http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/7/27/758493/-The-End-of-the-Beginning-of-the-Collapse

The great migrations themselves are becoming extinct, from salmon to elk to butterflies to tuna. Bats in the Northeast are suffering catastrophically from white-nose syndrome, at die-off rates of 90%. Pollinators are suffering dramatically. Top-of-the-food-chain predators everywhere are collapsing. All marine mammals have high levels of PCBs, and flame retardants, and a broad array of other human-made toxins coursing through their bodies.

The waste-processed effluent from our cities contains the prozac and viagra and hormone replacement runoff, that we flush down the toilet, which makes fish hermaphroditic. That water mixes with the pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer runoff from our factory farms -- creating a dead zone the size of New Jersey at the base of the Mississippi, joining other dead zones around the world.

In between California and Hawaii there is a gumbo of plastic gyring in the Pacific that's at least the size of Texas. Plastic does not biodegrade, but breaks down into particles that fish consume. And most estimates indicate we have already overfished between 85 and 90% of the raw biomass out of the ocean in the last century, and every day, we continue to hoover up four times more ocean biomass than is reborn. "Peak ocean" happened a long time ago, but our ever-more-efficient factory fishing has let us ignore it for a time.

Coal power belches heavy metals and incredibly massive amounts of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Global warming is not a theory, it is a given. CO2 does something much worse. While we bicker with global-warming deniers, the ocean is getting more acidic. Excess CO2 plus ocean produces carbonic acid. Ocean acidification is a clear and present danger. A slight rise in acidity dramatically affects calcium-carbonate-based lifeforms, like most plankton, shellfish, and coral, the cornerstones of the ocean biosphere. They are unable to form calcium carbonate shells, exoskeletons, or other structures.

We're also reaching, in the very near-term, limits on oil, fresh water (as reported magnificently yesterday in the diary "Water Bankruptcy"), topsoil, lithium, phosphorus, and plenty more. Worst of all, nearly everything (and more) on the above list is happening "faster than expected."

Now: almost any of the above could radically disrupt the economy (and should). Sometime soon, fish prices will skyrocket as overfishing's legacy creates radical scarcity. Sometime soon, the impact and risk of ocean acidification will be recognized by society, and radical steps will need to be taken to prevent our rich, biodiverse ocean from becoming an acidic, jellyfish- and algae-filled cesspool, in our lifetimes. Sometime soon (and the next five years are likely to be exceedingly warm) we will see a serious drought in a major food-producing belt. Sometime soon we will see explosions of unintended consequences: unexpected blooms of dead zones, collapses of shellfish and coral, and the complex ecosystems they support.

Each of these would have dramatic economic consequences. If even 1/4 of what I describe above is the emergency I think it is, then there's what might be called "a disruptive economic force." The present is not what the past was; the near future is by no means what the recent present was. We have reached a tremendously complex, tremendously traumatic point in human history. Economists try to predict the future. Few economists have grappled with the limits we are confronting.

Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We are now in a different kind of war — a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call “cars” may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn’t give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true — that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately….

so thousands of marble-sized ice spheres are raining down on me

The second flood is worse and prompts a state of emergency (”the government had removed the velvet glove”). For a while, despite crumbling infrastructure, some kind of normality is maintained, “seemingly through habit or momentum.” Gradually, however, lawlessness ’seeps’ in.

“Failure of the emergency electricity supply one afternoon, followed by a night of darkness, gave a kind of coup de grace to order. The looting of shops, and particularly foodshops, began, and spread on a scale that defeated both the police and the military.”

From there, it is a short step to the era of mass migrations, as people make a “panicky rush to stake a claim on the high ground while there is still room there.” A fiercesome “guerrilla war between starving bands” begins.

