Hey kids, let's go out to the garage and make some new life forms! Get ready, because it's already happening. We'll talk with Pat Mooney, founder of the ETCgroup about crazy new technology on the loose. Then well-known journalist Steven Kotler takes us on a tour of ecopsychology in ten easy steps. Is it a diversion for comfortable coffee shops or "the answer". Radio Ecoshock 160316

I'm Alex Smith. Welcome to Radio Ecoshock.

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ANOTHER YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY - PAT MOONEY OF ETC GROUP

You may be wearing clothes created with synthetic biology, and eating food laced with nanotubes. A weird future has arrived, without any warning labels. Our guest Pat Mooney will be your guide. Pat founded a group in 1977 looking into food, agriculture and commodities. In 2001 it was renamed the ETC Group, with offices in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and the Philippines. If it's controversial, the ETC Group probably has a report on it.





Pat Mooney

If you really want to know what this interview is about, and get the details on scary tech you've never heard of, be sure and check out this ETC Group newsletter "ETC's Irreverent Review of 2015... ...and (possibly) Irrelevant Preview of 2016".

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY

From the ETC Group newsletter:

"SynBio: During 2015, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity set to work monitoring and analysing biology and the panoply of new biotechniques. A multi-stakeholder working group met in Montreal at the end of the year and will report to the CBD’s scientific subcommittee this April. ETC’s Jim Thomas is a member of the committee. But, even as the UN inevitably concludes that CRISPR, synthetic biology, gene drives and everything else cry out for oversight, the EU Commission is expected to start 2016 giving a controversial legal opinion that at least some of the same techniques can enjoy a free pass – exempting so called ‘new breeding techniques’ from GMO legislation. (Incidentally, ETC together with Canada’s Bioeconomies media project and Germany’s Heinrich Böll Foundation published this year a video in several languages explaining SynBio).[xxxvii]

[xxxvii] ETC Group and Heinrich Böll Foundation, Video Animation on Synthetic Biology in 5 languages – French German, Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. "

Here's another good ETC Group source on synthetic biology.

EXTREME BIOTECH MEETS EXTREME ENERGY

ETC Group and Heinrich Böll Foundation, “Extreme Biotech meets Extreme Energy”, November 2015.

NANO TECH

I got an article from natural news saying "engineered nanomaterials or (ENMs)" are on the rise in food, including in allegedly "organic" food. Let me give you a paragraph from that article:

"A group called the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) established an inventory of consumer products [that]contain ENMs in 2005. After this list was presented by Mother Jones with over 1,000 entries, PEN ran too low on funds to continue by 2009. That list depended on food manufacturers' reporting ENM content. Nowb the food industry folks no longer report their ENMs at all because labeling ENMs is not required. Thus ENM food content remains shrouded in mystery even more than GMOs."

That's a quote from an article at naturalnews.com.

Here is more from the ETC Group newsletter:

"Nano NO More: Whatever happened to nanotechnology? ETC was the first CSO to take up the issue 15 years ago but, since then, dozens of other strong partners around the world have taken up the cudgels and are making progress (albeit belatedly) especially in the EU. But, nanotech is by no means gone away. The global market for nanomaterials is about 11 million tonnes projected to contribute to end products valued at €2 trillion in 2015.[xxxii] Six million factory workers will be handling nanoparticles by 2020. As we prepared for the Paris climate change negotiations, we learned that, for the first time, children in the city were found to have carbon nanotubes in their lungs.[xxxiii]

[xxxiii] Sam Wong, “Carbon nanotubes found in children’s lungs for the first time”, New Scientist, electronic edition, October 21, 2015."

Are there nano particles placed in our food, would Americans be told if there were, and will they migrate throughout our body? Is anyone testing them for safety, or do we just run the experiment on all humans and nature?

BLOCKCHAIN - WHAT IS IT?

ETC Group staff will vehemently deny that Pat Mooney, when he retires at the end of 2017, will be replaced by a blockchain…

CONTROLLING TECHNOLOGY - IS IT AN OXYMORON?

The ETC Group is working with the UN to set up a group to oversee and possibly control technology. But when have we ever met a technology we didn't try, and eventually release into the real world? We can't stop North Korea from developing nuclear technology, what makes anyone think they can stop humans somewhere in the world from making anything, especially at things like 3D printing and computers make even the most complex ideas easy in somebody's basement or jungle? Pat Mooney gives us an update on efforts by the international community.

FORESTS DISCUSSION SOURCES:

Outside the sci-fi products now arriving, let's relax a little in the world's forests. Except that news is hardly relaxing. Apparently satellites have been misreading the amount of the Amazon rainforest lost to agriculture. We also found out from another paper published in 2015, that new growth in the Amazon is storing about half the carbon scientists have assumed in so many climate studies.

Selections from the ETC Group newsletter:

"Unfortunately, other satellites have been misreading the Amazon forest cover underestimating the incursion of cattle, cane and soya and exaggerating the trees and their biomass. Instead of a forest loss reduction rate of 25% last year, the loss accelerated by 62%.[ii]

[ii] Do-Hyung Kim, Joseph O. Sexton, John R. Towshend, “Accelerated deforestation in the humid tropics from the 1990s to the 2000s”, 7 May 2015, Geophysical Research Letters.

Worse still, the trees are growing faster but dying faster too – and storing barely half the CO2 scientists have assumed.[iii]

[iii] Gautam Naik, "Study: Amazon's forests sequester less carbon", Wall Street Journal, electronic edition, March, 21 2015.

Meanwhile, the boreal forests of North America may soon become net-emitters of carbon dioxide rather than capturing a third of the world’s atmospheric carbon. New estimates suggest that the Yukon Flats forest has been a source of GHG emissions for half a century.[iv] Where the Yukon goes, Alaska and Siberia are likely to follow.

[iv] Ryan Kelly, Melissa L. Chipman, Philip E. Higuera, Ivanka Stefanova, Linda B. Brubaker and Feng Sheng Hu, “Recent burning of boreal forests exceeds fire regime limits of the past 10,000 years”, June 19 2013, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Climatologists – and the rest of us – also learned as we left Paris that perhaps as much as 40% of global deforestation comes through slave labor and that most of the world’s 35 million legally-defined slaves are either the victims of ecological destruction or are forced to contribute to one third of global annual GHG emissions through illegal mining, fishing, brick making and lumbering.[vii] We must all worry about what we don’t know we don’t know but a drastic reduction in GHG emissions is urgent – and not just for the climate.

[vii] Kevin Bales, Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World, Spiegel and Grau, 2016."

Pat Mooney has been looking into all this for decades. He's the Executive Director of the international Civil Society Organization ETC Group, based in Montreal, Canada, with branches in other countries, and co-conspirators all over the world. Keep up with latest developments at the web site, etcgroup.org.

Download or listen to this 26 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Pat Mooney in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

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ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN TEN EASY STEPS? JOURNALIST STEVEN KOTLER

We know the big problems threatening humanity and the natural world. We even have some affordable solutions. So why do we keep driving so hard toward the cliff of extinction? Maybe it's all in the mind. In this program, we'll add to my short-list of interviews on ecopsychology.

Steven Kotler is one of those endangered species called a real journalist. He's been published in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and much more. His best-selling 2012 book, co-authored with Peter Diamandis, is "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think".

From his dog rescue ranch in New Mexico, we welcome Steven Kotler to Radio Ecoshock.



Steven Kotler

I think the future is much worse than Steve thinks. But maybe that's my damaged mind-set. So we talk about the really fine article he published in Orion Magazine, "Ecopsychology in Ten Easy Lessons".

By all means, stop right here, and read Steve's article. It's entertaining, sure, Steven is a great writer. But it's deep, and well worth the time spent. I've been mulling it over ever since. And by the way, there's no question that climate change is wreaking havoc with people's mental health.

Steven tells us that's logical and real. For example, let's take James Lovelock's theory that all life is really one co-dependent organism, almost with a global mind. That is one interpretation of "Gaia". The late great Paul Shepard reasoned that when part of this great network is damaged, all feel it. Perhaps that's why we groan when another great swathe of the great coral reef die off, or an iconic animal is almost gone. Are we subconsciously attached to all of nature?

