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Recent Posts
- Climate Change dominates news coverage at expense of other existential planetary boundaries
- Excerpt from “The Geopolitics of Resource Wars”
- Homes & Buildings
- Book Review “The Outlawed Ocean” by Ian Urbina
- Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
- Motherboards: too complicated to make after oil
- “More and More and More” one of the best books on energy ever written
- The staggering destruction of knowledge by Christians in the Roman Empire
- The staggering cost of Net Zero in Britain
- Why the R/P Reserves to Production ratio does not show when oil will run out
- Catton on Collapse “Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse”
- Book Review of Grain Brain: Extraordinary claim not backed up by evidence
- Why did everyone stop talking about Population & Immigration?
- What would happen if trucks stopped running?
- How to survive a nuclear winter
Category Archives: 2) Overshoot
Increased flooding
Preface. It’s not just sea level rise, but increased precipitation, sinking land, hurricanes, and dam failures that will cause more floods in the future. Dams will fail more often in extreme rain as at least half are older than their … Continue reading
Posted in Extreme Weather, Floods
Tagged climate change, flooding
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Global Ice melting
Preface. As the Arctic ice melt accelerates due to climate change it could release more than 1 trillion pieces of plastic into the ocean over the next decade, possibly posing a major threat to marine life (Lewis 2014). The rate … Continue reading
Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Oceans, Sea Level Rise
Tagged biodiversity, climate change, fish, ice melt, plastic, sea level rise
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Soil salinity and erosion
Preface. Civilizations fail when their soils are ruined or eroded. One way conquerors made sure that those they enslaved during wars was to salt their land and burn their homes so they had nowhere to escape to. Erosion is an … Continue reading
Posted in Peak Topsoil, Scientists Warnings to Humanity, Soil
Tagged erosion, food, salinity, soil, topsoil
2 Comments
Aging nuclear power plants should be shut down
Preface. Below are my notes from the Greenpeace 146-page “Lifetime extension of ageing nuclear power plants”. Even if you don’t understand all the terms, read on anyhow, since it certainly conveys why nuclear plants grow more dangerous with age. Imagine … Continue reading
Posted in Energy Infrastructure, Nuclear Power Energy
Tagged corrosion, degradation, embrittlement, lifetime extension, nuclear power
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945 U.S. Superfund sites vulnerable to climate change
Preface. The energy crisis is likely to strike soon since global peak oil production was reached in November 2018 (EIA 2020). Let’s use energy to clean up these Superfund sites and nuclear waste, rather than wasting energy on wind turbines … Continue reading
Was the fall of the Roman Empire due to plagues & climate change?
Preface. Harper (2017) shows the brutal effects of plagues and climate change on the Roman Empire. McConnell (2020) proposes that a huge volcanic eruption in Alaska was a factor in bringing the Roman Empire and Cleopatra’s Egypt down. In addition, … Continue reading
Posted in Pandemic Fast Crash, Roman Empire
Tagged climate change, collapse, pandemic, plague, roman empire
1 Comment
Interdependencies & supply chain failures in the News
Preface. Joseph Tainter, explains in his famous book “The collapse of complex societies” how complexity causes civilizations to collapse. Fossil fuels have created the most complex society that has ever, or will ever exist, using fossil energy that can’t be … Continue reading
Posted in Interdependencies, Microchips and computers, Supply Chains
Tagged autos, electric grid, ford, interdependency, microchip, plastic, supply chain
2 Comments
A Century from Now Concrete Will be Nothing But Rubble
Photo: road abandoned since 1984 in the Florida Keys Preface. Much of the material that follows is based on Robert Courland’s 2011 book Concrete Planet, which explains why concrete is an essential part of our infrastructure. And it’s all falling … Continue reading
The orbiting solar power fantasy
Preface. This 2020 article “Solar Power Beamed Down To Earth From Space Moves Forward” will leave you all warm, fuzzy, and unworried about the future. The Scientists Will Come Up With Something. But that’s because you know little to nothing … Continue reading
Posted in Alternative Energy, Critical Thinking, Far Out, Orbiting Solar
Tagged far out, orbiting solar, solar power
2 Comments