Sentinel Intelligence

You're Not a Fearmonger. You Have Sentinel Intelligence. Jessica. Sep 23, 2024.

Some of us can hear the future.

You’ve probably heard about Helen of Troy. She’s blamed for starting the Trojan War. Not many people remember Cassandra.

She predicted it.

In Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon, you get Cassandra’s full story. In some ways, the Trojan War is really about a bunch of dudes who don’t listen to a woman, and it leads straight to the collapse of their civilization.

In later retellings, they ignore her twice.

Surprised?

Cassandra doesn’t exactly ask for the gift of prophecy. The Greek god Apollo falls in love with her. He puts her under a spell in one of his temples. Then he tells his pet snakes to go lick her ears. When she wakes up, she can hear the future. Apollo tries to seduce Cassandra, but she’s just not that into him. He has a meltdown. Zeus tells him no backsies on divine gifts, so he finds a loophole.

He curses her.

Now when Cassandra hears the future, nobody believes her. If you want to drive someone insane, that’s a good start.

Now get this:

Not only does Cassandra predict the Trojan war, but she also warns everyone about the Trojan Horse. Once again, nobody listens. They start calling her names. She tries to smash the horse open with an axe and gets dragged away screaming.

You know the rest.

Many of us have been identifying strongly with Cassandra over the last few years. We watch the media downplay and dismiss one threat after another. We endure endless opinion pieces about everything from climate alarmism to coronaphobia. Influencers accuse us of hurting everyone’s mental health. Strangers call us doomers and fearmongers. Our friends and family treat us like we’re paranoid. When we share dozens or even hundreds of studies, they refuse to look at them. They say, “I don’t want to read anything that’ll bring me down.”

“I’m trying to stay positive.”

Americans and Westerners in general are suffering from a pandemic of denial, wishful thinking, and toxic positivity. It impedes us at every turn, on almost every serious issue. It exacerbates our existing anxiety and contributes to our sense of despair about the future of the planet. Here’s the thing:

You’re not a fearmonger.

You have sentinel intelligence.

Sentinel intelligence refers to a special cognitive ability that allows someone to detect threats before anyone else. Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy talk about this trait in their book, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. They review a number of natural and economic disasters throughout history. As they write, “in each instance a Cassandra was pounding the table and warning us precisely about the disasters that came as promised.” Not only were they ignored, but “the people with the power to respond often put more effort into discounting the Cassandra than saving lives and resources.”

It just keeps happening.

If you have sentinel intelligence, your brain can aggregate and sift through extraordinary amounts of information in a very short period of time, especially when it comes to seeing latent or hidden dangers. You don’t get stymied by what Clarke and Eddy call the “magnitude of overload.”

In some ways, it’s a superpower.

Research on sensitive individuals confirms how sentinels and Cassandras think. Social psychologist Tsachi Ein-Dor writes that some of us "are chronically hypervigilant and constantly alert to potential threats and dangers. Other individuals, once alerted to a threat, are self-reliant and likely to take protective actions rapidly and effectively." In other words, we're hardwired alarm systems. Groups are more likely to survive when they have a mix of people who are skilled at detecting, communicating, and acting on threats to their survival.

Some of us can identify threats just by knowing that something's off. One study in Nature Scientific Reports describes this ability as scene gist. As they explain, "Scene gist extracted rapidly from the environment may help people detect threats." The shapes and contours of a landscape can trigger our threat brains even before we know the details of what we're looking at.

The findings suggest that scene gist extends beyond scanning your surroundings for patterns. It could apply to evaluating other types of input, like data. If you have sentinel intelligence, you know what it feels like to always have your threat brain on. You know how it feels when you're assessing and analyzing information and something feels odd, even before you can articulate what.

That's scene gist.

There's an avenue of research in psychology called threat sensitivity theory, where researchers study how individuals identify and respond to danger. As Samantha Denefrio explains, some individuals show an "exaggerated threat sensitivity." On the one hand, it can be maladaptive. On the other, it could save you from a deadly virus or a climate disaster.

Threat sensitivity lives on a spectrum.

As Stephen Ristvedt writes in Heliyon, "People on one end... are dispositionally hypersensitive to possible threat and thus more prone to anxiety and avoidance. Those on the other end... are relatively insensitive to threats and thus more likely... to take unnecessary risks."

Some research describes sentinels as flowers. A study in Translational Psychiatry looked at how college students respond to their environment. They found that around 30 percent react strongly to external stimuli, 40 percent show a moderate reaction, and about 30 percent show a weak reaction. They describe the low-sensitivity group as dandelions and the moderate-sensitivity group as tulips.

They call the high-sensitivity group orchids.

Orchids experience more intense reactions to art and music. They pay more attention to detail. They feel more overwhelmed by too much stimulus, but they simultaneously hyperfocus for long periods of time. They also tend to be quiet introverts. They’re more likely to feel self-conscious, and they’re more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

It all fits.

