Category Archives: solar energy

Is Climate Change Inevitable?

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Magdalenian Girl: a facial reconstruction by Élisabeth Daynès of a 24 year old woman whose ~15,000 year old skeletal remains were discovered in the Dordogne region of southwestern France in a limestone cave known as the Cap Blanc rock shelter.

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Is Climate Change Inevitable?

Greg asks (28 April 2022):

(1) Do you believe that climate change is an inevitable consequence of our highly technical, industrial civilization?

(2) Is it necessary to abandon the American lifestyle to ensure the habitability of the planet?

I’ve asked this question to quite a few people recently, and the general response has been ‘if we don’t do anything drastic now, then yes’.

(3) Is there any data that particularly worries you?

(4) What do you make of this?

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My response to Greg:

(1) Yes.

(2) Yes.

(3) Ocean acidification; ocean heating; seawater freshening in the North Atlantic; CO2 lifetime in the atmosphere (long); accelerating rate of deforestation; accelerating rate of carbon (CO2 + CH4) emissions; accelerating rate of fossil fuel use and planned use; expansion and severity of drought, aridity and “heat”; low use of regenerative agriculture despite increasing soil depletion and crop failures (food); biodiversity loss in general: plants, mammals, fish, insects; the low fraction of materials being recycled.

Forgive me for not quoting numbers for “data” here, but I am sure such can be found by any interested person with an Internet connection and who is willing to spend some time in the search.

(4) Global Warming Climate Change (GWCC) is an inevitable result of the high volumes of CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions exhausted by powering our highly technical, energy-intensive industrial civilization with fossil fuels. That “powering” also includes the use of extensive industrialized chemical and factory farming for soil-depleting and high water use/irrigated monoculture food production; and for huge production and polluting waste of (hydrocarbon-derived) plastics.

I believe it is possible to have a worldwide equalization of the standard of living to a high and “modern” level, by a combination of (a,b,c,d):

(a) using “green” (a.k.a., “sustainable”) sources of energy (solar-electric, solar-thermal, wind, hydro, tidal, geothermal),

(b) commitments to lifestyles based on efficiency instead of consumerism,

(c) the use of technology (e.g., aided by electronics and computers) to improve the harvesting of energy and its distribution through linked local networks,

(d) a political consensus to democratic socialism (since capitalism, militarism and fascism are inherently anti-egalitarian and tied to high uses of fossil fuels, for “power”).

It is only a GWCC Earth-degrading zero-sum game of “survival” if calorie-and-kilowatt exclusionary tribalism is paramount. That need not be the case, but the alternative “green” paradigm would require a global consensus to deep cooperation of indeterminate duration, and to large-scale, long-term economic planning.

The many dramatic scenarios about “the collapse of civilization” and “human extinction” in ‘X’ number of years, published (like most everything) as hyperbole to get attention, all presume (and most desire) a continuation of current trends — “business as usual” — and are thus only useful to the extent they prompt wider thinking and action along the lines of the Green Paradigm (GP) that I described.

By direct observation of our social reality today, all those scary predictions have so far been useless. The American Way Of Life (AWOL) and extreme worldwide inequity seem safely assured of being able to continue plowing on as the unwinding story of our civilization for quite some time. Perhaps some serendipitous shock will alter world consensus thinking before it is “too late.”

We are each and all wedded to our ways of life, our “lifestyles,” our routines and our expectations, and even the thought of making profound and permanent changes to those is resisted because in essence such changes would mean changing how we think of ourselves, and changing how we actually “are” and act.

There are always some people doing this, individually, at any time: when confronted by a sufficiently “life-changing” event, or tragedy, or flash of enlightenment, and they are then compelled by their new outlook to deconstruct and then reconstruct themselves into a new form. Some call this “rebirth,” others “recovery,” and some “conversion” or “satori.”

The great challenge of transitioning our current civilization to the Green Paradigm (or, the Post-Carbon World) is that most of the worldwide us would have to make such personal permanent changes concurrently within a timescale of at most a decade, and cooperatively on nested geographical scales from local to national to international.

The planetary-scale problem of Global Warming Climate Change and Biodiversity Collapse cannot be “solved” in a haphazard, piecemeal, sporadic, short-term manner; the solution procedure must be a permanently sustained comprehensive effort of planetary scope. Climate Change science has shown us that the weaker that effort, and the longer the delay before starting it (which ideally should have been decades ago), the sooner and longer (centuries? millennia?) and worse will be the sequence of environmental challenges and disasters we and our descendants will have to experience.

On the basis of my own calculations of Global Warming — which are generally consistent with the results of the professional climate scientists, and which I have described in numerous articles posted elsewhere — I see global warming continuing for a long time regardless of what we do or don’t do about it. However, the more timely and extensive and sustained our counteractions against it — that is, the extent and promptness of the “greening” of our civilization — the slower the rate-of-rise of that global warming, the lower the ultimate temperature plateau at which it peaks, and the sooner the world average temperature cools back to the lovely pre-industrial level that nurtured the 15,000+ year development of our human civilization. But we should think in terms of centuries of committed effort in order to achieve that complete recovery.

Finally, I wish to make a positive sociological point. Anything we do to improve human solidarity, social cohesion, “economics as if people mattered,” the worldwide standard of living and its uniformity (the Human Development Index) — because such socio-economic changes are needed in order to construct our response to GWCC — would make the experiences of life better for every individual regardless of whatever subsequent geophysical-environmental challenges came our way, and for however long our Green Paradigm civilization managed to continue.

Instead of tribes competing to “live longer” than the rest, we would be cooperating to all “live well together” for whatever timespan of habitability Planet Earth would be willing to allow us.

My advice: be grateful, be kind, have fun, and give life and love your best efforts throughout your time alive.

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Obsession: Climate Change Russian Roulette

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Obsession: Climate Change Russian Roulette

“Vaisala, an environmental monitoring company that tracks lightning around the world, reported 7,278 lightning strokes occurred last year north of 80 degrees latitude, nearly twice as many as the previous nine years combined. Arctic lightning is rare — even more so at such far northern latitudes — and scientists use it as a key indicator of the climate crisis, since the phenomena signals warming temperatures in the predominantly frozen region. Lightning occurs in energetic storms associated with an unstable atmosphere, requiring relatively warm and moist air, which is why they primarily occur in tropical latitudes and elsewhere during summer months.” [1]

Global Warming creates more humidity in the air to form droplets and ice crystals, and with more heat in the oceans and in the air there are more and stronger updrafts — forming clouds, being storms — to loft and freeze that humidity. The rapidity of that process (thunderclouds) is the source of the charge separation that results in lightning: static electricity created by friction and held by ice crystals high and low.

How about geo-engineering to reflect sunlight back into space, and cool the Earth? A friend asked: Is Dr. Ye Tao’s mirrors-on-the-ocean-surface scheme to reduce solar influx and thus reduce global warming reasonable? [2]

My initial reaction: It’s like wearing a thicker helmet so you can keep playing Russian Roulette.

My pal reacts: Indeed, but it appears to buy time. Would you agree with that?

My testy reply (and, he is a good guy) is based on my entrenched anti-geo-engineering bias (if you want to call it a bias), and my pessimistic assessment about “us” really ever responding to global warming climate change (GWCC):

I have no doubt that every technological scheme possible will be tried, and that no reason will ever be found for curbing CO2 emissions or ever ending our fossil fuel extraction (a.k.a. “business as usual”). In fact, those technological ideas will be used as justifications for continuing to emit CO2 (and greenhouse gases) at current and even higher levels.

As long as CO2 is in the atmosphere, it will act as an absorber of infrared radiation (IR, heat energy) radiated upward from the Earth’s surface — land and water — day and night.

Water vapor and organic vapors also capture IR, and there are increasing concentrations of these with continuing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and consequently increasingly higher biosphere temperatures: regional, planetary average, and very (very) long-term.

Reducing sunlight shining down to the ocean means reducing light energy used by plankton for photosynthesis, and they are the largest generator — larger than land-based plants — of oxygen (O2) for our atmosphere, and our breathing:

“Scientists estimate that 50-80% of the oxygen production on Earth comes from the ocean. The majority of this production is from oceanic plankton — drifting plants, algae, and some bacteria that can photosynthesize.” [3]

Also, plankton is the base of the food chain in the oceans, and all higher forms of life depend on them for survival (even us, for seafood). Baleen whales, rays and whale-sharks scoop up plankton directly, and are thus huge repositories of captured carbon, whose bodies after death sink to the ocean bottom and slowly become part of the chalky seabed rocks (“sequestration” done automatically by Nature). Since oceans are about 3/4 of the Earth’s surface, if we kill them we die quickly (geologically speaking). Life on land will not survive with dead, acidified oceans.

