The future is grim
Update 2021: I decided to clean up this article while in the process of writing a 2021 update.
I decided to write this piece to show the scale of climate collapse. Ten years ago, I was the guy chained up to a tree, five years ago, I was the guy protesting trying to get your attention to stop eating meat. I was arrested, ridiculed, and “roughed up”. Now I’m just tired. I’m a Ph.D. in int. relations specializing in climate conflicts, and here is my research.
Usually I would direct you here for 30,000 scientific papers about this fu*ked up situation. But showing research to people doesn’t work so
5 years ago there was a tv show called The Newsroom. It was mostly a serious tv show with some comedic tones about the world of media. There is a famous 5 minutes clip about climate collapse.
Let’s get to it.
Intro, some stats.
According to a Climate Central 2018 report, the current global temperature is above 1C the pre-industrial mean.
Climate stripes- look at the jump in 1995
On these charts you have all the CO2 levels, CH4 levels, N20 levels, Temp and sea level.
The 20 worst Global Warming consequences
9 charts, Why climate is killing us.
1.5C — This used to be the point at which scientists thought we were OK. In 2018 the IPCC wanted to stop global warming at this temperature predicting we will hit it with a 10% chance by 2023. At this temperature, heatwaves across the globe will happen every single year, and these ‘new’ heatwaves will be as hot as the Sahara Desert. There will be massive crop destruction, 70% of coral in the ocean will be bleached, and drought will affect 360M people.
Guess what? According to this year’s part of the IPCC 2019 report (Full report_ we are almost at 1.5C already. Nearly a tenth of the planet has already warmed 2 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century. (Source). The number of loss events (Tsunamis, storms, flood, wildfire) between 1980–2015 has QUADRUPLED
Historically, every climate summit missed its target of limiting GHG emissions by a lot.
Since the adoption of the Paris climate accord at the end of 2015, 33 global banks have provided $1.9 trillion to fossil fuel companies. The amount of financing has risen in each of the past two years.
Where is this shift to cleaner sources of energy? In the last 12 years, the share of carbon-free electricity has barely budged our pathetically slow shift to clean energy, in five charts
Biomass and 6th extinction
Earth appears to be undergoing a process of “biological annihilation.”Humanity Has Killed 83% of All Wild Mammals and Half of All Plants, Of all the birds left in the world, 70% are poultry chickens and other farmed birds(Source). A 2017 study looked at animal populations across the planet by examining 27,600 vertebrate species — about half of the overall total that we know exists. They found that more than 30% of them are in decline. Some species are facing total collapse, while local populations of others are going extinct in specific areas. Moreover, humans have wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970 (Source)
Insects are dying off at record rates. Roughly 40% of the world’s insect species are in decline, according to one study. Insects aren’t the only creatures taking a hit. In the past 50 years, more than 500 amphibian species have declined worldwide — and 90 have gone extinct — due to a deadly fungal disease that corrodes frog flesh. (Source)
And plants are going extinct up to 350 times faster than the historical norm.
On the other hand, Look at the explosion of domesticated animals between 1950 and 2000. Cattle is one of the causes of global warming. Ie. The Amazon is being cut down not for lumber but to make room for cattle (Source).
Re: fishes. There are entire “dark fleets” that turn off their transponders, allowing them to hide illicit activity such as [illegal fishing]. With one in five fish now caught illegally, and with 93 percent of commercial stocks now fully- or over-exploited, the drive to end overfishing was never been more needed. Or The Gulf of Alaska is too close for the first time ever, no more cod, salmon all but gone, Millions of small sea birds died since 2015. Europe is in the same “boat” Report about overfishing in the Baltic sea 2019 and the Mediterranean is the world's most overfished sea (Source). Overfishing is one of the reasons for a possible conflict in the South China sea. The Fishing wars.
And have you heard about bottom-trawling? A quarter of the world’s seafood caught in the ocean is collected through this method. The new analysis, which brings together the contributions of 57 scientists across 22 countries, suggests that 14 percent of the seafloor, shallower than 1,000m, is trawled.
The bleaching of the Barrier reefs or the “dead zones” are also caused by Global warming. “Dead zones” within the world’s oceans — where there is almost no oxygen to sustain life — could be expanding far quicker than currently thought, a new study suggests. The regions are created when large amounts of organic material produced by algae sink towards the seafloor, using up the oxygen present in the deep water.