Steve puts it better than I can, writing:

"In 1982, the late ecologist Paul Shepard extended this theory into psychology, proposing that if there are innate links between the planet and the human species, then those links should extend to the human mind. Shepard feared that by wantonly destroying the former we are simultaneously ravaging the latter — quite literally driving ourselves mad one clearcut forest at a time."

For the record, paleontologist Peter Ward thinks the Gaia theory is dead wrong. The record shows life has barely stumbled along, surviving many of it's own suicidal tendencies. He calls it the "Medea Hypothesis". Even so, it's true we all feel nature's pain as though it was our own.

The idea that damage to nature is also damaging our mental health is gaining more and more ground. The U.S. National Wildlife Federation brought out an expert report on it in 2012. Maybe we are not as unfeeling about nature as we like to think, or at least, as corporate science has led us to believe? If human intelligence was developed over a very long time as hunters-gatherers, is it any wonder we have become so crazy living in concrete boxes where nature is more or less banned?

We also talk about Laura Sewell and her essay “.” We have to revive our senses, Laura tells us, in order to really conceive of nature at all.

Of course some readers in Orion Magazine questioned whether we really have to go to the ends of the Earth, as Kotler did in Patagonia, to find our ecological selves. Do you think it's become impossible for humans to recognize their true inner selves in a city?

Here's another paragraph from Steve's powerful writing that moved me (from his article "Ecopsychology in Ten Easy Lessons"):

"It all clicks into place — as I am watching the death throes of this iceberg. This is the real impact of industrial repression, the impact of our environmental arrogance. Once this meltdown is complete, it will not reverse. The freshly melted water will never become ice again, at least not in any time frame that is fathomable in human terms. What does it feel like to witness these end times? Awful. Like murder. Like I’m the one who is melting."

What about ecopsychology? There's no time to train a hundred million eco-counsellors. Is this marriage of psychology and ecology destined to remain a plaything of the inner circle? Will it be taught in schools? Will it ever reach the Republican Party. Where can it go?

Despite the title, there is nothing "easy" about ecopsychology.

Steven Kotler is also co-founder and Director of Research for the Flow Genome Project, which trains athletes and others to reach their personal best. But as he talks (including explaining where the expression "Three dog night" comes from) - we realize his heart is in his New Mexico dog rescue project. It's called "A Small Furry Prayer" and Steve has a book out all about that.



Keep up with all things Kotler at his web site www.stevenkotler.com. You may also be interested in his book .

Download or listen to this 28 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Steven Kotler in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

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WRAPPING UP WITH MORE CLIMATE NEWS

Last week's program on strange, record-breaking developments in the Arctic is still waving out into the Twittosphere, still heavily downloaded. You can listen for free at soundcloud.com/radioeochshock, or download any of our past programs from ecoshock.org.

This week's climate horror story was pretty predictable. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have reached new levels above 404 parts per million. Just ten years ago, in 2006, it was big news when CO2 hit a record high of 381 parts per million. Greenhouse gases are still climbing, and they are increasing faster than ever before. Scientists used to talk about 2 parts per million added every year. Now it's over 3 parts per million, for the second year in a row. From February 2015 to February 2016 CO2 levels jumped 3.76 parts per million.

The rate of carbon emissions increases is not constant. There is an increase on the increase every year. Unless we go into a crash program to save ourselves, catastrophe is right around the corner.

Despite the Paris peace agreement, government bragging, corporate propaganda and our own pride when we walking or turn off a light switch, humanity and all the species are hurtling ever-faster toward rising seas, an ocean more acid, crop-crushing droughts and extreme weather. Some plants and animals will not be able to adapt fast enough. Some humans won't either.

But climate change is just one face of a revolution in human interference in natural systems. Let's look into synthetic life, a plague of new nano-materials and the joys of gene-drives. We must not forget the dark side of technology, in our race to try everything.

RADIO ECOSHOCK!

Radio Ecoshock reaches out to you every week from over 90 non-profit radio stations in 4 countries, and countless Net stations. It ripples out to more to listeners in more than 100 countries weekly, via , archive.org and many other sites. Still, not enough humans know how dangerous these problems are, or how short our time to deal with them.

If you agree this program content is important, you can help. Please go ahead and forward the show widely, Tweet about it, get it on Facebook. Thank you for helping me get the word out, by extending the voice of our expert guests.

And thank you for caring about your world.

NATURE REALLY IS THE BEST MEDICINE...

Our fake ad for Nature, as the new pharmaceutical wonder-drug, was created by the folks at nature-rx.org. Find the video version on You tube .

NATALIE MERCHANT "IT'S A COMIN'"

We go out with a tune by Natalie Merchant called "It's a Comin'". I first saw this posted on Guy McPherson's blog, Nature Bats Last. Find all her latest works at nataliemerchant.com.

And talk about timing! Natalie is back in the news!

Here are Natalie's opening words:

Wild fires, dying lakes,

landslides, hurricanes,

apocalypse in store

like nothing ever seen before.

It’s a-coming.

Third-generation refugees,

street mob burning effigies,

revolution, civil war

like nothing ever seen before.

SUMMARY: Abrupt warming in Arctic could lead to catastrophic consequences says top scientist Dr. Peter Gleick, ICCI Director Pam Pearson, and the founder of Paleoceanography, Dr. James Kennett. Three must-listen interviews.

"What is happening in the Arctic now is unprecedented & possibly catastrophic."

That's heard around the world at the end of February. It was picked up by the Independent newspaper in the UK, and many other places in the alternative and climate-savy media. Robert Hunziker did a strong piece about it in CounterPunch called "The Arctic Turns Ugly".

The Tweeter is a world-known scientist. Dr. Peter Gleick is a member of the US National Academy of Science, he's a MacArthur Fellow, and President of the Pacific Institute. He was a guest on Radio Ecoshock in March 2014 (find the blog and links for that audio here).

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

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DR. PETER GLEICK WARNS OF POSSIBLE ARCTIC CATASTROPHE

Why is it warming so much - is it just "El Nino" or is it really climate change? Generally, scientists say El Nino affects the Pacific, but not the Arctic. Most of the strange warming in the Arctic this past winter (with record low sea ice) is due to our heating the atmosphere, and not El Nino.

I ask Peter Gleick, why he is alarmed about this, and is that concern shared by other scientists?



Dr. Peter Gleick

The United Kingdom has practically been buried by storm after record-breaking storm this winter. Peter Gleick thinks abnormal weather is directly connected to big changes in the Arctic. That's the new understanding, led by scientists like Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University. The Jet Stream has been altered by the fact that there is less temperature difference between the poles and the equatorial zones. The oceans are hotter. The land is hotter, and in some places drier. All these things change the weather.

I worry an abrupt shift in climate could happen, and the corporate media would still bury us in Donald Trump and the Kardashians. Do you think climate silence is a conspiracy by a few major media corporations - or is it possible that all of us are so addicted to fossil fuels, we really don't want to know?

To be honest, I can barely bring myself to read the latest news. Maybe the problems in the Arctic are just too big to comprehend, or just too scary to face? Is it worthwhile to keep fighting, if all we can do is slow down the loss - and the damage, for the next generation?

There is, says Gleick, a big difference between a civilization facing severe challenges as the Earth warms, and a planet where climate changes so far and so fast that civilization cannot cope or adapt. We'll have to make major efforts to adapt to what we have already done. We can't continue to make it worse. So "yes" it is worth keeping up the fight.

Let's say Greenland ice loss doubles or triples, and the Arctic sea ice disappears for most of the year. Gleick agrees nobody knows what would happen. When we change the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we are running a giant experiment on the Earth. It's already out of control.

Gleick is a senior scientist, recognized around the world. When he suggests a "catastrophe" might be developing, is that language too extreme? He tells us that again, no one can say for sure, but our current path is taking us to climate changes so extreme it could easily become a catatastrophe.

Find out more about Dr. Peter Gleick, at the Pacific Institute. The web site is pacinst.org. Peter is author of many scientific papers and nine books, many of them reporting on world freshwater resources.

Download or listen to this 13 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Peter Gleick in CD Quality or Lo-Fi.

