Runaway Global Warming

It’s already happening so it is time that we start talking about it. It’s estimated that there is twice as much carbon in the permafrost as there is currently in the atmosphere and reports of high methane concentrations in parts of the Arctic go back to the mid-2000s. The first known Siberian permafrost methane crater formed in late 2013. The permafrost today is undergoing dramatic changes. Recent expeditions have confirmed that the seabed is destabilizing across the Laptev and East Siberian Seas. Massive sinkholes have been discovered on the floor of the Beaufort Sea.

Do I need to go on? There are other positive feedback loops too. Wildfires, for example, have been happening with increasing frequency and severity. The Arctic is also home to a bunch more methane in the form of hydrates (also called clathrates) that is being released as temperatures rise. There is also the potentially even more alarming ice loss feedback loop. Not only does the loss of albedo mean more warming, but the ice loss itself is troubling as it represents the accumulation of a significant amount of energy on this planet: if the amount of energy necessary to induce the phase change from 0C ice to 0C water were applied a second time, the resulting water would be raised to nearly 80C (water has a latent heat of fusion of 334 J/g and a specific heat capacity of 4.182 J/gC so 334/4.182 = 79.9).

Just type “ice melting faster than expected” in your favourite search engine and take a look at the results because it’s everywhere: the Arctic, the Antarctic, Greenland, the Himalayas, the Alps, etc. You can’t fool physics and we are already at the major glacier-fed rivers drying up stage. It takes 334 joules to melt every gram of ice and if it is happening so much Faster Than Expected, then the so-called experts are greatly underestimating the amount of energy accumulating in our planetary system.

I do not agree that climate modellers are experts because there are no experts at predicting the future. Not me. Certainly not the people who have been systematically downplaying both the severity and imminence of the present-day full-blown climate crisis. That’s because, despite the desire being present throughout human history, it is impossible to reliably predict the future and today’s pseudoscientific computer models are no better than yesteryear’s oracles.

Due to the cognitive biases in the field, had there been a model that accurately predicted the present conditions a decade ago, it would have been dismissed as too alarmist. Regardless, a perfect model provides exactly zero ability to prevent any of the “thousand-year” storms that are happening with much greater frequency than the stupid naming convention implies. Or heatwaves. Or droughts. Or permafrost thaw. Or crop failures. Or sea level rise. Or…

It is also worth noting here that the emissions that come from running complex climate models have the same impact as the emissions that come from mining bitcoin. One would hope that that impact is orders of magnitude smaller but the field seems to lack the capacity for that sort of introspection, or else they would not be planning on holding another pointless COPout session, and if such a study exists I don’t know how to find it. I imagine it would be met with significant pushback and criticism and the author would likely be accused of being a fossil fuel shill and in league with “the deniers” because those accusations are hurled at anyone critical of them.

As an outsider it’s difficult to even gauge how wretched the field truly is because of the high degree censorship. It’s not just the IPCC censoring all of the alarming parts from their reports but, as revealed by Kevin Anderson, it is present throughout the field. They self-censor because straying outside the acceptable bounds of the groupthink is career suicide and the senior researchers censor their junior colleagues. Always away from alarmism. Unfortunately, reality can be pretty alarming at times and ignoring the scary things doesn’t make them go away. I’d been hearing about this “private view” thing for years before Anderson gave that interview, and the silence on the matter from those cowards remains deafening.

To demonstrate that I am not simply biased against climatologists (just the modellers guessing at the future and declaring it science and the cowards who go along to get along) I will point to this study from earlier this year by Song et al. which I believe is the best piece of climate science we have seen in decades. The authors examined the trends in surface equivalent potential temperature which is a more comprehensive metric than surface air temperature because it also incorporates humidity. Not all of the energy that is accumulating goes into raising the temperature. Where possible, some will go into increasing the humidity because higher temperatures means more evaporation and warmer air is more capable of holding moisture.

The authors found that the tropical amplification in surface equivalent potential temperature was about equal to the arctic amplification in surface air temperature. In other words, contrary to the much repeated line about the arctic warming faster than the rest of the planet, when a full accounting of the energy is done the warming is found to be much more uniform. They also found that by this metric the warming from 1980 to 2019 alone was 1.48C.

