Economics, Ecology, Climate and Confusion

 By Terry Field

With the change in regime in Washington, a dam has broken concerning climate change. The scientific and eco-marketing community have become a little more emboldened, and there is more assertion in public concerning a reality that may overtake human and non-human life. In addition, there is a new dawning awareness by some in the chatterati that not only are these accelerating climate changes becoming ever-more difficult to cope with, but that there may be an unavoidable end point that is incompatible with advanced much remaining mammalian and other advanced life on earth. Quite clearly, were such to be experienced, would exclude any future for human life in any sort of scale at all.

I heard Secretary Kerry suggest that there may not be time to do anything meaningful. Such public utterance from the near – top of government of the United States is unprecedented. He is clearly listening to the real, not the politically moderated science coming out of the UN IPCC information washing-machine.

The realities have been well reported by serious science for well over twenty years, and in the last decade, a sea of ever-more alarming data and conclusions has emerged from the universities and institutes of the world.

The sum of the research is portentous, dreadful. A few of the realities can be described in the following, but there is much more, and none of it even slightly good:

1. Some of the many positive feed backs that accelerate and intensify the changes are triggered now and cannot be reversed.

2 Some feed-back loops have not been fully triggered, and if they are then very rapid severe climate change will entirely destroy human civilisation, by way of starvation and crop failure on a global scale, along with any form of order and much advanced life as the planet becomes rapidly desert with far less vegetation coverage.

3 Species collapse accelerates as species interdependence condemns total loss of large groups if mutually supporting species of even small numbers are removed from the system.

4 There is very little ‘biomass’ left that is not agriculture. There is very little mammalian life left now when compared to 100 years ago, and of that, what is left is in large measure domesticated for human farming usage. Genetic variation is greatly reduced, nearly everywhere.

5. It is probable that, for much of the effect, there is a 50 year lag between greenhouse gas emissions and the effect felt in atmosphere. Not 10 years as the IPCC suggests. 

6. The September arctic will be ice free in 2-3 years, not in 70 years from now as per the IPCC. This adds 25-30 years of COP2 emissions in its effect on climate change.

7.  Methane release is rapidly accelerating, may pause and cause super rapid heating. NOT modelled by the IPCC.

8. It is not enough even to entirely cease CO2 output to avoid catastrophic decline in livable condition across the planet. CO2 needs to be abstracted, in vast quantities, from atmosphere.

9.   As of today, we are 1.56 degrees C above preindustrial temperatures defined properly as 1750, and as it WAS before the IPCC cynically moved the date to a pre-industrial of 1900! Since when was 1900 pre-industrial?!? El Nino alone will make that + 1.85 in three or so years. SO much for the nonsense coming from the UN climate politics department UN of saying that below 1.5 C is the objective for 2100. Marketing liars do not change physical reality.

10. None of the above is yet known in general human society. Populations simply have no idea, or where there is some dim knowledge, are taught it is nonsense, or behave to pretend continuity is possible. The nine points above are the tip of the informational iceberg, all of which reinforces the central message. The hydrocarbon mass-human population society is not viable as it is, and one way or other will be greatly reduced in total scale, or functionally removed, and in relatively short order.

I cannot be bothered to discuss if this general ‘scene’ is ‘true’, and anyone who wants to do so must find another ear to listen to them. For me, the issues are simple. IF, and that is now not at all certain, this horror can be diminished to allow us to live reduced lives with reduced numbers, what must be done? Not what can be done in conventional terms, not what do we feel like doing, not what our third-rate, ecologically illiterate left / right political divisions can imagine our doing. Simply, what MUST be done to survive at all.

That is easy to state. Here are some of the bullet points. Execution details are irrelevant here; they are for the groups able to plan and perform.

- Cease all military production and activity. In every country. Immediately. Transfer the effort and the resources to carbon capture and storage. Carbon dioxide and methane needs to be removed from atmosphere. That vast industrial enterprise needs to be commenced NOW. Today. At the time of writing. ALL nations need to disarm rapidly totally permanently. That 7,000 year old cycle of self-abuse needs to end NOW. All essentially ‘tribal’ foreign policy matters tending to disagreement need to be dealt with, and ALL societies need to remove conflicting claims on all matters that generate disagreement. That is a luxury that will rapidly kill us all if we do not stop NOW and re-direct our fast-diminishing available resources.

