Climate Perspectives
It can sometimes be helpful to consider the ideas of other people. This page has essays and videos from a variety of sources. Some describe the details of the climate crisis, others offer perspectives on how to handle that. I have found all of them thought provoking each in their own way. Perhaps you will too. For videos, where possible I have embedded them below. Mother Gaia cartoon is from Humon Comics. Click it to go to the original.
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Outlook? Terrifying: TV weather presenters on the hell and horror of the climate crisis
What is it like to have a front row seat for the worst show in the world?Tuesday 19 July 2022 is a day that will stay with Ben Rich for ever. “I got up and immediately checked the weather observations to see what was going on,” he remembers. “Then I went to work for my shift. The station was really hot, the train was really hot, and I remember having this moment.” That was the day last year when the temperature in the UK surpassed 40C (104F) for the first time ever. Rich is a BBC weather presenter and meteorologist. “In my training, which was only about 10 years ago, I was led to believe that 40C in the UK was nigh on impossible” ... ITV meteorologist Laura Tobin, who does the weather bulletins on Good Morning Britain, was also on duty that day. Like Rich, she had been watching the models with a mixture of incredulity and dread. “I remember when I did my first bulletin on that Tuesday morning I forecast that we would break 40C. Then when I sat down and chatted to my producer, I had tears in my eyes. We shouldn’t be reaching these temperatures – it would be impossible to without climate change” ... For Tobin, there were a few things that brought home the reality of the situation. First, the increased frequency of extreme weather events, such as record temperatures, rainfall, drought and wildfires. “It got to a point where it’s like: another record? We won’t do this one because we did a record the other day. It almost started to become boring, but the fact that there were so many records show something is going on.” In 2021 Tobin went to Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic, to report for Good Morning Britain. She saw how the glaciers had receded, how the fjords were no longer freezing over, how this was affecting the wildlife. "Seeing the reality compared to seeing and knowing the science was different" ... [Clare Nasir who presents on Channel 5 as well as working at the Met Office] experienced something similar in 2013. Back then, Nasir says, the media thought it needed to provide a “balanced” point of view, and “even though the science at that point was pretty much spot on, they were allowing these climate deniers – whether they were in the pockets of the fossil fuel companies or whatever – to come on to voice their opinions without any factual backing whatsoever” ... And to accusations of scaremongering? “It is scary!” says Tobin. “The reality of climate change is very scary. We had thousands more deaths across the UK, tens of thousands across Europe, because of the extreme heatwave ... the reality is that temperatures that are hotter than our bodies cause people to die, and that will become my daughter’s summer normal when she is my age. That is scary.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/outlook-terrifying-tv-weather-presenters-on-the-hell-and-horror-of-the-climate-crisis··· --- ···
Dancing with Grief, By Dahr Jamail
The next morning, I read his message to the congregation, and went on to speak to them honestly about how it is now far too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe. I reminded them of some facts that they surely already knew, but which we are often too uncomfortable to sit with for long ... Meanwhile, the business-as-usual economic paradigm continues, and it, too, shows no indication of changing in the radical way necessary ... A sober reading of the latest climate change science indicates that we are now genuinely in free fall, and are in a non-linear situation of climactic disruptions, runaway feedback loops, and their effects. We are locked on a course towards uncontrollable levels of climate disruption, bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease, and war. There can no longer be any question that life as we know it, at least for those of us in the privileged West, is now ending.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-07-15/uncertain-future-forum-dahr-jamail-essay/··· --- ···
How to live when you know that you are dying
Care less, have fun – and accept the inevitable
