Climate Change Is the World’s Biggest Risk
Climate Change Is the World’s Biggest Risk, in 3 Charts
I think they might have missed at least two huge risks: Abrupt Methane Release and Abrupt Sea Level Rise.
Both of these missing items seems to be fairly misunderstood – or poorly understood. Here is some further reading and speculation on abrupt sea level rise to consider:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/west-antarctica-melting-amazon-not-helping/
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/antarctica-disintegrating-soon/
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2017/01/07/global-sea-ice-collapsing-carbon-tax/
I also think that Food Crisis ranks far, far higher (near the very top). No idea how or why they ranked this lower then unemployment, which simply makes no sense at all. Most of the climate change articles I’m reading all reference Food as a huge and significant problem.
Always worthy of revisiting (never loosing sight of)
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo Cipolla:
First Law: We always underestimate the number of stupid people.
Second Law: The probability of a person being stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Third (and Golden) Law: A stupid person is someone who causes damage to another person, or a group of people, without any advantage accruing to himself (or herself) — or even with some resultant self-damage.
Fourth Law: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people. They constantly forget that at any moment, and in any circumstance, associating with stupid people invariably constitutes an expensive mistake.
Fifth Law: A stupid person is the most dangerous person in existence.
Livraghi Corollaries.
First Corollary: In each of us there is a factor of stupidity, which is always larger than we suppose.
Second Corollary: When the stupidity of one person combines with the stupidity of others, the impact grows geometrically — i.e. by multiplication, not addition, of the individual stupidity factors.
Third corollary: The combination of intelligence in different people has less impact than the combination of stupidity, because (Cipolla’s Fourth Law) “non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people.”
‘just saying’
As a long-time organic gardener, I follow stories about the world’s dwindling supplies of phosphorus and potassium, two of the three (the other being nitrogen) crucial elements needed for food production.
I was shocked to discover this about “peak fertilizer:”
“We have been draining our supplies of potassium and phosphorus without considering the fact that they are (at least in the form we mine them in) a limited resource. While nitrogen can be synthesized from the air, potassium and phosphorus must be mined in the form of potash and phosphate rock.
Seventy percent of the world’s supply of potash is located in Canada and former Soviet countries. On the other hand, phosphorus is mined from phosphate rock, of which 85% of the world’s supply is located in Morocco. This means that both elements are held in a monopoly.
Perhaps a monopoly wouldn’t seem so scary if the elements existed in USA-friendly countries like Canada, but the stores of phosphorus are located in a geographically perilous region. The phosphorus deposits are located in the Western Sahara region of Morocco. Although Morocco currently holds this land, the UN recognizes that another party, the Polisario Front (a rebel group), as the rightful owners. If the fighting starts again, we could potentially lose access to phosphorus deposits.
If deposits of phosphorus and potassium were to run dry, the future of industrial agriculture could be threatened.”
http://www.holganix.com/blog/bid/62034/the-science-of-holganix-is-the-world-running-out-of-phosphorous-and-potassium
I wonder if Trump’s denier advisers have any clue about this upcoming political football.
All essential elements are “crucial” … but never fear, industrial capitalism, fiat exchange (commerce), social cohesion, potable water and climate stability will ALL have vanished well before the mines get stripped. The stone age didn’t end because it ran out of stones and the golden age of gluttony won’t end due to a lack of fertilizers.
The Energy Bulletin highlighted Peak Phosphorus almost 10 years ago.
http://energybulletin.net/node/33164.
Although there is still a lot of phosphate rock available, the extraction, transport and processing are dependent on oil, of course.
I suspect the phosphate crisis will be triggered by the arrival of the liquid fuel crisis, which seems certain to arrive within 3 years.
Most cities use fossil fuels to discharge essential nutrients into the sea/ocean via sewage systems, of course.
There are very few aspects of modern societies which are not completely mad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEE6ebgVtyQ
okay – went to source URL – what I saw was indiscernible – could NOT read the technicolor yawn (puke) splashed on my screen, not even zoomed in – with or without any of 3 pairs of glasses. If the moron that put those alleged graphics together had a freaking clue what he/she was attempting to convey I HIGHLY doubt the the VAST majority of the misery monkey tribes have the slightest idea of what was being attempted. I sure did not and not going to waste anymore time on it since as you’ve already noted is bollocks (nonsense). Arrrr-G ‘Sometimes’ (such as virtually always) so-called climate activists/sites are their own worst enemy (and look who’s talking).
just a matter of time
http://www.livescience.com/57248-nightmare-superbug-cre-infections-community.html
tick tock tick tock
where I’m ‘at’ (channeling Deek) … not that anyone asked
think think rant rant slobber slobber
shortens down to rant rant rant slobber slobber slobber
which truncates to slobber slobber slobber slobber slobber slobber
cough cough gag gag gasp gasp
EVERY fkn thing I fkn see on-fkn-line is fkn disgustingly fkn stupid – there is NO such fkn thing as fkn ‘intelligence’ full fkn stop fkn period . Have I fkn mentioned recently that I fkn hate fkn anus apes?
