Looming weather danger
So maybe we should actually do something? Or nah?
A remarkable spate of historic heat is hitting the planet, raising alarm over looming extreme weather dangers — and an increasing likelihood that this year will be Earth’s warmest on record.
New precedents have been set in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with their swift evolution: historically warm oceans, with North Atlantic temperatures already nearing their typical annual peak; unparalleledlow sea ice levels around Antarctica, where global warming impacts had, until now, been slower to appear; and the planet experiencing its warmest June ever charted, according to new data.
And then, on Monday, came Earth’s hottest day in at least 125,000 years. Tuesday was hotter.
“We have never seen anything like this before,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. He said any number of charts and graphs on Earth’s climate are showing, quite literally, that “we are in uncharted territory.”
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It’s not just that records are being broken — but the massive margins with which conditions are surpassing previous extremes, scientists note. In parts of the North Atlantic, temperatures are running as high as 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, the warmest observed there in more than 170 years.
Never mind – New Cruise Ships in 2023, 2024, and 2025:
There’s a lot to look forward to over the next few years, with new cruise ships on the horizon from so many of your favourite cruise lines. From luxury expedition vessels to family fun, there’s something for everyone in the long list of exciting new arrivals set for the seas.
There are 17 new ships due this year. 19 made their debut last year.
Let’s not forget the little bark recently acquired by “Outspoken climate activist Steven Spielberg.”
It’s a lovely thing. [Warning before clicking on link above: You might puke.]
Well thank god he’s a climate activist!
You can tell he’s a climate activist because his yacht only has two helipads.
2030 is a few years away >> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/could-this-futuristic-vessel-be-the-worlds-first-zero-emissions-cruise-ship-180982333/
Do what, exactly. The 1% are indeed egregious but…8 billion people. Indian farmers on the Deccan plateau are desperately poor but they still burn their fields every year choking much of the country. We all live in modern houses and most of us drive. it takes years of driving to overcome the embedded carbon in a Tesla.
the only “solution” is to better fund places like the Wuhan lab. A really nasty pandemic will be the solution. Of course, population in every continent but Africa is already negative.
Well that’s part of what I mean. We can’t.
But at the same time I also mean we’re not even trying. We could certainly give up cruises and luxury yachts.
Brian — “It takes years of driving to overcome the embedded carbon in a Tesla.” — No kidding, not to mention the downstream emissions from generating electricity. Yet they put “zero emissions” novelty plates on them. Like hell. It’s propaganda for virtue signalling conspicuous consumers.
Even if “we” were doing something, what would/should that be? Does there even exist a solution to this problem (really, a set of interlocking problems)?
(My money is on “There was a time when there was a solution – perhaps as late as 1970? – but because we did nothing then, there is very likely very little that we can do now.”)
Well we can produce either more or less in the way of carbon emissions, which I assume means we can either speed up global warming even more, or stop doing that. We can make it worse faster, or we can take steps to try to slow it. Making more and more SUVs and cruise ships and airplanes and Ultra Large Container Vessels doesn’t make things better.
It ain’t just the Cruise Ships.
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1677361887812493329
Taking any legal steps to change any of these would be framed as “Taking Our FREEDOM Away.” If it’s physically possible, and affordable financially (Hi Mr. Spielberg!), people will keep doing it. Things haven’t gotten to the point (yet) where doing any of these things is considered to be as dangerous and morally reprehensible as murder, arson, sabotage, etc. Whether we ever get there is doubtful. Getting there in time even less so. I don’t think our survival instincts are attuned to large-scale, complicated processes like climate change. Even though extreme events are becoming more common everywhere, I think it’s still too abstract, too difficult for the mass of people to make the connection between turning the key in the ignition, or boarding a ship or plane with the burning forests, rising floodwaters, droughts, etc. There are too many steps to keep track of and link up for them to form an immediate, existential threat as potent and compelling as a hungry predator or a burning building right before our eyes.
Globalization has allowed us to hide from ourselves the cost of the way we live. When the human world was more localized, the sources of the food we ate, the clothing we wore, and the tools we used, were much closer. If we didn’t make these items ourselves, then we might have known the people who did. I have no intention of idealizing a past I didn’t have to live in, that had plenty of poverty, disease, exploitation, and injustice. But those very real costs were more likely to be closer, and more likely to be shared, next door rather than overseas. We had much less impact than we do now, and fewer chances to siphon off, through conquest or purchase (or both), goods from elsewhere that we lacked near at hand. I think it’s harder to cheat people you see and interact with every day. But let some multinational corporation do it for us to people on the other side of the world, whom we will never meet, or have to face? That’s how our civilization works. It has outsourced misery and oppression alongside the jobs that have been moved overseas. We’re not supposed to look very closely at how we get what we get, and from whom. It’s all very neat, tidy and sanitized, with the human and natural cost kept from view, so we can sleep with plausible deniability. How do you step outside of such a vast system? How do you take it apart?
Our civilization is an immense, fragile, unlikely, and dangerous Rube Goldberg device cobbled together and let loose by an ape that barely knows how the world might actually work. Despite what consiracy theorists might think, nobody is in control. Or rather no one is in control. I’m not saying there are no conspiracies; there are actually too many of them. Thery are a collection of competing and conflicting interests, scrambling to gather the goodies they’ve managed to whack out of the planet they’ve mistaken for a pinata. Just as human knowledge is now too vast and diffuse for any one person to know it all, human economic activity is now so interconnected and all-encompassing that it is beyond simple control or direction. There’s no one lever we can pull, or brake we can apply, or wheel we can turn. Everyone has their foot on the pedal, but nobody is driving. The illusion of control offers an easy way to point the finger of blame elsewhere than at ourselves. While we certainly contribute, there’s not much we can do individually to change the course of the juggernaught we’ve been born upon. It was rolling when we arrived, and by the time we learn of its existence and our dependence upon it, we are enmeshed and complicit to a degree that makes extracting ourselves difficult.
It’s not just one thing we must do, but many, and we need to do them all at once. The need to keep eight billion of us alive puts an unsustainable strain on the planet, and reduces our ability to draw down our demands upon it as quickly as we need to in order to avert catastrophe. We are in a conundrum and at an impasse: we can’t keep eight billion humans alive without our current civilization, but before long, our current civilization is going to make it impossible to keep eight billion of us alive. Something has to break. Will it be our civilization, or the world? Or will they both go in rapid succession, one following the other, with some other species’s paleontologists left to ponder the significance of the thin film of microplastic beads and radioactivity that marks the upper bounds of strata containing human fossils. From such a vantage point, a few tens of millions of years hence, the quarter million years between human origin and extinction will be contemporaneous events, impossible to separate or distinguish at the unavoidably coarse scale that geology imposes at such temporal distances. We will be a puzzle and a marvel, but we will be gone, dinosaur and comet, all in one.