Open comment post: the AMOC shutdown and the future of agriculture
Posted on March 26, 2024 | 81 Comments
It’s time to move on to pastures new from my Saying NO… book, as I mentioned in my last post. Seems like an opportune moment to try an ‘open comment’ post to signal the change of direction, an idea I trailed at the start of the year.
What I think emerged from that discussion was for me to suggest a broad topic and perhaps a few talking points from it and then to see where things went in the discussion. Kind of like a normal post! Back then, Ruben wrote “I would love to hear your thoughts on AMOC shutdown, drought, more frequent extreme weather, and other growing challenges for agriculture. That might be a good topic for an open post.” Indeed I believe it would be, so let’s go with that.
In case this is unfamiliar, the ‘AMOC’ is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the major current system in the Atlantic Ocean, involving the northward flow of warm water and the southward flow of colder water which helps moderate the climate of both colder high-latitude countries and warmer low-latitude ones. Studies have suggested that present human-caused climate change could result in the shutdown of the AMOC, the consequences for both colder and warmer countries within this Atlantic system being, not to overstate the case … very bad.
A recent study that models AMOC shutdown has put the heebie-jeebies up a lot of people, including me – see Prof Stefan Rahmstorf’s summary here. Seems like we could be on course for an AMOC shutdown tipping point within the next seventy years with 95 percent confidence. The consequences within a century of the shutdown could be things like winter temperatures in northern Europe dropping by 10-30 degrees Celsius from the present, sea level rises of about a metre in some parts of the North Atlantic, the end of the Amazon rainforest, huge agricultural impacts, and other such worrisome things. And AMOC shutdown is only one part of the broader climate change picture.
There’s any number of things to talk about in relation to all this, and of course – the point of this post – I’m interested to know what others think. Six general questions for starters that are on my mind:
- Given the profile of long-term commenters/readers on this blog – who generally seem quite aligned with my own positions (surprise!), viz. lacking in personal political power, unconvinced by essentially apolitical ecomodernist techno-fixes and solutionism, unconvinced that top-down government actions will adequately address climate change and other aspects of the meta-crisis – how does the possibility of the AMOC shutdown and other rapid climate tipping points potentially within our lifetimes affect how we spend our time, think about our actions or orient to present politics?
- Assuming a drier and much colder North Atlantic world with much higher sea levels manifests rapidly within the next century or so, how do you see the social impacts playing out? Would ‘civilization’ and any kind of orderly agrarian world remain feasible across the North Atlantic and beyond? What would the processes of transition look like, socially? I’m particularly interested in discussing how contemporary political culture might deform, reform, crumble or persist in the face of rapidly devolving climatic and food crises. And also in what (if anything) we could usefully do individually or collectively now in terms of food and fibre production to increase resilience in the face of these looming crises.
- Much of our discussion of climate change in the wealthy and privileged North Atlantic world rests on the notion that when the proverbial hits the fan, it’ll be the poorer people in the poorer parts of the world who will be disproportionately in the muck. That’s usually how things work out, and there’s a lot to be said for well-meaning concern about people less fortunate than ourselves. However, I think this framing risks recuperating a rather privileged and complacent view that bad stuff only really happens to unfortunate people in unfortunate countries somewhere else, while ‘we’ will somehow carry on much as we are. Yet with the AMOC shutdown it looks like Britain and other North Atlantic countries may be among the places worst affected globally by climate change. Maybe picture a scene of small, leaky boats full of white folks desperately trying to get south across the Mediterranean as the coastguards of North African countries attempt to frustrate them in the face of a popular ‘stop the boats’ local politics. Does this change our contemporary political optics at all?
- Mentioning no names (I don’t want to get into another online spat already…), I’m often surprised at how many climate scientists (or scientists who talk about climate) on social and other media downplay climate risk and throw shade on so-called ‘doomers’. In relation to the AMOC shutdown, I’ve seen such scientists questioning the probabilities associated with the recent study. It’s reasonable to probe the minutiae but, as Prof Rahmstorf says, if we can’t rule the shutdown out at 99.9 percent probability (or higher, I’d venture to say), we have a big problem. Cavilling at whether it’s 95% likely, or something a bit less, is irrelevant in this context. Shades of Don’t Look Up. Which leads to my question: is our present culture, including some of its cleverest and best educated people, completely insane?
- I’ve always been a bit sceptical about James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis – not so much the point that there are planetary homeostatic mechanisms but the implicit teleology or ‘earth consciousness’ implied. I haven’t seen anyone talking about this aspect of the geophysics, and maybe I’m getting this entirely wrong, but presumably AMOC shutdown would counteract warming at high latitudes and increase albedo in the Arctic, while the global human economy and therefore greenhouse gas emissions would tank, with a further cooling effect. So maybe the shutdown would contribute to climate stabilisation at Holocene levels and rapid AMOC renewal as measured by deep planetary time. A horrific interregnum for multiple generations of humans, but nice homeostatic work by Mother Gaia. Almost as if she’s thought this through…?
- Finally, some people will no doubt say that the AMOC shutdown and other climate effects will spell the end of most agriculture, so we should use our high-tech electricity generating capacities – which for some reason they believe will not also end – to manufacture microbial food. I’m not convinced and am wondering if I should write a book about this?
So … I’m interested to see your thoughts. I will probably now take a break from blogging for a few weeks to think about my next writing project. And establish my lichen garden.
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This article from The Guardian says the tipping point on AMOC could well occur as soon as next year, or anytime between then and 2095. So there is still a fair bit of uncertainty, even though signs are not looking good. I think it is important to keep in mind that this could happen at an accelerating rate at pretty much any time.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/09/atlantic-ocean-circulation-nearing-devastating-tipping-point-study-finds
Recent reports on the broader topic of unfolding climate disruption strongly suggest that an acceleration of the rate of heating, most obviously in ocean temperatures, indicates we’re well into what I will call “the danger zone,” and since the concept of “carbon budget” was invented while we were apparently in “the safe zone” (or we presumed we were), I think it’s time to announce the end of some sort of “carbon budget” which we have to burn or spend. That is, we should regard ourselves as over budget, rather than swiftly nearing the end of our carbon budget. This will help us to get more honest about whether or not we want to devote so much effort, time, money, etc., in building the largest planned industrial project in human history, which goes by the name “the energy transition” — defined as an attempt to maintain something very much the current mode of “civilization” only running it on so-called “renewable energy” rather than fossil fuels.
When we look at “energy transition” in the light Richard Heinberg has recently set this project down in, it seems to be a mistake. In particular, it is a form of misdirection. And its consequences with regard to near term (over the next ten years) GHG emissions will be the opposite effect of lowering emissions. So it is utterly contradictory to the stated purpose of “energy transition”.
“Renewable energy sources require energy investment up front for construction; they pay for themselves energetically over a period of years. Therefore, a fast transition requires increased energy usage over the short term. And, in the early stages at least, most of that energy will have to come from fossil fuels, because those are the energy sources we currently have.”
from – Why We Can’t Just Do It: The Truth about Our Failure to Curb Carbon Emissions – resilience – (I’d post the link, but posting multiple links results in my post going into a moderation process … in which it will not be posted immediately. So “Google” the title for the link.)
“There’s one other hurdle to addressing climate change that goes almost entirely unnoticed. Most cost estimates for the transition are in terms of money. What about the energy costs? It will take a tremendous amount of energy to mine materials; transport and transform them through industrial processes like smelting; turn them into solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, vehicles, infrastructure, and industrial machinery; install all of the above, and do this at a sufficient scale to replace our current fossil-fuel-based industrial system. In the early stages of the process, this energy will have to come mostly from fossil fuels, since they supply about 83 percent of current global energy. The result will surely be a pulse of emissions; however, as far as I know, nobody has tried to calculate its magnitude.”
— from – Is the Energy Transition Taking Off—or Hitting a Wall?, by Richard Heinberg
I want the world to acknowledge that Heinberg is correct and the standard, conventional, popular narrative of “energy transition” is utterly and fundamentally flawed … because it will have the opposite of the intended effect. It will result in an increase in emissions at the time when we should be reducing emissions.
So we do have a lot of important work to do, and it involves having a REAL energy transition — by re-thinking and re-imagining what the phase “energy transition” ought to mean for us. What it ought to mean for us is a deliberate choice to reduce energy use as well as material throughputs in our economy. It suggests the need to embrace degrowth, which is more than just shrinking the economy. A lot more!
As for the future of food, and whether there will be a global food crisis. Of course there will be! The climate system is heading in a new direction, into another regime, and the instability means food will be challenging under the best of conditions apart from whatever the climate is doing, such as social and political conditions. I think it’s becoming increasingly apparent that we’re not going to be able to avert some kind and degree of civilizational collapse which is deeply rooted in climate destabilization… or climate chaos.
The globalized economic system will either break in a sudden collapse or will disintegrate more gradually. We can’t be sure which will occur, but one or the other will occur. This means we need to be realocalizing (and re-regionalizing) as much of our economy as we can in preparation for the storms ahead, as a matter of being prepared … rather like boarding up buildings before a hurricane. There will be a “small farm future”. It’s inevitable. The time to deliberately craft it is now, before the storms really hit us hard.
There will be no guarantees that the SFF will assure us access to basic livelihood and food in a destabilized climate system. But it’s the only option we will have. The only option we do have. So the time to prepare by building it is now.
Got me with your acronym ‘SFF’, but I’m not yet a smajei! ok, it’s ‘small farm future’. Thanks for kicking off what promises to be a rich threaded conversation. Like you, all my links are suppressed but searchable in duckduckgo.
I agree with your conclusion that we need to relocalize now, experimentally at the very least, to be more survival prone when TSHTF. But who is the ‘we’? (I suspect it is implicitly the global north top 10%, after all, most rural dwellers in the global south are already SFFers) Is it the only option we have? Maybe not, depending on timeframe, afterall, eventually we’re all going to die!
David Holmgren has the future mapped as 4 energy descent futures, Brown Tech being the one you describe as our global trajectory. He has plodded on with applied permaculture in print and lectures, including lengthening the glide path of urbanization in Retrosuburbia. But Kunstler was right, suburbia is the greatest misallocation of natural resources that history has ever known. The long emergency is upon us. Holmgren is a realist about unavoidable reduction in population, consumption and pollution.
The World Economic Forum, on the other hand, has a major infrastructure for tracking, analyzing, influencing, coercing policy to happen. Anyone can subscribe to the public facing website and content as I do. It sounds credible and germane to all major issues until one asks, ‘who are they acting on behalf of?’ It has to be the global elites, who must have long since reached the conclusion there is not enough energy to keep 8B people alive and well. They need enough prols to keep themselves in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Long live the gig economy! They know who the ‘we’ is. (Pogo did too.)
Jack Alpert, aka Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab, skil.org, has been calculating population numbers for many years. Most recent addition is a document entitled, A Plan for Unwinding the Predicament. He calculates how many people can be sustained in reasonable middle class european comfort supported by only truly sustainable energy sources, hydro and geothermal. It’s about 500,000. He even envisions a way to get from 8B to .5K without bloodshed.