These terms like orchid and sentinel describe the same overall group, and we find them throughout history. Psychologists sometimes describe them as highly sensitive. They’re often ignored, even persecuted for speaking truth to power. Our culture dumps a lot of judgment on them, along with anyone who falls somewhere on the neurodivergence spectrum. We’re called weak and emotional, and we’re attacked for feeling too much. The actual data suggests that it’s not a weakness at all.

It’s a strength.

It’s not easy to convince someone to take a threat seriously when you’re the only one who sees it. Your mind has pieced together hundreds or even thousands of different data points from research, but also from prior experience and observations. You’ll have trouble unpacking all of that. According to Clarke and Eddy, someone with sentinel intelligence “may at times appear obsessive and even socially abrasive.”

We’ve seen a lot of that lately.

This research also explains why so many people wait until there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence indicating a threat before doing anything. Dandelions and tulips don’t respond as strongly to their environments.

They miss the warning signs.

If you have sentinel intelligence, it probably bewilders you how the vast majority of people can’t or won’t connect all the dots and threads. It’s why you’re often confused with your arch-enemy, the conspiracy theorist.

There’s a big difference.

Sentinels care about people and want to keep them safe, even strangers. They’re inclined to think about the greater good, and they’re more willing to put up with inconveniences for the sake of protecting their group. They’re also more willing to risk the alienation and sometimes embarrassment of being wrong. They would rather be wrong than risk someone else’s life.

Conspiracy theorists do the opposite.

If sentinels display more compassion, conspiracy theorists show higher levels of narcissism and psychopathy. They’re less in tune with their surroundings. They show much less compassion. They place a great deal of importance on their own personal rights and freedoms. They give themselves a special role in revealing the truth. While they portray themselves as highly-informed and rational, they tend to string together random facts and observations into narratives with no internal consistency. These narratives often arrive at violence toward institutions and marginalized groups.

Sentinels usually advocate for simple measures, while conspiracy theorists push for violent interventions or radical solutions, like suspending the constitution or kidnapping governors.

Finally, conspiracy theorists are prone to trivialize and dismiss actual threats like corporate monopolies and disaster capitalism. When the Trojans ignored Cassandra, they indulged in a range of fallacies.

Here’s how Trojan brains think:

That will never happen.
Okay, it’s happening.
It’s not that bad.
Okay, it’s bad.
It won’t last long.
Okay, it will never end.
What’s your solution?
That won’t work.
It’s too late to do anything.
Everyone’s worn out.
There’s no way we could’ve known.
We should just let it happen.
Everyone’s on their own.
Everything’s fine.
I’m trying to stay positive.
It’s not my fault.
It’s yours.

Psychologists also have a name for the tendency to shrug off warnings. It’s called reactance. Paul Ratner talks about it in Big Think. As he writes, “not many are big fans of being told what to do.” On the other hand, “persisting in your obstinance can feel pretty satisfying.”

Jack W. Brehm introduced this idea in his 1966 book, A Theory of Psychological Reactance. His work inspired nearly 60 years of research on how individuals and groups shrug off warnings until it's too late.

Then they panic.

So, look:

Our survival depends on our ability to overcome these psychological hangups. We also have to get better at listening to sentinels instead of pathologizing them and talking about their social anxiety.

If you’re a sentinel, it often feels like the slightest suggestion of a threat sets off a cascade of denial and wishful thinking.

Now we know why.

Combine all of these psychological hazards, and you arrive at the current state of affairs, a Western society that remains largely unwilling to recognize threats and face them with simple solutions.

I don’t think the answer lies in softening our words or coddling fragile egos. That never helps. We just need a little confidence and reassurance that we’re doing the right thing. When minimizers call us hysterical doomers, we can lean on the psychology that says otherwise.

If you see a threat, there’s nothing wrong with speaking up. Someone’s always going to feed their own self-esteem by dismissing you.

Focus on the ones in the middle who might listen.

With enough effort, we can get through to the 40 percent of people out there who show some willingness to pay attention. They can fall prey to Trojan brain, but they’ll listen to sentinels. It’s worth trying.

Maybe this last part sounds optimistic.

If you have sentinel intelligence, maybe it takes all you’ve got just to protect yourself and endure everyone’s ridicule. Some of us are tired, and we need a break from the role of Cassandra. That’s fine.

Just remember, you’re not a fearmonger.

You have a gift from the gods.

You can hear the future.

Assorted Musings on Collapse

******* The #1 Reason I Became A Doomer. Alan Urban, Collapse Musings. Jan. 16, 2024.
We're not doomed because of climate change, resource depletion, or biodiversity loss. We're doomed because human nature made those things inevitable.

There are many reasons I became a doomer.

Climate change is accelerating and governments aren’t taking it seriously. The sixth mass extinction event is well underway and most people don’t care. Fossil fuels and other crucial resources are running out and most people don’t even know. Pollution in the form of microplastics and forever chemicals are rapidly accumulating in our bodies, lowering sperm counts and causing all sorts of health problems.

