Murphy: Here We Are

Here We Are. Tom Murphy, Do the Math. Jun 22, 2023.


I was asked some months ago by the Australian Foodweb Education organization to participate in their Here We Are project. The idea is to reflect on the statement: “Here we are, alive, at this moment, in this place, together.”

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Hi, I’m Tom Murphy, and I’m going to be responding to a prompt that goes:

Here we are, alive, at this moment, in this place, together.

And I think it’s a nice way to frame the kinds of things I want to say.

But first, I’ll introduce myself as…lately I’ve been saying I’m a recovering astrophysicist. I’ve had a career building instrumentation for telescopes, and some space projects, and just exploring the universe and what makes it tick. It’s been challenging; it’s fun; it’s demanding, rewarding; [using] cutting edge technology. But it’s also given me a lot of perspective on large time scales, large spatial scales, and I’m less interested lately in the science of astrophysics and more in what those perspectives can lend to our understanding of our current place as humanity on this planet.

So, what I want to do is pick apart this prompt, and treat it piece by piece, and then modify it as I go, and rebuild it in a slightly different way.

So it starts: Here we are

And the first thing we have to decide is: who do we mean by “we?”

Typically, when we say “we” in this context, we’re talking about humans, and specifically members of our civilization. Less so, say, hunter-gatherers or the Kalahari bushmen; we’re not on the same train. So think of it as human civilization. And I’d like to broaden that. I think we have to broaden that definition of “we,” and recognize that we’re part of a community of life: that humans are only 3% of animals by mass, and 0.01% of all life by mass—’cause there’s a lot of stuff out there: plants and bacteria and fungi, and we’re just one of 10 million species: it’s a very diverse Earth.

So, I think “we” really should be all of us in the more-than-human world.

So, the first modification is:

Here we ALL are, alive.

So, let’s talk about alive. Are all of us alive? Are we all accounted for? And what I’m getting at here is that extinction rates are up by about 1000 times over their background rates—the baseline. And at this stage, humans and our domesticated species, our domesticated animals are 96% of all mammal mass on this planet, leaving only 4% in the form of wild mammals. Meanwhile, the mammal mass on this planet—wild mammal mass—we’ve reduced by 80%. Most of it in the last 100 years. And, that’s really not okay. That’s kind-of devastating. And I think one thing that gives me a lot of worry is: if we’ve done 80% in such a short amount of time—knocked down 80% of mammals—the last 20% is going to be a snap. We’ve got this. We’re really good at this. We’re even better than before. So, that’s very disturbing and worrisome.

Our critters are gasping for breath. If they could talk they would be saying “I can’t breathe.” Our knee is on their throat. And one thing I’d like to point out is that: we can’t just dismiss this as “Oh, okay because humans are fine.” Because we’re not fine if the ecosystem’s not fine. Think of the ecosystem as something like our body. It’s got a lot of organs that do different things—different species play different roles in this ecosystem that’s been co-evolved to work together as a system. And, so organ failure can be bad for us. And so, if elements of our ecosystem—especially wide swaths of our ecosystem—are having trouble, then that’s bad for our health as well. And you know the saying: If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything. So if we haven’t got ecosystem health we really don’t have anything. Because it’s all founded—it’s all based on an ecosystem. We don’t exist separate from that. So it’s very important that we pay attention to this.

So are we alive? Yes, we’re alive, but we’re desperately ill at the moment.

We tend to focus on symptoms, and treat them as separate things. Climate change is one of those symptoms, and it’s one that we’ve started to pay a lot of attention to—because, finally, here’s one that we see that can directly affect us, and our organ is having trouble with this particular symptom. There are a lot of symptoms: deforestation, habitat loss, fisheries decline, pollution, agricultural runoff and dead zones. And the list is just enormous of symptoms that tell us that we’ve got trouble. And it’s all really from the same root cause. So, we’d like to understand the fundamental disease and not just treat symptoms. Because if somebody has a fever, you don’t just give them cold water—put them in an ice bath—to chill the fever. That’s not going to treat the actual underlying disease. And so we need to watch out because we are ill as an entire system.

So, Here we all are, BARELY alive, at this moment.

Let’s talk about this moment. I think a lot of us perceive ourselves as at the apex of civilization. But it’s a very unusual moment. I think of it kind-of like the crescendo of a glorious fireworks show. It’s dazzling. It’s impressive. It’s kind-of fun to watch. But it’s temporary. And so to get at that kind of timescale and what this moment means:

The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Humans have been around on this planet in some form for 2.5 to 3 million years. That’s 1/5000 the age of the universe. So we’re newcomers—we’re the new kids on the block. It’s hard to comprehend 2.5 to 3 million years, so I’m going to compare that to a timescale that we do have intuition for and direct experience with: that’s a 75 year human lifetime. So on that timescale, all of our history: agriculture, civilization doesn’t go back longer than 10,000 years. That’s just 15 weeks out of the 75 year lifetime. So it’s like a recent hobby: it’s something we just picked up. We’re not even very good at it yet. We don’t know what we’re doing. Meanwhile, science has only been around for the last 4 days of this life: that’s 400 years to us. And in the last day, we’ve ramped up our energy and resource usage by leaps and bounds, and in the last 12 hours alone of this 75 year life we’ve done the majority of our fossil fuel burning and ecosystem damage.

So I hope you realize that this can’t continue. This thing that were doing: it might be exciting, and you might thing we’re at the apex. But it’s faltering and wavering right now. We’re starting to see the cracks becoming visible. So a lot of people I think sense this, and are concerned. And that makes sense. I’ve been very concerned about this.

Okay, so, here we all are, barely alive, at this MOST PECULIAR moment, in this place.

So let’s talk about this place. And by this place, we mean Earth. It’s always been Earth. That’s our context. We were evolved on this planet as a part of an ecosystem. And I want to give you some perspective on just how special this place is, especially in the context of space.

So, if we were to shrink the sun to a grain of sand: 1 mm across—something that we can visualize—the solar system is about the size of a bedroom. And the sun has 99.85% of the mass in this bedroom-sized solar system all in this one sand grain. Jupiter claims almost all the rest of that, and is about the diameter of a human hair: barely visible. Earth is like a bacterium. We can’t even see it. So, this dusty […] bedroom-sized solar system—has less dust in it—fewer planets in it—less dust than your laptop screen does even after you’ve wiped it clean. It’s really empty. It’s really sparse. Meanwhile we’ve only traveled 1/3 of a millimeter from our little bacterium Earth, and that’s to the moon and that was 50 years ago. Since then, we’ve just been really on the skin, barely skimming the surface of this bacterium-sized Earth. The next star is another sand grain 30 km away, and this unimaginable emptiness describes one of the denser regions of the universe: a swarm of billions of stars called a galaxy!

And meanwhile this environment is very hostile to life. There’s no air. There’s no water. No food. So I hope you’re not hungry. And besides lacking those basic requirements of life—which are by the way on Earth—it’s a radiation hazard. Once you get outside of the protective magnetosphere of Earth, the radiation is up by about 100 times larger. Which means that if you’re going to go to the Moon or Mars, sign yourself up for cancer. ‘Cause you’re going to get it in short order—in a matter of a year or a few. So in order to be protected you’d have to live in caves. And think about how disappointing that would be to be sitting there wearing your space suit but you’re basically a caveman. Where did I go wrong? This is not what I imagined.

One way to drive home the difficulty of resources in space is the International Space Station—which is one of these things that just basically skims across the earth’s surface—has to import its oxygen by rocket launch at a cost of about $100M per rocket launch. It’s that hard to take care of the most basic need of human life, which is air: you can’t live without it for over a minute or two. We’re really tied to the earth and the earth’s resources: very strongly tied.

Because Earth is our haven, and it’s our heaven. It’s our blue heaven.

So here we all are, barely alive, at this most peculiar moment, in this SPECTACULAR LIFE-GIVING place, together.

But I’d say we’re not really together. We’ve isolated ourselves as humans from the rest of the community of life. We’ve declared ourselves above everyone else: the pinnacle of evolution. The master species. We think Earth was made for us and we’re made to rule the earth: that it’s our destiny somehow to have this glorious dominant presence on the planet. And it’s kind-of immature. We’re like adolescents who think they’re invincible and are oblivious to the harm that they might cause to themselves and to others in their environment.

The problem with this is that by not paying attention to the rest of the system, the organs… we could die of organ failure. And if we remain in this isolated mode where we think were somehow separate and we don’t play by the same rules—we’re not part of the system—and we let the system down and deprive it of the resources it needs, it’s not going to go well for us.

