blog036 Notes From The New Story Summit 2014

I offer my personal notes and observations made during the New Story Summit 27 September – 3 October 2014 at Findhorn Foundation, Scotland, for you to use for anything you want. I was privileged to participate in this astonishingly daring effort generated by the Findhorn inner circle as they hosted 320 or so edgeworking geniuses from some 35 countries around the world on a gift economy basis with full transparency over the finances. I consider this report as one way to express my gratitude for this extraordinary opportunity.

(NOTE: Sections without other attribution are mostly my own cogitations...)

GAMEWORLDS AND CONTEXT

Each culture is a story-world, a gameworld, with agreed upon rules of engagement, that automatically emerge out of a particular context. 

A context is a specific set of distinctions. Change one distinction in the context and it produces entirely new gameworlds. For example, football emerges from the "I win, you lose" context. If you change the distinction from "I win, you lose" to that of "Winning Is Happening," then you can add a second ball into the game, or after each goal have 3 players from each team change sides, or tie one's player's leg to the leg of a player on the other team. Changing one distinction changes the entire context and therefore all the gameworlds that emerge from it.

Culture is a gameworld. The most efficient way to evolve a culture is to land a new distinction in the context of the culture. A skill needed by cultural evolutionaries is landing new distinctions in a cultural context. 

Having a sense of specific distinctions that would create a context that gives birth to sustainable / regenerative human cultures on Earth is one thing. Having the skills to create the meta-conversations and navigate to the liquid states that accompany context-shift is a completely different thing. Such skills are not part of education. They are part of initiation.

EDUCATION AND INITIATION

There is a difference between an educator and an initiator. An educator delivers content – what to think about. An initiator delivers context – what to think with. These are very different skillsets. Modern culture (starting 6000 years ago or so) eliminated initiation. The result is that modern culture lacks adults. When a child makes a mess, who cleans it up? The adults. Modern culture is making unforgivable messes with no intention at all of ever cleaning them up. Modern culture is a child-level responsibility culture, with uninitiated adolescents running governments, multi-national corporations, religions, universities, and armies.

Modern culture cannot be repaired – its entire set of legal structures emerges from a child-level-responsibility I-win-you-lose context, an immature and false paradigm not suitable for life on a planet. Each person recognizing the fallacy of modern culture’s laws is no longer subject to those laws in the moment they establish a new set of laws to replace them.

For example, modern culture bases its education on enhancing the mind. Next culture observes that in addition to the physical body with organs that have sensations, and the intellectual body with a mind that has attention, concepts, assumptions, beliefs and stories, there is also the emotional body with its heart that has feelings, and the energetic body with a being that has presence, self-image, intention, vision, determination, and inspiration. From the next culture perspective, people educated in modern culture are seriously handicapped and distorted with an over-enhanced intellect and shriveled hearts and souls.

HIERARCHIES AND CIRCLES

There is a difference between a leader and a spaceholder. Leadership is required in hierarchical structures. Spaceholding is required in circular, spiral, galaxical, and cloud structures. If you try to do leadership in a circle, etc., you force the circle back into a hierarchy. Spaceholding depends on an entirely different skillset than leadership. Shifting from leadership to spaceholding changes your entire life.

In hierarchies, the people best suited to doing whatever it takes to climb the ladder and take positions of power are those with the least conscience about the consequences of their actions, in other words, the psychopaths.

There is a design error of modern culture: it uses hierarchical power structures which automatically select for sociopathic tendencies. In the past 50 years global hierarchies have been hijacked by the psychopathic agenda. This explains why no amount of good-hearted “speaking truth to power” can create an improved outcome. Nobody is listening. A bright future for humanity is not even on the agenda.

In a hierarchy there is limited room at the top, and there are hierarchies behind the hierarchies: mafia, multinational corporations, and, as Paul Simon names in his song The Boy In The Bubble, “a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires.”

There is a difference between a context holder and a spaceholder. In a circle both roles are needed. Spaceholding can be rotated amongst the participants and cannot go wrong if the circle uses Rapid Learning with its ongoing feedback and coaching from the context holders. A spaceholder may or may not be a context holder. In circles, part of the game is to ongoingly deepen and expand each person’s context-holding so that more and more of the participants serve as context holders.

Spaceholding can navigate much more dynamic and interactive possibilities than leadership because leadership depends on personal power and controlled design, whereas spaceholding flows archetypal power (not personal power) and thrives on nonlinear group intelligence paving the path while it is surfed.

There is a difference between growth-in-quantity and growth-in-quality. The growth in quantity concerns systems of having and acquiring. The growth in quality concerns systems of being and becoming (transformation, evolution, initiation). 

In growth-in-quantity there are real-world limits (population, toxic wastes, mineral deposits). In growth-in-quality there are no real world limits – only psycho-emotional limits in uninitiated adolescents. There is no top end to evolution.

THE NEW STORY

Old story: Time is money. New story: Time is time.

Time is an ally, so we speak what is essential so time has the space to work its magic. We can create space for time through stillness, emptiness, and attentive listening.

There are already story threads which we know are helping. But at the edge, we don’t know how the next possibilities unfold. We contribute to evolution by participating fully.

