2022 is Going to be The Most F**ked Up Year on Planet Earth Since -66,000,000
The title refers to the approximate year that an asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico causing the fifth great extinction (the latest research places the asteroid at 65.95 mya, ± 40k years). In particular, it was the event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs.
We are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction and we are the dinosaurs. In my opinion, 2022 is the year that the metaphorical asteroid will hit humanity and the planet. This is the year the cataclysmic impacts of climate change will strike en masse, affecting all species of plants and animals, no matter where they reside, air, sea or land. In this blog post, I will be making my predictions for what’s ahead in 2022.
First, from a purely numerical perspective, CO₂ will break 422 ppm (parts per million) at Mauna Loa at its peak this coming April, breaching 420 for the first time. 350 ppm was the last viable level (see this article), and breaking 400 ppm was viewed as cataclysmic (we passed 400 ppm in 2013). The last time CO₂ was at 420 ppm was 3 million years ago, when oceans were as much as 100 feet higher and global temperatures were 10F hotter (see this post). And we just keep on going.
We will also see the global average of methane break 1900 ppb (parts per billion) for the first time over the next few months. Even 1910 ppb is in reach in 2022. Methane is over 80 times as potent a GHG as CO₂ over its first 20 years in the atmosphere.
I note that there is a small chance of a massive methane burst coming from permafrost melt in Siberia or the East Siberian Arctic Sea (ESAS) methane clathrates that could radically increase global methane in 2022. What is more likely is that increased methane from these sources will lead to further acceleration of global methane. This increase will defeat the politicized mitigating path forward decreed in COP-26 of 30% reduction in global methane by 2030.
Next, expect novel and tragic climate disasters to escalate. The Canadian province of British Columbia is the model for what’s to come to your neighborhood in 2022. From record heat (Canadian record of 121F), to the fire that destroyed Lytton, to floods that destroyed transportation infrastructure throughout BC, to record cold, the beating BC is taking continues into 2022. The recent wildfires in Colorado near Boulder at the end of December, 2021, fueled by 100+ mph winds and a historic drought, burned with a ferocity that had never been seen in the region for as long as humans have documented such events. The scale, scope and duration of catastrophic climate events to come in 2022 is terrifying.
If you haven’t heard, it’s been hot in large parts of the Northern Hemisphere the last few months. For example, on December 26, Kodiak, Alaska hit 67F. Winter heat waves have consumed most of Europe and large parts of the U.S. High temperature records are being obliterated by 10F and more. These heat waves have set the stage for untold surprises in the farm and field. This article explains just a few of the consequences, which in the U.S. include failed peach, cherry, blueberry and citrus harvests, collapse of bee populations and increases in tick and mosquito-born diseases.
In 2022, we can expect extreme heat and humidity to bring increasingly large parts of the planet nearer to lethal wet-bulb temperatures. Those who can migrate will do so in earnest. Expect climate migration to get going at a scale never seen before as mobile populations look for refuge. Expect border battles to escalate as nations seal themselves off from the invading “aliens.” Expect heat, drought and water wars to cause civil unrest, desperation, disease and death among those who cannot migrate.
Many countries are starting 2022 with record numbers of Covid cases. While the omicron variant appears to lead to less severe illness (although this study concludes omicron and delta are roughly equal), the magnitude of this wave is sure to cause a tsunami of death and long-term disability. We don’t know what’s coming after omicron, but given the trajectory we’ve experienced the last two years, there is no reason to expect omicron to be the last bullet Covid fires at us.
On the political front, the decline of democratic ideals and the rise of hate is an inevitable consequence of misdirected ignorance and fear. We want something we can control, so we project our fear of the coming collapse of civilization onto a political party or candidate. The media-fueled outrage machine creates and supports the silo of our choice. It’s them. If only our party had full power, all the problems would be solved. Autocracy is the consequence.
