Cancun — Arrive by Air

Merida — Arrive by Air

Cozumel — Arrive by Air or by Cruise Ship

Progresso — Arrive by Cruise Ship

As you can see from the map, none of these places is very close to Coba.

Visiting Coba is just possible as a day tour from Cancun or Cozumel. Allow 8 to 9 hours for the excursion, whether you go on your own, or take a guided tour.

If you are staying someplace on the Mayan Riviera near Playa del Carmen figure 4 to 6 hours for the excursion depending on how much time you spend at the site and village. If you are coming from Merida, plan on a 3-hour drive, or a 4-hour bus ride just to get to the site. Which makes staying overnight at one of the hotels in the village an attractive option.

However you get there (car, taxi, or bus) this map gives a good idea of what to expect. You take the road marked Coba from the traffic circle (see top of map). Then go three kilometers and arrive at the village of Coba. It’s a very small place, around 1,300 people, so the main road is the only real road in town. Stay on the main road until it comes to the lake, then follow it around to the left.

Take the road along the edge of the lake and in about 200 yards you will come to the entrance of the parking lot for the site.

The parking lot is large because tour buses full of tourists use it throughout the day. While Coba is a little “out of the way” it still gets hundreds of people a day visiting the site.

There is the usual line of cinder block buildings around the edge of the parking lot, housing tourist shops and a couple of restaurants. The biggest structure in the lot is the zip line adventure building, in case you want to take a zip line ride across the lake.

The entrance to go into the site is located at the back of the parking lot. There is no on site museum but there are bathroom facilities.

***Site Tip***

This is a large site and you can easily walk 3 or 4 miles while touring it. These are the only restrooms on the site, so it is highly recommended that you visit them before starting your tour.

As a site, Coba suffers from a lack of explanatory signage. This map at the entrance is the only complete view of the site provided for visitors. Although there is signage at each of the major features of the site, there are no signs at the entrance discussing the city’s history and context.

At this point, if you are visiting the site with a tour group, your guide will probably give a short lecture on the site. All the presentations I heard can be summarized as follows:

Coba means “water stirred by wind”, “muddy waters”, or “murky waters” depending on your guide. It is estimated to have had 50,000 inhabitants (and possibly significantly more) at its peak, and the built-up area extends over some 80 km².

The site had a sizable agricultural population by the 1st century CE. The bulk of Coba’s major construction seems to have been made in the middle and late Classic period, about 500 to 800 CE.

Most of the dated hieroglyphic inscriptions are from the 7th century. However, Coba remained an important site in the Post-Classic era with new temples being built, and old ones kept in repair, until at least the 14th century, and probably right up until the arrival of the Spanish.

To understand Coba in context, it is necessary to understand how long people have been occupying the Yucatan peninsula. There are two sites that speak to this issue, Hoya Negro near Tulum, and the Loltun Cave near Kabah.

At Hoya Negro in 2007 cave divers found the oldest human remains in North America. Named Naia, the bones were those of a young girl who had fallen into a natural pit trap and died around 11,000 BCE.

Analysis of her bones revealed that she was 15 or 16 at the time of her death. She had given birth about a year before her death and she had suffered from several episodes of malnutrition\starvation as a child. Life at the end of the last ice age was apparently not easy.

At Loltun Caves, in the Puuc region near Kabah, you can take a tour of caves that have evidence of human usage since around 10,000 BCE. Stone tools and the bones of mammoths and bison are the earliest artifacts, but you can also see handprints on the cave walls, that carbon dating places between 7,000 to 8,000 BCE.

People have been occupying the Yucatan since the last ice age came to an end and the lakes of Coba would have been prime real estate.

A Cambridge article published in January 2017 (A Cultural and Climatic History of Coba, a Lowland Maya City in Quintana Roo, Mexico) used sediment cores from the lake to date human occupation and activity at the site. They found that forest clearance began around 1,650 BCE and corn started being planted around 850 BCE.

The population seems to have started growing rapidly around 100 BCE and to have peaked in the late 600’s\early 700’s. Lakeside milpas (like a rice paddy but for corn) were in place until 720 CE when the lake was diked as a reservoir.

Coba may have been abandoned for several decades in the early 800’s during a 20-year period of intense droughts. The longest, lasting for 5–6 years with rainfall averaging less than 4 inches per year, seems to have caused corn cultivation to completely vanish.

If it was abandoned, the city was reoccupied (although corn pollen in the lake sediments indicates a much smaller population) until around 1240 CE when a final abandonment occurred. Although the city was abandoned, a remnant population (small village level) has continuously occupied the area around the lake since that time.

The village that you drove through is that “remnant population”. The village itself is built on the ruins of the suburbs of Old Coba and has occupied that spot for at least 800 years.

Your tour of the site starts at the red dot.

Coba can be a difficult site to appreciate. It is so large, so minimally excavated (only 2%), and so thickly overgrown with forest that it’s difficult to see the ruins for all the trees.

Touring the site basically involves moving from clearing to clearing to see each one’s features. Each feature stands alone, so you can view them in any sequence you want.

However, I want to emphasize that the site is large, and while it’s very flat, the path from the entrance to the Grupo Nohoch Mul is about a mile. Looking at the map it’s clear that you can easily do three or four miles of walking if you want to see the whole site.

Therefore, many people choose to hire a pedicab to get around the site. I highly recommend this for several reasons:

One

It’s the tropics, even during the “cool, dry” part of the year (December to April) it will be hot and humid. During the “hot, dry” months (May and June) before the rains come, temperatures can climb to over 110 degrees in the afternoon. Finally, during the “hot, rainy” months (July to November) it will be hot, extremely humid, and infested with mosquitoes.

IF YOU ARE NOT ACCLIMATED, WALKING AROUND CAN KILL YOU.

People die from heatstroke in the tropics, and it can happen fast, so hire a tricitaxi and see the site comfortably.

Two

You will see more in each clearing, if you spend less time getting from clearing to clearing. If you only have a few hours at the site, hiring a tricitaxi is the best way to maximize your time.

Three

Archeotourism works when it makes it more important to local communities to protect ruins than to loot them. Looting of archeological sites is a world wide problem that has escalated in recent decades.

Be part of the solution and contribute to the local economy by hiring a local guide or, in this case, a pedicab.

If you decide to rent a bicycle or hire a tricitaxi stop at the small building near the entrance to make arrangements, or to purchase bottles of cold water and soft drinks.

From here, you can see the first clearing and the Grupo Coba. So whatever option you choose (walking, bicycling, or tricitaxi), proceed from here directly to the Grupo Coba

The Coba Group is the densest concentration of buildings in Coba. It comprises 43 structures, various courtyards, vaulted rooms, a grand plaza, where you are standing on this map, a ball court, and several stelae. Six sacbeob branch out from this group.

Its dominant feature is the structure known as the “Church” or Iglesia. It has nine round cornered, stepped layers and reaches a height of 24 meters (75 feet). Like most Mesoamerican structures it was built in a series of phases, each one building over the previous phase. Construction began in the Early Classic period, around 300 CE, and the last modification was made during the late Post Classic, around 1450 CE.

Shown here, at the base of the staircase, is the small shrine where Stele 11 is mounted. If you walk east around the north edge of the Iglesia you will find a small ballcourt. This ballcourt is part of the Grupo Coba. It is one of the two ballcourts found at this site.

Coba was brought to the attention of archeologists in 1926 after a description of it was published by an amateur explorer who had been taken to the ruins by local Maya hunters. The Carnegie Institute, who were working at Chichen Itza, made three expeditions to Coba over the next six years surveying and mapping the site.

They followed up these expeditions with the publication of a detailed report on the site, written by the pioneer of Maya archeology, Eric Thompson in 1932. This map, drawn by Thompson.

Shows the interconnected group of buildings and plazas known as Grupo Coba. On the map, you are standing in the main plaza looking east at the large temple that was the main feature of the complex.

As you can see from the trees growing out of the ruins, this building has been cleared and stabilized, but not fully restored. The rope indicates that it is not safe to climb past the first landing.

The size of the people in the shot provides a sense of scale for the photo. This is a large plaza, the staircase that the people are standing on is about 75′ wide and about fifteen feet tall. The height of the temple is estimated to have been 75 feet tall (25 meters).

In this picture, the small shrine with the thatched roof is where Stele 11 is mounted. The portion of Stele 11 mounted in the shrine is the upper part of what was once a much larger stele. This fragment was mounted in the shrine sometime between 1000 to 1250 CE during the Post-Classic period.

Keep in mind, that while Thompson’s diagram shows a huge complex of temples and buildings, this is what almost all of it looks like. Big piles of loose stones with lots of trees growing out of them.

When looking at photos of a structure it’s always difficult to really “feel” its size. People in a photo helps the viewer put the size of a structure in perspective. The women at the far side of these stairs give the viewer a greater appreciation for the width of this staircase. The woman in blue is pointing to another feature of this complex, a short tunnel.

One of the features of the Grupo Coba is this short tunnel that you can walk through.

The tunnel is about 30’ ft. long and you can clearly see the stonework used in its construction. At the far end of the tunnel it is easy to see the distinctive shape of Mayan tunnels. They are characterized by straight sides and a triangular cap.

At the other end of the staircase is another example of a Maya tunnel with the same characteristic shape. This shape is also seen in other cultures and is known as a “corbelled arch”.

This type of arch is also seen in Greece at the ancient Mycenaean sites. It is regarded as an intermediate type of arch by archeologists. An improvement over simple post and lintel roofing but not as good as a true arch like those constructed by the Romans.

The main defect of a corbelled arch is that it is not as strong as a true arch. Over time, the arch is more prone to collapse. Because of that, intact arches at Maya sites are always worthy of note.

One of the recent discoveries at Coba happened on these stairs in 2010 because of Hurricane Gilbert. The stairs, directly behind the stele fragment mounted in the small shrine at their base, collapsed during the heavy rains. When workers started to make repairs, they noticed something unusual and archeologists were called in.

What they found buried under the stairs was the base of Stele 11, the stele fragment mounted in the small shrine in front of the stairs.

Because it had been buried for so long and not exposed to weathering, this portion of the stele was in incredibly good condition. Here you can see how amazingly clear the glyphs and the figures are.

Underneath the stele, in a small stone cist (a small stone lined pit), the archeologists also found an offering cache.

For those of you who have “Indian Jones” fantasies this is what a real archeological find typically looks like. This is a jade necklace, ear spool, and shells.

Part of the cache consisted of these Spondylus shells. Spondylus shells from the Caribbean were highly prized throughout Mesoamerica for millennia. These are very faded but when fresh they would have been a bright orange. Cut up, the shell can be made into jewelry.

Something that is still being done to this day. Shells like this were traded widely and have been found at sites across Mesoamerica and South America.

The other part of the cache was this greenstone jewelry. Because of religious associations linking green to fertility and life, greenstone and green jade was highly prized by the Maya. Rulers are always depicted wearing greenstone and jade regalia.

Jewelry is one of those material things that doesn’t change much over time. Designs and materials are remarkably stable. You could put this necklace of jade beads on and look stylish today. Roughly 1,300 years after it was made.

While the cache items are of interest the real find was the base of Stele 11 in near pristine condition. For the first time ever, archeologists were able to combine it with the upper fragment and attempt to decipher its story.

What they found was a completely unknown king from the 600’s, the golden age of Coba. A king whose life was tied directly to that of Queen Lady K’awiil Ajaw, one of the most extraordinary woman rulers in all the Maya world. Interpretation of the stele, tells us that this man is Xaman K’awiil and that, “seventeen days and fifteen score days on (the day) 9 Ak’bal 11 Pop the white band was tied on the head of Xaman K’awiil, kalo’mte’; then he scattered drops on (the day) 1 Ajaw”. This stele is recording the accession to power of Xaman K’awiil on the day of January 24th, 633 CE.

This is important because it is only one year after the dedication date of Stele 3 in the Macanxoc group of stelae, and seven years before Stele 1 in that same group tells us that Lady K’awiil Ajaw comes to power. This makes Xaman K’awiil her direct predecessor, and probably her father. It also means that his reign was short, since she comes to power in 640 CE.

Unfortunately, the dedication date of this stele is illegible, so we don’t know when this stone was erected, or by whom. There is a reference in the text to a “kalo’mte’ Chan Yopaat”, which we know from the stelae in the Macanxoc group was the name of the successor to kalo’mte’ Lady K’awiil Ajaw. Given the dates of the various stelae discussed, and the reference to Chan Yopaat, it now seems likely that this stele was dedicated by Chan Yopaat sometime after his accession to power in 682 CE. The stele seems to be commemorating a military victory by Xaman K’awiil, who was probably his grandfather.

This man will be mentioned again when we walk through the Macanxoc group of stelae. This group of stelae tell the life history of a remarkable Maya queen and give us an unique biography of a Maya ruler. For now though, let’s wrap up our walk through the Grupo Coba with a quick look at the other buildings in the group.

Besides the Iglesia, there are many other secondary platforms like this in the Grupo Coba.

They are low (6 to 8 feet) and have around 500 to 600 square feet of flat area on top. We know that the low pillars would have supported posts holding up a high, steeply pitched, roof of thatch. So, we can visualize clearly what this platform would have looked like.

What we cannot know, is what this space was used for. Was it a commercial space? Was it an audience space? Was it a workspace for scribes, i.e. office space? Possibly it was used for different activities at different times of the year, and was a multiple use space. When all that remains are the stone bones of a building, determining its function, or functions, becomes educated guesswork.

The ecosystem here aggressively attacks the ruins.

In fact, the ecosystem here aggressively attacks just about every form of human manufacture. Few perishable artifacts (things made of wood, leather, feathers, cotton, paper, etc.) are found at Maya sites. The things that survive are ceramics, worked stone, and the bones of buildings.

Having examined the main features of the “Grupo Coba” ruins take the main trail on the north side of the pyramid to the next main feature: Ball Court A.

For the other parts of this tour of Coba:

Seeing Coba: Part Two, Ballcourt A

Seeing Coba: Part Three, The Roads of the Maya

Seeing Coba: Part Four, Story of a Maya Queen

Seeing Coba: Part Five, The Pyramid of the Painted Lintel

Seeing Coba: Part Six, The Main Ball Court

Seeing Coba: Part Seven, The Xai’be Pyramid

Seeing Coba: Part Eight, The Nohoch Mul Pyramid

More than 99.9% of scientific studies since 2012 agree: Humans have caused climate change. — Cornell University 2021

In America, the science you believe in depends on who you vote for.

Around half of the population STILL doesn’t think Climate Change is going to personally effect them.

Even people who do think they they will be “harmed” by Climate Change, often think that it will be LATE this century before it becomes “severe”. Like in the 2070’s or 2080’s. Which, if you are 30 or older, means you have a reasonable likelihood of dying before “Climate Change” becomes “Climate Crisis”.

That’s what the Majority thinks, and they vote accordingly. To them, 2100 still seems “far away”.

For those who are five to twenty five, “GenZ”, the Climate Crisis is going to be the rest of their lives. Their “best years”, when the world wasn’t dying, are already behind them. Ahead lies only the ruin that will be the rest of their lives.

Here’s how much the dialog has shifted in the last few years. I USED to get asked fairly often, “How much warming do you think will happen this century”?

Lately, I have been getting asked, “How much warming do you think will happen by 2050”?

This is a critical question and one that generates a LOT of discussion. Here are some basic facts.

Currently the atmospheric CO2 level is at 424.29ppmCO2. The yearly median level for 2022 was 417.2ppm.

Atmospheric CO2 levels saw a significant increase from 2023 to 2024, with the global average increasing by a record +3.75ppm. This was after a +3.21ppm increase in 2023 and what looks like another +3ppm increase in 2025.

The rate of yearly CO2 increase seems to have accelerated to around +3ppm per year.At that rate we are likely going to hit 560ppmCO2 by around 2070 at THE LATEST.

That’s the BAU level of CO2 if nothing gets better or worse.

In Mainstream Climate Science that means +3°C of warming.

For different reasons in both Alarmist Climate Science and the paleoclimate record it means about +6°C of warming.

The level of atmospheric CH4 (methane) is also HIGHER than it has been in at least a million years.

The Mainstream value for the CO2 equivalence (CO2e) of that CH4 is 53.2ppmCO2e. That’s based on the 100 year warming (GWP100) potential of the CH4.

CALCULATION

1900 parts per billion (ppb) of methane (CH4) is equivalent to approximately 53.2 ppm of CO2 when using a 100-year Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 28, as a GWP of 21–25 is sometimes used for this calculation. To calculate this, 1900 ppb is converted to 1.9 ppm, then multiplied by the GWP value of 28ppmCO2e to get 53.2 ppm of CO2e.

The short term GWP for CH4 is GWP20 and its CO2e value is around 85. This is based on the “half-life” of CH4’s warming effect being 12–14 years.

So, in the first 20 years a single tonne of CH4 is released it is equal to about 85 tonnes of CO2 but, over a 100 year period this value drops down to about 28 tonnes of CO2.

If you consider the increase in CH4 levels from about 750ppb (preindustrial) to the current 1950ppb then the effect of CH4 becomes 1,200ppb or 1.2ppm x 28 (GWP100 value) equals 33.6ppmCO2e.

SO

There are a number of ways to look at the increasing levels of CH4.

This is really BAD news. This is FAST warming that’s “on top of” or “in addition” to the expected CO2 warming.

For example, suppose you expect to get +2°C of warming from increasing CO2 levels from 280ppm to 360ppm. CO2 levels increase from 280ppm to 360ppm and temperatures increase +2°C.

Then you find out that 32% of the warming, or around +0.7°C was due to increases in the atmospheric CH4 level. That implies that you STILL have an ADDITIONAL +0.7°C of warming to go from the CO2.

If CH4 levels are falling, then your endpoint will be less than +2.7°C. However, if they are stable, or increasing, then +2.7°C is, at a minimum, where you will end up.

In our case of +1.5°C of warming over the 1850 baseline.

• If approximately 1/3 of planetary warming since the preindustrial period has been due to CH4 (+0.5°C), then there are two ways to SEE that fact. Either the +140ppm increase in the CO2 level from 280ppm to 420ppm caused ONLY +1.0°C of warming and the Mainstream estimate for 2XCO2 was 30% too high.

• OR, there is AT LEAST +0.5°C of additional CO2 warming that is now “locked in”. Which, if CH4 levels stay constant, will result in around +2.0°C of warming when equilibrium is reached.

I consider the latter case to be the most likely. What I think, based on my analysis, is that the CH4 is “masking” some of the warming implied at these CO2 levels. We have hit +1.5°C of warming and we THINK “well that’s all the warming”. Ummm…no.

EVEN IF WE HIT NET-ZERO TOMORROW

The implication of the CH4 increase since the preindustrial period is that a roughly 30% increase in the GMST is “locked in”.

In any case, using a value of 53.2ppmCO2e for the CH4 ENERGY forcing gives us a current CO2e level of:

425ppmCO2 + 53.2ppmCO2e(CH4) = 478ppmCO2e (CO2+CH4)

Finally there is the “Albedo Effect”.

The -0.5% dimming of the albedo since 2014 has a climate forcing equal to either 60–70ppmCO2e or +138ppmCO2e being added to the atmosphere.

CORRECTION/REFINEMENT

I have been saying that “Both Hansen and NASA/GISS agree on that number.” Ahh, foolish me. GISS and Hansen agree on the amount of ENERGY forcing this represents, they disagree on how that translates into CO2 “forcing”. Because they assign a HIGH value to 2XCO2 the Alarmists predict a climate forcing response to be about double that of Mainstream Climate Science. Hansen is estimating the HIGH value of 138ppmCO2e for the change in the Albedo since 2014. GISS is placing this value at 60–70ppmCO2e.

Using the “Best Case” NASA/GISS estimates, the CO2e level has reached.

BEST CASE — MAINSTREAM

425ppmCO2 + 53.2ppmCO2e(CH4) + 65ppmCO2e(Ab)= 543.2ppmCO2e (CO2+CH4+Albedo Dimming)

543ppmCO2e — Right Now, here today.

WORST CASE — ALARMIST and PALEOCLIMATE FINDINGS

425ppmCO2 + 53.2ppmCO2e(CH4) + 137ppmCO2e(Ab)= 543.2ppmCO2e (CO2+CH4+Albedo Dimming) = 616.2ppmCO2e(CO2+CH4+Albedo Dimming)

616.2ppmCO2e — Right Now, here today.

EITHER WAY

Large Cloud Feedback Confirms High Climate Sensitivity — May 2025 James Hansen…..columbia.edu/~jeh1/mail…

Rapid surge in global warming mainly due to reduced planetary albedo…..12/05/24

Researchers find a potential explanation for the unusually sudden temperature rise in 2023: reduced low-level cloud cover limits Earth’s ability to reflect solar radiation

IMPORTANT POINT

Any statement that reaching Net-Zero will “halt warming” that doesn’t deal with the “albedo effect” is pure Hopium.

Yet, that is what Mainstream Climate Science is telling us.

SO.

Could the Earth really warm another +1.5°C to reach +3°C in just the next 25 years. Is that even possible?

The short answer is that it’s an UNKNOWN.

Imagine two scenarios A and B.

In Case “A” the CO2 level is 180ppm, the GMST is around +8°C, and CO2 levels increase SLOWLY. Like +100ppm over 6,000 years slowly.

In Case “B” the CO2 level is 180ppm, the GMST is around +8°C, and CO2 levels JUMP SUDDENLY by +100ppm. Like in less than 100 years suddenly.

Now, we KNOW from scenario A that the GMST increases by +6°C at a rate of about +1°C per 1,000 years. That’s actually what’s happened multiple times over the last 800,000 years and we can see and measure it in the ice core record.

Scenario B is the one that there is NO geologic analog for in the entire 485my history of life on Earth. The ONLY thing that comes close is the Chicxulub Impact Event (dino killer 65mya).

However, we do know that the minimum answer in case B has to +6°C.

The same amount of CO2 should generate the same Equilibrium Climate Response. However, there is no guideline for “how fast” the Climate System is capable of processing a “bump” in CO2 levels on that scale.

Which means.

In my papers looking at Mass Extinction Events, I point out that there are periods when the GMST got to the same level as the End Triassic Extinction. However, in these other “hot periods” there was no mass extinction event. The level of extinctions was barely above the normal background rate.

The difference is the SPEED of the warming.

Case B could see Equilibrium Temperature levels that are MUCH higher than Case A. Because of the cascade of environmental feedbacks caused by the speed of the warming.

The paleoclimate record suggests that’s the “most likely” outcome.

NOW

We just lived through temperatures going from +1.1°C over baseline in 2021 to +1.6°C by 2024. A Rate of Warming of +0.125°C PER YEAR.

At that Rate of Warming, that’s +1.25°C per decade and +3°C happens by 2040.

We just lived through 3 years of warming at that rate, clearly the Earth “is capable” of it. To say it’s”impossible” is to ignore reality, AND it could be WORSE than that. We DO NOT know how fast the Earth is capable of responding to a jolt of CO2 of the magnitude caused by the albedo decline.

SO.

Theoretically, +1.5°C of warming can happen in just the next 15 years. Based on just what we have seen, it is possible.

THAT WOULD BE “WORST CASE”.

A CO2e level of effectively 560ppm, or 2XCO2, implies +3°C of warming — “Best Case”. That’s 100% Mainstream Climate Science numbers.

