Life on Earth is under enormous stress from a rapidly changing environment and climate. A recent study in Nature show how human societies are already impacted by a changing climate in at least 467 different ways. For example, increased water evaporation and increased air capacity to hold moisture, due to warming, have lead to extreme drought in places that are commonly dry (California, Middle East and Southwest Asia) that have lead to higher risk of heatwaves and wildfires. Warmer ocean waters enhances evaporation and wind speeds thus intensifying downpours and the strength of storms and risk of flooding from storm surges aggravated by sea-level rise. 

The cumulative changes from a disrupted climate are so massive and the speed at which they are occuring so rapid, only comparable to when a meteorite killed the dinosaurs som 65 million years ago, that many species will have a hard time adapting. Species must either tolerate the change, move, adapt, or face extinction. We know that species on land are moving polewards by 17 km per decade and marine species 72 km per decade. And just like terrestrial mountainside species are moving upslope to escape warming lowlands some fish species are driven deeper as the sea surface warms. This in turn impacts human well-being and is already forcing people to migrate.

The current socio-economic paradigm has not changed in accordance with occuring biophysical changes and will not be able to handle the mounting pressure unless it adapts or transforms into something new. A rapidly changing world cannot be navigated by concentrated, rigid, hierarchical, short-term social systems that resist change and tries to maintain status quo. We know this to be true of all living systems, including human societies. Civilisations fail to adapt to changing environmental conditions because they try to maintain high levels of sociopolitical complexity (large armies, bureaucracies, social stratification, occupational specialisations) and focus on expansion instead of dissolving into decentralized, smaller, more flexible and innovative units that are able to respond to change more effectively. That's why corporations, with global scope, are doing better than nation states. And why local communities and municipalities are responding more effectively to changes than governments. 

However, the limiting conditions, resource availability, under climate change make adaptation in place difficult since entire regions are becoming increasingly uninhabitable. Thus forcing people to migrate, just like other species do. This in turn puts extra pressure on national governments as social tensions increase over remaining resources. States that fail to provide essential services for their citizens eventually foster uprisings and risk internal conflict and collapse. We already see this occuring in the Middle East (Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Isreal/Palestine, Egypt). 

Unless governments take seriously the need for fundamental change of the sociopolitical system they will be unable to handle to shift to a post-carbon society able to cope with climate change. Trying to expand and pile on further sociopolitical complexity to the system will not work.

When people from the West and its mainstream media try to analyse what's happening in the Middle East all they talk about is armed conflict and war. But never do they mention the deep fundamental drivers of energy, water scarcity and climate change. 

Many countries in the Middle East are extremely vulnerable and on the verge of break down because they cannot deal with mounting economic/energy and environmental costs. Only a little disturbance is needed to make these states fall apart and then all hell can break loose. It has nothing to do with what type of people they are, its simply a matter of survival that brings out the worst in people. When water resources dry up, agriculture collapse, there's no way to make and income and food becomes unaffordable people tend to riot no matter which country. Thats what happened during the French revolution, after 1 million died from famine and peasants turned on the ruling elite.

Displaying a complete lack of understanding of the situation, and utter lack of morality, the imperial powers decided to try and grab the regions oil resources by getting rid of Saddam Hussein but instead created a power vacuum that was filled by al-Qaeda extremists who rapidly transformed into the Islamic State. Then followed by a proxy war over resources and power between many different actors in the region. Never ending fighting with no real benefits for anyone involved. The US "divide and rule" strategy is an utter failure. 

Intensifying the fight against extremists doesn't deal with the fundamental drivers of why they exist in the first place. Instead its producing more extremists as the conditions that laid the groundwork for the rise of IS are worsening. The long-term ecological crisis of especially water stress is worsening in the region. Severe drought conditions intensified by water mismanagement and climate change have led to failed crops and lack of clean drinking water. Leading to increasing food import reliance and pushing people to move into the cities where there are no job opportunities, creating tensions. Then government subsidies for food and fuel get slashed as state revenues from falling oil exports decline. This at a time when oil and food prices have steadily risen and have had major spikes on the international market. That's the perfect storm. 

Absolutely nothing have been done to build local capacity to cope with extreme weather or manage ecosystems more sustainably. The conditions of deepening water scarcity are projected to intensify in coming years and decades. Meanwhile population keeps growing. And that's why the future in the region looks bleak. The US idea of turning Iraq into a booming oil economy is simply nonsense. Even if there is still more oil left in Iraq, compared to Syria, Yemen or Egypt, they too will face peak oil within a decade or so. Hedging your entire future on oil is utterly idiotic and as we witness very destructive.

