Thanks, Alan, for the biopic and collapse awareness. Unfortunately, you may be too optimistic. I won't go into the details in an ocean of data verifying our rapidly heating environment here, except to point to the C3S (you need to check them out) data: the GAST has risen 0.4 degC in just the past two years and appears to be on an accelerating trend line, so 0.2 degC annually, reaching 2 degC GAST by 2027, 3 degC by 2032, and an unsurviveable 6 degC by 2047, just 22 yrs. from now, so you'll be 66yo, if you're 44 now. AS you will be the last one out, please turn off the lights. Have a blessed day. Gregg (also "Greeley's Newsletter.substack.com")
Yes, at least for those unable to survive the heat on the surface, but some will take refuge underground or on Mars (?), like the recent "Paradise" movie. Read the recent, 2-12-25 Hansen, et.al. paper: "The 0.4 degC increase of global temperature in 2023-2024 is explained...".
Dear Alan, it's brave of you to admit to your youthful gullibility because of course this looks like a disqualifying factor re believing your "latest conspiracy theory".
Like all children, you were naturally receptive to your biggest authority figures' influence. Indoctrination of false beliefs perpetuates exactly because of this. I think any mature, honest adult can forgive you this.
It's impressive and brave of you that you didn't double down via cognitive dissonance, and broke free of the illusions. Far from everyone makes it out. Well done. The world would be a better place if people were better at embracing scepticism and critical thinking. I feel like our educational institutions -- and society as a whole -- have completely failed us in this regard.
It's morbidly fascinating to me how hard it is for people to accept the mountains of evidence regarding our trajectory. Even the consequences of the simplest part of the polycrisis - rising CO2 levels - do not truly penetrate people's minds. If they did, they would be doing as Greta thinks makes sense: panicking like their house is on fire. Clearly, they are not.
Studying psychology, sociology, and neuroscience helps us understand our malfunctions, and one could go forever about this. Like you, I felt compelled to blog about it as a form of journaling along with a desperate attempt to raise awareness.
I cannot recommend the book "Don't Even Think About It - Why Our Minds Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change" (George Marshall) enough. Not only is it the best book on the subject, but it may be the best nonfiction book I have read, period. I'm not sure if it will offer you solace, though. That is more a philosophical challenge.
Thank you for your contributions. Fwiw, your site was instrumental in raising my awareness, and I share it often. The message does get through to some.
I do think pretty everyone will be aware sooner or later -- when it's way too late to mitigate much at all. It's just a question of time. The evidence will be overwhelming when people are dying in the millions and billions.
Fwiw, I think this is further out than you and climate alarmists believe, maybe 30-60 years. That's just my personal estimate, and I can't possibly say for sure. In general, I think humans are ridiculously good at adaptation, and we may well surprise positively.
Otoh, when one looks at the polycrisis as a whole, it's just overwhelming to an absurd degree. We are already in new waters we don't even understand, and humanity has never faced such a complex challenge before. I am highly doubtful of our ability to face it. I can easily envision a future world in utter shock, despair and apathy as everything comes crashing down at once. It will be truly horrific to witness the entire world's mental suffering. The one silver lining about being collapse aware in advance is that one has preemptively despaired, and, with a little luck, reached acceptance. One will be neither surprised nor shocked. And perhaps one will, during apocalyptic times, suddenly be the robust one people need to lean on for a change.
Nice essay! Being an engineer, I ignored Y2K at the time, but I did know people who said things like, "But even cars have computers in them! All cars are going to stop running!" I worked on embedded software, and the ROM budget for such things was about 2-16 kilobytes. I knew they weren't going to put a date library in any device that didn't absolutely require one.
But when you say, "Eventually, everyone will wake up," I'm not so sure. As you discovered with your parents, people don't like to be wrong, and they love to blame others. No, the crash will be Convicted Felon Cat Meat's fault, or the economists' fault, or the evil corporations' fault. Anybody but the person who has three fingers pointed back at them as they point a finger at everyone else.
I'm not even convinced that "collapse" as we imagine it will actually happen.
The Roman Empire took centuries to decline and fall. We keep spending more and more to get less and less oil, with whispered tales of untold petroleum resources below polar ice. I think climate change only has traction because some people with hare-brained schemes is thinking, "Hey, we can make a lot of money off this!"
An addict will kill their best friend for a fix. And they eventually kill themselves.
