The five ways the human race could be WIPED OUT because of global warming

I guffawed when I saw the title of this article but I had to read it.  We know that all bad things are attributable to global warming but this is the first prophecy of human extinction I have seen.  Author Bill McKibben is an old global warming hysteric from wayback but has never yet managed to make an accurate prophecy  -- and this one will be no better.

I am not going to fisk it all.  It is too silly for that.  It is just a collection of extreme improbabilities.

But I am amazed that he is still pushing the ancient and constantly overturned food-shortage barrow.  That shows he is an outright fraud. A couple of degrees of warming would open up for farming millions of acres in Northern Canada and Southern Siberia.  Food would become super-abundant.  And the extra rainfall from warmer oceans would green a lot of the earth's desert areas.  Australian and Canadian farmers already do wonders in low-rainfall areas. Think of their productivity leap with more rain

And the claim about IQ is wild.  I know of no sound source for it and IQ research is something I monitor.  He seems unaware that submariners routinely live in super-high concentrations of CO2 but no effects of it on their IQ are known.  Does anybody think that the USA would put into its nuclear submarines crew who are likely to go ga-ga?

McKibben may be relying on the old Satish study that I have previously critiqued. That study was so tiny, used no sampling and made no allowance for adaptation that its relevance is very doubtful but it should be noted that in that study high CO2 did show some adverse effects on human performance but also showed some positive effects. Not much for McKibben to hang his hat on.

Here's a little excerpt from the Satish study that is rather fun:

An inverse pattern was seen for “focused activity,” with the highest level of focus obtained at 2,500 ppm and the lowest at 600 ppm. Thus, most decision-making variables showed a decline with higher concentrations of CO2, but measures of focused activity improved. Focused activity is important for overall productivity

So overall productivity was best at the very highest level of CO2. CO2 improved your focus. Quite the opposite of what McKibben claims to fear.

Amusing that of all the bad effects of global warming that he lists, the only actual death so far that he claims is of one 12-year old boy


The deadly possible consequences of global warming have been laid bare in a book that reveals the terrifying ways the human race could be wiped out.

From a total food-system collapse, to a catastrophic sea-level rise and the return of lost deadly diseases, 'FALTER: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?' lists the lethal, and unexpected, ways that humans could become extinct.

Author Bill McKibben, a scientist and environmental activist who wrote the influential End of Nature - one of the first books for a mainstream audience on climate change - has followed up with this doomsday study of possible homosapien endgames - which include rising tides, falling crops and exploding populations.

Oceans heating up and disrupting photosynthesis leading to mass suffocation

 By the end of this century if the world's oceans continue to warm up they might become hot enough to stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the delicate process of photosynthesis, a 2015 study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology suggested.

More than two thirds of the earth's oxygen comes from phyto-plankton so the disruption of photosynthesis would more than likely result in the mass extinction of life on earth through suffocation.

While the melting ice sheets could trigger catastrophic natural disasters capable of decimating entire countries. In fact, increased seismic activity has been registered in Alaska and Greenland, suggesting this process has already begun.

Melting icecaps sparking catastrophic tsunamis destroying coastal life

 Additionally, the increased seawater could create a bending in the earth's crust which would prompt a massive increase in volcanic activity with lava poisoning marine life.

'That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It'll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,' the director of University College London's Hazard Centre told Rolling Stone magazine.

Scientists have evidence that such an event happened before. Some 8,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, a section of Norway's continental shelf collapsed creating a series of gigantic waves which swept all signs of life away from coastal Norway to Greenland.

Such was the violence of the waves, thought to be some 65ft tall, that a landmass connecting Britain to parts of Europe was drowned.

Deadly diseases in frozen animals thawing out and contaminating the water supply

 Melting icecaps has revealed a treasure chest of well preserved artifacts and specimens for scientists to study. But they could also bring the return of lethal diseases trapped in permafrost.

One example the book lists is a reindeer carcass that thawed after many thousands of years. The exposed body released anthrax into the surrounding water and soil which they infected two thousand reindeer grazing nearby, and they in turn infected some humans who hunted them - killing one 12-year-old boy.

Permafrost creates the perfect conditions for microbes and viruses to survive because 'it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark'.

Scientists have managed to revive an eight-million-year-old bacterium they found beneath the surface of a glacier.

While researchers believe there are fragments of the Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and Alaska, which could all infect humans should they be released from their frozen state.