 - Offer science and the best scientists the globe can provide control of event planning, needed resource allocation and direction of action. To do this all political systems will have to surrender dangerous bigotries of politically blinkered people, found in every parochial society in every country on earth, be they ‘right wing, left wing, ‘greens’, Greenpeace, and all other flavours of local bigotry born of ignorance. Even with this, to achieve anything concerning mitigating climate catastrophe, the clear objectives need to be agreed. If it is to re-establish and maintain, for instance, CO2 levels at 280 ppm, then ALL nation states of significance on earth must explicitly state their agreement with this. They should also agree a time frame. Which in present circumstances needs to be decades not hundreds of years. No objective, no agreement, no directing science, no success. The result. Mass death in a few decades. Or earlier.

Details are not for here. The actions needed will themselves remove the possibility of democratic social order, will directly result in enormous numbers of human dead, but that is now unavoidable. It is the lesser of the two evils. The intention should be simply to allow the human and other equally important species to survive in a world we recognise. All governments will need to direct and control societies as they quickly diminish in numbers in dreadful circumstances. To pretend otherwise, to suggest all can be done in steady-state human populations is simply to lie. To self-delude.

Where are we now? How big the gap?

IN all societies there is the assertion slight changes can ‘do the trick’. That is a simple lie.

Slight change condemns our living offspring to early death. Starvation, war, collapse, cannibalistic societies, mass slaughter all will roll across the globe in a totally uncontrolled, unmanageable way if the present ideas of current politicians prevail. An illustration. Biden has Kerry saying it may be too late to act. That same administration, however, spends, today, 2 trillion dollars making Americans able to buy MORE, to survive in immense comfort BETTER, to BEAT COVID (John Wayne like), to RECOVER PROSPERITY.

That is a knife in the guts of even denting climate change. Since these aided Americans will spend and not save their Bidenloot, the effect on the climate is Worse than giving 2 trillions to 10 multi billionaires, since they would simply save, reserve, park the asset, and not consume more goods directly.  After all, how many yachts, aircraft and private islands does a fellow need? Once they are acquired, the palate becomes jaded. The idea that social equality and the removal of global poverty reduces the risk of severe climate change is a nice conceit, but in reality, is it fantasy. Adding low-level primitive consumer power to five or more billion previously marginal-living people does nothing to preserve any part of the biosphere. Overlaying political and social preferences on climate physics is a bizarre form of self-delusion. Despite the chorus of cries to the contrary.

That most readers will laugh at these last few sentences should cause them to pause, to think and to reflect. Their laughter simply confirms that local political deeply held preferences, relevant to steady state societies in comfortable unthreatened times. That is far from the case now. Social preferences are a deep impediment to rational thinking when it comes to thinking about climate problem.

As for the Biden stimulus, well, in terms only of climate change and confronting it, it really is entertainment for people who live their lives without reflection.

And what is nice Mr Biden also doing?  He is also creating hypersonic missiles, vast space war systems, vast naval weapons platforms, millions of battlefield drones, robot-soldiers, the list goes on and on. It is all simply more of the same. SO stopping the military machines today? What chance? You can work that one out.

I hear central bank governors saying an ‘electrified world’ is the answer. People will be consuming 1/8^th the carbon of their ancestors.

Maybe fifty years ago I would have worked. Now? Well, they are amusing, and should perhaps be on the stage. Where will the gigantic tonnage of burnt energy needed to construct such a vast universal electrified world in all continents go as it is burned? Into the atmosphere! Into the seas!  Complete fantasy, pretending physics does not exist.  Mr. Carney (then Bank of England governor) said this and did not deny his probable move from Bank governor to politician. So he invents a palatable fanciful scenario that may also propel his career. Yet this is the best our hopeless ‘leadership’ can manage!

Even with his obviously political positioning, this ex-global banker is ahead of nearly ALL others now in power! AT least he began with a narrative that there is a dire problem. He just flunked everything after that.

The choices will be simple. Change and reduce our scale, our numbers, our total damage to the earth before catastrophe is clearly here. That means doing it now. Not tomorrow. Or wait, then watch the wave of horror overtake us with, then, no prospect of affecting the outcome. 

From what I know, I think we are well beyond the point where we can slow the change to a decertified, hot-state world. A world that will remain like that for hundreds of thousands of years. Where the cycle of the ice ages is removed and deferred. Where desertification is the face of the earth save for thin bands of reduced vegetation in the two tropics, and at the poles.

Unfortunately, now, every single politician possessed of real power spends ALL his or her time working to actively avoid anything that must be done, indeed what HAS to be done in order to give us and all other life a slightly greater chance of surviving and reproducing into the future.

