This page 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. Each of the TWELVE CRISES below has my brief introduction, with highlights of content and underlined links to sources and additional information:

1. CLIMATE CHANGE CRISIS

The Earth is warming. This is a fact confirmed by literally thousands of climate researchers worldwide, including those at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), from which the chart on the left was obtained. Critics of global warming point to a year here or there that was cooler than the last, but this chart, which plots mean worldwide temperatures over more than a century, shows an unmistakable trend upward. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 2000-2009 is the warmest decade since it began keeping records in 1850. Although 2009 was cooler than normal in North America, that was more than offset by warmer temperatures elsewhere in the world. (Click here for a NASA snapshot of temperature offsets.) “What we’re talking about is trends averaged over large areas and over long periods,” said Michel Jarraud, the WMO’s secretary-general, as quoted by the Christian Science Monitor. The annual State of the Climate report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) agrees with the WMO and NASA that “the past decade was the warmest on record and the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years. . . . Despite the variability caused by short-term changes, . . . when we follow decade-to-decade trends using multiple data sets and independent analyses from around the world, we see clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world.”

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change reports that “the scientific community has reached a strong consensus . . . . The world is undoubtedly warming. . . . largely the result of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities including industrial processes, fossil fuel combustion, and changes in land use, such as deforestation.” The website 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. A map of the arctic illustrates that “since 1979, more than 20% of the Polar Ice Cap has melted away in response to increased surface air and ocean temperatures.” TreeHugger reports on recent polar research, quoting the University of Manitoba’s David Barber, who says his three-year study found that “climate change in the region is happening much faster than our most pessimistic models expected,” and National Snow and Ice Data Center Director Mark Serreze, who says, “We’ve grown back ice in the winter, but that ice tends to be thin . . . and thinner ice simply takes less energy to melt the next summer.” At this rate, the Arctic will be ice-free in less than 20 years, perhaps as soon as 2013.

In “The Carbon Bathtub,” National Geographic illustrates the problem. “It’s simple, really: As long as we pour CO2; into the atmosphere faster than nature drains it out, the planet warms. And that extra carbon takes a long time to drain out of the tub.” Its “Global Warming Fast Facts” page 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.

Although the Earth’s climate has cycled between cold and warm periods, ice ages have dominated for more than a million years. Without intervention by man, the mild climate of the current 10,000-year interglacial period, the Holocene epoch, would surely give way to another ice age (NY Times). The central thesis of global warming is that the Industrial Revolution, which has pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for 200 years, has overwhelmed natural cycles and tipped the world into a new and dangerous warming trend. Science Daily reports that studies by some climatologists indicate 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.” Is it possible that pre-industrial man might have been able to achieve a prolonged Holocene epoch without consciously trying to do so, but that industrial man will not be able to prevent runaway global warming, despite taking the most desperate measures? (Click here for more information about natural cycles of climate vs. human influence on climate.)

“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.” Photos and a video in the LA Times of burning methane gas leaking through holes drilled in frozen Arctic lakes illustrate that global warming is freeing methane from its frozen state. “As much as 55 billion metric tons of methane could be released from beneath Siberian lakes alone . . . . That would amount to 10 times the amount currently in the atmosphere.” On land, measurements show that “a third to a half of permafrost is already within a degree to a degree and a half [Celsius] of thawing.” The United Nations Environment Programme warns, “methane release due to thawing permafrost in the Arctic is a global warming wild card,” which could lead to “abrupt changes in the climate that would likely be irreversible.”

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.” James Lovelock, best known for his Gaia Hypothesis, is also pessimistic. On Lovelock’s website 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.”

It’s also possible that global warming could paradoxically trigger another ice age, according to a report on thedailygreen.com. “The theory goes that a warming-induced influx of cold, fresh water into the North Atlantic from melting polar ice caps and glaciers could shut down the Gulf Stream, an underwater channel of warm ocean water that winds its way north from the Caribbean and moderates temperatures in the northeastern U.S. and Western Europe. The result, some scientists speculate, would be a return to ice age conditions. In the extreme, glaciers and freezing temperatures would render large swaths of the civilized world uninhabitable . . . . A less dire version would still cause bitterly cold winters, droughts, worldwide desertification and crop failures . . . .” You may recognize this as the premise of the sci-fi movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” which speeds up the phenomenon to a matter of weeks.

