Did You Hear About the Mars-Bound Raptor Engine
My colleague asked me, over tea and italian soda, at a local coffee shop: “What do you want to do about climate change?”
It’s a good question.
There’s nothing to be done about it, but at least doing something about it, like protesting or a lifestyle change, disarms the helplessness a bit.
We are helpless, you and I. There is nothing that you and I can do individually that will matter. You can sell your car and bike to work. You can disconnect the power to your house and install solar panels. You can eat only organic and locally-sourced food. You can grow your own food. You can do it all.
It still doesn’t matter.
Our species, homo sapiens, our entire civilization is built upon carbon. Even long before, when humans were still situated around campfires, that heat and light source based on carbon, released carbon, as did the whale oil we progressed to after that.
Carbon is tied to humanity like a double helix.
No exaggeration. We are a carbon-based life form.
And now there’s too much of it. Way too much of it. Hundreds of billions of tons too much of it. It covers our earth like a blanket, like a baby swaddled in wool.
In a moment of clarity and complete honesty, I replied to my colleague: “I want to crawl into a hole . . . until it’s all over.” That my response to any difficulty: disappear, only there’s no disappearing from climate change, and there is no waiting it out, unless you’re eternal, or undead.
It’s only going to get worse. These are the better days, the best days; right now. The days of the future will only be worse, and, get this, even if -- even if -- we somehow miraculously sucked all the human-produced carbon from the atmosphere in an instant . . . even if we did that, things still get worse.
We are experiencing the impacts of our carbon emissions from a decade ago, right now. Today is a result of yesterday’s emissions. 10 years from now, the globe will fully realize the warming effects of the carbon we release today. 2018 saw an increase in carbon emissions overall. 2019 is predicted to also be an increase overall.
And, we’re just talking about human sources of carbon.
If the earth takes over, through a mechanism called positive feedback loops (only these feedbacks are definitely not “positive,” in any imaginable way, for humanity at least). There is many times the amount of carbon that is in the atmosphere today, locked away in permafrost across the northern hemisphere. If this carbon is released, slowly over time, or quickly in a burst, it will not matter what humans do with their own carbon emissions, even if we zero them immediately and send the entire world back to the Stone Age; it will not matter. The earth will release its carbon and continue to warm the planet.
It’s happening. It’s been widely reported, even in the mass media. Check out the Vice news episode where the journalist starts the methane seeping from arctic ponds on fire. She singes her eyebrows in the process. Anything for a story, I guess.
The permafrost in Siberia is melting. Giant sinkholes dot the landscape, some of them a decade old. This is from melting permafrost. Methane is already being released.
It means we’re probably already screwed, even if we were able to engineer a way, or many different ways, to capture carbon from the air and sequester it somewhere underground -- we are talking about billions and billions of tons of carbon. Humans have never, ever completed a project on this scale. The mass mobilization of the West during WWII is nothing, absolutely peanuts, compared to the scale of what sucking all of this carbon out of the air would require.
Do NOT imagine that technology will save us. This is not Star Trek.
The only mediocre hope we have, and this “hope” is quite frail, and very dangerous, only slightly less dangerous than extinction itself, is geo-engineering. We will get here, out of desperation, maybe this decade, maybe the next. We could put trillions of tiny mirrors in space, to reflect incoming solar radiation, and thus manage the global average temperature. That’s the idea, at least, with geo-engineering.
The world is already dimmed by all the pollution, the particulate matter that humans are constantly pumping into the atmosphere. After 9/11, nearly all air traffic in this country was grounded. There was a noticeable uptick in the brightness in the sky, of the sun. This uptick did not need to be measured scientifically. A layman could see it. You may very well have seen it. No jets in the sky means no contrails.
It’s not just jets though -- it’s also particulate matter, like the smoke from coal-fired power plants. This particulate matter -- pollution -- swaddles the earth as well and provides a measurable cooling. We stop all carbon emissions today, or tomorrow, and that means, at least, a .5 degree increase in global average temperatures, from the loss of the dimming effect.
We are already doing geo-engineering, just not from space.
It’s here. It’s happening. The bad stuff is all around us, and we are not recognizing it. We are not connecting the dots. Come on, folks, half the Great Barrier Reef is already dead. It’s not coming back. The oceans have absorbed 90% of the additional heating the earth has experienced. The oceans are already in crisis, and not just because of plastic pollution.
Fish stocks are crashing. Whales are beaching themselves. There are no starfish left on the West coast of the United States.
California was on fire. It will be on fire again, after this latest freak storm rolls through with 10 feet of snow, causing power outages and mudslides. Or, maybe, another tornado in Michigan in December?
Sandy. Harvey. Irma. Maria.
Bats falling dead out of trees in Australia.
I can go on and on. Check out the evangelicals! They think it’s the End Times. Check-them-out! They do not say it’s climate change: they say it’s the Rapture. They are seeing something, seeing the same things as you and I, and nobody is talking about it.
We cannot keep living in this untruth. It is making us all sick, society sick, good people going bad, because it’s stressful -- damn stressful -- to feel this dread inside, to know in your bones that things around you are changing rapidly and that the environment, for which we all depend for our habitat, is under duress, and, this is the kicker -- nobody’s talking about it.
Nobody’s. Talking. About. It!
There is this enormous, galaxy-sized white elephant, perched upon every single person’s chest, and nobody is talking about it. They just continue to gasp for breath, and hope this enormous metaphorical pachyderm will get off their chest, but it doesn’t, because it can’t, and it won’t -- the elephant is here to stay because the elephant is climate change(d).
The climate is changed and bad things are happening, people are suffering and dying, all over the world, stressed and poor and do not know where they will live or where their next meal will come from, so they set out, in rickety boats across an unforgiving sea, and they know -- absolutely know -- the odds that they might perish are high. They know the stories, of all the boats that don’t make it, and all the bodies that wash up on the beach, yet, they still do it, they get into those boats, knowing it might be their last day, because they do NOT have another option. There is nowhere else to go.
This is climate change.
It’s not that way for you and I, not yet, but it’s coming, and look at how we are treating these people, suffering through no fault of their own.
Did you know, if you cut out the emissions of the top-20% of earners in the world, you cut half the world’s emissions. These people who set out in caravans, they did not cause the problem.
I did. You did.
I have travelled across the sea, more than once. I use my A/C. I use way more than the people who are in boats or caravans. They do not know that it was my emissions that killed their coffee plants and forced them to flee north.
What do we do?
We could choose to just burn the whole damn thing down -- the hothouse earth. We could do that. We might do that. Lots more people will suffer if we do that.
I don’t suggest we do that.
There is still a fight against carbon.
I do suggest some honesty. We may need some civil disobedience as well. Things are not normal. The climate is in duress. People are already suffering and dying. The climate is already out of control. We need to grow up and look at this demon in the face. As a species, we need to grow up and face the physics and facts.
Some people will always be blind, imprisoned by belief, not facts, and unimpressed with experience, the first-hand experience of a climate gone awry.
Don’t be one of them.
That’s all I can say. There is no hole to crawl into deep enough to escape this terrible thing. There is no escaping at all. There is denial, of course, even as you watch your fancy condo wash away, but there is no escaping.
It doesn’t end here.