What if things just keep getting worse and worse?
To me, that's more scary than collapse. Because humans will then have more time to take the rest of the planet down with them. If we take all the carbon that is under ice and put it in the air, we may be looking at 5°C to 6° or more. That has the potential to kill all surface life.
And all the ultra rich are building "safe places" all over the world to somehow survive it all. 🙄 Such hubris. They'll die with the rest of us, just somewhat later. I could go on for thousands of words just on that.
There's no need for a religilous Apocalypse. We're quite capable of doing ourselves in on our own. The proof is all around us. 😔 If humans survive at all, we'll be knocked back several hundred years, likely for good.
About 20 years ago a 'collapse aware' young 19-year-old renewables engineer in our online group thought he was going to be forced to watch his family and friends all starve to death in about 5 years. He committed suicide.
Back then I was utterly freaked out as well - and had a family health crisis to deal with on top. Renewables SUCKED because they were vastly too expensive to overbuild enough to compensate for bad seasons and weather. Solar took so much energy to mine, smelt, and purify all that high grade silicon that I wasn't even sure how low the EROEI of it really was!
But here we are 20 years later. Young Tas would not have to have watched his family all starve to death 5 years later, or another 5 years later, or another or another!
Solar now captures the same 24% of sunlight it captured back then - but only requiring a third of the silicon. The EROEI has shot up while the costs have come down.
Dramatically!
It's now doubling every 3 years!
Here's another thing. I used to worry that we would need SO much Overbuild to firm renewables that it would be like 5 times the total thermal value of all those fossil fuels.
But energy supply is only half the story. The other half is Electrify Everything - which once implemented means we will only need 40% of the primary energy of thermal energy sources like oil and gas and coal. Why? Burning stuff like cavemen is THAT inefficient! Laws of thermodynamics. We're throwing 60% of the energy away!
Even including say double the primary energy for Overbuild (for firming) takes us back up to 80% of thermal supply - but let's call it 100%. But basically when people run around screaming "It's the end of the world because we'll need 5 times the fossil fuel energy we use now in renewables just to cope with intermittency" you can see how far off base they are.
Bottom line? I agree with your concerns. Climate change is getting NASTY - biodiversity loss - all of it. On the other hand - if you only read certain kinds of papers from one perspective - are you really getting all the information? Are you really aware of what is happening now, let alone future trends? Because I see a great acceleration of certain possible positive trends also in the works!
Your concerns are absolutely valid. Most of them. Your conclusions about renewable energy need a LOT of work though!
I think it is important to put a boundary about what 'collapse' is most likely to be, if we are to get most people to get their heads around it.
Firstly, it isn't 'The end of the world!' The world will continue spinning, probably still have oceans and atmosphere and weather and all that stuff.
It is unlikely to be the end of life on earth. Life on earth has survived many periods when it was much hotter than now, and much hotter than the worst estimates of climate change. Whilst there are some who wonder whether we (humans) may be triggering runaway climate heating, even beyond 8*C, that is mostly because we don't understand what climate mechanisms may exist to moderate that, or if they exist at all.
Widespread destruction of life tends to trigger new species that will be better adapted to the conditions we leave behind us. If that is a world that is, say 5*C or even 7*C hotter, then future species are less likely to include many mammals and more likely to include, say, reptiles, and insects. So it is right to say, 'The end of the world as we know it' because it will be fundamentally different going forward.
Lastly, humans have taken the top spot on Earth because we have sufficient intelligence to create our own 'mini-environments' around us, from sunshading in hot climates to insulated and heated dwellings in the far north. But intrinsically, without external energy and technology, humans are adapted to a narrow range of temperatures peaking at around 35*C and down to around 5*C. We can already see that future temperatures almost everywhere on this planet are likely to be outside that range, probably within current lifetimes and your children's lifetimes. In short, humans will have very few places to survive without technology, and that has to mean very few large communities of people will survive, in small pockets of sufficiently benign climate.
All that is without considering the rising sea levels, storms fires, droughts floods, new diseases and pandemics, wars for survival, collapsing food supplies, end of fossil fuels as a net energy source, and a long list of the stuff we actually know about.
Which leaves us with Trump. I suspect there is now an informal agreement between Trump, Putin and Xi. Each wants their own race to survive, and each is making their plans to do so, and each has, I think, agreed to stop fighting between the three power blocks and leave each other get on with their plans and wars without interference by the other two.
