Guest “Really?!?” by David Middleton
Did you know that “?!?” is an interrobang? Neither did I until I started writing this post.
What Comes After the Coming Climate Anarchy?
BY PARAG KHANNA
AUGUST 15, 2022 7:55 AM EDT
Khanna is the founder of FutureMap and author of the new book MOVE: The Forces Uprooting Us.
In 2021, global carbon dioxide emissions reached 36.3 billion tons, the highest volume ever recorded. This year, the number of international refugees will cross 30 million, also the highest figure ever. As sea levels and temperatures rise and geopolitical tensions flare, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that humanity is veering towards systemic breakdown. The superpowers will be no salvation: Locked in a “new Cold War,’ the U.S. careens between populism and incompetence, while China remains locked down at home and alienates many nations abroad.
We’re not very good at predicting the next five days, let alone five years.
[…]
Today it’s fashionable to speak of civilizational collapse. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) states that just a 1.5 degree Celsius rise will prove devastating to the world’s food systems by 2025.
[…]
TIME
Really?!?
2025 is just three years away. Let’s go to the data.
- Food Supply (Our World in Data)
- Crop Yields (Our World in Data)
- Temperature Change and CO2 (Wood For Trees)
Crop yields
Daily food supply per capita
The article actually gets worse
Meanwhile, the most recent IPCC report warns that we must reverse emissions by 2025 or face an irreversible accelerating breakdown in critical ecosystems, and that even if the Paris agreement goals are implemented, a 2.4 degree Celsius rise is all but inevitable. In other words, the “worst case” RCP 8.5 scenario used in many climate models is actually a baseline.
TIME
RCP8.5 is a close to physically impossible as the human imagination can get. Atmospheric CO2 will probably double relative to the assumed preindustrial level around the end of this century.
Climate sensitivities derived from the closest thing to direct actual observational measurements (instrumental) yield climate sensitivities ranging from innocuous to mildly concerning. It’s also important to note that equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) is not the key parameter. The transient climate response (TCR) is what matters. It is the warming that occurs concurrent with the rise in atmospheric CO2 and it’s generally only about 1/2 to 2/3 of the ECS. So a 2 °C ECS would probably equate to a 1.0 to 1.3 °C rise in temperature as the atmospheric CO2 concentration doubles. The remainder of the ECS warming theoretically occurs over the subsequent 500 years, or so, as Trenberth’s missing heat returns from the depths of the oceans. Anywhere from 0.5 to 0.8 °C of the predicted TCR-induced warming has already occurred… Assuming arguendo that the 2.0 °C ECS estimate is reasonable, “business as usual” will lead to only an additional 0.5 °C or less of warming by 2100.
And worse
Let’s assume that we are indeed hurtling towards the worst-case scenario by 2050: Hundreds of millions of people perish in heatwaves and forest fires, earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts and floods, state failures and protracted wars.
TIME
Then he channels Thanos
But even in the most plausibly dire scenarios, billions of people will survive.
[…]
So where will the young survivors of today’s storms gather over the next 20-30 years? Which technologies will be the platforms of our future societies and economies? What new model of civilization awaits us?
TIME
He closes out with bits of plotlines from just about every post-apocalyptic science fiction movie ever made. I wish I had time to ridicule every paragraph in the article.
Dr. Parag Khanna and his PhD in international relations has earned a Billy Madison Lifetime Achievement award.
References
Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie (2013) – “Food Supply”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply’ [Online Resource]
Paul Ehrlich has still not retracted his claims of famine from 1969. The greens do nit seem to care if their scary stories are real.
Ehrlich’s book ‘The Population Bomb’ has bombed.
Mr. Istvan: What a shame, if it had sold, it would have made a smash musical comedy!
Trouble is, he’d have had to collaborate with Ozzie Osborne (or maybe Sting) to produce his musical doom show.
or Morrisey
Heaven knows I’m miserable now
Good choice Redge, I would suggest him co writing a musical about doom laden human folly with Sinead O’Connor. A duet made in depressed performance heaven….or should that be hell?
