RETURN OF ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

Extreme rainfall events are cropping up around the world. In England, once in a thousand year floods have repeated 3 times now, in five years. Records are falling in many countries. In a warmer world, we've gained 7 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere. It has to come down somewhere.

The short news clips about extreme rainfall events around the world came courtesy of BBC, Reuters, Fox, ABC, CBS, Euronews.

WASDELL VINDICATED

A few weeks ago, our guest David Wasdell suggested the outcome of our current path of emissions would eventually be a world at least 8 degrees C hotter on average, maybe more. Some questioned that. It is now the most heavily downloaded interview I've posted on soundcloud. If you missed it, listen in here.

This week the University of Edinburgh released a paper echoing Wasdell's climate. Eight degrees is possible, according to Professor Roy Thompson, as published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Find the University press release here.

DARK QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE

Climate change does not occur in a steady economy, or a peaceful time. This Fall we saw in Paris how terrorism empowered politicians to ban climate action, in the name of public safety. The terrorists knew they were attacking before the world flooded to the COP21 climate talks. They succeeded in disrupting the essential public voice.

But in this show, we ask two questions: will the fossil-based economy collapse just as extreme weather events punish property and infrastructure. What if we are too broke to rebuild or cope? There's a blog for that. It's theeconomiccollapse blog, with millions of readers. We'll look at frashing warning a new depression is forming, with blogger Michael T. Snyder.

Then, believe it or not, there are darker things to consider. If climate disrupts agriculture, as expected and already happening, social violence and wars may become worse. Our guest Professor Tim Snyder explains why climate change may open the door to more mass murder. It needs to be said.

Off we go, with black clouds hanging over economies around the world.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) Or listen on Soundcloud right now!



RETURN TOWARD COLLAPSE - MICHAEL SNYDER

The Federal Reserve just said the U.S. economy is so rosy they can raise interest rates by .25%, the first rise in about 7 years. So why is this environment reporter covering just the opposite?

Remember Hurricane Sandy, all pumped up with rising seas and a hot ocean off the U.S. East Coast. The damages from that one storm were estimated at $60 billion dollars, or about 55 billion euros to "fix". That didn't include bolstering the shore-line, or the estimated $10 billion dollars our Radio Ecoshock guest Professor J. Court Stevenson recommended to create flood-gates to protect New York Harbor. Download that 21 minute interview here.

What about the billions lost in the California drought, or more tens of billions with Hurricane Katrina? Politicians, and we the public, always presume there will be money to rebuild. Except we're already in the total debt economy, nationally, regionally, and personally. If the massive global economic system experiences a crash, there will be no money to recover from recurring climate damage. We will get hit - that's pretty well guaranteed from rising seas, extreme rainfall events (I report on a few of those in this show), agricultural losses, record wild-fires - you know, a lot of bad things.

The good news could be that only a global economic crash can prevent us from terra-forming the planet into a dying world. Things like the tar sands won't be worth developing, and ditto for dangerous Arctic drilling. The history of the past few decades shows only an economic collapse, like the fall of the Soviet Union, has led to genuine reduction of emissions.

The bad news is a lot of bad news. For example, if there is no money to invest, we may not make the transition toward cleaner solar and wind energy, or electric cars. We may be stuck with whatever inefficient grid and coal power plants we've got, not to mention aging nuclear hulks run way past their best before date. We may get stuck in the 20th century.

Of course there's a lot more. Pension funds could go broke. Governments could go broke (some already are). People will lose jobs, the poor will get even less, some of us will lose hope. It's a Depression with a capital "D".

Ever since the last "recession" of 2008, when major institutions teetered on the brink of global ruin - Michael T. Snyder has been writing a blog saying nothing has been fixed from that time, and in fact, most things have become even more precarious. For the past few months he's been posting various warning from the internal workings of the macro economic system that tell us another crash is developing. In the past few weeks, a lot of what Michael warns about is coming to the surface, even in the mainstream popular press.

Michael T. Snyder

In our interview he gives a list of about ten big warning signs. For example, the junk bond market has already collapsed, as it did before stocks fell in 2008. "Junk bonds" are really higher risk loans to corporations, like Chrysler for example. Most big pension funds are based on a presumed rate of return much higher than "safe" guaranteed interest rates. These funds need money just to pay out retirees now on the roles, much less the baby-boomers hitting the decks. Pension funds were more or less forced into the junk bond market.

Just in the last week, a big junk bond company called Third Avenue had so many demands for payouts (people bailing) they had to deny requests. There wasn't enough money. This triggered a run on many other junk bonds. It's a run on the junk bond bank.

That's just one sign. The near death of international shipping and trade is another. In fact, there have been a series of major banks, well-known international banks, who have warned a "downturn" is just around the corner. Private investment banks are warning their clients about the same. Michael Snyder has lists of them in his blog!

THE "PROPAGANDA MATRIX"

So why isn't Fox News and the general mass media telling you how serious this is? Snyder reminds us that six major media corporations control about 90% of what we see, hear - and talk about. The average American now watches 293 minutes of TV a day. Add in all the other media, like the Internet, social media, radio, newspapers - and those six corporations fill up an astounding 10 hours of the average person's day! Snyder calles it "the propaganda matrix".

It's little wonder that whatever they are blaring out over multiple outlets gets talked about in the office, at home, and on the street. It could be the Kardashians, terrorism, refugees, Donald Trump, somebody to hate, some awful crime - but it's seldom, very seldom, the raw facts that our economy isn't working for 99% of the people.

The world's fifth largest economy, the big hope of the developing world, is officially in a "Depression" according to Goldman Sachs. Do you know what country that is? Probably not. A few dozen stock markets around the world have already crashed. Did you know that? That's why you, and anybody who cares about the future, should listen to this interview with Michael T. Snyder.

Download or listen this Radio Ecoshock interview with Michael T. Snyder in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

If you want to Tweet or Facebook this interview, use this smaller link to the Lo-Fi version (which downloads faster to phones...) http://tinyurl.com/gvnngae

WHO IS MICHAEL SNYDER?

Who is he? As we learn in this interview, Snyder was a practicing lawyer. He was one of the many working in Washington D.C. in the shadow of the Capitol buildings. When the last recession hit, Snyder got out. He's happily living now in the mountains of Idaho. Snyder's blog, theeconomiccollapse.com gets about a million views a month. But it doesn't stop there. I've seen his posts on dozens and dozens of other blogs, including the biggest, like Zero Hedge.

Maybe you think Michael Snyder isn't qualified, or he's over-zealous. Go ahead, but first argue with the facts he packs into his blog posts - all with links to the original source, which you can check for yourself. Eventually you'll find his blog is a definite worthwhile watching post, as I did.

Snyder isn't adamant about everything. He'll ask the question, and wants you to check things out. Plus, Snyder doesn't say we'll wake up one morning to find everything closed, and start a new civilization from scratch. Rather he sees a downward staircase, where things fall apart, maybe over years. That was the reality of the last Great Depression in the 1930's. But this collapse would be global, and maybe the end of the fossil fuel civilization as we've known it.

I'd like to have Michael back again next spring, when we'll see whether Janet Yellen's official optimism, or Michael Snyder's deep suspicion, turn out to be reality.

During the interview we also discover Michael has a new novel out. It's kind of a thriller, but contains all sorts of projections into the future, from what he sees now. The title is "The Beginning of the End".

Michael also has two other online projects: a blog "End of the American Dream" and his new news web site "The Most Important News".

PROFESSOR TIM SNYDER: THE NEXT "HOLOCAUST" MAY BE DRIVEN BY CLIMATE CHANGE

I heard about the work of Professor Timothy Snyder in a controversial op-ed in the New York Times. It was published September 12th, 2015 under the title "The Next Genocide". He says climate change could drive us again towards mass murder.

The idea that rampant climate change will take hundreds of millions of lives was not new to me. For example, when the major delta of Bangladesh, where hundreds of millions live, becomes too salty for agriculture, due to invading seas - millions of environmental refugees will stream north. The only places they could go are already over-populated and very undeveloped, like Eastern India. It's not going to end well.

But Snyder has thought deeper about the possible consequences of climate change. First of all, he is an internationally-known scholar of the mass murders that happened during the mid-20th century in Eastern Europe. We call it "the Holocaust", but it turns out most of us still don't understand what happened there.

