29 Comments

1. 

   George Kaplan on September 10, 2026 at 8:57 am

   Scariest charts hit parade – most, but not all, show the average annual value of the parameter since around 2000.

   1 – Global average sea surface temperature (more so after Wednesday’s jump of 0.04)
   2 – Earth albedo
   3 – Earth energy imbalance (especially over millennial time scales)
   4 – Drought/flood intensity (five fold growth since 2020)
   5 – Ocean stratification index (with a bullet)
   6 – CO2 concentration over last 800,000 years
   7 – Number of days with average global surface temperatures over 17 degrees
   8 – El Nino monthly temperature prediction
   9 – Northern hemisphere land surface temperature
   10 = SF6 atmospheric concentration
   10 = Canada wildfire areas burnt

   Is the El. Nino area alone enough to describe the global average SST jumps – the Bain Maries of the GoM, Red Sea and Mediterranean have significant combined areas and just keep getting hotter no matter what year? And will the heat there be able to disperse into the deep waters once the Bjerknes feedback ameliorates? I think it more likely that most will disperse horizontally, so maintaining high global SST, or go into setting a new record for atmospheric temperature in 2027, and without any significant fall in 2028.

   • 

     Panopticon on September 10, 2026 at 4:59 pm

     George, the Sea of Japan is a major hot spot, too. That may be partly connected to El Nino, but it was extremely hot last year without one.

     Re air temps, this French meteorologist claims that, “Anthropogenic warming is becoming increasingly dominant. 84% of the warming observed at the [projected] peak of El Niño’s influence in 2027 [will be] attributable to human activities, while 19% [will be] attributable to El Niño itself – down from 30% in 1982–83.”

     https://x.com/Aigle_e/status/2097391903238975538

2. 

   George Kaplan on September 10, 2026 at 9:11 am

   At least the 1.5 overshoot and recovery canard is crumbling and the fundamental impossibility (i.e. based in the laws of thermodynamics and properties of matter) of CCR seems to be sinking in.

   • 

     Panopticon on September 10, 2026 at 5:05 pm

     George, I agree it is nice not to be relentlessly gaslit on that score.

3. 

   jupiviv on September 10, 2026 at 10:32 am

   Saw a blog post linked in the comments of a previous entry where the author describes his humiliating experience trying to chat about/explain doomerism to his therapist. Well what did he expect?!

   What I woulda done is – if he thinks I’m a funny crazy doomer then how about I have some fun at his expense, it’s only fair. Therapists like most professionals nowadays are overwhelmingly left-wing/woke, which means Greta Thunberg is their Child Saint of All Things Green. So I’d bring up Greta and explain to him that the reason he worships her and mocks me is because she crusades against the symptoms of an unsustainable system which he can easily distance himself from, whereas I and other doomers criticize the unsustainability itself which makes him and me and everyone else in our class position intractably complicit in it. It’s also fundamentally why Greta gets invited to preach at gatherings of the commanding heights of the very system she appears to criticize, and meanwhile I’m sat here feeling miserable with an unprofessional twat of a therapist who thinks I’m crazy. And then I’d leave.

   Anyway, on the topic of feeling depressed because of doom. My advice – find yourself a doomer chick, warm of heart and/or hot of countenance, and “balance the earth’s energy” with her several times daily.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D6OBVcYJqE

   • 

     Leaf on September 10, 2026 at 12:30 pm

     “…the reason he worships her and mocks me is because she crusades against the symptoms of an unsustainable system which he can easily distance himself from, whereas I and other doomers criticize the unsustainability itself..”

     well said jupiviv!

   • 

     Harmon on September 10, 2026 at 1:52 pm

     Jupiviv , credit for one of the funniest comments I ever read here
     But beware that most of the commenters here over the years are also )insufferable) wokies . It’s why I’ve tried and stopped years ago commenting here . Ehrlich and Hardin were right for more than one reason, and thar includes the right wing conservative parts of how ecology became a science in the 60s . Overpopulation and mass migration, and especially all the islam pampering from boomer pensioados, it’s all quite sad. Greta is a poster child of how mentally warped left wingers are , only committing logic to climate change but never to what a liberal society actually is. To what Karel Martel and many Western soldiers fought for , to create a free, scientific Europe in the first place.

