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I have not produced a video titled Means of Extinction since 30 July 2021. At that point, I had identified six means by which we were rapidly driving ourselves to extinction. Due to the rate of environmental change in our wake, and also the uncontrolled meltdown of nuclear power plants, any one of these means of extinction will lead to the extinction of all life on Earth. Nearly three years after I reported six phenomena by which we are driving ourselves to extinction in the near term, two additional means have appeared. I’ll report on one of them with this short video.

According to an article at SciTechDaily, humans are disrupting the planetary salt cycle, thus causing an existential threat. The article was published 2 November 2023. It is titled An “Existential Threat” – Humans Are Disrupting the Natural Salt Cycle on a Global Scale. The subhead is “A research group headed by a geologist from the University of Maryland warns that the influx of salt in streams and rivers is an ‘existential threat.’”

Here’s the opening paragraph: “The planet’s demand for salt is not without its toll on both ecological systems and human well-being, according to a new scientific review led by University of Maryland Geology Professor Sujay Kaushal. Published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, the paper revealed that human activities are making Earth’s air, soil, and freshwater saltier, which could pose an ‘existential threat’ if current trends continue.”

Here’s the buried lede, in the following paragraph: “Geologic and hydrologic processes bring salts to Earth’s surface over time, but human activities such as mining and land development are rapidly accelerating the natural ‘salt cycle.’…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Means of Extinction: Antarctic “Super Vortex” is Accelerating

June 3, 2024

Means of Extinction: Antarctic “Super Vortex” is Accelerating

From the Daily Mail in the UK comes an article titled Antarctica ‘super vortex’ is speeding up due to climate change – and it could melt thousands of square miles of sea ice, study reveals. The article was published on 27 March 2024. More sensationalist headlines appear in other outlets. From the Daily Star on 4 April 2024 is Antarctica ‘super vortex’ could put mankind underwater like an ‘apocalyptic film.’ From LAD Bible dot com on 1 April 2024 is Urgent warning over Antarctic ‘super vortex’ that could affect fate of humanity. In addition to serving as click-bait, these headlines might be more accurate than the one in the Daily Mail. Corporate media outlets tend to avoid articles about human extinction.

The story in the Daily Mail refers to a peer-reviewed, open-access paper in Nature. Here’s the lede from the article in the Daily Mail: “A massive vortex of ocean water encircling Antarctica, a swirling volume 100-times larger than all the world’s rivers combined, is getting faster due to climate change.”

The vortex is known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. It slows during Earth’s cool periods, such as during Ice Ages. It hastens when the planet warms. Considering we are undergoing the fastest rate of environmental change in planetary history, according even to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 8 October 2018 report Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees, it comes as no surprise that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current represents a threat leading to the extinction of all life on Earth.

The article in the Daily Mail begins with three key points: (1) Antarctic Circumpolar Current churns 6 billion cubic-feet of water per second; (2) the vortex slows during cool eras, like the Ice Age, but speeds up with global warming; and (3) researchers drilled 500- to 650-ft-long deep sea sediment cores for the study.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Humans may have nearly gone extinct.

April 23, 2024

Humans may have nearly gone extinct.

When we think of endangered animals, we generally think about elephants, tigers, and whales — but certainly not humans. Yet between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, ancestors of Homo sapiens lost 98.7% of their population, according to a 2023 study published in the journal Science. Before the population crash, as many as 135,000 early humans roamed the Earth, but according to the team of geneticists behind the study, that number plummeted to about 1,280 breeding individuals, and the population stayed that low for more than 100,000 years. (These weren’t modern humans, but earlier hominins on the genetic timeline; one species that was alive at the time was Homo erectus, and we’re still discovering new prehistoric human species.)

The population decline could have been related to the wild environmental changes happening around that time: Extreme cooling of the Earth coincided with a drought in Africa, leading to fewer sources of food. Whatever the cause, it created a genetic “bottleneck” that researchers say nearly wiped out our prehistoric ancestors. This conclusion lines up to a period of time that left few fossils behind, but the research has yet to be replicated by other studies, and many genetic scientists remain skeptical of the claim.

