Is the world being destroyed?

Is the world being destroyed

Summary
The Lancet Commission on pollution and health reported that pollution was responsible for 9 million premature deaths in 2015, making it the world's largest environmental risk factor for disease and premature death. We have now updated this estimate using data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuriaes, and Risk Factors Study 2019. We find that pollution remains responsible for approximately 9 million deaths per year, corresponding to one in six deaths worldwide. Reductions have occurred in the number of deaths attributable to the types of pollution associated with extreme poverty. However, these reductions in deaths from household air pollution and water pollution are offset by increased deaths attributable to ambient air pollution and toxic chemical pollution (ie, lead). Deaths from these modern pollution risk factors, which are the unintended consequence of industrialisation and urbanisation, have risen by 7% since 2015 and by over 66% since 2000. Despite ongoing efforts by UN agencies, committed groups, committed individuals, and some national governments (mostly in high-income countries), little real progress against pollution can be identified overall, particularly in the low-income and middle-income countries, where pollution is most severe. Urgent attention is needed to control pollution and prevent pollution-related disease, with an emphasis on air pollution and lead poisoning, and a stronger focus on hazardous chemical pollution. Pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss are closely linked. Successful control of these conjoined threats requires a globally supported, formal science–policy interface to inform intervention, influence research, and guide funding. Pollution has typically been viewed as a local issue to be addressed through subnational and national regulation or, occasionally, using regional policy in higher-income countries. Now, however, it is increasingly clear that pollution is a planetary threat, and that its drivers, its dispersion, and its effects on health transcend local boundaries and demand a global response. Global action on all major modern pollutants is needed. Global efforts can synergise with other global environmental policy programmes, especially as a large-scale, rapid transition away from all fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy is an effective strategy for preventing pollution while also slowing down climate change, and thus achieves a double benefit for planetary health.

The Italian river Po travels 403 miles from the Alps to the wilds of the Po river delta in the East, where it finally empties into the Adriatic Sea. Along the way, the water nourishes the agricultural fields that Italians have farmed for thousands of years. Today, the agricultural products it grows provides 40% of the nation’s GDP.

Euro News reports that currently, a drought so severe that it threatens the breadbasket of Italy has dried up the Po River so severely that seawater has been able to be ‘sucked back upstream.’ The reason is that the water in the delta is “higher than upstream. This is because the vacuum left by the lack of river water is being filled by seawater,” Giancarlo Mantovani, the Director of a consortium that protects the delta’s biodiversity, which can be seen flowing back upstream in some areas. For farmers in the area, it means saltwater seeping into the earth and poisoning crops, which are blackened and wilting.”

There has been no rain for three months and counting, but the source of the problem starts in the Alps, where snowfall is now at its lowest level in over twenty years, measuring fifty percent lower than average. It is not only reduced snowfall, but the Alp’s glaciers which are the reservoirs for freshwater, have rapidly thinned, enabling permafrost to thaw and massive boulders of rock to break off the towering mountains.

climate change—glaciers in French Alps melting rapidly—high-altitude permafrost can no longer hold in place the rocks on mountainsides—avalanches and flash floods increasingly threaten towns in valleys—permafrost is 20% of the world's land surface https://t.co/dpeB1cWKNn @YouTube
— Sara Laughter (@GreenAwakening) December 14, 2018

The process is playing out across the world, from the Himalayas to the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras in the United States and Canada. Scientists have warned of this process for decades and are becoming a severe threat from climate shocks that reduce the freshwater supply for billions of people worldwide. A warming planet is turning the agricultural lands of Italy into a ‘salty wasteland while putting hundreds of thousands of livelihoods at risk. “It is a 360-degree disaster,” states Mantovani to Rebecca Ann Hughes of Euro News.

The problem is now even direr as groundwater has begun to be pumped by farmers where they find only saltwater allowing, even more, to move upstream. A feedback loop is now set in motion, The result will be a loss of thirty percent of agricultural production to dead soil.

A glacier in Italy is turning pink. The color is caused by algae growth — and scientists worry it will make the glacier melt faster, because darker colors absorb more radiation.

Past studies report 50% of ice in the Alps' glaciers will be gone by 2050 because of climate change. pic.twitter.com/cgGwWQcG81
— AJ+ (@ajplus) July 7, 2020

Rebecca Ann Hughes writes:

In the Delta, Mantovani’s consortium has installed two barriers in branches of the river to prevent the uptake of saltwater from the sea. “These barriers are allowing us to deviate the seawater and create reserves with the little freshwater arriving from the mountains,” he says.

This is being collected in vats and canals - to be used in moments when there may be only saltwater in the Delta, a very real possibility.

With little rainfall on the horizon for the next few weeks, Mantovani also explains the most immediate and vital course of action is that everyone using the water from the river reduces their consumption.

“If there is no water, everyone throughout the river’s course must play their part to lower their usage,” he says.

A severe drought🚱 is affecting northern #Italy🇮🇹 and particularly the Po River basin#DYK that, as a consequence, water storage for hydropower generation is impacted?⚡️

Read the detailed report by our Global Drought Observatory #GDO at👇

🔗https://t.co/NWb90xvJXM pic.twitter.com/lK7x90XS4A
— Copernicus EMS (@CopernicusEMS) April 1, 2022

Of course, climate change is not the only factor disrupting the flow of Po. Humans have also channeled the water, which has reduced flooding of the fields that provides nourishment for healthy soils.
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The region grows the tomato sauce, fruit, vegetables, and wheat along with fifty percent of the livestock in Italy.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

When that slogan was created in 1976 the creators did not mean “in no particular order.” Recycling was supposed to be the last line of defense against pollution. You’re only supposed to recycle if you can’t reduce or reuse!

Today the vast majority of plastics end up in landfills or in the food that we eat. As for any electronics you recycle, that’s all sent to countries like India where 6-year-olds get to take them apart with highly toxic chemicals.

That isn’t even mentioning that recycling also encourages corporations to make more plastic products since they can advertise their product as being “recyclable.”

Yup, we’ve all been duped.

Recycling might feel good to do but in reality, it’s more harmful to the planet than simply throwing plastic in the trash.