For example, most people were killed by the Nazis in the infamous death camps right? Wrong, says Snyder. While the death camp toll was horrendous, even more millions died outside the camps, slaughtered wherever they were. I ask Snyder why we don't know this. One major reason was that Eastern Europe was behind the iron curtain of communism, where people couldn't travel or speak freely.

Professor Snyder is fluent in at least 10 languages. Most of us couldn't read the original documents, even if we could find them. In 2010, Snyder, a Yale historian, published a book on his research, "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin". The two dictators supervised the death of about 14 million people in the Eastern European lands between them.

Professor Timothy D. Snyder

I know from my own reading, the Holocaust was also the first case of turning advanced technology into machines for mass murder. Hitler's death camps used a punch-card system designed, provided (and maintained during the war!) by the American company IBM. Ford trucks carried the victims and troops around. Radio transmitted hate propaganda.

So where does climate change come in? I can't do justice to Snyder's arguments. You can find them in the New York Times article, or this one in the Guardian. But news articles just scratch the surface. The real juice comes from Snyder's new book "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning".

In the interview, we talk about how Hitler and his cronies viewed the environment. In some senses, the Nazi's had a tinge of "green". They wanted to restore some natural species (so they could hunt them), and used "nature" in their propaganda. But like modern climate denialists, Hitler also had a phobia, bordering on hatred, for real science. In some cases, like Einstein's theories, he denounced it as "Jewish science". That may be one reason why the Nazi's never developed the atomic bomb.

Tim Snyder tells us Hitler sold the Germans a fear that they could never feed themselves, so they needed "living space" - to be taken by force from others (like the Poles) who would be eradicated. Germans would run out of food, he thought, because fertilizers, hydridization, and other promises of science were false. It turns out he was totally wrong, and after the war Europe became a major exporter of food, using scientific methods.

MY INTERPRETATION OF THIS INTERVIEW

One of my key take-aways of talking with Tim Snyder is that mass murder does not require a state where people are at or near starvation. All it requires is that people fear it COULD happen, to justify terrible things.

In fact, it may not require a food shortage. Part of Hitler's argument was that the Germans, as a superior "race", should have the highest lifestyles. He specifically pointed to the developing riches of America. Tim Snyder thinks that someone, or some nation, could justify mass murder solely because people thought their lifestyle was threatened (not just their food). Does that raise any thoughts in you? What if there is an economic crash, or fear of one, and Americans, or Brits, think their lifestyle is going downhill? Could we turn that into an excuse to bomb the hell out of some other people far away? Or justify mass-murder at home?

The worst fear is that a national government will purposefully plan, over time, the mass murder of another population, as happened in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. We're not talking about murderous riots in the street, although those can be arranged. We're talking about applying computer tech, advanced weapons, money, and administration to depopulate some part of the world, or a sub-set of a national population.

That kind of mass-murder as policy could develop in times stressed beyond imagination by climate disruption. Timothy Snyder explains how. As Snyder writes in the New York Times:

"Denying science imperils the future by summoning the ghosts of the past."

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Professor Timothy D. Snyder in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

If you want to Tweet or Facebook this interview, use this smaller link to the Lo-Fi version: http://tinyurl.com/hal24ey

THANKS FOR GIVING ME THIS OPPORTUNITY

We're pushing the end of our time - at least for Radio Ecoshock this week.

My special thanks to those who reached out with financial support for this program, without much prodding from me. Aside from the help, it also makes me feel appreciated. Find out how you can help here.

I put in about 40 hours a week to produce this program. It's my "job" but I don't get paid for it. As I hope you can tell, each guest sends me on an adventure of research in preparation, plus time spent distributing the program, answering listener emails (write me radio //at// ecoshock.org), staying abreast of global news feeds, this blog, the web site, and all that. It's a life work, and I'm just glad you encourage me to do it.

I'm Alex Smith. As always, thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

Fires Raise Chernobyl Radiation - Again

Some interviews drive by, others stay for the deep record. This week I have two heavy-hitters for you. Right out of the international news, forest fires near the Chernobyl nuclear wreck in Ukraine have raised dangerous radioactive particles into the atmosphere - again. We have Dr. Timothy Mousseau, the world's foremost expert on the impacts of Chernobyl, and Fukushima radiation on living things.

Then Utah scientist Tim Garrett updates his work showing only a collapse of civilization could prevent terrible climate change. There are new discoveries, about our utter dependence on fossil energy, and where that leads.

Both of these are important interviews for the record. So I'm going to share my detailed notes, with some quotes. There's lots to learn, and many shocking facts.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 Mb)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!



DR TIMOTHY MOUSSEAU - EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST AND SPECIALIST ON IMPACTS OF NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS ON LIVING THINGS.

The largest fire in 20 years is burning near the crippled Chernobyl nuclear plant. The smoke will re-release radioactive contamination dropped in the forests during the 1986 melt-down of Reactor number 4, possibly the world's worst nuclear disaster.

How can radiation remain and return? What is the real risk? Scientists have been hard at work studying this problem. Just this February, the journal Ecological Monographs published a paper titled: "Fire evolution in the radioactive forests of Ukraine and Belarus: future risks for the population and the environment."

Dr. Timothy A. Mousseau is a co-author of this paper, and recommended to Radio Ecoshock by the lead author, Norwegian scientist Nikolas Evangeliou. Tim is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Mousseau joins us on Radio Ecoshock.

Here are my detailed notes, in the order each topic appears in the interview.

1. Mousseau started studying radiation effects on living things in the Chernobyl area in the year 2000, and has returned the area 3 to 4 times a year ever since.

2. I ask about the meme saying life is thriving in the highly radioactive Chernobyl closed zone. It is true that nature has returned. But everything from plants (such as trees) to animals (including birds) are suffering some impacts. (More about that later).

3. The Chernobyl radiation affected the Ukraine, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Northern Europe (including Britain) the most. But it went around the world and can still be found as a marker in oceans in the Northern Hemisphere as well. The areas of highest contamination are within a couple of hundred kilometers of Chernobyl.

Mosseau compares the fire that burned in the Chernobyl reactor for ten days to a volcano that erupts radioactive materials.

4. How does it work? How radiation enters the fibres of plants and cells of animals. "The dominant isotope at Chernobyl, and at Fukushima too for that matter, is Cesium 137. And Cesium 137 is a potassium analog. It behaves chemically much like potassium does. And so the plants actually mistake it, confuse if for potassium, and take it up as if they were taking up potassium. This Cesium gets taken up by the plants in the water, transferred to the leaves, and into the tissues.

And so it gets moved around. Even though most of the fallout is in the soil, it gets taken up in the water through the plant root system up into the leaves - and then redeposited on to the surface soil every year as the plants drop their leaves during the Fall."

To me, the horror of this is partly that we expected radiation in the soil to gradually be buried by plant debris and subside, away from the surface. Instead, roots keep grabbing the Cesium 137 and recycling it to the surface with leaf litter each year. Find a BBC article about the impacts of Chernobyl on tree growth here.

5. Fires near Chernobyl at the end of April 2015. Estimates are a few hundred to a few thousand acres of forest have been burned. It appears in early May the fires are under control. While some of the fires are in high contamination areas, most of them happen to be in areas of lower contamination. Satellite photos show dozens of small fires in Ukraine and Belarus and parts of South Western Russia - all areas with signicant amounts of radiation from Chernobyl.

"Its an on-going condition that is likely to get worse in the future as global climate change raises the average temperatures and reduces the total amount of precipitation in the area as well."

6. Tim is part of a large team of scientists from many countries who are studying the past records of forest fires, the record of radiation from Chernobyl, combined with climate change into models.

"What we've demonstrated is there is an enormous potential hazard from these forest fires because of the fact that they are likely to increase in size and intensity. And this has the power to basically lift the radioactive contaminants from the soil, from the plant material, and put it into the atmosphere and redistribute it."

7. What kind of particles?

STRONTIUM 90 GOES UNDETECTED WHILE IT BIOACCUMULATES

"The concern is that several of these isotopes are potentially far more dangerous biologically than the Cesium 137."

Scientists and the press have focused on the Cesium because it is cheap and easy to measure, even with a simple Geiger Counter, while others require sophisticated and expensive testing.

"Strontium 90 is really there in about equal levels to the Cesium. The Strontium 90, because it's a Beta emitter, doesn't give off any Gamma. This makes it much, much harder to measure it's levels."

For that reason, Strontium 90 is often not measured, and assumed to move as Cesium does.

