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Category: John James Newsletter

The John James newsletter sources information that the mainstream news deliberately ignores. The Generator checks, vets and provides sources for selected articles from John James’ feed.

  • Refugees and War

     

    Enormous areas of the most productive agricultural land would be underwater. One thinks immediately of Bangladesh and the North Sea farms in Holland and Anglesea. In addition frequent floods, droughts and storms caused by the huge land-form changes and increasingly disturbed atmosphere would cause severe losses every year. The reduction in food production would ensure that half the world’s population would be hungry or starving

    The anticipated 7 meter sea rise from glacier collapse will be far worse. This will directly uproot 300 -1,000 million people, some 15% of the world’s population. The ricochet will be far-reaching and incalculable.

    Where will all these homeless and starving people go? Who will look after them? How will their governments be forced to react?

    Imagine eastern European countries struggling to feed their populations with a falling supply of food, water, and energy, eyeing Russia, whose population is already in decline, for its grain, minerals, and energy. Or Japan, with flooded coastal cities and contamination of its fresh water, eying Russia’s Sakhalin Island oil to power desalination plants and energy-intensive agricultural processes. Envision Pakistan, India, and China skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and the remaining arable land.

    Prospects for major conflicts

    As abrupt climate change lowers the world’s ability to feed its people, aggressive wars are likely to be fought over food, water, and energy. Deaths from war as well as starvation and disease will decrease population size, which will, over time, bring the population down to whatever level the earth can sustain.

    Violence and disruption from the stresses created by abrupt change pose different conditions to any we are used to. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression in order to reclaim balance. The massacres in Darfur are an early example of the coming climate wars.

    Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food and water, rather than by conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honour.

    Such catastrophic environmental problems are likely to escalate global conflict.

    Nations with resources may build fortresses around their countries, preserving some security for themselves. Less fortunate nations especially those with ancient enmities with their neighbours, may be left to struggle for food, clean water, or energy. With over 200 river basins occupied by more than one nation, we can expect conflict over access to water. For example, the Danube touches twelve nations, the Nile nine, and the Amazon seven.

    In this world of warring states the use of nuclear arms is inevitable.

    YOU can prevent these wars NOW
    Personally     and Politically

  • The Clathrate Smoking Gun

     

    The possibility of violent methane degassing (or “burping”) has been called the clathrate gun hypothesis. There is a suggestion that the ocean’s bottom waters couldn’t warm up to 8°C. If so, that would certainly set off massive clathrate destabilization. This is what turns the clathrates into a ticking time bomb.

    These hydrates are already being released. Satellite photos show massive chimneys of methane bubbling off the ocean floor. They are subterranean versions of the gas field fires we saw during the first Gulf War in Kuwait.

    Historically there are spikes in the methane record that may be explained by the violent degassing of clathrates. Some think that the Eocene hothouse period was caused by runaway global warming from clathrates released from the oceans.

    The biggest of these catastrophes occurred at the end of the Permian period some 250 million years ago. More than 94% of all marine species in the fossil records suddenly disappeared as oxygen levels plummeted and life itself teetered on the edge of extinction. It took 20 million or more years for coral reefs to begin reestablishing themselves, and in some areas over 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy diversity.

    Both were caused by temperature rises of less than 6½°C. Now these are average temperatures, but in the Siberian permafrost where much of the clathrates are buried the land is warming faster than anywhere else on earth.

    None of this is reassuring, especially when we read what is happening to the permafrost boglands of Alaska and Siberia.

    YOU can prevent this NOW
    Personally and Politically

     

     

     

     

  • PERMAFROST METHANE TIME BOMB

     

    This is one of the most feared tipping points. There is a delicate threshold where a slight rise in the Earth’s temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment by triggering a huge and instantaneous increase in global temperature. See Footprints #3.

    This melting is an irreversible ecological landslide – a vicious circular feedback that is becoming stronger and stronger, and is doing so more quickly with every passing summer.

    Once started extreme global warming would be irreversible.

    A significant part of the heat gained during the summer is held within the peat by the autumn snow that acts like a blanket to keep it warm, and thus the heat gained is incremental. This is why the present passion for carbon trading will make no difference to the outcome.

    When we start heating these natural systems, the process quickly becomes unstoppable. We do not have any technological brakes we can apply. This is enormously important because we can’t put the permafrost back once it’s gone. The gasses stored there have the potential to raise temperatures even more than all of our past emissions.

    Permafrost Time Bomb

    Since the bogs were formed they have been generating methane, most of which has been trapped within the permafrost itself, in ice-like clathrates.

    It is estimated that the west Siberian bog alone contains some 70 billion tonnes of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface of the world. This is equivalent to emitting 1.7 trillion tons of CO2, which is more greenhouse gas than has been emitted by humans in the past 200 years.

