The Long Emergency

Dystopia or Utopia, take your pick. In The Long Emergency, James Kunstler discusses the impact the lack of oil will have on civilization. In The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil points out the fact we are fast approaching a time where tech will accelerate so fast that predicting the future becomes a futile task and OBTW, we will live forever.

So which is is it, will tomorrow be terrific or will it be a disaster? Only time will tell but let's talk a little about this.

The one big thing learned from Emergency is Kunstler's adroit coupling of energy to tech, something rarely discussed when talking about the wonders of technology.

Question: How much energy is required to build an iPhone?
Question 2: How much energy is required to ship the iPhone to customers?
Question 3: Could that device be built or shipped after we run out of oil?
Answer to No. 3: No way based on the current situation regarding renewables.

Why? Because not only is energy required to build the item in question but also oil-derived material makes up a large part of the device itself. (Plastics etc., etc.) Now extend this notion of building nearly everything in the world based on fossil fuel use and add it to the energy needed to maintain other aspects of society (i.e. transportation, food, heat, shelter etc., etc.) and one sees that Kunstler has extremely valid reasons to worry about the negative impact the end of oil will have on society.

According to Ray Kurzweil, the future's bright with tech expanding at double exponential rates and all will be right with the world if we can get through this "rough" spot of the 'aughts as we approach the singularity of the 2030s. While I agree with the double exponential bit in terms of research, the jury is out when it comes to bringing R&D work into the real world of politics, financial constraints and climate change as we move toward peak oil and the disruptions it will bring to the world.

Taken from this perspective, it looks like we are in a race to see if we can transition from non-renewables to renewables in a way that won't disrupt civilization, something devoutly to be wished but, in my opinion, will not for the following reasons:

1. Global Warming: GW is real and is accelerating at a rate not thought possible. The most recent projections state that by 2100, sea levels could rise by as much as 18-20 feet. With that in mind, NYC, Florida and London will be history not to mention 70% of the world's population live within six miles of the ocean. When this is factored in with the Tipping Point on GW, there is no question we are in trouble. In Nova, a terrific update on GW titled Dimming the Sun shows how pollution might be masking the true impact of GW. It's a must see and the findings, if true, are truly frightening.

2. US Debt: This is an ongoing disaster, particularly in terms of the sub-prime meltdown, trade inbalances, tax cuts and the never ending Iraq war not to mention the explosive growth of the defense budget. A perfect storm is brewing regarding US debt. For additional information, check out Time Bomb for another view on the debt equation and last but not least, read David Walker's (Comptroller General of the United States, head of the Government Accountability Office or GAO.) interview at the Financial Times regarding the financial health of the US.

3. Euros for Oil: If countries move toward euros to pay for oil, the US dollar, backed by the largest debtor nation in the world, will go belly up. (Some people disagree but they are in the minority.) Addentum - Click here for a recent update regarding oil, the dollar and the Saudis. Most interesting indeed.

4. Lack of Existing Infrastructure: Transforming R&D prototypes into real world products is a very involved process. There is no question solutions are in the lab able to solve ongoing energy problems and reduce, in part, the effects of climate change but the problem remains that establishing an infrastructure to support and enable these emerging technologies to work in reliable fashion at scales that can change the current situation is a very daunting task. Note: Oftentimes, the best solutions (Unix,/Sony Betamax vs. Microsoft /JVC VHS) do not prevail and the world suffers from making the wrong decision on any given tech.

5. Lack of Vision: From politics to big business, the lack of vision dealing with energy and GW has been astonishing considering just how serious these problems are. A Marshall Plan to deal with these issues at global level is desperately needed if we are to avoid Kunstler's dark vision of the end of oil or the catastrophic effects of run-away GW. Change is needed now but the question still stands: Do we have the courage to face these issues head on or will it continue to be ostrich time again with our heads buried in the sand hoping that these problems will go away on their own. At this point in time, our leaders have let us down, something that cannot go on if we are to take control of our destiny and change the world for the better.

End Game: Both books are awesome and well worth reading.
Summing it up: "One never knows, do one." Fats Waller

Crossing the Rubicon ...

