Monica Lee: Climate Crisis and Bullshit Optimism. May 21, 2022.
I’m so amazed by anyone who is optimistic with regard to our current climate crisis.
I suspect that this optimism prevails maybe because almost every mainstream article or discussion on the topic by a scientist ends with a message of hope that we can turn things around in time if we just work together and cooperate to cut our emissions.
They keep telling us that all the shit hits the fan by 2050 or 2100, so we assume that we have some time before we really need to buckle down and make some sacrifices.
I also suspect that no scientist really believes this and it’s really insulting to those of us who see through the bullshit message. Even if they know that there’s realistically nothing we can do at this point to stop and reverse the warming, it’s bad PR to not at least appear hopeful. Great, the ship’s going down and why not whore yourselves out to corporate media with your bullshit message of hope instead of telling the truth?
Surely, you’ve notice what’s happening around you. You don’t need someone else to tell you that things are headed off a cliff, or are you that frog in the boiling pot?
Excess carbon dioxide heating up the atmosphere? That’s okay, we’ll develop carbon sequestration technology that will remove the excess carbon and store it underground indefinitely and not worry about the environmental degradation that accompanies this technology and the fact that we’re already several decades too late for it to be a current viable solution.
Currently, the biggest carbon sequestration plant in the world may negate an equivalent of three seconds’ worth of emissions per year. There aren’t enough of these extremely costly plants in existence to even make a dent in offsetting the emissions.
Let’s plant more trees! Sure, we’ll just ignore the fact that there’s not enough available land due to its appropriation for agricultural usage and that there’s not enough time to plant the amount of trees needed to grow to their full potential to sequester enough carbon to slow down the warming caused by the increasing rate of carbon dioxide and methane and warming that’s already baked in the atmosphere.
And guess what? All of these increasing wildfires release even more of that sequestered carbon creating an endless feedback loop of increasing temperatures which leads to more wildfires, etc., because trees can’t adapt fast enough to the increasing temperatures.
In the past two years alone, twenty percent of the giant sequoias were wiped out of existence due to wildfires. Twenty percent of some of the oldest living organisms on the planet that were once considered fireproof are wiped out forever. Don’t count on restoring them anytime soon. It takes hundreds of years for them to reach their full height if they are allowed to grow in a temperate climate which no longer describes California.
In fact, every year, wildfires are getting worse, and at the time of this writing, the wildfire season started four months earlier than usual in the Southwestern United States where it’s also experiencing extreme drought. The water level of Lake Mead is so low that they’re discovering more remains of discarded dead bodies from the 70s or 80s.
In California, Gavin Newsom asked residents to conserve their water usage by about 15%, but instead, usage is up dramatically. If people living in California can’t be convinced to conserve water during an unprecedented drought and in fact do the opposite, what hope is there for other regions of the world?
How about we focus on the lack of insects? We’re losing more than 70% of our insects including bees. No problem, we can hand pollinate the fruit and vegetables and mimic what the bees and insects do to ensure our food supply. We don’t need the bees if there are enough of us willing to do their work for free. If bees are disappearing from our region, we’ll just steal them from somewhere else because that’s the trend these days in the world of beekeeping.
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Forget about sociopathic power-hungry leaders, the average person doesn’t care either. Just try to bring up the topic with friends or family, you will either get an angry reaction, outright dismissal, or pleas to seek treatment for mental health because they think you’re insane to feel anxiety over such a trivial matter.
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We should have been protesting the shit out of our crisis many decades ago and worked furiously to come up with solutions to slow and reverse the damage that we’re seeing now. We should have looked beyond the profit motive as a solution to all of our problems.
It’s pathetic and sad that the climate crisis spokesperson who berates world leaders for not making this issue the number one priority is a teenage girl who knows that we didn’t care enough to leave a sustainable planet for her and future generations.
Unfortunately, we have proved to be incapable of divorcing ourselves from this profit-driven system to come up with any meaningful solutions to save our asses and secure the viability of future generations.
Human reactions to this crisis tell me that there is no hope. I already knew this years ago, but I thought that at the very least a lot more people with all of the glaring evidence of the current environmental collapse would “look up”.
Disclaimer: Please stop reading if you are “doomed out” and would rather read solution-oriented articles sprinkled with sugar-coated positivity. I understand your need to avoid our harsh reality in order to cope with daily life, but some of us realists are unable to build up a wall of protective denial around us and pretend that everything will be okay.
We’ve disrupted the Earth’s climate systems to the extent that ironically, the only thing that’s kind of saving our asses right now and keeping us from experiencing a summer hotter than Hades is also what’s killing about four to seven million of us every year — industrial aerosols, or pollution.
We don’t truly understand the climate crisis and just how fucked we are unless we understand the concept of global dimming, or the Aerosol Masking Effect (AME).
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The general idea of AME is that some of the pollution we’re emitting in the form of sulphur dioxide is actually keeping us cooler. Tiny water particles bind more readily to SO2 particles, reflect sunlight, and prevent further global warming.