And all that is because of overshoot. We’ve already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, so it’s only a matter of time before the global population comes crashing down. But overshoot isn’t the main reason I became a doomer. In fact, I became a doomer about a year before I knew what overshoot means.

The main reason I became a doomer is because I realized that the challenge we’re facing is so monumentally large and complicated that humans are incapable of overcoming it. 

This idea upsets some people. They say things like, “What about World War II? Look at how the U.S. mobilized the entire nation to help defeat the Axis powers.”

Yea, after they were attacked and only because they had a clear enemy. This time, we can’t simply declare fossil fuels the enemy and stop using them overnight. Doing that would cause civilization to collapse, anyway.

Besides, fossil fuels aren’t the only problem. As I’ve explained before, we would still be headed for collapse even if there were no climate change or pollution because we’re completely dependent on finite resources (forests, aquifers, fossil fuels, rare-earth minerals, etc.) that will mostly be gone in a matter of decades.

Even after learning all this, people still say things like, “What about the Montreal Protocol? Look at how the entire world came together, created an agreement to protect the ozone layer, and followed through.”

Yea, but there’s a big difference between phasing out CFCs and giving up a source of energy that provides 80% of the world’s power, not to mention plastic, fertilizer, and thousands of other products. Even if we could quit fossil fuels, we would just tear up the world’s remaining ecosystems in search of rare-earth metals and other resources.

Despite the enormity of the polycrisis, people still say things like, “We’ll find a way. Look at everything humans have accomplished over the last two centuries: automobiles, airplanes, telephones, computers, and modern medicine.”

Yea, but only because of fossil fuels. Humans have been about as intelligent as we are today for at least 100,000 years, but we only just now managed to invent all these things. Have you ever wondered why?

It’s because starting about 250 years ago, we harnessed a source of energy that, at the time, was practically limitless. We used this energy to build the modern world, but now we have to somehow maintain the modern world while transitioning away from this source of energy. So-called renewables and battery technologies can’t replace everything fossil fuels do for us, and even if they could, we’re already out of time.

To be clear, I’m not saying humans aren’t intelligent enough to deal with the polycrisis. I believe that if everyone on the planet became collapse-aware and committed to saving the human race and as much of the natural world as possible, we could actually pull it off. The population would still decline due to overshoot, but we could turn the decline into a glide instead of a crash.

The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence. Rather, the problem is both psychological and sociological. Humans are incapable of overcoming the polycrisis because they tend to ignore or deny facts that make them uncomfortable. ...........................

Once you realize that humans have a tendency to deny death, the world starts to make a lot more sense. It explains why so many people believe there’s an afterlife despite a total lack of evidence. It also explains why people deny climate change is real despite the fact that there are decades of evidence and countless studies by thousands of climate scientists from all around the world.

In order to acknowledge that climate change (or peak oil, the sixth mass extinction, etc.) is real, you also have to acknowledge that your lifestyle is contributing to the destruction of the planet and the early death of millions (if not billions) of people. It means that everything the human race has achieved over the last two centuries was all for naught—that all we’ve done is destroy our home and ourselves.

This is a hard pill to swallow for people who believe humans are special. If you believe God created humans and put us here for some divine purpose, it’s hard to accept that we’ve behaved no better than bacteria consuming a piece of fruit. It feels much better to deny the science and continue living like you always have.

So we continue on without changing our ways. ..............

Even those who acknowledge that climate change is real tend to deny the reality of the situation. Recently, I read an article in The Guardian called I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis. I was wrong. It’s a case study that perfectly exemplifies the human penchant for denial. ...........

Another reason she’s optimistic is because “low-carbon technologies are becoming cost-competitive.” True, but has she ever thought about how we get the materials for those “low-carbon technologies”?

We use diesel to mine and transport the metals. We use coal or natural gas to produce the cement. We use oil to create the plastic. Until all of these things are made without fossil fuels, these new technologies aren’t exactly “low-carbon.”

To get off of fossil fuels, every fossil fuel power plant and internal combustion engine in the entire world has to be replaced by windmills, solar panels, electric vehicles, and more batteries than you can imagine so we can have power when it’s not windy or sunny.

It would take an unbelievable amount of fossil fuels to achieve this. Meanwhile, we’re already committed to 2°C of warming, after which we’ll start triggering irreversible tipping points. As I said before, we’re already out of time. ..........

Later, she offers another reason for hope when she says, “the world has already passed the peak of per capita emissions. It happened a decade ago. Most people are unaware of this.”

That’s great, but global emissions are still rising. It doesn’t matter if per capita emissions are going down if overall emissions are still going up. But Ritchie is “optimistic we can peak global emissions in the 2020s.”

She could be right about that, but just because our emissions stop rising doesn’t mean the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stops rising, too. As our emissions go down, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will keep going up, only at a slower rate.

She goes on to explain how thanks to improvements in technology and energy efficiency, her carbon footprint is less than half that of her grandparents’ at her age. Maybe so, but there are also three times as many people in the world today, so we’re still burning more fossil fuels than ever before. ........

