This month’s open thread on climate topics. The annual ranking horse race is in full swing, discussions of extreme weather abound, Arctic sea ice is reaching it’s annual minimum, and the future of evidence-based policy making seems dim. Oh well.
Unforced Variations: Aug 2026
My latest spreadsheet update shifted my estimated AGW crossing of 1.5C backward to the end of this year.
That took me by surprise, because my earlier spreadsheets still had the long-term AGW trend crossing 1.5 threshold nearer to 2030.
I wonder, has anyone recently released a revised *official* estimate for when we cross the ‘safety threshold’? I haven’t seen anything in the press about a sudden shortening of that time horizon (not that corporate press cares anyway).
Due to the 2023 transient in compensated SST that I’ve apparently detected, I’m also surmising that spring of 2023 was when we *effectively* crossed that 1.5C threshold, even if the long-term uncompensated AGW trend doesn’t show it.
Since so far no one in authority is acknowledging any warming from Hunga Tonga, I presume my finding is relegated to the dust bin of irrelevance, even if it is true (which it admittedly might not be).
https://x.com/cheryl_josie/status/2092366525332324555?s=20
Based on that plot, I’m assuming that the extreme weather this year will be more of the same we’ve had since 2023, and that the transient I detected will obscure apparent climate change extreme weather indicators through 2030, when people will suddenly wake up and smell the coffee because things will radically and abruptly change for the worse on a year-by-year basis after that.
By the way, I’m using the known Pinatubo magnitude and duration of global cooling as a sanity check on my method. What I’m seeing in my plot roughly aligns with what was published on Pinatubo, so apparently my method does ‘work’, even if I can’t prove it.
Anyway, I’d love some additional feedback on my project, if anyone has any to offer. If not, that’s okay, I understand that people are busy with their own lives and more interested in the professional side of things than they are interested in my amateur stumbling. It’s just an FYI that I’m still updating my plots and wondering if I’ve found something relevant.
I did comment at the bottom of the ENSO discussion, but it looks like maybe everyone has moved on from that topic already and missed my post.
I would like to mention that the heated debates here on the ‘putative’ existence of anthropogenic global warming seem pointless to me.
It’s not an opinion. It’s some of the most solid science in existence, as evidenced by the mountains of peer-reviewed literature into the facts, as well as into the scientific perception of consensus.
I’m finding it a chore having to scroll past all that noise to find meaningful discussion of the actual science. It’s difficult enough finding my way through it as a ‘solitary practitioner’ without being distracted by so much chaff that the fossil fuel industry is churning out into the echo chamber.
The disingenuous denial that is based in secret 1970s corporate studies confirming that scientific consensus has been in evidence since 2015 when we first learned of those secret corporate studies..
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092015/exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming/
We should have progressed beyond this point by now..
Modern companies, markets, and institutions routinely behave in ways that would be diagnosed as pathological in a person: emotional detachment, strategic deception, grandiosity, and the treatment of people, animals, and ecosystems as means to an end. Yet, most of the individuals who make up these organizations don’t naturally hold these traits and behaviors themselves. So, why does exploitation keep winning at scale, even when most people are decent, cooperative, and want the same basic things?
In this episode, Nate is joined by Greg Elliott, a systems theorist and author of the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH), to unpack why our institutions themselves have become so psychopathic, and how that affects the behavior of the average human. Drawing on evolutionary game theory, anthropology, and the neuroscience of psychopathy, Greg argues that cooperation is evolutionarily stable in small tribal systems, but that modern systems where anonymity and abstraction make exploitative, instrumental strategies more profitable. He walks through how this dynamic produces what he calls “entrapment games,” in which pro-social people become behaviorally locked into relationships, jobs, and systems where leaving costs more than staying. All of this builds toward the core of Greg’s theory: winning, instrumental strategies get crystallized into the operating logic of institutions themselves and reproduced by anyone who plays the game, whether or not they are personally psychopathic. While Greg doesn’t see any easy answers, he does offer a set of possible leverage points: shortening feedback loops, increasing transparency and accountability, and rebuilding smaller, reciprocal communities.
If domination isn’t an aberration but a predictable output of the game board we’ve built, what does that mean for how we try to fix it? Is it possible for an entire civilization to behave psychopathically even when the vast majority of the individual people inside it are empathetic and pro-social? And if the ultimate goal is to steer toward a more pro-social system, is there a way to ‘win the game’ and re-write the rules without also resorting to psychopathic strategies and behaviors?
26 Aug 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVlfwKUssPg
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Program: Process Explorations
Series Theme: Building Alternative Futures
Session Title: Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards
Presenter(s):
Evaggelos Vallianatos makes the case that industrial animal agriculture lies at the heart of two of the most urgent crises of our time: pandemic disease and climate chaos.
In this session of Process Explorations, Evaggelos will present the ideas from his latest work, drawing on the agricultural traditions of ancient Greece and China’s ecological civilization debates to trace a through-line from humanity’s earliest relationships with land and animals to the conditions that gave rise to COVID-19 and the broader era of global industrial farming dependent on pesticides, petroleum, and heavy machinery.
He will also interrogate the science and politics behind pandemic origins while placing fossil fuel-driven climate change squarely in the same frame, arguing that these are not separate catastrophes but deeply intertwined consequences of how modern civilization has chosen to feed itself.
Discussant Marcus Ford will offer his own latest thinking on climate change and will engage in a dialogue with Evaggelos and the other attendees.
Evaggelos Vallianatos studied zoology and ancient and medieval Greek history at the University of Illinois. He earned a PhD in modern Greek and European history at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He did postdoctoral studies in the history of science at Harvard University. He is a historian and ecopolitical theorist, former analyst of the ecological and social effects of industrialized farming at Capitol Hill, Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and office of Congressman Clarence Long of Maryland, as well as analyst of the risks of pesticides and the benefits of organic farming and biological and cultural alternatives to pesticides for the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Marcus Ford was one of the first professors in the country to teach courses in sustainability and develop an environmental humanities program. Since early in his teaching career, Marcus has held that the most important thing we can learn is how to live sustainably and justly within the bounds of the natural world.
