Climate Links: Sep 6, 2017: Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia

Tropical Depressions: On climate change and human utilitarianism. Sam Kriss, Ellie Mae O’Hagan, The Baffler.

“I DON’T KNOW HOW TO BE HUMAN ANY MORE.” 

On a wretched December afternoon in 2015, as raindrops pattered a planetary threnody on grayed-out streets, five thousand activists gathered around Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, hoping to force world leaders to do something, anything, that would save the future. Ellie was there. But what she remembers most from that afternoon during the UN’s Climate Change Conference wasn’t what happened in the open, in front of cameras and under the sky. As they took the Metro together, activists commiserated, briefly, before the moment of struggle and the need to be brave, over just how hopeless it could sometimes feel. People talked about bafflement, rage, despair; the sense of having discovered a huge government conspiracy to wipe out the human race—but one that everybody knows about and nobody seems willing to stop. 

Twenty meters beneath the Paris streets, the Metro became a cocoon, tight and terrified, in which a brief moment of honest release was possible. Eventually someone expressed the psychic toll in words that have stuck with Ellie since. It was a chance remark: “I don’t know how to be human any more.” 

Climate change means, quite plausibly, the end of everything we now understand to constitute our humanity. If action isn’t taken soon, the Amazon rainforest will eventually burn down, the seas will fester into sludge that submerges the world’s great cities, the Antarctic Ice Sheet will fragment and wash away, acres of abundant green land will be taken over by arid desert. A 4-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures would, within a century, produce a world as different from the one we have now as ours is from that of the Ice Age. And any humans who survive this human-made chaos would be as remote from our current consciousness as we are from that of the first shamanists ten thousand years ago, who themselves survived on the edges of a remote and cold planet. Something about the magnitude of all this is shattering: most people try not to think about it too much because it’s unthinkable, in the same way that death is always unthinkable for the living. For the people who have to think about it—climate scientists, activists, and advocates—that looming catastrophe evokes a similar horror: the potential extinction of humanity in the future puts humanity into question now. 

Strange Weather

It’s safe to say that we’re already living amid a general crisis of humanity. Little fragments of the coming barbarism slip backward in time. Climate activists can feel dehumanized by the pressures facing them, but there’s also an inhumanity in the mass tendency to simply ignore the pressures facing everyone. .... 

Climate activism is hard. Its communities are spaces of joy and friendship and common struggle, but it can also be dispiriting; humans against the tide, flesh against weather. Some activists drop out under the pressure of state surveillance and mental exhaustion. Friends and comrades talk of experiencing a kind of grief; grief for the transformations in climate that have already happened, grief for those who will suffer in the short term regardless of what action is taken in the future. Depression can be immobilizing. It can be depleting. But it also forces us to face the question in its most brutal and basic form. 

“I don’t know how to be human any more.” Did we ever know how to be human? And as humanity self-destructs in slow motion, wouldn’t knowing how to be human just accelerate our general disintegration? 

An Empty World 

Many of the climate scientists and activists we’ve spoken with casually talk of their work with a sense of mounting despair and hopelessness, a feeling we call political depression.  

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In other words, the inward condition of depression is nothing less than a psychic event horizon; the act of staring at a vast gaping absence—of hope, of a future, of the possibility of human life. The depressive peeks into the future that climate change generates. Walter Benjamin, trying to lay out the contours of melancholic experience, saw it there. “Something new emerged,” he wrote: “an empty world.” 

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We do not think of political depression as a personal disorder, the state of being depressed because of political events; rather it’s the interiorization of our objective powerlessness in the world. We all feel, vaguely, that our good intentions should matter, that we should have some power to affect the things around us for the better; political depression is the hopelessness that meets the determination to do something in a society whose systems and instruments are designed to frustrate our ability to act. 

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As the veteran activist Danni Paffard—... —puts it to us, “the climate movement has recognized that this is an existential problem and has created spaces for people to talk things through,” to exist within the sense of grief, to work with political depression instead of repressing it. After all, as the writer Andrew Solomon says, “a lot of the time, what [depressives] are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what’s really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don’t distract us very much.” There’s a substantial literature on “depressive realism”—the suspicion that depressed people are actually right. In one 1979 study by Lauren B. Alloy and Lyn Y. Abramson, it was found that when compared to their nondepressed peers, depressed subjects’ “judgements of contingency were surprisingly accurate.’” 