Mr. Piasa: I was hoping for Mel Brooks, with Matt Broederick as Dr. Doom Erlich. Dancing polar bears drop dead, synchronized swimming on the West side highway…..
Perhaps Ukraine could condense it into booklet form and load it into the M270 bomblet-dispenser rockets. Such incendiary writing is sure to be a match for parked Su-24s and Su-27s.
If Sri Lanka is anything to go by, once the greens have their apocalyptic scenario they’ll use any and all methods to achieve it.
Thanks, David. You’ve produced another educational and entertaining post.
I had to skip most of what Khanna wrote. Nonsensical shite like that gives me a headache.
Regards,
Bob
You must have a perpetual migraine, Bob. In the past apocalyptic theories would garner small loyal followings and a few “news” articles and sensationalistic books. Today they become global political policy and multi-trillion dollar industries. History will not treat the current Western decline kindly. Remember, history is written by the winners.
By the winners
or the survivors
Sometimes indistinguishable.
Khanna again?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/08/17/time-magazine-climate-anarchy/#comment-3579699
Or, how about the ‘Wrath of Khan(na)’?
That’s giving him entirely to much credit – at best he could possibly raise a mild ire.
Khanna represents incompetence. Most prefer populism.
Dave, I wish I had a sense of humor as good as yours. Well deserved ridicule of the abjectly ridiculous.
”Hurtling toward the worst case scenario…”. Gives hurtling a new meaning:
Without fossil fuels, no farm equipment to grow and harvest crops, no transportation to move crops to market, and no means to cook them. Khanna proposes inducing the very apocalypse he fears.
“Arctic sea ice did not disappear by 2014 and it’s increasing again.” – Rud, you are so out of touch. They have abandoned Antarctic ice and Arctic ice as panic generators, and are now concentrating on a glacier in Europe that is melting faster than the global average. Well, that was on Thursday. Not sure what the panic will be on Friday. You have to be quick to stay up to date.
We have to keep reminding the sheeple of the greens’ failed predictions, so let’s keep banging on about Arctic sea ice etc
And Polar Bears….
Yes, let’s remind them of all the failed climate change predictions the alarmists have made over the years.
Every prediction of doom has failed to materialize. And will continue to do so since there is no evidence CO2 is the control knob of the Earth’s temperatures. These guys are barking up the wrong tree.
I had a canvasser from the Scottish Liberal Democrats at my door the other day. He assured me that the ice is melting at both the North and the South Pole.
At the same time? 😆
Didn’t you hear?
A couple of weeks ago CO2 caused the poles to shift. They are now on the Equator.
(And I think in the move Guam capsized.)
Did I really need a sarc tag?
NO!
I am told that the Petermann Glacier in Greenland has grown 10 kilometers in the last decade.
“and are now concentrating on a glacier in Europe that is melting faster than the global average.”
The news report I saw yesterday on this blamed the melting on deposits of dust on the glacier blown up from Africa.
I was stunned that it wasn’t blamed on climate change! Somebody didn’t get the memo. 🙂
“Khanna proposes inducing the very apocalypse he fears.”
…et voila! exactly.
Fear is the most abused human emotion, it’s very easy to manipulate humans with fear, up to a point.
Indian gang ran fake police station out of hotel for eight months
That’s nothing.
International gang run the western governments’ FAKE climate policy for at least the last 20 years.
Well done David. These green devils are shameless.
The “climate anarchy” has been here for a very long time, with
the tropics being a place where more absorbed radiation is
making the surface cooler (h/t Willis Eschenbach, blue areas on
map below). As he later stated, “the big unanswered question in
climate science- not why the temperature varies, but why it
varies so little.” Cooling in the tropics? Whodda thunk!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/08/07/putting-it-into-reverse/
Willis is not showing cooling in that plot. He shows that the response to forcing is negative.
The tropics have warmed very slightly. The Nino34 region that straddles the Equator is currently on a downswing so it has cooled during the satellite era. Overall the temperature has probably increased over the past 150 years since records have been made.