Then there is the constraint of energy physics. Tim Garrett, astrophysist at U Utah, studies clouds, and energy dynamics. The Garrett Relation stands unrefuted (as well as unrecognized in MS science) that civilization is a heat engine, just like any warmblooded mammal and requires energy just to stand still, never mind grow. He’s calculated it and checked it against actual history. As you say JRM, to build out anything like an alternative energy infrastructure is a pipedream both in energy cost and time scale. Checkmate. No such thing as a ‘REAL energy transition’ I will say.
But Nate Hagens has been refining his model, The Great Simplification, to explain why humans seems to be programmed to be suicidal as a species, and therefore what can be done about it by any of us who are awake and systems minded. After over 100 interviews on his podcast, and a sojourn to a yoga ecovillage in India, he is approaching the conclusion that human nature is stumbling badly, on its evolutionary path towards greater consciousness. So also seem to say Kim Robinson in Ministry for the Future and Octavia Butler in her Parables novels.
Nevertheless there are brilliant and compassionate humans who are trying to educate, role model, and/or inspire numerous local efforts. These are the bright lights of evolving consciousness.
Helen Norbert Hodge has been studying Ladakh culture for several decades as an analog to global culture. Her foundation LocalFutures.org curates a large resource base of information for right-sizing this civilization. Is she insanely committed to the revitalisation of cultural and biological diversity and the strengthening of local communities and economies? Can any conscientious objector be called sane?
Joe Brewer has been working for 10 years or more to figure out how to elevate the skill level of lots of people worldwide to design the civilization footprint at bioregional scale. Anyone can get on board at Design School for Regenerating Earth.
Ok, enough of a palette of magnificent humans committed to building a better world our hearts know is possible. Andrew Boyd offers a great service to the mass of english speakers who are just confused. He built a decision tree, A Better Catastrophe. It helps one focus where we are confused and what our options are. Conclusion: there is no way out, justly or otherwise, so shoulder your share of the burden and live/love life with as much grace and compassion as you can.
Michael Dowd, RIP, has assembled a rich resource of talks, courses, interviews and links at postdoom. As has Shaun Chamberlin at Darkoptimism. Both help the sojourner navigate this grief stricken and ricketty future with emphasis on the inner life.
William Catton nailed it with his concise magnus opus, Overshoot, in 1980 and sequel, Bottleneck, available online not in print. He states as clearly as anyone, and is echoed by William Rees and the Odums, that the technological panaceas proposed by those who would harvest from the seas, harness the winds, and farm the deserts are ignoring the fundamental premise that “the principals of ecology apply to all living things.” These principles tell us that, within a finite system, economic expansion is not infinite and population growth cannot continue indefinitely.
So we indeed are fated to be living in the endtimes, a ringside seat at the crescendo and implosion of the energy rich market economy called globalism. How to survive the future is a question that will soon concern us all.
@ Ian Graham –
“As you say JRM, to build out anything like an alternative energy infrastructure is a pipedream both in energy cost and time scale. Checkmate. No such thing as a ‘REAL energy transition’ I will say.
Thanks for your lively and intelligent contribution to the unfolding dialogue, Ian.
What seems to me to be a pipe dream is what I sometimes call the “full replacement” narrative (FRN) on “energy transition”. The FRN says “we” (humanity in the general sense, I suppose) can maintain a material culture and economy very much like the present one, only it will be fully electrified and will use “renewable” energy rather than fossil fuels. Rather obviously, it proposes to keep the cars (all 1.5 billion of ’em and growing), but to replace them with electric cars. It plans to keep industrial-technological capitalism, but to run it on wind, solar, hydro and magical fairy dust.
FRN is what overwhelmingly most people mean when they say “energy transition”. It is this narrative which is a pipe dream.
“No such thing as a ‘REAL energy transition’ I will say.”
Well, I’d say yes there is. The REAL energy transition, for the most part, replaces exosomatic energy sources with endosomatic energy sources. It re-localizes and re-regionalizes economies and material culture.
(By the way, a lot of the future “economy” will be in the form of what I call “community self-provisioning,” which is like individual or family self-provisioning, but at the next social scale up — e.g., villages and neighborhoods. It is “self-provisioning” in that it takes place outside of a market/exchange system, as was the case before and external to what we call “civilization”.)
I’m proposing we keep the phrase “energy transition,” but toss out the pipe dream part.
Hello Mr Martin.
I do not, nor will ever have the educational, technical or knowledge based skills to give any coherent or cogent opinion on the body of your essay.
What I can give you is what we do to reduce and mitigate risk.
We will fail all our targets in relation to reducing the worst aspects of climate change, because of the neoliberal and lobbying base that western civilisations are now based on.
Rather than spending our efforts to mitigate change, we should accept in the case of the AMOC, that it will collapse and start to work on the enormous challenges we will face by preparing for them now.
As this would require successive governmental strategies and a generational commitment, this also, will not happen.
Therefore, the mitigation and planning needs to be on a community level.
I would start the process in funding a study by a university specialising in agriculture, history and biology to give a white paper on what effects we can expect to see when the AMOC stops in terms of how we can function as a society.
I believe what is critical is how the British Isles are affected, as land mass plays a critical part, so comparisons with say, Newfoundland are not entirely relevant.
Crowdfundme?
Derek
to Chris:
it would be nice if the comments platform could provide for editing as well as threading. I know I will want to revise or append to what I have written.
“it would be nice if the comments platform could provide for editing as well as threading.”
It may be possible to alter the computer code that runs this gizmo to do this. (?)
Chris Smaje also publishes these blog posts at Substack, which does allow for editing — but not bolding of text, italics, etc. (if I remember right). But Chris redirected all commenting to here … and disabled commenting there. Which makes really good sense, even if it means we cannot edit our own comments.
Hooray! Let the fun begin!
1.
This is very timely for me. We are moving to the land I grew up on, in the most arid region of Canada, to help my elderly parents. I am deep in the anxiety and uncertainty.
I am trying to think of this as what Sharon Astyk calls “Collapsing in place”—she points out that for many reasons most people will enter collapse where they are, not in some eco-village lifeboat retreat. So what does that look like?
We have deeded water rights…but what if no rain or snow falls in the watershed?
One of the houses was designed in 1980, planning for large amounts of passive ventilation. This strategy no longer works in a world with several months of smoke due to the wildfires. Air conditioning may also become necessary to life.
And can we even grow plants in this heat and drought?
So, I am trying to plan for a certainly hotter and dryer future, and for a world that, for example, will also have less access to electricity. I am a collapsenik, because I don’t think the massive, brittle and poorly maintained systems like electrical grids will endure—but at the very least we will have less stable power supply due to wildfires burning poles, transformers and distribution stations.
2.
I think you would have to be deeply delusional to have high hopes for society. Rebecca Solnit should turn in her pundit ID.
These past four years of pandemic have showed our social capacity, and in fact it was much worse than even I imagined.
The US is coming out of their second highest wave of the pandemic, with 1,000 Covid deaths per week…and did you hear about that? Did you see even masks, let alone any serious attempt to constrain the ravages of the pandemic?
We do not have the social capacity to cope with the future. If we did, we would have already changed it. My best advice is to strengthen real ties with your neighbours and communities, because those will be the largest units of mutual aid.
3.
I have long questioned the idea “the poor” will suffer most. The poor are actually highly skilled at adapting to changing circumstances, to getting along with less, and to supporting each other through adversity.
I think the overdeveloped world is going to do, again, what we saw with Covid, which is to demand their life not change, and to stand there and die until their demand is met.
Now, the resilience of poor folks carries little weight when your entire country is submerged. I am not saying they will not have it hard. But we have much further to fall, and we are going to land with many fewer skills or support systems.
4.
I don’t think our culture is insane, but it is maladaptive.
We are a culture of The Word. We revere thinking, rationality, and debate, and it turns out those things have little bearing on human behaviour.
Since we worship rationality, we end up with unfortunate situations—naming names—like where Michael Mann thinks he knows his backside from a hole in the ground vis a vis communication and human behaviour.
I have had the misfortune of working with engineers who think they are qualified to design the communications program.
So…I don’t think our culture is insane, but it is not going to get us out of this mess, and in fact, it will make things worse along the way.
5.
Yes, Gaia will be fine, but human timescales will be unpleasant. Earth has already undergone very rapid extreme heating, as well as massive dieoffs. Earth will be lush and abundant again, at some point, with a marvellous and startling diversity of wonderfully adapted organisms—some tiny number of which may even be human.
6.
John Michael Greer counsels that we are entering a salvage state. Solar panels that are manufactured today will be in use for a hundred years, providing some trickle of power to some important task.
So, it strikes me as entirely possible that various small populations will survive in caves, eating glop grown under LED lights. But there won’t be many of them, and I am not sure it will be a life worth living.
Should you write a book about this? I don’t know…we may worship The Word, but is this a life worth living for you? Certainly the people who are so ignorant of the physical world that they think the future will be just like this one except shinier will dismiss such a book.
As I have said before, I think folks like Leigh Phillips are actually just terrified to their very bones of dying, and so they have patched a Christian afterlife over onto their “rational” visions of Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism.
So, if you write a book like that you are effectively just a Satanist, and they want to go to Heaven.
Since you are granting me my wishes, I want you to write a book about being a peasant! And I want you to lard it with “Yes, that would be lovely, but that is no longer an option, so let’s talk about being peasants.”
p.s. I have been researching this land in advance of our move, and have found two different PhDs on the mosses and lichens of this area. I can walk out into the fields and look at boulders covered in lichen that has been growing there for…thousands of years? In the front yard? Wonderful.
1. AMOC shutdown is certainly a possibility that has been on my mind already.
I keep half an eye on youtube gardeners in places like Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. It’s also worth looking at historical precedents like the Little Ice Age, though that was confounded by the prior huge population decreases from the Black Death and the associated shortages of labour.
I grew up in a rather colder and drier climate than the UK enjoys, though slihgtly further south, so the winters were a bit brighter and summers a bit darker. My grandparents did still have a vegetable garden, despite regular winter temperatures of -30ºC and colder. They didn’t grow the same diversity of vegetables that I do, but there was time in the short summers for peas, spuds, carrots, onions and even sweetcorn — though in a drought year when watering wasn’t allowed, the corn did just used to die. I don’t think my grandfather was using heirloom or landrace varieties of anything,
My grandparents also had a “cold store” or root cellar, accessible from the basement of the house — not to keep the vegetables cold, but to stop them freezing solid as they would have if left in the ground. That said, 40ºC heat in summer wasn’t unheard of, and certainly 35ºC was fairly common. I can confirm that a dry heat is really much more comfortable than anything with humidity.
So: growing vegetables is possible with a shorter season and hard winters, because, well, people have done it. But with cooler summers too, we’d probably need to do a lot more growing under cover. This is one reason that I asked for (and got) a greenhouse (the largest allowed on the allotment) for my 40th birthday. Getting access to protected growing space is only going to get harder as other economic and ecological impacts play out, so I’m not going to assume that e.g. twinwall polycarbonate or plastic sheeting will be available forever. (My greenhouse is toughened glass and has, so far, held up well in the various winter storms we’ve had.) For now, the greenhouse is a help with season extension for tender plants like melons, especially given that the frost pocket nature of the Near Allotment means our last frost can be as late as early June (but usually isn’t); in future it might be a way to ensure staples like maize get a decent start, or I could just grow the beans in there. (Last year I experimented with greenhouse beans and drew the conclusion that it’s better to grow French beans outdoors where they do just fine than to crowd out my other greenhouse plants.)
