Guy R. McPherson writes a Substack blog with this title: "Nature Bats Last." I have mentioned McPherson before. One of the last times I think I mentioned him, on October 23, 2024, I called him "Glum."
McPherson's "glum" just keeps on coming! In a blog posting dated October 28, 2024, McPherson wrote that "Earth’s temperature could increase by 14 C, otherwise expressed as 25 degrees Fahrenheit." This temperature increase, if it were to occur, would far exceed the official estimates currently being accepted, which are in the 6-8 degree range. Click here for a link to the article in SciTechDaily that McPherson is referencing.
As is consistent with McPherson's commitment to "glum," he pretty much says that all humans would die if these predictions come true. In fact, McPherson thinks we will all be extinct long before Earth warms up as much as the article in SciTechDaily is predicting.
Jonathan Franzen, a local Santa Cruz resident, and an acclaimed author, does not, at least typically, glory in "glum." However, Franzen's 2019 article in The New Yorker has a message that doesn't seem all that different from McPherson's. Franzen asks, "What If We Stopped Pretending?" As Franzen's subhead puts it: "The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it."
I wrote about Franzen's article shortly after it came out. It does, by the way, mention Santa Cruz, and specifically the Homeless Garden Project. It's worth reading. While Franzen employs the word "apocalypse," he has a positive way of talking about it, which is more or less the opposite of "glum":
There may come a time, sooner than any of us likes to think, when the systems of industrial agriculture and global trade break down and homeless people outnumber people with homes. At that point, traditional local farming and strong communities will no longer just be liberal buzzwords. Kindness to neighbors and respect for the land—nurturing healthy soil, wisely managing water, caring for pollinators—will be essential in a crisis and in whatever society survives it. A project like the Homeless Garden offers me the hope that the future, while undoubtedly worse than the present, might also, in some ways, be better. Most of all, though, it gives me hope for today (emphasis added).
I am with Franzen! Patient and hopeful work is in order, not "pretending" that we don't have a problem, and that we don't have to face more and more of what are truly life-changing challenges. Let's not pretend, but let us not permit ourselves to state, as if it were an inevitable and inescapable truth, that there is nothing for us in the future but the glum certainty that there is no hope for all the glories of this Earth, and the human world we have made within it.
Let's not "pretend," but never say - or tell ourselves - that hope is a sham and that our efforts to persevere and prevail are not worth attempting. This thought seems particularly pertinent in view of what has happened, and is still happening in Los Angeles. When we confront "life-changing challenges," that means that we are going to have to change our lives. Franzen says that those changes can result in us being "better off" than before.
Can you buy that?
I know I can.
Gary, I'm sorry, but I can't remain "liberal silent". We are playing God with weather warfare. Pacific Palisades is the same land grab scenario as La- haina and Acapulco, etc. We must stop geo-engineering operations immediately.
ReplyDeleteI believe Mc Pherson's analysis is correct. Yes, recognizing the awful truth that humans have destroyed the systems that supported life on this planet for the last 10,000 years due to greed and denial is quite "glum". Maybe we should just keep under- estimating the damage so we can stay positive for a while longer, since the truth has not had any impact on policies over the last 30 years anyway.
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