Author: MuckAbout

John Michael Greer is one of the deep thinkers of our time. He is “macro-man” in that when he looks at a particular subject, he not only sees and analyzes the immediate subject at hand, he also thoroughly identifies all the things that bear on the subject as inputs and analyzes as many outputs as is possible and what they do (including unintended consequences). In other words, he’s a big picture man… Enjoy!

by John Michael Greer (The Archdruid Report)

     I’d meant to devote this week’s post to exploring the way that new religious movements so often give shape to emerging ideas and social forms during the decline of civilizations, and to sketch out some of the possibilities for action along those lines as industrial society moves further along its own curve of decline and fall. Still, these essays are part of a broader conversation about the future of today’s world, and now and then some other part of that conversation brings up points relevant to the discussion here.

That’s as much excuse as there is for this week’s detour. A few weeks ago, the P2P Foundation website hosted a piece by Kevin Carson titled When Ephemeralization is Hard to Tell from Catabolic Collapse. Carson’s piece got some attention recently in the peak oil blogosphere, not to mention some pointed and by no means unjustified criticism. It seems to me, though, that there’s a valid point tucked away in Carson’s essay; he’s got it by the wrong end, and it doesn’t imply what he thinks it does, but the point is nonetheless there, and important.

Getting to it, though, requires a certain tolerance for intellectual sloppiness of a kind embarrassingly common in today’s culture. When Carson talks about “the Jared Diamond/John Michael Greer/William Kunstler theory of ‘catabolic collapse,’” for example, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he simply hasn’t taken the time to learn much about his subject. “Catabolic collapse,” after all, isn’t a generic label for collapse in general; it’s the name for a specific theory about how civilizations fall—those who are interested can download a PDF here—which I developed between 2001 and 2004 and published online in a 2005 essay, and the other two names he cited had nothing to do with it.

Mind you, I would be delighted to hear that Jared Diamond supports the theory of catabolic collapse, but as far as I know, he’s never mentioned it in print, and the modes of collapse he discusses in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed differ significantly from my model. As for the third author, presumably Carson means James Howard Kunstler, the author of The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic—very solid books about the approaching end of the industrial age, though once again based on a different theory of collapse—rather than William Kunstler, the late civil rights lawyer who defended the Chicago Seven back in 1969, and who to the best of my knowledge never discussed the collapse of civilizations at all.

This same somewhat casual relationship to matters of fact pops up elsewhere in Carson’s essay, and leaves his argument rather the worse for wear.  Carson’s claim is that the accelerating breakdown of the existing infrastructure of industrial society isn’t a problem, because that infrastructure either is being replaced, or is sure to be replaced (he is somewhat vague on this distinction), by newer, better and cheaper high-tech systems. What Buckminster Fuller used to call ephemeralization—defined, with Bucky’s usual vagueness, as “doing more with less”—is, in Carson’s view, “one of the most central distinguishing characteristics of our technology,” and guarantees that new infrastructures will be so much less capital-intensive than the old ones that replacing the latter won’t be a problem.

That’s a claim worth considering. The difficulty, though, is that the example he offers—also borrowed from Fuller—actually makes the opposite case.  Replacing a global network of oceanic cables weighing some very large amount with a few dozen communications satellites weighing a few tons each does look, at first glance, like a dramatic step toward ephemeralization, but that impression remains only as long as it takes to ask whether the satellites are replacing those cables all by themselves. Of course they’re not; putting those satellites up, keeping them in orbit, and replacing them requires an entire space program, with all its subsidiary infrastructure; getting signals to and from the satellites requires a great deal more infrastructure. Pile all those launch gantries, mission control centers, satellite dishes, and other pieces of hardware onto the satellite side, and the total weight on that end of the balance starts looking considerably less ephemeral than it did.  Even if you add a couple of old-fashioned freighters on the cable side—that’s the modest technology needed to lay and maintain cables—it’s far from clear that replacing cables with satellites involves any reduction in capital intensity at all.

All this displays one of the more troubling failures of contemporary intellectual culture, an almost physiological inability to think in terms of whole systems. I’ve long since lost count of the number of times I’ve watched card-carrying members of the geekoisie fail to grasp that their monthly charge for internet service isn’t a good measure of the whole cost of the internet, or skid right past the hard economic fact that the long term survival of the internet depends on its ability to pay for itself.  This blindness to whole systems is all the more startling in that the computer revolution itself was made possible by the creation of systems theory and cybernetics in the 1940s and 1950s, and whole-systems analysis is a central feature of both these disciplines.

