Are We Pushing the Planet Past Its Tipping Points? by Umair Haque

It's anguishing to view the daily apocalyptic scenes of the Dixie Fire in California and the massive fires near Athens, Greece, that are destroying their last remaining forests. According to a July 15, 2021 CNN news report, close to a million acres in 12 states from 107 fires have scorched the Earth! 

We are in a definite global crisis with our planet rapidly over-heating. I appreciate how Umair Haque captures the big picture in just a few words. Note: In another piece, Umair notes our country's disproportionate role in CO2 emissions.

To go deeper, consider reading David Wallace-Wells titled, "The Uninhabitable Earth"—also available on Audible.com.  Jess Goodell's piece titled, "Hothouse Earth Is Merely the Beginning of the End," featured in the Rolling Stone, is also informative. Taken together, we in the U.S. have a special responsibility to address climate change due to our excessive carbon footprint that's killing the planet.

To Umair's point, we absolutely are not meant to survive the planet we are creating. 

To that end, we must educate ourselves on such matters. What are out schools doing to promote environmental awareness? We should all take a close look at President Biden's campaign promises on climate change and whether they go far enough. Exploring and getting involved in local efforts should be an ongoing task for us all.

Here in Austin's hill country, experts say that it's not whether raging fires will at some point visit us, but rather when this will happen. In fact, they already have, costing lives.

I see all of this as profoundly spiritual. Rather than hand-wringing and attempting to distance ourselves from these calamities, we should engage in ceremony, mourning the loss of animal life, vegetation, and human lives while humbling ourselves as a species to the consequences of humanity's bottomless delusional conceit about our harmful impact on the only planet we call home. 

This hubris is born out of our extractive relationship to nature to the point of being closed to the idea of our interconnectedness to it as our Indigenous elders and ancestors have always known.

This should concern us all. Not only are future generations at risk, but the present one, too. At the rate that the Earth is heating, could it already be too late to transition away from a carbon-based economy? That's the question at hand.

For those losing their homes, businesses, towns, and livelihoods, it already is too late for them, unfortunately. When will we learn?

-Angela Valenzuela

Are We Pushing the Planet Past Its Tipping Points?

It Feels a Lot Like We’re Taking the Planet Past the Point of No Return

by Umair Haque |  August 6, 2021

See that apocalyptic pic above? That’s the town of Greenville, California. It doesn’t exist anymore. The Dixie Fire incinerated it as it raged through the Sierra Nevada. And there’s plenty more where that came from. Floods in Europe. Germany underwater. Asia flooded, too. Twin heat domes scorching Siberia and North America. Small Canadian towns — Canadian — some of the hottest places on earth.

Something feels very, very wrong. To you, probably, as it does to me. But also to climate scientists. The frequency and magnitude of these “extreme events” is literally off the charts of their worst predictions. Even the experts are being left staggered by how rapidly and severely the planet is warming — or, more accurately, overheating.

The question that needs to be asked is a grim and difficult one. It goes like this.

Are we pushing the planet past its tipping points?

Let me explain. If you’re not versed in these basics of climate science, you should be. It’s not just warming alone that’s bad. It’s that warming triggers “feedbacks” — changes in the planet’s great systems that then accelerate warming. How much? From anywhere from apocalyptic to cataclysmic. Feedbacks can turn a slow, centuries long trend of warming into a quick few decades of sudden, incredibly fast, cataclysmic overheating.

“Tipping points occur when global heating pushes temperatures beyond a critical threshold, leading to accelerated and irreversible impacts.”

How fast are we talking? We’re talking about abrupt warming that happens within one human lifetime. Unfortunately, one that happens to be ours.

What kinds of feedbacks could produce the rapid warming we’re beginning to see — the sudden, abrupt overheating that’s leaving even climate scientists shocked?

To understand that, you need to know about the planet’s great ecologies. The ocean currents recirculate warm water and cool it, keeping the temperature of the ocean relatively low. There are the polar ice caps, which reflect sunlight, and cool the planet. The great rainforests, like the Amazon, absorb carbon from the skies, and breathe out fresh air.

