A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.
Why does America have a toxic sea… and how did it get there?
The Salton Sea was once one of California’s most vibrant tourist hotspots, a beach teeming with visitors and wildlife. Today it’s a shrinking, toxic lake at the center of a water crisis impacting 40 million people across the Southwest. What happened?
Shane Campbell-Staton visits the Imperial Valley to examine how a desert transformed into America’s vegetable garden, but at serious environmental and social costs. He meets Alex Jack, a third-generation farmer pioneering water-saving techniques to sustain his family’s farm, and Luis Olmedo, a community advocate fighting for the health and rights of migrant workers who harvest the valley’s crops.
The story of the Salton Sea reveals the harsh realities of scarce water, toxic pollution, and a system that doesn’t protect everyone equally. As new water regulations for the Colorado River loom in 2026, this pivotal moment demands a fresh approach to who controls this precious resource, and how it can be allocated more fairly.
I'm old enough to remember when the Salton Sea was the aquatic playground shown in the video and I find it sad that it is now too polluted to still be that. It's now become a place that fits what I wrote in John Oliver examines the UK elections: "One ofmy favorite sayings that I tell my students is 'no one, or in this case, no place, is completely useless; it can always be used as a bad example.'" It also serves as an example of three of Commoner's Laws, "Everything must go somewhere (There is no away)" for agricultural runoff, "There is no free lunch" for growing winter vegetables, and "Everything is connected to everything else" for water use. "Nature knows best?" We should be so lucky.
Follow over the jump for most read posts featuring clips from Human Footprint during the 15th year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News.
Something unexpected and potentially irreversible is changing Antarctica and scientists finally know why.
Over the past few decades, researchers have tracked the mysterious growth and sharp decline in sea ice in Antarctica. But a few years ago a troubling discovery was made that could upend global ocean circulation, push one species of penguin to extinction, and change our planet’s climate forever.
In this episode of Weathered, Maiya May looks into the role sea ice plays in our global climate, and the threat that its disappearance poses to our natural world.
From emperor penguins, to sea level rise, to the slowing of the AMOC, these seemingly inconsequential chunks of floating ice could hold the key to our survival. And their loss could be a sign that we’ve crossed a tipping point in an already delicate region of our planet.
Climate scientists and oceanographers have been so concerned about the AMOCweakening and collapsing because of the Greenland ice sheet melting that we've ignored the threat to the Global Conveyor Belt current from melting in Antarctica. We can't do that anymore, not once the Antarctic sea ice began to shrink the same way that Arctic sea ice had been for decades. At least Antarctic sea ice growing will no longer be a viable climate change denial talking point. Small favors.
Follow over the jump for the most read and active posts about climate change and extreme weather during the 15th year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News.
What happens when a planet crosses a climate tipping point it can’t recover from? Venus may hold the answer.
Scientists think Venus once had oceans, water, and a climate that may have resembled early Earth. But something pushed the planet past a threshold. Water evaporated, greenhouse warming spiraled, and Venus became the hottest planet in our solar system.
So what was that tipping point? And could anything like it happen on Earth?
In this episode of Weathered, Maiya May explores the science behind runaway greenhouse effects, ancient volcanic carbon releases, and one of the most surprising climate wildcards scientists have discovered: the potential collapse of stratocumulus clouds.
From crocodiles in the Arctic during past hothouse climates to cutting-edge models of cloud loss under extreme CO2 levels, this episode investigates what keeps Earth’s climate stable and what could push it toward irreversible change.
Earth isn’t turning into Venus anytime soon. But Venus reveals something more important: what happens when a planet loses its brakes.
That was something I learned back in November. The new fact I learned today was about how stratocumulus clouds, which form at the top of the marine layer, work and what the model predicts would happen when carbon dioxide levels go about 1200 ppm. That makes today a good day, as any day I learn something new is a good day.
This wraps up today's evergreen educational entry. Stay tuned for an entertainment entry I will share next month. Randy Rainbow just uploaded a new song!
Is this how civilizations end? As climate disasters intensify, some cities survive — and others collapse. So what makes the difference?
In this episode of Weathered, host Maiya May investigates what history reveals about system collapse, failed cities, and civilizations that didn’t survive climate shocks. Were they doomed? Or did they miss warning signs we’re seeing today?
With climate disasters and global warming accelerating, researchers Luke Kemp and strategic climate risk expert Laurie Laybourn break down the common patterns behind civilization collapse — and the 5 strategies that can help modern societies avoid the same fate.
If you’ve ever wondered:
Is it the end of the world?
When do systems collapse?
Can cities survive climate change?
How do we prevent total societal collapse?
This episode explores what history teaches us — and why it’s not too late to change course.
Because collapse isn’t inevitable. But survival isn’t automatic either.
