If you have arrived here and get something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars): Book 1: $2.99 Book 2: $3.89 Book 3: $3.89 Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially William Catton’s Overshoot and Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies: see here.
“We have, as a rationalising but not rational story-telling ape, created myths about our place in the universe and how we have contributed to it. Over the past several centuries, and certainly during the most recent one, we story-tellers have weaved narratives that it is our human ingenuity — particularly around technology — that has led to our expansion and apparent ‘successes’ (not the leveraging of a one-time cache of easily-accessible, storable, and transportable dense energy).
Along the way, we have lost sight of our place and dependence upon Nature, and how fundamentally important its complexities are to our very survival. As a result, many continue to cheerlead that which is most dangerous to our and every species existence on this planet; ignoring or rationalising away the signals being sent.”
This story-telling aspect of our species appears to be applicable to every sociocultural institution or school of thought that humans use to help them interpret, understand, and explain the universe and its workings.
As this paper that reviews the evidence surrounding the “…mainstream narrative for achieving socially just ecological sustainability” reminds:
“…humans are storytellers by nature. We socially construct complex sets of facts, beliefs, and values that guide how we operate in the world. Indeed, humans act out of their socially constructed narratives as if they were real. All political ideologies, religious doctrines, economic paradigms, cultural narratives — even scientific theories — are socially constructed ‘stories’ that may or may not accurately reflect any aspect of reality they purport to represent. Once a particular construct has taken hold, its adherents are likely to treat it more seriously than opposing evidence from an alternate conceptual framework.”
Before unpacking the psychology behind this phenomenon, let’s consider the concept of ‘energy blind spots’.
Energy Blind Spots
The term ‘blind spot’ arises from the idea that there exists a “spot within one’s range of vision but where one cannot see”. It’s initial use was physiological in nature but just as the word ‘blind’ had become used to suggest confusion or not controlled by reason, ‘blind spot’ became a reference to other more figurative aspects of life (e.g., morals, intellectual pursuits, general understanding) that one could not see, was confused about, or just simply ignored — the ‘carbon tunnel vision’ I discuss in Part 1 is an example.
In the sense of ‘energy’, it’s the inability to connect the fact that energy is the fundamental underpinning of all life and life processes but also, as Nate Hagens argues (in this video), our tendency to misattribute or ignore the ‘power’ derived from the energy sources we depend upon: “To our ancestors, the benefits from carbon energy would’ve appeared indistinguishable from magic. And instead of appreciating this giant one-time windfall, we developed stories that our newfound wealth and progress had emerged purely from human ingenuity. We had become energy blind.”
Hagens goes on to point out that everything requires energy from animal physiological functioning to human economic systems and everything in between. The ‘benefits’ that energy — particularly the one-time cache of easily-accessible/recoverable, dense, storable, and transportable hydrocarbon fuels — provides to human complex systems is, in human time scales, virtually indistinguishable from magic (see this video).
One barrel of oil, for example, can provide the equivalent of 4–5 years of human labour, but since we have been growing the supply and creating enormous surplus energy we hardly — if at all — take note of the tremendous impact and benefits of this energy source. It has been taken for granted, particularly as it pertains to our expansion of complex socioeconomic systems and technology. And this extremely unique period of our human existence (where we are drawing down a finite resource to ‘power’ our expansion well beyond the natural environmental carrying capacity of our planet) has been normalised within our social zeitgeist. It is the way things have been and will continue to be…to infinity and beyond.
Much gets discounted/ignored/misattributed by most people in their thinking (or, rather, non-thinking) about the hydrocarbon energy that goes into our existence: the millions of years necessary to create it; the complexity of accessing, extracting, refining, and distributing it; the pollution streams that arise from our extraction and use; and, all the energy that is lost in these processes — let alone the significant complexities of the socio-economic and -political aspects (from financial/monetary manipulation to resource wars).
While we appear to have more of this resource each year, we are also growing in both our population and economies resulting in less actual energy available per capita (NB: this metric has plateaued since 2018 when oil production hit its peak) and the very important surplus energy it provides to ‘fuel’ our continuing pursuit of growth (see Dr. Tim Morgan’s website for great insight into this aspect). But rather than consider these aspects of our energy windfall, we instead tend to focus upon our technology and economies (especially in terms of money) believing our current living arrangements have no limit.
