Category Archives: Warnings

Chemical Attack, Terrorism, Warnings

The Fentanyl Drug Epidemic – A documentary – And Opioid Weapons of Mass destruction

Leave a comment

This documentary describes the fentanyl drug epidemic in the United States and Canada.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtGpPhd-c7Q
The fentanyl drug epidemic in North America | DW Documentary

From the video’s description:

One hundred times stronger than heroin, the opioid fentanyl is cheap, potent and can be sent through the post. These market forces have seen it replacing heroin and causing unprecedented death, destruction and misery. The death toll has disproportionately affected the homeless and already marginalized. Now, due to its strength and low cost, the drug is also starting to be mixed into party drugs, such as cocaine and cannabis – with fatal results. The documentary travels to Vancouver, the epicenter of the fentanyl epidemic to meet with health care workers, activists, fentanyl dealers and addicts. It shows some of the radical initiatives fighting the abuse of this drug, and asks what the world could face if the fentanyl epidemic spreads outside of North America.

Fentanyl has killed tens of thousands of people.

The other side of fentanyl and carfentanil is their potential use as terrorist weapons, weapons of mass destruction.

Could fentanyl be a weapon of mass destruction?
What You Need to Know about Carfentanil

For more info see:

“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

Many parts of the world will become uninhabitable to humans and animals as the planet heats up

Leave a comment

Planet Earth is growing warmer, and as it does we will see parts of the planet become uninhabitable due to heat and humidity. The southeastern United States is vulnerable to this – it will be impossible to go outside without an air conditioned vehicle or suit:

Climate Change Will Make Parts of the U.S. Uninhabitable. Americans Are Still Moving There.

From the article:

The data shows that the warming climate will alter everything from how we grow food to where people can plausibly live. Ultimately, millions of people will be displaced by flooding, fires and scorching heat, a resorting of the map not seen since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Now as then, the biggest question will be who escapes and who is left behind.

It’s crazy to think that it will come to this – that humans will choose to destroy the planet instead of taking action to stop the burning of fossil fuels. Nonetheless, this is the path humanity is following right now, and it will have gigantic economic and social costs for all human beings unless we as a species change course. See the Global Warming chapter for details. And this video paints a dire picture:

Extreme Heat Could Make One Third of Planet Uninhabitable

“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

“We are going to have famines of biblical proportions in 2021”

Leave a comment

“We are going to have famines of biblical proportions in 2021.” This is the dire warning from The UN’s World Food Program:

Nobel-winning UN agency warns of ‘famines of biblical proportions’ in 2021 

Beasley said WFP needs $15 billion next year – $5 billion just to avert famine and $10 billion to carry out the agency’s global programs including for malnourished children and school lunches which are often the only meal youngsters get. “If I could get that coupled with our normal money, then we avert famine around the world” and minimize destabilization as well as migration. he said.

Global Warming, Warnings

Arctic Temperatures point toward extreme warming for the entire planet

Leave a comment

This article paints a dire picture:

It’s Way Too Hot in the Arctic Right Now

From the article:

In the latest sign that the transformation of the Arctic continues full speed ahead, Svalbard hit a record high temperature for November on Wednesday. A station set on the mountain pass of Reindalspasset recorded a high of 49 degrees Fahrenheit (9.4 degrees Celsius). That is, to put it lightly, extremely not normal and very bad.

The “very bad” part is going to get even worse as humans pour more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The only solution is to immediately stop burning all fossile fuels and to start extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reverse the process:

Any hope of keeping Earth habitable now requires sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere, a new study found

From the article:

Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gas today, the Earth would continue warming for centuries. Arctic ice and permafrost are already on an irreversible path of melting. That’s the finding of new research published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. The model suggests that even if emissions were to drop to zero this year, global temperatures would ultimately rise to be 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit higher in 2500 than they were in 1850 (that’s 3 degrees Celsius).

Humans must take extraordinary steps now or watch a disaster unfold through multiple mechanisms:

“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

A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.

Leave a comment

The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse

From the article:

“The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari.”

Also:

“We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more. 

It is a fascinating article. See also this blog post.

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

Our young are terrified by climate change

Leave a comment
Doomsday Book cover
Order the book today

The headline is “Our young are terrified by climate change” and they have every reason to be. “Climate change” is not just one thing. As the climate changes due to the combustion of fossil fuels, many different things happen including:

Our young are terrified by climate change

From the article:

“I often ask people to describe how they feel about their future given the specter of climate change, using just one word. The words I hear are painful — “fearful,” “concerned,” “terrified,” “frightened,” “hopeless” and — the most painful — “black”, from a 20-something. The words I hear are not unusual — over half of U.S. teens feel afraid or angry. And I have also heard apathy — no one cares. Most of those I ask are college students with their life ahead. Ask someone younger for their one word. Start with your children or grandchildren. Their word may frighten you.”

They have every reason to feel terrified and hopeless. This is an incredible doomsday scenario barreling down the tracks toward us, and humanity appears to be doing nothing concrete to stop it.

“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, Warnings

New Methane releases portend an unstoppable feedback loop of global warming

Leave a comment

One big worry in the scientific community is that the arctic permafrost starts to thaw out, and in the process it releases massive quantities of methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas far more powerful than carbon dioxide, so it doesn’t take much methane to have an effect on global warming.