To watch the current blindness to whole systems in full gaudy flower, glance over any collection of recent chatter about “cloud computing.” What is this thing we’re calling “the cloud?”  Descend from the airy realms of cyber-abstractions into the grubby underworld of hardware, and it’s an archipelago of huge server farms, each of which uses as much electricity as a small city, each of which has a ravenous hunger for spare parts, skilled labor, and many other inputs, and each of which must be connected to all the others by a physical network of linkages that have their own inescapable resource demands. As with Fuller’s satellite analogy, the ephemeralization of one part of the whole system is accomplished at the cost of massive capital outlays and drastic increases in complexity elsewhere in the system.

All this needs to be understood in order to put ephemeralization into its proper context. Still, Carson’s correct to point out that information technologies have allowed the replacement of relatively inefficient infrastructure, in some contexts, with arrangements that are much more efficient. The best known example is the replacement of old-fashioned systems of distribution, with their warehouses, local jobbers, and the rest, with just-in-time ordering systems that allow products, parts, and raw materials to be delivered as they’re needed, where they’re needed. Since this approach eliminates the need to keep warehouses full of spare parts and the like, it’s certainly a way of doing more with less—but the consequences of doing so are considerably less straightforward than they appear at first glance.

To understand how this works, it’s going to be necessary to spend a little time talking about catabolic collapse, the theory referenced earlier. The basis of that theory is the uncontroversial fact that human societies routinely build more infrastructure than they can afford to maintain. During periods of prosperity, societies invest available resources in major projects—temples, fortifications, canal or road systems, space programs, or whatever else happens to appeal to the collective imagination of the age. As infrastructure increases in scale and complexity, the costs of maintenance rise to equal and exceed the available economic surplus; the period of prosperity ends in political and economic failure, and infrastructure falls into ruin as its maintenance costs are no longer paid.

This last stage in the process is catabolic collapse. Since the mismatch between maintenance costs and economic capacity is the driving force behind the cycle, the collapse of excess infrastructure has a silver lining—in fact, two such linings. First, since ruins require minimal maintenance, the economic output formerly used to maintain infrastructure can be redirected to other uses; second, in many cases, the defunct infrastructure can be torn apart and used as raw materials for something more immediately useful, at a cost considerably lower than fresh production of the same raw materials would require. Thus post-Roman cities in Europe’s most recent round of dark ages could salvage stone from  temples, forums, and coliseums to raise walls against barbarian raiders, just as survivors of the collapse of industrial society will likely thank whatever deities they happen to worship that we dug so much metal out of the belly of the earth and piled it up on the surface in easily accessible ruins.

Given a stable resource base, the long-term economic benefits of catabolic collapse are significant enough that a new period of prosperity normally follows the collapse, resulting in another round of infrastructure buildup and a repetition of the same cycle.  The pulse of anabolic expansion and catabolic collapse thus defines, for example, the history of imperial China. The extraordinary stability of China’s traditional system of village agriculture and local-scale manufacturing put a floor under the process, so that each collapse bottomed out at roughly the same level as the last, and after a century or two another anabolic pulse would get under way. In some places along the Great Wall, it’s possible to see the high-water marks of each anabolic phase practically side by side, as each successful dynasty’s repairs and improvements were added onto the original fabric.

Matters are considerably more troublesome if the resource base lacks the permanence of traditional Chinese rice fields and workshops. A society that bases its economy on nonrenewable resources, in particular, has set itself up for a far more devastating collapse. Nonrenewable resource extraction is always subject to the law of diminishing returns; while one resource can usually be substituted by another, that simply means a faster drawdown of still other resources—the replacement of more concentrated metal ores with ever less concentrated substitutes, the usual example cited these days for resource substitution, required exponential increases in energy inputs per ton of metal produced, and thus hastened the depletion of concentrated fossil fuel reserves.

As the usual costs of infrastructure maintenance mount up, as a result, a society that runs its economy on nonrenewable resources also faces rising costs for resource extraction. Eventually those bills can no longer be paid in full, and the usual pattern of political and economic failure ensues. It’s at this point that the real downside of dependence on nonrenewable resources cuts in; the abandonment of excess infrastructure decreases one set of costs, and frees up some resources, but the ongoing depletion of the  nonrenewable resource base continues implacably, so resource costs keep rising. Instead of bottoming out and setting the stage for renewed prosperity, the aftermath of crisis allows only a temporary breathing space, followed by another round of political and economic failure as resource costs continue to climb. This is what drives the stairstep process of crisis, partial recovery, and renewed crisis, ending eventually in total collapse, that appears so often in the annals of dead civilizations.