In doing so, we fail to consider the drawdown of this finite resource and also the diminishing returns we are encountering as the cheap and easy-to-access reserves have mostly been extracted. To counter this (and other stressors) we have greatly expanded debt and manipulated interest rates. These financial/monetary manipulations have aided our efforts to access perhaps the last of our reserves via tight/shale oil extraction[1].
This has also helped to make it appear that our reserves are boundless — it’s simply our technology and politics holding back endless extraction — ignoring, of course, the significant fall-off in extraction experienced with these shale wells and thus the necessity to increase exponentially the drilling to maintain rates[2]. As Hagens argues, we are simply widening the straw to drawdown more quickly a finite quantity of our most important energy resource.
In addition, these shale oil reserves are drawn from the source rock that feeds other deposits; and once these are used up there are no other places to extract from except perhaps bitumen deposits — an extremely ecologically-destructive and energy-intensive process[3].
Most people’s views of energy production — be it from hydrocarbons or non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technology — is rather simplistic; in fact, the vast majority probably don’t even think about it at all as with most complex processes in today’s world and thus the ‘magical’ nature that arises with our technologies.
Hydrocarbon refining is rather complex and energy intensive (with intensity and complexity depending upon the source material) with the various products the result of distillation, cracking, reforming, treating, and blending. Basically, crude oil is heated in a distilling column that vapourises the various chemicals with each condensing at different temperatures as it rises in the distiller. Collection trays then siphon off each product.
As some products are in greater demand than others, ‘cracking’ (so named as it breaks up longer hydrocarbon molecules) is used to convert certain liquids. ‘Reforming’ is the process used to increase product quality and volume for some of these liquids. Natural contaminants (e.g., sulphur, nitrogen, various heavy metals) are removed by binding them with hydrogen (produced by the reforming process) and then used in other industries. Finally, ‘blending’ of various refined liquids is carried out to create the different products that get used to power our vast array of technologies.
Another brick in this energy wall that gets lost for most people is the vast array of products that get produced from hydrocarbons[4]. It’s one thing to argue that non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies will replace our hydrocarbons, it’s quite another to then look at the products — some of them quite important to our modern complexities, others quite superfluous — and imagine how these will be produced without oil and gas.
There are compelling stories, especially from economic schools of thought, that virtually everything is ‘replaceable’ if there is the demand — ignoring/denying, of course, the biogeophysical limits that exist upon a finite planet (to say little of the Laws of Thermodynamics).
Perhaps among the most important hydrocarbon inputs (and ones that are most people are blind to) include those into our modern, industrial agricultural and transportation systems (especially those involved in our long-distance supply chains). While there exist competing narratives about whether these inputs can be replaced by non-hydrocarbon ones, the scale and economy of such a transition are often glossed over or completely ignored — I find this particularly true for those advocating for the immediate cessation of hydrocarbon energy extraction and use — and with no real plan in place for the consequences of this approach.
The ‘Green’ or ‘Third Agricultural Revolution’, for example, has been made almost entirely possible because of the Haber-Bosch Process. This industrial-scale process for the creation of agricultural fertilisers, herbicides, and pesticides (as well as other non-agricultural products) converts atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia by a reaction with hydrogen that is produced using natural gas as the feedstock but also requiring significant oil and coal inputs.
And while some have argued that the non-renewable hydrocarbon inputs for this undertaking can be replaced by ammonia production via concentrated solar energy (ignoring the same complexities and ecological destructiveness that accompanies the production, distribution, maintenance, and disposal/reclamation of these non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies), all such bargaining does is attempt to sustain a population well above the natural carrying capacity — a predicament created by our leveraging of hydrocarbons.
As Vaclav Smil highlights in this essay on our population explosion:
“What is the most important invention of the twentieth century? Aeroplanes, nuclear energy, space flight, television and computers will be the most common answers. Yet none of these can match the synthesis of ammonia from its elements…the world’s population could not have grown from 1.6 billion in 1900 to today’s six billion [over eight today] without the Haber–Bosch process.”
Removing the hydrocarbon inputs into our global food supplies would be catastrophic without a well-planned and in-place substitute readily available — and probably one that could not support current population levels, let alone be created in a short period of time. And, because of how the world works, such a withdrawal of these inputs would be felt most horrifically by the disadvantaged members of our species.