My only real question about the study is why did it take so long for anyone to look into this? As the authors correctly point out, increased humidity is a long predicted consequence of global warming and we here in Southern Ontario, Canada, believed by many outsiders to be a future climate refuge, have been experiencing brutal humidity and nights that don’t really cool down anymore since at least the summer of 2016. It’s also, as they point out, a far more useful metric for predicting severe weather. Indeed, I remember hearing twenty years ago that we should expect more severe weather in the future because of the increasing humidity. That’s why I thought Hurricane Katrina was a good time to transition the conversation away from global warming = sea level rise! I believe my question may be answered by how quickly the paper was forgotten because despite being reported on widely when it was released, we are right back to hearing The Arctic Is Warming Four Times Faster Than the Rest of the Planet. No mention at all of Song et al.’s findings, but indicates that the rate of warming is accelerating and another example of the models being wrong.

I had no expectations when they gathered in Paris and still came away disappointed because bad as that Agreement is, and it is a death sentence for humanity and many other species, there was no schism in the field. Aside from Kevin Anderson they all just went along with it and began repeating the most harmful misinformation we have heard on the climate:

1. That 1.5C “future warming” (a metric that cannot be determined to any degree of accuracy) is “safe” (objectively not safe).

2. That there was a “carbon budget” remaining in 2015 (the original “safe” level of atmospheric CO2, 350 ppm, was passed in the late 1980s and we have since doubled that increase over the pre-industrial concentration of 280 ppm).

3. That “net carbon zero” is possible (requires a re-writing of the first and probably the second Law of Thermodynamics).

4. That “green” energy is a “solution” to climate change (green is a meaningless word when used in the context of emission intensive and environmentally destructive industrial goods like greyish-white wind turbines and bluish-black solar photovoltaics and there are no solutions, just stopping the damage and trying to mitigate and adapt).

Runaway global warming doesn’t mean that Earth is necessarily destined to resemble Venus, but that today’s already catastrophic level of climate change is merely a preview of what is to come and there is nothing humanity can do to change that. There is no going back. There isn’t even any stopping at our present level of yearly “thousand-year” storms because even if we do the best thing available to us and leave the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, the warming will continue. That doesn’t mean we should just keep burning through them as quickly as we possibly can, by the way. Instead it makes it even more imperative that we stop making things worse today, not thirty years from now.

I doubt we will ever see an admission from the official channels. They exist to misinform and keep the conversations about the future rooted firmly in fantasy so as to not “spook the markets”. The topic of Arctic methane is actively suppressed, as revealed by former IPCC expert reviewer Peter Carter in a recent interview:

I’ve had a leading climate expert who’s a very good climate expert, and in a public conference tell me that I couldn’t mention methane in the Arctic. That’s what he told me. I’m sitting on the panel, and I have to argue with this man.

I’ve heard for over two decades now that we need to downplay the severity of the climate crisis in order to “get anything done” because people will be “paralyzed by fear” if told the truth. Yet after all those years of systematic downplaying nothing has been accomplished. All it did was breed the complacency that let us sleepwalk into the worst case scenario and allowed the monstrous sentiment “Why should I care? It won’t get bad until after I am dead.” to proliferate. Not only have greenhouse gas emissions only ever grown, but our so-called leaders are still desperately trying to continue that trend. We aren’t even yet at the stage where we are able to discuss banning frivolities like cruise ships let alone anything “important” like air travel. A true discussion of what a fossil fuel-free future looks like is nowhere in the mainstream which is still solely concerned with sustaining an unsustainable way of living rather than our planet’s capacity to sustain life.

For fuck’s sake the venue chosen for their last COPout session was so unsuitable that they had to bring in two cruise ships to house the approximately 40,000 people that flew in over the course of it. They also had to ship in generators to power the fleet of luxury electric vehicles used to shuttle the “V”“I”Ps around because the local grid was insufficient. The fact checkers were all over that one so I will be quite clear so that I cannot be accused of spreading misinformation: this was a “climate” conference so everything they did was coated in a thick layer of greenwash and those generators burned used cooking oil rather than diesel, so they basically saved the world. Just ignore the fact that cooking oils are fossil fuel products themselves and using a lesser fuel means you have to burn more of it to generate the same amount of electricity. Oh, and, while diesel has a wide distribution network, this specialty fuel almost certainly had to be shipped in as well. Too bad the fact checkers don’t bother looking into the claims about the event being carbon neutral (yeah they bought their Carbon Indulgences and said the appropriate number of “Hail Al Gore”s, but that shit has always been a scam).