The Best Scam We Were Ever Sold

Only glass and metal are worth recycling. Everything else is a scam that has to be subsidized by Big Plastic.

In a 2018 study, it was found that of the total plastic ever created only 9% of it has been recycled. Meanwhile 12% of total plastics are being incinerated while 60% of them are in landfills or in the natural environment.

In order to actually “recycle” plastic, it has to be heated at a very high temperature. However, the process of doing so emits pollution that is more harmful than simply creating new plastic from scratch. The only way recycling is worth it is if the entire process is done by robots in a vacuum-sealed chamber.

So, how were we sold this lie of recycling?

The answer is simple: because it’s profitable.



During the 1970s Big Plastic corporations were receiving intense scrutiny for their pollution. In order to deflect this criticism and continue business as usual, they embraced the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra and brainwashed an entire generation into thinking that recycling was the most important thing we could do for the environment.

It culminated with the Container Corporation of America hiring one lucky college school student in 1970 to design a symbol to encourage people to recycle…



The now-ubiquitous recycling symbol was placed on products and advertisements to make us feel good about buying more plastic. And ****, it is a nice symbol. Just looking at it makes me feel like I’m doing something good for the environment. These corporations figured out that they could make consumers believe that recycling was the answer and continue to produce plastic without any guilt. Genius.

How to Solve the Plastic Crisis

Plastic should be banned outright and replaced with paper, wood, glass and metals. I know what you’re thinking: What if I dropped my glass drink and it shattered every time? (…or would glass turn into a logistical nightmare because it’s heavier to ship?)

That’s a small price to pay for not turning the planet into a giant floating trash island.

As I type this on a plastic keyboard with a plastic circuit board we have to realize that plastic is destroying everything. In fact, microplastics — extremely small pieces of plastic debris — are becoming more dangerous than global warming.

A new study published in Environmental Research found that microplastics were highly present in fruits and vegetables. Apples had one of the highest microplastic counts, with an average of 195,500 plastic particles per gram, while broccoli and carrots averaged more than 100,000 particles per gram.

The fact that something as inorganic and pathetic as plastic is slowly contaminating everything and violating every part of the earth is like cosmic horror to me. It’s the worst, most comical way for us as a species to die off. But it’s also very effective and is working.



This is why environmentalists need to push for more everyday plastic items should be transformed into glass.

Yes, glass-based items will make things more expensive and difficult in the short term, but they will be worth it in the long run.
Spread the Word

The phrase “recycling is a scam” is such a smart-ass douchey thing to tell someone. But sometimes the douches are right. Recycling is a giant scam.

Think of all the plastic bags in landfills, oceans, and rivers. Heck, I live by Central Park and the sight of all the plastic in the ponds sickens me.

And if you want to help: The next time someone asks if you want a plastic bag, say no. Bring your own reusable bags to the store. Use a metal water bottle and avoid those plastic straws. And best of all inform your congressman that recycling is a scam — if they need resources here are a few that are more credible than some random Black guy on Medium:

• Plastics Pile Up as China Refuses to Take the West’s Recycling
• The Dark Side of Electronic Waste Recycling
• Our Life is Plasticized

Remember these politicians work for us. Our tax money pays their salaries.

It’s time to stop the sanctimonious virtue-signaling BS around recycling and enact real change. Ending plastic recycling is a good start.

A dangerous mix of increasing international conflict, global climate change, and a lack of governmental efforts to fix either could be leading the world to an era of unprecedented destruction. That’s the thrust of a new report from Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), a European think tank focused on peace.

The report is titled “Environment of Peace,” a hopeful title that belies the report’s horrifying message: The twin dangers of conflict—meaning, in this context, wars or violence between governments or countries—and climate change are interconnected and getting worse.

“The report paints a vivid picture of the escalating security crisis,” a press release about the report said. “It notes that between 2010 and 2020 the number of state-based armed conflicts roughly doubled (to 56), as did the number of conflict deaths. The number of refugees and other forcibly displaced people also doubled, to 82.4 million. In 2020 the number of operationally deployed nuclear warheads increased after years of reductions, and in 2021 military spending surpassed $2 trillion for the first time ever.”

Global conflict dropped dramatically after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. As the report noted, that trend reversed in 2010. Deaths due to conflict are also on the rise, largely driven by the civil war in Syria. Proxy wars, old rivalries, and new power players are making it impossible to achieve a peaceful world. “Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, geopolitics was becoming discernibly more fraught,” the report said. “A particular feature has been the increasingly frosty relationship between China and several Western powers, notably the United States.”

The climate crisis exacerbates these conflicts. Increased heat means fewer places where people can live, which means more migration, which often leads to conflict, the report claims. Increased temperatures and rising water levels also means less arable land, which means less food. Food insecurity and migration patterns are, traditionally, drivers of conflict.

This is not something that’s happening in the distant future, according to the report, but is already occurring. Parts of India are already uninhabitable due to rising temperatures. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has threatened global wheat supplies. Ukraine produces a third of the world’s wheat and this year’s harvests are threatened by the invasion with some experts predicting the world has just 10 weeks of the critical food staple left.

“Climate change is already affecting food production on land and in the ocean,” the report said. “In the coming decades, it is forecast to reduce the yield of major crops such as maize, rice, and wheat, and increase the risk of simultaneous harvest failures in major producing countries.”

Most world governments are already aware of this. The Pentagon has spent the last decade sounding the alarm about food insecurity and conflict stemming from climate change. But governments aren’t willing to enact radical change to avoid disaster. The SIPRI report calls this a “the governance deficit.”

“For most of human history, the most serious risks have been the most direct: the lack of a key resource, or the threat that another community or country would take it away,” the report said. “Now, many of the most serious threats are shared. Rising temperatures, plastic pollution in the ocean, and the loss of ecosystem services provided by forests and plankton all pose universal risks.”

In addition to literal, physical wars, the report addresses “culture wars” as a contributor to the vicious cycle of humanitarian crises, government failure, and accelerating climate change. For example, the COVID-19 crisis gave the world a front-row seat to how world governments handle shared threats, and it wasn’t pretty. “Some leaders deliberately shaped their pandemic response around populist rhetoric diametrically opposed to science, promoting misinformation on fake cures and scare stories about vaccinations, willfully exposing their populations to far greater risks than were necessary,” the report said. “This provides a cautionary tale for the far greater challenge of overcoming the security and environmental crises.”

