Perilous Times
May 23, 2010
Mathew Stein
Author of When Technology Fails
Posted: May 19, 2010 10:00 PM
The Perfect Storm: Six Prophetic Trends Converging on
Collapse
Climate Change , Deforestation , Food , Gulf Oil Spill , Ocean
Acidification , Overpopulation , Peak Oil , Green News
Failure is not in falling down, but in refusing to get up. --Chinese
Proverb
There are dark clouds gathering on the prophetic horizon. They are the
clouds of six hugely troubling global trends, climate change being just
one of the six. Individually, each of these trends is a potential
civilization buster. Collectively, they are converging to form the
perfect storm--a storm of such magnitude that it will dwarf anything
that mankind has ever seen. If we are unsuccessful in our attempts to
calm this storm, without a doubt it will destroy life as we know it on
Planet Earth!
There is a popular saying that "the definition of insanity is doing the
same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result." If
we keep doing business in the same way as we have for the past century,
each of these six trends will continue their steep rates of decline,
collapsing the natural systems that form the foundation for our
civilization and the lifeblood of the global economy. Perhaps the
current Gulf oil spill is the wake up call that mankind needs to snap
us out of our complacency, realize that we are soiling our nest and
that continuation of "business as usual" will destroy the world as we
know it? Time will tell whether we heed this warning, go back sleep
once the oil spill is contained, or simply tire of the endless media
coverage, numb ourselves, and set these critical issues to the side.
We already have the technology and the means to turn this dark tide,
but we lack the commitment to make the hard choices and sweeping
changes that are necessary for shifting the future of our world from
its current course of collapse to a new course of sustainability.
The following six prophetic trends are converging to form the perfect
storm for global destruction, each of which is a potential civilization
buster in its own right, if left unchecked:
1. Climate Change: with a 90% degree of certainty, the world's top
scientists believe that our planet's climate is changing at an
accelerating pace, that these changes are caused by man, and will have
increasingly severe consequences for our world. Naysayers stress the
10% scientific probability that man is not the cause of current climate
changes, but would you board a plane if you were told it had a 9 out of
10 chance of crashing? It is a rare person over the age of thirty who
will tell you that the weather is not quite different now from when
they were a child. Certainly far more erratic, though not necessarily
always hotter.
Recent estimates by a collaborative team of climate scientists,
including a group from MIT, calculate that even if we implemented the
most stringent greenhouse gas limits currently proposed by some of the
world's governments, it is quite likely that our world's climate will
warm by 6.3F or more over the next century, leading to disastrous crop
failures in most of the world's productive farmlands and "breadbaskets".
2. Peak Oil: Our global economy and culture are built largely upon a
reliance on cheap oil. From the cars we drive, to the jets we fly, to
the buildings we live in, to the food we eat, to the clothes we
wear--almost everything that encompasses the fabric of our modern life
is either powered by oil, built from oil, or made/grown via machines
powered by oil. When the price of oil rose to $140 a barrel in 2008,
the world's economy went into a tailspin--collapsing local economies,
reducing consumption, and bringing the price of oil back down to a
fraction of what it had been just a few months earlier. Global output
of traditional crude oil peaked around 2005-2006 and is currently
declining. Expensive alternate oil and oil-equivalent sources, like tar
sands, deep ocean oil wells, and bio fuels have taken up the slack for
the time being, but these are limited resources and their utilization
is not growing as quickly as anticipated to fill in the gap caused by
the shrinking output from the world's mature oil fields. In 2008 the
International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that decline at a rate of
the world's mature oil fields at 9.1% annually, with a drop to "only"
6.4% if huge capital investments are made to implement "Enhanced Oil
Recovery" technologies on a massive scale.
2010-05-20-oil production-
Without developing energy alternatives at warp speed, or discovering
and developing an entire Saudi Arabia's worth of oil every few years
from now until eternity (an impossible fantasy), our world will be in a
heap of trouble if and when the economy starts to pop back and supply
once again falls short of demand, resulting in more oil price spikes
followed by another round of crashes. In the mid 1960s, when
discoveries of new oil reserves reached their historical peak, we were
discovering oil at a rate four times faster than we were consuming it.
In recent years, the tables have turned. With technology that is miles
beyond what was available in 1960, we are discovering about 1/10th as
much oil each year as we did then, but consuming it at a rate five
times faster than we discover it. That's like charging $100,000 dollars
on our credit cards each year, and only paying off $20,000. How long
can we keep that up before we bankrupt the system? For years,
governments have been official naysayers about the "Peak Oil theory".
However, in April the US military issued a report saying, "By 2012
surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early
as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach 10 million barrels per
day."
