The daily, the hourly assaults. Remember back when Boss Chaos was threatening to invade Greenland? That was all of eight weeks ago. Now added to the barrage of corruption, callous cruelty, lawless authoritarianism, aggressively racist and sexist policies and actions, and all but unprecedented stupidity, destroying institutions and damaging institutional integrity for years to come, we're mired in profligate murder and international economic suicide.
While all along, the assault on the future of life as we know it on planet Earth accelerates.
The climate crisis as a focus of news and public attention has sunk almost out of sight. Partly (one assumes) at the behest of tech bros anxious to power their AI bubble by any means necessary, previous federal efforts to lower carbon, support green energy and even to control pollution have been officially halted. Climate denial has never been easier.
Despite extreme weather in increasingly long doses, somewhere in America, almost all the time. Right now for instance: a record high temperature for March of any year was registered recently in Arizona: 110 F. From the Pacific to the Rockies, heat waves registered temps some 30 F degrees above the previous normal. Some 140 cities were affected by the current heat dome, which scientists said would be "virtually impossible" except for climate distortion.
As a consequence, mountain snowpacks in places like Colorado and California are low and likely to disappear early, leading to summer drought, and adding to wildfires (already ongoing in Colorado.)
Meanwhile, Hawaii is experiencing record rainfall and the worst flooding in 20 years, with one place worried about a major dam failure.
But just about all of the United States has been hit with extreme cold or heat (and some areas of the Southeast getting doses of both within 24 hours), snow or rainfall of greater intensity and longer duration, during unaccustomed seasons, all year. And there are doubtlessly effects as bad or worse elsewhere in the world, of which we are wearily and systematically ignorant.
These are the markers of what climate scientists have been predicting, more and more precisely, over the past 35 years. They are symptoms of the sickness enveloping the planet. There's little point in rehashing all the research results announced over the past year--it's pretty much all bad. It's been clear for awhile that the world is going to crash past the carbon and temperature goals of the Paris Accords. Sea levels have risen and are rising higher than previously known, and ice near the poles is melting faster.
But the latest UN report came out this weekend, and it shows that greenhouse gases are now trapping so much heat on the planet that it's not cooling off as it has in the past. In other words, the greenhouse effect is in effect. Hothouse Earth is no longer a prediction. It's the planet's present, and its future for potentially thousands of years--except of course it's likely to get worse.
Climate distortion is no longer the elephant in the room. That elephant is the room.
Current US policies and actions are among those patently insane. Other insane policies, like the destruction of public health and FEMA, will sooner or later contribute to the rippling effects of climate distortion. But the failure is shared. It's not all the party with the elephant symbol, though mostly it is.
Democrats in power had opportunities to do much better. But no Democratic candidate--not Clinton or Gore or Kerry or Obama or Biden or Harris--made climate a central issue in their campaigns. No Democratic President--not Clinton or Obama or Biden--ever made an Oval Office address outlining the dimensions of the climate crisis, with a comprehensive program to address it.
Obama (with the Paris Accords and environmental policies) and certainly Biden with his massive support for clean energy in the Inflation Reduction Act, made substantive changes to address aspects of the climate crisis. But especially in Biden's case, it was done stealthily. Obviously the judgment was made that calling for all-hands-on-deck efforts was politically dangerous, if not suicidal and therefore impossible to achieve. They had to bet that the crisis could be successfully addressed incrementally. Some experts even agreed, for awhile, especially about green energy. No one knows the future, but to me it so far appears to be a lost gamble.
For the first time, humanity faced a comprehensive global challenge to current civilization and current forms of life. But also for the first time, humanity has the knowledge, the ideas, the potential and the power to meet that challenge. Or so it once seemed. If this is an evolutionary test, so far humanity is failing.
I've been reading about and writing about the climate crisis for 35 years. On this blog alone, I've written somewhere between 835 and a thousand posts on this subject and related subjects since 2005. But I haven't written a word about it since Boss Chaos took power. And it could be I won't write about it again.
Younger generations will have no choice but to deal with its consequences. Maybe some of them will find meaning and purpose in their lives in addressing the causes and effects of climate distortion, by concentrating on them in whatever field of endeavor best suits them. For them, hope won't be primarily an emotion. It won't be what they feel. Hope will be what they do. Hope will not be felt or expressed so much as enacted.
Most may well suffer the consequences of climate distortion without ever naming it, just as we almost never name it now. An environment, McLuhan used to say, is invisible to its inhabitants, as water is to fish. In a practical sense that's nonsense, but in terms of conceptualization, it's probably true. Right now it's somewhere between denial, fatalism and unconsciousness. Nevertheless, the elephant is the room.
