This is a Dystopian Moment

[PaulK]

Lots of things can be done for the climate emergency that are all better than doing nothing. Exactly as with covid, too many of them aren’t being done promptly. The fossil fuel industry has a huge profit motive in nothing being done, and so the monstrous media machine is carefully cranked up to say, “it’s ok to do nothing.”

Warning: Your grandchildren are notably more likely to starve to death someday if we do nothing, next to nothing is being done, and surprisingly some of this won’t change even if the Progressives get their spending bill.

Would a cigarette pack-style warning help us to get it? Warning: Smokers really do get told by their doctors sometimes that they will almost certainly die of lung cancer, and soon.

[Aleph_Null]

Your commentary moved me to recheck the article, in which the nod to “chinupism” has shrunk to a cursory, almost ritualistically meaningless invocation:

There’s no benefit in giving in to “doomism,” either about climate, per se, or politics.

There’s a fundamental faith here that how we think of things changes the things we think of. It makes no sense, but it’s totally traditional US Amnesian thinking.

The moment we wade into any phrase in the vicinity, word-definitions twist into paradoxical obfuscation. The plurality of tipping point(s) obscures the incontestable fact that every last one of the these will be coming around the mountain when they come, together – as we witness today. When commentators search for a way to describe what we might possibly avoid, they usually settle on “the worst consequences” or some such – obvious hand-waving! No effort to sound like they know specifically of what they speak.

Demise of the human species on planet Earth is the name of the specific doom which appears to be unfolding. Probably tomorrow that agency with the doomer website, NOAA ESRL, will publish their May 2021 measurement for global atmospheric methane. I told my partner in crime over here that I just need another half year, watching that chart, to be sure of it. Right now I’ve got a probably, hardening into a yup. (An yup?)

We don’t get the Earth we wish for. I wish we did, but we don’t.

[Aleph_Null]

@Aleph_Null

We don’t get the Earth we wish for.

I’ve shared a couple of times the feeling of standing on the surface of a dying planet, or sharing that feeling with others who don’t share it. I joke around about that little methane site, but it’s the whole ballgame, practically, to me. Caroline: The number one most disturbing news I’ve seen lately (you might have shared it with me) is a study finding non-biologic (i.e. geologic) methane leaking from Siberian Tundra. It looks like a frozen cork, letting loose: Not just rotting biological material beneath the permafrost, also deeper deposits, discharging. We’ve heard (and more or less believe) the estimates for how much methane there is, and how much worse it is than CO2 for rapid heating.

This is where so much carbon starts filling the atmosphere, we’ve definitely invoked another end-Permian shock to Life on Earth – so it’s over for a lot more than humans, most probably (there’s that “probably”!) Human emissions are, honestly, pretty much beside the point, at that point. When it really sinks in, so that the last sliver of hope seems to be closing up for you, then your life plan starts shifting in poignant ways.

The toughest part for me is embarrassing to narrate, as I’m essentially mourning the artist I used to be (a selfish pain). Sharp twinges accompanying old sketches of mine, from long ago, from when I used to think I’d find something to do with such drawings. Never did.

[Caroline2]

Again, thank you for your comments----especially this one.

Much is hitting me really hard these days. I thought I was better prepared for what is happening, including the methane threat (to life) you mention.

I made the mistake of reading up on the latest re: Venus as there are several fairly recent articles on Venus being once habitable, like Earth.

Many scientists now think Venus might have kept expansive oceans for billions of years—a nearly perfect setting for life.
Venus could have been struck with multiple continent-spanning eruptions—the kind of catastrophic events that have caused mass extinctions on Earth. The eruptions would have poured CO2 into the atmosphere, causing a runaway greenhouse effect that boiled the planet dry.

It is gut wrenching to read about this----Venus may be left with phosphine as its only form of life and unless I’m missing something, that could happen here too.

Evidence indicates phosphine, a gas associated with living organisms, is present in the habitable region of Venus’ atmosphere.

[Greenwich]

lw -Sandy, of course, joined the East River and Hudson River across
Manhattan Island flooding Manhattan up to 39th street.

Unless we remove the pollution the viruses move on, it is very likely
we will have new viruses.

[lwmast]

These are very much transitional times and you have made some excellent points here. I’m not sure what the significance of how this storm impacted these rivers in this way, in my thinking that sounds dramatic. With the anniversary of 9/11 just around the corner, there is a lot of attention focused on NYC. I just watched a documentary that brought a new understanding of what happened. Sometimes events take a long time to see clearly because of the magnitude of the event.

Agreed, before this pandemic, not counting Ebola, the microscopic world of virus’ remained less interesting and unknown. Things have really changed. There are new treatments for this one. Some in clinical trials look promising, there is a nasal spray that is interesting.

[Aleph_Null]

Likewise, of course.

My own personal grok of specifically where Venusification happens: At the very top of the atmosphere. We know such a top is a mythical entity: Atmospheres keep getting thinner and thinner, dragging along a lot of lightweight atomic material. Should that gasbag contain little ol’ Hydrogen, sufficiently excited by heat, the planet can lose it – that’s Venusification: Oxygen can’t find anymore Hydrogen to glom onto, so it makes friends with Carbon, instead. (This childish understanding of mine may or may not have any correspondence with how serious people, with letters after their names, think of it.)

My guess is that heat-liberated Hydrogen winds up getting sucked into the Sun.

At any rate, Venusification looks like such a long, drawn-out process (a temporal analogy to “rock weathering”, perhaps) we’d be long-gone from global agricultural collapse, with too many et ceteras to mention, such as Beckwith foresees. We need a term for those “worst consequences” of AGW which might transpire long after we’re gone.

You may have read “The World Without Us” – which is worried about all of our unattended nuclear power plants going kerflooey, et cetera. I question that worry, in the context of AGW’s damage, which I expect to be even more permanent than those radioactive half-lives. The “long” of the long-term I foresee is the natural temporal debt from sunlight, concentrated into “fossil fuels”: hundreds of millions of years worth.