If you live in one of the areas inflicted by never-ending heatwaves right now, you don’t want to know how hot it would get without the cooling effect of aerosols, but scientists estimate that aerosols offset the effects of global warming, depending on the source, anywhere from a whopping 40 to 55%.
Therefore, the potential risks of reducing our emissions quickly and abruptly at this late stage after our long history of poisoning the planet are akin to an alcoholic abruptly quitting alcohol — dangerous and life-threatening.
So why is the most important news that affects all living organisms on the planet being kept secret?
Scientists have attempted to warn the public for decades that we need to cut our emissions. While it’s true that we can’t continue to poison the planet at this rate because it’s killing anywhere from about four to seven million people every year, the loss of cooling aerosols and the AME would kill us faster, thus creating a sort of Sophie’s Choice-type paradox.
Say what?
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Perhaps the AME is deliberately left out of mainstream discussion because it complicates the general message that we need to cut our emissions, and populations don’t seem to respond to simple messages too well, let alone complicated ones.
It’s as if our leaders and scientists collectively decided to not further confuse and frighten the already confused and frightened public.
...
Wet-bulb temperatures, with previous maximum temperatures of human survivability at 35°C (95°F) with 100% humidity, have been lowered in a recent study to 31°C (87°F) with 100% humidity even for young, healthy subjects. For older subjects, the temperature is likely lower.
I don’t need to be told what this spells out for all of us.
Dr. Michael Mann, scientist and corporate whore who praised Joe Biden for his “climate plan” after his election, blatantly lies in this interview posted here on Medium:
“There’s no science that supports the idea that we are committed to some sort of runaway warming. The science pretty clearly now indicates that how much warming we get is a function of how much carbon we burn. And the flip side of that is if we bring our carbon emissions to zero, the warming, at least of the surface of our planet, stabilizes very quickly. We basically stop the warming of the planet if we stop polluting the atmosphere with carbon.”I don’t know how these kinds of comments go unchallenged.
[they do, but by too few, and on Twitter, Mann blocks anyone who tries to debate the point with him]
And Joe Biden never had a plan. In case you were optimistic that we were going to get our shit together in the United States as the world’s biggest carbon emitter historically— and currently the world’s second biggest emitter — and take the first steps to reverse course and serve as an example to other nations, the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling just dealt a crushing blow to the EPA’s power to regulate emissions.
Most of us haven’t even noticed that we’ve run out of time to “really do something”, and the only choices we currently have are to continue with business as usual like we’ve been doing and watch mass die-offs in horror, or attempt to geoengineer ourselves out of this mess and hope against all odds that luck is on our side.
Do you ever wonder why geoengineering solutions to save the planet have even been considered in the first place?
More scientists are now admitting that if we don’t consider them, we are positively screwed. Even if we were able to curb our emissions to net zero right now, the rate of warming would continue to increase due to the built-in warming from CO2 emitted about a decade ago and the tendency for CO2 to linger in the atmosphere from hundreds to a thousand years.
If we attempt geoengineering solutions, the best-case scenarios of implementing these Hail Mary attempts could theoretically buy us some time, but more likely, we’ll cause more harm to the planet in the process and cause ourselves to become extinct faster.
Those are our choices?
Yes, apparently.
What former NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen has referred to as the “Faustian bargain”, the devil has come to collect. The stakes are much higher today than they were decades ago.
We’ve waited way too long, and instead of curbing our emissions when it really mattered, we’ve doubled down driving exponential growth of human population and expansion, global carbon emissions, and resource depletion thanks to capitalism.
Dr. Hansen noticing an unusually hot July in 2021, considering that it should have been relatively cooler in a fairly strong La Niña phase but was later confirmed to be the hottest month ever recorded, admitted in a study published in August 2021 that scientists are underestimating and ignoring the climate impact of the AME.
He recently stated that reducing aerosol pollution could double the rate of global warming over the next 25 years. That’s not good news considering that the amount of heat that the Earth traps has doubled since 2005 and is warming “faster than expected.”
The AME is the biggest wild card in climate change, perhaps the least understood climate forcing impacting global warming, and it complicates any geoengineering solution that exists today.
The most recent and well-known examples of real-world immediate impacts of the AME on global warming were the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, the temporary grounding of all airline flights after 9–11, and the temporary halting of production and manufacturing during the lockdown in China in 2020.
How did each scenario affect global temperatures?
The eruption of Mount Pinatubo caused a reduction in global temperature by about 0.6°C (1.1°F) for about two years. The vast amounts of aerosols injected high into the stratosphere created a cooling affect.
The period of September 11–14 when all flights were temporarily grounded had the biggest diurnal temperature range of about about 1.1°C (2°F) of any three-day period within the previous 30 years due to clear skies and lack of contrails that normally reflect solar radiation during the day and trap heat during the night.
...
Despite the large drop in CO2 emissions of 5.4% in 2020, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere continued to grow at about the same rate compared to previous years, and methane grew by 0.3%, at a faster rate than any other year within the decade due to the reduction of nitrogen oxides (NOx).
This is quite disconcerting considering that scientists are finally beginning to admit that we need to also focus on rising methane emissions.
