The State Of Play In Late 2025. Ian Welsh, Nov 3, 2025.
Let’s run thru the important points:
Domestically in the US the only issue that really matters is affordability. Food, housing and medicine. This will dominate the next few years, maybe even the next decade. Mamdani will win, he will be blocked from doing much of he wants by courts and the the State and federal government, and his future will depend on him making those who stop him the villains. The mid-terms and the next election will be fought in bread and butter issues.
China is going to win the AI race, as predicted.
This is, again, because Chinese models are at least 90% cheaper to run, and mostly open source. Only a complete and utter moron would run their business using proprietary models where OpenAI or Anthropic can jack up the price any time they want or depreciate the model you actually needed. Even US startups agree, 70 to 80% of them are using Chinese open models.
American AI either bursts or causes a great depression. Or perhaps bursts and causes a depression. There isn’t any other possibility. They’re spending trillions so American business can mass replace their workers. If it works, it causes a demand depression, a great depression like the Great Depression of the 30s. Who the hell do they think will buy their products? People can barely afford food and rent, let alone fancy AI crap. When they’re homeless they aren’t going to be customers. Meanwhile the rest of the world won’t be buying US AI crap either, they’ll be buying Chinese open source AI crap.
The War of attrition is nearly won by Russia. Ukraine just doesn’t have enough men and drones, it’s that simple. Next year, absent a peace deal, the big arrow moves everyone was wondering about will happen and Ukraine will be forced into unconditional surrender.
Europe is done. They’re losing their industrial base and their tech base. The people are unhappy and turning to populist opposition, either left or right. The Eurocrats are using lawfare to make outsider parties illegal if they look likely to win. This will take some time to play out. There will be changes in government away from neoliberalism, and if they can’t be achieved peacefully there will be a lot of violence. The EUs only play here is to try and gin up a war against Russia, but if they succeed, they’ll lose the war.
China and the US are now co-equal powers but that won’t last. China is on the rise, America is gutting its own science, arts and intellectual base while immiserating its own people and keeping smart foreigners out. (Or throwing them out.) All the big spend isn’t on re-industrializing, it’s on an AI moonshot which probably won’t succeed and will burst, or which if it does succeed will cause a Great Depression.
I will remind you that rich people have limited real power. They can buy a lot of influence, but if government turns on them they are done, because they do not have private armies capable of standing up to the State’s military and paramilitary forces. If the political zeitgeist turns against them, the government can make any changes it wants. Ask various Chinese billionaires how things worked out for them when the CPC decided they were too big for their britches.
One way they lose their influence is simply by having a real, undeniable depression. They’re doing everything they can to create one. If the Fed can’t bail them out, they’re done. The Fed’s ability to print dollars is going away, they have at most one large bailout left in them. After that, they can’t, because if the dollar isn’t the unit of trade for the world, over-printing will be catastrophic. Dozens of countries have found this out, again and again. Money can’t buy what your country can’t actually do, and the US can do less and less—the rich people sold America’s ability to do things to China to get three generations of fake wealth.
We are moving towards the end-game. It will take ten to fifteen years to play out. The West will be immiserated, neo-liberalism will end, US power and Empire will collapse. There will be wars and revolutions around the globe, because the force holding the world in its post-war, post-Soviet collapse state, including such things as borders, is going away. China is not likely to engage in massive military operations thousands of miles from its border and has shown itself uninterested in what happens in other countries domestically, unless they’re countries very close to it geographically.
Covid remains a thing, more specifically long Covid. We don’t measure it much any more, since governments don’t want to know, but there are multiple data points indicating its still disabling people. (I’ll do a proper article on this at some point.)
Likewise climate change and environmental collapse are real and so are resource issues. Farmland continues to lose fertility, the food-web is collapsing, the insects and fish and bird and everything else are dying and species are going extinct. This is going to cause huge problem. 1.4 billion Chinese cannot have a Western lifestyle without catastrophic environmental issues. If this is not dealt with (and it takes more than some orbital spraying to do so), the era of Chinese supremacy is not likely to last.
China will take the complete tech lead in essentially everything and they will also become the premier space-going nation. They have actually reduced carbon emissions, a good sign, and are massively planting forests. It’s not enough, but they are the only major nation taking these issues at all seriously. They look likely to start moving industry and power generation to space over the next 20 years and if they can get space mining and refining going, that offers some hope. (This is not space colonization, and the idea is to make it self-sustaining off world minus biologicals. Dropping resources from space is easy, getting resources into space is hard.)
The major geopolitical and economic issues I have been writing about for over 20 years are coming to fruition now and will play out over the next ten years. End of Empire. End of Neoliberalism. End of dollar hegemony. End of Europe. Western economic collapse. It’s all happening, exactly on schedule.
The glimmer of hope for Westerners is that political change is also coming. Put crudely, there are three possibilities: authoritarian corporatism wins thru a nasty surveillance and police state; right wing populists take charge and go nasty and mean, or left wing populists take charge and actually try to help people.
The third world will find a great deal more freedom than they’ve had for a long time. China will be the superpower, but at least for the first while seems likely to be fairly laid back about it. These countries, if they cooperate with China intelligently, will have a chance to really develop, in most cases an opportunity to make it to middle income status, since they will no longer be forbidden from the policies required to actually develop, as was the case under the IMF/World Bank “development” duopoly.
This is where we are, and where we’re going. Tighten those seatbelts and make what preparations you can. Remember that things like power and water and food will become more and more unreliable. It’s been a long time since the West and westerners had to deal with such issues, but they will be on the plate for at least thirty to forty percent of Westerners within fifteen years in nations which do not make the turn correctly, which seems likely to be the majority.
Tuesday, November 4, 2025
Monday, October 13, 2025
Morgan on Order
#312: A stroll along Revolution Street. Tim Morgan, SEEDS. October 11, 2025
CAN WEALTH AND ORDER SURVIVE?
Foreword
According to a recent BBC report, some of America’s wealthiest men are, or might be, investing in bunkers, or, as the article’s headline puts it, “doom prepping”. Author Zoe Kleinman goes on to mention just one of the many reasons why bunkers may be an impractical idea:
The real motives for “doom-prepping”, though, have nothing to do with conflict, climate or a takeover by autonomous technologies. The wealthiest must know that today’s extremes of wealth are abnormal, and might know, too, that the unfolding ending and reversal of material economic growth further stacks the odds against the continuation of this anomaly.
They might be uncomfortably aware, as well, that there is no form of wealth that can be guaranteed to survive extremes of economic, social and political turbulence.
As the economy contracts and the financial system fractures, any wealth contained in stocks, bonds, real estate or even money itself is at existential risk. The merit of gold is limited to being ‘less bad than’ other forms of wealth storage, whilst the energy-aware will be fully conversant with the frailties of crypto.
1
Even if you studied it at university – which very few of us have – the word “revolution” is likely to evoke passé images of beret-wearing Che posters on students’ walls, re-runs of Citizen Smith or Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and the endless tedium of debates about the minutiae of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and Mao.
In short, the very idea of “revolution” has come to seem, not just outdated, but positively outlandish.
But conditions are, in reality, increasingly trending towards the breakdown of the established order. Inequalities of wealth and incomes, already extreme, are being leveraged by economic contraction into matters of growing importance, and the essential, if vague, concepts of “merit” and “fairness” are very much in play.
Contemporary radicals might not be following any old-style Marxist-Leninist play-book, but anger with “the powers that be” is undoubtedly intensifying.
Whilst today’s highest-profile challenges to the status quo are essentially counter-revolutionary – even nostalgic – in character, we cannot expect this situation to continue, as hardship widens, and anger and cynicism deepen.
The redistribution of wealth from a minority to the majority has played little role in the Western political discourse over many decades, but conditions suggest that this contentious topic may soon return to a leading place in the debate.
Revolution – meaning ‘the rapid replacement of one regime with another’ – requires a combination, not just of unstable social and economic conditions, but of revolutionary ideas as well. In the absence of such ideas, revolution, thus defined, may seem unlikely.
But a chaotic collapse of order is all too possible. The guiding ideal of Western economies – an ideal not shared by China or Russia – is the sanctity of private profit. But the logic of profit may be a growth-dependent concept, and wholly unsuited to a post-growth economy.
The best ideas on offer might be those of “reform”, involving a voluntary retreat from extremes of inequality. This would be a retreat motivated, not by altruism, but by “fear of something worse”. Economic contraction will involve the redundancy of the big and centralised, and a revitalisation of the small and local, a context potentially favourable for reform.
The clincher, though, might be the impossibility of maintaining any form of concentrated wealth amidst the financial consequences of involuntary and unpreventable economic contraction.
2
There are, broadly, three courses that the development of society might follow. These can be called “reform”, “revolution” and “autocracy”, though these labels cover a mass of interconnected complexities.
“Reform” references a managed retreat towards lower levels of inequality. “Revolution” might mean the forcible replacement of one regime by another, or it might mean a less formal descent into disorder.
“Autocracy” might be invoked to head off revolution, or it might be imposed after the established order has collapsed into chaos.
3
Rebel forces, landing in the “soldier’s hour” before the dawn, were divided into three task-groups. The first took the presidential palace (and the adjacent guards’ barracks) entirely by surprise. The second seized the treasury with equal ease. Only at the radio station was anything more than purely token resistance encountered. By 9 am, the republic had a new government.
This, of course, is the stuff of a thousand thrillers, and the reference to the radio station places it in the middle years of the twentieth century.
But it does define the three things that any insurgency must seize, and over which any incumbency must retain control. These are executive power (including the security forces), money and information, the latter obviously including technology as well as the conventional media.
It seems unlikely, under current conditions, that any – say – Marxist-Leninist insurgency could seize control over these three critical levers of power.
But this isn’t to say that the incumbency couldn’t lose these critical levers in conditions of generalized disorder.
4
What this means is that we need to draw a clear distinction between “revolution” and chaos. The former seems an unlikely occurrence, but the latter outcome is all too plausible.
Chaos occurs where instability of conditions is abundant, but a nucleus of progressive ideas is absent.
Policing by consent has long been the preferred Western model for the maintenance of order, because policing by coercion is vastly more difficult, and drastically more resource-absorbing.
Likewise, the West has, hitherto, largely managed to combine government by consent with the preservation of wide differentials of wealth and income.
The prevalent logic has been that of merit – those who, gifted with greater abilities and greater energies, have accumulated wealth should be entitled to retain, and to pass on to their successors, the benefits of their own efforts.
The problems now arising include a delegitimization of wealth. In past times, wealth could be credited to the efforts of its possessors, but this connection is ceasing to persuade.
Policies have been adopted which, whether intentionally or not, are perceived to have severed the connection between affluence and merit.
5
What needs to be understood here is that, for reasons connected to energy and resource depletion, economic growth started to decelerate at least as far back as the “secular stagnation” of the 1990s.
The favoured tool for combatting this deceleration was credit expansion. This led, inevitably and in relatively short order, to the global financial crisis of 2008-09.
This was a moment at which a critical choice needed to be made. If the authorities had maintained a commitment to the principles of the free market, the over-extended (and the simply unfortunate) would have been wiped out. Opportunities would have opened up for new (and predominantly younger) economic entrants, with new ideas.
Instead, the decision was taken to prop up the system with the “monetary adventurism” of QE, NIRP and ZIRP, and to continue with these policies long after some form of stability had been restored.
The statistical effect has been to create an enormous bubble across multiple asset classes, but the social effect has been extraordinarily divisive.
Anyone who already owned assets in 2008 – or who worked in one of those sectors, mostly financial, in which incomes are linked directly to asset prices – has profited mightily from these policy choices.
But many others have suffered from rising rents, the insecurities of the casualised (“gig”) workplace, increases in the costs of necessities, and incomes that haven’t kept up with the broad level of systemic inflation.
6
In essence, a wedge has been driven between wealth and the nebulous (but powerful) concept of “fairness”.
It can be argued, in their defence, that decision-makers have been tied to an arc of inevitability – economic deceleration drove a recourse to “credit adventurism”, which led on to the GFC, and hence to the adoption of the “monetary adventurism” of those ultra-loose policies which in turn created a socially-divisive shift in the relationship between asset prices and incomes.
This, though, doesn’t give us much guidance on what happens next. When asset prices start to correct back towards a material economic floor far below current levels, do the authorities try to intervene – yet again – to prop up existing wealth-versus-income differentials?
Do they seriously believe that technological advances and monetary innovation can, together, hold back the tide of post-fossil economic contraction?
Or can a system that has already ceased to be “market capitalist” – and has become instead a post-capitalist expediency (PCE) – try to find new ways of defying the forces of economic and financial gravity?
7
Here’s a question for any historically-minded person reading this article:
Was Nicholas II overthrown in 1917 because Russians had been reading Marx, or because hardship and injustice had reached extremes at which the monarchy was no longer sustainable in the face of widespread popular discontent?
This poses a critical question in revolutionary theory, which is the comparative importance of ideas, and of material economic and social conditions, in the making of a revolution.
Lenin, of course, had clear views on this question. The first was that, whilst the rural oppressed (the “peasantry”) cannot make a successful revolution, the urban discontented (the “proletariat”) most certainly can. The second was that a revolution depends on the guiding hand of a “party”, a condition which presupposes a nucleus of ideas.
What Lenin was describing, though, was “revolution”, defined as the relatively rapid replacement of one regime by another. Though outside interference dragged things out until 1923, the Bolsheviks secured effective control of Russia itself within months of the downfall of the Romanovs.
Events were far more chaotic in France. Order was not restored until Napoleon took power in 1799, fully ten years after the revolution itself. Again, foreign interference played a major role, with counter-revolutionary and counter-imperial wars lasting from 1792 until 1815.
The French Revolution also reinforces Lenin’s emphasis on the “proletariat”. The only spontaneous revolt of the “peasantry” was the counter-revolutionary rebellion in the Vendée. No dominant party had an effective blueprint for a post-monarchical state at the time when the Ancien Regime was overthrown.
8
Though such assertions are all too often dismissed as propaganda, the Chinese authorities do remain wholly committed to Marxist-Leninist precepts, as modified for local conditions by Mao.
The Deng reforms did not, in any meaningful way, convert China to Western ideas. Behind Deng’s “two cats” allegory was a clear determination that, whilst capitalism might be allowed to serve China, China would never serve capitalism.
Beijing’s highest priority is the maintenance of high levels of urban employment, a challenge intensified by mass migration from the countryside to the cities.
Private profit is barely a consideration at all for the Chinese authorities. If losses and subsidies are required for the attainment of important national objectives, so be it.
Something not too dissimilar can be observed in Russia. The rise of the “oligarchs” was a feature of the country’s grim experiences in the 1990s. With those experiences confined to the past, billionaires are not required for the ongoing economic resilience of modern Russia.
The very different attitudes to private profit – largely disregarded in China, almost worshipped in the West – are critical to competition between the two leading economic powers. It’s at least arguable that the pursuit of profit is only possible under conditions of economic expansion.
