After another week of frightening temperature anomalies around the world, I gave a talk to supporters of the MEER project, which is trialling various means of locally-led climate adaptation that involve reflecting the sun’s rays. The video and transcript follow below. References for all the factual statements made in my presentation can be found within Chapters 1 and 5 of Breaking Together, which is available in all formats and regions, including a free epub download. Free audios of those chapters are also available. In the talk I am critical of mainstream climatology, as well as BigTech censorship of science-based analyses of the climate crisis that lie outside their preferred view of a manageable problem with technological solutions. From the talk:
“The so-called ‘fact checking’ group ‘Climate Feedback’ didn’t even consider two top climatologists worthy of a reply when they complained to them about helping Facebook to shadow ban an article that concluded we are inevitably heading for over 2 degrees global warming that will likely set off feedback loops. My understanding is that Professor Will Steffen died without even the courtesy of a reply from Climate Feedback. Dr Wolfgang Knorr still awaits one. So, we need to reclaim environmentalism from elites and officers of the establishment. We must stop pretending we are on the same side and instead build alternatives from below.”
As the shadow banning continues, if you think people should know about this MEER Talk, please email it to people, rather than sharing on social media…
Subscribe / Support / Study / Essays
Transcript of MEER Talk by Jem Bendell on July 2nd, 2023.
I’m pleased to be giving a MEER Talk because I welcome the contribution of the MEER initiative to the climate agenda. I first heard of the founder Dr Ye Tao, when he wrote to me in September 2020. He told me he had ditched his Harvard work on Magnetic Resonance Imaging to apply his engineering brain to our climate situation. He recognised the crisis already underway and the breakdowns to come. He told me what’s the point of researching such tech if society would collapse. I thought yeah, if you are a bit of a genius then you may as well apply yourself to the most pressing problems.
Since then I have been impressed by Ye’s focus and drive. He and his colleagues, including his students, have been showing how the approaches from engineering can make a helpful contribution. Perhaps that’s because there is an instinctive focus on identifying salience. After all, there’s no point in getting a PhD if your reactor explodes or your bridge collapses. Unfortunately, we have seen that the officers of the establishment, and of establishment climatology, find it difficult to listen to scholars like Dr Tao. He integrates information in ways not diluted or restrained by deference to the establishment. Such deference can arise due to habit, or limited time to go deeper on a topic, or a desire for status. But psychologists also point to how a fear of experiencing difficult emotions means some people ignore or vilify certain people and ideas that make them feel uncomfortable. So, I applaud all of you who have been involved in MEER. Although I think some other things are as important as ground-level artificial reflection of the sun, I think it’s going to be an important part of the mix. Because it’s key to do something immediate about the risks faced by the poor in cities that are overheating in the global south. It’s why I was pleased to help bring MEER and Dr Tao to the fringes of cop27 last year.
For those of us paying attention to climate data, the last few months have been scary. The unprecedentedly warm ocean surface temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic. The unprecedentedly slow regrowth of Antarctic Sea ice. The disruption of the northern jet stream and the lurching between droughts and floods that result. These changes show that the lull in the pace of global heating that began in 2018 has ended. That lull was likely due to the La Nina ocean current and a period of reduced sunspot activity (which therefore increased cooling cloud cover). Looking at the 2 years previous to 2018, back then I noted that observed warming was already above previously modelled projections. Combined with the woeful under prediction of sea level rise in past IPCC reports, I argued in the Deep Adaptation paper that climate science had been too conservative, and underplayed the severity and urgency of the situation. After the paper went viral I was condemned by some of the world’s most senior ranking climatologists. Some went on record in various outlets to claim I was wrong to say the models under projected the temperature changes. Well, data from 2016 and 2017 was indeed above the top of previous model projections. And current observations in 2023 are exceeding past models once again. I state this not as a vindication. But because I want scholars, activists, journalists and others to realise the dangers of the hubris of the elites in the climate sector. Just like in any sector, the elites have their focus influenced by institutional self-interests and their belief that they need to speak in reassuring ways. Just like any sector, there are also ambitious wannabes, who then echo the narrow views but with added enthusiasm or spite. Instead, passionate scholars on the edges of self-serving orthodoxies are often right. And the MEER initiative is on that creative edge.
I believe the scientific establishment’s attempts to control the narrative on climate have included mistakes that both opened the door to the climate sceptics and narrowed our understanding of the emergency and what to do about it. I think the one issue trumping everything is their ignoring of the carbon lag shown in the paleo records of past climates and atmospheres. Those records show that before humans affected the atmosphere, carbon dioxide usually increased 200 years or more after world temperatures rose. Much of the CO2 coming from the warming oceans. So previously CO2 was amplifying the warming set off by other factors, such as increased sunspots. That’s not good news, as the climate deniers want us to believe. It’s actually terrible news. It means there might not only be some committed warming ahead from existing CO2 in the atmosphere, but there might also be some committed carbon from existing warming.
It is like we are in a lounge sitting around an open log fire. The CO2 is like tinder, and we have stuffed the fire with tinder, so things have warmed up a bit more than they would have otherwise. But looking around we realise that we have stuffed the lounge with that tinder. At any moment a spark from the fire could set it all off. Such sparks could be more sunspots, or unusually warm ocean currents. It is obviously urgent that we remove as much tinder as we can from the lounge. But we might still get unlucky and some spits from the fire catch the tinder and set off a hothouse Earth. We should do what we can, but we are not in control.