So, Here we all are, barely alive, at this most peculiar moment, in this spectacular life-giving place, NO LONGER together.

So as members of the “cult of human supremacy,” which is another name for modern civilization… and that might seem extreme but think about it. How do the people you know think of humans and think of ourselves? Is it as superior species—as the pinnacle? If so, that brings problems. There are consequences to that kind of attitude—to the point where… having that attitude, we can’t really be trusted with almost anything.

So imagine that we pursue human equity and we see some people down below others and we want to raise the standards for those people who are below. That means that we’re going to claim more for us; more resources for humans; less for life. It’s as if we deserve this, you don’t. And that approach just won’t work. I mean it’s not working well even in this lopsided arrangement, let alone trying to ramp up how much we give to the human population.

Also, let’s say that we could implement perfect democracy: textbook democracy, perfect information flow, perfect representation & participation, no corruption. If the votes come from human supremacists—these cult members of our civilization—it’s going to be for the short-term benefit of humans to the exclusion of the rest of the ecosystem, which is really just bad for all of us. It promotes this organ failure.

How about renewable energy? So, if we were to be successful at replacing our fossil fuel habit with solar, wind—and there are real technical hurdles to this by the way; it’s not a guarantee—I mean there are things that fossil fuels do that we just can’t get out of the renewables. But let’s just say that—sweep those under the rug for a second—what if we could? My question is: what splendid things are we going to do with all that energy?

And one way to answer that is to look at what splendid things have we done with the energy that we have had that we’re using today? Well, we’re expanding the human enterprise, knocking down forests, we’re depleting the oceans, we’re ruining habitat, we’re eliminating species, we’re losing biodiversity, we’re losing soils, we’re losing life, we’re losing the vitality of the world. And so by prioritizing a transition on the energy front to renewable energy, we’re basically saying: the most important thing is that we keep civilization fully powered so we can go full speed ahead. Whatever the consequences.

So I think intent matters. What do we intend to do? Why should we be trusted with this great energy surplus? What are we going to do with it that’s so great. And I’m not—you know—color me skeptical that we’re going to do good things with it: restore ecosystems and prioritize the non-human world. So as long as all of these things are in the hands of human supremacists I’m afraid that I’m not going to like the decisions that are made and the consequences.

So, if we don’t learn to exercise restraint and sit on our hands: refrain from doing things just ’cause we can: that spells failure. We have to adopt a stance of humility and in my mind the choice is humility or failure.

So I think we should abandon our fantasies for some glorious destiny that we imagine for ourselves. That’s a mythology that’s not working; it can’t work; it never could have worked. It was always misguided. And if that’s the dream: if that’s the human dream, it’s not an appropriate dream. We need a new dream. That one’s just kind of a little bit rotten, in the end.

So the only destiny we have is: civilization is destined to fail. It’s not built on a foundation of biophysical ecological sustainability. It doesn’t even consider those things. It’s built on hubris, not on humility.

So the good news in all this… A lot of people are bummed out when I say civilization is going to fail. It’s depressing. They don’t want to hear it. And I get it. I mean, I was there too. I spent decades kind-of in that mode.

But the reason it’s not as bad as you think: it’s actually kind-of simple. That we are not civilization. Humans are not civilization. Civilization is just our recent hobby. It’s still new. We haven’t done it forever. It’s not part of who we are. It’s not baked in. It’s not our DNA. Civilization is not humanity. We don’t need civilization to have meaningful and fulfilling lives. [The reader may substitute “modernity” for “civilization” if desired.]

So, where do we go from here? I don’t have answers there; I don’t really know. But I sense that it starts with a new appreciation. I think we need to break the spell. We need to dissolve our love affair with civilization because it turns out it’s kind-of an abusive relationship and that civilization is a jerk. So we’re better off without it. We should recognize that the system we’re in already robs lives of meaning and has been [doing so] for ages. It robs Earth of species. It robs Earth of lives. It’s kind-of a marauding menace. And it’s never really been any other way. It just took a long time for it to get to this scale where it’s global and it’s apparent that it doesn’t work.

Meanwhile we’ve forgotten a lot of old [e.g., Indigenous] wisdoms that I think are really fascinating and time-tested. They work. They’re really worth studying. I’m interested in learning a lot more. And also, we haven’t created new wisdoms that will certainly happen. So one thing to recognize is that: just because we have lived in a hunter-gatherer mode for many many years, and it worked, and now we’re in this civilization mode and it won’t work doesn’t mean that we have to go back to hunter-gatherer. In fact, we can’t go back. We can never go back.

So, the future doesn’t have to look like the distant past—and it can’t. We get to invent new paths; new ways to live on this planet. Founded on a principle and a philosophy that respects all life. We need to accept roles as humble participants in this great dance—not some masters or overlords. So, we need to set aside our tin-pot overlord sham, and take this next great step. I’m honestly excited to see where this might go. What happens next? What is our great next adventure?

Okay, so I hope this was helpful. As a parting sentiment, I’m going to share this statement, this blessing of sorts: May we learn to live within Earth’s bounds to the enduring benefit of all life.

The Profound Loneliness of Being Collapse Aware

The Profound Loneliness of Being Collapse Aware. Alan Urban. Medium. Apr. 21, 2023.

“Is something wrong?” James asked.

I blinked at him. “What?”

“I dunno, you just seem quiet today.”

“No, I’m fine.” It’s just that we’re all going to die a miserable death in the near future, but other than that I’m fine.

Of course, I didn’t say those words out loud. What would be the point?

James and I had been friends for over a decade, but a few years back, I ended up living in a town about an hour away from him. Still, we met up once a month to eat lunch and play disc golf.

We had just reached the 18th basket. “Your turn,” he said.

“Oh, right.” I threw my disc. It was a terrible throw — straight into the bushes.

“Man, you’re having an off day.”

“More like an off year,” I said with a chuckle. It was November of 2020, and everybody was thinking about COVID-19 and wondering when things would get back to normal.

But not me. I knew things would never get back to normal, that the world I grew up in was gone, and that it was all downhill from here.

2020 was the year I became “collapse aware.”

If you’ve never heard that term, it’s when someone has learned enough about climate change, fossil fuels, pollution, biodiversity, and resource depletion to realize that modern civilization is unsustainable and will eventually collapse into chaos.

There are some collapse-aware people who think our civilization has several decades left, and there are some who think it will all coming crashing down in the next year or two. At the time, I believed we had several decades, but I was still terrified.

After searching the bushes for a few minutes, I found my disc and threw it again. We soon finished our game and headed to a Mexican restaurant where we ordered lunch.

“Have you seen how bad the wildfires in California have gotten?” I asked as we waited for our food.

“I know!” he said. “It’s crazy. This drought just keeps getting worse and worse.”

I nodded. “California grows a lot of food. What happens when there’s not enough water for the crops?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess they’ll have to grow food somewhere else.”

“Yea, but what if there is nowhere else?” I said. “There are droughts happening all over the world. What happens when we can’t grow enough food for everybody?”

“They’ll figure something out,” he said. “They could desalinate ocean water, and they could build indoor hydroponic farms. There’s always going to be demand for food, so they’ll find a way to grow it.”

I wasn’t reassured. “Yea, but those things take a lot of energy. What happens when the world starts running out of oil?”

“They’ll just build more solar panels and windmills,” he said.

“But what if I they can’t?” I asked. “We need oil to build those, but we’re already drilling for oil as fast as possible. And what if there aren’t enough rare-earth metals to build the renewables we need? How are we supposed to replace our entire energy infrastructure with renewables and grow enough food for everybody? How are we going to…”

I realized my voice had grown frantic, so I stopped talking.

James stared at me like I had just told him I was planning a trip to Mars.

Our waiter broke the awkward silence by arriving with our food. “Thanks,” I said, looking down at a plate full of beans, rice, and chimichangas. Although I had arrived there feeling ravenous, now my appetite was gone.

Once the waiter had left, James said, “You’re right, it’s bad. Really bad. But people will find a way. They always do.”

I nodded.

“Hey, did you hear what Trump said the other day?”

He obviously wanted to change the subject, so I let him. Although James was smart enough to realize our civilization was doomed, he simply couldn’t admit it to himself. He had too many plans: wife, kids, travelling…

So, I tried to forget about the end of the world and focus on enjoying our lunch. We had a nice time, but I left feeling frustrated. And alone.

