George Monbiot, Britain’s most popular environmental writer, has arrested himself. Four prominent climate scientists recently issued a pleading letter to greens to stop opposing nuclear power. And now an influential non-profit that for years has focused on climate change is all but begging that we not close down aging nuclear reactors. What the hell is going on? I…Continue Reading…
The end of the world, like everything worth knowing these days, will be tweeted: NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? | Nafeez Ahmed http://t.co/nWqOcD3UkB — Guardian Environment (@guardianeco) March 14, 2014 If a study with the imprimatur of a major U.S. government agency thinks civilization may soon be destined to fall apart, I…Continue Reading…
Paul Ehrlich and Ann Ehrlich, two long-time prominent voices in the environmental community, often speculate about the future of humanity. They recently shared this anecdote: A few years ago we had a disagreement with our friend Jim Brown, a leading ecologist. We told him we thought there was about a 10 percent chance of avoiding a…Continue Reading…
HuffPo’s minky in-house science blogger talks GMOs with a plant geneticist. (Hey, you don’t title your show/column”Talk nerdy to me” if you look like Ann Ramsey in Throw Momma from the Train.) The scientist who was interviewed says the science blogger knows her stuff. I agree. I watched it about 12 times. Then I moved on…Continue Reading…
UPDATE: Some of the information and assertions in this post have been disputed by Jared Diamond here. In 1995, Jared Diamond wrote an article for Discover magazine that began: In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral…Continue Reading…
Gail the Actuary, who often writes about peak oil and resource scarcity issues at The Oil Drum, makes the case here that we’re on borrowed time. But unlike Jeremy Grantham, she doesn’t think we can do anything about it: There is no real solution to our predicament. Even if a cheap liquid fuel could be found…Continue Reading…
On a recent post of mine at Climate Central, one reader left an impassioned comment that sounded as if he considered overpopulation to be the greatest threat to humanity. I’m going to break it up into three parts. Here’s the challenge, as he explained it: An even more overlooked problem is overpopulation (defined as living…Continue Reading…
I have a deeply cynical side but I’m also an optimist by nature. Ms. Collide-a-scape is the fretter in the family. Several months ago, we finally got around to watching the dystopian documentary that made quite a splash in 2009, which NPR accurately characterized: So this is how the world ends: Not with an action-movie…Continue Reading…
The paranoid flip side to Glen Beck is Civilizational Collapse hawker Michael Ruppert, the subject of this creepy 2009 movie. Like Beck, Ruppert has a loyal fanbase who share his dark worldview, which he now propagates on the web through…get ready for it: Collapse Network. Ruppert periodically posts videos on Collapse Network, such as this…Continue Reading…