Yemen reached a production peak in oil in 2001 and has now practically collapsed. Acute water scarcity and lack of food is reaching levels of mass famine. Nationwide fuel shortages are routine and economic activities have come to a halt. Livelihoods are destroyed, people starve and live in misery, and yet the US and UK support Saudi Arabia's bombing campaign of the country. 

Egypt has become a net importer of oil and food and is struggling to pay its bills for a growing population. Poor water management (irrigation, pollution, dumping of waste) and growing demand has led to water scarcity in the country. Cairo residents don't have access to water for large portions of the day. The U.N. World Water Development report for 2018 warns that Egypt is currently below the U.N.’s threshold of water poverty and dramatically heading towards absolute water scarcity (500 m3 per capita).

Even if we are able to limit global warming to 2 degrees the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will become unbearably hot and many parts unlivable in the coming future. Prolonged heat waves and dust storms will plague the already arid region. Destroying much of the region's agricultural potential. Researcher are expecting a climate exodus from the region. Of which we have seen only the beginning. 

Earth is a complex dynamic system. Earth system dynamics can be understood in terms of trajectories between alternate states separated by thresholds that are controlled by nonlinear processes, interactions, and feedbacks. For example, over the past 1.2 million years Earth has remained in a state of glacial and interglacial cycles. The current temperature change at 1,2°C above a preindustrial baseline has already pushed Earth out of the next glaciation cycle.

Furthermore, Earth is a water planet and incredibly inert. The time lag between cause and effect, between the heating and the final change in temperature, is large. The full warming effect of a large emission pulse may not be felt for several decades or centuries. As a result, the currently observed change in temperature represents only a part of the eventual expected increase in temperature resulting from already released greenhouse gas emissions.

Exactly where a potential planetary threshold, between a livable state and a hothouse state, might be is uncertain. Steffen et al. (2018) suggests 2°C as the critical limit, stating that passing two degrees could trigger tipping elements in the Earth System that could cascade, triggering further tipping elements, causing rapid warming beyond human control. 

Thus, actions taken over the next decade could significantly influence the trajectory of the Earth System for tens to hundreds of thousands of years and potentially lead to conditions that would be inhospitable to humans and to many other species.

How the climate system will respond to increasing CO2 levels depends on time-scale and which feedbacks we consider. Taking into account fast feedbacks such as clouds, water vapour, snow cover change, and aerosols we get a climate sensitivity of about 2-4.5°C to a doubling of CO2. But this does not include slow longer-term feedbacks such as ice sheet disintegration, changes in carbon cycle (e.g. permafrost thaw), vegetation cover changes, or changes in oceans ability to store carbon. If we include all feedbacks, both fast and slow, we get a Earth System Sensitivity of 3-6°C.  

Estimated temperature changes from fast and slow feedbacks. Source: Schmidt, 2016

Studies of past climates in Earth's history show that long-term feedbacks play an important role in Earth's overall climate. For example, during the mid-Pliocene some 3-4 million years ago, when global mean temperatures were about 3-4°C warmer than preindustrial and sea levels 10-25 meter higher than today, CO2 levels peaked at 450 ppm. Our current concentration levels stand at 410 ppm CO2, but temperatures have only risen about + 1,2°C, so Earth is likely to warm up at least to similar levels eventually. And we would over millenia have sea-level rise of up to at least 10 m.

The reason why most people don't talk about ESS is due to the fact that its presumed to take centuries or millennia for these slow feedbacks to kick in. But the issue now is that the rate of change is many times faster than any natural rate in Earth's history. Only comparable with catastrophic rare events such as the meteorite strike that took out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago. This means that longer-term “slow” feedbacks such as melting of ice sheets and changes in permafrost carbon stores are starting to occur now, much quicker than expected, and will likely impact humanity during this century.

Which means that on top of some more warming from rapid feedbacks that has yet to be realised due to thermal inertia we also face the consequences of slow feedbacks already coming into play. These biogeophysical forces are incredibly strong and could become dominant in driving the system. Thus limiting the range of potential future trajectories.

Main point: Earth's climate is more sensitive to forcings than standard scenarios of future warming assumes

Biogeophysical Feedbacks

There's an ongoing debate in the scientific community regarding the threshold value, tipping point, for frozen grounds in the Arctic, permafrost, to start thawing irreversibly. And whether released methane from the permafrost will occur gradually over time or more abruptly. There is more stored carbon in frozens soils than we currently have in the atmosphere.