You can Tweet out this interview with Peter Gleik using this tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/h53exrb

PAM PEARSON - CROSSING THRESHOLDS OF THE CRYOSPHERE

A surprising amount of Planet Earth is frozen. It's been that way for millions of years, all during our life and evolution. Last December, the world's leading experts on this frozen land and sea - warned Earth is heading into irreversible loss in the cryosphere. Nothing short of an ice age can avoid incredible changes that will re-arrange sea levels, cities, and life as we know it. Practically nobody heard them.

Scientists and civil servants who know this danger gathered into a largely volunteer group called the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, known as ICCI. They've issued a report called "Thresholds and Closing Windows, Risks of Irreversible Cryosphere Climate Change". We are joined by one of the co-ordinators of that report, Pam Pearson, the Director of ICCI. In fact, she founded this network of ice science specialists just as the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks failed.



Pam Pearson

Get an overview and link to download report "Thresholds and Closing Windows" here.



Here is what the ICCI says in a summary about this report:

"Policy makers and the general public alike now largely accept that the Arctic, Antarctica and many mountain regions already have warmed two-three times faster than the rest of the planet. What is less understood, outside the scientific community, is that the very nature of the cryosphere – regions of snow and ice – carries dynamics that once triggered, in some cases cannot be reversed, even with a return to lower temperatures or CO2 levels."

The Cryosphere breaks down into 4 important components, all acting differently on different time scales:

1. Ice sheets (polar land-based ice)

2. Mountain glaciers (retreating everywhere around the world)

3. Permafrost (up to 20% of the Earth's land mass is "permanently" frozen, except it's not. It's thawing.)

4. Arctic and Antarctic sea ice (floating on ice surface, does not add to rising seas, but does increase warming when melting back and exposing darker ocean water to sunlight.)

The report also covers Polar Ocean acidification.

I think the first thing to grasp is that politics and propaganda can't change a simple fact of physics: once the temperature goes over 0 degrees C, or 32 Fahrenheit, water changes state from ice or snow to a liquid. We can't talk our way out of that. The report says:

"Cryosphere climate change is not like air or water pollution, where the impacts remain local and when addressed, allow ecosystems largely to recover. Cryosphere climate change, driven by the physical laws of water’s response to the freezing point, is different. Slow to manifest itself, once triggered it inevitably forces the Earth’s climate system into a new state, one that most scientists believe has not existed for 35–50 million years."

The Arctic has been unbelievably hot this past winter. It rained in the dark of December, and I just read the Arctic February was more like the temperature expected in June.

But the ice-world is not just thawing at the Poles. I remember years ago the famous nature TV star Steve Irwin lamenting that tropical glaciers were disappearing. Now this report says that even if the Paris climate deal is carried out, we can still expect: "Complete loss of most mountain glaciers."

IRREVERSIBLE LOSS OF ICE

The Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, DID say that many aspects of climate change are "largely irreversible on human time scales." But they buried that on page one thousand and thirty three of a fat report that hardly anyone reads!

About two dozen scientists published an last December, urging more action to protect the cryosphere, at the Paris climate talks.

I found it fascinating that this ICCI report devoted a chapter to acidification of the polar seas. We know oceans become more acidic due to a chemical reaction with the carbon dioxide we keep adding to the atmosphere. But I haven't seen much about this at the Poles. It's happening even worse there, as colder water can absorb more carbon, which becomes carbolic acid. Northern fisheries and all marine life are threatened by this change.

THAWING PERMAFROST

I've done several shows on thawing permafrost. Scientists in Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and Alaska are most interested, but so are the people who live in those lands full-time. Is there a tipping point where once permafrost starts to go, it can fuel it's own further thawing? Apparently so.

The ICCI report says of permafrost thaw: "any carbon release [is] not reversible even with [a] new Ice Age, except on geologic time scales." I found that in a couple of places in the report. Even a new Ice Age may not be able to return Earth to the state known for millions of years! Most scientists say that the next possible date for an ice age, based on the tilt of the Earth's axis, - that ice age will not happen due to the warming gases we have already added to the atmosphere. So count that out.

You can find out more about melting permafrost as a driver to global climate change here.

WHAT ABOUT THE FROZEN METHANE - THE CLATHRATES?

One thing I found missing in this report is the threat of melting of frozen methane on the sea-bed, known as clathrates. Other scientists see clathrates as a likely driver in past extinction events. Why isn't it in this ICCI report? Pam tells us the science about clathrate melting is not yet sure. Some scientists say that for now, the methane released in Arctic waters is likely to be absorbed in the water column, before it reaches the surface and the atmosphere. Others, like Dr. Shahkova, say their research shows methane is already being released in the Arctic, more and more.

The authors of the ICCI report already had four irreversible certainties to report. They didn't want to add the clathrate problem until more finished science is in. Some of their scientists disagreed. It's not settled. See what our next guest, Dr. James Kennett has to say!

ABANDONING OUR COASTAL CITIES - IS THAT "ADAPTING"?

Here is one more paragraph from the stunning introduction to this report "Thresholds and Closing Windows":

"Adaptation to the levels of projected climate-related disruption, particularly sea-level rise that cannot be halted and accelerates over the centuries, simply will not be possible without massive migration and other changes to human centers of population and infrastructure, that will carry enormous economic and not least, historic and cultural costs."

Basically: humans will have to leave their coastal cities behind, and the some of the most fertile near-ocean river estuaries that now support many millions of people.

According to this ICCI report: "The only way fully to avoid these risks is never to let temperatures rise into these risk zones at all." After the climate is broken, and the cryosphere starts it's unstoppable melt, there is no way to "fix" it.

Find out more about the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative at iccinet.org.

Download or listen to this 27 minute Radio Ecoshock interview with Pam Pearson in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

You can Tweet out this interview using this tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/hauvzt6

DR. JAMES KENNETT - ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE FOUND IN THE PAST

Just 10 years ago, scientists told me melting the world's ice system would take thousands of years. Since then, with the shocking ice loss at both poles, we're not so sure. Abrupt climate change is possible. We're about to explore what can happen within one lifetime - that has already happened in the ancient past.

To find the clues, we dig into the sea bed with a founding expert in the field. Our guest is recognized as the father of that science, called Paleoceanography. He started publishing in the 1960's. He wrote the standard college textbook "Marine Geology", and founded a journal on this subject.



Dr. James Kennett

Dr. James Kennett is Emeritus Professor of Marine Geology and Paleocoeanography, in the Earth Science Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

For me, the startling results of this study, published October 2015 in the Journal Paleoceanography, is what could happen in just 50 years, easily within a single lifetime.

The paper name sounds very technical, but don't let that scare you off this interview. Kennett explains things very clearly, and it's one of the most important interviews I've done recently. The title is: "Abrupt termination of Marine Isotope Stage 16 (Termination VII) at 631.5?ka in Santa Barbara Basin, California".

You can read about this Santa Barbara Basin research in this helpful AGU article by Julie Cohen.

We learn in this paper that about 630,000 years ago, there was a relatively rapid shift out of a cold glacier period, to an interglacial period that was a lot warmer. The whole process took about 700 years - BUT it started with an abrupt temperature rise in only 50 years! Kennett tells Julie Cohen:

“Of the 13 degree Fahrenheit total change, a shift of 7 to 9 degrees occurred almost immediately right at the beginning.”

WHEN YELLOWSTONE BLEW UP

What do catastrophic events in Yellowstone Park have to do with all this? Well first of all, Kennett has studied and written papers on the Yellowstone Caldera, the giant hole in the ground blown out in an ancient explosion. He told science journalist Julie Cohen:

“Our tests showed that this particular ash was ejected from the Yellowstone volcanic caldera in Wyoming, which has exactly the same fingerprint. This huge caldera formed about 630,000 years ago, with most of the enormous volume of ash blown to the east. However, this eruption was so explosive that the ash reached the Santa Barbara Basin, forming a layer one to two inches thick. The discovery of this ash helped with dating the core.”

Kennett tells Radio Ecoshock listeners there were in fact two gigantic blasts at Yellowstone, about 200 years apart. The first was followed by a cloud that rolled around the Northern Hemisphere, blocking out the summer sun, and creating an instant cooling, similar to a "nuclear winter". The second created an even longer constant winter.

