“Something touched me deep inside, the day the music died”

Don McLean – American Pie

   In the past when civilizations went belly up through greed, mismanagement and the exhaustion of natural resources, human beings migrated somewhere else to pillage anew. But this time the game is over. There is nowhere else to go. The industrialized nations spent the last century seizing half the planet and dominating most of the other half. We giddily exhausted our natural capital, especially fossil fuel, to engage in an orgy of consumption and waste that poisoned the Earth and attacked the ecosystem on which human life depends. It was quite a party if you were a member of the industrialized elite. But it was pretty stupid.

   Collapse this time around will be global. We will disintegrate together. And there is no way out. The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is about to come to a crashing halt. And humankind, which thought it was given dominion over the Earth and all living things, will be taught a painful lesson in the necessity of balance, restraint and humility. There is no human monument or city ruin that is more than 5,000 years old. Civilization, Ronald Wright notes in “A Short History of Progress,” “occupies a mere 0.2 percent of the two and a half million years since our first ancestor sharpened a stone.” Bye-bye, Paris. Bye-bye, New York. Bye-bye, Tokyo. Welcome to the new experience of human existence, in which rooting around for grubs on islands in northern latitudes is the prerequisite for survival.

   We view ourselves as rational creatures. But is it rational to wait like sheep in a pen as oil and natural gas companies, coal companies, chemical industries, plastics manufacturers, the automotive industry, arms manufacturers and the leaders of the industrial world, as they did in Copenhagen, take us to mass extinction? It is too late to prevent profound climate change. But why add fuel to the fire? Why allow our ruling elite, driven by the lust for profits, to accelerate the death spiral? Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?

   The news is grim. The accelerating disintegration of Arctic Sea ice means that summer ice will probably disappear within the next decade. The open water will absorb more solar radiation, significantly increasing the rate of global warming. The Siberian permafrost will disappear, sending up plumes of methane gas from underground. The Greenland ice sheet and the Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers will melt. Jay Zwally, a NASA climate scientist, declared in December 2007: “The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now, as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines.”

   But reality is rarely an impediment to human folly. The world’s greenhouse gases have continued to grow since Zwally’s statement. Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have increased by 3 per cent a year. At that rate annual emissions will double every 25 years.  James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s foremost climate experts, has warned that if we keep warming the planet it will be “a recipe for global disaster.” The safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere, Hansen estimates, is no more than 350 parts per million (ppm). The current level of CO2  is 385 ppm and climbing. This already guarantees terrible consequences even if we act immediately to cut carbon emissions.

Read all of it here: by Chris Hedges, Calling All Future-Eaters

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    • Edger on September 6, 2010 at 19:04
      Author

    The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.

    But not a word was spoken;

    The church bells all were broken.

    And the three men I admire most:

    The father, son, and the holy ghost,

    They caught the last train for the coast

    The day the music died…

    • Edger on September 8, 2010 at 02:12
      Author

    …continuing to exploit fossil fuel resources without reducing carbon emissions or capturing and sequestering them before they warm the atmosphere, the eventual effects on climate and life may be comparable to those at the time of mass extinctions. Life will survive, but it will do so on a transformed planet. For all foreseeable human generations, it will be a far more desolate world than the one in which civilization developed and flourished during the past several thousand years.

    […]

    The business-as-usual scenario yields an increase of about five degrees Fahrenheit of global warming during this century…

    […]

    How much will sea level rise with five degrees of global warming? Here too, our best information comes from the Earth’s history. The last time that the Earth was five degrees warmer was three million years ago, when sea level was about eighty feet higher.

    Eighty feet! In that case, the United States would lose most East Coast cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Miami; indeed, practically the entire state of Florida would be under water. Fifty million people in the US live below that sea level. Other places would fare worse. China would have 250 million displaced persons. Bangladesh would produce 120 million refugees, practically the entire nation. India would lose the land of 150 million people.

    (and much more…)

    Jim Hansen,

    Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University

    The Threat to the Planet, July 13, 2006

  1. by proving through experimentation that he can actually select himself out of existence while at the same time leaving satellites to orbit the earth on their own. Yes, sheer genius.  

  2. Check out this. Nicole M. Foss is co-editor of The Automatic Earth. She holds a BSc in Biology, a post-graduate diploma in air and water prevention control and an LLM in international law. She is the former editor of The Oil Drum Canada. The linked article has many internal links to previous work. It is another take on what we have been discussing by a very impressive person.  

    • mplo on September 9, 2010 at 00:29

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