The Real Threat are Climate Optimists, not Doomers (or even Deniers)
How the fight over the 1.5°C threshold exposes Mainstream Climate Science’s concerning biases --- [Estimated reading time: 30 min.]
The year 2023 has been quite the ride, to say the very least. As we watched with increasing dread how various charts depicting global temperatures climbed to unprecedented highs, climate change visibly turned exponential. Still, not all is lost, the Optimists assure us zealously. If we just vote the right people into office, implement the right policies and shift funding away from fossil fuels, any potential problem with the climate can be solved. The real danger, they allege, are people who insist that things are getting worse: the Doomers.
But are things really that bad?
On almost half of all days during the past year, we’ve already exceeded the (admittedly rather arbitrary) 1.5°C threshold above preindustrial levels. 2023 was the warmest year on record by a large margin, making the past nine years the hottest nine years in recorded history. Now guess what the current year will become known for.
For the first time since recordkeeping began, all days of the year were warmer than 1°C above preindustrial levels, and – according to the analysis of Berkeley Earth – the average temperature in 2023 already reached 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, meaning we probably already breached that threshold. (Another analysis arrives at 1.48°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial level, but admits that it is likely that the “12-month period ending in January or February 2024 will exceed 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level.”) Land temperatures were – again, for the first time – above 2.0°C.
While record after record was shattered by the astonishing heat, we watched the elites flock together in an utterly unsustainable desert nation built entirely on fossil fuels,1 to discuss what we should do to stay below that very same 1.5°C mark – until 20-fucking-30. This blatant disconnection from reality will be the main focus of this essay.
Optimists were quick to point out that this “temporary transgression” (an increasingly common term!) by no means implies that all is lost, since even if we acknowledge that we’re beyond 1.5°C temporarily, “to breach the Paris agreement’s limit, the heating must be sustained for many years.” Oh okay – then there’s nothing to worry about! We’ll just sit around and wait for ten years, at which point the same people will probably just start claiming that, actually, to be really sure, we have to refer to the twenty-year average instead. Just to be really, really sure we haven’t breached it yet.
You see where this exercise is going.
It points to a future in which the elites and their lackeys will become increasingly confined to the reassuring and hopelessly optimistic illusions they continue to dream up, unaware of how far along the collapse trajectory this civilization already is – and increasingly hostile towards everyone who suggests things are different. The collective cognitive dissonance is reminiscent of the Danish folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
One thing that has happened – quite predictably, I might add – as a result of people pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes is the rise of a number of public, high-profile Optimists, loudly proclaiming that everyone else is wrong and that they are the only ones who see the situation without any biases, just as it is. They are the ones with the Truth. The Scientific Truth! Unsurprisingly, those people get most media coverage and hence most of the public attention.
They blame the so-called Doomers, to which (if we’re being forced to take sides) I count myself, for “stalling climate action” and “spreading nihilism.” In reality, most Doomers are – contrary to the Optimists’ claims – not gun-toting preppers with an obsession for four-letter abbreviations, awaiting NTHE (Near-Term Human Extinction) and preparing for when SHTF (Shit Hits The Fan) in their home-made bunkers, but a broad spectrum of pretty normal people with widely differing education levels and social backgrounds that, collectively, believe that the unusually stable climate of the Holocene that allowed for the development of fixed-field agriculture (and hence cities and civilizations) is over.
What comes next is anyone’s guess, but I think it’s important to at least consider human extinction as a possibility with a likelihood well above zero, especially after seeing more and more renegade papers (like this one) pop up in the last few years.
But whatever evidence we may present, we are being accused of “fear-mongering,” “doomsaying,” or worse, because what we say deviates from what’s currently considered “mainstream” and “consensus.”
Make no mistake: the Climate Optimists will discredit themselves in time, but if we just sit around and wait for that to happen while they continue to spread false hope and misinformation, we’ll lose valuable time that we could have spent on more productive endeavors (such as trying to figure out how to replace those components and services of the current system that are crucial to human well-being with localized, egalitarian, community-based, fossil-fuel-free, low-tech and low-input approaches). We Doomers have to push back against their narrative.