All the Species Declared Extinct This Decade
Population
If our numbers grow by 228,000 on an average day, then in one week, we will have added about 1,589,000 extra persons to the world population. And five days after that we will add another million and then another and another, and we are on track to continue this way repeatedly into the foreseeable future. Never before in human history have we asked our governments, infrastructure, social institutions, earth’s environment, and the social fabric of our civilizations to respond to and accommodate such mammoth increase numbers in such compressed periods of time (Source). To prepare for it Humanity must produce more food in the next four decades than we have in the last 8,000 years. (Source) But we are wasting so much food and losing so much water in irrigation that taking all this into account Society will collapse by 2040 due to catastrophic food shortages. The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. (Source)
Migrations
Tens, hundreds of millions of climate refugees. (MIT source) By 2050 there will be 1.5B migrants. Yes, it’s in 30 years. (Source). And it will increase the potential for conflicts and violence. A study by the Pentagon confirms there will be wars caused by migrants. Just an example of the top of my head. India could block the river Indus and kill hundreds of millions of Pakistanis (source). Both countries have WMD.
Consequently, there will be a rise of fascism and the use of concentration camps. Trump already tried to block migrants in the south of the US and China is doing terrible things to Uighurs to have a uniform country. We will see a rise of this in most developed countries over the next 30 years.
Famines
We can already see the effects of extreme weather on food shortages. It is affecting our food supplies (Source). 45M Southern African are facing starvation at the end of 2019 (Source)(Video). And climate change really looks like starvation and it will cause more and more humanitarian crisis (Source) One example: Extreme weather is behind the locust infestation of 2020, according to the U.N. East Africa experienced abnormally heavy rains late last year, flooding regions that are normally semiarid. Such conditions are favorable for locust breeding, which can grow substantially if not disrupted — a challenge in cash-strapped countries contending with insurgencies and other security challenges. Continued breeding in some areas is already deepening the crisis. Africa’s Worst Locust Plague in Decades Threatens Millions
Jet stream patterns could also destroy multiple crops. Climate variability is responsible for at least 30% of the annual fluctuations in worldwide agricultural yield. Under “normal” climatic conditions, the global food system can compensate for local crop losses through grain storage and trade. However, it is doubtful whether the current system is resilient to more extreme climatic conditions. Climatic shocks to agricultural production contribute to food price spikes and famine, with the potential to trigger other systemic risks, including political unrest and migration. (Source)
Severe floods spurred by record rainfall soaked the southeast and the Midwest this summer, delaying plantings of corn and soy crops. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the 12-month period ending in May of this year was the wettest 12 months on record in the United States. Flooding on the Mississippi River this year also set records for how long it lasted in several locations.(Source) American farmers are left alone with the problem (Source)
Not to mention that with climate change and crop destruction there is a rising tide of farmers’ suicides. Over the course of 30 years, 60,000 Hindu farmers committed suicide because they lost all crops (Source)(Source2)
In South America, gradually rising temperatures, more extreme weather events and increasingly unpredictable patterns — like rain not falling when it should, or pouring when it shouldn’t — have disrupted growing cycles and promoted the relentless spread of pests. That’s why Central American Farmers Head to the U.S., Fleeing Climate Change.
Scarcity of freshwater
India has 5 years to solve the water crisis, South Africa had the worst drought in 1000 years, Zambia has 2M on the brink of starvation thanks to regional [drought]. One of the possible flashpoints could be the Ethiopian dam on the Nile that may be the spark for an Egypt-Ethiopia-Sudan conflict (source) According to the UN report in 10 years, 4 billion people will be short of freshwater, 2 billion will be severely short of it.
Just in India, all the rivers on average have depleted over 40 percent. The Krishna, Narmada, and the Ganga have depleted over 60 percent, 55 percent, and 40 percent respectively.
The Ganga basin accounts for 26 percent of India’s geography and almost a third of agriculture. To build the railways, we ripped off vegetation in that whole region. In 70 years’ time we have taken down 78 percent of tree cover in the Ganga basin, and you expect that river to flow?
