Image Credit: Noah Berger
Excerpt: "It’s hot out there. It’s heating up faster than it has in 65 million years. And the temperature’s climbing, relentlessly, every day, every month hotter, higher, worse."
Alan: And this is just the beginning.
"Best Global Warming Posts Featuring John Oliver's Best Global Warming Debate"
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Why Are We Being Hit by So Many Crises at Once? Because This Is Extinction
It’s Not a Coincidence. We Are Now Entering the Age of Extinction — And You Can Feel It By the Day.
It’s not a coincidence. We are now entering the age of extinction — and you can feel it by the day.
It’s about to hit 40ºC (104ºC) in London. 46ºC (115ºF) in Spain and Portugal. 39ºC (102ºC) in France. The UK has issued its very first extreme heat warnings. France is evacuating cities because of wildfires. Record temperatures are being set across the world.
It’s hot out there. It’s heating up faster than it has in 65 million years. And the temperature’s climbing, relentlessly, every day, every month hotter, higher, worse.
Meanwhile, another Covid wave is raging. What do we even call Covid waves anymore, though? They used to be Alpha, Delta, and so on, great seasonal tsunamis. But now we appear to be beginning to have seasonal waves made of micro-waves of different variants. BA2, BA4, BA5, Centaurus. The waves are coming harder and — at least if you think escaping our immune systems and vaccines is alarming — faster.
Go ahead and think back, I don’t know, ten, twenty years. If I told you that a record-breaking heatwave stretched across much of the planet, while fresh waves of a pandemic kept hitting and surging — what would you have thought? Sci-fi dystopia? Yet here we are. Arthur C Clarke, genius that he was, thought 2020 would be the year humanity voyaged to Jupiter, and made contact with life in the universe. But this is the 2020s. Hell on earth.
And all that’d be bad enough — but we have yet to get to the economy. Inflation’s skyrocketing, rising to crippling levels. In Britain, butter can cost 8 USD. In America, food prices are 10% higher than they were last year. Rising inflation means real incomes are falling, because, of course, wages and incomes are keeping pace with the eye-watering ways prices are escalating. People are getting poorer.
How have politicians decided to deal with all this? Well, mostly, they haven’t. On the one side — the good side, the center left — they’ve just politely decided to ignore it. Think about the three examples above, and then think of how governments have handled these three problems. Covid? What Covid? The pandemic’s over!! And if you say it’s not, here, here’s a legion of pseudoscientists and doctors who play pundit on TV to attack you and call you names. Heatwave? Dying infrastructure? I guess…just tough it out, guys. We’re certainly not going to change anything. We’re not going to update our buildings or energy grids or water systems. LOL — we’re not going to invest a penny, centime, pence.
Oh, what’s that — inflation? I don’t know, I guess…just deal with it. Open up your wallet! Hey, you’re rich, aren’t you? So what difference does it make if food costs 10% more? Housing 30%? Energy 50%? Oh, what’s that, you can’t afford it? Hey — what do you want us to do about it, exactly? Too bad!!
You’re on your own.
See the common thread there? When I point it out, it should be obvious. You’re on your own. Think of the horrific, spine-chilling message that Democrats have sent to Americans. To American women, in the wake of the fall of Roe. You’re on your own. To America’s young people, who are begging and pleading for their “debts” — more instruments of coercion than financial arrangements at this point — to be cancelled. Sorry, not gonna do it. Even though we could with the stroke of a pen.
You’re on your own.
Whew. That’s terrible. These are supposed to be the good guys, after all, and they’re just out there…giving up…throwing their hands up in resignation…exasperated with people who want them to show a little leadership and take some action. It’d be bad enough, though, if all that were where it ended. But it’s not. Still not.
It’d be bad enough if all you were on your own from was…what I’ve described above. Heatwaves, temperature skyrocketing, pandemics surging, economies cratering, societies buckling, politics paralyzed. But it’s not.
On the other side of the political spectrum are the demagogues and lunatics and fascists. Take Britain’s sad, sordid example. One of the front-runners for PM is a figure who’s out there every day making their bid by blaming all Britain’s woes on…wokeness. I’m no fan of wokeness — I find it as irritating as you do, probably. But, and it’s big goddamned “but” the size of the solar system. What does wokeness have to do with…heatwaves…a pandemic…inflation…anything that’s a real, serious, material, modern problem in 21st century society? Nothing.
This is scapegoating. This figure — and many like them — are ascending to the heights of power by pitting societies against each other. Putting social groups at one another’s throats, blaming some for the problems of all, and calling to basically let loose the dogs of war on them.
