Wild Free and Happy Sample 64

 [Note: This is a new section from the rough draft of Wild, Free, & Happy. This is probably the end of the body text.  These samples start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE (if you happen to have some free time). 

Helter Skelter

Stephen Pyne has spent a lifetime thinking about fire.  Without the ability to use fire as a powerful tool, humans could have never migrated out of tropical Africa and colonized the outer world. 

When human pioneers eventually reached the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, they discovered plant and animal species that were especially ideal for domestication.  This region became known as the Cradle of Civilization.  Its development enabled us to accelerate our long and painful march to the staggering eco-horrors of today. 

Pyne is especially concerned about industrial fire.  Its combustion of fossil fuel results in carbon emission levels that are turbocharging an angry swarm of catastrophes.  “Our ecological effects have had the impact of a slow collision with an asteroid… together we have so reworked the planet that we now have remade biotas, begun melting most of the relic ice, turned the atmosphere into a crock pot, and the oceans into acid vats.”

Fire made us the unusual creatures we have become.  Our colonization of the world was like a spreading human wildfire that expanded across unspoiled wildernesses in search of fuel.  We enjoyed feasting on megafauna until they became scarce, at which point we advanced into new regions.  Over time, hungry humans ran out of unoccupied territory to expand into.  Oh-oh!

Groups had to revise their menus to include different food sources.  Aggressive groups could attempt to smash their way into territories inhabited by other groups.  As the millennia passed, and populations grew, friction between groups increased and spilled blood became more common. 

Weaker groups were more likely to be swept aside.  For example, of all the surviving wild cultures, the San people have the oldest DNA.  Their time-proven way of life was incredibly sustainable.  Their original homeland territory was vast, but over time, farmers and herders eventually snatched most of it away, forcing the San to retreat to the harsh Kalahari Desert.  By the 1970s, their traditional way of life had taken a serious beating.

Alfred Crosby summed up a bedrock lesson of history: “Winning streaks are rarely permanent.”  Like the traditional San people, most of the countless wild cultures that once existed sooner or later got blindsided by stuff like disease, colonization, capitalism, genocide, urbanization, and so on.  The wild cultures that still survive are not safe and secure.  Intruders from the outer world rarely enjoy a warm and fuzzy reputation for being kind and caring ladies and gentlemen. 

Meanwhile, in the fast lane, the human wildfire learned how to paddle down rivers, sail across oceans, roll on railways, drive across continents, fly through the clouds, zoom to the moon, vaporize cities, produce enough food to feed billions, blindside a stable climate, exterminate vast forests, and turn Earth into a loony bin for hordes of lost and confused primates.

Big History is a million-page catalog of countless bloody dog-eat-dog conflicts between tribes, nations, religions, and empires.  The strongest usually triumphed over the weakest, because the weak had no right to what they could not defend.  But those who remained in the fast lane were still vulnerable to getting blindsided by brutal surprises.

Sadly, glowing screens and motor vehicles are more precious than wooly mammoths or healthy planets.  The wizards of progress are guiding us toward a future of unimaginable prosperity, decarbonized energy, and tremendous achievements in family planning.  Everyone will eagerly cooperate.  Really?  Well, if you believe it, it’s true!

Animal in the Mirror

Pyne noted, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness, a plump chimp with a scraping stone and digging stick, hiding from the night’s terrors, crowding into minor biotic niches.”  In other words, an ordinary wild animal.

Since Neanderthals disappeared from the stage, our closest living relatives are now the chimps and bonobos, with whom we share up to 99 percent of our genes.  They have lived in the same forests, in the same way, for several million years, without degrading their ecosystem, starting a fire, or fooling around with tools fancier than sticks or stones.  They luckily benefit from their isolation, and the fact that their traditional habitat does not contain valuable resources that are tempting to greed monsters from outer space.

In his book Grandfather, Tom Brown shared a beautiful story he heard from his mentor Stalking Wolf, a traditional Apache from desert country, who traveled widely over the years, from the Amazon to Alaska, living off the land, and learning from it.  One time, while in Alaska as winter approached, he frantically had to stock up on food and firewood for the coming months. 

A bit later, when the snows arrived, he became fascinated by the ptarmigans, birds that survived in the frigid climate by their wits alone, sleeping in cozy snowdrifts.  They belonged in this arctic land, like the lizards belonged in Death Valley.  Lizards could not survive in Alaska, and ptarmigans could not survive on the desert. 

With the use of specialized tools, our species could survive almost anywhere.  But Grandfather felt uncomfortable because humans without fire and tools can only survive in special ecosystems.  He deeply wanted to genuinely belong somewhere, like the ptarmigans and lizards.  Over the passage of time, their way of life had become fine tuned for surviving in the ecosystems they inhabited.

Dear reader, this is a tremendously important point.  Animals that are wild, free, and happy are perfectly at home in the wild ecosystems they inhabit.  Like squirrels in an oak forest, they live where they belong, and remain intimately attuned to their habitat.

Our hominin ancestors fanned out across the planet, and eventually generated assorted impacts, including numerous extinctions.  Today, most of the mob of eight billion no longer lives and thinks like healthy wild animals.  A number of cultures have developed worldviews and lifestyles that are self destructively unclever, and ferociously brutal to the family of life.