According to the Composite Water Management Index report released by the NITI Aayog recently, many major cities including Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad may have no groundwater by 2020, affecting nearly a 100 million people. No population on the planet is as water-distressed as the Indian population. It has 17 percent of the world’s population but only about 3.5 percent of the world’s water resources. At any time, no population should use more than 15 to 25 percent of its groundwater resources. But today, over 80 percent of the water we consume and use is groundwater resources. (Source)
And it’s not only South Asia or Africa. European countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, France will have a tough time in 20 years (Source). In Australia, Queensland school runs out of water in Dec. 2019 as commercial bottlers harvest local supplies (Source). NASA researchers are expecting a “megadrought” in the US that will destroy crops in the next 5 years. (Source).
According to the Water Research Institute, New Mexico faces the direst situation of any U.S. state, with its water risk rating as “extremely high.” Its rankings put New Mexico on par with the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East and Eritrea in Africa.
California, a state that has its fair share of water problems, comes next. The drought that began sweeping across the U.S. in the 2010s is still causing huge problems, from California on up to southeast Alaska’s rainforest.
What is even more concerning is that U.S. groundwater is facing depletion, with industries and people digging ever deeper for water that used to come easy. (Source)
And at the end of 2019, over 1,000 experts call for global action on ‘depleting’ groundwater (Source)
PS: My Ph.D. is about flashpoints caused by water scarcity.
Illnesses
As the rest of the Earth warms, animals will be forced to migrate en masse. This means animals carrying tropical diseases (such as malaria. To give you an idea of why this should really scare you is because diseases like camel flu have a mortality rate of 36%. And the world’s hospitals are not ready for the health challenges of climate change( Source)
Nearly unbeatable and difficult to identify fungus has adapted to global warming and can now survive the warm body temperature of humans. With a 50% mortality rate in 90 days, meet Candida Auris, the first pathogenic fungus caused by human-induced global warming(Source)
Report from the WHO World at risk. They listed dozens of illnesses that the experts suggested had the potential to trigger an outbreak that could spiral out of control, among them the plague, Ebola, Zika virus, and Dengue. A flu-like deadly pandemic could sweep the world in hours and kill millions because NO country is fully prepared. A century ago the Spanish flu pandemic infected a third of the world’s population and killed 50million people. (Source)
- Lyme disease: A recent CDC report found that the number of cases of illnesses transmitted by ticks more than doubled between 2004 and 2016 in the US; the greatest jump was seen in cases of Lyme disease. Researchers identified warming temperatures and shorter winters as one of the reasons. Also, the change in the weather allowed ticks to invade areas that had previously been too cold for them to live.
- West Nile virus: Temperatures soared this past summer in Europe. At the same time, there was a sharp spike in West Nile virus infection — with more than 400 cases reported. Health experts believe the two are connected. The disease is spread by mosquitoes that have fed on infected birds, and warmer temperatures have helped to start the transmission season early.
- Malaria: In Ethiopia and Colombia, scientists observed that malaria’s range shifted to warmer areas between 1990 to 2005. In part because the transmitting mosquito thrives in the heat. But also, because the parasite that causes malaria reproduces faster inside the vector mosquito when the weather is warmer.
- Flesh-Eating Bacteria: It’s not just humans who enjoy a nice swim in the ocean when the weather is hot. Flesh-eating bacteria called vibriosis flourish in warm seawater. As temperatures climb and sea levels rise, they increase in number and can infect people through open wounds or by contaminating popular seafood like oysters. (Source)
Oh, and many dangerous bacteria are becoming resistant to the drugs meant to fight them. According to the newest data, more than 2.8 million people in the United States experience an infection from antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year. Moreover, these “superbugs” cause 35,000 deaths per year in the country. (Source)
Pollution
The scale of Pollution is terrifying and only growing. You can see a live feed of pollution levels (here)
Oil spills from tankers are getting rarer
but that’s just because US and Canada are expanding their local oil drilling production. Look at this timelapse of 10,000 oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico between 2010–2015. It’s like the Gulf getting chlamydia. The US is now the largest global crude oil producer and its Permian region (Texas) went from 1,000,000 barrels a day in 2010 to almost 5,000,000 b/d in [2019] and production could double by 2023(Source). 47% of U.S. oil fields that are discovered — but not yet developed — are dependent on fossil fuel subsidies and Subsidy-dependency varies fairly widely by region. In the Williston Basin of North Dakota, for example, 59% of oil resources are subsidy-dependent. In the Permian Basin of Texas, that number is 40%. Yes, it’s coming out of your pocket. YOU are subsidizing oil CEOs (Source). And have you heard about the Keystone Oil spill that no one is talking about and it will be impossible to clean up (Source). A staggering 61% of the world’s new oil and gas production over the next decade is set to come from one country alone: the United States.