ANOTHER SCIENTIST WORRIED ABOUT CLATHRATES AND ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE

Some of our listeners are deeply worried about much more global warming methane being released in our current climate shift. This paper talks about: "repeated discharges of methane from methane hydrates associated with both ocean warming and low sea level." Did that methane erupt from the West Coast of North America, or from the Arctic? Kennett says more methane has been measured all down the Canadian and American West Coast in recent years, bubbling up from the sea floor. Hotter oceans are already starting the first signs of clathrate melting. It's happening off the U.S. East Coast too.

This seasoned scientist is deeply concerned about the potential super warming effect of methane releases, as the oceans warm. He's not shy to tell us that, and you should listen. Dr. Kennett suggests that melting clathrates likely triggered the rapid 50 year warming found about 630,000 years ago. But we do not know for certain yet.

This paper did not speculate on a comparison of this 50-year shift a few hundred thousand years ago, and human-induced warming today. But personally, I wonder if we will see a similar deglaciation within a single human lifetime. Have we already entered this process?

I wonder what climate modellers like David Archer will think, after his book . Is there disagreement about how fast deglaciation can take place? Yes and no, says Kennett. Everyone who studies ice knows it can take hundreds to thousands of years for a giant glacier like the one covering Greenland to melt. On the other hand, he tells us, there is a big scientific consensus that quite rapid temperature changes have taken place many times in the past. It's both.

After the call, Jim told me that their research team wants to return to the Santa Barbara Basin to drill even deeper cores. These would tell us a lot about the history of Earth's climate and life, including methane releases, going back 1.2 million years. However, there is a lot of oil and gas drilling in that same basin, plus a very environmentally concerned community in California. So far, the scientists have not received permission to go back and open up this critical chapter in Earth's records.

Dr. James Kennett has published hundreds of papers, starting in 1962 right up to the present.

Download or listen to this 21 minute interview with Dr. James Kennett in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

You can Tweet out this Kennett interview using this tiny url: http://tinyurl.com/zd9mwrk

Here is a You tube video on abrupt climate change: "" with senior scientists like Richard Alley warning us all.

EARTH NOW WARMING FIFTY TIME FASTER

Here's an important article in the UK Guardian newspaper "Earth now warming 50X faster than coming out of last ice age".

That article says:

"What humans are in the process of doing to the climate makes the transition out of the last ice age look like a casual stroll through the park. We’re already warming the Earth about 20 times faster than during the ice age transition, and over the next century that rate could increase to 50 times faster or more. We’re in the process of destabilizing the global climate far more quickly than happens even in some of the most severe natural climate change events."

This paper, led by R.E. Kopp, is covered here in the Real Climate blog here.

The full citiation for the new science is:

R.E. Kopp, A.C. Kemp, K. Bittermann, B.P. Horton, J.P. Donnelly, W.R. Gehrels, C.C. Hay, J.X. Mitrovica, E.D. Morrow, and S. Rahmstorf, "Temperature-driven global sea-level variability in the Common Era", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pp. 201517056, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1517056113

The actual paper abstract is here.

That was one fully loaded Ecoshock show. I hope you found it useful. You can download all our past programs as free .mp3 files from our web site at http://www.ecoshock.org/ You can also listen to our more recent programs, for free, using the player at .

Alex Smith, your host and producer at Radio Ecoshock.

Summary: British & American scientists, including Joshua Elliot from Chicago, warn climate could bring "food shock" by hitting key crop areas. Will famine return? Maria Gillardin hosts reports from nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen from Fukushima Japan, site of world's worst nuclear accident.

Don't say you haven't been warned.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.



If you can support this radio show, I can use your help now. Radio Ecoshock is developing new graphics, a new web site, and blog plus podcast feed - which should make these important themes more widely available. Check out ways to support the show here.

JOSHUA ELLIOT AND FOOD SHOCK

What if extreme weather events, made stronger by climate change, hit a couple of major world food-growing regions? We go into "food shock". Let's explore what that can mean.

On February 12th, 2016 in Washington DC, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancment of Science, a group of British and American scientists provided their latest report on the fragility, and resilience of the global food system. We are joined by one of the presenters, Dr. Joshua Elliot, from the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.









Dr. Joshua Elliot

You can find these reports at the Global Food Security blog, at foodsecurity.ac.uk. For example, here is the main report I used: "" which comes as a handy .pdf file in your browser.

Try this blog entry on the program from Tim Benton.

And check out Tim Benton's blog post on UK food security here. I say that because (a) the UK government is a major sponsor of this study/report and (b) as Dr. Elliot tells us, the UK has only TEN DAYS worth of food supplies!

The long-time grain watcher Lester Brown warned for years that rice was within a half degree of it's upper growing limits already. What happens if the world rice zones become too hot for that crop? Joshua Elliot thinks the rice crop will be able to continue past heat limits, because it is generally underwater, which cools it.

This teleconference I recorded with Lester Brown, at the time head of the Earth Policy Institute is a good intro to his work, and continues to be heavily downloaded now 5 years later. Download full conference in CD quality (22 minutes) here.

Brown also warned that world grain stocks could only supply a few months of food at best. It appears we can't cover a whole year of bad crop losses. Should we be creating a long-term food reserve, as the ancient Egyptians did?

That turns out to be a very thorny idea. If there was a centralized food stock, maybe somone would use it to dictate political changes to a starving country? Anyway, most countries do not want to give up control of their own food sources. Remember when Russia experienced a huge crop loss in the heat wave of 2010, the Russians cut off food exports to make sure they could feed their own people. That was one driving factor in the "Arab Spring" revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, both of which import large amounts of grain, which is subsidized for the poor. When prices went up, the patience of the people went down.

So an international food bank seems unlikely at this time.

I AM NOT OPTIMISTIC ABOUT WORLD FOOD SUPPLIES

Unlike my guest, I am not a techno-optimist about our coming food supply. Just in: a new report says 75% of world crops depend on pollination. Yet 40% of pollinators like bees and butterlies are threatened by "total extinction". Bat and bird pollinators are also disappearing.

That is just one driver, not counting heat beyond crop limits, extreme weather events including floods and droughts, human encroachement on nature everywhere, expanding human population, the list goes on and on. Personally, I expect to witness mass famine again in my lifetime, as seen in the 1960's in China in 1959, and Ethiopia in 1984, but hitting more countries. Even in developed countries, it seems likely food will become a much larger part of our budget, and at times difficult to afford for millions.

I have food insurance in buckets in the basement which will last at least 30 years. We grow more of our own food every year. We are plugged into a network of local food producers and community gardens.

In the interview, Joshua Elliot mentioned the United Kingdom has a scant 10 days of food provisions. If the ships and planes stop for any reason, the country is in danger. Food backups in all countries have dropped dangerously low, just at a time of growing threats to agriculture as usual. I say: don't take food for granted.

FUKUSHIMA NUCLEAR DISASTER - STILL DEVELOPING - ARNIE GUNDERSEN

We're coming to the fifth year after the start of the world's biggest nuclear disaster. In March 2011, three reactors at the sea-side complex at Fukushima blew up. I covered it extensively on Radio Ecoshock, and one of my best sources has been nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education. Find my 2014 blog summary of continuing Fukushima threats here, and you can listen to or download that feature interview with Arnie here.





Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen

Now Arnie is back in Japan, checking out the radiation, the impacts, the human costs, and efforts by the operator TEPCO to stem continuing radiation running into the Pacific Ocean. His first telephone reports have been compiled by a hard-working California radio producer, Maria Gillardin. She hosts TUC Radio. Previously Maria was a leading producer at KPFA Radio in Berkeley, and was founding producer of the public affairs program "Making Contact".



Radio Producer Maria Gilardin

TUC Radio stands for "Time of Useful Consciousness". Be sure to support Maria as an independent radio maker, at tucradio.org. You can find still more telephone reports from Fukushima by Arnie Gundersen at fairewinds.org.

Remember, the nuclear accident at Fukushima was not an event in history. Even now, five years later, this horrible outpouring of radiation continues.