"But Strontium is a calcium analog. And so it gets taken up the same way into plants and animals, the way the calcium would. And as a consequence it tends to be fixed into the teeth and into the bones. It can actually bio-accumulate and bio-magnify up the food chain to a much greater level than Cesium usually does. So this makes it [Strontium 90] a more hazardous isotope. It tends to be in the background because we can't measure it very easily."

OTHER ISOTOPES LIKE PLUTONIUM AND AMERICIUM ARE IN THAT SMOKE...

"There's a significant amount of plutonium deposited in the ground around the [Chernobyl] reactor. This Plutonium is also decaying into something called "Americium". Americium and plutonium are extremely dangerous if ingested. The dangers are well known and ever a threat."

They [Plutonium and Americium] are heavier, they're denser, and they're less likely to be mobilized, but they are going to be mobilized if the fire is large enough. And of course, the half-lives of the Plutonium isotopes are measured in the tens of thousands of years, and the Americium is in hundreds of years. In fact the Americium levels are increasing in the area as a result of the decay of the Plutonium. So the hazards are actually going to increase over the coming decades with respect to those isotopes."

8. HUMAN HEALTH RISKS

The biggest risks are for the firefighters. [Alex notes the many stories of poor equipment, no breathing protection, no decontamination for these firefighters.] They do wear masks and gloves, Mousseau says.

The air-borne hazards decrease as one moves away from Chernobyl, so breathing hazards diminish relatively quickly with distance. The problem is that scientists are not so concerned with an external dose, as ingesting cancer-causing radioactive particles. We've just heard about bones and teeth. Mousseau also points out mushrooms bio-accumulate radiation, so that wild boar in Germany who eat mushroom are too radioactive to be safe to eat. Mice also eat these mushrooms, and then other things eat the mice.

9. BIRDS AND INSECTS

Mousseau has been part of scientific studies, along with Andrew Mueller on birds and insects both at Chernobyl and around the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.

Alex's note: Andrew/Andres Pape Moller is a Danish ornothologist studying birds at Chernobyl with Mousseau, but Moller is not without controversy about his methods. Accused of manufacturing some facts, Moller was almost ostracized by other scientists. Tim Mousseau has kept up their friendship, and criticizes the attacks on his fellow scientists. During a long career, Moller has published at least 600 scientific papers. His work on barn swallows stimulated a generation of biologists.

For more on this controversy see this article, but also read the comments below.

Other scientists have joined the Chernobyl investigative team over the years. They have found unexpected consequences for the animals living in the contaminated areas. They've published papers over the years about this.

"We found repeatedly in both Chernobyl and Fukushima now that the numbers of birds drops off in the more contaminated areas....in Chernobyl we see that up to 40 percent of the male birds are completely sterile. They have no sperm, in the more radioactive areas."

Birds in contaminated areas have higher incidents of eye cataracts. They have higher incidences of tumours and other developmental abnormalities.

In the last couple of years they've started new work with small rodents - mice and voles both in Chernobyl and Fukushima. They find very similar patterns of decline and disease.

10. DOES RADIATION CONTINUE TO CYCLE FOR GENERATIONS?

The half life for Cesium 137 is about 30 years, so it will eventually disappear. It's a 29 year half life for Strontium 90. "Certainly after a century or two most of that will have decayed into either less radioactive or non-radioactive daughter products."

Plutonium and Americium will be around for hundreds if not thousands of years.

11. MAIN MOTIVATION FOR STUDIES IS TO LEARN ABOUT ADAPTATION TO RADIATION

"The main motivation for the research we've been doing in these areas wasn't so much to document all of these abnormal, these negative consequences of exposure to radioactivity - but in fact to determine whether or not there have been adaptive evolutionary responses of the organisms to this novel stressor."

Just last year they published a paper showing a "handful" of birds had "managed to cope with the radiation in a way that was really quite striking. They do this by changing the allocation of some of their antioxidants towards defense against the radiation. "Now it's not all rosy because this change in allocation probably incurs a cost in terms of they can't use that antioxidant in terms of some other important function."

The scientists hope that knowledge might help humans who have to respond to radioactivity as well.

ALMOST 30 YEARS LATER CHERNOBYL STILL NOT SAFELY ENCLOSED, AND NO ONE CAN APPROACH WHERE THE SPENT FUEL IS

12. We discuss the problem of the unfinished "safe confinement" project for the radioactivity at Chernobyl, which is still covered only by a hastily constructed "sarcophagus" of cement, which is deteriorating. Why after almost 30 years from the melt-down hasn't this site been secured against further radioactive release?

The main hold-ups have been the complicated design, and the money. It's costing about 2 billion US dollars (and may go higher). Without the new shelter, they can't begin a more permanent remediation of the area, Mousseau tells us. The Ukraine can't afford that big cost. The world community is stepping up to provide funding, but they are still at least a half billion dollars short. A meeting is taking place in London this past week, trying to find the missing funding needed.

Building a new roof is just the first step. The planned new building includes cranes that can be operated remotely. They hope to investigate the interior of the Chernobyl building. No one knows what is going on inside - it's been too radioactive to approach the lower reaches of the reactor, where most of the spent fuel is, even almost 30 years later. Also, because the roof was leaking, Mousseau says, water has filled the bottom. This makes it impossible for people or machines to find out what is happening there.

Tim says as a much larger accident site, Fukushima will be even more expensive.

13. TIM RETURNING TO A CHAOTIC UKRAINE TO DO MORE RESEARCH

Things are very unstable in the Ukraine, "given the ongoing conflict between the Ukraine and Russia over the Eastern territories, and of course this has had an enormous impact on their economy. Their currency has been devalued considerably, by several factors, in the past few years, mostly in the past few months. And the unemployment rate has gone through the roof."

They will continue their studies of the rodents in the most irradiated areas, and hope to study the endangered Przewalski's horses, also known as the Mongolian wild horse, the last truly wild horse in the world. They were introduced to the closed zone near Chernobyl, but not monitored or studies well yet.

[See Wiki on Przewalski's horse here.]

14. HIS RESEARCH AROUND FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN

They have some parallel and comparative studies going on at Fukushima Japan. It's currently at a smaller scale due to lack of funding.

They just published 3 papers in the last few months on the ways Fukushima radiation has affected the bird population.

"The bottom line is that many of the bird species are showing very dramatic declines in the areas of high radioactivity ... what makes that particularly interesting is that it parallels what we've been finding in Chernobyl, ina completely independent area...again providing fairly strong scientific support for the hypothesis that it's the radioactivity that's the underlying cause of these drops in numbers."

15. THE CONTENTIOUS ISSUE OF LOW-LEVEL RADIATION [20:05]

What about the contentious issue of the impacts of low-level radiation? Every time there's an accident, the nuclear industry says eating a banana or flying in a plane is more dangerous. What do you say?

"The bottom line to all this discussion is that all radiation, of all sorts, generates damage to our cellular structures. It leads to damage to our DNA, damage to the membranes around the nulceus of our cells and the cell walls themselves.

Our bodies have evolved mechanisms to repair most of this damage over the eons. Radiation isn't new. Mutagens in the environment aren't new. In fact the very oxygen we breaths is a major cause of mutations in our bodies. And so we have all the machinery in place to deal with it, at least to some extent. But the fact that we grow old and die is actually in part the product of on-going mutational accumulation into our lives.

So radiation of all sorts, even small amounts contributes to that and so there's no such thing as a little bit of radiation being good for you... the more you add, the more the effects will be."

"One airplane ride is unlikely to be of much significance, given that we expose ourselves to many other mutagens in the environment. The same could be said for eating one banana. But if you fly an awful lot then you will be increasing the dose to your body and this has been demonstrated to increase rates of cataracts for instance in airline crews - which is one of the first signs of radiation exposure. We see it in the birds, we see it in humans as well. Certainly it's just the first step. There are other consequences likely."

16. CHECKING AGAINST NATURAL SOURCES OF RADIATION

Some places in the world have elevated radiation levels simply because radioactive materials, like uranium or radium come close to the surface. Mousseau et al did a meta-data study to comare what they found at Chernobyl and Fukushima to these sites.

In one example, the second largest cause of lung cancer in the U.S. and in China is radon, a colorless, odorless gas that can accumulate in basements. Radon leads to many thousands of extra lung cancer deaths in the U.S. every year. There is no such thing as a good amount of mutagens.