When I created this blog, I called it "A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it." I've shifted away from that, making this more "A blog about sustainability with a science fiction slant and a Detroit perspective," as it says on the Crazy Eddie's Motie News Facebook page (if you're still on Facebook, please follow), but I've never changed the description here after 15 years. That's because, deep down, I still believe in the mission I set for myself in March 2011.
On that note, here are the five strategies Maiya May and her guests propose to avoid collapse: situational awareness, adaptation, speed, democracy, and storytelling. On this blog, I'm sharing and telling stories to make people more aware of the situation, get prepared for the future, and encourage speedy responses and democracy. The last two seem like contradictions, as democracy is not known for rapid decisions, but I agree with May and her guests that both are necessary, if not easy. I hope my readers and I are up for the task.
On the third Monday in February, the United States celebrates the federal holiday known as Presidents Day. The day takes place during the birth month of the country's two most prominent presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. While the day once only honored President George Washington on his birthday, February 22nd, the day now never lands on a single president's birthday.
Across the country, most Americans know the day as Presidents Day. More and more of the population celebrates the day to honor all of the past United States Presidents who have served the country. Throughout the country, organizations and communities celebrate the day with public ceremonies.
Marlo Anderson celebrated all the Presidents' pets, which reminded me that Hoover Harding Cleveland is in fairly sparse company. As Wikipedia notes, "Only James K. Polk, Andrew Johnson, and Donald Trump did not have any presidential pets while in office" — something else Hoover Harding Cleveland has in common with Andrew Johnson besides having a majority of Senators vote to convict him after being impeached!
There’s an 18% chance that global warming exceeds four degrees by 2100 and that’s not a small risk when the stakes are civilization-ending.
In this episode of Weathered, host Maiya May talks with civilization collapse researcher Luke Kemp and strategic climate risk expert Laurie Laybourn about why high-end warming scenarios are often dismissed as “doomerism,” even though worst-case planning is standard in most fields. We break down how uncertainty in climate sensitivity and political derailment could push warming higher than expected and how climate shocks can trigger cascading failures across food systems, financial markets, and geopolitics. Understanding the climate endgame isn’t pessimism. It’s risk management.
Before I address the science, I'm making a meta comment about what I've seen on PBS YouTube channels and PBS and NPR websites since the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was defunded; public media has become more opposed, even antagnostic, to Donald "Hoover Harding Cleveland" Trump's policies since. If the authors of Project 2025 thought public media was biting the hand that fed them, they might be surprised at how much their hands are being bitten now that they're not feeding public media!
The Arctic was ice free and warm enough to host permanent forest cover across much of its extent. Iceland had a humid and subtropical climate...Dense, humid rainforests covered much of France, Switzerland, and northern Germany, while southern and central Spain were arid and contained open environments.
That's a very different world from today.
Speaking of today's world, the L.A.fires serve as an example where climate change is already causing disasters, which the current administration denies. Looking forward to the future, a possible collapse of the AMOC would be catastrophic and magnified by our economic system. Yikes!
New research shows sea level rise could accelerate far faster than cities can adapt to. In this episode, Maiya breaks down why even today’s warming may already be enough to trigger long-term ice-sheet collapse. And what that means for our coasts, our cities, and our future.
I lectured on climatechange last night and when the last video played, the preview for this video appeared on screen. I told my students I would watch it when I got home and I did! After watching it, it reminded me of the following questions from My students are watching 'Chasing Ice' during Earth Week.
17. What is happening to Greenland's melt zone as the climate changes?
It's expanding and moving up and into the interior of the ice sheet.
18. How much will sea level rise during the lifetimes of Balog's daughters?
1.5 to 3 feet (0.5 to 1 meter).
19. How many people will the rising sea level displace?
About 150 million.
20. What effect will rising sea level have on hurricanes and typhoons?
It will make the storm surges higher, making them more damaging.
Yellowstone was massive. Roughly a thousand times larger than the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the biggest eruption in the history of the continental United States. And if Yellowstone erupted again, the consequences for the U.S. and the world would be devastating. But there’s something far bigger than Yellowstone. Something so powerful it’s been linked to nearly every mass extinction in Earth’s history. And astonishingly, most people have never heard of it.
In this episode of Weathered, we explore the true giants of Earth’s volcanic past: the Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs). These vast flood basalt events dwarf supervolcanoes, pouring out millions of cubic kilometers of lava, filling entire regions thousands of feet thick, and unleashing pulses of greenhouse gases that have repeatedly driven abrupt climate change and global die-offs.
Along the way, we investigate what a modern Yellowstone eruption would actually look like, how ash, cooling, and atmospheric disruption would cascade across the world, and what ancient climate catastrophes can teach us about the rapid warming we’re causing now.
