Tags
Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Donald J. Trump, Ecological Overshoot, Entropy, Ernst Mayr, Evangelical Right, Fossil Fuel Dependency, Global Pandemic, Global Warming, Haber–Bosch Process, Human Exceptionalism, Jevons Paradox, Joe Biden, Joseph Tainter, Mass Extinctions, Omnicide, Prof Tim Garrett, QAnon, Second Law of Thermodynamics, Sedition, Techno-Fix, White Nationalists, White Supremacists, William Catton
I recently asked a scientist on Facebook how he copes with the knowledge that we are destroying the planet within the geologic blink of an eye. Here is his answer:
Pot helps! 🙂 But psychologically, I reread Catton’s Overshoot recently, where he talks about how once humans started burning fossil fuels, we evolved (devolved?) into detritivores, species that depend on dead organic matter for our sustenance. This led me to think about Human Exceptionalism. The classic view is that humans’ assumed superiority has caused us to not consider the welfare of other species and blinded us in our ignorance to how our lifestyles were jeopardizing life support systems worldwide (including for us); I agree with this view. But I’ve also come to challenge another view of Human Exceptionalism; namely, that we have the intelligence and capacity for compassion to override what is every species’ imperative (humans and all other species): that is, to continuously consume available resources with no concern for future sustainability, with its concomitant and inevitable population boom and bust. Thus, I try to cope by accepting, with sad resignation, that we’re not any more special than other species – we’ve just lacked apex predators to keep our population in check and have used hundreds of millions of years of stored solar energy (i.e. fossil fuels) to temporarily shield ourselves from our population crash. This final kicking us off our superiority pedestal has helped me “let go” and inspired me to aspire to be more in tune with natural processes (such as organic gardening, which also helps on a very small scale to restore the soil biodiversity we’re regularly destroying with the Haber-Bosch process). How do you cope? 🙂
I replied later that day…
To cope, you first must know the truth. Our modern global civilization is a heat engine, subject to the second law of thermodynamics just as every civilization that came before. Our massive burning of fossil fuels has not only blanketed the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases and acidified the oceans, it has given humans the unfortunate ability to disrupt all the major biochemical processes of the planet, thus making the current civilizational collapse one of global proportions. There is no putting that genie back in the bottle and the environmental disorder it has unleashed. Thus we are firmly in the grips of entropy and no amount of techo-fixes, such as walls to hold back the rising sea or geoengineering schemes to blot out that fiery orb in the sky, will change this stark fact. As Jospeph Tainter argued, further complexity only brings more unforeseen problems that must be solved. Higher efficiency only leads to increased consumption (i.e. Jevons paradox). As you say, humans are no different than any other organism in that they will expand to consume all available resources until reined in by environmental limits. Our superior problem-solving capabilities have allowed us to dramatically overshoot the planet’s natural regenerative systems. And so it seems that Ernst Mayr was correct when he said human intelligence is a fatal mutation in the evolutionary process. According to Mayr, intelligence is a double-edged sword, serving as a tool for our survival or rapidly carrying out our own annihilation. How do I cope with all that? Other than adopting a stoic attitude towards our predicament, there is no coping. It is what it is. Find simple joys in nature while nature is still around. I love hummingbirds and watch them at the feeder when I am home. Live in the moment when you can. Enjoy mankind’s ability to create beautiful art. Be kind to your fellow human and nonhuman. We’re all just temporary passengers on Spaceship Earth.
Now that America’s wannabe dictator has vacated the White House, maybe we can get back to pretending we’re doing anything of significance about climate change and the ghastly future bearing down on us. I’m sure we’ll get right on that existential crisis as soon as we tamp down the current global pandemic, sort out Trump’s QAnon and white nationalist seditionists, and bring together a country where half the population believes their cult leader’s endless lies and the evangelical Right idolize Trump as a vessel anointed by God. So much for heeding warnings against idolizing false prophets. Despite all those minor details, we’ll all be on the same page, right? Well won’t we???
