Climate Links: 03/25/2017

Arctic Permafrost Defrosting and the Age of War and Revolution, Ian Welsh. Mar 10, 2017.

For well over a decade I have written that we are past the point of no return on climate change. My reasoning was that hothouse gasses already in the atmosphere or which were for sure going to enter the atmosphere given our lack of action, were enough to trigger massive carbone and methane releases. 

Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon…

We’ve seen that methane, which accounts for only 14 percent of emissions worldwide, traps up to 100 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 5-year period. This means that even though carbon dioxide molecules outnumber methane 5 to 1, this comparatively smaller amount of methane is still 19 times greater a problem for climate change over a 5 year period, and 4 times greater over a 100 year period. 

It is even more potent in the short run. Meanwhile, the arctic circle was about 30 degrees warmer this year than normal, and permafrost is un-perma-ing.

Huge slabs of Arctic permafrost in northwest Canada are slumping and disintegrating, sending large amounts of carbon-rich mud and silt into streams and rivers. A new study that analyzed nearly a half-million square miles in northwest Canada found that this permafrost decay is affecting 52,000 square miles of that vast stretch of earth—an expanse the size of Alabama… 

…Similar large-scale landscape changes are evident across the Arctic including in Alaska, Siberia and Scandinavia 

There is no way we are avoiding near worst case scenarios for climate change without aggressive geo-engineering (completly unproven, and requires political willpower). We will see temperature increases in some parts of the world which are currently highly populated make those places uninhabitable outside of air conditioning. We will see changes in rainfall patterns which will cause large areas which are currently agricultural powerhouses to fail; an effect which will be compounded by the fact that we have vastly drained and polluted our groundwater in prime agricultural areas. 

Later on we will see vast rises in the ocean level. Virtually every city sitting on the seashore today will be gone in a hundred years, some a lot sooner. 

This stuff is baked into the cake. It is essentially unavoidable. It has been effectively, politically, unavoidable for quite some time now. 

Do not expect political, economic and social arrangements you favor to survive this. The waves of refugees will be magnitudes larger than those currently shaking the Middle East and Europe. There will be water wars; people will not sit still why they are dying, they will fight. Some of those wars will involve, at the least, the use of tactical nukes. 

Capitalism, Democracy, the Chinese Communist Party, etc… any system and group of people who can reasonably be blamed for this, will likely be on the block. When hundreds of millions to billions start dying, this will not go easy into that long dark night, no, they and those they leave behind will look for people and ideologies and organizations to blame, and they will find them in plenty, because everyone and everything in power has failed to prevent an entirely forseen and largely preventable disaster. 

Our failure will not be considered acceptable to those who pay the bill, and our “capitalism” and “democracy” and “corporations” and “free trade” and everything else you can think of will be on the block, liable for destruction. 

This is coming on faster than many expected. Added to ecosphere collapse, the current cyclical capitalist sclerosis, and vast arsenals, it is going to be vastly damaging. 

If you aren’t old, or sick, you’re going to suffer some of this. If you’re young, you’re going to suffer a lot of this, assuming you aren’t an early casualty. 

So it is. So it shall be. We were warned, we chose not to act, because corporations needed profits or something. 

So be it.

The Basic Psychological Structure of Our Society Does Not Work, Ian Welsh. Mar 20, 2017.

Here’s the thing. Our society only works after generational crises which don’t destroy it. After the Napoleonic Wars, the survivors make Europe more or less work. They get a good long run out of it, a surprisingly long one, but it goes south starting around 1870, and blows with WWII. 

It goes south in ways that are recognizable, by the way. For example, the British Empire pushes laissez-faire trade policies which make the rich richer but gut the British manufacturing base over time, moving much of it to, ironically, America. 

The system goes into crisis from 1914 to 1945, and the Americans take it over and run it basically well up until the early 70s, about 25 years. Then it goes into decline. It’ll be hard to tell exactly when the end-game crisis start(ed) till we can look back, but if we aren’t in it, we’re close. 

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But the core point here is that it’s very hard to create people who can run a system.

The common refrain is that prosperity destroys character. But that’s not quite right: the people who created the good post-war economy were the FDR types, mostly. People who were adults in the 20s and 30s, who saw what went wrong. 

People have a hard time learning from other people’s experiences. They have to see it themselves. So, in the early 70s there is an attempt to get rid of the short-sale uptick rule (you can only short a stock on an uptick of the stock) and it dies in the face of massive backlash. A couple decades later, those people are dead, and even more wholesale revisions to the rules put in place to stop another Depression from happening pass. 

Finally Clinton kills Glass-Steagall, the main spar, wholesale, something entirely unthinkable in 1960 when the population lived thru the reasons it existed. 

But the rot goes deeper than just “it’s hard to learn what you didn’t experience”, it goes to the core of how we raise ourselves; our children. 

School, as we do it, is a terrible way to raise people. What it actual teaches is “do what you’re told, when you’re told, wait to be told how to do things, don’t figure out things for yourself, and give the approved answer, not one you came up with yourself.” 

It trains drones. It trains people who are meant to spend their adult lives under supervision, doing what they are told, when they are told and giving their bosses the answers their bosses want. 

Those people make fine wage slaves, yes, but they don’t make good citizens. They have not only not learned to think for themselves, they have been taught not to. Even worse, they have been taught that if a thought of their own should come up, they should keep it to themselves. 

Meanwhile school interactions with peers are terrible. When we call something “high school” we mean horrible peer pressure bullshit. A few people love high school, most people remember it as one of the worst times of their lives. 

Wage slavery, and I use the term slavery very deliberately, is a terrible system if you want a democracy or a republic. Mass production consumer societies, where we choose from menus rather than creating anything ourselves, are terrible for democracies or Republics. 

The way we school people, the jobs most people work at, and how we distribute goods to people (thru money gained by sitting down, shutting up and doing what you are told) are antithetical to free, egalitarian societies. Only a crisis which forces people to think for themselves and where they have to be trusted for a while can briefly create people suited to political freedom. 

But we can’t have world wars and depressions all the time, for what I assume are obvious reasons. So we stagger along, brief good periods sliding into shit periods regularly. 

Of course there is more to it than this, such as cycles of destruction of capital and labor and so on, but much of that is manageable in theory. It isn’t manageable in practice, not because it couldn’t be done, but because our society; we, don’t create the people who can do it. 

Freedom, democracy, equality: these things are not compatible with how we order our economic affairs; how we raise our children, or how we condition our adults. 

We will not reverse course, this cycle, that doesn’t happen and won’t. It’s too late. But there is always another cycle. If we don’t want it to be as disastrous as ours, we must figure out a better way to run our economy; to educate our children, and not to live as adults. A way suited to people fit to be free. 

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All of this is do-able. In some sense most of it isn’t even all that complicated. But that doesn’t mean any of it is easy, and it is hardest because we have been trained to have a poverty of imagination; an inability imagine world’s that are much better than the one we live in. 

We have the technology. What we don’t have is the people. We aren’t the people who can run a good society (this is obvious, we haven’t.) 

But as the people we can re-create ourselves and our descendants. Biology is only half destiny, the rest is in our hands. 

So far we’ve been acting like bacteria in a petri dish, rushing to destroy our environment thru unchecked stupid growth. 

Let us hope we can prove ourselves wiser than that. Or, instead of us instructing ourselves, Nature will instruct, and her lessons will be harsh.