We ARE about to see how FAST it actually takes the Climate System to respond to a jolt of this magnitude.

Case Mainstream

Mainstream Climate Models are saying +3°C of warming over baseline in about 60 years (2085) at a Rate of Warming of +0.27°C per decade. They also are saying that warming will effectively halt when Net-Zero is reached AND that CH4 levels will rapidly fall as well.

Case Alarmist

Alarmist Climate Models are saying +3°C of warming over baseline in about 40 years (2065) at a Rate of Warming of +0.36°C per decade. They don’t see that as an endpoint. Ultimately they think as much as +12°C of warming may be “in the pipeline”. Although their models indicate much of this warming will happen gradually over several thousand years, up to +5°C of warming is possible by 2100.

Standard and Poors Global think there is a 50% chance of +2.3°C by 2040, implying +3°C by 2055.

Sustainability Insights: Why Planning For A 2.3°C Warmer World Is Critical This Decade And Next — S&P Global 09/15/25

The German Physical Society (German: Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, DPG), the oldest organization of “physicists” globally with a worldwide membership of 50,668, stated recently in their climate analysis.

Global warming is accelerating — A call for decisive action — Sept 2025

Global warming has entered a period of acceleration.

Already around 2050, warming could reach even +3°C compared to the pre-industrial period, with the rise in temperature in Germany being significantly higher than the global average.

Results from climate models suggest that warming to +5°C is likely by the end of the century.

These are not “crazy doomers” or “woke” environmentalists.

+3°C of warming by 2050 IS POSSIBLE NOW.

If you want to argue for a longer timeframe that’s fine.

It could be 2055.

Or 2065.

Or 2085.

No matter what, +3°C of warming is what’s coming.

This is what “the rest of their natural life” holds for “Gen Omega”

If you are GenZ now is the time to reassess your planned career choices and “life trajectory”.

Morgan Stanley is advising their clients that demand for air conditioning is going to BOOM over the next five years. There’s also a worldwide shortage of elevator repair technicians. Either of these jobs are likely to be in demand for a long time, even as things “fall apart slowly”.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 10/10/2025

ADDENDUM

In 2009 ABC did a documentary on Climate Change that is still one of the best things out there in terms of depicting how it is a “slow motion” catastrophe that will play out over a lifetime.

Here it is.

Earth 2100 is a television program that was presented by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network on June 2, 2009, and was aired on the History Channel in January 2010 and was shown through the year.

Hosted by ABC journalist Bob Woodruff, the two-hour special explored what “a worst-case” future might look like if humans did not take action on current or impending problems that could threaten civilization. The problems addressed in the program include current climate change, overpopulation, and misuse of energy resources.

The events following the life of a fictitious storyteller, “Lucy” (told through the use of motion comics, or limited animation), as she describes how the events affect her life. The program included predictions of a dystopian Earth in the years 2015, 2030, 2050, 2085, and 2100 by scientists, historians, social anthropologists, and economists, including Jared Diamond, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Peter Gleick, James Howard Kunstler, Heidi Cullen, Alex Steffen, and Joseph Tainter.

It ended with a quote from writer Alex Steffen, saying “Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: Can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?”

For Gen Omega this is going to be their life.

This is an example of Cognitive dissonance.

We can literally SEE our world getting worse each year now. Yet the stock market is at record highs.

The three leading U.S. indexes closed at record highs on Thursday — CNBC 10/02/25

“The S&P 500 inched up 0.06% to close at 6,715.35. It was up 0.3% at the day’s peak, reaching a fresh all-time intraday high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 78.62 points, or 0.17%, to finish the day at 46,519.72, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.39% to finish at 22,844.05. The tech heavy index also hit a new intraday record as well, supported by a gain in Nvidia shares, which also reached an all-time high, as investors continued to pile into the artificial intelligence giant.”

WTF is wrong with people?

Don’t they get that +3°C of warming by 2050 is like “Mad Max Apocalypse” BAD?

This past January the Actuaries Institute in Exeter found that their models indicate AT LEAST a 50% reduction in the global population if there was +3°C of warming by 2050. Their estimate was for GREATER THAN FOUR BILLION deaths as a result of that warming.

They also warn of:

• A breakdown of critical ecosystem services and Earth systems.

• A HIGH level of extinction of higher order life on Earth.

• Significant socio-political fragmentation worldwide and/or STATE FAILURE with rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital and systems identity.

• FREQUENT catastrophic LARGE SCALE mortality events due to disease, starvation, thirst, infrastructure failure, the migration of billions, and wars.

That’s what the EXPERTS in RISK Prediction and Management think will happen if we get to +3°C of warming by 2050.

JUST 25 YEARS IN THE FUTURE .

Even if you are as old as 50, you can reasonably hope to live to see 2050. If the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) increases another +1.5°C over the next 25 years (a Rate of Warming of about +0.6°C/decade) there’s AT LEAST a 50% chance that you won’t.

Globale Erwärmung beschleunigt sich - Ein Aufruf zu entschlossendem Handeln

Es ist nicht mehr zu leugnen: Der Klimawandel schreitet ungebremst voran und beschleunigt sich. In den Jahren 2023 und…www.dpg-physik.de

This might have something to do with it.

Americans have more money in stocks than ever before.

Americans’ record stock holdings hit 45% of assets.

From the article.

Americans have more money in stocks than ever before, and economists warn that’s a “bright red flag.” Direct and indirect stock holdings — including mutual funds and retirement plans — accounted for an all-time high of 45% of households’ financial assets in the second quarter, according to Federal Reserve data.

Stock ownership has now surpassed the levels of the late 1990s, just before the dot-com bubble burst, noted John Higgins, chief markets economist at Capital Economics. “That should ring alarm bells, even if the buoyant stock market keeps rising for a while amid enthusiasm for AI,” Higgins said.

He added: “Indeed, our forecast is that the S&P 500 will make further gains this year and next. But the current very high share of equities is a red flag to watch closely.”

SO, despite the growing alarm bells that this is yet ANOTHER BUBBLE, John Higgins (chief markets economist at Capital Economics) still thinks the S&P will CONTINUE to go UP. At least for the rest of this year and in 26’.

What great wave of economic growth and development is driving this “frenzy” in the market you might ask? Big tech companies like Nvidia have surged, lifting major indexes.

The AI bubble is the only thing keeping the US economy together, Deutsche Bank warns — Techspot 09/25/25

When the bubble bursts, reality will hit far harder than anyone expects.

According to a research note recently sent to clients by Deutsche Bank, the AI boom is ALL that is keeping the US economy out of being in a recession but, it cannot continue indefinitely. George Saravelos, Global Head of FX Research at Deutsche Bank, said the US would be close to a recession this year if Big Tech were not spending so heavily on building new AI data centers.

“The “AI machines” are literally saving the US economy right now, but this kind of growth cannot be sustained unless tech company spending remains on an ever-growing course. The bad news is, that in order for the tech cycle to continue contributing to GDP growth, capital investment needs to remain parabolic. This is highly unlikely.”

When you look at it that way, the two things — the AI Bubble and Climate Change Denial aren’t that different.

With that in mind, let’s look at what the German Physical Society (German: Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, DPG), the oldest organization of “physicists” globally with a worldwide membership of 50,668, stated recently in their climate analysis.

Warning, these are in German and there are no English versions. My German is pretty good but, if yours isn’t, Google Translate works great.

Here is the “Executive Summary”.

Global warming is accelerating — A call for decisive action — Sept 2025

There is no denying that climate change is progressing unchecked and accelerating. In 2023 and 2024, global average temperatures were +1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. It is even possible that the 1.5-degree limit of global warming adopted in Paris may already be permanently exceeded.

Meanwhile, even the commitment to keep global warming well below 2 degrees is only achievable with considerably increased efforts by the international community and there is a growing risk of this target being missed.

Global warming has entered a period of acceleration.

Results from climate models suggest that warming to +5°C is likely by the end of the century.

The Executive Summary is very short. Half of it is graphics like this.

Here is the full 14pg report.

Global warming is accelerating — a call for decisive action : Joint call of the DMG and the DPG….Sept 2025

It opens with this introduction.

Therefore, urgent action is needed.

Extreme weather events in Germany, Europe and worldwide are increasing both in their strength and frequency and are increasingly occurring in regions where they have previously been unknown.

The combination of heat and drought causes forests to die off and severely affects agriculture.

The local water balance is also greatly negatively affected by the consequences of global warming (melting of the alpine glaciers, absence of snow melt, etc.). This applies to both the agricultural and drinking water supply.

Extreme weather events, including large floods and large-scale wildfires, are causing a variety of fatalities and causing damage to private and public infrastructure of many billions of euros every year.

In many regions of the world, temperatures are reaching record levels. Such heat waves, also occurring in Germany, are a major health burden. They endanger, in particular, elderly and health-impaired people.

Rising temperatures also reduce the working capacity of the general population and causes enormous economic damage (in lost productivity).

At the same time, experts around the world are witnessing a drastic loss of biodiversity, which continues to intensify as a result of climate change and which impairs the resilience of our ecosystems.

Worldwide, the risk of impoverishment, hunger, refugee movements and social and global political instability continues to increase.

Despite these obvious developments, the global community and Germany have so far reacted insufficiently to the dangers associated with global warming.

Other than the opening statement about “global warming progressing faster than expected”. The rest of this sounds like standard IPCC warnings. Climate Change is getting worse “blah, blah, blah”. So what makes this report significant?

This part.

Although greenhouse gas emissions in Germany have been reduced since 1990, the current measures are not enough to achieve the goals of the German Climate Protection Act by 2030 or greenhouse gas neutrality by 2045 at the latest.

In Germany and internationally, the guaranteed climate protection targets are significantly too small (ambition gap) and the currently implemented and envisaged measures are not sufficient to achieve even these too low-measured targets (implementation gap).

This has far-reaching consequences:

Where it says “by 2050 there is a risk of warming by +3°C degrees”.

+3°C of warming by 2050 is catastrophically bad.

SO.

In the last 12 months there has been.

1. An account from last November’s Davos gathering about how many of the wealthy already think a climate disaster is unfolding.

“Wealthy ‘know the world is doomed, so may as well go out with a bang’” — Daily Mail 01/22/25

The ‘super rich’ could generally be split into two groups on the topic.

The prevailing mood was “after us, the deluge”.

2. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (Exeter) insurance industry report in January.

Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries - Exclusive: Report by risk experts says previous assessments ignored severe effects of climate crisis….www.theguardian.com

They think the world will DEFINITELY hit +3°C between 2070 and 2090. They also think there is a “chance” it could happen as early as 2050.

3. A February report by the Institute of International Finance.

FYI — The institute represents about 400 members from more than 60 countries, including JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. Hardly a “woke” institution.

In which industry officials argue that the financial sector needs a coordinated messaging campaign to regulators, investors and the public that the Paris targets are no longer within reach and banks should not be expected to pursue them.

4. The March report from Morgan Stanley.

Big banks predict catastrophic warming, with profit potential
Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and an international banking group have quietly concluded that climate change will likely…www.eenews.net

“We now expect a +3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.”

Morgan Stanley’s climate forecast was tucked into a mundane research report on the future of air conditioning stocks, which it provided to clients on March 17. A +3°C warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3% to 7% until 2030.

5. June’s announcement by JP Morgan that they are hiring the former chief scientist of NOAA. For the booming new business of “private climate change risk consulting”.

JPMorgan hired NOAA’s chief scientist to advise (high net worth) clients on navigating climate change

6. The S&P Global report on Sept 15th advising clients of the 50% risk of +2.3°C by 2040.

Sustainability Insights: Why Planning For A 2.3°C Warmer World Is Critical This Decade And Next — S&P Global 09/15/25

AND NOW.

7. Global warming is accelerating — a call for decisive action : Joint call of the DMG and the DPG….Sept 2025

A German report saying warming by 2050 COULD exceed +3°C.

JUST SO WE ARE CLEAR.

+3°C by 2050 is END of CIVILIZATION bad.

• That’s collapse of ocean fisheries.

• Permanent (on a human timescale) loss of about 40% of existing farmland in the midlatitudes.

• Droughts globally.

• Massive destruction of infrastructure (roads, rail lines, bridges, sewage treatment, power plants, harbors, communications, food processing/distribution) from weather disasters happening everywhere AND the loss of ability to REPAIR that infrastructure. IE we are rapidly approaching the point where whatever “breaks” will NEVER be repaired or replaced.

• 70% population reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa (around 700 million dead).

• Famines globally and starvation even in places like the US and Europe.

• Mass migration of billions of people seeking safety and food.

• The collapse of global manufacturing and supply chains.

Pretty much the end of “nation states”.

Over the next 25 years.

RIGHT NOW, that’s currently the “worst case” scenario.

There’s still a 50% chance that the RoW could be less than +0.5°C/decade. Although, that just buys us an extra 10–20 years before we hit +3°C. Unless we DO SOMETHING with that time it just delays the crash.

We WILL KNOW what it’s going to be, in about 2–3 years. The next El Nino will be the indicator of just HOW BAD things really are.

If you cannot see the “writing on the wall” at this point. Then you just don’t want to see it.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 10/04/2025

ADDENDUM

Record High Temperatures in the Ocean in 2024 - Advances in Atmospheric Sciences
Heating in the ocean has continued in 2024 in response to increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere…link.springer.com

Results from three international teams were consistent — the ocean is warming, and 2024 was a record.

OHC has increased steadily between 15 to 20 ZJ PER YEAR over the past five years despite the La Niña and El Niño cycles.

SO, Trump spoke on Tuesday at the UN. At a summit on Climate Change, before the ENTIRE World, the President of the United States stated.

“It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. “ — DJT on “Climate Change”

The summit, which took place last week at UN Headquarters in New York, is designed as a launchpad for COP30 later this year. Unlike the sprawling negotiations of a COP climate conference, this is a targeted high-level event where Heads of State, Government leaders, businesses, and civil society are expected to present concrete pledges and new national climate plans.

The MAGAt White House PR team had billed Mr. Trump’s address to the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly as a chance for the president to lay out his “New Vision” for how America “should be”, and “would be” wielding its power abroad. So, many nations were closely monitoring what Trump said on Tuesday.

Trump made it clear that the US official position is now utter contempt for global institutions.

As a “counterpoint” to Trump’s speech, Colombian President Gustavo Petro also spoke at the UN that day. Although few noticed, his language was extraordinarily direct. In stressing the need for climate action, Petro said of Trump:

“The most powerful man in the world does not believe in science. That is irrationality. As Germany, the country of great philosophers, of Kant, Feuerbach, and others, became prey to irrationalism in 1933. Today it’s this (US) country that is becoming irrational.”

“The old societies of Europe are collapsing, and the United States is applauding its new Hitler.”

“It’s not listening to its own young people, or its older people who died in the battlefields of Europe, fighting against Hitler and against his criminal ideology. Today, the same thing is being done (in the US) as Hitler did, building concentration camps for migrants, and stating that migrants are of an inferior race, and blaming them for crime and degeneration just like Hitler blamed the Jews.”

FYI — The US Department of State announced in a social media post on Friday that it had stripped Petro of his US visa. By international law and tradition this is illegal. Petro stated on learning this, “International law grants me immunity to go to the UN and that there should be no reprisals for my free opinion.”

So, Trump spoke on Tuesday.

THEN

On Wednesday in New York, countries lined up to say they would accelerate their efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. — NYT 09/24/25

At a climate summit at the United Nations on Wednesday, the vast majority of the world’s nations gathered to make their newest pledges to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.

EVERYONE WAS THERE

Geopolitical heavyweights including China, Russia, Japan and Germany were there. Dozens of small island states were there. The world’s poorest countries, including Chad and the Central African Republic, were there. Venezuela, Syria, Iran — there, too.

The United States was not.

Perhaps because the United States is the world’s biggest producer of both oil and natural gas.

Think about that.

When it comes to Climate Change policy, the US stands alone in isolation. NO ONE else, in the World, agrees with Trump and the MAGAts who put him in office.

America has become the World’s batshit crazy, racist, alt-right, old uncle.

On Wednesday the “adults” got down to business.

The most important announcement on Wednesday came from Beijing.

China for First Time Promises to Reduce Its Greenhouse Gas Emissions — NYT 09/25/25

From the article:

For the first time, China has announced a detailed target for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from its immense economy, saying on Wednesday that it would cut carbon dioxide and other pollution by at least 7 to 10 percent by 2035.

In the past, China had pledged only that its greenhouse gas emissions would continue rising until they peaked around 2030. Now, however, studies suggest that China’s emissions have already reached a plateau, five years earlier than expected.

China’s latest climate targets matter for several reasons. First, China currently is the world’s biggest polluter, which means that without a significant turnaround, there is little hope of slowing down global warming.

Let’s examine this statement CLOSELY. One of the common “whataboutism” arguments from the MAGAt’s, is that “China is responsible for climate change.” That it’s “stupid” for the US to try and reduce emissions “at great cost” when “China is the real problem”.

Yes, China is currently the world’s largest CO2 emitter but, the US is responsible for the largest share of CO2 in the atmosphere.

From the NYT article.

China’s new climate target is also a sharp contrast to the posture of the United States, which has contributed the largest share of emissions since the start of the industrial era and which has repudiated climate action under the Trump administration.

“It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. “ — DJT on “Climate Change”

From a national interest perspective, Trump’s speech showed that the U.S. is effectively abandoning the future to China and intends to continue basing its ENERGY policy on fossil fuels.

In contrast, China is announcing record amounts of solar and wind production.

China is SO far ahead of the rest of the world in solar panel production that they’re exporting it to most of the rest of the world. Just as the US is an Oil & Gas superpower, China is also becoming an ENERGY superpower. A SOLAR energy superpower.

The difference between these two positions is STARK.

After the Chinese, came the Europeans.

Despite Trump, the World Isn’t Slowing on Climate, E.U. Official Says — NYT 09/24/25

EU President Ursula Van der Leyen told the summit the EU was on track to reach its 2030 target of slashing emissions 55% by 2030, and the bloc’s 2035 reduction goal would range between 66% and 72%.

Australia, which plans to host a 2026 UN climate summit, announced a pledge that by 2035, it would slash greenhouse gas to between 62% and 70% below 2005 levels.

Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva warned that countries’ commitments made ahead of the U.N. climate summit in November would show the world “whether or not we believe in what the science is showing us.” Brazil has committed to reducing emissions by 59%-67% by 2035 and to stepping up efforts to combat deforestation.

It all looked and sounded GREAT.

Secretary-General António Guterres, assured everyone listening that the world was making progress in the energy transition, even if it was slow.

This might come as a surprise to some of you but the UN/IPCC currently EXPECTS +2.6°C of warming by 2100. IF we continue on with “business as usual” and don’t get to “Net-Zero” that’s how BAD they think things will get by 2100.

If that seems out of touch with the reality that the GMST averaged +1.6°C over baseline for 2024 and was over +1.5°C in 2023 then you don’t understand how Climate Science calculates the temperature for a given year. Climate Science uses a 20 year rolling average in order to “smooth out” the swings of natural variation.

Using a 20 year average from 2004 to 2024, 2024 was only +1.3°C above the preindustrial average. It will take another ten years of temperatures being above +1.5°C before we “officially” get there.

OR IT MIGHT HAPPEN A LOT SOONER.

Notice something about this graph, it shows warming of +1°C between 1980 and 2025. A Rate of Warming (RoW) of about +1°C over 45 years, roughly 20 times faster than any warming observed in the ice core record over the last 800,000 years.

Now, project that RoW out to 2100 and you get about +2.6°C of warming by 2100. Which makes it clear that the UN/IPCC models are ASSUMING that warming will not significantly accelerate during this time.

The UN/IPCC models, using mainstream climate science, assume that CO2 emissions are “peaking” right now. Their “worst case” is that CO2 emissions continue at the present level for the rest of the century. They expect CO2 emissions will decline rapidly over the next few decades and that Net-Zero will be reached between now and 2065. Once that happens they expect planetary warming to essentially cease.

That’s what mainstream climate science is saying. Here’s what Standard and Poors Global is telling its clients.

Sustainability Insights: Why Planning For A 2.3°C Warmer World Is Critical This Decade And Next — S&P Global 09/15/25

S&P (Standard and Poors) Global is an American financial services company that owns a number of the most well-known players in the global financial system. Including the credit rating agency S&P Ratings and the S&P Dow Jones Indices (which administers the famous S&P 500 stock market index).

These are VERY reputable analysts that are responsible for billions of dollars of wealth and who operate at the highest levels of the global economy.

These are not “crazy doomers” or “woke” environmentalists.

Their analysis uses probabilistic models typical of the financial industry and finds that.

A 50% CHANCE of +2.3°C (+4.1°F) warming by 2040!

This makes my prediction of +2°C by 2035 pretty much “spot on” in what appears to be the “new models” being used.

What this +2.3°C estimate implies in terms of the Rate of Warming value in their model.

IF — you assume that we are now at +1.5°C over baseline.

THEN — that implies a RoW of about +0.52°C PER DECADE.

Which means that these guys think the Mainstream +0.27°C/decade and the Alarmist +036°C/decade estimates are crap.

I stated recently that I thought the RoW could be as high as +0.5°C/decade. These guys seem to think there is a 50% chance that’s correct.

The implications of that are FUCKING DIRE.

That’s

+2.0°C by 2035–20% die off of human population predicted by IFoA

+2.5°C by 2045

+3.0°C by 2055–50% die off of human population predicted by IFoA

+3.5°C by 2065

+4.0°C by 2075

+4.5°C by 2085

+5.0°C by 2095

In the “Key Takeaways” they state.

This suggests that — as a baseline — all sectors, including households, may want to prepare for the impacts of physical climate risks associated with a +2.3°C world.

— If we’re not ready, there’s a 50% chance that economic costs from global warming would accumulate to 9%-33% of GDP by 2040.

— Yet, globally, climate adaptation and resilience needs remain largely unmet.

We believe this is due, in part, to uncertainties and data gaps associated with climate risk modelling, long and costly implementation of adaptation and resilience investments, and greater societal benefits than private benefits, all of which could put such investments on the back burner.

— In a more extreme case (90th percentile), the average temperature could be +2.8 C higher than preindustrial levels by 2040.

This is our finding after integrating the potential economic impacts of climate change into our probabilistic model.

— — — — —

If you remember, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (Exeter) issued a scathing report in January where they stated that mainstream Climate Science was “precisely wrong, rather than roughly correct”. They stated that +2°C of warming by 2050 would be “catastrophic” and probably result in global depopulation on the order of -25% (2 billion deaths).

Based on what they are seeing IRL, the insurance industry and now the financial industry are both saying that mainstream climate science MASSIVELY underestimated the speed of warming and the risks associated with it.

The S&P Global report states:

Based on a less severe and more severe GDP impact function — that is, the economic impact associated with temperatures rising — we find a 50% probability that temperature increases since preindustrial times would have accumulated to 9%-33% of world GDP per capita by the 2040’s.

The cumulative economic loss associated with temperature increases is set to rise and, with a probability of 50%, will be at least 9% in the 2040s using a conservative impact model, and at least 33% in the 2040s using a more pessimistic impact model, absent further adaptation and resilience measures. (Our GDP impact function is based on a panel modelling approach with fixed effects that links GDP per capita to changes in temperature.)