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 
Excellent conversation highlighting the situation quite succinctly. The trick humans mastered was to expand their ecological niche beyond the natural limits that constrain other species. I believe this moment happened long before humans discovered fossil fuels, occurring no later than the time the first neolithic farmer plowed land to plant crops. At which point entropy and biological succession determined human destiny.
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Overshoot is a valuable read, as is your post here. Many thanks!
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The Doomsday Clock probably reached midnight in 1990 or so. We’ve had so many “if we don’t act now” and other points of no return, we surely must have passed more than one.
It’s obvious no political system will ever do anything remotely suitable to the task of keeping the planet habitable. We’re still talking about 2030 and 2050 for this or that, as if billions won’t have starved by then.
It is a challenge to keep my head up some days, but the most freeing realization I’ve had is that it’s not my responsibility to save the world. I’m trapped in this system, this moment in history. It’d ridiculous to think I can single-handedly achieve anything against such titanic momentum. From a childhood worried about nuclear war to an adulthood seeing a much bigger cataclysm, it’s all the same.
Love the cartoons.
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Nice piece, Mike. The big question is how much of humanity will be sacrificed when the crunch comes. Half? Three quarters? 90%? There are scientific projections for all these scenarios.they all depend how quickly we gain control of our ‘uncontrollable’ emissions and activities. If we ever do. My guess is ther horrible truth will start to sink in in the current decade, with. Global water crisis coming with the ‘slow roast’ of global heating and the start of the big mid-century food crises. We need a big wake up call now, according to the Council for the Human Future. http://Www.humanfuture.org
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If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. – Lao Tzu
I’m going to sit on my ass,comment on the web & see where I end up because I’m incapable of seeing any solution. I will not change anything that upsets my set of living arrangements. When will we get back to normal? I shouldn’t have to live like this! 😉
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“Get me outta here!” – Roger Rabbit
“Beam me up,Scotty!” – Capt. Kirk
They might be on to something.
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Thank you xrayMike79.
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We are all in this together and who the hell wants that!
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man people are not even commenting anymore they care so little.
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Can I get help adding to the 2nd Amendment?
The right to keep & bear arms shall not be infringed regardless of how many American citizens are killed in the streets,schools,churches. I’ll be glad to add any other locations where Clever Apes can be slaughtered.
“It’s interesting when people die…give them dirty laundry” – Don Henley
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Someone cut off the fan! The Clever Ape is flinging shit!
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Hope you are enjoying a regimen of depressing, unpalatable, ghastly, unrelenting missives of gloom and doom courtesy of our friends and devoted laborers of science, the climate scientists and ecologists, patiently and steadily amassing evidence that humankind is driving the planet towards an unbearable hell hole at breakneck speed (getting you tipsy with tipping points, wildly gyrating polar jet streams, collapsing ice shelves, glaciers, and permafrost… and other apocalyptic goodies still hidden in the climate mystery bag but likely to pop out in short order), and in the process wiping out millions of species that have been around for umpteen millions of years, all in the blink of an eye in geological terms. But, please take comfort in the fact that life is resilient, even if only bacteria survive (or with a bit of luck single cell protozoa or the eternal optimists could even place bets on something higher up the evolutionary ladder) and so as the sun rises, evolution will continue at its merry snail like pace. The planet might still yet have at least 2 billion years left where some form of “life” might soldier on (barring cosmic events). Heck in a billion years “intelligent” life may yet once again reappear (whether it has yet appeared is debatable in the current climate — pun intended, though I guess some of you may shudder at the ugly prospect of such deja vu) and like a do-over get a chance to once again annihilate itself and most other forms of life, round 2. Its pretty clear that inherently unstable “intelligent life” never persists for long and is just a flash in the pan in evolutionary terms, generally going out with a bang (as a mercy killing we might still resort to nuclear armageddon), like all things the failed human experiment is probably typical across the universe.
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I really appreciate your comment, Henri. Thanks.
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I’ve been watching videos from the Mars Rover trying to decide which piece of property I want to build my new home on before the monkey minded,baboon brained Clever Apes destroy this place.
CO2 footprints – Parents with one child increase their CO2 footprint by 50% each, 2 children by 100%,3 children by 150%. Someone needs to tell parents that their children aren’t special & just add to infinite growth on in a finite habitat.