Maybe a vengeful God is punishing the world, as one of the characters wonders in The Kraken Wakes:

H’m. You think you’re so clever. Little gods yourselves with all your atom-splitting and microbe-conquering. You think you rule the world, and possibly heaven, too. Very well, you conceited little mites, there’s a lot more about life and nature that you don’t know. I’ll just show you one or two new things and see how your conceit stands up to them. I have had to do it before. [+]

http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/474108

this episode of the C-Realm features a lengthy interview with Dennis M. Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. he talks about quite a bit: how climate change models have heretofore been entirely too conservative, how there are many alternative energy sources which haven't been considered (he mentions algae and a different kind of geothermal), and what he sees as an ongoing transformation of society by tele-work, tele-eduction, and tele-everything. but perhaps the most interesting part was his discussion about the consideration of the Lifeboat Foundation's other concerns for the immediate future:

The purpose of the Lifeboat Foundation is to try to anticipate the potential existential risks to humans going forward as we prosecute what is essentially something that we've never done and seen before which is a simultaneous IT, Bio, Nano, Quantum Energetics, double-exponential tech revolution. All of these tech revolutions are frontiers of the small but feed off one another synergistically and they're all changing things in massive ways. Currently, we have, since 1959, seen computer speeds increase 10 million times. We are currently at about a petaflop. The human brain speed is 20 petaflops. We will be at human brain speed by 2012. So the machines will be as smart as human brains.

Beyond that, as we leave silicon and go on to Bio, Optical, Quantum, Nano, and Molecular computing, we are looking at an additional speed increase beyond human brain speed of somewhere between 10 to the seventh and 10 to the 11th power by 2030 to 2040. That's some massive, massive, machine capability. So the speed will be there to produce an intelligence beyond human. Well, what about the software? The software comes from either the current self computing algorithms and (AGI) or are from biomimetics.

Then there is 'emergence'. As far as we can tell, there is no general intelligence wiring in the human brain. Each piece of our intelligence evolved in the usual billion year evolutionary context over which we developed as today's humans to handle specific problems within that evolutionary context, almost all of which was in the hunter-gatherer realm. Any general intelligence that we have is wholly emergent - i.e. make something complex enough and it wakes up.

So between emergence, biomimetics, and self computing, people are betting that by 2025 to 2030, we will begin to approach or exceed human level machine intelligence. If this happens it may become an existential threat - one of the existential threats that are being looked at by the Lifeboat people. Because once the machines get smarter than us, they can do things that could take us down even inadvertently. You don't even have to postulate an evil machine to do this. And so how do you work this going forward to make sure that in the brain stem of the machines, in the lizard part of the brain, that they understand, and it's built into them from the initial stages, not to harm humans in any way shape or form? So we have to define what "harm" is...

http://www.futurescenarios.org/

this is a pretty interesting site that explores a pretty broad range of future scenarios. first, four distinct energy futures are presented: an ever-exponentially rising rate of energy use (think miracle fusion technology), a leveling off at current rates, a gradual decline from the present as more or less the high point in a bell curve, and sharp collapse. this part is fairly elementary.

where it really gets interesting is where another fourfold futurespace continuum is constructed along two axes: the speed of reduction of conventional energy supplies on one, with the speed and severity of climate change on the other. there's Brown Tech, where oil declines slowly but climate change happens rapidly, leading to a dirty, centralized world of totalitarianism and coal plants. Green Tech features both slow energy decline and slow climate change, allowing an orderly power-down into rhizomed alternative energy and distributed food production. Earth Steward, where the oil runs out fast but the climate change is relatively minor, meaning get Amish quick or get dead. and finally Lifeboats, with rapid loss of oil and rapid climate change, entailing GAME OVER UR FUX0RD wherein the best to hope for is that some isolated enclaves save parts of the intellectual traditions of civilization while the world quickly descends into a massively apocalyptic fail state.

the thinking behind and details of the various scenarios are hashed out, along with a discussion that some regions might undergo aspects of each. also interesting is the observation of how the size of a policymaking body reflects its general attitude towards preparing for the future: nation-states and multinationals prefer large scale centralized Browntech, states and cities tend toward Greentech, small communities towards Earth Steward, and individual family units shoot for the mere survival of Lifeboats.

sure, the future is like a box of chocolates, but it might be productive to consider the most likely possibilities.

The simultaneous onset of climate change and the peaking of global oil supply represent unprecedented challenges for human civilisation.

Global oil peak has the potential to shake if not destroy the foundations of global industrial economy and culture. Climate change has the potential to rearrange the biosphere more radically than the last ice age. Each limits the effective options for responses to the other.

The strategies for mitigating the adverse effects and/or adapting to the consequences of Climate Change have mostly been considered and discussed in isolation from those relevant to Peak Oil. While awareness of Peak Oil, or at least energy crisis, is increasing, understanding of how these two problems might interact to generate quite different futures, is still at an early state.

