Do You Get It Now

“There is always this call to ‘DO SOMETHING!’ ” said one of the speakers in Madison last week, gesticulating wildly somewhat in mockery of my main point, which is that within 30 years humans will emit 5 times more gigatons of carbon than is necessary to fuck Earth beyond all recognition.

I hadn't actually made the call to “do something,” hysterically or no, and indeed I see the point of being wary of certain kinds of call such as this, in particular as they may inhibit our ability to think.

And yet. It's all way too convenient a performance of smug rightness at the expense of oh, I don't know, 50% of all lifeforms (see the link below).

The paralysis of cynicism is precisely an effect of correlationist humanism, which persists at exactly the wrong time. [sarcasm] Since humans created gravity and evolution and so on (by mathematizing them and otherwise formulating them), it is more important to agonize about the impact of ecological policy on humans than it is to “do” the dreaded “something,” since human measurements are after all what make things real.[/sarcasm]

So this should provide something like a salutary intellectual slap upside the correlationist head. The link is to a pretty handy wheel of doom produced by MIT. The doom will be, as they put it, “largely irreversible for 1000 years.” Ready?

Staying near our current emissions will in the next few decades result in:

• Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 10°F over much of the United States
• Permanent Dust Bowl conditions over the U.S. Southwest and many other regions around the globe that are heavily populated and/or heavily farmed.
• Sea level rise of some 1 foot by 2050, then 4 to 6 feet (or more) by 2100, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
• Massive species loss on land and sea — perhaps 50% or more of all biodiversity.
• Unexpected impacts — the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
• Much more extreme weather
• Food insecurity — the increasing difficulty of feeding 7 billion, then 8 billion, and then 9 billion people in a world with an ever-worsening climate.
• Myriad direct health impacts