Extreme rainfall events are cropping up around the world. In England, once in a thousand year floods have repeated 3 times now, in five years. Records are falling in many countries. In a warmer world, we’ve gained 7 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere. It has to come down somewhere.
The short news clips about extreme rainfall events around the world came courtesy of BBC, Reuters, Fox, ABC, CBS, Euronews.
WASDELL VINDICATED
A few weeks ago, our guest David Wasdell suggested the outcome of our current path of emissions would eventually be a world at least 8 degrees C hotter on average, maybe more. Some questioned that. It is now the most heavily downloaded interview I’ve posted on soundcloud. If you missed it, listen in here.
This week the University of Edinburgh released a paper echoing Wasdell’s climate. Eight degrees is possible, according to Professor Roy Thompson, as published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Find the University press release here.
DARK QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE
Climate change does not occur in a steady economy, or a peaceful time. This Fall we saw in Paris how terrorism empowered politicians to ban climate action, in the name of public safety. The terrorists knew they were attacking before the world flooded to the COP21 climate talks. They succeeded in disrupting the essential public voice.
But in this show, we ask two questions: will the fossil-based economy collapse just as extreme weather events punish property and infrastructure. What if we are too broke to rebuild or cope? There’s a blog for that. It’s theeconomiccollapse blog, with millions of readers. We’ll look at frashing warning a new depression is forming, with blogger Michael T. Snyder.
Then, believe it or not, there are darker things to consider. If climate disrupts agriculture, as expected and already happening, social violence and wars may become worse. Our guest Professor Tim Snyder explains why climate change may open the door to more mass murder. It needs to be said.
Off we go, with black clouds hanging over economies around the world.
Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)
Or listen on Soundcloud right now!
RETURN TOWARD COLLAPSE – MICHAEL SNYDER
The Federal Reserve just said the U.S. economy is so rosy they can raise interest rates by .25%, the first rise in about 7 years. So why is this environment reporter covering just the opposite?
Remember Hurricane Sandy, all pumped up with rising seas and a hot ocean off the U.S. East Coast. The damages from that one storm were estimated at $60 billion dollars, or about 55 billion euros to “fix”. That didn’t include bolstering the shore-line, or the estimated $10 billion dollars our Radio Ecoshock guest Professor J. Court Stevenson recommended to create flood-gates to protect New York Harbor. Download that 21 minute interview here.
What about the billions lost in the California drought, or more tens of billions with Hurricane Katrina? Politicians, and we the public, always presume there will be money to rebuild. Except we’re already in the total debt economy, nationally, regionally, and personally. If the massive global economic system experiences a crash, there will be no money to recover from recurring climate damage. We will get hit – that’s pretty well guaranteed from rising seas, extreme rainfall events (I report on a few of those in this show), agricultural losses, record wild-fires – you know, a lot of bad things.
The good news could be that only a global economic crash can prevent us from terra-forming the planet into a dying world. Things like the tar sands won’t be worth developing, and ditto for dangerous Arctic drilling. The history of the past few decades shows only an economic collapse, like the fall of the Soviet Union, has led to genuine reduction of emissions.
The bad news is a lot of bad news. For example, if there is no money to invest, we may not make the transition toward cleaner solar and wind energy, or electric cars. We may be stuck with whatever inefficient grid and coal power plants we’ve got, not to mention aging nuclear hulks run way past their best before date. We may get stuck in the 20th century.
Of course there’s a lot more. Pension funds could go broke. Governments could go broke (some already are). People will lose jobs, the poor will get even less, some of us will lose hope. It’s a Depression with a capital “D”.
Ever since the last “recession” of 2008, when major institutions teetered on the brink of global ruin – Michael T. Snyder has been writing a blog saying nothing has been fixed from that time, and in fact, most things have become even more precarious. For the past few months he’s been posting various warning from the internal workings of the macro economic system that tell us another crash is developing. In the past few weeks, a lot of what Michael warns about is coming to the surface, even in the mainstream popular press.