Blindness to the importance of hydrocarbon energy to almost all of our complex systems is leading us to offer narratives that most assuredly are making our predicament of ecological overshoot worse. They mostly depend upon tales that highlight human ingenuity, especially with respect to technology, and offer ‘solutions’ to maintain for the most part our status quo systems and complexities.
Perhaps the most mainstream stories are that that rally around alternative energy production and technologies but that continue to depend upon ecologically-destructive industrial processes.
Why do we do this? Why do we construct stories that, depending upon one’s perspective, could be considered suicidal in nature? This I will explore in Part 3.
NB: Note that I did not go into detail about our ‘resource- and ecological-blindness’ but remained focussed upon our energy blindness in this essay. My discussion was already getting longer than originally planned so I decided to leave those aspects since the principles are virtually identical.
In our attempts to simplify our perspective on complexities, we create stories to aid our understanding and then view the world through the lens of our socially-constructed narratives that tend to ignore/deny/rationalise away aspects that don’t fit into our preconceived paradigm/worldview/schema. This is as true for material resources and the ecological impacts of our extractive enterprises as it is for the energy aspect.
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars):
Book 1: $2.99
Book 2: $3.89
Book 3: $3.89
Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
If you do not hear from me within 48 hours or you are having trouble with the system, please email me: olduvaitrilogy@gmail.com.
You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially Catton’s Overshoot and Tainter’s Collapse: see here.
It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 1
A compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.
With a Foreword and Afterword by Michael Dowd, authors include: Max Wilbert; Tim Watkins; Mike Stasse; Dr. Bill Rees; Dr. Tim Morgan; Rob Mielcarski; Dr. Simon Michaux; Erik Michaels; Just Collapse’s Tristan Sykes & Dr. Kate Booth; Kevin Hester; Alice Friedemann; David Casey; and, Steve Bull.
The document is not a guided narrative towards a singular or overarching message; except, perhaps, that we are in a predicament of our own making with a far more chaotic future ahead of us than most imagine–and most certainly than what mainstream media/politics would have us believe.
Click here to access the document as a PDF file, free to download.
From Popular Mechanics comes this headline on 22 April 2024: Trillions of Tons of Carbon Are Missing from Climate Models. The story begins with three bullet points: (1) While the world’s soils are home to lots of organic carbon—such as leaf litter and animal waste—inorganic carbon, which is often in the form of solid carbonates, can also leak into the atmosphere. And it isn’t accounted for by current climate models; (2) A new study focuses on the role of soils as both a storage for and emitter of carbon, and found that 23 billion [metric] tonnes of inorganic carbon could escape soil over the next 30 years; and (3) Good land management—as well as other practices, such as afforestation and improved rock weathering—can help slow down this significant source of CO2.
Here’s the lede: “The sole purpose of people and programs combating climate change is finding ways to keep carbon out of the atmosphere.” The first paragraph continues: “Planting trees is a big help, as their woody roots lock away carbon for decades, and companies are hard at work trying to find artificial means of sucking greenhouse gasses from the air and sequestering it underground. But in this obsession with tracking CO2 levels, one significant source of both emission and storage has been overlooked—the soil.” A minor detail is worthy of mention: Planting trees is not necessarily a big help, as I pointed out previously in this space.
The article goes on: “the top two meters of soil beneath our feet currently hold roughly 2.3 trillion [metric] tonnes of inorganic carbon—five times more than all of the terrestrial plants on Earthcombined.”…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Think CO2 Concentration at 0.04% is Low? These 10 Toxins are Deadly at Far Lower Concentrations.
Photo by Markus Spiske / UnsplashIf you follow me on Twitter , you’re probably familiar with the onslaught of nonsense from the anti-science crowd.
I’m fine with respectful, reasoned responses, but many of the arguments are insulting, childish or conspiratorial.
I know, if I were trying to win these people over I shouldn’t belittle them. But I’m not trying to win them over. There’s plenty of objective data showing why they’re wrong, but they choose to believe their feelings and political loudmouths instead of science. Nothing I do will change their minds. So I continue to make my observations about the world – take it or leave it.
Frankly, I don’t understand how these people have the time to scour Twitter for posts outside their world view. This brigade of deniers with nothing better to do has clearly gone through the same training program. They make the same points and share the same charts. Often, their ‘rebuttal’ has nothing to do with the original tweet. It’s like they’re blindly copy-pasting from their “how to be a science-denier” guidebook.
I usually ignore (or block) these comments, but once in a while something drives me nuts.
