Before I begin, let me apologize. This article is morbid. But it covers something that will probably happen in the future. It’s best to consider the subject now while still of sound mind.
The climate crisis is ultimately a food crisis. Unpredictable and changing weather patterns – compounded by resource shortages – threaten our ability to grow enough food to feed 8+ billion people.
The food crisis has already started. A visit to the grocery store reveals the increasing threat to food security. On a hotter planet, droughts worsen and floods persist increasing the probability of a breadbasket failure.
What happens to humans when food availability declines by 20, 50, 80%? The answer varies, but inevitably it all comes down to desperation, cognitive breakdown and violence.
Today these are words on your computer – ambiguous, nebulous. But what they really mean is unimaginable.
Side Rant: No, we can’t simply move farms to more ‘favorable’ locations. The food system depends on complex infrastructure that converts fossil fuels into the calories on your plate. This system evolved over generations, and would require a similar amount of time to fundamentally shift. Moreover, farming today already exists on the most arable land. What’s left is sub-par. Feeding today’s population depends on the unlikely combination of predictable weather, prime land and petrochemicals. Our population would have never reached today’s level without this lucky combination.
Some also argue that food supply isn’t at risk because food production has grown remarkably over the past century, primarily because we’ve become better at converting fossil fuels into calories. This argument suffers from normalcy bias. In reality, the world only surpassed 1.5 degrees above benchmark in 2023. We are just beginning to see the effects of our changing climate. Disasters are anticipated in the future, not the past.
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Third of world’s ocean surface particularly vulnerable to threats driven by burning fossil fuel and deforestation, new research finds
The world’s oceans are facing a “triple threat” of extreme heating, a loss of oxygen and acidification, with extreme conditions becoming far more intense in recent decades and placing enormous stress upon the planet’s panoply of marine life, new research has found.
About a fifth of the world’s ocean surface is particularly vulnerable to the three threats hitting at once, spurred by human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, the study found. In the top 300 meters of affected ocean, these compound events now last three times longer and are six times more intense than they were in the early 1960s, the research states.
‘Where do sharks hang out?’: the race to find safe spaces for the Galápagos’ ocean-going predators
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The study’s lead author warned that the world’s oceans were already being pushed into an extreme new state because of the climate crisis. “The impacts of this have already been seen and felt,” said Joel Wong, a researcher at ETH Zurich, who cited the well-known example of the heat “blob” that has caused the die-off of marine life in the Pacific Ocean. “Intense extreme events like these are likely to happen again in the future and will disrupt marine ecosystems and fisheries around the world,” he added.
The research, published in AGU Advances, analyzed occurrences of extreme heat, deoxygenation and acidification and found that such extreme events can last for as long as 30 days, with the tropics and the north Pacific particularly affected by the compounding threats.
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Cost of environmental damage will be six times higher than price of limiting global heating to 2C, study finds
The climate crisis will mean that average incomes will fall by almost a fifth within the next 26 years compared with what they would have been if there was no such crisis, according to a study that predicts the costs of damage will be six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2C.
Rising temperatures, heavier rainfall and more frequent and intense extreme weather are projected to cause $38tn (£30tn) of destruction each year by mid-century, according to the research, which is the most comprehensive analysis of its type ever undertaken, and whose findings are published in the journal Nature.
The hefty toll – which is far higher than previous estimates – is already locked into the world economy over the coming decades as a result of the enormous emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere through the burning of gas, oil, coal and trees.
Climate change and the cost of living: everything is going up
This will inflict crippling losses on almost every country, with a disproportionately severe impact on those least responsible for climate disruption, further worsening inequality.
The paper says the permanent average loss of income worldwide will be 19% by 2049, in comparison to a baseline without the impacts of climate breakdown. In the United States and Europe the reduction will be about 11%, while in Africa and south Asia it will be 22%, with some individual countries much higher than this.
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Experts say the floods, which have caught the authorities off-guard and left many people to fend for themselves, are just a preview of what is yet to come in the climate crisis.A view of a flood-hit area in the town of Orsk.Yegor Aleyev / TASS
ORENBURG REGION, Russia – Russia’s southern Orenburg region has been grappling with its worst flooding in decades, with 55 cities and towns fully or partially flooded and thousands evacuated in an unprecedented emergency.