I think I've only mentioned Yellowstone in the context of its volcanic activity once before on this blog in NOVA warns of 'The Next Pompeii' for the Ides of March, and that was only in passing as one of the stories I tell my students about volcanic calderas. On the one hand, that's surprising, as the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano would be a civilization-ending event. On the other, it's not, as the possibility is remote; it's likely tens of thousands of years away. Humanity has more pressing threats to worry about.
Maiya May also linked the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) to the eruption of another LIP, the North Atlantic Large Igneous Province. I may have heard that before, but, if so, I forgot, so I'm counting this as learning something new, which makes today a good day. It's also blogging as professional development.
Scientists just released the 2025 Global Tipping Points Report. And they say we’ve already crossed our first major tipping point, but it’s not what you think.
From melting ice sheets to collapsing ocean currents, these sudden, irreversible changes could reshape the planet in ways we can’t undo. But what does it really mean to cross a tipping point? How do we know we’ve crossed one? And how close are we to triggering others?
In this episode of Weathered, Maiya May talks with scientist Tim Lenton, who helped popularize the term “tipping point” in a landmark 2008 paper, to uncover which Earth systems are at risk, why they’re so hard to predict, and what crossing a tipping point means for our future.
[C]onvincing people to be less wasteful, particularly creating less food waste and eating less meat, especially beef, would be helpful. [One] could consider that to be a technology. So is renewable energy. Between the two, it would move Earth Overshoot Day back more than a month. Progress!
Yes, it is, and it's good news I can share with my students. Welcome to blogging as professional development.
That's a wrap for today. Stay tuned for World Toilet Day tomorrow. I have something planned from PBS Eons. Yes, really.
We used to have BILLIONS of these extraordinary trees. Thanks to a tragic twist of fate, now… there are only 4.
Once towering over eastern U.S. forests, billions of American chestnut trees nourished ecosystems, built homes, and sustained Appalachian communities. But in the early 1900s, a foreign fungus arrived, and within decades, nearly all of them were gone.
However, the species never fully vanished. Its roots still survive underground, sending up sprouts that grow, die, and regrow in an endless cycle. These trees are biologically alive, but with most never reaching maturity, they remain functionally extinct.
In the forests of Pennsylvania, Shane Campbell-Staton joins Sara Fern Fitzsimmons from The American Chestnut Foundation to track this tree’s strange afterlife and learn the science behind its potential revival. With the help of rare surviving trees, selective breeding, and even gene editing, scientists and volunteers are working to breed blight-resistant trees.
The chestnut’s comeback will take time. But researchers are making steady progress towards developing American chestnut trees that survive and thrive in the native range they formerly dominated.
This is a story I tell my students about the importance of biodiversity; the more biodiversity, the more possible ways organisms will be able to meet human needs and wants. If a species becomes extinct, biologically, functionally, or economically, other species will be able to meet the need. We lost American Chestnuts, so we turned to other species. That's a very human-centered explanation, but it's incomplete, both because humans never replaced all the uses they had for American Chestnuts and because other organisms didn't fully replace the trees in their lives, either, as the video points out.
I also use this as an example of the limitations of evolution by natural selection. If a trait needed to meet a challenge doesn't already exist in a population, the population doesn't evolve the trait; it goes extinct. Evolution by natural selection is not like how humans imagine problem solving works; nature does not brainstorm solutions. Instead, it picks up existing solutions off the shelf. For what it's worth, that's mostly what humans do, too. mRNA vaccines started off as possible HIV vaccines before they were used for COVID-19, for example. That didn't prevent the researchers from earning a Nobel Prize.
Back to the video. This is a post-apocalyptic zombie story, at least as far as the trees are concerned, if they were able to have an opinion. With the discovery of apparently immune individuals, humans can help the species recover from its zombie apocalypse. That's a good tale of surviving collapse I can use as an inspiration for us humans.
That's a wrap for today's topic. Stay tuned for another evergreen educational entry tomorrow.
Climate scientists warn of climate disaster. But economists? Many say the economic hit from global warming will be negligible. But a new study shows the cost could be way worse than we once thought. In this episode, we reveal exactly how much poorer we will be in 2100, break down why previous models got it wrong, what this study means for our future, and the “goldilocks” path to decarbonization.
It looks like the economists didn't heed one of Commoner's Laws, "Everything is connected to everything else." They ignored economic effects outside of the countries they were analyzing that would affect the target countries. On the other hand, the scientists weren't. I'm glad Timothy Neal looked at the effects of global climatechange on national economies. As we are finding out about tariffs, trade is important.
