Gaia is a tough bitch, once again

I post what aids my mental health, or at least has me convinced that it does.

Well, sea level rise is one of those odd ones. One of those climate wildcards is that with sufficiently rapid sea level rise from ice sheet loss, you pull the brake on global temperatures for a few decades. My idea is that the rapid loss of sea ice is part of a kind of “planetary brake response” that helps the planet make it through periods of rapid climate change without enormous loss of species.

Here’s Hansen’s 2016 estimate of surface air temperature rise around the world, assuming different rapidly rising levels of ice melt:

You can see that with a 20 year doubling time, you stay around 2.5 degree celsius before there’s a plunge in temperatures again, that suddenly ends when you run out of ice around 2155. Of course these numbers are somewhat hypothetical, especially the idea that the doubling just continues forever is hypothetical.

But now have a look at sea level rise around the world:

This suggests a doubling every twenty years, maybe a bit faster if ice loss became a bigger contributor over time than thermal expansion. Well, have a look here:

Thermal expansion is a shrinking factor. The meltwater seems to double by around every 11 years or so.

If that’s what we stay stuck at, a doubling every 11 years, then we get a surface temperature rise that bumps into a limit well before 2100.

The graphs for global temperature in this context of rapid sea level rise look as following:

None of these are particularly pleasing. But ice melt in both hemispheres gets you cooling, that should help most of the world limit rapid temperature change, except Great Britain, the initiator of the fossil fuel combustion experiment, which would be poetically plunged into extreme cold unlike anything it has ever ever seen during recorded history.

The cooling doesn’t last forever of course, eventually you run out of the ice and warming continues. But I would rather be at 3 degree Celsius by 2200 than by 2100. You see that with both hemispheres affected, it helps reduce warming basically everywhere around the world, but with very nasty cooling effects for North-Western Europe. Fortunately, Europe is used to cooling, we had the Pleistocene until just 10,000 years ago, with ice covering large parts of our continent.

The world has to know, whether this is the scenario that we face, because time is running out. If this is what we face, it won’t take fifty years until it reveals itself, as we’re already in 2025. It has enormous consequences, when it comes to ecological restoration. How are you supposed to make British forests prepared for the next fifty years? We have to know.

It also means that the idea of Europe as a future climate haven for migrants also has to be rejected, the migrants would have to be welcomed into a continent that plunged into freezing temperatures to which Northern Europeans and Siberians are somewhat adapted, but not sub-Saharan Africans. Europeans would have to become refugees, on their own continent. We would have to repopulate the dying French and Italian farming villages with Englishmen.

In general I don’t think Europe as a haven for climate migrants is really an idea you can base policy on. The projections are for four billion Africans by 2100, the vast majority of them will have to develop the means to survive the coming upheaval in Africa either way, migration or not migration. Europe has never absorbed more than a few drops of migration from the ocean that is the developing world, with enormous social upheaval as a result already.

Fundamentally I think foreign aid is a good thing. There are plenty of good people to be found in Africa, who would benefit from some help and are deserving of it. Aid like family planning and initiatives against child marriage can help them build up a future domestically, rather than in Europe.

This is also why I am just crushed by the shutdown of USAID. This was an agency that did good work, helping girls avoid being married as teenagers, helping people to improve their lives and avoid becoming burdens on others.

Europeans, I’m sorry to say, are the most well-meaning people you will find on this planet, their American cousins are more ruthless. But the reality we now face is that Europe has to struggle to avoid being taken advantage of by the world. This continent is not just some sort of last ditch effort to help people make it through a couple more years before everything breaks down here too.

40 Comments

  1. Why are we taking anything Hansen publishes seriously.

    Manhattan was supposed to be under water 30 years ago according to that subhuman

    • Sadly, I agree.

      Steven Koonin wrote a 2022 book ‘Unsettled’, and there are other sticklers for scientific integrity who understand the topic well. Strangely, many of them are emeritus professors or ex-professors, i.e. they only feel able to say what they think because their job no longer depends on toeing the official line.

      All I’ll say is, you need a lot of time to read up decades of papers and see what’s going on beneath all the government- and business-funded ‘studies’, i.e. the propaganda. Until ~2020 I assumed, for instance, that most published academic papers were replicable, not partly made up to suit the funders; and that the BBC normally attempted to tell us the truth. How utterly naive. I should have paid more attention to the ‘Climate-gate’ reports but I was working at the time … in a related field but no time to take apart what the BBC was telling us.