This is a week of powerful experienced edgeworking people coming together to care.

Expectations crawl out of the cracks between diverse worldviews. We are allies. Coming closer together minimizes the cracks. Authentic communication eliminates the expectations.

We each have our own thoughtware. The thoughtware we are using is not necessarily the only thoughtware or the best thoughtware we could be using. There is thoughtware that could let us create something completely different out of the same circumstances. With upgraded thoughtware, something completely different from this is possible right now.

DAVID SPANGLER (www.davidspangler.com):

The Earth has material and energetic ecologies.

Conversations with and messages from subtle beings are the least of the modes of relationship with subtle beings. In addition there is a vast circulation and exchange of life qualities and energies.

Stories give us one set of meanings and block others.

Life is not a story. Life is unadulterated experience.

Some subtle domains conform to our stories and reflect them back to us as if they are real.

Life does not have a dramatic arc like stories do.

Conflict and drama are not the only stories possible.

We can find meaning without stories by sitting with nature as it is.

Our view of stories can limit our powers of imagination.

New story vs. old story is a story that can create conflict and competition.

We need new stories about stories and storytelling, and new ways of thinking about the subtle worlds.

DREW DELLINGER (www.drewdellinger.org):

A human being is the space in which the universe reflects on and celebrates itself.

The stars are telepathic.

JOANNA MACY (www.joannamacy.net):

The sense of connectedness with all beings is politically subversive.

We need to go on the journey of despair before we can rise to empowerment.

NARESH GIANGRANDE (https://www.transitionnetwork.org/people/naresh-giangrande):

We are at the historic moment of choice where we choose a future we want or let happen a system we don’t want.

Ecocide is suicide.

Activate the proper frame.

Values get activated by stories.

Change is an emergent property occurring in strategic niches – like the cavitation points where bubbles emerge in a pint of ale. Transition towns (and ecovillages and conscious communities…) are strategic niches!

Transition network is a learning network.

ELISABET SAHTOURIS (www.sahtouris.com):

It is cheaper to feed our enemies than to kill them.

PAUL HAWKEN:

If we continue on the current path, everything has to die.

GILL EMSLIE (www.gillemslie.net), and ANA RHODES CASTRO (www.findhornconsultancy.com/trainers/ana.php) WORKSHOP:

We don’t need more leaders. We need more facilitators. Disturbances don’t go away if we ignore them.
Conflict facilitation should be taught in kindergarten.
Solutions emerge as a creation of the third (external, nonlinear, not self-evident) position.

If I adapt to you, my feelings that I don’t get along with you do not go away. They just create a bad mood. Then I throw out double signals, becoming the oppressor and getting revenge. If I acknowledge that I am afraid of conflict, I can create integrity between my body movements and my words. This increases my presence.

CHARLES EISENSTEIN (www.charleseisenstein.net):

Newness is part of the old story.

Now the water is rising from a new source.

The Earth is a being. Beings have rights.

We need a deeper revolution.

Climate change is an initiation to what?

Modern culture is losing faith in its own stories.

In the old story preventing the collapse of civilization is now hopeless.

Miracles are not possible in the old story. But cynicism and despair plug into the same worldview as ecocide. The habits of the old story are strong.

This is a gathering of the secret world government. It operates within a new causality.

We can pull on invisible threads. It’s not crazy or naïve. It is a different kind of logic where the logic of mind and the logic of heart do not conflict.

A story creates roles for people, and then they are locked into the roles. Who as the real power? The continuously self-authoring.

CLINTON CALLAHAN WORKSHOP (www.nextculture.org, www.ncrtc.eu):

Stories are held together with Is-Glue.

“Is” is a concept that does not exist in nature. “Is” is a product of the human mind, famously capable of understanding concepts that have no connection to reality. For example, it is simple to understand the concept of a sphere: all points equidistant from a single point in 3D space. But this is a mathematical concept. In reality there are no spheres. Think of all the superstitions you have heard of, like the superstition that it is possible for human beings to own parts of the Earth...

The concept-models define our interactivity with the world. The closer your model matches reality, the more effectively you can interact with reality. Change your model - for example, from a flatworld map to a roundworld map - and you change your qualities of interactivity.

Is-Glue comes in various forms: is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been, has, have, had, do, does, did, may, might, must, can, could, should, would, shall, will, and the NOT forms of each, such as is not, am not, are not, etc.

Since we started thinking and speaking we have been making stories about ourselves, others, and the world with Is-Glue. That is a dog. Johnny is bad. I am tired. I do not like this. My boss is a hero. I do hate my work. This is impossible. I cannot do this. The weather is wonderful in Scotland.

The world is rich in evidence. There is enough evidence to make up any story we want about anything. Stories are not true. How can a story be true? We just made it up. Believing that a story is true is simply unexamined thinking. Beliefs are stories specifically designed to cover up holes in other stories for which there is no explanation, where there is instead a void of nothingness, where there is “I don’t know,” such as, What happens when we die? Where did we come from? What is the purpose of life? What is consciousness?

Nothingness is a necessary resource. Initiated adults require nothingness and not-knowing as a space out of which to create new options to choose from.

There are only two things in life: Bullshit. And, nothing.

Which category is Culture? Religion? Politics? Marketing? Economics? Fashion?

