Category Archives: Global Warming

Global Warming, Government, Mass Extinction, Ocean Acidification, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

Humanity needs to change course immediately on climate change

February 27, 2021 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

This report from the United Nations is sobering:

U.N. Says World Has 10 Months to Get Serious on Climate Goals

“The language of diplomacy rarely allows for a true sense of emotion or urgency. But reading between the lines of the latest report commissioned by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—the body representing the 197 member nations of the Paris Agreement to minimize a global average temperature rise this century—the message is clear. The world has precisely ten months to get our act together if there is to be any hope of staving off a climate catastrophe by the end of the century.”

As described many times in this blog, there are steps that humanity could take (e.g. the immediate halt to fossil fuel usage and the immediate initiation of direct carbon dioxide capture from the atmosphere). But humanity shows little interest in averting the catastrophe that is approaching. Even though we know what will happen, and even though it will cause trillions of dollars in damage along with the displacement of millions of people, humanity seems unable to take action.

At this point it is difficult to imagine anything that would cause humanity to change course in any significant way. And what is really needed is an intense effort, similar to space program in the United States in the 1960s, where significant funding and hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers are dedicated to the task of solving and then reversing climate change.

“Failing to address climate change is “marching forward to what is almost tantamount to a mutual suicide pact”, said Kerry. “We bury our heads in the sand at our own peril. It’s urgent to treat the climate crisis as the urgent security threat that it is.””

“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

The collapse of the Gulf Stream

February 26, 2021 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

Several articles appeared this week talking about the weakening of the Gulf Stream, a river of warm water that flows from the Gulf of Mexico northward. Climate change is affectin g the flow, and if the flow stops then it will have unpredictable but likely catastrophic effects on the Earth’s weather, oceans and marine life.

Atlantic Ocean circulation at weakest in a millennium, say scientists

Scientists predict that the AMOC will weaken further if global heating continues, and could reduce by about 34% to 45% by the end of this century, which could bring us close to a “tipping point” at which the system could become irrevocably unstable. A weakened Gulf Stream would also raise sea levels on the Atlantic coast of the US, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The “end of the century” part is interesting, but there is reason to believe that it could happen much quicker. Another article:

A Major Ocean Current May Be Hurtling Towards Collapse

“The AMOC is at risk of collapsing when a certain level of freshwater flow into the North Atlantic from increasing ice melt in Greenland is reached,” Johannes Lohmann, one of the authors of the study, said in an email. “These tipping points have been shown previously in climate models, where meltwater is very slowly introduced into the ocean. In reality, increases in meltwater from Greenland are accelerating and cannot be considered slow.”

There is no way to stop the collapse of the Gulf Stream without ending the burning of fossil fuels, along with the removal of excess CO2 from the atmosphere.

Global Warming, Government, Mass Extinction, Sea Level Rise

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

February 19, 2021 Marshall Brain 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

Global Warming, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

Arctic Warming: A Very Bad Positive Feedback Loop

February 11, 2021 Marshall Brain 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.

Geoengineering, Global Warming

The feasibility of getting to Net-Zero carbon dioxide

February 6, 2021 Marshall Brain 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.”

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

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

January 31, 2021 Marshall Brain 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:

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?

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

Global Warming, Mass Extinction, Rainforest Collapse

What does climate change look like from orbit?

December 29, 2020 Marshall Brain Leave a comment

It can sometimes be difficult for an individual person on the ground to personally witness the effects of climate change right now. If you were in California or Australia during the wildfires, you might have been directly affected, but more people still are now seeing direct effects. However, satellite imagery allows a view of the whole planet, and what we can see from satellites paints a terrible picture:

Watching Earth Burn – For 10 days in September, satellites in orbit sent tragic evidence of climate change’s destructive power.

Last winter, for example, Australia experienced one of the worst brushfire seasons in its history. On the first Sunday of 2020 I decided to take a look. Himawari-8 revealed a vista as spectacular as it was unnerving. A giant furnace door had seemingly been pried open. A plume of smoke extended outward from the continent’s southeastern quarter, a region twice the size of Texas where flame vortexes had been spiraling 200 feet into the air. Carrying the color of the land it came from, that noxious exhalation bore the residue of a billion or more incinerated animals and innumerable plants, baked into tinder from decades of ever-hotter summers.

The author points out in the article how you can look through the eyes of these satellites yourself:

My earth-watching, made possible by NOAA and Colorado State University websites, originates in three geostationary weather satellites parked in exceedingly high orbits above the Equator.
The effects of climate change will only become worse and worse unless humanity takes direct and massive steps to correct things.

Doomsday Now

Category Archives: Global Warming

Humanity needs to change course immediately on climate change

The collapse of the Gulf Stream

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

Arctic Warming: A Very Bad Positive Feedback Loop

The feasibility of getting to Net-Zero carbon dioxide

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

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

The bees are disappearing

Just heartbreaking – the worst oil disaster in the world

What does climate change look like from orbit?

A companion website for "The Doomsday Book" by Marshall Brain