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.
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:
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.
The Cure for Climate Anguish. Rintrah, by Radagast. Sept. 7, 2024.
So I’ll try not to waste too many words on this, but the Dutch Extinction Rebellion protesters are blocking the entrance to the state museum in Amsterdam.
Ted Kaczynski famously warned that protesters should not create a rift between themselves and the general public. Rather, they should seek to find adherents, by attacking the excesses of the system they oppose. For his anti-tech revolution, he recommended focusing on genetic manipulation, rather than, let’s say, the electricity grid.
So if you block the entrance to the state museum, preventing people who have very little spare time from going to the museum, you’re inevitably just marginalizing yourself. You’re also marginalizing yourself of course if you start piling other leftists causes on top of your cause, like the Palestinians.
But I don’t think these people are seriously trying to save the world. I think they want to be able to say to themselves that they were “on the right side of history” and “tried everything”. Above all else, they’re trying to treat their own existential anguish.
They kind of ran out of ideas, so now they’re settling on a kind of “fifteen degrees to Hitler” leftist social shaming strategy. The fossil fuel industry is Hitler. ING, the Dutch bank, funds Hitler, so they’re nazi’s. The nazi bank also funds the museum, so the museum are nazi sympathizers.
But this is a bit of a dead-end social strategy. At this point, my honest recommendation is to just accept that the attempt to stop global warming has failed and we’re going to die.
“It was all looking pretty bleak. But then people blocked the entrance to a museum funded by a bank that also funds the fossil fuel industry and things began to get better!”
The Africans are fucked, the elephants are fucked, the orangutans are fucked.
But let’s be honest to ourselves. The African population is projected to swell to 3.5 billion by 2100. Global warming or no global warming, they were fucked to begin with. Their fertile soils are flushing down into the ocean.
Congo had 12 million people in 1950. They had 101 million in 2020. They will have 379 million by 2100. What did you think was going to happen? “Oh no, global warming caused millions of people in Congo to die of starvation in 2050 who would have otherwise died in a Malthusian catastrophe in 2080!”
Most people don’t zoom out, they live in the here and now. If you zoom out you’ll get anxious, because you will see your own ugly old mug and your death on the horizon. But if you’re going to zoom out, it would be better if you would recognize the inevitability of collapse too.
Nobody really knows exactly what’s going to happen, but you don’t have to be a genius, to recognize collapse is baked into the system by now. Forget about global warming for a moment. We don’t have the natural resources we need to keep the system going. The aquifers are depleting, our soils are flushing into the ocean, the pollinating insects are dying from our pesticides, our sperm counts are crashing and most of the population is obese.
The Koreans and Japanese are dying out, the Afghans and the Congolese are undergoing a population explosion. Call me racist if you want, but I don’t think the Amish-Afghan-Congolese coalition is going to build the same sort of society as the Japanese and the Koreans did.
If you think the temperatures we’ll get by 2050 are terrifying, wait until you see the resource depletion problem that kicks in much earlier. We don’t have the natural resources we need for the whole sustainable energy transition, there’s very little copper left in the world.
And if you think the resource depletion is scary, wait until you see the real problem, the pandemic problem. Congo has always had monkeypox. But in the old days people lived in isolated villages, so the virus would die out for lack of hosts, before finding its way into the next village.
But now people are living in giant refugee camps, in cities where children with bullet holes in their body lay in the same hospital bed as children with monkeypox. People now live in refugee camps where a hundred people have to share the same toilet. The women are forced to prostitute themselves, to feed their children. Just as nature tries to be merciful to the chickens we put in cages, nature tries to be merciful to the poor people stuck living in these refugee camps.
When you go from 12 million people to 101 million people, you make it much easier for a virus to spread to the next host, before dying out. Add some airplanes and truck drivers to that and a virus can spread to multiple other countries. That’s what happened to monkeypox. I said it before, I’ll say it again: Orthopox viruses killed 300-500 million people in the 20th century, even though smallpox was extinct by 1980. When this goes wrong, it goes very wrong.
“We’re going to save the Africans from global warming!”
Bro, you can’t save the Africans from monkeypox. The vaccines have finally arrived, but they won’t start vaccinating until they’ve trained the personnel, so the first vaccines will be administered in October at earliest. After that it’s a week or two before the vaccine is actually effective.