This is on top of the usual Commoner's Law lessons about climate change, "Everything must go somewhere (There is no away)" and "There is no free lunch" about the problem and "Nature knows best" for the solutions. That written, there is an optimal, if not ideal path. Too fast a transition would be as bad as the post-Peak-Oil future predicted in The End of Suburbia. Too slow and the planet will pass too many tippingpoints. To repeat what I wrote in PBS Terra tells 'The Dirty Truth About Our Clean Energy Future', "As I tell my students, sustainability is a balancing act. May we not fall over."
That's a wrap for today's evergreen educational entry. Stay tuned for the Sunday entertainment feature.
You might think rabbits are cute and harmless… After all, they’re the beloved protagonists of some of our most cherished children’s stories! But when 13 of them were released in Australia in 1859, they triggered one of the most destructive biological invasions in history. Within just 50 years, rabbits had overrun two-thirds of the continent, stripping ecosystems bare and threatening native species.
In this episode of Human Footprint, Shane Campbell-Staton meets historian Martha Sear to uncover the astonishing story of Australia’s rabbit invasion and the ecological nightmare it created. From the first release of the deadly Myxoma virus in the 1950s to more recent outbreaks, Shane explores how researchers used biological weapons against the rabbit plague… and why the struggle continues today, more than 160 years after rabbits arrived in Australia. Wildlife manager Ian Lenon and CSIRO scientist Tanja Strive help Shane understand how today’s experts are tracking rabbits and developing new biocontrol tools, and what the future might hold for Australia’s ecosystems.
This is the first story of biological control I remember reading and it's probably one I read about the same time as the first story of invasive species I can remember, the introduction and spread of European Starlings, which I covered in 'The Shakespeare Enthusiast Who Introduced An Invasive Species,' a story I tell my students. Like that story and the discoveryof insulin, I learned new things from this video, like myxomatosis being caused by a virus in the smallpox family and being spread by mosquitoes. The video also reinforced something I knew, which is that a pathogen can be too virulent for optimal spread. The hosts can die before they transmit the pathogens to the next host. That's a flaw in a lot of plague-caused apocalypses in fiction, although the readers and viewers generally don't mind; they're in it for the horror, not the science. Just the same, it's a good day when I learn something new. Also, I've already told my students this story and the cane toad tale, so this counts towards blogging as professional development.
That's a wrap for today's post. Now stay tuned for my planned Emmy entry tomorrow.
I'm not feeling up to resuming my Emmy Awards coverage today — the first day of classes for the Fall Semester left me tired and with the first papers to grade — so I'm revisiting one of the winners of the 2023 IgNobel Prizes for April Fools Day, a holiday special instead.
Two of the prizes connect to stories I tell my students, geologists, particularly paleontologists, licking rocks and spiders moving their limbs by hydraulic action. Science Friday went into more detail on both in Saluting Science’s Silly Side, Virtually (click to listen).
This year’s awards included prizes for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools, and for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.
I'm a paleontologist, so I know what geologists do in the field, including tasting rocks for composition and chewing on them for texture. I tell my students about the chew test for siltstone versus shale, but I also tell them not to do it to their specimens; the rocks are already identified. Besides, they can tell by rubbing them.
Would you lick a 65-million-year old dinosaur poop? Granted, it’s not a question many people ask themselves - but for George Frandsen it’s a firm, “Yes!”. Not merely a dinosaur fossil hunter, George is specifically on the hunt for coprolites, the more scientific term for ancient dino dung. Already the proud owner of the world’s largest collection of dinosaur poo fossils, we join him on his quest to discover more of these rare fossils. Far from being just an amusing curiosity, coprolites can unveil a surprising amount of clues into the lives and diets of dinosaurs. As for the licking part, well that’s maybe best left for George to explain.
Seeing this reminds me that I haven't used the eating bugs label since 2023 and not written a post focusing on the topic since 2019. I may or may not return to the topic, but if I don't, I have a new subject that can gross out my students and readers.
PBS Eons has a related video, but first here's Joss Fong of Howtown licking a fossil bone for science in Tastes like deep time...
[F]or anyone wondering, it was an Oreodont fossil from South Dakota, part of a jaw.
This is the one I might show my students; it's short and not as gross, although it has less information than the PBS Terra video.
While dino bones from the Late Triassic Period are few and far between, the other clues they left behind can reveal how this epic saga played out to those with the stomach to decipher them.
Because, it turns out, the story of the rise of the dinosaurs is a tale written in puke and poop.
No licking, but lots of gross and punny science. I approve.
I've never mentioned cane toads on this blog before, but they're one of the organisms my students use for their answers to a question on the final exam for my organismal biology class. Since I just graded those exams yesterday, cane toads are fresh on my mind. That's a story my students tell me.
They prefer suburban living, they’ll eat anything in sight (including each other), and…they’re taking over the world?
