We're Toast 13

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• US and Canada have lost three billion birds since 1970. That's one in four!
• How Big Agriculture Is Preventing Farmers From Combating the Climate Crisis. Monoculture farming is not sustainable.
• 'Unprecedented Conditions' Will Rule the Oceans This Century, Striking New Report Finds. The oceans and arctic regions are being affected the most by climate change.
• Nine Million Cubic Feet of Ice May Soon Collapse in the Alps. The same thing is happening in the Canadian Rockies.
• New Studies Warn of Cataclysmic Solar Superstorms. If the Carrington event happened tomorrow, we'd be toast. 
• Could the Deadliest Wildfire in U.S. History Become the New Norm? “We now have mass-fatality wildfires—specifically civilian fatalities."
• 'I don't know how we come back from this:' Australia's big dry sucks life from once-proud towns.

Politics

• Piketty on the "Brahmin left" and the "merchant right". It's worth taking the time to read through the slide deck mentioned in the article.
• How a White Supremacist’s Haircut Became a Symbol for Hate. Far-right extremists are now using Dylann Roof’s haircut as shorthand for calls to violence.
• Trump Administration Takes the Axe to Marine Life, Invasive Species Advisory Boards. This will come back to bite them.
• The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy. Grim reading, but I feat the author is right.

Technology

• The Dangers of Delaying FAA Modernization. Grounded by mid-20th-century technology, air traffic controllers cannot handle the ongoing demands of commercial airlines and drones.
• What Would It Take To Shut Down the Entire Internet. I'd worry most about the DNS system and BGP poisoning.
• We're Not Ready for a Massive Digital Terror Attack. This from Microsoft's Brad Smith, who should know.