 

I end, therefore, with a repetition. To slow or stop this global mass death of plants, insects, mammals, and other life, we need to see our numbers and our economic activity rapidly plummet. By billions of people. Yet at the time we add one billion mouths every 15 years. We try to reverse course, our effort should be to create technology for sucking vast quantities of greenhouse gas from atmosphere. Democracy, floating on the final century of excess, is done. It cannot begin to survive what is to come, even in the next quarter of a century, nor should it. Details of how to try to save complex life are for the best, the brightest, and future autocratic brutal coercive governments single function is to support the scientists and engineers  and to protect them as they battle against probability to try to succeed. Just as the brute power of Napoleon entrenched the feeble French revolution, so brute power is needed now to facilitate the heroes of the day – scientists – engineers, as they are finally allowed to do what MUST be done.

Or our grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren will die in unimaginable horror.

 

Terry, France, Ventose, 2021

 

A Letter from Normandy

by Glenn N. Holliman

My friend, Terry Field, fears that he is that ‘Voice Crying in the Wilderness’, largely alone trying to alert humanity that we stand in the midst of a new age, a radically  changing climate moving the planet, this good Earth, to a new and disastrous reality.  A reality he strongly argues that billions of peoples do not understand or acknowledge, and a political leadership remaining in denial of what is happening to all of us as we read these lines. 

Terry, an Englishman of considerable education and business experience and with homes in both the United States and France, writes this reflection upon his return to his restored manor house and garden in Normandy.  There he and Fina will experience another summer of French wine, calvados, multiple cheeses and tending to the roses and orchard. They will worry in frustration that their great grandchildren will face a different, much less inviting world, one with famine instead of the abundance of our generation.  And alas so should we. - GNH

A Note on Climate and Moral Blindness

by Terry Field

On returning from the warmth and comfort of Florida, to the changeable weather and quiet isolation of Normandy, life seems to be the experience of a dream. All is the same, yet nothing is the same.

The wide ocean separates worlds of different minds. I stand on the same earth of the same planet, but that is about all that is the same. Any mature reflection of the so-profound different ‘seas’ human beings swim in force one to accept that there is simply no commonality. Not of purpose, not of understanding of place, not of the deepest of desires, not even of the recognition of what it is worth living - and perhaps dying – for.

This is a dark realization, since such an awareness stops one adopting any real hope or expectation that in the face of what the most intelligent and the most sensitively aware on earth understand to be our darkest of dark predicaments, that there will or even can be a composite response to correctly perceived reality.

The depth of the difference in thinking and ‘being’ between such as France, Florida (and by extension, much of ‘rural’ America) and England – three countries I have some understanding, entirely removes any likelihood that the different minds will ever agree needs to be done, since they do not begin to agree on what matters, what is valuable, what is, to use a word not often applied, ‘sacred’.

It is a personal tragedy to properly recognize that the world as has been with human life is collapsing like a burning Chinese lantern.

And yet any sense of the dread reality is ‘internal’ to the individual, and hard to communicate to the legions of the intentionally or naively, profoundly un-aware. I used to consider that it was not just possible, but probable, that all people possessed of reasonable intellects and characters susceptible to rational discourse would immediately respond to the truth of what is happening, if only the tableau of reality were laid before them. A decade or more of observing mendacity bigotry and corruption has entirely removed any such expectation.

SO where are we now?

We are at the point where many thousands of readily observable degradation of species conditions across the entire large planet illuminates our daily observation that all is dying in front of us. All we need to do is look, and open our eyes, in order to see.

We are at the point where the air, the earth, the soil, the seas, fresh water, are all degrading, disappearing, becoming ever-so much more removed from the myriad creatures who need them for life. We are one such species.

We are at the point where the degradation of the real physical, biological, ecological global ‘stock’ is observably and rapidly declining to the point of multi-species collapse that is of itself accelerative to the point of all-species disappearance. Including Human life.

We are at the point where our civilization, having developed the employment of economic measurements that purposefully and deliberately exclude in value all that is worthwhile in the world, has resulted in the clear appearance of the comprehensive end point for the life of human beings, of our civilization, but far more importantly, the life of -literally – millions of species across the planet.

The global power-elite are advised by civil servants who, if they are not incompetent, know these realities. And yet the political class has steered us all to the point where it is impossible to see any mechanisms that can support the recovery of the stability of universal global life, without bringing in its train the inevitable loss of the great majority of human life, particularly human life compressed into high density urban centres.

Above a quiet winter evening in Florida, 2019. Terry is writing and Fina and my wife, Barb, discussing flowers and the quiet joy of sitting outside on a January evening. 