By the Numbers

Estimated population of humans on Earth

8 billion
Age (in years) of the oldest human DNA ever discovered

400,000
Years since Homo sapiens first emerged

~200,000
Individual prehistoric humans identified in fossils

6,000

DID YOU KNOW?

Several human species lived on Earth at the same time.

More than 20 human species — that is, species in the genus Homo — have existed in the last few million years. But evolution isn’t a straight line, and multiple early humans walked the Earth at the same time. When Homo sapiens (that’s us) first emerged around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, we joined at least eight other living species, including Neanderthals, Denisovans, and even Homo erectus…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Humanity’s End Was Determined from the Start

November 22, 2023

Humanity’s End Was Determined from the Start

The moment a species learns to manipulate its environment for gain is the moment the clock starts ticking on its demise.

Given the vastness of the universe, it’s possible that 1 billion intelligent civilizations exist.

So why is there no sign of these civilizations?

It is likely that all advanced civilizations are eventually destroyed by a “Great Filter”. And it’s probable that humanity is currently going through its Great Filter right now.

First, Let’s Examine Why Alien Life Should Exist

The Milky Way, our galaxy, is home to approximately 100 to 400 billion stars. Assuming that a portion of these stars are central to solar systems, similar to our own, it’s conceivable that the Milky Way could contain tens to hundreds of billions of such systems.

Adding to this, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, many found in systems with multiple planets through missions like Kepler and TESS, reinforces the idea that planetary systems are a common feature around stars. This widespread occurrence of exoplanets suggests that a significant majority of stars throughout the universe might host their own solar systems.

Expanding this view to the larger cosmos, with an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each potentially holding as many stars as the Milky Way on average, the numbers become even more astronomical. This implies a universe where hundreds of trillions to quadrillions of solar systems could exist, each with its unique characteristics and potentially life-supporting conditions.

To crudely estimate the number of solar systems with planets that have conditions favorable to life, let’s use the higher end of the estimate: one quadrillion solar systems in the universe. If 1% of these solar systems have planets with conditions favorable to life, there could potentially be about 10 trillion solar systems with planets that have conditions conducive to life.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

By Preston Howard: The Maximum Power Principle and Why It Underscores the Certainty of Human Extinction in the Near Future

October 2, 2023

By Preston Howard: The Maximum Power Principle and Why It Underscores the Certainty of Human Extinction in the Near Future

Howard T. Odum: co-originator of Maximum Power Principle

Today’s guest post by Preston Howard discusses an issue central to our overshoot predicament that is often ignored: The Maximum Power Principle (MPP). The MPP states that life optimizes for maximize power, not maximum efficiency, and implies that life does not look forward in time to consider the consequences of maximizing power today.

While preparing an initial report for Florida’s first Area of Critical State Concern¹ in 1972, I had the immense good fortune to spend time with Howard T. Odum, an environmental engineering scientist who directed the Wetlands Center at the University of Florida. The area of state concern was the Big Cypress Preserve adjacent to the Florida Everglades. Dr Odum and several of his graduate students had ongoing studies in the area. In informal conversations, Dr Odum explained the Maximum Power Principle as described below. I believe it presents Humanity’s current situation better than anything I have seen about global warming, overshoot, or climate collapse. However, to my knowledge no one has mentioned it in any serious article except Gail Tverberg in her articles about resource consumption.

To understand the Maximum Power Principle², let us imagine a square island, barren of any vegetation. As happened many times in Florida, suppose our island was created by fill where a shipping channel had been deepened. Situated close to the seaport, someone intended to build something on the new island, but permitting requirements and other administrative delays where taking “forever.” (These details provide a “context” for the discussion.)

The barren island does not remain barren for long, as plants soon begin to grow on it. The solar energy that bathes the island provides abundant energy for the early pioneer plants…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Hope, on the Balance of Probabilities

January 25, 2023

Hope, on the Balance of Probabilities

my now-slightly-outdated map of worldviews about collapse; right-click and open in a new tab to see it full-sized

It’s interesting to listen to social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger try to reconcile his assessment of the state of the world with his vehement insistence that we have to try as hard we possibly can to avert the ‘metacrisis’ that threatens to bring about the collapse of human civilization and the extinction of most or all life on earth, including humans.