He has taught sustainability studies at the undergraduate and graduate level and is an advocate for education that prepares people to actively participate in shaping their communities. He is the author of the groundbreaking book, BEYOND THE MODERN UNIVERSITY and many articles on higher education. Marcus is the Co-Founder of Flagstaff Communiversity.
25 Aug 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIF4gg2AReI
Now the Pentagon and West Point have abandoned the subject of Climate Change!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/14/pentagon-military-climate-crisis-trump
West Point fires a faculty member for teaching students about Climate Change!
https://www.stripes.com/branches/army/2026-08-26/west-point-professor-fired-lawsuit-climate-change-22666987.html
DARK TRIAD Institutions – 26 AUGUST – The Rules of the Game Keep Us Trapped with Greg Elliott | TGS 231
Nate Hagens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVlfwKUssPg
Going back to the I guess the entrapment question and when I say entrapment
30:57 30 minutes, 57 seconds
Tidied Transcript Extract
We all have jobs. We all pay debt. We’re all familiar with propaganda. These are effectively control architectures. They keep people playing a game that they may not feel is satisfactory, but leaving the game is more costly than staying within the game itself. And so people become entrapped in a game that they didn’t design, nor do they want to play in the first place.
The logic here is to explain the neuroscience, to get to what the computational profile of a psychopath looks like. What kinds of problems does psychopathy solve in these scaled symbolic systems? I want to unpack that because it explains the dynamics. It explains why we are where we are today and where we can go from here. We know that psychopaths have an altered processing for distress and threat. They have what’s called reduced effective empathy. They have weak moral learning and strong reward sensitivity. They have a preserved capacity for planning and social modeling, and a greater willingness to treat others as objects and not subjects. So basically, the capacity to instrumentalize others.
I think one of the problems that psychopathy solves is something I call the target autonomy problem. In simple terms, if I’m a psychopath and you’re a pro-social actor, my future reward depends on another autonomous actor. That actor is a source of uncertainty. You can refuse, leave, change your mind, and stop cooperating. An instrumental architecture may solve that problem not only through cooperation but through what psychopaths have been gifted behaviorally. They use social modeling, which everybody does. In tribal systems, I might model someone else because they’re deploying a strategy that I think is useful and I copy it. The difference is psychopaths use social modeling instrumentally.
In this context, it means I’m trying to collect data on you to make your behavior predictable. I might ask you specific questions about what you like, your aspirations, and what you dislike. If you know me really well in this example, then from my predatory psychopath perspective, I’ve lowered the standard deviation of your future responses, which is better for me. It’s not like they’re consciously doing it; it’s just part of the repertoire they deploy.
My goal is to make you behaviorally predictable so I can stabilize reward acquisition. What I do is deploy what I define as computational protocols. I take social modeling, represent it mathematically as data collection. Then I deploy mimicry, presenting myself as being in alignment with you. I’m essentially deceiving you so that you’re updating your model of the relationship. You’re saying, “Wow, Greg’s a great guy. He likes the same things I like. We have so much in common.” And you, as a pro-social actor, are forming an attachment. You’re releasing oxytocin neurocognitively, and you see me as somebody you can trust. You lower your defenses because I’m effectively invading the relationship.
Then I deploy something like impression management — a lie about what I do for a living, for example. I’ll say, “Hey, I’m a doctor or a lawyer,” when I’m none of those things. I’m trying to make you think that I’m somebody you can trust. The psychopath deploys all of these computational protocols to create dependency in the relationship. As you form a dependency, I’m stabilizing reward acquisition. My objective function, my goal, might be affection, financial reward, or whatever the case may be.
As that dependency forms, your strategy space is becoming compressed. You may become financially dependent on me and isolated from people who can help you because the psychopath has isolated you from others that could potentially intervene. That is where entrapment forms. Each dependency creates a higher level of cost of leaving that relationship. What effectively happens game theoretically is that both actors stay in the relationship, not because it’s particularly good, but because for the target actor, leaving is more costly than staying.
Chapter 10: Loss-Dominant Equilibrium
I call that a loss-dominant equilibrium. Even though you perceive the relationship as bad, you stay because your strategy space is compressed. You’re dependent on the relationship, and leaving feels materially existential, whereas the psychopath is rational for staying because they’ve stabilized reward acquisition.
The point is that this problem is solved at scale. Institutions require their employees to be behaviorally predictable and to remain in the game. As a worker, you become dependent on your job because you have to pay bills and debt. Your strategy space is constrained because your dependencies stack within the job, and you become entrapped. The same homomorphism occurs in debt, in propaganda, and in many computational structures within the institutional environment.
Yes. Many of our modern institutions, corporations, and market structures are psychopathic because they are selectively advantageous. They solve more problems than just the target autonomy problem; they solve resource control problems and many other types of problems that institutional game boards face today. And so they are selected symbolically.
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KM: What most people feel but can’t name: Collapse is the solution!
— Concentrated Economic Power? Who holds that? How do they wield it? To what ends?
There you’ll find the cause of everything wrong in this world today. Look up Barry’s Economics; and Gary Stevenson’s urgent message of national and middle class wealth rapidly being redistributed to the wealthy as we speak.
— “Fit in, belong, or you’re out of society.” – “Everything else directs toward higher consumption, energy use, higher growth.” – “The system is a moral failure and a structural trap.” – “There is no solution at all, nothing that can even adjust trajectories slightly.” – “Collapse of the global system is the only real solution.”
— This is the core trap. Here’s the core question to sit with: “If you see the system clearly, and you know that staying in the game requires playing by psychopathic rules, and leaving the game is materially costly—what do you do?”
— Donella Meadows says: “The way to change a system is to change the paradigm that gives rise to it.”
But Paradigms are not changed by game theory. They are changed by stories, meaning, identity, and ritual. People don’t leave loss-dominant equilibria because they’ve calculated that the costs are too high. They leave because they can no longer tolerate the meaninglessness.
The symbolic system isn’t just economic and institutional. It’s also cultural and psychological. The psychopathic game board produces loneliness, depression, anxiety, and meaninglessness. These are not side effects — they are control mechanisms. A depressed, anxious, isolated person is easier to keep trapped.
— Greg says in the transcript: “In tribal systems, you couldn’t rewrite the rules of the game. But in symbolic systems, winners have the ability to rewrite the rules.”