2. ECONOMIC CRISIS

The UK’s Times Online reports on Nouriel Roubini, Ph.D., professor of economics at NYU, whose predictions of an impending “global financial crisis” were on the mark. What’s next?  “Roubini said the world economy was ‘at a breaking point.’ The US, he predicts, faces “multi-year economic stagnation.” More recently, on his website, Roubini warns, “Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%. . . . The long-term picture for workers and families is even worse than current job loss numbers alone would suggest. . . . Many firms are telling their workers to cut hours, take furloughs and accept lower wages. Specifically, that fall in hours worked is equivalent to another 3 million full time jobs lost on top of the 7.5 million jobs formally lost. This is very bad news but we must face facts. Many of the lost jobs are gone forever, including construction jobs, finance jobs and manufacturing jobs. Recent studies suggest that a quarter of U.S. jobs are fully out-sourceable over time to other countries.” He notes the disparity between upbeat economic reports from Washington and real-life experience in average households. “While the United States may technically be close to the end of a severe recession, most of America is facing a near-depression.”

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.” (Click here for more information about the economic crisis.)

“25 Questions To Ask Anyone Who Is Delusional Enough To Believe That This Economic Recovery Is Real” is the title of a post on The Economic Collapse blog. Here are some highlights that may give you pause: “#1) In what universe is an economy with 39.68 million Americans on food stamps considered to be a healthy, recovering economy? . . . #2) According to RealtyTrac, foreclosure filings were reported on 367,056 properties in the month of March. [2010] . . . #7) Dozens of U.S. states are in such bad financial shape that they are getting ready for their biggest budget cuts in decades. . . . #9) The U.S. government is projected to have a 1.6 trillion dollar deficit in 2010 . . . . #13) The FDIC’s list of problem banks recently hit a 17-year high [775]. . . . #14) The FDIC is basically flat broke. . . . #17) 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement. Tens of millions of Americans find themselves just one . . . serious illness away from financial ruin. . . . #19) Gallup’s measure of underemployment hit 20.0% on March 15th. . . . #25) 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase over 2008. . . . more than during any month since U.S. bankruptcy law was tightened in October 2005.”

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 section 12, below.)

3. ENERGY CRISIS

America, along with the rest of Western civilization, is powered by fossil fuels. About 40 percent of our energy comes from oil, 24 percent from natural gas, 23 percent from coal, and 8 percent from uranium (nuclear energy). We use these resources as if supplies were endless, but they are not. When production declines, as it must, what will take their place? Only about 5 or 6 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources, such as hydroelectric, geothermal, solar, and wind. It does not appear that we have the technology, the money, the will, and the time to transition from non-renewable to renewable energy in a way that will preserve “The American way of life.” The “Peak oil primer” from Energy Bulletin is a brief but effective introduction to the problem. “Oil is a finite, non-renewable resource . . . . Oil companies have, naturally enough, extracted the easier-to-reach, cheap oil first . . . on land, near the surface, under pressure, light and ‘sweet’ (meaning low sulfur content) and therefore easy to refine. The remaining oil is more likely to be off-shore, far from markets, in smaller fields and of lesser quality. It therefore takes ever more money and energy to extract, refine and transport. Under these conditions, the rate of production inevitably drops. Furthermore, all oil fields eventually reach a point where they become economically, and energetically, no longer viable. If it takes the energy of a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil, then further extraction is pointless, no matter what the price of oil. . . . Of the 65 largest oil producing countries in the world, up to 54 have passed their peak of production and are now in decline.” The bottom line is that “peak oil presents the potential for quite catastrophic upheavals.” This is because “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.”

Matt Savinar, on Life After the Oil Crash, 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.