Cruise ship pollution. All 47 ships of the Carnival corporation are emitting 10x more SOx than all the EU cars. And they dump 1B gallons of sewage into the ocean every year(Source)
Timeline of smoke levels in Sydney from Reddit
And did you know that rising CO2 levels are making us dumber? (Source) Video showing what happens to us when CO2 ppm is above 600
There’s 1,000,000x more microplastic in our oceans and food than we realized (Source) and it doesn’t seem to stop. Major oil companies, facing the prospect of reduced demand for their fuels, are ramping up their plastics output (Source). Shell is building a $6 billion ethane cracking plant — a facility that turns ethane into ethylene, a building block for many kinds of plastic — in Monaca, Pennsylvania, 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. It is expected to produce up to 1.6 million tons of plastic annually after it opens in the early 2020s. And then everything ends in poor countries. Please read about the rivers of trash.
Landfills and the myth of recycling. Just watch the movie Plastic China. The UK, like most developed nations, produces more waste than it can process at home: 230m tonnes a year — about 1.1kg per person per day. The US, the world’s most wasteful nation, produces 2kg per person per day (Source). Before the China ban, the US was exporting 20M tons of plastic to China. The present dumping ground of choice in Malaysia. In October last year, a Greenpeace Unearthed investigation found mountains of British and European waste in illegal dumps there: Tesco crisp packets, Flora tubs, and recycling collection bags from three London councils. As in China, the waste is often burned or abandoned, eventually finding its way into rivers and oceans. (Source). Only 8.7% of plastic is recycled Yep. And it’s not even the tip of the iceberg. What about Electronic waste?. All this creates a gigantic health risk and causing many illnesses (Source 1), (Source 2)
Fashion is also to blame. In 2015, fashion creates more emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Around 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions are churned out by the fashion industry, due to its long supply chains and energy-intensive production. Textile factories in China, where “over 50%” of the world's clothing is now made” spew out around three billion tons of soot every year burning coal, contaminating the air leading to respiratory and heart disease. Textile mills are estimated to generate 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution and use 20,000 chemicals, many of them carcinogenic. While people bought 60% more garments in 2014 than in 2000, they only kept the clothes for half as long throwing 80lbs of clothes a year per American (Source). A lot of this clothing ends up in the dump. The equivalent of one garbage truck full of clothes is burned or dumped in a landfill every second. In total, up to 85% of textiles go into landfills each year. That’s enough to fill the Sydney harbor annually.
Washing clothes, meanwhile, releases 500,000 tons of microfibers into the ocean each year — the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. Many of those fibers are polyester, a plastic found in an estimated 60% of garments. Producing polyester releases two to three times more carbon emissions than cotton, and polyester does not break down in the ocean. A 2017 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated that 35% of all microplastics — very small pieces of plastic that never biodegrade — in the ocean came from the laundering of synthetic textiles like polyester. plastic pollution ocean waste environment. Polyester, nylon, spandex use 342M barrels of oil EACH YEAR. 33% of viscose in clothes comes from forests and 70% of the harvested wood is dumped (Source). And most donated clothes are trash and send to Africa to mass landfills. (Source) You really don’t need this 52nd sweater.
Common pesticides everywhere. They are found to starve fish ‘astoundingly fast’ by killing aquatic insects (Source). The long-term study showed an immediate plunge in insect and plankton numbers in a large lake after the introduction of neonicotinoid pesticides to rice paddies. The same thing is happening on the other side of the globe. Underwater fish farm pipe in British Columbia is still churning out virus-infected blood and guts (Source). And what about drugs pollution? [‘Dump it down the drain’: How contaminants from prescription-drug factories pollute waterways]
Permafrost and Methane.
[Soil in the Arctic Is Now Releasing More Carbon Dioxide Than 189 Countries]
At the 2C level we expect 6.6 million square kilometers of permafrost to thaw. And create a feedback loop of releasing a lot of methane which means that melting ice caps and permafrost becomes a self-accelerating extinction. It is already boiling with Methane But that is also terrifying because we know that there are pathogens frozen in that permafrost— pathogens like anthrax. Or 28 never-before-seen virus groups from two ice cores in the Tibetan glacier
Topsoil erosion
We are running out of topsoil (Source), by 2055 we will have none of it video. That’s the warning of “Surviving the 21st Century” author Julian Cribb to an international soil science conference in Queenstown, New Zealand on Dec 15, 2016.
