Towheeblog

See bottom of blog for added commentary from others.
Click here for summary of new book, Hothouse Earth, by a British scientist. This author says forget the fake climate optimism. We are past the point of turning back the heat. The earth will shoot past the 1.5 degree centigrade heating that has been touted as a maximum our species should allow. Hah, says this writer. He sees the earth going well past 2-degrees hotter, maybe to 3. His forecast would make a dreary end-of-times movie. Heat waves, drought and famine, widespread wildfires, dreadful storms, social and political upheaval as systems break down. Politics will not necessarily protect you–both right-wing Texas and communist Cuba now face power black-outs in coming hot weeks. Not a single democracy or dictatorship has been able to stop forest fires–from Siberia to the Sierra, they burn. Failed states will litter the planet–joining Yemen, Somalia, Brazil where they are deforesting the Amazon as quickly as they can, Libya, Syria, etc. etc. etc.

Nature is sick of us, and she is right to be so.
Covid has killed over six million. What’ll continent wide famines do? Killer heat is more dangerous than well-armed white Christian nationalists, or even Putin. You can hide from view, just take curbside delivery (while roads are still maintained). You can run from bombs or gunners. If there is no food, running is pointless.

Climate will worsen every aspect of the environment. More drought. More disease from bark beetle to West Nile (now across North America thanks to our changed climate) in more places. Extinctions. Burns, baby, burns. Inundated coastal areas including fancy places like Miami, London, Melbourne, San Francisco, Copenhagen. Rich enclaves will get leveed and huge pumping stations–say Hilton Head and Nantucket. If you live in a coastal village in Borneo? Sayonara, sucker.

In Japan macaques are getting even. Click here.

California may lose its sequoias to fire, a tree requiring fire to reproduce! Click here.

U.S. fires right now–click here

Even brilliant power broker, Sen. McConnell, could not help forestall mass death in his state’s hilly eastern Kentuck hollers. Click here for recent summary of the devastation. You wanna live in a steep holler with the river outside? Better be a great swimmer and sleep in your swimsuit. You’d think Mitch’d funnel some of that Chinese wealth from his wife’s family into flood protection. But then he has so many fond voters, who cares about a couple dozen washed downstream, and some of those might have been Dems anyway. Does Mitch imagine that stopping abortion will grow the population fast enough to replace all those the climate snuffs out?

It’ll be far too late to [prevent on-going worsening disasters, but climate destruction will eventually lead to dropping population and an end to that false religion of economic growth as a good thing. Time to go back and re-read George Stewart’s post-apocalypse classic, Earth Abides.

Meanwhile, greed dominates in the economic sphere. Those who run the oil companies are oblivious to what they are doing to our only planet. Click here.

A college classmate who went on to a distinguished career as a chemistry prof and researcher sent me this comment, based on discussions he’s had with climate researchers:
“The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at the moment has caused the oceans to increase in temperature in a continuous progression. If the levels all of a sudden stabilized, the temperature of the oceans would continue to rise, but the levels of CO2 continue to rise. Even it all human sources were to disappear overnight, it would take many years for the levels to decrease significantly from present one. The oceans are the buffer on the air temperature. Even though air temperatures fluctuate dramatically, even from year to year, the ocean determines the mean around which they fluctuate, and the oceans will only cool slowly even if CO2 levels were to begin decreasing. To me the future looks bleak; I fear for my grandchildren. Unmentioned so far in all of the discussion of global warming is what will happen to all of the people who are now living in the areas of the earth that will become less and less habitable until they are uninhabitable. Today’s concerns about refugees will seem paltry. I see a Malthusian future.”