Is the world being destroyed?

Abstract
Ecosystems worldwide are under increasing threat. We applied a standardized method for assessing the risk of ecosystem collapse, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Ecosystems, to coral reefs in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO), covering 11,919 km2 of reef (~5% of the global total). Our approach combined indicators of change in historic ecosystem extent, ecosystem functioning (hard corals, fleshy algae, herbivores and piscivores) and projected sea temperature warming. We show that WIO coral reefs are vulnerable to collapse at the regional level, while in 11 nested ecoregions they range from critically endangered (islands, driven by future warming) to vulnerable (continental coast and northern Seychelles, driven principally by fishing pressure). Responses to avoid coral reef collapse must include ecosystem-based management of reefs and adjacent systems combined with mitigating and adapting to climate change. Our approach can be replicated across coral reefs globally to help countries and other actors meet conservation and sustainability targets set under multiple global conventions—including the Convention on Biological Diversity’s post-2020 global biodiversity framework and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

• In one of the first comprehensive studies of images captured by the Envisat satellite, researchers with French consultancy firm VisioTerra found evidence of 18,063 oil slicks in the Gulf of Guinea between 2002 and 2012.
• While some of the slicks were caused by natural seepages from oil-rich coastal areas, the bulk were tied to shipping and offshore oil production.
• Researchers told Mongabay the images suggest that the total amount of oil spilled into the Gulf of Guinea over the study period was greater than 2010’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, despite going largely unreported.

When BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig flooded the Gulf of Mexico with 4 million barrels of oil in 2010, the catastrophe was headline news across the world for months. A new study of satellite images taken between 2002 and 2012 suggests that it may have been dwarfed by the amount of oil spilled into West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea in recent decades.

“There was a lot of news about what occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, which is good,” said Serge Riazanoff, one of the study’s authors and a researcher with VisioTerra, a French consultancy that specializes in satellite data assessments. “But nobody speaks about the fact that in the Gulf of Guinea it’s even worse.”

Riazanoff and his co-authors analyzed nearly 4,000 images of the West African coast taken by Envisat, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 2002 that recorded data across the world until it ceased functioning in April 2012. What they found when they started combing through those images to look for signs of oil spills was sobering.

According to the study, researchers were able to identify 18,063 oil slicks in the 10-year period covered by the images, mostly caused by spills from shipping vessels and offshore drilling platforms.

While some of the larger spills led to fines and penalties for companies like Shell and Exxon, Riazanoff said many others likely went unreported, particularly when they were relatively smaller or didn’t wash up onshore.

Images captured by Envisat’s advanced synthetic aperture radar (ASAR) were detailed enough to allow researchers to differentiate patterns of oil slicks from other oceanic events. Some slicks, called “seeps,” occurred naturally along parts of the coastline, but the bulk were caused by offshore drilling and exploration as well as deep-water de-ballasting by shipping vessels.

The worst period recorded in the study was 2008, when oil spills covered nearly 1,000 square kilometers (390 square miles) in the Gulf of Guinea over the course of the year, including around 400 km2 (155 mi2) of Angola’s coastal waters. Overall, Nigeria was far and away the most heavily affected country in the region.

Nigeria’s struggles with the environmental consequences of oil spills on shore have been well-documented, with the United Nations estimating in 2011 that cleaning up the heavily polluted Niger Delta region would take 30 years and cost billions of dollars. But less is known about the extent and severity of offshore spills — partly because the Nigerian government relies on oil companies themselves to disclose them.

“By law, when oil spills, the oil companies will indicate such,” said Idris Musa, director of Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA).

But analysts say the Nigerian government lacks the ability to independently monitor its coastal waters on its own, and that often companies stay silent rather than risk taking a PR hit or being forced to pay for cleanup efforts.

“The reality is they don’t have the capacity to ascertain when there has been an oil spill,” said Ife Okafor-Yarwood, a lecturer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an expert on the impact of oil pollution on coastal livelihoods in Nigeria. “They rely on the oil company that has access to a helicopter to take them there. The human capacity is there but they don’t have the assets.”

Musa told Mongabay that insecurity caused by piracy, a growing problem in recent years, has made it difficult for regulators to carry out unannounced monitoring visits to offshore platforms.

“Of course, [the companies] may not tell the truth, but you cannot go to any platform independently for now, for obvious reasons. We are in a place where we have a lot of illegal activities, nothing close to where we can go to any company’s platform to investigate so we don’t have mistaken identity,” he said.

Riazanoff said that in years past, VisioTerra has been hired by oil companies like France’s Total to monitor offshore oil spills — but only to warn them when those spills were headed toward the shoreline where regulators and the media were likely to take notice.

“We were monitoring the drift of oil slicks before they reach the beach where people would see it, but otherwise they don’t say anything,” he told Mongabay.

When those spills do arrive on shore, they can be catastrophic for coastal ecosystems and communities in the area.

“The impact is absolutely devastating, because it robs them of their livelihood, especially if they rely on fishing,” said Okafor-Yarwood.

According to Michael Watts, a professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, offshore oil spills can be caused by corporate negligence or illegal de-ballasting by shipping vessels, but also through leakage from theft and other forms of piracy.

“There’s a considerable amount of spillage that occurs with illegal loading at export terminals and offshore where a lot of barges lift and move oil,” he said.

Although the data analyzed by VisioTerra didn’t extend past 2012, Watts said it’s unlikely that much has significantly improved since then. As major oil producers move more of their operations in West Africa offshore, unless regulators are able to better monitor the industry’s compliance with environmental laws, the Gulf of Guinea will continue to suffer in silence.

“The pressure hasn’t been put on them, and for the most part the regulatory capacity and ability to enforce existing laws on the books vis à vis safety cleanup — certainly in Nigeria, but I would say virtually anywhere in the Gulf of Guinea — hasn’t improved,” he said.

The “disastrous” way in which plastic is used in farming across the world is threatening food safety and potentially human health, according to a report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

It says soils contain more microplastic pollution than the oceans and that there is “irrefutable” evidence of the need for better management of the millions of tonnes of plastics used in the food and farming system each year.

The report recognises the benefits of plastic in producing and protecting food, from irrigation and silage bags to fishing gear and tree guards. But the FAO said the use of plastics had become pervasive and that most were currently single-use and were buried, burned or lost after use. It also warned of a growing demand for agricultural plastics.

There is increasing concern about the microplastics formed as larger plastics are broken down, the report said. Microplastics are consumed by people and wildlife and some contain toxic additives and can also carry pathogens. Some marine animals are harmed by eating plastics but little is known about the impact on land animals or people.

“The report serves as a loud call for decisive action to curb the disastrous use of plastics across the agricultural sectors,” said Maria Helena Semedo, deputy director general at the FAO.

“Soils are one of the main receptors of agricultural plastics and are known to contain larger quantities of microplastics than oceans,” she said. “Microplastics can accumulate in food chains, threatening food security, food safety and potentially human health.”

