John Michael Greer: 2030 is the New 2012

Last week’s discussion of failed predictions in the peak oil movement inevitably touched on the latest round of claims that the world as we know it is going to come to a full stop sometime very soon. That was inevitable partly because these claims account for a fairly large fraction of the predictions made by peak oil writers each year, and partly because those same claims flop so reliably. Still, there’s another factor, which is that this sort of apocalypse fandom has become increasingly popular of late—as well as increasingly detached from the world the rest of us inhabit.

Late last year, for example, I was contacted by a person who claimed to be a media professional and wanted to consult with me about an apocalypse-themed video he was preparing to make. As I think most of my readers know, I make my living as a writer, editor, and occasional consultant, and so—as one professional to another—my wife, who is also my business manager, sent him back a polite note asking what sort of time commitment he was interested in and how much he was offering to pay. We got back a tirade accusing me of being too cheap to save the world, followed not long thereafter by another email in which he insisted that he couldn’t afford to pay anyone because his project would inevitably be the least popular video in history; after all, he claimed, nobody wants to hear about how the world as we know it is about to crash into ruin.

That was when I sat back on the couch and very nearly laughed myself into hiccups, because there’s nothing Americans like better than a good loud prediction of imminent doom. From Jonathan Edwards’ famous 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” right through to today’s zombie apocalypse craze, a good number of the biggest pop-culture phenomena in American history have focused on the end of the world in one way or another. A first-rate example is the 2012 furore, which turned a nonexistent Mayan prophecy of doom into one of the most successful media cash cows in recent times. I can testify from personal experience that toward the end of the last decade, every publisher I know of with a presence in the New Age market was soliciting 2012-themed books from all their regular authors because that was the hottest market going.

The 2012 prophecy may have been a predictive failure, in other words, but it was a whopping financial success. With that in mind, among other things, I predicted shortly after December 21, 2012 that a new date for the end of everything would soon be selected, and would promptly attract the same enthusiasm as its predecessor. As noted in a post last May, that was one of my more successful predictions; the new date is 2030, and it’s already picking up the same eager attention that made 2012 such a lucrative gimmick.

One of the great innovations of the runup to 2012, which will probably continue to shape apocalyptic fads for some time to come, is that you don’t actually have to propose a specific mechanism of doom; all you need is a date. The architect of the 2012 phenomenon, the late Jose Arguelles, seems to have been the marketing genius who first realized this.  His 1984 book The Mayan Factor, which launched the furore on its way, insisted that something really, truly amazing was going to happen on December 21, 2012, without offering more than vague hints about what that amazing event might be. Those who piled onto the bandwagon he set in motion more than made up for Arguelles’ reticence, coming up with a flurry of predictions about what was going to happen on that day.

It didn’t matter that most of these predictions contradicted one another, and none of them rested on any logic more solid than, hey, we know something amazing is going to happen on that day, so here’s some speculation, with or without cherrypicked data, about what the amazing event might be.  The pileup of predictions, all by itself, made the date itself sound more convincing to a great many people. Far from incidentally, it also offered believers a convenient source of shelter from skepticism:  if a nonbeliever succeeded in disproving a hundred different claims about what was supposed to happen on the big day, a hundred and first claim would inevitably pop up as soon as he turned his back, so that the believers could keep on believing that the world as we know it was indeed going to end as scheduled.

The same logic is already being deployed with equal verve on behalf of a 2030 doomsday. So far, without making any particular effort to find them, I’ve fielded claims that on or by that year, global warming will spin out of control, driving humanity into extinction; oceanic acidification will kill off all the phytoplankton, crashing oxygen levels in the atmosphere and driving humanity into extinction; the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone Park will erupt, plunging the planet into a volcanic winter and driving humanity into extinction; an asteroid will come spinning out of space and driving humanity into extinction, and so on.  I haven’t yet seen anyone proclaim that 2030 will see the Earth swallowed whole by a gigantic space walrus with photon flippers, but no doubt it’s simply a matter of time.