Twilight

This pix, taken a few years ago, sums up a possible future for man as civilization moves further into the Anthropocene and it's tangental relationship to all things related to tech, the environment and to earth as everything's connected and ... everything's quantum where certitude is but an illusion,

3500 articles, musings on thousands of postings and guesstimates, both accurate and inaccurate, populate this blog to the nth degree but you, my loyal readers, already know that so here's to crossing the Rubicon, a most perilous journey we will all be taking whether we like it or not.

No connects or numbering schemes but rather a random walk through a partial list of issues most dire with climate change being No. 1.

Covid-19 is but a weak introduction to what's coming, a pandemic to be sure, but nothing compared to GW and the impact it will have on the world.

For starters, the equator will soon become uninhabitable. Animals and plants are migrating away as we speak but little is said as to what species will survive as they make their desperate move. This also involves us and the impact on the food supply as growing food will move north and south with large swaths of land unable to sustain civilization due to not only excess heat but also loss of water as seen by the move on Lake Mead to restrict waster supply when the water level goes below 1047'.

2020-30 will be remembrance of species lost. Researchers discovered ocean life died much quicker than land in the Great Dying of 250 million years ago. Does this mean the same for us as the acceleration of GW is happening thousands of times faster than the 30,000 year timeframe of the Permian eruption of the Siberian Traps in northern Russia.

2040-50, the real bite of GW begins, where temps of 3+ take hold and Russia and Canada become the bread baskets of the world while Cat 6 hurricanes ply the Atlantic with devastating power. This scenario is already baked including the melting of the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland as the loss of albedo is a prime GW accelerant and we haven't even discussed the release of ever more methane from the rapidly melting permafrost and ocean located in and around the arctic. Water rise - 2-3 meters?

Forget Florida and cities on the coast, right?

Too many people add to the mix. 8 billion and counting. Not good, not sustainable but Gaia's thinking about a drastic solution to this issue, something Lovelock talked about over 15 years ago.

Mass migrations loom.

AI - the open ended tech where we have lost contro but don't know it yet but we will, soon.

Question: When does AI become sentient? 5 years, next year, 10? One never knows but whenever anyone says AI cannot be this or that, remember the Rand Corporation's take on the net and the fact only 20 systems will be ever be needed to run civilization. 

The military goes full tilt into autonomous bots armed to the teeth. Who's the enemy? How can they be identified? Is man the enemy? Skynet's happening as digital swarms are already being ramped up, connected as one entity driven by, you guessed it, AI. 

The needs of AI differ from us. What does that mean?

Cybersecurity - no system is invulnerable. Everything can be hacked. The biggie is shutting down infrastructure, you know, access to electricity, heat, medical and water supply among significant others. Countries all over the world are capping on this as tech is cheap. All it takes is brainpower, desire to hack and access to the web to make it happen. Is this the end of the world?

Biotech - CRISPR and manipulation of DNA, combined with AI as enhancer, what could possibly go wrong? Pandemics are us, not only with upcoming labs on a chip used by twisted individuals to create bugs but also of the natural kind as GW disrupts all things related to life. Think mosquitoes ...

Continued abuses ...

30% of all arable land is used to feed Bessie, Loghorn T. Fog Horn and Porky, an unsustainable way to feed man, not to mention the accompanying manure, urine and fertilizers used to leverage the land in addition to rampant injections of steroids and antibiotics, along with genetic engineering, to said fauna, to create fast growing franken foods, packaged for us rubes in all shapes and sizes, to consume to our heart's content.

Plastics and chemicals of all kinds, including micro plastics in our air, soil and of course, food, invade everything, something most disturbing as researchers are now finding out this deadly combination adversely impacts fertility. Children of Men anyone? ... by possibly 2045.

The car, ubiquitous in the US because there is no high speed or medium speed rail of any consequence in the US, pollutes the planet to no end as most are gas powered. Maybe we should ask China how they build high speed rail as they are really good at it while the US does nothing. Going electric is not all that great either as the grid, powered by natural gas and oil, power these things. Question, where will the batteries go? Can they be recycled? Good question to ask is it not?

Suburbs ... journey to nowhere, ditto strip malls. Both ecologically disastrous. 

Planes, another prime driver of fossil fuels continues unabated. The production and distribution of ever more stuff never ceases to amaze, particularly in terms of landfill when said stuff become a throwaway for the ages. Think China on this one. 

Subsidies to fossil fuel polluters instead of developing sustainables has been the US mantra for years. It looks like this is slowly changing but it will take time, something we no longer have.

