Life on Earth is Dying. Thousands of Species Cease to Exist. Homo Sapiens is the Cause

First published by Global Research on April 20, 2017

On the day that you read this article, 200 species of life on Earth (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) will cease to exist. Tomorrow, another 200 species will vanish forever.

The human onslaught to destroy life on Earth is unprecedented in Earth’s history. Planet Earth is now experiencing its sixth mass extinction event and Homo sapiens is the cause. Moreover, this mass extinction event is accelerating and is so comprehensive in its impact that the piecemeal measures being taken by the United Nations, international agencies and governments constitute a tokenism that is breathtaking in the extreme.

And it is no longer the case that mainly ‘invisible’ species are vanishing: those insects, amphibians and small animals about which you had never even heard, assuming they have been identified and given a name by humans.

You and I are on the brink of driving to extinction some of the most iconic species alive today. For a photo gallery of threatened species, some of which are ‘critically endangered’, see ‘World’s wildlife being pushed to the edge by humans – in pictures’.

If you want to read more about some aspects of the extinction threat, you can do so in these recent reports: ‘World Wildlife Crime Report: Trafficking in protected species’ and ‘2016 Living Planet Report’  which includes these words: ‘The main statistic from the report … shows a 58% decline between 1970 and 2012. This means that, on average, animal populations are roughly half the size they were 42 years ago.’

And if you want to read just one aspect of what is happening in the world’s oceans, this recent UN report will give you something to ponder: ‘New UN report finds marine debris harming more than 800 species, costing countries millions’. 

Of course, some of what is happening is related to the ongoing climate catastrophe and there isn’t any good news on that front. See ‘What’s Happening in the Arctic is Astonishing’.

But not everything that is going badly wrong is well known either. Did you know that we are destroying the Earth’s soil? See ‘Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues’.

Killing the Biosphere to Fast-track Human Extinction

And did you realise that even nitrogen is now a huge problem too? See ‘Scientists shine a spotlight on the overlooked menace of nitrogen’.

Of course, military violence has devastating consequences on the Earth’s ecosystems too, destroying land, water and atmosphere (not to mention killing human beings) in the fight over resources. You will get no joy from the article ‘Iraq’s oil inferno – government inaction in the face of eco-terrorism’ or the website of the Toxic Remnants of War Project. 

But every single aspect of military spending is ultimately used to destroy. It has no other function.

While 2.5 billion human beings do not have enough to eat. See ‘One in three people suffers malnutrition at global cost of $3.5 trillion a year’

As you read all this, you might say ‘Not me’! But you are wrong. You don’t have to be an impoverished African driven to killing elephants for their tusks so that you can survive yourself. You don’t have to be a farmer who is destroying the soil with synthetic poisons. You don’t have to be a soldier who kills and destroys or a person who works for a corporation that, one way to another, forces peasants off their land.

You just have to be an ‘ordinary’ person who pays your military taxes and consumes more than your share of world resources while participating without challenge in the global system of violence and exploitation managed by the global elite.

‘Why is this?’ you might ask.

This is because the primary driver of the human-induced mass extinction is not such things as some people hunting a particular lifeform to extinction, horrendous though this is. In fact, just two things drive most species over the edge: our systematic destruction of land habitat – forests, grasslands, wetlands, peatlands, mangroves… – in our endless effort to capture more of the Earth’s wild places for human use (whether it be residential, commercial, mining, farming or military) and our destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat by dumping into them radioactive contaminants, carbon dioxide, a multitude of poisons and chemical pollutants, and even plastic.

And do you know what drives this destruction of land and water habitats? Your demand for consumer products, all of which are produced by using land and water habitats, and the resources derived from them, often far from where you live. The most basic products, such as food and clothing, are produced on agricultural land, sometimes created by destroying rainforests, or taken from the ocean (where overfishing has savagely depleted global fish stocks). But in using these resources, we have ignored the needs of the land, oceans and the waterways for adequate regenerative inputs and recovery time.

We also participate, almost invariably without question or challenge, in the inequitable distribution of resources that compels some impoverished people to take desperate measures to survive through such means as farming marginal land or killing endangered wildlife.