10 kilos of topsoil, 800 litres of water, 1.3 litres of diesel, 0.3g of pesticide and 3.5 kilos of carbon dioxide — that’s what it takes to deliver one meal, for just one person,” Cribb says.
And it takes 2000 years to form 5cm of topsoil. If you don’t think this will affect you…just you wait until food becomes the rarest commodity on Earth. If you think you have seen human barbarity, just wait until those same humans are starving and desperate for food. This won’t mean millions starving. It will mean billions starving. Including you.
The Blue Ocean event
A Blue Ocean Event means that huge amounts of sunlight won’t get reflected back into space anymore, as they previously were. Instead, the heat will have to be absorbed by the Arctic. As long as the Arctic Ocean has sea ice, most sunlight gets reflected back into space and the ‘Center-of-Coldness’ remains near the North Pole. A Blue Ocean Event will not only mean that additional heat will have to be absorbed in the Arctic, but also that wind patterns will change radically and even more dramatically than they are already changing now, which will also make that other tipping points will be reached earlier. This is why a Blue Ocean Event is an important tipping point and it will likely be reached abruptly and disruptively by 2022 (Source) The arctic ice volume over the years in one chart. It is a downward spiral.
At the beginning of 2020, Greenland’s Ice Melt Rate Has Now Accelerated To A Whopping 234 Billion Tons Of Ice Lost Per Year. In the 1990s scientists observed Greenland was losing 25 billion tons of ice per year. The results of this study, recently released in Nature, show that between 1992 and 2018, Greenland lost 3.8 trillion tons of ice.
The ice sheet feedback loop
And when it comes to rising ocean levels it’s becoming increasingly difficult to predict because not only are we heating the air, heat is getting trapped in the oceans too which means that ice sheets in the Arctic circle and Greenland are melting from above and below — meaning they’re melting much MUCH faster than we estimated even in our most extreme estimates. This will mean that Florida and New York could be completely underwater. If you’re worried about refugees from Central and Latin America or Africa, you’ll want to start thinking about the tens of millions of people that will be fleeing inland to escape the inundations. Rising Seas Will Erase even More Cities by 2050. It triples our previous estimates.
The latest report shows that the oceans are warming at the same rate as if 5 Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second. Back in 2013 it was 4 Hiroshima bombs per second. (Source)
And warming oceans doesn’t just mean rising ocean levels either — it means more ocean water gets evaporated, which means larger, faster and deadlier hurricanes and torrential disastrous downpours (Source). In 2016 the US had five 1,000-year floods in less than a year (Source). NPR episode about flash floods
Wet-bulb event
The new analysis assesses the impact of climate change on the deadly combination of heat and humidity, measured as the “wet bulb” temperature (WBT).
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. At 100% relative humidity, the wet-bulb temperature is equal to the air temperature (Wikipedia)
Once the WBT reaches 35C (95F), the human body cannot cool itself by sweating, and even fit people sitting in the shade will die within six hours. Extreme heatwaves that kill even healthy people within hours will strike parts of the Indian subcontinent unless global carbon emissions are cut sharply and soon, according to new research. Even outside of these hotspots, three-quarters of the 1.7bn population — particularly those farming in the Ganges and Indus valleys — will be exposed to a level of humid heat classed as posing “extreme danger”. They're already parts of the world that are above 32–33C WBT (Source).
Ocean Acidification
Oceans are absorbing a large portion of the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere — in fact, oceans are the largest single carbon sink in the world, dwarfing the absorbing abilities of the Amazon rainforest. But the more CO2 the oceans absorb, the more acidic they become on a relative scale because some of the carbon reacts within the water to form carbonic acid (Source). If acidification decreases marine emissions of sulfur, it could cause an increase in the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface, speeding up warming — which is exactly what the Nature Climate Change study predicts. Researchers estimate that the pH of the ocean will drop by 0.4 pH units by the end of this century if carbon emissions are not stopped, or by 0.15 units if global temperature rise is limited to 2C. (Source)And why Ocean Acidification is so important? Because there is a mass extinction of phytoplankton in the oceans right now
Phytoplankton use photosynthesis to turn carbon in the atmosphere into carbon in their bodies. We looked at diatoms, a key group of phytoplankton responsible for 40% of this process in the ocean. Not only do they remove huge amounts of carbon, but they also fuel entire marine food webs.