My therapist told me she was dying the way someone else might admit to cancelling their gym membership. Oh no, she told me when I asked how her immunotherapy was going, she had stopped all that. She sounded regretful but not distressed. I was confused ... the chemotherapy hadn’t worked and the immunotherapy was somehow making things worse. She had been offered another treatment but that would mean losing her hair and she would rather not. So no, she had given everything up except the oxygen. “I love life but if it’s destiny, I don’t mind to die. I think it’s an injustice but I say, Sara, care less for once! ... maybe they’ll give me another few months, it doesn’t really matter. I’m feeling quite well actually!” In fact, we had two months [and] miraculously this was somehow enough time for her to teach me how to live without her and how to die excellently ... “It’s sad, yes, but let’s find the good augit,” she suggests inevitably. The good augit is the heart of Sara’s ideology. She created it, then embodied it. “Augit means to be able to stay with the good bit of your life. To stay with the good augit is to find the good in an experience,” she says. “If you don’t have this capacity to take the good augit, then you are trapped.” Her dying is a crash test for the augit theory ... “In this last period, I’ve never learned so much, it’s unbelievable. And you are doing the same. Maybe we are sharing because it’s like the both of us, in a different way of course, are being reborn,” she says. “I will be reborn as an angel and you will be reborn as a different part of you” ... Her beliefs are more ancient Greek than flower child. Dying becomes less terrifying when it’s less a brutal cessation of being and more a return to some original state with your meta-family: Mother Gaia, Father Uranus and Grandma Chaos. I find the idea reassuring ... she’s also bought presents for everyone in the town – books, toys, candles. [I] tell her that she’s been very generous. “Believe me if you’re generous it comes back,” she tells me. “Look at me! It comes back in so many things, unbelievable” ... When we speak again, I’m back in Greece and Sara sounds frail. She has written her rules for a good life and asks if she can read them out to me. The effort is audible.• 1 Balance: not putting all your effort into just one thing like professional success or accumulating wealth.
• 2 Honesty: being honest with yourself; not accepting comfortable lies.
• 3 Cherishing relationships with people who matter to you. Accepting that some people will never like you.
• 4 Developing your life to make best use of your own unique talents and attributes even when the result is not what society values the most.
• 5 Knowing when to give up on a lost cause. Accepting the inevitable with dignity.
• 6 Consider reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Edith Hall’s Aristotle’s Way.
“I am ready for everything because I have an excellent life. I adore my clients. I did an excellent job. I really like my children and my husband. I couldn’t have more. Seriously! If I need to go, maybe it’s better that I’m the first because I have all this romantic theory to help me. I’m not worried about it at all, but I don’t want pain. This is it – I don’t want too much pain” ... On Saturday morning, I receive a text from her number saying that she’s been taken ill. It doesn’t sound like her. It isn’t. Sara died on Friday morning ... Her middle son tells us they were all with her when she died. “The nurse was administering the end-of-life care, all the drugs that meant Mum could have a peaceful end, comforting Mum, saying, ‘You’re doing really well, Sara, really well, that’s good, good, good.’ The last thing Mum did was to turn around and with great effort say, ‘I’m not doing good, I’m doing excellent.’ That was her outlook. To look all the crappy stuff in the face and be like, nah, you’re all right. I see you’re there but I’m choosing to enjoy this more than I’m meant to. That ability to sing and dance no matter how shitty the situation and decide: no, I refuse to have a bad time here. I’m going to look at life and find it beautiful even if it sucks, and it really sucks at times. We should all remember that. We can all live excellently, not just fine.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/10/lessons-from-my-dying-therapist-care-less-have-fun-accept-the-inevitable··· --- ···
Climate grief is real – and I cannot keep watching images of our dying planet
I have a grief disorder which has arisen slowly over the past few decades and is likely to remain prolonged. My brain suddenly came to the diagnosis when I tried to watch Tim Winton’s series on Ningaloo Nyinggulu, one of the Earth’s last truly wild and intact places. I use the word “tried” because it hurt to watch, and I had to turn it off. After many years of working on environmental issues and being steeped in the wonder and beauty of the natural world I had realised it would inevitably die soon. Now I cannot watch these images of a dying partner ... Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher, created the word solastalgia. It is the pain experienced when the place where one lives and loves is under immediate destruction. It is felt as a sense of erosion of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress. It is a lived experience, a form of homesickness when one is still at home ... Most scientists agree we now live five minutes or less to midnight, which is the collapse of our society.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/05/climate-crisis-grief-is-real-solastalgia-dying-planet··· --- ···
Canadian Broadcasting Corp (CBC) 1984 Climate Change Documentary
We knew everything decades ago, yet did nothing. From the notes: "During the late 1970s it became increasingly clear that the planet was warming, culminating in the landmark Charney report, published in 1979. This 1984 documentary outlines our understanding of global climate change at the time."