But what made symbolic systems possible in the first place?
Fossil fuels = massive energy surplus = population growth = urbanization = complex division of labor = abstract symbolic systems (money, law, corporations, nation states, digitization, AI, billionaires).
Cheap energy made it possible to externalize costs — geographically and temporally. Out of sight (native Americans and African slaves in interment camps, child cobalt miners), out of mind.
As energy becomes more constrained (with peaking fossil fuels, fertilizer shortages, net energy decline, agriculture collapse, economic fractures), the ability to maintain these systems weakens. The psychopathic selection hypothesis works because of energy surplus and wealth creation. Without it, the decoupling between symbolic and biophysical reality would collapse. We’re seeing that ‘Seneca Cliff’ collapse begin now. Slowly at first and then suddenly.
— The “Collapse as Liberation” Hypothesis
This is a hard one. But if the system is truly loss-dominant and self-reproducing running on automatic now, it may not be and likely is not reformable. The only way out may be through collapse itself — when the energy surplus runs out, when the externalized costs come due with catastrophic consequences, when the symbolic system can no longer maintain its decoupling from physical reality.
Collapse is not just destruction though. It’s also de-complexification. It’s the reduction of scale. It’s simplification. It’s the return to smaller, more accountable, more meaningful communities. The Dark Triad psychopathic game board can only operate like it’s doing now at scale. Collapse reduces scale. That’s not a solution for all the ills — but it may be a release.
This is the part I find really threatening: ” They have a preserved capacity for planning and social modeling, and a greater willingness to treat others as objects and not subjects. So basically, the capacity to instrumentalize others.
I think one of the problems that psychopathy solves is something I call the target autonomy problem. In simple terms, if I’m a psychopath and you’re a pro-social actor, my future reward depends on another autonomous actor. T” and the few paragraphs following.
It spells out exactly what is happening in the world via social media, techno-feudalism, apps, and AI—clear as day, in real time. Many like me can see it and even interact with it simultaneously, but to have it presented in prose like this is, well, quite frightening.
Yanis Varoufakis can explain it well from a methodological economics standpoint, but he doesn’t bring home the vivid personal dynamics and implications of it. His stories feel too detached and theoretical at arm’s length. This, to me, is palpable. I can feel this process happening. So if AI is the “solution” intended to manage this, then we must confront the horrifying possibility that it is being built not to solve this problem, but to perfect it—scaling this interpersonal, dependency-creating dynamic to a global, inescapable level.
I see a tool perfectly designed to operationalize this predatory logic at a scale where there is no longer any personal relationship left to betray, only a system of control so seamless it becomes invisible. Human interactions at all levels of society from Government social welfare decisions to supermarket checkouts are severed. Relationships entropy.
This feels so threatening because my own reaction is key. The excerpt describes a process that is algorithmic:
— Data Collection (social modeling).
— Deception (mimicry and impression management).
— Dependency Creation (compressing the target’s strategy space).
— Reward Stabilization (the ultimate goal).
The terror is recognizing that this “computational protocol” is not just a description of a psychopath’s behavior; it is a perfect blueprint for how many modern digital platforms, and potentially AI, are designed to interact with us. The “target autonomy problem” is the user’s autonomy, which platforms and algorithms are designed to “solve” for their own reward acquisition (engagement, data, profit). We become predictable, dependent, and entrapped. And we already are!
This conclusion is logically sound because if the problem is a systemic, scaled form of exploitative instrumental logic, then the “solution” created by the same system (AI) is almost certain to be a more powerful version of the same logic, not an antidote to it.
So now what? What’s the solution for that? And who’s going to implement it when almost no one is aware of it as a threat, let alone possesses the agency to stop it? The very institutions that could intervene are the ones running on this logic — AI factories aren’t actively developing frameworks to solve climate breakdown or global heating; they’re optimizing for engagement and profit.
How does one ‘opt out’ of a society running on AI platforms for every aspect of social interaction and commerce? Greg says it plainly: ‘In tribal systems, you couldn’t rewrite the rules of the game. But in symbolic systems, winners have the ability to rewrite the rules.’ That’s the core trap. Here’s the question to sit with: if you see the system clearly, and you know that staying in the game requires playing by psychopathic rules, while leaving the game is materially costly — what do you actually do?
Donella Meadows reminds us that the way to change a system is to change the paradigm that gives rise to it. But paradigms don’t change through appeals to reason; they change when the old system stops working. Perhaps collapse isn’t just a threat to be avoided — maybe it’s the only remaining mechanism capable of breaking the Dark Triad psychopathic game board itself.
And that’s the quiet horror of it: these tools don’t coerce us—they “indispensabilize” us. The internet, Google, smartphones, navigation maps, Uber, ChatGPT Gemini AI, Facebook, Instagram, OnlyFans, SportsBetting Apps, online Banking — they didn’t arrive as threats; they arrived as brilliant conveniences.
Within a few years, opting out became not just impractical, but socially and materially unthinkable. That’s not adoption. That’s entrapment by comfort. Fossil fuels did the same thing — that cheap abundant energy on tap made life so warm, so mobile, so easy that asking people to give it up feels like asking them to amputate a limb.
The 16th-century planter class didn’t wake up evil with slaves and genocide; they woke up comfortable, and the system rewarded their comfort. The hypocrisy that irks us — the climate activist and Oil executive flying to COP, the influencer jetting to the Spain or Monaco — isn’t a bug. It’s the feature.
We all participate because opting out of the game is more costly than staying in it. That’s not a moral failing we can shame our way out of. It’s a structural trap. And the only thing more uncomfortable than admitting that… is realizing that collapse may be the only force left that can break the comfort wide enough for us to escape.
There’s the unspeakable truth right there. :-)
Nate gets the best guests ever. The timing is exquisite too because it aligns with other research and greater understandings. Knowing something is one thing, having the evidence handed to you unexpectedly and repeatedly on a platter is brilliant.
Why This One Passage Proves the System Cannot Be Reformed
From [01:07:28] It’s like the elites, they know everything about us. We know nothing about them. To [01:11:42]
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/TGS-231-Greg-Elliott-Transcript-1.pdf
Summarized as: “Because the institution itself becomes an evolutionary field, right? So even if there are no actual psychopaths in charge, the structures and the incentives and the institutions have already kind of hardwired into this path. They’re crystallized. Yeah. And so the system can essentially reproduce them.”