Hot beds are also a good technology to look at. Last year I direct-sowed squashes on still-warm compost heaps on 1st May and covered them lightly with netting for the first while, and had the best squash harvest I’ve ever had. We are still eating squashes. We will still be eating squashes for some time to come. Hot beds are moderately labour-intensive but you also end up with a bunch of compost at the end. Mine are made of fallen leaves, spent coffee grounds, and (mostly ramial) wood chips; I expect that in a much colder climate and with increasing economic disturbance, the woodchips might be harder to come by and the spent coffee grounds supply might dry up, but I suspect if you kept a big pile of leaves and crop wastes (and maybe some wood ash or something — I’m going to asssume that in longer winters, charcoal will be far too valuable to use as an agricultural amendment) and then started peeing on it in February or March it would heat up enough to be useful. I’m not experimenting with this yet myself, because my household goes into mutiny when I start saving pee in jars and transporting it two and a half miles by bicycle, and nobody wants to pee in the back garden for some reason (all parts of the garden are in full view of one set of neighbours or another), but I imagine the objections would dry up pretty fast if we were facing starvation.
All of this is relatively small-scale and relatively labour-intensive but that’s how I’m expecting agriculture to be in the future anyway. The bigger issue is that beyond “oh, this could make the weather…. quite cold here” it’s difficult to model complex systems well enough to make specific predictions, and so thinking about AMOC quickly devolves into trying to be prepared for every eventuality, trying to develop general resilience rather than work toward not being affected by any one occurence. I have read (I don’t remember where) that in pre-modern times there was a crop failure about once every five or six years and that was generally fine because people could get through on the previous winter’s yield, the issue was every generation or so there would be crop failure two years in a row and a famine would ensue. I don’t know how true this is, but I expect a more volatile climate than we’ve had for the last ten thousand years or so. The only way around this that I can see is to have a much more diverse group of staple crops; I’ve written here a number of times about how my peas do well in a cool wet spring and my French beans do well in a hot dry summer — both of them are perfectly good for making soup in the winter, as long as they don’t rot on the vines (and I do have a greenhouse where I can dry them). A genetically diverse collection of a staple grain like wheat or barley is going to be a bigger pain in the neck to harvest, but also more likely to just die if the weather isn’t perfect. I think there is also great value in short-season crops, so I am looking into bush beans and peas a bit more than I used to (I have previously mostly preferred climbing types, which outgrow some of the pests and give me more crop waste to compost).
2. I’m afraid that I think nation-states with good access to fossil energy (and to an extent, nuclear energy) will mostly export their problems elsewhere.
I don’t know how much “agrarian civilisation” is possible in a chaotic climate, but I want to separate out the concept of settled agrarian modes of production from that of civilisation, here; nomadic pastoralist and hunter-gathering societies may not be “civilised” in the sense of having cities supported by a surrounding landscape… but that’s not really what most modern people mean when they say civilised.
I am continually surprised by how much my horticulture and foraging activities blend into one another — I do things like inoculating freshly-cut logs in the park with mushroom spore slurry, or sowing climbing peas in the cages around street trees, but I also forage quite a bit of my fruit and my winter greens. I took a year off from jam-making in 2023 and we are still not through the backlog; I don’t really have enough bottles or storage space to make even more wine. My grandmother was constantly taking cuttings from this or digging up that to bring it home to her (flower) garden. I find it hard to believe that the line between hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist-preserver is really that stark. I know that my paternal agrarian ancestors poached venison, because I’ve heard the family stories about them feeding it to the local law enforcement; I am just as certain that the abundant Saskatoon berries that grow around where my paternal grandparents grew up were widely encouraged by the nêhiyawak people who lived there before they did and are also some of my ancestors if you go back far enough (and who were themselves new-ish to the area — I think mostly they came in with the fur trade of the 1740s). But my point is that while I think our current way of life might change drastically, and while I myself live in a city and don’t want to discount the many benefits modernity has brought me, I’m really not convinced that settled agrarian modes of production are somehow superior to other modes, or that “pure” settled agrarian vs “pure” nomadic pastoralism vs “pure” hunter-gatherer lifestyles are really all that accurate as ways to think about this. Humans will eat any damn thing we can if we’re hungry enough, including lichen.
I think it was Buckminster Fuller who talked about not destroying old systems but out-competing them. This is an attractive prospect, but I’m not sure how well it works in a degrowth situation.
I still think the best thing we can do is learn to produce at least some of our own food and fibre. I think there’s also a lot to be said for continuing to breed our domestic staples to be a bit more like weeds (i.e. not require perfect conditions) and continuing to find weeds we can eat and selectively breed to be tastier; the work that Shane Simonsen is doing with banya nuts, for example, is probably very valuable. In a messy corner of the Soup Garden I’m trying to get a self-seeding greens patch going, since the bulk of the winter greens this year has been from Allium triquetrum, sorrel, and some perennial leeky-garlicky thing that might or might not be a Babington’s leek (it was already there), supplemented by some autumn-sown chard and regular rotations of pea shoots; I’d love to have a summer selection too, with, say, amaranth, Horn of Plenty (I’ve only ever seen it for sale as an edible at Real Seeds, but it does self-seed very nicely and is a good summer substitute for lamb’s lettuce), some more chard, salad burnet (though this is more of a spring thing really) and so on. The goal there isn’t production of calories, but a self-sustaining population of low-effort greens so that I can spend the limited time I do have on production of things with more bulk or value.
3. I don’t want to equate the suffering of food bank guests in London with the suffering experienced by refugees, but… there are people in London who die of malnutrition. Measuring GDP instead of some more accurate indicator of wellbeing is already affecting people quite badly even within the privileged West/North/whatever, and there’s no reason to think that the already stark divisions wihtin our societies won’t get worse. Rhetoric around people being “unwilling” to work, alleged disability benefit fraud making newspaper headlines, and the ridiculous bureaucratic hoop-jumping required of people receiving jobseeking-related benefits are all part and parcel of the tendency to blame poor people for not being richer. The psychological mechanism for this, as far as I can tell, is the same as that for blaming sick people for being sick: if we can convince ourselves that particular bad things only happen to people who have done something wrong, then we can go on believing that we (who don’t do wrong things of course) will be safe. This is not actually how the world works, though. I see this pattern in a lot of our politics and it worries me at least as much as the practicalities of attempting to move anywhere else should conditions here become untenable. The remedy is probably spiritual rather than political.
4. Yes, sortof. My answer would be the same even without unfolding climate catastrophe, though.
When we deem a person insane it is often illuminating to ask: what would need to be true for their words or behaviour to be reasonable rather than insane? I think a similar question here is instructive: what values or priorities would need to be held by those with power in our society, for their actions to appear reasonable? After that you can often just follow the money.
This kind of idolatry — of putting economic growth ahead of the good and flourishing of all creation (including humanity) — is one of the reasons we so desperately need people to point the way to other modes of production and other attitudes to meeting human (and wider ecological) needs.
5. I am also somewhat sceptical about the idea of a consious planet, but then I believe in a dude from around two thousand years ago who died, harrowed Hell, and then came back to life to tell his mates to get their act together, so… who am I to judge whether Creation might have something we might best identify as consciousness?
I do think there is value in considering the earth (or a tree or a fire or a river or a bear or the wind) as an agent rather than as an object; something to be reckoned with in relationship, rather than a detail to be controlled. If thinking in terms of consciousness works then go for it. (And… some of my own spiritual experience has been remarkably animist, for a Christian, but more on that another time perhaps.)
6. Again, changes in our modes of production are not the same as “the end of most agriculture”. Perhaps people who think AMOC shutdown will spell the end of most agriculture are defining agriculture far too narrowly; a common problem among those who advocate for, say, precision fermentation. But I think someone has already written a book on why using electricity to generate food is not the best plan and certainly not the One Weird Trick To Save Humanity it is sometimes portrayed as by its advocates.
The early Christian church spent a bunch of time bickering over which beliefs are heterodox, basically playing whack-a-mole with various heresies (dualism, gnosticism, Marcionism, Arianism, modalism etc…) which, followed to their logical conclusion, would have negative consequences. There were committees and councils and no small amount of violence and schism. The creeds we ended up with as a result are interesting to me as an artefact of that time, because in general they state the positive rather than the negative. Without the historical context it’s quite difficult to realise that each and every sentence is also refuting one heresy or another, a deliberate act of boundary-marking (if not outright gatekeeping). But they’re also very much more complex than One Weird Trick.
Another boundary, though, is… less exclusive, and that is around baptism (and various other sacraments). The church teaches that all who are baptized in the name of the Trinity have salvation in Christ; but it does not say (at least these days) that those who are not baptized, or whose baptisms are done with some other wording, are *not* saved. That… isn’t something the church today properly claims to have any knowledge about. It’s out of our wheelhouse; God can do what God likes, including operating outside the confines of our own traditions and rituals. It’s like if I plant some carrot seeds in tidy orderly rows: I’m pretty sure that the plants that I sowed are going to be carrots, but… that doesn’t mean there aren’t any carrots elsewhere. This is not how our sacraments are usually presented, because it turns out humans really like binary thinking and their feeling of safety within an “in” group is intensified by thinking that anyone not in the “in” group is in some other, lesser “out” group. But personally, I have seen too much grace and blessing at work in the lives of people who aren’t Christians (either in terms of their beliefs or in terms of their baptism) to feel I can really treat sacraments as that kind of binary. So baptism isn’t One Weird Trick To Get Saved, but an external marker of an attitude or relationship which is part of a sort of dance with that which I identify as Divine, and there are lots of ways to dance. (There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.)
There will always be some technologist or journalist who wants to sell us One Weird Trick To Save Humanity, but… they also seem prone to thinking that anything outside the One Weird Trick simply won’t work. How do we ascertain, though, that a small farm future is not also One Weird Trick? I mean, I think it isn’t — simply because I observe how those of us who think it is our best bet are grappling with complexity and practical challenges as we go along — but framing the whole thing as “Our One Weird Trick is Better!” plays right into the hands of the extractivists/dualists/eco-modernists/whatever.
Articulating a set of strategies for the future that is more complex and resilient than One Weird Trick is going to be a longer process, but part of that is probably (like writing the creeds) figuring out a way to refute things that won’t work, but using positive language. Off the top of my head, maybe this looks like “Sunlight is ultimately the source of energy for food production on earth” rather than “electricity is probably going to be too scarce to use it for growing food in vats when we could use sunlight instead” but I’m not entirely certain; and there are probably many more tenets to develop. (NB I would try and avoid the councils and violence, though I’m not convinced schism is inherently bad.)
I love ‘this one weird trick will save the world..’ hilarious and absolutely brilliant. I think it could be a great strap line for a small farm future though – simply because it’ll never be one thing.
I also love the bible of positive affirmation principles, this could become an illuminated text and also put into song! Perhaps it could be called ‘This One Wierd Trick Will Save the World’?
Thank you!
“I do think there is value in considering the earth (or a tree or a fire or a river or a bear or the wind) as an agent rather than as an object; something to be reckoned with in relationship, rather than a detail to be controlled. If thinking in terms of consciousness works then go for it. ” That is also my perspective Kathryn.