https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/the-greenhouse-effect-and-planet-earth··· --- ···
Biodiversity loss is the very real end of the world and no one is acting like it
For the past 20 years, [we] scientists have been trying to scream about widespread biodiversity loss without being defeatist, struggling to thread the needle of conveying the urgency about our situation – and what happens to humans when we drive every other living thing on our planet extinct – while still sounding upbeat enough to spur positive change ... our time to avoid catastrophe is quickly slipping away ... humanity has now painted ourselves into a corner where our continued existence can only be met through “transformative” changes to our economic, social, and political systems. If that sounds unlikely to you, join the club.
https://massivesci.com/articles/climate-change-ipbes-global-assessment-biodiversity-loss-extinction/··· --- ···
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” (JRR Tolkein)
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Global Heat Gradient 1890-2019
Text and larger image at the link below. From Atlas of the Invisible by Cheshire and Uberti.
One of the chief misconceptions about the climate crisis is that warming will be uniform. Deniers cite a cold front here, a blizzard there as proof that climate science is bunk. Such bad-faith arguments ignore the difference between weather and climate. Weather blows through; climate takes off its coat and stays a while. Each tile represents one year from 1890 to 2019, coloured by how and where temperatures deviated from a reliable baseline period (1961-90). Reading the decades left to right reveals an alarming pattern. While heatwaves and cold spells speckle the grid, tiles for the current century are flush with warm tones. Including 2020, the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2005.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/01/atlas-of-the-invisible-using-data-reveal-climate-crisis··· --- ···
Why bankers close their ears to the ‘climate nut jobs’ talking about the end of the world
Like all the best villains, [banker Stuart Kirk’s] arguments are insidiously appealing. He says out loud what his audience thinks, cutting through polite society’s pious crap to reveal its selfish desires. “There’s always some nut job telling me about the end of the world,” he told the Financial Times’s Moral Money conference ... Notice the neat two-step he performs. On the one hand, only “nut jobs” talk of a catastrophe, even if the ranks of the nutty include the UN and every serious climate scientist. [And yet] he was articulating what most governments must subconsciously think [since] not one country has honoured the promises made at last year’s Cop26 summit in Glasgow ... central bankers do not understand the difference between a crisis and a collapse. An economic crisis may be devastating [but] from an economic point of view there is an “other side” to reach once the crisis has passed and we have returned to a type of normality. There is no other side to a collapse. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is talking about the rapid acceleration towards [collapse]. You can see it coming in the monstrous heatwave in India and the wildfires in Siberia. Once average global temperatures increase beyond 1.5C [climate collapse] will spiral “beyond the ability of humanity to influence it”. There are no climatic equivalents of interest rate rises or furlough payments to return us to a tolerable equilibrium.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/11/technocrats-cant-think-beyond-six-years-whatever-climate-nut-jobs-think··· --- ···
How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?