As I said, I do not see “us” ever cutting back on our CO2 emissions (so, keep shooting ourselves in the head), but I do see “us” using every conceivable scheme — especially if it can be patented and someone can make big money on it, like with COVID vaccines — to “mitigate” (thicken up our Russian Roulette protective helmets) so we can keep on burning up the fossil fuels, making the big bucks, having the profitable wars, and having an exponentially growing capitalist “good life.” Until it isn’t.

So, yeah, “it buys us time.” It’s so hard not to keep shooting ourselves in the head, isn’t it?

Notes

[1] Another sign things are getting weird: Lightning around the North Pole increased dramatically in 2021.
Rachel Ramirez, 5 January 2022
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/05/world/lightning-increased-north-pole-arctic-2021-climate/index.html

[2] Mirrors for Earth’s Energy Rebalancing (MEER:refEction) | Dr. Ye Tao | 2019NSSUS.
Dr. Ye Tao, 2019
https://youtu.be/fwvPJnPP9KI

[3] How much oxygen comes from the ocean?
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html

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Notes on Carbon Dioxide in Global Warming, Acidified Oceans, and Weathered Rocks

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Notes on Carbon Dioxide in Global Warming, Acidified Oceans, and Weathered Rocks

Like CO2 (carbon dioxide), H2O (water vapor) is a strongly heteropolar molecule — having one end with a positive electrical charge, and another end with a negative electrical charge — and absorbs outgoing Infrared Radiation (IR) from Earth’s surface, thus capturing heat in the atmosphere. Homopolar molecules like N2 (nitrogen) and O2 (oxygen) are transparent to IR. Inelastic molecular collisions redistribute that heat (as kinetic energy) to other atmospheric molecules (N2, O2, mainly) and atoms (Ar, He, trace components).

Most of Earth’s surface heat eventually diffuses into the oceans. Heat flows along the heat gradient in the negative direction from warmer air to colder water. The heat capacity (storage ability) of the oceans is IMMENSE (this is where ‘global warming’ ends up), and their heat content takes centuries to diffuse into a stable stratified distribution, rearranged by thermo-haline currents (a solar forcing effect) and by geometry (oceans as a spherical shell with warm equator and cold poles, so ocean heat diffuses poleward).

The fundamental problem of global warming is the ‘excess’ capture of outgoing IR (infrared radiation), reducing the rejection of Earth heat (originally delivered by incoming LIGHT radiation) into space: causing an imbalance between incoming energy (in the form of light to which atmospheric molecules are almost completely transparent) and outgoing energy (IR, to which heteropolar molecules, like CO2, H2O, CH4, NOx, are all quite opaque — absorbing).

Water vapor is by far the ‘greenhouse gas’ (IR absorber) with the highest concentration in the atmosphere at any time (immensely larger than that of CO2). It has been found by a combination of climate modeling calculations coordinated with field measurements in many global environments, that though the whiteness of clouds reflects sunlight back toward space (a global cooling effect), their IR absorptivity overwhelms that cooling, so that water vapor has a net global warming effect. As the average global temperature increases there is more water vapor in the atmosphere and this mode for global warming grows in magnitude — this is a self-amplifying or positive feedback effect.

CH4 (methane) and NOx are ‘short lived’ because they are eventually oxidized (by O, OH, formed by UV breaking up O2 and H20, and by other chemical reactions), whereas CO2 is very long lived because it is an endpoint product/species of chemical reaction chains that oxidize carbon compounds in oxygen-containing mixtures. CO2 has a low “chemical potential” and is known as a “chemical thermodynamic sink”. CH4 is eventually converted to CO2 and H2O. NOx is eventually converted to HNO3, nitric acid, which attaches itself to water droplets, so it has an aqueous form and rains out.

The long-term ‘chemical sink’ nature of CO2 is why science focuses on it as the leading culprit in the long-term trends of global warming. With greater warming of the ocean surface, more H2O vapor rises and releases its latent heat when it condenses into droplets (liquid) and ice crystals, and that ‘extra’ heat adds power to storms (winds, hurricanes: mass motion), and ultimately that ‘extra’ heat energy finds its way back into the oceans (for the portion of atmospheric heat that does not escape as IR into space).

When analyzing global warming, it all comes back to CO2. I highly recommend the book ‘Thermodynamics’ by Enrico Fermi (available in a budget-priced Dover edition): a slim volume that is a classic on the topic of chemical thermodynamics, and one of the best books on science of any kind that I have ever read.

My highly detailed outline of the chemical thermodynamics of atmospheric global warming is ‘Closing The Cycle: Energy and Climate Change’ at https://manuelgarciajr.com/2014/01/25/closing-the-cycle-energy-and-climate-change/.

The process of capturing atmospheric CO2 with rocks on the ground is one of rock weathering. CO2 in the air that brushes against the surface of carbonate and silicate rocks has a finite (and very low) probability of undergoing a chemical reaction with the rock surface, fixing the airborne CO2 onto a solid substrate. This is the longest term natural process of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere (10s to 100s of millennia).

A shorter term process is capture by the surface waters of the oceans, and that aqueous CO2 then combining with water molecules and already existing carbonate ions (CO3-2) in the water to form carbonic acid (H2CO3), which is weakly bound and both acidifies the oceans and scarfs up free floating carbonate ions to both starve mollusks, corals and foraminifera of the easiest chemical species from which to grow their shells (CO3-2), and even dissolving such shells of existing organisms (most being part of the masses of plankton, the base of the oceanic food chain).

The surface (not too deep) load of absorbed acidifying CO2 is then slowly cycled to the ocean floor by the ~1,000 year vertical currents, and at the bottom it dissolves the chalk deposited as the calcium carbonate (CaCO3) remnants of dead sea life, basically bone, shell and foraminifera casing ‘fossils’ — an ocean acidifying effect. So ocean capture of CO2 happens all the time, but the intake rate can saturate as the ocean becomes more acidified; eventually this intake process could shut off, coral reefs being a long lost memory by then.

Loss of “excess” ocean CO2 requires a low CO2 concentration atmosphere that can accept the gaseous release (is not saturated with CO2) of ocean CO2 that slowly diffuses out on mainly kilo-year timescales. A technically accurate description of ‘the carbonate system in seawater’ is given at https://sundoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/diss-online/04/04H141/t5.pdf. My more formal article than the discussion here, ‘Global Warming and Ocean Acidification Accelerate,’ is at https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/07/18/global-warming-and-ocean-acidification-accelerate/.

The next quicker process of fixing atmospheric CO2 is photosynthesis, and this is done both by plants on land and in the oceans, like: seaweed, giant kelp, and many small plankton-sized organisms; ocean based photosynthesis is a huge component. This happens all the time and fixes CO2 at the rate of plant growth. At a high enough CO2 concentration this process saturates, too.

What is not commonly appreciated is that there is an unbelievably gargantuan amount of fungal and bacterial ‘biome’ in the soil worldwide (as well as inside each of us in our intestines and colon) that interconnects plant roots and actually makes possible the fixing of CO2, by breaking down organics and minerals in the soil enabling plant roots to absorb nutrients they need to complete their growth cycles, which result in carbon being fixed into plant cellulose, and into soil carbonates. The TV show ‘Fantastic Fungi’ gives a visually stunning explanation of this, and is available here, https://www.netflix.com/title/81183477, and here https://fantasticfungi.com/. This plant-based natural process of “carbon capture” is disrupted and destroyed by chemical pesticide dependent industrialized monoculture farming.

I know it is a bitter pill to swallow, but the only real way to slow global warming in any noticeable way is to stop anthropogenic CO2 emissions FOREVER. There are no post-facto technological ‘capture’ or ‘remediation’ techniques that exist now or “could be developed” that would actually work as “silver bullets” of salvation; they would only ‘work’ as money making scams with which to gull those despairing of the ‘loss of easy living.’