“Historically, scenario analysis has been the main means of estimating climate risk, using narratives to outline possible global warming trends and associated losses. This approach is complex, relying on projections of future greenhouse gas emissions and their effects on weather patterns.”

“Energy transition and climate scenarios are available in the market, but without probabilities of occurrence, and they are not interconnected. This limits their usefulness in climate adaptation and resilience planning, in our view, even though they remain essential for transition risk management.”

“Scenario results are ‘sensitive to the assumptions embedded in narratives and model parameters’”.

-This is an exquisitely polite way of saying “the mainstream models are full of ASSUMPTIONS” that may not be true.

“For example, scenarios that target net-zero emissions by 2050 are useful from a transition risk perspective but may not be realistic.”

-LOL, “may not be realistic”.

“Meanwhile, predicting policies, technological change, and societal preferences beyond a few years into the future is difficult. Research by Dietz et al 2018 shows that uncertainty regarding productivity growth (such as, how AI may boost economic activity) and climate sensitivity (including how emissions translate into higher temperatures) significantly affects the estimated benefits of climate mitigation, and by corollary, adaptation.”

-It comes down to “climate sensitivity”. If you think that we won’t get to +3°C by 2100 then you value “climate mitigation” a lot less than if you think it’s going to be +3°C by 2055.

“Meanwhile, tipping points or compounding events cannot be extrapolated from past data and remain largely overlooked in current models”.

-Tipping points and feedbacks “remain largely overlooked in current models”. Oh swell, that means you can TRUST them to be “TOO LOW” in their predictions.

This is a thinly veiled critique of mainstream climate science and these guys, like the insurance actuaries are NOT “Impressed”.

The “Money People” are now saying OUTRIGHT that they believe mainstream climate science is WRONG.

Here’s what they say about their methodology in the report.

Methodology Overview: Embedding Energy Transition And Climate Sensitivity Uncertainties

“Our methodology quantifies the size and likelihood of physical climate risk losses across time and across thousands of possible scenarios.”

“Using this large number of emissions pathways, coupled with information on climate sensitivities. We provide a probability distribution for climate change outcomes through the global mean surface temperature (GMST) indicator. This probability distribution enables us to quantify risks robustly across all outcomes, weighted by their likelihoods.”

-This was not a “trivial” effort. They put a lot of time and money into this. They ran “thousands of possible scenarios” using differing values for climate sensitivity and differing CO2 values.

They state CLEARLY that they are using a RANGE of values for “climate sensitivity” or 2XCO2. This strongly implies that they DO NOT accept the mainstream value range for 2XCO2.

To say there is a 50% chance of +2.3°C by 2040, implies that you think there is at least a 50% chance that Hansen is right.

Large Cloud Feedback Confirms High Climate Sensitivity — May 2025

“Our approach allows us to answer questions, including but not limited to:”

- What is the probability that the GMST in 2050 will exceed 3.5 C?

- What is the probability that it will be below 2 C?

“The answers to the above questions allow us to estimate the probability of GDP losses, answering questions like:”

- What is the probability that GMST impacts on GDP will exceed 20% in 2050?

- What is the probability that they will be below 5%?

- What is the probability that the sea-level rises above a certain threshold?

“The answers to these questions enable robust risk assessment that is quantitatively informed of potential higher and lower risks, thereby aiding understanding of adaptation benefits in terms of avoided losses.”

“Transforming the probability distribution of GMST into the distribution of local conditions can support adaptation and resilience planning. For example, it can help governments seeking to avoid construction in areas at risk of sea-level rise or to design building codes for a given specification.”

-They are trying to put together a “practical” climate model that can actually indicate risk for planners and individuals on a fairly fine grained scale.

“Our probabilistic model indicates that a +2.3°C world is very likely to materialize in the next 15 to 25 years.”

By 2040, it’s very unlikely (2.5% probability) that the global average temperature rise will stay below 1.5 C compared to the preindustrial average.

We see a 50% likelihood that the GMST will go beyond +2.3°C in the next 15 years.

And yes, that’s an estimate that’s “pants shitting” BAD.

That’s an estimate which indicates 30% of the global population could be dead from starvation, migration, warfare, and infrastructure breakdown.

BY 2040.

The CONTRAST between what was said at the UN and what “the money” is saying/thinking could not be more stark.

SO, who’re gonna believe?

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 09/29/2025

ADDENDUM

In case the thought of billions of people starving to death wasn’t enough, the S&P report makes it clear that.

They are predicting the ECONOMY is going to SUCK.

“Potential economic losses associated with climate hazards will likely be significant in the next 15 years.”

“Based on a less severe and more severe GDP impact function — that is, the economic impact associated with temperatures rising — we find a 50% probability that temperature increases since preindustrial times would have accumulated to 9%-33% of world GDP per capita by the 2040s.”

“The cumulative economic loss associated with temperature increases is set to rise and, with a probability of 50%, will be at least 9% in the 2040s using a conservative impact model, and at least 33% in the 2040s using a more pessimistic impact model, absent further adaptation and resilience measures.”

So, at least a 10% decline in global GDP by 2040, and possibly a HUGE -33% decline. That’s like a worldwide “Great Depression” decline in GDP over the next 15 years.

There is also a geopolitical SURPRISE buried in the analysis.

“GDP loss estimates by country highlight that temperature-related damage (and the related adaptation and resilience needs) are location specific”.

“As a result of greater physical climate risk exposure, adaptation needs and potential avoided losses are much higher in terms of GDP in China than in the U.S.”

That’s REALLY interesting. They think warming will be WORSE for China than the US. I wonder how navigating this will play out geopolitically.

He told the Countries of the World that Climate Change is a “hoax” and then told them that they should buy more American Oil & Gas, “if you know what’s good for you”.

The MAGAt White House PR team had billed Mr. Trump’s address to the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly as a chance for the president to lay out his “New Vision” for how America “should be”, and “would be” wielding its power abroad.

This was going to be a SERIOUS speech with “major geopolitical” implications.

Despite a UN rule limiting speeches to 15 minutes. Trump rambled on for 56 minutes. He opened with this.

“What is the purpose of the United Nations?”

Then lectured the United Nations and other countries about how they were “failing” interspersed with a list of personal grievances.

Mr. Trump, who is in open pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize, trumpeted his role in bringing about several peace agreements or cease-fires during his speech. This, he argued, he was doing as a side job. Doing what rightly the UN should.

“Sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them,” he said, adding that “all I got from the United Nations was an escalator on the way up that stopped right in the middle.”

HIS grievances included but were not limited to; his not winning a renovation contract at the United Nations during his time as a real estate developer, windmills, other countries’ immigration policies which he claimed were leading them to ruin, and the way Brazil is being run.

Trump accused environmentalists of wanting to “kill all the cows.” Trump personally insulted the Muslim mayor of London, falsely claiming that Muslim leaders in the West are planning to institute Shariah law. Then proclaiming Christianity to be the “most persecuted religion on the planet.”

Trump bashed allies and foes across the globe.

There was some policy discussed.

He announced a new effort to enforce the biological weapons convention that would use “AI verification”.

This is about Covid. Trump is still obsessed with idea that Covid was “released” by China. Since he gave no details, my guess would be, that future “new virus” outbreaks will be subjected to “AI verification”. To make sure they are “natural” and not “biological warfare”.

He also wants “a cessation of the development of nuclear weapons.”

This is pure US self interest. It is REALLY CLEAR to everyone now that the ONLY way to keep the US from interfering or invading your country is to have actual nuclear weapons like North Korea. Trump wants to make it clear that the US FROWNS on this idea and might “bomb the shit” out of anyone who tries.

Trump also stated that the U.S. military would continue to play the role of executioner in killing ANYONE even “suspected” of smuggling drugs in international waters.

The KEY word here is “suspected”. Trump is giving the DEA the power of judge and jury and making the Navy be his executioners. They are murdering people in INTERNATIONAL WATERS where US drug laws do not apply, based on “secret evidence” that cannot be shared with the public.

Where does that end?

Does ANY country that incurs Trump’s ire, risk having its shipping fleet attacked by the US NAVY?

Trump warned anyone moving drugs out of Venezuela.

Essentially, Trump is telling the World that the U.S. military is no longer bound by international law. That’s the message.

During this “Castro-esque” harangue Trump seemed to remember that the delegates were there for a “Climate Summit”. He veered back on topic and produced this.

My thanks to u/DisingenuousGuy on reddit for this high-effort transcript of this portion of Trump’s speech from this video on YT. Here is Trump, in his “own words”.

Transcript

Another U.N. official stated in 1989 that, within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming. Not happening. You know, it used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago, in the 1920s and the 1930s, [The environmentalists] said global cooling would kill the world. [The environmentalists said] We have to do something.

Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler, so now they could just call it “climate change,” because that way they can’t miss. Climate change. Because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, it’s climate change.

Climate change-- no matter what happens-- you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people who, of course, put their country’s fortunes at risk and gave those same countries no chance for success.

They actually said during the campaign. They had a hat, the best-selling hat, [It says] “Trump was right about everything.”

If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail.

This sudden “almost sentence” is a veer towards immigration. Trump is literally standing in front of the world and telling “White” Europe, that if they let in too many “black, brown, or Muslim people” that “you have nothing in common with” it will destroy your countries. Trump seems ignorant of the fact that “White People” make up only about 15% of the global population.

I’m the President of the United States, but I worry about Europe. I love Europe. I love the people of Europe, and I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer.

The “double tailed monster” is renewable energy + non-white immigration. Both subjects play well to his base of racist White MAGAt voters. But, it was remarkable that he said this to a global audience of overwhelmingly “not-white people who understood EXACTLY what he meant.

You’re doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct, and you’re destroying your heritage. They must take control, strongly and immediately, of the unmitigated immigration disaster and the fake energy catastrophe before it’s too late.

He is advising Europe to close its borders and “fort up” against the ‘non-white horde” that wants to “destroy your heritage”. While ALSO giving up on renewables and committing to purchases of more American Oil & Gas.

The carbon footprint is a hoax. Made up by people with evil intentions and they’re heading down a path of total destruction.

This is TRUE, although not in the way Trump means it. The term “carbon footprint” was coined and popularized by the oil company British Petroleum (BP) and its advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, in 2004 as a public relations campaign to shift focus from corporate responsibility to individual consumer actions regarding climate change.

Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook | Rebecca……Climate-conscious individual choices are good - but not nearly enough to save the planet. More than personal virtue, we…www.theguardian.com

You know, the carbon footprint was a big, big thing a few years ago. I remember hearing about the carbon footprint. Then President Obama would get into Air Force One, a massive Boeing 747, and not a new one, an old one with old engines, and spew everything into the atmosphere. He talked about the carbon footprint. “We must do so.” Then he’d get in and he’d fly from Washington to Hawaii to play a round of golf, and then he’d get back onto that big, beautiful plane, and it’d fly back and they’d talk about global warming and the carbon footprint again. It’s a con job at extreme cost and expense.

Europe reduced its own carbon footprint by 37%. Think of that. Congratulations, Europe. Great job. You cost yourself a lot of jobs; a lot of factories closed, but you reduced the carbon footprint by 37%. However, for all of that sacrifice, and much more, it’s been totally wiped out and then some by a global increase of 54%, much of it coming from China and other countries that are thriving.

China now produces more CO₂ than all the other developed nations in the world. So all of these countries are working so hard on the carbon footprint, which is nonsense, by the way. It’s nonsense.

You know, it’s interesting. In the United States we still have radicalized environmentalists, and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. [These Environmentalists want] No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows. They want to do things that are just unbelievable, and you have it too.

This is very dangerous language. Environmentalists are being labeled as “radicalized”. This is the last stop on the line before labeling them as “terrorists” and environmental organizations as “terrorist organizations and fundraising fronts”. Trump is signaling that the US intends to “crack down” on them. He wants Europe to do the same.

But you know, we have a border strong, and we have a shape, and that shape doesn’t just go straight up. The shape is amorphous when it comes to the atmosphere.

Ummm… You mean the lines we draw on maps don’t somehow “magically” extend up into the air. Okaaay?

And if we had the most clean air, and I think we do, we have very clean air. We have the cleanest air we’ve had in many, many years.

Another bizarre example of Trump saying something true. We have significantly reduced smog and pollution “haze” in the US over the last five decades. Mostly, because we stopped burning coal to generate electricity and heat people’s homes.

Trump has signed executive orders to expand the burning and mining of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

But the problem is that other countries, like China, which has air that’s a little bit rough, it blows, and no matter what you’re doing down here, the air up here tends to get very dirty because it comes in from other countries where their air isn’t so clean. And the environmentalists refuse to acknowledge that.

In a “damage control” press release later in the day. Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, defended Mr. Trump’s comments and said in a written statement.

Don’t forget, earlier this year Trump literally “shook down” the EU and EXTORTED a pledge from them to buy $250 billion in U.S. energy every year through the rest of Trump’s term in exchange for some relief from his, probably illegal, tariffs.

Perhaps the self-obsessed craziness from Trump is itself the key message the world will receive about the United States. Many nations were closely monitoring what Trump said on Tuesday.

What the other nations of the world now see is the fact that “We the People” elected this man president, not once, but TWICE. There was an assumption globally that Trump was an aberration, that America had come to its senses when it elected Biden.

That’s no longer the case. So the World is taking Trump much more seriously this time around as an indication of “where America is at socially”. They are seeing this as a sign of just how unreliable and DANGEROUS an actor in the world the United States has become.

Although no nation can afford to walk away from America’s political and economic might, Trump’s threats to violate allies’ sovereignty represent a before-and-after moment for countries such as Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Denmark, and Panama.

From a national interest perspective, Trump’s speech showed that the U.S. is effectively abandoning the future to China.

While many countries have problems with Chinese authoritarianism, the Chinese are offering something that is at least stable and based in reality. Two things the United States is telling the world that we’re not interested in.

China is announcing record amounts of solar and wind production. They are SO far ahead of the rest of the world that they’re exporting it to most of the rest of the world. Just as the US is an Oil & Gas superpower, China is also becoming an ENERGY superpower. A SOLAR energy superpower.

In a world which is still using the US dollar as its default currency to conduct trade in. For NOW.

Move over, U.S. dollar. China wants to make the yuan the global currency.

Economic crises and Western sanctions against Russia are helping China realize its goal of turning the yuan into an……www.washingtonpost.com

Trump, in MANY ways, has withdrawn the United States from the world.

• Trump has weakened ties with traditionally close allies.

• Derided globalism.

• Curtailed U.S. soft power by slashing everything from foreign aid to overseas government-funded media.

• Withdrawn America from the UN’s global health agency, its human-rights council, and its cultural organization.

• Cut funding for a wide array of UN activities, including food assistance and aid to refugees and children.

As a result of this major reduction from its biggest funder, the UN has secured funding for only a fifth of this year’s required budget for humanitarian activities, a top UN official said this month. Millions of people around the world are going to be hurt by this and hundreds of thousands will die.

Trump made it really CLEAR to the World on Tuesday that if you aren’t “White” the US considers you a “menace” and doesn’t CARE if you live or die.

This is going to have CONSEQUENCES, BIG CONSEQUENCES.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 09/26/2025

ADDENDUM

This week has been a “turning point” moment in world history. The Climate Summit in both symbolic and real ways reflected the growing Climate Crisis and the world response to it.

For all its “weirdness” Trump’s speech was IMPORTANT.

The actual summit was on Wednesday and Thursday and a bunch of important things happened. My next article will discuss that, and put it into context with what the financial world is saying and a very odd NYT opinion piece from Zeke Hausfather about “geoengineering”.

Meanwhile, something weird is going on with the military.

Hegseth orders rare, urgent meeting of hundreds of generals, admirals

The Pentagon has summoned military officials from around the world for a gathering in Virginia. Top generals and their……www.washingtonpost.com

The Pentagon has summoned military officials from around the world for a gathering in Virginia. Even top generals and their staffs don’t know the reason for the meeting.

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered hundreds of the U.S. military’s generals and admirals to gather on short notice — and without a stated reason — at a Marine Corps base in Virginia next week, sowing confusion and alarm after the Trump administration’s firing of numerous senior leaders this year.”

“The highly unusual directive was sent to virtually all of the military’s top commanders worldwide, according to more than a dozen people familiar with the matter. It was issued earlier this week, against the backdrop of a potential government shutdown, and as Hegseth’s overtly political moves have deepened a sense of distress among his opponents who fear that he is erasing the Defense Department’s status as a nonpartisan institution.”

“There are about 800 generals and admirals spread across the United States and dozens of other countries and time zones. Hegseth’s order, people familiar with the matter said, applies to all senior officers with the rank of brigadier general or above, or their Navy equivalent, serving in command positions and their top enlisted advisers.”

“None of the people who spoke with The Post could recall a defense secretary ever ordering so many of the military’s generals and admirals to assemble like this. “People are very concerned,” one person said to the Post. “No one has any idea what it means.”

The MAGAts may be getting ready to PURGE the military of officers who refuse to swear that they will regard all orders from the President as “lawful”.

It happened before in a place called Germany.

But the outline is getting clearer.

“Masked agents operating in unmarked vehicles across the District under President Trump’s federal crackdown have sparked concern and fear among locals worried about the legality and accountability of such tactics. The White House has confirmed that federal officers are driving unmarked vehicles, wearing masks, and uniforms without name badges or identification.” — Axios DC 08/15/25

The strategy allows federal agents to “successfully make targeted arrests of dangerous criminals, and ultimately make our communities safer. While protecting the identities of ICE agents from retaliation. — WH spokesman

The White House CLAIMS that many of the people arrested under the crackdown had prior criminal histories. However, they refuse to provide any details. Just like they declined to comment on which agencies are using masks and unmarked vehicles and where detainment’s of the, well, “not arrested people” are occurring.

Because, arrested people have rights. They get access to layers, they get phone calls, they get “due process”. “Detainee’s” aren't arrested, they are “detained” and have ZERO rights.

The mysterious disappearance of hundreds of immigrants detained at Alligator Alcatraz

Lawyers and family members report that they have been unable to locate the inmates at the infamous Florida prison after… - english.elpais.com

Lawyers Report Disappearance of Hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz Detainees From ICE Database: 'It's a… - The Miami Herald reported that by late August about 800 detainees no longer appeared in ICE's database, while another…www.latintimes.com

With ICE they can always claim they put you on a plane and sent you to the prison in El Salvador.

Or gave you a FREE trip to Eswatini, South Sudan, or Uzbekistan.

Then they just “delete” your record from their database. Leaving your family in limbo after you have been “disappeared”.

“At the federal level, there are no guidelines or requirements that federal agents show their faces or remain unmasked when approaching a person or making an arrest. The same applies to unmarked vehicles.” — Insha Rahman of the Vera Institute of Justice.

[It] is legal under the law,” says Rahman. “Is it acceptable? Does it feel like it goes along with our norms of what law enforcement should do? I think most people would say no.”

UNLESS THEY ARE THE SUPREME COURT.

The Supreme Court has lifted limits that had been imposed on federal agents conducting immigration raids in Los Angeles.

On Sept 7th, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court decided to allow ICE officials to conduct roving patrols and use racial profiling to stop and detain people for no other reason than their skin color, the language they’re speaking, and suspicions about their national origin.

Or, if immigration officials just FEEL like it. Because you didn’t cower enough or act subservient enough when they ORDERED you to “get on the ground, NOW”.

Supreme Court Lifts Restrictions on L.A. Immigration Stops

A federal judge had ordered agents not to make indiscriminate stops relying on factors like a person’s ethnicity or that they speak Spanish. — NYT Sept. 8, 2025

In an unsigned (SHADOW DOCKET) opinion, the Court suspended a previous order issued by a federal judge, who found that agents operating in the city had been illegally detaining people based on their race, language, job, or location, and were “conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion.”

The Supreme Court Just Let ICE Detain Americans Based on Race

Indiscriminate immigration raids will expand across the country with the implicit blessing of the conservative…slate.com

FYI — The Court’s three liberal Justices dissented from the opinion.

After the decision Cristian Farias, a legal journalist who has written about various Trump-era court cases for The New Yorker, wrote.

“Just the other day, I was in the audience at Lincoln Center when Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, while promoting a new book, that she doesn’t think the United States is in a constitutional crisis.”

“Today, the Supreme Court, without offering a single line of reasoning, more or less declared that the Fourth Amendment, which protects everyone from unreasonable searches and seizures, nonetheless allows the Trump Administration to arrest and detain anyone who looks Latino, citizen or not, on account of the language that they speak or the kind of jobs they do.”

“The ruling putatively covers the Los Angeles area, but the effect could be national. If that’s not a constitutional crisis, then what is?”

The Government Wants to See Your Papers

And the Supreme Court decides that the Fourth Amendment might not be for everyone. - www.theatlantic.com

MEANWHILE

The US contemplates INVADING Mexico

In a 2023 report, it was revealed that during his first term, Trump privately asked military advisors about firing missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs. Officials at the time reportedly opposed the idea, calling it an illegal act of war.

Trump Directs Military to Target Foreign Drug Cartels

The president has ordered the Pentagon to use the armed forces to carry out what in the past was considered law enforcement. — NYT Aug 8th 2025

Trump Approves Military Action in Latin America Under Guise of Drug War

President Trump secretly signed a directive approving the Pentagon's use of military force on foreign soil to target…www.democracynow.org

Team Trump Is Actually Drawing Up Attack Plans for Mexico

Donald Trump isn’t bluffing about using the military against the cartels: He wants to breach Mexico’s sovereignty, if…www.rollingstone.com

Trump Is Ready to Invade U.S. Ally if It Doesn't Cave to His Demands

Donald Trump has drawn up attack plans for Mexico….newrepublic.com

Can Congress Stop Trump From Starting a War in Mexico?

More than 30 human rights groups urge congressional leaders to block Trump's attempt to target Mexican cartels…theintercept.com

DEA faced pushback at White House, Pentagon after urging Mexico strikes

The suggestion, though not acted upon, was met with alarm from officials who warned that Congress has not authorized….www.washingtonpost.com

Why Trump’s War on the Drug Cartels Is Bound to Backfire

The president’s punishment-heavy plan doesn’t just ignore other factors — it actively undermines itself.

The Commandos Prepping Mexico Attacks

Trump’s war on cartels is a godsend for a special ops command with an identity crisis

Thanks to our post 911 stupidity in allowing Bush II to declare war on “Terror” we are now in a state of never-ending war. One consequence of this “War on Terror” is that it allows a US president to designate ANYONE they want as “terrorists” and use the American Military to “go to war” with them.

SO, it comes as no surprise that Trump signed a directive which gives the Pentagon authorization to use military force against Latin American drug cartels designated as terrorist organizations. Including in Mexico.

From the Rolling Stone report.

“A U.S. official familiar with the matter confirmed to Rolling Stone certain details regarding the Trump-signed directive, which was first reported by The New York Times. Other knowledgeable sources, working in or close to this iteration of the Trump White House, say that unless Mexico gives Trump what he wants, this administration is serious about attacking its neighbor to the south.”

“According to administration officials and others familiar with the Trump administration preparations, it’s not a bluff: This American president wants to violently breach Mexico’s sovereignty — if and when he feels like it. He, after all, effectively campaigned on doing so during his 2024 bid.”

Trump Asks Advisers for 'Battle Plans' to 'Attack Mexico' if Reelected

Trump and the Republican Party are pushing plans for military action against drug cartels in Mexico-with or without the…www.rollingstone.com

“Just don’t call any of this a plan for an invasion, U.S. government officials implore.”