Though he’s far from clear about it, I suspect that this is what Carson meant to challenge by claiming that the increased efficiencies and reduced capital intensity of ephemeralized technology make worries about catabolic collapse misplaced. He’s quite correct that increased efficiency, “doing more with less,” is a response to the rising spiral of infrastructure maintenance costs that drive catabolic collapse; in fact, it’s quite a common response, historically speaking. There are at least two difficulties with his claim, though. The first is that efficiency is notoriously subject to the law of diminishing returns; the low hanging fruit of efficiency improvement may be easily harvested, but proceeding beyond that involves steadily increasing difficulty and expense, because in the real world—as distinct from science fiction—you can only do so much more with less and less. That much is widely recognized.  Less often remembered  is that increased efficiency has an inescapable correlate that Carson doesn’t mention: reduced resilience.

It’s only fair to point out that Carson comes by his inattention to this detail honestly. It was among the central themes of the career of Buckminster Fuller, whose ideas give Carson’s essay its basic frame. Fuller had a well-earned reputation in the engineering field of his time as “failure-prone,” and a consistent habit of pursuing efficiency at the expense of resilience was arguably the most important reason why.

The fiasco surrounding Fuller’s 1933 Dymaxion car is a case in point.  One of the car’s many novel features was a center of mass that was extremely high compared to other cars, which combined with an innovative suspension system to give the car an extremely smooth ride. Unfortunately this same feature turned into a lethal liability when a Dymaxion prototype was sideswiped by another vehicle. Then as now, cars on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive bump into one another quite often, but few of them flip and roll, killing the driver and seriously injuring everyone else on board. That’s what happened in this case, and Chrysler—which had been considering mass production of the Dymaxion car—withdrew from the project at once, having decided that the car wasn’t safe to drive.

The rise and fall of Fuller’s geodesic dome architecture traces the same story in a less grim manner. Those of my readers who were around in the 1960s will recall the way geodesic domes sprang up like mushrooms in those days. By the early 1970s, they were on their way out, for a telling reason. Fuller’s design was extremely efficient in its use of materials, but unless perfectly caulked—and in the real world, there is no such thing as perfect caulking—geodesic domes consistently leaked in the rain. Famed vernacular architect Lloyd Kahn, author of Domebooks 1 and 2, the bibles of the geodesic-dome fad, marked the end of the road with his 1973 sourcebook Shelter, which subjected the flaws of the geodesic dome to unsparing analysis and helped refocus the attention of the nascent appropriate technology scene onto the less efficient but far more resilient technology of shingled roofs. Nowadays geodesic domes are only used in those few applications where their efficiency is more important than their many practical problems.

The unavoidable tradeoff between efficiency and resilience can be understood easily enough by considering an ordinary bridge. All bridges these days have vastly more structural strength than they need in order to support their ordinary load of traffic. This is inefficient, to be sure, but it makes the bridges resilient; they can withstand high winds, unusually heavy loads, deferred maintenance, and other challenges without collapsing. Since the cost of decreased resilience (a collapsed bridge and potential loss of life) is considerably more serious than the cost of decreased efficiency (more tax revenues spent on construction), inefficiency is accepted—and rightly so.

It’s one of the persistent delusions of contemporary computer culture to claim that this equation doesn’t apply once modern information technology enters into the picture. Nassim Taleb’s widely read The Black Swan is chockfull of counterexamples. As he shows, information networks have proven to be as effective at multiplying vulnerabilities as they are at countering them, and can be blindsided by unexpected challenges just as thoroughly as any other system. The 1998 failure of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), whose publicists insisted that its computer models could not fail during the lifetime of the universe and several more like it, is just one of many cases in point.

The history of any number of failed civilizations offers its own mocking commentary on the insistence that efficiency is always a good thing. In its final years, for instance, the Roman Empire pursued “doing more with less” to a nearly Fulleresque degree, by allowing the manpower of legionary units along the Rhine and Danube frontiers to decline to a fraction of their paper strength. In peace, this saved tax revenues for critical needs elsewhere; when the barbarian invasions began, though, defenses that had held firm for centuries crumpled, and the collapse of the imperial system duly followed.

In this context, there’s a tremendous irony in the label Fuller used for the pursuit of efficiency.  The word “ephemeral,” after all, has a meaning of its own, unrelated to the one Fuller slapped onto it; it derives from the Greek word ephemeron, “that which lasts for only one day,” and its usual synonyms include “temporary,” “transitory,” and “fragile.”  A society dependent on vulnerable satellite networks in place of the robust reliability of oceanic cables, cloud computing in place of the dispersed security of programs and data spread across millions of separate hard drives, just-in-time ordering in place of warehouses ready to fill in any disruptions in the supply chain, and so on, is indeed more ephemeral—that is to say, considerably more fragile than it would otherwise be.