Michael T. Snyder
In our interview he gives a list of about ten big warning signs. For example, the junk bond market has already collapsed, as it did before stocks fell in 2008. “Junk bonds” are really higher risk loans to corporations, like Chrysler for example. Most big pension funds are based on a presumed rate of return much higher than “safe” guaranteed interest rates. These funds need money just to pay out retirees now on the roles, much less the baby-boomers hitting the decks. Pension funds were more or less forced into the junk bond market.
Just in the last week, a big junk bond company called Third Avenue had so many demands for payouts (people bailing) they had to deny requests. There wasn’t enough money. This triggered a run on many other junk bonds. It’s a run on the junk bond bank.
That’s just one sign. The near death of international shipping and trade is another. In fact, there have been a series of major banks, well-known international banks, who have warned a “downturn” is just around the corner. Private investment banks are warning their clients about the same. Michael Snyder has lists of them in his blog!
THE “PROPAGANDA MATRIX”
So why isn’t Fox News and the general mass media telling you how serious this is? Snyder reminds us that six major media corporations control about 90% of what we see, hear – and talk about. The average American now watches 293 minutes of TV a day. Add in all the other media, like the Internet, social media, radio, newspapers – and those six corporations fill up an astounding 10 hours of the average person’s day! Snyder calles it “the propaganda matrix”.
It’s little wonder that whatever they are blaring out over multiple outlets gets talked about in the office, at home, and on the street. It could be the Kardashians, terrorism, refugees, Donald Trump, somebody to hate, some awful crime – but it’s seldom, very seldom, the raw facts that our economy isn’t working for 99% of the people.
The world’s fifth largest economy, the big hope of the developing world, is officially in a “Depression” according to Goldman Sachs. Do you know what country that is? Probably not. A few dozen stock markets around the world have already crashed. Did you know that? That’s why you, and anybody who cares about the future, should listen to this interview with Michael T. Snyder.
Download or listen this Radio Ecoshock interview with Michael T. Snyder in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
If you want to Tweet or Facebook this interview, use this smaller link to the Lo-Fi version (which downloads faster to phones…) http://tinyurl.com/gvnngae
WHO IS MICHAEL SNYDER?
Who is he? As we learn in this interview, Snyder was a practicing lawyer. He was one of the many working in Washington D.C. in the shadow of the Capitol buildings. When the last recession hit, Snyder got out. He’s happily living now in the mountains of Idaho. Snyder’s blog, theeconomiccollapse.com gets about a million views a month. But it doesn’t stop there. I’ve seen his posts on dozens and dozens of other blogs, including the biggest, like Zero Hedge.
Maybe you think Michael Snyder isn’t qualified, or he’s over-zealous. Go ahead, but first argue with the facts he packs into his blog posts – all with links to the original source, which you can check for yourself. Eventually you’ll find his blog is a definite worthwhile watching post, as I did.
Snyder isn’t adamant about everything. He’ll ask the question, and wants you to check things out. Plus, Snyder doesn’t say we’ll wake up one morning to find everything closed, and start a new civilization from scratch. Rather he sees a downward staircase, where things fall apart, maybe over years. That was the reality of the last Great Depression in the 1930’s. But this collapse would be global, and maybe the end of the fossil fuel civilization as we’ve known it.
I’d like to have Michael back again next spring, when we’ll see whether Janet Yellen’s official optimism, or Michael Snyder’s deep suspicion, turn out to be reality.
During the interview we also discover Michael has a new novel out. It’s kind of a thriller, but contains all sorts of projections into the future, from what he sees now. The title is “The Beginning of the End“.
Michael also has two other online projects: a blog “End of the American Dream” and his new news web site “The Most Important News“.
PROFESSOR TIM SNYDER: THE NEXT “HOLOCAUST” MAY BE DRIVEN BY CLIMATE CHANGE
I heard about the work of Professor Timothy Snyder in a controversial op-ed in the New York Times. It was published September 12th, 2015 under the title “The Next Genocide“. He says climate change could drive us again towards mass murder.
