Radagast: Agricultural Collapse

Overly simplistic models obscure the risk of agricultural collapse. Rintrah by Radagast. August 5, 2026.

please see his post at the link above to see the charts and access hyperlinks in the article

There’s a big dispute in climatology, in regards to equilibrium climate sensitivity: How much does the Earth warm up, when you double CO2 in the air?

The IPCC maintains an estimate of 3 degree Celsius per doubling. Some, like James Hansen, think the number is much higher. He thinks it’s 4.8 per doubling, but many of the climate models the IPCC uses sit even higher, above 5 degree. The general idea is that these models “must be wrong”, so they’re not given the same weight when it comes to making predictions for how much warming we will get in the future as models that predict less dramatic warming get.

The main argument given to dispute the credibility of these models, is that they don’t properly reproduce the warming we have seen so far.

The dispute between models mostly comes down to differences in how the clouds are expected to respond. The “hot models” predict that the warming we experience from more CO2 results in a reduction in clouds that reflect sunlight. Thus these models are said to have “positive cloud feedback”.

But not everyone believes these models get it right of course, that’s why there is a scientific dispute. If these “apocalypse predicting” hot models were right, the Earth should be warmer than it actually is right now, that’s the idea upheld by those who are not convinced the hot models get it right.

The counter-argument to this idea, is that the hot models predict greater warming than we have seen so far, because there is other stuff we’re doing that is still keeping temperatures down.

So what are those things? One of them is the temperature reducing effect of air pollution, an effect known as global dimming.

This is the same effect that led some scientists to predict “global cooling” in the past, but as we succeeded at cleaning up a lot of this pollution, it became obvious we would find ourselves faced with rapid global warming in the future instead.

Estimates of how much global dimming we’re causing right now still vary quite a lot from one study to another.

How much it keeps temperatures down matters a lot, because this air pollution is something we will eventually stop dumping into the air: It kills millions of people by damaging our lungs and it acidifies the soil.

So far so good, anyone who has looked into climate change is probably familiar with what I have explained so far.

There is however another important thing we’re doing that helps keep our temperatures down, especially during summer. When you realise what it is, it feels pretty obvious, but it also confronts you with a massive looming problem.

As the author of one study puts it:

“In summary, we showed that irrigation expansion has regionally masked the historical warming of hot extremes from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and all other climate drivers combined,”

And as the authors of a different study put it:

Given our results for California and the global importance of irrigated agriculture, past expansion of irrigated land has likely affected observations of surface temperature, potentially masking the full warming signal caused by greenhouse gas increases.

We irrigate about 17% of the world’s land, to produce 40% of the world’s food. This land has its surface temperature reduced by about 5 to 7 degree Celsius, because the land cools as the water evaporates. This is not all positive, as the resulting higher humidity makes it harder for humans and other animals to sweat, but it does bring temperatures down.

More importantly however, when the water evaporates, it increases the formation of clouds. With satellites you can see that irrigated land has an average cloud cover of 40% during the day, versus 25% for non-irrigated land. These clouds peak between 2 and 4 PM, which is also when the heat influx into the environment from the sun is most intense. These clouds reduce temperature stress for the crops and reduce their water demand. In addition, photosynthesis tends to benefit from how these clouds turn direct sunlight into diffuse sunlight.

In large parts of the world, the water that is evaporated from irrigation, leads to an increase in rainfall, often up to hundreds of kilometers downwind. As a good example, the irrigation in the central valley of California increases water availability by 28% in the Colorado river basin.

Irrigation causes significant cooling of global average surface temperatures, primarily over land. The authors estimate 0.07 degree Celsius reduction in global temperature for the Earth as a whole, or 0.17 degree specifically on land.

A lot of people have been wondering, why India is lagging behind in global warming, compared to the rest of the world. Over the past 40 years, India has only warmed by 0.09 degree Celsius per decade, versus the global average of 0.30C per decade, and below the 0.23C recorded for regions at similar latitudes.

How did that happen? Well we know the answer. They began ramping up their irrigation:


Right now, it’s estimated that around 1 degree of global warming is suppressed over India, thanks to irrigation, both from the direct effect and the indirect effect (enhanced cloud formation):


The effect is strongest, in India’s agricultural powerhouse, the Northwest:


In Northern Italy, studies find that irrigation reduces the peak of a heatwave, by 6.6 degree Celsius. Humidity in the air does increase, but the wind blows that humid air away, so you’re still much better off, thanks to the irrigation.

But here’s the thing. Around the world, a lot of the water we use to irrigate our crops is groundwater, 43%. That groundwater, is generally being depleted faster than natural processes can refill the aquifer. In other parts of the world, we’re getting the water for irrigation from rivers that are supposed to be feeding lakes. The great salt lake is dying, because 62% of the river water that used to feed the lake, is now used for irrigation. Most irrigation as currently practiced by humans is unsustainable.

Farmers and governments know this. So how do they respond? Well, one solution is drip irrigation. Instead of just spraying a lot of water on your land, you slowly drip water on your crops. This causes less water to be lost through evaporation. This is great for the farmer and for the local aquifer, but think about the consequences.

Less water is used for irrigation. This means less water now evaporates. This mean you get less cloud formation, less reduction in temperatures over the land, less rain further downwind. All the positive externalities from irrigation are basically eliminated, when the farmers switch to drip irrigation. The farmers however, don’t have much of a choice. A lot of these farmers can’t just keep using the large amount of water they’re using right now.


The Water Situation in the Indian Subcontinent

After a terrorist attack, the government of India suspended the Indus water treaty, which requires India to share water with Pakistan. The Indian minister of water declared that not a drop of water will flow into Pakistan. India doesn’t have the infrastructure yet, to follow up on that threat. They’re now working on building the infrastructure, to deny Pakistan any water.

First they started dredging their dams. They have also now started planning the construction of new dams. They’re also building new canals, where the water can be used. They’re also diverting water to the northern Indian states, with a new tunnel that is supposed to be operational by 2029.

So, what happens to Pakistan? Well for starters, the Pakistani government is not happy. Their climate change minister has threatened to “chop off the hand” that tries to control its water. Pakistan was supposed to receive 80% of water from the Indus, under the Indus water treaty.

Pakistan has two main sources of water: They have the water from the Indus river system and they have groundwater from their aquifers. I can’t really find consistent reliable estimates on what percentage they derive from the Indus river system and what percentage they derive from their aquifers. Pakistan’s minister says half the population depends on the Indus river system. Some sources say 90% of agriculture in Pakistan depends on the Indus river system.

Other sources say that more than half of Pakistan’s water use in agriculture, comes from groundwater. The problem however, is that they’re using their groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it. Most cities in Pakistan have rapidly declining groundwater tables. A study recently estimated when groundwater extraction will peak in Pakistan. They arrived at 2040 as the most likely year when groundwater extraction from the Indus aquifer would peak. But that was before India suspended the Indus water treaty.

So, why is India doing this? The official reason is because of the terrorist attack. In reality however, they simply need the water themselves. Estimates are that by 2030, 40% of India’s population will have no access to drinking water. Estimates are that lack of water will reduce cropping intensity in India by 20%, with a reduction of 68% in the most water-scarce regions.

When an aquifer is depleted, the grains of sand that used to leave room for water are gradually compacted by the pressure from the soil above. As a result, after depleting an aquifer, it tends to be unable to properly recharge, even once you stop using the aquifer.

India’s recent heatwave was much worse than anything we faced in Europe. During these heatwaves, if you live in a city like New Delhi, there is just not any water coming out of the tap. Drinking water has to be driven into the city, by a “water mafia”, that bores illegal well holes. Then the population has to stand in a cue, to buy water from these tankers.

In Bangladesh, it’s the same problem. They just declared 5,000 villages as “water-stressed areas”, meaning the people are just not allowed to use the ground water to irrigate their crops anymore, they can only use the water to drink it themselves. In 1950, Bangladesh had 40 million people. Today, Bangladesh has 178 million people.

In Bangladesh, you have 20 million people living in the capital city, Dhaka. In Dhaka, the groundwater table is declining by 2 meters per year. By 2030, they’re looking at the groundwater table declining by 4 meters per year. As you have to delve deeper, there’s more arsenic and other pollutants in there. But eventually, it just gets so deep that it costs you too much energy to get the water up.

In other parts of the country, their problem is that when they use up the water beneath their feet, salty seawater infiltrates the groundwater. Salt water infiltration is threatening drinking water and water for agriculture, for more than 20 million people in Bangladesh. That’s more people than live in the entire Netherlands.

So, is there a technofix? Could India’s government just deliver desalinated water to Northern India instead? No, the math doesn’t math. Desalinated water would be about three times more expensive than the wheat it produces, so your food would become four times as expensive.

This is just the cost of desalinating the water at the coast. To transport all the water inland all the way from the coast to Northern India would roughly equal the cost of desalinating the water. In other words, your bread would be seven times as expensive as it is today.