Diatoms use dissolved silica to build the walls of their cells. These dense, glass-like structures mean diatoms sink more quickly than other phytoplankton and therefore increase the transfer of carbon to the seafloor where it may be stored for millennia.
The more acidic the seawater, the more the diatom communities were made up of smaller species, reducing the total amount of silica they produced. Less silica means the diatoms aren’t heavy enough to sink quickly, reducing the rate at which they float down to the sea bed, safely storing carbon away from the atmosphere.
On examining individual cells, we found many of the species were highly sensitive to increased acidity, reducing their individual silicification rates by 35–80%. (Source) Oh and microplastic is also killing plankton (Source)
Financial Black Swan event
The Next Recession Will Destroy Millennials Millennials are already in debt and without savings. After the next downturn, they’ll be in even bigger trouble. How CEOs got so rich in the last decades—buybacks. Student debt is massive. The minimum wage didn’t move for the last 40 years. The gap between productivity and a typical worker’s compensation has increased dramatically since 1979. If you want to read about wealth inequalities please see my article:
Conclusion
The super-rich
The rich know that it is too late, and they will be the ones to survive global warming (Source). Good GQ article on how the billionaires caused climate change and how they are building bunkers and buying NZ passports to fly there when SHTF happens. Why do you think they are getting richer and richer exponentially? To squeeze the last dollars from you. For example Canada, Norway, and Brasil will flood the world with oil just to profit at the maximum Article from NYT from Nov. 2019 “Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming”. And if anything happens they will just buy Visas or citizenship for 1M+ and bug out (Source) while migrants are put into concentration camps. Moreover here’s an interview with a guy that was invited by billionaires to answer their questions on how to bug out and leave us behind.
Moreover, the rich are against extinction rebellion movement and Greta. Jeremy Clarkson calls Greta an “Idiot” killing the car industry.
Good article on how the future will be seized by corporations. From private taxation to schools, corporate cops, and judges. It’s beginning in Toronto.
/u/nconvenientnews created a great post about how the billionaires are discrediting the climate activists and in here you have 20 firms behind 1/3 of CO2. And please don’t forget that The US military is a bigger polluter than more than 100 countries combined
Politicians
I don’t want to talk much about politicians but there is a trend around the globe to have skeptics deny climate change.
From Australia’s PM denying climate change when almost the whole continent is burning.
To Trump’s specialists
“Carbon dioxide is a actually a benefit to the world and so were the Jews”[William Harper ex-member of the national security council]
Greenpeace exposing the US skeptics (Source)
Bolsonaro is also a good example. Bolsonaro’s response to fires in the Amazon rainforest — in recent months he denied they existed and then blamed them on the media.
Here’s a list of the main US misinformers. The 2019 head of public US lands wants to sell all the national parks
Canada is better but not quite. The Ford government (Toronto) is spending hundreds of millions of dollars this year to tear down or cancel 751 renewable energy projects around the province(Source). Canada sells itself as a leader on climate change but it has the 3rd largest world oil reserved. The Canadian pipelines like the trans mountain one is a great example of how oil is still the “black gold” (Source)
And even Europe. Polish cities rank among Europe’s Dirtiest(Source). How Polish powerplant burns 1 ton of coal every single second and how Poland is the European capital of climate denial.
There’s also greenwashing. I won’t dive deep into this topic but just a small note about Germany — the presumed world’s best recycler. Germans recycle 66% of their trash, according to the researchers, who compiled their data from official sources and adjusted the numbers to account for different countries’ methods of measuring. BUT WAIT — More than 60% of all plastic waste in Germany is burned and just 38% is recycled, the report also said. It’s worth noting that the German government counts items as “recycled” if they have been exported for that purpose. So how much of the 38% are also burned? ( Germany is the №3 exporter of recycling and trash in the world). [Source]And the far-right climate denial is only growing in [Europe]
And if anything happens, a catastrophe, an economic collapse, or riots; police are there only until their family is safe and they get a paycheck. It is very likely that law enforcement and emergency responders will be pretty hard to find; in fact, I would go even further and say that they will become nonexistent. Even during small-scale disasters, law enforcement officers often leave to take care of their own families first. When things go bad (empty grocery stores, no utilities, mass riots, violence, etc.) you are more than likely going to have to defend and take care of yourself. Even FEMA pleads with the public, “You are your own first responder!” Governments are made of fallible people and imperfect systems with shrinking budgets and shifting priorities. As a result, when big disasters strike (like a hurricane), it overwhelms the government because emergency services aren’t designed for suddenly helping millions of people. For example, 911 can get overloaded or even inactive, as emergency responders aren’t allowed to go outside when it’s too dangerous. (Source)
Why going green is not the (only) solution.
