The Twin Hearts II

A repost from LUD of last summer.

[Introduction to the re-post: We'll likely survive global warming ( or should we more accurately say Global Rapid Heating: GRH, to coin a phrase and acronym) - that the transformed world will become the new normal, that our descendents will have forgotten or never have imagined the flavor of the world the current generations were born in and cherished. Our great great grandchildren may indeed prefer their hotter, stormier, more disease ridden world to ours. Is that tragic or consoling?]

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June 15th 2023

[An Editorial]

The two oceans, the twin hearts. The atmospheric rivers of warm moist air moving above us like sinuous fire hoses, now impacting the Antarctic. The slower echoing response of the deep ocean currents in this billions year old dance of our planet's energy budget. This place is so achingly beautiful still, but sea levels are rising in China with unprecedented rapidity,. Ground stations report that surface soil temperatures are rising also. Fires are burning up our forests. Skies turning orange. The watchful satellites report ever increasing number of lightning strikes and storm formation as this place is storing energy like an overcharged battery. We humans are wonderfully adaptable, but we can't cope with the loss of our sustaining mass agriculture and that's what's going to get us in the end. America in 2070 may have no Midwestern breadbasket. I fear the horseman, Starvation is coming back if we don't start on the road of drastc negative population growth. Either we do it voluntarily or have it forced on us much more painfully. Reducing carbon production is absolutely necessary but it's only half. We must reduce our numbers and quickly. We're destroying this place. Although we are reacting now and, as Sam Matey documents in his excellent Weekly Anthropocene substack, are taking a host of innovative corrective measures, will we be able to avoid calamity? Can we set things back to the way they were? I don't know- we are so distracted by our ephemeral politics and rivalries, our twin hearts of Us and Them. Driven by the effects of our own split nature, the human social sphere is also warming rapidly.

Just too many of us, too much energy. We may make it through the next century, but how many species will be lost because of our heedlessness? It bears thinking about.

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[Postscript to the re-post: The above was written less than a year ago but the data coming in are alarming: the diseases are moving north, the sea ice is shrinking, the ocean circulations, not only the AMOC, but others are altering before our eyes. If I repost this repost a year from now, how much will have changed? We shouldn't sit paralyzed, we can act- personally, locally, and globally. Even a little remediation can go a long way!]