Category: Environment Page 6 of 15

Hot Enough to Die

On July 9, 2021

So, the temperatures in the Pacific Northwest probably cooked around a billion sea animals.

Dead.

A billion.

The town of Lytton, which reached Canada’s hottest ever temperature, later burned down: 90 percent of the buildings gone. (Back in the 80s, I drove through Lytton a few times, can’t say I know it, but I spent a lot of time in the country around it.)

We’ve already hit high enough temperatures to kill some animals outright.

Humans can get there as well: It’s known as the wet bulb temperature.

The wet-bulb temperature (WBT) is the temperature read by a thermometer covered in water-soaked cloth (wet-bulb thermometer) over which air is passed.

This is to see what temperature it is with evaporation. If the wet bulb temperature hits 35 celcius, humans can’t lose heat, even if they drink water, and will die.

This corresponds to 95 percent humidity, and 88 F (31.1 Celcius.) The lower the humidity, the more heat you can take before dying, a.k.a., “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”

These are ideals, though, a lot of people die at lower wet-bulb temperatures, because they aren’t perfectly healthy or the heat just keeps going and going.

A researcher noted that just how bad high wet-bulb is:

“Even if they’re in perfect health, even if they’re sitting in the shade, even if they’re wearing clothes that make it easy in principle to sweat, even if they have an endless supply of water,” Horton said. “If there’s enough moisture in the air, it’s thermodynamically impossible to prevent the body from overheating.”

Coming to somewhere near you?

Most of these wet bulb conditions were concentrated in South Asia, the coastal Middle East, and southwest North America… A growing number of other regions are nearing this point: The Southeast US, the Gulf of Mexico and Northern Australia, all denoted by green on the map, are seeing higher daily maximum wet bulb temperatures.

Obviously air conditioning can protect you, but what if your AC goes out, or worse, there’s a brown or black out? A few hours later, you’re dead. Willing to bet your life on over-stressed power grids?

And, while a little misleading (they aren’t here in any great numbers, yet…), this is normal:

Originally, conditions like this weren’t expected until the mid 21st century, according to climate models. But they are actually already here.

Fun stuff, but what makes it even more difficult is climate instability; after all, much of the Pacific Northwest, especially along the coast, was known for its mild temperatures. (I grew up there, and can attest.)

The core thing to understand is less about heat specifically, and more that climate will keep getting more dangerous, and that you can’t count on government or corporations to keep you safe. You shouldn’t, if you can avoid it, put your life at risk by assuming “the power grid won’t go out when I need it most” or “there’ll always be a continuous supply of food.”

Expect that the highly-taut, over-efficient, no-slack, and unmaintained systems that run our society. optimized for maximum profit and not for resilience, will fail under shocks they were never designed to withstand — especially as our elites now expect such shocks, like Covid, to make them even richer and more powerful.

You aren’t precisely on your own, but don’t count on the normal of the past few decades to predict the future — except the normal of “no one with any power actually cares if you live or die or suffer, if they can make some money from your suffering.”

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Siphon the System Thinking Doesn’t Work Against Nature

By Ian Welsh

On July 5, 2021

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We live in a very, very rich society.

Oh, many people are poor, and real poverty, whether in the “Global South” or first-world backwaters, but our society throws off vast wealth. We could, essentially trivially, feed, house, and clothe everyone and give them a decent life. We have that sort of surplus, and far, far more.

In healthy societies, or societies where elites are scared of outside forces (whether human or natural), the emphasis is on growing the pie, on making the society stronger and richer so that it can survive the forces of which the elites and the population (perhaps) are wary. Unproductive use of resources is frowned on, something you can find even in English common law, where if land or property wasn’t being used, after a time it could be taken by someone who would use it productively.

In fantastically wealthy ages, where elites are sure they are secure from all enemies, they concentrate on fighting over the wealth, or, the pie.

The Gilded Age is a good example. The Americans and Brits of the early to mid 1800s were concerned with growing the pie; they didn’t feel invincible or untouchable. But after Britain had secured its second Empire, and painted more of the map than any other nation in history, and after the US had its civil war, broke the natives, and crushed the Spanish and Mexicans, the US and Britain felt they had it made. There were no real threats left.