Our best response to climate change is to change ourselves in every way possible and without ever looking back, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis — and to have fun doing so together. This has to be a willed conscious process because we do not have the luxury of a long timescale in a slowly changing world to allow the transformation of humanity to happen naturally through the unconscious genetically paced process of evolution.

But, with the right shared attitude, that much shorter timescale consciously willed personal and societal transformation could be more magical and take us to more wondrous new worlds than any fantasy of intra-galactic space travel at Warp Speed on the Starship Enterprise.

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Planet Earth Is Heating Up Faster

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Planet Earth Is Heating Up Faster

A new scientific paper just accepted for publication by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) shows that, on the basis of both computations and experimental measurements, the net rate at which Planet Earth is absorbing solar energy has increased between years 2005 and 2019. Planet Earth is heating up — global warming — at a faster rate, and that rate is increasing.

In my article here, I will first quote the abstract of this paper (“Satellite and Ocean Data Reveal Marked Increase in Earth’s Heating Rate,” by Norman G. Loeb, Gregory C. Johnson, Tyler J. Thorsen, John M. Lyman, Fred G. Rose, Seiji Kato, 15 June 2021; https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021GL093047), and then give my interpretation of the overall scientific conclusion, in plain English.

Abstract from the AGU paper:

Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI) is a relatively small (presently ∼0.3%) difference between global mean solar radiation absorbed and thermal infrared radiation emitted to space. EEI is set by natural and anthropogenic climate forcings and the climate system’s response to those forcings. It is also influenced by internal variations within the climate system. Most of EEI warms the ocean; the remainder heats the land, melts ice, and warms the atmosphere. We show that independent satellite and in situ observations each yield statistically indistinguishable decadal increases in EEI from mid-2005 to mid-2019 of 0.50±0.47 W m-2 decade-1 (5%-95% confidence interval). This trend is primarily due to an increase in absorbed solar radiation associated with decreased reflection by clouds and sea-ice and a decrease in outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) due to increases in trace gases and water vapor. These changes combined exceed a positive trend in OLR due to increasing global mean temperatures.

MG.Jr. Interpretation:

Earth’s increased temperature has melted ice and snow and reduced cloud cover, which means that less solar radiation (light) is reflected back into space — a warming effect. Note that clouds, snow and ice fields are white and highly reflective of light; bare ground and the ocean surface have much lower reflectivity. Planet Earth’s net reflectivity is called the albedo; and it has decreased.

Even though the increased average global temperature has warmed — stored heat in — the oceans (a 91% effect, as only 9% warms the lands and air) and thus caused greater evaporation of water (and snow melt and ice melt) into the atmosphere, fewer clouds are forming because the higher air temperature keeps the water vapor from condensing as quickly as in previously cooler times. Note that clouds are cold, they are made up of water droplets and ice crystals: condensate from cooled vapor.

However, the ever increasing atmospheric load of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases that humans cause to be emitted, along with the increased water vapor in the atmosphere, just noted, make for a denser gaseous “filter” or capture medium for the outgoing Infrared Radiation (Outgoing Long-wavelength Radiation = OLR = HEAT) that cools the Earth.

For Planet Earth to be in thermal equilibrium — at a steady average global temperature — the rate of heat-energy radiated out into space (cooling) must equal the rate of light-energy absorbed from the Sun (heating).

The quantity of thermal-energy emission per unit time (OLR) from any isolated body (like Planet Earth suspended in space) increases as its temperature increases. This phenomenon is known as the “blackbody radiation” effect in physics, and quantified by the Stephan-Boltzmann Law. So, one might have hoped that with Planet Earth’s now higher average temperature that it would reject heat (and cool) at a higher rate; and in that way seek to maintain a steady planetary temperature.

BUT the AGU paper shows that the decrease of Earth’s light reflectivity (albedo), combined with the increase of its OLR (heat) absorptivity by the atmosphere, overwhelm the also increased rate of heat (IR or OLR) emission from the planetary surface back towards space.

The net effect is an increase in the rate at which originally-solar energy is absorbed by Planet Earth, and hence an increase in the rate at which Planet Earth’s average temperature is increasing. This is a self-reinforcing effect, a.k.a.: a vicious cycle.

Immediately ceasing “all” (the vast majority of) emissions of carbon-dioxide and greenhouse gases is the first essential step to SLOWING the rate of global warming and attendant “climate change”, and the absolute beginning of a very long process of global temperature equilibration:

1, from a slowing of the rising trend of temperature;

2, until temperature reaches a plateau; because it takes decades to centuries for the oceans and lands to reach a temperature equilibrium — think of equilibrium as “uniformity,” though that analogy is not exact;

3, and then the slow (decades to centuries) re-absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere by the surface waters of the oceans and photosynthesis (plants);

4, with a gradual (centuries to millennia) reduction of global temperature.

It took 200,000 years to clear away the global warming “hyperthermal” event known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred ~55.5 million years ago.

The sooner the emissions of greenhouse gases cease: the lower the height of the inevitable maximum temperature plateau, and the shorter the duration of the period before temperature returns to “normal” (as in the Holocene). Regardless, that duration will be vastly longer than a human lifetime, and even many human generations.

The social and political implications of these scientific findings quickly become obvious on honest reflection.

[Thanks to Peter Carter for the AGU reference.]

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Nate Hagens, on Earth and Humanity

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Watch the video presentation “Earth and Humanity: Myth and Reality,” (2:52:15) by Nate Hagens, linked below. Hagens presents an analysis and grand synthesis of the multi-entwined crises of unsustainable human society living in the rapidly degrading world climate of an increasingly resource-depleted and increasingly inhospitable Planet Earth.

I guarantee that you will find many of your own views on this topic reaffirmed by Hagens, and also that he will challenge at least one of your cherished beliefs about it. This is good for serious people, it prompts them to think anew, and to rethink their assumptions.

What impresses me about Hagens’ analysis is that it is based on a wealth of data — the lifeblood of any real scientific or economic analysis — and that it is a multidimensional systems analysis, and not merely a “one note Johnny” narrow expertise (just finance, or just physics), single “smoking gun” caused problem (as the “overpopulation” reductionists claim) or a promotion of a single route to salvation solution (as the “nuclear power” reductionists claim). Hagens’s is an integrated description of the dysfunctional global system, which Nature plus Humanity has become, rather than merely being an uncoordinated list of a myriad of disconnected disasters, pathologies, ruins and wrecks.

Hagens does make specific recommendations near the end of his video, aimed at getting us (particularly in the U.S.A.) to begin dealing with our ongoing global systems failure in a substantive manner. After that he adds a few seconds of wordless video that will delight all lovers of wildlife.

Any abstraction of Hagens’ presentation to a single phrase would wash away all its insights and nuance, and would be unjust to the cause of transmitting understanding to the public. But, if you want an indicative soundbite, here is my maximally reductionist summary: humanity needs to scale back its use of energy very very significantly, and permanently, and now — an energy diet — just like a forever-maintained eat-less food-calorie diet needed to break an individual free from obesity.

Hagens’ video will make any serious person think (and we all better get serious), and that is the first essential step for us ever having a chance to get out of the mess we’re in.

Earth and Humanity: Myth and Reality
16 May 2021 (Nate Hagens)
https://youtu.be/qYeZwUVx5MY

The following two paragraphs are my abstraction and consolidation of internet descriptions of Nate Hagens, with much of this information drawn from The Post Carbon Institute (https://www.postcarbon.org/our-people/nate-hagens/).

Nate Hagens has a Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He is a former editor of The Oil Drum and worked on Wall Street for a decade before “seeing the light.” Since 2003 Nate has shifted his focus to understanding the interrelationships between energy, environment, and finance and the implication this synthesis has for human futures. Previously, Nate was President of Sanctuary Asset Management and a Vice President at the investment firms Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers. Currently, he teaches a systems synthesis Honors seminar at the University of Minnesota ‘Reality 101 – A Survey of the Human Predicament.’

Nate focuses on the interrelationship between debt-based financial markets and natural resources, particularly energy, and the unplanned for risks from the coming ‘Great Simplification.’ He also addresses the evolutionarily-derived underpinnings to status, addiction, and our aversion to acting about the future and offers suggestions on how individuals and society might better adapt to the coming decades.