The West in general – and the United States in particular – may be entering a profoundly different era with exactly the wrong set of ideas.
9
In its determination to maintain the central role of private profit, then, the West may be trying to board a train that has already left the station.
SEEDS analysis indicates that material economic prosperity – for which money is no more than an operating proxy and a symbol – is likely to be about 14% lower in 2050 than it is today. Based on current population trends, this would make the World’s average person about 31% poorer than he or she is now.
This average person’s woes will be greatly exacerbated by continuing rises in the real costs of necessities, and by soaring indebtedness, as and if the authorities continue with futile efforts to stave off material economic contraction using monetary tools.
But this “average” person is something of a statistical fiction, because dividing the numerator of aggregate prosperity by the population denominator takes no account of inequalities of incomes and wealth, inequalities which are extreme in the contemporary West.
At the more meaningful level of the median, huge numbers could be condemned to the desperation of destitution were current levels of inequality to be maintained under conditions of severe economic contraction.
Whilst it cannot necessarily be said that the Western authorities set out to create today’s extremes of inequality, these extremes are, as we have seen, products of long-standing policy choices, and inequality remains an issue that few Western leaders are minded to identify and address.
10
It would be relatively easy to reach depressing conclusions after this brief canter over the social, economic and political turf.
In essence, conditions are becoming conducive to a collapse of the existing order, whilst no intellectual blueprint yet exists for the channelling of discontent into the kind of ordered change-of-the-guard described, by Lenin and others, as “revolution”.
But the possibility of “reform” does exist. The template for this is the Britain of 1832, a society in which fewer than 180 people effectively controlled a country in which barely 4% of the English and the Welsh – and just 0.2% of Scots – were entitled to vote.
Though its passage was only enabled by proximity to “the verge of revolution”, the Reform Act of that year put the United Kingdom on a course which steered the country clear of the revolutionary ferment that plagued much of the rest of Europe during the following hundred years.
Essentially, Britain’s leaders opted for reform when the only alternative seemed to be the guillotines and the Phrygian caps of 1789.
Such an outcome might seem hopelessly optimistic until we recognise that economic forces are pushing towards a choice between chaos and managed change.
Centralised organisations are likely to be succeeded by localist alternatives as the burdens of central overheads become ever more unsustainable.
There is no form of stored wealth that can be relied upon to survive economic contraction.
The myth of a technological “rescue” from economic contraction might not long retain its plausibility.
Perhaps most importantly, a West which retains the ideal of personal profit is already being out-prepared by countries which do not.
CAN WEALTH AND ORDER SURVIVE?
Foreword
According to a recent BBC report, some of America’s wealthiest men are, or might be, investing in bunkers, or, as the article’s headline puts it, “doom prepping”. Author Zoe Kleinman goes on to mention just one of the many reasons why bunkers may be an impractical idea:
“I once met a former bodyguard of one billionaire with his own “bunker”, who told me his security team’s first priority, if this really did happen, would be to eliminate said boss and get in the bunker themselves. And he didn’t seem to be joking”.What’s much more interesting, though, is why anyone might seek the dubious safety of underground self-incarceration. Fears of nuclear conflagration, or of environmental catastrophe, might, perhaps, answer this question. The worry emphasised in Kleinman’s article is the potential advance of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or artificial super intelligence (ASI).
The real motives for “doom-prepping”, though, have nothing to do with conflict, climate or a takeover by autonomous technologies. The wealthiest must know that today’s extremes of wealth are abnormal, and might know, too, that the unfolding ending and reversal of material economic growth further stacks the odds against the continuation of this anomaly.
They might be uncomfortably aware, as well, that there is no form of wealth that can be guaranteed to survive extremes of economic, social and political turbulence.
As the economy contracts and the financial system fractures, any wealth contained in stocks, bonds, real estate or even money itself is at existential risk. The merit of gold is limited to being ‘less bad than’ other forms of wealth storage, whilst the energy-aware will be fully conversant with the frailties of crypto.
1
Even if you studied it at university – which very few of us have – the word “revolution” is likely to evoke passé images of beret-wearing Che posters on students’ walls, re-runs of Citizen Smith or Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and the endless tedium of debates about the minutiae of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci and Mao.
In short, the very idea of “revolution” has come to seem, not just outdated, but positively outlandish.
But conditions are, in reality, increasingly trending towards the breakdown of the established order. Inequalities of wealth and incomes, already extreme, are being leveraged by economic contraction into matters of growing importance, and the essential, if vague, concepts of “merit” and “fairness” are very much in play.
Contemporary radicals might not be following any old-style Marxist-Leninist play-book, but anger with “the powers that be” is undoubtedly intensifying.
Whilst today’s highest-profile challenges to the status quo are essentially counter-revolutionary – even nostalgic – in character, we cannot expect this situation to continue, as hardship widens, and anger and cynicism deepen.
The redistribution of wealth from a minority to the majority has played little role in the Western political discourse over many decades, but conditions suggest that this contentious topic may soon return to a leading place in the debate.
Revolution – meaning ‘the rapid replacement of one regime with another’ – requires a combination, not just of unstable social and economic conditions, but of revolutionary ideas as well. In the absence of such ideas, revolution, thus defined, may seem unlikely.
But a chaotic collapse of order is all too possible. The guiding ideal of Western economies – an ideal not shared by China or Russia – is the sanctity of private profit. But the logic of profit may be a growth-dependent concept, and wholly unsuited to a post-growth economy.
The best ideas on offer might be those of “reform”, involving a voluntary retreat from extremes of inequality. This would be a retreat motivated, not by altruism, but by “fear of something worse”. Economic contraction will involve the redundancy of the big and centralised, and a revitalisation of the small and local, a context potentially favourable for reform.
The clincher, though, might be the impossibility of maintaining any form of concentrated wealth amidst the financial consequences of involuntary and unpreventable economic contraction.
2
There are, broadly, three courses that the development of society might follow. These can be called “reform”, “revolution” and “autocracy”, though these labels cover a mass of interconnected complexities.
“Reform” references a managed retreat towards lower levels of inequality. “Revolution” might mean the forcible replacement of one regime by another, or it might mean a less formal descent into disorder.
“Autocracy” might be invoked to head off revolution, or it might be imposed after the established order has collapsed into chaos.
3
Rebel forces, landing in the “soldier’s hour” before the dawn, were divided into three task-groups. The first took the presidential palace (and the adjacent guards’ barracks) entirely by surprise. The second seized the treasury with equal ease. Only at the radio station was anything more than purely token resistance encountered. By 9 am, the republic had a new government.
This, of course, is the stuff of a thousand thrillers, and the reference to the radio station places it in the middle years of the twentieth century.
But it does define the three things that any insurgency must seize, and over which any incumbency must retain control. These are executive power (including the security forces), money and information, the latter obviously including technology as well as the conventional media.
It seems unlikely, under current conditions, that any – say – Marxist-Leninist insurgency could seize control over these three critical levers of power.
But this isn’t to say that the incumbency couldn’t lose these critical levers in conditions of generalized disorder.
4
What this means is that we need to draw a clear distinction between “revolution” and chaos. The former seems an unlikely occurrence, but the latter outcome is all too plausible.
Chaos occurs where instability of conditions is abundant, but a nucleus of progressive ideas is absent.
Policing by consent has long been the preferred Western model for the maintenance of order, because policing by coercion is vastly more difficult, and drastically more resource-absorbing.
Likewise, the West has, hitherto, largely managed to combine government by consent with the preservation of wide differentials of wealth and income.
The prevalent logic has been that of merit – those who, gifted with greater abilities and greater energies, have accumulated wealth should be entitled to retain, and to pass on to their successors, the benefits of their own efforts.
The problems now arising include a delegitimization of wealth. In past times, wealth could be credited to the efforts of its possessors, but this connection is ceasing to persuade.
Policies have been adopted which, whether intentionally or not, are perceived to have severed the connection between affluence and merit.
5
What needs to be understood here is that, for reasons connected to energy and resource depletion, economic growth started to decelerate at least as far back as the “secular stagnation” of the 1990s.
The favoured tool for combatting this deceleration was credit expansion. This led, inevitably and in relatively short order, to the global financial crisis of 2008-09.
This was a moment at which a critical choice needed to be made. If the authorities had maintained a commitment to the principles of the free market, the over-extended (and the simply unfortunate) would have been wiped out. Opportunities would have opened up for new (and predominantly younger) economic entrants, with new ideas.
Instead, the decision was taken to prop up the system with the “monetary adventurism” of QE, NIRP and ZIRP, and to continue with these policies long after some form of stability had been restored.
The statistical effect has been to create an enormous bubble across multiple asset classes, but the social effect has been extraordinarily divisive.
Anyone who already owned assets in 2008 – or who worked in one of those sectors, mostly financial, in which incomes are linked directly to asset prices – has profited mightily from these policy choices.
But many others have suffered from rising rents, the insecurities of the casualised (“gig”) workplace, increases in the costs of necessities, and incomes that haven’t kept up with the broad level of systemic inflation.
6
In essence, a wedge has been driven between wealth and the nebulous (but powerful) concept of “fairness”.
It can be argued, in their defence, that decision-makers have been tied to an arc of inevitability – economic deceleration drove a recourse to “credit adventurism”, which led on to the GFC, and hence to the adoption of the “monetary adventurism” of those ultra-loose policies which in turn created a socially-divisive shift in the relationship between asset prices and incomes.
This, though, doesn’t give us much guidance on what happens next. When asset prices start to correct back towards a material economic floor far below current levels, do the authorities try to intervene – yet again – to prop up existing wealth-versus-income differentials?
Do they seriously believe that technological advances and monetary innovation can, together, hold back the tide of post-fossil economic contraction?
Or can a system that has already ceased to be “market capitalist” – and has become instead a post-capitalist expediency (PCE) – try to find new ways of defying the forces of economic and financial gravity?
7
Here’s a question for any historically-minded person reading this article:
Was Nicholas II overthrown in 1917 because Russians had been reading Marx, or because hardship and injustice had reached extremes at which the monarchy was no longer sustainable in the face of widespread popular discontent?
This poses a critical question in revolutionary theory, which is the comparative importance of ideas, and of material economic and social conditions, in the making of a revolution.
Lenin, of course, had clear views on this question. The first was that, whilst the rural oppressed (the “peasantry”) cannot make a successful revolution, the urban discontented (the “proletariat”) most certainly can. The second was that a revolution depends on the guiding hand of a “party”, a condition which presupposes a nucleus of ideas.
What Lenin was describing, though, was “revolution”, defined as the relatively rapid replacement of one regime by another. Though outside interference dragged things out until 1923, the Bolsheviks secured effective control of Russia itself within months of the downfall of the Romanovs.
Events were far more chaotic in France. Order was not restored until Napoleon took power in 1799, fully ten years after the revolution itself. Again, foreign interference played a major role, with counter-revolutionary and counter-imperial wars lasting from 1792 until 1815.
The French Revolution also reinforces Lenin’s emphasis on the “proletariat”. The only spontaneous revolt of the “peasantry” was the counter-revolutionary rebellion in the Vendée. No dominant party had an effective blueprint for a post-monarchical state at the time when the Ancien Regime was overthrown.
8
Though such assertions are all too often dismissed as propaganda, the Chinese authorities do remain wholly committed to Marxist-Leninist precepts, as modified for local conditions by Mao.
The Deng reforms did not, in any meaningful way, convert China to Western ideas. Behind Deng’s “two cats” allegory was a clear determination that, whilst capitalism might be allowed to serve China, China would never serve capitalism.
Beijing’s highest priority is the maintenance of high levels of urban employment, a challenge intensified by mass migration from the countryside to the cities.
Private profit is barely a consideration at all for the Chinese authorities. If losses and subsidies are required for the attainment of important national objectives, so be it.
Something not too dissimilar can be observed in Russia. The rise of the “oligarchs” was a feature of the country’s grim experiences in the 1990s. With those experiences confined to the past, billionaires are not required for the ongoing economic resilience of modern Russia.
The very different attitudes to private profit – largely disregarded in China, almost worshipped in the West – are critical to competition between the two leading economic powers. It’s at least arguable that the pursuit of profit is only possible under conditions of economic expansion.
The West in general – and the United States in particular – may be entering a profoundly different era with exactly the wrong set of ideas.
9
In its determination to maintain the central role of private profit, then, the West may be trying to board a train that has already left the station.
SEEDS analysis indicates that material economic prosperity – for which money is no more than an operating proxy and a symbol – is likely to be about 14% lower in 2050 than it is today. Based on current population trends, this would make the World’s average person about 31% poorer than he or she is now.
This average person’s woes will be greatly exacerbated by continuing rises in the real costs of necessities, and by soaring indebtedness, as and if the authorities continue with futile efforts to stave off material economic contraction using monetary tools.
But this “average” person is something of a statistical fiction, because dividing the numerator of aggregate prosperity by the population denominator takes no account of inequalities of incomes and wealth, inequalities which are extreme in the contemporary West.
At the more meaningful level of the median, huge numbers could be condemned to the desperation of destitution were current levels of inequality to be maintained under conditions of severe economic contraction.
Whilst it cannot necessarily be said that the Western authorities set out to create today’s extremes of inequality, these extremes are, as we have seen, products of long-standing policy choices, and inequality remains an issue that few Western leaders are minded to identify and address.
10
It would be relatively easy to reach depressing conclusions after this brief canter over the social, economic and political turf.
In essence, conditions are becoming conducive to a collapse of the existing order, whilst no intellectual blueprint yet exists for the channelling of discontent into the kind of ordered change-of-the-guard described, by Lenin and others, as “revolution”.
But the possibility of “reform” does exist. The template for this is the Britain of 1832, a society in which fewer than 180 people effectively controlled a country in which barely 4% of the English and the Welsh – and just 0.2% of Scots – were entitled to vote.
Though its passage was only enabled by proximity to “the verge of revolution”, the Reform Act of that year put the United Kingdom on a course which steered the country clear of the revolutionary ferment that plagued much of the rest of Europe during the following hundred years.
Essentially, Britain’s leaders opted for reform when the only alternative seemed to be the guillotines and the Phrygian caps of 1789.
Such an outcome might seem hopelessly optimistic until we recognise that economic forces are pushing towards a choice between chaos and managed change.
Centralised organisations are likely to be succeeded by localist alternatives as the burdens of central overheads become ever more unsustainable.
There is no form of stored wealth that can be relied upon to survive economic contraction.
The myth of a technological “rescue” from economic contraction might not long retain its plausibility.
Perhaps most importantly, a West which retains the ideal of personal profit is already being out-prepared by countries which do not.
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Murphy on 6th mass extinction
Is the 6ME Hyperbole? Tom Murphy, Do the Math. Sept. 16, 2025.
go to link to see source article with links and charts, etc
Many of the stark conclusions I offer on Do the Math and in conversations with others rest on the equally stark premise that we have initiated a sixth mass extinction (6ME). Other self-defeating factors also loom large in establishing modernity as a temporary stunt, including resource depletion, aquifer exhaustion, desertification and salination of agricultural fields, climate change, microplastics, waste streams, “forever” toxins, and plenty more. People do call it a poly-crisis, after all (I prefer meta-crisis as most symptoms trace to the same root mindset of separateness and conquest).