This Earth Month, say hello to the Cane Toad: the epitome of failing upward. Wishfully introduced as a solution to a problem, cane toads have become the problem themselves. They’ve established themselves as an extremely successful invasive species… by doing nothing? Join the Fascinating Fails team as we look into how Cane Toads keep taking over ecosystems and what an ‘invasive species’ means in the era of climate change. Plus, find out ways YOU can help fight the climate crisis—it’s as simple as taking a picture!
Florida, the new home of BurmesePythons, Lionfish, and Giant African Snails, now has Cane Toads, too. I wish I could say I'm surprised. I also wish I could be more surprised that they are spreading north through the Sunshine State because of climatechange, but I've known that Burmese Pythons could spread that far north (they already have) and have been projected to be able to inhabit areas as far north as southern Maryland, so I'm not.
Did you know that Florida is home to 180 species of non-native reptiles and amphibians—and that’s JUST reptiles and amphibians! Luckily, there are a few ways to get things under control. Fascinating Fails host Maren Hunsberger tells us how!
Yikes! Florida has a worse problem with invasive species than I thought and I already knew it was bad!
Thanks to my students, Danny A. on Twitch, and PBS Terra for reminding me about Cane Toads. I learned a lot of new things today, which makes today a good day. Now stay tuned for the Sunday entertainment feature. Maybe I'll finally continue my Emmy Awards series!
Could mosquitoes be the key to fighting deadly diseases?
In MedellÃn, Colombia, a mosquito factory breeds millions of mosquitoes every week… on purpose. Why? To stop the spread of dengue, a mosquito-borne disease infecting millions of people each year.
At the World Mosquito Program, scientists infect Aedes aegypti mosquitoes with a naturally occurring bacterium called Wolbachia, which blocks their ability to transmit viruses like dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya. Once released, these mosquitoes breed with wild populations and spread Wolbachia, reducing disease transmission between humans.
But not everyone is convinced. Wolbachia doesn’t work the same way in every context. The effects vary by mosquito species, environment, and virus. So –while promising– this approach isn’t without its own risks. Can biocontrol outsmart one of the deadliest animals on Earth, or are we venturing into ecological territory we don’t fully understand?
The mosquito factory should look familiar to long-time readers, as the third video in Using biotechnology to eliminate and control mosquitoes for an early celebration of World Mosquito Day explained it. I'm recycling my reaction from three years ago: "Using one parasite that doesn't affect humans to reduce the ability of an insect to spread a parasite harmful to humans — clever! It's also not forever in the same way genetic modification is. Fine by me."
As for Jason Rasgon's doubts and criticisms, I'm filing them under two of Commoner's Laws, "Everything is connected to everything else" and "There is no free lunch." Compared to genetically engineering the mosquitos, I think infecting them with Wolbachia is an example of a third law, "Nature knows best."
By the way, I've never mentioned cane toads on this blog before, but they're one of the organisms my students use for their answers to a question on the final exam for my organismal biology class. Since I just graded those exams yesterday, cane toads are fresh on my mind. That's a story my students tell me.
For generations, we’ve been pumping water out of the ground assuming it would last forever. But, it’s running out. And a new study shows how global “peak water” could be just around the corner. In this episode, we’ll find out WHEN and WHERE peak water is expected to hit.
Groundwater depletion is only one of the effects May describes and I list as a result of over-pumping groundwater. So are subsidence, saltwater contamination, contamination from other surface sources, and decreased recharge of surface water from groundwater, which results in loss of riparian (streamside) vegetation, among other undesirable things. That makes this video one of the stories I tell my students. It also means that, if I show it to them, this entry becomes another instance of blogging as professional development.
I close by noting that I had heard that Indonesia was building a new capital city, but I didn't know why until I watched this video — subsidence exacerbated by sea level rise. That means I learned something new, and it's always a good day when that happens.
That's a wrap for today's post. Stay tuned for tomorrow's educational entry, which will be a CityNerd video about drivers and a drivingupdate, since Pearl will pass 70,000 miles today.
There's a strange bee called the alkali bee. And in one small valley in Washington, it's worth its weight in gold.
In Walla Walla Valley, farmers depend on alkali bees, a native species essential to one of the country’s most overlooked crops: alfalfa seed. In fact, the work of these tiny pollinators generates millions of dollars in agricultural revenue. Unlike honey bees, alkali bees take a pollen-packed smack to the face without hesitation, powering through millions of flowers with speed and precision. But alkali bees can’t be boxed, transported, or bought. They nest in the ground, require salt-crusted soil, precise irrigation, and near-perfect conditions to thrive.