Those you probably have some awareness of — here are a few you might not know about.

The boreal forests — the northern ones — are the largest ecosystem on the planet. They absorb vast amounts of carbon, too. Then there’s the northern permafrost, which keeps massive deposits of methane trapped — and the rocks in those areas do, too. The monsoons keep Africa and Asia cool, and their soils fertile. The coral reefs keep coastal areas of oceans healthy and vibrant with life.

These great ecologies are are also the planet’s great tipping points. There are, depending on how you count, and who you ask, from between eight to ten of them — I’ve barely touched on them, but this isn’t a book. The point is: these are systems we really don’t want to mess with.

Why not? Because collapsing these ecosystems will almost certainly lead to runaway global warming. Each one of these great ecologies plays an equilibrating or balancing role. Push them too far, and they break apart — but breaking them leads to feedbacks. For example, if the ocean currents slow down, and no longer circulate warm water, because the planet’s gotten too hot, then it heats even faster. If the poles don’t reflect light, because there’s little ice left, then the planet heats that much faster.

See what climate scientists mean by “feedbacks” now? You can think of them as simply a vicious circle. The point is to understand that global warming isn’t just a matter of first-order effects — but second and third order ones, too. Heating the planet so much breaks ecosystems, which protected the planet from heating up, and without them, a kind of chain reaction begins.

Now that you’re acquainted with the basics of climate science — and my apologies if I’ve explained it clumsily — let’s go through how many of tipping points we actually appear to be reaching. This is where things start to get pretty frightening, by the way.

Ocean currents? The most important one is the Gulf Stream. But in the last few months, “climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet’s main potential tipping points. The research found ‘an almost complete loss of stability over the last century’ of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).”

Did you get that?

“The signs of destabilisation being visible already is something that I wouldn’t have expected and that I find scary,” said Niklas Boers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who did the research. “It’s something you just can’t [allow to] happen.”

Ocean currents slowing and stopping are probably the biggest, most dangerous tipping point of all. Hit that point, and you get into the stuff of sci-fi movies. Just imagine what happens if oceans can’t cool the planet’s waters anymore. Bang. We all cook.

But we’re only just beginning.

Prince Made ‘Welcome 2 America’ in 2010. It Speaks to 2021.

Not that Prince wasn't highly gifted or perceptive, but that much of the chaos and craziness we're seeing today was already evident in 2010. What stands out for me that year is the particularly ominous and foreboding Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that leaked an astonishing 70,000 barrels of oil a day for a total of 87 days. 

It felt apocalyptic and still does as I reflect on it even today with great sadness for the all-but-forgotten or ignored horrific devastation it left in its wake—about which Mother Nature cannot forget.

How do you remember this moment?

I distinctly remember feeling anguished about it and suspect that those 87 days impacted all of our psyches and souls as a planet—and perhaps most especially for small children who feel and think deeply but who lack a language for their feelings, as well as our insightful and sensitive artists and cultural critics like Prince.

2021 is a testament not only to our not having learned that we, as humans, are a part of nature, but also that when we are not in sync, this gets manifest in nature—and increasingly with a ferociousness as we are seeing today.

The Delta Variant is exploding through the populace right now. And the Western U.S. is ablaze with more than 50 large fires burning at this very moment on this day of July 30, 2021.

About an hour ago, I shared with a dear friend, Lydia Perez, my own sense of the combined factors of white supremacist politics, the Delta variant, and the raging fires. Like a match on dry grass, we spontaneously combusted with a shared analysis and sharp critique, revealing the gravity of these otherwise concealed thoughts and feelings. She pointed out the four elements and how they are all currently activated. Wind (airborne virus), water (floods), fire, and Earth with earthquakes, a daily affair. 