According to its authors, the goal of the SIPRI report is not to send its readers into a fit of despair. It’s to wake politicians to the cold facts of where we are. “Our new report for policymakers goes beyond simply showing that environmental change can increase risks to peace and security. That’s established. What our research reveals is the complexity and breadth of that relationship, the many forms it can take,” SIPRI director and Environment of Peace author Dan Smith said in a press release. “And most of all, we show what can be done about it; how we can deliver peace and security in a new era of risk.”

It ends on a hopeful note and some recommendations. Essentially, the nations of the world must come together, invest in resilience, finance peace, and make clear the risks of not working on the problems of eliminating conflict and climate change together. “Humanity has the knowledge and skills to escape from the trouble in which we find ourselves,” the report said. “We can draw hope from the examples being taken by governments, civil society, local communities, and multinational groupings that are successfully addressing hazardous situations. The need is to learn from them and scale up.”

AUSTIN, Texas — An enzyme variant created by engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin can break down environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days.

This discovery, published today in Nature, could help solve one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems: what to do with the billions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and polluting our natural lands and water. The enzyme has the potential to supercharge recycling on a large scale that would allow major industries to reduce their environmental impact by recovering and reusing plastics at the molecular level.

“The possibilities are endless across industries to leverage this leading-edge recycling process,” said Hal Alper, professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at UT Austin. “Beyond the obvious waste management industry, this also provides corporations from every sector the opportunity to take a lead in recycling their products. Through these more sustainable enzyme approaches, we can begin to envision a true circular plastics economy.”

The project focuses on polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a significant polymer found in most consumer packaging, including cookie containers, soda bottles, fruit and salad packaging, and certain fibers and textiles. It makes up 12% of all global waste.

The enzyme was able to complete a “circular process” of breaking down the plastic into smaller parts (depolymerization) and then chemically putting it back together (repolymerization). In some cases, these plastics can be fully broken down to monomers in as little as 24 hours.

Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering and College of Natural Sciences used a machine learning model to generate novel mutations to a natural enzyme called PETase that allows bacteria to degrade PET plastics. The model predicts which mutations in these enzymes would accomplish the goal of quickly depolymerizing post-consumer waste plastic at low temperatures.

Through this process, which included studying 51 different post-consumer plastic containers, five different polyester fibers and fabrics and water bottles all made from PET, the researchers proved the effectiveness of the enzyme, which they are calling FAST-PETase (functional, active, stable and tolerant PETase).

“This work really demonstrates the power of bringing together different disciplines, from synthetic biology to chemical engineering to artificial intelligence,” said Andrew Ellington, professor in the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology whose team led the development of the machine learning model.

Recycling is the most obvious way to cut down on plastic waste. But globally, less than 10% of all plastic has been recycled. The most common method for disposing of plastic, besides throwing it in a landfill, is to burn it, which is costly, energy intensive and spews noxious gas into the air. Other alternative industrial processes include very energy-intensive processes of glycolysis, pyrolysis, and/or methanolysis.

Biological solutions take much less energy. Research on enzymes for plastic recycling has advanced during the past 15 years. However, until now, no one had been able to figure out how to make enzymes that could operate efficiently at low temperatures to make them both portable and affordable at large industrial scale. FAST-PETase can perform the process at less than 50 degrees Celsius.

Up next, the team plans to work on scaling up enzyme production to prepare for industrial and environmental application. The researchers have filed a patent application for the technology and are eying several different uses. Cleaning up landfills and greening high waste-producing industries are the most obvious. But another key potential use is environmental remediation. The team is looking at a number of ways to get the enzymes out into the field to clean up polluted sites.

“When considering environmental cleanup applications, you need an enzyme that can work in the environment at ambient temperature. This requirement is where our tech has a huge advantage in the future,” Alper said.

Alper, Ellington, associate professor of chemical engineering Nathaniel Lynd and Hongyuan Lu, a postdoctoral researcher in Alper’s lab, led the research. Raghav Shroff, a former member of Ellington’s lab and now a research scientist at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, created the 3DCNN machine learning model used to engineer the plastic-eating enzyme. Danny Diaz, a current member of Ellington’s lab, adapted the model and created a web platform, MutCompute, to make it available for wider academic use. Other team members include from chemical engineering: Natalie Czarnecki, Congzhi Zhu and Wantae Kim; and from molecular biosciences: Daniel Acosta, Brad Alexander, Hannah O. Cole and Yan Jessie Zhang. The work was funded by ExxonMobil’s research and engineering division as part of an ongoing research agreement with UT Austin.

18 May 2022

A new report published last week foresees a future in which droughts may affect over three-quarters of the world’s population, unless we take action. Climate change and population growth are identified as key drivers, with drought predicted in 23 countries to be driven primarily by population growth and in 38 by the combination of climate change and population growth.

Fresh water is a fundamental need – unlike most consumer products and lifestyle choices, none of us can do without it, all of us must share it and there is a finite amount of it. It is difficult and expensive to redistribute water from where it is plentiful to where it is in short supply, and our own actions mean more people will be denied it across the world.

Drought in numbers 2022, from the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), identifies the growing severity and extent of drought. it is clear about the fundamental drivers of the crisis, stating:

"Within the next few decades, 129 countries will experience an increase in drought exposure mainly due to climate change alone – 23 primarily due to population growth and 38 mostly due to the interaction between climate change and population growth."

Drought drives food scarcity, "megafires", biodiversity loss, and can even lead to ecosystems releasing carbon into the atmosphere instead of capturing it.

Among other findings, it warns that 700m people could be displaced by drought and that up to 5.7bn people could live in areas that are water-scarce for at least one month a year - the figure stands at an already shocking 3.6bn today. It goes on, "up to 216 million people could be forced to migrate by 2050, largely due to drought in combination with other factors including water scarcity, declining crop productivity, sea-level rise, and overpopulation."

