A Drop of Rain

Richard Heinberg recently wrote a short piece for The Ecologist (and believe me, all you head-in-the-sand denialists are about to wake up to a harsh dose of reality, so you might want to start paying attention to the people who are right, and who have been right all along) discussing the speed of systems collapse as of now.

Keep in mind, we’re sailing here on a very big ship, with a lot of inertia, so changes happen in a sort of surreal slow-motion time frame that requires something of a coherent overview to understand, although everyone of course immediately understands things like $100 fill-ups on their excessively large SUVs and trucks.

Heinberg’s point below, however, is worth some serious thought. I guarantee you I’m going to look at his suggestion very seriously, and I recommend you all do too.

As the Great Unraveling proceeds, there may in fact be only one occupation worthy of our attention: that of identifying the qualities that make our species worth saving, and then celebrating and exemplifying those qualities. If we concentrate on doing that, perhaps we win no matter what. Outwardly, it will probably look a lot like what many of us are already doing: working to save a species, an ecosystem, a human community; to make a village sustainable, or to halt a new coal power plant.

Taking in traumatic information and transmuting it into life-affirming action may turn out to be the most advanced and meaningful spiritual practice of our time.
How Do You Like the Collapse So Far?, 05 Jun 2008

All you idiots who blithely repeated the publishings of Exxon sponsored anti global warming / climate change groups as if you were doing some kind of ‘critical thinking’ are going to have to go out and find new flakes to listen to, sorry to give you the bad news…

Due to some shareholder pressure, primarily from the Rockefeller family, Exxon has agreed, finally, to stop funding some, but not all, note, of it’s anti-global warming pseudo researchers

The oil giant ExxonMobil has admitted that its support for lobby groups that question the science of climate change may have hindered action to tackle global warming. In its corporate citizenship report, released last week, ExxonMobil says it intends to cut funds to several groups that “divert attention” from the need to find new sources of clean energy.
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The ExxonMobil report says: “In 2008 we will discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Nine groups have reportedly lost the company’s support, including the George C Marshall Institute, the Washington DC-based think tank that asserts there is no scientific consensus on climate change, and that changes in the sun, not greenhouse gases, could be responsible for rising temperatures.
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Greenpeace says ExxonMobil continues to fund over “two dozen other organisations who question the science of global warming or attack policies to solve the crisis.”
Exxon to cut funding to climate change denial groups, The Guardian, May 28 2008

Remember, for profit corporations have one and only one interest: profit, aka, maximizing shareholder value. This is their essence, and the only way they will change is if you force them, through legal means, or pressure like this shareholder action. Exxon never believed this crap, they simply, and correctly, see the need to cut CO2 emissions as a business expense that they would like to avoid. So they spend a pittance funding these intellectual whores who have made a career out of denialist pseudo-science.

Next time you hear some idiot spouting some nonsense that helps a huge corporation ‘maximize shareholder value’ by disseminating lies and half-truths, try to not fall for it, ok? I’m thinking of a few people I’ve heard repeat this crap as if they were actually being ‘critical’…. far too many people, in fact…

Ilargi posted a very thoughtful comment in the automatic earth, a response to a Der Spiegel article on the environment.

Sometimes it’s refreshing to read a straight ahead piece like this amidst all the talk about the economy, especially when you have to hear pretty much every mainstream media voice on the planet talk about the costs of not killing ourselves, ie, the economic costs of stopping growth, which is what this all really boils down to in the end.

As long as we keep stating the earth’s value in monetary terms, we are irrevocably doomed. If you accept that you come from, and belong to, the world around you, and understand that Darwin has delivered proof that (wo)man has come from all that has been before, that 90% of our genes are identical to those of our pets and so on, than putting a dollar price on plants and animals and rivers and skies is identical to putting a dollar price on your own life, and on your children and loved ones. Everything alive is a part of you. Dollars are not.

In our economic system, based on debt, credit and interest, the future value of everything under the sun necessarily gets discounted over time. That is because currencies lose their value over time. It’s also in our genes: we prefer what we have now over what we might have later. Our ancestors were the ones who focused on immediate threats. Those who focused on future ones, in general didn’t live long enough to procreate.

There is an economist in this article who says:
“Protecting diversity is much cheaper than allowing its destruction.”
He’s wrong, because of what I just said: all future values are discounted, so destruction is more profitable than preservation. This economist has never grasped the essence of his own chosen field.
What is the earth worth?, the Automatic Earth, May 27, 2008

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Last week saw Barcelona receive it’s first shipments of water from France to alleviate it’s massive water shortage.