In this episode of Human Footprint, Shane Campbell-Staton visits the only place on Earth where solitary, ground-nesting bees are managed for large-scale agriculture. He meets third-generation farmer Mark Wagoner and entomologist Doug Walsh, who’ve each played a role in transforming this agricultural landscape into a living partnership with native pollinators.
Shane uncovers the extraordinary steps to keep these bees alive: building salt-encrusted bee beds, spraying pesticides late at night, and even rerouting a state highway. But supporting alkali bees is more than just innovative farming, it’s a glimpse into what it might take to protect WILD pollinators in a world built for honey bees.
This video ties into Vox explains 'What we get wrong about saving the bees' for World Honey Bee Day. According to the video description, "There are 20,000 other species of bees in the world — over 4,000 in the United States. They’re incredibly diverse, unique, and also important for pollination." Alkali bees fit that description perfectly. They also serve as an example of one of Commoner's Laws, "Nature knows best." That's a law I would like to cite more often.
Anand Varma shakes things up in his photography by studying the life of a honey bee and creating a story that most humans have never seen before!
I'm a zoologist and I've never seen honey bee metamorphosis before, so I'm sure most humans haven't seen it, either. File this under "It's a good day when I learn something new."
This episode of Photographer was nominated for Outstanding Science and Technology Documentary at the News & Doc Emmy Awards, but didn't win, although another episode won Outstanding Nature Documentary. Follow over the jump for the winner of Outstanding Science and Technology Documentary.
Beneath the streets of Los Angeles lies one of the most prolific fossil sites in the world. At the La Brea Tar Pits, millions of fossils including giant sloths, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, and mammoths have surfaced from ancient asphalt, offering a rare glimpse into a vanished world.
In this episode of Human Footprint, Shane Campbell-Staton joins paleontologist Emily Lindsey to investigate the sudden disappearance of North America’s megafauna around 13,000 years ago. Together, they follow the trail of ancient life through radiocarbon dating, fossil excavations, and lake-bottom sediment cores.
For decades, scientists debated whether climate change or human hunters were to blame. But new evidence points to a more complex and unsettling cause: a dangerous combination of warming temperatures, ecological disruption, and the spread of fires… ignited by us.
This isn’t just a story about extinction. It’s a glimpse of how past crises mirror the present, and a warning about where we could be headed next.
When I was doing my research at the Tar Pits 40 years ago, I became quite familiar with the competing hypotheses of climatechange and human overhunting (Paul Martin's overkill hypothesis) causing the terminal Pleistocene extinctions of New World megafauna. However, I also realized that overkill didn't replicate perfectly around the world. Humans arrived earlier in Australia than in the Americas, but it took thousands of years for the Australian megafauna to go extinct. The same was true in northern Eurasia, which had other humans, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, already living there for hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived. And, of course, where the megafauna had co-evolved with human ancestors in Africa and southern Asia, most of the large animals survived into the present. I resolved these data by synthesizing them; late Pleistocene extinctions happened during the first episodes of major climate change after modern humans were first present. The mechanism I had in mind was that climate change stressed the populations of megafauna, which then couldn't withstand human hunting. That ancient humans could make the effects of climate change worse never occurred to me. As Shane Campbell-Staton said, "That is a plot twist I wasn't expecting."
Just because I wasn't expecting it either doesn't mean I don't accept it. I do. After all, I've been watching the fire season expand in California over the past 15 years. I even ask my students two questions about in the worksheet for Chasing Ice: "1. Chasing Ice opens with a montage of natural disasters. Name three of them." One of them is a wildfire. "How many months has the fire season increased in the American southwest since the 1980s?" The answer is two months, although last year's California fire season extended about four months into January, which I recounted in PBS Terra tells 'The REAL Story of the LA Fires | Full Documentary' for Flashback Friday. As Campbell-Staton said, this is uncomfortably familiar.
[P]rocesses that happened in the past are likely to repeat in the future, so understanding the past is essential for preparation. This is a key takeaway from uniformitarianism, the concept that everything we see in nature is the result of everyday processes occurring over sufficient time, which is boiled down to "the present is the key to the past." It also means that the past is the key to the future.
File all the above under "it's a always a good day when I learn something new."
I also felt a lot of nostalgia seeing where I spent much of four years, but this entry has gone on long enough. Time to wrap it up. Stay tuned for another entry about the Creative Arts Emmy Awards.
Is global warming just part of Earth’s natural cycle? In this episode of Weathered, we break down why that’s not the full story. From ice ages and Milankovitch cycles to the role of CO2 and fossil fuels, today’s climate change is unlike anything in Earth’s deep past. Learn why the speed of warming matters and how we can bring our temperature down.
