Sure. The culture of “personal responsibility” isnt an invention of corporate greed, obviously, but they’re more than willing to exploit it to their own ends.
100% This.
We should do all we can as people to stop waste, recycle, and consume responsibly, but the massive amount of environmental damage is being done at a level out of our personal control.
We need to hold corporations responsible for their own sustainability initiatives. And we need people in power to regulate that way, it is the only way they will change, because it costs money to be more ecologically friendly, and if everyone is forced to do it, nobody gets a competitive advantage.
At the end of the day it wont matter once Brazil clear cuts the Amazon and destroys us all anyway.
It’s been a couple of weeks now since the IPCC report came out. You know what it says. If the whole damn species pulls together in a concerted effort “without historical precedent”— if we start right now , and never let up on the throttle— we just might be able to swing the needle back from Catastrophe to mere Disaster. If we cut carbon emissions by half over the next decade, eliminate them entirely by 2050; if the species cuts its meat and dairy consumption by 90%; if we invent new unicorn technologies for sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere (or scale up extant prototype tech by a factor of two million in two years) — if we commit to these and other equally Herculean tasks, then we might just barely be able to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C.[1] We’ll only lose 70-90% of the word’s remaining coral reefs (which are already down by about 50%, let’s not forget). Only 350 million more urban dwellers will be exposed to severe drought and “deadly heat” events. Only 130-140 million will be inundated. Global fire frequency will only increase by 38%. Fish stocks in low latitudes will be irreparably hammered, but it might be possible to save the higher-latitude populations. We’ll only lose a third of the permafrost. You get the idea.
We have twelve years to show results.
If we don’t pull all these things off— if, for example, we only succeed in meeting the flaccid 2°C aspirations of the Paris Accords— then we lose all the coral. We lose the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Shelf (not that it isn’t already circling the bowl, of course). Twice as many people suffer “aggravated water scarcity” than at 1.5°C; 170% more of the population deals with fluvial flooding. The increase in global wildfire frequency passes 60% and keeps going. Marine fisheries crash pole to pole. The number of species that loses at least half their traditional habitat is 2-3 times higher than would have been the case at 1.5°C. It goes on.
There’s no real point in worrying about a measly 2° increase, though, because on our current trajectory we’ll blow past 3° by century’s end (the Trump administration is predicting 4°, which is why they’re so busy dismantling whatever pitiful carbon-emission standards the US had already put into place; what’s the point of reducing profit margins if we’re headed straight for perdition no matter what we do?). We don’t really know what happens then. Methane clathrates released from a melting Arctic could turn the place into Venus, for all I know.
Ugh. I mean…I mean…ugh?!!
I admit I was not familiar with Peter Watts. But that blog was pretty alarming. I found myself wondering this morning after reading it last night, “that must be some crazy hyperbolic blogger and I must have just stumbled into the left-er side blogging of what surely drives the crazy modern right…yeah, that’s it, right?” So I go to read up on Watts.
“Ah ha! He is an author, I mean Hugo, good for him, but an author and not a scien-”. Oh. “Also obtained a Ph.D in…Zoology and Resource Ecology, but clearly his other cited sources are crazy town, right?” I was not familiar with many of those as well, so as anyone should in the modern era, I check them for media bias and factual content ratings. “Hmmm, better than Fox (duh, who isn’t), and MSNBC, and CNN, and…this is not fringe lunacy stuff.” I then peruse the IPCC special report directly myself for awhile. I then check up on Brazil’s election results. As a backdrop, at a Halloween party last week, I also had two Foresters I know pass on the carbon impact of the current norm of mega fires (hint, human fossil fuel use doesn’t really matter with our backwards attitude towards fire “fighting”). These are the same fires that are predicted to sextuple in NA according to the report. “Oh God…oh my #*$&ing God!”
At this point I feel like a smoker having a come to Jesus moment. I’ve been pretty sure we are screwed on the climate front for a long time. But I also realize that while it’s tantalizing, it’s also a way longer range red meat type subject to carry much news cycle. So it’s something I say, but not something I feel. Well, now I feel like I’ve been smoking and just accepted for years that lung cancer will come knocking someday. Someday. After reading that blog and poking around, I feel like the doc just sat me down and told me that someday is now. Or twelve years from now as the case may be.
