Ian Welsh

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

Category: Environment Page 11 of 15

Hurricane Irma and Thinking About Future Climate Change

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On September 8, 2017

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I haven’t written about the hurricanes this season because much of what I’d say, and will say, has become mainstream.

Yes, this is related to climate change, because hurricanes take their energy from the heat of ocean water and ocean water is hotter.

In the late 90s, my friend Stirling Newberry posited that the first major effect of climate change would be more extreme weather events, and more powerful ones. The journals at the time wouldn’t publish, but now everyone knows who cares to know.

So listen, now, and carefully. One of the next great concerns (and it has already begun) is going to be changes in routine rainfall patterns. Those changes are going to disrupt or destroy agriculture in large regions, as well as the typical vegetation of those regions. Forest fires will be one of the results, the great fires of this season will not be the last.

This will go beyond agriculture to what areas are viable to live in with large populations. Heinlein warned in the 50s that California was profoundly unnatural: it required vast water supplies and if they were disrupted, that could cause massive numbers of deaths. I fear large parts of India are also going to be destroyed by this, combined with rising heat. (In fact, leaving Island nations aside, India is one of the nations which will be hit hardest by climate change.)

Because we have also drained and polluted our aquifers, water is going to be a huge problem. I expect the combination of rainfall changes and aquifer destruction to devastate agriculture in many regions, including the US, China, and India.

Right now we produce more food than we need, globally, we just waste a ton of it and distribute it execrably, but that is going to change.

The just-in-time global delivery system is VERY fragile. You should have food and water to survive at least a couple weeks, and ideally a few months. Beans and rice is one option if you can also arrange something to cook with. This is cheap, and done properly you can live on it for a long time. And water, in case the water in your taps goes off or becomes undrinkable.  There are other options, and the survivalist types have done the work, it’s just a question of doing the research and figuring out what is within your means. A couple weeks food and something to cook with isn’t that expensive.(In some places a pot and wood will do the job, but not all places.)

Water, in particular, requires some room to store. But properly stored food and water in a shed, basement or even jammed into the corner of a room could save your life. (You may also or instead wish to have water purification gear available, such as iodine.)

Just something to bear in mind.

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 World Is Going to Hell Because

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On August 26, 2017

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Globe on FireYou get the behaviour you reward.

Politicians in the US, with the Iraq war and the vote to have it, committed the exact same war crime most Nazis were hung for: aggressive war.

They, including the most responsible politician, George W. Bush, were not punished for it. Indeed, Bush was re-elected and so were most of the others.

In 2008, there was a vast financial crisis, caused by bankers and Wall Street brokers and so on–financial executives. It included a widespread amount of fraud, aided and abetted by ratings agencies, financial regulators, and central banks.

No one was held responsible and sent to jail. Instead, they were bailed out and allowed to keep their illicit profits, and the same games that caused the crisis were reinstituted alongside aggressive money printing targeted at the class of people who caused the crisis.

In other words, the people who caused the financial crisis, as a class, were rewarded for that their behavior.

We have an ongoing problem, due to turn into a worldwide catastrophe causing over a billion human deaths and so many non-human deaths it will show up clearly in the geological record. It is called climate change.

Oil companies knew that climate change was real, based on their own research, back in the 80s. Not only did they not make that research public, they spent large amounts of money to fund propaganda saying that what they knew was true wasn’t.

Put more simply, for their own personal and financial gain, major corporate executives did their best to make sure that information known to be true, which might have helped stop a billion or more deaths, was not acted upon.

They have not been punished for that, but they have, indeed, retired wealthy and happy.

If people who knowingly do very very bad things (like causing the death and suffering of millions of people in wars, economic downturns, and forseeable environmental catastrophes) are not only not punished but rewarded, then more of the same behaviour will occur.

During his term in office, Obama increased drone murders significantly and destroyed Libya, in a war of aggression (the same war crime that for which Nazis were hung, and Obama also should be in a war crimes dock along with every other Western leader involved in Libya). He was then re-elected.