Footage from the cities of Orsk and Orenburg showed entire neighborhoods submerged underwater, with volunteers and emergency workers on inflatable dinghies rescuing people and animals trapped in their homes.
Experts say the floods, which have caught the authorities off-guard and left many people to fend for themselves, are just the beginning of what is yet to come in the climate crisis.
“The scale of the flood is colossal. Many areas, many houses are underwater,” said Oleg, a resident of Orsk, the Ural Mountains city hardest hit by the disaster.
“We need to rebuild and keep rebuilding. I think it will take a lot of time, but [it will be possible] if the authorities help people,” he told The Moscow Times.
In Orenburg, the regional capital, the river embankment, several neighborhoods and a few settlements outside the city have been submerged since the end of last week.
Despite days of round-the-clock rescue efforts, there is still no end in sight to the crisis. Hydrologists expect the Ural River to rise even higher in Orenburg on Wednesday, and the Kremlin said that the neighboring Kurgan and Tyumen regions face “difficult days ahead.”
Russia on Sunday declared a federal state of emergency in the Orenburg region, a move that allows federal forces to get involved in efforts to combat the flooding.
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Climate Crisis-“It turns out the climate is changing for the worse far quicker than predicted by early climate models.“
Climate change is taking affect in an era defined by soaring temperatures and escalating environmental perils, the release of Bill McGuire’s latest work, “Hothouse Earth,” resonates with striking urgency.
As humanity grapples with the profound consequences of climate change, McGuire, an esteemed emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, delivers a sobering narrative that lays bare the stark realities of our planet’s impending climatic catastrophe. In this comprehensive exploration, we delve into McGuire’s compelling analysis, examining the profound implications of his insights and the imperative for decisive action in the face of escalating environmental threats.
Against the backdrop of record-high temperatures and intensifying climate extremes, McGuire’s points out our planet’s perilous trajectory. With a career spanning decades in the field of geophysical and climate hazards, McGuire brings a wealth of expertise to bear on the urgent question of climate change.
Beyond the Tipping Point: Understanding Climate Breakdown
At the heart of McGuire’s analysis lies a sobering recognition: we have crossed the threshold into an era of irreversible climate breakdown. Despite decades of warnings and mounting scientific evidence, humanity has failed to heed the call for urgent action on climate change. Now, as McGuire warns, we are witnessing the consequences of our inaction unfold in real-time.
Can humanity eventually overcome its reliance on fossil fuel? The answer to that is certainly yes in the very long run, but an emphatic no in the next 25 years.
If the delusional but dead serious demands coming out of the international climate crisis community are to be believed, and as documented in the earlier two segments of this report, achieving universal energy security in the world will require wind energy capacity to increase by a factor of 60, while solar capacity increases by a factor of 100. The mix between wind and solar can vary, of course, but the required overall increase is indisputable. As noted in Part One of this report, that would be a very best-case scenario, where extraordinary improvements in energy efficiency meant that total energy production worldwide would only have to increase to 1,000 exajoules per year, from an estimated 600 exajoules in 2022.
Finally, and as explained in Part Two, this is preposterous. Wind and solar energy cannot possibly increase in global capacity by a multiple of 50-100 times. It is utterly infeasible. As noted, “The uptick in mining, the land consumed, the expansion of transmission lines, the necessity for a staggering quantity of electricity storage assets to balance these intermittent sources, the vulnerability of wind and solar farms to weather events including deep freezes, tornadoes, and hail, and the stupefying task of doing it all over again every 20-30 years as the wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and storage batteries reach the end of their useful lives—all of this suggests procuring 90+ percent of global energy from wind and solar energy is a fool’s errand.”