Wailing & gnashing of teeth won’t be pretty in the future. One would think that 7,800,000,000 Clever Apes would change directions. They do have an excuse; “It’s not my fault.”
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Recommend: “Seaspiracy is a 2021 documentary film about the environmental impact of fishing directed by and starring Ali Tabrizi, a British filmmaker. The film examines various human impacts on marine life and advocates for ending fish consumption.”
Watching it from a higher vantage point (the drum roll of the vast litany of humankind’s destructive activities), just reinforces the unpleasant zeitgeist haunting you that we now have a ring side seat to the great anthropocene extinction and the first round came and went long ago. Every day goes by leaves less doubt in my mind that humanity will wipe itself out in short order along with most living species on the planet. But I do love the innocently meek sounding euphemism: “bycatch” (code word for kill every damn living thing in the ocean). I also like the irony of obsessing about single use plastics, straws etc whereas huge fleets of gigantic super trawlers endlessly scraping the ocean bottoms, with millions of miles of fishing nets leaving nothing behind are doing far more immediate massive damage to sea life, coral reefs etc (in fact wiping out the entire ocean ecosystem from top to bottom as well as adding to microplastics pollution as a little side bonus from discarded nets etc). Similar to competing for disappearing water by drilling ever deeper wells (at least deeper than your neighbors eg instead of “keeping up with the Joneses” its going down with the…) to tap depleted non- renewable aquifers (eg CA), with almost no fish left it’s a race to the bottom, as we ever more viciously exploit the remaining scraps (slave labor to reduce costs, poaching etc). But maybe we consumers like to focus more on the fact we don’t want to fill our battered guts with the ever increasing amounts of microplastics we get from eating fish, knowing too that PCBs, dioxin and a litany of chemical toxins like to hitch a ride on them like stowaways (maybe mercury compounds too, I don’t know, anyway bon appetit mon ami). Did not realize to what extent commercial fish farming is a non-sustainable absolute, disgusting, polluting, revolting horror show. This is one of those superb documentaries that does a brilliant job of leaving you completely nauseated, drained, steam-rolled, A film that brings to your consciousness the depressing thought that you are “technically” a member of this self-annihilating species and in need of a stiff drink.
“Trawlers catch fish by dragging nets along the seabed. This process disturbs the carbon stored in sediment, releasing it as carbon dioxide and acidifying the ocean. The annual emissions from this practice are greater than those of Germany, according to the study published in Nature.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-30/china-super-trawlers-overfishing-world-oceans/10317394
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With all the environmental pollutants & physical destruction the Clever Ape has unleashed on this rock & it’s species I simply refer to George Carlin: “No one seems to notice,no one seems to care.”
Nothing like exciting news.
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Some interesting reading for anybody who might want to share with those out there not quite obtuse enough to remain die hard climate deniers but naive (or desperately wishful thinking) enough to be bamboozled and/or titillated by the latest fads or installments of the “feel-good” clownish, farcical proposals to save the planet. All those poor souls crying out: “for god sake help ! throw me some kind of life preserver, I am drowning in extinction despair. I cannot cope with the horrors of inescapable mass annihilation or contemplate the near term hell-hole we are rapidly turning the planet into, so please, I need to be hoodwinked to alleviate this nightmarish angst”. Maybe we should not be too snide speaking of these deluded cohorts given the even greater hordes that just plain don’t give a rats arse.
https://theconversation.com/climate-scientists-concept-of-net-zero-is-a-dangerous-trap-157368
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/05/28/the-net-zero-mirage/
“How many “tipping points” is one planet expected to endure? According to the latest climate assessment by the World Meteorological Association, there is now a 40% likelihood that global temperatures will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels within the next five years, and these odds of that happening are rising.”
“The Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the planet, driving the rising sea levels that threaten 300 million people around the world living in coastal communities. This is, of course, one reason why the fossil fuel lobby is very happy with the data showing 80 percent of US High School students lack even a basic understanding of science.”