The idea that rampant climate change will take hundreds of millions of lives was not new to me. For example, when the major delta of Bangladesh, where hundreds of millions live, becomes too salty for agriculture, due to invading seas – millions of environmental refugees will stream north. The only places they could go are already over-populated and very undeveloped, like Eastern India. It’s not going to end well.
But Snyder has thought deeper about the possible consequences of climate change. First of all, he is an internationally-known scholar of the mass murders that happened during the mid-20th century in Eastern Europe. We call it “the Holocaust”, but it turns out most of us still don’t understand what happened there.
For example, most people were killed by the Nazis in the infamous death camps right? Wrong, says Snyder. While the death camp toll was horrendous, even more millions died outside the camps, slaughtered wherever they were. I ask Snyder why we don’t know this. One major reason was that Eastern Europe was behind the iron curtain of communism, where people couldn’t travel or speak freely.
Professor Snyder is fluent in at least 10 languages. Most of us couldn’t read the original documents, even if we could find them. In 2010, Snyder, a Yale historian, published a book on his research, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin“. The two dictators supervised the death of about 14 million people in the Eastern European lands between them.
Professor Timothy D. Snyder
I know from my own reading, the Holocaust was also the first case of turning advanced technology into machines for mass murder. Hitler’s death camps used a punch-card system designed, provided (and maintained during the war!) by the American company IBM. Ford trucks carried the victims and troops around. Radio transmitted hate propaganda.
So where does climate change come in? I can’t do justice to Snyder’s arguments. You can find them in the New York Times article, or this one in the Guardian. But news articles just scratch the surface. The real juice comes from Snyder’s new book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning“.
In the interview, we talk about how Hitler and his cronies viewed the environment. In some senses, the Nazi’s had a tinge of “green”. They wanted to restore some natural species (so they could hunt them), and used “nature” in their propaganda. But like modern climate denialists, Hitler also had a phobia, bordering on hatred, for real science. In some cases, like Einstein’s theories, he denounced it as “Jewish science”. That may be one reason why the Nazi’s never developed the atomic bomb.
Tim Snyder tells us Hitler sold the Germans a fear that they could never feed themselves, so they needed “living space” – to be taken by force from others (like the Poles) who would be eradicated. Germans would run out of food, he thought, because fertilizers, hydridization, and other promises of science were false. It turns out he was totally wrong, and after the war Europe became a major exporter of food, using scientific methods.
MY INTERPRETATION OF THIS INTERVIEW
One of my key take-aways of talking with Tim Snyder is that mass murder does not require a state where people are at or near starvation. All it requires is that people fear it COULD happen, to justify terrible things.
In fact, it may not require a food shortage. Part of Hitler’s argument was that the Germans, as a superior “race”, should have the highest lifestyles. He specifically pointed to the developing riches of America. Tim Snyder thinks that someone, or some nation, could justify mass murder solely because people thought their lifestyle was threatened (not just their food). Does that raise any thoughts in you? What if there is an economic crash, or fear of one, and Americans, or Brits, think their lifestyle is going downhill? Could we turn that into an excuse to bomb the hell out of some other people far away? Or justify mass-murder at home?
The worst fear is that a national government will purposefully plan, over time, the mass murder of another population, as happened in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. We’re not talking about murderous riots in the street, although those can be arranged. We’re talking about applying computer tech, advanced weapons, money, and administration to depopulate some part of the world, or a sub-set of a national population.
That kind of mass-murder as policy could develop in times stressed beyond imagination by climate disruption. Timothy Snyder explains how. As Snyder writes in the New York Times:
“Denying science imperils the future by summoning the ghosts of the past.”
Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Professor Timothy D. Snyder in CD Quality or Lo-Fi
If you want to Tweet or Facebook this interview, use this smaller link to the Lo-Fi version: http://tinyurl.com/hal24ey
THANKS FOR GIVING ME THIS OPPORTUNITY
We’re pushing the end of our time – at least for Radio Ecoshock this week.