I didn’t become collapse-aware all at once. It was a process that began back in 2017. Donald Trump had just become president, and he kept calling climate change a hoax. Then in the fall, Hurricane Harvey came along and dumped more rain than any storm in U.S. history.

For the next few years, I watched as climate disasters got worse and worse. Record-breaking storms, record-breaking droughts, record-breaking heatwaves… It was so obvious that climate change was here, yet the voices denying it kept getting louder.

Then in 2020, COVID-19 arrived. I remember feeling horror and grief as one country after another began to report hundreds of deaths every day. But I also felt hopeful. After years of division, perhaps our nation would be brought together against a common enemy: the pandemic.

How wrong I was. Instead of uniting us, the pandemic divided us even further. I was baffled. For over a century, wearing masks and avoiding public gatherings were standard methods for dealing with a major outbreak. But now, even these basic concepts were being called into question.

Then in the summer of 2020, something occurred to me: If we can’t even come together to fight COVID-19, how will we ever come together to fight climate change?

I had always assumed that once the climate disasters got bad enough, we would get our act together and phase out fossil fuels. But all the evidence I had seen over the previous 4 years suggested otherwise.

So, I started researching. I wanted to know how bad things were, and how long before climate change started affecting our food system and infrastructure. Soon, I came across an article by David Wallace-Wells called The Uninhabitable Earth, an incredibly well-written and well-researched article that explained exactly what we’re in for in the coming decades.

After I finished reading it, I felt like throwing up. I finally understood that if we didn’t stop climate change, it wouldn’t just be inconvenient or bad for the economy — it would completely destroy our civilization. And not in the distant future, but in my own lifetime.

For the first time, I wasn’t just worried about climate change, I was scared. For days, I walked around with this nervous feeling in my gut — kinda like butterflies, but more like hummingbirds. When people spoke, I barely heard them. Sometimes, I forgot to eat.

However, I kept telling myself that collapse wasn’t inevitable. Technically, it was still possible to phase out fossil fuels in time to avert catastrophe. And maybe scientists would make some incredible clean-energy breakthrough, like fusion power plants.

That was my way of coping, but it didn’t work for long. A few months later, I came across a lecture by Sid Smith called How to Enjoy the End of the World. It was and still is one of the most fascinating lectures I’ve ever heard.

Sid explained concepts like the cost of complexity, energy return on energy invested, and Jevons paradox. He also talked about the decline of oil reserves, the depletion of mineral and water resources, and the exponential destruction of the natural world.

Then he said something that really frightened me: “…all of which would spell the end of civilization even without climate change.” I know I said that becoming collapse-aware is a process, but if I had to point to a single moment when I finally understood that the modern world is doomed, it would be the moment I heard those words.

During his presentation, I had completely forgotten about climate change, so to add that on top of all these other existential crises made me realize a terrible truth: It’s already too late to save civilization.

That night, lying in bed, I cried. And not just for me, but for everyone I loved. Especially my children. I felt like we had all been given a terminal diagnosis, and I was the only one who knew about it.

At first, I didn’t tell anybody. I was afraid they would think I was crazy. But bit by bit, I started testing the waters, like when I tried to talk to James about it at lunch.

A few months later, I went hiking with a friend named Aaron. He understood the dangers of climate change, so I thought he’d be receptive to the idea of collapse. As we walked through the woods, I told him a little about what I’d learned.

He listened somberly. “It’s gonna be a mess,” he said, “but hopefully Biden will turn things around.”

“Yea, hopefully…” I said, trailing off. Then I told him about a subreddit called r/collapse and how it’s full of people who think civilization is doomed.

He scoffed. “Yea, there are a lot of crazy subreddits.”

“I’m starting to think they’re right,” I said.

He looked at me. “Then you’re spending too much time on that subreddit.”

And that’s as far as I got with him. Aaron is convinced that oil companies are spreading climate doom in order to make people feel hopeless and give up trying to save the environment.

The thing is, he’s not wrong. Oil companies are spreading climate doom in hopes that we’ll give up. That’s why I always emphasize that even though it’s too late to save civilization, it’s not too late to save as much of the natural world as possible. Every 1/10th of a degree of warming that we prevent will save millions of lives and countless species.

I said as much, but he didn’t want to hear anymore.

A few months after that, the Pacific Northwest had one of the worst heatwaves in history. Several towns broke their high-temperature records by more than 5°C, over a billion sea creatures cooked to death, and the small village of Lytton burned to the ground.

Climate scientists were shocked. Although they had done a great job forecasting the rise in average global temperatures, it seemed they’d been wrong about the impacts of rising temperatures. At 1°C of warming, we were already seeing the kind of disasters that weren’t supposed to happen until we reached 1.5°C.

That’s when I began to realize that we might not have several decades left. We might only have one decade left before things rapidly fall apart.

So, I tried warning more people. I talked to friend named Heather who loves nature and is always posting things about climate activism. We discussed the concept of “global weirding” and how unpredictable the weather has become.

I said to her, “I’m kind of losing hope. It seems like climate change and biodiversity loss aren’t just getting worse, they’re getting worse exponentially. At this point, I don’t see how we can turn things around.”

“It’s definitely in snowball effect,” she replied, “but if we got some serious legislation and policy in place, we could turn this around in our lifetimes. For our children’s children.”

I almost told her that our children probably won’t have children of their own, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her that she’ll never be a grandmother. Who am I to put that thought in her head?

A few weeks later, I sent Sid Smith’s lecture to my older brother. He’s always been interested in emergency preparedness and doomsday scenarios, so I thought he’d be more open-minded about all this. When I called him, he admitted that he never got around to watching it, but assured me that things weren’t as bad as I thought.

“If it gets too hot to grow food, they’ll just move the farms north.”

“I don’t know if that will work,” I said, “With the jet stream breaking down, the weather will get too erratic for farming.”

He dismissed that idea, so I tried another tactic.

“What if we start running out of fossil fuels?” I asked. “Our entire agricultural system depends on oil and natural gas. Without them, we’re kinda screwed.”

“I don’t think that will happen,” he said. “They’re always finding more oil, and I’ve read that the Earth constantly generates oil, so we’ll never actually run out.” (That is bullshit, by the way.)

Obviously, I wasn’t going to convince him. However, there were several people I did convince. And in a way, their reactions were even more disturbing.

For example, I have another brother who patiently listened to everything I said and agreed that civilization will probably collapse in our lifetime. And yet, he doesn’t want to talk about it. Occasionally, I’ll send him an article or video about collapse, but he rarely replies.

I can understand why. Talking about collapse can be very upsetting, so I think he’d rather focus on enjoying his life. I get that. I really do. But it’s not the way I deal with bad news. When I’m upset, I want to talk it out.

And that’s exactly what I told another friend of mine named Jen. I told her that if we’re still alive in 20 or 30 years, we’ll be living in conditions like some of the most lawless and impoverished places on Earth today.

She didn’t say anything.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think you’re crazy. It’s just that…” She shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do, so why even talk about it?”

That reaction is so strange to me. If a massive comet were headed toward Earth like in the movie Don’t Look Up, would everybody just carry on like nothing was happening? Like we weren’t all going to die a fiery death in the near future?

I feel like I’m running around the deck of the Titanic, telling everyone, “Look! The ship is sinking!” and people are saying things like, “No it isn’t” or “We can still fix it” or “It’s not that bad.”

Maybe I’d be better off joining the orchestra, making music, and enjoying myself as the ship sinks.

In a certain sense, I already am enjoying myself. Becoming collapse-aware has made me realize how unbelievably precious life is, and how lucky I am to be alive.

Every morning I sit on my porch, marvel at the majestic trees, and watch as the sky changes color. Every day I hug my kids, tell them I love them, and treasure every moment we have together. And every evening I stand in my garden, watch the insects, and bask in the beauty of the leaves and flowers.

I try to appreciate everything in my life, from the sound of my cat purring to a simple glass of water. I can’t put into words what a miracle it is to be a tiny piece of the universe, observing itself for an infinitesimal moment in deep time.

But I can’t pretend everything is okay, either. I can’t just go on with my life like I did before. I refuse to bury my head in the sand. I want to talk about what’s happening. I want to come to terms with it. I want to warn people.

Most of all, I want someone to hug me and say, “I know. I’m scared, too.”

The last few years have been some of the loneliest years of my life, but I’m trying to change that. Last fall, I participated in Good Grief Network’s 10 Steps to Resilience and Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate, which was a wonderful experience.