      Possibly in the past 30 years ‘climate’ has been as fabricated as ‘COVID’ was. I currently don’t know. A friend who’s still an academic says that the science was conducted at least reasonably honestly until at least the 1970s, but since then standards have declined if not collapsed.

      I’m deeply disillusioned. In theory, this ought to be a good state. It means relieved of illusion(s) to which one had been subject.

      • As the End Times approach, the denialist grow ever more fanatic. It’s an article of faith. Reality is WHAT I say, not what happens. It’s quite funny, what with being H. SAPIENS and all.

  2. I think your believe system, climate change, veganism etc. is not proper for a LSWM. Instead you should switch to white ethnic nationalism, wich is the future anyways.
    I guarantee you that even Holland wont be flooded in our lifetime (and half of the country was north sea not long ago).

    • What’s your lifetime? I see first great inundations, then total submergence, by 2050. Do you expect to still be alive then? Sea-level rise is growing exponentially, as is ice loss in both the Arctic, ie Greenland, and Antarctic. When in doubt, take the worst IPCC ‘prediction’ and multiply by an order of magnitude.

  3. Northern European countries have their bread and cereals supplemented with vitamin d by law, which is the only reason blacks can survive here.

    Anyway, the phrase “kill them with kindness” is very apt. Welfare and foreign aid merely achieve an increase in the number of dependent people and a massive net increase in human misery. Also, with more people and their food being subsidized, there are more animals being tortured in cages.

    White people are the kindest towards the animals they eat.

    I told you before, free HIV medication to all women. Men have to pay. Perhaps a small dose of oestrogen in the medication which is free to women (at a level which inly mildly affects women) to discourage the resale to men.

    • The retards have decided instead on the moon dust sun-shielding option to keep the blue sky – hence why the big rocket development of late – hence why the need to develop the rocket technology privately – so that secrets can be kept by the engineers and scientists involved – the red herring being Mars.

    • Having lived in the UK, the sky is already white, from commercial flights. After the Icelandic volcano erupted in 2010, within days (I was lucky enough to be in the Lakes District) turned beautifully blue. Con-trails cool by day and warm by night.

  4. > Great Britain, the initiator of the fossil fuel combustion experiment, would be poetically plunged into extreme cold unlike anything it has ever ever seen during recorded history.

    ………

    I don’t think so.
    I NO LONGER BELIEVE.
    Not after all the lies I was told by the authorities during the covid “pandemic.”

    • I envy you Charlie, but, sadly, I still accept manmade climate change is happening – along with all the other symptoms of overshoot. I can see where your skepticism comes from though – TPTB just can’t lie straight in bed, they keep on manipulating us, etc.

      I’m skeptical of the prevailing narrative too, although my skepticism has landed me in a different place.

      For mine, the vaccine ‘science’ and the climate ‘science’ were both corrupted by the same forces: economics, profit incentives, power, etc.

      The truth of the climate issue got silenced because it wasn’t ‘convenient’ to the system. Kick over the rock, and you’ll find that ‘they’ never wanted to fix it. Fixing it would’ve been ‘inconvenient’ for profits and for other reasons – as if profits wasn’t enough motive on its own though.

      Similarly, the other day we were talking conspiracies about the “vaccines” here and I suggested (among other things) that the profit incentive probably played a role in the vaccine disaster, along with the ‘techie’ culture of being ‘disruptors’.

      Well, since then I read this, and what I’d guessed is basically what played out in the UK: https://hedleyrees.substack.com/p/self-incriminating-evidence-from-69b

      The UK put a venture capitalist in charge of the regulator, who like any profit seeking disruptor promptly shifted its focus “From watchdog to enabler” and then “We tore up the rule book”.

      There you go – techie/innovator/capitalist/progressivist sacrificing the science for fun and profit.

      I reckon a similar thing happened with the climate science. In my view, it was clear to many scientists and observers that the kinds of economic ‘solutions’ to climate change were never going to work, but they kept their mouths shut and limited what they said to what comported with the prevailing narrative of the capitalists/progressivists for fun and profit, and now we’re fucked.