“Cooling in the tropics”- poor choice of words. I meant what you said. Thanks!
Wait a minute… Just days ago, they were calling it the “climate apocalypse” and now it’s “climate anarchy”? Does Vegas have the odds on next week’s new climate moniker?
Climate Assault then Climate Armageddon then Climate Annihilation. They’ll move onto the B’s after that!
I don’t know, Richard. If word ever gets out that the current small rise in overall global temperature mostly reflects an elevation in the chillier nightly lows rather than much change in the daily highs that compose this calculated average of the two, then that incessantly asserted perilous ‘global warming’ meme is going to be seen for the bust that it truly is as any reason to abandon what has energized this world’s prosperity for over a century to adopt inconstant substitutes at a crushing cost; and ‘climate insurrection’ may become the operative response.
Have we had ‘climate collapse’ yet? I am struggling with keeping up to date.
Like Richard said, they haven’t bot to the Bs yet, so the Cs will come later.
Pretty sure anarchy is the mathematical result of apocay.
Apocalypse, not apocy… 😫
Thanks for clearing that up. At first I thought you were imitating a teenager texting on a phone. 🤦♂️
I was commenting on my phone… 😫
Channeling your inner ‘tween?👦
I was a teenager (chronologically) from December 1971 through December 1979… Texting wasn’t a word back then… However, the Internet did finally encourage me to learn how to type … 😆
I took typing class in high school because it was filled with girls. 😉
Funny story… Back in the late 80’s my best friend talked me into going to his aerobics class with him. When we got there, I figured out why he went there. We were about the only two guys in a roomful of girls. I went from “Oh boy, this is great!” to “I am going to die” about 5 minutes into the workout. I only survived because there was a Chili’s next door, and I knew they had beer… 🍻
I did the exact same thing! Didn’t learn to type but i got a lot of dates…
Two, still-hugely significant events in my life got me through Junior HS: 1) I was the only boy in typing class; and 2) my English teacher, Miss Hartel, had a habit of sitting on the front edge of her desk while wearing her short skirts and crossing her particularly fine legs. Those two events shaped and continue to affect my life even 60 years later.
David, It’s all proof there is a god and she loves us.
It made more climastrology sense the way you had it…
Apocalypse? Damn, my money was on Ipecac!
El Dorado… John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and James Caan… 👍 👍
“Climate change? Climate change? We don’t need no stinkin’ climate change!”
If we are bringing up old movies from the “treasure” chest….
Smart Money is on Climate Pox.
?!? stands for the interrobang, but the true interrobang is ‽ which is Unicode point u+203D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang
And for sarcasm or irony the ⸮ mark is used…
Let me see, which is easier, typing/remembering “?!?” or typing/remembering “u+203D”?
I think I’ll go with “?!?”.
Actual CO2 increase is tracking the RCP8.5 scenario. See attached.
Whenever I look at climate models I always base my analysis on the RCP8.5/SPS8.5 scenario because it highlights how absurd the output is. And so far civilisation is tracking the RCP8.5 scenario.
The only constraint to achieving RCP8.5 is China and India running out of coal and other countries locking up reserves.
If you look at the average solar intensity changes over the past peak of orbital eccentricity, the average intensity was already 8.5W/m^2 higher than present and that was at the onset of glaciation. I know for certain that climate models bear no resemblance to Earth’s climate. They are worse than useless junk.
PARAG KHANNA – God have mercy on his soul.
Hardly, more a case of ‘the Devil finds work for idle hands.’
Play the clip at the end of David’s post.
I did but I still think my comment attributes Khanna’s behaviour to the correct agency!
And of course, the article in this posting comes to us courtesy of TIME magazine, the same brilliant light bulbs who gave us the 1970s Ice Age scare…
First we are supposed to die of starvation from an oncoming ice age, but now it’s from the planet overheating. Which is it? I sure wish TIME and the rest of the gloom-and-doom media would make up their damn minds.
Fear-mongering sells, and they want to sell their publications!
