While falling down the Thwaites Glacier hole this morning, there was more climate change news released last week. The numbers are startling, deadening, and make me stumble to find words. We made million year changes in just one hundred. We’ve reshaped the world and don’t even know — or can imagine — how yet.
The atmospheric burden of CO2 is now comparable to where it was during the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period around 3.6 million years ago, when concentrations of carbon dioxide ranged from about 380 to 450 parts per million. During that time sea level was about 78 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, and studies indicate large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.
I stumbled into an interesting — and unsettling — time travel experience this morning. In today’s online, constantly updating world, when you search for something you get the latest updates. Algorithms don’t show you two year old articles when the terms can be found in more recently published material.
I sat down on Saturday to clean out a stack of Wired magazines I had been piling up in a when-I-have-time tower. Thanks to previous procrastination and pandemic time dilation, the issues stretched back to January of 2019. As always, the journalism was outstanding. Superb subjects, wonderful writing, delightful design. The article that snagged my attention and produced this morning’s paradox was The Race to Understand Antarctica’s Most Terrifying Glacier.
Of course it was climate change. Also of note, I had already stopped my print subscription several months ago since that’s just more consumption of paper and transportation costs and another tiny burden on resources I can eliminate from my daily life.
It struck me enough to search for Thwaites Glacier this morning and what should I find? A brand new article published three days ago. I jumped from we need more data to we have more data in one day. Boom, time travel! Unfortunately, it wasn’t good news.
For the first time, researchers have collected data from underneath the remote Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica using an underwater robot. Findings reveal that the supply of warm water to the glacier is larger than previously thought, triggering concerns of faster melting and accelerating ice flow.
It’s been a few years since I’ve watched Waterworld. Maybe it’s time for a refresher. Ooh, another idea. Disney needs to create a series of Primitive Technology videos with Moana characters teaching kids the skills they will need to survive in the environment they will inherit. I don’t think a magical water spirit is going to be there to save them.
Here’s another canary in the coal mine article for human powered climate change. The story has everything from Cold War nuclear missiles to leftovers forgotten in freezers and cool nicknames like Project Iceworm. It turns out that just hoping natural systems are infinite and resilient isn’t a reliable civilization plan.
The discovery helps confirm a new and troubling understanding that the Greenland ice has melted off entirely during recent warm periods in Earth’s history — periods like the one we are now creating with human-caused climate change.
Understanding the Greenland Ice Sheet in the past is critical for predicting how it will respond to climate warming in the future and how quickly it will melt. Since some twenty feet of sea-level rise is tied up in Greenland’s ice, every coastal city in the world is at risk.
You know what’s even sadder to think about it? If someone had been paying attention to those ice cores over 50 years ago, it still would not have mattered. They could have released a scientific study about these fossilized leaves at the first Earth Day in 1970 and we would still be in the same boiling pot we are now. People think in decades and lifetimes not millennia. The trend seems to be speeding up instead of slowing down. When we careen off the cliff, here’s to hoping for wide open water to splash down in.
Abstraction. Speculation. Competition. So much of our world in 2021 is geared towards individual profit over collective good. It’s been that way for a long time — really forever. The innate biological imperative of survival continues to hold grasp even after layers of conscience. Sure, some cultures that value the group have emerged, but we need some species level evolution. We need to find ways to make it easier for us to think about everyone instead of our self.
The Great Green Wall is an African-led movement with an epic ambition to grow an 8,000km natural wonder of the world across the entire width of Africa.
Now this is the bold, humanity-as-a-collective action I needed to see this morning. The world needs more people spending time on projects like this and less on NFTs(or blogging for that matter). Unfortunately, given the scale and bureaucracy it’s impossible to directly donate to the United Nations convention campaigning the Great Green Wall initiative. If you want to show some monetary support, you’ll want to head over to a partner such as TreeAid to donate.
267 weeks. 61 months. 5 years. Those numbers all represent the same thing. How long it’s been since I last posted on this here blog thingy. That sure is a long time and begs the question — why now? That probably has to do with a string of things I’ve read recently.
“Don’t like to write, but like having written. Hate the effort of driving pen from line to line” Frank Norris via kottke.org
“Purpose is an essential element of you.“ Chadwick Boseman via brenebrown.com
“One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work.”Austin Kleon
“There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating.”Oliver Burkeman
Going further, the words that keep ringing in my ear — and I hope to exorcise through this little diatribe come from the following quote published fifty years ago.
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
A human being had that thought in 1970. Here it is the year 2020 and so many still think a person is only worth their productivity. That value is only measured in what you can create or do for others. That your efforts must be quantified through currency or comfort or convenience. That life is a zero-sum game. That progress requires growth and positive year-over-year balance sheets.
Why can’t progress simply be zero? You replace all the things you extract in order to live. You erase your impacts so they don’t continually build up as debt to future generations. Hell, you quit externalizing costs and transferring them to living, breathing people currently on the other side of the planet or even right down the road. Accept that more isn’t always the answer because sometimes it’s the problem.
Consider this a warning that more word vomit similar to the above might come spewing out. Or it might not. I’m still swirling in the do less/do more conundrum of justifying my existence by doing things vs. simply being.