So, the countries turned inside. They concentrated on taking from others, on amassing wealth. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire was created by by buying out (often at terrible prices) the existing oil industry. It wasn’t creation of something new; it was consolidation in one man’s hands, of what was already there, so that he could reap the benefits.

England’s middle class in 1850 was the envy of the world. By World War I, the average Englishman had been so impoverished that huge swathes of potential soldiers had to be turned away from service in the armed forces. The rich imtiserated the middle class, crushed the farmers as best they could, and fought amongst each other to see who would rule the roost. (In this, they were less collegial than our rich are — far more willing to throw former members of the elite out entirely.)

To put it simply, there was far more money and power to be gained by grabbing a bigger slice of the pie than by growing it.

In the US, this wasn’t fatal; there was a lot of stolen land, and there was still plenty of room for elites to grow new things, even if it wasn’t the emphasis.

In Britain, it led to a fatal decline which is still ongoing; we can see now that Britain probably won’t even stay the “United Kingdom” —- odds are good Scotland will leave, and to add insult to injury, they’ll lose Northern Ireland as well. It is even possible, in the next 40 years or so, that Wales might leave.

From the behemoth astride the world, to a pathetic country that can’t even keep its heartland together.

For our purposes, however, the point is simpler: If you want to rule over other people, you must, in the words of Lois McMaster Bujold, rule their imagination. The greatest of men and women could lose everything tomorrow if their subjects simply stopped believing in their subjugation — and who has how much is entirely a matter of convincing other people to give it to you and let you keep it. Even when it’s a matter of force, you must convince the enforcing class to do what you say and to point the guns and use the prisons on the “right’ people.

It is true that growing the pie requires a fair bit of ruling over other people’s imaginations, but real increases in societal wealth require actually dealing with the world as it is; conquering people who resist, inventing and building steam engines, figuring out how to grow more food on the same land, and so on.

Just getting people to give you more of what already exists, what was created by other people and is produced by a system created by humans of the past, however, is pure imagination work. If people believe it is true, it is. You’re only dealing with human psychology and mass psychology.

Of course, a real world still exists; sometimes its people who don’t buy into your story. This is why China and the US are going to cold war and maybe real war, because neither is willing to live in the world created by the others fictions and ideals.

Then there is nature. It doesn’t matter if you believe that carbon and methane heat up the planet. They do and they will. It doesn’t matter what you think about Covid, if you un-mask and don’t quarantine people who have it, or came in contact with those who do, and if you don’t contact trace, and so on and so forth, then it will act like any other pandemic disease and keep mutating and spreading.

You can’t just manipulate other people’s beliefs about Covid and expect it to go away.

And so, people who have spent their entire lives doing nothing but manipulating other people’s beliefs are incapable of dealing with Covid or climate change. Covid doesn’t “listen to them.” Covid doesn’t care what they say.

Same with climate change. The forest will burn, regardless of what you say to the trees or to the weather.

Our elites, trained only to manipulate other people, are incapable of dealing with real-world events that can’t be controlled simply by controlling other people’s beliefs.

And so we will burn, and cough, and Covid will become endemic as the world slides towards collapse.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Reminder: Prepare for the Forest Fire/Smoke Season

By Ian Welsh

On June 29, 2021

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These temperatures from the West coast of Canada last weekend were absolutely insane.

I grew up in Western BC, Vancouver, and Victoria, in the ’70s and ’80s. These temperatures are crazy. Victoria, in particular (bottom right) is (or was) noted for mild temperatures. Hardly anyone has air conditioners. My parents retired there, and I visited regularly right up to about 2010. It was retirement paradise.

Anyway, if you live in the west of Canada or the US (and the West now extends far past the coast, almost to the mid line, in many cases), please be sure to buy a respirator mask (with extra filters) and an indoor air purifier, and do it NOW. The fire season is likely to hit early and hard this year, and after the rush you won’t be able to find any anywhere.