Trump's plan is a white supremecist 'Greater America' from a southern border at the Panama canal to the Artic, and will do everything he can to achieve that because it IS the end of days for humanity and the rules mean nothing anymore. Enough rich people, Republicans and high level government and state officials understand and agree Trump's racist intentions and its obvious why they are not admitting it.
Putin's plan was to take Ukraine for its resources and as a southern route to the sea, and he probably still has intentions to at least take back the ex-Soviet buffer states. But probably not all of Europe, that has few resources he needs, and he probably thinks will collapse anyway (with a bit of help!)
Xi's plan has long been underway; a self sufficient China and Asia with access to sufficient resources and sufficient energy. China benefits from a much flatter income profile so whilst the pressures are huge, it is a long way further towards its long term goals. It has zero intention of a war with the West.
In short, the best chances going forward is to make your best guesses, do what you feel able and willing to do, and to be very, very lucky!
Are you aware that there has been a 140-million-year trend of decreasing carbon dioxide? CO2 levels have been decreasing steadily since the Cretaceous period, from 2,500 parts-per-million of atmospheric concentration, and are now at a historic low. This is dangerous because, despite recent increases, we are still near the 150 PPM mark, below which plants cannot survive. We are indeed in a CO2 crisis, but it's the opposite of what you've been told. We are dangerously close to CO2 starvation.
Here's a whole list of climate heresies:
1) The warming effect of each CO2 molecule declines as its concentration increases. The change in forcing effect of CO2 is greatest when absolute concentrations are lower, and decrease as they go up. In other words, especially in the presence of more powerful greenhouse gases like water vapor, there's a ceiling on the effect that CO2 can have on Earth's heat loss into space (AKA “flux”).
2) Plants eat carbon dioxide. Horticulturalists routinely add CO2 in greenhouses for this reason.
3) In the last four ice ages, the CO2 level was dangerously low. As noted above, plants die at around 150 PPM, and during the last Ice Age we got down to 182 PPM - perhaps the lowest ever, and dangerously close to the extinction threshold.
4) Our current geologic period (Quaternary) has the lowest average CO2 levels in the last 600 million years. Current levels are near record lows. We are CO2 impoverished.
5) More CO2 means more plant growth. More CO2 is better for crop yields, better for forests, and better for animals.
6) Our current warming began more than 300 years ago, but man-made CO2 emissions only began to accelerate in the mid-20th century. Ergo, CO2 concentrations cannot be the sole cause.
7) Melting glaciers confirm modern warming predated increases of CO2. Glaciers don't shrink, even during warming periods, until a threshold is crossed at which summer melting exceeds winter accumulations. That point was reached around 1800, and the effect really became noticeable in the mid-1800s, long before significant human contributions to atmospheric CO2.
8) Rising sea levels confirm that the current warming trend predated increases of CO2. The rise has been steady since long before the post-war acceleration of CO2 emissions.
9) Given that temperatures changed dramatically during the past 10,000 years, the idea that the atmosphere of the entire planet is under our control is nonsense.
10) Interglacials usually last 10,000 to 15,000 years. Ours is 11,000 years old.
11) The last interglacial was 8°C warmer than today. In the Medieval period, when there were no SUVs, people were farming in Greenland and the polar bears were doing just fine.
12) Earth's orbit, axial tilt, Milankovich cycles and other astronomical factors drive glacial-interglacial changes.
13) We are living in one of the coldest periods in all of Earth's history, yet we can't stop bitching about warming. It's almost like there's some sinister agenda going on!
14) For most of our planet's history, it was about 10°C warmer than today.
15) IPCC models have overstated the current warming spell up to three times too much.
16) For human advancement, warmer is better than colder. More people die every year from the cold than from heat.
17) Cold periods lead to crop failure, pestilence, famine and mass depopulation. The Little Ice Age of 1300-1800 was not an easy time, and we should do everything we can to avoid another.
18) More CO2 means more moisture in the soil. When plants get more CO2, they have to “breathe” less, and reduced transpiration draws less moisture out of the ground, which is a good thing.
19) CO2 levels rose after the Second World War, but temperature fell.
20) The only thing constant about temperature over the last 600 million years is that it has been constantly changing.