Global soils are the source of all life on land but the FAO warned in December 2020 that their future looked “bleak” without action to halt degradation. Microplastic pollution is also a global problem, pervading the planet from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trenches.

The FAO report, which was reviewed by external experts, estimates 12.5m tonnes of plastic products were used in plant and animal production in 2019, and a further 37.3m in food packaging.

Plastic is a versatile material and cheap and easy to make into products, the report says. These include greenhouse and mulching films as well as polymer-coated fertiliser pellets, which release nutrients more slowly and efficiently.

“However, despite the many benefits, agricultural plastics also pose a serious risk of pollution and harm to human and ecosystem health when they are damaged, degraded or discarded in the environment,” the report says.

Data on plastic use is limited, it says, but Asia was estimated to be the largest user, accounting for about half of global usage. Furthermore, the global demand for major products such as greenhouse, mulching and silage films is expected to rise by 50% by 2030.

Only a small fraction of agricultural plastics are collected and recycled. The FAO said: “The urgency for coordinated and decisive action cannot be understated.”

Prof Jonathan Leake, at the University of Sheffield in the UK and a panel member of the UK Sustainable Soils Alliance, said: “Plastic pollution of agricultural soils is a pervasive, persistent problem that threatens soil health throughout much of the world.”

He said the impact of plastic was poorly understood, although adverse effects had been seen on earthworms, which played a crucial role in keeping soils and crops healthy.

“We are currently adding large amounts of these unnatural materials into agricultural soils without understanding their long-term effects,” he said. “In the UK the problems are especially serious because of our applications of large amounts of plastic-contaminated sewage sludges and composts. We need to remove the plastics [from these] before they are added to land, as it is impossible to remove them afterwards.”

As a solution, the FAO report cites “the 6R model” – refuse, redesign, reduce, reuse, recycle, and recover. This means adopting farming practices that avoid plastic use, substituting plastic products with natural or biodegradable alternatives, promoting reusable plastic products and improving plastic waste management.

Politics in the United States have become an increasingly polarized affair for decades, driven largely by the right moving further to the right. Observation of political polarization is not merely anecdotal; studies repeatedly bear this out.

Now, some researchers say the partisan rift in the United States has become so extreme that the country may be at a point of no return.

According to a theoretical model's findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the pandemic failing to unite the country, despite political differences, is a signal that the U.S. is at a disconcerting tipping point.

"We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a little bit closer initially . . . but if polarization is too extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue," said network scientist Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science and director of the Army Research Laboratory Network Science and Technology Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "If we reach that point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society."

As I've reported before, sociologists and experts in disaster resilience studies often observe that a "therapeutic community" surfaces in the wake of a disaster — whether that's a hurricane, wildfire, or a terrorist attack. While that was the case to some extent after 9/11, the pandemic hasn't united the nation the same way. Experts have argued that any possibility of unity was doomed from the start of the pandemic, in part because of how politically divided and polarized the nation was before the novel coronavirus began spreading. This latest paper adds to this theory, and suggests that the U.S. is so divided that it is at an irreparable point at which unity is not possible.

Szymanski and fellow researchers reached their conclusion by simulating the views of 100 theoretical legislators around 10 polarizing issues. The researchers had their theoretical legislators interact and network with theoretical neighbors and like-minded groups to see the influence these interactions had on polarization, too — akin to a "Sims"-like video game. When manipulating the group's "control parameters" — such as increased party identification, intolerance for disagreement, and extremism — the model found that polarizing behavior among politicians is one reason why the country is as politically divided as it is today.

At various points, the research team introduced an outside threat, like a pandemic, and then recorded how the group behaved. Interestingly, it appeared that when the group introduced an internal threat that failed to unite the country, that meant that the level of polarization was beyond repair.

"If the polarization is very, very deep in these 10 issues, then we are at the very dangerous stage in which it is very difficult to reverse polarization by democratic means," Szymanski told Salon. "When that tipping point is passed, there are no constitutional means that can reverse polarization."

Indeed, graphs displaying the relationship between polarization and the control parameters showed that in many situations a high amount of polarization that couldn't be rectified by an external threat meant that a society was in a "phase transition," where measures of polarization began to increase exponentially. In some scenarios, if the polarization was dialed down the trend could be reversed. In other cases, a recovery wasn't possible.

"Although political polarization is nothing new, expanding political division is creating an unpredictable environment that threatens the capacity of government to respond rationally in a crisis," said Curt Breneman, dean of the Rensselaer School of Science. "This research is designed to enhance societal resilience by predicting when the level of political polarization within an influential group is nearing the point where a sudden threat will no longer produce collective action."

Szymanski said he hopes people take away from this study that this "theoretical model confirms intuition."

"If the external strong signal does not unite people, we are in danger of getting into this irreversible polarization," which Szymanski alarmed is bad for democracy. "In a divided society, it's of course very difficult to maintain that democracy which requires agreements of all people and the people who win elections and lose elections."

Szymanski added that the research shows the U.S. is at a "dangerous level of polarization," but perhaps electing less polarizing politicians could reverse the trend the U.S. is facing.

"It's almost the last call," Szymanski said.

Polarization is being fed by corporate and military interests. The pressure is moving the Democratic party further right and less democratic in their actions.

We know microplastics are a big environmental problem and that they can now be found almost everywhere, including our food and water — and inside our bodies. But just how harmful are they? Since it’s a problem we’ve only recently started to realize, we don’t know yet — but the data is coming in, and it doesn’t look too good. At least in a petri dish, microplastics have the potential to cause significant damage to human cells in the laboratory, a new study found.


The study is the first to quantify the levels of microplastics (plastic particles measuring less than five millimeters) that may lead to harmful effects in human cells.

“This is the first-time scientists have attempted to quantify the effects of the levels of microplastics on human cells using a statistical analysis of the available published studies,” Evangelos Danopoulos, lead author and PhD student, said in a statement. “We are seeing reactions including cell death and allergic reactions as potential effects.”

Not only are microplastics everywhere already, but the contamination is expected to rise as plastic production and use around the world also increase. Within a century, the ecological risks of microplastics could be widespread in ecosystems across the world. So researchers are trying to understand just how dangerous these microplastics really are.

Exposure and contamination

Humans have two main routes of exposure to microplastics: ingestion and inhalation; we either ingest or inhale microplastics — and concerningly, both seem to be widespread. The presence of microplastics has been verified in human lung tissue, placenta, and colectomy samples.

Danopoulos and his team first reviewed a set of 17 previous studies that looked at the toxicological impact of microplastics on human cell lines. This allowed them to compare the level of microplastics consumed by people through polluted seafood, table salt, and drinking water with the level at which damage is caused to human cells.

They found that four specific types of harm to human cells (cell death, damage to cell membranes and allergic response) were directly caused by the microplastic that people eat. The study also showed that microplastics with an irregular shape cause more cell death than spherical ones. Most laboratory studies focus on spherical ones. At the levels already found inside human bodies, these particles seem to be causing significant cellular damage.

