Your 'doom quote' for today:
"We are living the spiraling endgame of industrial civilization: a senescent empire crumbling under the weight of its own moral corruption and foolish quest for eternal growth as the ecological foundations of life itself teeter on the brink."
https://t.co/AlbjuKthE0
@jonathanbfine@philosoraptor this is admittedly a weird place to put this, but Geosystems remains the best class I’ve ever taken at any level of education, through my masters. Thank you.
The last time an El Niño this strong hit, it killed 50 million people. That was 3 to 4% of the entire world population. Scale that to today and you're looking at 250 million equivalent.
The 1877 Super El Niño triggered simultaneous droughts across India, China, Brazil, and East Africa. Crops failed on four continents at the same time. The famine lasted three years. Researchers have called it "arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity."
NOAA's latest update gives a two-in-three chance this one reaches strong or very strong by fall. European models are even more aggressive. Sea surface temperatures need to exceed 2°C above normal to qualify as "super." The trajectory is pointing directly at that threshold.
Here's what makes 2026 structurally different from every previous Super El Niño: there are two independent supply shocks converging on the same crop cycle.
The Iran war has shut down roughly a third of the world's seaborne fertilizer trade through the Strait of Hormuz. US fertilizer supply was at 75% of normal in mid-March, right when the Corn Belt needed it most. Fertilizer prices hit their highest level since 2022. That input shortage is already baked into the 2026 growing season.
The El Niño yield shock operates on a 6 to 12 month lag. India is forecasting below-normal monsoons for the first time in three years. Indonesia and Malaysia carry 90% of global palm oil, and El Niño production declines in those countries take 6 to 24 months to peak. Every strong El Niño in the past 55 years has reduced global cocoa production.
So the fertilizer shortage weakens the crops El Niño is about to stress, and the El Niño yield collapse hits in 2027 on fields that were already under-fertilized in 2026. Two shocks with nearly identical lag structures, converging on the same harvest window.
The difference between 1877 and 2026: we can see this one coming six months out. The commodity futures curve is barely pricing either shock. Whether that's rational discounting or willful denial depends entirely on what the Pacific Ocean does between now and October.
america uses 15x more water on its lawns than it does on all of its data centers
driving a gas car is 10x the per capita electricity consumption of all u.s. data centers
in defense of the data center on substack
On Wednesday, I wrote about the upcoming El Niño, which some have described as a “Godzilla.” I cited some estimates suggesting it could mean global average temperatures hit 1.7C about preindustrial averages in 2027. The high range of what’s possible is actually closer to 1.9C.
The vaccine for hantavirus is being hidden in the data center closest to you. They’re hiding it from you and your drunkest, most volatile friends. Are you going to take that? Are you going to let the “AI” “people” inoculate themselves while your family suffers? Take action NOW
“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
Dr. Hansen and his team have determined that Earth is now locked into 10–13ºC / 18–23ºF heat increase. The human body can't physically endure such temperatures. Nor can our crops. Or our water supplies.
We have no plan. We desperately need one. For our young and other species.
@AngletonOrchids I teach a rhetoric class at a high school for gifted kids. We've looked at A LOT of this stuff this year. It is *everywhere* and even the kids mostly recognize how harmful it is. Their social feeds are just innundated with this stuff. Bad sign for those who will know nothing else
If you wrote a screenplay in which the executive for some evil AI company had a background in slavery and apartheid, they'd tell you to dial it back a notch.
Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???
"Anarchists often note that there is a difference between protest and direct action:
Protest is an appeal to the authorities to behave differently; direct action, whether it’s a matter of a community building a well, trying to shut down a meeting, or occupying a factory, it is a matter of acting as if the existing structure of power does not even exist.
Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free."
- David Graeber