The Water Situation In California

California produces huge amounts of food, the valley is said to produce a quarter of all food in the United States. The problem is, they depend on an aquifer that’s being depleted to produce that food, but the ground has now compacted, so that it has become physically impossible for the aquifer to be refilled by nature.

In parts of California, the situation with the aquifer is so bad, that the government has simply instructed farmers to stop using groundwater like the government did in Bangladesh, so the farmers are just leaving their land dry.

So with these new rules that means California is going to struggle to produce as much food from now on, as it did in the past. But think about all the feedback effects we now start to get as a result:

• Local temperatures get higher
• Less clouds are being generated
• The rest of the United States now gets less rainfall

The people in Arizona know very well how dependent they are, on water from the Colorado river. Well, that water is declining. And the summer flow of the Colorado river is increased by 28%, by Californian farmers irrigating their crops.

Through irrigation we’re both increasing rainfall when it is most needed and reducing the amount of water our plants need, by reducing peak heatwave temperatures.

If you take this into consideration, you’ll realize that when we have to stop irrigating our crops, we’ve got one hell of a feedback coming.

One study looked at what we can actually expect, in regards to groundwater depletion. They looked at 235 groundwater basins and found that total global human groundwater extraction will peak at 625 km3 yr−1 around mid-century, followed by a decline through 2100.

The peak and decline occur in about one-third (82) of basins, including 21 that may have already peaked. This will result in exposing about half (44%) of the global population to groundwater stress. The countries that are worst affected, are the United States, Mexico, Pakistan, India, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

There are also places, where groundwater use just doesn’t really seem to be an issue. Global warming is an easier environmental problem to understand, we’re all suffering from the pollution of the global commons. But groundwater is a stranger one: There are places that have already exhausted their groundwater, there are places busy exhausting it and there are other places where the groundwater reserve is actually increasing.

Soil erosion is a similar problem, there are places where we’re losing our fertile soil to erosion and there are other places where this is just not a serious problem.

Add the whole picture together however, and you see the problem: There are parts of the world where we’re running out of the soil our crops need, there are parts of the world where we’re running out of the water our crops need and there are parts of the world where the temperatures are simply getting too hot to properly grow crops.

Finally, there are places where the soil is good, the water we need is available and the temperatures are acceptable, but we’re running out of people who can grow the crops! Japan is a good example of this. They’re shrinking their farmland from 4.2 million hectare in 2020 to just 2.7 million by 2050. Their caloric self-sufficiency, will decline from 37% in 2020, to just 29% by 2050. The reason is because their farmers are old and they have nobody to inherit the farm.

Russia is another example. You have all these climate models, that predict that although food production will decrease as a result of climate change in countries near the equator, it’s no big deal because food production will increase in Russia and that will compensate on a global level. Here’s an example of what I mean:


This is what the World Bank published, back in 2010. Most of the world sees yields go down by 2050, but don’t worry, because Russia, Canada, New Zealand and Scandinavia will bail the rest of us out!

Well, that’s not going to happen, because the Russian government has been stupid enough to spend the past few years invading Ukraine. By now, a fifth of Russian farmers face bankruptcy. They don’t have the diesel they need. Russia is not going to increase its food production, they’re struggling to hold onto what they have.

Nobody seems to bother accurately modeling the situation that lies ahead of us, by incorporating all variables. Example, there’s much ado now, about a study that claims 1 degree of global warming reduces rice yields by 8.1%, rather than 3.8%.

But read the study and they admit:

Our estimates should be interpreted within the context of physiological effects. The temperature-yield relationships are derived from single-factor warming experiments, which allow us to isolate high-temperature effects from confounding water and nutrient stresses. However, these experimental conditions may differ from farmer-managed fields, where yield outcomes also depend on complex interactions among temperature, water availability, crop physiology, and canopy energy balance.

They’re looking at one variable in isolation. Globally, 75% of rice agriculture is irrigated. If you can’t irrigate your rice anymore, yields don’t drop 8.1%, they collapse.

But let’s take a look again, at the study that predicts what’s going to happen to our groundwater. At the end they write:

Our model does not include an explicit physical representation of processes such as recharge, capture or lateral flows. However, these dynamics are embedded in the historical depletion datasets we use to calibrate our model, and alternative depletion limits (described above) allow us to capture a range of plausible future groundwater availabilities resulting from changing human-induced or naturally varying fluxes.

Alright, so you’re not properly modeling how the aquifer recharges. Well that’s a problem, because the recharging of our aquifers changes too. As our climate changes, what happens is that you get longer periods of drought, followed by an increase in rain that falls all at once.

That’s a problem. Dried up land, struggles to absorb water. What is now happening in practice all across the world, is that we get a bunch of rain all simultaneously on dried land, that ends up in the rivers and is eventually dumped into the ocean. It no longer recharges our aquifers!

So again, when they say we will hit peak groundwater around 2050, that fails to take into consideration that our aquifers are no longer getting properly recharged.

And in fact, aquifers that now look sustainable to these scientists, that look like they are not being overexploited, may turn out to be overexploited after all, because the rain will stop refilling these aquifers for us, because it all falls simultaneously on dried-out soil that can’t absorb the water!

This is just lack of water that I’ve talked about. Your crops will get the opposite side of the coin too: Too much water, all at once. When your farmland is flooded for an extended period of time, your crop yields drop to zero, because the plants die and rot.

You can look at what happened to Pakistan’s rice production in 2022, when the country suffered severe flooding. They lost a third of their rice output that year.

And then there are the dense plumes of wildfire smoke, which can be enough to wipe out your harvest in their own way. If your crops don’t get sunlight, they don’t grow.

Our entire system of food production, depends on cereal grains. Two thirds of all the calories we consume, directly or through the animals we eat, come from grasses.

And when you understand that, you understand our problem. Grass ecosystems on this planet, are new.

The first true grass biomes (grasslands) did not form until the Miocene epoch, roughly 20 to 30 million years ago. Although individual grass species and tiny plants evolved over 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, they only grew as rare forest-edge or moist patches.

Why is that? You’re finding out as we speak. A forest is good at generating its own rain, because it releases water during periods of drought and absorbs massive amounts of water during periods of heavy rainfall.

Grassy ecosystems, which our entire system of food production depends on, can’t do that.

The last time CO2 concentrations in the air were as high as they are now, was between 14-16 million years ago.

The tropical grassy biomes only developed into expansive, dominant regional biomes roughly 8 to 3 million years ago. Today they support a fifth of the world’s human population.

With the climate trajectory we are on, there is essentially no guarantee, that the Earth will be capable of sustaining grassland ecosystems, including the artificial ones we depend on for our food.

If we stopped our greenhouse gas emissions today, you would be left with the kind of climatic circumstances, where grasses as we know them today, were minor plants on the outskirts of our forests.

Back then, the grasslands that now cover 27% of the Earth’s surface and 70% of our agricultural area, did not exist.

Under the climate we’re now creating, grasses could not survive, except as a kind of pioneer species that lived on the outskirts of forests.

The atmosphere can hold 8% more moisture with every degree of warming, so during summer the air now ruthlessly sucks up all the water out of the soil until the grasses start dying, then in autumn when it cools down, this massive amount of water is dumped onto these poor grasses with tiny roots that struggle to let all the rain flush down into the soil.

You can see this happening in England today. England has recorded its driest July on record, in a series since 1836, with just 6.5mm of rainfall recorded – just 10% of its long-term meteorological average for the month, and less than half of the previous record of 13.4mm set in 1911. That’s why England now looks like this:


Our animals are not safe either. A healthy young adult can survive a wet-bulb temperature of about 31 °C for a few hours in the shade. Cattle standing in an open pasture, with no shade and no relief overnight, start dying around 26 °C. They just don’t have bodies that can sweat as effectively as ours.

These conditions we are now dealing with, are not conditions under which we can sustain agriculture.

This only becomes obvious, once you start to look at multiple interacting variables. If you just look at heatwaves, rice yield goes down by 8.1% per degree of warming. If you actually take into consideration that rice dies when exposed to too little or too much water, you realize 1 degree of warming leads to a collapse in agriculture.

And then we haven’t even looked at what happens to your crops because of pest species yet. In India, they lose a fifth of their crop to rats. In other parts of the world, you lose your crop to insects. Plant defenses against insects are shut down, when CO2 concentrations in the air are increased. The plants you eat, can no longer defend themselves against insects. And because the winters get warmer, those insects no longer die off during winter.

What we also haven’t looked at yet, are the dust storms. Climate change causes dust storms to increase, but what’s particularly worrisome, is when you have arid soils that you can no longer use for agriculture, because once you abandon those soils, it takes years before nature can stabilize them for you. That’s the risk they now face in Arizona for example.