None of this stuff should be hard to understand. If leaders who do monstrous things are rewarded, as opposed to punished, for doing those things, more leaders will do even more monstrous things. They have been shown that is what is rewarded.

Welcome to a world tottering towards hell, because that is what too many people want–as measured by what they reward.

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.

Saying Is Doing

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On June 2, 2017

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(NOTE: POST BY MANDOS)

So. Trump has just announced his pullout from the Paris accords.

It doesn’t really matter whether the Paris accords actually did anything material or did anything material that was significant against climate change. What matters is that the Paris accords were the unifying symbol of public agreement that climate change was a thing. Trump’s move defaces that symbol. What he said does something. Insofar as that symbol is defaced, the probability of doing material things that might have an effect on the physical world is reduced, including saving whatever of human civilization can be saved, in extremis. If not reduced, then optimistically, changed — if it actually creates a galvanizing moment. Which it probably won’t, but we’ll see.

Saying is doing, symbols are at least as important as what is material, politics has limits as constricting as those of “nature,” assuming you believe in a false dualism and hierarchy between politics and the “natural” world.

Nature Does Not Grade on a Curve

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On May 13, 2017

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Globe on FireOne of the problems with how we are educated and how we work is that almost all of it is “grading on a curve.” What matters is what our teacher thinks of us; what our boss thinks of us. Except when it comes to sickness, nothing else matters even nearly as much.

It’s all “on a curve,” it’s all social bullshit. If you can convince your boss or teacher to pass you, you pass, and there’s no objective level required in most cases: The difficulty is set by a person.

Nature does not grade on a curve.

If a bear is chasing you, and you can’t run fast enough, you’re probably dead.

If your capitalist democratic system can’t handle climate change, a problem predicted decades ago (and in plenty of time to fix it), billions of people will die.

It doesn’t matter whether there are “reasons” why we couldn’t handle it, not to the dead.

It also doesn’t matter if there are “reasons” why we can’t come up with a better way of running the world than capitalism with a side of democracy or autocracy, depending on the country.

People are always nattering on about how capitalism is the bestest system ever. (Although what has really produced the changes they like is mostly industrialization, not capitalism, though that’s a different article.)

It’s nice that we can’t come up with something better than capitalism (er, ok, not nice), but capitalism has failed. That it hasn’t blown up yet is irrelevant to this. If my brakes and steering fail at 90 miles an hour as I’m heading towards a mountain cliff, well, no catastrophe actually happens until I not only go off the cliff, but hit the ground, but the future is set.

That’s where we are; the future is essentially set. We aren’t going to stop climate change, it’s doubtful we even can (it would, even theoretically, take massive geo-engineering at this point), so capitalism, and the political systems attached to it, like democracy and Chinese one-party autocratic rule, have failed.

It is that simple. And nature does not give a fuck if capitalism is the “bestest bestest system that we ever came up with” or if, qua Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

They have failed.

And what people are not getting through their heads is that they will be seen to have failed by those who have to suffer the consequences of our monstrous abnegation of responsibility.

They will be loathed; even as we who live in this era and especially those who were adults in the 80s and 90s, will not just be loathed, but treated as lepers, similiar to how we consider Nazis. (Yeah, I went there, deal.)

One of the problems with de-naturing (with living in almost entirely human made systems, and with pushing those bits we don’t control off into ghettos as we would illness), is that it means most people almost never experience a benchmark that isn’t set by other human beings. They feel, in their guts, that if only other people are convinced, any problem can be fixed or finangled.

No.

The bear doesn’t care that you can’t run fast enough because TV is funner than going for a jog, and nature doesn’t care that shareholders needed value and that oil barons didn’t want to be a little poorer (or whatever).

And neither will those who suffer from climate changes due to our ethical monstrosity and sheer incapability.

Capitalism is a shit system in a number of ways. It can be made to work, by people who stay right on top of it, as between the 30s and 70 or so, but it is prone to going off the rails. If all that meant was that the poor suffer what they must and the powerful do as they will, well, so be it, but it isn’t.

