Tag: forest

Major ‘Population Correction’ Coming For Humanity, Scientist Predicts

Major 'Population Correction' Coming For Humanity, Scientist Predicts
Abandoned city
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A little over two centuries ago, in the year 1800, roughly a billion people called Earth home.

Just a century later, it had grown by another 600 million.

Today, there are around 8 billion people on the planet.

That sort of growth is unsustainable for our ecosphere, risking a ‘population correction’ that according to a new study could occur before the century is out.

The prediction is the work of population ecologist William Rees from the University of British Columbia in Canada. He argues that we’re using up Earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate, and that our natural tendencies as humans make it difficult for us to correct this “advanced ecological overshoot”.

The result could be some kind of civilizational collapse that ‘corrects’ the world’s population, Rees says – one that could happen before the end of the century in a worst case scenario. Only the richest and most resilient societies would be left.

“Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources,” Rees writes in his published paper.

LINK: https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/major-population-correction-coming-for-humanity-scientist-predicts/ar-AA1fqbMu

No one wants to be right about this’: climate scientists’ horror and exasperation as global predictions play out Climate experts

As the northern hemisphere burns, experts feel deep sadness – and resentment – while dreading what lies ahead this Australian summer

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/25/northern-hemisphere-heatwaves-europe-greece-italy-wildfires-extreme-weather-climate-experts

 

World’s oceans changing colour due to climate breakdown, study suggests

The sea is becoming greener due to changes in plankton populations, analysis of Nasa images finds

Bright swirls caused by phytoplankton in the deep blue waters off Canada in early July 2023. Photograph: Nasa
Bright swirls caused by phytoplankton in the deep blue waters off Canada in early July 2023. Photograph: Nasa

Earth’s oceans are changing colour and climate breakdown is probably to blame, according to research.

The deep blue sea is actually becoming steadily greener over time, according to the study, with areas in the low latitudes near the equator especially affected.

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/12/worlds-oceans-changing-colour-due-to-climate-breakdown-study-suggests

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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KunstlerCast 377 — John Michael Greer on Magic and the Reenchantment of Daily Life

KunstlerCast - Suburban Sprawl: A Tragic Comedy

#377 — John Michael Greer blogs at Ecosophia, subtitle, Toward an Ecological Spirituality. JMG has been an astute observer of Western Civ’s arduous economic and cultural descent, and is the author of many books, both novels and non-fiction, including Green Wizardry, After Oil, The Wealth of Nature, and Not the Future We Ordered. Star’s Reach, is a novel set 400 years ahead in America’s neo-medieval future, The King in Orange, a meditation on the relationship between archetype psychology and the occult as acted out in politics and culture. Things are getting weird in America, wouldn’t you agree? Even a bit supernatural. To help us navigate through this wilderness of the weird, JMG and I talk about magic and the re-enchantment of daily life in these turbulent times.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

Out in the wild: how Ken Layne created an alternative to clickbait in the desert

Ken Layne, writer, publisher and proprietor of Desert Oracle, a self-published periodical and radio program. Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian
Ken Layne, writer, publisher and proprietor of Desert Oracle, a self-published periodical and radio program. Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/07/ken-layne-desert-oracle-magazine-desert-gawker

Sound artist eavesdrops on what is thought to be world’s heaviest organism

Artist records underground sounds generated by Pando, a huge group of aspens in Utah considered to be a single organism

Pando is made up of 47,000 genetically identical quivering aspens, which are considered to be a single organism, with the ‘trees’ actually branches thought to be connected by a shared root system. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Pando is made up of 47,000 genetically identical quivering aspens, which are considered to be a single organism, with the ‘trees’ actually branches thought to be connected by a shared root system. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/10/sound-artist-eavesdrops-on-what-is-thought-to-be-worlds-heaviest-organism-pando-utah

When it comes to the world’s heaviest living organism, it is a “forest of one tree” that is thought to take the crown. Now a sound expert is listening into the quiet grove in an attempt to hear its secrets.

Known as Pando – Latin for “I spread” – the 47,000 genetically identical quivering aspens in south-central Utah are considered to be a single organism, with the “trees” actually branches thought to be connected by a shared root system.

The upshot is a vast living entity, thought to be thousands of years old, that covers 43 hectares (106 acres) with a dry weight of about 6m kg, making it, putatively, the Earth’s heaviest living organism. But it is also an organism in danger, with experts warning Pando is probably dying off due to human actions.

Now an acoustic artist has revealed how he has delved deep to uncover fresh insights into the tree.

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/