Even if everyone in the world lowered their carbon footprint to zero and we stopped emissions overnight, the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere would keep warming the planet until the Earth reaches a new energy balance.

According to James Hansen, one of the most highly-respected climate scientists in the world, the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere would lead to 10°C of warming over the next few centuries, and as much as 6 or 7°C in one century. And that doesn’t include future emissions. 

There’s something else that would happen if we stopped emissions overnight: Global temperatures would spike. Few people know this, but a small percentage of sunlight is blocked by pollution (especially aerosols) from fossil fuels. Thanks to this pollution, the planet is about .. cooler than it otherwise would be. .........

I don’t mean to attack Hannah Ritchie. I’m sure she’s a great person, and I think she truly believes what she’s saying, but that’s the problem. She was so terrified of climate breakdown that she convinced herself there’s still hope. She simply couldn’t handle the horrifying reality that billions of people are going to die an early death, so she found a way to deny it.

And now she’s telling people that we can maintain modern civilization and stop climate change. That we can have our cake and eat it too. By doing this, she’s only making things worse. Books and articles like hers make it easier for people to deny reality and continue their carbon-based lifestyles without feeling guilty or afraid.

If climate change had a simple fix—like the Montreal Protocol—we would have done it already. But there is no fix for climate change. At best, we could slow it down, but that would require most people to drastically lower their standard of living—something like a permanent Great Depression. And since that is unthinkable, people deny the truth and tell themselves everything will be okay. 

That’s why I became a doomer. I realized that people are unwilling to make the changes necessary to avoid collapse, so they deny reality and cling to false hope. For decades, scientists have been warning us that we have to act as soon as possible, yet all we’ve done is the bare minimum. I don’t see any signs of that changing.

Humans simply didn’t evolve to handle a situation like this, and now there is research confirming it. According to a study by the University of Maine, certain features of human evolution could be stopping us from solving environmental problems. Researchers looked at how sustainable human systems emerged in the past, and they found two patterns:

Sustainable systems emerge only after groups have failed to maintain their resources. But today, if we don’t learn our lesson until after we’ve exhausted our resources, it will be too late. We won’t have the option to relocate to a new area because climate change and resource depletion are happening everywhere.

Systems of environmental protection tend to address problems within societies, not between societies. To slow down climate change, we would need worldwide regulatory, economic, and social systems. Without that, individual countries and regions will focus on their own problems and could even go to war with their neighbors for resources.

As the lead author, Tim Waring, said, "This means global challenges like climate change are much harder to solve than previously considered…It's not just that they are the hardest thing our species has ever done. They absolutely are. The bigger problem is that central features in human evolution are likely working against our ability to solve them.”

Inexhaustible Flows? Tom Murphy, Do The Math. Feb. 20, 2024.

I recently came across a statement to the effect that once we transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy like solar, wind, and hydro, we would essentially be home free for the long run—tapping into inexhaustible flows. It is a very pleasant notion, to be sure, and one that I believe is relatively common among enthusiasts for renewable energy.

Naturally, I am concerned by the question of: what magnificent things would we do with everlasting copious energy? As an excellent guide, we can ask what amazing things have we done with the recent bolus of energy from fossil fuels? Well, in the course of pursuing material affluence, we have eliminated 85% of primeval forest, made new deserts, created numerous oceanic dead zones, drained swamps, lost whole ecosystems, almost squashed the remaining wild land mammals, and initiated a sixth mass extinction with extinction rates perhaps thousands of times higher than their background levels—all without the help of CO2 and climate change (which indeed adds to the list of ills). These trends are still accelerating. Yay for humans, who can now (temporarily) live in greater comfort and numbers than at any time in history!

But the direction I want to take in this post is on the narrower (and ultimately less important) technical side. All the renewable energy technologies rely on non-renewable materials. Therefore, inexhaustible flows are beside the point. It’s like saying that fossil fuel energy is not practically limited by available oxygen for combustion, so we can enjoy fossil fuels indefinitely. Or that D–T fusion has billions of years of deuterium available, when there’s no naturally-occurring tritium (thus reliant on limited lithium supply). In a multi-part system, the limiting factor is, well, the limiting factor. Sure, into the far future the sun will shine, the wind will blow, and rain will fall. But capturing those flows to make electricity will require physical stuff: all the more material for such diffuse flows. If that stuff is not itself of renewable origin, then oops. The best guarantee of renewability is being part of natural regeneration (i.e., of biological origin). If solar panels, wires, inverters, and batteries were made of wood and the like: alright, then. ..........

Telling the Truth About Our Future. Art Berman. Feb. 27, 2024.

............................... How many EROI analysts can even explain what I just wrote or know how to find that information? Yet they proclaim with troubling certitude that there is an emerging consensus that fossil fuels have a lower EROI than renewables.

Delannoy and his co-authors do not mean to be misleading. They think they are telling the truth and that’s the problem. True believers are willing to go to any length to convince us of their truth. They believe it so strongly that they cannot be objective.

