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