They have made the initial mistake of setting themselves overambitious and obviously unrealistic “climate goals,” milestones in global heating that they didn’t think we would reach this soon. Back in 2016, when the Paris Agreement was signed, 2030 seemed far away. Far enough, at least, to be “that point somewhen in the future” when the politicians whose signatures decorate the document will have either died of old age or retired to their very own doomsday bunkers, and the rest of us will hopefully have finally “done something” about climate change. A few short but eventful years later, 2030 still seems pretty far away, but for rather different reasons. It has become obvious that the main goal for 2030 – staying below 1.5°C of warming – might be out of reach a full five years before schedule already. 2024 looks like it’s going to be the first full year that will exceed the 1.5°C mark. The first of many, one might add. Even the mainstream media starts admitting that it is increasingly likely that we’ll reach 1.5°C before 2030.
But don’t worry, the Optimists tell us. Things will be fine.
Optimists make up “the mainstream” of climate science, but it is important to note that this mainstream has, so far, been wrong about the severity of climate change. That’s why everyone is so surprised at what’s happening, and how fast.
As I’ve written before:
“Every few months we see a new article reaffirming the obvious trend: everything. is. happening. faster. than. expected. Experts have become ‘not alright’, worried, concerned, shocked, stunned, terrified, desperate, aghast, and, once the media started running out of adjectives to describe the scientists’ dread, flabbergasted. We know things are serious when climate scientists are becoming flabbergasted by the climate crisis.”
In the meantime, this list of terrifying adjectives has been topped again, this time by “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas” – used to describe the extremely abnormal temperatures in 2023.2
Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to increase unabated, and – so far – fossil fuels continue to be extracted, refined and burned at record rates. The mind virus I have termed PDST (Progress and Development, Science and Technology), called Wetiko by many Native American cultures, continues to spread and intensify. Wildlife habitat is lost to agricultural expansion, accelerating resource extraction and urban sprawl. And I’d be highly surprised if global reforestation efforts last year were sufficient to offset the forest areas lost to wildfires in that same period. To be honest, I doubt it.
Meanwhile, oil companies rake in record profits and simultaneously shower themselves with “green” awards attesting to their (alleged) sustainability and responsibility towards the environment and the climate. Increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions might even have staved off the next Ice Age, the corporate press assured us, so I guess we should thank the fossil fuel industry for narrowly averting an existential catastrophe for the human race.
It’s safe to say that things are really fucking bad, and continue to get worse. Yet Optimists tell us we’re wrong – without even flinching. Yes, the situation is serious, they admit (some even use the word “dire”), but that doesn’t mean we should “give up.”
Give up?!
Who the hell said anything about giving up? The real fight for a livable planet has barely begun! After peacefully protesting for a few decades – without any noteworthy success whatsoever – the fight for the living world will have to proceed to the next higher level of escalation, which is just the logical (and pretty inevitable) next step. Asking politicians to “please do something about climate change” has been one of the most unfruitful exercises of the climate movement, so it’s about time we take things into our own hands. If the system is unable to provide responses or solutions, we have to get busy, whether that means building community resilience, preparing to replace crucial services currently provided by governments, or actively resisting and/or fighting further development and resource extraction.
It has become crystal clear that there is no “room full of adults” working tirelessly to halt the annihilation of the biosphere. There are plenty of adults, in plenty of rooms, working on yet another 400-page report detailing the impacts of climate change on the economy and building complex mathematical models to estimate future costs. But if you dare to dig a bit deeper and expose some of the root causes of the current predicament, people call you an “eco-fascist” and say – quite correctly, I might add – that “we can’t go back to the Stone Age.” Okay, then!
Even worse, there is no shortage of highly influential people who claim that the problem isn’t even that severe. Yes, to them the Sixth Mass Extinction Event and accelerating Global Heating are just minor inconveniences that could be swept aside, would we just be able to focus on the positive things for a minute, instead of “throwing out hands in the air” and declaring that all efforts to save techno-industrial civilization are ultimately pointless.