When I first spoke with Joseph Tainter in early May [2020], he walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse. “Civilizations are fragile, impermanent things,” Tainter writes. Nearly every one that has ever existed has also ceased to exist, yet “understanding disintegration has remained a distinctly minor concern in the social sciences” ... Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems [and maintaining this requires] ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable ... His second proposal is based on an idea borrowed from the classical economists of the 18th century. Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits ... In recent years, the field Tainter helped establish has grown. Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk ... After I spoke to Tainter, I called several of these scholars, and they were more openly alarmed than he was by the current state of affairs. “Things could spin out,” one warned. “I am scared,” admitted another ... In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter [writes] “The world today is full.” Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collapse.html··· --- ···
Why Collapse Occurs; Why It May Not Be Far Away
Much of what peak oil theory misunderstands is what our society as a whole misunderstands. Most people seem to believe that our economy will grow endlessly unless we somehow act to slow it down or stop it. They cannot imagine that the economy comes with built-in brakes, provided by the laws of physics. Armed with a belief in endless growth, economists assume that the economy can expand year after year at close to the same rate. Modelers of all kinds, including climate modelers, miss the natural feedback loops that lead to the end of fossil fuel extraction without any attempt on our part to stop its extraction. A major part of the problem is that added complexity leads to too much wage and wealth disparity. Eventually, the low wages of many of the workers filter through to oil and other energy prices, making prices too low for producers ... As resources per capita fall too low, there are several ways to keep problems hidden. More debt at lower interest rates can be added. New financial techniques can be developed to hide problems. Increased globalization can be used. Corners can be cut on electricity transmission, installation and maintenance, and in the building of new electricity generating structures. It is only when the economy hits a bump in the road (such as a climate-related event) that there suddenly is a major problem ... In the past, collapse has not been instantaneous; it has taken place over quite a number of years, typically 20 or more. [Yet] a common characteristic of collapses, [like] avalanches, is that they often seem to start off fairly slowly. Then, suddenly, a large piece breaks away, and there is a big collapse. Something analogous to this could possibly happen with the economy, too.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/02/25/why-collapse-occurs-why-it-may-not-be-far-away/··· --- ···
How to Enjoy the End of the World
Dr. Sidney Smith, Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Hampden-Sydney College speaks at Virginia Tech on March 26 2019. His talk covers climate change, capitalism, and how human society will have to adapt to the challenges of the 21st century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8··· --- ···
A Full Life
This story from the MIT Technology Review is perhaps the most powerful piece I've seen on the climate crisis.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613349/a-full-life/··· --- ···
Why everything will collapse
"If you sense that the future looks bleak, that there is little chance that this whole mess will end in joy and good humor, that there is a tiny chance that we will escape a systemic collapse of the thermo-industrial civilization, you are not far from reality. In this video, based on the available data, we try to explain why we think the situation is inextricable and that a systemic collapse is now inevitable." Includes copious documentation and source material. Published on Dec 25 2017, situation has deteriorated since then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8··· --- ···
‘We’ve created a civilisation hell bent on destroying itself – I’m terrified’, writes Earth scientist
It was the spring of 2011, and I had managed to corner a very senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) during a coffee break at a workshop. The IPCC reviews the vast amounts of science being generated around climate change and produces assessment reports every four years. Given the impact the IPPC’s findings can have on policy and industry, great care is made to carefully present and communicate its scientific findings. So I wasn’t expecting much when I straight out asked him how much warming he thought we were going to achieve before we manage to make the required cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. “Oh, I think we’re heading towards 3°C at least,” he said. “Ah, yes, but heading towards,” I countered: “We won’t get to 3°C, will we?” (Because whatever you think of the 2°C threshold that separates “safe” from “dangerous” climate change, 3°C is well beyond what much of the world could bear.) “Not so,” he replied. That wasn’t his hedge, but his best assessment of where, after all the political, economic, and social wrangling we will end up. “But what about the many millions of people directly threatened,” I went on. “Those living in low-lying nations, the farmers affected by abrupt changes in weather, kids exposed to new diseases?” He gave a sigh, paused for a few seconds, and a sad, resigned smile crept over his face. He then simply said: “They will die.” ... If growth is the problem, then we just have to work at that, right? This won’t be easy, as growth is baked into every aspect of politics and economics. But we can at least imagine what a de-growth economy would look like. My fear, however, is that we will not be able to slow down the growth of the technosphere even if we tried – because we are not actually in control. It may seem nonsense that humans are unable to make important changes to the system they have built. But just how free are we? Rather than being masters of our own destiny, we may be very constrained in how we can act ... To understand you are in a prison, you must first be able to see the bars. That this prison was created by humans over many generations doesn’t change the conclusion that we are currently tightly bound up within a system that could, if we do not act, lead to the impoverishment, and even death of billions of people.
http://theconversation.com/climate-change-weve-created-a-civilisation-hell-bent-on-destroying-itself-im-terrified-writes-earth-scientist-113055··· --- ···
Watching the world burn
From a journalist who has been covering this for decades. Long but absolutely worth reading.