Jeff Gibbs 2019 video “Planet of the Humans,” released publicly on Earth Day 2020, was the most important presentation on the realities of our global “climate change” crisis to be made available in many years (https://planetofthehumans.com/). Nate Hagens’ new video “Earth and Humanity: Myths and Reality” is of much grander scope and at least of equal importance. See it and don’t get defensive, then refine your own stance from your points of disagreement with Hagens, and/or improve his systemic analysis, which is the type of thing needed to converge politically on what in all honesty would have to be called a World Plan for guiding human civilization through a transition — the Great Simplification — to a post carbon future, without suffering a catastrophic and life-ending collapse.

As a 20th century mechanical engineer who focused himself on the 19th century science of thermodynamics (and got away with a career in experimental nuclear explosions), I’ve said all what little I was competent to say about the physics and economics of “climate change.” So at this point all I can offer on the topic is bad poetry, and I’ll spare you that. But I can also recognize the value of new presentations like those of Gibbs and Hagens, and urge others to see them, study them, and act on them.

I am mindful of the urgent and totally justified demand posed by the next generation onto us world-controlling and world-destroying adults, through the voice of Greta Thunberg, for “action!” Nate Hagens’ systemic analysis is a very important step toward answering the questions of “what actions?” and “how do we implement them?”, and of actually working on Greta’s demand.

[Thanks to Isabel Ebert for pointing me to Nate Hagens’ video.]

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ADDENDUM:

Richard Heinberg both appears in “Planet of the Humans,” and leads the Post Carbon Institute.

The Most Colossal Planning Failure in Human History
May 2021
Richard Heinberg
https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-339-the-most-colossal-planning-failure-in-human-history

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Open Cycle Minds and Thermodynamic Socialism

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On 21 May 2021, Mark Ashwill’s excellent and moving article, “Of Class Rings, Bone Fragments and Fish Ponds: the Interminable Search for US MIAs in Vietnam,” was published (https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/21/of-class-rings-bone-fragments-fish-ponds-the-interminable-search-for-us-mias-in-vietnam/). It is about the searches by both Vietnamese and American groups for the unrecovered remains of those killed during the Vietnam War, while at the same time Americans continue to studiously avoid searching through their 20th century history to face up to its ongoing contortion of their 21st century national life. Think: Gaza in Palestine, May 2021, bombed Guernica-style by an unopposed Israeli military massively armed and lushly funded by the American Government.

“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” (misattributed to Mark Twain, but actually from 1970).

It is my belief that 1968 was the most pivotal year in United States history after 1945. The commitment then to continue pursuing the Vietnam War, and the refusal ever since to face up to the consequences of it — unlike Germany’s postwar forthrightness about its 1933-1945 period — have doomed the U.S. to sink with increasing madness into the delusional path of “exceptionalism” it has been on since.

The last time there seemed a faint chance of breaking free from our American neo-fascist trajectory was 1976-1978, during the Carter Administration — and, yes, I know he was far from “perfect.”

I don’t think the U.S. will break free of its current delusional-ideological trajectory until it has fully come to terms with its Vietnam War history — and war crimes — and I mean by much more than just erecting a Black Wall.

The Amerindian Genocide, Black Slavery + Jim Crow, and the Vietnam War are in my view the three major American-perpetrated Holocausts. American “sleep” is shame-based denial of historical American reality. We as a nation could awaken from that sleep and transcend its underlying pathology, to such great benefit to everybody everywhere.

A good friend of mine is a 1966-1967 US Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War, who survived much heavy combat and encirclement during the 1st Battle of Khe Sanh. He is the fiercest peacenik-socialist I’ve ever met, and also a really sweet gentle guy. He knows the truth.

And that truth is that official US Government ideology operates as an open cycle through the propagandized American Public Mind: we are not to “connect the dots” between what “we” have done with what “we” are doing. Acknowledging such attitudinally-causal links would be to operate both the personal and public minds in a morally closed cycle manner — to actually understand what is happening and why — and such clarified thinking must be dispatched into the non-thought oblivion of the memory hole in order to preserve the artifice by our political class of their guilt-free righteousness in perpetrating and sponsoring the war crimes deemed essential to the success of American foreign policy.

Let me suggest one such open cycle sequence of rhymed histories:

the Wounded Knee massacre, South Dakota 1890;

the Moro Crater massacre, southwestern Philippines 1906;

the No Gun Ri massacre, Korea 1950;

any number of massacres and bombardments in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1975;

the El Mozote massacre, El Salvador 1981, by a US trained and Reagan Administration sponsored Salvadoran Army;

the 2003-2011 Iraq War and its catastrophic aftermath;

May 2021: Palestinians apparently do not have a “right to exist,” but Israelis continue to have the right to destroy them with massive firepower gifted to them by the United States.

Imagine if closed cycle thinking had been applied after any of these catastrophes, and that had prevented subsequent ones because of the socially transformative moral effect of such thinking on the people and government of the United States. Give peace a chance. Is that funny? Why should the moral elevation of our American civilization be seen as an unrealistic and ridiculous fantasy? That is just a cowardly excuse to cling to barbarism and immaturity.

Our planet’s habitability is too rapidly and visibly decaying today, for us humans (and that includes you, unexceptional Americans!) to continue carrying on with the sociopathological behaviors exhibited by ancestors like Achilles, Genghis Khan, the Spanish Conquistadores, and the dictators of the 1930s. It is time we applied closed cycle moral thinking for the guidance of our political selves.

Thermodynamic Socialism

On 21 May 2021, The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reported that:

“Oil and gas operators’ required bond insurance in New Mexico would cover only a fraction of the potential cost of cleaning up wells and pipelines they might leave behind, which could stick the state’s taxpayers with a colossal bill [$8.3B], according to an independent study released Thursday.”
(https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/oil-and-gas-cleanup-could-cost-new-mexico-8-3-billion-study-says/article_6b8a9918-b97f-11eb-b0b1-6786d9af4fb1.html)

In pointing out this news story, Jeffrey St. Clair commented (23 May 2021, FB): “Same old story, all across the West. The mining, oil and timber corporations rip it up, abscond with the cash, leave behind poisonous rubble and the bill for cleaning it up…if it can be cleaned up.”

This “profitable” business behavior by resource extraction corporations is consistent with the type of energy cycle being promoted: the open cycle.

In thermodynamics, the open cycle is defined as the operation of any isolated “engine” — for extracting “work” from the consumption of “fuel” — by drawing the energy-containing resource (fuel) from an assumed infinite external and unchanging source (i.e., Nature), consuming it within the engine at high temperature to extract work (such as torque, or thrust), and exhausting the waste products of the conversion process into an assumed infinite external and unchanging sink at lower temperature (i.e., Nature). It is left to unspecified external reality — Nature — to endlessly absorb all wastes from our engines, and produce all fuels for our engines, without alteration to itself while existing at a constant temperature.

This has been a very useful concept for designing thermodynamically isolated fossil-fueled engines, like for jet airplanes, but it fails when “the engine” becomes so gargantuan — like being the aggregate fossil-fueled powering of our entire industrialized civilization — that it becomes comparable in “size” to the source and sink it is supposed to operate between. In terrestrial reality there are no isolated engines. You can’t wash an elephant in a kiddie pool, pretending it is in a river.

The aerobic-respiration-photosynthesis cycle sustaining wild animal and plant life on Planet Earth operates as a closed cycle. The aerobic exhalation of carbon dioxide by animal life is inhaled by plant photosynthesis to in turn exhale oxygen, in a balanced closed loop energized by the “fuel” of sunlight, and which cycle generates food for all: sugars, cellulose and protein.

The need to transform our civilization and reduce the amount of energy we use to conduct it, is entirely the task of abandoning further reliance on open cycle thermodynamics — the fiction that all our billions of little engines are each thermodynamically isolated — and operate our civilization’s aggregate planetary engine in a closed cycle. Of necessity this would mean abandoning the fiction that all our millions of little polities are sociologically isolated and can function in an apartheid and exclusionary manner.

Mens sana in corpore sano.

To power our planetary civilization with planetary closed cycle thermodynamics — in the interests of maintaining the longevity of human and much other life on Earth — we have to conduct our various socio-economic lives in a politically closed cycle manner across this planet. Think of this as thermodynamic socialism.

We humans are physically and intellectually capable of rearranging our civilization to operate at this elegantly integrated more advanced level, and we are now morally tasked to do so. We must leave our barbarism in the past and become a nation of morally closed cycle thinking in a world of thermodynamic socialism.

