No holds barred assessment of humanity's present, dire predicaments.

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"In fact, unless that time of calamity is shortened, not a single person will survive"" (Matthew 24:22)

Are we about to create a Hell on Earth? Could our oceans actually boil off, like what happened on Venus? Will all life on Earth be exterminated because we cannot free ourselves of our addiction to fossil fuels?

Recently I've begun to come across discussions on the Internet that say that our ongoing process of human caused global warming is leading to a runaway greenhouse effect. Much of the speculation about this seemed to be centered on NASA climatologist Dr. James Hanson.  

Dr. Hanson's short video on this can be viewed HERE . Dr. Hanson is unambiguous. He states that if we burn all of the carbon available to us in the form of oil, natural gas and coal, a runaway greenhouse effect is possible. He goes on to add that if we also release the carbon stored in oil sands, tar sands and other unconventional sources of hydrocarbon energy, this fate become an absolute certainty.

Hanson (at about 2:20 minutes into the video) says: """What will happen is that the oceans will become so hot that the oceans will begin to boil and the oceans will end up in the atmosphere. And that's what happened to Venus""

Temperatures on Venus are about 850 degrees F. Atmospheric pressure is nearly 100 times that of Earth. The atmosphere is poisonous.   Hanson says that this could occur as early as next century.

Let's consider what exactly this runaway greenhouse is, and how it might unfold here on our planet. By massive burning of oil, coal and natural gas, we release vast quantities of CO2, a heat trapping "greenhouse" gas, into our atmosphere. As a direct consequence of this, things get hotter and hotter, faster and faster. This is certainly happening now.

Dr. Richard Muller, who had previously been a noted climate change skeptic, recently, published a study, ironically funded by the climate-change-denying Koch Brothers, in which he found that human-caused global warming is very real. In fact, it has pushed global temperature up by an average of 1.5 degrees F. in the past 50 years alone. Muller stated:

" Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause . "

In July of 2012 a panel of hundreds climate scientists from 48 nations stated unequivocally that "global warming is accelerating." A video news report of this is available HERE . For example, they state that:""Greenland's glaciers are melting about 30 times faster than they were a decade ago""

THIRTY times faster!! In fact, this warming is occurring faster than any of the "high end" warming scenarios! In plain English, a greater magnitude of warming is occurring, and far faster than ever anticipated. Further, it is also occurring much sooner than anticipated.

OK, at this point I am certain that we are talking about objective reality here and not just alarmist hyperbole. So what is the "greenhouse effect" anyway and how does it work?

The basic idea is that a planet's atmosphere gets so hot, that eventually its oceans begin to boil off into the atmosphere. Since water vapor is a more powerful greenhouse gas than even CO2, this causes the atmosphere to get even hotter, boiling off ever more of the oceans mass until the oceans are in the sky--just like Venus.

Life--ALL life--ends forever on such a planet.

So just how does Earth end up like Venus? The process starts when we burn off the Earth's accessible supply of oil, coal and natural gas. These greenhouse gases raise the average temperature of the atmosphere by up to about 12 degrees F. Previous "worst case" scenarios had this occurring by the end of this century. However, we now know that our actual reality is MUCH worse than that.

This is likely because of positive (amplifying) feedback effects. These include an ever warmer atmosphere holding ever more water vapor--which as we've just seen is a very powerful greenhouse gas in its own right. This increasing warming causes decayed organic matter (ancient plants, basically) that are trapped in the permafrost to thaw and decompose, which releases vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is approximately 30 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as is CO2. This methane thawing process is underway and accelerating right NOW .

Other factors include the decreasing albedo (reflectivity) of the polar regions: the white, reflective ice melts, and exposes the dark, heat absorbing, soil and water.

Next the " clathrate gun " goes off. This massive methane release further warms the atmosphere by 10 to 18 degrees F. according to Dr. Hansen. To understand how this works, consider that vast quantities of methane clathrates are stored along the continental shelves of the Earth, as shown by the map just below.