We must come up with better ways to run our societies. We are creating existential threats by failing to do so, and our infatuation with capitalism risks taking democracy down with it.

Worse worlds are always possible. So are better ones, and no system is ever “the best.”

And nature doesn’t grade on a curve.

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.

Arctic Permafrost Defrosting and the Age of War and Revolution

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On March 10, 2017

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Globe on FireFor well over a decade, I have written that we are past the point of no return on climate change. My reasoning was that hothouse gasses already in the atmosphere, or which were for sure going to enter the atmosphere given our lack of action, were enough to trigger massive carbon and methane releases.

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon…

We’ve seen that methane, which accounts for only 14 percent of emissions worldwide, traps up to 100 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a five-year period. This means that even though carbon dioxide molecules outnumber methane 5 to 1, this comparatively smaller amount of methane is still 19 times greater a problem for climate change over a five year period, and four times greater over a 100 year period.

It is even more potent in the short run. Meanwhile, the arctic circle was about 30 degrees warmer this year than normal, and permafrost is un-perma-ing.

Huge slabs of Arctic permafrost in northwest Canada are slumping and disintegrating, sending large amounts of carbon-rich mud and silt into streams and rivers. A new study that analyzed nearly a half-million square miles in northwest Canada found that this permafrost decay is affecting 52,000 square miles of that vast stretch of earth—an expanse the size of Alabama…

…Similar large-scale landscape changes are evident across the Arctic including in Alaska, Siberia, and Scandinavia

There is no way we are avoiding near-worst case scenarios for climate change without aggressive geo-engineering (completly unproven, and requires political willpower). We will see temperature increases in some parts of the world which are currently highly populated. These increases will make those places uninhabitable outside of air conditioning. Changes in rainfall patterns will large current agricultural powerhouses to fail; an effect which will be compounded by the fact that we have vastly drained and polluted our groundwater in prime agricultural areas.

Later on, we will see vast rises in the ocean level. Virtually every city sitting on a seashore today will be gone in a hundred years, some of them a lot sooner.

This stuff is baked into the cake. It is essentially unavoidable. It has been effectively and politically unavoidable for quite some time now.

Do not expect the political, economic, and social arrangements you favor to survive this. The waves of refugees will be magnitudes larger than those currently shaking the Middle East and Europe. There will be water wars; people will not sit still while they are dying, they will fight. Some of those wars will involve, at the least, the use of tactical nukes.

Capitalism, Democracy, the Chinese Communist Party, etc…any system and group of people who can reasonably be blamed for this, will likely be on the block. When hundreds of millions to billions start dying, they will not go gently into that long dark night. No, they and those they leave behind will look for people, ideologies, and organizations to blame, and they will plenty of them, because everyone and everything who had any power has failed to prevent an entirely forseen and largely preventable disaster.

Our failure will not be considered acceptable to those who pay the bill, and our “capitalism” and “democracy” and “corporations” and “free trade” and everything else you can think of will be on the block, liable for destruction.

This is coming on faster than many expected. Added to ecosphere collapse, the current cyclical capitalist sclerosis, and vast arsenals, it is going to be immensely damaging.

If you aren’t old, or sick, you’re going to suffer some of this. If you’re young, you’re going to suffer a lot of this, assuming you aren’t an early casualty.

So it is. So it shall be. We were warned, we chose not to act, because corporations needed profits or something.

So be it.

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 Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Cyclical vs. End-Time Thinking

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On January 5, 2017

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Eras come and go.

Civilizations come and go too.

There have been ecological collapses in the past. For example, one took out the Mayans, and it was self-inflicted. The same is true, on a lesser scale, for Mesopotamia.

Human history is cyclical. It’s only “up trend” in a very long view of things.

In the normal course of events, I would expect that Western civilization would fall. It’s, well, inevitable. I don’t even think it’s that far away in historical time. Might be this cycle, might be a couple hundred years, but we’re clearly coming to the end of our rope.