And recently, I’ve started participating in Michael Dowd’s Post-Doom discussions. His focus is on moving from collapse awareness to collapse acceptance. The idea is that if you trust reality and embrace your mortality, you can live a life of awe and gratitude, even in the face of collapse. That sounds pretty good to me.

Currently, I’m working on finding more collapse-aware people in my own town, which is challenging given that most people don’t advertise their belief that we’re all doomed. It also doesn’t help that my social skills suck, but I’m not giving up.

Maybe a year from now, I can write another post about how I’m not so lonely anymore.

If you feel alone or misunderstood because of what you know about the future, don’t despair. Be patient, and keep looking for likeminded people online or in person.

Let’s find one another and make music together before the ship goes down.

Johnstone on Propaganda (and dangerous stupidity)

Most Propaganda Looks Nothing Like This. Caitlin Johnstone. May 28, 2023


When most people in the English-speaking world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to think of something that’s done by foreign nations who have governments that are so totalitarian they won’t even let people know what’s true or think for themselves.

Others understand that propaganda is something that happens in their own nation, but think it only happens to other people in other political parties. If they think of themselves as left-leaning they see those to their right as propagandized by right wing media, and if they think of themselves as right-leaning they see those to their left as propagandized by left wing media.

A few understand that propaganda is administered in their own nation by their own media, and understand that it’s administered across partisan lines, but they think of it in terms of really egregious lies like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or babies being taken from incubators in Kuwait.

In reality, all are inaccurate understandings of what propaganda is and how it works in western society. Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.

The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They’re the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.

One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.

Have you ever noticed how when you look at any mainstream newspaper, broadcast or news website, you never see views from those who oppose the existence of the US-centralized empire? Or those who want to close all foreign US military bases? Or those who want to dismantle capitalism? Or those who want a thorough rollback of the creeping authoritarianism our civilization is being subjected to? You might see some quibbling about different aspects of the empire, some debate over whether we should de-escalate against Russia so we can better escalate against China, but you won’t ever see anyone calling for the complete end of the empire and its abuses altogether.

That’s propaganda. It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.

The creation of that illusion is propaganda. It’s not something solid that you can point to easily because it’s comprised of an omission of something rather than a concrete thing, but it warps people’s perspectives in ways that have immensely far-reaching consequences. It’s something that doesn’t stand out too sharply against the background, but because people are exposed to it continuously day in and day out, it plays a huge role in shaping their worldview.

Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so. As political scientist Bernard Cohen famously observed way back in 1963, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. The world will look different to different people depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read.”

Ever noticed how the fact that our governments are increasingly tempting nuclear war seems like it ought to be a front-page story pretty much every day of the week, but instead the news is full of stuff like the US presidential race and people arguing over what products Target should sell during Pride Month? That’s agenda-setting.

The press could easily have spent the entire Trump administration screaming about the dangerous aggressions Trump was advancing against Russia instead of calling him a Putin puppet, and mainstream liberals would have fixated on Trump’s warmongering insanity instead of calling him Putin’s cock holster. But that wouldn’t have served the interests of the empire, which had been planning to ramp up aggressions against Russia for years. They set the agenda, and the public fell in line.

Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.

The continual message we’re fed every day is that there’s nothing to rebel against and nothing to oppose, because any problems we’re perceiving are our own fault and not the fault of an abusive, exploitative system which is built to extract profit from the working class and the ecosystem at the expense of both. The system cannot be a failure, it can only be failed.

Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful. Anyone who can’t be herded into either of these mainstream factions is instead herded into fake “populist” factions, which eventually corral them back into the mainstream factions. Those few politically engaged people who can’t be herded toward any of these groups are so small in number that they can simply be marginalized and denied any sizeable platform from which to spread their ideas, and “democracy” does the rest because the majority are supporting the status quo.

Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes. The way pundits, politicians and reporters will talk about the Biden administration surrounding China with war machinery without also talking about how freakish and horrifying it is that we’re looking at rapidly escalating brinkmanship between nuclear-armed countries. The way American cities are full of homeless people and it’s just treated as a normal and acceptable thing to simply let them stay homeless and push them out of wherever they try to be. The way nothing ever changes no matter who we vote for but we’re still herded into the voting booths and told to vote better.

As a character in the movie Waking Life puts it, “We all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no! Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven’t given us any other options outside the occasional purely symbolic act of voting — do you want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?”

They don’t just tell us what to believe about the world, they tell us what to believe about ourselves. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded on that test.

Over and over and over again, day after day, we are fed seemingly small messages which add up over time. Messages like,

• The world works more or less the way we were taught in school.
• The media have some problems but basically tell the truth.
• The status quo is working basically fine.
• Democracy is real and voting is effective.
• This is the only way things can be.
• Our government might have its problems, but it’s basically good.
• You can earn your way into happiness by working harder.
• You can consume your way into happiness with more spending.
• If you think the system is dysfunctional, you’re the dysfunctional one.
• Those who oppose the status quo are weird and untrustworthy.
• Things might get better after the next election cycle.
• Any attempt to change things is a silly waste of time.

By feeding us all these simple, foundational lies day after day, year after year from the time we are very young, they lay the groundwork for the more complex, specific lies we’ll be told later on. Lies like “Russia/China/Iran/etc is a real problem and its government needs to be stopped,” or “People are struggling financially right now, but it’s just because times are hard and it can’t be helped.”

All the mundane lies serve as a primer for the lies we’ll be told later, because once our worldview has been shaped by them, our basic human cognitive biases and predisposition to reject information which conflicts with our worldview will ensure that we’ll take on board the information which confirms our biases and reject any evidence against it. They construct our worldviews for us, then let our normal cognitive defense systems protect it.

Their messages don’t even need to be well-evidenced or well-argued, they only need to be repeated frequently due to a glitch in human cognition known as the illusory truth effect which causes us to mistake the feeling of having heard something before with the feeling of something being true.

Add to all this the recent development of things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and the deck becomes stacked against truth even further, because someone’s odds of stumbling across information which conflicts with the propaganda they’ve been fed goes dramatically down. Even if they’re actively searching for information which conflicts the mainstream worldview, algorithms by Google and Google-owned YouTube often make it almost impossible to find.

So that’s what we’re up against. There’s a failure to appreciate just how pervasive and powerful the empire’s propaganda machine is, even among those who are very critical of empire, because propaganda in our society is like water for fish — we’re swimming in it constantly, so we don’t see it. You have to step way, way back and begin examining our situation from its most basic foundations to get any perspective on how all-encompassing it really is.

Finding your way out of the propaganda matrix takes a lot of diligent work, tons of curiosity, the humility to admit you’ve been completely wrong about everything, and more than a little plain dumb luck. But if you keep hacking away at it eventually you get there, and then you can help others get there too. It’s a hard slog, but if our chains are psychological that means they’re ultimately only made of dream stuff. All that needs to happen is for enough of us to wake up.

Everything’s Getting Way More Dangerous And Way More Stupid. Caitlin Johnstone. May 26, 2023

Moon of Alabama has an article out on how an uncomfortable number of relatively restraint-oriented foreign policy officials have been exiting the Biden administration, while a China hawk has just been appointed the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Antiwar has an article out about how New York congressman Jerry Nadler told an Epoch Times reporter that he “wouldn’t care” if Ukraine used US-made F-16s to strike Russian territory, and doesn’t find the possibility that they might do so concerning.

This comes days after we learned that the Biden administration has signed off on Ukraine getting F-16s while also greenlighting an offensive on Crimea using US-made weapons, a nightmare scenario which greatly escalates the risks of nuclear war.

There are no adults behind the wheel of the vehicle that’s driving us toward World War Three. We’re on a bus that’s being driven straight toward a cliff, and it’s being driven by infants. If we survive this it will not be because of the experienced leadership of western governments, but completely in spite of it. ...........

OK Doomer: Real Talk

Life at 2030: Real Talk. OK Doomer by Jessica Wildfire. May 27, 2023.



Like me, you’ve probably spent some time wondering what your life will look like by the year 2030. Conversations around climate change have settled into three main groups. You have the climate deniers who believe it’s all a scam. You have the climate activists who demand urgent action. Now we have climate minimizers, who assure us we’ll be okay in a world with 2-3C of warming.

Well, let’s consider what’s happening now:

Farmers in the U.S. have already abandoned more than 30 percent of their winter-wheat fields this year. It’s the biggest drop in production in 100 years. Grain traders predict it’s going to get worse over the summer. It was a hard winter across the midwest, hit by drought and severe cold.