The large numbers of people now expressing an overt concern over their future and the future of their offspring are – very unfortunately – not effective nor are they helpful. Their terrors are justified. Yet none of them appear to understand that to even have a tiny chance of arresting this very-fast developing catastrophe, actions of such an extremely radical nature would be needed that the inevitable and unavoidable consequence of such actions would be the very rapid starvation of the great majority of people now living.

And we are at the point where, if this is not done, then all human and most other life on earth will be extinguished.

Within a century.  And long before that, all semblance of civilized order will have been long forgotten.

 In the context of reality, not our obsessional social fantasies, can anyone tell me why the sewage of Brexit, the squalor of Trump, the posturing of the mass-hysteria of the Ocasio-Cortezes of this world are other than trivially absurd and offensive? – Terry Field

Weak Reeds Bind Together

Our transnational writer, Mr. Terry Field of Normandy France and Sarasota, Florida, a born and bred Englishman, has awaken from his winter slumber and is once again at his keyboard.  Here we have his most recent thoughts on a number of issues troubling human beings in this era. - GNH

Brexit, Climate Change and the Fascistic Method. Weak Reeds Bind Together by Terry Field

Since 1945 and the end of the previously unimaginable bloodletting resulting from the final collapsed insanity of nationalism and the total war of nation states ordered by the deluded and the sociopaths, until the late 1970s all advanced nations, including the social democratic societies in the West, and centrally planned composite-ownership societies in the east, held broadly accepted ideas of how people should work and live together.  During this period, religious imperatives were suppressed, and religious expression was marginal and all-but unobserved as a significant social force.

Partaking of Florida sunshine in January, Terry, left, is thinking deep thoughts, seemingly oblivious to the smiles of the young ladies sharing a park bench with him. 

Since the obvious collapse of state socialism and the final collapse of European communism, this composite perspective that allowed for social economic and political/cultural integration at the supra-national level seemed to promise a peaceful future governed by non-nationalistic, logical-rational, intellectually driven governance, but that was an illusion.

Now all that is in the past, nationalism is the dominant vigor in the politics of most major states across the world. The imperative is for the nation to take control of its citizens lives, and cross-national co-operation is considered not only unnecessary, but also quite undesirable. Military power is being expanded in old and new major powers, and old agreements controlling arms are being thrown in the trash can.

The 19^th century is our model. The Twentieth century is no longer wanted.

In this transition, the political method of fascism has been very effectively applied. What do I mean by this? Well, when anyone talks about fascism, they and their listeners usually think about dictators wearing either the crooked cross or the hammer and cycle, and the repression that goes with it.

I mean something more attuned to the Roman meaning and nothing else. In the US House of Representatives, either side of the Speaker’s chair, there is a pair of bunches of fasces – bunches of reads binding an axe. 

So what is this? It is the binding of many weak reeds together to make them strong when together. That is a metaphor for the underpinnings for radical social and political changes in direction. In essence, when a settled socio-political structure is attacked by – often – small groups of focused, thoughtful, driven people possessed of new and different ideas from those generally accepted – and they would otherwise as mere individuals make no headway in changing minds - by binding together and making a ‘common front’ in forceful argument and persuasion they emulate the bunches of individual weak reeds. 

They are thus powerfully effective. One of the reasons they are so effective, is because nobody on the old political dispensation either anticipated their onslaught, nor were they prepared to argue equally forcefully against the projectors of these new (or perhaps rehashed old) ideas.

The fascistic method is far and away the most powerful political technique ever devised. It was the under-structure of the ‘Bolshevik’ revolution – a small tight driving inner political core, as opposed to the ‘distributed’ political movement of ‘Menshevism’. At this time of radical re-direction of political thought and the direction of the major societies of the globe, it is THE method that forces a wedge into the political world and shatters it at lightening speed.  I anticipate this method will be used by many groups as they observe the power of the method, and this in itself will further fragment the social fabric. It is arguable that such an approach has been applied to effect in the British Labour Party.

The ‘centre cannot hold’ when new or old novel ideas and directions are thrust into the minds of the somnolent.

This disruption has, I suggest, has only just begun. And it is NOT ‘right wing’ or ‘left wing’. It is a technique. And one that will change our lives and we need to become aware of that to avoid a sense of unanticipated crisis. I anticipate the European Parliament will experience change arising from precisely this methodology in May.

The British political system has seen this powerful effect, driven by highly talented political communicators within and without the traditional political structures over the last three years in the Brexit debate. The method has not only been very effective it has disabled the opposition, shattered the utility of the parliament, who, in general, were psychologically completely unprepared to fight with and respond to the same techniques. 

