What will it take?
Scientists are trying to get people to wake up and smell the smoke.
I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?
On Wednesday, I risked arrest by locking myself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles with colleagues and supporters. Our action in LA is part of an international campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the IPCC Working Group 3 report released Monday, which details the harrowing gap between where society is heading and where we need to go. Our movement is growing fast.
But the planet is heating faster.
Even limiting heating to below 2°C, a level of heating that in my opinion could threaten civilization as we know it, would require emissions to peak before 2025. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in the press conference on Monday: “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” And yet, this is precisely what President Biden, most other world leaders, and major banks are doing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Chase and other banks are contributing to murder and neocide through their fossil fuel finance.
Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk. For me, one of the most horrific aspects of all this is the juxtaposition of present-day and near-future climate disasters with the “business as usual” occurring all around me. It’s so surreal that I often find myself reviewing the science to make sure it’s really happening, a sort of scientific nightmare arm-pinch. Yes, it’s really happening.
You’d think that would be clear enough in light of the wildfires and heat domes and desertification and floods that are already happening, but it seems not.
It’s now the eleventh hour and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. I feel deep grief over the loss of forests and corals and diminishing biodiversity. But I’ll keep fighting as hard as I can for this Earth, no matter how bad it gets, because it can always get worse. And it will continue to get worse until we end the fossil fuel industry and the exponential quest for ever more profit at the expense of everything else. There is no way to fool physics.
The first cruise ship is due to arrive here in Seattle on April 11. They burn 80 thousand gallons of fuel a day.
There was a report on the radio yesterday that the forests here in Washington state that were affected by last summer’s “heat dome” appear as if they’ve been burned. Apparently they still haven’t recovered, even with all the rain this winter and spring.
You’ve had rain? Please, could you send some to Nebraska?
iknklast@2:
I would if I could!
It’s been a very wet winter and spring. The last few days it’s been raining hard, and horizontally. Even with all of that, they tell us that we’re still basically in a drought, and there are mutterings about this coming summer being the hottest ever. Tomorrow it is supposed to be 65ºF here, which is just absurd: the average last freeze date here is April 15.
What will it take? A successful social democratic revolution in the US. As long as capitalism is able to run rampant in concert with this strange US notion that individuals owe essentially nothing to society, the US will continue to lead the burn.