End Game
I have had second thoughts after posting this essay. For those who know, I don't want to become a Chicken Little like Chris Hedges. I'll bring the post up again once I have taken the time to take another close look at the issue. Whipping up Climate Change panic is as bad as Climate Change denial. Both distract us from our best vision of what we face and how we can deal with it.
A few specific notes on this issue:
--------------------------------------------------------
So here is what I wrote when I felt the sky was falling ...
Forgive me if this is a bit dark. It's a commentary on three movies with three sweeping ideas that boil down to the same vision. Whatever the future of the world may be, it will not include us. We have slipped past the "tipping point" where we could halt or reverse catastrophic warming of the planet. Whatever we do now, it's up to physics, not humans. We are already living in an "extinction event".
If you don't know what an extinction event is, I suggest this video. Perhaps you are imaging the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. That's a small one. The one we have cooked up for ourselves is more like the Permian Extinction. To compare to that disaster, we need to meet the Permian benchmark: extinction of 95% of all living species. We are well on our way. The recommended video is particularly strong on the "knock on" effects of methane release. This is particularly relevant to the Arctic situation and the cold ocean floor. Both of these environments are under-studied and the news tends to be bad. The video is an education on the way that one shock leads to another. There is nothing in nature that makes things return to normal.
The new Netflix Documentary, Our Planet, provides a spectacular tour of life on Earth as it stands now, along with numerous examples of how we are engineering extinction through habitat loss and climate change. People who watch this series may regard the commentary as preachy and alarmist. In fact, the only quibble I have with the series is that it repeatedly comes back to an appeal to "act before it's too late". But what it's actually showing you is that it is too late and it's getting worse. Apart from isolated cases of conservation, the trend is accelerating industrialized destruction. This is particularly true of climate change, which is now irreversible. Global warming in the Permian event was 10 degrees, well within reach now that we have passed the tipping point. It's a matter of time, but the journey from here to 10 degrees will not be pretty. Nor is there any reason to expect that warming will stop at 10. As far as the best models we have, even 6 degrees is "off the scale".
The other thing to note is that the Permian disaster took place over thousands of years. We are only a few decades into the current event. For those who say things will somehow return to normal, it's worth pointing out that recovery to "normal" biodiversity after the Permian event took 10 million years.
I'm not saying we are facing a replay of the Permian extinction. Our situation is quite different. There are overlaps in the mechanism (such as greenhouse gasses and warming) but in the Permian, catastrophe was kicked off by vulcanism (the Siberian trap). In our case, it's us. The other obvious difference is the time scale. The various interrelated "pulses" of extinction took about 60 thousand years in the Permian case. In our case, with typical human efficiency, we will probably manage most of the work in a few centuries. I focus on the Permian case by the Cretaceous-tertiary case (the dinosaur kill-off 65.5 million years ago) would serve as well but doesn't seem to be as serious as what we are heading into.
If any of this is new to you, I urge you to take a look at the videos. If this piques your interest, take the time to read the IPCC reports or one of the summaries. These tend to follow an interesting pattern. They are intended to urge immediate action and say we have "X years to avoid disaster". But disasters are already happening. If you dig deeper, the action proposals are completely unrealistic and we have already blown past the threshold temperatures. The fact is that, on the ground, World Governments have no chance of meeting their emission targets. In practice, we are ramping up our production of fossil fuels, not phasing them out. The Polyana language of the IPCC is exemplified by this remark from the 2008 report:
In the real world, we must refer to the IPCC's "worst case" scenario (even worse than "business as usual"). But it would be lovely if a few more people would at least understand the issue and the IPCC reports are a place to start. I'd love to be proven wrong by anyone with actual working knowledge of the subject.
Finally, I recommend the amazing movie: Samsara. This is a meditation that may help some of us to accept the impermanence of everything we care about. Samsara may help us get beyond our natural psychological barriers that go up when we are faced by an utterly hopeless situation. This even penetrates to scientific circles, where scientists of the IPCC fail to state alarming results for the (reasonable) fear that people will simply ignore findings that are "crazy bad". If we "seek first to understand" as a policy, we need to look squarely at all the possibilities, including the scary ones.
A few specific notes on this issue:
- It does seem like habitat destruction in Madagascar qualifies as a local extinction event. This example can be multiplied. The question is: do all these instances add up to a global extinction event? Are we forced to the conclusion that the disaster will rise to Permian levels?
- The IPCC report doesn't quite back up the judgment that an extinction event is upon us, or even that it would be a worst-case consequence of doing nothing. The job of the IPCC is to help us understand. If the IPCC models fail to tell us what will happen past 6 degrees, this is not quite the same thing as the world going off the edge into oblivion. It's just our knowledge that is being pushed into oblivion.