I recently heard Peter Wadhams talking about ice loss on Greenland – he’s professor of Ocean physics at Cambridge (i may have his title slightly wrong but he’s been studying Greenland for a long time). He said (peak?) summer ice loss had recently accelerated from 80 million tonnes per day to 80 million tonnes per hour – that was the headline figure and I should have been listening more carefully but I was listening to the podcast while doing other things. But the point was that this much fresh water spilling into the north Atlantic is part of the process leading to the shutting down of the amoc and its just accelerated ramatically. Secondly this much ice loss reduces the the height of the ice on Greenland and so more ice is exposed to warmer air at lower elevations so accelerating the ice loss. So we already have a feedback loop.
I’m not sure this reverses in any meaningful time frame – ice on Greenland is replenished by snowfall which would be reduced in the absence of the amoc bringing warm wet air northwards and the change in albedo across northern latitudes might well offset the effects of colder winter air temperatures – I don’t know (why would I?) and I’m not sure anyone does.
My understanding is one of the unique features of the Holocene has been climatic stability and that many earlier epochs had far greater short term localised climatic variability – that doesn’t bode well for agriculture (or much else).
The shutting down of a major ocean current is going to increase ocean anoxia, a feature of all mass extinction events linked to climate change. It will probably have knock on effects on other large ocean currents as well – thus another feedback loop. For the UK we’ll probably get drier and lack sufficient water for the current population (the SE of the country is already short of water) so the idea of small boats heading in the other direction has some basis but you’d never get anyone to take that idea seriously in the current political climate – but really I think amoc shutting down is a global event and one in which all bets will be off – what lies the other side in terms of human culture politics etc is as visible to us as the inside of a black hole.
There seems no political will or mass movement to even try and avert the possibility of this happening – and I’m not sure we could even if we wanted to – the processes set in motion, including the momentum of our own civilization are probably too great and largely beyond our control. Human brains – mine included just aren’t very good at dealing with uncertainty or timescales beyond the fairly immediate or imagining a world much different from the one we have – for instance we’re here on the energy intensive internet trying to imagine how agriculture will fare in a climatic regime outside of that within which agriculture developed or has ever existed. I’m not deriding our efforts just trying to point out our hardwired limitations in the face of very radical change on a timescales perhaps only slightly longer than a mortgage.
None of this is very cheery and I’m not sure I’ve addressed any of your talking points – I’m writing on my phone which makes for disjointed thoughts I find.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention, even if it indeed is rather sobering. As far as I can tell there’s been a steady stream (no pun intended) of bad news about the AMOC for a while now. People of the “doomer/prepper” persuasion sometimes push a simplistic “just move as far north as possible” angle, but I think this shows the picture is much more complicated.
Also timely in a way for me, since I’m at a point where I’m considering whether I want to stay in Norway for the rest of my life, and the fate of the AMOC is one potential argument for getting out while I can. In general it seems easier to live a low-energy life in a place with a warmer climate, as long as you can get enough water. On the other hand, I’ve been researching the Canary Islands a little lately, and basically decided it wouldn’t make sense to go there considering their drought issues. I guess the conclusion is that there really is no “escape” and that we’re going to have to lie in the bed we’ve made at this point. (Other than maybe New Zealand and parts of Australia, I suppose)
One aspect that’s still unclear to me is how bad the situation would actually get with an AMOC shutdown. I’ve seen suggestions ranging from a plunge into full-on Younger Dryas conditions to basically the same climate the Canadian Maritime provinces have today. And as Kathryn mentions above, those places are definitely habitable, even if we’d have to adjust our agricultural practices. Would we still get regular summers, just with much colder winters? Or are we talking about 10C summers here?
Cold winters would be nothing new here in Norway, of course. This year we had the first proper old-fashioned one since I moved to inland Norway from the coast, the kind of winter that used to be business as usual according to the old-timers here. I think the coldest I saw from my kitchen window this year was -27C. Honestly not that big a deal as long as you have ample firewood, but of course you do need to acquire, stack and handle all that wood. I’ll admit a future regime of constant -40C winters would be rather daunting, though. One household chews up rather a lot of trees just to get through one winter, compared to warmer climates where you don’t need to spend any energy at all to keep warm.
I do think the end of the AMOC would be the death knell for Northern Norway. The region is barely habitable as it is, and has seen a steady outflow of people to the south of the country ever since the 70s. Traditionally people also relied on fishing there for much of their diet, but of course those stocks have been decimated by industrial trawling and pollution.
To move the lens outward from my own country, and to touch on your point 3: a lot of people envision huge migrations into Europe from the Middle East and Africa as those areas dry out. For instance, John Michael Greer envisions this process turning Europe Islamic in a century or two IIRC. Like you said, maybe one effect of an AMOC shutdown would be to prevent this, leading to the survival of “traditional” European culture after all…or at least what’s left of it after centuries of industrialism and consumerism.
On a side note, I always felt the “Islamic Europe” theory was a bit flawed, in that it seems to assume all the migrants will hold to a strict version of Islam, the present Europeans will totally passively absorb that, and most importantly: that the incoming migrants won’t be deeply affected by and intermixed with the existing culture after a few generations. Or: sure, Europe in 2250 might be “Islamic”, but it’d probably be a weird form of Islam no one in present-day Morocco or Iraq would recognize.
As for contemporary political culture, in my opinion it would crumble for sure. All our current arrangements are extremely “min-maxed”, to use a gaming phrase, or totally optimized for our current climate and situation with very little slack. Even more so since the AMOC shutdown would be accompanied by a bouquet of other crises too. I think the result would be a political culture that has no choice but to grapple with reality. Ie., Peasants’ Republic of Wessex-style calculations might come in to fashion after all. 🙂 The result would probably be very lean times for many, but also the abandonment of bad habits like the absurd quest for eternal economic growth, in favor of whatever needs to be done to secure shelter, food and fiber here and now.
Regarding “What would the processes of transition look like, socially?”: well, that’s of course the most important and interesting question, and also hardest to answer. I’d like to think it’d involve the Boomers finally relinquishing their grip on power, and the replacement of financial and academic-based elites with…let’s say people of a rather more pragmatic persuasion. And like you and others have been saying for a while, some kind of land ownership reform/redistribution seems like a given.
Maybe I’m too much of an optimist, but I’ve long thought people will give up things like the internet and consumerism with less resistance than many think. I suspect that for most people (ie. the upper and middle classes, not those who really struggle) it isn’t really about the material comfort as such, but more about not appearing as lesser than the people around them. You can see this dynamic in an interesting way here in Norway, where people will gladly pay for holiday cabins in remote places with compost toilets and 12v solar electricity, even seeing it as a plus.
Meanwhile they’d consider it unfathomably far beneath them to put up with, say, an SFF-style compost toilet at home. Not because there’s anything objectively uncomfortable about it, but just because it’s a sign of poverty and “undignified”. Or “going backwards”, with our old friend the Religion of Progress again. As things unravel, courtesy of the AMOC and other climate and economic impacts, I think a lot of this kind of thinking will go away and people will adapt to circumstances, as long as everyone else has to adapt along with them, if that makes sense.
In places like my own country I’d also expect to see the government as an “employer of last resort” with a lot of New Deal-style public works if the supply of office jobs dries up, but maybe that would be more unlikely in a place as thoroughly neoliberalized as the UK (at least as it looks from the outside).
I think consumerism will be easier to give up than the internet. Humans, even very introverted ones, seem to really like having the ability to communicate quickly and easily with others.
I suspect we haven’t yet really understood the impact of the printing press, let alone the telephone or radio or blogs or, I dunno, discord.
Maybe. At the risk of giving a waffling “cover all my bases” answer, I’m tempted to both agree and disagree a little. I think you’re very right that the impact of radio and especially television has been a somewhat overlooked aspect of the enormous changes wrought on our societies in the 20th century. (But see Manufacturing Consent etc.)
The printing press is a fair point too. Lately I’ve been thinking about how we seem to have this compulsion to cram every single inch of every item we make full of writing. We can’t help stick letters on everything, and then there’s all the laws, the tsunami of books, the internet content, and all the other ways our culture is drenched in written language. Sometimes people complain that videos and audio books are replacing reading, and while I share some of the concern, I also find it intriguing that these media are closer to the more “natural” (for all the fraught definitions of that word) oral storytelling we did for tens of thousands of years rather than the profoundly “unnatural” written language.
Anyway, where I disagree is that I have a feeling people will adjust fairly well once the internet goes away. Yes, even many of the addicts. I’ll admit this is speculation on my part, but I think it’s one of those things that seems so important and impossible to live without while it’s around, but when it actually goes people will revert to relating to the flesh and blood humans around them in fairly short order. Especially since the kind of future we’ll likely get won’t leave them (us?) much choice anyway…
I also think John Michael Greer is likely correct that militaries and the like will have some kind of internet access long after regular users are cut off.
See, I think a lightweight, text-only internet would take many fewer resources than the video and audio world of online entertainment we have today… and I don’t think that either mass-produced print media (which arguably brought about the Reformation) or the internet have really impaired people’s ability to “relate to flesh and blood humans around them” — certain racism and bigotry of all kinds also existed before these technologies. It is true that mass produced print media, and mass literacy, led to cultural shifts, and it’s just as true that those of us who grew up in a very literate world are sometimes ill-equipped to deal with the more visual and symbolic culture which is now emerging.
It will certainly be interesting, though, whatever happens.
Wow, climate science is dense. That is some very serious maths and computer modelling, a dizzying array of data and some very specialised language. The discussions going on in the comments was even more confusing. (Some interesting discussion on the suez canal on the science site, that is struggling with dwindling levels of fresh water to float the ships – and presently the traffic has had to slow down. )
It would be good to understand in a more straightforward language, what constitutes the tipping point and why that is difficult to predict. (I get that it’s difficult to predict anything). This seems to be a physical process of desalination? We can say that this will happen, we just don’t know when, or we can avoid this happening – Stefan is saying we absolutely must. So whilst it’s not happening we absolutely must communicate this natural disaster in plain terms.
What I know about models (from another scientist on the great simplification) is that you get what your looking for. To be clear, I am happy to accept the findings of these hard working people but I am also aware of the human, machine and digital limitations to our knowledge. This is played out in a more polarised fashion in wider culture, where climate science is openly called out as fraudulent, for the use of centralised powers to control and command an increasingly fracturing situation. Many of the proponents of this view point to the experience of the pandemic which did see the greatest transfer of wealth ever, accompanied by central government overreach.
The catastrophic effects of both the shutting down of this earth system and the cascade of feed backs can be used for good and ill, is like all climate issues not real enough to inspire action until its too late, and in this sense cancels itself out as a tool for persuasion.
1. This is more grist to the mill of a more holistic political approach that will not get bogged down in the polarisation and culture war, building mutual interests and spaces for action. We will all have to figure out what we can let go of, how wide our aesthetics can go, or how narrow a defintion of tolerance can be.
2. This is another reason to get on with a small farm future, hence the reason to get AMOC into a more manageable language. Attached to every global catastrophic event can be the framing that a local community reponse now is the best way to tackle it. The community resilience, inter sufficiency and adaptability inherent in hyper local domestic production and low energy living embodied in this future will stand us all in better stead for the unpredictability of sticking out a less hospitable climate, or having to upsticks and bring our skills, practical and social to where ever we need to go/who will have us.
3. Is connected to 1 and the discussion ‘this can be used for good and ill’. This is just another catastrophic event that is unbelievable in scale – so most will choose not to.