Jay Griffiths wrote that humans evolved as highly alert nomadic hunters and foragers.  “We were made to walk through our lives wildly awake.”  Modern lifestyles are often mind-numbing routines — the opposite of the freedom we so deeply need.  When healthy wildness deteriorates into passive obedience, we become vulnerable to the burning pain of cage rage.  Very often, the daily news seems to be a barrage of batshit crazy cage rage stories from a wheezing world.

Timothy Scott Bennett concluded that we modern consumers were born and raised in captivity, something like zoo animals, the opposite of free, wildly awake, and at one with the land.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi biologist.  One of the spirits in their tribal traditions is Windigo, a monstrous demon cursed with a voracious appetite.  The more it eats, the hungrier it becomes.  In the old days, Windigo was notorious for hunting too hard, and not sharing with others, leading to hunger times.

Later, uninvited pale faced invaders from outer space smashed into tribal lands.  Native folks were stunned by their pathological foolishness.  Around the world, colonists have now created countless Windigo whirlwinds of mining, deforestation, industrial agriculture, overhunting, and insatiable shopping. 

Today, the hurricane of daily news from around the world shouts that the Windigo spirit has become a horrific global superpower.  Billions of folks everywhere eagerly dream of having more, more, more.  Even the superrich are maniacally grabbing and hoarding as much status glitter as possible.  This is not the path to a balanced and healthy future.

The Future?

In the preceding pages, I have explored my core question: how did things get to be this way?  Now what?  Humankind is deep in overshoot, and zooming down the path to a treacherously exciting future without brakes or safety nets.  My computer has a wonderful Undo function that can easily vaporize a sequence of mistakes.  Nature does not.  If you broke it, you bought it.

For folks who have more than a dozen working brain cells, the growing number of climate change reports and news stories are overwhelming.  It’s not a fake news hoax (unless you pretend it is).  Indeed, folks who yank off their blinders can discover a nonstop firehose of heartbreaking stories about floods, furious storms, heat waves, droughts, crop failures, melting glaciers, massive wildfires, and on and on — week after week after week.

Our foolishly unclever culture, hobbled by limited understanding and foresight, has successfully conjured into existence a colossal whirlwind of bad juju.  Eight billion consumers, with their famously big brains, are stampeding down the fast lane to a turbulent blind date with the rough justice of overshoot.  How embarrassing!

Fare Thee Well!

Dearest reader, congratulations!  One way or another, you’ve arrived at the skanky rear end of this word dance.  Pressure is visibly rising around the world, rivets are popping on the Titanic, and the global circus has become a freakshow of wildfires, climate catastrophes, conspiracy theories, religious fanaticism, cocky neofascism, merciless dog-eat-dog greed, berserk cage rage, pathological status seeking, fire-breathing patriarchy, and all-purpose bad craziness.  Something seems to be out of balance.  Like the old Chinese proverb warns, we are living in interesting times.

OK!  I’ve said what I needed to say.  I hope you’ve had some kind of meaningful experience with my literary monsterpiece.  Good luck!  Do your best!

An Innocent Booboo?

Finally, a weird idea.  Kindling the first domestic fire by spinning a fire drill stick was not, in any way, an obvious thing for a wild African primate to do.  The uncomfortable possibility is that maybe just one individual ancestor (a kid?) discovered it purely by accident, and it consequently unleashed two million years of change and catastrophe, and created the global horror show outside your window.  Whoops!  Undo! Undo! Undo!  Shit!

Wild Free and Happy Sample 58

 

[Note: This is the fifty-eighth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

[Continued from Climate Crisis 03 Sample 57]

 

Climate Crisis “Solutions”

Peter Wadhams, the melting Arctic expert, is totally freaked out by the expected impacts of the approaching climate catastrophe.  He notes that there are a number of proposed techno-responses, but none of them provide an effective cure for the nightmare we’ve created.  An effective cure, if there is one, will be something that has not yet been invented. 

Meanwhile, he thought that we should desperately throw all caution to the wind, and do whatever we can that might slightly slow the disaster down a wee bit, until the miracles arrive.  He even suggested building more nuclear power plants.  I disagree.  Let’s take a peek at a few of the proposed “solutions.”

Nuclear Power

Some folks advocate for nuclear energy because reactors emit no greenhouse gases while they operate.  Like solar panels, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams, reactors also have a limited lifespan.  Building new nuke plants requires large quantities of materials that require fossil energy for their production — cement and steel for example.  Like coal and oil, uranium is not a renewable resource.  Like coal and oil, the use of uranium has serious long-term negative impacts. 

If the objective is to reduce current carbon emissions, building numerous new nuke plants is not the most effective approach.  Every power switch has an OFF position.  Satellite photos of the Earth at night reveal tremendous amounts of wasted energy, and this waste is just the tip of the iceberg.  [LOOK]  My grandparents and mother were born in homes without electricity, as were 300,000 years of their ancestors. 

The expiration date for our maximum impact lifestyle is approaching, as we smack into more and more immovable limits.  Even if we immediately and permanently turned OFF industrial civilization, the ice would keep melting, the Arctic would keep warming, the permafrost would keep melting, atmospheric carbon would continue increasing, etc., etc.  Do we need electric cars?  Can we live without cars?