As long as corporations can profit any assinine con is in the cards, the lastest being biomass/woodburning: “In February, more than 500 scientists and economists wrote to President Joe Biden and other leaders to warn that converting wood into power is a carbon disaster, a forest destroyer and an absurdly inefficient way to generate energy… Trees are more valuable alive than dead,”
“Study after study proves that “burning coal instead of woody biomass””
But I have to confess, the following did leave me twisting in the wind for a moment, took a bit for the depth of absurdity to sink in, been a while since I have experienced such jaw dropping irony:
“In what the Times described as “a paradox worthy of Kafka,” ConocoPhillips is aiming to install cooling devices in Alaska’s rapidly melting permafrost to keep the ground stable enough to support drilling that is contributing to warming temperatures.”
Hell, this is a kicker for sure in the annals of human stupidity, Alice in Wonderland cannot hold a candle to this (or maybe a gas flare stack). A worthy epitaph to our demise, hands down winner of any Darwin Award. As a runner up maybe its all those nations just chomping at the bit in a frenzy to drill wells galore in the Arctic now that global warming has melted the ice, let’s get cracking, its the human inspired feed back loop of global warming !
Also if anyone has any illusions that regime change will mean any letting up of the farcical charade and lip service we endlessly devote to climate change:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/05/27/climate-denial-biden-goes-bat-massive-alaska-drilling-project-approved-under-trump?cd-origin=rss&utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Weekly%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Weekly%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email
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Another great comment, Henri. Thank you.
From the first article: “The only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.”
Ultimately the authors are still in denial. They imply that such cuts can be done and still maintain industrial civilization.
If any other realistic doomers are out there want to connect fee free mountain.courage@protonmail.com. Misanthropy and cynicism welcome.
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I’m a little late with this but that’s normal for me. 😉
Short version – Start at 6:30 & listen for 5-6 minutes,the most depressing part.
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Thanks! I knew this but hadn’t seen this interview. He boils it down very well. Some serious truth-telling indeed. Maybe we should all relax. Just get out the popcorn…
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hmm might be news to some that with all our amazing technology we have
no plan B:
and the only plans we have are plans for global suicide…
we are years too late..we need to give ourselves a kick up the backside…
indescribable suffering and death of billions of people…
its the casino of death, the casino of untold suffering…
Very sad how unrealistic/naive these poor dudes are, makes me cringe, we are finished, end of story. Any offering of hope at this point that our socio-economic neoliberal capital system will make the desperately needed changes is just utter cruel bullshit.
No way on earth we dumb lemmings are going to stop running over the cliff.
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Anyone know what’s going on with the Megacancer blog, started by James? It’s been down (“suspended page”) for a couple of weeks now. I hear he used to hang around this site.
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The megacancer of this rock is the 7.9 billion Clever Apes & the only cure is NTHE.
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i was also wondering what happened to the megacancer blog.
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My mental collapse!
I’m not religious but have been thinking about joining the Muslin & Mormon religions.
When I die, I will get 72 virgins & my own planet. My god is better than anyone else’s god & we will go to war to prove it.
“When you believe in thinks you don’t understand,then you suffer.” “Superstition”-Stevie Wonder
The great thing about FREEDOM!,is that one can believe any BS they choose.
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I refuse to proof read!
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The brilliant Chris Hedges said the American empire will collapse within a decade, two at most, at this point I think that is being overly generous. The current “heat dome” baking the western US, drought, disappearing aquifers, and reservoirs drying up fast is just an opening act portending the dire horrors soon to come, to quote: “This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years… But it is just surreal to see what you only ever saw before in your research studies and models, actually happening in real life. And you’re almost dumbfounded by the speed at which your projections have become reality…. the ground is burning like a hotplate. And we’re standing on it.”
If you thought last fire season was bad, seems like this early pre-summer heat wave will be the opening salvos of something far worse making last season seem like a picnic. 100s of raging massive wildfires out of control spewing vast amounts of c02 and pollution. Beyond the immediate human death toll due to fires, pollution, unbearable killer heat and the cascading collapse of power grids, the most immediate threat will be the collapse of agriculture (already huge tracts of agricultural land, almond trees etc are being plowed under in CA etc.), the number one cause of our demise and self-inflicted autodafe will be worldwide massive crop failures and starvation (we are not talking millions but billions of humans). And yet the very humans out west, already suffering and impacted, only exhibit a stunning level of passivity and cognitive dissonance that rivals the pathetic bleating of dumb sheep led to the slaughter by our revered consumerist death cult and the self-immolating endlessly greedy fossil fuel cabal (but maybe one should not malign sheep too much and revert to the lemmings comparison as more befitting.
