“In a report for the sustainability group Future Earth, a survey of scientists found that extreme weather events, food insecurity, freshwater shortages and the broad degradation of life-sustaining ecosystems “have the potential to impact and amplify one another in ways that might cascade to create global systemic collapse.” A 2019 report from the Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration, a think tank in Australia, projected that a rapidly warming world of depleted resources and mounting pollution would lead to “a largely uninhabitable Earth” and a “breakdown of nations and the international order.” Analysts in the U.S. and British military over the past two years have issued similar warnings of climate- and environment-driven chaos.”

It gets worse:

“If you are a nonhuman species, collapse is well underway. Ninety-nine percent of the tall grass prairie in North America is gone, by one estimate; 96% of the biomass of mammals — biomass is their weight on Earth — now consists of humans, our pets and our farm animals; nearly 90% of the fish stocks the U.N. monitors are either fully exploited, over exploited or depleted; a multiyear study in Germany showed a 76% decline in insect biomass.”
It will not be long before the Amazon rainforest and similar large ecosystems start collapsing and turning into deserts. Once that happens, equatorial regions are likely to become so hot that nothing can survive. Once that happens the oceans heat up to the point where they become uninhabitable as well. Melting ice raises sea levels a hundred feet or more and it is game-over for modern civilization as we know it.

What is so incredibly depressing here is that humanity could bind together and start correcting these problems. Humanity could:

Immediately stop burning fossil fuels
Immediately start extracting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in mass quantities
Immediately work to refreeze the arctic ice cap
Perhaps start working on geoengineering approaches
And so on

All of these steps are within our grasp. But can humanity get its act together and undertake any of them?

“The Doomsday Book” by Marshall Brain lays out this scenario in amazing detail and offers solutions to prevent this doomsday scenario from unfolding. You can order the book today on Amazon and other retailers.

Sea Level Rise, Tsunamis

A well-placed tsunami can wreak gigantic damage

January 27, 2021 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

The 2011 tsunami in Japan was an apocalyptic event for several parts of the country. Even though some of these areas had walls to protect against tsunamis, this tsunami easily overtopped them (as seen here around the 6 minute point). The rushing water in multiple locations across Japan caused unprecedented damage and over 15,000 deaths. This video captures one small part of the tragedy:

Japan Tsunami 2011

Same tsunami hitting another Japanese city:

Tsunami in Kesennuma city, ascending the Okawa river

What has happened here is that an earthquake off the coast of Japan has pushed a massive tectonic plate upward by several feet. All of the water above the plate – many cubic miles of water – has been pushe up as well, and the excess spreads out in all directions. Parts of the excess are what we see here.

The problem for any human decision-makers is that tsunamis are infrequent and unpredictable events, and it is incredibly expensive (and ugly) to build tall concreate walls that may not be used for decades . Unfortunately, short of moving the city out of harm’s way, there is no alternative to expensive, ugly walls for tsunami-prone areas.

Geoengineering, Global Warming, Warnings

Refreezing the arctic ice cap seems riduclous and impossible, but it is being suggested before weather patterns go crazy

January 25, 2021 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

This article states the problem…

We need to start refreezing the Arctic Ocean as soon as possible to save our megacities

“Rising carbon levels have already led to a 4C rise in Arctic temperatures, which has led to a 75 per cent loss of Arctic summer-ice volume. This has led, in turn, to the dark waters of the Arctic Ocean being exposed, which absorb heat from the sun. If they were covered with white ice, this would reflect it and thus keep the earth cooler. But the warmer Arctic waters are now melting the adjacent enormous ice-cap on Greenland at a rate seven times faster than in the 1990s, which in turn is raising global sea-levels faster than predicted.”

The ultimate solution, as mentioned in other posts on this blog, is to stop burning fossil fuels and simultaneously start extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But the situation is so dire in the Arctic that at least one scientist thinks humans should be artificially creating ice in the Arctic to create more reflective area. Here’s how:

“We now have to literally refreeze the Arctic Ocean, otherwise the heat from its open seas will continue to accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice-cap – which has enough water stored in it to raise the world’s oceans by seven metres. Research at Edinburgh University has proposed that if the clouds over the Arctic in summer are sprayed with sea-water, the salt in it would make the clouds whiter. This would reflect the sun’s heat and the ocean waters below them would start to refreeze.”
Can the nations of the world get their act together enough to implement something like this? This is the many-trillion dollar question, because once sea levels start rising to that degree, we will lose many important cities to flooding.

