Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Week 3.

Welcome to the new normal.

One of the things that gets brushed aside in the right’s politicization of climate change is that things don’t just get warmer; they get destabilized. Not only do weather patterns change, they become chaotic. It’s not just a different set of new temperatures and amounts of precipitation to be adapted to, but a constantly changing kaleidoscope of conditions, without enough stability for things like growing crops, which rely on particular, reliable combinations of conditions. The further our excursion from previous conditions, the more unstable things get. And this is just the agricultural realm. What happens to all of the current biomes when the patterns of flower and pollinator, plant and grazer, predator and prey are uncoupled suddenly and unpredictably? The emergence of a new, stable climate regime is unlikely to happen on a timescale convenient to human civilization; it can’t start at all until we stop doing all the things that are causing this disruption in the first place. We have to stop lighting fires before we can hope to see what might be left after the flames have gone out.

These are issues that can’t be fixed by dialing up the AC. This is food on the table stuff. At some point, those that have it will be unwilling to sell it to those that don’t, whatever the price, because you can’t eat money. Climate change denialism has always ignored these underlying issues in their preference to maintain the status quo, prioritizing the preservation of profit under business-as-usual to retooling how we do things to allow our continued survival without destroying the bio-geo-chemical basis of that survival. We’ve invented a technologically driven culture that thrives on ever accelerating change and innovation. But that culture has been dependent upon a steady, reliable basis for growing food. If we push the the Earth to the point where it becomes an ever-accelerating engine of change and “innovation,” that will erode or destroy the foundations of our being that we have taken for granted for too long. Turnabout is fair play, and the laws of physics play for keeps. We’re all along for the ride on this submarine, and its implosion is as inevitable, as that of the Ocean Gate Titan; it’ll just take a bit longer. It’s “Fuck around and find out,” writ on the largest scale we could possibly manage. Having failed to learn from the smaller scale, regional failures we’ve already passed through unnoticed, because there were still places outside the zones of failure that carried on, we’ve now graduated to disaster at a planetary level. Go us. We will suddenly discover that food doesn’t come from supermarkets, and parking lots, and highways, but from clean air, clean water, reliable rain and sunlight, and the interplay of life, climate, and geology that give rise to them.