In a world facing increasingly serious challenges driven by resource depletion, environmental disruption, and all the other unwelcome consequences of attempting limitless growth on a relentlessly finite planet, increasing the fragility of industrial society is also a good way to see to it that it turns out to be temporary and transitory. In that sense, and only in that sense, Carson’s right; ephemeralization is the wave of the future, and it’s even harder to tell it apart from catabolic collapse than he thinks, because ephemeralization is part of the normal process of collapse, not a way to prevent it.

There’s an equal irony to be observed in the way that Carson presents this preparation for collapse as yet another great leap forward on the allegedly endless march of progress. As discussed earlier in this series of posts, the concept of progress has no content of its own; it’s simply the faith-based assumption that the future will be, or must be, or at least ought to be, better than the present; and today’s passionate popular faith in the inevitability and beneficence of progress makes it embarrassingly easy for believers to convince themselves that any change you care to name, however destructive it turns out to be, must be for the best.  As we continue down the familiar trajectory of decline and fall, we can thus expect any number of people to cheer heartily at the progress, so to speak, that we’re making toward the endpoint of that curve.

Not all such cheering will be branded so obviously by another rehash of the weary 20th-century technofantasy of “a world without want,” or that infallible touchstone of the absurd, the insertion of some scrap of Star Trek’s fictional technology in what purports to be a discussion of a future we might actually inhabit. There will no doubt be any number of attempts in the years ahead to insist that our decline is actually an ascent, or the birth pangs of a new and better world, or what have you, and it may well take an unusual degree of clarity to see past the chorus of reassurances, come to terms with the hard realities of our time, and do something constructive about them.

Where we’ll end up – the very long view.

by

Muck About

Part I

I am of the opinion – born of what I feel is a long, productive existence and a life that has been one extended study-hall of immense satisfaction – that unless the developed countries of this world and those people who live therein rapidly modify their actions and priorities, we humans are doomed to be yet another Earth dweller that will sooner than later vanish in a like manner of the Neanderthals, dinosaurs, dodos and the multiple thousands of other species that have dominated or lived upon and disappeared from the face of this Earth.  I also feel this modification of the current “Growth, Growth, Growth Forever” attitude and actions will and can never happen and the fate of the human race is not in doubt; we will be extinct (or hugely reduced in numbers) far sooner than anyone today believes or even considers.  We have already exceeded the sustainable rate of extraction and usage of resources of our small blue planet – including water, mineral and agricultural and further expansion of such resources will be at a very high price of not just money, but environmental cost as well – much higher than local populations can afford.

Not a cheerful way to start an thought exercise article, is it?

We will very likely be extinct or existing at significantly reduced numbers in a much shorter time frame than the dinosaurs (after all, they lasted millions of years) because of our own extraordinary technical skills, questionable intelligence  and the equally extraordinary stupidity of our beliefs, behavior and inability to really accept the limits of growth, cooperative problem solving across nations, the human beings central drive of “I’ and ”me” and the simple fact that there are too many rats in the box. That is, too many bodies worldwide to support, having exceeded resources and to get along with each other.

Dinosaurs topped the food chain on earth for many millions of years before they just happened to be riding this big blue and brown rock that was in the way of a not-so-big asteroid that put them all out of business along with about 90% of all other life on Earth and in its seas. Small mammals escaped this holocaust in some areas through fortuitous location and pure luck which allowed further evolution to eventually lead to us.

I feel it will not be long, by any measure of time, much less cosmically speaking, before the last poisoned and diseased band of nomadic humans fall, one at a time; until the last man, woman or child dies.

Mother Earth will get along without us just fine and in a few hundred thousand years, an alien visitor might not be able to find more than a few concrete (no pun here) remnants of the race that once ruled the world..

That lonely, painful and pitiful ending of the human race will occur on this Earth relatively soon and it is very likely,  no matter what we do. How sad it is.

As long as mankind relies more on maximized economic growth, superstition, wishful thinking and short term selfish personal gain than fact and science and an awareness of species survival, we, as humans are simply dead and don’t know it yet. Unfortunately, capitalism as an economic system is far too successful at generating wealth and growth and scientific progress than it is at focusing on the long term survival requirements of future generations and the human race in general.  Capitalism is the philosophy of profit right now, growth, capture of natural resources and never thinks for a moment of tomorrow – much less the long view of species survival.

I think that John Maynard Keynes statement, “In the long term we are all dead.”, should be interpreted in a much stricter manner than he intended. No doubt, shorter term too.

There are several areas where general modification of human behavior is required sooner than later merely to slow down the extinction  of the human race. Not to keep us alive here on Earth, you understand, but to slow down the process of killing ourselves while we can take action to prevent racial extinction.

First on the list of things to try and deal with is that infamous bugaboo “global warming”.

