Highest heating level: all U.S. (but Florida), all Mexico, all Scandinavia, all Eastern Europe and almost all Russia. Image credit: Dr Peter Carter
Earth’s temperature is soaring. The global land temperature for March 2026 registered 1.89C. An exceptionally strong El Niño, or super El Niño, is forecasted this summer. If the prediction rings true, then we can expect more supercharged extreme events including climate firestorms and flash droughts. What’s more, freshwater is becoming scarcer.
Since 2005, Earth’s energy imbalance has clocked-in at an astonishing 11 zeta joules, each year. Reduced aerosols and fossil fuel emission surface heat is so high that it’s hurriedly melting the reflective white ice surfaces at the North Pole, South Pole, Tibetan Plateau (Third Pole) along with Greenland, sea ice, land glaciers and mountaintops.
Earth is warming faster than any time during the previous 485 million years.
The ability of the ocean currents to disperse equatorial heat is weakening. The oceans are coursing with combustion (fossil fuel, wood pellet, palm oil) heat that was previously stored in the deep but is now rising to the surface and preventing cold currents from upwelling and fertilising the phytoplankton. At least 40 per cent of phytoplankton, the basis of marine life, is missing.
The combustion-charged ocean surface is also stoking the atmosphere with 11 per cent more moisture. When it rains, it pours cats and dogs.
Too much freshwater all at once can be catastrophic. Too little freshwater is deadly.
Humans cannot survive more than three days without freshwater. Water is life. Life is freshwater.
Burning carbon is forcing an unstoppable planetary phase transition. Long lasting droughts are enveloping the U.S. west and southern plains, the Canadian Prairie Region (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba), interior of British Columbia and northwest, northern Mexico, southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Ethiopia, Somalia), the Amazon Basin (Brazil, Bolivia, Chile), the Andes Mountain Range, Morocco, southern Europe and the Mediterranean (Spain, Portugal, Turkey), southern Russia (Rostov and Krasnodar regions), China’s Yangtze River Basin, southern Australia (western Victoria, southern South Australia, Tasmania, southern New south Wales), India (Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra) and parts of the northeast, and parts of SE Asia.
Some of these afflicted drought regions have entered aridity, or, a permanent long-term climate characterised by a severe lack of moisture with both low annual precipitation and high evaporation. Accelerating greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) have others teetering on aridity.
The availability of drinking water, and just the right amount of atmospheric moisture at the correct growing season for breadbaskets to feed humans, is in peril.
First and foremost, to slow down Earth’s phase transition an immediate reduction in burning carbon is requisite. Followed hand in step by a compulsory worldwide target to attain zero combustion energy by 2035.
The world is not short of money, ingenuity or people power; but rather, it has been taken over by oligarch-backed politicians. This can change on a dime. We, the people, outnumber the billionaires, oligarchs, autocrats, bankers and lacky politicians by about 50 million to one.
Secondly, averting collapse entails switching animal agriculture to a plant-based way of simple living. This would free up a massive land area equivalent to combining the United States, China, the European Union and Australia to be rewilded. Rewilding reinstates keystone species (biological engineers), e.g. beavers, eagles, wolves, dingoes, elephants, jaguars, sea otters, sharks, starfish, ocean bait fish and many others into the wild, enabling biomes to drawdown carbon.
Animals are the “veins and arteries”, and the wee ones, such as bees, krill and others, are the “capillaries” of all ecological systems. Together, the animals are the heart of Mother Earth. They are indispensable mineral, nutrient and energy circulators, vital for growth and system fitness.
Providing energy for data centres will more than double fossil fuel emissions. Image credit: Dr Peter Carter.
AI is taking the world in the complete wrong direction. The amount of freshwater and carbon energy needed to operate hundreds of data centres around the globe will exacerbate aridity and cook the majority of planetary lifeforms alive.
A heat specialist, a goanna left lifeless from an unrelenting Australian heat dome, 2020. Image credit: Harold Smith.
Safeguarding all remaining old-growth native rainforests and wilderness are the key to our liveable planet. Native rainforests are sacrosanct towers of strength, hotbeds of life and imperative climate makers, which release rivers in the sky to irrigate the world’s breadbaskets.
Old and outdated habits along with overshoot behaviour (consumption, waste and population) are the culprits. So, change your behaviour! It’s obligatory. Eschew consumerism. Bathe in nature. Love is the solution. The time to embrace a Mother Earth Living Economy with a Contentment Index is forthwith.
This is a clarion call for planetary unity. And, the defence of all Mother Earth’s self-organised, self-regenerating, networks of interdependent cooperative biological land and sea communities – our life support system.
Otherwise, Earth is sailing on a beam reach to total and utter climate breakdown, an 8C hothouse. Unsurvivable.
Agitate. Disrupt. Defend.