Ian Welsh

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

Category: Environment Page 8 of 15

About the Amazon Burning: It’s Worse than You Think

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On August 22, 2019

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The Amazon goes, we go. This map doesn’t make it seem like it’s in danger, though it’s bad, but…


The Intercept has an excellent article on what the Amazon does, and what its loss would mean, but the simple facts are two:

  • Loss of another fifth of the Amazon, many scientists believe, would trigger a “dieback” causing the rest to die quickly.
  • Loss of the Amazon would release as much carbon into the atmosphere as all human activity since 1880.

What this means is a doomsday scenario. There are scenarios where not only humans, but all higher life dies, and this stands a good chance of being one of them: an uncontrollable increase of ten degrees Celsius or more.

We don’t survive that.

There are claims, which I find credible, that most of these fires were set deliberately by ranchers.

The Amazon is being deforested to create ranches, to sell beef to the rest of the world.

The obvious solution is for the rest of the world to simply pay Brazil more than the meat is worth to stop deforesting and to reforest. Any such treaty must have teeth– independent verification by auditors, NASA, and so on. And if the treaty is broken, not only does the money stop, but severe punishment is levied on Brazil. I hate that, but I don’t see a way around it. This sort of thing must stop. At the very extreme end, if we’re going to go to war over anything, this would be it, but despite what I wrote earlier, that wouldn’t be necessary: serious threats from the US and China would make Bolsonaro crumble. They could destroy Brazil’s economy tomorrow.

The general problem is larger, very difficult, and everyone’s problem. There have been such huge fires in the Pacific Northwest the last couple years that people had to stay indoors for weeks. Those fires weren’t deliberately set (though some were caused by human carelessness), but the problem is bigger: The southern part of those rainforests are no longer viable as rainforests. They’re going to go.

In general, we need to be re-greening.

We also need to do it smart, as too much replanting happens under conditions that amount to plantations: Monocultures which don’t have the full benefit of proper forests. (A good book to read for background is The Hidden Lives of Trees.

To further emphasize the issue, more long term…

Some parts of this problem are genuinely difficult but others aren’t. We can certainly re-green, and even re-green relatively quickly. Some things, like the temperate rain forest of the Pacific Northwest may not be saveable, but re-greening is.

The second thing we need to do is to help the oceans. We need alternatives to fished seafood, and we need them now, and we need to get after bad actors hard (like, but not exclusively, Japan). The key issue here is phytoplankton, which are responsible for perhaps 50 percent of the world’s oxygen, and which are in sharp decline.

This is a truly difficult problem and I won’t pretend it isn’t. But we must do what we can and treat it as the emergency it is.

As I wrote yesterday, we have a ton of problems, we have a ton of money which can’t find anything to do, and somehow we aren’t putting that money to use doing what needs to be done.

This is a question of political will, and so far, we don’t have any. Bolsonaro wants to do the exact wrong thing and reduce the Amazon faster. Obama bragged about increasing fracking massively. We aren’t, as a species or world society, taking these problems seriously, and they are potentially existential problems. Even if they aren’t existential (and I’d rather not risk it, thanks), they will certainly kill billions.

Perhaps we should do something.

Now.

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 Unfolding of Climate Change Catastrophe

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On August 6, 2019

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Globe on FireI want to keep this a very simple post.

There are three likely initial problems which will make the current situation turn into its first catastrophe.

I’m putting aside violent weather events like hurricanes.

The three are water, food, and other supply chain disruptions.

Water should be obvious. Aquifers are drying up, rainfall patterns will change, snowfall patterns will change, and glaciers are dying. This means that all our water sources are in play – groundwater, lakes, rivers, and streams. Many of these will just dry up. The annual cycle of rebuilding snowpacks and glaciers accounts for much of the world’s water.

The American Southwest will run out of water. Period. Most of India is borked, and so are vast parts of China, and so on. You need to do the research for wherever you live. Start by figuring out where your water comes from now and whether it is vulnerable.

Supply chains are a problem. It is barely an exaggeration to say that we have created the the most easily disrupted supply chain in world history. Things tend to be made or grown in a few specific areas, then shipped all over the world.

A severe climate shock which really wrecks food production will cause a huge rise in food prices, which will lead to various famines. That will lead to hoarding, looting, and violence.