I couldn't agree with her more. Our Indigenous knowledge and wisdom speak to this. Consider the following:

"During the past 24 hours, there were 1 quake of magnitude 6.2, 5 quakes between 5.0 and 6.0, 40 quakes between 4.0 and 5.0, 120 quakes between 3.0 and 4.0, and 260 quakes between 2.0 and 3.0. There were also 508 quakes below magnitude of 2.0 which people don't normally feel."

So, just in the last 24 hours, 426 earthquake were felt by people worldwide and an additional 508 occurred but were probably not felt. And precious little of this is newsworthy any longer. It's only something "to track." The historic Western fires in the meantime compete with maddening Washington and Texas politics and vaccine news.

It felt good to share in another's concerns and anxieties today. We both agreed that all of these phenomena we are witnessing are connected and that our job today is literally to survive and to actively protect and love the children, all our children, the next generation.

Prince got it right.

-Angela Valenzuela

Prince Made ‘Welcome 2 America’ in 2010. It Speaks to 2021. A full album has emerged from Prince’s vault that balances hard insights with visceral joys. 

By Jon Pareles, July 29, 3032 | New York Times

“Welcome 2 America” was completed in 2010 but then shelved.Credit...Mike Ruiz, via The Prince Estate

It’s almost as if Prince knew what lay ahead.

In 2010, Prince recorded but then shelved a finished album, “Welcome 2 America,” which was full of bleak reflections on the state of the nation. It arrives Friday as the Prince estate continues to open up Prince’s vault of unreleased music since his death in 2016. Unlike much of what has emerged so far, it’s a complete, stand-alone album — a disillusioned statement that sounds all too fitting in 2021.

“Welcome 2 America” was made two years into the Obama administration, and Prince didn’t see much progress. In the title track, women sing, “Hope and change”; then Prince dryly observes, “Everything takes forever/The truth is a new minority.”

The songs take on racism, exploitation, disinformation, celebrity, faith and capitalism: “21st century, it’s still about greed and fame,” Prince sings in “Running Game (Son of a Slave Master).” Eleven years after the album was recorded — as the 2020s have brought bitter divisiveness, blatant racism, battles over history and a digital hellscape of hyped consumption and algorithmically boosted lies — Prince doesn’t sound pessimistic, just matter-of-fact.

“Welcome 2 America” wasn’t made casually. It’s one of Prince’s more collaborative albums, constructed in discrete stages with different cohorts of musicians. Prince started out recording instrumental tracks — without vocals or lyrics — live in the studio with Tal Wilkenfeld on bass and Chris Coleman on drums. Then he worked with the singers Shelby J. (for Johnson), Liv Warfield and Elisa Fiorillo, sharing leads and harmonies with them. Morris Hayes, billed as Mr. Hayes, added keyboards and intricately jazzy simulated string and horn arrangements, earning credit as co-producer for six of the album’s 12 songs. Prince also did some final tweaking, including a rewrite of the title track.

But Prince had already released one album in 2010 — “20Ten” — and his attention turned to forming a new live band (including Mr. Hayes and the three backup singers) that would tour the world for the next two years. The American portion was called the “Welcome 2 America” tour, but the album stayed unreleased. (The deluxe version of “Welcome 2 America” includes a Blu-ray of a jubilant 2011 arena show in Inglewood, Calif.)

Image

Unlike much of what has been released since Prince’s death, “Welcome 2 America” is a complete, stand-alone album, full of bleak reflections on the state of the nation.Credit...Kevin Mazur, via The Prince Estate

“Welcome 2 America” makes its way from the bitter derision of its title track toward a guarded optimism, with detours — it’s a Prince album after all — into physical pleasures. The title song telegraphs its mood with its first notes: a snake hiss of cymbals and a bass line that inches upward, skulks back down and then plunges further, against a backdrop of ambiguous chords and synthesizer swoops. The track edges toward funk, and the women sing, but Prince doesn’t; he simply talks, deadpan, about information overload, high-tech distractions, privilege, fame and culture, asking, “Think today’s music will last?” Singing in harmony, the women amend an American motto to “Land of the free, home of the slave.”