It took four years for the government of Japan to admit that ALL the plutonium-laced nuclear materials in Reactor Three were blown into the air in the first days. That went to Japan, to the Pacific Ocean, and around the world in the stratosphere.





As Arnie tells us in detail, the human health impacts of the Fukushima disaster are still not widely known, and still covered up by the Japanese government. It's proving impossible to handle all the radioactive materials. Look for the government to start incinerating even more, which just means dumping dangerous radioactive particles over a wider area.

Every day a throng of workers try to find more space to store still more highly radioactive water. Every day they fail, and some drains into the Pacific Ocean. We have no idea how this will end, or if it will ever end in this century, or the next. A nuclear melt-down is forever in human terms, and this was three melt-downs.

As Helen Caldicott wrote in her book, nuclear power is not the answer to global warming or anything else.

I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and caring what happens to this planet.

SUMMARY: Coming up on Radio Ecoshock two heavy hitters. We have the expert on past mass extinctions, and maybe the present one, scientist Peter Ward. Then climate scientist Paul Beckwith joins me. There is serious news about plankton, the tiny ocean plants that feed the seas, and provide most of the oxygen you are breathing right now. I'm Alex Smith. Welcome to Radio Ecoshock.

Listen to/download this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB)

Or listen on Soundcloud right now.



A NEW WEB SITE, BLOG AND PODCAST FEED FOR RADIO ECOSHOCK

The long-standing (since 2006) Radio Ecoshock podcast on Itunes has died. That is because this blog has become too complex for the Itunes system. I have to break apart the podcast feed and the blog. Plus, the web site is rather boring. It just doesn't reflect the excitement of our guests and the danger of these times.

I have a new site designer working on this. He's a long-time fan, in the online business, who is giving Radio Ecoshock a great low rate. Carl's been running the Radio Ecoshock web site for years, flawlessly. He's a big reason you can get Radio Ecoshock online. Plus, Russ, the original Ecoshock graphics designer, is coming back with a new logo and some screen graphics.

As you know I've been fundraising last fall and continuing. That's partly to save up for the cost of a new web site, blog - everything really. If you can add to that fund, we'll get even more online, helping more people find out about climate change and other serious problems facing this civilization. If you can help, use this page to see donation options.

A CALL FOR GRAPHICS OR PHOTOS

Do you have photos or other graphics or images you can contribute to our new web site and blog?

Photos of nature, or the wreckage of nature would be welcome for the new site and on-going use (like on Soundcloud). Or you may have drawing, art, or images suitable for Radio Ecoshock (burning Earth, fallen forests, nuclear stuff, you know what we cover).

You must own the rights to material you submit. If it is public domain, you must send proof (say a link) that shows it is public domain.

Send your submission, or a link to where I can get it, to: radio //at// ecoshock dot org. Thanks for helping out if you can! Let's get this science and news out further to more people.

DR. PETER WARD: PAST EXTINCTION, PRESENT DIRECTIONS

Is Earth designed by life for life? Or is this a casino of chance, where catastrophe decides the survivors? Those questions, and more this week with Dr. Peter Ward on Radio Ecoshock. I can tell you Peter is a Professor at the University of Washington, and a paleontologist. He's a specialist in the long history of Earth, it's climate, and its periods of mass extinction.

In my opinion, Peter is also one of the most under-estimated minds in American science. His 11th book shook me. It's called That books presents the best theory we have on the mechanism of great mass extinction. That was in 2007. Two years later he surprised us again with the Medea Hypothesis (Princeton University Press) which we'll touch on. His 2010 book "The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps." stands near my desk, as a standard for the public. In 2015, he published "A New History of Life: The radical new discoveries about the origins and evolution of life on Earth" with Joe Kirschvink. It is radical science. We'll find out why.

It's my pleasure to welcome Peter Ward back to Radio Ecoshock.



Dr. Peter D. Ward

I saved up some serious questions for Peter, which touch on his string of books. We start by revisiting his now ten-year-old theory of how a massive extinction of land and sea creatures happened. That's in the classic book (read it!) "Under A Green Sky". I ask Peter to describe the organisms that created a poisonous atmosphere for a time on Earth.

These are bacteria that have a different metabolism than most life we know. They do not depend on oxygen, and breath out sulphur dioxide. That's the "rotten egg" chemical you may have smelled in a high school chemistry class. We instinctively run away from that smell, because it is poisonous to our lungs.

Ward theorizes that when oxygen ran to lower levels in great warming of the oceans in the distant past, these sulphur producing bacteria took over from oxygen producing plankton. Waves of poisonous gas would have washed over land, killing off most life forms there. Thus we have a period of ten million years (among several such times) where there is no record, or very little sign, of life in the fossil record of rocks.

These sulfur bacteria are very ancient. They were on Earth at least 3 billion years ago, and remain with us still. You can find them in the bad-smelling oxygen-deprived parts under a beach, if you dig down. If oxygen in the oceans become depleted beyond a certain point, these sulfur breathers will come roaring back!

All this relates to the possible collapse of oxygen-producing plankton, which I cover with Paul Beckwith in the second part of this program.

A few weeks ago I interviewed the Russian scientist Sergei Petrovskii, now working in the UK. His work suggests that phytoplankton, which produce the majority of the world's oxygen, could thrive as warming progresses, up to a point where many species go into extinction. The paper is called "Mathematical Modelling of Plankton–Oxygen Dynamics Under the Climate Change".

The full paper is here.

Or you can listen to my interview with Petrovskii here.

Sergei Petrovksii told us he had not yet checked his model against the record of the ancient past. So I ask Peter Ward, who know about such things, if there have been cases of a dip in world oxygen levels in the paleoclimatic record, since the Great Oxygenation Event, about 2.3 billion years ago?

His answer is "yes" many of them. Ward tells us that each of the mass extinction events in the past 500 million years were accompanied by a reduction of oxygen. Listen to the interview for the full details, but this appears to further the concerns raised by Petrovskii - that extreme warming could lead to a plankton die-off and consequent loss of oxygen.

Download or listen to this 30 minute interview with Peter Ward in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

ARE SEA LEVELS RISING FASTER?

My next problem touches on Ward's book . In Robert Scribbler's blog, Robert Marston Fanney says sea level rise has accelerated. He writes: "From 2009 Through October 2015, Global Oceans Have Risen by 5 Millimeters Per Year". He cites data and a graph from AVISO, the satellite altimetry data site.

On the other hand, very new science has come out suggesting a drier state of land is soaking up more moisture than before, limiting sea level rise. That comes from work led by J.T. Reager, a researcher with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

What does Ward see happening in this matter of short-term sea level rise? Actually, he prefers not to talk about short-term sea level at all. There isn't a consensus yet about it, as new science comes out. What we do know is that sea levels WILL rise, and Ward documents the impacts of that in his book "The Flooded Earth".

ON QUESTION OF SEA LEVEL RISE: BREAKING SCIENCE

Here is a quote from a press release February 22, 2016 from the Potsdam Institute:

"Sea-level rise past and future: Robust estimates for coastal planners

POTSDAM INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE IMPACT RESEARCH (PIK)

"Sea-levels worldwide will likely rise by 50 to 130 centimeters by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced rapidly. This is shown in a new study led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research that, for the first time, combines the two most important estimation methods for future sea-level rise and yields a more robust risk range. A second study, like the first one to be published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides the first global analysis of sea-level data for the past 3000 years. It confirms that during the past millennia sea-level has never risen nearly as fast as during the last century."

And here is a news story about that second breaking science story - that sea levels are now rising faster than they have in the past 2800 years.

CATASTROPHISM

Starting in the 1700's, scientists, especially geologists, described the world a gradual continuum, where "the present is the key to the past". The opposite theory, called catastrophism, was left for fringe writers like Immanuel Velikovksy.

Peter's newest book re-writes the history of life on Earth, not from the viewpoint of gradual evolution, but from the many catastrophes that have occurred on this planet. That's not just the impact of asteroids hitting, but gigantic and long-lasting eruption of volcanoes, the almost frozen times known as "snowball Earth", and of course the many periods of serious global heating.