FutureScenarios.org presents an integrated approach to understanding the potential interaction between Climate Change and Peak Oil using a scenario planning model. In the process I introduce permaculture as a design system specifically evolved over the last 30 years to creatively respond to futures that involve progressively less and less available energy.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/comparative-planetology-interview-with.html

...and climate change, utopia, design, futurism, permaculture, etc.

For one thing, modern civilization, with six billion people on the planet, lives on the tip of a gigantic complex of prosthetic devices – and all those devices have to work. The crash scenario that people think of, in this case, as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.

It’s easy to imagine people who are bored in the modern techno-surround, as I call it, and they’re bored because they have not fully comprehended that they’re still primates, that their brains grew over a million-year period doing a certain suite of activities, and those activities are still available. Anyone can do them; they’re simple. They have to do with basic life support and basic social activities unboosted by technological means.

And there’s an addictive side to this. People try to do stupid technological replacements for natural primate actions, but it doesn’t quite give them the buzz that they hoped it would. Even though it looks quite magical, the sense of accomplishment is not there. So they do it again, hoping that the activity, like a drug, will somehow satisfy the urge that it’s supposedly meant to satisfy. But it doesn’t. So they do it more and more – and they fall down a rabbit hole, pursuing a destructive and high carbon-burn activity, when they could just go out for a walk, or plant a garden, or sit down at a table with a friend and drink some coffee and talk for an hour. All of these unboosted, straight-forward primate activities are actually intensely satisfying to the totality of the mind-body that we are.

So a little bit of analysis of what we are as primates – how we got here evolutionarily, and what can satisfy us in this world – would help us to imagine activities that are much lower impact on the planet and much more satisfying to the individual at the same time. In general, I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.

Because a lot of these supposed pleasures are really expensive. You pay with your life. You pay with your health. And they don’t satisfy you anyway! You end up taking various kinds of prescription or non-prescription drugs to compensate for your unhappiness and your unhealthiness – and the whole thing comes out of a kind of spiral: if only you could consume more, you’d be happier. But it isn’t true.

I’m advocating a kind of alteration of our imagined relationship to the planet. I think it’d be more fun – and also more sustainable. We’re always thinking that we’re much more powerful than we are, because we’re boosted by technological powers that exert a really, really high cost on the environment – a cost that isn’t calculated and that isn’t put into the price of things. It’s exteriorized from our fake economy. And it’s very profitable for certain elements in our society for us to continue to wander around in this dream-state and be upset about everything.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071229/ap_on_sc/ye_climate_records

a record number of climate records were broken this year. and global climate change is just starting to kick into gear. you have been warned.

January was the warmest first month on record worldwide — 1.53 degrees above normal. It was the first time since record-keeping began in 1880 that the globe's average temperature has been so far above the norm for any month of the year.

And as 2007 drew to a close, it was also shaping up to be the hottest year on record in the Northern Hemisphere.

U.S. weather stations broke or tied 263 all-time high temperature records, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. weather data. England had the warmest April in 348 years of record-keeping there, shattering the record set in 1865 by more than 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

It wasn't just the temperature. There were other oddball weather events. A tornado struck New York City in August, inspiring the tabloid headline: "This ain't Kansas!"

In the Middle East, an equally rare cyclone spun up in June, hitting Oman and Iran. Major U.S. lakes shrank; Atlanta had to worry about its drinking water supply. South Africa got its first significant snowfall in 25 years. And on Reunion Island, 400 miles east of Africa, nearly 155 inches of rain fell in three days — a world record for the most rain in 72 hours.

Individual weather extremes can't be attributed to global warming, scientists always say. However, "it's the run of them and the different locations" that have the mark of man-made climate change, said top European climate expert Phil Jones, director of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in England.

This war was entirely unnecessary, as testified to by your own reports. Among the most capable of those from your own side who speak to you on this topic is Noam Chomsky, who spoke sober words of advice prior to the war, but the leader of Texas doesn't like those who give advice. The entire world came out in unprecedented demonstrations to warn against waging the war and describe its true nature in eloquent terms like "no to spilling red blood for black oil," yet he paid them no heed.

It is time for humankind to know that talk of 'the rights of man' and 'freedom' are lies produced by the White House and its allies in Europe to deceive humans, take control of their destinies and subjugate them.