Yet, towering over these concerns is a sixth mass extinction. Mass extinctions are defined as brief periods during which over 75% of species go extinct. I take it as given that large, hungry, high-maintenance mammals like humans won’t be among the lucky survivors—who are more likely to hail from families like microbes, mollusks, arthropods, or otherwise small, scrappy critters. In any case, it’s bad…very bad.
Invocation of the 6ME serves as a final nail in the coffin…end of story…to be avoided at all costs. All the aspects we like about modernity lose appeal when held up against the 6ME as a direct consequence. Even though the other challenges listed above can carry the argument as well, they generally must do so as a set, and we’re not so talented at apprehending parallel concerns—imagining each to be surmountable in isolation (pointlessly; it’s whack-a-mole). The 6ME delivers a single, inarguable, fatal blow to modernity, which is why I have taken to invoking it as a heavy-handed “nuclear option” straight away. No point playing around. While it may seem extreme, extreme circumstances justify extreme responses.
But is the threat real, or rhetorical? Basing arguments against modernity largely—though not entirely—on the 6ME could amount to overblown doomerism. In this post, I challenge myself on the veracity of 6ME claims. Have I fallen into a false sense of the urgency of this moment? Do I really believe a 6ME is going to play out?
Evidence
Okay, we can’t truly know the future—yet some developments are reasonably certain: like continued expansion of the universe (apparently to a cold “heat death“); the sun entering red-giant senescence in 5 billion years; oceans evaporating in something like a billion years due to increasing solar intensity; our own deaths; continued cycles of years, seasons, days; rocks tumbling downhill rather than up, etc. Likewise, only a small fraction of the species alive today will evade extinction for 100 million years, even in the absence of a 6ME crisis. Climate will change as it always has—independent of the recent anthropogenic slap—and species will adapt, disappear, or emerge as a result. Aversion to a 6ME is not the same as assuming everything is otherwise static or perfect (which I am often assumed to imply, even though I don’t say/think anything as simplistic as that).
Current trends are rather clear, and ominous (see hockey stick and ecological nosedive posts, and this Guardian article). Extinction rates are up 100–1,000 times the background rate—and possibly higher; estimates err on the conservative side. Even at the low end, we are currently witnessing the highest extinction rate since the Chicxulub impact that took out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Serious stuff.
Relatedly, the count of living beings is falling fast. Annual population declines tend to be in the 1–2% range among mammals, birds, fish, and insects, accumulating to average declines of more than half in less than half-a-century. The road to extinction necessarily travels through population decline. Ecological interdependencies translate to collateral damage: insect loss means bird loss, for instance. At some point, the Web of Life crafted over many millions of years becomes too damaged to repair itself or hold its integrity, resulting in a cascade of failures at all trophic levels.
The Wikipedia page on the 6ME provides a thorough background and copious citations from the scientific literature that I won’t try to replicate here. I encourage reading or skimming the page, which among other things conveys an overwhelming consensus on the reality of the phenomenon. The exceedingly high extinction rate is not at all a fringe belief among those who have done the legwork. I would label the deniers as “fringe,” except they are essentially extinct themselves, among the professionals.
Causes
This one isn’t hard, and I won’t belabor the point. In a nutshell, it’s human activity and consumption. It’s 8 billion people, most of whom strive within the market system of modernity, placing back-breaking and unprecedented demands on Earth and on the Community of Life. The encroachment by and for agriculture, extraction, development, and disposal is a dominant phenomenon across the planet, leaving precious little wild space (especially contiguous) for biodiversity to remain intact. And what remains is shrinking fast—cut off and cut down.
This Nature article includes an informative graphic ordering and breaking down the ten largest contributors to extinction threats. Climate change is seventh on the list, following over-exploitation, agricultural activity, urban development, invasion/disease, pollution, and environmental modification.
What this means is that the push to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy (itself a conjectural fantasy) would do precious little to address the 6ME threat. In many ways, it makes the situation worse by increasing materials extraction (a very materials-heavy enterprise due to diffuse energy density), co-opting more land for energy capture, and most importantly keeping modernity’s pedal to the metal on the most substantial causes of species loss (e.g., the six items in front of climate change on the list referenced above). Full steam ahead, just without as much actual steam!
But is it Mass Extinction?
While extinction rates are through the roof, and wild population declines aim the barrel straight toward extinction of an enormous number of species, we certainly cannot claim to have carried out a sixth mass extinction…yet. By various estimates, we may have already lost something like 1–10% of species—predicted to climb up to 13–27% by 2100. While this (highly uncertain) estimate falls short of the 75% mass extinction level, three big points: 1) beware cascading failures (domino effect); 2) the year 2100 is not the end of time, as so many projections unintentionally imply, and just an instant from now on relevant timescales; and 3) these numbers are already tragically huge, when you think about what it means—millions of species, gone forever!
In any case, if one is to be accused of hyperbole, it is on these grounds: we have decidedly not yet carried out a 6ME. Two seconds into a jump off a skyscraper, some may object that it’s premature to talk about a sidewalk splat that hasn’t happened yet. It’s therefore unfair to say we’ve caused a mass extinction, even if we are certainly causing a phenomenon that has all the hallmarks of early-onset extinction. That said, splat-objectors had better propose a realistic prevention strategy—and fast—rather than simply pointing out that the splat hasn’t happened yet. Not bloody useful!
The question I have is: what possible reversal would accompany modernity’s continuation, given the overwhelming balance of loss and decline? It’s hard to look at the graph above and be glib about a sudden reversal of the nosedive—without a single credible plan or even much discussion at all about the decline itself, much less what it would take to effect such a reversal.
The stakes are too high to tolerate “what-about-ism,” pointing to isolated counterexamples of recovery. Nice try, but the totality of the matter is clear. One comprehensive study of over 70,000 vertebrate species finds that the “losers” outnumber the “winners” by 16 to 1. I mean, even mass extinctions have their winners, right? So, pointing them out accomplishes nothing other than addling our meat-brain simplification circuits—such an easy thing to do! When modernity’s root practices (agriculture, extraction, development) directly destroy habitats, one has to invoke magical thinking to believe that biodiversity could recover without a serious contraction of modernity’s scale and practices, which I assure you is not a seriously-entertained proposal on the table—putting us all at dire risk.
So: it is too soon to assert as proven fact that we are experiencing a mass extinction presently. But it’s not unreasonable to speak in such terms when extinction rates are orders-of-magnitude higher than normal—at their highest point since the last mass extinction—while the present and projected trajectory promises to accumulate more damage unless the situation changes radically.
Dismissals and Timescales
A common reaction to bad news that hasn’t yet fully developed to the point of being “clear-and-present” is to dismiss it—especially if operating at an incomprehensible scale (parodied well in the movie Don’t Look Up). The reflex is easy to understand: Earth is so inconceivably large that surely we can’t budge it, meaningfully. A casual glance (in select luckier places) reveals unimaginably large tracts of forest and an abundance of life. Whether about pollution, waste (plastics, for instance), climate change, or a 6ME, knee-jerk common sense says that such an immense substrate as Earth can tolerate anything we throw at it. Left out of this impulsive mental equation is 8 billion people advancing ever-expanding ecological challenges in every corner of the globe. Think again. It needn’t “compute” in our heads to still be true.
Part of the difficulty lies in timescales. A forest might look healthy to our naïve eyes: it’s got trees for god’s sake! What more could be relevant? But superficial appearances can be deceiving. Take the Elwha River, for example. About 100 years ago, dams were erected for hydroelectric power, cutting salmon off from the interior forest of the Olympic mountains. Gone was a counter-current conveyor belt of nutrients from the ocean that had been in place for countless millennia and that was vital to long-term health of flora and fauna. The damage won’t be apparent immediately, but gradually nutrients wash out and are not replaced, starving the forest of essential building blocks. Centuries later, the forest could be gone (which is why the S’Klallam people pushed—successfully—for the dams to be removed). Much like the skyscraper analog above, it’s like putting a plastic bag over someone’s head and commenting after 5 seconds that their oxygen levels are still fine, so what’s all the fuss about plastic bags? They’re not dangerous, see! Wait for it…
I had a similar realization on a lovely hike east of San Diego in 2023. It was a warm, sunny morning in early April and the ceanothus (California lilac) was in splendid bloom. A vast area was decked out in lavender-colored florets. Despite the lovely impression it formed on the retina, the eardrums revealed a more sinister story. It was dead silent. No bees. Given the ideal conditions, the buzz of bees should have been almost deafening: bumble bees in particular love ceanothus flowers. But pollinators—not just domesticated honeybees—are in serious trouble in the last decade or so. Without sufficient pollination, no new (or too few) seeds will form, and the next generation of ceanothus will fail to materialize. Come back in 50 years and this wild garden could be wiped clean of ceanothus, forever. What looks pretty today may be already effectively a form of walking-dead. It’s far too soon to have experienced the myriad rippling consequences of our recent fever-pitch assault on natural systems. The show is just getting started, and natural resilience can put on a brave face for a time. Life will struggle to do its thing right up until it no longer can, easily fooling our ignorant eyes.
Resilience?
Wait: is Life fragile, or robust? It’s both, of course, depending on context (a single logical label seldom suffices when complexity reigns). Anyone who has waged war on flora or fauna designated as weeds or pests will attest that Life fights back. It must be so, or Life would not have survived both chronic and acute hammerings over billions of years. Climate has changed many times; continents merged and separated; volcanoes and even asteroids took aim at life. Some species always go by the wayside in such events, to varying degrees, while others survive and expand.
As a thought experiment, if humans were suddenly removed from Earth, would the 6ME proceed on its own momentum, in reaction to the habitat destruction and “forever” toxins spread across the globe? We don’t know, of course. It might. I tend to doubt so, but can’t really defend that gut sense. I look at abandoned places like Chernobyl—where Life has sprung back to create a forested ruin full of wildlife—and think it can all be okay-ish. It may take millions of years to shed the severe perturbations of modernity, as we’ve essentially shaken the etch-a-sketch and distributed non-native species around the globe in a madcap game of forced reconciliation. Picture the cages of a zoo suddenly evaporating: the mayhem will continue for a while before settling down to a slowly-evolving quasi-equilibrium. On the other hand, ocean acidification from CO2 absorption might put an end to the foundation of life in the oceans, impoverishing the land as well. And climate change—while seventh on the list presently—may stomp entire regions and relegate much of the present biodiversity to the dust bin (e.g., tropical rainforests turned to deserts). So, it may very well be too late to stop a 6ME.
On the other extreme, what seems reasonably clear is that keeping the gas pedal engaged on modernity’s engine will continue to perpetuate population declines and extinctions until the job is complete and ecological collapse—thus our own—is effectively assured. So, let’s not do that. Let’s recognize modernity as a poison pill that is killing the planet, and begin shifting to a radically different way.
But, what about the middle case, where modernity self-terminates—as I believe it will—over the next century or two—possibly driven by demographic decline? Is the 6ME crisis averted? Because this scenario sits between the “disappearance” and “continuation” scenarios, my answer must also lie between, meaning that it could go either way, but has a lower chance of rebounding than in the “sudden disappearance” scenario. In fact, failure of institutions and global supply could make billions of humans desperate for food, in which case anything larger than a mouse may be in real trouble—further advancing the extinction drive. It’s even possible that modernity self-terminates because of ecological collapse as the 6ME gathers steam, becoming its own cascading contribution to the phenomenon. Have we already passed a tipping point? We don’t know. We’re in uncharted territory, which at least ought to make us sit up straight and question our ways.
Overreaction and Asymmetric Risk
Because we have no crystal ball, and can’t peer into the far future, we simply can’t know how serious the present extinction surge will turn out to be. Given the inherent resiliency of Life, am I overreacting by taking the alarming trends seriously? Might I just chill out?
Obviously, no one can say with any certainty. But let’s contrast two statements that can definitely be differentiated on the grounds of veracity.
The extreme downside for humans if the 6ME assessment is correct would appear to me to completely overwhelm the speculation that maybe somehow—against all current evidence—Earth’s Community of Life can tolerate this unprecedented shock. That’s classic asymmetric risk. The precautionary principle strongly suggests we not be dismissive of 6ME warnings.
Thus, I would not call talk of a 6ME hyperbole. It has a very real and serious basis, whose plausible consequences are rather severe for humans. Waving it off would seem to be the height of irresponsibility and hubris. If I owned and edited a newspaper, the 300-point font headline would read, every day:
Last Ditch Effort
Before letting it rest, let me take one final crack at the validity of invoking the 6ME. Whether it is appropriate to speak as if the 6ME is essentially baked-in depends—as so much does—on context.
The present context is that the vast majority of people in our culture assume that modernity continues. In that mental space, a 6ME is essentially guaranteed to play out, and therefore constitutes a fair tool to employ for dislodging ubiquitous faith in modernity.
Whether I personally believe the 6ME will play out to true mass-extinction levels in the fullness of time is essentially irrelevant, as my faith in modernity is already shattered, so that I can imagine (hope for) modernity’s disappearance well before the situation is irreversible. Still, it’s completely fair to point out that the price of prioritizing modernity (over humanity and the rest of Life) leads to colossal failure. To the extent that modernity remains “real,” so does a 6ME: they go together. Maybe, then, it’s modernity that’s hyperbole. It still rhymes.
go to link to see source article with links and charts, etc
Many of the stark conclusions I offer on Do the Math and in conversations with others rest on the equally stark premise that we have initiated a sixth mass extinction (6ME). Other self-defeating factors also loom large in establishing modernity as a temporary stunt, including resource depletion, aquifer exhaustion, desertification and salination of agricultural fields, climate change, microplastics, waste streams, “forever” toxins, and plenty more. People do call it a poly-crisis, after all (I prefer meta-crisis as most symptoms trace to the same root mindset of separateness and conquest).
Yet, towering over these concerns is a sixth mass extinction. Mass extinctions are defined as brief periods during which over 75% of species go extinct. I take it as given that large, hungry, high-maintenance mammals like humans won’t be among the lucky survivors—who are more likely to hail from families like microbes, mollusks, arthropods, or otherwise small, scrappy critters. In any case, it’s bad…very bad.
Invocation of the 6ME serves as a final nail in the coffin…end of story…to be avoided at all costs. All the aspects we like about modernity lose appeal when held up against the 6ME as a direct consequence. Even though the other challenges listed above can carry the argument as well, they generally must do so as a set, and we’re not so talented at apprehending parallel concerns—imagining each to be surmountable in isolation (pointlessly; it’s whack-a-mole). The 6ME delivers a single, inarguable, fatal blow to modernity, which is why I have taken to invoking it as a heavy-handed “nuclear option” straight away. No point playing around. While it may seem extreme, extreme circumstances justify extreme responses.
