The disaster that is looming ahead of us is nebulous, and its vagueness has made it incomprehensible: we focus on a few signs and indications and hope that better heads and wise leaders prevail.
What are those better heads? And who are those wise leaders?
We’ve got mountebanks like Elon Musk, telling us that we should try to terraform Mars (given what a great job we are doing terraforming Terra, why would anyone expect the crew of Musk’s lifeboat to experience anything but a cold lonely death?) and we have leaders holding meetings to thrash out resolutions that have gigantic backdoors built into them for campaign contributors and the military. The techno-ignorati and mountebanks have glad-handed civilization along, long enough, that when the motherfucker catches up with us, it’s not only going to be too late, it’s going to be emotionally traumatic when the whole thing sinks in. Not that that will make the slightest bit of difference.
“The Motherfucker” is how I have come to think of it. [This stuck in my mind from an old rant by Henry Rollins in which he called El Nino “The Motherfucker”; I think that it’s more appropriate for climate change in general]
It is not “sea level rise” because we could cope with that; it would just suck a lot. It is not “dead zones in fisheries” like the Bay of Bengal (food source for tens of millions of people) becoming a deoxygenated septic tank with no fish in it, or the Gulf of Mexico being a biological wasteland at certain depths, thanks to the gigantic uncontrollable oil spill from Deepwater Horizon (200 million gallons and still leaking) and it’s not the massive flooding that is tearing up the Mississippi’s surroundings – New Orleans is one more flood away from being a dead-zone and the dams in the area are being furiously vented into farmland to prevent the city’s levees from getting hit with more pressure than their jury-rigged repairs can handle. After all, it was an election year when they did the repairs – no sense letting another party get into office and take the credit – so both parties will wring their hands and point their fingers when the city is obliterated and tears down the US insurance industry with it. Good riddance to those bastards, anyway; it’s just too bad they won’t be able to grace the elegant wrought-iron lamp posts of New Orleans’ Vieu Carre.
That big mud-pit is Capetown, SA’s main water reservoir in 2018 – they narrowly missed “zero water” [qz]
Of course it’s going to be worse for the powerless. And the powerless that are going to take it on the chin hardest are the ones that have been afflicted with generations of corrupt politicians who have continued to sell them down the river. South Africa is an obvious example: ruled for generations by imperialist racists, the locals were literally treated as disposable. Comes a time when it turns out that the extractive rulers didn’t worry about infrastructure, just keeping the poor in line. Does that sound familiar?
Farmers take one for the team: Bonnet Carre spillway opens and inundates farm land to protect New Orleans
Right now, at this moment, huge amounts of water are being released into farmland elsewhere in the delta, to bring the water-level down so it doesn’t overwhelm the levees again. Following the last disastrous flood of the city, the minimum was done so that victory could be declared – and the poor shrugged, dusted themselves off, and started rebuilding. You know those “infrastructure” bills that Washington’s elite are wringing their hands over: this is the “infrastructure” they are talking about. That and New York, Miami, Boston, and New Jersey. New Orleans’ pumping stations date back to the 1920s, which is probably not a bad thing, since they knew how to engineer in those days – imagine what it’d be like if the city was depending on crap made by the beltway bandits who brought us the F-35? Right now, farmers are watching the US Army Corps of Engineers decide whether or not to open the Morganza spillway and flood 25,000 acres of farmland above Baton Rouge, to prevent the city from being inundated. The Bonnet Carre spillway has already been open for weeks.
That’s going to impact crops. The silt probably won’t help the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s probably already beyond repair.
That is Chennai’s main reservoir. What is not there? Water.
As the US midwest floods, parts of India are taking it on the chin, hard. India is experiencing one of its worst heat-waves in recorded history. [cnn] It’s so hot that people have to just lie there and not do anything: the heat will kill them if they exert themselves. Lying around in a wading pool would be an ideal option for the 4.6 million people in Chennai, which is also experiencing one of the worst droughts in recorded history. One of the problems with advanced civilization is that it allows us to build more complex interdependent systems, and push the failure-point farther away.
When The Motherfucker hits, it’s bigger and badder. That’s the problem with kicking the can down the road.