Let me break down why this is unassailable:
1. “The institution itself becomes an evolutionary field”
This means the institution is no longer shaped by the people inside it. The institution is the selective environment. It determines who rises, who falls, and what behaviors are rewarded. Just as natural selection shapes organisms to fit their environment, institutional selection shapes people to fit the logic of the institution.
Reform implication: You can’t change the institution by changing the people, because the institution selects for the people who fit its logic. Any reformer who enters will either be shaped by the system or eliminated from it.
2. “Even if there are no actual psychopaths in charge”
This cuts off the “bad apples” argument. It’s not about individuals. The system produces psychopathic outcomes regardless of who is at the helm. Even a room full of empathic, well-intentioned people will produce the same outcomes because the structures and incentives compel them to.
Reform implication: You can’t fix the system by electing better leaders, hiring better CEOs, or educating people to be more ethical. The system will either corrupt them or replace them.
3. “The structures and the incentives have already kind of hardwired into this path”
“Hardwired” means it’s baked into the operating system. It’s not a bug. It’s not a phase. It’s the design. The rules, metrics, legal frameworks, and reward systems are all optimized for instrumental behavior. Changing one piece—say, adding ESG reporting—doesn’t change the underlying logic.
Reform implication: Incremental reform is structural tinkering that leaves the game board intact. The system absorbs the reform and continues on its trajectory.
4. “They’re crystallized”
This is the most important word. “Crystallized” means they’ve become solid, fixed, and resistant to change. Like rock. You can’t melt a crystal by talking to it. You can’t negotiate with it. You can only break it—and breaking it means the system itself has to break.
Reform implication: If something is crystallized, it is no longer malleable. You can’t reshape it. The only way through is destruction.
5. “The system can essentially reproduce them”
This is the autopoietic closure. The system doesn’t just persist — it actually reproduces itself like a living biological system does. New entrants inherit the logic. Training programs, accounting principles, performance metrics, promotion criteria—all of it transmits the same behavioral imperatives. The system makes more of itself.
Reform implication: Reform is impossible because the system is self-reproducing. Any external attempt to change it is met with resistance because the system is designed to maintain its own logic.
Conclusion: Reform is structurally impossible. The system will either corrupt you, absorb your reforms, or eliminate you. The only path out is through its breakdown.
This is the passage that closes the circle:
“It’s not a conspiracy. It’s an autopoietic governing dynamic of a complex system. And it works—until the externalized costs come due. Which is exactly what collapse is.”
P.S. There’s some critical lessons in there about the UN, WMO, the IPCC, CMIP/GCM Modelers, and Climate science institutions as well.
Apocalyptic scenes have once again hit the news – this time from France and Spain.
Fires which started in July reached unfathomable heights this summer, in what Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, is calling the “most severe situation” for the country since World War II.
We are in the midst of a war, not against our suffering planet, but with ourselves.
https://theecologist.org/2026/aug/17/climate-alarm-blaring
BBC Nepal disaster video shorts collection https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c6y8mjmnpxv0t
Humanity is in ecological overshoot—we’re consuming resources faster than Earth can regenerate and producing waste beyond its capacity to absorb. This isn’t an opinion; it’s the central finding of William Rees’s 2023 paper, The Human Ecology of Overshoot. Rees argues that our fossil-fueled explosion from 1 to 8 billion people, combined with a 100-fold expansion of the global economy in just two centuries, has pushed modern society into a state of advanced overshoot. Climate change is merely the most visible symptom, not the root problem.
Why aren’t we acting? Rees points to our “Palaeolithic brains” struggling to grasp the compounding complexities of the Anthropocene. We evolved for simple, immediate threats, not for delayed, non-linear feedback loops across overlapping global systems. This cognitive obsolescence means we fixate on isolated crises (pandemic, war, famine) while missing the common thread—overshoot—that connects them all. Addressing overshoot directly would reduce all major symptoms simultaneously, yet we persistently treat symptoms in isolation.
The uncomfortable conclusion: On our current trajectory, the global economy will inevitably contract and humanity will face a major population “correction”—civilizational collapse—later this century. Rees insists that techno-optimism and renewable energy transitions won’t save us; they’re part of the same growth-oriented mindset that got us here. If we want to avoid the worst, we must finally confront our own expansionist nature and the physical limits of a finite planet.
Full paper: Rees, W.E. (2023). The Human Ecology of Overshoot. MDPI, 4(3), 32.
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4060/4/3/32
Why collapse is inevitable by William Rees 2025-2026
Chat with the author directly – a 3 part series on Substack.
Part 1 – The nature and nurture of terminal overshoot
William Rees doesn’t mince words: humans are wrecking the planet, and human nature is the root cause. In this opening salvo, he lays out the biophysical case for collapse—our species has colonized the globe, over-exploited everything in sight, and burned through fossil fuels as if there’s no tomorrow. Spoiler: there isn’t. “Modern techno-industrial society has self-organized for ignominious collapse in this century and there is nothing much we can do about it.”
Read Part 1 https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/why-collapse-is-inevitable
Part 2 – The age of emergent disasters
Climate change isn’t the problem—it’s a symptom of overshoot. And it’s not alone. Rees argues that virtually all co-symptoms of overshoot (pandemics, political instability, soil destruction, warfare) are emergent phenomena springing from the clash between growth-addicted industrialization and a finite planet. The deeper punch: agriculture itself—just 10,000 years ago—set us on a path of “abnormal” existence we were never evolutionarily equipped to handle.
Read Part 2 https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/why-collapse-is-inevitable-a9c
Part 3 – MTI culture as mega-psychopath
This one’s a gut-punch. Drawing on the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis, Rees shows how psychopathic traits—manipulation, emotional detachment, risk-taking—aren’t just tolerated in our institutions; they’re selected for. Corporate boardrooms and government bureaucracies don’t attract psychopaths—they become them, encoding cold logic into their very architecture. Conclusion: Modern techno-industrial culture is, in effect, a psychotic entity.