But is the threat real, or rhetorical? Basing arguments against modernity largely—though not entirely—on the 6ME could amount to overblown doomerism. In this post, I challenge myself on the veracity of 6ME claims. Have I fallen into a false sense of the urgency of this moment? Do I really believe a 6ME is going to play out?
Evidence
Okay, we can’t truly know the future—yet some developments are reasonably certain: like continued expansion of the universe (apparently to a cold “heat death“); the sun entering red-giant senescence in 5 billion years; oceans evaporating in something like a billion years due to increasing solar intensity; our own deaths; continued cycles of years, seasons, days; rocks tumbling downhill rather than up, etc. Likewise, only a small fraction of the species alive today will evade extinction for 100 million years, even in the absence of a 6ME crisis. Climate will change as it always has—independent of the recent anthropogenic slap—and species will adapt, disappear, or emerge as a result. Aversion to a 6ME is not the same as assuming everything is otherwise static or perfect (which I am often assumed to imply, even though I don’t say/think anything as simplistic as that).
Current trends are rather clear, and ominous (see hockey stick and ecological nosedive posts, and this Guardian article). Extinction rates are up 100–1,000 times the background rate—and possibly higher; estimates err on the conservative side. Even at the low end, we are currently witnessing the highest extinction rate since the Chicxulub impact that took out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Serious stuff.
Relatedly, the count of living beings is falling fast. Annual population declines tend to be in the 1–2% range among mammals, birds, fish, and insects, accumulating to average declines of more than half in less than half-a-century. The road to extinction necessarily travels through population decline. Ecological interdependencies translate to collateral damage: insect loss means bird loss, for instance. At some point, the Web of Life crafted over many millions of years becomes too damaged to repair itself or hold its integrity, resulting in a cascade of failures at all trophic levels.
The Wikipedia page on the 6ME provides a thorough background and copious citations from the scientific literature that I won’t try to replicate here. I encourage reading or skimming the page, which among other things conveys an overwhelming consensus on the reality of the phenomenon. The exceedingly high extinction rate is not at all a fringe belief among those who have done the legwork. I would label the deniers as “fringe,” except they are essentially extinct themselves, among the professionals.
Causes
This one isn’t hard, and I won’t belabor the point. In a nutshell, it’s human activity and consumption. It’s 8 billion people, most of whom strive within the market system of modernity, placing back-breaking and unprecedented demands on Earth and on the Community of Life. The encroachment by and for agriculture, extraction, development, and disposal is a dominant phenomenon across the planet, leaving precious little wild space (especially contiguous) for biodiversity to remain intact. And what remains is shrinking fast—cut off and cut down.
This Nature article includes an informative graphic ordering and breaking down the ten largest contributors to extinction threats. Climate change is seventh on the list, following over-exploitation, agricultural activity, urban development, invasion/disease, pollution, and environmental modification.
What this means is that the push to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy (itself a conjectural fantasy) would do precious little to address the 6ME threat. In many ways, it makes the situation worse by increasing materials extraction (a very materials-heavy enterprise due to diffuse energy density), co-opting more land for energy capture, and most importantly keeping modernity’s pedal to the metal on the most substantial causes of species loss (e.g., the six items in front of climate change on the list referenced above). Full steam ahead, just without as much actual steam!
But is it Mass Extinction?
While extinction rates are through the roof, and wild population declines aim the barrel straight toward extinction of an enormous number of species, we certainly cannot claim to have carried out a sixth mass extinction…yet. By various estimates, we may have already lost something like 1–10% of species—predicted to climb up to 13–27% by 2100. While this (highly uncertain) estimate falls short of the 75% mass extinction level, three big points: 1) beware cascading failures (domino effect); 2) the year 2100 is not the end of time, as so many projections unintentionally imply, and just an instant from now on relevant timescales; and 3) these numbers are already tragically huge, when you think about what it means—millions of species, gone forever!
In any case, if one is to be accused of hyperbole, it is on these grounds: we have decidedly not yet carried out a 6ME. Two seconds into a jump off a skyscraper, some may object that it’s premature to talk about a sidewalk splat that hasn’t happened yet. It’s therefore unfair to say we’ve caused a mass extinction, even if we are certainly causing a phenomenon that has all the hallmarks of early-onset extinction. That said, splat-objectors had better propose a realistic prevention strategy—and fast—rather than simply pointing out that the splat hasn’t happened yet. Not bloody useful!
The question I have is: what possible reversal would accompany modernity’s continuation, given the overwhelming balance of loss and decline? It’s hard to look at the graph above and be glib about a sudden reversal of the nosedive—without a single credible plan or even much discussion at all about the decline itself, much less what it would take to effect such a reversal.
The stakes are too high to tolerate “what-about-ism,” pointing to isolated counterexamples of recovery. Nice try, but the totality of the matter is clear. One comprehensive study of over 70,000 vertebrate species finds that the “losers” outnumber the “winners” by 16 to 1. I mean, even mass extinctions have their winners, right? So, pointing them out accomplishes nothing other than addling our meat-brain simplification circuits—such an easy thing to do! When modernity’s root practices (agriculture, extraction, development) directly destroy habitats, one has to invoke magical thinking to believe that biodiversity could recover without a serious contraction of modernity’s scale and practices, which I assure you is not a seriously-entertained proposal on the table—putting us all at dire risk.
So: it is too soon to assert as proven fact that we are experiencing a mass extinction presently. But it’s not unreasonable to speak in such terms when extinction rates are orders-of-magnitude higher than normal—at their highest point since the last mass extinction—while the present and projected trajectory promises to accumulate more damage unless the situation changes radically.
Dismissals and Timescales
A common reaction to bad news that hasn’t yet fully developed to the point of being “clear-and-present” is to dismiss it—especially if operating at an incomprehensible scale (parodied well in the movie Don’t Look Up). The reflex is easy to understand: Earth is so inconceivably large that surely we can’t budge it, meaningfully. A casual glance (in select luckier places) reveals unimaginably large tracts of forest and an abundance of life. Whether about pollution, waste (plastics, for instance), climate change, or a 6ME, knee-jerk common sense says that such an immense substrate as Earth can tolerate anything we throw at it. Left out of this impulsive mental equation is 8 billion people advancing ever-expanding ecological challenges in every corner of the globe. Think again. It needn’t “compute” in our heads to still be true.
Part of the difficulty lies in timescales. A forest might look healthy to our naïve eyes: it’s got trees for god’s sake! What more could be relevant? But superficial appearances can be deceiving. Take the Elwha River, for example. About 100 years ago, dams were erected for hydroelectric power, cutting salmon off from the interior forest of the Olympic mountains. Gone was a counter-current conveyor belt of nutrients from the ocean that had been in place for countless millennia and that was vital to long-term health of flora and fauna. The damage won’t be apparent immediately, but gradually nutrients wash out and are not replaced, starving the forest of essential building blocks. Centuries later, the forest could be gone (which is why the S’Klallam people pushed—successfully—for the dams to be removed). Much like the skyscraper analog above, it’s like putting a plastic bag over someone’s head and commenting after 5 seconds that their oxygen levels are still fine, so what’s all the fuss about plastic bags? They’re not dangerous, see! Wait for it…
I had a similar realization on a lovely hike east of San Diego in 2023. It was a warm, sunny morning in early April and the ceanothus (California lilac) was in splendid bloom. A vast area was decked out in lavender-colored florets. Despite the lovely impression it formed on the retina, the eardrums revealed a more sinister story. It was dead silent. No bees. Given the ideal conditions, the buzz of bees should have been almost deafening: bumble bees in particular love ceanothus flowers. But pollinators—not just domesticated honeybees—are in serious trouble in the last decade or so. Without sufficient pollination, no new (or too few) seeds will form, and the next generation of ceanothus will fail to materialize. Come back in 50 years and this wild garden could be wiped clean of ceanothus, forever. What looks pretty today may be already effectively a form of walking-dead. It’s far too soon to have experienced the myriad rippling consequences of our recent fever-pitch assault on natural systems. The show is just getting started, and natural resilience can put on a brave face for a time. Life will struggle to do its thing right up until it no longer can, easily fooling our ignorant eyes.
Resilience?
Wait: is Life fragile, or robust? It’s both, of course, depending on context (a single logical label seldom suffices when complexity reigns). Anyone who has waged war on flora or fauna designated as weeds or pests will attest that Life fights back. It must be so, or Life would not have survived both chronic and acute hammerings over billions of years. Climate has changed many times; continents merged and separated; volcanoes and even asteroids took aim at life. Some species always go by the wayside in such events, to varying degrees, while others survive and expand.
As a thought experiment, if humans were suddenly removed from Earth, would the 6ME proceed on its own momentum, in reaction to the habitat destruction and “forever” toxins spread across the globe? We don’t know, of course. It might. I tend to doubt so, but can’t really defend that gut sense. I look at abandoned places like Chernobyl—where Life has sprung back to create a forested ruin full of wildlife—and think it can all be okay-ish. It may take millions of years to shed the severe perturbations of modernity, as we’ve essentially shaken the etch-a-sketch and distributed non-native species around the globe in a madcap game of forced reconciliation. Picture the cages of a zoo suddenly evaporating: the mayhem will continue for a while before settling down to a slowly-evolving quasi-equilibrium. On the other hand, ocean acidification from CO2 absorption might put an end to the foundation of life in the oceans, impoverishing the land as well. And climate change—while seventh on the list presently—may stomp entire regions and relegate much of the present biodiversity to the dust bin (e.g., tropical rainforests turned to deserts). So, it may very well be too late to stop a 6ME.
On the other extreme, what seems reasonably clear is that keeping the gas pedal engaged on modernity’s engine will continue to perpetuate population declines and extinctions until the job is complete and ecological collapse—thus our own—is effectively assured. So, let’s not do that. Let’s recognize modernity as a poison pill that is killing the planet, and begin shifting to a radically different way.
But, what about the middle case, where modernity self-terminates—as I believe it will—over the next century or two—possibly driven by demographic decline? Is the 6ME crisis averted? Because this scenario sits between the “disappearance” and “continuation” scenarios, my answer must also lie between, meaning that it could go either way, but has a lower chance of rebounding than in the “sudden disappearance” scenario. In fact, failure of institutions and global supply could make billions of humans desperate for food, in which case anything larger than a mouse may be in real trouble—further advancing the extinction drive. It’s even possible that modernity self-terminates because of ecological collapse as the 6ME gathers steam, becoming its own cascading contribution to the phenomenon. Have we already passed a tipping point? We don’t know. We’re in uncharted territory, which at least ought to make us sit up straight and question our ways.
Overreaction and Asymmetric Risk
Because we have no crystal ball, and can’t peer into the far future, we simply can’t know how serious the present extinction surge will turn out to be. Given the inherent resiliency of Life, am I overreacting by taking the alarming trends seriously? Might I just chill out?
Obviously, no one can say with any certainty. But let’s contrast two statements that can definitely be differentiated on the grounds of veracity.
- Everything is actually fine: no credible cause for alarm.
- Unprecedented alarm bells are going off, and could plausibly portend our doom.
The extreme downside for humans if the 6ME assessment is correct would appear to me to completely overwhelm the speculation that maybe somehow—against all current evidence—Earth’s Community of Life can tolerate this unprecedented shock. That’s classic asymmetric risk. The precautionary principle strongly suggests we not be dismissive of 6ME warnings.
Thus, I would not call talk of a 6ME hyperbole. It has a very real and serious basis, whose plausible consequences are rather severe for humans. Waving it off would seem to be the height of irresponsibility and hubris. If I owned and edited a newspaper, the 300-point font headline would read, every day:
SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION STILL UNDERWAYI’m not clear what other headline would possibly merit displacing this one. It’s a message that bears repeating—never deserving the label “old news.” Ironically, as long as there are newspapers, the headline will likely remain true.
Last Ditch Effort
Before letting it rest, let me take one final crack at the validity of invoking the 6ME. Whether it is appropriate to speak as if the 6ME is essentially baked-in depends—as so much does—on context.
The present context is that the vast majority of people in our culture assume that modernity continues. In that mental space, a 6ME is essentially guaranteed to play out, and therefore constitutes a fair tool to employ for dislodging ubiquitous faith in modernity.
Whether I personally believe the 6ME will play out to true mass-extinction levels in the fullness of time is essentially irrelevant, as my faith in modernity is already shattered, so that I can imagine (hope for) modernity’s disappearance well before the situation is irreversible. Still, it’s completely fair to point out that the price of prioritizing modernity (over humanity and the rest of Life) leads to colossal failure. To the extent that modernity remains “real,” so does a 6ME: they go together. Maybe, then, it’s modernity that’s hyperbole. It still rhymes.
Sunday, May 4, 2025
Magical Thinking
Magical Thinking. Dave Pollard, How to Save the World. May 3, 2025
Every few years I read an essay that is so well-written and so pertinent to the subjects of this blog that I just want to copy and paste it into my blog (with attribution of course) so it stays as a permanent part of my 22-year-long chronicle of civilization’s demise.
The latest from British historian-diplomat Aurélien, entitled Do You Believe In Magic, is just such an essay.
In it, he resummarizes what I’ve described as the five underlying causes of, and contributors to, the polycrisis that has given rise to the current collapse of the systems constituting our civilization. They are (in my own words):
In short, this is why (I believe) collapse is occurring, and why it will inevitably be a complete collapse, rendering life in future centuries unrecognizably different from how we live today.
Enough words from me. Please read his whole (long — 5500 words) article, linked above. Here are some of what I thought were the most cogent passages:
Maybe I like this essay so much because it is so consonant with my own thoughts. But whatever the reason: What he said.
Every few years I read an essay that is so well-written and so pertinent to the subjects of this blog that I just want to copy and paste it into my blog (with attribution of course) so it stays as a permanent part of my 22-year-long chronicle of civilization’s demise.
The latest from British historian-diplomat Aurélien, entitled Do You Believe In Magic, is just such an essay.
In it, he resummarizes what I’ve described as the five underlying causes of, and contributors to, the polycrisis that has given rise to the current collapse of the systems constituting our civilization. They are (in my own words):
- The staggering complexity and interdependency of the now-global systems on which our civilization now rests and depends;
- The ever-growing size and scale of the human population and its activities, infrastructure, and artifacts;
- The increasing incompetence of all of us, but especially those with wealth and power, to cope with the predicaments that collapse presents. This incompetence (an objective statement of fact, not a dismissive judgement) has been more than a century in the making, and would take decades to rectify. It has four aspects:
- Insufficient cognitive capacity to navigate our complex world safely and effectively (we have not been taught how to think for ourselves, nor given enough practice using our critical, creative and imaginative thinking skills);
- Insufficient information and knowledge (and too much misinformation) to have an adequate context for forming coherent and useful beliefs and taking appropriate action;
- Insufficient technical and ‘soft’ skills and experience to be able to understand what needs to be done and to carry out appropriate and necessary actions (and even to do our day-to-day jobs) capably, especially collaboratively with others;
- Insufficient mental health to be able to think coherently and act in a reasoned and effective manner;
- A lack of appreciation of how things actually get done (from lack of knowledge of history and lack of practical experience), and a commensurate incapacity to practically intervene in our failing systems in useful and productive ways; and
- The inherent fragility and lack of resilience in these systems caused by the pursuit of profit and short-term thinking instead of effectiveness and sustainability.
