vs
2 Likes
4 Likes
Here’s a novel twist:
https://twitter.com/joshgnosis/status/1349834063905898503?s=21
https://twitter.com/joshgnosis/status/1349839044125999104?s=21
A Murdoch-owned paper, of course.
4 Likes
Conclusions
We have summarized predictions of a ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health, and climate-disruption upheavals (including looming massive migrations) and resource conflicts this century. Yet, our goal is not to present a fatalist perspective, because there are many examples of successful interventions to prevent extinctions, restore ecosystems, and encourage more sustainable economic activity at both local and regional scales. Instead, we contend that only a realistic appreciation of the colossal challenges facing the international community might allow it to chart a less-ravaged future. While there have been more recent calls for the scientific community in particular to be more vocal about their warnings to humanity (Ripple et al., 2017; Cavicchioli et al., 2019; Gardner and Wordley, 2019), these have been insufficiently foreboding to match the scale of the crisis. Given the existence of a human “optimism bias” that triggers some to underestimate the severity of a crisis and ignore expert warnings, a good communication strategy must ideally undercut this bias without inducing disproportionate feelings of fear and despair (Pyke, 2017; Van Bavel et al., 2020). It is therefore incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to eschew reticence, avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and “tell it like it is.” Anything else is misleading at best, or negligent and potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst.
6 Likes
2 Likes
No doubt that Climate Change is one of the most Complex Problems that we need to solve together.
We have many solutions, we need to make sure that they are being implemented widely.
4 Likes
This…
but also THIS:
5 Likes
How about some good news for a change?
(sorry paywalled but:)
Personally going to celebrate in advance of all the hyperventilating the late stage capitalist Greed Community is going to do, hearing that the very ground we stand on, the very air we breathe, the clean water on which all life depends, is legally defensible and has a right to exist.
I think I’ll go to Wheatsville South and buy a coupla these:
Cheers.
5 Likes
I hope it’s the first step in addressing the issue, but we’ll see.
2 Likes
We are all connected.
5 Likes
Too bad you can’t bomb climate change back into the Stone Age Ice Age.
Although… nuclear winter… - let’s keep thinking, shall we?
1 Like
Please excuse overabundant use of sarcastic quotes, I allowed myself one cup of coffee after weeks of being off the stuff; thanks.
Yeah, I am not a huge fan of “geoengineering” (nowadays called “climate engineering”) which belies the very real issue that this term is far more guesswork than real honest engineering.
My criticisms of such are not limited to “solar radiation management”…
… so…
… I agree, let’s definitely sort something better than nuclear winter, yes.
There is no Plan[et] B, as the saying goes.
Here’s a take from Stewart Brand, he of Whole Earth Catalog and The Long Now Foundation and many other things besides…
https://twitter.com/stewartbrand
… wrote this book:
and specific to my discussion here, this section of that wiki entry:
Brand has self-identified as an “eco-pragmatist.”
I can’t begin to quantify here, now, in writing, how queasy I feel when I contemplate a future in which nuclear power and geoengineering / climate engineering are required, regarded as sine qua non for humans to continue to live on our home planet.
Seriously.
I live in Texas, which claims (if our gubner is to be believed) that were it to be its own nation, would be the ninth largest economy in the world. [Interesting if true.] This state is utterly beholden to the petroleum industry. Texas state gummint has denied and will continue to deny climate change even as Houston floods, drowns…
… while choking to breathe…
… trashing the Gulf of Mexico, on which many depend for food and employment…
(oh lookit a success story but at tremendous cost–insert the justice deferred, justice denied quote here)
… even as the state seeks to develop even more petro-infrastructure threatening to poison critical freshwater aquifers that a lot of us (like me) have as our sole source of drinking water…
… the Edwards Aquifer in particular, being already overdrawn and fragile due to the many droughts we have in Texas.
The half-life of petroleum pollution is long. Remediation of such pollution costs time and money and quite often the health of living beings directly and unavoidably exposed. Cleanup is never even close to 100%. The petroleum industry has gotten off legal hooks for cleaning up its messes for nearly a century:
The half-life of many kinds of nuclear pollution is longer and has far-reaching consequences inside the genomes of all life-forms imaginable. So IMO, fuck nuclear power. The assholes who run our current energy system can’t even be arsed to get petroleum right. Blah blah blah but but but thorium beds are ok and can be run correctly or easily or whatever etc., ok fine change my mind but please provide citations and a path forward that excludes late stage capitalism and the invariable human stupidity.
These mutations are irreversible and long-lasting, far beyond human comprehension.
Humans are very very bad at assessing threats that are invisible, exponential, or otherwise regarded as remote inasmuch as they do not see themselves personally affected or in danger.
So before I go full depression and lead us all into the spiral of thinking that our planet is in a death spiral, I want to post these as positive actions we can take.
If you do have time / energy / ability, plant some fucking trees or help set up food gardens in food deserts or communities-at-risk; if you don’t have one near you, please consider starting one of your own. Examples include but are not limited to… please post your own additions in your replies:
http://ronfinley.com/the-ron-finley-project/
If you have no time or land to plant trees, and you are privileged enough to have money to donate, please conside these:
etc.
Try to find an org that performs over the long haul (so that the trees get watered and are planted in ways compatible with current science):
Thank you for reading this far.
8 Likes
Literally:
4 Likes
4 Likes
The greenhouse future awaits us all.
Bruce Sterling called it.
http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/26-50/Note%2000027.txt
Over many years, I’ve read hundreds of thousands of words about
the Greenhouse Effect. The issue has been very hard for
any futurist to miss. In 1994, I even wrote and published
an entire science fiction novel postulating a grim
Greenhouse future.
handles:
and
and
4 Likes
5 Likes
Handy graphic:
11 Likes
It is, but I think people could make this even simpler. Cold air is sluggish. It tends to stay in the Arctic., whereas warm arctic air spills out all over the place. And that’s what we’re getting, warm arctic air everywhere, which incidentally is still much too cold for places like Texas.
7 Likes
