Five years ago I predicted this omnicidal set of living arrangements would be done by the end of this year. In the intervening period, the following individuals have made predictions consistent with complete collapse of the world’s industrial economy: James Howard Kunstler, Niall Ferguson, Michael Ruppert, “Rice Farmer,” Karl Denninger, Rob Viglione, Gerald Celente, Jeff Rubin, Matt Savinar, Catherine Austin Fitts, Max Keiser , Jim Willie, Graham Summers, Charles Munger, Gonzalo Lira, Peter Schiff, John P. Hussman, Doug Casey, Jan Lundberg, Chris Hedges, Michael Snyder, Kenneth Deffeyes, Matt Simmons (deceased), Bill Bonner, Paul Craig Roberts, Marc Faber, James Wesley Rawles, Tony Robbins, Nouriel Roubini, “Tyler Durden” (the collection of analysts and writers at Zero Hedge), James Kwak, Simon Johnson, Chris Clugston, John Taylor, Bob Janjuah, Samsam Bakhtiari, Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, Bob Chapman, George Ure, Anthony Fry, Igor Panarin, Mac Slavo, G. Edward Griffin, Joseph Meyer, Harry Dent, Lindsey Williams, Richard Russell, Harley Bassman, Niño Becerra, Martin Weiss, Stephanie Jasky, Eric deCarbonnel, Richard Mogey, Robin Landry, Robert Prechter, Pamela and Mary Anne Aden, Paul Farrell, Nassim Taleb, Gilbert Mercier, Chris Duane, John Williams, Hugh Hendry, Arthur Laffer, Daryll Robert Schoon, Jeff Gundlach, Byron King, Simon Black, Albert Bates, Gordon T. Long, Clyde Prestowitz, Bill Deagle, John Lohman, Alessio Rastani, Mark Grant, Ann Barnhardt , Christopher Greene, George Soros, Bill Clinton, and Willem Buiter.
It’s small consolation to have such abundant and varied company. American Empire didn’t fall. Neither did the Eurozone. We haven’t hit Dow 4,000 (hence capitulation of the stock markets). Hyperinflation hasn’t kicked in. Sadly, I’m still hacking away, and you’re still reading online.
Maybe next year. Here’s hoping.
This post is a gift to all those folks cheering for industrial civilization to keep on keeping on. To keep destroying every aspect of the living planet. It seems you’ve found what you’re looking for, in the spirit of the three Chinese curses, so feel free to point out I’m incorrect. Again. I’m done with predictions involving timing. And we’re done, too, in the very near future, with particular thanks to continuation of the industrialized economy. We’ve locked in near-term human extinction. First to go: those of us living in the interior of a continent in the northern hemisphere.
Same-day update: I’m featured in this week’s version of OWS Week. It’s embedded below.
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The essays about motivated reasoning will remain open to commentary for another couple of days. During that time, I’ll be traveling.
December 21st, 2012 at 5:44 am
I’d put it sometime in 2016, for a number of indicators. Very likely a financial crisis that will dwarf the one we have seen so far. Certainly the beginnings of a collapse of available services. And an unmistakeable peak in both industrial and food production per capita. Downhill from there. Just based on some modelling. Some crisis may precipitate the slide sooner, but it is unlikely to be much later than that.
December 21st, 2012 at 5:45 am
Hey Guy….. you left MY name out of that list…… :{)
It’s always a bit tricky putting dates to events like these… Ehrlich got caught with his pants down too. And now it looks like the Mayans got it wrong too..!
I’m frankly amazed the wheels haven’t fallen off yet; but you must admit, there are so many hamsters pedalling like mad behind the scenes to keep the Matrix going, I’m getting less and less surprised at just how far down the road they can kick the cans…..
We all know that the longer it takes, the worse the crash will be. Maybe this year?
December 21st, 2012 at 6:16 am
Hi Guy,
Sorry to read the bitterness. Your talk at UMass Amherst kicked me the last bit of the way into myself. I’ve increased doing my part, in the small ways a single person can, by reaching out more explicitly to those closest to me (in heart as well as proximity).
Mike’s notion of the hamsters peddling to keep the Matrix going – excellent! Reminds me to finish editing a video…
Another friend shared a Pema Chodron quote to Facebook about the same time as this blog entry of yours, it speaks to me on many levels, including pain and grief for the world.
”To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.”
The Mayans’ predictions, btw, include awakening as well as cataclysmic change. Seems to me the two are going to go hand-in-hand. Hopefully the numbers of people moving out of zombification into awakened states will continue to increase, and those of us on the path will continue to grow our collective will.
December 21st, 2012 at 6:27 am
While I feel the urgency of all of the above in respect of economic collapse I am no economist. On climate however I suspect the roughly 35-40 year lag effect for the generalised impact of carbon emissions on average global temperature places catastrophic collapse still some way off – after all, the extreme climate events of 2012 could best be described as the normal outcome of cumulative emissions up to the mid 1970′s. Emissions racked up a notch during the 80′s and 90′s and on average doubled to over 2% increase per annum during the 2000′s, took a small dip in 2009, and are now increasing at around 3% per annum. This suggests the great cull may be underway in the 2040′s. Of course everyone’s catastrophe seems final, as it was to those who have perished, but as Orlov notes, you don’t really notice the enormity of the die-off till you look at your class photo and realise most of your friends are dead. This has not yet been my fortune in the so-called “lucky country”, even though my countrymen and governments blithely persist as global leaders in coal exports and per capita carbon emissions. Even if a cyclone Sandy, extreme drought in the SE, and killer cyclone seasons become the new normal for the US, the mess can be cleaned up and rebuilt, although where I am from I’d give more thought to living underground (on higher ground) – unlike the developing world where reconstruction is much more a challenge or an impossibility. How long the US or the Western industrial system can keep externalising its survival costs, in terms of access to resources, food and energy is for me an economic imponderable and I defer to knowledgeable economic and geopolitical commentators. Even so, I foresee no specific catastrophic event other than the one that I will have to deal with when it happens to me – despite my avoidance and survival strategies. Following Orlov, my priority is to teach my kids the skills that I believe will make them the kind of people most likely to survive.
December 21st, 2012 at 8:49 am
Steph, I appreciated your name being linked to your own writing. I’ve decided to do the same, here, tremulously. We must live fairly close to each other. Come hang out.
Guy, you have marked the failure of the timing predictions to come true. (But we still have a few days left before the end of 2012, right?) What sort of gift or congratulations are in order for the cheerleaders of industrial civilization? Corpses of entire species at their feet? Ravaged societies? Dead children? The prediction that remains true is that the longer Civ is prolonged, the worse it will be, for everyone. And so it has come to pass. The ones that are still alive now are not the first ones to go, I feel compelled to point out. The first ones to go are already gone. Meanwhile, may your travels be bold, both within and without. (I reconsidered writing “safe travels.” A futile wish.)
December 21st, 2012 at 9:15 am
Hi Jen, yes – we must be close, funny that you were in the audience at Guy’s talk. I wish I had actually known about the livestreaming in advance, because we could have made the interpretation accessible to a wider audience. Oh well (I’m good at noticing missed opportunities, ha).
Your sentiment to travel boldly is great. I understand the trepidation of linking my name publicly with these pronouncements of impending doom. Took me over a week to post that blogentry (http://www.reflexivity.us/wp/2012/12/get-off-the-grid-or-why-ive-been-pensive-lately/) because of . . . various worries. Will my entire social circle change? What about those friends who have helped hold me in place while I flailed around for my own solid center? In the past, I’ve let anticipated pain overrule present joy. It’s a tricky business, staying stable without moving into denial or some other disconnected kind of coping strategy.
As I become more clear in myself, my sense of self-purpose strengthens and – lo-and-behold! There are good feelings here! Bill McKibben is right on this point: we’ve got a chance and we’ve got to use it.
December 21st, 2012 at 9:24 am
Guy, sadly it no longer seems to matter that the economy didn’t collapse this year, although admittedly we have a few days left, even a few hours for the Mayan calendar end of the world to come to pass.
The picture at this link says it all for me
http://neven1.typepad.com/.a/6a0133f03a1e37970b017744cf5360970d-pi
Climate change is racing ahead of everyone’s predictions, it is out of our hands. The powerlessness of humans to save themselves is going to be more and more apparent. For that reason probably they will end us all with a nuclear war just so they can play their game of Last Man Standing.
December 21st, 2012 at 9:25 am
Guy
This maybe said by others before…
This collapse thing all depends on what you define as a collapse.
I’m sure many living during 1930-45 in Europe, especially non violent peaceloving Germans would have viewed their countries slide into a totalitarian state as a type of collapse.
That is not making excuses for the lack of outright collapse.
As I tell anyone who will listen, once Peak Oil hits home, and cheap oil is no longer an inexpensive engine of the industrial economy, then economic ‘growth’ is no longer possible, at least in such a prolific way.
So no more easy fuel into the front end of the industrial economy, hedged by some brief replacements by coal and gas, but essentially once the spluttering stops at the back end or outlet of the industrial economy, the only way to maintain anything like the present standards of living in Anex-1 nations is to squeeze more ‘value’, ‘efficiency’ or sweat from the labour forces. This means at first, all working harder for less and for longer at the same range and class of employment existing now.
Soon this will run into some form of greater slavery for many more, and also Non-Anex-1 nations will get screwed into famine and greater poverty than we ever thought possible.
Rule No 1:
Capitalism always needs a form of labour to exploit, and when it is feasable, that labour is replaced by technology.
The other option is a collapse, but we might as well call it a period of rapid transformation, and probably high death rates.
So I see that either Slavery or Rapid Transformation/Collapse is probable.
As an example of how we are already seeing the challenges to capitalism after peak oil and the rise of the middle class in Australia, the large mining and fossil fuel industrial leaders are calling for a Northern Economic Zone to be formed in Australia, so they can ‘develop’ the potential in remote and possibly arable(really?) land there. This is because present labour wages for the infrastructure by trained Australians is too high for them. They want to be able to bring in overseas non Australian workers, read China, Philipines and others, on group visas, who will have no rights to present conditions like sick pay, holiday pay, overtime rates, personal life and injury indemnity cover, and they will get a fraction of the base salary of what the jobs now earn. If they cause trouble, their labour hire company can send them back, no probems there will be plenty coming to fill that spot.
‘Call for northern Australian special economic zone’
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-06-20/call-for-northern-australian-special-economic-zone/2764830
A snippet:
“A free-market think tank says the Federal Government should follow the lead of other countries in creating a special economic zone to develop northern Australia.
The Institute for Public Affairs says reducing taxes and regulation across the north would stimulate development and population growth.”
( Did that indicate …population growth? I bet thats’s how ‘cancer’ sees its main objective, endless growth!)
Basically all the normal economic contraction economics that kick in that beni,fit the employers and business lobby groups when a recession occurs are simply going to get more and more traction, but the catch is there will be no substantial upcycle, no growth in the same way as the industrial economy is use to exploiting and if there is any assuageing of a steep decline, it will be because someone is getting substantially screwed even more.
This will not last for very long, but even a top shelf surveilence state aparatus cannot control populations who have nothing to lose due to hunger, disease induced by malnutrition and unemployment.
I agree it is very surprising that the ‘Beast’ is not rotting by now, but just because the death throes are rare not clearly apparrent does not mean your and others analysis is not sound.
It may just mean that the ‘Beast’ has a bag of tricks it can and will resort to before it breaths its last substantial breath.
Remember, no economic upcycle is coming now. All we get is more unemployment and bargaining or stripping away of worker and civic entitlements and ‘rights’ until even a monkey could sign to its tree dwelling neighbour that they, the monkeys, babboons and gorillas, were the smart ones for opting for remaining in trees and shunning the expanding savanna grasses we went blindly into for a feed.
Lastly Guy, please remember that no one is wrong when they stand up and defend the living beings and planet, by making an argument for the common good, that should make everyone, even those presently ignorant of the death and destruction their way of life manifests, reflect and respond and change the status quo. That they do not is no fault of the one who stands and fights the just fight.
We are not at the terminus just yet.
As an aside, IMO, it is consistant that when a Piscean temperament sacrifices for the greater good, if it is done for the clear selfless reasons they are intending, then they usually expect it to make a significant difference.
One problem with that process, is there may be upwards of 5 or so billion others specifically doing no such thing, and quite the opposite, and to me the jury is still out on the overall cosmic impact of one who sacrifices completely, from the heart, for all beings.
The characteristic ‘trap’ for Pisceans is they ‘try’ to help by intentional sacrifice, even if it is relativly spontaeneous, and the bigger the wound, or mess, the stronger the impulse to ‘give more’, or even ‘give up’ more. My real lived experience, as a Picean, is that this eminates from an unconscious sense of spiritual responsibility for the group, or tribe, ( world???). Piceans are the mystics, dreamers and healers, at least in temperament.
If the problem persists, then it must be because their sacrifice is not great enough, or they have gotten something wrong in thier preparation etc. Ie they presume there is a problem with them, at least initially.
It can take a long time for these people to realise their way is not inauthentic, far from it, but it negates everyone elses responsibility to do the same self transformation of mind, body, and actions in the world as they are doing. If Piceans do know this, or do learn this, then it means they have a far greater perspective from which to discriminate about where they focus their considderable healing powers, or talents.
I’ll cop a bit of criticism for bringing up Astrological issues here, but I do so with considerable experience dodging those who perhaps we can now desribe as having some ‘motivated reasoned’ prejudice concerning the veracity and authenticity of some of the deeper cultural meanings and knowledge embedded in Astrology.
Nothing you have done in all this attempt to save the living planet you have shared here has been a failure. I can’t say it simpler than that.
December 21st, 2012 at 9:27 am
That all said
Guest Post: The Interconnective Web of Global Debt
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/21/2012 11:00 -0500
Via John Aziz of Azizonomics blog,
It’s very big:
Andrew Haldane:
Interconnected networks exhibit a knife-edge, or tipping point, property. Within a certain range, connections serve as a shock-absorber. The system acts as a mutual insurance device with disturbances dispersed and dissipated. But beyond a certain range, the system can tip the wrong side of the knife-edge. Interconnections serve as shock-ampli ers, not dampeners, as losses cascade. The system acts not as a mutual insurance device but as a mutual incendiary device.
A mutual incendiary device sounds about right.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-21/guest-post-interconnective-web-global-debt
Just as the ice went unexpectedly quickly this year, and the economy did so in 2008, the whole shebang will likely fall quickly before long.
December 21st, 2012 at 9:34 am
Though I was cheering for the collapse at the near financial catastrophe a short while back, I didn’t not think it would happen, and here is why; Though there are many ideological and political differences, the world economies are joined together like a tight web (think of a tree canopy whereby the weak trees are held up in a storm). So, these ‘soft falls’ will continually be averted by bailouts, forgiveness of debts, money printing, and other resourceful rescues. It will require a ‘hard fall’ whereby we hit the wall of environmental disasters before this industrial beast topples. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will happen for quite some time (Waaay too damn long!).
December 21st, 2012 at 9:35 am
OzMan, I agree that we are in collapse, but not collapse of emissions. For the planet to be saved from out of control global warming the emissions need to stop and they haven’t done that. I think it is too late for any salvation but maybe a big Carrington Event solar flare will be just the ticket to shut down major grids (unfortunately to also lead to more Fukushimas)
I checked spaceweather.com today and maybe there is some hope here
FARSIDE SOLAR ACTIVITY: The Earthside of the sun remains quiet, but the farside is growing restless. During the late hours of Dec. 20th and continuing through Dec. 21st, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has recorded a series of CMEs flying over the solar limb:
The source of the clouds appears to be multiple blast sites on the farside of the sun. This means Earth is not in the line of fire. The increasing pace of farside activity, however, suggests that the Earthside might not be far behind. Stay tuned for changes.
December 21st, 2012 at 10:38 am
i’ve been trying to come up with a really good physical model of what “collapse” means. After a lot of thought, and a few glasses of wine last evening – i think it’s right in front of us, hiding in plain sight: a vast sinkhole.
Before it occurs, all appears normal on the surface. Then suddenly a “hollowing out” occurs beneath the surface and the surface sinks, and as the underlying substrate continues to be eroded more and more of the surrounding once-solid surface drops into the deepening abyss. After a short while it’s much too big to be simply “filled in” and it grows and grows at its own pace (the rate having to do with unseen forces on invisible areas).
That’s what’s happening in the financial sector, the world economy and on an individual level in societies around the world. We can certainly see how the biosphere is steadily falling away into oblivion with arctic sea ice, dying trees and actual sinkholes (again – all over the world). In some places, like Michigan and Greece, entire large areas are being swallowed up with ever fewer jobs while crime, desperation, lawlessness and death on the increase accompanied by steady decay, neglect and abandonment all around and growing.