      We would’ve had to have done something truly radical a long time ago, and they knew it, but decided not to.

      So now we’re in ecological overshoot.

      The kids are all fucked, and they know it. The future is fucked. Our ecosystem is fucked, etc, but a lot of capitalists got to make a lot of money.

      Of course, everyone with a brain could’ve worked this out, including thinkers on both of the dominant sides of politics, but they chose to do what was convenient, along with everyone else, and what could TPTB or anyone else do really? If TPTB chose not to do anything, perhaps nothing could’ve been done, and what hope did anyone else have?

      A big self-organizing shitshow that will end in disaster.

      Perhaps this was inevitable, like what happens with a large self-organizing system like a cyclone that builds, rages, and then dissipates.

      Like a cyclone, the human system seems to have been, and still seems to be, beyond rational human control.

      We guaranteed this, I guess, when we put Mammon in charge.

      • Wombat, what do you think the system should have done about alleged global warming? Beyond a carbon trading system?

        And what does global warming have to do with ecological overshoot, which to my mind has to do with human overpopulation and nothing to do with CO2?

        • Q: What could have been done about the warming?

          A: a number of things, we had options, none that were attractive to TPTB. Why, the high priests of the religion of progress/capitalism couldn’t even accept that there are limits on a finite planet! People have been whining about that for decades, but the economists still don’t accept it.

          So, we couldn’t even get to step 1, which is accepting that we have a problem – which has now metastasized into a predicament.

          If we had accepted things, we might’ve seen the writing on the wall and pulled the plug on industrial civilization, smashed the machines, dismantled all the factories, burned all the technical manuals, etc. and returned to the land.

          That wasn’t going to happen though, was it? So, instead we doubled down, and doubled down, and doubled down. . .

          I’m a ‘rip the band-aid off’ kind of guy, so tearing it all down would’ve been my first pick, it still is (although I accept that I’ll probably never live to see that happen), but there were other options.

          We could have attempted to introduce a steady state economy.

          We could have tried de-growth.

          We could have just said “fuck this!” and walked away, en masse, into whatever remains of the wilderness.

          But none of those would’ve been very ‘comfortable’ or good for business, they might have created shortages, and no player is/was going to unilaterally ‘disarm’ while other players remain armed. So once again, we went the other way instead.

          Suffice to say that there were options, but that ultimately none of them were attractive to TBTB (or to a sufficient number of people to make a difference) or they/we would’ve tried them instead of just lying, manipulating, and gaslighting everyone about how there’s no problem and everything is ‘cool and normal’.

          Well, sorry, but it isn’t all going to be okay.

          Q: What does global warming have to do with ecological overshoot?
          A: Manmade climate change is a problem that was primarily driven by pollution, which was/is a necessary consequence of the consumption of fossil fuels.

          Fossil fuels provide the energy for modern civ. The more civ consumes, of everything, the more fossil fuels get burned to make it happen, the more pollution, the more climate change. But I suspect you knew I would say something like that and are setting me up for the: “Climate change isn’t caused by fossil fuels! It’s caused by [insert alternate theory]!”. If that’s the case, then I’m not really interested into going into it.

          So, back to the linkage to overshoot, we saw there was a problem and we were having an impact on climate, and an impact on all the rest, and then we decided to double down, and double down, and double down. . .

          The numbers from all that doubling down have now spooled up now into stupid proportions. Every doubling we need to find all the stuff that we ever did before, then double it! Same goes for consequences.

          Everything is getting fed into one big Ponzi that is increasingly unstable.

          Now, sure, Civ produces good stuff, and we rely on it for survival and if we kill it then lots of us will almost certainly die, but it also produces consequences, such as pollution (carbon is one, but there are as many others as there are consumer products: endocrine disruptors, a buggered nitrogen cycle, forever chemicals, etc.); mass extinctions; intensifying competition for increasingly scarce affordable resources (fuel, water, soil, minerals, etc.), depression, aggression, etc, etc.

          The combined consequences of EVERYTHING are mounting and we have/are sailing past planetary boundaries.

          So, where to from here now?

          Well, barring an act of God, the same thing will happen to us as happens to every other species that ends up going into overshoot, which is that we will consume and/or pollute ourselves to death.