Is that impossible? The toppling of moral impossibilities in past human society always began as gleams of morally closed cycle thinking in just a few minds.

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Global Warming is Nuclear War

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Global Warming is Nuclear War

The average global surface temperature rose by 1°C during the 110 years between 1910 and 2020.

During the 50 years between 1910 and 1960, the average global temperature rose by 0.25°C, an average rate-of-increase of 0.005°C/year. Another 0.25°C of biosphere heating occurred during the 25 years between 1960 and 1985, a rate-of-rise of 0.010°C/year. During the 20 year span between 1985 and 2005 another 0.25°C of temperature was added, a rate-of-rise of 0.0125°C/year. During the 15 year span from 2005 to 2020 another 0.25°C of temperature rise occurred, with an average rate-of-rise of 0.0167°C/year.

While the average temperature rise of 0.25°C was the same for each of the four intervals, the first (between 1910 and 1960) required 45.5% of the 110 years between 1910 and 2020; the second (between 1960 and 1985) only required 22.7% of the 110 years; the third (between 1985 and 2005) required the smaller fraction of 18.2% of the 110 years; and the most recent period (between 2005 and 2020) took the smallest fraction of 13.6% of the 110 years.

Given that a 1°C rise of the temperature of Earth’s Biosphere (EB) is the equivalent of it absorbing, as heat, the energy yield of 109 billion Hiroshima atomic bomb explosions, we could imagine the EB being bombarded by an average of 1 billion Hiroshima bombs per year between 1910 and 2020 (within 109 year-long intervals). If that yearly bombardment were done uniformly, it could represent 2 Hiroshima bomb explosions per square kilometer of the Earth’s surface once during the year; or it could represent one Hiroshima bomb explosion per day in each 186 km^2 patch of the Earth’s surface, for a worldwide bombing rate of 2.74 million/day. Global warming is very serious!

Let’s refine this analogy so it reflects the acceleration of global warming since 1910.

The 27.25 billion Hiroshima bomb equivalents of heating that occurred between 1910 and 1960 would represent a bombing rate of 545 million/year; or 1.5 million/day spaced out at one daily explosion per 342 km^2 patch of the Earth’s surface.

The 27.25 billion Hiroshima bomb equivalents of heating that occurred between 1960 and 1985 would represent a bombing rate of 1.09 billion/year; or 3 million/day spaced out at one daily explosion per 171 km^2 patch of the Earth’s surface.

The 27.25 billion Hiroshima bomb equivalents of heating that occurred between 1985 and 2005 would represent a bombing rate of 1.36 billion/year; or 3.73 million/day spaced out at one daily explosion per 137 km^2 patch of the Earth’s surface.

The 27.25 billion Hiroshima bomb equivalents of heating that occurred between 2005 and 2020 would represent a bombing rate of 1.82 billion/year; or 5 million/day spaced out at one daily explosion per 103 km^2 patch of the Earth’s surface.

The heating rate for the 1°C temperature rise of the EB since 1910, averaged on a yearly basis, was 5.725×10^24 Joules/110years, or 5.2×10^22 Joules/year, or 1.65×10^15 Watts of continuous heating. This rate of heat storage by the EB (into the oceans) is only 0.827% of the continuous “heat glow” given off as infrared radiation by the EB (mainly at the Earth’s surface), which is 1.994×10^17 Watts at a temperature of 288.16°K (Kelvin degrees; an absolute temperature of 288.16°K = 15°C+273.16°C; absolute zero temperature occurs at -273.16°C).

If we were to imagine impulsively infusing the EB with the same amount of energy, by a regular series of “heat explosions” each of energy release equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb, then the 1 billion explosions per year (the 109 year average) would have to occur at a rate of 31.7 per second.

Atomic bombs release their energy explosively within 1 microsecond, representing a radiated power of 5.25×10^19 Watts for an energy release equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb yield (5.25×10^13 Joules). In this hypothetical exercise, I am lumping all the atomic bomb explosive yield into heat, but in real atomic explosions energy is released in a variety of forms: heat, nuclear radiation (gamma rays, energetic neutrons, X-rays, radioactive material) and blast pressure. The energy forms emitted by atomic bomb explosions ultimately heat the materials they impact and migrate through, and this is why I lump all of the bomb yield as heat.

An explosion sphere with a 56.4 centimeter diameter (22.2 inches) radiating heat at 5.25×10^19 Watts during a burst time of 1 microsecond would present a 1m^2 surface area at a temperature of 5,516,325°K = 5,516,051°C. Imagine 32 of these popping into existence at random points around the world during every second of the day and night since 109 years ago. We would certainly consider that form of global warming a crisis deserving our attention.

Because the invisible low temperature heat glow style of global warming that we actually experience does not rudely punctuate our lives with random blasts of such intense X-ray conveyed heat that any human standing nearby would simultaneously be vaporized while the molecules of that vapor were atomized and those atoms stripped of all of their electrons down to the atomic cores, we ignore it. But the heating effect on the biosphere is energetically equivalent to what we are causing with our greenhouse gas and pollution emissions.

Thermodynamically, we have greenhouse gas-bombed out of existence the pristine biosphere and its habitable climate that first cradled and nurtured the infancy of our species 2000 centuries ago, and then fed and protected the development and growth of that fragile chimera we call “civilization,” which our potentates have been proudly boasting about for at least 8,000 years. And we’re still bombing, now at an ever increasing rate.

All of the numbers quoted here come out of the results described in my report “A Simple Model of Global Warming” that I produced to help me understand quantitatively the interplay of the major physical effects that produces global warming. I invite both the scientists and the poets among you to consider it.

Global Warming Model

70% or less of the sunlight shining onto the Earth reaches the surface and is absorbed by the biosphere. From this absorbed energy, in combination with the presence of water and organic material, all life springs. The oceans, which cover 70.2% of the Earth’s surface and comprise 99.4% of the biosphere’s mass, form the great “heat battery” of the planetary surface. All weather and climate are generated from the heat glow of that battery. A portion of that heat glow, equivalent to the solar energy absorbed, must escape into space for the planetary surface to remain in heat balance, at a constant average temperature. For that temperature being 15°C (59°F), 62.31% of the heat glow must escape.

30% or more of the incident solar energy is reflected back into space, with 24% of that reflection by clouds, and 6% of that reflection from land and ocean surfaces. While snow and ice are the most nearly perfect reflective of such surfaces, they only cover 10% to 11% of the planet and that coverage is slowly being reduced by global warming, increasing the solar heating.

Our introduction of greenhouse gases and pollution particles into the atmosphere has added to the already existing load of naturally emitted humidity, organic vapors and grit from volcanic eruptions and windblown dust. These components of the atmosphere absorb and retain heat (infrared radiation), blocking some of the necessary heat glow loss, and thus warming the planet. The increasing accumulation of these components — because a warmer world has higher humidity producing more clouds, and because of our continuing emission of atmospheric pollutants — scatter an increasing portion of the incoming sunlight back into space, which is a cooling effect called “global dimming.” The imbalance of all these effects is dominated by warming and the biosphere’s temperature is rising at an accelerating rate.

My life is a race against the clock of a certain though indeterminate finality. The COVID-19 pandemic has made me very conscious of this inevitability. After seven decades of existence I cannot do everything I want, in terms of living, fast enough. This is not irrational terror, it is awakened appreciation and understanding. There is all of Shelley yet to read, and Keats, and so many more; and so many more birds and flowers, and daylight and nighttime beauties of the Nature to see, and so many more differential equations and physical problems to solve, to not want to go on living. The urge for continuation is innate, genetically programmed, whether in robotic virus particles or in cognitive life forms like cats and human beings. For me, that cognition includes the irrational emotional desire to combat global warming so that future generations of all Earth’s life forms have decent chances of continuing.

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Endgame For Green Utopia

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Endgame For Green Utopia
[REVISED, EXPANDED, IMPROVED, 12 May2020]

On these two opposing types of responses to the movie “Planet Of The Humans”
(https://planetofthehumans.com/):

PRO: “The key, however, is that all these [‘greenish’] energy policies have to be carried out after capitalism has been wiped out and under conditions where production is based strictly on use.“

CON: “This documentary is trashy fake news. It’s Trumpian in its disdain for the facts…, they point away from real climate action solutions (such as renewable energy infrastructure) and peddle fascist snake oil of population growth i.e. advocate ecofascist genocide…Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t raving ecofascist lunatics will continue to fight to change society.”