Today I was listening to a podcast where an experienced journalist was interviewing an energetic young person about the “Green New Deal.” They had lots of pointed questions about practicality, where the money was going to come from, etc. The young person sounded sincere and – I’m sad to say – ignorant. It’s not enough to say “we have a program of social reform that includes climate change” – they’re going to be pecked to death by duck-quacking questions like “where is the money going to come from?” [I have a suggestion for that] the reporter was oh, so practical. Because our stupid species dying out is really something we need to be practical about. The young person should have told the journalist about The Motherfucker. There’s nothing practical about what’s coming and radical responses probably won’t even be enough. Placing our faith in politics turns out to be a bad move because politics means “politics as usual” which is a lot of what got us to this situation in the first place.
When I think about this stuff I start to go into a panic. I also begin dropping pieces of information that I simply can’t cope with; I have to pick them back up later and try to look at them carefully. When I tried to learn what the current leak-rate from Deepwater Horizon looks like, I stumbled across another one that (naturally) was not big news: MC 20 Saratoga. [poo]:
Back in November last year, the US Coast Guard directed Taylor Energy to implement a new containment plan which “must eliminate the surface sheen and avoid the deficiencies associated with prior containment systems.”
“Surface sheen” means “visible on the surface” i.e.: let it keep leaking so long as it’s not making a great big plume of oil.
source: NOAA
That’s what the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico looks like, last year. No surprise: it’s bigger than the year before: 2,900 square miles. That’s a gigantic region of anoxic water – something swims into there, it dies and falls to the bottom where it sits. It’s going to make a lot of fossils, someday.
If I sound a bit panicky about this, it’s because I am. The American public seems to be focused on sea-level rise, because that’s important, but it’s only one manifestation of a vast set of interconnected problems, each of which is disastrous. For example, the arctic permafrost was considered “possibly going to be melting within 70 years.” Well, it’s already well on its way, today. [ew] With that comes the terrifying possibility of frozen methane being released, which will cause firestorms and breathing “dead zones” on the land, in addition to releasing massive amounts more carbon. That’s the hypothetical “runaway feedback loop” that takes us right into the Permian Extinction scenario and it looks like we are in the early stages of that happening. Meanwhile, the US says it doesn’t expect its carbon emissions to start to go down until around 2050 and we’ll be lucky if there’s a reduction in the rate of increase. That isn’t going to make a whit of difference if the methane starts dumping into the atmosphere because it’s going to outpace human emissions and will continue to do so for centuries, since there aren’t even good models for when/if the planet starts to cool back down. [ls]
Methane bubbles in the ice in an arctic lake
All day long, the surface of Esieh Lake in northern Alaska shudders with indigestion. This Arctic lake never fully freezes. Stand next to it, and you’ll hear it hiss. Watch it, and you’ll see it boil with ancient, bubbling gas. Light a fire over it, and the lake will fart a tower of flame higher than your head.
Another tocsin is this: right now we’re at about 460 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. At around 600 parts per million, people begin to experience rapid cognitive decline. We don’t know what kind of permanent damage it does, but when you don’t have enough air getting to your brain, you get stupid. [yale] When it gets up around 1000 parts per million, you start to get slow and lazy and head for a coma and death. Some estimates show the “die” part happening around 2100AD if the worst-case carbon scenario happens. The best-case is not going to happen, the “not so horrible case” still puts some of humanity into brain-damage territory for hundreds of years and the case that the ICC thinks is most likely has everyone headed for cognitive decline and brain-damage starting around 2050AD and getting worse until 2100AD. Remember, 2050 is around the time the US strategists think we might be able to start turning down the increase rate of our carbon release. By that time, China’s going to be blasting out way more carbon than the US. Perhaps the US and China’s strategy is “when people start to die in large numbers” we won’t have as many people driving cars.
The current trend-lines don’t significantly separate until a while after 2050, which is around the same time that parts of the planet become uninhabitable and there are mass die-offs. The RCP8.5 scenario is runaway thermal feedback from methane release – which is the scenario we’re actually heading toward. That puts Permian Extinction 2.0 happening around 2100AD and completing by 2200AD.
You’ll notice we’re tracking right below the worst-case scenario, and well above the “we’re into brian-damage country” – actually none of those scenarios look anything like good. When will lack of oxygen affect the development of fetal brains? There: that’ll give the anti-vaxxers something to really worry about.
Hm. Someone once called me that, and I merely replied I did not fuck my mother, but, were I to fuck some random woman, she might have birthed and therefore be a mother.
