NOTE: This original post was the basis for a permanent “Evidence” page. Click here for the updated page.

This post provides examples of the sort of evidence that has persuaded me that we are perilously close to the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAWKI). No one item makes the case, but perhaps you will find the accumulated weight of evidence compelling, as I did. The items are organized by “crisis.”  Each one has my brief introduction, with highlights of content and an underlined link to the article or website:

Climate Change Crisis

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change provides several pages of “Global Warming Facts and Figures,” including “The Physical Basis of Global Warming,” “Observed Temperature and Greenhouse Gas Trends,” and “Impacts” of climate change observed thus far. Charts and graphs illustrate, among other things, that although short term weather runs hot and cold, long term climate is trending hotter, temperature increases closely parallel greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels are rising, and tropical storms are increasing. A map of the arctic (reproduced here) illustrates that “since 1979, more than 20% of the Polar Ice Cap has melted away in response to increased surface air and ocean temperatures.”

On its “Global Warming Fast Facts” page, the National Geographic reports that “global warming could lead to large-scale food and water shortages and have catastrophic effects on wildlife,” according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Other concerns include rising sea level and acidifying oceans, melting glaciers and ice caps, heatwaves and wildfires, droughts and growth of deserts, disappearing habitat, and species extinction.

Ice ages have dominated Earth’s climate for more than a million years, and scientists wonder when the current interglacial period will end. Some say that based on Milankovitch cycles (Earth’s orbit around the Sun, its tilt, and its wobble), global cooling is overdue. Many attribute the delay to the Industrial Revolution, which has pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for 200 years. But Science Daily reports that climatologists speaking at a conference of the American Geophysical Union say that human-induced warming began far earlier than previously thought. Based on physical evidence and computer climate models, they say that “between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago, both methane and carbon dioxide started an upward trend, unlike during previous interglacial periods. . . . The introduction of large-scale rice agriculture in Asia, coupled with extensive deforestation in Europe [produced] methane from terraced rice paddies and carbon dioxide from burning forests. . . . In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming. . . . The cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age.” They do not dispute that greenhouse gases have increased dramatically during the Industrial Revolution, but they say that the influence of pre-industrial humans on climate was profound.  “If you think about even a small rate of increase over a long period of time, it becomes important.”

James Lovelock, Ph.D., OBE, a respected scientist in the UK, best known for his Gaia Hypothesis, wrote The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (2006). On Lovelock’s website he provides the text of his lecture on this topic to the Royal Society (2007) in which he says, “There is little that can we do to prevent the Earth System moving to the hot stable state,” such as that of the Eocene period, 55 million years ago. “I now take an apocalyptic view of the future because I see 6 to 8 billions of humans faced with ever diminishing supplies of food and water in an increasingly intolerable climate. . . . We now face the stark choice between a return to a natural life as a small band of hunter gatherers or a much reduced high tech civilization also in balance with nature.”

A report by the UK’s Guardian on a global warming conference at Exeter University is headlined, “Too late? Why scientists say we should expect the worst.” Conference speakers reported that “carbon emissions were soaring way out of control – far above even the bleak scenarios considered by last year’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”  At the same time, studies showed that the ability of the oceans and forests to absorb carbon dioxide was weakening. “The battle against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the world needed to prepare for things to get very, very bad.”

“Methane Bubbles in the Arctic Ocean Give Climate Scientists the Willies,” is the title of a disturbing article on the Discover Magazine website: “Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.” Another term for this is “runaway global warming.”

Economic Crisis

Boom2bust.com revels in its role as “the most hated blog on Wall Street.” The blog provides a lengthy page of “evidence” for its prediction of “the coming U.S. financial crash.”

The UK’s Times Online reports on Nouriel Roubini, Ph.D., professor of economics at NYU, whose predictions a year ago of an impending “global financial crisis” were on the mark. What’s next?  “Roubini said the world economy was ‘at a breaking point.’ He believes the stock markets are now ‘essentially in free fall’ and ‘we are reaching the point of sheer panic.’”  The US, he predicts, faces “multi-year economic stagnation.”

In an article entitled “World Economic Demand is Collapsing,” UK’s The Market Oracle reports, “Every sector is being hit, from new cars to recycled cardboard.” One result is that “there has been a screeching halt of shipping worldwide. Products are backing up in Asia.” “Get ready for a horrific next few months of layoff news around the world,” they warn. “Since world demand is literally falling off a cliff since October, and businesses are running out of cash (there is no credit at all out there for the companies or their customers), it appears we are indeed in the beginning stages of a real world economic depression.”