My special thanks to those who reached out with financial support for this program, without much prodding from me. Aside from the help, it also makes me feel appreciated. Find out how you can help here.
I put in about 40 hours a week to produce this program. It’s my “job” but I don’t get paid for it. As I hope you can tell, each guest sends me on an adventure of research in preparation, plus time spent distributing the program, answering listener emails (write me radio //at// ecoshock.org), staying abreast of global news feeds, this blog, the web site, and all that. It’s a life work, and I’m just glad you encourage me to do it.
I’m Alex Smith. As always, thank you for listening, and caring about our world.
Collapse cannot be modelled
it is not a process we can understand.
welcome back to the dark side Alex.
may the farce be with you,
hope your brave enough to face this link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DieOff/comments/3x7tji/china_will_destroy_earth_selling_sustainability/
surreal show
after economic collapse, we will embrace science and history
time is only a mathematical 4th dimension
we will not turn to history
we will become history
destroyer of worlds
it's as simple as the nose on your face
Lovelock was attacked for saying China would go to Africa
again ahead of his time, just like Hansen's 100% citizen dividend.
instead we get McKibben and Klein socialism
nothing will go the way we want
nobody good will ride on top of history's last tidal wave
Did you not spend the last 20 years not watching the Discovery Science and History channels on teevee?
they are 2 of the most evil channels on television
We will turn to them, not the hope doctor Snyder imagines
I do not see the world behaving well in times of many over-whelming crises.
did I mention trump teevee?
Where we will end up is yet to unfold, Callaghan. Trajectories are still unclear, up in the air, and the variables are quite beyond the abilities of the best super computers to simulate. One can paint an endless sea of dystopia… and many like you seem to revel in the wallowing. I don't mean to attack you in particular, as the latest brain research shows our species inability to process such challenging data sets and paradigm choices.
What is all too often overlooked or ignored is all the unfolding understanding in associated realms (biology, genetics, the myriad of solar opportunities, the many possibilities articulated by the Rifkens…indeed, every single day new discoveries and insights are unfolding that, together… will shift reality. It is really difficult to even begin to lay out the endless web of learning as to materials, interactive organisms, and scientific unfoldings we are on the cusp of.
Simple minded focused doomerism, arguing within a narrow set of a huge universe (carbon emissions, for example or the evils of humanity as you love to revel in) results in your mantra: "nobody good will ride on top of history's last tidal wave"…
Why do you waste your precious time proselytizing over and over again on this crude blather? Do you get off on it? Month after month you spew your drivel…if it is so hopeless, why bother? You are a troll… nothing more. w
While one can easily reach the conclusions or mantra's you spew… by narrowly examining the endless array of possibilities, I consider it a rather disgusting, weak, lazy, and sloppy approach to understanding, let alone, weaving the web of the future. You are like evil incarnate yourself… all doomers are… acting as an agent of hopelessness and ending. Little more than the hammer that trys to extinguish life itself. I've often wondered… are such agents even "human"?
One thing I admire about Alex is his willingness to walk the walk, explore many possibilities, and not get totally caught up in one slice of a perspective on reality and it's unfolding. The doorways to perception are wide, far wider than any of us can begin to comprehend… and I find both apprehension and excitement in this truth…
Humanity may end horribly. It may go thru an extremely difficult time. We may come together and with much work, discover and incorporate many mysteries to current scientific understanding and jump the crevasse… My portrayals of possibilities is crude and totally insufficient given my tracking of science across all fields and my willingness to conceive of this web in ways you obviously are incapable of. I love the gifts of insight by Beckwith, Hanson, Jacobson, Rifkin and the countless members of our society trying to descern pathways and possibilities. And none of them can begin to incorporate all the unfolding data sets and scientific knowledge pouring out into our toolset.