In the cryptic “1010 (Rin Tin Tin),” Prince asks, “What could be stranger than the times we’re in?” over skeletal, choppy piano chords, and he goes on to decry “too much information” and a “wilderness of lies.” With “Running Game (Son of a Slave Master),” Prince confronts a microcosm of rich vs. poor: the way the music business takes advantage of newcomers.

Yet as usual in Prince’s catalog, “Welcome 2 America” balances hard insights with visceral joys. He sings about pointless conflicts over religion in “Same Page, Different Book” — “So much more in common if you’d only look,” he insists — but his lyrics about rocks, missiles and car bombs arrive backed by crisp syncopations. In “1000 Light Years From Here,” he puts breezy Latin funk behind reminders of Black perseverance, touching on the subprime mortgage crisis and the 2008 financial-sector meltdown: “We can live underwater/It ain’t hard when you’ve never been a part/Of the country on dry land.” Prince put new lyrics to “1000 Light Years” as an upbeat coda to the even more pointed “Black Muse” — a song about slavery, injustice and America’s debt to Black culture — on the last album he released during his lifetime, “HitnRun Phase Two.”

Prince pauses the sociopolitical commentary for “Check the Record,” a rock-funk stomp about infidelity, and for “When She Comes,” a sensual falsetto ballad marveling in a woman’s ecstasy. (Prince also reworked “When She Comes” for “HitnRun Phase Two,” emphasizing male technique instead.)

As the album ends, Prince calls for positive thinking. “Yes” reaches back to the supercharged gospel-rock of Sly and the Family Stone. After that tambourine-shaking peak, “One Day We Will All B Free” eases into reassuring, midtempo soul. But the “Yes” that Prince calls for is an affirmation that “We can turn the page/As long as they ain’t movin’ us to a bigger cage,” and “One Day We Will All B Free” is also a warning about unquestioning belief in what churches and schools teach. Prince saw a long struggle ahead.

Prince
“Welcome 2 America”
(NPG/Sony Legacy)

Lee Klinger – Indigenous-based forest management – looking to the past for a way forward •Nov 14, 2019

Friends,

I'm happy to introduce you to the work of Lee Klinger that appears in this book by Jacobs, D. T. [Four Arrows] (2006). Unlearning the language of conquest: Scholars expose anti-Indianism in America (University of Texas Press). He is the only non-Native American contributor to this anthology and his work is outstanding. His specific contribution is titled, "Ecological Evidence of Large-Scale Silviculture by California Indians," pp. 153-165. It debunks myths about Indigenous peoples of the Americas as lacking in technological know-how. 

Far from it. Silviculture refers to the extraordinary scientific knowledge and wisdom of our Indigenous ancestors to maintain and preserve forests.  Modern humans are mostly not even able to think at the level about which he writes and speaks as in this video appearing below.  That is, our Native ancestors to this continent tended not only gardens and farms, but actual forests and woodlands. They set trees and forests on fire with great knowledge and intention, yielding the impressive groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods in the Northwestern regions of the country, known as California and Oregon today.

If we are to save ourselves and the planet, we would do well to revitalize and embrace Indigenous languages, wisdom, knowledge, and ways of knowing and being in relation with Mother Earth. Thankfully, as you can hear in this video presentation, this is exactly what Klinger is doing.

Check out an earlier illuminating blog where I post a piece on Four Arrows titled, "The Indigenization Controversy  For Whom and By Whom?"

Finally, Unlearning the Language of Conquest  is an excellent addition to your bookshelf, as well.

-Angela Valenzuela

These ferocious fires in California are not something that anyone can simply write off because they don't affect you. To the contrary, this is catastrophic, impacting us all at some level, even if solely spiritually or psychologically. Despite what I feel is a severe lack of media attention to these fires—such as the North Complex fire described below that burned more than 269,000 acres, one of the largest fires in state history—we should see them as minimally on the scale as the environmental disaster that unfolded in the Gulf of Mexico back in the summer of 2019 not so very long ago. 

