Category Archives: Warnings

Global Warming, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

Is the loss of arctic ice the true harbinger of the climate apocolypse?

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Is the loss of arctic ice the true harbinger of the climate apocolypse? Probably:

Blue Ocean Event : Game Over?

From the description:

A Blue Ocean Event, or Ice-Free Arctic, is the source of almost fever pitch speculation in the climate science world. The consequences of the disappearance of sea ice from the arctic ocean, however briefly, at the end of a summer melt season some time in the not too distant future, are potentially very ominous for the way we organise our human socio-economic structures today. This week, we consider what those consequences may look like.

It truly is a frightening prospect. Without artic ice to cool things off, temperatures in the northern hemisphere can go haywire and permafrost will melt, releasing gigatons of methane and CO2 into the atmosphere in a positive feedback loop. It is both terrifying and deeply depressing, because it appears that humanity (though politics, lack of leadership, lobbying, inertia, ignorance, indifference, corporate power in the fossil fuel industries, etc.) will be unable to take any coordinated action to turn things around.

See also: Global warming has profoundly transformed Arctic in just 15 years, report warns

The Arctic as we once knew it, an inhospitable, barely accessible and icebound place, is gone. Climate change has transformed it into a region that can heat up to 100 degrees, is beset by ferocious wildfires, and is covered in permafrost that is no longer permanent. The sea ice cover that has long defined the Far North is fast disappearing. This is the picture from a new international scientific assessment released Tuesday. The 2020 Arctic Report Card, a report led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) involving 133 scientists from 15 countries, points to trends that, with each passing year, have grown more extreme and have far-reaching implications for people living far outside the region, including in the Lower 48 states.

“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.

Pandemics, Warnings

COVID-19 is just the first – we face the prospect of pandemic after pandemic

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How Climate Change Is Ushering in a New Pandemic Era – A warming world is expanding the range of deadly diseases and risking an explosion of new zoonotic pathogens from the likes of bats, mosquitoes, and ticks

This paragraph paints a picture of what humanity has lost due to COVID-19:

Covid-19 likely emerged from the wilds near southern China, then found residence in horseshoe bats before making the jump to humans. The virus, as of this writing, has infected 63 million people and caused 1.5 million deaths around the world. The global economic impact of the pandemic was estimated at $8 trillion to $16 trillion in July 2020 — it may be $16 trillion in the U.S. alone by the fourth quarter of 2021 (assuming vaccines are effective at controlling it by then). The amount of human suffering this tiny microbe has caused is incalculable: lost loved ones, vanished jobs, broken families, and lingering sickness from a virus that will eventually retreat but will never disappear.

But the future could be much worse:

But the biggest impact may be on the emergence of new pathogens from animals. Through intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising temperatures, we are forcing creatures to live by the cardinal rule of the climate crisis: adapt or die. For many animals, that means migrating to more hospitable environments. In one recent study that tracked the movement of 4,000 species over the past few decades, as many as 70 percent had moved, almost all of them seeking cooler lands and waters. Some animals have made big leaps. Atlantic cod have moved more than 120 miles per decade. In the Andes Mountains in South America, frogs and fungi species have climbed a quarter mile higher over the past 70 years. In Alaska, hunters are discovering parasites from more than 950 miles southeast in Canada, alive under the skin of wild birds (tiny parasites adapt better to rapidly changing temperatures than large animals). Great white sharks are turning up as far north as Maine. “A wild exodus has begun,” writes Sonia Shah in The Next Great Migration. “It is happening on every continent and in every ocean.”

Somehow humanity has to stop doing what it is doing and become responsible stewards of the planet. But can humanity do this?

“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.

Warnings

The Map of Doom – A fascinating way to categorize and rank Doomsday Scenarios

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The Map of Doom is a fascinating way to categorize and rank doomsday scenarios:

The Map of Doom | Apocalypses Ranked

From the Video’s description:

This year was the first experience we’ve had of a global disaster affecting every single person on Earth. And also how unprepared society was to deal with it, despite plenty of people giving warnings that this was going to happen at some stage. But in the midst of all the doom I started to wonder, what other things could threaten humanity, that we are not thinking about? So I made the Map of Doom to list all the threats to humanity in one place. But just finding them all is not enough. I wanted to find a way of comparing the risks of all of these disaster scenarios. So this video follows my attempt at doing that, and I think I’ve hit on a great way to visually compare all these dangers, which I haven’t seen anyone do before, so hopefully by the end of the video you’ll have a better idea about what the biggest threats are, and how they compare to this pandemic.