Nuclear war becomes a possible given just how many countries hate each other.

Resource depreciation, environmental degradation and poverty, combined with starvation and over population, become prime drivers for revolution and violence all over the world.

Right now, it's lip service. Nothing of real consequence is being done because that means enormous change for all of us, an issue not be be addressed until the real shit hits the fan. Time frame - 2050.

One point perspective

Guesstimates

Funhouse

Guesstimates, you know, predictions about the future or even the present is chancy at best as change is the only constant and because of that, one can only throw darts and hope one doesn't miss. In Crossing the Rubicon ..., BRT talked about a perilous future, here, within that time frame, will be a tiny partial guess as to how science and tech will hold on as best as it can as in the face of a most pernicious storm of our own making.

For starters, SI FI in books and film is at it's acme with China going full tilt in examining it's relationship to same as it becomes the other super power on planet earth.

Cancer becomes solvable due to AI and intense compute power able to discern how proteins fold and how that impacts the communicative problem of cancer cells as to why they go rogue.

Fusion will happen as there is simply too much money and need for it to not happen. Think MIT and private enterprise on this front as research is beginning to bear real fruit. Timeframe - 20 years. This will be the true start point to hopefully ameliorating GW as solar, wind and wave lack the energy density to transition energy grids from coal, oil and gas with any degree of success.This is key if civilization is to survive as nature does reset if given a chance as carbon and methane injection into the atmosphere will begin to fall if fossil fuels are finally done away in their entirety. If this doesn't happen, we're toast.

Happy motoring begins to collapse as there is no more cheap energy to be found. Shale and natural gas have had their day in the sun. Scarcity becomes the new watchword for now though cheap and powerful batteries to power the inevitable changeover to electric goes prime time. 

Graphene becomes real in more ways than one can imagine. Ditto quantum computing.

Really big telescopes get built and discoveries of all kinds take off.

Space travel ...

As obnoxious as Elon Musk is, the man knows rockets and how to build them to be useful and practical at the same time. This reusability factor will expand to other vendors, as it always does, as the resources in space are too valuable to ignore. Starting with good enough and improving upon same to make the space tech reliable and relatively cheap will make space travel viable but Mars "ain't" the answer to how man will survive the coming storm of GW.

Astronomy goes lunar with radio and optical scopes being built on the far side of the moon.

Moon and Mars get bases, 10-20 years out.

The James Webb telescope becomes operational, finally.

Extraterrestrial life is discovered. Mars, Europa, Enceladus or Titan look to be the best candidates or perhaps aliens make the scene. It's about time don't you think? 

Quantum Mechanics and Relativity finally gets unified under a new theory.

Quantum chemistry goes primetime

Gravitons indirectly become recognized as the carrier force for gravity.

Medical

In situ stem cell treatment of maladies like cancer, diabetes and hear problems gain traction due to the aforementioned computational and AI prowess of systems coming online as we speak. This also applies to increasing the lifespan of man though, in light of what's coming, one has to ask the existential question, Is it a good idea?

AI becomes sentient. Question, What's next?  

Guaranteed income is coming as bots are going to take over most jobs because it's cheaper and more efficient. Sustainability will become the mantra as conditions on planet earth get worse. 

Smart weapons, autonomous bots and digital swarms of cheap but deadly drones, controlled by AI, replace the large and overly complex systems of today. Think Avatar.

Lab on a chip gets real. 

Nanotech gets real, finally.

Local farming gets real.

Geoengineering, a tech most disquieting, gets all too real. 

Media, untrusted to the max, becomes immersive. Think Blade Runner 2049.

Video goes virtual but we already know that. Think The Mandelorian.

Hardware craps out. Solar, 20 years, ditto wind. Will we have the resources to replace said tech? 

Bots as sexual companions go prime time.

Deep Fakes reside everywhere, not only in images and video but also in audio and writing.

Guns become more cherished than ever in the home of the brave & land of the free.

China and the US avoid a hot war.

Rewild the world - David Atenborough

We totally depend on tech, a most fragile entity without question.

All of this can happen if we have enough time ...

Resource depletion et al ... 

Earth Overshoot Day (EOD) is the calculated illustrative calendar date on which humanity's resource consumption for the year exceeds Earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources that year. 

30 years from now, it's June 30 therabouts. Think 2050.

The descent.