We really needed all that pollution generated so that we could get another reaffirmation of the commitment to continue paying lip service to the Paris Agreement. Just imagine how much worse off we would be without it! Unfortunately, I feel you can apply that sentiment to the vast majority of climate science for the last twenty years. I don’t think we would be any worse off had it not existed at all. All the so-called experts have done is mislead on the timeline and severity of the crisis while pushing known scams and betting our future on magical technology being invented at some point. We could even be in a better position had a different, more comprehensive, understanding of the predicament that humanity faces, overshoot, become mainstream instead.

Because the overshoot framework explains all of the crises humanity is confronted with today. Overshoot occurs when a species exceeds its available carrying capacity. This happens when there is abundant available energy (in most cases food) and insufficient predation. Overshoot inevitably ends in a population crash. A famous example was when reindeer were introduced to St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. With no predators and abundant lichen, the reindeer’s favourite food, the population exploded from 29 in 1944 to 1,350 in 1957 (13 years) before peaking at approx. 6,000 in 1963 (6 years) and crashing to just 42 by 1966. Because there were no fertile males remaining, the reindeer had died off from the island by the 1980s.

What humans have done is even worse than an animal overconsuming it’s food supply. The fossil fuels were a one-time bounty of energy and we burned through them as quickly and recklessly as we possibly could. In the process we not only expanded our population well beyond anything sensible but we also unleashed countless pollutants, including enough greenhouse gases to push us past multiple climate tipping points. It was always foolish because industrialism, as the process of converting fossil fuels into pollution while also converting other non-renewable resources into pollution, is inherently self-terminating. As the Limits to Growth team found again and again across their scenarios: if the resource constraints don’t get you the pollution will. To this day we only plan to further industrialize.

The number one thing William R. Catton Jr. recommended we do in his 1980 book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change was leave the fossil fuels in the ground and find another way to live. After all, countless generations of our ancestors managed just fine without them. Instead, more than half of all the fossil fuels ever burned were burned since. It’s actually a stronger message than what we are hearing from the so-called experts today who routinely tout the physically impossible “net carbon zero” to rationalize why we don’t have to leave the fossil fuels in the ground and an energy transition that, despite being talked about extensively for decades, has yet to even start and, as recent research reveals, is also physically impossible.

Originally I hedged that last bit and said it was only likely impossible based on a conceptual argument: in humanity’s past energy transitions, the move from wood to coal to oil saw us going to a more energy dense, and in the case of oil more versatile and useful, energy source. The “green” “transition”, as espoused by some politician’s with their Green New Deals, will supposedly have us go backward in a fraction of the time and do so painlessly. Unsurprisingly, the paper by Mark Jacobson that that proposal was based on has been heavily discredited since. I disagree that a paper that got through peer review despite overstating the potentially available hydroelectric capacity by 100x is an example of peer review working. In the two years between its publishing and the rebuttal it was able to significantly poison the discourse.

But in the time it has taken me to complete writing this Simon Michaux has released some of his numbers. Michaux is a geologist with the Geological Survey of Finland who a few years ago set out to determine the kinds and quantities of minerals that Europe would need for its “green” “transition”. He found the literature lacking in this regard and had to basically start from scratch. He published his methodology last year in this enormous paper and his follow-up which has the actual calculations is currently undergoing peer review, but he has been sharing his results in interviews and recently gave a lecture:

It’s important to note that most of the deficiencies are caused by the mineral requirements of the grid-scale batteries deemed necessary due to the intermittency of the so-called renewables:

and removing them gives:

which is not quite as bad, but still shows potential issues with both lithium and nickel. Any storage scheme is liable to run into similar issues with scaling. The best option, pumped hydro, is geographically limited. Using excess electricity to electrolyze water into hydrogen and converting it back into electricity when needed with a fuel cell has a round trip efficiency of only 47% (which can be increased to 66% if the heat released by the fuel cell is utilized) while batteries are in the range of 70-95%.