Recognizing your own stories as bullshit (albeit, interesting or entertaining bullshit) gives you the freedom to identify other vendors of bullshit for what they are: vendors of bullshit. You are then on equal status and have the power to choose your variety of bullshit over theirs simply as a matter of preference, framed by the purpose you consciously choose to serve: such as clarity, transformation, communication, respect, love, possibility, wellbeing, oneness, service, sustainability, etc.

If you do not recognize your own culture and beliefs as bullshit then you consider them to be the truth and will go to war defending them against other cultures and beliefs.

New understanding comes from new distinctions woven into a new context. Such as: there is a difference between bullshit and cowshit. Men do bullshit, which is to say things that are very relevant, but simply not true, such as, “I will be home at seven.” Or, “I will help Johnny with his math homework.” Or, “I will fix the faucet on Saturday.” Women do cowshit, which is to say things that are very very true, excruciatingly true, undeniably true, but simply not relevant, such as on Friday evening after the kids are in bed and you find yourselves in the bedroom, she says, “I see that you didn’t pick up the laundry basket full of clothes on your way up the stairs… I washed those clothes. I ironed those clothes. I folded those clothes. And you couldn’t even carry them up the stairs?” If the man does not know this is merely cowshit, how can he step around it instead of in it so that love can happen?

An essential seems like a wild-card until it is recognized as an essential.

If you are waiting to say something that you have known for a long time we invite you to sit back down. Co-creating emerges out of the current necessity in a small now.

When you let your fear block you from speaking or taking action you are blocking part of the whole.

Qualities of holding and navigating space include the necessity of space, space in space, space in time, space in position, but not space in purpose.

You are responsible to create the culture that makes sense to your deep self, that you would love to live in with your friends. To the degree that you do not invent the gameworlds of your life, you are a pawn in someone else’s gameworld. How to become a gameworld reinventor?

GETTING OUT

We need schools of getting out. They teach skills for getting out of modern culture in all respects (insurance, debt, ownership of property, stock investments, taxes, passports, education system, credit, TV, alcohol, cars, economic, consumption, food, clothing, housing, entertainment, conditioned assumptions, beliefs, expectations, arrogance, bigotry, lack of cultural relativity, etc.), because we copied modern culture’s assumptions and thinking flaws into our being before we could speak.

We are beginning a generation of deconditioning and healing. We need whole schools for learning how to extract ourselves from the patriarchy.

Something that seems like a miracle from one perspective (e.g. getting out of modern culture) is quite natural in another perspective.

Since we absorbed patriarchal thoughtware before we could speak, getting out involves learning to think about what we are thinking with – in other words, noticing the brand of thoughtware we use so as to detect when we are using Standard Human Issue Thoughtware. Through taking responsibility for what we are thinking with, we gain at least the chance of thinking something different. We need this observational gap between us and modern culture's insidious thoughtware to have freedom of movement in our thinking, perceiving and choosing.

THE QUESTION

The question comes down to this: which context are you standing in? The modern patriarchal empire context? Or the regenerative next culture context? It is an either / or choice. We don’t get to do both, because if you mix poison water with fresh water you only end up with poison water and the patriarchal empire prevails until doomsday. However, human beings are famously schizophrenic. We have parts to our psychological structure. Sometimes we are completely unconsciously identified with the modern capitalist patriarchal empire parts where the world is flat and we unconsciously think we can go to the edge and drop our nuclear and toxic wastes over the side into free space. And sometime we are rather more consciously identified with sustainable regenerative cradle-to-cradle parts that recognize the Earth is a ball and every degree of toxicity is captured in feedback loops and poisons us.

There is also a part of our individual selves that remains free and was never sucked into the delusions of the modern patriarchal empire. When you start paying attention to your attention from the neutral observer perspective it becomes obvious when your schizophrenic identities get triggered. Only when you have achieved the sensitivity of noticing you are about to be triggered do you get a chance to conscious make a different choice other than creating the capitalist patriarchal empire context.

People who come together in a community of practice – a shift-agent training school – help remind each other to stay awake and retain nonlinear options. When three or more individuals establish a seed crystal of next culture in the global ethnosphere, and make critical connections (connections over which value and services are exchanged) their exchanges generate a field of influence for the emergence of next culture.

Starting at about 15 years of age, human beings are designed to get initiated into taking responsibilities for things people in modern culture never even thought of taking responsibility for. These ongoing adulthood initiatory processes ignite the free-and-natural adult man and woman, unfolding original purposes, stellating inner archetypes, and jacking-in to archetypal lineages that serve partnerships, projects, interconnected communities and the Earth. In this way adults come to serve something greater than themselves.

MAY EAST (www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=68731248&goback=.npp_may*5east%2F1b%2F27%2F40):

The only power we carry in the United Nations is an energetic signature. We stand on the verge of a precipice and activate a positive future by putting our attention on the edge where the positive future begins.

WORLD FUTURE COUNCIL (www.worldfuturecouncil.org):

Saving the planet is free.

We are facing tipping points with irreversible consequences.

JODIE EVANS from CODE PINK (www.codepink4peace.org):

We will not raise our children to kill another mother’s child.