Countries splinter in the face of GW, resource depletion and environmental degradation. 

Hundreds of millions die as forced migration is hazardous to one's health. India's problem with Covid is just a taste of what's coming as glaciers dry up and variable land disappears under the onslaught of GW.

India, without the monsoon, is terrifying to the max.

Science get attacked by the ignorant. Politics becomes ever more fractious. The US anyone?

Man goes tribal.

Enclaves of modernity will spring up to hold off the hordes of impoverished millions along with bands of foraging bandits, bringing forth a new dark age with islands of civilization residing, either behind fortified walls or hidden away to avoid detection. Dangerville awaits.

VR will be big as travel becomes too perilous. Cybersecurity will be job one to keep intruders digitally away.

2050 looms.

         There's A Pony In Here...Somewhere.

Roadway 101

 

Water, Water...

Though somewhat tongue in cheek, the excellent Salon article titled How to Solve America's Water Problems pulls no punches in stating we are in big trouble in the H20 scheme of things. "In San Diego, which just experienced its driest summer in recorded history, the hills are charred from October's wildfires. The state of California is so tapped out that the pumps that carry water from the Sacramento River to San Diego were tightened in December. Water authorities are urging San Diegans to tear up their grass and replace it with cactus and succulent."

and..."Metro Atlanta draws its water from Lake Lanier, a dammed-up stretch of the Chattahoochee River. The Chattahoochee forms part of Georgia's boundary with Alabama, then joins the Flint River to become the Apalachicola, which flows through the Florida Panhandle. The more Atlanta drinks, the less flows downstream. Since this year's drought began, Lake Lanier has shrunk to 15 feet below its normal level, its all-time low. As it withers, Georgia, Florida and Alabama have been bickering over the remaining supply."

And we haven't even talked about the problems in the west/southwest or the near death state of the Florida acquifer (pollution, pesticides & fertilizers) as the US continues to dry up under the impact of GW.

To get a better idea of the current situation in the US, click on the image above to get the NDIS (National Integrated Drought Information System) take on this grave problem.

When combined with the impact GW is having on the sea, (GW 1 & 2) the potential for ironic calamity really starts to take hold because at the same time Florida and the Southeast is drying up, coastal areas will flood out as ocean levels rise.

Don't you feel better now?

Habeas Corpus

The debate is over, has been for a long time for rational people regarding GW but... for flat earthers refusing to believe earth's becoming an oven because of us, the art of stupid looms, especially with three reports coming in from NASA & NOAA showing how the rise of CO2 levels impacts climate change and the UN's IPCC (350mb - PDF) monster titled Climate Change 2013 providing ever more evidence that GW's a reality show writ large. Because of this, it's time for unbelievers to finally pack it in and realize we're in big trouble and must make radical  changes now regarding energy and it's connect to the environment or face consequences too dire for civilization to even contemplate. 

Click on the National Academies graphic below to get a concise view of why ignoring GW truly is the art of stupid. To learn more about how researchers put together climate models to explain their findings, click here.

The Question to ask now is, does Obama have the guts to pull the plug on Keystone XL?

Well do ya?...

Misalignment ...

Black Eyed Susan

Yours truly takes pictures and videos when walking in woods and fields as my loyal readers know.  While walking, one readily sees the adverse impact of GW ranging from the early blooming of flowers to the dearth of insects needed to pollinate the flowers in question. Other slights include the slow dying of unhealthy trees along with the early arrival of birds, which often proves problematic when the food sources for said birds are not available due to the specter of climate change. The frightening aspect about this is the fact it's just the beginning in terms of what GW means for the continued existence of mankind as nature cannot adapt fast enough to this catastrophe of our own making.

Humans may welcome the chance to put away our coats early. But off-schedule springs can have devastating ecological impacts, from pollinators missing the flowers they usually visit to an increase in conflicts between humans and animals as hibernations are cut short. “A really early spring can lead to all sorts of unexpected problems,” says Morgan Tingley, an ornithologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The situation will only worsen as climate change makes warmer winters and earlier spring conditions ever more likely. “The issue is when really early springs don’t just become the exception; they become the rule. And that is what we are seeing with climate change in general,” Tingley says. “The extreme has become the typical.  That’s when we start to see stronger, really negative impacts.”

