Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Environment Page 2 of 14

Permafrost Tipping Point Almost Certainly Reached

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On July 11, 2023

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As regular readers will know, for a long time I’ve emphasized what are now being called tipping points, and in particular the tipping point where permafrost melt becomes self sustaining. As a matter of politics, I’ve been quite sure this would occur, since we aren’t likely to do anything about it.

One model shows that the tipping point is already past. If we were to stop all emissions today, it would still happen and temperatures would still rise.

It’s possible this model is wrong on the margins, but I’d be rather surprised if it’s wrong on the fundamentals. The danger has always been passing the point where humanity was in the driver’s seat. We started global warming climate change, but we can no longer stop it short of, perhaps, some hail-mary geo-engineering.

Back in 2009 I said that runaway climate change was a sure thing, not because I thought then that the tipping point had been reached, but because it was clear that we were close to the tipping point and that politicians were not going to take action. I considered the 2008 election the last chance, Obama was elected and he was a disaster: not only didn’t he take the action needed, he vastly increased fracking, something he is very proud of, having said “that was me!”

Let’s run quickly thru what this means.

Water shortages in large areas of the world. We’ve depleted and poisoned the aquifers too. This is going to be ugly: most of the American southwest, large chunks of China and India, huge areas of Africa, and more. I’ve written about this many times, this is a 100% certainty.

Actual Famines. Right now we produce way more food than we need. We won’t continue doing so. The first famines will be distributional famines, but by 2050-60 at the latest there will be real subcontinental scarcity famines. Obesity isn’t going to be an issue for much longer, maybe 20 years.

Massive Refugee Crises. Like nothing we’ve every seen. Borders will be SHUT and refugees will be shot. I figure the best candidate for the first one that involves tens of millions of refugees in a short period is Bangladesh/India. And I give 50/50 odds the Indians will shoot a lot of them.

Supply Chain Cascade Failures. We’re already seeing this. We’re past the tipping point on economic collapse as well, though it will be quite uneven. My favorite current failure is that there’s a shortage of Siracha hot sauce, and there’s nothing that can be done about it because there aren’t enough materials to make it with.

This issue has a lot more causes than climate change, but climate change doesn’t help.

Ecological Collapse. The birds, the bees, the insects: they’re all dying and when their populations collapse, we’re going to be in a world of hurt. This is why I usually say “climate change and environmental collapse.” Some of this stuff is really scary, like the possibility of a collapse of the phytoplankton in the ocean which produce about 30% of our annual oxygen.

Large Chunks of the World Being To Hot To Live In. Yeah, sorry. At first it’ll just be in the summer, but in time it’ll be most of the year.

Will Spain, northern Africa and the southern Med even be inhabitable in the summer in ten to twenty years? The only solution would appear to be a ton of solar and/or nuclear and a lot of air conditioning, but you can’t farm in these temperatures, heck this is approaching wet bulb death temperatures.

Riots, Revolutions, Warlordism, etc… Yeah, sorry, when the famines and no water and heat and so on get bad, people will not sit there and just die and countries will break up. I would expect, in about 30 years or so, for half the world’s countries to be essentially descended into warlordism. In fifty years, 70% or so.

All of this was preventable, we knew in time and knew what to do and did not do any of it.

As a species we are responsible, but the people who are most responsible have names and addresses. One of the requirements of handling climate change and ecological collapse in the best way will be to remove them all from power, take everything they have, and throw them in prison for the remainder of their lives. They can be permitted to have no power and everyone must understand see that they did not benefit from their evil.

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Utilities As Mutual Companies

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On July 3, 2023

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One of the big constant news stories recently has been about UK water utilities constantly flushing untreated sewage into the rivers and oceans near the UK, while raising prices, paying huge salaries to their executives and massive dividends. One solution is to take them back into public ownership.

But another possibility is to make the mutual companies. I worked for a mutual insurance company for a while, and helped it de-mutualize, at which point its prices went up, employees were treated worse, executives made more money and so on.

