A World Without U.S.

"The great battle is between science and capitalism, and science has to win."

Kim Stanley Robinson

 

After the latest tragic Supreme Court decision chipping away at effective constitutional democracy, I've taken a step back from the daily drone of so-called news.  The logic of what is happening leads to doom in a variety of flavors.  So I go again to someone whose professional purview is the future, for a different perspective.

Since about 2002, I've been reading Kim Stanley Robinson's novels as they've been published (beginning with The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternative history that remains among my favorites), after and while catching up with his earlier work--notably the Mars Trilogy (Red, Green and Blue Mars) that made his famous, at least within the science fiction community; the "Three Californias" visions of different near futures, and the Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-2007) about the climate crisis future.

So when The Ministry for the Future was published in 2020, I read it in the context of his past work.  I admired it, of course, and saw its importance.  Then President Obama included it in his list of his favorite books of the year, and that seemed to accelerate its entry into a wider world of readers and influential people. It has since become something of a global phenomenon.

I've recently begun re-reading it, having acquired the first paperback edition (with the cover I love, featuring an old clock face with no hands) so I can mark it up as I read more carefully. 

I met Stan (as he prefers to be called) in 2013, when he gave a talk and then a bookstore reading here in Arcata.  He talks well and fluidly, and responded generously to my questions.  Probably about then I began checking out his video interviews and talks, mostly on YouTube.

So I continued to check out new videos, which multiplied rapidly after 2020, as he became an international figure based on Ministry. He was invited to several UN climate meetings, first as an observer and then as a participant, though not a voting representative.  He's been sought after as a speaker and interviewed by principals of a number of organizations (think tanks in the broadest sense), as more and more people dug deep into his book. So during the six or so years since first publication, The Ministry for the Future became his full time job: his ministry (and he's said recently that he had something like that meaning in mind when he chose the book's title: advocating for those in the future as something like a religious commitment.)

Through the resulting videos I kept up on his thinking.  At first he seemed dazzled by what he was learning, including that several of the ideas he proposed in the book were already being considered by scientists and major banks.  Especially after President Biden's economic response to the pandemic and his signature legislation that jump-started American clean energy technology industries,  he seemed to become more optimistic about the chances of effectively addressing climate distortion.  

Then the second coming of Chaos, and the systematic attempts to dismantle everything that might help address the causes and effects of the climate crisis.  Including, quite recently, the final dismantling of the National Science Foundation.   

His Science in the Capital trilogy of about 20 years ago was about addressing the climate crisis, and the then- new danger of abrupt climate change. (He more recently edited these three into a single novel called Green Earth.  However my affection for the original trilogy remains unaffected.)  Notably, the protagonists include an American President and scientists centered at the National Science Foundation.

Like the more exaggerated feature film, The Day After Tomorrow, a concern in these books was disruption of the Atlantic current, which would severely alter climate in the Americas, Africa and Europe, and not for the good. Shortly after that in the real world, scientists began downplaying the possibility--until last month, when two studies suggested that the current's collapse is more likely than recently believed.

One of the books in his capital trilogy describes a climate-derived disaster, a storm that floods Washington and other places on the U.S. East Coast.  He named the storm Sandy--years before the hurricane of that same name ravaged the East Coast, including flooding New York City, as well as killing 254 people in eight countries. 

I asked him about this when he was in Arcata--did he think it would take an even bigger climate-related disaster to motivate and focus climate crisis efforts?  His answer seemed uncharacteristically vague to me.  But in his 2020 return to the theme, he begins Ministry with an horrific catastrophe, a heat wave so intense that millions of people in India die.  And that's when things start to happen.

But probably the major difference in the leadership that responds to climate distortion in this novel is that the Ministry is an international organization under the UN Paris Agreement, and the leading countries in the ensuing efforts are India, China and the European Union. Robinson wrote this novel at the ragged end of the first Chaos term, and so this time the United States is almost irrelevant, a weaker and hopelessly chaotic country, basically held in quiet contempt (except for California.) 

And so it is coming to pass for the United States.  In a recent interview, Robinson is scathing about the effects of the second Chaos terms so far, which he characterizes with the scientific term "stupid."  

He notes what is undisputed: Europe by and large is healthier than the U.S., with lower infant mortality and early death, while healthcare is cheaper.  Adequacy of income is more widespread, and people are happier. He cites a poll that suggests people seem even to be happier with their government in China than in the U.S.  He notes that these societies are much more science-based.  And they are moving more deliberately towards a green future.

So-called plug-in solar is widespread in Europe and elsewhere, though largely unknown in the U.S. due in part to heavy lobbying by recalcitrant power companies.  Cheap, portable and efficient (and most often made in China), it is rapidly changing these societies.  Robinson has been told that the collapse of the power grid that took out the air conditioning and allowed millions to be baked alive in extreme heat-and-humidity in his Ministry novel, is now much less likely in India because of widespread cheap solar.  

Things are hardly perfect in these countries, and fossil fuel pollution is still rampant, not reducing greenhouse gases fast enough.  But what Robinson calls the utopian vision of avoiding a mass extinction event, or even the collapse of human civilization, now has its centers of hope elsewhere, in societies that embrace a social ethic and especially science.

Science is hardly blameless or infallible, and scientists prone to arrogance and cupidity and denial of consequences of their researches have much to answer for.  But at its best science deals with reality, and ideally does not lie about it.  

"Sanity will prevail," Robinson said in a recent interview.  "Reality is reality because it bites.  It doesn't go away when you pretend [otherwise.]" Or on another occasion: "What can't go on, won't go on."

It's not pretty to watch the self-destruction of America as it has been developing since its inception, and as it became a haven and an example to the world.  It will take longer to reverse the destruction and rebuild than to destroy, especially when Supreme Court decisions collapse foundations while the Executive weakens and destroys institutions and the hapless Legislature paws the ground. 

 It's not good news for those who expect a future in this country.  Already, and for the first time in nearly a century, the U.S. is experiencing more out-migration than immigration (and U.S. birth rates are well below replacement level.)  People aren't even visiting--why would they? When they might wind up shackled on the floor of a bus on the way to an ICE concentration camp.

The implication of The Ministry for the Future is that while huge problems exist and will grow, the societies built on sanity will lead in addressing them. (Though the novel also posits a fair amount of violence.)

 Other nations in the real world, disgusted and no longer dazzled by the superpower United States, are already beginning this process on many fronts, including climate. In April, representatives of sixty nations met to strategize on reducing fossil fuel consumption and emissions feeding climate distortion.  For possibly the first time in international climate crisis meetings, the U.S. was not invited. 

This meeting was organized in frustration with the regular United Nations process, which these nations (meeting in Columbia) felt weren't getting the job done, at least not fast enough.  But while the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were singled out as unwanted obstructionists, other nations not invited included India, China and Russia.  It's very unlikely global climate disruption responses can be effective without China and India.  But without the U.S.?  Maybe that's the future. 