3. Collapse of the World's Oceans: with 11 out of 15 of the world's
major fisheries either in collapse, or in danger of collapse, our
world's oceans are in serious trouble! The ocean's planktons form the
bottom of both the food chain and the bulk of the carbon-oxygen cycle
for our planet. According to a recent British government report, the
oceans have lost 73% of their zooplankton since 1960, and over 50% of
this decline has been since 1990, and the phytoplanktons are also in
serious decline! Unfortunately, the coral reefs aren't doing much
better than the planktons. By 2004, an estimated 20 percent of the
world's coral reefs had been destroyed (up from just 11 percent in
2000), an additional 24 percent were close to collapsing, and another
26 percent were under long-term threat of collapse.
4. Deforestation: Over 50% of the world's forests have already
disappeared, and much of the rest is in threatened. Deforestation
contributes approximately 25% of all global greenhouse gasses, nearly
double the 14% that transportation and industry sectors each
contribute. Additionally, the forests of the world are a critical part
of the weather cycle as well as the carbon-oxygen cycle. Each large
mature tree acts as a giant water pump, recycling millions of gallons
of water back into the atmosphere via evaporation from its leaves or
needles. It has been estimated that a single large rainforest or
coniferous tree has an evaporative surface area roughly equal to a 40
acre lake. When the trees are decimated in a region, a process called
"desertification" tends to occur downwind because the trees are no
longer there to pump groundwater back into the atmosphere to fall back
to Earth as additional rainfall at some down wind location.
2010-05-20-tree-water cycle-
5. The Global Food Crisis: Soils, Weather and Water. For the first time
since the "green revolution" started, our world is producing less food
each year, yet its population continues to rise as we loose more top
soil, arable land, and have less water for irrigation. Climate change
is currently contributing more to losses than technology is to gains.
In 2008 and 2009, food riots threatened the stability of many
governments. In 2010 extended droughts in the breadbaskets of both
China and India are threatening the food supply for over 1/3 of the
world's population!
6. Over Population: This is the elephant in the room that few are
talking about. In the last decade, we have added more people to the
population of our planet than were added between the births of Jesus
and Abraham Lincoln. In the mid 1980s our world first overshot its
capacity to provide for its human population, yet this population
continues to grow and we continue to live on borrowed time. One
thousand years after Jesus walked the Earth, human population was
around 1/2 billion. Eight hundred years later this population doubled
to 1 billion. It took only 130 more years to double to 2 billion in
1930. When I was a kid in 1960, world population hit 3 billion people
and it only took another 40 years to double to 6 billion in the year
2000.
It is anticipated that the world's population will reach 7 billion in
the year 2012, meaning that between the start of the year 2000 and the
end of 2012 (barring some huge catastrophe that kills hundreds of
millions), more people will have been added to the population of our
world than lived on the entire planet just two hundred years ago! There
is simply no way we can achieve a sustainable future unless our
population stops growing and starts shrinking. Either nature will do
this for us, with starvation and plagues spreading across the planet as
our natural and man-made systems fall apart, or mankind will use its
intelligence and free will to proactively implement positive solutions
to these issues.
2010-05-20-population growth-
My intention is not just to bum you out, but to do my part in sounding
the alarm for a massive wake up call to start taking the sort of wide
ranging actions that will be required in order to succeed in changing
the course of our "Titanic" (planet Earth) to dodge the iceberg of
global collapse. Averting collapse will not be easy, but it is far
better that the alternative! Highly motivated societies have shown that
they are able to marshal huge forces to accomplish great things. When
Hitler joined forces with Mussolini and Japan, the threat was great
enough to unite the Russians and Americans with the rest of the world
in a common goal.
If we could put humans on the moon, build the Panama Canal, defeat
Hitler, and rebuild Europe after WWII, why can't we unite to create a
viable planetary civilization? So far, we lack not the means, but only
the will and the leadership. In general, people lead and governments
follow. It took massive action on the part of millions of people in the
abolitionist movement to finally put a candidate in power (Lincoln) who
was willing to do something about it, and for the suffrage movement to
finally force governments to grant women the right to vote. Though none
of us will individually alter the course of the universe, collectively
we can do this! Just as the German people were asked how they could
have allowed the Holocaust to take place before their very eyes, do we
wish to be held accountable by future generations for allowing the
approaching "Perfect Storm" to devastate our world while we had the
knowledge and technology to change its course?
We must do what we can. Always. At night we must go to sleep
knowing that we have done our best, and there is no more you can do
than that. Do not let the problems overwhelm you. Start somewhere,
anywhere, with just the smallest gesture of compassion, and you have
made a dent against the evil of the world. --Gottfried Muller, in Thom
Hartmann's The Prophet's Way
Matthew Stein is the author of When Technology Fails