On the other end of the spectrum, not all flowers will bloom early; some tie their efflorescence to the amount and quality of sunlight they receive. But those that do so can mismatch with pollinators that emerge ahead of schedule as a result of warm weather. If the primary flowers they rely on haven’t bloomed, there won’t be anything for them to eat. “I heard some anecdotal accounts ... of dead bees being witnessed on the ground,” says Theresa Crimmins, director of the USA National Phenology Network. Some biologists speculate that warm temperatures might have lured the bees out of their winter rest and that they then starved without the right flowers being open.

A welcomed pit stop :)

2025 guesstimates ...

AI generated but you already know that, right?

Haven't done this in a while but here are some guesstimates
for 2025 as one cannot predict the future, ever. :)

• The dumpster fire known as the Agent Orange administration begins its first year.
• Fluoride may be banned in public water supplies thanks to RFK Jr., someone totally unqualified to run NIH in any way, shape or fashion.
• The tech bros, Musk, Thiel, Besos, among significant others, take over government.
• The MAGAs get screwed again. The difference from 2016 is that they finally realize the truth about Trump for the very first time.
• Education. in the land of free and home of the brave. continues to descend into an abyss of its own making.
• Climate change, the 900lb guerrilla, creates the new normal of weather anomalies 24/7.
• 2025 will be the hottest year ever recorded but we already know that, right?
• Israel, with US backing, continues its pursuit of genocide 24/7.
• China's becoming the next superpower while the US continues to lose ground.
• Ukraine becomes the next Korea with a DMZ separating Russia from western Ukraine.
• Inflation is here forever, thanks to resource depletion, climate change and environmental degradation.
• Countries are splintering thanks to climate change and the rise of far right politics.
• England continues to go third world.
• AI's everywhere, AGI's possible entry rises up near the end of 2025.
• Facist capitalism and Neo-feudalism, thanks to gross inequality, goes prime time.
• Inept politicians pander to get reelected as the government slides into incompetency.
• US threatens Iran with Bibi's urging as Israel continues to run US foreign policy.
• Politicians continue to be bribed with pennies on the dollar.
• The Trump cabinet slides into irrelevancy due to unqualified entities running the show.
• The US becomes a cold, tech driven haven controlled by AI and the tech power elite.
• Women's rights no longer apply.
• Christian Nationalism becomes a thing.
• The supreme's corruption becomes obvious to the max. 
• Analog computing begins to drive AI.
• Life, or remnants of same, will be discovered on Mars.
• US debt explodes with the advent of Trump's tax breaks for the rich.
• The grift is on once the lame duck agent orange assumes office on January 21, 2025.
• The death of empire for the US looms.
• Job replacement via AI moves into high gear as unemployment rears its ugly head for real.
• How much longer can the bubble, known as the stock market, continue to expand to red giant territory?
• The ability to generate stuff at the same rate as 2024 begins to shrink thanks to GW.
• The Arctic and Antarctic continue to melt at record pace.
• Greenland may become part of the US if Trump has his way due to China's interest in gaining access to the world's largest island due to its incredibly important geographic location. Why? because of GW opening up trade routes, thus creating opportunity and competition among nations wanting to control the region for profit and power.
• The same goes for the Panama Canal.
• Quantum computing finally becomes real.
• Quantum AI and the road to the Matrix becomes possible.
• The multiverse becomes a thing.
• Serious medical advancement, with the aid of AI, goes primetime.
• In the end regarding the art of prediction, one never knows, do one? - Fat Waller

You Fix the Budget

The NY Times O.K., You Fix the Budget is a very cool interactive tool allowing us plebes the chance to fix the budget by making cuts on virtually every part of government, a concept both alluring and challenging to say the least but there are the usual suspects not factored into the equation able to screw the pooch in ways defying the imagination. They are...

Tech: Nothing is discussed about the disruptive aspect of technology, the double exponential acceleration of same that will impact the budget at ever increasing levels as we move toward the mystical year of 2030 or the estimated start point of the singularity. 

Global Warming: By 2030, the full impact of GW may finally be starting to set in as chaotic systems of which GW is a part, is an environment driven by phase transitions whereby changes experienced by the system are anything but linear and cannot be predicted because of the law of initial conditions.