There are basically two camps, some believe the permafrost to be stable with a threshold value around <3°C while others claim 1,5°C is enough to start thawing large parts of the frozen grounds and lakes in the Arctic. 

For a lay person this is quite confusing, but it simply means that there isn't enough data to know for sure and so some scientists are more or less conservative in their estimates. Then there is the question of using climate models to try and predict potential threshold values or doing actual fieldwork and extrapolating conclusions from that. To my knowledge, climate models have a pretty bad track record of capturing highly non-linear dynamics in the climate system. For example, Arctic sea ice passed a tipping point in 2007 and is now in a death spiral but models had predicted sea ice to remain until the end of this century. Pretty high margin of error if you ask me. Also, we are learning that there seems to be differences in how permafrost soils and lakes thaw. 

According to a recent field research study funded by NASA of thermokarst lakes, formed by thaw of permafrost below the soil, in Alaska and Siberia the potential for abrupt thaw (decades) is now likely and irreversible. As the Arctic warms more of these lakes are appearing and growing in size which expands the thaw below. It has been estimated that they now cover about 20% of northern permafrost regions. This could double the release from terrestrial landscapes by the 2050s. A carbon cycle feedback that is not yet included into climate models.

This is bad news for climate change mitigation efforts. This feedback is significant because methane is about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping gas. And the lakes are expected to thaw even under the lowest IPCC emissions scenario, adding further warming. Since we most likely are already committed, warming yet to come from current emissions, to 1,5-2°C this extra warming from the permafrost reinforcing feedback could take us above the 2C threshold for potentially catastrophic warming. Unless we rapidly decarbonize our economy and try to take out carbon from the atmosphere by for example large-scale reforestation efforts. Time is not on our side. We need a climate emergency plan.

We are in for another global oil supply crunch from 2018 onwards that many experts say will trigger another severe economic recession if not depression. A fragile global economy, with a massive debt overhang, cannot handle too high oil prices. A large portion of most countries budgets, and individuals budgets as well, are spent on fossil fuel energy. That's why rapid price increases (over $60 per barrel) crushes demand and flips the economy over into a recession. In turn, leading to the bankruptcy of non-profitable unconventional energy ventures like tar sands and fracking. Thus further reducing supply over the long term.

Since the early 1970s global energy costs have steadily increased. Even if oil prices have oscillated with recurring spikes and drops, as the economy tries to adjust, the overall trend is a steady increase. This is due to the fact that extraction has become increasingly difficult and costly, yielding ever lower return on investment. The problem of course is that we built our economies based on cheap energy that yielded relatively high net energy to society. But that is a thing of the past and now we are struggling to afford our current lifestyles. Thats basically why we started this massive global debt bubble, pulling forward future consumption with cheap credit. But costs will eventually have to be paid.

We have now reached a point when all the energy and resources available to society are required just to maintain our existing level of complexity. A phenomenon puzzling many commentators, calling it secular stagnation. All these factors have made the global economy so fragile that even small perturbations from climate change, wars or falling credit could tip the system over into a deflationary spiral. With economic inequalities already increasing, increasing social instability, this is a recipe for disaster. 

No economy will be able to recover unless it transitions to non-fossil fuel energy sources and writes down its debts. And even then net energy will likely be much lower, meaning that society still has to lower its overall consumption of energy and resources. Implying a voluntary measure to reduce organizational complexity in society. Something few previous civilisations managed, perhaps the British did when they dismantled their empire. 

Global food prices have increased steadily since 2005, about the time of global peak oil, now at 1970s highs or above. Further exacerbating the problem is booming populations, freshwater scarcity and climate change. 

Today’s population levels depend on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. Especially vulnerable to rising food prices are people with low purchasing power and without subsistence farming to fall back on. We know that food price increases that reach 200 on the FAO index have led to riots and unrest.

Many countries in the Middle East are especially vulnerable due to convergence of several different crises. State revenue losses from falling oil exports, due to depleting resources and higher domestic consumption, with a need to cut food and fuel subsidies usually make people very upset. Especially when, as is the case in the region, people have no way of making a living coupled with overexploited water reservoirs and eroded soils. As if that wasn't enough, scorching heat and significant risk of recurrent droughts makes the entire region utterly unsustainable. Without energy they have nothing. The chances for further conflict and wars in the region are high. Massive, continuing, migration flows towards Europe is to be expected. 