Even Fox News calls it “devastating.”

It’s not looking good for beef, either. The nation’s cattle inventory is reaching all-time lows this year. As of April, inventory was down 4.4 percent. Again, drought is hitting pastures hard. It’s driving up the cost of feed. Worse, the long-term data shows a clear overall decline over the last 20 years. Even when the beef industry “expands,” we’re producing less than we did during the 1990s. Most agriculture experts will tell you: Beef is in decline, and prices will only go up from here.

For the first time ever, nations are seriously considering a plan to vaccinate chickens and turkeys against avian flu, during the worst outbreak in recorded history. During the last 18 months, the global poultry industry has culled 200 million birds. It’s been having a real impact on prices. All that sounds great for vegans, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that our breadbasket is slowly failing. If it’s not drought and heat waves, it’s the growing threat of disease.

It’s not just in the U.S., either.

Asian countries have already been seeing record-breaking temperatures as high as 112F. China is bracing for another summer of extreme heat, alternating between drought and flooding. Experts predict it will threaten “to disrupt more commodities, even niche ones like rubber and peanut crops.” As of April, drought has already caused delays at 80 percent of the country’s rubber plantations.

Back in February, Britain was rationing fruits and vegetables.

According to CNBC, stores were limiting the purchase of tomatoes, peppers, and cumbers “to three items per customer.” The cause? Extreme weather across southern Europe and northern Africa.

Experts predict that even coffee is going to become a luxury item as climate change kills off 50 percent of farmland by 2050. We’ve already seen coffee farmers in Central America abandoning their fields.

Does this sound like fearmongering?

These are all reported facts.

Here’s the big picture:

We haven’t even crossed over the 1.5C threshold yet. That’s the number climate scientists have told us to stay under, if we’re going to avoid the worst fallout of global warming. Recently, they predicted there’s a very good chance that we’ll breach that limit within the next few years, decades earlier than expected. Artificial intelligence models are predicting it’s guaranteed.

Climate scientists have held back from making detailed predictions about what our lives are going to look like by 2030. They hedge. They don’t want to get blamed for causing panic. They talk in relatively vague terms. Nobody wants to be wrong. Climate “alarmists” like Bill McGuire or Gaia Vince have painted vivid portraits of what to expect down the road. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the rise of climate minimizers over the last few years, people who consider themselves experts who go around insisting that 2C of warming won’t be that bad.

Increasingly, the mass media has started to condition us for life in a 2C world. They’re already working on their minimizer rhetoric.

Are we surprised?

For the last year, they’ve worked hard to convince everyone to accept mass death and disability at the hands of a virus. It’s starting to look like that’s the strategy of choice for unavoidable climate change.

I’m not afraid of sounding like a doomer.

Here’s what I think we can reasonably expect our lives to look like by the year 2030. I think it’s important to talk about. I’m not trying to scare anyone. I’m trying to prepare them, rationally and emotionally.

First, I think we can expect inflation to continue. The vast majority of politicians and economists still live largely in denial when it comes to climate change. They’re not factoring it into their models. It doesn’t matter how much the Federal Reserve keeps hiking up interest rates. That’s not going to help, either. The real problem here is twofold. First, there’s just straight-up corporate greed.

Second, the midwest and southwest are sinking deeper into a geologically predictable megadrought. Climate change is going to make it even worse.

We’re talking about a second Dust Bowl.

Large parts of the U.S. are already seeing the return of dust storms. Earlier this month, a dust storm caused a 72-car pileup in Illinois. More and more, farmers are reporting drought on par with the 1920s and 1930s. As a farmer in Nebraska told local news: “It’s just wildly dry here…and this is the wet season, so we should be soaking up a lot of rain… that’s a little bit scary.”

Severe weather in general will keep getting worse.

According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, severe weather in 2022 cost the U.S. more than $21 billion in crop losses. That’s a minimum estimate that doesn’t even include livestock, structural damage, or other factors. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration calls 2022 the third worst disaster year in American history, with the worst happening in 2017. So anyone trying to claim that we’re seeing less severe weather is…lying.

Meanwhile, lines at food banks keep getting longer. As pandemic SNAP benefits expire, demand is going up everywhere from Utah to California.

When you combine corporate greed with megadrought and soil depletion, it doesn’t take a genius to predict a vast expansion of poverty and hunger by the 2030s. Food is just going to keep getting more expensive.

Rationing and shortages will become the norm. We can cross our fingers and hope that the vegetation zones will simply shift, and that other states can take up the slack by growing more food.

That’s a big if.

Homelessness is going up, anywhere from 6 percent a year in some states to 23 percent in states like Oregon. Housing is just too expensive. It’s partly greed, but also driven by climate change as warmer weather brings disease and insect infestations to the world’s timber supplies. There just aren’t enough houses for people, and investors treat them more as commodities than living spaces. Again, we could adapt by replacing timber with bamboo.

We’re not doing that (yet).

Summers will become unbearable in large parts of the U.S. We’re talking about heat indexes in the 110s on a regular basis.

Forget going outside.

More people are going to rely on air conditioning 24/7. People in Arizona are already using oven mittens to open their car doors.

In an optimistic scenario, we’ll build more solar farms and wind turbines to handle the grid pressure from more people blasting their AC. In a more realistic scenario, you can expect power disruptions and curtailments.

If you’re lucky, it won’t be life-threatening.

Just extremely uncomfortable.

Severe weather is beating up our economy, despite what the deniers and minimizers say. In 2021, damage from natural disasters totaled $145 billion. Americans are feeling it, with 90 percent of us paying more for home insurance. A lot of insurance companies have started to abandon areas prone to extreme weather. They’ve been paying out more than $1 billion a year, a sixfold increase from the 1980s. Ten insurance companies went bankrupt in Florida just over the last two years. Contrary to logic, people are choosing to move to dangerous areas. They’re simply not thinking about their long-term future.

By 2030, you can expect to pay a lot more for insurance depending on where you live. It’s going to get so expensive and hard to find, a lot of Americans will simply start choosing to skip it altogether.

It’ll become another luxury.

We could go on, but I think you get the idea.

This is what the world kinda looks like now, and we haven’t even breached 1.5C of warming. So that’s what we can expect by 2030: We’re going to be paying far more for food. We’re going to be buying a lot less meat, and probably fewer fruits and vegetables. There’s going to be long lines at food banks.

A majority of Americans will be broke and food insecure. We’ll struggle to cool our homes. We’ll struggle to find insurance. We’re going to see people wind up poor and homeless than we didn’t expect.

The year 2030 is going to look a lot like 1930.

The difference is that we’ll already be in a prolonged war with China, because that’s what our politicians and military seem to want more than anything. We’ll very much feel like we’re living through a Second Great Depression, except it’s going to last longer. It will probably be the new normal.

So, a lot of us aren’t “doomed” just yet, especially if we start preparing now. That would mean moving to a plant-based diet. It would mean thinking about a tiny house or an earth-sheltered home with earth tubes instead of some huge structure on the coast or the middle of the Arizona desert. It would mean building or joining a climate-resilient community, and embracing a life that’s framed more around sustainability and homeostasis. On a larger scale, it would mean demanding better public housing and better public transportation. It would mean demanding more efficient use of resources, including water.

We’re in the business of climate adaptation now. Adapting to a hotter earth does two things at once. It helps us in the short term, but it also achieves a lot of the goals that climate optimists say they care about.

I’m writing this because climate minimizers are going around telling us not to worry about a world that’s 2C warmer. They’re trying to convince us that it’ll be fine, that it won’t really have an impact on us. You know, it sounds a lot like climate denial, just in a different outfit with different makeup.

They don’t want us to think about the future in concrete terms like food and housing shortages, and unaffordable home insurance.

If people did that, they would get angry.

They would demand action.

They would do something.

The Real Enemy is Normal. OK Doomer by Jessica Wildfire. May 26, 2023

Here’s the thing:

A Yale study on climate change communication found that 70 percent of Americans are worried about climate change. More than 30 percent of them are deeply worried. And yet, only 9 percent are talking about it.

That’s a huge gap.

Margaret Klein Salamon puts her attention on that gap in the second edition of her book Facing The Climate Emergency. It comes out in a few days. (Yes, she asked me to write about it. No, she’s not paying me anything.) Last year, I wrote about the first edition of her book and how it changed my life. Salamon’s writing has been there for me in the same way that my readers tell me my work has been there for them. When I get dragged through the mud for spreading doom, her book reminds me that it’s healthy to express our sense of grief and especially our outrage at the inaction and sanguine complacency that surrounds us.