          Some of us will probably survive, but it’s gonna be pretty tough.

          But nowadays, I find myself caring less about all this. Maybe I’m a bit burned out by it. Maybe I’m finding God now and acceptance. Maybe I’m just getting old and losing the passion of a younger man. Dunno.

          Everyone has my sympathy, and for what it’s worth I’m sorry, but I don’t see it ending well for anybody and I am increasingly accepting/resigned to that – what would it matter if I wasn’t?

          • It’s partly greed, what with fossil fuels being worth tens of trillions in assets, and underpinning the banking system, stock-markets and ruling regimes, but another deadly malady contributing, STILL, to the refusal to act, is Rightwing psychopathy. Once the denialist big-wigs told the Rightist knuckle-draggers that ecological science is created by ‘communist Greenies’,the Right became dedicated deniers, and remain so to today. The Dunning-Kruger mentality is their natural habitat.

        • FFS – we couldn’t even get rid of capitalism, or charging interest, or the wage system, let alone deal with this.

      • Yes, there is one. Tax all primary energy with 200% and redistribute per capita right back. Two problems solved:
        Those who use less, get more and all illegals register to get the money. After 20 years nobody in his right mind would buy a gas guzzler because who wants to enable others to live on a big energy budget? And on top, the rich pay more too, bc they use more.

        But, ofc, both sides are against THAT. Bc it solves a problem fundamentally.

  5. In 2016 according to Hansen’s predictions and models the sea level would rise several meters (2-3 meters) in the space of 100 years. 10 years later and my favourite Mediterranean beach has gained acreage.

    • As I said above, as the disaster unfolds, the moronic Rightist Dunning-Krugerites grow MORE fanatical, and will until the end. This creatures seems to think that sea-level rise is uniform across the planet, that other forces like isostatic rebound and local geological factors do not exist, and that beaches are stable and unchanging over centuries, with no erosion or deposition by the sea.

  6. I can’t make any sense of why the third world keeps booming in population. How hard is it to figure out that having more kids won’t make you richer, or your future brighter?

    Just look at Egypt, a severely overpopulated desert that is still growing in population for some reason. What a retarded species of rats you have to be to continue growing on a land where there is literally nothing.

    You wrote in some previous post that we don’t know why the French didn’t grow in population during the industrial revolution. We can’t even use poverty or education as a cause of population boom because France was full of dirt poor people at the time. Maybe the French have inner qualities that all these creatures don’t have.

    • To be fair, the low status whites who actually fucking breed like the Amish and Varg tend to live a similar kind of existence as third worlders.

      It seems to be that if you shove people into cities and factories they breed less than if you shove them onto farms and villages. Digging in the dirt all day makes you optimistic probably.

      The thing is, is that sometimes depression is warranted, there is a reason why human evolved to be capable depression, depression can spur adaptation.

      On a bigger level the white people breeding in their little homestead communes are contributing just as much to the environmental collapse as urbanites. They still use electronics and vehicles, and they still need fertilizer which is produced by industrial processes. Varg wants to eat meat all day so he needs feed for his animals feed that was probably grown in Brazil or Africa; his lifestyle just means he’s able to feel connected enough to life to want to breed. This doesn’t mean the Varg Fucko the Clown lifestyle is sustainable or that it will last.

      Ultimately if you’re having kids it’s probably because you’re able to live in a similar state of blissful ignorance as the black people happily farming in Africa, though at-least they eat less meat and use less electronics so on a individual level their existence costs less than your own.

  7. Republicans are the party of delusional optimism and unlimited growth. But Democrats for are the party of nagging, hectoring, scolding and then doing nothing about the problem anyways. They produce very impressive graphs and statistics and then once they get voted into office nothing gets done. Then when they’re out of office, suddenly the problem re-appears, even worse than before, and it’s urgent they get in in order to fix things. Rinse and repeat.

    Not only do I not trust The Science, but I also think the whole subject is just doom porn for people to fantasize about coming apocalypses.

    Fundamentally, very few people– white, brown, yellow, or w/e– are going to accept being told ‘It’s over’. People love their communities, want to have kids, and they want their lives to continue going. Any movement whose whole foundation is a rejection of those things (‘Just Go Extinct’) is doomed to failure. It will never go mainstream, it will just eek out an existence in edgy memes and whining in the corners of the internet.