A global challenge

While it is easy to see drought as a problem affecting arid, low-income countries bordering deserts, nowhere is immune. According to the report, over the last century Europe has been hit by 45 drought emergencies – almost one every two years. In the UK and EU, it finds, "annual losses from drought are currently estimated to be around EUR 9 billion and projected to rise to more than EUR 65 billion without meaningful climate action."

The list of 23 countries experiencing drought emergencies between 2020 and 2022 features some of the world's most unable to face the challenge, mainly low income with high population growth, including Afghanistan, Niger, Madagascar and Ethiopia. However, the United States and Brazil (home of the world’s largest river and largest rainforest) also feature on the list.

Little boy pumping water in India

The vulnerable at risk

Like every environmental emergency, however, those already marginalised and vulnerable are most at risk. The report notes that women and girls are affected disproportionately by drought. Among other challenges, collecting water falls disproportionately on women (72 percent ) and girls (9 percent ). Shockingly, in some cases, they may spend as much as 40 percent of their calorific intake carrying water. Meanwhile, a quarter of all children could be living in areas with extreme water shortage by 2040.

Transformative action

Like almost every other major environmental report, this one is explicit that incremental improvements are not enough:

“We are at a crossroads. We need to steer toward the solutions rather than continuing with destructive actions, believing that marginal change can heal systemic failure.” - Ibrahim Thiaw, Executive Secretary UNCCD

The solutions it calls for include sustainable and efficient agriculture, "reducing or stopping" the consumption of animals, pro-active drought management and primarily land transformation. That means "building and rebuilding our landscapes better, mimicking nature wherever possible and creating functional ecological systems.” This approach would help address underlying factors of degraded water cycles and loss of soil fertility.

The population factor

While the report identifies the importance of population growth, it stops short of calling for action to address it. This is a significant omission. The unmet need for contraception is very high in many of the countries it identifies as most at risk, while gender equality is also low. Among them is Afghanistan, where Population matters is currently supporting the vital work of Afghan Family Guidance Association through our Empower to Plan programme. Action on family planning and gender equality in these vulnerable countries will both improve lives and help to reduce the increasingly critical threat posed by drought.

While scavenging through a compost heap at a Leipzig cemetery, Christian Sonnendecker and his research team found seven enzymes they had never seen before.

They were hunting for proteins that would eat PET plastic — the most highly produced plastic in the world. It is commonly used for bottled water and groceries like grapes.

The scientists weren't expecting much when they brought the samples back to the lab, said Sonnendecker when DW visited their Leipzig University laboratory.

It was only the second dump they had rummaged through and they thought PET-eating enzymes were rare.

But in one of the samples, they found an enzyme, or polyester hydrolase, called PHL7. And it shocked them. The PHL7 enzyme disintegrated an entire piece of plastic in less than a day.

Two enzymes 'eat' plastic: PHL7 vs. LCC
PHL7 appears to 'eat' PET plastic times faster than LCC, a standard enzyme used in PET plastic-eating experiments today.

To ensure their discovery wasn't a fluke, Sonnendecker's team compared PHL7 to LCC, with both enzymes degrading multiple plastic containers. And they found it was true: PHL7 was faster.

"I would have thought you'd need to sample from hundreds of different sites before you'd find one of these enzymes," said Graham Howe, an enzymologist at Queens University in Ontario, Canada.

Howe, who also studies PET degradation but was not involved in the Leipzig research, appeared to be amazed by the study published in Chemistry Europe.

"Apparently, you go to nature and there are going to be enzymes that do this everywhere," said Howe.

PET plastic is everyone
Although PET plastic can be recycled, it does not biodegrade. Like nuclear waste or a nasty comment to your partner, once PET plastic is created, it never really goes away.

It can be refashioned into new products — it's not hard to create a tote bag from recycled water bottles, for example. But the quality of the plastic weakens with each cycle.

So, a lot of PET is eventually fashioned into products like carpets and — yes — an exorbitant number of tote bags that end up in landfill sites.

There are two ways to look at solving this problem: The first is to stop production of all PET plastic.

But the material is so common that even if companies stopped producing it immediately, there would still be millions of empty soft drink bottles — or tote bags fashioned from those bottles — lying around for thousands of years.

The second way is to force the plastic to degrade. Scientists have been trying to find enzymes that will do that for decades and in 2012 they found LCC, or "leaf-branch compost cutinase."

LCC was a major breakthrough because it showed that PETase, a component of LCC, can be used to degrade PET plastic when it is combined with another enzyme known as an esterase.

Esterase enzymes are used to break chemical bonds in a process called hydrolysis.

Scientists working on LCC have found that the enzyme does not differentiate between natural polymers and synthetic polymers — the latter being plastic. Instead, LCC recognizes PET plastic as a naturally occurring substance and eats it like it would a natural polymer.

Engineering the enzyme
Since the discovery of LCC, researchers like Sonnendecker have been looking for new PET-eating enzymes in nature. LCC is good, they say, but it has limitations. It is fast for what it is, but it still takes days to break down PET and the reactions have to occur at very high temperatures.

Other scientists and researchers have been trying to figure out how to engineer LCC to make it more efficient.

A French company called Carbios is doing that. They are engineering LCC to create a faster, more efficient enzyme.

Elsewhere, researchers at the University of Texas in Austin have created a PET-eating protein using a machine learning algorithm. They say their protein can degrade PET plastic in 24 hours.

David Zechel, a professor of chemistry at Queen's University said these approaches always start with something that is known — the researchers don't necessarily find anything new, but work to improve what has already been discovered.

This type of engineering is important as researchers try to create the optimal enzyme to degrade PET, said Zechel.

Sonnendecker's work shows that "we haven't even remotely scratched the surface" in terms of the potential of naturally occurring enzymes "with respect to PET," he said.

Bottles still don't biodegrade
Sonnendecker's newly discovered enzyme has its limitations, too. It can break down the containers you buy your grapes in at the grocery store, but it can't break down a soft drink bottle. Not yet.

The PET plastic used in drink bottles is stretched and chemically altered, making it tougher to biodegrade than the PET used in grape containers.