Make other preparations, including getting ready to leave, as necessary. If you are asthmatic, see about stocking up on meds, and so on. Don’t leave this, please. I know I’ve written this before, recently, and it’s a bit boring to write it again, but I want to be sure people hear this.

As for the West, I am in mourning. I love the coast; the rain forests dripping with water, the ferns looking like jewels in the dew, the deep, dark forests where decaying leaves soften each step and old trees shelter you as you walk. Much of that is going to go away. Future generations along most of the West coast will never know the beauty and ease of the temperate rain forest.

For this and many other crimes, those who chose to do nothing about climate change are guilty. We are losing so much, and will lose so much more, that should never have been placed at risk.

Some of what will go is no loss, mostly human things. But the animals and plants did nothing to deserve this, and my sorrow is even more for them than the humans who will suffer.

Only fools ask for what they deserve, but ask or not, we are going to get it. It’s just a pity that so many of the most responsible won the death bet, and so many of those who will suffer did nothing to warrant it.

Meanwhile… get prepared for fire season, so your suffering is reduced and less is added to the toll, at least these years.

Update: Barely ahead of it, wildfires have started in BC. Get the gear you need tomorrow, Wednesday. Don’t wait.

After multi-day stretch of incredible heat across British Columbia interior–including 121F degrees today in Lytton, the highest temp ever recorded in Canada or on Earth north of 50°N–multiple large pyrocumulus plumes suggestive of intense wildfires have quickly developed. #BCwx pic.twitter.com/Jv5eOFKleT

— Daniel Swain (@Weather_West) June 30, 2021

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Yes, Virginia, Permafrost IS Going to Release Carbon and Methane

By Ian Welsh

On June 25, 2021

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So, for years I’ve been saying that a great point of concern was methane/carbon release from permafrost. Every time I brought this up, I was told by someone that studies said it was unlikely.

This summer in the Russian arctic:

Arctic Temperature 2nd last weekend June 2021.

Feel free to take a break from reading to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.

There is more carbon stored in permafrost that there is carbon in the atmosphere. When permafrost thaws, it comes out as a combination of carbon and methane.

The greatest concern for climate change has always been, “When do we hit the self-reinforcing spirals?” Put another way, “When does it stop mattering if humans reduce emissions?”

The problem is that we really don’t understand the climate very well; our models are crude. Almost everything is actually coming in faster than we anticipated — Arctic ice is clearing faster than expected, Antarctic ice is calving sooner than we thought it would, glaciers are retreating faster than expected, etc, etc.

This, again, was easily predictable, in the sense that, for decades now, consensus forecasts have always come in “under” the actual results. So the smart bet was always on the over, and that’s the bet I’ve made and shared with my readers for many years now.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT GOING TO BE STOPPED.

Even if it is still possible to do, we are not going to do it — our political masters aren’t doing anything significant enough to even nudge the curves. Our populations are not voting primarily on climate change, or Sanders would be President of the US and Corbyn Prime Minister of the UK.

You must plan for climate changed based on the assumption that government will be of little help — it’s you and your friends and any other people you can find who want to prepare with you.

This means assuming breakdowns in the supply chain. It means assuming hotter weather in general, BUT more variable weather also — cold waves and so on will also become more frequent. Hurricanes and other extreme weather events will continue their trends of being more common and more powerful.

Assume a marine inundation event sooner than expected; if you aren’t at least a couple feet above sea level, don’t assume you have forever do something about that — a couple decades, maybe, and extreme weather could easily cause a flood before that.

Remember that water is going to be harder and harder to get; as the glaciers go away and as there is less snow pack, rivers will be fed far less. A vast amount of groundwater has been polluted by farm runoff, fracking, and other stupidity.

I also expect that oxygen concentration in the air will decline, and air quality will be worse.

This is an accelerating trend. It has moved very slowly, but it is speeding up and will continue to speed up. Think about how Covid curves have gone in incompetent countries: slow, slow, slow — VERTICAL. We’re a ways from vertical yet, but the lines for effects are no longer in “looks flat” territory.