The Elephant Is The Room

 

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.  Quite recently for instance: a record high temperature for March of any year in any place in the US was registered in Arizona: 110 F.  From the Pacific to the Rockies, the recent mid-March heat wave registered temps some 30 F degrees above the previous normal.  Some 140 cities were affected by that 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, for just the past 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.  As goals haven't been met and promises not kept, it's been clear for awhile that the world is going to crash past the global temperature red line of the Paris Accords. (And that's even before the obscene bombing and warfare in the Middle East is reportedly spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than 84 countries combined.) Among the predicted effects, 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 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 most importantly an emotion.  It won't be what they feel.  Hope will be what they do. Real 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 some mix of denial, fatalism and unconsciousness.  Nevertheless, the elephant is the room.

Year of Dread?

 The most obvious cause for dread is the 2024 election campaign and the elections themselves.  As 2023 ended, the polls showed President Biden with low approval ratings, and several polls showed Trump ahead in preference for November's voting.  But politically, November is a long time in the future.  Nobody really knows what polls measure these days, except whatever it is they measure is in the present, not that future.  A lot will happen between now and then--and I suppose that's as much reason for dread as the possible outcome.

I've called him Homegrown Hitler on this blog since 2016, and so I am not surprised that Trump has become so obvious about it that even major media has noticed.  His election would be a defining tragedy for this country, as it is likely to complete the destruction of constitutional government he and his cronies and minions have begun. I don't think he will be elected, but the institutions of government and law, as well as the Constitution itself  have already been seriously weakened, perhaps fatally in the long run, with the pressure that the future is highly likely to bring.  

Regardless of the election outcome, it's all but assured that the coming year of news will relentlessly and copiously be about Trump. Even worse that last year.  The media can't shake its addiction to him (even the progressive British paper the Guardian features his photo on every online front page, sometimes several of them), since he is for many the ultimate in clickbait.  President Biden has so far signaled that he will make Trump and his threat to democracy the primary issue of his campaign, which may only be acknowledging reality. (But my few readers be forewarned: you'll need to get your Trump fix elsewhere this year.)  

There's almost inevitably going to be a lot of related drama this year: trials for 91 felonies, Supreme Court decisions, the campaign, the election, probably extending into 2025.  Just dreading the drama has to head the list.  

For me, another cause for public dread in 2024 is that, partly because Trump is likely to be the major campaign issue, once again this year we are no going to get the clear, forthright and vocal leadership on the climate crisis that we need.

If you got past the war news, the front page lifestyle features and celebrity controversies, you may have noticed that 2023 was officially the hottest year in history, and not this time by a little.  By a lot.  Human civilization is perhaps ten or twelve thousand years old, but the Earth's temperature hasn't been this high in 100,000 years, at least.  The jump far exceeded predictions and scientists' expectations.

For the past decade, the clarion cry for climate action has been fixed on keeping the world's temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Centigrade on average.  2023 hit 1.48 and some scientists believe it is likely that sometime in 2024 or shortly afterwards, it will be official that the 1.5C has been breached as the average.  This is the number that the nations of the world said in the Paris Agreement of 2015 that they wanted to avoid.  "Above that threshold," said a CNN report, "many of Earth's ecosystems will struggle to adapt and summertime heat will approach the limits of human survivability is some places."  That's the minimal impact.  If it pushes the planet past various tipping points, it will be much worse, especially in the long term.  

There was positive news during the year on addressing climate distortion, and the Guardian (the most reliable daily news source for climate issues) published dueling year-end evaluations: "World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientist says" vs. "I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis.  I was wrong."

The title of that second one is disingenuous--nobody expected most "of us", i.e. people now alive to die from the climate crisis. Just when in the future that might be a real possibility depends on a lot of other things as well.  It's an annoying simplistic way to talk about the real concerns. (On the other hand, some thousands of people will likely die of effects of climate distortion effects this very year.)

 The author of this piece and the book it comes from, Hannah Ritchie, bases her optimism chiefly on statistics about the growth and prospects of renewable energy, especially as it becomes cheaper than coal and oil. She pushes these conclusions to the point where she accuses anyone with doomsday warnings as aiding climate crisis denialists.  

The title of the first one, on the other hand, fails to mention that the scientist in question is not just any scientist--it is James Hansen, formerly of NASA, the scientist who brought the news of the climate crisis to Congress and the world--in 1988.  

While I don't dispute the numbers that Ritchie and some other climate writers use and apply to temperature rises (she believes the rise could be stopped at 2C or a fraction more) due to the phenomenal growth of renewables, the climate crisis is not just about balance sheets, it doesn't just go by the numbers.

The dangers of the climate crisis to the natural world and to civilization, even in the rest of this century, are not about absolute numbers.  They are also about what the effects of climate distortion in the real world can do to push at vulnerable situations, and make already dangerous matters catastrophically worse.  That includes exacerbating threats to the natural world on which we depend, from species extinction to the now fragile life of the oceans.  But it also includes threats to vulnerable institutions and to the now fragile global civilization, and these may well become more dangerous sooner than later.

Some of the direct effects of climate distortion are evident now--we don't even have to wait for the spring and summer fires and heatwaves of 2024--we're about to see climate distortion-fed and energized storms and coldwaves in much of America, with attendant direct and indirect damage, including flooding.  We're seeing coastal flooding on the increase as well.  Meanwhile, a quarter of the world's population is living in drought, and huge parts of the world are drying up to a lethal extent.

These begin cascades of consequences.  Even in America there are mounting costs of addressing multiple disasters, with communities slow to recover.  The danger of disease and epidemics increases.  Worldwide, we are especially seeing probably the most proximate cause of danger for the rest of this century: large scale migration; that is, large numbers of refugees.  Sometimes it is caused directly by climate effects, sometimes by warfare and political turmoil that is in part caused by climate effects.  

But we don't talk about migration that way.  We don't see it that way.  Many take no thought as to the reasons, and have no empathy for the refugees--something we haven't seen for awhile in the global north, but with dangerous potential for the stability of governments and public institutions.  This is one obvious problem related to climate that increases the dangers of violence and warfare, including the eventual use of nuclear weapons.  (Speaking of dread, I worry the dread of nuclear bombs has weakened, and their use against people is likely to happen again.)

Refugees and the reaction to them is only one issue that needs to be addressed in the context of the climate crisis.  The world dearly needs the leadership to spell it out clearly: to talk about causes and effects, and to outline action to address each.  But there is no such leader, even on the horizon.  There really isn't one I see in the US.  The only possibility I know of is Vice-President Kamala Harris, who seems to have some grasp of the problems, and who I once heard speak in terms of the causes and effects of the climate crisis--which is possibly the only terms that can organize the information in a form people at large can immediately grasp.