In “Prophesy of economic collapse ‘coming true,’” New Scientist reports, “A real-world analysis of a controversial prediction made 30 years ago concludes that economic growth cannot be sustained and we are on track for serious economic collapse this century. In 1972, the seminal book Limits to Growth by a group called the Club of Rome claimed that exponential growth would eventually lead to economic and environmental collapse.” (More about the Limits to Growth study in the “Multiple Crises” section below.)

Fertile Land Crisis

Australia’s Daily Reckoning reports on the topsoil crisis. “The problem is that we’re losing it faster than we can replace it. And replacing it isn’t easy. It grows back an inch or two over hundreds of years.”

The UK’s Guardian reports that “new maps show that the Earth is rapidly running out of fertile land and that food production will soon be unable to keep up with the world’s burgeoning population.”

The International Herald Tribune reports that China risks food shortages because of its loss of arable land. “China has already lost about 1 percent of its agricultural land – the equivalent of Holland and Belgium combined – every year for the past eight years.”

Food Crisis

In this TIME magazine article, “How to End the Global Food Shortage,” the authors lament, “The world economy has run into a brick wall. Despite countless warnings in recent years about the need to address a looming hunger crisis in poor countries and a looming energy crisis worldwide, world leaders failed to think ahead. The result is a global food crisis.” Recommendations for averting disaster include financial aid to farmers for fertilizer and seeds, a halt to subsidizing diversion of food crops into biofuel, and assistance in “weatherproofing” crops.

“Food crisis will take hold before climate change, warns chief scientist” is the title of this article from the UK’s Guardian. The gist is that biofuels are taking food from the poor. “There is progress on climate change. But out there is another major problem. It is very hard to imagine how we can see a world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous increase in the demand for food which is quite properly going to happen as we alleviate poverty.”

Australia’s The Age warns in “Food shortage catastrophe creeping up on the world” of “ongoing food shortages that go well beyond current concerns on food security, and which will result in regional unrest and conflict.”

India’s Financial Express reports in “Global food stock at lowest, prices to rise further” that “food stocks have plummeted to lowest level since 1980s.” The result has been “food riots reported from many countries like Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti, Burkina Faso and Senegal” and fear “that this may spread to other countries.”

Mass Extinction Crisis

“The Earth is in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of both plants and animals,” reports Science Daily. “The last mass extinction near the current level was 65 million years ago, called the Cretaceous Tertiary extinction event, and was probably the result of a meteor hitting the Earth.”  “The current extinction event is due to human activity, paving the planet, creating pollution, many of the things that we are doing today,” said co-author Bradley J. Cardinale, assistant professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology at UC Santa Barbara. “The Earth might well lose half of its species in our lifetime. We want to know which ones deserve the highest priority for conservation.”

This PBS article reviews evidence that an extinction is underway and wonders, “What is the fate of our own species likely to be? . . . One possibility is that as diversity and abundance wither, the species causing it all — Homo sapiens, the most dominant species in history — could also be on the road to oblivion. But another possibility is that Homo sapiens, which has proved to be a very effective weedy species itself, will persist. That’s the view of paleobiologist David Jablonski, who sees us as one of the survivors, ‘sort of picking through the rubble’ of a world that has lost much of its biodiversity” and with it “much of its ability to provide many of the valuable services that we take for granted, from cleaning and recirculating air and water, to pollinating crops and providing a source for new pharmaceuticals.” This destruction is not easily undone. “The recovery will be unbearably slow in human terms — 5 to 10 million years . . . before levels of biodiversity comparable to those we inherited might be restored.”

“How Will the Sixth Extinction Affect Evolution of Species?” is the title of this article on the ActionBioscience website. The answer? “The current extinction crisis, if unchecked, will disrupt evolution to a degree that earth will see a proliferation of pests and a decline of large mammals, the tropics will no longer be powerhouses for the evolution of new species, and the biodiversity losses will persist for millions of years.”

Mineral Crisis

In “Earth’s natural wealth: an audit,” New Scientist reports that “reserves of such commonplace elements as zinc, copper, nickel and the phosphorus used in fertiliser will run out in the not-too-distant future.” How much of these and other metals and minerals on which we rely is left in the ground? There is no authoritative audit, but rough calculations have scientists concerned. “Virgin stocks of several metals appear inadequate to sustain the modern ‘developed world’ quality of life for all of Earth’s people under contemporary technology.”

New Scientist displays a “Mineral Depletion” map in which “territory size shows the proportion of all annual mineral depletion that occurs there.” North America, Europe, Africa, and China appear much smaller than on traditional maps. “Territories that appear small on this map may lack minerals, or have already used those worth extracting.