The present near-freezing temperatures of the oceans several hundred feet below the surface keep this methane frozen. However as the oceans begin to warm, the uppermost layers of these methane ice deposits begin to sublimate--that is to change directly from an ice to a gas. Vast quantities of methane are released into the atmosphere, adding another element to the accelerating greenhouse effect. This triggers more ocean warming, and with it, even faster methane hydrate sublimation.

Such a process is believed to have caused the Permian Extinction event 252 million years ago. The Permian Extinction was the closest, so far, that life has come to being completely wiped off of the Earth: 96% of all marine species and at least 70% of all terrestrial life suddenly died.  

One of the deadly effects of the Permian Extinction was that the temperature and acidity of seawater was so altered that most plankton, source of about half of the planet's oxygen production, could not survive. The organisms which could thrive in these acidified oceans gave off vast amounts of hydrogen sulfide, a deadly gas that pretty much suffocated anything that needed to breathe oxygen . The result was the sudden near-extinction of multicellular life on Earth.

Given our accelerating rate of warming, it is now a near certainty that the clathrate gun will indeed go off. That alone may be enough to drive humanity into extinction in the near future.

And this process is already beginning once again. We can't say exactly when this rapid mass release of methane into the atmosphere will happen, however the perceptible intensification of our planetary warming strongly argues in favor of this occurring sooner rather than later. At that point, human civilization definitely comes to an end, and most likely, so does the human race itself.

Yet, things could get even MUCH, MUCH worse than this.

The combination of burning conventional fossil fuels (which represent a 10 to 12 degree F. warming), the clathrate gun going off (a 10 to 18 degree F. temperature rise), release of arctic methane due to permafrost melting, decreased albedo due to ice melting etc. are certain to raise the mean temperature of the planet by 25-50 degrees F. That may be enough to evaporate progressively more water vapor into the atmosphere until sometime in the next century the oceans begin to boil.

At that point it is game over for life on Earth forever. FOREVER.

Dr. Hanson states that this process will become a certainty if we also burn significant quantities of the planet's "unconventional" hydrocarbons--oil sands, oil shales, oil released by hydrofracking, etc. This is exactly what we are doing right now in response to the alarm over "peak oil."

Hydrocarbon energy drives our economy. But the US Energy Information Agency (EIA), has confirmed that production (crude plus condensate) of conventional oil (what we get from a generic oil rig) peaked in 2006. Since 2004, conventional oil production has remained approximately flat at about 74 million barrels of oil produced per day.  

The EIA stopped publishing this statistic altogether in 2011, ostensibly due to "budget cuts." What continues to be published is a statistic purporting to show total production of "all liquids." This is a mixed basket of energy substances including crude oil, natural gas liquids, ethanol, oil-like substances cooked out of oil shales, tar sands and so on. This is very much like combining apples and oranges together and counting them as being the same thing.

But for many reasons, these fuels are not the same. For instance, natural gas can't be substituted for gasoline for most applications--try filling your car up with it and see what happens (no, don't!).

Most importantly, this deceptive statistic leaves out the very different EROEI's of each energy substance. "EROEI" stands for "Energy Returned on Energy Invested." Conventional oil, such as that found in West Texas and Saudi Arabia, has an EROEI of about 100 to 1. That means that for one barrel of oil's worth of energy expended in production, you get back 100 barrels of petroleum--a gain of 99 times over the initial energy investment.   But the conventional oil being discovered today is closer to 10:1 with respect to EROEI, due to the greater difficulty in producing it. In essence, all of the "low hanging fruit" of easy to get oil has already been gotten. What remains is progressively harder to get.

Unconventional oils such as tar sands, oil shales, fracking-produced oil and natural gas possess EROEI's of closer to 3:1, or even worse. They cannot substitute for the much higher net energy oils they are replacing.

So the net energy available is actually decreasing, even though the total numbers of barrels of oil equivalent ("BOE") is alleged to be slowly increasing. With tax incentives and legions of gullible investors, it is still possible to make a paper "profit" off of these unconventional substances for the time being, even though they do little to address our underlying energy deficiencies.

