Doomers

1 in 20 Americans have the "forever chemicals" in their drinking water. The new, $10.3-billion deal will kickstart the clean-up process.

(paywalled)

Like most of this country's infrastructure, California's dams were built without regard for the truly severe weather that climate change makes possible. In the US, electrical grids, coastlines, transportation networks, communication facilities are all vulnerable to extreme weather.

What, if anything, is your community doing to prepare its infrastructure for the ravages that rising temperatures will bring?

Once again, we are experiencing the intensity of a climate event that far surpasses what was ever predicted under current conditions.

Marine heat waves (MHW) have increased 20-fold, according to this study. It is projected that such events, occurring once every hundreds to thousands of years under a pre-industrial climate, will occur at least every decade under 1.5ºC conditions and annually under 3.0ºC conditions.

However, the MHW currently underway in the North Atlantic is “very exceptional,” said Mika Rantanen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute and is “way beyond the worst-case predictions for the changing climate of the region."

Published 21 April, 2022, this not-yet-peer-reviewed study (pdf) applied the Ginzburg-Landau theory (Wikipedia) to model future conditions on this planet. Predictably, even the best case scenarios presented dismal outcomes.

Mixotrophic microbes are single-celled organisms such as plankton and paramecium that are able to switch between photosynthesis and predation for survival. Plankton is the base food source for all marine trophic levels. Normally, these microbes employ photosynthesis, absorbing carbon and providing 70% of atmospheric oxygen. But their switch to eating other single-celled critters releases carbon.

The mechanism for the switch is not well understood, but appears to be triggered by a rise in the temperature of their environment. Their switching could indicate a tipping point for sustainable marine life and accelerate global temperature increase.

Although the linked study examined attitudes of those 16 to 25 years of age, there are many outside that range (myself included) who experience extreme pessimism about the future of human existence.

What experiences led you to your own conclusions about the fate of humanity? Do those conclusions affect your everyday decisions? How does your acceptance of imminent calamity shape your long term goals?

I'll start. I was but a child in the 1960's (Boomer II), born into a family deeply involved in charismatic Christianity. Fear surrounding the predicted events of a highly anticipated second coming of Christ (The Rapture, Tribulation, etc.) combined with the exaggerated cultural threat of communist aggression and the certainty of thermonuclear destruction created a perfect storm of personal despair and dread by the time I was 9 years old. As the fundamentalist Christian culture edged toward prosperity gospel and Seven Mountains, my mind turned towards nihilistic and scientific literature.

By my teenage years, I was solidly convinced that nothing short of a miracle could save humanity prior to my 30th birthday. Yet, here we are. The angst of my childhood absolutely shaped the trajectory of my life. Secondary education seemed a senseless enough endeavor to ignore. I considered reproduction to be a cruel endeavor. I embraced agnosticism, punk culture and anarchism.

The privileged existence of being white, privileged and cis male has served me well, and I can't say that I'm unhappy. I find succor in the growing probability that a natural death will spare me the majority of horrors to come. And I am sad and angry for what subsequent generations are about to experience.

What's your story?

Heat waves of this nature are becoming more frequent as our climate catastrophe continues.

The technology to do this exists, but it will never happen. Like any other organism, humans will use up all available finite resources until death is certain.

Experts seem divided on whether or not Russia's invasion of Ukraine already qualifies as a global war. There's no doubt that the conflict is having negative consequences on an international scale. There are those who claim that these consequences are grave enough to eventually end society as we have come to know it.

I think anyone can envision a scenario whereby V. Putin makes a decision that provokes other powers into direct armed conflict.

Most of the media is referring to these charts as "alarming". Has no one been alarmed by previous charts?

(opinion)

More bad news... Every climate catastrophe indicator is far above what anyone even considered just a year ago. It appears that the rate of climate change is beginning to increase exponentially, further evidence that enough climate tipping points have been reached to render change unstoppable.

(opinion, pay-wall)

Vietnam's leading climate activist, Hoang Thi Minh Hong, has been arrested and jailed for "tax evasion". She, her husband, and 15 staffers of the Center of Hands-on Action and Networking for Growth and Environment (CHANGE) were detained on May 31. On June 1, she was formally charged and imprisoned while the others were released.

With this arrest, Ms Hoang joins 5 other climate activists in detention, all charged under vague laws governing corporate taxation.

Consequentially, Vietnam risks losing $15.5 billion of funding from EU and G7 countries to assist them in achieving net-zero carbon status by 2050.

It is clear that Republicans and Democrats alike will never do enough to solve climate catastrophe. Can America's ambivalence be reversed through the legal system?

It's all fine and good for John Kerry to utter a fundamental truth about a major driver of climate catastrophe, but it is a useless proclamation without offering a solution.

Have enough tipping points been breached that there are no prescriptions to offer?

(Washington Post articles are pay-walled)

The Montreal Protocol, with a mere 46 signatories in 1987, has reduced chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) use to 10% of peak 1974 levels. CFCs, typically used as refrigerant, are powerful greenhouse gases that degrade the Earth's ozone layer as they break down, allowing harmful UV radiation to reach the surface. A United Nations study estimates that the ozone layer will be restored to pre-industrial levels over most populated areas by 2040, with polar regions to follow in the coming decades.

It is also estimated that had CFC use continued, global temperatures would now be an additional 1 degree Celsius warmer.

A mass extinction of life on Earth as a result of willfully generated climate change is certainly one of the most daunting outcomes that civilization currently faces. But it is certainly not the only danger.

Nuclear war, killer asteroids, coronal mass ejections, artificial intelligence, pandemic, super-volcanoes, and many other events of lessening probability have the potential to end civilization as we know it before all of the honeybees die.

Leaving aside the certainty of climate catastrophe, what other events could occur that have the potential to destroy our civilization?

By any stretch of the imagination, this is not fresh news. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has been observed to be slowing for several years now, and the consequences of losing the cooling properties of the oceans have been long established.

Is it too late to do anything to prevent mass extinction? Have enough tipping points been breached that render a reversal impossible?

I think it will happen far sooner than we're being told.

I am increasingly convinced that climate scientists withhold information vital to understanding how dire Earth's climate situation really is.

I think it's just too late for humanity to turn this around.