The Trump administration has characterized migration as an invasion, so it isn’t a stretch to think they’d consider the shipment of drugs as an attack.

It was reported in November 2023 that Trump’s incoming administration was considering a “soft invasion” of Mexico, in which American special operations would be sent covertly to assassinate cartel leaders.

Potential plans on the table at the time included everything from drone strikes and commando raids, airstrikes on cartel infrastructure or drug labs, sending in military trainers and “advisers,” and waging cyber warfare against drug cartels and their networks.

Theoretically this was to be done WITH the cooperation of the Mexican government.

However, former intelligence officers who have been tracking the issue say the new Trump directive is bigger than just the Mexican cartels. The focus is on interrupting cartel operations throughout the region.

Rolling Stone stated that a Defense Department source says units at Fort Bragg have already prepared target packages. The source declined to share which unit or who the targets might be, but the North Carolina post is home to both the Army Special Operations Command and the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees Delta Force and Seal Team Six.

If, or when, Trump decides to blow something up in Mexico, he will be presented with an already prepared menu of options. Which would include possible targets like high-profile cartel hubs or leadership hideouts, or drug-making facilities, as identified by American intelligence gathering.

Because WHY NOT destabilize our Southern neighbor and turn the 131 million people who live next door against us?

MEANWHILE

Trump pushes India towards alliance with China

Trump imposes extra 25% tariff on Indian goods, ties hit new low

The new import tax will raise duties on some Indian exports to as high as 50%….www.reuters.com

In early August Trump imposed an additional 25% tariff on Indian goods, making tariffs on Indian goods as high as 50%. His reason for doing this is supposedly Delhi’s continued imports of Russian oil despite the “sanctions” declared on Russia by the US. Ostensibly Trump is using the “sanctions” against Russia to try and force Putin to the negotiating table and end the Ukraine War.

In actuality Trump has been trying to FORCE “allies” globally to buy more American oil and LNG. To the point of waging Economic Warfare against countries that we are ALLIED with.

India’s Modi vows to protect farmers, cuts tax, pushes self-reliance amid Trump tariff tensions

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the country on Friday to move towards more self-reliance, manufacture…www.reuters.com

Indian Prime Minister Modi urged the country to move towards more self-reliance, manufacture everything from fertilizers to jet engines and EV batteries, and vowed to protect India’s farmers in the face of a trade conflict with the US.

Trump’s tariffs threaten to disrupt India’s access to its largest export market, where shipments totaled nearly $87 billion in 2024, hitting sectors like textiles, footwear, shrimp, gems and jewellery.

This is having CONSEQUENCES

India and China are partners, not rivals, Modi and Xi say

Their meeting took place five days after Washington imposed 50% tariffs on Indian goods due to New Delhi's purchases of…www.reuters.com

And NOW Trump is “clamping down” on one of India’s big “exports”. Its computer engineers and software developers.

Trump’s $100,000 Visa Fee Spurs Confusion and Chaos — Sept 20th

Wall Street banks and tech companies big and small were scrambling on Saturday to figure out how their tens of thousands of employees would be affected by President Trump’s proclamation imposing a $100,000 fee for visas granted to skilled foreign workers.

H-1B visa fee timeline imposed by US 'concerning', says India trade body

Nasscom says the one-day deadline could have 'ripple effects' on the US innovation ecosystem and global job markets….www.aljazeera.com

So, no more “cheap” goods from India and the 5th largest economic power in the world is being told that the US doesn’t want anymore “Indian Students coming to US universities or Indian Workers working for US companies and taking spots that (White) Americans should have”.

Yeah, this is going to go well.

MEANWHILE, on the personal level.

For most people, the largest effect of Trump’s policies on their lives has been a noticeable spike in food prices.

Food costs remain high — and could rise further with tariffs

CNBC.com, August 12th 2025

Americans are worried about grocery prices again, and they’re making changes | CNN Business

President Donald Trump campaigned on lowering grocery prices during the 2024 race and pledged that Americans are “going…www.cnn.com

More than half of Americans say they are stressed about food costs, according to poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released this week. (Aug 8th)

Fifty-three percent of people said grocery costs were a “major” stress, while 33% said they were a “minor” stress, according to the poll. Only 14% said groceries were not a source of stress.

GLOBALLY

THINGS STILL SEEM RELATIVELY NORMAL, BUT……

In 2023 and 2024 wildfires surged across the globe. From tropical rainforests in South America to boreal forests in Canada and Russia. These fires released more than 4Gt of greenhouse gases each year (including carbon locked in trees, as well as methane and nitrous oxide from burning).

That’s ALMOST equivalent to adding the US annual emissions into the atmosphere each year. From WILDFIRES.

Climate change has increased the odds of extreme regional forest fire years globally — Nature…

Regions across the globe have experienced devastating fire years in the past decade with far-reaching impacts. Here, we…www.nature.com

In one final signal that our global civilization has “peaked” and is collapsing.

Literacy is declining globally

The illiteracy rate worldwide has ticked up by 2.2 percent on average from 2024 to 2025, with 773 million people worldwide unable to read at all.

According to the new report from the World Literacy Foundation, 2 billion people worldwide (1 out of 4) struggle to read a single sentence. Singapore has the highest literacy rate, followed by Ireland, Estonia, Japan and South Korea. — Ed Nawotka, Publishers Weekly

Another sign of AMERICAN Decline —

The US ranking in literacy varies depending on the definition of literacy and the specific assessment used, but recent data indicates a ranking of 36th in the world in terms of literacy skills, with a literacy rate of approximately 79% for adults in 2024. This contrasts with the high percentage of U.S. adults (21%) who struggle with basic reading tasks and a significant portion (54%) reading below a sixth-grade level.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 09/21/2025

ADDENDUM

Interacting with a larger audience on Reddit for the last year, has made clear to me just how “extreme” my climate analysis is compared to the mainstream. I know that to a lot of people I must come across as a “crazy” person.

FYI- Here’s how I visualize myself.

After all, I am telling you that our civilization has ALREADY started collapsing and that over the next 25 years, the global population is going to shrink somewhere between 25% to 50%. Mostly because of an acceleration in global warming and the “knock on” effects of that warming.

I am LITERALLY telling you that, “The End is Fucking Nigh”.

So, I can understand why it’s easy for most people to dismiss what I’m saying. It doesn’t “sync up” with their “observed day-to-day” reality.

Although “reality” is starting to have a dystopian vibe for some of us here in the US.

The ‘blob’ is back — except this time it stretches across the entire North Pacific — CNN Sept 19th

So, let’s talk about that.

After all, error correction is part of growth. If you cannot admit your mistakes, you cannot grow.

Let's start with the fact that I am NOT a Climate Scientist or Researcher. For a lot of people, that fact right there “disqualifies” me from doing ANY sort of “climate analysis”.

On Reddit this has played out in a number of ways.

For example, when I post my articles in the r/collapse subreddit I am required by the Moderators to include a “disclaimer” stating that I am not a “climate scientist”. This was apparently a “compromise” that was worked out to allow me to keep posting on the r/collapse subreddit. The fact that this “compromise” was necessary indicates the strength of the faction that wanted to “ban” me from being able to post at all.

Here is the disclaimer that I add at the end of my posts on Reddit.

Mandatory Disclaimer:

I write and post on a number of sites and have been attacked for having no “academic credentials” in any field related to climate science. I do not wish to misrepresent myself as a “climate scientist” or “climate expert” to anyone who is reading this or any of my other climate related posts, so let us be clear:

I am not a climatologist, meteorologist, paleo-climatologist, geoscientist, ecologist, or climate science specialist. I am a motivated individual studying the issue using publicly available datasets and papers.

The analysis I am presenting is my own. I make no claim to “insider or hidden knowledge” and all the points I discuss can be verified with only a few hours of research on the Internet.

The analysis and opinion I present, in this and my other climate articles is exactly that: my opinion. I hope anyone reading it finds it useful, informative, and insightful but in the end, it is just my opinion.

I am GRATEFUL that the mods on the r/collapse subreddit let me post AT ALL. I have been “shadow banned” in the r/climate subreddit and am generally allowed only to make comments in most of the other “climate change” related subreddits.

On Reddit I am somewhat “controversial”.

Here is something posted 8 months ago in the r/climatechange subreddit.

r/collapse is panicked over “The Crisis Report — 99”. Is it accurate?

This article has cropped up in r/collapse and they’ve worked themselves into a fervor over it. The article, from Richard Crim: https://richardcrim.substack.com/p/the-crisis-report-99

Richard is very upfront about not being a climate scientist himself, but has clearly done much research over many years.

I’m looking for the view from climate change experts on whether what he is saying holds water, because I don’t have the expertise to analyze it deeply myself. The article highlights a lot of really concerning data, and asserts/predicts a number of scary things.

A few of which are.

• The temperature should have been falling in late 2024 as El Nino comes to an end, but it increased

• We saw +0.16°C warming per year on average over the last 3 years

• Obsession over “net zero” emissions is missing another major contributor, Albedo. Because of this, many predictions about the temperature leveling off after hitting net zero are wrong and the temperature is more likely to continue to accelerate.

• Temperatures will accelerate well beyond the worst case scenario

• We are so far off of predictions that we are in “uncharted territory”

• We will see +3 sustained warming by 2050

His writing style comes across a bit crazy with all the CAPITALS everywhere, a bit conspiratorial and alarmist. But, I can’t fault what he’s saying. I’m hoping someone can tell me why this guy is wrong

This post generated 583 comments. Both supportive and dismissive.

Some people have VERY strong “opinions” about my analysis over on Reddit. I upset a fair number of people there with my “unsubstantiated doomism”.

THE REASON FOR THIS, IS THAT MY ANALYSIS DOES NOT AGREE WITH THE “MAINSTREAM CONSENSUS” IN THE FIELD.

Not only am I “not an Climate Scientist”. I am telling people that “Mainstream Climate Science” is wrong.

I am doing this so convincingly that it scares people.

Because, I am saying that things are MUCH WORSE than you think and that they are RAPIDLY about to get much, MUCH WORSE.

NOW.

My mention of this is not an exercise in personal vanity or boastfulness. There is a serious point to be made here.

• I have been posting on Medium since 2020 and have just over 2,200 followers there. A BIG post gets around 3,000 views.

• I have been posting on Substack since December 2022 and have just over 3,800 followers there. My biggest post, which was Crisis Report — 99, got 13,000 views.

• On Reddit, some of my posts have gotten over 200,000 views.

I reach a much bigger, much more DIVERSE group of people on Reddit than I do on Medium or Substack. My posts are never picked up by “the algo” on either site to go on people's “suggested reads” lists. I get new followers only from “word of mouth” and recommendations.

People who find my stuff on Medium and Substack are “primed” to find my work convincing. For a lot of you, I am not telling you anything new. I am validating what you already suspected or felt. Explaining WHY the reality you are observing seems so “out of sync” with the mainstream narrative around climate change.

On Reddit, I am talking with a MUCH bigger audience of people, with a much more MAINSTREAM view of climate change. People who have ONLY ever heard the mainstream climate science narrative about how the Climate System works and the risks of Climate Change.

Fewer hear about it on social media or hear people they know talking about it.

For the MAJORITY of people in the US, their entire understanding of the intensifying Climate Crisis is what they see reported on CNN, MSNBC, or FOX News. If they are readers it’s what they are reading in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, or the Atlantic.

These are the people who I reach on Reddit, and to a lot of them, what I am saying is scary as hell.

Because, as this guy who “schooled” me last week on what “the science” says.

The efficiency of CO2 as a greenhouse gas decreases logarithmically. The law of diminishing returns applies. The amount of warming from 280ppm-560ppm will be 3°C. The amount of warming from 560ppm — 1120ppm will be 3°C. The amount of warming from 1120ppm — 2240ppm will be 3°C. That sounds quite nice for northern folks like me that live in the geologic footprint of the most recent glacial maximum a short 13000 years ago. — Drew Hall, Substack

Which does indeed make me seem like a “doomer”. Unless you look at the recent papers doing “meta-analysis” of the entirety of the paleoclimate research on global temperatures in the past.

Look at how HOT it got over the last 485 million years. There were times that paleontology indicates the GMST may have reached +40°C. Using the “mainstream guesstimate” for climate sensitivity would mean CO2 levels of around 38,000ppmCO2.

Here's the CO2 range that paleontology finds for the Permian “Great Dying” the WORST mass extinction event in the history of life on Earth.

Here’s the CO2 range for a period “closer to home”.

During the PETM, the hottest peak in the last 65my, CO2 levels PEAKED at around 1600ppmCO2.

Using “mainstream” numbers for climate sensitivity would indicate warming of around +7.5°C over the 1850 baseline(14°C) — at MAX. Indicating a GMST of around +21°C.

The paleoclimate evidence indicates the GMST was AT LEAST +32°C and it could have been as high as +38°C.

Only ONE of those numbers warms up the Arctic enough to make it “ice free” year round and create a climate that allows alligators and palm trees to live on the plains around the Arctic Ocean.

HOWEVER.

Despite this evidence that they got it WRONG in 1979.

Mainstream climate science” INSISTS that 560ppmCO2 shouldn’t cause much more than +3°C of warming over the 1850 baseline, +4°C “at worst”.

As I show in my chart, at the current rate of +3ppm/year increases in CO2 levels. We will hit 560ppm sometime between 2055 and 2065 depending on how things go.

SO.

THAT ALONE should have ANY “rational” person literally “shitting their pants”. +3°C of warming puts us at a Global Mean Standard Temperature (GMST) of +17°C or +62.6°F. Here's what the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA), Exeter found in their report this past January (2025).

They found that “Human Mortality” would probably be “Greater Than” 50%. Or, in other words, more than 4 billion people will likely die of starvation and state failures if we hit +3°C of warming by 2050.

That’s the INSURANCE INDUSTRY, the industry built on “risk management” saying this. It doesn’t get more “mainstream” than that.

THEY DIDN’T even CONSIDER what +4°C might look like. Let alone the possibility of +6°C at 560ppmCO2. This is a CONSERVATIVE forecast based on what they see happening globally.

The ONLY way we THEORETICALLY avoid this now is by getting to Net-Zero before then. Which is again, exactly what mainstream climate science is saying.

Exploring climate stabilization at different global warming levels in ACCESS-ESM-1.5 — October 30th, 2024

FYI — In this “mainstream” paper, the consensus of the team that produced it, is that Climate Sensitivity COULD BE as HIGH as +4°C at 560ppmCO2.

Remember, we are on track to hit 560ppm in just 30 more years — TOPS.

That's the BEST CASE forecast now, using the mainstream climate science estimate for “Climate Sensitivity” of +3°C warming for doubling the atmospheric CO2 level from 280ppm to 560ppm. This has been the mainstream estimate for Climate Sensitivity since the Woods Hole Climate Summit in 1979.

Oh REALLY Micheal?

Action on climate change faces new threat: The doomers who think it’s too late to act

By Peter J. Hotez, Michael E. Mann published September 11, 2025

“Doom-mongering convinces many would-be climate advocates that climate action is a hopeless cause. But the blistering attacks against mainstream climate science and scientists advance an agenda of division, dividing the rank-and-file climate activists and leading voices from the scientific community.”

While denialism is a prominent and well-known barrier to action, in this excerpt from Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World (Public Affairs, 2025), authors Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Peter Hotez, Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, examine another obstacle: climate doomism.

Doom porn sells, and it has surely borne fruit for the polluters, petrostates, and plutocrats who are fanning its flames. Consider the vitriol directed at Katharine Hayhoe and Mike [Michael Mann] by ostensible climate advocates who insist it’s too late to act and dismiss our messaging on urgency and efficacy as “hopium,”

Even revered climate scientist James Hansen, whose early predictions of warming proved prophetic, has gotten sucked into the vortex of soft doomism.

The scientific consensus is that we can still avert a catastrophic planetary warming of +1.5 degrees Celsius (+3 degrees Fahrenheit) if we rapidly reduce carbon emissions this decade.

His rhetoric has grown increasingly heated and conspiratorial in nature, including vitriolic attacks on mainstream science and scientists, such as tweeting in late 2023: “The United Nations and COP28 are lying. They know the 1.5°C and 2°C global warming targets are dead.”

Climate Twitter today is filled with toxic doomist messaging and assaults on leading climate communicators who are subject to an endless onslaught of “hopium” accusations from ostensible climate advocates anytime we dare claim that it’s not too late to do something about the climate crisis.

Here's the deal.

The mainstream climate scientists are holding onto the 1979 estimate of +3°C warming from 2XCO2.

They are doing this despite the paleoclimate and fossil record indications that they are WRONG.

A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature

Understanding how global mean surface temperature (GMST) has varied over the past half-billion years, a time in which evolutionary patterns of flora and fauna have had such an important influence on the evolution of climate, is essential for understanding the processes driving climate over that interval.

Judd et al. present a record of GMST over the past 485 million years that they constructed by combining proxy data with climate modeling (see the Perspective by Mills). They found that GMST varied over a range from 11° to 36°C, with an “apparent” climate sensitivity of ∼8°C, about two to three times what it is today.

They are doing this despite the fact that they got Arctic Amplification WRONG.

Latitudinal temperature gradients and climate change

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 103, NO. D6, PAGES 5943–5971, MARCH 27, 1998

Doubled CO2 equilibrium simulations from different atmosphere-mixed layer ocean models show different degrees of high-latitude climate warming amplification; in the GFDL model, the temperature response at high latitudes is 3–4 times that at the equator, while in the GISS model, it is only close to a factor of 2 [Rind, 1987a].

The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979

Communications Earth & Environment volume 3, Article number: 168 (Aug 2022)

In recent decades, the warming in the Arctic has been much faster than in the rest of the world, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. Numerous studies report that the Arctic is warming either twice, more than twice, or even three times as fast as the globe on average. Here we show, by using several observational datasets which cover the Arctic region, that during the last 43 years the Arctic has been warming nearly four times faster than the globe, which is a higher ratio than generally reported in literature.

Our results indicate that the recent four-fold Arctic warming ratio is either an extremely unlikely event, or the climate models systematically tend to underestimate the amplification.

They are doing this despite being WRONG about the amount of carbon sequestered in the permafrost UNTIL 2008.

In 2008, the first REAL study of Arctic permafrost and its potential to influence the Climate System, DOUBLED the estimate for the amount of organic carbon held in permafrost soils.

Vulnerability of Permafrost Carbon to Climate Change: Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle

Thawing permafrost and the resulting microbial decomposition of previously frozen organic carbon “C” is one of the most significant potential feedbacks from terrestrial ecosystems to the atmosphere in a changing climate.

We show that accounting for Carbon stored deep in the permafrost more than doubles previous high-latitude inventory estimates, with this new estimate equivalent to twice the atmospheric Carbon pool.

They are doing this despite being WRONG about “how fast” the permafrost would melt.

Climate Change Drives Widespread and Rapid Thermokarst Development in Very Cold Permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic (2019)

It’s melting. WAY faster than the models indicated it would. Observed maximum thaw depths at our sites are already exceeding those projected to occur by 2090 under representative concentration pathway version 4.5.

They are doing this despite being WRONG about “how much” CO2 might be released by the melting permafrost.

Terrifying Study Finds Melting Permafrost Could Unleash Way More Carbon Than We Thought. (2021)

While the Arctic was previously considered a carbon sink, new research shows that the region is emitting more carbon than it is absorbing, largely due to permafrost thaw. It is estimated that the world’s permafrost contains up to 1,700 billion tonnes of carbon, which is almost double the amount of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere, and four times more than what has already been emitted by humans as since the Industrial Revolution.

If all permafrost were degraded to the point of decomposing, the disastrous effects would be felt all over the world.

Because mainstream climate science ASSUMES THAT the permafrost will release CO2 slowly. Due to it being “bound” to iron in the permafrost.

Iron mineral dissolution releases iron and associated organic carbon during permafrost thaw

Nature Communications volume 11, Article number: 6329 (2020)

There may be greater CO2 emissions associated with thawing Arctic permafrost than ever imagined. An international team of researchers, including one from the University of Copenhagen, has discovered that soil bacteria release CO2 previously thought to be trapped by iron. The finding presents a large new carbon footprint that is unaccounted for in current climate models.

It turns out that Iron doesn’t bind organic carbon after all.

It was believed that the mineral iron would bind carbon even as permafrost thawed. The new field study demonstrates that bacteria incapacitate iron’s carbon trapping ability, resulting in the release of vast amounts of CO2. This is an entirely new discovery.

“What we see is that bacteria simply use iron minerals as a food source. As they feed, the bonds which had trapped carbon are destroyed and it is released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gas,” explains Associate Professor Carsten W. Müller of the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management.

They are doing this despite evidence that they got their estimate for “climate sensitivity” WRONG from the very beginning in the 70's.

“Climate effects of aerosols reduce economic inequality. Nature Climate Change, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41558–020–0699-y”:

Estimates indicate that aerosol pollution emitted by humans is offsetting about 0.7 degrees Celsius, or about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, of the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions,” said lead author Zheng. “This translates to a 40-year delay in the effects of climate change.

Without cooling caused by aerosol emissions, we would have achieved 2010-level global mean temperatures in 1970.”

Despite ALL of that.

Doomers are “the problem”.

We are on the verge of a PARADIGM SHIFT in Climate Science. The paradigm that has been in place since the 80’s is about to collapse.

We are on the verge of a “New Understanding” of the Climate System, of SEEING it in a new way.

It's NOT going to be good for our civilization.

The ONLY questions now are -

How LONG will it take before more people realize this?

How FAST will the warming be?

Why is anyone still listening to Michael Mann?

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 09/15/2025

ADDENDUM:

A snapshot of our warming planet.

A look at the pieces.

Decarbonization

No matter how much renewable energy we add to the mix each year. It’s the total amount of fossil fuels we burn each year that matters. We continue to burn more each year.

Decarbonization is happening, but not nearly fast enough. To achieve the necessary progress for the climate, we need to see its growth not only meet our new energy demands each year but also start displacing existing fossil fuels in the energy mix much faster. - Hannah Richie

As long as the demand for “more energy” grows faster than the addition of renewable energy sources: fossil fuel consumption will continue to rise. With global temperatures soaring, the demand for air conditioning is skyrocketing. EV’s reduce tailpipe pollution BUT increase demand for electricity. As we decarbonize and “electrify everything” our ENERGY needs are doubling and tripling.

At this rate, “renewables” will replace fossil fuels ONLY when those fuels become scarce enough that they are too expensive to use.

Health and Safety

Carbon dioxide as a pollutant: the risks on human health and the stability of the biosphere. - Royal Society of Chemistry (June 30th 2025)

A new paper on the direct human health impacts of carbon dioxide as levels grow in the atmosphere. Writing in the journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the authors conclude:

“The chemical and biochemical pollution associated with CO2 is a serious problem that may turn out to be no less important than that of radiative forcing in terms of damage to human health and to the whole biosphere.”

As one of the authors, Ugo Bardi, explained in a dispatch for the Club of Rome.

“We found that the current concentration of 425ppm is not far from levels that can negatively affect people’s health, and we breathe much larger concentrations indoors. In addition, we keep it increasing by about 3ppm every year. What are we doing?”

“We are continuously exposed to concentrations much higher than those at which our ancestors evolved and, reasonably, were optimized for. A body of knowledge has accumulated on this subject as the result of experimental tests. The data are still scattered and often in need of verification.”