They will have 380,000 vaccines, on a population of 90 million in Congo alone. The capital city Kinshasa has already had its first 11 detected cases. There are 17 million people living there.
Good luck. This is going to turn into the same thing as SARS2, you’re just going to accelerate its evolution by vaccinating against it.
“I wonder what’s going to happen…”
Well, I have often released animals in Sim Life that showed this growth pattern and ate all the plants before the plants could produce seeds, so allow me to spoil the ending for you: They’re going to die. You can stabilize the ecosystem a bit, by releasing a plague virus before the animal population peaks, but otherwise they will probably just make all your plants extinct too.
But that’s just Congo. Nigeria will have 477 million by 2100, Ethiopia will be at 366 million. The EU will have 420 million by 2100, so yes, Nigeria alone would have more people than the EU. What do you think is going to happen?
By 2100 Nigeria would have the population density of the Netherlands! Forget about improving yields for a moment. In the Netherlands, we’re using 7% of our land, just for housing. Your food production is going to decline, simply because you’ll need to use your most fertile farmland to build houses and roads for your population. After all, your first cities like Lagos emerged in fertile river deltas, not in the middle of the desert up north.
We obviously won’t make it that far, collapse is baked into the system by now. But people don’t want to hear this, they want to think they can still dig their way out of this hole.
The crown of trees looks like this:
(see his post for pic)
This is how they stop pathogens from spreading. For generations, people living in the jungle did the same thing, they were highly xenophobic, they avoided other tribes.
But now countries like Congo are becoming an actual unified whole. And the number of flights worldwide exploded:
(again, see his site for pic)
So take a guess what’s going to happen.
The writing is on the wall by now.
Like the era of antibiotics, the era of controlling viruses through vaccination is of limited duration.
We’re now entering the pandemic era. Global warming will be of secondary concern.
Radagast: A fata morgana in the desert of the real
The nice thing about 9/11 is that it taught a lot of people never to trust anything their government is involved in ever again. The reward for that lifelong distrust you were immunized with came in 2021. Am I saying it’s an inside job? Before psychedelics I would say yes. Now I would say: 9/11 happened in your head. There’s no objective reality, it’s all in the eye of the beholder and you’re (un)lucky enough to have ended up in synch with mine.
And you might say I should watch some 2 hour documentary that proves who did it. But here’s the thing: They caught FSB agents in Russia with explosives in an apartment complex, yet you can’t PROVE that the FSB caused the Russian apartment complex bombings. And in a world where you can’t prove the FSB committed a terrorist attack, after the FSB agents were caught planting explosives in an apartment complex, what chance do you have to prove that Cheney and the PNAC gang had those planes fly into those buildings?? It’s a fool’s errand.
The point is: Physical matter doesn’t determine what happened. Rather, these are the constraints within which we, the conscious observers, have to maneuver. And from your angle it’s obvious what happened, but that can only ever tell us something about you. It’s a Rorschach test: It’s not designed to have a single correct answer.
It’s like the wave-particle duality. Is it a wave, is it a particle? It’s both as long as we don’t force the function to collapse through sufficiently careful observation. And events like 9/11 or the Russian apartment bombings are forever in that grey zone, where it looks like a particle, but it might just be a wave.
The sufficiently paranoid conspiracy theorist will point out that the attacks were FORESHADOWED! Look at Neo’s passport in the Matrix! It expires on 9/11!
Or look at that Lone Gunman episode, where the government flies a plane into the WTC to increase defense spending!
Or look at how the Simpsons predicted 9/11!
So what happens is you find yourself expanding your conspiratorial vision of the world. Apparently these people insist on giving you hints. As part of their Satanic religion, they must foreshadow what they’re going to do. And they are dedicated enough that a Lone gunman Episode is insufficient, the SImpsons have to be made complicit too.
But what I would argue, rather than calling you crazy, is that you haven’t expanded your paranoid view of the world enough yet. You’re looking for an agent here within this world. That’s the mistake. It’s something that designs this reality you experience, that’s toying with you. It’s pulling your legs, never quite giving you concrete proof of what’s going on, forever keeping you guessing, forever keeping you deeply suspicious, but unable to prove that something is not adding up. And when it decides to troll you through the Matrix out of all possible movies, it’s just laughing in your face.