Here are the causes, here is what we need to do, and here is what we're doing about them.  Here are effects, here is what we need to do, and here is what are doing about them.  There is a plan, and I will keep updating you on our progress.  This is what we need, and what--in 2024--we are once again unlikely to get.

While Republicans continue their delusional and self-serving rants, Democratic politicians are afraid to name the crisis and its components.  Everything is obscured, disorganized, coded.  Electric cars alone aren't going to do it.  Saying that the climate crisis is about jobs is not enough.  It's just more hiding from really confronting the crisis and its dimensions.

The United Nations had another climate meeting in 2023, another COP.  This year's much lauded outcome was to declare that the age of fossil fuels is over, we're going to end them.  Excuse me if I see this as akin to an alcoholic declaring an end to drinking, and celebrating that with another round.  Meanwhile the US is pumping more oil than any nation in the world, and any nation in history.

Most of the COPs beginning with the Paris Agreement have been about promises.  They set goals for reducing carbon output.  They never meet them.  They set up a fund for rich nations to help the poor nations most affected, especially by rising tides.  They failed to put any money in it, and then they contributed too little.  It's been mostly about promises. Similarly, there are lots of ideas for technologies and things to do; some of the oldest have been known for years but still nothing is done. And others will require decades more of refinement, when it will likely be too late to apply them effectively.  Yes, people and nations are trying, and showing some progress.  But not enough to keep the promises from becoming lies we tell ourselves.

Until we dread the lies more than the work that needs to be done, every year will be a year of dread.  That's all I've got to say.  Captain Future, over and out.

Zombie Summer

The 1950s atomic monster movies expressed widespread anxieties about nuclear apocalypse that were otherwise suppressed by a combination of societal (and especially political) pressures, and psychological denial.  So what are the buried fears that the persistently ongoing fashion for zombie stories might express?  

 I wrote about this in 2017 in terms of super rich individuals and corporations (bloodsucking vampire capitalists) versus the mass of everyone else—the economically and therefore societally vulnerable and insecure, sometimes called the precariat (the zombies.)  The metaphor and the relationships work when considering the origin of the zombie figure in Haiti, with tales of plantation owners using magic to resurrect the newly dead and use them as slaves. Early Hollywood movies adapted this premise.

 Today’s zombies are said to have their direct origin in George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, which itself has spawned a series of films, apparently still ongoing.  Though in that first movie the “living dead” are not called zombies, this has become the contemporary definition for other films and television shows. 

The socioeconomic interpretation still works, and the Romero films found other applicable metaphors, like zombie consumers in a shopping mall. But maybe there’s another newly relevant metaphor as well.

  In the 50s and early 60s, psychologist (including those employed by the government to study the situation) were surprised by the apparent lack of societal reaction to the spectre of possibly world-destroying nuclear weapons.  Some of the first suggestions of fears were embodied in the seemingly innocuous atomic monster movies. 

 The same might be said of the muted response to the possibly world-destroying effects of climate distortion. While political denial clearly benefits fossil fuel megacorporations and the politicians they own, it might also be a convenient cover for the personal, psychological denial we all must engage in, at least from time to time, in order to stay sane.  But persistent, extreme and even organized denial may have particular toxicity. 

 There is a sense that denial itself can turn people into zombies, both of the Haitian kind (slaves to wealthy economic interests) and of the Romero kind: people who are in a sense already dead but still walking, still struggling to survive. 

  Now the weeks and months of intense heat experienced by so many this summer suggests a more physical resonance, an embodiment of climate distortion effects. Specifically, the zombie figure suggests the effects of relentless extreme heat on human beings.  For relentless heat dulls the brain, saps vitality and will, until people begin to feel and even look like the living dead.

 It could be that these physical effects of extreme heat have escaped the consciousness of recent generations, with the omnipresence of air conditioning.  Prior generations understood it—it’s present as another character in several Tennessee Williams plays, as well as the courtrooms of To Kill A Mockingbird and Inherit the Wind.  I suppose my generation was the last in the US to grow up without air conditioning in every business and public building and every automobile, as well as most homes. Except of course in poorer places, where the past lived on. 

 But even if the medical community is somewhat baffled about the effects of atmospheric heat on the human body, somewhere in the unconscious that knowledge is visceral.  Too much of it for too long and you not only feel like a zombie, you begin thinking and acting like one.

 This zombie summer is unlikely to be the last, and so our fears for that future might be expressed in these figures of ghoulish entertainment.  

Climate Distortion

Update: Nine days after this post, about 175 million people (or close to the total US population in 1960)  in every region of the United States were under heat advisories with many experiencing high heat indexes, and the temperature of the ocean off Florida was 100F.  After forty days of excessive heat, the southwest was anticipating moderating temperatures but higher humidity as monsoon rains were forecast for early August. The world is boiling, said the UN Secretary-General.

The current heatwave in the US south and southwest (as well as northern Mexico) is expanding.  The National Weather Service predicts that this weekend about 80 million people will experience temperatures or heat indexes above 105F.  And the heat is likely to continue into next week.

When you add up everyone in the world dealing with excessive heat for weeks at a time, and then factor in those dealing with torrential rain and flood, firestorms and smoke, and all the associated problems, that number must be in the hundreds of millions if not billions.

This is the summer that climate distortion comes home.  The heat is no longer a temporary inconvenience, nor are the floods and fires.  They are much harder to ignore, and for many they are fatal to ignore. Their reality changes everyone's daily reality: how they think, plan, act and feel.  It should be motivation for institutions to make more than temporary fixes.  Gaps in public services become more apparent and must be addressed.  Even when the weather changes.

Climate distortion--though not necessarily this summer's weather--is here to stay, for a very long time.  It seems important to me to understand what's happening.  Some people call it climate change (a name invented by a Republican consultant so it wouldn't sound so "negative").  But the climate hasn't changed.  It has been distorted.  From a different point of view, some call it climate derangement.  It's colorful, but it isn't any more accurate.  The climate has not changed nor has it gone insane.  The climate is doing what it has always done in these geophysical circumstances.  But something is distorting the climate--usually making it more extreme and violent.  Something is interacting with ordinary climate phenomena, like El Nino and various other cycles.  That something is excessive CO2 and other identified gases spewn into the atmosphere by industrial age human societies, and the global heating they have caused.  

The effects of these distortions can be predicted in a general way, but not in a weather forecasting kind of way.  More days of higher temperatures in the summer, for instance, has been widely predicted for decades as an effect of global heating caused by greenhouse gases.  But distortions are inherently volatile.  Nobody knows how they will manifest in a given year.  A distorted climate is full of shocks and surprises.  There may be baseline changes within all this, but those probably won't be known until some time has passed.  But because of time lag effects, a distorted climate is here to stay.