My own “Oh Shit!” moment came in early 2009, two years after I began writing on the science and geopolitics of climate change for Agence France-Presse. The knee-buckling sucker-punch came at a conference in Oxford where a wide range of experts were asked to imagine a planet that had warmed four degrees Celsius. The tableau that emerged was a waking nightmare ... colleagues berated me for the preponderance of negative stories in my reporting. “We have to give people hope,” said one. “You should focus more on good news.” But there is no good news, at least not from nature or science. Since the world collectively decided 30 years ago to fix the climate and save the realm of living things, every indicator of planetary health has dramatically worsened. In 2009 scientists identified nine “planetary boundaries” that must not be crossed. At that time, we had already stepped outside the safe zone of three: global warming, the rate of species extinctions, and too much nitrogen in the environment. Today we have breached six, probably seven ... The most common refrains in the thousands of peer-reviewed studies on climate change and environmental degradation I’ve looked at over the last 15 years are “worse than we thought”, “faster than we feared” ... we are rapidly destroying Earth’s life-support systems ... For more than a dozen years on the beat, I convinced myself that I was unscathed by the steady drip drip of planetary doom and gloom. Following the science, my articles inched steadily over the years toward the language of existential crisis, but only rarely did I allow myself to truly contemplate what that meant, to relive the intensity of my original “Oh Shit” moment. When I did, I clenched my teeth until the squall subsided, and carried on. Now the firewall is crumbling ... folks doing strategic communication on global warming – the UN, green groups, scientists and arguably, the media – tread a very fine line. They want to scare people enough to take the problem seriously but not so much as to make them feel hopeless ... “Reporters actually know more than almost anyone – even most scientists – about the true scale of the threat,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben told me some years ago when I aired my frustration. “But if you become an advocate it will be used to undermine whatever you write,” said the author of “The End of Nature” ... You may not have thought about it much, and you may not want to. But like it or not, the reality of climate change is going to encroach on our lives, body and soul. Brace yourselves.
https://correspondent.afp.com/watching-world-burn··· --- ···
Shell Oil Company: Climate of Concern
Shell Oil Company made Climate of Concern in 1991 as a warning against the dangers of climate change; then they ignored it. More at https://thecorrespondent.com/6285/shell-made-a-film-about-climate-change-in-1991-then-neglected-to-heed-its-own-warning.