(Not a term I like, it’s ugly and it’s silly, no matter how cool Samuel L. Jackson may be)
Marcus I don’t have anything intelligent to add, you’ve covered a lot of the intractable problems here and on other posts. I have become far happier about not being able to have children than I once was as it has become more and more clear how slim the chances of successful change happening really are, which is a small personal positive. I have no positives for the human race as a whole, largely because the vast majority of us simply can not bear to look at this head on, those of us that do find as you do that we have to look away at times because the scale of the problem, the breadth of the supporting evidence, the minute probability that successful action will be taken in time are together just too much, so I offer some comforting hugs in the absence of anything more substantial.
John Morales@#1:
Someone once called me that, and I merely replied I did not fuck my mother, but, were I to fuck some random woman, she might have birthed and therefore be a mother.
In this case it’s an oblique reference to the “mother earth”/gaia trope – if Earth is our mother, we’re all motherfuckers in a metaphorical sense.
What’s your source for those CO2 toxicity data, because I’m pretty sure you’re off by a factor of 100. Remember, 1000 ppm is 0.1%
Yeah, something is wrong with your CO2 toxicity – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Below_1%
Wikipedia has a few references (wiki). Not sure what we can expect from chronic exposure on a global level. I guess we’ll get to find out.
Jinx!
Dauphni@#4:
What’s your source for those CO2 toxicity data, because I’m pretty sure you’re off by a factor of 100. Remember, 1000 ppm is 0.1%
Most of the sources referencing CO2 effect on cognition appear to be based on a study by McNaughton:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4892924/
The study is measuring the cognitive impact of fairly low levels of CO2 – 500ppm to 1200ppm; I’m pretty sure I did not misread the units. This is all stuff I read and digested some time ago and I’m working from the impression that I took away from it. Other writers about climate disaster have also reached similar conclusions though I suppose if we’re all going off McNaughton and McNaughton’s wrong, then “never mind”? This is one of those things I’d be perfectly happy to be completely wrong about.
rojmiller@#5:
Yeah, something is wrong with your CO2 toxicity
This is one of those times when being off by a factor of 100 is a really great thing.
I read somewhere recently that the mini ice age that occurred in the 1600s was caused by farmlands in North America reverting to forests (and becoming massive carbon sinks in the process) after the native inhabitants were largely wiped out by diseases brought by European invaders. Maybe the Motherfucker will have a silver lining after it wipes out the vast majority of humanity, reducing the tiny remainder to a hard scrabble, hunter-gatherer existence.
Something to think about.
#8 Marcus wrote:
No, you didn’t misread them in the article (although they went up to 1400 ppm):
The problem is what you said in this post: “At around 600 parts per million, people begin to experience rapid cognitive decline. … When it gets up around 1000 parts per million, you start to get slow and lazy and head for a coma and death.”
Obviously they weren’t subjecting these people to possibly lethal levels of CO2. :) Their lowest “greenest” level was in the neighborhood where you said people start declining, and your coma-or-death levels are considered normal at minimum allowed ventilation levels, even though housing often well exceeds that level. 10,000-100,000 ppm seem to be the danger thresholds you were after. So I’m thinking you misremembered something you read elsewhere about CO2 toxicity.
This is good news to me. I was nearly suffocated in a walk-in cold room once by massive amounts of dry ice in the adjacent freezer seeping in. It was not fun, although probably a better way to go than being baked to death, which now seems the more likely scenario.
I feel lucky that I don’t like children anyway and I don’t particularly desire to experience parenting. Otherwise I’d have a hard time deciding what to do with my reproductive organs. Giving birth to a child right now seems like a bad idea, yet many people do so, because they want to have children.
That’s typical billionaire thinking. He doesn’t give a fuck if the rest of humanity starves to death on a ruined planet. What matters to Musk and the like is that a couple of white billionaires get to escape to somewhere else and can live happily ever after. One should not look for solutions that only allow a handful of people (who all somehow happen to be white billionaires) to survive. Instead we should be thinking about how to save the planet and all the people and animals and plants that already live on it.
Marcus @3, ah. Missed that.
@Andreas Avester
If he’s planning to escape he should go somewhere he can actually breath the air. If Musk does go to Mars (i bet he won’t) he’ll probably end up getting killed by his former acolytes when the colony collapses.