A civilization ends when it can’t handle problems that are totally obvious, because its ideology won’t allow it to deal with them. In our case, the ideology is economics and capitalism, which insists that decisions must be made based on what maximizes profit. Our ideology doesn’t recognize that profit is a social construction, and doesn’t take into account all the upsides or downsides of doing anything. This, combined with our moral belief that money is “good,” and that the more money you have the better you are, is killing our civilization. (These categories, expanded slightly, cover state capitalist societies like the USSR well enough.)

These problems are acknowledged; just as most of the problems which led to the fall of the Roman Empire were acknowledged, but we refuse to fix them. Every once in a while, an FDR will roll around and patch up one part of the problem, but, eventually, we go back to doing the same thing.

Normally this would amount to reactions like, “Oh well, sucks to live in such times.” Nations, societies, and civilizations come and go and it’s very sad, but it’s just how the world works.

The question is, “Is this time different?’

The argument is scale. We’re a global society, and we’re causing an environmental disaster that is magnitudes larger than any humans have caused before.

One argument is that, “Hey, people predict the end of the world all the time and they’ve always been wrong.”

Which is true, and that argument will be usable until humanity does go extinct (which, inevitably, it will, the question is only when) because it is a one-time event. That it has not happened to humans in the past does not mean it cannot happen. We’re currently driving many species to extinction. Each species goes extinct only once; species extinction due to environmental problems is dead common, and often due to environmental problems the to which the animal in question contributed.

My best guess is that this time is not the human extinction event, but I make that a matter of probability, not probability based on, “It’s never happened before,” (because it has, just not to us), but simply because I expect the climate and ecology will stabilize at a new norm and that the norm will likely be livable for humans.

I regard the loss of all coastal cities and lands as inevitable. We are going to lose the Antarctic ice shelf, and it is going to flood coastal lands. Due to the self-reinforcing part of the cycle, especially with relation to methane gas, that’s just going to happen–and probably sooner than we think.

Before then, we’re going to see widespread disruption of weather, which, combined with our overuse and poisoning of aquifers, will mean widespread food shortages, starvation, and mass migration of hundreds of millions of people in one go. There is no question in my mind that we will see wars for water, and they will be major wars.

There are a myriad of knock-on events which will occur, most of them bad. It will be particularly amusing (in, yes, a sick and sad but appropriate way) if Europe is plunged into an Ice Age. This seems quite likely, as the warm water current which keeps Europe much hotter than it should be could be cut off.

But there are reasons to believe that we’ll stabilize, and those humans who remain will go on. This isn’t a 100 percent thing. I believe there is a non-trivial chance we will drive ourselves into extinction, but I judge it as less likely.

On the other hand, I’ve rolled a lot of dice in my life, and I can tell you that the one, ten, or 30 percent probability you discounted can bloody well come up.

More to the point, while catastrophe is now inevitable, the scale of that catastrophe is not fixed and we can still do quite a bit to mitigate and prepare.

Clearly, we aren’t going to be doing any mitigating or preparing for the next four to eight years. The current generation of leadership needs to be replaced, either by youngsters or the last of the post-war liberals with integrity (Sanders and Corbyn are the representatives of that cohort; Sanders lost, Corbyn is polling badly, though I haven’t written him off).

This is where we are. Our civilization is heading into one of the periodic crises that civilizations go through AND, not coincidentally, we have an ecological disaster of unprecedented scale barreling down on us.  The first has so far made it impossible to deal with the second, but it is also our best chance, because it promises the possibility of new leadership with new priorities on the other side.

But we must find a replacement for our current economic ideology, as it has served us very badly. We are also going to need to take a hard look at our political ideologies, whether “democratic” or authoritarian, because they have performed no better, being unable to even so much as slow the onrushing night.