The distortions in turn can distort various major ocean currents and atmospheric currents that play a huge role in determining weather patterns.   Then we're in the area of feedbacks and tipping points.  That's climate distortion.  They can eventually alter key features of the planetscape that affect climate, like polar ice.  They can affect life directly as well as indirectly, with cascading consequences.

Some people won't care much why this is happening, but they may face the fact that it is happening. Maybe some other people will finally listen to the basic findings of climate science.  I am not one of those who make a  rigid slogan out of "trust the science."  First of all, there is no such thing as "the science." Scientists, for any number of reasons on a scale from benign to corrupt, sometimes sell conclusions derived from bad science.  Science is not pure.  Human knowledge is much weaker than we like to pretend it is, and that's really true of western science.  You usually have to use your judgment in which "science" to believe.  

But climate science--which is really a name for those studying chemistry, biology, physics and various more complex hybrids of inquiry applied to climate--has come at its conclusions in a variety of ways, from measuring aspects of today's world to measuring aspects of the deep past, to modeling various possibilities.  Some requires sophisticated computation; but some is based on quite elementary physics and chemistry.  All of this should be clear to anyone who has read or seen An Inconvenient Truth since 2006, and there are more sciences involved now. 

For decades now, thousands of scientists of various kinds from every nation on the planet have come together to share their findings and put together a consensus in UN climate reports.  No subject has been studied more thoroughly by more people over a longer time in a cooperative way, and come to the same conclusions.  In comparison, your doctor's diagnosis is the equivalent of a coin toss.  

There are a number of practical lessons to be derived from this, including that the resistance to climate crisis conclusions is largely in the murky realm of the psychological (though it is excused and made easier and therefore more cynical and corrupt by politics.)  That should tell us that in order to address climate distortion, its effects and its causes, means exploring our inner distortions--fears, needs, desires as well as such unconscious drivers as denial and projection.  It means exploring the inner distortions related to social media, algorithms, group dynamics and so on.

Finally it means finding again the core of our beliefs in ourselves, what we're all about, our operating principles, our deep commitments and ideals, all of which may have been distorted by the rush of complexities around us.  It's not going to be easy, navigating the increasing number of hotheads around us (is it coincidence that mass shootings have gone up recently along with the temperature?) but in the end society and the individuals within societies will rise and fall on whether "you'd do the same for me" remains a transcendent impulse of what used to be called decency. 

Heat is Global

 Updates 7/18: The high temperature in Phoenix equaled or exceeded 110 degrees F for the 19th straight day, and for the eighth consecutive night did not dip below 90. On Monday, a huge dust storm blew over the city.  Death Valley CA reached 128F daytime and 120 between midnight and 1 a.m. on July 17. These are air temperatures--it was estimated that the sidewalks were 200F.  Parts of Nevada struggled to go below 100F at night.  Parts of Texas continue to be gripped by a heatwave that is challenging power reserves for air conditioning.  

But the most dangerous place on Earth seemed to be Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, where the heat index reached 152F.  Iran is suffering from water shortages as well.  All of these are getting close to fatal combinations of heat and humidity, called wet bulb temperatures. Even in Europe, where parts of Spain topped out at nearly 115F, and Italy at 113.  The hot temperatures in Greece are accompanied by fires raging around Athens.  Triple digit heat continued in China and Japan.  One town in China recorded a Death Valley-like 126F.  

Meanwhile the smoke from Canadian fires is again pouring down over Chicago, New York and other US locations.  Intense rain in eastern PA caused a sudden flash flood--4 feet of water suddenly washed over cars on a rural road.  Only two members of one family survived.  

So for the first time I can recall, heat has been consistently in the headlines for days at a time, linked to climate disruption caused by greenhouse gases. 

On July 3, Earth as a planet had the highest temperature ever recorded.  Scientists estimate that the world was hotter than it has been for something like 125,000 years.  That's about 90,000 years before the first known human cave paintings.

  The next day, July 4, it was hotter.  Two days later, hotter still. 

The temperature rise was worst in the worst places for future prospects, like the oceans and the Antarctic, but there are days and weeks already this summer of record-breaking heat in China, India, and Africa where drought persists and spreads, and far northern Canada, where forests continue to burn, week after week.  Texas is still in the midst of a crippling heat wave, while its governor signed legislation prohibiting local governments from giving outdoor workers a fifteen-minute water break.

 Parts of Arizona were also breaking heat records, and more heat is forecast for much of the Southwest and interior California this week and perhaps for longer. Meanwhile, sudden and intense rain storms—other manifestations of climate distortion-- flooded parts of the northeastern US and southern California.  This was after dense smoke from Canadian fires choked areas of the northeast and Midwest—smoke that is very likely to return.

  This is all happening even before the Pacific ocean phenomenon known as El Nino was predicted to start bumping up temperatures; scientists forecast it would be doing that six months from now.  Global heating, augmented by other atmospheric and ocean factors, is likely to make this the hottest year on Earth.  Until maybe next year.

The phenomenon of global heating is a condition of the atmosphere that surrounds every inch of the Earth's surface. Its basically distorts the climate systems that have harbored life as we know it for, say, 125,000 years.  Hotter weather is one of its manifestations, at different places and times.  But where heat and its other expressions occur, their effects are global: everything is affected.  

 Here’s the basic fact to consider about these current manifestations of climate distortion-- the fiery winds, the relentless floodwaters, the smothering smoke, the rising tides, collapsing land, deathly drought, titanic storms, and the implacable blankets of heat: they don’t notice if your house is worth fifty thousand dollars or five million. They don’t care about your stock portfolio or your credit score. They don't read your bumper stickers or yard signs. They don’t take into account your race, political party or religious affiliation.

 You can’t threaten heat with your AK-47, and you can’t shoot it dead.  You’ll sicken even quicker in your body armor.  You can't stop it with a gene-splice or an AI program.  There isn't an ap or a hack that makes it go away.  Congressional hearings just add more hot air.

  Heat doesn’t care if you live off the grid or in a metropolitan tower.  It doesn’t care where you get your news, or whether your smartphone is the latest.  It doesn’t know if you are a banker or an influencer, a feminist or a Proud Boy, or if you hate liberals or hate baby boomers.  It doesn’t care what your pronouns are.  It doesn’t notice how many likes you’ve collected. 

 It doesn’t care that you resent the rich or fear the poor.  When the tarmac melts at the airport, neither the airbuses nor the private jets can take off.  When the asphalt sinks, the Mercedes and the Volt alike can’t get very far. When the grid goes down from too much demand, and there’s no more fuel for the home generators, not much about you matters except where you are and who will help you.

 It took an entire year to gather and interpret the data, but it turns out that last summer in Europe—the hottest in its history so far—more than 61,000 people were killed by the heat.  Some died from heatstroke, but in more cases, heat killed people with serious conditions that otherwise would have lived.

