If you get beyond the mere political and performance news and look at what is happening to our planet, survival is THE ISSUE on our crowded Earth. From microbes to migration of displaced persons, from charcoal to coral reefs, there is constant change and struggle and a feeling that change is bringing an inevitability. Is it down the drain? Over the cliff? Into the abyss? To even type the word “hope” seems now almost cynical, like urging somebody to go shopping to make themselves feel better. We are consuming the planet and destroying its ability to support life, ours along with the gorilla, the coral, the right whale, the ponderosa, the banana we love to eat, the Bachman’s Warbler (oh wait, that one’s long gone).
This will be my final catalog of the climate crisis events. I find I can no longer read and shrug and vow to move on. It all looks so awful I almost think the author of The Uninhabitable Planet was just having fun and making us feel false hope…even though his opening line is “It’s worse, much worse, than you think.”
No, David Wallace-Wells (author of above), your book doesn’t even approach my imaginings, my pity for my grandkids, my relief that I am old enough not to be around when we hit 3 degrees Centigrade above the old average, or 4 or 6 or…
Here’s some of the recent stuff, each indicative of what we have to look forward to…and I am not even going to mention the Dengue Fever outbreak in the Pacific. Wait until that spreads like West Nile or Lyme’s Disease have.
Hardly worth noting that July, 2019, was the hottest month on record.
Meanwhile Greenland used to be a sort of ironic name for that icy land. No more.
In Brazil the authoritarian regime seems determined to deforest the Amazon, bad in too many ways to count.
The oceans and their living ecosystems suffer, from coral and plankton to whales and sharks. Beyond mere acidification, heat, deadly algae, pollution, oil spills, upheaval of ocean currents…we now find that climate change is inhibiting creatures for communicating and even sensing their watery world. This tantamount to taking away all the cells phones in a high school.
Bee deaths continue and we are not sure why or what or how or… I hope I do not outlast almonds and cherries.
Turns out the meteor that crashed to Earth near the Yucatan 66 million years ago was a disaster that almost didn’t happen. Yet it did for the dinosaurs and millions of other organisms and allowed the conquest of Earth by our mammalian ancestors and avian cousins. There will be no swerve in the current extinction event.
Cities are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Too much heat. There is a biological limit to how much heat a Human body can stand and that limit is far below boiling water or baking granola.
And then high water or drought or general social collapse.
Speaking of social collapse. Human migration will only increase as drought and starvation get worse…it won’t stop at Honduras or Somalia or Syria. It will be tens of millions of people not mere thousands.
That will cause even more violent nationalism, genocide and racism. The gunner in El Paso already sees the future as a fight to save his lifestyle from the impoverished hordes because the environment is disintegrating. Young eco-fascist have leap-frogged the right-wing deniers and grabbed climate crisis as a great reason to kill their enemies.
One bright spot seems to be that the current U.S regime is trying to save us from the worst. They are blocking information that might upset. They want to protect us from the unpleasant science that says future crops of rice will far less nutritious because of the heat. The researcher who did the studies has quit. Oh well, rice is only the #1 source of starch for billions of people. Let ’em eat cake.
Lake Merced, 1868:
San Francisco, 1890:
1897 map:
San Francisco before earthquake:
Cutting through sand hill to make Second Street near Rincon Point, before 1900.
Living with sand after earthquake:
Theodore Wores’ painting of dunes looking across to Lake Merced in early 1900s, lupine in bloom where houses now stand:1914
Lake Merced Boulevard construction:
Richmond District today, note the small pockets of private open space between houses:
Lake Merced today:
ecowise 