It will be a short delay until I figure out what the hell am I doing.
Oh wait, there will be ???
- We've got time.
- Do we?
"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroad. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." - Woody Allen
- He was kidding.
I'm not.
It looks like we did not choose correctly.
After all,
there have been no humans on Earth when the global average temperature was 3,5°C above baseline.
2 million years of human experience, all less than 3,5°C above baseline;
baseline being the beginning of Industrial Revolution.
We are headed for more than 3,5°C above baseline, in the near future.
Human extinction will not resolve because we are not clever.
It's not as if we can't handle temperature swings;
you came from outside, inside is way more than 3,5°C,
it's closer than 10°C or 15°C, that's not the issue.
The issue is habitat. We´re human animals, as with all other animals,
we need habitat to survive and that habitat has to include food.
And it's difficult for me to imagine a world in which we'll have food,
for humans, at say 3,5 or 4°C above baseline.
Especially in the relatively near future that will bring us that 3,5°C or 4°C.
John Davis, writes at the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, last September concluded,
based only on CO2 in the atmosphere: "The world is probably at the start of a runaway Greenhouse Event
which will end most human life on Earth before 2040."
He is only contemplating one greenhouse gas, Carbon Dioxide (CO2).
And, as reported by NASA a couple of days ago,
we're at carbon dioxide levels that are likely higher than they've been for the last 20 million years.
For 2 million years there has been humans on the planet.
We're at nearly 400 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we were at 280 ppm (parts per million).
So, this is a huge change in atmospheric chemistry.
If we input some of the self-reinforcing feedback loops,
associated with the so far 0.85°C rise in temperature,
instead of as John Davis did, which is to ignore those and focus only on carbon dioxide,
if we include some of those feedbacks, according to Paul Beckwith, climate scientist at the University of Otawa,
we are headed to 6°C within a decade. 6°C from the current level.
About a year later, back with double down... ok double and a half,
he said that we can expect up to 16°C increase within a decade or two.
And he is basing these projections on paleoclimatic information.
So, for example,
according to Science, one of the more reputable journals in the scientific community,
climate change is on track to it for 10 times faster than at any time during the last 65 million years.
Within that 65 million years is an event 55 million years ago,
which is a 5°C rise within 13 years, global average.
10 times faster than that is 50°C rise in 13 years;
or maybe a 5°C in 1,3 years;
either is enough to remove habitat for all humans on the planet.
It's happening, and a lot faster than most people think.
A little bit more evidence, according to a paper on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
as one of the premier journals in the world on science,
from 5 years ago,
we will remain at or above the current carbon dioxide (CO2) level for at least the next thousand years.
We are at 396ppm of CO2 right now and we will be, at a minimum, with 396ppm for at least the next 1000 years.
Contrast that with the message of 350.org
which indicates we will get down to 350ppm if we just use a civilised approach to it by mid century;
the middle of this century. That's not gonna happen, it can't happen, it's physically impossible.
But 350.org is not gonna tell you that.
According to the UN Environment Programme, during 2008,
it was the dire year of the Great Recession, remember when we started calling them "recessions",
because the Prozac Nation can't handle the word "depression"?
I mean, it was a Great depression, wasn't it? At least for me, I don't know about you?
It was... awesome!
At any event, it was in that catastrophic year of the Great Recession, that the global CO2 emissions actually increased
to their highest level since we enacted the Clean Air Act in this country, in 1980.
But that was nothing compared to 2009,
when carbon emissions increased to a new record setting level.
And in 2010, when they exceeded that previous record setting level,
likewise for 2010, 2011 and 2012, and we just found out about 2013,
every year, every single year, we set new records for greenhouse gas emissions,
and we are at the midst of a global economic recession, at best.
It's clear, at this point, that civilization is a heat engine.
And from a great paper by Timothy Garrett in climatic change,
"Only a complete collapse prevents runaway climate change."
We have know this for years. And by "collapse", what Garrett means is
no fuel at the filling stations, no food at the grocery stores, no water coming out of municipal taps.
If we wanted to have habitat for humans, in the not too distant future,
the understanding in 2009, when the paper was published,
was that we needed to completely collapse industrial civilization.
And I don't know anybody who sign up for that, by the way.
And I can't imagine a politician running on that campaign.
I can just see,
two presidential candidates in debate:
"No, I can collapse it faster than you can."
"No, but I can have the lights out by a week after I'm elected."
Right.
According to a paper in the Astrophysical Journal - yes, even astrophysicists are talking about climate change -
the Earth is within 1% of inhabitability.
That's not very far.
So, for the entire enterprise of astrophysicists,
it was assumed that Earth was in the middle of the habitable zone.
Here is the habitable zone for stars of different sizes.
So, for a star of our size, the astrophysicists used to thought Earth was right there,
in the middle of the habitable zone, for the entire discipline of astrophysics.
But then, somebody actually looked,
and discovered, last March, that actually Earth is in the inner edge of the habitable zone,
within 1% of being uninhabitable.
Mars is here, Venus is somewhere distant from Earth as Earth is form Mars;
Venus is about right there, and we what happened to Venus´ atmosphere.
It got striped away.
What this suggests is that
with minor changes in the Earth's atmosphere, we can go Venus.
Well guess what! We haven't made minor changes in the Earth's atmosphere,
we have done major changes in the Earth's atmosphere.
We have gone from 280ppm to 400ppm, nearly 400ppm in CO2, in the atmosphere.
That's one of a handful of greenhouse gases. Another one is methane.
Methane was 700ppb before the beginning of the industrial revolution,
it's now about 2000 parts per billion (ppb); nearly tripled...
the level of methane, as we observed in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
How bigger deal is methane, it's about 100 times more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,
molecule per molecule. 100 times in the short term, meaning less than 20 years.
It's only about 20 times more powerful than CO2 over a 100 years or so but,
we don't have 100 years or so.
And finally, a little bit about that collapse, that Tim Garrett wrote about.
Clive Hamilton points out in his latest book
that without the atmospheric sulphates associated with industry, when collapse occurs,
Earth will be an extra 1,1°C warmer.
Add 1,1°C to the current 0,85°C and we're at 1,95°C, lets call it 2.
Even collapse takes us to 2°C,
the much dreaded political target.
If the system doesn't collapse, we're at 2°C within a matter of years from now...
If the system does collapse, we're at 2°C within 3 days.
And they call us Homo sapiens, the wise ape.
Think that it should have been homo cavitus which is the clever ape, instead.
There's this contrarian myth that has been floating around since 1998,
the hottest year of global average temperature based on land records,
and the myth is that the climate change has slowed, has plateaued,
that based on land surface records,
we have seen a pause in climate warming, the Earth's warming, since 1998.
And in fact, based on land records that's right, and so people wondered for a long time:
"Where is that heat going?" As it turns out it is going to the ocean.
We look at 1998 and that's where heating of the oceans accelerates.
So, we figured out about a year ago where that extra heat is going.
Is not going into land masses; it is going into the ocean.
And finally, just less than a month ago, there's a paper which came out with an explanation of that.
The general heating of the Earths surface has increased the winds over the ocean
and that increased wind has allowed for more heat to be sunk deeper into the oceans,
than was previously occurring. If we have an El Niño event,
a bunch of that heat comes out quite suddenly in a short period of time.
If we don't have an El Niño event, if we have a continuous series of "La Niña" years,
than that heat stays in the ocean and warms up and therefore acidifies the ocean.
Already the oceans have acidified to the extent that...
more than half of the phytoplankton in the ocean has been killed within the last few decades.
Phytoplankton is the base of the marine food web and it accounts for about half the food we eat.
So, if we keep this up, we are going to kill all the phytoplankton.
- Doesn't that also account for about 2/3 of the oxygen in the atmosphere?
- It accounts almost 1 for 1 with land plants.
So, it accounts for about half of the oxygen.
And yes, it would be inconvenient to not have oxygen in the atmosphere.
If that's where you're going with that question.
However, oxygen is incredibly recalcitrant in the atmosphere, so...
...I suspect there would be a 1000 years or more before we have oxygen levels drop down to 16%
or even 15%, in the atmosphere, as opposed to the current 18%.
So, there will be a huge lag after phytoplankton die, before oxygen drops to unsafe levels.
[Imperceptible question from audience]
I... I don't know. 21?
21. And 15, apparently, becomes dangerous for humans.
So, we're a long way from oxygen being dangerous.
- ??? is 11%, by asphixiation ???. Only that. Sorry.