In short, this is why (I believe) collapse is occurring, and why it will inevitably be a complete collapse, rendering life in future centuries unrecognizably different from how we live today.
Enough words from me. Please read his whole (long — 5500 words) article, linked above. Here are some of what I thought were the most cogent passages:
Visions are easy, but the West has progressively lost the capacity to formulate and operate mechanisms for putting them into practice. In part, this is because there is very little inherited understanding left of the necessary practical steps. For example, re-shoring manufacture of some pharmaceuticals would involve activities that most politicians and pundits have never heard of, let alone be able to describe. Finding and importing supplies of chemicals, designing and building factories, recruiting and training skilled technicians and graduates in chemical engineering (having set up the necessary courses first, naturally), dealing with all the various health and safety hazards, setting up a distribution system for the products … I doubt if much of our current ruling class and its parasites has any idea even of the steps involved, let alone how to sequence them. By contrast, there’s a great deal of experience in closing factories, making workforces redundant and tying yourself to overseas suppliers. But unfortunately, that’s not much use here…
The Anglo-Saxon (now more broadly Western) fixation with archetypal heroic entrepreneurs and university dropouts has obscured the historical fact that no significant industry, and no key technology, has ever been developed without some level of planning and government encouragement…
[The recent Western government approach to crises has been] to create the right “magical” environment (low taxes, few regulations) and then the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurs would spontaneously do the rest, through the “magic” of the “market.” The magician, however, having summoned up these powers, should make sure to stay well away from the working… Instead of doing things, governments “create the conditions” for others to do things, and sit back in hopeful anticipation. Serial failures, in true New Age fashion, meant that the spell was not right, or more usually that it was not used with enough will and conviction. The idea that governments should actually do things is considered a quaint anachronism…
As a result, where governments actually did have to do things, there was no tradition or capacity in planning and implementation to fall back on. Covid demonstrated this, in the search for some magical gizmo that would solve the problem without the large-scale government programmes that were no longer possible. Vaccines, for all their questionable efficacy, could be presented as “creating the conditions” for people to return to work, so enabling the government to declare the problem solved. The incoherence of Mr Trump’s attempts to rebuild US industry through tariffs, and the ignominious retreat this seems to have provoked, are simply the latest example of the magical thinking that says vague aspirations can be converted into specific results through willpower and the creation of the right “conditions.” In reality, it seems unlikely that anyone in Mr Trump’s confidence has the remotest idea of what would be practically involved in rebuilding US Industry. Likewise, the incoherence between ambitious, high-level American plans in Ukraine, in Gaza and in the Middle East more generally, and their desultory and amateurish execution, has been much noticed…
Thus, whatever may be the incoherent strategic objectives western governments set themselves in trying to navigate the appalling challenges of the future, and even regain lost ground if possible, they are highly unlikely to be achieved. Not only is the technical capability lacking, but the very thought-processes are absent as well… Inevitably, as the capability for holistic thought and planning has been lost, governments and others have found themselves adopting little ad hoc measures which they delude themselves, when aggregated, can collectively be passed off as a “strategy.”… Naturally, then, governments don’t really have strategies for dealing with the massive environmental and climate challenges of today and the near future, for example: they just have sets of disconnected initiatives from brainstorming sessions organised by management consultants, many at cross-purposes with each other…
The result is that the machinery and the competence, and even more the capacity for strategic thought and planning, do not exist at anything like the level required to tackle the really major problems discussed in my previous essay. To take a simple example, the price of gas in Europe is likely to rise very sharply in the next few years, and there may be actual shortages if the Russians decide to be awkward. There will be electricity outages in the winter and people will be without heat and power because they can’t afford it, or it simply isn’t available. The last time anything similar happened was the 1973 oil crisis, which resulted in well-organised countries such as France and Japan turning to crash nuclear programmes. The thought of any western country having the imagination or the resources to mount any programme of such ambition these days is laughable. We can imagine a procession of politicians telling people to buy warm clothes, run around to keep warm and invest in solar panels, which if you are an unemployed single mother living on the fourth floor of a tower block isn’t particularly helpful.
Yet in a way this minimalist, short-term approach is understandable, even if it’s not very attractive. The combination of really large and potentially insoluble problems, and a radically reduced capability to deal with problems of any kind, virtually dictates that governments will at best be reduced to merely fiddling with things, and at worst just spend their time arguing about whose fault it is…
[When it comes to programs like recycling and waste management, for example], the total size of the problem is immeasurably larger than the sum total of the initiatives that individuals can take to deal with it… The result is that, because the size of the problems we face in many areas is overwhelming, critics, activists and others fasten on to anything that can be done quickly, whatever its real impact, just because it can be done, and also because often it will not affect them… The discrepancy between the sheer magnitude of upcoming problems and the sum total of the ideas for dealing with them, no matter how individually well-founded, is partly because few of us are capable of comprehending what really large numbers mean…
Effectively, therefore, we have built highly complex, extremely fragile, urban systems that will collapse, perhaps terminally, after relatively little stress, and which depend absolutely on the continuity of power and fresh water supplies for ever and ever. Because there is no reversionary mode, and no Plan B if anything goes wrong, we rely absolutely on the favour of the gods for our survival… [As an example], over the last generation, food distribution chains, which used to be quite simple, have taken on a hallucinatory complexity, not least as sub-contractors and sub-sub contractors have become the norm. The resulting system seems supernaturally complex, especially since its main purpose, after all, should be to make sure we have enough to eat. Yet in fact, the actual purpose of the system is to make as much money as possible for shareholders and managers. Western states thus depend for their very survival on elaborate and complex food distribution chains that are designed to reduce costs to the bare minimum, and have little or no redundancy in them. All we can do is pray that they are not greatly disrupted…
Now, few of us wanted this situation, and even the glassy-eyed utopian ideologues of the 1980s didn’t actually think it would turn out this way. But the combination of immensely complex and fragile systems with the ever-decreasing capability to manage them, or even stop them disintegrating, is lethal, if only our rulers realised it. After all, ask them how the population and industry of Europe is going to manage in an era of massively more expensive natural gas, and they have no idea, other than that some magical solution will pop out of a Powerpoint presentation. As Leonard Cohen said, we have seen The Future, and it’s murder. All our rulers can do is wait for a miracle.
Maybe I like this essay so much because it is so consonant with my own thoughts. But whatever the reason: What he said.
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Ockham's Razor and JPM's Heliocentrism
William of Ockham and the Collapse of Complexity: A Razor’s Edge for the End Times
The Man Who Cut Through the Noise
In the 14th century, a Franciscan friar named William of Ockham wielded an intellectual tool so sharp it still slices through modern delusions: Ockham’s Razor. His principle—“Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”—was a rebellion against medieval scholasticism’s tangled webs of abstraction. As the Church fractured under rival popes—each justifying their authority with layers of theological jargon—Ockham’s Razor would have cut through the pretense, like so: “If God is truly omnipotent, why does He need your bureaucracy?” (His defiance would cost him; he was excommunicated in 1328, but history would prove his blade sharper than their dogma.) Born during the chaotic aftermath of the Black Death, which wiped out a third of Europe’s population, Ockham developed his philosophy in an era when grand institutions clung to complexity while failing their people. Feudal lords enforced labyrinthine land laws to squeeze starving peasants; Ockham’s insistence on minimal assumptions would have retorted: “When the plague renders your contracts void, what survives but the simplest truth—that men must eat?” Seven centuries later, we face a parallel evasion of reality: as of April 2025, NOAA data reveals atmospheric CO₂ concentrations surged at a record-breaking rate in 2024—3.75 parts per million, the highest annual jump ever recorded. Yet the Trump administration suppressed the findings, burying them in social media posts instead of the agency’s usual press releases. Here, Ockham’s Razor cuts through the noise: the simplest truth—that we are losing the fight against climate collapse—is being obscured by institutional cowardice and bureaucratic sleight-of-hand (Environmental Integrity Project 2025; Friedman 2025).
Our current predicament reveals an even deeper irony: we now spend trillions subsidizing fossil fuels while pouring billions into “high-tech renewables” that, according to J.P. Morgan’s Heliocentrism report, have increased global solar capacity without displacing fossil fuel dependence. The renewable energy revolution has become its own kind of scholasticism—a complex theology of lithium batteries, rare earth minerals, and solar panels made in coal-fired factories. These technologies, while reducing direct emissions, simply replace one form of extraction with another:
- Cobalt mines where children work in toxic pits to power electric vehicles
- Lithium extraction that drains Andean groundwater for grid-scale batteries
- “Green” hydrogen projects that consume more electricity than they produce
Ockham would see this as the same old pattern: multiplying entities (new mines, new supply chains, new waste streams) rather than addressing the root problem—our refusal to reduce consumption. The J.P. Morgan report confirms this: despite $9 trillion spent on renewables since 2010, the renewable share of final energy consumption crawls forward at 0.3%-0.6% annually, while fossil fuels still power 80%-85% of industrial production (Cembalest 2025). The razor’s judgment is clear: no technology can sustain infinite growth on a finite planet.
The Jevons Paradox: Efficiency as a Trojan Horse
The report’s data exposes a brutal truth: the Jevons Paradox is alive and well. As solar and wind become cheaper, energy demand grows, swallowing efficiency gains. For example:
- Solar capacity doubled from 2021–2024, yet fossil fuel consumption rose in absolute terms.
- Battery storage additions (38 GW by 2027 in the U.S.) are outpaced by data center and AI energy demand, forcing utilities to add more natural gas capacity (Cembalest 2025).
This paradox undermines the core promise of renewables: that they will replace fossil fuels. Instead, they enable greater energy use, reinforcing the status quo. Ockham’s Razor demands we ask: Why layer complexity (renewables + storage + grid overhauls) when the simplest solution is to consume less? ......................................
............................................ John Gray’s icy nihilism—his insistence that progress is a myth and collapse is inevitable—aligns somewhat with Ockham’s empiricism. But where Gray sees futility, Ockham might see clarity. The data does not demand despair; it demands adaptation. Indigenous philosophies, like the Iroquois Seventh Generation Principle, already embody this simplicity: act today with the seventh generation in mind. No need for hyperobjects or existential dread—just a direct, intergenerational contract with reality.
Modern environmental policy, by contrast, operates in a realm of abstraction. The Paris Agreement’s target of limiting warming to 1.5°C relies on speculative technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS), which has yet to be deployed at scale despite decades of research. The J.P. Morgan report mocks this as the “highest citation-to-usage ratio in the history of science,” noting that planned CCS capacity is just 2.5% of current emissions (Cembalest 2025). Ockham would dismiss such wishful thinking and focus on what we know works: reducing emissions at the source, protecting intact ecosystems, and scaling down unsustainable consumption. ...........................
....................... The madness will not end gracefully. Those profiting from complexity will fight to keep their labyrinths intact. But as the walls crack, the choice becomes stark: cling to the sinking ship of business-as-usual, or grab the razor and start cutting ropes.
In the end, Ockham’s Razor offers no false comforts—only the clarifying shock of cold steel against delusion. The truth was always simple: we were never too stupid to survive, only too clever by half.
Friday, February 14, 2025
Anderson re Hansen
Has Global Warming Accelerated – a short response to Hansen et al. Kevin Anderson. February 13, 2025.
I was asked by Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News for my thoughts on James Hansen and colleagues’ recent paper Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? Bob’s article is available at: New research led by James Hansen …
For those interested, a slightly modified version of my full quote is copied below:
I was asked by Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News for my thoughts on James Hansen and colleagues’ recent paper Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? Bob’s article is available at: New research led by James Hansen …
For those interested, a slightly modified version of my full quote is copied below:
Even with robust data, scientists can—and regularly do—arrive at slightly different conclusions. The differences often stem from the assumptions they choose to make, both explicitly and implicitly, as well as how they interpret incomplete or competing datasets. This is the essence of scientific inquiry: through open discussion and debate our understanding improves. For those who critically engage with science, additional factors such as risks and consequences come into play, especially on complex issues like climate change.
In this context, the policy process has abdicated its responsibilities, opting instead for short-term acquiescence with business as usual, rather than offering strong, transparent and cogent leadership. After decades of half-truths, delusion, and outright lies from those in positions of power—and often from their advisors as well—we now find ourselves facing severe risks of disastrous outcomes. Whether we align with the more conservative forecasts of the IPCC or the more challenging warnings of Jim Hansen, the policy implications are strikingly similar. We are rapidly blasting through the 1.5°C commitment, and even staying “well below 2°C” now demands global emission cuts of around 7% annually,☨ starting this year—a rate nearly 2 percentage points higher than we saw during the most stringent COVID lockdowns, and that was for just one year
From a policy perspective, and certainly from the viewpoint of anyone concerned about their family, community, or the future of humanity, the science in 2025 is unambiguous. Without abandoning failed incremental green policies in favour of swift, deep, and transformative emission reductions, we face a future fraught with dire consequences if the IPCC is correct, or catastrophic outcomes if Jim Hansen’s analysis proves accurate. His latest findings only underscore the shameful failure of many to engage honestly with physical reality and call for the radical, if not revolutionary, shifts now required if we’re to deliver on even a weak interpretation of Paris. We are not sleepwalking into the apocalypse—we’re charging toward it with full awareness of what’s at stake. Even more damning, we can already see the devastating effects of our actions tearing apart the livelihoods—and even the lives—of vulnerable, often poor, low-emitting communities, far from the high-emitting areas where we live, and frequently comprised of people of colour. These communities, along with our own children in the near future, are the canaries in the coal mine—and yet, we appear willing to sacrifice them without ever learning from their suffering.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Hansen: Global Warming Has Accelerated. Why? What Are The Consequences?
Global Warming Has Accelerated. Why? What Are the Consequences? James Hansen and Pushker Kharecha. Feb. 12, 2025.
Once upon a time, Earth Sciences was blessed to have brilliant, articulate, scientific leaders, such as Jule Charney and Francis Bretherton, whose knowledge and overview of climate science commanded respect. And there were many other scientists with deep understanding of the scientific method, who helped spur progress in the field and assure that progress was recognized. Top science writers, such as Walter Sullivan, could rely on such scientific researchers for perceptive descriptions of the major issues and progress in addressing them. We recall fondly learning from Charney’s colleague at MIT, Peter Stone, who served as the principal adviser for climate research at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, back in the days when Charney was trying to decide whether global equilibrium climate sensitivity to doubled atmospheric CO2 was more like 2°C or 4°C. The correct answer would have enormous practical implications.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in 1988, and endorsed by the United Nations that year, produces comprehensive climate assessments about every six or seven years. The reports contain a large amount of useful information; the most recent report on the physical science basis of climate change, the Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC AR6), was published in August 2021. IPCC’s approach to climate analysis came to be dominated by use of global climate models (GCMs) for climate simulations of the past 1-2 centuries. We have taken a complementary approach, placing comparable emphasis on paleoclimate data, GCM modeling, and modern observations of climate processes, as described in our three main papers published in the past decade: (1) “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms,” (2) “Global warming in the pipeline,” and (3) “Global warming has accelerated.” The third of these, published last week, was long, as it tied all three together, especially via its Supplementary Material (SM), which usually houses only secondary material. Here is a link to the Abstract + Paper + SM as a single document. Below, we first provide a plain language summary of the three principal conclusions of this paper and then address questions raised in the media by kibitzers.
