No post today. I’ve been working on a kinda lengthy piece about the US legal system, white supremacy, trauma, and summary punishment. It’s not really appropriate for a day of celebration, but more importantly I want to take the time to do it right, rather than half-assing something on such an important and serious subject.
So for now I’ll just say happy Juneteenth, and none of us is free until all of us are free.
There are moments in all of our lives, in which we realize that we missed our chance to do something important, and no matter what we do now, it will affect the rest of our lives. It might be a relationship that was neglected till it fell apart. It might be a health problem we ignored until it became an urgent threat to our lives. It might be an accident or illness that left us disabled. It might be a choice that ended a job, or a career path. As we grow older, it gets easier to look back and see those points where certain possible futures ceased to exist. Those aren’t moments to give up, but they are moments beyond which everything is different, at least a little, and we have to change to account for that.
One of the mainstays of the climate “debate” has been the question of predictions and deadlines. If you’ve been paying even a little attention to the issue, you have seen headlines like this one from 12 years ago, saying we only had 10 years left to take real action, if we wanted to avoid catastrophe.
“NASA scientist James Hansen, widely considered the doyen of American climate researchers, said governments must adopt an alternative scenario to keep carbon dioxide emission growth in check and limit the increase in global temperatures to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
“I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change … no longer than a decade, at the most,” Hansen said Wednesday at the Climate Change Research Conference in California’s state capital.
If the world continues with a “business as usual” scenario, Hansen said temperatures will rise by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 7.2 degrees F) and “we will be producing a different planet.”
We did take some action. There has been an increase in both energy efficiency, and the use of renewable energy since Hansen made that warning. Unfortunately, it was not enough.
I wrote a post in 2023 called “defeat by small victories” about the tendency to celebrate incremental gains in one area or another, for the sake of keeping up people’s spirits. I get the reasoning, but as we watch Republican fascists begin their next assault on democracy, and the AI bubble’s data center madness threatens to double energy consumption, I stand by my earlier gloom:
For me, the one that nags me the most isn’t one from my own life, but the time that’s been wasted on climate change. What would the world be like if governments had acted when scientists and corporations all knew what was going on, back in the late 1970s, early 1980s? I think it’s entirely possible that we couldn’t have “solved” the problem, but there’s no question that we had a chance for a drastically different future. If we’d been making the kind of steady, deliberate change that was being called for, the planet would be a cooler and less chaotic place, today.
We had a chance, and it was squandered before I was born. Worse than that, the same choice has been made every damned day since then, and so now big changes are all that’s left. Either we change our entire society in a major way, or it will be “changed” for us by the rapidly warming climate. The oceans are doing scary shit right now, and it seems like the powers that be are moving ahead with their plans to use violent repression to deal with the crisis they’ve created.
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I feel as though I’ve spent my entire life hearing about small victories in one area or another, and how each one will help us a whole lot, at some point in the future. They never seem to deliver on that promise. Some of those victories did pay off, by reducing emissions, but they’re hard to notice because they weren’t enough to stop overall emissions from continuing to rise. The majority seem to just be empty promises, or doomed half-measures like trying to offset CO2 emissions with forests, which definitely never catch fire or anything.
Reading that today, I feel pretty comfortable stating that the situation has gotten worse. I’m writing this post because I didn’t have a clear idea for anything better, so I went with my fall-back of browsing climate science headlines on Science Daily, and these were the stories that caught my eye:
Antarctica is melting from below and scientists say it’s worse than expected: Hidden warm-water traps beneath Antarctica’s ice shelves may be speeding up sea level rise far faster than expected
Arctic Ocean passed a tipping point and scientists say it may never recover: Scientists say the rapid disappearance of sea ice is triggering a hidden chemical shift that is stripping the ocean of nitrate — a nutrient essential for the tiny plankton that support Arctic life.
Alaska’s glaciers have a startling response to rising temperatures: Alaska’s glaciers are proving to be highly sensitive to warming temperatures.
Rising seas could drown mangroves and release vast stores of carbon: Rising seas may push mangroves from climate heroes to unexpected carbon emitters.
Ah yes. It was 12 years ago that Hansen said we had 10 years left to make a big change.
See, the problem with these deadlines is that bad-faith actors often present them as “the world will end in 10 years”, and when it doesn’t, they declare the prediction to be wrong. That was never the prediction. Look at that last headline – rising seas could drown mangrove swamps, causing them to move from capturing carbon, to releasing it as the ecosystem collapses and the plants rot. Well, what’s happening with the sea level?
Sea level rise is speeding up and scientists now know exactly why: Earth’s oceans are rising faster than ever, and scientists say the forces driving it are now impossible to ignore.
According to the new study, published in Science Advances, global sea levels have risen at an average rate of 2.06 millimeters per year since 1960. But the pace has increased dramatically in recent decades, reaching 3.94 millimeters per year between 2005 and 2023.
Researchers found that warming oceans are the largest contributor, responsible for 43% of the increase. As seawater heats up, it expands and occupies more space, pushing sea levels higher around the world.