This video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTlYYlRN0LY··· --- ···
Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored)
From Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis by Alice Bell
In August 1974, the CIA produced a study on “climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems”. The diagnosis was dramatic. It warned of the emergence of a new era of weird weather, leading to political unrest ... “The climate change began in 1960,” the report’s first page informs us, “but no one, including the climatologists, recognised it.” Crop failures in the Soviet Union and India in the early 1960s had been attributed to standard unlucky weather ... Meanwhile, the weird weather rolled on, shifting to a collection of west African countries just below the Sahara. People in Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad “became the first victims of the climate change”, the report argued ... the early 1970s saw [worldwide] reports of droughts, crop failures and floods [but] few people seemed willing to see a pattern ... This claim that no one was paying attention was not entirely fair. Some scientists had been talking about the issue for a while. It had been in newspapers and on television, and was even mentioned in a speech by US president Lyndon Johnson in 1965 [but] there was a lack of urgency in discussions ... debate about climate change in the last third of the 20th century would be characterised as much by delay as concern, not least because of something the political analysts at the CIA seem to have missed: fightback from the fossil fuel industries ... a deliberate, organised effort to amplify natural doubt, extend it, and use it to dismiss and distract from warnings to take action on climate change ... fund real scientists, but in a way that would confuse and muddy the message. They had done this before, with air pollution in the 1940s, and their PR companies had picked up a trick or two from fights about the links between tobacco and cancer ... one of the hardest parts of writing about the history of the climate crisis was stumbling across warnings from the 1950s, 60s and 70s ... We are now living our ancestors’ nightmares, and it didn’t have to be this way.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/05/sixty-years-of-climate-change-warnings-the-signs-that-were-missed-and-ignored··· --- ···
The Utility of White-Hot Rage
"In my 15 years as an environmental journalist, I’ve always been able to ground myself on a bedrock optimism that humanity will get its act together. Lately, though, as the pandemic has dragged toward its third year, the West has continued to burn, drought has parched my part of the world, and climate action has stalled, that has changed. I am burned out. For some people, this might manifest as fatigue, or disengagement. For me, it’s anger ... “There is such a thing as righteous anger, because that is not about you and your personal ego; it really is the anger you’re feeling on the behalf of the vulnerable,” Dekila Chungyalpa, the director of the Loka Initiative at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me ... Leslie Davenport, a psychologist and the author of Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change [said] climate change, an ever-present crisis, causes “ambient anxiety” that raises our background levels of tension and worry. But the pandemic is also causing ambient anxiety. For people of color, racism does the same, every day. For Indigenous people, colonialism exists as a constant present-tense stressor as well. Poverty creates an immense burden of ambient anxiety. Many activists are thus working under “ambient” stress levels that no amount of coping techniques can neutralize ... We should accept joy when it comes and enjoy it without a particle of guilt. But if we don’t feel a lot of overall hope right now, that’s okay. We don’t need optimism or hope to keep showing up for climate work. We can do it out of pure spite if we need to until our optimism returns. Even as I work on my own burnout, I plan to stay mad."
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/01/why-im-staying-angry-about-climate-change/621358/··· --- ···
Human Population Through Time
It took 200,000 years for our human population to reach 1 billion—and only 200 years to reach 7 billion. From the American Museum of Natural History.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE··· --- ···
Noam Chomsky 2010 lecture: Human intelligence and the environment
"Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of American biology [argued] that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation. And he had a good argument. He pointed out that if you take a look at biological success, which is essentially measured by how many of us are there, the organisms that do quite well are those that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or those that are stuck in a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They do fine. And they may survive the environmental crisis. But as you go up the scale of what we call intelligence, they are less and less successful. By the time you get to mammals, there are very few of them as compared with, say, insects. By the time you get to humans, the origin of humans may be 100,000 years ago, there is a very small group. We are kind of misled now because there are a lot of humans around, but that’s a matter of a few thousand years, which is meaningless from an evolutionary point of view. His argument was, you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation. He also added, a little bit ominously, that the average life span of a species, of the billions that have existed, is about 100,000 years, which is roughly the length of time that modern humans have existed. With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not."
https://chomsky.info/20100930/··· --- ···
The Discovery of Global Warming
How did we get here? A good site to get the big picture is The Discovery of Global Warming, "a hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change." There are many interesting and informative parts of this site including a Timeline/Milestones page at https://history.aip.org/climate/timeline.htm which describes "in chronological sequence the most important events in the history of climate change science."