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well looks like armageddon is coming faster than we possibly could have imagined:
“The news does not get much worse than a recent scientific report that the planet is trapping twice as much heat as it did only 14 years ago.” and “Their study found a doubling of the imbalance for the period from 2005 to 2019. That’s exceptionally troubling, almost beyond comprehension”…
Humans across the globe including the US will literally be baking to death, its already starting and will only intensify to catastrophic levels too soon for comfort. . “It is particularly concerning to see high night-time temperatures becoming a growing threat. This gives no respite to people struggling to cope with searing daytime heat and can lead to deadly heatstroke”
Unsurvivable heatwaves:the “wet bulb” temperature (WBT). Once the WBT reaches 35C, the air is so hot and humid that the human body cannot cool itself by sweating and even fit people sitting in the shade die within six hours.
Thirty-three years after James Hansen testified to Congress, global carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 70% and have never gone down in any given year, always up, never down. When Hansen testified, fossil fuels were 79% of the world’s energy. It’s 84% today in the face of every wind turbine and solar panel that’s been installed over the past decades ever since Hansen spoke out about the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/28/lethal-heat-hits-the-planet/
The rhetoric and gimmicks they use to placate the public, from carbon credits to wind turbines and solar panels, are, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury.
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You are as fine an archer as Robin Hood and The Green Arrow. What you wrote was pretty near a perfect bullseye.
Ozzie Zehner did try to raise awareness for well over a decade on the issues of Solar and Wind/ We prefer our Green Illusions.Clean, Green, Sustainable. Indeed.
Jensen’s recent book Bright Green Lies is worth a look at. If only Jensen and Keith weren’t so hostile to the Trans Community I would be more willing to listen, but it’s clear I wouldn’t be welcome with them. Here at the end of the road it seems the Left side of the aisle can’t find enough to agree upon that we still have to wage what I feel are petty, harsh, insensitive actions.
The downside of Jensen’s book is that it is so numbers heavy. We’ve become a reflection of the other side, somehow losing sight of the stories and speaking in the tongues of figures.
Paul Kingsnorth wrote about our speaking in the language of business years ago and abandoning telling stories. We met our ‘enemy’ on their turf. Paul’s recently found or found again religion (one of the Catholic or Christian faiths) which makes me nervous.
It’s like Orlov changing his mind about Peak Oil. Stewart Brand becoming a nuclear supporter and a capitalist.You need a scorecard to keep track of all the changes in the characters. Good thing I’ve got years of practice from watching daytime soaps and reading Marvel Comics as a child (in the heyday of Kirby-Ditko-Heck-Lee).
Jason Bradford still contends we’re going back to a rural lifestyle, but doesn’t mention the number of deaths we’ll be seeing.. Not sure how many ‘us’ that is. Will it even be possible to grow food when temps reach 104 degrees when photosynthesis shuts down.
Could Sylvia Earle be right? That by not eating fish we’ll save the earth? Is Chis Hedges on the right path by preaching his faith in becoming a Vegan. Many tend to be okay eating things not of our Kingdom (vegetables) thinking that’s okay.
My life partner and I taught 2 semesters of Sustainability at the New School and CUNY (we really wanted to call it Collapsology, but that scared the beejees out of the Curriculum Committee). As gentle as we were with the topic, the push back was rapid and immediate from the start. We don’t discuss solutions (what are solutions anyway?), but most of those attending the class wouldn’t take any action unless they were guaranteed the outcome they desired. Anything less was not acceptable.
Tali Sharot’s work on the brain seems to be something I can agree with. For the most part people just dig their heels in when their beliefs are threatened.
The young woman of color at the Union Square Farmer’s Market Information Booth strongly insisted that India found a new method of saving water. She insisted that permaculture would do the job. An odd statement from a person of color as most permaculture courses in the USA are not exactly examples of a diverse background.