When you have dust storms, the leaves of your young plants are damaged by the dust. This can dramatically reduce yields. In other cases, your soil is damaged by large amounts of salt deposited by the dust storms. Again, nobody really tries to put a proper number on this.

So, could we just block the sun instead? Would that bail us out? I wouldn’t count on it. There are numerous studies that take a look at what happens when you block the sun. When you start blocking the sun, you start changing everything. How much rain falls, where the rain falls, where the wind blows, all this stuff starts changing.

And to make matters worse, we don’t even known if blocking the sun would even work to reduce warming. When you spray these sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere, they can react with ammonia in the atmosphere to form ice-nucleating particles such as ammonium sulfate. Those particles then give rise to cirrus clouds, which have the effect of causing further global warming.

And keep in mind, the effect of these aerosols in the stratosphere that block the sun is not symmetrically opposed to the greenhouse effect. You will reduce warming more during summer than during winter, you reduce warming more during the day than the night, you reduce it more near the equator than near the poles. This is all opposite of how the greenhouse gasses affect the climate, so when you try to compensate for it by blocking the sun, you still just create a whole new global climate. There’s no real guarantee it will work.

The most likely outcome of what we are doing, is that we simply end up with a climate in which agriculture just no longer works. The methods we’ve so far used to mask the damage we’ve caused to our climate, the unsustainable use of irrigation, the blocking of the sun through air pollution, are falling away. The ecosystems we depend on for our food today simply did not exist, in the climatic circumstances we are now creating.

Radagast's Manifesto

surprise! another post by Radagast.

as always, posting here does not mean i agree with all of the material (i may even disagree strongly with some of it) but that I do think it is worth thinking about

The Ineluctabilist Manifesto. Radagast. July 12, 2026.

This is a work in progress, you can always check back later to see the newest version.

Everyone writes their own manifesto these days, so I figured it’s time I write mine. I’ve spent about twenty years of my life, studying the limits to growth and the inevitable decline of civilization, as well as how to respond to our bizarre human predicament. I figured it may be useful for me to explain my conclusions, it may help other people avoid having to reinvent the wheel.

There are things that are important to know and there are things that are not important to know. Out of those things that are important to know, there are those that we can know and those that we can not know. This is important to acknowledge, because it is perhaps the main problem of the human predicament. We have developed a level of intelligence, that makes us yearn to know things that nature just refuses to tell us. This overdevelopment of our intellect is one of the main causes of suffering, as Peter Wessel Zapffe explained in The Last Messiah.

The most important questions, are inevitably those I can’t give you a conclusive answer to. 

Examples include:

• What does it mean to be a good person?
• Are we going to be judged for our actions in this life?
• Who is truly happy?
• Where does consciousness originate?
• What sets us apart from the other animals?
• Is death the end?
• Why do bad things seem to happen to good people?
• Why do good things seem to happen to bad people?

These are some of the difficult questions in life. Generally this doesn’t stop people from proclaiming to have found an answer.

I wish to focus however, on the questions we can answer, specifically in regards to the future we face and how we should respond to it. I have arrived at the following ideas:


I – The Ineluctability of Civilization’s Collapse

Something can be inevitable, without being ineluctable. Things that are ineluctable, are those that are inevitable and that humans tend to struggle against in vain. This is true for death, it is also true for the collapse of our civilization. It was always going to happen and at best we could delay it by a few decades. We barely accomplished that, mainly through the proliferation of birth control. We made an attempt at fighting global warming, but it barely made a dent, it may have delayed the ineluctable by a few years at most.

You can try to stop the collapse of civilization by encouraging people to reform it, like Greta Thunberg and many others did. You can also diagnose civilization as a mistake and try to accelerate its collapse, like Ted Kaczynski and a small number of other people did. In reality, you are going to achieve neither. Most people you know will try to save civilization, but they stand no chance of accomplishing this.


II – Life is a mixed bag

Camus wrote that the ultimate question that philosophy tries to answer is whether to commit suicide or not. (hmm, don't come across this particular idea much, but its the second time in as many days that I have, the other in a book by A.C. Grayling; who goes on to argue that it is not the most important question, the most important is how we choose to consider others' interests when deciding upon our actions/inactions.) There is not a simple answer to that question, it depends entirely on your circumstances.

In general, life is a problem to be lived with. Life is only easy and pleasant for people who have no redeeming virtues. If you think to yourself “life is great”, then you’re just a bad person and I’m not really interested in interacting with you.

The general advice I have to offer, is to attempt solutions to life that are reversible, before attempting solutions that are irreversible. As an example, a lot of people attempt solutions to it that are irreversible, not just suicide. We have a sizeable demographic now, of young people who attempted to transition to the other gender but came to realize it does not solve the problem of being alive. It just leaves your body with irreversible alterations.

Suicide is similar, in that it can’t be reversed. Before attempting an irreversible solution, I recommend attempting the reversible ones. SSRIs seem to work in about 3% of the population. I have to recommend against trying them, you’re not missing out on anything except weight gain and sexual dysfunction that could be permanent in a small minority of people who receive them. I was lucky, in that the side-effects were temporary for me, you may not be so lucky.

“Exercise” works as a solution for people who are not actually very suicidal to begin with.

Solutions that actually do work in most people who are very suicidal, include MDMA, Psilocybe mushrooms, Mescaline cacti, Ketamine and 5-MeO-DMT. Even Scopolamine is worth looking into, if you feel like you’re running out of options. You have to be really careful with the dose though. If you ever find yourself really struggling and 5-MeO-DMT is for whatever reason not an option, you can consider the synergy of Ketamine and Scopolamine, which has been well-documented to work.

All of this will require proper research on your part.

The worst part about explaining this, is that I don’t really have an answer for people who already tried the irreversible solutions. I’m sorry.


III – The Goodness of Collapse

Civilization is a failed project that has caused a lot of misery, its disappearance will make the world a better place. There are multiple reasons for this.

The main reason however, is because of animal suffering. Currently, 70% of all bird biomass is domesticated. What that means, in simple English, is that most of the world’s birds, are birds that people grow for food. These are birds kept in very crowded rooms, without any trees or other plants. These are birds that are deformed, they can’t properly stand on their legs because humans bred them to grow as fast as possible.

I could also explain what humans do to pigs and cows, but it should be common knowledge by now.

It does not matter whether civilization makes humans happy or not, if it causes unhappiness for the animals that humans eat.

You can choose to be vegan, it’s a great virtue. We did however, evolve to eat flesh of other animals and I think you will likely find what I found as a vegan: It constantly feels like something is missing from your diet.

My personal recommendation however, would be to choose a golden middle road: Eat the flesh of animals that had a normal life. An oyster or a mussel doesn’t care whether you grew it on a rope, or whether it grew naturally on a rock, because it doesn’t have a brain. And yet, it delivers your body the iron, Zinc, vitamin B12 and long chain Omega 3 fatty acids that it craves.

I also personally think that it’s alright to eat wild caught fish, like sardines and herring. They had a normal life, that was inevitably going to end in a painful death, as wild animals eat each other all the time. Try to live in accordance to what you find justifiable to yourself.

It is unrealistic, to expect that people will just choose to eliminate animals suffering by becoming vegan. All indications suggest that the majority of humanity simply does not care, not even the slightest bit. We will not solve the animal suffering problem, without the collapse of civilization. The fact that billions of people are going to die agonizing deaths as a result is unfortunate, but inevitable.

There are also other problems, that deserve to be mentioned. The average human life expectancy in the developed world is now around ninety years. We spend the end of our lives in a state of dementia, with a body that is falling apart. This causes vast suffering.

Generally speaking, the majority of human suffering can be traced back to the existence of the sex drive. This is a complex topic, but the general reality is that the various ways in which the fulfillment of the procreative drive can fail is what causes the majority of human suffering. As an example, studies show that people with a spinal injury tend to be more upset by their inability to have sex, than their inability to walk or use the toilet independently.

The best years of life, are the childhood years, the years we spend in innocence before the emergence of the sex drive. In the absence of civilization, most humans will spend the majority of their time alive as children again.

IV – The Great Normie Awakening

At some point, all the normies are going to figure out that this civilization of ours has no future. They will begin to realize that they will not get to retire at all. They will realize that the kids they brought into the world will die of violence, heatwaves, thirst and hunger, at a young age.

This transition towards the Great Normie Awakening is going to take place over the next 25 years or so, it will mostly be complete by 2050. At that point, hardly anyone will still be ignorant enough to believe that global warming is a hoax, or that technology will fix it for us.

The AI bubble only fools people who are desperate to be fooled. It will obviously collapse over the coming years, but it will also become obvious that we will struggle to reliably deliver electricity to the population, especially in Europe.

People will also begin to figure out the demographic problem, namely, that people with a high IQ have mostly stopped reproducing, while people with a low IQ brought a lot of children into the world.

In much of the developing world, it will become very obvious that agriculture is going to fail, mainly due to a lack of available fresh water.