The subject of global warming is guaranteed to either bring yawns from those who have heard the arguments before and are bored to tears by the mention of it or screams from those who are passionate in their desire to have us all ride horses (which produce methane – another greenhouse gas) or walk everywhere we go and burn supper over a renewable energy source. It seems that the subject is too big for consensus by those knowledgeable enough to study and understand the data,  much less achieve any understanding by the great masses of people in the world who are not at all scientifically literate nor think with any critical ability and rely on “allah”, “god”, “government” or their so called “elected” (which is a joke all in itself) representatives to do their thinking for them and to determine their fate.

Scientists have proven without doubt that global climate change is a reality. The fact that anthropogenic heating of our atmosphere and oceans is not in question. Why it is happening is being debated (to death) and is, in fact, of no consequence whatsoever..

From temperature records recovered from Arctic and Antarctic ice cores, tree rings, ocean bottom cores, permafrost, ice sheet boreholes in Greenland the Antarctic along with other sources, science has proved beyond any doubt whatsoever that the current warming trend we are experiencing is not unique in our Earth’s history. Earth has heated up and cooled off relatively rapidly many times before, the last ice age terminating a mere 11,000 years ago – less than a blink of the eye as far as geological time is concerned. Barely time, in fact, for the ice to melt from between the toes of the last Neanderthal (which happened to be another failed experiment on the branching tree of evolution) and permit modern man to waltz onto the scene.  In fact, there are some facts that more than suggest that modern homo sapiens had a little hanky-panky going for them with Neanderthals on the way by!  We share DNA with Neanderthals and that can happen only one way!  We were likely smarter than our predecessors and just bred them out of existence. We’ll never know for sure but science is making great strides to try and find out.

Science has also proven that the major reason why our atmosphere and oceans are heating up this time is because humanity is burning fossil fuels at a furious rate while eliminating carbon sinks (such as rain forest) at the same time.

In fact, a close look at the temperature records hint that we may have been starting to slide into another mini-ice age way back in 17th century or so and the industrial revolution in the 19th century stopped the trend cold (pun intended) and reversed it.

Existing and efficient carbon sinks such as the oceans are becoming warmer, they are expanding as they warm and they are becoming more acidic from CO2 absorption much faster than predicted.  This, in turn, kills corals world wide, modifies mating capabilities of fish and is killing even the krill in Antarctica which ends up destroying the basis of our own food chain. Such destruction is causing an unholy mess in the Arctic as the ice melts, polar bears starve and all the Nations with Arctic Ocean frontage are fighting over who gets to drill and plow up the now open Arctic Ocean floor firstest and mostest!

Those fossil fuels lurking hither and thither under the Arctic seabeds, Canadian tar sands and elsewhere have accumulated in the Earth’s crust over millions of years. It took hundreds of millions of years for natural evolution, climate change, decay and huge pressures to form and store the hydrocarbon deposits and the deposits of chill, semi-stable methane hydrates now laying about on the Arctic seafloor. We are burning the oily portions of these hydrocarbons up billions of times faster that it took to create and store them in the first place. And another thing:  It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether we burn coal, oil in either its’ “natural form” or refined as gasoline or “natural” gas.  They all end up emitting CO2 and assorted pollutants such as soot when burned.  Period.  Further and even more serious, when the oceans warm sufficiently, those frozen methane hydrates will begin to evaporate, bubbling methane up and into the atmosphere.  A Summer occurence in the Canadian North every year! Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2 and will, in turn, accelerate greenhouse effects.

Fossil fuels are literally giant storehouses of carbon which is a component of hydrocarbon fuels that results in carbon dioxides, soot and monoxides when it’s burned. These hydrocarbons are locked into safe forms such as carbonates in rock and soil and sea bottom, oil and natural gas, methane in solid deposits on the floor of the oceans (the previously mentioned methane hydrates) in the Arctic and elsewhere and they were all placed there by natural processes that happens to lock up the carbon far from Earth’ atmosphere in such a way that it can’t cause trouble. Too much carbon dioxide or methane in the atmosphere (along with other more esoteric gasses both naturally occurring and of human creation) and we get the overused and abused “greenhouse effect”. More solar energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, ground and sea than can be radiated back into space, or otherwise dissipated.

It is also a demonstrable fact that in the past, rising temperatures of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are very capable of suddenly tipping Earth’ climate into a cooling phase that will eventually end up as an ice age. This transition into a cold phase can happen in as small a span of time as a decade.  When and how fast are unanswered questions, we only know of rapid oscillations in the geological past.

