Irreversibly Losing Our Cool
FLYING BLIND: Ironically, one key aspect of this Arctic summer is the notion of flying blind.
Followers of the Arctic climate situation are no strangers to paradoxes. And one of those paradoxes this very summer melt season, is that while the data right now are not forthcoming, such that we have very little clue as to either the conclusion of the summer sea ice melt or its land-based glacial meltout, we do in fact know a whole lot about the future of such melt.
We now know more about the future of melt, and therefore global warming, than we have ever done before.
A few clarifications might be in place:
While a tiny few people and scientists are actually deeply infatuated with ice and the polar regions, the climate-aware people’s close following of the ice isn’t about the ice itself. It’s about all of us and the entire planet. Perhaps the best way to explain this is via the great brightness of ice and snow.
When warming leads to a loss of ice and snow, it’s not like these bright areas are a passive victim of global warming. To a much larger degree, they are a massive ampli-fier of the warming signal; The Arctic becomes a powerful cause on its own in heating up the rest of the planet.
This is because when we lose that amazing brightness, the Arctic attracts much more solar energy, instead of reflecting it back into space. This means the ocean and land heats up even further regionally, entering into a spiral where even more snow & ice disappears in the following years.
And then, when there’s no longer a giant freezer left on the top of the planet, there’s also no longer a way for warm air and water to go to cool down. Air circulation and ocean circulation patterns may persist, but at a much smaller scale and with signifi-cantly smaller effect: And as a consequence of this, the entire planet will heat up much, much faster even than now.
This is how ice is a decider, rather than a receiving victim, of global warming.
Let’s say you’re skeptical
as you read the above paragraphs. And you tip your chair ever so slightly, making skeptical faces, going Nah, skeptical. All fine, but if you tip the chair too far back, it will actually fall over and it won’t end well for you.
Likewise, there is a point where sets, or cascades, of Arctic climate elements start to tip. You’ve no doubt heard talking heads on the TV talk about how we need to get a grip and do something, or whatever, lest we reach these tipping points. And then they wax poetic about some rapidly closing window of opportunity. That’s them trying to pretend like the Permafrost didn’t tip yet, the Greenland Ice Sheet didn’t tip yet, the Arctic sea ice didn’t tip yet, and so on and so forth.
The truth is, all of these polar tipping points were already triggered, in a cascade, just as the scientists predicted. They’re now just left trying to manage how we, the public, perceive this epic loss of our common cool. The loss of our cool forever.
A decade ago this summer
I woke up at the family cabin in the mountains, back in the old country. It was August, but every morning, noon and night was 8 degrees. Eight degrees and fog, sometimes, eight degrees and rain other times. Call it a diversity of different types of wet, with eight degrees Celsius.
And I remember going from thinking goddammit! Will the Sun never come out? to sweet, such lovely chill air. And then my mind went into a rabbit hole of thinking this cold was a resource, an invaluable natural resource that was increasingly short of supply. It’s not the “correct” way of saying it, but it works for me as a layperson.
And yes, today’s the birthday of my grandmother, who got that mountain cabin built a few years after becoming a mother. She too loved that cabin dearly.
There’s been a lot of disgusting
climate denial this year, by UN climate scientist people, really too much to mention. But as I’ve already ventured into poetic realms, I’ll instead settle for cli-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson’s appalling climate denial. I have a lot to say about it, and it also neatly lets me connect some key points, for our understanding as a species.
Now, this of course won’t be a true back-and-forth between Stanley, the celebrated writer of climate fiction, and a layperson nobody. But it is, after all, a true fictional back-and-forth.
“Well, it’s hard.
The situation is both complex and quite bad. So there’s this phrase that I’m frightened by called hopium, that if you write about hope in this situation, you’re merely providing a panacea that we’re already doomed, this thought that it’s too late.”
No, Stan. The situation isn’t ‘complex’ but quite simple. And ‘quite bad’, really?
“So being frightened by that, I’m looking at the situation quite closely. And what the science is, across the board, what we’re being told is we’re in a dangerous situation, a slippery slope. We could heat up too much and get into a runaway greenhouse effect that heads towards hothouse earth.”
If you are as you say, ‘looking at the situation quite closely’, as you should, you KNOW we’re in a lot more than a ‘dangerous situation’. This isn’t a ‘slippery slope’ where it MIGHT get dangerous further down the slope. We heated up too much and got into a Runaway Climate Change. I’ve been tweeting about it throughout the ‘COP of Truth’.
“We don’t know how close we are to that, but we’re not there yet.”
We’re moving further and further away from that trigger point for Runaway Climate Change, by the way, as we celebrate at least 20 years since we were there.
“There’s things we can do. So when there’s still things you can do, it is definitely not time to give up.”
While there’s really nothing we can do, one good starting point is to STOP LYING TO KIDS.
“They’re very, very important.
If we don’t respond well in the next couple of decades, it gets exceedingly difficult. And there is a point where if we slip on the slippery slope into a runaway greenhouse effect, nothing humanity can do after that will bring us back.”
We didn’t respond well in the past Twenty Decades since we first understood this dynamic, and so there’s consequences. You know how the real world works, you’re an author. A couple of decades ago we slipped on the slippery slope into Runaway Climate Change, and now there’s nothing humanity can do that will bring us back.
“And this I find quite terrifying. And it needs to be spread about as news, although if you scare people too much, then you get, especially young people go, well, we’re, yeah, it’s too late. We’re doomed because we’re not very good at coherent action.”
Stan, the kids already know it’s too late. The fact that you feel the need to lie even more to them, just makes them more convinced there is No Future.
Now, I’m just a nobody, from Nowhere
and I bet Stanley hasn’t even read the above fake dialogue. I shall nevertheless thank him for inspiring it, and for bringing much clarity to this August climate update.
Of course, this text wouldn’t be a true piece of text if it didn’t also trigger some additional clarifications and amplifications. In this case, it clarifies the abyss between the Doomer and the Transdoomer.
Kim Stanley Robinson is the Doomer.
He’s the glass-half-full, window-half-open kinda chap. I myself used to be one, also. It was always just a question of voting harder, or saying the window was closing faster. Until I realised, together with some absolute top people, professors and otherwise, that the proverbial window was both solidly shut and shattered in a million pieces.
This is when I became a Transdoomer. And it’s not so much that the Doomers are wrong, they’re just living in the past. They’re hoping for someone to warn or save Cæsar. Or in our case Industrial Civilisation. In fact, according to “Bright Green Lies”, most so-called environmentalists today are actually trying to save Civilisation, not Nature or the Biosphere.
As the Latin suggests, the Transdoomer has been through Doom.
He has seen how Industrial Civilisation, or the World as We Know It, is utterly and very irreversibly Doomed. And yet he rejoices! Why? Because the single way Life on Earth could survive, was if Industrial Civilisation faded away and ceased to be.
This, really, isn’t rocket science. Just common sense.