But it needs to be emphasized that supply chains are a more general problem. Are you on a drug or medicine from which withdrawal will be ugly–or even deadly? This includes a lot of legal psychiatric drugs, including SSRIs and so on. Withdrawals are really ugly. Most people don’t have an extra supply. If the supply chain is disrupted, and at some point it almost certainly will be, you could be in a world of hurt.

Our capitalists, who are already killing people by raising prices on drugs like insulin, will, of course, capitalize on this and kill many more.

So these are the three most likely initial catastrophic scenarios. There are others like heatwaves and category 6 hurricanes and cyclones, but those tend to be localized. When water is scarce you have only days to live. When food is scarce a few weeks (you can go a week or two if you are healthy without any real problem, it’s just unpleasant.) And when medicines or other supplies you need go away, well, that may put you down or incapacitate you.

Look at your vulnerabilities in these areas, and if you can do something to mitigate them, please do.

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 Problem with Neoliberal “It’s Never Been Better” Triumphalism

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On July 15, 2019

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Saying that humanity is currently the best off it has ever been (a dubious proposition in any case) is like saying “I’ve never been warmer” as you burn down your house.

Globe on FirePeople like Pinker have been trotting out stats to claim that we’ve never been better off. Those stats are questionable, based on a definition of  poverty that is beyond questionable. Meanwhile, in India, people eat less calories than they did 30 years ago. (I traveled in India and lived in Bangladesh 30 years or so ago. Eating less calories is unimaginably bad. That a small middle class and a new wealthy class has been created means little to those eating… less.)

But let’s wave that all aside. Let’s posit that human life now is the best it’s ever been.

Meanwhile, in India, people are dying in 50 degree C weather. France had a massive heatwave. Indian farmers are committing suicide in droves, in large part because of issues with ground water.

Extreme weather is getting worse, the permafrost is melting 70 years ahead of the consensus forecast, and so on. Ecologically, fish stocks are collapsing, the Amazon is being chopped down at a ferocious rate, more than one study has found collapses in insect populations at 80 percent or so, and others have noticed that without insects, you don’t have birds, and so on and so forth.

Blah, blah, blah.

Not only is no human an island, but humanity lives among other species, and they make our lives possible in ways we are barely aware of. Most oxygen in the world, for example, is produced by small ocean organisms, organisms which could have a mass die off.

Sigh.

So let us say that this is the bestest of best worlds, a Panglossian paradise.

Present prosperity is being paid for with future poverty, future mass death, and a non-trivial risk of human extinction. As for non-human species, they are already dying at a rate which will show up as the fastest mass extinction in Earth’s existence.

This is only a good bet if you are sure that you’re going to die before the bill comes due. That was a good bet for the GI Generation. A decent bet for the Silents and not a bad bet for about the first half of the Boomers. It’s a bad bet for everyone afterwards who expects to live to 70 or 80 or so (a normal human lifespan in most developed countries).

And, of course, it’s a bad bet if you actually, y’know, care about your children, or other people’s children, or the future of humanity when you’re gone. (Gonna be a shitty place to reincarnate too, if reincarnation exists.)

Now let’s bring this back to neoliberal “greatest time to be alive” triumphalism.

The sub voce message there is, “We don’t need to change, everything’s fine and getting better.”

But, if we’re living not just unsustainably, but in a way that will call Biblical level catastrophe within the lives of most people now alive and their children, perhaps we do need to change, and radically.

So this sort of triumphalism, even if it were true, would be a disservice to not just humanity, but life on Earth.

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.

Why the Consensus Environmental Predictions Are Wrong

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On June 15, 2019

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So, a little bit ago, I noted that with temperatures of 70 degrees in the arctic, we could expect permafrost to melt, and that would release methane. Methane is a lot stronger a greenhouse gas than carbon, in the short run, and there is a lot held in arctic permafrost.

It was suggested that this was “alarmism” and the temperatures would penetrate enough for the permafrost to really melt.

Yeah, about that…

One point I have made consistently now for many years is that virtually everything will happen faster than the consensus estimates. That point has been, well, consistently true.

The estimates made by organizations like the UN are always way too optimistic. Always. They are always wrong.

This is partially because they are playing politics: They’re trying to tell decision makers what they are willing to hear. It is partially because decision makers trim their estimates and it is partially because most people, even most scientists, are shitty system thinkers.