    Again, that doesn’t mean I embrace delusional optimism and ‘everything will always go up’. I already know of a few long-term problems facing us, I know that a lot of bubbles are going to burst; it’s not hard to imagine that there are others. The state of the infrastructure speaks for itself. However, fixing these issues or at least minimizing the damage is going to require a very different mind-set than just passive cynicism.

    • It doesn’t have to be over but it will be over because people are not willing to make the changes to ensure that it continues. People can deny reality, write some vapid cope about the reproducibility crisis and the flaws of the peer review process; then ignore the dead zones and the hundreds of millions of hectares that are turned to desert every year. Masses of people now eat nothing but lard and think shitting yourself is normal because contrarians on YouTube told them the food pyramid was created by vegetable corporations. Most people are incapable of objectively analyzing reality and so their opinions aren’t worth much.

      Without a mass conversion to a Green economy it doesn’t matter what conspiracy theories you believe in or how many kids you pump out, everything’s just helping to accelerate the destruction of your way of life. You’re just bringing people into the world who will be expected to DoorDash because AI is too stupid to drive but just smart enough to do every other job.

      Don’t like that? Tough shit, how about you do something to counteract the problem? No? You want to eat meat and fly around and you don’t want to believe that’s a problem? Alright well you’re just not paying attention and giving you a vote is a mistake and realistically you’re a dead end even if you have kids as they too will probably just be just as much of a burden on the planet’s equilibrium and humanity’s economic plan.

      • Assuming that all of these predictions come true, which is already a stretch, good luck having anybody other than a handful of depressives join a movement like that. It’s doomed, for the reasons I explained above.

        I already said I agree that the system is flawed, and that there are many problems that have been neglected or encouraged/fed for far too long.

        The alternative will have to be a movement or party that defunds the existing bubbles and Ponzi schemes, while trying to shore up the falling standard of living for the bottom 80%. AND providing them dignity, a meaningful life, and a common culture– not just telling them, ‘Sorry, but you just have to get used to misery and isolation’.

        • I imagine a lot of Romans / Italians saw the crisis and collapse of their empire coming. There must have signs of decay, overexpansion, long-term problems not being addressed, etc. Those huge changes don’t just happen in one day. And they did face a variety of problems– economic, climate-related, political, military, and so on and so forth. Just like we do.

          However, the correct response was not to abandon your community and society and then spend your days inhaling copium. Thinking that a collapsing empire was going to come back to life was also a delusion, of course.

          And Italians / Romans did make it out of their societal crisis, just in a much different shape. They didn’t die out as a population, although substantial parts of their economy, culture, and way of life did (since they were too big to be maintained in a collapsing ecosystem). They also saw gains to their health, once the days of their collapsing empire were over. I imagine the culture become less decadent, too.

          Americans and Westerns should understand and internalize something like that, not just abandon themselves to cynicism. Brace for a hard landing, adapt and make changes, time to make tough decisions, etc etc etc… and reaching stability at a lower level.

    • Clearly you have NO idea of how great is the catastrophe. First, the forcing of extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the last 250 years has caused the greatest increase in energy trapped in the Earth system in ALL planetary history.Second, 250 zettajoules (ten to the 21st power)of that has been sequestered in the oceans, which will drive climate chaos for hundreds of millennia.

  8. ‘Just Go Extinct’
    ‘Roll Over & Die’
    ‘You Don’t Deserve to Have a Future’

    Slogans for the climate change movement.

    They also target art, like paintings. After all, there’s no greater example of capitalism, consumption, and greed in general than a museum– most of which are dilapidated and have been underfunded for decades now. Such a brave against-the-system movement. Such noble sacrifice!

    Not to mention that their plans are perfectly aligned with industrial capitalism in other areas. Meat, housing, and transportation are expensive. Herding people into cheap apartments in shithole cities, feeding them a diet derived from a handful of monocrops, busing them around… all of that is cheaper and more convenient for the elite compared to the alternative of building durable homes in suburban or rural environments, using pasture for animal products (which would improve the health of the population, too), and providing dignified forms of transportation.