Dreams of Utopias and illusions of self-importance die hard, even in the face of reality. Nature doesn’t care about how we fantasize; it just keeps on with its grand cycles, which those of global heating, environmental destruction and species extinction are now overstimulated by us, homo sapiens. The fundamental question here is: how good of an equitable world society could we energetically have, and by ‘greening it’ can we limit global warming?

PART 1:

The best we could possibly do would be to equalize the standard of living (Human Development Index) worldwide to HDI=0.862 (the range is from 0.28 for the poorest, to 0.97 for the richest nations), with a per capita electrical energy use of u=4000 kWh/c (kilowatt-hours-per-year/capita). The world average by nation (in 2002, and similar now) was: HDI=0.741 at u=2465 kWh/c. The U.S.A. had HDI=0.944 at u=13,456 kWh/c (a rich highly developed country). Niger had HDI=0.281 at u=40kWh/c (a poor underdeveloped country).

The recommended leveling is for nations with u>4000kWh/c to REDUCE energy use (a.k.a economic activity AND militarism), and nations with u<4000kWh/c to INCREASE energy use ENTIRELY APPLIED to raising living conditions (a.k.a. human-centered health and welfare: “socialism”).

This means world socialist government and no wars, and no nationalism.

Examples of enlightened HDI=~0.861 countries (ranked by energy efficiency) are Malta (HDI=0.867), Czech Republic (HDI=0.874), Estonia (HDI=0.853). There is no excuse for a nation to expend more than u=6560kWh/c, because that was Ireland’s usage and it had an HDI=0.946 (and a phenomenal energy efficiency as I calculate it).

All of this is to equalize the experience of whatever is going to happen to humanity because of geophysical changes (“global warming”).

My numbers for the above come from the following linked analysis (using 2002 data).
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/06/09/linking-energy-use-and-human-development/

PART 2a:

From where do we source that energy powering the world-equalized “decent life”? Obviously, we use the fossil fuel and nuclear power infrastructure that we have now to power a maximum effort “full speed ahead” program of developing, building and installing greenish energy technology based on:

– solar (from light-to-heat in water, oil and brine slurry pipes; and also photovoltaics but that is materially limited for the needed exotic elements),

– wind (especially offshore),

– hydro (using existing dams-plus-reservoirs as “pumped storage” facilities, so “excess” solar energy collected during the day pumps water “uphill,” which can then be released “downhill” through the turbo-generators to produce nighttime electricity),

– wave/tidal as possible (without wrecking important inter-tidal bio-zones),

– energy conservation by building/home design (both for insulation, energy capture and greenhousing),

– energy conservation by design of appliances and the mechanical and thermal systems used industrially and for personal living,

– also a necessary transformation of our transportation sector (for bicycles, trolleys, trains, ships even with sails; and bye-bye to most planes, most cars especially big-engined SUVs and trucks, cruise ships, and all that high-waste military gear),

– also necessary is a transformation of agriculture to localized small organic multiculture farms, and away from international-aimed large oil-chemical stimulated monoculture agro-factories/feedlots/plantations.

PART 2b:

As greenish energy sources come on-line, an equivalent generating capacity of fossil and nuclear infrastructure is taken off-line AND SCRAPPED (and materially recycled/reprocessed).

The goal is to always increase the proportion of greenish technology and always decrease the proportion of old energy technology, while keeping the total energy generation such as to provide u=~4000kWh/c worldwide (to maintain HDI>0.862 worldwide).

It will never be possible to eliminate all of the old energy technology and still maintain the decent level of HDI “we” experience and is the moral right of all 7.78B (and growing) of Earth’s people to experience.

Note that fertility rates decrease (they are already negative in some rich countries) as HDI increases; so the rate of population growth will diminish as higher standards of living are widely experienced; with greater physical, heath, child, and economic survival and security, as well as education, provided socialistically worldwide.

ENDGAME:

Global warming would most likely still continue, but at a slower pace, if given all the above. So the endgame is to equalize the experience of “the geophysical inevitable” (whatever it actually ends up being), while always striving to increase energy efficiency so as to maximize HDI given the energy used.

It seems PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE to have a very high standard of living worldwide (HDI~0.9) with a per capita energy use that is at least 3x less (or, at 1/3 current US-level usage) to 7x less (or, at 1/7 current usage by the most profligate) of ‘rich, energy-wasting nation’ usage.

But global warming (the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere) may be too far advanced to ever stop by throttling back or even eliminating human (economic) activity; though undoubtedly it could be noticeably slowed by such cutbacks, as has been vividly demonstrated in a very short time by the COVID-19 economic slowdown that has visibly reduced pollution, and afforded greater freedom to wildlife (seen roaming in emptied city streets around the world!).

All of this would mean the ‘best world available’ for ‘everybody’ for as long as it is energetically possible to maintain it. And if human extinction is ultimately unavoidable, then we’ll all go together as brothers and sisters of equal rank.

Now to all who would say that this “all in” paradigm is so psychologically and politically improbable that it will never happen, I say fine, I won’t argue it, but realize that in order to accurately and realistically gage the actual (really potential) value of whatever your scheme or dream for Utopia is, it is essential to know how to calculate what is POSSIBLE within the limits imposed by geophysics (the laws of physics and the workings of Nature) given the natural resources sustainably available from Planet Earth (this is to say without the degradation of its environments and biodiversity).

One small example. Today it is possible to use an ‘app’ on your smart-phone to alert your local coffee shop to prepare your preferred caffeinated concoction, and pay for it electronically over the vast internet-banking computer network (humming and exhausting heat 24/7), then drive to your Java pit-stop and pick up your to-go order, discarding the container after consuming the contents, which container may end up as soiled waxed paper in a municipal organic compost pile, or as plastic in a solid waste landfill, or at worst as litter.

Imagine that modality of coffee consumption is gone in the “all in” world, and instead you have to appear in person at your coffee shop — perhaps on one of your walks into town, or on the walk home from the trolley stop after work — place your order to a human being manning the Java-preparing technology, pay cash (to eliminate all the internet energy-to-heat waste), and drink your coffee from a washable mug you carry or they provide; or, extravagantly, from a paper cup that easily composts. Even more efficiently, you could buy a bag of coffee beans, take them home and grind them with a handcrank grinder, and make delicious coffee at home.

The quality of life is not diminished by simplifying it energetically, or by relaxing its pace. More likely these increase it.

4000kWh/c HDI>0.862 Equalized Green Utopia World:

The 4000kWh/c Equalized Green Utopia World (HDI>0.862) would need 18% more electrical generation than in 2017 (for a world total of 30,189TWh), and applied with 62% greater efficiency for producing social value than we currently do.

In our current World Paradigm, we only get an average of 62% of the potential social value inherent in the world electrical energy generated, and which social value is also very inequitably distributed. The average 38% of annual socially wasted (SW) electrical energy (9,730TWh total at 1,289kWh/c in 2017) goes into all the Social Negativity (SN) of: capitalist-economic, nationalist-political and prejudicial-societal inequities; militarism and wars; and to a lesser degree some technical inefficiencies of electrical generation and of appliances.

The potential (or Primary) energy (PE) contained in the natural resources (all raw fuels and sources) used to generate the World Energy in 2017 was 162,494TWh; and 25,606TWh of electrical energy was generated that year, which was 15.8% of the Primary Energy. That percentage can be taken as a lower bound on the efficiency of our current conversion of raw energy resources into socially applicable energy, because some quantity of fuel (PE, with some refined) is converted by combustion directly to heat, both to drive heat engines and for industrial and personal uses (e.g., smelting, cooking, heating).

CONCLUSIONS:

For a 4000kWh/c Equalized Green Utopia World “today” we would need 18% MORE usable (electrical and available heat) energy than consumed in 2017, applied with 62% GREATER EFFICIENCY for producing social value than we do currently. Eliminating today’s Social Negativity (SN) would be the energetic equivalent of gaining 38% more energy (in our current paradigm).

But global warming will continue because it is impossible to eliminate all CO2 and greenhouse gases producing processes of energy generation and use. The rate of increase of global warming (the upward trend of temperature) can be reduced as the purely Green (non-CO2 and non-greenhouse gases producing) methods of energy production and use provide a larger portion of the total World Energy production and consumption.