One thing that annoyed me in particular was climate scientist Michael E. Mann, whose latest book “The New Climate War” (published in 2021) gained increasing traction among those who consider themselves educated.3
In the introductory paragraph of the chapter titled “The Truth is Bad Enough,” he claims that “doomism today arguably poses a greater threat to climate action than outright denial,” a baseless accusation that I will address in a minute. He continues:
“If catastrophic warming of the planet were truly inevitable and there were no agency on our part in averting it, why should we do anything? Doomism potentially leads us down the same path of inaction as outright denial of the threat.”
– As I’ve written before, being a Doomer does in no way, shape or form imply inaction. All Doomers I know, myself included, work as hard as they can to soften the impact of the blow we’re about to be dealt. We dedicate ourselves and our lives to planting trees, growing food, experimenting with alternative staple crops and drought- and flood-resistant cultivars, we attempt to build community resilience, and we prepare to take over vital aspects of the system (such as healthcare and food distribution) when they inevitably become unavailable to all but the richest during the next level of the metacrisis’ progression.
The assumption that “doomism implies inaction” tells us more about the psychology of those making this claim than it does about reality. If Mann were to admit to himself that civilization is collapsing and can’t be saved, his response would probably be exactly what he alleges we Doomers are doing.
“Exaggerated claims and hyperbole, moreover, play into efforts by deniers and delayers to discredit the science, posing further obstacles to action.”
– Yes, but so far the Doomers – apart from a few extreme outliers like Guy McPherson4 – have been right: we find ourselves in the middle of the worst-case scenario, in which no concrete action whatsoever has been taken to slow down global greenhouse gas emissions (and hence rein in the continued growth of global GDP). With no viable method to remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via mechanical means in sight, no matter how many billions of dollars are wasted on this endeavor, the only option left is to actually reduce fossil fuel consumption on a global scale. Now how likely is that to happen, if not necessitated by the reality of Peak Oil slowly catching up?5 If we, as the IPCC recommends, “halve emissions until 2030” – a 50 percent reduction in industrial output, electricity production, and car, airplane and ship traffic, which would all translate into a drastic reduction of economic activity, and all that over the course of the next five years – what would be left of their beloved industrial civilization?
But it’s getting worse. In the final chapter, the first of his “four-point battle plan” is “disregard the doomsayers.” You read that right. He advises people to not even listen to those damn Doomers, to not even engage in any dialogue with them – since doing so would merely give their arguments (and their scary implications) more credibility, presumably because the Optimists would be forced to admit that their assessment has been, well, too optimistic. So, when confronted with research that shows an acceleration of global warming, or the breach of key thresholds and tipping points, Mann’s advice is to basically press your hands over your ears and scream “LALALALALALALALALA” at the top of your lungs.
I have trouble putting into words how enraged I am by his stance. This is not only highly unscientific; it is fucking dumb. What he is telling people is basically “You know, don’t even talk to those dangerous Doomers. Don’t even listen to or address their arguments, and don’t ever waste your time responding to their claims.” Great. So we are being openly discouraged, by “one of the world’s leading experts on climate change,” to assess any future trajectories that diverge from the “green zone,” the optimal outcome for humanity and the planet, that becomes more distant with each passing day.
This gives people an excuse to believe, without having to further engage with any actual evidence, that there really isn’t anything to worry about. Similar things result from the latest IPCC reports, which sound somewhat alarming, but mostly convey the image that climate change is something that will happen “in the future” and will affect “the economy.” And what ultimately ends up in the IPCC reports are merely the points – sometimes already outdated by the time of publication – that everyone agreed upon. Even opinions that only slightly diverge from the Mainstream are systematically excluded, for lack of “consensus” among “experts.”
Consequently, you hear genuinely concerned people discuss the impacts of climate change on the economy they partake in – on timescales reaching until 2050, 2070, or even 2100.
But how about, instead of arguing about a future that has probably never been this uncertain in recorded history, we focus on what’s directly in front of us? How about we try to assess what climate change will do to our lives and the communities we inhabit in the next five to ten years? How about, instead of listening to a few privileged academics, writers, politicians and business executives from overdeveloped countries babble on about how life isn’t so bad in their echo chambers and gated communities in San Francisco or Seattle (or wherever the hell those people live), we listen to those that are experiencing climate change right now? The farmers currently facing the longest droughts in living memory? The fishermen unable to subsist on their meager catch? The people already being displaced by extreme weather events?
