Monday, June 1, 2015

Scorched Earth

Salton Sea, California

All following images are from the book:  
Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (OVER)
because climate is only one symptom of the Endocene

Number Four on his list reads:


I reponded as follows:

Ozone is a potent greenhouse gas in itself.
Ozone is causing massive forest dieback.
More warming leads to more ozone.




1.  Link to Wittig's paper quoted above.

Other peer reviewed journal articles:







Posted with more transcribed excerpts here.


Directly from EPA Secondary Ozone NAAQS Evaluation:























  2. Gail, thanks for posting all this. It's very interesting. I'm glad you got to go over it with Guy.. it sounds like being a grad student and having to defend a thesis (I've never been a grad student, thank the FSM..). It's good he got you to defend the rigor of your investigations, and congrats for having gotten your observations into his list of feedbacks.

    I chanced a comment at Orlov's joint. He let the second half through, but deleted the half where I talked about seeing no bees or flies or spiders, and that my "doominess" came from personal observation. Oh, well. Frustrating, but it won't change anything.

    1. Lidia that is terrible that Dimitry deleted some of your comment considering there was nothing inflammatory about it, my respect for him just plummeted.

    2. Technically it was two comments. The first one he didn't post. I'm actually surprised anything got through, since he has censored me in the past, and I just gave up trying to comment. Just tried it for a lark.

    3. I too have been dismayed at the paucity of pollinators this spring. I used to see dozens of bumble bees on the dandelion flowers but not this year. For days our flowering crab apple tree, literally covered with blossoms, did not have a single pollinator. I did see a couple of bumble bees later in the cycle. At one time there were 220 separate species of bumble bees in Maine_ not any more. The university and state biologists are conducting a bumble bee roundup with citizen participation. I'm anxious to hear what they find and if they will corroborate my local observations.

    4. By the way, Kevo, the only reason I even brought it up is that Gail has also had a history of being censored there, so in my blathering I was talking to her, in a way, more than making a general announcement.

      JMG is also quite vicious in his moderating practices. Neither he nor Dmitry (this is my conjecture) is interested in giving space to anything that takes away from their main product, which is how to deal with civilizational (rather than ecological) collapse. Disagreement is just not allowed in their threads, and they are assiduous in painting NTHE as a "fringe" theory maintained by kooks with some sort of nihilistic agenda.

      They can run their blogs as they see fit, but the censorship bit does make them out to be rather bullying, in my opinion. And if you ever wander over to "The Decline of Empire", well there are very few comments for a reason! That guy gets apoplectic with rage. There are others we all know.. it gets tiresome to recount, and I am running out of places to comment. So, Gail... thanks for putting up with me, and the rest of us!

      @Anonymous, it's not just bees, but all the small sorts of hoverflies, wasps, ants, and other bitty insects just aren't around the flowers at all. There are fewer houseflies, spiders, clothes and pantry moths... and it is NOT because of my good housekeeping. Like Gail with the ozone and plants, I wonder whether anyone is taking note of this. I extrapolate this down to the soil beings.. what's happening to them even under good conditions (iow, adequate water, no spraying of toxic gick). I pulled last year's veggie stems out of my garden beds pretty much intact, and I just don't see my compost piles breaking down the way I imagine they should. I'm only 2 years in this house, so is it just my imagination, or...?

    5. Oh, hoping not to belaboring the issue.... here's the rest of what I had written at Club Orlov, more or less: that last year I had been to some presentations and workshops held by Dr. Elaine Ingham, a soil microbiologist. (She has been making the rounds of "permaculture" and "sustainable ag." conferences.) Dr. Ingham's radical claim is that all soils have the nutrients plants need to thrive (so mineral amendments are a waste), and that what soils are deficient in are the right sorts of microbes that will effectively feed the plants by breaking down soil components and engaging in exchanges of necessary elements for plant saccharides. Her approach is to use concentrations of good bacteria and fungi obtained from healthy compost and, in particular, compost teas—to restore soil ecosystems. When asked how to obtain a good variety of these organisms if your surroundings were deficient, she suggested finding some "healthy woodland" and taking a sample of that soil to inoculate your home compost. At a different point in the presentation, she was asked where one could find examples of "healthy woodland" in Europe, and she said that "there are none".

      And so I put this information together with the evidence of my own senses, not just of the lack of large insects, but the lack of odors. The forest doesn't *smell* like the forest to me. I went to Maine last month, and the seashore doesn't *smell* like the seashore... More things are going on that we'd like to admit.

  3. I agree with Richard best summary to date. Presenting to Guy really made you step up your game. Been meaning to post on your last post as well. Came across an interesting critique of Camus.

  4. Hey Gail (and readers/commenters)!

    Nice job on the research - i had always thought it was part of the feedbacks (buried in one or another already listed).