I’m going to follow this story for a while to see when the first major news source points to overpopulation coupled with the drought. Currently the best they seem able to do is tell us that Barcelona has about 5 million plus people, but it seems to be too much of reach for anyone to say that the arid land simply cannot support that population.

Barcelona is a preview of what’s going to happen in the American Southwest, with Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, and many other large metropolitan areas built in the desert soon to face the same issues as their water supplies become increasingly impacted by global warming initiated snowpack loss, overpopulation, and of course, a lifestyle that is simply absurd to even consider realistically in a desert in the first place.

Barcelona is a dry city. It is dry in a way that two days of showers can do nothing to alleviate. The Catalan capital’s weather can change from one day to the next, but its climate, like that of the whole Mediterranean region, is inexorably warming up and drying out. And in the process this most modern of cities is living through a crisis that offers a disturbing glimpse of metropolitan futures everywhere.
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The political battles now breaking out here could be a foretaste of the water wars that scientists and policymakers have warned us will be commonplace in the coming decades. The emergency water-saving measures Barcelona adopted after winter rains failed for a second year running have not been enough. The city has had to set up a “water bridge” and is shipping in water for the first time in the history of this great maritime city.

A tanker from Marseilles with 36 million litres of drinking water unloaded its first cargo this week, one of a mini-fleet contracted to bring water from the Rhone every few days for at least the next three months. So humbled was Barcelona when prolonged drought forced it to ship in domestic water from Tarragona, 50 miles south along the Catalan coast, 12 days ago, that city hall almost delayed shipment and considered an upbeat publicity campaign to lift morale and international prestige.
Spain’s drought: a glimpse of our future?, independent.co.uk, 24 May 2008

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Check out this interview with Philip Sutton. You can also listen to the second and first parts of the interview (see below for links). What is being talked about here is scary stuff, and is going to start manifesting even more than it is already today, in increasingly obvious, and probably, deadly, ways.

Mankind has a test now, it can chose to take it seriously, or just try to carry on with business as usual as long as it can, which isn’t looking like it will be that long.

This is the third interview with Philip Sutton, coauthor with David Spratt of a recent report titled Climate Cod Red: The Case for a Sustainability Emergency. The first interview reviewed the latest scientific understanding of climate change and established an appropriate target for temperature change and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The second interview discussed the socio-political implications of the latest scientific understanding—namely the need to go into “emergency” mode, abandoning business and politics as usual in order to make a rapid transition to a fossil-fuel free economy before catastrophe unfolds.
Philip Sutton, GobalPublicMedia, 28 Apr 2008

Download/Stream it directly (mp3).

You can find Part II here, and listen to mp3 here.

Part I is here. Listen to mp3 here.

I wrote about this story a month or so ago. I have to admit, this makes me sad. I lived in Barcelona, and I really like that city, and the Catalans in general. But even in the 90’s, when I lived there, two things were getting quite obvious:

1. Catalonia was VERY dry. Dry as in global warming/drought dry.
2. Far too many Northern Europeans were moving there, either to live, or to make vacation houses along the Costa Brava, and wanting of course to maintain their high resource consumption Northern ways.

In a year that so far ranks as Spain’s driest since records began 60 years ago, the reservoir is currently holding as little as 18% of its capacity - at a time of year when winter rains would usually have provided an essential boost by now.

Rainfall figures show a consistent series of shortfalls in recent years - just as Barcelona’s population has expanded to more than five million and the region’s booming agribusinesses demand ever more irrigation.

For residents here, the arrival of water by ship is a profound shock - normally it’s the drier areas further South that are notoriously parched.
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Now the Barcelona authorities are having to take the unprecedented step for any major European city of topping up supplies by the highly visible means of giant tankers arriving in relays, each bringing 28 million litres, up to a dozen ships coming over the next month.
Ships bring water to parched Barcelona, bbc.co.uk, 13 May 2008

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Incredible times we live in, I have to say. The Los Angeles Times just published an editorial that’s pretty much straight up peak everything:

Even for Americans — who are constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little terminal right now.

It’s not just the economy: We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it helps send the price of a loaf of bread shooting upward and helps ignite food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem … how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.

There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, NASA’s chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper — that “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”
The Los Angeles Times, Opinion, May 11, 2008

Looks like reality is starting to penetrate even the densest of places, the mainstream corporate run media. Maybe there is hope. We’ll see.

Well, any idea that a change from one state, expansion, aka ‘growth’, to one of contraction, would be smooth and relatively pain free is one you can probably get rid of right about now.