Fossil fuel depletion: By 2030, the cost of oil will be immense. The disruptive impact of this cannot be predicted as oil is the prime driver of today's economy. Without it, modern civilization stops, period. Coal as replacement is not viable due to low energy density and high pollution factor though we continue to burn it with little regard to the impact it's having on climate change. Solar as viable replacement is possible due to nanotech and full understanding of photosynthesis but predictions regarding this is guesstimate at best due to the inherent limits of knowledge man will always experience thanks to  quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle and chaos. Ditto for algae and other biofuel substitutes and nuclear fusion, cold or otherwise.

Financial Follies: If the current ponzi scheme system of finance continues unabated, courtesy of Wall Street and significant others, the ever increasing mountain of US debt could bankrupt the nation before 2030 even though the Fed thinks the dubious option of Quantitative Easing (the art of printing money) may get us out of this dreadful predicament by papering over the debt with currency possibly resembling that of the Weimar Republic's.

Even though these variables are not part of the app, take a shot anyway. It's better than just complaining about it, right?

Wise Guys & then some

Dropping water levels in Lake Mead, below the Hoover Dam, revealed human remains that have probably been hidden for decades.Credit...Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times

Now that GW's going full tilt while Lake Mead goes dry, secrets of the body kind are showing up as the water drains away in the year of our lord 2022.

It’s the mob guy who went missing after skimming from the Stardust casino. No, it’s the lake resort manager hunted down by the Chicago Outfit. Could it be the work of a biker gang muscling in on Mafia turf? Or maybe someone just fell off a boat after one too many.

Ever since the bodies started turning up this month in Lake Mead — the first in a barrel, the next half-buried in sand, both exposed by plunging water levels — theories in Las Vegas are flourishing about who they are, how they wound up in the country’s largest man-made reservoir, and what might surface next.

Lake Mead is in desperate shape. Along with Lake Powell, upstream on the Colorado River, Mead is the key to prosperity for the booming cities, suburbs and farms of the desert Southwest – Arizona, Southern California, and, of course, Las Vegas. In addition to the unfortunate guy in the barrel, decades of overuse capped off by several years of brutal, climate-driven drought has exposed an intake pipe for Southern Nevada’s 2.2 million people.

They’re running out of water. Putting megacities like Phoenix and Vegas in a desert was never a good idea. They were always destined to run out of water, some day. But the rampant growth and a years-long, killer drought have made the crisis immediate.

And with the corpse-in-a-barrel story, we have one more link between climate and popular culture: The Sopranos meets fossil fuels.

It hardly made a wave, thereby joining the long rap sheet for climate change’s impact on our culture. Mostly, it’s things we’re losing.

And it's not just humans ...

The somber findings come amid the Southwest’s driest two decades in more than a thousand years, as drought-starved bodies of water yield one surprise after another.

At Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico, a bachelor party stumbled across a fossilized mastodon skull that is millions of years old. In Utah last year, the receding waters of Lake Powell revealed a car that had plunged 600 feet off a cliff, killing the driver. And as Lake Powell dries up, archaeologists are getting a chance to study newly emerged Indigenous dwellings.

Buying property in the Southwest is rather dubious, is it not?

Now just 30 percent full, Lake Mead has already fallen to its lowest level since it was filled during the Great Depression, raising fears in places such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., that also draw water from the reservoir below the Hoover Dam.

Federal authorities announced this month that they would delay releases from the Colorado River into Lake Mead, about 30 miles east of Las Vegas, dwindling it even more.

Remember, GW's just warming up, right?

3 years & counting ...

 

It's just the beginning ... Intense sunset to the max.

3 years and counting, a guesstimate made by yours truly vis a vis GW whereby relative normalcy continues relatively unabated before the wheels start to fall off is now being supported by research done by scientists far more versed in this subject than I will ever be. 

Scientists enlisted the help of an AI to estimate how long it would take until global warming gets really bad. The AI's assessment? We might be screwed.

The resulting study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that global temperatures could reach the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius in just a decade. Exceed that, and scientists warn of increased drought, widescale die-offs of wildlife species and ecosystems, and famines, to name just a few drastic ramifications.

2050, transition 2/step or the notion phase transitions are NEVER linear.

A typical phase diagram. The dotted line gives the anomalous behavior of water.

As CNN notes, this projected timeline is largely in line with the predictions of other significant reports. But the AI study has a far grimmer idea of when the 2 degree threshold will be reached, estimating close to an 80 percent chance that the world will hit that mark by 2065 — and that's assuming we maintain net zero carbon emissions. Noah Diffenbaugh, co-author of the study and a climate scientist at Stanford University, told CNN that there's a 50 percent chance that 2 degrees will be reached even sooner — by 2050, if emissions stay high.