It may be that your circumstances allow you to do little, but do what you can. And turn your efforts towards triage: Saving, or helping, yourself and those you want to save. The political battle is lost, was lost, and until absolute catastrophe hits, nothing of significance will be done.

That’s the future. Plan for it, please.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Huge Western Wildfire Season Far Beyond California

By Ian Welsh

On June 8, 2021

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So, this is the drought map for 2020:

Here’s the drought map for this year:

Yeah.

Expect wildfires all through this region and beyond. You should prepare NOW if you live in these areas (check for Mexican or Canadian maps if you live in those countries). Remember, you buy NOW because if you wait everything will be out of stock.

You may need (not a complete list):

Respirators
Air filters, have extras, especially for any air conditioners
A “go bag” in case you’re forced to evacuate.
Some sort of back-up electricity, even if only some batteries for your small items.
Tape to tape over your doors and windows. Painters tape, perhaps.
Internal air filtering fans. (Tutorial on how to make from box fans.)
Standard stuff like water and staple foods in case supply chains are disrupted.
Asthmatics and other people with breathing problems should make sure they have enough meds, if they can.

Larger scale preparations may include:

Non-flammable roofing and keep the roof clean of flammable materials like leaves and needles;
Change your lawn to something non-flammable; a rock garden perhaps.
I hate chopping down trees, but you may wish to consider any too near your house.
Be sure any flammable vegetation is not touching your house nor can fall on it.

I’m sure no expert on this sort of thing, so please leave suggestions for preparing in the comments and do your own research.

BUT the main thing is to do your research and preparation NOW. (Really ,it should have been sooner, and I apologize for not writing this article earlier.)

This is, yes, a result of climate change, exacerbated by bad forestry and soil management. But without climate change it wouldn’t have happened. This is how the ecology of local areas is changing to match the new climates. Unfortunately, that means the destruction of what is there now.

(In that vein, we are coming up on a period of serious food inflation. If you can store it, buy food now.)

Be well, be safe.

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Why Progress Always Required Space Travel

By Ian Welsh

On April 28, 2021

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When I was a teenager I read The Club of Rome’s “Limits To Growth.” The Club ran consumption, pollution and population numbers thru some simple models to see what would happen. The model misses climate change, so we’re worse off than they expect (much worse off) and some other factors, but the stuff it models has been coming in approximately as expected.

The standard model of progress, often assailed by thinkers like John Michael Greer, assumes that there aren’t significant limits to growth that we can’t substitute out of. Run out of oil? Switch to solar? Run out lithium, figure out another way to make batteries? Run out of water, mass-desalinization? Run out of soil, make soil or grow plankton in water. Run out of fish? Fish farms.

Etc…

But the people who created the model, who championed it, aren’t as optimistic and stupid as their opponents often indicate: the standard future model of people who believe in progress requires space exploitation precisely because we can’t assume we can always find a substitute on Earth for what we lack.

If you want, in other words, to keep GROWTH you must exploit space. Send out the space miners! Harvest solar above the atmosphere. Explore, exploit, grow!

You don’t necessarily have to colonize space in any meaningful way to do this, though the earlier imagineers thought we would: this can be done by robots and telepresence mostly, with a very few actual humans in space.

Note that this side-cuts most of the standard complaints about space colonization: other planets nearby all suck, and are worse for life than Earth (even shitty places on Earth like Antarctica) and space itself is full of deadly radiation and other problems we don’t know how to fully mitigate.

Doesn’t matter if you’re just sending out robots to get stuff (lithium, say) and bring it back.

BUT none of this matters in a larger sense because the real problem isn’t running out of lithium or copper or helium or any other simple substance like that.

It’s destroying the biosphere, climate and ecosphere

Earth’s true wealth is an intricate web of life, from creatures simpler than bacteria all the way up to blue whales, including plants and fungi and insects and a wild variety of creatures we don’t understand or haven’t even discovered.

That, along with Earth’s climate, is what you can only get on Earth, at least within the solar system. That’s what we’re destroying.