This decline in net energy is actually the ultimate cause of the economic disturbances intensifying through the world and national economies. They are based upon debt with the expectation that expanding future wealth will pay of today's debts. Given long term economic contraction in the future, today's debt becomes ever more worthless. And so economies teeter towards inevitable collapse.

So let's step back and look at the big picture here. Due to their unalloyed short-term greed, energy corporations are heavily investing in mining and refining these unconventional, low EROEI, hydrocarbon sources. This adds greatly to the rate at which CO2 is released into the atmosphere. It also adds greatly to the overall quantity of CO2 released. Additionally, as this utterly irrational CO2 buildup occurs, it ensures that our national and global economy will collapse in the near term future as its fundamental assumption of ever greater wealth production in the future ("growth") is violated. This vastly reduces our ability to deal systematically with the CO2 buildup as everyone tries to look out for themselves.

And, by the way, that net increase of CO2, according to Dr. Hansen, makes a runaway greenhouse effect INEVITABLE.

Instead of using our fossil energy reserves to rapidly and methodically transition away from fossil fuels, we are literally burning them up to get at ever lower-net-energy reserves of fossil fuels. Energy companies do this because it is all they know how to do. Our politicians remain silent, or actually enable this, because they are paid by energy lobbyists to do so .

The handful of corporate conglomerates which own nearly all our mass media are evidently too busy reporting on Kim Kardashian's latest foibles to take the time and trouble to report seriously and in depth about climate change, except for their manufactured "controversy" on whether or not climate change is real at all. The result is that misinformed and uninformed people do nothing, and the overall system accelerates to utter absolute and eternal doom. This is where we are right now.

We can't tell when, but unless we fundamentally change our ways, sometime relatively soon the process of warming will become unstoppable. We will then have a short while to reflect upon out utter folly before we all horribly and painfully die. Earth becomes uninhabitable for us long before the oceans actually begin to boil.

If that were as far as it went, I would see poetic justice at work. However, what we are about to do is to EXTERMINATE ALL MULTICELLULAR LIFE ON EARTH FOREVER!

Think about that: every tree, every bird, every fish in the sea, turtles, monkeys, dogs, cats--ALL LIFE, gone FOREVER.

There are no words to describe the magnitude of such an evil. And we are the perpetrators. If we fail to act decisively, and quickly to put a stop to this, we shall surely be dammed to the lowest circle of hell--and deservedly so. And our self-made Hell will be right here on Earth.

Realize that our oligarchic (rule by the rich) political system CANNOT deal effectively with this problem. The same persons who are causing the climate change are profiting immensely by their rapine of the environment, and they have bought off the political system and largely control our mass media as well. Democrats, Republicans, the various dominant political parties and factions elsewhere around the world--all are part of the problem rather than the solution.

Then where to start? Start with yourself. Localize, become as self-sufficient as possible. Cooperate with others of like mind in your communities. A critical mass of aware people will be reached. Then decisive actions will come very swiftly--hopefully, more swiftly than our impending annihilation. One can hope.

Or just ignore the warnings, dismiss them as alarmist, don't worry, be happy, and await your fate ".

At the deepest level our impending self-inflicted demise comes about because we are basically just very clever apes. An ape can prune a small branch and insert it into a termite mound thereby obtaining a tasty snack. With our even larger brains we can insert a pipe into the earth and obtain the energy of a half-billion years of stored sunlight. We are intelligent. What we are not however is wise. We do not consider the long term consequences of our actions. We do not consider the overall effects of our actions on the wider human and natural systems in which they are embedded. Professor Ugo Bardi has defined this mental attribute as sapience .

Our planet is being rapidly drive over the brink because the level of intelligence which controls its actions is simply that of a clever, but selfish and infinitely greedy, ape. In whatever time remains to us we must maximally develop our capacity for sapience. The existing power structure of the planet MUST be swiftly and irrevocably replaced by sapient humans.