    There are so many vectors going against Earth's habitat for humanity (among the many other plant and animal species) that it's practically guaranteed that we won't be here much longer.
    i've posted that mankind won't make it through the 2020's and it looks more and more certain as time moves on. Food shortages have begun; disease, even NOVEL diseases, are ramping up; volcanos are awakening all over the planet; sea level rise is going to impact us all very soon; destructive storms are increasing in number and strength; drought and flooding events are becoming more prevalent; increasing HEAT is beginning to impact life populations (all species); methane and hydrogen sulfide is becoming a larger part of the atmosphere; aside from all these (and too many more to even list) NATURAL phenomena taking us in the "wrong" direction, there's also the human (stupidity) factor, at the root of the entire process - note to God (from Animal House): "Hey, ya fucked up! You trusted us!"

    As for Orlov, he's a lot like Dave Cohen who thinks he knows it all and pontificates from his blog (that i won't visit any longer, like Orlov's and Greer's) after he disparaged Guy's reputation and backed Archer's model-based comment about an abrupt methane release being unlikely, while COMPLETELY missing the point that it's spewing from MANY more locations than just the Arctic Sea. i could care less what (t)he(y) think about anything.

    Lidia - your assessments match mine (as they obviously would in the real world of experience). Thanks for putting it out there. i also appreciate your repartee and comments over on NBL.
    i visited ulvfugl's amazing blog recently and he too was noticing (and mourning) the loss of insects in his perfect location for their existence. Scary times - and getting worse.

    Thanks everyone for your comments and links and BIG UPS to GAIL! GREAT JOB!


  5. If you would, please tell us details of the pictures.

  6. i know you're all over this Gail: here's another article you can add to the archive

    Ocean cycling of nitrous oxide is more intense than thought, emissions are increasing [h/t CO Bob from Robert Scribbler's site comments]


    It turns out that a particular zone of the ocean—a boundary between oxygen-rich surface waters and oxygen-free, or "anoxic," deep waters—plays a key role in nitrogen cycling. This "suboxic" zone experiences an imbalance between bacterial processes that create N2O and those that break it down—and the excess of N2O created by this imbalance is given off to the atmosphere.

    Ocean nitrification begins with nitrogen entering the sea as runoff from agricultural fertilizers and other sources. Marine microbes take in nitrogen compounds, such as ammonia, and chemically modify them, releasing N2O as a byproduct. Other bacteria carry out denitrification, a process that breaks down nitrogen compounds through steps that ultimately lead to nitrogen gas—but which can also release some N2O.

    Most of the time, these processes balance out. "The denitrifying bacteria that produce N2O also consume it, and it was thought that these two processes are pretty tightly coupled," Babbin says. But that's not the case in the suboxic layer, resulting in leftover N2O that leaks away to the surface.


  7. Good job, Gail!

    But it's not just trees that will go as the desertification of Planet Earth continues.
    In my rural neighborhood, vines are disappearing as well as insects, rodents, and predators that feed on them. There seems to be a shortage of food for the insects, so the rodents have little to eat. The hawks and owls are having a hard time finding their daily meals as well.

    Not all deserts are hot and dry. Some are moist and cold like the deep ocean. A desert is where there is a shortage of life. Think of a tropical rain forest with its richly abundant biodiversity. Our future planet will be just the opposite.
    From today's local rag:
    (If some insects are endangered and protected, it would seem that more common insects are also in short supply, as commented above.)


  8. I've arrived at this position:

    Every aspect of the situation on this planet is far worse than we think it is.
    Every situation is getting worse faster than we expect.
    We are past the knee of most of these exponential curves.
    We will make no collective effort to turn these curves around, because of the way politics works on the human brain.
    We are out of time to do anything but nibble around the edges of local security.
    Local security is no longer even achievable in most places on Earth, certainly not for longer than a few years.

    I no longer need to find out anything more for myself.

    I see no point in waking people up to the imminence of the death of everything they love - there seems to be little kindness in that act, just a sort of malignant self-congratulatory schadenfreude. In any event, most personality types aren't even wired to be able to hear the message (see ). As a result I'm dropping out of the pundit's role to concentrate on immediate, personal needs. I've noticed a trend in this direction (JHG and the Orlovinator excluded) - people like George Mobus, David Korowcz, Nicole Foss and I seem to be dropping off into silence. There is nothing left to say.

    I've enjoyed following most of our interactions, Gail. Best of luck!

    1. I'm not sure who you have in mind who displays a "malignant self-congratulatory schadenfreude", although I do agree that there is no point in trying to wake people up. They are better off asleep, since there is nothing to be done, and it is almost impossible to force someone to see anyway. However, it seems to me that more and more people are waking up on their own, as events transpire, and is seems also that when they do, there is commonly a process of questioning and grieving. Often people wake up alone among their friends and family, and their revelations aren't received warmly. So, aside from the doom-sayer-lites who are profiting off of the promise of survivalism, I think staying engaged with the growing community is a compassionate thing to do. I know many, many people who have read your essays Paul, as you have honestly chronicled your struggles and insights being collapse aware, have benefited and been grateful for what you have written so far. Best of luck to you, too! We are all dodging bullets now.

  9. Drought, heat, and insects responsible for killing more than 12 million trees in California

    A combination of drought, heat and insects is responsible for the death of more than 12 million trees in California, according to a new study from UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). Members of the NCEAS working group studying environmental factors contributing to tree mortality expect this number to increase with climate change. [more]



Blog Archive

Follow by Email

My Blog List

Search This Blog