It is also important to note that Michaux only looked at the mineral requirements for the EVs, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, etc. and did not assess what would be needed to upgrade grids to be able to handle the additional load since less than 20% of global energy consumption currently comes in the form of electricity. He also mentions that he did not consider what would be needed to replace the fossil fuels currently used in industrial processes which he estimates to be about half of them, so the full picture of our “decarbonize and electrify” schemes is much worse. I believe it is also important to keep in mind that mining is a destructive and polluting industry with a record of atrocious human rights violations and there are only two ways to get “affordable” minerals: cheap fossil fuels or slave labour.

Catton had this to say about how we ought to be approaching our situation (his emphasis):

Our Best Best: Expect the Worst

Mankind is condemned to bet on an uncertain future. The stakes have become phenomenally high: affluence, equity, democracy, humane tolerance, peaceful coexistence between nations, races, sects, sexes, parties, all are in jeopardy. Ironically, the less hopeful we assume human prospects to be, the more likely we are to act in ways that will minimize the hardships ahead for our species. Ecological understanding of the human predicament indicates that we live in times when the American habit of responding to a problem by asking “All right, now what do we do about it?” must be replaced by a different query that does not assume all problems are soluble: “What must we avoid doing to keep from making a bad situation unnecessarily worse?”

Again, a better message than anything we are seeing today.

I have always hated the “we have to downplay” line because not only is it dishonest, it’s disrespectful and if we can’t handle the truth, how will we ever react appropriately when reality hits us? Furthermore, why should we blindly trust the opinions and beliefs of such disrespectful liars?

Jem Bendell has written a fair amount on whether climate alarmism delays action because it is something he has been accused of since he published his paper, Deep Adaptation, in 2018 and he has found the exact opposite. Rather than being paralyzed by fear, many readers have gone on to become activists. This short documentary from Bendell, Oskar’s Quest: Children Discuss Collapse, features children discussing collapse (the horror). Titular Oskar’s parents came across Deep Adaptation at a time when he was visibly distressed about the future and decided to read it with him. Oskar, spurred to do something, convinced his school to let him do a “Quest Project” which is usually only for older students. Oskar’s parents, reasoning that he is probably not the only child feeling this way and seeing that there are no real venues to discuss this topic, decided to introduce the father’s class to Deep Adaptation. Jem sits down with the students after they have had time to really process it. They are all glad that they were given the opportunity to discuss it, one even saying that he wishes he could have learned about it at 8 rather than 18.

During his interview, Oskar says that rather than sadness, he mostly feels acceptance now. The rest of the children also seem to have reached the acceptance stage that us “doomists” (we prefer realist) wish everybody could experience because it is a much healthier way to approach our predicament. It isn’t easy to overcome the barriers of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, and Depression, especially since attempts at discussion are usually just ended without any real discussion occurring, but those who do find it quite liberating. Michael Dowd has extensively documented this viewpoint in his Post Doom conversation series. Common themes are the need to be caring and compassionate as we face an uncertain and unpleasant future; the need to mitigate the harm done to all life, both human and non-human; and the need to make the most of the time we have remaining.

Horrible things, I know. What we are trying isn’t working because it can’t possibly work. The “green” “transition” promises that not only can can we eat our cake and still have it in perpetuity, but that we also won’t get fat despite eating all that cake. We need to stop with the techno-fantasy and start recognizing that we share a finite planet with a diverse biosphere that, collectively, we are entirely dependent upon for our continued existence because it doesn’t need us. In fact, the rest of the biosphere tends to do better without us around.

The people who are wrong about everything else are right about one thing: if collapse acceptance is allowed to go mainstream it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why would anyone continue saving for a future that doesn’t exist? Or keep going to a job they hate rather than spending the limited time we have remaining with loved ones? But collapse is inevitable, it’s just a matter of if we can willingly end the industrial economy soon enough because humanity can survive an economic collapse. We will not survive the collapse of our biosphere.

The communities that survive the coming population bottleneck, if any, will do so through adaptation and mitigation strategies that are entirely local in nature which is why it is important that we start having the conversations about runaway global warming; about overshoot and population crash; and about peak oil and the ongoing collapse of the oil economy. Because we have no chance when faced with such challenges if we can’t even talk about them openly.