What amazes me is that people are not worried. So far, Canada’s wildfires have emitted 410 megatons of carbon. The previous record was in 2014, when the fires emitted 138 megaton. The wildfires in Canada this year emitted more carbon than German fossil fuels do. They tell you that the carbon will be sucked up again when the trees regrow. But this takes decades to happen. Before that time you’re going to be faced with more fires like this.
As you lose the trees, the carbon in the soil becomes vulnerable. Canada has 384 billion tonnes carbon stored in peatland and other soils. So far, humanity has burned 681 billion tonnes of carbon through fossil fuels. In other words, Canada has huge amounts of carbon in its soils that it can introduce into the atmosphere, once the trees that keep this carbon in place are lost.
But the bigger question to ask yourselves is what happens to all these black carbon particles, the dark soot that enters the air. When the forests in Canada burn, black soot tends to end up on the Greenland ice sheet. This absorbs sunlight, thus warming up the ice sheet and increasing surface melt.
Canada has now lost 5% of its forest coverage, in a single year. Outside Canada, hardly anyone is paying attention to this. We hear about Greece, Libya and Maui, because people are dying there. But in Canada, the nightmares of tomorrow are being born right now. This is positive feedback. It’s what we were being warned about decades ago.
This is why the original goal more than thirty years ago was to keep global warming below 1 degree Celsius. Above 1 degree Celsius they realized there was a risk of setting off chain reactions by destabilizing ecosystems. Unfortunately, the world went with Nordhaus’ 2 degree target. This target was not based on scientific understanding of how ecosystems function. It was based on an economist doing some back of the envelope math.
We’re not at the point yet where positive feedback from ecosystem degradation overwhelms the anthropogenic forcing. But we have set a reaction in motion, that can now continue even when we stop pushing. If we somehow get our own emissions down to zero, we’re going to have to figure out how to sequester the natural emissions that we triggered, or how to stop those emissions.
There are still things humanity can do. We can decide to slam the brakes. We could transition to a minimally land-using diet. We can easily return more than 75% of land to nature. We can stop flying. We can grow crops like cactus fruit for ourselves on degraded marginal lands. This would rapidly reduce the greenhouse effect and reduce the heat waves.
But with every day this madness continues, we’re making it harder for our species to have any sort of future on this planet. We are instead moving towards the Idiocracy scenario: A world of low IQ people on a planet suffering dust storms and failing harvests, who are beginning to die of hunger.
You’re living in a situation, where people just no longer have the cognitive capacity necessary to address the problems they’re faced with. That’s the theme of Idiocracy: There are problems, they can be solved, but the people are just too stupid to figure it out. In Idiocracy it’s: “Wait, why don’t we just give water to the plants?” On planet Earth it’s: “Wait, why don’t we just eat the grain and soybeans ourselves instead of feeding it to cows and pigs first?”
We have a similar situation to Idiocracy, where a handful of people realize what’s necessary to reverse this global crisis and are willing to do what’s necessary to reverse it. The majority of people however, especially the low IQ low status white males, are in denial about the crisis and unwilling to do what it takes to reverse the crisis.
The mistake that leftists make is to think that right wingers are evil. In our society, the political right basically fulfills the function of representing the interests and worldview of people with a low IQ. That’s why the whole demographic rallies around a figure like Donald Trump, rather than a DeSantis or any of the other contestants. There are all sorts of anonymous nerds who see some sort of future in rallying the mediocre low IQ masses behind their own favorite autocrat, but dumb people will tend to rally behind a dumb leader, so I don’t give them much chance.
Every attempt at convincing the political right that something needs to be done about reversing the changes to our atmosphere seems doomed to fail. That’s because the political right now exists to serve the interests of people not capable of understanding complex problems. The evolution from “resisting societal changes” to “being too stupid to understand why something needs to change” is a relatively natural and gradual one. .................
continues at his site