- Are you giving advise?
I'm not even done yet!
She's making a lovius called 'The End'...
[Imperceptible question]
The heat in the ocean helps explain why Antarctica
and the Arctic are both loosing ice, yes.
And in particular in Antarctica, it hasn't been observed until quite recently that the ice is melting,
and it's melting from below, so the surface ice has remained approximately the same.
But the ice is melting from below so we are loosing ice mass.
It's much more obvious what's going on in the Arctic; the cover is being reduced as well as mass.
We'll talk a little bit about the 28 self-reinforcing feedback loops
that are irreversible at temporal spans relevant to the human condition.
28.
And then there are 2 that are reversible, if we have the political will.
And we are gonna focus primarily on methane clathrates coming out of the Arctic Ocean, because
that one happened 4 years ago, was reported in Science 4 years ago,
so this is the one we know the most about, and we know quite a bit about it, at this point.
And then I'm gonna just list the others because, at some point...
...there's no point.
At some point you realize that we fired the gatling gun and the bullets are all coming
and it only takes one to put us out, so why study the other 9 thousand bullets we fired.
So the Arctic hold the methane hydrates or clathrates in the shallow sea floor of the Arctic Ocean,
which are bubbling up to the surface and releasing the methane into the atmosphere,
from these clathrates, these little cage structures.
That methane in the Arctic sea floor alone is...
...equivalent to a thousand to ten thousand gigatons of carbon;
versus 226 gigatons that were burned with fossil fuels as of March 2010.
So now we are up to 260 gigatons of fossil fuels that were burned - of carbon we burned through fossil fuels -
but, in an event,
the methane hydrates in the Arctic are 4 to 40 times, roughly, the carbon equivalent
of all the carbon dioxide we burned so far since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
So... it's a lot.
We now know that a minor increase in temperature is sufficient to trigger the methane release,
and that's because the clathrates are in the shallow sea bed;
they're not at great depth.
A 50 Gigaton "burp" of methane is highly possible and that in tons is equivalent to more than 1000 Gigatons of carbon,
or roughly 4 times of what we have burned so far.
Highly possible at any time.
Methane plumes have been observed up to 150 kilometres across, by NASAs CARVE project.
A methane plume, what that looks like is... if you're in a ship out there in the Arctic ocean,
and you happen to be in the middle of a methane plume, 150 kilometres across,
it would be like ginger-ale bubbling out of the Arctic Ocean as far as you can see in every direction.
You wouldn't see it for very long, because you'd be dead surely thereafter,
because the methane is lethal.
So, take the picture... for posterity.
Based on an analysis from this one feedback alone,
we can expect global average temperature at more than 4°C of baseline temperature by 2030,
more than 10°C by 2040.
And this is what that looks like, the same cramp kinds of polynomial curve to the existing data;
It's number 3 here, and has methane going exponential out of the Arctic Ocean.
Malcolm Light's analysis concludes that the Gulf Stream transport rate,
or the thermo-healing conveyor belt, which drags warm Atlantic water up into the Arctic,
started the methane hydrate or clathrate gun-firing in the Arctic in 2007,
when the energy per year exceeded 10 million times the energy necessary to release those clathrates.
More than 10 million times.
So, this apparently has been going since 2007;
I think that is a long enough time to conclude that the clathrate gun has been firing.
The clathrate gun is what climate scientist, including James Hanson, have been worried about for a long time.
In 'Storms of my grandchildren', Hanson worried quite a bit about firing clathrate guns,
or the methane bomb; and looks like we are there.
He only know about a self-reinforcing feedback loop being triggered by looking in the review mirror.
We have about 7 years of review mirror, at this point.
This illustrates what Albert Bartlett, professor emeritus from Colorado University for many years,
described in his presentation, which he gave over a thousand times.
He says "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
We think linearly, so we think that this change, so far, has been pretty linear.
But event's have gone beyond linear now.
We are no longer in the linear age in terms of change in the recent past, much less in the near future.
An example commonly used is, in high-school classes, is:
you have a pond and... algae, a tiny bit of algae,
and the algae doubles in cover, everyday.
How long after the lake is half-full before it's full?
One day.
That's an example of what happens with exponential function.
What this looks like as if about 3 weeks ago, in terms of methane concentration,
you see heavy concentration of methane in the Arctic and over the land masses of large continents.
Siberia, where the methane is being released as the permafrost melts.
Northern Canada and all through the Arctic.
The measurements have been up to about 2400 ppb within the last few days.
This is 1 of the 2 reasons that habitat for humans will disappear from the Northern Hemisphere
before it disappears from the Southern Hemisphere.
The other reason is that the land to water ratio is so much higher in the Northern Hemisphere
than it is in the Southern Hemisphere,
and land mass has heat up more than twice as fast as the global average.
So at 2°C rise in global average temperature means
roughly 4,5 or 5°C rise in the interior of continents.
In the south-western interior of a large continent in the Northern Hemisphere,
like, say right there where I live,
you can expect habitat to disappear for humans within weeks after collapse is complete;
or within weeks of hitting the 2°C global average.
All this water, relative to land, in the Southern Hemisphere
provides for a great ameliorating impact in terms of temperature rise.
Not to mention the fact that there's this large continent down there that still has quite a bit of ice;
in contrast to the Arctic, where the Us Navy even predicts
that the Arctic ice will be gone by September 2016.
That's the US Navy; the headline says: the Arctic ice will disappear by 2016, 84 years ahead of schedule.
- [Laughter] - 84 years!
- I'm thinking: who wrote the schedule?
It's ahead of... Who wrote the schedule?? Did we put that on the calendar somewhere?
Journalists.
That's huge, by the way. What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. It ain't Vegas.
We loose the ice in the Arctic and things get really weird in a hurry.
The Arctic is the planet's ice... air conditioner. Arctic Ice is the planetary conditioner.
One example,
to illustrate the point:
To melt one gram of ice into one gram of water,
at zero degrees,
- so they are both at zero degrees, they are both at freezing -
to melt one gram of ice to one gram of water requires 80 calories.
Take that same 80 calories, put it into the gram of water, that is now melted at zero degrees,
put in the 80 calories, it goes up to 80 degrees centigrade.
When we get rid of the ice, that heat starts going into the ocean,
starts warming up the ocean, instead of melting ice.
When the Arctic ice is gone, an event we haven't observed in the human history,
is going to produce profound changes in the temperature, global average temperature.
There is one self-reinforcing feedback loop presented in the ??? ?????? in 2010,
and there are 4 more, discovered and reported in 2011.
One of those being Siberian methane, and methane was leaking out in Siberia as well out of land masses.
It's not just out of the Arctic, it's out of land masses as well.
And in Summer 2010, those methane events were about 30cm, about a foot in diameter.
And so scientists would go out and light those on fire like these Roman candles,
that just go wweeashhh, you know.
Look mum, I can light a fire. This is what scientists do to get attention.
This summer of 2010, those methane events are about 30 centimetres across.
Summer 2011, they're a kilometre across.
We're seeing geological events play out in real time.
We're beyond linear in terms of climate change.
So, one self-reinforcing feedback loop in 2010, 4 in 2011,
the 6 in 2012...
so we are seeing an acceleration of the reporting of the self-reinforcing feedback loops.
And finally, in 2013, there were these 6...
that gets us through July,
and then there were these 6, that gets us through September.
And then there are these 4... so there were 16.
16 reported in 2013.
So far only 1 reported in 2014 but we're running out of places to categorize these things.
We are learning a lot more about each of these self-reinforcing feedback loops,
and the evidence becomes increasingly dire and overwhelming.
Finally there are 2 reversible feedback loops...
...aah, we could not drill in the Arctic,
and in fact we aren't, any more. Isn't that awesome?
Shell went up there in 2012, September, when they're fast tracked,
they sent the two rigs in the world deemed capable of handling the weather in the Arctic,
and they were crushed. Sometimes nature bats last.
And they went screen back and spent the next year and a half working on them,
and they just announced, 2 weeks ago, that they're not going back.
That the seas are too hight, that we don't have the technology to extract that energy,
and the energy doesn't have enough energy in it,
the energy return on investment is so low that it's just not worth it.
So far; we'll see if that holds.
An finally, if there's a way to save a buck, we're gonna take the short-cut, right?
One of my neighbours, in South-western New Mexico,
gave a presentation at a public library, about two and a half weeks ago,
and he was on the first ever tanker to go through the ?? at Northwest Passage.
