SPEAKING OF DOOM...

FAIRWELL TO THE HOLOCENE

I promised you a new DOOM post awhile ago. While the US Presidential Race rages on, the issues get buried or reduced to a soundbite. Here's one issue.
I encourage you to follow the links and read and listen.

got doom?

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posted June 26, 2008 10:48 am
by David Adam at commondreams
Published on Friday, August 15, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
Suffocating Dead Zones Spread Across World’s Oceans

Critically low oxygen levels now pose as great a threat to life in the world’s oceans as overfishing and habitat loss, say experts

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December 10, 2007
By Jacques Leslie at Mother Jones
The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global
Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?

~snip~
The grander astonishment is the most massive and rapid redistribution of the earth's resources in human history. In a mere two and a half decades, China has awakened from Maoist stagnancy to become the world's manufacturer. Among the planet's 193 nations, it is now first in production of coal, steel, cement, and 10 kinds of metal; it produces half the world's cameras and nearly a third of its TVs, and by 2015 may produce the most cars. It boasts factories that can accommodate 200,000 workers, and towns that make 60 percent of the world's buttons, half the world's silk neckties, and half the world's fireworks, respectively.

China has also become a ravenous consumer. Its appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump from fewer than 100 million people now to 700 million by 2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism. China is by a wide margin the leading importer of a cornucopia of commodities, including iron ore, steel, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, and nickel. It is the world's biggest consumer of coal, refrigerators, grain, cell phones, fertilizer, and television sets. It not only leads the world in coal consumption, with 2.5 billion tons in 2006, but uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations—the United States, Russia, and India—combined. China uses half the world's steel and concrete and will probably construct half the world's new buildings over the next decade. So omnivorous is the Chinese appetite for imports that when the country ran short of scrap metal in early 2004, manhole covers disappeared from cities all over the world—Chicago lost 150 in a month. And the Chinese are not just vast consumers, but conspicuous ones, as evidenced by the presence in Beijing of dealers representing every luxury-car manufacturer in the world. Sales of Porsches, Ferraris, and Maseratis have flourished, even though their owners have no opportunity to test their finely tuned cars' performance on the city's clotted roads.

The catch is that China has become not just the world's manufacturer but also its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion. Chinese ecosystems were already dreadfully compromised before the Communist Party took power in 1949, but Mao managed to accelerate their destruction.
~snip~

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Tomgram: Mike Davis, Welcome to the Next Epoch
posted June 26, 2008
Now, in a striking report from the front lines of science, Mike Davis, TomDispatch regular and author most recently of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire, "welcomes" the new geologic era we're officially entering, a period in which humanity may simply, and catastrophically, outrun history itself.
-Tom

Living on the Ice Shelf
Humanity's Meltdown
By Mike Davis

1. Farewell to the Holocene
~snip~
To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered "a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years." In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which "now exceeds natural sediment production by an order of magnitude," the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.
~snip~

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On NPR's Talk of the Nation SCIENCE FRIDAY
Mass Extinction Event On the Horizon? (broadcast Friday, August 15th, 2008)

Scientists studying many different parts of the planet's ecosystems are warning that Earth may be on the verge of a sixth major mass extinction event. In a series of papers published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers examining biodiversity around the globe paint a gloomy picture for the planet's species. Warning signs include recent mass die-offs of amphibians and declining fisheries.

Over the course of the Earth's history, there have been at least five major extinction events -- the End Ordovician, Late Devonian, End Permian, End Triassic, and End Cretaceous. But are we facing a sixth major extinction period -- and is there anything that can be done about it? In this segment, Ira talks with biologist Paul Ehrlich about what is driving biodiversity loss and what can be done to reverse the trend.

LISTEN to this interview! It's about ten minutes of the most riveting case for SOMEBODY doing SOMETHING to stop this madness.

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Lastly, we have THIS FUTURE to look forward to, UNLESS cooler heads prevail. And maybe not even then, as we slide down the back-end curve of Peak Oil.
Making Other Arrangements
A wake-up call to a citizenry in the shadow of oil scarcity
by James Howard Kunstler
photographs by David Maisel
Published in the January/February 2007 issue of Orion magazine

~snip~
Still, the widespread wish persists that some combination of alternative fuels will rescue us from this oil and gas predicament and allow us to continue enjoying by some other means what Vice-President Cheney has called the “non-negotiable” American way of life. The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them will allow us to continue running America, or even a substantial fraction of it, the way we have been. We are not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, Monsanto, and the Interstate Highway System on any combination of solar or wind energy, hydrogen, ethanol, tar sands, oil shale, methane hydrates, nuclear power, thermal depolymerization, “zero-point” energy, or anything else you can name. We will desperately use many of these things in many ways, but we are likely to be disappointed in what they can actually do for us.

The key to understanding the challenge we face is admitting that we have to comprehensively make other arrangements for all the normal activities of everyday life. I will return to this theme shortly, but first it is important to try to account for the extraordinary amount of delusional thinking that currently dogs our collective ability to think about these problems.
~snip~

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I urge all who read this to read every one of these essays in whole and send these links to your friends, family, co-workers and lists. The Bu$h administration has gutted the EPA and replaced sound science and scientists with political bravado and industry hacks. The Corporate Media is being fueled by the same companies that are trying very hard to make you believe this is a complete fabrication.

It's NOT FUNNY. And it is VERY REAL. You can spend your time wringing your hands about Obama and McCain and follow the lead of the corporate-owned media over every little gossippy tid-bit on the candidates. Or you can get to work to do what you can for yourself and to help others prepare for this slow-moving worldwide crisis. It's not a matter of "IF" but "WHEN".

got doom?

to be continued.......