Having said that, I am not as apocalyptic as some analysts. Because another mistake establishment climatologists have made is to downplay the role of deforestation in reducing the bacteria and pollen that help to form the clouds that cool. That was downplayed as it was not considered global, and yet we now know it is a regional and global process. Modern humans have cleared as much forest in the last 120 years, as the previous 9000 years, with rates rising since the early 1970s, which correlates with the rise in global temperatures.
The implication of all this is that we need to broaden and deepen the response to climate change. Humanity’s very survival might depend on us stopping deforestation – now – as well as speeding up appropriate reforestation and agroforestry – now. That means I regard attempts at better surface level reflection of incoming radiation as part of a broader agenda than simply decarbonising economies.
The world is suffering from our science, our media, our regulators, our politics and our governments being captured by factions of capital. The fossil fuel industry spread bullshit of many kinds, using dark arts to even turn lifelong hippies into climate sceptics. But the clean tech industry are also spreading self-serving lie that modern societies can transition to being entirely powered by renewable energies. Some estimates are that only 6% of global energy use is from renewables (not including nuclear as renewable). As renewable energy grows, it is not displacing fossil fuels but adding to the mix as energy demands grow. We can be misled by the electrification of our homes. Of total energy used worldwide, only 20 percent is household. The rest is sectors like agriculture, construction, forestry, manufacturing, and mining. Fossil fuels are used in so much of modern society. Such societies will need to power down, to degrow our consumption, and with the rich being the ones to go first – all of them. The FT caused a stir last week when their energy reporter noted the obvious fact that capitalism can’t deliver a sustainable transition for an economy that is well over 80% dependent on fossil fuels for its energy needs. But what it didn’t say is that no political economic system can deliver that shift. Instead, our societies simply won’t function like they do today. One worrying development is that the ‘clean tech capitalists’ are now influencing Big Tech, like Facebook, to ‘shadow ban’ the view that more tech and enterprise won’t fix the situation with our climate. The so-called ‘fact checking’ group ‘Climate Feedback’ didn’t even consider two top climatologists worthy of a reply when they complained to them about helping Facebook to shadow ban an article that concluded we are inevitably heading for over 2 degrees global warming that will likely set off feedback loops. My understanding is that Professor Will Steffen died without even the courtesy of a reply from Climate Feedback. Dr Wolfgang Knorr still awaits one. So, we need to reclaim environmentalism from elites and officers of the establishment. We must stop pretending we are on the same side and instead build alternative from below. The upside of a societal collapse would be that the elites and officers of the establishment might lose their power. Well, my book explains how the process of the creeping collapse of industrial consumer societies is already underway. Sceptical? Well, the Human Development Index is the most basic indicator on this process. It has been declining each year since 2019 in 80% of countries, in all regions of the world. Some of that data is collected 2 years before release. So it’s a decline that began pre-pandemic. Previously it had been rising, always, in richer countries since 1990. Data on our quality of life shows a global plateauing since 2016 and that 90% of countries have a declining quality of life. In the rich OECD countries this fall has been consistent since 2016. And some of that data was also collected a few years prior. So that suggests a persistent decline starting before 2015.
In the book, I connect these cracks on the surface of modern societies with the crumbling foundations in our economic, energy, environmental, and food systems. Climate change is an accelerator of all these fractures, as well as being a problem in itself. Specific societies have been disrupted terribly for centuries both by natural disasters and political violence. But the evidence I present in Breaking Together supports the view that we have reached a point where most modern societies, while continuing to function on the surface, are already in the early stages of their collapse.
But of course, elites don’t experience this reality, as they can buy their way out of the difficulties. And top experts in their silos are incentivised to ignore an integrated perspective on this situation. Nearly all the people providing us their views on the situation are part of the establishment. For all their radical talk, when you dig deeper you find a managerialist, technocratic, elite-friendly and often imperialist bunch of ideas about what to do. I say the environmental movement must ditch any deference to the folks who watered things down for years and who promote elite friendly responses today. It’s time to stop pretending that we are on the same side. Instead, we can join people who are recognising collapse, rejecting incumbent power, and working together on alternatives from below. We can find our own way of participating in what I describe as a ‘great reclamation’ of our power from corporate rule. So although due to the nature of the MEER Initiative I have focused a bit on climate in my comments today, I’d welcome questions on anything, including, this wider topic of the environmental movement.
(The video of the MEER talk includes 45 minutes of Q&A).
For a detailed analysis of how senior-ranking climatologists and their ecomodernist friends in journalism have been misleading audiences on climate science, see my essay on the topic of ‘committed warming’: Don’t be a climate user – an essay on climate science communication. Chapter 13 of Breaking Together describes the way the US-based ‘censorship industrial complex’ is hiding (globally) alarmist information and even demonising such views as extremism. At the time of writing only niche publications are covering this dystopian trend. The presentations of Dr Bendell and Dr Tao at COP27 follow below.
Donate to keep Jem writing / Read Jem’s book Breaking Together / Read Jem’s key ideas on collapse readiness / Subscribe to this blog / Read the Scholars’ Warning / Visit the Deep Adaptation Forum / Receive Jem’s Biannual Bulletin / Receive the Deep Adaptation Review / Watch some of Jem’s talks / Find Emotional Support.
Prof Jem Bendell 
[…] Climate truth is a challenge to power – even that of senior experts […]
[…] Climate truth is a challenge to power – even that of senior experts – Professor Jem Bendell […]