Things have certainly not changed much in the past 20 years. I remember stumbling into Peak Oil due to Mike Ruppert’s talk at a 9-11 Truth event. Just being a witness to all of this for all that time and trying to maintain my sanity has been a challenge.
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just wanted to add that beyond our greed-driven, relentless and unabated pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere, the runaway nightmarish doubling of heat retention in the last 14 yrs is probably also due to all the self-reinforcing and uncontrollable positive feedback loops finally starting to kick in big time (and probably will soon take over as the major drivers, then we can finally take a back seat and relax and just watch the show or fireworks if you want…), saturated acidic dying oceans unable to act as a carbon buffer any more, ever diminishing albedo due to ice melt, melting carbon rich permafrost slush and activated microbes releasing vast amounts of methane & CO2 which is also bubbling up from ocean clathrates (and this might start accelerating exponentially), raging fires sweeping across the planet etc…as the saying goes, its already out of our hands…
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul…..
They would not listen, they’re not listening still.
Perhaps they never will…
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Wonder what happens when an animal overpopulates it’s habitat?
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Strange how the corporate elites don’t seem to realize that, much faster than ever imagined or anticipated, they and their cherished offspring will roast and perish in the hell they are turning this planet into just like the rest of us, ending their unbridled power and lives of excess, obscene luxury and waste, the result of commodifying and ruthlessly plundering this planet till the laws of nature put an end to this relentless, maniacal destruction being wrought on the ecosphere. They might have a little extra time but probably not much and their end days won’t be any less nightmarish. I don’t really envy the super-rich holed up for a time in their underground luxury condos (converted former nuclear warhead missile silos at the cost of millions, how charmingly poetic the symbolic irony) like condemned desperate rats scurrying around in their underground burrows feasting on their remaining caviar stocks while all hell rages above them till the lights finally go out.
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Ah, almost forgot to mention the doomsday preppers, hard as nails, mistrusting, rugged individualists, barricaded in their stockades, complete with machine gun turrets and military grade arsenals, barbwire and fierce dogs to guard their precious food pantries. Sorry to break the news… Sadly, all this meticulous prepping won’t keep them from being baked alive in searing heat when the propane tanks run out or their solar panel wiring installs dissolve in the intense off the scales heat. I know you valiently tried your best to outlive the rest of us but you will have to give it a little more thought. Unfortunately, it’s hard to compete with those tycoons that can take classy luxury elevators to the bottom coolness of their posh silos….
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from Rebecca Gordon:
“But here’s what I didn’t imagine: that, at my own advanced age (I’m almost 77), I would live to see something of the genuine blast-furnace effect of that phenomenon. Now, it seems, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not just my children and grandchildren, but I am likely to be living through climate change in a big-time way. After all, this is happening remarkably fast, as the recent soaring temperatures and fires in the northwestern U.S. and Canada have so shockingly made clear, as has the staggering mega-drought, unprecedented in human memory, that now extends across significant parts of this country and exceeds the worst-case scenarios of climate scientists.
And given those blazing temperatures in our own backyards, including the Northeast where I live, who had time to notice that the ground (not air) temperature at one spot in Siberia (Siberia!) hit 118 degrees recently as heat waves scorched the region…”
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/10/why-are-we-fueling-our-own-extinction?utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Weekly%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Weekly%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/07/09/dead-heat-it-too-late-leave?utm_term=AO&utm_campaign=Weekly%20Newsletter&utm_content=email&utm_source=Weekly%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email
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Three great comments!
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Could someone please speed up this dragging ass collapse? I can’t handle the anticipation much longer.
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Tennessee Republicans must have read my last comment. Thanks for any attempt at collapsing family units. There might be a lot of tears & gnashing of teeth in Tennessee.
https://www.rawstory.com/vaccine-tennessee/
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Its hard to stomach the current endless flow of alarmist rags coming out like this “The American West’s Climate Hellscape Is Just a Preview Droughts, heat waves, and floods are the new normal—unless policymakers get serious.” from FP magazine, a rag for smug cloistered plutocrats (or their endless milquetoast cadres of obliging subservient sycophants and whores crowding the corridors of government and academics), only now, you gutless wonders have the moral courage to finally sound the alarm, like the lyrics go:
“Well it’s a little too late to do the right thing now”
or to paraphrase
“Turn the jukebox up throw some sawdust down. I’m too far gone to turn this heat around”.
