SOC Global Environmental colapse the view from the sand box……..Pt. 2

If you have not read the first piece SOC Power Politics and Economics the view from the sand box……….Pt. 1), I would encourage you to do so.  It introduces the notion of SOC  and catastrophea and why it is important and real.

Let us step into the way back machine and take a journey with me.  The year is 1973.  In this year I was a senior in high school getting ready to graduate.  In this year two pivotal events occurred which shaped the soul that I am.  The first was the publication of a book, “The Limits to Growth”.  The second was an article in the Wall Street Journal.

The book “The Limits to Growth” was a book which caused an uproar.  It was at the time received so coldly by both the business and political community that one would have thought they had declared Communism the victor in the struggle of the Cold War.  What was the method and message of that book that it would be roundly dismissed and upbraided.

The article in The WSJ was barely noticed and ignored in the wishful chaos of the time but it had the haunting character of the wind whistling mournfully in the halls of my life.  What did they say and why did it foreshadow the fulfillment of the book I have mentioned above.

The basic upshot of the WSJ article was the source of the piece I wrote “the game of musical chairs and the myth of modernity”…….

They only said that mine was to be the first generation since the great depression to do on average worse than their parents, and that each succeding generation would do worse if nothing changed.  That is all that they said.  It was not what they said, it was what they did not say that put fear and darkness in my already troubled soul.  What they did not say, could not say, was said by the book “The Limits to Growth”.  The fact that the group of systems theorists did say what the WSJ would not say was the reason it was dismissed as alarmist.

Together these two written works told a story of a future that filled me with foreboding.  From that year until just this year I have been on a journey to understand human beings and the journey we were on.  At first I studied systems theory, and mathematics, to understand the underlying foundation for the models and conclusions in the book.  At the same time I under took a study of the esoteric beliefs of those who had gone before me, in an effort to understand the growing shadow inside myself.

My life has been given the gift of being broken and full of trauma.  In the eighties and nineties I studied psychology and human development, and the spiritual systems of Buddhism, Taoism, and aboriginal spirituality.  At the same time I began an exploration of the emerging field of complexity and chaos theory.  This was coupled with a deeper study of the development of human neurology and the psychology of family systems and the issues of historical trauma.  At the same time I began to look at this thing we called evolution.  All of these and few more provided the basis for the conclusions I have drawn.  None of this makes me correct in my conclusions.  They are only a description of where my soul traveled in order to find understanding of the future I lived in daily fear of.

The model the limits to growth used was very crude model by the standards of today.  It was what is called an aggregate model.  It did not discuss anything but the very general behavior of the system of human activity as a whole.  The book was comprised of a set of 20-30 model runs which represented the global behavior of population and other factors based on sets of assumptions about likely paths of human action or inaction in the near future.  Each model run had a curve depicting population, production,environmental health,per capita wealth, per capita social services, etc.., and all model runs had some version of a set of curves which tracked against time the behavior of those variables.  All of the curves had a characteristic S shape at the beginning and then followed three different sets of paths at the end.

The first set of final paths assumed we would react early and accurately to the existence of throughput limits and they all leveled off at or near the carrying capacity of the planet and then gradually rose as our instrumentality allowed us to live more artfully on this earth.  They were the most optimistic runs of the model. The next set of final paths went above the carying capacity but recovered and the carrying capacity of the planet dropped for the period of time we were in overshoot, then they rose and fell finally arriving at a stable carrying capacity.  Wiggling up and down as we over and under reacted.  But they allowed for a future with a high degree of vigor and recovery, below where we are now.  With population and carrying capacity below where we are now, but some measure of instrumentality and industrial capacity intact.  The final set were all collapse in which we went into overshoot and failed to respond.  The outcomes were always the same no matter how you changed the assumptions, a catastrophic collapse of human population and the destruction of the carrying capacity of the planet.  Being the seventies the systems theorists who wrote these models all said do not worry we can easily respond in appropriate ways and will because the survival of life is at stake.  The seventies were a hopelessly optimistic time.  Well the seventies came and went.  Then the eighties came.  The capital class of the human race set itself the task to deny, disconfirm and delay any response which would slow down the process of growth.  The folks who had written those models came back 20 years later and wrote a sequel, in the nineties.  In it they confirmed the model to be accurate in its predictions to with in 3%.  Which for a model of its kind was pretty damn good.  And despite the total lack of any meaningful action on the part of the politicians and capital class they tried to be hopeful again this time out of fear of being branded alarmist.  After all this was the era of Clinton and the hip, slick and cool.  The don’t worry fuck somebody crowd, we can deal with that tomorrow there is still plenty of time.  All of the model runs made an assumption which turned out to be brutally impossible.  They assumed to save ourselves we would redistribute the capital of the world to the population of the planet, to reach demographic transition in the biggest, and fastest growing, and poorest populations.  We each could have had at that time the material well being of the average Eastern European.  Shelter, adequate nutrition and health care and access to education.  That assumption was the one which set the capital class in motion.  They bought the congress and then bought the media and educational system.  And the mantra began in order for you be one of the comfortable members  of the human race, versus one of the growing hoard of very uncomfortable ones, you had to play the game as they defined it, and we went along.  One final fact occurred towards the end of the nineties and perhaps earlier depending on how you look at it.  We began to go into overshoot in several critical throughputs.  In the eighties and perhaps earlier went into overshot in the carbon throughput.  In the nineties we went into overshoot in the water throughput.  In the nineties we went into overshoot in the throughput of species loss.  In the early part of this decade we began to notice that we had begun to deplete the richest most dense sources of a great many resources, and we are going into petroleum top out as we speak.