But of course no society can actually solve its genuine, material, pressing problems this way. By telling Big Lies which scapegoat some for the problems of all, just because it’s convenient, expedient, what some social groups, especially the working class, betrayed, abandoned, furious, desperate, wants. A scapegoat. Who’s anyone but the callow, shallow, unread, illiterate, soulless leaders who caused all these crises to begin with. Someone more like…someone other. Historically demonized and hated. Someone powerless to fight back. Give me a good scapegoat, and I won’t care about anything else. I just want someone to hurt. For all the ways I’ve been let down and damaged.
What am I describing above? What’s the truth I’m trying to get to?
We are now living in an Age of Ultra Crisis.
It is much, much worse than most of us think. Because most of us still don’t really grasp how the dots above are connected. Most of us think, even if unconsciously, that all these crises now afflicting our world and our civilization are coincidences. We don’t understand — not fully, not really — that they are part of the same underlying problem, which is the true one, the central one, the Big One.
What problem is that, that connects heatwaves, pandemics, inflation, shattered economies, demagogues, and a broken politics? I’m going to tell you. Through one final example. A kind of funny one, in fact.
France is running short of… Dijon mustard. Quelle horreur, mes amis!!! The French take food very, very seriously — as one should — and they protest at the drop of a hat, as one should. Thoroughly civilized people. And so you can imagine that a shortage of Dijon mustard is actually…kind of a big deal. It’s not like Paris is suddenly The Purge. But, you know, these are little signs that civilization is quite possibly breaking down right before one’s bistro-loving eyes.
Now. Why is France having a shortage of Dijon mustard? This is the interesting bit. Go ahead — first, guess. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The reason? “French mustard producers said seed production in 2021 was down 50% after poor harvests, which they said had been brought on by the changing climate in France’s Burgundy region and Canada, the second largest mustard seed producer in the world.”
Now zoom out. Think about the way prices are rising, across the board. Just think of food. No, it’s not just Russia’s war, though that doesn’t help. This bout of inflation began before that even started. The real reason? It’s because harvests are beginning to fail. For all kinds of crops. Above, we have the example of mustard. But also coffee — which is spiking in price. There’s sugar, wheat, cocoa.
Those are leading indicators. In time, all our harvests will begin to fail. That is because you can hardly raise the crops which thrived in the temperate, civilization-friendly climate of the last 100,000 years or so on a planet that’s more like a scorched one from 65 million years ago.
In time, all our harvests will begin to fail. How much time? We’re at this point much, much faster than it was thought we would’ve been. We are now standing here on the precipice of mega-failure. Of living on a planet in which it’s just not possible to supply mustard, cocoa, wheat, sugar, on a civilizational scale anymore.
Ever.
Now expand that list, because it’s not just food. It’s things like metals, for example. Good luck mining them when it’s 150 degrees outside. It’s things like paper, which comes from plants, which are also not exactly having a great time at the moment. It’s things like animals.
Think of Covid, now for a moment. What is Covid? To most people, it’s a “pandemic” — and that’s if they even get that far in thinking well about world. What does “that far” mean? Covid isn’t just “a pandemic” at all. Pandemics are what happen on a dying planet.
There was a researcher who predicted, way back in the 1990s, that animals would begin to have great, great alterations to their great patterns of migration, as the planet heated up. They’d begin to flee towards the poles. She was laughed at and mocked. And now? It’s happening. The animals are trying to flee a dying planet.
But they have nowhere to go, and so they’re just heading north and south. They are trying to escape as best they can.
What are they trying to escape?
Pandemics come from “zoonotic flow” — increased contact between animals and humans. On a rapidly heating planet, animals flee, and try to find what’s left of a temperate climate. They move towards, through, across, beyond, human zones of habitation, which are also shrinking. Zoonotic flow increases. And pandemics accelerate. This, too, is science.
Covid isn’t just a pandemic. It’s part of a trend. Pandemics caused by the same the thing the animals are trying to escape. A boiling planet. And that’s exactly, too, what’s causing the harvests to fail, making raw materials suddenly much, much harder to mine, source, distribute, manufacture, which is what’s causing inflation to spike.
Are you seeing the problem here yet?
