We are entering another period of political activity in the
United States, and it's time once again for me to state
Unknowncountry.com's political position. Briefly stated, we
don't have one. This isn't a political website.
Each individual who works and publishes here does have one,
of course, but we don't make a practice of exposing them on
the site--at least, only very rarely. In any case, most of
us are such mavericks that we don't fit into any current
political pigeonhole.
Personally, I see politics from two broad persepectives. The
first is that most of the western democracies are expressing
a lot of political indecision, and that's what will happen
to ours in November. We will almost certainly end up with a
gridlocked government of some sort.
Unfortunately for us, that works better in the parliamentary
systems that now have them than it does in our system. The
British are knocking along with a coalition between the left
and the right, and the Australians are about to do something
similar. Their governments will continue to function, while
ours will have much more difficulty.
The reason for the indecision is that we are so unsure about
the human future. What will happen to us? Is the environment
collapsing or not? And what of our economies? Have we
reached the limits of growth, or is there still more
potential to grow without causing nature to collapse?
Because none of these questions have clear answers, most of
the developed world is in a state of indecision.
Unfortunately, with all the signs of change around us, it
seems to me personally that nature has already made its
decision, so I am primarily focused on the question of how
to live in a world that will be experiencing extraordinary
and generally negative environmental change.
I do not agree with the conventional environmental movement
that human intervention can save the situation. The reason
is that current changes are being driven from two
directions, one natural and the other manmade.
We understand very little about the changes taking place in
the solar system and on our sun, but we do know from
observing, for example, the luminosity of the other planets
that there does appear to be a general warming throughout
the solar system.
We also know, however, that carbon dioxide levels are rising
dramatically on earth, and now also methane levels, and that
this is in some way related to human activity.
The relationship, and the degree to which we can actually
effect change, though, is not clear. Paleoclimatology tells
us that essentially the same set of conditions appeared
prior to the sudden and devastating end of past interglacials.
The problem is, we were not a factor during those periods of
change, which involved fantastic climactic upheavals that
resulted in the planet's climate changing completely, and in
a matter of very short periods of time.
So what can we do? The environmental movement doesn't wish
to address the fact that there is a natural component
involved because they want people to reduce carbon
emissions. The corporate and third-world governmental
response is to say that it's a natural cycle that we can't
do anything about, so let's just ignore it.
There is no group with any significant power that is trying
to take the obvious step of gaining a clear understanding of
what is happening and planning for it.
Therefore, whatever it is, it is going to unfold without our
being prepared for it in any way.
So, as I said, here at Unknowncountry, you can count us as
mavericks. There is no part of the American political system
that can address this matter usefully. The developing world
will not address it because they want to reach developed
status without being slowed down by environmental concerns.
The big multinationals are fixed on their expenses over the
next three months, and so encourage their political base to
say that it's all a natural phenomenon and so nothing can be
done.
The result is that there isn't even any meaningful planning
for the inevitable, and there isn't going to be any.
Meanwhile, nature will continue to unfold as it will. Nature
is numbers. It is neither friend nor enemy. It is simply
there, doing what it must.
We have seen a fantastic cluster of climactic disasters in
the past few years, and are now looking at what is probably
the greatest such catastrophe in recorded history, the
Pakistan floods. At the same time, the monsoon is
devastating parts of China, while summer temperatures in
Russia and Siberia have smashed all time records and winter
temperatures in Argentina have been brutal.
The most educated and powerful parts of
the human community cannot face the truth of what is
happening, which is why the great democracies are so
undecided and why there is so much debate about it.
Debates don't affect nature, though, and from now on, there will
continue to be potential for extraordinary climate extremes,
and no area of the world will be exempt.
However, what is also false, or at least unclear, is what we
can do about it. Certainly, if we did what the corporate
world so desperately does not want us to do and reduced
carbon emissions, that would have some sort of an effect,
possibly even a beneficial one. But it's not clear, and for
a strange reason.
This is because there is about to be a full-scale methane
bloom on planet Earth, and even if we reduced carbon
emissions by half over the course of a single year, we
probably couldn't stop it.
Methane was already outgassing from melted permafrost at
unexpectedly high rates before this summer, which has
devastated much of the Siberian permafrost and caused what
will be found to be massive outgassing.
Methane is a very dangerous greenhouse gas, but, unlike
carbon dioxide, it doesn't persist in the atmosphere for
very long.
Because of the rising methane load in our atmosphere, during
the next few years, there will be extraordinary
temperature spikes on our planet. There will be many areas
where temperatures will rise above the levels where human
and many animal bodies can continue effective heat exchange.