Expect the rise of totalitarian and authoritarian governments. Here in the U.S. we have our midterm elections, poised to give new power to States to overthrow vote tallies that the majority in power does not like. Election control has been going on for generations in places like Russia, Iran and China. This year, the U.S. is poised to see the “autocratic party” usurp power for good.
Expect more people to become aware of the inevitability of the collapse of global industrial civilization in 2022. Expect more movement towards the bright green lies of wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and nuclear. Expect more children and working poor to be enslaved in lithium and cobalt mines to feed the first-world’s hunger for clean energy. Among the wealthy, owning a Tesla and having solar on your rooftop (with battery backup) will be the symbol for having done your part to save the planet.
As food becomes more scarce and supply chains continue to degrade, necessities will be harder to find and prices will go up. Expect inflation to accelerate. In the other direction, a long overdue stock market correction will be set in motion by monetary policy and fear. In short, 2022 is the year that the financial “everything bubble” will pop. Expect the filthy rich to get filthy richer.
There is some good news. I don’t anticipate that a BOE (blue ocean event) will occur in 2022. A BOE is less than 1 million square kilometers of Arctic ice extent at the minimum in September. Nor do I expect the Thwaites glacier (the “doomsday glacier”) to collapse, raising sea level by 2 feet, or for massive quantities of Greenland’s ice to unexpectedly slide into the North Atlantic. These singular tipping points will happen soon enough. The IPCC predicts a BOE by 2050. My personal over/under is 2043 (see this post). Recent news puts the Thwaites glacier at risk in the next 5 years. Greenland had record melt in 2021 that included the first rain ever recorded on Greenland’s summit. Expect the Arctic, Thwaites and Greenland to make it through 2022.
Expect over-population and overshoot to take its toll everywhere and in every way in 2022. There are too many people on planet Earth, too many of whom consume too much. We are a failed and invasive species on a dying planet and these are sad times.
This is going to be one f**k of a tough year to be a plant or animal on planet Earth. As much as you are able, be kind, be generous and be of service.
Here are the top 22 impacts of climate change that we will see in 2022:
- Acid rain
- Algae blooms
- Ash & smoke
- Bees dying & pollination loss
- Climate refugees & migration
- Coral bleaching
- Crop failures
- Disease, pandemics (plants & animals)
- Droughts
- Extreme cold
- Financial/bank/stock collapse
- Fires
- Floods
- Food & water riots
- Heat waves: frequency, power, duration
- Hunger, famine & starvation
- Infrastructure collapse
- Price instability & inflation
- Storms — more frequent, power, duration
- Supply chain & transportation collapse
- Unemployment & poverty
- War & terrorism
Depressing
Yep, it’s about right.
Fasten your seat belts.
Umm not to be offensive, but most of this is wrong. Just wrong. First off, I want you to consider your opinion (doomsday) Vs the top climate scientists in the world in the IPCC. Do you really think they would leave out things that a layperson would know of? There’s a whole section on feedback loops! Also, a site by someone who actually is a climate scientist: ,
– link deleted –
Guess we shall see if he is wrong but I tend to believe him since climate scientists have been short sighted and wrong on their predictions. If I were you, I’d be prepared for what this article’s predictions, or accept the fact that being unprepared will seal your fate. No harm in being prepared either way, even though I don’t believe we can really prepare much for it.
And this person who has no formal education on climate is somehow more accurate?
They have eyes and we can see the effects of climate changes now that we shouldn’t be seeing for another 10-20 according to climate scientists reports 10-20 years ago. Climate change is speeding up because governments around the world failed to heed the warnings of Carl Sagan in 1985 and went on “business as usual”, giving out coal and oil subsidies (taxpayer money) to keep polluting and profits rolling. 70% of the problems we are seeing is coming from corporations, where profits and polluting beat out people.
Why is this so hard to see? You must be keeping your head in the sand because you don’t want to believe it.
Agree to disagree, then.
I don’t get it. You think that the scientists, whose whole life is dedicated to this is somehow less observant than you as a layman and knows less than you. Link a peer reviewed study by an actual journal that shows ANY proof of this. Also, I did know all of this, and life IS going to get harder, but NTHE? Really?