Possibly the best depiction I can offer of our existance at present is a mycelial web… moving in a zillion directions, with our ultimate destination still up in the air. I hate the moments when I allow the depression of YOU to take over my spirit, as it accomplishes absolutely NOTHING. It's the dark force itself, slimely trying to quench the future of our species…
I sometimes go there. But every day I fill bits of my psyche with new insight and information about what we are learning everywhere and how it is really unfolding into a tsunami of change that none of us can really fathom at the moment; I'm glad I do not go to the darkness of your soul very often.
tinyurl.com/vastman
12/18/15
I just have a comment regarding Mr. Wasdell's presentation (which I watched a couple of weeks ago):
I live in Pennsylvania and we are dealing with a legislature wholly owned by the fossil fuel industry. No matter what we say or do, the give the frackers anything and everything they want. It seems as if they don't understand the magnitude of the problems we face. It is very frustrating to talk to them and to see their eyes glaze over. I'd send my representatives Mr. Wasdell's lecture, but I'm sure they'd not watch it.
What can we do in the face of such… blindness/greed/stupidity?
Susan – it's hard, I know. Maybe your relatives would read the book by Walter Brasch, author of"Fracking Pennsylvania". He's got the whole story of how the fossil fuel companies bought your state legislature, and the agencies supposed to protect the public. You can listen to my interview with him, using links in this blog entry:
http://www.ecoshock.info/2014/01/the-awful-truth-about-fracking.html
Alex
@vastman
You, seem to have lost the big picture. Maybe all is not lost, maybe it is, we all have our right to an opinion.
https://newandancientstory.net/episode-03-deep-wealth-and-transformation/
Opinions are like weeds…they often choke the life out of an otherwise thriving ecosystem… I have NOT "lost" the big picture… dumbed down simpletons, ignorant dweebs, racists, doomers… hell… even frackers and oil barron planet destabilizing fools have "opinions". WTF is wrong with you???
We are in a moment… actually, the data indicates we are in THE moment when the trajectory of our species and countless others is on the line and you talk about frackin' "opinions" and entitlements??? Every time I connect with such ignorance I ponder whether we are indeed a failed species…and wish I had a "delete" button to exorcise the cancer…
Data… it is everywhere… it isn't an frackin' opinion. Based on our current understanding of the animal kingdom we have evolved with the unique ability…the magical means of making sense of it all, combining, connecting, and integrating the unfolding fundamental laws of nature, where we are, the possibilities…and shifting out of this death spiral… Maybe that's what the mycelial webs connecting and moving nutrient flows within huge regions of our planet are doing… they certainly AREN'T wallowing in friggin OPINIONS!!!
THE BIG PICTURE??? it's an opinion??? Friggin' repugnant douche bags selling their children's future for an oil execs "OPINION"??? And the rest of you moaning about how its all f'd and blah blah blah… both sides spewing fantasy OPINIONS when coherent attention to detail and directions is needed.
I strive to connect with thinking, caring, insightful humans doing all they can to come to grips with the REAL "BIG PICTURE", not your frackin' OPINION… to hopefully think/manifest/focus effort enabling our species to NAVIGATE and climb out of this ocean of bullshit, negativity and hedonistic self-annihilation based on ridiculous "OPINIONS" before air breathers everywhere SUFFOCATE as our planetary oxygenation system… phytoplankton… cease functioning. This trajectory is based on DATA, not OPINIONS… So are the pathways out of this mess… there's lots to do, lots to refine, and everything is at stake.
The engine of life deserves better than stupid OPINIONS…blather spewing out of lazy, ignorant programed sheeple…We hold the future of life as we know it, in our hands… take some responsibility…
tinyurl.com/vastman
Susan… connect with thinking humans… be the lever of change… we are many… they are few… you will find humans all around you eager to move the lever… join them… it is powerful and is needed.
Thank you, Alex, for your reply. I'll look for that book.
Vastman, no, we are not many… those who truly understand our situation… are few… I find this true everyday… I'll have people I know who say, "I'm a liberal, I believe in climate change".. but, the do not even begin to understand the scope of change necessary or all the scientific realities facing us… they continue on with their regular lifestyles and think nothing of it… not connecting that to our problem… as is the case with most.. especially in the developed countries, running off to the casinos, the stadiums, the NASCAR… flying here, flying there.. buying plastic this and plastic that… buying new EVERYTHING.. CREATING DEMAND… ………………………………………………..