The observable fact that Earths’ atmosphere and ecology is a dynamic one versus something static, makes it very probable, barring the poisoning of those organisms that transform carbon dioxide into oxygen that we will never attain or even closely approach the status now existing on Venus. Venus is an example of a static environment and the “greenhouse” effect taken to extremes but it is very likely that Venus also never had the ecological opportunities of a closed oxygen/carbon cycle or even possibly plate tectonics and vulcanism in the first place. This last statement is still subject to some scientific argument but the arguments “for” are too weak to convince me.  The planet is too close to the Sun and too hot to start with.  A trip to the planet will be required to determine if plate tectonics ever had a chance to modify the surface features of the planet or not.

Mars likely had such a carbon/water (and even oxygen) cycle millions of years ago. We know there are vast quantities of water ice merely inches below the surface of Mars and it once flowed as liquid on the surface. Recent instrumentation mining on Mars has proven that drinkable water was, at one time, plentiful on the surface of Mars and I suspect that sooner or later, hard evidence of extraterrestrial life will be discovered.  Our robot explorers have found pretty absolute proof that liquid water once flowed on the surface in large quantities and that in numerous locations, contitions were favorable for life formation.

Methane has been detected in Mars’ atmosphere – and methane must be renewed in some fashion or it oxidizes and  vanishes over time. Most likely Mars’ water ice came from comet impacts and other infall from space over time as it did on Earth and was possibly, though not proven, maintained by an oxygen/water/carbon cycle such as we have today. Over time, due to lesser gravity, weaker magnetic field (more on this later) and less solar heating, the cycle was gradually broken and the atmosphere leaked away into space, leaving frozen water behind as a clue to what used to be.  Whether life had time to evolve on Mars has yet to be answered — but I’d bet yes.

However, on Earth, should those organisms that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen fail in their job, the ever greater buildup of carbon dioxide would indeed eventually turn the Earth into a static, blistering no-life world as more and more solar heat is captured, unable to radiate back into space and sooner (astronomically) than later, alter the very basics of the physics of our planet’s ecosystem.  We will be long gone before that happens.

How do I know personally that global warming and ocean expansion is alive and well? I went to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands back in 1973, and worked for five years at the Biggest Bullseye in the world which was the terminus of the Pacific Missile Range that was located there. Twice a month (lesser) and twice a year (major) depending on the sun and the moon’s relative positions with regards to earth, there would be extraordinary low tides – just perfect to walk the reefs between islands searching for shells and to observe the wondrous sea life that inhabits the reef. Twice a year, during these extra low tides, the sea would actually recede to the extent that the reef surface was bare – no water at all – and the salt water would flow beneath the surface of the reef so one could stand quietly and listen to the reef “talk”, bubble, moan and gurgle as water made its way into and out of secret and normally flooded passages.

It was a magic place to live in more ways than one.

I returned to Kwajalein a second time in 1995, some 16 years later. No more does the reef “talk”. No more is the surface of the reef laid bare during these twice-monthly or twice yearly low tides. Now, at the lowest tides of the year, 12 inches or more sea water flow across its surface, drowning the magic singing of the reef. The Pacific ocean is rising as are all the oceans of the world. In the mid-1990s, on Kwajalein and other Marshall Island atolls, barriers had to be built along the windward side of these low islands. Storms waves that normally broke against the protective barrier reefs now sometimes flow clear across these low islands from the ocean into lagoons, uprooting trees and making permanent habitation impossible.

In another 30 years or so, these low islands will likely be gone forever, completely submerged or at the least uninhabitable because of storm surges that put the islands completely awash.

On average, the seas have risen 7-10 inches since accurate sea level measurements have been available (since radar bearing satellites refined the data).  That’s a lot of water, all of it from melting ice in Greenland, the Arctic, the Antarctic and glaciers.  Floating seas ice doesn’t count as it displaces as much water as is contained in the ice itself so sea ice melt is a null factor.

Further, last week (2/9/2013) a report was issued by climate  scientists and oceanographers that there will be further two foot rise in general sea levels within the next 30 years.  The particular study was a risk analysis of sewage treatment plants in Souther Florida and showed that within 30 years, most of Southern Florida and the three major sewage treatment plants will be isolated on little islands as the water rises.

Seas are rising roughly three times as rapidly as initial scientific estimates.  Get that?  THREE TIMES AS FAST!!

Of course, it won’t take 30-40 years for sea level rise to make itself apparent as storm surges and tidal action will disable these sewage plants, ports and much of populated Southern Florida.  there will be large tracks of land from the Gulf Coast through New England that will also be made uninhabitable (including NYC), as this general rise in ocean level progresses with as much impact, over time, as ice sheets durning an ice age.

Katerina, Hurricane Sandy, Staten Island and Long Island are excellent examples of storm surges couples with rising sea waters and how storm surges will eat us alive as time passes whether we “believe” in global warming or not!

This is all not to say that periodic changes in the Sun’s intensity, Earth’s orbital variations and a natural warming period of our Earth is not a contributor to the problem but we’re doing the most damage faster than natural changes in nature can do it.