Life, in general terms, is going to spend a long time getting worse for a lot of people. There’s a lot of triumphalism about how great our world is, and stats to back it up (stats I don’t trust, but that’s another post), but even if it’s 100 percent true, this “greatness” is time-limited. It has already reversed for many people in the core hegemonic power, where we have had an absolute decline in years lived, as well as huge shocks rolling through the birthplace of our civilization, Europe.

Expect this. Bake this into your plans. Things are going to get worse, and you should be prepared for that, not just physically, if you can, but psychologically. Periods which are shit for decades or even centuries are common in human history, and people keep on keeping on.

Trump isn’t the end of the world, if the end of the world is coming. He isn’t even the start of the end of the world. He and various other events which will occur soon, are at most, the beginning of the end of this period of history.

At the other side of this crisis point, we will either have a society which can deal with these problems well enough to save hundreds of millions to a billion or two lives, or we won’t.

And that’s a set of issues far larger than Trump.

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.

Clio, the Muse of History

Heaven on Earth: The Kindness Maxim

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On December 19, 2016

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In the past, I have noted that kindness is generally the best policy and always the best policy default. If you don’t have an ironclad reason not to be kind, be kind.

Let’s run through this.

People who are treated badly, become bad. The abused grow up to abuse. The sick make others sick and cannot contribute to society. Happy people are better to be around. Prosperous people can afford your products and services.

Happy, healthy, loving, and prosperous people are the people we want in our societies.

We evolved in bands. Forty to fifty people running around the Savannah. We would have been friendly to some other bands (those with whom we shared ancestors) and we were hostile to most other humans, who were our competitors. The level of hostility varied with carrying capacity; if resources were short because of too many humans, quite hostile, otherwise not very.

We did not evolve to take into consideration the needs of large groups of people. In order to do so, we evolved cultural methods: fictive kinship, culture, story, myth, and religion. These things created fictional identities which went beyond people we knew of or saw every day.

Theses are all hacks for a fundamental evolutionary problem: We’ve evolved to be pretty good to those we see all the time, and not to care much about people we don’t.

This was fine when were just a particularly clever animal. Even when we got to the point of making wholesale changes to the environment (usually through agriculture), the worst we could do is ruin a local ecosystem–we couldn’t mess up the world.

But, today, for good or ill, we live in that “interconnected world” and the “global society” everyone talks about. What happens to someone in Nigeria, Brazil, or China matters to me. Their happiness, their health, their prosperity affects mine.

And how they affect the environment affects me, too. How I, a first-worlder with a huge carbon footprint, affect the environment, affects them.

Their well-being affects mine. It is in my interest for them to be better off.

This isn’t what you’ve been told. Economics treats the world as a zero-sum game, a matter of managing scarcity.

The world has scarcities: resources, dumps for pollution like carbon, etc. But civilization isn’t, usually, a zero sum game. Instead, it’s usually negative sum or positive sum, or both. For some time for Westerners, and a few other developed nations, it has been positive sum, and there have been many other periods of positive-sum games.

My win is everyone else’s win.

Creating a good society requires both managing actual scarcities and understanding that actual scarcities are scarce, and that most things people want to do are positive sum. It requires turning most of what we do into positive-sum games. A good society is one in which “your win is my win” is made true far more often than not.

“We win together” is a prescriptive statement which must be made into a descriptive statement. (It is also a descriptive statement in general, because if my win isn’t your win more often than not, we don’t live in a good world.)

So humans must see beyond their identities, their tribes, and their nations, to treat all humans as people whom we want to be healthy, happy, prosperous, and loving. For their sakes and for our sakes.

But there is an additional step required to create a good society, a good world, a good civilization.

We must care for non-human life.

The mass-death of trees and plankton affects you, it affects me. The mass death of fish affects you, it affects me. The destruction of marshlands causes floods and reduces water quality; it affects you, and it affects me. Ecosystem collapse—well, you get it.

The problem here is that I’ve given you the rational argument.

Rationality is marginal. It’s not that humans can’t be rational, it’s that rationality is the lesser part of why we do things or how we make decisions. We make decisions based on emotions, and those emotions are based on our ideologies and identities.