Hi there! I've read many posts about economic collapse, and I can tell that yours is very valuable. Though many people think that everything in their world will stay exactly the way it is forever, there are many who believe this not only to be false, but dangerous to even think. The reason it’s dangerous is that as long as people are complacent they will not prepare for the future. See more http://survival-mastery.com/basics/economic-collapse-preparation.html
Just listened to this show — been working my way backwards thru the archives.
Two comments. First, the genocide is already under way! No need to wait, or speculate.
One form of that comes like it did in Nazi Germany — relatively quickly, since it was driven be a centralized, singular ~authority~. The current kind is not centralized, and not driven by a single force.
Instead, it is happening slowly, and driven by what you could call a distributed force — the force of corporate, capitalist economics; the force of our individual greed and callousness and indifference, and fear and denial; the force of momentum of our society. It happens EVERY day; day after day after day, as if the ways things are will last forever — a form of Misplaced Concreteness applied to time and what arises in it.
The victims, so far, have been. largely, not folks in the U.S. or Canada or “the rich world.” The victims have been poor humans and creatures in the natural world.
That genocide is VERY much already well under way!
Thing is, it is really such a virulent form that we do not, yet, commonly, recognized for what it is actually is: OMNICIDE!
Yes, it is hell bent on exterminating ALL life on Earth!
It’ll just take it a while, but since its progress is very likely exponential, we all won’t have to wait all that long! by something like 2050, …
Second, the whole part of the show about economic collapse and such was almost humorous, in an admittedly perverse way. Yet more of the typical drivel about how you can try to survive the unsurvivable. Sure, stock up on metals and guns; and canned food. It won’t help.
You can’t survive in outer space without a space suit. None of us will survive, long, on a planet that is no longer suitable for agriculture. You could go so far as resorting to cannibalism or feed of the dead, literally, but in the end, you too will simply starve.
Finally, if I heard correctly, Alex talked about Greens taking up arms, or such; of greens being the ones committing the violence . Alex, only in, my dreams!
How I wish Greens had surface-to-air missiles, and would use them to blow the corporate jets of Exxon and Koch Brothers and Trump and so many others right out of the sky! But, alas, no such luck.
The people, Alex, who WILL turn even more violent are the right wing fascists who will kill anybody who even tries to stand in their way of them continuing to drive their super-sized trucks, on diesel, with the coal burner attached to the exhaust! The Ted Nuggent’s of the world. They WILL kill in order to try to save themselves, and their way of life.
Alex, if you live long enough, and keep doing Radio EcoShock, you’ll get to report on that happening — until folks like that take you out too.
The U.S. is perhaps singularly situated to be the worst of the worst of it. A nation full of guns. A nation increasingly populated by the morbidly obese, who are physically incapable of doing much, except pulling a trigger. A nation where maybe a full third of the population who are, effectively, homicidal as well as insane — people like Trump, and his supporters.
When the denial starts to crumble, and the anger phase sets it, boy is it going to be one hell of a show!! Maybe, for a while, those who are getting screwed, (the other two-thirds of the U.S. population,) will get violent — and take out the corporate-backed politicians and right wing crazies and the fossil fuel corporations and the NRA. I’m not going to hold my breath on that one …
You need psychiatric help, my friend! My office is always open.
Vastman has it right about “opinions,” btw! Opinions, like beliefs, are mental constructions!! Nothing more, nothing less.
The are ideas that exist inside our heads. They DO matter, since they drive what we say and do and don’t say and don’t do.
But, they are not “real” in the way that, for example, global warming is real — my opinion or belief about gravity will not prevent me from falling off a roof.
Part of will prove so absolutely fatal to humanity is that we confuse our individual opinions and beliefs and such with reality.
As vastman put it: selling their children’s future for an oil execs “OPINION”???