17. AFTER FUKUSHIMA RADIATION, WILL FOREST FIRES IN JAPAN BE DANGEROUS?

Japanese forests are in mountains, and there is more moisture. Mousseau isn't sure about the fire hazards there. Japan has had years and years of forest management, largely restricting fires, which may add fuel if one arises.

"It is a significant concern for Japan, although I don't think anybody's started to think about it just yet. Given what we've found about the accumulation of dead plant material in more radioactive areas - the fact that the radiation impedes the normal decomposition process, leading to higher accumulation of what is essentially fuel for a fire, this is a significant concern."

Along with Japanese collegues, they've just started research to see if the same kinds of accumulation of litter is happening in Japan. We may get an answer by this Fall.

18. NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS ARE NOT RARE AND WILL CONTINUE

Due to differences of views in the scientific and political communities, funding for basic research into the impacts of these nuclear accidents, and radiation in general, has not met the needs of what we should know.

"These nuclear accidents are not as rare as we used to think they were. There was a recent study published, highlighted by MIT, that suggested that nuclear accidents on the scale of Chernobyl are likely to occur in the coming years. You know, a Three Mile Island scale accident is likely to occur in the next ten years. Nuclear energy is not going away any time soon, so we really do need to know more, much more, about the consequences for both human health and the broader environmental impacts, if we're going to continue down this path."

Find a British newspaper article about the likelyhood of more nuclear accidents here. Original source: "Probability of contamination from severe nuclear reactor accidents is higher than expected" May 22, 2012. (lead author Jos Lelieveld, director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry).

CHERNOBYL FUNDING RESULTS (Alex's notes, not in the interview)

Finance ministers of major developed countries met in London in early May, trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars needed to complete the "Safe Confinement" building over Chernobyl. This would be the largest movable structure in the world. Note they cannot say the radioactivity will be "contained" but it will be lowered, and thus "confined". Read about the funding crisis here.

With new funding promises the project is stil short 85 million euros, but has enough now to continue without delay.

DECOMMISIONING UNITS 1-3

Remarkably, three reactors at Chernobyl that did not explode continued to be operated for years after the accident. Consider the whole area was evacuated, including the fully developed city of Pripyat, we have to wonder at the exposure to the workers inside the remaining reactors.

The last Chernobyl reactor shut down in 2000, but they still have their fuel and spent fuel in the highly radioactive building.

According to this article in the World Nuclear News...

"For the period between 2028 and 2046, the most contaminated equipment will be removed from the units, while the reactors themselves will be dismantled between 2046 and 2064."

"For the decommissioning of units 1, 2 and 3, the international community is financing, through the Nuclear Safety Account, the Interim Storage Facility 2 (ISF2) at a cost in excess of €300 million and the Liquid Waste Treatment Facility (LRTP). The ISF2 facility is currently in the final phase of construction and will process, dry and cut more than 20,000 fuel assemblies and place them in metal casks, which will be enclosed in concrete modules on site. The used fuel will then be stored safely and securely for a minimum period of 100 years. The LRTP received an operating licence at the end of 2014."

In other words, it will take about 80 years after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 to bring the whole site to a "decommissioned" state. I expect about the same time frame for Fukushima, taking operations there to about the year 2100, all the time draining the economy and threatening health and the environment. And governments wonder why we don't trust nuclear power!

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Dr. Timothy Mousseau in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

DR. TIMOTHY GARRETT UPDATES WORK ON CIVILIZATION AS A HEAT ENGINE, WITH 2 NEW PAPERS.

Here is an unusual plot for a story: an atmospheric scientist uses principles of physics to predict the global economy will slow to near zero growth. Then it's fragility and exposure to natural disasters suggest a high risk of "accelerating collapse".

That's all part of an on-going discussion I've followed over the years on Radio Ecoshock, with University of Utah scientist and Professor Timothy J. Garrett. In two interviews in 2010, Tim Garrett explained his discovery of a formula that linked economic wealth to the amount of energy consumed. That sounds simple, maybe even obvious, but it caused a slight storm of criticism from old school economists. Tim's work also predicts that only a precipitous crash in our economy could avoid a disastrous warming of up to 5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.

Listeners have downloaded Tim Garrett's two previous Radio Ecoshock interviews thousands of times, partly because they cover the convergence of Peak Oil, climate change, and economic distress - all in terms of the laws of Physics. It's ground-breaking work which hasn't yet really reached the wider public.

TIM GARRETT RESOURCES ON RADIO ECOSHOCK

You can listen to (or download) Tim's first Radio Ecoshock interview (February 5, 2010) here at archive.org. His second (November 19, 2010) is here. Plus there is a transcript of his November 19, 2010 interview here.

Download or listen to this new interview with Dr. Tim Garrett in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Tim has pursued his theories and observations in a two-part publication, coming out in scientific journals in 2014 and in March 2015.

Here are links to Tim's two most recent papers, as discussed in this interview:

"Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis"

First published: 4 March 2014

"Long-run evolution of the global economy: 2. Hindcasts of innovation and growth"

Published March 24, 2015

MY DETAILED NOTES ON THIS NEW TIM GARRETT INTERVIEW

THE BASIC THEORY AS LAID OUT IN EARLIER (2010) PAPERS (my interpretation of what Tim said)

1. The global economy occurs in a physical world which is bound by relatively simple laws of physics.

2. Picture a body. It begins small, consumes energy, and eventually reaches a relatively stable size, but must keep consuming energy to maintain that size. It may not grow more, but it still needs energy.

3. It turns out there is a fixed relationship between wealth and the amount of energy it consumes.

4. Right now our total wealth turns out to be about 2,000 trillion dollars. Our rate of energy consumption is about 17.5 Terawatts. That's about 17,000 large power plants, whether they are coal or nuclear. In 1970, those quantities were almost precisely half of that. And from 1970 to 2015, wealth and energy have grown in "lock-step".

5. Just as a heavier person needs to consume more energy to sustain themselves than a smaller person, a large world economy has to consume more energy just to sustain itself. There is a fixed relationship, which turns out to be about 7 watts per thousand inflated-adjusted 2005 U.S. dollars.

TIM GARRETT'S TWO NEW PAPERS

6. The first is titled "Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis" as published in "Earth"s Future", an open journal of the American Geophysical Union, on March 4th, 2014.

7. He points out that economists seem to see a different world than physicists or biologists. Instead of trying to influence the economy or politics, the physicist sees our system as a whole, where we are all (people, cars, factories) energy-consuming agents.

8. His theory sees "wealth" a global total, rather than the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of various countries. For example, "wealth" could include all the remaining production of previous ages, including the Roman Coliseum or Rembrandt paintings, which are not part of this year's production alone.

9. I ask where he fits in with the movement of limits, such as Richard Heinberg's "Peak Everything". If we discover new sources of energy, as in the Tar Sands of Alberta and heavy oil in North Dakota, these new energies will be applied to generate more wealth. It allows civilization to grow faster. Conversely running out of energy demands a smaller economy and less wealth. Garrett's formula allows us to predict the impacts of either scenario.

10. If we grow faster, then we need to consume more energy to maintain ourselves, just like a heavier person who finds more ready food. If we need to consume more to keep what we have, we will deplete those reserves ever faster. In that way, discovering more energy leads to sooner depletion.

11. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide accumulates ever faster in the atmosphere. Eventually, perhaps even now, climate change damage begins to cost more than civilization can afford.

12. Garrett has written about the role of innovations in this scheme of things. Can we innovate our way out of this predicament? He replies that we got into this situation precisely because of innovation. We've just gone through a period of innovation but our rate of emissions are much higher than even 20 years ago. We grow, and our pollution grows.

13. He writes about the "fraying" of networks within civilization, due to continual natural disasters, as climate change develops, and, I would add, along with Joseph Tainter, perhaps due to other pressures and breakdowns in a complex civilization. How long can major corporations and Wall Street continue to ignore those risks and those costs? Garrett replies at this time local disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, are very serious, but the global effects are still rather small. We overcome this fraying by discovering new energy resources.

14. There are two ways this "fraying" may become more difficult to recover from. 1. We may not discover enough new energy resources to replace the wealth lost. Or 2. environmental disasters become more frequent and widespread, so that we struggle just to keep at our current level, and cannot grow further.

15. At that stall speed, Garrett's modelling work suggests the global economy becomes fragile, so a following natural disaster may lead to "accelerating collapse".