“Our analysis of the data showed that cell viability depends on the shape of the microplastics. Irregularly shaped microplastics, which are the majority found in the environment, are more hazardous than spherical,” Danopoulos said. “So far, most toxicology studies have been testing spherical microplastics. There needs to be a shift.”

For the researchers, the findings show that we are eating microplastics at levels consistent with harmful effects on our cells, which could then trigger other health effects. Nevertheless, he highlighted the high level of uncertainty regarding how ingested microplastics are excreted from the body – crucial to better understand the true risk that microplastics pose to our health.

The study was published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.

* Losses rising as climate fuels more extreme weather events

* Pittsburgh, Columbus among non-coastal areas facing risk

* Businesses are leveraging new risk-mapping data

American businesses stand to lose more than 3 million days of operations from flooding in 2022 and will face worsening economic fallout in the coming decades as climate change fuels ever more extreme weather events, researchers said Monday.

Next year's expected damage, based on estimated trends, translates to a nearly $50 billion annual hit for local economies in cities from Miami to Pittsburgh, according to First Street Foundation, a non-profit group that maps climate risk.

In a new study, researchers there took a rare comprehensive look at the expected flood risk to businesses and local economies in the United States - a threat often underestimated amid a focus on flooded homes and family losses.

"It's a whole other dimension of flood risk," said Jeremy Porter, head of research and development at First Street Foundation.

"You talk about commercial activity, you're talking about the economic activity that underpins the entire community."

In total, local businesses in the United States could lose the equivalent of 3.1 million days of operations in 2022 from floods - a number estimated to hit 4 million by 2052 as flood threats grow, the report said.

Researchers found that roughly 730,000 retail, office and multi-unit residential properties - with commercial properties as well as homes - are at risk of projected flood damage today in the contiguous United States.

High-risk metropolitan areas included Miami and New York – coastal spots where heightened threats are to be expected – but also inland cities like Pittsburgh, which sits at the confluence of three rivers.

"Pittsburgh was a big surprise to us. Once we started doing the analysis it made total sense, but it wasn't what we would have expected," said Matthew Eby, founder and executive director of First Street Foundation.

Nashville in Tennessee and Cincinnati and Columbus in Ohio are other moderately-sized, inland cities that are nevertheless at significant risk of flooding from nearby river overflows and extreme rainfall, according to Porter.

"You tend to think about the coasts, but it's very important that we don't ignore rivers and streams," said Steven Rothstein of Ceres, a U.S.-based nonprofit working to reshape economic systems to address climate and other risks.

FLOODED BASEMENTS

The study calculated the economic fallout from flood risk by projecting expected damage and repair time for buildings, in part by digging into detail such as which floor key equipment was located on.

Getting such information into the public sphere can help individual property owners looking to make changes to cut risks, said Ibbi Almufti, a structural engineer with the engineering firm Arup.

"Raising equipment out of the basement, for example, or hardening your exterior with flood walls" are among possible fixes, said Almufti, whose firm partnered with First Street Foundation on the report.

He said he was struck by the scale and growth of the anticipated threat and by rising damage in some particular U.S. locations.

For example, Bay City, Texas - about 80 miles south and west of Houston - was projected to see a 5.8% increase in the number of structures with damage over 30 years.

However, that small boost in numbers translated to a more than 900% increase in estimated economic damages over that period.

Even six additional inches of flooding on a more frequent basis can significantly boost average annual losses, Almufti said.

Cities and municipalities are taking note of the rising risks and in some cases relying on businesses to help them update their own modeling and risk projections.

For example, Florida's Broward County has worked with Jupiter, a company that maps climate risk, to develop 100-year municipal flood projections.

Still, major unknowns - like how new infrastructure could cut risks - inject a degree of uncertainty into longer-term projections of risks, said Miyuki Hino of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

There is "really good reason why we don't know what the flood hazard is going to be in 2070 or 2080," warned Hino, an assistant professor who studies flood risk and sea level rise.

CLIMATE GENTRIFICATION

Plenty of businesses are already acting on growing climate risks, with their own bottom line and business continuity worries in mind.

Some major corporate headquarters and facilities - including Roper Hospital in Charleston, South Carolina - have made plans to relocate to cut their climate-related risks.

But more vulnerable populations can end up getting crowded out by firms looking to cash in on the least flood-threatened land, in a process known as climate gentrification.

For example, sophisticated data modelers and investors have been "buying up all the properties in little Haiti in Miami because it is the highest elevation point and they know that's going to be the most valuable real estate," Eby said.

Flood data and risk calculations are continually evolving – but that can't be an excuse for inaction on threats, Rothstein said.

Already, "Dallas had two 100-year floods within four years – not 200 years," he noted.

"The risk is not, gee, do you have perfect data? I think the biggest risk is doing nothing."

When it rains for a few days in a row, Roosevelt Jones can’t use his bathroom. Water fills the septic system in the yard, sewage gurgles up into the bathtub, and the toilet won’t flush.

“So, you imagine you’re sitting up about two o’clock in the morning, and then you get the urge to go use the Number Two,” said Jones, who lives in Suffolk. “A whole lot of time you have to hold it.”

Jones, a former union organizer, is 80 years old. When holding it gets unbearable, he goes to one of the churches where he does custodial work.

There are more than a million septic systems in Virginia, many of them designed like the one on Jones’s property. When the toilet flushes, the waste is supposed to go into an underground tank. Gravity then pulls it into the soil where microbes treat and process it.

But if the land is too wet, the process fails and waste overflows into surrounding areas.

Experts say that’s becoming more common across coastal Virginia, where sea levels are rising at the fastest average rate on the Eastern Seaboard.

Soggier soils due to persistent flooding — along with heavier rainfall and aging tanks — are expected to cause more widespread septic failures over the next few decades. Historically marginalized Virginians could bear the worst of it.

A rising water table

Jones lives in Suffolk’s rural but densely populated Oakland-Chuckatuck area.

He and many of his neighbors, who are predominantly Black, have been trying to get better sanitation for decades.

Many residents previously used outhouses before installing septic tanks. Conversations about a proposed sewer line — which would connect the neighborhood to municipal wastewater — date back to at least the 1970s.


Septic systems rely on gravity to pull waste into the soil where microorganisms treat and process it.


Not surprisingly, Jones said the smell is “awful” when his septic system backs up.

“That’s why we call it waste,” he said.

It’s not just a nauseating inconvenience. High exposure to septic fumes can cause breathing problems and other health issues. Failing systems can also leak raw sewage into nearby creeks and rivers, contaminating them with bacteria, viruses, and nitrogen.

Suffolk has done drainage work to help ease flooding, but developers have built new housing that pushes stormwater into people’s yards. Residents say the flooding has never been worse.

For Jones, the septic system problem seems to go away when the ground is dry. But with sea level rise, experts say there are many places in coastal Virginia where the ground may never dry.