Melting ice has also become an increasingly important factor. Mountain glaciers account for 27% of sea level rise since 1960, while the Greenland Ice Sheet contributes 15% and the Antarctic Ice Sheet adds another 12%. Changes in land water storage make up the remaining 3%.
The study also sheds light on why sea level rise has sped up over time. Since 1960, ocean warming and reduced land water storage played major roles. Since 1993, however, the rapid melting of glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica has become a much larger driver of the accelerating trend.
Scientists warn these patterns are likely to continue for decades.
So for the mangroves, it’s not a question of if they will be drowned, but of when they will be drowned. If we wanted to prevent the world’s mangrove swamps from becoming a carbon source and adding to the speed of the warming, we missed our chance. That’s gone now.
We had the opportunity to change course, and we missed it because there are numerous amplifying feedbacks, in which aspects of our planet respond to warming with more warming. The mangroves, the increase in forest fires, and the thawing permafrost are all examples of how the rise in temperature is causing the natural world to increase its own greenhouse gas emissions, which will keep going for as long as the temperature and/or sea levels are elevated. Likewise, as the world’s ice continues to melt, it leaves behind bare earth and open water, both of which absorb sunlight that the ice was reflecting back into space.
The horrifying, tragic truth is that we are on track to keep warming for centuries to come. That would probably be the case if we were to stop all emissions tomorrow, but obviously that’s not going to happen. We’re currently trending in the opposite direction. It might be possible to change course if we dedicate a huge portion of the global economy to growing, harvesting, and storing as much fast-growing plant matter as possible. That would mean all the resources we currently spend on things like war, and indulging billionaires, and overproduction, instead go to growing and harvesting stuff like Kudzu and fast-growing grasses, turning them into charcoal, and burying them.
If we do that starting pretty soon, it might be possible to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere fast enough to slow, or even reverse the warming. Maybe.
Forgive my pessimism, but I do not think we are going to do that. It is too late. As I’ve been saying for years now, we need to plan and invest for surviving on a much hotter planet than the one on which we evolved, and on which we built what we call civilization. The alternative is dying on that hotter planet.
And if we’re honest, the current fascist nightmare is a good demonstration of what we can expect that “dying on a hotter planet” will look like. As ecosystems shrink in on themselves and collapse, and artificial scarcity becomes true scarcity, humanity’s current default setting is to turn to authoritarianism. We don’t have enough to feed “our own”, so we must keep out any refugees, even if our policies made them flee their homes. We’ve already heard the plans from the far right: Landmines along borders, and sinking unapproved boats, and endless war to protect what we have from anyone else as the lives we lead grow smaller and dimmer, until humanity is snuffed out altogether.
That’s the future offered to us by the right. Not living, not even surviving, but ending ourselves for the sake of preserving the power of our rulers, and the systems that gave them their power.
Or, somehow, we can build a society that values life, and values living.
We can build cities that can function without anyone having to go outside in deadly summer heat. We can build modes of indoor food production, from greenhouses to algae farms. We can use the wonders of modern technology to benefit everyone, and to build a future that’s better than our present.
Right now we’re doing the opposite. Right now, for all the small victories I’ve seen celebrated throughout my life, we are headed for catastrophe because we missed the deadline. We tried incrementalism and it has lead to disaster. It is no longer possible, if it ever was, to avoid dramatic, systemic change. The longer we wait, the less control we will have over that change, because if we do not choose it, it will be forced upon us by the rising temperature.
This is, in a sense, a followup to the warning about the coming El Niño. If you haven’t already, you should start working on a food supply for emergencies, and you should start now. Further, you should look into how to do it properly, because it’s not hard to screw it up.
About 15 years ago, I helped form a “climate working group” intended to get Quakers in New England Yearly Meeting to take global warming more seriously. As a group, Quakers often pride themselves on their historical commitment to peace and justice, exemplified by their opposition to war, and their role in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. With that history, how could they not be doing more about this growing global crisis? So we focused on our region, and on having our community lead by example by using their resources as a mostly middle-class community to get themselves off of fossil fuels.
At the time, one of my contributions to our presentation was to encourage people to look into disaster prepping. The use of fossil fuels created a society with the capacity to be post-scarcity, or close to it, but in the process has set us on the path to a return to involuntary scarcity. As I’ve said many times, our entire civilization was built on a foundation of predictable weather patterns allowing reliable food production, and those patterns are breaking down. As the temperature rises, it has never been a question of if there will be food shortages, but when.
Well, the “when” seems to be sooner than I’d hoped. As I’ve said before, famine is often more a political issue of resource distribution and policy decisions, than it is an absolute scarcity of food. To that I want to add: those political considerations also affect the volume of food produced, which will be particularly relevant in the next couple years. We’re entering what is likely to be a severe El Niño, but while that’s often associated with worldwide crop failures, it’s not the only problem. The Republicans’ pointless war on Iran has not only caused a fuel shortage that has yet to reach its peak, it has also caused a fertilizer shortage, which is a serious problem for an agricultural system that depends heavily on imported inputs like fertilizer and pesticides to make things grow in over-worked soil and to mitigate the pest problem caused by monoculture. Throughout this northern-hemisphere growing season, farmers all over the world are trying to make do with far fewer resources than they normally have. Once again, America is “leading the free world” off a cliff.