If you take the trouble to study the a graphic of CO2 and methane concentration in the atmosphere over time, the ever rising levels of greenhouse gas is directly coupled to the Industrial Revolution starting in the mid-19th Century, with exponentially rising populations and the burning of fossil fuels. The effect is too obvious to be disputed.  We may be experiencing a normal solar cycle of earth heating and cooling but many scientists, myself included, feel that without human input to atmospheric heating, we’d already be 150 years into the next ice age.

These rising oceans will slowly make themselves felt along all continental coastlines world wide with Katerina, the destruction of New Orleans and the recent destruction along the New Jersey and New York shores from Sandy as dramatic examples.  Believe me when I say that New Orleans was only the first mega-distruction of an urban center.   New York and New Jersey followed and more will happen based on the luck of steering winds and Hurricanes and storms.  Next will come Miami (as explained above) or Corpus Christi, Jacksonville or Charleston, Houston or other coastal cities along the Gulf and Eastern Seaboard all depending on the capriciousness of rising sea levels and nature.

It will not be wind and tornados that do the damage but storm surges riding atop the tides that will provide the mother of all destruction of ocean front properties and the death of millions who cannot or don’t flee these storm surges in time.

Whole countries most likely to die first are the low, marvelously beautiful islands of Bahamas, Pacific and Indian Oceans that reside on both sides of the equator. They are mostly poor, sparsely populated and easy to overlook and ignore. Some of these island nations are now in negotiation to move their entire population to a mainland country.  Do you truly think this would happen if seas were not rising?

The biggest country at risk is impoverished Bangladesh. This hapless country, carved from India first as Eastern Pakistan and then as an independent nation is geographically situated on the delta of the Ganges River. Almost the entire country is only a few feet above mean high ocean tide. The Bay of Bengal into which the Ganges flows, is the home of the nastiest tropical cyclones you’d ever not want to see.

This country is doomed and so are the people in it that do not migrate.

When I was a boy, raised in Mississippi and Northern Florida, there was a poem about hurricanes we knew by heart:

June- too soon

July – stand by

August – it must

September – remember

October – all, over

Not so 65 years later. Now hurricane “season” starts the first day of June and ends the last day of November. Soon hurricane season will start in May and end in December. This poem, as originally composed, is no longer applicable.

So is global warming a doomsday threat? I doubt it. We will never do anything  to slow it down. We will experience flooded coastal cities and huge loss of life and economic disaster long before we’ve admitted and contained the ramifications of what we have done and Mother Nature has done in response.  What we desperately need to do on a global basis is to stop arguing over “whether global warming is real”, regardless of what caused it and start figuring out what we are going to do as a race to deal with what’s coming. We must not continue to argue and fuss over whether or not it is coming because it is.

So instead of arguing about whether “global warming” and all its ramifications is a fact, we simply need to start working on how we are going to deal with it.  Period.

The next thing on the list of doomsday subjects we need to recognize is population expansion.

The problem of too many people has been beaten to death in debates and is generally now ignored. It is a calculable fact that if one conservatively projects current world population growth for another 150 years, all things being equal in logistical support, food and such, the people at that time would be literally shoulder to shoulder covering all the exposed land masses on Earth. Way too many rats in a box.

Of course, this won’t happen. Paul Ehrlick and others predicted catastrophe years ago from population growth due to the lack of our ability to feed all those hungry mouths. That hypothesis that gathered rust in the junk heap of failed extrapolated predictive theories and a bad timing call is not being resurrected as better communication and surveys show that poverty and hunger are not expanding in lesser developed areas of the world. For some interesting exceptions : see Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.

I personally think Mr. Ehrlick was simply too early in his predictions as was Mr. Malthus.  (Timing is a bitch!)

We are not exempt from resource exhaustion, hunger and poverty as our population continues to increase – first and not the  least in the so-called developing world.  Most of the developed world, The United States, Japan, Europe, Russia and China have entered demographic Hell and are losing productive population much faster than natural birth rates are renewing them.  The developing nations of the world – at the top of the heap –  are doomed to be populated by smaller, younger, stupider and less educated populations and much larger non-productive aging populations as time goes by – and it will happen faster than anyone realizes.   Unfortunately, the undeveloped (3rd World) countries and even as few mid-developing countries have populations that are expanding far faster than their abilities to house, feed and support them.

Technology, yet again to the rescue, is continually providing the means of higher agricultural production with lower costs with genetically modified bread and beans and there is no reason to believe this increase in agricultural productivity will slow down in the foreseeable future. (Barring tragic mistakes – but we’ll address that later).  It will also place these countries at the mercy of Monsanto and other hybrid seed producers, forcing farmers in the those country to use genetically modified seed every years instead of harvesting their own seed crops for the following years.  This will not end well.