The overall conclusion is clear: negative effects on human mental abilities are seen already at CO2 concentrations commonly experienced indoors today. And the higher the atmospheric concentration becomes, the higher the indoor concentrations will be.

“For now the negative health effects of excess CO2 can be reversed by exposing the affected people to fresh air. The problem is that the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is irreversible on a human timescale.”

Nobody in the whole existence of the human species was ever exposed to these concentrations of CO2 for their whole life, but future generations of humans will be. And nobody knows for sure what the effects on our health and our very survival could be. It is a gigantic experiment being carried out on our bodies and our children's bodies.

Global Aridification

Evolution of long-term global drought during past 70 years based on estimated evaporation using the generalized complementary relationship — Journal of Hydrology, April 2025

Principle Findings:

• Drought increased in 45% of the Earth’s land and was mainly driven by increased atmospheric evaporative demand.

• Most of Africa and South America, Mediterranean region, southeastern China, and Canada were hot spots of drought increase.

• Changes in vapor pressure deficit and wind speed dominated drought changes in 80% of the Earth’s land.

With the intensification of global warming, meteorological drought is becoming increasingly frequent, leading to agricultural drought, hydrological drought, and socioeconomic drought as a result of the propagation through the water cycle (Kim et al., 2019).

Unprecedented continental drying, shrinking freshwater availability, and increasing land contributions to sea level rise — Science Advances, July 25th 2025

The emergence of mega-drying regions on the continents

Abstract

Changes in terrestrial water storage (TWS) are a critical indicator of freshwater availability. We use NASA GRACE/GRACE-FO data to show that the continents have undergone unprecedented TWS loss since 2002. Areas experiencing drying increased by twice the size of California annually, creating “mega-drying” regions across the Northern Hemisphere.

While most of the world’s dry/wet areas continue to get drier/wetter, dry areas are now drying faster than wet areas are wetting.

Changes in TWS are driven by high-latitude water losses, intense Central American/European droughts, and groundwater depletion, which accounts for 68% of TWS loss over non-glaciated continental regions.

“Continental drying” is having profound global impacts. Since 2002, 75% of the population lives in 101 countries that have been losing freshwater.

Furthermore, the continents now contribute more freshwater to sea level rise than the ice sheets, and drying regions now contribute more than land glaciers and ice caps. Urgent action is required to prepare for the major impacts of results presented.

"Staggering" Water Loss Driven by Groundwater Mining Poses Global Threat

A new study finds that freshwater resources are rapidly disappearing, creating arid "mega" regions and causing sea…www.propublica.org, July 25th 2025

Groundwater is ubiquitous across the globe, but its quality and depth vary, as does its potential to be replenished by rainfall. Major groundwater basins — the deep and often high-quality aquifers — underlie roughly one-third of the planet, including roughly half of Africa, Europe and South America. But many of those aquifers took millions of years to form and might take thousands of years to refill. Instead, a significant portion of the water taken from underground flows off the land through rivers and on to the oceans.

The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically, that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

Humans have become a “geologic force”. Strip mining millions of years of “fossil water” and sending it back into the oceans. It will be THOUSANDS of years before these aquifers recharge.

The study (Unprecedented continental drying, shrinking freshwater availability, and increasing land contributions to sea level rise) examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content.

Since 2002, the GRACE sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss patterns around the planet. Around 2014, though, the pace of drying appears to have accelerated, the authors found, and is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year.

The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions spreading across the earth’s mid-latitudes. One of those regions covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst. For example, during droughts when California has enforced restrictions on delivery of surface water to its farmers — which the state regulates — the enormous agriculture enterprises that dominate the Central Valley have drilled deeper and pumped harder, depleting the aquifer — which the state regulates less precisely — even more.

For the most part, such withdrawals have remained invisible. Even with the GRACE data, scientists cannot measure the exact levels or know when an aquifer will be exhausted. But there is one foolproof sign that groundwater is disappearing: The earth above it collapses as the ground compresses like a drying sponge. The visible signs of such subsidence around the world appear to match what the GRACE data says.

Mexico City is sinking as its groundwater aquifers are drained, as are large parts China, Indonesia, Spain and Iran, to name a few. A recent study by researchers at Virginia Tech in the journal Nature Cities found that 28 cities across the United States are sinking — New York, Houston and Denver, among them — threatening havoc for everything from building safety to transit. In the Central Valley, the ground surface is nearly 30 vertical feet lower than it was in the first part of the 20th century.

When so much water is pumped, it has to drain somewhere.

Just like rivers and streams fed by rainfall, much of the used groundwater makes its way into the ocean. The study pinpoints a remarkable shift: Groundwater drilled by people, used for agriculture or urban supplies and then discarded into drainages now contributes more water to the oceans than melting from each of the world’s largest ice caps.

The rivers ultimately drain into the ocean, where fresh water becomes salt water. For that water to be usable again, it must either be industrially treated or return to the land as rain. But with climate change, these same drying regions are seeing less rainfall.

If the drying continues — and the researchers warn that it is now nearly impossible to reverse “on human timescales” — it heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order.

The majority of the earth’s population lives in the 101 countries that the study identified as losing fresh water, making up not just North America, Europe and North Africa but also much of Asia, the Middle East and South America. This suggests the middle band of Earth is becoming less habitable.

It also correlates closely with the places that a separate body of climate research has already identified as a shrinking environmental niche that has suited civilization for the past 6,000 years. Combined, these findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

Both California and Arizona grow significant portions of America’s fruits and vegetables. Something has to give. “If you want to grow food in a place like California,” Famiglietti asked, “do you just bring in water? If we deplete that groundwater, I don’t think there’s enough water to really replace what we’re doing there.” The United States might not have much choice, he added, but to move California’s agriculture production somewhere far away and retire the land.

“The U.S. doesn’t have a national water strategy,” Famiglietti said, referring to a disjointed patchwork of state and court oversight. “We don’t even have a national water institution. We haven’t thought as a country about how we would even protect our own water resources for our own national interests, and we’re a mess.”

8 Things to Know About New Research on Earth’s Rapid Drying and the Loss of Its Groundwater

• Much of the Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying,” affecting the countries containing 75% of the world’s population, the new research shows.

• Mining of underground freshwater aquifers is driving much of the loss.

• Much of the water taken from aquifers ends up in the oceans, contributing to the rise of sea levels.

• Water From Land Has Become a Leading Driver of Sea Level Rise

• As droughts grow more extreme, farmers increasingly turn to groundwater.

• Drying regions of the planet are merging.

• Water pumped from aquifers is not easily replaced, if it can be at all.

• As continents dry and coastal areas flood, the risk for conflict and instability increases.

The accelerated drying, combined with the flooding of coastal cities and food-producing lowlands, heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order, the researchers warn. Their findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

This “drying out” has consequences.

Global soil moisture in 'permanent' decline due to climate change - Carbon Brief

A new study warns that global declines in soil moisture over the 21st century could mark a "permanent" shift in the… - March 27, 2025

The study findings indicate that soil moisture can no longer bounce back from a dry year, as it has in the past:

“It used to be that when precipitation goes up again, we recover water in the soil. But because of this increasing evaporative demand, once we have strong El Niño years — which lead to much less rainfall for a year or two — it seems that we are not recovering the water fully because of increasing evaporative demand. Because of that — even if we have a wet year following dry years — the water in the soil doesn’t seem to recover.”

Drought is often described as a “creeping disaster” — because by the time it is identified, it is usually already well under way.

Paper author Ryu explains:

Continuous increase in evaporative demand shortened the growing season of European ecosystems in…….www.nature.com, July 2023

The length of the growing season has decreased over the 2011-2020 period in Europe probably due to higher atmospheric…

The results (Fig. 6) show that the reversal in Growing Season Length trend occurs after 2003–2004, probably due to the severe drought we had in Europe in 2003. However, we still see a positive trend for GSL till 2013–2014, meaning that the growing season is still lengthening, albeit at a slower rate. However, after 2014, the trend gets negative meaning that the growing season length is shortening.

It turns out, that it doesn't matter if it is “warmer earlier”, you don't really get a longer growing season. The KEY factor is moisture. Once that’s gone you rapidly go to “onset of dormancy” and plants stop growing. Hotter and drier conditions result in a shorter growing season even if Spring seems to come earlier and earlier.

Global Burning

Our world is ON FIRE.

Analysis: Record UK wildfires have burned an area twice the size of Glasgow in 2025 - Carbon Brief…..Wildfires have scorched more than 40,000 hectares of land so far this year across the UK - an area more than twice the size of Glascow… www.carbonbrief.org

Wildfires strain emergency services in Albania - www.intellinews.com

Wildfires continued to sweep across southern Albania on July 28, prompting the evacuation of several villages and…

Cyprus gets help from other countries to battle huge wildfire that has killed 2 - apnews.com

Cyprus' government spokesman says aircraft from Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Spain are on their way to help battle a…

Fire in southern France burns 8,000 hectares - www.lemonde.fr

The Aude department has seen an increase in the areas burnt in recent years due to low rainfall, and the current fire…

Greece battles wildfires across country, evacuates villages - www.reuters.com

Explosions could be heard as huge clouds of smoke covered Drosopigi village north of Athens, where factories with…

Video. Fresh wildfires force evacuations in northern Spain - www.euronews.com

Video. A new wildfire outbreak was reported in Guxín, following a wave of forest fires that had already burned 515…

Four dead in Turkey wildfires as blazes continue across Greece - www.thetimes.com

Thousands evacuated from the Turkish city of Bursa and from near Athens as heatwave sparks fires throughout southern…

Grand Canyon Wildfire Spreads to More Than 126,000 Acres — NYT Aug 5th, 2025

Canada

New study shows how climate change is driving wildfire season to start earlier in California….www.pbs.org

Parts of California are seeing fire season start more than 10 weeks earlier now than in the 1990s. Two authors of a new…

The BURNING of the global forests also has CONSEQUENCES. It feeds the accelerating failure of the Terrestrial Carbon Sink, turning the “global forest” from a carbon sequestration system into a carbon emission system. This intensifies the effect of human GHG emissions since very little of them have been sequestered by the biosphere for the last 2 years.

World’s Forest Carbon Sink Shrank to its Lowest Point in at Least 2 Decades, Due to Fires and Persistent Deforestation — World Resources Institute, July 24th 2025

Global Flooding

Perversely, while the world is drying out, MASSIVE “rain events” are increasing in frequency. A warmer atmosphere holds more water, 7% for each +1°C of warming. When rain does happen we can expect DELUGE.

E&E News: Global warming worsened Pakistan's monsoon floods, study finds -politicopro.com

The World Weather Attribution study found rainfall from June 24 to July 23 in the South Asian nation was 10 to 15…

Heavy rainfall that triggered floods in Pakistan in recent weeks, killing hundreds of people, was worsened by human-caused climate change, according to a new study.

The study by World Weather Attribution, a group of international scientists who study global warming’s role in extreme weather, found that rainfall from June 24 to July 23 in the South Asian nation was 10 to 15 percent heavier because of climate change, leading to many building collapses in urban and rural Pakistan.

Over 50 missing after cloudburst triggers flash floods in Uttarkashi….. www.indiaweekly.biz

A devastating cloudburst in Dharali, Uttarkashi, has killed at least four and left over 50 missing. Rescue operations…

China floods: more than 30 killed in Beijing and tens of thousands evacuated - www.theguardian.com

Authorities relocated 80,000 residents from China's capital after registering rainfall of up to 543mm (21 inches) in some districts.

Hong Kong hit by flooding after flurry of rainstorm warnings - phys.org

Parts of Hong Kong were brought to a standstill by flooding caused by heavy rains on Tuesday, after the highest-tier…

The city logged its highest daily rainfall in August since records began in 1884, at just over 355 millimeters (13 inches) recorded at the Hong Kong weather observatory’s headquarters at 2:00 pm (0600 GMT).

Atmospheric Rivers May be Diminishing on the West Coast and Surging in the East, Study Finds … - insideclimatenews.org

Over a 20-year period, atmospheric rivers could double the amount of rain falling on part of the Southeast, the…

Opposing trends in winter Atmospheric River over the Western and Eastern US during the past four… - www.nature.com

Winter atmospheric rivers (ARs) are crucial for water supply and extreme weather events over the western (WUS) and…

Dong and his co-authors found that wintertime atmospheric rivers are growing significantly more frequent and intense over the Eastern U.S. while diminishing over the West. Their research showed that, over a 20-year period, atmospheric rivers could double the amount of rain falling in parts of the Southeast.

Dong’s team found that between 1980 and 2020, atmospheric river frequency over the Eastern U.S. increased by almost five percent each decade, with the storms slamming the South particularly hard. Parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee saw average atmospheric river rainfall rates increase by as much as two millimeters per day per decade over the last 40 years. With average daily precipitation in Mississippi currently being about 3.9mm per day (0.15in), if this trend continues, atmospheric rivers could double the average rainfall in some parts of the state in 20 years. Extreme rainfall rates in parts of Georgia have risen by almost four millimeters per day per decade, according to the study.

Our current infrastructure, the “constructed” world of the Anthropsphere, is NOT READY for these storms.

New mapping reveals D.C. region's growing vulnerability to flood risk - wapo.st

Large swaths of the Washington region, including many of its roadways, rail lines and bus stops, are more vulnerable to…

As the region experiences more extreme weather, an increased number of roads and rail lines could flood, not just those in low-lying areas.

Two flood maps of the region, one using existing data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and another with data from an independent flood modeler, Fathom.

While outdated FEMA analysis shows only areas adjacent to waterways and rivers that are prone to flooding, the Fathom map also includes areas that would be affected by flash floods, intense rain events and an overrun of storm drains.

From the article:

The differences are stark. Nearly 40% of the total miles of road in the region are shown to be at risk of flooding using the Fathom-informed map, compared to 14% with the FEMA data alone. Sixty-four percent of the region’s rail lines are also at risk, compared to 39% in the FEMA-only assessment.

Over the past 150 years, the average temperature in D.C. has risen about +6°F (+10.8°F), driven by urbanization and increasing planet-warming pollution. This warming has accelerated evaporation, boosting humidity and increasing the amount of moisture storms can tap into.

According to the 2023 National Climate Assessment, the most intense downpours have grown heavier across the eastern United States. By 2100, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments team projects a 33% increase in the number of days each year with at least one inch of rain — and a 53 percent rise in days with two inches or more.

These increases are forecast for a low emissions scenario — which assumes policies are implemented to slow climate warming.

Global Hunger

Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation — Published: 18 June 2025

These projections are for a +3.0°C world between 2089–2098. They ASSUME and allow for aggressive and effective “adaptation and mitigation” efforts like “drip irrigation” and water conservation.

This is also WILDLY OPTIMISTIC.

The projection of +3°C by 2100 is regarded as the “Business as Usual” model in which emissions do not significantly decline and “net zero” is not reached. It is regarded as a WORST CASE number.

Realistically we will probably hit +2°C by 2035 and +3°C between 2060 and 2070 (assuming a Rate of Warming around +0.36°C/decade).

The real WORST CASE is hitting +3°C between 2050 and 2060, which could happen.

Their projections for a +3°C “worst case” world are:

MAIZE

Under a high-emissions scenario, our projected end-of-century maize yield losses are severe (about −40%) in the grain belt of the USA, Eastern China, Central Asia, Southern Africa and the Middle East. Losses in South America and Central Africa are more moderate (about −15%), mitigated in part by high levels of precipitation and increasing long-run precipitation. Impacts in Europe vary with latitude, from +10% gains in the north to −40% losses along the Mediterranean. Gains in theoretical yield potentials occur in many northern regions in which maize is currently not widely grown.

SOYBEANS

The spatial distribution of soybean yield impacts is similar in structure to maize, although magnitudes are accentuated; for example, about −50% in the USA and about +20% in wet regions of Brazil under a high-emissions scenario.

RICE

High-emissions rice yield impacts are mixed in India and Southeast Asia, which lead global rice production, with small gains and losses throughout these regions. This regional result is broadly consistent with earlier work. In the remaining rice-growing regions, central estimates are generally negative, with magnitudes in Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Central Asia exceeding −50%.

WHEAT

Wheat losses are notably consistent across the main wheat-growing regions, with high-emissions yield losses of −15% to −25% in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa and South America and −30% to −40% in China, Russia, the USA and Canada. There are notable exceptions to these global patterns: wheat-growing regions of Western China exhibit both gains and losses, whereas wheat-growing regions of Northern India exhibit some of the most severe projected losses across the globe.

CASSAVA

Cassava is projected to have uniformly negative projected impacts in nearly all regions in which it is grown at present, with the largest losses in Sub-Saharan Africa (−40% on average under a high-emissions scenario). Although cassava does not make up a large portion of global agricultural revenues, it is an important subsistence crop in low-income and middle-income countries. Thus, these yield losses may be a substantial future threat to the nutritional intake of the global poor.

SORGHUM

Sorghum losses are widespread in almost all of the main regions in which it is grown at present: North America (−40%), South Asia (including India) (−10%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (−25%). Projected gains emerge in Western Europe (+28%) and Northern China (+3%).

Climate Politics

How the Rapid Spread of Misinformation Pushed Oregon Lawmakers to Kill the State's Wildfire Risk… - www.propublica.org

After Oregon's record-breaking fire season in 2020, lawmakers wanted to map out which properties were most at risk. But…

Once rural MAGAt voters saw their property values decline they went ‘nuts”.

Christine Drazan, the Oregon House Republican leader, joined more than a dozen other Republicans in February 2025 behind a sign that said “REPEAL THE WILDFIRE HAZARD MAP.” She called the state’s map “faulty, defective, harmful” and said it, along with related fire-safe building and landscaping rules that are in the works, is “a heavy-handed bureaucratic takeover” that’s kept rural residents from insuring or selling homes.

“This map is destroying their property values”.

In the end, what’s most remarkable about the campaign against Oregon’s wildfire map isn’t that misinformation found an audience.

It’s that it worked.

This is how misinformation gets accepted as fact among MAGAt voters.

America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy - www.theatlantic.com

From the article:

Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so — by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels — may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.”

In other words, curbing GHG emissions is not merely voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.

A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite picture of legal responsibility. It announced a plan to rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, from 2009, says quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and qualify as harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases IS the legal basis for power-plant rules, tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the executive branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and methane. The EPA would now like to “change their mind” about that.

The U.S., famously, does not make much of international laws. In prior international climate negotiations, America has tried to minimize its responsibility as the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases. Margaret Taylor, the U.S. legal adviser to the State Department under Joe Biden, presented commentary at the ICJ in December 2024 in which she argued that current human-rights laws do not provide for a right to a healthy environment, nor should countries be financially responsible for past emissions, both of which the ICJ ultimately disagreed with in this new opinion.

The Trump administration seems ready to simply ignore, if not outright reject, any responsibility the U.S. might have for climate change. We DO NOT CARE what the rest of the world thinks, cuz we’re Murican’s and we don't have to care.

The change in the EPA Endangerment finding.

Trump moves to scrap climate rule tying greenhouse gases to public health harm - www.theguardian.com

EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to revoke key scientific finding that allows for US climate regulation

In order to do this, the EPA has to rescind a 2009 landmark declaration which determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.

The government cannot “regulate” what corporations are dumping into the environment unless they can PROVE that it's causing harm. Instead of making the industry prove that the Green House Gases their products generate are safe, the government was forced to prove that GHG emissions were a danger to the “public health and welfare”.

This took DECADES because the industry fought it tooth and nail. That's why it didn't happen until so fucking late. It was fought all the way to the Supreme Court. Which finally ruled in 2007 that the EPA has authority to regulate greenhouse gases as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Hours after Zeldin announced the intention of the EPA to undo the 2009 “endangerment finding”, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a 150-page report defending the proposal, claiming scientific concern about the climate crisis is overblown.

Wrote Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, in the report’s introduction. Here is the report in full. It's ONLY 151 pages, which is pathetically short for a document that is supposed to “push back” on the “cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science.” By which Wright means the ENTIRETY of over 50 years of Climate Science going back to the 70's.

It was written by just FIVE GUYS in just FOUR MONTHS.

“The Trump administration report was crafted by five handpicked scientists who are seen as having fringe or contrarian views by mainstream climate scientists, with no peer review. The experts behind the report have previously denied being climate deniers. The energy department did not respond to a question about the authors.”

Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change — NYT, July 8th 2025

MOST significantly, if the 2009 endangerment finding is undone by the Supreme Court. It could make it pretty much impossible for future Administrations to try to curb emissions without new legislation from Congress.

At this point, repealing the endangerment finding on scientific grounds should be impossible. Despite the claims of the D.O.E. report, the evidence since 2009 that climate change represents a threat to public welfare has become much more overwhelmingly conclusive

So instead, the Administration’s legal arguments center on how, exactly, to interpret the relevant sections of the Clean Air Act.

This could appeal to the current “highly partisan” Supreme Court.

None of the five Justices who were in the majority in the Massachusetts v. E.P.A. ruling in 2009 are still on the Court. But three of the dissenters: John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas remain. Meanwhile, three of the Court’s newer Justices, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett are Trump appointees.

Richard J. Lazarus, the Harvard Law School professor who wrote a book about the 2009 decision stated.

“There are a couple arguments they make where a hostile Court might bite. My guess is that their aim here is not to have the Court say there’s no endangerment but for the Court to say there’s reason to revisit the endangerment finding. There won’t be a revisitation, but that by itself will be enough to collapse everything.”

Because “gaming” the rules and finding “ways to cheat” is how MAGAts “govern”.

The E.P.A.'s Disastrous Plan to End the Regulation of Greenhouse Gases - www.newyorker.com

With a new proposal, the Trump Administration, which has already laid waste to dozens of programs aimed at limiting…

Scientists slam Trump administration climate report as a 'farce' full of misinformation - www.theguardian.com

Experts say the report being used to justify the mass rollback of climate regulations has many claims based on…

Pretty much every climate scientist on the planet, who is not one of “the five”, thinks this report is misinformation, disinformation, and flat out lies.

MEANWHILE in Europe.

EU wants to pay poor countries to cut emissions. It never studied the plan's impacts. - www.politico.eu

The European Commission released a controversial plan to offshore millions of tons of greenhouse gas cuts, but admitted…

Europe continues to hope that it can “appear” to be doing something about their GHG emissions by “outsourcing” setting aside land for reforestation. They hope to pay “the poors” to set aside VAST chunks of their countries as PERMANENT “carbon reserves” so that the “developed” countries can keep polluting for a few decades more.

Unfortunately, no one asked “the poors” what they thought about this idea first.

Climate Science

Something COOL.

See how aerosols loft through Earth's sky - www.sciencenews.org

Aerosols, small particles in the atmosphere like salt and dust, may offset a third of human-caused climate warming…

The sky abounds with aerosols, tiny particles with large sway over Earth’s temperature. A new NASA visualization reveals how these airborne particles swirl through the atmosphere.

Unlike greenhouse gases, which can persist for years and disperse globally, aerosols remain aloft for only days and form regional plumes. These high-flying motes counter climate warming by reflecting solar radiation back into space and acting as condensation nuclei, increasing the number of droplets in clouds and making the poofy masses more reflective.

“Those two effects together have offset about a third of climate warming … about a half a degree Celsius,” says atmospheric scientist Sarah Doherty of the University of Washington in Seattle.