So don’t sit back waiting for some miracle by the United Nations, international agencies or governments to solve this problem. It cannot happen for the simple reason that these organizations are all taking action within the existing paradigm that prioritizes corporate profit and military violence over human equity and ecological sustainability.

Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, they are encouraging overconsumption by industrialized populations and facilitating the inequitable distribution of income and wealth precisely because this benefits those who control these organizations, agencies and governments: the insane corporate elites who are devoid of the capacity to see any value beyond the ‘bottom line’. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’. 

If you want action on the greatest challenge human beings have ever faced – to avert our own extinction by learning to live in harmony with our biosphere and equity with our fellow humans – then I encourage you to take personal responsibility.

If you do, you need to act. At the simplest level, you can make some difficult but valuable personal choices. Like becoming a vegan or vegetarian, buying/growing organic/biodynamic food, and resolutely refusing to use any form of poison or to drive a car or take an airline flight.

But if you want to take an integrated approach, the most powerful way you can do this is to systematically reduce your own personal consumption while increasing your self-reliance. Anita McKone and I have mapped out a fifteen-year strategy for doing this in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ which obviously includes nonviolence towards our fellow species.

One of the hidden tragedies of modern human existence is that we have been terrorized into believing that we are not personally responsible. See ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”‘.

For a fuller explanation, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. 

It isn’t true but few people feel powerful enough to make a difference.

And every time you decide to do nothing and to leave it to someone else, you demonstrate why no-one else should do anything either.

Extinction beckons. What will you do?

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Robert J. Burrowes, Global Research, 2018

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Cape Town water crisis prompts rationing to prevent Day Zero tap shutoff

I try to remain objective on global warming , but we must admit the evidence is starting to build. China is planning a polar silk road. Cape Town is one of millions of cities being stressed by overpopulation and limited natural resources. Perhaps South Africa could exchange its unlimited, but controlled and manipulated, supply of diamonds for ship loads of water?

Average reservoir level in Cape Town, population 4 million, is at 27%, but not all of that is usable

Source link

http://www.cbc.ca

The Associated Press

Posted: Jan 26, 2018

People queue to collect water from a natural spring outlet in the Cape Town suburb of St. James on Jan. 20. Residents are being advised to reduce daily water usage by over 40 per cent to avoid a Day Zero scenario that could happen in the coming weeks. (The Associated Press)

 

Long lines of South Africans collect water daily from a natural spring pipeline in an upscale suburb of Cape Town, illustrating the harsh impact of a drought that authorities say could force the closure of most taps in the country’s second largest city in just over two months, an occasion ominously known as Day Zero.

The prospect that large sections of South Africa’s showcase city, famously perched near two oceans, might go without running water has induced anxiety as well as resolve among its nearly four million residents. It has attracted scrutiny from scientists and city managers worldwide who also face the dual challenge of ballooning populations and shrinking resources. If it goes dry, Cape Town would become the world’s first major city to do so.

“There are a lot of people who have been in denial and now they suddenly realize this is for real,” said Shirley Curry, who waited to fill a plastic container with spring water from one of several taps outside a South African Breweries facility in the Newlands suburb.

 Security guards made sure people took only an allotted amount – 25 litres maximum in one line and 15 litres in another express line. However, things were more freewheeling at a nearby spring water source with no oversight. Mayor Patricia de Lille this month threatened to fine those who use too much water and said the city can no longer ask people to comply: “We must force them.”

• Cape Town’s plans to shut off water will mostly hurt poorest residents, local activist warns

The spectacle of people scrounging for water could become more common as Day Zero approaches in Cape Town, whose natural beauty has made it a coveted spot for international visitors. While the city urges people to restrict water usage, many living in poor areas already have limited access to water. They use communal taps in gritty neighbourhoods such as Blue Downs on the Cape Flats, where people washed clothes outside and carried buckets of water to shack dwellings on a recent afternoon.