“What we see is that the water table, the groundwater table, is rising,” said Molly Mitchell, a researcher at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. “If [the system] was installed 30 years ago, the conditions surrounding the septic system have changed since that time. And so you might not have…the level of treatment from the sediment that you had when the system was installed.”

Although many of the state’s systems are considered beyond their lifespan, Mitchell said exactly how many are at risk is hard to know for sure.

Researchers don’t know precisely where all the tanks are. Only a portion of the state’s data on these systems is digital. The other records are on paper, filed away in local government desks. State officials are piecing together available information to expand its database, but for many septic systems, there simply are no records.

As for how sea level rise will impact septic tanks in the future, Mitchell said it will be a gradual process.

“It’s going to be one property at a time. But it’s still going to be a lot of properties,” she said.

Roosevelt Jones lives in Suffolk’s Oakland-Chuckatuck area. When it rains for a few days, his septic tank backs up and prevents him from using his toilet.

A huge equity problem

Existing problems are expected to worsen in Suffolk, Chesapeake and southern Virginia Beach. But it’s rural shoreline communities — such as the Middle Peninsula, Eastern Shore, and Northern Neck — that could face the worst septic problems.

Tom Hogge has experienced these issues firsthand. He built his house in the low-lying Guinea Neck area of Gloucester County in 1995. Within the first few months, sewage was coming out of the ground.

“Brand new home, couldn’t flush the toilet. Washing machine, couldn’t use that,” he said. “Down in this area it’s terrible for septic systems.”

Eventually, the county put in a public sewer line, solving Hogge’s problem. But that’s not always practical in areas where houses are far apart. Other coastal residents need a special, high-tech septic system that can better withstand flooding.

That’s exactly what Robert Hutchens was recently installing for a resident on a waterfront property in Gloucester County.

“We’re upgrading an existing system that has failed here. It was constructed in the 1960s,” Hutchens said, standing next to his excavator.

The new system treats waste with coconut husks and can cost as much as $50,000. Hutchens knows that’s out of reach for most people.

“The ones that can afford it obviously will. But those that can’t, you know, they’re going to get their medicine, they’re going to eat before they fix their wastewater system,” Hutchens said.

Workers install a new septic system on a property in Gloucester County. The system treats waste with coconut husks.

Access to sanitation is a huge equity issue across the country. In many areas, it affects people of color — particularly Black residents — more than white people.

Historians say that’s partially because after the Civil War, many freed slaves could only acquire property that flooded easily. That same land has been passed down over generations.

“The people that are seeing the problems first and foremost, were those that are victims of structural racism, or were mandated by racial covenants in terms of where they could settle,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, a national sanitation activist who serves on an environmental justice advisory council for President Biden.

Other disproportionately impacted groups include lower-income people in rural areas, tribal communities, and immigrants.

Today, marginalized residents are vulnerable to legal consequences. Unaddressed septic issues can mean fines — even criminal prosecution or eviction — so, many people don’t come forward for help. But officials say it’s rare in Virginia to actually bring people to court over this.

“If granny has a failed septic system, [a] commonwealth attorney is not going to take granny to jail, ” said State Delegate Keith Hodges, who represents the Middle Peninsula.

“We always are in an enforcement posture,” added David Fridley, a manager for the Three Rivers Health District. “But the real goal is always to solve people’s problems and connect them with resources.”

Solutions in the works, but questions remain

Localities provide grants and loans for homeowners for routine septic service, which is required every five years for people living in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.

But that assistance does not always reach the people who need it. The Northern Neck Planning District Commission has had a septic pump-out program for 15 years, but in its entire history — and out of a population of about 50,000 — just 800 people have asked for help, according to commissioner John Bateman.

“A lot of times, people are certainly reluctant to come forward when they have wastewater issues, especially if they can’t afford the repair,” noted Lance Gregory, director of the Virginia Department of Health’s division focused on septic issues. “So that’s I think really critical for us, is building that trust with the community.”


Failing septic systems can leak raw sewage into nearby creeks and rivers, contaminating them with bacteria, viruses and nitrogen.

Virginia lawmakers are working on solutions. A new law this year set up a statewide fund to help with repairs and replacements. State officials also will start considering the impacts of sea level rise when issuing permits for new septic tanks.

The officials say it’ll be a game changer that could be a model for other coastal states with septic issues.

Some activists, including Flowers, are skeptical.

“I’ve been doing this for over 20 years,” she said. “And everybody has the next best thing, and it hasn’t worked and they’re right back where they started. And the money has been spent, the engineers and all the other officials that charge fees make money and they move on. And the homeowners are left holding the bag.”

Skip Stiles of the Virginia environmental non-profit Wetlands Watch also wonders what happens in the long run. While he’s supportive of the state’s efforts, he’s not sure whether it’s worth investing in new septic systems in some areas.

“If you’re along the shoreline and your septic system is flooding from underneath, it’s sort of like a canary in the coal mine for the fact that within a decade or two your house is going to flood,” Stiles said. “And it will be so compromised that we may not want to continue to support people living there. That’s going to be the hardest problem.”

More coastal communities will have to face that dilemma soon. By 2060, much of the Middle Peninsula, Eastern Shore and Northern Neck could be underwater.

There are people already dealing with that now, though.

Like Roosevelt Jones, the 80-year-old from rural Suffolk. Rainstorms flooded him out last Christmas, and he’s afraid that will happen again this year.

“And I won’t be able to use my bathroom,” Jones said.

Jones and his late wife, Catherine, were leading a push to get Suffolk to extend a sewer line to their community and address the flooding problems. That way, their neighbors would never have to deal with a septic back-up again. But, since she died in August, the effort has lost momentum.

Diana Klink, a city of Suffolk spokesperson, told WHRO that a recent petition for a new sewer line for Jones’s community did not receive enough support. But she said Suffolk has designated $14 million in federal Covid relief funds for water, sewer and stormwater upgrades for the area.

Jones doubts that will resolve his problems.

“Seems like to me, I’ll be on my way out like my wife before they even get it done,” Jones said.

• "China's leaders see distant water fleets as a way to project presence around the world. The aim is to be present all over the world's oceans so that they can direct the outcomes of international agreements that cover maritime resources." — Tabitha Mallory, CEO of China Ocean Institute and affiliate professor at the University of Washington, Axios, March 23, 2021.

• In the past five years, more than 500 abandoned wooden fishing boats, often with skeletons of starved North Korean fishermen aboard, have washed up on the shores of Japan. For years the cause was unknown, until it was found out that the likely reason was that "an armada" of Chinese industrial boats fish illegally in North Korean waters.... It is estimated that China's fishing vessels have depleted squid stocks in North Korean waters by 70%.

• Most of the fishing vessels in China's fleet are trawlers. "Fishing by trawling method sweeps out the seafloor in the south, and annihilates its resources," a representative of the fishermen said.