In tests, Sonnendecker's team has developed a pre-treatment that is applied to PET bottles, making it easier for the enzyme to degrade the plastic. But that research has yet to be published.

With industry help, said the researcher, technology using PHL7 to break down PET at a large scale could be ready in around four years.

There is more carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere than at any time in the past four million years, as the world's continued dependence on fossil fuels keeps humanity hurtling toward a "global catastrophe," officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned on Friday.

"It's depressing that we've lacked the collective willpower to slow the relentless rise in CO2."

NOAA reports its Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in Hawaii measured CO2 levels averaging 420.99 parts per million (ppm) in May, an increase of 1.8 ppm over levels at this time last year, while scientists at the San Diego-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography, which also tracks atmospheric CO2, calculated a monthly average of 420.78 ppm.

"The science is irrefutable: humans are altering our climate in ways that our economy and our infrastructure must adapt to," NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a statement. "We can see the impacts of climate change around us every day."

"The relentless increase of carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa is a stark reminder that we need to take urgent, serious steps" toward climate resiliency and action, he added.

As NOAA explains:

CO2 pollution is generated by burning fossil fuels for transportation and electrical generation, by cement manufacturing, deforestation, agriculture, and many other practices. Along with other greenhouse gases, CO2 traps heat radiating from the planet's surface that would otherwise escape into space, causing the planet’s atmosphere to warm steadily, which unleashes a cascade of weather impacts, including episodes of extreme heat, drought and wildfire activity, as well as heavier precipitation, flooding and tropical storm activity.

Impacts to the world's oceans from greenhouse gas pollution include increasing sea surface temperatures, rising sea levels, and an increased absorption of carbon, which makes sea water more acidic, leads to ocean deoxygenation, and makes it more difficult for some marine organisms to survive.

Before the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels registered around 280 ppm for the entire history of human civilization, or about 6,000 years. Since then, it's estimated that human activity has released more than 1.5 trillion tons of the planet-heating greenhouse gas.

"CO2 levels are now comparable to the Pliocene Climatic Optimum, between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when they were close to, or above 400 ppm," notes NOAA. "During that time, sea levels were between five and 25 meters higher than today, high enough to drown many of the world's largest modern cities. Temperatures then averaged 7°F higher than in pre-industrial times, and studies indicate that large forests occupied today's Arctic tundra."



Adequately reducing global CO2 emissions would require a dramatic shift in human activity—especially by the world's wealthiest 1%, who according to a September 2020 study by Oxfam emit more than twice as much CO2 as the poorest 50% of humanity.

"It's depressing that we've lacked the collective willpower to slow the relentless rise in CO2," said Ralph Keeling, who runs Scripps' program at the mountaintop observatory. "Fossil fuel use may no longer be accelerating, but we are still racing at top speed towards a global catastrophe."

Pieter Tans, senior scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, said that "carbon dioxide is at levels our species has never experienced before—this is not new."

"We have known about this for half a century, and have failed to do anything meaningful about it," he added. "What's it going to take for us to wake up?"

The ramifications of the historic megadrought happening in the U.S. right now are getting increasingly serious. Hydropower is faltering, farmland is too parched to produce, and millions of people are currently under water restrictions. It’s a drought so big that it has eclipsed 1,200 years of climate history. Human-caused climate change is at least partially responsible.

Fields Lay Fallow

California is the U.S.’s produce aisle. The state grows more than a third of the country’s domestically harvested vegetables and two-thirds of our fruit and nuts. But feeding the nation requires a lot of water. Agriculture eats up about four times as much water in the state as urban water usage. Right now, farmers are struggling to meet their needs with what’s available.

Because of water shortages, hundreds of thousands of acres are sitting stagnant, without any crops growing. An estimated 400,000 acres of cropland were idled because of lack of water last year, according to one analysis from the University of California and other groups published in February. And things have continued to get worse.

One farmer told the BBC that he was forgoing tomato planting this year because there just wasn’t enough for irrigation. In a report from CNN, another farmer told the outlet he wasn’t growing crops on about half of his land. “I got the land, I got the people. I have everything but no water. I can’t do it,” the farmer said.

The state’s senate is considering a bill to help support farmworkers unable to find employment under drought conditions that is basically farmworker UBI. The legislation would provide monthly payments of $1,000 for three years to households that include a farmworker.

And it’s not just farmworkers and food production suffering: It’s the stability of the land itself. In recent years, the Federal Bureau of Reclamation has restricted how much water from rivers and reservoirs can go to farming. Just a few months ago, the bureau announced it wouldn’t be allocating any water for irrigation in parts of the ag-heavy Central Valley. In lieu of surface water being directed their way, farmers have been leaning heavily on pumping ground water from wells, drilled ever-deeper underground. But over-pumping means parts of the Valley are starting to collapse inward in a process known as subsidence. Thanks to drought, the very earth under Californians’ feet is falling away.

Water Agency Starts Choking Taps

In an effort to help the water supply last as long as possible, both local and state agencies in California are asking people to limit their water use. Outdoor watering has been banned or heavily moderated in many regions. And those who fail to comply with new water restrictions are encountering actual consequences, from financial penalties to choked taps.

If people wantonly water their lawns, flower beds, and even sidewalks, they face fines of up to $600. Households that opt to repeatedly pay the fines and continue to flout the restrictions are put on notice. In the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which includes some of the wealthiest areas of Los Angeles County, more than 600 households are on notice after three strikes, according to reporting by the New York Times.

Of those households, 20 of the worst offenders were threatened with the installation of flow restrictors on their properties’ taps. Four of the 20 households refused to sign a commitment to the restrictions, and so the water district went ahead with the flow restrictors last week, reported local news outlet KABC.

The flow restriction devices take taps down to a trickle, making outdoor watering effectively impossible, and are to be kept in place for at least two weeks. If people try to remove them once they’ve been installed, they’ll be charged another $2,500.

From the NYT:

“This is not our preferred way of interacting with our customers,” David Pedersen, the head of the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, told me. “We are in a situation where we can’t have customers wasting water.”