There is no way. Not one fraction of a percent of a chance that the world changes path to the extreme needed according to that report in the next twelve years. While it was sort of academically interesting before, I am suddenly rather distressed that I am likely going to, for realzies going to, get a front row seat to the end of civilization before I die.
Yeah. It’s safe to freak out indeed.
Yeah, that blog was… I don’t even really know how to describe it. Maybe it’s like finding yourself tied down to the railroad tracks and suddenly you realize you see a light and hear a blaring horn. You always knew this was how it was going to go unless you found a way to free yourself, but it’s still shocking and upsetting to see it bearing down on you.
“Not now! I’m not ready! I just need some more time!”
I’ve been following this for a long time. Now you folks know how I feel all the damn time.
… but her emails.
Japan’s summers in the past 6 years have spoiled the surprise for me :(
For anyone who wants some small piece of good news, Australia’s trajectory looks to be positive. We had a carbon price for a couple of years but then (for some reason?) we voted in Toby Abbott who doesn’t believe in climate change and he promptly axed as much environmental legislation as he could.
Now, the more reasonable party has been leading the polls for a long time, looks set to win the election which will be next year, and very recently they also announced:
Some positive signs for the future, yet in the meantime we’re still a deforestation hotspot.
Great to think that the fires in California are the new normal. And will get worse.
Yeah, I can’t remem which IPCC report made me realize that our fates were already sealed but I do remember that the article linking it also included a chart showing the amount of fossil fuels that have already been identified and cleared for extraction and where it puts us if indeed those fossil fuels are extracted and consumed (on track 6 degrees Celsius which is likely optimistic) and it dawned on me that economic and political reality made the end of the world inevitable.
Over the past few years that certainly has not only been validated, it’s been amplified. My wife’s advice to me at the time was the same as Watt’s wife’s — Enjoy the moment. Death is always an inevitability, you can’t stop living your life or finding joy in the world just because it will all end.
One of the Professors Watt references in that post predicts that society collapses in the next decade. This is distressing to me because I’ve been kind of coming to that sense myself. Things are starting to go to shit and the rate at which they go to shit is only going to accelerate. I can envision multiple scenarios to lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it in the near future.
I’ll stick with my wife’s advice. It’s whistling past the graveyard but isn’t that what life is anyway? All things come to an end but I’m more sad for the things that are not me. I can accept my own inevitable end stoically but it pains me to think of the pain to come for so many. Other people, children, great civilizations, wildlife.
The other thing that kind of bums me out of late when I think about our political situation is this — When people speak of authoritarianism, they generally include an optimistic reminder that the arc of history is long, dictators die, regimes fall and democracy often re-ermerges. But the arc of history is no longer long. What comes next is likely what we have until the end.
It will be fitting that Trump will be our president when things really go to shit. Where do they spend the money they robbed when money means nothing?
They are, and they are not. One of the foresters that I mentioned is pretty high up in Cal Fire. Besides really souring the mood with his take on the environmental impact of mega fires, he also indicated that there is finally some change in the way California sees fires. There is finally non-trivial money starting to be allocated to prevention and control (rather than nearly all of the budget going to fighting). This will mean more controlled burns, fuel reduction, and adjustments to post-fire seeding to help slow down and reverse the mistakes that 100 years fire fighting has entrenched. It is rather counter-intuitive, but I have been listening to both foresters lamenting for years about how wrong it has been to fight fires-- or at least fight them the way we do. We make bigger problems doing it the way we have been.
I get that. We have our fires here as well. I’m more worried about my neighborhood becoming seaside property until the power goes out and I die from the heat. To each their own. :)
The ocean will put out the fire.
Heat from the sun causing 100 degree plus spikes without AC. But thanks for playing. :)
Just remember, when all seems lost, intellectuals have predicted the end of humanity on multiple occasions. I’m not just talking about men and women standing on the corner proclaiming the end of the world with signs and prophecies. I’m talking about math, starvation, disease, war… We gotta do the best we can as soon as we can, no matter what, but it is not exactly rare for people to believe this is it.
Virtually nothing could destroy the human race entirely.