Paul Dorfman pointed out the embarrassing fact that climate change is leading to rising sea levels.  The Greenland ice sheet is approaching a tipping point that would make accelerated melting inevitable.  If miracles don’t rescue us, we’re going to see more coastal and inland flooding.  “With 41 percent of all nuclear plants world-wide operating on the coast, nuclear may prove an important risk.”  May?  At least 100 of these plants are just a few meters above sea level.

“The near-term effect of rising mean sea-levels at coastal nuclear installations will be felt most profoundly during extreme storm conditions when strong winds and low atmospheric pressure bring about a localised increase in sea-level known as a ‘storm surge.’”  Inland plants also face warming-related risks — wildfires, river floods, low river levels.  If river temperatures get too warm, their ability to properly cool reactors is diminished.  Worldwide, more than a half billion people live within 50 miles (80 km) of a nuke plant.

William and Rosemarie Alley wrote the book on nuclear waste storage.  In 2012, the U.S. had generated lots of high-level radioactive wastes — 70,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, and 20,000 giant canisters of military material.  Waste was stored at 121 sites in 39 states.  William worked for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and it was his job to find a secure place to safely store this stuff forever. 

At first, folks thought it would become harmless in 600 years or so.  Eventually, they realized that some of the waste would be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.  It needed to be stored in a geologic repository, in strong deep bedrock that would not collapse if a future ice age put a mile thick ice sheet above it.  It had to be dry, seismically stable, accessible to transport, and inaccessible to terrorists.

After 25 years of research, costing $10 billion, Alley recommended the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, which was as close to perfect as possible.  President Obama got elected, and promptly rejected the site, for political reasons.  President Trump tried to revive the project, but failed.  Now it’s 2021, and there is far more high-level waste sitting around.  The U.S. has 60 nuclear power plants, and there are 443 in the world.  Guess how many nations are using geologic repositories.  Zero.  One in Finland might open in 2023.  People like using electricity, but few fully trust the honesty of corporate interests, and the integrity of their government servants.

Edwin Lyman wrote a 148 page report on the new generation of “advanced” reactors that may be put into commercial use at some point in the future.  He works for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization dedicated to objective analysis.  It is financially and politically independent of the nuclear power industry’s interests.  The industry makes a number of impressive claims about the technological advances of the new reactors.  Lyman has reservations.  Different is not the same as better.  He labels ten claims, including improved safety and security, to be “misleading.”  The report is a free download.  Enjoy!

Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS)

BECCSs was another big idea.  Instead of burning filthy coal, we could grow, gather, and burn lots of “replaceable” biomass fuel — grasses, trees, crop residues, etc.  These fuels would absorb CO₂ as they grew, and then we could burn this renewable resource to make happy green electricity.  The chimney smoke from the burning would be processed to remove the CO₂, which could then be safely stored underground forever in some way.  The technology for capturing the CO₂ is expensive, guzzles lots of energy, and is not yet feasible for full scale deployment.

Net Zero

James Dyke, Robert Watson, and Wolfgang Knorr are three venerable climate science elders who have been watching the clan of eco-wizards contemplate possible solutions to the climate crisis for many years.  They wrote, “It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land.  That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation.” (Land now used to produce food.)

The three lads wrote a fascinating and heartbreaking essay on the elusive goal of net zero emissions.  [HERE]  The climate crisis is a consequence of having way too much CO₂ in the atmosphere, and adding more and more every day.  So, the apparent solution involved extracting the excess CO₂ from the air, while also sharply reducing the rate of current emissions.  The Holy Grail was “net zero” — extracting as much carbon as we emit, creating a healthy balance.  In maybe 30 years of net zero, bye-bye climate crisis, hello happy days!

Until 2021, the three professors kept their opinions to themselves.  The technosphere is a sacred realm of miracles.  Expressing doubts is heresy.  Heresy can rubbish your reputation, and jeopardize future research grants.  They understood that the notion of net zero was daffy — “burn now, pay later.” 

If we plant a bunch of trees, they’ll sequester carbon as they grow, and we can continue living recklessly.  This encourages blind faith in future techno-miracles, and it discourages everyone from making big changes in the here and now.  Consequently, carbon in the atmosphere keeps increasing.  The professors finally came out of the closet, and shared their pain.  Hooray!

Bonnie Waring laments humankind’s hallucination that, with a bit of encouragement, the world’s forests can absorb enough carbon to end the climate crisis.  “But the fact is that there aren’t enough trees in the world to offset society’s carbon emissions — and there never will be.”

Solar Radiation Management (SRM)

The goal of SRM is to artificially increase albedo by frequently dispersing tons reflective substances high in the sky, year after year, forever.  McKenzie Funk wrote about Microsoft billionaire Nathan Myhrvold, who was working on a planet saving miracle.  His StratoShield project would spray 2 to 5 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere every year.  This would make the sunlight one percent dimmer, and enable life as we know it to continue a bit longer, maybe.

While this might deflect some incoming heat, ongoing CO₂ emissions would continue building up in the atmosphere and oceans.  Will vegetation be OK with reduced sunlight?  Will precipitation patterns change?  Apparently the hallucination is that by reducing incoming heat, the Artic would quit melting, and humankind could live happily ever after.  Another variant is cirrus cloud thinning — modifying high-altitude clouds to make them thinner, less of an insulating blanket.  This would allow the planet to release more heat from the atmosphere.