If we connect this to the cataclysmic Australian fires, as we should, that took place less than a year ago, we should further heed the warnings of extinction as in this piece titled, "Scientist warns of ‘extinction crisis’ as Australia wildfires wipe out a billion animals."

This is not science fiction. This is the real deal. Our Earth mother is on fire. 

What we are witnessing was predictable. Yet since the Nixon presidency, there has been precious little leadership either on climate change—more appropriately termed a "climate emergency," or in educating our children and communities about it though we are all impacted. Education can play a massively important role in all of this, yet where is the leadership? Like Nero, Trump tweets as our country burns.

To wit, fire season is hardly an abstraction here in Central Texas as you can learn about from this August 24, 2020 piece in the Austin American Statesman titled, "Bastrop County prays for rain as fire season heats up." I don't see this primarily as a policy issue that we "fix," but rather as a major shift that we have to undergo immediately in no uncertain terms if we are to survive as a human species.

To get a really good sense of the science behind all of this, consider reading this post featuring David Wallace-Wells titled, "The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition | New York Magazine"—whose book is worth listening to on Audible.com—together with Jess Goodell's piece in the Rolling Stone titled, "Hothouse Earth Is Merely the Beginning of the End." 

Earth is going to be fine, by the way. However, by the way things are going, it's humans that aren't, sadly and tragically as we see all of this play out before our eyes in living color.

The point here is not to trigger your "eco-anxiety," which is a real syndrome that so many are experiencing right now, but rather to encourage you to vote. We all have a vote and a voice in a democracy. We must insist that those in power lead on the climate crisis that we're currently in.

Below are several hashtags that I've come across that will allow you to track all of this on Twitter and other social media.

-Angela Valenzuela

#GreenNewDeal #ExtinctionRebellion #Vote2020 @algore #InconvenientTruth @EnvironmentTex @SierraClub @TexasSierraClub  @TXWaterFuture #OneWaterTexas #gogreen #sustainable #SustainabilityTexas @EnvDefenseFund #ClimateEmergency 

#climateaction #environment #nature #climatechange #ClimateDenial #sustainability #ecofriendly #savetheplanet #green #zerowaste #earth

15 fatalities confirmed. North Complex now among state’s top 5 deadliest fires

            Firefighters search a burned-out residence Tuesday in the Berry Creek neighborhood near Oroville, Calif.

            (Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images)

By LUKE MONEYSTAFF WRITER 

SEP. 15, 2020

11:35 AM

 

UPDATED1:16 PM | Los Angeles Times

The confirmed death toll from California’s unprecedented firestorm has risen to 25 as crews work to hem in some two dozen major blazes still burning statewide.

Another fatality was confirmed Monday in the area of the North Complex fire near Oroville — boosting that fire’s death toll to 15, according to the Butte County Sheriff’s Office. In recorded state history, only four blazes have been deadlier.

Authorities have released the names of seven fire victims: John Butler, 79; Sandra Butler, 75; Jorge Hernandez-Juarez, 26; Philip Rubel, 68; Khawar Bhatti, 58; Millicent Catarancuic, 77; and Josiah Williams, 16.

All were residents of Berry Creek, a mountain town northeast of Oroville that was devastated by the fire.

As of Tuesday morning, officials said the North Complex was 39% contained. At more than 269,000 acres, it is now the eighth-largest fire in state history, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

It also ranks among the most destructive fires California has ever seen, consuming or damaging 723 structures so far, officials said.

The North Complex is just one of several historically large conflagrations that have ignited over the past month. So far this year, fires have chewed through more than 3.2 million acres statewide — an area larger than the state of Connecticut.

The statewide firestorm has destroyed more than 4,200 structures and forced over 60,000 people from their homes, according to Cal Fire.

The breakout of blazes includes what is listed as easily the largest wildfire recorded in California: the August Complex in Mendocino, Humboldt, Del Norte and Trinity counties.