The Mauna Loa, Hawaii CO2 tracking station reports word CO2 levels at record highs.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to new figures that renew fears that climate change could begin to slide out of control.

Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii say that CO2 levels in the atmosphere now stand at 387 parts per million (ppm), up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years.

The figures, published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on its website, also confirm that carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than expected. The annual mean growth rate for 2007 was 2.14ppm – the fourth year in the past six to see an annual rise greater than 2ppm. From 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year, but since 2000 the annual rise has leapt to an average 2.1ppm.

Scientists say the shift could indicate that the Earth is losing its natural ability to soak up billions of tons of carbon each year. Climate models assume that about half our future emissions will be re-absorbed by forests and oceans, but the new figures confirm this may be too optimistic. If more of our carbon pollution stays in the atmosphere, it means emissions will have to be cut by more than currently projected to prevent dangerous levels of global warming.
The Guardian

Increased Coal Fired Power

In case you’re not clear on why this is happening, China is currently adding about 1 new coal fired electrical power plant per week, even though it’s barely able to supply them with coal as it is.

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Last week James Howard Kunstler had a pretty insightful blog posting, highlighting the fast rising belief in the United States that Big Oil is responsible for the gasoline price rises:

A friend asked me how come the public apparently grasps the reality of climate change but can’t seem to wrap its collective brain around the unfolding oil crisis.

I’m not convinced that the public does grasp climate change. It’s perceived, perhaps, as a background story to daily life, which goes on regardless. Are you even sure Hollywood didn’t invent it — and maybe some boob at Time Magazine is selling it as though it were really happening?

Few have anything to gain by espousing denial of climate change. It’s hard for most people to tell if they have been affected by it. It doesn’t quite seem real. Those who actually make gestures in the face of it –- screwing in compact fluorescent lightbulbs, buying Prius cars — end up appearing ridiculous, like an old granny telling you to fetch your raincoat and rubbers because a force five hurricane is organizing iself offshore, beyond the horizon.

The public appears aggressively clueless about the peak oil story. They do not accept any threats to the motoring regime. The news media is surely not helping sort things out. I saw a remarkable display of ignorance on CNN last week when the new resident idiot-maniac Glenn Beck hosted Teamster Union boss James Hoffa and they agreed that the oil companies were to blame for high fuel prices. To put it as plainly as possible, Beck doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, and it’s disgraceful that CNN gives free reign to this moron to misinform the public. It’s perhaps equally amazing that Hoffa doesn’t know we have entered a permanent global oil crisis based on demand having outrun supply. These two idiots think that if Exxon-Mobil built a new refinery down in Louisiana, everything would be fine, diesel fuel would go back down to 99 cents a gallon, and it would be Christmas every morning.
Kunstler, April 28, 2008

The misconception that private oil companies are behind the recent gasoline price spikes is important to look at more closely. I’ve been finding this mistaken view too when I talk to people who have not actually looked into the questions of gas prices as they relate to Peak Oil. Essentially, what we’re seeing is how complete the domination of the corporate media is when it comes to how people come to understand complex issues.
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As if the recent increases in basic food commodities globally wasn’t enough, now the dreaded new Wheat Fungus strains are devastating Africa’s wheat crops:

On top of record-breaking rice prices and corn through the roof on ethanol demand, wheat is now rusting in the fields across Africa.

Officials fear near total crop losses, and the fungus, known as Ug99, is spreading.

Wheat prices have been soaring this week on top of already high prices, and futures contracts spiked, too, on panic buying.

Experts fear the cost of bread could soon follow the path of rice, the price of which has triggered riots in some countries and prompted countries to cut off exports.
[...]
David Kotok, chairman and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, said the deadly fungus, Puccinia graminis, is now spreading through some areas of the globe where “crop losses are expected to reach 100 percent.”

Losses in Africa are already at 70 percent of the crop, Kotok said.

“The economic losses expected from this fungus are now in the many billions and growing. Worse, there is an intensifying fear of exacerbated food shortages in poor and emerging countries of the world,” Kotok told investors in a research note.

“The ramifications are serious. Food rioting continues to expand around the world. We saw the most recent in Johannesburg.

“So far this unrest has been directed at rising prices. Actual shortages are still to come.”
MoneyNews.com

They didn’t say the words, but I have to suspect that, like California’s bark beetle problem, this is indirectly related to global warming, rising mean temperatures providing new flash points for problems to come from.

What’s even more disturbing is the report that Bush has cut funding for wheat rust research.
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