A nauseating plethora of alarmist articles are now popping up like choking weeds with the same pathetic song and dance, heck, gosh darn, we’ve been filling our pants with mountains of scat (latin always sounds more high class) for the last 50 years, and it looks like they’re finally starting to split at the seams and I am worried about all the fans I hear humming, so maybe its time we start doing something about it. To quote: ““It’s really a wake-up call to us that climate change is here and it’s getting worse, and we’re not prepared,” and “shrinking window of opportunity to enact policies ” and I don’t know where they found this complete idiot that somehow calls himself a climate scientist: “Climate change is not self-perpetuating; we’re perpetuating it through the choices that we continue to make,” said Swain, the climate scientist”, unless the sod was misquoted I find it hard to believe this came out of his piehole (maybe it should read Swain, the court jester). Not only is it self-perpetuating but its almost a certainty that multiple irreversible catastrophic tipping points are now in the rear view mirror (a tragic joke that we can still hold the line at 2C), and that as right-wingers in their infinite wisdom rightly predicted human activity is rapidly becoming only a minor contributor (although of course they wrongly claimed that at the beginning), the die is cast, the rubicon of self annihilation has been crossed, the cake is baked. Even if it wasn’t its clear we will never do anything coming even close to addressing the magnitude of the unfolding nightmare.
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hmm to add to the lovely, melancoly “Swain song” mentioned in my prior comment:
‘Subsidizing the Climate and Ecological Crisis’: Biden Approving Fossil Fuel Permits Faster Than Trump or Obama. AP’s findings run counter to the president’s campaign vow to end oil and gas extraction on public lands.”
and:
“Manchin’s Energy Bill Condemned as ‘Kick in the Gut to Climate Justice: “Instead of funding non-polluting alternatives, it throws public money at expensive, unproven technologies that will allow the fossil fuel industry to continue poisoning frontline communities and trashing the planet.”
we can always count on Manichaean Manchin to do the right thing
you probably heard about the plague of grasshoppers but in case you didnt see this:
1 billion sea creatures cooked to death in Pacific Northwest
Shoreline temperatures have rocketed above 120 degrees Fahrenheit
ah heck we’ve pretty much already destroyed the dying over heated acidic, overfished oceans anyway so what does it matter…
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The Rolling Stones were close but center target.
Their lyric could have been ‘You can’t always get what you want but sometimes you get what you deserve.’
Maybe I should add the “World’s Greatest Lyricist” to my bucket list?
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Any time collapse, Covid, climate change comes up in conversation with my brother-in- law,he says “It’s going to get worse before it gets nasty.”
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Well to paraphrase one of our great leaders: “starvation is just around the corner”.
Some recent healines: “‘Wither away and die:’ U.S. Pacific Northwest heat wave bakes wheat, fruit crops” and “Farmers and experts anticipate worst wheat harvest in years after extreme heat and drought levels fields” and “The U.S. Wheat Crop Is in Trouble
Spring wheat could see some of its lowest wheat yields in decades due to widespread drought and heat.” and “the Department of Agriculture said Monday that farmers were projected to harvest their smallest crop of spring wheat—crops planted in the spring and harvested in the autumn—in 33 years” and a few quotes from farmers:
“This is probably going to be the worst harvest we’ve had for the 35 years we’ve been doing this” and “The general mood among farmers in my area is as dire as I’ve ever seen it,” Kress said. “Something about a drought like this just wears on you. You see your blood, sweat and tears just slowly wither away and die.”
“Farmers are scrambling to handle the one-two punch of drought and a searing heatwave.”