16. This leads to the question: "How will the growth end?" Nothing grows forever. Using the analogy of ocean waves, there are some which rise and fall slowly. Others rise very rapidly, perhaps because they are reach a rising bottom near the shore, and then they fall very quickly. He thinks the rapid rise of this fossil-powered civilization is more likely to fall quickly as well. We are more prone to a rapid collapse, than a slow decline, he says.

Reintro 16:55

17. We go to the second paper, "Hindcasts in Innovation and Growth", published in March 2015. The "hindcast" part comes from testing weather models. Those models are tested by starting the model somewhere in the past, and see if it can accurately describe ("predict") the weather is actually happening now. The success of failure is measured into something called "a skill score".

18. Garrett did the same thing with his model of the constant between wealth and energy, trying it at various periods of time to test for accuracy. As it is accurate, he feels confident in predicting the future economy, if we know the availability of energy. The skill scores for predicting energy and gross world wealth were greater than 90 percent. However, the theory may not work for specific countries.

IPCC AND MODEL PROBLEMS FOR FUTURE PREDICTION

19. As an atmospheric scientist, I ask Garrett how his predictions compare to the forecasts made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their models are extremely complicated, trying to calculate a huge range of variables, with hundreds of equations. Complex models are very hard to test.

[My own research notes: A whole series of scientists and institutions try to model out a whole range of human activities and responses. These are called "Integrated assessment models" or IAM. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses them to calculate different emissions paths. Recently the American economist and MIT scholar Robert Pindyck suggests integrated assessment models are useless and misleading.]

20. Testing IPCC models against his own, Garrett finds the IPCC models are very optimistic about how much the GDP is going to grow in the coming century, and also overly optimistic about how little CO2 levels are going to rise. "In fact they have us growing to an absolutely massive size, without having to consume much energy to sustain that accumulation of wealth".

21. The IPCC may argue effiency gains allow this optimism. Garrett's research shows efficiency gains to the opposite: "it is by becoming more efficient that we are able to grow faster and ultimately to consume more."

THE "DECAY PERAMETER"

22. It is an expression of "the fraying" we talked about earlier. Like a tree we have intertwined branches of social, political, and communication networks that always spread outwards. Social networks, for example can decay, as we lose touch with people. The decay parameter recognizes and measures how networks may naturally fall apart.

23. For a civilization, one example would be the natural decay of buildings over time. Natural disasters due to climate change may advance the decay parameter.

WHAT IS WEALTH? IS IT WHAT WE SAY IT IS?

24. We discuss the example of fad items that are "worth" a lot for a while, but then become worthless. Beyond the basics of food and shelter, do we define what wealth is, and how does that affect this theory?

25. Tim says that is true of "money" and gold. We agree they are worth a certain amount. But without that common agreement, they may be useless. Values may depend on how things help a network to flow.

ARE NEGATIVE INTEREST RATES A SIGN THAT GROWTH HAS STALLED?

26. Garrett has also wondered about this, but says it is above his economic expertise to say. His models based on physics can't break down those kinds of details. He would like to be able to answer that and will consider it.

WHY POPULATION IS NOT MATERIAL TO FUTURE PREDICTION

27. Some people believe population growth is the driving factor in our consumption and pollution. Instead, population grows because of a higher availability of energy resources. Finding the Saudi oil fields in the 1950's was like winning the lottery. I agree new sources of energy can provide fertilizer for more food, more transport and refrigeration of that food, etc.

28. Like roads or telecommunications, we are all made of matter, and it takes energy to make us. From the view of the physicist, all things are networks which require energy to exist.

FORECASTS HARDER AS FOSSIL FUELS RUN THEIR COURSE

29. Our growth rate is starting to stabilize after the huge impulse of finding giant oil fields in the 1950's.

30. If there another impulse developing? Possible. An eye-opening presentation at Stanford by Professor Adam Brandt showed a mind-boogling amount of accessible fossil fuels in Alberta's Tar Sands, North Dakota and in fracked oil and gas. We may have stumbled on another energy lottery which could propel more growth and more wealth. Read an article about Adam Brandt, and why the 20% greater pollution from Tar Sands really matters, here.

31. Garrett's formula can be applied to those resources, once they are better known, to predict the growth outcome. Here I may disagree, because at the same time a "keep it in the ground" movement of disinvestment in the tar sands is gaining ground. Social forces, based on concerns about climate change, may mean that lottery ticket may never be cashed, or at least not in full.

WARNINGS OF CATACLYSMIC CLIMATE CHANGE

32. With Garrett's atmospheric expertise, I ask him about the warnings from the Earth League that we face a 10 percent chance of experiencing "cataclysmic climate change" of 6 degrees C (11 degrees F) by the end of this century, on our present course.

33. He replies: "That sounds totally plausible to me". His model shows that if civilization manages to sustain itself, perhaps based on new energy from Tar Sands, the Arctic or wherever.

"...in the models it is not impossible to imagine carbon dioxide levels passing 1,000 parts per million - that's four times pre-industrial levels. Four times pre-industrial corresponds to two CO2 doublings, which would translate quite easily to 6 degrees Celsius of warming. And that's where you start thinking about, well the title of one of my papers, 'maybe there's really no way out'. I mean if civilization doesn't collapse because we run out of energy, then perhaps civilization keeps growing for a while as the carbon dioxide emissions accumulate in the atmosphere to such a point that there is this warming that you talk about.

And then you do have to think about what the implications are for civilization, and again, the word 'collapse' does come to mind."

34. I ask if a popular press book with this theory will come out. He's thinking about it.

HELP KEEP RADIO ECOSHOCK GOING!

Special thanks to Patricia, who made a generous donation to Radio Ecoshock this week. I'm still a little short of what it will cost to run the program over the summer time. If you can help, it's easy to do from this page.

Find Radio Ecoshock on Soundcloud, Facebook, and Twitter. Our web site with all our past programs as free mp3 downloads is at ecoshock.org.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening and please join me again next week.

Feed Yourself

QUICK SUMMARY: Oil guru Richard Heinberg on life after fossil fuels. Marjory Wildcraft: why you may want to grow your own groceries. Radio Ecoshock 150408

Five percent of the world's oil tanker capacity is waiting to load up near Basra Iraq, where production is way up. The United States has only one month of oil storage capacity left. After that, what comes in must go straight to market, likely for as little as $20 a barrel.

Is peak oil dead? And why isn't the economy responding to cheaper oil? We'll ask the guru, Richard Heinberg. He's one of the people who popularized the oil squeeze, with his book "The Party's Over". Heinberg has a new book out: "Afterburn, Society Beyond Fossil Fuels".

After that, during this Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, a couple of us hope to persuade you to grow some of your own food. Marjory Wildcraft, from growyourowngroceries joins us. There's a lot of reasons we need to pay attention to the food supply.

Locked and loaded, this is Radio Ecoshock.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now!



RICHARD HEINBERG: AFTERBURN

"We live in the time of what might be called the Burning" - Richard Heinberg.

In 2003, his book "The Party’s Over: Oil, War & the Fate of Industrial Societies" turned Peak Oil from an insider worry to a popular movement. Twelve years and eight books later, Richard Heinberg is still the go-to guy for what's happening with world energy - and there's a lot happening right now. Richard's post in California is at the Post Carbon Institute.

Of course everyone wants to know what happened to Peak Oil and the way out of this fossil fuel mess. Richard gives us that update, and whole lot more, in his latest book just out, called "Afterburn, Society Beyond Fossil Fuels".

"As energy issues become more critically important to society’s economic and ecological survival, they become more politically contested; and as a result, they tend to become obscured by a fog of exaggeration, half-truth, omission, and outright prevarication."

- Richard Heinberg, "Afterburn"

We all thought high oil prices would grind the economy into a crash. Now oil has fallen to less than half price, and it looks like THAT could trigger some very bad things. What's happening out there on the oil fields?

I've been reading that some big energy companies hedged their production at over $90 a barrel. There's no way some Wall Street betters can pay half the world's energy bill. Something has to give, yes?

Richard wrote about the fragility of the oil industry and it's massive debt, especially in the fracking industry, in his recent book "Snake Oil". Our second guest Marjory Wildcraft, who lives in West Texas, says she's toured around in Texas, seeing exactly the oil blight, abandoned rigs, and depressed towns that Richard Heinberg wrote about.

I can remember, just five years ago, a big debate about climate change and peak oil. Some Peak Oilers said we'll never get to full-blown climate catastrophe, because the oil will run out soon, very soon. Now we know humans can find and burn enough oil to wreck the climate.