     Anyway, thanks for the hilarious response.

     • 

       Cassandra on September 10, 2026 at 4:35 pm

       I’m sorry you felt run off, Harmon. I generally appreciate multiple points of view. I think some of the woke liberal positions have gone off the reservation. At this point I would never call myself woke or liberal, nor conservative. My doomer point of view in some important ways helps me stay outside the political fray. I guess if there was a good label for me at this point it would be misanthrope (which is pretty much unacceptable to everyone), despite the fact that there are a few humans I love and appreciate! All of our cleverness has set us down this path of near total destruction. As Catherine Ingram has said, this is how it was always going to unfold. So I don’t wring my hands about wetiko or denial or other versions of “where did we go wrong??”

       • 

         Survivalist on September 11, 2026 at 4:06 am

         It is not true that most of the commenters here are wokies. The suggestion is ridiculous.

     • 

       Panopticon on September 10, 2026 at 5:28 pm

       My vague impression is that most readers lean liberal, though by no means all, Harmon. However, this is primarily an LtG / climate change blog that acknowledges there are no good political models for managing what is coming, so the comments section has never felt strongly political to me.

       Trump catches the odd bit of flak, I guess. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a single comment either arguing for or against Islam. 🤷‍♂️ For the uninitiated, Karel aka Charles “The Hammer” Martel halted the advance of Muslim forces into Western Europe in the eight century at the Battle of Tours.

       RIP Bonnie Tyler, btw (featured in Jupiviv’s intriguing musical mash-up).

       • 

         Mike B on September 11, 2026 at 12:42 pm

         I think those of us reading here realize Trump is mostly irrelevant, given our circumstances. Collapse is a foregone conclusion anyway.

4. 

   Truth Wizard on September 10, 2026 at 10:45 am

   Absolutely cooked.
   We’re here together to witness it.

5. 

   Cassandra on September 10, 2026 at 11:45 am

   Rapid & complete systemic collapse

   From Quark’s latest:

   “The process is very long, because the system’s representatives intend to prolong growth until the end, even if this includes the sudden and absolute exhaustion of all reserves. And also an important consequence is that the catabolic plateau can only end with a rapid systemic collapse, once the process of absolute resource consumption has advanced so much that it is no longer possible to decrease slowly.

   Since the fiduciary system is completely artificial, the final rupture is absolutely spectacular. Probably, monetary injection will be abused until hyperinflation due to loss of confidence makes stretching the process useless and we all know that the subsequent descent must be impressive. Positive feedback also contributes to the rapid and complete collapse, since the system has become too complex for a simplification to be sufficient to resume growth.

   Finally, wars never help. And the beginning of some of them, in the present time, allows us to suggest a not-so-distant end in the coming decade.”

   https://rayonegro.substack.com/p/meseta-catabolica

   I imagine he is hedging his bets with his comment about the coming DECADE. I guess we will see! Fun times, eh wot?

   • 

     Cassandra on September 10, 2026 at 12:36 pm

     PS. Re the link about the shocking flood in the Himalayas on Aug, 26, I think global system economic collapse will be like that – rapid and complete. Like we can’t imagine, having lived our whole lives in this insanely interconnected complex global financial/economic system.

     • 

       George Kaplan on September 10, 2026 at 3:17 pm

       Is Quark a climate denier? I don’t recall seeing any comment about it on his pieces (but I mostly see the translations posted here). Recently accelerating climate chaos is unarguably now the biggest multiplier of any of the complexity collapse factors, so a decade while ignoring it would become a couple of years by including it.

       • 

         Cassandra on September 10, 2026 at 4:19 pm

         I don’t know if he is, George. But obviously energy & economics is his jam.

