EDITOR’S NOTE: This post first appeared on Il Corvid’s Facebook profile. After reading it, I liked the blunt message it delivered so I asked if he wouldn’t mind having it published here as well. Il Corvid lives somewhere in California along the Pacific coastline…I believe.
You are not doubt wondering why I, as a criminal mastermind and Facebook’s resident super villain, should give a rat’s ass about climate change. Wouldn’t I be better off pretending it doesn’t exist, as so many other, lesser villains are doing, so that I can capitalize on the moment and rake in money at the expense of future generations? Shouldn’t I be fighting legislation trying to stem greenhouse gas emissions so that my third-world sweat shops and questionable chemical factories can continue to belch their noxious fumes unabated?
That crap is for amateurs. I have a far bigger design in mind for you all.
See, it’s like this: there still seems to be a bunch of you who think that the jury is still out on climate change. It’s not, of course, and hasn’t been for nearly two decades:
1) The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study last year(2010) from Stanford showing that 97-98% of all climate scientists are in total agreement that climate change is real, that it is man-made, that it is serious, and that there’s something we could be doing about it;
2) Nature Climate Change published an article last month showing the links between public policy and public support—no public support, no policy. They also note that “other research has shown that organized opponents of climate legislation have sought to undermine public support by instilling the belief that there is widespread disagreement among climate scientists about these points—a view shown to be widely held by the public.”
Now, that group of people who are still in denial about this are going to drag you all to hell. While you watch, helplessly. It’s not the denial that’s the real evil, it’s the fact that the other half of you know this is going on and will be unable to do anything about it. Now THAT is honest villainy, right there. The oil and coal companies, the chemical manufacturers, the industrial agricultural giants, the automobile and airplane manufacturers, if they were at the top of their game, they’d be saying “hell yeah climate change is real. And you’re gonna DIE!” whilst making obscene bank deposits from the products that we would all continue to buy from them because we are simply too weak and ill-disciplined to wean ourselves. Watching someone screw themselves, even while it is in their power to save themselves… it gives me little shivers of pleasure.
And what do I mean by hell?
In an article in Scientific American (2010) marine biologist Marah Hardt and ecologist Carl Safina summarized the situation in this way:
“Marine life has not experienced such a rapid shift in millions of years. And paleontology studies show that comparable changes in the past were linked to widespread loss of sea life. It appears that massive volcanic eruptions and methane releases around 250 million years ago may have as much as doubled atmospheric CO2, leading to the largest mass extinction ever. More than 90 percent of all marine species vanished. A completely different ocean persisted for four million to five million years, which contained relatively few species… Alarmingly, the pH drop observed so far and the predicted trajectory under current emissions trends are 100 times faster than any changes in prior millennia. Left unchecked, CO2 levels will create a very different ocean, one never experienced by modern species.”
Right. And you add that with this, published last month in Nature by researchers at the University of Florida and U of Alaska :
“We calculate that permafrost thaw will release the same order of magnitude of carbon as deforestation if current rates of deforestation continue. But because these emissions include significant quantities of methane, the overall effect on climate could be 2.5 times larger… Our collective estimate is that carbon will be released more quickly than models suggest, and at levels that are cause for serious concern.”
So it’s not just the greenhouse gases, it the kinds of greenhouses gases that are getting released that will really twist the knife. Hell, we’re dumping more crap into the air than our planet has seen in over 800,000 years. How bad ass is that? The last time the world saw this kind of greenhouse gas release, it killed damn near everything in the ocean.
Speaking of dead oceans, that reminds me—how ironic is it that the sea level rise is going to take out everything on the coasts?. Two studies from 2009, one from the Pacific Institute, the other from the California Natural Resource Agency, relate that the worst-case sea level rise scenarios are those in which global temperatures increase such that the Greenland, Antarctic, and Arctic ice masses melt. Should abrupt climate shifts occur that release the water held in these areas, a sea level rise of 7 to 14 m (23 to 40 ft.). There go your ports, your coastal cities, your coastal freeways. The Central Valley ag fields of California will be toast. Most of Florida will be underwater. Nice. That is systemic villainy at its finest.
Makes you wonder what’s going to happen to the rest of the ecosystem, eh. Certainly makes ME wonder, as I sip my sherry in my underground bunker, with my stockpiles of dry goods, barrels of ionized water, guns, and gold bullion.
The rest is going to burn, of course, as suggested by the California Natural Resource Agency:
Since the 1980s, the state has recognized apparent changes in the frequency, intensity, and duration of wildfire, especially in conifer-dominant ecosystems in the Sierra Nevada and chaparral ecosystems in coastal and interior southern California. Land-use, land management, and fire suppression policies, particularly in conifer forest and chaparral communities, are thought to have affected attributes of fire regimes throughout human history. In recent years, researchers have determined that changes in climate have had an important role in altering fire regimes. Current information suggested an extension of the fire season and increasing the number of large wildfires, as well as wildfire intensity. Particularly, higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt are thought to have contributed to these changes. Wildfire occurrence statewide could increase from 57 percent to 169 percent by 2085.
Yeah buddy.
Not that it’s really anyone’s fault, per se. We made the decision to go with gas cars instead of electric ones in the beginning of the 20th century. Hell, climate scientists are finding now that this all started shortly after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We had no idea what we were doing, frankly, and by the time our level of scientific sophistication was such that we could measure what was going on , it was too late. We were already screwed a century ago by a decision we didn’t even know we were making. Sweet, sweet irony.
And not that it would matter. We know what we’re doing now and we’re still not choosing to do the right thing. Despite the glaringly obvious, despite the overwhelming scientific data, despite the moral bankruptcy of not dealing with this immediately, we’re hoping that this will all go away, like a bad dream. Well, at least you are. I have property now that will be ocean front in a few decades. I’ll invite your grandkids over, they’ll live to see it. Perhaps they can work in my brutal, non-unionized factories.
And I suppose you shouldn’t feel too bad about this. Human civilizations routinely fail this test. They always collapse when faced with these challenges. The folks that survive are not the general populace, they’re the handful of individuals that, for whatever reason—special skill sets, solid local resource base that survives the climate shifts, whatever—that preadapted them to their new climate. In other words, they were ready for it, deliberately or not. We weren’t made stronger because of these events, we survived despite them—and only small pockets, not the civilizations themselves. And we should feel damn lucky, because a lot of species didn’t.
That’s the real beauty of this—the same habits and societal traits that got you into this mess will further doom you once you are in it. It’s like thrashing around in the quicksand.
So, keep it up, friends. The world’s not going to end—YOUR world is going to end, along with 40-70 % of the biosphere. What’s left is will keep going. And I will rule it.
Oh, and I’m taking applications for my factories now.
This is brilliant. What? Too early? Damn.