The professional classes and the oligarchy can force a militaristic green regime off the back of it, and/or (fully) militarised supply chains to mitigate, and/or instigate their escape plans.
Again, the lure of good food and clothes and a resilient, skillful community (2) is more persuasive than ‘your next’, even though its true!
4 Insanity is the ruling paradigm, in which psychopathy and narcissism is normal and rewarded. Somehow science, scientism and scientists have become both victim, perpetrator and saviour, creating a weird triangle that the culture war can pick up at any point as a cudgel. The question is not so much, is it true but how useful is that truth? Creating deeper and deeper layers of chaos and uncertainty around an already distressed animal will not help calm it.
5 Mother knows best! I was astounded by the cordaceps fungi that would infect insects that started to effect the homeostasis of the rainforest. In the ants, if the infected were noted they would be taken as far away from the colony. Undetected they would climb above the colony, clamp on to die and grow their fungi showering it down as it burst. This might relate to 4!
6 Yes, this is the centralised, military dystopia that the evangelical conservatives see emerging from climate science propaganda and we see just as clearly with a belief in the data and corporate control and enrichment. Why keep us alive though? Again, maybe as a mitigation, like the field kitchens employed in the Irish famine/genocide/holocaust, a salve to what’s left of the ruling classes moral conscience.
Me and Alice keep referring to Andor, a star wars spin off series, brilliantly written. At one point Andor ends up in a penal colony making parts for the empire’s military. They discover that one of the prisoners who has served his time and been released has ended up on one of the prisons other floors – that no one is getting out, ever.
A plan is made and enacted, the shout goes out – ONE WAY OUT!
That’s a small farm future.
Stefan Rahmstorf’s blog comments were worth the time to read through. Interesting that the fresh water signal they are looking at is in the Westward currents off the southern tip of Africa. So I assume the fresh water in those parts would be coming from Antarctica? There is already some slowing of Antarctic bottom water formation which also ties into the strength of the AMOC. Another important aspect is the large importance of AMOC circulation and the efficacy of the ocean carbon sink or the importance of the AMOC in the ventilation of the deep ocean.
Storing food calories to get you through winter gets more difficult in places with short growing seasons. Storing fodder for animals or dry goods for yourself requires barns, dry rooms, and rodent protection. Salted pork was a way peasants could utilize the productive summer gardens to fatten up something for the larder. Both building barns and processing a couple pigs for winter stores is benefited by company so maybe a more agrarian future might encourage more sociable agreements with neighbors.
The pooling of the hot ocean waters of the tropics will undoubtably lead to breakdowns in ocean economies at the same time Europe and the North Atlantic cools. Who knows the effects on the ElNino cycle or precipitation patterns elsewhere.
It really complicates things when it is so very difficult for any small farmer to make even a minimum wage. The small farmers keep the rare and somewhat forgotten small animal stock that used to grace our farms. I think Shane Simonsen zero input agriculture speaks to the energy question but heat in cold climates means extra work making wood at the expense of what the garden demands. So wood and livestock and the time to squeeze everything into a shorter growing season seem prerequisite for dealing with cold but where I live I have to prepare for heat and a slow power down of cheap energy.
Lots of lengthy comments- took a while to absorb. To Chris’ item #4, I offer a link to a site where this is pondered. The host, and the regulars, go down many rabbit holes, but the central theme is “why do we deny the obvious disaster unfolding in front of us?.”
The host occasionally asks for guest posts, and this one was mine. The topic is relevant to the themes we discuss here.
https://un-denial.com/2024/03/19/by-steve-carrow-what-would-a-wise-community-do/#comments
Regarding AMOC impacts- I don’t know what will happen here in Wisconsin, but we already have large swings. The amplified Rossby waves and meandering jet stream are impacting us already.
We were in extreme drought this past year( still not fully out of out) and our garden and hayfield struggled. However, the hazelnuts, which we do not irrigate, took it in stride, with no noticeable reduction in production. Deep perennial roots needs to be part of your local response to climate weirding and the descent.
In summer 2022 which was a pretty bad drought here, the thing that surprised me was bracket fungi on big trees. I expected they would need more rain, but in fact had Dryad’s Saddle, Chicken of the Woods and Beefsteak Fungus, all of which are pretty good and much less prone to being wormy than some of the smaller fungi I routinely forage (which were indeed not doing so great that year).
So that’s another vote for deep-rooted perennials.
PS nice post over at un-denial, but I stopped wading through the comments there are soon as the anti-vax stuff came up. Rabbit holes indeed!
Yeah, as the host there himself often says, you have to sift the wheat from the chaff on much of what is on the web. 🙂
The AMOC is one of those big plantery forces that I kinda don’t spend time worrying about.
Not because it’s not going to happen but because if it does, there isn’t much I can do about it.
Bit like what the effects would be if the top blows off the volcano in Yellowstone (or is it Yosemite?).
In either case , the effects would be so far reaching, that prodiction is near impossible.
Bit like predicting the weather !!!!!!!!
I concentrate my thoughts on things a little easier to digest.
For example, the peak of absolute fossil fuels extraction in 2018, is going to lead to an end to economic growth, which will precipitate a collapse in the financial system, as we know it.
This collapse is going to happen within my lifetime, probably in the next few years. Preparing for this eventuality, is where my thoughts are focusing.
Yep , I remember the ho ha about the gulf stream shutting down with wailing and gnashing of teeth from the BBC and the guardian , it’s just another scare story by the over educated .
Lol is the killer of our civilization and diesel is the canary in the mine , is oil production is up but it’s the wrong sort of crude , 8 gallons of diesel to every barrel of oil ,round here diesel is $1.50 a gallon higher than gas it used to be $.50 cents difference . The oil majors are not drilling they are spending profits on dividends or acquiring small fields drilled by someone else , depletion of reserves is happening at a increasing rate , in a few years it will price diesel out of the market and with it out civilization .
It seems like the biggest question is “when?”, whether this particular collapse would happen during our lifetimes, or our children’s lifetimes (or perhaps even further into the future?).
Our societies are failing to effectively deal with present-day crises, so I’m not very optimistic about the different factions coming together to effectively address a predicted disaster much in advance before it hits, especially when the forecasts for when its going to happen are based on simulations and models having their own uncertainties and potentially questionable assumptions.
Chris mentioned “a recent study that models AMOC shutdown”. That particular study got some criticisms about its statistical methods and assumptions, such as:
“In their simulation, Westen et al. (2024) found a gradual decrease in the AMOC strength under increasing freshwater forcing and eventually a much steeper decline, which may pass for a collapse, although it extends over an entire century. This proof of the possible existence of an AMOC collapse in a complex global climate model, which takes the entire climate system into account, is certainly a success. However, one would expect that a more complex model would also allow the choice of a more realistic setting, e.g., a realistic amount of meltwater inflow into the North Atlantic caused by global warming over a reasonable period of 100 or 200 years. In contrast, van Westen et al. (2024) increased the freshwater input in their simulation over a period of more than 2000 years and kept increasing even when the temperature in Northern Europe was already falling dramatically (and the Greenland Ice Sheet was growing!), which makes it difficult to assess the relevance of the simulation results for the real world.”
The critic goes on to claim that a more appropriate statistical analysis of the data results in “no indications of an imminent collapse”:
“Assuming that the proposed early-warning signs are useful in some way and applying more appropriate statistical methods to the short series of available historical data, no indications of an imminent collapse of the AMOC can be found.”
Yet, the critic concludes that the unreliable evidence doesn’t actually rule out an imminent collapse:
“Of course, this does not mean that a collapse is not imminent, but merely that the evidence presented so far in favor of an imminent collapse is not reliable.”
A new indicator for the AMOC strength still gives no indication of an imminent collapse
Erhard Reschenhofer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16600
Regardless of when the collapses (including financial) might occur, I think a big problem that privileged individuals will have, when faced with whatever collapses do occur during their lifetimes, will be coming to terms with downsizing their aspirations and sense of (fossil-fueled) possibilities, alongside the downsizing of their consumption levels. This is one big problem (the problem faced by the privileged) which can be effectively dealt with, in advance, at the individual and household level.
Chris commented (further below): “I’m wondering if the update at the bottom of Stefan Rahmstorf’s commentary addresses the objections of the author Steve links?”
Rahmstorf’s update doesn’t seem to address those criticisms, which (going by my memory) are largely about the real-world reliability of the model, and the ways the historic data was statistically analyzed (the specific methods for smoothing the data points, for example).
As far as I can judge the fear that the AMOC would shut down is overstated, or rather the speed and when that could possibly happen, is overstated. In general I am a bit skeptical to overstating tipping points in the same way as I am wary of overstating “rapid total collapse” when it comes to human society. Of course, it does depend on what perspective of time you have, is 100 years rapid?. Perhaps I am even more alarmed by this quote about a scientific study showing the likelihood of AMOC shutdown: “Now van Westen’s team has done the most sophisticated simulation so far, requiring a total of six months on the Netherlands’ national supercomputer, called Snellius. That was very expensive, he says.” !!! (from https://www.newscientist.com/article/2416631-atlantic-current-shutdown-is-a-real-danger-suggests-simulation/)
In general, I think models are good to predict BAU developments but mostly unable to predict tipping points and other more complex chain reactions.
1. As a result of above reasoning, I don’t change my strategies or worldview as a result of the uncertain AMOC shutdown.
2. The major problem for agriculture is unpredictable weather – within reasonable limits that is. A more adaptable form of agriculture is nomadism and herding. That is why the Sami herds reindeer in the North of Scandinavia. In Sweden there have been switches back from agriculture to more hunting and foraging during some earlier periods with bad weather. The problem is that a lot fewer people can survive on foraging, nomadism or hunting (in any combination) than from crop farming. In my analysis changing climate will be ONE of several factors making our current civilization untenable, including the superstructures, our demands on the rest of nature, and most likely as well as most difficult our current popultion. Personally, I believe resource constraints and internal tensions in a system built on growth (capitalism) will play a more decisive role than climate change. But obviously all these factors are interlinked, man-made climate change is an effect of overuse of resources.
3. I go with Ruben’s comment.
4. This is perhaps the biggest question of them all of the 6. Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: The culture is stuck in a paradigm shaped by modernity and markets. It has “worked well” for two hundred years so why would it not work well in the future? Of course it is based on myths, like any culture. As Donella Meadows said: The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an afterlife. We build skyscrapers, because we believe that space in downtown cities is enormously valuable. ” The culture also has far too much faith in education and science to guide us and to help us. Some studies point to that confirmation bias is as big or even bigger among those with higher eduction…
5. On Gaia, I go with Kathryn’s comment. In a way, it is perhaps just good that we BELIEVE in Gaia as a form of “rational irrationality” in the same way as other religions – an antidote to “irrational rationality” which is the religion of modern western culture. A bit similar to my comment re sacredness in your previous post.
Also I think it helps to view climate changes not only as a physical process, when we do that we certainly can’t find any Gaia. If we see the Earth system as a combined system where life itself also play a huge role, there is more space for Gaian perspectives. I believe this article can be of some use by giving a wider perspective: https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/10/2/25 as well as Rob Lewis article about the same: https://theclimateaccordingtolife.substack.com/p/are-ecology-and-climate-the-same
In general, I am intrigued by the notion that there are self-regulating mechanisms in ecosystem or the Earth system, but it is hard to explain that from an evolutionary perspective (with “evolutionary” I don’t mean necessarily a gene-based development. I am just busy writing a text that discuss that.