It is important to be aware of the inevitable prospect of the Great Normie Awakening, because civilization only functions as long as the normies can be fooled into doing their jobs. Once they stop showing up for work, the whole thing begins to collapse at an increasing speed. You will be surprised to see how rapidly things eventually go south.


V – The Value of Stupidity

What tends to characterize modern humans, is their stupidity, vanity, docility and superficial character. Above all else however, they are remarkably stupid. This is not an accident, these are essential ingredients in their ability to navigate life in modern civilization. You too, would probably be better off being dumber. Stupidity makes life easier, at the cost of making it less meaningful.

When you truly find life to be too difficult to carry, then stupidity is a proper answer. When life is too difficult, play at a lower difficulty level.

The reason most people seem happy and confident, is because they’re generally pretty dumb. Ignorance is bliss and when you find life to be so miserable that you want to die, you should try to actively take steps that will have the effect of making you dumber.

Alcohol and cannabis deliver a kind of golden synergy that results in grand stupidity. I would like to recommend combining the two with pizza, but I have moral qualms in regards to eating dairy.

There is also a kind of stupidity that comes from employment: If you spend your whole life putting numbers into spreadsheets, interacting with dumb people, carrying out automatic motions with your hands to deliver some product to a customer, it is inevitable that you will become dumber too. This is one of the reasons some old people tend to be relatively happy: They became stupid through work.


VI – Racism, the misplaced virtue

Although I genuinely care about people of all backgrounds. I’m mainly interested in attracting white supremacists to my worldview. There are multiple reasons for this.

To start with, the white supremacists live with a severe wound: They spend their whole lives, angry about something that is inevitably going to happen: The disappearance of the white race.

My goal here is not to shame people. I think in general, racists are better people than non-racists. They are more honest, they are more willing to devote themselves to a goal greater than themselves and they are less willing to look away from troublesome information. If you find yourself becoming a minority in your own neighborhood, if you find out that Pakistani gangs are raping the girls of your tribe and your government actively facilitates this, it is only natural and virtuous for you to be upset. These are healthy normal instincts.

My goal however, is to reduce people’s burden.

My first recommendation, is to understand that there are things in nature that take a long time to emerge and there are things that emerge rapidly. Things that emerge rapidly, can rapidly re-emerge. This is true for white people. White people took less than 10,000 years to evolve. This is very rapid, on the timescale of evolution.

If the environmental conditions are right, white people will just evolve from non-white people again. This is unlikely to happen anytime soon, as it will require the Earth to arrive at a new position of climatic stability. Our planet also faces changes that are much harder to reverse however: White people can just re-emerge from non-white people, but if the elephants go extinct, they will not re-evolve.

The most important thing to understand for the white supremacists, is as following:

The future is going to be so horrifying, that if you really care about white children, you should avoid bringing them into existence.

If as a white supremacist, you choose to bring white children into existence, despite being aware of how horrifying the future is going to be for them, you are ultimately worse than a pedophile.

I also recommend being honest to yourself about the difference between white people and people who are not white. It is a natural and healthy human instinct, to look at your own tribe and to think it must be superior to other tribes. Ultimately however, the idea is arbitrary: The idea naturally emerges in you, because it helped your ancestors to spread their genes.

In reality, you will find that there are bad people who are white, as well as good people who are not white.

VII – Finding the self outside yourself

Most people tend to go through the following pattern: They pursue simple ambitions in life that tend to come intuitively to them. They seek to meet their parents expectations, then as they become older children they try to display the kind of behavior that helps them make friends and prevents them from being bullied, then they seek to find a partner, then eventually they seek to play some kind of meaningful role within society.

They don’t really tend to consciously deeply think through any of this, unless something goes very wrong and the natural path becomes difficult for them to navigate on autopilot. That’s when people tend to start practicing self-denial: Instead of doing what naturally makes them happy, they try to find some kind of higher abstract good and pursue that instead.

They may become vegan, they may become social justice activists, they may join the clergy, others may pursue some kind of political extremism.

My recommendation, is to walk a kind of golden middle road: The way to accept your own death, is not through self-denial, but by learning to find the self outside yourself. Then, as you learn to find the self outside yourself, your goal should be to take care of the self outside yourself, in the same manner as you always almost automatically took care of your own needs as a child.

You should not blindly pursue your own simple interests forever. You should not try to deny yourself either, by pursuing some kind of greater abstract good goal.

Rather, you should learn to recognize elements of yourself, in the world around you. This requires you to first truly understand what makes you you. And importantly, there is no objective answer to that question: You decide what makes you you.

Once you come to understand what makes you you, you can then decide to take care of the self that exists outside yourself.


These are the seven messages I wish to offer to people:

• Civilization’s collapse is ineluctable.
• Life is a mixed bag.
• Collapse is a good thing.
• The normies are going to wake up too.
• Stupidity is a great boon.
• Racism is a misplaced virtue.
• Find the self outside yourself.

I think seven is a good number. Ten is round, but nobody remembers ten messages.

I plan on rewriting and expanding this document where necessary.

Collapse [soon] and avoid the rush

Collapse now and avoid the rush. Rintrah by Radagast. July 3, 2026.

A lot of people on Reddit tend to get really upset, when I show them this:

I’ve seen all sorts of attempts at denying the obvious: Maybe that number on the left is for the entire airplane! Maybe it’s actually misogyny of me to point out that you shouldn’t be spending your twenties traveling around the world!

No, I’m sorry. The corporations and the media deceived you into thinking that something is normal, that is in fact not normal. Every year we’re using an amount of fossil fuels that took many thousands of years to come into existence and we’re using the atmosphere as the place where we dump our waste after we burned those fossil fuels. That’s just not a normal way to live. It’s not a way of living that will remain available to humans for very long.

The reality is as following: Every time you take an intercontinental flight, more carbon dioxide has to be released into the air through combustion, than an entire African village home to dozens of people releases into the air in a single year. Unfortunately, as they tend to grow their own food, such a village also houses the people who are most directly affected by the global warming your flight causes.

Nobody claims that flying is the main cause of climate change. The problem is that it’s much easier for people to stop flying, than it is to stop growing rice. Some greenhouse gas emissions are just unavoidable with the technology we have available right now. And considering that the airline industry is one of the main industries that is constantly growing its carbon footprint, whereas most other industries at least try to reduce their impact, by 2050 the airline industry will in fact be one of the main remaining causes of further global warming, unless we now wake up and collectively start changing the way we live.

I’m pretty sure you might be wondering: “What’s in it for me?” Well the thing is, as with collapse in general, that if you make the lifestyle changes today that are going to be necessary, then you won’t have to experience the discomfort of having them forcibly shoved down your throat tomorrow, which I promise you, is where this will be headed eventually.

Today you might say to me: “Well, I had to travel to the other side of the world, to visit my grandmother’s funeral.” I’m not here to judge you. What I’m here to tell you is: “By the time your mother leaves this world behind, your government may not allow you to visit the funeral. Consider moving to live near your family, while you still have the freedom to make that decision yourself.”

You’ve seen how this went with COVID. The media, the experts, the governments, all stuck their heads in the sand, until at some point in March 2020, by which time it was already impossible to stop this virus from spreading, they all simultaneously implemented lockdown measures. Humans tend to stick their heads in the sand, until eventually they all panic simultaneously.

Well, climate I’m telling you, is not going to be any different. The American oil companies were all warned about this problem, in the 1950’s. By the late 1970’s, they had an accurate picture of what was going to happen. If at any point they chose to warn us, we would have had plenty of time, to figure out an alternative way to live without using any more fossil fuels. They did not warn us, Hansen warned us, in 1988.

If we had taken Hansen’s warning seriously, we would still have had some time to figure out a way to stop using fossil fuels. Hansen’s warning was not taken very seriously. In fact, when Hansen warns us we need to reduce carbon dioxide back below 350 parts per million to stabilize the climate, nobody really listens to him unfortunately. Hansen did not plan for climate change to become a kind of grand existential conflict for humanity. Hansen had hoped we would implement a carbon tax and start building nuclear reactors.

That did not happen. We’re happily continuing the march towards oblivion. So, what you can reasonably expect to happen at some point, is a climate event that is so massive, that we can not choose to ignore it. We will get an event that is so massive, that we end up getting the kind of mass panic we had in March 2020, when we suddenly had tens of thousands of police on the streets of Paris, announcing to people that they had to stay inside.

What would that look like? Well, for that, we have to talk about wet bulb temperatures. When you wrap a thermometer in a water-moistened cloth, it will behave differently. The water will evaporate, depending on the humidity of the air and you will be able to measure a wet bulb temperature.

As humans, we are guaranteed to die when the wet bulb temperature reaches 35 degree Celsius for at least six hours. Our bodies are not able to use sweating to cool down at that temperature anymore. It doesn’t matter if you sit in the shade, you just die at this temperature. Until we started changing the climate, such wet bulb temperatures occurred nowhere on Earth: No part of the Earth reached temperatures too hot for human survival.

