My wife actually asked me if we could see the Barbie movie, which is opening at our local theater this weekend. Of course we can! I was looking forward to it already. It looks to be trippy and fun.

As the media have frequently mentioned lately, because they do love a contrast, the Oppenheimer movie also opens this weekend (but not at our theater.) Cool, I’d like to see that one, too, even more than Barbie. They’re different movies, there isn’t any real conflict between them. Here’s an article that says ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ tell the same terrifying story.

The underlying premise of all the jokes — that these films come out on the same day but are about hilariously different subjects and have wildly different tones — is misguided. The two movies actually have a fundamental, and disturbing, common ground. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind our nuclear age, and Barbie — a toy that takes over three cups of oil to produce before it lingers in landfills around the world — both tell the story of the dawn of our imperiled era.

“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” each offer a window into the creation of the Anthropocene, the suggested term for our present geological epoch, in which human beings have become the most significant influence on the natural environment at a planetary scale.

That’s an interesting connection: how do we define the anthropocene, by all the piles of plastic or the global dusting of radioactive isotopes?

Either works for me, they all coexist in a narrow slice of time, only a century long. On a geological scale, either one provides a sharp boundary.

Like I said, I’d like to see both movies. Unfortunately, Oppenheimer isn’t booked locally in the near future. Instead, we’re getting served Sound of Freedom after Barbie, a conspiracy-theory fueled abomination of a movie (see Rebecca Watson for why it’s bad). I predict it’ll clean up at the box office in our little corner of Red America.

After that post about the horror of the lawn, I thought I’d do a quick comparison.

Here’s what the majority of the campus looks like:

Here’s a narrow strip of prairie plants near the science building:

Which looks better?

We all have lots to worry about already, with pandemics and climate change and political crises and growing irrationality, but one I’m increasingly alarmed by is the popularity of these pseudo-intellectual frauds parading about as “longtermists” or “effective altruists” who believe we should be worshipping potential future generations rather than dealing with real people in the here and now. It leads to distorted priorities. It doesn’t help that their thought-leaders are cocky ignoramuses. Émile P. Torres writes about William MacAskill’s opinion of the importance of climate change.

One finds the same insouciant attitude about climate change in MacAskill’s recent book. For example, he notes that there is a lot of uncertainty about the impacts of extreme warming of 7 to 10 degrees Celsius but says “it’s hard to see how even this could lead directly to civilisational collapse.” MacAskill argues that although “climatic instability is generally bad for agriculture,” his “best guess” is that “even with fifteen degrees of warming, the heat would not pass lethal limits for crops in most regions,” and global agriculture would survive.

I am not a climate scientist, but I know a number of them, and follow the work, and that statement is jaw-droppingly idiotic. Even with the amount of warming we’ve got now, we’ve had heat waves that kill large numbers of people, and this past year has seen a series of extreme weather disasters.

Record-breaking heat waves baked India and Pakistan, then monsoon flooding left about a third of Pakistan under water, affecting an estimated 33 million people. Temperatures exceeded 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius) for prolonged periods in many places, and even broke 122 F (50 C) in Jacobabad, Pakistan, in May.

The Asian heat helped to melt some glaciers in the Himalayas, elevating rivers. At the same time, three times the normal annual rain fell in Pakistan during the weekslong monsoon. More than 1,500 people died in the flooding, an estimated 1.8 million homes were damaged or destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of livestock were lost. Food for the coming seasons will be in short supply.

Extreme heat in Europe led to wildfires, especially in Spain and Portugal. The drought in Spain dried up a reservoir, revealing the long-submerged “Spanish Stonehenge,” an ancient circle of megalithic stones believed to date back to around 5000 B.C. Electricity generation in France plummeted, with low rivers reducing the ability to cool nuclear power towers, and German barges had difficulty finding enough water to navigate the Rhine River.

That’s just this year! And the trend is ever upwards! Keep in mind that when climate experts tell you they’re concerned about a 3 degree rise, they’re looking at the mean temperature…and the extremes will be far worse. It’s the extremes that kill people and devastate regions, not the mean.

Yet here’s MacAskill blithely claiming that a FIFTEEN FUCKING DEGREE rise would be acceptable. Agriculture would survive, he thinks, so we’d be OK. Never mind the floods & fires & storms & mass upheaval & total disruption & civilization collapse. William MacAskill thinks he’ll still get his corn flakes every morning.

But don’t listen to me. Torres contacted real climatologists about that claim.

For example, I shared the section about global agriculture with Timothy Lenton, who directs the Global Systems Institute and is Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter. Lenton told me that MacAskill’s assertion about 15 degrees of warming is “complete nonsense—we already show that in a 3-degree-warmer world there are major challenges of moving niches for human habitability and agriculture.”

