OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #150, OCTOBER 23, 2023

 

OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #150, OCTOBER 23, 2023

Tom Engelhardt.  Warming and Wars Converging.
Gerardo Ceballos and Paul Ehrlich.  Extinguishing Not Only Species but Genera.
Dick Bennett.  What Did We Know and What Did We Do by 2010?
Erica Jung and Güney Işıkara .  “Degrowth and Ecosocialist Revolution.”

“Are We the Dinosaurs of the 21st Century?   And How Our Wars Distract Us.”  By Tom Engelhardt,  October 19, 2023. [This is one of the best summaries I have read of our predicament, as warming and wars converge upon us.  Here is Engelhardt’s conclusion.  –D] . . .…. . ..Or rather, if you want to think of it this way, humanity is now making war on itself, using fossil fuels as its slow-motion weapon of long-term atmospheric devastation, while distracting itself with more localized wars on this planet. And thanks to that, it has no longer become totally absurd to talk about our possible extinction. In a sense, you might say that, with our own special form of brilliance, humanity has managed to create both a devastatingly fast and a spectacularly slow way of doing ourselves (and so much else) in. I’m talking, of course, about those nuclear weapons and climate change. And thanks at least in part to our inability to stop fighting wars among ourselves, we seem to be ensuring that climate change won’t be the full-scale focus of our attention as it should be. So, think of those nukes and climate change as fast and slow-motion versions of that asteroid that took out the dinosaurs and so much other life on Earth 66 million years ago. At least, however, T-Rex and its pals weren’t responsible for the force that made them history. If things don’t change on this planet in the decades to come, the same might not be true of humanity. You would, in fact, have to say that we might have created our own asteroid, sent it on a devastating slow-motion path to Earth, and then (to make matters worse) largely ignored its coming and began killing each other first. Consider all of this, then, the deepest form of human madness and just hope that somehow, from the Middle East to Ukraine, Beijing to Washington, we can wake up to what we’re doing to ourselves before it’s too late.

“Study finds human-driven mass extinction is eliminating entire branches of the tree of life.”

Originally published: Phys.org  on September 18, 2023 by Stanford University (more by Phys.org)  |  (Posted Sep 21, 2023)

The passenger pigeon., the Tasmanian tiger, .the Baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear.  Yet, an analysis from Stanford University and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the crisis may run even deeper. Each of the three species above was also the last member of its genus, the higher category into which taxonomists sort species. And they aren’t alone.

Up to now, public and scientific interest has focused on extinctions of species. But in their new study, Gerardo Ceballos, senior researcher at the Institute of Ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Emeritus, in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, have found that entire genera (the plural of “genus”) are vanishing as well, in what they call a “mutilation of the tree of life.”

“In the long term, we’re putting a big dent in the evolution of life on the planet,” Ceballos said.

 

 

Dick Bennett.   What Did We Know about CO2 and Temperature, When Did We Know, What Did We Do, What Are We Doing Now to Stop the Heating Further?

I am rereading some of the books I had to store in boxes because of a broken water pipe last Christmas Eve.  Some hold up well, some do not.  Paskal’s Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map (2010) seems prescient.  Peter Lehner’s (with Bob Deans) In Deep Water: The Anatomy of a Disaster, the Fate of the Gulf, and How to End Our Oil Addiction (2010), is a still stimulating and apparently factual analysis of the blowout of BP’s Macondo well by its drill rig Deepwater Horizon and the consequences.  The recommendations of its last chapter, however—the how to end our oil addiction—in the context of the continued rise of global temperatures and predictions by the IPCC assessments, cannot serve the urgent needs of our world today.   They were good solutions in 2010-- IF acted upon then with the full force of a Manhattan Project/Marshall Plan/Apollo Moon Flight our atmosphere might be stabilized now.  But the failure of action by world leaders and national populations have made those solutions too late.    In Chapter 6, “Beyond Petroleum,” he recognizes that despite three positive developments-- in vehicle gas efficiency, increased use of biomass fuels, and reduced driving--, “we’re on track to increase our oil consumption.”  He proposes seven ways we can stop the global increase of CO2 and temperature:  electrified vehicles and trains, mass transit, freight hauled more by trains, redesigned urban centers, biofuels, and “the right incentives.”   If we accomplished these “efficiency gains and transportation alternatives” we could cut US oil consumption “by eight percent by 2020.”  But how politically we might make even these insufficient efficiencies and alternatives he does not say, although in his “Epilogue” he vaguely urges an increase in “responsible public oversight” and other effete remedies proposed by the corporate-allied Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) the success of which, with apparently no irony intended, is assured by our country’s proven resilience. 

 

Erica Jung and Güney Işıkara .  “Degrowth and Ecosocialist Revolution.”  Science for the People  ( September 8, 2023).  (more by Science for the People). (Posted Sep 20, 2023)

It is becoming increasingly clear that humanity cannot resolve the anthropogenic ecological crises without radically restructuring our social relations—a consensus shared by the degrowth movement and revolutionary socialism.