The sad truth is that a renewable energy transition is imaginary. ................

Society is in a terrible predicament. Papers like Delannoy’s give false hope that there is a renewable pathway that can save us from climate change. But climate change is just the tip of the iceberg.

Over-consumption of all energy is destroying earth’s ecosystem—the true basis of wealth that forms the foundation for human prosperity. This includes the destruction of forests, the genocide of the animal kingdom, the pollution of land, rivers and seas, the acidification of the oceans, and loss of fisheries and coral reefs.

Focusing on climate change alone is a narrow view. Carbon dioxide is just one of the pollutants contaminating the environment. The growth of the human enterprise enabled by excess energy use threatens everything. Substituting renewable for fossil energy will make that problem even worse.

We are well beyond a soft landing for the planet. There are no moderate pathways forward. Pretending that there are is counter-productive. A radical reduction in all energy consumption is the only solution.

The problem is that it’s not the solution that we like but it’s time to start telling the truth about our future.

***** #271: “Peak almost everything”, part one. Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics. Feb 26, 2024.

WORSENING STRESSES IN AN INFLECTING ECONOMY

As almost everyone must have noticed by now, economic and broader affairs are in a strange state of uneasy limbo. The economy certainly hasn’t ‘collapsed’, as some pundits have long been predicting, but neither is it growing, in any meaningful sense.

Conditions are characterised by worsening hardship and widening inequality, and this, compounded by suspicion and mistrust, is making itself felt in increasingly fractious domestic politics. A disturbing feedback loop ties internal political discontent into the stresses of dysfunctional international relations.

There’s a growing feeling that ‘things aren’t working’, and that the continuing affluence of a minority is in striking contrast with the deteriorating economic circumstances (and worsening insecurity) of the majority.

One can almost sense a collective holding of breath as we wait to see ‘what happens next’.

I cannot escape a conviction that very few people really understand that what we’re experiencing now isn’t some kind of temporary economic stasis, but the cusp of a fundamental change for which societies are not prepared.

Accordingly, the aim here is to use the SEEDS model to make sense of this unquiet calm, and to provide some insights into what actually does ‘happen next’.

In summary, hardship and stress at the level of the micro – that is, of the household and the individual – are about to extend into disorder at the level of the macro. We’re heading very rapidly into “peak almost everything”.

The qualifying “almost” is necessary, and we need to know how we can best navigate the turbulence that is now about to commence. We need to work out which activities – which sources of income, employment, revenue, profit and value – are likely to buck the generalised trend of disorderly decline.

The two-stage inflexion

Stated at its simplest, growth in material economic prosperity has long been decelerating towards a point at which the economy as a whole inflects from expansion into contraction. .........

Our best recourse is to objective analysis of economic and financial fundamentals.

Properly defined, the economy is a system for the supply of material products and services to society.

Thus seen, the economy is an energy system, not a financial one. Nothing that has any economic value at all can be provided without the use of energy. Money has no intrinsic worth, but commands value only as an “exercisable claim” on the output of the material economy. We know that the large and complex economy of today has been built on an abundance of low-cost energy sourced from oil, natural gas and coal.

The factor which does most to determine economic prosperity is the material cost of energy supply. If delivering 100 units of energy requires using the equivalent of 99 units in order to make it available, the game is scarcely worth the candle.

If, on the other hand, 100 energy units can be delivered at a cost of only 1 energy unit, this activity is immensely productive of economic value.

Energy is never ‘free’, but comes at a cost measurable in terms of the proportion of accessed energy needed to create and sustain the infrastructure required for energy supply. This cost is known here as the Energy Cost of Energy, abbreviated ECoE.

Globally, trend ECoEs reached their low point in the quarter-century after the Second World War, explaining the super-rapid economic growth enjoyed in that period.

Since then, ECoEs have trended upwards because of the depletion of fossil fuel resources. Oil, gas and coal remain abundant, but have been getting progressively costlier to access. Renewables, with their lesser energy densities, cannot take us back to a halcyon age of ultra-cheap energy.

Being unable – or unwilling – to face the implications of rising ECoEs, we’ve long been playing a game of “let’s pretend” with the economy. Because GDP is a measure of financial transactions – and not of material economic value – we can create a simulacrum of “growth” by pouring ever-increasing amounts of liquidity into the system.

Nobody needed credit deregulation, QE or sub-zero real interest rates in the 1945-70 period, because low ECoEs were driving the economy along, ‘very nicely, thank you’, without recourse to financial manipulation. Only as the economy has decelerated have we adopted various forms of monetary gimmickry in order to pretend that the illogical promise of ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’ remains a valid expectation.

Using the concepts of two economies, energy-determined prosperity and money as claim, SEEDS models the trajectories of financial and material economic trends. As can be seen in Fig. 2, ECoEs have been rising relentlessly, and surplus (ex-cost) energy supply has been decelerating towards contraction. Per capita surplus energy has inflected into decline, and prosperity per capita has taken on a downwards trajectory.