Youre wrong about nobody coming up with solutions to these problems. Most of these issues already have fairly low tech solutions (there are other unmentioned ones that dont but theyre further off or completely unsolvable). Look into permaculture yields, keyline design, holistic livestock management, rocket mass heaters. Youre right in another way though because this stuff isnt going to get implemented. Despite being mostly cheap.
I don't think the author is deluded, but I'm not sure he's correct.
These are VERY serious problems we are facing, and we've left everything incredibly dangerously late to act...but, as quite a few others here have noted, it won't be anything explosive and it won't mean human extinction.
If we're lucky, we'll merely get our arses kicked and have to learn very quickly to live MUCH more constrained lives - Lloyd Alter's work here on Substack is useful, as is David Holmgren's book "Retrosuburbia". This would be pretty rough and there will be a lot of human suffering, particularly in places like Bangladesh and Pakistan, but it won't mean the complete collapse of our "civilisation".
The worst case is that we pollute ourselves back to the stone age and won't ever be able to get back as we've burned all the easy-to-use energy sources like coal and oil.
On balance, I think it's probably going to be more like the former than the latter case. But, that said, foreseeing collapse under the circumstances we are facing is by no means paranoid or deluded - I'm just hoping it's less than completely accurate!
Civilizations collapse in a continuous manner, and it takes about 2-3 centuries for the whole bottoming out to happen in the more “quick cases.”
Even so, the end of one world simply means the beginning of another. The end of western Civilization and its demise means the birth of newer Civilizations and ways of looking at the world.
Is the world ending? Yes! But it is a whimper and not a bang. Case in point: population & demography.
By century’s end, probably about 3 billion people will be left due to energy shocks, demographic decline, ecological overshoot, material scarcity and tech stagnation… then likely by millennia’s end we will see 400-500 million people left on the entire planet.
After this millennia long Dark Age, we will then see another wave of Civilizations be born. Such is humanity.
There is no “big extinction” event in the horizon, but rather as Grandmaster of DOOM, John Michael Greer has noted… what we will see is a “Long Descent.”
Thanks, Alan, for the biopic and collapse awareness. Unfortunately, you may be too optimistic. I won't go into the details in an ocean of data verifying our rapidly heating environment here, except to point to the C3S (you need to check them out) data: the GAST has risen 0.4 degC in just the past two years and appears to be on an accelerating trend line, so 0.2 degC annually, reaching 2 degC GAST by 2027, 3 degC by 2032, and an unsurviveable 6 degC by 2047, just 22 yrs. from now, so you'll be 66yo, if you're 44 now. AS you will be the last one out, please turn off the lights. Have a blessed day. Gregg (also "Greeley's Newsletter.substack.com")
Yes, at least for those unable to survive the heat on the surface, but some will take refuge underground or on Mars (?), like the recent "Paradise" movie. Read the recent, 2-12-25 Hansen, et.al. paper: "The 0.4 degC increase of global temperature in 2023-2024 is explained...".
Dear Alan, it's brave of you to admit to your youthful gullibility because of course this looks like a disqualifying factor re believing your "latest conspiracy theory".
Like all children, you were naturally receptive to your biggest authority figures' influence. Indoctrination of false beliefs perpetuates exactly because of this. I think any mature, honest adult can forgive you this.
It's impressive and brave of you that you didn't double down via cognitive dissonance, and broke free of the illusions. Far from everyone makes it out. Well done. The world would be a better place if people were better at embracing scepticism and critical thinking. I feel like our educational institutions -- and society as a whole -- have completely failed us in this regard.
It's morbidly fascinating to me how hard it is for people to accept the mountains of evidence regarding our trajectory. Even the consequences of the simplest part of the polycrisis - rising CO2 levels - do not truly penetrate people's minds. If they did, they would be doing as Greta thinks makes sense: panicking like their house is on fire. Clearly, they are not.
Studying psychology, sociology, and neuroscience helps us understand our malfunctions, and one could go forever about this. Like you, I felt compelled to blog about it as a form of journaling along with a desperate attempt to raise awareness.
I cannot recommend the book "Don't Even Think About It - Why Our Minds Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change" (George Marshall) enough. Not only is it the best book on the subject, but it may be the best nonfiction book I have read, period. I'm not sure if it will offer you solace, though. That is more a philosophical challenge.
Thank you for your contributions. Fwiw, your site was instrumental in raising my awareness, and I share it often. The message does get through to some.