In a recent video, he said:

How can evolutionarily nasty chimpanzees with a high orientation for conflict and irrationality, with nuclear weapons and AI and synthetic biology, with a history of using technology in conflict-oriented and harm-externalizing ways, how can 8 billion of us with exponential tech [increasingly available to all] do a good job of governing that much power? It doesn’t actually look that promising.

Yet he insists that “we cannot know for certain” that we are fucked (or that we are not), so we each have a responsibility to do what we can, working with others, to pull us back from the brink.

His argument reveals a curious quirk about humans and our relationship to complexity, uncertainty, and hope. We seem completely preoccupied with what John Gray calls “the needs of the moment”, and it is clear that this preoccupation has directly produced the metacrisis (a combination of many, unintended, crises and system collapses — economic, ecological, political, social, health, educational, resource, technological, and, for some, spiritual/religious) in which we find ourselves. Yet we continue to cling to hope for our future when all logic says it’s unfounded.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Extreme heat could put 40% of land vertebrates in peril by end of century

January 24, 2023

Extreme heat could put 40% of land vertebrates in peril by end of century

Study shows ‘disastrous consequences for wildlife’ if human-caused emissions push global temperatures up 4.4C

A female desert bighorn sheep in the Joshua Tree National Park, California. Such areas would be among the worse impacted if global emissions are not cut. Photograph: Michael S Nolan/Alamy

More than 40% of land vertebrates will be threatened by extreme heat by the end of the century under a high emissions scenario, with freak temperatures once regarded as rare likely to become the norm, new research warns.

Reptiles, birds, amphibians and mammals are being exposed to extreme heat events of increasing frequency, duration and intensity, as a result of human-driven global heating. This poses a substantial threat to the planet’s biodiversity, a new study warns.

Under a high emissions scenario of 4.4C warming, 41% of land vertebrates will experience extreme thermal events by 2099, according to the paper, published in Nature.

In worse affected regions, such as the Mojave desert in the US, Gran Chaco in South America, the Sahel and Sahara in Africa and parts of Iran and Afghanistan, 100% of species would be exposed to extreme heat. It is not possible to say if these areas would be uninhabitable, but it is likely that more species would become extinct.

A desert tortoise in the Mojave desert, southern California, US — A desert tortoise in the Mojave desert in California, US, an area that would be one of the worse hit by extreme heat. Photograph: Scott Trageser/Alamy

Researchers mapped the effects of extreme heat on more than 33,000 land vertebrates by looking at maximum temperature data between 1950 and 2099. They considered five predictions of global climatic models based on different levels of greenhouse gas emission, as well as the distribution of terrestrial vertebrates, to work out how exposed animal populations would be.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

It’s a Race: Will Human Extinction Result from a Loss of Aerosol Masking or Ongoing Overheating?

January 24, 2023

It’s a Race: Will Human Extinction Result from a Loss of Aerosol Masking or Ongoing Overheating?

Science Snippets: Peak Fossil Fuels

November 30, 2022

Science Snippets: Peak Fossil Fuels

Latest peer-reviewed journal article appears in the prestigious Elsevier series of journals:

McPherson, Guy R., Beril Sirmack, and Ricardo Vinuesa. March 2022. Environmental thresholds for mass-extinction events. Results in Engineering (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2022.100342.

Full text:

When the head of the conservative International Energy Agency admits we are in the midst of the “first truly global energy crisis,” then you know we’re in serious trouble. According to the chief of the International Energy Agency—the IEA—that’s the current situation. The story was published by Reuters on 25 October 2022.

Let’s turn back the clock a bit. According to the IEA, the extraction of conventional oil for the world peaked in 2006. Conventional oil refers to crude plus condensate, and it’s the relatively easy oil to extract and refine. The tough stuff comes next, which is why we have been rabidly pursuing shale and other petrochemicals that have a low energy return on investment, often called EROI. It comes as no surprise that 16 years after the conservative IEA concluded we had passed the peak of crude-plus-condensate, the most important element in the history of industrial civilization, we have similarly, and in a much worse state, passed the peak of all oil. All, as in the whole shebang.