People collect water from a communal tap at an informal settlement near Cape Town on Tuesday. While the city urges people to restrict water usage, many living in poor areas already have limited access to it. (The Associated Press)

Cape Town’s leaders have instructed residents to use only 50 litres of water daily from Feb. 1, down from the current 87-litre limit. Day Zero is projected to arrive on April 12, but some fear it could come sooner, while others hope it won’t happen if rationing works and rains eventually come.

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MASS EXTINCTION event now under way that will decimate the global human population, scientists claim

Source: MASS EXTINCTION event now under way that will decimate the global human population, scientists claim – NaturalNews.com

With permission from

NaturalNews.com

by: Mike Adams

August 20, 2017

(Natural News) A hotly-debated study led by Professor Gerardo Ceballos at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico warns that the human population explosion is leading to the widespread contamination and destruction of the planet, ultimately collapsing life support systems upon which human civilization depends. As reported by The Times of Israel:

Human overpopulation and over-consumption are leading Earth to its sixth mass extinction faster than was previously thought, with the human race likely to be eradicated along the way, a new study warns…

These findings indicate nothing short of “biological annihilation,” the scientists conclude, “a massive anthropogenic [human-driven] erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization.”

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was co-authored by Paul R. Ehrlich, a population control advocate.

Adding to the controversy of the study, Paul Ehrlich’s views have also been cited by population control advocates like Bill Gates, who calls for an engineered depopulation of the planet in order to achieve long-term sustainability. Bill Gates has donated millions of dollars to infertility technologies and vaccine “innovations” that include vaccines in Africa being covertly laced with infertility chemicals to achieve a race-based “medical cleansing” / genocide by making sure black people don’t reproduce.

To some, the warnings of Paul Ehrlich echo the hysteria of globalists like Al Gore, who claims that climate change, not chemical poisoning of the planet, will destroy human civilization unless everybody agrees to pay him $15 trillion dollars. In truth, “climate change” only predicts oceans rising less than a meter in a hundred years, yet the mass chemical poisoning of our world will collapse human civilization long before rising oceans becomes a relevant issue (and that’s assuming the temperature data are accurate, but we know much of those data are routinely faked by the pro-climate change science hustlers).

The entire “environmental” movement ignores all the real, immediate threats to our planet

What’s my take on all this? The real threat to sustainable life on our planet isn’t so-called “climate change,” it’s the mass contamination of our world with pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceutical runoff, hormone-disruptor chemicals, genetically engineered crops, heavy metals in medicine (such as mercury in vaccines), industrial chemicals and biosludge. Yet, astonishingly, no mainstream environmentalists seem to care about any of these threats. The entire environmental movement has become nothing more than a mindless climate change echo chamber, totally clueless about the real threats to our world that are destroying sustainability right now.

For example, left-leaning environmentalists are now openly denying the chemical gender-bender effects of atrazine because they all want to believe that gender is a “choice” rather than something that can be altered by chemical exposure. So they deny all the science surrounding atrazine because it conflicts with their LGBT narratives. In a similar way, the same Leftists who warned about cigarette smoke causing cancer now believe that marijuana smoke is somehow harmless, even though it contains many of the exact same carcinogens as tobacco smoke. Meanwhile, California’s hemp farms are producing massive tonnage of toxic runoff, poisoning thousands of acres of land across the state. And nobody seems to care, since it’s all being done in the name of “pot legalization.”

In my view, if we don’t stop the mass chemical poisoning of our world — and of ourselves — we will of course destroy ourselves in the process. That’s why I’ve dubbed humanity a “suicide cult.” In the name of corporate profits, humans are poisoning their food (pesticides), poisoning their minds (psychiatric drugs), poisoning their agricultural soils (glyphosate) and even poisoning their children (toxic vaccines).

Watch this Natural News video to learn more, and see all Natural News videos at this Vimeo link.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/230345426

 

Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse

Source: Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse | The Tyee

TheTyee.ca

By William E. Rees 

William E. Rees is professor emeritus of human ecology and ecological economics at the University of British Columbia.

July 17, 2017

‘Overshoot’ is when a species uses resources faster than can be replenished. We’re already there. And show no signs of changing.

Too many people consuming too many resources and deepening inequality a prescription for disaster. Tokyo photo by Marco Verch, Creative Commons licensed.

