You can be forgiven for thinking that the most important thing happening now is the war between Ukraine and Russia. After all, the Russian government through its foreign minister and its mouthpieces in the media has threatened to use nuclear weapons to win the war in Ukraine. Whether you think Russia is bluffing or not, it’s all very scary.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on planet Earth our perilous ecological situation is spiraling from bad to worse. That this is the big story and has been for many decades has escaped the media but does occasionally get their attention when the perilous consequences cannot be ignored. Climate change and the resulting drought and heat that are now our constant companions are currently showing up in the news cycle. To wit:
The water level in Lake Mead (formed by Hoover Dam to provide water to Arizona, California and Nevada) has declined to historic lows. The original intake valves that used to supply water to Las Vegas and environs are now exposed for the first time ever. (Other deeper ones were built in anticipation of this day. See my coverage of the now 23-year-old drought when it was only 10 years old.)
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The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California for the first time is limiting water use for outdoor watering. The order affects about 6 million residents. The District is also calling on users in the entire district of 19 million people to lower water use by 30 percent.
High temperatures of 110 degrees F have hit India early in the summer season. In addition to the threat to human health, the heat is threatening the yield of India’s recently planted wheat crop which is now estimated to decline between 20 to 50 percent due to heat damage. This is happening against the backdrop of a decline in wheat exports from Russia and Ukraine, formerly the world’s number one and number five exporters, respectively.
This decline is due to snarled shipping routes along the Ukraine’s Black Sea coast (due to the war) and a decision by Ukraine and Russia to withhold wheat exports temporarily to make sure the countries have enough for their own needs. The worldwide market in wheat means that conditions wherever wheat is grown cannot be ignored.
Drought in Brazil due to a resurgent La Niña is threatening the corn crop in the country’s main southern corn growing region. Of course, Brazil grows other crops there including soy, sugar and oranges, all of which have experienced rises in their prices.
After three years of failing rains in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya and rains still absent a month into the current rainy season, 20 million people could face extreme hunger this year in the Horn of Africa.
I could just as easily adduce a list of unusually heavy flooding across the world. This is the flip side of global warming. As the hydrological cycle both changes and goes into overdrive, it brings too much or too little moisture to areas previously neither too wet nor too dry.
It’s true that people and agriculture could migrate to areas where climate change is making conditions more favorable to farming. It would be both expensive and chaotic to do so. And, expedited relocation would almost certainly entail seizure of land and forced resettlement which has a very grim history. Just ask Native Americans! Moving agriculture means not just finding new land for planting, but also moving or rebuilding the entire agricultural infrastructure of farm services with it.
Our difficulty as a civilization at this late date has been to accept that there is now no frontier to flee to when we’ve degraded the fertility of the soil, upset the climate, extracted all the valuable minerals, and poisoned the air, the soil and the seas all the way to the poles.
If human civilization avoids nuclear annihilation in what is really World War III (which we are conveniently calling the Russia-Ukraine war), everyone will breathe a giant sigh of relief. We will, however, still be facing another type of annihilation of our own making. Only if we end our war on the biosphere and our overexploitation of the underground stores of the planet will we humans have a chance of avoiding a societal collapse which on our current trajectory seems inevitable.
Image: “Preserve your forests from destruction, and protect your country from floods and drought “. Illustration shows a female spirit labeled “Public Spirit” warning two men cutting logs, of the consequences of deforestation. 1884. Puck Magazine via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Preserve_your_forests_from_destruction,_and_protect_your_country_from_floods_and_drought_LCCN2012645164.jpg
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Yes you have certainly made the point of no return for humanity. It is raining just now and the pastures need it. Been colder than usual and my planting is delayed but compared to other places we are doing well. Having prepared to be self sufficient I hope that we will be able to live out our last few years peacefully.
I find this quote amazing, and probably as Californian as it can get. The green, ecologically aware, originators of high taxes, high utility bills to pay for “green” solutions, no accidental fire shall go unpunished and no consumer should ever be hurt in attempts to save the world except in their pocketbook, THESE folks FOR THE FIRST TIME, are limiting water use? Knowing this information right here those folks are just now NOTICING?
I don’t know about that group. but regulations on water use have been common in California for years.