Direct Air Capture (DAC)

Direct air capture (DAC) is an experimental technology that removes CO₂ (but not methane) from the atmosphere.  The captured carbon can be permanently stored in the ground, at significant expense, or sold for commercial uses.  For example, it could be pumped into active oil wells to enhance oil recovery, or converted into a synthetic fuel, or used to carbonate bubbly beverages, etc.

Alister Doyle reported on a radical DAC experiment.  Climeworks, a Swiss business, is developing a DAC facility in Iceland.  Big fans suck in air, the CO₂ is removed, mixed with water to form a mild acid, and then pumped into basaltic rock that is 2,600 to 6,500 feet (800 to 2,000 meters) below ground.  Two years later, 95 percent of what was CO₂ is petrified, turned to stone, where it will safely remain for millions of years.  The basaltic formations suitable for these operations are only found under about 5 percent of the world’s dry land, but more are available underwater. 

This is an energy-intensive process, and Iceland was chosen because it produces cheap and abundant zero carbon geothermal energy.  In 2020, there were 15 DAC plants in operation around the world, capturing more than 9,000 tons of CO₂ per year, which was “the equivalent of the annual emissions of just 600 Americans, each producing about 15 tonnes of climate-changing pollution.”

Robert Hunziker wrote about a DAC plant in the southwest U.S. that will begin operation in 2024.  Powered by natural gas, it will capture one million tons of CO₂ per year.  Meanwhile, worldwide human activities are emitting 4.2 million tons every hour.  In this plant, air is sucked in, CO₂ is extracted by a chemical solution (like potassium hydroxide), more chemicals then transform it into pellets of 50 percent CO₂, the pellets are heated to 900°C, producing a gas that can be stored underground forever.

By building a global system of 100 million of these processing units (as soon as possible), enough CO₂ could be extracted from the air to keep up with global emissions (but not the carbon already in the atmosphere).  Extraction could be done at the bargain price of $330 to $800 per ton.  DAC is not used for high concentration point source emissions, like those from the worlds many cement factories, or biomass power plants.  These operations can use Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) systems.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)

Jorgen Randers believed that the excess carbon in the atmosphere could be successfully extracted by building 33,000 large Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plants, and keeping them running forever.  Permanently storing huge amounts of a gaseous compound is far more challenging than storing gold or diamonds.  Also challenging is finding enormous amounts of money to build 33,000 plants.  CCS was a super-delicious fantasy.  We could keep burning coal, remove the carbon from the smoke, and avoid the dreadful need to sharply cut other forms of carbon emissions.  Not one coal plant got a CCS system.  It was too expensive, and it was not mandatory.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)

CDR is also intended to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.  It uses different methods than DAC.  Plant more trees.  Encourage agriculture to sequester more carbon in the soil.  Restore wetlands.  Spread nutrients on the ocean surface to stimulate blooms of phytoplankton (tiny plants) to increase their intake of CO₂.  One study found that oceanic phytoplankton declined about 40 percent between 1950 and 2008.  The prime suspect is rising surface temperatures.

Geoengineering (Climate Engineering)

Geoengineering is a word used to describe large scale interventions like SRM and CDR.  If one or both turn out to be miraculously successful, humans could, in their wildest dreams, continue burning fossil energy, and living like there’s no tomorrow.  In reality, neither is a proven success, nor cheap, easy, or sustainable.  Both ideas make lots of people nervous, for a wide variety of intelligent reasons, including expense.  Unintended consequences are guaranteed.

Green New Deal (GND)

Every day our minds are blasted with misinformation.  Humans have created a way of life that is so complicated that it’s impossible for anyone to understand more than a tiny bit of it.  Most folks are clueless about sustainability.  This is why U.S. legislators promoting the Green New Deal program are not laughed off the stage.  It sounds like a sweet dream.

The GND became a trendy idea around 2018, but legislation to pursue it was defeated a year later.  Its primary objective was to eliminate global warming by rapidly moving away from fossil energy, and replacing it with clean, green, zero-carbon renewable energy.  Believers shouted with joy and celebration.  It’s not too late.  We can save the world, and still enjoy our modern consumer lifestyle in an advanced society.  Let’s do it!

Mining.com is a news source for the mining industry.  Its editor, Frik Els, praised the efforts of frontline GND proponents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg — “mining’s unlikely heroines.”  Why?  Because the Green New Deal would be a multi-trillion dollar godsend for mining and manufacturing corporations.  The nation’s power system would require massive changes, and lots of new high-tech infrastructure.

Moving from unsustainable fossil energy to unsustainable “carbon-free” energy would require enormous amounts of minerals to make the needed steel, concrete, copper, lithium, silicon, etc.  Mining operations and industrial centers primarily run on fossil energy, not breezes and sunbeams.  Fossil fuel is the primary energy source for making solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, and high capacity batteries. 

These “green” devices have limited lifespans, and must be replaced periodically.  This regular maintenance requires ongoing fossil energy inputs, and carbon emission outputs, until civilization moves off the stage.  Like Siamese twins, industrial civilization and the climate crisis are inseparable components of the same unsustainable monstrosity.