I’ve been worried about my own situation, as our income is closely tied to the academic year, and we’re in the lean months now (sign up for my Patreon if you have the money and want to help me survive). That said, I think none of the world’s wealthy nations will suffer as much from this as will the US. Fascism is a death cult, and in their eagerness to punish powerless scapegoats for society’s problems, they have devastated the country’s population of migrant workers. Most of those who haven’t been rounded up by the GOP’s version of the SS are reluctant to go to work, lest they be put in a concentration camp, tortured, and possibly murdered.
So while the whole planet has to suffer because of the US slide into fascism, the US is facing problems that most of the rest of the world is not, because of that fascism. Of the crops that don’t fail, many will rot in the fields once again. I worry that this will be used as a chance to expand US use of slave labor, but even without that, hard times are coming.
Going back to my time as a Quaker climate activist, I don’t know whether anyone took my advice at the time (many seemed to think I was overreacting), but I maintain that it is something everyone should be doing, to whatever degree finances and time allow. I also advocate that people with the means account for their neighbors in said prepping.
Disaster prep gets a bad rap, I think, because it is primarily seen as the province of right-wing nutjobs who seem eager for civilization to collapse. The right-wing “prepper” mentality seems to be a power fantasy, in which the prepper will enjoy one of three scenarios. The first is that they will become the Lone Survivor archetype, in which their hoarded food and weaponry will allow them to survive in the wasteland, and fight off the savage raiders who will inevitably come for their supplies. The second is that they will become those raiders themselves, taking what they want from those with fewer weapons. The third is that either the food, or some other resource they’ve been hoarding will be their ticket to social power and acceptance. If I’m the only one around with a supply of iodine, everyone will owe me for protecting them from thyroid cancer in the irradiated aftermath of nuclear war.
I advocate for what I call “pro-social” prepping in which you are preparing to do what you can to care for your community in hard times, and intending to share what you have, rather than hoarding it, and/or using it as a source of power over others. I also maintain that I was right to start urging this all those years ago. It’s hard to predict when or how disaster will strike, and when it does, all you have is what you have.
If you have nothing stored up, then anything you get to fix that problem will be better than nothing. but as I’ve said before, having food stored for emergencies is not as simple as buying a bunch of rice and beans or MREs and forgetting about them until you need them. You can do that, of course, but it comes with risks. If you’re not regularly interacting with your food supply, how can you know if mice start getting at it, or if moisture got into your dried food to let it rot, or a bad batch of canned food is starting to swell? The only way to ensure you’re actually ready for hard times is to actively maintain that supply.
The best way to do that is to constantly use it. Make it a part of your normal diet, so that you’re always eating the oldest stuff, and replacing it with new. This also ensures that when hard times hit, you already know how to use the food you have, and you have what you need to prepare it. Hard times can be a little easier if the food is tasty, and I can say from (camping) experience that you don’t want to wait until all you have is canned food to discover that you don’t have a working can opener.
Five years ago, Tegan wrote an excellent post on how to build and maintain a pantry that goes into all of this, but I have a new factor to add in, and that’s food intolerance. I said earlier that anything is better than nothing, but that may not be true if the food you get is poisonous to you, specifically.
I’ve known I’m lactose intolerant for about a decade, but over just the last five years, I’ve lost the ability to safely eat a whole bunch of different foods. I had used garlic powder as a non-perishable source of flavor for most of my life, but now we have a decent-sized bag of it that I simply can’t eat. Canned baked beans are cheap and tasty around here, except that they’ve all got tomatoes in, and those cause problems for me. Likewise, we have a big jar of split peas that I can’t eat, another of red lentils that seem to cause problems. The scale of of the problem depends on the food in question. For lentils and wheat, the problems can be subtle, and less of a problem for a single meal. For garlic and peas, it’s severe intestinal pain, and other symptoms I’d rather not describe in detail. The list of foods I can’t eat is longer than that, but you get the idea. It’s also worth noting that if you are eating food that is damaging your digestive tract, there’s a good chance you’re getting less nutrition from the stuff you can digest.
It has taken me time to adjust my diet to remove most of my favorite foods, and learn to make tasty food from what I can eat. Thankfully, rice has yet to let me down, and beans do OK for me if I prepare them correctly, but hopefully you can see the issue. Tegan has been slowly eating through the pantry foods I can’t eat, and we can share them with neighbors if it comes to that, but what if I simply didn’t eat split peas in normal life? We’d hit a time of hardship, and discover that something in our pantry disagreed with me. Because few meals are made of just one ingredient, then we’d have to figure out what the problem was, and simply have less food available, at the worst possible time.
So my message is this: Hard times are coming for the world, and especially for the US. The best time to start stocking and maintaining your pantry was 15 years ago, but the second-best time is now.