Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumWhat If We Stopped Pretending? The climate apocalypse is coming. (New Yorker)
The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we cant prevent it.
New Yorker
By Jonathan Franzen5:00 A.M.
Sept 8,2019
The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafkas fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts weve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If youre younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earthmassive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If youre under thirty, youre all but guaranteed to witness it.
...If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the worlds inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope...I wonder what might happen if, instead of denying reality, we told ourselves the truth.
All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was winnable. Once you accept that weve lost it, other kinds of action take on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving action. In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weaponsthese are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it.
And then theres the matter of hope. If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them longer-term, most of them shorter. Its fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of whats to come, but its just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specificallya community, an institution, a wild place, a species thats in troubleand take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that its good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending
This is a long powerful article. I cant do it justice with the clips. This article and comments from some very smart posters have made me, painfully, come to agree with the authors conclusion.
Zoonart
(11,845 posts)something close to what has been expressed in this essay.
He said we should stop spending money on "Saving" the planet and spend our money instead, on space exploration with the goal of getting the human genome off the planet and onto an hospitable planet elsewhere in the universe. This is a measure of how darkly a great mind viewed the future of sustaining life on of this planet.
Boomer
(4,168 posts)If we can't keep Earth -- the place best suited for our survival -- in habitable condition, then we don't really deserve a second chance. And if we can't survive on Earth after we've turned it into a hell hole, we probably can't survive in space, which is far more harsh than even a ruined planet.
Zoonart
(11,845 posts)just pointing out that some of our most prominent thinkers are not hopeful.
We cannot spread into other worlds when we cannot take care of our own.
The_jackalope
(1,660 posts)That would justify such a superhuman effort. Why not send something like drosophila melanogaster?
The ego is a great tool, but makes a lousy master.
Zoonart
(11,845 posts)Duppers
(28,117 posts)We know of no other such planet
especially one inhabited by intelligence beings capable of growing our genes. And why would they care about such an incompetent species as us?
Newest Reality
(12,712 posts)I have come to a very similar conclusion after my forays into the available information.
It still makes sense to do what can be done to diminish the overall impact of our species on the environment and biosphere, it may be too little, and it is way too late. You could say that the momentum has gathered, the foot is on the gas pedal and the pedal is to the metal now. The window we had to take drastic action is closed as far as a short turnaround is concerned. Drastic, global changes in lifestyles and systems are not in the offing.
We may now be at the point where mitigating the damage and preserving what we can for an indefinite period of time deserves more focus. At best, it is two-prong then. The resources to do so are only going to go so far as resources become a more glaring issue, so how we spend them is not another opportunity to take advantage of, rather than squander it as it has been with prevention.
Climate grief has now surfaced as a psychological outcome of our predicament and that is another area that we may want to address as we collectively attempt to be honest and realistic about the rapid change, climate feedback loops and chaos to come. Recognizing that grief might be pragmatic since denial is also a means of coping, though it can make one more vulnerable and prone to shock.
We have a lot of adjusting to do, but it makes sense to be more focused and aware in the now and consider some of the ideas that the article provides.
Thanks for posting that one!
Boomer
(4,168 posts)"Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I dont see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met."
My perspective as well. Humans will not make the necessary extremely harsh sacrifices for gains we will never see in our own lifetime. And that's assuming the sacrifices worked, because I'm a bit dubious that we can put this genie back in the bottle, no matter what we do now.
lapfog_1
(29,199 posts)I'm a baby boomer scientist... not a climate scientist but I did work with a large number of them in the 1990s when I was working for NASA.
I believe the climate scientists... but I think the IPCC is too conservative when they have a) modeled the rate of climate change and b) modeled the effects of climate change.
If the Greenland Ice Sheet melts entirely, it won't be 150 years into the future... more like 50 or maybe less than that. That will cause the level of the oceans to rise 5 or 6 meters. It will likely kill (for a time) one of the great heat transportation ocean circulating currents (The Gulf Stream) from bringing warmer waters to northern Europe. You think we have weather extremes now (and we do), just wait until that happens...
We have over 7 billion people on this planet... we are going to have huge problems feeding them all within 30 years... the middle east and northern Africa and possibly parts of South America and North America and central Asia are going to be uninhabitable. Crop failures on a massive scale. Climate refugees in the 100s of millions, if not billion+.
A lot of people are going to die... and that is if we don't go to war with each other over dwindling resources.
The earth will be more like Easter Island after the Rapa Nui population exceeded the ability of the island to sustain it... 94% of the Rapa Nui died of with a period now estimated to be only 3 to 5 years ( tribal warfare, smallpox from european contact, and starvation ).
Homeless gardens aren't going to fix things.
For anyone under 35, you all better hope that there is a climate fix in the offing... and I'm not talking about getting the world off of fossil fuels, although that is required, but we may be at or beyond the tipping point where the climate that sustained humans (and other creatures) for the last few thousands of years is now in feedback loops that will warm the planet if we turned off every drop of oil and natural gas and didn't dig up and burn one more lump of coal.
StevieM
(10,500 posts)It involves a small percentage of the population hanging on until a geonengineering program can be implemented that (slowly) works against the feedback loops, at first bringing them even, and then gradually overtaking them. And that would likely take hundreds of years.
But it might not be possible to even do that well. A more dire result may not be avoidable. Hydrogen sulphide and methane hydrate may finish us off.
You should read this article. It isn't that long.
http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm
CrispyQ
(36,446 posts)Not to worry, though. Someone will come along & tell us that our big brain will get us out of this mess, even though it's our big brain that got us in this mess. "We create our own reality." Yeah, right.
mountain grammy
(26,614 posts)I'm sorry. The last paragraph:
and you're right. Clips don't do it justice.
The_jackalope
(1,660 posts)And definitely stop pretending.
Duppers
(28,117 posts)Bookmarking....back later.