The first time we ever saw a wet bulb temperature above 35 degrees on Earth, was in 1987, in Pakistan. By now, these temperatures are emerging in Iran, in Saudi Arabia and in other parts of the Middle East too. ...

Europe is warming twice as fast, as the world as a whole. One of the consequences is that during heat waves, we now see the sort of temperatures in parts of Europe that you would normally only see in the Middle East.

It gets worse, because 35°C was always the generous theoretical ceiling. It was the point past which we were certain nobody survives. But in a recent study on healthy young adults, it was found that none of them were actually able to cool down at that temperature. Their bodies started getting in trouble much earlier, at a wet bulb temperature of around 30.5 degree Celsius. And for elderly, it’s even harder than for young people to cool down.

Heat stress conditions beyond the limit of human survivability are already a regular thing now on Earth. And due to arctic amplification, the fact that we actually see more rapid global warming in parts of the world that lie further north, there is not really any major part of the world anymore where we are safe from these heat waves.

Now combine this realization, with another problem we face: The heat dome. Because we have changed our climate, the weather has started behaving differently. It’s not just a fact that the Earth in general has warmed, but heat waves now behave differently. We now increasingly get heat domes, which are large parts of the world where the heat is simply trapped and the weather becomes stationary.

One such climate change-linked heat dome, happened in 2021 in Canada and the United States, on the Pacific coast. A study estimated that it was almost certainly caused by climate change, which had made it an estimated 150 times more likely for it to happen.

So what happened during the heat dome? For starters, 1400 people are thought to have died in it.

On June 27, Lytton a village of 250 people in Canada, recorded the highest temperature the town had ever seen: 46.6 °Celsius. But the heat was stuck. There was no wind, the heat was not moving, the soil was drying out and the heat just kept building up. The next day, the town reached an even higher temperature: 47.9 °Celsius. Two consecutive record-breaking days.

But the record would be beaten again, the next day. Finally, on June 29, the temperature in Lytton, British Columbia, hit 49.6 °C (121.3 °F), the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada. The next day, a forest fire swept into the city and everyone had to flee, as the town was destroyed. In British Columbia, 815 people suddenly died during the heatwave. Of those, 570 were deemed heat-related. Of those 570, 21% were younger than 65.

The elderly are more vulnerable, but our planet can now reach temperatures hot enough to kill children and healthy young adults too. As I just showed you, our planet can now reach such temperatures, not just in the Middle East, but even in Canada.

So, please allow me, based on what we’ve learned, to offer you a prediction:

At some point, something big is going to happen. Something so horrifying, that many people will not be able to mentally cope with it. And people are going to freak out. They’re going to freak out, like you’ve never seen before. All these realizations people have been suppressing for years, are going to be released in a tidal wave of emotions, all at once. And governments are going to find themselves panicking too, like they did in March 2020.

As I have explained before, the electric grid in Europe is just not equipped to have us all use air conditioning. Only 20% of Europeans have air conditioning. This does not stop people right now however, from buying air conditioning. If everyone used air conditioning, our evening demand peak would be 50% higher than it is right now, enough to crash the grid. Also, please keep in mind, that our cities suffer a massive heat island effect. Cities can be up to ten degree Celsius hotter than the neighboring countryside.

So, what is going to happen? Well, I expect that at some point, we’re going get a heat dome, over a developed country that people think fondly of. It could be Canada, it could be the United States, it could be Japan, it could be a European country. A place that people associate in their mind with happiness and carefreeness, a place they may have visited as tourists, not a place where people expect misery to happen. South Sudan already has two million climate refugees, but nobody cares. No, for panic to emerge, it needs to go seriously wrong in a Western country.

...

That heat dome, is going to stay stuck. People will turn on their air conditioning. The electrical grid will not be able to handle the demand. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people, will then suffer a blackout. They will rapidly notice the heat becoming unbearable. People will try to flee, but it will be difficult to flee, as it is often difficult to evacuate an entire town at once.

You will turn on your evening news and you will see video footage, of an entire town just annihilated in a heatwave. If I had to pick my best guess, I would guess Phoenix, Arizona, but as the Pacific heatdome illustrated, it can literally happen to Canada. And this time, the news won’t hold back. They’ll show you what actually happened. They will show you what it actually means, to die like this.

You will see houses with dead grandparents in them, who never left their couch, with their dead dog right next to them. You will see cars stuck in a traffic jam, with Sally Soccermom, Joe Sixpack and their little children in the back of the car, all dead. Not people in Uganda, not people in Sudan, but people who look like you, who look like they could be your colleagues or neighbors, dead.

A kind of climate 9/11, if you will. I honestly don’t expect it will take more than a decade, before we have a climate 9/11. The conspiracy theorists will immediately jump on the opportunity for another explanation: Space weapons! Ionosphere heaters! Weather manipulation! Occult Satanic ritual human sacrifice! It was all predicted in an episode of the Simpsons!

But it’s not going to work, because those same people were saying twenty years ago that it’s all a hoax and that the Earth had not warmed since 1998. People are going to panic, people are going to freak out. Government departments are composed of average human beings and they are going to freak out too. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

There will be people going crazy. Young women removing all their holiday pictures from Instagram at 3AM. Married middle-class men with children who work at oil companies quitting their job overnight. People who will commit actual sacrifices, in an attempt to appease nature. Psychologists won’t be able to cope with the demand from people having mental breakdowns. The reason it will be such complete insanity is because people already know all of this, but they still suppress it. But at some point, everyone will almost simultaneously become unable to suppress it. What you are living in now, is the quiet before the storm.

And then within a few days, you find yourself waking up in a whole new world. A world where you have to request permission if you want to travel somewhere by airplane. A world where the tires of your SUV are slashed at night and your neighbors pretend not to see you when you walk past them. A world where a handful of people hoard all the beef in your local supermarket and then there is just never any new beef available anymore and you never quite figure out why.

A world where posh people just sit in the dark in the evening, because they don’t want their neighbors to see them using electricity when their solar panels don’t work. This is your worst nightmare, isn’t it? Your Klaus Schwab WEF globalist horror scenario? Well, that’s why I’m telling you: Prepare for it. It’s going to happen. Nature is done with our bullshit and people are going to figure that out the hard way.

So, what I’m telling you, is to collapse now and avoid the rush. Move to live closer to your family and friends now, don’t sit as an “expat” in some city with a bunch of roommates you don’t really like. Stop flying now, because they’re no longer going to let you fly, unless your life depends on it.

Stop eating beef now, because you’ll crave it and the local supermarket won’t have it for you. Sell your car now and buy a bicycle, because your car will one day be a badge of shame, especially if it is big or expensive. Stop having children now, because it’s going to get ugly.

There will be a before and after to all of this. Not because the climate itself will suddenly shift dramatically one day, but because this is just how human psychology works. Negative emotions and realizations tend to be suppressed, until we can’t suppress them. And then when we look around us and see that others can’t suppress them anymore, we find ourselves able to let go too.

So what I’m asking you, is to just prepare for it. Make the changes that are going to be necessary to your life now, rather than being part of the big crowd of people who will try to exit the theater all at once when someone yells fire. Help make this a somewhat orderly and dignified transition.

Radagast: Nobody is prepared for what's going to happen

Nobody is prepared for what’s going to happen. Rintrah by Radagast. Jun 10, 2026.

To help us figure out what’s going to happen to our planet climatologically speaking, you can look at the last time greenhouse gas concentrations were as high as they are today. That era, is called the Pliocene.

The Pliocene was 5,3 to 2,6 million years ago. CO2 levels were at most around 400 parts per million back then. We’re at 430 ppm right now, so we’re actually in the process of leaving the Pliocene type climate behind. But here’s the important thing to understand: During the Pliocene, the global temperature was 2 to 3 degree Celsius above what it is right now! In the Arctic in particular, temperatures are thought to have been ~19 degree Celsius warmer than they are now.

Why? It was not the sun, the sun was slightly fainter than it is today. The continents were also in the same place. No, the main reason is believed to be because the Pliocene had a bunch of forest fires that resulted in the emission of all sorts of smoke particles. Those smoke particles are dark colored and as a result absorb sunlight.

Another part of the puzzle is that right now, we’re still hiding some of the warming that’s baked into the system, through toxic air pollution. When we actually get rid of fossil fuels, that air pollution will disappear too, revealing the global warming that’s still being hidden right now. Most of that hidden warming is on land. Estimates are all over the place, but center around 0.5 degree Celsius globally. That’s warming you’re still going to get, even if you would stop all emissions today.