Increased carbon dioxide causing decreased brain function

McKibben also points to the increased carbon dioxide levels impairing cognitive ability. Again, by the year 2100, carbon dioxide levels could rise to a thousand parts per million, while would cause a 21 percent cognitive regression.

A study on the effects of cognitive impairment through carbon dioxide poisoning showed the most pronounced effects on 'crisis response, information usage and strategy' functions within our brains, one Harvard study reported.   

Food supply breakdown causing mass starvation

While humans have for large parts of the late twentieth and early twenty first century managed to keep ahead of an exploding global population, it has come at a great human cost.

Farmers have been displaced in third world countries, forcing them into slums, while fertilizers, pesticides and machinery has increased production radically.

However, that production could be completely halted with increased heat and drought, with studies on coffee, cacao and chickpea growth highlighting the damning effect warming has on them.

The food source humans most rely on, though, is also the ones that are most at risk.

Cereals are the cornerstone of human nutrition providing the vast majority of the world's calories: corn, wheat and rice all evolved as crops in the climate of the past 10,000 years - so a sudden spike to that climate, at a rate evolution cannot maintain, means the crops will die and fail to grow in the new, parched land.

A 2017 study in Australia, home to some of the world's highest-tech farming, found that 'wheat productivity has flatlined as a direct result of climate change.'

Wheat yields tripled between 1990 and 1990 but have stagnated since then as temperature increases and rainfall declined by nearly a third.

In June 2018, researchers found that a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature - which is what the Paris accord is targeting - could cut U.S. corn yields by 18 percent.

A four-degree increase - the earth's current trajectory would cut the crop almost in half.

It is a similar story for corn, the planet's most widely grown crop. The systematic breakdown of mass agricultural farming would see the foundation of human sustenance wiped out, plunging the earth into a mass scavenging race for nutrition.

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Scientists Prove Man-Made Global Warming Is a Hoax

Not quite but temperatures were much higher 3 million years ago while CO2 levels were the same as today. It seems clear that CO2 was not the cause of the warming 3 million years ago so how do we know that there is any connection now?  We don't

The far-left ThinkProgress reports that scientists have finally proven that the theory of man-made Global Warming is a total hoax.
Of course, no one will admit it, but that is exactly what has happened.

A new scientific study shows has revealed the following:

Current CO2 levels of 410 parts per million (ppm) were last seen on Earth three million years ago, according to the most detailed reconstruction of the Earth’s climate by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and published in Science Advances.

Yes, you read that correctly, three million — million — years ago CO2 levels on Earth were the same as they are today, but there is one major difference between three million years ago and today…

Three million years ago, we humans were not driving cars or eating the meat that requires cow farts; we weren’t barbecuing or refusing to recycle or building factories; there was no Industrial Age, no plastic, no air conditioning, no electricity, no lumber mills, no consumerism, no aerosols.

In fact, three million years ago, there were probably no human beings on Earth, at least not human in the way we use that term today. And yet…

CO2 levels were the same then as they are now…

Hmmm…?

But I thought humans warmed the planet? That’s the hustle we’ve been sold for three decades now — you know, that WE are the problem.

We have also been told the problem is DEFINITELY NOT a billions-year-old planet running through cycles where the temperature might fluctuate a bit. Oh, no, that could never be it — so stop saying that could be, you Denier.

Well, what about the Ice Age that occurred thousands and thousands of years before the Industrial Age.

Shut up, Denier.

And yet…

According to the study, scientists also discovered that during this period of Global Warming “there were no ice sheets covering either Greenland or West Antarctica, and much of the East Antarctic ice sheet was gone.”

How is this possible 2,999,971 years before Arnold Schwarzenegger bought his Hummer?

It gets worse:

Temperatures were up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer globally, at least double that at the poles, and sea levels were some 20 meters (65 feet) higher.

How is that possible 2,999,945 years before Americans moved to the suburbs and lit up the charcoal grills?

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The attack on CO2 emissions is an attack on combustion -- which has been behind most technological progress

Science is not the only subject where there is limited public knowledge. There seems to be little understanding of human history. Throughout history, the discovery of fire has been recognized as the greatest factor in the development of civilized society. To generations connected to the earth’s real physical struggles, the benefit of fire is unquestioned. To those who have ‘evolved’ free of lives most basic demands, it is important that we remind ourselves of the necessity of combustion.

The greatest initial benefit for mankind from fire was light in the dark and warmth in the cold. This was soon followed by the cooking of food, which reduced disease transmission, improved digestibility and refined tastes. That was soon followed by fired clay pottery and sanitation of water thru boiling.