All the listed have happened and continue to happen .. not sure why he’s clocked onto 2022 specifically or how.. the list is real enough but…
You say “most of this is wrong” — please be specific about one thing you think is wrong and give a specific reference that supports your statement. I’ll leave that link in place if it checks out. That will get us started.
Okay, first up: the blue ocean event. It has been estimated at around 0.2 degrees Celsius of warming, and Peter wadhams is fraught up wrong.
Next, the amoc. The IPCC report, which you get your info from, says that the amoc will most likely weaken, then recover.
There is no evidence whatsoever of a methane bomb under the ESAS, and I don’t see why you can predict crop failure when an entire organisation of smart people are against you
And of course the link gets deleted with no explanation
Hi Ian,
I am eager to have a cogent dialog/debate with an informed person on this subject. “Most of this is wrong” is what? An opinion? A strongly held belief? I very politely and sincerely ask, have you read Overshoot/Catton, Peak Everything/Heinberg, Limits to Growth/Meadows any articles on Alice Friedemann’s blog or her source material (Geo Destinies), etc. (insert the titles, links whatever for any disputable “doomer” literature here.)
Did you notice, “code red for humanity” stated in the most recent IPCC report? What is your cogent, reasoned, evidence reply to these works? I’m asking this politely and respectfully, not to pick a fight, or disagree with your view, but rather to find ANY evidence based arguments that can substantively dispute (in this case Eliot’s) claim. I agree with Eliot, and wish I could disagree! What well informed person can speak in a clear evidenced way to give us hope? Please who? Who can effectively dispute Schellnhuber? Who can dispute the meaning of the Keeling curve? Who can tell us, reliably, the methane won’t be pouring out of the Arctic? Who can reassure us that the “blue ocean event” won’t create an almost instantaneous runaway warming effect? Every person, and all life on earth needs some genuine reliable reason for hope.
I’m not saying overshoot is wrong, but there were studies disproving the fact that the blue ocean event would not cause runaway warming and the ESAS bomb would n it happen, I did link it but it got deleged
Thanks.
Climate scientists only publish what they can definitively prove.
I would say this is not quite true. There are lots of error bars in climate science. Mostly what you see is a paper producing a new estimate for something, a discussion about why the models used are slightly better than the previous ones, and smaller error bars.
IPCC report has bee watered down by politicians. They don’t want to show the real report. The scientists said that themselves.
“We leaked the report because governments – pressured and bribed by fossil fuel and other industries, protecting their failed ideology and avoiding accountability – have edited the conclusions before official reports were released in the past. We leaked it to show that scientists are willing to disobey and take personal risk to inform the public.”
Read it on scientistrebellion
https://scientistrebellion.com/we-leaked-the-upcoming-ipcc-report/
The above predictions and consequences are sometimes regarded as being socially irresponsible to list. Others believe that blunt realism is needed.
Hoy día es difícil saber quién nos engaña y asusta o quién nos engaña y promete mejoras.
Las visiones apocalípticas son deleznables desde el punto de vista del común de la población por el caos y vulnerabilidades emocionales; pero también son concientizantes ante cierta indiferencia social manifiesta…
Ahora los comunicadores emplean este tipo de información a su buen interés o de los poderes que los manejan.
Son épocas de poca credibilidad y de decisiones personalisimas. Los estados nos mienten y nos cuidan poco o nada en función de sus macro intereses …los privados siempre buscan rentabilidad a cualquier costo. Son épocas difíciles.
Don’t forget the collapse of the healthcare(privatized healthcare in the US at least) as we knew it.
And the corrupt government will fail and a massive financial collapse.
Yep, healthcare, just didn’t make the top 22.
I hope a financial crash doesn’t happen. I think we’re already seeing runaway processes. This blue ocean thing would be a shockingly visual one, but the last 60 years has been a slow-rolling runaway process. If there is one thing I have learned these last 6 years, it’s the slow-rolling process that is the most devastating, the events that are not alarming, the ones you can only see when someone finally uses the correct words to describe them.