GIGI COYLE (www.schooloflostborders.org):

It is an initiation to find our initiators, our elders, our carriers. They will not be provided to us.

KOSHA JOUBERT (Global Ecovillage Network GEN www.ecovillage.org):

It’s a joyous adventure. The world connection is already there. There’s a finer woven net of love, a river of life and hope that flows through the GEN network in realtime living. There is nothing to hide because we see everything. It flows in a much bigger open circle. There has been a blessing on our work. We can see it and receive it. We can do so much more. We can bring imagery that touches young people’s hearts. The smaller paths are everywhere and they’re beautiful, abundant seeds scattering. We know about solutions. We come in and spread the seeds. I need to start traveling and not stop. It’s a river now, bringing the sweetness of informed hope to places of sharpness. There is so much fear of doing things differently, but the core movement invites people into a multitude of possibilities of expression. It is possible to come home to yourself. We know people of integrity in governments. I want the river to come to my village, to the women, a river of love and support for the children in a way of life in any ecovillage. Courage and support is so big of a gift that I can go home and give it away, where the contradictions fall away, not walking against, not walking towards. We are walking together, into our life, and every island is safe. We have the pressure of being a bud that is unstoppable in its opening to become a flower, to exchange pollen, to generate more seeds. GEN is a web of hearts, the beauty that can be created by letting what is not beautiful fall away. Sharing joy, laughter and peace, feeling pain there and knowing what to do next, to feel love in the midst of rage so the river flows free, creating space for the techies and excel sheets and those who can count the numbers, and the magicians and a new kind of education. The pain of one part is washed away when it is seen by the other part. The river wakes up at fear and grows into collective human evolution. We can help those who cannot ask for help to ask for help. We can have an Ecovillage Fuck-Ups website using errors as a shared learning resource. The river speaks all languages, circles upon circles of worlds around us that want to play and give. There is a special love happening, so many more circles who long to give. Learning to receive, learning to work with magnetic attraction, being able to die well, letting narrow conceptions dissolve. Let the frantic doing die. Let frozenness in the face of the arrogance of men of power die. We each have different gifts. We can exchange, and thus wake up. GEN makes it so everywhere is home.

POLLY HIGGINS (www.pollyhiggins.com, http://eradicatingecocide.com):

TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPUmN88htCo

"Questers" ask questions. (An authentic question is a question the answer to which changes your life.) For example: How can we make it a legal duty to care for the Earth? Criminalize ecocide? Assert Earth’s right to life?

There is a shrinking democratic space. I support each of us calling on others to dare to be great.

Daring to be great means daring to fail.

This is a rehearsal space.

JONATHAN DAWSON (www.schumachercollege.org.uk/about/jonathan-dawson):

I want a community of practice of humans living within their means, not theoretically, but diving into a new system in reality, a grown-up school of regenerative culture, taking concepts into physicality, especially with the funnest things: improvisation, theatre, cooking – human beings are designed to fly!

JOHN D. LIU (www.whatifwechange.org, www.eemp.org):

Green Gold docu on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBLZmwlPa8A

I am looking for people who want to collaborate with a “Visual Ecological Database” with 20 years studies in every biome. I’m doing ecological forensics, going backwards, deconstructing how the ecological damage happened. What was the motive of the crime? Who did it and why?

I keep coming to a flaw in the economic reasoning. Externalizing costs is a lie that makes you bankrupt from day one. We have a corrupt and corrupting economic system.

The politics of oppression are not useful anymore because now the oppressors are also threatened. We need to all put our heads (and hearts) together to shift to a planet-wide regenerative system. It is happening anyway. What the corporate politicians need to wake up to is that there are not enough Kevlar-suited special forces to suppress humanity.

If you don’t have regenerative systems knowledge no amount of money will help you change the world for the better.

If you succeed at bringing down the existing system without a replacement you are in terrible shape. That’s why we are full-speed-ahead building the next system.

Making excellent films is one thing. But the platform for distributing the films is just as crucial. It is easier to collaborate with a platform when you make a series of 36 films rather than one full length documentary, but the films need to be good enough.

We have to work together for the rest of our lives.

The economic principles of modern culture are flawed. Water is priceless. You cannot monetize nature. Instead naturalize the economy so the incentive is to preserve, regenerate and protect ecosystems. When you formalize it that ecosystem function is vastly more valuable than manufacturing and consumption, this changes everything. Suddenly it is impossible to pollute. True wealth comes from natural ecosystem function.

The fundamental flaw in modern economic thinking is easily exposed unless you are insane or psychopathic.

One Small Step Can Change Your Life – the Kaizen Way – book by Robert Maurer

You can develop a critical awareness as an internal process about making practical use of influences to overcome a learned helplessness.

John D. Liu us running a parallel knowledge event for 8 weeks on 2 stages at the Lima, Peru COP20 event. He says Lima will spend $150 million and risk being irrelevant. This is a humiliation. www.cop20lima.org, http://unfccc.int/meetings/lima_dec_2014/meeting/8141.php

SYNTHESIS FROM NEW STORY SUMMIT

Every time I reflect on New York I see where hungry ghosts changed the Twin Towers into a Hiroshima of grief and rage. No innocence here. No phoenix either. Only greedy bugs crawling in a swirl of ashes and chaos. Not enough wisdom for a rebirth. Just a procession of smoke and mirrors, an eternity of sadness and anger. I cannot change what I cannot face.