Colorado Cloud Seeding

Outside of California, things have gotten even weirder. If a proposed ocean-to-Great Salt Lake pipeline sounds like sci-fi to you, consider that Colorado has been trying to combat drought by actively changing the weather since the 1970s.

The mountainous state’s $1 million “Weather Modification Program” primarily focuses on cloud seeding to boost snowfall. Cloud seeding is a process wherein silver iodide particles are released into the atmosphere in a targeted way to promote the generation of ice particles, which then turn into falling snow.

Multiple western states fund Colorado’s program, because snowpack in the Rocky Mountains is so integral to the region’s rivers, but the exact benefit of the technology is unsettled. It has big limitations. For instance, cloud seeding can only boost existing storms, not generate entirely new ones. It also requires very specific wind, humidity, and cloud conditions to work.

In winter 2020, cloud seeding contributed an additional estimated 326,000 gallons of water to Colorado’s snowfall, according to the Jackson County Water Conservancy District president. Yet this added precipitation barely scratches the surface of the what’s needed, and decades of cloud seeding haven’t yielded the promised results.

As drought conditions worsen, Colorado and its neighbors are hoping to lean even more on weather modification technology, but experts warn that it can’t stand alone as the only solution. Cloud seeding or not, if we don’t tackle climate change head-on, Colorado will soon be headed toward a future with half as much snow, according to a recent study.


Beyond the Western U.S.

Outside of the West, other U.S. states are also facing growing drought. For instance, almost three-quarters of Massachusetts is dryer than normal, and a big patch of the state is in moderate drought. Water shortages in Hawaii are being exacerbated by a lack of rainfall. And, although nowhere near as intense as the Southwest’s drought, swathes of the Southeast are experiencing drought, too.

Across the border in Mexico, dry conditions are leading to water restrictions as well. The state of Nuevo Leon has limited residents’ water access to a six-hour daily window of time (a much more stringent limitation than what some in the U.S. are dealing with). Scientists have been able to specifically link much of the North American drought to human-caused climate change.

Droughts happen worldwide. Iraq and Spain, for example, are also reckoning with lack of precipitation, drought, and water restrictions. Although each event hasn’t been well studied enough to prove a direct connection to our greenhouse gas emissions, the most recent IPCC report emphasized that every bit of additional warming adds to the increasing risk of worsening drought.

Abstract
In recent years, airborne microplastics have been identified in a range of remote environments. However, data throughout the Southern Hemisphere, in particular Antarctica, are largely absent to date. We collected snow samples from 19 sites across the Ross Island region of Antarctica. Suspected microplastic particles were isolated and their composition confirmed using micro-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (µFTIR). We identified microplastics in all Antarctic snow samples at an average concentration of 29 particles L−1, with fibres the most common morphotype and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) the most common polymer. To investigate sources, backward air mass trajectories were run from the time of sampling. These indicate potential long-range transportation of up to 6000 km, assuming a residence time of 6.5 d. Local sources were also identified as potential inputs into the environment as the polymers identified were consistent with those used in clothing and equipment from nearby research stations. This study adds to the growing body of literature regarding microplastics as a ubiquitous airborne pollutant and establishes their presence in Antarctica.

“I’m trying to figure out how bleak the future of the planet is. I assure myself that, even if I’m a starving artist, at least I have thousands of dollars in my retirement fund that I’ve been saving up for the last 20 years. Now I’m worried that everything we always thought was true (that the stock market always goes up over time) may not be forever true. Is there a risk of the entire financial/banking system crashing anytime in our lifetime (or the next 20 years) so decades of savings just goes up in smoke?”

It’s bad out there. Getting scary, economically, right?

Let me give it to you straight.

Way, way back when, I used to speak of a thing called “the opulence bubble.” That bubble is now bursting. Our entire economy is that bubble. We’re an industrial civilization on a dying planet. How much longer do you think it can really go on?

What is “the opulence bubble”? “Opulence” is a formal term. Economists — the really good ones, and there are about maybe ten of us left in the world at this point — use it to mean “things we don’t really need.” Or “things made with hidden costs.”

Just think of opulence as…the American lifestyle. When we live in the States, it’s in an affluent little neighborhood in a wealthy coastal town. Every house, big. Air conditioned to the max. The neighbors used to have three cars, now they have four, maybe five. You need these things just to survive, many of them, in the States, because, of course, there are no real public goods. Good luck getting anywhere without a car.

That’s opulence. But there’s a lot more to it than that, too.

Extinction.

Nobody much seems to understand this point, because our media does a terrible job of educating people.

Now. Is our civilization “based on hydrocarbons?” Yes, but it’s much worse than that. There’s a truer truth here. Our civilization is based on externalizing the costs of hydrocarbons. What does that mean?

Well, just look around. What are the skies full of? Hydrocarbons. The ocean? Plastic — carbon. What’s all that doing? Melting the ice sheets. Destroying major, planetary ecology, one after the other, from the Amazon to the great currents in the seas. Raising the temperature. To levels not seen for millions of years. We walking naked apes? We’ve only been around for 300,000.

Extinction.

What is our civilization really based on? It’s a bubble. The bubble works like this. Having had an industrial revolution, we extract stuff from the earth, and all that extraction begins with hydrocarbons, which are our primary energy source. We use all that extraction to manufacture stuff. What stuff? All the stuff. That we take for granted. The stuff of our everyday lives.

Let me give you an example. Think of a broom. A broom used to be something made of wood and straw, in local factories. Now? They’re made in China, of plastic. Hydrocarbons. Everyone has one, two, five.

How much does the broom cost? I don’t know, $5 — and it doesn’t matter. Because the truth is that the true costs of the broom are way, way higher than that $5. They include the carbon emitted in the manufacturing, the production, the distribution, the waste. All the ways that carbon then goes on to kill off trees and animals — like birds dropping dead from the skies. Goes on to melt ice sheets and raise the temperature to the point of…

Extinction.

See why I called it a “bubble?” What I was trying to teach my peers was that we were not paying the true costs of the stuff of our civilization. We were just kicking the can down the road. But someone would have to pay those costs, in some way.