 How many strokes and heart attacks are caused by the inability to breathe caused by intense heat? How many accidents are caused by overheated brains?  How many more diseases carried by insects that thrive on heat are spreading? How many infections and chronic conditions are related?  These things may not get counted quickly or at all, or widely reported (especially if they involve so-called migrants, the poor generally, the old) or even noticed, but that doesn't mean they aren't happening. 

 The current and upcoming heat wave in the southwestern US is at least happening at a time of the year when the air is dry.  If it recurs later in the summer, with higher humidity, it could conceivably reach the most dangerous condition in which (if the AC goes) thousands and even millions could die in a few days. Poorer places in Asia are even more vulnerable to this outcome, but parts of Texas and the Midwest are likely to see both triple digit temperatures and high humidity in the coming days, and the  Southeast is always prone to that potentially lethal combination.  The Pacific Northwest may be in for its second once-in-a-thousand-years heat dome of this year.

Heat affects the body and the mind, mood and emotions, and the ability to think clearly. The heat debilitates, and it can kill you even if you don’t believe in it, and all your cyberspace friends agree. It doesn’t weaken if it polls badly.  You can’t shout it down or argue it away.  

 Of course, it doesn’t hit everyone equally—not at first.  But the effects spread and cascade, so eventually it doesn’t matter if you are a billionaire or homeless, a buffed-up model or a helpless elder. It still happens.  Even if it isn't hot now where you are, you will still feel its effects eventually.

 The heat beats down on the animals crowded into mechanical meat factories, and in the fields and forests.  It bakes the soil and kills the roots of once-future food. It boils the water and the fish in it. It scalds the oceans and the tiny organisms that provide us with most of our oxygen. It kills the bees that keep plants growing, the insects that feed the birds (though it’s relatively kind to mosquitoes) and on up the chain.  Heat doesn’t care if you’re a vegan or a vegetable.  It just is.

 There's a lot that can be done to address the effects of climate distortion, and to address its causes so it doesn't get hopelessly worse in the far future. It’s a complex crisis but with a fundamental choice.  Either society works together for all, so that chances increase that many survive, with life on the planet relatively intact and the future is better, or it ultimately becomes every being for itself, with misery and violence for most, when at best only few survive, in conditions no one wants to contemplate. 

 Not everybody has to buy in, but the appropriate institutions on every level must be strong and courageous, and focused.  As time goes on it will take many more capable and dedicated people to do this work. This is a planetary emergency that is also many national and local emergencies.  All other distinctions among citizens ultimately become fatal distractions.  Until there is nothing but confusion, anger, desperation and then just dull heat in anyone's head.    

Captain Future, Captain Past

 The irony hasn’t escaped me: under the ancient marquee of Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily, in recent years I have been writing primarily about the past. 

 In particular this was brought home to me by an email I received from Jay Matson, poet, entrepreneur and a student several years ahead of me at Knox College.  He signed it Captain Past.  It seemed a more accurate moniker for what I was writing, as well as for the subjects of his recent poems.

 Sometime around 2005 I adopted Captain Future as a screen name for my posts on Daily Kos and a few other similar sites, as well as in other contexts.  I also began this blog around then. The purpose I had in mind for it was to highlight positive ideas and information for a better future—hence, dreaming up daily.  Even when I got sucked into the morass of contemporary politics, the perspective was to see things as they affected the future.  But I did get sucked in, railing against Bush, the Iraq war, torture, etc., then advocacy for Obama, then immediately unmasking Homemade Hitler in 2016. 

 Those posts, heartfelt and certainly justified, are the fodder of history, and as writing are painfully ephemeral.  I did focus at appropriate times on major threats to the future, such as nuclear weapons and especially, primarily, the climate crisis. Occasionally I highlighted positive steps towards a better future, and certainly tried to articulate principles necessary for pursuing it. Some of these posts remain very relevant. 

 But I also continued to respond to the latest news, to people and events that quickly faded.  And I did that, helplessly and stubbornly, for more than15 years, from the time that blogging was all the rage through the time that “nobody blogs anymore.”

 At the same time, I was exploring aspects of the past, especially my own, in writing that mostly didn’t make it out of the computer.  When I retired and turned attention towards writing projects on past and future, I discovered that my most natural form, and the way I could actually write something whole, was the kind of blog post that I had developed, solely on my own, over those years.  That my blog readership dwindled over the years was somewhat depressing but in the end irrelevant.  Writing these posts here and elsewhere, or essays or whatever they might be called, was its own reward.

 So I did a version of my Soul of the Future project as a series of posts here, but also the History of My Reading and more recently the TV and Me series, which concerned the past.  These evocations of the past increasingly took over this blog, partly because I was feeling more and more alienated from the public present. 

 For especially in the past few years I began to see, to feel acutely, that the world around me has changed so thoroughly that I mostly don’t have a place in it.  Just about everything is significantly different.  I can’t imagine how I would be making a living in this present.  Then again, I can’t imagine how I even would have been able to go to college, or lived in the places I lived.  Which leads me further back, to not even imagining how I could have been born at all.

 Obviously, approaching my 77^th birthday, I have many more days behind than in front of me.  But in this more profound way, my life is almost entirely in the past. I’ve always felt somewhat alienated, as if I might be an alien.  Now it’s pretty clear: I am definitely from another planet, the one that used to be here.  (For one thing, it had more birds.)

 Eventually I may be relegated to a very narrow present moment existence.  But for now, I live powerfully in memory.  Why do we have memories?  They seem an extension of the first requirement of any creature: to know what is food and what is not.  Anyone familiar with dogs or cats will understand how the first function—and perhaps the first step-- of memory is remembering where and when you find food, a vital skill for survival.  So for me, in various ways, memory is related to sustenance.

 What about that future I am supposedly captain of? In many ways, I cannot even conceive of an actual future anymore.  AI in particular has me throwing up my hands.  But in one essential way, the future is all too clear.  Captain Future’s mission was to relentlessly persuade about the need and possibility of acting in the present to further a better future, and specifically to meet the challenge of the oncoming climate crisis.

 I have been writing about the climate crisis since 1990. For the years I wrote about it on this blog, it was the quintessential elephant in the room (forgive me for using one of the many mindnumbing clichés that no longer have much power.) But today the climate crisis is no longer the elephant in the room.  The climate crisis is the room. 

 The climate crisis is no longer avoidable: it is the present and will be the present for the imaginable future.  A few data-driven experts who previously sounded alarms have recently moved the zeitgeist towards believing that the clean energy initiatives especially embodied in the Inflation Reduction Act will mean the United States at least will significantly lessen predicted levels of CO2 emissions in the near future, thereby preventing the worst case level of global heating.  But even if that works out, it does not stop what is happening, and will happen for decades to come.  The climate crisis is not “solved,” (whatever that means.)

 Even if future heating remains below levels that UN climate scientists designate as catastrophic (and that itself seems unlikely), those levels are approximate and truly uncertain.  Add to this the real world fact that when effects have differed from those predicted by climate models, they most have proven worse in reality than in what amounts to educated guesses.    

