In an extensive NY Times Saturday article (Europe’s Great Rivers Are Dying. The Continent Is In for a Shock) we learned:
"All across Europe, shipwrecks and skeletons are rising from the deep.
Near Prahovo, Serbia, Nazi ships scuttled in 1944 now lie
broken-backed on sandbanks. In Croatia, a 1930s cargo ship protruded from the water. On the
newly exposed riverbed of the Danube in Bulgaria, what local experts say is
most likely part of the skeleton of an ancient mammoth was found scattered
across the sand, like discarded bones after a giant’s picnic.
Much of Europe is in the middle of a severe drought, and major
rivers have been reduced to a fraction of their usual size. Europe’s
second-longest river, the Danube, is now facing record lows, recently measuring
just 9 inches deep in Budapest. Part of Italy’s mighty Po River is also at
a record summertime low. And the Rhine, a major outlet for
trade flowing from the Alps to the North Sea, is now shallower than
at any time since records began."
Prompting the question: what is going on? Clearly, it can't be normal given just 9 years ago - when we visited Budapest- the Danube's level was more than ample to convey barges and boats, e.g.
Meanwhile, in the Sunday Denver Post the lead headline was:
"Drought has Colorado Burning Up" -
referring to the dozens of fires that have raged in the state this year, including many still going on. The biggest the Aspen Acres fire, only 72% contained. And, last but certainly not least, there are the record breaking temperatures this summer raising havoc around the globe. True, the abnormal El Niño is playing a role, but it's also acting as a climate time machine giving us a preview of what it will be like in 2037.
That’s because this El Niño is temporarily pushing global temperatures to levels that might not otherwise be reached for another decade. According to an analysis by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather that was shared with The Washington Post, there’s around a 95 percent chance that 2027 will become Earth’s hottest year on record — soaring past the last record in 2024 — because the combination of El Niño and projected climate change (owing to increased CO2 concentrations) could spike global temperatures to around 1.76 degrees Celsius (3.17 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial averages. This value would be so far above the warming trend of the past decade that it could bring global temperatures to levels not otherwise expected under that trend until around 2037.
Recall (from my Feb.,
2017 post) researcher and author David Suzuki, in his book It's A
Matter of Survival (Harvard University Press, 1991) co-authored
with Anita Gordon, predicted the first 'Year of No Seasons’ by 2040. Bear in
mind Suzuki based his projections on 1991 data and the hope we'd be able
to keep the warming increment to less than 2C by 2100. With the advent of Trump
and massive return to fossil fuels, this isn’t going to happen.
Suzuki and Gordon wasted no time bitch-slapping the complacent
reader from the first words of Chapter One: Beyond Your Worst Nightmare:
"A.D. 2040- If we were to give this year a name it would
be Despair. This is the hopeless world we have left our children and grand
children. Where once our lives were measured and enriched by the cycle of the
seasons, there is now only searing heat and the certainty it will get hotter.
Seasons exist only in the nostalgic longing of those of us old enough to
remember the richness of life......”
On p. 8 of the same chapter, Suzuki and Gordon go on to link
the total disappearance of the seasons worldwide by 2040 to global mean
temperatures 5 C (9F) above what they were in 1991. Given that Carl Sagan once
forecast an increment of 6C as adequate to trigger the runaway Greenhouse,
Suzuki's numbers would put us right on the cusp. Once that begins, and the
methane is also released from melting permafrost and later CO2 is released from
all the carbonate rocks in the world, we are for the high jump.
Bottom line: Even factoring in the effects of the El Niño it appears we are getting a preview of what the climate conditions will be like in 2037, with forecasts already made (as far back as 1991 by Suzuki) that it will either be in the first year of no seasons or close to it - say be 2040.
But more current research indicates the previews of future decades may also be feasible, and they are not sanguine. Specifically, in January 2021, a paper published in Frontiers in Conservation Science laid out the dismal details. According to the authors, we are already traveling down the path of a sixth mass extinction. The primary factors driving it include: loss of biodiversity, climate disruption, overconsumption, and population growth. These are not future threats but happening now, pushing our civilization toward its end.
The fact is that two serious warnings have already been published: one by David Suzuki and Anita Gordon in 1991 in their popular book, It's A Matter of Survival. The other appears in a paper in a scientific journal, written in careful academic language, and it says something no headline wants to print:
Civilization as we know it may not survive this century.
And here is the sentence that should have stopped the world:
the process may already be irreversible. Even if every emission ceased
tomorrow, the climate emergency would continue. The machine is already running and will continue doing so. I already elaborated on this process in multiple previous posts.
Even if all CO2 emissions halted it would not make a dent in the long term accumulations already in the atmosphere. The process may be described like a series with terms being added, viz: to describe the CO2 content now in the atmosphere, and added henceforth. We initiate the series with n= 1 (for 1926), viz. CO2( 2026) = x 1 + x 2 + x 3 + x 4 +.............+ x 1 00
Terminating at the last term 100 years later. Here each ‘x’ denotes the CO2
burden added for each year in succession.