In 2019, Jeff Gibbs produced the documentary Planet of the Humans, which put a spotlight on the GND’s heavy dependence on magical thinking.  Powerful corporate interests are dedicated to keeping consumer society on life support for as long as humanly possible, because it is the engine of their growth and profits.  They generously fund celebrities that preach the GND gospel of a limitless beautiful future, 100% clean energy, net zero emissions, sustainable growth, and jobs, jobs, jobs!

Max Blumenthal described what happened next.  Immediately following the release of Gibbs’ film, a mob of well-known eco-celebrities exploded with bloodthirsty rage, loudly denounced the demonic film, and demanded that it be suppressed.  This explosion of hysterical fury had the unintended consequence of stimulating a tidal wave of publicity for the film.  On YouTube, it got millions of views in a month.  The intense drama also tarnished the reputations of the noisy ultra-righteous (well paid) censors.

In March 2021, Derrick Jensen and team published Bright Green Lies, and Julia Barnes released the Bright Green Lies documentary, based on that book.  Having learned their embarrassing lesson, celebrity critics largely took this as an opportunity to quietly go fishing in North Dakota.  Both the Planet of the Humans and Bright Green Lies devoted significant effort to describing the dodgy performance of mainstream environmentalism, and its big money supporters. 

In May 2021, Alice Friedemann published Life After Fossil Fuels, which filled in important missing pieces.  She didn’t spank eco-celebrities, or provide a “solutions” chapter.  She directed her full attention to simply explaining, in great detail, exactly why the bright green vision was irrational, impossible, nonsensical, and unaffordable (the inconvenient truth).  Her readers are better able to see through the fog of misinformation, and keep both feet firmly planted in reality, where they belong. 

Climate Sources

Alley, William M. and Rosemarie Alley, Too Hot to Touch, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013.  [REVIEW]

Andreassen, Karin, “Massive blow-out craters formed by hydrate-controlled methane expulsion from the Arctic seafloor,” Science, June 2017.  [LINK]

Anthony, Katey Walter, et al., “21st century modeled permafrost...,” Nature Communications, August 15, 2018.  [LINK]

Barnes, Julia, Bright Green Lies, Oceanic Productions, 2021. [LINK]

Bazilchuk, Nancy, “Giant gas craters discovered at the bottom of the Barents Sea,” sciencenorway.no, October 5, 2018.  [LINK]

BBC Newsround, “What are ‘zombie fires’ and why is the Arctic Circle on fire?” May 20, 2021.  [LINK]

Blumenthal, Max, “‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary,” The Gray Zone, September 7, 2020.  [LINK]

Cartier, Kimberly M. S., “Climate Change Uproots Global Agriculture,” Eos, January 25, 2021.  [LINK]

Cribb, Julian, The Coming Famine, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010.  [REVIEW]

Davis, Mike, Late Victorian Holocausts, Verso, New York, 2001.  [LINK]

Di Liberto, Tom, “Changes in ENSO impacts in a warming world,” NOAA, Climate.gov, September 27, 2018.  [LINK]

Dorfman, Paul, “When climate breakdown goes nuclear,” Ecologist, July 14, 2021.  [LINK]

Doyle, Alister, “Iceland is sucking carbon dioxide from the air and turning it into rock,” Thompson Reuters Foundation, February 4, 2021.  [LINK]

Duffy, Katharyn, et al, “How close are we to the temperature tipping point of the terrestrial biosphere?” ScienceAdvances, January 13, 2021.  [LINK]

Dutkiewicz, Stephanie, et al., “Impact of ocean acidification on the structure of future phytoplankton communities,” Nature Climate Change, July 20, 2015.  [LINK]

Dyke, James, et al., “Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap,” The Conversation, April 22, 2021.  [LINK]

Ehrlich, Paul and John Harte, “Pessimism on the Food Front,” Sustainability, MDPI, April 9, 2018.  [LINK]

Els, Frik, “Mining’s unlikely heroines: Greta Thunberg and AOC,” Mining[dot]Com, October 30, 2019.  [LINK]

Flis, Andrej, “An unusual Ocean anomaly is being detected in the Gulf Stream…,” Severe Weather Europe, February 14, 2021.  [LINK]

Farquharson, Louise, et al., “Climate Change Drives Widespread and Rapid Thermokarst Development in Very Cold Permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic,” Geophysical Research Letters, June 10, 2019.  [LINK]

Fox-Skelly, Jasmin, “What is the hottest temperature life can survive?” BBC Earth, February 10, 2016.  [LINK]

Friedemann, Alice, Life After Fossil Fuels, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2021.  [REVIEW]

Funk, McKenzie, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, Penguin Press, New York, 2014.  [LINK]

Ghosh, Sahana, “A drying Ganga could stall food security and prevent achieving SDGs,” Mongabay-India, September 13, 2018.  [LINK]

Gibbs, Jeff, Planet of the Humans, Huron Mountain Films, 2019.  [LINK]

Giger, Peter, “Climate change will be sudden and cataclysmic.  We need to act fast,” World Economic Forum, January 19, 2021.  [LINK]