With a world so large, many who haven’t felt the bite of hunger or slept in the cold, dismiss it as not applying to them – until suddenly a big emergency occurs (a black swan event) – your company decides to “downsize” several thousand workers for example and there you are in the sinkhole of economic and psychological “depression.” Never saw it comin’! A medical emergency bankrupts more people anymore than does housing (in fact, for some of the people who lost their homes it was due directly to a medical condition impacting their lives). If the electrical grid fails (which i had a dream about last night) and can’t be brought back on-line in fast enough time (or at all), the collapse happens “suddenly” also.
The dream was about this coming year. Spring came in so hot that it broke all kinds of records: 90′s in mid-March in Maine for example. The problem persisted for 8 more months – all blistering heat day and night, no wind, getting hotter and hotter as spring grew into summer. The demand for air conditioning quickly overloaded the national power grid and it couldn’t be brought back up because too many turbines burned out trying to keep up. Replacement parts and new equipment couldn’t be delivered for 5 – 8 months, and installation would be another 2, but by then everything had ground to a halt and the collapse picked up speed. With little to no rain (despite the cloud seeding) nothing grew and panic and chaos took over. People began dropping from exhaustion, heart attacks, strokes, lack of water. Suicides increased to unbelievable levels; a favorite method was to just sleep in ones car with the family, the engine running and the garage door closed and the car windows open – like my neighbors.
After only a month the complete breakdown of civilization occured; money was useless as there was nothing to buy; social services like police, ambulance and fire protection vanished, hospitals were abandoned, and government was powerless.
Now maybe it won’t be spring of 2013, but i could just see it all playing out: worsening conditions every day until suddenly – all hell broke loose and there was no more “culture,” cooperation or civilization. This could easily happen anywhere and everywhere between
Alaska and Australia on the globe. Most of humanity would be wiped out within a year and, since the following year would only be worse, any survivors had nothing to look forward to and the cycle of death would continue until the nuke plants erupted and we know how it ends.
December 21st, 2012 at 11:09 am
Okay, so I am not really into the whole New Age Mayan stuff, however, since this is posted on the end of the world day, I thought this little tidbit might be relevant. The winter solstice started happening with the sun in the dark rift of the Milky Way in 1980 (Reagan?) and will come out of it in 2016. So this is the “era” of the galactic alignment. Can the economy hold out past 2016? I hope not. In the mean time, I’ll do my best here in DC working with Chesapeake Earth First! and being the old man on the bicycle.
December 21st, 2012 at 12:06 pm
.
Fast or Slow
I’m a fast crash devotee—
My view, and of course, that’s just me;
Still, when doom gets to you
(If there’s time for review),
I’m guessing that you will agree.
December 21st, 2012 at 12:39 pm
It’s great to make a correct prediction, but the timing really won’t matter in 10-20 years. I remember someone saying in 1990 that humans would eviscerate the environment in 200 years. That’s close enough.
December 21st, 2012 at 12:42 pm
I like the analogy Tom. I often tell people that many of us ‘eco wackos’ are like termite and wall inspectors; We see the damage going on at the support and foundations. Meanwhile the parasites continue fussing over wall paper and furnishings (like fiscal cliffs, Greece bailouts etc). And then one day the walls collapse and the roofs caves.
December 21st, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Tom, do you mean sinkhole like the current one in Bayou Corne sinkhole in LA, or the earlier Lake Peigneur sinkhole in LA, or the Guatamela sinkhole. No I think you mean like the Brazilian Port Sinkhole http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTzn2IGRVhc 1:47 you have to see it to believe it!
December 21st, 2012 at 2:19 pm
Hey Kathy! Yeah, like either of those, or both, or even this one in Guatemala that really freaks me out (i think it’s like 300 ft deep):
http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=yfp-t-701-1-s&va=giant+guatemalan+sinkhole
i was struck by the mechanics of sinkholes more than any specific physical one.
i liked your link to big solar activity on the far side and did a little snooping around. Scientists aren’t sayin’ much but some wouldn’t be surprised if a huge solar prominence erupted on the Earth side before the year is out or early next year – there’s just no way to tell and it’s happened before – taking out the electrical grid of which ever countries happen to line up at the time.
December 21st, 2012 at 2:25 pm
We all know with certainty that we WILL die. None of knows exactly when.
We all know with certainty that industrial civilization is doomed. None of us knows when it will finally topple over.
There are just too many variables.
December 21st, 2012 at 3:18 pm
Human extinction might as well occur in our lifetime (rather than 200-300 years hence). We’ve created this mess and deserve to experience the consequences. I’m just thankful I didn’t bring any children into the world.
Assuming humans do go extinct within the next 20-30 years, how will it occur? I imagine starvation will play a role as the climate becomes too chaotic to reliably grow food. And war too, as resources become strained. But could we also experience heat waves so intense as to cause mass death?
I’m curious how folks think this will play out, i.e., the general time frame involved and the various ways our extinction will occur.
December 21st, 2012 at 4:51 pm
Cuntagious, I’m curious how folks think this will play out, i.e., the general time frame involved and the various ways our extinction will occur.
Earlier in the month someone else posted the same question. You may have missed that, so I’ll post my response again . . .
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I’m pretty sure that this next year we will see lots of unrest with respect to food shortages. Some of those will be felt even here in the U.S., at least insofar as the price of food continues to rise.
The globally dispersed drought will intensify, worsening food production and water scarcity.
I think we’ve entered the “hockey stick” phase of global temperatures. It’s going to get very hot, very quickly.
War and social unrest will be the rule for the next few years.
I can’t see how the financial system holds up for much longer. I won’t be at all surprised if it comes tumbling down in 2013 but certainly by 2015. Most likely due to a collapse in the quadrillion dollar derivatives Ponzi scheme.
Once the financial system collapses and lines of credit and other instruments of the global market evaporate, then all hell breaks loose on the local level. When food and other supplies stop flowing in the industrialized world, that’s when things get real ugly.
With the collapse of the financial world, the real world systems won’t be far behind. Motor fuel will stop first. Even if someone had cash or property to use for trade, with credit gone, the distributors won’t be able to buy it to distribute it.
Electricity will follow shortly after. With no credit, suppliers won’t be able to operate for long. With electricity off, all the conveniences of modern life will disappear like so much smoke in the air.
Once the power goes out, civic water supplies dry up. Then, it’s only a matter of days for almost anyone living in a city.
With no power and no fuel, nuclear reactors begin to melt down.
The timing for all this is predicated on the timing and extent of the financial system collapse. I think that’s why TPTB are scared shitless to let the banks fail.
So many variables and so many other things that I didn’t even mention. But, that’s one way this could all unfold.
December 21st, 2012 at 5:03 pm
Does anyone think we will arrive to the point of mass- cannibalism? Afterall, rats left in a barrel will turn on themselves to survive. This is a great fear of mine.. a “cannibal apocalypse.” I read “The Road” and it scared the shit out of me…. I fear we are well underway to a similar outcome.
December 21st, 2012 at 5:25 pm
Pilot, I don’t think we will arrive at the point of mass cannibalism although I do think that some may occur towards the end. You might want to watch the movie Alive (or the book) based on the true story of people whose plane crashed in the Peruvian mountains. They finally began eating the frozen dead bodies of those who had died in the crash. It was difficult for them and they tried to make a sort of ceremony out of it. Given how hard it was for them, by the time they had decided the bodies would have been no use as food, only the fact that they were frozen made that possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alive:_The_Story_of_the_Andes_Survivors
I think that because we are social creatures we have to have some level of trust that within the social unit, the tribe, people will not look at each other as food. How could humans hunt together otherwise. I believe most cannibalism in hunter-gatherer tribes where it occurs is either of the dead (to take in their spirit) or of people from other tribes that have been killed in battle.
Imagine you are on a boat at sea and someone dies, you may all decide to eat them. But then don’t you begin to get edgy. What if your boat mates decide now to kill you when the food runs out. So if you are all edgy and afraid, when do you sleep? If you don’t sleep how can you keep rowing? It solves one problem but creates another eh?
December 21st, 2012 at 7:45 pm
I don’t think cannablism will happen except in extreme cases, however, I imagine that pets and just about all wildlife will vanish as the hunger pangs escalate (a terribly tragic thing to contemplate). For example, I hear that in North Korea, almost all birds have vanished for a similar reason. With guns and ammo galore, everything that moves will be shot and consumed.
December 22nd, 2012 at 3:43 am
Bailey, yes when I was in Haiti in Port-au-Prince there were no birds but chickens. I was told the Haitian boys brought down all the wild birds with slingshots for food.
December 22nd, 2012 at 3:56 am
“The one chart about oil’s future everyone should see
With high oil prices and new drilling techniques unable to move the needle on worldwide crude oil production, we should ask ourselves whether it is wise to base energy policy on the fantasies of industry and government forecasters, Cobb writes.” http://tinyurl.com/d9roflm
One look at the chart and one can see that next year or the year after begins the big slide. How collapse cannot be catastrophic when that happens I don’t know. Unfortunately it is almost certainly too late to prevent NTE – too bad for us.
December 22nd, 2012 at 6:25 am
The Mayans may not be wrong. some interpret the prognostication to mean 2012 is the beginning of the end.
December 22nd, 2012 at 6:38 am
Cannibalism is distinctly possible based on historic precedent. After the Eastern Islanders ravaged their only home, they were forced to subsist on a protein diet of human flesh. We know this because this is the pathetic condition Captain Cook discovered upon his arrival to the island.
When the first Pacific islanders arrived to EI, they discovered a true Garden of Eden- rich volcanic soils perfect for agriculture, magnificent forests that were home to an amazing variety of endemic flora and fauna including the largest Palm tree to ever exist, and finally surrounded by an ocean teeming with seafood. What happened? Overshoot. The population exploded. At first all was well and thanks to this bountiful land sufficient spare time was available to construct the toppled ghostly stone statues that exist today. However, within some hundreds of years the land was depleted due to soil erosion and the bountiful forests were denuded literally. The last tree to be found on the island was chopped done and as a consequence the seafood protein which at this point was essential for their survival was no longer available-no trees than no wood to construct fishing canoes. You have to ask yourself what were they thinking when the last tree was cut?
You must watch the movie, “Soylent Green” which is more relevant today than ever. I found this film the most frightening I have ever seen because I can easily envision the scenario portrayed in the movie. Also, great acting to include Edward G Robinson and C. Heston. A must see.
December 22nd, 2012 at 6:43 am
I think cannibalism is definitely going to be a become commonplace, eventually, when the world is depauperate. Check on the original true story of the Essex, that inspired Moby Dick – or go see Life of Pi.
One sleeper problem is the fungus is going wild. It’s consuming plants, animals, amphibians and people. Some say, it’s partly due to background radiation: http://optimalprediction.com/wp/
I am in a google group, mostly about overpopulation, and managed to effectively end one discussion about non-renewable resources with this comment:
I realize that there are myriad ways we are in overshoot and are committing ecocide however, it’s pretty obvious to me that we are going to drown in our own shit, and soon. All you have to do to see that is one of two things – go snorkeling, or go for a walk in the woods.
Both the oceans and the forests are dying at an astoundingly rapid rate. It’s really quite obvious if you look at trees and coral reefs, you don’t need a scientific paper to tell you – although there are many. In fact the EPA is circulating a draft to their Science Advisory Committee with an eye to tighter regulations on ozone pollution, but of course this will never be allowed and even if approved will not lower precursor emissions quickly enough to avert ecopocalypse.
They actually have produced maps, that are behind the empirical curve, but still they unequivocally show “biomass loss” directly attributed to ozone damage. This is just a bureaucratic euphemism for the dieback of vegetation, which is in reality far, far worse because the rampant knock-off effects of opportunistic pathogens are what is proximately killing trees by the millions all over the world. When the US Environmental Prostitution Agency says even that much, you know it’s happening – and we simply cannot survive in a world where the base of the food chain (and source of oxygen) in the oceans and on land is “losing biomass”.
I put the maps on this post (far down): http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2012/12/no-one-knows-where-this-will-lead_19.html
Does any of this matter? Maybe not since even without it, thanks to amplifying feedbacks, climate change is already inexorable and unstoppable. I just still seem to harbor an anachronistic affinity for the truth.
December 22nd, 2012 at 7:01 am
In addition to growing your own foods, people would do well to acquaint themselves with all the wild plants and insects which can be eaten. I have already done so. I also grow mushrooms – and even have some pics from my blog featured on Paul Stamet’s site.
The good news is that without electricity, we will not be aware of all the horrors and tragedy pouring in from all over the world – only that which we can see for ourselves. Not having modern medicine (and medicines) is not going to be a good thing!
December 22nd, 2012 at 7:09 am
In Soylent Green the people did not KNOW they were eating human remains. The protaganist was trying to bring this news out because he knew it would be very upsetting to people. The movie Soylent Green makes the point that people don’t want to eat other people, it horrifies them. That is not to say that in dire straights, when social mores break down, they won’t, but just to say that there is a strong aversion.
December 22nd, 2012 at 7:54 am
http://tools.themercury.com.au/stories/53876155-breaking-news.php
TWO Russians who were lost in wilderness for four months may have been forced to eat the corpse of a companion to survive.
A group of four men had disappeared in August on a river-fishing expedition to the vast Yakutia region in the Russian Far East, one of the most remote and inhospitable places in the world.
Only two of the men were finally helicoptered to safety at the end of November and the discovery of fragments of a human corpse at their campsite prompted investigators to open a murder case amid rumours of cannibalism.
The two survivors have not been arrested but are being treated as witnesses in the murder case. However it appears investigators are now certain cannibalism took place.
“During questioning, one of the witnesses testified that cannibalism did indeed take place,” a source in the investigation told the Komsomolskaya Pranda daily on Monday.
“It was not murder.
“They ate the man after he died from being unable to cope with the conditions.”
Yakutia newsite NVPress.ru also quoted local investigators as saying that the fisherman named Alexander Abdullayev confessed that he and the other survivor Alexei Gorulenko ate the corpse of Andrei Kurochkin.
“According to Abdullayev, Kurochkin died a natural death – he froze to death – and he and Alexei Gorulenko fed themselves with his flesh for weeks,” NVPress.ru said.
Investigators from Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, confirmed officially for the first time last week that they were looking at cannibalism as a possible explanation.
The local branch of the Investigative Committee (SK) said they had flown out one of the fishermen – apparently Abdullayev – last week to look for the fourth man named as Viktor Komarov.
They found the fishermen’s UAZ jeep – in which they had driven deep into the taiga – half submerged in a frozen river but the “corpse of the fourth fisherman was not found”.
Rescuers had found the two survivors by the Sutam River some 250 kilometres from the nearest town of Neryungri in the south of Yakutia.
According to Komsomolskaya Pravda they had covered some 150 kilometres on foot after the breakdown of their jeep triggered their problems.
December 22nd, 2012 at 8:18 am
More on collapse . . .
At what point does a ship go from “taking on water” to “sinking”? When does it cross that magical line? Is it the moment the hull springs a leak or is it when the last bit of the ship goes under the water? I suspect that many would agree that a ship is sinking when the amount of water coming in is greater than the ability of the bilge pumps to move the water back out. Those on board might not notice the sinking until quite a while later depending on how quickly the water is coming in and how large the ship is.
The industrial economy is much more complex than a ship sailing on the water, however, the analogy is a sound one and multiple comparisons can be made.
If the most fundamental purpose of an economy is to provide basic needs to its citizens, then it’s easy to see that we’ve been collapsing for quite some time. Food (and water) is the lynchpin of any civilization – modern industrial or otherwise. Without it, no civilization can last more than a few months, no matter how “advanced” they may be. Global Food Reserves Have Reached Their Lowest Level In Almost 40 Years For six of the last eleven years the world has consumed more food than it has produced. This year, drought in the United States and elsewhere has put even more pressure on global food supplies than usual. As a result, global food reserves have reached their lowest level in almost 40 years. Experts are warning that if next summer is similar to this summer that it could be enough to trigger a major global food crisis. At this point, the world is literally living from one year to the next.
The amount of food coming into the system has been barely sufficient to offset population growth for quite a while. However, over the last decade, as the article notes, the flood of new mouths to feed has overtaken the ability of the bilge pump of food production to offset it. There are no more bilge pumps to bring online. We are, indeed, sinking.
As the wonderful graphic that Kathy C linked to above shows, the bottom is about to fall out of oil production. Combine that with climate change, and it’s clear that most of our bilge pumps are about to fail. We are reaching the point when our sinking is going to be noticeable even to those dancing in the ballroom.