This new book also originates from Ward's important earlier book the "Medea Hypothesis". That is an answer to James Lovelock's and the Gaia hypothesis. Instead of life arranging the best circumstances for its continued survival, Ward finds in the geologic record that life forms have often been suicidal, destroying the conditions required for survival. Does that sound familiar?

The new book is: ": The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth" by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink.

If life bumbles along through long periods between catastrophes, often of it's own making, where do you think we are now? Are we on the edge of the next mass extinction, or could that be thousands of years from now?

GET THE RIGHT PETER WARD!

It's really strange. Peter when I talk with some of the world's top scientists, it's common for them to mention Peter's theories. Radio Ecoshock listeners ask about him. He's been on PBS, Coast to Coast AM, and helped Animal Planet. Yet if I Google Peter Ward and climate, the top couple of pages refer to a man who really is on the fringe of climate science.

Yes, Dr. Peter Langdon Ward is a vulcanologist with unorthodox views on the causes of climate change. Rather than fossil fuels, the other Peter Ward claims volcanic eruptions and depletion of ozone from chlorinated substances cause global warming. It's a different kind of denial, and yet the American Geophysical Union (AGU) continues to give this other Peter Ward top billing. Shame on them. The fossil fuel companies must love it - "we're not responsible, it's the volcanoes or something...." Yeah right.

Here are some links to the real Peter Ward - Peter D. Ward, from the University of Washington.

His academic bio, on the University of Washington site. The Peter Ward Paleontologist page in Wikipedia.

Here is Part 1 of my video interview with Peter Ward five years ago, but still valid.



Part 2 is . Part 3 .

, TED-Ed talk 3 years ago. Peter Ward You tube video "".

PAUL BECKWITH ON THE PLANKTON THREAT

The world economy is teetering. The weather is nuts and dangerous. So let's talk about plankton! Those little critters in the ocean we never see, produce most of the oxygen you are breathing right now. They are the bottom of the food chain for ocean life. And they are in trouble.

Here to chat about all this is a regular Radio Ecoshock correspondent, climate scientist Paul Beckwith. By the way, there's a humorous album of photo-shopped Paul Beckwith .



Paul has two Masters Degrees, and is now working on his Ph.D. in climate science at the University of Ottawa. He's a prolific communicator on climate, with emphasis on his research into abrupt climate shifts.

Paul says we are entering an abrupt shift of climate now, and we will have to do some kind of geoengineering to save a livable climate. That might include feeding nutrients to plankton, whether by dumping iron into the sea, and the non-scientist Russ George tried, or even by placing tubes into the sea, to use wave power to bring up nutrients from the depths for plankton to feed on.

The latest studies found a very disturbing trend. Apparently we've lost almost 40% of plankton in world oceans already, at least according to a 2010 paper. Paul Beckwith, tells us about that study in posted on You tube two weeks ago.





Then a newsletter from Jim Thomas of the ETC Group said the loss was not as great as thought. The disappearance of plankton may be partly due to satellite misreading. Jim cited the paper “Revaluating ocean warming impacts on global phytoplankton”, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on October 26, 2015.

Paul says this new study implies a loss of plankton at about 8%, instead of 40% since 1950. If true that would be good news. But there is more research needed. At the very least, this new paper in Nature Climate Change tells us more about plankton's response to warming oceans. Paul's comments are excellent, listen in.

Download or listen to this 29 minute interview with Paul Beckwith in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Paul and I talk about many things, like the impact on fisheries and world food, declining Plankton in the Indian Ocean, super warming in the Arctic and what that means for plankton, and whether he thinks the die-off of mammals and sea birds on the West Coast is caused by Fukushima radiation (he doesn't).

Get all the latest from Paul Beckwith on his web site here. I also get a lot of good tips from .

NEXT UP: FOOD SHOCK

Next week, Radio Ecoshock covers the coming phenomenon of food shock. This isn't about doomer fantasies. The warning comes from government-funded institutions and serious scientists. Be sure to tune in for our food shock show next week.

Sorry to nag about money, but if you can spare some, I'll need it for the new web page, blog, graphics and all that. The page to find out how is here.

We are out of time. I'm Alex. Thank you for listening again this week, and for caring about our world.

Summary: Australia fires climate scientists while expanding coal. Ellen Roberts of GetUp! reports. From Netherlands, scientist Arjen Hoekstra finds 4 billion people in water scarcity. From Hong Kong, Stuart Heaver on nuclear fear next door. Radio Ecoshock 160217

A new paper by Australian scientists find that that the number of bushfires in Australia is up 40 percent just since 2007. Find that study here.

Another hot summer is just ending in Australia, with another round of fires. Meanwhile, Tasmania is burning, with fires so hot they create their own lightning - self-sustaining fires.

What does the government do? It hires a thug to fire 110 climate scientists who report on the growing impacts of climate disruption. The premier climate study agency CISRO, is being converted into a for-profit tech research agency with industry in mind. Why? The new boss says climate change has already been proven, so why keep all those climate scientists?

Over 3,000 scientists around the world have petitioned to stop the carnage at CISRO. No matter. The government has other fish to fry, literally, as the waters around Australia heat up beyond the survival limits of the famous Great Barrier Reef (just look at this recent example from Fiji). That doesn't matter anyway, as the Australian government just approved a massive new coal mine complex, and a coal shipping port just a few kilometers from that reef.

That's the real reason climate science has to go. It's the coal business, mate.

We'll get to the scientist who led a study showing billions of people experience "severe water scarcity", and listen to more nuclear fears about reactor mania in China. Welcome to your dose of world news and science, this week on Radio Ecoshock.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock show in CD Quality (56 MB) or Lo-Fi (14 MB) Or listen on Soundcloud right now!



ELLEN ROBERTS, GETUP! AND AUSSIE COAL CRAZIES

There are crazy projects, and then there are plans so dangerous we can't believe any government or corporation would do it. Here is one of those. In Australia, just before Christmas, the government announced approval of a mega-coal shipping terminal just a few kilometers from the World Heritage Great Barrier reef. Australia is busy expanding production with absolutely giant mines, to ship more climate-wrecking coal to India. What could go wrong?

Here to tell us about it is Ellen Roberts of the Australian activist organization GetUp! The GetUp! group in Queensland covers a wide range of issues, from climate change to mistreatment of refugees. They help organize the public to get action, despite the current reactionary government in Australia.





Ellen Roberts. Photo credit: Australian Financial Review at afr.com

Here is part of a GetUp email to their members:

"Earlier this year, we helped the Mackay Conservation Group defeat the Carmichael mine in Federal Court. And in 2013 GetUp members funded two court cases that stopped the Abbot Point expansion in its tracks. They were historic cases that forced new laws banning dredge spoil from being dumped out at sea.

But, under huge pressure from the coal lobby and conservatives within his party, Greg Hunt has just re-approved Adani's destructive, unprofitable coal disaster.

This port will involve more than a million cubic metres of dredging in Great Barrier Reef World Heritage waters. It will make way for a company with a documented history of bribery, corruption and environmental destruction to build one of the biggest coal mines in the world.

The mine would create more carbon emissions than most countries. It will heat the oceans, bleach our coral and undermine international efforts to stop global warming. On every level, this is a disaster.

We've done it before. Now, we have no choice. To stop this project, we have to do it again."

If it makes you feel any better, the Adani Group in India have announced they will delay opening their super coal mines in Australia, and the new coal port. Perhaps they've noticed that stock in coal companies around the world have crashed so badly that many are going bankrupt. The Australian government is still optimistic though, hoping they can help crash the world climate with more coal. This adds to my conviction that only a major economic crash can possibly stop civilization from environmental suicide.

All along, the Aussie coal industry has foot tooth and nail against any subsidy for solar or wind power. Now that Asian coal demand has fallen, and Australia's mines running at a loss, here comes the coal industry looking for billions more in taxpayers dollars - aside from the multiple subisides they already get in public infrastructure.

More on falls in Asian coal demand lower down in this article.

By providing coal, Australia is helping India avoid the transition to clean fuel. India and that whole region is hard hit by climate change. Plus literally millions of Indians are killed every year by air pollution caused by burning coal. I think Australians need to take some responsibility for the impacts in India, but here we also have an Indian corporation using Australian coal to pollute their own people.