6…..
Lichen garden seems smart – they will survive us by far!
Two further thoughts:
– Firewood seems like a great way of keeping warm until you run out. Does anyone with better historical knowledge than I have want to elucidate whether the destruction of old growth forests in Britain (or elsewhere in Europe) was really because of firewood, which can be obtained by coppicing, rather than because of harvesting larger trees for shipping and construction projects? Was this really a sort of enclosure in action?
– The ocean is big — really big — and it feels like small local efforts don’t do a lot either way to change things. I do think a small farm future is, of increasing necessity, our best way forward, but I wonder about coordination problems like this. Atmospheric carbon is another one; pandemics are another. We don’t really have any tried and tested real-world solutions to these kinds of interconnections; we don’t have a good way to stop externalities being discounted when they are, well, external. (Another example: the sugar and cotton trades and anti-slavery movements).
One might think that more information would eventually put this right; that if I can see the effect my actions are having halfway around the world, fairly immediately, then maybe I will be more considered in my actions. But what appears to actually be happening is that communication channels that can be used for truth can also be used for falsehood, to the point that we have all manner of “truthers” who have been told, and readily accepted, quite a few wild conspiracy theories; and that some eminently reasonable positions (like “we should probably try to avoid putting more CO2 into the atmosphere and oceans” and “we should probably try to avoid AMOC shutdown” and even “it’s worthwhile to have better sick pay legislation so people don’t have to come in to work with a novel virus whose long-term effects are as yet unknown”) are painted as lunatic conspiracies or impossibly idealistic dreaming in parts of the mainstream press.
We’ve just had several centuries of increasing literacy (at least in the West), which is now giving way to a much more visual and symbolic culture; I’m just old enough to have done reasonably well in the literate culture I was raised in, but not young enough to have the facility with image that I see in people even five or ten years younger than I am. I don’t know how this fits into the above dynamic, but the existence of deepfakes doesn’t fill me with optimism.
Thanks Kathryn,
If I had to make a guess, I’d say don’t worry about household firewood for heating.
I’m pretty sure that the deforestation of Europe had more to do with smelting iron.
Yep , the forests of the peak district were felled turned into charcoal and sent to Sheffield via pack horse .
Re. firewood and deforestation, IIRC the old-growth forests were hit harder here in Norway due to demand for ship-building timber in places like Britain and the Netherlands, and later logging for paper pulp and construction timber, rather than firewood. Especially oak forests along the southern coasts, since they were well-sited for export and also one of the few places warm enough to grow big hardwoods.
We’re blessed to have the birch (Betula pubescens) as one our most abundant trees, which grows quickly and is ideal for firewood. So in general it doesn’t make sense to cut down old growth for firewood when you can just use fast-growing birch, especially since most of the old growth would be fir and spruce which aren’t that great for wood heat in comparison. That’s probably why we didn’t develop much of a coppicing culture here either (to my knowledge).
Thanks for a fine harvest of interesting comments. I pronounce this open comment idea a success, and will probably try another one in due course.
Maybe it’s implicit in the idea that I don’t weigh in too heavily myself in response to the comments, but I will touch lightly on a few points that interest me.
1. Climate change as a major driver of unfolding world-historical change in human societies is cut and dried IMO, the exact details of it less so. I know that not everyone who reads this blog agrees. Fair enough, I’m not going to debate it – but there are many paths to the breakdown of the existing world system and towards a small farm future. I welcome constructive discussion here with anybody charting those paths.
2. Thanks to the two Bruces (there are two, right?) and Steve L for the interesting comments on AMOC dynamics. I’m wondering if the update at the bottom of Stefan Rahmstorf’s commentary addresses the objections of the author Steve links?
3. As is often the case with climate change, it’s the speed of the change rather than the change itself that seems most challenging. Winter temperatures of -30 can be manageable, whereas a biogeography in which winter temperatures of -30 become the norm in southern England over the course of a few decades probably isn’t manageable, and not just by humans…
4. …however, I agree with Steve C and Kathryn that crop diversity in general and perennials in particular are a good way to go. Although in increasingly cold northerly climates the main perennials are likely to be grass and browse for edible animals, implying smaller populations (per Gunnar’s comment, which I haven’t yet had time to assimilate)
5. The points about greater climatic variability are interesting. I think this probably suggests lower average productivity locally, and therefore maybe also smaller local populations. A lot of the present world system is geared to the worldwide flow of resources – not in especially benevolent ways, but in ways that nevertheless help to overcome local variability and limitations. That may be less true of future human ecologies.
6. Ruben’s point about neighbours and communities being the largest units of mutual aid interests me – and perhaps illuminates Bruce’s point that what lies the other side in terms of human culture politics etc is as visible to us as the inside of a black hole. I think that’s true up to a point – but we have a pretty good idea of the kind of things that happen from past political breakdowns and knowledge of human status orders. So I think Ruben’s advice is sound, but I also think it’s important to attend to supra-local politics in the context of collapse, because – while substantially uncontrollable – that will be absolutely critical to local outcomes, and it’s not entirely uncontrollable.
7. Pressing that point further, I think the way human status concerns get articulated is important, even in times of biogeographic meltdown. Kim’s points about compost toilets are quite profound, and I will want to return to this!
8. I’ve found Kathryn’s thoughts on religious-political history and one weird trick idolatry informative. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not invested personally in distinctions between civilization/barbarism, farming/foraging etc. I think we need to get out of these escape from history and escape from ecology narratives … I don’t think the idea of small farm futures succumbs to the problem because it’s not about an escape or charting such singular paths. One of the various disappointments of Monbiot’s response to ‘Saying NO…’ was his positioning of me as a ‘single path’ utopian who’s hoping that collapse will bring about the world I want to see. I think he knows that’s not what I’m saying, but went for that line of attack as the easiest way to play to his base – which speaks precisely to the political problems of transition that we have.
9. Joel: “Somehow science, scientism and scientists have become both victim, perpetrator and saviour”. Nicely put! Another political problem to wrestle with in transitioning to more useful conceptions of science, knowledge & practice.
10. Further conversations for the future raised by commenters here – thanks Kathryn, James, Ian, Kim: (1) the history of English woodlands (2) collapsology and the real energy transition (3) traditional (European) culture
11. My point 6 above was supposed to be a joke, by the way. Been there, written that.
Thanks all
I do think a run of -30°C winters might reduce the rat population in London. I would probably welcome that, at least. But it probably wouldn’t look good for the skylarks, either.
My life has changed substantially from the pattern it had even a few years ago, but this was not without mental and emotional costs; a lot of people seem less capable of these kinds of changes. I’ve thought a bit about why I’ve been willing to change so many of my habits and all I can really come up with is that I moved a lot as a child (quite substantial moves, too), and that less of my sense of self is mediated through habitual social activity and status games. That is — I think people are going to figure out that I’m a bit of a weirdo pretty quickly regardless of how hard I try to fit in, and so I approach social conformity (or compliance) from a different angle than many people do.
https://youtu.be/r79rxfOFJJY?si=vXfxANlpD_v7tgjl
Planet critical report on oil depletion 2030s
Very interesting. I skim-watched most of that by holding down the left touchpad button for double-speed playback – the report is as good a reason as any to get the (electric-powered?) skates on when it comes to preparing for the more expensive and volatile world our hearts know is likely.
Also re people editing their comments, I’m not really a fan of this for various reasons. You already get a four minute regret window, and that’s my limit! No text is ever definitive…
If you want to add to or correct something you’ve written, feel free to add another comment to that effect.
If you badly want a comment you’ve written to be expunged entirely from public scrutiny, drop me a line via the contact form and I’ll oblige.
Thanks for your understanding … and please do keep commenting!
Correction – five minute regret window.
See!
I don’t really mind one way or the other, but I am not getting an edit button when posting comments from my phone, even immediately afterward. Will try from a big computer later on.
Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve seen the edit button on my laptop. It may be that I’ve just not noticed, so this very post is a test as well. Just to be sure.
Test result: No edit button appeared.
https://twitter.com/anasalhajji/status/1773754505059852529?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1773754505059852529%7Ctwgr%5Eece3c27c0f7c7d7208d703372b879ecae1ee2e39%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theautomaticearth.com%2F2024%2F03%2Fdebt-rattle-march-30-2024%2F
Interesting comments by a African president .
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13251019/canada-revolt-police-RCMP-home-ownership-trudeau.html
And Canada running into deindustrialsation
Sorry I’ve been rather quiet here – my input is set to be quite sporadic for a few weeks, but hopefully then returning with some new things to say. Or at least some more things to say.
Quick follow up on some points above, re Steve L’s points this is all well outside my lane but I took Rahmstorf’s comment to be suggesting that the model was more real-world than some people were saying despite its apparently unrealistically slow freshwater input. But I guess that doesn’t speak to the statistical critique.
Gunnar, much to agree with in your comment – although I’m less reassured about AMOC shutdown than you. Fully agree with you that we’re stuck in a (mythical) paradigm which isn’t going to serve anyone well, but seems impervious to change. If my recent experience is anything to go by, there are influential voices who say that “absolutely everything needs to change” while balking in practice at any real significant change and opting instead for hopium, thereby further helping to seal the existing paradigm. It’s a deep problem.
Memo to self: we need to talk about firewood. And coppicing. And wood in general.
Re Diogenes’s link to the (Caribbean!) president, IMO although what he had to say was a little self-serving, I think he has a point. Where I go from there is that poorer countries (especially ones with fossil fuel reserves) just aren’t going to decarbonise unless richer countries not only decarbonise but also level up the economic playing field. Which takes us back to stuck paradigms, alas.
Regarding the edit option, I’ll try to take a look at that when I get the chance. Is nobody seeing this option? Maybe I’m the only person who’s getting offered it when I post a comment … which would be kind of pointless, since I don’t really need it.
Ah yes, firewood. For those of us in temperate zones, home heating is a significant energy user, and cooking may be done pretty much everywhere with wood in the future. And wood makes a pretty handy material for making things too 🙂
If governments were serious about green initiatives, (I know, I know…..) they would be all out investing in transitioning housing stock to highly insulated, energy efficient standards. Reduce the need BEFORE sizing any energy supply arrangement.
A while back, I looked in to what a sustainable firewood use might look like. This was just a roundhouse approximation, and doesn’t nearly account for all the system variables, but is another indicator for what limits there are on carrying capacity for humans living in houses.
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2019/01/half-way-there.html
Lots of variables where firewood is concerned , the type of wood matters greatly ( hardwood v softwood ) moisture level , type of stove used and it’s efficiency . Down here in TX I use less than a cord of oak ( 8 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet ) a year , probably double if it was used for cooking , in Idaho they use 10to 14 chords of softwood . I never fell a tree , after cleaning up wind damage and the odd one blown over I get plenty from a 5 acre woodlot .
This is a test of whether I get any option to edit this comment.
Nope, still nothing. But I know it used to exist! Computers, bah.
Meanwhile, I was thinking about AMOC shutdown and maple syrup today; some of the traditional syrup/sap trees need some good cold hard winters and a freeze/thaw cycle in the spring to produce well. Maybe it’s worth investigating tree syrups more generally? I think sugar maple is the “easy” one in that it’s mostly disaccharides; my understanding is that birch sap, for example, contains more fructose and so needs much more care in boiling off the water, or else it will burn (and taste nasty).