There is even a poster available:

Map of Doom Poster

“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, Hurricanes & Cyclones, Mass Extinction, Ocean Acidification, Rainforest Collapse, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

Humans continue burning fossil fuels despite the obvious stupidity of doing so

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Such a depressing headline:

World is ‘doubling down’ on fossil fuels despite climate crisis – Production must fall by 6% a year to avoid ‘severe climate disruption’ but Covid-19 funding is supporting increases

The world’s governments are “doubling down” on fossil fuels despite the urgent need for cuts in carbon emissions to tackle the climate crisis, a report by the UN and partners has found. The researchers say production of coal, oil and gas must fall by 6% a year until 2030 to keep global heating under the 1.5C target agreed in the Paris accord and avoid “severe climate disruption”. But nations are planning production increases of 2% a year and G20 countries are giving 50% more coronavirus recovery funding to fossil fuels than to clean energy.

The headline, however, is not nearly strong enough. The reality is that fossil fuel burning should be reduced to zero immediately, and humanity must start sucking excess CO2 back out of the atmosphere. Otherwise the planet faces an unstoppable cascade of catastrophic effects including:

As discussed in the book, humanity somehow needs to transform its thinking to a wartime posture against climate in order to prevent all of these cataclysms from occurring. If we do not take immediate action, the prospects are dire.

“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.

Asteroids, Warnings

The real threat of asteroids to planet Earth

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This video lays out the real threat of asteroids to planet earth:

These are the asteroids to worry about

For more info see Asteroid Impacts.

The threat of an asteroid strike is real, and the potential for a life-ending event for the planet is a possibility. Humans have not yet mapped most of the asteroid threats the planet faces, and we do not yet have a defense system that could eliminate a threat even if we detected one. In other words, this doomsday scenario is a real threat that deserves real action.

“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, Rainforest Collapse, Sea Level Rise, Warnings

We are past “the Point of No Return” on climate change according to some scientists

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If humanity could turn on a dime and completely stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we would definitely be better off. But are we past “the point of no return” already?

‘Past a point of no return,’ according to British Journal Scientific Study on climate change; Reducing greenhouse gas emission to zero still will not stop global warming; Scientists see ‘an acceleration of Pandemics’

The findings of the scientific study are alarming. It shows that irrespective of the reduction of greenhouse gasses, emissions are brought down to zero. It is not sufficient to stall the melting of permafrost.

This would be an example of a positive feedback loop, where melting permafrost releases enough methane to raise temperatures, which releases more methane, and so on. This video describes the problem in stark detail:

Arctic Methane. Has 2020 triggered a tipping point?

If this is the case, then the only hope is to combine the halt of fossil fuels with different forms of geoengineering.

Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do

“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, Government, Warnings

‘Republicans Remain Opposed to Any Policies That Would Reduce Fossil-Fuel Use’

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‘Republicans Remain Opposed to Any Policies That Would Reduce Fossil-Fuel Use’

Back in the U.S., the relief of Donald Trump’s long good-bye will begin yielding to the stark reality that his party remains fundamentally pathological. No issue highlights this depressing reality more clearly than climate change. For more than a decade, the GOP has stood alone among major right-of-center parties in industrialized democracies worldwide in its refusal to endorse climate science. But during the Trump era, the party’s rhetorical emphasis shifted. The major Republican point of agreement is now to insist on fossil-fuel use as an inherent good.

This is a worst-case-scenario when it comes to Climate Change – an entire political party and tens of millions of voters all opposed to solving the problem at the root of the climate change crisis. The only hope we have is to stop burning fossil fuels immediately, and start pulling carbon back out of the atmosphere, and to probably deploy geoengineering measures as well. To have an entire political party opposing these measures is planetary suicide.

Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do
Geoengineering May Be the Answer to 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.