• In a number of West African countries -- Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and others -- Chinese trawlers have for years "taken advantage of poor governance, corruption and the inability of these governments to enforce fishing regulations" according to the China-Africa project. "Today, the Chinese vessels largely operate beyond government control, prompting an increasingly serious environmental crisis brought on from over-fishing that also endangers local coastal communities who depend on these waters for their livelihoods". In July 2020, six Chinese super-trawlers arrived in Liberia, capable of capturing 12,000 tons of fish -- nearly twice the nation's sustainable catch.

• In South America, Chinese predatory fishing is now so critical that in March, Argentina announced the creation of a Maritime Joint Command to combat the predatory fishing practices of foreign vessels.

• The Chinese fishing fleet, however, is about much more than fishing. "Against the backdrop of China's larger geo-political aspirations, the country's commercial fishermen often serve as de-facto paramilitary personnel whose activities the Chinese government can frame as private actions", stated an August 2020 report by Ian Urbina, published by the Yale School of the Environment. "Under a civilian guise, this ostensibly private armada helps assert territorial domination, especially pushing back fishermen or governments that challenge China's sovereignty claims that encompass nearly all of the South China Sea".

China has by far the world's largest fishing fleet. However, the Chinese fishing fleet is about much more than fishing. According to investigative reporter Ian Urbina, "Against the backdrop of China's larger geo-political aspirations, the country's commercial fishermen often serve as de-facto paramilitary personnel whose activities the Chinese government can frame as private actions." Pictured: Filipinos protest China's incursion in the West Philippine Sea, on June 21, 2019, in Manila, Philippines. Filipino fishermen reported that on June 9, 2019, a Chinese fishing vessel rammed and sank their boat within the Philippines' Exclusive Economic Zone, leaving all 22 Filipino crew floating at sea before being rescued by a Vietnamese fishing vessel.

Communist China seems increasingly to be depleting the world's oceans of marine life. The country has by far the world's largest fishing fleet of anywhere between 200,000 to 800,000 fishing boats -- accounting for nearly half of the world's fishing activity -- approximately 17,000 of which belong to its distant-water fishing fleet. The growth has been made possible by enormous state subsidies. In 2012, for instance, the Chinese state poured $3.2 billion in subsidies into its fishing sector, most of it for fuel. However, according to a report from 2012, "government support for the fishing and aquaculture sector could be as much as CNY 500 billion (USD 80.2 billion, EUR 61.7 billion) when regional and national subsidies for rural-based fish farmers are taken into account."

As noted by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), many industrialized countries, having depleted their domestic waters, go distant-water fishing in the territorial waters of low-income countries, but China's distant-water fleet is by far the largest in the world. The ODI also noted that ownership and operational control of China's fleet is both "complex and opaque".

"China's leaders see distant water fleets as a way to project presence around the world," Tabitha Mallory, CEO of the consulting firm China Ocean Institute and affiliate professor at the University of Washington told Axios. "The aim is to be present all over the world's oceans so that they can direct the outcomes of international agreements that cover maritime resources."

Chinese fishing vessels deplete the stocks of countries not only in Southeast Asia, but also as far away as the Persian Gulf, South America, West Africa and the South Pacific. Their predatory and unsustainable fishing methods are endangering not only marine life, but also the livelihoods of local fishermen. China is considered to be the largest perpetrator of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU) in the world, as well as the largest subsidizer in the world of such practices.

Admiral Karl Schultz, the Commandant of the United States Coast Guard, has warned:

"IUU fishing has replaced piracy as the leading global maritime security threat. If IUU fishing continues unchecked, we can expect a deterioration of fragile coastal States and increased tension among foreign-fishing Nations, threatening geo-political stability around the world,"

The consequences are sometimes grisly. One of the most shocking examples is that of North Korea: In the past five years, more than 500 abandoned wooden fishing boats, often with skeletons of starved North Korean fishermen aboard, have washed up on the shores of Japan. For years the cause was unknown, until it was found out that the likely reason was that "an armada" of Chinese industrial boats fish illegally in North Korean waters, forcing the locals to venture further from shore, where some of them die in a vain search for fish and eventually wash up in Japan. It is estimated that China's fishing vessels have depleted squid stocks in North Korean waters by 70%.

In Iran, pro-reform media reported in July that Chinese vessels were "illegally cleaning out fish resources in the Persian Gulf" while "Iranian fishermen are forced to pay ten thousand dollars in bribes to Somalian pirates to let them fish on the African shores". Most of the fishing vessels in China's fleet are trawlers. "Fishing by trawling method sweeps out the seafloor in the south, and annihilates its resources," one representative of the fishermen said. According to a July 2020 report from Iran News Update:

"In recent years, this horrible issue [activity of Chinese trawlers] has contributed to a two-third decrease in Iran's aquatic reserves and sounded alarms about the annihilation of the country's marine ecosystem. Moreover, this kind of fishing negatively affected Iranian fishers' businesses..."

Iran has reportedly been leasing out its territorial waters in the Persian Gulf to Chinese industrial ships for more than a decade. In 2018, the Deputy for Port Affairs of the Ports and Maritime Organization of Iran, Mohammad Ali Hassanzadeh, admitted that Chinese ships were "operating under a 'long-term lease' for fishing at a depth of 200 meters (roughly 656 feet) in Iranian waters."

In a number of West African countries -- Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria and others -- Chinese trawlers have for years "taken advantage of poor governance, corruption and the inability of these governments to enforce fishing regulations" according to the China-Africa project.

"Today, the Chinese vessels largely operate beyond government control, prompting an increasingly serious environmental crisis brought on from over-fishing that also endangers local coastal communities who depend on these waters for their livelihoods".

In July 2020, six Chinese super-trawlers arrived in Liberia, capable of capturing 12,000 tons of fish -- nearly twice the nation's sustainable catch.

A March 24 report by the Environmental Justice Foundation said that Chinese state companies have been "fleecing" Ghana's ocean resources "by camouflaging as locally incorporated trawler owners that pay lower license fees and penalties for engaging in illegal fishing activities", denying the country millions of dollars in license revenues.

"The report details how the Chinese control up to 93 percent of the trawl vessels in Ghana, a country that is now losing between USD 14.4 million and USD 23.7 million (EUR 12.1 million and EUR 20 million) annually in fishing license fees and fines from trawlers."

In South America, Chinese predatory fishing is now so critical that in March, Argentina announced the creation of a Maritime Joint Command to combat the predatory fishing practices of foreign vessels. According to Diálogo, a military magazine published by the U.S. Southern Command:

"Each year, a fleet of foreign fishing vessels, mostly from China, sails along South American coasts, threatening the marine resources in the region. According to the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation, the involvement of Chinese vessels in squid fishing in the region has grown steadily over the last two decades."