Today, there would not be a hungry child or adult on the planet if the infrastructure was in place to enable delivery of food staples to the general populations of those hungry countries. In those countries where starvation is a real problem, the political barriers of civil wars, ruthless warlords, tribal leaders, religious genocide and greedy, immoral politicians are a much bigger barrier to distribution than lack of roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

Because of our (so far and failing) ability to feed more and more people, starvation has turned into a political problem, not one of food production.  At least for the next decade or two.  One severe world wide crop failure due to changes in climate and rainfall (not only likely but probable) can overturn things in a single growing season. So far, we are growing agricultural products in a distributed fashion to sufficiently buffer such changes but that is likely not to last as planetary climate change modifies atmospheric jet streams, storm patterns and wet/dry seasons all over the Earth.  Not to mention political use of food as a weapon as time goes on to wage war against those populations deemed a “bother” or perhaps considered to be hindering the continued expansion of developed nationality of advanced countries.

The higher productivity of agriculture is the reason why population density and growth has fallen off the table as a popular subject to debate (temporarily), even though it is still a vitally important subject of discussion and study. Additionally, religion that espouses moral opposition to birth control in any fashion (including abortion) is spreading throughout religiosity in both developed and developing areas of the world even as the USA swings to evangelical prominence.   Muslim populations are exploding.  At the same time, women’s rights are swinging to the fore and will probably win in developing countries, given the endurance and really tough female humans’ determination for self-direction.  In Muslim directed Islamic countries, no so much and we war may come in the long run pressured by population growth within less educated, highly religious and much poorer developing countries.  It appears that developed and more educated countries will simply commit suicide by birth rates so low as to limit their ability to hold their own against both legal and illegal immigration.  At that point, the original settlor’s of such developed countries will simply be overwhelmed by new comers, poorer, more ignorant but in over whelming numbers.

“Por español, oprimo numero uno.”

Worse luck, that, and our great-grandchildren will live to regret it as one result will be the lack of new workers to finance their old age.  And they will recognize the fact, slowly but surely.

On the other hand, one plus to the equation of population control lies in the developed countries better treatment of women including education.  The more educated a woman is, the fewer children she will likely have, which contributes to both the good and the bad of it all.  That is one reason that, in my humble opinion,  Fundamentalist Islam in any number of its’ incarnations is quite evil and immoral for they forbid females any control over their own bodies and forbid any education at all for females if they can manage it.  That is also why they will eventually fail ideologically as they are wasting one half of their population’s brainpower, creativity and soothing effects of feminine thinking and abilities by suppressing female education.  Islam is, sadly, at its’ base, a religion of death and world conquest, driven by selfish and ignorant men, bent on forcing the world to think and act as they do.  Islam has been fighting this war for several thousands of years and there is no end in sight. The EU is the latest to experience Islamic immigration and will rue the day they began pandering to this fundamentalist surge.  I await the outcome of that situation with non-baited breath..

What is far more likely the result of continued developing (as opposed to developed) national population expansion is war. Wars are fought over possession and control of land and resources, one of which is fixed and the other being used up and declining. There are, of course, other excuses for fighting a war, such as wars based upon tribal or religious differences or the simple urge to rape and pillage, but throughout the history of human conflict, the need for control of land and the resources thereon is the basis for war.

Need I illustrate? The Iraq “wars” were over oil and ego and failed thinking. We now have no presense in Iraq and it is now slowly slipping back into savagery as Shiite/Sunni warfare is increasing there daily and soon the Shiite majority in Iraq may join with the Shiite majority in Iran to form a new basis for Islamic expansion (i.e. Iraq/Iran = New Persia) with a large die off in Sunni Muslims in the process.  Not conducive to production of wealth or knowledge (or oil) in any way or form for either country. (besides, China is buying all the Iraqi oil they can lay their hands on – at our expense. Is that stupid or what!!).

WWII was over oil and mineral resources – Germany wanted them and had no way to pay for them after the ridiculous repatriation and “pay back” conditions placed upon it post-WWI.

WWI? Again, over resources that were unevenly divided in the then politically defined Europe. Vietnam and Korea? Artificial wars created by political stupidity in splitting up spoils of WWII. Vietnam and Korea were similar to the Middle East conflicts as after WWII the Middle East was carved up (mostly by the British, Stalin and FDR) into “countries” and no heed was paid to tribal differences, logical borders or past history.

In the Mid-East, this had to lead to the pain and agony that we are witnessing today as Islam fights to bring these tribal differences to heel under a crushing 1600th Century set of rules in a 21st Century World.

End Part 1

To be continued.