I have mentioned several times that I'm a paleontologist who studies Pleistocene fossils, particularly snails. What I don't mention is that I used data from the snails, clams, and plants of Rancho La Brea to reconstruct the late Pleistocene climate of southern California, so I'm quite familiar with natural climate change. That's why I was able to respond intelligently to Ed, the troll who was better than a spammer, when he snarked "Maybe you can tell us what the climate is supposed to be so we will know if it's changing too much."
Ed, actually, I can. The average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere should be almost two degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it is today based on the pre-1900 temperature trend, three degrees based on the progress of previous interglacials. If you want the reasoning and evidence, you will have to wait until I put together an entire entry with links; it will take more effort than a simple comment is worth. In the meantime, count your blessings that you stumbled onto someone who actually knows the answer to what you may have thought was a rhetorical question too hard to answer.
That was back in 2015.
I'm glad to see Maiya May and Jessica Tierney of the University of Arizona confirm both what the climate would have been doing naturally and what it's doing instead. It shows what I told Ed was (and still is) correct.
I teach Milankovitch cycles to my geology students, both on the first field trip where I ask them to describe a display at a museum which summarizes the effects as "stretch, wobble, and tilt (eccentricity, precession, and obliquity)" and in a lecture about glaciers and glacial features, where I reinforce my point with The History of Climate Cycles (and the Woolly Rhino) Explained from PBS Eons.
Throughout the Pleistocene Epoch, the range of the woolly rhino grew and shrank in sync with global climate. So what caused the climate -- and the range of the woolly rhino -- to cycle back and forth between such extremes?
I've been showing this video since just before the pandemic; I'm surprised I haven't embedded it here until now. I guess I just needed the right opportunity.
As Dr. Tierney points out, carbon dioxide is at levels not seen for 3.6 million years so the Earth is on track for much warmer temperatures even if humans stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Because of the fossil foolishness in the BigBrutal Bill, the U.S. alone will continue emitting carbon dioxide and methane for years. Worse yet, as Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth described, it will take 400,000 years for natural processes to remove the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That's four more Milankovitch cycles! Maybe that will make our distant descendants less subject to ice ages, but it's going to mess up the near future for us and progeny down to our great-grandchildren.
The supermarket is one of the strangest and most powerful inventions in human history.
Grocery shopping is often perceived as a simple, mundane activity. And for many, access to food has never been more effortless. But supermarkets hold far more power than we realize. The journey our groceries take to reach the shelves touches every part of our lives – from our health, to our culture, to the environment.
In this episode of Human Footprint, Shane Campbell-Staton embarks on a global investigation into the supermarket’s origins, revealing how they transformed the world and grappling with what the future may bring. He explores how innovations in food production, packaging, transportation, advertising, and retail design revolutionized how we buy our food.
Today, supermarkets offer endless choices and low prices, but behind the shelves lies a darker truth. In pursuit of efficiency, we’ve surrendered control of our food system to vast corporations, promoted global supply chains that hide labor and environmental abuses, and flooded our diets with ultra-processed foods.
Shane travels from surreal supermarket art installations to apple orchards, commercial film sets, shrimp farms, urban food co-ops, and beyond, connecting with people whose lives are intertwined with this system. What he uncovers is a complex story of the modern grocery store, the true cost of convenience, and the urgent need to reimagine the way we feed ourselves[.]
I first encountered the story of the supermarket in Stuffed and Starved, one of the textbooks my co-instructor and I chose for Global Politics of Food, the course we taught when I started this blog. Here's what I wrote then.
[T]here is a lot wrong with the international food system, some of which is contributing to global collapse and much of which won't survive collapse, either, such as the long supply lines and heavy use of fossil fuels. In this book, Raj Patel gives a piercing critique of the way global capitalism shapes what humans grow and eat, exposing many of the flaws in the food system that contribute to collapse and what can be done about it. It's also an entertaining and informative read and Raj Patel is a charming and compelling person who knows his gin.
Yes, I know Raj Patel, and I was pleased to see that Shane Campbell-Staton interviewed him for this episode. It really wouldn't have been complete without him.
I'm also pleased that this episode told the backstory to the rivalry between Kellogg's and Post satirized in Emmy nominee and double Razzie winnerUnfrosted. That movie wasn't as stupid as it first seemed.
The most appalling thing I learned from this video was about shrimp. The TED-Ed video I embedded as the second video in Whales and fish, two stories I tell my students mentioned the environmental effects of shrimp farming on mangrove swamps and other coastlines, but it didn't include how shrimp farming contributed to depleting other fisheries and resulted in enslaved fishing crews. I know I write that "it's always a good day when I learn something new," and both of those were new to me when I first watched this, but both of them are terrible facts to learn about farm-raised shrimp, enough to make me not want to eat "America's most popular seafood." The problem is that it's not just shrimp, it's throughout the supply chains of dozens of foodstuffs, including coffee. It looks like Trafficked:UnderworldswithMariana van Zeller has lots of material still to cover.*
All of the above serve as examples of two of Commoner's Laws: "There is no free lunch" and "Everything is connected to everything else." Maybe the rest of the episode goes into the waste created by the food system as an example of "Everything must go somewhere (There is no away)," the emphasis of the last time I referenced Commoner's Laws. Instead, Dr. Campbell-Staton concludes with an example of "Nature knows best" in the Detroit People's Food Co-op. I'm glad to see a happy ending from Detroit.