https://history.aip.org/climate/··· --- ···
Watch 25 Years of Arctic Sea Ice Disappear in 1 Minute
In 1985, 20% of the Arctic ice pack was very old ice, but in March 2015, old ice only constituted 3% of the ice pack. Animation by NOAA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw7GfNR5PLA··· --- ···
Carl Sagan on science, knowledge, and ignorance
"Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance" (Carl Sagan, from his 1995 book Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)··· --- ···
The Unchained Goddess (1958)
The fourth Frank Capra film in the Bell Telephone Series was released in 1958 for use in public schools throughout the United States. It expresses an early concern about climate change at about 50 min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqClSPWVnNE
If you prefer, here is the climate change segment as a two-minute excerpt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-AXBbuDxRY··· --- ···
An apology from an environmentalist
"I was one of the people who told you changing your light bulbs or buying organic couscous would make things OK. I was wrong and I knew I was wrong at the time ... Earth’s immune system has rightly identified us as a virus. It’s firing up its antibodies and stimulating a fever to rid itself of the disease. We are like any other organism. Much like bacteria, with access to an abundant energy source — in our case, fossil fuels — we fill up our petri dish. We engulf or expel everything else. When we run out of energy and resources to exploit, the overblown population crashes back to something manageable; or it dies off completely. It’s not evil, it’s just the way life works ... We were blindsided by climate change, even though we had known about it for more than a century."
https://thespinoff.co.nz/science/01-07-2019/an-apology-from-an-environmentalist/··· --- ···
Climate Change: Why is it so often “sooner than predicted”?
"[H]ow often does a climate change headline or story use a phrase like that? “At levels not expected until” or “faster than expected” or “sooner than predicted”? I opened a search engine and started plugging in these and other variants to find out. It didn’t take long to answer my question: regularly, as it turns out. There are several reasons: #1 IPCC As Standard Setter: the bureaucratic process that produces IPCC reports [where] political concerns come into play. Additionally, because this process is slow, the data is not current. #2 The Situation is Complex: multiple feedback loops are in effect which are not fully understood or easily predictable individually, let alone in the aggregate. #3 Lack of Big Picture Perspective: The increasing specialization of the sciences ... we must look at the big picture but very few people are doing that. #4: No Money for Predicting Undesirable Outcomes: few (if any) are interested in hearing about unhappy endings. #5 Most scientists not only don’t want to deliver a dire message, but they don’t want to believe it themselves."
http://macskamoksha.com/2019/06/climate-change-always-sooner-than-predicted··· --- ···
Global Dimming: The Aerosol Masking Effect
Global dimming masks part of global warming yet causes its own harm. It is caused by the particulates we constantly put into the air reflecting away some of the sun's heat. They fall to earth quickly but we keep putting up more, which causes more masking. The dilemma is that this effect is caused by the same industrial processes that create global warming, which we're trying to stop. But if we do stop, global temperatures will rise significantly almost immediately, far too quickly for adaptation. Here is a 2005 BBC documentary on this, archived at https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/global-dimming/. There is also a transcript at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_trans.shtml, a summary at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_prog_summary.shtml, and a q&a backgrounder at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_qa.shtml.··· --- ···
The Math of Runaway Warming
A good overview on how this all ties together and builds on itself. Title is misleading, there's no actual math :)
https://leftymathprof.wordpress.com/runaway-warming/··· --- ···
Meteorologist Nicholas Humphrey on fossil fuels
"Fossil fuels are essentially chemically stored sunlight from plant growth ... All the carbon released by humanity in the past 25 years is equivalent to over 50 million years of plant growth which was needed to sequester it. This comes to around 250,000 years worth of plant growth in 45 days and 5,576 years worth of plant growth per day ... it is estimated humanity has burned nearly 200 million years worth of plant growth in just 160 years."
https://www.patreon.com/posts/26036417··· --- ···
Kurt Vonnegut on climate change
“Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on … All lights are about to go out. No more electricity. All forms of transportation are about to stop, and the planet Earth will soon have a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery. And nobody can do anything about it. It’s too late in the game. Don’t spoil the party but here’s the truth: We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one.” (Kurt Vonnegut, from his final book, A Man Without a Country)··· --- ···
Climate Change Is Giving Us 'Pre-Traumatic Stress'
Scientists on the front lines are speaking out about how their climate data drives despair, but these emotions may also be the most potent force for change.