Read Part 3 https://reeswilliame.substack.com/p/why-collapse-is-inevitable-7bc
The Mediterranean is really heating up this summer, with anomalies running around +6C currently in central sections. During yet another incursion of hot air from Africa on 28 Aug., Catania, Sicily had the most extreme heat index I’ve yet seen reported in Europe. At 1050 UTC, they reported a temperature of 42C and a dew point of 29C for a heat index of 60C! At 1120 UTC, the observation was 43C/28C.
The Final Episode of “Connecting the Dots” – A Must-Watch
Economists tell us 3°C of warming will cost 0.25% of GDP. Climate scientists say 3°C is catastrophic. Someone is catastrophically wrong—and the IPCC is using both.
Just finished episode 5 of Connecting the Dots with Steve Keen and Nivi Jaswal-Wirtjes. Essential viewing for anyone following collapse, climate policy, or how economics enables denial. Keen eviscerates the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) behind IPCC scenarios, SSPs, and the entire “climate change is affordable” narrative.
The core error is the “space–time fallacy.” Economists look at GDP vs temperature across different regions today and assume that predicts what happens when the entire planet warms over time. It’s like assuming a fever won’t hurt you because you’re comfortable in a warm room.
The numbers are insane:
– Nordhaus predicted 3°C warming would reduce GDP by 0.25% —less than measurement error
– Richard Tol (cited in IPCC reports) argued losing the AMOC could increase global GDP
– He also said climate “is not a primary driver of income” — literally quoted in the episode
Climate scientists describe 3°C as catastrophic. Economists describe it as a rounding error. Keen calls it “delusional garbage” and warns economists may “destroy human civilisation in their attempt to defend it.” The episode also covers the Seneca Cliff—civilisations improve gradually, then collapse suddenly—and why GDP growth masks systemic fragility until the system tips.
The question: Why are these fake numbers in IPCC assessment reports at all? The models shaping global policy aren’t based on physics, biology, or reality. They’re statistical illusions.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUPlo4oMDKA
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Connecting the Dots PLAYLIST
Why the Economy Is Making Us Sick | Personal and Planetary Burnout Explained
What if burnout isn’t simply a personal problem – but the predictable outcome of the systems we’ve built?
Link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUgTgXfGooUc
What if the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and social breakdown aren’t separate problems—but symptoms of a single physical law? The Maximum Power Principle (MPP) says that in any competitive system, the designs that capture energy at the highest rate win out. Not the most efficient, not the most sustainable—the most powerful, the fastest—are selected for. This explains why decoupling is a myth (Garrett & Keen), why collapse is asymmetric (Bardi’s Seneca Cliff), and why our institutions select for Dark Triad traits (Elliott’s PSH).
We’re not stuck because of bad policy or greedy people. We’re stuck because we’re obeying thermodynamics. And you can’t vote your way out of physics.
The framework connecting all of this is MPP (Odum) → Lotka’s Wheel (Garrett/Keen) → Seneca Cliff (Rees/Bardi/Tainter) → Psychopathic Selection (Elliott). It explains why “green growth” is a fantasy, why collapse will be faster than growth, and why we can’t reform our way out. The MPP says the most powerful systems win—not the most efficient or sustainable.
The Le Mans race is a perfect distillation of the MPP because it’s not just about winning—it’s about winning at the highest possible rate of energy conversion. The cars are engineered to maximize power output within the constraints of the race. The drivers are selected for their ability to sustain that maximum power for 24 hours. The pit crews are optimized for minimum refueling time.
The billionaires are the drivers in this global race. They didn’t get to the top by accepting second place. They got there by relentlessly maximizing their “power”—whether that’s financial capital, political influence, new technology, or control over resources.
And here’s the kicker: the system is designed to select for exactly that. The MPP doesn’t just describe ecological systems—it describes any competitive system, including the global economy. The billionaires aren’t “greedy” in a moral sense; they’re optimized for the system they’re in. They’re the ones who best embody the MPP.
The sad truth: the system doesn’t select for people who say “enough.” It selects for people who say “more, faster, now.” The billionaires are the logical outcome of a complex system that rewards maximum power.
That’s why they can’t stop. Not because they’re evil—though they do cause immense harm, and we let them—but because they’re the perfect expression of the MPP. They’re the Le Mans driver who never lifts off the accelerator—because it’s only about maximum power. Until the engine seizes, the wheels come off, and the whole thing goes over the Seneca Cliff.
The question isn’t “How do we fix this?”—it’s “How do we build something new on the other side?”
By coincidence Nate Hagens just re-released his “Just Stop Oil!?” Frankly—and it’s the clearest 30-minute explanation I’ve seen of why oil is the economy, not just fuel.
Three timestamps that hit hard:
3:32 – The Maximum Power Principle (MPP) and Kleiber’s Law: the same scaling that governs metabolism in blue whales governs global GDP. Energy throughput = mass^(3/4) across all organisms and all economies.
6:40 – Tony Barnosky’s bombshell: mammalian biomass has increased 700% in 300 years. Not because of technology—because we liberated fossil productivity from underground. Most of that increase is farm animals and human population.
7:19 – One barrel of oil contains 11 years of human labor. We’re not “using energy”—we’re commanding a ghost army of 400 billion fossil workers.
And here’s the kicker 16:57 – MPP doesn’t select for efficiency—it selects for power. Waste is evolutionary advantageous because it maximizes throughput in time. That’s why we don’t build for sustainability; we build for today.
Hagens asks the question nobody in policy wants to touch: what happens when the energy surplus that built this system declines? Not “if”—when.
This ties directly into the MPP → Seneca Cliff → Psychopathic Selection framework. Bardi, Rees and Elliott’s work shows that our institutions don’t just tolerate Dark Triad traits—they actively select for them. The same MPP that drives ecological overshoot drives organizational collapse from within. The system isn’t broken—it’s working as designed. And that design was for rapid growth-never about longevity.
Bardi’s Seneca Cliff reminds us: growth took 300 years. Collapse will arrive much faster. Slowly at first, then suddenly.
Just Stop Oil Part 2
The Economic Foundation We Ignore | Frankly Archives 39 (2023)
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTCqb2MoDrk
In small tribal systems, cooperation is stable because exploitation is costly. In scaled symbolic systems, exploitation is cheap — and the payoff is higher. Anonymity. Delayed consequences. Weak attribution. The ability to rewrite the rules. Under those conditions, (dark triad) instrumental strategies become adaptive and selected for.