Here is the kicker. Coal companies in the United States and Europe are going bankrupt. Their stock is almost worthless. Nobody wants to invest in them. Why is Australia the last place to hear that the coal age is over?

Download or listen to this 17 minute interview with Ellen Roberts in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

WATER SCARCITY EXPERIENCED BY 4 BILLION PEOPLE - ARJEN HOEKSTRA

Word about this scary study is spreading around alternative media, even as it fades from it's 15 seconds of fame on mainstream outlets like the Guardian. Hardly anyone has a full interview with him. Radio Ecoshock does.

If you need water, just turn on a tap. Take as much as you want. Unless of course you are one of the four billion people on this planet who often can't.

You heard that right. A new study from the Netherlands is titled "Four billion people facing severe water scarcity." It's another jaw-dropping signal from the real world in trouble.

Dr. Arjen Hoekstra co-authored the paper with Mesfin Mekonnen. I think it's safe to say that Dr. Hoeskstra is a world authority on water use. His latest book "The Water Footprint of Modern Consumer Society" was translated into Chinese, with his other titles appearing in many languages.

He advises governments and international institutions like UNESCO and the World Bank. He founded the Water Footprint Network. And he's Professor in Water Management at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands.







Dr. Arjen Hoekstra

Essentially this study finds that 4 billion people experience at least 1 month of severe water scarcity a year. About half that number have to survive through many months of where water is hard to find, and some countries, like Libya, have severe water stress all year round.

To be accurate, here are the hard numbers from the Hoekstra paper:

""We find that about 71% of the global population (4.3 billion people) lives under conditions of moderate to severe water scarcity (WS > 1) at least 1 month of the year.

About 66% (4.0 billion people) lives under severe water scarcity (WS > 2.0) at least 1 month of the year.

Of these 4.0 billion people, 1.0 billion live in India and another 0.9 billion live in China. Significant populations facing severe water scarcity during at least part of the year further live in Bangladesh (130 million), the United States (130 million, mostly in western states such as California and southern states such as Texas and Florida), Pakistan (120 million, of which 85% are in the Indus basin), Nigeria (110 million), and Mexico (90 million)."

"The number of people facing severe water scarcity for at least 4 to 6 months per year is 1.8 to 2.9 billion.

Half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round. Of those half-billion people, 180 million live in India, 73 million in Pakistan, 27 million in Egypt, 20 million in Mexico, 20 million in Saudi Arabia, and 18 million in Yemen. In the latter two countries, it concerns all people in the country, which puts those countries in an extremely vulnerable position.

Other countries in which a very large fraction of the population experiences severe water scarcity year-round are Libya and Somalia (80 to 90% of the population) and Pakistan, Morocco, Niger, and Jordan (50 to 55% of the population)."

Picture women walking a few miles, every day, with a jug of dirty river water on their heads, and you get the idea. Crops can't be watered. It's hard to wash dishes or keep kids clean. This is not a statistic, but a snapshot of very difficult lives that most of my listeners have never encountered.

I'm wondering about the possibility of more abrupt water shortages. For example, farmers in parts of India and China are drilling deeper and deeper to suck out groundwater. California is doing the same, and last year some of those wells ran dry. Is there a point where groundwater can no longer make up for rainfall losses - and could we reach that point soon?

Another comparatively abrupt cause of water shortage would be pollution of rivers and lakes. For example, many rivers in China that are now too toxic to drink or unfit for irrigation. Add in ever-growing populations, and the increased need for water to satisfy new demand for meat, and we have a mess.

This whole picture, as bad as it is, will change significantly with climate change.

In a previous paper, Hoekstra published with Wiedmann, in the journal Science June 2014, they found that humanity's total environmental imprint, not just water use, was "unsustainable". We all know this is true.

There are pressure points where countries are moving toward such extreme water stress that their economies, political systems or even survival are at stake. It's already happened in Libya and Syria, with many more to come.

Arjen's latest book is "The Water Footprint of Modern Consumer Society". We discuss his new paper, with co-author Mesfin Mekonnen, titled "Four billion people facing severe water scarcity." That was published in January 29 in the journal "Science Advances".

Download or listen to this 20 minute interview with Arjen Hoesktra in CD Quality or Lo-Fi Follow the work of Arjen Hoekstra though his web site here.

Here is a recent (January 2016) called "Breaking the Wall to Water Security."

Or try : Prof. Arjen Hoekstra on Virtual Water: The Water Footprint of Modern Society.

DANGEROUS NUCLEAR NEIGHBORS IN CHINA - STUART HEAVER

Why am I back talking about the wave of nuclear plant construction in China? First of all, we all do care about other people, even on the other side of the world. A nuclear plant accident among tens of millions of people could be the greatest tragedy ever seen. It's bound to happen eventually.

When it does, there will be no place to go. Those millions will continue to live in radioactive hot zones. If you still don't care, remember that the plume of very radioactive dust spread from Fukushima in Japan all the way around the world. Uranium from Fukushima was found in New England, and radiation arrived in Europe and Scandinavia. A nuclear accident anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere pollutes the whole Northern Hemisphere, for thousands of years. Now maybe you care what happens in China, where dozens of reactors with new designs never successfully run anywhere else are being built right now.

Lately there have been riots on the streets of Hong Kong. It's about freedom of speech, about continuing a free market, about a way of life. Behind it all, there is a growing dark shadow of worry about the new reactors being build right next door on the mainland. Radio Ecoshock investigates.

Stuart Heaver is a journalist with the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. His article in the Post Magazine, January 10, 2016, alerted me to this under-reported nuclear danger. The headline is: "Radiation fear in Hong Kong from China's unproven and possibly faulty nuclear reactors nearby."





Journalist Stuart Heaver from Hong Kong.

China is building and planning a wave of new nuclear reactors. There are eight under construction right now in Guangdong Province, all within 150 kilometers (93 miles) of the crowded super-city of Hong Kong. There are 120 million people in that small area. Trust me, there is absolutely no way to evacuate Hong Kong in any timely manner, should a nuclear accident like Fukushima occur.

There is a contingency evacuation plan for Hong Kong, Heaver tells us, but no one takes it seriously. The biggest and nearest fear is the multiple reactor complex at Daya Bay. There are at least two operators there. Suspicion abounds.

China is not famous for transparency. At least Western privately owned reactor companies have to file some information for their shareholders. The reactors being built by the Chinese government don't. Who knows if the public will even be told if there is a leak of radiation to the air or water? The Soviets didn't tell people in Kiev about the Ukranian nuclear blow-up at Chernobyl, until the Swedes outed them four days later!

One or the reactor complexes uses untested technology from AREVA, the French government controlled nuclear company. French regulators just revealed there is a serious flaw in the reactor core design. Chinese regulators did not inform the public. As we heard a few weeks ago in my interview with Mycle Schneider, this flaw is so serious, the current construction may have to be ripped down and start again.

China will also be the testing ground for the new Westinghouse AP-1000, so-called Third Generation reactors. It's almost like the government decided to try one or two of everything, to see what works and what doesn't. But it's a terrible thing when nuclear technology doesn't work!

Meanwhile, as Stuart Heaver tells us, Chinese industrial culture has a very bad record for safety. You may recall recent news footage of a major port in China blowing up. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Hong Kong media reports every week on deaths, explosions, leaks, and general accidents in industry on the Chinese mainland. The safety culture is not there, and that's terrible news when nuclear reactors are involved.

Even a government survey showed only 34% of Chinese people are confident nuclear power will be handled safely. Another reactor inland is built in an earthquake zone. The last big one was in 2012.

I don't want to pick on China. So far the nuclear record of other countries is worse. China is already a leader in alternative energy, and becoming pro-active on climate change. It's just that we now know nuclear power is literally a dead-end path. It's time to stop the construction and go for alternative energy all the way.

Download or listen to this Radio Ecoshock interview with Stuart Heaver in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Follow Stuart Heaver through his blog here. His Twitter handle is .

I'm Alex Smith. Please support making and distributing this program if you can. Find out how here.

Thank you for listening, and caring about our world.