"There are days where I literally can't work. I'll read a story & shut down for the rest of the day." Over the course of the following week, Holthaus said he received hundreds of messages from people saying they were experiencing the same thing ... "The amount of pressure to get this information out, and the belief that there may not be a process by which to do it is really going to make climate scientists feel powerless," said van Susteren. "The best way to take a person down is to give the message that what you know is not going to be listened to ... It's essential to communicate with emotion [to] the public." Indeed, this is what drove Holthaus to his Twitter soapbox and part of the reason he believes that his message evoked such a strong response from the community. "[Emotion] is how you tell stories, and telling stories is what moves people. Scientists sort of sell themselves short in this sense of being storytellers. If scientists feel passionately enough about the state of the world and show some sort of vulnerability — terror, anxiety, or anything — I think that that is what is going to relate to people who don't have the technical knowledge ... We're all feeling this depression at least a little bit and there really isn't any other choice other than to just sort of accept that and realize that each one of us is going to die eventually anyway," said Holthaus. "In that same way, climate change is in some ways inevitable at this point, so we have to accept that and realize that there's still positive things we can do in our lifetimes."
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vvzzam/climate-change-is-giving-us-pre-traumatic-stress··· --- ···
Faster Than Expected: Why most climate scientists can’t tell the truth (in public)
One of the cliches of climate change reporting is climate scientists claiming to be ‘surprised’, ‘shocked’ or ‘baffled’ by extreme events happening so much faster than predicted by their models and research studies ... This means most people, including those in power and in the media, genuinely don’t know how desperate things already are. Even many directly engaged with the subject don’t realise concepts like limiting warming to a ‘safe’ 1.5C global average are now meaningless ... You don’t need to be a scientist to know that misjudging the seriousness of a situation compromises any response. This article explains why traditional climate science methods cannot keep up with rapid change. It provides an analysis of the psychological defences that prevent most climate scientists from admitting this in public when, unofficially, they all do and say they are afraid. In conclusion, we consider how scientists can overcome this irrational position, for the good of us all.
https://medium.com/@JacksonDamian/faster-than-expected-9675203cf8ac··· --- ···
When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job
Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can't really talk about it.
https://https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-sad-climatologists-0815/··· --- ···
Chris Hedges on the situation we find ourselves in today
Journalist and ordained minister Christopher Hedges gave this sermon at Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada on January 20th, 2019.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9MnG7FTooE··· --- ···
Kate Marvel: We Need Courage, Not Hope, To Face Climate Change
A theoretical physicist by training, climate scientist Kate Marvel is an associate research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics.
https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-need-courage-not-hope-to-face-climate-change/··· --- ···
Catherine Ingram: Facing Extinction
Ingram's essay on finding meaning in these times has resonated with a great many people. "I suspect we are facing extinction in the near future. Can I speculate as to exactly when that might happen? Of course not. My sense of this is based only on probability. It might be similar to hearing about a diagnosis of late stage pancreatic cancer."
http://www.catherineingram.com/facingextinction/··· --- ···
Aldous Huxley on learning from history
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." (Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays, 1959)··· --- ···
Don't bet on the UN to fix climate change - it's failed for 30 years
Is it a vain hope for 197 countries to agree on any meaningful climate action at all, especially when it involves so much money and power? Scientists knew from the late 1950s that carbon dioxide was building up and that this could be a problem. By the late 1970s, they knew it would be – it was just a question of when. By 1985, at a workshop of scientists in Villach, Austria, the answer became “sooner than we thought” ... negotiations towards an international treaty to do something about climate change itself did not begin until February 1991. The world’s media largely ignored them ... The sticking point was – and still is – what the US government, and the business lobbies behind it, would find acceptable ... since 2015, many nations are failing to meet their Paris commitments. Even if they did, global average temperature rise this century would be far in excess of the two degrees above pre-industrial levels that the deal is supposed to ensure. The US pulled out of the Paris agreement in June 2017. A clear pattern has emerged ... the stakes could not be higher. If political, economic, technological and cultural solutions aren’t now found, the outlook for humanity – and the other species we share this planet with – is exceptionally bleak.
https://theconversation.com/dont-bet-on-the-un-to-fix-climate-change-its-failed-for-30-years-123308
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