What conversations about “the year 2050” tend to ignore is that climate change is already catastrophically impacting entire communities and ecosystems all around the world.
And whatever happened to the precautious principle? Isn’t it the responsibility of a scientist to consider all likely outcomes? Where exactly is the evidence that the Doomers’ scenarios are less likely than the Optimists’? More rooftop solar PV and more electric cars on the road haven’t done a damn thing to slow down emissions – all they have done is increase resource extraction, and concomitantly increase all the emissions and pollution associated with this process.
But there are more people like Michael Mann. Rebecca Solnit, Optimist by profession, make it clear that there is absolutely no reason to worry, because... Well, just don’t worry. And now go back to sleep. Her latest article in The Guardian, titled “We can’t afford to be climate doomers,” has been refuted elsewhere in great detail, but it’s still worth to take a closer look at a few key assertions.
Just like Mann, Solnit alleges that “Doomers discourage people who otherwise might act, so they’re working toward the worst outcomes they claim to dread.” Yes, we do discourage people, but only to stop wasting their time with the “Rights of Nature” movement, lobbying for a few new bicycle lanes, the so-called “renewable” energy transition, or any other non-solution that might have made a difference, had we started half a century ago.
Again: personally, I haven’t met a single Doomer that preaches inaction. Strawman much?
She continues:
“Most positive climate news doesn’t make very dramatic reading, and I usually find it in technical journals, tweets from scientists and policymakers, and climate-specific news services. It’s often about incremental stuff, like that we’re deploying more wind and solar and using less fossil fuel to generate electricity. Or it’s about legislation or technical things like new battery storage materials or less polluting concrete formulas.”
Okay. But “incremental stuff” in the face of the accelerating, exponential collapse of the biosphere doesn’t exactly sound like good news to me. More wind and solar capacity is added, but has not replaced even a fraction of the global fossil energy mix – it merely adds to it (see graph above).6 Wherever “less fossil fuels [are used] to generate electricity,” this leaves out the fact that electricity is usually only a fraction of total energy used – which remains firmly dominated by coal, oil and gas. Legislation has utterly failed to stop the growth of the global economy, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. We can’t win the game against the capitalists as long as they make up the rules – it’s their own damn game, so they are just going to change the rules (or ignore them) if they actually feel threatened. “Technical things” are published in techno-optimist outlets each day, but only a miniscule percentage of those new developments will ever be employed at scale (or in time).
The ace up her sleeve are surveys (*eye-roll*) “showing that in 2023 ‘nearly seven-in-ten Americans (69%) favor the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050’ and in 2021 ‘three-quarters (75%) of adults in Great Britain said they were worried about the impact of climate change.’ Great! But who is willing to drastically reduce their “high standard of living”7 as a result of worrying and favoring?8
Soon after, another article, an excerpt from Hannah Ritchie’s book “Not the End of the World,” published in The Guardian, that showed us that things really aren’t all that bad recently made the rounds. The article (titled “I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis. I was wrong”) is a textbook example of the reductionist, left-hemisphere thinking that defines the dominant culture. The author used to believe collapse was inevitable and imminent, but, after looking at the data, charts, and facts, came to the conclusion that things are actually improving! That’s what the data shows, so there’s really no need to worry now! Everything still goes up, right?!
In Pinkeresque fashion, Ritchie goes on to tell us about how “poverty” and “child mortality” is allegedly falling rapidly, and how this somehow means that climate change won’t wipe out half the population (or more). If you’re surprised by those illogical correlations, you’re not alone.
She was “completely wrong” about “‘natural’ disasters” (her scare quotes), since much fewer people die today than during the past century or so. But if less people are dying, it is not due to fewer or less severe disasters, but due to early warning systems and more advanced technology. This is as true for tsunamis as it is for wildfires and crop failures. Crop failures in one region are easily papered over by simply trucking in more cheap, toxic, industrially produced food from elsewhere. But this approach only works when oil is inexpensive and harvest failures are not widespread. Moreover, the highly complex technological system that still manages to reduce some casualties is on the brink of collapse as well, which Ritchie does not address at all. Resource scarcity alone will throw a wrench in the works.