Now of course it’s possible to raise hard questions about each of these claims—well, in fact, it’s more than possible, it’s easy, since none of them rely on more than a few fringe studies on the far end of scientific opinion, if that, and most of them quietly ignore the fact that greenhouse-gas spikes, oceanic acidification, and nearly everything else but the aforementioned space walrus have occurred before in the planet’s history without producing the results that are being expected from them this time around. I’ll be taking the time to raise some of those questions, and offer some answers for them grounded in solid science, in a series of posts I’ll start later this year. Still, fans and promoters of the 2030 fad have nothing to fear from such exercises; like the legendary hydra, a good apocalypse fad can sprout additional heads at will to replace those that are chopped off by critics.

Thus it’s pretty much baked into the cake at this point that 2030 will be the new 2012, and that we can count on another sixteen years of increasingly overheated claims clustering around that date before it, too, slips by and a new date has to be found.  We’ll be discussing the trajectory of the resulting furore from time to time on this blog, if only because there’s a certain wry amusement to be gained from watching people make epic fools of themselves.  Still, the point I want to raise this week is a little different. Granted that apocalypse fandom is an enduring feature of American pop culture, that very few people ever lost money or failed to attract an audience by insisting that the end is nigh, that a huge and well-oiled marketing machine lost its cash cow when 2012 passed without incident and thus has every reason to pile into the next apocalypse fad with redoubled enthusiasm: even so, why should fantasies of imminent doom attract so much larger an audience now than ever before, and play so much more central a role in the contemporary imagination of the future?

There are, as I see it, at least four factors involved.

The first is a habit of collective thought I spent much of last year discussing—the widespread popular conviction, amounting to religious faith, that today’s industrial civilization is an unstoppable juggernaut that will keep rolling onwards forever unless some even more gargantuan catastrophe mashes it flat to the dust. That conviction, as I’ve noted in previous posts, is not confined to those who are cheering the march of progress.  Plenty of people who claim that they hate industrial civilization and all its works are as convinced as any cornucopian that it’s certain to keep moving along its current trajectory, until it finally vanishes on the horizon of whatever grand or dreadful destiny it’s supposed to have this week.

As a heretic and a dissenter from  that secular faith, I’ve repeatedly watched otherwise thoughtful people engage in the most spectacular mental backflips to avoid noticing that perpetual progress and overnight annihilation aren’t the only possible futures for the modern industrial world. What’s more, a great many people seem to be getting more fervent in their faith in progress, not less so, as the onward march of progress just mentioned shows increasing signs of grinding to a halt. That’s a common feature in social psychology; it’s precisely when a popular belief system starts failing to explain everyday experiences that people get most passionate about treating it as unquestionable fact and shouting down those who challenge it. Believing that our civilization and our species will be gone by 2030 feeds into this, since that belief makes it much easier to brush aside the uncomfortable awareness that progress is over and faith in industrial society’s omnipotence has turned out to be utterly misplaced.

That’s one reason why apocalyptic fantasies are so popular these days. A second reason, which I’ve also discussed at some length in this blog, is the role such fantasies have in justifying inaction, when action involves significant personal costs. One of the hard facts of our present predicament is that the steps that have to be taken to get ready for the future bearing down on us all require letting go of the privileges and perquisites that most Americans consider theirs by right. A few years ago, I coined the acronym LESS—Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation—to summarize the changes that we’re all going to have to make as things proceed, and began pointing out that any response to our predicament that doesn’t start with using LESS simply isn’t serious.

I’m pleased to say that a certain fraction of my readers have taken that advice seriously, and tackled the uncomfortable job of downsizing their dependence on the absurd amounts of energy, stuff, and artificial stimulation that are involved in an ordinary American lifestyle these days. I’m equally pleased to say that an even larger number of people who don’t read The Archdruid Report and don’t know me from Hu Gadarn’s off ox have gotten to work doing the same thing. Those people are going to be in a much better position not merely to weather the crises ahead, but to help their loved ones, friends and neighbors do the same thing, and potentially also contribute to the preservation of the more useful achievements of the last few centuries. Still, it’s hard work, and it also requires a willingness to step outside the conventional wisdom of our society, which claims to be open to new and innovative ideas but in practice tolerates only endless rehashings of the same old notions.