EXCERPTS FROM: World Energy Consumption
[HEAVILY EDITED and AMENDED by MG,Jr]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

According to IEA (in 2012) the goal of limiting warming to 2°C is becoming more difficult and costly with each year that passes. If action is not taken before 2017 [sic!], CO2 emissions would be locked-in by energy infrastructure existing in 2017 [so, now they are]. Fossil fuels are dominant in the global energy mix, supported by subsidies totaling $523B in 2011 (up almost 30% from 2010), which is six times more than subsidies to renewables. So, limiting the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius is now doubtful.

To limit global temperature to a hypothetical 2 degrees Celsius rise would demand a 75% decline in carbon emissions in industrial countries by 2050, if the population is 10 billion in 2050. Across 40 years [from 2010 to 2050], this averages to a 2% decrease every year.

But, since 2011 the emissions from energy production and use have continued rising despite the consensus on the basic Global Warming problem. Hypothetically, according to Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute [in 2009], in order to prevent the collapse of human civilization we would have to stop increasing emissions within a decade [by 2019!] regardless of the economy or population.

Carbon dioxide, methane and other volatile organic compounds are not the only greenhouse gas emissions from energy production and consumption. Large amounts of pollutants such as sulfurous oxides (SOx), nitrous oxides (NOx), and particulate matter (like soot) are produced from the combustion of fossil fuels and biomass. The World Health Organization estimates that 7 million premature deaths are caused each year by air pollution, and biomass combustion is a major contributor to that pollution. In addition to producing air pollution like fossil fuel combustion, most biomass has high CO2 emissions.

FINALLY:

Even with the 4000kWh/c HDI>0.862 Equalized Green Utopia World, global warming would continue at a rate faster or slower depending on how low or high, respectively, a proportion of World Energy is generated and used by purely Green methods. To repeat:

All of this would mean the ‘best world available’ for ‘everybody’ for as long as it is energetically possible to maintain it; and if human extinction is ultimately unavoidable, then we’ll all go together as brothers and sisters of equal rank.

The quality of life is not diminished by simplifying it energetically and by relaxing its pace. More likely it would be increased even in today’s paradigm; and most decidedly so with the elimination of Social Negativity in all its forms, which are so wasteful of energy.

Our potential civilizational collapse and subsequent extinction is up to Nature; but whether that occurs sooner or later, and with what level of shared quality of life we experience our species’ remaining lifetime, as well as its degree of equitable uniformity, is entirely up to us.

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Climate Change and Voting 2020

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Climate Change and Voting 2020

Today, humanity faces a situation unique in the 200,000 year existence of our species Homo sapiens sapiens, and unique in the 2 million year existence of our genus, Homo: the unprecedented steady linear advance of global warming since 1970, which is making our planet irreversibly less habitable as time progresses, and which is driven entirely by the emission of greenhouse gases as waste products of human activity, particularly the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. If this human-caused global warming remains unchecked it could ultimately lead to our extinction.

Global warming is intimately coupled with population growth (see Note). The universal desire for a better life leads people everywhere to try to acquire and use more energy to reduce the drudgery of daily survival, and beyond that to increase their security, comfort and enjoyment. Food is the source of our internal energy, that which powers our metabolism. The most popular source of our external energy today is fossil fuels: the burning of refined petroleum fuels, natural gas, and coal. From these we derive most of the heat and electricity we generate and use both industrially and personally, as well as for propelling our transportation. It is the increasing energy demand per person of a growing world population that drives the unprecedented rate of global warming we are experiencing.

Motivating people everywhere to see global warming as the fundamental cause of their local disasters of severe weather, drought, failed agriculture and fishing, habitat loss and resource scarcity wars, and then motivating them to cooperate internationally to immediately reduce the rate of global warming as much as geophysical conditions will allow, is the singular political problem of our time for our species.

The trends of population (in billions) and global warming (in degrees °C increase relative to the average global temperature during 1880-1920, the datum) are given in the table shown. The quantities listed up to the years 2019-2020 are based on data. The populations listed after 2019 are extrapolations based on an assumed linear population increase of +87.5 million per year (M/y), which was the average rate of increase from the years 2011 to 2019. The temperature increase above datum (delta-T) for years after 2020 are linear extrapolations based on the temperature ramp observed between years 1970 and 2020 (a +1.4°C increase over 50 years).

What is not yet known is if and when global warming will accelerate beyond the linear trend assumed after the year 2020, in the table. Such acceleration would be caused by the appearance of new physical conditions such as:

the transition of tropical forests from being carbon absorbers and sinks to becoming carbon emitters because of their severe degradation brought about by logging, drought and wildfires;

a massive methane release from the thawing Arctic;

sudden and massive glacial calving and melt in Greenland and Antarctica baring more ground for the absorption of solar radiation and the release of formerly trapped methane and carbon dioxide;

methane released from warmed oceans because of the breakdown by heat of methane clathrates (solid methane hydrate “ices” formed under cold high pressure at ocean depths).

Because of the unprecedented pace of our current global warming, we do not have the luxury of unlimited time — as was true in prior millennia — to physically evolve adaptively or escape by migration in response to climate change. (Migrate to where?, a billionaire’s habitat bubble on Mars? We already have a worldwide climate change and environmental collapse refugee crisis, and it will only get worse without a civilization-transforming response to climate change.)

To slow global warming to the minimum rate now limited by geophysics (the carbon load of the atmosphere) will require a species-wide change of human behavior as regards how energy is generated, conserved and used; how we steward the environment; and how the growth of human population is to be limited and people cared for everywhere. It takes Nature 200,000 years to clear a massive excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (such as we have injected over the previous century), and this occurs through a sequence of increasingly longer term processes: CO2 uptake by the oceans (years to decades), dissolution of seafloor sediments (the dissolving of chalk acidifying the oceans over decades to centuries), the weathering of carbonate rocks (centuries to millennia), and silicate weathering (tens to hundreds of millennia). CO2 uptake by photosynthesis is blunted by the ‘torrential rain-flooding plant-growth punctuated drought-wildfire’ cycle.

We can only attenuate global warming by species-wide willpower, and the sooner we develop and apply that willpower the greater will be the degree of that attenuation, and the further the likelihood of our causing our own extinction.

Without an internationally coordinated climate change response effort within the next dozen years that is 70% larger than the combined war efforts of World War II (to account for the +5.5B population increase between 1939 and 2020), global warming will reach and then exceed 2°C above the 1880-1920 datum. Warming beyond that point will likely be impossible to counteract by any human actions, and the climatic and weather-disaster consequences will be dire and unrelenting.

We have lost the luxury of unlimited time to dawdle in our many egocentric obsessions and illusions — waiting for the ideologically “perfect” revolution; seeking the most ethnically pure nationalism; the ideal theocracy; the maximization of our wealth; the complete destruction and disappearance of those “other types” of people whose savings, lands, resources and lives we want to steal; mindless absorption in superficial consumerism and ‘electronic comic book video game TV internet social media entertainment’ — before collectively reforming ourselves into better futures. Nature has made our old awareness-blunting time-wasting games obsolete by becoming feverish over its infection from our greenhouse gas toxicity. Our last chance for civilizational transformation that can alter the course of climate change is now, this next decade.

Clearly, the single best strategy to slow global warming is to replace fossil fuel energy with solar and “green” energy, whose production and use does not emit CO2, CH4 (methane), and other organic greenhouse gases and vapors.

Everything I have described up to this point has been said before by many people in many ways over many years. Now, about voting.

The only way we can achieve the civilizational transformation required to have any ameliorating effect on the course of global warming, and tackle the singular political problem of our time for our species, is to wrest control of governments from oligarchic, neoliberal, capitalism-obsessed, theocratic, nativist, and climate change ignoring elites — especially in countries having disproportionate political-economic-military power, expelling disproportionate quantities of greenhouse gases, and causing disproportionate environmental destruction — and then establishing regimes committed to real and immediate climate change response. Such real climate change response naturally subsumes all narrowly defined issues of economic equity and social justice.