While a massive solar flare or nuclear war or financial collapse would certainly bring about sudden noticeable collapse, the fact is, collapse is already happening and with or without those dramatic events will continue to accelerate.
December 22nd, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Friedrich Kling – “The Mayans may not be wrong. some interpret the prognostication to mean 2012 is the beginning of the end.”
I was thinking that same thought the other day. Even though I didn’t believe that the world would suddenly end on the 21st, it does seem like 2012 was the year that the hoplessness of our situation — runaway climate change leading to near term extinction — really became apparant. Doubt the Mayans knew this. Nonetheless, the calander ending in 2012 is appropriate.
December 22nd, 2012 at 1:03 pm
Happy New Baktun and a joyous solstice to all
http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2012/12/21/happy-new-baktun-and-a-joyous-solstice-to-all/
December 22nd, 2012 at 4:51 pm
Bailey said: «In addition to growing your own foods, people would do well to acquaint themselves with all the wild plants and insects which can be eaten.»
what wild plants? what insects? not considering that wild plants and insects have only fed very very small groups of humans through history, there will be very few wild plants and insects left!
I have a friend who went for kind of a “survival in the woods” workshop a couple years ago. He told me most participants could not go through the experience because they found nothing to eat (and promptly boarded their cars to go back to their computers). Jared Diamond also said it in the middle of the jungle: «You see all this green life around me, but there is nothing to eat».
now is december 22, 2012. I was sure (although I don’t know why) to live until this day. From now on, it is another chapter of the story.
December 22nd, 2012 at 5:49 pm
On cannibalism:
Most people have difficulty eating other species as well, if they don’t have to kill the animal themselves. i know this first hand because I have seen people unable to eat an animal that they witnessed being killed.
Modern “industrial world” citizens are probably the least well equipped for a “less than comfortable” life.
December 22nd, 2012 at 6:09 pm
Michele said: what wild plants? what insects?
Dandelion (grows wild everywhere where I live), purslane, cactus, Japanese Knotweed, acorns, berries. Even leaves of certain bushes can be eaten – like mulberry.
Insects: grasshopers, meal worms, locusts, cicadas, crickets, dragonflies, earth worms (yes, there is a restaurant in Croatia serving them!). Insects are a better source of protein.
Full list – http://edibug.wordpress.com/list-of-edible-insects/
I am not saying to exclusively eat these, but for those who know about them, there should be plenty available. Why? Because most won’t know about these food sources, AND with the cursed lawn mowers gone, millions of acres will return to vegetation and flowering – attracting insects, birds, and more.
December 22nd, 2012 at 7:18 pm
Guy, you’ll get your way eventually. What are we on now, Quantitative Easing six? Those chickens are going to come home to roost sometime, and it isn’t going to be pretty when they do. Loose fiscal policy has been happily ending empires since the dawn of time.
The environmental deal… Well I look outside and see a foot and a half of snow at 14 degrees with six more inches enroute early next week and that whole Global Warming thing sounds pretty nice about now. Bring on the long pig as long as it’s warm.
Just keep biding your time and staying ready. And hey, look on the bright side: there was no asteroid, nobody shooting at you, and no zombies. Well…. Zombies might have been kinda fun.
And what happened to Frank? I haven’t seen the Ol’ Coot in a while now.
December 23rd, 2012 at 4:42 am
Turbo we haven’t seen you in a long time either. Guess you have been lurking or you wouldn’t know Frank is missing. Let me further guess, Frank will shortly re-appear. You two seem tied at the computer terminal.
December 23rd, 2012 at 5:11 am
There was a person who was a guesser
Whose certainty grew lesser and lesser
It then grew so small
It became nothing at all
And he became a college professor
December 23rd, 2012 at 6:05 am
If the temp. in Siberia is -60F for a high, what is the low? Try to explain to your neighbor how that proves global warming!
Seems that the data and reports from the Artic are coming forth.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/
December 23rd, 2012 at 8:04 am
Take your best shot…at this:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/12/20/sandy-hook-massacre-official-story-spins-out-of-control/
December 23rd, 2012 at 8:04 am
Seated at a table, a customer looks at the menu in a cannibal restaurant:
Fried missionary ……………….$ 25.00
Roasted explorer ……………..$ 35.00
Baked politician ………………..$100.00
He asks the waiter “Why so much for the politician?”
Waiter: “Have you ever tried to clean a politician?”
December 23rd, 2012 at 9:22 am
Dave, I have been looking at that story about Sandy Hook since so many of the recent mass murders seem suspicious. So a few days ago when it was cold and I had some time I looked back at Columbine and found there are big questions there as well. Some years after 911 I looked back at Oklahoma City too. And also at the war in Kosovo. It seems I was asleep….
December 23rd, 2012 at 9:28 am
I put that story on my blog in the 21st, there’s been an update since.
http://www.monsangelorum.net/?topic=deadly-serious-2&paged=5#post-6271
December 23rd, 2012 at 10:36 am
I think we as a group have come to the conclusion that people will believe what they like to believe…about anything. I suppose the gov. knows this as well. Maybe we are among the last to accept this as a truth.
December 23rd, 2012 at 10:39 am
My conundrum is that I don’t trust government, but I also don’t trust 99% of anti-government. I see some form of umbrella government as a necessity in a globally connected, severely overpopulated planet. Tearing down government is not going to be the answer, because it is only a symptom.
December 23rd, 2012 at 10:53 am
Most Americans believe there’s an enemy called Al Qaeda, don’t they ?
http://youtu.be/cHAwbYpRGkQ
December 23rd, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Ulvfugl, thanks for the update. Something to do while waiting for collapse
Bailey, whether or not we have an umbrella gov’t is not about what we want, think is best, etc. It is about whether or not that gov’t can stay in power. Civilizations crash. This one is a global one, but that doesn’t mean it can’t crash, it means that when it does it will be huge, horrific, and final. No one here I think wants the chaos that follows, but they also know that every day it continues puts more nails in the coffin of our species and most others on the planet. Some think the coffin is nailed shut already and all that is left is to play taps.
Homo sapiens, some agree
From its future cannot flee
Its far too late
To avoid its fate
Homo sapiens, RIP
December 23rd, 2012 at 1:00 pm
An umbrella government will have to secure enough resources to maintain the ribs and the fabric of the umbrella.
December 23rd, 2012 at 1:14 pm
all that is left is to play taps
December 23rd, 2012 at 1:20 pm
Here you go:
http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2012/12/23/the-app-to-enlightenment/
December 23rd, 2012 at 1:24 pm
I am with you guys (and gals). I only wish that collapse had happened about 2 decades ago. In retrospect, I also wish we had never discovered the usefulness of fossil fuels (since the energy and products thereof is what what has led to Empire and it’s governments).
December 23rd, 2012 at 3:03 pm
I believe that the unraveling of the Amerikun economy will begin with a precipitous rise in food prices due to continuing droughts in the grain belt (and perhaps a spike in oil prices caused by a future conflict with Iran). The Amerikun economy is held together by retail sales … those who can’t afford Macy’s go to the People’s Republic of China’s distribution arm, Walmart. Once the disposable income is gone, the situation will quickly deteriorate as more and more people lose their jobs and their homes.
TPTB have been preparing for this inevitability. Sandy Hook is just the latest false flag production. I don’t think its main focus was guns. They are going to use Sandy Hook to demonize anyone who questions the sustainability of the Matrix. Armed or not, if you don’t believe that sports and endless consumption are the highpoint of human existence, then you’re probably a dangerous “survivalist” like Lanza’s mother.
December 23rd, 2012 at 3:10 pm
One more thought.
Then kind of collapse which causes the global economy and national security states to fold will not occur anytime soon, IMHO. What will collapse in the coming years (and which is already in a state of collapse) is the middle class lifestyle of the industrial north. A police state has been prepared to replace the sheeple’s paradise of consumption. If they can’t buy you off, then they will put a gun to your head, kick you in the ass and throw you in a gulag if you don’t play along. In Amerika it will be totalitarianism with a Coke and a smile.
A police state can operate in a collapsed economy, e.g. North Korea and Cuba.
December 23rd, 2012 at 3:53 pm
A police state can operate in a collapsed economy
Random acts of terror, the Spartan strategy, death squads, to keep the helots freaked out and subdued, has often been used by USA, against the populations of several south and central american states, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc, Argentina, Chile, also Philippines,( that terror campaign is part of Obama’s background) but not domestically, (unless you count against the black slave population and indigenous indian population), but perhaps that’s what’s coming, divide and rule, as the appalling Jay Gould said, ‘I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half’, pretty neat way for the one percent to reduce the population, I mean, they don’t care which half ‘wins’, so long as they are busy fighting each other and the elite are safe in their offshore havens… so maybe, if these weird shooting horrors, if they are as sinister as suggested, are a way to crank up the pressure… ?
December 23rd, 2012 at 4:18 pm
I suppose that to make sense of imperialism, the sort of madness that we see going on in the world, you have to think like a psychopath, which is hard for decent folk to do, I mean, Henry VIII, who killed off his wives, writes, it seems quite casually… “…you must cause such dreadful execution upon a good number of inhabitants, hanging them on trees, quartering them, and setting their heads and quarters in every town, as shall be a fearful warning…”
This is terror, as a tool, to control people, through fear. That was 500 years ago, but really, things are not so very much different. Psychopathology and the lust for power is the same, and people’s response to seeing people slaughtered is the same.
http://earlymodernengland.com/2012/12/mother-shipton-and-the-end-of-the-world/
December 23rd, 2012 at 4:54 pm
.
From insight obtained huffing glue,
My end would come someday, I knew,
But I didn’t expect
I’d belong to a sect
Which thought everyone else would die too.
December 23rd, 2012 at 5:29 pm
BtD – a diamond among pearls!
December 23rd, 2012 at 5:34 pm
Gail, aw, thanks.
December 23rd, 2012 at 5:41 pm
Arnie Gundersen update on Fort Calhoun and San Onofre power plant status – summary – not very good
podcast at http://fairewinds.org/content/nrc-fails-enforce-its-own-regulation
The Fort Calhoun stuff is bad enough, the San Onofre starts at 12:25 and well if it goes it could well bring down the economy.
As for a police state in a failed economy, depends what you mean by failed economy or what causes it to fail. A grid collapse would mean the police couldn’t pump gas for their cars, there would be no more bullets made, cities and many rural areas would quickly run out of food, etc. I think when we are talking about failed enough to reduce carbon output we are not talking North Korea type failed, we are talking END of INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION. The factories stop spewing CO2, the cars don’t run, etc.
December 23rd, 2012 at 5:57 pm
“…At one end of the spectrum are the Guy McPhersons, who believe we have triggered irreversible positive feedback mechanisms that cannot be stopped, and we have another generation or two left as a civilization. At the other end of the spectrum are those who either ‘deny’ the scientific projections altogether, or who downplay the immediacy and suggest there is time to effect an orderly transition to a renewables economy….
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/12/unforced-variations-dec-2012/comment-page-6/#comment-310601
December 23rd, 2012 at 6:14 pm
What does this mean, NTE?
Well, since you’re an addressee:
It’s inopportune
That we’re going to die soon,
But that’s how it’s going to be.
December 23rd, 2012 at 6:24 pm
Kathy C Said:
Turbo we haven’t seen you in a long time either. Guess you have been lurking or you wouldn’t know Frank is missing. Let me further guess, Frank will shortly re-appear. You two seem tied at the computer terminal.
I’ve occasionally lurked. Been busy crossing the globe a couple times. Bucharest is particularly beautiful and if you’re into that whole Vampire Lore thing, it is technically Transylvania, it’s right up your alley. Good food too.
I was just wondering where the only other guy from the olden days on the old site was. We’d have fun throwing good natured jibes at each other.
I haven’t seen Stan around in quite a while either.
December 23rd, 2012 at 6:57 pm
“I was just wondering where the only other guy from the olden days on the old site was. We’d have fun throwing good natured jibes at each other.
I haven’t seen Stan around in quite a while either.”
Nor Victor.
December 23rd, 2012 at 8:38 pm
Random acts of terror ……….has often been used by USA ……….but not domestically?/i>
Oklahoma City and 9-11?
December 23rd, 2012 at 10:40 pm
@Gail
I thought of you this morning when I awoke from the most horrible nightmare, in which I looked out the kitchen window to find that the big, beautiful blue spruce in our back yard, the only healthy tree in the neighborhood, which is home to a multitude of birds, under which the children play and deer used to take shelter during heavy rains prior to last summer’s drought, well, someone had chopped it down. I was in such a panic and was so relieved to see it was still there when I ran to look. I really love that tree and always wonder why it seems to do so well when all the other trees around here are so sick. Maybe I will give it a hug tomorrow before I visit your blog for a good cry.
December 23rd, 2012 at 11:17 pm
By “failed economy” I’m referring to the notion that collapse comes at the tail end of a pernicious cycle of decline and rot. Yes, eventually the grid itself will cease to function, but before the security state systems arrive at that terminal stage, they will burn all the oil and coal they can get their hands on to keep the state apparatus running. IMO, the consumerist crack binge will end for the masses long before total collapse.
The gulf between the end of the golden age of consumption and grid collapse will be filled by totalitarian societies of meager subsistence for the former middle class. I say this because capitalism does not work in reverse. When the capitalist system was growing, the principal beneficiaries of the system built nice partially democratic/plutocratic societies at the expense of nonwhites and the environment. Capitalist contraction inevitably leads to fascism. And as anyone can see, we in the West are well on our way to becoming fascist security states.
Already, there is estimated to be over 500,000 surveillance cameras in use in London alone. It is said that the average Londoner is photographed 500 times a day. And with over 4 million surveillance cameras in use throughout the UK, this amounts to nearly 1 camera for every 14 British citizens.
December 24th, 2012 at 12:53 am
A bit off topic…
I had a work colleague friend who was an Architect and he collected corporations’ slogans.
He used to say their true agendas were always there in plain sight.
The one I remember best is for Unilever, who make kitchen detergent, bathtub bars of soap, and laundry detergent:
“Power At An Affordable Price”
One recent headline from hurricasne Sandy also seems to fit the same mold:
“New Yorkers Lose Power”
I do a lot of walking in preparation for a walk around this Great Southern Land, and there is a sign about 5 km from my house, which I must have walked past and read over a thousand times in the last three to four years.
It only hit me yesterday as I got up at 4am and did my Sunday 3 hours up the mountain to Bell Railway station, a relatively uninhabited area, so there is plenty of quiet time to meditate, and hear the birds call as the light approaches. It is now my motto for my future journey walking anywhere, but also walking around Australia:
“Keep Left Unless Overtaking”
Can anyone beat that?
If anyone is not getting them, give it a little time and repeat the phrase over and over, until your verbal mind reaches alternative meanins for the combnation of words.
The irony….
‘Icehouse – Great Southern Land.’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=AU&v=3mkidP2OUCk&hl=en-GB
What a land, and IMO if humanity has a small chance these Aborigines will get their land back…. finally.
December 24th, 2012 at 3:30 am
Depressive, yes we will have ever increasing police state until the grid fails, BUT that is probably not far away
Since the early 1990s, according to data gathered by Massoud Amin, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Minnesota, the number of power outages affecting more than 50,000 people a year has more than doubled, and blackouts now drain between $80 billion and $188 billion from the U.S. economy every year. The power grid is slipping backwards to a time when infrastructure was unreliable, and more and more people are talking about going “off the grid” with solar, batteries, and generators as a result. Will this doom the greater grid, and by extension the greater good?
It’s not easy to keep 450,000 miles of high voltage lines up and humming. But the situation has gotten worse over the years because the U.S. has increased the load on its lines while investing less in the systemhttp://www.psmag.com/environment/electric-forecast-call-for-increasing-blackouts-43395/
The number of outages as more than doubled in the last 20 years. The stress on the system from overuse as temps rise will increase. The damage to the system from storms will increase. And our congress allocates funds to highways and bridges. Increasing blackouts was what Richard Duncan of Olduvai theory fame said would happen as we headed back down the stone age.
December 24th, 2012 at 3:34 am
The scientists get surprised by actual facts on the ground once again
West Antarctica has warmed much more than scientists had thought over the last half century, new research suggests, an ominous finding given that the huge ice sheet there may be vulnerable to long-term collapse, with potentially drastic effects on sea levels.
A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth.
“The surprises keep coming,” said Andrew J. Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who took part in the study. “When you see this type of warming, I think it’s alarming.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/science/earth/west-antarctica-warming-faster-than-thought-study-finds.html?_r=0
It will be interesting for the “its not as bad as Guy says” crowd to comment on this
December 24th, 2012 at 3:38 am
Why is Guy’s story hard to sell? We are addicted. Oil is worth about $140,000 a barrel and more. This isn’t new, just a reminder.