Heinberg compare our rivers to the "rivers" of gasoline that flow along our highways, and throughout our society. I was struck by his observation on how open and visible water is, and how hidden the gasoline flow is at every stage. It's underground, in pipelines, in our tanks, and never seen.

In his new book "Afterburn", Richard Heinberg writes: "Quite simply, we must learn to be successfully and happily poorer." Somehow, I don't think we'll hear that in the upcoming American election campaign...

Stanford professor (and Radio Ecoshock guest) Mark Jacobson and Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute say we can continue growing the economy powered by renewable energy. Why is Heinberg so gloomy? Can he really be sure we won't find ways to continue the current wealth of civilization?

WHY UTILITIES AND GOVERNMENTS FIGHT OFF ALTERNATIVE ENERGY

In the new book "Afterburn" he says:

"When the government tries to provide people the basics, power is centralized — but as the capacity of the government wanes, it can feel threatened by people trying to provide the basics for themselves, and act to discourage or even criminalize them."

Are we seeing signs of government resistance to self-sufficiency and going off-grid? Heinberg says yes, and gives a piercing analysis of the curious balance of big grids. At the beginning (now) only people with enough capital or credit can afford the up-front costs to install solar power systems. Then they get a free dividend, and can feed extra power back into the grid.

At some point, there is so much home-grown power, that a relatively small portion of the population (generally the poorest) are supporting a large and increasingly expensive big-grid infrastructure. Then the power companies use their leverage (read bribes to politicians) to get laws limiting local power, or making it very expensive in the permit process.

Heinberg says in the long run, the big grids will have to cave in, and become completely re-organized. For one thing, it leads to something much closer to an energy democracy, versus the current top-down monopoly structure.

Here is an RT news piece titled: "Local governments crackdown on residents going 'off-the-grid'". [starts at 3:30 ]

We talk all this through in a major interview with one of the great alternative thinkers of our times. I thought I was familiar with many of Richard's ideas, but I enjoyed reading the new book "Afterburn, Society Beyond Fossil Fuels". For me, it tied a lot of things together to create new insights and inspiration. For what it's worth, our previous Radio Ecoshock interview with Richard Heinberg is the most listened to file we have on Soundcloud.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Richard Heinberg in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

If you would like to Tweet out or Facebook this interview, to pass it on, you can use this "tiny url" for the Lo-Fi version. http://tinyurl.com/pykow9v

PLANTING MUSIC

To get in the mood for our next guest, let's listen to a little plant music. This an ad from Peaceful Belly Farm. Watch the cool video (with that great music) here.

Yeah. Nature can sing. That's Jamie Drysdale, Blackstreet, and the crew from Peaceful Belly Farm in Boise Idaho. There spring plant sale is over, but the music lives on.

Solutions? You want solutions? Here's a prime Radio Ecoshock interview with answers. It's what I listen to, and what I'm doing to prepare for the new future.

Alex Smith, by his winter garden (tucked in with leaves as ground cover). Note 7 foot deer fence and home made garden shed.



MARJORY WILDCRAFT - GROW YOUR OWN GROCERIES

Every time there's a hurricane or a snow storm, we see news footage of grocery store shelves going bare in a few hours of panicked buying. Our whole food system, from giant corporate farms to just-in-time truck deliveries is shaky, very shaky. So is the economy. Toss in GMO food, sugared-up with corn syrup and pesticides, and its a public health mess. Then comes the drought, flood, heat waves and freaky weather from climate change.

All this yells at us: we should grow at least some of our groceries! And Marjory Wildcraft is the person to show us how. Her course DVD course "Grow Your Own Groceries" sold over 300,000 copies. Her You tube videos how-to get tons of hits. Now she's organized a free online summit on Home Grown Food.

THE FREE ONLINE FOOD SUMMIT

First the big news: all this week (April 9th to 12th) Majory has organized a free online "Food Summit" stacked with video interviews with some of the world's big names in permaculture, alternative gardening, and prepper gardening.

Here is Majory's video about that.

If you are reading this blog before April 12th, go ahead and sign up. It's totally free with no gimmicks. I've been watching a bunch of presentations. So far my favorite is with the host of permies.com, Paul Wheaton. He gave an overview of at least 10 different gardening styles.

That's what Majory says is the starting point for beginners. Find out what type of gardening appeals to you most. Is it growing in straw bales? Aquaponics? Permaculture? There's lots to choose from.

In the beginning, Marjory's husband and son were not interested. Now her backyard is a whole experiment, including aquaponics. Then husband and son got involved, liking the pumps and mechanics of aquaponics, to produce tomatoes, lettuce and fish. You need to find the technique you resonate the best.

Then she says: start small! If people take on too much right at the beginning, they may give up. A 50 square foot garden (4.6 square meters) may be all you need to start.

Majory says our current food production is a big mistake. It leads to heart disease, diabetes, obesity and more. The food industry is over $1 trillion business in the U.S. alone. Really, Majory tells us, most of those products in the supermarket, from baked goods to meat, are mostly twelve crops, reworked with sugar, fat, and chemicals.

It looks like there is an abundance of food in grocery stores. Over 90% is imported from hundreds or thousands of miles away, depending on a just-in-time trucking and air system. People who can grow their own food have more resilience, making themselves and their community stronger.

There are at least 30 presentations from a variety of groups and authors in the online Food Summit. They include:

* John Jeavons, 43 years grow-biointensive gardening method, used in many countries around the world.

* Sylvia Bernstein, aquaponics.

* Joel Salatin.

* Toby Hemenway on permaculture.

* The Livestock Conservancy.

* John Kohler's "Growing Your Greens" from his strong You tube channel.

- and a whole ton more. Many have been guests on Radio Ecoshock.

The Summit has strong sponsors: National Gardening Association, kidsgardening.org, Mother Earth News, and the American Preppers Network.

The Summit starts Monday April 9, starting at 9 am Eastern, several up for 24 hours, so people in different time zones (all around the world) can tune in. Five new ones are posted every day. Find out more here.

=========================

If you would like to know more about Marjory, and learn from her, try some of her many excellent You tube videos. Like this one: "How to Grow Half Your Food in your Backyard in Less than an Hour Per day." Marjory works through the numbers of what it would take to grow half of your food needs in a common backyard, spending less than an hour per day!

What about the time it takes to operate all this? About an hour per day. Occasionally more for special projects. Some systems can be automated for 2 to 3 days absence.

She is developing 5 different systems, including aquaponics, with fish, veggies and quail. She has another vegetarian system, based on root crops. She's also experimenting with a backyard food forest, and polyculture.

In less than 2 generations we've lost the ability to feed ourselves, turning it over to big corporations. Now we can rediscover ways to grow food and medicine. Get lots of help online from web sites and You tube videos. Learn what works and what doesn't.

Majory also offers a full DVD video course called "Grow your own groceries" in 2 DVD's. It includes rainwater collection, gardening, rabbits (how to breed and butcher too), food forests, and more. There is a bonus CD with pdf documents, on rabbits, companion gardens, permaculture, and more. That's at a pretty decent price of $37 plus shipping.

Here are some of my other favorite Marjory Wildcraft videos:

"Highly Nutritous Food In Only 4 Sq. Ft. For Hungry Urbanites"

"How to Grow Your Own Groceries in a Dark Apartment"

"Economic Collapse Survivor - Marjory Wildcraft Interviews Rita Ojeda" (in Cuba)

And of course my favorite, the video that led me to discover Majory: "Survival Gardening In The Heat with Marjory Wildcraft". That's had 77,000 views so far. The thing is: as global warming ramps up, we need to adapt what we can grow, being ready for heat waves. There are some good tips here.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Marjory Wildcraft (30 min) in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

If you want to Tweet or Facebook this interview, use this tiny url, which leads to the Lo-Fi version. http://tinyurl.com/qf87wwm

THE CALIFORNIA DROUGHT

Now that California has finally issued an emergency directive to save water, the world has discovered NASA scientist Jay Famiglietti. The Los Angeles Times quotes Jay and NASA satellite studies saying there is only one year of groundwater left in America's most populous state.

I knew Famiglietti's groundwater studies were dynamite when they first came out. Over a year ago, on March 5th 2014, Famiglietti was my guest in a special on the California drought. Here's the scoop: NASA has twin satellites called Grace. One follows the other, and by comparing measurements, they can determine changes in ground mass. That works to show Greenland is losing mass as it's ice melts, and so is Antarctica. But it also shows changes in the water underground, including in California. When that water evaporates, or gets pumped up, the world weights a little less in that spot.