(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.)

The concepts of break points and exponential growth don’t really penetrate into most people’s thinking.

The way the world works for long periods is that it’s mostly the same, and there are trends, and the trends are mostly linear. Assume the world be about how it was yesterday, add or subtract the trends, and you’re done.

But when the world actually changes, it changes fast. Those linear trends (which often aren’t linear, they just look like it) hit break points, and they go exponential, or geometric, or they just change their linearity dramatically (from a one percent change to a three percent change a year, say.)

And everything then changes, big time.

This is true for human affairs and for non-human systems (though the two are largely the same now that humanity is the elephant in the ecosystem tea shop). So everything changes after the Great Depression and after the War. Everything changes because of the oil shocks leading to stagflation leading to Reagan/Thatcher.

There’s a status quo, with slow change, then something breaks the status quo, and BOOM.

This is how climate change is working and will work. Slow change, then a threshold is crossed and BOOM. Weeks of tornadoes. Category 6 hurricanes (5 was supposed to be the top.)

Or permafrost melts.

And the permafrost melt is happening 70 years before expected by the consensus estimate.

People suck at systems thinking, even most scientists.

The world is changing. We have the foreshocks now of changes which in a decade or two, will lead to a VERY different world. Ecologically and socially.

This can no longer be stopped. It will not happen. (Maybe we can, once we take it seriously, make it better with geo-engineering, but that will not stop it from first happening.)

So, again, we are now in the “Something bad is going to happen, what are you going to do?” stage. Organizing to stop it failed. It failed. It failed. It is done. You can organize to mitigate and prepare, and you can prepare yourself.

Good luck.

 

The Most Important Climate Change Graph You’ll Ever See

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On May 28, 2019

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This is why we won’t be stopping climate change, and why you must personally plan for it.

We are not going to start mitigating at 5 percent this year.

We are not going to start mitigating at 9 percent in 2029.

These are political non-starters. They will not happen. For whatever reason, probably because most decision makers are old and will die before the worst, and the rest are rich and think that their money will protect them, we have not and will not do what is needed until there is widespread catastrophe: Catastrophe which kills millions in the developed world and China.

And maybe not even then.

(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.)

If you are not yourself old, and likely to die in the next ten to 20 years, or if you have dependents you wish to protect, you need to take this seriously and make plans.

As part of my recent essay collection, I wrote two new essays. One of them was a long article on how to evaluate your risk from future events, including climate change.

That essay starts on page 146, and if you read no other essays in the book, I’d appreciate it if you read that one.

You can get the book, in PDF or Epub format, here.

Even if you have little money, there are preparations and precautions you can make.

Start thinking about this now; start preparing now, because if you just react when catastrophe hits, your odds of surviving or avoiding the worst suffering go way down.

Start preparing also because when catastrophe hits, it is likely to do so by surprise and sooner than most mainstream estimates. The systems in question are not linear and we don’t properly understand all the feedback loops. It is very likely that there will be a point where change becomes geometric.

So, please, read and prepare (or just prepare).

Say Goodbye to Permafrost (And Civilization)?

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On May 13, 2019

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Globe on FireSo, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are now higher than they have ever been since homo sapiens have existed.

Meanwhile, on Russia’s arctic coast, which is permafrost, the temperature is 29C, 84F.

That means the permafrost is melting.

Because we continue to pump green house gasses out, because every scenario includes more significant warning, I will state again: We are not going to avoid permafrost melting.

Permafrost holds vast amounts of methane. Methane is, short term, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

This will likely then lead to methane releases from arctic seas. It will lead to faster melting of glaciers and polar and antarctic ice. As oceans warm, they will expand further, leading to sea level rises.

Increased temperatures will lead to even more extreme weather events such as category 6 hurricanes.

We will see changes in weather patterns and so on.

But the key point is that we are about to hit the accelerator, and there is no actual possibility of avoiding it, which will almost certainly lead to exponential, uncontrolled increases in climate change.

We are, for all practical purposes, past the point of no return. We will lose our coastal cities, for example, the only question is when. The glaciers and snowcaps in most of the world will go away, leading to many rivers drying up.

Etc, etc…

Climate change is not a question, it is a certainty, and the question is not, “Will it be bad?” but “How bad?”

The answer is, almost certainly, “Very, very bad.”

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.

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.

 

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