Ian Welsh

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

Category: Environment Page 9 of 15

One Million Species at Risk of Extinction + One

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On May 6, 2019

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Globe on FireSo, you’ve probably seen all the articles aboutthe UN report which finds that one million species are at risk of extinction, out of the 8.7 million species we believe exist.

That’s more than 10 percent.

The key thing that tends not to get emphasized in this is that ecosystems are chains, or complex webs of interactions. The death of insects, for example (remember when driving caused bug splat? I can’t remember the last time I saw that), will reveberate through the entire web, starting with birds.

These interactions are complicated and we do not understand them well at all.

For example, there is a non-trivial risk that the algae, which are the major oxygen producers in the oceans, will die. They produce 70 to 80 percent of our oxygen.

If that happens, humanity will go extinct, along with a lot more than one million other species.

Our actions are insanity. Absolute insanity. We are destroying the web of life which makes our own existence possible.

We have no escape. We cannot even make biospheres (enclosed environments) work. Without that, we cannot begin to try to keep even a small population alive during the collapse (not that that would be anything but a catastrophe anyway).

But the fact that we can’t make even a simple enclosed environment which can support human life work is the point. We are playing with systems we don’t understand. We are committing mass genocide of other life forms.

And there is a better than even chance that it will be a million, or millions, +1. We do not exist separate from the web of beings who make life on Earth possible.

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.

Is There Hope For Mitigating Climate Change?

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On March 22, 2019

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I’ve always felt that the last thing which came out of Pandora’s box, hope, was the worst thing to come out. People wouldn’t put up with the evils of the world so readily if they didn’t feel hope.

Most recently, in America, Obama ran on “hope” and did, well, very little to help most people who voted for him. (And rather a lot to hurt them.)

So, what hope is there for dealing with climate change?

What, I think, there clearly isn’t, is hope that we avoid serious and catastrophic consequences. The methane in permafrost will be released and we are going to get hit hard.

People will die, it will be bad. For some people very bad.

Combined with ecological collapse there is an outside, but still real, chance that we will destroy our civilization or wipe ourselves out.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the generational cohort is changing. The Boomers are giving way to the Millenials (Xers, of whom I am one, never counted for much politically.)

As Stirling Newberry explained, old people don’t much care about climate change because they’re going to be dead before the worst of it hits.

Young people do.

And the Overton window is shifting: even if Pelosi (old) sneered at the Green New Deal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got it talked about and taken seriously. Multiple Presidential candidates are for some version of it.

What is possible; what is acceptable, is changing.

The Green New Deal is no different from what many people have suggested in the past: refit the entire economy to be as carbon renewable as possible. Make every building as close to energy neutral as possible, use renewable energy, etc..

We had the technology in the 90s, heck we had much of it before then. AOC’s plan is, in broad strokes, identical to what I used to propose Democrats run on back in the 2000s, when no one took it seriously.

So, yes, there is hope.

The other piece of hope is that things get really bad; catastrophically bad, as soon as possible. We need to lose millions of people to climate change and ecological collapse in an obvious and terrible way, so everyone else wakes up.

That’s not nice, but this is a boiling frog situation: we need something to happen that makes people panic and realize that they can’t take their time fixing this.

As long as it seems like a slow change, we will tend to put off the very radical change that is needed.

Fortunately, I’m almost certain climate change will be discontinuous and that bad things will happen off schedule and before we expect them to. In one sense that’s bad, especially if whatever happens is so bad we can’t recover, but if it doesn’t, it’ll be exactly what we need.

Grim, but that’s where we are.

Hope? Yeah, there is some. But only if we seize the chances we will be given.

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.

 

Climate Change and Game Theory

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On March 21, 2019

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**This Article Is By Stirling Newberry**
It is certainly true that if you want to know the economic outcome of a situation, it is best to study Game Theory. But it is also true, that if everyone else is bad at game theory you’re even better off. Which is why the New Yorker has a writer whose job is mis-represent game theory.

 

I suppose that I should talk about Brexit, and I will in due time. But there is a larger game afoot: climate change.