How? That is not an easy question to answer, but answered it must be considering the alternative. To do this we must first establish responsibility. Who or what is fundamentally responsible for our plight. Forget the politicians. In an oligarchic society they are simply "hired help." Money animates the human world. This is not a good thing. Consider the Bible, which states unambiguously in Timothy 6:10 ""For the love of money is the root of all evil"" That same source has Jesus displaying real anger on only one occasion--against the money changers of the Jerusalem Temple. Just try to imagine how our Wall Street gangster bankers, "banksters", would have fared"

As far as human beings are concerned, therefore, the moneymen--the "banksters" of Wall Street, The City in London, and other global banking centers are at ground zero as the causal agents of our predicament. However, even if they were all dragged off in individual tumbril carts (Google it) to well-deserved executions, and better people were put in charge of our financial system, nothing fundamental would change. This is because it is our financial system itself which is ultimately at fault. An economic system centered upon money based upon debt is at the root of our rapidly impending doom.

Interesting, there is nothing more American than money that is NOT based upon debt. In fact Brittan's forcing their debt based currency on the American colonies in the 1760's was the precipitating cause of the American Revolution. If you do not know about this, read this article on Colonial Script . During the Civil War Abraham Lincoln did something similar by issuing Greenback Dollars . And then there is "hard money" gold and silver currency mostly. The fundamental point is that money, however conceived as a store of value, cannot be based upon debt. Incentives against hoarding it, and in favor of spending it (letting it circulate so that others may benefit from it), are critical as well. Our concept of money must be fundamentally rethought. If we do that, all else about our political economy will change fundamentally as well. Our trajectory towards doom is altered. If we fail to do that...we die, as I've discussed just above.

We must be prepared for instant action when the precipitant event which will crash the existing system occurs. Near term possibilities include economic collapse, a sudden and hugely dramatic environmental catastrophe, or blundering into a devastating war, probably for oil. I don't have specifics, we simply need to do a lot of thinking and learning and growing, so that when the moment comes, sapience can wrest control of humanity's disastrous trajectory and steer us to an unknown but hopeful future.

If you are thinking that that would take a miracle, you might be right. Leaving aside unfalsifiable religious ideas on that subject, there just might be a falsifiable, scientific miracle. Recent experiments by quantum physicists have shown that the "future" can affect the "past". While this sounds nonsensical, remember that our minds evolved to allow us to find food and mates while avoiding becoming something else's dinner. The Universe, or more properly, the multiverse, is infinitely more wondrous and complex than that. Rather than expound on this research and its significance to the resolution of our sorry plight here, I direct the interested reader to a posting on this topic I wrote recently. It can be accessed HERE . Quoting myself from that article, I assert:

My own take on all of this [scientific research findings] is that unknowably far in the future of the Cosmos, Life, in the form of the ultimate civilization, manifesting the ultimate degree of emergence , encompassed everything. The victory of consciousness over matter, and its quantum foam underpinnings, was then complete.

I conclude from all of this that, as bleak as our present sometimes seems to be, as bleak as events in our near future will likely be, we should always go forward trying to do what we believe to be right. Those actions which are supportive of Life--all life, not just human life--those actions which are supportive of fairness, justice, equality, contribute towards the consolidation of a deep emergence which will win out against entropy, decay, dissolution, death, in the end. We just don't know how, or when--nor would we want to know, as that would negate free will.

There may well be a Universal Life Force which is reaching out to us. If so, let us embrace it. If you want to think of this force a being God, or the Christ, the Messiah, the Mahdi, The Buddha, the Tao, benevolent ET's, or just plain emergent fortune, that's fine too. It's now or never for life on Earth! We don't get a second chance if we screw this up"

Authors Website: https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/3979729587610286911

Authors Bio:

Michael P Byron is the author of The Path Through Infinity's Rainbow: Your Guide to Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad. This book is a manual for taking effective action to deal with the crises of our age including global climate change, peak oil, and political failure to deal with these and other problems.

His previous book is Infinity's Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization.

Byron-has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine.--He teaches all aspects of Political Science and Political Economy in local colleges in the San Diego area.- He was the Democratic Party's candidate for United States Congress in California's 49th Congressional District in 2004. In 2002,-he- ran as a write-in candidate upon discovering that the Republican incumbent, Darrell Issa, had no major-party challenger.

Mike lives in Oceanside, CA with his wife, Ramona Byron. Both are Navy veterans.