Inevitably, a good many people who sense the necessity of change won’t act on that awareness because they realize the personal costs involved. Fantasies of imminent doom provide an escape hatch from the resulting cognitive dissonance. If the world is going to crash into ruin soon anyway, the reasoning runs, it’s easy to excuse further wallowing in the benefits the American system currently gives to its more privileged inmates, and any remaining sense that something is wrong can be redirected onto whatever cataclysm du jour the true believer in apocalypse happens to fancy.  Believing that the end is nigh thus allows people to have their planet and eat it too—or, more to the point, to convince themselves that they can keep on chomping away on what’s left of the planet for just a little while longer.

The third factor, which relates to the second one, unfolds from the historical tragedy of the Baby Boom generation, which is massively overrepresented in apocalypse fandom just now.  The Boomers were among the most idealistic generations in US history, but they were also far and away the most privileged, and the conflict between those two influences has defined much of their trajectory through time. Starting when the Sixties youth culture crashed and burned, the Boomers have repeatedly faced forced choices between their ideals and their privileges.  Each time, the majority of Boomers—there have always been noble exceptions—chose to cling to their privileges, and then spent the next decade or so insisting at the top of their lungs that their ideals hadn’t been compromised by that choice.

Thus the early 1970s were enlivened by the loud insistence of former hippies, as they cut their hair and donned office clothing to take up the corporate jobs they’d vowed never to accept, that they were going to change the system from within. (Even at the time, that was generally recognized as a copout, but it was a convenient one and saw plenty of use.) By the 1980s, many of these same former hippies were quietly voting for Ronald Reagan and his allies because the financial benefits of Reagan’s borrow-and-spend policies were just too tempting to pass up, though they insisted all the while that they would put part of the windfall into worthy causes. Rinse and repeat, and today you’ve got people who used to be in the environmental movement pimping for nuclear power and GMOs, because the conserver lifestyles they were praising to the skies forty years ago have become unthinkable for them today.

One consequence of these repeated evasions has been an ongoing drumbeat of books and other media proclaiming as loudly as possible that that the Baby Boom generation would change the world just by existing, without having to accept the hard work and sacrifices that changing the world actually entails. From 1972’s The Greening of America right on down to the present, this sort of literature has been lucrative and lavishly praised, but the great change never quite got around to happening and, as the Boomers head step by step toward history’s exit door, there’s no reason to think it ever will.

Perhaps the saddest of all these works came from the once-fiery pen of the late Theodore Roszak, whose 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture played a significant role in shaping the Boomer generation’s self-image. His last book, The Making of an Elder Culture, expressed a wistful hope that once the Boomers retired, they would finally get around to fulfilling the expectations he’d loaded on them all those years ago. Of course they haven’t, and they won’t, because doing so would put their pensions and comfortable retirements at risk. Mutatis mutandis, that’s why the Age of Aquarius turned out to be a flash in the pan:  “Let’s change the system, but keep the privileges we get from it” reliably works out in practice to “Let’s not change the system.”

The expectation of imminent apocalypse is the despairing counterpoint to the literature just described. Instead of insisting that the world would shortly become Utopia (and no action on the part of Boomers is needed to cause this), it insists that the world will shortly become the opposite of Utopia (and no action on the part of Boomers is capable of preventing this). This serves the purpose of legitimizing inaction at a time when action would involve serious personal costs, but there’s more to it than that; it also feeds into the Boomer habit of insisting on the cosmic importance of their own experiences.  Just as normal adolescent unruliness got redefined in Boomer eyes as a revolution that was going to change the world, the ordinary experience of approaching mortality is being redefined as the end of everything—after all, the universe can’t just go on existing after the Boomers are gone, can it?  It’s thus surely no accident that 2030 is about the time the middle of the Baby Boom generation will be approaching the end of its statistically likely lifespan.