Sometimes limestone rock surrounded the fire pit, and when heated, produced cement. This led to mortar, stucco, concrete and better bricks. Fire allowed us to refine and mold metals, and to clear vast areas of existing vegetation so that humans could cultivate crops. Fire gave us the first method controlling epidemics by burning infected bodies, possessions, even villages. Fire was also man’s first weapon of mass destruction.

When harnessed to steam engines, fire freed us from the drudgery of muscle work and the uncertainty and inefficiency of sail. Fire lifted the first balloons, which gave mankind the gift of flight. When liquid fuels were developed for internal combustion engines, there was an unimaginable increase in the individual’s production capability. This ‘force multiplier’ has had a tremendous impact on everyone’s life.

Think of the countless lifetimes it would take in walking or horse riding to duplicate the travels of the average person in a modern society. Think of the countless hours of drudgery in your life if every blade of grass and board of wood was cut by hand. And yet, that has always been mankind’s duty, until the twentieth century. Then there was a weird coincidence of events.

First, tractors freed millions from the horse drawn plow to live in a post-agrarian society. As industrialization efficiency improved most physical labor could be replaced with managerial and bureauctic employment. Large portions of the population were for the first time in history freed from most daily contact with the harsh conditions previously required to exist on this planet. They were now empowered to manage and dictate the behavior of those still bound by nature.

Then in the last century two other forces developed to reinforce this absurd and detached evolution in life style. Progressivism developed at the beginning of the twentieth century to employee this newly freed population in the utopian dream that mankind’s energies could now be planned and controlled by expanding government bureaucracy.

Failure of these plans, in many places and at many times, in the last century have not deterred the still fervent belief that the perfect autocracy is soon to be achieved. Those freed from the dictates of nature were now the masters and overseers of those still bound by the forces of nature. The mid century Nihilist philosophy of ‘values are baseless and nothing is knowable’ would stem from these same detached minds.

Educators embraced both movements and indoctrinated the rapidly expanding population of detached minds. These great minds were now free from having to make any sense and from needing the correct answer. The ultimate expression of this detached and completely unrealistic movement is the current pseudo-science of the climate debate and the villianization of combustion.

Funny that it only takes a few generations of luxury brought by combustion to renounce the benefit of combustion. Carbon dioxide is a benign molecule that is essential to life molecule. The one word that describes each of us the moment when we quit producing carbon dioxide is DEAD. And now these great, detached minds are telling us that to solve a non-existent problem we must be taxed and completely controlled on our use of combustion.

No level of control by these freed minds will provide the expected outcome so the rules will be ever changing and ever increasing. The only way a bureaucrat can get a raise is to create new opportunities within the bureaucracy.

Global warming, which was modified to global climate change to accommodate the current cooling cycle, is the worst ‘science’ since the world was flat. Prolonged exposure to CO2 levels fifty times higher than normal have no measurable side effects and yet the EPA has just declared that CO2 is a toxic substance.

Believing that the world was flat didn’t change the planets shape.

Believing that carbon dioxide is a toxin does not make it a toxin.

Believing that a change of several parts per million of a simple, naturally occurring, and three-atom molecule is going to impact the climate is delusional.

The forces that will be the only beneficiary of carbon control are now controlling the only information allowed in the debate of these new laws, taxes and regulations.

The fix is in because the loyal opposition is a little too loyal to the same puppet masters. As we all know, fire can be our friend or foe. But it is not something that government can or should have complete control over. We are being offered a great restriction in our freedom in exchange for the creation of a new government revenue stream. We must resist these forces tampering with the cornerstone of civilization. We must demand genuine climate change debate.

I refuse to follow the Neo-Maoist leadership and their lemming like propaganda network. Typical of ‘New Think’ is the ‘New Speak’ term for those of us counterrevolutionaries who oppose the AGW indoctrination. We are labeled ‘deniers’ when in fact we are ‘deniees’….those who are denied a right to express our informed opinions in this declared settled debate. Central planning can dictate, but they have no answers.

Society would not exist without science or combustion. And yet, science has proven easy to corrupt and combustion easy to demonize. It is time for those of us with some level of residual cognitive ability to rebel against this oppressive mind control system. I chose to follow in the footsteps of Patrick Henry. I will man the barricades against the AGW fraud until my last CO2 ladened breath.

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“RRR” (Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle) is mostly a “feel-good” idea without any benefit

I have no problem with any of the “RRR” terms per se, but only within the framework of proper cost/benefit analyses. Willy-nilly application of any of those “R’s” without an understanding of their true effects, their costs (both here and elsewhere), or (known) better alternatives, makes the problems only get worse, not better.