    There are already impacts on roads and buildings which are collapsing as the ice-held foundations melt. In addition, once the bog dries out deep sub-surface fires ignited by lightning will themselves create more CO2 to add into the air.

    Alarmingly, it has just been reported by Wetlands International that huge areas of wet peatland forests are being drained and logged in Indonesia and Malaysia. Along with the ensuing peat fires this contributes 2 billion tons of CO2, making South-East Asia the third largest polluter in the world behind the US and China.

    We CAN reduce our CO2 emissions from fossil fuels but we COULD NOT reduce methane emissions once they get started. These huge natural forces would take over and change our world in double-quick time.

    YOU can do a great deal to prevent further warming NOW
    Personally and Politically

     

    To the top

    Every item of information comes from the most recent and reputable scientific sources and published dialogues. As citations would impede the text, and as most may be looked up on the web, we decided not to fill the text with them

  • A conference without compassion: a guarantee of Mutually assisted suicide

     

    A few rich individuals and great corporations have abrogated the right to do as they will with the air that we all breathe. They have usurped the commons!

    In the Copenhagen Accord there are no deadlines, no assurances, and talk of keeping below 2C makes no link between science and the reality of continued pollution. Nothing at Copenhagen gets even near what is needed if a meaningful attempt is to be made to avert runaway climate change. The IPCC states that this Accord guarantees that global temperature will in reality reach over 3 degrees.

    Even at 2 degrees the IPCC forecasts a 9m seal-level rise, and that could be in much less than the next 80 years. To get what this means I repeat what I wrote in the August FOOTPRINTS:

    Lets assume that rising temperature follows a regular trajectory, and lets assume that there is a one-to-one correlation between temperature rise and its consequences. Such a regular trajectory is unlikely as the combination of growing C02-e, carbon and ice-melt feedbacks, solar cycles and stronger El Niño may join with extreme weather events and global tipping points to aler the trajectory of this process.

    Though we don’t understand many of the complexities, the simplicity of this calculation has a lot to recommend it.

    With continued steady linear growth the earth will be heated to 1C by 2012, and to 2C by 2030.

    Paleoclimatic evidence shows that for every 1C rise we should expect a minimum 4-metre rise in sea levels. We have just calculated that by 2030 the conditions will be in place to guarantee a minimal 8-metre sea level rise. With the usual inertial delays of thirty years or so built into the earth’s system, and applying a regular trajectory for sea levels as we did with temperature, we could be looking at

    A sea-level rise of 500mm within a decade and a full metre during the next (ie. before 2030).

    During this time large areas of agricultural land will be gradually flooded, in Egypt, Bangladesh, northern China and the Philippines. Florida, Boston and London will be badly affected, as will Melbourne and much of our coastline. Food production will be lessened as the Himalayan glaciers melt, there will be a lot less to fish and land will be lost to drought and sea. In the same period global population will rise by one billion, most living in cities. We are fully aware of the refugee crisis that would follow such sea-level rise, and the likelihood that there would be war. This is a recipe for catastrophe if we dont prepare.

    However we vary the parameters, this process shows we have run out of time and should prepare now for what cannot be prevented if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on earth is adapted.

    But Copenhagen has side-stepped that. George Monbiot again: We have now lost 17 precious years, possibly the only years in which climate breakdown could have been prevented. This has not happened by accident: it is the result of a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by the energy industries. This idiocy has been aided and abetted by the nations we have characterised, until now, as the good guys: those that have made firm commitments, only to invalidate them with loopholes, false accounting and outsourcing. In all cases immediate self-interest has trumped the long-term welfare of humankind. Corporate profits and political expediency have proved more urgent than either the natural world or human civilisation.

    Our political systems are incapable of discharging the main function of government: to protect us from each other. Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared. The governments which moved so swiftly to save the banks have bickered and filibustered while the biosphere burns.

    These governments raised many trillions to keep the stock exchanges open. They could do the same to buy the support of the great polluters, on any terms, to stop this crisis. They could, but wont. Governments could do it without recourse to any elected body. They (Obama, Rudd, Brown etc) just did it through the Federal Banks. Why not again?

    Do the frogs have to wait until the water is boiling?

    Bruno Sekoli of Lesotho, Chair of the Group of Least Developed Countries said on behalf of over a hundred countries “1.5 degrees is nonnegotiable – more than that means death to Africa. It will cause unmanageable consequences – it will leave millions of people suffering from hunger, diseases, floods and water shortages.’
 How can it be realistic to condemn half of humanity?”

    I paraphrase Andrew Glikson: The atmosphere is tracking into critical levels. An examination of the geological record indicates that, with the exception of major volcanic and asteroid impact events that triggered mass extinctions of species, never has atmospheric CO2 risen at a rate as fast as at present: 2 parts per million/year, the earlier highest record being about 0.4 ppm/year about 55 million years ago.

