A couple of times a year, I write about the catastrofuck or the fuckpocalypse or the fuckageddon that will be caused by the effects of climate change. Sometimes it's about searing temperatures somewhere in the world, the effect of which will be eventually be to cause a refugee crisis in the neighborhood of a billion people and pretty much completely upend the way in which we all exist. And that's not even mentioning the floods, the fires, and the wildly fluctuating weather and its effects. We're screwed. But every single time I write a climate change post, without exception, it does some of the lowest numbers of anything I put out.
We know that's one reason why there is so little coverage of climate change even as its effects ram our asses every day: no one wants to see that we're fucked by something so massive that it would require the entire world to do something about it. Of course, you can make the news compelling if you want, but I guess that inevitable doom is a turn-off.
But we need to talk about climate change. And I'm really sorry. I know you'd rather the political shit that goes straight to the dopamine center of the brain and floods you orgasmic satisfaction. Trust me, I'd much rather be writing about Tucker Carlson's nut tanning or the ludicrous decision by a Trump-appointed idiot judge that overturned the mask mandate for public transportation. I'd love to spend my time mocking them and calling them horrid names. (I mean, to be fair, last Friday, I already spent a good bit of time on Tuckus.)
So fucking listen for a few minutes here because we're fucked beyond fucked, fucked in a way where you look at everything going on and think, "Yeah, it's horrible that such suffering goes on, but, basically, we've got a few decades and we're all gonna be suffering horribly." I know, I know, I fucking know that you know this and you try to put it out of your heads, like we good Gen Xers did with the threat of nuclear annihilation back in the 1980s. But listen:
A couple of weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from the United Nations put out the third part of its assessment of the state of the climate crisis. This was the final piece of the assessment, and it focused on "Mitigation of Climate Change," as the title read. It was the section that was supposed to give us hope after the screaming alarms of the first two parts. Except this one screamed at us, too. And the scream was "What the fuck is wrong with you? We're gonna die and you're doing almost nothing to stop it!"
Without getting into the weeds of the findings (although feel free to read them), what we're facing is that while some mitigation of fossil fuel and other harmful emissions has slowed, it hasn't by nearly enough. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres put it, "Current climate pledges would (still) mean a 14% increase in emissions. And most major emitters are not taking the steps needed to fulfill even these inadequate promises." You got that? The shit that everyone said they're gonna do, including the Paris Climate Accords, isn't enough, even if everyone comes through, which, let's face it, if the barbaric Christian extremists in the GOP take over, the United States will be saying, "Suck our coal, fuckos" to the rest of the world.
Hell, we don't even have to wait until then. Guterres also said, "Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness," madness that the United States is engaged in now. At least we're doing some spending on renewable energy, even if we need so much more. If Republicans get back into power, that pittance will disappear.
Remember when we hoped to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to prevent the worst catastrophic effects? Yeah, you can flush that down the shitter. The only way we're getting there is if we get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2060. "That would require using about 95% less coal, 60% less oil, and 45% less gas by 2050," and even then we'll need a fuck-ton of trees and technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. So the best we can hope for, really, is 2.2 degrees, which will murder the coral reefs and render large parts of the planet uninhabitable, killing masses of people and bringing about that migrant crisis I mentioned at the top. I'm pretty sure that it means shit will get miserable for the rest of us, too.
You feeling terrible yet? Remembering why you don't read this kind of news because it seems so insurmountable, so existentially hopeless? Well, it's about to get worse because, see, according to many scientists, this is the watered-down version of the report, avoiding getting too real about the kinds of emissions-cutting that are needed because it will make rich countries sad. That's why when this report was released, a thousand climate scientists engaged in civil disobedience around the world over national governments' inaction; they blocked entrances, chained themselves to buildings, including the White House fence, and more, getting arrested in the process, all to make someone listen. It failed.
Most of us didn't hear a goddamn thing about the report or the protest. I get it. An article on the protest has been sitting in my tabs for the last week or more, reminding me to write about it. And I'm not saying that shit like the war in Ukraine or "Don't Say Gay" laws or gun violence in the United States aren't important. Absolutely they are, and, as awful as they are, we can comprehend those challenges in a way that we can't with the climate emergency.
But we better figure this shit out, and by that I don't just mean eliminating fossil fuels. We better figure out a way to make everyone care, to attempt to unify over this, to act or die.
Okay, that's it. You made it. Next up, I'm sure I'll write something about Ron DeSantis getting ass-fucked by a horny Goofy or some such shit. And climate change can go back to that threatening thrum in the background until hurricane season.