The (environmental) problems we now have in parts of the world are mostly because of inadequate treatment of “garbage.”  The “RRR idea” is, unfortunately, contributing to the problems, for a simple reason.

Typical household  garbage is no longer (and hasn’t been for decades now) a “clean” assemblage of materials that can be easily composted to produce fertile soil, or even be reused/recycled to produce newer or better materials for any purpose.

Not only do we not have the capability to convert all kinds of plastics, like food containers, magazine mailing envelopes, and numerous other plastics into new products, even if we could, it still would be a waste of energy. From collection, to storage, to sorting, to cleaning, to actually “recycling,” each step consumes energy, labor, space, clean water and — in the end – is a no-win situation all around.

Not long ago, our local “recycling” system recognized it, in a small part only, by no longer accepting Styrofoam for recycling. It is now to be disposed in regular garbage.

Garbage should be Destroyed, not “Recycled”

I find it truly amazing how folks who proclaim to be highly concerned about such things as “pollution,” “climate change,” and related concerns can be so naïve to expect that “out-of-sight” is the same as “problem solved.”

Garbage should be destroyed for good, for several good reasons. Nearly all of it cannot actually be recycled and turned into other products. The most obvious reason is that most materials are not clean enough to do so and, even if they were, it still would be an energy-wasteful exercise in futility.

So, what’s the solution out of this apparent dilemma?

Simply add another “R”

That additional “R” stands for “Recapture” of the energy content. Any modern garbage incineration plant with catalytic “afterburners” can do that. Thousands of tons of municipal refuse can thus be reduced to a few cubic feet of solid material, some of which can truly be recycled (e.g. metal components) and the current landfill sites will last for centuries.

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A lot of dam potential

CFACT’s recent article “What’s the Dam Deal?” by Grace Cancelmo raises important questions about expanding the use of dams for hydropower and other useful purposes. The US Energy Department (DOE) has done some interesting research on this topic, because dams are already our biggest renewable energy source, by far. Increased interest in mitigating droughts and floods also points to dams as a possible strategy, so I decided to look into the potential for increasing the use of dams in America.

As Cancelmo points out, there are already a great many dams, with over 90,000 listed in the National Inventory of Dams. The Inventory started in 1972 with 45,000 dams (I was involved in creating it, as a junior engineer) so we have doubled since then.

Very few of these dams have hydropower capacity, so the first thing to look at is adding that capability. After all, the dam is already there, so the cost is minimal compared to building a new hydro dam.

However, every existing dam already has one or more purposes, so its ability to handle hydro generation may be limited. Let’s quickly look at the main purposes and how well they might handle hydro.

To begin with, there are two basic types, namely those with the ability to store a lot of water for future use and those that cannot do that for one reason or another. They can all still generate power, but the ones without storage can only do so when the water happens to be there. In this respect they are like wind and solar power, which is unpredictably intermittent.

Two of the principle no-storage types are navigation and recreation dams. A number of the major U.S. rivers have been what is called “canalized,” which means they have a series of locks and dams so that boat traffic, especially freight barges, can use them. These are navigation dams. They do not store water but there is a big river flowing over them so pretty good hydro potential.

A lot of the smaller dams in the Inventory are built for recreation, especially boating and fishing. These reservoirs will have houses and docks built around them, so the water level has to stay pretty constant. This means they cannot store a lot of water, and then release it later to generate power, because this causes a large variation in water level. But if there is a good stream or river flowing through then it can be used to generate hydro, when it is flowing well.

Those with storage can wait until the power is needed, which makes their power more valuable. However, whether they will have water to store, or to spare once stored, will still be unpredictable, as it depends on how much precipitation occurs and when it happens. Three common types of dam with potential storage capacity are those for flood control, municipal water supply and irrigation water supply.

Back in 2012, DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory did an assessment of the potential for adding hydro to America’s non-powered dams. The numbers are pretty large.

The study estimates that the nation has over 50,000 suitable non-powered dams with the technical potential to add about 12,000 megawatts (MW) of hydropower capacity. The 100 largest capacity facilities—primarily locks and dams on the Ohio, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas rivers operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—could provide 8,000 MW of power combined.

Note that there are 10,000 more dams now then back then. Also, this study did not consider increasing the power capacity of existing hydro generating facilities.

In short there is significant potential for adding hydropower capacity to America’s existing dams.

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