1969! He was on an oil freighter, of course, that busted it's way through the Northwest passage.
He described the experience in riveting detail, it was a difficult task,
and the other boats to break out that ?? and it got stuck and... it was really tough going.
And now is like you can go up there in your sail boat.
Anybody in September can go through the Northwest Passage now, it's open water.
It was 1969, not that long ago.
So now what?
I like to check in with the pinguins,
quick before we kill them all.
There are two responses to this kind of information.
There's the societal response, what do we do as a society, and there's the individual response.
And the societal response remains the same as it has always been,
"If the message is somehow we are going to ignore jobs and growth
simply to address climate change,... I won't go for that." (Barack Obama, 14 Nov. 2012)
And of course not, this is again in that category of promoting collapse,
and no politician is going to get up on the stage and say:
collapse is gonna save our species therefore we're gonna collapse the settle living arrangements.
The Obama administration surely knew about this briefing
from the Alliance of Small Island States at COP15,
the Copenhagen climate change meeting that they threw under the bus,
and this line comes from their report:
"The long-term sea level that corresponds to current CO2 concentration is about 23 meters above today's levels..."
This one were 385ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere; we are now at 396.
"...and the temperatures will be 6 degrees C or more higher.
These estimates are based on real long-term climate records, not on models."
So there is a lag between CO2 emissions and temperature,
or in the past, between temperature and CO2 emissions.
When the catching up is done, to 385ppm of CO2,
it's gonna produce conditions which are unsuitable for humans to survive.
So then, in terms of individual response, I'd like to turn to the moral philosopher Bruce Springsteen,
for my advise.
"In the end what you don't surrender, well the world just strips away"
Or lets say it like a Zen Buddhist, "Let go or be dragged".
The near future will not be like the recent past.
Or Carpe Diem, seize the day.
When I speak at college campuses, the students point out after my presentation
that I'm pronouncing this incorrectly.
It's actually crappy diem.
As in "You ruined my day."
Or from Nietzsche, "live as though the day were here" to which I would add one thing,
that's from the philosopher that pre-dated Nietzsche by a couple thousand years,
Hippocrates, from the 'Hippocratic Oath': "First, do no harm".
And finally, from the poet Leon Staff in the 'Warsaw Ghetto'
"Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time that it seems that it is not needed at all."
We had science and technology for quite a long time,
and the technology produced by the knowledge that comes from science
has been catastrophic.
Let's take the window berry brow, do some poetry now.
I always finished like a Hollywood movie.
I have really good news...
You get to die. [DNA assures our unique stature (i.e., you get to die)]
Isn't that awesome?
It is, it means you got to live; and the odds against you living,
the odds against this collection of DNA being present,
exceed the odds against plucking at random a single atom from the entire Universe.
We know a lot about DNA, we know roughly how many atoms there are in the Universe:
between 10^80 and 10^100 atoms in the universe.
The odds against you being here, you being in this physical form,
your DNA appearing in this collection, in this human body,
any time, ever, exceed by far the odds against plucking a single atom from the entire Universe.
If I believed in miracles I would think we all were one.
It's incredible! We get to die.
And that means, we get to live.
As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said:
"In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I that are privileged to be here,
privileged with eyes to see where we are and brains to wonder why."
Nobody else gets to do this.
And I'll add something else:
We are here at the end.
Everybody else you've ever known checked out before the movie was over.
- Oh shit!
- And we get to be here AT THE END.
If that isn't awesome I don't know what is.
And this is amazing because we are the last human beings to get to display our humanity,
to get to demonstrate the best of what it means to be human.
We get to act as if we're in hospice because we are.
Because the whole planet is at this point,
including the species that remain, after we drive 200 species to extinction every day.
The whole planet is in hospice.
When I see people in hospice I don't see people grumping for another dollar.
I see people giving things away.
I don't see people hoarding, I see people giving of themselves.
I see people acting with kindness and compassion,
and going out with some ??? of dignity.
Let's try that!
Even if all the data are wrong; even if I'm wrong.
Wouldn't that be something?
Wouldn't that be a pretty reasonable way to live?
I think so.
But I've been called some funny names.
Things that we might pursue in hospice, and here is the typical CEO response:
"And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors,
we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit."
[Laughter]
So, this is the Goldman Sachs approach.
I mean, this is ???
and Jamie Diamond,
and the people who apparently just love money so much that they must have more.
This is the 85 people on the planet...
...who have much net financial worth as... half of the people in the planet.
But I don't think this would be anybody in this room or you wouldn't be in this room.
There's money to be made out there.
Still money to be made in planetary destruction; get out there and get after it!
No, I don't think this is us.I think...
I think we are the people who actually might be interested in pursuing something different than that,
something other than fiat currency, like: we might pursue love, in lives of excellence.
And by lives of excellence I am thinking here of Socrates and his approach.
He spent an entire life asking 6 questions.
6 questions! That's all, he just went around asking people questions; 6 questions at various forms.
What is courage?
What is good?
What is justice?
What is moderation? What is piety? What is virtue?
6 questions.
After 7 years they killed him for it. We should be so lucky.
To ????? so much that we... just by asking questions,
the state can't tolerate us anymore.
What a way to go! Nobody gets out alive.
So that's a life of excelence; and pursuing love, pursuing those we love.
I´m thinking about your children, your grandchildren, the people you love spending time with,
and I'm also thinking about the living planet that sustains us all.
It's a living planet that allows us to live. Not the other way around.
I used to say, before the great recession really kicked in,
that if you think the economy is more important then the environment,
try holding your breath while counting your money.
But then I'd speak in Michigan and people would pull out their wallet,
while holding their breath, and put it back in and say: "what else do you got?"
They didn't take but a couple of minutes.
Because in Michigan they're in the front line of collapse.
I think we can do better than what we've been doing.
Occasionally people despair, while hearing me speak...
[Laughter]
Astonishing, I know.
Or from the ??? ???: "Inconceivable!"
To which I respond: The action is the antidote to despair.
Even if, especially if,
our actions don't matter in the long run.
What better judge of our character than our willingness and ability to act?
I once read that the best judgement of a man's character - obviously this wasn't written by a man -
the best judgement of a man's character is what he can do for those who do nothing for him.
What he does for those who can do nothing for him.
So think about that. Think about people who can't do nothing for you.
You have power over them, and yet you treat them with kindness and dignity and compassion.
And we can do that... about everything.
It's not just about our character, it's about everything we do; it's about our humanity.
Action is the antidote to despair.
Is iconoclastic, ??????? pointed out years and years ago
So, if you're damned if you do and damned if you don't,
then do! What do you got to loose?
What do we got to loose?
Let's do something!
Even if ultimately it wont make any difference.
We are judged only by ourselves. There is no History left to judge us anymore.
If you wanna learn more about my writting,
and how could you not, [Laughter]
I write profusely at 'Nature Bats Last', guymcpherson.com
and I write a monthly essay for 'Transition Voice since the ??? was found dead about 4 years ago,
and my latest effort is with a couple of other teachers and homesteaders
in preparing people for an ambiguous future.
Finally, my latest book is called 'Going Dark', and I have copies here.
I promote in practice a gift economy, which means you can just take one if you want.
There are also bookmarks; laminated bookmarks.
And the bookmarks have, most importantly,
this url on them.
So, there's an essay in 'Going Dark' that starts on page 85,
that describes the dire nature of the climate situation. I've only given just a brief overview here.
And all this information can be found with links, at: guymcpherson.com/climate-chaos/
That url is on these bookmarks, so by all means take a bookmark, take a book,
if you wanna give me a gift back you can give me fiat currency, but...
but I'm not asking for that. If you want, give me a gift.
Sometimes when I speak at college campuses, nobody has any money, of course specially college students;
they owe their entire life savings, forever, to the federal government,
just for the privilege of going to school,
so, frequently they give me pieces of art.
But, last time that I spoke in a college campus it was in Winnipeg,
and I complained that I would sign books but I don't have a pen,
and so the first guy says "Here, you can have my pen. I'll take a book."
So, sounds great! Thoughtfull. Some people are clever.
I would be... ecstatic to entertain your questions, or comments,
and at this point, of course, answers are particularly welcome.
Thank you very much attention and, please, lets have a discussion.
[Applause]
Thank you! Can we turn the lights up?
All the way in the back there?
- Do you see any possibilities for a mass-scale investment in carbon sequestration,
soils, trees, plants, in a time scale that could make a difference?
I heard a trillion tree programme ??? ???