One argument I’ve heard on repeat recently is that CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere, therefore it cannot affect the climate.
I’m being kind when I say this is a simplistic argument.
Small does not = immaterial.
To prove my point, here are 10 things that are deadly at levels far below 0.04% concentration:
Botulinum toxin: It can be lethal at about 1 nanogram per kilogram of body weight. This equates to incredibly minute concentrations, roughly 0.0000000001% in the body.
Ricin: A dose of about 22 micrograms per kilogram of body weight can be lethal. This is also a very low concentration, about 0.0000022%.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Open-top chambers (OTCs) in Latnjajaure, Sweden, provide a controlled environment to study simulated warming of the tundra ecosystem. Credit: Sybryn Maes
The warming climate shifts the dynamics of tundra environments and makes them release trapped carbon, according to a new study published in Nature. These changes could transform tundras from carbon sinks into carbon sources, exacerbating the effects of climate change.
A team of more than 70 scientists from different countries used so-called open-top chambers (OTCs) to experimentally simulate the effects of warming on 28 tundra sites around the world. OTCs basically serve as mini-greenhouses, blocking wind and trapping heat to create local warming.
The warming experiments led to a 1.4 degrees Celsius increase in air temperature and a 0.4 degrees increase in soil temperature, along with a 1.6 percent drop in soil moisture. These changes boosted ecosystem respiration by 30 percent during the growing season, causing more carbon to be released because of increased metabolic activity in soil and plants. The changes persisted for at least 25 years after the start of the experimental warming—which earlier studies hadn’t revealed.
“We knew from earlier studies that we were likely to find an increase in respiration with warming, but we found a remarkable increase—nearly four times greater than previously estimated, though it varied with time and location,” says Sybryn Maes of Umeå University, the study’s lead author.
The increase in ecosystem respiration also varied with local soil conditions, such as nitrogen and pH levels. This means that differences in soil conditions and other factors lead to geographic differences in the response—some regions will see more carbon release than others. Understanding the links between soil conditions and respiration in response to warming is important for creating better climate models.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ours is a carbon based economy. On the other hand, carbon emissions are wrecking the climate; for proof just take a look at this short tour de force from Paul Beckwith. In related news UK emissions in 2023 fell to lowest level since 1879. But why is that so? Are we on a path to a green Nirvana, or something entirely different is going on? If you suspect that it is the latter, then this one is for you.
For starters, take a look at this chart, from the Carbon Brief article linked above. Wow, the UK is back to 1879 levels of emissions, when steam locomotives were all the hype, and we didn’t have neither airplanes nor cars! I mean, isn’t that shocking?! This is a precipitous, relentless fall, clearly signalling an end to an era.
There is one minor snag though: this has little to nothing to do with climate policies. And while the well researched and fairly objective Carbon Brief article admits so, it fails to name the elephant in the room. Beyond the many blips and dents what you can see on this chart, dear reader, is a textbook example on how peak carbon looks like. The UK has unwillingly provided us with a Petri-dish experiment on how the depletion of a finite energy resource puts an end to an era of economic, military and geo-strategic dominance together with rising living standards.
Missing entirely from the conversation around both emissions and economic growth is the fact that this is what happens when a country is running out of cheap and easy to access carbon, like easy to mine coal, or oil and gas gushing out from a well. Take a glance at the chart above once again…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Experts suggest” your standard of living be reduced by over 85%
A report on the future of travel and tourism, co-authored by a travel agency called Intrepid Travel and The Future Labs Institute, posits a future deeply impacted by climate change and restrictions on tourist travel to combat it.
From the report (pardon the length, emphasis added):
“Carbon Passports
A personal carbon emissions limit will become the new normal as policy and people’s values drive an era of great change.
As demonstrated by a worldwide tourism boom, the frequency at which we can fly is once again seemingly unlimited.
Conscience and budgets permitting, we feel free to hop on planes from one place to the next. But this will change. ‘On our current trajectory, we can expect a pushback against the frequency with which individuals can travel, with carbon passports set to change the tourism landscape,’ says Raymond [Martin Raymond, Future Laboratories co-founder]
Personal carbon allowances could help curb carbon emissions and lower travel’s overall footprint.
These allowances will manifest as passports that force people to ration their carbon in line with the global carbon budget, which is 750bn tonnes until 2050.
By 2040, we can expect to see limitations imposed on the amount of travel that is permitted each year.