1. The leap of global temperature in 2023-2024 is explained; no new physics is required.
The 0.4°C increase of global temperature in 2023-24 was caused equally by increase of absorbed solar radiation and a weak El Nino. Increase of absorbed sunlight was mainly spurred by reduction of aerosols (tiny particles), especially those emitted by ships, as the International Maritime Organization imposed a strict limit on the sulfur content of ship fuels beginning in 2020. Aerosols serve as cloud formation nuclei; the induced clouds reflect sunlight and cause global cooling that offsets part of the global warming caused by increasing greenhouse gases. This cooling offset has long been described as a “Faustian bargain” because aerosols constitute particulate air pollution that kills millions of people every year. Our Faustian payments – an increase of global warming – come due when we reduce health-damaging air pollution and thus reduce aerosol cooling.
2. Climate sensitivity is 50 percent larger than the best estimate of IPCC.
We show that the climate sensitivity required to yield best agreement with observed global warming in the past century is 4.5°C for doubled CO2, which is 50% larger than IPCC’s best estimate of 3°C. Together, conclusions 1 and 2 imply that near-term global temperature will decrease very little: thus, averaged over the El Nino/La Nina cycle, the 1.5°C limit has been reached. IPCC’s estimate of climate sensitivity depended on the assumption that aerosol climate forcing was unchanging during the period 1970-2005, but we show that aerosol forcing increased (became more negative) during that period as aerosols spread more globally, including over pristine ocean areas where their effect is greater. If aerosols were fixed, greenhouse gases are the only forcing and the climate sensitivity required to match observed warming would be about 3°C for doubled CO2. But the net forcing was actually smaller during that period because the negative aerosol forcing was growing, so a larger climate sensitivity is required to match observed warming of the past century. Our estimated climate sensitivity coincides with the sensitivity derived from glacial-to-interglacial climate change, the portion of the paleoclimate record for which precise knowledge of greenhouse gases is available.
3. Accelerated warming increases ice melt and upper ocean warming, threatening to shut down North Atlantic overturning circulation by mid-century and cause large sea level rise.
We show that observed ice melt over the past 20 years was similar to assumed ice melt in climate simulations of “Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms.” The rate of ice melt did not increase in the past decade, but, given the leap of global temperature to +1.5°C above preindustrial, we expect ice melt to accelerate, especially in regions such as southeast Greenland where ice melt is injected directly into the Irminger Sea, a region where deepwater forms. The North Atlantic is warming at depths beneath the surface wind-mixed ocean layer, with warmer water penetrating beneath the sea ice and ice shelves. Paleoclimate data suggest that such sub-ice warming can lead to sudden loss of regional sea ice and thus increased warming and summer rainfall on lower reaches of the Greenland ice sheet and increased freshwater injection into the ocean. Our climate simulations suggest that such increased ice melt and rapid surface warming can shut down the overturning ocean circulation by mid-century, which would be the “Point of No Return” because shutdown is irreversible in less than centuries. Large sea level rise would become inevitable, as heat normally transported into the North Atlantic would remain in the Southern Hemisphere and speed melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Global warming acceleration increases this danger because the increased heating both reduces the density of the upper layer of the ocean and increases the rate of ice melt.
Reactions. How would Charney, Bretherton and other scientific leaders of yore have responded to these papers and assertions, and how would the media have responded? It’s a pretty safe bet they would conclude that the papers are a serious analysis. They would think about what observations are needed to confirm and illuminate the issues that are raised. Instead, much reaction in the media seems closer to the continual squealing of farm animals. It is hard to fault the science writers; their stories reflect what they are told by the scientists who are willing or even eager to respond to their inquiries. We find many responses to be unscientific and surprising, given the intergenerational issues that are raised. An illuminating example is the response to Seth Borenstein, the climate science writer for the largest news organization in the world (Associated Press), who was told by 5 of his 6 go-to climate experts that he should not even write about our paper “Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms;” thus he did not. The paper was also blackballed by the IPCC AR6 report; not a single mention in the several-thousand-page report. Below we speculate about reasons for this treatment, but first let’s respond to current reactions to our “Acceleration” paper.
Reaction 1. Feedbacks. It is claimed that we neglect climate feedbacks, which cause most of the warming and cause the largest warming to be in the Southern Hemisphere, not the Northern Hemisphere, where the ship aerosol effect is largest. In fact (see our Fig. 10), the largest sea surface warming is at latitudes 30-50N in the Northern Hemisphere, where ship aerosol forcing is largest. The total ocean heat content gain may be larger in the more massive Southern Hemisphere ocean, but that supports our interpretation. Most increased energy flux into the planet is from climate feedbacks. We evaluated the contributions of forcings and feedbacks that affect Earth’s albedo (Fig. SM15, in the Supplementary Material of our current paper) and energy imbalance. Over the period (since 2000) of precise satellite measurements of Earth’s albedo (reflectivity), Earth has darkened by 1.7 W/m2. Based on the geographical and temporal distribution of the darkening, we infer that about 0.5 W/m2 of this darkening is the ship aerosol forcing. About 0.15 W/m2 is ice/snow albedo feedback, due to reduced sea ice area, which is well-defined. Thus, by subtraction, most of Earth’s darkening must be the cloud feedback that is expected with global warming. It is a huge feedback for the 20-year period with satellite data. If we over-estimated the aerosol forcing, the cloud feedback is even larger.
This simple bar graph (Fig. SM15) has another story to tell, which Charney and Bretherton would have recognized instantly: the large cloud feedback in a brief period implies that climate sensitivity is much higher than 3°C for doubled CO2. Charney’s comparison of climate models with 2°C and 4°C sensitivity revealed that a 2°C response is provided by doubled CO2 forcing plus water vapor feedback and small sea ice feedback. Addition of only modest cloud feedback raises the sensitivity to 3°C, as an amplifying feedback enhances all other amplifying feedbacks. Thus, the large cloud feedback in the past two decades provides independent confirmation of high climate sensitivity.
Reaction 2. IPCC AR6 models yield realistic global warming acceleration without a ship aerosol effect. The person making this claim – and asserting that it contradicts our conclusions – apparently does not realize that there is a big difference between IPCC’s best estimate for aerosol forcing history and the aerosol forcing in GCMs participating in CMIP6 and IPCC AR6 climate simulations. The IPCC best estimate aerosol forcing is shown in our paper in Fig. 3 and in Figs. 13 and SM1 as updated by Forster et al. (2024). This IPCC aerosol forcing includes the direct aerosol forcing and the larger indirect effect on clouds. This IPCC aerosol forcing is used in the literature for various purposes, e.g., in derivation of an “emergent constraint” on climate sensitivity; these authors assume, consistent with the IPCC aerosol forcing estimate, that aerosol forcing is nearly unchanging over the period 1970-2005. Then, based on observed global warming and assuming that greenhouse gases are the only significant changing forcing in that period, they infer an “emergent constraint” on climate sensitivity: specifically, sensitivity must be close to 3°C for doubled CO2.
However, if they allowed the aerosol forcing to change during that period, they would have found quite different results. We showed that there is a one-to-one relation between the climate sensitivity that gives best fit to observed warming and the trend of aerosol forcing in the period 1970-2005: if the aerosol forcing is constant, the sensitivity is ~3°C; if the aerosol forcing increases as in Bauer’s Matrix aerosol model (almost 0.5 W/m2), the sensitivity is ~4.5°C; if the aerosol forcing increases as in Bauer’s OMA aerosol model, the sensitivity is ~6°C (see Figs. 17 and 18). Given this one-to-one relation between climate sensitivity and the aerosol forcing change during 1970-2005, the “emergent constraint” that climate sensitivity is near 3°C amounts to the following: “if we assume that climate sensitivity is near 3°C, we find that climate sensitivity is near 3°C.”
For the sake of estimating climate sensitivity, we made climate simulations for 1850-2024 with two free parameters (climate sensitivity and the change of aerosol forcing during 1970-2005) and two constraints (1.6°C global warming between 1850 and 2024, and 0.18°C/decade warming during 1970-2005). The best fit was obtained with sensitivity ~4.5°C for doubled CO2 and an increase of aerosol forcing during 1970-2005 similar to that in Bauer’s Matrix model.
After all this explanation, what is wrong with the assertion that CMIP/IPCC models already yield recent acceleration of global warming? Answer: many of the models in the CMIP/IPCC ensemble are not using the IPCC aerosol forcing history. The ensemble includes models that use the Bauer aerosol forcings, e.g., which were steeply increasing during 1970-2005 before stopping growth entirely or even switching to change of the opposite sign. Thus, the average of IPCC models yields global warming acceleration, but it cannot match observed acceleration and the results certainly do not support IPCC’s best estimate for aerosol forcing.
Reaction 3. Range of model fog. Another reaction is that observed rapid warming falls in the range of all CMIP/IPCC climate simulations, so there is no basis to question IPCC assumptions. CMIP/IPCC models include the good, the bad, and the ugly. Yet IPCC takes the distribution of model results as a probability distribution for the real world, using this distribution for mathematical analyses that separate IPCC from the possibility of widespread public understanding, much like the Wizard of Oz tried to overpower Dorothy and her friends. For their purpose, a “merit” of the huge range of this model fog is that IPCC will always be “right,” the real world will fall somewhere within that huge fog. Oops! Maybe not. In a paper that perhaps provided the “rationale” for IPCC to blackball our “Ice Melt” paper, 15 authors, representing leading GCM groups, used 21 climate projections from eight “…state-of-the-science, IPCC class…” GCMs to conclude that “…the probability of an AMOC collapse is negligible. This is contrary to a recent modeling study [Hansen et al., 2016] that used a much larger, and in our assessment unrealistic, Northern Hemisphere freshwater forcing… According to our probabilistic assessment, the likelihood of an AMOC collapse remains very small (<1% probability) if global warming is below ~5K… ”. Here, even the range of model results does not seem to encompass all realistic possibilities: few climate experts would assert that 5°C global warming, sufficient to melt most of the ice on the planet, would be unlikely to shut down AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). Their models likely obtain AMOC stability only because injection of cold freshwater into the polar oceans in the models is underestimated or based on too-lethargic ice sheet models.
Models are essential for understanding ongoing climate change and projections for the future, but by themselves they are inadequate and unable to provide an adequate assessment. The models will be a much more powerful tool, if they are used along with an equally heavy emphasis on paleoclimate data and observations of ongoing climate processes, and the information from all of these combined with mindfulness of climate physics.
Reaction 4. We overlooked the role of decreased aerosols from China. The direct radiative effect of aerosol change is shown in clear-sky measurements of the global increase of absorbed solar radiation (Fig. SM8). The global effect of aerosol change in 2020-2023 relative to 2000-2010 is less than 0.1 W/m2, after the effect of changes in sea ice is removed. China may provide a large fraction of that flux change, but even in total this is a small effect. Change of all-sky absorbed solar radiation (Fig.9) is an order of magnitude larger and the temporal and spatial footprint coincides with the ship aerosol change, and clearly not with change of emissions from China, where the largest decrease was in 2005-2015. The spatial and temporal pattern of SST change (Figure 10) further support the dominance of ship aerosols. It is not surprising that the ship aerosols are much more effective; they are emitted into the lower part of the atmosphere in unpolluted ocean skies, where they have the most effect on clouds.
Bretherton and Charney would not have been confused about the role of Chinese aerosols, which they would recognize has no effect on our three main conclusions above. (1) most aerosol change in China occurred prior to 2020-2023 (Fig. 13), with negligible effect on the sudden global warming in 2023. (2) Our inference of an increasing global aerosol forcing during 1970-2005 and derivation of 4.5°C climate sensitivity are independent of the source of increased aerosol forcing. (3) Our conclusion that the danger of passing the “point of no return” (AMOC shutdown and large sea level rise) is increased by the accelerated North Atlantic warming is straightforward: the increased heating reduces the density of the upper layer of the ocean and increases the rate of ice melt – conclusions that do not depend on uncertainties about aerosols from China.
Reaction 5. Our results are an outlier. When we have answered all the questions, the critics always resort to “they are an outlier,” with results outside those of the “mainstream” climate research community. This is stated in a way that makes it seem that we are unlikely to be right, even when the real world offers ample evidence in support of our conclusions. The media is then forced to go along with the critics because they outnumber us (there are exceptions, e.g., the comprehensive article by Carrington in the Guardian). However, that’s not the way science works. Science does advance as data become available. Eventually this leads to corrections of the mainstream view – some minor, some major. The difficulty in the case of climate change is that slowness to recognize reality is particularly harmful to young people and future generations because of climate’s delayed response and the danger of passing the point of no return, as we emphasized in the video introduction to our paper.
One clarification is needed: our statement that “2°C is dead” was qualified with the phrase “unless a miracle occurs.” It is true that we do not expect a miracle, but the qualification should be included. It is also true that 2°C could be avoided via temporary purposeful cooling to reduce the massive geoengineering (geotransformation, if you prefer) that humanity is presently inflicting upon our home planet – but we do not have the knowledge to recommend such action and the public is nowhere near a point of endorsing such action. The closest thing to a miracle that is conceivable soon would be adoption of cost-free carbon fee-and-dividend policy that we have advocated for almost two decades, as required to underlie and unleash the millions of changes needed to move the world as rapidly as practical to carbon-free energy and a declining level of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Presidents Obama and Biden each had the opportunity to initiate such a revenue-neutral action as part of economic actions required to address economic crises early in their administrations. Instead, Obama did little for climate and Biden borrowed massive amounts of money from future generations (via deficit funding) to subsidize already mature (solar and wind) technologies, an approach that spurred inflation and invited a whiplash energy policy response from the competing political party.
Summary. How is it that we can be cast as “outliers,” if the real world supports our interpretation of ongoing climate change? In part, we suspect, it is because of the “cottage” industry (quotation marks because it is not a small industry) that has built up in support of IPCC. It’s easy to understand how IPCC went down the track of low climate sensitivity, as early climate models had simple cloud treatments that produced only modest climate feedback. For those low-sensitivity climate models to match observed global warming during the several decades of steady warming since 1970, they required that (unmeasured) aerosol forcing remain almost unchanging in that period. We now have evidence that aerosol forcing was actually increasing (becoming more negative) during that period, which is consistent with paleoclimate evidence that climate sensitivity is high. It is difficult for such a huge industry to change its position, but in the end physics will rule.