 I repeat, the elephant has not left the room.  The elephant is the room.  The future world is a hotter world, with accelerating consequences.  Even this spring—April and May—there are or have been intense and long-lasting heat waves in southern Asia, Europe, North America, and always Africa.  There are massive forest fires already in western Canada and Siberia.  Torrential rains have flooded out towns in a region of Italy—the worst flooding in that country for a century.  A heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest—when a similar event happened in a summer month, it was called a once in a thousand years event.  That was two years ago.  Most ominously, the upper levels of the oceans are consistently hotter than they’ve been since measurements began 40 years ago, leading to an array of devastating current and future consequences.  The UN predicts the oceans will continue to heat up until at least 2300 just based on the effects of global heating to the present.

 These events, this suffering and death, this destruction, is going to get worse, year after year. (For instance, the World Meteorological Organization has just predicted a 98% chance that the next five years will be the hottest five years on record.) The financial and social costs of coping with them are eventually going to override denial and demand shocked attention.  Eventually it may even happen that wars will be recognized for what most already are—climate wars. And the migrations that the wealthy countries are already unable to cope with in a civilized manner might even be recognized as directly or indirectly involving climate refugees. 

 The point isn’t that this is a doomsday scenario—the point is that it will eventually and inevitably be the context for everything in the future—including every individual decision on education and profession for the next generations, and eventually on where and how to live.

 To meet the challenge of the global climate crisis required a level of maturity in humanity and its societies that once seemed possible, since it would not have required anything more than heeding those who have foretold the possibilities and the consequences.  But it didn’t happen in enough time to prevent climate distortion, and now nobody really knows where things are going to end up.  Again, this is the context for the work, the hopes and fears, and the lives of those who will live in this future, as it quickly becomes the present.

Apart from the omnipresent threat of thermonuclear extinction in the mid-1960s, this country and the world in general seems less institutionally stable than it seemed when I started college.  Despite "progress" in some areas, there seems to be regression in many more. The global battles between self-righteous reactionaries in their various forms and the self-righteous revisionists in their various forms makes for a peculiarly unstable world, especially in social and political institutions that people otherwise would rely on in times of common crisis. 

 It’s possible to exaggerate how widespread this is in America, but the extremes are jolting.  Guns of unprecedented destructiveness are a bigger part of US life than at any other time in its history, or was ever even imagined.  The return of child labor makes the huge gulf between rich and borderline poor look like the early 19^th century London of Dickens novels. Margaret Atwood’s Gilead society from The Handmaid’s Tale seems more possible than ever, only we’ll be calling it Florida.  And so on. All this at at the precise time we can’t afford to go backwards, to make more trouble for ourselves. But that’s what we’re doing, and expending a lot of energy, resources, attention and social capital doing it, diverting it all from where it is truly needed.  This makes us dangerously vulnerable and fragile as a society, as a civilization.    

 The climate crisis, the onrushing extinctions of other lifeforms, the unsustainable distance between the obscenely rich and everyone else—these are the meaningful vectors now creating any future context I can imagine.   The addition of AI and other technological wonders only magnifies and exacerbates the chaos that also becomes the background if not the foreground of future life. 

So I don’t see much of a role for this Captain Future anymore, except following the lead of Captain Past. I doubt I’ll have much to say about contemporary politics anymore—it’s all the same drone, and out of my old hands.  What I may be able to offer is my particular perspective from these many years I've been around.  My own past now reaches back beyond the experiences of the vast majority.  Perhaps it’s an inevitable discovery of my time in life, or perhaps it’s an historical truth (or I suspect, something of both), but I feel more continuity with my parents and grandparents time than this present I find myself in, and certainly any future I can foresee. That’s certainly not what I expected in the 1960s.  In any case, this perspective is all I’ve got to contribute, aside from bearing witness.

 I may have observations on aspects of the present based on those perspectives, as well as more recollections (I hope to continue and even finish my History of My Reading series, which should go faster through the decades than it has so far.)  I may finally get around to writing about words, another long-planned project.

 I’ll still check the numbers of “readers,” though what’s officially counted may be mostly bots, and who knows who goes uncounted.  Readers may encourage me, but the absence of readers will no more than temporarily discourage me.  The words are what’s real, and somehow I can only abandon my pieces by publishing them. Though I still hope to explore other forms of publication (even as I suspect them of being just as dubious) I will likely continue publishing in this hapless form of the blog.  

 If I do it under this marquee, it’s because Captain Future is a product of the past.  When I started using it as a screen name I actually had no idea that there were Captain Future stories, since they’d been written and largely forgotten in the 1940s.  When I learned that the idea for Captain Future was the result of a visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the World of Tomorrow, that had always fascinated me (and which my mother visited), the link between past and future was made.  In a sense, I am now such a link.

Liars, Liars, Planet on Fire

Apart from more extreme temperatures (including for the second straight summer, the Pacific Northwest), forest fires, floods (northern Alaska to the Ohio valley in the US), the most prominent climate news this week is the deal for climate provisions in the US Congress' upcoming reconciliation bill.  Spurred in part I'm sure by this summer's heat etc., it's being described as simultaneously the most extensive climate-related legislation ever, and not enough to bring the US in line with its UN climate pledges.

But at least as important, and quite possibly more significant, is a story not getting as much attention: the announcement by the Democratic Republic of the Congo that it is auctioning off vast tracts of forest peatlands to oil and gas companies for extraction.  Keeping the country's forests intact is crucial to the effort to lessen the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.  These forests are huge carbon sinks, and cutting down trees for fossil fuel extraction is a double defeat.

But it gets even worse. In addition to the blow to climate, the sites up for auction include habitat for the endangered mountain gorillas, as well as other threatened primate species.  Indigenous tribes could also be displaced.  So it is a blow to efforts to avoid a mass extinction event, and a blow to the cultural  caretakers of the forests.

The Congo government is not the cynical equivalent of those despoiling the Amazon rainforests--it supports saving its forests to address climate distortion.  But those same UN treaties include agreements for the rich nations like the US to pay poorer and less industrialized nations some of the money they need to preserve their forests and to prepare for the effects of the climate distortion that the more industrial nations, like the US, have caused.  And those nations, including the US but also western Europe, have not paid what they promised.  Not even close.

So the Congo is calling them out, and they are likely to be just the first.  That the US isn't paying the relatively small amount they promised is simply outrageous.  In addition to paying into the international fund (which they aren't doing), the US and Europe could be making specific deals with individual countries like the Congo, that asked for $5 billion a year.  They didn't get it, so they've gone to the fossil fuel industry, selling off their future as well as everyone's.  And it's our fault.  

