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Recent Posts
- The Mayflower from the book The Barbarous Years
- Deep Sea Oil
- Book review of “Livewired. The inside story of the ever-changing brain”
- The conveyor belt may be slowing down — Yikes!
- Battery Energy storage batteries (BESS) too complex to ever be commercial
- New war and energy alliances over next resource wars
- Book review of “Siege: Trump Under fire”
- Why do people vote for Trump?
- Book review of “Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID”
- The evolution of the Republican party from 1960 to 2024: from moderate democracy to extreme authoritarianism
- Why some people are conservative and others liberal
- Book review: Bring the War Home: The white power movement & paramilitary America
- Book review: How Democracies Die
- Book Review “Conservatives without Conscience” by John Dean
- Book review of “The Power Worshippers. Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism”
Category Archives: Planetary Boundaries
Colonization of Mars & The Moon: a book review of “A City On Mars”
Preface. There are so many difficulties to overcome to colonize Mars. If the astronauts can even survive the bombardment of radiation on the way there. Where would the energy come from? There is no flowing water for hydropower. Wind and … Continue reading
Posted in Climate Change, Hopium, Human Nature, Planetary Boundaries, Where to Be or Not to Be
Tagged asteroids, astronauts, colonization, hopium, Mars, Moon, space
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Rare Earth updates: recent research on why complex & intelligent life are rare in the Universe
Preface. These are updates to Ward & Brownlee’s book “Rare Earth: Why Complex life is Uncommon in the Universe”. If we are one of the few planets with intelligent life, what a shame it would be if we destroyed ourselves … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution, Human Nature, Planetary Boundaries, Wood
Tagged combustion, complex life, evolution, intelligent life, photosynthesis, rare earth, Theia, venus, water
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The 10th planetary boundary: Salt
Preface. In 2009, Johan Rockström proposed that there were nine planetary boundaries we must not cross. In 2023, Richardson et al found that 6 of the 9 boundaries had been transgressed: Climate change CO2 and radiative forcing, Biosphere integrity, land … Continue reading
Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Planetary Boundaries, Pollution, Soil
Tagged biodiversity, existential threat, salt
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A Mega Storm in California might cost $1 trillion & destroy a third of America’s food
Preface. Hurricane Katrina cost somewhere between $109 and $250 billion dollars (Amadero 2017). Estimates of hurricane Harvey range from $100 to $190 billion (Kollewe 2017, Lanktree 2017). The next California ArkStorm is likely to cost $900 billion, or even a … Continue reading
Posted in Floods, Planetary Boundaries
Tagged arkstorm, california, extreme weather, flood, superstorm
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The nine boundaries we must not cross or we may go extinct
Preface. This post has excerpts from the famous paper by Rockström et al (2009) as well as a more recent proposal by Running (2012) on an easier measure of how close we’re coming to rendering the planet uninhabitable. The media … Continue reading
Posted in Acidification, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Extinction, Planetary Boundaries, Pollution, Sea Level Rise, Water, World's Best Scientists
Tagged atmospheric aerosol loading, biogeochemical nitrogen cycle, biological diversity, boundaries, chemical pollution, climate change, Earth, extinction, global freshwater use, global warming, IPCC, land system change, ocean acidification, ozone hole, peak oil, phosphorus cycle, stratospheric ozone, sustainability
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The Good News About Peak Oil
As oil declines, the threat of a greenhouse earth & extinction from climate change decline Carbon sequestration, wind, solar, geo-engineering, and other remedies are trivial compared to the effect declining fossil fuels will have on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The … Continue reading
Posted in Peak Natural Gas, Peak Oil, Pesticides, Planetary Boundaries, What to do
Tagged climate change, fertilizer, natural gas, peak oil, pesticide, rationing
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Not enough fossil fuels left to trigger another mass extinction
Preface. Since both conventional and unconventional oil peaked in 2018, we clearly won’t be burning fossils at exponentially increasing rates until 2400 as the IPCC expected. Quite the opposite, currently the decline rate of oil is 8% a year, which … Continue reading
Climate Change dominates news coverage at expense of other existential planetary boundaries
Preface. In the half dozen science magazines and newspapers I get, almost the only environmental stories are about climate change. Yet there are 8 other ecological boundaries (Rockström 2009) we must not cross (shown in bold with an asterisk below) … Continue reading
World’s Oceans are losing Oxygen rapidly
Preface. Yikes, add deoxygenization to your list of worries. Oxygen levels in the world’s oceans declined by roughly 2% from 1960 and 2010. The decline was largely due to climate change, though other human activities such as nutrient runoff from … Continue reading
Posted in Climate Change, Extinction, Mass Extinction, Planetary Boundaries
Tagged climate change, deoxygenation, phytoplankton
7 Comments
Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change
Preface. This is a summary of the National Research Council 2013 study of abrupt changes of climate change. Related: 2019-12-6. Research reveals past rapid Antarctic ice loss due to ocean warming. “…the sensitive West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed during a … Continue reading