Thus, the CO2 effect for a given year is not just for that year, but rather
inclusive of the cumulative additions for all the years - starting up to 100
years before. Needless to say this series continues 100 years from now, into the future. Using this series model it is possible to capture climate 'snapshots' decade
by decade, degree by degree, all the way to 2100.
The starting point is not some distant future. It is today. (
TODAY – GLOBAL TEMPERATURE + 1°C
Look around at the effects:. Earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, bushfires, and a
global pandemic have battered humanity within a single stretch of recent years, 2016 to 2o26. Further, our ecologically unsustainable way of living makes
more deadly pandemics almost guaranteed.
The planet’s surface has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius. The top 100
meters of the ocean have heated by 0.33 degrees, which sounds insignificant until one sees the body count: roughly 30 percent of the world’s coral reefs are already
dead and dragging marine biodiversity down with them in a chain reaction.
Add to this the ice sheets are shrinking. China has been able for the first time to send ships across the Arctic to save time in global delivery, given the extent of melted ice at the top of the world. Meanwhile, global sea levels have climbed 20 centimeters. Floods - like those now inundating Indiana and Ohio- strike more often, creeping into coastal communities. And in the animal kingdom, populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish have crashed by almost 70 percent.
Add to that, pollution and consumerism poisoning the soil, water,
and air that sustains us. Let's also add one more detail making everything worse: the richest 1
percent now holds half the world’s wealth, and that staggering inequality keeps
stalling the drastic measures that could still change the ending.
Add a half a degree more in 10 years, and the ocean starts to empty.
At 1.5 degrees of warming, 70 to 90 percent of all coral reefs die, taking
roughly 25 percent of marine life with them.
On land, the rising heat and accompanying drought will destroy potential harvests, threatening the
loss of millions of tons of maize, wheat, and soybeans. The people who depend
on fishing and farming face famine first, and they do what humans have always
done when the food runs out. They leave, triggering waves of mass migration. We will be in much the same position as in 1877 when an aberrant El Nino was responsible for the deaths of 50 million, i.e.
Thirty years on Earth’s population reaches 10 billion mouths, just as the planet’s ability to feed them buckles. The coral reefs and their ecosystems stand at the edge of total annihilation,
Meanwhile, beyond the oceans, thousands of other species begin sliding into extinction. The warning is no longer a paper in a journal., it's the evening news, every night. Worse and worse news: Ochre skies redolent with smoke and ash, from prolonged blazes, heat indices hitting 135 degrees in most cities, lost crops, power grids collapsing - as well as rivers, lakes dried up.
80 years from now, by 2106, the seas swallow the
coastlines, driving hundreds of millions of people inland. Nations strain and
snap under the flood of refugees, and mass migration ignites conflicts,
possibly wars. Food and clean water grow so scarce that the human population
itself begins to collapse. The catastrophe strikes the poorest regions first,
then spreads everywhere, feeding civil wars and global chaos.
What would the planet actually look like in that final
act? Humanity’s monument would be ruins
and garbage: endless stretches of abandoned civilization: empty mounds of concrete and mountains of
plastic that will not break down for thousands of years. The cities dying the moment maintenance stopped. Without workers running the pumps, the
subways of a metropolis like New York drown within hours.
The energy sector turns from lifeline to threat, as
unattended nuclear plants leak, and potentially implode like Chernobyl, poisoning
everything around them. 
Earth itself will need millions of years to heal. And it would. Eventually, it would grow back greener, wilder, and more diverse than ever. Just without us in the picture. Scientists still disagree about how soon, how severe, and whether collapse could have been avoided. But no one will deny the reality.
Just look out your window at the fires, the floods, the heat
records falling year after year, then ask yourself: Does it really sound so far off? Not if
The warning has been on the table since 2021. The choice between
drastic action and collapse by 2100 is still ours, but not for much longer.
by Bill McKibben | August 15, 2026 - 4:44am | permalink
Last time I marked the fifth anniversary of this newsletter with a remarkably heavy burst of analysis—a “where do we stand” summary that let me speak at the highest possible level about our past, present, and future. So of course I’m worn out, and perhaps you as well. We’re going to proceed less systematically this time—I’m going to show you some numbers that have arrived in the last few days, and try to make sense of each of them, with only slight regard for how exactly they fit together.
And it’s all a useful reminder that though the climate and energy crises have everything to do with psychology and sociology and economics and political science and theology and love and art and winter, they are rooted in quantifiable physical fact, which cannot be wished away and which must be faced resolutely.
So, to begin:
And:
Scientists warn end of civilization in 'decades' with just 10 percent chance of survival
And:
UN Climate Framework Withdrawal By Trumpers Puts The Planet On Path To Runaway Greenhouse Effect
And:
Colorado River projected to deliver a third of normal water supplies
And:
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