At the top of the “Peak Minerals” page on Oil Empire is a quotation by Sir Fred Hoyle: “It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.” What follows are several articles substantiating Sir Fred’s first claim, the one about man exhausting the Earth’s resources. It remains to be seen whether Hoyle was right about his second claim.

Natural Gas Crisis

This article on the Energy & Capital website explains why “Peak Natural Gas will become a major problem over the next decade. Canada’s natural gas industry is in jeopardy. And with the U.S. being so dependent on Canadian gas, this puts our economy at risk from the resulting shortfalls.”

A search for articles about “peak natural gas” on The Oil Drum produced this page. There’s lots of verbiage and graphics, but the bottom line is: “Although not as reliable as oil data, the data for gas already yields a clear downward trend.” Production decreases and demand increases do not make for a pretty picture on a graph–or in real life.

“Natural Gas Shortages and the coming CHILL in America’s Living Rooms” is the title of this article on the Sustainable Home Blog.” It’s all down hill from there: “The North American outlook for natural gas production is not good. Mexican production has been in decline since 1999. U.S. production has been in a plateau for some time. All the big finds have been tapped and are in decline. . . . And the new wells are declining at rates as high as 80% in the first year.

Ocean Crisis

NASA reports that “dead zones are occurring in many areas along the coasts of major continents, and they are spreading over larger areas of the sea floor. Because very few organisms can tolerate the lack of oxygen in these areas, they can destroy the habitat in which numerous organisms make their home” Satellite imagery includes the Mississippi River Delta (reproduced here), the Yangtze River, the Pearl River, the Baltic Sea, and the Black Sea.

“Industrial carbon dioxide is turning the oceans acidic, threatening the foundation of sea life,” reports Discover Magazine.

“We thought we could fish forever,” says Fishery Crisis, but “the size and abundance of commercially targeted fish species has plunged in recent decades.” The author places much of the blame on “Greedy human ‘overfishing.’”

“Oceans in Crisis But U.S. Slow to Act” is the title of this report from the Environment News Service. “The nation’s system of ocean and coastal governance dysfunctional, out-of-date, and inadequate,” says Leon Panetta, a former California Congressman and cochair of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative.

Oil Crisis

Matt Savinar’s Life After the Oil Crash was one of the first websites devoted to Peak Oil when it debuted in 2003, and it remains one of the best resources for understanding this unfolding crisis. Matt, a lawyer by training, explains that “the issue is not one of ‘running out’ so much as it is not having enough to keep our economy running . . . . A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10 to 15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.”  This is because oil is essential not only for transportation, but for fertilizer, water and power, medicines, plastics, asphalt, paint, and the production and distribution of just about everything made, sold, and used in our society. He believes that there are no realistic alternatives to oil that are not themselves “derivatives” of oil in that they require huge amounts of oil for their production–oil that will not be available.  This website is a must-see for anyone new to the issue of Peak Oil.

This “Peak oil primer” from Energy Bulletin is a brief but effective introduction. The bottom line is that “our industrial societies and our financial systems were built on the assumption of continual growth – growth based on ever more readily available cheap fossil fuels. . . . Oil is so important that the peak will have vast implications across the realms of war and geopolitics, medicine, culture, transport and trade, economic stability and food production.”

James Howard Kunstler is a national treasure. His website is worth a visit at least once a week to read the latest installment of “The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle.”  His Washington Post op-ed is a good introduction to Kunstler’s style and substance. Speaking about the “global energy predicament,” he says, “I hear an increasingly shrill cry for ‘solutions.’ This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation. . . . the desperate wish to keep our ‘Happy Motoring’ utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system — or even a fraction of these things — in the future. We have to make other arrangements.”

Overpopulation Crisis

People and Planet has a real-time world population counter that increments as you browse the site. It is disconcerting to see that about seven babies are born every second, joining 6.7 billion humans who preceded them. There were only three billion in the mid-60′s, so the population has more than doubled in just 40 years. “Globally, many experts are concerned that the earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ is already overstrained.” Newcomers arriving at this rate “add enormously to the burden of greenhouse gases which threaten to heat the planet – not to mention all the other demands which increases in both population and consumption are putting on the earth’s natural systems.”  The authors provide a useful overview of the main issues.

“Sustainability, Carrying Capacity, and Overconsumption,” is the title of this page on overpopulation.org. It  offers a real-time population counter, as well as counts of deaths from hunger, acres of wild lands lost, metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted, and metric tons of topsoil eroded. The authors point out that “world population would not be a problem if there were unlimited land, unlimited water, unlimited resources.” Of course, there are limits to these resources, and as their counters increment, it is painfully obvious that growth in population and consumption is proceding at an alarming rate. The website explores these issues in considerable depth, as well as providing links to other sites.