As oil from “easy-to-obtain . . . near-at-hand energy deposits in relatively safe and friendly locations” diminishes, “the survival of our energy-centric civilization increasingly relies on supplies obtained from risky locations — deep underground, far at sea, north of the Arctic circle, in complex geological formations, or in unsafe political environments. That guarantees the equivalent of two, three, four, or more Gulf-oil-spill-style disasters in our energy future.” (TomDispatch) Claims of untapped deposits (e.g., 3-15 billion barrels from the Gulf of Mexico, 8-10 billion barrels offshore from Brazil) sound reassuring until you do the math. Even if the claims from new finds prove accurate and every barrel could be extracted, they would not make up for declining production elsewhere, much less meet growing world demands. The Brazilians predict production will reach 3 million barrels a day by 2020. Today, the U.S. consumes 20 million barrels a day, over 7 billion barrels a year. World consumption is nearly 85 million barrels a day, 31 billion barrels a year. By 2020 consumption could be much higher.

Other unconventional sources include oil shale (sedimentary rock) and Canadian tar sands. These reserves are immense, but extraction is extremely difficult, costly, and damaging to the environment. And even the most optimistic estimates of production from shale and tar sand 20 years from now would not meet even half of today’s consumption in the U.S. alone. Oil from Middle Eastern and African countries could be cut off at any moment by terrorism or political upheavals. If we are counting on oil to maintain the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed, we are bound to be disappointed.

Can natural gas take up some of the slack from oil? In the U.S., production is outpacing demand and the natural gas industry claims vast reserves, but critics point out that extraction is increasingly dependent on a technique called “hydrofracking.” Developed by Halliburton Co., hydraulic fracturing involves pumping fresh water laced with a cocktail of chemicals, including benzene and other toxic substances, into rock under high pressure to open up passages through which oil and gas can be extracted. During the Bush administration, the EPA found the practice to be safe, and congress exempted it from the Clean Water Act, but opponents, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, contend that “EPA’s conclusions are unsupportable,” agreeing with a “whistleblower” EPA employee who called his agency’s report “scientifically unsound” and questioned its impartiality. These and other critics are concerned that hydrofracking poses environmental hazards, including contamination of drinking water sources. ProPublica has found over a thousand reports of water contamination from drilling across the country. One widely reported example is the town of Dish, Texas, a few miles north of Fort Worth, where residents are complaining that benzene emissions have lowered air quality, killed trees and animals, and sickened people. As one local woman put it, “I’m not against the oil and gas industry. I’m against being poisoned.” An award-winning film, “Gasland,” documents the consequences of hydrofracking (click here for the HBO trailer). On February 18, 2010, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce began an investigation into hydraulic fracturing.

“How long before the lights go out?” is the headline in the UK’s Telegraph. “Gas heats almost every home and generates over 40 per cent of our electricity, making Britain the world’s fifth largest consumer. . . . Britain’s gas supply is apparently on thin ice. Until the beginning of this year, National Grid had only once been forced to issue a Gas Balancing Alert – warning the market that supply might not meet demand and urging suppliers to pump harder. Since then it has issued another four [in just one month, January, 2010]. . . . None of this would have happened a few years ago, when North Sea production meant Britain was more than self-sufficient in gas. But after a 30-year boom, UK output finally peaked in 2000 and started to fall . . . . In 2004 Britain became a net importer for the first time, and National Grid expects we will have to import three-quarters of our gas by 2015. That makes Britain increasingly vulnerable to any future supply interruptions like those last month, or when Russia next cuts off Ukraine in their long-running dispute over gas prices.” According to a report published by The Oil Drum, “It is projected that between now and 2020, Europe will need to develop additional natural gas supplies of approximately 120 – 150 Gcm/a (thousand million cubic meters per year) from more distant sources . . . . If additional supplies fail to appear, Europe could see an imbalance in natural gas supply and demand starting as early as 2011/2012“.

Some claim that vast supplies of coal can make up for declining oil and natural gas, giving us a century or two longer to develop alternatives to fossil fuels. But Matt Savinar points out that, “coal production, like oil production, will peak long before the total supply is exhausted. Were we to liquefy a large portion of our coal endowment in order to produce synthetic oil, coal production would likely peak within 2 decades, if not much sooner.” Others claim that uranium can power our civilization, even though it would take literally tens of thousands of nuclear power plants to do so (today there are just 438 worldwide), and there’s nowhere near the money or talent or time to build so many, nor the uranium to fuel them.