So are you saying Kurt’s statement was inaccurate, or the website I referenced detailing the levels of drought across this century for California is inaccurate? Because if in fact the drought is no surprise, has been coming for years, has been occurring already, then it sure sounds like someone just now got around to noticing. The surprise being in the state where the state philosophy is usually to torture the people through the mechanism of cost to mend their evil ways. Unless of course the state gives up, and then you’ve got the California metro area homeless issues, gentrification, oilfield wastewater irrigation of human food crops, the discouragement of oil and gas development…while the state continues to happily consume it, and so on and so forth. Does this type of psychological disconnect exist in your state Bart, is it something visible and known within the internal state politics and conversations among its citizens or in its papers?
Let’s stick to the topic.
Living in California, it’s hard to avoid the awareness of drought.
I remember in 1972-3 having to be careful about water usage. Many signs like:
“In this land of drought and sun,
We only flush for number one.”
In recent years, there have been periodic restrictions about things like outdoor watering. There’s a movement toward drought-tolerant landscaping. Our city uses recycled water from sewage for watering landscaping.
The specifics probably change from water district to water district.
Interesting that you can see drought stamped everywhere, but some write about it as though California just noticed. Or, arguably, finally decided to do something substantial about. The idea that you’ve noticed these things yet the right of folks to keep their lawns green across the same time span is quite….contradictory.
Circa 2018, after a decade of increasingly dire news and denial of our climate situation. I came to the conclusion that humanity was not going to do the right thing and work to avoid climate catastrophe. If I were super wealthy (ala Bill Gates), I might want to take it upon myself to solve the problem, but how so…? If people have demonstrated an inability to change, the only solution is fewer people. That’s an easier proposition to consider if you’re a socio/psychopath, but fortunately for us, it’s been demonstrated in multiple psychological experiments that making someone wealthy turns them into exactly that. So for these elites, they have not only the resources to do such a thing, but they aren’t repulsed by it in the same way that you or I would be. It would have to be done “under the radar”, with a compliant media and mass censorship of course. Gee, I wonder what their plan might be?
Do you think it will be easier to reduce the population than to reduce emissions?
our current condition will not be alleviated by throwing money at it,
we have arrived at this current mess through the obsession with ‘making money,
we have used the planet as an infinite piggy bank–to be cracked open and the contents pilfered ad infinitum
In the short term we can increase oil and gas production in the US without hurting the climate, if these are used to help Europe shut off Russian oil and gas. Keep it in the ground in Russia.
No. Only keeping it in the ground in the US and in Russia equates to not “hurting the climate.”
He’s saying it’s like for like; no extra.
Jevons and China and the Third World clamoring at the door, say different.
Actually, the opposite is true. Here in the US most of our production is via low EROEI (i.e. higher emissions) fracked wells. Russia still has loads of conventional reserves and no need to go to the extremes we’ve had to. Thus, their fossil fuels are lower emission than our own, if we’re going to split hairs here.
I do suppose your “without hurting the climate” clause could be interpreted in a few different ways. If we’re looking at current trajectory of self-extinction via carbon emissions, it’d be hard to hurt our future any more than we already have.
erm https://www.coreysdigs.com/global/new-controlled-food-system-is-now-in-place-and-they-will-stop-at-nothing-to-accelerate-their-control/?fbclid=IwAR2hHOkDq70-Mtyrd2rPTFSph3SySgJuEtKIFCg0cjhBtbj2h9YYmgKDYFE
but the largest actor in population reduction has changed course…
Details?
China, no?
I know he is saying “no extra”, but we have to go negative, not stay at a given level to avoid “hurting the climate”.
Agreed, totally. Indeed we need to consume below a long-term-sustainable level for a while, until hammered renewable stocks recover, too.
It would certainly appear that way, considering how much voluntary emission reduction we’ve seen over the last few decades where climate change has been widely acknowledged. Nobody would go along with voluntary population reduction measures, but people are easily fooled into wars, and have demonstrated a willingness to take fake vaccines in response to an engineered pandemic.
no need even for engineering, the fiction suffices.
I agree — I don’t think that the avoidance of climate catastrophe is even possible at this point. But attempts at population reduction are definitely within the realm of possibility, and would be the single most important part of an effort by anyone who *does* believe that recovery is possible. Throwing money at such an endeavor now looks to be working quite well. US health insurers are reporting 6-sigma spikes in working age mortality. BC and Alberta just reported numbers indicating a 70% increase in mortality (I believe in the 18-44 age group). Immunologist Dolores Cahill reported early in the vaccination program that she thought it would kill most recipients within a decade. The trends are definitely working in her favor. My sister’s family (all vaxxed and boostered) all just got covid as well, as have many of their friends. ADE — encountered with the original mRNA /SARS vaccine trials in 2013 — does appear to be a potential problem. I have yet to see any credible explanation of why it would not occur this time.