Global Warming, Government, Warnings

The world’s coming fresh water crisis will be a catastrophe for many major cities

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We can see the fresh water catastrophe coming, but will we do enough in time to avert it? This video lays out the problem:

Explained | World’s Water Crisis | FULL EPISODE | Netflix

According to the video, these cities are on the brink of a fresh water crisis unless action is taken:

  • Cape Town, South Africa
  • Sao Paulo, Brazil
  • Melbourne, Australia
  • Jakarta
  • London
  • Beijing
  • Istanbul
  • Tokyo
  • Bangalore
  • Barcelona
  • Mexico City

Other well known problem areas are dry places like Las Vegas, Saudi Arabia (and many other desert areas in the Middle East and Africa), parts of China and India, etc. These places currently rely on aquifers that are going to soon be empty.

Some of the large urban areas are coastal so they will eventually resort to mass desalination (with its own pollution and energy problems, but better than dying of thirst), but a place like Mexico City or Las Vegas may not be so lucky.

This article paints a dire picture:

More than 3 billion people affected by water shortages, data shows – UN warns about consequences of not conserving water and tackling climate crisis

Water shortages are now affecting more than 3 billion people around the world, as the amount of fresh water available for each person has plunged by a fifth over two decades, data has shown. About 1.5 billion people are suffering severe water scarcity or even drought, as a combination of climate breakdown, rising demand and poor management has made agriculture increasingly difficult across swathes of the globe.

With human populations continuing to rise, the problems only get worse unless something causes the human population to crash.

One possible solution is purely economic. Municipal water in a place like Las Vegas might be a penny per gallon today. If it rises to 50 cents or a dollar per gallon, then people will treat water differently. It might mean the end of golf courses and giant artificial lakes in the desert:

Government, Warnings

Misinformation is dividing people, destroying facts and skewing reality

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This is a fascinating article with a number of real world examples of how misinformation, disinformation and malinformation are destroying civil society:

Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder – Our willingness to share content without thinking is exploited to spread disinformation

Online misinformation has been around since the mid-1990s. But in 2016 several events made it broadly clear that darker forces had emerged: automation, microtargeting and coordination were fueling information campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion at scale. Journalists in the Philippines started raising flags as Rodrigo Duterte rose to power, buoyed by intensive Facebook activity. This was followed by unexpected results in the Brexit referendum in June and then the U.S. presidential election in November—all of which sparked researchers to systematically investigate the ways in which information was being used as a weapon.

An example:

Take, for example, the edited video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that circulated in May 2019. It was a genuine video, but an agent of disinformation slowed down the video and then posted that clip to make it seem that Pelosi was slurring her words. Just as intended, some viewers immediately began speculating that Pelosi was drunk, and the video spread on social media. Then the mainstream media picked it up, which undoubtedly made many more people aware of the video than would have originally encountered it.

A pair of solutions:

In a healthy information commons, people would still be free to express what they want—but information that is designed to mislead, incite hatred, reinforce tribalism or cause physical harm would not be amplified by algorithms. That means it would not be allowed to trend on Twitter or in the YouTube content recommender. Nor would it be chosen to appear in Facebook feeds, Reddit searches or top Google results.

Until this amplification problem is resolved, it is precisely our willingness to share without thinking that agents of disinformation will use as a weapon. Hence, a disordered information environment requires that every person recognize how he or she, too, can become a vector in the information wars and develop a set of skills to navigate communication online as well as offline.

The ultimate expression of this will be AI that can detect things like hate speech, misinformation, lies, intentionally altered or falsified content, etc. and effectively eliminate them from the public square. When that happens, the world will be a much better place.

Global Warming, Warnings

Scientists say net zero by 2050 is too late

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Scientists say net zero by 2050 is too late

From the article:

CRC quotes British Professor of Energy and Climate Change Kevin Anderson as saying the world is currently on a path to 3–5ºC warming by 2100. He warned that a 4°C warmer future is “incompatible with an organised global community”. That sort of temperature rise is “beyond adaptation”, he said, because it will “devastate the majority of ecosystems and has a high probability of not being stable”.

A further problem is that climate change is not one thing, but many. Humans must take extraordinary steps now or watch a disaster unfold through multiple mechanisms:

This video describes one path to net-zero:

Is 100% Renewable Possible By 2050? – Interconnectors

But it is too little too late. The pace of change must accelerate dramatically.

“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.