According to the headline of a story published on January 15th, 2021 by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Fossil fuel production expected to increase through 2022 but remain below 2019 peak.” Of course, the US EIA is referring to extraction, not production. It’s not as if humans are producing oil. Oil is not ice cream, after all. Even though we do not produce oil, we’re doing a great job sucking it out of the bowels of the planet and turning it into gasoline, diesel, and other energy-rich materials that make our lives easier..

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Chris Hedges: Imminent Mass Extinction

November 21, 2022

Chris Hedges: Imminent Mass Extinction

https://youtu.be/cbH_o-96qZI

Are We In the Midst of a Silent Mass Extinction?

October 4, 2022

A white deer mouse on sand surrounded by plants

Genetic diversity in deer mice creates differences in coat color. NICOLE BEDFORD

Are We In the Midst of a Silent Mass Extinction?

A new modeling technique aims to help scientists and policymakers detect declines in genetic diversity based on habitat loss.

Nearly one fifth of the genetic diversity of the planet’s most vulnerable species may already be lost, an analysis published today (September 22) in Science finds. If accurate, it would mean that many species are already below a conservation threshold proposed last year by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) a part of the United Nations Environment Programme.

Calculating lost genetic diversity

Moisés Expósito-Alonso was in his back yard in Menlo Park, California, last year reading a monograph on the unified theory of biodiversity—“kind of a nerd thing to do,” he says—when an idea dawned on him. He kept seeing concepts related to biodiversity and realized that those concepts should also relate to the genetic diversity of a given species.

Expósito-Alonso, an evolutionary geneticist and ecologist at Stanford University, says that one equation in particular caught his eye: the species-area relationship (SAR), a function that predicts that species-level biodiversity becomes richer as habitat area expands. Essentially, it says that “when you explore ecosystems, you continuously find more species because you find more little niches to which different species have adapted,” he says. And as humans have increasingly carved up ecosystems for our own purposes, the SAR holds that the reverse is also true—shrinking habitat areas diminish species biodiversity. Researchers have used the SAR to estimate extinction rates, and it has been cited in policy-making decisions, Expósito-Alonso says; so, he began to wonder if a genetic diversity equivalent existed that could analogously predict how habitat loss reduces genetic diversity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Dawn of the Apocalypse

July 24, 2022

The Dawn of the Apocalypse

We were warned for decades about the death march we are on because of global warming. And yet, the global ruling class continues to frog-march us towards extinction.

The past week has seen record-breaking heat waves across Europe. Wildfires have ripped through Spain, Portugal and France. London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II. The U.K. saw its hottest day on record of 104.54 Fahrenheit. In China, more than a dozen cities issued the “highest possible heat warning” this weekend with over 900 million people in China enduring a scorching heat wave along with severe flooding and landslides across large swathes of southern China. Dozens of people have died. Millions of Chinese have been displaced. Economic losses run into the billions of yuan. Droughts, which have destroyed crops, killed livestock and forced many to flee their homes, are creating a potential famine in the Horn of Africa. More than 100 million people in the United States are under heat alerts in more than two dozen states from temperatures in the mid-to-upper 90s and low 100s. Wildfires have destroyed thousands of acres in California. More than 73 percent of New Mexico is suffering from an “extreme” or “severe” drought. Thousands of people had to flee from a fast-moving brush fire near Yosemite National Park on Saturday and 2,000 homes and businesses lost power.

It is not as if we were not warned. It is not as if we lacked scientific evidence. It is not as if we could not see the steady ecological degeneration and species extinction. And yet, we did not act. The result will be mass death with victims dwarfing the murderous rampages of fascism, Stalinism and Mao Zedong’s China combined…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Could climate change make humans go extinct?

April 3, 2022

Could climate change make humans go extinct?

A 3D illustration of a woman watching a climate change simulation of Earth.