One may nonetheless argue that other forms of energy can supplement wind and solar in order to still fulfill the climate community’s goal to completely displace oil, natural gas, and coal. But what then, and in what proportions? Here are the alternatives:
Beware the Snake Oil Salesmen: Climate Change and Elite Confabs
So, dozens of political leaders, their hundreds of staff, multitudes of corporate leaders, and who knows how many ‘celebrities’ have all gathered in Glasgow, Scotland for an elite confab (#26) to discuss the ‘Climate Crisis’. Heaven knows how many resources have been extracted and pollutants dispersed in this latest political theatre (mostly? all? at taxpayer expense). The irony is not lost on many, except perhaps much of the mainstream media that tends to simply regurgitate political media releases and share simplistic narratives for exceedingly complex issues — it is indeed difficult to get someone to understand something if their income depends on them not understanding it.
So, dozens of political leaders, their hundreds of staff, multitudes of corporate leaders, and who knows how many ‘celebrities’ have all gathered in Glasgow, Scotland for an elite confab (#26) to discuss the ‘Climate Crisis’. Heaven knows how many resources have been extracted and pollutants dispersed in this latest political theatre (mostly? all? at taxpayer expense). The irony is not lost on many, except perhaps much of the mainstream media that tends to simply regurgitate political media releases and share simplistic narratives for exceedingly complex issues — it is indeed difficult to get someone to understand something if their income depends on them not understanding it.
Needless to say I expect little of substance to result from this event. In fact, I am increasingly seeing this event as an expo for marketing of ‘green/clean’ energy products (and making sure most? all? countries pursue purchasing them) that do not address our fundamental predicament — ecological overshoot — of which greenhouse gases is but one negative consequence (and not even the worst). And, of course, all of this provides the justification to create trillions of more dollars out of thin air (the debt held by a variety of the ruling class) that will be funnelled towards specific industries (owned by others of the ruling class) while doing little to reduce actual consumption or ecologically-destructive extraction industries.
This is increasingly looking not like a problem that can be solved but a predicament that may at best be mitigated on the margins. One of the most significant dilemmas, however, appears to be the ‘solutions’ that are being bandied about also appear to be the ones that will simply make the situation worse: increasing technology and complexities in the form of ‘renewables’.
The evidence is accumulating quickly that ‘renewables’ (which aren’t really because they require lots of non-renewable, finite resources in perpetuity) are neither ‘green’, nor ‘clean’, nor ‘sustainable’. They require the fossil fuel platform at every level of their production, maintenance, and after-life disposal, and depend upon a variety of rare-earth minerals whose procurement wreak havoc on the environment. The entire ‘renewable’ narrative is appearing more and more like a sham meant primarily to market products and support business as usual than do anything about reducing our ecological destruction and carbon footprint (and keep in mind that our current debt/credit-based monetary/economic/financial systems are all predicated on growth in perpetuity — they will most certainly collapse without it).
If we are not discussing significant degrowth, however (and we’re not because there’s no money to be made from it and the primary motivation of the ruling class, who control the mainstream narratives, is the control/expansion of the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue streams), then it would seem we are just creating stories to sell more stuff and people tend to accept them readily because they reduce cognitive dissonance — we recognise we live on a finite planet and infinite growth is not possible (except through extreme magical, Cargo Cult-like thinking) but want to also believe that we can continue to live in our energy- and resource-intensive lifestyles uninterrupted and without significant sacrifice.
Basically, the snake oil salesmen of the world are, as they often (always?) do, leveraging our fear over a crisis (or crises) to enrich themselves mightily. We are being led to follow a path that actually exacerbates the predicament of overshoot rather than reduces the harm caused by us blowing past the biophysical limits imposed by a finite planet.
In this age of climate crisis, the world is consuming more crude than ever. Peak oil demand? Not yet. Maybe one day, perhaps even soon, around 2030. For now, however, the global economy still runs on oil.
It will take a while before governments certify it, but every piece of data points in the very same direction: In the past few weeks, global oil demand has surpassed the monthly peak set in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic.Expressed in barrels a day, the fresh record high in global oil consumption totals about 102.5 million, likely hit in the last few weeks in July and above the 102.3 million of August 2019. Picture this: We use enough crude to fill about 6,500 Olympic-size swimming pools every day. More than a third of those swimming pools would be needed to quench the thirst of two countries: the US and China.
