10/31/2019

Halloween Horror: We're Fucked When It Comes to Climate Change

Man, I want our children and grandchildren to just fucking destroy us. I want them to look on us as the lowest fucking vermin that ever walked the earth. They should want to launch our remains into space so our poisoned minds can no longer pollute anyone's beliefs. Of course, this is all assuming a future, which, frankly, at this point, seems less and less likely.

While you were worried if Trumpy S. Pumpkins gets impeachified good and quick, several more reports came out detailing just how very fucked the world is because of climate change, and this time it's gonna happen in the lifetimes of most of us. So if your plan was like those of most conservatives, which seemed to be "Fuck it. I'll be dead. Let the kids deal," well, that just got wrecked like a melting glacier.

By 2050, which, according to my awesome math abilities, is just a little over 30 years away, sea levels are now predicted to rise to the point where major cities will be underwater during high tide. You got that? You don't? Ask people in Miami what that's like. But this is worse. We're talking Bangkok, Shanghai, and Mumbai being uninhabitable, and we're talking over 150 million people affected. If you really wanted to stop immigration and refugees, you'd do some goddamn thing to mitigate the effects of climate change because, right now, we're facing a migration crisis the likes of which the world has never seen.

It's Halloween, so...boo?

That not scary enough? How about the destruction of entire ecosystems, huh? Maybe the loss of a quarter of all birds in North America or the plunge in insect populations is a little to big to grasp. So check out the destruction of an emperor penguin colony, in part because the sea ice wasn't as strong anymore and storms wiped it out, giving the penguins no place to, you know, live. That's Antarctica. On the other side, Arctic sea ice is at its lowest point for this date ever.

Off the coast of Northern California, kelp forests are dying because of high marine temperatures, which affects the sea urchins and the starfish which then affects the fish themselves which then affects the seals and, aw, hell, the bald eagle, and, holy shit, that is getting mighty close to the food chain for you and me.

Meanwhile, the constant waves of fires upon fires wash across California. Climate science writer and activist Bill McKibben wonders if California is becoming uninhabitable due to this.  This was something that was predicted by Mike Davis in his stunningly prescient book Ecology of Fear, where he saw Southern California and Los Angeles in particular collapsing under its own reckless land development as it collided with environmental degradation. What seemed absurd in 1998 was prophetic.

Our failure to act, our failure to shut shit down until our leaders act, is a monstrous abandonment of future generations. We're past the point where we can reverse any of this. We are now at the "Can we not make shit worse?" part of the equation, and the resounding answer from our feckless, fossil fuel-owned leaders is "Fuck you. Burn more coal."

We are creating a hell out of earth for the future. If you want to bring this back to politics, we should be voting out and, yeah, impeaching any leader who refuses to act and who shuts their eyes to the reality that is melting and burning all around them.