- Right... - ...and soils; those sequestred in a time frame that may yet be relevant?
- No. - O.K.
- And a primary reason for that is...
it's gonna require an enormous amount of fossil fuel energy to plant trees,
and to transport the water to the desert where that project proposes planting those trees.
In addition, the time is so short, we are talking a decade and a half.
To implement change, trees just are not gonna grow that fast and sequester that much carbon.
In addition, they are carbon neutral.
You plant the trees, they grow, they sequester the carbon, and then what happens for them?
- They die. - That's right, they die, and almost all that carbon is released back up to the atmosphere.
They fix some in the soils, in ???, depends on the ecosystem how much they fix in the soils...
But I don't see that; and I read about this data that this essay, with few likes.
Aaahm... right up here. Maybe not. Go ahead.
- Did you say that link that...That link will have information from your presentation, or?
- Yes. All the information I presented here is included there, and there´s links to everything I said.
- O.K.
- So, this is the single best source of what's going on in the real world of climate change.
-O.K. I have a second question.Earlier you were talking about positive feedback loops,
and I was just wondering if the ones you listed, you said there was two that we could change,
'reversible', and there were 16, was it?
- 28. - Oh, 28, yeah, right, yeah.
The ones you listed... I mean... what about like...
the plankton that dies and the carbon that's released from that,
and that's like a sink, and then like the... I don't know...
- I love it when I´m the most optimistic person in the room!
[Laughter] -Yeah, and then there's a...
- Yeah, these are the ones that are reported in sort of the mainstream scientific arena.
And there may well be others that people haven't thought over, that we haven't documented yet.
Like the fact that all those phytoplanktons are gonna die
and are gonna be unable to fix the carbon they're fixing now.
- Right.
- Yeah. You're a happy good lucky guy, I can tell.
You love the fun of the party, aren't you? [Laughter]
- I have read climate scientists who don't ??? ??? I read Hanson, Kevin Anderson...
none of them, so far that I have known, predict that human beings are gong to be extinct in 15 years
[imperceptible]
- Yes, that's right
- Why?. What facts do you have that we're not hearing from other scientists?
- Almost nobody is willing to admit that the clathrate gun has been fired.
That includes Hanson. Although Hanson made a major shift within the last month.
Up until a month ago, he said that 2°C is a relevant target,
and less than a month ago, he said 1°C; we can not possibly go beyond 1°C.
As we've known since the United Nations (UN) greenhouse gas task force reported,
in October 1990, that we can't go over 1°C or it's gonna be utter catastrophe.
Well, it turns out that we have our utter catastrophe with the self-reinforcing feedback loops at .85
Earlier than expected.
Kevin Anderson is the guy in the UK that doesn't fly,
...and he is the person who comes the closest to anybody I know
who still has a job who speaks truth to power.
So, I have great respect for him and great respect for James Hanson,
although James Hanson is still on the nuclear phase
unaware that recent scientific literature indicates that
nuclear power plants are not carbon neutral, they actually produce fossil fuel carbon
to build them, and get them going; over their life span, they are carbon intensive.
So, I think Hanson is behind the time.
Yes, he has been outspoken for a long time,
but I don't think he has kept up with the relevant literature.
- What are your thoughts about Fukushima?
- What are my thoughts about Fukushima?
I think it was probably a bad idea.
[Laughter]
I wasn't done with my sentence...
Who's that actor? That guy... when he gets a script he throws out all the punctuation?
[Imperceptable]
Maybe him too, but it´s not...
Christopher Walken!
Christopher Walken throws out the punctuation and that's why...
he has these unusual gaps in the way he speaks.
He doesn't make a lot of sense, sometimes.
He's a funny guy!
But I digress.
I think it's a bad idea to...
...to implement a programme so that we can boil water
without having the slightest clue of what to do with the waste product.
Waste products that last millions of years, in the case of plutonium.
There has never been a human structure to last longer than 50 thousand years.
We're so filled with uberess that we think "oh, we'll fix that; we'll solve that later."
So in 1939, when the nuclear age begin, we just assumed someone would fix that down the road.
Guess what, nobody fixed it.
There is a paper presented at American Geophysical Union meetings...
aahm, Robin: what's the guy's name? - Brad Werner.
Brad Werner; if he was in Germany it would be Verner. But he's Brad Werner.
And the title of his talk was "Is Earth Fucked".
[Laughter]
And I think he.... yeah. I mean he did answered it.
But it's pretty clear that because of cluster Fukushima...
somewhere such events, I mean, just consider Fukushima,
which according to Hellen Calicut, Arnic Anderson and David Suzuki and other nuclear folks,
Fukushima alone represents a significant threat to human habitat in the Northern Hemisphere.
There is four hundred and forty some nuclear power plants around the world
and so if we collapse the settled living arrangements, if we stop,
if we get that president that stands up and says "I'm gonna have lights out by the day after tomorrow",
and we actually pull that off, than we could have stopped runaway greenhouse,
if we did that like 40 years ago,
but,then all the nuclear power plants in the world melted out,
so that's gonna be inconvenient.
- Why would they melt down?
Because they rely upon grid tie electricity
to maintain the circulation of the water through the cooling ponds.
Until those spent few rods spend years in this cooling ponds
and then are stored into dry cask storage, they're dangerous.
So, they're dangerous for a long time.
There was a panel in New York City late last year, including Ralph Nader
and the most recent ex-head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States,
and they were asked, at the very end of the panel, how long it would take to decommission Indian Point,
the new nuclear power plant right outside New York City. And they hummed and hummed, refusing to answer.
And finally, they were badgered long enoug that they had to come with an answer. They said 6 decades...
to shut down Indian Point.
6 decades...
It's a long time!
Forever is a long time, especially towards the end.
- A difficult question. I have read a novel about global warming and it described a lot of what you are saying,
but I also struggle with this idea, we have a mythology that human beings are this sort of alien presence
and we're doing this terrible thing to nature. And to point a fact: we are nature.
There is nothing outside of nature and we are exactly what nature is doing.
And, you know, if I go over Phoenix, or looking at what's going on in China,
it seems like it's nature doing this;
and from your philosophical side... because often we want to demonize people for going to Disneyland
or driving a SUV, but you know what? Usually is, in many cases, their best human emotions,
they want their families safe so, out of love they think and consider these things safe,
but of course, wont, but they're going to Disneyland because they are doing it for their kids.
So you are working against something so fundamental in the human experience,
that it's also, probably, the best art that people experience themselves.
and to tell them "now you are wrong; now you're destroying everything
when you're an abomination to all of nature" it's a very difficult thing philosophicaly.
So I'd like to know your philosopher side; if we are nature... and we didn't come from another planet,
we are doing what nature wants done here.
- Anybody familiar with Lucy Kay? Comediant. - Oh Yeah!
- Social character, Lucy Kay? I love this.
The one on Indians? This one little one minute clip on Indians, it's awesome.
He says "Sometimes I think people came from like another planet." That's how he starts.
So, they were just that alien.
But no, we are in fact part of nature.
We act as if we are apart from nature, instead of a part of nature,
but we're definitely a part of nature.
And we are the mutant part.
2 million years human beings lived on the planet without going and taking a population overshoot.
2 million years humans lived on the planet, at the global level, without going to human population overshoot.
2 million years we lived in... in systems, in social systems,
that did not allow for degradation of human habitat.
And then, a few thousand years ago we discovered civilization
and civilization grew several times, more or less, ...several places, more or less simultaneously
and from then it's all have been a wild drive, we were immediately in overpopulation overshoot
and started destroying water and fouling the air and washing the soil into the ocean,
and all that stuff we have been doing since then,
furthermore ???? up human population overshoot,
in the rate of 207 thousand or so people a day, that's ???
so, if you're looking for fault, for blame, it's not you and me.
It's these settled living arrangements into which we have been born.
We are born into captivity, we are born in the civilization, we didn't get to choose.
Nobody comes out and says "Oh shit! No, I'm going back in."
[Laughter]
Right? Not only that but it just keeps getting better, right?, We've got ipods now.
And the whole thing. And it just looks like it keeps getting better.
Every year my life has been worse than the year before.
Every year we dirty more air and foul more water and that whole thing,
and everybody I know thinks it's getting better because we have smartphones. Right?
So that's my bumper sticker "Genocide for Smartphones".
We know how we chose, didn't we?
More about blame. Of course it's not our fault, we're born into this settled living arangements,
we did what society expected of us and if we didn't we were called crazy...
and furthermore, it's FORTY YEARS... from cause to effect;
It's 40 years from greenhouse gas emissions until temperature rise.
