Climate Letter #980

Where is everybody?  This is a philosophical type of essay, written by a retired astrophysicist, which puts the problems we are facing today into the broadest possible perspective.  In short, “Whitmire argues that if we are typical, it follows that species such as ours go extinct soon after attaining technological knowledge.”  I happen to have much the same way of looking at things, with a slightly different twist, which you can read about below the link.

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–My main point of difference is that the primary moving force behind our current dilemma is industrial civilization itself, which is the natural mother of technological knowledge and innovation.  It actually started when the first stone tools were made by human ancestors, who later added the control of fire.  (Maybe they are the right ones to blame?)  Then humans came along and the pace kept picking up, especially quite quickly after the Renaissance.  The 19th century brought on a perfect storm of development, with advanced machinery, fossil fuels, electricity, new materials, better health, education and so on, leading to all sorts of apparent benefits plus exceptionally rapid population growth.  It all happened much too fast, with an absence of proper controls and careless disregard of harmful side effects.  If we could go back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and start over again in a much more measured and careful way things might have stayed under better control, but that is not how humans operate.  The damage has been done, and we keep adding to the mess even after learning that cleaning it up from this level is exceedingly costly and difficult if not impossible.  We can still try to salvage something of value that life in the future, whatever it looks like, may be able to build upon.
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Here is someone else who has the same basic fears but looks at it with an eye that involves a mixture of politics and gender identity.  His main point is that everyone, including liberals, needs to wake up to what matters most in life and set the right order of priorities, of which saving the planet should be at the top of the agenda.  Well said.
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Not everyone is enjoying the benefits of the industrial revolution.  This feature story from National Geographic points out that three billion people are still cooking over open fires, enduring a lot of bad smoke in doing so.  “The typical cooking fire produces about 400 cigarettes’ worth of smoke an hour.”  Gathering and burning firewood actually makes a small contribution to climate change, but perhaps that can best be overlooked as a criticism in this context.
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Dozens of towns in Alaska are at risk from rising sea levels.  Federal assistance is badly lagging, but someone will have to step up and help these people relocate.  This post has two good photographs, one of which is absolutely amazing.  What are they doing there?
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Climate science:  A better understanding of “Earth’s natural thermostat” has been found.  It is well known that rock weathering is the leading natural process that removes CO2 from the atmosphere.  The discovery is that weathering slows down when temperatures are getting colder, making it easier for the gas to build up again from volcanic emissions or the like and restore warming.  When temperatures are very hot the reverse is true, largely assisted by expected increases in rainfall.
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A picture gallery of wildfires in southern Europe:
Carl

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