The scenario would probably make quite a good psychological horror movie or game.
The good news is i’m likely to die around 2080 at the latest :\
dangerousbeans @#14
Sure, I know that nobody could possibly have a happy life on Mars. It just couldn’t work.
What bugs me here is the principle itself that some billionaire wants to escape in a lifeboat to some nice and safe place while the rest of us die and suffer on a fucked up planet. For me it would be irrelevant whether some asshole billionaire escapes to Mars or to New Zealand or to an underground bunker or whatever, I simply don’t want them to escape at all. Rich white men were the primary contributors to the current greenhouse gas problem, I don’t want them to get away with escaping from experiencing the same suffering that they have inflicted upon the whole humanity.
@Andreas Avester
Yeah that’s fair. I’ll help you drag them down with us
Andreas,
Well, I would too, were that within my purview. So, sure, I share that attitude, though I lack the means.
What would bug me, were I that way inclined, is lacking the means to survive.
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dangerousbeans:
What a shitty attitude. You’re doomed, so you will make sure those who would not otherwise be doomed be likewise doomed? If you sink, drag others with you if you can?
(I don’t usually wank on about morality, but for fuck’s sake! What a dismal attitude)
[one lousy close tag; what bugs me right now is that I did not preview]
Not necessarily. I recently read through the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy by Cixin Liu (first book is The Three-Body Problem). The trilogy is a hard sci-fi story covering a pretty good stretch of time and it introduces several situations where the characters are caught up in a disaster that could end up killing everyone around them. In all of these events a significant number of people try to stop anyone from getting out if they think they might be stuck themselves and I largely agree with the way they’re portrayed as selfish and counter-productive.
In a disaster scenario, lets say a flood, I’m going to be focused on getting myself and everyone around me through it as much as possible. If I start struggling I’m not going to deliberately look for other people to drag down with me (although I might as an involuntary reaction). But climate change is not a sudden disaster and while everyone has some responsibility there’s a whole class of people who have far, far more to do with creating it than you or I. In this case, I don’t really feel it would be selfish to want to keep them from swanning off to some high class retreat while the rest of us try to live through a crisis of their creation.
Fortunately in the real world there’s no indication I know of that even the selfish rich fools who are pushing us towards the brink of extinction have any realistic plans to survive it. Bunker plans are little more than a con game. Despite knowing since the 70’s that they were causing a climate disaster, the only apparent plan of the fossil fuel companies is to… wait for the rest of us to panic and literally pay them to stop making money killing us all. The only apparent plan is to have piles of money then buy their way onto whatever remote patch of ground looks likely to pull through relatively unscathed. They don’t seem to have a Plan B and I don’t think their first idea is going to work so well.
lanir:
See, that’s where we differ.
You assign blame, you want retribution (or, at least, just deserts).
Me, I just want to survive best as I can, and therefore accept others want the same thing.
Priorities.
To expand lanir’s flood example: if a rich person has a yacht they are using to save their expensive artwork i will happy take over the yacht and replace the art with vulnerable people. if the rich person doesn’t like that i will replace them with vulnerable people.
if these people are going to dedicate their excessive resources to saving themselves rather than others then dealing with them is a useful move.
dangerousbeans, are you saying you’d dedicate whatever resources you have to saving others rather than yourself?
(easier to say than to do, I think)
Really? 🙄
No, but I use my excess resources to help others instead of hoarding them. Whereas apparently you’re fine letting others die rather than force people to share their excess
dangerousbeans, thanks for the clarification.
So, you did not intend to suggest that people with excessive wealth (i.e. those who own more than they need for bare personal survival) should not use it to save themselves, you intended to suggest that people’s excess wealth should not be used upon themself.
(You must lead a monkish life indeed, that you only have what is needed for personal survival)
PS
Sorry, but I can’t resist, dangerousbeans. So, another comment on your comment.
Weird inference. There is no such appearance.
Your putative alternatives are not even mutually incompatible, never mind complementary.
(To be clear, your inference is neither valid nor justified nor true)
Fuck mate, you talk like a lawyer
Yeah, well, I don’t hypocritically chide others for having “excessive wealth”.
You talk like an ideologue.
John Morales@#20:
Me, I just want to survive best as I can, and therefore accept others want the same thing.
You probably won’t, that’s the point. And why would you assume others want the same thing? My suspicion is that you find that, quite often, other people react very differently than you, right?