The timeframe equation ...

Image by Fokke Hassel via Getty / Futurism

On New Year's Day, several Stanford scientists joined CBS' Scott Pelley on the program "60 Minutes" to discuss the global mass extinction crisis. Spoiler: no one had any good news.

Tony Barnosky, a Stanford biologist whose work involves using fossil records to map changes in ecosystems over time, told CBS that his work suggests that extinction rates today are moving at roughly 100 times the rate typically seen in Earth's four-billion-year known history of supporting life.

According to Barnosky, such rapid population loss means that Earth is currently experiencing the worst mass extinction episode since the dinosaurs. And while Earth itself has repeatedly recovered from mass extinction events, the vast majority of the life existing on our planet at the time has not.

Unfortunately, that may well include us humans — or, at least, the trappings of our technological civilization.

"I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we've had it," Barnosky's Stanford colleague Paul Ehrlich, who also appeared on the show, told Pelley, "that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to."

That grim reality, according to the researchers, means that even if humans manage to survive in some capacity, the wide-reaching impacts of mass extinction — which include habitat destruction, breakdowns in the natural food chain, soil infertility, and more — would cause modern human society to crumble.

"I would say it is too much to say that we're killing the planet, because the planet's gonna be fine," said Barnosky. "What we're doing is we're killing our way of life."

Nature will handle gw but us ... not so much.

An existential threat

BRT has talk often about climate change and the ramifications of same as the threat is an existential one, not to earth but to us rubes living on her. When combined with environmental degradation, resource depletion and over population, the situation is dire to say the least with scientists now openly talking about a runaway GW effect that could introduce a population control mechanism of truly biblical proportions as articulated by James Lovelock over 10 years ago.

The Ant & the Grasshopper, courtesy Aesop, is apt here as America continues to deny the obvious ongoing event of GW being writ ever larger as we move further into the 21st century.

IN a field one summer’s day a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart’s content. An Ant passed by, bearing along with great toil an ear of corn he was taking to the nest.   

 “Why not come and chat with me,” said the Grasshopper, “instead of toiling and moiling in that way?”  

“I am helping to lay up food for the winter,” said the Ant, “and recommend you to do the same.”   

Why bother about winter?” said the Grasshopper; “we have got plenty of food at present.” But the Ant went on its way and continued its toil. When the winter came the Grasshopper had no food, and found itself dying of hunger, while it saw the ants distributing every day corn and grain from the stores they had collected in the summer. Then the Grasshopper knew:

        “IT IS BEST TO PREPARE FOR THE DAYS OF NECESSITY.”

Not just insects ...

 Populations of sea lion pups have dropped 64% in Australia. Matthew Dickstein / Getty Images

It's not just insects ... it's all wildlife as the 6th extinction goes primetime in the year of our lord 2022. The acceleration of GW is not only terrifying, its inevitable as phase transitions are never linear as seen by when a pond freezes over as the day before, said pond is 50% ice free. Nothing of significance is being done to reduce fossil fuel burning as it takes a catastrophe of momental proportions for man to change. For yours truly, a wet bulb event in India, as articulated in The Ministry of the Future, works but one fears it will well before 2050 given just how fast GW is accelerating thanks, in large part, to the loss of albedo in the arctic. 

The percentage of diffusely reflected sunlight relative to various surface conditions

“Today we face the double, interlinked emergencies of human-induced climate change and the loss of biodiversity, threatening the well-being of current and future generations.”

So begins the executive summary of the Living Planet Report 2022. Released every two years by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the study examines global biodiversity and the health of the planet. The latest report reveals an average 69% drop in world vertebrate species in less than 50 years.

We can make a difference but it must happen now.

But there have been some promising discoveries with species that have been recovering.

The population of loggerhead turtle nests grew by 500% on the coast of Chrysochou Bay in Cyprus from 1999 to 2015. Credit conservation efforts that include relocating nests and using cages to protect others from predators. 

Conservation measures have also helped mountain gorillas. In the Virunga Mountains along the northern border of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda, populations of mountain gorillas increased to 604 animals, up from 480 gorillas in 2010.

Author Kim Stanley Robinson