All posts by Marshall Brain

Global Warming, Government, Mass Extinction, Sea Level Rise

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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?

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

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.

Clean energy, Global Warming, Government, Rainforest Collapse, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

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

Leave a comment

Collapseologists are warning humanity that business-as-usual will make the Earth uninhabitable

“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:

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

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.

“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, Warnings

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

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.

“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, Mass Extinction

The bees are disappearing

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.

“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.