So this is the sort of stuff that’s baked in, at 400 parts per million. That’s why people like Hansen and Bill McKibben campaigned to rapidly reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere to less than 350 parts per million. At today’s CO2 concentration, you won’t keep today’s climate. Even the IPCC’s chair, Rajendra K. Pachauri, said that the real target should be 350 parts per million. [ed MW: and that too was WRONG; even at 350, there were no guarantees of maintaining a stable climate; 300 should have been the real target, but politically impossible as we had already left it too far behind]

The 1.5 degree Celsius target you hear about so much, is NOT a scientific target. It’s a political target, invented by diplomats. Long before the world settled on 1.5 degree of warming, we were warned in 1990 that: “Temperature increases beyond 1.0 °C may elicit rapid, unpredictable, and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.”

The 2 degree target was dominant before the world began to realize how much damage we were already seeing at today’s level of warming and moved to 1.5 in 2015. That 2 degree target originates with an economist, William Nordhaus, not with climatologists. These days, Nordhaus goes around saying we might as well have 4 degree of warming, a level of warming that would render large swathes of the Earth too hot for human survival.

There is however, no actual scientific basis to the idea that we can just choose to stabilize temperatures at 2 degree or 4 degree Celsius, which is why years ago I made the following comic to illustrate the idiocy of what Nordhaus is proposing:

We’re all in that car together, the people at the steering wheel are insane maniacs and we’re headed for the shark-infested waters.


Of course our CO2 concentrations will never stabilize around 400 parts per million, we’re already at 430 right now and there’s no reason to expect that emissions will reach zero anytime soon. TotalEnergy expects that by 2050 we’ll still be getting 60% of our energy from fossil fuels, down from 80% today. CO2 concentrations will inevitably rise well above what we see today.

If you want to know what the ultimate committed warming is, from today’s greenhouse gas concentrations, you’re looking at 10 degree Celsius of global warming. That’s what you end up with eventually, as the white ice sheets gradually melt and reveal a darker surface that absorbs more sunlight (heat), while the permafrost begins to release greenhouse gasses on its own. This is a process that takes centuries, but the idea people have, that we can stop using fossil fuels and temperatures will stabilize as a result is nonsense.

No, in reality, we’re now stuck with continuing global warming for centuries to come. But in the short term, it’s very likely to accelerate. A recent study suggests we’re facing 0.5 to 1 degree Celsius of warming, in the next ten years. We had 0.488 degree of warming over the past ten years, so this is simply a modest acceleration of what we’ve already seen.

I know Democrats no longer care. I know Greta Thunberg now has other stuff to care about. But this problem is not going away. And anyone who tells you that temperatures will stop going up once we stop our emissions, is lying to you. Because of positive feedback loops in the climate system, there is no way to stabilize temperatures at 3 degree Celsius.

What’s actually happening is that the Earth is transitioning into a hothouse Earth state because of our actions. This is a process that has only just begun, but will continue to unfold for thousands of years to come. If you wanted to stabilize the Earth’s climate, what you would need to do is suck CO2 out of the air and store it somehow. You would need to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere from today’s 430 parts per million, down to less than 350 parts per million. [nope! 280-300!!]

You’re not going to achieve that. Even global reforestation won’t remove more than 85 ppm from the atmosphere, which means that within two years even global reforestation wouldn’t be enough. There’s no longer any realistic scenario left, in which global temperatures will stabilize during this century.

Let me illustrate what the problem is. Remember how we were warned in 1990 that above 1 degree of global warming, we could expect extensive ecosystem damage? We’re at 1.5 degree of warming now. So where is the extensive ecosystem damage? Well, take a good look at how much CO2 concentrations are rising every year:

Note how there’s a jump in the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere in 2023 and 2024. Why is that? That’s when the 2023–2024 El Niño event took place, which caused a spike in global temperatures. The Amazon suffered a severe drought as a result. That drought turned the Amazon from a carbon sink, into a carbon source. The record jump of CO2 concentrations in 2023 and 2024, was a result of the Amazon ecosystem beginning to fail.

Do you realize what this means? Our ecosystems are beginning to die and as a result they’re beginning to dump the carbon they have been sequestering for us, back into the atmosphere. And none of this is about to stop, even if our emissions suddenly stopped today, because of the positive feedback loops we have triggered. Take a good look, at the other little train we have set in motion:

What you’re looking at, is the Earth’s albedo, its ability to reflect sunlight rather than absorb it.

It has declined, mainly because of the gradual disappearance of snow and glaciers and changes in cloud coverage. The disappearance of snow and glaciers is a delayed process, that takes time to unfold, it continues even when emissions stop. The decline in albedo is equivalent in effect to raising CO2 by 110 parts per million. That’s the train that has been set in motion for us.

Again: There is no climate stability, as long as CO2 concentrations remain above 350 parts per million. Even 350ppm is a generous estimate, the safe target may be as low as 300ppm. [ahhh, there it is.] And since o;nobody has a realistic way to bring concentrations back below 350, let alone 300ppm, there is no stability in our lifetimes. This is just how the climate system works. Politicians want to believe they can stabilize the climate at whatever level they want, but they can’t.

There is no stability at 1.5 degree Celsius of warming, it means your car is slowly rolling down the hill. There is no stability at 2 degree Celsius of warming either, it means your car is rolling down the hill a little faster. 2.5 degree, 3 degree? Forget about it.

So what are the consequences in our lifetime? Well let’s start out with some of the basics. In the summer of 2022 France’s nuclear fleet sat at 40% of its peak capacity. The heat was simply too intense to use the river water for cooling, without killing all the life in the rivers. Now wait 10 years, as global temperatures rise 0.5-1 degree Celsius. Europe is warming twice as fast as the world as a whole, so add 1-2 degree Celsius on top of what we get today. Now add the demand from people’s air conditioning. You get blackouts.

Now try India. I quote:

I’m sure some of you have seen the international headlines or the new UN climate warnings about the heat dome over India right now. The IMD (our weather department) has issued red alerts across my region (the northwest/central belt). Yesterday, a town near me recorded 48.2°C.

I want to explain what 48 degrees actually feels like when you live in a developing country, because it is terrifying.

You can’t just “stay inside and run the AC.” The power grid simply cannot handle the load of millions of people trying to cool down, so we are dealing with rolling blackouts. Imagine sitting in the pitch dark in a concrete room that has been baking in the sun for 12 hours, with no ceiling fan, while the ambient temperature inside is still hovering near 40°C at midnight. You don’t sleep; you just pass out from exhaustion.

The taps are running dry because the heat evaporates local reservoirs and water usage spikes. People who have to work outside—street vendors, construction workers, delivery drivers—are collapsing. Even the water coming out of the cold tap during the day is hot enough to literally brew tea.

It feels like we are living on the absolute razor’s edge of what the human body can endure, and it’s only May.

This is what they’re getting in India, right now. By 2030, 21 cities in India, including New Delhi, are expected to have exhausted their groundwater. There won’t be water coming out of the tap. There won’t be water for agriculture. They’re using up their groundwater faster than nature can replenish it. That’s four years from now.

Now try adding 1 degree Celsius of warming on top of what they’re getting right now. What do you think is going to happen? People are going to flee. Not by 2100. Not by 2050. No, within the next ten years, you’re going to have droves of people try to leave India, whether legally or illegally. They’re going to try to leave, in whatever way they can.

The refugee crisis in Europe back in 2015, consisted of 1.3 million refugees, one million of whom were Syrians. Around five percent of Syria’s population of 20 million back in 2015 tried to enter Europe. If 1% of the Indian population tries to flee to Europe, that’s 15 million people.

Now add Pakistan and Bangladesh, which face the same situation as India: Depleting aquifers, sea level rise, overpopulation and global warming. In total, their population will be 2.021 billion people by 2036. If just 1% of their population tries to flee to Europe, that’s 20 million people.

Oh, did you know, the EU signed a deal with India a few months ago, to make migration from India into the EU easier?

You’ve seen the situation in the UK, the conflicts that emerge due to migration over there. If, during the next ten years, one out of every thousand Indians decides to move to the United Kingdom, their former colonial overlord, the Indian population in the country doubles.

Forget about the legal migration for a moment. If your choice is between dwelling in homeless shelters in Europe, or living in a city where it’s 48 degree Celsius, where you don’t fall asleep but collapse from exhaustion, a city without electricity, a city without fresh water coming from the tap, what would YOU do? I would book a plane ticket to Europe and never go back.

The United States has 13 million illegal immigrants, mostly South Americans. How long do you think it takes until they have 13 million illegals from the subcontinent? People will overstay their visa, people will fly to America just to give birth to their kids.

There is no future in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. The heatwaves are approaching the limits of what a healthy adult can physically survive. The groundwater is being depleted, they won’t have any water coming out of the tap. The electricity grid is not equipped to handle the heatwaves, let alone once the rich start buying air conditioning.