I have made birch syrup. It is a very nice product and with a nice taste, but the sugar content is low so there is an awful lot of boiling to be done (here comes the firewood again…)
And I never see any “edit” option…
I mean, if you’re heating your house with firewood anyway…
…but I wonder if concentrating it to a point that would be good for making wine or beer might be less fuel-intensive than a fully sweet syrup. Hmm.
(Of course, many other concentrated sweeteners also require considerable energy for processing.)
@ Chris Smaje –
I propose that we have another “open comment post” (but it could just be called a conversation or a dialogue, maybe?) on the topic of Voluntary Energy Descent. Some while back you said you’d be willing to host a conversation on this topic here, and I think this would be a good time to open it up and get it going. I happen to believe it is one of the most important topics in our world right now, but various things are standing in the way of people having this conversation. So it would be a great service if we were to nurture this conversation into being here.
If this gets started here, I can direct people to the conversation from various places, such as Resilience.org and Deep Transformation Network.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/analysis-even-the-ipccs-latest-report-doesnt-support-climate-activists-lies/
Interesting piece about the ipcc reports / confidence in them and how media interpret them
Climate Change Dispatch, and Tom Harris, is not a legitimate source of science journalism.
https://www.desmog.com/tom-harris/
It’s a source of disinformation.
Shoot the messenger ignore the message , there is huge amounts of smoke and mirrors from both sides , and dismissing either side automatically allows bad science .
I was thinking today about local food and what that looks like for me in London vs what it might look like for, say,my relatives in Canada, and was reminded of your first two questions here, which asked those of us who are longer-term commenters to write about how the looming possibility of AMOC shutdown affects both our expectations and, consequently, our actions….
… and I wonder, too, whether this could be a place for some questions around our expectations on transport in the future, and particularly how we expect reduced transport availability (for people, produce and manufactured products) to play out and how we might mitigate that. It’s the sort of thing I expect we all tackle differently, but I think very few of us are even 50% self-provisioning, so both local markets and longer-distance transport seem like they will be important factors, and I’d be fascinated to read about how other commenters are considering this in a slightly more structured way.
Kathryn –
It seems to me that very few people are believing that our present dominant modern of economy is likely to fail in our very own lifetimes, much less over the next decade or two at the outside. Transport is just one facet of all of this, as is food availability. The mainstream narrative is that technological developments will ease and slow any real challenges, and so there’s little reason to think about any of it very much.
Alternative narratives are not seeming to influence the public discussion, so there’s very little planning for change going on.
I know the general mainstream narrative is that there isn’t a big problem, or that we’ll think of something.
I’m wondering about the specific practical steps being taken by commenters here, who I think you’ll agree are not representative of the mainstream narrative.
I think James is right in that the majority of people leading busy modern lives don’t think about collapse scenarios because they’re either run ragged by modernity, and/or feel an understandable sense of powerlessness and are probably also intent on keeping their collective peckers up with easily had pleasures and distractions. There may also be a kind of collective death drive, a ‘what will be, will be’ attitude that keeps one plodding on through the landscape of inverted totalitarianism with more of a smile than a frown. At my most fatalistic, I see nothing wrong with that, really, and there may even be a kernel of wisdom to it. All of which is to say that this did make me hesitate to respond to Kathryn’s questions. But I find it challenging and fascinating to attempt to look after our household’s water needs from what falls from the sky and percolates through the earth, into the well. I put sorting out (and economising) the water requirements at number one (and there’s kind of no end to that – I could spend my life terracing a hillside). The climate is a concern – the heat and all the rest of it. I remember once emailing Will Bonsall to see what he knew about high summer temps and specifically at what point is heat ruinous for most crops, specifically where does photosynthesis drop off to an undesirable point. His answer did touch on AMOC in a way. He said if you’re thinking of leaving Hungary for the UK you might be out of the frying pan and into the fire in that the UK could soon share a similar climate to Labrador if some of the climate scientists are right. Worrier that I am, I immediately looked into what can be grown in Labrador, and could easily see myself adapting to a diet of cabbage, turnip and potatoes if needs be (and if the way was open). In the meantime, I intend to keep growing and saving seed, and look into landrace breeding a little more, and maybe (pushing the boat out) try to get the neighbours/community involved. It all takes time and space, those damned eternal problems. Transhumance is another interest. I’m glad we have a few animals for supplying much-needed fertility to the garden (ducks and a donkey, though the cats also do their bit, usually where I don’t want them to), though I sometimes have a yen to wander off with the donkey and some grazing animals, to change the wallpaper for a while (they say sheep teach you patience, and goats teach you philosophy). As for expectations of transport, I hope the bikes I have (road, off-road, tourer, tandem, tandem triplet) will see me out (selfish, I know) and I probably have enough clothes by now too, though outdoor work tends to get through gloves and shoes like nobody’s business, and trousers don’t last long, either. As for the wider transport that is the lifeblood to modern life, much like the AMOC predictions, that’s anybody’s guess. I like to think we’ll learn to do without, once again, though probably not before deep carnage.
I had intended to have a go at thinking about Chris’ six questions and had a read of the links, but it’s a busy time for sowing and more than that I quickly concluded ‘who am I kidding? This is way too big for me’, even though I’m not immune to amusing myself with my own dumb arrogance.
I have a friend nearby who worries along similar lines and in fact always surprises me with what he’s been looking into, so much so that I only visit every few weeks or so as I come away with my head spinning – collapse-ology can be so intense. Last thing I remember him surprising me with was the remark that children, in extreme survival scenarios, tend to fare better than adults – they’ll try different things to eat, experiment more, be wilder in a sense, lie down when they are exhausted, etc, while adults can get gripped by panic, lose energy through fear, and may slowly shit themselves to death if they’re not careful. On rethinking this, I take it as another good reason to keep alight that childish aspect that’s forever flickering in the brain, however dimly. I should also get to know wild plants and mushrooms a lot better.
Water is absolutely key! And the more unstable the climate, the more important it becomes to be able to store it.
My skills for making rainwater (or worse, river water) safe to drink are definitely mostly theoretical, insofar as I know how to make a (fairly rudimentary) carbon filter and a (fairly rudimentary) solar still. We do have a bit of additional tap water storage in “get through three days, during which you decide whether to stay put or get out” amounts, and probably enough potassium permanganate/chlorine tablets to get through a month or two, but those are all fairly short term measures.
Perhaps this summer instead of fruit wines I should investigate brewing small beer. We do have much more wine now than we’re likely to get through, but we’ll need to drink some to free up some bottles before I can do much more.
@Kathryn
Have you thought of an MSR filter as an emergency back up. Quite expensive but perhaps priceless going forward.
@John
We do also have a lifestraw each, which will help in a dire emergency, but that doesn’t do a whole lot for wider community resilience. Potassium permanganate and chlorine tablets take up little space and are currently very, very cheap.
Knowing how to build larger filters, and being able to work together with neighbours to do something together if necessary, is probably more useful.
Further thoughts on water:
Importing fruit from across the world is expensive and potentially harmful partly because the high water content means importing avocado or tomatoes or whatever is essentially importing water from drought-stricken areas.
It strikes me that growing higher water-content fruits locally (melons, cucumbers, tomatoes, grapes… what am I missing?) could form part of a coherent local water storage scheme.
Regarding wild plants and mushrooms — I started by buying a local field guide aimed at foragers (Richard Mabey’s “Food For Free”, a classic of the genre), and keeping it in the bathroom. Every time I was in there I’d pick it up and look at an entry for a food; I started recognising some of them in local parks when out on walks. And now… a food-free walk is a rare occasion. I wouldn’t want to try to forage all my calories, as so much fo what I do forage is greenery, but I spend quite a lot of my outdoor time surrounded by food. There are still several things I haven’t bothered with, as well — I never did bother learning the difference between cow parsley and fool’s parsley, for example, and though I forage a pretty wide range of mushrooms there are some I steer clear of just because they’re too easily confused to be worth the risk.
These days it’s a bit easier, because there are phone apps and so on — though I would never rely on only those, and will still carry my smallest fungi field guide during the autumn (I have some much more comprehensive ones at home). It’s worth being choosy about local field guides, too, as there are some AI-generated ones out there which are a very bad idea. But I think there’s something to be said for getting some (reputable) books and making a point of studying them; a lot of it is about learning to pay attention to and recognise details that most people don’t notice, seeing only “weeds” or “hedge” or “flowers”.
https://twitter.com/newstart_2024/status/1777633886324875351?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1777633886324875351%7Ctwgr%5Ef84e35dc794896c9047c36b1226cbb1ce3ded6f6%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theautomaticearth.com%2F2024%2F04%2Fdebt-rattle-april-10-2024%2F
Interesting news clip from Tasmania ( cloud seeding )
Big subjects to be sure.
1) It is going to take a catastrophic event like the AMOC shutting down or a big slab of the Antarctic ice sliding into the ocean to make climate change real to people. Unfortunately at that point it is probably too late to make a soft landing. I am hopeful that young people are seeing that focusing the western economy on making returns for a few very wealthy investors is not working out for them. Present politics are a mostly waste of time if the choice is The Green New Deal or the business as usual on steroids alternative.
In the mean time I’m going to keep skimming a little off the top of the energy spike to get us in a better position to survive without it. We have lots of water, even in drought years. Our farm is on a small river and we have a couple of wells where the water comes up within 20′ of the surface, close enough to pump without electricity. PV panels kind of seem like a good idea but I’m not sure that they are worth the cost. Wind generators are 19th century technology and appear to be a more sustainable choice.
2) Our economic and political structures are houses of cards at best. Neither can afford to do anything meaningful about climate change. Local democratic processes might survive.
3) No. Contemporary political optics are not affected by reality.
4) Maybe. Most likely they can’t bring themselves to peer into the abyss and imagine a less convenient life. They don’t a lot of practical skills so they would be eaten by the lions. Consumer culture is a powerful drug.
5) Things do have a way of working out, overshoot maybe. Any human timescale is infinitesimal compared to geologic timescales. 12,000 years ago people here were hunting with the local megafauna with stone points.
6) No.
I like the framing of “skimming a little off the top of the energy spike” to make things better later on.
I understand micro hydro can have a very good EROEI, perhaps this is a better option than solar panels if you’re in a position to put something in a river or stream — especially if you are handy with fixing the mechanical issues that can happen with anything that has moving parts. Just a thought; you know your own context better than I do, obviously.
I’ve always been wary of the ‘skimming’ approach, I guess because I see as akin to an addict thinking ‘just one last time then I’m all set’, but hey, that’s the bind we are in.
I mean, I think it would definitely be better if we only used fossil fuels for measures that will get us off fossil fuels and into self-provisioning localised economies; but… they don’t ask me for advice about that stuff.
The reality is we’re probably putting more fossil fuels into military weapons and luxury cruise vacations than we are into solar panels (which are not the One Weird Trick that will save us, but could still have a place in a transition), wind turbines (ditto), insulation (…ditto), or ground source heat pumps (…you get the idea). I personally don’t purchase military weapons or luxury cruise vacations, nor do I invest in either, but there is no ethical consumption under crapitalism and there will doubtless be some level at which I am complicit in both.