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/12/22/energy-part-i/
December 24th, 2012 at 3:46 am
Robin : Oklahoma City and 9-11?
I suppose you could include those events to support the thesis I outlined, but I didn’t include them, because, (disregarding who actually really did them and for what reason), the majority believe the mainstream version, McVeigh and A Q, so the majority don’t see the terror as coming from their own elite class, do they, whereas the southern blacks knew who was lynching them ( easy to google for that ! ) and the victims of terror in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Philippines, etc, knew who was inflicting it upon them, just as the Palestinians know who oppresses them and the Pakistanis know who blows them up with drones, there’s no attempt at false flag concealment. If it becomes clear that random acts of terror are committed against American public, and the ‘authorities’ don’t even bother to try and invent cover stories, then we’re into something new and terrible indeed…
I see it a bit like the situation in 1930s, when jews got beaten or murdered, and the authorities publicly blamed ‘gangs of thugs’, but went to no great trouble to investigate or punish any ‘thugs’, and secretly, covertly, were organising and supporting the ‘thugs’. The next stage is when the ‘thugs’ start wearing official uniforms and become immune to prosecution.
There is that grim anecdote (in my memory, may not be exact) of a man being ordered at gun point to the death camps, who recognizes the officer as his best friend from schooldays, and the officer just shrugs ‘I was unemployed for five years’. The people who create the money out of thin air can always pay the hungry to obey orders and do their dirty work…
December 24th, 2012 at 6:07 am
More Sandy Hook extreme weirdness
December 24th, 2012 at 6:22 am
ulvfugl the link doesn’t work
December 24th, 2012 at 6:36 am
Sorry, try this
http://youtu.be/67J2jBBQSKA
December 24th, 2012 at 6:44 am
1:34 ‘possible ..two occupants with ski masks..’
An anomaly that doesn’t fit the story… ?
December 24th, 2012 at 6:52 am
from KathyC’s link which says: “The number of outages as more than doubled in the last 20 years.”
“…the majority of power outages in the U.S. are caused by weather, in particular storms blowing trees on the lines…”
Exactly so. Welcome to my waking nightmare: the reason the power outages have doubled is that trees are falling on the lines. The reason the trees are falling isn’t storms – we have always had storms. The storms are getting worse, but not yet twice as bad, twice as often. The trees are falling because they are dying. It’s Christmas Eve, and they’re still dying. Sigh.
December 24th, 2012 at 8:36 am
Gail, yes the trees falling, and often very large trees. But after they fall you have to replace wires and that takes humans – yet at at time when outages are more frequent the skilled people who go out in bad weather so we can turn on our lights are aging and often not being replaced. I presume because for the short term that makes for more profit….
Human resource managers at utilities are very concerned about the
looming shortage of workers within the industry. Work Force Aging
and Turnover in the U.S. Electric Power Industry, Preserving
Legacies of Knowledge by Michael Ashworth (2005) shows a study in
which several top tier human resource executives were asked about
their current problems in staffing the electrical industry. The biggest
obstacle for these utility human resource officers was the aging work
force with 71% of them ranking this the number one issue. Fiftyseven
percent of the surveyed managers reported that the average age
of their utility operations employees were between 47 and 49 years
old. The ageing workforce was not the only concern expressed by
these utilities. The employment levels within the industry have
dropped 23.7% since the early 1990’s while the output of the industry
has increased by 30%.
http://www.dora.state.co.us/puc/docketsdecisions/DocketFilings/08I-227E/08I-227E_TaskForceEI-WorkersShortage01-28-09CIM.pdf
It is all part of the whole and because there are ever more connections when it collapses it will collapse big time IMO.
December 24th, 2012 at 8:36 am
Well, maybe, let’s say, a proposed plot for a fictional tv drama, like a crime family that goes back a long way, that included a couple of presidents, made enormous money out of the LIBOR scandal, and a tax guy working for GE knew something, and was getting bit bold, bit unreliable, and didn’t take a hint, so his wife and kid got blown away, as a warning, to him and all the others… along with a whole lot of other kids, to make a smokescreen for the media to build on, so nobody would see the real reason…. but I don’t find it convincing that the one 20 year old could kill so efficiently in that short time, so many anomalies, just doesn’t add up… but there’s other possible fictional tv dramas floating in my head… maybe someone will dig up some clues… Thing is, ever since JFK, Jim Jones, Waco, OK City, etc, etc, the MSM churn out a story line and keep plugging it, but if you dig, even just a little, you hit all this crazy stuff that says that story can’t be right… and the weirdness remains…
December 24th, 2012 at 8:46 am
That theory derives something from what I read about Mexican drug cartels. How does a boss ensure his authority and security, in such a hostile and violent environment ? It helps to have lots of brothers, cousins, nephews, a clan, in the business, who you can more or less trust and rely on, but they don’t want to be ‘employees’, so how do you ensure that your own bodyguards don’t betray you ? Well, you pay them the right amount, not too much, not too little. if it’s too little, the other drug gang might tempt them with more. But the main leverage is to know their loved ones. They need to know, that if they misbehave, it’s their wife, mistress, girlfriend, mother, children, that will pay the price.
So, every now and then, if an employee strays, you make an example, so all others will see what happens…. and that you, the boss of bosses, can do this outrage in plain sight of the whole world, and get away with it, because you have the power, and nobody can stop you….
December 24th, 2012 at 8:58 am
ulvfugl, you make an excellent point about the invisibility (to the masses) of the true oppressors. 9/11, and now Sandy Hook, are sacred events that have been imprinted on the culture such that anyone who questions the official narrative is a heretic and/or mentally ill. This is why political resistance from the left is a nostalgic joke. After the Kennedy assassination, Amerika came under new management by a sinister criminal elite and they have been running the show from behind the curtains ever since.
You cannot bring about social change through any of the normal means of passive resistance when the enemy is a technologically sophisticated criminal army masquerading as the government. The so called left, right and middle are now controlled by the same dark powers who orchestrate the opera of pseudo-democracy to keep the zombified voting class in check and distracted. Political agitation has become just one more media spectacle which, at best, results in cosmetic changes on the society’s mental screen. Collapse is the only hope for any structural change to come about. Of course, by the time the Matrix collapses it will probably take the biosphere with it.
December 24th, 2012 at 9:51 am
Thanks, depressive.
Kinda pertinent to that is this story, although I agree with you, there are even blacker forces hiding in the background…
…the story reveals the charade of that electoral game, one in which powerful corporate elites manipulate the system through money and the media they own to restrict voters’ choice to two almost-identical candidates. Those candidates hold the same views on 80 per cent of the issues. Even where their policies differ, most of the differences are quickly ironed out behind the scenes by the power elites through the pressure they exert on the White House via lobby groups, the media and Wall Street.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/21/why-the-washington-post-killed-the-story-of-murdochs-bid-to-buy-the-us-presidency/print
December 24th, 2012 at 9:55 am
still 25 000 houses without power in the province of québec since Friday because of a “storm”… (from 100 000 last Friday). This is 100 000 homes, not people. An employee from the utility said on tevee: «In the wooded areas, it looks like the ice storm of 1998».
But there was just a quite ordinary winter bout with quite normal winter winds, that would never have brought down so many trees if they were not so sick. And (my guess) the grid must get weaker from those thousands of piecing up the system.
and from the article at the beginning of this thread, WOW!, what a boy’s club!:
James Howard Kunstler, Niall Ferguson, Michael Ruppert, “Rice Farmer,” Karl Denninger, Rob Viglione, Gerald Celente, Jeff Rubin, Matt Savinar, Catherine Austin Fitts, Max Keiser , Jim Willie, Graham Summers, Charles Munger, Gonzalo Lira, Peter Schiff, John P. Hussman, Doug Casey, Jan Lundberg, Chris Hedges, Michael Snyder, Kenneth Deffeyes, Matt Simmons (deceased), Bill Bonner, Paul Craig Roberts, Marc Faber, James Wesley Rawles, Tony Robbins, Nouriel Roubini, “Tyler Durden” (the collection of analysts and writers at Zero Hedge), James Kwak, Simon Johnson, Chris Clugston, John Taylor, Bob Janjuah, Samsam Bakhtiari, Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, Bob Chapman, George Ure, Anthony Fry, Igor Panarin, Mac Slavo, G. Edward Griffin, Joseph Meyer, Harry Dent, Lindsey Williams, Richard Russell, Harley Bassman, Niño Becerra, Martin Weiss, Stephanie Jasky, Eric deCarbonnel, Richard Mogey, Robin Landry, Robert Prechter, Pamela and Mary Anne Aden, Paul Farrell, Nassim Taleb, Gilbert Mercier, Chris Duane, John Williams, Hugh Hendry, Arthur Laffer, Daryll Robert Schoon, Jeff Gundlach, Byron King, Simon Black, Albert Bates, Gordon T. Long, Clyde Prestowitz, Bill Deagle, John Lohman, Alessio Rastani, Mark Grant, Ann Barnhardt , Christopher Greene, George Soros, Bill Clinton, and Willem Buiter.
No comments.
December 24th, 2012 at 10:13 am
ulvfugl said:
“but I don’t find it convincing that the one 20 year old could kill so efficiently in that short time, so many anomalies, just doesn’t add up…”
Kids in a crowded classroom will tend to gather up for protection allowing that piece of cowardly trash to murder them. .223 bullets at close range tend to overpenetrate, i.e. go through, and strike things behind them. In this case, the kids classmates. At approximately 4 centimeters, the bullet begins to yaw and at twelve to sixteen is traveling base first.
Little kids are maybe six to eight inches front to back. If he unloaded a thirty round magazines into those kids, it becomes easy in the extreme to see that he was actually inefficient. Many of the children were hit five or more times from projectiles that had already passed through their classmates. Your attribution of this tragedy to outside conspiracies does not factor in Occam’s Razor.
Twenty kids in one class in today’s overcrowded public indoctrination centers is normal. My High School, Minneapolis South, had a graduating class of 600 housed in a building that was only designed to accommodate 1000.
It’s about time we put a full time police officer or two in every school.
December 24th, 2012 at 10:34 am
If you say so, Turboguy, I can’t be bothered to argue with you, there’s plenty of other forums where you can find people who will tell you that you are wrong.
December 24th, 2012 at 10:43 am
Among all the doom and gloom, I think it is nice to remind ourselves how fascinating life and nature is (which is something Guy points out). There are so many corrective forces in nature, and though they may not be of the potency to avert our assault in the short term, there do seem to be self corrective mechanisms hard at work. Corals are known to emit chemicals during excessive heat and sun which can form cloud structure (both to shade and even bring rain). They can also attract herbivorous fish when vegetation threatens.
There are hundreds of such examples in nature, and some even subscribe to the Gaia hypothesis and feel that the earth itself is an interconnected organism. I don’t personally know how far to take such theories, but in light of this article, wouldn’t it be something if Yellowstone responded to global warming (of course, most of us could kiss our asses goodbye)..
When the Ice Melts, the Earth Spews Fire
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121219133551.htm
December 24th, 2012 at 10:55 am
..This was the take away message from that article I found to be interesting..
“They found it with the help of geological computer models. “In times of global warming, the glaciers are melting on the continents relatively quickly. At the same time the sea level rises. The weight on the continents decreases, while the weight on the oceanic tectonic plates increases. Thus, the stress changes within in the Earth to open more routes for ascending magma” says Dr Jegen.”
December 24th, 2012 at 1:37 pm
With the holidays bearing down I have alot of alternative Christmas Carols floating through my head. Reading all of BtD’s limericks inspired me to spread some “holiday cheer”!
THE CLIMATE SONG
(Sung to the tune of THE CHRISTMAS SONG/CHESTNUTS ROASTING)
Creatures roasting in the wildfires
Jack Frost brings ten feet of snow
High tide carols being sung on the coasts
And folks with now where left to go
Everybody knows a temperature rise of six degrees
Will not make the future bright
The tiny tots being born everyday
Will find it hard to live theirs lives
They don’t know 4c’s on its way
With more misery and suffering every day
And with the feedback loops,they soon will find
That 6c isn’t far behind
And so I’m offering this simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Although it’s been said
Many times,many ways
With Climate Chaos
We’re screwed!!
WHAT CHILD IS THIS
(Sung to the tune of WHAT CHILD IS THIS)
What child is this who lays to waste the Earth
And all her species?
Whose coming brings the end of things
All life,all beauty ceasing
This,this is humanity
Growing exponentially
Greed,greed
The selfish seed
The Earth,the Mother weeping
December 24th, 2012 at 2:15 pm
Now this:
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/two-firefighters-shot-killed-while-responding-webster-n-163105823.html
December 24th, 2012 at 2:36 pm
thestormcrow – thanks for the carols. Well done.
December 24th, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Indeed!
December 24th, 2012 at 3:07 pm
thestormcrow, now those are some carols that don’t feel as jarring as the standard ones. Thanks.
December 24th, 2012 at 3:15 pm
Came across this interview with Kevin Tucker, who was waiting for civilisation to collapse in 2006… interesting to compare, what thinking has changed and what hasn’t, since then.
http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/wild-times-ahead/Content?oid=1337295
December 24th, 2012 at 3:34 pm
Just yesterday, some climate denier told me atmospheric methane concentrations had stopped rising. I thought “surely that’s wrong, Guy told me so…”
So I googled images (for graphs) of methane concentrations, and lo and behold, it’s TRUE. So how can this be if so much CH4 is escaping from the permafrost?
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/images/methane_atmosph_concentr_1984_2004_big.gif
December 24th, 2012 at 3:48 pm
That graph goes to 2005 ? It’s 2012 ?
December 24th, 2012 at 3:49 pm
http://arctic-news.blogspot.ca/2012/12/methane-contributes-to-accelerated-warming-in-the-arctic.html
December 24th, 2012 at 4:02 pm
@ Mike
Assuming you actually are interested in methane levels, your graph is a little outdated. Methane levels didn’t start to spike until only a few years ago…..But, whatever you do, don’t take Guy’s word for it, all the information you could ever want is right at your finger tips.
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=7624&Method=Full
http://www.csiro.au/news/GlobalMethaneRising.html
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080423_methane.html
December 24th, 2012 at 5:04 pm
David Benson, on Real Climate, pointed out that during the Eemian, comparable to present, with slightly higher temperatures, there does not seem to have been a tremendous release of methane… so I wonder if that is correct, and if anyone knows any explanation or technical details about the differences between then and now ?
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Eemian
December 24th, 2012 at 5:50 pm
Guy
Do you concede that you may be wrong about the far more complex issue of near term human extinction too? I’ll concede that you may be correct, but still think it highly unlikely.
December 24th, 2012 at 6:13 pm
All the evidence supports Guy’s position, there’s no evidence to support your position, Yorchichan, it’s just your opinion.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/12/15/1329841/report-humanity-has-overshot-the-earths-biocapacity/
Humans can continue to degrade the planet for a long time yet, but every day the damage is worse. That can only lead to one inevitable conclusion.
December 24th, 2012 at 6:40 pm
Yorchichan, we’ve triggered eight positive feedbacks, seven of which — acting alone — lead to near-term human extinction. Abundant evidence points toward near-term human extinction. Each of the positive feedbacks was triggered within the last four years. Had economic collapse been complete in 2009, as seemed likely at the time, our species probably would have persisted at least another couple generations.
December 24th, 2012 at 7:17 pm
Yorchichan,
Preventing Guy’s NTE scenario requires something big enough to break the upward growth in anthropogenic carbon emissions, drive them into rapid and dramatic decline, and rapidly cool the planet enough to restore the Arctic sea ice to early 1980′s extent and thickness.
Only three things might be able to do that:
1) asteroid impact (impossible within the needed time frame)
2) eruption of a supervolcano within the next few years.
3) nuclear war
December 24th, 2012 at 7:43 pm
What’s amazing to me, is how few–only four–atmospheric sampling stations are in all of the Arctic. Only two are in-situ. There is only one surface flask observatory in all of Russia! Add to this the socio-economic reasons for distorting any evidence of a massive methane spike, and I wonder if we will ever see, reliable data about methane levels in the Arctic again.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/iadv/index.php?code=SPO
December 24th, 2012 at 8:22 pm
That graph goes to 2005 ? It’s 2012 ?
Motivated reasoning will clutch at straws.
December 24th, 2012 at 8:55 pm
According to this essay, it’s not a fiscal cliff. Rather, it’s descent into lawlessness.
December 24th, 2012 at 9:37 pm
It just doesn’t make sense to me that anyone (or groups) would cover up this methane story. I mean, if you are on the sinking ship and can’t get off, what would be your motive (or advantage) in trying to cover it up? This is what I don’t understand.
