Angels in Carbon Paradise

“Being co-evolutionary, Gaia tried to keep pace with our evolution but lately has given that up and gone its own way.” My friend Clinton Callahan plays around with game theory. In his latest communication he says whether we think about it much or not, we all play the game of picking a favorite illusionary paradise. […]

Why so Many People on Earth? The Ideology of Natalism

(Above: a 19th century English family).  A few years ago I was invited at a reunion of citizens concerned about social issues. When I was there, I was startled to discover that only concern of the group was the evils of abortion. It was a fascinating experience: one of the persons speaking reported a calculation […]

How Ghana’s Rapid Population Growth Could Become an Emergency

Paul Ayormah and his fellow farmers make their way home after hours spent manually weeding a friend’s one-acre maize farm in Ghana’s Eastern Region. “Tomorrow it will be the turn of my maize farm,” he tells IPS. This year, Ayormah and his colleagues who live in Donkorkrom in the Kwahu Afram Plains District of the […]

After ‘Peak Water,’ the Days of Plenty Are Over

In a recent paper in Science of The Total Environment, a team of Chinese researchers created a model of the Urumqi No. 1 catchment in Xinjiang, China, and made a surprising discovery. As they sought to estimate the effects of global warming on glacier thinning, retreat and local supply of water resources, they found that […]

Apocalypse by 2040? Shock as MIT computer model predicts END DATE for civilisation

A COMPUTER MODEL developed in 1973 by a team of MIT researchers has predicted the “end of civilised life as we know it” by 2040, with a major change coming in 2020 – just two years away from now. An apocalyptic computer model, processed by one of the world’s largest computers in 1973, has predicted […]

Climate, politics and the narrow vision of futurists

Most people know the tale of the blind men and the elephant. Each describes a part of the elephant. The elephant is said to be like a pillar by the blind man touching the elephant’s leg. The one touching the elephant’s tail says the elephant is like a rope and so on. Now, let’s substitute […]

Will Paul Ehrlich’s prediction finally come true?

The Green Revolution may have prevented the fate that was forecasted for a world bursting at the seams and unable to feed itself. But unlimited population growth means that doomsday could be well within sight In the period 1975–2018, world population increased steadily at 83 million per year, and reached 7.6 billion in 2018. The […]

Johan Rockström predicts climate doom again but is not advocating nuclear or ocean solutions

If global warming reaches 2 degrees C it could trigger a feedback, or “tipping element,” in one or more of our natural systems and drive further warming, Rockström. * Johan Rockström has predicted ticking environmental clocks to doom before. I will review his warning from 2009. * Many others have predicted climate runaway scenarios * […]

We’re Going to Die in Record Numbers as Heatwaves Bake The World

Mounting science is painting a very bleak picture of a future of soaring temperatures, and the accompanying death toll those soaring temperatures will demand. New research has given us the first solid prediction of how more heatwaves like the one that’s struck Europe this year will affect future death rates, finding tropical heatwaves in some […]

See the Scars That Oil Exploration Cut Across Alaska’s Wilderness

Matt Nolan, who runs a mapping business in Alaska using aerial photography, was flying a small plane to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northeastern part of the state last month when he noticed a pattern on the tundra. Dr. Nolan, a geophysicist, saw a grid of tracks left by heavy vehicles involved in […]

It’s Only August and We’ve Used Up a Year’s Worth of Earth’s Resources

With the planet’s population expected to increase to 10 billion by the year 2050, we desperately need to figure out how we’re going to provide enough food, water, and other vital resources for all of these people. But when you consider the alarming rate at which we’re currently burning through Earth’s resources – even with […]

Global Heatwave is Symptom of Early Stage Cycle of Civilisational Collapse

The extreme weather events of the summer of 2018 are not just symptoms of climate breakdown. They are early stage warnings of a protracted process of civilisational collapse as industrial societies face some of the opening symptoms of having already breached the limits of a safe climate. These events are a taste of things to […]

Earth Overshoot Day Offers Sustainability Lessons

August 1 will mark Earth Overshoot Day, the day that worldwide humanity will, in only seven months, have taken more resources from the Earth than can be replenished within a single year. During a calendar year, the globe’s 7.6 billion residents consume through overfishing and overharvesting forests more than Earth can replace and emit more […]

Why, in a Few Years, Nobody Will be Talking About Climate Change Anymore.