Gowdy, John, “Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization,” Science Direct, Futures 115 (2020) 102488. [LINK]

Gray, Richard, “The mystery of Siberia’s exploding craters,” BBC, November 30, 2020.  [LINK]

Halweil, Brian, “The Irony of Climate,” World Watch, March/April 2005.  [LINK]

Hatfield, Jerry L., and John H. Prueger, “Temperature Extremes: Effect on Plant Growth and Development,” Weather and Climate Extremes, 10 (2015) 4-10. [LINK]

Hunziker, Robert, “Boundless Dying Trees,” Counterpunch, September 29, 2020.  [LINK]

Hunziker, Robert, “Direct Air Capture and Big Oil,” Counterpunch, March 12, 2021.  [LINK]

Hunziker, Robert, “Menacing Methane: An Analysis,” Counterpunch, December 12, 2020.  [LINK]

Jamail, Dahr, The End of Ice, The New Press, New York, 2019.  [REVIEW]

Johnson, Doug, “Ecological impacts of solar geoengineering are highly uncertain,” Ars Technica, April 11, 2021.  [LINK]

Jensen, Derrick, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies, Monkfish Publishing, Rhinebeck, New York, 2021.  [REVIEW]

Jones, Nicola, “How Climate Change Could Jam the World’s Ocean Circulation,” Yale Environment 360, September 6, 2016.  [LINK]

Katz, Cheryl, “How Long Can Oceans Continue To Absorb Earth’s Excess Heat?” Yale Environment 360, March 30, 2015.  [LINK]

Katz, Cheryl, “Why Rising Acidification Poses a Special Peril for Warming Arctic Waters,” Yale Environment 360, October 24, 2019.  [LINK]

Kentish, Portia, “Melting permafrost is a threat not just to the Arctic, but to the entire planet,” Emerging Europe, August 26, 2020.  [LINK]

Koirala, Santosh, “Rice paddies raise methane threat,” Climate News Network, September 10, 2016.  [LINK]

Kritee, Kritee, et al., “High nitrous oxide fluxes from rice indicate the need to manage water for both long- and short-term climate impacts,” PNAS, September 25, 2018.  [LINK]

Lamb, Evelyn, “Should We Eat Less Rice?” Scientific American, August 21, 2019.  [LINK]

Lancet, “The 2020 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: responding to converging crises,” Institute for Global Health, January 9, 2021.  [LINK]

Larsen, Janet, “Setting the Record Straight: More than 52,000 Europeans Died from Heat in Summer 2003,” Plan B Updates, Earth Policy Institute, July 28, 2006.  [LINK]

Lenton, Timothy, et al., “Climate tipping points: too risky to bet against,” Nature, November 28, 2019, Vol 575.  [LINK]

Lenton, Timothy, et al., “Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system,” PNAS, February 12, 2008.  [LINK]

Lewis, Matthew, "When Will It Get Too Hot for the Body to Survive?" Slate, July 26, 2021.  [LINK]

Liesowska, Anna, “Giant new 50-metre deep 'crater' opens up in Arctic tundra,” Siberian Times, August 29, 2020.  [LINK] 

Limburg, Karin, et al., “Ocean Deoxygenation: A Primer,” One Earth, January 24, 2020.  [LINK]

Luo, Qunying, “Temperature thresholds and crop production: A review,” Climate Change, December 2011.   [LINK]

Lyman, Edwin, “Advanced Isn’t Always Better,” Union of Concerned Scientists, March 2021.  [LINK]

Mann, Michael, The New Climate War, Public Affairs, New York, 2021.

Markings, Samuel, “The Effect of Temperature on the Rate of Photosynthesis,” sciencing.com, March 9, 2018.  [LINK] 

McDowell, Nate, et al., “Pervasive shifts in forest dynamics in a changing world,” Science, 29 May 2020.  [LINK]

McFall-Johnsen, Morgan, “Greenland's ice is melting at the rate scientists thought would be our worst-case scenario in 2070,” Business Insider, August 14, 2019.  [LINK]

McNeill, J. R., and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, Belknap Press of Harvard, Cambridge, 2014.

Monbiot, George, “Mass starvation is humanity’s fate if we keep flogging the land to death,” The Guardian, December 11, 2017.  [LINK]

Natali, Susan, “Losing Frozen Earth Could Cook the Planet,” Living on Earth, June 12, 2015.  [LINK]

Pearce, Fred, “As Climate Change Worsens, A Cascade of Tipping Points Looms,” Yale Environment 360, December 5, 2019.  [LINK]

Pearce, Fred, “Why Clouds Are the Key to New Troubling Projections on Warming,” Yale Environment 360, February 5, 2020.  [LINK]

Ortega, Rodrigo Pérez, “Trees Are Growing Fast and Dying Young Due to Climate Change.” Smithsonian, September 16, 2020.  [LINK]

Pleitgen, Frederick, et al., “The Middle East is running out of water…” CNN, August 22, 2021.  [LINK]

Randers, Jorgen and Ulrich Goluke, “An earth system model shows self-sustained melting of permafrost even if all man-made GHG emissions stop in 2020,” Scientific Reports, (2020) 10:18456  [LINK]

Ranganathan, Janet, et al., “Shifting Diets for a Sustainable Food Future,” World Resources Institute, Washington D.C., 2016.  [LINK]