A financial crash is definitely coming sometime in the next 3-6 months, with Evergrande about to implode China’s economy, which will bleed over the world. The Fed has given 4.5 trillion dollars to 4 major banks. Why would they be pumping that much money unless something big was coming? The same derivatives that crashed the economy in 2008 are back again and about 10x worse. Banks made bad decisions with their customers money and the fat lady is about to sing.
We reached 420 PPM last April already. You should update this.
Individual days, yes, but not for the monthly reporting average at Mauna Loa. The 2021 peak average last year was 419.13 ppm.
You all are obviously convinced that a blue ocean event and Arctic methane bomb will kill us all. I can’t speak for overshoot, maybe it’s right maybe it isn’t, but predicting the future with any sort of certainty is just an educated guess. I’ve tried to link to a source by a climate scientist not having hopium but actually explaining the science and the fact that those claims are overexaggerated but they got removed so how am I supposed to make an argument?
Most of the 22 items listed are results of Overshoot, not climate change per say. Remember, the latter is merely a symptom of Overshoot. The current focus on “trying to fix climate change” is a distraction from the predicament that Overshoot is.
To be fair a lot of the list happen anyway, even without Overshoot, given the US Military Industrial Complex and it’s forever wars.
I’d add:
23: more species loss
24: more random “unexplained” wildlife die-offs
For Ian, try these papers:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63657-6
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbmkz8/us-military-could-collapse-within-20-years-due-to-climate-change-report-commissioned-by-pentagon-says (article)
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507
And never forget the exponential function, and our inability of our species to understand it:
https://youtu.be/kZA9Hnp3aV4
The ongoing collapse isn’t just the preserve of climate scientists. A multi-disciplinary approach encompassing psychology, anthropology, history, economics, maths, conservation biology, etc is required to fully grasp the all-encompassing threat to our existence on this planet.
Fabulous post, thanks.
Everything is due to overshoot/overpopulation. There is a good argument to made that overpopulation is the only problem. But the acceleration of overshoot/overpopulation in the last 250 years has been facilitated by extracting carbon wealth with its resulting GHGs and the increase in GDP and agricultural efficiency. Overx was going to happen eventually without fossil fuels, but fossil fuels have made it more of a chicken/egg thing at this moment.
Thank you, sir, this is a damn good article. I live in Sri Lanka. We faced some unprecedented rainfall throughout the year 2021 in our country. In my place, we rarely get flooded easily. Apparently, the last time it happened was when my father was about 15 years old. Now, after about 37 years later, our place got flooded two times in 2021. And also, the cold season usually lasts until the end of January, or even early February. But this year, it’s already gone. It barely lasted for 4 weeks. Not sure people in my country notice these new changes or just don’t care. Maybe it’s because of the covid and this financial disaster, they got their plates filled. I don’t know if these things relate to climate-related unprecedented events happening around the world but, this really makes me anxious.
Thank you for sharing your experiences. It is hard to understand why some people can’t see the obvious catastrophe unfolding.
Just to ask, at what point would you admit that you were wrong on the collapse?
We’re are a similar moment to where we were 70,000 years ago. Our existence as homo species, the naked ape, was threatened by global cooling. We could barely survive living near the Equator. How did we manage? We invented language. That saved us.
Now we are faced by a threat of similar magnitude. What, if anything, is going to save us this time? In my view, it’s a radical transformation of both individual and collective consciousness. Based on the Hawkins log Scale of Consciousness of 1 – 1,000, we are currently calibrating collectively at 160. In the last 10 years, we have gone down from 235. We may be continuing to go down. If that is the case, and we are unable to recover, we have definitely had it. Enjoy the time while you still can.
