Firstly, thank you for posting your excellent researches and analyses that contribute so much to the understanding of so many of us. Your work is valuable to us, so please try to keep going with it.
I have a small request: it seems to me that we are at a point where some research (and images) include AMOC declining or turning off altogether and some do not, depending on the models used. For us in Europe the difference is massive, so it would be very useful to know if it is AMOC corrected. I will also mention that I find myself hoping for AMOC to turn off much sooner than even the latest models - sooner the better! It seems the one morsel of relative hope in an otherwise very difficult scenario of mass extinctions and human collapse, although I do appreciate many northernmost Europeans won't feel the same way!
Of course you must also pace yourself, give yourself spaces, have other plans and reasons, as we all do. My own time includes walking my dog 3 or 4 times a day (a couple of hours), meditating most days, coffees with friends, consciously listening to music, daytime naps, and NOT watching the mainstream news (most of which is irrelevant to me). I'm sure you have developed your own strategies to decompress.
I posted the other day about the 5 stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
I said that after decades watching and studying climate change, and with the help of Lovelock's Gaia interpretations, I was mostly at 'acceptance' with occasional forays into anger (at the corrupted politics and lack of action) and bargaining (my personal survival stratégies). Perhaps if you are still mostly in the depression stage (that I understand very well), you could look forward to emerging into acceptance too. I'm sure it will come.
The other week someone criticised me for the 'acceptance' idea, angry that I was 'giving up' and I was supposed to be fighting for what I believed in. I wrote a long reply, but then didn't send it. I realised that she needed to find her own path through, and my comments and 'excuses' (to her) would fall on deaf ears. We can only do what we can do.
Whilst we are all complicit in what we have done to this extraordinary planet, the only one we have ever found that we know can sustain life, you nor I are personally responsible for it because we have not been given the godlike power to change this path. We can only be spectators and commentators. To assume more responsibility is an arrogance, even hubris!
Please keep up the good work as a spectator, commentator and explainer. Our tour guide!
And please forgive yourself for your lack of godlike powers! 🙂
This is exactly what I was thinking, how does AMOC turning off effect this research. A map showed northern Europe being fertile but publications about AMOC show the opposite.
Yes. Please take care Richard. We really appreciate your work. I am sure the weight of your research and message is massive and that you cannot help but absorb. For what it is worth we are carrying some of this with you. Love of all things takes a toll. Especially these days. but perhaps love also frees us. All life is but a fleeting thing.
The scale is so different now. We have really impacted the entire biosphere in ways that we could’ve never imagined even at 1 billion people. I often ask my housemates to imagine 8 billion houses just like ours. To contemplate whether that would even be sane on this planet. It never is.
Excellent breakdown. It’s always good to see someone trying to grasp and contend with the larger implications of the Climatastrophe, which is not a standalone, but follows the paths set out by the fatal corruption of social institutions long underway.
By the way, you should correct the spelling of the last word to “ mourn.”
Dear Richard, personally I admire and am very grateful for what you do here, your clarity and courage in doing it. I think it valuable because it forces me to pay attention, to bear witness, and to be intensely grateful for what we have now — still — the wonder of it, the beauty of it. I go about my days saying thank you to trees and feeling shame and sorrow. It is heart-opening stuff and I believe it is, in the crisis and last-minuteness of it all, helping me evolve, finding my love and my courage. It gives me enormous compassion for myself, other people, the world at large. If only I could have been like this without having to lose a world … but that seems to have been our path — not to know how precious it all was until we are losing it.
One quibble I have is that you are too optimistic. I do not see, without a managed collapse, which we are not capable of, how everything on earth is going to avoid being poisoned to death by not just plastics but also radiation sickness as the nuclear power stations are abandoned and begin to leak. I would value your thoughts on this.
Hello Richard, as a fellow autistic man I am obsessed with all the data you have gathered here and extremely grateful to read your analysis whenever you post. I just want to know facts and data and continue to learn how our world works and thankfully you provide all of this with no sugarcoating (even though it is all objectively horrifying).
Thank you so much for all you do and much luck moving forward. I know the knowledge must weigh heavy on your heart and mind but you are a clear voice out there helping many of us stay informed, and in the words of Sagan "it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
Thank you for a detailed review of where our climate is today and how we got here. The visuals are very insightful and worth a careful study. As to your question about what good is it to know all this I will answer that everyone deserves to know. There are many useful discussion groups that help people process the dire news that makes every other problem seem small. Here is just a partial list collated by friends of the late great Michael Dowd who created this website linked here: https://postdoom.com/conversations/
He not a Russian bot, he’s a fossil fuel apologist. He’s a hack. He spreads misinformation, and flat out wrong data to anyone who will listen. He uses blogs as “sources”. I could go on, but he’s the person that no one on earth should pay attention to.