The lethal consequences of our own incorrigible folly are starting to smash into us with an apocalyptic vengence and at such a break neck pace that even I could not have imagined just a couple of years ago, and I am definitely a bona fide card carrying member of the pessimist party, like topsy-turvy day has finally come home to roost (and from what it looks like even top tier climate scientists are taken aback and bewildered not having fully factored in devastating feed-back loops) its like the planet is flipping into a slaughter house overnight, “normal” weather such as has existed for 1000s of years and allowed to exist in the first place is now a thing of the past. First the horrendous raging fires sweeping across Australia (terminally addicted to coal abetted by old Rupert), the brutal cold wave hitting Tx (damage $200 billion), now the “blast furnace” heat waves hitting the western US (and we thought it was only Dubai and our beloved Saudi compadres that were going to get their asses toasted any time soon), and recently the never before seen scale of massive, devastating flooding in Germany. Raging fires exploding across the west are already on track to far outpace the disasters of last years horrific season given the tinderbox created by the heat and drought, and, pop goes the weasel, we just lost one of the worlds most important carbon sinks. “As a consequence of decades of unrelenting logging, slash burning and cattle ranching, what was once the world’s largest carbon sink, the Amazon, is now a net emitter of carbon.” (to quote Jeffrey St. Clair, Roaming Charges, the most brilliant commentator on the planet, no one comes close to this demi-god).
I wrote in a comment earlier: “and other apocalyptic goodies still hidden in the climate mystery bag but likely to pop out in short order”, recent events certainly prove this was not just idle banter….the roller coaster has hit full speed now and now goodies will be coming down the pipeline lickety-split…
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Little addendum, at least as a consolation prize (or condemned mans last smoke) we get to enjoy the spectacular and majestic beauty of towering 40,000 foot tall pyrocumulonimbus clouds (mouth full at that), reaching to the heavens like no other clouds, the signature event of massive burning blazes scorching the earth, the ultimate tell tale sign of a dying planet raging out of control (itself through lightenting causing even more fires to erupt…)
To be more descriptive, a NASA article entitled “Fire-breathing Storm Systems” describes it this way: “Pyrocumulonimbus is the fire-breathing dragon of clouds. A cumulonimbus without the “pyre” part is imposing enough—a massive, anvil-shaped tower of power reaching five miles (8 km) high, hurling thunderbolts, wind and rain. Add smoke and fire to the mix and you have pyrocumulonimbus, an explosive storm cloud actually created by the smoke and heat from the fire”. Called “pyroCb” storms, they can funnel their smoke like a chimney into Earth’s stratosphere, allowing the smoke to be spread for thousands of miles.
these topsy-turvy weather events might make you think climate change is our species one true apotheosis and transformative act:
So make a face that’s horrible and frightening
Make a face as gruesome as a gargoyle’s wing
For the face that’s ugliest will be the King of Fools..
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We’re not animals, we’re human beings’: US farm workers labor in deadly heat with few protections
.. even with the most optimistic set of assumptions – the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades – we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change. The Earth’s climate would enter a chaotic era lasting thousands of years before natural processes eventually establish some sort of equilibrium. Whether human beings would still be a force on the planet, or even survive, is a moot point. One thing seems certain: there will be far fewer of us
Requiem For a Species (2010)
of course non of this has even remotely happened, pretty much the opposite (Bolsonaro and company etc…)
Not everyone believes we should be completely forthright with the general public about the depths of our crisis, including many of those in our Government.
Because it’s far too late to do anything to mitigate the crisis.
Far too late to avoid a global environmental, ecological and economic catastrophe.
This may go some way to explaining why the general public is still not being told the truth by Governments around the world.
It may go some way to explaining why many of the super-rich have already set up lavish underground ‘doomsday bunkers’ where they and their families can bug out when the shit hits the fan.
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Entitled Americans shouldn’t have to pick their own tomatoes & they should priced cheaply. Wonder how many have severe reactions to physical work & sweat?
My garden takes a lot of time & effort.
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We live in exciting times & the future will be a real blast…of heat.
Time to share.
I don’t like stupid,including mine in the past, regardless of one’s race,gender,politics,religion,culture,ego or immediate gratification demands.. There is no vaccine yet,for any of these?
I do realize that “You can’t fix stupid.” Wait! Stop! NTHE will cure stupid!
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