SO, of COURSE the MAGAts want to shut it down.

Trump moves to shut down NASA missions that measure carbon dioxide and plant health — Aug 6th, 2025

The Trump administration is moving to shut down two NASA missions that monitor a potent greenhouse gas and plant health, potentially shutting off an important source of data for scientists, policymakers and farmers.

President Donald Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 includes no money for the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, which can precisely show where carbon dioxide is being emitted and absorbed and how well crops are growing.

Surviving a Climate Disaster

Practical Advice.

The surprising reasons floods and other disasters are deadlier at night " - Yale Climate Connections

It's not just that it's dark and people are asleep. Urban sprawl, confirmation bias, and other factors can play a role.

Disaster 101: Your guide to extreme weather preparation, relief, and recovery - grist.org

From packing an emergency kit to navigating FEMA aid to finding legal services and mental health resources, this is a…

Signals of Collapse

Why insurers worry the world could soon become uninsurable — CNBC Aug 8th, 2025

Top insurers fear the climate crisis could soon outpace industry solutions, effectively threatening to make entire regions around the world uninsurable.

Günther Thallinger, a board member at Allianz, one of the world’s biggest insurers, recently outlined how the world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for financial services, such as mortgages and investments.

We are clearly on a pathway now of 2.7 degrees or 3 degrees where adaptation is simply not doable anymore. This is just what it is. — Günther Thallinger, Board member at Allianz

Global insured catastrophe losses hit $80 billion in first half of 2025, report shows - www.reuters.com

Global insured losses from natural catastrophes reached $80 billion in the first half of 2025, preliminary estimates…

Hottest Month, Highest Costs: How Climate Extremes in July 2025 Shook the Global Economy … - cleantechtimes.com

July 2025 will be remembered as a month when climate change's economic consequences hit home around the world.

US Social Collapse

ICE is well on its way to becoming the American SS and Trump’s personal army.

To deliver on his campaign pledge to deport illegal immigrants, President Trump is relying on Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So his new domestic policy law gives it $75 billion over the next four years, which will make it the best-funded law enforcement agency in the country. Evan Gorelick and Lyna Bentahar of Wired break down some stats behind ICE’s expansion plan.

• $45 billion to expand the detention system. That money could allow ICE to hold more than 125,000 migrants at a time, the nonpartisan American Immigration Council estimates, more than doubling the agency’s current capacity.

• 14,050 more employees. To recruit them, ICE wants to use social media and digital advertising, according to contracting records.

• 18-year-old enforcers. The agency lowered the age requirement for all roles, including agents. It previously required most candidates to be 21.

• $50,000 signing bonuses. That’s what you can get if you take a job at ICE. The agency is also offering student-loan repayment assistance and other benefits to attract recruits.

• $30 billion for deportations. That money will help hire officers, pay bonuses and buy new vehicles. Trump’s goal is to deport one million immigrants per year.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’: Trump’s ICE Is Now Recruiting Teenagers

ICE opening up recruiting to teenagers because they can’t find enough adults willing to be their racist storm troopers is some real dystopian shit,” said one critic.

Critics pointed to a similar move to increase recruitment at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where lower hiring standards resulted in increased reports of sexual misconduct and corruption among Border Patrol recruits.

Surprisingly, despite all of these “peace keepers” around, there is one group of Americans who feel VERY THREATENED these days.

US companies spending record amounts to protect executives as threats rise - www.reuters.com

U.S. companies are spending record amounts to keep their executives safe in response to rising threats and the killings…

Threats against corporate executives “have massively ramped up since 2020,” said Chris Pierson, the CEO of cybersecurity firm BlackCloak.

Their “FEAR” hasn't stopped their drive for “profit”.

Wall Street traders will get fatter bonuses after riding volatile markets - www.reuters.com

Wall Street stock and bond traders can expect their bonuses to jump 10% to 30% this year as they cashed in on turbulent…

Remember, Wall Street doesn't MAKE anything. This is money being leeched out of the economy directly into the pockets of the “high net worth” class.

The looting of the US economy is now in high gear.

'We're Fast Stumbling Into Stagflation,' Expert Warns as Unemployment Rolls Hit 4-Year High Under… - www.commondreams.org

"In contrast with the president's assertion of bustling job creation," said The Century Foundation's Andrew Stettner…

Oh gee, unregulated adoption of AI is causing “mass layoffs” across the country. How can that be? AI is going to make everyone wealthy says Trump.

While normal people fear for their jobs and stress about paying for groceries.

Cost of Groceries 'Major Source of Stress' as Trump Tariffs Start to Bite | Common Dreams

Anxiety about grocery prices is particularly strong among Americans earning $30,000 or less per year, as nearly two-thirds of them described paying for groceries as a "major source of stress."

Their “betters” prepare their “apocalypse” escape plans.

Why Are Silicon Valley's Utopians Are Prepping for Collapse?

On The Nerd Reich, Guthrie Scrimgeour & Taylor Lorenz reveal why tech billionaires promising a bright future are…www.thenerdreich.com

How would you put these pieces together?

What pattern do you see in the data?

I see COLLAPSE.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 08/10/2025

ADDENDUM:

Let's look at some of the pieces.

Starting with the BURNING of the Boreal Forests.

Canada’s wildfire season is now at its busiest period and officials are warning that hotter than usual temperatures are expected to persist until September across most of Canada.

The HEAT is in the Oceans.

Because, RIGHT NOW, the SMOKE from the fires is actually cooling this area down so much that temperatures are below normal.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires brings unhealthy air to large swaths of the Midwest

Smoke from Canadian wildfires hovered over several Midwestern states Saturday, bringing warnings of unhealthy air for…phys.org July, 2025

If you are having trouble visualizing what that looks like. Here's a picture of Chicago.

And here's something to give you an idea of “how big” the area affected by this smoke actually is.

It’s a pretty massive area

NOW, let’s be CLEAR. Breathing this smoke is BAD for you.

Here’s a way to translate the AQI into something everyone can understand: cigarettes.

Online calculator converts air pollution index into number of cigarettes you’ve smoked

This is based on the following conversion:

AQI 50: Equivalent to 0.5 cigarettes.

AQI 100: Equivalent to 1 cigarette.

AQI 150: Equivalent to 2.5 cigarettes.

AQI 200: Equivalent to 5 cigarettes.

*It’s important to note that this is a rough estimate and the actual health effects of breathing air with an AQI of 200 may vary depending on factors such as the specific pollutants present and the length of exposure.

Although that “cigarette equivalence” probably doesn't truly capture how bad wildfire smoke can be for your lungs.

What we don’t know about wildfire smoke is likely hurting us

Wildfires may affect our lungs and immune systems long after the blaze dies down. February 2020

What do we know about the long-term health effects of wildfire smoke?

Actually, not that much. It's very understudied, but what we can see doesn't look good.

“After California’s Humboldt wildfires ravaged thousands hectares of land in June 2008, sending a blanket of smoke across California, Lisa Miller, an immunologist at UC Davis who heads the respiratory diseases unit at the California National Primate Research Center, saw the opportunity for a long-term study.”

“After the smoke from the fires abated, and then twice over the next several years, Miller and her team tracked changes in the immune system and lung function in monkeys at the center. Initially, Miller expected the animals to develop asthma or other common respiratory ailments. But instead, she detected something more insidious:”

So, going outside with an infant or toddler in this smoke is probably REALLY BAD for them. Perhaps causing “lifelong” damage.

Here's another study from January of this year.

What we know about the health effects of wildfire

Wildfire smoke is about 10 times as toxic as the regular air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, and there's no…news.stanford.edu January, 2025

They open with this:

Wildfire smoke is about 10 times as toxic as the regular air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, and there’s no safe level of exposure, Stanford experts say: the more we breathe, the worse a range of health outcomes.

Then state, VERY CLEARLY that:

“The data also pretty clearly show that our notion of sensitive groups should probably be greatly expanded. In addition to kids, elderly populations, or anyone else with preexisting conditions, like asthma, we need to think about populations like pregnant people whose birth outcomes can be substantially affected by exposure.”

“Portable indoor filtration is often the best option for many households, and well-fitting N95 masks can help when outside.”

“Given the toxicity of wildfire smoke and that we can expect children to be exposed to these toxic events more often, I think it’s best to err on the side of caution. Children are a sensitive population and should be limiting their time outdoors during poor air quality days.”

“Schools need to have filtration systems in place to keep indoor air quality clean for students, whether that is HVAC systems or portable air cleaners.”

Given the MAGAt dismantling of the Department of Education does ANYONE really think there is going to be Federal money to install these systems in schools? Hell, we couldn't get money to upgrade the air quality systems in schools to try and prevent kids from getting Covid over and over again. As a result of that “decision” the Mayo Clinic has found,

Realistically, we aren’t ever going to upgrade the air systems in public schools anytime soon. Particularly in “low tax” MAGAt RED states where CRITICAL infrastructure like bridges and dams has been allowed to “run down” to the point of failure.

However, MAGAt politicians will do asinine things like this.

Republicans Blame Canada for Wildfire Smoke ‘Suffocating’ the U.S. — NYT 07/11/25 (shared article free to read)

Six members of Congress from Wisconsin and Minnesota have asked Canada to say how it plans to tackle the blazes and reduce the haze billowing south.

“Smoke from Canadian wildfires is casting a shadow for many Americans this summer, a group of six Republican lawmakers say, and they want Canada to answer for it.”

““In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family, and creating new memories,” the U.S. representatives from Wisconsin and Minnesota wrote in a letter this week. “But this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things.””

“Their letter, addressed to Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, DEMANDED to know her government’s plan for tackling the wildfires and accused it of lax forest management which has contributed to “suffocating” smoke.”

“Our communities shouldn’t suffer because of poor decisions made across the border,”

• Tom Tiffany, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin and one of the letter’s authors, said in a post on X.

MAGAt politicians seem to suffer from “chronic irony impairment”.

They are also completely IGNORANT about what's actually going on. Sadly, so are most Americans. Even those who consider themselves “climate change aware”.

BOLD WORDS, right?

Allow me to put it together for you.

The Arctic and the Antarctic are VERY different places. That simple fact has profound consequences for all of us when it comes to Climate Change.

The South Pole is in the middle of a continent surrounded by ocean.

The North Pole is an ocean surrounded by land.

That land consists of permafrost and forests.

Both of which sequester Carbon.

A LOT of Carbon.

We worry about the Amazon and forests in Indonesia, but the Boreal Forests hold more Carbon than all the other forests in the world COMBINED.

Because of their location these forests are EXTREMELY vulnerable to global warming. Again, you wouldn't think it to look at the map but the area these forests grow in is the FASTEST WARMING region on Earth.

This is due to “Arctic Amplification”.

Arctic amplification refers to the phenomenon where the Arctic is warming at a significantly faster rate than the global average.

You REALLY need to understand what Arctic Amplification is and how it works. It’s IMPORTANT to your personal future.

Here's a couple of articles I have written over the last few years.

049 - The Earth’s Climate System - A Short Users Guide. Part 02. Arctic Amplification — Understanding why the Polar Zones are warming 4X faster than the rest of the planet.

050 - The Earth’s Climate System - A Short Users Guide. Part 03. Permafrost Melting — The role of permafrost in the Climate System. (07/01/23)

Here's the “short” version.

Polar Amplification, in this case Arctic Amplification, is a clearly understood feature of the Climate System. It was included in the very first General Climate Models back in the 70’s. However, no one had a clue as to “how much” amplification of overall planetary warming there would be. The models tended to be very conservative in their guesses.

Then in the 90’s, fossils were found in the Arctic Circle of palm trees and alligators that dated back to the PETM. So, clearly the question of “how much amplification” there would be became URGENT.

Because climate scientists understood that, due to the geography of the Earth, there is a potential “carbon bomb” present in the Arctic permafrost.

That dark green line of the Boreal Forest is also where 780,000 years of permafrost has accumulated. FYI- no permafrost older than 780,000 years has been found. The implication is that the Earth has only been cold enough for the last 780,000 years for permafrost to be “permanent”.

The organic matter trapped on ice in the permafrost suppresses an estimated amount of organic carbon of around 1,672 gigatonnes. Which is equivalent to all of the organic carbon contained in ALL of the land plants on the WHOLE planet PLUS what’s in the atmosphere at this moment. Which is IN ADDITION to the carbon sequestered in the Boreal Forests themselves.

In fact, the “Boreal Zone” has functioned as a carbon sink for so long that if you burned all of the oil available in all the reserves around the world, you would still release less carbon than the boreal forest and permafrost is currently holding.

So, if the Arctic warms up substantially faster than the rest of the planet, there is a BIG RISK of triggering the “carbon bomb” even at relatively low levels of increase in the Global Mean Surface Temperature. What the fossil record indicated was that we REALLY needed to understand “Arctic Amplification” in order to know what the risks of adding CO2 to the atmosphere actually were.

In 1998 NASA/GISS did a study to set a model value for Arctic Amplification. Latitudinal temperature gradients and climate change — Journal of Geophysical Research, vol.103, no. D6, pages 5943–5971, March 27, 1998.

GISS predicted that Arctic Amplification would be “no more than 2X overall planetary warming”. The Alarmist models in this study predicted “between 3X to 4X” warming.

GISS went with the lower number. The world accepted that number and climate models have been using it since then. However, GISS was WRONG and we have been using wildly optimistic numbers in our climate models.

Because the Arctic is warming a LOT faster than the rest of the Earth.

The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979.

Communications Earth & Environment volume 3, Article number: 168 (Aug 2022)

This is not just BAD, this is CATASTROPHICALLY BAD.

It means that the +1.5°C of planetary warming we have experienced globally translates into at least +6°C of warming in the High Arctic.

The part of Siberia where the biggest deposit of permafrost on earth sits is also the FASTEST warming place on the planet.

This kind of warming is going to kill ALL of the Boreal Forest and it’s happening REALLY fast now.

The tree species that dominate Canada’s vast boreal forest, are black spruce and poplar. While the Canadian boreal forest is VAST (2.7 million sq km) unfortunately it is not a “diverse” forest.

“There are only a few tree species there, but they dominate our landmass.”

While the trees are well equipped to withstand the harsh northern winters. The same traits that give them an advantage in the cold make them poor candidates to survive in a warming world.

“What we’re finding is that climate change effects are causing high mortality in many boreal tree species, and those that survive actually consume less CO2.”

These findings are painting a picture quite different than the long-held assumption that climate change would benefit the northern forests. They suggest a “double whammy” effect in which the burning forests ADD CO2 to the atmosphere and then REMOVE less CO2 from the atmosphere because they are dying.

In fact, if Canada’s largest forest removes progressively less CO2 from the atmosphere, global greenhouse gas accumulation WILL occur MUCH faster than currently predicted. Something that is ALREADY happening.

World’s Forest Carbon Sink Shrank to its Lowest Point in at Least 2 Decades, Due to Fires and Persistent Deforestation. — World Resource Institute, July 24th 2025.

These trees are VERY unlikely to be “replaced” by “new growth” any time soon.

As more southern tree species, like maple, are predicted to migrate northwards, they will find the harsh environment, low light conditions, and thin soils of the boreal forest hostile to their presence. This means that the void left behind by retreating boreal species will not be easily replaced in a warmer world.

So, yes. The fires in Canada are actually the MOST IMPORTANT NEWS in the world right now.

Because, no matter what else is happening in the world, the Climate Crisis is accelerating. These fires are going to keep burning UNTIL THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO BURN.

We have already “tipped” over the tipping point.

The rest of our lives will be “smokey”.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 08/05/2025

ADDENDUM:

A PSA for people who are in the “smoke zone”.

You wouldn’t give your nine year old a pack of cigarettes to smoke.

If you let them play outside without a mask, breathing “unfiltered” air.

That’s what you’re doing.

An Air Quality Index (AQI) of 200 is considered “Unhealthy” and is equivalent to smoking approximately 5 cigarettes per day.

This is based on the following conversion:

AQI 50: Equivalent to 0.5 cigarettes.

AQI 100: Equivalent to 1 cigarette.

AQI 150: Equivalent to 2.5 cigarettes.

AQI 200: Equivalent to 5 cigarettes.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS ALREADY SHORTENING YOUR CHILDREN’S LIVES.

Albedo “dimming” has INTENSIFIED since 2014. This dimming has now persisted for over TEN YEARS and has quadrupled the annual ENERGY flow into the Climate System since 2000.

Solar radiation reaching Earth is about 340W/m2, averaged over Earth’s surface, so the -0.5% albedo decrease is a +1.7W/m2 increase of absorbed solar energy.

THAT’S LIKE ADDING +138ppm OF CO2e to the atmosphere SINCE 2014.

This has had a BIG effect on the Earth Energy Imbalance or EEI.

Which is WHY, the oceans are not “cooling down” after the MASSIVE El Nino we just had in 23/24.

Sea Surface Temperatures are roughly 19 days away from their mid-year peak. 2024 didn't break 21°C in August, but 2023 did. If 2025 peaks above 2024 it could be the second hottest year on record.

In a typical year between 1979 and 2000, the average temperature in the northern hemisphere temperature would break the 21C (70F) barrier in July and continue for about five weeks, according to University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute.

Last year, the hottest on record, the northern hemisphere’s average temperature held above 21°C from June 13th until September 5th.

Remember, 90% of ENERGY from the Sun goes into the oceans.

And 80% of that ENERGY enters the Climate System in the Tropics, between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.

Put these observations together and what does it tell you?

WARMING IN 2025 IS BEING SUPPRESSED BY LA NINA CONDITIONS.

That’s what those “cooler than average” waters in the tropics mean. Those waters are cold upwellings from the deep ocean. They come to the surface and start absorbing ENERGY from the Sun. Literally cooling the planet down like water in a radiator absorbing HEAT.

Meanwhile the HEAT from the 23/24 El Nino has now fully moved into the mid-latitudes. Which are sweltering.

Week of sweltering US heat - is this the new normal in a warming world?

Experts say brutal temperatures across much of US set to become more common as planet continues to heat up…..www.theguardian.com

About 92.7 million people — 28 percent of the population of the contiguous United States — live in the areas expected to have dangerous levels of heat.

This isn't a “one off” event that may never happen again for the rest of your life. Some fluke of natural variation that happens once every 100 years.

These kinds of heatwaves are going to get WORSE from here on out. This NEVER goes back to “what it was before”. That's what “new normal” means.

Iranians asked to limit water use as temperatures hit 50C and reservoirs are depleted

Public holiday announced in Tehran as government tries to grapple with deepening water crisis…..www.theguardian.com

FYI — 50°C is 122°F.

Copernicus: Third-warmest June globally - Heatwaves in Europe amid temperature extremes across both……..The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on…

Extraordinary March heatwave in Central Asia up to 10 °C hotter in a warming climate…..In March 2025, Central Asia experienced an unusually intense heatwave, with temperatures reaching record highs across - www.worldweatherattribution.org

Rising temperatures and extreme weather hit Asia hard…..The WMO's State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report says that 2024 was the warmest or second warmest year on record - wmo.int

The 2025 Heatwave in Southeast Asia: A Window Into the Future

While heatwaves intensify, demographic, economic and urbanisation factors worsen their negative impacts in Southeast…www.climateimpactstracker.com

Scientists consider South Asia a window into the future of extreme heat. Recent studies revealed that events like the April 2025 heatwave were 4°C higher over the past 30 years than the average between 1950 and 1986.

THE REST OF YOUR LIFE THINGS ARE GOING TO GET HOTTER.

Warming is being “suppressed” this year. It could be HOTTER.

Next year I think it will be. Next year I think we are going to have another BIG El Nino.

Because this reminds me a lot of what 2022 was like.

The Crisis Report — 02 - May 2022

The UN has confirmed that we are about to get a massive temperature spike….medium.com

Now, the only question is, “how hot is it going to get”?

In 2022 I asked that question.

2021 was the seventh year in a row in which global temperatures were more than +1°C above the preindustrial average.

The WMO forecast that the next five years (2022–2026) would be the “hottest on record”. They also stated that during this period the GMST could “temporarily” exceed +1.5°C of warming over baseline.

World has 50–50 chance of hitting 1.5C mark soon: U.N. — Frontline India

Forecasters also say there’s a 93 per cent chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record.

My conclusions that May were:

The IPCC is forecasting a warming peak of +0.4°C during the next El Nino.

James Hansen is forecasting a warming peak of +0.6°C during the next El Nino.

I am forecasting a warming peak of +0.8°C during the next El Nino.

We are all saying there is going to be warming. We are all saying part of that warming is going to be an El Nino (that’s what the IPCC is implying when they say the warming will be temporary). We are all saying that some of this warming is going to be caused by SOx getting washed out of the atmosphere.

We are all saying the same thing, we just disagree about how hot it’s going to get. — May 2022.

— — — — — — —

Well, we all know how that turned out. Temperatures PEAKED at just over +2°C for several days in 2023.

2024 AVERAGED a Global Mean Surface Temperature of +1.6°C of warming over baseline.

2025 has barely “cooled off” at all. DESPITE being a La Nina year. The La Nina pattern is barely suppressing global temperatures from climbing higher.

Here's what the WMO forecast this May, 2025.

WMO Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update (2025-2029)

The Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update is issued annually by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It…wmo.int

Did you catch that?

Sometime during the next five years.

Remember, in 2022 they forecast that temperatures would peak at around +1.5°C and then cool down back to between +1.2°C and +1.3°C. They didn't think there was going to be an El Nino in 2023.

As late as January 2023 the mainstream forecasts stated there was only a 50/50 shot of an El Nino developing in 2023.

NOAA is confident that we will not get an El Nino this Fall/Winter.

The Mainstream looks at global surface temperatures slightly cooling down from 2024’s highs.

And, IMMEDIATELY picks up the narrative that the crisis is over, “it appears that 2025 may be tracking a more typical path, more consistent with the gradually rising temperatures in prior years”.

AS IF THIS MEANS NOTHING.

Because the oceans are RAPIDLY soaking up HEAT this year.

In 2022, a La Nina pattern suppressed overall warming. Despite that global temperatures increased by +0.1°C DURING a La Nina Year.

This year, a La Nina pattern is suppressing warming going above +1.6°C over baseline.

In 26/27 I think temperatures will go over +2°C for MONTHS during a MASSIVE El Nino.

The global food situation is going to get MUCH, MUCH WORSE in 2026.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 07/28/2025

ADDENDUM:

Let’s continue our discussion about MASS EXTINCTION. Since we are now living through the Sixth Extinction Event.

Which is about to get much worse.

There have been 5 MAJOR Mass Extinction (ME) events over the last 500my.

These extinction events stand out from the normal background extinction rate of typically less than 5 families per million years.

Just to be clear a “family” is different from a species. Species actually go extinct all the time as part of the continuing evolution of the Earth. Things CHANGE and with change there are winners and losers.

It’s estimated that the normal background rate of species extinction is around 1 extinction per million species per year (E/MSY). This means, for example, that if there were a million species on Earth, one would be expected to go extinct naturally each year.

A conservative estimate (Climate change extinctions, Science, 5 Dec 2024, Vol 386, Issue 6726, pp. 1123–1128 DOI: 10.1126/science.adp4461) is that:

A third of Earth's species could become extinct by 2100 if climate change isn't curbed

An analysis of research on most known species around the world finds climate change puts many species at risk of…www.livescience.com

That estimate is -30% of species at +5.4°C (+9.7°F) of warming, a high estimate for warming, but one that is possible even though it seems extreme right now. Particularly if all you are hearing is MSM climate news.