In a weird way you are correct. There is no point to Net Zero. Our extinction is locked in either way. So drill baby drill is probably the only realistic expectation going forward. We were too stupid to try to plan around the problem so we are doing what we know best, slamming the gas pedal and trying to slam through it all.
I understand your position…. and I do agree that adaption and increased prosperity in any case is what we can always do best as mitigation and austerity was never a reality for most of the civilizations.
We do see the outlook differently… I would be more in fear of another ice age than a mild warming trend and more CO2 maybe an advantage rather than a threat.
Thankfully no ice age is coming anytime soon. Unfortunately it means we still all die. The heat is a problem. The oceans are literally dying. Coral might come back in 30-50 million years but in general gg.
Well….I have information from scientists that have come to a far different conclusion from the Climate alarmists.
Their position is that NetZero is unnecessary, technologically unattainable, economically unviable and extremely foolish.
This group is growing with many significant scientific experts now joining their team.
They will be getting a lot more attention and support from new western governments that are fast running out of confidence with the NetZero approach, and who are decommitting from the IPCC and COPs extravaganzas.
These climate realists have a lot more historical facts and scientific logic on their side of the argument. They can demonstrate that on nearly every metric earths ecosystems are thriving and that this is accruing from a modest warming and an increase in CO2, and that the human condition continues to improve using the power of fossil fuels.
They agree that the climate is slightly warming, but that its not an emergency, and its not us. They have facts that show that our climate has warmed and then cooled 5 times in the last 10,000 years and has been warmer than now, and we flourished in times of warmth and suffered in times of cold.
"What is the value of having this knowledge?" I like to know the details, as dire as they are. When my spouse was in the ICU earlier the year, I asked the doctors a million questions. Of course this didn't have any ability to change the outcome (she pulled through, by the way), but it gave me a tiny sense of control which was much needed. Similarly, knowing the details of the collapse somehow makes me feel less powerless, even though I of course am. If I'm getting hit over the head with a hammer, I want to know the specs at least.
The value of having the info now is our ability to get out in front of disaster that will come to our location on the map.
We can take evasive action now, before it's too expensive.
The second reason is every newsletter teminds me that things are not normal and to stay on top if my evasive action. Otherwise I slip back into "things are fine right now, so why worry" mentality. We need to pay attention to this.
I've seen a sentiment discussed a few times that resonates quite a bit with me, and it's that the epic story of our species, like a really compelling novel I can only read sporadically, I realized I'm gonna get to finish it. I know how it ends now!
All the angst and regret I had worried that life would go on and I would miss it, I'd miss all the technology advances, I'd miss the lives of my children and their children, I'd miss seeing a better and more compassionate world realized. But, I realized that I literally have a seat at the finish line of an 8-billion-person exploratory Amazing Race within this precious planet. I'll be able to have that last dance and properly mourn the end of the party.
My kids and their generation will be the last to bring up the rear, and they have all wisely concluded long ago that it was profoundly unethical to have children given the data before us, so there will be (thankfully) no generation to follow.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has a great quote about this feeling: "Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.
It's powerful to be a witness to the events of an unprecedented cosmic extinction event in real time. It is a reality we remind each other about often and we try to take that extra time and see and witness each step in it's stunning context. I prefer to think that we are quite privileged to see the end of the show, to hear the fading notes of the unavoidable Finale.
Pay no attention, Richard, to the shrill cowards clinging to denial and toxic positivity as some sort of "value" that is in reality mere delusion while they shriek and cry in their panicked defense of the comfort of BAU. Please continue to share data points and their consequences as they emerge so those of us with eyes to see can mark the road, witness the progression, and prepare ourselves and our circles as well as we can. It's the heroic mark of truth-tellers from history who stand like a beacon. Thank you.
Thanks Richard. I feel for you, understand, the difficulty traversing the last month. It is not easy. Peace man. Be yourself, do as you will, trust your own instincts. I too struggle with knowing what we know about 'collapse' etc. A couple of years ago I had to just stop looking at any climate science related materials after a couple of decades being up to date all the time - and seeing what was coming for a very long time -it was years before I could handle having another peak and now I don't as involved as before and protect myself eg the realization of the coral reefs destruction, that it could not be averted and would be the first really big tipping point, really hit me hard in the mid-2000s. Please take good care, you and everyone, be kind to yourself. It's not your fault. There's nothing you have to 'fix'. Peace.
Firstly, thank you for posting your excellent researches and analyses that contribute so much to the understanding of so many of us. Your work is valuable to us, so please try to keep going with it.
I have a small request: it seems to me that we are at a point where some research (and images) include AMOC declining or turning off altogether and some do not, depending on the models used. For us in Europe the difference is massive, so it would be very useful to know if it is AMOC corrected. I will also mention that I find myself hoping for AMOC to turn off much sooner than even the latest models - sooner the better! It seems the one morsel of relative hope in an otherwise very difficult scenario of mass extinctions and human collapse, although I do appreciate many northernmost Europeans won't feel the same way!