People need to hear it. ............

Hagens: The Real Global Macro

 The Real Global Macro | Frankly #28

Tsakraklides: We were never in control

We Were Never In Control. George Tsakraklides. Apr. 7, 2023.


Contrary to what humanity’s impressive technological milestones and achievements may suggest, the surprising truth is that we have never been in charge of what happens to us. As a biological organism aiming to maximize its chances of survival, all of our accomplishments and decisions were blindly driven with this primary survival objective in mind: economic growth, technological evolution, population increase. Whatever it takes, at whatever cost to us, or to the planet. From our humble beginnings as a monocellular life form and up to today’s complex industrial civilization, evolution has never stopped self-selecting for exactly the same traits in humans: greedy and exploitative tendencies, and the physical and mental skillsets that accompany these – given that, it is these precise skillsets which are the most likely to avert extinction in the short term. Our brain therefore was enlarged and optimized to become a resource exploitation logistical device: it was customized to “mine” all aspects of its environment for resources efficiently, quickly, and most importantly, at terrifying scale. The seemingly quantum leap in data processing power that evolution gifted us with is so immense, that its impact has still not fully been realized. Our brain is still able to keep up with any sophisticated technology we develop, just about. Humans with exactly the same brain as us, living just a few thousand years ago, would never have imagined that their brain can do all this, and keep up with it.

Humans aside, our greedy tendency is the natural, evolutionary driver of any species, whether it is an amoeba or a Nobel prize winner. However complex and sophisticated our DNA becomes, it will always self-select for attributes that favor its successful replication into the future. Social intelligence, philosophy and ethics cannot weed out greed, ever, simply because greed will always be supercharged by the evolutionary process. Therefore, although we often erroneously think of ourselves as the only species with true sentience and “free will” to take our own decisions, the reality is that we have never really been in charge. The most important factor in any of our decisions is, and will always be, our own personal survival in the very short term. This is a permanent, indestructible feature of our hardware that came with our factory settings: our DNA. This DNA codes for mental skillsets and hormonal responses which influence our attitudes and behaviors, and which our popular culture often likes to classify as social “norms” which are determined and shaped by our environment in different societies and timepoints in our history. While much of this is true to an extent, the big elephant in the room is the part of our greed which is DNA-based: it simply cannot be tackled.

Of course, this is not good news when it comes to addressing the apocalyptic catastrophe we have in store for this planet. Implementing any of the myriad of already existing solutions for stopping our self-destruction would require us being able to step outside of the context of economic growth and exploitation, which is so paramount to our identity. We simply lack the faculties to do this, and proof of this is that the more solutions to climate change emerge, the more conscious our discussions become on what it is we need to urgently do, the more obstinate our resistance grows towards implementing any of it. Our greedy personal survival instinct is much stronger than any rational or technological solution which benefits the greater society or ecosystem. Are we introspective enough to recognize this, rise above it and begin to cultivate the mental tools we desperately need, despite this pre-disposition? It is a question of nature vs. nurture, and nature is overwhelmingly winning thus far, hands down, for the overwhelming duration of our history. Addressing climate change and the ecological apocalypse is not an issue of yet another technology or increased processing power, these have both run their course. It is an issue of truly, genuinely claiming our own destiny, for the very first time in our 200,000 years of existence as modern humans. The expectation is almost impossible, as much of humanity does not even believe we are responsible for what is happening. Those who accept no responsibility have already given up on their potential to make a difference in the course of events.

It is of course a profound disappointment, not to mention a paradox, that evolution didn’t know any better than select for some of the most ecocidal attributes in humans. But evolution is not an infallible process. Its drawback is that it can only operate based on current wisdom, that is, what it knows at the time of mutation. It is always completely oblivious to the future. We evolved in an era of abundance on the planet, which is not the case today. New evolutionary mutations, new species of humans are needed urgently in this new, depleted environment we have created. The life forms that evolve after we’ve wrecked Earth will probably have no choice but to be a bit more thrifty, at least for the first few million years. As far as humans go, we cannot simply redesign ourselves like a new iphone version. Evolution is a cumulative process and DNA code can only be amended, not rewritten. We have gone too far down the evolutionary path to remove greed out of our biological system. Crocodiles are much more ecological in comparison: they can go without a meal for 12 months, and don’t even get grumpy about it. They have more patience and Zen wisdom than our own Dalai Lama.

I know that many philosophers, environmental activists and economists will disagree with me. They believe that we have the power vested in us to take control of our destiny. I wholeheartedly hope that they are right, and that I am very wrong, but I come to this conversation from a biology perspective, and biology eats philosophy, economics and social theory for breakfast any day. Biology is the raw blood and bones of who we really are. Our hormones and our “wiring” do determine much of our behavior, unfortunately.

Look at today’s world. Despite all of this technology and sophisticated civilization, do we really think any of us are in charge of our lives? The same survival instincts still rule at large, the same irresistible “lifeforce” within each organism to greedily appropriate as much resource from its environment as it possibly can. The difference between humans and other species is that greed for us is as much an instinct, as it is an institutionalized, perennialized and sophisticated economic system that controls every aspect of our daily needs, and every corresponding natural resource catering to these. The irresistible survival instinct that all species have is, in the case of humans, harnessed and monetized by an organized economic system that has become impossible to escape, unless one goes off-grid and completely checks out of society. As an organized industrial society, we have long ago outsourced our future to this economic system, which supersedes any national or global political entity.

What is also unique to our species is that the survival of this economic system has become more important than the survival of humanity. The system only cares about propagating itself, and it does this by farming more humans and creating more consumer needs in order to increase its revenue. We are all strongly encouraged, and with the utmost urgency, to keep on consuming, polluting and having more children. Not for our benefit, but solely to prevent this toxic, unsustainable capitalist system from collapsing into itself any earlier than it will anyway. The industrial revolution, institutionalization of society and digital marketing all evolved with the same, common goal: to scale up consumption and create easy-to-manage identical humans, who all helplessly depend on this system like a hospital patient hypodermically connected to a drip feed. Modern human life is as unnatural as that of a chicken, living and dying under electric light in a chicken factory. We have relinquished control of our lives long ago to this factory, addicted to its hallucinogenic drugs and growth hormones and not knowing any better. Moreover, this system is completely watertight. There is absolutely no escape. The “chicken humans” do not even know what free-range means, growing up in a cultural context which legitimizes a completely artificial life, yet one that feels vividly real to all of us, given that it is the only reality we have ever known of.

From this dystopian but pragmatic perspective, human civilization is technically no longer run by humans. It is run by profit and algorithms, both completely selfish, non-human entities that have zero ethics or social and environmental conscience (arguably we lack these as well). Human or other life therefore already has no value within this matrix. We have effectively been hijacked, turned into working zombies, simply so that this system can continue, regardless of our own well-being or future. Just like true zombies, we have no idea that we are technically dead.

This system would have made sense to an extent, if at least it was a sustainable economic model that could continue into the future, securing our survival within a mutually parasitic/symbiotic relationship. But it isn’t, as it is based on the exponential leveraging of the very resources which it destroys. It is exhausting its own fuel, and it does so at an accelerating rate, much like stock market derivative instruments which rely on fake money. All of Earth, including its beings, resources, climate systems and all of humanity, is being parasitically exploited by a non-human, semi-sentient, self-destructive Ponzi scheme entity we shallowly call capitalism. It is now in full control of our lives, and of the planet’s resources. This is a sure death sentence for human civilisation, a large proportion of biological life on Earth, and, depending how bad things get, a significant hurdle to any new complex life forms who may try to emerge one day out of the planet’s radioactive ashes.

The system of course has evolved to give us the impression that we DO have full control and choice over our lives. But both the list of choices as well as the decision options are limited and prescribed. They represent different flavors of the same option, which aims to maximize returns for an economic system addicted to profit. Sentenced by birth to be stakeholders of this scheme, we are purposely miseducated and groomed to become greedy, insatiable consumers, running around all day working, purchasing, paying bills and destroying Earth in the process. We have not simply lost any rudimentary control over our lives, but our own lives simply do not matter. It is the preservation of the hard, cold profit indexes of the economic system that matters, and which all of us work for.

