About This Website
Thanks for stopping by. Climate News · Research · Perspectives began as my personal site but has been re-focused on facts about the climate crisis, because nothing is more important. We're not just watching the biggest trainwreck in human history, we're on the train. The climate situation is deteriorating rapidly. We are running out of time.
The accepted measure of evolutionary success is how long a species survives. Our species has been here only a very brief period - about a quarter million years. Agriculture-based civilization has existed for just ten thousand years. And our petroleum-powered industrial society is only a few hundred years old. Yet in this very short time we've trashed the place. As time goes on this only becomes more obvious.
But, think it's obvious now? Just wait. Climate change is a lagging indicator; the effects we see today are mostly from the trashing we did years and decades ago. Every year our trashing is more extensive than the year before, and it seems to be coming to a head.
Climate change itself isn't what will get us, I think. That will come later (and won't help). First though, the bare beginnings of it will thoroughly disrupt the fragile house of cards of our globally interconnected economic system, making a mess of this thing we call civilization. Ever play Jenga? Don't have to remove many blocks before the whole thing collapses. Even if some fraction of homo so-called sapiens survives that, given what will remain I wonder what life will look like for them. For us.
Still, it's a privilege to have a front row table at the restaurant at the end of the universe. We get to watch this amazing trainwreck happen in real time. Quite a show.
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What's here: This site is a curated climate research and analysis archive, maintained by one person over many years. The Research page collects (at last count) over 5000 reports and citations from peer-reviewed journals, government agencies, and mainstream science journalism, arranged newest-first, and going back over 200 years to the beginning of modern climate science starting with Fourier in 1824 and Foote in 1856. The Scenarios page is my own brief big-picture overview of where we're likely headed and why, framed around cascading failures in the systems underlying modern life, and drawing on Tainter's work on the collapse of complex societies. There is no fundraising here, no newsletter subscription, no political affiliation, no advertising, and no cookies. The aim is to make the evidence available in a coherent format, so readers can reach their own conclusions. The line goes that journalism is the first draft of history; this site sits somewhere between the two.
Road map: If you're looking for a brief big-picture overview the Scenarios page is a good place to start. My original idea for this website was to post a well-curated list of notable research articles, to allow people to read for themselves and draw their own conclusions. But that Research list has grown quite large, with thousands of citations and references going back over 200 years. So, in addition some have asked me for a short overview of how we got here and where this is likely going, and the Scenarios page is my best guess on that. You might also like the Perspectives page, which has offerings from others that I've found illuminating.
Calhoun: I have also provided a sample of articles on John Calhoun. His famous rodent habitat studies documented that even while providing all physical requirements for a population, stress (which he induced through overcrowding) will always lead to the population's extinction, with notable exhibition of bizarre and self-defeating behaviors along the way, and especially towards the end of the habitat's cycle. As modern living, and in particular the looming climate crisis, create ever greater stress in our own habitat, consideration of whether Calhoun's findings apply to our current situation may well be in order.
About me: I've been following the scientific literature regarding climate change for a long time, and saved articles and studies I found especially interesting, starting from when we did that on paper. This became the core of this site's Research list when I turned my personal site into this climate site. I've always liked history and facts in general. Facts provide context. With context, data can become knowledge. Without it, all you have is noise. If you like, there is more context about me on the About page.
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The painting to the left is called "Three" and is by my wife Cathy Karklyn. Click it to go to the original.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." (Upton Sinclair)
However, "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is © Barry Smiler and is licensed under
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)