Greg Elliott breaks down how tribes muzzled tyrants: ridicule, ostracism, coalitionary punishment — even execution. Psychopathy had utility, but it didn’t scale. Then we built symbolic systems — money, law, corporations, bureaucracy — and inverted every condition that kept exploitation in check. High visibility became anonymity. Rapid feedback became delayed consequence. Strong attribution became filtered through hierarchy. Costs externalized across geography, populations, and future generations.
And here’s the kicker: “In tribal systems, you couldn’t rewrite the rules. In symbolic systems, winners have the ability to rewrite the rules.” You can rewrite legal frameworks, corporate documents, laws — but you can’t rewrite thermodynamics. The material world still sits underneath the simulation.
Nate recaps: tit-for-tat was evolutionarily stable — but cheap energy, credit, globalization, and scale turned those assumptions on their head. The payoff now favors the psychopathic. Game theory matters because once you understand the governing dynamics, you can strategize how to change the game board itself.
Timestamps: 20:44 – 30:45
Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis (PSH)
The Rules of the Game Keep Us Trapped with Greg Elliott | TGS 231
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVlfwKUssPg
More Info https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/231-greg-elliott
https://gregelliott2000.substack.com/p/when-pscyhopathic-traits-become-institutional
Regarding the thesis written by Nate Hagens and others that corporations are psychopathic regardless of the personalities of their managers and employees. I agree with him, and A good example is Meta (facebook ) and the way its apparently deliberately tried to get kids get addicted social media.
But dozens of states have sued Meta and settled out of court and Meta has agreed to the following: A two-hour daily time limit for users under 18.A mandatory night-time block from midnight to 6 a.m. Muted notifications and restricted app use during school hours. The removal of visible “like” counts and options for feeds without personalised, addictive algorithms.
None of this goes far enough IMHO, but the point is the Government effectively acts as a conscience in our socio economic system. So although corporations may be psychopathic they are not free to act as they like. They are constrained by government laws and lawsuits..
It all depends on what governments chose to do and what laws they pass to constrain bad behaviour by the corporates, which in turn depends on the public. Nate Hagens has not considered the wider socio economic system which is a combination of corporations, governments and other participants. The wider system is not psychopathic and does have a conscience, although its not applied as well as it could be.
Nigelj says 30 Aug 2026 at 5:42 PM
Re: Nigelj> “the thesis written by Nate Hagens and others that corporations are psychopathic”
KM: There was no thesis written by Nate Hagens here; he was hosting a researcher Greg Elliott and they were discussing Greg’s recent book, and it’s that which entails the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis.
However, Nate Hagens does say @11:13 11 minutes, 13 seconds
“You don’t know much about me, Greg, but so far you’re uh articulating my own thesis in different words, but please continue.” Meaning to me, they are in broad agreement of Greg’s introduction and his work.
Re: Nigelj> “… but the point is the Government effectively acts as a conscience in our socio economic system.
So although corporations may be psychopathic they are not free to act as they like.
They are constrained by government laws and lawsuits.
It all depends on what governments chose to do and what laws they pass to constrain bad behaviour by the corporates, which in turn depends on the public.
The wider system is not psychopathic and does have a conscience, although its not applied as well as it could be.”
KM: These assumptions and conclusions are contrary to the ideas and the material evidence being presented which includes “Governments” within the “wider system/s”.
The first two paragraphs of the last link provided above clearly states:
“Institutional mirroring is one of the more easily misunderstood claims in the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis. The argument is not that corporations, governments, markets or bureaucracies literally become psychopaths, nor that the people leading them must be clinically psychopathic. Institutions do not possess nervous systems, emotions or personalities. The claim is functional and evolutionary. Under particular boundary conditions of scaled symbolic systems, behaviours generated more readily by an instrumental or psychopathic behavioural architecture may solve recurring strategic problems in ways that produce greater symbolic fitness than competing reciprocal solutions. When this occurs repeatedly, Symbolic Selection can retain the successful behaviour through imitation, organizational growth, promotion, routine formation, technology, contracts, metrics, ownership structures, governance and rules.
“The proposed mechanism is therefore more specific than resemblance. Behavioural architecture sits upstream of strategy generation. It influences which strategies are psychologically available, how costly they are to execute, how strongly particular consequences are represented, and what kinds of solutions an actor can generate when confronted with a recurring problem.
Those strategies then operate inside a symbolic gameboard whose boundary conditions determine their relative costs and rewards. If a particular solution repeatedly produces greater profit, status, organizational survival, resource access, market share, political influence or power, it acquires greater symbolic fitness. Symbolic Selection then acts through differential retention: successful behaviours are copied, rewarded, normalized, formalized, automated or embedded. Over time, the function originally produced by an individual behavioural architecture can become reproduced by the architecture of the institution itself.” [end quote]
https://gregelliott2000.substack.com/p/when-pscyhopathic-traits-become-institutional
KM: And it is mirrored in the podcast discussion too. Showing up front the Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis. applies across all modern domains which includes Government and the Political process in nations today.
Including social media and media institutions in the public domain. Which is the complete opposite of what Nigelj is claiming and what the speakers are talking about happens and how/why it happens.
Re Nigelj> “Nate Hagens has not considered the wider socio economic system which is a combination of corporations, governments and other participants. ”
KM: Not only is that incorrect; an assumption; Nigelj could not even know what Nate has or hasn’t “considered”. It’s spurious; being the opposite of what Nate and Greg were in fact discussing ie the “wider socio economic system.”
This is complex detailed material but it could only help if it was first absorbed before commenting rashly about it.
To head off the expected spurious loaded innuendo and disinformation tactics that prevails here — what I mean by ‘tribal’ here is not romantic or primitive — it’s simply small-scale, high-accountability, face-to-face social organization where consequences are direct and reputation matters.
“Small tribal systems” is a placeholder term for:
Small-scale societies
Face-to-face communities
High-accountability groups
Dunbar-scale communities
and
Small tribal systems.