- In my thinking about Utopia, I deliberately skip over the issue of Climate Change, but, in so doing, I manage to visualize some kind of realistic world that has overcome the Climate emergency. Somehow. Are my Utopian ideas more realistic than my Extinction event fears?
- At the end of this essay, I refer to the need to reorient our psychology to accept the end of everything (Samsara). That turned out to be a psychological turning point. In brief, it was an opportunity to separate my own feeling of panic from what was going in in the real world.
--------------------------------------------------------
So here is what I wrote when I felt the sky was falling ...
Forgive me if this is a bit dark. It's a commentary on three movies with three sweeping ideas that boil down to the same vision. Whatever the future of the world may be, it will not include us. We have slipped past the "tipping point" where we could halt or reverse catastrophic warming of the planet. Whatever we do now, it's up to physics, not humans. We are already living in an "extinction event".
If you don't know what an extinction event is, I suggest this video. Perhaps you are imaging the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. That's a small one. The one we have cooked up for ourselves is more like the Permian Extinction. To compare to that disaster, we need to meet the Permian benchmark: extinction of 95% of all living species. We are well on our way. The recommended video is particularly strong on the "knock on" effects of methane release. This is particularly relevant to the Arctic situation and the cold ocean floor. Both of these environments are under-studied and the news tends to be bad. The video is an education on the way that one shock leads to another. There is nothing in nature that makes things return to normal.
The new Netflix Documentary, Our Planet, provides a spectacular tour of life on Earth as it stands now, along with numerous examples of how we are engineering extinction through habitat loss and climate change. People who watch this series may regard the commentary as preachy and alarmist. In fact, the only quibble I have with the series is that it repeatedly comes back to an appeal to "act before it's too late". But what it's actually showing you is that it is too late and it's getting worse. Apart from isolated cases of conservation, the trend is accelerating industrialized destruction. This is particularly true of climate change, which is now irreversible. Global warming in the Permian event was 10 degrees, well within reach now that we have passed the tipping point. It's a matter of time, but the journey from here to 10 degrees will not be pretty. Nor is there any reason to expect that warming will stop at 10. As far as the best models we have, even 6 degrees is "off the scale".
The other thing to note is that the Permian disaster took place over thousands of years. We are only a few decades into the current event. For those who say things will somehow return to normal, it's worth pointing out that recovery to "normal" biodiversity after the Permian event took 10 million years.
I'm not saying we are facing a replay of the Permian extinction. Our situation is quite different. There are overlaps in the mechanism (such as greenhouse gasses and warming) but in the Permian, catastrophe was kicked off by vulcanism (the Siberian trap). In our case, it's us. The other obvious difference is the time scale. The various interrelated "pulses" of extinction took about 60 thousand years in the Permian case. In our case, with typical human efficiency, we will probably manage most of the work in a few centuries. I focus on the Permian case by the Cretaceous-tertiary case (the dinosaur kill-off 65.5 million years ago) would serve as well but doesn't seem to be as serious as what we are heading into.
If any of this is new to you, I urge you to take a look at the videos. If this piques your interest, take the time to read the IPCC reports or one of the summaries. These tend to follow an interesting pattern. They are intended to urge immediate action and say we have "X years to avoid disaster". But disasters are already happening. If you dig deeper, the action proposals are completely unrealistic and we have already blown past the threshold temperatures. The fact is that, on the ground, World Governments have no chance of meeting their emission targets. In practice, we are ramping up our production of fossil fuels, not phasing them out. The Polyana language of the IPCC is exemplified by this remark from the 2008 report:
The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities.There is a difference between the "rapid and far-reaching" transitions occurring in the dreams of the IPCC and the rapid and far-reaching changes in the wrong direction that are actually occurring. Honest commentators have admitted that the Paris Accords, even if honored 100% (unlikely) would not achieve the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees. Let's face it, we're not even trying. Read the IPCC report not for its fantasy recommendations but for its dire predictions.
In the real world, we must refer to the IPCC's "worst case" scenario (even worse than "business as usual"). But it would be lovely if a few more people would at least understand the issue and the IPCC reports are a place to start. I'd love to be proven wrong by anyone with actual working knowledge of the subject.
Finally, I recommend the amazing movie: Samsara. This is a meditation that may help some of us to accept the impermanence of everything we care about. Samsara may help us get beyond our natural psychological barriers that go up when we are faced by an utterly hopeless situation. This even penetrates to scientific circles, where scientists of the IPCC fail to state alarming results for the (reasonable) fear that people will simply ignore findings that are "crazy bad". If we "seek first to understand" as a policy, we need to look squarely at all the possibilities, including the scary ones.
Comments
Post a Comment