Climate change

“We do not know what the future will be…”

“It is a truism that we do not know what the future will be. But we can see trends. We do not know if the power of human ingenuity will help sufficiently to change the environmental trajectory we are on. Unfortunately, the recent years of innovation, investment and patenting indicate how human ingenuity has increasingly been channelled into consumerism and financial engineering. We might pray for time. But the evidence before us suggests that we are set for disruptive and uncontrollable levels of climate change, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war.

“We do not know for certain how disruptive the impacts of climate change will be or where will be most affected, especially as economic and social systems will respond in complex ways. But the evidence is mounting that the impacts will be catastrophic to our livelihoods and the societies that we live within. Our norms of behaviour, that we call our “civilisation,” may also degrade. When we contemplate this possibility, it can seem abstract. The words I ended the previous paragraph with may seem, subconsciously at least, to be describing a situation to feel sorry about as we witness scenes on TV or online.

But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.

“These descriptions may seem overly dramatic. Some readers might consider them an unacademic form of writing. Which would be an interesting comment on why we even write at all. I chose the words above as an attempt to cut through the sense that this topic is purely theoretical. As we are considering here a situation where the publishers of this journal would no longer exist, the electricity to read its outputs won’t exist, and a profession to educate won’t exist, I think it time we break some of the conventions of this format. However, some of us may take pride in upholding the norms of the current society, even amidst collapse. Even though some of us might believe in the importance of maintaining norms of behaviour, as indicators of shared values, others will consider that the probability of collapse means that effort at reforming our current system is no longer the pragmatic choice. My conclusion to this situation has been that we need to expand our work on “sustainability” to consider how communities, countries and humanity can adapt to the coming troubles…”

Text: Jem Bendell, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy

Image: Depiction of Hell, by Hieronymus Bosch

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“Everywhere was beauty…”

“We were determined to hike as much of the park as possible despite the rising temperatures. In a flat, sandy area surrounded by tall trees, we began to unload our gear. Sweat poured down our faces and backs as we pitched our tent and rolled out our sleeping bags, which stuck to our skin in the heat. A hundred meters from camp, we found a water pump and used it to fill our glass bottles. By mid-afternoon, we had set out on a steep 1.5-mile trail to Beech Cliff, an edifice that looms over Echo Lake. The sun singed our skin, but ferns and birches and pines danced in a light breeze all around us. Everywhere was beauty.

“As we climbed, I listened for the birds. I knew from our guidebooks that many of Maine’s forest birds stop singing in late summer, but this was a peak migration period for shorebirds, and Acadia—a slip of land surrounded by ocean—falls directly in their path. The books brimmed with photos of gulls and loons filling the sky and dotting the shoreline. But on the trail, I heard nothing. I squinted toward Somes Sound in the distance, hoping to see the gulls as tiny white specks in the fjard, but saw only water.

“Where were the birds? The rodents? Even the bugs? As a child, I was terrified by loud noises. But here, with two hands on a boulder and my feet sinking into hot, dark peat, it was the profound silence that filled me with dread…

[…]

“An hour into the hike, the trail grew more vertical and less distinct from the rest of the forest floor. Vines and thick roots crossed the path, making it difficult to find our footing. The air was dense with heat; I could feel it pulsing in rhythm with my heart.

“At the trail’s halfway point, we paused to catch our breaths and drink from our water bottles. The trees were still quiet—so quiet that we could hear human voices traveling up the cliff from the lake below. Then, suddenly, a bird call. A single gull appeared overhead, its belly a white flame against the blue sky. It circled above as if watching us, before disappearing from view. We waited for others to follow, but none came. Instead, more silence; more stillness. There would be no “snowstorm” of gulls that day…”

Text: Amy Brady, Encountering Beauty and the Effects of Climate Change in Acadia National Park, Catapult.

Pic: Max Ernst, page from “Oedipus (Oedipe), Volume IV,” from A Week of Kindness or the Seven Capital Elements (“Une Semaine de bonté ou les sept éléments capitaux,” 1933–34)

“The planet’s fate is already sealed…”

“Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous seven degrees by the end of this century.

“A rise of seven degrees Fahrenheit, or about four degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.

“But the administration did not offer this dire forecast, premised on the idea that the world will fail to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite:

The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.

“The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.

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“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002.

“The document projects that global temperature will rise by nearly 3.5 degrees Celsius above the average temperature between 1986 and 2005 regardless of whether Obama-era tailpipe standards take effect or are frozen for six years, as the Trump administration has proposed. The global average temperature rose more than 0.5 degrees Celsius between 1880, the start of industrialization, and 1986, so the analysis assumes a roughly four degree Celsius or seven degree Fahrenheit increase from preindustrial levels.

“The world would have to make deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this drastic warming, the analysis states. And that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”

“The White House did not respond to requests for comment.”

Text: Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100, Washington Post.

Pic: Surface of Venus.

Black-eyed Angels

ice-melt-globe-opener.adapt.945.1

I jumped in the river, what did I see?
Black-eyed angels swam with me
A moon full of stars and astral cars
And all the figures I used to see

All my lovers were there with me
All my past and futures
And we all went to heaven in a little row boat
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt

Text: Pyramid Song, Radiohead.

Image: What the world would look like if all the ice melted, National Geographic.

Any Imaginable Future

“…New research […] shows that a major ice age was narrowly missed just before the industrial revolution , probably because the development of agriculture had nudged the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just above the tipping point.

“The bottom line is we are basically skipping a whole glacial cycle, which is unprecedented,” said Andrey Ganopolski, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany and who led the research. “It is mind-boggling that humankind is able to interfere with a mechanism that shaped the world as we know it.”

Floating Icebergs under Cloudy Skies, 1859
Frederic Church, Floating Icebergs Under Cloudy Skies. June or July 1859.

“Like no other force on the planet, ice ages have shaped the global environment and thereby determined the development of human civilisation,” Schellnhuber said. “Now human interference is acting as a huge geological force, so this is a defining paper for the Anthropocene idea.” If carbon emissions are not restricted, he said, they could end the million-year-long period of ice age cycles altogether.

Michel Crucifix, at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium and not involved in the new research, said: “It reinforces previous assessments asserting that humanity’s collective footprint on Earth already extends beyond any imaginable future of our society.”

“Such long-term consequences may seem surprising, given that the emissions will occur over a few centuries at most,” he said. “In fact, the mean half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is of the order of 35,000 years. Consequently, anthropogenic CO2 will still be in the atmosphere in 50,000 years’ time, and even 100,000 years, which is enough to prevent any glaciation.”

Text: Damian Carrington, Fossil fuel burning ‘postponing next ice age’, Guardian Australia.