William Rees is an ultra-distinguished ecological scientist, and
an original researcher on human impacts on biosphere life. Eric Lee has
cleaned up, and
published a formatted transcript
with slides, taken from Prof. Rees recent webinar presentation titled -
"Will Modern
Civilization be the Death of Us? Have Humans Become Obsolete?". It is presented here, because of the disinterest of mainstream media and conventional political narrative.
The idea of a renewable-energy powered future that allows for economic growth is a ... delusion — a death sentence for Earth’s ecosystems and posterity’s well-being. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of reality. ...
The real problem lies in the way we think — that’s the true dark matter operating beneath the surface, shaping how we perceive and engage with the world.
Eric Lee works hard to understand, organize and quote from people who actually have a clue as to what is going on.
I present the text of the "Climate Emergency Forum" this week, the video is published on YouTube, State of the Climate 2024 - Earth in Crisis. Discussion centered around the publication in the BioScience journal, available online - "The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth". This was published on 08th October 2024, by an author list of Climate Scientists in prestigious institutional paid positions, who are not known to be given to alarmist predictions without strong evidence. A number of factors suggest the earth's climate system warming resistance is collapsing. Terrestrial carbon sinks are not working as well as before. Well known climate tipping point processes are getting bigger. And of course human civilization continues to pump out more greenhouse gases every year.
.. to pageUgo Bardi offers a flash of insight into reasons for differences in strategy of Nation-State majorities, versus the ideology of elites in charge of Empires.
... Nation-States persecute minorities, while Empires try to protect the rights of its minority groups, something that an independent power can often do. A nation-state, instead, is a natural born killer of minorities. Simply, it has no mechanisms to protect them from the whims of the majority.
... In Western democracies, you can vote for any candidate as long as he/she obeys the orders of the US elites. Once people lose their trust in democracy, the American Empire cannot last for long.
The Climate Analytics (CA) report published this week confirms that Australia has one of the world’s highest total per capita emissions for all greenhouse gases, double that of China and nine times bigger than India. . . .
According to the CA report, Close to 80% of Australia’s total fossil fuel CO2 footprint in 2022 was due to exported carbon. Australia is the third largest fossil fuel exporter in the world, after Russia and the US. In terms of total greenhouse gas footprint, Australia ranks second, however, due to our love of emission-intensive coal.
Since coming to power, the Albanese Labor government has been working hard not to talk about climate warming impacts, not to lead the nation in a public conversation about how to face the greatest threat to our future, and it shows in recent public opinion research.
...The government does not want to talk about future climate risks because it is conspiring with the fossil fuel industry to make the problem worse.
This is no longer the same planet Earth we once knew, that loved us.
It doesn’t matter if climate scientists cannot accurately say if this is code red, or code purple. They should be labeling it as code “extinction” or “collapse”, and communicating it accordingly.
According to conventional econometrics, GDP per capita has never been better.
The global middle class are living in Maximum Human Supremacy.
Meanwhile, our biosphere has never been more at risk.
Our denial is in the comforting lies of statistics - The Unbearable Anthropocentrism of Our World in Data
...While Australia debates the merits of going nuclear and frustration grows over the slower-than-needed rollout of solar and wind power, China is going all in on renewables.
New figures show the pace of its clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week.
The China Energy Council estimated renewables generation would overtake coal by the end of this year.
Who set up these ISDS tribunals?
Another way that a wealthy few maintain a fossil fueled stranglehold over this planet.
….[modern] humanity is a cancer, and that’s neither hyperbole, metaphor nor analogy…
Eric Lee published in Medium.com this review of the book "Homo Ecophagus" authored by doctor Warren M. Hern
Unfortunately there still remains a lot of fossil fuels, especially oil, to feed this global civilization cancer until it kills its host.
For this global cancer to die it needs to be starved, or selectively poisoned.
For those who care to know officially,
average global warming of below 1.5 °C
looks to be a thing of the past.
Our ecosphere system responds to human escalation.
The race to biosphere extinction continues.
In his You-tube explanatory series "How to enjoy the end of the world" ( HTETEOTW ) Dr. Sidney Smith continues to describe the bare-bones of what he thinks everyone ought to know, in order to understand, accept, and maybe start preparing for some of the big changes that are happening now.
"... Nothing lives that doesn't also die, an outcome guaranteed by the fundamental laws of nature that govern both energy and complexity. Civilizations, including our own, are no exception. ... " - B. Sidney Smith
His Ph.D is in Mathematics, and a summary of his outlook includes this essay in 2012, entitled "All the bunnies in the meadow die". Some of this essay material is re-used in this latest video on Ecological Overshoot. The basic definitions are very clear.