Accompanying this, financial stresses have been worsening. Debt has massively outgrown reported GDP as credit expansion has been deployed to create purely cosmetic “growth” (Fig. 3A). It required annual borrowing of more than 11% of GDP to sustain illusory “growth” at a supposed average of 3.5% (3B) over the past twenty years. Broader liabilities have exploded (3C), and the state of disequilibrium between the financial system and the underlying material economy has become extreme (3D).

When we apply the extent of disequilibrium stress pictured in Fig. 3D to the quantum of exposure shown in Fig. 3C, the end result – a massive and disorderly financial correction – becomes a foregone conclusion.

With the exception of the stress measure illustrated in 3D, we don’t need access to the SEEDS system to work out that this ‘bigger-than-the-GFC correction’ cannot long be delayed, and will happen at the moment when the delusory promise of perpetual economic growth loses the last shreds of its credibility. .................

All of these processes are going to change the balance of forces in civil society, such that politics becomes ever more unpredictable.

A point that cannot be emphasised too strongly is that economic deterioration, with all of its attendant stresses, is moving from the predicted to the experienced.

Some discretionary sectors are already contracting. Politics is already becoming dysfunctional. The hardship being presented officially as a temporary problem is, in reality, a foretaste of the shape of things to come – or, perhaps more aptly, the shape of things to go.

What is Latent Heat of Fusion? Erik Michaels, Problems, Predicaments and Technology. Feb. 28, 2024.

Imagine my surprise last week when I read Tom Murphy's article after publishing my own and discovering that there was a common theme to both. Tom often writes about the unsustainability of our behaviors and civilization, but to describe common beliefs of many of the cornucopian-type thinking that so many people have today struck me as funny being it was so coincidental. Isn't it ironic that biological life has figured out how to tap into inexhaustible flows of energy and this is essentially sustainable but technology use (and our dependence upon it) doesn't even come close? A similar article from The Honest Sorcerer also tells the same story.

Perhaps what I often find incomprehensible is how people come to these stances of hopium regarding emerging qualities of collapse and thinking that we are embarking on some sort of beautiful, sustainable journey to the future. Of course, it becomes rather obvious over time that most of these people simply haven't widened their perspective to include all aspects of ecological overshoot and collapse - their perspectives are limited to their own specialty within their own field of study and the silo they seem to be stuck in acts as an echo chamber. ....................... 

Last week, I posted some information about what is commonly called "forever chemicals" to point out the existential issue of pollution loading. This was initially pointed out more than 50 years ago in the Limits to Growth study as shown in this video which I have posted before several times. My purpose last week was to demonstrate how symptom predicaments of overshoot are combining and interacting as threat multipliers not only to civilization, but to our very existence as a species. As usual, a new study came out that proves that this issue is worse than originally thought due to symptom predicaments of climate change spreading these toxins further afield due to extreme weather events and wildlife contaminated with the toxins moving around and further contaminating water and soil. Almost every week, regardless of what topic I write about, I find new information a week or two later proving how the situation is even worse than what I originally wrote about, just like in this particular issue. .............

Two paragraphs up, I posted an article about the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) which delineates some scary thoughts. What I didn't point out there is what I again want to bring to the forefront (I've brought this topic up before (a long time ago), but these things have a tendency to be forgotten). The beginning of this article reviews some of the same information from last week and expands on that theme; but along the same lines of thinking, I want to bring up something most people are not aware of or have forgotten. This is the latent heat of fusion, the topic of today's picture at the top. I was introduced to this by the fact that 80 calories of heat will melt one gram of ice (at 0 degrees Celsius) so that it becomes water (phase change) and then that same amount of heat applied to the water will raise the temperature of that water to 80 degrees Celsius. Think about how the biosphere is losing its cryosphere and what that means for the world's air conditioning system. These exponential changes are now baked into the system through both oceanic thermal inertia and the lag effect. Climate change, the symptom predicament of overshoot, is irreversible on human timescales. 

I needed to get through all the above material to get to this point that today is the absolute best day of the rest of your life.

I don't want to sound grim or bring inconvenient truths to the forefront, but denying the existence of this knowledge makes no sense. Essentially, this is what most people want you to do - deny the existence and implication of these facts. While it is true (and I have repeatedly said this time and again) that we don't know precisely what will happen and when it will happen, certain events are inevitable and it is only a question of when, not if. Collapse of industrial civilization is built in, as it is self-terminating. Once this occurs, the loss of a large portion of the aerosol masking effect (global dimming) will also be lost and global warming will once again suddenly increase, similar to what has taken place over the last several years due to the loss of aerosols produced from the marine shipping industry. Despite reducing particulate matter in the atmosphere, the IMO 2020 rules have had mixed results as this article points out. Once again, something labeled as a "solution" has unexpected results. My point is not to simply ridicule ideas that many people think of as solutions or proper responses; one still needs to respond in an appropriate fashion and certain ideas (like degrowth) are the only appropriate responses available. However, just because these ideas have been brought around to the forefront of society does NOT mean that they will solve the predicament of overshoot or prevent civilization from crashing. Taken together with the inevitable outcomes of climate change and energy and resource decline (both symptom predicaments of overshoot) multiplying each other's effects, these hard facts point out that conditions will never be better than they are right now. 