Families are MUCH bigger than species. Here's an analogy to help visualize the difference.

Imagine a family tree:

• Each individual person (e.g., you, your sibling, your parent) represents a SPECIES

• Your immediate family (including parents, siblings, and children) represents a GENUS.

• Your extended family (aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) would be like a FAMILY.

• Different extended families (e.g., your mother’s side, your father’s side) would be like different families within an ORDER.

In essence, a family encompasses a broader range of organisms than a species, grouping together related species based on shared characteristics and evolutionary history.

The difference between a species going extinct and a family going extinct is like the difference between someone killing just you. Or someone killing you, your wife, your kids, your parents, your grandparents, your aunts, your uncles, and ALL your first cousins.

It's a MUCH bigger deal when families of organisms go extinct than it is when a species goes extinct.

During the GREAT DYING of the Permian/Triassic Mass Extinction 250mya, 96% of species AND 56% of FAMILIES went extinct. The biosphere shrank by around 90% from the beginning of the event to its peak.

It was the first “land centric” mass extinction event. The previous two ME’s had primarily affected life in the oceans since there really wasn’t any life on land to speak of. Since the Devonian ME of 350mya a 100my had passed and LIFE had colonized the land.

We can see the effect of this colonization and carbon sequestration in the paleoclimate fossil record. See the RED arrows, those are ICEHOUSE climate states when the Earth got as cold as it has been for the last 2–3 million years in our age. Plants pulled so much CO2 out of the superheated atmosphere that the Earth cooled down to about the same place we are now, DESPITE the volcanic activity that was going on during this period.

Then an apocalypse came along and wiped out a world that had existed for over 100 million years.

The WORST part of it happened right at the beginning, during the first 75,000 years.

“We show that pCO2 increased from 426ppm(CO2) in the latest Permian to 2507ppm(CO2) at the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction within about 75ky, and that the reconstructed pCO2 significantly correlates with sea surface temperatures.” — Field evidence for coal combustion links the 252 Ma Siberian Traps with global carbon disruption — June 2020

CO2 levels “shot up” from 426ppm to +2500ppm within about 75,000 years. Say, roughly 2100ppm over 70,000 years. That's a rate of increase that averages out to about +2.8ppm PER CENTURY.

For comparison:

The current rate of CO2 increase is 132 TIMES faster than the catastrophic warming that triggered the “Great Dying”.

During this increase in CO2 levels a “tipping point” was crossed and things suddenly got MUCH WORSE. Around 860ppm(CO2) the tropical forests started dying out, the coral reefs vanished, and the plankton populations the oceans collapses.

Early Triassic super-greenhouse climate driven by vegetation collapse - Nature Communications

The Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME), the most severe crisis of the Phanerozoic, has been attributed to intense…www.nature.com

Mega El Niño events may have caused planet's greatest mass extinction | CNN

Mega El Niños could have intensified the world's most devastating mass extinction, which ended the Permian Period 252…www.cnn.com

As atmospheric partial pressure of carbon dioxide doubled from about 410 to about 860 ppm (parts per million) in the latest Permian, the meridional overturning circulation collapsed, the Hadley cell contracted, and El Niños intensified.

The resultant deforestation, reef demise, and plankton crisis marked the start of a cascading environmental disaster. Reduced carbon sequestration initiated positive feedback, producing a warmer hothouse and, consequently, stronger El Niños. The compounding effects of elevated climate variability and mean state warming led to catastrophic but diachronous terrestrial and marine losses.

From: Mega El Niño instigated the end-Permian mass extinction — Science, Sept 2024

The “cascading environmental disaster” started at around +860ppmCO2. FAR below the +2500ppmCO2 level that would ultimately be reached.

To be CLEAR, CO2 levels of +860ppm represent a +12°C (+21°F) increase in the Global Mean Temperature OVER the GMST of 13.9°C (57°F) that we had in 1850 at CO2 levels of 280ppm.

In the paleoclimate record for the last 500my, going from 280ppm(CO2) to 860ppm(CO2) raises the GMST from around +14°C (57°F) to around +26°C (78°F). At which point the biosphere begins to rapidly die IF this increase happens too quickly.

Because there have been times when the GMST was VERY HIGH and yet species die-off was fairly low. Barely higher than the normal background extinction rate.

So, the lesson of the Permian-Triassic “Great Dying” is that SPEED MATTERS. The difference between a HOT world that’s flourishing and full of life and a denuded desert world that's barren seems to be HOW FAST the planet warms up. Particularly how fast it goes from CO2 levels in the mid 400’s to the mid 800's.

When it happened too quickly during the Permian, life between 30°N and 30°S DIED.

Then 50 million years later. It happened again.

· Triassic-Jurrasic Extinction: 201 million years ago.

The Triassic-Jurassic Event was FAST in geologic terms.

Huge and widespread volcanic eruptions triggered the end-Triassic extinction

Some 200 million years ago, an increase in atmospheric CO2 caused acidification of the oceans and global warming that…news.mit.edu

We now know that over a relatively short period of time, massive volcanic eruptions from a large region known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) spewed forth huge amounts of lava and gas, including carbon dioxide, sulfur and methane.

This sudden release of gases into the atmosphere created intense global warming and acidification of the oceans that ultimately killed off thousands of plant and animal species.

Using igneous rocks from the CAMP eruptions as well as sedimentary rocks that accumulated in an enormous lake that existed for several million years. Researchers used a combination of techniques to date the rocks and to pinpoint the beginning and duration of these volcanic episodes.

By using geochronology and astrochronology techniques to date the lake sediments researchers were able to obtain precise estimates for the onset of volcanism 200 million years ago. The sediments revealed that there were three SHORT INTENSE bursts of magmatic activity during a 40,000 year period.

From these measurements researchers discovered that the eruption of magma, along with carbon dioxide, sulfur and methane, occurred in repeated bursts over a period of just 40,000 years. A relatively short span in geologic time.

“This extinction happened at a geological instant in time. There’s no question the extinction’s started occurring at the same time as the first eruption.” — Sam Bowring, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Geology in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

In terms of causing a Mass Extinction event speed was apparently the critical factor.

In the seas, about 23–34% of marine genera disappeared; corals, bivalves, brachiopods, bryozoans, and radiolarians suffered severe losses of diversity and conodonts were completely wiped out, while marine vertebrates, gastropods, and benthic foraminifera were relatively unaffected.

On land, all archosauromorph reptiles other than crocodylomorphs, dinosaurs, and pterosaurs became extinct. Crocodylomorphs, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and mammals were left largely untouched, allowing them to become the dominant land animals for the next 135 million years.

Plants were likewise significantly affected by the crisis, with floral communities undergoing radical ecological restructuring across the extinction event.

- Wikipedia

Here’s a description of what paleontology tells us the world was like during the peak of the extinction event from the book “Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future” (Peter Ward, 2007)

“No wind in the 120-degree morning heat, and no trees for shade. There is some vegetation, but it is low, stunted, parched. Of other life, there seems little. A scorpion, a spider, winged flies, and among the roots of the desert vegetation we see the burrows of some sort of small animals — the first mammals, perhaps.”

“The largest creatures anywhere in the landscape are slim, bipedal dinosaurs, of a man’s height at most, but they are almost vanishingly rare, and scrawny, obviously starving. The land is a desert in its heat and aridity, but a dune less desert, for there is no wind. The land is hot barrenness. Yet as sepulchral as the land is, it is the sea itself that is most frightening.”

“Waves slowly lap on the quiet shore, slow-motion waves with the consistency of gelatin. Most of the shoreline is encrusted with rotting organic matter, silk-like swaths of bacterial slick now putrefying under the blazing sun. We look out on the surface of the great sea itself, and as far as the eye can see there is a mirrored flatness, an ocean without whitecaps.”

“Yet that is not the biggest surprise”

“From shore to the horizon, there is but an unending purple color — a vast, flat, oily purple, not looking at all like water, not looking like anything of our world. No fish break its surface, no birds or any other kind of flying creatures dip down looking for food. The purple color comes from vast concentrations of floating bacteria, for the oceans of Earth have all become covered with a hundred-foot-thick veneer of purple and green bacterial soup.”

“At last there is motion on the sea, yet it is not life, but anti-life. Not far from the fetid shore, a large bubble of gas belches from the viscous, oil slick-like surface, and then several more of varying sizes bubble up and noisily pop. The gas emanating from the bubbles is not air, or even methane, the gas that bubbles up from the bottom of swamps. It is hydrogen sulfide, produced by green sulfur bacteria growing amid their purple cousins.”

Hydrogen sulphide poisoning of shallow seas following the end-Triassic extinction - Nature…

The evolution of complex life over the past 600 million years was disrupted by at least five mass extinctions, one of…www.nature.com

“There is one final surprise.”

“We have gone to the Nevada of 200 million years ago only to arrive under the transparent atmospheric glass of a greenhouse extinction event, and it is poison, heat, and mass extinction that are found in this greenhouse.”

All of that from CO2 levels levels doubling from the high 700’s (about +10°C over our 1850 baseline of 14°C) to around 1400ppm (about +18°C over our 1850 baseline) over a 40,000 year timeframe.

Basically, the Earth became so hot that few plants or animals could survive in the equatorial and tropical regions.

Or pretty much what happened during the Permian Mass Extinction.

By 2050 we will be at around 750ppmCO2e. At a +3ppm/year rate of increase we will reach 860ppmCO2e around 2085.

Assuming things don’t accelerate.

860ppm(CO2e) represents a +12°C warmer world than our 1850 baseline or a world where the GMST is around 26°C (79°F).

That’s Triassic-Jurassic Mass Extinction event levels.

It took 40,000 years of volcanic eruptions to boost CO2 levels enough to cause +8°C of warming during that event.

We did it in about 150.

THINGS ARE GOING TO RAPIDLY GET WORSE NOW.

We have “tipped”.

End Part Two.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 07/20/2025

ADDENDUM:

This is the part that people aren’t getting yet. The “just how really BAD we f’ed up”. Here's a SHORT outline of what's happening.

Let’s start with “ecosystem turnover”.

036 — The World’s Forests are Burning, Ecosystem Turnover is the Cause. Let’s All be Really Clear on What that Means.

Notice the strip of dark green at the top of the Northern Hemisphere. That’s the Boreal Forests. We worry about the Amazon and forests in Indonesia, but the Boreal Forests hold more Carbon than all the other forests in the world COMBINED.

ALL of Boreal Forests are projected to burn.

In Alaska for example, researchers in 2019 made a projection: By the middle of this century, Alaska’s forests, now dominated by spruce, would give way to forests of deciduous trees, like birch, aspen, and cottonwood. Their conclusion,

“We’re going to lose every single spruce tree in Southcentral Alaska”.

After they die they are going to BURN and release the carbon they are sequestering.

The organic matter that the permafrost suppresses is estimated at around 1,672 gigatonnes. Which is equivalent to all of the organic carbon contained in ALL of the land plants on the WHOLE planet PLUS what’s in the atmosphere at this moment.

The Boreal Forests standing on top of the permafrost zone are estimated to be storing around 700–800 gigatonnes tons of carbon.

There is enough sequestered carbon in the Boreal Forests to raise CO2 levels around +100ppm. That's not counting the Amazon or other global forests.

Each year during the spring and summer you can literally SEE the Boreal Forests “breath in” and suck CO2 out of the air. These forests take in billions of tons of human-released greenhouse gases. “Eating” roughly 1/6 of CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and the loss of forests around the world. Then “sequestering” this carbon in the form of bio-mass.

Or at least they used to.

Because the High Arctic is warming up “faster than expected” and these forests are starting to die.

Now, we have known since the 60’s that most of the ENERGY going into the Climate System happens around the Equator.

80% of the ENERGY in the Climate System starts in the Tropics. Above latitude 40°N and 40°S the other areas of the planet LOSE more ENERGY than they take in. ENERGY in the Climate System moves from the Equatorial zone to the Poles.

The question has always been, what happens to it after it gets there?

From the 70’s on, it has been understood that this ENERGY gets to the poles and builds up. It “accumulates” and Accumulation is a form of AMPLIFICATION.

Hence the term “Arctic Amplification”.

This isn’t so much of a problem for the South Pole but researchers have always been VERY concerned about the North Pole.

WHY?

Ummm…go back and look at the forest map. There is a shitload of forest and permafrost around the Arctic Ocean that you don’t have in Antarctica.

There is around 750,000 years of accumulated organic carbon in the Northern permafrost. It has been sequestering carbon for a LONG time which makes it a potential “carbon bomb” if it melts.

Climate Science has known about this since the 70’s but didn’t get around to trying to set an “official” value for Arctic Amplification in climate models until 1998.

See: Latitudinal temperature gradients and climate change.

JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 103, NO. D6, PAGES 5943–5971, MARCH 27, 1998 by David Rind NASA\GISS

FYI- this was a HUGELY influential paper, it was a major effort by GISS to set this value for the General Climate Models going forward and they also discredited paleoclimate research in this paper. See my article CR:050 — The Earth’s Climate System — A Short Users Guide. Part 03. Permafrost Melting — The role of permafrost in the Climate System. (07/01/23) for details.

There were three main theories.

1. The North Pole would just ‘eat’ the extra HEAT ENERGY.

2. The temperature at the North Pole would go up, “slightly”.

3. The temperature at the North Pole would go up, “A LOT”.

What was starting to scare Climate Scientists in 1998, was that they had believed the answer would be #1 or #2. But new fossil evidence, indicated it was #3.

In 1998 mainstream climate science decided that #2 would be their answer.

Here are Rind’s conclusions.

“Future climate projections from different (Climate) models show substantial differences in the projected latitudinal temperature response from anthropogenic greenhouse perturbations”.

“Doubled CO2 equilibrium simulations from different atmosphere-mixed layer ocean models show different degrees of high-latitude climate warming amplification.”

“In the GFDL model (Alarmist), the temperature response at high latitudes is 3–4 times that at the equator.”

“While in the GISS model (Moderate), it is only close to a factor of 2 [Rind, 1987a].”

“The regional response in these different models depends on these differences in equator-to-pole gradients, which affects the hydrologic cycle, in general, and storm energetics [Rind, 1987a, 1988].”

Translation — EVERYTHING, “kinda” depends on how this works.

Rind and NASA/GISS had a CHOICE here. Between an ALARMIST model they didn’t “agree” with, and their model which produced results in-line with their expectations.

They picked their own model. What did you think would happen?

That was very influential. NASA/GISS is regarded as the “Gold Standard” in Climate Science. It became an accepted FACT that this would be the “expected” amount of “Arctic Amplification”.

High-Latitude Climate Warming Amplification should ONLY be “close to a factor of 2”.

Reality says “they were WRONG”.

Because the Arctic is warming a LOT faster than the rest of the Earth.

The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979 …..Communications Earth & Environment — volume 3, Article number: 168 (Aug 2022)

In recent decades, the warming in the Arctic has been much faster than in the rest of the world, a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification.

Numerous studies report (based on models) that the Arctic is warming either twice, more than twice, or even three times as fast as the globe on average.

Here we show, by using several observational datasets (REAL collected DATA) which cover the Arctic region.

That during the last 43 years the Arctic has been warming nearly four times faster than the globe, which is a higher ratio than generally reported in literature.

We compared the observed Arctic amplification ratio with the ratio simulated by state-of-the-art climate models, and found that the observed four-fold warming ratio over 1979–2021 is an extremely rare occasion in the climate model simulations.

The observed and simulated amplification ratios are more consistent with each other if calculated over a longer period; however the comparison is obscured by observational uncertainties before 1979.

Our results indicate that the recent four-fold Arctic warming ratio is either an extremely unlikely event, or the climate models systematically tend to underestimate the amplification.

Yah think?

NASA/GISS TOLD everyone in 1998 to use a LOW value for Amplification and so EVERYONE did. EVERYONE assumes that NASA/GISS knows what they are talking about.

No one questions the “scientific consensus” because if you do, why then, ‘you’re a DOOMER’.

However, it gets WORSE.

Not only is the High Arctic warming up 4 times faster than the rest of the planet there is something called the Latitudinal Equator to Pole Temperature Gradient and Latitudinal Response.

Remember the title of the 1998 paper isn’t “Setting a value for Arctic Amplification”. It was Latitudinal temperature gradients and climate change. If you have never heard of that, here’s what David Rind a GISS researcher emeritus had to say.

The first sentence of this paper asks.

“How variable is the latitudinal temperature gradient with climate change?”

Then goes on to tell us that;

“This question is second in importance only to the question of overall climate sensitivity.”

“Our current inability to answer it affects everything from understanding past climate variations, and paleoclimate proxies, to projections of regional effects of future greenhouse warming [Rind, 1995].”

So, it’s a BIG DEAL.

Here’s what the current Latitudinal Equator to Pole Temperature Gradient looks like for the Northern Hemisphere.

The “heat loss constant” in this case is -0.62C per degree of latitude.

Meaning, that for every degree North you go away from the Equator, subtract 0.62C of HEAT from the amount you started with. Remember, there are only 90 degrees of latitude between the Equator and each of the Poles.

The North Pole seems cold to us. But 38% of the HEAT ENERGY that starts at the Equator winds up there, and STAYS.

So what happens if you force a HUGE amount of HEAT into the system at the Equator?

That’s what the paper in 1998 is mostly about.

The mainstream consensus in 1998 that you find in textbooks is that this curve remains basically “unchanged”. The thing to remember is that this conclusion was based SOLELY on modeling using the biases and variable values of the Moderate faction in Climate Science.

Is there actual evidence that backs this up?

In 2016 the paleoclimate data came together. It says the mainstream models are full of shit.

Some Thoughts on Global Climate Change: The Transition from Icehouse to Hothouse Conditions

From book: Earth History: The Evolution of the Earth System (2016)

Because the North Pole is warmer than the South Pole they have different “Energy States”. The NP is a “Cooling Greenhouse”, while the SP is a “Severe Icehouse”.

In this graphic there are seven different “climate states” shown for a variety of different periods of the Earth. The Tropics-to-Pole Temperature Gradient is shown for each of these climate states, in both of the two hemispheres.

The way to use the graph, is to pick the state each of the poles is currently in and average the results to get the Global Mean Temperature of the planet. We are currently in a 5/7 configuration, so the GMT should be around 15C (59F). Which, of course, is the current GMT.

Now, what happens if we dump enough CO2 into the atmosphere to raise the GMT by +4C? The amount of warming the paleoclimate record indicates we can expect at a CO2 level of around 420ppm.

Raising the GMT +4C shifts us into a 3/5 climate state.

In the High Arctic temperatures go up about +20C.

The High Arctic where the BOREAL FOREST and PERMAFROST are, will probably warm up about +20°C JUST from the CO2 we have already dumped into the atmosphere.

We aren’t just “warming up” the Arctic.

We have set off a CARBON BOMB.

One that has the potential to boost atmospheric CO2 levels into the 1200ppm to 1500ppm range.

Enough to warm the planet +18°C to a GMST of around 30°C when it “peaks”.

The Boreal Forests are DOOMED.

We are just at the beginning of the GREAT BURNING.

A MASS EXTINCTION has started.

It gets worse from here on out.

The ONLY REAL question now, is “how fast”?

Mainstream Climate Science is starting to acknowledge that “Houston we have a problem”.

Which means that in 18 to 36 months the general public is going to become aware just how BAD things are going to get.

The SIGNS are “adding up”.

Earth’s Energy Imbalance More Than Doubled in Recent Decades — First published: 10 May 2025 https://doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001636

Abstract

Global warming results from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions which upset the delicate balance between the incoming sunlight, and the reflected and emitted radiation from Earth.

The imbalance leads to energy accumulation in the atmosphere, oceans and land, and melting of the cryosphere, resulting in increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather around the globe. Despite the fundamental role of the energy imbalance in regulating the climate system, as known to humanity for more than two centuries, our capacity to observe it is rapidly deteriorating as satellites are being decommissioned.

Key Points

• Earth’s energy imbalance more than doubled in recent decades

• The large trend has taken us by surprise, and as a community we should strive to understand the underlying causes

• Our capability to observe the Earth’s energy imbalance and energy budget is threatened as (the CERES) satellites are decommissioned

From the paper, which is very short by the way.

Global warming results from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions which upset the delicate balance between the incoming sunlight, and the reflected and emitted radiation from Earth.

OK, when they mention GHGs (CO2, CH4, NO, etc.) they are talking ONLY about the ENERGY radiating AWAY from the Earth. These gases trap ENERGY in the Climate System and prevent it from radiating back into space. They have nothing to do with the amount of ENERGY going into the Climate System, that's controlled by the ALBEDO. Increasing the level of GHGs in the atmosphere causes the Earth to “retain ENERGY” and warm up.

The imbalance leads to energy accumulation in the atmosphere, oceans and land, and melting of the cryosphere (von Schuckmann et al., 2023), resulting in increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, and more extreme weather around the globe (IPCC, 2021). Despite the fundamental role of the energy imbalance in regulating the climate system, as known to humanity for more than two centuries (Fourier, 1822), our capacity to observe it is rapidly deteriorating as satellites are being decommissioned (Loeb et al., 2024).

This strong upward trend in the imbalance is difficult to reconcile with climate models: even if the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing and associated climate response are accounted for, state-of-the-art global climate models can only barely reproduce the rate of change up to 2020 within the observational uncertainty (Raghuraman et al., 2021).

The root cause of the discrepancy between models and observations is currently not well known, but it seems to be dominated by a decrease in Earth’s solar reflectivity (Goessling et al., 2024; Stephens et al., 2022), and model experiments suggest it could be due to poorly modeled sea surface temperature patterns, the representation and emissions of polluting aerosol particles, or something else (Hodnebrog et al., 2024).

The energy imbalance is the result of multiple factors: forcing, feedback and internal variability.

• The main forcing is that of anthropogenic emissions that lead to accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, emitted infrared radiation to space is reduced, driving a gradually increasing imbalance.

• Part of the positive greenhouse gas forcing is offset by the presence of anthropogenic aerosols, which cool climate by reflecting sunlight back to space and influence cloud reflection. The forcing from aerosols, even in recent decades, is poorly known (Bellouin et al., 2020). But some evidence suggests the cooling effect is weakening as governments address air quality issues (e.g., Hodnebrog et al., 2024).

• However, the rising surface temperatures also lead to more infrared emission to space, which reduces the energy imbalance, constituting a negative feedback mechanism.

• The warming further activates other climate feedbacks from clouds, water vapor, the cryosphere, etc., which together act to amplify global warming.

• Internal variability arising from weather and slower modes, such as El Niño and La Nina, can also cause year-to-year fluctuations in the energy imbalance.

With an observed global warming of about +0.6°C (from +0.9°C to the current +1.5°C) over the 2001–2024 period, the enhanced outgoing radiation from feedback mechanisms should have countered a substantial part of the increase in radiative forcing, but that is not clearly evident from the observational record.

Much attention has been given to the record breaking surface temperatures in 2023 and 2024, and this has a bearing on the energy imbalance since the EEI in 2024 beat all records in 2023.