40 years! Forty years ago, I was 13. I wasn't even driving.
I was looking forward to it, having no clue, in my early teens, what the consequences would be.
None of us knew.
If you knew 40 years ago that we were headed for the abyss,
and you lived this long, you're a stronger person than me.
To have that clatter around in your head... - Thank you!
- Yeah, thank you!
[Laughter]
- Did she just say ... Did she just thank me for calling her crazy?
Because I almost never get that!
Ok, You're all crazy!
- Thank you! - Thank you! [Laughter]
So, it's 40 years from cause to effect, from action to consequence
in terms of warming of the planet, and within the last 29 years
we generated more greenhouse gas emissions than in the previous 236 years combined.
So we haven't even begun to see the temperature rise associated with those last 29 years.
.85 is a walk in the park compared to what's coming.
.85 °C rise.
So, I'm not looking to blame anybody, except the whole thing.
The whole system is irredeemably corrupt, and we just showed up,
like we didn't get to choose it.
We could have chose sometime when we wouldn't get to see the end of the movie.
And for most people, they think that was better.
- What do you think of some of these ideas about shooting particles up in the atmosphere?
- Geoengineering is a fine question.
Lets see what the intergovernmental panel on climate change,
in their latest assessment, which ???, which has been heavily leeked,
they say "Global warming is irreversible without massive geoengineering of the atmosphere's chemistry."
that's a direct quote.
Since then, we've got a paper coming out from Earth System Dynamics, that says:
"Climate geo-engineering cannot simply be used to undo global warming"
Next paper: "Geoengineering may succeed in cooling the Earth, but it would also
disrupt precipitation patterns around the world."so we couldn't actually grow any food.
Next paper: "Attempts to reverse the impacts of global warming
by injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere could make matters worse."
Next paper Environmental Research Letters "Risk of abrupt and dangerous warming is inherent
to the large-scale implementation of ..." Solar Radiation Management. Putting particles up into the air.
Next paper, from a couple of days ago. Current schemes,
and this paper looked at 5, the 5 most common current schemes of geoengineering,
"Current schemes are likely to either be relatively useless or actually make things worse"
Finally, let's ask the people what they think.
They think it's a stupid idea.
I agree with them.
For a change, I agree with people in this completely irredeemably corrupt society.
I think they figured this one out.
[Imperceptible]
- ...there is nothing that can be done, doesn't make any difference ???,
nothing can change the fact that everyone in this room is going to die from climate change.
Do yo feel that presenting things in that form actually encourages people to try and do something about it?
- No. - No. It doesn't.
- For several reasons. First of all, I don't know anybody, well there's a handful of people around the world,
??? resistance members among them, who are trying to terminate the settle living arrangements.
I've been trying to do that for a long time and it really hasn't worked out very well.
2, people say: Well, in light of this information don't you think people will become hedonists?
[Laughter]
Americans? [Laugter]
Becoming hedonists?
How would I tell the difference?
We could have everything we want, we have the world's reserve currency.
I don't know a single college student who doesn't show up at college having made a requisite trip to Europe.
That was a big deal when I was a kid. You got to love stories that start like "When I was a kid..."
When I was a kid, people didn't just go to Europe when they're in Highschool.
It was inconceivable that anybody would do such a thing.
Am I afraid people will start acting like hedonists? Not really.
The Buddha... I bet this story isn't true but I'm gonna tell it as if it is.
The Buddha, apparently, asked one of his students how frequently he thought about death,
and the student goes "I think about death pretty much all the time, probably 100 times a day."
And the Buddha goes "You must think about death with every breath."
Let's live. Let's live here, now.
You all knew you were gonna die. Right? Since you were 11 or so?
And you reach this understanding when you're 5 or so,
apparently you realize that you're gonna die but you don't really have a chance to synthesise,
to integrate it into your being. But by the time you're 10 or 12 years old,
everybody knows that death doesn't do just apply to grandma, it applies to them too.
And I remember, actually, when my grandmother died when I was 11 years old,
and I cried for 2 weeks and I barely knew the woman.
I mean, I met her a few times, she lived always away, and I didn't know her at all.
And I cried for a long time, and later, much later, it occurred to me that I wasn't crying for her.
I was crying for me.
She was an indicator that I'm mortal too.
And I hate that!
I mean I don't mind that nobody gets out alive, as long as I'm an exception.
[Laughter]
So, the wolf is always at the door. Right?
Let's act with some urgency in our lives; lets act as if the here and now matters;
let's act as if people around us matter; let's act as if the living planet matters too.
That's all I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting that we act.
I am also suggesting that I can't imagine it will work to save our species,
but as a conservation biologist I have long known that humans were gonna go extinct.
I didn't know it would be on my watch.
But...
...all species go extinct,
including the most clever of them all.
You, you with the hat.
He says: Is it true that you're investing heavily in start up space travel companies?
Or are you relying upon intervention by friendly extra-terrestrial?
[Laughter]
No, I'm not investing in space travel.
I suggest that we live here, now. That's sort of inconsistent with jumping in a space-ship.
And I read the Martian chronicles when I was a kid
- I don't know if you remember Ray Bradbury's classic commercial chronicles? -
and people were starting to kill each other in mass here on Earth, so the rest of the people decided to go on Mars,
And it wasn't long that they were on Mars before they could look back and see
everybody on Earth killing themselves, and by that time the process was well under way on Mars.
So, we not only have to escape, we have to change human behavior.
With respect to aliens,
all you have to do is pretend that I'm an alien,
and now convince me. Tell me why you're worth saving?
Tell me why you're worth extending the run
of the species that is driving to extinction 200 species a day?
Tell me why you're worth saving, when you're not saving anything.
If you can do that, you can have the microphone.
I have 2 questions. The quick one... I kind of missed what you meant by clathrate gun.
That's not my main question; that just came up from your answers to other people's questions.
aah... people that I know who question climate science,
aahm... one of the big arguments that they make... is.. ahm
ok aah... with carbon you're talking parts per millionth, with methane you're talking parts per billionth,
and they say that really the biggest greenhouse gas, the thing that can hold the most heat
is water in the atmosphere.
Which is, I'm not sure exactly but it's aah
- That's correct, by the way. The biggest greenhouse gas is water in the atmosphere.
- So...
- Right. It's a little change in a little number. What can possibly go wrong?
- Right.
- Yeah, I've heard that one.
- aahm... When you ingest Anthrax it's a little number, that has a big change.
280ppm is not 400ppm.
If you question the greenhouse effect,
go out in your car on a sunny day, with the windows down,
and it's almost the same temperature inside as out, and then roll up the windows.
Like in 5 minutes is a little uncomfortable. Well, in 15 is a lot of uncomfortable and 30 minutes...
- ... ??? of the car it's the window. [Imperceptible]
- Right, and so this is an excellent analogy for Earth with a whole bunch of windows,
and every molecule of CO2, above baseline, is rolling up a little window,
and it takes 40 years for those effects to be felt.
I'm not sure how to convince people who are unconvinced by evidence.
There's no... I don't think there's any way to do that.
- It's clear to me that global warming is going on,
but the math between parts per millionth and parts per billionth and
water vapor, which I'm not sure exactly but it's much different,
so I have a hard time at making that math work, making it, conceptualizing it,
the whole "yeah, that's what it is!".
- Well, I'm not sure I can help you then because
you can put greenhouse emissions or global warming or climate change in the search box,
your favorite search engine, and find abundant information
that is merely elucidation of what has become the scientific obvious.
In 1847, George Perkins Marsh, United States ambassador and naturalist,
- is it not interesting? What a weird combination.
You don't see many ambassadors these days who aren't attorneys, much less who are naturalists -
1847, before we started burning any fossil fuels at scale,
1847, George Perkins Marsh predicted global warming as a result of burning fossil fuels.
By 1896, Svante Arrhenius, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry,
predicted we would observe a 1°C temperature rise - global temperature, planetary average -
by the year 2000, if we keep burning fossil fuels.
The mechanism has been known for a really long time,
it was demonstrated in practice by Guy Kalender,
in 1938, in a paper by Royal Society,
and in 1938 he demonstrated there was a significant rise in global average temperature.
It was a 40 year lag, he documented that rise in about 1915,
about 40 years after we started burning fossil fuels at scale.
The evidence is overwhelming.
If it can't convince somebody then it can't convince somebody,
and I'm not interested in trying to convincing them.