I do think pretty everyone will be aware sooner or later -- when it's way too late to mitigate much at all. It's just a question of time. The evidence will be overwhelming when people are dying in the millions and billions.
Fwiw, I think this is further out than you and climate alarmists believe, maybe 30-60 years. That's just my personal estimate, and I can't possibly say for sure. In general, I think humans are ridiculously good at adaptation, and we may well surprise positively.
Otoh, when one looks at the polycrisis as a whole, it's just overwhelming to an absurd degree. We are already in new waters we don't even understand, and humanity has never faced such a complex challenge before. I am highly doubtful of our ability to face it. I can easily envision a future world in utter shock, despair and apathy as everything comes crashing down at once. It will be truly horrific to witness the entire world's mental suffering. The one silver lining about being collapse aware in advance is that one has preemptively despaired, and, with a little luck, reached acceptance. One will be neither surprised nor shocked. And perhaps one will, during apocalyptic times, suddenly be the robust one people need to lean on for a change.
Best wishes.
Nice essay! Being an engineer, I ignored Y2K at the time, but I did know people who said things like, "But even cars have computers in them! All cars are going to stop running!" I worked on embedded software, and the ROM budget for such things was about 2-16 kilobytes. I knew they weren't going to put a date library in any device that didn't absolutely require one.
But when you say, "Eventually, everyone will wake up," I'm not so sure. As you discovered with your parents, people don't like to be wrong, and they love to blame others. No, the crash will be Convicted Felon Cat Meat's fault, or the economists' fault, or the evil corporations' fault. Anybody but the person who has three fingers pointed back at them as they point a finger at everyone else.
I'm not even convinced that "collapse" as we imagine it will actually happen.
The Roman Empire took centuries to decline and fall. We keep spending more and more to get less and less oil, with whispered tales of untold petroleum resources below polar ice. I think climate change only has traction because some people with hare-brained schemes is thinking, "Hey, we can make a lot of money off this!"
An addict will kill their best friend for a fix. And they eventually kill themselves.
What if things just keep getting worse and worse?
To me, that's more scary than collapse. Because humans will then have more time to take the rest of the planet down with them. If we take all the carbon that is under ice and put it in the air, we may be looking at 5°C to 6° or more. That has the potential to kill all surface life.
And all the ultra rich are building "safe places" all over the world to somehow survive it all. 🙄 Such hubris. They'll die with the rest of us, just somewhat later. I could go on for thousands of words just on that.
There's no need for a religilous Apocalypse. We're quite capable of doing ourselves in on our own. The proof is all around us. 😔 If humans survive at all, we'll be knocked back several hundred years, likely for good.
About 20 years ago a 'collapse aware' young 19-year-old renewables engineer in our online group thought he was going to be forced to watch his family and friends all starve to death in about 5 years. He committed suicide.
Back then I was utterly freaked out as well - and had a family health crisis to deal with on top. Renewables SUCKED because they were vastly too expensive to overbuild enough to compensate for bad seasons and weather. Solar took so much energy to mine, smelt, and purify all that high grade silicon that I wasn't even sure how low the EROEI of it really was!
But here we are 20 years later. Young Tas would not have to have watched his family all starve to death 5 years later, or another 5 years later, or another or another!
Solar now captures the same 24% of sunlight it captured back then - but only requiring a third of the silicon. The EROEI has shot up while the costs have come down.
Dramatically!
It's now doubling every 3 years!
Here's another thing. I used to worry that we would need SO much Overbuild to firm renewables that it would be like 5 times the total thermal value of all those fossil fuels.
But energy supply is only half the story. The other half is Electrify Everything - which once implemented means we will only need 40% of the primary energy of thermal energy sources like oil and gas and coal. Why? Burning stuff like cavemen is THAT inefficient! Laws of thermodynamics. We're throwing 60% of the energy away!
Even including say double the primary energy for Overbuild (for firming) takes us back up to 80% of thermal supply - but let's call it 100%. But basically when people run around screaming "It's the end of the world because we'll need 5 times the fossil fuel energy we use now in renewables just to cope with intermittency" you can see how far off base they are.
Bottom line? I agree with your concerns. Climate change is getting NASTY - biodiversity loss - all of it. On the other hand - if you only read certain kinds of papers from one perspective - are you really getting all the information? Are you really aware of what is happening now, let alone future trends? Because I see a great acceleration of certain possible positive trends also in the works!