Experts suggest that individuals should currently limit their carbon emissions to 2.3 tonnes each year – the equivalent of taking a round-trip from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia..
Analysis found that 39, or 78%, of the 50 environmental projects were categorised as “likely junk or worthless” due to one or more “fundamental failing”.
Reforestation is one of the most common projects traded within the VCM. Credit: Richard Whitcombe via Shutterstock.
The “vast majority” of environmental projects most commonly used within the voluntary carbon market (VCM) to offset greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions seem to have “fundamental failings” and cannot be relied upon to tackle global warming, according to a joint investigation from the Guardian and non-profit climate watchdog Corporate Accountability.
The investigation analysed the top 50 emission offset projects, selected because they have sold the most carbon credits within the global VCM, and found that most of them exaggerate climate benefits and underestimate the potential harm caused by the project’s activity.
The most popular projects traded globally include forestry schemes, hydroelectric dams, solar and wind farms, waste disposal and greener household appliance schemes across 20 countries, most of which have developing economies. The data comes from Allied Offsets, the world’s biggest and most comprehensive emissions trading database, which aggregates information about projects traded within the VCM from their inception.
The analysis found that 39, or 78%, of the 50 projects were categorised as “likely junk or worthless” due to one or more “fundamental failing” that undermines its alleged emissions offsetting power.
Eight others, or 16%, look “problematic”. There is evidence to suggest that they may have at least one fundamental failing and could therefore be “junk”.
The effectiveness of the remaining three projects could not be assessed properly or classified definitively, largely due to a lack of available public, independent information. The analysis also found that $1.16bn worth of carbon credits have been traded so far from those projects classified as “likely junk or worthless”.
To the shock of everyone with any semblance of common sense, we are clearcutting forests and burning the trees based on the idea the process is carbon neutral.
Yesterday [April 23, 2018], the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would begin to count the burning of “forest biomass”—a.k.a. wood—as carbon neutral. The change will classify burning of wood pellets a renewable energy similar to solar or wind power.
[But] Even if a tree is planted for every tree converted to fuel pellets, trees regrown on plantations don’t store the same carbon as natural forests. One recent study suggests it would take 40 to 100 years for a managed forest to capture the same amount of carbon as a natural forest. And since most plantation forests are harvested at 20 year intervals, they will never make it to the carbon-neutral point.
“Unless forests are guaranteed to regrow to carbon parity, production of wood pellets for fuel is likely to result in more CO2 in the atmosphere and fewer species than there are today,” William Schlesinger, President Emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies writes for Science.
Doomberg picked up on this idea in an extensive set of Tweets.
Doomberg Tweet Thread
In the second half of the 16th century, Britain plunged into an energy crisis. At the time, the primary source of energy driving the British economy was heat derived from the burning of wood, and Britain was literally running out of trees.
Soil degradation is a global problem. A third of the planet’s land is already severely degraded, and soil is being degraded at a speed that threatens the health of the planet and the civilizations that depend on it (Whitmee et al. 2015). Depletion of soil organic carbon (SOC) resulting from extractive agriculture is a key driver of soil degradation (Lal et al. 2015). Much of this SOC has been released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2), a potent greenhouse gas contributing to ongoing climate change, including extreme weather events. Soil degradation also diminishes water infiltration and retention, biodiversity, watershed functions, and the nutritional value of food. Reversing soil degradation is a top global priority (UNCCD 2017).
Yields of major crops have increased substantially in the last century, primarily through intensive chemical fertilization. However, the greater aboveground plant biomass production resulting from chemical fertilization has usually not led to proportional gains in plant inputs to soil and soil organic matter (SOM) accrual (Khan et al. 2007; Man et al. 2021). Instead, these practices, in concert with other intensive agricultural practices such as intensive tillage, monoculture, application of pesticides, and bare fallows, have caused declines in SOM, increases in greenhouse gas emissions, and pollution of waterways (Loisel et al. 2019). However, adopting regenerative agricultural practices, such as substituting chemical with organic fertilizers like compost or manure, reducing tillage, intensifying and diversifying crop rotations, and cover cropping, often increase SOM (McClelland et al. 2021). The mechanisms underlying the positive effects of regenerative agricultural practices on SOM, however, are not well understood. Elucidating these mechanisms would advance our capacity to design agricultural strategies to reliably enhance agroecosystem SOM content, which would assist in reversing soil degradation and enhancing soil quality, food security, and climate change mitigation globally (Amelung et al. 2020).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Most of us have heard the phrase rose-tinted glasses, meaning a tendency to view the world from an optimistic, rosy, point of view. As we also know, when we look at things through only one perspective, we can gain an unrealistic view of reality. There is nothing wrong with being optimistic, but if that blinkers us to other aspects of life and the world, then there is no need to work for social change or environmental justice.
