my favorite cat makes another guest appearance.

The first piece of information you should know about is a video from June. I’ve been ruminating over this for a month. My first thought was Green Day’s song about waking up when September ends. 

But no, this is a projection from Dr. Guy McPherson. This comes in the wake of lots of predictions by various entities about loss of all Arctic Ice by the end of this summer. That would spell catastrophe for those of us addicted to breathing or eating. And the projection dovetails with known economic phenomenon. Our economy is running on fumes and never really left a recessionary state after 2009. The reality is that most of our economic crashes are in September or October. James Howard Kunstler had pontificated on this for several years. September is the time when economic plans go awry. It’s the time when people take stock (figuratively) of where the economy is. For those with college-age progeny, it’s when investments are sold off to send them out to university. The economy crashed in October 1929, with the stock market crapping out in the US and taking people’s hopes and dreams with it for a generation. The Lehman brothers crash took an estimated $600 BILLION out of the economy (never to return) on September 15, 2008. Best Guess according to the GAO was that Twenty Two trillion dollars disappeared with the bubble burst. It was that crash (which followed the Bear Sterns debacle earlier that year) that seized up markets worldwide. Jon Stewart caught the tenor of that preceding summer in this video. 

Just a bit of history to let you know the precedent. I’m not an investment banker. I am the simple performance artist. 

So here was Guy’s prediction/projection/ frightening vision–post-industrial civilization comes to an unfortunate end sometime this September. I could try and explain it, but Dr. Guy does a far better job here:

Lots of sleepless nights since. This may not be the final word on the subject, but it’s useful to remember that McPherson’s detractors, when asked when the shooting match comes to an end, will (mostly) demur and say something like ‘well, not then’. Remember that Dr. James Anderson of Harvard, another reputable source, has said we’re extinct by 2023 at best.

And yesterday(July 3) in a posting on his site, Dr. Guy was at it again–he explains what would bring such an occurrence. He’s here with the bad news. He does over-rely on Zerohedge, a website I have mixed feelings about, but other financial news groups are panicked as well. And Zerohedge is following the lead of the people at Shadowstats, who are reporting that the ‘real’ economy (not the one driven by Stock buybacks) is in real trouble.  As the Good Doctor sees it, a Lehman style meltdown seizing the economy shuts down much of industrial activity, causing a drop in Global Dimming. That leads to a boost in temperature worldwide as more sunlight strikes the earth, which melts perhaps all of the Arctic summer ice by September… feedback loops galore. This is a prediction that has been made before, but our understanding of the global dimming problem is now of a nature that it’s understood how such an occurrence could drive everything faster.

Whether these people are right about September,  I believe that they’re right when they say a loss of Arctic Ice (aka a ‘blue ocean event) would be the end of much of human agriculture. We might have one more harvest before the world is too warm for crops like wheat to survive. Two thirds of human food consumption involves wheat in some way. 

The good news: Trump won’t be president much longer. The bad news: he will be our last president.

Seize the day.