In a mutual companies, customers own the company. Dividends are paid to the customers. Prices tend to be lower than in stock companies (there’s plenty of research on this), employees are treated well and executives make less. Since customers own the company, they have a say in what the company does, and since customers of, say, water companies wouldn’t want sewage in the water or forest fires (for electrical companies like California’s PG&E) they might prove better for environmental concerns and also for customer service. Also a lot less likely to get situations where the customers water is full of lead and other pollutants.

There used to be a lot of mutual companies, but most of the de-mutualized because executives wanted to pay themselves more, especially thru stock grants and so on, but if a law was put in place that utilities and other public companies like railways and public transit are either public or mutual and can’t be stock companies, that might cure a lot of problems, especially if the owners(customers) have to approve executive salaries.

Worth a try, at any rate, though I’m aware of the political problems.

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And He Said To Me “We’re all going to die, and heaven knows we deserve to”

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On June 12, 2023

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That’s what a friend wrote to me when he sent me the story attached to that picture.

“A cleanup is underway as an unquantifiable amount of dead fish washed ashore on several Texas beaches today due to low oxygen levels in the water, according to a Quintana Beach County Park Official.”

Yeah. Now this isn’t just a climate change thing, nor is this the first time it’s happened, but warm water holds less oxygen and also reduces the number of oxygen producing phytoplankton. Red Tides (algal blooms which deplete oxygen) are also made more common by climate change.

So, there are two things to say about this.

First: the probability that all humans will die is low. Not zero or effectively zero though I know some smart people who think that’s true. They argue “the Earth has had this much carbon/heat before and there was life, it’ll suck, but whatever.” Well, yeah, but not while humans were around.

What it really is is about is an assumption that the next equilibrium point (from the one we’ve inhabited for about 10K years) is a livable one, and that we won’t blow thru it and others and settle at one which is not livable, or more accurately, which we cannot adapt to in time to avoid an extinction spiral.

It is also true that the problem is NOT just carbon, it is ecological collapse. Human are apex predators. If we take out the web beneath us, we are the ones most vulnerable.

This is probably true. It is not certainly true.

Second: Just Because Human Life Will Probably Go On, Doesn’t Mean Yours Will. Or, y’know, the life of anybody you care about. Always true, but more true in mass death scenarios. Nor does it mean your life will not really, really, suck.

Well, there’s your Monday cheer for you!

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Declining Birth Rates Are Good & Bad

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On April 4, 2023

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So, there’s constant talk about the problem of declining birth rates and how much of a problem they are. There’s some truth to this, but a lot of it is based on the argument that more people lead to growing economies and that argument is terrible. The part that is reasonable is the rising increase in infertility, including plummeting sperm counts. That’s not bad because it leads to less children, precisely, it’s because it indicates how badly we’ve poisoned ourselves.

But the simple fact of the matter is that the world is well past its carrying capacity for the type of society we have. The Club of Rome predictions from 1968 have almost all tracked the real world, and we’re just past the hump: we’re into decline, but barely.

Notice that population decline happens about 30 years after the peak of food, industrial and services per capita. That’s bad and it’s part of what is going to make this so ugly. Check out the food per capita line for some real ugliness, though there’s going to be a lot less fat people.

Note that carrying capacity is not purely about population. Different global societies have different carrying capacities per capita. If we had not gone with planned obsolescence (there was a fight over near the end of the 19th century, managers vs. engineers and the engineers lost); if we did not have suburbs and exurbs but only urban, rural and wilderness; and if we had seriously started our transition from fossil fuels in the 80s instead of electing Thatcher and Reagan, our carrying cost would be much less and the world could support a much higher population. But under current circumstances, the world maximum population is probably about two billion, and once climate change runs amok it will be less.

So our population is going to reduce. It’s not “we have to reduce our population” it is “we are animals who exceeded the carrying capacity of our environment and our population IS going to drop, whether we like it or not.” That’s going to suck.

There was a window to avoid this. It is a result of our own decisions: to go with planned obsolescence, to have suburbs and massive numbers of cars, to pollute like maniacs, to destroy the forests and the swamps and the jungles, to not transition away from fossil fuels and dozens of decisions based on greed and “I won’t be here when it gets bad, so who cares?”

