John Michael Greer on the climate crisis. My problem with my man JMG is that he tries to both have his cake and eat it. He de facto downplays the climate crisis, saying that it isn´t apocalyptic. But if you read his interesting essay to the very end, well, it sure sounds apocalyptic enough!
>>>To begin with, melting the polar ice caps will raise sea levels three hundred feet. While it will take centuries for this process to complete, even the first steps along that route will play merry hob with the global economy, flooding most of the world’s large cities and a vast amount of other real estate, erasing entire nations from the map, forcing mass migrations, crippling ports and other trade facilities, and the list goes on. Meanwhile the weather isn’t simply going to pop right into an equable condition; to judge from what’s currently happening, the climate belts will keep on lurching unsteadily toward the poles a little at a time, causing droughts, floods, famines, and other entertainments.>>>
Ahem, how isn´t this an apocalypse? I think the problem might be that JMG defines "apocalypse" in very literal or narrow terms (although that might be because most other people do the same thing). If all or most people die off next Thursday, and flesh-munching zombies appear from the bowels of the Earth, that´s an apocalypse. If not, it´s gradual change, thank you!
Which is small consolation for those forced to live through the "entertainments".
Three other take aways from the essay: we can´t do shit to reverse the changes, making AGW a predicament rather than a problem. And a hot climate is actually the "old normal" as far as our planet is concerned. So are rapid climate changes. During the "Boreal climate stage" around 9600 BC, global average temperatures rose with 7 degrees centigrade in less than a decade - a more dramatic shift than that predicted by most climate scientists or activists today, and yet here we are.
The third important point is that we really don´t know that much about the climate to begin with. All kinds of feedback loops might presently be unaccounted for. But since life on this planet has survived for billions of years, it´s safe to assume that not even a bipedal ape known as Man can permanently turn Earth into a new Venus - unless, I suppose, some really crazy establishment faction tries out bioengineering on a really large scale!
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