Your concerns are absolutely valid. Most of them. Your conclusions about renewable energy need a LOT of work though!
I think it is important to put a boundary about what 'collapse' is most likely to be, if we are to get most people to get their heads around it.
Firstly, it isn't 'The end of the world!' The world will continue spinning, probably still have oceans and atmosphere and weather and all that stuff.
It is unlikely to be the end of life on earth. Life on earth has survived many periods when it was much hotter than now, and much hotter than the worst estimates of climate change. Whilst there are some who wonder whether we (humans) may be triggering runaway climate heating, even beyond 8*C, that is mostly because we don't understand what climate mechanisms may exist to moderate that, or if they exist at all.
Widespread destruction of life tends to trigger new species that will be better adapted to the conditions we leave behind us. If that is a world that is, say 5*C or even 7*C hotter, then future species are less likely to include many mammals and more likely to include, say, reptiles, and insects. So it is right to say, 'The end of the world as we know it' because it will be fundamentally different going forward.
Lastly, humans have taken the top spot on Earth because we have sufficient intelligence to create our own 'mini-environments' around us, from sunshading in hot climates to insulated and heated dwellings in the far north. But intrinsically, without external energy and technology, humans are adapted to a narrow range of temperatures peaking at around 35*C and down to around 5*C. We can already see that future temperatures almost everywhere on this planet are likely to be outside that range, probably within current lifetimes and your children's lifetimes. In short, humans will have very few places to survive without technology, and that has to mean very few large communities of people will survive, in small pockets of sufficiently benign climate.
All that is without considering the rising sea levels, storms fires, droughts floods, new diseases and pandemics, wars for survival, collapsing food supplies, end of fossil fuels as a net energy source, and a long list of the stuff we actually know about.
Which leaves us with Trump. I suspect there is now an informal agreement between Trump, Putin and Xi. Each wants their own race to survive, and each is making their plans to do so, and each has, I think, agreed to stop fighting between the three power blocks and leave each other get on with their plans and wars without interference by the other two.
Trump's plan is a white supremecist 'Greater America' from a southern border at the Panama canal to the Artic, and will do everything he can to achieve that because it IS the end of days for humanity and the rules mean nothing anymore. Enough rich people, Republicans and high level government and state officials understand and agree Trump's racist intentions and its obvious why they are not admitting it.
Putin's plan was to take Ukraine for its resources and as a southern route to the sea, and he probably still has intentions to at least take back the ex-Soviet buffer states. But probably not all of Europe, that has few resources he needs, and he probably thinks will collapse anyway (with a bit of help!)
Xi's plan has long been underway; a self sufficient China and Asia with access to sufficient resources and sufficient energy. China benefits from a much flatter income profile so whilst the pressures are huge, it is a long way further towards its long term goals. It has zero intention of a war with the West.
In short, the best chances going forward is to make your best guesses, do what you feel able and willing to do, and to be very, very lucky!
Just my views.
Are you aware that there has been a 140-million-year trend of decreasing carbon dioxide? CO2 levels have been decreasing steadily since the Cretaceous period, from 2,500 parts-per-million of atmospheric concentration, and are now at a historic low. This is dangerous because, despite recent increases, we are still near the 150 PPM mark, below which plants cannot survive. We are indeed in a CO2 crisis, but it's the opposite of what you've been told. We are dangerously close to CO2 starvation.
Here's a whole list of climate heresies:
1) The warming effect of each CO2 molecule declines as its concentration increases. The change in forcing effect of CO2 is greatest when absolute concentrations are lower, and decrease as they go up. In other words, especially in the presence of more powerful greenhouse gases like water vapor, there's a ceiling on the effect that CO2 can have on Earth's heat loss into space (AKA “flux”).
2) Plants eat carbon dioxide. Horticulturalists routinely add CO2 in greenhouses for this reason.
3) In the last four ice ages, the CO2 level was dangerously low. As noted above, plants die at around 150 PPM, and during the last Ice Age we got down to 182 PPM - perhaps the lowest ever, and dangerously close to the extinction threshold.
4) Our current geologic period (Quaternary) has the lowest average CO2 levels in the last 600 million years. Current levels are near record lows. We are CO2 impoverished.
5) More CO2 means more plant growth. More CO2 is better for crop yields, better for forests, and better for animals.
6) Our current warming began more than 300 years ago, but man-made CO2 emissions only began to accelerate in the mid-20th century. Ergo, CO2 concentrations cannot be the sole cause.