One or twice. I think. Oops!
Yes, I’m NOT off my meds. I’m trapped in the Twilight Zone … after dark.
This emerged on a CO2earth link recently.
‘A Pocket Handbook of Soft Climate Denial
Posted on October 6, 2016 by Devin Smith | 5 Comments
Michael Hoexter, Ph.D.
In a recent piece, I introduced the concept of “soft climate denial”. In soft climate denial, people acknowledge that climate change is real and threatening and may even be panicked about it. However, in this cultural-political constellation with attendant states of mind, the solutions for climate change that are embraced are in no way commensurate to the acknowledged threats to human existence posed by anthropogenic global warming. Consequently, soft climate denial leads often to hand-wringing or other ineffectual actions but no decisive steps taken towards meeting the challenge of human-caused and human-accelerated global warming…….’
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2016/10/pocket-handbook-soft-climate-denial.html
A good list of soft-climate denial. He missed “nationalistic exceptionalism”. We / I won’t be affected, and if we are, “we’ll fix it”, etc., etc.
He also did not mention “climate acceptance and solutions” as a “soft-climate denial”, which it is. The inherent belief that somebody will fix it. It is evident that the author actually doesn’t even realize that the “no fix, no solution” is the far likelier reality for everyone. He barely mentions this awareness in his closing sentence, “We must break out of hard and soft climate denial together or our species is likely doomed.”
But what stands out is an inherent assumption that political solutions are the pathway towards acceptance (awareness, no more denial), and their inherent and forthcoming ‘solutions’ that must exist. That is to say, the author doesn’t mention the glaring facts that this whole assumption may be dead wrong. He can’t see it himself. Politics may become irrelevant as some future point in the not-too-distant future.
I’m quite certain that we can ‘intellectualize’ our way into tomorrow indefinitely (while the world continues to collapse all around us), accomplishing little or next to nothing. We can also ‘await’ the ‘mass awareness’ critical mass that some think is essential for ‘real change’ to occur (how would this actually help?). Lacking the absent and assumed solutions these views embrace, both strategies are already doomed. If effect, the world is playing catch-up to reality and intellectuals are guilty of the very things he pointed out: all points, 1 through 12.
Soft-climate denial is simply no better then hard-climate denial, or fantasy imaginations of rapture rescue, etc. This is what people, intellectuals, scientists, the average Joe do not see and do not accept. Anything less then full-blown, total acceptance and understanding of the known realities and outcomes that can be projected with a high degree of accuracy is sufficient – because this lack of knowledge and awareness will consistently lead to the wrong actions, wrong preparations, wrong reactions and wrong ideas about what any of us can do, collectively or individually.
And because that is exactly what is happening on a global scale throughout every level of society and within ever institution – we’re still missing the boat and are simply watching it float away on rising acidic seas. We are not onboard.
As the joke goes: Republicans pretend climate change isn’t real while Democrats pretend to care about it.
There was a great piece on Huffington Post a couple of months ago that nails our predicament: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-watson/why-fighting-donald-trump_b_12951212.html
I’ve been asked to review a ‘survival expert’s book’ again. He’s apparently making $1000 dollars a day ‘consulting’ and has experience as a survival instructor in the military. So I did… and all I can say is sigh…
It is ASTOUNDING how completely wrong the ‘experts’ are about survival, priorities, potentialities, tactics and methodologies. I know this comes off badly, but c’mon! I have yet to see ANYONE publish accurate, timely and specific advice that is actually RELEVANT.
I’ve said this before – Most people are preparing for the wrong things. And they’re taking the wrong advice on what to “do”. And apparently, paying for it. What this tells me is how completely unprepared Americans are for reality. They’re still ‘prepping’ for a false reality with false expectations and false levels of actual preparedness. Some of the information is applicable, but the majority is not.
So be very, very careful what you think is ‘expert’ advice. It’s probably not.
“expert” : former drip under pressure
There is an amazing correlation between the size of one’s paycheck and the levels of bullshit one can publish.