Similarly, Luke Kemp, a research associate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk who recently co-authored an article with Lenton on catastrophic climate change and is an expert on civilizational collapse, told me that “a temperature rise of 10 degrees would be a mass extinction event in the long term. It would be geologically unprecedented in speed. It would mean billions of people facing sustained lethal heat conditions, the likely displacement of billions, the Antarctic becoming virtually ice-free, surges in disease, and a plethora of cascading impacts. Confidently asserting that this would not result in collapse because agriculture is still possible in some parts of the world is silly and simplistic.”

If we’re really worried about existential risk and the possible extinction of the human species, I say we need to tar and feather these longtermist fantasists and launch them on a rail to the moon. It looks like delusional crackpots are going to kill us all.

Fifteen degrees. My god, that’s insane.

This past week has been Stevens County Fair week, and you know what that means: we strolled around looking at cute bunnies and ducks!

Also, unfortunately, all the trucks. This is a red county, with so many people who think the mega- (or MAGA-) truck is a status symbol. A dealership was selling trucks at the fair — $91,000!!?! Who spends that much on a basic vehicle? I think back to my aunt and uncle who had a working truck on their ranch. It was a battered near-wreck that they got used and cheap, and used to roll about the ranch, dropping off bales of hay or salt blocks. It was dented and dirty, and looked like a vehicle that saw daily hard use.

The ones I saw at the fair and parked around town on my daily walk are shiny and well-washed. They’re used by their owners to drive into town, where they can pick up a dollar cup of coffee at McDonald’s. I get to be a typical Liberal and walk, not drive, to the coffee shop for a two dollar French Roast, sneering at all the red-staters in their obviously pampered big pickup trucks.

Also, though, I’ve had the distinct impression that the trucks have been growing over the years. While I’m sneering, I’m also kind of appalled at the size of these monsters…and it’s true! The trucks have been expanding and becoming more lethal!

Trucks have gotten bigger, taller, gotten larger blind spots, and become much more powerful, luxurious, and expensive. Almost nobody even makes small pickups anymore, like the 1986 Toyota Hilux that I drove in college. The Toyota Tacoma, which used to be in that segment, is now almost as big as my old F-150.

This behemoth design trend — particularly the very tall, square front end seen in so many SUVs and trucks today — is both pointless and dangerous. Manufacturers have known for years that this style of vehicle is much more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, yet they keep making them bigger, taller, and heavier. Trucks and SUVs now make up fully 70 percent of all new cars sold in the U.S. Their bloated design is killing people, especially pedestrians.

When I made this observation on Twitter (in somewhat hyperbolic fashion), conservatives got steamed. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) accused me of being “afraid” of pickups. For the rest of the day, I got to enjoy good old conservative facts and reasoned debate: sexist and homophobic slurs, lurid fantasies about vehicular homicide, and repeated assertions that I drive a Prius — which appears to be the automotive equivalent of soy in the conservative mind palace. (I do not currently own a car of any kind, for the record.)

Rousing Cruz’s ire is a point in the author’s favor, but that 70% of the vehicles sold in the US are gross, heavy, oversized trucks and SUVs is a great American shame. And it’s killing people!

It does seem rather far-fetched to think that automakers are consciously building their biggest trucks to be more dangerous to pedestrians, but that is actually the case. To see why, let’s start with some data. According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, there were 6,283 pedestrian fatalities in 2018, an increase of 53 percent compared to 2009 and the highest figure since 1990. That gives the U.S. a figure of 19 pedestrian deaths per 1 million population. By contrast, France and Denmark had rates of 7.0 and 5.2 that year — especially remarkable because walking around in Paris and Copenhagen is far more common than it is in most American cities. Indeed, not long ago the European Union had a considerably greater rate of pedestrian fatalities than America, probably because walking is so much more common there. But the E.U. has cut pedestrian deaths by about 40 percent between 2007 and 2018 (from over 8,000 to about 4,900), while the U.S. has gone the opposite direction. Oslo and Helsinki did not have a single pedestrian death in all of 2019.

That’s nuts. We’ve owned, I think, 3 cars in the 40 years we’ve been driving, and the trend has been getting smaller and smaller cars each time. That probably means that at some point our matchbox is going to be crushed on the road by a massive Canyonero.

I still remember the eruption of Mt St Helens vividly. I was living in Eugene, Oregon at the time, where we mainly experienced it as annoying chronic ash falls, but I was recently married and my wife’s family all lived in Longview and Vader, towns not far from the volcano. We got in a little volcano tourism that summer.

It was catastrophic, but also an opportunity. Researchers have been thoroughly studying that area ever since, documenting how nature recovers. You can still see the scars, but it’s impressive how much the landscape has bounced back.

We should pay a call on the area again sometime. Unfortunately, my in-laws have either died or moved away now, so sometimes nature can get better, but on a small scale, it can get worse.