When the snowpack is low, or missing, as it is this year in the Sierra Nevada mountains - California growers and cities make it all up by pumping from the ground reservoirs, from the Earth's savings account. That works for a year or two, but with the drought now in it's fourth year, that water bank is running dry. Already some farm wells have gone dry, and then whole orchards die, or fields lay dry and fallow.

Considering California produces about one quarter of America's vegetables, fruits, and nuts, you may need to grow some food where you are. This could affect the global food market, and may force an exodus of millions of people from California.

Of course, I interviewed Jay Famiglietti and wrote about the California drought LAST year in this March 5th, 2014 Radio Ecoshock show blog.

Oh, Oh. We are out of time again. Be sure and join us next week for more science, tips, and disturbing news on Radio Ecoshock.

I'm Alex Smith, saying thank you for listening, and caring about your world.

Mass Extinctions Past & Present

UK scientist Paul Wignall on climate change & mass extinctions. Power expert Darren Hammell on risk of grid going down, for many reasons. Radio Ecoshock 150218

No doubt you've heard biologists and those darned environmentalists say we are already in the Sixth Great Mass Extinction. Animals and plants are disappearing daily. So in this show, we'll take a tour of a few past mass extinction events, with one of the planet's leading scientific experts on the subject.

Then we'll explore a more direct problem: how will you make out if the electricity goes off for a while. What happens when the grid goes down, and can we ease the pain?

All that, and the ultimate solution to all our problems, this week on Radio Ecoshock. I'm Alex Smith.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen right now on Soundcloud!



EXTINCTION EXPERT DR. PAUL WIGNALL

Why did 90% of all species living on Earth go extinct around a quarter of a billion years ago? Was this caused by global warming? We'll seek some answers from our guest Dr. Paul Wignall. He's from the School of Earth and Environments at the University of Leeds in Britain. After decades of research and publications, Dr. Wignall is one of the world's experts on past extinctions.

Before we go into some fascinating details about the instability of life here on Earth, one quick question: does the study of the past tell us important things about the rapid warming humans are causing today?

Dr. Wignall says yes it does. A look into the record of the past shows us "how the world works", especially in periods of rapid warming and rapid cooling. "It's an experiment that's been run in the past."

Paul studied rock formations, and fossils in them, all over the world, from Poland to my own Canadian Province of British Columbia. But I notice particularly after 2006, most of his papers are co-authored with Chinese scientists. Why is that?

First of all, Wignall says, Chinese scientists were interested in the same questions. But mainly there are rock formations in South China which can read like a book of the past. He's done fieldwork with Chinese colleagues in Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces.

His work has touched on a number of controversies raised by other scientists here on Radio Ecoshock. Let's start with your 2009 paper "Mantle plume: The invisible serial killer". What is a "mantle plume"?

Wignall says: "A mantle plume is a structure or feature within the Earth, in the Mantle. It basically refers to hot material that sort of wells up from the core, from the centre of the Earth, and sort of rises up to just beneath the crust. And when it reaches the base of the Earth's crust, it then creates a lot of vulcanism."

Compared to today's experience of volcanoes, these events were "orders of magnitude bigger scale eruptions". These volcanoes erupted along with carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and some other gases. Very little methane was in those eruptions, "but we think that the eruption of carbon dioxide triggers the release of methane."

A FORAY INTO THE RIDICULOUS

Now I asked Dr. Wignall about the methane, because another wild prediction by Malcolm P.R. Light cited this Wignall paper of 2009. In the Arctic News blog, a chart purporting to explain why "Omnicide" would occur on Earth as early as 2023 was published. By "omnicide" I presume it means the death of all living things.

Citing Malcolm P.R. Light, a persistent contributor to the blog, this chart draws twice on the mysterious "Enrico Mantle Methane Eruption Anomaly". Actually, it's a chart republished first on Light's Facebook page, and then in Arctic News. The creator of the chart/photo is the reliable scientist "Goddessof TruthandLove".

A search for this "Enrico Mantle Methane Eruption Anomaly" finds nothing, except a previous post by Malcolm Light in Arctic news February 28, 2014. It appears he made it up.

That post in the Arctic News blog February 2, 2012 begins with this statement:

"During the Late Permian (Figures 16 to 19) there was a major global extinction event which resulted in a large loss of species caused by catastrophic methane eruptions from destabilization of subsea methane hydrates in the Paleo-Arctic (Figures 16, 17 and 13a)(Wignall 2009)"

So Light's source is supposedly work by UK extinction specialist and our guest, Dr. Paul Wignall of Leeds.

Searching Wignall's works, we do indeed find a paper with ominous titles about a mass extinction event and a "Mantle Plume".

(Wignall P; Racki G (2009) Mantle plume: The invisible serial killer - Application to the Permian-Triassic boundary mass extinction. Comment, Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology, 283, pp.99-101.)

But as you've just heard in the Radio Ecoshock interview, the Mantle Plume eruption was not itself methane, although it may have triggered the release of more methane. And in fact, this published Comment by Wignall and Racki was about an earlier paper by E. Heydari at al. Wignall and Racki disputed Heyari's theory that a massive amount of methane was released by a mantle plume event.

In other words, Malcolm Light cites as his source the very work by Paul Wignall THAT REFUTES LIGHT'S THEORY. Talk about sloppy sources and science!

You can verify all this by downloading a .pdf of Wignall's comments here. And then read the disputed "Invisible Serial Killer" theory of a mass methane release (by Heydari et all, not Wignall) here.

BACK TO REAL SCIENCE - "LETHALLY HOT" OCEANS

In 2012, Paul Wignall and his Chinese co-authors published another paper in 2012 that caused a stir. They suggested Earth experienced "Lethally hot temperatures during the Early Triassic greenhouse".

From the Radio Ecoshock interview, Wignall says: "We've recorded the warmest interval probably for the past billion years of Earth's history. It's in the aftermath of this huge extinction 250 million years ago. It seems that that extinction coincided with warming. And we think the warming just got even worse in the aftermath of it, and so produced temperatures - we calculated sea surface temperatures rather than on land. But sea surface temperatures approached 40 degrees Centigrade at times. Which is extremely hot, well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit....

You could just about tolerate having a shower or a bath at 40 degrees [C] but it would feel scaldingly hot. It's a bit sort of like the temperature of hot soup.

This is at the equator. We didn't say these temperatures were all over the world. But the equator temperatures were that and we think at higher latitudes the [sea surface] temperature gets cooler toward the Poles, so the polar temperature were not too bad. But certainly at the equator we think it became lethally hot. So it became impossible for many animals and many groups to live in equatorial waters."

Here is the scientific reference for this work: Sun, Y, Joachimski, MM, Wignall, PB, Yan, C, Chen, Y, Jiang, H, Wang, L and Lai, X (2012) Lethally hot temperatures during the Early Triassic greenhouse. Science, 338 (6105). 366 - 370. ISSN 0036-8075 The full text is available here.

Note this paper was controversial. Some other scientists disputed it, including the team of N. Goudemand, C. Romano, A. Brayard, P. A. Hochuli, and H. Bucher. Read about that here.

But in our interview, Wignall says they are pretty sure they are right about this one. Here is an easy-to-understand article about Wignall et all's theory of lethally hot oceans, this time in the Huffington Post.

In an interview for Naked Scientists, Wignall said all forests were lost at that time, which is an amazing thought. And it was a catastrophic time for insects as well. He tells us about what happened to the trees and the bugs.

DID HYDROGEN SULFIDE FROM THE SEAS KILL OFF LAND ANIMALS?

Author and paleoclimatologist Peter Ward has been a guest several times on Radio Ecoshock. His book "Under a Green Sky" affected me deeply. You can watch a video interview I did with Dr. Peter Ward on this page. Here are the two key interviews with Peter Ward on Radio Ecoshock, as audio files: "Under a Green Sky" (2008) and "The Medea Hypothesis" (25 minutes)(2009). This are still very valid and powerful today.

Dr. Paul Wignall published a paper in 2012 on "green sulphur bacteria" - the same agents Ward suggested arose in the oxygen-poor oceans. He wrote their hydrogen sulphide exhalations may have caused mass death in land animals. So this is more proof that this theory of mass extinctions on land is the best we have so far.