It’s not unexpected. The International Energy Agency, which compiles benchmark supply and demand statistics, has anticipated it for months. It was just a question of timing, since oil demand surges during the northern hemisphere summer, when millions of European and American families guzzle gasoline and jet fuel during their holidays. The wholesale cost of refined products, such as gasoline, is surging too.
Granted, the new demand milestone is just one flimsy data point. Global oil consumption statistics are routinely revised, and a final figure probably won’t be set in stone until next year, or even 2025. The margin of error is relatively wide, too, probably at least 1 million barrels a day. But experience indicates that demand is typically revised higher, rather than lower.
Key UN reports published in last two days warn urgent and collective action needed – as oil firms report astronomical profits
The climate crisis has reached a “really bleak moment”, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has said, after a slew of major reports laid bare how close the planet is to catastrophe.
Collective action is needed by the world’s nations more now than at any point since the second world war to avoid climate tipping points, Prof Johan Rockström said, but geopolitical tensions are at a high.
He said the world was coming “very, very close to irreversible changes … time is really running out very, very fast”.
Emissions must fall by about half by 2030 to meet the internationally agreed target of 1.5C of heating but are still rising, the reports showed – at a time when oil giants are making astronomical amounts of money.
On Thursday, Shell and TotalEnergies both doubled their quarterly profits to about $10bn. Oil and gas giants have enjoyed soaring profits as post-Covid demand jumps and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The sector is expected to amass $4tn in 2022, strengthening calls for heavy windfall taxes to address the cost of living crisis and fund the clean energy transition.
All three of the key UN agencies have produced damning reports in the last two days. The UN environment agency’s report found there was “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” and that “woefully inadequate” progress on cutting carbon emissions means the only way to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a “rapid transformation of societies”.
With no mention of military emissions at COP26, a coalition is mobilizing to force the Pentagon to disclose and reduce its enormous carbon footprint.
More than 100,000 people protested the United Nations Climate Change Convention, or COP26, in Glasgow last month, where they networked, forged alliances and made clear their opposition to the status quo.
“There have been 25 COPs before this one, and every year leaders come to these climate negotiations with an array of new pledges, commitments and promises and as each COP comes and goes, emissions continue to rise,” Ugandan delegate Vanessa Nakate said. “I hope you can appreciate that we may be skeptical when the largest delegation here … does not belong to a country but instead belongs to the fossil fuel industry.”
There were in fact more than 500 delegates in attendance at the conference with ties to the fossil fuel industry, or twice the number of indigenous delegates.
Scientists from within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, acting out of fear that their reports would be watered down, leaked part of the IPCC report months ahead of schedule. The report provided critical information about the huge energy consumption of wealthy populations and the need for them to adopt lifestyle changes in order to avoid civilizational collapse.
Additionally, Greenpeace UK reported that more than 30,000 leaked files show corporations and nations, including petrostate Saudi Arabia and OPEC, pressured the IPCC to focus on potential technological solutions and exclude language calling for phasing out fossil fuels. In the end, COP26’s weakened language called for a “phase-down of unabated coal power and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies” rather than the “phase-out of fossil fuels.”
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There are, in fact, no human comparisons for the effort required to reverse the global-scale damage wrought by 300 years of industrial growth. Nevertheless, people still reach for past human endeavours to try to spur our political leaders to an action which, in truth, is far beyond them. How many times have we heard that tackling climate change requires an effort similar in scale to the Apollo moon landings or the Manhattan Project? And then there is the stubbornly undead comparison to the Second World War. Every time we think we have successfully driven a stake through the heart of this insane proposition, someone who has failed to understand what the war was really about, resurrects it and drafts it into service in the fight against climate change.
Today it is everyone’s favourite media environmentalist George Monbiot’s turn to suggest that:
“The astonishing story of how the US entered the second world war should be on everyone’s minds as Cop26 approaches.”
Monbiot gives a reasonable summary of the various measures taken by the Roosevelt Administration to mobilise the US economy for war in the wake of Pearl Harbour. Then he asks:
“So what stops the world from responding with the same decisive force to the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced? It’s not a lack of money or capacity or technology. If anything, digitisation would make such a transformation quicker and easier. It’s a problem that Roosevelt faced until Pearl Harbor: a lack of political will. Now, just as then, public hostility and indifference, encouraged by legacy industries (today, above all, fossil fuel, transport, infrastructure, meat and media), outweighs the demand for intervention…
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Two rounds of negotiation take centre stage, about halfway through Amitav Ghosh’s new masterwork The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.