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Hope is difficult. “I work with young people,” Brodie explains. “Even up until five years ago, I felt I could inspire them. But now I have PhD students—I have trouble giving them a feeling that they can still do something. We’re in an era of science denial.” It’s not the inevitability of climate change that’s depressing; rather, it’s precisely the realization that it can be prevented—together with the day-to-day reckoning with the pettiness of what stands in the way. “When I was younger,” Paffard tells us, “I would walk through the City of London and look at people living their everyday lives and think, ‘We’re all just continuing as though everything is normal, as though the world isn’t about to end.’ And that used to freak me out and make me angry. But now it just makes me sad . . . it’s the moments where you let yourself think about it when you get overwhelmed by it.” 

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Political depression means staring into a vastness, but one without grandeur or the sublime, one that’s almost invisible. When we wake up with every morning, it’s just there, seeping into our bones. “I am amazed,” Paffard tells us, “by our inability to engage with things that are scary and bigger than us. It’s the minutiae that keep us going . . . it’s too big for us to hold in our minds.” What can we do? We’re only human. 

All Too Human 

We’re living in what’s been called the Anthropocene. The name is supposed to describe an era in which humanity—the anthropos—is no longer just another biological presence on the surface of the Earth, but a geological force inscribing itself in the ledgers of time. Human forces distort the climate and the biosphere on multiplying levels; every living thing in the deepest untouched woods and the sunless pits of the oceans is shaped, in some way, by human activity. Whatever happens next, good or bad, the Earth will record our existence for billions of years in a layer of mulched plastic and the detritus of a mass extinction. But the name, Anthropocene, is an uncomfortable one: it implies a humanity triumphant, finally emerging into its destiny as a force among worlds and stars. What it actually means is different: a humanity in excess of itself, a humanity recklessly spilling over beyond its own bounds, at risk of wiping itself out entirely. As soon as this thing called the human fully articulates itself, it threatens to vanish. 

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For a popular and vulgar Darwinism, humanity is the point where biology reaches its apotheosis and becomes something qualitatively different, in the same way that life itself is the apotheosis of chemical processes, the transformation of chemistry into something that calls for a new set of rules. The notion of the Anthropocene stands as a twisted mirror in front of Darwinism: humanity comes into its full being only as a geological process, a fossil. Not life exceeding itself, but the agent of the annihilation of all life—the point where it turns back into rock. 

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What’s most dismal about climate change is that absolutely nobody wants it to happen—it’s being engineered by cynical propagandists, frenzied manufacturers, and careless states, but the destruction of billions was never the goal. The future is taking shape out of a grim alliance among the fragility of the earth, the profit motive, the dominance of short-term thinking, and the chaos of complex systems. As everyone we spoke to pointed out, one of the most frustrating aspects of the struggle against climate change is how centerless the opponent is: “there isn’t a single node of power that we can capture and then change,” says Lewis. It lives in office buildings and the halls of government, but also inside our own heads. It’s an inhuman thing residing within humanity: our inability to save ourselves from our own actions.
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Greenland Is Burning: Wildfires and Floods Surge Worldwide. Dahr Jamail, Truthout. Sep. 5, 2017.

Several leading climate scientists have come out with a statement that underscores the fact that the Paris Agreement goal -- limiting planetary warming to 1.5-2°C -- is too little, too late, given that this goal would already be well above any temperatures experienced during the period of human settlement since agriculture began. 

Former NASA climate chief James Hansen, along with co-authors cryosphere expert Eric Rignot, paleoclimatologist Shaun Marcott and oceanographer Eelco Rohling, concluded in a paper that, "the world has overshot the appropriate target for global temperature" because there are large risks in "pushing the climate system far out of its Holocene range." (The Holocene is the epoch that began approximately 11,700 years ago.) 

They said the fact that our current temperature has surpassed 1°C of warming indicates that we're already half a degree warmer than the previous Holocene maximum. Our current temperature is as hot as it ever was during Earth's previous warm period, the Eemian (130,000-115,000 years ago) when the "sea level was 6-9 meters (20-30 feet) higher than today." The scientists warned of feedback loops kicking in that will raise sea levels by several meters, thawing of global permafrost, and significant loss of the polar ice sheets. Yet, while their warning was obviously meant to be in the future tense, we are already seeing each of these effects now. 