All this stuff is connected. It isn’t some kind of eerie set of coincidences. The heatwaves. The infrastructure which can’t take it. The pandemics. The inflation. The cratering economies. The social contracts which aren’t able to provide anymore. The political bargains which suddenly don’t seem to work. The sudden feeling — like waking up in a horror movie, every day — that it’s all going off the rails. The way demagogues turn around and find scapegoats for these problems, and point the finger at them, so the problems never get solved. The way the center left shrugs and gives up, because, yes solving these problems does mean that humanity now has to act at a whole different level, a planetary one, a collective one, evolve a truly mature consciousness, or else. The way the masses, numbed, in despair, resigned to futility, believe nothing is possible anymore, and in rage and shock, turn to the demagogues, and seek out the scapegoats.
All this is part and parcel of the same underlying, deep, problem.
This is Extinction.
Take a look at our world. Really look at it. Put everything you know and believe to one side. And look at the world as it is. Not as you want it to be, as you think it should be. Just see the truth of what is now.
This is Extinction, my friends. We are living on borrowed time on a dying planet.
That doesn’t mean that you should go and slit your wrists. Quite the opposite. Don’t caricature my message like some vapid wannabe Ivy League pundit.
We have to do something about this, if we want some semblance of civilization to survive. Do something about it. And that means, quite frankly, anything. Any little thing counts right now. Every tiny thing matters intensely.
We’re at a place where even wearing a mask hasn’t become a social norm. That is how numb and fatalistic and inured to collapse we have become. My message isn’t that end is inevitable — that’s their message, really, the demagogues and the center left, both, who are united in one way: not lifting a finger to do anything real, positive, humane, immense, beautiful, noble, true. One side screams violently and scapegoats, and other sits there, sulking.
We all have to begin now. To grow beyond this. This way, this attitude, this thinking, this mentality. Now, we change or die. We mature, or we regress back towards some kind of fascist Handmaid’s Tale dystopia, like America is. The path we have to walk is unmade. It will be made only by walking. It’s up to us to be the ones who fight for something of civilization, humanity, life, to survive.
But we are not those people yet. Not enough of us, to enough of a degree. We sit in silence. Stew in it. We don’t speak out enough, hard enough, long enough, forcefully enough. We don’t demand from our leaders what they are unwilling to give. We don’t take our cultures by the lapels, and wake them up from their Marvel Movie stupor. We don’t insolently shake the lassitude and numbness from our societies and economies. But we must become those people. Whether by studying the past, or hearing the beating of our own hearts, or just listening to the way the great and timeless rhythm of life itself is convulsing in pain and shock now.
You want easy answers, I bet. There aren’t any. There’s just this one. It is up to us. Right now. This is the most crucial juncture in human history. Every tiny act matters intensely in that way. From deep history’s point of view, our plight is painfully simple.
If — and it’s a big if — there are enough of us, and we are brave and strong and wise and forceful enough, something of civilization, life, a future, will survive.
And if there aren’t, not much will. There will just be more of this…a little worse some days, a lot, others…right down into oblivion. That’s what the demagogues want, after all. The masses seduced by them have fallen under the spell of. Better to die than to fight. Better to die fighting each other than to fight for life, love, grace, a higher purpose, an ultimate truth. Easier to hate and lash out in violence than to face the most terrible, frightening truth of all about us walking apes. This is all we have, this planet, the life on it, one another, and love is all there ever was against the endlessness of death, time, and dust.
In that terrible knowing, comes the only truth there ever really was. In this endless battle of love against hate raging deep down in our terrified primate soul, shocked by just existing at all, mewling with fear and pain at the surety of death — in the end, love must win, for civilization to persevere. The scales must be balanced towards love. Or else. The lights go out. And everything comes undone.
That’s what too many of us are letting them have. We are not lovers yet. Not in that great and grand and beautiful sense of the word. We’re afraid of being those people, still. Lovers of life, one another, the world, civilization, truth, beauty, justice. We think that’s “cheesy” or whatnot. But is it? Isn’t that what they want? And so we sit here, silent, and let hate, violence, ignorance, and brutality win. But we are going to have to be. To be lovers. In the truest sense of the word. Senses we have yet to understand and explore. What does it mean to love an ocean, a tree, a planet, a species, an ecosystem — not just a “country” or a Trump or a Marvel Movie?
It’s always been love against hate. It will always be love against hate. And the proportions determine the fate of civilizations. Too much hate — bang, down you go. Too little love — sorry, enjoy your ruin. And that choice has never, ever been truer than right now, the most crucial juncture in all of human history. What do we love? Anything? Just demagogues? Hate itself? Power, violence, supremacy, domination? Or things which matter, which nourish and nurture us right back, too?
This is Extinction, my friends. But do we get it yet?
Umair
July 2022
"We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying": Umair Haque
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