At the same time as this is happening, Netflix is beginning to show a new action series in which one scene cost $7 million.  Not the whole series or the whole episode, not even big Marvel-sized effects, but one fight scene that will last a few minutes on the screen.  This society at the moment can afford to keep its climate promises, and meet its commitments to the future.  We can live without $7 million fight scenes and $300 million movies and a lot for which our governments spend billions. We can't live without the rain forests, or with a mass extinction.  

Hotheads

It so happened that the first articles, books and documentaries outlining what was then called the Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming were coming to my attention just as Pittsburgh, where I lived, experienced several very hot spells during consecutive summers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. So my comprehension of the eventual effects of this phenomenon was visceral as well as intellectual.

 Because I was hot. Really, really hot. It was hard to breathe, hard to sleep and hard to think straight. For the next few summers I had one window air conditioner in my apartment, bulky but not so heavy that I couldn’t move it. So during heat waves every evening I installed it in a bedroom window so I could sleep, and every morning I moved it to the window of my home office, so I could think. If that wasn’t enough, I would brave walking through the visible heat waves up the Murray Avenue hill to the ice-bath air conditioning of the Eat & Park. But none of these strategies erased the oppression of heat.

 I saw what the heat did to other people, too. It made some people testy and even violent, others lethargic and dull. Or both, in unpredictable syncopation. It got scary, or at least the nagging source of low-level anxiety. Muscles tensed against the heat as they did against the winter cold, and the worst of it was wondering if it would ever end.

 And so I saw a contour of the future. There would be a period during which society would be challenged to stop a mortal danger before it started to take effect, to address a crisis before it arrived. It was to be the challenge of human civilization’s evolution.

 As I soon learned, it was crucial that it be done this way, because once the danger was obviously here and doing its damage, it would be too late to stop it completely, and harder to stop it from becoming much, much worse in the farther future, pretty much forever.

 But even at first I realized there was another reason. Because once it started getting really, really hot, people weren’t going to think straight. They weren’t going to be able to act with clarity and energy. They weren’t going to have the same cool, calm and collected judgment, they would become prey to impulses and anger, and have fewer inhibitions against violence, anti-social and self-destructive behavior. Because they would be too damn hot. And things would get worse, because overheated people would make them worse.

 All this turned out to be a little naïve, but basically and unfortunately coming true. It seems that it didn’t take actual heat to turn people into hotheads (although some bright underemployed statistician might try coordinating heat indexes with places that host heavy concentrations of climate crisis deniers and other angry extreme right fanatics.) Who needed heat when permission to entertain crude prejudices and crazed ideas from the unconscious, to name scapegoats and profess the counterfactual was given by invisible prophets and very visible demagogues, and amplified by new and powerful social media to form electronically connected cults and mobs?

 So now, largely because society has failed for more than 20 years to take the necessary action to address the causes and effects of climate disruption, the heat—as predicted, if a bit ahead of schedule—is on.  At this moment, the effects are coalescing. 

Extreme drought continues in the US West and Southwest (including Texas and Mexico), with large sources of water visibly drying up. Less obvious is that most of the US is in some form of drought, as is much of Europe, Australia, and huge chunks of Asia and Africa. Other places, like the four corners area in the US southwest, are getting torrential rains and flooding.

 July saw mountain glaciers collapse, most visibly in Italy where people were killed in the avalanche. Meanwhile, Greenland ice is melting so fast and so much with enough water to drown all of West Virginia. Apocalyptic forest fires burn in Spain, Portugal, France and elsewhere in Europe. A decade or so ago, Portugal made world news with its forest fires, but more area has been burned this summer than then, and there’s too much competition for attention for it to be much noticed.

 But strikingly common at the moment is quite simply the heat. England (which is farther north than any US city) experienced its hottest days and nights possibly in history. Excessive heat ranged across Europe, from Greece and North Africa in the south to the Netherlands. Several cities in Germany recorded historic heat highs.

 It’s hot around the world. Large areas of southern China were gripped in heat for weeks, as well as parts of India and Pakistan. And so on. 

This week much of the United States is very hot.  Over 100 million people are dealing with extreme heat, in every part of the country.  A single clump of heat causing record breaking temperatures reached from the West past the Great Plains--triple digits in South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas.  Now this heat has moved through the Midwest to the East Coast. Triple digits in every section of the country.

 

Taken together, deaths directly attributable to heat counted so far are in the thousands, while UN officials and climate experts warn that this is all just the beginning, and that climate distortion will keep adding heat and its effects well past the middle of this century, and if nothing effective is done to deal with causes, it will be much worse for much longer.

 Heat can kill directly through heat stroke and dehydration (heat being the primary weather-related cause of death in the US), but it damages the human body in a number of other ways. It seems science is just catching up on this, and so far hasn’t done much of a job warning the public.

 As for effects on the brain, there’s this almost incredibly deadpan report published in the Guardian:

 “It can be hard to think clearly when you’re too hot. Studies have shown that extreme heat can affect mental performance. Hot weather has been linked to reduced cognitive function, judgment errors and higher risk of occupational injury. At extremely high temperatures, the blood-brain barrier begins to break down. Proteins and ions accumulate in the brain, causing inflammation.

 Many people report feeling irritable on hot days, and evidence suggests that extreme heat negatively affects mental health. A recent study in New York found that, on hot days, there were more emergency hospital visits due to substance abuse, mood and anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and dementia. Another study linked rising temperatures to higher suicide rates.” 

Several other effects include excessive fatigue, and the body simply shutting down. None of these should be big surprises to anybody who has endured a severe heat wave, though there’s also short-term denial and bravado, and the tendency to forget the trauma that the body nevertheless remembers.

 So consider the implications when the number of hot days per year increases, and the hottest days are hotter, until the coolest day in a future decade may be equal to the hottest days in this decade. Somewhere along the way, just addressing the effects of climate disruption would normally become a major societal concern, even if such efforts go under different names to soothe the deniers. This would be a normal function of a working society. But these efforts will take planning, gathering resources, agreeing on ends and means, and working together, to deal with the hot present and to prevent climate disruption from getting worse.  Such efforts will need to be multiple, because these effects affect everything, from emergency services to melting pavement, frying electrical infrastructure and toxic air.  These efforts will require cool heads and calm hearts.  But every hotter year that gets more difficult.

 It’s work that needs to be done now, but there's still resilience and surplus resources in the system, so when the heat wave ends, it's possible to forget about it and go on more or less as normal, momentarily focusing on the next shiny and distracting object. But as our society loses this elasticity of resilience by using up its surplus and suddenly non-renewing resources, and dealing with multiple emergencies becomes overwhelming, it will get more and more difficult to ignore it.  But recent experience strongly suggests some will try. 

 Absent changes that anticipate these problems (like a new economic model that prioritizes paying for efforts to address climate disruption, and perhaps even prioritizing basic sufficiency for all, while making billionaires impossible), as the systems of production, transportation, communication and simple governance break down, the challenges will be even greater. It will be no time for deniers to be in charge, and it certainly will be a dangerous time for hotheads to be influential, let alone calling the shots. 

