Watching the World Die

Lately this song keeps coming to mind. It replays in my damn head several times a day now. You might recall it from the radio.
“We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die”—Everclear—1996

This song was ill timed for me personally, for while its subject is a breakup, it’s repeating Mantra was what I had only just begun to face. I wonder now if others have faced it. Spent almost 20 years fighting it, before I accepted it. So now I hear that chorus in my head all the time but not in association with any breakup, but with exactly what its refrain repeats.
“Yeah, watch the world die”

I first heard about elevated carbon levels in our atmosphere from a scholastic weekly. A cheap school newspaper common in the 70’s. Mostly it was used for paper airplanes, very few students read them. I read everything. It was a couple of lines long and mentioned elevated CO2 levels, and that more testing would be done.

I suspected then what that meant because I understood in a very basic way how carbon traps heat. I went to my professor of environmental studies with it and he told me “ah, its one paper, needs peer review”. So I waited for that, and it began coming in the 80’s.

So in the 80’s I became that pain in the ass you knew, who insisted we drive smaller cars (like I did), recycle (like I did), and tried to get people to be aware (like I did). I continued this until 1996, when I first heard of the Sulphur blooms. That disturbed me, and no one paid any mind, its Africa. Problem for me was sulfur blooms are a tipping point, one forecast for 2030 back in the 80’s.

If you can plot a graph you will realize the problem with a forecast that underestimates the change by 50 years. Imagine that it takes an hour to drive somewhere, and your friend drives while you nap, but you arrive in 5 minutes.
Something transpired there right?
Same here, the changes took place far too quickly, which mean our models underestimate due to unknown variables. We are much further into change of climate than we are aware.

By the Time Al Gore’s film came out I had already grieved for my family. Accepted the hard reality that the world they inherit will continue to get worse for centuries, and there is no way to stop it. I spent much of my life in rural and wilderness areas, and have watched the tipping points fall like dominoes. I have watched more tipping points falling, with startling regularity since then, all the things we expected to see in an extinction event. Crossbreeding of species because environmental conditions force it have resulted in Growler bears and new types of black tipped shark that we know of. The Humboldt squid vastly increased its range because it likes O2 depleted water, the sea lions not so much, less fish, less food, less sea lions, but more vicious squids which we now suspect communicate with light underwater. The Great Barrier Reef is dead even as we discover an unknown reef near the mouth of the Amazon, which we are burning to grow more cattle.

If we all reacted like it was December 8th 1941, if all industry was forced to comply, if all gas was rationed as if we were at war like WW2, then we might have a chance to mitigate the damage which is coming, which I think many of you can either now see or have experienced in recent years.

Earth has been through worse, it has a long recovery time measured in millions of years, upstart humanity has never experienced the type of world we are creating, and history shows we are not likely to fare well. The species which survived prior extinction events are scant, crocodiles, insects, sharks, squid, and a small shrew like creature, and some scavenging birds.

The recent IPCC report says 12 years before catastrophic circumstances, If we all mobilize like I said above. However if you read the report yourself, something few do anymore, you would discover the repeated use of one term; Adaptive. Adaptive technologies, strategies, structures and so on.

Now understand that the IPCC report always minimalizes its results by only including the reports you can get over a hundred nations to agree on politically. That is right, it is using the reports which have the lowest numbers in order to gain the political consent of the participating nations. So by its very nature it is the least case scenario. Despite this it is pleading for the world to ADAPT, because it is adapt or die, as a species.

I do not expect humanity to get its collective shit together to fight this global problem, few of us are built psychologically to grasp it. We evolved to see imminent threats, like a lion in the grass, seeing the threat in a very slow chemical reaction is not so easy. If you take a standard globe like you would find in a school or on a desk, and tightly wrap it in Saran Wrap, and realize that is our atmosphere almost to scale, that your work commute is farther, perhaps much farther than outer space, then you might start to realize what us adding smoke since we discovered fire has done, But the sky looks huge to us and it is hard to imagine.

It takes hundreds or thousands of years for the atmospheric chemistry to remove said carbons, and the Earth don’t care. Once the weather kills off enough of us Carbon levels will decrease, and Earth is patient. We humans don’t have that long. We could survive as Moorlocks perhaps, wealth will shield some for a while, but it takes thousands of years for Earths cycles to lower CO2 at all. The changes we have made will affect our ancestors out as far ahead as Sumeria is behind, and more.

Don’t get me wrong, humanity needs to do all it can do, I have trust it will, but I fear it will be far too little and way too late to avoid the worst of what is to come.

"May you live in interesting times" is an English expression purported to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. We are in interesting times. These days I try to enjoy what I can and do my part but I have no hope for my children, no faith my grandchildren will have children. The world they will experience is one I cannot truly conceive, and it will drive and has driven my vote.

Next time who will I vote for?
#NotTrump

Adapting to Climate Shift is all that matters, and all other concerns are affected by it.

So how many of you are like me, and feel like you are just watching the world die?

“Yeah watch the world die
Yeah watch the world die
Yeah watch the world die
Yeah watch the world die”