‘Sleeping giant’ Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find – Exclusive: expedition discovers new source of greenhouse gas off East Siberian coast has been triggered

Scientists have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean – known as the “sleeping giants of the carbon cycle” – have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal. High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected down to a depth of 350 metres in the Laptev Sea near Russia, prompting concern among researchers that a new climate feedback loop may have been triggered that could accelerate the pace of global heating.

The problem is that once this cycle gets started, it can create a positive feedback loop. The methane that is being released causes heating that causes more methane to be released and so on, vastly accelerating the pace of global warming.

There is also methane leaking out under Antarctica for the first time:

First Methane Leak Found on Antarctic Sea Floor Confirms Researchers’ Fears

Scientists have, for the first time, discovered an active leak of methane gas from the sea floor in Antarctica. It is a process that’s likely to accelerate the process of global heating.

It is the same kind of problem.

“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

Scientists Increasingly Shocked by the Loss of Sea Ice in the Arctic

Leave a comment

Many articles over the last several weeks have been pointing out the gigantic warning that humanity is receiving from the massive loss of ice in the Arctic. It is an undeniable sign of the planet’s warming, and it is only going to get worse unless humanity takes action:

Drone footage shows extent of Arctic ice loss

“The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world,” Dr. Enric Sala, executive producer and National Geographic’s Explorer-in-Residence said in a panel discussion following the film’s premiere on Oct. 7. “The Inuit are really the human face of global warming, and all these activities that produce all this carbon pollution are not in the Arctic region, they are mostly in a world where we are or farther south, but they are suffering the consequences.”

Climate scientists and activists responded with alarm Thursday to reporting that this is the latest date in recorded history that “the main nursery of Arctic sea ice in Siberia has yet to start freezing,” another example of the present-day consequences of human-caused global heating. According to the Guardian, “The delayed annual freeze in the Laptev Sea has been caused by freakishly protracted warmth in northern Russia and the intrusion of Atlantic waters, say climate scientists who warn of possible knock-on effects across the polar region.”

In August, Adrienne White – an ice analyst at the Canadian Ice Service who monitors the Canadian Arctic for changes in sea ice – was reviewing satellite imagery when she spotted something remarkable. The enormous Milne ice shelf, which was the last intact ice shelf in Canada and which White had studied closely before as a PhD student, was dissolving. A huge chunk larger than Manhattan, roughly 43% of the shelf, broke off in one piece. And as it collapsed into the ocean, it took with it much of the equipment her former colleagues had left there.

What a ‘sobering’ report on Arctic ice loss means for global sea levels

Will humanity do anything to solve this crisis? Will it undertake the immense global effort necessary to reverse all of the damage that has been done?

“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.

Plastics, Warnings

There’s 14 million metric tons of microplastics sitting on the seafloor, study finds

Leave a comment

We know that there are big pieces of plastic floating in the ocean: plastic bags, plastic cups, plastic straws, plastic bottles, “ghost gear” (abandoned fishing nets and other equipment), etc. We know that these big pieces break down into smaller pieces floating in the ocean. But it gets even worse:

There’s 14 million metric tons of microplastics sitting on the seafloor, study finds

Justine Barrett from CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere who led the study, said in a statement that, “Even the deep ocean is susceptible to the plastic pollution problem.”

“Plastic pollution that ends up in the ocean deteriorates and breaks down, ending up as microplastics,” she said. “The results show microplastics are indeed sinking to the ocean floor.”

Scientists have called plastic litter “one of this generation’s key environmental challenges” and the problem is an internationally recognized environmental issue. Plastic is a persistent pollution that hurts wildlife, the ocean itself and there’s growing concern about the potential health risks it poses to humans.

It is difficult (but possible) to imagine somehow filtering floating plastic bits out of the water. Maybe we can invent enormous robot whale sharks that do it. The problem is so immense though that we would need a million of these robots.

But filtering plastic out of ocean sediments? How do we do that? Maybe we invent another robot, but still… The disruption to the ocean environment will be immense, and the robot will need to sort the plastic bits out of the sand and mud bits.

The article points out that the problem will only gets worse. And then you watch videos like this and see immensity of the problem in underdeveloped countries:

Kinshasa residents fed up of ‘rivers’ of plastic waste

Fixing this doomsday problem will take a massive worldwide effort, and this is just one of the doomsday problems humanity faces.

“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.

Rainforest Collapse, Warnings

Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study

Leave a comment

The Doomsday Book has a chapter on Rainforest Collapse and all of the tragedy that the collapse will bring to our planet. This article reinforces the dire situation we face:

Amazon near tipping point of switching from rainforest to savannah – study

Much of the Amazon could be on the verge of losing its distinct nature and switching from a closed canopy rainforest to an open savannah with far fewer trees as a result of the climate crisis, researchers have warned.

One big problem is that the conversion of the forest to savannah means a massive tree die off. Every tree that dies releases its stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, meaning ever rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere and warmer temperature across the globe. It is a horrible positive feedback loop that will eventually make earth’s equitorial regions uninhabitable.

“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.