Maybe a miracle happens, maybe they make it through the next ten years without their agricultural production completely failing as they run out of groundwater, without lethal heatwaves, without the electricity grid failing. Maybe they can handle the 49 degree Celsius heatwave, 10 years from now. Wait ten more years, now it’s 50 degree Celsius. Ten more, now it’s 51 degree Celsius. New Delhi, has warmed 2.93 degree Celsius in the past 16 years, because big growing cities are warming up more rapidly than the world as a whole.

At what point do you think things start breaking down? 49 degree heatwaves? 50 degree heatwaves? When do you think people start fleeing for their lives? Want to hear the best part? Once India decides to do everything right, when they stop burning coal, when they stop using internal combustion engines, they will be rewarded with up to 0.7 degree Celsius of global warming on top of what they already have, warming that is currently still being hidden by toxic air pollution.

That’s India for you. Now take a look at Southeast Asia and Oceania. Worldwide, 500 million people depend directly on coral reefs, for food, for tourism and for coastal protection, because the corals break the waves. In Southeast Asia, 70-90% of all the fish people eat come from the coral reefs. Coral reefs are 0.2% of the ocean’s floor, but deliver 10% of fish humans eat.

The coral reefs, are zombies. They’re already dead. Even if you somehow managed to keep global warming to just 1.5 degree of warming, you lose 70-90% of all coral reefs, by midcentury (2050). Gone, not coming back. At 2 degree, you lose 99% of them.

That’s ~500 million people living on small islands, who will need to figure out some other way to survive, within the next 24 years. People whose main protein source, is fish from their coral reefs. What are they going to do? Their economies are going to collapse. Life on some isolated island is affordable because you have tourists visit and because you eat the locally caught fish.

Half a billion people who have to figure out some other way to survive in the next 24 years. If 1% of them decide during the next 24 years that their way to survive is by moving to Europe, that’s five million people. Again, that’s five times the Syrian population that moved into Europe in 2015.

Now try Africa. Africa will have 2.5 billion people by 2050. Make it very simple. We have 2 billion people in India, 2.5 billion in Africa, 500 million people who depend on the coral reefs. All reasonable estimates suggest that by 2050, all these people are going to be in big trouble.

If you have five billion people in trouble and 1% of them try to flee to Europe, that’s fifty million people. That’s fifty times the Syrian population that moved into Europe and 38 times the overall 2015 refugee population that entered Europe.

Why would they move to Europe? They speak the languages. Europe is already multicultural. Europe is wealthy. Europe has a pleasant climate. Where else would they move? China and the Middle East won’t let them in. Africa and India will have enough problems of their own. Russia lies in shambles. Australia has an extreme real estate crisis and hardly lets any people in.

Your only real options to flee, if you don’t want to live in a giant tent city in a neighboring country, are North America and Europe. Australia and New Zealand put together have a population of 35 million people. If 1% of Africans, coral reef dependent islanders and subcontinentals tried to move to Australia and New Zealand, they would double the population of those countries within 25 years. That’s not realistically possible.

So, if you think Europe has a big problem with multiculturalism and immigration right now? Well, wait until 1% of Indians decide they don’t want to live through 49 degree heatwaves without safe drinking water and electricity anymore.

Maybe things get really bad and by 2050, the entirety of Africa looks like Syria did during the civil war, so 5% of the population tries to flee to Europe, just like 5% of Syrians did back in 2015. That’s 125 million people for you. That’s 25% of the EU’s overall projected population. So effectively 20% of your population is African by 2050.

Note: These are not far-fetched estimates. The UN projected 86 million climate refugees for sub-Saharan Africa alone by 2050, back in 2021. But since then, we’ve started to see the consensus shift towards more rapid warming in the near-term, as 2023 and 2024 surprised effectively everyone. And by now, we’re getting serious projections of 0.5-1 degree in the next decade. This is all going to escalate much faster than anyone expected.

But let’s say Eastern Europe decides they don’t want to play along with this and go for the hard approach: They open fire on anyone who tries to enter their countries. Western Europe goes for the soft approach. Now 40% of your Western European population by 2050 is African. The majority of your under 65 population consists of illegal African migrants. How do you maintain a semblance of a functional democracy under those conditions?

Your laws and systems in regards to illegal immigration, were built for today. There are an estimated 3 million people living illegally in Europe right now. Try multiplying that population forty times over the next 25 years, tell me how you’re going to deport them. You won’t have the capacity for it. What you’re going to get under those circumstances, is what you saw in Belfast last night: Citizens deporting them on their own, burning down their houses.

Demographics, is destiny. The numbers don’t lie. Today there are more children born every day in Ethiopia, than in the entirety of the European Union. Ethiopia has more than 100 languages, more than 80 ethnic groups, none above 35% of the overall population. They also have the worst projected impact from climate change for all of Africa.

Where do you think the Ethiopians are going to flee, once their harvests start failing, or the pastoralist tribes start encroaching upon the sedentary tribes? Look at their neighbors. Somalia has been in civil war since 1991, with no end in sight. Sudan is in the middle of a civil war too. South Sudan has the world’s lowest GDP per capita, so don’t expect any help there. Eritrea is a communist dictatorship. Djibouti has a population of one million. That leaves Kenya, which will presumably at some point say “enough is enough”.

So where oh where are the Ethiopians going to flee, once the harvests start to fail? Help me out here. Ideally the destination needs to be wealthy, tolerant, democratic, the climate should be pleasant and there should be programs available that offer housing to refugees, along with ample employment and education opportunities. Can you think of anywhere?

And keep in mind, North America and Europe won’t just be dealing with climate refugees from other parts of the world. No, you’re going to be dealing with internal climate migration too. Decades of drought have caused the Great Salt Lake in Utah to dry up. People in Salt Lake city are now inhaling toxic dust from the lake bed, so they’re fleeing the city. What are they? Climate refugees.

A town in Switzerland was destroyed by a collapsing glacier, so the residents were evacuated. What are they? Climate refugees. The Netherlands plans to destroy a village of 1,100 people, to expand renewable energy infrastructure. What are those residents? Climate refugees. This will perhaps shock people on both sides of the political spectrum, but climate refugees can in fact be white.

The refugee streams you’re going to get as a result of climate change, are unlike anything the world has ever seen in history, but nobody is prepared for it. In fact, most people don’t even have the vaguest clue what they need to be preparing for. Nobody is prepared for what’s going to happen.

Radagast: Degrowth

Is Zeke Hausfather right, is Degrowth dumb? Rintrah by Radagast. Jun 16, 2026

Degrowth is dumb, you heard it here first!

Thank God for Zeke Hausfather! Where would be all be without this man?

Imagine you had a magic wand that would allow you to change the laws of physics, to make it so that CO2 and methane in the atmosphere do not actually cause global warming. Wouldn’t that be great?

Well, a degrowther would argue we would still find ourselves faced with big problems during this century, because the real problem we face, is the overall size of the human economy, the overall demands that we place on the Earth. But that is nonsense of course! As long as we just make sure to keep global warming below 1.5 degree Celsius, everything else will turn out alright on its own!

Today, I want to take a look with you at some of the non-climate problems that we face, that will require us to reduce the size of our economy do things a little differently. Just a little tiny bit, I promise!

Something has to replace fossil fuels, especially oil

Even if fossil fuels did not cause global warming, we would still have to stop using them, for the simple reason that they are finite. It is becoming increasingly expensive, to dig them up out of the Earth. That is a bigger problem than it may seem, because we don’t really have a good sustainable alternative for most of the ways we use them.

What you probably think to yourself is that we can stop using oil, because you’ve seen electric vehicles. Imagine if every van and every passenger vehicle, stopped using oil as fuel and became electric. That would solve just 25% of global oil use. Most of our oil use, is in ways that are much more difficult to replace.

For example, we need fuel for our airplanes. Can’t we turn plants into fuel for our airplanes? Yes we can, but that’s going to require a lot of plants. If we wanted to meet 2050 level demand for air travel with biofuels, we would need to be using 30% of total globally sustainable biomass. That’s not going to happen, because people also need to eat.

But there are other uses of fossil fuels, that also have to be replaced. Around 14% of the oil we use, is used to produce petrochemicals, including plastics. Again, the plastic manufacturers are looking towards our crop production, to produce “bioplastics”. Like biofuels for air travel, this will also be competing with land we use to produce food. And we will need biofuels for heavy duty trucks, which will also require land.

So, in the world where global warming is not a thing, we’re still going to need to stop using oil at some point. And that’s not going to be easy. In fact, it is going to be competing with our need to use our farmland for food.

We don’t have enough fresh water left

This is another big problem for which we don’t have a solution. In large parts of the world, we get our water for food production and other human uses, from water that we pump up from the ground. There is however only limited amounts of water available in the ground below our feet. Globally, 35% of all the fresh water we use, comes from stored groundwater.

Large parts of the world are depleting their groundwater faster than it can be replaced by nature. This is true for India, where the situation is particularly acute, as well as for the United States.