Among the things which catch the eye of the repercussions of your unjust war against Iraq is the failure of your democratic system, despite it raising of the slogans of 'justice, liberty, equality and humanitarianism'. It has not only failed to achieve these things, it has actually destroyed these and other concepts with its weapons - especially in Iraq and Afghanistan- in a brazen fashion, to replace them with fear, destruction, killing, hunger, illness, displacement and more than a million orphans in Baghdad alone, not to mention hundreds of thousands of widows. Americans statistics speak of the killing of more than 650,000 of the people of Iraq as a result of the war and its repercussions.

People of America: the people of the world have recently come to know that, after several years of the tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions to continue the killing and war there, which has led to your disappointment.

And here is the gist of the matter, so one should pause, think and reflect: why have the Democrats failed to stop this war, despite them being the majority?

The answer to this question is: they are the same reasons which led to the failure of former president Kennedy to stop the Vietnam war. Those with real power and influence are those with the most capital. And since the democratic system permits major corporations to back candidates, be they presidential or congressional, there shouldn't be any cause for astonishment in the Democrats' failure to stop the war.

You're the ones who have the saying which goes, "Money talks." After the failure of your representatives in the Democratic Party to implement your desire to stop the war, you can still carry anti-war placards and spread out in the streets of major cities, then go back to your homes, but that will be of no use and will lead to the prolonging of the war.

It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of your 'democratic' system and how it plays with the interests of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations.

It has become clear to all that they are the real tyrannical terrorists. In fact, the life of all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations. Despite that, the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on not observing the Kyoto accord, with the knowledge that the statistic speaks of the resulting death and displacement of millions of human beings, especially in Africa. This greatest of plagues and most dangerous of threats to the lives of humans is taking place in an accelerating fashion as the world is being dominated by the 'democratic' capitalist system, which confirms its massive failure to protect humans and their interests from the greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives.

And despite this brazen attack on the people, the leaders of the West - especially Bush, Blair, Sarkozy and Brown- still talk about 'freedom' and 'human rights' with a flagrant disregard for the intellects of human beings. So is there a form of terrorism stronger, clearer and more dangerous? This is why I tell you: as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system.

If you were to ponder it well, you would find that in the end, it is a system harsher and fiercer than your systems in the Middle Ages. The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of "globalization" in order to protect 'democracy'.

Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa - all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system.

So it is imperative that you free yourselves from all of that and search for an alternative, upright methodology in which it is not the business of any class of humanity to lay down its own laws to its own advantage at the expense of the other classes as is the case with you, since the essence of the laws under which you live is that they serve the interests of those with the capital and thus make the rich richer and the poor poorer. [+]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20122975/site/newsweek/page/0/

the damn deniers keep holding on to their holographic matrix myths that mass industrial civilization doesn't do any harm.

Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate's Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with "the overwhelming science out there, the deniers' days were numbered." As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. "I realized," says Boxer, "there was a movement behind this that just wasn't giving up."

The NEWSWEEK Poll finds less than half in favor of requiring high-mileage cars or energy-efficient appliances and buildings. No amount of white papers, reports and studies is likely to change that. If anything can, it will be the climate itself. This summer, Texas was hit by exactly the kind of downpours and flooding expected in a greenhouse world, and Las Vegas and other cities broiled in record triple-digit temperatures. Just last week the most accurate study to date concluded that the length of heat waves in Europe has doubled, and their frequency nearly tripled, in the past century. The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the last century. Snowpack whose water is crucial to both cities and farms is diminishing. It's enough to make you wish that climate change were a hoax, rather than the reality it is.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/17/AR2007071701808.html

eat it, Hummer guy.

On a narrow, leafy street in Northwest Washington, where Prius hybrid cars and Volvos are the norm, one man bought a flashy gray Hummer that was too massive to fit in his garage. So he parked the seven-foot-tall behemoth on the street in front of his house and smiled politely when his eco-friendly neighbors looked on in disapproval at his "dream car."

It lasted five days on the street before two masked men took a bat to every window, a knife to each 38-inch tire and scratched into the body: "FOR THE ENVIRON."