 

Money is crated in the past, but paid for in the future. Loans are paid off by future earnings. Normally money is created about the same in the future as in the past, so the fact that it’s actually created in the future doesn’t matter. Because this is mostly true, economists usually don’t pay much attention to the fact, even though they know it. As a result, they don’t think about the times when the future will be a lot different than the past.

 

But 1st people are going to use the false game theory to make a bundle of cash, and then die. Because after all, dying is a way to keep the money and choose who it goes to. But more on that later.

 

One of the main ways that the future changes from the past is when we change how we get our supply of energy. Think back 300 years, only the most vital industries could use coal, almost all of the rest used either wood, wind, or muscle power. Coal started extremely expensive, but once transportation was run by coal became cheaper. That means that 100 years ago, everybody who could use coal did so.

 

But on the boundaries there was a new kind of energy: oil. Oil had several advantages over coal, mainly because it was liquid and flowed from place to place rather than solid which meant it had to be shoveled. And do not think the people shoveling did not how hard that was. Coal was mainly for industry, and next for naval (which is the 1st place when Churchill appeared on the scene, he was one who decided that oil was the right way to power ships, rather than coal).

 

What this has to do with Game Theory? Very occasionally the past is loaded with people who made money from an economy based on one specific power, but the future needs another source. This is why today we are stuck between the people who made money in oil, but whose future is not oil. The problem is that it is not just oil, it is the entire apparatus for distributing power: cars, for example, are actually oil on wheels. So the people who made money in the past want to keep going because they are going to die before the bill comes due. Meanwhile, people who live in the future, that is to say, young people, realize that oil is bad for them. One can draw supply-demand diagrams if one really needs to. All people with oil are rich, and the vast majority of young people are poor and they do not spend as much of their lives on oil-based things and activities.

 

That means that old people, who run the economy and politics, keep voting for oil ( and to some extent coal.) The problem is that it is not just people, but climate which has a say. Almost everybody reading this will not be alive by 2200, but our children might just make it, and their children almost certainly will. This is a problem with Game Theory if you think about it: the people who have the money are going to die before the bill comes due. If John Maynard Keynes was alive he would propose government as the solution, but the government is now run by same old people. So don’t hold your breath.

 

 This is why action is coming from below: young people know that they are going to pay the actual bill for the oil based economy, while old people are going to get the money. There are various other problems, such as nuclear power being safe, except because of the people who run it. This is actually also part of game theory: nuclear power requires smart people run it, but the probability says that there are more profitable things than running a nuclear plant, so people with talent go into those rather than supplying nuclear power. Which is a problem because nuclear power is dangerous, and stupid people who run it make mistakes (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi.) Once every 15 years does not do the job, it has to be 0 tolerance, and that means getting brighter people, but the economics does not allow for that. Thank you for playing have a nice day.

 

But the general problem of money from the past dictating the future can be solved: because borrowing occurs regularly, and most of the borrowing is rolled over. That means that the currency markets could, by general government agreement, make borrowing for the oil based economy more expensive and make it cheaper for renewables and nuclear power. Proceeds will be split between the 2 currencies, and while there will be graft ( you cannot help that, but you can limit it.) slowly the world’s energy supply will be made cleaner. Gradually as more people become aware of the cost to themselves, the fee will be enlarged to cover the cost.

 

Thus the result is an N by N matrix with each player determining what is the best use of there time. This means that the government sector, will determine the cost, and the market will determine what should be done.

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Water Wars And the Great Indian Die-Off

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On March 19, 2019

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Humans can go without food for weeks. Water, a few days:

The core fact of climate change and human mismanagement of resources that a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that the worst of it is going to be about water.

Consider the Indian subcontinent. It is under three main water threats:

  • As glaciers go away, glacier fed streams and rivers dry up.
  • There has been vast depletion of aquifers, and within twenty to thirty years this will reach a crisis that devastates agriculture. There is no water to replace this aquifer water.
  • Climate change will change wind and rainfall patterns. Much of Indian agriculture is based on the monsoon cycle. If it fails even a few times in a row, agriculture will be devastated.

These items often feed into each other: for example, depleting groundwater is one of the culprits in drying up the Ganges, and if the Ganges goes dry, India dies.