In June, a huge Chinese fishing fleet of 300 vessels arrived in the area around Ecuador's environmentally protected Galapagos Marine Reserve. The Chinese vessels, which stayed in the area for a month, accounted for "99% of visible fishing just outside the [Galapagos] archipelago's waters between 13 July and 13 August," a report found. They were fishing for squid, which are essential to the unique Galapagos seals and sharks, and for commercial fish that otherwise contribute to the local economy. In 2017, Ecuador jailed 20 Chinese fishermen for capturing 6,600 sharks off the Galapagos Marine Reserve. The sharks are used in shark fin soup, a Chinese delicacy.

In the South Pacific, according to two former U.S. officials, "illegal, unregulated fishing by Chinese vessels has become common in American Samoa and Guam and as far east as Hawaii". The overfishing is so detrimental to the locals that a tuna cannery on American Samoa, one of the island's largest employers, had to suspend operations temporarily due to a lack of fish.

The Chinese fishing fleet, however, is about much more than fishing. In an August 2020 report published by the Yale School of the Environment, investigative reporter Ian Urbina wrote:

"Against the backdrop of China's larger geo-political aspirations, the country's commercial fishermen often serve as de-facto paramilitary personnel whose activities the Chinese government can frame as private actions. Under a civilian guise, this ostensibly private armada helps assert territorial domination, especially pushing back fishermen or governments that challenge China's sovereignty claims that encompass nearly all of the South China Sea."

China's use of fishing boats to assert its power and territorial claims was on full display in March, when a fleet of more than 200 Chinese fishing vessels swarmed and anchored at the Whitsun Reef in the South China Sea. The reef lies within the Philippines' exclusive economic zone.[1] In 2018, more than 90 Chinese fishing vessels anchored within miles of the Philippine Thitu Island, after the Philippine government began work on the island's infrastructure.

In September, the US Coast Guard released a report, "Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing Strategic Outlook," which announced "the U.S. Coast Guard's commitment to leading a global effort to combat illegal exploitation of the ocean's fish stocks and protect our national interests". The report stressed the need to "(1) Promote targeted, effective, intelligence-driven enforcement operations, (2) Counter predatory and irresponsible State behavior, and (3) Expand multilateral fisheries enforcement cooperation" and urged that a coalition of intergovernmental and international partners would be necessary. In April, the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy launched a joint mission in the Western and Central Pacific to combat illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing (IUU fishing) and boost regional security. In February, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, recommended that the US "consider leading a multilateral coalition with South American nations to push back against China's illegal fishing and trade practices."

It is time to think about Turkey — the country.

It may be a faraway place you know little about, but it borders the European Union, has a population more than twice the size of Canada and is about to default on a material portion of its $446 billion (U.S.) of external debt. This means financial loss for some investors but it can also bring greater political turmoil to Europe and further declines in the value of the euro.

Today, one U.S. dollar buys almost 15 Turkish lira. When 2021 began, it bought less than eight Turkish lira. Official data shows consumer price inflation rising at more than 20 per cent year on year.Some well-informed authorities believe it could now be running at above 80 per cent per annum.

In the past, such situations have spiralled into a period of hyperinflation. Turkey is no stranger to such outcomes. As recently as 2005, the country dropped six zeros from its bank notes, transforming, for instance, the 10 million lira note into a 10 lira note. It is not possible to service your foreign currency debt when the value of your exchange rate collapses so quickly. Major debt defaults by companies and possibly the Turkish government now seem very likely.

Turkey has a gross external debt position, money loaned from non-Turkish entities, of $446 billion. To put this into context, the total on balance sheet liabilities of Lehman Brothers when it collapsed was just more than $600 billion. Nonetheless, Turkey’s debts to the rest of the world are big enough to be important. Some of this $446 billion owed to foreigners is loaned in Turkish lira by local commercial banks owned by foreign banks. However, $262 billion is in the form of bank loans and international debt securities, in foreign currency.

It is getting difficult to keep up with the true size of the Turkish economy, given the rate of inflation and collapse in the exchange rate, but it is around $700 billion. Its foreign debt to GDP ratio is at a level where default has historically been common. From 1901 to 2001, Turkey (for part of that period known as the Ottoman Empire), defaulted on its government debt obligations six times. That is a higher number of defaults over that period than either Brazil or Argentina.

If you happen to invest in an emerging market debt fund you will be exposed to losses should Turkey, either its corporations or its government, be unable to repay their debts.

Across the world, other funds, such as pension funds, have invested in Turkish debt securities, pursuing the higher yields on such instruments. Those who hold local currency fixed interest securities are already nursing large losses due to the collapse of the Turkish exchange rate. Fortunately, most of these securities are well distributed throughout the world financial system and the owners, such as pension funds and mutual funds, have not themselves borrowed money to fund their investments.

While some European banks will be nursing large losses from their investment in Turkey, it is unlikely that defaults on Turkish debt securities, whether denominated in Turkish lira or foreign currency, will create a systemic risk for the global financial system. Those defaults on its debts are just part of a broader economic collapse that will threaten stability in the region.

Turkey, a country with slightly more people than Germany, has been home to the world’s largest refugee population since 2014. According to the United Nations, it has 3.6 million refugees from Syria and a further 330,000 refugees from other jurisdictions, particularly Afghanistan. The EU struck a deal with Turkey in 2016 to prevent these refugees from journeying into Europe by funding The EU Facility for Refugees in Turkey. So far it has committed six billion euros to support these refugees.

For a Turkish administration watching its exchange rate and economy collapse, there is leverage in the fate of these nearly four million displaced people.

In desperation could the administration allow these refugees to attempt the crossing into the EU in an attempt to secure more financial support from the EU? If they did and they succeeded, in so crossing would this destabilize the already fractious relationships between EU member states on the issue of immigration?

In fact, Turkey’s continued economic meltdown could have profound political ramifications for the EU, if it instigates the mass migration west.

Turkey’s importance to the stability of Europe cannot be overestimated.

The country has an army of 355,000 — bigger than any single member of the EU and more than eight times larger than Canada’s. Turkey is a member of NATO but has long-standing territorial disputes with Greece, another NATO member. Greece recently signed a defence pact that would commit France to intervene to defend Greece should it be attacked by a third party. France, in return, will be selling Greece ships and warplanes to defend it from its only natural aggressor, Turkey.

Meanwhile, the U.S., which has nuclear weapons in Turkey, is vociferously opposed to Turkey’s recent purchase of the S-400 air defence missile from Russia.

Things are complicated for this portion of the NATO alliance and an economic collapse in Turkey significantly increases the risks of a local administration acting desperately in desperate times.

And it’s not just within NATO that the military situation has become more precarious. Turkey has military aspirations in the region and has provided military intervention, whether through troops on the ground or the provision of war material, in Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, Azerbaijan and Qatar.

In Ukraine, Turkish supplied drones played a key role in attacks on Russian forces. In 2015, Turkey downed a Russian warplane on the Syrian/Turkish border. The Turkish navy has recently been active in expelling vessels from waters near Cyprus. This is part of a claim to the oil reserves in those waters. Turkey’s claim is not recognized by the United States, the European Union or key Eastern Mediterranean states.