This is why it is so important to embrace and be grateful for what we have right now and to Live Now!

Doomerism

Doomerism as Lifestyle. Bates, The Great Change. Feb. 18, 2024.

"Some tipping points are worse than others. Human ones are the scariest."

Apocalyptic scenarios are what fuel Eliot Jacobson’s jaundiced outlook for most efforts to do something about climate change. Jacobson is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. Here he is on Dan Miller’s Climate Chat on February 4, 2024:

Jacobson: I am an environmentalist and so I am in favor of the collapse of global industrial civilization, right? I am in favor of the human footprint on this planet becoming smaller just as quickly as it possibly can…. The problem is that these technologies are more likely to prolong civilization than to aid in its descent. All of the other things that humans are doing, whether it's destroying the biosphere through plastic pollution or what we're doing to our food production and how we treat animals, all of these other harms we are doing to the planet are only going to grow in scale. You're not going to put lithium in place of beef, right? As we create products that will allow civilization to maintain itself and grow even more, we're talking about destruction of our soils and that all boils down to even more suffering for a greater number of humans, even more suffering for a greater number of animals and species on the planet, even a larger ultimate extinction event, right?

You know we're going to hit the Seneca Cliff and the question is, how high up that cliff do we want to compel ourselves to go through these Al, alternative technologies before we go over it? So I'm not going to tell you that they don't work, right? … I think that's outweighed by the long-term impacts it has on allowing population to continue to grow and allowing the destruction of yet other ecosystems.

Miller: Not only would I describe you as a Doomer but I would describe you as a Promoter of Doom.

Jacobson: Yeah very much.

Miller: You're for doom because you think it will be better for the entire Earth or it'll be better for the environment.

Jacobson: Yeah, again, I am an environmentalist. And the best thing that could happen to this planet is to get rid of people.

Miller: Okay well that's very interesting. I didn't expect the conversation to go there, but uh I yeah I guess I don't agree. I mean, first of all, I don't disagree with sort of the premise and a lot of what you say….

Jacobson: We were using the example of [climate science writer and blogger] Michael Mann. Michael Mann is not an environmentalist. He is the opposite of an environmentalist. He is for the destruction of ecosystems. He is for new technologies that are going be placed on locations that are pristine, whether they're mines or fields of solar panels… wind turbines and ocean ecologies, right? He is for them with the idea that that would allow human civilization to continue to grow, which because of all the other impacts of humans will even further degrade various systems, right? So to call me the one who is pro-collapse actually… Michael Mann is setting the stage for a much larger collapse than I am. He said his idea is not just that 8 billion humans should collapse but that 10 or 12 billion humans should collapse. And on our way out we should create even more devastation to the planet, right? So, I absolutely disagree that Michael Mann is in favor of preserving the planet.

You get the point. If you favor green technology, you are just making it worse for the next generation, who will fall off a higher cliff when ecosystems implode. As alluring as I find this view, I am also chastened by the guest editorial that Tyler Austin Harper, assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College, wrote for The New York Times on January 26, 2024 entitled, “The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule”:

Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong. Human life and labor were not superseded by machines, as some in the 1920s predicted. Or in the 1960s or in the 1980s, two other flash-in-the-pan periods of A.I. hype. The takeaway is not that we shouldn’t be worried but that we shouldn’t panic. Foretelling doom is an ancient human hobby, but we don’t appear to be very good at it.

My own take is that I read the same tea leaves Jacobson does. I get the points Hansen and Simons have raised about the curve of acceleration that global climate catastrophe has entered. And yet, I also recognize there is a lot of inertia in Earth’s systems and Gaia is trying to mend as best she can, all the time.

Harper wrote, “Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives.” Maybe we will get lucky. Maybe an errant genes similar to that of the autistic wolf from whom all modern dogs are descended (sociability genes WBSCR17, GTF2I and GTF2IRD1) will suddenly appear and transform the next generation of homo. Maybe we will all start singing Aquarius.

I’m not in favor of gene manipulation. I think we already have an altruistic gene and a heroic action gene. My efforts now are to muster those genes into service—to help Gaia mend. That may mean having fewer children and grandchildren. It may mean shutting down fossil mining and drilling and those damned nuclear whack-a-moles. I don’t think it means putting an end to Brian von Herzen’s re-greening of the marine food web or John D. Liu’s ecosystem regeneration camps. I don’t think it should stop us from creating more ecovillages, eco-districts, and eco-regions and showing the way to live in harmony with Earth and each other, practically, and with heart.

There is plenty of work to do, and all of it is rewarding, for however long we have.

There is a growing recognition that a viable path forward is towards a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Doomers

On Being a “Doomer”. Eliot Jacobson, Ph.D. Watching the World Go Bye. Sept. 1, 2021.