One of, if not the most astute observation I’ve yet seen in a youtube comment: “Psychologists aren’t interested in atheism in the same way that doctors aren’t interested in healthy people.” Yeah – WAY off topic – just had to share. Humans are fkn goners because opinion consistently triumphs over fact and fantasy trumps reality at every turn. SIGH.
Here are all the risks of climate change in a single graph
Uh, right. This is the BEST science can do to convey what lies ahead? Are they f’n KIDDING? Why do we need to instruct them on what should be obvious (nobody understands what they’re saying)?
I do note that that the majority of ‘risks’ are all HIGH to VERY HIGH. But is it their intention to pass this to Congress and the other morons that run this kountry?
What would have made much more sense was to simply chart the rising temperature with the ‘key risks’ inflating at each higher level.
Every RFC (“reasons for concern”) offers it’s own narrative, which to fully understand, you need to pull completely apart and reassemble the information yourself to grasp what they’re trying to say. It’s as if they went out of their way to make this difficult.
From the paper:
“The transition to High risk is located at ~1.6°C, relying primarily on projections of large, near-term changes in the magnitude and likelihood of extremes of temperature and precipitation.”
Depending which scientist you believe, warming has already passed this figure, and there is “guaranteed warming” already in the pipeline far higher then this. So the ‘transition to High risk’ is a historical event, already happened.
Sorry, but the f’kn idiots are going to dicker around and produce endless graphs, charts, studies and reports to try and convince stupid f’kn humans that “we’re all at risk”.
Don’t get me wrong – glad they are there and working on it, but hey, if they want some f’kn action, they’re going to have to get a LOT more clear then this.
Does anybody else detect a problem here????
this is deliberately deceptive unconscionable shit (visual dysentery) – i.e., ‘after all’, monkeys WILL be monkeys . (shit is a weapon, aim for the eyes)
most ‘americans couldn’t compute making change from $1.00 for a 99 cent item – ntm recognize or acknowledge physical reality while it kicks them in the balls – yet they’re ‘expected’ to be ‘sold on’ climate chaos conjecture by a novel kaleidoscope of graphically exotic puke – uj huh sure they are/will – uh huh. IMO this ‘almost’ appears to have been ‘designed’ to have an effect the opposite of that allegedly being presented.
“No matter how cynical I get, I can never keep up.” ~ Lily Tomlin
… much more on that story later
the planetary situation(s) exponentially unfolding are ‘always’ presented – if at all – as (if) potential problems of uncertain probability, severity and and ‘correct ability’ – Whereas (meanwhile in reality): there’s IS no fkn ‘problem(s)’ … there is ‘only’ predicament. Problems may (or more likely not) have viable solutions but predicaments are not problems; they only have consequences (outcomes).
Two dominant effects/realities of which you should be absolutely certain to persist, 1) inevitability has and never will fail to occur and 2) the manifest hubris of willfully destructive stupidity knows not limits.
Gravity sucks. Energy cooks. Reality bites. Spacetime swallows.
Always worth a mention whenever the word exponential comes up is Albert Bartlett’s brilliant lecture ‘Arithmetic, Population and Energy’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8
Al exposed the lunacy of mainstream thinking decades ago, and had almost no impact on society despite tens of thousands of people hearing him live or via video over more than 4 decades.
It puts our ‘failure’ into perspective.
Chris Martenson took up the baton and ran with it for a while with his Crash Course series. The only problem with Martenson is that he keeps talking about prosperity.
‘fantasy trumps reality at every turn’
Only in the short term. In the medium and long term ‘Geochemistry trumps ideology’ and practically everything else.
“Japan’s largest coral reef system has become the latest casualty in a long series of coral bleaching events around the world.”
http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/database/?pageid=event_desc&edis_id=CB-20170114-56766-JPN
It’s not just heat, of course. Torrential rain and heavy snow, and unseasonal weather are all increasing. Climate chaos is a better descriptor than global warming.
‘Just as California’s liberal elites had convinced everyone that climate change had permanently altered global weather patterns such that the entire state was doomed to be stuck in a perpetual drought which would inevitably render it about as inhabitable as the surface of Mars within years, an unrelenting series of storms has struck and in a matter of days filled lakes, overflowed rivers and buried mountains in snow. And just like that, 40% of California was lifted from a drought that had plagued the state for a decade.
Of course, that much rain, in such a short period of time, can have devastating consequences as this video from Big Sur illustrates…….But we’re sure this abundance of rain is ever bit as much due to global warming as the lack of rain was last year…but we’re still waiting for official confirmation on that from our respected political leaders in Sacramento’
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-13/stunning-and-after-pictures-california-drought-and-devastating-rain-storms