There are any number of flashpoints between Turkey and its NATO allies and with Russia. History is littered with examples of political regimes that have sought to distract attention from local economic difficulties with various forms of what are sometimes euphemistically called “foreign adventures.”

There is much focus today on territorial disputes involving Taiwan and Ukraine as they involve two powerful military forces in Russia and China. Meanwhile, there is little focus on the economic collapse of Turkey and what it might mean for mass immigration to the EU. There is even the risk of military confrontation within the EU borders.

Turkey is much more strategically important than Argentina or Venezuela or Zimbabwe, other countries that have recently lurched into hyperinflation.

The EU sells much more to the world than it imports but despite this the Euro exchange rate is declining. This decline reflects the exodus of capital.

The continued economic deterioration in Turkey and the risk of even larger political problems for the EU will probably lead to further capital outflows from the Eurozone and a further depreciation of the euro.

When midnight strikes on New Year’s Day of 2050, there will be little cause for celebration. There will, of course, be the usual toasts with fine wines in the climate-controlled compounds of the wealthy few. But for most of humanity, it’ll just be another day of adversity bordering on misery—a desperate struggle to find food, water, shelter, and safety.

In the previous decades, storm surges will have swept away coastal barriers erected at enormous cost and rising seas will have flooded the downtowns of major cities that once housed more than 100 million people. Relentless waves will pound shorelines around the world, putting villages, towns, and cities at risk.

As several hundred million climate-change refugees in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia fill leaky boats or trudge overland in a desperate search for food and shelter, affluent nations worldwide will be trying to shut their borders even tighter, pushing crowds back with tear gas and gunfire. Yet those reluctant host countries, including the United States, won’t faintly be immune from the pain. Every summer, in fact, ever more powerful hurricanes, propelled by climate change, will pummel the East and Gulf Coasts of this country, possibly even forcing the federal government to abandon Miami and New Orleans to the rising tides. Meanwhile, wildfires, already growing in size in 2021, will devastate vast stretches of the West, destroying thousands upon thousands of homes every summer and fall in an ever-expanding fire season.

And keep in mind that I can write all this now because such future widespread suffering won’t be caused by some unforeseen disaster to come but by an all-too-obvious, painfully predictable imbalance in the basic elements that sustain human life—air, earth, fire, and water. As average world temperatures rise by as much as 2.3° Celsius (4.2° Fahrenheit) by mid-century, climate change will degrade the quality of life in every country on Earth.

Climate Change in the 21st Century

This dismal vision of life circa 2050 comes not from some flight of literary fantasy, but from published environmental science. Indeed, we can all see the troubling signs of global warming around us right now—worsening wildfires, ever more severe ocean storms, and increased coastal flooding.

While the world is focused on the fiery spectacle of wildfires destroying swaths of Australia, Brazil, California, and Canada, a far more serious threat is developing, only half-attended to, in the planet’s remote polar regions. Not only are the icecaps melting with frightening speed, already raising sea levels worldwide, but the vast Arctic permafrost is fast receding, releasing enormous stores of lethal greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

At that frozen frontier far beyond our ken or consciousness, ecological changes, brewing largely invisibly deep beneath the Arctic tundra, will accelerate global warming in ways sure to inflict untold future misery on all of us. More than any other place or problem, the thawing of the Arctic’s frozen earth, which covers vast parts of the roof of the world, will shape humanity’s fate for the rest of this century—destroying cities, devastating nations, and rupturing the current global order.

If, as I’ve suggested in my new book, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, Washington’s world system is likely to fade by 2030, thanks to a mix of domestic decline and international rivalry, Beijing’s hypernationalist hegemony will, at best, have just a couple of decades of dominance before it, too, suffers the calamitous consequences of unchecked global warming. By 2050, as the seas submerge some of its major cities and heat begins to ravage its agricultural heartland, China will have no choice but to abandon whatever sort of global system it might have constructed. And so, as we peer dimly into the potentially catastrophic decades beyond 2050, the international community will have good reason to forge a new kind of world order unlike any that has come before.

The Impact of Global Warming at Mid-Century

In assessing the likely course of climate change by 2050, one question is paramount: How quickly will we feel its impact?

For decades, scientists thought that climate change would arrive at what science writer Eugene Linden called a “stately pace.” In 1975, the US National Academies of Sciences still felt that it would “take centuries for the climate to change in a meaningful way.” As late as 1990, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that the Arctic permafrost, which stores both staggering amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, an even more dangerous greenhouse gas, was not yet melting and that the Antarctic ice sheets remained stable. In 1993, however, scientists began studying ice cores extracted from Greenland’s ice cap and found that there had been 25 “rapid climate change events” in the last glacial period thousands of years ago, showing that the “climate could change massively within a decade or two.”

Driven by a growing scientific consensus about the dangers facing humanity, representatives of 196 states met in 2015 in Paris, where they agreed to commit themselves to a 45 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and achieve net carbon neutrality by 2050 to limit global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. This, they argued, would be sufficient to avoid the disastrous impacts sure to come at 2.0°C degrees or higher.

However, the bright hopes of that Paris conference faded quickly. Within three years, the scientific community realized that the cascading effects of global warming reaching 1.5°C above preindustrial levels would be evident not in the distant future of 2100, but perhaps by 2040, impacting most adults alive today.

The medium-term effects of climate change will only be amplified by the uneven way the planet is warming, with a far heavier impact in the Arctic. According to a Washington Post analysis, by 2018 the world already had “hot spots” that had recorded an average rise of 2.0°C above the preindustrial norm. As the sun strikes tropical latitudes, huge columns of warm air rise and then are pushed toward the poles by greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere, until they drop down to earth at higher latitudes, creating spots with faster-rising temperatures in the Middle East, Western Europe, and, above all, the Arctic.

In a 2018 IPCC “doomsday report,” its scientists warned that even at just 1.5°C, temperature increases would be unevenly distributed globally and could possibly reach a devastating 4.5°C in the Arctic’s high altitudes, with profound consequences for the entire planet.

Climate-Change Cataclysm

Recent scientific research has found that, by 2050, the key drivers of major climate change will be feedback loops at both ends of the temperature spectrum. At the hotter end, in Africa, Australia, and the Amazon, warmer temperatures will spark ever more devastating forest fires, reducing tree cover, and releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. This, in turn (as is already happening), will fuel yet more fires and so create a monstrous self-reinforcing feedback loop that could decimate the great tropical rainforests of this planet.

The even more serious and uncontrollable driver, however, will be in the planet’s polar regions. There, an Arctic feedback loop is already gaining a self-sustaining momentum that could soon move beyond humanity’s capacity to control it. By mid-century (or before), as ice sheets continue to melt disastrously in Greenland and Antarctica, rising oceans will make extreme sea-level events, like once-in-a-century storm surges and flooding, annual occurrences in many areas. If global warming grows beyond the maximum 2°C target set by the Paris Agreement, depending on what happens to Antarctica’s ice sheets, ocean levels could increase by a staggering 43 inches as this century ends.