It's pointless.
This is like the difference between trying to convince people
who believe in climate change, but that it's not that bad.
The burning of fossil fuels, of course, creates heat,
so we've got lots of heat going on all over the place, all the time.
So couldn't that heat that we're continuously introducing into the environment...
be a major factor? - No. It can't.
Because we turn the heat off for extended periods of time, in various places,
we now removed for the urban heat island effect and for local phenomena
when calculating global average temperature.
We can talk about this later but I don't want to spend any more time on it, today
The mechanism has been described, has been illustrated, we've known for a long time
that you can't burn fossil fuels that accumulated over millions of years
in the span of 150 to 200 years without consequences.
We've know this for a long time. We're seeing those consequences.
We shouldn't be surprised.
All the way in the back. - Can we shift gears for a bit
and talk about living gracefully? Can you say a few words about the gift economy?
I really... that's what is near dear to me.
- Sure. I live in a small valley in south-western New Mexico,
where I practice and promote agrarian anarchy.
Anarchy is not chaos. Anarchy is an absence of rulers.
Chaos is an absence of rules.
I practice agrarian anarchy in the spirit of Wendell Berry
and Edward Abbey,
and Henri David Thoreau
and to a lesser extend, with slaves involved, Thomas Jefferson
and I also practice and promoted gift economy,
and that's what we did for the first 2 million years of the human experience.
It was only after civilization arouse that we started...
the notion of currency.
Yes, fiat currency.
I, almost every time I go to the store, which isn't very often,
the cashier rings me up and then here she says "How would you like to pay for that?"
and I bring out these pieces of green paper and I go: "You're still taken these?"
They look at me like I'm crazy.
I'm not rolling that out, because I've been called a lot worse.
But they're still taking those, and it's all a con game,
it's an unbelievable scheme!
I mean... the secretary of treasury Jack Lew admitted that, last October!
He said: if people want money instead of rolling over the bonds, the whole system comes down.
He admitted it, it's a Ponzi scheme; right out there in public.
And the American public is like: "[yawn] Can you pass the chips?
What´s on today any way?"
So, a gift economy... of course a gift economy works great when you're in a triangle situation.
If you have dunbar's number of people, 150 to 250 people,
well, then everybody can keep track of everybody
and the consequence of shunning somebody is probably death for that person.
Now that we've become so globalized and interconnected and dependent upon fiat currency,
that then all bets are of, so to speak.
But, I'm still trying to promote that, even though it doesn't do any good.
It's like everything else.
Why not? I propose doing everything differently, then we're doing now.
- It feels great!
- Yes.
aaah... over here. - Thank you! Thanks for coming ???
You kind of lost me on the methane hidrates. I think that it's not kind of ??? but,
aah, I was doing some research recently on... what they're calling next generation biofuels
and one of them is cellulosic ethanol, the other one, that you're probably familiar with is Algae,
and in the finding there´s a number of people and companies that are doing some pretty cool stuff,
and I came upon one in Florida that has already ??
that they can do 10 thousand gallons of biofuels per acre per year,
using salt water and the CO2 coming out of power plants.
10 thousand gallons. You get about 50 gallons from soybean oil.
Those are completely different things. Could that, you know, change your predictions
of ????? that going? Again, they've already proven it...
The company that I encourage everyone to look it up is Algenol, A-L-G-E-N-O-L,
they are in Florida and they're trying to expand right now.
- These are not my predictions, first of all. These are other people's predictions.
I'm just relaying the good news.
Providing some context.
With respect to the methane, that's a second question about methane,
so I should explain that a little bit better.
Methane is enclosed within small cages,
only slightly bigger than the methane molecule, the CH4.
Enclosed within a cage and that cage is in the shallow sea beds,
and when it warms, that cage with the methane starts to rise,
and when it warms a little bit more the cage falls apart.
And then the methane molecules are released directly into the atmosphere.
So this cages are called clathrates or hydrates.
This is called the clathrate gun or the methane bomb.
It appears that we´ve triggered it.
Until we can undo the irreversible...
Until we can reverse the irreversible feedback loops, I don´t think it matters.
Furthermore, I´m not a fan of the car culture.
I think the car culture is a huge part of our problem, and so...
continuing the car culture... I don´t think is a good idea,
even if it means carrying our cars with buffalo shit, I´m still not a fan.
- So but, I mean, if we were just in a perfect world
we were able to stop going for oil, stop ?????? Canada
and start plugin in these ponds, start growing these biofuels that way...
10 thousand gallons per acre per year, you got to admit is pretty significant.
yes, I´de be interested in seing the energy return on the amount of energy investment for that.
Is this tight oil, like Shell and tar sands?
-No, no, this is algea.
I understand, but algea to petrol is not one magic wand ?????
- Oh, what it is is 9 000 of those gallons is ethanol and the remaining 1000 is about
1/3 jet fuel, 1/3 gasoline and 1/3 diesel and then the sludge ???
Ok, I don´t know enough to comment. I encourage anybody who would go algenol to look them up.
I´m not a fan of the car culture, of airplane culture, of maintaining industrial civilization
that is making us sick, making us crazy and killing us, by any means.
So, if this is another way to prop up civilization, I´m not a fan.
That´s what it sounds like.
Yes. -Two questions:
How and when did you come to your realisations about this?
And, if there is no hope, why aren´t you down in southwestern Mexico ???????
Wow, two tough questions. Pack your bag. Could we ascort this guy out?
Security? Do we have security? I think it´s time we let this sucker out.
Sometimes I show and we have technical problems.
The first stop of this tour was in Eugene (I have a point)
and I found out, one minute before the presentation beggins, I don´t have a projector.
So I just did stand-up. Tragedy.
So, I apreciate you humouring me with your laughter.
I reached this realisation in 2002, when I was editing a book on climate change,
that we were heading for extinction probably in 2030 or so.
And, about a year later, I discovered the concept of global peak oil, and I realised:
This is it! This is the ?????. This is the one that´s going to save us
in terminating the industrial civilization. We will stop spilling emissions.
And... that was a long time ago.
- And fracking happended!
Yeah. Fracking and tar sands. You know, everything we do to maintain
this settled arrangement that is killing everything, including us.
So, that was in 2003-2004 that I thought there would be a game over by now.
I moved to southwestern New Mexico for a variety of reasons.
One of which was that the university were I was working
was just another exemple of fundamentally irredeamebly corrupt system.
So I didn´t feel confortable working there anymore.
I´m not there now
because the project has failed.
I built a platinum level doomsdead, a homestead that has 2 solar whels
and a ?????.
No fossil fuels are required to run the place. It´s amazing for huge gardens
a large orchard, goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys and a goose named Myrtle.
The most important part of the whole thing. And then she left.
She went to the neighbours!
They have six big ??? ducks and she´s like: "hey, this is my people."
And she wondered off and she spends all her time down there.
She come like one every two or three months, and she´s "quack quack quack"
and the honk says "I just want to check in and say I don´t live here anymore. Screw you!"
And that´s when I knew. I got to get the hell out of there, because it ain´t working.
Even Myrtle wouldn´t stay.
So, it´s been a complete catastrophic failure.
I would rather be here than there.
- Why was it a failure?
- You mean, besides Myrtle?
- Yeah, besides Myrtle. - I know, I know.
I can´t remenber the stuff. I have to look it up.
It says here in this book - it must be true because it´s on paper-
Let´s see...
"I left the easy life of a tenure professor in an amazing university
to develop and occupy the property I called 'The MudHut',
and I did that for five premiere reasons, all of which have failed.
So, all the goals have failed to be met.
Firts of those, I left as an act of resistance against the dominant paradigme.
Guess what, the dominant paradigme and those within it failed to notice.
2. I left as an example of alternative living, in my case promoting a gift economy
within agrarian anarchy.
My example has failed to inspire a number of significant others to live differently,
to live outside the system.
3. I left as a way to promote more... to provide more time
(my eyes are getting worse everyday)
a way to provide more time for speaking and writing about important topics,
actions which were discouraged at the university where I was working.
My last department head was hired specifically to make my life
miserable enough so that I would leave.
She´s a dean at the University of Washington now. Congratulations.
I have enjoyed limited sucess in this arena, although triumph ???? not battling administator
dragons has been largely consumed with vigorous physical work,
like digging those damed trenches for the water delivery system.
4. The place is a refuge for the youngster, the son of the couple
with whom my wife and I shared this property, as well as his generation.