The people who remember how to sing a song that brings a person back into alignment with right relationship have been under siege.

We are moving from the glittering world to the green world.

Nourish the children so they can present themselves.

Message to young people: I want you to want your life enough to bring your life to life in the way you want to live it.

But how can an elder tell a young person to want their life when the elder doesn’t want their life?

The problems are so big, but they are always changing, so if you wait a minute you’ll get an entirely new problem.

We vote for heroes and they sign off on lies.

There is only one of us here.

Only free people can make a free world. This means people employed by corporations, military, government, religion, can never build a free world. They can only duplicate the horrific prison conditions of their lives.

We who came are seeds. You don’t plant seeds in seeds. You give the seeds space and sunshine and water to grow. Eventually seeds find a way to grow no matter what.

blog034 Will Any Humans Become Post-Carbon?

Probably nobody will read this blog because it is far too long, far too horrifyingly detailed, and far too realistic for most tastes.

But I write it anyway, to fulfill a promise I made.

Back in 2007 I read the book High Noon by J. F. Rischard (also available in German). Rischard’s information shattered my Box’s long-standing defenses against the outside world. In a state of shock, two friends and I tracked J. F. Rischard down in Paris and interviewed him for 2 days in 2008. What a kind and intelligent man he is. As a result of Rischard’s intense download I began studying up on several global situations, in particular methane clathrates and depleted uranium.

 

The year 2007 is interesting. According to David Spratt’s September 2013 report, “Is Climate Already Dangerous?” we crossed the planetary Rubicon in 2007 at about 0.76 degrees centigrade of global warming. Maybe I felt it… Maybe you felt it too? At this point, not only had Arctic sea-ice passed its tipping point, but the Greenland Ice Sheet was not far behind.

(Reference: www.scribd.com/doc/168483927/Already-Dangerous-1) 

Adding to the mounting evidence behind 2007 as the point of no return, Malcolm Light concluded on 22 December 2013, “We have passed the methane hydrate tipping point and are now accelerating into extinction as the methane hydrate ‘Clathrate Gun’ has begun firing volleys of methane into the Arctic atmosphere.”

(Reference: https://sites.google.com/site/runawayglobalwarming/the-non-disclosed-extreme-arctic-methane-threat)

According to Light’s analysis, the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere will resemble that of Venus before 2100. Two weeks later, in an essay stressing near-term human extinction, Light concluded: “The Gulf Stream transport rate started the methane hydrate (clathrate) gun firing in the Arctic in 2007 when its energy/year exceeded 10 million times the amount of energy/year necessary to dissociate subsea Arctic methane hydrates.”

(Reference: Malcolm Light http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2014/01/global-warming-and-the-gulf-stream.html)

(Reference: Malcolm Light http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.html)

The clathrate gun began firing in 2007, the same year the extent of Arctic sea ice reached a tipping point. But who knew it?

(Reference: www.the-cryosphere.net/7/275/2013/tc-7-275-2013.html)

Because of my research, my new collaboration partners at www.planetaryculture.com asked me to submit a blog paragraph about what the United Nations needs to know about methane and global warming for a paper they will read at the United Nations’ Climate Summit set for 23 September 2014 in New York City.

(Reference: www.un.org/climatechange/climate-summit-2014)

I took Planetary Culture’ writing offer seriously. Perhaps I was naïve. My commitment threw me hard down into a rabbit hole in which I have not yet hit bottom. I quickly found intense new information published since my 2008 research spree that pertained to the methane “clathrate gun” (which I would now name the “clathrate cannon”).

Maddeningly, every shred of new evidence only reveals that the situation we are in is far more menacing and frightening than anyone anywhere ever suspected, even in their worst nightmares. We are talking here, folks, about near-term human extinction due to global warming, possibly as soon as 2050.

  

That’s probably why I recently posted a cute little comic on my facebook page with the caption: “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.” Anyone selling tickets to Mars?

Methane (CH4) is the most abundant organic molecule in the Earth’s atmosphere. (Brasseur et al., 1999). It’s presence was first noted in 1948 from features in the infrared absorption spectrum (Migeotte, 1948) and it is now routinely measured. CH4 is the third most important greenhouse gas after H2O (water) vapor and CO2 (carbon dioxide) and has a Global Warming Potential (GWP) 25 times that of CO2 on a 100 year timescale (Forster et al., 2007) [but over 70 times the Global Warming Potential of CO2 on a 10 year timescale, which turns out to be extremely relevant, because recent evidence indicates that climate can shift far more suddenly than previously suspected, in decades. Not only that, but when CH4 degrades it does not vanish. It simply morphs into CO2 and then sticks around another 100 years continuing to warm the globe.]