The three factors just listed all have a major role in fostering the apocalypse fandom that plays so large a part in today’s popular culture and collective imagination. Still, I’ve come to think that a fourth factor may actually be the most significant of all.

To grasp that fourth factor, I’d like to encourage my readers to engage in a brief thought experiment. Most people these days have noticed that for the last decade or so, each passing year has seen a broad worsening of conditions on a great many fronts. Here in America, certainly, jobs are becoming scarcer, and decent jobs with decent pay scarcer still, while costs for education, health care, and scores of other basic social goods are climbing steadily out of reach of an ever-larger fraction of the population.  State and local governments are becoming less and less able to provide even essential services, while the federal government sinks ever further into partisan gridlock and bureaucratic paralysis, punctuated by outbursts of ineffectual violence flung petulantly outward at an ever more hostile world.  The human and financial toll of natural disasters keeps going up while the capacity to do anything about the consequences keeps going down—and all the while, resource depletion and environmental disruption impose a rising toll on every human activity.

That’s the shape of the recent past. The thought experiment I’d like to recommend to my readers is to imagine that things just keep going the same way, year after year, decade after decade, without any of the breakthroughs or breakdowns in which so many of us like to put our faith.

Imagine a future in which all the trends I’ve just sketched out just keep on getting worse, a tunnel growing slowly darker without any light at the far end—not even the lamp of an oncoming train. More to the point, imagine that this is your future: that you, personally, will have to meet ever-increasing costs with an income that has less purchasing power each year; that you will spend each year you still have left as an employee hoping that it won’t be your job’s turn to go away forever, until that finally happens; that you will have to figure out how to cope as health care and dozens of other basic goods and services stop being available at a price you can afford, or at any price at all; that you will spend the rest of your life in the conditions I’ve just sketched out, and know as you die that the challenges waiting for your grandchildren will be quite a bit worse than the ones you faced.

I’ve found that most people these days, asked to imagine such a future, will flatly refuse to do it, and get furiously angry if pressed on the topic. I want to encourage my readers to push past that reaction, though, and take a few minutes to imagine themselves, in detail, spending the rest of their lives in the conditions I’ve just outlined. Those who do that will realize something about apocalyptic fantasies that most believers in such fantasies never mention: even the gaudiest earth-splattering cataclysm is less frightening than the future I’ve described—and the future I’ve described, or one very like it, is where current trends driven by current choices are taking us at their own implacable pace.

My guess is that that’s the most important factor behind the popularity of apocalyptic thinking these days.  After so many promised breakthroughs have failed to materialize, cataclysmic mass death is the one option many people can still believe in that’s less frightening than the future toward which we’re actually headed, and which our choices and actions are helping to create. I suggest that this, more than anything else, is why 2030 is going to be the next 2012, why promoters of the it’s-all-over-in-2030 fad will find huge and eager audiences for their sales pitches, and why some other date will take 2030’s place in short order once the promised catastrophes fail to appear on schedule and the future nobody wants to think about continues to take shape around them.

Mind you, there are less delusional and less self-defeating ways to face the challenging times ahead—ways that might actually accomplish something positive in a harsh future. We’ll talk about one of those next week.

25 Comments on "John Michael Greer: 2030 is the New 2012"

Meld on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 12:59 pm 



Boom, the druid strikes again. Excellent food for thought as usual.

robertinget on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 2:32 pm 



Even atheists buy lottery tickets.
Magic thinking is contagious.

It took millions to keep Gandhi poor.

According to our current secretary of defence, Chuck Hagel, it will take a trillion dollars spent on modernizing
nuclear weapons to “keep us free”.