In one, US State Department and Pentagon officials win agreement that carbon emissions connected with the military are to be kept out of the Kyoto Protocol – an omission that has been preserved in international climate agreements to this day.
At the opposite end of the global power hierarchy, Khokon, a refugee from the Kishoreganj district of Bangladesh, has engaged in desperate negotiations simply to stay alive. His family’s low-lying land had been flooded for six months, followed by long droughts, hailstorms, and unseasonal downpours. The environmental degradation was followed by political depredations, as well-connected people seized increasingly scarce arable land including part of Khokon’s family’s farm. Eventually there was no better option than to sell some land and send Khokon to France – but he was quickly deported back to Bangladesh. There was no paid employment for him so after seven months of hopelessness,
“his family sold the rest of their land and paid another agent to send him abroad again. Dubai was Khokon’s chosen destination, and he paid accordingly; but the agent cheated him and he ended up in Libya instead. For the next several years he had to endure enslavement, beatings, extortion, and torture. But somehow he managed to save up enough money to pay traffickers to send him from Libya to Sicily in a ramshackle boat.” (all quoted material in this article is from The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh, published by University of Chicago Press, October 2021)
Khokon was penniless, traumatized – but unlike many others he survived the voyage. Assisted by support groups for refugees and by relatives, he was able to stay in Italy and get a job at a warehouse in Parma.
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Overcoming the climate crisis will require a shift away from our growth-based, corporate-dominated global system
General view during the Global Climate Strike March on October 02, 2020 in Durban, South Africa. According to media reports, the group demanded that individuals and governments must take stronger action against the effects of climate change and the emittance of the greenhouse gas. (Darren Stewart/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
The global conversation regarding climate change has, for the most part, ignored the elephant in the room. That’s strange, because this particular elephant is so large, obvious, and all-encompassing that politicians and executives must contort themselves to avoid naming it publicly. That elephant is called capitalism, and it is high time to face the fact that, as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system of our globalized world, the climate crisis won’t be resolved.
As the crucial UN climate talks known as COP26 (short for “Conference of the Parties”) approach in early November, the public has grown increasingly aware that the stakes have never been higher. What were once ominous warnings of future climate shocks wrought by wildfires, floods, and droughts have now become a staple of the daily news. Yet governments are failing to meet their own emissions pledges from the Paris agreement six years ago, which were themselves acknowledged to be inadequate. Increasingly, respected Earth scientists are warning, not just about the devastating effects of climate breakdown on our daily lives, but about the potential collapse of civilization itself unless we drastically change direction.
The elephant in the room
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In 2016, an inconceivable event aborted the Paris climate scheme. The Americans elected Donald Trump. Calling the Paris deal a rip-off of his country, Trump swiftly pulled the U.S. out of the accords. Upon what grounds? Put simply, America First.
“Follow the money!”
The old maxim is always sound advice when assessing the motives of those advancing bold agendas for the benefit of mankind.
Invariably, the newest progressive idea entails a transfer of wealth from the taxpaying classes of Western nations to our transnational, global and Third World elites.
For the masters of the universe, establishing justice and equality for the world’s poor are rewarding exercises in every sense of the word.
Consider the 2015 Paris climate accords.
Its declared goal: Save the planet from the ravages of climate change, which is caused by carbon dioxide emissions, which are produced by industrial nations with too many of the world’s factories, farms, ships, planes and autos.
Under the Paris accords, wealthier nations of the West were to set and meet strict national targets for reducing their carbon emissions.
Together, these reductions were to prevent any rise in the planet’s temperature of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
This was presented as the world’s last best hope of preventing a climate catastrophe in this century.
Among the warnings the climate has been sending us:
The melting of polar ice caps, killer hurricanes, droughts, wildfires such as we had this year in California, river floods in Europe, rising sea levels, and the swamping of coastal towns, cities and islands like the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.
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