Rose-tinted however, are not the only style of glasses we can wear. Over the past decade or two we have become accustomed to wearing carbon-tinted glasses. There are many within the climate change movement wearing these glasses, and many too (sadly) within the environmental movement.
What do I mean? First, I’ll briefly outline how we have come to be wearing carbon-tinted glasses, and then secondly, point out how those glasses blinker us.
What are carbon-tinted glasses?
Since we began to learn about climate change (from the time that it was known as the “greenhouse effect” and on) we have slipped into our western pattern of attributing linear thinking and a simplistic cause and effect mentality. It goes like this: 1. The atmosphere is warming up, 2. It is warming up because of the build-up of carbon, 3. Carbon is being added to the atmosphere because of human causes, 4. Primarily, the burning of fossil fuels, 5. What is the solution? 6. Replace fossil fuels as the source of energy with “renewable” energy sources (particularly solar and wind.)
Central to this linear thinking is the role of carbon. Within this tightly framed mindset the issue becomes simply one of reducing carbon.
Thus, we get blinkered by our seeing the world through carbon-tinted glasses.
What are we blinkered to?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Instead of scaling up renewable energy, researchers promote unproved ideas
Credit: Katie Louise Thomas
At last year’s Glasgow COP26 meetings on the climate crisis, U.S. envoy and former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry stated that solutions to the climate crisis will involve “technologies that we don’t yet have” but are supposedly on the way. Kerry’s optimism comes directly from scientists. You can read about these beliefs in the influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Integrated Assessment Models, created by researchers. These models present pathways to carbon reductions that may permit us to keep climate change below two degrees Celsius. They rely heavily on technologies that don’t yet exist, such as ways to store carbon in the ground safely, permanently and affordably.
Stop and think about this for a moment. Science—that is to say, Euro-American science—has long been held as our model for rationality. Scientists frequently accuse those who reject their findings of being irrational. Yet depending on technologies that do not yet exist is irrational, a kind of magical thinking. That is a developmental stage kids are expected to outgrow. Imagine if I said I planned to build a home with materials that had not yet been invented or build a civilization on Mars without first figuring out how to get even one human being there. You’d likely consider me irrational, perhaps delusional. Yet this kind of thinking pervades plans for future decarbonization.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
In Sweden’s far north, permafrost beneath the Stordalen mire is up to thousands of years old.
Sheltered by snow-spattered mountains, the Stordalen mire is a flat, marshy plateau, pockmarked with muddy puddles. A whiff of rotten eggs wafts through the fresh air.
Here in the Arctic in Sweden’s far north, about 10 kilometres (six miles) east of the tiny town of Abisko, global warming is happening three times faster than in the rest of the world.
On the peatland, covered in tufts of grass and shrubs dotted with blue and orange berries and little white flowers, looms a moonlander-like pod hinting at this far-flung site’s scientific significance.
Researchers are studying the frozen—now shapeshifting—earth below known as permafrost.
As Keith Larson walks between the experiments, the boardwalks purposefully set out in a grid across the peat sink into the puddles and ponds underneath and tiny bubbles appear.
The distinct odour it emits is from hydrogen sulfide, sometimes known as swamp gas. But what has scientists worried is another gas rising up with it: methane.
Carbon stores, long locked in the permafrost, are now seeping out.
Between carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, permafrost contains some 1,700 billion tonnes of organic carbon, almost twice the amount of carbon already present in the atmosphere.
With average temperatures rising around the Arctic, the permafrost has started to thaw.
Methane lingers in the atmosphere for only 12 years compared to centuries for CO2 but is about 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas over a 100-year period.
Thawing permafrost is a carbon “time bomb”, scientists have warned.
Vicious circle
In the 1970s, “when researchers first started showing up and investigating these habitats, these ponds didn’t exist”, says Larson, project coordinator for the Climate Impacts Research Centre at Umea University, based at the Abisko Scientific Research Station.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