Of course you must also pace yourself, give yourself spaces, have other plans and reasons, as we all do. My own time includes walking my dog 3 or 4 times a day (a couple of hours), meditating most days, coffees with friends, consciously listening to music, daytime naps, and NOT watching the mainstream news (most of which is irrelevant to me). I'm sure you have developed your own strategies to decompress.
I posted the other day about the 5 stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
I said that after decades watching and studying climate change, and with the help of Lovelock's Gaia interpretations, I was mostly at 'acceptance' with occasional forays into anger (at the corrupted politics and lack of action) and bargaining (my personal survival stratégies). Perhaps if you are still mostly in the depression stage (that I understand very well), you could look forward to emerging into acceptance too. I'm sure it will come.
The other week someone criticised me for the 'acceptance' idea, angry that I was 'giving up' and I was supposed to be fighting for what I believed in. I wrote a long reply, but then didn't send it. I realised that she needed to find her own path through, and my comments and 'excuses' (to her) would fall on deaf ears. We can only do what we can do.
Whilst we are all complicit in what we have done to this extraordinary planet, the only one we have ever found that we know can sustain life, you nor I are personally responsible for it because we have not been given the godlike power to change this path. We can only be spectators and commentators. To assume more responsibility is an arrogance, even hubris!
Please keep up the good work as a spectator, commentator and explainer. Our tour guide!
And please forgive yourself for your lack of godlike powers! 🙂
This is exactly what I was thinking, how does AMOC turning off effect this research. A map showed northern Europe being fertile but publications about AMOC show the opposite.
Yes. Please take care Richard. We really appreciate your work. I am sure the weight of your research and message is massive and that you cannot help but absorb. For what it is worth we are carrying some of this with you. Love of all things takes a toll. Especially these days. but perhaps love also frees us. All life is but a fleeting thing.
As a longtime (former) journalist, my mantra is this: Never Read the Comments.
And please keep writing. You are doing important work. I am not alone in appreciating it, dire as it is. Thank you.
The scale is so different now. We have really impacted the entire biosphere in ways that we could’ve never imagined even at 1 billion people. I often ask my housemates to imagine 8 billion houses just like ours. To contemplate whether that would even be sane on this planet. It never is.
Excellent breakdown. It’s always good to see someone trying to grasp and contend with the larger implications of the Climatastrophe, which is not a standalone, but follows the paths set out by the fatal corruption of social institutions long underway.
By the way, you should correct the spelling of the last word to “ mourn.”
Dear Richard, personally I admire and am very grateful for what you do here, your clarity and courage in doing it. I think it valuable because it forces me to pay attention, to bear witness, and to be intensely grateful for what we have now — still — the wonder of it, the beauty of it. I go about my days saying thank you to trees and feeling shame and sorrow. It is heart-opening stuff and I believe it is, in the crisis and last-minuteness of it all, helping me evolve, finding my love and my courage. It gives me enormous compassion for myself, other people, the world at large. If only I could have been like this without having to lose a world … but that seems to have been our path — not to know how precious it all was until we are losing it.
One quibble I have is that you are too optimistic. I do not see, without a managed collapse, which we are not capable of, how everything on earth is going to avoid being poisoned to death by not just plastics but also radiation sickness as the nuclear power stations are abandoned and begin to leak. I would value your thoughts on this.
Yours in fear, in grief, in love. Thank you.
Hello Richard, as a fellow autistic man I am obsessed with all the data you have gathered here and extremely grateful to read your analysis whenever you post. I just want to know facts and data and continue to learn how our world works and thankfully you provide all of this with no sugarcoating (even though it is all objectively horrifying).
Thank you so much for all you do and much luck moving forward. I know the knowledge must weigh heavy on your heart and mind but you are a clear voice out there helping many of us stay informed, and in the words of Sagan "it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
Thank you for a detailed review of where our climate is today and how we got here. The visuals are very insightful and worth a careful study. As to your question about what good is it to know all this I will answer that everyone deserves to know. There are many useful discussion groups that help people process the dire news that makes every other problem seem small. Here is just a partial list collated by friends of the late great Michael Dowd who created this website linked here: https://postdoom.com/conversations/
Thanks for that I think it could help me. Saved the links and will look into it more.
I am reading your article… but we have a wide band of scientific conclusions on the climate.
Some say we humans have caused a climate Armageddon and some say that the climate is always changing its not an emergency and its not us.
You must understand that if this was a medical problem we would be seeking multiple 2nd opinions. and resisting a hasty operation….. such as NetZero.
Most of the hard facts now point to a non problem..
Just saying.