Robbins, Jim, “The West’s Great River Hits Its Limits: Will the Colorado Run Dry?” Yale Environment 360, January 14, 2019.  [LINK]

Robine, Jean-Marie, et al., “Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003,” Comptes Rendus Biologies, February 2008.  [LINK]

Santora, Tara, “What's the hottest temperature the human body can endure?” Live Science, July 31, 2021.  [LINK]

Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report, U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, D.C., 2018.  [LINK]

Seibert, Megan, and William Rees, “Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition,” Energies, MDPI, July 26, 2021.  [LINK]

Shivaram, Deepa, “Heat Wave Killed An Estimated 1 Billion Sea Creatures,” NPR, July 9, 2021.  [LINK]

Siberian Times, “’Big bang’ and ‘pillar of fire’ as latest of two new craters forms this week in the Arctic,” Siberian Times, July 2, 2017.  [LINK]

Smith, Tierney, “Warming oceans face CO₂ tipping point,” Climate Change News, January 24, 2012.  [LINK]

Steffen, Will, et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” PNAS, August 14, 2018.  [LINK]

Struzik, Ed, “How Thawing Permafrost Is Beginning to Transform the Arctic,” Yale Environment 360, January 21, 2020.  [LINK]

Sukhova, Valeria, and Olga Gertcyk, “Bubbling methane craters and super seeps: is this the worrying new face of the undersea Arctic?” Siberian Times, November 19, 2020.  [LINK]

Sullivan, Cody and Rebecca Lindsey, “2017 State of the climate: Ocean uptake of human-produced carbon,” NOAA Climate.gov, August 1, 2018.  [LINK]

Tnau Agritech Portal, “Agrometeorology: Temperature and Plant Growth,” 2016.  [LINK]

U.S. Geological Survey, Thermokarst and Thaw-Related Landscape Dynamics, Reston, Virginia, 2013.  [LINK]

Waage, Malin, et al., “Geological controls of giant crater development on the Arctic seafloor,” Scientific Reports, May 21, 2020.  [LINK]

Wadhams, Peter, A Farewell to Ice, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017.  [REVIEW].

Wadhams, Peter, “The Global Impacts of Rapidly Disappearing Arctic Sea Ice,” Yale Environment 360, September 26, 2016.  [LINK]

Wahid, Abdul, et al., “Heat Tolerance in Plants: An Overview,” Environmental and Experimental Botany 61 (2007) p. 199-223.  [LINK] 

Wagner, David, et al., “Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts,” PNAS, January 12, 2021.  [LINK]

Wallace-Wells, David, The Uninhabitable Earth, Tim Duggan Books, New York 2019.  The shorter 2017 version is [HERE]

Waring, Bonnie, “There aren’t enough trees in the world to offset society’s carbon emissions — and there never will be,” The Conversation, April 23, 2021.  [LINK]

Welch, Craig, “Artic permafrost is thawing fast. That affects us all,” National Geographic, September 2019.  [LINK]

Witze, Alexandra, “The Arctic is burning like never before,” nature.com, September 10, 2020.  [LINK]

Wohlleben, Peter, The Hidden Life of Trees, Greystone Books, Berkeley, 2016.  [REVIEW]

Woody, Todd, “To save our oceans, we have to change what we do on land,” Grist, September 25, 2019.  [LINK]

Surviving the 21st Century



In the old Three Stooges comedies, whenever Curly did something dumb, angry Moe gave him a dope slap (SMACK!).  With regard to humankind’s war on the future, a number of thinkers have been inspired to write passionate dope slap books, including Man and Nature (1864), Conservation of Natural Resources (1910), Checking the Waste (1911), Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913).  Dope slap books are a two-step: (1) describe the terrible growing harms, and (2) provide a motivating pep talk loaded with rational solutions — based on the assumption that the society is rational.

In the last 30 years, a tsunami of dope slap books have flooded the market.  The latest comes from Australian science writer Julian Cribb, Surviving the 21st Century.  He does a great job of providing a competent and sobering introduction to ecological reality in 2017 — vital knowledge that every 16-year old (and their teachers) should know (but don’t).  He’s good at explaining complex challenges in an understandable way.

The book has ten chapters, each discussing a category of serious risks.  (1) Dangerous overconfidence in human brilliance.  (2) Mass extinctions.  (3) Degrading the planet.  (4) Industrial warfare.  (5) Climate change.  (6) Pollution.  (7) Feeding an overgrown herd.  (8) Urban growth and disease.  (9) Moronic beliefs that trump scientific facts.  (10) It’s time for action — think like a species.

Humankind’s current mass hysteria has an oxymoronic name, Sustainable Growth™, and its destination is oblivion.  We are going to be slamming head-on, at high speed, into crucial limits — a magnificently irrational course of action.  Cribb prefers a mindful Plan B, a gradual, managed, and cooperative path to a slower, simpler, far less crowded future.

All humans have a hardcore addiction to food.  In his 2010 book, The Coming Famine (reviewed HERE), Cribb described the enormous degradation caused by feeding an ever growing population, and presented readers with many rational suggestions.  In the following seven years, the naughty world largely disregarded his recommendations.