There were two ways that those “negative externalities” — hidden costs — would have to be resolved, and only two ways. One, we’d have to clean up. We’d have to decarbonize the skies and unpollute the oceans and learn to revive the planet’s dying ecologies — because all of those things provide us air, water, medicine, food, life. Or, two, they’d die off, and we’d pay the price in self-destruction.

Which one of those two options appears to be occurring right now? The self-destruction one.

We’ve spent centuries at this point being an industrial civilization. Extracting and manufacturing steel, glass, cement, plastic, fertilizer — choose a basic raw material, input, thing — with hydrocarbons. All those inputs become the stuff of our everyday lives. Everything from sugar and wheat and coffee — made with fertilizer — to buildings and electronics and household goods made with the rest of it. We’ve mastered this art, taken it to the limit. We can literally tear holes in the planet looking for yet more gas and oil to an incredibly sophisticated degree.

But. That whole time? All those centuries? We haven’t been paying the hidden costs. And so…well…our planet is now dying.

Extinction. You can literally see it happening now. I told you the story about the little girl who asks where the monster that’s killing all the birds is. How much longer is the American West going to be habitable? What happens when the water runs out here or there? When the energy grids begin to fail? The harvests? They’re already failing.

What happens when you don’t pay a debt? Interest accrues, right? There’s a kind of interest at work here, too. We’ve spent centuries not paying off this debt, the debt of injuring the planet. Now the planet is mortally wounded.

See all that inflation around? What’s it really about? Second and third rate economists — and there are a lot of them — crow, again and again, about the “pandemic ending.” It’s tiresome. Hello, we’re in the middle of another wave. It’s not over.

What was Covid? A fluke? Of course not. It was part of a pattern — SARS, MERS, Covid. Temperature rising. Habitable land decreasing. Animals and humans rubbing shoulders uncomfortably. Zoonotic flow — transmission of biomaterial between species — skyrocketing. Covid was just part of a trend. That trend is predicted to accelerate. Guess what happens as human and animals both flee to highlands, as the earth scorches, looking for water, food, relief from the killing heat? More pandemics. Not my guess — a scientific fact.

Pandemics? They’re part of extinction. Now think of how just one pandemic has brought our world economy to its knees. It’s not going to be the last one.

What were the effects of the pandemic? Well, Covid basically shut everything down — and then billionaires used it to profiteer, since people suddenly couldn’t get the basics. That’s a tiny window into the future. Inequality skyrockets. The rich make out like bandits. The powerless and vulnerable begin to die — just like they are, of heat, even in rich nations, in rich cities, like Phoenix. Nobody’s rising from the ashes of extinction but the devil.

Extinction.

Shortages and inflation. What are they really about? The second and third rate economists and analysts — the kinds you hear on CNBC or whatnot — will tell you it’s about some sudden spike in “demand.” LOL — who are they kidding? At this point, we have four solid generations experiencing catastrophic downward mobility. Gen X did way worse than Boomers, and it was still kind of funny, then Millennials did worse than Gen X, then Zoomers did worse than Millennials — and now it’s not funny, it’s shocking and tragic. Next come two generations we haven’t named yet, and they have no economic prospects whatsoever. None. Zoomers and millennials can’t afford houses and families. The two generations coming after them are going to be poorer than that.

There’s no sudden spike in “demand.” Quite the opposite. We are suddenly, rapidly growing dramatically and catastrophically poorer. Because we cannot supply the basics anymore. Suddenly, opulence has caught up with us.

Want to know why inflation’s really soaring — and shortages are becoming endemic? Because harvests around the globe are failing. For everything. Sugar, coffee, wheat. Commodities are soaring in price as a result — which is what we grossly call the planet’s natural bounty. What happens when a planet begins to die? Suddenly, it can’t provide anymore, at the same level, at the same rate. And prices skyrocket, because supply goes into shock.

That is the real problem we face.

The opulence bubble is imploding now, all around us. Our civilization’s economy is failing — all of it. How long does it take to get a new Mac? Months. Shortages? Everything from tampons to baby formula to flights. Next up come energy, food, water, medicine.

This isn’t a joke. It’s not a drill. This is the end of a chapter in human history.

The opulence bubble is popping — and its the greatest bubble in human history. It’s the bubble of an industrial economy pretending it could go on forever, injuring the planet, taking without giving, and the planet wouldn’t convulse in death spasms.

The bubble is popping. The planet can’t supply us anymore with the things we’re used to — especially not in the same abusive ways — and so we are now growing dramatically, rapidly poorer.

Is any of that making sense? Let me tell you why I ask. When I came up with this idea — and I wasn’t hardly the first, I was young. Really young. In my early 30s. I stood on the shoulders of elders — Partha Dasgupta, Amartya Sen, Herman Daly, many more. But I was proud of my idea. I used to feel really strongly about it. I use to feel like I’d solved something when I came up with this idea. But you know how it goes for people like us. We’re the Cassandras, the different ones. And so almost every single one of my colleagues and peers — we were much younger then — turned on me, columnists and writers and economists and so forth. So I stopped writing about it for a very long time.

They thought I was saying all this to scare people. Some of them still do. They don’t understand — still don’t — that I’m the one with family in the hottest city on earth. With little cousins asking me where the monster that’s killing all the birds is. I inherit the burden of the wretched of the earth, man, because, well, where do you think I come from? I’m not trying to scare you. I never was. I’m just trying to warn you.

This is extinction. It’s not a game. It’s not a joke. It’s not a drill. This is the real thing.

What happens next? This does. When I say “our entire industrial economy was a bubble, and now it’s popping,” I’m not kidding. Do you think the harvests are magically going to come back to life? The rivers suddenly flow again? The animals resurrect themselves and frolic joyfully in the sunshine again?

None of that is going to happen. And so the future, economically, at least, is more of this. Accelerating. Faster and faster. Right on into oblivion. Shortages, inflation, uncertainty — all of which are really just part of the same thing: a civilization growing dramatically poorer, because it can’t supply itself with basics anymore, because it killed its planet.

I’m not trying to scare you. I’m warning you. How do you prepare for all this? You find a place to live. Harden it. Power it sustainably. Make sure it has a water source. In a temperate place. Surrounded by life, which has a chance of going on. You find a community which values life. You start or shift to a career in which you fight. To save what’s left of all this. Life and civilization. You love, as desperately and fiercely as you can. You grieve, every single day, for all those countless billions of lives, gone, in the wink of an eye. Extinction.

