Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Ok so forget 1.5, now how about….
…Earth has lost its chance to prevent some of the worst of global warming’s harms. So now the world must figure out how to get temperatures below the danger zone and back to safety, officials say.
The problem is, “back” is not really possible. Not without time travel. “Safety” might be just as illusory.
“We were unable to stop the runaway train of global emissions to avoid 1.5 C of warming,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who wasn’t part of the report. “Now overshoot scenarios require us to stop the train quickly and to back it up. “
Again, we can’t go “back.” “Back” is gone. We’ve burned down the station and torn up the tracks. Wherever we end up, it will be somewhere else, not the comfortable (or uncomfortable) familiarity of a world that’s gone up the smokestack. Our problems are not linear. They are not like backing up a train, or even like putting toothpaste back into a tube. They are more like trying to recover a seven course meal after it has been chewed, digested and excreted. Not going to happen. Karl Rove once boasted of the United States’ unrivaled power (though much of it holds for humanity as a whole):
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Little did Rove know just how true his words were. We have indeed created a “new reality”, but not the one that Rove et al thought they were. The surface, business as usual game of extraction, exploitation, appropriation, and monopolozation of the entire planet has unleashed a nightmare of unintended consequences that have made obvious the fact that the world is not an inert, passive, bottomless stockpile of the materials we covet. Nor is it an empty, unresisting, bottomless receptacle for the inconvenient wastes and byproducts of our activities. We might think we’re just digging a hole and pulling stuff out, but other things take up the space of the materials and beings we remove. We might think we’re throwing things away, but there is no “away.” Proportions and ratios of minerals, gases and organisms shift and change, with planetary ramifications. Earth’s reactions were never going to be linear and Newtonian, because large parts of the Earth System are alive.
We’ve only become a global species within the last few centuries. Sure, we got around to almost everywhere we were going to get millenia ago, but it took the European “Age of Discovery” (and its colonial imperialism) to stitch everyone together into one big global market, whether they wanted to be or not. We can’t even rewind our own history, let alone that of the entire biosphere. Bringing back pseudo-mammoths through genetic tinkering will not bring back the mammoth’s biome. But if someone thinks they can make a buck out of it, it will probably happen, or at least have a shit-ton of money thrown towards it in hope of some kind of ROI.
We should have disposed of the economic concept of “externalities” many years ago. Now it’s on track to dispose of us. Being able to completely ignore the deleterious effects of one’s behaviour might be a neat parlour trick, but you can’t fool Mother Nature. She’s keeping score and kicking ass. The distance in space and time between waste and impact has now reached zero. “Over there” has always been on the same planet. “Later” has become NOW just as quickly as “far away” has become HERE. How do we even think of the narrow “cradle to grave” lives of or products and processes when we’re still more interested in the contents of our bank accounts? Talk about buzzkill. Now all these classical economists and business types react like teenagers who have had their allownces cut off and who can’t count on mom to pick up after them and do their laundry for free. If we can’t get off our addiction to growth, Earth will do it for us, cold turkey on a planetary scale.
Proportions and ratios of minerals, gases and organisms shift and change, with planetary ramifications. Earth’s reactions were never going to be linear and Newtonian, and they never have been, because large parts of the Earth System are alive. The rearrangement of all of these structures, process, and beings is going to be wildly unpredictable. Past states of being are not recoverable. Entropy doesn’t work that way (see the seven course meal analogy above). We are off the rails, and in uncharted territory. We’ve managed to push the world into a new climate regime which might not reach any sort of “stability” for some time, and not likely at a rate convenient to human time-scales. (Even assuming it does, there’s no guarantee, and precious little likelihood that it will be as benign and beneficial to the human enterprise as the last ten thousand years have been. ) “Stopping” now won’t take us back. The knock-on effects we’ve triggered, along with the emissions we’re already committed to, that are baked into the system because of their dwell time, have ended any hope of that. We’ll have to ride it out as things unwind and play out as they will. Not that we’re passive bystanders in all of this, but our relative inaction and complacency up to now have limited our choices going forward. This means that the measures we take now will take longer to kick in, or they will likely be more extreme, some are bound to reach for the quick fix because tomorrow has come too soon.
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