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September 15 2019 Seems I've not posted in a while. Partly it's that I've been doing more stuff outside in the Summer. But there's another reason; it seems the taboo of discussing the dire yet increasingly more probable outcomes of humanity's failure to address our planetary overshoot has been lifted. More and more articles are appearing in major media outlets exploring the myriad of ways things could go sideways. They still for the most part focus almost exclusively on climate and apparently it's still taboo to bring up population reduction as a mitigation strategy but still, it's sort of a remarkable change. I haven't really read any doomish books lately other than David Rice's self-published memoir Desert Soliloquy [0]. The first few chapters seem more fiction than fact but onward it was an engaging enough chronicle of his roughly two years living in a cave in the Mojave desert of California in the 1990s. Rice has a YouTube channel under the same title of his memoir which has an eclectic mix of stuff. He has been a ranch hand in northern New Mexico for several decades which seems to provide him with sufficient solitude, enough to keep his misanthropic nerves in check. A sampling of stuff read or watched recently that seem worth a mention: - - What Is Energy Denial? - Don Fitz / Resilience.org - September 12, 2019 https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-09-12/what-is-energy-denial/ A list of "The 15 Unstated Myths of Clean, Renewable Energy", complete with links to back up the arguments. A nice concise piece to forward to your favorite techno-optimist that still thinks all we have to do is switch everything to electric power derived from wind and solar. - - What If We Stopped Pretending? - Jonathan Franzen/The New Yorker - September 8, 2019 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending The sub-title pretty much sums what's to follow: "The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can't prevent it." It's actually a well-researched article and actually avoids that little bit of hopium that until only recently was always found in article of this genre. After outlining an all-inclusive to-do list needed to meet the latest IPCC target of 2 degree C comes this: "Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don't see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my [mental] model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met." I concur, unfortunately. - - Climate 'catastrophe-check' for UN Aid Agencies - John Doyle / UPFSI - May 2019 https://youtu.be/_Deaz3UN0rw (YouTube, 24:50) Came across this video recording of a UPFSI [1] hosted conference on the Arctic News Blogspot [2]. Never heard of John Doyle before; apparently he is some sort of staffer with the EU in Brussels. Searching around I found another video recorded conference he moderated for DG Connect [3] which is really quite good but an epic 3.5 hours long. In the intro Doyle gives a nod to Guy McPherson and "Sam Carana", a pseudonym used to mask the various posters on the Arctic News Blogspot, so I am a bit reluctant to take his word for the exceedingly bleak "facts" laid out in his catastrophe-check. Nonetheless, it was nice to see a rather diverse group, including several from governing entities, discussing the coming challenges in the DG Connect conference. It's worthwhile just watching the last presentation plus the Q & A and maybe the closing statements starting at 1:50:00. Too bad the video is so tiny. -- References: [0] http://desertphile.org/ [1] http://www.upfsi.org/ [2] https://arctic-news.blogspot.com [3] https://vimeo.com/337506486/eb0bfe09eb