Humans have a virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, even when self-preservation is at stake.

The scariest example is the simplistic, growth-oriented, market-based economic thinking that is all but running the world today. Prevailing neoliberal economic models make no useful reference to the dynamics of the ecosystems or social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world.

What truly intelligent species would attempt to fly spaceship Earth, with all its mind-boggling complexity, using the conceptual equivalent of a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle driver’s manual?

Consider economists’ (and therefore society’s) near-universal obsession with continuous economic growth on a finite planet. A recent ringing example is Kaushik Basu’s glowing prediction that “in 50 years, the world economy is likely (though not guaranteed) to be thriving, with global GDP growing by as much as 20 per cent per year, and income and consumption doubling every four years or so.”

Basu is the former chief economist of the World Bank, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of economics at Cornell University, so he is no flake in the economics department. But this does not prevent a display of alarming ignorance of both the power of exponential growth and the state of the ecosphere. Income and consumption doubling every four years? After just 20 years and five doublings, the economy would be larger by a factor of 32; in 50 years it will have multiplied more than 5000-fold! Basu must inhabit some infinite parallel universe.

In fairness, he does recognize that if the number of cars, airplane journeys and the like double every four years with overall consumption, “we will quickly exceed the planet’s limits.” But here’s the thing — it’s 50 years before Basu’s prediction even takes hold and we’ve already shot past several important planetary boundaries.

Little wonder. Propelled by neoliberal economic thinking and fossil fuels, techno-industrial society consumed more energy and resources during the most recent doubling (the past 35 years or so) than in all previous history. Humanity is now in dangerous ecological overshoot, using even renewable and replenishable resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and filling waste sinks beyond capacity. (Even climate change is a waste management problem — carbon dioxide is the single greatest waste by weight in all industrial economies.)

Meanwhile, wild nature is in desperate retreat. One example: from less than one per cent at the dawn of agriculture, humans and their domestic animals had ballooned to comprise 97 per cent of the total weight of terrestrial mammals by the year 2000. That number is closer to 98.5 per cent today, with wild mammals barely clinging to the margins.

The “competitive displacement” of other species is an inevitable byproduct of continuous growth on a finite planet. The expansion of humans and their artefacts necessarily means the contraction of everything else. (Politicians’ protests notwithstanding, there is a fundamental contradiction between population/economic growth and protecting the “environment.”)

Ignoring overshoot is dangerously stupid — we are financing growth, in part, by irreversibly liquidating natural resources essential to our own long-term survival.

And things can only get worse. Even at today’s “lacklustre” three-per-cent global growth rate, incomes/consumption would double in just 20 years and produce — in this century — dramatic climate change, widespread extinctions, the collapse of major biophysical systems, global strife and diminished prospects for continued civilized existence.

But even this threat isn’t enough to move the world community to act sensibly to save itself. Like a mind-altering drug, the compound myth of perpetual growth and continuous technological progress obscures reality. Economists thicken the fog by insisting that the economy is “decoupling” from nature — another illusion resulting from faulty accounting, modelling abstractions and the fudging effects of globalization (for example, wealthy countries “offshoring” their ecological impacts onto poorer countries and the global commons).

The biophysical evidence — that is, reality — shows that material consumption and waste production are still increasing with population and GDP growth. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide is accumulating at accelerating record rates in the atmosphere and the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 sequentially shared the distinction of being the warmest years in the instrumental record.

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Staving Off the Coming Global Collapse | The Tyee

The conversation between plants and soil

Source: The conversation between plants and soil

phys.org/news

By Daryl Holland

June 6, 2017

Plants have a finely balanced relationship with soil, depending on it for vital resources. Credit: Pexels

To a child, soil is just dirt – a home for worms. To a gardener, soil is a collection of organic matter and nutrients. But to plants, soil is a hotbed of chemical activity. And plants don’t just observe, they actively participate in this activity.

Plants release chemicals into the soil, called exudates, that tell microbes to turn on or turn off certain chemical processes. Scientists are beginning to understand these signals and are hoping to exploit them to improve the efficiency, sustainability and environmental impact of the trillion dollar agricultural industry.