The overall complex — which now includes two enormous fires, previously called the Doe and the Elkhorn, under its umbrella — has burned more than 794,000 acres and is 30% contained.

“Critically dry fuels” are continuing to challenge firefighting efforts on that complex, officials said Tuesday.

With Wildfires, Heat Waves, And Rising Sea Levels, Large Tracts Of The Earth Are At Risk Of Becoming Uninhabitable by Bill McKibben

Friends,

When Bill McKibben writes about global warming and climate change, we all need to take heed.  I've previously posted these two pieces by him and he's just come out with another appearing below.

• Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry by Bill McKibben. We absolutely need to stop the fracking industry dead in its tracks 

• The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition | New York Magazine

There are many policy issues we must confront.  However, the environment cannot wait.  We are delusional to ignore the science and think otherwise.  We are likely the last generation that can act decisively on this—not to actually stop the heating of the Earth, at this point—but to preserve ourselves as a species, as a human race.

Where is the leadership on this, I always wonder?  Even with such environmental groups as the Sierra Club, Environment Texas, and the like, this is a problem that cannot get outsourced.  Everyday folks in all communities need to unite to focus on this from every possible angle, including curriculum development and local campaigns and teach-ins for clean(er), renewable energy.

Let's get behind a Green New Deal.  Either we take on the fossil fuel industry or we face a hot and ever-heating Earth and all that means for the kinds of massive devastation to plant, animal, and human life that we are collectively witnessing or personally experiencing.

Sí se puede! Yes we can!  And we must...!

-Angela Valenzuela

#InconvenientTruth @EnvironmentTex @SierraClub @TexasSierraClub  @TXWaterFuture #OneWaterTexas  #SustainabilityTexas

With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts.

By Bill McKibben

Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.
I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people; more than six hundred others are missing. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.
For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out. Late in 2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started to grow again—by thirty-eight million, to a total of eight hundred and fifteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. found that child labor, after years of falling, was growing, “driven in part by an increase in conflicts and climate-induced disasters.”
In 2015, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris, the world’s governments, noting that the earth has so far warmed a little more than one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, set a goal of holding the increase this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), with a fallback target of two degrees (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). This past October, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a special report stating that global warming “is likely to reach 1.5 C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.” We will have drawn a line in the sand and then watched a rising tide erase it. The report did not mention that, in Paris, countries’ initial pledges would cut emissions only enough to limit warming to 3.5 degrees Celsius (about 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, a scale and pace of change so profound as to call into question whether our current societies could survive it.
Scientists have warned for decades that climate change would lead to extreme weather. Shortly before the I.P.C.C. report was published, Hurricane Michael, the strongest hurricane ever to hit the Florida Panhandle, inflicted thirty billion dollars’ worth of material damage and killed forty-five people. President Trump, who has argued that global warming is “a total, and very expensive, hoax,” visited Florida to survey the wreckage, but told reporters that the storm had not caused him to rethink his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accords. He expressed no interest in the I.P. C.C. report beyond asking “who drew it.” (The answer is ninety-one researchers from forty countries.) He later claimed that his “natural instinct” for science made him confident that the climate would soon “change back.” A month later, Trump blamed the fires in California on “gross mismanagement of forests.”
Human beings have always experienced wars and truces, crashes and recoveries, famines and terrorism. We’ve endured tyrants and outlasted perverse ideologies. Climate change is different. As a team of scientists recently pointed out in the journal Nature Climate Change, the physical shifts we’re inflicting on the planet will “extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”

“His last words were ‘Yodel-ay-he-hoo.’ ”

The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. But already, even in the most affluent areas, many of us hesitate to walk across a grassy meadow because of the proliferation of ticks bearing Lyme disease which have come with the hot weather; we have found ourselves unable to swim off beaches, because jellyfish, which thrive as warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the water. The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.