Note that the green sulphur bacteria thrive in oxygen poor oceans. We are already seeing dead zones pop up around the world, due to "anoxia" (lack of oxygen). Other scientists also worry that when the Arctic ice melts, and the climate warms, there will be less ocean mixing, and so more zones where oxygen-breathing creatures die off, and green sulphur bacteria replace them. The theory is that those bacteria breath out the very toxic gas hydrogen sulphide (aka sulfide) - which comes ashore in waves, suffocating land animals.

See this paper:

Richoz S; Van De Schootbrugge B; Pross J; Püttmann W; Quan TM; Lindström S; Heunisch C; Fiebig J; Maquil R; Schouten S; Hauzenberger CA; Wignall PB (2012) Hydrogen sulphide poisoning of shallow seas following the end-Triassic extinction, Nature Geoscience, 5, pp.662-667. doi: 10.1038/ngeo1539

In Wignall's work, I noticed these papers on extinction events are missing the so-called evil twin of climate change, ocean acidification. Wignall says that is because acidification is so hard to study in ancient rocks.

We cover a lot of ground, with this prolific scientist. Please download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Dr. Paul Wignall, in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

You can also watch this interview with Paul Wignall on RT TV's show "The Big Picture", done in September of 2013.

Here is another scientific paper co-authored with Paul Wignall you may be interested in.

Song H; Wignall PB; Chu D; Tong J; Sun Y; Song H; He W; Tian L (2014) Anoxia/high temperature double whammy during the Permian- Triassic marine crisis and its aftermath, Scientific Reports, 4, . doi: 10.1038/srep04132

The abstract for that is here. Find the full text download here.

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WHEN THE GRID COMES UNDER ATTACK

Though we barely heard about it, in January Pakistan suffered the world's 4th largest power blackout. 140 million people went dark, including the capital Islamabad and the country's largest city, Karachi. It was a terrorist attack, the very thing that has worred top regulators and power companies in America, and in every Western country. Could a major country like the U.S., Britain, or Canada go dark, and for how long? What can we do to prepare?

Our guest is one of the bright young men in American power. Darren Hammell is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Princeton Power Systems, a company that specializes in bringing rewewable energy online.

Darren Hammell, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Princeton Power Systems

Could a terrorist darken a large area of the United States? Could it happen? A first effort already occurred in California. The attack on the southern California substation in Metcalf on April 16, 2014 appears to have been well-planned, and no one has been caught yet. Here is a Wall St. Journal article about it, and a Wiki entry.

The former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or (FERC), Jon Wellinghoff, has been practically yelling about how poorly the electricity system is defended against terrorism. Our guest Darren Hammell agrees and explains.

Then we have the spectre of cyber-attacks. Almost all of this equipment is operated remotely by computers. Acording to the Wall St. Journal, American power companies reported 13 cyber attacks in just the last three years. We also have the example of the state- engineered Stuxnet virus that went after nuclear power plants in Iran. A cyber-attack could even shut off dams in electric generating stations.

Another worry big in some circles is an electro-magnetic pulse, an EMP, from either a single nuclear weapon blasted off in the atmosphere, or due to a solar storm. If we had a so-called Carrington Event, the whole grid could go down, possibly for years.

Finally on our list of big grid vulnerabilities, we have those well known terrorists, the trees, the weather, and human error. There was the big Northeast blackout of the United States and Canada in 2003, that darkened 55 million people. That was caused when a single plant in Ohio went down. Poor switching and a fragile grid multiplied the impact to a quarter of a continent and millions of people.

The four largest blackouts in the world all happened in South East Asia. The two largest were in India, then Bengladesh, followed by the recent power loss in Pakistan. The India blackout of 2012 hit 620 million people, that's almost 10% of the world's humans. Hammell says that is partly because electric systems in south east Asia usually don't have reduncancy. Whereas there are many different switching routes for power in New England, there may be a single large power line carrying all the capacity across parts of India. When that goes down, for any reason, there is no alternative.

Find a list of the world's biggest power blackouts here.

ONE SOLUTION - THE MICRO GRID

Darren Hammel is one of several voices calling for more micro-grids. These are electric systems which can break away from the main grid, and operate independently if needed. For example, a university might have a small generating station, and the ability to have their own micro-grid. These are already being set up, in pioneering ways in several Amercian states.

I just saw an article about four homes in Missouri with rooftop solar panels and a microgrid. The project was built by students and set up by the Missouri University of Science and Technology. When do we move from the pioneer stage of microgrids to full-scale implementation?

The former prison colony on the Island of Alcatraz off the coast of California is another example of an independent power system. This award-winning system is solar powered. Interest in micro-grids in the North East of the U.S. has been growing since Hurricane Sandy.

Find out more about microgrids from this site, and from the US Dept of Energy. Or check out this explanation from "How Stuff Works" and this article from Technology Review.

I don't know if you are familiar with the work of Joseph Tainter, but he looked at the rise and fall of empires with an eye to fragility. When large empires become too complex, they break down, but they break down into smaller more self-sufficient islands, like the Medieval fortress cities that operated as nation states. I wonder if the new need for microgrids doesn't reflect an uncertainty about the future of big systems. Just a thought.

Listen to or download this Radio Ecoshock interview with Darren Hammell in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

THE MEGA DROUGHT

Thousands of scientists met this past week for the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS. On your behalf, I attended a couple of presentations for the press. I'm an accredited scientific journalist after all.

There were two big stories from an environmental point of view. The first was a study that finally tries to measure how much plastic waste ends up in the ocean every year - and where it's coming from. The second predicted a greater chance of a mega-drought in the Southwest US - a dry period lasting decades or even hundreds of years. That's happened in the past, and climate change makes it more likely now.

Here is the link to follow up. And here is a popular magazine explanation, from Science Magazine. Maybe this is enough. Or should I contact the mega-drought authors to see if we can line up an interview?

As just a preview, here's a quick summary. By studying tree rings, soil samples and other data, scientists found a series of prolonged droughts in the U.S. Southwestern states, and even into the central plains. These long, long dry periods reached from California, where so much food originates, through to the plains states, where again, a lot of food is grown, or raised as meat on grasses.

The last big drought in that area was in Medieval times. So there are cycles, possibly related to ocean conditions in the Pacific, which can bring about super-droughts even without fossil fuelled carbon in the atmosphere. That chances of a long-lasting drought occurring in any one century are about 5 to 10%. But now with climate change, the odds of experiencing a super-drought in this century have risen as high as 80%. That's a very big chance that agriculture, and maybe even some cities in the Southwest, might have to be abandoned.

As one of the authors, Toby Ault of Cornell University pointed out, the glimmer of good news is the drought was not deep enough to kill off all trees. Otherwise they could not measure tree rings, in some cases going back thousands of years. The definition of a super-drought is not that there is no rain at all, but that precipitation of all kinds drops back drastically, for at least 35 years, and possibly much longer.

Even if rains come, a hotter world means soils let go of their moisture at a greater rate, as evaporation. Soil moisture is the critical factor for plant life, and for species that depend on plants, including ourselves. It's also key to replenishing rivers and water reservoirs.

The authors suggest that society build in planning and infrastructure for prolonged droughts, just as we do for earthquakes in some states, or for hurricanes in others. With climate warming, drought has become a high risk natural disaster.

THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION FOR EVERYTHING: FOUR MORE PLANETS

Now and then, I get emails asking for more solutions. Fair enough. So this week Radio Ecoshock presents the ultimate solution. In this show we have Murray Reiss of Salt Spring Island, in British Columbia, Canada performing his stage routine called "4 More Planets".

I saw this on You tube here, but the audio wasn't great for radio. Murray kindly sent me a better recording.

Murray Reiss

Murray Reiss is a Salt Spring Island, BC, poet and activist with one foot in the printed page, and the other on the stage. His collection "The Survival Rate of Butterflies in the Wild" was named best first book of poetry published in Canada in 2013 by the League of Canadian Poets. Murray performs as a solo spoken word poet, and as a member of the Only Planet Cabaret.

Next week we'll hear about climate change and crops in Europe. And famous climate scientist Michael Mann joins us.

Find all our past programs as free mp3 downloads at ecoshock.org. Please help support Radio Ecoshock if you can. Radio stations do not pay for the program. Listener donations fund my research, the phone calls, and the broadcasts. I count on you to keep going. Get the details here.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening.

We end this program with the song "When the Grid Goes Down". It was written and performed by long-time musician and composer Craig Anderton. I can't find a web site for him, but you can watch the You tube video here. Here is Craig's You tube channel.