The infamous ‘Doomsday Clock’ is again at two and a half minutes to midnight  -  the closest since 1953

Ice covers 10 percent of Earth's surface and helps moderate the planet's temperature. Glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets around the world are melting at an alarming rate. Much faster than climate models had predicted, like what Peter Wadhams, expert on ocean and ice physics, discusses in the video clip above. Climate models fail to interpret the real climate system because they ignore nonlinear dynamics, like key carbon cycle feedbacks and tipping points, crucial to the real system.

The Arctic (North of 60° N) is a key strategic region of global importance. Changes in the Arctic impact Earths energy balance, cloud formations, global wind patterns and ocean currents, release of methane, sea level rise, phytoplankton blooms and much more. As seen in the image below.

A recent study published by NASA shows how, since 1958, Arctic sea ice cover has lost about 66% of its thickness, averaged across the region at the end of summer. Old ice has shrunk more than 2 million square kilometres and today 70% of the ice cover consist of ice that forms and melts within a single year. Thinner, weaker seasonal ice is much more vulnerable to weather than thick ice and can easily be broken apart by storms. 

That's very bad news for our planet as darker ocean waters absorb more sunlight and triggers further warming. Melting sea ice has already contributed to about 25% of current warming but could add double that amount when the Arctic ocean starts becomes ice free in summer. That's a very strong reinforcing feedback process that accelerates warming which in turn accelerates further ice loss and so on. While in theory, with some sort of risky geoengineering, it would be possible to reverse this trend I really doubt we can do much to stop it. We can't even stop our greenhouse gas emissions from growing every year. No, its too late for Arctic sea ice, what we see now is a death spiral. 

Mohamed Ataya, a 31-year-old Syrian tends to his plants on the rooftop of his damaged building in the Syrian rebel-held town of Arbin, in the eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus last week. Ataya, who used to be a professional football player before the war, cultivates seeds for sale. Reddit March, 2017.

People seem confused, deluded by mainstream media into to wishful thinking, about the current state of affairs in the world. But there is that uneasy feeling that all the alarming reports about peak oil, climate change, desertification, species mass extinction, freshwater scarcity, dying coral reefs, melting of polar ice caps and toxification of our environment are piling up. In fact, we are currently living in a time of a collapsing civilisation, the end to wasteful resource use and reliance on fossil fuels. Everything is becoming increasingly expensive leading to falling standards of living and a majority of the world's population who can barely afford food, shelter or gas for transport anymore. When food becomes too expensive people riot and revolt against the ruling elite. Conflict arises and sometimes it breaks out into wars. Syria being the prime example. For Syrians who are still within the country's borders a total and rapid collapse has long since been underway and is continuing to this day. Look at the man watering his seeds in a city of concrete ruins. Its utterly sad and beautiful at the same time. That is reality. And we will be seeing more of it as entropy starts moving in from the periphery of the global economy towards the centre.

Marx once said that "religion... is the opiate of the masses", meaning that it reduced people's immediate suffering and provided them with pleasant illusions which gave them the strength to carry on. Nowadays, such plesasant illusions are not only provided by religion but also by the entertainment industry, media and medical science in form of legal narcotics.

Wishful thinking is today so prevalent that it even has infected the brain of people who are trained not to be biased, scientists. I mean sure, economists have always been blissfully ignorant and wrong in their predictions but what I’m talking about is more widespread. It's a deep denial among the people researching our most critical issues: climate change and energy limitations. 

You see it in the media when scientists discuss oxymorons like “green growth”, or proclaim that we can “decarbonize our entire economy within 20 years”, or that “agriculture will save biodiversity”, or that “lab grown meat will solve our food problems” and so on. It's nothings but grasping at straws in a world that is on fire. Such delusional statements are more about belief systems and identities reflecting values than science. It's also because climate scientists have been told by behavioural psychologists not to scare people as it may hamper action. But isn't it odd that the profession that claims to be devoted to curiosity and truth seeking wants to restrict exploration of future possibilities and censor people due to how it might come across to others?

Our climate reality is harsh. Most scientists tend to underestimate our predicament because they are too conservative, not the other way around. But now it's becoming clear, predictions made by oversimplified climate models have underestimated the changes we're already witnessing due to climate change. Earth, the biosphere, ecosystems and human systems such as the economy are dynamic complex systems and their behaviour is nonlinear. A model that does not include critical feedbacks in the system will not be able to accurately predict results in the real world. This has now become obvious as real world observations about the sad state of our climate is pouring in. Climate change is accelerating.