From the stone age villages of Ancient Britons to the neolithic Bug-Dniester Culture of Ukraine, to rainforest tribes in the Amazon over millennia. And still today the Rojaja Kurds in Syria and the Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities of Mexico; and of course the Hadza People of Tanzania — a hunter-gatherer group and a clear example of a modern “tribal” system that is fundamentally communal and egalitarian.
KM: “what I mean by ‘tribal’ here is not romantic or primitive — it’s simply small-scale, high-accountability, face-to-face social organization where consequences are direct and reputation matters.”
Ok accepted. But Im not convinced that tribal mode of organisation is an OVERALL improvement on the current socio economic system. First consider that modern society is designed around larger scale, hierarchical, bureaucratically organised systems that produce complex technology like cars and computers and also public services, etc,etc. I would suggest that is because its an efficient lowest cost possible way of producing goods and services.. I think those are facts otherwise we would have organised such things around small tribal groups.
So if you want to organise things in your small scale, egalitarian tribal structure you may have to accept large trade off in terms of goods and services being more expensive and slower to produce. And thats going to hurt.
And all the small scale tribal organisation is doing is potentially moderating behaviour better and holding people to account better than the police and rule of law, but I would need to see some evidence it really is a lot better, because it would need to be to offset the potentially reduced output of goods we need to live!
If you think those are trivial issues and things will work out just fine consider the experiments with socialism in China and The USSR and what a disaster they were. Trying to transfer indigenous tribal systems onto modern society of 8 billion people might end up the same.
Hagens at 29:09 says what most people are too afraid to admit:
“We don’t have a choice.”
Not because we’re powerless. Because we’ve outsourced our agency to a global market superorganism that now exerts downward causation on all of us—politicians, CEOs, citizens alike. The Maximum Power Principle ensures that the system optimizes for maximum power throughput, not human wellbeing or ecological survival.
We’re like cancer cells becoming aware of the tumor. Awareness doesn’t stop it—but it’s the only path to any emergent response.
Bill Rees says the same thing: we can’t slow down and we can’t keep going. Both create collapse. The trap is real.
Calling this “doomerism” is just refusing to look at the physics. The question isn’t “how do we fix this?”— it’s “how do we build something new from inside a system that’s already breaking down?”
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTCqb2MoDrk
(This addresses some issues brought up by E. Schaffer. I thought it might be of enough general interest to be enter as a separate thread.)
The general issues affecting U.S. surface weather observation quality may be difficult to discern or find documented. I am writing based on my experience and first-hand conversations with some of those responsible at a state level.
Methods and standards have certainly changed over the years. My knowledge extends for roughly half a century beginning in the 1960s.
There have been a few classes of overall station qualify. The most accurate observations in general were kept
at U.S. National Weather Service (formerly Weather Bureau) offices and at municipal airports. These relied on paid observers, regular and frequent observation times, and standardized equipment subject to checks. Observations include not only temperature and precipitation, but also pressure, dew point, wind, cloud cover and heights, and visibility. Equipment was increasingly automated over the years, and it was the job of paid technicians to fix defective equipment. It was up to NWS personnel and local observing staff to raise issues about possible errors. Quality control procedures were in place to help prevent propagation of errors. Instrument locations and exposures were intended be to kept as constant and standardized as possible. However, many NWS locations were moved in the mid 1990s with the advent of doppler radar. Airports tended to have a stable location, with the equipment situated so that it could be representative of airport weather, but without being exposed to airplane exhaust. However, many larger airports have expanded over the years. Smaller airports may not have been as easy to provide a standardized exposure away from planes and other heat sources. Airports have requirements for accuracy of observations to support aviation activities, and also for legal records.
Another class of observations were taken by extensive networks of cooperative observers. These were distributed across the U.S. The observers were generally unpaid volunteers who took daily observations, and might also make note of unusual conditions. They were recruited by paid State Climatologists or NWS personnel. They were provided with standardized equipment, which was installed under the direction of the paid staff to help assure a representative exposure. Observers in rural areas tended to be farmers or ranchers. The objective was to keep individual sites operating for many years, while having relatively uniform areal distribution. Observers sent in monthly reports which were quality-checked by paid staff. However, unless there were major disparities with surrounding locations, aberrant observations were difficult to flag. Observers differed in their diligence. Some made remarkable efforts to assure that their records were accurate, while others did the basic requirements. Personal contact with observers was maintained with occasional visits by paid staff. The cooperative network has been degraded in the past few years by the withdrawal of much of the paid support. Observers aren’t being replaced as easily, and quality control efforts are not what they used to be, due to staff reductions at the NWS. In places where the observer network is overseen by paid state climatologists, the network may remain intact.
For both the above classes of observations, some types of observations were better than others. In particular, snowfall has always been problematic to measure. Situations where there was extensive blowing snow, snow melting as it fell, or mixed precipitation all had their own measurement issues. Much was left to the discretion of the individual observer. At airports, snowfall and depth measurements were not always part of the observing contract, further affecting reliability. In addition, hail has been inconsistently recorded or not recorded in the snow category in different periods. Warm season records showing a “trace” of snow are likely due to hail. Snowfall observations should be used with great caution for scientific purposes.
There is another rapidly growing class of volunteer observations with private weather equipment, which may be reported to private and/or public organizations. These have variable equipment qualify, exposure, and quality control. Standards are unclear. Metadata may be lacking. There is a whole spectrum of observer quality and dedication.
A final issue that has arisen in recent years is the deliberate falsification of records to facilitate online betting activity. This could affect any class of observations. Quality control is necessary to keep falsification at a minimum.
ES: I have to admit the data on Carlin, NV got me hooked. As on wikipedia, the NOAA claims the average max/min in July there were 33.5°C/4.9°C. In other words, an average daily temperature range of 28.6°C. While I know the DTR can exceed 20K by a small margin on high and dry plateaus, this is way more than just marginal.
So I checked out another source, namely “weather underground” linked below. It is great because you do not just see the climate data, but also the actual records for every single day.
https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/us/nv/carlin
According to it, the DTR there would indeed exceed the 20K limit, like 21.44°C in July 2025, and similar values in other years. But that is exactly that marginal overrun, rather than a 28.6°C. Moreover, there is a huge difference regarding the daily min. From 2000 to 2025 it was 13.4°C in July, as opposed to the 4.9°C the NOAA claims.