Due to ongoing accelerating climate change, the unsure future in this location probably will be
notably short.
And 5. it´s a way to extend my own life and that of my wife.
Due to ongoing accelerating climate change, our future in this location is likely to be quite short.
So this were the 5 goals I had. The next paragraph starts with:
"Perhaps most importantly there is a widenning chasm within the partnership formed
in this shared property. Although leaving the life that I loved as an academic
to move to a diferent location made sense at the time,
long before the climate change news grew so dire, and everyone's collapse appeared eminent
I now view the major personnal transition as infinitly regretable.
I´ve come to see that it was the wort mistake of my life, althoug I´m not dead yet,
so can yet get up and be myself.
So it hasn´t worked in part because of the relations on the property,
which have broken down in a somewhat horrifying manner.
You know, living with people is hard.
???? that was essencially my question.
When you found out that essencially we were all going to be done,
???????????????????
Of course, my reaction at the time was utter despair
and I didn´t fit in particularly well in society before that,
but when you start mourning events that haven´t happened yet,
you´re an absolute nutcase.
And so, people are mourning the death of their 92 year old grandmother,
whose been hanging on suffering ???? from cancer for 3 years, and I´m like;
Let it go. That´s one human being that´s had a full and rich life. Let her go.
I´m mourning the near come demise of our entire species, and people are going:
What? You don´t know what you´re talking about. That´s a theoretical thing.
It´s so abstract. It reminds me of "Star Trek".
-Yay! Somethings do.
I don´t know if you remember the early days "Star Trek"... - Yay!
- I got that... Yes, that´s who exactly I´m going to talk about,
Mister Live Long and Prosper. -Yay!
So, a ship was blown up, a vulcan ship was blown up
and like 300 people died and Spok sheds a tear.
A tear! It´s unbelieveble! He shows no emotions ever.
And all the humans are like: "what? what´s up with that?"
He says: "You people mourn the death of a single individual.
I just lost 320 of my comrads, and you can´t understand."
And I felt the same way, only it was 7 billion.
And nobody got that either. Weird.
[Imperceptible]
Yes, so the question is if this climate chaos causes human extinction,
will there be any animals that would be alive. Yes, I think there will be.
The faster we terminate the industrial civilization, the more especies,
I believe, will remain. Even if terminating industrial civilization
leads to 2ºC in a short period of time, then I still think that
some organisms have a chance.
Here´s the thing: if we have chinook salmon next year,
we might have chinook salmon in twenty years.
But if we don´t have chinook salmon next year, we won´t.
So, what I´m working for, is those other species, at this point.
I think we´re done.
But I´m working for those other species, and here´s what I´m really working for:
Edward O. Wilson, Conservation Biologist at Harvard University
predicts that only 10 million years after an extinction level event
- there have been five, so far, we are in the midst of the 6th extinction-
only 10 million years after an extinction level event, we have a vibrant green planet again.
10 million years.
The more seeds we can plant now, the more species we save now,
the greater likelyhood that in only 10 million years, we have a vibrant planet again.
Recently, like in the last two months, there was a new species,
previously unknown to humanity, discovered in the sarcophagus of Chernobyl.
It was a slime mold. In the sarcophagus.
Ionizing radiation at that level and we can´t even kill everything.
As mutch as that´s our goal. Is to kill everything.
It appears that we´re not going to be "successful" at that.
So, my goal is to keep as many species around as we possibly can.
Do you take any comfort from quantum mechanics and dark energy and dark matter?
This could be a very small sliver of what we think is real.
Sure. Absolutely. I take comfort from nearly anything at this point.
Dark matter maters.
I´m remembering two of the past extinctions, where 60 millions and 200 millions and...
55 millions and 251 million years ago
what percentage of the land and sea species were ???? or lasted ???
Was like 95%?
In The Great Dying, 251 million years ago, the number of taxa, the number of species,
but, probably more general level, the number of genera that we lost
was more than 95%.
And 55 million years ago, it was more than 90%.
So, it´s a huge proportion.
So everything that´s here now ????
Yes, that´s right. Everything that´s here now
is because those species made it through the extinction ????
So, your hope would be a 5 or 10 or 15% survival rate.
Yes. If we have 0,0001% that get it through that´s better than 0,00001%.
Yes, absolutely. Let´s act as if every species matters.
On the higher estimates that you have though, do you feel like there could be
a runaway kind of climate chaos that could lead to a similar ?????
that just ???? beyond where ?????
Yes, it´s possible. It´s possible that we could go Venus.
In the same frame of analysis, he sugests that, by 2026, we´ll have a 160 degrees centigrade
of the surface temperature. So that´s Venus, by the end of the century.
It could be, but I think we should act as if that´s not going to happen,
that we should act as if our future matters, that we should act as if the future of
other organisms matters as well, instead of just saying: uhm, it´s done.
It´s game over. Let´s party like it´s 1999.
I have another question too, about what you were saying of the actual time scale,
and now I know that there is some... this drought in California,
and ???? food prices are going up, and all this kind of things,
I kind of intuitively felt that maybe we are seing the beginning,
maybe they´re not going down again, like this is.... the food prices
and the accessability of food... and so I´m wondering if you think
that what we´re seing now with how this affects on the food system,
if that is going to be the first to get afected as far as what we will really notice,
and see that the producing areas are not going to be able to produce food anymore
It could very well be and David ??? writing for Fiesta Group
in late 2012, as I recall, indicates that global economic collapse will be complete
in as little as 3 weeks after a significantly disruption in the supply chain.
And here he´s talking about supplay chain disruption, including food, or oil,
or any number of other things. A significant disruption we´re 3 weeks away
from terminating the settled living arrangments.
Yes, I think that what we´re seing now is the result of climate change
as already baked into the cake, and that because of that 40 year lag,
there is little we can do, now, that will have any impact on
how those changes will play out. We´re locked in to a drought.
????? for a really long period of time.
It´s going to be wet and cold in the U.K. and northern Europe, for a long time.
And so, yes, ???? food suply.
What do you think the social impact will be, for the next 2 or 3 year, on a global scale?
Social impacts of climate change?
Several people, in retrospect, now have viewed the Syrian´s spring
as a consequence of drought, of food shortage induced by climate change,
So, if that´s a canarian coalmine, and it might be, then we could see that spreading to
far wider portions of the globe. So, I read an analysis yesterday, indicating
that we´re one year away from massive global scale scale food riots,
because of disruptions in the food supply. Could be.
I can´t hear you.
[imperceptable]
Ok, so, are there any counter-balancing cooling signs? Well, there are
there´s at least one negative feedback I know about,
one negative reinforcement ???. As the planet warms it releases more heat
in the space, but as near as I can tell, that´s linear, not exponential.
We are due for an ice age and the sun is dimming,
and apparently it will reach it´s lowest point, in terms of radiation, in about 2020.
So, we´re dimming right now. We´re overcoming the effects of a ...
of decreased energy coming from the sun.
What is scheduled to be an ice age, we´re overcoming that with carbon emissions.
So, vulcanos anybody? I mean, they´re worth for the short term.
But we need to keep spilling the materials into the air, the refelctive particles in to the air
forever, and so... super vulcanos? Anybody signing up for Yellow Stone going?
So, it may well take something like that to counter-balance
??????, I´m a psychologist. I remember reading some...
And I´m not crazy, so...
I remember reading some pop psychology reviews about
educaters telling people about climate change, and if they put it
in a `no way out of it`kind of perspective, the students leave feeling as if
they can´t do anything about it. And when they track
how they change their behaviours afterwards, they don´t change anything
or, you know, recycle less. If they hear about it in a positive light,
"we cand do something", they tend to do more greenish kind of stuff.
Are you familiar with the study, if so, how do you... are there other things
that go in the equation for you, like
it´s going to go anyway so at least we could go with some dignity, something like that?
I'm not familiar with the study but that never ceased me from commenting about a study
just because I don't know anything.
The comment about recycling, if I punch you in the face
do you think it's O.K. if I apologize?
No, of course not! That's a horrible thing!
But we recycle... It's the same thing.
Punch the planet in the face and we recycle,
"oh it's good, look, I recycle, look at me..."
What about reduce and reuse?
Remember the other 2 R's, the ones that matter?
The only ones that make corporate America any money is the recycle one.
So, that's why we do that. But, it's an apology after a punch in the face.
I do this for many reasons,
among them that nobody else does.
I think we have the right to know,
and the corporate media and the corporate governments of the world
are not telling you the facts.