The three main nutrients plants need to grow are carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. A plant’s carbon needs come from air in the form of carbon dioxide, but the nitrogen and phosphorus needs come from the soil, and often nitrogen is the element in shortest supply naturally – and so to increase their yields, farmers add nitrogen to the soil.

Artificial nitrogen fertiliser is an essential component of an agricultural system that feeds more than 7 billion people, but it comes with a huge environmental cost. As the population grows, and as feeding habits change to more meat-based diets, nitrogen pollution looks set to become even more of a problem.

Combatting nitrogen pollution

“The extent to which we’ve meddled with the nitrogen cycle globally is astonishing,” says Professor Herbert Kronzucker, head of the University of Melbourne’s School of BioSciences.

“210 million tonnes of nitrogen per year are taken from the atmosphere and turned into a solid form of nitrogen through human activities. And most of this ends up as fertiliser in agricultural soil.

“But less than half of this can actually be captured by plants. The rest is lost to the atmosphere as nitrogen gas or the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, or leaches into waterways where it is a major pollutant.

“In the US, more than half of all lakes are badly impacted by too much nitrogen or phosphorus.”

But what if instead of adding more and more nitrogen to the soil, we help plants to better use the nitrogen that’s already there?

Professor Kronzucker and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, Laval University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences are looking for crops that communicate with the soil in a way that reduces their nitrogen requirements. 

“We became interested in the relationship between chemicals from plants and the impact these have on soil microbes,” says Professor Kronzucker.

Human meddling

Nitrogen takes many chemical forms. The most useful forms for plant growth are nitrate (NO3-) and ammonia (NH3). Chemical processes in the soil transform nitrogen between these and other forms.

One example is a process called nitrification, which turns ammonia into nitrate. Nitrate is problematic in the soil because, while plants love it, it doesn’t stick around like ammonia does. It tends to dissolve in water and is washed out of the soil through rain and groundwater. Also, soil microbes turn nitrate into nitrogen gas, which is useless to plants.

All of these processes are reversible, and eventually nitrogen gas is returned to the soil through another microbial process called nitrogen fixation, but this process is too slow for industrial agricultural systems. Farmers have to keep adding more and more nitrogen, and usually this is in the form of artificial nitrogen fertilisers.

These fertilisers are produced using an energy intensive industrial process that ‘fixes’ nitrogen gas by turning it into ammonia. This process, called the Haber-Bosch process, was a major factor in the Green Revolution that began in the 1960s and now provides food for more than 7 billion people.

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The conversation between plants and soil

The Great Acceleration and Obliteration

“Never before in US history has the welfare of the upper crust of society taken so much precedence over the health of everything, including the 99% middle/poor class as well as the only inhabitable planet in the solar system. It’s the only one!”

Source: The Great Acceleration and Obliteration

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Robert Hunziker

May 16, 2017

Homo Sapiens live in an epoch unlike anything throughout history, figuratively speaking, as far back as Adam and Eve, especially since 1950 “the times they are a changin’” with headlong speed. In fact, ever since 1950, The Great Acceleration has taken off like a spaceship destined to hit warp speed, accelerating faster and faster. As this evolves, humanity risks becoming “a bug looking for a windshield.”

Here’s the issue with The Great Acceleration: “Only after 1945 did human actions become genuine driving forces behind crucial Earth systems” (J.R.McNeill/Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 2014, pg. 208).

Still, Earth spins within the solar system at the same rate as it has for eons, whereas in stark contrast to that steady timeless global spin, humanity’s anthropogenic spin turbocharges the entire planetary ecosystem. This has never happened before, and thus, people need to brace themselves for a major jarring to the ecosystem. In fact, it’s already started!

Silently unreported by mass media, The Great Acceleration inadvertently destroys life systems. It happens right before our eyes. Not only that but regrettably, Trumpeters will assuredly accelerate that destructive capacity. That’s guaranteed, a “done deal” for sure. The “bug looking for a windshield” has never looked more certain than when world leaders (ahem), like Trump, look away from and ignore and downplay and denigrate everything about the ecosystem, which is referred to as “home” by pretty much everybody.