December 24th, 2012 at 9:44 pm
====> This has nothing to do with the current post, but is a question about the previous “virtual conference” posts. I was about to respond to comments directed towards me, but realized that the post had been closed to comments.
It seems that one of the virtues of a blog/conference is that it can be unstuck in time as much as it is in space. Whereas I can apprehend that a real, live conference has to end Sunday at 4:00 p.m. for logistical reasons, I seem to have missed the closing deadline here, for what it is worth. Greg seems to have promised quite a lot from these sessions (descriptions filled with what “will” come out of them, what “will” be analyzed, and so forth) and, as much as one might dismiss these particular lines of inquiry, it certainly does not help to have the dialog cut short. Most blogs I have come across leave comment threads open, even for years.
============
Anyway, to keep it brief, I would like to respond at least in passing to OzMan’s long, thought-out comment: I am aware of “transitional objects” and think that he’s not entirely wrong to connect that concept to “motivational reasoning”. What’s clear is that there is a failure of modern humanity to Grow Up, in other words. The Native Americans who cautiously took decisions based on the outcome for the Seventh Generation have been forced to give way to the man-babies with sideways baseball caps derided by James Howard Kunstler.
I don’t understand Greg Robie’s backhanded compliments by which he alternately grovels before me (I have apparently not only emasculated him, but beheaded him!) and then patronizingly seeks to explain away my spontaneous and non-personal criticisms as my lashing out at him for having made poopie* in my refuge (Guy’s blog) — *this is Greg’s metaphor.
I just call ‘em as I see ‘em. Guy’s blog interests me, but is not my refuge (there is no refuge). Over the last couple of months since I discovered NBL, I suffered through many sociopathic comments by certain parties who now seem to be officially unwelcome in order to read sincere comments by the likes of BCNurseProf, Daniel, Kathy C, uvufgl, etc. (sorry if I get anyone’s handle wrong).
I have been on a long journey of study to get to where I am and Guy’s blog is a waystation, certainly. One of the ultimate waystations, you might say: a place people go when there is nothing left to do or to say, but they need to keep talking, or listening.
My situation is particular in that I have just recently started caring for my mom, 81, who is dying of a fatal lung disease (I will spell it out to avoid the jargon/acronym; it’s Ideopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis). Neither she nor I wants extraordinary measures for her, but she’s on O2 24/7 (not deemed an extraordinary measure). We’re at that point where there isn’t really much more left to do or to say, except to say goodbye–a goodbye that could last a few months or a few years, it’s unclear. It’s nauseating to witness the doctor’s inquiries about “depression” (“what do you look forward to?”), and we both dread the required upcoming appointment with the “Spiritual Counselor” (I have the luxury of being able to absent myself). If the doctor or the Spiritual Counselor asked me what I looked forward to, they would get an earful… For some reason, it appears to be deemed unnatural for dying old people to be depressed, btw.
So I take some comfort (not refuge) in Kathy C’s repeated offering to the effect that no-one will die who wasn’t already going to die. That does make viewing the passing of the world less painful, so thanks, Kathy C.
Anyway, to get back to the place you go when there’s nothing more to do or to say: that’s the Hospice. Hospice, interestingly, DOES want you to do things (O2) and say things (Spiritual Counselor). And right here at Guy’s place, though we know the world is “on hospice”, we are exhorted to do things and to say things!
I think this is a curious parallel and one that I am going to work through over the coming days and weeks.
December 24th, 2012 at 9:56 pm
Kathy C: The number of outages as more than doubled in the last 20 years. The stress on the system from overuse as temps rise will increase. The damage to the system from storms will increase. And our congress allocates funds to highways and bridges. Increasing blackouts was what Richard Duncan of Olduvai theory fame said would happen as we headed back down the stone age.
One of the side effects of the push for all healthcare records in the U.S. to be electronic is that when the power goes out, so does healthcare. Even though we have battery backup for all of our systems, they only last few an hour at best. When they go out, then we can’t make appointments, print prescriptions, see patients’ medical records, order tests, nothing. Even though I still have my education and medical knowledge, if I can’t access a patient’s chart to see what medications he or she is on, and then can’t write a prescription (I no longer have rx pads – we just print them out when we need them), there’s not much I can do. If a power outage lasts very long, then healthcare becomes one more casualty of a collapsing system.
December 24th, 2012 at 10:22 pm
Bailey: It just doesn’t make sense to me that anyone (or groups) would cover up this methane story. I mean, if you are on the sinking ship and can’t get off, what would be your motive (or advantage) in trying to cover it up? This is what I don’t understand.
There are several reasons I can think of. Chief among them is denial. Most people are in denial about what’s happening. Even those who are well educated and well informed are in denial. Of those who accept the numbers, many think that technology will save us. The path toward NTE, which the methane numbers make much more likely, leads to chaos and destruction of our dream state world. The path toward salvation by technology is much more orderly and pleasant. Solution: don’t release the data.
December 24th, 2012 at 10:28 pm
Lidia, thanks for the comparison between hospice and Guy’s blog. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but I guess it’s quite valid. The world is on hospice.
December 24th, 2012 at 11:09 pm
I agree with Dr. House. Denial, even among the well educated and the elites, seems to be the main reason for inaction. A close friend of mine lives next door to a climatologist at the University of Miami. When he recently asked his neighbor about methane, the climatologist was astounded. He said that in his experience no one outside of the scientific circles who deal with climate/ecological issues had any awareness about the methane crises. He also said that they can’t get any of the politicians to listen to them.
It’s psychologically easier to posit some grand conspiracy behind the wall of ignorance and delusion because it implies that someone is in control. Chaos and blindness are more unsettling. I don’t think that anyone is in control, or at least not in control enough to change the course of this civilization. Our species is headed off a cliff because of the stupid choices we collectively made (or allowed to be made for us). Although some brainy wack jobs in places like the Pentagon have dreamt up Dr. Strangelovian survival plans (such as limited nuclear war, or underground cities in Antartica), at the end of the day these are all just paper napkin fantasies that will never come to fruition. When the long slide into oblivion picks up speed, Bill Gates, et al., will be swept up in the death drive along with the rest of the unwashed peasants.
December 24th, 2012 at 11:44 pm
The REAL Dr. House: ” we can’t make appointments, print prescriptions, see patients’ medical records, order tests, nothing.”
My family got great care under the UHC (Universal Health Care) regime in Italy while we lived there, although it happened that I came upon a receptionist/administrator who lamented the lack of toner in his printer. Since the State/Region or what-have-you hadn’t seen fit to deliver him the needed toner, he just kept PRINTING OUT PRESCRIPTION LABELS THAT WERE UNREADABLE. Because, hey, he was just paid to print the labels out, NOT to assure that they were readable!
At the same time as the State was attempting to digitize everything, it was still the case that (unlike in the US) patients were always given their charts/results to cart around to the next doctor/appointment (always a sound practice, actually, IMO).
===
I remember my sister telling me, several years ago, about a power outage in LA. She was shopping at some mall, and without electronic backup the clerk *could not* make the sale: UNABLE to calculate the sales tax or the giving-change aspect of the transaction. My sister quickly figured the totals, but the clerk refused payment until the “system” was back on line to process it. So my sister left the merchandise on the counter unsold.
December 25th, 2012 at 2:33 am
During this time of the year when double layered make believe prevails, it’s comforting to know that there are some people somewhere who are at least trying to see.
December 25th, 2012 at 3:15 am
Regarding: “…it’s not a fiscal cliff. Rather, it’s descent into lawlessness.”
Shallow views. Got 9/11 wrong and thinks PROSPERITY and GROWTH are the answer.
We are so addicted to the cheap and plentiful energy. “There is nothing we won’t believe and do to keep the addiction going”. (That’s a Dr. Phil quote, by the way) The world would rather deny and die than go into rehab. How many in this group really want to be personally responsible for all their food, clothing and shelter? You know, like all the other mammels on the earth. That would require us to recycle our waste, like all the other mammels on earth. Who wants to do that?
My daughter saw “Chasing Ice” last weekend. She was very impressed. Is a believer now. She sees that the earth will heat up without its cooling system. Anyone who drives a car knows that.
December 25th, 2012 at 3:34 am
Bailey, LOTS of things are covered up or just not talked about in the news
The methane time bomb possibility is known. Its also called the clathrate gun hypothesis. Google either term. I learned about it about 6 years ago when I read the book When Life Nearly Died which posited that such an event might be part of the end Permian-Extinction. You can also google “rising methane in the arctic” to see that in fact this is something scientists know about.
But for example if you lived near a nuclear power plant that had some serious vulnerability don’t you think you should know? Not according to the NRA. Thus it takes a whistle blower to let you the public know. Even then it is not front page news – you learn these things by being interested in the subject and doing your own research once you hear some tidbit
In a letter submitted Friday afternoon to internal investigators at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a whistleblower engineer within the agency accused regulators of deliberately covering up information relating to the vulnerability of U.S. nuclear power facilities that sit downstream from large dams and reservoirs.
The letter also accuses the agency of failing to act to correct these vulnerabilities despite being aware of the risks for years.
These charges were echoed in separate conversations with another risk engineer inside the agency who suggested that the vulnerability at one plant in particular — the three-reactor Oconee Nuclear Station near Seneca, S.C. — put it at risk of a flood and subsequent systems failure, should an upstream dam completely fail, that would be similar to the tsunami that hobbled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan last year. That event caused multiple reactor meltdowns.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/14/flood-threat-nuclear-plants-nrc_n_1885598.html
Last summer when Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant was flooded, the flood was the big news, but the worry behind the scenes was that upstream dams might break. Each dam that might break would then put added water against the next dam creating a cascade of dam failures that would have created our own Fukushima.
There is strong pressure on the mass media and/or voluntary cooperation to keep many things out of the news or play them down, back page them etc.
December 25th, 2012 at 3:42 am
Lidia, having volunteered for 10 years with Hospice in 3 different cities I can tell you that various Hospices are better or worse at what they do. My father was put on Hopsice 7 years ago and 4 years latter he was off because he had failed to die. His wife is the main reason for that. One could wish for no better caregiver than her in one’s last years. Although she is 25 years younger than him, I fear that she will now not last as long as he does.
But to the point, when he went on Hospice he had to option to take or not take various services. They did not opt for the spiritual counselor or social worker or volunteer, only the nurse visits. If you find some aspect of Hospice to not be helpful, ask if you can NOT use that service. I suspect that you have that option.
December 25th, 2012 at 3:48 am
From deadly cold in Russia, floods in Britain and balmy conditions that have residents in southwest France rummaging for their bathing suits, the weather has gone haywire across Europe in the days leading up to Christmas.
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/White_Christmas_for_Moscow_while_south_Europe_sweats_999.html
December 25th, 2012 at 4:12 am
Fer yer cognisance:
Dr. Jeff Masters’ WunderBlog
The top ten weather stories of 2012
December 25th, 2012 at 4:26 am
dairymandave : How many in this group really want to be personally responsible for all their food, clothing and shelter? You know, like all the other mammels on the earth. That would require us to recycle our waste, like all the other mammels on earth.
The other mammals don’t ‘recycle their waste’, other organisms do it for them, as part of the ecology. Each species has it’s particular characteristics, we, as primates, have ours. We were never ‘personally responsible for all our food, clothing and shelter’, we lived in groups, where we cooperated, and devised many different approaches to solving the problems of survival, from living in caves to living on boats to following herds of animals.
We actually had excellent systems that provided everything that we needed, for example, throughout Europe, self-contained peasant villages, which grew crops like flax to make linen, for weavers to make into cloth, for tailors to make into clothes, where everybody had a skill, trade, a livelihood, a place in the community, with a rich cultural life. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but in places like Estonia it lasted for more than three thousand years, with examples where it actually enriched the ecology, examples of the highest density of plant species on Earth, actually in a manmade environment.
It all got wrecked, by industrialisation, by urbanisation, by lust for power, imperialism, and the discovery of coal and oil, by the idea that things could be ‘improved’ by making farming ‘more efficient’…. hubris and the myth of progress, which has lead to total catastrophe for everyone…
Theoretically, we could redesign our systems and have excellent elegant lives in communities which provided us with all our food, clothing and shelter. Jeff Vail did some fascinating work on that years ago, which he called ‘envisioning a hamlet economy’ and his rhizome theory, in the days when we dreamers still thought there was a chance humans would see sense and do something to avert oncoming extinction. Sadly, it has turned out that we proved to be unduly optimistic.
http://www.jeffvail.net/2006/04/envisioning-hamlet-economy-topology-of.html
December 25th, 2012 at 5:04 am
Hey everyone: all the best to you during the holidays (and beyond) – please enjoy and cherish the time we have left!
Turboguy: i saw a response to that (crazy) idea you ended your comment with that goes like this. What we need is a teacher in every gun shop!
Kathy C and Lidia: i’m at a similar place with a younger cousin dying of starvation because he’s allergic to food and meds among a vast array of other things. He’s been suffering with this for 30 years as it progressively got worse and now he’s backed into a corner. Hospice wanted to provide him with a feeding tube, which he refused and they were going to transfer him to a hospital. His brother intervened and read them the riot act and now he’s just waiting to die. He hasn’t eaten anything in 39 days now and looks like an Aushwitz victim – gaunt, sunken, weak – skin and bones. He just wants it to be over. i visited with him yesterday and, while a football game was on in the background we laughed and talked about food, which he really misses. He’s in constant pain (especially his gut) and relayed that one of his nurses visited with him the night before and commented that “you shouldn’t be here” (in the sense that she’s never seen anyone last that long without food). His mind is still sharp, he has great memories but is looking forward to death.
Quick check on Bayou-Corne:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kp8-sKja6A&list=FLHE92x768p8h-fMrqhsnE1Q&index=1
December 25th, 2012 at 5:26 am
Some while back dairymandave asked what to say to a neighbour about record low temperatures in Russia and Siberia, as a result if global warming.
I think that is easy to answer. Increasing CO2 wrecks the climate system and feedback loops, as Guy has mentioned, kick in, so the weather becomes chaotic, with unusual extremes becoming increasingly more frequent. Melting of Arctic ice has wrecked the jet stream, so its oscillations are amplified.
Anybody remember this ancient paper by Donella Meadows ?
A positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing. The more it works, the more it gains power to work some more.
The more people catch the flu, the more they infect other people. The more babies are born, the more people grow up to have babies. The more money you have in the bank, the more interest you earn, the more money you have in the bank. The more the soil erodes, the less vegetation it can support, the fewer roots and leaves to soften rain and runoff, the more soil erodes. The more high-energy neutrons in the critical mass, the more they knock into nuclei and generate more.
Positive feedback loops drive growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems. A system with an unchecked positive loop ultimately will destroy itself. That’s why there are so few of them.
Usually a negative loop kicks in sooner or later. The epidemic runs out of infectable people—or people take increasingly strong steps to avoid being infected. The death rate rises to equal the birth rate—or people see the consequences of unchecked population growth and have fewer babies. The soil erodes away to bedrock, and after a million years the bedrock crumbles into new soil—or people put up check dams and plant trees.
In those examples, the first outcome is what happens if the positive loop runs its course, the second is what happens if there’s an intervention to reduce its power.
The most interesting behavior that rapidly turning positive loops can trigger is chaos. This wild, unpredictable, unreplicable, and yet bounded behavior happens when a system starts changing much, much faster than its negative loops can react to it.
http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/places_intervene_system.html
December 25th, 2012 at 5:45 am
i meant to add this link to my previous post:
http://naturalsociety.com/pesticide-chemical-tap-water-linked-food-allergies/#ixzz2EDDft1Ds
December 25th, 2012 at 5:58 am
michele/montreal:
and from the article at the beginning of this thread, WOW!, what a boy’s club!: James Howard Kunstler, Niall Ferguson, Michael Ruppert, “Rice Farmer,”…
It IS interesting that nearly all the experts who claimed “global financial collapse/complete collapse of the world’s industrial economy” were guys. Boy’s club indeed!
December 25th, 2012 at 5:59 am
ulvfugl; I agree but most of my neighbors wouldn’t understand any of that. So why try?
I might try the idea of the polar caps being the cooling system of the earth, similar to their car’s antifreeze. Most people understand that.
My mother is in a “home” @95 and we visited her the other day during their christmas party. Santa was there doing his usual Ho, Ho, Ho thing. This is what people really believe in, I think. Something for nothing.
December 25th, 2012 at 6:37 am
Yeah folks, I have personally been well aware of the methane situation for a couple of years. I guess I am one of those people that is in denial about people in denial. Climatologists have to know about this, and for the life of me, I cannot understand why they aren’t organizing marches on Washington. What good is your career, reputation, funding etc. if you know you are going to be bending over and kissing your ass goodbye soon? Even the so called Union of Concerned Scientists do not have anything on this..