This Ponzi scheme of “wealth creation for wealth creation’s sake” has been an Armageddon of natural wealth destruction for the planet so far. Most of us are just not able to see it, as we think we were getting something out of it for ourselves. In reality, we abandoned all 8 million other species of this planet when we signed under the dotted line to join the ranks of this Ponzi scheme corporation, forgetting that we are one of these 8 million species ourselves. Ironically, the better the profit numbers look, the poorer we become, eventually stealing from each other in an oversubscribed betting scheme that is heading for collapse. We, collectively the stakeholders, will of course pay the full price. As for the “system”, it is non-biological, non-sentient, and will simply hibernate until the next big civilization it manages to hitch a ride with.

Climate Realism not Doomerism

A critique of the WaPo article : Why climate ‘doomers’ are replacing climate ‘deniers’


An article called “Why climate “doomers” are replacing climate “deniers” ” by Shannon Osaka was published on March 24th 2023 in the WaPo. I consider myself to be somewhat of a climate doomer so I thought it would be interesting to see what they had to say about “doomers”.

The article starts with the story of a young man, Sean Youra, who learns the truth about climate change, we are basically screwed, it’s too late, climate change is going to destroy the world as we know it. But apparently, according to “scientists and experts”, his discoveries are just “defeatism”, which could “undermine efforts to take action” and “may be just as dangerous as climate denial.”

Really? I’d be interested to learn how these efforts can change the fact that the concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is now above 500ppm CO2e, which will warm the planet by about 10°C in the long term, according to the latest paper by James Hansen.

We are then introduced to Zeke Hausfauther, a contributor to the IPCC report, who says “It’s fair to say that recently many of us climate scientists have spent more time arguing with the doomers than with the deniers”. I dug a little to learn more about the fellow. Zeke is the typical paid climate scientist who spreads absolute non-sense, like the myth that “climate change stops at net zero”.

I recently wrote a thread on this subreddit debunking this myth. The gist of it is that the biggest contributor to climate change are the 1 trillion tons of CO2 already in the atmosphere, not current emissions. It can sound counter intuitive, but current emissions are keeping us cool because burning fossil fuels also produce aerosols which cool the planet by about 1°C. But unlike greenhouse gas, who stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, aerosols only stay there for a few days/weeks. Net zero will therefore accelerate global warming and not stop it. Net zero is not even possible anyways since just to feed 8 billion people, you need fertilizers made with fossil fuels. And like we saw above, with current GHG concentrations, 10°C of warming are locked in.

We are then introduced to Guy McPherson, with whom many here must be familiar with. Guy claims that humans will be extinct within 10 years. I don’t want to enter in a debate about this claim or the person behind the quote, but knowing how much global warming there is in the pipeline, even if it’s not in 10 years, is it that crazy to believe that humanity won’t make it?

She then describes Guy McPherson as the type of conspiracy theorist who claim that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is downplaying the seriousness of the issue. Is it even a conspiracy theory at this point? The IPCC has consistently been downplaying the pace and severity of climate change. One good example from the link I just shared : “The IPCC has always confidently projected that the Arctic ice sheet was safe at least until 2050 or well beyond 2100.” How is that going?

We are then introduced to a man called Andrew Smith. I’ll leave the full quote because I believe that Andrew is completely right, and he is probably the sanest person quoted in this article.

Andrew Smith, a retired engineer from Yorkshire, England, is slightly turned off by the term “doomer.” It provokes, he says, a sense of being on the fringes of society, or visions of doomsday preppers filling their bunkers with canned food. “For me, a climate doomer is simply a person who’s taken a look at the peer-reviewed science, taken stock of the natural world around them, and come to a conclusion,” he wrote in a message via Twitter. Smith believes that the world is on track to warm 4 to 8 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial times.

The author then mentions 2018 as the year that doom really started spreading, with the strikes from Greta Thunberg, protests from Extinction Rebellion, the publication of Deep Adaption by Jem Bendell – I somewhat agree with this, it’s the time when I started opening my eyes too.

That same year, the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C was published too. The author quotes Hausfather again regarding that report, who says that “part of the problem is that climate targets — say, the goal to limit warming to 1.5C — have become interpreted by the public as climate thresholds, which would drive the planet into a “hothouse” state. In fact, scientists don’t believe there is anything unique about that temperature that will cause runaway tipping points; the landmark IPCC report merely aimed to show the risks of bad impacts are much higher at 2C than at 1.5.”

Again, Hausfather is spreading nonsense. First off, it's not possible to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. Climate change is driven by GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. The study of paleoclimates has clearly shown that. During the Pliocene, 3 millions years ago, GHG concentrations were around 400ppm CO2e and temperatures were around 3-4°c higher. We are now at more than 500ppm CO2e, why does he think it’s possible to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C?

The 1.5°C and 2°C objectives are an invention by people like William Nordhaus, an American economist from Yale University. They have no basis in science, it’s all based on what he thought capitalism could get away with. The idea was that we were only at 1°C of warming, that we still had a “carbon budget” and that we could keep emitting greenhouse gas for a while, for the sake of economic growth. He even got a Nobel Prize for economics in 2018 for being such a good defender of the status quo.

Funnily enough, Hausfather is a fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, founded by no other than Ted Nordhaus, William’s nephew. The Breakthrough Institute advocates for technological development, and increasing economic growth, through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. While people are starting to cook to death, the Nordhaus family keeps its priorities straight : infinite economic growth!

The author then quotes, Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute, who has said that while humans probably won’t go extinct due to climate change, “not going extinct” is a low bar. I hope that Kate has some solid advice for surviving in a +10°C world, because I frankly don’t. It’s funny that it’s pretty much always people with kids like Kate who spread hopium. I guess it’s easier than telling your kid that all they will ever know is a dying world?

At the end, we learn that Youra corrected his way, rejected doomerism and embraced hopium, with congratulations from the Washington Post.

Now here is my advice. I don’t know how long civilization or humanity have, or how exactly this will end, but I can see the ship going down with the next few years or decades. We are beyond screwed. The first step is to accept this reality. You may feel terrorized by this, you may feel numb, powerless, and it’s a completely normal reaction to have, many have gone through this in this space. Then it’s up to you to decide what you want to do with the time you have left. I would personally recommend not having kids, preparing at least a little, both physically (storing food, water, etc.) and mentally, not working too hard, and just doing what you enjoy most while you can.

R.I.P. Will Steffen

Will Steffen’s crucial climate ideas on “Hothouse Earth”, tipping cascades and non-linearity. David Spratt, Climate Code Red. Feb. 1, 2023.

(go to Spratt's article at Climate Code Red for active links)


The eminent Australian climate scientist, and former Labor government advisor and head of climate at ANU, Will Steffen, who died early this week from complications following cancer surgery, will be remembered for some of the big, crucial ideas he and his collaborators contributed to the understanding of the Earth System, particularly planetary boundaries, climate tipping point vulnerabilities and cascades, risk and nonlinearity, and the “Hothouse Earth” scenario.

Particularly in the last few years, Steffen was very clear and forthright in communicating the threat and the dynamics of the climate system, and the trajectory towards collapse:

"Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse … That is, the intervention time we have left has, in many cases, shrunk to levels that are shorter than the time it would take to transition to a more sustainable system.”

More recently, Steffen and others asked:

“Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe.”

And in a recent book chapter, "The Earth System, the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene", he recognised that climate change was already dangerous:

"It is clear from observations of climate change-related impacts in Australia alone – the massive bushfires of the 2019–2020 Black Summer; the third mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in only 5 years; and long-term cool-season drying of the country’s southeast agricultural zone – that even a 1.1 °C temperature rise has put us into a dangerous level of climate change.”

Steffen was the key scientific climate advisor to the 2007-2013 Australian Labor government. In that role I often disagreed with his political advocacy, and told him so. Will’s advocacy stuck pretty rigidly to the 2°C, 450-ppm-CO2 goal that was de rigueur in global and national policy-making circles in those days, even as the science was already clear that it was a dangerous goal, and Jim Hansen had persuasively outlined the case for a goal of under 350 ppm, which had been adopted around the world by some more progressive parts of the climate movement.

But Steffen was far from alone amongst scientists around the world who become jammed between politics and science, in the struggle for balance between research knowledge and wanting, or sounding, to be politically relevant to governments either in denial or unwilling to grasp the size of the task.

At the same time, Steffen was keenly aware in 2008 that “the scientific community is underestimating the speed at which the climate is changing”, warning that the world's sea levels could rise by up to four metres by the end of the century.