(Reference: http://co2now.org/Know-GHGs/Methane-|-CH4/methane-and-climate-science.html)

Methane records, along with paleo-temperature data, from both Antarctica (Petit, et al., 1999) and Greenland (Chappellaz, et al., 1993) reveal the close correlation between methane and millennial-scale warming and cooling. Indeed, CH4 more closely parallels the rapid variations of polar temperature records than any other measured gas (Chappellaz, et al., 1993). Humans have perturbed the atmospheric methane budget to a remarkable extent. Ice core records have shown that the CH4 concentration had remained between 350 and 800 parts per billion (ppb) for the past 650,000 years (Brook et al., 2000; Spahni et al., 2005); whereas in 2007 global mean CH4 concentration was 1775 ppb (Forster et al., 2007) [and now in 2014 it exceeds ~1820ppb (Morrison et al., 2014)]

(Reference: http://co2now.org/Know-GHGs/Methane-|-CH4/methane-and-climate-science.html)

The following is the paragraph (or two) which I think the United Nations needs to know about methane. After that comes the latest Earth-shattering data with references.

TOLERATING CARBON EMISSIONS IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

If coordinated international actions are not immediately implemented to end fossil fuel burning, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and sequester present atmospheric carbon and methane, new evidence suggests that even if we could create a post-carbon society, there won’t be humans alive to live in it.

The consensus findings among authoritative scientific institutions (NASA, NOAA, NSIDC, Hadley-Met, Tyndale, Potsdam, CSIRO, BOM, the world’s academies of science, IPCC and so on) indicate beyond reasonable doubt that continuing open-ended emissions of greenhouse gases incontestably leads to the demise of humans as well as most of life on Earth in a frighteningly near term (by ~2050). Therefore, any governing body that tolerates or promotes further greenhouse gas emissions through burning fossil fuels or burning forests or fracking, etc., contravenes international laws, violates human and animal rights and national sovereignty, and commits a monstrous crime against humanity and nature.

(Reference: private communication of a work in progress by Andrew Glikson, The Legal Dimension Of Overwhelming The Atmosphere With CO2 http://cci.anu.edu.au/researchers/view/andrew_glikson)

THE UNITED NATIONS MAY BE WORSE THAN USELESS

If the United Nations will do no more than offer suggestions to member states and continues to refrain from enforcing stringent restrictions, then humanity is wasting its time trying to reverse climate change under the auspices of the United Nations. The UN should be immediately dismantled and an action-oriented global survival agency should be activated, more appropriately named United Peoples.

A war is required now if there is to be a human presence on planet Earth in the next century: an urgent war against the status quo and all its institutions and laws, a war that causes immediately changed political and corporate behaviors, a war of action-oriented responsibility for consequences, a war of instantaneously enforceable restrictions, a war of internationally-coordinated engineering efforts to pull down atmospheric CO2 and methane (CH4) concentrations.

How ridiculous it would be to stand there arguing with your neighbor about fairly consuming the last remaining minerals when a piano is falling from above and will kill the both of you. The methane “clathrate gun” has already been fired. Life on planet Earth is the victim.

The United Nations will either convert scientifically founded imperatives into immediate and enforceable actions, or become guilty by complicity of ending human civilization on Earth. Those individuals, special interests and organizations spouting adolescent non-negotiable stances need to be sent to their room without dinner by a United Peoples authority with more “guns” than the teenagers have.

THE PHYSICS

A recent global warming denial argument challenged that if greenhouse gases are trapping so much more heat, why has the Earth’s average air temperature only risen 0.8 Centigrade? The answer is: we have been putting the thermometers in the wrong place! They should have been set in the depths of the oceans. 93.4% of incoming solar energy is being absorbed by the oceans of the world, converting water from its solid state as ice to its liquid state as water, called the latent heat of fusion (melting) or enthalpy of fusion. Only 2.3% of incoming heat is absorbed by the air.

(Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion)

(Chart Reference: Sam Carana http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2014/06/arctic-atmospheric-methane-global-warming-veil.html)

The sun’s energy is being absorbed on the Earth by the ice in glaciers, methane-clathrates, and frozen tundra as it melts into water. It takes 80 calories of heat energy to change 1 cubic centimeter of ice at 0 degrees Centigrade into a puddle of water at 0 degrees Centigrade. The remarkable thing is that the added heat is needed for the phase change, that is, to change the H2O from a solid to a liquid, from ice to water. But after absorbing the 80 calories of heat, the now melted water remains at 0 degrees Centigrade. It did not get warmer. However (and here is the shocker), if you add the same amount of heat energy, another 80 calories (just like the sun continues to add heat each day to the oceans) the little puddle of water that used to be ice now quickly jumps to 80 degrees C. 

(Chart Reference: www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-intermediate.htm)

What does this mean? It means that the vast majority of newly trapped solar energy has been absorbed by the oceans to melt Arctic and Antarctic glaciers, permafrost, and methane clathrates. In the moment they are melted enough the incoming heat shifts from melting the ice into rapidly raising the water temperature. That is when you will see sudden global air temperature increases. We are on the verge of this.

The Change in Earth’s Total Heat Content graph also underscores just how much global warming the planet is experiencing. Since 1970, the Earth's heat content has been rising at a rate of 6 x 10 to the 21st power Joules per year. In more meaningful terms, the planet has been accumulating energy at a rate of 190,260 gigawatts. Considering a typical nuclear power plant has an output of 1 gigawatt, imagine 190,000 nuclear power plants pouring their energy output directly into our oceans. Our climate is still accumulating heat. Global warming is still happening.

