Monthly Archives: February 2021

Global Warming, Government, Mass Extinction, Sea Level Rise

John Kerry (Special Envoy for Climate) gives us 9 years to get our climate act together

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According to John Kerry, we have 9 years to start getting out act together and 29 years to hit net-zero on Carbon:

Kerry warns the US has 9 years to avoid worst climate consequences

From the article:

““The scientists told us three years ago we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left,” Kerry said. The former secretary of State appeared to be referring to a 2018 United Nations report, which warned that global emissions needed to decrease 45 percent by 2030 in order to avert 1.5 degrees of global warming… “We all need to develop not just a number but a road map for how we will actually make the dramatic progress we need to make over the next 10 years and what we will specifically do to get to net-zero by no later than 2050,” Kerry stated.”

The question that many experts are exploring now is, “have we already stretched nature so far that 1.5 degrees is impossible without drastic measures.

What Kerry should instead be doing is taking a big leap and advocating dramatic global measures. Net Zero should be happening in 10 years, not 30, and CO2 needs to be extracted from the atmosphere to boot. Fossil fuel consumption must end quickly and completely, and we must remediate the carbon dioxide we have already released. Why should Kerry do this?

  • We have to do this if the planet is to survive
  • Dramic steps like this will drive publicity
  • If we turn on crisis mode behaviors, there is some hope that humanity can get the job done.

Trillions of dollars or infrastructure, millions of human lives and quadrillions of plant/animal lives are at stake. Humans must take drastic steps, and Kerry should be leading the charge globally.

U.S. Special Envoy for Climate, John Kerry at Climate Adaptation Summit

“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.

Government, Power Grid

The Texas Power Grid nearly collapsed, and if it had the power would be out for weeks or months

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It is unbelievable how close the Texas power grid came to complete shut down:

ERCOT: Texas was ‘seconds and minutes’ away from catastrophic months-long blackouts

From the article:

“Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday… The worst case scenario: Demand for power overwhelms the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow, power lines to go down. If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid can take months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.”

This comment on Reddit described the worsening situation in real time:

Comment by /u/redditmudder

From the comment:

“Update8 (FEB15 12 noon): ERCOT’s poor planning (long term, not just last night) has now caused Texas to lose 30% of its generating capacity. When this is over, we need to insist that ERCOT change both the emergency response load-shedding model, and their worst-case temperature event model. ERCOT’s poorly-devised playbook last night has caused what should have been an 8 GW shortfall to become a 22 GW shortfall… in real-world terms, that means six million additional homes are without power, versus what could have happened if the grid didn’t nearly fall off a cliff last night. Note: Both numbers I mention above were possible given the current weather conditions. The additional 14 GW shortfall is a direct result of ERCOT’s emergency measures further destabilizing the (already unstable) grid… telling everyone to start brownouts at exactly the same time (as happened last night) destabilized the grid so greatly that several baseload plants offlined themselves (so they wouldn’t blow up). Here are my long term suggestions to ERCOT.”

Say that a month-long blackout had occurred. Texas would have likely descended into total mayhem – no power, no water, no food (the stores were already bare), people dying en masse and so on. It would have been a true doomsday situation. How would anyone prepare for that? This is an interesting video for a perspective on this question:

How to survive the first 2 months after SHTF

“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.

Power Grid

The Power Grid in Texas Collapses Due to Cold Weather. 4 million homes without power in bitter cold

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The situation in the state of Texas grows dire when the power grid collapses due to extreme cold temperatures. Without power, 4 million homes are without heat, light, internet, etc.

Texas’ power grid crumples under the cold – Competition for natural gas and frozen wind turbines are only some of the problems.

“Monday morning, as a jet stream brought frigid air south to the central United States, Texas residents found themselves facing rolling blackouts as the statewide grid struggled to meet demand amid a large shortfall in generating capacity. As the day wore on, many saw these blackouts extend for ever longer periods of the day, and grid authorities are expecting problems to extend into at least Tuesday. As of noon local time on Monday, the Southwest Power Pool, which serves areas to the north of Texas, also announced that demand was exceeding generating capacity.”

Texas has its own, private power grid and is not easily connected to either of the other two U.S. grids, so when Texas cannot generate enough power to meet its needs, there is a big problem. Unfortunately, Texas is seeing unexpectedly low temperatures that max out demand.

Power grids need to have excess capacity in all aspects – generating capacity, transmission capacity, etc.. Unfortunately, “excess capacity” and capitalism are at odds, because excess capacity is expensive but goes unused until it is needed.

“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.

Mass Extinction

90% of large fish are gone. Will humanity act in time to save those that remain?

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The Earth’s oceans feed billions of people, but overfishing is decimating the fish stocks that make this possible:

We’ve removed 90% of all large fish from the oceans. Just 10% to go.

From the article:

Daniel Pauly: This is 90% of all big fish, tuna, cod and groupers, the problem is the big fish that live longer and they are gone almost everywhere. And while in some regions of the world, in Europe a little bit, in the US, there has been a trend towards rebuilding the stocks, reducing the effort or at least not letting it increase as it was happening before, and the result of this is that the situation as you will read in newspapers is not as bad as before.

Robyn Williams: The point about big fish, many fishers have always gone for the bigger fish and thrown the little fish back, but it turns out that the big fish are the ones which are most fertile and produce the most offspring, so if you catch big fish you are depleting the next generation. Is that true?

Daniel Pauly: That is exactly what is happening. The depletion of big fish effects that species very much. These are the more threatened. If you think of groupers, big groupers or big bluefin tuna or sturgeons that are almost extinct everywhere. So the fish that gets big and that need a long time to reach maturity, they are the ones that are the most under pressure. And then within the species, the fish that are big are pushed to the brink because fisheries are selective for big fish usually. There are two kinds of big fish and both of them are impacted.

The Doomsday Book has a whole chapter on the decimation of living organisms on Earth today: fish, birds, insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, rainforest biomes, etc. All wildlife is being crushed by humanity from multiple angles: habitat loss, pesticides, extermination, hunting, poaching, artificial lighting… Populations are falling, and unless humanity takes radical steps toward preservation, extinction is inevitable for many species. Thus we are in the planet’s sixth mass extinction event.

“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.

Global Warming, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

Arctic Warming: A Very Bad Positive Feedback Loop

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If humanity could fully appreciate everything that this video is saying, we would understand that the situation with Earth’s climate is devolving very quickly and we need to take immediate, dramatic steps to reverse climate change:

Arctic Warming: A Very Bad Positive Feedback Loop

How do we get humanity to change course? Somehow we would need to start with the developed world – countries like the United Stets and Europe. And then they could provide solutions to the developing world to eliminate all fossil fuels.

“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.

Geoengineering, Global Warming

The feasibility of getting to Net-Zero carbon dioxide

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Here is an optimistic article on achieving net-zero carbon emissions:

Getting to Net Zero – and Even Net Negative – is Surprisingly Feasible, and Affordable – New analysis provides detailed blueprint for the U.S. to become carbon neutral by 2050

“Reaching zero net emissions of carbon dioxide from energy and industry by 2050 can be accomplished by rebuilding U.S. energy infrastructure to run primarily on renewable energy, at a net cost of about $1 per person per day, according to new research published by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the University of San Francisco (USF), and the consulting firm Evolved Energy Research. The researchers created a detailed model of the entire U.S. energy and industrial system to produce the first detailed, peer-reviewed study of how to achieve carbon-neutrality by 2050. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world must reach zero net CO2 emissions by mid-century in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change.”

“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.