You’re stuck with a society that expects you to believe a completely ridiculous story, about the mightiest nation in the world that has two of its skycrapers brought down by a guy in a cave in Afghanistan who decides a bunch of dudes have to hijack some airplanes and fly them into the buildings. Buildings that were bought by a guy a few weeks before, who then went on to sue his insurer to insist the two buildings being hit by airplanes constitute two separate terrorist attacks and thus entitle him to double the money. What actually happened on 9/11 appears more like a parody of a conspiracy, than as an actual conspiracy.
The Pentagon somehow announces the day before a couple of trillion dollars are unaccounted for. The people involved in the accounting are blown up the next day by an airplane strike into a section of the building that was recently reinforced.
The top dogs in government write a creepy document where they explain how they wish to build an American empire, for which they will need a “new pearl harbor” to pull the whole thing off. And they even go around, giving speeches where they warn about such a surprise event:
And simultaneously, at the end of the day you’re just unable to poke a sufficiently strong hole in this whole thing to deflate it, the kind of big hole that allows you to move on with your life. Your choice is: Either ignore it like all the normies do, or turn yourself into a social pariah by digging and digging and digging in an attempt to find that one silver bullet that allows you to finally put the whole thing to rest. But you won’t find it. It’s a rabbit hole, filled with quicksand at the bottom.
And the mistake you make, is that you play along in the game. You signed up to go on the fool’s journey. Like a young farmhand who has his colleagues ask him to get the strawberry ladder, they’re going to keep the game going as long as you’ll play along with it: “Where’s the strawberry ladder?” “Oh haha it was out there somewhere in the attic, see if you can get Joe to get it for you, ask him about it.”
Because the real game here, is metaphysical. You’re looking for something concrete, here in this world. Something you can grab and hold and show to someone else: “Look, this type of metal doesn’t create this kind of crystalic structures until 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, which JET FUEL CAN’T REACH!” And so you’re like the young farmhand looking for the strawberry ladder. As long as you play the game, your coworkers will help you out in search of the strawberry ladder.
The joke is that you won’t find it here in this world. I’ll never find that video again that proves Timothy McVeigh was still in the army months after he had supposedly quit, it was on Youtube, it was deleted and nobody bothered to back it up. You’ll never find that video that proves the controlled demolition beyond a doubt. And http://archive.org won’t have that news article you seek. But if you’re naive enough to play along, this world will happily keep you forever searching, searching for your very own strawberry ladder.
It’s a supernatural event. 9/11 happened in your brain and what really happened is in the sight of the beholder. There is no objective answer, because there is no objective reality. It’s all subjective. From time to time events happen, events where us mere mortals can’t agree on what took place.
What 9/11 is, is the desert of the real. When Slavoj Zizek wrote Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he was quoting Morpheus in the Matrix. And Morpheus, was referencing Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. A Simulacra, according to Baudrillard, is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
To Baudrillard, we live in a world of symbols, symbols which serve to obscure the fact that reality, insofar as it may even exist, is irrelevant to our lived day to day experience. So it is with 9/11. What actually happened on 9/11 is irrelevant, what matters for our lived experience is what it became as a symbol. And when you try to find out what really happened, when you try to replace their symbol with that of your own, first you will encounter a conspiracy, but as you dig deeper, you will merely encounter a void.
These events are like forks on the road. And as our boats split off into different directions on the river, we try to hold hands, we try to pull each other back towards our direction: “Look at this obscure Youtube video I found! This proves it beyond a doubt! Your fact-checkers have nothing to say about it!”
But again, it’s a fool’s errand: The boats will be pulled apart. The forks on the road exist for a reason. Maybe a consensus reality with 8 billion people is just hard to run, maybe it takes a lot of processing power.
You’re stuck in a ride in an amusement park. And what runs this amusement park is entirely indifferent to your suffering and confusion. It seems to find it hilarious that you continue to believe any of this is even real.
You could call this a metaphor if you want, about the nature of reality. But I would say: Just smoke it. Smoke the Salvia plant. The metaphor will manifest itself before your very own eyes. The clowns will appear and they will joke with you, they will mock you, you will see their whole circus, along with the device within which they put you through all of this insanity.
And when you do, when you return from the circus, you can forget for a moment about trying to prove what happened on 9/11. Two skyscrapers where 3000 people were immolated by their own government becomes among the least of your worries. You felt as if there is a joke that’s being played on you, but it’s much bigger than you held possible.
