The John James Newsletter 259

Our firefighters have been experiencing some extreme, tough fire conditions that they said they’ve never seen in their life. We just ended the hottest summer on record. We have fuels that are in critical drought state. This is the sixth year of seven years of drought.

Daryl Osby, chief LA County Fire Dpt

The way the fire came through, as fast as it did, was unreal. It was apocalyptic, like something you’d see in a movie. My place went up in flames with no insurance. Now I’m probably permanently homeless. I don’t know how we’ll recover from here.

Robert from Paradise

We just had 10% of our county's housing stock erased in one day; it's hard to convey the significance of that

Ed Mayer

We know with high confidence that the progressive disintegration of ice sheets and the transgression of other tipping elements are difficult to reverse after critical levels of warming are reached; Earth’s recent geological past suggest that a Hothouse Earth is likely at CO2 concentration either already realised or projected

Will Stephen

Trump has much greater affinity for autocrats, claiming warm, even affectionate, relations with Putin, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, Mohammed bin Salman, Rodrigo Duterte and now Brazil’s , Jair Bolsonaro

The Guardian

Children born today may be the last generation to see coral reefs in all their glory. Today’s reefs have a history going back 25 million to 50 million years and have survived tectonic collisions, such as that of Africa into Europe, and India into Asia. Yet in five decades we have undermined the global climate so fundamentally that in the next generation we will lose the globally connected reef system that has survived tens of millions of years.

David Obura

If the trend of the past 600 years continues to hold, there is a larger than zero probability that we'll see a new conflagration that could surpass that of the the second world war in destruction and victims

Cassandra's Legacy

A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions ... control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania (Australia) geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

The Earth is in a death spiral. It will take radical action to save us

Climate breakdown could be rapid and unpredictable. We can no longer tinker around the edges and hope minor changes will avert collapse. Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear and gradual. But the Earth’s systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways. When these systems interact, their reactions to change become highly unpredictable. Small perturbations can ramify wildly. Tipping points are likely to remain invisible until we have passed them. We could see changes of state so abrupt and profound that no continuity can be safely assumed. Read more

Human activity is dissolving the ocean floor

Normally the deep sea bottom is a chalky white. It’s composed, to a large extent, of the mineral calcite (CaCO3) formed from the skeletons and shells of many planktonic organisms and corals. The seafloor plays a crucial role in controlling the degree of ocean acidification. The dissolution of calcite neutralises the acidity of the CO2, and in the process prevents seawater from becoming too acidic. But these days, at least in certain hotspots such as the northern Atlantic and the southern oceans, the ocean’s chalky bed is becoming more of a murky brown. Because of human activity, the level of CO2 in the water so high—and the water is so acidic—that the calcite is simply dissolving. “Because it takes decades or even centuries for CO2 to drop down to the bottom of the ocean, almost all the CO2 created through human activity is still at the surface, but in the future, it will invade the deep-ocean, spread above the ocean floor, and cause even more calcite particles at the seafloor to dissolve,” Read more

Elephants come up with a foolproof way to survive ivory poachers

Never ever underestimate the intelligence of Mother Nature. A strange thing has been observed among the young female elephants of Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park: About a third of them never developed tusks. While tusklessness is not unheard of in female African elephants, normally it would only happen in about two to four percent of them. The tuskless crew in question here are amongst the first generation born after the end of Mozambique’s 15-year-long civil war, a war in which much was financed through the slaughter of elephants for ivory. Ninety percent of the area’s elephants were killed, yet those without tusks survived. And now they’ve passed the trait on to their daughters. Read more

If you think the conflicts are bad now, just wait until a critical amount of resources run out in large portions of the world (including food and water) due to a combination of climate change factors, overpopulation and other matters intersected.

Half Million Killed by America's Global War on Terror 'Just Scratches the Surface'

"This new body count signals that, far from diminishing, the war is only intensifying." The new reportestimates that since 2001, between 480,000 and 507,000 people have been killed because of war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan—a tally that does not include the more than 500,000 deaths from the war in Syria, raging since 2011, which the U.S. joined in August 2014, and "indirect deaths," or those killed by war's impact on public health, such as limiting access to food, water, hospitals, and electricity. Read more

Our future is here, now ... day by day.

On the 10th - California wildfires kill nine, drive 150,000 from their homes

Early Thursday morning, a small fire started along the Feather River in Northern California. Due to high winds and dry conditions, the fire spread rapidly to the west, and by Friday evening had burned 90,000 acres and erased the town of Paradise (population 26,000) from the map. The road to Paradise is now littered with the burned-out remains of abandoned cars.

On the 12th - 300,000 people were forced to flee their homes as the worst wildfires in Californian history rage through the US state.

The ‘Woolsey Fire’ swept through hills around Malibu, killing at least 25 people and decimating thousands of homes including those of some well-known celebrities.

On the 13th - Demands for 'Real Climate Action' as Death Toll From California Wildfires Hits Record

"This is not the new normal. This is the new abnormal," said Gov. Jerry Brown. The statewide death toll hit 31 and destroyed more than 6,000 structures. It tops the record for the most destructive fire ever. Some areas now burning had fires in 2005 and 2008, so they aren't fuel-choked closed-canopy forests.

On the 14th - The confirmed death toll from the Camp Fire in Northern California soared to 48

as officials continued a systematic examination of the destroyed city of Paradise, a city of 26,000 people, destroyed in minutes. Hundreds of people remain missing.

On the 16th - Searches intensify with more than 600 reported missing in California's Camp Fire

The Camp Fire -- the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history -- has left 63 people dead, destroyed about 9,700 homes and scorched 142,000 acres.

The Fossil Fuel Industry Spent $100 Million to Kill Green Ballot Measures in Three States — and Won

“We had a pretty good shot, but they definitely had way more resources than we did. I guess the oil and gas industry is just another example of money buying elections.We have had a warning,” Nelson said, referencing that report, “that we either end our dependence on fossil fuels or things are going to get extremely rough for mankind. For me, it shows that it’s just about greed and money for this industry.” Read more

World has no capacity to absorb new fossil fuel plants

The IEA calculated that existing infrastructure would “lock in” 550 gigatonnes of C02 over the next 22 years. That leaves only 40 gigatonnes, or around a year’s worth of emissions, of wriggle room if temperatures are not to overshoot the 2C threshold. The group’s annual World Energy Outlook, published on Tuesday, revised future CO2 emissions upwards on last year’s report. Read report

G20 nations still led by fossil fuel industry

Stimulated by an increase of about 50% in subsidies over the past 10 years to compete with increasingly cheap wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. The G20 nations spent $147bn (£114bn) on subsidies in 2016, although they pledged to phase them out more than 10 years ago.Coal, oil and gas subsidies risking rise in global temperatures to 3.2C, well beyond agreed Paris goal. lRead more

10°C in a decade - rapid climate change is possible

The Younger Dryas is one of the most well known examples of abrupt change. About 14,500 years ago, Earth's climate began to shift from a cold glacial world to a warmer interglacial state. Partway through this transition, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere suddenly returned to near-glacial conditions. This near-glacial period is called the Younger Dryas, named after a flower (Dryas octopetala) that grows in cold conditions and that became common in Europe during this time. The end of the Younger Dryas, about 11,500 years ago, was particularly abrupt. In Greenland, temperatures rose 10°C in a decade. Other proxy records, including varved lake sediments in Europe, also display these abrupt shifts. Read more