So… space exploitation? Why not. It may help deal with some bottlenecks. But it still won’t let us continue GROWTH and the standard progress model, because the real limit to growth is simply that if we go past the Earth’s carrying capacity — which I will say, despite some disagreeing with me — we unequivocally have, we then start destroying that carrying capacity and all the things we must have that only Earth supplies.

Earth is the Jewel, the most important place in the universe for humans, right now. We cannot do without it and what is important about it is not copper or lithium, it is precisely climate and LIFE (ecosystems). Our destruction of those two things is what makes the standard model of progress impossible.

We’ve got a limited resource, created by processes of evolution which take millions of years to work. We are so ignorant we cannot even create a self-sustaining biosphere; we cannot fix what we are breaking.

Anyone and any system destroying the Earth’s climate and ecosphere is thus, then, doing the greatest wrong possible for the future of humanity, and of much life on Earth. Our mass genocide of other species is a slow form of strangling ourselves.

Space can help, but it won’t get us around the real issues. Only true respect for the genuine non-renewable resources we MUST have and which exist only on Earth can create a positive future for humanity and for all the species we have held hostage and not yet murdered, who are unfortunate enough to be trapped on Earth with us.

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All the Futures that Will Not Happen

By Ian Welsh

On April 26, 2021

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I’m often amused and saddened by the techno-optimists among us and their fantasies of great futures. Or even the woke folks who think that color and gender and whatnot are the great political frontier.

Let’s run through this. Water.

Baseline Water Stress

To put some numbers on it:

New modeling of the world’s groundwater levels finds aquifers — the soil or porous rocks that hold groundwater — in the Upper Ganges Basin area of India, southern Spain, and Italy could be depleted between 2040 and 2060.

In the US, aquifers in California’s Central Valley, Tulare Basin, and southern San Joaquin Valley, could be depleted within the 2030s. Aquifers in the southern High Plains, which supply groundwater to parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, could reach their limits between the 2050s and 2070s, according to the new research.

The thing to understand about this is that it doesn’t show permanent aquifer damage. If you overdraw aquifers, they lose the ability to hold as much water; that reduction is permanent.

Then there is fracking and other forms of poisoning groundwater, though how much is difficult to determine. (It’s not small.)

Meanwhile, the next thing is that important rivers tend to be driven by snowpack runoff and glaciers, but snowpack is becoming less and less and glaciers are receding. We’re talking about rivers like the GANGES and the Yangtse, not to mention all the European rivers which start in the Alps.

So we have groundwater depletion, some of it permanent. We have poisoned groundwater, and we have a reasonable expectation of reduced water in rivers, which in some cases will dry up entirely.

Let’s move on to more fun stuff: ecosystem collapse.

Wildlife Reduction

This number is from 1970, which was already very reduced. You can read accounts of what the Grand Banks were like originally: They could literally dip a pail into the ocean and come up with fish. We’ve massively reduced wildlife everywhere, insect populations are collapsing, and so on. Recent estimates are that the Amazon is no longer a net producer of oxygen, but now produces Carbon Dioxide.

Phytoplankton produce half the world’s oxygen. From 1950 to 2010, the population of phytoplankton dropped 40 percent. We can safely assume losses were not even, but are accelerating.

The general picture in terms of climate change is all bad:

Climate Dashboard 2018

Note that first graph very carefully. There is NO sign in the actual numbers that we are doing anything of importance to stop this trend. Kyoto and Paris have achieved nothing, which is to be expected, since they were voluntary.

Let’s put this all together: massively rising temperatures; more extreme weather events; changes in climate, including rainfall patterns; massive depletion of aquifers at the same time as we can expect many rivers to lose volume or dry up; no effective political action.

One thing that India’s Covid crisis clarified for me is that India won’t be able to handle climate change, so let’s make some predictions.

India breaks up within 20 to 30 years. It dies amid great famines which kill two hundred million or more people. Bangladesh, of course, will go oven sooner, and unleash a tsunami of over 150 million refugees which India does not want, as they are mostly Muslim.

China breaks up 30 to 45 years from now and descends into warlordism. Prior to the breakup, there is a better-than-even chance of war with Russia for Siberia. Again, hundreds of millions of deaths.