As for economies, high dependency rations (fewer working age people supporting people who can’t work) will be a drag. But because we have legitimately already overshot carrying capacity and because of resource and sink constraints (sinks is where we put our pollution, like CO2 and methane) reduced overall population is going to be more good than bad.

How much population will be lost is, in some sense, up to us. We left doing all the right things too late to avoid this, but the faster we transition to societies built around not exceeding planetary limits and working with and for the environment, the less people will die.

But even in a very optimistic scenario I have trouble seeing our population not winding up down two to three billion.

It is what we, as a species, chose through our decisions. That doesn’t mean you or I chose, we mostly didn’t, but at the species level, our decisions lead here.

It is what it is, and it will be what it will be.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The First Great Environmental Crisis Will Be

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On March 21, 2023

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Water. As I’ve said for many years.

The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40 percent by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit.

I’ll use the US as an example, though this going to effect almost all countries, some much worse than others, and it will cause a number of wars. Candidates include all nations along the Nile River, and all nations around the Himalayan plateau, among many others. The US may threaten war with Canada to get Canada’s water resources and may invade if Canada is recalcitrant. The Great Lakes will be a great problem.

But let’s take a look at the (more or less) current situation. These are the 2015 numbers for fresh water withdrawals (numbers are done every 5 years, but I, at least, can’t find the 2020 numbers. There won’t be a dramatic change, however.)

The first thing we notice is that electricity generation and agriculture, for crops, no animals, are the big users. Public supply is a distant third with industrial an even more distant fourth.

How is this historically? The news is mostly good, except in irrigation:

But the irrigation news is bad. It’s only a 2% increase, but…

Not every sector posted declines, though. Fresh groundwater withdrawals increased by 8 percent compared to 2010. And irrigation increased by 2 percent.

Again, the California drought effect is to blame. Irrigation accounts for 70 percent of fresh groundwater withdrawals. Rivers and reservoirs were so depleted during the drought that California farmers pumped and pumped from aquifers. Fresh groundwater withdrawals in California for irrigation increased by 60 percent, while surface water withdrawals for irrigation in the state decreased by 64 percent.

Withdrawing from groundwater means that there’s not enough rain. The long California drought, finally broken this year, but very likely to return, leads to taking more water from aquifers than can be recharged and damages aquifers so that their maximum capacity is permanently reduced.

Let’s flip back to energy generation. Thermoelectric means coal and gas and oil turbines, mostly. There is a general move away, but not quickly enough.

That’s the new generation added, here’s the retired.

Notice that the natural gas added (9.31) is almost equal to the natural gas and coal removed (9.51). Natural gas uses less water than coal, but still plenty.

The pace of reduction of use of water needs to increase significantly. Solar, while it doesn’t use water for generation does use a lot of water in construction, so wind is preferable from this point of view, with the standard issue of difficulty in supplying baseline energy, since the wind is rarely completely reliable.

There are solutions in many places. California is a huge water problem in the US, but desalinization could provide much of the solution since California is on the coast. I’ll do a full article on that later, but despite high costs, large scale desalinization is possible especially if it done using tidal power and not thermoelectric.

And tidal power is one of the most promising new powers. Wind and solar are unsuited for steady baseline generation, but in places close to the ocean, the waves are constant. For example:

As a newer technology this is still expensive, but moving to scale would reduce costs significantly. It’s 24 hour, though there’s variation in energy generation due to tidal cycles, it’s obviously renewable and it doesn’t use up water during generation, while it doesn’t have nuclear’s downides.

The great problem with desalinization is simply getting it from the shore inland. Depending on geography that may be doable, or not, but great waterworks programs were done in the 18th and 19th century, and much is possible.

Still, as with everything else, we needed to moving on solutions 20 years, or more, ago, and that means solutions aren’tgoing to be ready at the necessary scale in time.