As Britain approaches the choice of leaving with no signed treaty, or remaining and cancelling (via another plebiscite) It is possible that a similar ‘push-back’ by the most driven in the political landscape may be seen to use this method. It will raise the stakes for both the commentators and the voting public.

Both need to know that they are not stripped of their minds just because they are assaulted by ultra-forceful political assault-troops and charismatic leaders. Can people become so aware? Probably not in this short timescale.

Climate Change 

Time to tell the dreadful truth and share the sense of awe and horror with the ‘man in the street’????

The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change is assisted in its deliberations by an extensive ‘editing’ panel that includes Saudi Arabia, Russia, The USA, China the EU and Japan, as well as other superpowers like Iceland. The report is affected by these actors.

The IPCC suggests now that we – the human race and the world entire – have about eleven years and a few months (now) to ‘act’ in order to avoid uncontrollable increasing global heating, climate change and internal feedbacks that make anything humanity can do quite irrelevant. In simple terms, after eleven years and a few months (amazing precision!) we become bystanders to a removal of our and most life on earth in very little time indeed. The logic is unavoidable. And unarguable. Or is it?

The IPCC reports understate the speed of change (it is non-linear but second order change now, the IPCC has suggested a linear slower acting anticipated change) and ignores or greatly diminishes the loss of Arctic ice and the albedo effect, the release of methane from the shallow Arctic shelf off Russia, and the release of CO2 and methane from the melting permafrost, and the effect on CO2 release from warming of the lands south of the arctic arboreal.

In other words, the IPCC is NOT realistic and the eleven years (and a few months) is probably a FANTASY NOW.

In addition, Many scientists suggest that the ‘sensitivity’ of the earth to CO2 is far greater than that assumed by the IPCC, and that the climate now experienced, and the level of global warming experienced now is the product of the CO2 and other gasses output to atmosphere by civilization (a heat engine) up to about the mid to late 1960s.

In other words, we have not yet experienced the heating that will come from the total – vastly increased ( and non-linear) CO2 and some recent methane that has been emitted between 1970 and now. In simple words. There is no ‘carbon budget’ left to burn.

Imagine then what is to come just from that.

SO What is the probable real condition?

The probable real condition is beyond terrible and all should be awed by it.  

It is very possible that we are at or beyond the point when the global climate system is going to further accelerate to a level not seen for more than 200 million years. It may well be now that there is nothing that human social order can do in order to stop the removal of mammalian and most other life from the surface of the earth.  

Fantasists rejected climate change.

Terry has grown a beard, similar to the Old Testament renderings of Jeremiah, a prophet who warned but was little heeded in his time.  

Their white noise is now dissipating. But the rising awareness of the problem is of course couched in terms that there is always some kind of solution. This is a reasonable approach – indeed the only possible approach give the ‘public need not be disturbed’ eternal requirement for social stability – and a social collapse serves no rational purpose today whatever the probable future. BUT....

The IPCC talks about a ‘technology switch’ to try to save ourselves that any rational economist will say likely destroys the prosperity of the comfortable legions living in the rich world’s societies (denied by many, but in reality unavoidable). That alone is why almost nothing is or probably will be done. Despite the rising awareness.

Others suggest the IPCC assumed-CO2 removal from atmosphere used in its models to ‘achieve’ its ‘2 degrees warming’ (really laughable, since such does not exist, or where it exists is quite untested and really at the level of the  Wright’s ‘plane, minus its ‘proof-of-flying’) compounds the unreality, and quite widespread skepticism of the value of its committee’s deliberations.

IN SUMMARY, I suggest to you that we are very likely now to be beyond the point of being able to control this dreadful rapid future progression, to a world unimaginable, with little life left upon it and certainly not homo sapiens or many other complex life forms, whatever the hopelessly incompetent, and often completely corrupted governments of the world do or do not to try  to do in order to ‘ameliorate’ the effects and the extent of the changes. Physics is its own master.

In all this, we still use the fascistic method to play tribal games.

Who now thinks survival is probable, or perhaps even possible??

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness of Denial?