"I'd say one in five people who come by have that 'you-got-what-you-deserve' look," said his friend Andy Sexton, 27, who is visiting from Arkansas and has been helping Groves deal with fallout from the crime.

http://funtasticus.com/20070711/snow-in-latin-america/

the first snow in BA in 80 years. the climate wackiness is going on all around the world, apparently. but it's not just that. has anyone experienced an unusual bump in the level of just plain weirdness the last few weeks?

http://rs65.rapidshare.com/files/36394893/Johan_Galtung_-_Decline_and_Fall_of_American_Empire.mp3

an hour-long alternative radio podcast featuring Johan Galtung. he predicted the decline of the Soviet empire within a decade in 1980, and predicts an end to the US Empire by 2020. he defines empire as having four components: economic domination, political supremacy, cultural influence and military power. none of this is particularly novel, but he does put out some interesting ideas. one being that the greatest beneficiary of the decline of American empire is the US Republic itself. he notes the distinction many world citizens make between loving the American Republic and hating the US Empire (i myself of course make that distinction). he makes the related point that criticizing the Empire is not un-American (i'd argue that supporting it is).

he gives a four-point plan for ending US Imperium:
1) stop the killing, withdraw military bases
2) stop extremely unjust international economic deals
3) join the world: give up "US as chosen people of God" idea
4) enter into dialogue with many countries, i.e. participate in a multipolar world

of course, even if these don't happen, the conjoined clusterfuck of peak oil, climate change, economic woes, negative international opinion and the accelerating death spiral of military and unconventional violence will take a toll eventually.

also, according to Galtung, the US is the #1 believer in Satan worldwide, which i thought was interesting. it's a pretty good talk. if you want even more detail, or just prefer reading to listening, there's a document detailing all the contradictions fatal to the Empire.

http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=1172

according to this guy, regard for science and reason have very little to do with it. rather, the position of climate change denial against overwhelming scientific consensus serves as a key dogmatic item around which in- and out-group distinctions can be made. much like the mythic content of "primitive" societies, the ludicrous tenets of cults, or indeed large chunks of Western religious dogma.

Dogma wears two hats. First of all, dogmatic words can convey literal meaning that often flies in the face of the evidence. Consider religious dogma, for instance. That Mary was a “virgin” is nonsensical; it is even self-disproving. So why say such a thing? The answer relates to dogma’s second function: dogma facilitates bonding.

The assertion of group-approved-nonsense looks and sounds ridiculous to outsiders, but uttering it loudly in the presence of one’s group proves one’s loyalty to those insiders. The more nonsensical the dogma is, the tighter the bond it is capable of generating among those willing to utter it. Consider, for instance, the correlation of the absurdity of the dogma and the strength of bonding in Unitarians (less absurd, less bonded) and Mormons (more absurd, more bonded).

Therefore, uttering nonsensical dogma is not primarily about conveying the truth of the matter asserted. Rather, it’s about sending out a sonar signal in order to identify allies and enemies. It is a herding mechanism.This deep need to be accepted by a group is so deeply wired into humans that, in most people, it even overcomes the urge to follow evidence where it leads. Unfortunately, the literal meaning of the dogma doesn’t entirely dissipate. Therefore, we have lots of Republicans who still refuse to act on the threat of global warming.

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1503029

Pope Bruce on futurism and climate change denial.

I've been "predicting" changes in the climate since 1998. I even "prophesied" that in public forums. That prediction of the future wasn't "impossible." It was a lead-pipe cinch, because the climate was ALREADY changing in 1998. That wasn't "the future," it was the present. That future couldn't be admitted in 1998 because people were (and still are) way too heavily vested in the processes changing the climate.

It's eight years later now, and the climate's worse. Eight years from now? Worse still. You think I'm pulling that out of my hat? Every scientist in the world agrees with me. Every insurance guy, too. It still feels like "prediction" -- barely. Not because there's any real doubt about what's happening and what's going to happen, but because people don't want to believe it.

If your doctor predicts that your liver will blow because you're a raging alcoholic and you're obviously in denial, it won't help you to tell the medico that 'nobody can predict the future.' That is not a proper skepticism: that is a cop-out. Maybe you'll get Korsakoff's instead of cirrhosis, but if you're chugging a heavy narcotic by the barrel and case, heck yeah, of course ill health is in your future. Your doctor isn't a supernatural genius: you're a self-destructive fool. That little tremor in your hand? That's a futurist precursor of a big tremor in your hand. And the more you close your eyes to the future, the more of a prophet he becomes.