A digital illustration of someone watching a climate change simulation. (Image credit: boscorelli/Shutterstock.com)

The impacts of climate change are here with soaring temperatures, stronger hurricanes, intensified floods and a longer and more severe wildfire season. Scientists warn that ignoring climate change will yield “untold suffering” for humanity. But if things are going to get that much worse, could climate change make humans go extinct?

Scientists predict a range of devastating scenarios if climate change is not kept under control, but if we just consider the direct impacts, then there’s some good news; it’s unlikely to cause our mass extinction.

“There is no evidence of climate change scenarios that would render human beings extinct,” Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State and author of “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet” (PublicAffairs, 2021), told Live Science in an email.

However, it’s possible that climate change will still threaten the lives of hundreds of millions of people, such as by leading to food and water scarcity, which has the potential to trigger a societal collapse and set the stage for global conflict, research finds.

Too hot to handle?

Humans are increasing the amount of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, in the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels and other activities. These gases trap and hold heat from the sun, causing global temperatures to rise and the climate to change much faster than it otherwise would, putting humanity on a dangerous path.

A runaway greenhouse effect is probably the only way climate change impacts could directly cause human extinction, according to Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

False Beliefs and Denial

December 27, 2021

False Beliefs and Denial

Sam’s Gap at the Tennessee/North Carolina border

I have embarked on quite the journey over the past year. I stepped out of my comfort zone and decided to begin writing this blog. I do enjoy discussing energy and resource decline and climate change, because of the stark implications they present. I’m less comfortable talking about extinction due to the uncertainty of a timeline and the controversy surrounding it. Despite my knowledge in this field, I never feel like I know enough; so I’m always digging for more information. The studies, articles, videos, and other media I have discovered are sometimes difficult to digest. I often have to step back to think about what I am writing and how it will be received for those few who are reading it. I am ever mindful of how I felt upon first discovering where we are as a species and precisely how we continue chopping off the limb we are perched upon. It is quite difficult at times, understanding not only where we are but where we are headed; also comprehending the inertia behind us pushing us into new realms and sending us beyond tipping points. Today’s article combines an eclectic mix of both recent events and stories with new material from Tom Murphy, William Rees, Jeff Masters, Alice Friedemann, and many others. Those of you familiar with my posts will be unfazed; new readers may be horrified.

The way some of my articles are received by a few point to anger and denial. I understand this because I was also there for a while, although I quickly progressed beyond those stages of grief. Despite my knowledge regarding human denial of reality and then the accompanying optimism bias which often typically lead to overshoot, I am still surprised by the sheer scale of this denial..

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tim Merges the Worst Climate News in History with Epic Images

December 24, 2021

Tim Merges the Worst Climate News in History with Epic Images

“Climate change is one of a host of environmental ills for which technological solutions are being proposed. In fact, most of the proposed solutions exacerbate environmental ills in other dimensions such as species loss and mass extinction. This tendency of technological reasoning to ‘bleed’ from one dimension or axis to another— to cause unintended consequences, is a function of the structure of this type of reasoning.”
“Paradoxically, calls for analytical rigor tend to narrow the realm of scientific concern, thereby raising the range of unintended consequences. This paradox is internal to the structure of technological reasoning. In practical terms, the 2018 IPCC Report on climate change relies on dubious technology to produce ‘negative carbon emissions.’ This both distracts attention away from more plausible methods and it could wildly exacerbate mass extinction.” Climate Change and Technology

Mark Brimblecombe’s piece de resistance on the mitigation myth is a must read;
“It is not nice to be told that you have been diagnosed with a terminal condition. It is even worse to be given false hope that if you did this or that you could mitigate the problem or turn it around when it cannot. If a medical practitioner does this, they lose their job. But climate scientists do this frequently, and probably to keep their job. It is virtue-signalling to agree with national and international climate agreements which propose that we can fix this by reducing (mitigating) our carbon footprint and carbon emissions… and so continue ‘business as usual’ and live happily ever after.” Climate Change and the Mitigation Myth

In the above video I mentioned the paper by Professor Corey Bradshaw suggesting that even Tardigrades are in danger. Our interview with Professor Bradshaw and links to the paper we discussed are embedded following; Professor Corey Bradshaw explains the unfolding “Extinction Cascades” on Nature Bats Last.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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