One thing to take from all this, however, is that your person water use isn’t all that important. This doesn’t mean some ridiculous usages shouldn’t end: lawns should be illegal anywhere that doesn’t have enough yearlong rainfall to support them without watering, for example, but taking a shower isn’t going to kill the budget. And as for agriculture, while we can increase water thru desalinization, California growing mass crops of almonds, notoriously water-thirsty, is and always has been ridiculous. Switching to crops that need less water is a no-brainer, though it may require price supports and agricultural market restructuring.

But let’s take it as a given that there’s going to be a worldwide freshwater crisis. Even with use reductions and desalinization, rivers that are fed by glaciers and snowpacks are going to experience a decline and some will stop existing entirely. This will effect all the countries around the Himalayas, all the glacier fed rivers of North and South America, water outflow from the Corderillas, etc, etc…

At first, in most cases, there will be an increase in water, because of faster glacier melt and old snowpacks which have been essentially permanent melting. Then there will be a long term decrease, which will not be reversed without some form of global cooling, which will probably require geo-engineering.

On the bright side, increased warming will, globally, likely increase rainfall, but that doesn’t mean it will increase rainfall where you are or where crops are, and the general prospect for growing crops under global warming scenarios is dismal, except in certain farther north and south areas. Overall, however, the gains will be vastly outstripped by the losses and if we see, for example, problems with any of the great monsoons, the effects will be catrastrophic.

This will be exacerbated by the fact that aquifers worldwide have been massively depleted and the depletion continues. This is as true in India and China as it is in the US. Entire regions which rely on groundwater will collapse.

A water crisis thus feeds directly into a food cris.

As an individual there are solutions. Rainwater collection, condensers, creating your own storage spaces (common in the 20th century but illegal in most municipalities today) and so on. These will be made more difficult because of widespread pollution. It’s no longer safe, for the first time in human history, to just drink rain-water, for example and figuring out how to make the water you collect safe will be a major issue.

But you should consider doing some research on this (and I will likely revisit it with more details). You can survive 30 to 40 days or even more without food. Without water you die quick.

And, politically speaking, any country or region where the water is privately owned needs to move to public ownership.

If you think food riots are bad, water-riots will be worse and quite justifiably so.

The future is getting very close to being today.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

I’m Just Embarrassed For Humanity At This Point

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On February 3, 2023

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I was thinking today about China giving up on Zero Covid. They were responding to significant public protests. The CCP isn’t democratic by our standards, but they actually care a great deal about public opinion, especially “expressed” public opinion.

What’s embarrassing, however, is the failure to spend the two years Zero-Covid bought fixing infrastructure. We know, at this point, that ventilation, HEPA filtering and UV radiation work. (This is what the rich gave themselves at Davos, so don’t waste anyone’s time arguing.)

There was a time, basically in the Victorian era, where we rebuilt all of the water infrastructure because we had finally got it thru our thick skulls that disease spread thru water. We did it, and it made a huge difference.

I think particularly of China because no other major country even really tried. China had the time, and they have the industrial resources to do what is necessary (also, refit buildings with water traps, those little u-bends you see  under your sink or by your toilet.) They’re the largest manufacturing nation in the world, and they had spare housing workers hanging around.

Clean the air flow in buildings. Even just putting a HEPA filter in a classroom, without any other changes, drops Covid massively.

Now, this is a symptom of a larger problem. We have known about climate change for decades. The science was clear and known to the educated public by the late 70s, before there was a huge push for climate denialism backed by big money. There were some obvious easy solutions that amounted to “change infrastructure to use less energy.” Every building in developed country could have been made to use vastly less energy, and since we had an unemployment crisis combined with an energy crisis, it would have been the obvious right thing to do. Instead we did demand restriction through wage suppression, which had the side-benefit of making the rich a lot richer.

It has remained the right thing to do for decades. AOC’s New Green Deal is just a version of what everyone with sense has known needed to be done. I put out a similar plan first in the early 2000s at BOPNews, but I was nowhere near the first.

This is just embarrassing. We know what’s wrong, we know how to do some of the major steps required to fix it and we don’t do anything. Zero Covid was, on top of that run incompetently (but China gets points for at least trying till they gave up.)