It gets better. See essay ‘Fire and Ice’ in ebook Blowing Smoke.’
Thanks Rud. I have downloaded the Kindle version from Amazon and will be reading it.
Funny that the 1973 version has a cover with Archie Bunker. Haven’t read the actual crap in the mag, but are they ridiculing the RIGHT? I dumped Time and Newsweek in the 70s due to their leftist lean, then dumped U.S News and World report in the early 80s for the same reason. CBS Evening News during Reagan (Dan Rather), then only read the local “conservative” newspaper and talk radio until FOX news came around.
Now, the local “conservative” newspaper is on it’s last legs, Fox is getting harder to watch, less The Five, Gutfeld and Carlson. Bret Baier is following in the footsteps of previous anchors who went left, although I can understand his move to get ANY Democrats to come on their show. But the softball questions he throws them are pitiful.
I am now reading Newsmax and Breitbart online for better views of the “news”.
I bet Fox News is losing viewship to Newsmax.
I bet they are when Trump gives a speech, which he has been doing on about a weekly basis lately. Newsmax covers the Trump speech and Fox News does not, and there must be a lot of Fox News viewers like me who switch channels during that time.
The new management at Fox News is trying to distance themselves from Trump, but most of the reporters and hosts are not against Trump. There are a few, though.
Distancing oneself from a person who is supported by 74 million voters, and who currently holds a 98 percent approval rating among Republicans, is not a good idea if you are seeking viewers.
While this man is totally wrong about the Ukraine-Russia war and disproved war crimes, his comments on agriculture, the coming world wide famine and China are realistic and terrifying:
https://youtu.be/Wi_nFz1CJSI
I need to add P Khanna to my list of climate “anti-Cassandras”-
climate prophets who say things that are not true yet (almost) everyone believes them.
Paul Ehrlich is the poster child of group of useful idiots.
It’s the standard practice for the climate doom & gloom crowd: when in doubt, trot out another environmental collapse scenario. The fact that fewer people are listening escapes them.
Let’s run Modtran !
Go to the UChicago website.
If you run the default settings you should notice that it uses “clear sky” and “tropical”. The real world is more than half cloud cover and “temperate”. In the default run (400 ppm CO2), IR heat leaving is almost 300 watts whereas real world is 240, and temperature is almost 300K versus 288K for the real world.
So we must model a bit closer to some real numbers. Start by entering a small temp offset, say .001 degrees, so that the program gives the “fixed Relative Humidity” option, then select “fixed RH”. Fixed RH as the temperature changes means a warmer planet has more water vapor in the air, which is how it really works.
Also select “Mid-Latitude Summer” and “Strato Stratus .66 km /2km top” for cloud cover.
You should now be about 274 watts and 294 K….well…only half way to reality, but a good start…
Now press “Save to background”. This saves your run at 400 ppm CO2 and the conditions you chose. Now ONLY change CO2 to 800 ppm.
Notice ground temp will stay the same but outgoing IR decreases by about 2.6 watts. Note this is less than the usual 3.7 watts per CO2 doubling primarily due to Modtran’s assumptions about cloud cover albedo, which we chose to be more realistic than the clear tropical sky of the default run.
So 2.6 watts is the CO2 forcing for our double CO2 scenario…not as much heat is leaving the Top of Atmosphere (the program says view is from 70 km up)…. so that planet surface will warm up until it can radiate that 2.6 watts to outer space through the atmospheric IR window. We can use Modtran to calculate this increase by using the “surface temperature offset”.
A little trial and error plugging ground offset temperatures into the “offset” box and you should get about .85 degrees. So this is how much the surface will warm to have the same amount of heat exiting TOA with 800 ppm compared to the 400 ppm base case. Now .85 C for a CO2 doubling is a lot less than the IPCC is saying.
You can continue this CO2 increasing…at 3200 ppm, double-double-double present CO2 levels, the offset will be around 2.6 C, so about what the IPCC says for a single doubling of CO2.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Modtran’s IR calcs. However it parameterizes many factors regardin albedo, cloud cover, rainfall and the like. However any case you choose closer to the real world TOA IR and real average surface temperature, will result in numbers much less “scary” than we are commonly told.
