems logical.”
That’s the sound of lightbulbs going on! (It’s a good sound to hear.)
> Compress a gas. Its temperature rises. Allow it to cool to the ambient temperature. Allow it to decompress. This makes it much colder. — Jessica #263
This is true, but cannot be the explanation for the fact that air gets colder as altitude increases, up to a point. Consider: as a bubble of air rises and cools, an equal bubble of air must fall and warm, in order to maintain a stable air pressure at the various altitudes, and thus a stable temperature.
The standard air temperature at the height of Kilimajaro at 5890 meters above sea level is -23.3°C.
https://www.eoas.ubc.ca/courses/atsc113/flying/met_concepts/03-met_concepts/03a-std_atmos/index.html
Also consider: in the stratosphere the air temperature actually increases from 20-50 kilometers altitude, despite the drop in pressure.
So some mechanism other than pressure controls temperatures at altitude. I’m sticking with CO2 blanketing effects in the lower portion of the atmosphere. I have no idea why temperatures increase in the stratosphere.
>But who killed Kurt Cobain?
Don’t you mean Kurdt Cobane? And isn’t he still alive? 😉
>At that point it becomes a kind of useless self replicating novelty with no useful purpose.
I wonder what the EROEI of a tree is?
Michael, exactly. There’s something decidedly nasty about the inherent biases of many of our current crop of hypercomplex technologies, and it seems to me that the hypothesis that best explains that is interference by evil entities.
Clay, one of the early posts on the Archdruid Report talked about the idiotic way in which our society kicks out each rung of the ladder as it climbs to the next, leaving plenty of room to fall:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2006/07/climbing-down-ladder.html
Keep in mind, though, that air traffic control, banking, and a great deal more used to be done with no silicon chips at all!
Michael, oh my. What a fine example of progressivist cluelessness!
David, you’re missing the point. Of course CO2 didn’t cause climate change in those instances, and there was no reason to think it did, since — ahem — there wasn’t a huge industrial civilization burning millions of barrels of oil and more millions of tons of coal every single day. We now have one of those. Since many things can cause climate change, saying, “Well, CO2 didn’t cause those climate changes!” proves nothing about what’s causing the current round: you might as well claim that because the Jonestown flood wasn’t caused by somebody dynamiting the dam that broke, therefore dynamiting dams can’t cause floods. Now of course you’re quite right that the biosphere is quite robust enough to handle sharp temperature changes without massive dieoffs, but — ahem — that’s exactly what I said in my post. You might want to reread it…
Martin, but AIs will also be competing with humans for electricity. Thus I expect trouble in all directions.
Lathechuck, to my mind they’re wholly orthogonal to each other. If they’re getting their land for free, furthermore, the fairly steep prices they’re asking for their housing units suggests to me that somebody may have a hand in the till.
TylerA, that seems like a reasonable comparison.
BeardTree (if I may), ahem. They’re using human brains as a vehicle for their demonic manifestations? I’m sure I must have read a novel by somebody named Lewis about that…
Other Owen, exactly. Everything becomes more expensive, and some things will become so expensive that nobody will have them any more.
Annette2, exactly. A lot of people forget that Africa is the second largest continent on Earth — it’s huge, wildly diverse, and still very rich in resources. As for drying muskeg, good question — I know that once the permafrost melts along the shores of the Arctic Ocean and the rivers flowing into that ocean are no longer dammed up by ice in the winter, that region is going to have amazingly fertile and well-watered soils. The Mackenzie River will likely become another breadbasket region.
Stephen, that metaphor works as well!
Batstrel, unfortunately astral projection is becoming difficult because so many people are engaging in, shall we say, half-astral projection! If I ever get to Mars I’ll ask the native Barsoomians what the weather’s like.
Annette2, excellent! Yes, and we’ll be talking about that at great length later on.
Dennis, it seems to be dependent on very, very complex and subtle feedback loops. Ouija boards are controlled by complex, subtle feedback loops among the sitters using the board; LLMs are controlled by equally complex and subtle feedback loops in the programs. I get the impression that subnatural beings are very weak on our plane, and can’t control anything so dramatic as the tumbling of the icosahedron in your magic 8-ball.
Booklover, there’s that!
DT, no argument there at all. Old-fashioned conservation would also do a world of good just now.
Siliconguy, I missed that news story. All I can assume is that the German leadership knows perfectly well that they’re shoveling smoke, and plan on pocketing vast amounts of money from defense contracts and moving to Uruguay as the Russians march in.
Cliff, thanks for the data point.
Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas,
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/steamy-relationships-how-atmospheric-water-vapor-amplifies-earths-greenhouse-effect/
The drop in temperature with elevation is the lapse rate. Discussion below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapse_rate
@Michael & JMG “There’s something decidedly nasty about the inherent biases of many of our current crop of hypercomplex technologies, and it seems to me that the hypothesis that best explains that is interference by evil entities.”
There is something very odd with the latest round of hyper technologies in how they completely captivate and mentally entrap the users. This isnt just like social media or hyper addictive video games. It has a very diferent flavour now. That people want to hand over their entire thinking facuity and essentially their entire being over to these things.
That folks just let generative text tools do all their communication with friends and family is wild, it is a complete divorce from life itself. Im not one to usually fall into the line of “Evil entities at work” but seeing people almost totally switch themselves off when using these things is alarming. There is something much deeper going on than just addictive tendencies.
Chris at Fernglade #55: “Have a nice break too – and suck up some of that ancient energy – you’ll love it. 😊 Hope you get to explore some interesting places, and my mind wanders to a certain book by Nikolai Tolstoy who you recommended to read a long time ago in a month far away. A good antidote to MZB and the Mists of that which shall dare not be named here. It is rare for me to burn a book, but only a hot bonfire could purge the memories.”