People generally underestimate the vulnerability of systems and resources that seem to work automatically, like the light going on when you flip the switch. Especially in a society that depends on global supply chains, the vulnerabilities are many. 

But I also worry that everyone  underestimates how hard it may be to keep a cool head in an overheated world.  Our best chance may be to address these problems, the causes and the effects of climate disruption, and set the pattern for addressing them, while the heat is not unrelenting for long periods. To use the visceral knowledge much of this country and the world is helplessly acquiring this summer to provide impetus for a future in which cooler heads may prevail.

 Because if climate disruption remains inadequately addressed, the choices we face are not likely to be simply between this society and the same society in a hotter world, with the predictable winners and losers. The choices may well be between a society consciously addressing the causes and effects of climate disruption, and a society that falls into chaos and violence, long before much of the country becomes unlivable because of climate disruption effects. 

 This is a possibility not only within the US but around the world. If I’m lucky I won’t be around to see if I’m right, but unless climate disruption is addressed (especially in an equitable way), this planet may see in this century the ultimate disaster movie in reality : Hothouse Earth v. Nuclear Winter. If the hotheads have their way.

What Would Climate Leadership Look Like

 

Among the recent climate disruption news that got little attention: an annual UN weather report found that all four key climate disruption indicators rose to record levels in 2021: largest concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global mean sea level higher than ever, global mean ocean temperature higher than ever and higher ocean acidification higher, leading to Ph levels lower than in 26,000 years. 

 The consequences of atmospheric greenhouse gases and sea level rise are bad enough, but the lesser known effects on the oceans potentially have even greater long-range consequences. The ocean's crippled ability to store CO2 could be only the beginning.  Already there are huge dead ocean zones (one the size of Florida), and massive fish kills. Ocean heat begins consequences which the report authors call "irreversible on centennial to millennial time scales." 

In what qualifies as qualified good news, another report estimated that, left unattended, climate disruption will cost the global economy $178 trillion in the next 50 years.  But that's a fraction of what it is estimated to cost to aggressively address climate disruption.  If that were to happen, the report estimates, the global economy could even be in the black in 50 years.  I tend to view all such economic estimates as exercises in fantasy.  But this does affirm what others have maintained: the cost of doing something seems high, but the cost of not doing it will be much much higher.  And I at least mean more than monetary cost as well.

But in the US we don't hear much if anything about any of this from our political leadership.  Republicans ignore and deny it, and I'm afraid Robinson Meyer makes too good of a case in his Atlantic article that Democrats seem to be "sleepwalking toward climate disaster."  It is likely only weeks before the chance to pass a meaningful climate bill could disappear for a long time, and there is little indication of any sense of urgency.

Instead Republicans steer attention to issues they virtually create out of nothing but political ambition, while Democrats reel from one headline crisis to another.  There's been a global pandemic, there's an awful war in Ukraine with global implications, a previously unthinkable reversion on reproductive rights, and a chilling burst of deadly gun violence, particularly those incidents in which helpless elders and helpless young children are slaughtered as they peacefully live their lives.  There's inflation--especially in high gasoline prices-- causing anxiety and hardship.  And there's always something, something else.

What would climate leadership look like?  Ideally it would have begun in the 2020 elections, in which candidates--including for president and v.p.--ran on the climate issue as their overriding priority.  Once elected, they would ignore the noise and get to work. There would be experts offering solutions in White House meetings, some of them televised. There would be legislation proposed and projects begun. In an appearance every week, the President and Vice-President would present the latest information in context, explaining its importance, explaining the latest research, progress reports on legislation and projects (including what isn't working and why)--in sum, the latest efforts to address the causes and the effects of climate disruption.  This would be like FDR talking about the war, only without any worry about the enemy listening in.

Then every month, the President would talk from the Oval Office with a more general summary, but also in the course of discussing the most attention-getting issues of the moment, would show how they relate to climate disruption. 

Because they all do.  In some ways that are understood and others not, climate disruption is stirring up deadly diseases which find a home in places they aren't usually seen.  Russia may well be responding to both direct climate disruption effects and the prospect of declining revenues from fossil fuels, the primary source of its global income. Climate disruption is certainly at the heart of other wars around the world.  Inflation is an international phenomenon, and is being fed at least partly by the present effects of climate disruption: the higher costs of food due to drought-induced crop failures, for instance, and other higher costs due to other weather-related disruptions to the global supply chains.  Inflation due to all of this will only increase in the future unless both causes and effects of climate disruption are successfully addressed.

Reproductive rights are key to the lives of women, and gender equality is a large factor in reducing poverty and fostering sustainability. Climate disruption may underlie a lot of fear, anxiety and anger, and while it is probably not the primary or proximate cause of extreme violence--including extreme and violent political rhetoric and division--it is probably not a coincidence that it is all happening at the same time.  

Climate leadership would pounce on all opportunities.  The pandemic could have been an educational experience, seen as a possible dress rehearsal for dealing with the sudden spread of diseases made possible by climate disruption.  Inflation and the war in Ukraine could be focal points for arguing that accelerating green energy and dumping fossil fuels are economically and geopolitically as well as environmentally necessary.  A lot of political nonsense could be avoided simply by refocusing on the main issue.

This model of climate leadership obviously is not happening. The President has never given a single Oval Office address on climate disruption--not just the current President, any President.  Few presidential candidates in the primaries, and no presidential candidates in the general election have made addressing the causes and effects of climate disruption the theme of their campaigns.  Though it was mentioned more often as a priority by many Democratic congressional candidates and the national ticket in 2020, few congressional candidates talked about it prominently and in detail.

It could be that as Meyer suggests, they just don't understand the issue fully.  They obviously don't think the electorate cares enough about it to support a candidate who does. But in Stanley Greenberg's most recent polling in the US, UK, France and Germany, he found that next to Ukraine, addressing climate disruption is the top priority of the majority he polled.  It's not clear if it's a majority in the US alone, but he did find majority support for a transition to green energy.

One small indication of how climate leadership could emerge comes from the recent elections in Australia, where recent governments have taken wildly different positions on climate disruption, which is having dire effects there.  A group of independent candidates ran for the legislature with addressing climate disruption as their main issue.  They won, and in an alliance with one of the major parties, have made it a national priority.

In upcoming congressional elections, Democrats are reportedly divided on whether to emphasize the abortion issue or respond to Republican attacks on inflation and other pocketbook issues.  Or whether to attack Republicans as extremists undermining democracy.  All of these are of course valid issues.  But until candidates start talking about climate disruption, and start running on this issue, the kind of consistent leadership and attention necessary doesn't seem likely.  Frankly I don't see candidates out there, especially beyond contending for a few House seats, that sound like leaders on this issue, or perhaps even have the capability to see the big picture.  But I'd love to be surprised.