On a programmatic note: We have long realized that our conclusion that modern nuclear power needs to play an important role in decarbonizing global energy systems limits our ability to obtain public and philanthropic support for CSAS. Now, it seems, this situation is much aggravated by any open discussion that purposeful global cooling may eventually be needed. It’s reminiscent of an analysis once made by JEH’s oldest grandson at age 10: “If we keep doing what we are doing now then the environment will be ruined when the people who are kids now are grownups. And unless we can figure out how to make a time machine that actually works, there will be no way to go back in time to fix it. It’s not fair that the grownups now are ruining the atmosphere for the grownup in the future. Grownups now are scared of nuclear power but they should be scared of what will happen if they keep doing what they’re doing now because we know the ways to use nuclear power safe and we know that using fossil fuels is not safe. It’s very dangerous.” It seems that “grownups,” have now decided that, after tying one arm behind the back of young people (by setting back nuclear R&D several decades; nuclear power has the potential to be our least expensive 24/7 power source, as well as having the smallest environmental footprint), they should also tie their other arm behind their back by prohibiting research on purposeful cooling, in case the grownups screwed up again and did not leave a time machine.
The tactics of the kibitzers seem to work on most of the media and some of our prior supporters. Apparently, the kibitzers have learned from politicians that it doesn’t matter if what you say is true or not, and even ad hominem attacks are allowed – if enough people repeat the arguments often enough, they are accepted. Our attitude has usually been that we don’t have time to deal with all the disinformation and also focus on our scientific research – because eventually the truth will come out. The problem with this assumption is that continuation of the United Nations approach is dangerous. The current policy approach, and belief that it can lead to climate stabilization and cooling by mid-century, is inexorably putting young people into an untenable position. We believe that it is important, despite the advice the UN gets from their massive scientific support group, to clarify where the approach of the United Nations Conferences of the Parties is taking young people.
We are very grateful to those people who continue to support Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions.
Once upon a time, Earth Sciences was blessed to have brilliant, articulate, scientific leaders, such as Jule Charney and Francis Bretherton, whose knowledge and overview of climate science commanded respect. And there were many other scientists with deep understanding of the scientific method, who helped spur progress in the field and assure that progress was recognized. Top science writers, such as Walter Sullivan, could rely on such scientific researchers for perceptive descriptions of the major issues and progress in addressing them. We recall fondly learning from Charney’s colleague at MIT, Peter Stone, who served as the principal adviser for climate research at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, back in the days when Charney was trying to decide whether global equilibrium climate sensitivity to doubled atmospheric CO2 was more like 2°C or 4°C. The correct answer would have enormous practical implications.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in 1988, and endorsed by the United Nations that year, produces comprehensive climate assessments about every six or seven years. The reports contain a large amount of useful information; the most recent report on the physical science basis of climate change, the Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC AR6), was published in August 2021. IPCC’s approach to climate analysis came to be dominated by use of global climate models (GCMs) for climate simulations of the past 1-2 centuries. We have taken a complementary approach, placing comparable emphasis on paleoclimate data, GCM modeling, and modern observations of climate processes, as described in our three main papers published in the past decade: (1) “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms,” (2) “Global warming in the pipeline,” and (3) “Global warming has accelerated.” The third of these, published last week, was long, as it tied all three together, especially via its Supplementary Material (SM), which usually houses only secondary material. Here is a link to the Abstract + Paper + SM as a single document. Below, we first provide a plain language summary of the three principal conclusions of this paper and then address questions raised in the media by kibitzers.
1. The leap of global temperature in 2023-2024 is explained; no new physics is required.
The 0.4°C increase of global temperature in 2023-24 was caused equally by increase of absorbed solar radiation and a weak El Nino. Increase of absorbed sunlight was mainly spurred by reduction of aerosols (tiny particles), especially those emitted by ships, as the International Maritime Organization imposed a strict limit on the sulfur content of ship fuels beginning in 2020. Aerosols serve as cloud formation nuclei; the induced clouds reflect sunlight and cause global cooling that offsets part of the global warming caused by increasing greenhouse gases. This cooling offset has long been described as a “Faustian bargain” because aerosols constitute particulate air pollution that kills millions of people every year. Our Faustian payments – an increase of global warming – come due when we reduce health-damaging air pollution and thus reduce aerosol cooling.
2. Climate sensitivity is 50 percent larger than the best estimate of IPCC.
We show that the climate sensitivity required to yield best agreement with observed global warming in the past century is 4.5°C for doubled CO2, which is 50% larger than IPCC’s best estimate of 3°C. Together, conclusions 1 and 2 imply that near-term global temperature will decrease very little: thus, averaged over the El Nino/La Nina cycle, the 1.5°C limit has been reached. IPCC’s estimate of climate sensitivity depended on the assumption that aerosol climate forcing was unchanging during the period 1970-2005, but we show that aerosol forcing increased (became more negative) during that period as aerosols spread more globally, including over pristine ocean areas where their effect is greater. If aerosols were fixed, greenhouse gases are the only forcing and the climate sensitivity required to match observed warming would be about 3°C for doubled CO2. But the net forcing was actually smaller during that period because the negative aerosol forcing was growing, so a larger climate sensitivity is required to match observed warming of the past century. Our estimated climate sensitivity coincides with the sensitivity derived from glacial-to-interglacial climate change, the portion of the paleoclimate record for which precise knowledge of greenhouse gases is available.
3. Accelerated warming increases ice melt and upper ocean warming, threatening to shut down North Atlantic overturning circulation by mid-century and cause large sea level rise.
We show that observed ice melt over the past 20 years was similar to assumed ice melt in climate simulations of “Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms.” The rate of ice melt did not increase in the past decade, but, given the leap of global temperature to +1.5°C above preindustrial, we expect ice melt to accelerate, especially in regions such as southeast Greenland where ice melt is injected directly into the Irminger Sea, a region where deepwater forms. The North Atlantic is warming at depths beneath the surface wind-mixed ocean layer, with warmer water penetrating beneath the sea ice and ice shelves. Paleoclimate data suggest that such sub-ice warming can lead to sudden loss of regional sea ice and thus increased warming and summer rainfall on lower reaches of the Greenland ice sheet and increased freshwater injection into the ocean. Our climate simulations suggest that such increased ice melt and rapid surface warming can shut down the overturning ocean circulation by mid-century, which would be the “Point of No Return” because shutdown is irreversible in less than centuries. Large sea level rise would become inevitable, as heat normally transported into the North Atlantic would remain in the Southern Hemisphere and speed melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Global warming acceleration increases this danger because the increased heating both reduces the density of the upper layer of the ocean and increases the rate of ice melt.
Reactions. How would Charney, Bretherton and other scientific leaders of yore have responded to these papers and assertions, and how would the media have responded? It’s a pretty safe bet they would conclude that the papers are a serious analysis. They would think about what observations are needed to confirm and illuminate the issues that are raised. Instead, much reaction in the media seems closer to the continual squealing of farm animals. It is hard to fault the science writers; their stories reflect what they are told by the scientists who are willing or even eager to respond to their inquiries. We find many responses to be unscientific and surprising, given the intergenerational issues that are raised. An illuminating example is the response to Seth Borenstein, the climate science writer for the largest news organization in the world (Associated Press), who was told by 5 of his 6 go-to climate experts that he should not even write about our paper “Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms;” thus he did not. The paper was also blackballed by the IPCC AR6 report; not a single mention in the several-thousand-page report. Below we speculate about reasons for this treatment, but first let’s respond to current reactions to our “Acceleration” paper.
Reaction 1. Feedbacks. It is claimed that we neglect climate feedbacks, which cause most of the warming and cause the largest warming to be in the Southern Hemisphere, not the Northern Hemisphere, where the ship aerosol effect is largest. In fact (see our Fig. 10), the largest sea surface warming is at latitudes 30-50N in the Northern Hemisphere, where ship aerosol forcing is largest. The total ocean heat content gain may be larger in the more massive Southern Hemisphere ocean, but that supports our interpretation. Most increased energy flux into the planet is from climate feedbacks. We evaluated the contributions of forcings and feedbacks that affect Earth’s albedo (Fig. SM15, in the Supplementary Material of our current paper) and energy imbalance. Over the period (since 2000) of precise satellite measurements of Earth’s albedo (reflectivity), Earth has darkened by 1.7 W/m2. Based on the geographical and temporal distribution of the darkening, we infer that about 0.5 W/m2 of this darkening is the ship aerosol forcing. About 0.15 W/m2 is ice/snow albedo feedback, due to reduced sea ice area, which is well-defined. Thus, by subtraction, most of Earth’s darkening must be the cloud feedback that is expected with global warming. It is a huge feedback for the 20-year period with satellite data. If we over-estimated the aerosol forcing, the cloud feedback is even larger.
This simple bar graph (Fig. SM15) has another story to tell, which Charney and Bretherton would have recognized instantly: the large cloud feedback in a brief period implies that climate sensitivity is much higher than 3°C for doubled CO2. Charney’s comparison of climate models with 2°C and 4°C sensitivity revealed that a 2°C response is provided by doubled CO2 forcing plus water vapor feedback and small sea ice feedback. Addition of only modest cloud feedback raises the sensitivity to 3°C, as an amplifying feedback enhances all other amplifying feedbacks. Thus, the large cloud feedback in the past two decades provides independent confirmation of high climate sensitivity.
Reaction 2. IPCC AR6 models yield realistic global warming acceleration without a ship aerosol effect. The person making this claim – and asserting that it contradicts our conclusions – apparently does not realize that there is a big difference between IPCC’s best estimate for aerosol forcing history and the aerosol forcing in GCMs participating in CMIP6 and IPCC AR6 climate simulations. The IPCC best estimate aerosol forcing is shown in our paper in Fig. 3 and in Figs. 13 and SM1 as updated by Forster et al. (2024). This IPCC aerosol forcing includes the direct aerosol forcing and the larger indirect effect on clouds. This IPCC aerosol forcing is used in the literature for various purposes, e.g., in derivation of an “emergent constraint” on climate sensitivity; these authors assume, consistent with the IPCC aerosol forcing estimate, that aerosol forcing is nearly unchanging over the period 1970-2005. Then, based on observed global warming and assuming that greenhouse gases are the only significant changing forcing in that period, they infer an “emergent constraint” on climate sensitivity: specifically, sensitivity must be close to 3°C for doubled CO2.
However, if they allowed the aerosol forcing to change during that period, they would have found quite different results. We showed that there is a one-to-one relation between the climate sensitivity that gives best fit to observed warming and the trend of aerosol forcing in the period 1970-2005: if the aerosol forcing is constant, the sensitivity is ~3°C; if the aerosol forcing increases as in Bauer’s Matrix aerosol model (almost 0.5 W/m2), the sensitivity is ~4.5°C; if the aerosol forcing increases as in Bauer’s OMA aerosol model, the sensitivity is ~6°C (see Figs. 17 and 18). Given this one-to-one relation between climate sensitivity and the aerosol forcing change during 1970-2005, the “emergent constraint” that climate sensitivity is near 3°C amounts to the following: “if we assume that climate sensitivity is near 3°C, we find that climate sensitivity is near 3°C.”
For the sake of estimating climate sensitivity, we made climate simulations for 1850-2024 with two free parameters (climate sensitivity and the change of aerosol forcing during 1970-2005) and two constraints (1.6°C global warming between 1850 and 2024, and 0.18°C/decade warming during 1970-2005). The best fit was obtained with sensitivity ~4.5°C for doubled CO2 and an increase of aerosol forcing during 1970-2005 similar to that in Bauer’s Matrix model.
After all this explanation, what is wrong with the assertion that CMIP/IPCC models already yield recent acceleration of global warming? Answer: many of the models in the CMIP/IPCC ensemble are not using the IPCC aerosol forcing history. The ensemble includes models that use the Bauer aerosol forcings, e.g., which were steeply increasing during 1970-2005 before stopping growth entirely or even switching to change of the opposite sign. Thus, the average of IPCC models yields global warming acceleration, but it cannot match observed acceleration and the results certainly do not support IPCC’s best estimate for aerosol forcing.
Reaction 3. Range of model fog. Another reaction is that observed rapid warming falls in the range of all CMIP/IPCC climate simulations, so there is no basis to question IPCC assumptions. CMIP/IPCC models include the good, the bad, and the ugly. Yet IPCC takes the distribution of model results as a probability distribution for the real world, using this distribution for mathematical analyses that separate IPCC from the possibility of widespread public understanding, much like the Wizard of Oz tried to overpower Dorothy and her friends. For their purpose, a “merit” of the huge range of this model fog is that IPCC will always be “right,” the real world will fall somewhere within that huge fog. Oops! Maybe not. In a paper that perhaps provided the “rationale” for IPCC to blackball our “Ice Melt” paper, 15 authors, representing leading GCM groups, used 21 climate projections from eight “…state-of-the-science, IPCC class…” GCMs to conclude that “…the probability of an AMOC collapse is negligible. This is contrary to a recent modeling study [Hansen et al., 2016] that used a much larger, and in our assessment unrealistic, Northern Hemisphere freshwater forcing… According to our probabilistic assessment, the likelihood of an AMOC collapse remains very small (<1% probability) if global warming is below ~5K… ”. Here, even the range of model results does not seem to encompass all realistic possibilities: few climate experts would assert that 5°C global warming, sufficient to melt most of the ice on the planet, would be unlikely to shut down AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). Their models likely obtain AMOC stability only because injection of cold freshwater into the polar oceans in the models is underestimated or based on too-lethargic ice sheet models.
Models are essential for understanding ongoing climate change and projections for the future, but by themselves they are inadequate and unable to provide an adequate assessment. The models will be a much more powerful tool, if they are used along with an equally heavy emphasis on paleoclimate data and observations of ongoing climate processes, and the information from all of these combined with mindfulness of climate physics.
Reaction 4. We overlooked the role of decreased aerosols from China. The direct radiative effect of aerosol change is shown in clear-sky measurements of the global increase of absorbed solar radiation (Fig. SM8). The global effect of aerosol change in 2020-2023 relative to 2000-2010 is less than 0.1 W/m2, after the effect of changes in sea ice is removed. China may provide a large fraction of that flux change, but even in total this is a small effect. Change of all-sky absorbed solar radiation (Fig.9) is an order of magnitude larger and the temporal and spatial footprint coincides with the ship aerosol change, and clearly not with change of emissions from China, where the largest decrease was in 2005-2015. The spatial and temporal pattern of SST change (Figure 10) further support the dominance of ship aerosols. It is not surprising that the ship aerosols are much more effective; they are emitted into the lower part of the atmosphere in unpolluted ocean skies, where they have the most effect on clouds.