Why wait 16 years?

rollin on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 2:34 pm 



2030 actually has some validity as being an end time. It won’t be an end of the world scenario but it could ring in the beginning of the end.
All the stressors on civilization seem to be increased in the 2030 to 2040 period. Whether it be climate change, ocean life destruction, water supply, copper production, fossil fuel production; all things point to a turn-over just before or slightly after 2030.
One of the big pushes into continuing BAU is the opening of the Northwest Passage for transport and fossil fuel production. That should be completely open by 2030.
So if we want to pick a date for the start of the end, 2030 is acceptable.
It might take one or two centuries to end the resilient human race or they may figure out a way to move onward. The future is always a dim place to see, but as Scrooge was told, changing your ways can make things better.

eugene on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 3:00 pm 



I think Greer likes to talk just to hear himself do it. His “predictions” carry no more weight than anyone else’s and long winded diatribes don’t make them true. Criticizing someone else’s opinion and, after all, opinions about the future are just that.

In spite of his ramblings, I don’t think it takes much sense to see things are “winding down” on multiple fronts and have been for a long time. Remember a prediction is about time and doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Just means the timing is off.

Jerry McManus on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 3:03 pm 



Greer looking down his self-righteous nose at “doomers” again. Ho hum.

Given that oceans are in fact acidifying, given that the climate is in fact changing, given that fossil fuels, topsoils, aquifers, fisheries, forests, and yes, phytoplankton are in fact rapidly depleting, then I think it is a safe bet that the next 20 years are not going to be anything like the last 20 years, or even like the last 200. Not even close.

The only thing that I predict will NOT change is Greer’s ponderous, pompous, and entirely unreadable prose.

CAM on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 3:17 pm 



It is easy to deride the imaginings of the apocalyptical, or belittle the assumptions of the cornucopian optimists. But, there is a reality that transcends both. Around 1930 the worlds population reached 2 billion, a culmination of approximately 8 million years of the hominid lineage. Less than one hundred years later we are over 7 billion headed for 10 billion. Virtually every resource is under growing pressure with no let up in sight and no apparent way to stop this speeding train. It is of course a fools errand to prophesize when and how this all ends, but end it will!!

GregT on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 3:25 pm 



Other than Greer’s prediction above, I haven’t personally heard anyone else predict an apocalyptic event to occur in 2030. I have, however, heard some in our scientific communities speak of 2038. Maybe Greer will be attributed to setting the new doomsday prediction date?

I have heard of peak oil, ocean acidification, arctic amplification, methane clathrate releases, climate change, desertification, the growing food crisis, the growing water crisis, the hole in the ozone layer, species extinction, fisheries collapse, deforestation, the global finical crisis, overpopulation, AND nuclear war. But we ARE going to fix all of these things, right?

There is a growing consensus within our scientific communities, that we are headed for extremely unpleasant times, IF we shut down modern industrial society soon. If we don’t, we face the very real probability of our own extinction.

Is 2030 the year of the apocalypse? I seriously doubt it, but I have been wrong before. Is 2030 going to be the year we finally find Utopia? Ditto.

The trends are crystal clear, for anyone that cares to pay attention. Where we are headed should also be a no brainer. The one thing for sure, 2030 isn’t going to be anywhere near as pleasant as 2013, and those paying attention would be well served to make plans now.

Those that believe ‘someone will think of something’, carry on, there’s nothing to see here.

chilyb on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 3:39 pm 



The Yellowstone super-volcano park is set to erupt in 2030?

J-Gav on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 4:14 pm 



2030 don’t mean jack to me. On the other hand, convergence/acceleration of 2 or more of the trends GregT mentions will make for a jolt liable to upset BAU for good. By 2016, 2020, 2030, 2040? Who knows? Not the end of the world, but a clear sign is on the way that things are just not going to get back to the “normal” we’ve grown used to for the last 50 years.