Meanwhile, how do you think Pakistan is going to react, when, as things get worse, they realize that their agriculture, or people, are dying because India has decided to take upstream water they need?

India isn’t the only nation that will be hit hard by all this, but it’s going to be one of the worst. I am almost entirely positive we will see a famine in India which kills literally hundreds of millions of people.

Perhaps it won’t include a war between Pakistan and India; nuclear armed states, over water.

We are now in the triage period of an oncoming catastrophe. A lot of people are going to die, more will be immiserated, and the question now is who, and to a lesser extent how many.

This isn’t to say that nothing can be done to decrease the death count slightly, and to reduce the odds of human extinction, but we are past the point of no return on Climate Change. It will happen, the large stores of methane in permafrost (and probably in the arctic) will be released and climate, including rainfall patterns, will change. Large numbers of rivers and streams will dry up, and sea-levels will rise.

This will not happen on an even schedule of +X every 10 years, when it goes bad, it will go ballistic, and events like ice melts and changes to ocean and wind currents will happen quickly. Some of them may happen like switches flipping. It will go from “sucky” to “catastrophic” fast, with little warning.

So, I know that many people are stuck. No money, no health, no youth and too many obligations.

But be aware of this and plan for it if you can.

And if you live in India or any of the nations around the Indian subcontinent, please be particularly careful as there is even less possibility of India avoiding the worst case scenario than there is for most countries.

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 Day the World Ended

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On February 23, 2019

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A small point:


The Supreme Court stole the US election of 2000 AD for the Republicans. For George Bush, Jr. It stole it from Albert Gore.

My friend Stirling Newberry was the only person at the Supreme Court protesting.

Afterwards, he said to me and some others (paraphrased): “That was our last chance. We are going to ride this bucket all the way down to hell.”

Turns out he was right.

(Whatever you may think of Gore, and I think he’s a coward, he was, ummmm, serious about climate change.)

We aren’t going to hold global warming at two degrees Celcius. We aren’t even going to come close.

We all know this. More on some specific consequences, in only one country, which will cost hundreds of millions of lives, later.

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.

Our Germophobic, Plastic-addicted Society

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On December 7, 2018

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Recently saw this picture, and had to laugh, because you’d never see this today in the West.


Every sandwich, today, would be individually wrapped, at the least in plastic wrap, but probably with a hard plastic container as well.

We are a bunch of germophobes, but it serves us ill. When I was a child in Malaysia, there was a rule among the ex-pats. The kids who were kept from all contact with “local” germs, were sick as heck. (One friend had his toys boiled regularly. He was sick all the time.) Those of us who were allowed to have normal contact, had no more illnesses than the locals (less, because we were properly inoculated and so on.)

Meanwhile we have vast stretches of ocean which are clogged by plastic. Plastic is showing up in both marine and terrestrial wildlife, and making its way into our own food-chain.

 

The rule for all consumer goods, and indeed, all manufacturing, should be that if it doesn’t degrade, or the manufacturer doesn’t guarantee recycling, with a bond posted to ensure performance and lack of strategic bankruptcy, it doesn’t get made. In those rare (and they should be very rare), cases where as a society, we want to make an exception, waivers should be required, and they should be paid for: the cost should be multiple of the monetary damage they do by not being recyclable. (At least two times, and multiple because monetary damage is not the only damage.)

Add to this laws and enforcement of laws banning “planned obsolescence” and we might be well on our way to un-fucking our environment. Or, I suppose, we could continue to prioritize short-term profit, neurotic fear of germs, and convenience. I mean, who gives a shit if our children and grandchildren have a planetary environment which can support life at the worst, or an environment which is incredibly unhealthy (which plastic’s estrogenic effects have already created)?

(Note: I’m in the hospital (serious, but unlikely to kill me), so things like comment moderation may not happen until I’m out, or may be delayed. Likewise, typos and other errors are unlikely to be fixed.)

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.

Shun the Climate Change Deniers

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On October 25, 2018

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Guest Post by *Eric A. Anderson* Guest Post

I have a little boy. He is my first, and most likely, only child — and he is everything to me.

