September 8, 2015
So let me just lay it all out: The pressure of impending climate collapse is overwhelming. The long, slow-boil terror, day in and day out, requires stamina. Activists who have been aware for a long time of all our problems, who have been working for better days that we create through an audacity of skill, tenacity, heart and hard work, are struggling to not give in to despair and doom. Everything we work for has this dark cloud overhead.
What’s crazy is we probably had tens of thousands of years left before the next climate change began, since the last one only finished some 10,000 years ago. We’ve used most of our new era all up. By many ways we’re erasing millions of years of life in a span of decades, and climate change is now the capstone. If the oceans die off, as they have in the past from massive climate disruptions, it affected the entire world, and took millions of years to rebuild into something new and alive.
We’ve entered the Sixth Mass Extinction (for multiple reasons, not just climate), temperatures continue to rise, another July was again the hottest on record, sea level rise is guaranteed to take over coastlines, the oceans are acidifying, and with all the burning carbon being forced into the atmosphere, any moment a possible tipping point could occur that sets off a massive release of previously frozen methane from melting permafrost in the Far North or the seabed and blasts the Earth with a doomsday feedback loop.
Even before that happens, we could face a future of what renowned former NASA climate scientist describes as: “Forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”
And all this could happen within several decades. The effects we’re experiencing now are just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.
And what’s crazy is the Republican Party has descended into madness, as Jonathan Chait writes in The New Yorker.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is actually “warning other countries to “proceed with caution” before negotiating with the U.S.” Isn’t this treason, not to mention a crime against humanity?
Our times are now being compared to right before World War II.
During World War II, millions and millions of people suffered and died, as well as were killed in outright warfare.
But this time might be worse. Except for the threat of nuclear war, we have always had a world to recover back into, even in our darkest hour.
Humanity’s best nature worldwide has worked for centuries to continually improve the rights, security and well-being of people in the face of indescribable odds and ugliness.
In December, the world’s powers will gather in Paris for the United Nation’s climate change conference.
It’s our last best chance for sure.
And in hopeful news? Jonathan Chait, in his New Yorker piece, excitingly describes massive green energy gains in the last couple years that have been spurred by “edict” and “technological revolution”.
Is there actually some hope? We are in an emergency situation, we could still be too little too late. You can’t stop a mountain from falling. Where are we in the “severing”? At the very least, sea level rise is inevitable, no matter what we do.
Even as we get emissions down, there’s still going to be the need for some kind of scaleable invention that sucks out carbon pollution that is already in the atmosphere.
I’ve said this before: What does it mean to die and die and die so many times, yet somehow still stay alive?