Curiously, overcrowding the planet has turned the planet small, as electronics and air travel shrink the world: “In the span of one human lifetime, 1945 to 2015, global population tripled from about 2.3 billion to 7.2 billion. This bizarre interlude, with sustained population growth of more than 1 percent per annum, is of course what almost everyone on Earth now regards as normal. It is anything but normal,” Ibid, pg. 41.

The tripling of population “within only one lifetime” is remarkable, sobering, breathtaking. Woefully, that is only the beginning of a process that may run out of control because unpredictably the repercussions of The Great Acceleration are like a drunken driver on the Italian Amalfi Coastline dangerously close to going over cliff’s edge at each and every turn.

In fact, death traps already exist, as for example, from 1950 to 2015 one of the principal byproducts of The Great Acceleration, air pollution, killed 30-to-40 million people, mostly Chinese as of late, which is roughly equal to the death toll from all wars throughout the world since 1950 (source: Ibid, pg. 24).

Furthermore, industrialization is on a tear, goosing up The Great Acceleration. Since WWII, motor vehicles increased from 40 million to 850 million and plastics production increased from one million tons to 300 million tons. Those numbers are not only signals of acceleration but off the charts! Still, everybody assumes it’s normal, except for climate scientists.

Normality is belied by the conditions of the biosphere itself as human activity shifts carbon stored over millennia from the lithosphere (Earth’s upper mantle and crust) into the upper atmosphere at unsustainable rates running from 1,200 million tons per annum in 1945 to 9,500 million tons in 2015, 8xs faster within only 70 years. Eight times anything is a big number, e.g., if everyone’s wages multiplied 8xs, everyone would be rich.

Even at the unsustainable rate of 8xs, carbon emissions continue accelerating, pre-Trump, post-Trump, forever-Trump, getting a huge boost ever faster during Trump days. For example, CO2 emissions during the 2000s have been running at a 3.3% annual rate of increase versus a rate of 1.3% during the 1990s. That’s a 150% increase within only one decade. Meanwhile, the atmosphere is already filling up with CO2, the primary cause of global warming. It can only take so much before the thermostat gets stuck wide-open… relentless heat scorching agriculture.

As such, humanity has become a vast experiment; nobody’s been here before, nobody. Meanwhile, the United States, under the direction of Trumpeters, cut public links to information about the crucial carbon cycle by cutting NOAA’s budget “to the bone.” Either that’s an honest mistake or it’s a mean-spirited mistake; chose your poison. Regardless, scientists are out of favor: According to a USA Today headline: “Trump’s Proposed NOAA Budget Cuts Rattle Scientists” d/d March 6, 2017.

Meanwhile, at the core of The Great Acceleration, capitalism works… at the top! Proof: Everything is accelerating as if there are no limits to growth and more growth. That’s capitalism par excellence. But cautionary flags are ubiquitous, e.g., according to certain academic circles, there is another side to the story: “The Great Acceleration in its present form cannot last for long,” Ibid, pg. 5. Expanding balloons eventually pop.

One major risk within the context of The Great Acceleration is human behavior itself because people have a tendency to dither away precious time when it comes to life-threatening issues that appear too big to tackle and too difficult to wrap arms around, like the planet: “Whilst the US and China fiddled for 20 years from 1995-2015, arguing about terms and conditions of the Kyoto agreement, the total tonnage of global carbon emissions from the energy sector nearly equaled that of all human history prior to 1995,” Ibid, pg. 78. That’s big league acceleration!

How does it end? Regrettably, not very well with Trumpeters at the helm. They’ve publicly denounced any and all concerns about the health of the planet and/or its inhabitants, as for example, the American Health Care Act, an oxymoronic title after reading its contents, makes deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, by $800 billion. “Donald Trump is attacking low- and middle-income families, children, seniors and people with disabilities in order to hand a $6 trillion tax break to his wealthy friends―the largest tax break in U.S. history” (Source: socialsecurityworks.org).