Despite lacking the warming influence of an active El Niño, thus far, 2017 is on track to be the second-hottest year on record, with 2016 being the hottest, and 15 of the 16 hottest years recorded happening since just 2000. 

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Underscoring the rapidity of the changes we are already in, the leading British global investment firm, Schroders, with assets worth more than half a trillion dollars, released a warning to its clients that, if we continue consuming oil and gas at current rates, Earth is on course to experience temperature increases of nearly 8°C (14°F) by 2100. The firm's head of sustainable research noted, "Climate change will be a defining driver of the global economy." 

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The ability of humans to feed our ever-growing populations continues to look increasingly precarious. A recent report by the London-based think tank Chatham House shows how ACD is threatening the intricate network the world of humans uses to feed ourselves. The report details how the majority of the planet's food is shipped through 14 "choke points," and shows that if simultaneous extreme weather events that knocked out crops occurred in, for example, Russia and the US, starvation in areas that were heavily reliant upon those imports would be practically guaranteed. 

On that note, a report in the journal Environmental Research Letters shows that ACD is directly reducing the amount of protein found in rice and wheat, thanks to increasing CO2 levels. Disturbingly, researchers who worked on the study said they still do not understand how or why CO2 emissions drain protein and other nutrients from plants. Yet this phenomenon could very well have catastrophic global consequences when it comes to attempting to feed Earth's ever-burgeoning human population. This development may well leave populations already vulnerable to lack enough to eat at risk of early death and/or stunted growth. 

Another brutal report showed how, across Africa, ACD is a key factor in diminishing the amount of land needed to grow food for the continent's increasing populations. (Soil degradation, erosion and poaching also contribute to this decrease.)
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However, a quickly mounting body of evidence shows us that climate disruption is not only a reality, but it's occurring more quickly and intensively than expected. 

A study recently published in Nature Climate Change showed that there is only a 5 percent chance the Earth will warm by only 3.5°F or less by 2100. (In other words, there's a 95 percent chance it will warm by more than that amount.) Another study showed that even if all emissions ceased, the planet will still warm by another 2°F by 2100. 

Lastly, for anyone who has any doubt that we are already very far along in the course of abrupt ACD, have a quick look at this 35-second video that illustrates the ramping up of planetary warming over the last 100 years.

Loss of human habitat makes the mainstream. seemorerocks. Sept. 4, 2017:


Climate Change Already Impacting Wheat, Rice, Corn, Soybean Yields Worldwide. Jeff McMahon Forbes. Sept. 2, 2017.




The Strange Future Hurricane Harvey Portends. Peter Brannen, The Atlantic. Aug. 31 2017.

Climate change is pushing more water into the atmosphere—with bizarre consequences.

Houston: A Global Warning. Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone. Aug. 31, 2017.

The devastation of Hurricane Harvey marks a turning point and raises the terrible possibility that we've entered the age of climate chaos

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This was a disaster foretold. In the 1990s, climate scientist Wallace Broecker said that the Earth's climate was "an angry beast" and that by dumping massive quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, we were "poking it with sticks" – and nobody could say how the beast would react. That's where we are today. Harvey is the third 500-year flood to hit the Houston area in the past three years. Ten years ago, most scientists thought we might see three feet of sea-level rise by 2100. Now, estimates by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say the worst-case might be eight feet by 2100, while former NASA scientist James Hansen argues that it could be 10 feet or more. The larger reality is, we're moving into an era of unknown impacts, where it is impossible to say how fast our world will change, or how bad it will get.

The Floods of August: Climate Change Hits Home for Millions Worldwide. Claire James, CounterPunch. Sept. 6, 2017.

So there may be no immediate impetus from disaster to climate action. The media plays an important role here. There are three ways that media can let us down in reporting climate change-influenced disasters. 

The first is when the media give prominence to events which are easy to report, rather than those which are truly significant. Harvey is a significant story deserving major coverage. Yet before Harvey hit Texas (and hit the headlines), where were the reports on the South Asian flooding? 

Even given the general tendency to treat the deaths of poor people in non-western countries as non-newsworthy, the death toll was then climbing towards a thousand and 41 million affected across three countries. But someone actively following the news could easily be completely unaware of these floods.

There’s a disaster much worse than Texas. But no one talks about it. Jonathan Freedland. The Guardian. Sept 1, 2017.

In this story America is not the victim. Along with Britain, it is on the side of the perpetrator – helping to cause the world’s worst humanitarian crisis