(Reference: www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-intermediate.htm)

THE INDICTMENT

Hallor Thorgeirsson, a senior director with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said on 17 September 2013: “We are failing as an international community. We are not on track.” These are the people who know about, and presumably could do something about, our ongoing race to disaster.

(Reference: Climate Change Summary and Update http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update) 

We have already triggered 38 self-reinforcing feedback loops. 34 of those are irreversible. The most deadly is the arctic methane tipping point.

(Reference: http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/)

(Reference: Guy McPherson www.youtube.com/watch?v=odlReNpGQ7c )

“A 4 degrees C warmer world can, and must be, avoided – we need to hold warming below 2 degrees C," said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim.

(Reference: www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-change-report-warns-dramatically-warmer-world-this-century)

The World Bank’s climate models do not include any of the 38 self-reinforcing feedback loops.

(Reference: Guy McPherson www.youtube.com/watch?v=odlReNpGQ7c, and Climate Change Summary and Update http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update)

Globally in 2011 fossil fuel subsidies topped half a trillion dollars.

(Reference: Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies www.odi.org/subsidies-change-the-game)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits global warming is irreversible without geoengineering in a report released 27 September 2013.

(Reference: www.newscientist.com/article/dn24261-world-wont-cool-without-geoengineering-warns-report.html#.U7fo2LHABid)

As pointed out in the 5 December 2013 issue of Earth System Dynamics, known strategies for geoengineering are unlikely to succeed: “climate geo-engineering cannot simply be used to undo global warming”

(Reference: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-geoengineering-approaches-climate.html)

Our path leads directly to the 4 degrees C mark. The conservative International Energy Agency throws in the towel on avoiding 4 degrees C in this video from June 2014.

(Reference: World Energy Investment Outlook – especially at the 25-minute mark www.youtube.com/watch?v=awwVbAG0eig)

The 19th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 19) held in November 2013 in Warsaw, Poland, was warned by professor of climatology Mark Maslin: “We are already planning for a 4degrees C world because that is where we are heading. I do not know of any scientists who do not believe that.”

(Reference: http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update)

There is a paper in the 16 December 2013 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluding that 4 degrees C terminates the ability of Earth’s vegetation to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide.

(Reference: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216154851.htm) 

(Chart Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#mediaviewer/File:Atmospheric_CO2_CH4_Degrees_Centigrade_Over_Time_by_Reg_Morrison.jpg)

In the above chart, Reg Morrison, a climate scientist in Australia, compares three sets of data on one time scale of 420,000 years:

1.     atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations

2.     atmospheric methane (CH4) concentrations

3.     global average temperature variation from the present in degrees C.

[As you can see, CO2, CH4 and Earth’s temperature follow a nearly identical path. The shock comes from noticing that the current 400ppm (and quickly rising) concentration of CO2 indicates we have already arranged for a minimum increase of global temperatures of 4 degrees C above normal.]

CO2 has hovered around 280ppm for the past 12,000 years, and has not been over 400ppm for 15 million years, when sea levels were at least 25 meters higher, temperatures were at least 3 degrees C warmer, and there was no arctic sea ice.

(Reference: http://phys.org/news174234562.html)

At no time in the last 20 million years have levels of carbon dioxide increased as rapidly as at present. In addition to that, the current 1820ppb (and quickly rising) concentration of CH4 (methane) indicates we are rapidly on our way to an increase of over 16 degrees C which is consistent with climate disruptions during the Permian Mass Extinction event 250 million years ago.

(Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere)

By the end of the Permian Mass Extinction 95% of all life on planet Earth was dead. It took 10 million years for life to come back. This is referred to as “the Great Dying.” We are already well into Earth’s sixth mass extinction event, and species are dying at an unprecedented rate of 200 species per day.

(Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_mass_extinction)

A typical species will live for 10 million years. On Earth now, amphibians are going extinct at a rate of 45,000 times the ordinary background extinction rate.

(Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction#Modern_extinctions)

 
The Gulf Stream has sped up three times since 1940, and then in 2010 the Gulf Stream melted through the Arctic ice wall and began carrying gigajoules of heat along the Gakkel ridge onto the East Siberian Shelf and the Laptev Sea.

(Reference: Gulf Stream Heating Siberian Sea http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2014/06/arctic-atmospheric-methane-global-warming-veil.html)

There are over 2,200 gigatons of methane frozen under Siberian tundra and the Laptev Sea. Easily 50 gigatons could be released. There are only about 5 gigatons methane present in the global atmosphere now. Methane is 70-80 times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gas when compared over a 10 year span. The methane does not then become harmless. It oxidizes into CO2.

(Reference: Natalia Shakhova via Sam Carana http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2013/11/horrific-amounts-of-methane-over-laptev-sea.html)

Global temperature can jump up 5 degrees C in as little as 13 years.

(Reference: Morgan Schaller & James Wright http://news.rutgers.edu/research-news/new-finding-shows-climate-change-can-happen-geological-instant/20131003#.%20Ux4PccdYFGm)

387 ppm CO2 is already catastrophic. The world has to be taken back to the 280 ppm of the pre-industrial era if global calamities are to be avoided.