You grow and develop and mature. Into the kind of person who is better than all this. Just being a hyper predator killing a planet. You become.

Let me ask you a question. None of this is really about economics. It’s about who we are. What our relationship with time and being and life is. So let’s just get to it.

Do you think it’s possible to hurt God? I mean it in a secular way. The Universe. Can God be hurt? Or was Nietzsche right — God’s dead, good and evil don’t exist, and nothing but power matters?

What do you really think? Me? Here’s what I see. The light of a soul burns in every one of us. You know it and I know it. I don’t think you have to be religious to really know that much. Why else do we listen to music? Read poetry? Weep and laugh and sing and hold each other so desperately the second the night falls? Have little pets? Just look into a tiny thing’s eyes. See the way an ocean murmurs. You’ve heard the universe whispering the truth of it all to you. Over and over again. All this is alive, just like you. You are part of this, too. You are a child of stardust and time. Death holds you like a friend. All this is called “the universe.” It’s not out there, it’s in here. In each of us. We all know it, even if we pretend we don’t. I know we know it every time I see someone smile at my little puppy.

This is all there is. This is all there is. Just this. Life. In this beautiful and connected and timeless way. Each breath is every breath. In one eye, all reflections are beheld. Every moment is the eternal, and each one is, as Camus said, the Last Judgment.

So let me ask you again. Is it possible to hurt God? As in “the universe.” Me? I think that’s what we’re doing. I think the universe is wounded. By us. I think it’s recoiling in pain. I can feel it these days. Am I the crazy one?

It is waiting for us to learn something. To mature into grace and truth. Or continue on, down the road of lost souls.

The road to extinction.

*Save up. Put the money somewhere safe. Invest a little bit every month in something real, a company you value, a home, things that keep their value, made with love and care, education, people. Build systems of care for yourself and those you love. Don’t spend much, even if it feels like money’s losing its value. Sock it away. And think about all the above. Because it’s not just about money. It’s about life.

Some within the climate science community, and many outside it, have called out those who have highlighted the colossal threat presented by global heating as peddlers of climate ‘porn’ in recent years.

One eminent climate scientist has even warned that we should avoid using such terms as ‘shocking’, ‘terrifying’ or ‘devastating’ when describing climate breakdown, for fear of inducing ‘denial, paralysis and apathy’.

This is wrong on so many levels that it is difficult to know where to start.

Disintegrating

I am pretty sure that if a poll were held today, to determine what percentage of the population was terrified by the prospect of dangerous climate breakdown, the number would be pretty small.

Plenty of people would likely say they were concerned, quite a few would probably admit to being seriously worried, but terrified, no, not many. And this is a problem.

The truth is that we are at the heart of a crisis situation that has the potential to tear apart global society and economy within decades.

Belittling the dire straits we find ourselves in will do nothing to help us tackle the climate emergency. Instead it will – inevitably – foster the idea that things aren’t actually too bad.

So, it might get a bit hotter, and the weather might be a little wilder, but nothing we can’t cope with. This is, of course, completely untrue. Our once stable climate is rapidly disintegrating, and no one will be insulated from the mayhem this will bring in the decades ahead.

Alarmist

It is now practically impossible to keep this side of the 1.5°C dangerous climate change guardrail, but if we are to have any chance at all of reining in runaway heating, we need drastic action now, today.

And the only way we are going to get it, is if the scales can be made to fall from people’s eyes so that the awful future that their children will grow old in and their grandchildren grow up in, is revealed to them. For this to happen, climate scientists need to tell it like it is – uncut and uncensored.

We need, in other words, to strike terror. Fear may, in certain circumstances, paralyse, but more often it drives action. Today, we only have to look at the response of the Ukrainian people to the Russian invasion, for confirmation of this. Fear makes adrenaline levels surge, which in turn actuates an innate and irrepressible urge to act.

And never have we needed such a compulsion as much as we do today. Telling it like it is not being alarmist, far from it. Indeed, whether it is possible, any longer, to paint a picture that is bleaker than the coming reality, is a moot point.

Heating

The fact is, if we want to see entire populations rise up and demand serious action, which is what we need – and soon – then we need everyone to be scared, really scared, not slightly concerned.


As philosopher and climate activist, Rupert Read, wrote to me recently, "grim is good". As Read stresses in his forthcoming book, Why Climate Breakdown Matters, we are not spectators watching climate catastrophe unfold, we are agents.

We have the ability and opportunity to engage, to make a difference, but this will only happen if enough people understand the magnitude of the problem, and are scared enough to act.

This will never, however, be the case as long as climate scientists, and those who work on the impacts of climate breakdown, tip-toe around the issue and rein in their language. In many ways, doing so, is only marginally better than denying the existence of global heating, acting as it does to appease concerns for the impacts of climate breakdown in the decades ahead.

Power

Let’s not beat about the bush here, climate breakdown is a catastrophe. Soon, it will be all pervasive, affecting everyone on the planet and insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives.

This is well demonstrated by a single statistic: by 2050, an increasing global population will drive the demand for food up by one half, while at the same time, agricultural yields could be down by as much as one third. Discounting all other impacts of global heating, this – in itself – is enough to drive wholesale starvation and widespread civil strife.

So, be scared, be terrified. But don’t let this feed inertia. Embrace your fears and use them to galvanise action. If you feel the need, blockade an oil refinery or glue yourself to a motorway. Even if this isn’t to your taste, there is still plenty you can do.

Drive an electric car, or even better use public transport, walk or cycle. Stop flying, switch to a green energy tariff, eat less meat. Spread the word about the climate catastrophe among your family, friends and colleagues, lobby your elected representatives at both local and national level, and use your vote wisely to put in power a government that – when it comes to the climate crisis – actually walks the talk.

António Guterres says the world must turn the tide of rising sea levels, ocean heating, acidification and plastics pollution

The UN secretary general has declared that the world is in the middle of an “ocean emergency”, and urged governments to do more to restore ocean health.