“In 2012, the world topped out at 4.9 tonnes per person. Since then, per capita emissions have been slowly falling. Nowhere near fast enough, but falling nonetheless.”
The “per-capita emissions” argument is utterly useless considering the steep population growth we’ve experienced in the same time. Sure, some things got a bit more efficient, but if Jevon’s Paradox teaches us anything, it is that any gains in efficiency will be overshadowed by an overall increase in consumption/usage. But another reason we seem near a peak is the simple but grave fact that we’ve started to hit the biophysical limits of the planet. We don’t have as much “more” as we’d like to, so we’re forced to slow down a bit. This is not at all evidence of any successful climate action or policy.
Oh, and we can expect the price for so-called “renewables” rise again as both oil and crucial metals and minerals required for their production become increasingly scarce and nations, corporations and individuals scurry to secure as many solar panels and wind turbines as they can before supply chains rupture.
The last thing I’ll say about the Optimists’ argument that “things are still getting better” is that the infamous Limits to Growth study (which seems eerily on track with some of its more concerning scenarios) predicts a peak and consequent decline of several variables somewhen during the 2020s (aka right fucking now). A hiker exclaiming “but we’re still walking uphill!” right before reaching a mountaintop is technically correct, but his statement is not necessarily valuable as an indicator of future altitude.
And here we arrive at an important point:
What we Doomers are proposing is merely a continuation of currently observed trends. It is the Optimists who allege a radical diversion from those trends – and hence, the burden of proof rests solely on their shoulders. It is them who have to bring forth convincing evidence that things are not deteriorating, or that a turning point is at least in sight.
The Optimists’ Achilles’ heel is the following graph:
Nonetheless, Optimists claim that “not all is lost,” and we have to continue recycling, insulating our houses, bicycling to work, eating vegetarian food, going to protests, signing petitions, and writing letters to our representatives in government.
This blatant disregard of lived reality in favor of abstract models is what the Optimists all have in common. Why confront the (admittedly quite scary) real world when you can seek refuge in abstractions, in numbers and charts that convey a sense of order, and hence of security?
The Optimists’ arguments are generally unconvincing, often bordering on the delusional. The kind of false hopes people like Mann, Solnit and Ritchie perpetuate are truly dangerous ideas to give people these days – but, in their desperation, people tend to believe whatever the hell they like – whether that’s rooted in physical reality or not.
So, which one are you, dear reader, going to believe: the actual, real world - or whatever mathematical wizardry and other abstractions statisticians come up with to try to describe & categorize it in a hopelessly reductionist fashion? Remember, statistics lie.9
When I look at the Optimists, I see quietly desperate people struggling to come to terms with “the end of the world as we know it” (aka modern civilization, the Western middle-class lifestyle, or the American Dream™), then suddenly seeing an “easy way out,” and embracing it wholeheartedly (and, unfortunately, rather uncritically). This happened to some of my own friends, for whom the truth was just too much, too painful – so they started listening to Jeremy Rifkin (or any other techno-optimist prophet talking about impending salvation through technology and the “pledges” of nations - made by politicians who will conveniently retire long before having to actually do anything about those issues themselves). Yet this is by far not the most rational thing to do – discarding all that inconvenient evidence and direct experience for some techno-utopian, Pinkeresque nonsense about how “the World is still getting better.” Look around, for fuck’s sake. You can bury yourself in data and numbers if the real world becomes too scary, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re in the midst of the collapse of the only global empire ever to exist.
Also, I wonder what the Optimists have to say about the current collapse of the biosphere? The catastrophic decline in basically all wild animals, including insects? The acidification of the oceans? How do they propose wildlife levels will rebound? What are their responses to micro- and nanoplastics, antibiotics and endocrine-disrupting chemicals that by now saturate the entire global ecosystem? How do we get rid of those? And how would we feed 8+ billion people without massive fossil inputs?
The Optimists do have “solutions” – wildly naïve propositions that sound increasingly far-fetched, unrealistic and desperate. Blinders on, they sink billions of dollars into the latest “start-up” that promises to save the world through minor efficiency gains, and enthusiastically forecast that A(G)I will soon be able to guide us all out of the darkness, into the light.