“Climate change,” like “urban sprawl” or “gun violence,” has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it. But exactly what we’ve been up to should fill us with awe. During the past two hundred years, we have burned immense quantities of coal and gas and oil—in car motors, basement furnaces, power plants, steel mills—and, as we have done so, carbon atoms have combined with oxygen atoms in the air to produce carbon dioxide. This, along with other gases like methane, has trapped heat that would otherwise have radiated back out to space.

Continue reading here.

Hothouse Earth Is Merely the Beginning of the End, by Jeff Goodell

Ominous.  These happenings.  Even the Arctic is experiencing wildfires. 

Yesterday, I had to replace four car tires that were just barely three years old due to significant cracking from heat damage!  At work, I park in a covered parking garage and in shade at home, too.  Still, the heat destroyed them.  

Friends, especially those of you living in hot climates like Texas, do check your car tires regularly.  At least the ones I had on my car fared poorly and were actually quite dangerous. I fear that the heat can make our roads more dangerous, in general.

All of this, in turn, is also about global warning—which is what this piece is also about.  

Mother Earth is responding to our fundamentally flawed relationship to her.  

Inescapably worrisome when your very species-being is at stake.


-Angela Valenzuela

Hothouse Earth Is Merely the Beginning of 

the End

Not the end of the planet, but maybe the end of its human inhabitants

By

JEFF GOODELL 

A 747 Global Airtanker makes a drop in front of advancing flames from a wildfire Thursday, August 2nd, 2018, in Lakeport, California.

Kent Porter /The Press Democrat/AP

“Our future,” scientist James Lovelock has written, “is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.”

I thought about Lovelock the other day as I drove across Idaho, watching plumes from a forest fire rise in the distance. My mom and two of my kids were texting me about their experience driving through Redding, the city in Northern California where a “firenado” had devastated the region and accelerated a wildfire that killed six people. Not far away, in Mendocino, the largest fire in California history was burning an area the size of Los Angeles.

On the radio, I listened to reports from around the world: in Athens, Greece, a fire killed 92 people; in Japan, a brutal heat wave claimed 80 lives. This summer, wildfires have been burning in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. There are even wildfires in the Arctic. High temperature records have been shattered all around the globe, including in Death Valley, California, which set the record for the hottest month ever recorded on the planet, with 21 days over 120 degrees. Our world is aflame.

I doubt any of this would surprise Lovelock, who is one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century, as well as one of the most articulate prophets of doom. As an inventor, he created a device that helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer and jump-start the environmental movement in the 1970s. And as a scientist, he introduced the revolutionary theory known as Gaia — the idea that our entire planet is a kind of super-organism that is, in a sense, “alive.” Once dismissed as New Age quackery, Lovelock’s vision of a self-regulating Earth now underlies virtually all climate science.

And in Lovelock’s view, the Earth’s self-regulating system is seriously out of whack, thanks largely to our 150-year fossil fuel binge. “You could quite seriously look at climate change as a response of the system intended to get rid of an irritating species: us humans,” Lovelock told me in 2007 when I visited him at his house in Devon, England, for a profile in Rolling Stone. “Or at least cut them back to size.”

And Lovelock did not mince words about the future that we are creating for ourselves by ignoring the warning signs on our superheated planet. As I wrote at the time:

In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. “The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia,” Lovelock says. “How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable.” With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes – Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

A new paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” reached more or less the same conclusion, even if was stated in more general scientific terms (and of course minus any reference to a “culling” of Earth’s population).

The paper, which was widely covered by everyone from USA Today to Al Jazeera, projected a very Lovelock-ian view of our world, arguing that even if we managed to hit the carbon emissions targets set in the Paris Climate Accord, we still might trigger a series of accelerating climate-system feedback loops that would push the climate into a permanent hothouse state, with a warming of four, five or even six degrees Celsius. If that were to happen, the paper argued, “Hothouse Earth is likely to be uncontrollable and dangerous to many, particularly if we transition into it in only a century or two, and it poses severe risks for health, economies, political stability (especially for the most climate vulnerable), and ultimately, the habitability of the planet for humans.”