I once thought that I knew what love is. I am still learning that I had no idea I could love anyone so deeply. I would lay my life down for him in a heartbeat, and will viciously attack any who dare threaten it.

There are those that threaten it every day.

Those that, in the past, I have professed to love and who, in turn, profess to love my son:

They are my parents.
They are my older sisters.
They are my Aunt, and my Uncle.

They move their mouths as they profess their love for my son, but I know in my heart that it’s not true. They are lying to both him and themselves.

They are lying because they are climate change deniers.

Because they vote for people, parties, policies and platforms that are actively contributing to the destruction of the planet my son depends on for his future survival. Or, they don’t vote at all.

When I confront them on this fact, they argue with me. They cajole and threaten. They scoff at the precautionary principle. Throughout, I am left dumbfounded. I ask them, “If there were even the tiniest chance you could be wrong, why would you risk the future of your family?” To which, they consistently reply in some manner of, “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m so old I’ll be long gone.” And so, their words of love are hollow. They are selfish. They are hypocrites. They are killers.

They care more about their ideology, than they care for my son. I have to call them what they are.

Therefore, if I continue to profess my love for both them, and my son, what does that make me? What does that make the man who professes that he is willing to go to any lengths to try and ensure that his son has a future that doesn’t read like a dystopian novel? A future wherein, my son doesn’t look at me and say “Daddy, why didn’t you do something???”

To do both makes me the hypocrite. But I’m not a hypocrite.

Which is why I have made the decision to shun them all.

They need to feel the repercussions of their actions.

Everyone one of them do. Immediately. There is simply no time to lose.

I would be lying if I told you this isn’t the most difficult decision of my life.

However, I believe this drastic act of protest is the only thing that will bring them to their senses about how deadly serious I am about the risk that their climate change denying poses to my son’s future.

We live in desperate times. And desperate times, call for desperate measures.
I’ve told them all that they are welcome to join my family again upon photographic proof that they have voted for political candidates who will work to ensure ecologically sane policies.

I exhort you to do the same, if indeed, the love you profess for your children is true.

We all must shun the climate change denying hypocrites that profess to love us from one side of their face, while they sell our future down the road with the other. Enough is enough.

Please think hard about joining me in shunning them all.

Bend Over and Kiss Your Ass Goodbye: IPCC Report Version

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On October 24, 2018

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Read, and weep.

Once more: Climate change is settled science. Climate change is past the point of no return. (If you believe that nations are even going to keep the Paris agreement targets, you’re such a fool you’ll be sold all the world’s bridges.)

These numbers are catastrophic, and the IPCC reports are always over-optimistic. Always.

There are quite a number of scenarios where this stuff happens faster. You’ll notice that this chart has straight line assumptions. That’s almost certainly wrong. What will actually happen is that we’ll get some feedback loop like arctic or permafrost methane release and that will lead to parabolic increases. When it breaks, it will break hard.

At that point, a lot of other problems could also blow up, the most serious of which would be the oceans losing their ability produce oxygen. If that happens, well, we’re dead.

Even if it doesn’t, things like the thermohaline currents flipping or shutting off are possible. Europe could, in the middle of everyone else getting hot, have a mini-ice age.

People don’t realize how far north Europe is. If it didn’t have warm currents, it would be like parts of Canada that are, well, almost uninhabited, and for damn good reasons.

This will also, certainly, screw with weather systems. Imagine Indian monsoons failing for even three years in a row. Can you say hundreds of millions of deaths. Move your lips.

And it isn’t that we are decelerating, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who will likely win election, has essentially promised to chop down what remains of the Amazon jungle as fast as possible (and also, to commit genocide on the remaining indigenous tribes. No, don’t pretend, that’s what he means.)

We are so far up shit creek we are never seeing clear waters again.

Be very clear on this, and if you want to survive (deciding to not bother is a legitimate decision and if you’re old you may die before the worst of it) start doing what you can for yourself.

We are long past (a good ten years past, at a minimum) any possibility of stopping this.

This is triage time. Are you going to survive? Your family, friends, and loved ones?

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.

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