Our regular contributor, Terrance Field, retired business person living in France and Florida, London School of Economics graduate and voracious reader, pens another cry of concern over the change in the earth's climate.  Here in America the catastrophic, unprecedented deluge of rain over Houston and other parts of the Gulf Coast have brought to the fore front the reality that yes, for whatever reasons, the globe's temperature is rising.  Again disturbing, confrontational reading.-Glenn N. Holliman

A Short Note on the Undeniable Reality of Climate Change

by Terry Field

A slew of excellent reports from the highest calibre science institutes across the world, supported by copper-bottomed observation data from multiple sources shows irrefutably that:

1 Climate change is continuing at rates unanticipated a decade ago.

2 The severity of the range of possible outcomes is greater than previously modelled.

3 The upper ranges of temperature, acidification of oceans, storms and desertification is expanded over prior expectations as data is better gathered and more clearly analyzed as to outcomes.

In every refining of the data, of observations, of analysis in the last decade there has only been a reinforcement of the disturbing reality that sensitivity to carbon has been understated when it comes to climate change and warming of the globe.

There is no refutation possible now. All else is quackery.

This problem, known for very many decades now, of progressive deterioration in the climatic conditions that allow the vast diversity of life to exist on this planet has a particularly disturbing characteristic. One that is now becoming more fully understood, and more incontrovertible.

Climate change – global warming – is increasing disproportionately to the energy input. There is a ‘cumulating’ effect, and on top of this, as the earth heats, it becomes more sensitive to a given energy input from carbon release.

Some had hoped that an increase in cloud cover and moisture density in the atmosphere would act to ‘ameliorate’ climate change. Study shows this is not the case. There is no such aid to be had from cloud cover and distribution both vertically and horizontally.

At the time of writing, CO2 concentration has risen to 406 parts P.M and has been recorded very recently at 410 ppm. This is unprecedented for enormous periods of time. Add to this the rate of accumulation is faster than in nature by large multiples, and the picture of disorder, uncontrolled acceleration, and the potency of human generation of CO2 from carbon burning is now quite compelling.

What has been done; what is being done. Is it sufficient?

Almost nothing has been done to restrict the growth in carbon burning and CO2 release to date, despite what has been known and what is now known.

The Paris agreement is voluntary, timid in its actions, disordered in its ‘voluntarism’ (required in order to get any agreement at all from the United States) and is a tiny fraction of what was needed to avert rapid warming, and tipping points being reached, met and the consequences becoming patent.

Add to this the political impossibility of selling to the American people the idea of wealth transfer to the ‘developing’ world to cause it to avoid the use of hydrocarbons and the Paris accord is now of really very little value indeed, despite the hype.

Now the United States has dismantled its monitoring and control agencies. The EPA is eviscerated, and the nation has given notice of leaving the Paris Climate accord.  The United States is now removing the modest actions taken to disfavour carbon extraction and burning, and is doing all it can to accelerate the use of that source of energy.

Whilst local actions by committed environmental CO2 ‘averters’ is welcome, it is no match for a full federal program combined with the oil, gas and coal industries working together to re-establish massive carbon input into the productive economy.

Has the process stalled terminally, and what is the likely future?

There are, at the time of writing, 1600 incremental coal fired power stations planned for the developing nations and these will be built across the world. The United States has a clear drive, via fracking, leaving aside the coal and oil being pushed by Trump’s administration to continue its recovered vitality and prosperity.

The appearance of alternative solar and to a small degree wind-powered systems has acted at the margin. The real driver to American prosperity is fracked, super-cheap gas with gigantic reserves available for future usage.  Europe is attempting to switch much of its power generation to ‘renewables’ with less CO2 output, but with limited success. Germany uses coal stations to back up the variability of these sources, and its CO2 output is not greatly reduced as a result.

The reality for Europe is the imposition by didactic political power of relatively impoverishing expensive lower carbon output energy. Europe is, by its history, a place where state power is immense, and personal freedom highly constrained. Even there, the attempt at decarbonisation is puny. The socialist/green alliance to destroy nuclear power has a great deal to do with this quite perverse outcome.

Thus the process of attempted reduction in carbon output is trivial across the world. Much marketing hype in national media, some old technologies made a little more effective, but that is about it.

Why is the attempt so trivial to date??

In a word, economics.

The elites who guide the affairs of the world – even ever so poorly – have for long understood the powerful linear relationship between availability – and thus low price – of conventional energy sources and economic prosperity. Indeed, in the West that relationship is enhanced by a relative power over the rest of the world that has flowed directly from the control not only of abundant hydrocarbons, but also the financial downstream – the recycling of funds through the western banking system, for mostly internal usage. They know that that system is under threat from the heterogenous supply characteristics of distributed ‘renewable’ power systems. Add to this the potential to recycle funds earned from these new energy systems through non-western banking systems and the threat becomes  very obvious indeed.