Meanwhile, progress toward developing renewable energy is woefully slow. Don’t even mention ethanol. It takes about as much energy to produce it as you get out of burning it. What’s the point? The two most promising renewables, solar and wind, contribute a scant 2 percent combined to energy production in the U.S. To convert this country’s transportation and power generation from non-renewable to renewable energy sources would take trillions of dollars and literally decades of time, not to mention immense natural, industrial, and human resources, as well as strong and visionary leadership, unprecedented political cooperation, and whole-hearted public support, effort, and sacrifice. If that’s what it takes, we’re in big trouble, because we don’t have it.

In a Washington Post op-ed, James Howard Kunstler writes about the “global energy predicament. “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.”

4. FERTILE LAND CRISIS

“Only about 10 percent of the world’s land surface is arable, whereas the other 90 percent is just rock, sand, or swamp, which can never be made to produce crops,” according to Peter Goodchild, writing on The Oil Drum website. Given the number of humans who must be fed (6.7 billion) and the world population growth rate (tripled in the last 60 odd years), any reduction in the amount of land available for growing crops would be cause for concern. Be concerned. Be very concerned.

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.”

“The Food Nightmare Beneath Our Feet: We’re Running Out of Soil,” reads a headline on the AlterNet website. “Each year the world loses an estimated 83 billion tons of soil,” the article warns. “According to the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC), as of 1991, human activity has brought about the degradation of 7.5 million square miles . . . of land, the equivalent of Europe twice over.” Causes include conversion of farmland to other uses, farming practices that decrease fertility and increase erosion, desertification (in which fertile land becomes desert), and pollution. “We’re running out of soil. As with other prominent resources that have accumulated over millions of years, we, the people of planet Earth, have been churning through the stuff that feeds us since the first Neolithic farmer broke the ground with his crude plow. The rate varies, the methods vary, but the results are eventually the same. Books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse and David Montgomery’s Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations lay out in painful detail the historic connections between soil depletion and the demise of those societies that undermined the ground beneath their feet. . . . We as a species would be wise to take better care of our dirt.” (Click here for more info about soil depletion.)

5. 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.”

In “The Global Food Crisis” National Geographic reports, “For most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing. After years of drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world saw global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record. ‘Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year,’ warned Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., at the height of the crisis. ‘This is too low to meet population growth and increased demand.’ High prices are the ultimate signal that demand is outstripping supply, that there is simply not enough food to go around. Such agflation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food. Even though prices have fallen with the imploding world economy, they are still near record highs, and the underlying problems of low stockpiles, rising population, and flattening yield growth remain. Climate change—with its hotter growing seasons and increasing water scarcity—is projected to reduce future harvests in much of the world, raising the specter of what some scientists are now calling a perpetual food crisis.”

Click here for the “Food Security Risk Index 2010,” released by risk analysis and rating firm Maplecroft, which “evaluates the risks to the supply of basic food staples for 163 countries.” This map shows vast areas of the world to be at risk, and the situation is expected to worsen in coming years, as the effects of economic downturns, poverty, warfare, failing infrastructure, and climate change are more pronounced.

6. 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.”

“Forests razed can grow back, polluted air and water can be cleaned — but extinction is forever,” reports TIME. “And we’re not talking about losing just a few species. In fact, conservationists quietly acknowledge that we’ve entered an age of triage, when we might have to decide which species can truly be saved. The worst-case scenarios of habitat loss and climate change — and that’s the pathway we seem to be on — show the planet losing hundreds of thousands to millions of species, many of which we haven’t even discovered yet. The result could be a virtual genocide of much of the animal world and an irreversible impoverishment of our planet.  Humans would survive, but we would have doomed ourselves to what naturalist E.O. Wilson calls the Eremozoic Era — the Age of Loneliness.”