And perhaps the most concerning thing is that this is exactly what those in power want to hear – climate optimism is feeding their confirmation bias, and hence the notion that things aren’t that bad. As a result, the ruling class has absolutely no idea what’s actually going on.
This is “stalling climate action.”
A common thing to happen during the collapse of past civilizations was the emergence of millenarian cults who promised an impending Golden Age of Abundance, Peace, Prosperity, Joy and Happiness. This is to be understood as a fear reaction, a psychological defense mechanism, against the threat of uncertainty and doom. Today, the closest analogue we have to those millenarian cults are the Optimists, the folks telling us that there is nothing to worry about as long as we just keep doing what we’ve been doing for over a century: build more machines, make more humans, produce more goods, and continue to subdue and exploit the planet that is our only home.
I have watched Optimist conferences about “green” technology where wild-eyed speakers in fancy suits went full cult prophet, raising an outstretched hand in the air while clutching the microphone with white knuckles, and droning on about how in a few years’ time, nobody will know how to drive cars anymore, energy will be clean and abundant, and robots and AI will do all the work for us.
Some people still believe that Deniers pose the most imminent threat, but I will not even give their point of view any attention other than saying that we’ll see how long they can uphold their worldview in the next few years. But the same is true for the Optimists.
Optimists and Deniers are not even that far apart anymore, since both downplay the severity of the issue, and thus forestall any real actions & responses to the rapidly converging crises. They are both unable to deal with the reality that their lifestyle is way past its expiration date, and that they are inhabiting an outdated worldview. For the Deniers, it will become impossible to uphold the claim that climate change isn’t happening (and even if it is, it isn’t caused by industrial civilization) – but for the Optimists, it will be increasingly difficult to insist that the 1.5°C hasn’t been breached, as month after month logs as already being above this threshold. Sure, the world might cool to a chilly 1.4°C during the next La Niña10 – but what about the year after? And the year after that?
Both the Deniers and the Optimists cling to their 20th-century worldview with increased fervor as it becomes clear that we’re living through the End of an Era.
At what point can we collectively admit that things are much worse than we thought and won’t turn out as we expected? When can we finally be honest about our situation?
Or, as Arnold Schroder, founder of the World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics and Global Survival and host of the Fight Like An Animal podcast, put it:
“How long can we say ‘it’s almost too late’ before we say ‘it’s too late’? How long will we say ‘this is happening faster than we predicted’ before simply acknowledging that it’s happening exactly as fast as it is?”
The painful reality is: climate action and policy have utterly failed. Dozens, if not hundreds of meetings, summits and conferences have not led to a single improvement in the overall situation. Carbon emissions continue to rise, and the only thing that will be able to reverse this trend is the impending economic contraction, the protectionism we will see as a result of food shortages, and the resource scarcity we’re just now getting the first taste of. One way or another, emissions will drop – but not because people want them to.
Furthermore, it remains to be seen how many tipping points we’ve breached already, and how long it takes to balance the current concentrations of greenhouse gases and ecological destruction on the ground out again. (Current estimates range around 100,000 years.)
Maybe temperatures are going to drop below the 1.5°C threshold again, at least for a while, but it is highly likely that this dip would be short-lived. But don’t be fooled by the Optimists’ claims that this is reason for “hope” or evidence for successful “climate action.” The global climate takes time to respond, and by the time it has responded to the current concentration of atmospheric carbon – which is only a matter of time – 1.5°C will seem like the Good Old Days. Remember, current concentrations of CO₂ are at the highest level in 14 million years, which should be reason for careful concern, since the genus Homo exists for a mere three million years.
And, concludingly, the most important thing to remember is that we should not let reductionism fool us into thinking that the definition of climate change is “how atmospheric CO₂ levels relate to arbitrary temperature thresholds we set for ourselves.” Climate change is but one aspect of a much larger crisis: the collapse of the biosphere, and Earth’s shift into a new climatic and ecological regime.
Ultimately, it does not matter even the slightest bit when exactly we cross a certain threshold expressed in degrees centigrade above some equally arbitrary level we consider optimal, so I hope this is the last thing I feel compelled to write about this particular issue.