Embarrassing. I’m just embarrassed for our leadership, who are psychopathic morons, even the ones who sometimes try to do the right thing, and I’m embarrassed or humanity, given how human social dynamics lead to such terrible leadership, over and over. Periods with competent leadership are rare, those where the leadership is both competent and non-psychopathic rarer still (in the US, this period in the 20th century arguably only exists for the period where FDR was in charge, and was marred even then by the sad fact that he was racist, particularly against Japanese (ironically because he liked the Chinese.) Truman, despite his good reputation, was a disaster.)

But this is a human problem which has gone on for about eight thousand years, and maybe longer.

The entire shit-show is just embarrassing and pathetic.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Some Good Covid News From France

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On January 5, 2023

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They are going to put CO2 monitors in all classrooms, with a limit of 800ppm.

This sort of thing is what has  needed to be done for a long time now. We need to clean up our air the way we did our water to get rid of waterborne diseases. Aggressive ventilation, filtration and UV (with ozone detectors to make sure it isn’t too much) should be standard in all buildings.

As a plus, as CO2 rises due to climate change, we’ll know how bad it is. Leaving aside pathogens, CO2 is toxic. One of the larger problems we have, but fail to acknowledge is also the reduction in oxygen content in cities and buildings, which is also bad for us. Were I rich, I’d have a positive pressure house built with filtration, CO2 monitors and scrubbers, and oxygen concentrators and O2 monitors. (Positive pressure is more than doable. The SciFi author Robert A. Heinlein created one back in the 50s.)

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Water monitoring and filtration/purificiation in all houses would also be wise. For the first time in history, rainwater is no longer safe to drink.

Generally speaking the world is going to become a lot more variable: forest fires, droughts, pollution and erratic weather. The US just got hit by a huge massively cold winter storm, meanwhile Europe had a heatwave in January. We need to prepare.

 

It’s Not Just About Climate Change, It’s About Ecological Collapse

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On December 21, 2022

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Earthworm Edition:

…they estimated a decline in earthworm abundance of between 33% and 41% in the last quarter of a century, the period for which the best data was available…

Dr Matt Shardlow, of the charity Buglife, said earthworms were essential to healthy soils and productive ecosystems and the decline in UK earthworm populations – at a rate of about 15% per decade since 1960 – was “deeply alarming”.

“Devastated earthworm populations in arable soils are to be expected due to the widespread use of toxic pesticides,” he said. “But declines in broadleaved woodlands and pasture indicate that climate change and growing levels of animal-wormer pollution in soils are likely to be also driving this insidious facet of biodiversity loss.”

This always gets called “biodiversity loss”, but if you lose key species, you can have ecological collapse. For example, in the oceans, the most likely future scenario is that jellyfish become the dominant species.

Notice that we don’t really know how long this has been going on, and how deep it is. The “normal” gets set to people’s childhood, as with bug splat. For those too young to remember, it used to be that insects were so thick in the air in rural and wilderness areas that when you drove through them your windscreen would be covered with their dead bodies.

Not anymore.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating or subscribing. )

The Grand Banks off Newfoundland were once so rich with fish that you’d drop in a bucket and it would come up full. The passenger pigeon (not dodo as I wrote earlier) was so prolific that flocks would literally blot out the sun. My Uncle Jack told me that when he was a youth in the 20s and 30s in Northwest BC, he would take a line and an earthworm just out of the town of Prince George, and have a salmon in 10 minutes or less. Another Uncle, who had a small trawler, told me similar stories of decline, back in the 80s.

As with climate change, we’re screwing with systems we don’t really understand, but we do know that we are reliant on their proper functioning for food, water and breathable air. Rain water is no longer safe to drink, for the first time in human history. Major aquifers are drying up and being permanently damaged and many of them are polluted.

The scale of the damage we are doing the environment is staggering, and we are, like it or not, part of the environment. We understand so little that we can’t even create a close environment capable of supporting life more advanced than slimes. If we fuck this up, we can make it so bad we won’t know how to fix it.

And earthworms, as every gardener knows, are gold for soil fertility.

Amazing.

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