You’ve no doubt read about honeybees, which have suffered the loss of a third of their colonies each year for the last four years, but the dieoff of species extends to many more life forms. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species reports that “17,291 species out of the 47,677 assessed species are threatened with extinction.” This includes “21% of all known mammals, 30% of all known amphibians, 12 per cent of all known birds and 32% of all known gymnosperms (conifers and cycads).” ICUN also notes that “results for other species-groups . . . such as freshwater fishes and dragonflies, indicate similar high levels of threat.” Indeed, TreeHugger notes that “between 5 million and 50 million flowering plant species may be threatened with extinction.” Since “fewer than 2 million have been discovered . . . millions of species may vanish from the planet before they are known to science. And these numbers, a new study shows, may be conservative.”

7. 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, indicating that they “lack minerals or have already used those worth extracting.”

“If we keep following the ruling paradigm of sustained global economic growth, we will soon run out of cheap and plentiful metal minerals of most types. . . . The precautionary principle urges us to take immediate action to prevent or at least postpone future shortages. . . . for the sake of next generations.” So warns André Diederen, senior research scientist at TNO, Holland, in a lengthy and well-documented article on The Oil Drum.

“World faces hi-tech crunch as China eyes ban on rare metal exports” reads a headline in the UK’s Telegraph. “Beijing is drawing up plans to prohibit or restrict exports of rare earth metals that are produced only in China and play a vital role in cutting edge technology, from hybrid cars and catalytic converters, to superconductors, and precision-guided weapons,” the article reports. The metals include terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium, neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum. Alternate sources of these elsewhere in the world are rare and extraction is much more difficult and expensive. China’s hoarding of these metals effectively gives its domestic needs priority over the rest of the world and corners the market for products that cannot be made without them. Indeed, if supplies of the metals are exhausted by consumption within China, it could eliminate outside markets for certain products, until such time as substitute technologies can be developed.

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.”

8. 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. University of Bristol researchers compared today’s ocean conditions to the last period of catastrophic acidification, “55 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum . . . and determined that acidification is happening ten times faster today than it did during the PETM,” according to a report in TreeHugger.

“Marine phytoplankton — the vast range of tiny algae species accounting for roughly half of Earth’s total photosynthetic biomass — have declined substantially in the world’s oceans over the past century,” according to a report in Nature. “Phytoplankton are the basis of the entire marine food chain, and . . . through photosynthesis, they produce around half of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere . . . .”

“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.’” A Science Daily headline reads “Fishing Fleet Working 17 Times Harder Than in 1880s to Make Same Catch.” The article reports on a study by the UK’s University of York and the Marine Conservation Society that found that “trawl fish landings peaked in 1937, 14 times higher than today, and the availability of bottom-living fish to the fleet fell by 94 per cent.” In a Bloomberg.com interview, oceanographer Sylvia Earle describes not only the depleted stocks but the pollution and destruction left in the wake of commercial fishing: “We take 100 million tons of sea creatures out of the ocean every year and replace them with 100 million tons of garbage. . . . Trawling for shrimp is like bulldozing a forest to catch songbirds and squirrels. You throw away the forest and all the other creatures and shake out a few pounds of protein.”

“An oceanic toilet bowl” is the title of an article on GlobalPost.com. “Lurking a few inches below the ocean’s surface and straddling an area the size of Texas . . . is a giant swirl of plastic and trash, all emanating from someone’s backyard, village, boat or beach. It’s your garbage, not quite buried at sea. These are the gyres, where the ocean’s currents collect floating garbage. There are five or six around the globe. The most prominent one . . . floats in the doldrums of the north Pacific, halfway between the coasts of the United States and Asia. . . . Researchers can only estimate the number of animals killed by debris throughout vast swaths of ocean, but one 1997 study suggested more than 100,000 marine mammals die from entanglement or ingestion of trash and fishing gear each year. . . . Scientists fear pieces of plastic smaller than plankton are entering the food chain when ingested by fish, and later, by you and me.” National Geographic reports that researchers who trawled the garbage patches using fine-meshed nets found an average of 520,000 bits of plastic per square mile in the Atlantic and 1.9 million bits per square mile in the Pacific.

“Monster Jellyfish” is the title of an article on Discovery Channel, and the accompanying photo shows one of the sea creatures that appears larger than a human diver next to it. The article reports, “overfishing and high levels of nutrients in the water . . . create low-oxygen dead zones where jellyfish survive, but fish can’t.” Add to that the effect of climate change and we could see a “jellyfish stable state, in which jellyfish rule the oceans.”