   • 

     Panopticon on September 10, 2026 at 5:32 pm

     I can’t disagree with Quark there, Cassandra. Talking of monetary abuse:

     “Donald Trump’s promise of a $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every US citizen if Republicans retain control of the US Congress in November’s midterm elections has sparked incredulity and accusations of bribery.”

     https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/10/trump-5000-midterm-cash-dividend-response

6. 

   Leaf on September 10, 2026 at 12:27 pm

   “Relying only on planting and saving trees to capture carbon would mean covering enormous chunks of the world in forests that take years to start absorbing meaningful amounts of carbon after being planted—and can always burn down.”

   Good point – we better bury “enormous chunks of the world” under this manufactured industrial carbon capture hellscape.

   “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”

   Jobs and the economy. More of the same. Fake “green” is better than real green if it keeps our ever-expanding mindless overconsumption overshooting a little while longer.

   I wonder if carbon capture infrastructure is manufactured, installed, and maintained without emitting carbon?

   • 

     Panopticon on September 10, 2026 at 5:42 pm

     Leaf, carbon capture infrastructure, is, as you imply, just another industrial system.

     The very idea of capturing little puffs of the global superorganism’s flatulence and burying them underground has always struck me as absurd; right up there with growing crops for fuel.

7. 

   zip on September 10, 2026 at 1:12 pm

   Europe launches CO₂ storage – but how big is “big”?

   At Yara’s fertiliser plant in Sluiskil, in the Dutch province of Zeeland, Europe’s largest commercial Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) facility has officially entered operation. It can capture and liquefy up to 800,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year from ammonia production. The CO₂ is then shipped to Norway, where Northern Lights permanently stores it around 2.6 kilometres beneath the North Sea seabed.

   And no, we should acquit the Norwegians. The CO₂ is not being pumped into depleted oil fields to increase pressure and squeeze out some additional oil. Northern Lights injects it into a deep saline aquifer.

   Technically, Sluiskil is an obvious place to start with CCS. Producing ammonia from natural gas generates a relatively concentrated stream of CO₂. Yara also has decades of experience capturing and liquefying CO₂. The project cost Yara about €200 million and is intended to store around 12 million tonnes over fifteen years.

   That brings us to scale.

   Yara itself states that 800,000 tonnes represents roughly 0.5 per cent of annual Dutch emissions.

   Total greenhouse-gas emissions from the EU economy and households amounted to roughly 3.3 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent in 2025.

   Put Sluiskil’s 800,000 tonnes against that figure and the result is approximately 0.024 per cent of European emissions.

   In other words: about one fortieth of one per cent.

   Purely as an illustration of scale, storing an amount equivalent to the EU’s present annual greenhouse-gas emissions this way would require more than 4,000 facilities with the capacity of Sluiskil. That is emphatically not a realistic CCS scenario – not all European greenhouse-gas emissions consist of CO₂ that can be captured in this way – but it does put the numbers into perspective.

   The business model is interesting too. Yara avoids the cost associated with emitting these 800,000 tonnes under the European emissions trading system. CCS itself produces no new energy or other physical product here. Its economic value arises because emitting CO₂ carries a price, while capturing and storing it avoids that cost. The infrastructure has also been developed with a combination of private investment and public support.

   • 

     Panopticon on September 10, 2026 at 5:48 pm

     Thank you, Zip – very interesting. It all sounds equivalent to “mitigating” decapitation with a Band-Aid. Good times for Yara, though, with higher fertiliser prices, and now carbon capture bolstering its green credentials:

     “Yara stock gains as new carbon capture facility is inaugurated in the Netherlands… For investors, the strategic angle is clear: in a sector where fertilizer producers face increasing regulatory and customer pressure on emissions, being able to offer lower carbon-intensity products can be a differentiator.”

     https://www.ad-hoc-news.de/boerse/news/corporate-news/yara-stock-gains-as-new-carbon-capture-facility-is-inaugurated-in-the/70082936

     • 

       Craig Anderson on September 10, 2026 at 10:11 pm

       When you account for the CO2 emitted from the energy used to liquify the CO2 what’s the balance? Or are the promoting the BS story that they are using “renewables”. I’d guess the total footprint is probably still a net emitter.