The idea that the Earth’s climate system has certain tipping points, or thresholds, is nothing new. Small changes in the temperature of the Southern Ocean, for example, might have big implications for the West Antarctic ice sheet, leading to an ice cliff collapse that could raise sea levels by 10 feet or more in a very short (geologically-speaking) period of time. Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State, has described the Earth’s climate as a highly complex system that, based on small forces that are still only dimly understood, tends to lurch from one steady state to another. “You might think of the climate as a drunk,” Alley wrote in his great book The Two Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future, which was first published in 2000. “When left alone, it sits; when forced to move, it staggers.”

There is no groundbreaking new science in the Hothouse Earth paper. Rather, it’s a synthesis of what is already known and presented in a compelling way. But it is an important reminder of two key attributes of the climate crisis. The first is that the real threat of climate change is not a slow slide into a warmer world; it’s a fast change into a radically different climate. How fast that change could happen, and how radically different it might be, no one can say for sure. But by continuing to dump fossil fuels into the atmosphere at an ever-increasing rate, we are rolling the dice. As Columbia University scientist Wally Broecker famously put it, “If you’re living with any angry beast, you shouldn’t poke it with a stick.”

And we are not doing nearly enough to fight it. The Hothouse Earth paper points out — again, in a very Lovelock-ian way — that fighting climate change is not just a matter of reducing carbon pollution in the future, important as that obviously is. It’s about taking active stewardship of the planet now, and thinking more holistically about how to manage it now. Among other things, that means giving up the notion that there is a “solution” for climate change and accepting the idea we are living in a rapidly changing world now. How will we engineer drinking water systems to deal with this? How will we manage forests? How are coastal cities going to adapt to — or intelligently retreat from — rapidly rising seas?

“The heat and fires we’re seeing this summer is worrisome,” Alley tells Rolling Stone, in his typically understated way. “There are certainly human fingerprints on a lot of it.” But, Alley points out, this is just the beginning. As of now, the Earth has warmed just 1 degree Celsius. “Dealing with what we’re seeing now is the easy stuff,” Alley says. “With each additional degree of warming, the impact will be greater.” Alley is most concerned about physical systems with likely tipping points, such as the West Antarctic ice sheet.

He’s also concerned about biological tipping points. “If the oxygen level in oceans drops just a little, it could have a big and immediate impact on sea life,” Alley says. “A fire in Brazil could lead to rainforest being replaced with savannah, which would have all kinds of consequences for biological diversity, as well as for carbon uptake.”

But it’s the tipping point in human systems that worry Alley the most. He points to the recent drought in the Middle East, which was a key driver in the Syrian civil war. “You can see the resilience of different political systems. During the drought, Israel was OK. But Syria was not.”

Maybe this is the summer that we figure out that, as Lovelock put it, our engines are about the fail and we are indeed headed over the falls. But I thought that after Hurricane Katrina, too. And after Sandy. Instead, America elected a president who thinks climate change is a hoax and tweets insanely about how California doesn’t have enough water to fight the fires because it has “diverted” rivers into the Pacific. (As University of California at Merced professor LeRoy Westerling explained to NPR, “Even if you built a massive statewide sprinkler system and drained all of our natural water bodies to operate it, it wouldn’t keep up with evaporation from warmer temperatures from climate change.”)

When I talked to Lovelock in his cottage in Devon 11 years ago, he wasn’t worried about the fate of the planet. “Gaia is a tough bitch,” he told me. Whatever we humans do to it, he argued, it will eventually recover its equilibrium, even if it takes millions of years. What’s at stake, Lovelock believes, is civilization. “I don’t see it being too long before forms of life, based on the idea of [artificial intelligence] and so on, take over and run the planet for heaven knows how long.”

What about humans?  When asked about this recently, Lovelock told the BBC: “Don’t you consider it possible that we’ve had our time?”