Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We’re approaching a turning point on the mainstream’s attitudes towards climate change. // On climate, young Republicans now sound like Democrats // Over 170 news outlets vow to cover climate // McKibben in TIME: “Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different”
The date was Thursday, July 25th – the hottest day ever in Europe, part of a record-setting heat wave. Climate change, in other words. By the time we reached the airport the next morning for the long journey home, all the stories had melted in the heat and merged into just one story, one anguished question:
Where indeed, Mr. Gauguin, are we going exactly?
The New Yorker and other mainstream voices are spreading the message about the seriousness of climate change, and the possibility of an apocalypse. The Pope too says that the climate is in an emergency and asks the world to abandon fossil fuels.
The Earth’s ecosystem is a typical complex system. It reacts to perturbations, even minor ones, sometimes very strongly. Don’t expect it to remain stable just because it has been stable up to a certain moment.
I’ve learned that I need to work on my own grief because it’s the only way I can access the depths within myself that are requisite of these times. Only then am I able to be clear about what is most important, and what my next right step should be.
Globally, the frequency and intensity of heatwaves are generally rising due to climate change. However, we do not yet see a clear upward trend in extreme temperatures in India.
“The sooner we realize that humanity won’t have a Hollywood ending to climate change, the more chance we have to avoid ours becoming a true horror story.”
On that, I think we can agree.
While the dominate public narrative has been that we are making great leaps toward a low-carbon economy through the rapid deployment of renewable energy, the IEA report in late March showed a civilization moving inexorably toward climate catastrophe.
The novel has essentially the same premise as the hit disaster movie from five years earlier, The Day After Tomorrow. The Gulf Stream ocean current, which has long played a crucial role in our planet’s climate system, undergoes a sudden collapse driven primarily by human-caused global warming. Ice caps rapidly spread across the northern hemisphere, rendering places like New York City and western and northern Europe uninhabitable to all but the most rugged survivalists.
I just finished reading David Wallace-Wells’ book,”The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” When asked whether focusing on predictions of doom is productive or just numbing, Wallace-Wells responded: complacency poses a greater risk to our species than panic. A little panic can be a good thing, especially if you have become complacent.
So you want to escape climate change. That’s a reasonable impulse — climate change rivals nuclear war for the greatest threat to human life in the history of our species’ existence.
Generations of Hollywood films have conditioned us to expect snowbound Christmases, even though they are no longer the norm for Missouri (Meet Me in St. Louis), modern London (Love, Actually), or most of the other cities where such movies are set.