8. 

   Martin on September 10, 2026 at 2:26 pm

   No, nothing “political” at all ’bout these comments today. Nothing political in the least, Just pure Rush Limbaugh love and Trumpian truth from deep.within the arteriosclerotic dying empire.

   • 

     Panopticon on September 10, 2026 at 5:53 pm

     I will try to keep the comments section as apolitical as possible, not least because I am pretty apolitical myself and ill-equipped to moderate that sort of back and forth…

     It’s only just occurred to me that Rush was perhaps an unfortunate first name, given that the poor chap had a raging OxyContin addiction.

     • 

       Survivalist on September 11, 2026 at 4:09 am

       Never trust a junkie

9. 

   Bob Shaw on September 10, 2026 at 6:35 pm

   CC is causing aquifers to be overdrawn, bad droughts, and/or heavy floods that wipes out water & sewage infrastructure.

   If an area is starting to run out of potable water, the best way to reduce water usage is to abandon flush toilets and bidets, especially if the sewage cannot be safely routed and processed by the huge spiderweb of sewage infrastructure that has become non-functional due to insufficient water, no electricity for pumps, or broken pipes from a flood or landslide.

   Highly infectious and lethal Ebola sewage freely running down the street instead of proper handling, packaging, and safe disinfection/disposal is just a dire example for you to consider.

   Wise city planners would require a landfill to be safely located on high ground, even beyond the reach of the highest projected CC flood. That way plastic-bagged poop & used TP [when buried] cannot enter the area watershed.

   People that own sufficient land on high ground should be encouraged to have an outhouse. After wiping with TP, then using baby wet-wipes, a person can be just as clean as a bidet user. No potable water is used, then polluted.

   I asked Google: Does most of Europe use bidets or toilet paper?
   ——-
   ANSWER

   Most of Europe relies primarily on toilet paper for daily bathroom hygiene, though bidets are very common in specific Southern and Western European countries. [1, 2]

   Where Bidets Are Common

   Italy: Bidets are practically universal; over 97% of households have them, and they have been required by law in all new homes since 1975. [1, 2, 3]

   Spain and Portugal: Bidets are also widespread in private homes and vacation rentals. [1, 2, 3]

   Other Regions:
   Traditional separate bidets or handheld bidet shower heads (common in Finland) appear in various forms across parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, but they are rarely found in public restrooms anywhere on the continent. [1, 2, 3, 4]

   Where Toilet Paper Dominates

   Northern and Western Europe: Countries like the UK, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, and France generally treat toilet paper as the standard primary method. While France invented the bidet in the 18th century, actual bidet installations in French homes have sharply declined over the last few decades.
   ‐——–
   ME: I have never been to Europe, but let us hope Italy can drastically reduce their potable water usage. Hauling water jugs to flush a toilet and/or power a bidet seems like a bad tradeoff, especially if damaged infrastructure means it flows down a street.

   Bob Shaw Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

10. 

    Curt Kastens on September 10, 2026 at 7:27 pm

    A bit of historical trivia. I had no idea, until I saw this, that the history of guided (as in flown by a remote pilot as opposed to pointed in the right direction like the V! and V2 rocket and cruise missile) goes back to mid 1943. My guess would have been that such technology was not developed until 1960.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1QpX9Vs-Wk

11. 

    Robert S. on September 11, 2026 at 6:48 am

    The folly about Carbon Capture is that it is an open ended process; end product carbon is not returned to its initial state so as to close the loop on the carbon dioxide cycle. That means should carbon capture actually work, it would work only for a while. Eventually the process will have to come to a stop when carbon dioxide reservoirs fill up. Carbon Capture when done on scale provides no long term solution.

    • 

      rob on September 11, 2026 at 4:04 pm

      Like all corporate “solutions “, it’s not meant to provide a solution, long term or otherwise; the only thing these schemes are designed to capture are government funding on the scale and unaccountablility status of “defense” spending.