7) Melting glaciers confirm modern warming predated increases of CO2. Glaciers don't shrink, even during warming periods, until a threshold is crossed at which summer melting exceeds winter accumulations. That point was reached around 1800, and the effect really became noticeable in the mid-1800s, long before significant human contributions to atmospheric CO2.
8) Rising sea levels confirm that the current warming trend predated increases of CO2. The rise has been steady since long before the post-war acceleration of CO2 emissions.
9) Given that temperatures changed dramatically during the past 10,000 years, the idea that the atmosphere of the entire planet is under our control is nonsense.
10) Interglacials usually last 10,000 to 15,000 years. Ours is 11,000 years old.
11) The last interglacial was 8°C warmer than today. In the Medieval period, when there were no SUVs, people were farming in Greenland and the polar bears were doing just fine.
12) Earth's orbit, axial tilt, Milankovich cycles and other astronomical factors drive glacial-interglacial changes.
13) We are living in one of the coldest periods in all of Earth's history, yet we can't stop bitching about warming. It's almost like there's some sinister agenda going on!
14) For most of our planet's history, it was about 10°C warmer than today.
15) IPCC models have overstated the current warming spell up to three times too much.
16) For human advancement, warmer is better than colder. More people die every year from the cold than from heat.
17) Cold periods lead to crop failure, pestilence, famine and mass depopulation. The Little Ice Age of 1300-1800 was not an easy time, and we should do everything we can to avoid another.
18) More CO2 means more moisture in the soil. When plants get more CO2, they have to “breathe” less, and reduced transpiration draws less moisture out of the ground, which is a good thing.
19) CO2 levels rose after the Second World War, but temperature fell.
20) The only thing constant about temperature over the last 600 million years is that it has been constantly changing.
Bullshit
Oh wow, what a stunning rebuttal!
Yep. It covered every point you put forward and described each one with great precision.
Goodbye.
Youre wrong about nobody coming up with solutions to these problems. Most of these issues already have fairly low tech solutions (there are other unmentioned ones that dont but theyre further off or completely unsolvable). Look into permaculture yields, keyline design, holistic livestock management, rocket mass heaters. Youre right in another way though because this stuff isnt going to get implemented. Despite being mostly cheap.
Act accordingly just in case it isn’t. Persist.
Humanity is toast.
Just means this is the first time seeing this movie.
Right there with you.
The "west" is ending.
The "west" is not the world.
I don't think the author is deluded, but I'm not sure he's correct.
These are VERY serious problems we are facing, and we've left everything incredibly dangerously late to act...but, as quite a few others here have noted, it won't be anything explosive and it won't mean human extinction.
If we're lucky, we'll merely get our arses kicked and have to learn very quickly to live MUCH more constrained lives - Lloyd Alter's work here on Substack is useful, as is David Holmgren's book "Retrosuburbia". This would be pretty rough and there will be a lot of human suffering, particularly in places like Bangladesh and Pakistan, but it won't mean the complete collapse of our "civilisation".
The worst case is that we pollute ourselves back to the stone age and won't ever be able to get back as we've burned all the easy-to-use energy sources like coal and oil.
On balance, I think it's probably going to be more like the former than the latter case. But, that said, foreseeing collapse under the circumstances we are facing is by no means paranoid or deluded - I'm just hoping it's less than completely accurate!
Depends really what you mean.
Civilizations collapse in a continuous manner, and it takes about 2-3 centuries for the whole bottoming out to happen in the more “quick cases.”
Even so, the end of one world simply means the beginning of another. The end of western Civilization and its demise means the birth of newer Civilizations and ways of looking at the world.
Is the world ending? Yes! But it is a whimper and not a bang. Case in point: population & demography.
By century’s end, probably about 3 billion people will be left due to energy shocks, demographic decline, ecological overshoot, material scarcity and tech stagnation… then likely by millennia’s end we will see 400-500 million people left on the entire planet.
After this millennia long Dark Age, we will then see another wave of Civilizations be born. Such is humanity.
There is no “big extinction” event in the horizon, but rather as Grandmaster of DOOM, John Michael Greer has noted… what we will see is a “Long Descent.”
Seems to me we were having this conversation in the 70s. Without making any predictions, I give you https://a.co/d/iGwwAS3
It makes you anthropocentric?