And whilst Ross Garnaut’s 2008 report for Labor on climate change had contemplated the 450 ppm and 550 ppm goals (with short-term warming of around 2°C and 3°C respectively), Steffen in a 2009 report for the climate change department had recognised that 550 ppm (a doubling of the pre-industrial CO2 level) could lead to 6°C of warming:

“... when ice extent is treated not as a forcing but as a climate system response, so that both fast and slow feedbacks are included, the climate sensitivity approximately doubles (Hansen et al. 2008). Therefore, the eventual temperature rise in response to a doubling of CO2 is at least 3C and likely up to 6C, depending on the behaviour of the slow feedbacks.”

Many scientists and collaborators have already expressed their sorrow at the death of Will Steffen and paid tribute to his legacy, for example here and here and here.

Steffen’s passing is a great loss to climate understanding and advocacy in Australia, and to the research community at a global level. I will remember his work particularly for publications over the last fifteen years that dealt with system-level analysis of climate change, boundaries, risks and dynamics. In no particular order, some key papers and contributions in which he was either lead author or a co-author include the following:


1. “Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against” (2020)

Authored by Timothy Lenton, Johan Rockström, Owen Gaffney, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, this paper was the first peer-reviewed paper (to my knowledge) to recognise the climate emergency as constituted by existential risks: “We are in a climate emergency… this is an existential threat to civilization” and “the evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute”.

The paper pointed to “biosphere tipping points which can trigger abrupt carbon release back to the atmosphere.. Permafrost across the Arctic is beginning to irreversibly thaw and release carbon dioxide and methane… the boreal forest in the subarctic is increasingly vulnerable.”

The authors said that:

“the clearest emergency would be if we were approaching a global cascade of tipping points that led to a new, less habitable, ‘hothouse’ climate state. Interactions could happen through ocean and atmospheric circulation or through feedbacks that increase greenhouse-gas levels and global temperature. Alternatively, strong cloud feedbacks could cause a global tipping point. We argue that cascading effects might be common. Research last year analysed 30 types of regime shift spanning physical climate and ecological systems... This indicated that exceeding tipping points in one system can increase the risk of crossing them in others. Such links were found for 45% of possible interactions. In our view, examples are starting to be observed.”

The conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that the threat, the risks, are overwhelming. And it is a slap to conventional economic modelling of climate risks, when they write that:

“If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization. No amount of economic cost–benefit analysis is going to help us. We need to change our approach to the climate problem.”

2. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” (2018)

With Steffen as lead author, this paper known colloquially as the “Hothouse Earth” paper, and one that captured the public imagination, was downloaded 270,000 times in just the first few days after publication.

A “Hothouse Earth” scenario is described, in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining (without further human perturbations). This “Hothouse Earth” planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even in the 1.5°C-2°C range.

Steffen also said that: “even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5°C to 2.0°C rise in temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway.”

In other words, even 1.5°C of warming could be so dangerous that further warming would become self-sustaining; a warning seemingly ignored by policymakers and most advocates.


3. Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios (2022)

This paper published last year by ten authors, including Steffen, cannot be underestimated in bringing together a high-level analysis of the need for climate research to focus on the worse-case high-end possibilities:

• “Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios.” We know that temperature rise has “fat tails”: low-probability, high-impact extreme outcomes. Large uncertainties about dangerous surprises “are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect them.” Thus “a thorough risk assessment would need to consider how risks spread, interact, amplify, and are aggravated by human responses”.
• “Climate damages are likely to be nonlinear” and result in an even larger risk tail. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high greenhouse concentrations that are often missing from models.” There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state [including] “recent simulations suggest that stratocumulus cloud decks might abruptly be lost at CO2 concentrations that could be approached by the end of the century, causing an additional ∼8 °C global warming. Large uncertainties about dangerous surprises are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect them.”
• Feedbacks and future warming: Declining emissions does not rule out … extreme climate change [due to] feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high greenhouse concentrations that are often missing from models. Examples include Arctic permafrost thawing that releases methane and CO2 , carbon loss due to intense droughts and fires in the Amazon, and the apparent slowing of dampening feedbacks such as natural carbon sink capacity. These are likely to not be proportional to warming… instead, abrupt and/or irreversible changes may be triggered at a temperature threshold. Particularly worrying is a “tipping cascade” in which multiple tipping elements interact in such a way that tipping one threshold increases the likelihood of tipping another.

4. "A safe operating space for humanity" (2009)

Led by John Rockstrom and Will Steffen, with 27 others (including Hansen and Schellnhuber), this landmark paper proposed that a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide should not exceed 350 ppm:

"We propose that human changes to atmospheric CO2 concentrations should not exceed 350 parts per million by volume, and that radiative forcing should not exceed 1 watt per square metre above pre-industrial levels. Transgressing these boundaries will increase the risk of irreversible climate change, such as the loss of major ice sheets, accelerated sea-level rise and abrupt shifts in forest and agricultural systems. Current CO2 concentration stands at 387 p.p.m.v. and the change in radiative forcing is 1.5 watts per square metre. There are at least three reasons for our proposed climate boundary. First, current climate models may significantly underestimate the severity of long-term climate change for a given concentration of greenhouse gases. Most models suggest that a doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentration will lead to a global temperature rise of about 3°C (with a probable uncertainty range of 2–4.5°C) once the climate has regained equilibrium. But these models do not include long-term reinforcing feedback processes that further warm the climate, such as decreases in the surface area of ice cover or changes in the distribution of vegetation. If these slow feedbacks are included, doubling CO2 levels gives an eventual temperature increase of 6°C (with a probable uncertainty range of 4–8°C). This would threaten the ecological life-support systems that have developed in the late Quaternary environment, and would severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies."

5. “Human impacts on planetary boundaries amplified by Earth system interactions” (2020)

In this paper, Lade, Steffen et al surveyed and provisionally quantified interactions between the Earth system processes represented by the planetary boundaries and investigated their consequences for sustainability governance and identified a dense network of interactions between the planetary boundaries. The resulting cascades and feedbacks predominantly amplify human impacts on the Earth system and thereby shrink the safe operating space for future human impacts on the Earth system. The three key findings for policymakers were:

• Interactions are crucial to understanding the planetary boundaries and humanity’s impacts upon them. For example, biophysically-mediated interactions have almost doubled direct human impacts on the planetary boundaries.
• Most interactions we found were amplifying, meaning that impacts on one planetary boundary lead to increased impacts on other planetary boundaries. Cascading of human actions through multiple components of the Earth system complicates governance of the Earth system. On the other hand, these interactions offer substantial scope for synergies: if impacts on one planetary boundary are decreased, impacts on other planetary boundaries may also lessen.
• Interactions between planetary boundaries lead to trade-offs between the boundaries. For example, interactions between agricultural activity and carbon emissions mean that high levels of both cannot be maintained. On the other hand, these trade-offs offer humanity some freedom in choosing how to navigate to a safe operating space.

6. Model limitations

Will Steffen was clear about the limitations of models and a quantification fetish when dealing with hard-to-project non-linear change and “Hothouse Earth” possibilities, for example in this Guardian article from 2018:

“I think the dominant linear, deterministic framework for assessing climate change is flawed, especially at higher levels of temperature rise. So, yes, model projections using models that don’t include these processes indeed become less useful at higher temperature levels. Or, as my co-author John Schellnhuber says, we are making a big mistake when we think we can ‘park’ the Earth System at any given temperature rise – say 2°C – and expect it to stay there”.

“Even at the current level of warming of about 1°C above pre-industrial, we may have already crossed a tipping point for one of the feedback processes (Arctic summer sea ice), and we see instabilities in others – permafrost melting, Amazon forest dieback, boreal forest dieback and weakening of land and ocean physiological carbon sinks. And we emphasise that these processes are not linear and often have built-in feedback processes that generate tipping point behaviour. For example, for melting permafrost, the chemical process that decomposes the peat generates heat itself, which leads to further melting and so on.”

This is important because so much policymaking has been based on a goal of climate getting towards 2°C and then assuming that could become stable, when in fact the paleoclimate history suggest that 2°C is not a point of system stability, but a signpost on the road to a much hotter 3–4°C outcome.

And with William Knorr in The Conversation, Steffen warned that due to model limitations, we will not know exactly how the climate crisis will unfold until it’s too late.

Finally, Steffen’s capacity to communicate clearly and succinctly is well encapsulated in an interview with The Intercept when he said getting greenhouse gas emissions down fast has to be “the primary target of policy and economics” with something “like wartime footing”.

That sounded to me like a very short, effective description of the climate emergency.