I’m intrigued – what’s the title of the Tolstoy book? As for MZB and the Mists…I got about 20 pages into that doorstop before giving up on it. Her agenda was painfully obvious (and simplistic): “Pagans good, Christians bad!” I wanted to like it because other young women (I was in my 20s at the time) all seemed to love it, but I thought the author was imposing late 20th century feminism on an ancient legend, and it seemed clumsy and anachronistic. I wasn’t surprised to learn that both of MZB’s children have accused their parents of severe abuse: her feminism seemed contrived and superficial (which makes sense for a woman who would allow her husband to molest her children – a real feminist wouldn’t tolerate that).
JMG, Ha! Good point and duh for me. We may be entering very strange territory.
Michael, that’s one of the many things that concerns me. It really does look like demonic obsession.
Yavanna, the book in question is The Quest for Merlin by Nikolai Tolstoy, and it’s a fine read — far and away the best introduction to the real figure behind the watered-down fantasy image. As for Bradley, I see her as a tragic figur. She herself came from an abusive background and was abandoned by her first husband when she had two small children to take care of. That was what started her writing career — she began writing filler for bottom-feeder magazines of the true confessions type because she could pay her bills that way while still taking care of her kids, and worked her way up from there. I attended a writing workshop of hers many years ago where she discussed that, and also described the market research that led to her Arthurian novel. She literally went to every Pagan event in northern California for a year, asked people “So what do you think the Arthurian legends were really about?” and used that as the basis for her version. A strange, troubled, contradictory person.
BeardTree, I’m reminded of a meme:
@David Coulter, I had the same question as Walt: how did you come by that number of 3% human-related CO2? I have never heard that before.
@Michael Gray (#283) & JMG (#286) in reply:
One of the greatest weaknesses of complex modern civilization is that for it to work well, people have to do a lot of thinking, even hard thinking, on a regular basis. But people absolutely hate to think, and people will do almost anything to avoid hard thinking. Thomas Alva Edison is said to have posted on the wall of his workshops: “There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.”
So a new invention (that is, AI) that removes any need for people ever having to think is, perhaps, the ultimate seduction, the temptation that can destroy millenia of civilization and entire species. And any seductions that has such great a power feels demonic.
Re: Michael Gray’s “It has a very diferent flavour now. That people want to hand over their entire thinking facuity and essentially their entire being over to these things.” [Sic]
I’m afraid when I read this, what first comes to mind is how TV was talked about when I was younger – how it was rotting our minds and we were losing the ability to have our own thoughts separate from what we were fed by the networks. And then I think about the hysteria that arose with the publication of Goethe’s Leiden des jungen Werther and the copycat behaviour that arose. Perhaps this is just another of those cycles which afflicts a large part of Western society with each phase in the development of communications technology (I wonder how Mercury figures in all this?).
@Siliconguy #282
Within the lower atmosphere where convection takes place, a bubble of warm air rises and cools as it expands. There are only two places it can lose heat: either to the surrounding air, or radiating away into space. Transferring heat to the surrounding air would have no net effect, so only radiation into space needs be considered.
The higher the bubble rises the greater the radiative loss because there is less CO2 above to blanket it. When the bubble returns to the ground it gains temperature, but less than it started with because of the radiative loss. So again, the temperature gradient is maintained by CO2 blanketing differentials at different elevations governing the lapse rate.
The net effect of the convective mixing is to cool the ground layer and warm the upper layer. The presence of moisture in the air complicates matters, but we can’t affect moisture globally because the oceans dominate moisture content, so there’s no point in considering it.
@Northwind Grandma #65
Not sure if that TV program is related, but it may have been an adaptation of this book:
https://archive.org/details/worldwithoutus0000unse
It’s a light read, but enjoyable.
I appreciate you entertaining the techno-optimist viewpoint here. The whole political situation can kill us very quickly, but there may be some good news in renewable energy. Many a slip betwixt the cup and lip. This is not going to be an easy transition. Hubbert and Rickover taught us that fossil fuels could only be a stepping stone. Giacomo Ciamician was 44 years ahead of them with the realization that coal is a finite resource. There are hundreds of years of it left, but if it is burned, the climate will be drastically altered.
This (link below) is an interesting alternative. BTW, I tracked down ClimeWorks and they claim that the energy cost of capturing a pound of CO2 out of the air is 4 kW-hrs. MicroScamGPT claims that current PV panel pricing makes that about 10 to 15 cents. Electrolytic hydrogen should cost the equivalent of diesel fuel at 60 cents a gallon. I don’t want it anywhere near my car, my house, or my neighborhood, but I’d be OK with generating, storing, and using it at a combined-cycle powerplant in the desert.
To Conquer the Primary Energy Consumption Layer of Our Entire Civilization – Casey Handmer’s blog
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/04/08/to-conquer-the-primary-energy-consumption-layer-of-our-entire-civilization/
[Originally posted on the Terraform blog April 3, 2025.]
Walt and Aldarion
To answer your questions:
1) Human contribution of annual CO2 production: The 3% figure (actually 3.4%) is given at https://climateataglance.com/climate-at-a-glance-natural-vs-human-contributions-to-greenhouse-gases-and-global-average-temperatures/
The pie charts near the end of the article is particularly useful. I picked this figure up from somewhere else though but cannot remember when (it was a while ago). I assume it is correct but cannot confirm from primary sources. There are references at the end of the article but I have not checked these.
2) Natural sources of CO2: From the article are “Humans contribute approximately 3.4 percent of annual CO2. The remaining 96.6 percent are from natural sources, like volcanoes, decaying plants/biomass, and animal activity, seen in Figure 2, below.”
Hope this helps