Bretherton and Charney would not have been confused about the role of Chinese aerosols, which they would recognize has no effect on our three main conclusions above. (1) most aerosol change in China occurred prior to 2020-2023 (Fig. 13), with negligible effect on the sudden global warming in 2023. (2) Our inference of an increasing global aerosol forcing during 1970-2005 and derivation of 4.5°C climate sensitivity are independent of the source of increased aerosol forcing. (3) Our conclusion that the danger of passing the “point of no return” (AMOC shutdown and large sea level rise) is increased by the accelerated North Atlantic warming is straightforward: the increased heating reduces the density of the upper layer of the ocean and increases the rate of ice melt – conclusions that do not depend on uncertainties about aerosols from China.
Reaction 5. Our results are an outlier. When we have answered all the questions, the critics always resort to “they are an outlier,” with results outside those of the “mainstream” climate research community. This is stated in a way that makes it seem that we are unlikely to be right, even when the real world offers ample evidence in support of our conclusions. The media is then forced to go along with the critics because they outnumber us (there are exceptions, e.g., the comprehensive article by Carrington in the Guardian). However, that’s not the way science works. Science does advance as data become available. Eventually this leads to corrections of the mainstream view – some minor, some major. The difficulty in the case of climate change is that slowness to recognize reality is particularly harmful to young people and future generations because of climate’s delayed response and the danger of passing the point of no return, as we emphasized in the video introduction to our paper.
One clarification is needed: our statement that “2°C is dead” was qualified with the phrase “unless a miracle occurs.” It is true that we do not expect a miracle, but the qualification should be included. It is also true that 2°C could be avoided via temporary purposeful cooling to reduce the massive geoengineering (geotransformation, if you prefer) that humanity is presently inflicting upon our home planet – but we do not have the knowledge to recommend such action and the public is nowhere near a point of endorsing such action. The closest thing to a miracle that is conceivable soon would be adoption of cost-free carbon fee-and-dividend policy that we have advocated for almost two decades, as required to underlie and unleash the millions of changes needed to move the world as rapidly as practical to carbon-free energy and a declining level of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Presidents Obama and Biden each had the opportunity to initiate such a revenue-neutral action as part of economic actions required to address economic crises early in their administrations. Instead, Obama did little for climate and Biden borrowed massive amounts of money from future generations (via deficit funding) to subsidize already mature (solar and wind) technologies, an approach that spurred inflation and invited a whiplash energy policy response from the competing political party.
Summary. How is it that we can be cast as “outliers,” if the real world supports our interpretation of ongoing climate change? In part, we suspect, it is because of the “cottage” industry (quotation marks because it is not a small industry) that has built up in support of IPCC. It’s easy to understand how IPCC went down the track of low climate sensitivity, as early climate models had simple cloud treatments that produced only modest climate feedback. For those low-sensitivity climate models to match observed global warming during the several decades of steady warming since 1970, they required that (unmeasured) aerosol forcing remain almost unchanging in that period. We now have evidence that aerosol forcing was actually increasing (becoming more negative) during that period, which is consistent with paleoclimate evidence that climate sensitivity is high. It is difficult for such a huge industry to change its position, but in the end physics will rule.
On a programmatic note: We have long realized that our conclusion that modern nuclear power needs to play an important role in decarbonizing global energy systems limits our ability to obtain public and philanthropic support for CSAS. Now, it seems, this situation is much aggravated by any open discussion that purposeful global cooling may eventually be needed. It’s reminiscent of an analysis once made by JEH’s oldest grandson at age 10: “If we keep doing what we are doing now then the environment will be ruined when the people who are kids now are grownups. And unless we can figure out how to make a time machine that actually works, there will be no way to go back in time to fix it. It’s not fair that the grownups now are ruining the atmosphere for the grownup in the future. Grownups now are scared of nuclear power but they should be scared of what will happen if they keep doing what they’re doing now because we know the ways to use nuclear power safe and we know that using fossil fuels is not safe. It’s very dangerous.” It seems that “grownups,” have now decided that, after tying one arm behind the back of young people (by setting back nuclear R&D several decades; nuclear power has the potential to be our least expensive 24/7 power source, as well as having the smallest environmental footprint), they should also tie their other arm behind their back by prohibiting research on purposeful cooling, in case the grownups screwed up again and did not leave a time machine.
The tactics of the kibitzers seem to work on most of the media and some of our prior supporters. Apparently, the kibitzers have learned from politicians that it doesn’t matter if what you say is true or not, and even ad hominem attacks are allowed – if enough people repeat the arguments often enough, they are accepted. Our attitude has usually been that we don’t have time to deal with all the disinformation and also focus on our scientific research – because eventually the truth will come out. The problem with this assumption is that continuation of the United Nations approach is dangerous. The current policy approach, and belief that it can lead to climate stabilization and cooling by mid-century, is inexorably putting young people into an untenable position. We believe that it is important, despite the advice the UN gets from their massive scientific support group, to clarify where the approach of the United Nations Conferences of the Parties is taking young people.
We are very grateful to those people who continue to support Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions.
Hansen has made his 2010 book Storms of My Grandchildren available here.
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Prologue: The Biospheric Reckoning
Prologue: The Biospheric Reckoning
I. Gaia’s Unruly Children: Hubris of Man
The Earth, in her ancient and indifferent wisdom, had always known how to heal herself. She had endured ice ages carving continents into jagged sculptures, volcanic eruptions wiping out the sky, and celestial bombardments scorching her skin into craters. But never before had she borne a parasite quite like humanity—a species so adept at consumption, so skilled in the art of forgetting its place.
Earth patiently tolerated the antics of this novel species: the atom-splitting, the deep-sea trawling, the ceaseless hunger to bend organic matter into profit. Despite the warnings of shrinking ice caps, coral reefs bleached white, and heatwaves in the dead of winter, corporate boardrooms still buzzed about “market corrections” and “energy transitions,” as if the laws of thermodynamics could be lobbied. Humans, mere tenants on a planet whose existence spanned billions of years before their unruly ascent, were oblivious to the existential threats mounting against them. They were about to be evicted…
II. The Fever: Antibodies of the Anthropocene
It began not with a scream, but with the silence of ice surrendering to the Age of Fire unleashed by Homo sapiens—a crack in the world’s oldest vault, exhaling a breath that had been held for millennia.
The virus did not emerge. It uncoiled.
Locked in the permafrost of Siberia, a sarcophagus of ice had preserved it like a forbidden psalm, a hymn from an epoch when the Earth was young and humanity did not yet exist to defile it. This was no ordinary pathogen. It was an archaeon of annihilation, a sleeper agent from the Pleistocene, its genetic code etched in the language of extinction. When the frost finally relinquished its grip, the virus rose—not from the steaming jungles humanity had plundered, nor the gristle-packed markets where species were stacked in cages—but from the pristine, white throat of the Arctic. Scientists dubbed it Morbus glacies, a clinical epithet for what survivors would later scream as The Thawed God.
Its method was poetry written in frost. Microscopic spores, delicate as diamond dust, rode the jet stream like nomadic assassins. They infiltrated lungs not with the violence of a blade, but the kiss of a snowflake—soft, inevitable. Within weeks, humanity choked with the sound of coughing—a grim chorus echoing through streets and skyscrapers. Cities transformed into galleries of the damned. The infected didn’t scream or bleed. They burned.
It began with a low-grade fever—99°F, then 100°, dismissed as seasonal flu. But by day three, temperatures spiked to 107°, defying ice baths and antipyretics. Skin flushed not with rosy heat, but a mottled crimson, as if capillaries were bursting beneath the surface. Autopsies would later reveal the truth: the virus hijacked the hypothalamus, overriding thermal regulation, turning the human body into a runaway furnace.
Muscles melted into lactic acid. Organs cooked in their own fluids. Brains, sweltering in their skulls, left victims in a permanent hallucinogenic state. Death came when the fever burned through cellular proteins, collapsing the body like a gutted star.
Scientists named it hyperpyretic encephalitis. Survivors called it The Ember Plague. But the most chilling detail wasn’t the heat—it was the vector. The virus thrived in mosquitoes that now bred year-round in Europe’s sweltering cities, in ticks creeping north as winters warmed. Humanity had engineered the perfect incubator: a planet feverish with heat, sweating out pathogens evolved to feast on overheated flesh.
But the Thawed God was no solitary deity. It was a prophet, a herald of the microbial pantheon awakening beneath humanity’s boot.
Its emergence triggered a cascade. Diseases once confined to the tropics flourished in a climate run amok. Mosquitoes carrying dengue and malaria infested European cities, thriving in summers that now steamed like saunas. In America’s heartland, farmers collapsed in their fields, lungs riddled with fungal spores that sprouted grotesque tendrils through their flesh. Labs scrambled to engineer vaccines, but the viruses mutated faster than science could chase them. By the time a cure was bottled, the target had already evolved.
Humanity’s response was defiance, not wisdom.
They continued torching forests to clear land for hamburger meat and palm oil. They continued draining ancient aquifers to cool the power plants fueling their industrial agriculture and industry. Their mantra of “green growth” masked a refusal to abandon exponential consumption. They clung to buzzwords like “resilience” and “innovation,” treating the Earth as a malfunctioning machine to be debugged rather than a living system they’d broken. Every solution was a stopgap, every strategy a gamble. And still, they refused to admit the truth: they were not fighting a disaster.
They were facing an immune response.
III. The Storm: Sky’s Retribution
Then came the hurricanes—not the familiar, seasonal tempests, but leviathans baptized in the feverish waters of a boiling ocean. They began as statistical outliers, then evolved into a pattern no model could dismiss.
The first to rewrite the rules was Hurricane Lachesis, initially classified as Category 6, a designation created for storms that laughed at old scales. It drifted toward the Gulf Coast with the patience of a predator, its winds peeling roofs from hospitals and shifting foundations in Houston’s industrial corridors. Storm surges, supercharged by thermal expansion, seeped into Miami’s aquifers, contaminating freshwater reserves with a saline rot that would linger for decades. Lachesis was not an exception; it was a recalibration. Cyclones began stalling—over Dubai, over Shanghai—their paths warped by weakened jet streams. The one that parked itself over the Emirates for nine days did not shatter towers but drowned them from within, overloading drainage systems never designed for desert monsoons. In the South China Sea, a typhoon veered north, dumping rain on the Gobi until temporary lakes swallowed mining towns and their fossil fuel machinery whole.
The weather grew spiteful in its precision. Lightning storms, turbocharged by atmospheric instability, ignited tinder-dry boreal forests from Alberta to Siberia. Tornadoes materialized in clusters, chewing through midwestern wind farms and trailer parks with impartial efficiency. The rain, warmer and heavier now, fell in relentless waves, leaching heavy metals from soil into reservoirs, creating a toxic brew.
Still, the architects of resilience doubled down. They raised seawalls lined with osmotic membranes, built AI-piloted drone fleets to inject cooling aerosols into the stratosphere, and sunk billions into carbon capture vaults buried beneath the tundra. Each solution bred new consequences. Expensive seawalls accelerated erosion in the neighboring coastlines; aerosol injections changed global rainfall patterns, diverting rains from agricultural zones and sparking famines; the tundra projects triggered methane leaks from thawing permafrost. Engineers spoke of “managed decline” and “adaptive thresholds,” sterile phrases that masked the truth: every intervention tugged at a thread in what remained of the ecosystem’s fabric.
By the time the North Atlantic Current faltered, stalling nutrient cycles and collapsing fisheries from Newfoundland to Norway, it was too late to parse cause from effect. The climate had become a hall of mirrors, humanity’s reflection warped by every desperate correction. The storms, though, remained crystalline in their intent—not wrath, but equilibrium, attempting to restore balance through a language of floods and fire whose lesson we had refused to learn.
The message was clear: nature’s ledger always collects.
IV. The Burn: Earth’s Purification
Megafires raced across continents, a billion amber teeth devouring vineyards, suburbs, and entire ecosystems. They weren’t just fires—they were Earth’s fever burning through the kindling of human denial.
The Amazon, its canopy stripped and soil desiccated, ceased to breathe. Conflagrations gnawed through the “lungs of the planet”, reducing it to a blackened trachea. The Australian outback became a crematorium for a billion creatures, their screams lost in the roar of a red horizon.
In every country, infernos towered like skyscrapers, devouring entire towns in minutes. Highways choked with fleeing cars became graveyards of melted steel. Embers were lofted miles ahead of the main blaze, seeding destruction in neighborhoods still clinging to the illusion of safety. Survivors wore gas masks to filter ash that fell like gray snow, their eyes fixed on horizons where the sun glowed an apocalyptic orange through a perpetual toxic haze. What the flames didn’t claim, the aftermath did: charred hillsides shed into mudslides, rivers ran black with debris, and once-lush landscapes became smoldering patchworks of new deserts.
In the thawing Arctic and Siberia, ancient methane reserves escaped into the atmosphere to create a vicious feedback loop of wildfires raging with a ferocity beyond containment. Their acrid smoke blotted out the sun and cloaked the northern hemisphere in an eternal twilight. The once-frozen tundra had become a cracked, smoldering wasteland, where flames devoured skeletal forests.
Every flame laid bare the delusions of control, the hubris of containment algorithms, the rot of economies built to monetize extinction. The economy, now a doomsday cult, demanded infinite growth from a finite system. The wealthy fled to sealed arks of concrete and filtered air, sipping champagne as they watched the world burning on their flat screens. The poor burned quietly, their ashes blending with the soil they’d once tilled.
V. The Final Paroxysm: Oppenheimer’s Legacy
The biosphere had already unsheathed its claws: pestilence had decimated human populations, storms had scoured the coasts and erased cities, and wildfires had reduced entire nations to charcoal sketches. But it was not enough. The architects of the Anthropocene, those apes who had tamed fire and selfishly reshaped the entire planet in their image, would not go quietly in the night. No—they would burn the house down with them.
In the end, humanity’s epitaph was written in fission and fallout. Nations were fractured by dwindling resources and their military’s chain of command had been frayed by famine and flight. Leaders, cloistered in bunkers lit by the glow of missile consoles, gnawed on paranoia. Screens flickered with maps flashing red—cities quarantined, farmlands desiccated, reservoirs empty and crumbling. A button pressed in desperation, a missile launched in error—the pretext mattered little. ICBMs arced through the stratosphere, their contrails like the talons of some vengeful raptor.
New York’s skyline melted into a silhouette of shadow, its millions vaporized mid-breath. Beijing’s Forbidden City became a glass plain. Paris, the City of Light, ignited into a funeral pyre that rivaled the dawn. The bombs did not discriminate. Despot and democrat, saint and sinner, the elderly and the newly born—all were reduced to isotopes.
Others, too impoverished for ICBMs, resorted to cruder blasphemies; dirty bombs salted the earth with radioactivity. In Karachi, a jihadist cell detonated a cobalt-60 “dirty bomb” in a sewage canal. The radiation clung to the water, turning the Indus into a serpent of gamma rays. In Nashville, a doomsday cult wired a reactor core to propane tanks, their leader screaming about “the Rapture’s glow.” It scarcely mattered who had “won”; nuclear winter descended like a shroud, a twilight that stretched for years. The lucky died instantly. The rest perished from famine, cannibalism, and disease…until only one walked the Earth.
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