What matters is that change is clearly accelerating. And what will matter from now on is not words, but actions. Concrete actions to drastically reduce our dependence on the rapidly deteriorating system of global ecocide. We have to be brave, to take a leap into the unknown and hope for the best, but it’s the only thing left to do. Clinging to nostalgic fantasies about the lifestyle of the late 20th century is not going to help anyone, least of all the Living World. A new Era has begun, and how exactly this age will play out is entirely up to what humans, as the dominant species (whether we like it or not), will do in the next few years. In a recent episode of Arnold’s podcast, he expressed the dilemma with the following allegory (I’m paraphrasing here):
Imagine you’re a heavy smoker who’s at high risk of dying from lung cancer. You are presented with two options. Either you wait for an as-of-yet nonexistent cure that might or might not be developed in time – or you fucking stop smoking.
The choice should be obvious.
And, because there’s currently so few things to smile about, here’s another meme:
I write stuff like the above in my free time, when I’m not tending the piece of land we’re rewilding here at Feun Foo. As a subsistence farmer by profession I don’t have a regular income, so if you have a few bucks to spare please consider supporting my work with a small donation:
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A country that imports over 85 percent of its food, has a staggering population density of 120 people per square kilometer despite having negligible water resources, and uses thermal desalination – mostly fueled by (you guessed it!) more fossil fuels – to produce the vast majority of potable water. As one of the countries that would not be able to exist without techno-industrial civilization, it is not surprising why they stick to the status quo so much – and why they can be such good friends with the Optimists.
In fact, try googling every conceivable adjective used to express concern and/or surprise, and there’s a good chance that some academic has already used it to express his feelings about the latest climate science.
Full disclosure: I didn’t read the entire book – my time is too valuable. I’m familiar with the main points, though, and I’ve read enough of it to come to the conclusion that the book is pretty much an elaboration on whatever happens on Mann’s Twitter feed, mixed with some climate modelling.
Michael Mann has called Guy McPherson a “doomist cult hero.” He’s not. Many Doomers (like Jem Bendell) have publicly distanced themselves from the few fringe personalities on the spectrum.
Which in and of itself would be catastrophic for the techno-industrial system.
Another issue is the fact that the mining and production of said technologies requires vast amounts of fossil fuels as well, and produces large quantities of persistent, highly toxic pollutants.
Every time I use that phrase I’m reminded of Ted Kaczynski’s memorable take on the issue:
“As for [the] claim that the ‘overall material standard of living seems to be increasing,’ the way that works is that the technoindustrial system simply defines the term ‘high standard of living’ to mean the kind of living that the system itself provides, and the system then ‘discovers’ that the standard of living is high and increasing. But to me and to many, many other people a high material standard of living consists not in cars, television sets, computers, or fancy houses, but in open spaces, forests, wild plants and animals, and clear-flowing streams. As measured by that criterion our material standard of living is falling rapidly.” (Technological Slavery, 2008)
I am aware that rich people have a considerably larger ecological footprint, but that doesn’t mean that if we somehow manage to curb consumption levels of the elites, the rest of us can continue living our current lifestyle. A drastic reduction in living standards is inevitable, and the richer you are, the steeper the decline.
Despite the common claim that “it’s not statistics that lie, it’s people” – a sibling of the “guns don’t kill people” argument – leaves out the fact that a statistic is itself an abstraction already, and hence is unable to display the real world in all its complexity. Needless to say, statistics can be used to show pretty much everything you like. Here, I’ll tell you that wildlife numbers are actually increasing (at least when modeled as number of animals per hectare of habitat)! If that habitat shrinks due to agricultural expansion, the remaining animals will inhabit a smaller patch of land, hence their numbers are increasing – at least per unit of land. Progress!
As James Hansen proposes in his most recent paper.
Never forget hope was the last and worst evil to escape from pandora's box. The more time you spend gardening the less you have left for consuming media about global warming.
BROTHER!
I exclaim with arms outstretched.
At last someone ELSE who SEES what I "see".
The Crisis Report - 51
Unclothing the Emperor : Understanding “What’s Wrong” with our Climate Paradigm. In order to understand “Why” things are happening “FASTER than Expected”.