Global Warming, Mass Extinction

The bees are disappearing

January 24, 2021 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

Many agricultural crops need bees in order to bear fruit. Unfortunately, humanity is killing off the bees. These two articles paint the picture:

A quarter of all known bee species haven’t been seen since the 1990s

“The number of bee species recorded worldwide has been sharply decreasing since the 1990s. Eduardo Zattara and Marcelo Aizen at the National University of Comahue in Argentina analysed how many wild bee species are observed each year as recorded in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility – a publicly available platform where researchers and citizens can record sightings of bee species. They found that there were a quarter fewer species reported between 2006 and 2015, as compared with the records we have from before 1990.”

Why are the bees declining? Gigantic fields with just one crop, plus pesticides, plus loss of habitat are the main problems cited.

A CRITICAL ANIMAL FOR EARTH’S SURVIVAL HAS GONE MISSING

“Due to their significant role as pollinators of plant life, bees have an outsized impact on the global ecosystem. The study notes the roughly 20,000 bee species are “are the most important group of insect pollinators” on Earth, contributing to the pollination of 85 percent of all cultivated crops. As a result, the decline in global bee species spells trouble for the planet — and the survival of people. “Insect decline is a hot topic now and bees are widely recognized as one of the most important pollinator groups,” Orr says.”

The loss of bees is similar to climate change, rainforest collapse and sea level rise. Rational human beings know these are huge problems that will eventually create an existential threat for billions of human beings. But we seem unable as a species to muster the energy or courage to solve the problems. Thus the time til doomsday ticks closer and closer. For example, if bee populations collapse, humans will not longer be able to eat many fruits, nuts and vegetables.

Global Warming

Just heartbreaking – the worst oil disaster in the world

January 18, 2021 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

This video is both eye-opening and heartbreaking, both for the planet and the people affected by this spill. The video is called “The World’s Worst Oil Related Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of”:

The World’s Worst Oil Related Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of

From the Video’s description:

“Deep in the Amazon Rainforest of Ecuador lies the “Amazon Chernobyl”, a 1,700-square-mile environmental disaster brought on by oil extraction and production. After a visit to Ecuador in 1993, human rights lawyer Steven Donziger and other attorneys brought a class-action lawsuit against Texaco (later Chevron) on behalf of over 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people from this Amazon region who were affected by this disaster. Through his personal testimony and supporting footage, Steven recounts his experience advocating on behalf of the environment and affected communities and the personal toll this work has had on his life. It’s time to wake up.”

There are so many reasons to immediately stop using all fossil fuels. It really is a no-brainer decision at this point, and we as a species should make the decision to invest the resources necessary to fast-track their elimination. To do otherwise will cause us to lose so much.

Keep in mind that this is just one mega-spill out of many:

Top 10 LARGEST OIL SPILLS IN HISTORY

Hurricanes & Cyclones, Nuclear Bombs, Power Grid, Terrorism

Is battery backup a viable option in a grid failure?

January 16, 2021 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

Several chapters in The Doomsday Book talk about power grid failures, because there are multiple ways for the grid to fail, including:

Coronal Mass Ejections
Terrorist attacks
EMP attacks by foreign countries
Bad weather, like hurricanes

Hardening the grid against these problems can limit the duration of grid failures, but we will probably never have a grid with 100% uptime. I have personally been in a grid failure, caused by a hurricane, that lasted a week, and one caused by an ice storm that lasted several days.

What are the options for people when the grid fails. It is possible, with enough money, to create a whole-house backup system that can provide power for a long time. A large generator running on natural gas or propane can do it. So can a big battery bank with a large solar array.

The problem is that whole-house can mean a lot of power. Things like air conditioning, deep well pumps, electric hot water heaters, refrigerators, freezers, and electric car recharging require lots of power. You might need a 20 kw generator to handle the entire load of a typical suburban home. A battery bank need 100 kilowatt-hours of capacity plus a huge inverter to handle the full load of a house for any reasonable period of time. Both options get expensive.

This is why the book advocates a much smaller approach, understanding that if the goal is to provide only the essentials, the equipment needs are radically smaller and therefore affordable. For example, Keeping an internet modem plus router up, along with the ability to recharge devices like laptops and phones, takes relatively little power. Building a backup system to supply just these needs costs a few hundred dollars. The size of the battery is a few kilowatt hours and the inverter is small. A single solar panel could extend the duration significantly, perhaps indefinitely. At this low price point, every home or apartment could have this facility and then, in the case of a power grid failure, everyone would be able to communicate and use the internet.

This article talks about some of the issues with trying to build a whole-house system, rather than a small targeted system for backup power:

The Myth of Whole-Home Battery Backup

Lots of insights in here about backup power.