A large accumulation of energy in a single year, however, does not necessarily cause the temperature anomaly in that year. Rather, the temperature in 1 year is perhaps better thought of as the result of the energy accumulated in earlier years, combined with any rapid change in forcing (e.g., aerosol emissions, volcanic eruptions or solar forcing), internal variability within the climate system, as well as climate feedback mechanisms.

The energy imbalance started to decrease already in the second half of 2023, and continued to weaken in 2024 (Figure 1), suggesting that stabilizing feedback mechanisms are now active in the aftermath of the El Niño event.

Whistling past the graveyard here.

A similar pattern was seen after the 2009/10 El Niño, but not nearly as pronounced for the 2015/16 event. Notably, the drop in 2024 relative to 2010 follows the overall upward trend and coming years will tell if the energy imbalance remains at this more modest level, or bounces back up to the high levels observed in recent years.

Disentangling the underlying causes and effects of changes in the energy imbalance relies heavily on observing trends in both the emitted infrared and reflected sunlight, and how they vary spatially and over seasons.

The components of the Earth’s energy imbalance are currently observed using a combination of NASA’s CERES onboard several polar-orbiting satellites, and the total solar irradiance (TSIS-1) instrument on the International Space Station.

The mean of these observations for 07/2005–06/2015 is constrained by estimates of the increase in interior energy, predominantly from rising ocean temperatures monitored using thousands of autonomous Argo floats (Johnson et al., 2016). The resulting radiation budget record requires an overlap of different instruments in orbit to ensure there are no discontinuities between successive missions and to prevent loss of critical data. If there is a gap in the record with this system, then our ability to track and understand changes in the energy imbalance is severely compromised (Loeb et al., 2024).

Currently, four sets of CERES instruments are in space, and the Libera follow-on mission (e.g., Hakuba et al., 2024) with similar or improved capabilities is planned to launch in 2027.

It will indeed be crucial to closely monitor and quantitatively understand changes in the Earth’s energy accumulation, particularly during the coming decades as the nations of the world take steps to keep global warming well below +2°C (United Nations, 2015).

Stabilizing global warming below +2°C can still be achieved by swiftly phasing out fossil fuel burning.

LOL, this would require “net zero” by 2035. So, realistically it's “fantasy”.

If successful, such mitigation efforts will first manifest in a peak, followed by a slowly declining trend in Earth’s energy imbalance, essentially decades ahead of the temperature signal (Meyssignac et al., 2023).

It is in the energy imbalance that we can follow up and assess the effectiveness of the mitigation efforts on the fly. And if surprises lie ahead, for example, from unexpectedly large aerosol forcing (Hansen et al., 2023), or an unexpected loss of climate stability, then the imbalance is the first place this can be detected.

Dozens of researchers from institutions across the world have called for improved monitoring capability and more research into the evolution of Earth’s energy imbalance.

Regardless of why Earth’s energy imbalance is growing so rapidly, the implications are alarming.

“The larger the imbalance is, the faster climate change happens. If we have more imbalance, that means more energy accumulating, [so] temperatures rise faster.”

— — — — —

This paper was reported in this article.

Earth's energy balance is rising much faster than scientists predicted, and we have no idea why…..For reasons still unknown, Earth's energy imbalance is rising much faster than models can account for. Now, scientists…www.livescience.com

I think you will hear/see more about this in coming months in increasingly mainstream media sources. That's how “science news” gets processed and disseminated to “the public”.

If the ALBEDO dimming continues and persists (which, if it's about cloud diminishment, it will) then the amount of ENERGY going into the Climate System will remain at an elevated level.

As CO2 levels and CH4 levels rise, more and more of this ENERGY will get trapped in the Climate System instead of radiating into space.

90% of the ENERGY in the Climate System is in the oceans.

They are RAPIDLY heating up now.

HEAT is building up.

The Climate Crisis IS deepening and accelerating.

Even mainstream climate science has started to admit it.

Within 18 to 36 months this understanding will start to become “common knowledge”.

As it does, the world “as we knew it” will die.

The Beginning has ENDED.

Now, we are at the beginning of the END.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 07/10/2025

ADDENDUM:

I’ll finish up looking at extinction events and the lessons of the paleoclimate record next time. This paper was just too significant to wait.

Mainstream climate science is starting to crumble.

A paradigm shift is about to happen. Our understanding of the Climate System is about to fundamentally change.

We are about to TRULY UNDERSTAND the RISKS and COSTS of a “fossil fuel based” energy policy.

Over a BILLION people are going to starve during the next decade.

And that’s just the “opening phase” of Collapse.

Let's consider MASS EXTINCTION. Since we are now living through the Sixth Extinction Event.

Roughly 252mya there was a Mass Extinction Event, the Permian-Triassic Extinction. It was so BAD that it's known as the “Great Dying” because it wiped out around 90% of life on the planet.

Here's what paleontology tells us that world probably would have looked like from space.

It was only about +4°C warmer than it was in 1850. Then it SUDDENLY warmed up. A LOT.

WTF happened?

Well, CO2 levels in the atmosphere went CRAZY.

Six-fold increase of atmospheric pCO2 during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction - Nature…The Permian-Triassic mass extinction was accompanied by a massive release of carbon into the ocean-atmosphere system…www.nature.com

We show that pCO2 increased from 426ppm(CO2) in the latest Permian to 2507ppm(CO2) at the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction within about 75ky, and that the reconstructed pCO2 significantly correlates with sea surface temperatures.

Mass balance modelling suggests that volcanic CO2 is probably not the only trigger of the carbon cycle perturbation, and that large quantities of 13C-depleted carbon emission from organic matter and methane were likely required during complex interactions with the Siberian Traps volcanism.

Here's what translates to in modern terms.

The extensive Siberian flood basalt's (the Siberian traps) in northeastern Siberia and adjacent western China started erupting about 252 million years ago and this initial period of eruptions lasted for about 600,000 to 900,000 years extruding 2 million to 3 million cubic km (480,000 to 720,000 cubic mi) of basalt lava.

The massive eruptive event that formed the traps is one of the largest known volcanic events in the last 500 million years. The eruptions continued “on and off” for roughly 2 million years and spanned the Permian-Triassic boundary. Today, the area is covered by about 3 million square miles of basaltic rock.

While they were happening these eruptions contributed great amounts of volcanic ash to the atmosphere, probably darkening the skies and lowering the efficiency of plants in taking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Something we have experienced recently with smoke from wildfires in Canada.

Contrasting yield responses at varying levels of shade suggest different suitability of crops for…Despite the large body of research surrounding crop growth parameters, there is still a lack of systematic assessments…link.springer.com

The ratio for cereals is about 1% shade = 1%-1.5% loss of yield. The ratio for maize is even worse. Across the Midwest this weekend (June 3rd) the overall “shade effect” was probably a -10% reduction in sunlight.

SO, we can be confident that 600,000 to 900,000 years of volcanic “shade” was “not good” for the planetary biosphere. In fact the Permian ME is uniquely bad in the amount of damage it did to terrestrial plants. No other Mass Extinction comes close.

That wasn't the WORST aspect of this extinction event though. The WORST part of it happened right at the beginning, during the first 75,000 years.

“We show that pCO2 increased from 426ppm(CO2) in the latest Permian to 2507ppm(CO2) at the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction within about 75ky, and that the reconstructed pCO2 significantly correlates with sea surface temperatures.”

What was MUCH, MUCH WORSE than the volcanic ash “darkening the sky” was that the volcanic eruptions ignited massive coal deposits. Burning coal, as we know, releases lots of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Field evidence for coal combustion links the 252 Ma Siberian Traps with global carbon disruption — June 2020

Here we give further evidence that Siberian Traps magmas intruded into and incorporated coal and organic material, and, for the first time, give direct evidence that the magmas also combusted large quantities of coal and organic matter during eruption.

Volcanic coal-burning in Siberia led to climate change 252 million years ago….A team of researchers led by Arizona State University geoscientist Linda Elkins-Tanton has provided the first direct…www.nsf.gov

During this event, up to 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species became extinct.

“Our study shows that Siberian Traps magmas intruded into and incorporated coal and organic material,” Professor Elkins-Tanton said. “That gives us direct evidence that the magmas also combusted large quantities of coal and organic matter during eruption.”

BURNING FOSSIL FUELS IS DEADLY FOR LIFE ON EARTH.

Whether it happens “naturally” or as part of an “industrial revolution” it ALWAYS FUCKS with the Climate System.

· Ordovician-Silurian Extinction: 440 million years ago.

This one was caused by falling CO2 levels and a period of intense cooling. It is considered the second-worst mass extinction event in Earth’s history, causing the loss of 25% of marine families, 60% of marine genera, and 85% of marine species.

It’s believed that the tectonic uplift of the Appalachian mountains (once higher than the Himalayas) created lots of geologic weathering and sequestration of CO2. As CO2 levels fell the planet got a LOT colder and things died.

· Devonian (The Age of Fishes) Extinction: 365 million years ago.

This extinction was not a single event but a series of pulses that unfolded over millions of years. The most significant pulse known as the Kellwasser event, occurred around 372 million years ago. This was a SLOW extinction, the event may have spanned several million years, with estimates ranging from 500,000 to 25 million years.

The exact causes of the Late Devonian extinction are still debated, but theories suggest a combination of factors, primarily:

• Oceanic Anoxia: A lack of oxygen in the oceans, likely triggered by nutrient runoff from the expansion of land plants, is a leading hypothesis.

• Global Cooling: Evidence suggests periods of cooling may have occurred, possibly triggered by changes in atmospheric CO2 levels due to plant expansion.

So basically, plants expanded across the land and sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere while breaking up rocks and releasing nutrients. Runoff from these nutrients caused massive algal blooms in the oceans. Which sucked so much oxygen from the oceans that approximately 70–85% of marine life died.

· Permian-Triassic Extinction (The Great Dying): 252 million years ago.

The “Great Dying,” was the most severe mass extinction event in Earth’s history, wiping out approximately 90% of the planet’s species. The primary causes are attributed to massive volcanic activity in Siberia leading to climate warming and ocean acidification.

CO2 levels went up to +2500ppm and the oceans warmed up to +40°C (104°F) at the equator. The Global Meant Surface Temperature was about 32°C (90°F) and the South Polar ice cap melted completely.

This was a spate of articles last week discussing the Permian-Triassic extinction.

The 'Great Dying' wiped out 90% of life, then came 5 million years of lethal heat. New fossils…A mass extinction event wiped out around 90% of life. What followed has long puzzled scientists: The planet became…www.cnn.com

Around 250 million years ago, Earth was near-lifeless and locked in a hothouse state. Now…The answer confirms scientists' suspicion that when our planet's climate crosses certain 'tipping points', truly…theconversation.com

They were in response to this paper in Nature.

Early Triassic super-greenhouse climate driven by vegetation collapse - Nature Communications….The Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME), the most severe crisis of the Phanerozoic, has been attributed to intense…www.nature.com

Here's what the paper states:

“Here, we explore a further mechanism for elevated Early Triassic temperatures that is closely tied to the timeframe of extreme warmth. This approach is based on the concept of an ‘upper temperature steady state’, in which a change in the Earth system caused the climate-carbon cycle to stabilize at a much higher global temperature for millions of years.”

They think that if it gets hot enough, so much of the plant life dies off that the Climate System gets “locked into” a hothouse state for a prolonged period.

“Specifically, we investigate the hypothesis that the key driver of the transition to a super greenhouse Earth was the dramatic and prolonged reduction of low-latitude terrestrial biomass caused by the PTME and its delayed recovery. Tropical peat-forming ecosystems are responsible for substantial drawdown of CO2, but these extensive biomes were lost at the end of the Permian.”

Basically they think it got so hot that almost all of the tropical jungles (low-latitude terrestrial biomass) DIED. These died, then burned and released all the CO2 they sequestered back into the atmosphere.

Once these forests were gone, there was nothing to draw that CO2 back out of the atmosphere and sequester it in tropical peats again. So, it stayed HOT for a really long time.

“Indeed, plant species richness and abundance dropped significantly during the Permian–Triassic transition, which is the only genuine mass extinction level event of land plants through the whole Phanzerzoic. Leaving a multimillion year “coal gap” in the Early to Middle Triassic where terrestrial plant materials did not build up as peat.”

It stayed “so hot” for “so long” that most of the planet turned to desert and most life on land and in the oceans died. There was so little plant life that it left a “multimillion year “coal gap” in the Early to Middle Triassic where terrestrial plant materials “did not build up as peat”.

Here's how CNN reported the paper.

The Great Dying has been attributed to a period of volcanic activity in a region known as the Siberian Traps, which released huge amounts of carbon and other planet-heating gases into the atmosphere, causing intense global warming. Enormous numbers of marine and land-based plants and animals died, ecosystems collapsed and oceans acidified.

Scientists from the University of Leeds in England and the China University of Geosciences thought the answer may lie in a climate tipping point: the collapse of tropical forests.

The Great Dying extinction event is unique “because it’s the only one in which the plants all die off,” said Benjamin Mills, a study author and a professor of Earth system evolution at the University of Leeds.

They analyzed the fossils and rock formations to get clues about climate conditions in the past, allowing them to reconstruct maps of plants and trees living on each part of the planet before, during and after the extinction event. “Nobody’s ever made maps like these before,” Mills told CNN.

Forests are a vital climate buffer as they suck up and store planet-heating carbon. They also play a crucial role in “silicate weathering,” a chemical process involving rocks and rainwater — a key way of removing carbon from the atmosphere. Tree and plant roots help this process by breaking up rock and allowing fresh water and air to reach it.

Once the forests die, “you’re changing the carbon cycle,” Mills said, referring to the way carbon moves around the Earth, between the atmosphere, land, oceans and living organisms.

Michael Benton, a professor of paleontology at the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the study, said the research shows “the absence of forests really impacts the regular oxygen-carbon cycles and suppresses carbon burial and so high levels of CO2 remain in the atmosphere over prolonged periods,” he told CNN.

It highlights “a threshold effect,” he added, where the loss of forests becomes “irreversible on ecological time scales.” Global politics currently revolve around the idea that if carbon dioxide levels can be controlled, damage can be reversed. “But at the threshold, it then becomes hard for life to recover,” Benton said.

This is a key takeaway from the study. It shows what might happen if rapid global warming causes the planet’s rain forests to collapse in the future — a tipping point scientists are very concerned about.

Here’s how The Conversation reported the paper.

The trigger for the Permian–Triassic mass extinction event was the eruption of massive amounts of molten rock in modern day Siberia, named the Siberian Traps.

On land it is thought surface temperatures increased by as much as +10°C to +14°C (from 18°C (64°F) to around 30°C (86°F)) too rapidly for many life forms to evolve and adapt.

In other similar eruptions, the climate system usually returns to its previous state within 100,000 to a million years. But these “super greenhouse” conditions, which resulted in equatorial average surface temperatures upwards of 34°C (93°F) persisted for roughly five million years. In our study we sought to answer why.

We analysed how the biomes changed from just before the mass extinction event, until about eight million years after.

We hypothesised that Earth warmed too rapidly, leading to the dying out of low- to mid-latitude vegetation, especially the rainforests. As a result the efficiency of the organic carbon cycle was greatly reduced immediately after the volcanic eruptions.

Plants, because they are unable to simply get up and move, were very strongly affected by the changing conditions.

Before the event, many peat bogs and tropical and subtropical forests existed around the equator and soaked up carbon. However, when we reconstructed plant fossils from fieldwork, records and databases around the event we saw that these biomes were completely wiped out from the tropical continents. This led to a multimillion year “coal gap” in the geological record.

The tropical forests were replaced by tiny lycopods, only two to 20 centimetres in height. Nothing would have been growing higher than your knees by the end of the Permian and Early Triassic.

Enclaves of larger plants remained towards the poles, in coastal and in slightly mountainous regions where the temperature was slightly cooler. After about five million years they had mostly recolonised Earth. However these types of plants were also less efficient at fixing carbon in the organic carbon cycle.

We found that the initial increase in temperature from the Siberian Traps was preserved for five to six million years after the event because of the reduction in net primary productivity.

It was only as plants re-established themselves and the organic carbon cycle restarted that Earth slowly started to ease out of the super greenhouse conditions.

It’s always difficult to draw analogies between past climate change in the geological record and what we’re experiencing today. That’s because the extent of past changes is usually measured over tens to hundreds of thousands of years while at present day we are experiencing change over decades to centuries.

In the case of the Permian–Triassic mass extinction, plants were unable to respond on as rapid a time scale as 1,000 to 10,000 years. This resulted in a large extinction event.

WE ARE AT 430PPM ATMOSPHERIC CO2 RIGHT NOW.

The rate of CO2 increase has been +3ppm per year for the last 3 years in a row.

We will be at +500ppmCO2 by 2050.

The decline in the planetary albedo has increased the ENERGY going into the Climate System to +1.7W/m2 according to James Hansen.

That has the same effect as adding +138ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere SINCE 2014.

The level of atmospheric CH4 has increased +179ppb since 2000. CH4 levels are now around +1900ppb. The HIGH for the last million years was never more than about 700ppb.

The increase in CO2 since 1850 has the same effect as adding +100ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere.

IF these two forcings remain stable between now and 2050.

We could reach a CO2e level of about +750ppm by 2050.

This puts us in VERY DANGEROUS territory.

You might remember that CNN reported on another paper last fall related to the Permian extinction.

Mega El Niño instigated the end-Permian mass extinction

Science, 12 Sep 2024, Vol 385, Issue 6714 pp. 1189–1195

Mega El Niño events may have caused planet's greatest mass extinction | CNN…..Mega El Niños could have intensified the world's most devastating mass extinction, which ended the Permian Period 252…www.cnn.com

Here's something from the paper’s Abstract.

As atmospheric partial pressure of carbon dioxide doubled from about 410 to about 860 ppm (parts per million) in the latest Permian, the meridional overturning circulation collapsed, the Hadley cell contracted, and El Niños intensified.

The resultant deforestation, reef demise, and plankton crisis marked the start of a cascading environmental disaster. Reduced carbon sequestration initiated positive feedback, producing a warmer hothouse and, consequently, stronger El Niños. The compounding effects of elevated climate variability and mean state warming led to catastrophic but diachronous terrestrial and marine losses.

The “cascading environmental disaster” started at around +860ppmCO2. FAR below the +2500ppmCO2 level that would ultimately be reached.

By 2050 we will be at around 750ppmCO2e. At a +3ppm/year rate of increase we will reach 860ppmCO2e around 2085.

Assuming things don't accelerate.

We could see a Rate of Warming as high as +0.5°C per decade by 2050. Warming of +6°C up to +7°C by 2100 is ENTIRELY possible. These next 10–15 years are our LAST CHANCE to collectively take actions to slow this disaster down and try to mitigate it.

And the MAGAts just stepped on the gas.

Republicans' 'One Big Beautiful Bill' Not So Beautiful for the Climate…..Four research firms project that the Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill Act will raise greenhouse gas emissions and…www.scientificamerican.com

End Part One.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

• rc 07/07/2025

ADDENDUM:

You might remember my graph from The Crisis Report - 052 - Unclothing the Emperor : Understanding “What’s Wrong” with our “Climate Paradigm”. Part 2 - Acceleration of the Rate of Warming (RoW). (11/07/23)

At that time mainstream Climate Science was still insisting that the Rate of Warming WAS NOT accelerating. Well, in just 18 months the “Alarmist” position has now become “mainstream”.

Part Two of this series will cover three additional extinction events, the End Triassic, the End Cretaceous, and the PETM. Each of them has similarities that speak to how the overall Climate System works as well as unique aspects that have relevance to what's happening today.

Lastly, the book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) is still an excellent introduction to the ongoing Mass Extinction event currently taking place.

After researching the current mainstream view of the relevant peer-reviewed science, Kolbert estimates flora and fauna loss by the end of the 21st century to be between 20 and 50 percent “of all living species on earth”.

Since 2000 the Earth’s ALBEDO has decreased by about -0.6%. Most of the decrease (-0.5%) happened since 2014.

On average, about 30% of the sunlight that hits the Earth bounces back into space.

The planetary albedo helps determine the Earth’s average temperature. If the albedo rises (meaning that more light gets reflected back to space), all other things staying equal, our planet gets cooler. If the planetary albedo declines, the earth warms up.

Here’s the bad news: the Earth’s albedo has been declining during the last 20 years. BY A LOT, although it seems like a small amount.

Here’s what James Hansen stated in his post, Large Cloud Feedback Confirms High Climate Sensitivity 2025 — May, 2025

Earth’s albedo (or reflectivity) is the portion (percent) of incoming solar radiation that is reflected back to space. As shown in Fig. 1, in the period of precise satellite data (since early 2000), Earth’s albedo has decreased about 0.5%.

We described this change as a BFD (Big Fucking Deal) because it has staggering implications. Solar radiation reaching Earth is about 340 W/m2, averaged over Earth’s surface, so the 0.5% albedo decrease is a 1.7 W/m increase of absorbed solar energy.

It’s LIKE ADDING +138ppm OF CO2e to the atmosphere SINCE 2014.

+138ppmCO2e in JUST 11 YEARS.

For context:

That's about 7,000 years of “normal” CO2 increase IN JUST 11 YEARS.

That's “how significant” this change in the planetary albedo is. It massively accelerates and amplifies the warming caused by increases in CO2 and CH4.

If this change happened by itself, that sudden JOLT of ENERGY into the Climate System would be bad enough. However, there are several other factors that are also making things worse.

Our CO2 emissions have increased the atmospheric CO2 level by +58ppm since 2000.

That’s 3,000 years of “normal” interglacial CO2 increases. In just 25 years.

It took 150 years (1850–2000) to increase the CO2 level by +90ppm (280ppm to 370ppm).

Between 2000 and 2025 we increased the CO2 level by about 2/3rds of that amount (+58ppm).

At the present rate of increase (+3ppm/year), we will finish the second +90ppm in about 10 more years.

280ppm to 370ppm = 150 years.

370ppm to 460ppm = 35 years.

That's a +400% increase in the rate of CO2 increase.

In addition to that there is the rising level of atmospheric CH4 or methane.

Since 1850 the level of atmospheric CH4 has increased from 800ppb to over 1900ppb. Since 2000 the increase has been about +175ppb.

The current level of CH4 adds the equivalent of about +100ppm of CO2e to the atmosphere.

NO MATTER WHAT WE DO NOW — THESE THINGS HAVE ALREADY HAPPENED.

These things are facts and they have CONSEQUENCES.

Now.

You can argue about the exact CO2 equivalence of 1900ppb CH4. Should it be 100ppmCO2e, or 75ppmCO2e, or 125CO2e?

You cannot argue the methane concentration is not higher than it has been in millions of years.

Food for thought:

You can argue about the exact amount of change in the Earth’s Albedo and whether or not it’s due to “natural variation”.

You can argue about WHY the albedo has dimmed over the last 25 years. Is it about cooling SOx aerosols being washed out of the atmosphere as we stop burning high sulfur coal and oil or is it about a decline in the global amount of cloudiness?

You cannot argue that the albedo has not dimmed or that after 10 years (2014–2024) this dimming seems persistent, stable, and has TRIPLED the amount of ENERGY going into the Climate System since 2010.

You can argue about the significance of increasing the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by +58ppm since 2020. Will going from 370ppm to 425ppm increase the Global Mean Surface Temperature just the +1.5°C we have observed so far, or will it raise the GMST the +4°C over baseline that the paleoclimate record and the Alarmist models indicate?