In countries that offer some degree of democracy to their people, it is necessary to vote for politicians — now — whose prior history indicates they would be most reliable at vigorously pursuing a maximal climate change response, locally, nationally and internationally. For U.S. voters in 2020 that means electing Bernie Sanders to lead the Democratic Party ticket for the presidency, and then voting to ensure he wins the November general election. It is also necessary to elect people who would be Congressional representatives and Senators allied with Bernie Sanders. It does not matter whether sweeping the Sanders socialist-populist groundswell youth-quake “revolution” into power fits in with your ideal of an American government regime, however intellectually refined, or crudely simplistic, or myopically and corruptly partisan, or vainly and egocentrically identity political your ideal regime would be. We no longer have time to put off making partial gains in the direction of our goal, in order to wait for anyone’s variety of personally tailored political perfection.

The burden of responsibility on the citizens of the politically powerful, economically rich, profligate greenhouse gas emitting countries is to agitate and vote for, and vigorously implement, the real type of climate change response that is being described here. The burden of responsibility on the older citizens and older non-citizens is to put their time, money and energy into creating and protecting a good world with a decent future for the young. That has always been the responsibility on adults, and in our time — now — that responsibility must be discharged by implementing a real climate change response which is intrinsically a revolution of: economic equity, social justice, energy conservation and efficiency, rapid transition of energy sources and infrastructure from fossil fuels to green energy, and demilitarization.

In countries whose governing elites do not offer the people an effective political voice, it is necessary that those people find ways to change the nature of their governments. Risky, I know, but essential in order to respond to the looming threats of climate change.

I know that everybody can easily rationalize continuing to drift along with the mindsets they have now. But that will only keep us as distracted, delusional and disunited as we are now, and convey us all haplessly into the implacable civilization-chewing grinder of runaway climate change. We do not have the luxury of preferences anymore if we are to prevent the worst, especially for our children and grandchildren.

As I write this during a warm rainless mid-February spring in Northern California, with whitish pink-tinged apple, cherry and plum blossoms; magnolias flowering; purple florets of vinca; yellow tufts of eucalyptus; small purplish rosy globular flowers of polygonum, light blue florets of rosemary, bright orange California poppies, yellow flowers of oxalis and daffodils; and many other varieties of flowers blooming two months early, I wonder if the dry season October wildfires will now flare up in August, or even July. There has been no rain this February, “normally” the wettest month of the year for California; it appears we are entering a new drought.

And I wonder if the slow, tentative awakening in the public mind to the reality of increasingly inhospitable climate change, which awakening I observed during the course of 2017, 2018 and 2019, will accelerate and coalesce into the national and world “cosmic consciousness” that I know is essential if we Homo sapiens sapiens are to have any chance of actually protecting ourselves (all of us everywhere), within the next decade, from the worst possibilities of runaway climate change.

Note

The purpose of social welfare societies — socialism — is to provide their individuals with sufficient quantities of water, food, shelter and energy to carry on fulfilling lives, without subjecting those individuals to lonely struggles for precarious survival. This is why mortality rates are lowest in highly socialized prosperous societies, and why the consensus of individuals living in them is for low rates of reproduction, even to the point of birth rates below 2.1 per woman, the replacement rate necessary to maintain the existing size of a society’s population.

Clearly, the single best strategy to slow, and perhaps even reverse global population growth, is to provide a global system of reliable socialized security to completely support individual healthcare for life, obviously including: maternity care; safe birthing; safe abortion; child survival, healthcare, education and launching into “independent” living; elder care; and humane natural and self-willed dying. There is simply less incentive to have more children if more of them are guaranteed to survive and experience full and decent lives, and if the individual has a socially guaranteed protection of their own survival.

The above Note is from:

Oil, Population, Temperature, What Causes What?
9 June 2019
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/06/09/oil-population-temperature-what-causes-what/

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Manuel García, Jr.’s Worldview, 2020

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Manuel García, Jr.’s Worldview, 2020

I am just over one-eighth of a billionth of humanity, and I think that the impact and value of my thoughts and ideas are about as significant. This year, 2020, I will be 70 years old, and I think that I have probably said everything original that I was capable of saying. I am sure that I will write more of my little essays, and put them out there, but they are more than likely to be repetitions and rehashes of what I have previously written. Right now I cannot imagine squeezing any new insights out of all the reading and studying (and living) I have done in physics, science, history, psychology, Buddhism, and literary fiction.

So, I have compiled a list of 20 of my essays (of recent years), which as a group I offer as representative of my “worldview,” as of 20 January 2020. I post that list here, “for the record,” and for the ‘benefit’ of people new to my web-pages. All of this represents my annual (in January) “state of the world” message.

I have no ego regarding my Internet publications; if they are useful and encouraging to you then great, if not then I think at least they have done no harm.

My plans are to continue absorbing things that interest me, learning as I can, and expressing myself as feels right and enjoyable. I am satisfied that at the very minimum I have improved just over one-eighth of a billionth of humanity.

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Eight Categories, and Numbers of Articles in Each:

1 TRANSFORMING U.S. AND WORLD SOCIETIES (3)
2 CLIMATE CHANGE ACTION VERSUS CAPITALISM AND MILITARISM (4)
3 THE PHYSICAL REALITY OF GLOBAL WARMING (2)
4 WAR IS A CRIME, AND THE FOLLY OF WAR WITH IRAN (2)
5 POPULATION GROWTH + CLIMATE CHANGE + ENERGY USE (3)
6 CLIMATE CHANGE FACTS AT THE MOVIES (2)
7 THE TRUE PURPOSE OF A HUMAN LIFE (2)
8 HOW TO FACE THE FUTURE: ENJOY, AND BE KIND (2)

3+4+2+2+3+2+2+2=20

Article titles are within their respective web-links

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TRANSFORMING U.S. AND WORLD SOCIETIES (1/3)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/04/09/whats-wrong-with-the-united-states/

TRANSFORMING U.S. AND WORLD SOCIETIES (2/3)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/10/16/the-inner-dimensions-of-socialist-revolution/

TRANSFORMING U.S. AND WORLD SOCIETIES (3/3)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/05/13/too-many-people-or-too-much-greed/

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CLIMATE CHANGE ACTION VERSUS CAPITALISM AND MILITARISM (1/4)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2018/11/19/climate-change-action-would-kill-imperialism/

CLIMATE CHANGE ACTION VERSUS CAPITALISM AND MILITARISM (2/4)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/09/09/climate-change-denial-is-murder/

CLIMATE CHANGE ACTION VERSUS CAPITALISM AND MILITARISM (3/4)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/06/27/american-climate-change-policy-you-dont-matter/

CLIMATE CHANGE ACTION VERSUS CAPITALISM AND MILITARISM (4/4)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/11/20/climate-change-is-a-war-crime/

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THE PHYSICAL REALITY OF GLOBAL WARMING (1/2)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/07/15/ye-cannot-swerve-me-moby-dick-and-climate-change/

THE PHYSICAL REALITY OF GLOBAL WARMING (2/2)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/12/20/co2-and-climate-change-old-and-new/

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WAR IS A CRIME, AND THE FOLLY OF WAR WITH IRAN (1/2)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/01/05/war-the-unending-theft/

WAR IS A CRIME, AND THE FOLLY OF WAR WITH IRAN (2/2)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/01/05/attacking-iran-will-save-the-world-redux/

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POPULATION GROWTH + CLIMATE CHANGE + ENERGY USE (1/3)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/06/02/our-globally-warming-civilization/

POPULATION GROWTH + CLIMATE CHANGE + ENERGY USE (2/3)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/06/09/oil-population-temperature-what-causes-what/

POPULATION GROWTH + CLIMATE CHANGE + ENERGY USE (3/3)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/06/09/linking-energy-use-and-human-development/

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CLIMATE CHANGE FACTS AT THE MOVIES (1/2)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/12/12/climate-from-catastrophe-to-cataclysm/

CLIMATE CHANGE FACTS AT THE MOVIES (2/2)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/12/31/climate-change-at-the-movies/

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THE TRUE PURPOSE OF A HUMAN LIFE (1/2)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/12/29/being-alive/

THE TRUE PURPOSE OF A HUMAN LIFE (2/2)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/08/04/what-is-the-purpose-of-life/

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HOW TO FACE THE FUTURE: ENJOY, AND BE KIND (1/2)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2015/12/11/living-confidently-in-times-of-climate-change/

HOW TO FACE THE FUTURE: ENJOY, AND BE KIND (2/2)
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2017/05/04/what-can-i-do-about-climate-change/

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