In addition, it's probable that the northern oceans will
reach a temperature high enough to melt the methane hydrates
now trapped in them. This will cause a further gigantic
release of methane, with the result that planetary
temperatures will not be viable for things like crop
production, or even for sustaining life in many areas, for a
period of two or three
years.
The methane, which will have emerged over a short period of
time, will also dissipate over a short period of time, with
the result that the atmosphere will release the stored heat,
one result of which will be the sort of profound storms that
Art Bell
and I predicted in "Superstorm."
As has happened in the past, these storms are likely to
leave snow over over large parts of the northern hemisphere.
When spring comes, the reflectivity of the snow combined
with the absence of methane in the atmosphere will result in
a great deal of solar heat being reflected back into space.
If the snow does not melt over the summer, it will be added
to the next year, and a new ice age will have begun.
It is also possible, of course, that the scenario will
unfold differently. Chiefly, the levels of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere may be so high that they will continue to
hold enough heat close to the planet to forestall a new ice age.
However, in the context of what is likely to happen, that
seems unlikely, because human activity will have dropped
very dramatically during the methane-induced heat spike, and
our industries will not be emitting carbon dioxide on
anything like the scale we are experiencing now.
I am not a prophet, but I am a close enough observer of the
realities of nature to know that the picture I have painted
here is very likely to actually happen. It has happened in
the past many times, and with the addition of the human
factor, it is likely to happen with, if anything, more speed
and violence this time.
Europe has, in the past, experienced profound climate change
on this scale in as little as a matter of weeks, and the
European continent remains just as vulnerable now. In North
America, the most serious changes will involve, first,
disruption of the growing season in Canada and the United
States, to the extent that worldwide famine is probable.
Even as this is being written, food commodities, led by
wheat, are experiencing dramatic price increases. The
combination of the damage to the central European crop and
the destruction of Pakistani agriculture will result in
serious food shortages next spring, probably centering in
vulnerable third-world states with large populations and
heavy food import requirements.
However, the situation we are seeing presently is nothing
like what will happen when North American crop failures are
brought into the mix.
I wish that I could say that none of this was inevitable,
but I think that it is close enough to inevitable that we
should plan for it as best we can.
How to do that? One thing would be to live on a small farm
south of 49th or 48th Parallel and north of the 35th
Parallel, and to make sure that the farm has a deep, strong
and clean well. Build a greenhouse capable of growing enough
produce to feed the people you need to feed, and use poultry
for meat.
Also, go off the electrical grid using both solar and wind
power, and be certain to supply yourself well with battery
storage, and expect long periods without electricity or
fuel, even if you are off the grid. This is because fuel,
obviously, will cease to be distributed and neither solar
nor wind power will be guaranteed during a period of
frequent storms.
There will come a time when your greenhouse and your poultry
will be your only sources of food, and your well your only
source of water. I also urge you to stock the classics of
literature and music in paper form, because, in the context
of which I am speaking, the digital age in which we live now
is going to end along with the social infrastructure we have
known.
Some form of self defense will be essential, because, at
first, large numbers of people will be migrating from the
cities. After a year or two, though, this will no longer be
a problem.
A new culture, and a new world, will develop. As a student
of the Roman Empire, I want to be very clear about what
happened then. You might have read politically correct
histories of Rome that state that the Romans made a sort of
choice to admit the Goths to the empire and more-or-less
integrated them.
This is a lie. In fact, what happened was that trade ended,
the use of money ended, literacy ended, and Europe sank into
a thousand year period where life was short, painful, dismal
and ignorant. It only very slowly emerged from this, and
then only into a
time of religious dictatorship. It was not until the
fifteenth century that glimmers of freedom and genuinely
civilized behavior began to return.
So, if you are out there some day on your farm, please
remember my words. Educate your children. Teach them to
remember the last human world in all its glory and wonder,
and all its confusion and ignorance and foolishness. Do this
so that they will have a chance of making a new world,
founded along lines of compassion and balance that are hard
for us to imagine in this age of ours, the sunset of our world.
As a final note, we recently received an angry letter from
an Unknowncontry.com subscriber who canceled her subscription
because she disagreed with something one of us had said.
During political times, this always happens. Please recall
that this website is as large as it is unique, and if you
look hard enough, you are going to be able to find something
on it somewhere that you disagree with, no matter your
political persuasion.
It is also true, however, that there is no other place in
the world that offers the kind of clarity and truthfulness
that you find here. Across the whole vast archive of this
website, there are literally thousands of important stories
that appeared nowhere else, or were generally suppressed, or
spun into lies for political reasons.
As time goes on, Unknowncountry is going to become more
important, not less, so please look beyond the immediate
political moment when reading our content.
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