Skimming is not going to be enough either, but at least it’s something I can do: turning woodchips (processed using fossil fuels) into soil is still better than using that same fuel for almost anything else I can think of, and trimming urban trees remains a necessity.
It’s not us giving up fossil fuels it’s fossil fuels giving us up .
The UK passed its production peak somewhere around the turn of the century , U.S. fracking peaks this year ,( fracked wells production falls off a cliff, usually around 2 years after they are tapped ) conventional oil peaked 2 decades ago , China’s coal peaks this year or next , their main reserves are now 2 Km deep and very expensive to mine , only Russia has any untapped cheap oil / gas .
Fossil fuels have started their long decent , there is not enough left to alter climate , forget car free net zero by 2050_ by that time oil / energy will be so expensive no one will be able to afford it .
There are a few people writing about the collapse of complex societies , they are worth searching out and reading .
6) An excerpt from and excerpt of ‘Navigating the Polycrisis’:
In particular, this book is less concerned with “predicting” the future than with illuminating possible lines of world historical development in order to inform present-day strategies that can help shape the future in more progressive (or at least less catastrophic) directions. As I discuss in chapter 2, militaries, intelligence agencies, central banks, and corporations are all deeply engaged in various forms of future-scenario analysis, which they use to develop strategies that may “perform well under a range of future conditions.” Rather than allowing powerful actors to monopolize these techniques in their efforts to preempt and constrain the future possibility space, scholars and activists should engage in counter-hegemonic futures analyses in order to widen our imaginaries of possible futures and develop strategies to bring about more just futures. As John Urry says, the terrain of futures studies “is too important to be left to states, corporations and technologists, . . . and social science needs to be central in disentangling, debating and delivering those futures.”
The entire excerpt is at :
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-04-18/navigating-the-polycrisis-excerpt/
Global Polycrisis interesting word .
Kinda smacks of western imperialism , neither China or Russia are going to have anything to do with western ” crisis ” both have been seriously crapped on by the West as they call them ” The Golden Billion ” .
Africa is becoming more independent now it has customers for its minerals other than the West , most of sub Saharan Africa has kicked out the French and told them to take their money with them . BRICS is the upencoming group , the multinationals have no control anymore , sanctions against Russia has shown them they don’t need the West or any of its ideas , they blame the West for climate changes / vampire capitalism and are not in the mood to be lectured .( See my post of the BBC interview with president that I am afraid got on the wrong continent , )
You perhaps almost seem to be an apologist for Russia. I’m not an apologist for Russia or the USA, or any nation / state. The USA is the heart of a global empire. I happen to live on some of the land it claims to own and control, but I’m not an American, really. Not really. I mean, f**k all nations and states. Who needs them or wants them?
Russia is certainly no better than the USA, and can rather easily be called worse, even more dangerous and despicable. Why? There is less of a trace of actual democracy (and basic human freedoms, such as of assembly and speech) in Russia than the Evil Empire of the USA.
And it’s rather clear that Russia’s “government” is nothing other than an organized crime organization, with Putin at the helm as a top level Mafia murderer.
Adam Curtis’ Traumazone comes to mind… I think this is worth several hours of anyone’s time – it’s documentary footage from Russia of the years up to Putin coming to power, in a kind of collage that will allow you to draw your own conclusions, or not. I think it’s memorable for the coverage of Boris Yeltsin, among others. It’s also truly shocking in parts, but the main thing I got from the film is that it seemed to me that one is far better served living the hardest-scrabble life in the back of beyond, unless you like to be in the thick of the action, maybe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0
I am not pro anyone I was pointing out that Russia has enough energy in the ground to take it well into the next century and they will not be lectured by the West neither will most of the rest of the world , the West has not got sufficient energy, Global power comes from fossil energy not printing presses / fiat money , Europe is finding that out right now , huge amounts of bluster but no substance , with no industrial capacity to back it up . German companies are going bankrupt faster than any time in history ,, the UK is a basket case , and western defense is a shambles , ,Europe has priced itself out of world markets and with that their ability to buy and import food is coming , the idea from the EU to rewild 30% of the land area and import the lost production IMHO a recipe for starvation .
The wests ability to influence the rest of the world is waining in every way , no one dares to tell china to stop building coal powered generators , or to tell Singapore to stop importing Russian gas , western governments would be shown the finger leading to bad press for the wests politicos .
The world is changing western hegemony / imperialism is over , Nigeria borrows money from China not the imf / world bank many other third world countries are going down the same path , we live in interesting times .
Doesn’t it seem like if the western economies implode that China’s export market disappears overnight ? Then what ? Russia can’t defeat countries like Afghanistan or Ukraine. Energy supplies don’t do you any good without a market, i.e. no buyers. Interesting times indeed.
Thanks Greg. Mike has sent me a copy of his book and I’m looking forward to reading.
I’m finding the ‘global crisis’ and international geo political narratives increasingly like dungeons and dragons, pushing players around a board and reading scenarios, giving out points. A brief view of the introduction of the new book, that glides like an Eagle over the warring empires, is that we need to be transdisciplinary – which sounds alot like common sense, the jack of all trades, the peasant or the commoner. Who have been adapting to every iteration of ‘the future’ thrown up thus far.
Adaptation no matter how radical, is the skill of the animal and the environment. Which is still, no matter what we are told, the basis of all life and knowledge. If the ‘evil’ powers of ‘the world’ have been planning our futures, they are clearly not any good at it. I think that is why Chris’s perspective holds more of the visceral outlines of an actual future.
It is way less to do with galactic government be held to account by the good people but the endurance of technologies of commoning through groups of individuals and families living on the land, which is achieved without and despite the cruel fantasies of internationalist institutions. The more we can live without these institutions and the supply chains and mass production they uphold and defend, will be achieved through the everyday crafts of community provisioning not through any erzats academic data crunching and high falutin’ suits. Don’t get me wrong, facts and research are important but they don’t teach skills, so we’re back to animals and environments.
Again, my reasoning is not to belittle knowledge about ‘the world’ or the violence of The Great Game, which seems to be the subject of this book. I do see, the modernist perspective of being able to look at the world in this way, that it is empirical and predictable – a living machine. This idea underpins Nate Hagens superorganism and like any self respecting Luddite, I am sceptical.
In the book The Nuclear Bomb, the author traces the mechanisation of war into the bureaucracy of the call up in the First World War. The ability to process so many men into the meat grinder of the trenches.
This bureaucracy is the underlying system of modernity, it is shot through every part of our politics, culture and economy and structures our imagination. Its dynamics of hierarchy, based in the military, are embodied in our education from the earliest years and shape our family relationships.
Rather than spending time outlining these present modernist bureaucratic systems and how they may or may not interact, our approach might be, how do we (help) dissolve/ collapse/ hospice this system and its view of the world?
How do we rewire brain pathways and nervous systems attuned to the present value systems? The concept of personalities and the careers available at any given time are alloyed to the needs of institutions. We can say ‘some people just love coding’ without exploring the relationship between self and work, and how it can be more beneficial to our societies and natural environments.
Some kind words from ‘your boss’ about a report you wrote, or something you sold, create good feelings and contribute to our sense of self, further consolidating the ‘reality’ of the bureaucratic hierarchy these human exchanges are taking place in. Equally, negative feelings create the same atrophication.
Our approach might be through the learning of practical skills, the interaction with living systems and the patterning and sense of selves and communities that emerge from that. I think it will be hard to rid ourselves of the imprinted ‘reality’ but there is great strength in the processes of community provisioning to ‘de programme’ these structures.
My sense is, in China and Russia and Africa and Asia and America and Europe many people have lived this way, continue to live this way and will live this way without and despite the empires and resource wars that are at the heart of these hierarchical bureaucratic international institutions. That somehow giving them credence is to indulge in the reality they create and perpetuate, perhaps without even being aware that we are.
In my final reply to myself on this seam of thoughts, I’ll try from another but related set of assumptions.
They way speak about nations is to invoke a person, who will do this or that action or response. This is further embodied by markets as a force or larger personage that holds sway of these nation persons, sometimes in thrall to one or other them, or a group of them.
It is comparable, I think, to grandfather sky, mother earth and sister river – all terms of speaking we would recognise from an indigenous perspective. These terms are not comparable, however, because one is taken seriously, even given status of law and precedent over these other terms and domains. One set of terms are taken seriously and are spoken by ‘professional’ ‘adults’, or to pick up on earlier, people living in modern bureaucratic hierarchies.
“Russia can’t defeat countries like Afghanistan or Ukraine.”
And the USA / NATO lost Afghanistan .
According to Chinese numbers there exports to the West are 40% of exports and dropping .
https://sputnikglobe.com/20240421/us-confiscation-of-russian-assets-will-supercharge-de-dollarization-1118035188.html
This needs watching closely , watch the dollar against gold , when I think it was Nixon who finally took the dollar off the gold standard gold was $43 an ounce , today it’s $2391 ,
https://www.kitco.com/charts/gold. Look at the 5 year chart , that is worrying . US budget deficit is $1 trillion every 100 days , it will not be long before half the gov income goes to pay interest on T bonds , the non dollar denominated world is selling $ and buying Gold . ( that’s the inflation problem ) Russia seems to be doing quite well , even at net zero everyone will need lubricants , unless this happen s
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/19/new-york-offshore-wind-canceled-00153319
Too expensive for the supposedly richest country on the planet !
“Reading through this post really got me thinking about the dire consequences of potential climate tipping points like the AMOC shutdown. It’s unsettling to consider the possibility of such drastic shifts in our climate within our lifetimes. The questions posed here challenge me to rethink my assumptions about how society might cope with such changes, especially in terms of political culture and global inequalities.
The author’s reflections on the AMOC shutdown highlight the interconnectedness of climate change and its impacts on different regions, challenging the notion that only certain parts of the world will bear the brunt of environmental crises. It’s a wake-up call to recognize that even affluent regions like the North Atlantic could face severe disruptions.
I share the author’s frustration with climate scientists who downplay the risks or engage in debates about probabilities while the threat looms large. It’s concerning to see such reluctance to confront the urgency of the situation, especially among those who are supposed to be leading the charge.
The speculation about the potential role of planetary homeostasis in mitigating climate effects is intriguing, albeit unsettling. It’s a reminder of the intricate relationship between human activity and the Earth’s systems, and the unintended consequences of our actions.
Lastly, the suggestion to explore alternative food production methods in the face of agricultural uncertainty raises important questions about resilience and sustainability. It’s a topic that merits further exploration and discussion.
Overall, this post has sparked a lot of reflection for me, and I appreciate the opportunity to engage in this conversation. As the author takes a break to ponder future projects, I’ll be reflecting on these questions and considering what actions I can take in response to the challenges ahead.”
What role does the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) play in moderating the climate of high-latitude and low-latitude countries?
We have been concerned with the specter of climate chaos for four decades, and moved to a small farm in Nova Scotia 20+ years ago to be as self-sustaining as possible, expecting the worst when governments abdicated all responsibility. By now, we are pretty much set up to be independent and are building local community to fill the gaps. The potential AMOC collapse brings the crisis into new focus. A quarter of our food production is now in tunnels and greenhouses, and increasing weather instability may require additional shelters. Open-pollinated seed maintenance will be critical and may be the greatest challenge going forward.