Costs of going green are insane and the global economy is unable to bear the brunt of this mass switch. Going 100% green energy is not possible with the current consumption. Earth lacks enough [metals] to produce solar panels, batteries, and ways to distribute energy around the globe. Building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of plastic. Solar power requires even more cement, steel, and glass — not to mention other metals. Global silver and indium mining will jump 250% and 1,200% respectively over the next couple of decades to provide the materials necessary to build the number of solar panels, the International Energy Agency forecasts. World demand for rare-earth elements — which aren’t rare but are rarely mined in America — will rise 300% to 1,000% by 2050 to meet the Paris green goals. If electric vehicles replace conventional cars, demand for cobalt and lithium will rise more than 20-fold. That doesn’t count batteries to back up wind and solar grids. (Source) A periodic table of elements that we are running out of. Why do you think that China controls 90% of all rare minerals? (source)
A single electric-car battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving, and processing more than 500,000 pounds of raw materials somewhere on the planet. The alternative? Use gasoline and extract one-tenth as much total tonnage to deliver the same number of vehicle miles over the battery’s seven-year life.
The new green deal is not enough. The Developing World Is Increasing Emissions At Such A Rate That Any Emission Reduction By The Developed World Will Be Offset. Even if we imagined that the political will could be found in both the United States and the European Union to spend trillions on a Green New Deal, and we made the somewhat generous assumption that these plans would be successful in achieving net-zero emissions by 2030, it would really have no meaningful impact on global carbon emissions thanks to China, Africa, India, and South America.
Same with a meat tax. We can impose a tax on meat in the developed countries but China, India, or South America are eating more and more meat by the day. According to Asia Research and Engagement’s report “charting Asia’s protein journey”, meat and seafood consumption in Asia will rise 33% by 2030 and 78% from 2017 to 2050.
And the power grid is dying (at least in the US). The US military could collapse within 20 years because of a fragile power grid. Blackouts due to extreme weather (hurricanes, floods, wildfires) are on the rise, in part due to climate change, which is only going to get worse. Clean energy technologies threaten to overwhelm the grid — the issue of top-down and DERs (Source). And ¼ of all US bridges could collapse by 2040 (Source). There were some 15,500 high-hazard dams in the US in 2016. For the full report.
Additionally, even the best carbon capture facilities in the world are emitting 25 times more CO2 than they sequestred.
One of the articles looked at the 50-year history of mechanical carbon capture efforts, all entirely tied to the fossil fuel industry, most just used to pump more oil out of played out oil wells as enhanced oil recovery approaches. The assessment showed that virtually no CO2 by global standards has been captured by CCS and that a single year’s output of current wind and solar farms are avoiding 35 times the CO2 that has been ‘captured’ over 50 years of CCS history. Basically, all CCS is a rounding error on the actual solution, just stop emitting CO2. But this is the kicker. All the natural gas that they are shipping turns into a whole lot more CO2. The math is straightforward. For every 1000 kg of natural gas, they grab 90 kg of CO2 and sequester it. Assuming zero leaks, the 910 kg of natural gas is burned by customers, producing a bit over 2500 kg of CO2. Net CO2 emissions are approximately 2410 kg for every 1000 kg of natural gas they pump out of the ground. (Source)
John Sterman’s (MIT’s foremost system dynamics expert) shows even MAGIC tech can barely keep us below 4 degrees by 2100
Why tree-loss prevention is more important than planting them.
There’s too much CO2 in the atmosphere that planting trees can no longer save us — (Source). However, scientists estimate that we need to plant 1 trillion trees to mitigate Global warming. WITHOUT LOSING ONE SINGLE TREE because a burning/rotting tree is releasing all the CO2 back (Source). The Amazon is losing 3 football fields PER MINUTE thanks to the fire. If you prefer an interactive map of all the live fires right now please see here.