.. to pageThe International Energy Agency forcefully states that the pathway to net zero by 2050 is a very narrow one and requires that no new oil and gas fields get approved.
And yet, despite the Australian public voting for Labor’s pledge to aggressively reduce emissions, on the day after he was sworn in as Australia’s 31st Prime Minister, Albanese was at Kantei in Tokyo making a contrary pledge of “better energy security” for Japan.
Recent Freedom of Information (FOI) releases, and close examination of a mosaic of evidence, have shed new light on who’s been convincing the Government to back away from turning off the gas tap.
The Barossa project is key to the future profits of Santos. The project involves piping gas from the Barossa field north of Darwin for onshore processing. Its output is intended for export to Asia.
In terms of carbon emissions, Barossa is the dirtiest of projects. Some experts have described it as a carbon emission project with LNG as a by-product. To deal with this, the company intends to bury the unwanted CO2 output in the now commercially depleted Bayu-Udan gas field in Timor-Leste waters.
Energy cannibalism, or energy self-use, is the necessity to spend energy in order to extract additional energy from the environment. This publication estimates that by 2020 the production of oil liquids, including Diesel fuel, costs 15.5% of the energy from this high energy quality resource. This fraction is growing at an exponential rate. By 2050, the net-energy fraction will be around half. Unconventional oil liquids are reported as continuously replacing higher quality conventional ones. A review of energy analysis literature and history highlights industry predictions about future supply, and evaluates several models to conservatively predict long term decline of net energy. Global heating by emissions is accelerated by the rise in gross production of oil liquids, peaking maybe in 2035, if no other dynamic factors intervene. There are a lot of caveats and assumptions listed.
For biosphere and climate integrity, and survival of other species, we cannot run out of low cost, net energy fast enough. For economies, declining net energy is the fast disappearance of the temporary carrying capacity of fossil fuels to power all the requirements of sustaining our industrial civilization, and must end our enormous population overshoot of over-consuming humans.
The "Honest Sorcerer", B on substack, presents irrefutable logic that this age of mining must reach an end, as mining ability requires energy and mineral supply, and this declines with depletion. The fully dependent renewable energy transition cannot prevent a global energy and minerals supply crunch. The end of mining brings our all-consuming, destructive industrial civilization, to its natural biosphere-breaking end.
Big overshoot of our extinction cliff edge. Our planet's cooling system has broken. . . . Lest we forget, humanity’s conundrum is an overshoot of nearly every safe environmental boundary that allowed humans to survive and thrive in the last 10,000 years. . . . The absurdity of our response, or lack thereof, is becoming ever more apparent as conditions continue to deteriorate around us. . . . We have already lost more than half, two thirds even, of all life on the planet.
.. to pageNow calibrated with current datasets, an updated Limits to Growth model shows collapse in global industrial output is already happening just about now. Collapse is from resources depletion, particularly oil. Human population reduction will follow later. Persistent pollution is indexed to accumulated industrial CO2 emissions, which will continue grow to badly plague us later.
Film showings of this epic coal port blockade have started, around Australia. Find one or arrange one for your community.
Rupert Read, Ecological Philosopher, projects courage from his strong convictions in a short graphic film below.
A longer presentation on why - this you-tube link. Salter Lecture 2023 -
"The horrible wonderful truth about Climate. Why facing that truth changes everything".
Gas Emissions Craters (GEC) are exploding in Siberia as the permafrost melts - like a teenager coming down with Acne. Major carbon sinks move towards failure around our planet. The Amazon Rainforests is now considered a carbon source. Our overheated oceans may become so choked with heat and carbon dioxide they stop obliging to absorb more of our insults. Such are dangers being faced by all life on this planet, as human industrial civilisation has refused to stop growing. It is all becoming the stuff of biblical "Revelations". One would think our pentacostal prime minister should to Glasgow to lap it up, but no, Australia and the fossil fuel world isn't ready for this.
. . . unless there are immediate rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that limit warming to close to 1.5° C or even 2° C, the problem will extend “beyond reach” and beyond any chance for some level of control.
NSW nature conservation council needs your support to continue to pressure the NSW government to finally stop the logging destruction of our remaining native forest areas. It can be done. The industry is uneconomic. 91% of timber is from plantations, and it needs to be 100%. We need native forest ecosystems to stop declining and grow in size and health, to enable the survival of the creatures that live in them, including koalas.
I know it is a bitter pill to swallow, but the only real way to slow global warming in any noticeable way is to stop anthropogenic CO2 emissions FOREVER. There are no post-facto technological ‘capture’ or ‘remediation’ techniques that exist now or “could be developed” that would actually work as “silver bullets” of salvation; they would only ‘work’ as money making scams with which to gull those despairing of the ‘loss of easy living.’