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/
I am one of those people who have gone through life with my eyes taped wide open, and I don’t get the denial thing – unless you are one who can benefit from denial without said circumstance effecting you and your’s personally. The cognitive dissonance of the human race astounds me. Now if I can just find my crashed space ship so that I can return to my home planet.
December 25th, 2012 at 6:49 am
The reason the Boy’s Club’s prediction of complete collapse of world’s industrial economy by 2012 did not come to pass is that the Club’s perspective proceeded from (at least) three flawed assumptions.
First, the Club assumed that politicians would do nothing to intervene in a financial crisis and just “let the Market decide”. In fact, they intervened with a vengence. For better or worse, said intervention broke the back of the financial panic, which stabilized the global financial system (albeit precariously).
Second, the Club assumed that businessmen, fundamentally, are all vicious people, suspicious of everyone, and thus eagerly waiting to stab both their customers/clients and their business partners in the back at the first opportunity to make an extra buck (such as during a financial panic). In fact, business operates on the basis of contracts, a high degree of mutual trust, and ability to flexibly respond to the needs of the situtation at hand. And so, the widespread use of long-term contracts for energy supplies cushioned the effect of wild price fluctuations in the spot markets. The existence of mutual trust between businessmen, and between businessmen and customers/clients, led to flexibility in enforcement of contractual obligations (timing and amounts of deliveries, payment schedules, etc). Together, these behaviors prevented a deep economic recession (depression in some countries) from turning into economic collapse.
Third, the Club assumed that the public at large, fundamentally, is composed of individuals who by nature, will act solely in their own narrow self-interest and tear each other apart to try to get whatever they can for themselves in a free-for-all the moment the opportunity presents itself (such as during a financial panic). The fact that that largely did not happen, of course, further stabilized the world financial and economic system between 2008 today. Moreover, the fact that that largely did not happen speaks volumes about the veracity of this view of human nature.
Those are the main reasons why the Club predictions were so wildly off, I think. In passing, I should also mention that many of the Club’s members are “goldbugs” and are heavily invested in the precious metals and precious stones markets. Given that, perhaps it would be wise to consider the possibility that the Club may have had a vested interest in encouraging financial panic and economic collapse, as a possible reason for the intensity and shrillness of their public pronouncements.
December 25th, 2012 at 7:09 am
Arthur; Yes, money can be created, bailouts given, contracts and laws can be made, more energy can be fracked or steamed to prod things along.
The latest fear, however, is food. None of these tricks will work with food. However, the number of eaters could be reduced. Or the quality of what is eaten could be lowered. Or less could be exported so someone else starves. Less ethanol produced. Less waste.
December 25th, 2012 at 7:20 am
Tom, I wish your cousin a speedy end to his suffering.
Even Hospice personnel can be in a bit of denial at times. I had one patient who wanted me to massage her legs, so I did. I mentioned this to Hospice and they got upset and said that could cause a clot to go to her heart. Duh? You mean horrors she might die before 6 mos are up?
In another case a woman had to put her father in the hospital finally – he had Congestive Heart Failure. The Dr. prescribe pain medication of x to y quantity. She asked the nurses to give the largest dose he prescribed. A nurse accused her of trying to kill her father.
People so often are forced to suffer because others can’t deal with death. They are willing for others to live in pain so they don’t have to face the fact that we are mortals.
Oh well
Christmas day and no special dinner planned, no family around, no gifts to unwrap. Maybe I will make the merry christmas phone calls to family later in the day – maybe not. PEACE blessed Peace from the craziness.
December 25th, 2012 at 7:42 am
Arthur, what you outlined is exactly related to the point which I made (and why I never expected the collapse then). I.e., the world is an interconnected, interdependent industrial parasite colony which operates as a giant safety net (regardless of surface ideological differences). Think of group of meth users and ask how important their personal ideologies are!
This is why I say that all ‘soft issues’ can be averted and ‘shock absorbed.’ However, the ‘Hard issues’ related to environmental collapse, food and water shortages, peak oil, coastal destruction, etc, etc. will ultimately bring the economy and Empire down. Though I cheer for it daily, I do not expect it as soon as many here do. I have been hearing (and cheering) for collapse for decades now, and it never happens.
December 25th, 2012 at 7:43 am
dairymandave2003,
None of these were “tricks”, in a morally odious sense. They were all aspects of the global economic and financial system that allowed it to respond to a financial and economic crisis with enough flexibility to prevent collapse. The Club missed it because their view of reality was too rigid. Moreover, their view of human nature, of what a human being is, was and still is, fundamentally flawed. Their view of how business actually operates was and still is fundamentally flawed. The simple understanding of how and why businessmen use long-term contracts was and still is lost on them. Likewise, the simple understanding that two businessmen who mutually trust each other may be comfortable with adjusting contract terms, payment schedules, amount of payment owed, etc., when one (or both) of them face a time of adversity was and still is lost on them.
I would go even further than that. I would go so far as to claim that the very idea that mutual trust and cooperation are fundamental operating principle of human relationships is completely lost on all the Club members. What prevented collapse of the industrial economy? Mutual trust and cooperation prevented it. Simple as that. Club members remain bewildered by it all.
December 25th, 2012 at 7:58 am
Bailey,
I like your description of the world economy as a giant, industrial parasite colony. Your prediction of the colony’s fall due to the “Hard issues” of resource depletion, environmental destruction and climate instability sound much like that of John Michael Greer. “Slow collapse” over many decades, even a couple of centuries.
Though I notice that Greer has been using the term “climate instability” as a cause of collapse more frequently over the past year (since the late 2011 reports of accelerated Arctic methane outgassing, really)…
December 25th, 2012 at 8:02 am
dairymandave2003,
Speaking of (lack of) food, the likelihood of major food riots in the “Arab Spring” countries of the Middle East by late 2013 is very high. The on-going North American drought being the primary root cause.
December 25th, 2012 at 9:43 am
Limits to Growth offered several scenarios of how things might play out.
In 1972, the Club of Rome’s infamous report “The Limits to Growth” [Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J., Behrens_III, W. W. (1972). The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Universe Books, New York] presented some challenging scenarios for global sustainability, based on a system dynamics computer model to simulate the interactions of five global economic subsystems, namely: population, food production, industrial production, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable natural resources. Contrary to popular belief, The Limits to Growth scenarios by the team of analysts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not predict world collapse by the end of the 20th century. This paper focuses on a comparison of recently collated historical data for 1970–2000 with scenarios presented in the Limits to Growth. The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compare favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the “standard run” scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century. The data do not compare well with other scenarios involving comprehensive use of technology or stabilizing behaviour and policies. The results indicate the particular importance of understanding and controlling global pollution.
Check out the charts here comparing actual data to the various scenarios they presented – (a) standard run, (b) comprehensive technology, and (c) stabilized world
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378008000435
If you read what the media puts out about Limits to Growth you have no idea about what they actually said. Turns out that doing nothing (standard run) is playing out quite close to what they projected for population, industrial output, non-renewable resources, pollution, food, services per capita.
December 25th, 2012 at 9:43 am
Full report at http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf
December 25th, 2012 at 9:47 am
Lidia Says: the world is “on hospice”
The world is on hospice, it’s true—
Easing pain is the best we can do;
We could still be humane
While circling the drain—
Remember: we’re just passing through.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MssbI4_SzYg/UFzThvOrSvI/AAAAAAAAAT4/gqIRy0T0NXg/s1600/mr+natural2.jpg
December 25th, 2012 at 9:55 am
(Oldie from elsewhere:)
As people become doom aware,
Psychological help for despair
Should try to provide
A quick self-care guide
For hospice type terminal care.
December 25th, 2012 at 10:08 am
Climatologists have to know about this, and for the life of me, I cannot understand why they aren’t organizing marches on Washington. What good is your career, reputation, funding etc. if you know you are going to be bending over and kissing your ass goodbye soon?
People will believe anything rather than face the fact that their lives and their world are coming to an end. This is especially true of people who are well fed and comfortable.
During the Holocaust, the Jewish prisoners (who significantly outnumbered the guards) went along with the most superficial lies because the truth was too unimaginable.
Unlike concentration camps, death camps had no barracks to house prisoners, other than those for workers at the camps. In order to process the murder of thousands of people, great pains were taken to deceive the victims concerning their fate. Jews deported from ghettos and concentration camps to the death camps were unaware of what they were facing. The Nazi planners of the operation told the victims that they were being resettled for labor, issued them work permits, told them to bring along their tools and to exchange their German marks for foreign currency. Food was also used to coax starving Jews onto the trains. Once the trains arrived at the death camps, trucks were available to transport those who were too weak to walk directly to the gas chambers. The others were told that they would have to be deloused and enter the baths. The victims were separated by sex and told to remove their clothes. The baths were in reality the gas chambers.
December 25th, 2012 at 10:14 am
My point is that even if climatologists had the ability and will to organize a resistance movement, the masses won’t believe what they are saying. The information about the methane catastrophe is readily available on the internet. It’s hidden in plain sight, but almost no one wants to believe it. The sheeple are not imprisoned by the suppression of knowledge, they simply prefer a state of pleasant ignorance. Knowledge hurts, stupidity soothes.
December 25th, 2012 at 10:17 am
depressive lucidity,
The wake-up call will be the appearance of the first Arctic methane firestorm. Most people will have to visually see a methane firestorm before they realize it’s a problem.
December 25th, 2012 at 10:37 am
Global leaders have rejected the AMEG’s call for large-scale geo-engineering to cool the Arctic. For 2013, they plan to concentrate on global financial matters. Global leaders are hoping that an imminent major eruption of a volcano in Argentina will inject enough sulfate particulates into the stratosphere to stave off sea-ice collapse for a couple of years (2017 vs. 2015).
December 25th, 2012 at 11:39 am
Global warming seems to cause an increase in volcanic activity.
The periods of high volcanic activity followed fast, global temperature increases and associated rapid ice melting. To expand the scope of the discoveries, Dr. Kutterolf and his colleagues studied other cores from the entire Pacific region. These cores had been collected as part of the International Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) and its predecessor programs. They record more than a million years of the Earth’s history. “In fact, we found the same pattern from these cores as in Central America” says geophysicist Dr. Marion Jegen from GEOMAR, who also participated in the recent study. Together with colleagues at Harvard University, the geologists and geophysicists searched for a possible explanation. They found it with the help of geological computer models. “In times of global warming, the glaciers are melting on the continents relatively quickly. At the same time the sea level rises. The weight on the continents decreases, while the weight on the oceanic tectonic plates increases. Thus, the stress changes within in the earth to open more routes for ascending magma” says Dr. Jegen.
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/when-the-ice-melts-the-earth-spews-fire/
December 25th, 2012 at 11:45 am
depressive lucidity,
Interesting. But will it be in time, and will it be enough?
December 25th, 2012 at 12:27 pm
Btd, just passing thru – yep that about covers it.
Great picture at the link
December 25th, 2012 at 1:11 pm
Well, Kathy, then you might enjoy Mr. Natural explaining what it all means:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NWi7jPrDf-s/TgCMFv-rRRI/AAAAAAAAXWU/aTHFgguPlQU/s1600/Crumb%2BMr%2BNatural%2B3.jpg
December 25th, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Thank BtD. That is what I thought – nice to have it confirmed
We think that our lives have meaning
More than just housework and cleaning
If it doesn’t mean shit
I’ll have to admit
For my ego that’s very demeaning
December 25th, 2012 at 2:26 pm
BenjamintheDonkey,
You’re rhyming is becoming contagious.
Someway, somehow…
…you have to be stopped.
December 25th, 2012 at 2:33 pm
@Ulvfugl
You stated:
“…..Jeff Vail did some fascinating work on that years ago, which he called ‘envisioning a hamlet economy’ and his rhizome theory, in the days when we dreamers still thought there was a chance humans would see sense and do something to avert oncoming extinction. Sadly, it has turned out that we proved to be unduly optimistic.”
http://www.jeffvail.net/2006/04/envisioning-hamlet-economy-topology-of.html
I both agree and remember well that narrow window of time when the dawn of peak oil, allowed for a bevy of foolish optimism to swell among the choir. I then considered Vail’s writing to be some of the best. His rhizome theory was a key part of forming my own local food security schemes…..oh well. Looking back…..it was lovely time, wasn’t it.
December 25th, 2012 at 3:27 pm
Yes, we had a chance, didn’t we, Daniel, all sorts of positive ideas, we’d figured out what the problems were and figured out what the answers were, Fukuoka, forest gardens, reed beds for sewage systems, etc, etc, and then came the evil, the madness of Bush and Cheney and Blair… that squandered the one small chance…
In a way, that’s why it’s easier for me now, because my shock, despair and grief happened years ago, when I realised most American and most British had not the slightest idea about what the real issues were…
Instead of destroying whole countries, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, now Syria, killing, bombing, in fact killing the whole effing planet, with this mad lust for power and control and money and exploitation, we could have been doing this…
http://youtu.be/xzTHjlueqFI
December 25th, 2012 at 3:39 pm
Good news, folks. It looks like the imperialist disco party orgy which treats the planet as a giant buffet of cheap resources may soon be swallowed up by 600 trillion dollars of derivatives.
http://www.infowars.com/say-goodbye-to-the-good-life/
The 2nd Great Depression will not be enough to avoid NTE, but at least we will get to see the look of shock and awe on the faces of the piglets when their world of Big Box Consumer bullshit crashes. I hold them morally responsible for choosing to be pigs instead of conscious people. They had the chance to wake up. The information is all around them. Even the Tea Party Preppers (as autistic as they are) recognize that something just ain’t right. 99.8% of the people I know will not even acknowledge that there’s a problem.
December 25th, 2012 at 3:39 pm
@Arthur Johnson
You stated:
“I would go even further than that. I would go so far as to claim that the very idea that mutual trust and cooperation are fundamental operating principle of human relationships is completely lost on all the Club members. What prevented collapse of the industrial economy? Mutual trust and cooperation prevented it. Simple as that. Club members remain bewildered by it all.”
I would love to agree you. But unrestrained and undocumented trillions of dollars in “quantitative easing” may have something to do with kicking economic collapse down the road a bit….don’t you think? Where you see mutual trust, I see mutual dependence and no alternative to sustaining a hopelessly broken global economic system by any means necessary.
December 25th, 2012 at 5:02 pm
Aha, so, the North Korean propaganda film, (which I thought was brilliant) showing how crap American capitalist culture is, wasn’t actually made by the North Koreans after all…
http://ondemand.tv3.co.nz/Media-3-Season-1-Ep-16/tabid/59/articleID/8890/MCat/540/Default.aspx
December 25th, 2012 at 5:06 pm
Here’s the original
http://youtu.be/Dw-p84oWW84
December 25th, 2012 at 5:56 pm
Arthur Johnson The reason the Boy’s Club’s prediction of complete collapse of world’s industrial economy by 2012 did not come to pass is that the Club’s perspective proceeded from (at least) three flawed assumptions.
All due respect, I don’t recognise that depiction of yours, of what has occurred over the last few years at all
How about this, as an alternative, rather more realistic, story of what happened…
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqhns7_catastroika-english-subtitles_shortfilms#.UNpJOxwmBX8
December 25th, 2012 at 6:04 pm
Daniel,
But unrestrained and undocumented trillions of dollars in “quantitative easing” may have something to do with kicking economic collapse down the road a bit….don’t you think?
It did. And this was part of my “first point”. The Club members assumed that politicians and government officials would do nothing to intervene in the financial panic, that they would simply watch while “the Market” took care of everything. In fact, they intervened with a vengence, breaking the panic, and causing many of the Club members, particularly the “goldbugs”, to lose a lot of money in the process (they had placed big bets on economic collapse, thinking that everyone was going to have come crawling to them to buy gold. Things didn’t out that way).
“Mutual trust” primarily came into play in the mutual behavior of businessmen towards each other and their customers/clients. Instead of “mutual suspicion”, for the most part, what actually occurred, for the most part, was “mutual trust”. “Cooperation” primarily came into play in the behavior of the general public. Instead of individualism (“just grab whatever I can for me and mine”), what actually occurred, for the most part, was “cooperation”.
The Boys’ Club got it all wrong. Their assumptions about the nature of government, the nature of business, and human nature itself were so far off the mark it’s ridiculous. Interestingly, as michele/montreal pointed out, with one or two exceptions, the Club members are all men, er, boys. Is it possible that, in all their machinations, the Club neglected to consider the dramatic change in the status and position of women vis-a-vis men worldwide? Could that dramatic change have had something to do with why global financial collapse/collapse of the industrial economy did not occur in 2008-2012? Hmmmm.