The US is going to hurt worse than is obvious: Core areas will hit depletion, and many rivers will dry up. Large chunks of the Southwest will become completely uninhabitable. California’s population carrying capacity will drop massively, unless it moves to mass de-salinization (a dicey prospect).

We’ve just had ourselves a lesson in what exponential growth looks like. There is every reason to expect that at least some parts of ecosystem collapse and climate change will act that way: When break points are reached, they will accelerate, and nothing we can do will stop them. Worst case scenario is a hothouse Earth in which humanity goes extinct, but entirely plausible scenarios see the Earth losing half or more of its carrying capacity. The process will involve a lot of death, suffering, and war.

There’s a decent chance we get a marine inundation event. Rather than water rising by small amounts every year, at some point it rises very quickly, and large amounts of the coast flood permanently.

Remember that the “moderate” estimates have almost all been wrong. The “worst case” scenarios, for decades now, have been coming in correctly.

All of which is to say, whatever future you think you’re going to have, you need to run it past this lens. Does it survive this? Does society spend resources on whatever it is in the face of hundreds of millions of deaths and billions of refugees?

So, no, your future, whatever it is, unless you can instantiate it in the next two decades, probably isn’t going to happen.

The clock is ticking, we are running out of time to do whatever it is we want to do, and it is very likely that we are past the point of no return; that even if we were to go all-out to stop climate change and environmental collapse (we won’t), we could — at best — limit it to “losing half the population.”

lf you’re old enough, none of this matters, of course. But we are now at the point where, if you aren’t 60 and in poor health, or 70 and in good health, you’re probably going to get see at least the start of the really bad times.

We’ll come back to what this means in more depth later, but for now, just make your plans based on this understanding of what the future holds.

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American Suicide Numbers Dropped Last Year

By Ian Welsh

On April 8, 2021

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So, we kept being told Covid was causing increased suicides and it turned out not to be true.

I suspect this means is that American bosses are so shitty that a pandemic combined with massive economic problems is preferable to working with them in close quarters.

One of the great problems with “capitalism” is that businesses break people and aren’t stuck with having to clean up the mess they made. This is particularly noticeable, lately, at Amazon, who, in at least one case, kept an ambulance outside its warehouse because it knew enough workers would collapse and need it. Or who schedules its delivery drivers so tightly they shit in bags and piss in bottles and get UTIs.

Walmart built its business on underpaying workers and sending them to get government benefits; meaning, it wasn’t actually paying for the cost of its labor. By doing so, it wiped out businesses who did pay the cost of their labor.

Capitalism, for most of its history, has required not paying either cost of its labor practices (the human damage it does) or the cost of the resources it is permanently destroying (most recently, we are on track to kill about 50 percent of all known living species, which have both monetary and non-monetary value).

A system which throws off that much damage is obviously deranged and its “gains” are obviously unsustainable. Humanity has a limited set of resources off of which it has to live (including an ecosphere) and no, “technology” cannot replace them all. We don’t even understand the interactions of a properly functioning ecology enough to create a simple one in a biosphere; we can’t fix, or heal, what we break, any more than companies who compel employees to suicide can bring them back.

None of this is particularly necessary. Our problem is that we are STUPID. Capitalism has obvious problems that we refuse to acknowledge or deal with. We need a new way of managing our economy, one which also manages ecology and resources like, oh, THE Amazon.

This is not going to be possible if we base economic decision-making on supply and demand as we currently understand them. Nor is it going to be possible with the version of democracy or one-party states through which we have been running our society. (Nor is green fascism a solution, since fascism bottlenecks decision making.)

Money, based on debt, of which our society runs huge chunks around for almost all of our history, will also have to be completely re-thought because money has a strong tendency to reward people who abuse at scale, and always has.

None of this is impossible, though we’ve left it too late, so we’re going to eat the bitter fruits of our actions. I suggest, among other things, working to be sure that those with the most power, rather than using that power (money is power) to avoid the consequences of their actions, are forced to gorge on what they have done.

Letting bygones be bygones is a very large mistake when the bygone is multi-species genocide.