Let’s start with the obvious. The word “doomer” is a word with horribly dark connotations. The obvious interpretation is that a doomer believes life is hopeless, they might as well give up trying; there is no value in being alive. But that is emphatically not the doomer’s perspective. Doomers understand that life is a terminal disease for all of us, that any objective examination of one’s life should include the inevitability of death. Yet, even with this universal existential dilemma, doomers still enjoy sunsets and friends, they work towards goals, they have families, they celebrate births and mourn deaths, and they struggle on. Most of all, doomers recognize that humanity has a collective terminal illness here and now, not at some unimagined future time.

Doomers do not believe climate change is going to end well for the natural world or for humanity. Doomers are saddened by the innumerable losses that are taking place in the natural world, including plants, animals, oceans, ice and ancient physical processes. Doomers are saddened by losing all the achievements of humanity, including art, literature, science and philosophy – the totality of humanity’s legacy. Doomers are saddened by the human suffering already taking place and the massive suffering of all species, plant and animal, that lies ahead. Doomers are saddened by the prospect of losing friends and family, what’s going to happen to those they work with, those they play with and those they love. And doomers are saddened by the shortening of their own lives, the fear that comes with having an unexpected terminal illness. In short, doomers are saddened by their profound understanding that it’s the near-term loss of everything.

Most doomers are not invested in finding the causes of the planet’s demise. Those who want to argue if our collective crisis is due to greenhouse gas emissions, overpopulation, peak oil, or something else are still playing the game. Engaging in blame and finger pointing creates anger and anxiety. Doomers are not looking for a fight and will deescalate when confronted.

On the other hand, doomers are curious about what the future will bring and the full scope of events to come. They want to know the consequences of climate change, what could happen, what is likely to happen, what is on the speculative bubble and they want to know an approximate time scale. The doomer is invested in education and scientific discovery and wants to follow the best road map for what will be possible and what will be necessary as the planet dies.

Doomers support environmental activism. They encourage positive and progressive action and understand that such action has positive benefits. As has been said, if environmental activism allows one butterfly to live one more day, then it is worth it. Doomers are conscious of their own actions and their impact on ecosystems and the planet.

There is another perspective that the doomer’s awareness brings. It means doomers don’t have to compete anymore. They don’t have to win. They don’t have to be right in every argument they make. The world becomes non-political. Religious beliefs lose their importance. They realize they are part of the human family on a dying planet and that everyone is experiencing a singular and tragic death together – the sixth great extinction – in their own way.

Doomer’s grieve. There is no linear roadmap for processing this grief, nor is there a catalog of the emotions the doomer might experience in the context of their grief. The doomer accepts the cycle and range of emotions that are theirs to bear. In my case these include denial, anxiety, sleepless nights, anger and depression. My grief has also led me to learn more about climate science, to listen to and read what the experts have to say and to engage with online communities. The doomer does their best to not judge their experience or the experience of others, but also understands that judgement is its own type of coping and relief.

And doomers believe that in this particular crisis there is an opportunity. They can use this common moment of suffering to find ways to be kind to others. They can use whatever personal abundance they might have to be generous as much as they are able. And while they still have the energy and mobility for action, they can look for ways to be of service. Volunteering is the greatest honor they can gift themselves in the limited time they have left.

Having no hope for the long-term future of human civilization smacks of cults, fringe religious beliefs and mass suicides. But this lack of hope is now mainstream. We hear and read about the reality climate change brings every day. From fires to floods to droughts to heat waves; from the Arctic ice melting to the weakening of the gulf stream to rain falling on the highest peak in Greenland to the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef; from failing crops to the scalding alive of salmon as they attempt to swim upstream to the decimation of rainforests; from Madagascar to Lytton to Paradise, disaster is the reality on planet earth today. “Doomer” is not the right word for someone who is simply paying attention. “Doomer” is not the right word for someone who looks at the jigsaw puzzle pieces laying on the table and understands the final and inevitable picture they will become.

In these remarks I have used the word “doomer” freely to express my own philosophy about end-times in a way that many people who consider themselves to be doomers may not subscribe. I do not pretend to speak for all doomers, nor wish to constrain the beliefs and methods of other doomers to the scope of what I’ve written here. The word “doomer” may not be the right word to describe my own perspective on life during the planet’s transition. Maybe there is no right word. Maybe there are no universals. I don’t know. But this is really hard and I am profoundly sad. We have never been here before. No one individually, no society and no other generation of humans on earth has ever had to process events of this magnitude or attempt to express thoughts like these in the context of overwhelming scientific evidence backing this view.

I am not going to propose another word to replace “doomer” in the way I’ve used it here. I don’t know a word that is more suitable. But the other way to look at this is that the word “doomer” captures all the positive perspectives that come with understanding the inevitability of death. Life is short, sadly much shorter for many than we expected it to be when we were younger. But that’s where we are. Doomer or not, whatever word makes you most comfortable, what we all can do going forward from here is to act with kindness, be as generous as we are able and find ways to be of service.