December 25th, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Kathy C, thanks for sharing your experiences with Hospice. Thinking of you today and sending wishes of peace. Thanks also to you and Benjamin for your wry verses.
December 25th, 2012 at 6:26 pm
On the methane situation, no wonder the public doesn’t take it seriously when you have ‘experts’ (and commentators) like this completely downplaying it.
http://tinyurl.com/cvul35t
December 25th, 2012 at 8:19 pm
@ Arthur Johnson
I’m sorry Arthur, but I’m just not following your logic. Gold in over $1,650 an ounce. I personally, told everyone I knew over ten years ago, who had any kind of stock portfolio, to sell everything and buy gold, which then was around $300 oz. As far as gold is concerned, and I’m highly doubtful that that was many of “the clubs” motivation, but even if it was, I don’t think they have been proven wrong, at least in that regards.
It’s not that I am defending “the boys club’s” economic predictions. I personally pay very little attention to anyone’s economic predictions.
Yes, it was probably imprudent for Guy to continue to include others predictions of economic collapse by year’s end. But it seems that you’re suggesting that we have somehow averted permanent economic contraction, and that somehow all the underlying coercive factors contributing to capitalism global Ponzi scheme, have somehow been ameliorated by “businessmen’s mutual trust”????
You stated:
“Mutual trust” primarily came into play in the mutual behavior of businessmen towards each other and their customers/clients. Instead of “mutual suspicion”, for the most part, what actually occurred, for the most part, was “mutual trust”. “Cooperation” primarily came into play in the behavior of the general public. Instead of individualism (“just grab whatever I can for me and mine”), what actually occurred, for the most part, was “cooperation”…….The Boys’ Club got it all wrong. Their assumptions about the nature of government, the nature of business, and human nature itself were so far off the mark it’s ridiculous.”
I so vehemently disagree with the bases of your assumption, I don’t even know where to begin…….so I won’t. If you consider global finance to be driven by anything other than acute self-interest, not alone, cooperation and mutual trust………it’s going to take far more than a few blog comments from me to counter such wishful thinking. And god knows I would love for you to be right!
And as another example of not being able to follow your logic, you stated:
“Is it possible that, in all their machinations, the Club neglected to consider the dramatic change in the status and position of women vis-a-vis men worldwide? Could that dramatic change have had something to do with why global financial collapse/collapse of the industrial economy did not occur in 2008-2012? Hmmmm.”
It’s far from my intent to be a needless contrarian, but what you’re saying is on the verge of being nonsensical. And not only that, but I would walk into the kitchen and castrate myself with a dull butter knife, for even the possibility of what you’re saying, to be true. If you have any evidence that the status of women throughout the world, has somehow prevented the economy from collapsing then please provide it, otherwise you’re being even more hyperbolic than the “boy’s club” you’re attempting to discredit.
But, while there are unfortunately very few examples, by the time any woman has risen through the ranks to influence the inner workings of Wall Street, Central Banks and government, they are no less egregious than their male counterpart. Thatcher, Merkel, Clinton, Albright, Rice, Lagarde……….these people are monsters, regardless of their sex.
Or, are you suggesting that the paltry advancement of women in becoming more of the bread winners on Main Street, or recipients of micro loans in developing countries, has somehow had any bearing on the absolute insanity of international neo-liberal fiscal policy?
Again, I’m sorry AJ, but I can’t at all, follow what you’re implying.
December 25th, 2012 at 8:43 pm
Guy
Yorchichan, we’ve triggered eight positive feedbacks, seven of which — acting alone — lead to near-term human extinction. Abundant evidence points toward near-term human extinction.
Sorry for the slow reply. I don’t have your list of eight positive feedbacks in front of me, but I do recall that at least half of them related to release of methane (not really sure why these are not all lumped into one category). I’ve had a look at the historical atmospheric methane levels and, yes, Daniel is correct that methane levels have resumed their upward trend after a brief leveling off at the start of this century. However, the rate of increase is still not as great as it was a few decades ago. If methane was already acting as a positive feedback I would expect to see the rate of increase in methane levels going up every year rather than decreasing. A methane molecule only persists in the atmosphere for about a decade (on average) so a tremendous amount would have to be released over a very short space of time for runaway greenhouse to occur. I haven’t the faintest idea what this ‘tremendous amount’ might be. Anyone else got any figures?
ulvfugl
All the evidence supports Guy’s position, there’s no evidence to support your position, Yorchichan, it’s just your opinion.
I would respectfully disagree. I’ve yet to see any convincing evidence of near term human extinction. The link you provided only shows evidence of overshoot and suggests therefore we are due a die off rather than extinction. For near term extinction near term runaway greenhouse is required, and this has yet to be proven (admittedly, in my opinion).
Arhur Johnson
I fail to see how any of the three catastrophes you mention (supervolcano/ nuclear war/asteroid impact) would help prevent near term human extinction. In fact, quite the opposite because our food supply would be removed for a few years. Even if the atmosphere were dimmed sufficiently to re-cool the planet, this effect would only be temporary until the particulates left the atmosphere and then we’d be back to where we started with the positive feedback mechanisms still triggered.
Or are you arguing that because the disasters would kill so many people plus industrial civilization, we would no longer be in a position to pollute the atmosphere with greenhouse gases? In this case any disaster would do and not merely one which cooled the planet.
December 25th, 2012 at 9:07 pm
Feedbacks and relative associated information are described in detail in the presentation embedded here. A cryptic overview follows, and bear in mind that “beyond 1 degree C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage” (United Nations Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases, 1990):
Arctic Ocean methane hydrates (Science, March 2010) equivalent to 1,000 to 10,000 Gigatons of carbon (vs. 226 Gigatons thus far via burning fossil fuels)
Arctic is defrosting because warm Atlantic water is shooting through the Fram Strait (Science, January 2011)
Siberian methane (Tellus, February 2011): vents increased in diameter by three orders of magnitude between summer 2010 and summer 2011
Amazonian drought (Science, February 2011)
Boreal peat (Nature Communications, November 2011)
Antarctic methane, equivalent to 10x carbon in northern hemisphere (Nature, August 2012)
Russian forest and bog fires (NASA, August 2012)
Arctic drilling, fast-tracked by Obama administration during summer 2012
December 25th, 2012 at 9:41 pm
Daniel, please don’t castrate yourself with a dull butter knife, and not just because I doubt the stuff about “increased status of women” somehow preventing economic collapse.
I’m not at all convinced that women have “advanced.” Oppression and exploitation are alive and well. I’m not sure what “status” and “advancement” are supposed to mean. And which women are we talking about?
And economic collapse is only a matter of time. People just can’t resist making predictions about when. The fact that not everyone is seeing evidence of economic collapse doesn’t mean it isn’t already happening, or that some dramatic event isn’t imminent. Why do so many people still believe the economy is cruising along just fine? It boggles my mind.
December 25th, 2012 at 9:56 pm
@ Jennifer Hartley
I concur….boggled indeed.
December 25th, 2012 at 10:32 pm
Good plan Doc, skipping the time frame predictions. Not enough data and too many variables. Best, I think, to embrace both ignorance and certainty.
Of course there’s the soundtrack to enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_5kv8QeBBc
December 25th, 2012 at 11:24 pm
Guy
I’ve watched a few of your presentations before. They are good but get a bit repetitive after a while and the one you linked to isn’t great quality video or audio so I’ll give it a miss.
Scary figures on the amount of methane stored in the Arctic. This is located in the ocean sediments rather than the rapidly disappearing ice. Is there any evidence a significant amount of these hydrates has been destabilised and is about to be released?
Skeptical Science, hardly champions of the climate change deniers, seem to think the jury is still out on Arctic methane:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/arctic-methane-outgassing-e-siberian-shelf-part1.html
No time to comment on all the other feedback mechanisms you list. Taken together they certainly present a grim picture, but has anyone proven runaway greenhouse will occur before industrial collapse?
Is there anyone else apart from yourself and some/most of the NBL regular contributors who thinks human near term extinction is a done deal?
December 26th, 2012 at 3:07 am
I know this may sound cold but I have not been following closely the Nancy Lanzer story. How do many of you see this link being credable?
“School shooting is now a proven false flag.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0UtMWzCoVE
Pretty hard to tell over here down under.
Any comments would be helpful.
December 26th, 2012 at 3:26 am
Daniel”by the time any woman has risen through the ranks to influence the inner workings of Wall Street, Central Banks and government, they are no less egregious than their male counterpart”
The worse boss I ever had was a woman. Not even rising as far as you suggest apparently had the same effect. Some feel like they have to try so hard to be like the boys in the club that they manage to be worse than the boys in the club.
December 26th, 2012 at 3:52 am
It seems comments on the other workshops are ended so…
ulvfugl
You wrote on the other workshop:
“In old fashioned vernacular parlance, that would have been called ‘stupid, confused, immature…’ so you replace a basic common term with a fancy upgrade that makes it sound as if you’re being smart and intellectual and superior and educated, but the actual added insight and utility is zero.
Of course, you couldn’t publish papers in academic journals or give talks at conferences about ‘stupid’ or ‘ignorant’ people, but you can about people who use ‘motivated reasoning’, so that makes it okay and acceptable.”
I do agree with this generally, however, perhaps the term ‘stupid’ describes someone who has limited mental reasoning capacity to begin with, but it does not describe those who in all other ways appear reasonably capable of understanding complex, even abstract ideas, but nevertheless display ‘blue smoke’ and ‘gear grinding’ when faced with some of these propositions and evidence of NTE, Peak Oil etc.
So I wouldn’t want to diminish the usefulness and aptness of descriptors like, ‘stupid’, ‘confused’ or ‘immature’, however, I do think there is a case for looking a little deeper, to see if these descriptions are covering other types of messes in peoples’ minds.
To me the defining note with this issue is fear.
A stupid or immature of confused person does not necessarily experience fear when displaying these inadequacies, but the postulate of ‘motivated Reasoning’ and my proposal that fear and anxiety are operating in the same way that it does in the ‘Transitional object’ scenario, is an attempt to explain the fear. Why is it manifesting at that time?
There is probably no way to go much further with these issues in discussion here, and I accept you are right on most points.
As a leaving comment, I think ‘Motivated Reasoning’ as a concept is attempting to look at why some people are not disposed to go beyond the normal cosmological socialisation of their worldview, or what we call as thier comfort zone.
I feel that it is fear, and once educated to a reasonable degree, the fear becomes apparent when topics and evidence are put forward that requires the fear barrier to be crossed, or alleviated by trust for a time, so the evidence can get an airing.
No accounting for just plain stupid though, I agree.
December 26th, 2012 at 4:08 am
Oz man, the shooting is suspicious, but on this youtube clip this guy is stating things as true that others that have been investigating have not found solid proof of, such as that the father was to testify about Libor. http://occupycorporatism.com/no-viable-connection-between-peter-lanza-us-senate-libor-hearings/ As far as gun control, doesn’t the NRA counter proposal of armed guards at the schools seem more like a step to a police state. For my part I am more afraid of preppers with shit loads of guns than the government. And I really would like people who buy guns not to be known violent criminals. But at any rate what good are guns in the hands of the citizens if the government can take you out with a drone? I would presume that the point of such shootings if they are actually done by the gov’t is to continue to instill fear, not take away guns – Diane Feinsteins gun control proposal bans assault weapons – with 900 EXCEPTIONS. That doesn’t sound to me much like taking away everyone’s 2nd amendment rights.
At any rate if you want to have a little conspiracy theory fun google “Eric Holder Oklahoma City” Seems our attorney general has an interesting past.
December 26th, 2012 at 4:29 am
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/11/29/166156242/cornstalks-everywhere-but-nothing-else-not-even-a-bee
quick article which illustrates the effects of spraying/gmo corn on the biota
expand this to large scale and what have we got?
December 26th, 2012 at 4:58 am
Thanks, Kathy C., interesting, that…
http://www.westernjournalism.com/holder-was-responsible-for-168-deaths-in-the-1995-oklahoma-city-bombingand-more/
December 26th, 2012 at 5:45 am
More climate signs:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/science/earth/west-antarctica-warming-faster-than-thought-study-finds.html?hp&_r=1&
December 26th, 2012 at 5:57 am
and Amazon drought…
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=amazon-rainforest-drying-out
December 26th, 2012 at 6:45 am
Feedbacks. We look at all the climate feedbacks feeding into each other but in fact the whole system of civilization has positive feedback feeding into disaster. We’ve talked about the grid collapse causing 400 Fukushimas. But well before that climate will cause plant meltdowns. We have flooding, upriver dam breakdown, not enough water for cooling, not cool enough water, increasing fires with less resources to fight them that could engulf power plants, geological instability from changing weight on the planet and fracking which could lead to more earthquakes, rising sea levels making storm surges more dangerous.
I listened to a Peter Ward talk on rising sea levels the other day. He talked about cities flooding but I didn’t hear him mention nuclear power plants flooding.
It is of course hard to envision all the interconnectedness and how they affect each other, and there will be the ones we can imagine as well as the unknown unknowns
A tragedy we have sown
No point to moan and groan
We studied and learned
Hoping not to be burned
But we cannot know all the unknown
December 26th, 2012 at 6:49 am
@ Ozman …perhaps the term ‘stupid’ describes someone who has limited mental reasoning capacity to begin with…
Oh, the way I use ‘stupid’, it applies to lots of people who are well-educated and think themselves very intelligent… my point was really, that some of those academics are just using euphemisms, and not doing what intellectuals are supposed to do, imo, which is to clarify, explain, bring useful insights…
The intellectuals talk about ‘narratives’ and ‘paradigms’, but why not just call them ‘stories’, which is what I prefer to do, because that is, essentially, what they are, and then everyone knows what we’re talking about. And then explain in simple terms, with examples that people are familiar with. You know, wtf does a psychologism like ‘cognitive dissonance’ actually mean or feel like ? It’s just bullshit jargon to exclude common folk from the conversation.
What it means is, that if you grow up believing that the world was created by God, as in the biblical account, and then along comes Darwin with a pile of fossils as evidence, you’ve got two incompatible stories. And that creates a problem, not just for soceity, but inside your own head. That’s cognitive dissonance. The discomfort that occurs when two ( or more ! ) sets of beliefs collide, and are impossible to reconcile.
This happened to me, growing up reading kid’s comics, that said we were all going to be riding around in our own personal flying cars by now, and visiting other planets for holiday breaks. Instead, I’ve got NTE.
Another example of cognitive dissonance is when your US president tells you that some evil Al Q guys destroyed your Twin Towers, therefore you have to go and invade Iraq, and then you discover that the story makes no sense, and Iraq had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Twin Towers….
That’s the trouble with cognitive dissonance. You sorta want to believe the one story, because it’s easier, but there’s that bit of the story that just doesn’t fit any more, that bit that keeps niggling and causing anxiety…. like you want to trust your husband or wife, they wouldn’t ever cheat on you, would they, but…..
I’m not entirely against neologisms or psychologisms if they are needed or useful, for example, this one, ‘percepticide’, makes a good point, imo :
Further, research into extremely repressive situations show that when people perceive atrocities and injustices, often they must actually renounce their own perception to avoid danger to themselves. Diana Taylor calls this “percepticide” in her study of the fourteen years of military dictatorship (1976-1983) in Argentina, which unfortunately was supported and financed by the U.S. government. This renunciation, according to Taylor, “turns the violence on oneself. Percepticide blinds, maims, kills through the senses” (Taylor, 1997, p.124). When whole populations are forced to not-know what is going on around them, when the media choose to not-name injustice, watching-without-seeing becomes “the most dehumanizing of acts.” This kind of renunciation establishes a split within the self, where certain knowings are exiled, and unavailable for the negotiation of one’s life. Robert J. Lifton (1986), in his study of Nazi doctors, described this as a doubling of the self, where one self is condemned to numbness regarding what the other self knows and understands.
The fictitious “rational consumer” self in a homogeneous nation, mythologized in the official history of the modernist era, has been created by a long practice of percepticide. For how many years did history books portray the genocide caused by colonial expansion as a triumph of civilization, the tragedy of slavery and the plantation system as unrelated to the wealth amassed for industrialization, the exclusion of women, Native Americans and African Americans from the political process as the rise of democracy? Educated in this paradigm, how much have we learned to deny? How might we have been maimed and blinded by the thousands of media images that allow us to normalize violence, stereotypes, and passivity? In order to see ourselves more fully, the pictures we paint of ourselves and our theories of psychology must also include the likelihood that our perspectives are limited by our situated histories, that what we can see is steeped in collusion with the paradigms that shape our consciousness.
http://www.mythinglinks.org/LorenzWatkins.html
December 26th, 2012 at 7:14 am
Kathy C., I think that the problem you point to springs from reductionism, it’s the same problem Yorchichan has, scientists and others, try to understand by teasing out one strand from the complex tangle, and treating it in isolation. It’s not the one strand that’s going to annihilate us, it’s the whole lot together, everything imploding, because everything is linked to everything else…
December 26th, 2012 at 8:35 am
Damn! Even the dams..