The Big One is coming and it could be far worse than anyone imagined.
The Cascadia Subduction Zone, just off the Pacific Northwest coast, is building toward a massive earthquake and tsunami. But new research reveals an even more terrifying possibility: widespread toxic spills, infrastructure collapse, wildfires, and deadly gas plumes. All triggered by a single seismic event.
In this episode of Weathered, we dig into the science behind the Cascadia Megaquake, why the Pacific Northwest is especially vulnerable, and how climate change could make it worse. We explore what you can do to stay safe and why your community might be your best line of defense.
Infidel753: The Portland metro area has two million people and Seattle is even bigger. Even if 125,000 people were killed on the Oregon coast and a similar number on the Washington coast, I would still expect the death toll from structural collapses and fire in Portland and Seattle to be much larger.
Coastal fatalities (Oregon): 4,800 (4,500 from tsumami, 300 from the earthquake itself)
I-5 corridor fatalities (Oregon): 400 (all from earthquake)
Coastal injuries (Oregon): 6,500 (5,000 from earthquake, 1,500 from tsunami)
I-5 corridor injuries (Oregon): 9,000 (all from earthquake)
Homelessness/needing shelter (Oregon): 520,000 (500,000 earthquake, 20,000 tsunami)
Coastal fatalities (Washington): 9,100 (9,000 from tsunami, 100 from earthquake)
I-5 corridor fatalities (Washington): 300-1,600 (300 earthquake, 0-1,300 tsunami)
Coastal injuries (Washington): 5,000 (2,000 earthquake, 3,000 tsunami)
I-5 corridor injuries (Washington): 7,400 (7,000 earthquake, 400 tsunami)
Homelessness/needing shelter (Washington): 415,000 (370,000 earthquake, 45,000 tsunami)
According to these estimates, more people will die from the earthquake along the I-5 corridor than along the coasts in both Oregon and Washington, but far more will die from the tsunami along the coasts alone (13,500) than the total that will die from the shaking throughout both states (1,100). So, no, the official estimates do not support your expectation that "the death toll from structural collapses and fire in Portland and Seattle to be much larger" than tsunami deaths on the Oregon and Washington coasts.
Infidel753: Very interesting links, thank you. I need to think further about this.
Me: Thanks for linking to the sources of these statistics and the blog as a whole in Link round-up for 18 January 2025. I'm glad to have informed you and your readers.
The statistics quoted are from a 2016 document, but the casualty numbers are higher than in the video, 43,800 total deaths and injuries in the document compared to "over 30,000 casualties" (total deaths and injuries) cited by Tina Dura of Virginia Tech. Surviving Cascadia also cites a 2022 study by Patrick Massey for FEMA that projects 1,100 earthquake-related fatalities, 13,000 tsunami-related fatalities, and 24,000 injured. The death count is substantially the same, but the number of injuries is less than the 27,900 predicted in the 2016 estimate, altough the 2022 report was for a February earthquake and tsunami. Casualties could be higher during the peak of tourist season. Cascadia Rising didn't list a dollar amount, but I can believe the video's estimate of $81 billion dollars of damage.
On the other hand, Luke Hanst of Portland State University added up to 2,500 deaths from toxic gas exposure resulting from burning fuel and chemical storage tanks and hundreds of thousands of people affected, adding tens of thousands of injuries. Even adding the 2,500 deaths to the 400 from the earthquake listed above for Oregon's I-5 corridor would not push it above the 4,800 deaths expected along Oregon's coast, but it does make the risk more even as well as much higher along the interior.
The video added two items of scientific interest, the effects of liquefaction and climatechange. I make a big deal of the former when I lecture about earthquakes, especially the 1964 Alaska Good Friday earthquake. I might show this video to my geology students just to reinforce the point. Climate change will make the subsidence along the coast, which the video in January's post showed happening in 1700, even worse.
For what it's worth, I've seen similar, if not the same, findings about lower crime rates and increased cooperation after natural disasters and wrote about them five years ago in Seeker/DNews is optimistic about how people would behave during the apocalypse. As I wrote then, "that's good news, even if it might not be good entertainment."
Still good news.
That concludes the latest installment in this series. Stay tuned for the first Sunday entertainment feature of July. Awardsshows!