In the book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (1996) Daniel Goldhagen argues that the Germans couldn’t possibly have missed that their government was exterminating the Jews and other ethnical groups. But it is also possible that most Germans were misled by the technique of “deception by omission” played on them. This is a powerful perception management technology […]

Florida is about to be wiped off the map’

Sea level rises are not some distant threat; for many Americans they are very real. In an extract from her chilling new book, Rising, Elizabeth Rush details how the US coastline will be radically transformed in the coming years ‘Take the six million people who live in south Florida today and divide them into two […]

Heinberg: Human Predators, Human Prey

Society as Ecosystem in a Time of Collapse, Part I This month’s MuseLetter is Part I of a 3-part essay that uses predation as a metaphor to unpack power relations in human societies. Stay tuned! Introduction A lion runs down a gazelle; a raiding band brandishing clubs, bows, and arrows descends on a tribal village; […]

Fukushima’s nuclear signature found in California wine

Throughout the 1950s, the US, the Soviet Union, and others tested thermonuclear weapons in the Earth’s atmosphere. Those tests released vast quantities of radioactive material into the air and triggered fears that the nuclear reactions could ignite deuterium in the oceans, thereby destroying the planet in a catastrophic accidental fireball. Atmospheric tests ended in 1980, […]

The Sustainable Bioeconomy, a Path Towards Post-Extractivism

Ecuador has decided to move towards a bioeconomy-based development model, “which must be sustainable,” because otherwise “the remedy could be worse than the disease,” said the country’s Environment Minister Tarsicio Granizo, who is spearheading this innovative approach. In this interview with IPS, Granizo explained that the proposal represents a response to an extractivist model which […]

Global Warming Hysteria: Record Heat, Vanishing Sunspots, Co2, and Lawsuits

There’s record heat, but why? How do we measure it? What’s going on with sunspots? Blame the US? Answers below. Record Heat ​ Yes, there’s “record heat” thanks to the nonsensical way we measure temperatures. Mann-Made Warming Watts Up With That provides a humorous, but accurate, summation in Friday Funny: Josh on Mann-Made Warming. In […]

‘How Many Humans Can the Earth Support?’ Mathematics Professor Addresses Ahead of World Population Day

Humans are the most populous large mammal on Earth today, and probably in all of geological history. This World Population Day, humans number in the vicinity of 7.5 to 7.6 billion individuals. Can the Earth support this many people indefinitely? What will happen if we do nothing to manage future population growth and total resource […]

Why ‘Orphan’ Oil And Gas Wells Are A Growing Problem For States

When Bill West drives his weed sprayer over wheat and hay fields at his ranch northwest of Gillette, Wyoming, he occasionally bumps into debris from the more than a hundred defunct natural gas wells on his 10,000-acre property. The company that owned the wells went out of business four years ago, leaving behind fuse boxes, […]

Global Warming Could Be Double What Models Predict

An international team of researchers suggest that future global warming may eventually be twice as warm as projected by climate models Global warming could be much worse than predicated by current climate models. Researchers often use records of Earth’s past to predict changes in the future. A latest assessment of past warm periods shows that […]

For 9 months, I’ve asked environmentalists why they don’t address immigration as population issue

For 9 months, I’ve had scores of conversations with environmental leaders and thinkers about immigration’s impact on the U.S. population and environment. I heard some of this: I hope the Trump administration is successful at reducing future immigration flows because such incessant population growth is inhibiting our ability to conserve other species’ habitats. But I […]

Overpopulation Problem? What Overpopulation Problem?

Some people seem to be horrified at the sight of these images. For me, it is more a sensation of melancholy. These masses of people can exist only for a brief moment in the history of humankind. Overpopulation is a problem that will solve itself rather quickly although, unfortunately, not without pain. I keep reading […]

Meanwhile, In The Arctic…

In a development that could further advantage OPEC members as they step up production to compensate for falling exports out of Venezuela and (potentially) Iran, the Barents Observer is reporting that two of Russia’s largest Arctic out-shipment points for oil and LNG have become “packed with ice” leaving tankers and carriers stranded in the “paralyzed” […]

Tracking the dangers of air pollution

A sea of grass ripples in the wind, whilst occasional clumps of heather stand proud, refusing to bend. In the distance gullies on the Pentland Hills hold the remnants of winter snow. Sheep graze and lapwings sound their distinctive “peewit” call. If it weren’t for the cluster of boxes, tubes and metal rods, you’d be […]

Climate Alarm: Failed Prognostications

“If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit [between now and] the year 2025 to 2050…. The rise in global temperature is predicted to … caus[e] sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle […]

Solar Overtakes Gas, Wind as Source of New US Power

Despite tariffs that President Trump imposed on imported panels, the U.S. installed more solar energy than any other source of electricity in the first quarter. Developers installed 2.5 gigawatts of solar in the first quarter, up 13 percent from a year earlier, according to a report Tuesday from the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM […]

India’s ‘worst water crisis in its history’ is only going to get worse

India is suffering from the worst water crisis in its history and around 600 million people face a severe water shortage, according to a government think tank. Approximately 200,000 people die every year due to inadequate access to clean water and it’s “only going to get worse” as 21 cities are likely to run out […]

Concrete is the stuff civilization is made of. But for all its blessings, there are huge environmental costs

You may not realize it, but as you read this you are probably surrounded by the most important artificial material ever invented. Is there a floor beneath you, walls around, a roof overhead? Chances are excellent they are made at least partly out of this astonishingly underappreciated material: concrete. To most people, concrete is just […]

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