New Global Warming Culprit: Methane Emissions Jump Dramatically During Dam Drawdowns
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120808081420.htm
December 26th, 2012 at 8:40 am
If that weren’t enough, even stressed crops are emitting more methane. And we know crops are going to get more stressed! Folks, we really do have cascading feedback effects due to our activities. The big question is not if but when.
Stressed Crops Emit More Methane Than Thought
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090817142851.htm
Another unreported problem is NO emissions (a powerful greenhouse gas) from increasing wildfires..
http://summitcountyvoice.com/2011/07/12/wildfires-spur-emissions-of-greenhouse-gases-from-soil/
December 26th, 2012 at 8:53 am
where does all the methane go? (just sayin’!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_ozone
Tropospheric ozone is a greenhouse gas and initiates the chemical removal of methane and other hydrocarbons from the atmosphere. Thus, its concentration affects how long these compounds remain in the air.
Methane, a VOC whose atmospheric concentration has increased tremendously during the last century, contributes to ozone formation but on a global scale rather than in local or regional photochemical smog episodes. In situations where this exclusion of methane from the VOC group of substances is not obvious, the term Non-Methane VOC (NMVOC) is often used.
http://www.eeb.org/EEB/?LinkServID=CE1E5250-5056-B741-DB16E09F7346411E&showMeta=0
Methane is a major source of background tropospheric ozone.
Together with particulate matter, ozone is the air pollutant with the highest estimated impact on human health. Ozone is a powerful and aggressive oxidising agent, elevated levels of which cause respiratory health problems and lead to premature mortality. High levels of ozone can also damage plants, leading to reduced agricultural crop yields and decreased forest growth.
Current measures on ozone precursors have focused primarily on decreasing the peaks of ozone, especially in urban areas, and therefore on precursors such as NOx and non-methane VOCs. However, over the past decades background levels of tropospheric ozone have been steadily rising. While many of the cheapest and easiest measures to decrease these other ozone precursors have already been taken, specific controls for methane are still lacking.
more:
http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/env/documents/2010/eb/ge1/EMEP%2034th/presentations/Importance%20of%20Methane%20for%20Ozone.pdf
December 26th, 2012 at 9:19 am
If you’re able, please join me in supporting Marc Baker and family
December 26th, 2012 at 12:26 pm
Excellent presentation’s Guy. I just wanted to add one thing with regard to peak oil – which has been postponed over the last couple of years via new drilling technology brought over from the natural gas tracking boom – it works to unlock previously considered irrecoverable (nonconventional) oil reserves.
Those “smart” guys at the oil companies have now unlocked these massive stores of what was previously considered inaccessible oil. This technology is transferable to many oil reserves around the world and we may now have unlocked more oil than we have drilled and burned so far (from a climate change perspective its very bad).
Here’s a nice graph of U.S. oil production with the trough and now increased production can be seen (the increase is supposed to continue increasing for a long time here in the U.S.):
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus2&f=m
Basically Peak Oil was and is correct for conventional oil, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook) massive amounts of unconventional oil reserves have been unlocked by recent drilling tech and oil prices. This will probably allow the economy to continue to roll along for the foreseeable future as opposed to being choked off by Peak Oil which we won’t be feeling the effects of anymore (until enough non conventional oil has been sucked out of the ground and burned – by then, presumably, our friends the feedbacks will have taken things out of our grasp (if not already).
This is why the expected Peak Oil production figures and pricing effects have come off the expected path – non conventional oil has been unlocked in a massive way that wasn’t foreseen even 3 years ago.
December 26th, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Scott What absolute nonsense! Anyone who has even taken a modest look at the Oil/Gas industry knows that this whole Fracking hype is a push by the Oil Oligarchs to get the easy oil and gas and make a ton of money before the public wakes up.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/15/1119969/-Drill-Baby-Drill-The-Fracking-Bubble-is-Bursting#
take a look at the charts, these wells are playing out very quickly. And the wells that have been done so far are of course the best of the lot.
December 26th, 2012 at 1:23 pm
Hey Scott – that’s great, it’ll be business as usual while the crops dry out and burn up or the growing season gets washed away by flooding. Climate change is going to ramp up significantly, as are “natural” occurances like earthquakes and volcanic action to make growing food all but impossible, while the trees and plankton die down to the point where they aren’t contributing much oxygen. Meanwhile the rise in heat causes the electrical grid to fail and here comes the US version of Fukushima many times over. The financial system is on a knife-edge of solvency (or the appearance there-of) and when fresh water is getting hard to come-by, panic ensues and we have cascading failures of the systems that make-up civilization.
If what you say is true, “they” aren’t going to have anyone to sell the oil to, no way to get it there or dispense it when the collapse into the sinkhole of reality increases its relentless pace, possibly this spring.
(imho of course)
December 26th, 2012 at 1:37 pm
Dunno about fracking in the USA, Nicole Foss has done an interesting article re the UK
http://theautomaticearth.com/Energy/the-second-uk-dash-for-gas-a-faustian-bargain.html
December 26th, 2012 at 2:32 pm
Here’s an interesting weather report from yesterday illustrating how quickly “collapse” can happen (for even more fun, click on and play the music link, the bottom one, at the same time in another window and let it play in the background while you watch and listen to the weather. Imagine what it felt like to be there. Coming to a town near you.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/dutchsinse
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WI0fQoAbnQ
December 26th, 2012 at 2:34 pm
I’ve posted a new essay. It’s here.
December 26th, 2012 at 3:05 pm
On the day after Christmas, it is likely that another anarchist will be imprisoned for refusing to talk about their political beliefs and their friends before a federal grand jury in Seattle.
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/maddy-pfeiffer-grand-jury-jail/6664/
December 26th, 2012 at 3:09 pm
Superman1 on RealClimate :What would be useful on this blog is to have a thread devoted to the issue you raise. I have in mind a debate, or some sort of exchange, among three experts in this area. One would be Guy McPherson, who believes we have already passed this point of no return. A second would be Kevin Anderson, who believes we are getting near. A third might be David Archer, who had a post on this blog about a year ago downplaying the immediate danger from methane relative to what McPherson or Wadhams would propose.
The debate could be written only, with three separate contributions answering very specific topics. Or, it could be a phonecon among the three, with audio and transcript made available. Or, it could be an email exchange, with the full exchange transcribed. But, it would be valuable for each proponent to have to defend his viewpoint against knowledgeable experts.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/12/unforced-variations-dec-2012/comment-page-6/#comment-311636
Personally, if people can’t see where this thing is headed by now…..
December 26th, 2012 at 3:45 pm
Kathy C Says:
We think that our lives have meaning
More than just housework and cleaning
If it doesn’t mean shit
I’ll have to admit
For my ego that’s very demeaning
Problems where ego’s involved
May or may not be resolved
When guru or sage
Says, “Break out of cage:
Shitcan ego—then problem solved.”
==
Kathy C Says:
A tragedy we have sown
No point to moan and groan
We studied and learned
Hoping not to be burned
But we cannot know all the unknown
Things fall apart, for a start—
The center can’t hold: that will smart;
Or, sans bouquet,
It’s, like, how you say,
The fucking thing’s coming apart.
December 26th, 2012 at 4:28 pm
@ Ozman re Sandy Hook, some of the anomalies, if you have not seen already
http://anewworldsociety.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sandy-hook-elementary-school-massacre-is-a-possible-false-flag?xg_source=activity
December 27th, 2012 at 8:38 am
Some contributions I can offer re Arctic methane:
In March of 2009 when the International Scientific Congress was gathered under the title “Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions” in Copenhagen, and in the same venue that the COP would use that December, I heard referenced that there were only 20 scientists in the world who had linked their careers to methane. Apparently the “established science” (~1980), upon which subsequent scientific work was based, identified carbon dioxide as the most important greenhouse gas to understand in terms of anthropomorphic climate change and government policies. Methane was also a problem, but the early scientific work saw it as distant (a century or several, ie secondary) threat. Limited funding–and therefore academic careers–pursued studying CO2. This was the gas society was adding to the air in increasing quanities, lasted the longest, and which governments could do something about. Referencing ulvfugl’s observations about stories, the first draft of the story the scientific community told itself was incomplete, but once trusted–once part of what effects homeostasis–is hard to change. (Note that the collection of data on atmospheric methne didn’t start until 1978; the CO2e of CH4 is yet being revised (upward); the atmospheric chemistry that breaks it down and requires the OH radical, the dynamics of which is poorly understood relative to altitude/air density.)
Besides David Archer’s guest post at Real Climate ulvfugl referenced, there is another “It’s all about me(thane)” by Gavin a year or so before that reiterates the primary importance of CO2, as well as another a few years before that. From my perspective (surpriseNOT), motivated reasoning made it a challenge to see the data on methane that did not fit the trusted story. An egregious example of this was a paper published using only two years of surface air sample data (2007 & 2008) to draw a conclusion from. That ‘study’ showed that what methane there was in the Arctic, was wetland based, and not increasing. As also noted in these comments there are only 6 stations where samples can be taken, and though Svalbard showed an increase during the study period, when averaged using accepted modeling calculations, it disappeared. Because this study looked at the planet as a whole, and the Arctic contributes little of the total, the anolomy was not reported.
In terms of the scientific community missing tripping of the positive feedbacks involving Arctic methane, they have an agreed upon definition for what that is. Theirs is likely helpful to that meme in its internal communication, but needs to be ignored to avoid serious miscommunication when communicating with the general public. What Guy, and common sense, says is the initial stages of a positive feedback tip, in scientific parlance, isn’t.
December 28th, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Don’t know how many of you use Chris Martenson’s PEAK PROSPERITY website, but there exists a very good forum on AGW run by Mark Cochrane, a proper Climate Scientist whom I very much respect….. http://www.peakprosperity.com/forum/definitive-global-climate-change-aka-global-warming-thread-general-discussion-and-questions/71
When asked about the possibility of a 6C rise by 2050, this is what he had to say…:
Getting 6 C by 2050 seems farfetched unless we intentionally trigger to so-called clathrate gun. Even then, I am not sure that it is likely to happen that quickly simply due to the thermal intertia of the oceans and glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. Roughly 90-95% of the incipient energy imbalance goes into warming or melting water. We’ve warmed by around 0.7C in the last 30 years or so. Getting an extra >5C in the next 40 years would require truly massive changes in greenhouse gases and Earth’s albedo. This certainly wouldn’t mean that all is well if we don’t manage this incredible feat of climate suicide in 40 odd years. We may get there yet around 2100.
Such rapid warming would lead to greatly accelerated mass loss from the icesheets in Greenland, Western Antarctica and increases from East Antarctica. Melting those giant ice blocks would be a giant heat sink that would attenuate the rise in temperature but it would do so at the cost of flooding the worlds oceans very quickly. In other words, although we might not warm so fast the cost would be rapid sea level rise of several meters this century, flooding coastlines and yielding terrible storms. As things stand, most estimates are for 1-5 meters, which will make many, many cities untenable.
Some recent food for thought on that score came out in the last week in Nature Geoscience showing much of the western Antarctic icesheet is warming twice as fast as predicted (see BBC article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20804192, and Bromwich et al 2012 abstract http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo1671.html))
The map (at above URL) is just correlation coeficients but the warming has been 2.4C between 1958 and 2010. While Greenland gets much of the press, the Western Antarctic ice sheet may be more unstable because most of it is currently grounded below the waterline. Basically the ice is frozen to the ground or still too heavy to lift but once the water level gets higher, then much of the sheet could rapidly float (just like an ice cube in your glass) and collapse with an ultimate 5 m sea level implication. The big brother in East Antarctica only has 30% below water line but that is another 20-25 m of sea level. Ultimately, if we somehow manage to stay on the ‘business as usual’ emissions path then over the next few centuries we will have changed coastlines world wide with 10s of meters of sea level rise (See Hansen new pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20121226_GreenlandIceSheetUpdate.pdf).
Lest you think he is just a harbinger of doom touting positive feedbacks, Hansen and Sato (2012) see exponential increases in the rate of ice melting/sea level rise with a 5-10 year doubling time, they ultimately believe that once we reach about 1 m of sea level increase that strong negative feedbacs from all of the melting icebergs will dampen the temperature rise and hence slow the exponential rate of increased melting. I can’t grab the figure from the pdf, but if you go to the Hansen and Sato pdf linked above and scroll down to Figure 9 you will see the future simulations with (left) and without (right) ice melt. As you can see the melting would lead to a much cooler North Atlantic and a moderate cooler Southern Ocean with an overall global amelioration of land temperature increases. If you think the ice will somehow hold off from melting, plan for a heck of a lot warmer near future.
Overall, if we manage to keep finding more and more fossil fuels to burn or accidentally release (melting permafrost etc) then we will have an atmosphere akin to what existed 32 million years ago before Antarctica froze up. It would take a while, hundreds to thousands of years, but we’d be putting an end to ice ages for the foreseeable future.
Mark
December 28th, 2012 at 4:13 pm
On the other hand, according to the International Energy Agency, 6 C by 2050 is quite likely:
“Coal will nearly overtake oil as the dominant energy source by 2017, and only a drop in world gas prices could curb the use of the dirtier fossil fuel in the absence of high carbon prices, the International Energy Agency said.”
“The IEA, the energy agency for developed countries, said earlier this year that without a major shift away from coal, average global temperatures could rise by 6 degrees Celsius by 2050, leading to devastating climate change.”
In other devastating news — about which virtually nobody will give a damn — we’re driving species to extinction at up to 560 species per day.
December 28th, 2012 at 9:09 pm
Wow…… so even those IEA hippies are in on it….
December 28th, 2012 at 9:16 pm
I realise we could release shitloads of greenhouse gases, but it doesn’t alter the fact that it takes 8000 times as much energy to melt ice than it does to raise its temperature just one degree if no phase change occurs….. and that this is where most of the trapped energy goes at this point in time. For temperatures to rise really dramatically, we need to import way more energy than is currently involved in melting ice…..
December 29th, 2012 at 7:28 am
@Mike
Such rapid warming would lead to greatly accelerated mass loss from the icesheets in Greenland, Western Antarctica and increases from East Antarctica. Melting those giant ice blocks would be a giant heat sink that would attenuate the rise in temperature but it would do so at the cost of flooding the worlds oceans very quickly. In other words, although we might not warm so fast the cost would be rapid sea level rise of several meters this century, flooding coastlines and yielding terrible storms.
So I guess the presumption is that if there is a drastic rise in sea level, it would be the result of much melted ice as opposed to thermal expansion of sea water? I wonder about this personally, because I live near the NE Fl coast, and have thought about moving. However, without going too far north, I felt it was better to be closer to the temp moderating effects of the ocean, but there is the catch 22 of sea level rise too close to the coast. However, if sea level rise is mostly the result of melted ice, it sounds like inland areas may not be so deadly hot. Decisions, decisions. I wonder how many others are trying to decide on the best places to move (or not) based on climate considerations??
December 29th, 2012 at 1:11 pm
my latest rant……. http://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/have-we-fired-the-clathrate-gun/
December 29th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
@Bailey, I know how you feel….. I’m in Australia, and I’m planning to move 2000 mile South to a cooler clime. What I’m reading tells me that if the WAIS does collapse, then the waters off Tasmania might cool down. THAT’s where I’m going. To be brutally honest…. if I were you I wouldn’t even stay in the US!!
December 29th, 2012 at 2:57 pm
@ Mike
Latent heat of ice is 144 BTUs vs 1BTU to raise it 1°F. Not sure where the 8000 figure came from, but even at 144, it is a lot. My take away from watching “Chasing Ice” was the time lapse photography of the glacier deflation and retreat that visualized this transfer of heat . . . and wondering how this use of heat will change the existing IPCC modeling that leaves out land-based ice. Until I find out countering information I’m gonna go with Hansen rather than the IEA on this one. It seems to me that they likely are using the linear models sans feedbacks, only this time the omitted feedbacks allows for longer napping on our journey to hell and high water, & NTE.
December 29th, 2012 at 3:13 pm
New to me…
We calculate that the sub-Antarctic hydrate inventory could be of the same order of magnitude as that of recent estimates made for Arctic permafrost.
http://climatestate.com/pure-climate-science/item/potential-methane-reservoirs-beneath-antarctica.html