This article on “Population, Sustainability, and Earth’s Carrying Capacity” was written in 1992, but it is still one of the best introductions to the subject. The authors provide “a framework for estimating the population sizes and lifestyles that could be sustained without undermining the potential of the planet to support future generations.” The world’s population in 1992 was about 5.5 billion, and the authors looked ahead to its doubling with concern: “Whether the life support systems of the planet can sustain the impact of so many people is not at all certain.” Speaking about the 90′s they noted, “The current decade is crucial, marking a window of environmental and political opportunity that may soon close.” From our perspective nearly a decade into the new century, we can say that the window closed.  Note the name of the website, “Dieoff.”  That’s what happens when population and consumption overshoot carrying capacity.

Water Crisis

“The reason for the world’s growing water woes is evident in the numbers. The planet fairly sloshes with water–326 quintillion gal. of it–but only 0.014% of that is available for human use. . . . And the available water we do have is far from evenly distributed. About 1.1 billion people have no access to clean water.” That’s the crux of the problem that TIME magazine confronts in this article, entitled “Dying for a Drink.” Reports from various locations show that providing fresh, clean water for drinking, agriculture, and other uses is not just a problem in the third world, but in the US, Australia, and other industrialized countries, as well. The article is a useful introduction to the water crisis.

“In 1999 the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reported that 200 scientists in 50 countries had identified water shortage as one of the two most worrying problems for the new millennium (the other was global warming).” This BBC report offers an overview article, “Dawn of a Thirsty Century,” and an interactive map of “World Water Crisis Flashpoints.” “We use about 70% of the water we have in agriculture. But the World Water Council believes that by 2020 we shall need 17% more water than is available if we are to feed the world.” The article says we’re exhausting surface water sources, overpumping underground aquifers dry, and finding that climate change is altering traditional rainfall patterns and amounts.

“The lack of safe drinking water is not confined to the world’s poorer nations; it also threatens over 100 million Europeans,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon according to this report from IPS. “Population growth will make the problem worse. So will climate change. As the global economy grows, so will its thirst. Many more conflicts lie just over the horizon.” Is he raising the spectre of wars over water?

Multiple Crises

In Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines, Richard Heinberg addresses “a frightening array of peaks” we face in the new century: oil, natural gas, coal, population, grain, uranium, climate stability, fresh water, arable land, wild fish harvests, and yearly extraction of some metals and minerals (including copper, platinum, silver, gold, and zinc). Heinberg notes the “societal pattern of denial” about this, and warns that talking about it “is not likely to win votes, lead to a better job, or even make for pleasant dinner banter.” And yet, to ignore these crises is to ensure that they will unfold in the worst possible way. “It is hard to escape the conclusion that, while the 20th century saw the greatest and most rapid expansion of the scale, scope, and complexity of human societies in history, the 21st will see contraction and simplification. The only real question then is whether societies will contract and simplify intelligently or in an uncontrolled, chaotic fashion.” There’s an edited version of the introduction to Heinberg’s book on the Global Public Media website.

Thomas Robert Malthus hypothesized in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) that unchecked population growth always exceeds the growth of means of subsistence. He developed a mathematical model of geometric population growth and arithmetic resource growth and found proof in the misery, famines, plagues, and wars of his time. The Limits to Growth (1972), commissioned by a think-tank called the Club of Rome, brought Malthus’ thesis up to date through computer models of population, pollution, industrial and food production, and resource consumption, confirming that there are, in fact, resource limits on Earth beyond which growth and consumption would lead to sudden collapse in both population and industry. The Minnesotans for Sustainability website has a synopsis of Limits to Growth, The 30‑Year Update (2004), which found “symptoms of a world in overshoot,” including sea level rise, a widening gap between rich and poor, depleted fisheries, degraded agricultural land, declines in per capita GDP, unsustainable water use, increasing wastes and pollutants, and approaching peak oil production.

Oil Empire provides a page-full of information about the “Triple Crisis: Peak Oil, Climate Change, Overshoot,” and related matters.

The appropriate conclusion to the Multiple Crises section is Dieoff.org. With its flash videos, animated gifs, charts and graphs, and more links than you will EVER be able to click and explore, Dieoff’s working hard to bring you the information you need to fully comprehend TEOTWAWKI. It’s as bright and busy as a pinball machine in the attract mode, but worth a visit.