Yella Lines And Dead Armadillos
If the center holds, we're doomed
Links are at the end.
I had not visited The World Famous Kapahulu Safeway Rooftop Parking Lot and Photo Platform in a while, at least not for photographic purposes, but Friday I did and it was grand, and it reminded me that parking structures often offer really good photo opportunities.
Everybody knows Donald Trump (rap name Concrete Bundy) is facing a lot of trials and probably some related tribulations during the next 12 months, but you don’t get the full impact of it, or at least I didn’t, until you see the starting dates in one place. He has the one starting today (Oct. 2), another one January 15, another one January 29 (a federal class action fraud suit filed in 2018), another one March 4, another one March 25, another one May 20, and another, the Georgia trial, with a date yet TBD.
Plus whatever might surface meanwhile.
And he’s still going to win the GOP nomination, barring death or an equivalent state of mind prior to July 15 of next year.
There’s hardly been a moment since Yeats wrote it, in the wake of World War One, that The Second Coming hasn’t seemed apropos to one current event or another. There’s always been an impending apocalypse or an actual cataclysm. (I can’t remember why but I was convinced at the time that Nixon mining the harbor at Haiphong was a harbinger of one or the other.)
At present we have the lingering prospect of nuclear war, should something go drastically awry in Ukraine or Taiwan or wherever, which would qualify as an apocalypse—”I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed”—and the certainty of global warming, which will bring cataclysms and, you never know, quite possibly an apocalypse.
Global warming and, more immediately, the threat of a nuclear outbreak in Ukraine are the primary reasons that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reset their Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight earlier this year, the closest it has been.1
As I’ve repeatedly noted, I’m really bad at predictions, so you should probably take this one with a large grain of horror: global warming will wreck us before nuclear war does.
To support this thesis, I’m relying on a man named Brain, another named Brilliant, and a third, somewhat plaintive one named David Wallace-Wells, who somehow at some point acquired currency as something of an authority on global warming.
I’ll begin with Wallace-Wells, who last October wrote a superficially optimistic New York Times Magazine piece on the prospects for managing our way out of a full-blown climate apocalypse (no paywall).2 It amounted to nations and leaders and oil companies doing the right thing at the right time so hard that a future observer might say to humankind, in the immortal words of Julia Roberts, “By the grace of God or I don't know what . . . you have managed to Forrest Gump your way through this.”
Obviously, as I said at the time, that’s not going to happen.3 And Wallace-Wells, in a morose return to the subject a month shy of the anniversary of the afore-mentioned piece, after the hottest year on record, appears to agree (NYT, no paywall)4.
[W]e’ve known for years that just rolling out renewables wouldn’t be enough, that some existing fossil fuel assets would have to be “stranded” to meet the world’s ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and that additional fossil exploration or buildout threatens to push us past its riskier two-degree target, as well. There may be reason to think that U.S. natural gas could help some coal-heavy countries in the short term, and some European officials have come to believe the continent will need our L.N.G. for decades. But at some point, you have to find a way to leave those fossils in the ground.
Which we’re not doing. In fact, we’ve taken the greenhouse gas reduction goal of the Paris Accords—reducing emissions by half between then (2016) and 2030—and treated it like a prominent Russian businessman on the wrong side of the Kremlin.
Splat.
So that’s Wallace-Wells sorted. We turn now to professors Brilliant and Brain. Larry Brilliant was one of the leaders of the successful effort to eradicate smallpox, and he has thoughts about the relationship between climate and health, mentioned in passing in yet another NY Times climate piece (no paywall)5 quoting from an interview he did elsewhere earlier this year.6
(Brilliant credits his emergence as a leader in global health to a guru who repeatedly threw apples at Brilliant’s balls to motivate his departure from an ashram.)
The primary connection [between global warming and global health] is that the antecedent causes of climate change and global warming are many of the exact antecedent causes of pandemics. As the Earth gets warmer, animals from the south migrate to the north. Over a billion more people are at risk of malaria right now because the Anopheles mosquito can now breed at higher altitudes and greater latitudes. Animals meeting other animals carrying the same viruses leads to variants. We’re having a tremendous amount of spillover because the forests and rainforests are being clear-cut.
. . .
Fossil fuels create greenhouse gases, leading to global warming. And with that, you wind up changing the way water works, the way salt works, and the entire ecosystem of the planet. The same things that cause climate change cause spillover, where animals and humans live in each other’s territory. Spillover is occurring now at five times the rate that it did 50 years ago. Every year one, two, or three new novel diseases that have never been seen in human beings are spilling over from animals, and we’re exposed to them.
The NYT piece goes into more detail about which particular diseases are being exacerbated by global warming, including dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, a tropical virus characterized similarly to dengue by fever and intense joint pain. All three are carried by the same mosquito, which, like the malarial Anopheles mosquito, is expanding in range as the planet warms.
This is to say in part that were we to stop global warming in its tracks this minute, we would still have exposed billions of people to diseases which were never before endemic where they live, and we’d still have that human-wild animal interface sending new diseases and new varieties of existing ones our way.
So that’s Brilliant. Here’s Brain.
To those on this “positive” or “hopium” end of the [global warming amelioration] spectrum, here is something to consider: Things are way, way worse than you think. The reason people can believe that everything is going to be OK is because they have not taken the time to comprehend all the different things that are going wrong simultaneously, nor how seriously these things are going wrong.7
Brain too notes the increase in greenhouse emissions every year since the signing of the Paris Accords; that 2023 is likely to be the first year in which the average global temperature hits the 1.5° Centigrade above preindustrial temperatures mark, making exceedingly unlikely the goal of holding the global average temperature increase to that mark or less by 2050; that as the planet warms, environmental features that once acted as carbon sinks, such as tundras, are melting and releasing the greenhouse gasses they’ve been storing up for millenia; and, we’re running out of fresh water because glaciers are melting and the runoff is not replenishable in the long run.
There’s more, of course, but my doctor says not to obsess. (Her advice typically goes the way of Russian businessmen and the Paris Accords. Splat.) I will note that more people competing for fresh water sources appears to be responsible for an increase in cholera worldwide, per one of those NYT stories.
And that, Comrades, is all I got, except to ask you to consider what the most dramatic action you might take to encourage our elected officials and their corporate patrons to adequately address the global warming catastrophe/cataclysm/apocalypse. What’s the outer limit?
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Be well, take care, consider the rebellion.
(Here’s the music. Probably don’t listen to the second one.)
Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, “We’re Ok. But We’re Lost Anyway;8” Marcel Duchamp, “Sacrificio;9” The Beaches, “Blame My Ex;10” Bleached, “Don’t You Think You’ve Had Enough;11” Cat Power, “The Greatest.12”
Thrive under pressure, that's the ticket; is true not only in Tejas ...
We're all gonna die!