Sea ice in the Arctic is melting at an alarming rate and looks to be completely gone summertime some time in the coming years (2022?), accelerating global warming further. Ice and snow reflect about 80 percent of the Sun’s energy back into space while the darker ocean and land will absorb 90 percent of that heat. The albedo effect due to vanishing sea ice is already responsible for about 25 percent of global warming (Pistone et al. 2014). Greenland shed about 280 gigatons of ice per year between 2002-2016 and the island’s lower-elevation and coastal areas experienced up to 4 meters of ice mass loss (expressed in equivalent-water-height) over a 14-year period (NASA, 2018). Accelerating rates of ice loss also implies accelerated rates of sea level rise. Certain cities will have to be abandoned. In ten years prior to 2016 the Atlantic Ocean soaked up 50 percent more carbon dioxide than it did the previous decade, speeding up the acidification of the ocean (Woosley et al. 2016). And the list goes on and on with increasingly worrisome observations.

With an increase of carbon emissions of 2% in 2017 (Carbon Brief, 2017), the so called “decoupling” of economic activity from emissions is not yet making a net dent in global emissions. Even if we start reducing emissions now it's not going to be enough to prevent dangerous climate change since there is about a decade lag between emissions and resulting warming (Ricke & Caldeira, 2014). We have already (95% probability) gone past the 2°C warming point/UN target (Raftery et al. 2017), and are  likely headed towards 4-5°C (Steffen et al. 2018). That's because the Earth system is dynamic and is more likely to continue warming until it stabilises at another point, which in the Earth's past occurred at about 4-5°C warmer than pre-industrial levels. By the way, it is generally accepted that a 5 degree rise in temperature is not compatible with human civilisation as we know it. At the same time, perhaps a complete collapse of civilisation could prevent the worst climate change outcomes (Garrett, 2012). But no one is going to promote or talk about that in public. Even if diminishing returns on resources, especially oil, likely will shrink our civilisation in the near future, whether we like it or not (Turner, 2014). 

No one likes either outcomes of this predicament and that's why most experts are basically just arguing over different options of removing carbon from the atmosphere through geoengineering. Using machines to suck out carbon, however, is not feasible both in terms of cost and scale and could cause more harm than good. Current technology would have to be scaled by a factor of 2 million times within 2 years. That's just not going to happen. Biological approaches to carbon capture such as planting trees, restoring soils, holistic grazing, and growing seagrass and kelp appear far more promising. 

Anyway, the real issue for ordinary people is how to adapt to a world that is increasingly hostile while using less energy? Not wasting time listening to myths about "green tech" or believing in fantasies like "colonising Mars" or "geoengineering the entire planet"

We know that there are tipping points in many different complex systems. Although they may be hard to study and exactly define. For example in large systems such as the global economy or climate system. A recent study shows beautifully, in simpler ways, how social animals that lives in communities also have tipping points, before the function of the system changes fundamentally.

In this case the research focused on the communal spider which lay their eggs, spin webs and share their prey in cooperatives colonies, from Massachusetts to Argentina, in relatively cool temperatures. However, only until 31 degrees C, after which they start to attack each other. Suggesting a tipping point where some small perturbation can cause an abrupt and dramatic shift in the behavior of the system.

Reversal is difficult

I'm sure most readers have already heard about how Sweden have struggled with lots of wildfires this summer. This is due to a heat dome forming over Scandinavia because of a broken and “stuck” jet stream (as explained in the video above) leading to high pressure weather over most parts of the country for two months (May-July) straight with very little or no rainfall. Only 13 mm (0.51 in) of rain from the beginning of May to late July. And temperature soaring to >30C, which in some regions is 20C above the norm. This have also been the case where I live, in the south east, where many are suffering from the prolonged heat and drought. 

Many elderly are weakened and suffer heat strokes since buildings are not equipped with cooling air conditioning. Hospitals have had to cancel operations due to the heat and systems overheating. The death toll this summer will be above the norm.

Farmers have had a bad harvest due to lack of precipitation and don't have enough hay to feed their livestock. Many have had to slaughter their cattle. The government has promised 1.2 billion kronor (117 million euros, $137 million) in aid to help farmers hit hard by the drought. But many farmers think it's too little too late to keep them from going bankrupt and it doesn't help against the lack of rain. 

Lots of wildfires have been raging in the middle part of the country, forcing people to flee and emergency measure to be put in place. Approximately 20,000 hectares" of forests have burned up. Some counties have banned outdoor fires and put restriction on water use. The government has had to ask other EU countries for help to fight the many wildfires both from above and on the ground. Volunteers have also played a  major part in the effort to evacuate and put out fires. 

Groundwater levels in smaller lakes in the south east are below average and falling. It will take a lot of rain or snow to recover to normal levels.

Many animals suffer as well and people have put out water bowls in their gardens to provide relief.