Rationality, or “reason,” allows us to weasel out of doing the right thing too often. It is a tool for our emotions; emotions which right now scream: “My interests, my ideology, my identity, my people matter MOST!”

For a good world to exist, we must feel that other humans should be treated kindly simply because it is the right thing to do. We should be revolted by anyone going hungry, anyone being tortured, anyone being raped. The moment we think “They had it coming,” we’re on the wrong track. (Punishment is not the point, removing the ability of bad actors to continue to act badly is.)

And this principle needs to be extended to non-human life. We need to feel bad when animals are dying in large numbers and going extinct–bad enough to do something about it. We need to instinctively, by default, move to protect them. We should be as revolted by images of dolphins being slaughtered as we are by humans being slaughtered. If we kill for meat (and I eat meat), we should insist it be done humanely.

This must be based on values, principles, and identity, of feeling that humans and animals and even plants are all alive–and because they are alive, they must be treated with respect.

There are sound, pragmatic reasons for doing so; there are also sound moral reasons for doing so (read the Hidden Life of Trees). Anyone who doesn’t think most animals don’t feel pain, or don’t suffer, is on a profoundly unethical, immoral track.

This is the right thing to do, morally and pragmatically, and if we don’t figure out how to do it, we’re little better than bacteria that grow until they destroy their own environment and experience a great die-off.

Be kind. It creates the world you want to live in, and it may well save your life and the lives of those you claim to care about. By granting life the love you reserve only for a few, you give those few (and yourself, as it happens) their best chance at long life and prosperity–and grant it to your descendants as well.

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.

Surviving Climate Change

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On May 15, 2016

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The news is all bad. You may have seen this graphic already, but it’s worth meditating on.

Climate Trend from NASA

Yes, this year has been breaking records. Every single month has been the hottest on record.

There is a chance we’ve “broken out” from the trend, and will now see full operation of the vicious cycle.

I am going to suggest that readers start taking this into account in their personal lives. Figure out how climate change is likely to effect where you live. It isn’t always obvious or linear (for example, there’s a chance that Europe could enter a cold-free if the Gulf Stream shuts off, and it’s already lost one-third of its strength).

Effects will also include movements of people from the worst affected areas. Is where you are, or are going to be, one of the places they will flee to? Are you in a “global city” where the richer citizens may want an “insurance property” driving up real-estate prices even more?

What do you want to do about this for yourself, your family, your nation, and/or the world?  The answer can be “little to nothing,” but it’s worth thinking on. Pushing for residence requirements for real-estate ownership could save your house or condo, as increased prices will increase taxes. It could also make it possible for your children or other young people to live in the nicer cities where the good jobs are.

Where are the refugee camps going to be set up? Does your country have any realistic possibility of settling refugees fairly rather than in camps?

Are you, conversely, in a place from which people are going to have to flee?

Move before you are required to flee. Really. Take the hit necessary and get out, unless you’re old and without dependents.

Is your area going to run out of water? I recently visited San Antonio, and that city will probably run out of water in a couple decades. It might be able to import enough, but it might not. Water is going to be in short supply all through the south.

As shortages hit, violence will increase. Are you on good terms with the local violent authorities, whoever they are? Dean Ing, the science fiction writer and survivalist, moved to a small town and then made sure to become friends with the police chief and the local base commander.

Are you considering how to get, at least partially, off the grid? Could you eat or drink for a few weeks if there were disruptions? What about alternate heating or cooling arrangements? Do you have a “bugout bag” and a “bugout plan” if you have to leave suddenly? The very basics can be cheaper than one might think.

Some of this may be overblown: yet. But it’s worth thinking this stuff through and making what precautions you can. And remember the rule of surviving bad times and disasters.

Friends and neighbours. Make sure you have friends, locally, and that your neighbours know and like you. People who are well-liked by a lot of people are far more likely to survive bad times than those who aren’t. And having really good friends wherever you may have to flee to, if it comes to that, is wise.

Start cultivating.

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