    Early humans survived a rise of +3C about 2.8 million years ago. Homo sapiens survived abrupt temperature rise of about +5C during the two last glacial terminations 130 thousand and 14–11 thousand years ago, in part through migration. The species will survive.

    It is less clear how civilization itself can survive a rise of over 2C, for the lives of 7 billion people are totally dependent on
    1) mountain snow-fed river systems for agriculture in deltas that are prone to sea level rise,
    2) on extensive cultivation of marginal desert regions such as in Australia and Africa that will turn into desert,
    3) on regular monsoons as in India and east Africa that will change course, and
    4) on coastal centres and port cities that are needed for the transport of food, and will be drowned under the sea. Little of our wealth and learning will survive such changes.

    According to James Hansen at 2C “Science reveals that climate is close to tipping points. It is a dead certainty that continued high emissions will create a chaotic dynamic situation for young people, with deteriorating climate conditions out of their control.”

    Enjoy your Christmas!

    John James

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  • FOOTPRINTS

     

    Agreeing to end fossil fuels wont work if we leave it until 2020. We need to cut all use by 10 percent every year until then. The men of money have sown doubts among us, with an exceptional attack on the integrity of the scientific community.

    Why do we listen to them? George Monbiot suggests that denial is our habitual way of dealing with fear of death. This is like saying “We all know we are doomed if we do nothing. Yet we are too comfortable as we are. Lets roll over and go back to sleep, maybe it will just pass away!” Fat chance!

    So, back to the present: Copenhagen. The summit is political. This means compromise between opposing forces. As in vector analysis, the resultant will be in between, which means significantly less than is needed.

    There is no point in targeting politicians without also targeting the decision-making individuals who are hiding behind their corporate facades. To expect politicians to make decisions is pointless. We need to project ourselves directly onto the other force in the vector, on a personal basis.

    Two million Australians will become sea-level refugees. How many of them run the companies causing the problem? This is where action should be directed.

    John James

    Please forward this newsletter to your friends and encourage them to join the mailing list at http://www.planetextinction.com/planet_extinction_newsletter_subscribe.htm

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  • Extinction of life on Earth through Global Waming

     

    The question for humanity is: can global warming be prevented?

    There is now enough CO2 already in the air, so were we to STOP all burning of fossil fuels immediately, STOP driving all cars and trucks and STOP devastating our forests – and did so NOW – temperatures would still continue to rise for at least another two decades!

    We wont be doing that – will we?
    Nor will Big-Oil nor will Big-Coal nor will our governments!

    Then watch out!! For by the time we get around to it – and convince China and India etc etc to do the same – the earth’s mean temperature could have increased by at least 2 degrees centigrade. This may not seem a lot, but when the whole globe gets close to this temperature we now know from recent scientific evidence that the following consequences are more than plausible, and these tipping points could happen abruptly:-

    1. There are vast stores of CO2 and methane held in forests, in the oceans and in the soil. Before 2 degrees is reached these greenhouse gases will start to seep into the atmosphere. This will increase temperatures further, triggering the emission of more carbon dioxide and methane – and a dangerous and unstoppable feedback loop will have started. The warming of permafrost in Siberia is a major concern.
    2. The affect of global warming on Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, especially Greenland and the Western Antarctic, will be devastating. The process of disintegration has already started, and will soon be irreversible. Complete collapse of these two areas would raise sea levels by more than 14 metres.
    3. Trees will be under considerable stress, and whole species may be wiped out either by the heat or by insect pests that flourish in a warmer climate. This is already happening in north America. Bush fires will be more frequent and larger, each time releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
    4. The great tropical forests of the Amazon, Borneo and the Congo are being over-logged and tests have shown they are likely to collapse if drought lasts more than three years. These forests are the major CO2 sinks.
    5. As a result, supplies of food and water will be greatly diminished from flooding, sea level rise, drought and chaotic weather.
    6. Close to a billion people will be forced to search for new homes. This unwanted immigration will force nations to resort to extreme measures including nuclear war.
    7. Continued global warming will turn our lovely planet into a greenhouse of hell for all living things as habitats are threatened. It has happened before in the Eocene Warming and can again.

    Therefore we have to prepare.
    Government must galvanise now to protect our children from imminent danger

    Everywhere, everyone, must STOP using fossil fuels, PLANT trees while
    still PREPARING for the worst … within the next 8 years.

    We cannot allow our world to be destroyed. Failure is not an option .

    Every MOTHER knows that even a ten percent possibility
    that we could DAMAGE OUR CHILDREN is unacceptable.

    WOMEN EVERYWHERE – urge your men to read this and start running their lives differently.

    YOU can prevent further warming NOW
    Personally and Politically