In this new book, Cribb dreams of miraculously doubling food production, and feeding the growing mob until we hit Peak People, at ten or twelve billion, in 2060.  All nations will heroically cooperate in rapidly making many rational (and extremely radical) changes, we’ll avoid total catastrophe, and proceed with a bumpy but tolerable decline to a sustainable population of somewhere between two and four billion by 2100.  That’s a big dream.

Is it really possible to feed ten billion?  Readers learn that there are no new plant breeding miracles on the horizon.  In the 1960s, the Green Revolution research had noble intentions — temporarily boost food production, so humankind would have an extra ten years to resolve its embarrassing orgy of overbreeding.  It was a beautiful dream.  Food production actually doubled.  Unfortunately, the population problem was swept under the bed, and the human herd more than doubled, intensifying the original problem.

Hopium addicts have no doubt that the wizards of science will save the day.  GMO plants have been a stunning success at boosting the sales of toxic agrochemicals, but they have had minimal impact on harvest volumes.  The current rate at which we are depleting underground aquifers, and other freshwater resources, is going to crash into limits before 2030.  Destruction of the planet’s remaining topsoil continues at an impressive rate.  Food production trends are not encouraging.

“Outside of a nuclear war or asteroid collision, the biggest shock in store for the human population in the 21st Century will be the impact of climate change on the food supply.”  Luckily, readers discover a plan for doubling food production by solving big problems.  We’ll create a new form of agriculture that can survive in an unstable climate, produce lots of excellent food, and do so sustainably — without using a spoonful of fossil fuel!  We’ll make sustainable oil from algae.

The required inputs for algae farms are sunshine, salt water, and urban wastes.  “Algal oil… can be made into anything you can make from fossil petroleum — ‘green’ fuel, plastics, textiles, chemicals, drugs, food additives.  Furthermore, researchers have calculated, algae could supply the world’s entire transport fuel requirement from an area of 57 million hectares — which is a bit smaller than Switzerland — and can mostly be in the ocean in any case.”

Belief is the subject of the fascinating chapter nine, and something I’ve thought a lot about.  Belief may very well be the biggest threat to the survival of our species, worse than all the other threats combined.  Even the most ridiculous, insanely stupid, self-destructive beliefs can be highly contagious, readily passing from one generation to the next, fully resistant to reason, common sense, or factual reality.  Belief trumps reason.

Belief insists that human-caused climate change is impossible.  Humans do not share common ancestors with chimps and baboons.  Technology can solve any problem.  Perpetual growth is possible on a finite planet.  Good consumers must gain respect and honor by devoting their lives to working hard (at soul killing jobs), recklessly borrowing, impulsively spending, proudly hoarding trendy status trinkets, and promptly discarding trinkets the moment they cease being trendy.

Cribb believes that foresight is our ultimate skill, enabling us to perceive potential dangers, avoid them, and survive.  Wild humans, intimately attuned to the complex patterns of their ecosystem, excelled at foresight.  We don’t.  We are cursed to inhabit an industrial culture that mutates at a furious rate.  New technologies are often obsolete in five or ten years.  We can never become intimately attuned to something similar to a high-speed runaway train.

We’re trapped in a cycle of repeated mistakes, perpetually erecting new empires, watching them self-destruct, and never learning.  We’ve installed at least 440 nuclear power plants before we’ve built a single facility for safely storing the radioactive wastes that can remain highly toxic for a million years.  Nobody had the foresight to predict the staggering consequences of the Ford Model T, or the microchip, or metal smelting.  Hey, let’s colonize other planets!

Crusty old farts like myself, who have been reading dope slap books for 30 years, and observing how little they inspire society, no longer shout and cheer when the latest vision rolls by.  Cribb does an excellent job describing the challenges.  His grand vision requires humankind to undergo an amazing transformation, from the pathetic dullard Homo delusus (self-deceiving human) into the new, wise, and beautiful Homo sapiens (wise human).

Cribb has no doubt that “solutions to all of these challenges exist or can be developed.”  Today, essential information can be instantly shared with people everywhere in the world.  Scientific knowledge grows exponentially every decade.  Intelligent change is entirely possible!  Around the world, young women are having fewer children — voluntarily!  We are not obligated to commit mass suicide.

Understand that this is a textbook for college students.  Universities are monasteries that instruct the next generation in the management of Sustainable Growth™.  They require textbooks that reinforce the loony beliefs of the hopeless Homo delusus.  Cribb makes a heroic effort to tap-dance across a ballroom where the entire floor is covered with greased marbles.  It’s obvious that he is acutely aware of the growing challenges of reality (which are heretical nonsense at the monastery).  He knows that the young novices are likely to learn little or nothing about these challenges — unless he cleverly sneaks them into a gospel that appears to be orthodox.

Today’s novices are 100 times smarter than slobbering geezers over 30.  They are acutely aware that they have inherited a catastrophe.  They don’t need a dope slap.  They know that transforming all of nature into toxic landfill dreck is insane.  Hopefully, Cribb’s book will help the novices bombard the abbots with high-powered questions, and encourage our species to shift toward becoming Homo sapiens.  Good luck!

Cribb, Julian, Surviving the 21st Century: Humanity’s Ten Great Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them, Springer International Publishing, Switzerland, 2017.