#darn! #damn! #SNAFU #FUBAR #deepdoodoo #deeperdoodoo
#bottomlessdoodoo

@ariadne @livingarchitect

Yeah, speaking as a non-climate-scientist with a basic science background, I don't think anyone who's read even James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren would find this a surprise. There has been continuous dissonance between what he wrote even that long ago and the things you see discussed today.

I've taken to disregarding anything that is an assurance that it will be "only" a certain amount bad, unless accompanied by a proof. I don't know why it's conservative to ignore things you can't prove. Conservative seems to me to be considering anything you can't disprove.

I also think we're underestimating the degree to which society can melt down if basic structures like food and supply chains break. The public is fearing that sea level rise will drown them or something first-order like that, and so they're reassured if that won't happen right away. But there are much more subtle effects that can have secondary and tertiary effects on society much more immediately: crop failures and famines, mass population displacement, closing of borders or trade, storms changing the price point for transportation in a world that thinks it's fine to centrally source key things from the other side of the world, and what I call "resource wars" (not to mention just garden variety social unrest).

I've also been referring to the interval we're in as "The Counting", by which I mean the era during which disasters are few enough we still bother to count them. As problems progress, others' problems won't be news because we'll all have problems. It will be harder to dig people out in that case. We'll stop counting.

The principal business of humanity will become disaster recovery, and the reason some plutocrats are not bothered by the lack of prep on this is that they're salivating over the money and power they imagine comes of being positioned to profit on this ... as if somehow the world economy would still exist in that case and there'd be anything to DO with that profit.

There are so many things about capitalism to blame here, but the single-minded focus on short-term profit and the idea that you can then cash out and carry no lingering responsibility are examples of why it is so destructive.

#society #climate #science #DeepDooDoo #capitalism