Category Archives: Warnings

Humanity needs to change course immediately on climate change

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.

See also: ‘Mutual suicide’: US issues stark warning on 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.

The collapse of the Gulf Stream

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.

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.

One more thing to worry about – the collapse and reversal of Earth’s magnetic field

As if pandemics, Climate Change, economic hardship, terrorism, etc. are not enough to worry about, now comes the reversal of Earth’s magnetic field:

Could Doomsday Come From a Reversal of the Magnetic Poles?

“After studying the reversal of Earth’s magnetic pole known to have occurred 42,000 years ago, a science team led by Alan Cooper from the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, Australia concludes that the event had significant environmental repercussions, especially at lower and mid-latitudes. That time period, known as the Laschamps Excursion, had anomalously high radiocarbon concentrations in the atmosphere, which were linked to a higher influx of radiation. When the reversal occurred, within a span of about 1,000 years, Earth’s magnetic field weakened drastically and the magnetic North and South Poles flipped, temporarily leaving surface-dwelling organisms largely unprotected from high influxes of both ionic and ultraviolet radiation.”

The Earth’s magnetic field provides several protective functions, and without it the protection disappears.

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.

The next solar storm could be catastrophic for civilization

Solar storms are random in their timing and location. Since the sun is a sphere, these storms burst out of the surface of the sun in random directions. But occasionally, the timing and direction are exactly right for a solar storm to hit Earth:

Solar storms can wreak havoc. We need better space weather forecasts

“Without a good way to anticipate these solar storms, we’re vulnerable. A big one could take out a swath of our communication systems and power grids before we even knew what hit us. A recent near miss occurred in the summer of 2012. A giant solar storm hurled a radiation-packed blob in Earth’s direction at more than 9 million kilometers per hour. The potentially debilitating burst quickly traversed the nearly 150 million kilometers toward our planet, and would have hit Earth had it come just a week earlier. Scientists learned about it after the fact, only because it struck a NASA satellite designed to watch for this kind of space weather. That 2012 storm was the most intense researchers have measured since 1859.”

There are two types of solar storms, both of which could be catastrophic. Right now there are some efforts underway to harden power grids against these storms, but there is much left to do and the hardening is expensive.

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.

Arctic Warming: A Very Bad Positive Feedback Loop

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.

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

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.

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

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.

China has a fleet of Super Trawlers capable of stripping the ocean bare

Humans are rapidly depleting the ocean of fish. There are simply too many people catching too many fish for the fish to replenish themselves, and soon we will see more and more species collapsing. There is a whole chapter in The Doomsday Book about these kinds of mass extinction events. Watch this video:

Peru defends its waters as Chinese boats are accused of illegal fishing

Example:

Why is the government letting destructive ‘supertrawlers’ fish in Marine Protected Areas?

The intensity and scale of supertrawler fishing is a real threat to the habitats within MPAs. These industrial vessels stay at sea for weeks on end, catching, processing and freezing hundreds of tonnes of fish every single day. Ocean life is deeply interconnected, so when vast numbers of fish suddenly vanish from one part of the ecosystem, it’ll inevitably have serious impacts on everything else.

Supertrawler-size ships also carry a massive extra risk if anything goes wrong. There’s simply no margin for error when you’re working with mile-long nets that can cause serious damage if they’re not used correctly. Even without the direct impacts from fishing, supertrawlers put these vulnerable habitats at risk every time they enter an MPA.   

Currently, it’s completely legal for them to do all of this, which makes a mockery of the idea of a Marine Protected Area. 

Exposed : Supertrawlers fish in UK Marine Protected Areas in 2019

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.

The Dustbowl era in the United States was a doomsday scranario for agriculture and the food supply, and we are about to repeat it

A terrifying article about the next United States dustbowl:

National Soil Erosion Rates on Track to Repeat Dust Bowl-era Losses Eight Times Over – Scientists Say Farmland Degradation to Worsen with Climate Change

From the article:

The UCS study analyzed various scenarios for erosion rates and total soil loss using soil survey data from the National Resources Inventory, a research program conducted by the USDA and Iowa State University. Because of climate change, the possibility for even more accelerated erosion rates exists. The study found if more flooding and droughts lead erosion rates to worsen again, reverting back to the higher rates recorded almost forty years ago, farmers nationally are at risk of losing more than two inches of soil by 2035 and five inches by 2100.

In other words, we depend on the soil to grow the food we eat, but we are not good stewards of the soil. Therefore the topsoil is washing and blowing away, and with it our ability to grow grains like wheat, corn and soybeans. It could lead to a food catastrophe.

Climate Change will force human migration in 3 ways: Flooding, drought and heat

There are three big things that will force human beings out of one area and into another:

  • Flooding – Climate change can cause flooding either by raising sea levels or increasing rains (e.g. hurricanes)
  • Drought – Climate change causes areas that once received rain to dry up. Rainforest collapse is the most dramatic example, but simple rainfall pattern change is another.
  • Heat – As the planet warms, equatorial regions will eventually become so hot that humans can no longer tolerate or work in the heat.

All three of these effects will cause climate migration, by millions and millions of people. The people who are migrating will have no choice, because the alternative is death.

Take a country like Bangladesh. Much of Bangladesh is highly susceptible to sea level rise, and much of Bangladesh is hot and humid, so rising temperatures will eventually make it virtually uninhabitable. 160 million people live in Bangladesh, and most are in poverty already. Given this, the headline is probably understating things:

Climate change could create 63 million migrants in South Asia by 2050

The growing impacts of climate change have already pushed more than 18 million people to migrate within South Asian countries, but that could more than triple in three decades if global warming continues on its current path, researchers warned on Friday. Nearly 63 million people could be forced from their homes by 2050 in the region as rising seas and rivers swallow villages, and drought-hit land no longer supports crops, said ActionAid International and Climate Action Network South Asia in a report. The projection does not include those who will be forced to flee sudden disasters such as floods and cyclones and so is likely an under-estimate, noted Harjeet Singh, global climate lead at ActionAid. He said the situation could become “catastrophic”.

The obvious solution is to try to limit the damage that climate change causes by:

  1. Stopping the combustion of all fossil fuels
  2. Pulling carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere

Unfortunately, there are many economic forces and powers that want to move in the opposite direction:

‘Grossly Insufficient’: ExxonMobil Lambasted Over Emissions Reduction Plan That Pledges No Reduction in Absolute Emissions

ExxonMobil’s Monday announcement of new targets for addressing greenhouse gas emissions was met with derision by climate advocates who called the plan “too little, too late.”

There is something Exxon could do to help migitgate the problems it has created. Exxon could develop and sell a carbon neutral gasoline substitute. In this way, all of the existing pipelines and gas stations and vehicles could still operate, while not adding any more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Using solar, wind or nuclear power, there is definitely a pathway toward achieving this. For example, the U.S. Navy has demonstrated how to make jet fuel out of seawater.

What If We Powered the Planet With Seawater?
How Big Can Wind Turbines Get?

There are several other approaches that can make synthetic gasoline as well. Exxon (and other oil companies need to scale them up and sell synthetic gasoline instead of fossil fuel gasoline.

Then humanity needs to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at a massive scale:

Carbon Engineering | Direct Air Capture Technology

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.