‘A Wake Up Call’: The World Needs to Prepare for Massive Crop Failure

Climate change is messing with the jet stream, and it means more extreme weather events in the future.

 

Drought-stricken corn crops bake in the sun as temperatures continue to hover around 100 degrees Monday, July 25, 2011, in Tomball, Texas.

LINK: https://gizmodo.com/study-world-needs-to-prepare-for-massive-crop-failure-1850605691

Are We Facing the Reality of Civilizational Collapse?

The Hottest Days in 100,000 Years. How Long Do We Have, and What Does “Collapse” Mean for a Civilization?

The Hottest Days in 100,000 Years. How Long Do We Have, and What Does “Collapse” Mean for a Civilization?

 

The hottest series of days in 100,000 years. The world, for its part, looked away. Nobody much noticed. Us, humankind, going through this historic, epochal change. Things will never be the same again — not even if, somehow, the temperature “goes back down,” because the planet, of course, will by then have been altered, profoundly.

Those of us who are paying attention, though, might have begun to wonder: what about this thing called “civilizational collapse”? How close is it? What does it really mean?

LINK: https://eand.co/are-we-facing-the-reality-of-civilizational-collapse-18d2817cf85d

Needed: Either Degrowth or Two Earths

Needed: Either Degrowth or Two Earths

In a May 30 essay for the New York Times titled “The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring,” one of the architects of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Brian Deese, wrote, “Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build battery factories and develop other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

There’s just one problem. Those technologies aren’t going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to reduce emissions fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe is to phase out the burning of oil, gas, and coal by law, directly and deliberately. If, against all odds, the United States does that, we certainly will need wind- and solar-power installations, batteries, and new technologies to compensate for the decline of energy from fossil fuels. There is no reason, however, to expect that the process would work in reverse; a “clean-energy” mobilization alone won’t cause a steep reduction in use of fossil fuels.

I think top leaders in Washington are using green-energy pipe dreams to distract us from the reality that they have given up altogether on reducing US fossil fuel use. They’ve caved. This month’s bipartisan deal on the debt limit included a provision that would ease the permitting of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines like the ecologically destructive Mountain Valley fossil-gas pipeline so dear to the heart of West Virginia’s Democratic senator Joe Manchin. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has issued new rules allowing old coal and fossil gas power plants to continue operating if they capture their carbon dioxide emissions and inject them into old oil wells. And under the IRA, those plants that capture emissions will receive federal climate subsidies, even if they use the carbon dioxide that’s pumped into the old wells to push out residual oil that has evaded conventional methods of extraction. And the IRA did not even end federal subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, which could have saved somewhere between $10 and $50 billion annually. Taken together, these policies could extend the operation of existing coal and gas power plants much further into the future.

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Bystander video from the mass stabbing at a playground in France that wounded 4 children. (CENSORED)

Bystander video from the mass stabbing at a playground in France that wounded 4 children. (CENSORED)
by u/theykilledk3nny in masskillers

Bystander footage showing the arrest of the perpetrator of the mass stabbing at a park in Annecy, France. 4 children and two adults were injured in the attack. The perpetrator was apparently shot in the legs during the arrest.

Bystander footage showing the arrest of the perpetrator of the mass stabbing at a park in Annecy, France. 4 children and two adults were injured in the attack. The perpetrator was apparently shot in the legs during the arrest.
by u/theykilledk3nny in masskillers

Special Pre-Release Discount for Statio Numero Illustrated

Statio Numero
Statio Numero

Statio Numero

Chapter 3 of the Liminal Cycle

Knowledge of Liminal and Xen, which make up the first two parts of the trilogy, will be necessary for understanding this work.

Statio Numero

A product plan left behind documents the creator’s descent into a parallel world or maybe simply madness. A story about persona, identity, liminality, and voice.

He Told Followers to Starve to Meet Jesus. Why Did So Many Do It?

Hundreds were drawn to a remote wilderness in southeastern Kenya by the End Times preaching of pastor Paul Mackenzie. Relatives and ex-members tried to intervene, but some did not want to be rescued.

After bodies were exhumed, holes were left in the ground at a mass gravesite in the Shakahola Forest in Kenya.Credit...Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
After bodies were exhumed, holes were left in the ground at a mass gravesite in the Shakahola Forest in Kenya.Credit…Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LINK:https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/world/africa/kenya-christian-cult-deaths.html

The far north is burning—and turning up the heat on the planet

The Arctic and surroundings are being transformed from carbon sink to carbon emitter.

The Arctic and surroundings are being transformed from carbon sink to carbon emitter.
Fire-damaged trees in a boreal forest near the Saskatchewan River in Alberta, Canada. As northern forests burn, they’re releasing massive amounts of carbon.

The far north is both a massive carbon sink and a potent environmental time bomb. The region stores a huge amount of CO2 in boreal forests and underlying soils. Organic peat soil, for instance, covers just 3 percent of the Earth’s land area (there’s some in tropical regions, too), yet it contains a third of its terrestrial carbon. And Arctic permafrost has locked away thousands of years’ worth of plant matter, preventing rot that would release clouds of planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane.

But in a pair of recent papers, scientists have found that wildfires and human meddling are reducing northern ecosystems’ ability to sequester carbon, threatening to turn them into carbon sources. That will in turn accelerate climate change, which is already warming the Arctic four and a half times faster than the rest of the world, triggering the release of still more carbon—a gnarly feedback loop.

LINK: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/the-far-north-is-burning-and-turning-up-the-heat-on-the-planet/