Are the claims that new energy technologies are low cost and the switchover will not be damaging to Western – indeed global economic wealth-generation correct????

When the Stern report was produced about a decade ago, the optimistic assumptions contained in the report concerning the very modest costs required to switch to low-carbon energy systems and the ‘benign’ effect to be experience in the real economy was the subject of some quite cynical comments in the serious press.

Now, so much later, and with data showing we are at a much more serious point in CO2 concentration, and with dire projections for 2100 near term outturns, nobody suggests that this benign economic projection is realistic.

People like Hansen in the USA suggest we are now at the point where the only viable method of avoiding total catastrophe in not many decades is the development of immense Carbon Capture and Storage technologies.

This technology does not presently exist in a scaled format. Only very small plants in test-mode exist. Some new designs are being built, but the general observation on this technology is that it will add between 60% to 130% on top of the existing hydrocarbon input to gain the same output. This translates to gigantic increased hydrocarbon demand, and immense increases in cost, rapid approach towards ‘peak’ oil, and result in vast non carbon pollutions both upstream and downstream for the use of coal.

This, and all the other disruptions associated with carbon removal suggest that energy becomes stratospherically expensive, and physically difficult to deliver. The pressure to bring new nuclear power designs on-stream will be intense. The early indications of this technology would suggest a significant increase to costs of energy supply from this source.

The re-engineering of the distribution system that will be required from the potential CCS power stations and the new generation of nuclear, plus renewables is anticipated to add considerable cost to the grid distribution system.

Add to this the integration of hydrocarbon products into a vast number of products, that supply being achieved by energy intensive thermal and catalytic cracking plants. These products are not subject to simple substitution with non-carbon sourced chemicals. The more we know, the more it would appear that there is a massive impact to the economy resultant from any real attempt to ‘decarbonise’ energy supply and product design. Some suggest it cannot be done; that we have arrived at a point where it is so late, and the required revolution to avoid utter climate catastrophe so vast in cost and disruption that civilisation, organised advanced society cannot survive the experience.

A fancy way of saying that is simply cannot be done.

We are too late to even try.

What are the real prospects, today, for the coming 100 years of climate change? In a simple descriptive.

The models are less and less vague.

Data is more robust.

It suggests a possible range of outcomes.

In terms of temperature, the range of outcomes by 2100 seems to coalesce around the range 2 degrees C minimum, more probable 3.5 degrees C. A maximum of 6 degrees C is now reinforced by progressively more studies, better data, more accurate analysis and realistic modelling.

 The descriptives of this range of average global temperatures range from unsettling, where degraded quality of agriculture, living standards, length of life, species survival becoming more difficult and ‘on the edge’ -  to a collapse of life across a vast swath of species, and unliveable conditions for all higher forms of life in all but the extreme polar regions. And even there small survivor groups of greatly reduced ranges of species will be exposed to the real possibility of extinction. And that includes us.

An earth at + 2 degrees is dangerously unpleasant. Very different from now.

An earth of + 3.5 degrees sees drowned countries, disappearance of coasts, most cities charnel houses no longer habitable, the central belt of the globe subject to super-hot periods where mass death of hundreds of millions will be unavoidable. The waters of the Indian sub-continent become seasonal, and the deserts of central India, of China, of the Mongolian plateau, of the Sahara then surrounding the Mediterranean both south and north  grow inexorably.

The Amazon largely disappears and becomes a carbon emitter, not carbon absorber.

The Northern ice is gone. The waters, now dark, absorb more heat – a ‘feedback effect’. The southern ice melts at an increasing rate from land not simply ice-shelfs, and Greenland ice does the same.

Massive rises in sea levels are experienced.

International food and most other trade dies. Starvation across the globe becomes commonplace.

+ 4 degrees and above – feedback reinforcing loops abound. Death of every form of sophisticated life is everywhere. We cannot and do not survive this experience.

Why do you hear nothing of this?

Because:

1 Climate Scientists are not social scientists. They fail to communicate. And now often fear so to do.

 2 Some – indeed many – now fear nothing can be done, and there is little point in terrifying the population.

3 This catastrophic circumstance takes time to assimilate. We are trained to hope and believe that we are able to innovate in every way to solve previously insoluble problem.

Yet now this problem is slowly - very slowly – becoming obviously ‘soluble’ at the expense of either:

An utter collapse in our economy, social and political order and distribution of wealth, power, and absence of extreme violence on the one hand or at the expense, on the other:

A collapse of the conditions that support life and a drastic and frankly unimaginable reduction in the size of the global human population.