...
Most people don’t even know that our climate crisis is heading toward not just a crisis, but a total annihilation in the very near term.
It’s not just a mass annihilation of all humanity.
It’s a mass annihilation of all living organisms on our planet, and it’s happening now, not in the distant future.
Most of us haven’t even noticed that we’ve run out of time to “really do something”, and the only choices we currently have are to continue with business as usual like we’ve been doing and watch mass die-offs in horror, or attempt to geoengineer ourselves out of this mess and hope against all odds that luck is on our side.
Do you ever wonder why geoengineering solutions to save the planet have even been considered in the first place?
More scientists are now admitting that if we don’t consider them, we are positively screwed. Even if we were able to curb our emissions to net zero right now, the rate of warming would continue to increase due to the built-in warming from CO2 emitted about a decade ago and the tendency for CO2 to linger in the atmosphere from hundreds to a thousand years.
If we attempt geoengineering solutions, the best-case scenarios of implementing these Hail Mary attempts could theoretically buy us some time, but more likely, we’ll cause more harm to the planet in the process and cause ourselves to become extinct faster.
Those are our choices?
Yes, apparently.
What former NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen has referred to as the “Faustian bargain”, the devil has come to collect. The stakes are much higher today than they were decades ago.
We’ve waited way too long, and instead of curbing our emissions when it really mattered, we’ve doubled down driving exponential growth of human population and expansion, global carbon emissions, and resource depletion thanks to capitalism.
Dr. Hansen noticing an unusually hot July in 2021, considering that it should have been relatively cooler in a fairly strong La Niña phase but was later confirmed to be the hottest month ever recorded, admitted in a study published in August 2021 that scientists are underestimating and ignoring the climate impact of the AME.
He recently stated that reducing aerosol pollution could double the rate of global warming over the next 25 years. That’s not good news considering that the amount of heat that the Earth traps has doubled since 2005 and is warming “faster than expected.”
The AME is the biggest wild card in climate change, perhaps the least understood climate forcing impacting global warming, and it complicates any geoengineering solution that exists today.
The most recent and well-known examples of real-world immediate impacts of the AME on global warming were the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, the temporary grounding of all airline flights after 9–11, and the temporary halting of production and manufacturing during the lockdown in China in 2020.
How did each scenario affect global temperatures?
The eruption of Mount Pinatubo caused a reduction in global temperature by about 0.6°C (1.1°F) for about two years. The vast amounts of aerosols injected high into the stratosphere created a cooling affect.
The period of September 11–14 when all flights were temporarily grounded had the biggest diurnal temperature range of about about 1.1°C (2°F) of any three-day period within the previous 30 years due to clear skies and lack of contrails that normally reflect solar radiation during the day and trap heat during the night.
...
Despite the large drop in CO2 emissions of 5.4% in 2020, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere continued to grow at about the same rate compared to previous years, and methane grew by 0.3%, at a faster rate than any other year within the decade due to the reduction of nitrogen oxides (NOx).
This is quite disconcerting considering that scientists are finally beginning to admit that we need to also focus on rising methane emissions.
...
Most people don’t even know that our climate crisis is heading toward not just a crisis, but a total annihilation in the very near term.
It’s not just a mass annihilation of all humanity.
It’s a mass annihilation of all living organisms on our planet, and it’s happening now, not in the distant future.
Jessica Wildfire: We Should Be Building Homes to Survive The Climate Apocalypse
They’d be cheaper, too.
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We’re going to live harder lives than our parents.
We’re going to have to get scrappier.
A lot of knowledge hasn’t been passed down from prior generations, so we’re going to have to get it from places like books. Some good ones include David Pogue’s How to Prepare for Climate Change, and Carleen Madigan’s The Backyard Homestead.
Hey, I know.
We were preparing for a different future, one stripped of upward mobility and easy retirement like we were promised. We’re looking at a future where it’s smart to know how to build an outhouse.
The future of our old dreams is gone.
It’s not going to happen.
Adopt a new mindset.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, just a starting point.
It’s a different way of thinking.
It’s a way of investing that most Americans don’t think about, because they’re too busy worrying about stocks and crypto. It’s about redesigning a future where we actually feel some hope.
I don’t know about you, but just knowing that I could pull water out of the air if I needed makes me sleep a little better.
You could even just dig a hole.
There’s options.
There’s no point in working all the time and dreaming of the things that we’ll never afford, especially when those things were creating enormous inequality and destroying the planet. There’s also no point in curling up into a ball and crying yourself to sleep every night.
Imagine if millions of us adopted this new mindset. Imagine if we gave up our dreams of making millions and owning big homes, and instead we started thinking about how to live better with less. We could live happier and more in tune with our environment.
We could be more equal.
Instead of wasting our last resources on mansions in the desert, we could be building smaller, cheaper homes that use less energy. We could be housing more people with less. We could be designing and building homes for a better future for everyone, not just the super rich.
It’s what we always talk about anyway, right? Let’s apply this trendy minimalism in ways that actually matter.
Endless growth was killing us.
This way is better.
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