For me, the most interesting aspect of JMG’s article is the idea that date-precision apocalyptics are actually more comforting, and thus likely to become more popular, than recognizing the more likely scenario of a (more or less) gradual decline where every decade takes its toll on lifestyles people in the West have long felt they’re entitled to.

ghung on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 4:32 pm 



I used to comment at the ADR occasionally, but Greer has a tendency to smack down any dissenting comments pretty quickly. There’s a huge (virtually infinite) number of possibilities between current BAU and utter apocalypse, and I give Greer’s take on things about as much consideration as I give Guy McPherson’s NTE predictions. At least Greer’s ideas have a future 😉

Having been trained in, and having worked with complex systems, I understand the various ways they can fail. Our hyper-complex industrial systems have both redundancy and inter-dependency; a lot has to go right to keep them functioning, and a lot is being ignored regarding their vulnerabilities. Tipping points and cascade failures have and will occur. Does this portend the end of the world? I doubt it. Does this mean that humans will simply muddle through? Not necessarily.

It occurred to me some time back that Greer is attempting to modify the human experiment from a religious standpoint; countering the religions of growth and apocalypse with his vision of reality. He insists that ‘this time isn’t different’ than past crises. My jury-of-mind is still out on that one. A dramatic climate shift leading to limited (or all-out) nuclear war could deal life on this small planet quite a blow. One of those low-probability, high-impact combination of events, unlikely to happen? Not so sure, but I’m not going to dwell on it too much. I’ll just keep doing what I do.

Gotta go split wood.

Meld on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 4:54 pm 



Jerry, you really think Greer’s prose is unreadable? I find him to be one of the most erudite, concise and easily read writers alive today. Sometimes he does cover the same ground a few times in his blog posts, but the man writes an essay every Wednesday without fail so it can be excused.

To some of the NTE doomers, It’s highly unlikely the human race will be anywhere near extinct in even ten thousand years. I doubt most people in 50 years will even accept that they live in worse times then than they do now (although objectively they will be less materially endowed). At the end of the day, if we have food, water, shelter and companionship our free time will always be given to moaning about something or other. Will billions of people die over the next century? yes, but then billions are due to die anyway even with infinite progress. What is more likely is a return to higher infant mortality rates and a lower average life span as modern medicine shuts down over the next few decades. We’ll adapt, move on and moan about how stupid all the consumerist, materialist spiritualists oafs were in the early 21st century.

Meld on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 4:55 pm 



*nonspiritual

J-Gav on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 5:33 pm 



ghung – Good post! I also used to comment (for a year or so) on the Archdruid Report -and understand your reaction. Doesn’t make his articles uninteresting or irrelevant but, like you, I always end up looking for my own ground, not somebody else’s.

John D on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 6:14 pm 



I have to disagree with some, and give credit for a good, thought provoking article. I still think though, that our downfall will be sooner and will be caused by the weakest link in the chain- collapse of a hypercomplex, debt-ridden, global trade dependent economic system. With trillions of dollars stored as zero’s and ones on computers, things could steamroll quicker than most people anticipate.

Arthur on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 6:22 pm 



I wonder if peak.oil can wait until 2030, remember TOD. How many of us will be posting here by that time?

Watched the movie 2012 in the cinema. Something about earth crust displacement, even Einstein was fascinated about the idea that a prof. Hapgood had come up with. But 2012 came and went, Mayans be damned and the Netherlands is still located at 52 degrees north.

Y2000 came and went and no global meltdown as a consequence of software written in the 60s and 70s, assuming 2 digits to represent a year.

Peak conventional oil 2006 is long behind us, but not peak oil itself. And peak fossil is more interesting than peak oil. So yes, 2030 could be the new date to watch for the world to really meet peak fossil. But will it matter?

Last weekend I was in Bavaria/Germany, for the first time in 10 years. The metamorphosis there is spectacular. Solar panels everywhere. There are even scouts making a living from hunting down still empty roofs to make the owner an offer he can’t refuse, namely to lease this ‘useless space’. Perhaps nobody cares about depleting fossil by 2030.

PapaSmurf on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 7:34 pm 



I am wondering if Peak Oil even matters any longer. There is clearly enough unconventional hydrocarbons to power us along for a few more decades.

I used to be worried about near term PO. Not so much any more.