(Reference: James Hanson and colleagues www.juancole.com/2009/10/modern-day-levels-of-carbon-dioxide.html)

A 50 megaton release of methane from the Arctic Ocean seabed will cost $60 trillion. Research in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf has suggested that such a vast release of methane was possible, and continued exponential increase of methane could, within 20 years, reach a level where methane dominated over CO2 in global warming. Some researchers warn of a 50 gigaton burst being possible “at any time”.

(Reference: www.ameg.me/index.php)

(Chart Reference: http://climatestate.com/2013/06/21/vast-methane-plumes-seen-in-arctic-ocean-as-sea-ice-retreats/)

“In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed,” Dr Semiletov said. “We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some of the plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal,” he said.

(Reference: http://climatestate.com/2013/06/21/vast-methane-plumes-seen-in-arctic-ocean-as-sea-ice-retreats/)

Vast amounts of methane are held in sediments under the Arctic Ocean. The Laptev Sea is part of the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS). Shakhova et al. (2010) estimate the accumulated methane potential for the ESAS alone as follows:

-        organic carbon in permafrost of about 500 Gt

-        about 1000 Gt in hydrate deposits

-        about 700 Gt in free gas beneath the gas hydrate stability zone.

Shakhova et al. in 2008 considered release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage as highly possible for abrupt release at any time. By comparison, the total amount of methane currently in the atmosphere is about 5 Gt.

(Reference: http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2013/11/horrific-amounts-of-methane-over-laptev-sea.html)

(Chart Reference: http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2013/11/horrific-amounts-of-methane-over-laptev-sea.html)

An uncomfortably high proportion of current estimated arctic methane releases come from a source which is very poorly understood, and that could conceivably change considerably in the very near future. Both the HIPPO program and researchers at the Wegener Institute have estimated emissions from an unexpected source – the ocean surface itself – which demands far more scrutiny in predicting near-term evolution of arctic conditions. This is the opposite of discussing the drama of methane hydrate – it is a very mild source of methane emission, and is very diffuse. However, it is deeply dependent upon sea surface conditions, which are rapidly changing with changes in summer sea ice cover, and thus has a potential for very large changes in its emissions rate in the very near future. The estimates of current emissions make this source currently about the same as the total combined emissions from subsea permafrost, free gas and some hydrate which have, cumulatively, been widely discussed in the media, stemming from the research of Natalia Shakhova, Igor Semiletov and others, and usually attributed in the media to methane hydrates. The hypothesized but somewhat mysterious biochemistry of this surface production is based on the assumption that shifts in the N:P (nitrogen to phosphorous) ratio (one of the so-called Redfield ratios), make aerobic methanogenesis possible in arctic surface waters, and the estimates are that this is probably releasing about 8Tg methane annually now. Could these emissions suddenly increase? If losses of sea ice induce further emissions from this source, then increases could be very considerable.

(Reference: http://1250now.org/near-future-arctic-methane/)

A 2014 paper has found strong evidence for a bacterial source of the carbon-cycle disruption: the methanogenic archaeal genus Methanosarcina. Three lines of chronology converge at 250 mya, supporting a scenario in which a single-gene transfer created a metabolic pathway for efficient methane production in these archaea, nourished by volcanic nickel. According to the theory, the resultant super-exponential bacterial bloom suddenly freed carbon from ocean-bottom organic sediments into the water and air [contributing the Permian Mass Extinction].

(Reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/15/5462) 

(Chart Reference: http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2013/11/horrific-amounts-of-methane-over-laptev-sea.html)

One thousandth of the thermal energy presently transported in the Gulf Stream is enough to trigger Arctic methane release. Only a few percent of the 1000 gigatons is enough to complete the methane greenhouse veil already blanketing Earth. By comparison, the industrial revolution has until now only emitted 250 gigatons of carbon equivalent.

(Reference: http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2014/06/arctic-atmospheric-methane-global-warming-veil.html) 

(Red color indicates >1950ppb methane concentrations. Graph Reference: http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2013/11/horrific-amounts-of-methane-over-laptev-sea.html)

[Taking CO2 concentrations back to 280ppm and methane (CH4) concentrations back to 1250ppb (www.1250now.org) involves illegalizing profit-driven corporations, illegalizing stock and currency exchanges, and illegalizing land and mineral-rights ownership, because these social structures have already proven to be suicidal at a global level. Taking CO2 concentrations back to 280ppm involves collapsing civilization intentionally and immediately. Could we do this? Yes. Will we do this?]

Only a few hundred people in the world are actually discussing these ideas. More than 200,000 people would have to understand these ideas each day for us just to keep up with population growth.

(Reference: Guy McPherson www.youtube.com/watch?v=odlReNpGQ7c)

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Question: Did you read this whole blog?

If so, you might want to join the Near Term Human Extinction Evidence and Support Group. (Not kidding… about it being perhaps a good idea to join… I did.)

(Reference: www.facebook.com/pages/Near-Term-Human-Extinction-Evidence-and-Support-Group/170787913129107) 

For love of the living Earth,

Clinton 

(still in the rabbit hole, tunneling sideways at a furious rate, seeking other dimensions, and perhaps some friends on the same journey…)