I think you have the right to know, I think you have the right to know what I know and
there's a whole bunch of people who know what I know, by the way.
I was contacted, out of the blue, much to my surprise,
a guy you would all know if I said his name,
he contacted me in December of 2012, and he says:
"You got it figured out, on the climate change front; I'm buying the whole thing,
and can I come and visit the the 'mud hut'
because I'm moving to the Southern Hemisphere, and I want to replicate what you're doing."
This guy is about my age, and I did a bunch of research to figure out if this was actually him.
Because I'm thinking "Famous people don't send me email messages."
So I did a bunch of research and it all matched, but still I wrote back to him and I said "Are you really you?"
you know, because after he lied the first time he wouldn't lie the second time, I'm sure but..
So people know. People with lots of fiat currency
are converting that fiat currency into land and homesteads in the Southern Hemisphere,...
- George Bush is one of them. ...and this is not the only case.
That's right. The Bush family is among them.
with a homestead in Paraguay. James Cameron, the film maker, owns a whole bunch of New Zealand,
and the list goes on and on.
So, I do this in part because I think we deserve to know what I know.
We deserve to know the facts and the models and the projections about climate change.
And I don't see anybody else doing that.
Yes. - Perfect time for comments.
????
Some Dallas philosophy a little bit.
What we can do is become aware. That's what you're doing.
I know a lot more information than I did before I came in here tonight.
So the first step is to become aware and then act accordingly.
I would also add to that: act if it´s the right action.
Buddha said that, when he played tennis.
Also, right action. So, awareness and then act accordingly.
That´s the best that we can do, and it´s all that we can do
and it´s enough.
The Universe will take care of the rest.
If we act in the Now, in the Present, we make our tomorrows.
Yes, I agree. So awareness is the first step
and awareness is not Nirvana. Awareness is a curse.
Oh! I forgot to mention something.
Now is probably the wrong time.
But I don´t know if you remember this first slide. It has an asteroid.
And it´s supposed to remaind me to tell you that there´s two kinds of people in the world,
those who categorize people under two kinds of people,
Oh. no, no, no.
There are people who want to know, they want to know everything, they want to be fully aware,
And then there are people who don´t want to know anything.
If there is an asteroid coming, they don´t want to know about it until they´re dead.
So don´t tell me a thing.
Others of us want to know and I want to be out there staring the damned thing down.
When it gets here, it better hit me in the nose.
That´s me. So I assume that´s you.
But I was supposed to start by saing that if that´s not you, now it would be a good time to leave.
Now is a bad time to leave, because now you all know.
It´s like that Louis CK routine, where he is talking to this 3 year old daughter
and, she keeps asking him questions and finnally he starts to get frustrated
and he says: because at some point the Sun will blow over and kill us all.
And so the 3 year old, before the conversation started didn´t know anything, and now she knows everything.
And Ifeel the same way. Now you know everything.
You know that you´re going to die as so as averybody else.
But you knew that anyway. So it´s not a big surprise. You´re not 3 years old.
Could you talk a little bit more about the northern hemisphere versus the southern hemisphere?
You´re not depressed enough, yet? Jesus, what does it take with you people?
How much longer do we have in the southern hemisphere?
How much longer to build a property down south?
Oh. I think it´s gone. I had an answer for that. Let´s see.
Malcom ??? did this analisys for the Arctic Methane Emergency Group on the ??? of February of 2012
and it´s distrubing to me that this is the sort of stuff that it´s in my head.
And in it he concluded that all life on Earth will be extinct by 2047, plus or minus a few years.
And he said, 2031.6, plus or minus 13 years, in the northern hemisphere
2047, plus or minus a similar number of years, in the southern hemisphere.
So that for all like on Earth. That´s 16 years. 16 years.
I think he´s wrong. I don´t think we can kill everything.
I see no way that we can manage to kill everything by 2047.
So, if it´s 16 years for all life, how much is it for human life?
I don´t know, Is it 10 years, is it 15? I don´t think anybody really knows.
But, I mean, you decided to move to New Mexico. Yeah, that was stupid, remember?
I love the way you keep bringing that in, though.
You were really stupid, let´s bring that up again.
What is with you people, anyway? You say I´m stupid and you laugh about it.
That´s a little disturbing.
And that guy who isn´t a psychologist laughed. ??? go get one.
So if this ???comes to pass, when and as you expect, what will you do?
Will you wait around and starve to death with everyone else or do you have a plan for yourself?
Is there a point?
[Imperceptable]
You´re just too macabre. That´s what you are.
What am I gonna do? Well, I suspect where Iive, at some point,
temperatures will rise, to a high enough level, that will ???? the proteins in all the planet.
That´s like 125 or 120º fahrenheit, and that will ???? all the proteins in all the plants.
So all the plants will die. And where Ilive those spring winds are horryfic.
Starting in February and March, it´s like 40 or 50 mile ??? winds every day
and it´s really quite unpleasant. Well, ????no plans.
A thousand people died in the dust ball in this country, choking to death, literally, on dust.
So that´s everybody I know, ????
And you will wait for that to happen, as opposed to take your on life?
What´s it take to get a drink in this place?
I..... It´s dificult for me to imagine a scenario in which I will commit suicide
There is a young guy named Daniel ???? whio wrote an essay, in "Nature Bats Last" maybe a year ago,
whose 11.300 words, which is a lot, specially in Twitter nation, where 140 characters ????
11.300 palavras and it´s just ????, it´s he´s journey, he´s ride
of despair and utter hopelessness, followed by total extinction
You know, just up and down, up and down, and it was horrifying,
and I can summerize that essay in just 3 words: starvation, predation and suicide.
That´s all they said. 11.300 words.. 11297 more than it took me.
I don´t see myself commiting suicide.
I eagerly anticipate seing the comeback of the living planet, if only for a few weeks or months.
I think it will be awesome to see the end of industrial civilization.
And yes, it will kill me, way sooner than it´s going to kill almost everybody else in the planet.
Already 5 million people a year die early death because of climate change and people ask me: when it´s going to start?
To the families of those 5 million people, it already started.
So, it´s already in the way. I look foward for the living planet to make its come back, no matter how briefly.
So I can´t imagine I will kill myself.
However, there are a lot of people who have that in mind for me. So I might not escape the bullet just yet.
Sometimes I think it´s good that people are ignorant because
if everybody is were as ??? as we are, now, there might be panic and...
... I know you will oppose it, ???? that´s not my point of view
you know, bring it on, so we can all ????? better place
I just, sometimes, like... I was reading ????? They´re all like in Lala land, but, maybe it´s good.
People in California aren´t freaking out, they are ????
Right. So. You´re sort of the ??? the government and the corporate media´s approach:
just don´t tell them anything that maters. -Well, yeah, I guess I am,
-Keep them ??? and they´ll be happy, because ignorance is bliss.
Why do we have a ??? state? Why do we have a media, if not to inform? Why do we have governments if not to lead?
- To steal!
I hate when people tell the truth. That´s supposed to be my job!
- I love being here because I am so depressed about all the stuff and it's great to have somebody like, you now...
Yeah, and generate a whole community of like-minded people.
People ask me all the time when I'm done "Do you own stock ???"
"Because I really want to drink now."
Yes Robin?
So, this collapse, if you can bring if on,
the paper by Brad Werner?
"Earth Fucked", ...
he says the only...he did a mathematical model of a couple of human environment systems,
and the way the mathematical model is playing out,
it is that if we wait for some top-down answer... it's not coming,
and, chances are, he says, "Earth is Fucked", that's it.
But... the point that's uncertain in his model is...
the one thing that might make some kind of difference, I don't know if it would be enough to save anybody, but
the actually only thing that might make a difference is
if there is just a massive bottom-up to bring down civilization...
within the next 5 years. Within the next 5 years it has to be complete or there is no - and there might already be enough -
but, in his model, how do you feel about bottom-up, bringing it down in the next 5 years,
would there be a way that we grow enough food for a few Adams and Eves, to keep the insanity going?
??? finally shows up.
I think it's a great idea, terminating industrial civilization, has been foremost on my mind for years.
Yes I think that's ingenious, no I don't think it will matter for our species.
I think we're already done. We're just walking around to save on the funeral expenses.
Not easy to bury a species, you know; that shit costs money
And we are all about the money.
Have you been filming this whole time?
I said these horrible things about my ???
We're gonna have to edit that up, by the way.
Thank you all for coming, I'll stay here as long as you want, don't forget to get a copy of "Going Dark"...