However, if we wake up; recognize and accept the existential threat of global warming; all come together as one; shift our consciousness collectively to 500 and Above (the level of Love) on the Hawkins Scale; reverse, capture, and store carbon emissions; and radically transform our lifestyles and our relationships with each other and with the planet; we will survive and thrive.
What your choice? Stay as you are and experience near-term extinction; or choose to make the shift and then help others. This is a magical moment in our history. What is your choice? Extinction or co-creating Heaven on Earth? 🙂 <3
I know you will say that I am suffering from Hopium and Apocaloptimism. I can see the threat with the same eyes that you see them and I acknowledge that we are in a very dangerous situation. The chances of us waking up, shifting consciousness, and doing all the things I say are necessary above, and in time, are very slim.
The reason why I am saying it is still possible, however remote the chances, is because we now have a way to RAPIDLY experience a radical transformation of consciousness. The process used to take a lifetime using practices such as prayer, yoga, meditation, etc. But now the shift can be achieved in a couple of hours and sustained following just a few months of practice.
This completely changes the equation. I train trainers to train trainers. If everyone chose to embrace this process, we could experience the shift I am talking about in as little as five years! Yes, five years!!!
You’re probably totally skeptical, and I don’t blame you. Two hours to shift!!! That has to be impossible. But no, it is totally possible. It entails identifying where we are holding on to blocks in our energy field (ckakras). These were all created in Separation Consciousness. Then we go into Unified Consciousness. From there it is very easy to clear the blocks. We then shoot up the Hawkins Scale. Most people go all the way to Infinity! Then, it is a question of embedding, integrating and sustaining the shift. That takes a few months of practice.
I invite you to experience a Clear Your Blocks session. This takes two hours and can be done online using Zoom, or similar. Try it, and then judge. Does it work, or not? If it works, if everyone did it, could we save ourselves from near-term extinction???
Plato, The Critas: “What now remains compared with what existed then is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth wasted away and only the bare framework of the land left.”
Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague, 1994: “…The extraordinary, rapid growth of the Homo Sapiens population, coupled with its voracious appetite for planetary dominance and resource consumption, had put every measurable biological and chemical system on earth in a state of imbalance.
Extinctions, toxic chemicals, greater background levels of nuclear and ionizing radiation, ultraviolet-light penetration of the atmosphere, global warming, wholesale devastations of ecospheres…something had to give. That something was Nature…”
Overpopulation and economic overshoot are genocidal problems but not the cause of the coming collapse. It’s the bigotry proclaiming humans are the ‘master race’. It’s no accident that Nazis are rising everywhere. The ideology of concentration camp guards appeals to those who put their jobs, mortgage, and convenience before all else. It appeals those who shrug and grin, but don’t hear the screaming or the shots, who don’t notice the smoke and ashes falling on their heads, who don’t notice what’s missing.
Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Eduardo Galeano: “My great fear is that we are all suffering from amnesia. It’s not a person. It’s a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten.”
EVERY predicted climate change impact has arrived sooner, and with more damage. Starting with rapidly increasing temperatures, complete loss of multi-year Arctic ice, floods of glacier and ice cap meltwater, habitat loss, local extirpations and regional extinctions, violent storms, forest fires, droughts, floods, activation of seabed methane hydrate deposits, ocean acidification, collapse of ocean ecosystems, and the starvation of birds, insects, and animals as ecosystems are crushed and paved. Climate Nazis exist, but weren’t born psychopaths like Hannibal Lector, or made like Buffalo Bill. Climate psychopaths sold their consciences, their hearts, their futures, to the lowest bidder.
Farley Mowat: ”We are under the gross misconception that we are a good species going somewhere important and that at the last minute we will correct our errors and God will smile on us. It is delusion.”
Thomas Paine: ”To argue with a person who has renounced reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”
Look on the bright side, 2023 will be worse than 2022…
The year 2025 will probly be the year where we all know how fucked we are. It will be an EL Nino year combined with a solar maximum, flavoured with a pinch of economic depression resulting in less global dimming.
You forgot “billions of crabs disappearing” in your prediction… 😉