This week, a paper came out that summarized the state of the literature on climate change, and boy howdy, shit’s bleak. Well, not bleak in any way that we didn’t already know, but bleak in its completion.
The paper posits a number of ways that the Earth could find itself in a Venusian spiral, using the term “feedback loop,” which certainly does sound better than “inescapable quicksand fuckpit of our own making.” There’s been some interesting pushback, poking at the portion of the paper that seems to downplay the relationship between emissions and warming once the feedback loop threshold has been passed, but the story is mostly playing to type.
It’s interesting, and terrifying–so, basically modern climate science. This story shook me out of my dog days stupor for a different reason, though; these conclusions aren’t necessarily new, their presentation is, perhaps. No, the science wasn’t the attractant this time, but the public reaction.
I wouldn’t typically comment on a scientific paper at all, but this particular paper got CNN writeups and briefly became the topic of the hour on Twitter early this week. All of the politics writers who only poke their heads into climate science when there’s a particularly big event or study were there, yelping and squealing with the rest of the climate neophyte public. And sure, I can criticize. But I won’t right now.
This, I think, is a demonstration of the increasing public awareness of the actual severity of climate change, sure. But I think it’s also the first rumblings of the social-scale depression period we’re about to experience as a species–a species collectively going through the 5 stages of mourning for the Earth we’ve (slowly) killed.
The dual ideas that 1) climate change is irreversible at this point and that 2) action at this point is a matter of mitigation, not cure, can often beggar answers, let alone action. The challenge for the Left (and, for some of us, in our own heads) is maintaining motivation to save the world in the face of the fact that the world we’re saving will be extremely shitty, even in the best case scenario.
(That said, there’s another take, one slightly more punishment-oriented, and the closer we get to environmental oblivion, the more I accept it. Maybe there’ll be a post. Maybe not.)