“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,” said former congressman Leon Panetta, in his capacity as cochair of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative (he’s now the Director of the CIA).

9. OVERPOPULATION CRISIS

The worldwide average lifespan of a human is about 66 years (64 for males and 68 for females). In the last 66 years, from 1943 to 2009, the world population has grown from about 2.2 billion to about 6.7 billion. So during the average lifespan of a human in the modern era, the population has tripled. Tripled! Considering that scientists estimate it took about 15,000 years for the population to triple in preagrarian times and about 1,500 years in the agrarian era, does the growth rate in the industrial age give you any cause for alarm?

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. 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 Dieoff.org, “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, as illustrated by the above graphic. (Click here for more information about overshoot and its consequences.)

10. WAR CRISIS

[This section is under construction.]

11. 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.” You may be surprised at how widespread the problem is. One of the flashpoints is America’s Ogallala Aquifer, which “stretches from Texas to South Dakota, and waters one fifth of US irrigated land.” This vital resource “is being depleted at a rate of 12 billion cubic metres (bcm) a year. Total depletion to date amounts to some 325 bcm, a volume equal to the annual flow of 18 Colorado Rivers.” The article goes on to point out, “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.”

Here is a summary of distressing water statistics:
• Over a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean drinking water
• By 2025, this number could be 1.8 billion
• More than 2 billion tons of human and animal waste and industrial pollution are dumped into waterways every day
• 2.5 billion people have no access to proper sanitation
• Over half of the world’s illnesses are due to diseases caused by unsafe water
• More than 5 million people die each year from water-related diseases -– 10 times the number killed in wars
• We’re draining aquifers much more quickly than the natural recharge
• Americans use about 100 gallons of water at home each day, while the world’s poorest subsist on fewer than 5 gallons
• 46 percent of people on Earth do not have water piped to their homes
• Women in developing countries walk an average of 3.7 miles to get water
• The Tibetan Plateau supplies water for nearly a third of humanity, 2 billion people, from its snowpack and glaciers, which are melting faster than they are being replenished
• With 83 million more people on Earth each year, water demand will keep going up

12. MULTIPLICITY AND SIMULTANEITY OF 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.” The introduction to Heinberg’s book is 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.

A summary of Chris Clugston’s lengthy report, “On American Sustainability — Anatomy of a Societal Collapse,” is available on The Oil Drum. He says we are in a “predicament . . . irreparably overextended — living hopelessly beyond our means ecologically and economically — at a time when the supplies of many critical resources upon which we depend will soon be insufficient to enable our American way of life. We are about to discover that we are simply another unsustainable society subject to the inescapable consequence of our unsustainable resource utilization behavior — societal collapse.” We’re using up renewable resources such as water, croplands, grazing lands, wildlife, and forests faster than Nature can replenish them, and we’re exhausting nonrenewable resources such as oil, natural gas, coal, minerals, and metals which cannot be replenished, and we’re degrading atmospheric, aquatic, and terrestrial natural habitats beyond Nature’s ability to replenish them. He warns that “no amount of ingenuity, innovation, and effort can create unlimited resources on a finite planet. . . . We will be sustainable, either voluntarily or involuntarily; and we will be sustainable soon.” His prediction? “Absent immediate fundamental changes to both our distorted worldview and our dysfunctional resource utilization behavior,” neither of which he expects to occur, “America, as we know it, will cease to exist well before the year 2050.” Clugston’s complete 79-page report can be downloaded in PDF format here.

The University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment (IonE) has produced a video about the “tipping points” of several environmental crises, such as climate change, ocean acidification, and the mass extinction of species. Once a tipping point is passed, a major and irreversible change takes place. Depending on the crisis, we have already passed that point or are rapidly approaching it:

This video coincides with publication of “Boundaries for a Healthy Planet,” IonE Director Jonathan Foley’s cover story in Scientific American magazine.

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.

NOTE: This page is updated frequently. Some content is drawn from previous posts on the main page.