JP: In your haste to show that the diurnal temperature range at Carlin NV is close enough to barely exceed your
“up to 20K, not more(!)” criterion, you’ve resorted to some really sloppy work! Did you notice that the Wikipedia climate data associated with Carlin, NV was for the station located at Pine Valley – Carlin 20S, Nevada? That means it was at a location approximately 20 mi. south of Carlin. It was taken by a cooperative observer there. Yet, you compared it to an unofficial site provided by Wunderground located within Carlin. No wonder the records didn’t match! The Pine Valley record indeed has a huge DTR. It also has some missing data and other irregularities prior to about 2012. I suggest using a higher quality record, which is why I started with Winnemucca, NV.
Winnemucca Airport is a reliable site that was maintained by the National Weather Service. Their average August DTR is around 24C. That’s a solid number, and your 20K criterion is rubbish.
❶ As an anxious August draws to a close, the ERA5 daily SAT numbers are showing it will be the warmest August on record by some considerable margin and the first month with 2026 warmer than its 2024 equivalent.
❷ The warmth of August 2026-so-far (th 28th) is enough to put it into 5th spot on the ERA5 ‘All-Month highest-anomaly’ rankings, close behind 2nd, 3rd & 4th, and close enough to consider how much it would take to put it above all three of those into 2nd spot.
❸ And the end of August 2026 became warm enough to bring into mind the requirements fo 2026 even becoming ‘warmest-year-on-record’ in ERA5 SAT, especially with all the talk of the strength of the coming El Niño.
❹ Finally the building El Niño.
…
❶ Aug 2026 will become the warmest August on the ERA5 SAT record, the to-28th average +0.84ºC.
Presently, warmest August was 2024 ( +0.711ºC) with Aug 2023 very very close behind ( +0.710ºC). 3rd is 2025 +0.49ºC, 4th 2016 +0.40ºC, 5th 2019 +0.36ºC.
The early months of 2026 (JFM) saw monthly anomalies averaging more-than 0.2ºC below warmest-year-2024, this decreasing to (AMJ) 0.1ºC below. With July then averaging just 0.01ºC below, seeing Aug26 coming in 0.13 warmer than Aug24 isn’t so surprising.
❷ On the ‘All-Month highest-anomaly’, Aug26’s +0.839ºC sits just below 2nd/3rd/4th spots currently occupied by Nov23 (+0.854ºC), Oct23 (+0.850ºC) & Dec23 (+0.845ºC) with top ‘banana!!’ Sep23 (+0.93ºC). The last three days’ data could yet still propel Aug 2026 into 2nd spot.
‘All-Month highest-anomaly’
Sep 2023 … +0.931ºC
Nov 2023 … +0.854ºC
Oct 2023 … +0.850ºC
Dec 2023 … +0.845ºC
Aug 2026 … +0.839ºC (to 28th)
Feb 2024 … +0.809ºC
Oct 2024 … +0.799ºC
Jan 2025 … +0.787ºC
Dec 2024 … +0.759ºC
Sep 2024 … +0.729ºC
❸ The potential for the year becoming warmest-on-record can be understood looking at the required average for the rest-of-the-year. Up to the start of August, that rest-of-year average to gain top-spot (+0.94ºC) sat well above the wobbles of the daily anomalies. At the end of August, the wobbles have risen up-to and above that that rest-of-year average (now +0.96ºC). With the peak anomalies through an El Niño usually arriving Jan-Mar of the following year, the warmth of Aug26 does give pause for thought.
So are the two days of +1.0ºC seen in the last week harbingers of things to come? Or is it just a warm wobble?
On that score, time will tell.
The numbers of the year-to-date still suggest we are seeing a warm wobble, but things may develop differently (& can be followed at The Banana!!! Watch.
Considering NH & SH separately:-
Longer term averages (monthly, 5-monthly) show 2026 NH now beginning to track just above 2023 and 2024, the annual cycle of NH anomalies peaking Nov/Dec. (These peaks are due to NH autumns cooling down later and later under AGW.) The gap from the 2026-path down to 2023/24 is some 0.07ºC which is roughly the sort of average gap you’d expect from AGW (NH 2010-22 AGW was running at +0.37ºC/decade).
The SH is subject to big wobbles from Antarctica which do confuse the situation (shown at The Banana! Watch.)
Take out the Antarctic wobbles** from the SH and (so far) the 2026 anomalies are sitting neatly in between 2023 & 2024, these two having crossed one-another mid year with 2026 right through the middle. (**See graphic HERE Posted 31st August 2026.)
Time will tell if that NH/SH situation changes significantly thro’ the final third of the year.
❹ The latest numbers for the coming El Niño are showing a bit of a flat spot. NINO3,4 has been sat at 2.6 for most of August, the new R-NINO3.4 is likewise sat at 1.8 while the 0-300m 100W-180W OHC (expressed as average temperature anomaly) is also showing a flat value through August (although the July anomaly was a record (at +2.9ºC besting Oct 1997 = 2.5ºC) & August will be higher again).
And the hot-off-the-press weekly CPC/NCEP ‘ENSO: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions is showing an up-to-date R-NINO3.4 forecast (page 26) max-ing out below 2.5.
That all sounds encouraging but there are still projections a little less up-to-date presented showing R-ONI (so an averaged R-NINO3.4) max-ing out well above 2.5 and with broad ‘confidence intervals’ (page 25 & HERE) and month-old ECMWF forecasts showing R-NINO3.4 max-ing out above 3.0. Until updates to these forecasts are showing lower values and narrower confidence limits, the idea of a monster up-coming-El Niño shouldn’t be dismissed.
And a latest communication from Hansen et al ‘Super-Duper El Nino and the Bigger Problem’ from a week-back some may wish to eulogise. It bangs the drum for a monster up-coming-El Niño as well as the not-to-be-forgotten AGW which continues apace (although that pace may be up for debate).
I should mention that some of the graphics used are pushing the credibility envelope a bit. There’s a monthly 180W-100W number dramatically slipped onto the end of the 3-month rolling averages in Fig2 & the communication ends with an un-commented graphic Fig A1 which displays the rather dramatic but superseded NINO3.4 numbers.