Never before in US history has the welfare of the upper crust of society taken so much precedence over the health of everything, including the 99% middle/poor class as well as the only inhabitable planet in the solar system. It’s the only one!

Still, as it happens, within the context of The Great Acceleration, Trump’s 1% have opted to go out in flaming glory, as they are the primary beneficiaries of all that floats to the top, but then again, some of the 1% are attempting to “get out of Dodge” by escaping to planets far, far away, leaving the hordes behind to fight over tillable land.

Evidence of The Great Acceleration is far and wide. After all, it was only one generation ago in 1986 when the eminent biologist E. O. Wilson (Harvard) presciently sounded the alarm in a book titled Biodiversity (The National Academies Press): “It carries the urgent warning that we are rapidly altering and destroying the environments that have fostered the diversity of life forms for more than a billion years,” Ibid, pg. 84.

Alas, there’s no way E. O. Wilson could have foreseen Trump would come along to “seal the deal” for his prognostications and in the process actually speed up the negative aspects of The Great Acceleration, as America becomes great again, maybe/probably not, but if so, for very, very short duration.

Withal, don’t stand underneath national monuments. Those are subject to severe budget cuts, poor maintenance, and unexpectedly crashing down forevermore as the nation loses its soul.

Postscript: Disastrous breaking news out of Alaska: The following is a synopsis (quotation) of a horrifying scientific release d/d May 11, 2017 that is extraordinarily relevant to The Great Acceleration:

“The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires). That’s an amount comparable to all the emissions from the US commercial sector in a single year.”

“The chief reason for the greater CO2 release was that as Alaska has warmed up, emissions from once frozen tundra in winter are increasing – presumably because the ground is not refreezing as quickly. Now what? Sit in a circle and hold hands, or get to work to find what (if any) options we’ve got?”

That’s Global Warming!

That is horrific news, almost as bad as it gets especially this early in the repercussions cycle of The Great Acceleration. It now appears that nature is competing head-to-head with humans, overflowing the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases. That’s a perfect script for an apocalypse film project.

Looking ahead, one option scientists cannot rely upon is help from the anti-science Trump administration. Ipso facto, The Great Acceleration fallout is about to leap forward like never before. Batten down the hatches!
And, Trump thinks health care is tough…

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at roberthunziker@icloud.com

Apocalypse Soon: Cataclysmic Disasters And Mass Death Are In Humanity’s Future

Source: APOCALYPSE SOON: CATACLYSMIC DISASTERS AND MASS DEATH ARE IN HUMANITY’S FUTURE |

govtslaves.info

MICHAEL SNYDER

May 8, 2017

 Are we on the verge of the worst times in all of human history? We live at a moment when prominent leaders in the scientific world and in the religious world are both urgently warning that humanity could soon be facing a nightmarish apocalyptic future. Weather patterns are rapidly changing, the crust of our planet is becoming increasing unstable, “superbugs” that are resistant to antibiotics threaten to completely render our best medical treatments obsolete, the number of global terror attacks continues to rise year after year, and thanks to weapons of mass destruction humanity now has the capability of completely destroying itself several times over. They often disagree about why it will happen, but an increasing number of scientific and religious leaders have come to the exact same conclusion that the future of humanity is very bleak.

Despite the fact that technology is increasing at an exponential rate, many top thinkers in the scientific community now believe that there is a very good chance that the human race will be facing extinction by the end of this century. The following comes from an outstanding Salon article…

The late microbiologist Frank Fenner, for example, whose virological work helped eliminate smallpox, predicted in 2010 that “humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction, and climate change.” Similarly, the Canadian biologist Neil Dawe reportedly “wouldn’t be surprised if the generation after him witness the extinction of humanity.” And the renowned ecologist Guy McPherson argues that humanity will follow the dodo into the evolutionary grave by 2026.

Those are some very sobering words.

Perhaps you have never heard of any of those guys before, but I know that virtually all of you have heard of Stephen Hawking. According to Hawking, we have now reached “the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity”…

“Now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it.”