At the moment (2019–2020) we are losing 13–15 million hectares per year in South America and Africa and South East Asia because it is converted from a forest to agricultural land (Source). And even if we plant trees “Turkey planted a world record 11 million trees in November 2019. Ninety percent of them may already be dead”
So, if we assume that 1M trees are one step that you make, then 20 meters is 20M trees right? 1 trillion trees are like 2.5x from where you’re standing to the International Space station. Not to mention all the pollution by delivering the seeds (or small trees from tree farms), all the logistics in preparing the ground for planting and all the promotion waste etc.
The #teamtree movement is a feel-good thing but by the end, it is a marketing [stunt]. Just look how the views number exploded since Mr.Beast announced this movement. From 5M a day to 20M a day. And Mr. Beast is not really known to care for the environment. He often litters thousands of ballons. Or he puts 100 Million Orbeez In his Friend’s Backyard. Not to mention everything was probably imported from China on a cargo ship (How cargo ships are emitting a boatload of CO2). Or how he drove 1000 times through the same drive tru with his massive Ford truck. Or can you even recycle a pool of slim?. And his world’s largest cereal bowl? I bet some starving kids will feel good about his #teamtree now. So yes, he is greenwashing himself using your money.
Peak Copper
An international team of researchers has looked at the material demands and pollution that would result from a push to get the globe to 40 percent renewables by the middle of the century. The analysis finds that despite the increased materials and energy demands, a push like this would result in a dramatic reduction in pollution. And for the most part, the material demands could be met, with the possible exception of copper. 40% Green Energy requires 200% more [copper], 100% green energy requires 500% more copper. We move some 3 billion tons of earth per year to get 15 million tons of copper. We cannot recycle it into existence. Substituting aluminum for copper takes 5X the energy and is less safe. And there are no substitutes
Peak sand?
“Sand is the most-consumed natural resource on the planet besides water. People use some 50 billion tonnes of “aggregate” — the industry term for sand and gravel, which tend to be found together — every year. That’s more than enough to blanket the entire United Kingdom. The demand for that material is so intense that around the world, riverbeds and beaches are being stripped bare, and farmlands and forests were torn up to get at the precious grains. And in a growing number of countries, criminal gangs have moved into the trade, spawning an often lethal black market in sand. In India, the amount of construction sand used annually has more than tripled since 2000, and is still rising fast. China alone has likely used more sand this decade than the United States did in the entire 20th Century.
The problem lies in the type of sand we are using. Desert sand is largely useless to us. The overwhelming bulk of the sand we harvest goes to make concrete, and for that purpose, desert sand grains are the wrong shape. Eroded by wind rather than water, they are too smooth and rounded to lock together to form stable concrete.” Source
And lastly —What are feedback loops? and why we can’t stop them.
Why does nobody talk about collapse?
Because a world without hope is a burning world. Imagine 7B people realizing they don’t have a future but only 20 or 30 years? It’s pure chaos — Story of a redditor from Chile. Additionally, the wealthy of this world are trying to promote such work ethics that you don’t have the time to read, watch or study the above. This endless cycle of working-buying stuff-sleeping is damaging our society. We are becoming more and more ostracized from each other by using technology like FB or Tinder. Moreover, some countries or politicians are trying to destabilize the world as we know, to create confusion and conflicts between us. Divide and conquer. Why do you think Russia stands [behind Brexit], the [Black/Blue LM movement], and the [rise of fascism in Europe]? If you want to read more about Russia’s violations of law here is my 1.6k upvoted comment.
If you are 15 years old, emissions went up 30% in your lifetime.
If you are 30 years old, emissions went up 60% in your lifetime.
After 30 years of trying, solar and wind are < 3% of total world energy use.
Just think of the last 10 years. since 2009, emissions went up some 15%.
The distinct burden of being a climate scientist. Climate scientists often resemble Sarah Connor of the Terminator franchise, who knows of a looming catastrophe but must struggle to function in a world that does not comprehend what is coming and, worse, largely ignores the warnings of those who do.
Why do you think there are so many protests going around? Here are all the major protests happening around the globe right now. Why so many people are protesting
Really good book — The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
We are heading into a future where we are going to spend all our free time online by reading more and more disturbing news. Forest fires, hurricans destroying cities, fish dying, new diseases killing countries, all doom and gloom. You could almost say that we are heading into darkness, doom-scrolling our last pieces of sanity.
And when discussing the above with skeptics, please use arguments. List. And I didn’t even talk about the economically destructive power of Automation.
For more: www.reddit.com/r/collapse