Please note and be aware that ‘solutions’ as described here are solutions for the earth. Not for us.

Physics is like that.

It is not anthropocentric.

4 Politicians have suggested that things are better than they are. The IPCC reports have consistently underplayed the dread reality.

5 The models all – or nearly all – include geo-engineering – the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere as a critical element in presenting g a credible plan to remain within an acceptable climate outcome – usually defined as + 2 degrees.

The problem here is a simple one. None of these technologies exists, all are in the earliest conceptual stage, none are even remotely understood as to their total effect on life on earth. None are close to being ‘costed’.

 Implementation, nor thought about in terms of resilience and reliability. NO running cost effect on economic continuity is attempted.

In other words, we need these technologies to make numbers add up and the outcome look even tolerable therefore they must be made to exist! A sort of moral imperative applied to both physics and economics.

Many, myself included, would call this close to insane.  Certainly utterly irresponsible; but foolish lightweight politicians need coca to sleep at night, and this is their ‘cocoa’.

Are we seeing the start of the catastrophe? Will such a thing make a positive difference?

The bloodless argument revolves around ‘probability’.

Are the events increasing in violence, severity, destructiveness, incidence of human and other species death? Do we see events we have never seen before?

Certainly there is data suggesting hurricanes are shifting northward at 35 miles every ten years from the Gulf. The recent storms attacking the Eastern seaboard in the US look highly unusual. Houston is presently experiencing the consequences of 52 inches of water dropped from a single low pressure event.

If we look at Asia, the monsoon seems perturbed; varying in date, in intensity, in regional effects in ways not seen before.

Heat plumes in the Middle East, some 150 F – have been seen in Iran, Kuwait, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Never before seen heat plumes. mortally dangerous to those unprotected by air conditioning. Certainly mortal to local fauna.

The perturbation of the Arctic has seen minus 80 degrees experienced in Siberia. This has destroyed transhumance, and hunter gatherers have ceased their way of life after tens of thousands of years of quiet continuity.

In the most recent extreme cold, two thirds of all mammalian life in large swathes of Siberia died. This was seen before, when the Arctic melted in the last interglacial, and the pressure variation down from the arctic modified. The records of this are very clear.

Syria has lost its surface water; its agricultural regions have become deserts, the weather table has dropped from 9 feet below grade to 1500 feet below grade. War was in significant measure caused by this. In Turkey, the Eastern regions of Asia Minor are also experiencing extreme water stress, social discontent, and a (possibly) irritated population turns to radical Islam as a panacea.

Portugal is modelled consistently as being one of the most early-affected States bordering the North Mediterranean. Sure enough, immense summer fires have consumed large areas of the landscape of that country.

Projections show that the Mediterranean basin will be the most acutely and earliest affected non-polar region on earth as the climate heats up and absorbs energy.

The models suggest that the entire basin will become a desert; Italy will be a desert. The desert may extend as far as Paris.

Consider the consequences for the loss of viability, agriculture, activity in much of the south of the United States. The data would indicate that event is beginning to be seen.

 Night-time temperatures are rising across the belt from Cancer to Capricorn. This may be the pre-curser to the impossibility of human (let alone other mammalian and other life) continuing to live in that large central belt on Earth.

Is this alarming and dreadful set of conditions unavoidable; possibly avoidable, probably avoidable?

We are dealing with probabilities. Potentials.

As things are, I believe it is simply too late to avoid more than + 2 degrees C.

If carbon removal technologies develop and become affective, this may be avoided. I do not expect this. It is an un-quantified hope, and nothing more.

BUT if there is no serious reduction in carbon output, and no geo-engineering project works with any significant effect, then I expect +3  to +4 degrees by about 2100.

At which point so many positive feedback loops will have kicked in, that Humans will then have no effect on the outcome – their capacity to control the process will have become null.

Whatever happens, I anticipate a massive reduction in the productive economy across the world. And if we as a global society avoid violent disorder and large-scale regional collapse I will be very surprised indeed.

And remember, so many of the positive feedback loops are not even in the IPCC reports as they cannot be reliably quantified.

Some of these are as follows.

1 The loss of northern Arctic sea ice – the ‘albedo’ effect accelerates ocean heating.

2 The loss of a very large portion of the Amazon Basin. Now considered unsaveable by most informed observers.

3 Methane release from the Siberian tundra.

4 Methane release from frozen clathrates in the warmed shallow Arctic oceans.

5 Non-linear ‘plus’ response to a given input of CO2 to the system.

There are many others; these are sufficient to be going on with. - Terry Field