The last 100 years have been unlike any other era in human history. We have constructed towering cities all over the planet, we have developed remarkable technologies that have enabled us to make the impossible more than possible, and the population of this planet has shot up to a staggering 7 billion people.

But in order to feed our exploding population, we are going to need another miracle. According to Megan Clark, the head of Australia’s national science agency, more food will need to be produced over the next 50 years than has been produced throughout the rest of human history combined…

“It is hard for me to comprehend that in the next 50 years we will need to produce as much food as has been consumed over our entire human history,” she said.

“That means in the working life of my children, more grain than ever produced since the Egyptians, more fish than eaten to date, more milk than from all the cows that have ever been milked on every frosty morning humankind has ever known.”

These are the types of things that keep scientific thinkers up late at night. At this moment, great famines are already hitting places such as Venezuela and Yemen, and this trend is only going to accelerate in the years ahead.

Hopefully mass death for the human race will be delayed for as long as possible, but one thing that is already happening is widespread species extinction among wild animals all over our planet. The following comes from one of my previous articles…

It has been called “the long extinction”. Our planet is in the process of dying, and as you will see below, this process of death and destruction appears to be accelerating. According to a report that was put out by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, the number of wild animals around the globe appears to be decreasing at a rate of about 2 percent a year. 2 percent may not sound like a lot to you, but over 10 years that would mean that 20 percent of all wild animals in the world would be gone. And according to that same report, it is being projected that the total loss of wildlife during the 50 year period from 1970 to 2020 will be a staggering 67 percent.

For religious leaders, the concerns are often more spiritual in nature.

Many Christians are convinced that the return of Jesus Christ is rapidly approaching, and meanwhile many Muslims are expecting a figure known as “the Mahdi” to come back soon. Here is more from the Salon article that I quoted earlier…

Returning to religion, recent polls show that a huge portion of religious people believe that the end of the world is imminent. For example, a 2010 survey found that 41 percent of Christians in the U.S. believe that Jesus will either “definitely” or “probably” return by 2050. Similarly, 83 percent of Muslims in Afghanistan and 72 percent in Iraq claim that the Mahdi, Islam’s end-of-days messianic figure, will return within their lifetimes.

As I discussed in The Rapture Verdict, I certainly believe that anyone that is able to stay alive through the cataclysms that are coming will have the opportunity to witness the return of Jesus Christ. So many ancient prophecies found in the Bible are being uniquely fulfilled in our generation, and it is truly an exciting time to be alive.

Unfortunately, many are not prepared for the great challenges that we will have to face before Jesus comes back. The following prophecy was recently given by Jeff Byerly…

There are a lot of men who are taking puzzle pieces and forcing them in places they do not go and it is making the picture unclear. The end of this season will bring clarity and you will understand exactly where you are when the fiery “kickoff” event happens. The financial collapse will soon follow. Then food will be hard to come by and many will starve but my remnant will feed even greater multitudes than I did, for I have gone to the Father. The whole world shall once again go to war and over one fourth of the inhabitants of the earth shall be killed by guns and bombs, by famine, disease and the beasts of the land. There will be many martyred during this time and I will avenge their deaths when the number of them has been fulfilled.

All this will happen before the day of the LORD. The great day Our indignation, vengeance, retribution and wrath shall be poured out upon the children of disobedience. No man shall hide from Us. We shall find all those deserving just punishment. There will be a global earthquake caused by an asteroid hitting the sea. There shall be tsunamis worldwide and every mountain shall be moved and every island will be out of place. The very atmosphere will be ripped open and recede like a rolled up scroll. The sun will be black and the moon will be blood, gross darkness shall cover the people and the whole earth for three days as in the time of Exodus, but My the houses of My people shall have light and people shall become light for they will be changed and My glory shall be shown on them. My children will be shown clearly to the world who they are!

Of course many other men and women of God have been warning about many of the exact same things, but most people are choosing not to listen.

Personally, I am entirely convinced that we are living during one of the most critical times in all of human history. The years ahead will be incredibly difficult, but for those that are part of the Remnant they will also be incredibly thrilling.

Great shaking is about to begin.

For those that know who they are, who they belong to and where they are going, that is actually very good news.