In fact, a “worst-case scenario” by the National Academies of Sciences projects a sea-level rise of as much as 20 inches by 2050 and 78 inches in 2100, with a “catastrophic” loss of 690,000 square miles of land, an expanse four times the size of California, displacing about 2.5 percent of the world’s population and inundating major cities like New York. Adding to such concerns, a recent study in Nature predicted that, by 2060, rain rather than snow could dominate parts of the Arctic, further accelerating ice loss and raising sea levels significantly. Moving that doomsday ever closer, recent satellite imagery reveals that the ice shelf holding back Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier could “shatter within three to five years,” quickly breaking that Florida-sized frozen mass into hundreds of icebergs and eventually resulting “in several feet of sea level rise” on its own.

Think of it this way: In the Arctic, ice is drama, but permafrost is death. The spectacle of melting polar ice sheets cascading into ocean waters is dramatic indeed. True mass death, however, lies in the murky, mysterious permafrost. That sloppy stew of decayed matter and frozen water from ice ages past covers 730,000 square miles of the Northern Hemisphere, can reach 2,300 feet below ground, and holds enough potentially releasable carbon and methane to melt the poles and inundate densely populated coastal plains worldwide. In turn, such emissions would only raise Arctic temperatures further, melt more permafrost (and ice), and so on, year after year after year. We’re talking, in other words, about a potentially devastating feedback loop that could increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere beyond the planet’s capacity to compensate.

According to a 2019 report in Nature, the vast zone of frozen earth that covers about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is a sprawling storehouse for about 1.6 trillion metric tons of carbon—twice the amount already in the atmosphere. Current models “assume that permafrost thaws gradually from the surface downwards,” slowly releasing methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But frozen soil also “physically holds the landscape together” and so its thawing can rip the surface open erratically, exposing ever-larger areas to the sun.

Around the Arctic Circle, there is already dramatic physical evidence of rapid change. Amid the vast permafrost that covers nearly two-thirds of Russia, one small Siberian town had temperatures that reached a historic 100 degrees Fahrenheit in June 2020, the highest ever recorded above the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile, several peninsulas on the Arctic Sea have experienced methane eruptions that have produced craters up to 100 feet deep. Since rapid thawing releases more methane than gradual melting does and methane has 25 times more heating power than CO2, the “impacts of thawing permafrost on Earth’s climate,” suggests that 2019 report in Nature, “could be twice that expected from current models.”

To add a dangerous wild card to such an already staggering panorama of potential destruction, about 700,000 square miles of Siberia also contain a form of methane-rich permafrost called yedoma, which forms a layer of ice 30 to 260 feet deep. As rising temperatures melt that icy permafrost, expanding lakes (which now cover 30 percentf of Siberia) will serve as even greater conduits for the release of such methane, which will bubble up from their melting bottoms to escape into the atmosphere.

New World Order?

Given the clear failure of the current world system to cope with climate change, the international community will, by mid-century, need to find new forms of collaboration to contain the damage. After all, the countries at the recent UN climate summit at Glasgow couldn’t even agree to “phase out” coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Instead, in their final “outcome document,” they opted for the phrase “phase down”—capitulating to China, which has no plans to even start reducing its coal combustion until 2025, and India, which recently postponed its goal of achieving net-carbon neutrality until an almost unimaginably distant 2070. Since those two countries account for 37 percent of all greenhouse gases now being released into the atmosphere, their procrastination courts climate disaster for humanity.

Who knows what new forms of global governance and cooperation will come into being in the years ahead, but simply to focus on an old one, here’s a possibility: To exercise effective sovereignty over the global commons, perhaps a genuinely reinforced United Nations could reform itself in major ways, including making the Security Council an elective body with no permanent members and ending the great-power prerogative of unilateral vetoes. Such a reformed and potentially more powerful organization could then agree to cede sovereignty over a few narrow yet critical areas of governance to protect the most fundamental of all human rights: survival.

Just as the Security Council can (at least theoretically) now punish a nation that crosses international borders with armed force, so a future UN could sanction in potentially meaningful ways a state that continued to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or refused to receive climate-change refugees. To save that human tide, estimated at between 200 million and 1.2 billion people by mid-century, some UN high commissioner would need the authority to enforce the mandatory resettlement of at least some of them. Moreover, the current voluntary transfer of climate reconstruction funds from the prosperous temperate zone to the poor tropics would need to become mandatory as well.

No one can predict with any certainty whether reforms like these and the power to change national behavior that would come with them will arrive in time to cap emissions and slow climate change, or too late (if at all) to do anything but manage a series of increasingly uncontrollable feedback loops. Yet without such change, the current world order will almost certainly collapse into catastrophic global disorder with dire consequences for all of us.

WALKING ON LAVA

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.

What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unraveling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.

Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.

‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.

Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.

It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight – Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.

This time, the crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy, and the brave new world of consumer democracy being forged worldwide in its name. Upon the indestructibility of this edifice we have pinned the hopes of this latest phase of our civilisation. Now, its failure and fallibility exposed, the world’s elites are scrabbling frantically to buoy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little restraint, for restraint would be its undoing. Uncountable sums of money are being funnelled upwards in order to prevent an uncontrolled explosion. The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them.

Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.

As the financial wizards lose their powers of levitation, as the politicians and economists struggle to conjure new explanations, it starts to dawn on us that behind the curtain, at the heart of the Emerald City, sits not the benign and omnipotent invisible hand we had been promised, but something else entirely. Something responsible for what Marx, writing not so long before Conrad, cast as the ‘everlasting uncertainty and anguish’ of the ‘bourgeois epoch’; a time in which ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’ Draw back the curtain, follow the tireless motion of cogs and wheels back to its source, and you will find the engine driving our civilisation: the myth of progress.

The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained. Onto the root stock of Western Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up. On the top floor is human perfection. It is important that this should remain just out of reach in order to sustain the sensation of motion.

Recent history, however, has given this mechanism something of a battering. The past century too often threatened a descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on Earth. Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods. Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social background into which they were born. They fear crime, social breakdown, overdevelopment, environmental collapse. They do not believe that the future will be better than the past. Individually, they are less constrained by class and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law, surveillance, state proscription and personal debt. Their physical health is better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look.

Most significantly of all, there is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control, lies something that neither Marx nor Conrad, Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. Something that Western civilisation – which has set the terms for global civilisation—was never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine, fatally, the myth of that civilisation. Something upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, and which they have all trained themselves not to see.

Are you depressed or something? None of the issues that have been raised in this thread were even touched on in the video, making your post pointless. No mention of climate change, carbon pollution, or environmental destruction whatsoever. Or maybe you just wanted to make fun of hillbillies?

Every link you are posting paints an exaggerated picture of doom, depression and despair.

Yes, that article about 2050 depressed the hell out of me.

I am making fun of the ridiculous apocalyptic prophecies of destruction being painted on this thread.