Can’t we just solve this problem with desalination plants? No we can’t, for multiple reasons. To start with, desalination requires a lot of electricity. If India wanted to stop using groundwater and start using desalinated water, they would need to figure out how to produce 122% more electricity than they currently do.

The real cost in some parts of the world is not so much in desalinating the water, as it is in transporting the water. If you could produce the desalinated water and teleport it to the farmland where it is needed, that would quadruple the cost of producing wheat. But we can’t teleport the desalinated water, we have to transport it from the coast, to the place where it is needed. Transporting water is expensive.

Approximately 1% of global freshwater use comes from desalinated water. Desalination will never play more than a minor role in meeting our water needs. It’s simply too expensive for most purposes for which we use freshwater in most of the world.

We don’t have enough copper available in the ground

The world will face a 30% shortage in the amount of copper we need, by 2035. Because of droughts in Chile, it’s currently hard to produce enough copper to meet the world’s global need, as certain methods of copper mining and refining use a lot of water. We also simply face a massive problem with declining core copper grades. Average copper ore grades globally have deteriorated from approximately 1.5% in the 1990s to around 0.6-0.7%.

We don’t have the right iron ore left to produce steel without using fossil fuels.

We don’t have enough of the high quality iron ore we need, to produce steel without using fossil fuels. The world has already exhausted the best iron ore that was available.

We’re losing our soils faster than nature can regenerate them for us

In some parts of the world, we’re making our soils unsuitable for agriculture by polluting them. That is the case in China, where the share of polluted soil grew from 5% in the 1980’s, to 19.4% today. The three main causes are use of pesticides, use of fertilizer and use of mulch. Together this results in the buildup of heavy metal pollutants in the soil, that reduce the growth rate of plants and make those plants unhealthy for human consumption.

In other parts of the world, soils are being lost to erosion. Estimates are that 16% of our soils will be lost within 100 years to erosion.

We’re damaging our soils by polluting them with microplastics

As I explain here, current estimates are that our overall global harvests are reduced by 5.5% by microplastics in our soil. As long as we continue using plastics, we will cause further buildup of microplastics in our soils, thus further reducing agricultural yields.

We’re eating so much fish that the global ocean ecosystem is changing

Because humanity is eating too much fish, jellyfish are taking over the ocean. The jellyfish also eat the eggs and larvae of fish, thus making the problem self-reinforcing. The ocean is approaching a global state shift, towards a jellyfish-bacteria dominated ocean. Jellyfish are not generally eaten by other animals, so the jellyfish blooms just decay, feeding blooms of bacteria. Other factors in the transformation to a jellyfish-bacteria soup ocean, are climate change and the human introduction of pollutants into the ocean, like human sewage and manure from the animals we raise for food.

A jellyfish dominated ocean is bad news, for a number of reasons. For starters, it means we won’t have fish to eat. Second, jellyfish clog our pipes. Jellyfish blooms are already constantly shutting down our nuclear reactors. This will only get worse, as we transition to a global jellyfish-microbial ocean soup. They are also shutting down our desalination plants.

We’re at serious risk of triggering a chain-reaction that destroys all our satellites and makes it impossible to navigate space

We have too many satellites in the air. A Kessler syndrome is now a real possibility, which would leave us without all the different functions satellites deliver to us. According to the experts, we need to start launching fewer satellites into outer space.

Oh yeah and while we’re at it: We’re now having so many old satellites crash back into our atmosphere, that all the aluminum being vaporized is starting to cause significant damage to our ozone layer.

We have to stop using light at night

Global insect populations are declining by 1-2% a year. In Germany they found a 75% decline in insect populations in 27 years. At least part of the reason insect populations are declining, is because we are confusing them with our light pollution at night.

Who cares about the disappearance of the insects, right? Well, ninety percent of all our bird species do. Ninety percent of all bird species depend on insects at least during some part of their life cycle.

Well, who the hell cares about the disappearance of the birds, right? I will just sit inside, staring at my computer screen and not worry about what goes on around me. I just don’t care if 90% of all bird species were to go extinct!

Well, more than 70% of all plants that produce flowers depend on birds to disperse their seeds. But I just hate flowers, alright? Well, birds disperse the seeds of 90% of plants in tropical ecosystems. So, we lose the rain forests without the birds. Well, who the hell cares about the rain forests, right?

The insects, the flowering plants, the birds, the rain forests, let them all die on the altar of our Gross Domestic Product! Well, here’s the problem: We depend on the Amazon rain forest for 20 billion dollar worth of agricultural products every year, because the forest generates so much rain.

And I will admit, I kind of don’t want to die of hunger. As you can see, everything is interconnected. We screw with the insects, we screw with the birds. We screw with the birds, we screw with the plants whose seeds they distribute. We screw with the seeds, we screw with the rain forests. We screw with the rain forests, we screw with the rain we need for our own crops.

So yeah, I am of course not one of those crazy progress-hating degrowthers, but I think we have to reconsider using light at night. I don’t want to get trapped in a global chain reaction of extinctions that leads me to die of hunger.

We have to stop driving our cars everywhere

For one third of species of mammal studied, being hit by cars is the number one cause of death.

This man saved us all, by figuring out a way to reduce global oil consumption by at most 25%!

This may shock some of you to hear, but when a zero-carbon electric vehicle like a Tesla encounters a hedgehog, the hedgehog will still respond to the threat by rolling up. This may shock you when I tell you this too, but that results in the hedgehog being flattened.

As Ben Goldfarb puts it: “We’re living in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event in our planet’s history, and roadkill is truly one of the major reasons for that.” The estimates are that for 50% of endangered species in North America, roads are part of the reason why they are endangered.

You might want to start shutting down your nuclear power plants too

So yeah, we already figured out that in the jellyfish-dominated global ocean soup, nuclear power plants that get their water from the ocean regularly start struggling with the filters being clogged by massive jellyfish blooms, I already showed you this.

But what about the nuclear power plants that get their cooling water from the rivers? Well, they are endangering the species that live in the rivers, like the fish that live in them. You see, the water that is returned into the river, is hotter than the water that was taken from the river. This kills your fish.

Well who cares alright? Let’s just kill everything that lives in the river, we need the electricity!

Yeah I agree, let’s kill everything in the river. We have to take one thing into consideration however: The warm water in the river from the nuclear power plants also triggers harmful algae blooms. Higher water temperatures can accelerate the growth of various waterborne pathogens, including bacteria, viruses, and protozoa. In other words, when we warm up our rivers too much with our nuclear power plants, we are left without safe drinking water.

We might want to start shutting them down at some point, at least during heatwaves in summer. Those crazy hysterical European greens may have been onto something.

My conclusion

So, I agree with Hausfather. Degrowth is dumb. We should not stop growing the economy.

What a silly idea! No, we simply need a simple technofix. Just make sure we keep global warming below 1.5 degree Celsius, build a bunch of nuclear power plants, solar panels and wind turbines and everything will be alright!

And alright, I guess we should simply:

-Start flying less

-Start driving less cars

-Start using less water for agriculture

-Start producing less plastics

-Start producing less copper

-Start producing less steel

-Start launching less satellites into the air

-Start getting used to shutting down our nuclear power plants when the river gets too warm

-Start eating less fish

-Stop dumping our livestock manure into the ocean

-Stop using lights everywhere during the night

But let’s not call that Degrowth. I get it, Degrowth is a forbidden word. Too European in style. No, let’s call what we need to do something else. Let’s call it: Cool growth. Or hey, how about this one? Patriotic Growth. No? How about American Growth?

And finally, I have to be serious for a moment and mention that I have in fact heard of the “decoupling” idea. The idea means effectively nothing to me, I consider it a rhetorical trick. I would recommend anyone who seriously believes in the idea of decoupling, to walk into a local pub in the future and explain to some of the guys sitting there drinking beer, that although they can no longer afford to eat meat, drive a car or fly, the economy has actually grown according to your charts. They would tell you: “Get outta here!” It is not an idea I feel like dignifying with a serious response.


My proposal to Zeke Hausfather

Since degrowth is of course very dumb, my proposal to Zeke Hausfather is as following:

Please explain to people how to increase the size of the global economy and deliver everyone an abundant and equitable future while everyone will have to:

-Start flying less.

-Start driving our cars less.

-Start using less water in agriculture

-Start producing less plastics

-Produce less copper

-Produce less steel

-Launch less satellites into the air

-Start reducing overall electricity consumption, as we will increasingly often have to shut down our nuclear power plants

-Start eating less fish

-Stop dumping our animal manure in the ocean

-Stop using light everywhere during the night

My suspicion is that achieving all of these objectives, would probably require us to engage in fewer economic activities, which would then result in a smaller overall economy.

But that is degrowth, which is dumb. So my question to Mr. Hausfather is: Please show how we can achieve these goals, without reducing the overall size of our economy.

I know you can do it!

Let’s put more people into the world! Let’s further increase the size of our economy! There’s no way this can go wrong!