SUMMARY: "Reality 101" with Nate Hagens, our minds, our world, the fossil trap. Scientists Alexander "Sandy" MacDonald of NOAA and Chris Clack of CIRES: yes we can power America with solar and wind power.

This week on Radio Ecoshock we'll see how hard it is, and how possible it is, to get out of the matrix. Resilience expert Dr. Nate Hagens talks about his college course "Reality 101".

Then we visit with two top American scientists whose recent study was published by the government-funded National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A detailed study of sun and wind says yes we can replace fossil and nuclear power with renewable energy, and it won't cost any more than what we are doing now.

Thanks for joining us this week as we explore where we really are, and what we could do about it.

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NATE HAGENS: REALITY 101

I don't know about you, but I'm often stuck on Bob Dylan's words: "something is happening here, but you don't know what it is". Wouldn't it be great if we could take a course to understand reality?

The course exists. Dr. Nathan J. Hagens teaches "Reality 101 - A Survey of the Human Predicament" to graduate students at the University of Minnesota. Nate Hagens is a familiar name to anyone who tracks energy and resilience. Nate was a successful Wall Street trader. He left all that in 2003 to probe deeper. Nate is on the Board of Directors of the Post Carbon Institute, a Director of the Bottleneck Foundation, and he teaches. He's working on a book that he doesn't want to talk about yet. Hagens lives on a farm in Wisconsin with a collection of animals.







Dr. Nate Hagens

I first learned about Nate from speeches made at Peak Oil conferences. We talk about that a bit. But the bigger problem here is the big problem - the nexis of threatening developments that seem too large to grasp. We have guests that see everything in terms of energy. Others focus only on the environment. I've talked with a few eco-psychologists. Nate is one of the few who attempt to wrap them all up together.

The course begins with . Then it gets into "Systems theory and complexity" with a combination of You tube videos and Nate's own unreleased writing.

A QUESTION OF EXTINCTION

There is a course section on geologic time, and paleclimatology. Dr. Peter Ward, a several-time guest on Radio Ecoshock, is twice featured in the syllabus. I've got Peter lined up for a return trip to Radio Ecoshock soon. He's one of the few scientist to crystalize a working theory of how mass extinctions in the past really worked. They all developed through climate change, except for the great asteroid strike in the Gulf of Mexico about 65 million years ago. And even there, the dying animals (including dinosaurs) and plants may have already been weakened by a planetary warming that began a few million years before the asteroid hit.

You can watch a video interview I did with Dr. Peter Ward on this page. Here are the two key interviews with Peter Ward on Radio Ecoshock, as audio files: "Under a Green Sky" (2008) and "The Medea Hypothesis" (25 minutes)(2009). This are still very valid and powerful today.

In the course "Reality 101" there is a segment on mass extinction. I ask Nate Hagens where he stands on the idea of human extinction, either this century, as suggested by Dr. Guy McPherson, or in the near-coming centuries? If I can summarize Nate's reply, it would be that humans are very ingenious and adaptable. He doesn't think there is any basis for worrying about a near-term extinction, certainly not in this century. But please listen to the interview to get it in Nate's own words.

COPING WITH A STONE AGE MIND

I watched a "Reality 101" course video about evolutionary psychology. It is a You tube interview with John Tooby and Leda Cosmides on "Stone Age Minds". Contrary to some tenets of psychology, they say the human mind arrives not as a blank slate, but with structures designed to cope with problems of a hunter-gatherer society. Tooby and Cosmides talk about mismatches between our ancient mental capabilities and the newly-minted modern world. That could explain a lot. , courtesy of Reason.tv

Nate also offers his students an unpublished (yet) article "The Psychological Roots of Resource Overconsumption". You won't find that anywhere online, but it may appear in Nate's upcoming book "Bottleneck".

Then we have to consider how many of our problems dealing with the world are based on sexuality and addiction.

A PROSPEROUS WAY DOWN?

On Resilience.org I found another text required in the course. It's called "A Prosperous Way Down" by Howard and Elisabeth Odum. Actually, that article is a short-form introduction to of the same name. Is there a prosperous way down, and why should we accept going "down" at all? Nate explains why we either throttle back consumer society by choice and plan - or we collapse into a very nasty chaos.

The students wrap up the "Reality 101" course with a group discussion "What to do as individuals". That's a big one. As Nate wrote in an email to me: "What does a rational, non-sociopathic human facing the multiple bottlenecks of the 21st century DO?" Talk among yourselves.

There seem to be only two doors: (1) we keep on going and trust the next generation will figure things out, or (2) we are so completely doomed we might as well enjoy the end of days. Some of us hope there is a third door, but is there really?

This interview is kind of a warm up, for a longer interview I hope to do with Nate Hagens, when he and his co-author bring out their new book "Bottleneck" later this year.

Download or listen to this 30 minute interview with Nate Hagens in CD Quality or Lo-Fi

Nate has a Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He left Wall Street money to become an alternative social critic. His personal web site is called "The Monkey Trap" (which is seldom updated).

Here is , given for the Worldwatch Institute. I also like "" July 2014 found here.

DR. ALEXANDER "SANDY" MACDONALD AND DR. CHRISTOPHER CLACK

Scientists say wind and solar CAN power America

Wouldn't it be great if most of the electricity generated in America came from wind and solar, instead of climate-wrecking fossil fuels? Of course it can't be done, except it can. Who says so? Hippies from California? Not quite.

It's all in a new paper by a former senior scientist at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a physicist/math whiz from CIRES, The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, at the University of Colorado Boulder. Our guest are Dr. Alexander MacDonald, known as "Sandy", the recently retired director of NOAA’s Earth System Research Lab, and Dr. Christopher Clack from CIRES - all in Boulder Colorado.





Dr.Alexander MacDonald and Dr. Chris Clack

We talk about a new article titled "Future cost-competitive electricity systems and their impact on US CO2 emissions" published online in the journal "Nature" on January 25th, 2016.

Maybe the best way to begin is to give you the links sent to me by the Public Affairs Officer at NOAA Communications. My thanks to Theo Stein for getting me up to speed on this breaking paper.

The NOAA/CIRES press release is here.

"At the bottom of the CIRES release are animations of solar potential, wind potential and a power flow animation showing how a system dominated by renewables and supported by a HVDC grid might dispatch power around the country to meet demand."

The FAQ is here.

CIRES also put together this brief explainer.

THE BIG NEWS ABOUT ALTERNATIVE ENERGY IN AMERICA (and everywhere else)

So what is the big news?

(1) The United States could power at least 80% of it's energy needs, maybe more with just solar energy and wind power. That's amazing and encouraging but there's more.

(2) Electricity from this system would not cost any more than it does today.

(3) Nuclear plants could be shut down. All coal-fired power could be closed. Only a few gas generators to pick up occasional slack would be needed.

(4) massive power storage would NOT be needed. That's a huge break-through.

(5) no new technology is required. We have the tools and we know how.

This system would require the construction of nation-spanning DC High Voltage lines. Current AC transmission lines are incredibly wasteful, losing up to half of all power created. And because AC cannot transmit power efficiently, (a) you have to build nuclear plants dangerously close to cities and (b) AC line cannot bring wind power from the central plains to New England (for example).

High Voltage DC lines already exist. There is one in Alberta Canada, and one running from Oregon to California. It's not unknown or untested tech. We can do it.

The real breakthrough comes from studying weather, in great detail, on a very big scale (across the United States). NOAA and CIRES has all the weather data to do it. They did and this paper is the result. So if you study alternative energy just within one state, it won't work to replace what we have. But if you look at national resources, and have a way to transmit them, it's all possible.

Of course the sun only shines during the day. But it turns out that the wind is strong enough at night to keep things going (when demand is lower anyway). We don't need storage, these two scientists say.

Just check out their press release, the short video, and their great maps and you'll see the future of energy.

Download or listen to this 24 minute interview with Alexander MacDonald and Chris Clack in CD Quality or Lo-Fi. Please pass these links on to your friends and on social media.

GET THE WORD OUT!

Don't forget you can find all our past interviews with scientists, authors, experts and activists on our web site, at ecoshock.org. Those are free for download or listening, anywhere in the world.

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I'm Alex Smith. Thank you for listening, and caring about your world.