Terrorism

The unbelievable, unimaginable seige on the U.S. Capital

January 7, 2021 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

Yesterday (January 6, 2021) a real doomsday scenario came to life. At the behest of a U.S. president, a mob of thousands of his supporters stormed the U.S. capitol building. Both the house and senate were in session to certify the election results from the Electoral College. The mob was able to overwhelm security forces, break into the capitol building itself and enter the congressional chambers.

Only by several strokes of luck was a catastrophe averted:

The representatives and senators were escorted to bunkers and safe spaces before the mob got to them.
No one was able to find and breach these safe spaces.
There was very little gunfire, so only a few people died.
None of the representatives or senators, nor the vice president, were captured or killed.

This event is being currently written up in a thousand news sources, and it is likely to be something historians are still discussing a hundred years from now. The event is unprecedented, nearly impossible to believe. The amount of corruption represented in the event is something that (hopefully) will become the subjects of a dozen investigations. The corruption includes:

The lies the president and supporters have repeatedly told about a “stolen” election.
The people in power (including over a hundred representatives, a dozen senators, multiple attorneys general, major news organizations like Fox news, etc.) who supported and amplified these lies.
The obvious failure of capitol security forces, perhaps because of insider interference
The lack of a military response (ditto)
The background of the rally that immediately preceded the attack.
And so on….

It is quite possible that the American democracy could have been lost in this event had things gone differently. Conjecture is that, had there been enough deaths, or had the vice president and others been captured or killed, the president would have declared martial law, invalidated the election, and seized essentially dictatorial power. A doomsday scenario indeed.

Chemical Attack, Government, Terrorism

Transporting natural gas by rail through cities – a doomsday scenario

January 1, 2021 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

If you have read The Doomsday Book, you know that one thing terrorists look for is places that store potential energy. They especially like to release potential energy in crowded areas. This proposal brings big concentrations of potential energy right through the heart of many cities:

‘That Terrifies Me’: Trump Rule Allows Natural Gas Transport By Rail In Dense Areas

What makes it terrifying?

In an effort to boost natural gas exports, the Trump administration has reversed longstanding federal policy and approved transport of gas by rail anywhere in the country. Opposition has come from Hollywood stars, state attorneys general and local residents who worry about the danger this poses. But plans are moving ahead for a New Jersey project that calls for one of the longest such transport routes in the country: 200 miles through densely populated areas of the East Coast.
The gas from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale would first be sent by pipeline to a new liquefaction plant in the rural northeast part of the state. Refrigeration units would chill it to negative-260 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point it becomes liquid and easier to ship. The part of the plan that scares a lot of people is the next step — transporting the gas by truck or rail down the busy I-95 corridor to a planned export terminal along the Delaware River in Gloucester County, New Jersey.

Generally speaking we do not ship gasoline – another flammable liquid – this way. Gasoline is flowing in underground pipelines, which is much safer.

What could go wrong? It is easy to imagine a 50-car train of liquified natural gas. Each car has 30,000 gallons say of LNG, or about 100,000 kilograms of LNG . That is 1.5 million gallons of LNG total, or 5 million kilograms. And now a bomb blows up a part of the train. If all of the LNG ignites, that’s the energy equivalent of about 50,000 tons of TNT (ref). That is 3 times more energy than the energy released by the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima. Even if only a few cars ignite, it is still a huge explosion. It is a doomsday scenario in the making. This video shows the potential problems:

Communities at Risk: Hazards of LNG

Pandemics

COVID-19 is mutating, and we do not know exactly what that means

January 1, 2021 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

A scary article about the COVID-19 virus:

The Mutated Virus Is a Ticking Time Bomb – There is much we don’t know about the new COVID-19 variant, but everything we know so far suggests a huge danger.

The new mutation allows the virus to spread faster. In other words, it is more contagious. Why does that matter? The article puts it this way:

A more transmissible variant of COVID-19 is a potential catastrophe in and of itself. If anything, given the stage in the pandemic we are at, a more transmissible variant is in some ways much more dangerous than a more severe variant. That’s because higher transmissibility subjects us to a more contagious virus spreading with exponential growth, whereas the risk from increased severity would have increased in a linear manner, affecting only those infected.

Because the vaccine roll out will take many months (possibly years in the United States if the government keeps bungling things), this more contagious version will cause millions more to get infected, meaning many more deaths. Especially when people are acting like idiots during a pandemic:

At Least One Person Is Hospitalized With COVID-19 After Attending That Republican Christmas Party With A Conga Line

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aegCbSU8nrg

Doomsday Now

Monthly Archives: January 2021

We are headed in a direction where large areas the planet become unihabitable