GW seems more likely as the real long term issue.

ted on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 8:50 pm 



Papa Smurf you are naive! Where do you think all that fracking would be without Ben giving 85 billion every month to the banks….I will say that again 85 billion! It might be chump change to you but that is a lot of money. Also do you really think that the shale deposites in the U.S will continue at current levels for another 10 years? They drill the sweet spots first not the other way around. Quit eating those mushrooms and telling everyone to “have a Smurfy day!” Come back 4 years from now and if oil production is increasing around the world I will buy you and Smurfette a
Beer!!!

Meld on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 8:51 pm 



Papasmurf, unconventional hydrocarbons are the result of peak oil. We passed it. Peak oil is a century long decline in living standards and a relocalisation of the world back to pre industrial revolution levels. What peak oil is not is the zombie apocalypse or the end of days.

ghung on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 9:19 pm 



Since we’re on the doom/no doom subject, I thought I would throw this in:

Strong Geomagnetic Storm Imminent

An intense coronal mass ejection observed Tuesday is expected to cause strong geomagnetic storming late Thursday into Friday. Geomagnetic storms on Earth can impede the operation of electrical grids and temporarily damage radio and satellite telecommunications. The NWS Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) continues to closely monitor and update forecasts and impacts as required.

We aren’t in charge; just along for the ride.

ghung on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 9:22 pm 



Sorry – http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

Should be quite an aurora tonight.

GregT on Thu, 9th Jan 2014 10:17 pm 



Peak oil is a decades long decline in living standards, coupled with dwindling food, water, and resource shortages.

Thoughts of a century long decline, is a form of denial. IE, It won’t affect me in my lifetime. Reality check. It is going to affect most of us in our lifetimes, and it isn’t going to be a nice slow return to a comfortable log cabin in the woods, surrounded by food markets.

The so called Zombie apocalypse is well known in my circle, as the time when the masses of people in the cities can no longer find food. Think it can’t happen, think again, it already is in many parts of the world, in developed countries.

We may not be facing the end of the world in a decade or two, but we most certainly will be facing the end of the world, as we knew it.

Makati1 on Fri, 10th Jan 2014 2:35 am 



Back and forth the argument goes. The black swans are so thick they cover the sky and only a few pin points of sunlight can still peek through, yet some think they are just clouds that will disburse, and others think they will migrate somewhere else or never land.

Meanwhile, on planet Earth, every country with a financial system tied to the Central Banks is printing money like crazy, and fighting the coming collapse with every lie, false statistic and propaganda method ever thought of.

In the past, such times led to world wars. This one will be nuclear. Does this one have to have a nuclear exchange? Nope! Just take down the power grid in a country and in a few weeks their nuclear plants will be Fukushima twins. There are over 400 such ‘bombs’ already in place. Can civilization survive 400+ Fujushimas?

As for me, 2030 seems too far out to be the actual collapse time. More like 2020 or sooner. Some of us will be proven correct eventually. Not that we will have time to think about it when it happens. Survival will be the new and highest priority in our lives. Those of us who survive it, of course.

FriedrichKling on Fri, 10th Jan 2014 3:19 am 



@ ghung

Your criticism of Dr. Guy McPherson is unwarranted. If you took the requisite time, than you would understand that his projections for NTHE are simply based on prosaic scientific commentary on the state of the Earth’s environment, which by any reasonable person’s analysis points to an ever worsening ecological position.

FriedrichKling on Fri, 10th Jan 2014 3:21 am 



50 Doomiest graphs of 2013:

http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2013/12/50-doomiest-graphs-of-2013.html

ghung on Fri, 10th Jan 2014 4:30 am 



@ Friedrich

I didn’t criticize McPherson. I read both Nature Bats Last and The Archdruid Report weekly and give them my full consideration. I doubt either one cares much whether or not I agree with their conclusions, and I don’t make my living contemplating how screwed humanity is. It’s just a hobby.

I personally give us about a 7.5 on the screwed-o-meter. 10 is utterly fucked, but we may use this as a learning experience.