Comments from Modtran users especially regarding specific CO2 runs are appreciated….NO, I don’t have the purchased version.
“Today it’s fashionable to speak of civilizational collapse. “
*********
It’s been fashionable to talk about the collapse of civilization and the end of the world for a long time now.
History of the Millerites, a Religious Sect (thoughtco.com)
“The Millerites were members of a religious sect who became famous in 19th century America for fervently believing the world was about to end. The name came from William Miller, an Adventist preacher from New York State who gained an enormous following for asserting, in fiery sermons, that Christ’s return was imminent.
At hundreds of tent meetings around America throughout the summers of the early 1840s, Miller and others convinced as many as one million Americans that Christ would be resurrected between the spring of 1843 and the spring of 1844. People came up with precise dates and prepared to meet their end.”
********
I won’t even try to count the number of times in human history when the Earth has been given a reprieve from its end.
the U.S. careens between populism and incompetence
Well… If Orange Man was Populism, I guess that makes Incompetence…
President Biden, ladies and gentlemen. Even the Climate Cult thinks he is useless.
That’s not unusual – even Joe Biden thinks Joe Biden is useless. If he was actually running the country or had any amount of power then America might be in real trouble, thankfully even his handlers aren’t quite that stupid.
This is where academia is going, like it or not. Anthro-everything. We’ve totally destroyed nature by overpopulating.
Never mind the presently observed paradigm, our models predict climate porn- and that’s what sells these days!
The scene from Monty Python was filmed at the abandoned Tomnadasahan copper mine on the south side of Loch Tay in Perthshire, Scotland. I first visited it when I was 8 and found some pyrite and malachite and started my geological collection.
No rabbits?
I’ll have a briar, please.
With a Tar Baby back. [If you think that is a racist dog-whistle to the QAnon types, stuff that race hustling shtick up your ass.]
Only when the UN calls out China and forces them to decrease their CO2 output will I believe that they are serious about the “problem” of climate change due to human CO2 production. No other country has pumped more CO2 into the atmosphere than China over the past 30 years. No other country has been given a pass like China. And all the Western nation leaders say nothing, which is all I need to know about this global “emergency”.
What I can’t believe is that there are still people out there who think the world will end if “we” in the West don’t cut our noses off to spite our faces.
It’s about rich westernized countries and rich oil producing countries sending money to poor countries under the guise of “saving the environment”. Also eventually controlling the means of production by control of fuel and chemicals. China and India are actually just as good at green-virtue-signalling as everyone else because they like the totalitarian control aspect. Unfortunately, central planning without the buy-in of the population has a tendency to fubar.
‘When?’ Hahaha, oh dear me that’s hilarious. Good one Dwayne.
Readers may like to comment on this dissenting voice in terms of availability of agricultural land. The author’s message is pretty much there ain’t no more to be had & it’s even worse than you can possibly imagine!
https://singularityhub.com/2022/08/18/after-millennia-of-agricultural-expansion-the-world-has-passed-peak-agricultural-land/
Sorry but no. The author’s opinion is that there is no more cropland out of the available agricultural land available unless we all stop eating meat and convert the now available land to crops. She constrains any growth of new cropland by invoking the gods of biodiversity, despite the knowledge that there is far more land available for agriculture than has been used so far. It’s biased propaganda that ticks all the correct green buttons but is completely and utterly wrong.
When we peons are faced with the alternative of starving to death because there is no fertilizer except do ng and no fuel for agricultural equipment, biodiversity can go hang.
Well the alarmists are already lining up their strategies to convince the masses of the much predicted food production decline, due to ‘global warming’..
They are as aware as the rest of us realists, that food and general world wellbeing has increased in step with the increasing Co2 along with the increased use of mechanised farming methods globally.
They the alarmists, are determined to make the food production graphs turn down. The way they have chosen to do that is to ban the use of man made fertilizer.