A non-problem? Are you a Russian bot? Lmao
He not a Russian bot, he’s a fossil fuel apologist. He’s a hack. He spreads misinformation, and flat out wrong data to anyone who will listen. He uses blogs as “sources”. I could go on, but he’s the person that no one on earth should pay attention to.
We need to keep a sense of perspective.... plenty of conflict of facts....
https://nigelsouthway.substack.com/p/no-netzero
In a weird way you are correct. There is no point to Net Zero. Our extinction is locked in either way. So drill baby drill is probably the only realistic expectation going forward. We were too stupid to try to plan around the problem so we are doing what we know best, slamming the gas pedal and trying to slam through it all.
Obviously this will go badly.
I understand your position…. and I do agree that adaption and increased prosperity in any case is what we can always do best as mitigation and austerity was never a reality for most of the civilizations.
We do see the outlook differently… I would be more in fear of another ice age than a mild warming trend and more CO2 maybe an advantage rather than a threat.
Thankfully no ice age is coming anytime soon. Unfortunately it means we still all die. The heat is a problem. The oceans are literally dying. Coral might come back in 30-50 million years but in general gg.
Well….I have information from scientists that have come to a far different conclusion from the Climate alarmists.
Their position is that NetZero is unnecessary, technologically unattainable, economically unviable and extremely foolish.
This group is growing with many significant scientific experts now joining their team.
They will be getting a lot more attention and support from new western governments that are fast running out of confidence with the NetZero approach, and who are decommitting from the IPCC and COPs extravaganzas.
These climate realists have a lot more historical facts and scientific logic on their side of the argument. They can demonstrate that on nearly every metric earths ecosystems are thriving and that this is accruing from a modest warming and an increase in CO2, and that the human condition continues to improve using the power of fossil fuels.
They agree that the climate is slightly warming, but that its not an emergency, and its not us. They have facts that show that our climate has warmed and then cooled 5 times in the last 10,000 years and has been warmer than now, and we flourished in times of warmth and suffered in times of cold.
https://nigelsouthway.substack.com/p/no-netzero
"What is the value of having this knowledge?" I like to know the details, as dire as they are. When my spouse was in the ICU earlier the year, I asked the doctors a million questions. Of course this didn't have any ability to change the outcome (she pulled through, by the way), but it gave me a tiny sense of control which was much needed. Similarly, knowing the details of the collapse somehow makes me feel less powerless, even though I of course am. If I'm getting hit over the head with a hammer, I want to know the specs at least.
The value of having the info now is our ability to get out in front of disaster that will come to our location on the map.
We can take evasive action now, before it's too expensive.
The second reason is every newsletter teminds me that things are not normal and to stay on top if my evasive action. Otherwise I slip back into "things are fine right now, so why worry" mentality. We need to pay attention to this.
I've seen a sentiment discussed a few times that resonates quite a bit with me, and it's that the epic story of our species, like a really compelling novel I can only read sporadically, I realized I'm gonna get to finish it. I know how it ends now!
All the angst and regret I had worried that life would go on and I would miss it, I'd miss all the technology advances, I'd miss the lives of my children and their children, I'd miss seeing a better and more compassionate world realized. But, I realized that I literally have a seat at the finish line of an 8-billion-person exploratory Amazing Race within this precious planet. I'll be able to have that last dance and properly mourn the end of the party.
My kids and their generation will be the last to bring up the rear, and they have all wisely concluded long ago that it was profoundly unethical to have children given the data before us, so there will be (thankfully) no generation to follow.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has a great quote about this feeling: "Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.
It's powerful to be a witness to the events of an unprecedented cosmic extinction event in real time. It is a reality we remind each other about often and we try to take that extra time and see and witness each step in it's stunning context. I prefer to think that we are quite privileged to see the end of the show, to hear the fading notes of the unavoidable Finale.
Pay no attention, Richard, to the shrill cowards clinging to denial and toxic positivity as some sort of "value" that is in reality mere delusion while they shriek and cry in their panicked defense of the comfort of BAU. Please continue to share data points and their consequences as they emerge so those of us with eyes to see can mark the road, witness the progression, and prepare ourselves and our circles as well as we can. It's the heroic mark of truth-tellers from history who stand like a beacon. Thank you.
Thanks Richard. I feel for you, understand, the difficulty traversing the last month. It is not easy. Peace man. Be yourself, do as you will, trust your own instincts. I too struggle with knowing what we know about 'collapse' etc. A couple of years ago I had to just stop looking at any climate science related materials after a couple of decades being up to date all the time - and seeing what was coming for a very long time -it was years before I could handle having another peak and now I don't as involved as before and protect myself eg the realization of the coral reefs destruction, that it could not be averted and would be the first really big tipping point, really hit me hard in the mid-2000s. Please take good care, you and everyone, be kind to yourself. It's not your fault. There's nothing you have to 'fix'. Peace.
"For that, I morn." Actually, that should be "mourn".