Through out this process we have been exposed to the prognastication of the scientific community.  They assured us that global average temp would rise only slightly, perhaps a degree in a hundred years nothing to worry about.  Then opps it might be 3 degrees in a hundred years, opps again maybe 6 degrees in a hundred years.  They said that the ice would never melt, then well it will melt but in 3-400 years, then opps it is melting faster then we thought, then opps it is melting 5 times faster then we just said opps about….  well you get the picture.  Why is this.  The principal reason for the complete failure of the modelers is SOC.  In the seventies we had very little hard data so our models were very general and in fact far more accurate than todays models.  One of the first things the capital class did to sabotage this situation was to say we needed to study it more.  So we set out in an effort to gather more data both to understand the problem and to convince the public that action needed to be taken.  However we have been measuring and our measurements are always behind not in front of the predictive curve.  We have lost the forest for the measurement of the trees.  And that very data has been used to cloud the issue.  We have known for 40+ years all we needed to know and exactly what to do.  But a determined group of people have set out to destroy the human race so that they can retain their position of privelege and power.  The brutal fact is the models have always underestimated the true non linear behavior of the dynamic and will.  Meanwhile the we got to study it crowd, have had 40+ years to take over the planet and create the foundation for feudal technocracy.  I hate to break it to you it is so much worse than we think that most of us would not want to get up in the morning if we truely understood.  We have set off several sets of no return triggers at this point, making human action to stop it meaningless.  The least of which is methane and an ice free arctic.

Throughout this it must be understood that there are a class of inhuman beings who have known all along that this was true.  These people made themselves evident shortly after George Bush Jr. was elected.  Shortly after his election he admitted in public that global warming was real.  The next day the RNC printed a letter which demand he deny it and take back his statement.  The letter stated that if he were to stick with his admission it would make people realise just how immoral their position of we do not want to do anything yet, we need to study it, was.  And being the good little sock puppet that he was shortly afterwards he said what he meant was just that,  we need to study it more.

We are on the decks of the Titanic.  We set sail and hit an ice berg.  The unsinkable ship is going down.  The wealthy have taken the life boats and left us below or on deck.  We will not stop the ship from going down.  But the band plays on……..

There will be no magical fixes.  They want it to go down.  They just want to be the ones in the life boats.  I can not make it any clearer than that.

As methane boils first out of the tundra and then out of the oceans the planet is going to warm up. And I assure you it is going to be much more than a mere 3 degrees, more than 6 degrees before this is over.  We are going to add roughly 20000 times the carbon burden of the last 180 years of industrial activity and none of it is ours.  It is just a no return we have triggered already.  Let me say it again it is a done deal, no stopping it.  And let me be clear about one final thing, there are folks who know this and are preparing to not just throw us under the bus,  they are preparing to take the life boats and leave us on deck.  The forests of the northern hemisphere are toast.  50% of the species of the planet are going to disappear in what will be seen by those that come after us as an ELE(Extinction Level Event).  This will it collapse , will it not collapse crap is specious, it is going to go through a catastrophic SOC event of epic proprotions.  And meanwhile the band plays on arguing over which phreaking party to back.  Folks they are bought and sold.  We keep watching the sock puppet and not noticing that it is the same phreaking hand.  There is the little matter of what happens to all of that ice which of course wont melt…..OH dear it is melting… Oh dear it is melting faster much faster ……..I got some hard news most if not all of it is most definitely melting and its rate of melt is accelerating….and more importantly the rate of the rate of melting is increasing… that little notion of the consequences of the behavior of the second and third derivatives of this particular quantity…..it is going to dump and it is going to force one third of the human race to migrate and where will they go…..where will they be welcome……wars are fought over much less…..and the Defense Department said just that as well as the World Bank a few years back.  After all of this is over…. and we are no longer a technical and industrial syphilization  the carbon will begin to come out of the atmosphere….for co2 it is about 300 year half life and for methane around 24 years…..which means our world is going to reflex from deserts and fire and droughts….to flood….. to an ice age…..same as it ever was…..the great wheel of fire and ice embedded in our mythologies……

fire….water….ice…..

the great sieve of evolution…..

been going on for millions of years and the real driver behind human evolution….

Catastrophea is real……

I am sitting on the deck of the titanic sand trickling throw my grasp…….

Grain after grain falling onto the pile and the pile always behaves the same…..

It always grows to a certain shape and then under goes a reorganization….

An SOC event…..

We are at scale and an SOC event at scale is always catastrophic……..

This is not the first and it most certainly will not be the last…..

But if you do a little research you will realize that that is not something a species goes through unprepared and remains in lifes genomic envelope…..

Somewhere along the way I decided to try to save the world I love……

I realized I had been created and broken by life so that in my seeking of wholeness I could help out…..

That is where I stand today…..

I seek to ease the coming suffering…..

I seek to help create the way for as many of  us to live as possible…..

Not just to live but to thrive…..

I do not have a tin foil hat I have a fleece one……

I am not afraid……

Because in coming to terms with the future I discovered the path through the present to it….

In Pt 3. – 7  I will outline what I believe to be the broad boundaries of a response.  We have everything we need to respond to what is coming what is missing is the clear recognition of where we actually are  and the will to do something about it.  Playing in the band is not an option if you want to save the world you love….  

The political system will not act in time it is owned by those in the life boats and we are still on deck………and that is the view from sand box…..on the decks of the titanic…….