The impact of what is being pushed by the globalist left can be seen in Europe, right now, with farmers taking to the streets in demonstrations. It can also be seen in Sri Lanka a country that has knowingly destroyed its food production, and food export industry i.e. tea, by banning artificial fertilizer use.
There are riots in Sri Lanka already. This will become a world wide reaction/response as the planned food scarcity increases. The scarcity is due to bans on fossil fuel use and thus bans on fertilizer production that is fossil fuel based.
The end result of this UN supported reduction of fertilizer is poverty and starvation.
We must not let this global stupidity continue.
Moron
Run away! The killer rabbits have returned!
“And every bunny was kung .. fu fighting.”
“The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) states that just a 1.5 degree Celsius rise will prove devastating to the world’s food systems by 2025.”
Based-on what? Other than what they really REALLY hope will happen, I mean – that seems to be what all their other predictions are based-on. Has anybody pointed-out to them that they’re basing their catastrophism on global warming, which they claim will be caused by CO2 – and that plants JUST LOVE CO2?
As a result of all this pesky CO2, the Earth is greening – which suggests plants will do a whole lot better than they so direly predict. Nothingburger.
The Borg have an infallible counter for this increase to food supply. Their success with the climate change hoax can be extended to demonise the use of fertilisers. Fertiliser manufacture depends on NO2 as a precursor for ammonium nitrate. The Borg believe NO2 has much more potential as a GHG target than methane, and banning the use of ammonium nitrate will do much more damage to the world than the war on CO2 has done for them.
Sri Lanka has provided a very succinct example of just how much damage this campaign can achieve. The Greens in the EU are already forcing this calumny on Europe with the WEF cheering them on. It seems that the only lesson learned from the Sri Lankan disaster is that the Borg now has another very effective weapon.
What is sickening is that governments now appear to be purposely imposing policies to make food shortages a reality – see Sri Lanka and the Netherlands as 2 who are leading the way. It is not climate change that will create food shortages, it is climate policy that will.
Don’t forget Canada in that list.
Makes one wonder if the war on fertilizers that contain nitrogen is a desperate attempt to make all their food shortage prophesies come true?
Ooh ya think? The fact that not one single solitary one of their predictions has come close to true so far has probably not escaped their attention. In their fruitless quest to become relevant, I wouldn’t put it past them to engineer a disaster. On the other hand, Hanlon’s razor suggests they really might all be bloody stupid idiots without a clue.
I’ve been wondering where this 3-year until disaster timeline was coming from – been seeing it all over.
Have you been reading 30 year old back issues of magazines?
Assuming Brandon serves out one full term occupying the White House… Donald Trump or Ron Desantis will be moving in in January 2025, hence the world ending in 2025 trope… 😎
David, to paraphrase a great statesman and Nobel Prize winner, never underestimate the ability of [Republicans] to F-things up.
It’s like the skit from Beyond the Fringe – Now is the end perish the world (nothing) well not quite the conflagration we were counting on. Oh well, better luck next time.
The one truth in the referenced article is that hundreds of millions may well perish if current trends continue, not from imaginary catastrophic warming but from starvation when these idiots convince the policy-makers to destroy the systems that produce our food, energy and safety. We are already making food more unavailable/unaffordable for people in the least developed nations. How can we think this is virtuous? How can we ignore the welfare of so many in the cause of an imaginary bogeyman totally unsupported by real science? Worse, the climate evangelists keep claiming we are saving the poorest and least developed from catastrophe – what catastrophe? enough to eat? cheap reliable energy? education? female empowerment?
“The one truth in the referenced article is that hundreds of millions may well perish if current trends continue, not from imaginary catastrophic warming but from starvation when these idiots convince the policy-makers to destroy the systems that produce our food, energy and safety.”
Climate change policy will have killed them, not human-caused climate change, which has never been shown to be real.
They will die because our leaders are living in a delusional alternate universe where they think CO2 is a dangerous gas. The CO2 is not dangerous, it is the deluded leaders who are dangerous.