The image above is a screenshot captured from a video. Click right here to view the video itself. In a way, it is kind of mesmerizing.
I found about this video from an email sent to members of "Sunrise Santa Cruz," a group based on the UCSC Campus. Sunrise Santa Cruz is concerned about Global Warming - or "Global HEATING," which is the language used in the Sunrise Santa Cruz bulletin that I am providing to you, below:
The spiral temperature graph comes from NASA. This graph only goes to 2022, but 2023 and 2024 have been even more abnormally high, as this chart from the EU agency Copernicus shows (Copernicus may be a vital link, if Trump gets his way and defunds our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, NOAA). Scientists -- and those of your professors who keep abreast of the scientific literature -- say they are afraid.
Folks, I've avoided posting too much dark stuff on this site, but -- global heating is the greatest crisis the world has ever faced, and it's going to make worse every other crisis: economic inequality. Resource shortages. Strains on national, local, and family budgets. Infrastructure damage. Immigration pressures. Racism. Xenophobia. Political tensions generally. YOUR LIVES, YOUR FUTURES, and those of folks you love will be -- in many ways already are -- affected by this crisis. As the years pass, if action continues to be deferred, the inequities and the constraints on your futures will only worsen. "Justice delayed is justice denied," MLK Jr famously said, and this is as true for the climate crisis as it is for colonialism, structural racism, land theft, etc.
Meantime, UCSC drags its feet, continuing with business-as-usual. Shifting our energy to renewables? That can wait. Climate education? That can wait. Staffing a long-promised faculty-admin committee to address climate action and environmental justice in operations, teaching, and research? Not at all urgent. Has taken YEARS.
THAT is too often the function of a university: preserve the status quo. Keep a lid on problems. Keep power where power has always been. Tell students they are the change... and then keep change from happening, or dramatically incrementalize it. Don't take my word for it: peer-reviewed research supports this.
If YOU are outraged -- I am, and I daresay you should be -- with this university's postponing climate action, ignoring the impacts of global heating on the most vulnerable populations in this country and far beyond, and continuing to partner with fossil fuel companies (through banking, accepting research money, and letting fossil fuel executives/attorneys onto university boards) -- then come to our meeting....
So far as the climate crisis is concerned, silence is complicity, and our university is complicit -- however well-intentioned and "green" it claims to be (emphasis added).
The message here is pretty clear, and I believe that it is "spot on" with respect to the advice it is giving to students who are attending the University of California, Santa Cruz. Let's all pay attention! This message is also addressed to those of us who are not students, even to those of us old enough to have been born in 1943, when Global Heating was already well underway.
If we would like actually to have a "Happy New Year" this time around - and that New Year has now arrived, of course, almost three whole months ago - we are all going to have to reorient our lives. We are going to have to change our lives to meet the challenges of "Global Heating." These will not be "minor" changes.
How does significant change happen? According to the anthropologist Margaret Mead - and I think she can be cited as an authority - it happens when small groups of concerned people get together and decide to take action to make the changes that need to be made. They stop "observing," and "judging," and start "acting."
Let's keep that in mind, and start acting accordingly!
Thank you Gary for pushing global warming to the top of the heap of catastrophes we are enmired in. It's entirely understandable that climate collapse and democracy collapse would happen, synchronistically driven as they are by the same pathologies--adherence to out of control resource consumption and disconnect from our earth and the reciprocal relations with her that all humans once had.
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