- "Notes on Carbon Dioxide in Global Warming, Acidified Oceans, and Weathered Rocks" - Manuel Garcie Jr.
Climate Council Public Petition to sign: To play its fair part in the rapid, sustained reductions required globally, Australia should aim to reduce its emissions by 75% below 2005 levels by 2030, and to net zero by 2035.
Nafeez Ahmed publishes "How to Save the World in 15 Years. PART TWO." The IPCC is politically climate conservative. Climate tipping points are irreversible and evidencing now. Not just the climate. The latest data also suggests that more than half – six out of nine – planetary boundaries appear to have now been crossed by human civilisation.
New is latest IPCC report "Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis" The hard work of many, it has fully documented and projected climate past and potential futures, with lots of corroborating detail, numbers and graphs, and improved datasets. Climate science is more certain, errorbars a little smaller. The website "Real Climate" scored a flurry of new posts from notable climate scientists. Future scenario pathways, our warming future, will depend on choices of today's governments and their money and power brokers. Just how much denial will they be allowed to get away with? Chances of scraping under 1.5 C° of warming in the next thirty years depends on keeping with the best "low-emissions scenarios". Nations need to work more on their NDC's, the "Nationally Determined Contributions". Global cooperation needs to come from a willing positive force from home, not a negative arm-twisted condescension imposed externally.
Analysis reveals that “Net Zero 2050” strategies will lock in many decades of unnecessary fossil fuels use well past 2050, with an unsustainable, business-as-usual economic pathway, dangerous “offset” trade-offs, and unacceptable risks of unstoppable climate warming. - Breakthrough - National Centre for Climate Restoration
Simon Michaux, expert on minerals processing, reports on our real system limits for mining of minerals, particularly those required for IT and green technologies. A detailed PDF of same report is available from here.
Robert Hunziker declares we have started the rolling climate apocalypse. Cities, infrastructure and people of fossil fuel civilization are not designed to withstand extreme heat and rapid flooding events. Evolved ecosystems are dying from the advanced human onslaught.
ParraCAN has its first online survey here.
The Coal Industry has Manipulated and Controlled Australia through the Liberal National Party and Murdoch NewsFork for decades, and looks forwards to ruining it while it profits.
Even aiming to stay within the global warming range of 1.5 to 2 degrees C, the earth systems are pushed on a path that takes us to the kind of climate of 3 million years ago, Pliocene or even 50 million years ago, the Miocene. The Holocene, which nutured our civilizations, is over forever.
Right now, to avoid the extreme, conditions of the Miocene, not compatible with human civilization at all, and insure that only Pliocene conditions are reached, a rapid, global exponential decarbonization is required
David Suzuki points out, that a recent climate science paper says there remains only a 5 percent chance of staying below 2 degrees this Century, and we have actually more chance of reaching 6 degrees of warming (10%), than staying below 2 C. So we'ed better get on with it, as a global apex species, because even 2 degrees is not favourable to the long term survival biosphere apex species such as ourselves. Australia is especially singled out for its rigged corporate games in government..
Everything politicians think they know is most certainly wrong for the real world. Global governments fixation on mutual traded, competitive, exponential, fossil fueled growth. This is the worst possible, long term option ever. There is no wriggle out of contract consequences - Making a Hell of Earth. So what is the cause of this collective insanity? Rapid extinction is nature's unthinking plan for a species that collectively destroys its foundational environment.
The Global Carbon Project, which collects and analyses our global carbon behaviour, shows that nearly everybody is misbehaving.
Growth in global carbon emissions in 2018 looks to be around 2%, which is exactly tied to the rate of economic growth (by GDP)
Growth in Gas was the worst at 3.0%, and almost certainly involves a growth in total methane leakage. It is not provable that the rise in global carbon emissions with GDP has produced a similar rise in global well-being.
New record high of carbon dioxide emissions of 37 billion tonnes for 2018, says we are going to fail very badly.
Humanity are still trying to collectively have infinite growth on this finite planet. Here in Australia, our Prime Madman Scott Morrison, keeps defiantly shouting his "Strong Economy" slogan, in the tones of "Resistance is useless", while Australia burns hotter. After Albert Einstein, we could say that only one thing is infinite, and that is human collective stupidity.
Absent any serious form of global self-control, human global demolition will be future choked by several possible natural "Limits to Growth". Given our massed social and technical ingenuity, we might even manage to have several at once. We might escape the global decline in essential heavy fuel oil supply to power our global big machines, or spend all our energies against the inexorable rise in new climate disasters. This is probably already out of our control, as we struggle to keep creating new limits by growing our ongoing demolition of biodiversity and natural sustainability.
If enough people demand it, governments could declare a climate emergency tomorrow, and we could all get on with the job of fixing it.