    They’re really just the heirs of the neoliberal crusade of the 80s and 90s. Their ancestors defunded and abandoned all kinds of useless services, including the welfare state / public health and the parks / museums, and now their spiteful descendants are going on one last and final offensive to destroy those things for everybody.

    • Actually I think we deserve a future it’s just that most people don’t act as though we do, sustainability means a sustained future.

      You’re profligates setting the house on fire and screaming that there is no future if you’re aren’t allowed to start fires in the house. You tell yourself the house will never burn down since the idea the house could burn down makes you feel bad.

      Cattle are the perfect monocrop, just feed them soybeans fortified with vitamin supplements, steroids, and vaccines; and a carnivore influencer on Instagram can survive well enough eating nothing but them. Cattle take up more resources to produce so they encourage the expansion of production which is beneficial to increasing GDP. Animal products can be kept affordable for producers and consumers through the falling rate of profit and inflation through subsidies, and most people are willing to pay taxes to be able to regularly afford meat while not raising animals themselves which is why there is no outcry against farm subsidies like there is for things like education for children and green energy.

      Obviously in real life rather than Alex Jones hypothetical future NWO world wealthy capitalist countries have the highest rates of consumption of animal products.

      • “You’re profligates setting the house on fire and screaming that there is no future if you’re aren’t allowed to start fires in the house. You tell yourself the house will never burn down since the idea the house could burn down makes you feel bad.”

        You don’t even know what you’re saying or who you’re talking to, which is why your posts are riddled with gotchas / random jabs. It’s just like your trolling– all you want is the fleeting satisfaction of “owning” someone. I already admitted the existence of long-term problems and acknowledged that delusional optimism is suicidal. See my replies above.

        “Obviously in real life rather than Alex Jones hypothetical future NWO world wealthy capitalist countries have the highest rates of consumption of animal products.”

        Which is a good thing, or public health would be even more fucked.

        Societies that are based around agriculture do not produce a high standard of living for their populations. They never have, since vegan diets are bad for your health. This has been true for 1000s of years, since the beginning of civilization– hunter-gatherers were healthier than farmers, and so were herders/ shepherds. The fact that the American diet has become more and more vegan since the 80s has been accompanied by the drastic rise in heart disease, obesity, inflammation, and all the other negative outcomes that result from consuming a diet unfit for human beings.

        You are also wrong in saying that there is no outcry against farm subsidies– there is. Tons of people are upset that we have a backwards system that subsidizes the production of cheap crap, rather than real food.

        And you are also wrong in thinking that meat is affordable. The average family can’t afford meat these days. They eat a de facto vegan diet of corn syrup, seed oils, and all kinds of synthetic sludge. I don’t know where you people get this idea that Americans are all eating tons of steak, hamburgers, cheese, and eggs– it’s another example of how out of touch your movement is with the real state of America.

        • >The fact that the American diet has become more and more vegan since the 80s has been accompanied by the drastic rise in heart disease, obesity, inflammation, and all the other negative outcomes that result from consuming a diet unfit for human beings.

          Just making a drive-by shitpost to point out that you’re objectively the opposite of correct: https://i.insider.com/591343c1dd0895722d8b4721

          • Meat is a broad term– look at red meat vs white meat. When most families eat meat these days, it’s WAY more likely to be white meat (boneless, skinless, heart-healthy, etc etc)– not a lot of nutritional value, compared to beef or pork.

            And then take a look at the rest of their diet. All kinds of sugary junk, ramen, filler food, and other corn-based slop. Many of the ingredients were not even broadly used before those sectors were deregulated in the 80s.

            The fact that people have started eating more and more junk food, while abandoning the really nutritious stuff, is why all of those negative changes have taken place.

          • Traditional Greek cooking contains very, very little meat, and not a lot of animal products generally. Real Greek cookbooks have many vegan recipes even if they aren’t that kind of cookbook; there are lots of salads and beans and cooked greens. And the people who eat it are extremely healthy. It’s probably the right diet for most people if health is the goal. It includes no corn syrup and no seed oils, and is suited to scarcity.

            Americans destroy their kidneys with toxins in their foods and by catching covid, and then suddenly they can’t eat meat because they have kidney disease. It is a really unfortunate sequence.

Leave a Reply

Comments should be automatically approved again. People who misbehave will be banned.

Your email address will not be published.


*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.