I thought the part in Chixin Liu, where the people who were going to be left behind on Earth attempt to prevent the lifeboats from leaving, was a very human moment. It strikes me as highly unlikely that everyone would stand back, shedding manful tears, and watch humanity’s few remains escape. Fighting tooth and nail seems more likely. And, since we’d be talking about humans, I assume that the real scenario would mean “stand back and shed manful tears while Prince Harry and his spawn board the escape vehicle, accompanied by Kim Kardashian and Dick Cheney” we have a history of not choosing our best or brightest, only our most corrupt and sneaky. So, monkeywrench the hell out of the engines and lets watch them fly into the sun before we die.
@John Morales
There are plenty of billionaires who have made their fortunes by lobbying for increased use of fossil fuels and who intentionally undermined attempts to promote alternative energy sources. There are people who got rich by ensuring that the USA has no viable public transportation network thus ensuring that everybody is forced to drive a personal car. And so on. There are billionaires who intentionally polluted the environment, because filtering the polluted water and air from their factories would have decreased their profits.
Given the fact that billions of people are likely to die in the near future, lobbying in favor of increased fossil fuel usage might as well be seen as a crime against humanity.
Even the average billionaire who isn’t directly related to the fossil fuel industry has a much larger carbon footprint than I do. So, no, I am not a hypocrite. I don’t live in a ridiculously large mansion with an outrageous heating/air conditioning bill. Nor do I travel with a private jet. And in my home there is no furniture made from tropical hardwood.
Under normal circumstances, I’d support every person’s attempts to ensure personal wellbeing. Wanting to survive is a normal and rational desire. Same goes for wanting personal wellbeing. But, if said wellbeing is obtained by abusing other people, then I oppose the flourishing of such criminals.
Marcus @#28
Personally, I tend to be vengeful. If the lifeboat was boarded by members of some primitive hunter-gatherer tribe who had no impact on the climate change whatsoever, I’d wish them good luck. After all, they don’t deserve to suffer as a result of white people fucking up the planet.
If, however, the lifeboat was boarded by billionaires who earned their fortunes by promoting fossil fuel usage and who have enjoyed a luxurious life by traveling via private jets, I’d try to prevent them from being the sole survivors. If we all die and suffer, the ones responsible for all this misery should be the ones who suffer the most.
By the way, if I was in danger, my own survival would be my number one priority. If, however, I knew that I’m doomed and I cannot save myself, then I’d just vent my anger by pursuing revenge.
Andreas Avester@#29:
I’d just vent my anger by pursuing revenge.
I’m not sure if “revenge” is even the right word.
It’s more like a blocking strategy. “I have determined that your survival is contemptible, so I am going to prevent it so that you do not outlive your betters including me.” When it comes to people like the Trumps and Kardashians and Mountbattens, I’d be willing to say that there are artworks I’d rather see sent to Mars, then them. if anything’s got to go. I’m not even saying that a bunch of Caravaggios is worth more than that lot; they’re not even worth a 1st pressing of the Bee Gees.
Since it’s quiet,
Marcus @28:
[1] Huh?
[2] I don’t. I merely state that I accept that (some, not all) others want the same thing. I do know about the reality of suicide, you know.
It’s not about assuming that others want the same, it’s about not accusing those who do want the same for wanting it when I myself want it.
[3] Depends. Pretty sure I’m like most non-suicidal people, but.
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Andreas @29:
Yeah. Thus my initial claim about “You assign blame, you want retribution (or, at least, just deserts).”
(Reiterating it doesn’t make it stronger)
It’s not about “flourishing”, it’s about survival. That was the very objection to which I objected, that equivocation. Only a saint gets away with condemning others on that basis — and I’m no saint, so if you condemn them you condemn me (though obs I am poorish), and I think you’re wrong to do so.
(Or: My issue is qualitative, not quantitative. cf. “Now We’re Just Haggling Over the Price”)
Since it doesn’t help you live any longer, I think that “revenge” is the perfect term for it.
One can argue about the morality of this, but also we must recognize that it’s an extremely powerful human urge, on the level of the urge to have sex, and that probably does help keep people in line to at least some degree. (Yes, your revenge attempt, even if you end up worse off personally for it, might well be a benefit to society, if there’s any society left after the apocalypse.)